Glenn Greenwald notes the irony of Fred Hiatt's WaPo lecturing anyone on the damage done to US diplomatic and human rights credibility. Hiatt writes:

Here's Grapevine Fires, the new animated video of the Death Cab for Cutie song.

"Grapevine Fires" was initially inspired by DCFC vocalist/guitarist Ben Gibbard's up-close-and-personal encounter with 2007's California wildfires. The song - which was recently included on "CHANGE IS NOW: RESTORING AMERICA'S PROMISE," the official commemorative CD-DVD set celebrating President Barack Obama's historic inauguration - motivated Walter Robot to create an animated short film which brilliantly relays the sense of devastating tragedy and forced optimism caused by the fire's wrath.

Guitarist/keyboardist Chris Walla blogged the Democratic Convention for Rolling Stone. We did a CNN show together the day of Obama's acceptance speech at Brooklyn's Bar and Grill and then made our way by media bus together to the Pepsi Center (quite an ordeal) and I really like him.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

As I noted yesterday, jilted Bachelor winner Melissa Rycroft, was added to the roster at Dancing With the Stars, which premieres tonight. She had all of two days to rehearse. I think she will be great, she's danced all her life and was a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. I'm also glad she'll be a bigger star than Jason.

Lil' Kim is another I'm interested in watching.

Really smart move by ABC to add Melissa -- lots of people like me who aren't DWTS fans will be tuning in just to watch her and cheer her on.

What are you watching tonight?

In a post on how lousy the Media is, Tristero argues that:

[T]he meme the press is toying with right now, surely abetted by Republican operatives, is that Obama always avoids the hard decisions. A nice guy, the president, but just not tough.

I thought they were toying with the meme that Obama is a socialist? And that Obama was fighting back by dismissing critiques of progressive economists of his and Geithner's efforts on the financial crisis (you know the one where dismisses Krugman, Roubini, Stiglitz, et al?). In other words, unless, Stiglitz, Roubini and Krugman suddenly became GOP operatives, I think Tristero got this one wrong.

Speaking for me only

GOP House leader John Boehner has been rightly ridiculed for his absurd spending freeze plan in the throes of a economic depression. Boehner of course offered this plan as a solution to the coming depression. The WaPo Editorial Board wrings its hands over "excessive spending" without even referencing the current economic situation:

More noteworthy is the significant jump in domestic spending that is built into the annual baseline. Critics of the spending package say that the increase is 8 percent over last year's levels; for complicated bookkeeping reasons, the number as scored by the Congressional Budget Office is closer to 6 percent. Either way, this jump raises both short- and long-term concerns. . . . [I]ncreases of this size cannot continue; it's worrisome that the president's proposed budget for 2010 appears to envision another increase in excess of 6 percent in this category.

You see? Fred Hiatt and Co. are worried about the 6% increase in spending, but not the 6.2% contraction in the economy in the 4th quarter. They are not worried that we are shedding jobs at a 600,000 per month clip. Yet again, the disconnect in the Beltway is incredible.

Speaking for me only

Just another heads-up that Colorado snowboarder and former Bachelorette winner Jesse Csincsak will be on John Walsh's America's Most Wanted tonight. Jesse wants to help solve the murder of snowboarder Ben Bradley, who was killed for his snowboard outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Ben's board was from of a limited edition of 200, made by Never Summer of Denver. Finding Ben's limited edition board could lead to the killer.

Jesse told me he's really psyched about the show and hopeful that leads will come in once it's aired so that Ben’s family can finally have some closure.

Responding to Glenn Greenwald's post questioning his grant of anonynmity to Obama Administration sources, Ezra Klein gives an inadequate reply (imo of course):

[W]e are, fundamentally, dealing with a collective action problem: So long as there are journalists willing to speak with sources on background, sources can demand background for most all commentary. An individual writer -- particularly at a small outlet -- can then choose between anonymous sources or none at all. And so far as informing readers go, some sourcing is better than none.

This is unconvincing. Klein's willingness to use anonymous sourcing at the drop of a hat actually does a great disservice to journalism and to his own work. It becomes apparent that he is simply a part of the spin, not the reporting. It would be far better if he reported what was on the record, than to allow an anonymous record to be created. "Everybody does it" is no excuse. It is precisely why the Media is such a joke today. It appears Klein has chosen to be in on the joke. More . .

Jackson Diehl, Fred Hiatt's Lieutenant on the WaPo Editorial Board, pens perhaps the dumbest thing we have yet seen from perhaps the dumbest group of people on the planet, the Media. Diehl writes:

Washington has spent the past couple of weeks debating whether Barack Obama's ambitious agenda and political strategy are more comparable to those of Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. Oddly, hardly anyone is talking about the ways in which Obama is beginning to resemble the man who just vacated the White House. . . Obama hasn't strayed far from Karl Rove's playbook for routing the opposition. But surely, you say, he's planning nothing as divisive or as risky as the Iraq war? Well, that's where the health-care plan comes in: a $634 billion (to begin) "historic commitment," as Obama calls it, that (like the removal of Saddam Hussein) has lurked in the background of the national agenda for years. . . .

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Former C.U. Professor Ward Churchill and current University of Illinois (Chicago) Professor William Ayers teamed up Thursday night in Boulder to speak to students at the University of Colorado. The topic: Academic Freedom. The title of their presentation: "Forbidden Education and the Rise of NeoMcCarthyism."

Ayers talked about Obama's presidency (nothing unusual from what the article reports) and the danger if teachers are not allowed to challenge their students due to fear about raising certain topics or asking certain questions.

"We should always be developing a curriculum of questioning," Ayers told the students. "As a teacher, your responsibility is to challenge dogma and orthodoxy, not to just accept it."

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Update: Robin Williams' publicist says he will need open heart surgery for an aortic valve replacement.

Comedian and Actor Robin Williams is reportedly in ICU in a South Florida hospital, due to heart problems. Other papers are reporting the same thing. He's been on tour and canceled his latest appearances.

Our good thoughts for a speedy recovery go out to him.

It may be too little too late, but Facebook is in the process of making big adjustments to become more like Twitter.

These are the changes:

1. Facebook changed its home page to allow streaming of posts from Facebook friends in realtime. (Twitter updates immediately as people post.)

2. Facebook enabled filtering for those realtime updates, letting users filter those status updates by friends, applications and other groupers. (You can filter a bit on Twitter but have better options in Twitter filtering applications like twalala.)

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Roger Cohen plays the "French Card" regarding our economic crisis:

I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States. . . . There is a touch of France in its “étatisme” — the state as all-embracing solution rather than problem . . . I’d thought of Obama as less Robespierre than Talleyrand. I still think he’s more bridge-building centrist than revolutionary. He needs to be. Money has never been more fungible than today. Punish capital and it will punish you by saying, “Hasta la vista!” The former French President François Mitterrand learned that a little over a quarter-century ago when, after an initial wave of nationalizations, he reversed course. . . Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries. . . Obama, in his restorative counter-revolution, must be careful to steer clear of his French temptation.

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