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One year from today will be Inauguration Day. President Obama will begin his second term, if we’re lucky.

Here’s Vice President Joe Biden shaking hands with a Democratic fat cat at a fundraiser here in Columbus, Ohio, last Thursday:

I’m the fat cat.

(I wonder if a girdle would help…)

Rob Reiner, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher:

Jon Huntsman is the only candidate in that whole group that believes when an apple falls from a tree, it hits the ground.

Actually, I think Mitt Romney secretly believes that, too. But he would never dare to say it out loud.

Update: Three days after Reiner made this observation, Huntsman dropped out of the race. A man with his views has no place in the modern Republican Party.

One day in the autumn of 1970, I was given a ticket to an Ohio Democratic Party fundraising event at Veteran’s Memorial here in Columbus.

I was seated way back, at a table far from the podium. I was close enough that when a well-known statewide official or candidate rose to speak, I could say, “Ooh, that’s really him!” but distant enough that I felt like a spectator rather than a participant.

As I made my way out at the end of the event, I found myself walking right past John Glenn, one of the first American astronauts. I eagerly shook his hand. He said something like, “How are you?” but I couldn’t say anything in reply. I was in awe.

Today is John Glenn’s 90th birthday.

Since my first encounter with him, he became a U.S. Senator from Ohio. After he retired from the Senate, he flew on the Space Shuttle and became the oldest human being to go into space.

Happy Birthday, Senator Glenn. I’m still in awe.

That Tom Tomorrow fella sure has a way with words. He says:

It doesn’t matter if you believe in global warming.

Global warming believes in you.

Reality always seems to have a way of grabbing your attention, even if it’s not always in time to allow you to alter reality.

Why did Newt Gingrich’s entire campaign staff suddenly quit? Cartoonist Don Asmussen may have the answer.

Nobody wants to live entirely without hope, you know…

Have you ever felt like politicians are holding you hostage?

If you didn’t feel that way during the posturing over a government shutdown a few weeks ago, and if you don’t feel that way during the ongoing posturing about the federal debt ceiling, how about now, when the subject is disaster relief for Missouri tornado victims:

Rescue workers worked through more storms in an effort to find potential survivors, even as the death toll rose to at least 119. President Obama pledged full support to the state Monday, telling survivors, “We’re here with you. We’re going to stay by you.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), however, said that before Congress approved federal funds for disaster relief, it had to offset the spending with cuts to other programs.

If this is how Republicans respond to disasters, then federal neglect after Hurricane Katrina starts to make sense…

Update: photos from Joplin.

Another update: Apparently this attitude is catching on in Canada, too.

Here’s a map of locations and contacts for a ballot-initiative petition to repeal Ohio’s notorious Senate Bill 5, which stripped state workers of many of their collective bargaining rights.

There seem to be a lot of empty areas…

For years, I’ve been trying to find a way to say what Lawrence O’Donnell said quite effectively on Tuesday.

The Trump message on governing was that it’s easy.

…

The sad truth of the “governing is easy” message is, that view is actually shared by something close to 50% of the electorate.

…

[Arnold Schwarzenegger] ran for governor of the biggest state in the union claiming that governing was easy.

…

What is true of both of these men, the movie star and the reality TV star, is that they were ignorant enough about governing to actually believe what they were saying about it. No one, no Republican or Democrat, who has ever taken an oath of office as mayor, governor, senator or congresswoman believes that governing is easy. Office holders who know better in both parties have trafficked in that lie. Their political sin is much greater than that committed by Trump and Schwarzenegger.

…

The Trump-Schwarzenegger-like candidate who comes along next will offer simple-sounding solutions to very complex problems that the candidate does not and cannot understand. That candidate will brand himself or herself as confident, bold, tough and truthful. That candidate will not have the experience to be able to tell the one simple truth we know about government: to govern is to choose, and the choices are never easy.

A couple Fridays ago, I went downtown to see Jon Stewart — Live! In Person! — do his standup act.

It was the end of the week when President Obama, confronting a campaign of ludicrous lies by Donald Trump, obtained his “long form” birth certificate from Hawaii and released it to the public. It was one day before Obama and comedian Seth Meyers surgically eviscerated Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was two days before Obama announced that we had tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden.

Stewart’s routine was a mix of comic stand-bys — such as a bit about computers rapidly becoming obsolete — and jokes “ripped from the headlines.”

He said he prayed that Donald Trump would run for president. Gee, that sounds so quaint now.

He talked about the big switcheroo from the “cool new generation” of Republican governors, like “backward chair guy,” Ohio’s own governor, John Kasich, who has stripped state workers of bargaining rights, and who called a policeman who pulled him over for a traffic violation “an idiot.”

At the end of the show, Stewart took a few questions shouted from the audience. Someone said, “What should we do about Kasich?” Very loosely paraphrased, his answer was something like this:

You have to understand that this guy is your vaccine.

Sure, it hurts, and you feel a little sick. But there’s only a limited amount of damage this guy can do. The things he’s doing are waking up your political immune system. When your newly-formed antibodies kick in on election day, your political system is going to heal itself.

My antibodies are itching to go.

Tom Tomorrow brings back a comic strip from 2001, to remind us how Americans fight fundamentalist terrorists.

More retro-funnies here and here.

The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen on Republican attempts to claim credit for getting bin Laden:

In March 2002, just six months after 9/11, Bush said of bin Laden, “I truly am not that concerned about him…. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”

In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.

In September 2006, Bush told Fred Barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an “emphasis on bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism.”

And don’t even get me started on Bush’s failed strategy that allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora.

I’m happy to extend plenty of credit to all kinds of officials throughout the government, but crediting Bush’s “vigilance” on bin Laden is deeply silly.

Let’s be fair: some things are fundamentally difficult.

I didn’t consider it a black mark against the Bush Administration that they didn’t “connect the dots” before the 9/11 attacks. I didn’t consider it a black mark against the Bush Administration that bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora — even if a case could be made that Defense Department errors made that possible.

Hindsight is easy. Getting the answers right when you can’t even be certain what the questions are — that’s hard.

Getting Osama bin Laden required enormous competence, a lot of hard work, and patience.

But, from The Lost Year in Iraq:

Bremer, who arrived with sweeping plans to remake the country, had a young and inexperienced team, but his staff had passed a political litmus test in Washington. “It’s a children’s crusade … of former Republican campaign workers, White House interns [and] Heritage Foundation people,” says Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post.

Col. T.X. Hammes, a counterinsurgency expert and adviser to Iraq’s Interior Ministry, felt Bremer’s staff could have been better trained. “We had so many of these very, very young people that are dedicated Americans, brave enough to take a chance and go into Iraq to try to do something right for their country,” he tells FRONTLINE. “But [they] didn’t get any training; they have no background. … And yet we put them in charge of planning at [the] national level.”

It seems to me that the Bush Administration didn’t value competence, didn’t respect hard work, and didn’t have patience.

That is the black mark against them.

On Friday, President Obama ordered action against Osama bin Laden.

On Saturday, he spoke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The video seems a little different, knowing what we know now — especially when he says, “What a week!” or “These are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.”

Donald Trump, who seemed so important last week, looks about as significant as a damp, soiled dishrag.

Here’s a challenge: how do you make a thoughtful person talking for ten minutes interesting? Here’s one approach.

Rachel Maddow on Republican overreach — Financial Martial Law:

Sometimes, to steal what poor people have, you first have to steal their rights as citizens.

A few weeks ago, Cartoonist Ruben Bolling looked at one kind of government shutdown.

Those unintended consequences can be surprising, sometimes.