We are undone: The House votes to delay the transition to digital TV, after all.

The House today has voted to delay the nation’s transition to digital television by four months, less than two weeks before broadcasters were scheduled to turn off traditional analog signals and air only digital programming Feb. 17.

The vote is a victory for the Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers who pushed to give consumers more time and resources to get ready for the switch. Some Republicans argued a delay would cause further confusion and cost broadcasters millions.

President Obama has said he will sign the bill delaying the switch once it lands on his desk.

Do you really need this extra four months? Does anyone really need it? Yes: President Obama needs it, for reasons already discussed. And, considering the way his first two weeks have gone, he needs it all the more.

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The Vatican demands that Bishop Williamson recant his denial of reality, and states that Pope Benedict was unaware of his position on these matters when he issued the unexcommunication. This doesn’t surprise. Of-course, since Williamson is not a legitimate Roman Catholic bishop to begin with, the Church has questionable leverage over him.

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Cheney unleashed: Bless his heart. The article at the Politico is today’s essential read.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration—“that’s about 11 or 12 percent”—have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” He called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates native countries.

[...]

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

As much as I miss having George W. Bush in the White House, I have to say that I miss having Dick Cheney in the Naval Observatory even more.

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