VIDEO-- Bill Kristol: I Was Wrong To Blame Obama For Stock Market Declines

By GottaLaff



Bill Kristol was ::gasp!:: wrong about something, and is, wait for it... admitting it? Zut alors! Where are my smelling salts? Quick, someone get me to a fainting couch...

Indeed, a key talking point of the right-wing in late 2008 and the early part of 2009 was that the significant decline in the stock market was evidence that Obama’s approach to economic recovery was already failing. [...] Kristol argued that Obama’s failure to base his entire economic agenda on ensuring day-to-day gains in the markets on Wall Street demonstrated he had already failed at governing:

So the stock market drops over 25 percent since Election Day, almost 20 percent since Inauguration — and Barack Obama tells the American people at his press conference Tuesday not to “spend all your time worrying about that.” [...]

The stock market is about real money, about the real livelihoods of real. … I’m told almost every theme in Obama’s speech last Tuesday night was focus-group tested–and the speech played pretty well politically. But the markets weren’t impressed. Isn’t it time for Obama and his team to get up the nerve to stop playing politics and to govern?

[...] Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Republicans in Congress all got on board. The question now is whether or not Kristol’s conservative brethren will follow his lead and issue a correction.

Will InSannity, Boss, or any of the Rushpublic punditiots follow suit? I doubt it. Will a retraction about Le Burger de Dijon be far behind? Jamais. Not on votre life.

Kit Bond's remarks about Holder? Not so fast, say Sen's. Leahy, Whitehouse

By GottaLaff

Punk'd... or should I say, misled. And I was never happier to be talked down:

The implication of the piece is fairly clear: Holder promised Bond to eschew prosecutions, and Bond promised not to block his nomination. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee -- which approved Holder today -- strongly denied that such an exchange could have occurred.

"It would be completely wrong if a senator said, 'I'll vote for you if you promise to withhold prosecution of a crime'," Leahy told me. "No senator would make a request like that. It'd be improper."

"Maybe Governor [Rod] Blagojevich [D-IL]" would have sought such an assurance, Leahy quipped. He never specifically referenced Bond, who declined to answer questions about the Times piece while leaving the Senate chamber this afternoon.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a Judiciary panel member and former federal prosecutor, had a similar response when questioned about the likelihood of Holder making the "assurances" that Bond believes were offered.

"It sounds a little improbable ... it's, frankly, improper for members of Congress to demand [a pre-determinative stance on] prosecutions."

Sounds like the Times report should be taken with a full shaker of salt.

Improper is an understatement. Even if it was inaccurate, let's keep our fingers crossed that Holder isn't even thinking in the direction of the Times' report.

However, Ellen Ratner's reporting is usually pretty good, so the question of Rove's "executive privilege" is still a problem.

H/t: Eve

New York Times admits goof: Letter criticizing Caroline Kennedy was fake

By GottaLaff

Sacre bleu! The retraction:

Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that was signed by Bertrand Delanoe, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.

This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.

Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.

We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoe's office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.

This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoe's office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.

We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.

We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.

La lettre originale:

As mayor of Paris, I find Caroline Kennedy’s bid for the seat of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least. What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.

With all the respect and admiration I have for Ms. Kennedy’s late father, I find her bid in very poor taste, and, after reading “Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key” (news article, Dec. 18), in my opinion she has no qualification whatsoever to bid for Senator Clinton’s seat.

We French have been consistently admiring of the American Constitution, but it seems that recently both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from a truly democratic model. The Kennedy era is long gone, and I guess that New York has plenty of more qualified candidates to fill the shoes of Hillary Clinton. Can we speak of American decline?

Bertrand Delanoë
Paris, Dec.18, 2008

Nice try. Busted. Au revoir, now.

H/t: Kingsburyqc