While I appreciate the Gator sentiment in this House floor appearance by Jacksonville Congresswoman Corrine Brown, word that she is mulling a U.S. Senate bid makes me think that perhaps we might want a Senator who could actually read a simple congratulatory message.

Watch this video in horror, after the jump.

By Lorna Bracewell
PoHo contributor

In a presidential proclamation issued on Monday, President Barack Obama officially recognized the month of June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The president’s call for equality and his acknowledgment of the many contributions LGBT people have made to America’s culture, society and politics despite being culturally, socially and politically marginalized are truly moving. However, I can’t help feeling slightly ambivalent about the whole thing. Here’s why:

Unlike many in the big gay blogosphere, the root of my ambivalence is not the excruciatingly slow pace at which the president has pursued formal equality for LGBT people. Rather, it’s the order in which things seem to be happening. It seems wrong to me that LGBT people have been given a month before we’ve been given civil rights.

That’s not the way things happened for African Americans. They officially got their duly deserved month in 1986 when Congress passed Public Law 99-244. This law required the president to issue a proclamation recognizing Black History Month, which had been privately observed since 1915. Then President Ronald Reagan obliged with a document that reads quite similarly to Obama’s LGBT Pride Month proclamation.

All of this happened some 116 years after the passages of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the amendments to the federal Constitution that abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the laws, and enfranchised all males regardless of race, and 22 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a federal law that went a long way toward making the abstract legal rights guaranteed by those amendments substantively meaningful for African Americans.

In short, African Americans got their rights first and their month second. It is almost Orwellian that the many achievements of the LGBT civil rights movement are being extolled while LGBT people are still being denied the most basic civil right of marriage and are still prevented from serving openly in the military.  Let’s hope history-turned-on-its-head doesn’t repeat itself and force us to wait 116 years for formal equality.

Young has not signaled his intentions, but his retirement has been rumored for at least a decade. Yesterday, Politico mentioned him again as a leading retirement prospect because he raised virtually no campaign money in the first quarter.

In a written statement, Justice said, “The impact of the faltering economy can be seen all across our community in the form of short sales, foreclosure signs and shuttered businesses. Florida families are pulling together at the dinner table and in churches and synagogues because they are determined to succeed. We need more leaders in Congress who share that determination.”

The full statement after the jump.

Senator Charlie Justice Announces Run for Congress

Justice to Campaign for Florida’s 10th Congressional District Seat

St. Peterburg, FL – State Senator Charlie Justice today announced his candidacy for Florida’s 10th Congressional District.

“I am running for Congress because decisions that are made in Washington D.C. have a profound impact on the families and small businesses here. Floridians sent a clear message in November that they want change. Now we need to make progress,” said Senator Charlie Justice.

“The impact of the faltering economy can be seen all across our community in the form of short sales, foreclosure signs and shuttered businesses,” said Senator Justice. “Florida families are pulling together at the dinner table and in churches and synagogues because they are determined to succeed. We need more leaders in Congress who share that determination. I believe that we can build a stronger future for our children and our grandchildren and create lasting opportunity here in Florida.”

Justice will mobilize Floridians from St. Petersburg to Dunedin in an aggressive campaign to offer new solutions to the challenges facing Floridians during these tough economic times.

“As your congressman, I will focus on creating more and better jobs, improving our public schools, attacking the high cost of homeowners’ insurance and providing leadership while we develop alternative energy sources and end our dependence on foreign oil. I will work with Democrats, Republicans and Independents to get things done and change the way Washington works,” said Justice.

Charlie Justice was elected to the State Senate in 2006 after serving in the Florida House of Representatives from 2000-2006. Justice has championed ambitions plans to protect Florida homeowners, increase transparency and accountability in government, and create opportunities for hardworking families to get ahead. A native of St. Petersburg, FL, Justice is married to Kathleen Justice and has two daughters, Allison and Erin. He is an Academic Advisor of the University of South Florida.

www.charliejustice.com

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Paid for and authorized by Charlie Justice for Congress

“I’ve asked the employees of AIG financial products to step up and do the right thing,” Liddy told the panel this afternoon. “Specifically I’ve asked those who received retention payments in excess of $100,000 or more to return at least half of those payments, some have already stepped forward and offered to give up 100 percent of their payments.”

You can read my earlier post about his prepared remarks, and download them in their entirety, at this link.

And here’s a video excerpt from Liddy’s testimony.

Nonetheless, the public demands a head, and today, that head is Ed’s.

From Liddy’s prepared remarks, these gems:

Mistakes were made at AIG on a scale few coudl have ever imagined possible. The most critical of those mistakes was that the company strayed from its core competencies in the insurance business. This was typified by the creation of what grew to become an internal hedge fund, which then became substantially overexposed to market risk.

And:

We have addressed our liquidity crisis and stabilized the company’s cash position.

We are executing a methodical, orderly wind-down of AIG financial products, the business that caused many of the company’s financial problems; We have reduced the notional value of AIG financial products’ derivatives business from $2.7 trillion to $1.6 trillion.

I feel all warm and fuzzy that we’ve got $1 trillion less exposure. And what does he have to say about those bonuses that have fueled a populist rage?

No one knows better than I that AIG has been the recipient of generous amounts of government financial aid. We have been the beneficiary of the American people’s forbearance and patience. And we are acutely aware not only that we must be good stewards of the public funds we have received, but that the patience of America’s taxpayers is wearing thin.

Where that patience is especially thin is on the question of compensation. I am personally mindful of both of the environment in which we are operating and the President’s call for a more restrained compensation system. At the same time, we are essentially operating AIG on behalf of the American taxpayer so that we can maximize the amount of money we pay back to the government.

In order to do that, we have to continue managing our business as a business — taking account of the cold realities of competition for customers, for revenues and for employees. Because of this, and because of certain legal obligations, AIG has recently made a set of compensation payments, some of which I find distasteful.

Yes, those darned “certain legal obligations.”

At this point, I say we let AIG fail and let a bankruptcy judge sort out the mess — and recover those odious bonus payments.

Download Eddie’s full remarks in .pdf.

“Close them down, get them out of business,” Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.”

While the Alabama senator did not say which banks to shutter, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has “always been a problem child.”

Mr. McCain, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” echoed that sentiment without identifying any banks. Mr. McCain, who lost the presidential election last November, also accused the Treasury Department of avoiding the “hard decision” to let “these banks fail.”

An 1,100-page budget bill starting to move forward in Congress has provisions that would relax the nearly 50-year-old Cuban embargo, our nation’s longest-lasting foreign policy mistake over the last half of the 20th Century. The Palm Beach Post reports:

The bill, which is expected to be voted on by the House on Wednesday, already has Cuban-American lawmakers balking.

The 2009 budget bill would:

• Prevent the U.S. government from spending any of its budget enforcing 2004 rules that keep Cuban Americans from visiting their homeland more than once every three years.

• Create a general travel license for Americans who sell food and medical supplies to Cuba.

• Let Cuba pay for the American produce it buys when the products arrive in Havana. Current law forces Cuba to pay up front before products leave U.S. ports.

• Require the U.S. Treasury Department to issue a report showing how much of its staff and funding is spent on enforcing the ban on travel to Cuba.

And there is a growing chorus that the embargo did not work and is not going to work. This from the Miami Herald:

MIAMI — The Obama administration should take “a serious look at U.S. sanctions towards Cuba,” Fareed Zakaria, CNN analyst and editor of Newsweek’s international editions, urged Tuesday at a foreign policy summit at Florida International University.

“We’ve had a policy of punitive sanctions, and the idea has been that we would topple Fidel Castro’s regime,” Zakaria said.

“Fidel Castro and his brother are the longest-lived heads of government in the world. Surely, that suggests the policy is not working.”

The United States has sustained a 47-year-old embargo that prohibits trade with the island.

Influential Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana declared recently that the embargo “has failed.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered a review of the embargo.

The New York Times sets the table for him by polling and finding Obama remains enormously popular:

President Obama is benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership, providing him with substantial political clout as he confronts the nation’s economic challenges and opposition from nearly all Republicans in Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans.

Jacob Heilbrunn uses that poll data as his jumping off point for labeling Obama’s speech on the economy tonight as the epitaph for the conservative movement:

It’s further confirmation not only of Obama’s extraordinary political skills, but also the precipice that the GOP hasn’t approached but actively leaped over. When Obama delivers the State of the Union address Tuesday, he will wield the one of the most powerful hands history has ever bestowed upon an American president.

Obama will undoubtedly seize the opportunity to sketch out his program for American renewal, both in domestic and foreign policy. His speech, I predict, will not only be seen as a pivotal moment in restoring American democracy, but also an epitaph for the conservative movement that has finally run American into the ground.

By 2010, the GOP’s refusal to vote for the stimulus bill will been seen a as decisive event in the party’s fortunes–for the worse. Had the party cooperated with the president, it might have been able to resuscitate itself. The Times/CBS poll indicates that Americans are displaying great patience and don’t expect the economy to turn around any time soon. But they have seen through the GOP’s charade of purporting to stand for fiscal discipline–after plunging the country into $1 trillion of debt over the past eight years.

The conservative movement is now officially dead. All that remains is for the pallbearers to carry the casket to its burial site. Obama’s speech tomorrow will provide the funeral oration.

Bonus cuts: Rising GOP star and 2012 presidential contender-to-be La. Gov. Bobby Jindal will deliver the Republican response to Obama’s speech.

Now, it turns out it was a different scumbag who did it. This from the AP:

RS wrote in its latest issue:

Do you foresee a scenario in which senior members of the Bush administration are actually prosecuted?

I think so. The American people deserve answers. Where we are now, in terms of prosecution of White House staff, is that we have charged them with contempt of Congress. We’re talking about Harriet Miers, Josh Bolten and Karl Rove. The natural course of events from here is that the speaker will determine what charge we’re going to pursue, because there are more than one. Under Bush, the Justice Department told the U.S. attorney not to prosecute the case. So the beat goes on – it just gets worse. We don’t know what will happen, because they’ve delayed it a long time.

I’m talking more about the level of a Donald Rumsfeld – people who authorized torture and greenlighted the kidnapping and rendition of innocent people.
I didn’t like their policies, which is why we needed to win the election – to get them out of power.

But I don’t know what the evidence is against them on any specific charge. When you have a truth-and-reconciliation commission . . . look, I’m still fighting the bombing of Cambodia. I still have my gripes with the administration that bombed Cambodia before you were born, so I think it’s important to bring these things out. If you have a case against someone, you bring a case.

Pelosi was supportive of legislation aimed at a kind of “Truth Commission” that would look at the wrongdoing in the previous administration.