by Kagro X [courtesy of Daily Kos]

Here's something no one could have predicted...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday announced joint appointments to a landmark ethics review board that for the first time will allow private citizens to review allegations against members.

Still, four out of six members of the board for the newly created Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) will be former members of Congress, including former CIA Director Porter Goss (R-Fla.), who will serve as co-chairman.

Well, golly-gee! Wow. The ex-chief spy -- in an era where insane FISA "reforms" have already made people suspicious of political spying -- being put in charge of sorting out the dirt on Members of Congress.

By the way, go read the article. It's a masterwork of news-in-context. Porter Goss, named to co-chair the ethics panel, written up in a DC insider publication, with no mention whatsoever of Dusty Foggo or Duke Cunningham.

Spies, bribes, hookers... ethics panel. Yeah, this is gonna be great.

Accountability, here we come!

by Todd Beeton [courtesy of MyDD]

Burnt Orange Report has been hitting back against the over the top anti-blogger bias found within the OpEd page of the Austin American-Statesman but in Sunday's paper, a frontpage "story" crossed a line even for this paper's low standards.

Editor & Publisher documents the atrocities:

-- The audience nearly staged a "faint-in" when Gore appeared (note use of '60s term).

-- Pelosi is so far left her title should include "(D-Beijing)." This would come as a surprise to many in the crowd who have criticized her timidity - and posed hostile questions in the Q & A..

-- The liberal blogosphere is "terribly self-confirming" -- not like the mainstream media! In a contradiction, he then noted that at the conference they "critiqued themselves."

-- It's shooting fish in a barrel "to paint liberals as overly intellectual types incapable of having fun unless reading Noam Chomsky counts, and its sure does for them." In fact, the convention was practically "party central," few attendees were "intellectuals," and only a tiny percentage, I would guess, are Chomsky lovers -- again, an outmoded stereotype.

[...]

And this appeared on the frontpage. Really? The piece immediately drew the ire of bloggers, which is to say an unending litany of blog posts, LTEs and phone calls until finally the story was removed from the website and the editor issued an apology. Apparently it was supposed to be funny but we just didn't get it, humorless bloggers that we are.

by The Huffington Post News Team [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

The Austin-American Statesman published a front-page article on Sunday mocking Netroots Nation and calling Rep. Nancy Pelosi "arguably so left-leaning that her parenthetical should be...

by The Huffington Post News Team [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

grist.org For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), any action on climate change hinges on Barack Obama winning the White House this fall. Only the bully-pulpit...

by The Huffington Post News Team [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged disaffected backers of Hillary Clinton to support Barack Obama's choice for vice president, even if he picks a female candidate...

by Paul Hogarth [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

It's no surprise that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got a tough reception at Netroots Nation - as bloggers asked about the Iraq War, impeachment and...

by The Huffington Post News Team [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday blamed the "two oil men in the White House," President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Republican allies...

by Phoenix Woman [courtesy of Firedoglake]

On the rare occasions when Team Bush or their fellow Republican office-holders do something almost sensible, it's often something that they and their media buddies have attacked Democrats for doing or proposing. The planned meeting in Switzerland between US and Iranian envoys is just the latest example.

by Meteor Blades [courtesy of Daily Kos]

• Al Gore delivered a "moonshot" speech on energy today, a speech many people had hoped would come from Barack Obama's lips on January 20, 2009. Every kilowatt of U.S. electricity, Gore said, should come from solar, wind and other eco-friendly sources in a decade. Not 25 or 50 years, but 10.

  A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But here’s what’s changed: the sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power – coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal – have radically changed the economics of energy.

  Andy Revkin at The New York Times's Dot Earth has an annotated version of the speech.

• In a new paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Marina Ottaway and Mohammed Herzallah write that even Arab countries usually aligned with Washington are undertaking diplomatic initiatives that contradict U.S. policy, "because they no longer trust the U.S. capacity to contend with escalating regional crises" whether that relates to Iran, Lebanon or Hamas.

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