Your turn.

This is an Open Thread.

Last week, the silly Dick Morris let his Hillary hate run away with him as he pronounced her irrelevant. Here is the way Morris put it:

So what is Hillary’s mandate? Of what is she secretary of State? If you take the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan out of the equation, what is left? One would have to assume that the old North Korea hands in the government would monopolize that theater of action. What, precisely, is it that Hillary is to do? The question lingers.

Next week, Clinton goes to China. Dick Morris may not have heard of it, but I am sure most of you have. Secretary Clinton spoke about her upcoming Asia trip yesterday (h/t andgarden. The video of her speech is here.

Jeralyn has passed the TalkLeft torch to me on responding for National Journal's blogger poll.

Two questions were presented this week. The first:

Have events of recent weeks made you more encouraged or less encouraged about prospects for bipartisanship this year on major issues that Congress has yet to tackle, such as health care reform and energy legislation?

More . .

Three federal prosecutors in the Ted Stevens' trial were held in contempt of court Friday for failing to comply with a federal court order to turn documents over to Stevens' defense team:

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called it "outrageous" that government lawyers would ignore his deadline for turning over documents.

Last month, Sullivan told the Justice Department to turn over all its internal communications regarding a whistleblower complaint against the FBI agent leading the investigation into the former Alaska senator.

More...

The Senate passed the stimulus bill late Friday night and the NY Times reports it was the longest congressional vote in history.

Hopefully, President Obama and the Dems learned that Republicans are not their friends.

The House vote was 246 to 183, with just 7 Democrats joining all 176 Republicans in opposition. In the Senate, the vote, 60 to 38, was similarly partisan. Only 3 centrist Republicans joined 55 Democrats and 2 independents in favor.

What took so long? [More...]

Ezra Klein and James Fallows note that Betsy McCaughey is back spinning her falsehoods again on health care. Fallows writes:

In 1994 [McCaughey] wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.

. . . Why bring this up now? Because McCaughey has sprung up again to "reveal" another hidden danger in another Democratic administration's plans. . . . [W]hat is wrong with her "analysis" this time[?] [They are] flatly disprovable lies.

More . . .

From Jane Hamsher, good to see the Obama team recognize what some of the President's supporters refuse to see:

Mr. Emanuel owned up to one mistake: message. What he called the outside game slipped away from the White House last week, when the president and others stressed bipartisanship rather than job creation as they moved toward passing the measure. White House officials allowed an insatiable desire in Washington for bipartisanship to cloud the economic message a point coming clear in a study being conducted on what went wrong and what went right with the package, he said.

(Emphasis supplied.) This is good. Very good. Now, as Jane says, there really is no need to announce these things on the record, to assuage the peanut gallery (meaning people like me). Just do them. Oh BTW, stimulus bill passes House. How many GOP votes? Why ZERO of course.

Speaking for me only

It's Friday the 13th, Valentine's Weekend and Starbucks is introducing instant coffee next week. That's all I've got. Here's a thread for your thoughts, all topics welcome.

So A Sullivan tells us:

The great tragedy of the Gregg withdrawal is that this was precisely what he had been selected to achieve. The chance of real entitlement reform - the one thing that can indeed put the US back on a path to fiscal sanity - is real in the first year of an Obama presidency. . .

(Emphasis supplied.) Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Gregg vote for every Bush budget that destroyed our fiscal house? Also correct me if I am wrong, but weren't there budget surpluses (in the hundreds of billions of dollars if memory serves) when a certain William Jefferson Clinton left the White House? More . . .

Via ScotusBlog:

The pancreatic cancer for which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery on February 5 has been determined as TNM Stage 1 by doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. All lymph nodes proved negative for cancer and no metastasis was found. In the procedure Dr. Murray Brennan, the attending pancreatic surgeon, removed the Justice’s spleen along with a portion of her pancreas.

Extraordinarily, the approximately 1 cm lesion revealed on a late January CAT scan, the discovery of which led to the February 5 surgery, proved benign. But in searching the entire pancreas Dr. Brennan identified a previously undetected single, even smaller, tumor which upon examination was found malignant.

Justice Ginsberg was released from the hospital today and is recuperating at home. Our best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Matt Yglesias writes an interesting post on the political delusions of Republicans and their enablers in the Drudge/Halperin Media. But in the end, Yglesias' best, and obvious insight (except to those fascinated by 11 dimensional chess) is this:

I’ll be the first to tell you that none of this will matter very much if the economy is in the toilet in 2012.

Indeed. Elections are, first and foremost, referendums on the governing party. I suggest those who are really interested in Democratic success worry more about whether the Obama Administration's policies will work than whatever antics the GOP is pulling. Cuz that's gonna decide the political health of the Democratic Party for the next decade at least. Given the situation in the country, President Obama can lead Dems to FDR-like dominance or Jimmy Carter-like enfeeblement. I think the Bill Clinton Third Way is no longer on the menu.

Speaking for me only

Here are the final numbers of grants to law enforcement for lock em up programs:

• Violence against women prevention and prosecution programs $225,000,000
• Southern border and high-intensity drug trafficking areas $30,000,000
• ATF Project Gunrunner $10,000,000
• Internet crimes against children initiatives $50,000,000
• Rural drug crime program $125,000,000
• Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants $1,000,000,000
• Justice Department salaries and expenses for administration of police grant programs $10,000,000
• Office of Justice Programs state and local law enforcement assistance (Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants) $2,000,000,000