Yes, let's write another broken Obama promise up on the chalkboard. This time, just a few months after saying he wanted more pressure from the left, he says, on behalf of Democratic moderates in the Senate, he didn't really mean that on national healthcare, telling advocacy groups they need to shut down their ads against Nelson, Feinstein, Landrieu, etc.

BUT... that's not all. He's also threatening to throw around some muscle.

And, it is rather convenient to do this at the Fourth, a la BushCo news dumps. Plus, if you follow my link, you'll also see who was chosen... and I use that word deliberately... to write this up.

An American expatriate in Honduras, who started there with the Peace Corps several years ago, has this to say:

The Ex president had said several times that it did not matter to him what the Supreme Court and the Congress thought He was going to carry through his referendum, even went to the extreme of robbing funds from other ministries to pay for the referendum. Most people are extremely confused by the Response of Obama, Obama was extremely popular down here, and for him to denounce this action without researching it seems like a betrayal to them. Chavez and the OAS are seen as leftest enteties who are or were trying to illegally influence Honduras's internal politics. (sic per e-mail)

More at my personal blog, including a gander at why, as well as how, Obama has mishandled this. And, I've asked my correspondent to weigh in with further details as he wishes.

Police brutality and possible gay targeting days before the 40th anniversary of Stonewall?  Sad but true, as I detail on my blog, as the Fort Worth Police Department claims it was just doing its job. But, investigating claims of serving intoxicated patrons does NOT need a level of force that leads to one person getting a fractured skull.

Fort Worth has one openly gay city councilman, which will help in efforts to get to the bottom of this, but it still won't be easy. And, the FWPD has looked pretty clueless in its PR so far.

And, BurnedOut in comments, the link shows it's OK now.

Via CNET, it's clear that the anti-science wing of the GOP is going to try to make hay out of an allegedly suppressed report by career EPA staffer Alan Carlin, cited by Smokey Joe Barton last week on the House floor during Waxman-Markey debate.

But, look at Carlin's own Googlepages site, and you'll see some political angles and ax-grinding positions.

Look at my blog for a more detailed analysis on things like cost-benefit analysis, aerosols and more, from Carlin's own words.

I'm referring to Josh's "bigger than the both of us" post.

There, wondering about Team Obama vs. Big Bad AIG, he says:

We're paying them off, either in full or in part, out of fear that pulling the plug on these contracts would so destabilize the global economy that paying it is a better solution than not. But we're doing it for us. Not them. They are, at best, collateral beneficiaries. ...

Or at least that's the idea. Unless we're actually just chumps and Obama -- via Geithner and Summers -- have simply ceded the running of the whole thing to the people who caused all the problems in the first place. And we are just along for the ride even though we're paying the bill.

To which, I e-mailed Josh:

I wasn't quite this prescient in detail last fall, but this is the general reason why I voted Green in 2008 as in 2004.

And, still glad I did that today. I simply don't buy the  "tone deaf" excuse. This was deliberate, coming not just from Geithner, but his boss,the man whose No. 1 campaign contributor most of last year was Goldman Sachs and who was the No. 2 senator, to Dodd, in AIG money received in the 2008 cycle..

More thoughts on the left-hand side of the two-party duopoly at my blog.

For the record, I agree strongly with Proposition 8 opponents that the measure was a constitutional revision and not an amendment. (It was the one major contribution I made besides my ones to the Green Party.)

That said, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is either being VERY disingenuous or else incredibly out of the loop in gay activism.

I have it on fairly good authority that a fair amount of gay activists WANTED Prop. 8 on the ballot in the first place.

Reading, or hugely MISreading, the political tea leaves in the Golden State, gay rights supporters thought this was the ideal place to get the first ballot-box victory in the country.

And, due to the Religious Right, and somewhat the Mormons, they were hugely wrong.

So, instead of making the "key legal arguments" nine months ago, they're being made now.

My ideal solution, were I a Solomonic member of the California Supreme Court?

Rule that Prop. 9 was indeed a revision, while --

Severely fining California, and even national, if necessary, gay rights leaders under any possible statute. Barratry, for the lawyers involved, perhaps?

On an issue like this, you take the victory however you can get it.

Assuming that, as I've been told, this was a strategy, was incredibly stupid.

Which raises the question, can the Bobbsey twins, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Team Obama economic czar Larry Summers, save the economy?

Paul Krugman might have more reason to say No.

The WaPost has a semi-puff job piece on the two

Among the most interesting tidbits?

Despite the GOP, on the one hand, saying that FDR made the Depression worse, and Paul Krugman on the other hand saying the Obama stimulus is too small, Summers-Geithner have led the "budget hawk" fight inside Team Obama.

Meeting in January on the eighth floor of the transition team's office in downtown Washington, Geithner pressed the incoming president to commit to cutting the deficit to 3 percent of the economy over the next five years, which would keep the nation's debt roughly in line with normal economic growth. Summers quickly backed him.

Well, just as the current economic clusterfuck is putting paid to traditional conservativism, even thought the GOP doesn't see itself as a fish just shot in a barrel, if the two-headed Summers-Geithner monster is wrong, neoliberalism might be on life support itself.

But, due to the two-party duopoly, it's going to be hard to clear the two corpses out of the way.

Lobbyist Vicki Iseman, whom The New York Times may or may not have implied, a year ago, had an affair with John McCain (and the NYT can't do anything about reader inferences as to what it did or did not imply, or intend to imply) has a pennies-on-the-dollar settlement (not literally, because she gets nothing financially) with the newspaper, which primarily consists of the paper publishing an online column written by her attorneys, and an NYT note to readers" in Friday's print edition.

Given that the NYT didn't have to give Iseman any money (other that, possibly, lawyers' fees; that's unclear), my parsing of the original article, above the first link, should sum up this issue.

I think it's clear the newspaper won this baby. It just, in today's newspaper fiscal world, didn't want to spend any more money on attorneys.

As a newspaper editor myself, if I ever were in a similar situation, I KNOW I  would feel like I had won.

Take, for example, the stipulated verbal announcement language of the settlement.

The NYT never outrightly said Iseman/McCain had an affair in the first place. So, it's definitely no skin to stipulate that. As for the "imply," well, the NYT can't do a thing about what readers inferred it implied. The settlement language not mentioning that shows how tissue-thin it is.. As for the "intent" issue, the question of Iseman being a "public person" or not is irrelevant. It's tough to prove intent, period, in a civil case, without a big smoking gun. Especially, since the NYT "note to readers" says it did not "intend to conclude" (emphasis added) a relationship existed.

In short, the NYT did not withdraw a single word of the original story, and did not offer an apology on behalf of its readers' inferences about any NYT intent.

In fact, it's arguable Iseman lost, by having such a weak settlement rather than withdrawing the suit entirely. Now, she and her lawyers have brought new attention to herself and the story.

If Ben Smith thinks she won, it shows how much of an idiot he is. And, as I posted there, where did she get such clusterf*ck lawyers?

As revealed in a Congressional hearing today, Peanut Corporation of America President Stewart Parnell said, in internal e-mails, he was more worried about bottom line costs than about salmonella, or other problems the company knew it had at its main plant, including cockroaches and a leaky roof.

So worried, in fact, that untested products were sent out the door to the public. So worried that PCA stopped using a testing lab that found too much contamination.

So, with salmonella a known cause of sickness, and potentially contaminated products shipped from a factory whose owners knew it had a leaky roof and cockroaches, isn't this criminal assault?

Parnell didn't answer that, or anything else, in person today, instead repeatedly taking the Fifth before Congress. As did other PCA honchos.

And, much of the product from PCA plants went to nursing homes or schools.

You know, here in Texas, if you specifically assault a child or an elderly person, it ups the criminal charges and punishment potential.

Given that we now know PCA made at least one kid sick:

"The issue was no longer what had we done unknowingly, but what had PCA done knowingly," father Terence Hurley said.

Or, from the MSN story about taking the Fifth, at least one senior citizen was killed:

"I would like to ask why anyone would not want to have mandatory recall. Why do we leave it up to the company?" asked Jeffrey Almer, whose mother, Shirley Mae Almer, died Dec. 21, several months after the outbreak was first known about. The 72-year-old was in a Brainerd, Minn., nursing home recovering from cancer treatment when her daughter served her peanut butter toast.

"Their behavior is criminal, in my opinion. I want to see jail time," he said.

Thus, the rhetorical question is a no-brainer in my mind.

I say, let's put PCA President Stewart Parnell and a few of his minions on trial.

And, if convicted?

Well, the "eye for an eye" of the Torah actually isn't always such a bad idea.

Lock them up in a jail cell with nothing but their own peanut products for jailhouse food.

The new Treasury Secretary has hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. And, even if this passes the letter of President Obama's anti-lobbying ethics reform executive order, it sure doesn't pass the spirit of it, or the smell test.

And, I'm not sure if it even passes the letter of the lobbying rules.

If this isn't proof that the second round of TARP disbursements, and much else within Obama administration economic efforts, will be targeted at Wall Street and not Main Street, I don't know what is. (In other words, per the one Democratic National Convention commercial, Obama's financial administration IS about Smith Barney and NOT about "average Joe" speaker Barney Smith.)

For the non-diehard Obamiacs, please tell me  you're not surprised. (Don't forget the name of Obama's top campaign contributor!)

And, I hope you're not surprised that MSLBs haven't noted this issue yet.

Will his lies, arrogance, sense of entitlement, undercut the sense that Obama's stimulus efforts aren't just for the insiders?

What else are you going to say about Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner's laughable claim that TurboTax software errors caused him to miss paying more than $30,000 in FICA taxes he should have?

First, TurboTax is a simple program, and very much GIGO driven. If Geithner input garbage, whose fault is that?

And, the lie is so transparent, to boot. For 'winger blogs, this baby was far easier to check than claims that Bush National Guard documents aired by Dan Rather were possibly typed on a computer rather than a typewriter or early word processor. And, they've blown it out of the water.

So, too, did TurboTax maker Intuit.

Besides, the "Turbo Tax ate my tax preparation" excuse ignores the two years Geithner had a preparer due his taxes. The only way Geithner got those years wrong was if he lied to his preparer about being considered self-employed, despite the IMF telling him he was considered self-employed for tax purposes.

Beyond that level of bald-faced transparency in a lie, to me, there's often a grain or two of arrogance. It's as if Geithner is nonverbally telling Congress, "Yeah, I lied. But, I'm the indispensable man, so, what are you going to do about it?"

The country's top financial man, including being the ultimate boss of the IRS, skipped paying part of his taxes for years. That's bad enough. Now, he's lying about why he did it.

Let's let San Francisco Chronicle columnist Kathleen Pender have a few words on the importance of this all:

 I believe that hiring a man who failed to do his taxes right will set a terrible example. Our tax system is built on the premise of pay when due, not pay when caught.

As for people who say we can't afford to do without a Treasury Secretary right now, I counter:
1. Obama knew all this a month ago or more; he could  have nominated somebody else;
2. If you accept that argument, you're accepting Geithner's "indispensible man" arrogance;
3. We can't afford to do WITH Tim Geithner running the Treasury;
4. Obama's "common man" popularity runs SERIOUS risk of early trouble, re the stimulus plan, more TARP bailout, etc., if a "one set of laws for me, another for  you" guy  is running the show.
5. Obama's appearance of fallibility grows the longer he stays with Geithner.
That said, as I noted, nobody forced Obama to stay with Geithner after Obama's vetting team first became aware of the problem.

Instead, unless he changes his mind, President Obama is determined to inflict a serial liar upon the United States as chief point man for as much as $1 trillion of economic stimulus work. Unfortunately, at least one "yes" vote on the Senate Finance Committee bought into the "indispensable man" argument.

And, given the new report that Caroline Kennedy withdrew her Senate seat seeking because of her own tax and housekeeper problem, this is not a mild matter.

Updated, per a TPM post, and first commenters here:

If Obama REALLY wanted change at the Treasury, he would have excluded anybody with any of the following taints:
1. Worked for Goldman Sachs.
2. Works for Citigroup.
3. Worked for Larry Summers.
4. Worked for Robert Rubin.
5. Worked for the NY Fed.
6. Worked for The Fed.
7. Taught econ at either Chicago or Stanford.

That's just for starters.

Meanwhile, TPM reporter Elana Schor, whether on her own or "carrying water," is trying to compare a relatively minor donor misfiling by the political action committee of Sen. Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, and the attempt is almost as laughable as Geithner's own laughable lies, but not surprising.

Here's why it's laughable:
1. Apples and oranges, comparing this with Geithner.
2. The fact that Schor, or the webmaster or whomever, said "go look for it yourself" rather than posting the actual PDF, indicates its small taters what Grassley's PAC did.
3. It was Grassley's PAC; we don't know if he knew anything about it.
4. It was, apparently, a one-off deal, not four years of malfeasance.

I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you that this is somehow supposed to make Geithner look better, or not so bad. I'm sure this will be a MSLB talking point; Steve Benen has already linked it at Washington Monthly.

And, if Ms. Schor wants to report on something related to this issue, why didn't she contact Intuit, for starters? Or a CPA? And do some reporting on Geithner's claims?

And, there's more YET to think about.

Cabinet nominees are coached and prepped for their confirmation hearings. Don't tell me the "TurboTax defense" came out of nowhere. Why doesn't Ms. Schor start asking around about that, too?

Anchorage Daily News Editor Pat Dougherty has finally fessed up to a three-month coverup, namely that, in the weeks before the Nov. 4 general election, he DID have a reporter, namely Lisa Demer, investigating the (still-unanswered) rumors around Trig Palin's birth. The revelation comes as part of an exchange of e-mails between him and the governor, excerpted on my blog.

Texas progressive pundit Jim Hightower's most famous book is probably "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos."

Well, in case Dougherty didn't realize it before, in current Alaskan politics, there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow editors and live wildcat Sarah Palin.

That said, he should have realized it.

In his blog post on ADN's editor's blog where he admits the deception, while at the same time dissing people with questions about Trig's birth (or Tripp's now) as conspiracy theorists, he tells Palin, in his New Year's Eve e-mail response to her, just how little cooperation his reoprter, Lisa Demer got from Mayor Whazzup and her staff and others.

In spite of that, in spite of the election upcoming, etc., shades of the 2004 New York Times, he decided to sit on Demer's reportage. And still is.

Hello???

Here's my blog take on this. Needless to say, Doughertyis getting royally reamed in comments.

Josh posted reader LG's comments about this earlier today, and I agree.

Can the MSM, like CNN in this case, talking about 2008's job losses being the worst since 1945 put the job-loss figures into some historical context? The 1945 population was about half of today. In fact, it's not as bad as 1982, even.

See my blog link for more about this vs. 1982, if you're under 40, and for concerns about the "worst since Depression" line becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, it is true, as Kevin Phillips has so well noted, that unemployment calculation methodology has been, to be blunt, "fudged" since 1982. That said, some of the fudging had been done before then, as Phillips has also written.

That said, as I note, there's a full percentage point difference between 2008 job losses and 1982. Even with allowance for fudging, I don't think you can say problems now are significantly worse than they were then.

We now have more evidence that 1982 was worse. I know that under-35s, and perhaps to some degree, even those in the 35-39 range don't grasp this, or else aren't old enough to remember, it, but 1980-82 was a real recession, not like the Poppy Bush recession that got Clinton elected, or the Clinton/Shrub Bush recession.

Will the media, including the hometown Anchorage Daily News, start looking for answers to all the questions raised by Tripp Palin's birth?

Those questions start with whether the kid was born on a Saturday or a Sunday, why Gov. Palin's office is stiffing the press so far as to not even issue a release (it did with Trig's birth), lie about why it's not releasing any PR and more.

Getcha popcorn, as Terrell Owens would say here in Dallas.

Among the questions:
1. Can Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White really block the appointment? Will state AG Madigan, also known as "Candidate No. 2," be asked to rule if White has any such power, or is just a paperwork functionary in a case like this? As "Candidate No. 2," should she recuse herself if such a request for ruling comes to her office?

2. How did Bobby Rush get tapped to run race-based flack? Is Jesse Jackson Jr. mad at being cut out of the loop?

3. Speaking of this, if Harry Reid falls back to his original position of the Democratic party not letting Burris (or ANY Blago appointee) caucus with it, will the Congressional Black Caucus rise up? Especially since Reid welcomed Joementum, once again, with open arms?

All very good questions. These and more are discussed further on my blog.