A thinker who doesn’t like to lead

Hi Katalusis readers,


Just so you know, I did my duty this morning and voted. Afterward, I backtracked to yesterday's Washington Post and found confirmation for what I've long suspected:  being a thinker is not enough for the president of the United States - other qualities are required. 

 

Pundits are just now discovering a major difference between Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as cited by Eilperin and Nakamura at the Washington Post: “Bush is a leader who didn’t like to think,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a global political risk-management firm. “Obama is a thinker who doesn’t like to lead.”

In their article titled Where did Obama go wrong? Eilperin and Nakamura write:

The week after his reelection, President Obama was a man full of promise and promises: His job-approval rating stood at 54 percent, the 2010 tea party wave that had knocked his first term off balance appeared to have receded, and he seemed as sober about the future as he was hopeful.
“With respect to the issue of mandate, I’ve got one mandate . . . to help middle-class families and families that are working hard to try to get into the middle class,” he said at a news conference in the East Room of the White House in November 2012. Obama acknowledged the dangers of “presidential overreach in second terms,” but he put forward an expansive, legacy-building agenda: a major fiscal deal, immigration reform and action on climate change.

Two bruising years later, he has registered progress only on addressing climate change, and a president who once boasted of a barrier-breaking liberal coalition is under fire from his own party as his Republican rivals are poised to make gains in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

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Tell Pres. Obama: Don't let Shell drill in the Arctic!

Shell rig on its way to Arctic.

From Credo’s Elija Zarlin:

Dear Virginia,

Right now, Shell's Kulluk drilling rig is getting towed up the Pacific Coast to the Arctic.¹

The Arctic has never been drilled for oil, not even under President George W. Bush. But at the end of March, the Obama Administration approved Shell Oil's inadequate spill plan for the Beaufort Sea.²

Drilling in these pristine waters could begin as soon as this summer. This is the eleventh hour.

But President Obama still has to approve the final Permit to Drill — and a decision could come by the end of this month.

Tell the Obama Administration: Don't let Shell drill in the Arctic. Click here to sign the petition.

The Arctic's Beaufort and Chukchi seas are like nurseries of the earth — providing crucial breeding ground and food supply for countless species of wildlife. Upsetting this habitat would have broad ripples through the wildlife food chain literally across the globe.

Almost exactly two years after the devastating Deepwater Horizon spill, the impacts are still being felt by the Gulf Coast and Gulf marine life. In many ways, we still don't understand the long term damage caused by the massive volume of spilled oil and toxic dispersants.

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama promised: "I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago."

But there is still no proven way to clean up an oil spill in the extreme arctic environment — which includes hurricane force storms, 20-foot swells, pervasive sea ice, low temperatures and months of darkness.³

It's not late for Obama to call off Shell's drill bits. Tell Obama: Stand up to Big Oil and protect the Arctic. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

President Obama says his energy plan is "all-of-the-above."

But between pushing the southern, export portion of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and now opening the Arctic to drill for oil that won't do anything to reduce gas prices,⁴ it seems a whole lot more like President Obama's energy plan is "oil-above-all."

President Obama needs to stand up to pressure from the oil industry, and admit what we all know: Drilling in the Arctic is a terrible, misguided idea, that's just not worth the risk to this one-of-a-kind area, or the damage we know it will do to our climate. Click below to automatically sign the petition below:
http://act.credoaction.com/r/?r=5546424&id=38375-4150669-PVvP3Kx&t=10

Thanks for working to move us past oil drilling.

Elijah Zarlin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

1. "New era in Alaska drilling looms," LA Times, March 4, 2012
2. "Shell Wins 'Safety' Permit From Obama Administration To Start Dangerous Drilling In Arctic Seas ," Think Progress, March 28, 2012
3. "Arctic "should remain off-limits to drilling"," Oil Change International, Feburary 6, 2012
4. "U.S. drilling won't lower gas prices, study shows," Associated Press, March 22, 2012

Commercial drones for hire in the land of the free

The photo on the right shows an armed drone,

America’s current weapon of choice; 

so far, the recently authorized commercial drones are unarmed.

It had to happen, I guess. Once the Obama Administration embraced the hunt down and kill capacity of armed drones in the skies over Pakistan and elsewhere, commercial interests in America would seize on the unmanned aircraft for its own purposes. 

And it being an election year and our malleable president eager to please the people with the bucks, it's understandable that he would hasten to sign a law making it legal for your local real estate agent to check out your back yard without your knowledge, much less your permission.

The New York Times reports this morning:

A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.

But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue. 

Read more:

Politicizing the positive jobs report

It’s unfortunate that the media is primarily presenting a positive jobs report in terms of the 2012 presidential election campaign instead of first seeking to inform the public of what the new numbers may mean for America’s struggling families.

Politico’s Alexander Burns and Ben White offer a typical analysis of the latest development on the economic front:

President Barack Obama hasn’t unfurled a “Mission Accomplished” banner just yet. But Friday’s jobs report showing unemployment dropping to 8.3 percent, the lowest level of his presidency, is an unexpected boon for Obama’s reelection bid and a serious hurdle for his top competitor, Mitt Romney, who has staked his campaign on a jobs-and-economy message.

While 8 percent-plus unemployment is still a perilous number for any incumbent, the clear downward trend in the jobless rate complicates the Republican narrative that Obama is an out-and-out economic failure who has no hope of turning around the economy.

You have to read further before the article mentions in passing how the recently released jobs numbers might be received by those whom they most critically affect:

“Those numbers are good news for the country and they are good news, politically, for the president,” said Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “It puts particular pressure on Mitt Romney as the nominee to offer a big, bold, sweeping agenda of reform and economic growth and contrasts with the president’s vision. He’s simply not going to be able to run a campaign built on a foundation of criticism.”

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When will the Obama Administration investigate the perpetrators of the economic crisis?

Obama and bank officials. Photo credits: public domain.

Credo, Moveon.org, and other progressive organizations are joining forces to pressure the Obama Administration during this election year to investigate the big banks that caused the housing crisis and resulting recession.

Check out this message from Credo and sign the petition to get Obama to act:

Wall Street greed fueled the housing bubble, and it's not hard to find evidence of what appears to be widespread and pervasive fraud by the biggest players in the mortgage industry.

Yet, despite the work of a handful of brave state attorneys general, there has been an astonishing lack of investigation into the misdeeds and outright crimes that caused the financial crisis.

The investigations that do exist have barely begun to scratch the surface.

And without meaningful investigations, there won't be any accountability for the Wall Street crooks who drove our economy off a cliff.

Tell President Obama: Announce a full investigation into the cause of the housing bubble and foreclosure crisis. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

The collapse of the housing bubble caused trillions of dollars in homeowner equity to evaporate, which directly led to our economy grinding to a halt.

And the ensuing wave of foreclosures — caused in no small part both by predatory loans designed to fail and out-and-out foreclosure fraud — has destroyed communities across the country and shrank the tax base of local governments right when there was the most need for the services they provide.

Yet with all the resources at its disposal, the Department of Justice and other federal entities have yet to announce a full investigation of the cause of this man-made economic catastrophe.

Quite the opposite. Thus far the president's advisors have been pushing for a bad settlement with the banks that lets them off the hook . But a bad settlement has been stopped so far by courageous progressive attorneys general supported by an army of grassroots activists like you.

We now have an opportunity to change the White House's strategy as the reelection campaign heats up, and get the president to come out on the right side of this issue.

Tell President Obama: Announce a full investigation into the cause of the housing bubble and foreclosure crisis. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

The timing of this fight is critical.

The election calendar is working with us by pushing President Obama to be more aggressive than he's been. We saw this, for example, with his recent recess appointment of Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

And we know that President Obama's political team wants him to run against Wall Street.

CREDO is not alone in asking the Obama administration to launch a full investigation. We're joining with MoveOn and other progressive groups in this campaign.

If we make enough noise, it will be hard for the Obama administration to avoid calling for full investigations into the fraud that led to the housing crisis.

It's a completely reasonable ask, it's within his powers to call for a full investigation, and it's the right thing to do.

Tell President Obama: Announce a full investigation into the cause of the housing bubble and foreclosure crisis. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

Thank you for speaking out. Your activism matters.

Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

Bill Clinton deserves the title of "first black American president" more than Obama does

L. Douglas Wilder, governor of Virginia from 1990 to 1994, was the nation’s first elected African-American governor. His piece at Politico yesterday compares Bill Clinton’s presidency to Obama’s in terms of benefits for blacks and concludes that under Clinton, blacks fared much better.

That conclusion unavoidably reminds us of the Obama campaign’s wildly false accusations of racism against Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 08 primary.  Despite the painful irony Wilder’s piece evokes, however, it’s well worth the read.

Referencing Toni Morrison’s comment that Clinton was "America’s first black president," Wilder writes:

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.

Has that happened? I am forced to say, “No” — especially when comparing Morrison’s metaphorical first black president to the actual first black president.

Think back on a small slice of merely the upper levels of the Clinton administration, and remember how many Cabinet agencies the Arkansan had named African-Americans to lead: Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown, Army Secretary Togo West, who succeeded Brown at Veteran Affairs, Office and Management and Budget Director Franklin Raines and Director of National Drug Control Policy Lee Brown. Clinton also regularly cited Vernon Jordan as a respected adviser and strategist.

Clinton may not have been the nation’s first black president — but he did make appointments like he was. Obama would do well to look a little closer at the Clinton template.

Wilder continues:

By birth and life experience, Clinton cannot lay claim to the title of first black president — as Morrison knighted him. But Obama needs to work harder to make it less obvious that Clinton, in governing deed, actually deserves it more that the 44th president does.

Read the entire article here:

It has come to this: the Hillary moment for 2012

Secretary Clinton attends the 2011 APEC Forum. Photo shows Clinton at the CEO Summit in Honolulu, Hawaii on Nov. 11. State Dept Image/Scott Chernis.

 

 

Would anyone at the Mile High Stadium in Denver in ’08, where the Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama against a backdrop of Greek pillars, have dreamed that 2012 might be Hillary’s moment?

The recommendation by Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen in the Wall Street Journal that Democrats replace Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton on the ticket in 2012 is startling in its bluntness:

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion. 

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president's administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy. 

Note: recall that Democratic leaders dissed Hillary in 08 for being “too polarizing.”

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Bill Clinton’s new book: “Back to Work”

Scanning the online reviews this morning of Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work,” I’m reminded first of all that it’s naïve to expect objectivity in the mainstream media and second of all, one ought not to rely on the judgment of critics in determining the merits of a new publication. Nevertheless, we can gain a little background information and a few insights from such treatises as Jodi Cantor’s piece at the NY Times: With a Book, the Last Democrat in the White House Tries to Help the Current One:

Last summer, as Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrated the former president’s 65th birthday with a party at their rented Hamptons home, talk among their guests turned to President Obama’s travails over the debt crisis and doubts about his re-election. “I’m really trying to help him,” the white-haired former president said, shaking his head, “but he seems to have lost his narrative.”

Starting Tuesday, that help will take its most public form yet, in the form of a new book by Mr. Clinton, titled “Back to Work,” that makes a case for confidence in government and Mr. Obama’s jobs bill. The book marks a new and somewhat warmer stage in the two men’s rivalry and relationship, one that could benefit Mr. Obama. The awkward twist: the former president has been so frustrated at what he sees as the current one’s failure to explain his economic policies that he has literally decided to write his own version of the story. “He both sells it and wants them to sell it more,” said John Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff who also advises the current administration.

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Nancy Pelosi defends traditional Democratic values, or not?

There’s a lot of ambiguity in this story from Politico on Nancy Pelosi’s attempts to hold the line against the Obama Administration’s gradual caving to Repubs on sacrificing Social Security and Medicare in order to continue subsidizing the wealthiest Americans who are apparently entitled to huge tax breaks.

As “torn” as she may be, though, Pelosi does at last seem to grasp that Barack Obama, her idol of  2008, the inheritor of Camelot and all, is best described as a chameleon who changes colors to fit whatever context in which he finds himself.

Politico’s Jonathan Allen has the scoop:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is back at the bargaining table — but it’s not yet clear whether she’s willing to make a deal.

Burned by President Barack Obama’s decision to keep her out of negotiations on last year’s tax deal and this spring’s budget bill, sources close to the California Democrat say she is torn between playing deal-maker on a debt limit increase and fully protecting the priorities of Democrats’ liberal base.

On Thursday, in advance of a Friday meeting with the president at the White House, Pelosi lit into Obama’s budget director, Jack Lew, in what is becoming a habit of sending sharp messages through his top aides. Pelosi sought to impress on Lew — and no doubt his bosses at the White House — that House Democrats expect to be consulted more now than on past deals and that the president can’t expect to win passage of a debt limit package without support from House Democrats.

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Barack Obama as the country’s new Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover, Wikipedia Commons

Walter Russell Mead, a Democrat who voted for Obama in 08 and was on board in 09 to claim the new president had earned the Nobel Peace Prize, asserts in The American Interest: “The Obama Administration’ is on the road to becoming the most anticlimactic expression known to man.”

But the real shocker in Mead’s post is a couple of paragraphs down when, after noting the euphoric media’s comparisons of Obama to predecessors Lincoln, FDR, Carter, Reagan, etc., the worthy foreign affairs professor suggests that what the country really wanted when they elected Obama was another Bill Clinton. Imagine that.

Read it for yourself:

President Obama swept into office on a tide of Lincoln and FDR comparisons.  A giddy press corps swooned every time he spoke; his cabinet was a ‘team of rivals’ like Lincoln’s.  His mandate, the press said, was to be a transformative president, like FDR.  The more sober said he would be a Democratic Reagan: just as the Californian led the country into a generation of conservative politics, so President Obama would lead Democrats into permanent majoritarian status.

This was the consensus of the mainstream press; it was also the opinion of the President’s inner circle.  Based on that consensus, the President made the decisions which, if he fails of re-election in 2012, history will likely regard as the fatal mistakes of his term: he went along with the flawed and failed stimulus program the Democratic Congress put forward, and he pushed forward on health care reform before economic recovery was assured.

In reality, President Obama’s mandate was not to be a transformer; he was elected to conserve.  In 2008 the independents who elected Obama by deserting the GOP were tired of the drama of the Bush administration and they were terrified by the financial panic that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers.  What they wanted was another Bill Clinton: a calm and soothing figure who would feel their pain and tweak the New Deal/Great Society state model to make it a little more user-friendly and a little less bankruptcy prone.

Mead concludes that Obama is most likely to be remembered as a second Hoover:

Midway through 2010, President Obama looked less like Lincoln redux and more like a Clinton manqué.  By the end of that year, the penultimate dissing of the President began; friends and foes began to ask whether President Obama might not be, gasp, the new Jimmy Carter.

Instapundit maestro Glenn Reynolds has been saying for some time that from where he sits, the Carter comparison looks like a best case scenario for this President.  For all our sakes, I hope Glenn is wrong, but increasingly there’s another specter frightening the Obama administration:  the ghost of Herbert Hoover.

Mead goes on to demonstrate the many commonalities between Obama and Hoover and in his concluding remarks almost incidentally mentions the five – the FIVE – shooting wars on the current president’s hands “in Afghanistan, tribal Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and now, apparently, Yemen.”

Read more.

The deterioration of the United States since 9/11

Posting hours after bin Laden’s death was announced on May 2, I suggested the notorious one may have won the battle he led against the Western world. Bob Burnett, Berkely writer and retired Silicon Valley executive would agree. Burnett writes:

The death of Osama bin Laden is an opportunity to reflect upon the deterioration of the United States since the attacks on September 11, 2001. We've entered into an endless state of war and our economy teeters on the brink of collapse. And, as a people, we've developed a distinctive derangement.

America's craziness developed in four stages over an eleven-month period: First, on November 7, 2000, there was a controversial presidential election. On December 9th the US Supreme Court intervened, and, as a result, George W. Bush became president. Bush had had an undistinguished business and political career and was the least qualified presidential candidate in eighty years.

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Praise or blame for the Obama Administration’s decision to support the no-fly zone in Libya?

photo via Stray Dogs that Amble In, Part IV

Stray Yellar Dog and D.K. Jamaal address the likely response of the woman-hating element in the media to the possible outcome of Obama’s decision to join international forces in establishing a no-fly zone in Libya. 

SYD sums it up: "If All Goes Well in Libya It's To Obama's Credit, If We Get Mired in Another War... That's Hillary's (and Mac's) Fault."

In the meantime, Nick Kristoff at the NY Times applauds the initial success of the UN’s humanitarian intervention in Libya to prevent the ongoing slaughter of civilians.

Kristoff reports the gratitude of Libyans for the just-in-time intervention.

This may be a first for the Arab world: An American airman who bailed out over Libya was rescued from his hiding place in a sheep pen by villagers who hugged him, served him juice and thanked him effusively for bombing their country.

Even though some villagers were hit by American shrapnel, one gamely told an Associated Press reporter that he bore no grudges. Then, on Wednesday in Benghazi, the major city in eastern Libya whose streets would almost certainly be running with blood now if it weren’t for the American-led military intervention, residents held a “thank you rally.” They wanted to express gratitude to coalition forces for helping save their lives.

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Take your pick: a diplomatic response to the Egyptian crisis or another neocon shock and awe adventure to overthrow the regime of a sovereign nation?

A US soldier watches as a statue of Saddam Hussein falls in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

Neocons as romanticists? You’d think that was the case in reading David Brooks’ interpretation of the Obama Administration’s response to the Egyptian crisis in which the erudite, comparatively moderate Republican columnist at the NY Times takes a swipe at both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (See No Quarter’s Larry Johnson for more about the neocons’ “trying to light the fires of democracy in Egypt.”)

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic offers a more thoughtful, in-depth analysis of how Washington has responded to the unfolding revolt in Egypt. Ambinder clearly points out the difference between an Administration benefiting from the expertise of a cadre of seasoned diplomats and taking well-considered steps rather than following the advice of neocons to rush blindly into the turmoil erupting on the soil of another sovereign nation.

Ambinder writes:

After Tunisia, the intelligence community, the diplomatic community and the White House all anticipated that protests would spread. The sheer number of calls the State Department was fielding from other governments was a clue: lots of mid-level diplomats in the Mideast wanted to know what their counterparts at State were hearing and seeing.

What they were seeing was "a sort of contagious element," a senior administration official said. (Like others, the official offered a candid assessment on the condition of anonymity because events were still unfolding.) "By Thursday night we were warning journalists and our allies that we anticipated that Friday would be a tough day ... and that there would be some stark images."

Egypt was simply the most logical candidate for unrest. Protests of some sort erupted in the country fairly regularly. Anger at President Hosni Mubarak for breaking his promise to lift the country's decades-old emergency law was acute. A food shortage was in the offing. The government wasn't able to distribute coupons for bread that many smaller vendors relied upon. Mubarak had long ago lost the formal support of the Egyptian Army, who, the U.S. was fairly certain, would never take up arms against the people.

On Monday, January 24 and Tuesday January 25, the White House watched the first wave of mass protests in Cairo. Ironically, there was little about the internal political debate inside the country that the U.S. was not privy to, a consequence of its close military relationship with the Egyptian Army and Air Force, which had kept informal tabs on the government for Americans.

Most Egyptian military officials of consequence were in the U.S for an annual training exercise assessment last week, as were several of the country's intelligence officials. The early briefings were basic. Outside of the National Security staff and State Department desk officials, the knowledge about Egypt's political structure was thin. A number of White House officials were given an Encyclopedia Britannica-like briefing about the basics: how many U.S. citizens were inside the country and contingency plans to get them out; reminders that Egypt wasn't a Muslim country; Hosni Mubarak was a Coptic Christian of a certain sect; the Muslim Brotherhood was at once an opposition political party and a co-opted part of the social system. The government encouraged its charities and even accepted its recommendations for cultural censorship while treating its political platform as anathema.

Read the entire article:

John Kerry's sensible, forward-looking advice on the Egyptian uprising

Sen. John Kerry, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offers some sound advice to both the besieged President Mubarak and the Obama Administration in responding to the crisis in Egypt:

EVEN if the protests shaking Egypt subside in the coming days, the chaos of the last week has forever changed the relationship between the Egyptian people and their government. The anger and aspirations propelling a diverse range of citizens into the streets will not disappear without sweeping changes in the social compact between the people and the government — and these events also call for changes in the relationship between the United States and a stalwart Arab ally.

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Who is Gene Sperling?

It’s disconcerting these days to watch the analysis of Shields and Brooks on the PBS NewsHour. From his gleeful, fawning support of Obama in ’08 and simultaneous contemptuous disparagement of Hillary Clinton, Mark Shields, um, he’s the liberal of the pair, now speaks scathingly of “the Obama cult.” And that’s why Shields is glad to see the shakeup in the Obama Administration that includes the appointments of Gene Sperling as director of the National Economic Council and Bill Daley as chief of staff.

So who is Gene Sperling and how has the media done in introducing him to the public? Ezra Klein thinks the media has fallen down on the job:

Matt Yglesias is right that the media -- myself included -- has done a crummy job introducing people to the work and thought of Gene Sperling, as opposed to scrutinizing the few areas of his background that seemed likely to create controversy:

Like [Sperling] or hate him, I just wish the past week’s worth of commentary on him hadn’t relied so heavily on “six degrees of Robert Rubin” versus “here’s a thinly sourced anecdote from the 1990s.” Sperling’s views on economic policy are not a state secret. He published a good book in 2005, or if you want a briefer precis of his views, you can read his 2007 article for Democracy. 

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By choosing Bill Daley, Obama alarms his liberal fans yet again

Once a beacon of hope for the left, Obama now perches at the center

If you spent any time at all in the trenches back in the ’08 Democratic primary, you recall how viciously those kids on the left, while fueling Obama’s campaign with their $1.00 donations, denigrated the Clinton Administration and attacked Hillary Clinton. They especially vilified the Clintons for being centrists, and they held up the haloed Obama as the harbinger of a new politics.

Obama’s politics are about as new as the politics of the Daley machine in Chicagoland, and it’s interesting how the punditry are finding ways to support Obama’s pick of Bill Daley, who is apparently as centrist as they come, to replace Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.

That would be the same punditry that joined the kids in '08 in elevating Obama while tearing Hillary down. Oh, well, maybe it was just their sexism.

In his NY Times piece on Daley’s appointment, Eric Lipton does acknowledge that Daley’s appointment has “alarmed some of the president’s liberal supporters, who say that bringing Mr. Daley into the White House violates a commitment to curtail the sway of special interests.”

But then Lipton provides one of the more objective takes on Obama’s latest decision to bring an old Chicago pol to the White House:

WASHINGTON — He is a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank. He also serves on the board of directors at Boeing, the giant military contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which has billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system.

And now William M. Daley, the son and brother of Chicago mayors and a behind-the-scenes political player himself, will hold one of the most powerful jobs in Washington: chief of staff in the White House, where he will help decide who gets into the Oval Office and what President Obama’s Capitol Hill agenda should be.

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Maureen Dowd offers balanced coverage of Obama’s Q and A with Repubs

Wow. It’s hard for me to admit this and even go so far as to link to her op-ed in today’s NY Times, but of all the coverage I’ve scanned of Obama’s much heralded Q and A with the Republicans the other day, Maureen Dowd has offered the most balanced account of the occasion. Hey, she even acknowledged that despite his emergence from his “Camus coma,” Obama got his comeuppance a few times from Utah’s freshman member of the House, Republican Jason Chaffetz.

Is it too much to hope that our punditry is finally emerging from its comatose state evident since Barack Obama first-stepped on the national stage?

Read Dowd’s entire column here:

The air seeps out of the Obama balloon

Mort Zuckerman’s piece titled The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama in the US News and World Report summarizes the word from the media one year after its idol became president of the United States.

Uh, Mort, some of us avoided being swept up in the drunken euphoria rampant in the 2008 Democratic primary and general election and instead endured the contempt shown those who opted for sobriety. Now we can only shake our heads at the sad spectacle you portray:

The air is seeping out of the Obama balloon. He has fallen to below 50 percent in the poll approval ratings, a decline punctuated by his party's shocking loss in the Massachusetts special election.

Why?

Barack Obama was undoubtedly sincere in what he promised, even if his promises were within the normal range of political exaggeration. The first trouble is that his gift for inspiration aroused expectations, stoked to unprecedented heights by his own staff, that he would solve the climate crisis on Monday, the jobs crisis on Tuesday, the financial crisis on Wednesday, the education crisis on Thursday, Afghanistan on Friday, Iraq on Saturday, and rest on Sunday. His oratorical skills were highlighted by the contrast with President Bush, who mangled words so much that his incoherence became, as Tina Brown wrote, "a metaphor for incompetence." Expectations were spurred, too, by Obama's recognition that Americans yearned for a new kind of politics, a rejection, as he put it, of "politics as usual."

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A Long-Term Strategy in the War on Terror

In the aftermath of the Christmas Day terrorist attempt, which the president has linked to Al Quaeda, the Obama Administration justifiably scrambles to strengthen security measures. In the meantime, concerned citizens might be wise to look at promising long-term religious and spiritual resources in responding to the ongoing war on terror.

For example, process theology offers bridges between major world religions, science and religion, religion and spirituality, and across societal divides such as gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnic origin.

A post-Einsteinian, post-Jungian worldview, process theology emerged from the musings of Alfred North Whitehead, a noted mathematician who pursued interests in philosophy and science - even quantum physics. As one might expect, process theology is not antithetical to established scientific principles, and it remains open to new discoveries and insights in both science and religion.

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Swiss Style Universal Health Care Coverage for Americans and a Little Respect for Seniors, Please!

The debate on health care reform continues this Monday morning in August. Scanning various reports of out-of-control town hall meetings on the subject and editorials across online news sources, it’s obvious there’s still a lot of fear out there among various segments of the population.

Let’s start with the rebellion of seniors to a provision in the House versions of the bills that would reimburse doctors who counsel Medicare beneficiaries on “end-of-life’’ issues. Certainly, end-of-life counseling has its merits as Bill Clinton pointed out in a speech last Thursday before the Netroots Nation conference of liberal bloggers.

What Clinton failed to mention was the origin of the uproar about the end-of-life provision. The problem for seniors began with the Administration’s scary introduction of the proposed counseling on this very personal and critical issue as a means for cost cutting in the Medicare program. Many seniors heard the proposal as limiting expensive procedures such as hip replacements for people who might die within a year or two anyway. This was not good PR for health care reform, especially within a context already disrespectful to seniors in which our president, along with leaders of both parties, habitually refer to Social Security and Medicare as “entitlement programs,” i.e., government handouts.

I repeat: seniors paid into Social Security and Medicare throughout their working lives, and Medicare deducts a sizable chunk of change from their monthly retirement benefits.

As for the overall health care reform bill that might ultimately emerge from congress, Paul Krugman offers a calm voice in the midst of the current storm:

So where does Obamacare fit into all this? Basically, it’s a plan to Swissify America, using regulation and subsidies to ensure universal coverage.

If we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route. True “socialized medicine” would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.

But a Swiss-style system of universal coverage would be a vast improvement on what we have now. And we already know that such systems work.

So we can do this. At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies.

I would add to Krugman’s list of obstacles, the Administration’s condescension and disrespect for America’s senior citizens.