One afternoon in January, Sean Penn
answers the door of his Bay Area home, shoeless, in jeans and a
gray thermal undershirt, his hair sort of crazily mussed, looking
as if he's just woken up. It's a couple of minutes past noon.
To say that Penn has "aged well" is to employ a nonstandard
usage of the term. He does not look younger than his 48 years. His
forehead is baroquely creased, his long face haggard, his hair
soaring and gray-streaked and parted down the middle. Something
Penn is...
In a memo to her fellow RNC members yesterday, Dr. Ada Fisher said that their newly elected chairman, Michael Steele, is “‘eroding confidence’ in the GOP and that members of his transition team should encourage him to step aside.” She reiterated her argument on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show last night. Fisher’s memo echoed reports in Politico that anonymous “key party leaders” are beginning to feel that “the GOP has made a costly mistake.”
This morning, Steele indirectly responded to the call for his resignation as he guest-hosted Bill Bennett’s conservative talk radio program Morning in America. A caller said to Steele, “I hope that Paul Bagalla and Emanuel and Carville don’t convince you to resign your position.” Steele responded, “Not me baby!“:
STEELE: It’s been a good week, it’s been an instructive week. That’s really what I take away from a week like this. … The instruction is particularly for republicans is that you need to stay focused, other wise you get scapegoated. […]
CALLER: I hope that Paul Bagalla and Emanuel and Carville don’t convince you to resign your position.
STEELE: Aww, trust me. Not me Baby! Nuh-uh. Not happening. No way, no how!
Listen here:
If this has been a good week for Steele, we’d hate to see a bad one. He began the week calling Rush Limbaugh’s radio show “ugly” and “incendiary” last weekend. By Monday — following the lead of otherRepublicans who recently crossed Limbaugh — Steele walked back the comments in a public apology. The next day, Steele went so far as to imply that Limbaugh’s is the only opinion that matters in the party that Steele ostensibly leads.
Beyond Steele’s apparent inability to handle the public relations side of his new job, Politico reports that he’s having difficulty mangaing the organizational side as well. A month into his tenure, he has yet to hire any senior aides:
On the organizational side, Steele does not have a chief of staff, a political director, a finance director or a communications director. Last week, one of the two men sharing the job of interim finance director was forced to resign.
For now, “the fourth floor,” as the RNC’s executive suite is known, is being run by a pair of consultants. “There[base ']Äôs frustration that there[base ']Äôs no discipline, no planning,” said a well-known Republican consultant. “He’s risking being overexposed by accepting every interview, which makes gaffes more likely.”
But perhaps most ironically, Steele’s plea that the caller “trust” him is coming from the same man that told Glenn Beck last month: “You have absolutely no reason, none, to trust our [party’s] word or our actions at this point.”
Colbert Report Takes Glenn Beck's End Times Scenarios To The 'Doom Bunker' (VIDEO) If the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/05/jon-stewart-eviscerates-c_n_172057.html";>Daily Show wasn't locking down their Peabody Award for the year last night, surely someone out there is getting ready to honor Stephen Colbert for his pants-wettingly hysterical parody of the Glenn Beck Show, which aired a half-hour later. From Beck's new perch at Fox News, he's been allowed to air some pretty INSANE things. Honestly, it's a great gig if you can get it, and my hat's off to Beck for really doubling down on the lunatic content. Life's short! Go hard and go crazy and go ahead with strange crackpotty <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-moroz/tracy-morgan-glenn-beck-a_b_170592.html";>segments like the "GLENN BECK WAR ROOM" where you "game out" a bunch of doomy scenarios with the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore and the spooky Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute.
If anything, Colbert demonstrated that Beck has only begun to maximize the potential of these periodic ruminations of the apocalypse. Joined by Moore and Colonel Jack Jacobs, Colbert laid out the Next Level of Fear. Soybean currency! Koalapox! Werewolf Congresses! A Kansas-Mexico Axis! DECEPTICONS WILDING OUT IN THE STREET. And fog, FOG, FOG!!
Swear to you, I had to watch this twice to experience all of the truthiness.
Fox Attacks Union's Posh Digs, Even Though They're A Success Story Conservative media outlets have been hammering the AFL-CIO for hosting a board meeting at a glitzy resort in South Beach Miami. But a key fact has gone unmentioned: as a condition for booking that unionized hotel, the AFL-CIO was able to make major advancements for organized labor.
On Wednesday, Fox News ran a segment lambasting the AFL-CIO for hosting its Executive Council meeting at the posh Fontainebleau Hotel.
"That's where they did the Victoria's Secret show a couple months ago," said host Bill Hemmer. Added co-host Megyn Kendall: "That's a boondoggle for everyone involved, the AFL-CIO and Brian Wilson."
A number of other outlets followed suit, running the clip of the segment after it was broadcast on Fox News and blasted out by Danny Diaz, a Republican operative mobilizing anti-union efforts.
The Fontainebleau Hotel is, indeed, luxurious. But it owes its glint in large part to union hands. The hotel is one of the few in the area that has a unionized workforce -- a primary reason it was chosen as a venue for the meeting. It gets even better.
According to the AFL-CIO, when the hotel was planning an extensive renovation three years ago, the union and its state and local affiliates entered into negotiations: in exchange for hosting the union's Executive Council meeting in 2009, the developers would agree to hire workers with union protections. The result was four million work-hours for local construction workers, with benefits and high pay over a two-and-a-half year period.
"The booking of the hotel for our Executive Committee Meeting was included in a negotiation that created tens of thousands of good-paying, family-supporting jobs," said a union official. "The hotel kept their part of the deal and created many jobs for Floridians so of course the AFL-CIO kept our part of the deal and held our Executive Council meeting here."
In short: the ALF-CIO advanced the very crux of its political objectives in exchange for hosting its meeting at an upper-end hotel. The union may have shelled out a few extra bucks in the process, but the message sent is not, it seems, the one of indulgence that Fox News was portraying.
"We are proud to work in conjunction with companies that do provide fair wages, benefits, and job security," said the AFL-CIO aide.
RNC Members, GOP Strategist Describe Party In Turmoil The concerns with the tenure of RNC Chair Michael Steele continue to mount, both on a broad and managerial level. A day after one RNC member called on the newly elected chair to step down from his perch, another publicly rapped the Maryland Republican for the histrionics he has brought to the post.
Glenn McCall, an RNC member from South Carolina, told the Huffington Post that he didn't think -- as one other committee member recently suggested -- that Steele should resign from his current position. But he did openly question whether the chair was pushing the party in the wrong direction.
"I don't think he needs to resign," said McCall. "I personally believe we need to be an inclusive party. But we don't need to go out changing who we are, trying to seem like we are in the hip-hop generation.... I don't think it will win us any votes."
"I wouldn't go to the extent of saying he needs to resign," McCall repeated, when asked about fellow RNC member Ada Fisher's call for Steele to step down. "I do think we need to be more focused on our message and sticking to our principles."
In offering his take on the current state of the RNC, McCall joins a small but growing number of voices to have publicly critiqued Steele, just weeks into chairman's tenure. And while the majority of critical assessments have focused on the bigger picture -- from Steele's embarrassing rhetorical flourishes to his bizarre fight with Rush Limbaugh -- others are more concerned with the small-bore aspects of his tenure.
A Republican strategist familiar with how the RNC has restructured itself under Steele described a staff distraught and upset with personnel decisions and under-staffed in key areas.
"There was a firing of tons of staff," said the strategist. "The way the firing was done, more specifically, was problematic. There were a lot of people pissed about them being let go. ... The RNC is currently functioning without research staff. The RNC fired all the communications staff then went and told about five or six who were deemed "indispensable," that they weren't really fired and that they should stay on for another month but not tell their soon-to-be-former colleagues."
"Steele kowtowing to [Limbaugh] totally sucks," the strategist added. "But I also think there's some really bad decision-making that has gone on in terms of organization."
The RNC did not immediately return a request for comment.
Yesterday, Politico reported on an alleged “strategy” to paint hate radio talker Rush Limbaugh as the face of the GOP, and claimed that it was “hatched” by Democratic strategists and is “being guided in part from inside the White House.” From there, Greg Sargent detected a “new media meme” that the White House “is entirely to blame for the Rush Limbaugh story getting so much media attention and turning into a media circus.”
Today, Limbaugh charged that the White House is “playing manipulative games with washed up talking heads, targeting me on the taxpayer dime. This country doesn’t need another administration playing dirty tricks and making enemy lists.”
Doing their part to defend Rush, House Republicans have ascribed sinister motives to the White House[base ']Äôs alleged strategy. They claim it is an intentional effort to distract the nation from more pressing issues. “Political operatives in the White House are trying to divert attention away from the challenges facing our economy,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) complained yesterday. Fox News is amplifying the talking points:
BRET BAIER: Is the White House using Rush Limbaugh as a diversion? We’ll look at the controversy that just won’t go away.
SEAN HANNITY: Now it took quite a bit of coordination between the White House and the liberal media, but they have succeeded in distracting the attention of the American people away from President Obama’s free wheeling spending spree and towards Rush Limbaugh and the leadership of the Republican Party.
KARL ROVE: This is misdirection. They’re trying to draw attention away from the things that the country wants to talk about and that they know they’ve got a vulnerability on in order to have a conversation about Rush Limbaugh.
Watch the compilation:
Except there are a couple problems. As Sargent noted, “it’s a grotesque exaggeration” to say a coordinated campaign hatched in the White House to focus on Limbaugh:
[T]he Politico piece just doesn’t say this. If anything, the reporting in there proves the opposite. The piece says that the “strategy took shape” after Dem strategists James Carville and Stan Greenberg polled on Rush and found him to be deeply unpopular. But as Steve Benen notes, Carville and Greenberg aren’t Obama advisers, let alone White House advisers. That’s not all. The piece explicitly says that groups outside the White House…were the first to push the strategy.
Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, will reportedly not leave his television career to become Surgeon General. Gupta, who had been the leading candidate for the post, withdrew his name even as President Obama hosted a health care summit at the White House. Gupta did not attend. He encountered criticism for his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko and for having a cozy relationship with drug companies. On the Wonk Room, Igor Volsky floats Howard Dean as a possible replacement.
Update "Sanjay Gupta was under serious consideration for the job of surgeon general," an administration official told CNN. "He has removed himself from consideration to focus more on his medical career and his family. We know he will continue to serve and educate the public through his work with media and in the medical arena."
The International Criminal Court (ICC) yesterday issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Today, the AP reports that, based on the legal principles the ICC used to arrest al-Bashir, former President George W. Bush could be next on the list:
David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects.
Crane is a former prosecutor of the Sierra Leone tribunal that indicted Liberian President Charles Taylor and put him on trial in The Hague.
Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, said the al-Bashir ruling was likely to fuel discussion about investigations of possible crimes by Bush Administration officials.
President Clinton signed the “Rome Statute” setting up the ICC in 2000 but Bush then “unsigned” the document in May 2002, thereby withdrawing U.S. support for the court. However, the Wall Street Journal reported today that according to a senior White House official, the Obama administration may reconsider joining the court.
In a memo to her fellow RNC members yesterday, Dr. Ada Fisher said that their newly elected chairman, Michael Steele, is “
Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, will reportedly not leave his television career to become Surgeon General. Gupta, who had been the leading candidate for the post, 
David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects.
![http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-out.png"](http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-out.png"){kind=link}