A White House official tells TPM the party-crashing Salahis managed to meet President Obama on the receiving line at the state dinner.

In a statement just released to TPMDC, the Indian Embassy categorically denies any role in the incident whatsoever.

New statement out from the Secret Service under the fold ...

Read more »

We're trying to find out more about White House party crasher Tareq Salahi. Salahi is on the board of the American Task Force on Palestine, a DC lobby group closely tied to the Palestinian Authority government of Mahmoud Abbas. But his name seems already to have been scrubbed from the site. Here's what it looked like before the party-crashing incident.

Meanwhile, if you need more evidence that Tareq Salahi is the Zelig of fame-grabbing celebrity-socialite nonsense, here's video of Tareq and his wife interviewing Will.i.am and thanking him for his support for the America's Polo Cup. Salahi is the captain of the US Polo Team, or at least that's what he says. Does the US really have an official team?

In my last post I noted that the White House party crasher couple appears to have pretty substantial ties to the Indian Embassy in Washington. So let's put our thinking caps on and think about what may have happened.

Read more »

It's just a theory so far. But I'm surprised we haven't heard this mentioned before. Gawker notes that crasher couple Michaele and Tareq Salahi have fairly substantial connections to the Indian Embassy in Washington. That doesn't prove anything. And what it suggests would probably be much less worrisome than the story we're hearing now. But it's hard for me to imagine that their being good friends (apparently) with the DCM at the Indian Embassy (the number two at an Embassy who is usually a professional diplomat) didn't have something to do with their ease getting in.

In our conversation in the office about this incident this morning, one thing I mentioned was that what seemed strange to me wasn't just that they got in but that they were apparently so confident about their ability to get in.

We're looking into this now. Here's our first report on the crasher story.

Top Ten things you didn't know about the Obama campaign before reading David Plouffe's Audacity to Win.

The annual Golden Duke Awards are coming up. And the LA Times noticed that a text message Sen. John Ensign sent to his girlfriend Cindy Hampton was only one syllable off from being a bona-fide Haiku.

How wonderful it is. Can't believe,
it's like a kid. Scared but excited.

I've often thought that a lot of tweets, and probably texts too, are close to being haikus. We've had a lot of sex scandals this year (as we always do). So in the honor of the day, and to work off your post-turkey stupor, email us your haiku based on one of 2009's plentiful sex scandals.

We're having a bit of a debate here in the office about whether the State Dinner party crasher story is just a funny holiday weekend weirdness story or a genuine security issue. On the one hand, you've got Rep. Peter King (R-NY) saying that the fact that the crashers had to go through the metal detectors and conventional weapons screening was 'incidental'. "They could have had anthrax on them. They could have grabbed a knife from the dining room table." I'm willing to put that down as pretty standard Pete King nonsense. (I'm actually pleasantly surprised, given the climate post-Ford Hood, that there's been no mention from the right that the male party crasher appears to have an Arabic or perhaps Turkic name. But perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate.)

But I'm on the side of thinking that it actually is kind of a big deal. We pay a lot of money, for good reason, to keep the White House and the president's person, super secure. And the idea that these two could just walk right in without even being on a White House wave-in list, let alone the invite list for a State Dinner. Not having weapons isn't the only issue.

What do you think?

Read more »

Here's one story we're watching closely on a Friday when there was supposed to be no news. On Wednesday, Dubai's sovereign wealth fund asked to delay certain debt payments and then rushed to raise more money. It raised more money but the international financial community is still not confident that they're out of the woods. Globally speaking, this sounds like one of those stories that's no big deal unless it's not. A member of the governing board of the European Central Bank tells Reuters, "The events in Dubai in recent days are one of the hiccups if you like, one of the difficulties, which affirms that we were right to highlight the uncertainty ahead of us and that the road ahead could be a bumpy one."

In itself the numbers aren't that big (measured on a global scale), only tens of billions of dollars. But if larger institutions turn out to have a lot of exposure to it, and that pushes some of them back into unstable territory and rushed liquidations of assets, the whole thing could spread. At a minimum it's an example of the still quite risk averse international financial markets.

From WaPo ...

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

Doug Hoffman says he'll run again in New York's 23rd district next November.

Like the Summer of Love (1967) forty-two years ago, we'll be remembering and no doubt historians will be writing about the Summer of Crazy (2009) for years to come. Whether aging Tea Partiers will be having reunions to get nostalgic in 2050 is another question. But we've assembled our Top Ten Right-Wing Crazy Protest moments for your Thanksgiving viewing pleasure.

Here's the most thought-provoking and perhaps most important piece I've seen written on the Public Option. And it was written back in June. (Here's a follow-up debate on the argument advanced in the linked article.)

When I first focused on the public plan proposals back in the spring what was never clear to me was why, far from gobbling up the whole private insurance market, it wouldn't become a dumping ground for all the sick people the insurance companies can't make a profit insuring. That is especially the case if you restrict its availability to people who aren't currently insured. (Remember: the private health insurance business model is covering as many healthy people and as few sick people as possible.) That's exactly what Paul Starr thinks would happen in a poorly structured Public Option. And what he calls a poorly structured public option sounds uncomfortably like what we have on the table right now.

(ed.note: In this post I was speaking in broad terms and referencing earlier discussions of Public Option access. I should have said that current versions of the public option restrict access largely to those who are current not insured.)

As you can see, we're featuring our Top Ten Reader Tips We're Thankful For. But I wanted to take this opportunity to thank our regular readers for you continued tips, support, readership and helpful critiques over the course of this year.

Read more »