Catching Up With The Hammer

The Daily Grind

BY Mary Katharine Ham

The guy who wrote the Arizona law explains what's in it.

I have no doubt his tremendous charisma will overcome this obstacle.

The SWAT team has the Tea Partiers under control, everyone.

Virginia man forced to get new vanity plate after CAIR deems the one honoring his favorite NASCAR drivers coded hate.

Navy to the Gulf oil spill.

If anything ever begged for Photoshopping, this is it.

The regressive anti-smoking lobby hates poor people.

The Boy Scouts now offer a gamer badge.

“In other words, raising taxes on the rich or corporations, closing tax loopholes, eliminating wasteful or low-priority programs, and prohibiting earmarks simply won’t be enough.’’

Daily Grind from The Hammer

The Daily Grind
7:50 AM, Apr 20, 2010 ·
BY Mary Katharine Ham

Brussels: Vacations are a human right.

Most transparent administration ever has sit-down with press about the fact that it's not letting them cover anything.

Ha, Barbara Boxer to supporters: "Get excited," like the Tea Partiers!

Obama gets testy with Don't Ask, Don't Tell hecklers. Where's that famous left-wing civility?

Janine Turner, proud conservative.

When Bill Clinton was warning that we have to be careful with words that might incite violence, he should have directed some of his lecture to his wife's donor list.

DOJ abandons attempt to read Yahoo! e-mails without a warrant.

Well, it is certainly a change.

Eugene Robinson: The unprecedented distrust in the federal government is a moral victory for... Obama!

The Daily Grind

The Daily Grind

BY Mary Katharine Ham

Third party candidate can't even save Reid, says new poll.

Reid advisers relying on the "none of the above vote."

SNL appears to have simply taken a Palin-bashing brainstorming session and turned it into a skit without editing. What will they have left for next year?

New York's hipsters too cool for the census. Apparently, right-wing paranoia's reach wider than ever expected.

A progressive light astutely pegs the reason for the pro-Israel stance of most southern Republicans: "They’re infatuated with the Israeli army. Why? Because the Israeli army kills Muslims."

Palin to Rubio: "Call me!"

Courage to acknowledge the entitlement crisis: Synthetic indignation being the first refuge of political featherweights, Crist's campaign announced that he believes Rubio's suggestions are "cruel, unusual and unfair to seniors living on a fixed income." They are indeed unusual, because flinching from the facts of the coming entitlements crisis is the default position of all but a responsible few, such as Wisconsin's Rep. Paul Ryan, who has endorsed Rubio.

The 'stache is back, and John Stossel was just ahead of his time.

Romney wins SRLC straw poll?

The health-care fight in Massachusetts heats up. Get excited for our own version.

Most transparent administration ever: President Barack Obama was overheard Sunday telling Pakistan's Prime Minister about the kerfuffle he caused a day earlier when he breached protocol and left the White House without members of the press in tow."Apparently I caused quite a problem," Obama told Yusuf Raza Gilani, noting that the media was unhappy about missing the trip to one of his daughter's soccer games.

Daily Grind from The Hammer

I was actually working today, so I missed a lot of things I usually post.

Two items of a personal nature I'd like to share:

First, I've been asked to sit on the Board of the newly established EaglesUP! 501(c)(3) organization, an honor I have accepted. (Those Jersey girls have a way of talking you into anything.)

Second, I've been asked by none other than Laughing Wolf hisownself to be a member of the core group Cooking With the Wounded, another honor I readily accepted. You don't refuse a member of the team at Blackfive, you just don't. They have things and know stuff.

The Daily Grind
BY Mary Katharine Ham

Oops, again: "In a statement the authors of the paper said: 'Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work. One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.'

Dana Perino and Bill Burck on the Friday night news dump: "So, in one corner we have a legal all-star team of Mukasey, Filip, Estrada, Mahoney, Goldsmith, and Margolis. In the other corner, we have OPR operating far outside its comfort zone and area of expertise. This shouldn’t have been close — and it wasn’t, on the merits. The fact that OPR almost succeeded — and was stopped only because Margolis did the right thing and brought the curtain down on this farce — should remind everyone that partisan politics are alive and well at the Justice Department."

Vindicating John Yoo.

USA! USA! USA!

E.J. Dionne goes Jimmy V on health care.

Salman Rushdie: "Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong."

Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll, signaling something very significant. Remember how much it portended when Mitt Romney won it in a landslide?

Aww: Valerie Jarrett wants Sarah Palin to stop making fun of "hope and change."

Keith Hennessey ponders the president's goals in the Blair House summit.

The Hammer With the Daily Grind

She has some other good stuff over at the Weekly Standard blog. Go see.

The Daily Grind

BY Mary Katharine Ham

And, the NYT wept: "Mr. Bayh’s decision staggered Democrats. It was the latest in a series of setbacks that illustrate just how far the party’s fortunes have fallen since President Obama came to office more than a year ago, sweeping big majorities into the House and Senate with him."
Again: "Climate experts have been forced to admit another embarrassing error in their most recent report on the threat of climate change."

It has come to this: Palestinian protesters dressed as Navi from "Avatar."

Who would try to fight Mitt Romney? (Another one of those violent right-wingers, I bet.)

Cool: "The Afghan Taliban's second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was captured last week in Karachi during a joint operation by Pakistan's intelligence service and the CIA, according to U.S. and Pakistani sources."

No. 2 on the list of those who could replace Bayh for Dems is the guy who called health-care protesters "political terrorists." How populist!

Indiana Dem cries WH conspiracy to anoint Baron Hill as Dem candidate in Indiana.

Henry Paulson on how to watch the banks.

Plagiarism at the New York Times?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Congress.

Obama to announce new nuke plants.