Last month, I blogged that since Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement Buffy Wicks participated on a conference call with then-National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) communications director Yosi Sergant, seeking to drum up support from artists (many receiving (or hoping to receive) grants from the NEA) for the president’s health care plan, that long-time community activist should follow Sergant’s lead and resign her government position.

Well, it looks like another White House staffer, associate director of public engagement Kalpen Modi (AKA the actor Kal Penn, who played the second title character in the 2004 flick Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) organized and aspired to be in on that very call.

Newly disclosed emails link Kumar to the NEA politicalization scandal:

The emails reveal that Modi worked with now-former NEA national communications director Yosif Sargant in planning the August 10 conference call that was first revealed by Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood.com web site. Participants in the conference call were encouraged to use their talents to generate public support for the Obama agenda in Congress.

Via JWF via Instapundit.

Since Modi has also been involved in Administration efforts to politicize independent agencies, it’s time for this talented actor to leave Washington and return to Hollywood.  Which would be a good thing for both locales.

While Peggy Noonan is normally Dan’s territory, I hope he will indulge me on this one.  Reason being is that I’m now a self-created student of the “American Generations” after reading “The Fourth Turning“.

Noonan’s column today sums up exactly why, as a Gen X’er, I hold the Baby Boomers in such disdain and long for the day that they have exited our political structure.  Noonan also echoes a lot of what Strauss and Howe said about the Boomers in “The Fourth Turning”.

Her column title sums it up nicely: We’re Governed by Callous Children.

And her last paragraph fits the Boomer Class like a glove:

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

As Strauss and Howe noted in 1997, it is now our time.  The practical Gen Xers & The Millenials have to rescue America from the Baby Boomers who lived their entire adult lives wishing for the ideals of America to end; and are now in the middle of fulfilling those goals.

It is time to take America back from these callous children.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Bruce, of course, I’ll indulge you on this one.

I agree that the column you cite was particularly insightful.  And do hope you’ll indulge me by according me the privilege of writing a followup.

The folks at Pajamas asked me to write a piece on the recent Gallup poll showing that since Obama’s election, Americans have been moving to the right.  Here’s a taste of what I said.

If every American describing him- or herself as conservative identified with the Republican Party, nearly half of all Americans would support the GOP, while barely one-quarter would back the Democrats.* Yet, while our political parties increasingly divide themselves along ideological lines, those line are not always straight. Indeed, according to the latest Gallup poll, more than one in five (22%) Democrats describe themselves as conservative.

This poll which found that conservatives remain the largest ideological group is America, while welcome to those of us who believe America is a center-right nation, is sobering to those of us who identify with the GOP. According to Gallup:<

Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 20% as liberal. This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group.

And this shift to the right has accelerated since the election of Barack Obama, ranked by the National Journal in 2007 as the most liberal member of the United State Senate, to the White House with increased–and more liberal–Democratic majorities in Congress. The poll shows clearly that their elections have not succeeded in moving Americans leftward.

You can find the rest on their homepage.

Enjoy!

And Happy Halloween.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Should New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Jon Corzine win reelection next Tuesday, despite approval ratings that remain in the basement, he should be grateful his Republican opponent never considered the advice of former President Thomas E. Dewey after learning the results of the 1948 election.

Oh, whoops, I’m sorry, I forget, I was, uh, looking at the polls from that campaign and saw that Dewey had led the then-not very popular incumbent President Harry S Truman throughout the campaign, edging the Democrat by 5 points in the final pre-election poll.  On Election Day, he lost by nearly that amount.

You see, the aforementioned Mr. Dewey looked at his lead in the polls and said it was good.  He thought it was enough just to be the opposition to an unpopular incumbent.  Wanting a change, people would surely vote for the candidate most likely to beat the Democrat.  He wouldn’t need to wage an aggressive campaign.

Well, Harry Truman ran a spirited campaign.  And the rest is, as they say, history.  Perhaps because Mr. Dewey carried New Jersey by roughly the same margin he led in the last national poll, Corzine’s Republican opponent Chris Christie may have thought Dewey’s strategy of sitting on his lead would work in the Garden State.

The current polls, however, tell a different story, a very tight race, with some surveys giving the hapless Democrat an edge.  Hapless he may be as an executive, but he’s been ruthless on the campaign trail, zinging the Republican with tens of millions of dollars of negative campaign ads. (more…)

One thing you can count on when the AP reports on the story of the “outing” of the wife of Bush critic and Kerry campaign aide Joe Wilson (the dishonest one, not the apologetic one) is their failure to mention one significant fact about the Democrat’s ballyhooed New York Times article:  he lied.

Now that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government (CREW) has won its lawsuit against the Department of Justice, it has “received documents related to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with the FBI in the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity.”  The AP, as you can guess, ever eager to report a story that could be spun against that good Republican is all over it.  Writer Pete Yost “reports“:

In a New York Times opinion piece in July 2003, Wilson accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to buy a uranium “yellowcake,” in the African nation of Niger. Bush referred to the yellowcake during his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union speech to Congress as he was trying to rally support for going to war with Iraq. Yellowcake is a powdered form of uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon if purified and enriched.

The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports. Wilson brought back denials of any sale and argued such a sale was not likely to happen.

Um, Pete, since you seem to be quoting from Annenberg’s Political Fact Check report on the matter, why don’t you give us the rest of the paragraph:

But the Intelligence Committee report also reveals that Wilson brought back something else as well — evidence that Iraq may well have wanted to buy uranium.

And let’s not forget this:

But that’s not the way the CIA saw it at the time. In the CIA’s view, Wilson’s report  bolstered suspicions that Iraq was indeed seeking uranium in Africa.

In other words, if anyone was misrepresenting anything here, it was Joe Wilson.  If would be nice if those who cover the story would at least report the fact that this Democratic hack has long since been discredited.

But, then again, that might undermine the media effort to portray the former Vice President in a negative light. (more…)

This is just too delicious to ignore.  Recall the conventional wisdom of the better part of the last decade about then-President George W. Bush’s supposedly go-it-alone foreign policy and how that man antagonized our allies.  This silly notion was all based on the failure of two of our allies, France and Germany, to support that good man’s commitment to enforcing numerous United Nations resolutions which Iraq had violated.

Well, when Jacques Chirac, the man who served as President of France for the better part of W’s tenure in the White House stepped down in 2007, our relations with the Gallic nation quickly improved.  The problem was not the American President, but the French one.

Now, that perfidious Parisian has been ordered to stand trial for corruption.  Pardon my schadenfreude.

*NB, I flipped the order of the clauses in the title as, upon further reflection, I realized this version just plain sounded better.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Sean A offers an important reminder:

And just to be clear, during the Bush Presidency, when liberals were constantly bemoaning America’s “standing in the world community,” and shrieking about “the rest of the world laughing at us,” Chirac is one of the paragons of integrity whose approval they judged as indispensable.

To show you just how much a late bloomer I was as a film buff, when I first read about the first archetypal screen gangster, James Cagney, I confused him with Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners’ co-star Art Carney.

After reading about Peggy Noonan’s express in her wonderful What I Saw at the Revolution her “intuition” that the Gipper’s

. . . idea of the presidency and how to be president was influenced by a scene in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the big hit of 1942 [where an] actor playing FDR gives a presidential medal to George M. Cohan in a private little ceremony in a room in the president’s house

I knew I had to see the movie.  Cagney (of whom I then knew so little I mistook him for a small screen comedian

as Cohan, is properly awed.  The FDR character is down-to-earth and expansive–he has all the time in the world as he makes the visitor feel at home.  They reminisce.  Cagney/Cohan speaks of his birth–born red-faced and squalling on the Fourth of July as the cannon went off in the public square in celebration.

When I rented the flick, I saw not the Cagney familiar to most film lovers, the fast-talking, self-confident, rough-playing man of the streets, but a lovable fellow, devoted to his wife, committed to his country and dedicated to his music.

Only in recent days as I look for cinematic “heroes” similar to the mythological Achilles have I discovered the “real” James Cagney, the quintessential screen tough guy.  For a film lover, it has a been a real treat to experience his archetypal performances for the first time.  And it’s helped me shape the beginning of one chapter of my dissertation.

Just watching him, you can see how his performances influenced generations of screen gangsters and the directors who helped bring their characters to life.    Would Goodfellas have been so good had Scorsese not had Cagney to draw on as an influence?  Could Coppola have ever have conceived of bringing the Godfather to the silver screen without having scene the diminutive Irishman in action?

What contrast is his character to the role he played the first time I saw him on screen.  How interesting it is to experience a screen legend “backwards.”   And not for the first time.

Obama signed the stupid piece of legislation this week.  Figured I should mention it.  To underscore how inane and childish this legislation is — it is named the Matthew Shepard/James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Law.

Would Byrd’s name be attached if George W. Bush hadn’t been the Governor of Texas?  Would this new law have punished Byrd’s murderers any more than they were?  No — two were sentenced to death, the other will spend the rest of his life in jail.

Stupid, childish, petty Democrats run our nation.  Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats and Obama oppose things like free-market healthcare reform, free-market social security reforms,  and tax reforms that would actually do something for gay families.  And the Islamist Pogrom of Gays?   Democrats are silent.

Never forget that, folks.  But when you murder someone this weekend, just make sure you don’t yell nasty things at them first.

*sheesh*

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

It would be nice if there were more men like the Rudy Giuliani in the Republican Party, strong leaders who are conservative when it counts, fiscal hawks who are tough on crime and strong on national security, yet not beholden to social conservatives on issues of concern to gay people.  More often than not, when a Republican candidate is more “liberal” on gay issues than the rest of the caucus, he (or she) is more liberal on many other issues as well, not opposed to higher taxes, less committed to regulatory relief and reform, weaker on national security.

So it is with Dede Scozzafava, the Republican nominee for Congress in the special election to fill the seat of John McHugh, vacated when he was confirmed as Secretary of the Army.  Aware that she had a record on gay issues similar to that of the former Mayor of the Big Apple, we at GayPatriot had initially remained silent on the campaign, not joining other conservative bloggers in trumpeting renegade Republican Doug Hoffman who is running on the Conservative line in this election.

That all changed upon learning from the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund that Scozzafava was “the most liberal member of the GOP caucus in the state legislature, scoring a 15% rating on the Conservative Party’s scorecard.”  And she’s not just liberal on state issues, she is also liberal on national issues as well, supporting the Democrats’ spendthrift “stimulus” and their “card check” legislation.

At a time with record growth in federal spending, record deficits and an ever-expanding federal government, we cannot afford another spendthrift federal legislator, least of all one who calls herself a Republican.  We need to hold the line on federal spending and cut, not expand, government regulation.  We could find no convincing evidence that the Republican nominee in NY-23 is committed to that small government conservative agenda.

That is why we at GayPatriot join other “grassroots conservatives” in endorsing Doug Hoffman for Congress in the special election to be held next Tuesday, November 3 in New York State’s 23rd Congressional District.  We believe the Conservative candidate will do a better job in standing up to the big spending/big government policies put forward by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats and support a real reform agenda, cutting back on the size of the federal government, reducing the scope of its regulatory authority.

We recognize that Hoffman is not an ideal candidate, but we don’t live in the ideal world.  In this election, citizens of upstate New York have three real choices.   Considering the broad range  issues of concern to us, he is by the best of the three.  We encourage all GayPatriot readers living in NY-23 to pull the Conservative Party lever in next Tuesday’s balloting.

Last week alone, more Californians filed for jobless benefits for the first time than the number of jobs created by the “stimulus” since it passed nearly nine months ago.  The Golden State had largest increase in claims for benefits (of any state) with 5,774 citizens asking for government help after being laid off  (H/t Instapundit).

According to recovery.gov, the “so-called stimulus” created (or saved) 2,260 jobs in the Golden State since the President signed the bill in February.   At that time, the Golden State’s junior Senator, Barbara Boxer, heralded Senate passage of the legislation, promising it would “put Californians to work“.

Hey, Ma’am, it doesn’t seem to be putting Californians to work.  You said, “This bill will put Californians to work now building the highways, bridges, transit and rail systems, and renewable energy sources of the 21st century.”  The data show layoffs “in the construction, services and agricultural industries.”  So, maybe 2,260 Californians are building bridges for the state.  5,774 fewer are building other things (or otherwise engaging in productive and remunerative activities).

Let me repeat:  More than twice as many Californians lost their jobs in just one week in October than the number of Californians put to work by the “stimulus.”

Back in the Republican landslide of 1980, GOP candidates across the nation, riding the Gipper’s coattails, swept many entrenched Democrats out of office, including Indiana’s John Brademas, then the House Democratic Whip, Al Ullman, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and long-time Democratic Senators like Washington State’s Warren Magnuson, then the senior member of the United States Senate (having first taken office in 1944), and other Senate powerhouses including Indiana’s Birch Bayh, Wisconsin’s Gaylord Nelson and South Dakota’s George McGovern.

In New York, eight-term Congressman Lester L. Wolf lost his Long Island seat to a man 34 years his junior, 27-year-old John LeBoutillier, just one year out of Harvard Business School. The Republican became “the youngest member of the 97th Congress,” and certainly acted like it. He regularly engaged in ad hominem attacks not just on Democrats, but also on his fellow Republicans, calling Charles Percy, the then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “a living disaster with almost no redeeming features.”

He reserved the better part of his rancor for then-House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, famously opening one speech with the line, “Tip O’Neill and the federal government are the same: they’re both big, fat and out of control.“

His juvenile attacks earned him the admiration of many young conservatives, but did not help him with his Long Island constituents.  In 1982, he lost his seat in the Republican-leaning district to Robert Mrazek.

Such, I believe, will be the fate of the man who, in the current Congress, most resembles John LeBoutillier.  Elected in 2008 as part of the Obama landslide in Florida’s Orange County (where nearly two-thirds of his constituents reside), Rep. Alan Grayson has engaged in rhetorical attacks on his Republican colleagues that make Leboutillier’s accusations seem tame by comparison. (more…)

I’m not sure how I feel about President Obama’s reversal of George W. Bush’s policy of disallowing media coverage of the return of fallen military members to Dover AFB. Perhaps I’ll never really settle in on how I feel about such an emotional subject. I give myself that latitude.

But I definitely want to take the opportunity today to give the president credit for the classy way in which he welcomed my falled brethren early this morning.

Jake Tapper has the details.

Today President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 which includes language making it illegal for a person basically to think the wrong things while committing a crime.

Yes, the Defense Authorization includes the pearl of Leftists, Hate Crimes (sic) language.

Before I get too far into what will necessarily be a mischaracterization of what I want to say here, let me be perfectly clear: I think those who support this legislation more or less have the best intentions in mind. I, too, am disgusted by the crimes against Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. I am glad that those who perpetrated these vilinous acts against Shepard are currently each serving two consecutive life sentences. They will never again see the light of day. Meanwhile, two of the three murderers of Byrd are awaiting their executions while the third is currently serving life in prison.

What must be realized, however, is that the fates of these five men are symbols of how the justice system in America worked without the need for a hate crimes act.

Plain and simple, this is a law that criminalizes what someone is thinking.

All instances of its execution necessarily have contingent upon them the breaking of a law that already exists, and the justice that certainly follows thereafter. All that will happen is that an accused person will be held criminally liable for thinking things.

This law is brought forth with all the best of intentions and I don’t think those who support it realize how insidious and counter to our system of liberty it really is. It’s truly the stuff of Orwell

It is an abomination of liberty, and hopefully the Supreme Court will knock down its clearly unconstitutional basis.

That said, it is incredibly poetic that in July, anti-gun activists celebrated the defeat of a rider to the same bill that would have made it easier for law-abiding citizens to travel among the states with concealed weapons.

Tell you what: If you want to stop hate crimes, here’s a first step: Allow people to defend themselves!

It seems to me that these two riders tell the story of the Left in America today: Trust us. We’ll take care of things for you. Leave your liberties aside and put your faith in the government to take care of you.

It troubles me.

- Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

While some gay left-wing bloggers are ever eager to criticize the Jewish State and some Jewish students, reluctant to lose favor with their left-of-center peers, don’t want to advertise that they’re pro-Israel, that Middle Eastern democracy remains one of the few (if not the only) nation in the region where gay people can live openly.

Even some Orthodox (Israel’s equivalent of American social conservatives) are more tolerant of gay people than is the Palestinian Authority.

This story, via Commentary Contentions via Ynet which illustrates that point.  When T, a Palestinian man partnered with an Israeli, heard his father who lives in a West Bank village was ill, he went to visit him.  Since “going to the village is life-threatening for him because residents there are not willing to accept his sexual orientation,” they had to meet near the checkpoint (border crossing with Israel).  Denied re-entriy into Israel because of a paperwork snafu and “for security considerations,” he feared going to his family’s village.

A few years earlier, he had been arrested and tortured by Palestinian security services.  

Left with no other choice, he turned to the only person he knew in the area who could help him – a religious settler who has known him for some years. The man decided to give asylum to T. even though he knew it would not be looked upon favorably in the settlement. (more…)

Back in 2006, Democrats were able to recapture the congressional majorities they had lost in 1994 by putting themselves forward as the “not-Republicans.”  In 2008, they built on those majorities and their presidential nominee captured 53% of the popular vote, the highest percentage a non-incumbent Democrat had received in over three-quarters of a century by campaigning against an unpopular Republican incumbent and offering vague promises of “hope” and “change.”

Yet, this year, as Chris Christie’s campaign in New Jersey shows, while people are beginning to sour on the Democrats, particularly the incumbent Democratic Governor he seeks to replace, many are still not ready to pull the lever for the Republican.

In 2009 (and possibly 2010), it may not be enough to simply be the “not-Democratic” party (as it was in ‘06 and ‘08 to be the “not-Republican” party).  Perhaps, the GOP’s difficulty stems from the freshness of people’s memories of the last time the Republicans controlled all the levers of political power in our nation’s capital.  From 2003-2007, successive Republican congresses did little to control domestic spending, even with a Republican in the White House.

But, in ‘06 and ‘08, memories of the last Democratic Congress has long since faded (save for political junkies).   Few could remember what had sparked the 1994 Republican rout.

Perhaps many who did believed the Democrats had since learned their lesson and had changed their wayward (read:  spendthrift) ways.  On the campaign trail, they, particularly their party’s 2008 presidential nominee, certainly sounded like it.

Now that people can see that Democrats have returned to their free-spending ways, Republicans need show that we’ve learned from out recent setbacks.  Perhaps a GOP leaders need acknowledge that they lost their majorities, in large measure, because legislators failed to rein in federal domestic spending.

In that acknowledgement, they could remind Americans of the words of the document which, back in 1994, helped Republicans regain congressional majorities for the first time in forty years, the Contract with America: (more…)

Maybe because I’ve been reading a lot of about sex differences lately that all this hullabaloo over the president’s golfing (and basketball) buddies has struck me as just that:  hullabaloo.  No more than a tempest in a teapot.  

So what if he golfs and plays basketball only with men?  If these outings are just for recreational purposes only, then he’s doing what the better part of his fellow citizens do every weekend.

Have you ever heard feminists get upset when women gather together without men?   

It happens all the time and has happened throughout history–and likely through prehistory as well.  Numerous anthropological studies show that primates also often gather together in conclaves which exclude the opposite sex.

Some have become so obsessed with gender equality that we alas have often lost sight of human nature.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE:  This post was inspired by blogging law professor William A. Jacobson’s post on the same topic where he asks:

Let Obama play hoops and hit the links with the guys. Exactly which high-powered woman is he supposed to set a pick for, box out, or look the other way when she uses the foot wedge? Hillary? Maureen Dowd? Janet Napolitano?

Let’s criticize the president on his policies and not politicize his downtime.   We all need time to relax–and should be able to choose our companions when we do.

Three weeks ago, I predicted that a coming Christie surge in the New Jersey gubernatorial election.  And while most serious polls do show Chris Christie, the Republican challenger moving back into the lead against Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine, one respected poll does put the incumbent (comfortably) ahead.

The real question now is how late-deciding voters will break and what percentage of those now favoring independent Chris Daggett will stick with their man and how many will peel off to one of the two major party candidates.  According to Politico, one poll shows late-deciders moving in one direction, Daggett voters moving another:

[a] poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling finds that late-deciding voters are lining up behind Christie. The poll shows Christie leading Corzine by four points, 42 to 38 percent with Daggett at 13 percent. Christie only led by one point over Corzine in the last PPP survey two weeks ago.

Interestingly, the PPP poll shows that Daggett voters are more likely to support Corzine as a second choice by a 10-point margin, 42 to 32 percent.

That last number surprises me as it contradicts the conventional wisdom that Christie and Daggett are splitting the non-incumbent vote.

Corzine has used her vast resources, spending more than twice as much as his two opponents combined, to boost his Republican adversary’s negatives, but he hasn’t done much to increase his own favorables.

Despite his expenditures–and the Democratic tenor of the Garden State electorate, Corzine’s poll numbers languish in the high 30s and low 40s.  The Democrat could still pull this enough, even while remaining unpopular with his constituents.

WAIT A SECOND!  Maybe Daggett voters will break for Christie.  Jonathan Last notes this tidbit from the Quinnipiac poll showing Corzine “suddenly +5 also shows that 38 percent of Daggett supporters say they might change their mind and that Christie is +16 in that group.“

UPDATE:  Glenn Reynolds picks up a nugget about Corzine’s spending that I missed,

MAN OF THE PEOPLE: “New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine (D) has personally furnished $22.6 million of the total of $24.1 existing in his re-election campaign’s coffers — more than 90% of the total — according to the New Jersey Star-Ledger.”

Sent to me by GayPatriot reader Dan from New York:

Let me get this straight.

We’re going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn’t read it, and who smokes, with funding administered by a Treasury chief who didn’t  pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s nearly broke.

What possibly could go wrong?

Indeed.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard found “the incredulous look on [Campbell] Brown’s face” to be “absolutely priceless” when the CNN hostess asked Valerie B. Jarrett, Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, about bias at MSNBC and the Obama Administration official contradicted herself.

Miss Jarrett refused to answer the question and blathered on with some nonsensical drivel at odds with her statement that “of course” FoxNews is biased:

Well, you know what, this is, this is the thing. I don’t want to — actually, I don’t want to just generalize all Fox is biased or that another station is biased. I think what we want to do is to look at it on a case-by-case basis. And when we see a pattern of distortion, we’re going to be honest about that pattern of distortion.

So, if it’s a case-by-case basis, why not point to particular errors on FoxNews rather than badmouth the entire network–while watching its ratings increase?

What I found telling is how the Administration flack addressed Brown’s next point, “That’s all, that you’ve only spoken out about Fox News“:

That’s actually not true. I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power. 

Jarrett did not name another Administration target, acting as if she was still in the streets taking on “the man.”  Hate to break it to you, Val, but your boss is “the man” now.  Allahpundit calls this comment, “The ultimate expression of self-righteous victimhood, offered here by … a senior advisor to the most powerful man on earth.“

And I ask, what does it say about the mentality of the President’s minions if, more than nine months after their guy takes office, they act like they’re still on the outside.  Val, you’re not speaking truth to power, you’re power trying to silence the truth.

And kudos to Campbell Brown for asking tough questions of Administration official.  If her fellows followed your lead, they lift CNN out of the ratings basement.