Everyone has a theory about the financial crisis. These theories range from the absurd to the plausible — from claims that liberal Democrats somehow forced banks to lend to the undeserving poor (even though Republicans controlled Congress) to the belief that exotic financial instruments fostered confusion and fraud. But what do we really know?

 On the generic ballot question, in any given timeframe, Rasmussen always has the most pro-Republican results. Every. Single. Time. Without fail.

 Democrats are hungry for a hardball strategy against a resurgent Republican Party, and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin is positioning himself as a leading aggressor — a move that could help him in a potential run for majority leader.

 So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.

 At this point, Democrats are still poised to suffer setbacks in November, but no chamber will change hands. Still, Republicans have so convinced themselves of their epic victory against "socialism," that even incremental gains will shatter them. Their expectations have been set so high, aided by Cook and other analysts like him jumping the gun, that meeting them is an impossibility.

 The latest toxic meme to spread across the pages of my once-beloved Washington Post is that President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, is the one reasonable man in the White House.

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

 With all the gloom and doom these days, the Democrats may be talking themselves into a crisis. While there is every reason to believe that the party is in trouble and will lose seats this year, there is no solid data that would justify a view shared by many here in Washington that the Democrats are destined to lose control of the House. This certainly could happen, but it is really too early to jump to that conclusion.

 Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 2/22-24. Likely voters. MoE 4% (1/28/2009 results)

 Aided by a handful of Republicans, Senate Democratic leaders on Monday kept alive a $15 billion job-creation measure and are poised to pass the measure later this week.

 A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick [his lips are moving, ergo it must be lies] Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained “plainly inaccurate information” that undermined its conclusions,  according to Justice Department investigators. 

 If you want to be honest, face these facts: At this moment, President Obama is losing, Democrats are losing and liberals are losing.

 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) lacks the votes to begin debating his targeted jobs bill, according to sources monitoring the legislation.

Reid needs 60 votes to open debate on the $15 billion jobs bill. The vote is scheduled for Monday, when lawmakers return from the Presidents Day recess.

 During an interview with Obama in the fall of 2007, I was struck by just how much he sounded like Clinton when he spoke of the importance of wringing "the excesses of the '60s" out of the Democratic Party. Then, unprompted, Obama added that "Bill Clinton deserves some credit for breaking with some of those dogmas in the Democratic Party." Remember, Obama was running against Hillary Clinton at the time.

 The filibuster reform fight is getting more interesting. This morning, David wrote about the burgeoning effort among Senate Dems to prime the procedural pump to be ready at the beginning of the next Congress to change the filibuster rule, and the current Majority Leader, Harry Reid's opposition to doing that just now.

 Labor groups are furious with the Democrats they helped put in office — and are threatening to stay home this fall when Democratic incumbents will need their help fending off Republican challengers. 

 

 Earlier today, President Obama made a surprise appearance at the daily White House press briefing. (Watch it and read the full transcript on DKTV or view it at the bottom of this post.)

Here's a brief summary of some of the major topics he covered:

 We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

 DailyKos has released a new poll, conducted for it by the polling outfit Research 2000, which seems like it was commissioned solely for the purpose of depressing liberals. Not only does it confirm that a sizable chunk of Republicans still refuses to believe that President Obama is legitimate, but also that, even in 2010, as "Don't ask, don't tell" slowly inches closer to repeal, fear and intolerance of gay people is still rampant among the GOP. If you were having a pleasant day, don't click ahead to read our list of the poll's ten most alarming revelations.

 HANDS down, the State of the Union’s big moment was Barack Obama’s direct hit on the delicate sensibilities of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The president was right to blast the 5-to-4 decision giving corporate interests an even greater stranglehold over a government they already regard as a partially owned onshore subsidiary. How satisfying it was to watch him provoke Alito into a “You lie!” snit. Here was a fight we could believe in.

 As promised, President Obama appeared this afternoon at the House Republican caucus' retreat in Baltimore, delivering a short speech, followed by some fascinating Q&A. If you missed it -- the appearance was aired live on C-SPAN -- you'll really want to watch it when the video is posted online. It was simply fascinating.

 Yesterday, I interviewed David Axelrod and was struck by his inability to explain how the White House would highlight the the difference between disagreement and obstruction. Today's session, if it becomes a regular event rather than a one-off, provided part of the answer. He'll debate them directly. But that may be tough to do. Republicans are already spreading the word that they made a mistake allowing cameras into the event. Apparently, transparency sounds better in press releases than it does in practice.

But if this is to be the last of these we see for a while, make sure to take the time and watch it, or read the transcript. It's some of the best political television I've seen in memory.

 When President Obama squared off with House Republicans in a question-and-answer session on Friday, perhaps no issue was more contentious than health care. Among Mr. Obama’s boldest assertions was that Democrats had put forward a mostly centrist plan and that Republicans attacked it as “some Bolshevik plot.”

 By the time Obama was done, and had stayed about 30 minutes past when he was scheduled to leave, Republican leadership was ready to get him out of the room. One GOP lawmaker asked for one more question, and as Obama started to say he was out of time, Pence jumped in, too: "He's gone way over." And with that, Obama took his booklet of GOP policy proposals and left the room -- in much better political shape, possibly, than he was when he walked in.

 President Obama just spoke before the House Republican caucus and then took questions from members - live. It was amazing television - watchable, interesting, feisty and even a little dramatic. I was reminded of the campaign when, in a single speech in Philadelphia, Obama neutralized the Jeremiah Wright issue that could have sunk his candidacy. The environment and subject matter are obviously completely different now, but Obama proved again that he performs best when he's up against the wall. Today, at the caucus meeting, he went right after Republicans on their turf and, in my opinion, owned them.

 The moment President Obama began his address to Republicans in Baltimore today, I began to receive e-mails from Democrats: Here's an except from one of them: "I don't know whether to laugh or cry that it took a f$$@&$* year for Obama to step into the ring and start throwing some verbal blows... I'm definitely praying at mass on Sunday morning that this Obama doesn't take another 12 month vacation." 

 Last week, the Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Obama administration, published an acerbic essay about the difference between true deficit hawks and showy “deficit peacocks.” You can identify deficit peacocks, readers were told, by the way they pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending.

 A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

 The Democratic Party got a resounding wake-up callfrom the voters of Massachusetts on Tuesday. But it's long been clear that 2010 would be a challenging election year for our party.

 The tools were available to quickly pass a health care bill, yet Democrats were too incompetent to do so. And on issue after issue, they've proven completely ineffective.

THAT's why the base is sitting things out. They don't need blogs or MSNBC to tell them that Democrats can't govern. They already knew that Republicans don't want to govern, but the Democrats were supposed to be different. And they are, they want to govern, but they can't. And the voters that worked their asses off to give Democrats the White House and super majorities in Congress are now realizing that it was all for nothing. That all that talk about hope and change was cynical bullshit designed to motivate them. It worked once, but that crowd is learning the art of political cynicism, and it ain't pretty.

 President Obama will propose in his State of the Union address a package of modest initiatives intended to help middle-class families, including tax credits for child care, caps on some student loan payments and a requirement that companies let workers save automatically for retirement, senior administration officials said Sunday.

 It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated(with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican ineither his campaign advertising or his victory speech.

 2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.

  Since the suicide bombing that took the lives of seven Americans in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, the Central Intelligence Agency has struck back against militants in Pakistan with the most intensive series of missile strikes from drone aircraft since the covert program began.

 It's worth taking a step back from health-care reform for a second. What Democrats are doing isn't just abandoning a particular policy issue. They're proving themselves unable to govern.

 The notion of right-wing "populism" is suddenly fashionable following last Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts, when even stiff millionaire suit Mitt Romney could be heard braying about the "royalists" who rule Washington. But all such fakery was exposed today by an event of far greater moment. The Supreme Court's narrow, poorly argued and highly political decision in the Citizens United case -- which removes century-old restrictions on corporate influence-buying -- is the culmination of a Republican dream. From this moment forward, what the original American populists once called "the money power" will be enabled to overwhelm all other forces in American democracy using sheer wealth -- and that includes every "tea party" activist with a dissenting opinion about bank bailouts, executive abuses or crooked contracting.

 It turns out there were core contradictions in the promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008. They caught up with his party on Tuesday in Massachusetts.

 It's one of these annoying conceits that at key moments people write editorials and posts on 'what the president should say', 'what the president should do'. But with the recognition that it's an annoying tradition, let me take a stab at it. Not because there's any reason he should listen to me but because it's a convenient way to explain what I believe is a sensible way forward.

 Yet with little notice from the public, Obama has been steadily rewriting a major area of American policy — the environment — from global warming to gas mileage rules, logging to endangered species. Many of his initiatives have particular impact on California.

 The President's steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters had sent packing twice in a row in the name of "bipartisanship," and his refusal ever to utter the words "I am a Democrat" and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy--and hence competing parties--for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility.

 In June 2008, a few months before the financial implosions began, I asked two smart financiers who happened to be Republican about the future of the seemingly shaky American economy.

 Lately many people have been second-guessing the Obama administration’s political strategy. The conventional wisdom seems to be that President Obama tried to do too much — in particular, that he should have put health care on one side and focused on the economy.

 Even given the low bar set by America’s bogus conversations about race, the short-lived Harry Reid fracas was a most peculiar nonevent. For all the hyperventilation in cable news land, this supposed racial brawl didn’t seem to generate any controversy whatsoever in what is known as the real world.

 No one should be surprised that Robertson invokes God's wrath or Satan's trade-offs when horror hits. Whether it's a hurricane, a terrorist attack or an earthquake, one can be fairly certain that Robertson's Ouija board will point to a supernatural explanation.

 Quite obviously, the sharp descent for Majority Leader Reid can be owed the "Game Change" revelations over last weekend, which brought to our collective attention the awkward phrase now burned into the minds of most in the political conversation: "negro dialect".

 Here’s what’s coming in economic news: The next employment report could show the economy adding jobs for the first time in two years. The next G.D.P. report is likely to show solid growth in late 2009. There will be lots of bullish commentary — and the calls we’re already hearing for an end to stimulus, for reversing the steps the government and the Federal Reserve took to prop up the economy, will grow even louder.

 Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. You want unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Man, we handed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.

 The Pakistani Taliban claimed Friday that they used a turncoat CIA operative to carry out a suicide bombing that killed seven American CIA employees in Afghanistan as revenge for a top militant leader's death in a U.S. missile strike.

 In the fall of 2003, the new commander of American forces inAfghanistan, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, decided on a new strategy. Known as counterinsurgency, the approach required coalition forces to work closely with Afghan leaders to stabilize entire regions, rather than simply attacking insurgent cells.

 President Obama declared Tuesday that there had been a “systemic failure” of the nation’s security apparatus after being told about more missed signals and uncorrelated intelligence that should have prevented a would-be bomber from boarding a flight for the United States.

 Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn’t begin until 2001. Do we really care?)

 Rebuffed this month by skeptical lawmakers when it sought finances to buy a prison in rural Illinois, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with the money to replace theGuantánamo Bay prison.

 As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.

 Here's what Democrats need to ponder: Can they prosper in the absence of George W. Bush?

His presidency was a tonic for Democrats and led to a blossoming of political creativity on the center-left not seen since the 1930s. No tactic, no program, no leader ever did more to catalyze the party than the rage Bush inspired.

 Before I explain the generic insult, let me first make something perfectly clear: I am your enemy.  That you don't know this is understandable: after all, people like me prefer it that way.  But until you understand just what you're up against and why, you're going to continue to lose, and look like fools in the process.

Barack Obama has indeed sold you out.  He and many of his Democratic colleagues have sold you out on healthcare, and they've sold you out on financial reform.  You were looking for a savior, and you've been had--not an altogether atypical result for those looking for a strong leader to "save" them.

 Toyota Motor said Monday that it planned a widespread release of its plug-in hybrid car in 2011 as the company scrambled to gain the upper hand in an increasingly crowded battle over next-generation “green” technology.

 When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

  E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

 In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded: