Needlenose

(Via the White House, ten days ago.)

Wurzelbacher and Borkin…kinda rolls off your tongue, huh?  And when they don’t win, they can parley their collective 30 minutes of fame into their own Faux News political talking heads show.

Good thing for Borky that he didn’t mouth off to “Dick” Cheney – he would have ended up with buckshot instead of sprinkles on the old snowcone.

Remember this?

The new guy’s stepping up to the challenge, though he needs help from his sidekick:

I knew President Obama’s photo-op at a burger joint with VP Joe Biden yesterday would be a likely source for a caption contest… but I didn’t expect the choices would be this rich!  (Note: Whatever It Is, I’m Against It has already gotten a jump on me with a couple of these.)

Just offer captions on the ones that inspire you, or if you’re daring you can try to offer a complete narrative…

Photo 1:

Photo 2:

Photo 3:

Photo 4:

Photo 5:

Photo 6:

Photo 7:

(Photos 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 by Kevin Lamarque for Reuters; photos 4 and 6 by Charles Dharapak for the Associated Press; click photos for links.)

From Reuters a couple of days ago (via Salam Pax):

Before leaving Washington last week to deliver a major foreign policy speech in Germany, [Vice President Joseph] Biden chided Baghdad for failing to settle disputes over the city of Kirkuk and to enact a law dividing oil revenue, among other issues.

“I think our administration is going to have to be very deeply involved. We are going to have to get in there and be much more aggressive in forcing them to deal with these issues,” Biden said.

Asked about Biden’s remarks on Tuesday, [Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-]Maliki, an increasingly assertive leader whose followers won surprise victories in provincial elections last month, fired back.

“I believe talk about applying pressure on the Iraqi government or taking hard measures against it no longer works,” he said at a news conference in Baghdad with visiting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The New York Times version is even more blunt:

“The time for putting pressure on Iraq is over,” Mr. Maliki said in answer to a reporter’s question about Mr. Biden’s remarks. “The Iraqi government knows what its responsibilities are.” [. . .]

According to political advisers, Mr. Maliki is intent on changing the nature of Baghdad’s relationship with Washington, shifting Iraq’s role from a client state to a more equal partner.

This is a point I kept trying to make last year, when I wrote that Maliki & Co. had every reason to sincerely push for U.S. concessions in the SOFA negotiations – including endorsing Obama’s proposed withdrawal timeline.   Rather than begging for a neocon occupation to prop them up, I wrote last July, the Shiite clerical powers who put Maliki and his allies in office wanted to

… use the American military as a contractor of sorts to help cement a Shiite-led government’s power, then nudge us aside when the task was more or less complete.  Maliki’s newfound spine, if anything, just means that they think that time is drawing closer.

And it’s drawing closer still now.  Anyone on the U.S. side who imagines we’re still in a position to impose our will on Iraq, whether it’s Biden, Obama, or Gen. Petraeus and his cronies, is likely to spend the coming months finding out how irrelevant their plans are.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

To people worried about the seeming centrist tilt (um, wait, can you tilt to the center?) of many of president-elect Barack Obama’s appointees, this morning’s announcement that progressive economist Jared Bernstein has been named as VP Joe Biden’s top economic adviser should be good news.

Yes, I know that folks like Atrios, Matt Yglesias, and others have raised questions about just how much clout Bernstein will have as the vice president’s economic adviser, rather than one of the familiar posts formulating policy for the top guy, but I think that in some ways, this may be more of a feature than a bug.

It seems noteworthy that the Obama-Biden team created this position for Bernstein, apart from the established organizational chart.  The strategy might be to keep Bernstein free of administrative responsibilities and turf battles, able to survey the whole range of economic policymaking and express his views as he sees fit.

Given that he’ll be able to do so not only directly in group sessions but via Biden as the latter meets individually with Obama, that could be a fairly influential role.  Anyone who’s seen Dick Cheney use the VP office’s lack of official duties (or restraints) to informally shape an entire administration should be pleased that it could work in our favor this time around.

Oh, and one last note.  SusanG wrote at Daily Kos that:

Bernstein posted quite a few diaries here, mostly in the summer of 2006, focusing for the most part on the debilitating effects of conservative economic ideology–or what he called “Your [sic] On Your Own” (YOYO) economics.

That phrase turned up in Obama’s campaign rhetoric in the spring (and his nomination acceptance speech) as a retort to Bushites’ pretensions of creating a so-called ownership society (“What it really means is that you’re on your own”).   And Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity cites comments by National Economic Council nominee Larry Summers to claim that Bernstein “seems to have pulled some of the centrist economists towards his point-of-view, rather than vice versa.”

So if you’re writing off Bernstein as a token liberal whose job will consist of being ignored, you might want to think again.  (I hope.)

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

“Thanks for explaining how to use the bureaucracy to circumvent the President and impose my own policies… Hillary passes along her thanks, too!”

(Via Reuters:  “Vice President Dick Cheney bids farewell to Vice President-elect Joe Biden, following their nearly hour-long visit at the vice president’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington.”)

I couldn’t possibly summarize the Biden/Caribou Barbie debate better than the Rude Pundit.  Here is the nutshell:

Joe Biden kicked Sarah Palin’s perky ass from one end of that stage to another. It was humiliating, watching the bizarro display of Palin, this talking points automaton set on “spunk,” absolutely failing to impart any cogent thoughts or cohesive answers or even string together the surprisingly full sentences she spoke into anything like a policy

Greenboy sez “Check it out!”

Souiee!  The CongrAssclowns are at it again, both sides wallowing in an orgy of pork fat under cover of a (supposedly) must-pass bailout bill.  Check it out, the bailout bill headed for the House is larded with billions of dollars in earmarks, mostly in the form of tax breaks to strategically important industries like wooden arrow toymakers and rum distillers.  How can you possibly make a Shrubya attack on the Treasury worse?  Run it through Congress!  This is fucking unbelievable!  And of course forked-tongue McBush, who not last week was trash-talkin’ about earmarks is supporting this bill.  I’m glad Biden (finally) called him on the ‘Maverick’ bullshit.  Maverick the TV show maybe – Hollywood fantasy.

I think it’s time for us to restart the “Share Our Wealth” society outside both venal parties and put some pressure on those putzes.

Pretty funny stuff.