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High-Five Inauguration!

HIGH-FIVE INAUGURATION! - watch more funny videos

(via C&L)

Best. Headline. Ever.

Would that John McCain had the same self-awareness:

Castro says he doubts he'll be lucid in 4 years

(h/t)

Watch for Limbaugh and Hannity to turn this into an Obama scandal

Not even Yitzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma can play in 20-degree weather:

The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

“It’s not something we would announce, but it’s not something we would try to hide,” Ms. Florman said. “Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it. The fact they were forced to perform to tape because of the weather did not seem relevant, nor would we want to draw attention away from what we believed the news is, that we were having a peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.”

That's because you don't listen to Limbaugh and Hannity, Ms. Florman. Because they live in a world where it's OK to take American kids into war based on lies, it's OK to conduct mass surveillance of all Americans' electronic activities, focusing particularly on journalists. It's OK to wreck the economy, it's OK to shovel $700 billion of taxpayer money into the pockets of guys like John Thain. But Yitzhak Perlman not wanting to risk one of his priceless instruments in the cold? THAT, Ms. Florman, is a scandal in Sean Hannity's America.

Wait for it. Watch for it. You know it's coming.

The last Bush Administration "surge"

It's jobless claims:

The number of U.S. workers lining up for state jobless benefits surged last week and home building slumped to a record low in December, data showed on Thursday, as the economy's downward spiral accelerated.

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s is forcing companies to slash jobs, creating a vicious cycle for an economy mired in a year-long recession.

This was the first major set of grim economic data to greet President Barack Obama, who took office on Tuesday, and analysts said it underlined the need for swift government action to heal the fractured economy.

The White House said Obama was working to implement a rescue plan quickly, but believed the economic climate could still worsen before getting better.

"The young, new administration woke up to a pounding economic hangover. It's a hangover that will likely last for some time since no one yet knows how to deal with it," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group in Princeton, New Jersey.

Adding to the ranks of unemployed, technology giant Microsoft Corp announced the largest job cuts in its history on Thursday, laying off up to 5,000. Chipmaker Intel Corp and chemical company Huntsman Corp also announced thousands of job cuts this week.

First-time applications for state jobless benefits rose to a seasonally adjusted 589,000 in the week ended January 17 from 527,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.

This was the highest number since a matching reading in the week of December 20 and exceeded analysts' forecasts of a rise to 540,000 new claims. The last time claims were higher was in 1982, when they notched a weekly rise of 612,000.

Underscoring the deterioration in the labor market, the number of people remaining on jobless rolls after drawing an initial week of aid jumped 97,000 to 4.61 million in the week ended January 10.

If there is any good to come out of all this, it's that at least so far, Americans seem to have awakened from the infantile state into which George W. Bush encouraged us to wallow for eight years and recognize that we didn't get here in 100 days and we're not going to get out of it in 100 days. And with the exception of Rush Limbaugh and his hate radio compatriots, who get paid based on the amount of hatred he can rouse out of Americans' financial misery, most Americans are willing to have some patience and see how the situation shakes out. Amazing what happens when a president asks us to be grownups instead of telling us to go shopping and stuff ourselves with candy while he, Big Daddy, takes care of keeping the boogeyman away (but don't get too confident in him, he can't control you unless you're scared all the time).

I'm less convinced than some that Obama is going to be able to fix this mess; not because he's not up to the job, because he is. I'm just not convinced it can be fixed.

A giant "Eff You" to bumblin' John Roberts

Yesterday Congress struck a blow against pay discrimination, undoing a pet cause of the Bush Administration -- and of the Roberts court -- by passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:

The Senate approved landmark worker rights legislation Thursday that will make it easier for those who think they have endured pay discrimination to seek legal help. The vote was 61-36.

The House approved a similar measure Jan. 9, three days after the 111th Congress convened. Because the Senate made modest changes in the House version, the House must pass it again. Once it does, as is assured, this will be one of the first bills that President Barack Obama signs into law.

This culminates a two-year effort, mostly by Democrats, that made one-time tire plant supervisor Lilly Ledbetter a civil rights icon and a political star.

The legislation overrides a May 2007 Supreme Court ruling that Ledbetter, a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. employee in Gadsden, Ala., couldn’t sue her employer for pay discrimination because she didn’t file suit within 180 days of the alleged discriminatory act.

“It set us back 40 years in our fight for equal opportunity in the workplace,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

Ledbetter roamed the Capitol’s halls Thursday, explaining to lawmakers and reporters that she was unaware of the pay disparity during most of the 19 years she worked at Goodyear.

“Pay levels were a big secret,” she said, “but an anonymous person left a note in my mailbox at work one day, comparing my pay to that of three male managers — and that’s when I knew I’d been the victim of pay discrimination.”

This isn't a difficult-to-define case of trying to assess work of equal value; this is a case of a woman being paid significantly less for doing THE SAME JOB as men. The insult in the law that was upheld in the Ledbetter decision was that it was somehow incumbent on the worker to try to dig out the pay scales and find out what everyone else was making within the first 180 days of being hired, and that if you didn't immediately start out in an adversarial position with a new employer, it was tough noogies for you.

For the record, the Republicans who crossed over were Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Arlen Specter. No male Republicans other than Specter voted for this bill, and no Democrats crossed to the Dark Side, which means that all but one of the thirty-five Republican men in the Senate believes that paying women less than men for EXACTLY THE SAME JOB is perfectly OK. I wonder, then, how they expect these women to feed the babies that Republicans want to force them to have?

George W. Bush's America is alive and well

I definitely like what I see so far. Whether it's the revocation of George W. Bush's executive order 13233, which sealed just about all presidential records, or the plan to close Guantanamo Bay in a year, in just two days Barack Obama has made very, very clear that there's a new sheriff in town, and this one doesn't regard the Constitution as "just a goddamn piece of paper."

However, you do not live for eight years led by a man whose stock in trade was hate and fear and loathing and have it just disappear just because the titular head of bigots and crazies has gone back to Texas, as evidenced by what one Obama supporter endured last Sunday:

In the unseasonable cold of a clear January morning, Forsyth County mother of three and ardent Barack Obama supporter Pam Graf was sifting through the charred, hellish remains of what was once her home on Lanier Drive.

Graf's home had been burned to the ground. No one was in the home at the time of the blaze. Graf said her three children had been sent to stay with their father while she driving to attend the presidential inauguration.

Her trip to witness Obama make history taking the oath of office was cut short midway to Washington, D.C. Instead she returned to meet with county fire investigators and insurance providers. Now she's just trying to decide where to go from here.

In a time of jubilation for a large percentage of the country, Graf is stunned by the apparent hatred to which she has been subjected.

"I can't even make out the rooms," she said. "It's like everything collapsed into the basement. It looks like a bomb went off."

Graf's home burned down early Jan. 18 in what authorities are calling a "suspicious fire." Most shocking to Graf, and to some of the citizens of the county, state and nation at large, was graffiti the apparent arsonist left on scene.

Spray painted on the fence around the home it said, "Beware [expletive deleted] your black boy will die."

While Forsyth County fire investigators refuse to comment on the nature of the statement, Graf, who moved to north Forsyth from Dover, Del., three years ago, said there's little doubt as to its meaning.

"I do not think they were targeting me personally," she said. "It seems obvious that this is a direct result of my support of the president. They don't support the president, so they attack me. I'm a very easy target for someone's racial hatred."

This is the fruit of the Atwater/Rove axis of campaigning. This is the fruit of the Willie Horton ad and Ronald Reagan's myth of the welfare queen in the Cadillac. This is the result of nearly thirty years of Republicans pointing the attentions of the working and middle classes down the socioeconomic ladder while fatcats like John Thain rob them blind. This is the fruit of Sarah Palin's all-white rallies where she screeches about "The real America."

Think about the ruins of Pam Graf's house. Think of the family photos she no longer has. Perhaps there was jewelry or china that was her grandmother's that she no longer has. Think about it -- a woman burnt out of her house because she wanted to go join 1.8 million other people in celebrating the inauguration of a new president who just happens to be black.

Then think about some of the things you've heard out of Republican mouths for the last three decades, and do the math.

Because while people in theory on the same side as I am are blasting me as akin to a racist simply because I simply don't share Aretha Franklin's personal taste in millinery, ACTUAL racists are burning down the homes of people who are guilty of nothing other than enjoying the fact that we now have a president who can construct a coherent English sentence.