Josh Marshall:

If Scott Brown wins on Tuesday [. . .] Health Care Reform will be dead [. . .] [H]ow incredibly stupid is the dawdling over the last few weeks going to look? The work of a year, arguably the work of a few generations, let go needlessly over a single special election? It's really almost beyond comprehension.

Some points - 1 - why would a health bill be dead? Why not reconciliation? This bill may be great in Marshall's mind, but it is not to a lot of us. 2 - Dawdling over the last few weeks? Is he talking about attempts to make the bill more progressive? Really? The dawdling he should be complaining about occurred last summer - when Max Baucus was allowed to hijack the process for 3 months. 3 - What is beyond comprehension is the political malpractice of Democrats for the last year on most every issue. They are staring at a debacle in Massachusetts on Tuesday and one in November because Rahmbo and Axelrod have blown it.

Speaking for me only

Arkansas Democratic Representative Vic Snyder announced he will not seek re-election. Coincidentally, Firedoglake published a SUSA poll it sponsored showing Snyder in deep trouble the same day. Strangely enough, some bloggers are accusing FDL of having driven Snyder out of the race. This is sheer stupidity. But it is also something more troubling - an apparent willingness to be dishonest to forward the Party.

Daily Kos will be polling any number of races in the upcoming cycle. I know Markos and he will not pull his punches. Will he be attacked by these purveyors of know nothingism? Is this the first shot of a campaign to blame Democratic troubles on disgruntled progressives? If it is, the campaign needs some sharpening, as this attack on FDL because of Snyder's announcement is really dumb.

Speaking for me only

From SportsLeft -- A big weekend of NFL playoff football kicks off tomorrow. Are the Cowboys as good as they look? Can the Jets run over the Bolts? Can the Ravens stop Peyton Manning? Will the Saints make some noise in these playoffs after tanking at the end of the regular season? All intriguing questions.

Let’s start with the Saturday afternoon match up between the Cardinals and the Saints. The Saints are 7 point favorites playing at home. The Cardinals come off of a wild win over the Packers last week. One thing we should expect is a lot of points and the over/under reflects this expectation – it is 57. The Saints led the league in scoring and point differential. The question here is a simple one – which Saints’ team do you expect to show up? The one that was the best team in the league or the one that limped home with 3 straight losses, including 2 at home? I expect the good Saints. The Cardinals are not good, especially on the road. I like the Saints big – take the Saints (-7). I also like the Over (57). More . . .

Paul Krugman took a strange swipe at Glenn Greenwald when Glenn wrote tangentially about the Gruber disclosure brouhaha. Glenn's response is a winner:

Nobody suggests that there's anything wrong with hiring Gruber to perform modeling analyses and paying him to do so. That's all perfectly appropriate; I'm all in favor of the Government's retaining genuine experts (as Gruber is) for analysis. Nor has anyone claimed that Gruber changed his views because of these payments. The issue is the non-disclosure, and -- most serious of all -- the misleading attempts by the White House and others to depict him as being "objective" and independent rather than disclosing that he was being paid a significant amount of money by the very party whose interests his advocacy was advancing[.]

I can not believe anyone disagrees with Glenn's point here. Krugman seems to be flailing here. Note, as someone accused of not disclosing conflicts of interest in the past, I am pretty averse to these types of charges. But Gruber's failure to disclose in this instance seems pretty direct. He should have disclosed.

Speaking for me only

On Friday, January 22, MTV and George Clooney will host a telethon to raise money for Haiti.

EW reports the show will be simulcast on ABC, NBC, HBO and CNN.

With our world filled with tragedy and disappointments, it is important to keep our senses of humor. Luckily, Digby finds a gem for our laughing pleasure:

Why Not Young Luke Russert for [ABC's] This Week?

[More . . .]

Gen. David Petraeus (Will Forte) and President Ali Abdullah Saleh (Fred Armisen) host a press conference on U.S. aid to Yemen and al Qaeda last night on SNL.

Funny dkos diary. AdamB provides link to new "Lost In 8:15"

My favorite line of it? "The survivors see a boat. It's Desmond. He's drunk." That always made me laugh. For the record, I love Lost and would choose watching the premiere over the SOTU. I can always watch the SOTU later on You Tube.

Speaking for me only

For the college football national championship. From the Rose Bowl. Tonight.

I like Alabama's defense to stifle Colt McCoy and Mark Ingram and Trent Richardson to wear down the Longhorn defense.

I like the Crimson Tide (-4).

This is an Open Thread.

From a NYTimes editorial:

[. . .] Either the National Counterterrorism Center didn’t get all of the information it was supposed to get — or it utterly failed to do its job, which is to correlate data so any pattern emerges. No doubt sorting through heaps of information and determining what is urgent or even worthy of follow-up is daunting. Still, it is incredible, and frightening, that the government cannot do at least as good a job at swiftly updating and correlating information as Google. Long before Mr. Abdulmutallab was allowed to board that flight to Detroit, some analyst should have punched “Nigerian, Abdulmutallab, Yemen, visa, plot” into the system. We are still waiting to find out whether Britain told Washington that it had revoked the suspect’s visa. Shouldn’t that have been on file?

We will reserve judgment about whether anyone should be fired for what President Obama has rightly called a “systemic failure.” [. . .] The United States cannot be enclosed in an impermeable bubble. But Mr. Abdulmutallab never should have been allowed to board that plane.

Can someone explain to me why this is wrong?

Speaking for me only

Update: Both subpoenas have been withdrawn.

When the TSA increased security after the Xmas Day foiled bomb plan, two bloggers got a copy and posted it. The TSA paid them a visit last night, serving them a subpoena, wanting to know their source.

TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public....Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn't cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.

What was in the top secret memo? [More...]

Joe Klein:

The denizens of the left blogosphere consider themselves the Democratic Party's base. But they are not. For Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, the wing is not the base; the legions of loyal African Americans, union members, Jews, women and Latinos are. In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration—the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts—that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power. The perversity of this is beyond comprehension,"

(Emphasis supplied.) Setting aside the invective, as a defense of the health bill as responsive to the base, it seems pretty ludicrous. The health bill includes an excise tax - vigorously opposed by the unions, either the Stupak Amendment or the Nelson Amendment - attacks on a woman's right to choose, and excludes undocumented aliens from coverage -hardly a bone to Latinos. Oh BTW, it also excludes a public insurance option - favored overwhelmingly by all Democrats, base or not. The perversity in arguing that the health bill appeals to the Democratic base is beyond comprehension.

Speaking for me only