Some things I'm reading this morning:

• Update: Melissa Rycroft, the bachelor contestant weepy Jason Mesnick proposed to and then crassly broke up with on-air, will be replacing the injured Nancy O'Dell on Dancing With Stars Monday night. A former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, she's been dancing her whole life. And now ABC gets another shot at those Bachelor viewers who were very angry at the finale. Smart move.

• The LA Times reports the US Attorney in Los Angeles did a switcheroo on medical pot raids. After AG Holder's speech last week, the prosecutor ordered his local AUSA's to hold off on their medical pot cases. Then he lifted the ban. What's up with that? No one's talking. Update: Teddy at Firedoglake has more.

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President Barack Obama is getting ready to make some changes in our policy towards Cuba. Among those who will benefit:

US companies are queuing up as the president moves to ease restrictions on travel and trade, raising hopes of warmer relations and an end to the embargo.

...The White House has moved to ease some travel and trade restrictions as a cautious first step towards better ties with Havana, raising hopes of an eventual lifting of the four-decade-old economic embargo. Several Bush-era controls are expected to be relaxed in the run-up to next month's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago to gild the president's regional debut and signal a new era of "Yankee" cooperation.

The details are in the spending bill: [More...]

Don't forget to turn your clocks ahead. One more time song:

What's your favorite song about time? This is an open thread, all topics welcome. [videos were deleted by you tube]

Just another heads-up that Colorado snowboarder and former Bachelorette winner Jesse Csincsak will be on John Walsh's America's Most Wanted tonight. Jesse wants to help solve the murder of snowboarder Ben Bradley, who was killed for his snowboard outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Ben's board was from of a limited edition of 200, made by Never Summer of Denver. Finding Ben's limited edition board could lead to the killer.

Jesse told me he's really psyched about the show and hopeful that leads will come in once it's aired so that Ben’s family can finally have some closure.

Think Progress:

The [Newsweek] poll also contains the interesting and “somewhat surprising” finding that a majority of the American public supports nationalizing the banks:

Temporary nationalization is another way for the federal government to deal with large banks in danger of failing. This is where the government takes over a failing bank, cleans its balance sheets, and then quickly sells it off. In general, which do YOU think is the better way to deal with failing banks…

29 Government financial aid WITHOUT any government control of the bank, OR
56 Nationalization, where the government takes temporary control?
11 Neither/Other (VOL.)
4 (DO NOT READ) Don’t know

More . . .

Krugman, citing Media Matters, writes:

One major sin of news coverage, especially on TV, is the way certain points of view just get excluded from consideration — even if many of the best-informed people hold those views. Most famously and disastrously, the case against invading Iraq was just not heard in the months before the war.

And still it happens. According to the invaluable Media Matters, the idea that the Obama stimulus plan might be too small — a view held by many well-known economists — basically went unreported on broadcast news during the stimulus debate. . . . Meanwhile, it’s rapidly becoming clear that yes, the plan was too small.

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Responding to Glenn Greenwald's post questioning his grant of anonynmity to Obama Administration sources, Ezra Klein gives an inadequate reply (imo of course):

[W]e are, fundamentally, dealing with a collective action problem: So long as there are journalists willing to speak with sources on background, sources can demand background for most all commentary. An individual writer -- particularly at a small outlet -- can then choose between anonymous sources or none at all. And so far as informing readers go, some sourcing is better than none.

This is unconvincing. Klein's willingness to use anonymous sourcing at the drop of a hat actually does a great disservice to journalism and to his own work. It becomes apparent that he is simply a part of the spin, not the reporting. It would be far better if he reported what was on the record, than to allow an anonymous record to be created. "Everybody does it" is no excuse. It is precisely why the Media is such a joke today. It appears Klein has chosen to be in on the joke. More . .

Much discussion on Obama's lobbyist ban and the troubles caused by it (see Kagro, Yglesias and Sirota. I always thought Candidates Obama and Edwards were engaging in mindless populism with this issue and Sirota's post in particular really illustrates this point. David writes:

Your turn.

This is an Open Thread.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, with the consent of the Obama Administration, vacated the Fourth Circuit Al Marri decision and dismissed the appeal as moot. I personally think this was the correct legal result but I do agree with Glenn Greenwald that the Obama Administration should do more on this issue:

[t]here were numerous steps the Obama administration could have and should have taken to prevent a repeat of the Padilla travesty, including: (a) explicitly renouncing the Bush administration's view that the President possesses this radical power (the super-transparent Obama DOJ refuses to comment on its view in that regard even though Candidate Obama explicitly rejected a similar theory -- see Questions 5 and 10); and (b) urging the Supreme Court to resolve the question notwithstanding Al-Marri's indictment, as Al-Marri's lawyers requested, on the ground that it meets one of the judicially established exceptions to the "mootness" doctrine.

More . . .

Mike Lux has a nice piece in the Huffington Post about timid Democrats:

Unfortunately for those of us in the Clinton administration, our too-cautious message, along with the "don't do anything transformative with health care" Democrats -- folks such as Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) -- slowed the Clinton health care reform effort enough that it stalled in Congress, which kept our voter base home in the 1994 elections and cost Democrats control of Congress. With our problems far worse now than they were in the '90s, I fear that these cautious Senate Democrats could damage Obama's ability to make big enough change. If that happens, voters who expected big change from Obama will be severely disappointed, and 2010 could be another 1994.

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Jackson Diehl, Fred Hiatt's Lieutenant on the WaPo Editorial Board, pens perhaps the dumbest thing we have yet seen from perhaps the dumbest group of people on the planet, the Media. Diehl writes:

Washington has spent the past couple of weeks debating whether Barack Obama's ambitious agenda and political strategy are more comparable to those of Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. Oddly, hardly anyone is talking about the ways in which Obama is beginning to resemble the man who just vacated the White House. . . Obama hasn't strayed far from Karl Rove's playbook for routing the opposition. But surely, you say, he's planning nothing as divisive or as risky as the Iraq war? Well, that's where the health-care plan comes in: a $634 billion (to begin) "historic commitment," as Obama calls it, that (like the removal of Saddam Hussein) has lurked in the background of the national agenda for years. . . .

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