THE SAINTS WENT MARCHING IN AND OVER [31-17]…Well deserved…Congrats to the People of New Orleans Whose Hopes Were Rewarded (even if a victory in Miami will not solve the city’s continuing crisis.)

USAToday.comBrees confirms his elite status with Super Bowl MVP effort

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Drew Brees, a career underdog, outdueled Peyton Manning, the NFL’s golden boy, lifting a franchise, a team and a city to once-unthinkable heights Sunday night in Super Bowl XLIV.

For four seasons, Brees carried the football dreams of many folks on his shoulder pads. Against the favored Indianapolis Colts, the sentimental favorites from the Bayou culminated the 2009 season with a 31-17 upset victory for their first Super Bowl triumph after four decades of almost-habitual losing.

“We played for so much more than ourselves,” Brees said. “We played for a city, the Gulf Coast region and ‘Who Dat Nation.’ ” [More here →]

As For WHO dat?

For me, The Colts will always belong to Baltimore. I can’t feel sorry about their defeat. And the WHO? We were fooled again. All that lighting and pyrotechnics was a way of saying goodbye to “Our Generation,” and a band that was! There should have been more attention paid to the debate over the appropriateness of their selection. The Dallas Morning News nailed them:

“Almost immediately, it was clear this would not be a time-machine trip back to the band’s – and the band’s fans – glory days. Daltrey sounded strained – and judging from his singing, straining to hear himself – and Townshend looked and sounded desperate. He can still windmill his guitar, but he wasn’t so much singing as shouting.

The stage was the most exciting part of the show. It featured a circle of radiating lights that achieved all kinds of cool effects. By the time the group got around to singing “Who Are You?” the title’s question had taken on a pointed irony it didn’t use to have: Who are the Who now?”

MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKERS
BEAT THE PRESS SNOOZE HOUR
WAITING FOR MANDELA

Breaking and Shaking: The Daily Disaster

• CNN: An explosion at a Connecticut power plant near Hartford has caused “mass casualties,” authorities say.

Hartford Courant: “Witnesses and emergency response authorities said as many as 100 people were injured and an undetermined number may have died when a massive explosion blew up a power plant in Middletown.”

Monday Morning (AP) MIDDLETOWN, Conn. – A fire official said Monday that it remains unclear whether everyone is accounted for after a massive explosion that killed at least five people at an under-construction power plant.

And another less explosive (on the surface) disaster with more casualties - 1 out of every 8 Americans.

Hunger in the US of A: UP

• The Hunger in America 2010 study, commissioned by Feeding America, reports that there has been a 46% increase in the number of Americans who receive food from food banks since the last report was released in 2006.

That’s more than 37 million, or 1 in 8 Americans.

[More here →]

The Latest From Iran

Washington Post, Monday Morning: Iran handed over a letter to the U.N. nuclear agency on Monday informing it about the Islamic republic’s plans to start enriching higher-grade atom fuel from Tuesday, state television reported.

“Today we handed over the letter,” Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told Arabic-language al Alam television.

Motivate This

For some time I, and others, have been writing about morphing—specifically the way president Obama has come to take on the Bush persona and some of his policies. The last time we heard from our last King George, counting his brief photo-op in the role of savior of Haiti [Did he go there and help? I must have missed it.], we learned that he had become a motivational speaker. The company that first hired him was called “Let’s Motivate.”

Now it seems like that’s the direction President Obama has chosen, too, with his recent round of “moti-political” speeches preaching to Republicans about the magic elixir of bi-partisanship and about not throwing in the towel to Democrats. (He’s now invited the GOP to another White House health care summit.)

The loss of one Senate Seat in one state—with a reported shift of just 2% of the vote has driven the Dems to despair and distraction and the Repugs to the Ramparts with Sarah P, lifting her version of a page from Lenin’s notebook and calling for a revolution. (And, in effect, the break-up of the Republican Party as we have known it.)

Daily Beast: “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?” Sarah Palin asked a crowd of 1,100 gathered for the first National Tea Party Convention Saturday night, part of a 40-minute speech assaulting the Obama administration and pumping up the conservative faithful. “America is ready for another revolution.”

In the space of a few weeks, political fortunes seems to have been reversed, with the right becoming the party of community organizing and activist politics and the confidence shaken Dems crying in their beer and beards. Maybe it’s time for another beer party in response to the tea party, or, at least, some recognition on the part of the all-high that texting the list of ten million supporters should be activated. Otherwise, the real Obamacrats have to start thinking of building their own movement to push the Prez maybe to return to what the right continues to insist, more likely, distort, as his radical roots.

Sean Hannity’s America: Barack Hussein Obama and Friends - A History of Radicalism

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

The president is back to denouncing Fox by asking supporters to ignore it. Notice no one in his ranks is calling for an effort to create a real competitive channel, even as Air America goes down and sites like ours totter for a lack if funding.

FADES TO WHITE

Washington fading to white under the snowstorm of the century is the perfect metaphor for a government that has been locked in stalemate for months with Democrats unable to use that super majority for anything more than divisive bickering. A Congress used to playing chess, shifted to checkers and got stuck on check mate.

The NASA shuttle has been grounded and so is the Administration when it comes to governing or changing much; in real terms, unemployment is not being dented significantly even as Wall Street searches for signs of consumer confidence so they gear up their confidence game again. The lobbyists are in power; the people have been disenfranchised again.

INAUGURATION: Despondent Democrats on Saturday heard from their party leader who urged optimism in the face of Republicans’ strong challenge to their congressional dominance. The president said political leaders must plot their way forward to November with an understanding of the economic difficulties Americans face.

“I understand their frustration. You understand it as well,” Obama said.

At its winter meeting, a defiant Democratic Party worked to project a message of strength even as loyalists acknowledged the prospect of several defeats in November.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

• Raghida Degham: Is Obama A Failed Presdidet or… 


• G7 Forgives Haiti’s Debt, US considers Doing the Same

• GlobeandMail.com: Recovery Teeters as Debt Crisis Spreads

• Bob Herbert on Structural Problems Creating Job Loss

We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good. The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.

We don’t hear a lot that is serious about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure or the trade policies that crippled so many American industries or our inability (or unwillingness) to compete effectively with China when it comes to the new world of energy for the 21st century or our abject failure to provide a quality public education for the next generation of American workers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.

Speaking at a conference here on Wednesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said that if we don’t act quickly in developing long-term solutions to these and other problems, the United States will be a second-rate economic power by the end of this decade. A failure to act boldly, he said, will result in the U.S. becoming “a cooked goose.” [More here →]

SINGLE PAYER—NOT DEAD YET

Jerry Policoff writes from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania:

The Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee at their annual candidate endorsement convention here in Lancaster, Pa. passed a resolution by unanimous consent calling upon the Pennsylvania Legislature to enact the Pennsylvania Family and Business Healthcare Security Act (HB 1660 and SB 400) which would enact universal comprehensive single-payer healthcare in Pennsylvania. We also won the endorsement of several major candidates for elective office.

Real News On The Deficit