I have been enjoying the clips of President Obama kicking it old school with the House GOP in my hometown of Baltimore yesterday. There were many enjoyable moments, but I really enjoyed part of the exchange with Rep. Chaffetz of Utah. The Freshman GOPer was in full concerned troll mode as he baited President Obama with his “sadness”.
The young lad served up a litany of crocodile tears including a wing-nut meme that way to many in the media and on the left have bought hook, line and sinker:
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: You said you weren’t going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did. I applauded you when you said it — and disappointed when you didn’t.
Oversimplification and a reduction of evidence to a simplistic binary frame is a favorite sophistic tactic of the wing-nuts and single-focus advocates (left, right and center). Often, this reduction to a binary frame is based on a false assumption that binary absolutes are the only measure of purity (and therefore: truth).
The rejection of a holistic view of how the world actually works drives me nuts. The attacks on President Obama over lobbying and transparency are rooted in this mindset and Chaffetz seemed to be the designated wing-nut given the assignment to confront President Obama with this lazy meme as just another talking point in his litany of wankery. While <a href=”http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/president-obama-takes-questions-gop-house-issues-conference”> the entire exchange is worth watching</a>, I really enjoyed this answer by the President:
THE PRESIDENT: In terms of lobbyists, I can stand here unequivocally and say that there has not been an administration who was tougher on making sure that lobbyists weren’t participating in the administration than any administration that’s come before us.
Now, what we did was, if there were lobbyists who were on boards and commissions that were carryovers and their term hadn’t been completed, we didn’t kick them off. We simply said that moving forward any time a new slot opens, they’re being replaced.
So we’ve actually been very consistent in making sure that we are eliminating the impact of lobbyists, day in, day out, on how this administration operates. There have been a handful of waivers where somebody is highly skilled — for example, a doctor who ran Tobacco-Free Kids technically is a registered lobbyist; on the other end, has more experience than anybody in figuring out how kids don’t get hooked on cigarettes.
So there have been a couple of instances like that, but generally we’ve been very consistent on that front.
This was a great answer for the Wing-nuts and the folks in the media trained to carry their water (as <a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/?p=33644 “>Dougj pointed out the other day</a>).
The issue of corruption in Washington is one that I’ve spent some time following and there has never been, in my lifetime, a President who aggressively confronted corruption—until now. This is one of the success stories of the first year of the Obama Administration and I think things will be even better in the second year.
Treat this as a late night open thread.
Cheers
dengre
Bob In Pacifica
Did anyone talk about single-payer or doesn’t that exist in this universe?
arguingwithsignposts
watching my pres. act like jeb bartlett was a thing of beauty. /shameless obot.
ETA: why, yes, I’ve been watching season 6 of “The West Wing.” Why do you ask?
Yutsano
Denge: I was hoping you would weigh in on this at some point. To stay a bit more general: do you think the Republicans allowing the taping of the Q & A session was a deliberate ploy or a massive miscalculation on their part? One does not graduate from Harvard Law without thinking on their feet.
Davis X. Machina
Yes, actually, and funny you should ask.
The Republicans kept insisting they would have loved to enact it, if necessary over Democratic opposition, because it’s the just right thing to do, dammit, but the president didn’t ask them.
handy
@Bob In Pacifica:
Don’t you mean soshalism? Which reminds me, you know who else believed in single payer? /wingnut
mr. whipple
What about hemp? Why can’t I have my hemp?
valdivia
Another excellent post, thanks DennisG. I think highlighting this sort of achievements is crucial both because the MSM carry water for republicans but also because a lot of people just want to focus on the negative. Shameless Obot still enjoying the excellent kicking ass he did this week.
mcd410x
Rogue Mocha Porter, Bell’s Oberon, mmm.
Michael
More devil water (Mount Gay Rum), more “In Bruges” and more Showtime “Tudors” please.
I’m just freaking enjoying the hell out of my Saturday……
Dennis G.
@Yutsano:
I think they believe their own chatter about the teleprompters. The basic idea that Obama is an empty suit who can not hold his own without a script. The idea that he uses a teleprompter because he is aware of the power of words and carefully crafts them as a writer never crossed their minds as the listened to the spin from the EIB network and Fox. They believed it and saw a zero downside to a President on the ropes (in their view) getting smacked by the GOP on live TV.
As usual, their understanding of reality left them in a bit of a hole. Dumb bunnies, one and all. But I really thank them for the enjoyable TeeVee.
Cheers
General Winfield Stuck
I expect this from wingnuts. They have no shame. I still remember the first day the House met in January 2007, after dems took it back. And the wingers started right off with one minute speeches on tax and spend liberals without so much as cracking a smile, after they had exploded the budget on unnecessary war and truckloads of tax cuts for the rich and wingnut welfare to their corporate masters. It is what they do. Image is everything to them, and hypocrisy just another word for nothing left to lose.
I don’t worry a lot about them because they are clowns, but disciplined clowns on messaging. What I worry about is those on our side who validate their vacuous memes. Concerned lib after concerned lib come here to wank with the Obama no different than Bush blather, whether it’s that Obama is still using rendition and it doesn’t matter that rendition has been used for decades as a means of legal extradition, and it was Bush’s use to send people to other countries to be tortured, Obama isn’t.
Or equating Obama letting Bush ongoing court cases play themselves out in the judicial system as being akin to obama also breaking the law by not dropping them because liberals are pressuring him to which would amount to the same politicization of the DOJ that the Bushies were guilty of.
Or Obama using the State Secrets invocation for legitimate reasons and not to cover up criminal acts. The list goes on with these dishonest memes pushed by folks like Greenwald et al. I do detest it so, the constant lack of nuance and analysis to get to the truth of things, in lieu of keeping the outrage machine set to 11, on both sides of the isle.
someguy
My only problem with O’s performance is that he didn’t lock the doors and call an airstrike on the building on the way out.
Yutsano
@Dennis G.: Of course if you REALLY want to get them hissing and spitting mention that Saint Ronnie used teleprompters constantly. But yeah they are so wrapped up in the image of Obama being an empty suit that when reality reached up and smacked them in the face they had virtually no fallback position. One would think losing an election to him would have made them take him seriously.
Short Bus Bully
Amazing to think that Obama with a mic just riffing off the cuff answers to winger questions could so outshine the SOTU address… But it did.
If the White House doesn’t realize what kind of a gold mine they have by putting him up in front of people like this they deserve all the Harry Reids they get.
Violet
This was one of my favorite exchanges from the whole Q&A. I loved the bigger moments, of course, like the slamming of Pence, but this bit was beautiful. I loved President Obama’s explanation of it too, because just in case people don’t understand why he might have a few lobbyists in the administration, this is a clear, easily understandable, sensible explanation.
I have seriously drunk the Kool-Aid again. /Obot.
OT – Went to see “Crazy Heart” tonight and it’s very good. Jeff Bridges deserves at least an Oscar nomination for his performance. It’s a lovely small film.
DougJ
The issue of corruption in Washington is one that I’ve spent some time following and there has never been, in my lifetime, a President who aggressively confronted corruption—until now. This is one of the success stories of the first year of the Obama Administration and I think things will be even better in the second year.
Yes, I agree.
How did you last as long as you did on Kos spewing this kind of blasphemy, though? You should at least qualify it with a few caveats about Rahm Emanuel.
General Winfield Stuck
@DougJ:
LOL. That was my thought to.
Yutsano
BTW prediction now: if somehow the Republicans get the majority in the House impeachment will get put on the table.
BR
Come Monday, I hope everyone here was mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore 1 week ago will summon that same spirit and call their representatives in support of pass-the-damn-bill on health care.
John O
I confess to measuring a person by their reaction to who did better in that exchange. (But giving them a pass if they have no idea it even happened.)
It was the most deftly handled bitch-slap I’ve seen in a long, long time.
If the Dems were smart, and they’re not, they would be out en masse and clamoring for more of these.
Politics 101.
DougJ was right. You have to know when to step on a neck if you want be in the politics business.
Watch our fearless majority party blow the momentum. If most Americans are going to view politics as sports, you have to play it like sports.
Violet
@BR:
Agreed. I hope Tim F. posts to remind everyone on Monday. We can’t let up now.
freelancer (itouch)
@BR:
Tim F will beat us if we don’t.
General Winfield Stuck
I will say, that if early leaks are correct that David Margolis of the DOJ, watered down an investigation report into Bush’s torture lawyers, I may well join the progs in a poutrage. Isokoff says the dude did it on his own, without consulting Holder or Obama. I don’t know if that is true or not, but individuals changing official investigation reports on their own is actually like the Bushies, and it will be on Obama or Holder to correct this bullshit, if true. It is one thing for a decision to be made that Yoo, Bybee and company didn’t violate lawyer ethics rules, though it would be hard to swallow allowing waterboarding as anything but illegal torture, it is quite another to alter reports. We will see how this shakes out, and I hope it isn’t what it now looks like.
Yutsano
@Violet: Absosmurfly. If anything after the smackdown we need to get even more aggressive, mostly because the teabaggers will be moving on to other issues but we will keep hammering. Balloon Juice as a source for positive progressive change. Whowouldathunkit?
kommrade reproductive vigor
Two sentences, one of them all mauled up. He would have been more coherent if he’d said “I haz a sad.”
@Yutsano: Yeah, they’ll charge him with PWB. (Presidenting While Black.)
John O
@General Winfield Stuck:
Yep. Big test for the Big H.O. If someone needs to hang, he has to hang ’em, and he has to do it with the same seriousness he brought to his race speech, the SOU, and his recent C-Span Greatest Hit.
I think he’ll handle it, pragmatist that he is. If he doesn’t, he’ll have diminished in at least one voter’s eyes.
BillCinSD
Suck I did not realize keeping the evidence of torture secret was a legitimate reason for state secrets, but then I’m not a general
Yutsano
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Heh. Good catch. He made up a new verb. I can haz my language back plz?
Silver
@BR:
Impeachment? I’d expect a good old-fashioned lynching. Also, expect half the Democrats in Congress to be down there throwing the rope over a beam to string him up in a show of bipartisanship.
Nellcote
Blame It On Bush!
/j. mccain
General Winfield Stuck
@BillCinSD: Big Strawman dude. It is up to the judicial system these cases are now in to make those calls, not you, or Glenn Greenwald, or the ACLU. There is pending legislation to codify how the SS can be used, and how it can’t. Until that becomes law, these cases are being adjudicated by the system we have.
Nellcote
@Yutsano:
An alternate universe needs an alternate language. All the cool kids are doing it, see LaPalin’s “mandation”.
cathaireverywhere
I was delighted by the whole exchange. I wish it had gotten more play, and I hope he does this more often. I live in a city chock-full of ultraconservative idiots. It’s tiring, and I would like them to be forced to watch so they can see what he is really like. (of course, if Rush told them not to believe their eyes, they wouldn’t) I just can’t believe how dumb the Repubs were- they definitely watch too much Fox and didn’t realize how bright the president is. I kept trying to imagine how GWB would have done in a similar situation with the Dems.
Dennis G.
@DougJ:
Most folks there are nice enough. I did have a few problems with the Rahmers, especially those buying into any of the many all powerful Rahm conspiracy theories.
I know smacking Rahm is popular in certain corners here and there, but I never quite got that. I guess it will get me into trouble one day.
Cheers
MikeJ
Obviously not a real progressive. You’re not supposed to say anything good about Obama unless you have an “on the other hand” ready to shit on him with.
Fail.
Made Tho. Keller’s meatballs and tomato sauce from ad Hoc at Home. Ready to burst now.
Jean
In Frank Rich’s column, “The State of the Union is Comatose,” he devotes some space to the Republican Q&A, wanting Obama to publicize their hilarious ideas of reform, such as more tax cuts for the wealthy that increase the debt. He notes that FDR sure didn’t stop blaming Hoover or the Republicans, even after years, and won a landslide election. He just kept hammering the point home. Rich: “Americans like Obama far more than they like any Congressional leader. They might even like more of his policies if he spelled them out. But none of that matters if no Democrat fears him enough to do any of his bidding and no Republican believes there’s any price to be paid for always saying no.”
After the Q&A, which I watched on C-Span, Boehner talked a bit to the caucus, suggesting that bills be broken into bite-sized pieces so that Republicans might vote “yes.” I assume that those would be Republican ideas that Democrats would agree to vote on.
While Democrats might have seen this Q&A as a big success, Republicans are leveling more criticism of Obama. It was a platform for voters who may have watched it and are not wingnuts.
If, as Obama told the Republicans, they have boxed themselves in, I’m waiting for when they suffocate, when they do pay a price. So far, only the Dems are. Can they just not hang together and pass some damn legislation–HC???
John O
@Jean:
Shorter Frank Rich: Step on their necks. Play offense.
Dmitry
Utah — sniff sniff — makes me think of people taking advantage of children.
Mormons have taken 100 children out of Haiti.
Does the good representative know if they are safe? Does the good representative have a connection to the children taken?
And lastly, why are regular American BLACK children not good enough for the wingnuts? Why do they have to import them?
Yutsano
@Jean:
Sigh. Why does Obama have to lead by fear? We tried that for eight years there Frank, we saw the end result. And what exactly is the price for the Republicans to keep saying no, since their only objective is to get back into power? I’m trying to get what Rich is saying here, but isn’t the whole point of change well actually changing?
Jean
@John O: That’s right, including some Dem necks. Does Webb have to take an oppositional stand now too? Jesus.
The Dems don’t know that health care reform dying after a year of focus would be a gigantic loss? We have to call them every day and TELL them? I do, but it’s just maddening.
Jean
@Yutsano: I agree that leading by fear is not change. But some show of strength to get things done is needed. I’m an O-bot through and through and still worry that he’ll be weakened by his own party because they can’t get their act together and find a way around the dastardly right wing. I’m focusing my frustration on the Senate.
What I hope is something smart is going on behind the curtain. It’s all I’ve got.
Dee Loralei
Dengre, my fav moment was when he handled my own idiot Congresscritter, Marsha Blackburn. Oh, how I loathe that woman. But the entire Q&A was a thing of beauty.
And after his rope-a-dope with them at the SOTU I am firmly back in the O-bot column.
Jean
@Dee Loralei: Blackburn is despicable. Her voice alone is painful. My rep is the pitifully stupid Cantor whose face in every scene is like “Find Waldo.”
Cat Lady
My favorite part was how beautifully and clearly he called out the demonization tactics as a dead end for them. An independent leaning person with half a brain would have to shake their head in agreement – how can there be any negotiation if one side refuses to act in good faith? He did a wonderful job mentioning Howard Baker and Bob Dole in that context.
Another deft remark was how he complimented Paul Ryan’s beautiful family, then jokingly apologized if it was going to cause him trouble. That was Obama-fu.
/O-bot.
Yutsano
@Cat Lady: I believe the proper term is “Hoisted upon their own petard”. Denge is right, they chose to believe the delusions of Rush and Steele and ended up getting a big smack of reality. I’m an independent by religious restriction (I can’t join a political party) but in my beliefs I’m very much a DFH. I was very very proud of what my President did here.
mcd410x
In any situation — QB for the local sports franchise, defensive alignment, political parties — there always exist two factions: those who jump ship early and those who go down with the boat.
Do we really have to play down to these stereotypes? Aren’t we more clever than this? Really, the only time in memory I’ve seen anyone equating Obama & Bush is someone constructing a simple strawman to huff and puff and knock down.
Is there any who would lead us to more imaginative pastures?
Notorious P.A.T.
Off-topic but I have a question about presidential campaigns and money. I’ve heard that in the past 40-odd years the candidate who raised the most money has won every presidential election. Is that so, and where could I find out more about this?
Dee Loralei
@Cat Lady: It was Obama-fu.And if they keep on imploding this week. If they go on the Sunday bobblehead shows and keep repeating how they bested Obama in that forum and how they gave him what for and schooled him and about how he was rude and defensive, then we’ll know he got into their OODA Loop. And then they will truly over-reach. Just as Hillary did, just as John McCain did.
( I learned about OODA Loops during the campaign from a commenter ((Tom Carpenter or TCinLA)) over at Steve Benen’s old place. The interenet is a grand agora for learning new things.)
mcd410x
It’s unfortunate that more people won’t see Obama’s takedown yesterday.
How on Earth isn’t it common knowledge that the GOP is devoid of any sort of plan about anything? That they’re running on less than empty?
Also.
Yutsano
@Notorious P.A.T.: I know Obama out-earned McCain, I’m not entirely certain of what the results are for the previous elections however.
handy
Actually I do read/hear this a bit, mostly from self-identified independents I’ve interacted with. I’m guessing this is the “fiscal irresponsibility” instinct talking.
Lefty critics of Obama tend to take a longer path but essentially arrive at the same point: he hasn’t closed Gitmo, he hasn’t drawn down from the two wars Bush started, insurance companies are the winners in HCR (just like corporations were the winners in the Bush admin). So, no, you probably don’t hear a lot of simple “Obama is the same as Bush” rhetoric, but it’s essentially a “status quo” argument.
Frederick
I guess it could be said the Obama Administration cut out the middleman… and I’m sure it was in the public’s best interest that “Mark Patterson, the chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, …[who] worked as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs in 2008” got in there.
Cat Lady
@Dee Loralei:
An OODA loop – hadn’t heard that before, but now I see that’s exactly what he’s done.
Of course, the Sadlys have already found Exhibit A of OODA Loop FAIL.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@mcd410x:
I thought it was nice of them to give Obama a coloring book that he was able to wave around to help drive points home. It’s always nice when the opposition gives you ammo right before the shootout. I did note that the President forgot to tell them some other problems with the coloring book they gave him; there are very few pictures in it and what few it has are ‘by the number’ yet have no numbers on them.
Finally, he could have consoled them with a ‘but it’s the thought that counts…’ to put the smiles back on their rosy-cheeked faces.
Obama schooled them and they know it. When Pence was on Wiffleball afterward and Tweety asked him if he would like to do this again or even a few more times, Pence gave an emphatic “NO” that just screamed ‘I know we are stupid but right now our GOP asses are smarting from the nationally televised Presidential Ass Kicking they just got. You think I want to do that again?!
Next week the GOP will be saying that they schooled Obama and blahblahblahblah. I only hope enough people will see the trip to the woodshed Obama gave them and hear the tone-deafness of the goopers.
mcd410x
@handy: Yeah, I specifically meant here. I should have been more precise.
Either way, some people stay the course, some jump ship. You may as rail on people who love/hate French toast or butternut squash. Because butternut squash is JUST WORDS.
Yawn. Here’s some Wilco.
John O
Well, I’ve personally engaged my GOP friends to watch it and “judge for yourself,” and if everyone did that I think we/you would make some political capital out of it.
Repeating now, they’re probably too stupid and inept to do it, but the Dems should be on TV begging for this to happen regularly.
Send it to Jane, also.
==-+
This and Rahm’s announcement on Friday.
Obama’s take down of the GOP. Meaningless. Eye and ear candy for sure. But meaningless.
I’m done. If the Dem’s can’t move that bill across the finish line when it’s practically fucking DONE. I’m done with them. Granted it was a shitty bill, but it was a shitty bill with some huge reform. It was a start.
Fuck Obama, Rahm, Pelosi, Reid, the lot of ’em. Thankfully I can vote against Pelosi. More importantly, the DSCC, DCCC, OFA and Obama will never see the inside of my wallet again.
If the Dems can’t stop people from dying because they can’t afford health care, they don’t deserve my support. And no, this nibbling around the edges shit like making sure mental health care is paid the same as physical health care (which is indeed good!) isn’t going to cut it. HCR is practically done. Even if it is the Senate bill, it’s head and shoulders above the status quo.
Dunno, if I’m going to vote GOP, and I can’t see myself not voting…but I sure as shit am NOT going to vote for an incumbent Dem.
Fuck the lot of ’em.
handy
Good to see you’re going with the lesser of two evils.
Martin
@Yutsano:
Personally, I think they made a reasonable assumption: 140 elected officials against one guy were at worst even odds for them. And I know y’all will call me naïve on this, but I think the folks there really did want to have the conversation in the open.
But Frank Luntz, the pollster that Obama talked about while he was there suggested that Republicans do more of this. Now, he’s not the guy in Obama’s gunsights, but I think he has a point – doing it pulls the Republicans up to Obama’s level. What I think he means by that isn’t that it necessarily elevates their stature, but that it’s going to force them to rely less on simplistic talking points. That’s good for business for him, but probably good for the GOP as well.
Kyle
They believed it and saw a zero downside to a President on the ropes (in their view) getting smacked by the GOP on live TV.
After eight years of Chimp, the Repigs were so conditioned to
President=Mumbling Willfully-Ignorant Swaggering Dumbass Who Talks in Comic Book Phrases
that they thought Obama would be the same.
Martin
@==-+:
Yeah, because the GOP would have passed the bill…
Whaaa!
Martin
@==-+:
Yeah, because the GOP would have passed HCR…
Whaaa!
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@==-+:
Shorter ==-+: I didn’t get my pony! Firebags AWAY!!
Awww, feel better now? No? Good.
==-+
@handy:
HA! good one. :)
the and there should be an or. However doesn’t change the fact that I’m seriously pissed. Pissed enough that I was deprived of any enjoyment of Obama’s take down on Friday. Which makes me doubly pissed.
Jason Bylinowski
@==-+: I gotta say, that was weakly done. You sound like you’re looking for a reason to go GOP to me, & I say you should go ahead. If it’s just a binary decision to you, then it sounds like you are the type of person who likes things to be broken down into simple categories of black and white. There’s a party for that viewpoint, it’s called the Republican Party; you’d fit in well there, really. That’s kinda their thing.
I’m very happy with the way things went late this week; here’s hoping it’s the start of a strategic shift for our side.
Redshift
@==-+: Good for you, then stay home. We have the most disastrous incarnation of a political party in modern times, whose members are still loudly defending the policies that drove the country into moral perfidy and economic catastrophe, and if you can’t come out and help prevent them from being given the wheel again because the Dems haven’t done a good enough beyond saving us from that, then it’s probably best if you leave politics to the grownups. You may deserve the government you’d get, but the rest of us sure as hell don’t.
Redshift
@General Winfield Stuck: I expect this from wingnuts. They have no shame.
A prime exhibit in the history of their shamelessness to me was the Bush/Gore debate where Gore talked about the Patients’ Bill of Rights, and Shrub responded with “we passed a Patients’ Bill of Rights in Texas,” despite the fact that it had passed over his veto. I could perfectly understand that Gore didn’t have a response — in pre-wingnut times, it seemed a reasonable ground rule of debate that your opponent wouldn’t claim credit for something he had actually bitterly opposed. But now any level of dishonesty IOKIYAR.
MelodyMaker
Good to make the distinction, Dennis G. Well put.
But, they have to keep fucking that chicken.
mcd410x
And as we check in with Whale Wars, once again, nothing is happening …
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Oh fuck, the latest Rahmrage is on the Wreck List over at the GOS. I guess Rahm wrote a book that has a chapter attacking Lakoff and thus he is telling Obama to blow him off. That and Dean was fired by Obama.
Must be a slow night over there.
Darkrose
@Michael:
We just mainlined the first three seasons, and I’m jonesing for more. It surprised me, because when I first heard about it I was like, “Johnathan Rhys Meyers as Henry? Seriously?” But I was amazed by how quickly I forgot that he doesn’t look at all like Henry VIII, and accepted him as the character.
At the moment, I’m feeding the addiction by reading. I finished Eric Ives’ The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn last night, and I’m starting on Alison Weir’s Henry VIII. My Amazon wish list is suddenly packed full of Tudor history.
Platonicspoof
@Notorious P.A.T.:
I haven’t googled your question, but instead used the phrase
“United States presidential election” plus a given year in the wikipedia search box. The resulting article for 2008 is better than the one for 2004, and I expect that is a trend. But this will give you something closer to raw numbers rather than one source with one claim.
Realistically, the expenditures by those outside the campaigns should be considered, so technically the better question is which campaign plus independent (outside) money wins.
Even that version is quickly looking like an attempt to avoid reading a book.
It might be more revealing to look at campaigns that win in spite of being greatly outspent.
Anyway, examples (note different terms in contents – ‘costs’, finance, etc.):
United States presidential election, 2008
United States presidential election, 2004
Are you looking for a way to bet big on the 2012 election?
AxelFoley
@General Winfield Stuck @11:
This. All of this.
AxelFoley
@DougJ @16:
LMAO
Tomlinson
@==-+:
This.
@Jean:
And this.
That’s it in a nutshell. Obama was great at both the SOTU and the Q&A was simply brilliant, but all of that matters exactly zero if they can’t pass what needs to get passed.
They may think that they can redirect away from HCR, but for me (and a lot of their base), that’s a HUGE deal, it’s critical for now and even more critical for the future, they have it right at the goal line and they have apparently decided to take a breather.
Not. Acceptable.
John Redworth
Watching this entire Q&A was a moment of clarity that should be seen by anyone with the ability to think beyond what the talking heads are telling them. I still have friends that watched bits and pieces of the meeting and came away that all Obama does is blame Bush without having any real ideas of his own. I would not bet against someone on the right proclaiming that Obama was being fed answers through an ear piece.
It has been a long time coming to see a President walk in to the snake’s den and take them on without teleprompters or support staff. Obama did great and you could tell by the looks of self loathing on the faces of some of the GOP members there. Of course Boner and company said it was a big win for the GOP since they “made” Obama listen to their wonderful ideas, something I guess they missed the part where he dismissed most of them as fantasy.
The GOP won’t make the same mistake with Obama again and if they do invite him back, no cameras or press will be allowed. This gives them greater chance to claim victory with a chance for people to no refute it. They might not be the party that Pelosi and Reid (which btw, I can’t stand either one) has made them out to be such as no ideas, no real way out of the woods, etc… but it just seems their ideas and plans are not realistic to the needs of the country. Thank you GOP for making that smackdown possible, it was enjoyable.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
I’m scared to wonder how badly it would go if the President did this in front of the Democrats. Then again, the Blue Dogs could use a whipping or three, so I guess it balances out some.
Joe Max
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): That and Dean was fired by Obama.
I’ve got a bit of insight into all that. In a manner of speaking, that’s true.
I know someone who worked the Dean campaign, and they (the Deaniacs), who were the original driving grass-roots force behind “liberalizing” the Dems, saw themselves being pushed aside by the new kids, the Obama people. And since the O-bots won, they were the new bosses. They had no need for the old-school Dean people, and nothing personal, but sorry, we’re in charge now. My friend expressed a lot of resentment about it, since they (the Deaniacs) had paid their dues in the trenches, dammit, and believed (with good cause) that if it hadn’t been for Dean’s candidacy in 2004, followed by his “50-state strategy” as DNC chair, Obama wouldn’t have won in 2008. But yet they were tossed aside when it came to sharing the political spoils (like places in the DNC campaign hierarchy) which they felt they had earned a piece of.
Obama may not have “fired” Dean literally, but effectively, that’s exactly what happened. He wanted his own people in place, not the old Dean crowd, who owed no allegiance to him. I think this lingering resentment is part of what’s behind the attitude of the minions of the Great Orange Satan and their ilk.
Brett
No shocker there, since he’s a whackjob who got his seat by outdoing the incumbent Republican in conservativity, in a heavily rural district that’s more conservative than God (meaning that the primary is the election – the Democrat is basically a token formality).
daryljfontaine
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
Part of that Pence appearance had me sure we had the GOP narrative on the appearance sewn up tight — he kept talking about how Obama had finally acknowledged that the GOP had ideas! REAL IDEAS! with of course none of his own acknowledgement of Obama’s dismantling of most of those ideas. And Tweety, despite his later slobbering over Obama, couldn’t take Pence’s dick out of his mouth long enough to show a clip of the retreat and force a followup question like, “Why are you being such a lying shitball, Congressman?”
D
bob
@MikeJ: Obviously not a real progressive. You’re not supposed to say anything good about Obama unless you have an “on the other hand” ready to shit on him with.
This is negative and wrong, MikeJ. I’m a full-on Nader-honoring Hamsher-nonbashing Progressive … and I fully support Obama and think he’s doing better than could be expected, especially considering the situation and environment.
In fact it is only my support for Obama that keeps me in contact with such non-thinking vitriol from “allies” (whatev) such as yourself.
There is more to the picture than your narrow view, in case you’re interested in reality and facts.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Joe Max: I can understand the resentment on the ‘change of guard’ and restaffing of the trenches, old wood can still be damned good wood but that’s how the game of party politics is played. For someone like me, the proof is in the pudding and Obama has 2010 for the warm-up and 2012 for the main show. If the ‘new’ structure doesn’t deliver then it’s his and his team’s cojones that will be in the proverbial vice.
Dean delivered and Obama has to do the same thing and even expand on it. The complainers can bitch all they want now but to me it’s just so much ‘preemptive bitching’ until the main show in 2012. They should save their ammo and strike then if he doesn’t deliver, when it will matter. Pointlessly bitching right now seems more like attempts to try and poison the waters so it makes it harder for him and the party to do so.
Kind of that self-fulfilling prophecy thing that people warn about. Keep saying you suck and guess what? People believe you, even if it’s not true.
The Republicans know something about this and that is why they have been able to successfully thump the Democrats asses in the public square. I sure would hate to see the left decide that this is a good tactic to use on themselves in the name of purity. From what I can see, just like the nuts on the right who would gladly hijack the Republican party for their own ends (and are trying to do so right now), there are nuts on the left who would be more than happy to do the exact same thing but luckily for us sanity has reigned (so far).
Eating our own is counterproductive when the ‘enemy’ we face would like nothing more than to destroy us while we are distracted doing so. In fact, I am sure that Grover Norquist would like nothing better than to do just that.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@bob:
Then you are the exception and definitely not the rule when it comes to ‘your crowd’. I can understand then why you might not like being disparaged but you have to admit that people tend to paint others by the company they keep.
Firedoglake is an Obama/Rahm-hating fevered swamp with a few of you reasonable individuals floating around in it. Sorry if you are tarred by the broad-brush of discussion/ranting but that’s what happens in situations like this.
Politics is not a friendly sport. Not in the least.
bob h
There won’t be a next time, but should it occur and the Republicans whine that the Democrats did not consult about HCR, I hope Obama cites the example of the end-of-life counseling provision of Senator Isakson (GA). It was turned into the death panel accusation by Palin, Grassley, and other Republicans.
chopper
@handy:
nonono, the wingnuts believe in a single prayer system. as in, you get sick and you pray your guts out.
The Grand Panjandrum
@Dee Loralei: @Cat Lady: The idea of Obama being inside someone’s OODA Loop was first posited by James Fallows back in February 2008 during the Democratic primary season. It then began to bounce around the blogs after that. Here is a more completed description of the OODA Loop.
Montysano
It will be interesting to see if younger Republicans, those with a career in front of them, decide that riding the Teabagger Express to oblivion is a poor strategy and decide to work with Obama.
OTOH, as Obama pointed out on Friday: once you’ve characterized the Pres as Mooslim/Kenyan interloper who favors Death Panels, it’s kind of hard to explain to your constituents why you’re now willing to work with him.
Brick Oven Bill
Dennis.
Obama was compelled to name Mark Patterson, the lobbyist from Goldman Sachs, to be Chief of Staff at the United States Treasury. To supervise Mark, he was compelled to name Tim Geithner.
They had to fool Bush. They own Obama.
I am now off to practice Geometry. Perhaps we can discuss this later.
change we can believe in, my ass
I believe people put too much faith in Obama’s words. Yes, he’s well-spoken and can think on his feet. Great.
What matters to me are the things that are of direct, personal, desperate consequence to me: help for small business and health insurance.
If the president honestly wanted to help small business, he’d loosen credit. (This would mean concessions from the bankers.)
I don’t have health insurance. President “we’ll deal with it some time in the future” Obama has made it clear now that he doesn’t care.
Doesn’t matter what he says, folks.
aimai
I enjoyed every minute of Obama’s beating down of the Republicans. But I have to point out something here which seems to be getting lost in our self congratulations. This is not game over, and its not even a game changer.
The Republicans as a caucus have thrown their entire energy against a strategy of waiting Obama and the Dems out. Waiting them out until they lose the desire to actually pass Democratic initiatives, and waiting them out until they lose the *ability* to pass democratic initiatives. They’ve gotten midway to both points–the health care bill is far less progressive and fiscally sound than it would have been without the (necessary) need to coax Enzi, Grassley, Snowe, Collins, and the centrist dems to the table. We lost Kennedy’s seat *for three years* and now won’t have a sixty seat supermajority necessary for passing legislation over Republican intransigence. Now they are playing for the rest of the marbles which is to retake the house, senate and Presidency on the basis that the dems can do nothing good, and that the people won’t grasp whose at fault or remember what it was like when Republicans controlled all three branches.
They want full power, and they are not planning on stopping until they get it back. Full Power tastes damned good, and they remember what it was like when they controlled everything including the guest lists to important parties. They know that Obama’s strategy is simply to peel off enough Republican reps and Senators to get on with governing. And that if he can do so he will win–not only keeping the house but gaining back the senate and keeping the Presidency.
When Obama went to speak to the Republicans he was aiming over their heads at their voters–that’s a strategy aimed both at 2012 and at bringing pressure to bear on wavering Republicans now. But if the Republicans just stay strong and devoted to the idea of regaining total power its simply not going to work. And if the voters never swing over to backing Obama vis a vis their own Republican reps, or it has no effect on the Senate–say, on Snowe and Collins–Obama is going to be an eight year footnote in history.
I know Stuck is going to insist that people who aren’t snorting sunbeams every day are traitors who are worse than Republicans but that’s just the intense narcissism of tiny differences appropriate to a narcissitic person who has overidentified with a leader figure. I think its possible to love Obama, to admire Obama, to applaud Obama and yet grasp that the strategy he appears to be following is a high risk one. I applaud him for taking it, and for doing so incredibly well, but its only one part of the overall strategy. If the Dems as a party don’t/can’t capitalize on what he is doing: which is simply trying to win over independent voters and a stray Republican or two before the next election we will lose the only real leverage we ever had which was sheer numbers in the House and Senate. Sheer numbers which, because of disorganization and dissent and corruption in our own caucus we failed to use when we had them.
aimai
change we can believe in, my ass
Read this and weep:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/01/healthcare-reforms-final-minutes
Montysano
@change we can believe in, my ass:
This is a perfect example of the dementia. The POTUS has no ability to “loosen credit”. None. He can suggest it, support it, encourage it, but he cannot do it.
snowbird42
@aimai:
And it seems as if the Dems dont know what to do with power. They are happier fighting to get ahead.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
While I have seen some happy people here I have also seen realists post here who know that this is not any kind of game changer, nor is there any real hope that the Democrats in office will try to capitalize on it.
No, it is not getting lost in our self-congratulations, at least not among the reality based out there though I am seeing these ‘reminders’ telling us that they are.
Perception, that’s what it’s all about. Projection don’t cut it for me, I’ll let others play that game.
@Montysano:
Shhh! You’re harshing their buzz with that nasty thing called reality!
change we can believe in, my ass
@Montysano:
He can’t “pass health care reform” either.
He has chosen to be timid and tentative in his efforts to effect health care reform and help for small business.
Just words.
MikeBoyScout
Dennis,
All thinking people and especially any thinking person interested in political theater would find Friday’s event interesting.
But dismantling a(ll) concern troll(s) on national tee vee is just theater.
What frustrates me about our little victory dance is that the president and the Democrats only need the Republicans the president had his open dialog with Friday if they are incapable of governing with the historic majorities they have been given.
I won’t disagree with you regarding the wingnut style and form, but I’ve got to ask you two questions.
a) Why should anyone care about the ignorant arguments of a minority parliamentary faction?
b) And if there is a reason to care about the ignorant arguments of a minority parliamentary faction, how could that ever be the faction in our House of Representatives?
All good theater, but the opposition does not intend to act in good faith. This is what Luntz sees that the left does not. Obama could clean their clock every Friday and as long as the Democrats spend anytime on it, Republicans win.
TR
@change we can believe in, my ass:
You know what else are “just words”?
“Blow it out your ass.”
change we can believe in, my ass
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
The reality is this:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-d…..al-minutes
Rahm Emmanuel says that HCR won’t be dealt with now, but “after the economy”. (See Keviin Drum, above, to understand the real tragedy of this….)
It appears that Obama means well — he spoke up in support of HCR in the SOTU — but is unable to influence the Democratic congress and his chief of staff.
debit
@change we can believe in, my ass: Where you’re seeing “timid” and “tentative”, I’m seeing “assuming an overwhelming majority should be able to get their shit together long enough to pass a bill without needing their hands held.” He was wrong about that and I think he realizes it full well.
I’ve also been rather upset and disappointed with Obama the last few months, so I get where you’re coming from. However, the state of the union address convinced me he’s corrected course and changed tactics. Congress, the Senate side anyway, does needs its collective hands held along with a swat on the collective butt. They already got the butt swat (and I hope it stung). And on Friday, the republicans got a righteous paddling, which was only fair.
I don’t think everything is going to be easy, or that we’re going to get exactly what we want. But when the man is trying to do the best he can to keep our house from being foreclosed on and to make sure we can still put dinner on the table I can wait for the pony.
ETA: Oh, I see, a Rahm hater. Never mind. Doll, touched, etc etc etc
El Cid
I agree that unjustified oversimplification is not to be desired; neither is, however, weakly justified complication for the benefit of portraying oneself as somehow more balanced, more ‘holistic’ than another.
For example, in many issues, there are infinite numbers of elements — and yet, one is justified in emphasizing some elements over others. Some really are more significant in many human terms than others, yet those other elements and angles surely do exist and
And it’s something that the very wealthy and the very powerful often grasp clearly — focusing policy, rhetoric, research, and organization around their primary goals and against that which they oppose — while the interests of the less wealthy and the less powerful are often alleged to be crude, over-simplified, and intellectually undesirable if similarly represented.
In short, I feel that there is quite frequently a double standard.
Those with the most ability to manipulate our governing and ideological and economic system in their interest — the extremely powerful — use the ‘oversimplification’ argument to their own best advantage — when their interests are served by binary proposals, they emphasize the binary nature of the agenda they wish to push.
On the other hand, when it seems that a binary approach might be won by their opposition, suddenly they push very strongly for a ‘complexity’ approach.
When it came time to push for banking and financial deregulation and un-regulation, it was pushed as a prison of rules keeping us from innovating. When now re-regulation is being discussed, suddenly the system is so complicated that we face great dangers if their innovative capacities are blocked by ham-handed government.
The same is true of climate change, of health care debates, of foreign policy, you name it.
I’m all for discussing issues in whatever way appears to be empirically and theoretically justified, but I also tire of always being urged to prioritize complexity and the finding of more variables when often such an approach tends to weaken the approaches and agendas of those wishing to represent the interests of the vast majority over the most empowered few.
aimai
DougL (formerly etc…)
Don’t get excited. If the shoe doesn’t fit, you must aquit (yourself) of being the object of my post. I’m not, in fact, accusing anyone (but stuck) of being a cheerleader. I’m just observing that Obama and the Dems need to actually do some pretty scary stuff if they are going to go beyond merely humiliating the Republicans on TV. Scary stuff like getting together in a retreat, like the Republicans do, and having the President and Plouffe and Rahm lecture their whiny assess about getting shit done if they aren’t to lose their majority in 2012.
I’m thrilled that Obama did this with the Republicans and I see it as part of a clearly excellent long term strategy and all that. But no one can look at the crashing dropped ball on Health Care reform–Harkin came out and said today that they had a house/senate agreement on health care reform which could have gone back for the last vote and been on Obama’s desk but that the MA loss caused everyone in the Dem caucus to lose their fucking minds and pull back.
I don’t expect Obama to be king and I don’t fault him for not being able to make the Democrats see sense and pass their own fucking legislation in a timely manner. And perhaps he, Pelosi, and Reid think they can somehow pass HCR this year and in the long run it won’t matter. But they’ve been so crashingly wrong before–read Brian Beutler’s take on the major missteps leading up to the final nail in the coffin of the MA election–that I’ve really lost faith in their wisdom and their political acumen *as a group.* Obama has been reaching out to the right wing/independents for a long time. Its time he reached out more directly to the right and left in his own party and tried to create some party discipline. Its the only way he will get his own legislation passed. I just see the continued blog-hysteria about the left of the left as totally misplaced. Jane Hamsher isn’t responsible for the failure of HCR–the dems didn’t vote against it, or aren’t failing to pass it, because of anything the farthest left has said or done. They are dropping the fucking ball because they can’t agree that the wellbeing of the party trumps perfect legislation, or house/senate protocol.
aimai
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai:
Them sunbeams is some good shit man, here, have a snort. And I ain’t no narcissist, I just loves me some plastic Unicorn.
aimai, our idiot genius.:-)
change we can believe in, my ass
@debit:
I admire Ralm Emmanuel. I was delighted that the president chose him — a kick-ass among a bunch of fearful Democrats.
I know that Ralm uses his considerable influence and clout to advance the president’s agenda.
I wish very, very much that the president’s agenda included a commitment to health care reform.
Rahm’s reordering of priorities shows that it doesn’t.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/01/healthcare-reforms-final-minutes
debit
@change we can believe in, my ass: Dude. I haven’t had health insurance since I was laid off when the company I’d worked at for 20 fucking years closed down 6 years ago. If anyone wants health reform, I assure you, it’s me.
Blame him for not pushing hard enough, sure, but the lion’s share belongs squarely with the Senate and Harry Reid. Put the pressure there.
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai: Here is an idea. You may well think your above a dweeb like me, but if you want to challenge my commentary here, how about challenging directly one of my comments, instead of with broad smarmy insults wrapped inside your smarmy screes. Just a suggestion./ And maybe lower yourself to actually blockquote things you don’t agree with and stating exactly why.
El Cid
@aimai:
I just don’t agree. There really are fundamental interests in conflict here. We want to assume that members of the political party so many of us support really want the same things we do, but this is just not a well-supported assumption. There really are Democratic leaders whose personal ideological and other related interests motivate them more strongly than ‘party’ victory or the well-being of Americans. Of course there are. And it’s simply unfair to force us to look at such a situation and always choose to ignore obvious motivators over nebulous explanations such as ‘perfect vs. the good’ or ‘spinelessness’ or ‘cluelessness’.
We can either accept that such divisions exist and understand that really strong campaigns of mobilization, etc., would be needed to manage such fundamental policy and political conflicts into a unified fight, or we can continue to act surprised and shocked when disunity derails an agenda which might veer dangerously close to helping the vast majority more than an entrenched, super-powerful minority.
aimai
I do want to come back and say one thing about the brilliant interaction between the Representative from Utah and Obama–people don’t seem to have noticed that the particular lobbyist example Obama used to slay the Utah Rep was an *anti tobacco* lobbyist.
Chafetz, to my undying shame, is a jewish convert to mormonism. See here:
But the main point is that qua Mormon he and his constituents are rabidly anti tobacco.
aimai
aimai
General,
Its not worth blockquoting you. The only reason you figure in my comments is that you are relentlessly and, to my mind, pointlessly shit stirring with respect to other commenters and other blogs. When you say something interesting about politics in detail I generally agree with you. But most of your comments in recent months have just been the same thing over and over again: brief attacks on named or unnamed democrats who have failed to acknowledge Obama’s perfection, his hidden plans, his successes and brief brags about your own prescience, or loyalty, or superior understanding about how everything is going to work out best in this best of all possible worlds. Its not worth blockquoting this boilerplate. But it stands for something kind of pathetic and destructive to the party which is the continued assumption that our real enemies are on the left, and not the center/right.
aimai
El Cid
O/T: Watching CNN and Howard Kurtz, I’m thankful that Joan Walsh is briefly allowed on the air, but apparently David Frum, with his pin-striped suit and new ultra-black shiny hair dye is either auditioning for the next “Godfather” chapter or he really likes the look of the Tauron males on “Caprica”.
change we can believe in, my ass
@debit:
Exactly. I blame him for not pushing hard enough.
He hasn’t tried, dude. For whatever reason, he’s
not motivated.
He can act when he wants to: he’s packed his administration with friends of the financial industry and is giving them exactly what they want. From what I understand, to the point of setting the stage for another melt-down.
This HCR bill saves the country money now and works to avert the certain health-care-related fiscal catastrophe that’s coming down the road.
And people benefit – right away! – in hugely important ways.
According to this, the votes were there:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/01/healthcare-reforms-final-minutes
Where is Obama? Making fun put-downs of the Republican caucus….
aimai
El Cid,
I don’t disagree with you. The Democratic caucus, such as it is, is filled with weak, spineless, corrupt, people as well as some incredibly good people who have only limited leverage in the system. I’ve never thought the Dems actually needed us, as outsiders, to tell them what serves their interests as individual actors (that they got into power as Senators or Reps shows they know their business at the level of business) or to tell them what serves the party’s interest at the electoral level is going to be different from what serves their own.
The way the Republicans have enforced party discipline is pretty clear: they have very deep pockets that they can and do raid to support their losers when loser’s lose, and which they can offer to make up the difference between voter support and real financial freedom. I only wish the Democrats would do the same thing. Its been obvious for a while that they should have told Blanche Lincoln to “take a bullet for Health Care” and promised her either tons of money to run her re-election campaign or a great job outside of politics for a while. The biggest problem I have had with Reid as a Majority leader is his inability to get his very small caucus to stay together. Its not that I think that stuff gets done on appeals to reason or to personality or by sheer commanding character. I think that gets done with big sticks and big carrotts and the reminder that if the party goes down so too does control of committees. I presume one reason the party lacks discipline at the senatorial level is that the senators don’t fear losing total control of the chamber and headship of the relevant committees so it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if they can’t overcome the supermajority requirement?
At any rate, I agree with you that we have to have a very sophisticated view of political choicemaking and political actors to understand why the Dems don’t show party loyalty and pass their own best version of HCR and reap the obvious rewards electorally. But that being said its pretty clear that there would be really obvious rewards for all members of the caucus, and there are pretty severe problems for all of them as the result of a failure to pass HCR.
aimai
Dennis G.
@Joe Max:
As an old Deaniac myself (I was one of those day-glow orange hatted folks knocking on doors in Iowa and in the room where one could barely hear “Dean’s scream” over the crowd), I can see the critique, but I’m not sure I buy it.
There will always be infighting in DC and in the Democratic Party. Dean and his team were always going to be replace by any new President with his or her team. This was not a surprise.
Now I wish that President Obama had a better working relationship with Dean. And I wish that Howard had a more formal role in the Administration, but if that is the basis of the lingering resentment that some feel towards President Obama I think they’re just being WATB. I’ve seen zero evidence that Dean is acting out of resentment, but then again I’ve always thought he was firmly grounded in reality.
Dean has been a strong advocate for a PO in HCR and for getting the most progressive Bill possible, but he has not jumped the line into crazyland (IMHO). I’m sure that some will disagree with that view.
Cheers
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai: OK, just so I get this right. Yours and others relentless criticism that Obama is to blame for just about everything that has gone wrong on the planet and the democratic agenda is rightious and good for the party, and we Obots are the real problem standing in the way of your wisdom getting through to Obama making him do shit right. And then, all of a sudden, Obama does what he’s been doing all along except this time on national teevee to a large group of wingnut CC’rs, Obama becomes the Commanding Figure you have pined for for so long and now you are happy in spite of we Obots best efforts to scuttle your wise message. Talk about narcissistic.
And it is a cowardly way to debate by proclamation of inferiority of your opponent. BTW, and is not part of BJ way imho.
El Cid
aimai:
I agree that there would be rewards to many leading elected Democrats and the party establishment and consultancy class in passing effective HCR, and that there would be negative consequences for not passing HCR.
Yet the opposite is true as well — there would be negative consequences for many leading elected Democrats and leaders of the party establishment and the consultancy class if any type of effective HCR is passed, and obvious rewards if either effective HCR is not passed or what is passed is ineffective.
We cannot simply assume that the decision matrix motivating identifiable powerful Democrats (etc) are the same that we would prefer. This isn’t cynicism — there are reasons why over the decades there has been such enormous power elite focus over managing who takes over key positions of the legislative leadership.
I disagree that it’s the same for Republicans — you just don’t find the same sorts of fundamental conflicts and contrary motivations among Republicans. It’s not that it’s there but party discipline is ruthlessly enforced; it’s that the Republicans are much more as a party and as individual leaders are much more united at fundamental policy levels than are Democrats.
Where are the Republicans who will suffer any negative consequences, party-wise or individual, if effective HCR is not passed? I don’t think there are any. Maybe I’m forgetting somebody, but I can think of a Republican elected official in any leadership position who would gain from the passage of effective HCR. You could game out weakly positive potentials for an Olympia Snowe type, but that would lose to the much greater probabilities of political losses.
So, we have one party whose decision matrix is pretty simple and fairly uniform, and another party where it’s much more complex and not at all uniform.
Yes, again, I would prefer that all leading Democrats agree to accept the priorities that I would prefer and that would be better for their party and the nation, but I do not think this reflects reality.
JAHILL10
@ Dennis G #106
Dean jumped it only once in my opinion when he joined the “kill the bill” crowd. But that was about the only time when he left the reality based community and entered the “we’ll get something better if we start from scratch” magical thinking fairlyland where after a bruising year of working through this legislation, Congress would want to start all over again. This time with feeling!
JAHILL10
BTW, call your representatives tomorrow and tell them to pass the damn bill.
KDP
@cathaireverywhere: Yes, I’d like to see more of this too. Unfortunately, if they watch Fox, they’ll see little of these exchanges as evidenced by Friday’s switchover from broadcast to commentary when it became clear that the Republicans were not about to put Obama ‘in his place.’
Hmmm, of course, if Obama provided a comparable a$$kicking to Democratic leadership, Fox would probably broadcast it in its entirety. Anyone want to take a bet?
@Dmitry: I heard on NPR this morning that the Prime Minister of Haiti must now approve all transfers of children off of the island. I hope this may help to minimize trafficking by Mormons, Christianists, and other opportunists.
aimai
Stuck,
I don’t get the “you and yours.?” I’m a stone democrat, have always been, will always be. I haven’t worked to undermine any of Obama’s initiatives. If I don’t share your utter and pointless hysterical contempt for everyone to the left of me that doesn’t push me into the camp of “kill the bill.” And I really think that accusing me of being unfair to you after you routinely make remarks like “aimai: our resident idiot” is a bit rich.
But in any event I agree with Jahill10, and wanted to post that now is an excellent time to call not only our democratic representatives but all republican reps as well. The thrust of Obama’s message to the Republicans was “be afraid, be very afraid, that when your constituents realize you have no ideas, and are not intending to do anything about their problems, they’ll boot you.” And, indeed, the republicans in that room implicitly recognized that danger. Tom Price’s question to Obama was, essentially, “can’t you help us out with our own conservative voters by not making us look like complete fools?” The Republicans have to worry that their own constituents will turn on them not just from the teabagger side but from the independent/get something done side. Now is a good moment to besiege your reps, if they are republicans, and say “I heard you guys talking to President Obama and that dude is starting to make sense to me…” Individually some Republicans may be peeled off and once the logjam of Republican caucus intransigence is broken I don’t think they can get it back.
aimai
Dennis G.
@aimai: @MikeBoyScout:
In and of itself the importance of this Q & A with the GOP can be over-hyped, but I think it was a critical moment in the politics of this year.
The GOP decide last year to run the 1993-1994 playbook as their best chance to regain power. This plan requires that you obstruct everything that you can, inflame populist anger and stand united as a Party that just says NO.
This worked in 1994 in large part because the Democrats were engaged in infighting and as a result, they did not notice what the GOP was doing until it was too late to respond. One could make a reasonable case that this trend from 1994 was also being repeated and the election of Scott Brown is evidence that might support that idea.
The Q & A was a sign that the GOP will not get to run their 1994 game plan without opposition. Confronting the Republicans and their talking points the way that the President did should be a cause of concern for GOP mavens from Rove to Luntz to Ailes and the elected puppets they manipulate from McCain to Boehner to McConnell to Pence.
The Q & A was a good sign that Republicans will need to calculate a political cost for their 1994 strategy. It is only a sign and more will need to happen if the GOP’s obstruction is going to become a problem for them.
An important thing will be what the Democrats in the House and Senate decide to do. Will they act or will they run for the hills? While the President is fighting, we are still waiting for Congress to act. Passing the Damn Bill would be a sign that Democrats in Congress have decided not to repeat their mistakes of 1994. If they do that, the GOP’s plan will melt like the snow.
Another benefit of what the Q & A is that it inspires some journalists to ask the Republicans some harder questions. Not many, but a few more than usual on the Sunday shows. Time will tell if any of this will stick.
Cheers
dengre
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai:
My problem with you is that you are aloof and arrogant, and your positions and criticisms change with the weather from what they were yesterday. Therefore somewhat different than mine and others critique of the Jane Hamsher’s of the left crowd. Just to make that clear.
Maybe that’s because you are a front pager on other blogs and don’t realize you’re are in the comment section of Balloon Juice. We debate each other as equals here, and specific to specific comments we make.
aimai
El Cid,
Yeah, I don’t disagree. But I guess what I’m arguing is that pessimism, however correct, doesn’t get anything done politically. Just because pessimism tends to give up. I’m not all hopey/changey because I’m pretty pessimistic myself. But all the research on optimism vs. pessimism leads to the conclusion that while we pessimists have a more realistic view of things optimists tend to get stuff done, sometimes surprisingly good or surprisingly surprising stuff done just because they are willing to get out of bed in the morning and try the next thing. I’m influenced here by the work of Martin Seligmann.
In terms of childrearing Seligmann advises trying to raise an optimistic child because such children don’t give up, while pessimistic ones do. He advises us not to totalize situations or people, calling them all bad or all good, because that makes it too hard to deal with them or change them. He argues that being able to break up a situation or a goal into smaller, more managable parts, enables children to find a way to get to their goal in a stepwise way. I find the same to be true of politics. There are definitely bad actors, but even they are amenable to pressure. There are definitely bottlenecks and complexities to getting legislation passed, but even these are subject to rational review and critical thought and, eventually, can be broken down into a manageable path to success (of course, maybe not).
So I guess, politically speaking, I prefer to think like a critical pessimist and act like an optimist.
aimai
Stuck
Who cares whether you think I’m “aloof and arrogant?” I mean, really–do *you* even care? Its not an important criticism–hell, its not even a meaningful criticism in the context of blog posts and political commentary.
aimai
D'Andrea
@El Cid:
I grew up in the very deep south in the 1950’s and 60’s.
Your comment reminds me of people’s acceptance of that status quo.
They were fine people — my parents among them — but their attitude and actions reflected “this is just the way things are and always have been….”
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai: Hey, you are the one that attacked me with the label narcissistic, which, btw, doesn’t seem the right perjorative to me. I much prefer cultist or maybe idol worshipper, seems more accurate to your stereotyping. And it doesn’t matter if I care or not about your aloofness, it is what I wanted to say and did. I like you aimai, just consider it friendly advice.:)
D'Andrea
@El Cid:
I grew up in the very deep south in the 1950’s and 60’s.
Your comment reminded me of people’s acceptance of that status quo.
“It’s too bad, but it’s always been this way, is this way for a reason, and is never going to change….”
colby
“According to this, the votes were there”
Actually, “this” doesn’t say that at all. It says the negotiators reached an agreement, but that doesn’t mean “the voters were there”. No one can say for certain that the Stupakers would accept the Senate’s abortion language. No one can say for certain that Lieberman and Nelson would’ve stayed on board (remember, the intra-Senate negotiations found an agreement, too, before Lieberman needed to punch a DFH). They had an agreement, sure- but Harkin doesn’t say a word about a whip count.
MikeBoyScout
@Dennis G.:
Thanks for responding, but let’s think this through.
“The Q & A was a sign that the GOP will not get to run their 1994 game plan without opposition.”
Surely, you and I agree that this is not the first sign. Surely you and I agree that Obama cleaned their clock.
“Confronting the Republicans and their talking points the way that the President did should be a cause of concern for GOP mavens…”
Really? Why? Will it turn wingnutia against the Republicans? Will independents and Dems get reinvigorated with Hope & Change enthusiasm?
“The Q & A was a good sign that Republicans will need to calculate a political cost for their 1994 strategy.”
Ah, the nub of it. Where is there a shred of evidence that there has been or will be any political cost to the scorched earth, just say no strategy?
If there is to be a cost, I posit that the president and the Dems assign one.
“Another benefit of what the Q & A is that it inspires some journalists to ask the Republicans some harder questions.”
Ponies and rainbows? Which journalists who have not already asked hard questions do you expect to start?
Seriously, doesn’t Fox’s cutting away go to show that the infotainment industry we kindly call journalists will go on its merry way as it always does?
Look, the only thing the Q&A provides the president and the Dems is recorded prima facie case to stick it to the Republican obstructionists. This plus good theater is really all we got on Friday. sorry.
D'Andrea
testing….
aimai
Stuck,
This is not about you and me. I used your posts as an example of the kind of pointless attack rhetoric that doesn’t really do any good, on blogs or in real life. Its not just tedious to read one or two lines attacking imaginary bad leftists and bad democrats because they fixate on Rahm, or attack Obama, or whatever. Its bad politics. If you think people are out on the ledge (and some of them appear to be) saying “I’m going to jump [out of the democratic party, out of voting, out of faith that Obama and the Dems will keep their promises”] the politically smart thing to do is to *try to talk them off the ledge* not continue to shout “jump you stupid bastards, jump.” This is the way I read your posts. When the political conversation is going along merrilly, such as when most of the blog commenters are agreed that they are happy with something Obama has done, you almost always take it upon yourself to, essentially, troll the other commenters and other blogs by insisting that somewhere else, or some other poster, is crazee, leftist, kill the bill, anti obama or whatever the fuck else fantasy enemy you think you have on the left. Of course such people exist–at FDL and Kos or generally in the bloggosphere. But what is the function of making fun of/attacking these people? Obama just went to the Republican Caucus and spoke politely to them even as he handed them their heads on a platter. Because that’s good politics. Listening respectfully to what people have to say, and what they think they are doing, is an important part of building and holding together a coalition. This as true for Obama voters and supporters on the left as it is for independents in the center/right.
Its true that I didn’t attack Jane Hamsher as early and as vociferously as some–I think that’s what you are alluding to when you claim that I’m inconsistent. But as I’ve pointed out in connection to all negotiations over the bill “time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.” Early on in the negotiations for the content of the Senate Bill I thought there was some utility *for Obama and Reid* in having a strong left pull against which they could bargain. I saw Jane and other progressive actors as an important part of the overall negotiations for the best bill.
After Jane and her site became more disaffected, angry, and dangerous to the bill *in its later incarnation* and when the timeline had slipped I absolutely never supported her or what she was doing. In fact, SteveM and I delinked her site. I was particularly opposed to the smearing of individual political actors, such as Grubner, with accusations of corruption and bad faith. I am also opposed to the smearing of Rahm as corrupt or acting in bad faith. I think he’s bad at his job *as it was described to us* but I don’t think its because he’s a bad person or not committed to Obama’s agenda and I don’t approve of any attacks on Rahm or his position as chief of staff, or personally. I think its wrong to personify policy differences or to attribute to malice what can better be explained by incompetence or the collision of a complex set of competing demands, institutions, and actors.
aimai
Joe Max
@Dennis G.:
That describes my friend to a ‘T’. She was there too (I wouldn’t even be surprised if you even her – a petite, redheaded, whipsmart woman from California named Ellen.) But I don’t make the news, I only report it. I didn’t really buy it either, and I told her much of what you said here myself.
It seems that in the period from 2004 to 2006 those people like yourself and Ellen did staff the offices that made the “50-state strategy” happen. And then the rise of the O-bots replaced them (a lot of them, anyway) and they resented it, as it looked like a bunch of johnny-come-latelies taking over what they had worked so hard for. But you’re absolutely right, that’s the way it works in national party politics.
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai:
I take pride in going against our blog host who has mercilessly defended the manic progressives against the mindless Obama cultists that support Obama in spite of BO’s constant fuck up fails, and not following aimai’s sage advice. And I say drat on the fiendish Cole blasting those of us demanding evidence of Obama FAIL. Whas up with that anyway?
Nope not all, I think you are inconsistent on your general analysis of current events. One day you tell us there is no swing vote center and no point in attempting bipartisanship, and after Obama gives a dressing down to wingers with carrots as well as sticks, and link to one of your blog posts on “romance” or some nonsense with excoriation of Obama’s style that at least equals my excoriation of the “tiny” number of internet progs foaming with anti-Obama meme making. And then obama gives a lecture to wingers saying pretty much what he has all along, except this time on teevee, and presto, obama is cool again and the shrieking stops on a dime until the next issue, and we will go through the whole inane theater again. I say, although the number of screamers on the tubes is very very small, they are loud and the MSM is always looking for a intraparty dissent meme to flog. That can hurt, and can validate the wingers perennial opposition.
And your “Commanding Figure” comment was a classic in meme making for the opposition to use. You know, wingnuts, the real enemy that I’ve been, and Cole has been screaming about for months, not searching every rock for a reason to criticize Obama that does the wingers work for them, as well as many other rational Balloon Juicers.
Macha Maguire
It’s cool… but what I heard/read was an honest, decent man doing his utmost utterly to change the game. And what I’ve read since, are his supporters going back to the old game.
is it not possible that somehow, enough people can stop taking sides to make the whole deal different?
that’s what he’s trying for. And that’s what needs to happen. He’s the only politician pretty much anywhere in the world since Gandhi who’s trying this. There must be ways to help, surely?
General Winfield Stuck
@aimai: And I will admit to occasional gratuitous prog bashing past the point of necessary. I am working on that, with moderate success.
Though I have no doubt we will replay again the shrieking obama fail sooner rather than later. But the relative peace should be a cease fire from me for now.:)
Mnemosyne
@change we can believe in, my ass:
Funny, I remember just a couple of weeks ago that Kevin Drum was an example of someone who was totally wrong about needing to pass the Senate bill because he was totally wrong about Iraq so therefore he would never be right about anything again ever, QED.
Now he’s the last honest man.
Jim Once
@Darkrose:
Yeah, same here. Season 3 in one night, no less. I’ve read all of Weir’s previous books, am currently on her new one re Anne Boleyn. (God, I love my Kindle.) The absolute best, most recent Tudor fiction is Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Cannot wait for the sequel.
AkaDad
@change we can believe in, my ass:
I guess you weren’t paying attention to the SOTU address where he proposed to give TARP money to communtiy banks specifically to loosen up credit for small businesses.
Some people would say you were being disingenuous, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
change we can believe in, my ass
@AkaDad:
Obama has said a great many good things.
Tim I
@Violet:
I saw ‘Crazy Heart’ last night also. It was a great movie. Jeff Bridges has my vote for Best Actor, though Maggie Gylenhall was terrific, as well.
Anonsters
@General Winfield Stuck:
Or equating Obama letting Bush ongoing court cases play themselves out in the judicial system as being akin to obama also breaking the law by not dropping them because liberals are pressuring him to which would amount to the same politicization of the DOJ that the Bushies were guilty of.
…I sincerely hope you were having a moment where you just needed to vent and so didn’t really stop and think about what you were typing. Because the emboldened (ha) part is, well, wildly inaccurate. Not to mention wrong.
Yes, by the system we have. The system in which the rules of evidence and procedure are routinely examined, restated, modified, created, eliminated. The system in which one presents arguments about what certain evidentiary privileges mean, how far they extend, what they should and shouldn’t cover and why or why not. Not the system in which one is required to sit by and be silent, because the cases are “in the system.”
If you need evidence of how the rules aren’t set in stone, and that they change, and that it is the courts who change them based on evaluating competing arguments, with specific reference to the state secrets privilege, see Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan in the 9th Circuit (PDF warning).
General Winfield Stuck
@Anonsters:
If I could I would double down the bolding that you make on my quote. Courts, Judges and juries decide stuff of legal controversy. Now maybe, or maybe there is merit to the claims made by either side in these cases. But since they are in the system, or were when Obama took office, I will say again. FOR OBAMA TO PULL THE CASES NOW BECAUSE THE LEFT WANTS HIM TO IS INJECTING POLITICS INTO THE DOJ, LIKE BUSH WOULD DO.
There, now, I did it. doubled down.
And you make my argument for me. The courts do change the rules, absent of clear congressional intent, or law. The cases are in the motherfucking courts now. New law is pending to clarify how and when the SS can be used.
goatchowder
The teleprompter thing is pure Republican projection.
They do that. Republicans are notorious for accusing Democrats of WANTING or TRYING to do things the the Republicans have been ACTUALLY DOING for years or decades. It was a Rove specialty too; he used to do it with hand-rubbing glee.
You name it: sex, corruption, fascism, statism, socialism, raising taxes, inflating the deficit, shredding the Constitution– all these things Republicans are accusing Democrats of TRYING to do, the Republicans have actually been doing for decades.
“Death panels” is my favorite of the recent ones: we have had death panels for decades, and they’re called “insurance company claims review clerks”. Pre-existing condition– no health care for you!
Republican projection worked great for a long time, because it used to cause Democrats to get al flummoxed and incoherent and defensive and start denying that, no, they didn’t ever beat their wives, nor were they trying to. Ancient political trick, updated for the last 30 years of Republican projection.
But people are starting to get wise to it. We have a few scrappy Democrats like Alan Grayson and Al Franken who give it right back and hit back really hard.
And Obama is in a class by himself, he’s unflappable, and he doesn’t fall for this at all. He just calmly and expertly dismantles the projection, as above.
If you’ve ever watched the “Joe the Plumber” exchange, it’s stunning. Sam the not-really-a-plumber was basically lying out his ass and projecting, and Obama did just like what he did here: calmly dismantled the guy. Sam had no business. Sam wasn’t making $250k/year. Sam had no clue what the hell he was talking about. Sam wasn’t even named Joe. Obama had his number within seconds.
Anonsters
@General Winfield Stuck:
Do you think that cases just happen in courts by themselves? That they magically pop up like mushrooms and the judges just go about their business adjudicating these random appearances?
Cases in courts have to be argued by the parties. In several instances one of the parties is, that’s right, the United States government, represented by DoJ. That requires DoJ to go to court and make arguments about the scope and extent of state secrets, for example, or any other issue you can imagine, including executive power. The arguments DoJ makes in those cases will depend on the sitting president’s view of the issues.
Why do you think that the D.C. federal district courts allowed for a certain delay in the GITMO habeas cases when Obama was just coming into office? The courts acknowledged that there were likely to be new or different policies with the new administration, which would change the complexion of the legal arguments made in the GITMO habeas cases. They acknowledged that some of the issues being litigated may be rendered moot by new positions taken by the DoJ.
Changing the arguments you make before a court because the party you represent has a different view of the issue is not injecting politics into the DoJ in the way Bush wanted to do. Bush wanted people in the DoJ who would aggressively pursue a partisan Republican agenda, who would harass or prosecute Democrats and leave Republican politicians alone. Bush injected politics into DoJ by making political party relevant to whether you were hired as a career civil service employee, like asking people applying for internships or positions in U.S. attorney offices who they voted for, etc. That is injecting politics into the DoJ. Changing the arguments you make to reflect a different view of the legal issues is not injecting politics into the DoJ, not in the relevant sense you mean.
We’re not talking about ordering a particular U.S. Attorney to suspend the criminal prosecution of a particular person or something. The U.S. Attorneys are supposed to make those decisions themselves. What we’re talking about is making new arguments to courts to reflect Obama’s purportedly different policies.
If you dispute that, cite examples, because those are the only types of cases I know of that people of my persuasion are particularly annoyed with Obama about.
Anonsters
@General Winfield Stuck:
I missed commenting on that little pearl of wisdom.
You glided right over the whole point I was making: courts don’t just up and decide to change the rules because, hey, it feels like a good day to go ahead and change some rules.
Courts are there to adjudicate cases and controversies. Adjudication means resolving disputes. A dispute requires two parties. In our adversarial system, the two parties make arguments to courts, and the courts rule (ostensibly) on the basis of who has the better arguments, or which side is right (or more right than the other).
That means that the parties have to make arguments.
The arguments a party makes are going to be based on the outcome they desire. If I want outcome X, and y & z are reasons that would tend to establish X, I’m going to argue y & z. If I want outcome A, and b & c are arguments tending to establish A, I’m not going to argue y & z, now am I?
If Obama did not want to maintain the Bush status quo on state secrets, or executive power, or war powers, the arguments the Obama administration makes before the courts would be different than the ones Bush’s administration did, because they would be seeking different results.
General Winfield Stuck
@Anonsters: How do you know the Bush government is hiding crimes? I suspect they are, as do you, but we don’t really know for sure. All we know is the ACLU claims it does. There is a question of legal precedent at question here, and if Obama were to just pull the plug, it would set one. And the next time someone got a bug up their ass and wanted the government to turn over their secrets, just to make sure, they would only have to use these cases being dropped as the default position. I think Obama is just letting the Judicial system set that default position instead of him doing it at the behest of his political parties base, and I support that.
Here is the thing. Folks like you and me screamed loudly and rightly so of Bush breaches in separation of powers with not only the Judicial Branch, but the Legislative one as well. Obama promised to return to the right principles of doing that devoid of pol expediency of the Executive branch. I think that is what he is doing, and the only way to restore such sanctity to the system is to stop doing it wrong. Which is to me Obama bending to cries from the left to do their bidding. The courts are what we have to decide these things, and they are doing that. And the Congress has pending leg to clarify the whole use of SS priv./ Until then, let the courts do their work which is what we pay them for.
General Winfield Stuck
@Anonsters:
all of these things already existed before Bush and now. The status quo for Bush’s use of them was to abuse them and is sorta the topic of this thread.
You seem to be conflating Bush’s abuse of these provisions with Obama using them without abusing them. Unless you have solid evidence he is. And my previous comment states what I think Obama is doing with these legacy lawsuits, so no need to rehash them again. He is letting the courts decide their fate and validity. No more, no less, IMHO>
Anonsters
@General Winfield Stuck:
And I think you’re just wrong about that, and your comments suggest to me that you don’t understand how our legal system works.
You continually miss the point that courts don’t just “do their work” in a vacuum. The courts decide cases based on evidence and arguments (either or both, depending on what level we’re talking about). Those are not presented in some pristine, “objective” way. They are presented by advocates. One side tries to persuade the court to do it their way, the other side tries to persuade the court to do it their way. The way you present your case is entirely up to you.
The point is that Bush made aggressive and shockingly broad arguments on all those fronts. That is the Bush status quo. Yes, they existed, but the arguments Bush made to justify his positions were extreme.
Um, no. They would have the various doctrines as they presently exist. Whether to take a case to court is not simply a matter of law. It’s a matter of policy. Even for criminal cases. What do you think “prosecutorial discretion” means in that context? In the context we’re talking about, i.e. civil cases, it’s even more a matter of policy, policy that is routinely determined at the highest levels of government.
Promises don’t mean anything without action.
Indefinite detention without trial, trials by military commissions still planned, continuing extreme claims of secrecy, denials of habeas corpus.
Perhaps it’s not unreasonable to conflate use with abuse in these cases.
General Winfield Stuck
@Anonsters: I understand what you are saying. You want Obama to drop SS claims that brought about these lawsuits. And you want Obama to accept your argument, or change it to yours and the ACLU’s to open these secret files because they may contain evidence of wrongdoing. And he should drop the governments claim, out of hand? really? because you agree with the plaintiff and are right just because you say you are. I am not a lawyer, but I worked closely with government lawyers in bringing and defending against civil lawsuits for quite a few years, and testified as a government witness many times. So I am not that unfamiliar with the topic.
And yes, cases are brought and adjudicate based on evidence and argument. But you left out the part that those things are also decided on by a non partial entity. The court, judges and juries. And I realize the tricky nature of SS cases and some judges not wanting to even consider the evidence out of deference to the Gov.. But this is the system we have. Until there is new laws passed out of Congress to clarify the SS conundrum.
We will just have to disagree on this, though I understand your frustration, I reject completely your assertion that Obama is preserving the status quo so maybe he can do the same thing. This is the mindless projection of Obama bashing of his being like Bush that I oppose, every time. You need evidence to make those claims, and letting these cases proceed to let the courts make the call is not that. It is not covering up anything, it is not Obama being Bush, much as you want to allege. Just isn’t, But you are free to allege it and I am free to knock it down. Carry on.
Anonsters
@General Winfield Stuck:
I don’t think I ever said that he was preserving the status quo so that he could do the same thing.
I’m troubled by the precedent being there at all, without being altered. So my desire is to see Bush’s arguments repudiated and put to bed as extreme and harmful, not preserved, or left floating in this sort of vague, ill-defined way. I don’t trust any politician, on principle. Letting past arguments stand without repudiation is not a good way to go.
Do I think Obama wants to do the same things Bush did? Not really. Do I trust that he won’t? Absolutely not. And that has nothing to do with Obama per se. That just has to do with my unwillingness to trust politicians tout court.
Of course, it doesn’t help when you see that American citizens are being listed on JSOC/CIA’s target list for killing, per Obama’s instruction. That is deeply troubling to me. On the other hand, I’ll give him props when I think he’s due them: like releasing the OLC memos, etc.
[Edit: Ok, maybe I drifted towards saying that he was maintaining the status quo in order to make use of it in my last comment, when I said that perhaps it’s not unreasonable to conflate use and abuse. But I didn’t mean to imply that Obama = Bush. Just that these troubling practices are being held over, whatever Obama’s motives may be.]