Sunday Snapshot: Everyone Hearts Scott Brown

One of the more compelling Sunday Show slates in recent memory, with the lion's den appearance of Roger Ailes on ABC's This Week with...Barbara Walters...and Candy Crowley being named host of State of the Union on CNN (with John King moving to weekdays at 7pm).

The headlines: everybody loves Scott Brown. Ripped from the fictional SNL sketch last night.

On Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Rep. John Boehner: "While at a time when Americans are asking where are the jobs, why do we want to get in this debate? while we're fighting over health care and trying to find some way to come to common ground, why do we want to get into a divisive debate that will do nothing more than distract the real debate that should occur here about helping to get our economy going again and getting American people back to work."

BTW: Boehner said he'd support a scrub of the Pentagon's budget to look for unnecessary spending, too. (House Speaker Pelosi said she'd insist on it.)

Brown, on Don't Ask, Don't Tell: basically, he wants to hear from the generals. He's still pro-choice.

And on the Tea Parties? "Somebody would never come up to me and say, by the way, I'm a Tea Party member; I'm supporting you.  It never happened."


Throwaway line? Brown, on whether he'd react if he was OK with daughters posing nude: it's be up to "their discretion."

Brown didn't rule out 2012; said it was way too early to tell; said he was fine with Palin running.

Pro Bowl metaphor extra: Robert Gibbs essentially conceded his team a delay of game penalty. Where the country was "inside the one yard line" re: health care a few weeks ago, Gibbs said today they're "inside the five yard line."  Negotiations fast and furious.

Gibbs was reluctant to say whether the administration was reconsidering its decision to try KSM in a civilian court; seems to be the first preference still, but seems like the policy decision is being restudied considerably. No quotes to that effect, but that was the impression Gibbs left.

David Axelrod's words on KSM:

The attorney general and the Defense Department worked out protocols about how these cases should be handled.  Under those protocols, the attorney general decided to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed back to New York to stand trial for his crime for the murder of 3,000 innocent people, and he wanted to do it near the, the site of, of the crime itself.  He wanted to do what the Bush administration did over and over and over again and try these people in--try these murderers in, in Article III court where these--and, and that's what he decided to do.  The local authorities were receptive to that at the time. Since then, as you know, the mayor and the police chief and others have changed their minds and said they thought it would be too logistically difficult and too expensive.  We have to take that into consideration, and we're doing that now.

PS Note: David Gregory cross-referenced Larry Summers's "statistical recovery and a human recession" quote in Davos.

And David Brooks called it profound:

Yeah, to me, that's the profundity of what Larry Summers has said about the human recession, because it's a psychological recession.  If you ask people, "Why aren't you investing?  Why aren't you lending?" it all comes down to uncertainty, at the end of the day.  And so we could shove money in the economy, but if bankers and entrepreneurs don't have any sense of certainty, then they're just not going to invest for something six months out, a year out.  And so we've not only got this economic problem, but it's compounded by a psychological problem, magnified by the fact that distrust of institutions is at a highest level in American history.  You go back to Watergate, you could go back to everything, people distrust institutions more than ever before.