Mitt Romney gets in position for his next reincarnation "But the real problem, said the paper, is "the real Mitt Romney -- Harvard MBA, political scion, hardworking businessman, super-wealthy master of Wall Street offerings, devout Mormon -- might not be what Republican primary voters actually want."
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 Arnold Schwarzenegger holds Great California Garage Sale to help economy Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is holding an online "garage sale" in his latest attempt to balance California's budget.   Published: 12:04AM BST 28 Aug 2009  California's $85bn (£52.5bn) budget has a deficit of $26bn (£16bn).In his latest move to boost his state's ailing economy, Mr Schwarzenegger is offering 6,000 items - ranging from cars to computers to binoculars - for auction on the eBay and Craigslist websites.  California began selling unneeded or unclaimed items online last week and is holding a two-day auction of 6,000 more on Friday and Saturday.To entice buyers, the governor has autographed the sun visors of several of the vehicles up for sale in order to raise their value."By posting items online, Californians and people from other states and around the world can participate in the Great California Garage Sale," Mr Schwarzenegger said in a statement on his website. "This is a win-win for the state and for shoppers. Together we are eliminating waste and providing great deals in this tough economy." "I look forward to selling these signed cars and making some $ for California," he wrote on the Twitter micro-blogging website last week.   

   The media's vast rightwing idiocy America's extreme right is as vocal and irrational as it was in the 1990s and the US media is too spineless to stop it Comments (105)     Dan Kennedy guardian.co.uk,
This past Sunday, Meet the Press host David Gregory asked former president Bill Clinton if "the vast rightwing conspiracy" – a felicitous catch phrase coined by Hillary Clinton at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal – was alive and well."Oh, you bet. Sure it is," Clinton responded. "It's not as strong as it was, because America's changed demographically, but it's as virulent as it was."Clinton was right, of course. From birthers to teabaggers, from talkshow host Glenn Beck's denouncing Barack Obama's alleged "deep-seated hatred for white people" to Confederacy-worshipping congressman Joe Wilson's yelling "You lie!" at the president, it's clear that the extreme right is as irrational and vocal as it was in the 1990s. And now, more than ever, the extremists are virtually indistinguishable from the mainstream of the Republican party.But another, equally toxic element has carried over from the 90s – an element that Gregory, not surprisingly, failed to bring up and that Clinton was too polite to mention. It is simply this: Major elements of the media, terrified of accusations that they're in the tank with Democrats and liberals, would rather deny reality than tell the simple truth. This abject spinelessness is a significant factor in how the lies of the right infect public discourse.Three recent examples tell the tale:• A Time magazine cover story by David Von Drehle on the aforementioned Beck, though critical (the headline: "Is Glenn Beck bad for America?"), soft-pedaled the virulence of its subject's paranoid hate-mongering – failing to mention, for example, that Beck at one time promoted the notion (while saying that he couldn't know for sure, wink, wink) that the Obama administration was building concentration camps where it would lock up its enemies.But it was the overwrought attempts at balance that stood out. The weirdest: in describing the recent teabagger rally in Washington, Von Drehle wrote: "If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic." Von Drehle surely knew, though, that the 70,000 figure came not from liberals but from the Washington fire department. The larger numbers were just lies.Unmentioned were the antiwar rallies of the Bush era that drew hundreds of thousands of marchers – and barely a fraction of the coverage accorded the teabaggers.• Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, beside himself that the Post failed to cover the Acorn and Van Jones stories with the alacrity and hysteria he evidently believed they deserved,…

   In ’98, Hints From Sotomayor on Death Penalty  
Judge Sonia Sotomayor in 1998. That year she handled a death penalty matter, her only such case on the federal bench.   " The case record shows she was curious enough about the defense arguments that she ordered prosecutors to produce data on the race of defendants considered for the death penalty. But it also shows she was tough on defense lawyers, repeatedly challenging their claims that minority defendants were disproportionately singled out."   

 High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu ProvocateurBy JIM RUTENBERG and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON  James O’Keefe III, accused of trying to tamper with a senator’s phones, is one of many young conservatives who use pranks and recordings to make their points. Week in Review: The Art of the Political Caper