According to my twitter feed, Obama’s deal in Copenhagen is a sham and a failure. Can we just impeach him and install Hillary already?
Black Jimmy Carter
Home Free
And while we were all arguing about the Lieberman/Nelson Hippie Retribution and Anti-Abortion Act of 2009, look what happened:
A Congressional tax standoff has opened a window of opportunity for wealthy Americans determined to avoid paying up post-mortem.
With lawmakers unable to agree on a year-end fix for a quirk in the Bush-era tax cuts, the federal estate tax is set to be repealed for one year as of Jan. 1, meaning that those who suffer a timely death could escape the usual certainty of taxes.
Not like we could have used that money or anything. You do have to appreciate the fact that the Republicans are still achieving the legislative goals even in the minority. Personally, I blame Obama for not using the bully pulpit and think a stronger President like Hillary would have never let this happen.
More at LGM.
Welfare Queens
It’s not about a salary it’s all about reality:
The federal government quietly agreed to forgo billions of dollars in potential tax payments from Citigroup as part of the deal announced this week to wean the company from the massive taxpayer bailout that helped it survive the financial crisis.
The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued an exception to longstanding tax rules for the benefit of Citigroup and the few other companies partially owned by the government. As a result, Citigroup will be allowed to retain $38 billion in tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value when the government sells its stake to private investors.
While the Obama administration has said taxpayers likely will profit from the sale of the Citigroup shares, accounting experts said the lost tax revenue could easily outstrip those profits.
But, you know, Taibbi was wrong about Rubin. And he may have said fuck.
*** Update ***
Marci Wheeler tweets- “Wonder if he got a CBO score first?”
*** Update #2 ***
Commenter J. Michael Neal says I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, and after reading his comment, I tend to agree with him. If he is right, there is no reason to be worked up about this. I can’t think about the bankers rationally anymore and need to wait an hour or two after I read something before I post.
The Last Eight Years Never Happened
You can’t fight a successful war unless the commander-in-chief is fully committed to it. So President Obama’s chief task in his speech Tuesday night on Afghanistan is to make it absolutely clear that he is.
***It’s true that Obama championed Afghanistan as the “good war” in his presidential campaign last year. And as recently as August, he called it “a war of necessity.” But his painful, three-month deliberation on what to do in Afghanistan severely undermined his prior statements.
The point is legitimate doubts about Obama’s tenacity in Afghanistan — his level of commitment — abound in the military, among allies whom Obama wants to deploy more troops, and with the American public. More than anything else, he needs to lay those doubts to rest in his address.
So despite the fact that the previous administration almost completely ignored Afghanistan for the last two terms, and the fact that it was Obama who immediately rushed more supplies and personnel to Afghanistan upon his inauguration, because Obama has not immediately followed through with the next neo-con wet dream and instead took a couple months to determine the best course of action, he has a credibility problem.
Up is down with these people, and I simply can’t believe they can say or write this crap without bursting out in laughter. They have to know how full of shit they are. They just have to.
And again, Sullivan:
If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama’s middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.
Is there any doubt that this is exactly what is going to happen?
We are all Vulcans now
John Harris, in a list of ways to attack Obama that Republicans may find helpful:
Too much Leonard Nimoy
[…..]But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.
Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.
Are there other first-world countries where the media spends a lot of time worrying that its leaders are too rational?
The next two criticisms are, by the way, in order “The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols” and “But some of the same insider circles that are starting to view Obama as a bully are also starting to whisper that he’s a patsy.”
The Village attacks on Obama are just as inconsistent as the winger attacks.
Where did the dithering start?
I did some searchers on “dithering” in the New York Times and Washington Post archives. In the Times, there were eleven uses of the word post-Cheney out of a total of 47 in the past year. In the Post, there were 36 post-Cheney out of a total of 46 in the past 12 months.
Michael Gerson, Jackson Diehl, and David Broder have all accused the president of “dithereing” post-Cheney. Gerson also used the phrase about a week before Cheney’s speech. Ronald Krebs and Dana Milbank also wrote pieces accusing Obama of dithering before Cheney’s speech (Jim Hoagland also wrote a piece, praising the dithering). The phrase seems to have originated with Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” on October 4.
It’s interesting how these words take off and I think it’s likely that neocons settled on it and that Krebs, Gerson, and Cheney all using it within a week of each other was no accident (Diehl and Broder fall more in the category of useful idiots).
The word “dithering” appeared only once on the NYT’s editorial page, in a Maureen Dowd piece satirizing Cheney.
Update. This is apropos of John’s last post, for those to whom that isn’t obvious.
Update. Halperin fronts Broder channeling Cheney. The circle is complete. Tinkers to Evers to Chance.
What He Said
I was going to write something about this syrupy ode to George Bush by Caroline Glick and this PUMA nonsense from the Hillbuzz, but Daniel Larison handles it so much better:
Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.
Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.
Can a brother get an Amen?