While many of us might have had differences with Tim Russert over his political coverage on Meet the Press and elsewhere, now is not the time for that. This is a tragedy for his family, friends, colleages, associates and viewers, and for anyone who met or knew him, and my heart goes out to all of them.

I put together a brief video of his very final moments on what will now be his last Meet the Press show, which, quite fittingly, consisted entirely of a panel of members of the press (including his possible replacement, the excellent Chuck Todd).

It was especially fitting and ironic that in his final segment, he talked about the rise of Barack Obama, and how a man whom Obama has been favorably compared to, Robert F. Kennedy--who, like Russert, himself died tragically and all soon exactly 40 years ago last Friday at the height of his success and at a moment of great change in American politics and society)--predicted that a black man could become president in 40 years. Indeed, Tim, indeed.

And we'll be right back...

Sorry about the brief diary, but I just heard about this on Hardball and confirmed it online. James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip and highest-ranking African American in congress, just announced that he will formally endorse Obama on Tuesday. He is the first member of the Democratic leadership to do so. No doubt many will very soon follow.

I just watched a recording I made of last Sunday's Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer that was kind of funny. Not the part where he interviewed God's Own Candidate Mike Huckabee, or Mitt "Position of the Week" Romney, but the ending segment. He always closes the show with a brief commentary on the issues of the day, and Sunday's was pretty amusing, in an Andy Rooney/Stephen Colbert sort of way.

He basically interviewed himself as a representative of the media, on why the media got last week's New Hampshire primary so wrong. Naturally, Bob Schieffer the interviewee ducked and evaded the questions that Bob Schieffer the interview threw at him and tried to change the subject, and it ended on a rather "ugly" note.

Sorry about the briefness of this diary. I just thought that it was funny and worth bringing to everyone's attention. YouTube below the fold.

Not to mention Bush, Cornyn, Gonzo/Goodling/Taylor, Bloomberg, and tyrants and authoritarians in general, as seen in a NY Times article today, in a way that is not at all comforting, and which alarmingly parallels our own political situation at present.

I assume that everyone's heard about Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf's recent declaration of martial law, suspension of Pakistan's constitution and arrest of hundreds of political opponents, activists, judges, lawyers, journalists and others who are or are seen as a threat to his rule, under the excuse of maintaining order after a series of terrorist attacks and mounting political tension in Pakistan.

Well, Musharraf's defending this action by invoking, of all people, Abraham Lincoln and his suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War. When in reality he is clearly invoking entirely other people of a decidely less prudent and more tyrannical sort. Read on for the details and decide for yourselves.

It's official! Just minutes ago, at 11:00AM local time today in Oslo, Norway, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize will be co-awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.!

Congratulations, Al, from all of us!!!

This is going to be a short diary, but I was just listening to today's Washington Journal, CSPAN's morning issues-based call-in show, and I couldn't help but express amazement at the disgust and outrage that a number of people who called in on the Republican line expressed over Bush and the GOP's position on SCHIP expansion.

I mean, these people are LIVID that they would vote against extending children's health insurance to families that under present economic conditions simply cannot afford to provide their children with adequate health care. Some of them are threatening if not promising to abandon the party over this issue.

I should add that there's no way to tell if these callers are actually Repubs, or astroturfers calling in on the Repub line to pose as irate Repubs. Many of them were also disgusted with the war and waste in Iraq, which most Repubs have so far continued to support. But if at least some of them are for real, this could be HUGE, and yet another sign of what awaits the GOP in '08.

I posted a couple of YouTubes below the fold

The verdict was just announced and Jose Padilla and his two co-defendants were found guilty on ALL counts.

Either that, or he's a complete idiot (not necessarily out of the question as Schieffer has never impressed me as being the brightest bulb, but he's long had a GOP bias and close friendship with the Bushes, and has been referred to by Bush as his favorite reporter).

On today's Face the Nation interview of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he kept repeating GOP talking points about how a "precipitous pullout" from Iraq leading to an "all-out civil war", "ethnic cleansing" and Iran taking over half of Iraq and its oil, and that that could "be as much the responsibility of Democrats as that of the Bush administration". I kept wondering if this was a supposedly unbiased professional reporter or if Lindsay Graham has just taken over Schieffer's body.

And as if that wasn't enough, Schieffer kept insisting that in this past week's all-night senate debate on the Levin-Reed amendment, Reid had caused the GOP's blocking of it coming to an up or down vote by refusing to allow a similar vote on GOP amendments, despite being repeatedly told by Reid in very clear language that he had in fact offered to put ALL of these amendments up for a vote so long as they allowed the Levin-Reed amendment a vote too, and that they had refused, thus forcing him to prevent their amendments from being voted on.

Not sure if this has been diaried yet, but yet another federal court has just ruled against the Bush administration's detainee policies. And not just any court, but the ultra-conservative and supposedly Bush can do no wrong DC Circuit Court of Appeals, on which sit such Federalist Society luminaries as Douglas H. Ginsburg (who issued the ruling), David Sentelle (who voted to overturn the convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter), Laurence Silberman (ditto), Brett Kavanaugh (who may well have lied to congress when he was confirmed last year), and the ever-popular Janice Rogers Brown, of "Gang of 14" fame.

This was a 3-judge panel, not the full court, so the administration can try to appeal the ruling to either the entire court or the Supreme Court. But the ruling basically ordered the government to turn over its information on Guantánamo detainees who are challenging their detention, and considering how conservative this court is, it seems pretty major to me, non-lawyer that I am.

Bush signed it yesterday, without fanfare and with no apparent signing statements.

This is HUGE.

What is S.214? It's the bill--now law--passed by both the house and senate earlier this year by overwhelming margins (306-114 in the House, 94-2 in the Senate), that repeals that provision snuck into the Patriot Act revision in 2005 by Arlen Spector's office in the middle of the night that gave the Attorney General the power to appoint permanent "interim" US Attorneys, bypassing the need to obtain Senate confirmation as per the previous process, and which Gonzo has exploited repeatedly to stack the Department of Justice with corrupt Bushies.

I was watching the Chris Matthews show tonight (not Hardball, this is his weekly that typically features four ultra inside he beltway types of the typically mushy center (e.g. Klein), center-right (e.g. Noron) or hard-right (e.g. Brooks) variety (funny how there are almost never any center-left let alone hard left types on it), and the panelists were Norah O'Donnell (aka Noron) of NBC/MSNBC, Richard Stengel of Time, Gloria Borger of CBS/US News, and Patrick Healy of the NY Times.

Yech.

Anyway, the consensus seemed to be that Dems were going after Rove And Gonzales for purely political reasons, not substantial and legitimate ones. No mention whatsoever was made of their being at the center of the US Attorneys scandal and just about every other BushCo scandal from day one. It was merely Democrats trying to make political hay out of some passing White House pseudo-scandal in order to escape having to explain why they haven't yet ended the war as they promised, and get back at their political enemies.

I.e. it's the Plame/Libby narrative all over again: nothing to see here, move on, Dems in disarry, a big to-do about nothing, sour grapes, etc. Same old same old. Control of congress and the national narrative has changed, but the MSM continues to stick to the same tired old narrative.

I was listening to a repeat broadcast of a portion of today's house floor debate on the Iraq war supplemental bill that was voted out of committee this week, and will be voted on soon by the entire house, and was struck by the combative tone and content of remarks made by Republican congressman Jerry Lewis of CA, in reaction to this bill's being brought to the floor under a closed rule, which means that no amendments can be added to it.

Most alarming was the following:

"the speaker has imposed martial law on the peoples' house"

I'm not making this up! Alaska Representative Don Young (of Bridge to Nowhere and Don Young's Way fame) just effectively called for the execution of any representative who votes for the Iraq War Resolution tomorrow in a speech on the floor of the house today during the marathon debate on the resolution.

Here is what he said:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.

He attributed this quote to Abraham Lincoln, without providing any reference to where he got this quote or when and where Lincoln supposedly said it.

There's a problem with this quote, though (among several): Lincoln never said it, or anything remotely close to it!!! Think about it! A Republican representative just lied on the floor of the house and called for his opponents' execution!

More below the fold.

Wow! I mean WOW!

First John McCain yesterday, and now Chuck Hagel is on a tear against Vice Neocon Dick Cheney.

Tonight on the PBS News Hour, decorated Vietnam War veteran, Republican senator and outspoken Iraq war critic Chuck Hagel--the only Republican on the senate Foreign Relations Committee who voted for the non-binding Reid Resolution today--all but called Dick Cheney a scoundrel, a liar, a lunatic, a moron and a coward when he responded to a question posed to him by Gwen Ifill, regarding Cheney's statement earlier today during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, in which he said that Americans did not have the "stomach" to complete the "mission" in Iraq (in yet another likely inadvertent but telling invocation of militant Christianity by this would-be latter-day gang of Crusaders).

You can read the relevant excerpt below the fold:

Ok, I'm starting to get suspicious, as this has been happening with alarming frequency the past few years. This time from a Boeing employee:

Friday, December 15, 2006
Boeing worker fired over lost laptop
Boeing managers to be reprimanded for leaving employees vulnerable

By JAMES WALLACE
P-I AEROSPACE REPORTER

The Boeing Co. said Thursday that it has fired the employee whose laptop was stolen, putting the personal information about nearly 400,000 retired and current company workers in jeopardy.

Files on the stolen computer contained salary information, Social Security numbers, home addresses, phone numbers and birth dates.

A person with knowledge of the matter said the employee data were not encrypted, as company policy requires once the data had been downloaded from a server.

A friend of mine forwarded me an encouraging article just published on the Huffington Post by an academic colleague of his, Annette Bernhardt, Ph.D., on some major recent advances in increasing the minimum wage at the state level, that she and her colleagues at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law have been working on. This past election six states--in the nation's "heartland", no less--passed ballot initiatives calling for increases in the state minimum wage, with up to a whopping 70% voting for the increase across the red-purple-blue political spectrum.

And with Democrats, led by progressive Democrat Nancy Pelosi and dominated by their progressive coalition in the house, along with populist Harry Reid in the senate, set to take over congress in just over a month, and making an increase in the federal minimum wage one of their top priorities upon assuming the majority--and Republicans likely loath to risk further fueling growing and well-deserved public perception that they are the party of the rich and privileged by opposing this--things are looking very good for this happening soon at the national level as well.

It's official. The Democratic caucus has just elected Nancy Pelosi as the next Speaker of the House and Steny Hoyer 149-86 as the next Majority Leader. MSNBC just reported it. No online stories on it yet other than breaking headlines. Democrats are set to hold a press conference to announce the results.

Also, as many of you already know, James Clyburn of South Carolina has been elected as Majority Whip and Rahm Emanual as Caucus Chairman.

Yesterday McJoan wrote a front-page diary, The Day After, about how we should all enjoy this well-deserved moment of celebration and joy after a hard-won victory. I agree. It's taken us years to achieve this victory and we should absolutely savor it to its fullest.

But let's also not forget what awaits us when reality hits us in the face like the first cold winter's wind that usually comes blowing through in mid-November. E.g. the inevitable right-wing smears and attacks by GOP surrogates, parotted by MSM talking heads, editorials about how partisan and shrill Dems are, and, perhaps most toxic, the right-wing ass-kissing "let's reach across the aisle" bullshit about to be spewed by the DLC crowd.