I’ve read several reports stating the budget will be 100 billion more than last year, but aren’t the Afghan/Iraq wars included instead of being supplementals? If that is the case, the budget is actually, using the accounting bullshit of the Bush years, 50 billion less?
Black Jimmy Carter
State of the Union Programming Note
Hulu is going to livestream tonight’s SOTU address and the Republican response. I’m going to try watching it there, because I’ve had trouble with drop-outs and freeze-ups on the “serious” online channels (CNN/MSNBC) during previous Presidential speeches.
And for a little schadenfreude, EventheWingnuttiest Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-‘Prosperity’) has begun a walkback on attending the National Teabaggers Convention. Probably just miffed that Palin is gettin’ paid and nobody offered Michele an ‘honorarium’, but still.
Things Will Burn
If this happens, they might as well all resign en masse:
Perhaps that will be true for health reform, though no one has any real clarity yet about what the path forward is. But for the larger progressive agenda, including initiatives like immigration reform, cap and trade, and LGBT issues, the aftershocks of Brown’s win may be far more detrimental.
One Capitol Hill veteran I spoke with on Friday was particularly pessimistic, for instance, about the prospects that the White House will push for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” this year.
“I’m getting the sense they will try to ignore this as long as possible and then they will maybe trot out some commission to delay it another year if they are forced to do anything,” said the person. “It will be fascinating to see what the LGBT community does if they do this.”
You thought things were volatile now- wait for this to go down and Obama might as well just resign. It won’t matter that the last couple of weeks it has been the progressives trying to scuttle HCR, the attitude will be “first they failed on health care, gitmo is still open, now they screwed us on DADT.”
Things will get ugly, particularly for bloggers given the loud voice gay rights advocates have in the liberal blogosphere.
And don’t get me wrong- things should burn. Obama and his team and our Congress critters really do seem intent on staying in the fetal position until the Republicans have the House and Senate under their control.
I Take It Back- He Gets It
Ok, glad I didn’t slit my wrists after that NYT piece. This interview with Obama was reassuring:
OBAMA: No — well — absolutely. No, keep in mind the point that I’m making here.
It was the right thing to do for us to salvage the financial system, and I make no apologies for that, at all. But we knew at the time how politically toxic that was.
What it gave people a sense of is, “We’re spending all this money, but I’m not getting any help.”
And, “Gosh — I wanted Obama to come in there to start making sure that I was getting help; not the big special-interest and the institutions.”
Now if I tell them, “Well, it turns out that we will actually have gotten TARP paid back and that we’re going to make sure that a fee’s imposed on the big banks, so that this thing will cost taxpayers not a dime,” that’s helpful. But it doesn’t eliminate the sense that their voices aren’t heard, and that institutions are betraying them.
And I think that’s been expressing itself all year. And they’ve gotten increasingly frustrated over the course of the year.
So I take complete responsibility for the fact that — A — we had to salvage a financial system that could have made things much worse. We had to take the steps that we did at the beginning of the year, in order to stabilize the economy.
And I am actually glad to see that the economy’s now growing again, and we have the prospect of a much better economy in 2010. But that doesn’t negate the anger and the frustration that people are feeling.
Read the whole thing.
Now I’m Ready to Fire Rahm
With Democrats reeling from the Republican victory in the Massachusetts special Senate election, President Obama on Wednesday signaled that he might be willing to set aside his goal of achieving near-universal health coverage for all Americans in favor of a stripped-down measure with bipartisan support.
Could someone please point out that not one Republican is going to vote for any HCR, because they simply want you to fail. The guy who got elected last night? He ran as the 41st vote to stop HCR.
What is this? Battered spouse syndrome? Stockholm syndrome? What is the name for this delusion? WTF are these guys thinking?
*** Update ***
LOL. Fair enough. I confess to being consistently inconsistent. I blame the pain pills.
Bust out the cardigans
Not to pat ourselves on the back, but we’ve been talking about this idiotic meme for weeks:
Like every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy, President Obama is battling the perception that he’s a wimp on national security.
It’s not just coming from Republicans (for example, Dick Cheney’s accusation that Mr. Obama is trying to pretend that the country isn’t at war). Now barbs are coming from the center too. This week’s Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative cover: Mr. Obama next to Jimmy Carter with — gasp — an “equals” sign in the middle. New York Times/CBS polling shows that public approval of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy dropped 9 points to 50 percent between last April and November. Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on the Daily Beast blog two weeks ago that Mr. Obama needs to toughen up with his adversaries. “He puts far too much store on being the smartest guy in the room,” Mr. Gelb wrote. “He’d do well to remember that Jimmy Carter also rang all the I.Q. bells.”
Personally, I’m not sure how CFR qualifies as centrist, or why anyone takes the group seriously at all: Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s plenty of smart people there, but you’re only as serious as your craziest senior fellow, in my book.
Update. CFR probably does qualify as centrist. Its president, Richard Haas, was fairly anti-Iraq war (mostly after the fact, but still).
More 11 Dimensional Chess to Screw Progressives
Last week we learned that Obama, in what can be described only as AMAZING foresight, nominated Dawn Johnsen at the beginning of the year to appease progressives, and then killed her nomination just to show those progressives who is boss. Or to secure Senate votes for HCR. Or because he is actually George Bush II and doesn’t want her there, but wants credit for nominating her. Or because he secretly hates progressives and figured this was a good way to hurt them. Depending on what your flavor of conspiracy kool-aid is, it is one of those or maybe a combination of all of them. At any rate, it was, we were informed, a major betrayal to the people who elected him (funny enough, the people who are always telling us “they” elected Obama are always the ones angriest with him):
Barack Obama and Harry Reid owe an explanation to both Dawn Johnsen, and the voters who worked so hard to elect them, as to why they intentionally left Johnsen’s critical nomination out in the cold so long, and then killed it outright. The main media in the United States owe their readers the duty to ask the questions and demand answers. That much, at a minimum, is owed to the citizens.
Apparently he had so much fun stabbing the left wing in the back he is going to do it again:
Two sources with knowledge of the situation told HuffPost that they expected the re-nominations to be announced soon. But administration officials emphasized that no decisions have been made as of yet. Senate Democratic aides, meanwhile, said they were in the dark about where those nominations stood. The president can not officially re-submit a nominee until the Senate reconvenes on January 20, unless he is pursuing a recess appointment.
In the daily briefing on Tuesday, Gibbs said he did not “know what decisions have been made about nominees that have, as a result of being — having passed a year, need to be re-nominated.”
According to sources, however, the names of those people whose nominations were held up during the past year and are likely to be re-nominated include:
Dawn Johnsen, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel
Christopher Schroeder, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy
Mary Smith, Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division
Craig Becker, National Labor Relations Board
Louis Butler, U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Wisconsin
Edward Chen, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California
David Teeples, Army brigadier general
Over here at Balloon Juice, where we are all Obots, alternate theories prevail- such as Obama really wanted her confirmed, but was occupied or misread the level of Republican perfidy in the Senate. Those theories, which do not absolve Obama but also do not automatically assume the worst of Rahm Obama and take on the paranoid belief that Obama hates progressives, so they should probably be dismissed.
And before I leave, let me present you the obvious spin for the people who were peddling this nonsense last week- “Of course he wants her re-nominated! He saw how important our voices were when we screamed in outrage last week.” Which, of course, is more nonsense, as Obama has been holding strong with liberals all year.
And no, I am not writing this to just pick on progressives or to troll my website. I want my reality-based community back. Where did you all go? Or, to paraphrase commenter Cleek (who, btw, has an excellent blog YOU SHOULD VISIT!), “Show me on the doll where Rahm touched you.” Please come back. I liked working WITH you.
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