John Bailey thought it was great when his neighbor was elected to the House of Representatives in 2007.

“Not everyone lives next door to a congresswoman,” he said.

But two years later, he doesn’t feel so lucky. The congresswoman’s house is abandoned and in disrepair, “a blight on the neighborhood,” Bailey said.

He thinks the way that Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach) has treated her Sacramento home tells far more about her than her voting record.

“I wouldn’t want anyone that irresponsible to represent me,” said Bailey, like Richardson a liberal Democrat. “What I don’t get is how she has the time to visit with Fidel Castro but doesn’t have time for her own house. If you can’t manage your own household, you probably shouldn’t get involved in international affairs.”
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Rep.Richardson is a disgrace and should be forced to fix up the property by the City.

Binyamin Netanyahu threw down the gauntlet to the US last night, grudgingly agreeing to a limited Palestinian state that would be demilitarised and not in control of its airspace or borders.

The hawkish Prime Minister insisted that Israel would never give up a united Jerusalem as its capital, and said that established Jewish settlements in the West Bank would continue to expand — despite explicit objections from Washington.

In a keynote speech that referred to a Palestinian “entity” far more frequently than an actual state, Mr Netanyahu tried to advance elements of his economic peace plan — whereby the Palestinians would get increased investment but only limited sovereignty — while still conceding to US insistence on the creation of an independent Palestinian country.
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Obama and Jimmy Carter are not going to be allowed to sell Istrael down the river.

CIA director Leon Panetta says it’s almost as if former vice president Dick Cheney would like to see another attack on the United States to prove he is right in criticizing President Barack Obama for abandoning the “harsh interrogation” of terrorism suspects.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine’s June 22 issue.

“It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”
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Leon Panetta is a Democrat HACK who is out of his element being CIA Director

Biden tells “Meet the Press” that “everyone guessed wrong” on the impact of the stimulus, economy was worse off than anyone thought.

Backs away from the estimate that the funds could create or save 3.5 million jobs, instead promises 600,000 by the end of the summer.

The mayor of Hiroshima — one of the two Japanese cities obliterated by US atom bombs during World War II — on Sunday denounced North Korea for threatening to build more nuclear weapons, a report said.

“I am furious, with them (North Korea) for defying strong protests from the international community, including Hiroshima, the city attacked in an atomic bombing,” mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said in a statement, as reported by Jiji Press.

“This means a grave challenge for the international community, which can never be forgiveable,” Akiba said.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said this weekend that he opposes a public option plan for consumers in a healthcare reform plan to emerge from the Senate.

“I don’t favor a public option,” Lieberman told Bloomberg News in an interview broadcast this weekend. And I don’t favor a public option because I think there’s plenty of competition in the private insurance market.”

Lieberman’s decision joins several other centrist Democrats’ decision to have publicly refused to back the plan, derided as a “government-run” plan by Republicans.

Centrist Democrats like Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) have also been skittish to back the public option, which is favored by liberal Democrats and the Obama administration. If Republicans are able to pick off enough Democrats, they may be able to muster enough votes to filibuster any legislation that includes the public option.

Mitt Romney, a once and maybe future presidential candidate, calls Iran’s presidential results “a fraud” and urged President Barack Obama to speak out against the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Obama, Romney said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” should “indicate that this has been a terribly managed decision by the autocratic regime in Iran.”

The former Republican Massachusetts governor also used the Iranian results to broaden his indictment of Obama, saying “it’s very clear that the president’s policies of going around the world and apologizing for America are not working.”

Romney cited the belligerence of Iran, North Korea and Russia and the refusal of European countries to offer significant troop increases for Afghanistan.

Tens of thousands of people have joined a rally in central Tehran to celebrate the re-election of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Crowds thronged the main thoroughfare, Vali Asr street, waving Iranian flags and chanting in jubilation.

The president’s closest opponent in the election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has lodged an official appeal against the result amid continuing angry protests.

Mr Ahmadinejad denied any vote-fixing, saying the result was “very accurate”.

Photo of the year-
“Iranian Courage”
Threats Watch found this.

The regime is shooting at and beating the Iranian democracy protesters:

Kamangir has news on a Toronto protest.

Iranian blogger Winston is following the developments.

Michael Totten is continually updating on the fraudulent election.

As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran–thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities–an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: “CNNFail.”

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes–nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran–reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.

The al-Arabiya network has reported at least three people dead in riots that broke out in Tehran following the results of the Iranian elections.

The report says Iranian security forces have surrounded a neighborhood in which many reformists reside, including former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

It's way past midnight in Tehran, but this city is not sleeping. Outside on the streets, people are honking their horns in protest and stretching their hands out of cars making peace signs — a sign of support for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the opposition candidate apparently defeated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran's presidential election on Friday.
In neighborhoods across north and central Tehran, shouts of "Death to dictator!" fill the air, mostly in female voices, coming from house windows. There are also shouts of "Allah-o Akbar!" — reminiscent of the revolution — on the urging of a communique from Mousavi's office.

Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was reportedly arrested Saturday following the reformist's defeat at the polls by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of Mousavi, the main challenger to Ahmadinejad, have responded to the election with the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade and claim that the result was the work of a dictatorship.

There have been a number of contradictory reports from Iran, in large part due to the heavy restrictions imposed on the media in the Islamic Republic and in particular on foreign reporters.

Mousavi's arrest was reported by an unofficial source, who said that the presidential contender had been arrested en route to the home of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Pro-reform Mousavi has denounced the election as rigged and vowed he will not accept defeat. He and key aides could not be reached by phone Saturday.

President Obama's Justice Department didn't just disappoint some of his liberal supporters by arguing in support of the Defense of Marriage Act this week, disappointing if not angering supporters who also support same sex marriage and were appalled by the comparison of same sex marriage to incestuous ones. The president's lawyers also repeated some of the Bush administration's national security arguments.

The Obama Justice Department on Friday asked the full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review an earlier appeals court ruling to determine if details about CIA rendition flights coordinated by Jeppesen Dataplan — a division of Boeing — should be protected as "state secrets."

As a candidate, then-Sen. Obama faulted President Bush for using the "state secrets" argument too often, and too broadly, though as president he has used it in at least three cases:
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Oh My! Cloning into W?

The Huffington Post checks in with "The View"'s Joy Behar, who, I noted yesterday, will be getting her own HLN talk show that replaces the Lou Dobbs repeat at 9 p.m.

"I'd love to have Sarah Palin on the show," Behar said. "She would do very well with me, because I'm not out to get Sarah Palin. I want to hear from her; she has things to say."

Behar, an outspoken liberal, said she wants to invite guests from both sides of the aisle to appear on her show.

"I don't want to do just a liberal show," she said. "I interviewed Ann Coulter when I was sitting in for Larry King a couple of times, and we have a rapport. I like to talk to her. I think it's interesting to me to talk to people who don't agree with me all the time. Rush Limbaugh, let's get him on the show! Even Dick Cheney is welcome on my show. I'll have a faucet ready for him but he can come."

I have been in Iran for exactly one week covering the 2009 Iranian election carnival. Since I arrived, few here doubted that the incumbent firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad would win. My airport cab driver reminded me that the president had visited every province twice in the last four years – "Iran isn't Tehran," he said. Even when I asked Mousavi supporters if their man could really carry more than capital, their responses were filled with an Obamasque provisional optimism – "Yes we can", "I hope so", "If you vote." So the question occupying the international media, "How did Mousavi lose?" seems to be less a problem of the Iranian election commission and more a matter of bad perception rooted in the stubborn refusal to understand the role of religion in Iran.

Gay rights groups expressed dismay with the Obama administration Friday over its championing of the Defense of Marriage Act, a law the president pledged to try to repeal while on the campaign trail.

The government filed a motion late Thursday to dismiss the case of Arthur Smelt and Christopher Hammer, who are challenging the 1996 federal act. The law prevents couples in states that recognize same-sex unions from securing Social Security spousal benefits, filing joint taxes and other federal rights of marriage.

U.S. Department of Justice lawyers argued that the act — known informally as DOMA — is constitutional and contended that awarding federal marriage benefits to gays would infringe on the rights of taxpayers in the 30 states that specifically prohibit same-sex marriages.

"The president made very explicit and emphatic campaign promises that he opposes DOMA and would provide leadership calling on Congress to repeal it," said Jennifer Pizer, marriage project director for Lambda

The Iranian government declared an outright election victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday morning, and riot police officers fought with supporters of the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who insisted that the election had been stolen.
After a mostly quiet morning in Tehran, Moussavi supporters began filtering onto the streets. By early afternoon, thousands had come together, many of them wearing the trademark green of his campaign, chanting angrily that they would fight on as Mr. Moussavi had urged them to do on Friday night when he claimed that he had won and that there had been voting “irregularities.”

“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mr. Moussavi said during a news conference with reporters just after 11 p.m. Friday, adding: “It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back.”

As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The Illinois senator's 2008 financial disclosure statement shows he sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders in a closed meeting to craft legislation to help financially troubled banks. The same day, he bought $43,562 worth of Berkshire Hathaway's Class B stock, the disclosure shows.