Hear, Hear (cont.)

Via Andrew Sullivan's blog:
"I’m feeling grateful to the prez these days because we happen to be in the middle of a bunch of midsized crises. There’s the oil spill in the Gulf (which is verging on a big crisis, I guess). There’s the Times Square bomber. There are various floods in Tennessee and elsewhere. The European Union is falling apart over the Greek debt crisis, and so on and so on. It’s good to have a president with equipoise. It seems to me that Obama is handling his role, which ranges from the marginal to the significant, in these events with calm professionalism. He’s active yet not annoying. He’s not taking credit for everything. He’s not creating friction by making any missteps. He is calm, cool and collected,"
- David Brooks on our temperamentally conservative president.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/05/why-his-approval-rating-is-ticking-up.html

TW: I think many of us have been saying this for quite awhile, glad to see a proto-conservative coming around...

The War That Keeps On Giving...

TW:...succor to those opposed to American interests. It is the mistake that keeps on taking American- lives, treasure and reputation. All that has happened since 2004is the can has been kicked down the road. W. Bush had his "surge" that resolved nothing except reducing the political heat from flaming to simmer. Obama is conducting the "troop reduction" which kicks the can another year or two down the road and at least reduces American exposure in lives and treasure but will not solve much.

What would the teabagging Republican party suggest for Iraq at this point? More troops? More torture?

From Tom Ricks:
"I thought I was a pessimist about Iraq until I read this comment by a U.S. military official in today's Washington Post:

All we're doing is setting the clock back to 2005. ... The militias are fully armed, and al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to move back from the west. These are the conditions now, and we're sitting back looking at PowerPoint slides and whitewashing."

Ugh. I think 2005 was my least favorite year of the war Iraq, when things were falling apart and the American officials were insisting that they weren't. 2006 was bloodier but at least by the end of the year, it was clear that something had to change.

The official's comment in the Post reminds me of when, a few months ago, a top American expert in Iraqi affairs took me aside to warn me that I was dangerously optimistic. I asked him if he misspoke and mean that I was too pessimistic about the prospects for Iraq. "No," he said, shaking his head. "You are too optimistic. You think a civil war in Iraq is avoidable. It is not. It is inevitable."
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/17/iraq_the_unraveling_42_05_again

The Shelby Note To the White House

TW: You may have heard Richard Shelby, Republican Senator from Alabama, has held up ALL Obama appointees pending clearance of some of his earmarks. Click on the link below for the actual note he sent to the White House (via Ezra Klein, give it a few seconds to load).

http://contactsheet.org/cgi-bin/ransom.pl?thedata=Hey+Obama%2C%0D%0A%0D%0AMeet+me+in+the+park+outside+the+Senate+with+40+billion+dollars+worth+of+pork+%0D%0A%0D%0AOr+you%27ll+never+see+any+of+your+appointees+ever+again%0D%0A%0D%0AAnd+NO+COPS!!!!!!&Button=Generate+Ransom+Note

There Is That And Then There Is This

TW: There is this...

From Paul Krugman at NYT:
"Last week Mike Pence, the third-ranking Republican in the House, was asked what compromise he would agree to on health care. His answer, word for word, was

'Well, look, you know, I was, uh, yeah, yeah, look, uh.'

Today Tim Pawlenty has an article in Politico, which is a bit more articulate than that — but as Bruce Bartlett says,

'he rants about the deficit without proposing any spending cuts and insisting on still more tax cuts.'

Well, look, you know, he was, uh, yeah.

The moral here is that right now the GOP literally has no ideas about how the nation should actually be governed.

And the scary thing is that lack of ideas seems to be a winning platform."

TW: and then there is this...I really wish the country would give the guy a chance to govern instead of listening to the pantheons of incoherent bloviation like Pence/Palin et al.

Oh Well...Substance Is Boring Anyway

From Jim Surowiecki at New Yorker:
"...Thanks to my longstanding obsession with the obsolescence of our eighteenth-century political and electoral hydraulics (such as the separation of powers and the lack of a single government accountable to a national electorate) and this sclerotic system’s sadomasochistic twentieth-century refinements (such as the institutionalization of the filibuster), I am not astonished that Obama has had trouble “getting things done.” Absent only the filibuster—even while leaving untouched all the other monkey wrenches (committee chairs, corrupt campaign money, safe districts, Republicans, etc.)—Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.

Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.

Meanwhile, President Obama forestalled a second Great Depression, turned the attention of the executive branch toward real problems, restored lawfulness and decency to foreign and domestic policy, damped down the flames of global anti-Americanism, and staffed the agencies and departments with competent, public-spirited officials who believe in the duty of government to advance the general welfare. In this generation, Obama is as good as it is likely to get. I’m not sure whether that’s good news or bad, and I’m not saying that liberals shouldn’t keep the pressure on him to do better. I am saying that their—our—anger and exasperation should be directed elsewhere, at systemic grotesqueries like the filibuster and at the nihilists those grotesqueries enable."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/01/one-year-beware-of-sudden-downdrafts.html