In contrast to the seventy some minutes you may or may not have wasted watching the State of the Union address the other night, the Presidential Remarks at House Republican Conference yesterday are must see.

A word of advise to Mr. Obama, you do remember what happened to the last President who tried to out Republican the Republicans, don’t you?

See also: The Ratchet Effect

You cannot pass!

Aides: Democrats have plan if Burris shows up
Posted: 08:00 PM ET

From CNN Congressional Correspondent Brianna Keilar

(CNN) — Senate Democratic leaders think Roland Burris, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s pick to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, will likely show up on Capitol Hill Tuesday for the opening day of Congress, according to a Democratic aide familiar with Senate Democratic leaders’ plans.

They have prepared a contingency plan in case he does, the aide added.

Burris will not be allowed on the Senate floor, according to this aide and a Senate Democratic leadership aide.

Watch: What if Burris shows up?

The aide familiar with Senate Democratic leaders’ plans said if Burris tries to enter the Senate chamber, the Senate doorkeeper will stop Burris. If Burris were to persist, either trying to force his way onto the Senate floor or refusing to leave and causing a scene, U.S. Capitol Police would stop him, said the aide.

“They (police) probably won’t arrest him” but they would call the sergeant-at-arms,” the aide said.

Not to be out done, The Hill is reporting Republican Senator John Cornyn will, “filibuster any attempt to seat Democratic Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken next week.”

Picture via None Such Folks

I was reading the latest Glenn Greenwald post at Salon, “Cheney says top congressional Democrats complicit in spying” and I couldn’t help but remember a bit of a rough draft I had hanging around. It consisted solely of one extended blockquote:

It is with William A. Rockefeller, father of John, that we have to do here. There is enough which is authentic to be gleaned about him to form a picture of a striking character. William A. Rockefeller was a tall and powerful man with keen straightforward eyes, a man in whom strength, and fearlessness, and joy in life, unfettered by education or love of decency, ran riot. The type is familiar enough in every farming settlement, the type of the country sport, who hunts, fishes, gambles, races horses and carouses in the low and mean ways which the country alone affords. He owned a costly rifle, and was famous as a shot. He was a dare-devil with horses. He had no trade — spurned the farm. Indeed he had all the vices save one — he never drank. He was a famous trickster, too; thus, when he first reached Richford he is said to have called himself a peddler — a deaf and dumb peddler, and for some time he actually succeeded in making his acquaintances in Richford write out their remarks to him on a slate. Why he wished to deceive them no one knows. Perhaps sheer mischief, perhaps a desire to hear things which would hardly be talked before a stranger with good ears.

It was not long after he came to Richford that he began to go off on long trips — peddling trips some said. Later he became known as a quack doctor, and his absences were supposed to be spent selling a medicine he concocted himself. Irregular and wild as his life undoubtedly was, his strength and skill and daring, his frankness, his careful dress, for he paid great attention to his clothes, as well as the mystery surrounding the occupation which kept him looking so prosperous, made him a favorite with the young and reckless and, unhappily, with women. On one of his trips he met in Moravia, New York, the daughter of a prosperous farmer, Eliza Davison. It is said that the girl married him in the face of strong opposition of her family. However that may be, it is certain that about 1837, William A. Rockefeller brought Eliza Davison to the Rockefeller settlement as his wife, and here three children were born, the second of whom — the record of his birth is dated July 8, 1839 — was named John Davison.

In 1843 William A Rockefeller moved his family to a farm near Moravia, Cayuga County. The reputation he had built up in Richford as a “sporting man” was duplicated in Moravia. He soon became the leader in all that was reckless and wild in the community, and was classed by the respectable and steady-going as a dangerous character on whom no doubt much was fastened that did not belong. It may be for this reason, as well as because of his frequent long and unaccounted for absences, that he is still classed popularly in Moravia as one of the gang who operated the “underground horse railroad” — and ran off horses from various parts of the country. There is absolutely no proof of this, but the conviction and sentence to the State prison, in 1850, of three of his closest pals for horse-stealing coupled with his bad reputation made many of his disapproving neighbors fix the crime equally on him, and to-day old men in Moravia nod their heads sagely and say, “He was too smart to be caught.” John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study

John Davison “Jay” Rockefeller IV, Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, and Harry Reid. Pals.

A tip of the hat to Betmo & Google Reader.

I honestly don’t know quite how to deal with this. Over the past year I have strained and even broken treasured friendships over the idea that allowing a Republican to win over a Democrat, no matter how bad he or she is, would be to empower the more destructive of the two parties and ultimately enable the kind of horror show we’ve seen in the past eight years.

But Matthews is a bridge too far. I could never vote for, raise funds for or in any other way help Chris Matthews become a member of the Senate and if it came down to it, if I lived in Pa, I’d probably support Specter. If we thought Lieberman was perfidious and unreliable, we haven’t seen anything yet. Matthews is very nearly nuts as far as I can tell. – Digs

Funny, besides ideology, I thought that the number one reason the last 8 years were the way they were was because of one party rule…

Cross-posted @ GFA51

“. . . At this stage in the campaign, I’ll take any version of Barack Obama as president over McCain/Bush/Palin.

However, I will gladly have this second discussion with you 1 second after – we should be so lucky – Barack Obama is sworn in.” – tristero

The discussion being Glenn Greenwald’s observation, “it’s far from clear which version of Barack Obama will end up governing.” Greenwald, perhaps still chaffing at Monsieur IOZ’s oft restated “defender of the status quo ante” characterization, was in the middle of letting the rhetorical guns blaze:

. . . it’s worth underscoring — in fact, it’s vital to keep in mind — that the option of politically empowering Democrats is the opposite of a panacea. The Democratic Party structure in Washington, and particularly its leadership in Congress, is more corrupted and destructive than anything else there is — with the exception of the right-wing faction that has been running the country for the last eight years. Contrary to the inane conventional Beltway wisdom that bipartisanship is oh-so-tragically scarce, Democrats as an entity have, over and over, passively acquiesced to, and frequently actively enabled and participated in, many of the worst abuses of the last eight years. Their leadership in Congress is corrupt and craven to the bone in many of the same ways the GOP leadership has been — and they’re about to be far more entrenched and their power far less checked.

Waiting until one second after Senator Obama has been inaugurated–should that occurrence indeed happen–is far too late in the game to start criticizing. While the Daily Kos crowd crows for the back of the Republican Party to be broken, the pendulum swings, and “the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent.”

See also: Can Obama See the Grand Canyon?

The Primary Day Ritual

Update:

If you want to read an article that encompasses so much of why I dislike Clinton–whether it intended to or no–it’s right here:

“A lot of us have been at this a long time, so we that the road is tougher after last night — in part because people like Tim Russert declared it so — but we are still working and this campaign is not over,” one of her top strategists said. “This morning, she got up and got herself to West Virginia after arriving home at 2:30 a.m.”

Tim Russert is someone who matters to these people.