Tea Party clashes with GOP establishment over defense

The tension between the Republican establishment and the Tea Party insurgents erupted on the House floor for the first time Wednesday when 110 GOP representatives -- mostly freshmen and some longtime conservative gadflies -- broke from their leadership and most of their caucus in order to kill a defense contract. The vote highlighted an establishment-versus-Tea Party split that was glaring during the campaign season, and brought to the fore the uncomfortable question of defense spending. The amendment, killing the contract for a backup engine for the F-35 fighter, passed 233-198 Wednesday, but 130 of the 240 voting Republicans opposed the cut, including House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. This puts the GOP majority and its leadership at odds with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who doesn't want the backup engine, and former President George W. Bush, who also tried to kill it.

"Democratic State Senators who protested the budget repair bill by leaving the state have been found. The lawmakers are in the Best Western Clock Tower Resort in Rockford Illinois."

I'm killing time till 'justified'.

INTO ETERNITY is a mind-bending film that explores the utter impossibility of storing nuclear waste for 100,000 years, the time estimated by scientists to render it safe. It is, on the one hand, a documentary about the Onkalo storage facility presently under construction in Finland, and on the other hand, a startlingly beautiful work of art and an urgent provocation that ponders the question of who - or what - will remain on this earth when that time frame has elapsed.

HBO Films is on a roll today. Earlier today we showed you the trailer for Cinema Verite, due out in April. Now we have a 42-second trailer for Thurgood, starring Laurence Fishburne. Thurgood will air February 24th on HBO in honor of Black History Month

they are indeed on a roll.  Sunset Limited which is circulating now is riveting.

John Stossel
Is Seasteading the Future?

Here's a novel idea: Escape the suffocating chains of intrusive government by starting your own country!

That's Patri Friedman's idea. He comes from an impressive line of libertarian thinkers. Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize-winning free-market economist, was his grandfather. His father is David Friedman, author of the libertarian classic "The Machinery of Freedom." Milton Friedman advocated severely limited government. David Friedman thinks we need no government at all. And now Patri believes he has an effective solution to bad government: communities on the ocean surface, or seasteading.

Link

Some highlights:

"When protesters held a funeral march for the first man killed by police, the authorities here then opened fire on the mourners, killing another person."

State history standards get 'D'

AUSTIN -- A conservative education think tank has severely criticized Texas' new social studies curriculum standards as a "politicized distortion of history ... offering misrepresentations at every turn."

In a report being released today, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute gives the Texas social studies curriculum standards a "D" while accusing "the conservative majority" of using the curriculum "to promote its political priorities, molding the telling of the past to justify its current views and aims

and we know what that is.

Darren Aronofosky (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream) has never been one for subtlety. He's all about grand spectacle and fervent theatrics -- things for which his long-in-the-works passion project Noah is perfectly suited. Aronofsky has been obsessed with the biblical figure ever since he won a school poetry competition for a poem he wrote about the end of the world as seen through the eyes of Noah. He was 13 years old.

[He was the] first environmentalist. [The] first person to plant vineyards, drink wine and get drunk. I was stunned going back and realizing how dirty some of those stories are. They're not PG in any way. They're all about sleeping with your brother's sister who gives you a child who you don't know. That kind of stuff got censored out of our religious upbringing.

Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.

The latest round of polling from Public Policy Polling, attempting to figure out what voters today might do in 2012, has bad news for the roster of presumed GOP candidates.

That is, if you consider it to be "bad news" if you're trailing Obama by three to five points in a nationwide head-to-head in February 2011, while there are still months and months or potentially bad economic headwinds to live through between now and Election Day. Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney find themselves in that position, which, I assure you, they are not sweating. Other potential candidates fare less well, ranging from Newt Gingrich, who trails by seven points, to Ron Paul, who trails by fourteen.

But one opponent is doing great against Obama: Imaginary Generic Moderate Republican Candidate!

While none of those candidates would win against Obama in the poll, respondents preferred a "moderate Republican candidate" to the President by a 46% to 44% split. Even a generic Republican candidate tied Obama at 47%. That suggests that, while voters prefer Obama to the current GOP challengers, it's not necessarily because they're keen vote for Obama: rather, it seems that they haven't found a Republican they like better.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) alerted Capitol Police Thursday after a threatening fax arrived at her office attacking her proposal to strip Pentagon sponsorship from NASCAR teams.

McCollum's staff tells TPM this is the first time they've alerted the police about a threat made against here office since the health care debate.