The Exquisite Contrarian

If you’re right leaning don’t get distracted by Keillor’s early paragraph about health care.  This is a great read that takes the pulse of America while reminding everyone that we need to pull ourselves together while pulling ourselves up.

Here we go: Recombobulate America.

Nehisi said in his blog on The Atlantic’s site, ”Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white.”

Is there any better way to respond to Matthews’s comment, stating he’d “forgotten Barack Obama was black for an hour” during the SOTU?

From Slate’s article: ”But you can plainly see the weariness in [Justice] Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is “to confuse metaphor with reality.” Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.”

The entire article can be found here.

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Obama told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview today.

A New Cigar Lounge is coming to Alexandria, Virginia.  Why?  Because Virginia’s new no smoking law gave a restaurant’s owners no other choice but to move their successful cigar smoking clientele to a membership only format.

Apparently OBL’s used wording in his most recent tape that implies an imminent attack.  Not sure if this is why the UK alert level has been raised, but definitely hit the radars of most western nations.  Here’s more from The Telegraph.

Yes, that’s right, still not a single pilot killed in the history of the American drone program.  Simply amazing. This is why drones are great.

From MSNBC:

• Osama bin Laden purportedly claimed responsibility for the attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas in a new audio message released Sunday threatening more attacks on the United States.

So it takes OBL an entire month to hint he had something to do with the attempted crotch bomb airliner attack.  How about this?

1. Nope, but thanks for trying to take credit.
2. Yes, we know your most mindless followers (is that redundant?) will believe you’ve orchestrated something more than a plan to dig a deeper cave in the last two years, including this poorly executed attempt at killing Americans
3. Oh – and why do you keep bringing up Palestine, like you’d been right in the middle of that one?  Your number two (‘who does number two work for’, by the way?) is doing a great job of alienating the people you’re trying to engage.

American public: don’t sit at home scared of this dude.  Focus your energy on what we’re doing inside the United States.  We’ve got kids growing up American and leaving for Pakistan to learn how to return and kill other Americans.  That’s nuts.

More on the OBL statement here.

The The New York Times is reporting that President Obama is bringing in David Plouffe and the rest of his winning team to counter the potential GOP backlash tide that could result in big Dem losses in this fall’s elections.