So a big story (at least in our circles) from Sunday was the belated admission from White House Press Tool — ahem, Secretary — Robert Gibbs that, like we’ve been saying for months, there’s actually a chance that the Democrat House Caucus will lose their majority in November.

First, welcome back to electoral reality, Mr. Gibbs!  We haven’t seen you for quite some time.

Now, Nanny Pelosi was none too pleased with the White House for interrupting her Nero-like serenade.  You see, as long as she keeps everyone in her caucus thinking that there’s a chance things might get better, she’s got a better chance at keeping the caucus from blowing her off like a Lindsay Lohan parole date.

And yet, while most of these goofballs have not been blessed with common sense to equal a Hilton heiress, they only got to this point in their careers by knowing exactly which way the wind is blowing.  We’ll get back to that in a minute.

There is, natch, a flaw in Pelosi’s argument.  She apparently has attempted to calm the cacophonous gaggle of baby Houselings by telling them “Silly White House, they don’t even live in your districts — how could they possibly know better than me?  Everything’s gonna be just fine.”

Which is something like what those bonesaw doctors used to tell me right before they stabbed me with four needles at once.

First, there is the obvious answer, as one of those drama-queens might say it:  ”Like, polling, you idiot.”  You clearly don’t have to be there to read the bliddy numbers, Nan.  The numbers coming out of California (!) do not require a Nostradamus to interpret.

More immediately, however, is this fact:  Nanny Pelosi doesn’t live in all those districts either.  And the politicians who do, know darn well that Gibbs is right.  Furthermore, Gibbs is a suit and pastel tie — while he’s a smart guy, he gets his information from David Axelrod.  That’s a dude who knows more than Speaker Nero about national elections.

So while I still think that the chance of taking the House outright remains as thin as my chances of scoring a date with Senator Scott Brown’s daughter…

Let’s just say that last I heard, she was still single

The exchange, broadcast on 1210 AM’s Dom Giordano Show [but not archived on the station's site], began when Specter challenged Bachmann to articulate what, exactly, she stands for, according to a readout on the clash published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s lively Early Returns blog.

Bachmann first laid out her agenda — cutting taxes and killing President Obama’s health reform bill — at considerable length.

When Specter tried to counter, Bachmann, darling of the Tea Party movement, kept on talking, which didn’t sit well with the one-time Philadelphia DA, who is a stickler for politeness and protocol.

“I’m going to treat you like a lady,” Mr. Specter shot back. “Now act like one.”

Ms. Bachmann replied, “I am a lady.”

I used to be one of those guys who defended Specter as a necessary evil — a guy who was with us 85% of the time, he wasn’t that bad, etc. etc.

Oh MAN, was I wrong.

Here’s my major beef with this particular instance of idiocy: You wouldn’t say that to a man.  You wouldn’t tell a guy who is killing you in a debate to “be a gentleman.”  You’d come back at him harder, fight stronger, outsmart him, out-flank him — but you don’t whine about his manners.

And here’s why: When you’re getting rhetorically curb-stomped by a male, you don’t worry about whether he’s treating you nicely.  Arlene — I mean Arlen’s problem is that he got beat by a girl, and he doesn’t like it.

Suck it up, you unprincipled swine.  You won’t be here for much longer anyway.

In a discussion on tonight’s episode of Hardball of what the Democrats’ options would be in the event of a Scott Brown victory, Chris Matthews said this:

You have GOT. To be kidding me.

Audie Murphy served twenty-seven months in the European Theater of World War II.  At least a year of that time, it appears he was under the age of 18.  He won, among others:

• The Belgian Croix de Gurre
• The French Croix de Gurre
• The French Legion of Honor (That’s their highest honor)
• A Purple Heart with two Oak Leaf clusters (means he was wounded three times)
• Two Bronze Stars
• A Legion of Merit
• Two Silver Stars
• A Distinguished Silver Cross
• And last, but certainly not least, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Rahm Emanuel has won accolades for being an unmitigated jerk to everyone who gets in his way.  That [several choice expletives deleted] doesn’t deserve to visit Audie Murphy’s birthplace, much less be mentioned in the same sentence.  Rahm Emanuel built a Democrat majority in two houses of Congress — very well, that’s a good accomplishment.  Audie Murphy invaded Sicily, Salerno, was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant at the ripe old age of 18 (six years younger than ME!), became his company’s commander at age 18, promoted to First Lieutenant in under two months, and was awarded the Medal of Honor eighteen days before his 19th birthday.

There are men who live a full century that don’t accomplish that much.  And Rahmbo never will.

Here is the text of Audie Murphy’s Medal of Honor citation.  If Rahm could imagine a story this good, I’d be impressed.

Rank and organization: Second Lieutenant, U.S. Army, Company B 15th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division.

Place and date: Near Holtzwihr France, January 26, 1945.

Entered service at: Dallas, Texas. Birth: Hunt County, near Kingston, Texas, G.O. No. 65, August 9, 1944.

Citation: Second Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by six tanks and waves of infantry. 2d Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to a prepared position in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire, which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad that was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued his single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way back to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack, which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy’s indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy’s objective.

Audie apparently was the first veteran to talk openly about battle-related psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

And Chris Matthews thinks that ramming this god-awful health care bill through Congress is the same thing as what Audie Murphy did.

I wish that I had known Audie Murphy.  I wish that I had the opportunity to tell him how very much I appreciate his unbelievable valor in serving his country.

Rahm will never be half the man that Audie was.  Matthews oughta know as much.

MoveOn.org is panicking in Massachusetts. Here is your proof:

So…How ’bout that Scott Brown?  Pony up, people.

And here, in a longer segment, is the same fuzzball making an appearance on this morning’s edition of Morning Joe:

Awriiiiiiight.

Please pardon my snickering. You see, I’ve been seeing Ed Morrissey and other bloggers pound the table (don’t misunderstand me, I want them to do so) about how the RNC gave Scozzy Bear a million bucks to lose a primary — and then endorse the Democrat. But I digress.

The RNC was there for The Scozz, and now they’re not there for Scott Brown. Is it likely he will win, even with their help? No, in fact it is highly likely he will lose — there’s no way Timmaah Kaine, the absentee governor of Virginia, kicks off his DNC tour by losing Ted Kennedy’s seat. But it is hilarious to me that, a little over a year after Romney gave the cease-campaign order, he’s the only national Republican putting up any kind of meaningful fight in Massachusetts.

It’s funny because…while Mr. Morrissey announced his support for Romney back in the primaries, I remember a lot of bloggers who called Romney a lot of not-nice things. And by the way, for his mandatory health-care debacle in Massachusetts, he deserves much of it. That said, I don’t see anybody rushing to give the guy props for doing the correct and conservative thing here.

I’ll keep listening to the crickets through 2010, and then we’ll figure out if we can do better than Romney — and on that subject, I hope we can. But in the meantime, will somebody that matters please just notice this?

It’s not like he’s getting crowded out in that field…

Toward the end of this speech, Newt reverts to his forte: History.  Say what you will about his politics, his blind partisanship, and his weak committment to principles he once championed; the man knows his history.  His chosen example was the march of George Washington and the Revolutionary Army to the feasting (and quite probably drunken) Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, New Jersey.  Here is a transcript of the portion I am talking about:

GINGRICH: And on Christmas Day in 1776, Washington’s army had collapsed from 30,000 in Brooklyn in September, to 2,500. Less than one out of every thousand Americans had the courage to be with Washington on Christmas Day. Of that 2,500, one third did not have boots. They wrapped their feet in burlap, and they left a trail of blood marching the nine miles to Trenton. Washington decided to cross an icy river at night, in a snowstorm. To march at night, to surprise 800 professional German soldiers, win a surprise victory, capture all 800, and reestablish the legitimacy of the Revolution. Two weeks later, he had 15,000 volunteers. The password that night was, “Victory or Death.”

I want you to go from here, after this weekend, and look every successful person you know in the eye, and look every patriot in the eye, and tell them: There are young men and women risking their lives all around this planet; in uniform, in the State Department, in the intelligence community, so we can be free. Don’t tell me how much you’ve given. Don’t tell me how tired you are. Don’t tell me how frustrating it is. This country was created by people who were willing to say “Victory or Death,” while marching in burlap bags in the middle of a snowstorm. We’re going to have to find those people again. We’re going to have to run people for 513,000 offices, in both parties. We’re going to have to isolate and crush the secular socialist left, and we’re going to have to replace their failed system with systems that succeed. This is work George Washington would have approved of. And this is work you need to take seriously for the next three years, so that we can give our children and grandchildren the greatest, free-est, and most prosperous country in history.

I call particular attention to those bolded words, because I want to make a point that I think Newt left unsaid.  Some of you are veterans, and have been where I am going.  Some of you have never had the privilege of serving this country in uniform; or in the State Department; or other agencies of the federal government whose purpose is to keep America safe from foreign enemies.  For example, Mitt Romney.  He has led a life of privilege through inheritance, and through his own hard work — and I don’t begrudge him that, the guy has merely done what I would have done (become fabulously wealthy).  There is nothing wrong with being rich — in fact, I wish more people WERE rich.  You see, the rich pay more taxes, and our current crop of taskmasters have spent us to embarrassing lows.

But I digress.

I am joining the Air Force.  Somewhere around 35,000 other people will join me as new Air Force recruits this year.  I will go perform a job that only 2% of the world ever gets to do — and I gotta tell you, I’m seriously loving the thought of this job.  I can’t even tell you how much fun this is gonna be.  My job, in essence, is to be part of the greatest, strongest, smartest, best-educated, hardest-working airborne team on earth; whose purpose it is to intimidate or destroy the enemies of this country who would do us harm.

I do not, however, fight for freedom.  That’s a fairly common misconception.

Pay very close attention to what I’m about to say, because if you get nothing else out of this diary, I want you to get this: The military absolutely does not keep you free. The military provides you the opportunity to be free, if you have the wits and fortitude to seize it.

You see, while I’m off in other countries fighting those foreign people who would do this country harm, I can do nothing to help save this country from the fascists who promise Utopia in exchange for your liberty.  What I and my wingmates do is very simple: I engage one enemy (the external enemy) so that you have a fighting chance against the other enemy (the domestic enemy).  I will put up with a single-payer health care system (Tricare, if you’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with this bureaucracy, consider yourself blessed and lucky), sleeping in federally-built housing (the AF is nice compared to the Marine barracks, but still…), a 24-7 on-call job that I am not allowed to quit, the joys of uniformed politics — in addition to the privilege of getting shot at with munitions considerably larger and more deadly than mere bullets.  And in the meantime, I expect you — no, I demand this of you — to have the common decency to hold the line while I’m gone.

The military is above all else, a team.  This team acts in small units, which report to larger units, and so on up the chain of command.  So go form a team, a small group of dedicated activists in your subdivision, in your city, in your county, and get in the war.  We don’t wear burlap on our feet anymore, but as long as you’re enjoying your Birkenstocks, wear them out for a good cause.  So I leave you with a great speech on the subject from a Colonel Nathan P. Jessup, a fictional Marine who was far more squared away than Hollywood ever gave him credit for.  As much as you want me on that wall, as much as you need me on that wall…I need you, organized and operating, to give me a nation to come home to.

Give me a nation worth defending, and I’ll defend it to the last breath in my body.  But don’t complain if you haven’t given it everything you’ve got.  Because on a cold New Jersey winter night in 1776, some eight hundred and twenty-five young men marched through the snow, hail, and wind to give you a chance — just the faintest chance — at securing your own freedom.

In my daily exercise of trawling the interwebs for something that makes me laugh, I was skimming through the Daily Kos; and I found a headline that caught my eye:

Why there will never be a right-wing dKos: and why they can’t find more/better Republicans.

Now I’m always interested in the mental contortions of the opposition grassroots — especially when they deem themselves knowledgeable enough about, y’know, me, to write with authority on what I think and do.  And it’s also fun to find out that the Kos doesn’t even know we exist!

Anyway, I must say that (by the way, content warning on that Kos diary, they have somewhat lax morals) it was with some confusion that I came across this line:

I went across the street, literally, [redacted] and dropped Window Pane (LSD that came in clear small postage stamp – like pieces).

Oh goody, we have a druggie trying to explain why we can’t find more/better Republicans.  Like, for example, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Chuck DeVore, Michael Williams, Bob McDonnell, Bill Bolling, Ken Cuccinelli, Col. West, and so on…

But I digress.

Here’s the money quote from this particular altered-reality hippie:

But back to my premise.  All politicians have an ambivalent relationship with the truth.  Politicians and public figures in general, want to appeal – market themselves to a particular audience.  This is where their shading and gradations of the truth begin.  They are appealing to an audience.  Change the audience, change the message.  Politicians are like the captains of a ship always checking the winds and currents to stay afloat and move forward.

Republicans have faith in the captain.  They are like the crew on a ship ready to take orders and keep this ship afloat and moving forward.

Oh, dear lord.  Does this sound like anything you’ve heard lately — like, for example, the public flogging the NRSC comm guy keeps taking from Leon?  And how about the times that Erick slaps Mitch McConnell around for not doing all that could be done to stop this health-care debacle?

Perhaps this diarist hasn’t figured this out yet, but the very reason the Republican Party can’t seem to find its collective buttocks with both hands, is that the exact opposite is true.  Politicians aren’t captains of any ship; the People of America are sovereign — we are the captains.  Politicians are more like rank-and-file sailors — they work the rigging, set the sails, and carry out the orders of the true captain.  And what we have in DC is a bunch of mutinous sailors, spending the goods of the ship — goods which they do not own, and cannot replace.

The Republican Party is tied to the Captain’s Mast.  This is akin to classic maritime punishment. But at the end of the flogging, the sailor is expected to return to his duties.  And to not screw up again.

I have confidence that they will.

In case you’ve not seen the horrifically bad Indiana-Jones-Meets-X-Files movie, the title refers to the updated version of The Fonz jumping the shark; at one point during this movie, Indiana Jones climbs inside an old refrigerator to survive a nuclear detonation.  It works.  Later in the movie, we are expected to fear for his safety when he engages in a fistfight.

And now that I’ve explained my title, let me tell you all what has got me all giddy.

I signed up for a DailyKos account.

Now before you all go nuts on me, I’m not a mole.  At least, not here.  I plan to, in a manner of speaking, take the fight to the wingnuts — I plan to say generally reasonable things on their site, and not overly conservative things that would make their heads explode.  But I will not profess to be a liberal — some things are just too horrible to imagine.

So here’s my question for you: Who wants to go with me?  We can have a contest for who can survive the longest, controlling time-period for site activity (if you post more often, you’ll survive for a lower period of time, so we’ve got to take that into account), with extra points awarded for any laudatory phrases for which you didn’t get banned.  Think “But Dick Cheney was such a good Vice President!”  That’s worth at least a 3% bonus score.

Let’s roll

Israeli officials reacted angrily Thursday night to a British decision to advise retailers and importers to use labels to distinguish between West Bank produce being grown in the settlements or by Palestinians. One official charged that Britain was singling out Israel and encouraging a boycott.

According to a statement released by the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Importers, retailers, NGOs and consumers have asked the government for clarity over the precise origin of products from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs).

“The label ‘West Bank’ does not allow consumers to distinguish between goods originating from Palestinian producers and goods originating from illegal Israeli settlements.”

Therefore, according to guidelines put out by the department, “Traders and retailers may wish to indicate whether the product originated from an Israeli settlement or from Palestinian producers. This could take the form, for example, of ‘Produce of the West Bank (Israeli settlement produce)’ or ‘Produce of the West Bank (Palestinian produce)’, as appropriate.“

Of all nations in the world, the country formerly led by Winston Churchill against the Nazis should know better than this.

In case you missed the meaning of the above, the British government is going to distinguish between Jewish produce and Palestinian produce coming from the Middle East.  It’s the same produce, grown in essentially the same dirt, by people who differ mostly in political views — and those political views are leading to a boycott of a specific race of people.

I’ll say it more simply: This enables and encourages racism in Britain.  Against Jews.

I feel physically ill.