The Commentariat -- Feb. 18, 2013

Happy Presidents' Day George Washington's Birthday

Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor: "... there is no federal Presidents' Day holiday. We don't care what your mattress ad says -- is that a legal document? The official name of today's day off is 'George Washington's Birthday.' It's supposed to honor the Father of Our Country, and only him.... [According to] the Office of Personnel Management list of 2013 holidays..., 'This holiday is designated as 'Washington's Birthday' in section 6103(a) of title 5 of the United States Code, which is the law that specifies holidays for Federal employees.... Though other institutions such as state and local governments and private businesses may use other names, it is our policy to always refer to holidays by the names designated in law.' Washington's Birthday has been a national holiday since 1885." Aw, shucks:

My column in the New York Times eXaminer takes down Tom Friedman's latest effort to "reform entitlements"; i.e., cut Social Security & Medicare. ...

... Dean Baker does an excellent job of debunking all of Friedman's economic arguments.

** Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker on naked Dubya & naked power, with reflections -- literal & figurative -- on the state of the GOP.

Philip Elliott of the AP: "The White House is downplaying its draft immigration proposal as merely a backup plan if lawmakers don't come up with an overhaul of their own. It won't be necessary, Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike are telling the Obama administration." ...

... Jamelle Bouie, in the Washington Post: despite the high degree of similarity between Obama's plan (which actually contains some detail) & Rubio's plan, "Rubio has come out against the administration's proposal.... Is Rubio interested in passing immigration reform, or does he want credit for being the kind of GOP senator who is interested in immigration reform."

Margaret Hartmann of New York: as the deadline for a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline looms, President Obama will have to choose between the environment & our Canadian friends. ...

... Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian: according to organizers, a crowd of 35,000 "protesters descended on Washington DC on Sunday demanding Barack Obama shut down the Keystone XL pipeline project to show he is serious about taking action on climate change.... The event, billed as the largest climate protest in US history, was intended as a show of force before Obama renders his decision on the pipeline project in the next few months. Protesters were bussed in from 30 states and Canadian provinces."

Paul Krugman: "... just about everyone except Republican men believes that the lowest-paid workers deserve a raise. And they're right. We should raise the minimum wage, now." ...

... John Cassidy of the New Yorker agrees. CW: an excellent explanation of why.

New York Times Editors: The sequester cuts, "which will cost the economy more than one million jobs over the next two years, are the direct result of the Republican demand in 2011 to shrink the government at any cost, under threat of a default on the nation's debt.... Last week, Senate Democrats produced a much better plan to replace these cuts with a mix of new tax revenues and targeted reductions. About $55 billion would be raised by imposing a minimum tax on incomes of $1 million or more and ending some business deductions, while an equal amount of spending would be reduced from targeted cuts to defense and farm subsidies. Republicans immediately rejected the idea; the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, called it 'a political stunt.'" ...

... MEANWHILE, the ever-brilliant Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says a good solution would be for "the government [to] protect the Defense Department from automatic spending cuts by slashing $1.2 trillion from the Affordable Care Act," as Josh Israel of Think Progress reports. As Israel notes, not only would that cost 30 million Americans the opportunity to obtain health coverage, "Obamacare actually reduced the deficit. [Graham's] proposal to put its elimination on the table would mean increasing the budget deficit by an estimated $109 billion over the same 10-year period, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office." CW: do you think Lindsey Graham gives a rat's ass about the deficit? He just doesn't want you to have affordable healthcare. Of course, he has great government-sponsored health insurance.

Max Rivlin-Nadler of Gawker: "During the year it went public, Facebook made $1.1 billion in profits. But thanks to some nifty accounting, the company won't be paying any federal or state taxes on it -- instead, it will actually be receiving a federal tax refund of about $429 million.... Not only that, but Facebook is actually carrying 'forward another $2.17 billion in additional tax-option tax breaks for use in future years.' Basically, they would like to do this every year. One of our most successful new companies is not paying a dime in taxes. Yes, let's please cut Medicare. That's the thing that's broken." CW: a good answer to Tom Friedman.

Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed: "Marco Rubio ... has now capitalized on [his Big Gulp] moment to raise more than $100,000 for his Reclaim America political action committee by selling branded water bottles. A source close to Rubio tells BuzzFeed that the water bottles, which were sold on the senator's PAC website to anyone who makes a donation of $25 or more, sold like hotcakes. In the period since they went on sale Wednesday, more than 3,100 of the PAC's 'Marco Rubio Water Bottles' have been sold."

Obama Planning to Put Chips in Every American Brain. Here's the genuine New York Times headline: "Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain." Oh, the story sounds benign enough: "The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics. The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain's billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness." CW: If this doesn't bring the conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork, I'll eat my ... brain.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post: United Arab Emirates helps poor communities in third-world nations -- like the United States. CW: the low-tax, no-union GOP mentality, most prevalent in the South, is responsible for where we are today, a country that can't afford to or chooses not to pay for basic needs.

Satire Alert. Andy Borowitz: "The chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology said today that the committee would hold hearings next week 'to settle the question, once and for all, of whether meteors exist. The media has been in something of a frenzy recently on this whole topic of meteors,' said chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas). 'I think it's irresponsible of them to frighten the public about something that, at the end of the day, may be about as real as unicorns.'"

The Big News from the Barack Obama-Tiger Woods Golf Game -- White House Press Corps Is "Livid":

Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can say a broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV have today expressed extreme frustration to me about having absolutely no access to the President of the United States this entire weekend. There is a very simple but important principle we will continue to fight for today and in the days ahead: transparency. -- Ed Henry, WHCA president & Fox "News" correspondent

I really can't tell you how important it is to me -- and to history -- to know the particulars of that golf game. -- Constant Weader

Hillary Cashes In. Dan Amira of New York: Clinton will begin her career as a well-paid speaker in April or May. And she write another book/cash-cow.

Local News

Emory University Needs a New President, or at Least Three-Fifths of One. Max Rivlin-Nadler: "Writing in the winter issue of Emory Magazine, President James Wagner rhapsodizes about the need for compromise in a politically turbulent society. He points out that the constitution was in itself a compromise. Another example he cites, is the Three-Fifths Compromise, which legally represented slaves as less than a person.... He then goes on to explain that compromises, like the Three-Fifths Compromise, keep our country great." ...

... With all due respect to those 19th-century do-gooders who had the idea of repatriating American blacks to Africa, it would have been a far, far better thing if, after the Civil War, the U.S. had deported all the white people in the Confederate states.

Here's the Maggie Smith interview, by Steve Kroft, which I mentioned in the Comments section. There are some Web extra segments here:

My tilting teapot.

News Ledes

Washington Post: "Rejecting a push by Britain, European governments on Monday decided against providing weapons to Syrian rebel forces, expressing fears that more arms would only lead to more bloodshed in a conflict that already has taken nearly 70,000 lives. The decision, by European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, illustrates the difficulty that Europe and the United States have had in dealing with the two-year-old Syrian civil war despite their unanimous condemnation of President Bashar al-Assad and his ruthless battle to remain in power."

Reuters: "Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa reveled in a sweeping re-election victory that allows him to deepen his socialist revolution even as he seeks to woo foreign investment in the resource-wealthy Andean nation."

Reuters: "Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made a surprise return [to Venezuela] from Cuba on Monday more than two months after surgery for cancer that has jeopardized his 14-year rule of the South American OPEC member."

The Commentariat -- Feb. 17, 2013

If you don't think Saint Ronald of Reagan & the Ghost of Saint Ronald have put this country on the skids, read the essays by Coontz & Stiglitz, neither of which, BTW, mentions Saint Ronnie:

... Stephanie Coontz, in a New York Times op-ed: "... despite the increased workload of families, and even though 70 percent of American children now live in households where every adult in the home is employed, in the past 20 years the United States has not passed any major federal initiative to help workers accommodate their family and work demands.... When the United States' work-family policies are compared with those of countries at similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in dead last....We must stop seeing work-family policy as a women's issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders." ...

... Joe Stiglitz in a New York Times op-ed: "Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country.... Probably the most important reason for lack of equality of opportunity is education: both its quantity and quality.... While racial segregation decreased, economic segregation increased. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better." ...

... Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post: "For the first time since the New Deal, a majority of Americans are headed toward a retirement in which they will be financially worse off than their parents, jeopardizing a long era of improved living standards for the nation's elderly, according to a growing consensus of new research. The Great Recession and the weak recovery darkened the retirement picture for significant numbers of Americans. And the full extent of the damage is only now being grasped by experts and policymakers."

Paul Krugman: increasing the minimum wage is good economic policy. ...

... Also, Krugman, from Saturday morning: "On both sides of the Atlantic, the austerians seem to be freaking out. And that has to be good news, an indication that they realize, at some level, that they're losing the debate." Krugman goes on to explain how Joe Scarborough is going crazy. Fairly funny, because it takes so few words for Krugman to eviscerate him. ...

     ... None of this high-profile discussion on the failure of austerity has any effect on that idiot Tom Friedman, who today rolls merrily along, urging a Grand Bargain to cut entitlements because "We can't protect both generations in full anymore, but we must not sacrifice one for the other -- favoring nursing homes over nursery schools -- and that's what we're on track to do. One should not be surprised, I suppose, to learn that a person who lives in the Palace of Versailles is, well, rather unconcerned about old ladies in nursing homes. I'd like to smack Tom Friedman in the face. And if he turned the other cheek, I should smack that, too, because I can't protect both cheeks & must not sacrifice one for the other. ...

... MEANWHILE, in a post titled, "The Deficit Hawk Delusion," Derek Thompson of the Atlantic does a lovely job of explaining actuarial projections to dummies (see Scarborough, Friedman). For all the good it will do. ...

... BECAUSE that idiot Joe Scarborough got out his home photocopying machine & plagiarized -- or claims to have plagiarized; who the hell knows? -- some unnamed "senior economist" at the Rand Corporation. ...

... Samuel Knight in the Washington Monthly thinks Scarborough would have been better off to argue that our imaginary currency problems came about "because space aliens raided the Treasury in the dead of night because Nicholas Cage and Chuck Norris were off duty, having been contracted by the Navy to fight a flotilla of krakens in the Caribbean the week before."

The Fed -- Still Bailing out B of A. Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: "... last week's details of the undisclosed settlement between the New York Fed and Bank of America are remarkable. Not only do the filings show the New York Fed helping to thwart another institution's fraud case against the bank, they also reveal that the New York Fed agreed to give away what may be billions of dollars in potential legal claims."

Matt Taibbi has a long piece in Rolling Stone on the criminal element that runs HSBC. I've been trying to read for a few days, but can't get to it. So here it is: "People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze.... But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated­ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder -- well, aiding and abetting it, anyway. That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy."

Lisa Rein of the Washington Post: "Advocates for the vast numbers of visitors to America’s national parks are pressuring Congress to prevent deep automatic spending cuts that would result in reduced hours and services across the country, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Yellowstone. Few corners of the federal government directly touch the public as do the 398 parks, monuments and historic sites, which draw 280 million visits a year. The system would feel the effects immediately of a $110 million slash should budget cuts take effect March 1...." CW: this is actually an upside to sequestration; Tea Partiers who want to deep tax cuts will be in for a rude awakening when they find out the GOP's starve-the-government project has closed or limited access to their favorite park & ruined their family vacations.

Sarah Halzack & Josh Hicks of the Washington Post: "The Department of Labor has suspended new enrollment into one of the nation's largest job-training programs for low-income youths, citing cost overruns that critics have blamed on mismanagement. The Job Corps enrollment freeze could close the door on as many as 30,000 young adults struggling in a troubled economy and could cost about 10,000 staff jobs, according to the association that represents private operators for the program."

Alan Gomez of USA Today: "A draft of a White House immigration proposal obtained by USA Today would allow illegal immigrants to become legal permanent residents within eight years. The plan also would provide for more security funding and require business owners to check the immigration status of new hires within four years. In addition, the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants could apply for a newly created "Lawful Prospective Immigrant" visa...."

Eric Lipton of the New York Times: "The background story of how the accusations [against Sen. Bob Menendez {D-N.J.}] were initially made has all the makings of a Hollywood political thriller, even snaring the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the process.... The way Mr. Menendez first came under broader scrutiny, at a minimum, illustrates the often-hidden role that partisan players have in helping push the major news media to dig into ethical allegations lodged against sitting members of Congress." ...

... Ernesto Londoño and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post have another big story on Menendez's Dominican shenanigans, a story which also ensnares the U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Raul Yzaguirre. CW: the more I read about this sorry affair, the more I see it as political hackery all around -- Menendez batting for his team, Republicans batting for theirs. The citizens of the U.S. & the Dominican Republic be damned.

David Adams of Reuters: "Using stolen names and Social Security numbers, criminals are filing phony electronic tax forms to claim refunds, exploiting a slow-moving federal bureaucracy to collect the money before victims, or the Internal Revenue Service, discover the fraud.... [The scheme] has ballooned into a massive, and dangerous, illegal industry that could cost the nation $21 billion over the next five years, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.... While the IRS says it has detected cases in every state except North Dakota and West Virginia, the fraud's epicenter is Florida, and it is mostly concentrated in Miami and Tampa."

Maureen Dowd & I share a pet peeve: "historical" films that make up stuff because some Hollywood blockhead thinks real history isn't dramatic enough. I know history is subjective & there are plenty of unknowns, but tossing out the knowns in favor of car chases or whatever is irritating. I'd like to think when I watch a bazillion-dollar movie, they could afford to hire a few historians to fact-check the script.

Jason Horowitz of the Washington Post: "VatiLeaks ... exposed the church bureaucracy's entrenched opposition to Benedict's fledgling effort to carve out a legacy as a reformer against the backdrop of a global child sex abuse scandal and the continued dwindling of his flock. It showed how Benedict, a weak manager who may most be remembered for the way in which he left office, was no match for a culture that rejected even a modicum of transparency and preferred a damage-control campaign that diverted attention from the institution's fundamental problems."

Right Wing World

Frank Bruni: Ted Cruz is an asshole.

Over at Fox "News," the patriotic hosts don't see anything wrong with making a 102-year-old woman stand in line to vote -- in the heat -- for 5 hours. "'What's the big deal? She was happy," [Martha] MacCallum argued. 'She waited on line, she was happy that she voted.' 'They held her up as a victim!' [Bill] Hemmer alleged. 'What was she the victim of? Rashes on the bottom of her feet?'" CW: another occasion to remind ourselves that the U.S. is one of a very few so-called democracies in which citizens do not have a constitutional right to vote.

News Ledes

CNN: "President Barack Obama hit the greens Sunday with famed golfer Tiger Woods, according to deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest. Obama is spending President's Day weekend at a sprawling resort in Palm City, Florida, where he's polishing his golf game. On Saturday, he worked on his swing with Woods' former coach, Butch Harmon." CW: I guess this means Tiger is rehabilitated now. Either that or he & Obama went partying while the First Lady & daughters are skiing out West.

AP: "Angry residents [of Quetta, Pakistan] on Sunday demanded government protection from an onslaught of attacks against Shiite Muslims, a day after 81 people were killed in a massive bombing that a local official said was a sign that security agencies were too scared to do their jobs. Saturday's blast at a produce market in the city of Quetta also wounded 160 people and underlined the precarious situation for Shiites living in a majority Sunni country where many extremist groups don't consider them real Muslims." CW: so if -- before the attack -- a U.S. drone had taken out the terrorists who planted the bomb, would that have been a bad thing? Just asking.

The Commentariat -- Feb. 16, 2013

My column in the New York Times eXaminer is on the limits of mainstream journalism, as evidenced by some New York Times reporting -- or not.

The President's Weekly Address:

     ... The transcript is here.

Your Democratic Scandal du Jour: Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "The Justice Department filed fraud and conspiracy charges on Friday against former Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., saying that he used about $750,000 in campaign money for personal expenses that included a Michael Jackson fedora and cashmere capes." You can read the charges here. ...

     ... Katherine Skiba of the Chicago Tribune: "Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife Sandi intend to plead guilty to federal charges alleging the former congressman misused $750,000 in campaign funds while she understated their income on tax returns for six years, their lawyers say."

Tabassum Zakaria of Reuters: "President Barack Obama's pick for CIA director, John Brennan, promised senators who will vote on his nomination more openness about U.S. counter-terrorism programs, saying the closely guarded number of civilian casualties from drone strikes should be made public, according to his written responses to questions released on Friday."

... When One Democratic Scandal a Day is Not Enough. Carol Leonnig & Peter Wallsten of the Washington Post: "A team of FBI agents has been conducting interviews in recent weeks in the Dominican Republic and the United States, looking into allegations that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) patronized prostitutes in the Caribbean nation, but has found no evidence to support the claim, according to two people familiar with the investigation."

Jonathan Bernstein, in the Washington Post: the Hagel filibuster "shows the need for Harry Reid to revisit, or at least threaten to revisit, filibuster reform.... Hagel or no Hagel, we're going to keep seeing more of these 'nullification' filibusters: GOP efforts to keep agencies [like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] from functioning as required by law by refusing to allow anyone at all to be confirmed.... Perhaps the one thing that was made very clear ... is that Republicans indeed believe in that 60 vote standard, and are willing to extend it to every single nomination.... That’s just not how the constitutional 'advise and consent' responsibility is supposed to work, and it's not how it ever worked before 2009." ...

... ** Traitors! Steve Benen: "In American history, a Senate minority had never blocked an up-or-down vote on a cabinet nominee -- until [Thursday]. Republicans broke new obstructionist ground by filibustering a Defense Secretary nominee during a war.... I remember the Bush/Cheney era pretty well.... Americans were told pretty consistently for seven years that to publicly question the Commander in Chief or stand in the way of his national security agenda was offensive, if not outrageous ... because to question the president, when al Qaeda might hear you, was to put America in danger."

... Jim Inhofe Has Kind Words for Terrorists. Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon: Jim Inhofe, the stupid old goat who is the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, "told Foreign Policy's Josh Rogan that [Chuck] Hagel's relatively soft stance on Hamas, among other things, meant that Inhofe could not support him.... [But] using his current standard, Jim Inhofe might have a hard time voting to confirm Jim Inhofe.... In 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Inhofe did not seem concerned. Hamas has done 'some good things, even as a terrorist group,' he told the Oklahoman. He compared the group to one of the country's largest charities, saying Hamas is like 'the Salvation Army with loaded guns.'" ...

... Dana Milbank: First, "Lindsey Graham ... opposed Chuck Hagel's nomination ... because of Hagel's foreign policy views. Then he argued that Hagel had not produced sufficient background material. Now he's arguing against Hagel because of the administration's handling of the attack on U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, last September -- when Hagel was a professor at Georgetown University.... Graham's antics have as much to do with events in Columbia, S.C., as with events in Washington.... In order to survive the Republicans' backward primary system, Graham needs to de-emphasize anything that might make him appear to be reasonable." ...

... In a pretty hilarious column, Gail Collins compares the Senate to "a bad Carnival cruise. They're dead in the water, nothing's working and the chief engineer is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.... If we were on a Carnival cruise, [John McCain] would be the captain. A captain who got on the P.A. and announced that the ship was going to Mexico. No, Alabama! No, in a circle! Or maybe we'll just stay dead in the water until a week from Tuesday and see what happens." ...

... Robert Burns of the AP: "Republicans have found a boatload of reasons to try to sink Chuck Hagel's hopes of becoming the next defense secretary. But the issue they used this week to stall his nomination -- the White House's handling of last September's deadly Benghazi attack -- may seem entirely unrelated to Hagel's qualifications because, well, it is." CW: it's good to see the AP writing a serious piece that casts Graham & McCain as political opportunists & crybabies.

Not Too Big to Wail. Waaaa! Waaaa! Waaaaaaa! Luke Johnson of the Huffington Post: Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) questioning of bank regulators Thursday hurt bankers' feelings & made them angry. CW: (See yesterday's Commentariat for video.) I'll bet she feels terrible about that.

Howard Dean tells Sam Stein of the Huff Post that he hopes the sequester happens as it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to cut Pentagon spending. CW: I could not disagree more, but the sequester -- with accompanying recession -- is beginning to seem inevitable, at least Dean points to (what I expect would be a short-term) upside.

Republican Bruce Bartlett, in the Fiscal Times: "... politically, supporting a higher minimum wage is a no-brainer for Democrats. In fact, the last time it was a political issue, during the 2006 campaign, it was a major factor in Democratic gains, helping them take control of Congress. Democratic insiders believe it could help them do the same in 2014.... In a head-to-head fight with Democrats on raising the minimum wage, Republicans will lose." P.S. to Marco: "Latinos support a higher minimum wage by an 85 percent to 12 percent margin."

Frank Rich on the national circus. AND on the former Cardinal Ratzinger., soon-to-be the former Pope.

E. J. Dionne: "... handing leadership [of the Roman Catholic Church] to a woman -- and in particular, to a nun -- would vastly strengthen Catholicism, help the church solve some of its immediate problems and inspire many who have left the church...."

Michael Stone of the Examiner: "In a perverse display of religious narcissism, the pedophile enabling Cardinal Roger Mahony is finding 'inner peace' in the humiliation and disgrace he now faces for his role in the sexual abuse of children. In a deplorable and insensitive blog post, the disgraced Catholic leader laments the fact that he is 'humiliated, disgraced, and rebuffed by many' for his part in the rape and sexual assault of children, without once lamenting the fact that his despicable actions are directly responsible for the unspeakable suffering of those same children.... In his blog post Mahony compares himself to Jesus, implying that he is emulating Jesus 'in rejection, in humiliation, and in personal attack.'" ...

... Michelle Smith & Nicolle Winfield of the AP: "Newly unsealed documents in a lawsuit brought against the Roman Catholic order Legion of Christ show the group's former second-in-command testified he discovered the order's founder, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, had fathered a daughter in 2006, but never confronted him about his double life and didn't share the news with the group's broader membership." CW: what an odd thing -- about the only people these old boys expose or discipline for breaking some RC rules are liberals, like nuns helping the poor.

Right Wing World

Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: newly-minted Sen. Ted Cruz (RTP-Texas) is a real asshole, and proud of it. (Or something like that.) Weisman's piece is worth a read. ...

... Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post: Ted Cruz is a real asshole: "One Republican senator described Cruz to me as 'Jim De­Mint without the charm,' referring to the rigidly conservative South Carolina Republican ... who was not exactly renowned for being warm and fuzzy."

Bill Maher on The Citadel. Thanks to James S. for the link:

Local News

Ivan Moreno & Kristen Wyatt of the AP: "A package of gun control measures won initial approval in Colorado's Democratic-controlled House Friday night, with Vice President Joe Biden personally phoning four lawmakers from his ski vacation in the state to speed along the emotional debate."

News Ledes

AP: "On Friday, San Bernardino County investigators revealed [suspected murderer Christopher] Dorner died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and defended tactics used during their search before a fiery gun battle ended an exhaustive manhunt. Dorner, 33, is believed to have entered the condo through an unlocked door sometime Feb. 7, soon after he arrived in the resort area of Big Bear Lake after killing three people. He locked the door and hunkered down until the condo's owners came to clean it, said San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon."

Reuters: "U.S. securities regulators filed suit on Friday against unknown traders in the options of ketchup maker H.J. Heinz Co, alleging they traded on inside information before the company announced a deal to be acquired for $23 billion by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc and Brazil's 3G Capital.The suit, in federal court in Manhattan, cites 'highly suspicious trading' in Heinz call options just prior to the February 14 announcement of the deal. The regulator has frequently in past filed suit against unnamed individuals where it has evidence of wrongdoing, but is still trying to uncover the identities of those involved." Probably John & Teresa Heinz Kerry.