Via Politico:

“The House has just canceled votes for the week, meaning the chamber will be out of session through Feb. 22, including next week’s scheduled Presidents Day recess. Across Capitol Hill, virtually every press conference and every committee hearing are also being canceled as a second blizzard approaches.”

I don’t know about you, but I think this might be a terrorist plot.  It looks as if the terrorists have gotten a hold of George Bush’s hurricane machine and retrofitted it to become a blizzard maker.  Instead of blowing up planes to get their point across, they are now blocking legislation through natural phenomena…ingenious.

That’s it? That’s all? This is the ad that the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority have been screeching about? This is the ad that the Feminist Majority has said will inspire terrorism? Are you kidding me here?

President Obama finally addressed reporters concerning the failed terrorist attack on Christmas and the subsequent fallout from the initial comments made by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that the “system worked”.

Via Reuters:

“This was a screw up that could have been disastrous,” the president said during a meeting in the White House situation room, according to the White House media office. “We dodged a bullet but just barely. It was averted by brave individuals not because the system worked and that is not acceptable. While there will be a tendency for finger pointing, I will not tolerate it.“

Hear that?

The President will not tolerate any finger pointing!

Oh wait……

DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) say the previous admin let down their guard.

“In general, we are facing the consequences of the Bush administration’s failures to deal with al Qaeda,” Van Hollen told Hotline OnCall.

I originally posted this a couple of years back.

For a long time, I subscribed to CNN’s breaking news email alerts (at least I did until they started considering Paris Hilton breaking news but not things that were happening in Washington or on Wall Street, so I unsubscribed).

Eight years ago today, I got a great many breaking news emails.

I have them saved, and rereading them is a chilling and haunting account of that day.

I have every email saved from September 11 to the fall of Kabul, but I will repost the September 11 ones and those for the immediately following days.

I repost them today, because I think that we should all read and remember. It is too easy to forget and too simple to exploit.

Think back to that day.

Remember what you were doing.

What you saw.

What you felt.

What you thought in those chaotic early hours when nothing was clear and everything was surreal and the fog of war obscured for the first time in almost two centuries three locations on American soil.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 06:55:02 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– Iraq claims U.S. spy plane shot down; Pentagon confirms losing contact with unmanned craft. Details to come.

I include this only out of a sense of irony; Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, but it was the first breaking news email I got that day.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 08:52:02 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– World trade center damaged; unconfirmed reports say a plane has crashed into tower. Details to come.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 09:21:02 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– Second plane crashes into World Trade Center.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 09:23:02 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– FBI investigating reports of foul play in World Trade Center plane crashes, according to the Associated Press. Details to come.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 09:32:02 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– Sources tell CNN one of two planes that crashed into World Trade Center was an American Airlines 767.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 09:42:02 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– President Bush calls plane crashes at World Trade Center a terrorist act.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 09:46:02 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– White House evactuated. Details to come.

Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 09:47:03 -0400
From: BreakingNews@CNN.COM
To: TEXTBREAKINGNEWS@CNNIMAIL4.CNN.COM
Subject: CNN Breaking News
BREAKING NEWS from CNN.com

– Fire reported on National Mall in Washington

The cameras that the networks use are all mounted on a single building, and from their perspective the smoke coming from where the plane had struck the Pentagon appeared to either be coming from the National Mall or from the State Department.

(Read more after the leap)

Arlen Specter, according to the Indy Star, is hinting at a GOP filibuster of Obama’s nomination of lefty Bloomington law professor Dawn Johnsen to be chief legal counsel at the Justice Department:

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said his party may try to block the confirmation of Indiana University professor Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The committee approved her nomination by party-line vote last month, but a full Senate vote has not been scheduled.

Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn is working to block the nomination, but it’s unclear whether Republicans will try to filibuster.

Johnsen was a critic of former President George W. Bush’s policies on aggressive interrogation of suspected terrorists. Those tactics were endorsed by the legal counsel’s office, which produced memos allowing such methods as waterboarding, which simulates drowning.

If Arlen Specter is on board with blocking Johnsen’s nomination, then she’s probably in very serious trouble.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has well-documented connections to the terrorist Earth Liberation Front, dispatched two young women to protest the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Bloomington’s west side on Saturday. As an added attention-getting measure, they were dressed in green bikinis (and what appeared to be leather boots) for St. Patrick’s Day.

Imagine for a moment that I showed up to picket Planned Parenthood wearing a thong. Despite the fact that my fellow abortion opponents would disown me and condemn my behavior, I would discredit the anti-abortion movement and bring shame upon myself with that kind of indecent exposure. Would I draw attention to the protest? Yes. Is it likely that I would draw a reporter from the newspaper, thereby bringing the issue of abortion into the spotlight? Yes. But I would be harming the cause of opposing abortion, even though more people heard about the issue by reading about my hypothetical thong-wearing protest.

This is why PETA’s protest tactics are not effective. Rather than drawing attention to the issue of animal cruelty, they make the issue all about themselves. If the PETA “ladies” were holding graphic photographs of chickens killed for our food, they would draw attention and probably anger, but the focus would be on the issue of animal cruelty – not the circus-like atmosphere created by immature people begging for attention.

(Read more after the leap)

Speaking to a crowd of voters at a candidate forum in Plymouth last night, Congressional candidate Luke Puckett substituted a brief address remembering the events of 9/11/01 for his normal stump speech. The text of his remarks can be found below.

“Good evening, my name is Luke Puckett and I am running for Congress. I am a husband, father of three, and small business owner and employer from Elkhart. I am running for Congress because I believe that it’s time for some common sense solutions in Washington. From the slowing economy to high energy prices, Washington has failed to put in place policies that will help the hardworking people of Indiana.

“Tonight, I want to deviate a little from my normal campaign speech. Instead of talking about Washington’s lack of leadership and lack of response to our problems, I want to talk about a day in which we saw leadership and in which we saw a courageous response to pressing needs.

“Since the fall of the Soviet Union we pondered how we would meet the global challenges of the new era. We were lulled into a false sense of security and we wondered if we would ever again face monumental threats to our existence and our ideas. But liberty has always had its foes and history handed us our moment to stand on a late summer day 7 years ago.

“On September 11th, 2001 when we saw hate in action in the form of a terrible attack that ranged from the World Trade Center in New York City to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. to a cornfield in Pennsylvania. Those who perpetrated this evil act were motivated by a venomous ideology of bondage and totalitarianism. Their motives were evil and their actions were cowardly.

(Read more below the fold)

Headlining at the Free Republic:

This ad is presently run on television in VA by a 527 group.

Evan Bayh appeared Sunday morning on Face the Nation on CBS.

Let’s just charitably say it wasn’t his best performance.

The transcript isn’t up yet, so I’ll settle for the reporting on the Indy Star.

Interviewed on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the Indiana Democrat said McCain is given to “bellicose rhetoric which has a tendency to inflame conflicts rather than to defuse them.”

This “bellicose rhetoric which has a tendency to inflame conflicts rather than defuse them” would stem from McCain supposedly, according to The One’s own advisers and surrogates, having “roughly the same position” as the Obamassiah?

From the Washington Post:

Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the U.N. in the Clinton administration and an Obama supporter, objected to the suggestion that Obama had been late in coming to a tough condemnation of Russia. Obama and McCain are now more or less on the same page in decrying the aggression, he said.

“It is based on an exaggerated and deliberately misleading perception of Senator Obama’s initial statement, which was issued early, while the crisis was unfolding,” he said. “This is an attempt by people supporting Senator McCain to politicize a great international tragedy and it’s not worthy of the dimensions of the problem, especially when both candidates have roughly the same position.”

Perhaps Evan Bayh should explain himself.

Which is it?

Does Barack Obama have “roughly the same position” as John McCain?

Are they “more or less on the same page in decrying the aggression”?

How do such statements square with Bayh’s assertion that McCain is engaging in “bellicose rhetoric”?

(Read more after the leap)