I think the Louisiana Dems should stay in mind come Emmy time.

(via)

Bret Schundler has released a chronology of events pertaining to his firing in New Jersey, and if his version of events is to be believed, it doesn’t look good for conservative hero Chris Christie. In the document, Schundler claims that at multiple instances he told Christie not to mischaracterize the mistake, and yet Christie explains to him his plan to assail the Obama administration and bureaucracy for their own mistake.

Schundler has also released the emails, and the Daily Record explains:

The copies of the e-mails Schundler provided shed light on the storm that the discovery of the error created in Christie’s office. They show officials scrambling to craft a response for a Star-Ledger reporter who first called attention to the mistake.

“I need an answer on this,” Comella writes to officials in the state Department of Education, attaching a copy of the reporter’s questions.

A response, crafted by Alan Guenther, the department’s director of communications, asks Comella to allow Deputy Commissioner Andy Smarick to talk directly to the reporter, saying that “the real story is the major reforms in our plan that the peer reviewers praised heartily for their sensibility and boldness.”

“I know what the real story is here,” answers Comella. “I need you to put in email the explanation to her question. Thanks.”

Schundler, who has been cc’d on all the e-mails, responds, “Maria, I’ll send you something on this momentarily.”

Part of his answer read, “All we could do was confirm that we had erred — the 2008 data was not included.”

Christie knew he and his people screwed up, and made a concerted effort to make this not about the mistake his administration had made, but to cover it up with an attack against the Obama administration.

No wonder he’s a conservative hero.

The idea that this woman is at the tip of the spear for conservative action against immigration makes so much more sense now.

Detail:

But it was 13 seconds or so of silence that is being talked about more than anything else.

During her opening statement, Ms. Brewer began by defending her stewardship: “I have, uh, done so much and I just cannot believe that we have changed everything since I have become your governor in the last 600 days. Arizona has been brought back from its abyss. We have cut the budget. We have balanced the budget and we are moving forward. We have done everything we could possibly do.”

At that point, she stared down at the papers in front of her, clutched her hands together, laughed nervously but struggled to come up with anything more to say. It was painful to watch.

Finally, though, she recovered and said: “We have did what was right for Arizona.”

Oh my God America, still blaming Bush? It’s like people haven’t listened to con efforts to disappear the last eight years.

Nearly two years after Barack Obama was elected president, Americans still are inclined to blame his predecessor for the nation’s current economic problems.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, more than a third of those surveyed said George W. Bush deserved a great deal of the blame for economic woes and a third said he should get a moderate amount of it. Not quite another third called that unfair, saying he warranted not much or none of the responsibility.

The 71% saying Bush should get blamed was a modest decline from the 80% who felt that way about a year ago, in July 2009.

Miss me? Oh, hell no.

Oh my God, this is awesome.

MP3

Not surprisingly, she shot an ad at Glenn Beck’s revival meeting.

Too often nowadays, parents just don’t want to do the job of raising their children, and instead put them on dangerous, mood-altering drugs as a substitute for parenting. It’s very sad.

At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums.

Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3.

He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her ‘wit’s end’ when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality. ‘All I had was a medicated little boy,’ Ms. Warren said. ‘I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.’

UPDATE: Montgomery County Police report that the gunman has been shot, the devices attached to him went off. There were 3 hostages, all safe. They are looking for more devices in the building to deactivate.

UPDATE: Reports are now that the gunman is dead.

James Lee photo via Flickr (via Silver Spring Singular)

Multiple outlets (Washington Post, TBD) are reporting that an armed gunman has taken a hostage at the Discovery Channel headquarters building in downtown Silver Spring,MD. This happens to be the area I live in. Insane.

UPDATE: For those who instantly think he’s a wacko-liberal, from his manifesto: ” Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it.” In other words, the guy is nuts.

UPDATE: This is apparently a picture of James Lee, the hostage taker.

Here’s another picture, from The Awl:

Apparently he’s got a website that demands “stop all human birthing”.

UPDATE: Here’s allegedly the guy’s manifesto, as found at the site SaveThePlanetProtest.com, reads like nutty ecoterror stuff.

From Reddit:

My mom has been trying to get health care for years. She’s 57 years old, has rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and congestive heart failure. As bad as that may sound, these are all very treatable conditions if you have insurance.

Ten years ago, my mom started a non-profit performing arts school and theater company that has changed the lives of hundreds of kids. But the school is too small to be able to buy a group plan for its employees. And my mom has been trying for years to get private healthcare and been denied by ALL the major health insure companies where she lives. There was no government high-risk insurance pool in her state, and to get on Medicaid, they wanted her to sell her house and reduce her income by half so that she wouldn’t look like she had so many assets. This summer, her state opted to use the federal money from the recent health care reform law to establish its own high risk health care pool. Today, she got the letter that she will be covered in 30 days at a very reasonable cost.

What this means to her is that she will finally be able to access the kinds of treatments that will greatly improve her quality of life. The fingers on her right hand have bent almost 30 degrees. Before this, she couldn’t afford the tests to qualify for the better treatments that will halt the deformation of her hands. She also frequently has to wait on tests because she has to save up or petition the doctor’s office for a payment plan. My mom works seven days a week to give her community access to amazing cultural experiences – and this healthcare is going to allow her to keep that going for much longer. I’m not sure that everything in that legislation was a perfect idea. But this will change a huge number of people’s lives in very real ways and we need to let people know.

Yum.

Of course he lied.

Beck also invoked Washington while describing the inspiring experience of visiting famous tourist destinations around the nation’s capital. ‘I have been going to Mt. Vernon,’ he explained. Holding out his hands for emphasis, he declared with emotion, ‘I went to the National Archives, and I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington.’

It was an eyebrow-raising revelation and certainly an original image: Beck cradling the actual words of the first president. But would the persnickety gatekeepers of the nation’s historical legacy at the National Archives allow some talk show bombthrower to put his mitts on a rare (and fragile) artifact? The answer, it turns out, is no way. Beck was not telling the truth.

Beck did receive a special VIP tour of the archives, arranged by an as-yet unidentified member of Congress. During that tour, he did get a peek inside the ‘legislative vault,’ which isn’t open to ordinary visitors. But Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper insists that Beck didn’t lay a finger on any precious documents, much less George Washington’s inaugural address. That would be a major violation of policy. ‘Those kinds of treasures are only handled by specially trained archival staff,’ she explains. Cooper acknowledges that someone at the archives did show the document to Beck, but that was the extent of it. Regarding Beck’s claim that he held the document, Cooper says that seeing such documents for the first time can be a very emotional experience. ‘I’m certain it was a figure of speech,’ she says.”