Month: February 2007

Why Edwards Was Slimed

by tristero

Because he’d make a superb president, just the kind the rightwing fear. Krugman explains Edwards’ health plan:

…Mr. Edwards sets out to cover the uninsured with a combination of regulation and financial aid. Right now, many people are uninsured because, as the Edwards press release puts it, insurance companies “game the system to cover only healthy people.” So the Edwards plan, like Schwarzenegger’s, imposes “community rating” on insurers, basically requiring them to sell insurance to everyone at the same price.

Many other people are uninsured because they simply can’t afford the cost. So the Edwards plan, again like other proposals, offers financial aid to help lower-income families buy insurance. To pay for this aid, he proposes rolling back tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000 a year.

Finally, some people try to save money by going without coverage, so if they get sick they end up in emergency rooms at public expense. Like other plans, the Edwards plan would “require all American residents to get insurance,” and would require that all employers either provide insurance to their workers or pay a percentage of their payrolls into a government fund used to buy insurance.

But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further.

People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, “Health Markets,” the press release says, “will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.” This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, “the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.”

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Oh, and by the way, Krugman, unlike his employers, knows better than to play along with faux controversies ginned up anti-semitic theocrats: he completely ignores them.

And also by the way, Edwards’ not the only Democrat running who’d be a superb president. And it’s early. Looks like we’ll have many excellent choices.

Weenie Roast

by digby

So I hear through the grapevine that Libby defense fund chairwoman and all around GOP assassin Barbara Comstock turned heads by bringing former Republican Senator and current TV star Fred Thompson to the trial today. (Here’s a news report on it.) I’m sure the town was all atwitter at the return of the glamorous Tennessee hunk.

Remember this?

The New York Post, of all venues, reported recently that the Tennessee senator had of late become something of a sex object for “Capitol Hill hotties,” one of whom complained about “all these other women” who wouldn’t leave the senator alone. “I can’t get up to get a cocktail at a party without coming back and finding some girl sitting at my chair,” the woman was quoted as saying.

Margaret Carlson, the writer for Time and host for CNN, is described this way: “She calls his apartment all the time. It’s the joke all over Washington that Margaret has this huge crush on him. And Fred is clearly not interested.” (To which the gallant Thompson responded: “I generally don’t comment on these matters, but as it relates to the statements made about my friend Margaret Carlson, I should be so lucky.”)

I would feel sorry for poor Margaret except for the fact that she’s supposed to be a journalist and all this insider political/media incest makes me sick. Is it too much to ask that reporters refrain from actually sleeping with the people they are supposed to be covering? It’s bad enough that we have to put up with the cocktail weenie phenomenon.

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Better Than A Dead Centerfold

by digby

Is it me, or does Mary Matalin sound like she’s issuing some sort of threat here:

I want you to understand the gravity of what you’re doing here. In 15 years I have never called you back, when you’re jerking my chain 24-7. I’ve never done this. It’s not about my chain. It’s about clarifying and disallowing you to twist my words. If Scooter wrote it down, then I said it. I’m not contradicting Scooter—Is that clear? Are looking at me? Are you listening to me? Ok.

Wow. Somebody needs to stop watching “The Sopranos.” (And somebody’s lawyer (or vice president) must have been mighty concerned.)

Christy has all the Matalin backstory on this at FDL and it’s very entertaining.

But answer me one thing. If Matalin is threatening as she sounds like she’s threatening, what exactly is she threatening to do?

And also, what’s this comment about Matthews all about?

So it’s not what I think about him. I think he’s an incredible human being who has overcome a lot. I love his wife and when his show was first on it was must see TV. And now I can’t trust… if I know for a fact that everything he’s saying about things in which I’m involved are wrong then I can’t trust anything else that he says

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What’s he overcome?

(And why is she continuing to lie when we have seen the document and heard the testimony that proves her little “damage control” operation was a smear job at the behest of the vice-president. Can’t she stop?)

I’m enjoying watching this sick social/professional clusterfuck unravel. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

Update: I understand from the comments that Matthews has both conquered a drinking problem and is battling complications from diabetes. That’s probably what Matalin was referring to.

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Strategic Mousetrap

by digby

I continue to be impressed by Jim Webb. I don’t know what it is that makes him so straightforward and honest about what is really going on, but he is, and I’m grateful.

Yesterday he appeared with Chris Matthews and blew me away with this analysis, which was right on. (Try to ignore Tweety’s inane ramblings) :

WEBB: …One thing that we‘re going to see, however, is that when the—after we do the continuing resolution, when we have the 9/11 report coming to the Senate floor they‘re going to allow amendments. There are going to be a number of amendments on Iraq. I‘m actually considering putting in an amendment about Iran.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about Iran, because a lot of people, me included, wonder whether this administration might get us involved in a second war in that part of the world—the Mideast—in other words, get into a war with Iran. Does the president have the constitutional authority to go to war with Iran without checking with your branch of government?

WEBB: I don‘t believe he does, and there are two situations with respect to Iran. The first is, as I said yesterday on the issue of Iraq and how to move forward—the great frustration that I have is that we don‘t even have half a strategy here.

We have a continuing military policy—every time there is an escalation of the violence inside Iraq, but we have not had an aggressive diplomatic offensive by this administration that matches the quality of our military performance and that would embrace these countries in the region in a way that we can get a diplomatic solution.

You‘re not going to do that unless we go to Syria and Iran, as many people have said. Now, with respect to the administration and Iran specifically, I asked Secretary of State Rice, last month in a hearing—I read the presidential finding on the—on the resolution of ‘02 which basically said from this administration that they believe they have a lot of requisite authority, and possibly including Iran.

I asked her to clarify that. I have not received a clarification and I‘m considering putting a resolution in that basically says that no previous resolutions, no previous law empowers this administration…

MATTHEWS: Wow.

WEBB: … to unilaterally go into Iran.

MATTHEWS: I don‘t know the number of countries in the world right now, senator, maybe you know, it‘s probably under 200 but does the president hold authority to attack any one of them if he wants to, under this requisite authority that‘s mentioned here?

WEBB: This is a big problem.

MATTHEWS: I would say so. He could attack England basically on this reading.

WEBB: Yes, if you look at the framers of the constitution, they wanted to give the president as commander in chief the authority to repel sudden attacks.

That is totally different than conducting a preemptive war. And you know one thing, if you look at where we are in the Persian Gulf right now, when I was secretary of the Navy and until very recently, we never operated aircraft carriers inside the Persian Gulf because, No. 1, the turning radius is pretty close. And No. 2, the chance of accidentally bumping into something that would start a diplomatic situation was pretty high.

We now have been doing that, and with the tensions as high as they are, I‘m very worried that we might accidentally set something off in there and we need, as a Congress, to get ahead of the ball game here.

MATTHEWS: Before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was known to have engaged in that kind of activity in the North Atlantic, creating perimeters out there and daring the Nazi fleet—the U-boats to attack within that perimeter and basically month after month, increasing that perimeter until he thought he had perhaps been in a situation to gin up a war with a country he hated and wanted to see us fight.

It turns out that of course that Pearl Harbor intervened. Is this president trying to do the same thing, do you think? Trying to create a situation where it‘s easy for Ahmadinejad to do something wrong and create an act of war?

WEBB: Well there are again—even on the military side, there are two different situations. One is if there are Iranian military people actively involved inside Iraq as a former marine, I would support the notion of tactically engaging them. I haven‘t seen concrete evidence of that, but that‘s one situation.

The other situation, I do think that this administration has been pushing the envelope and we need a clear set of guidance from the Congress about when you can conduct preemptive war. Preemptive war is—was not even a concept until about 13 or 14 years ago.

MATTHEWS: What‘s the difference between being preemptive war and starting a war? It seems to me preemptive war is what I think Hitler did against Poland. I mean, what is preventive mean? It seems like you start a war, but you call it a preventive war. Isn‘t that simply nomenclature? If you started military action against another country, you‘ve started the war, haven‘t you?

WEBB: We‘ve always had a concept of a preemptive attack—if you see for instance a terrorist element getting ready to hit you…

MATTHEWS: That‘s preemptive. How about preventive?

WEBB: … you can hit them first.

MATTHEWS: Because Bush talks about preventive, not preemptive. He doesn‘t say like Israel did back in ‘67, when they saw the screws being tightened and war coming and everybody mobilized. They said we‘ve got to act. That‘s preemptive. Preventive is when you just say we don‘t like the other guy‘s cut of his jib. We‘re going after him.

WEBB: I don‘t think we should be doing either in terms of a war, preemptive or preventive. And the language if you look at the presidential finding on the ‘02 resolution is very loose. It even goes to threats or other concerns and that‘s why we‘re going to be seeing Secretary of State Rice in the next day or two—I‘m going to again present this to her and if they don‘t give us a clear answer, I‘m going to introduce a resolution.

MATTHEWS: I thought the Democrats back when they went along with this war, people like Gephardt, especially Gephardt, managed to get one bit of concession out of the administration that the war on Iraq would only be the war they were going to fight, that they didn‘t give them a complete blank check to fight any country in that region around the world. Maybe we should both do some legislative history checking here, but I do wonder where the Democrats didn‘t get that small concession from President Bush when they agreed to basically tow his line.

WEBB: They certainly didn‘t, if you read the presidential findings.

They have thought that they did, when they were debating it, but as you know, I and a number of people including Tony Zinni and General Hoar, two former CentCom commanders, would basically say this is not the way to deal with the war against international terrorism. You don‘t tie your military up into one spot and create essentially a strategic mousetrap.

It was a very bad strategic decision for us to go in Iraq in the first place and we‘re not going to get out of there until we have the right kind of diplomatic environment.

See, that isn’t so hard. It’s the truth and it’s also a strong, believable Democratic critique.

Most importantly, he goes directly at the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and rules it out completely. This is the single most important thing he said and it’s vitally important that other Democrats follow his lead. It’s not hard to say that they will always defend this country, but the Bush Doctrine has made us untrustworthy in the eyes of the world and we need to go back to adhering to international law.

This is beyond politics. The Republicans apparently believe that they can say anything and then govern according to their whims. The Democrats can’t. Somebody has to fix this mess. Democrats need to start speaking about this issue in realistic terms.

Update: I meant to also mention this article in Vanity Fair which explores this Iran issue in some depth. Very interesting.

One little nugget:

Baker’s realpolitik is anathema to neocons, but it is worth remembering that Bush, despite pursuing a neoconservative agenda in Iraq, is not a dyed-in-the-wool member of their group. “The president is a true believer in the policies the administration has been engaged in,” says one former N.S.C. staffer. “When it is applied to the policies regarding the Palestinians, Hamas, or Iran, there is a common thread. It is not pure neoconservatism, nor is it the pragmatic realism we saw under Bush One.”

Bush showed his willingness to depart from the neocon line a year ago, when he received an unusual proposition from Israeli officials together with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas, and a top administration neoconservative, Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. According to a Middle East expert, the Israelis and Abbas had determined that Hamas was positioned to fare strongly in the upcoming Palestinian elections, so they came to the administration with a plan to postpone them. “The Israelis and the Palestinians together had worked out a way to do it,” says the expert. “The Israelis were going to say that Hamas candidates could not run in Jerusalem, which was under Israeli jurisdiction, because they did not recognize Israel’s right to exist. And Abu Mazen was going to say if they can’t run in Jerusalem, then we can’t have an election now, [because] it wouldn’t be fair to Hamas. It was all worked out.”

There was just one problem: Bush, whose enthusiasm for spreading democracy had led him to actively lobby for the elections, didn’t want to go along. “The president said no,” the expert says. “He said elections will be good for Hamas. They would have to be responsible. They expected Hamas to do well, but not get a majority. Now they’ve become the government and it’s a big mess.” If anything, Bush had shown himself to be less pragmatic than his neocon advisers.

When you have a man with a fifth grade worldview (shared by Cheney, by the way) this is what you get.

And then there’s this little bit from Frederick Kaplan about the AEI surge recommendation report:

“There was no contact with the Bush administration. We put this together on our own I did not have any contact with the vice president’s office prior to … well, I don’t want to say that. I have had periodic contact with the vice president’s office, but I can’t tell you the dates. If you are barking up the story that the V.P. put this together, that is not true.”

Right.

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Sign Up

by digby

The Edwards campaign is standing by their bloggers as they came under assault by the rightwing noise machine and good for them.

But this is going to be the pattern unless the news media recognises that they have a substantial number of readers who will not tolerate a reprise of the kind of rightwing smear job collusion we’ve seen in the past. No matter how tittilating the story, when a conservative hitman like William Donohue comes calling with a sob story about how “offended” he is by someone’s “vulgar” language, professional journalists should put his phony complaints into context. There’s no excuse for this failure to expose the agenda of the rightwing noise machine anymore. With lexis-nexis and Mr Google, it’s just too easy to research the accuser and put his comments into context before they breathlessly rush to report the latest little GOP oppo nugget of misinformation. In many cases, if they do this, they will see that the story is not newsworthy in the first place and if it is, it is much more complicated (and interesting!) than the faux outrage.

When a reporter gets information from a partisan source, they have an obligation to thoroughly vet that information and ensure that their outlet is not being used as a political tool — and if they are, and the story is newsworthy, they owe it to the reader to present both sides of the story. This is not “he said/she said,” as some commenters have assumed. (That is an entirely differEnt phenomenon, which is giving the impression that one opinion or conclusion is equal to another as a way to appear non-partisan.)

If an accuser or the beneficiary of a political hit is guilty of the thing of which they are accusing others, the press has an obligation to point that out. The readers have a right to know the full set of facts.

Tim Russert has been squirming on the witness stand for two days, attempting to explain his lazy and self-serving journalistic ethics. The most important fact to emerge is that he very rarely seemed to consider telling the public the whole set of facts on anything, preferring instead to dole out little bits as needed in order to keep his access and ensure that he didn’t upset the social rules of washington DC. The end result is that he told the wrong story.

Today we see the press running with another manufactured scandal about Pelosi’s airplane travel with all the glee of a bunch of 7th grade schoolkids on their way to the beach.

Enough is enough. Blogpac has put together a campaign to hit the news organizations that ran with the blogger story yesterday without providing any context on Donohue or the McCain staff. It’s great that Edwards didn’t cave on the issue, but this will not be the last of it. They are running with Clinton Rules again and this time they are going to get some grief for it.

Go here. Sign up. It only takes a minute.

Update: William Donohue responded to the Edwards campaign decision:

“We will launch a nationwide public relations blitz that will be conducted on the pages of the New York Times, as well as in Catholic newspapers and periodicals. It will be on-going, breaking like a wave, starting next week and continuing through 2007. It will be an education campaign, informing the public of what he did today. We will also reach out to our allies in the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist communities. They worked with us before on many issues, and are sure to do so again. What Edwards did today will not be forgotten.”

The question is, will they work with a man who went on the radio and said:

“Just imagine if a white guy is performing oral sex on a statue of Martin Luther King with an erection. Do you need to see it to know it’s ugly?”

and

“Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay?

And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex. “

Racial bigotry, bizarre and vulgar sexual images, anti-semitism and anal sex all in two little quotes. He’s quite the fine representative for conservatives all over the nation.

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They’re Baaack

by digby

If you doubt that we are now operating under Clinton Rules, just check out C-Span right now where you will see Dan “Scumbag” Burton railing on the floor of the House about Nancy Pelosi wasting money by requesting a huge airplane to ferry her and her entourage back and forth to gay orgies in San Francisco. (Ok, I made up that last part.)

We’re back on the tarmac with Republican spendthrifts accusing the democrats of being wealthy elitists who are ripping off the taxpayers. They do this by picking one little example, usually false or exaggerated, and then ppound on it relentlessly, getting the utterly irresponsible morons in the press to turn it into a “scandal.” Get ready for “scandal” after “scandal” after “scandal.” They haven’t missed a beat.

We have just lived through a dozen years of these miserable crooks stealing the country blind. Many of them, including Burton, are under ethical clouds and others are literally in jail for ripping off the taxpayers. The country is in such breathtaking debt that it will take a generation to fix it, if we can. They rubber-stamped the most unpopular, failed presidency since Hoover for six long years until the American people finally got sick of it. And here they are unctuously whining for hours about how they are just trying to “save the taxpayers money” by having a hissy fit over Nancy Pelosi’s travel.

But here we are. CNN is lapping it up, suggesting that Pelosi should be willing to puddle jump through the nation if she doesn’t have a tailwind that night, and generally giving this completely bullshit (Pentagon lie) story legs. All the cable bloviators are shivering with excitement about covering their favorite kind of story again — trivial, bitchy, tabloid stories about Democrats. Yum.

The good news is that I just heard Anthony Weiner refer repeatedly to the “Republic” party on the floor of the House. I like it.

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Diss Christianists, Not Christians

by tristero

In re the Edwards bloggers dust-up many people including Digby have correctly pointed out that when it comes to religious bigotry (and bigotry towards gays), William Donohue is such a loathsome, anti-American theocrat as to be beneath notice when he rails against the presumed motes in the eyes of others.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the Edwards bloggers themselves crossed the line. Me, I don’t have an opinion beyond thinking that what was reported was so dull that I can’t see how it had the potential to interest, let alone offend, anyone. Nevertheless, much of our rhetoric about religion vis a vis politics remains naive, often obnoxious, unfocused, ill-informed, and counterproductive.

That this is so today, after 30 plus years of relentless assault by christianists (ie, fascists like Donohue who maliciously exploit this rhetorical failure for secular gain), is simply mind-boggling. It’s high time to develop a genuinely effective rhetoric to confront christianism. To be specific: It is one thing to criticize a person’s political actions, all of which are fair game. It is quite another to insult their religion, which is not.* Why? It’s not because it’s rude, it’s more important than that:

To attack the religious beliefs of someone like Donohue is to completely miss your target. That’s right, to mock Donohue’s religion is tactically useless. Because his christianism, not his Catholicism, is the danger. And it is a very, very grave danger.

Stated another way, the argument is that Donohue’s religious beliefs and practices are none of my, or anyone else’s business other than those in his church. His political actions most certainly are, and they deserve our full, uninhibited, and completely withering contempt. As for his craven hiding behind the skirts of priests to deflect criticism, Donohue and his fellow christianists, whatever their denomination, deserve widespread denunciation from the larger Christian community.

By blaming Catholicism for his vile politics, Donohue has hijacked the spiritual beliefs of all Catholics and demeaned their religion. I suspect that there are not a few extremely thoughtful and pious Catholics who are utterly disgusted by Donohue’s bigotry, which simply reeks of ignorance if not outright blasphemy.

Again, it is quite possible to respect a person’s religious beliefs while attacking them, without mercy, when they advocate theocracy and/or fascism. And it’s high time we did it better.

*I’ll leave for another time to discuss Dawkins’ and others who object to religious practice on principle. To place their arguments within the context of the American discourse on religion is not a trivial task. Suffice it to say that the Constitution and American jurisprudence is clear about a wall of separation so in a sense, whether religion per se is a good thing or a bad thing is not directly relevant here. American tradition is simply not to privilege one religious tradition over another.

Freak Of The Week

by digby

The president of the Catholic League, William Donohue says on the radio (7:34):

“Just imagine if a white guy is performing oral sex on a statue of Martin Luther King with an erection. Do you need to see it to know it’s ugly?”

This is the man who the American media invited all over television and on to the pages of the major newspapers yesterday to breathlessly complain about the offensive, bigoted language of the Edwards bloggers.

Is it really too much to ask that when the media gets a nasty, tabloid tid-bit from the rightwing character assisins that they at least find a religious spokesperson who isn’t guilty of the thing of which they are accusing Democrats?

Why is it that so many of the rightwing scolds turn out to be closeted gays, or crooks or vulgar racial bigots themselves? Maybe the media ought to take it on faith that when one of these accusers turns up feverishly clutching his pearls about the offensivness of liberals that they should investigate them for the real story. It’s always much juicier.

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Job Description?

by digby

So it turns out that Monsignor Tim spilled his guts early on to the FBI and only later decided that he didn’t have any obligation to testify to the Grand Jury. How odd. Here we thought it was all about the first amendment. Hamsher and Huffingtonwere both in the courtroom today and have the strange story.

This revelation makes it all the more shameful that the widely respected reporter and analyst who hosts Meet The Press could tell the FBI what he knew about the Libby leak but never informed the public. Apparently he wasn’t protecting his sources from government intrusion, he was protecting them from public embarrassment.

Tonight the Lehrer News Hour featured Tim Ruttan, the media critic of the LA Times and another media observer to talk about the Libby trial and what it reveals about the way journalism is practiced in Washington. I thought Ruttan nailed it:

Q: Tim, why don’t you start with an overview. What do you see?

Ruttan: I think we see the picture of a certain strata of the Washington press corps which has a certain relationship with people in the administration at its highest level based on access and mutual convenience. It’s not a pretty picture…

Q: Tim, one of the issues is who talks to whom, and when? And some people see this as a question of whether the press, and you’ve just alluded to this, of whether the press and the people in the government are too cozy. Play that out, spin that out for us a bit. Tell me what you see, how do you see it playing out in the Libby case?

Ruttan: Well, I think it plays out in a very interesting way because if you stand back from what occurred during those months, you have the picture of a number of high level Washington correspondents, very fine news organizations, who were essentially missing the story in the interests of preserving their access. I don’t think that one person in 50,000 really cared what the identiy of Ambassador Wilson’s wife might or might not have been. I do think that a large number of people might have been interested in the story of how the white house, especially the office of the vice president, had set out in a systematic way to discredit a prominent critic of the administration’s rationale for going into the war in Iraq. That’s a real story, but that wasn’t the story that was being told because these reporters were willing parts of that effort to discredit Ambassador Wilson.

We DFH bloggers have been ranting about just that since the details first emerged. All these famous, respected journalists were babbling incessantly about “the case” and almost none of them were telling the real story. It has taken putting them under oath in a federal trial to finally tell the public what they know about the most powerful people in the US government smearing a critic.

Can we all see what’s wrong with this picture?

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Lil Russ On The Stand

by digby

Tim Russert got quite a going over this afternoon by Libby’s lawyer. I have no way of knowing what the atmosphere was like but that seems like a high stakes game to me. Most people don’t think of Russert as we in the blogosphere do. To the general public, he’s a TV celebrity who they see on election night and on the Today show and everybody seems to think he knows what he’s talking about. He’s about as close to Walter Cronkite as we get these days. It’s very dicey to go after him hard and say he’s a forgetful, unprofessional prick.

I suppose they had no choice. He’s the key prosecution witness. But I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

It sounds like Russert got a little peeved, but I don’t know for sure. I can’t wait to hear the color commentary from Jane tonight. It’s sure to be interesting.

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