The Geithner authorized bank Stress Tests are the economic equivalent of a high school football coach padding the grades of his players so that they can all play in the next big game. Unfortunately for the team, a few of the players have died. But that doesn’t stop Coach from dressing them in uniform and propping their bodies up on the bench next to the Gatorade cooler.

Via Shakesville, a story about President Obama writing an excuse note for a child who attended one of his events.

Jane Hamsher has been covering the hell out of the House action around the war supplemental bill. There’s been a lot of action around that supplemental the past week– photo suppression out, “Cash for Clunkers” as a supposed seduction for progressives and Rahm Emanuel pushing hard because the White House needs the included IMF funding to go through.

Politico posted an article last night that highlights Republican claims that the national deficit will be Obama’s downfall. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) was quoted as saying: “This is not an inherited situation. This was a matter entirely of this administration’s and this Democratic leadership’s making.”
Cornyn’s statement is an easily disproved lie. The current deficit is $11.4 trillion and that hefty sum was not amassed in the less than five months Obama has been in office. The New York Times analyzed nearly ten years worth of CBO reports to find the …

The crux of the Daily Telegraph story discussing the torture pictures was the content confirmation by Major General Antonia Taguba. But Salon’s Mark Benjamin spoke to Taguba and got some clarification

Robert Gibbs was asked yesterday about the photographs from the Daily Telegraph story. He took the opportunity to work in a juvenile slam against the British press system:

Mark Krikorian, writing for The Corner was mocking Obama for pronouncing Sonia Sotomayor’s name as if she were Latina or something. How does he make through the day with English’s mish mash of a language?

Last month, the Obama administration agreed to release a “substantial number” of photographs from U.S. facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was to be the first time any images were released since the infamous leak of Abu Gharib photos during the Bush years. But that offer was quickly retracted. Robert Gibbs said that “nothing is added” by the release of “sensationalistic” pictures.In seeming contradiction, President Obama released a statement the next day emphasising that the photos “are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images we remember from Abu Ghraib”.

Try as they may, the right has not been able to get an oppositional foothold regarding new SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor. The whisper campaign- which began when she was still on the shortlist and originated with anonymous court clerks quoted by Jeff Rosen of The New Republic- was insubstantial and mostly easily disproved and/or ignored. When you’re lobbing accusations of intellectual lightness at a woman that graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and received her J.D. from Yale Law School, it is obvious that your side is not bringing their A game.

Sen. James Onhofe (R-OK):

In the months ahead, it will be important for those of us in the U.S. Senate to weigh [Sotomayor's] qualifications and character as well as her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender, or political preferences.