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From Fox News Sunday, "Big Bad" John Cornyn is worried about the cencus being politicized if it's moved away from the control of the Commerce Secretary.

Wallace: Sen. Cornyn we now learn that the Obama administration is going to have the Director of the Census Bureau report not only to the Commerce Secretary, but also to the White House. What's wrong with that?

Cornyn: Well ordinarily this has been something that the Commerce Secretary's done and I think it ought to be done on a competent as much as possible non-partisan basis and to shift it to the White House to me just politicizes the census which is not something we should be doing.

Wallace: What's the danger briefly of politicizing the census?

Cornyn: Well because of course that determines who gets what Congressional districts. States like Texas were going to get probably at least three new Congressional districts based on the reproportioning and of course in drawing those lines, redistricting within states it's all based on those census figures. So if you cook the figures up front I think it distorts that process going forward and undermines the concept of one person one vote.

Coming from Texas, John Cornyn should know all about gerrymandering after what happened there in 2003. Hyprocrisy thy name is Republican.

From Headzup, the Week in Cartoons.

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Thomas Ricks thinks that the Iraq war is far from over. "This year we're in now, '09, is going to be, I think, a surprisingly tough year," Ricks told NBC's David Gregory.

Ricks believes that the Bush administration's surge strategy kicked the can down the road. "Basically the surge succeeded militarily, failed politically," he said. General Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, sees negative effects of the surge. "What he says is that Iraqis, many of them, used the breathing space we created to step backwards to become more sectarian, become more divided," explained Ricks.

Thomas Ricks is author of the new book, "The Gamble."

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On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the new Republican Party chairman had authorized payment to his sister for services that were never performed.

Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.

Appearing on ABC, Steele denied the charges. "It's all false," he argued. "This is not the way I intend to run the RNC with this over my head," said Steele.

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Brent Bozell during a discussion on William F. Buckley Jr.'s book The Reagan I Knew on C-SPAN's Book TV opining over the state of the media today and wondering if William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan would have had their voices heard in today's television media. He makes the huge stretch of comparing Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on cable news today to Walter Cronkite, David Frost and Merv Griffin, like they had the same audience.

While I completely agree with Bozell that way too many on the cable news networks are forced to come on television and try to make a point in two minute sound bytes and that does nothing to add to any real political discourse in this country, him using that pretense to say that either Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley Jr. would not have had their opinions propogated by our sorry excuse for a "main stream media" is a complete joke.

Other than Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann we don't have any progressives controlling the narrative out there... period, on any of the cable news networks or on the big three. We have sorry milk toast excuses for surrogates that supposedly represent the "liberal" side of an issue and the Democrats apparently have not gotten the message yet that the press is not their friend. When they decide to break up these media monopolies that are controlling everything we watch and listen to I'll feel that maybe they have started to get a clue.

I had a conversation with a friend that I sadly found out liked Sean Hannity recently. It made me wonder how much time I wanted to spend with her in the future since it is hard to have sane conversations with someone who's basically been brainwashed, but at least we had an honest dialog that evening about where this country is headed and she answered a question I had for her about how many progressives she even knew existed.

She had no idea who Amy Goodman or Bill Moyers were, and she had no clue that any of the major much less lesser read liberal blogs out there even existed. I named a bunch of them off and let her know that if she didn't know who those people were she actually had no idea what the other side of the story was, and what an alternative view point to Sean Hannity was.

Brent Bozell may not be happy that the conservatives of our time actually have a couple people out there taking them to task on the TV machine as Rachel puts it, but to try to pretend that conservatives haven't had a chance to put their narrative out there because Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been allowed to be on the air on MSNBC is an utter and complete joke. And comparing them to anyone who anchored a major news network when that's all the public had to watch at the time during the era of Cronkite is an even bigger joke.

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Paul Krugman debunks Joe Scarborough's talking points on how the Republican party has actually governed as compared to their rhetoric. It would be nice if we had more progressives than just Paul Krugman who actually know something about economics allowed on our airwaves to shoot these guys down when they tell such obvious lies.

Scarborough: Let me just say though, George Bush over the past eight years had the most disastrous spending policy. They decided to cut taxes. They decided to increase the deficit. They decided to increase entitlement spending while they were fighting two wars. They made no tough decisions what so ever. You can't say that that's the traditional conservative approach to economics. It was a disaster and I think we can all agree with that can we not?

Krugman: You've got some mythical image of what a modern conservative is. Reagan increased spending while cutting taxes. Bush increased spending while cutting taxes... Who is your ideal here?

Krugman follows with giving us a dose of reality from Scarborough's talking points about how we were just so full of bipartisan love and that worked so well while Clinton was in office.... and calls what happened while he was President and Republicans controlled the Congress what it was...gridlock. He manages to get Scarborough to admit that we need some bold steps now if we're going to fix the mess we're in. I don't think bold is what we're going to get as long as the Republicans feel obstructing is better for them for political purposes than actually fixing our economy.

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Rachel Maddow would like for the Republicans who want to use the stimulus bill to make political hay to get out of the way of the ones who are actually trying to save our economy. She notes the importance of quick action if the stimulus is going to have any chance working.

Her use of the term Know Nothings reminded me of an article I read back in November at Alternet titled Thanks to Sarah Palin, We Get to See the Cruelness of the GOP as It Really Is which described the Know Nothing party of the 1840's.

But there is another strand that runs through their history.

Back in the 1840s, there was a group called the Know Nothings. They were against immigrants and for real Americans. ("Real American" did not then, as it does not now, refer to Indians; it refers to descendants of English immigrants.) The movement was based on fear. Irish and German Catholics were going to take over. They would take orders from the Pope-in-Rome (one word). Their values were not "our values." They drank. Their nunneries were virtual brothels and when the nuns had babies they practiced infanticide.

The Know Nothings started with secret societies like the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, associated with William Poole, better known as Bill the Butcher, depicted by Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. Their public political face was the American Republican Party, which became the Native American Party, and finally the American Party.

Their platform was:

• Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries.
• Restricting political office to "native-born" Americans.
• Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship.
• Restricting public school teaching to Protestants.Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools (from the Protestant version of the Bible).
• Restricting the sale of liquor.

Rachel's Know Nothing obstructionists and the Know Nothings of old do seem to be cut from the same cloth don't they?

From ProgressIllinois.com:

Last night, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) introduced an amendment to the stimulus package that would prohibit the "direct or indirect use of funds to fund the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)." This is the latest example of the GOP's ongoing effort to demonize ACORN, which reached its zenith with their ridiculous "voter fraud" accusations last fall.

Thankfully, Sen. Dick Durbin stepped up to smack Vitter down, noting ACORN's good works and, more specifically, the assistance they provided to Louisiana residents following Hurricane Katrina (indeed, the organization is based in New Orleans).

From Whitehouse.gov:

Yesterday began with some devastating news with regard to our economic crisis. But I'm pleased to say it ended on a more positive note.

In the morning, we received yet another round of alarming employment figures – the worst in more than 30 years. Another 600,000 jobs were lost in January. We've now lost more than 3.6 million jobs since this recession began.

But by the evening, Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands.

In the midst of our greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American people were hoping that Congress would begin to confront the great challenges we face. That was, after all, what last November's election was all about.

Legislation of such magnitude deserves the scrutiny that it's received over the last month, and it will receive more in the days to come. But we can't afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary. The scale and scope of this plan is right. And the time for action is now.

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From Bill Moyers Journal:

President Obama's message of change resounded deeply with Americans tired of "business as usual" in Washington, but most people, the President included, have admitted that change does not come easily to Washington. As the President's agenda meets its first resistance in the Capitol, two guests on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL argue that the establishment has a surprising army of defenders — the political press.

Full transcript to follow.

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