President Barack Obama on Saturday urged Americans to show patience over the economy and argued that his just-concluded Asia trip was critical for U.S. exports, countering criticism he had returned empty-handed.

The leaked emails and documents from CRU climate scientists are much ado about nothing, and the deniers touting them are hypocrites and may become criminals by republishing them.

Their provision would restore a program called Title V, which, since the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, has allocated a yearly $50 million in grants to abstinence-only education programs. Obama let the program lapse in June, leaving some abstinence-only groups in dire straits. So in September, Sen. Orrin Hatch offered an amendment to restore Title V via heath-care reform, which (much to the outrage of liberal groups) just squeaked through the Senate Finance Committee with a 12–11 vote. A similar amendment, offered in the House by Rep. Terry Lee from Nebraska, died in committee.

Palin is whining about her Newsweek photo, but it reflects who and what she really is.

Bigger than the budget deficit, America has a leadership gap. The economic recovery is not creating jobs, unemployment is rising, and the president and Congress offer little more than nostrums and platitudes. Republicans push tax cuts that experience teaches have doubtful prospects for success.

Zombies are invading almost every aspect of our daily lives. Not only are the flesh-chomping, blood-lusting, pale-faced creatures with mouths full of black goo appearing in movie theaters, television series, and everywhere in screen culture as shock advertisements, but these flesh-eating zombies have become an apt metaphor for the current state of American politics. Not only do zombies portend a new aesthetic in which hyper-violence is embodied in the form of a carnival of snarling creatures engorging elements of human anatomy, but they also portend the arrival of a revolting politics that has a ravenous appetite for spreading destruction and promoting human suffering and hardship.This is a politics in which cadres of the unthinking and living dead promote civic catastrophes and harbor apocalyptic visions, focusing more on death than life. Death-dealing zombie politicians and their acolytes support modes of corporate and militarized governance through which entire populations now become either redundant, disposable or criminalized. This is especially true for poor minority youth who, as flawed consumers and unwanted workers, are offered the narrow choice of joining the military, going to prison or being exiled into various dead zones in which they become socially embedded and invisible.

The Progressive Book Club, Media Matters, and Max Blumenthal team up to fact check and debunk Sarah Palin's book. This is the first in a new partnership between Progressive Book Club and Media Matters - the Right Wing Book Watch

We're buried in foreign debt and now we have a news group that's blaming it all on those "foreigners" (the same ones who float our debt every month) and "the government" (the same government in which some of the group served). Pat Buchanan, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-NC) and some other well known names make up the group, "Economy in Crisis." The group talks about restoring the "former glory" of our economy. For the vast majority of citizens, what glory was that?

Help make Sarah Palin even more irrelevant. Make Levi Johnston a superstar.

Story from the LA Times about Sarah Palin and her upcoming tour of the US.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Obama takes heat for skipping Berlin Wall anniversary « - Blogs from CNN.com

America is a democracy – perhaps a little less democratic these days – but a democracy nonetheless. Many people complain about the government without seeing the irony that, in democracies, the government is us.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Tea Party activists hit the Hill, arrested outside Pelosi’s office « - Blogs from CNN.com

A Global Elite Has Taken the Reigns. A Global Elite Has the Desire to Rip Down the Governments That Are in Place.

The Republican Party is imploding. Democrats should take no glee in the mess on the right, unless they play it right. It should be seen as a warning bell: Let the Republicans fracture into two parties, but it is critical that liberals fix – and maintain – the Democratic Party, and thus retain a majority that can advance a progressive agenda. We must not allow a party schism to occur in the Democratic Party.

The Democratic party doesn't have the luxury of settling for a 'base hit' in a game in which there are only home runs. For the Democrats, that is! The GOP has the luxury of just putting a man on base! Democrats don't have the luxury of nominating anything less than a JFK or an FDR.

In late July, ThinkProgress first reported on a memo detailing how conservative activists can successfully disrupt Democratic health care town halls. The memo, authored by a Tea Party Patriots volunteer named Bob MacGuffie, was distributed on a listserv controlled by FreedomWorks — the corporate front group run by Dick Armey that is dedicated to organizing tea parties and other anti-Obama efforts around the country. A member of the listserv, Jenny Beth Martin, blasted out the memo on June 13th, declaring, “We here in CT have developed a strategy for holding our elected officials accountable. We show up en mass at the ‘town hall’ meetings they have!” The tactics included:

I appeared on CNN American Morning yesterday to discuss today's highest profile elections. You can watch the segment here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiqxDgb94TA - I tried to make the point that while these elections are important, and while the Democratic Party certainly has its problems right now, these contests do a better job of illustrating severe Republican weakness than anything else right now. Karl Rove and the Beltway Punditburo are busy trying to tell us all why the three big elections today - the Virginia gubernatorial, the New Jersey gubernatorial, and the New York special congressional election - are a referendum on President Obama and the progressive agenda, and a bellwether for future elections. While Chris is absolutely right in saying that the national Democratic Party clearly has some issues it needs to work through, the idea that these three races are big-time commentaries on progressivism itself is is just plain moronic - even for a Washington chattering class that is made up mostly of morons.

HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you’re going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody’s going to say, “All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party.”

***UPDATED 3:00PM*** Scozzafava has endorsed Democratic candidate Bill Owens over conservative party candidate Doug H