This is like when they ask you a job applicant about their weaknesses in an interview and they answer: I work too hard sometimes.

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” said Gingrich

[…]

“What I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them,”

via 44 – Newt Gingrich: ‘Passion for the country’ led to personal indiscretions (video).

Some overstatements have worked their way into the governor’s routine public comments, like a claim that he balanced the budget last year without raising taxes; in truth, he cut deeply into tax credits for the elderly and the poor. But inaccuracies also crop up when he is challenged, and his instinct seems to be to turn it into an attack on someone else instead of giving an answer.

[…]

Mr. Christie fired Bret D. Schundler, his education commissioner at the time, accusing him of lying about the hearing. But Mr. Schundler said he had warned the governor before the news conference that what he was about to tell reporters was false.

“His entire point was he likes to be on offense rather than defense,” Mr. Schundlersaid days later. “He wanted to make this all about the Obama administration’s picayune rules rather than our error.”

via Governor Christie’s Talk Is Not Always Straight – NYTimes.com.

Christie’s strategy: Don’t get it right. Get it out first and be bully about it.

Josh Marshall links to an article that suggests are our government is thinking about supplying Libyan rebels. May as well throw some landmines in the mix as well.
Ridiculous.

Apparently, the cascade of uprising in the Middle East was completely unexpected by our intelligence apparatus.

I wonder where all the resources went? Oh …right:

Mr. BAER: Well, let me put it this way, Egyptian Arabic is peculiar, a peculiar accent, and it’s difficult to learn especially, you know, the familiar Arabic. And it would take an officer two years of studying Arabic, three years on the ground mastering Arabic, and about 10 years to get a grasp of a society like Egypt. That’s ideally what happens. You know, it’s very difficult for someone to devote a career of 20 years on a single country like Egypt, especially when you’ve got two wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has just sucked resources and people and – mainly in support of the military and these two countries. So the CIA is truly – the bench strength is very, very thin. And you can see what’s happened that this expertise – it’s just been drawn away by these two wars and, you know, how you get it back, it’ll take years.

via A Covert Affair: When CIA Agents Fall In Love : NPR.

 

Smells Fishy (couldn’t help it)

Authorities in Redondo Beach are investigating what killed millions of fish over the last day at King Harbor Marina.Fish, including anchovies, sardines and mackerel were floating lifeless in Basins 1 and 2 of the north side of King Harbor Marina.

via Millions of dead fish at King Harbor in Redondo Beach [Updated] | L.A. NOW | Los Angeles Times.

When you have a politician who wants to run for President but has crystal clear public, on the record statements of the secessionist, wing-nut, bither, tea bag or civil rights history revisionist sort, that person should immediately stop getting the benefit of the doubt from progressives even when they say something reasonable.

Chris Dodd to Lead MPAA. I guess.

RightNetwork has found a talk show host…

Now the site seems to have been awakened from its nap and it’s poignantly clear that it’s decided to let everything ride on the illusionary populist appeal of its pet rock, “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, yes, that has-been never-was pseudo-phenomenon from 2008.

via To Baldly Go Where Everyone Has Gone Before | James Wolcott’s Blog | Vanity Fair.

Really?

Jay Rosen cast everyone that wrote a “twitter can’t topple dictators” article as not serious. Above The Law lists some serious people’s “cyber pragmatists”.

He must not have read Evgeny Morozov’s new book Net Delusion, whose very first chapter names the fools, links to the content, and reframes the big question as not whether social media matters but rather which side it ultimately benefits in the balance of power between citizens and authoritarian states.

Aaron Bady has a much more nuanced set of thoughts. TechPresident’s Nancy Scola has some additional words of wisdom on how to evaluate social media’s role in the latest wave of democratization

via Idle Twatter : Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I wrote one. I named a few people who made foolish statements. Maybe I can make my point more “serious”. Cheers to the people in Northern Africa and the Middle East that have used social media to promote and facilitate action.

Not all dictators will be so clumsy, lost or timid in the face of centralized, hardware network dependent social media (Iran, Zimbabwe). The networks that protesters used to disseminate information are dependent upon regime controlled infrastructure.

It’s great that Facebook and Twitter did so much for us. But the despots will figure out how to work around them both technically and politically. They’re too easy to disrupt. Facebook could go down on its own

[…]

There’s all kinds of crazy stuff you can do at a firewall to make one site appear to be having technical problems. Real technical problems (but fake ones nonetheless). There are consultants calling on generals all over the world, right now, selling them wonderful Internet dashboards that selectively and randomly make sites appear to have problems of their own, not caused by the government.

via Scripting News: A fractional horsepower news network.

The Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, carefully studied the movement’s strategy and developed a strategy he hoped could subvert it. He used mass arrests but avoided the kind of dramatic, violent incidents that might backfire by attracting national publicity. Pritchett arranged to disperse the prisoners to county jails all over southwest Georgia to prevent his jail from filling up. The Birmingham Post-Herald stated that “The manner in which Albany’s chief of police has enforced the law and maintained order has won the admiration of… thousands.”

via Albany Movement – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

“Generally, in Libya before this, there was no media,” explains Shallouf*. “So if Tobruk made a revolution, [the government] would spend three to five days killing us and finish the revolution. Nobody in [larger nearby communities and cities] al-Baida or Darna or Benghazi would have heard about it. But now with al-Jazeera and Facebook and the media, all of Libya hears about the revolution and is with the revolution. They know about it. They think, ‘I am Libyan, this is my family, so I will go to the street to fight for them.’ ”

He and fellow Libyans had followed the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings on al-Jazeera and satellite Arabic-language news channels. He did his best, along with other Libyan activists, to internally circulate the videos he saw so that other Libyans could get a glimpse of what was happening on either side of their closed-off country. “After I got videos from the Internet, we sent them from Bluetooth to Bluetooth. Mostly videos of fighting in Egypt. I felt two things when I saw these videos: I felt sad. And then I wanted to make a revolution!”

With the Internet shut down, Libyans crossed the border for access. Says Tawfik al-Shohiby, a chemical-engineering professor at the University of Tobruk: “We sent my brother and his friend to Marsa Matruh [in Egypt] to use the Internet. I went to Egypt every day to give him a flash disk full of media from Tobruk, al-Baida, Benghazi. They were videos from mobiles. Not just mine. We made copies, went to the Egyptian border at Salloum and gave it to someone there — my cousin’s son — and he went to Matruh, where my brother was. That was the first media center of the Libyan revolution. My brother [a 31-year-old computer engineer] had this idea. On the 16th of February, he printed flyers for the protest and spread them in the streets from his car.”

*[Gamal Shallouf a marine biologist interviewed by Hauslohner]

via Liberating Libya with Laughter, Facebook and al-Jazeera – TIME

Dave Pell on Nir Rosen’s ugly “she was asking for it” comments and weird defense of them:

Rosen’s offending tweets were in response to the reports that CBS’ Lara Logan had been sexually assualted near Tahrir Square on the day Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Here is a sampling of his handiwork.

“Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson [Cooper]. Where was her buddy McCrystal.”

via Breaking News: Man Tweets Without Really Thinking About It First : All Tech Considered : NPR.

Slate’s David Plotz finds fault with “new media”

And the problem with a lot of new media is that it erodes the barriers between what it is we are allowed — as our private selves — to think and feel because we are human (and thus flawed) , and what it is that’s appropriate and fine to say in public.…Slate editor David Plotz, during last week’s Slate Political Gabfest podcast

via Change of Subject: The blurt locker.

My talk under my breath, or in Vegas, or while playing Rugby, or watching sports with fans of a rival team is not the same talk at meetings or the family dinner table. I get Plotz’s point. It simply doesn’t apply here. I just don’t see where twitter eroded that barrier for Rosen. Yes, we all have ugly private thoughts. The “problem” is Rosen didn’t think his thoughts were ugly. He consciously posted them and stood by them, and then was shamed into giving a half ass apology.

If a person can ever be ashamed of an idea, it shouldn’t become a tweet, blog or status update. They are all a form free autographed billboard that are automatically archived to preserve your stupidity.

Andrew Sullivan is measuring Daniels for a Brooks Bros. Boys suit to wear to his 2012 inauguration as as POTUS and David Brooks names him the care bear of the GOP. Meanwhile, in a world of where people may still want to learn more about Gov. Daniels, Paul Waldman finds an account of Princeton undergrad Mitch Daniels being caught with a boat load of drugs.

[…]enough marijuana in his room to fill two size 12 shoe boxes, reports of the incident say. He and the other inhabitants of the room were also charged with possession of LSD and prescription drugs without a prescription.

[…]

The comically mild penalty he received — a $350 fine, no jail time, no probation — was a salutary wake-up call that allowed him to go on to a productive career. And he presents this as evidence in favor of laws that would absolutely destroythe career of anybody caught in 1989 (or today) doing what Daniels was caught doing. A couple of hundred thousand students have lost their financial aid, in many cases meaning they had to drop out of college, because of a conviction for possession or sale of drugs. If Daniels was in college today, and thus had actually served time as a convicted drug dealer, not only would he have no political future, he wouldn’t have much of a future at all.

via Mitch Daniels On Drugs.

Contrast that with what Mitch Doggy Dogg prescribes for a kid at Indiana University caught with a joint:

In calling for enforcement of drug laws against even casual users — publicizing the names of arrestees, at least minimal fines or jail time for those convicted and requiring no-use policies from colleges and other beneficiaries of government funds and so on — William Bennett is exactly right

Mitch wants Indiana to have Rockefeller Laws that helped create million dollar blocks. Or the same type of draconian laws passed in the 1980s that help fill California jails so much that the 45,000 member Correctional Officers Union is the most powerful union in that state.

It’s like social security hawk Paul Ryan’s crusade to gut Social Security because Americans desire so much to depend on SSI and use it as a hammock” while he had his own hammock after his father’s tragic death: their boot straps are too good for us to use when we’re in need.

Things being “Rahm’s fault” in Washington was conventional wisdom. They will actually be his fault in Chicago. And there will be a lot of things to take the blame for. Can’t say I’m envious of the victor.

It’s utterly disgusting what Forde was willing to do to secure a shadow authority to exact violence on immigrants.

On May 20, 2009, Forde and two alleged accomplices stormed the Flores’ home in Arivaca, Arizona. Two men killed Raul Flores Jr. and shot his wife and Brisenia’s mother Gina Gonzalez before shooting the 9-year-old girl point-blank. Gonzalez testified during the trial that she could hear her daughter, roused from her sleep in the living room where she was camped out so she could be close to the family’s new dog, ask why her parents had been killed, then silence as the shooter stopped to reload a gun, and finally two shots that went through the little girl’s head.

[…]

Much of the chatter on the lefty blogs and immigrant rights networks in the weeks of the trial has been dominated by bitter confusion about the lack of media coverage the case got.

via Shawna Forde Gets the Death Penalty.

Why so little Forde coverage? Silly liberals! There is only one domestic story and one international story allowed at a time via TV news. The courageous union-busting of Gov. Walker of WI vs. the greedy teachers unions who get rich by teaching in public schools is obviously much more important.

Lawrence O’Donnell vs. Bill O’Reilly. LO steps in for KO and is now striking out against BillO.

A senior CBS correspondent is recovering in hospital in the US after she was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob while covering the Egyptian protests, the US network says.

It says the attack occurred on Friday in Cairo’s packed Tahrir Square after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

Ms Logan became separated from her crew and was rescued by women and soldiers.

via BBC News – CBS’s Lara Logan attacked by Egyptian mob in Cairo.

That’s awful.

Military Coup is what happened in Egypt.

I am not sure, but from what I understand the constitution had a succession plan that called for the head of parliament to take over in case the President steps down. Instead the military has suspended the government and the rules that define the it and has placed the country under control of the High Military Council.

The military has much to lose in the transition, these officers and analysts say. Over the years, one-man rule eviscerated Egypt’s civilian institutions, creating a vacuum at the highest levels of government that the military willingly filled. “There aren’t any civilian institutions to fall back on,” said Michael Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about the Egyptian military. “It’s an open question how much power the military has, and they might not even know themselves.”

The beneficiary of nearly $40 billion in American aid over the last 30 years, the Egyptian military has turned into a behemoth that controls not only security and a burgeoning defense industry, but has also branched into civilian businesses like road and housing construction, consumer goods and resort management.

via Succession Gives Army a Stiff Test in Egypt – NYTimes.com.

The military may be the most trusted government authority, but that may not mean they are trustworthy. They were participants in Mubarak’s autocratic regime for better (filling in civilian services) and for mostly worse (military trials and torture for civilians) and their splinter with Mubarak was his plan to transfer power to his son Gamal.

Mubarak is gone. His regime is over. The paternalistic autocracy is not.

From ThinkProgress’ Wonk Room, WV Senator Joe Manchin Claims Coal ‘Doesn’t Get A Penny Of Subsidies’. Manchin doesn’t let facts get in the way:

Puzzling out the subsidies to the coal business is as unnerving as edging through a dark mineshaft swarming with Velcro-winged bats. This is because a big chunk of the subsidies are not direct handouts, but packaged as tax credits, tax breaks, and other goodies too numerous to itemize here. The U.S. coal industry enjoyed subsidies of around $17 billion between 2002 and 2008, including tax credits for production of “nonconventional” fuels ($14.1 billion), tax breaks on coal royalties ($986 million), exploration, and development breaks ($342 million), according to a study by the Environmental Law Institute.

On top of this federal largesse, state and local governments coddle coal with hundreds of millions per year. The Kentucky state government’s net subsidy to coal is $115 million. Virginia grants tax credits of about $26 million to power plants just to burn Virginia coal, and doles out credits ranging from 40 cents to $2 per ton for another 20 million tons not burned by power plants. Bioregionalism at its finest.

via Hey Mr. Green: Does the Coal Industry Get Subsidies?