Flashmobbing against racism in Paris

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White House still not sure where it stands on health care reform

Hey, it's only a trillion dollars:

This is health-care reform's endgame, or close to it. Next Wednesday, Barack Obama will give a prime-time address before both houses of Congress. But that's not all he's giving Congress. The administration is going to put a plan down on paper. The question is what it will say.

Conversations with a number of White House officials make it clear that, at this point, even they don't know. The argument was raging as recently as last night, and appears to have hardened into two main camps. Both camps agree that the cost of the bill has to come down. The question is how much, and what can be sacrificed.

This does not instill confidence. It would be nice to know that if we're going to spend another trillion dollars of the taxpayers' money that we're actually going to spend it on something well thought out, and worthwhile. It's not clear that either is happening. And that is profoundly disturbing. Read the rest of this post...

DNC goes after Cheney

This is good. Cheney has never been loved by the American people, and even in the past few months Republicans have been saying they'd like him to shut up and go away. Now, Cheney is probably doing this to help keep him in the public eye, to aid sales of his new book when it comes out. Still, Cheney's attacks are harsh, and they need to be responded to. And the DNC is.

In a new 30-second television ad set for national cable and local cable in Washington, the DNC asserts many of Cheney's statements have been incorrect — particularly those in which he has argued enhance interrogation techniques conclusively yielded intelligence.

That ad compares those recent statements to ones he made in the leadup to the Iraq war, when he declared Americans would be "greeted as liberators" and that he was sure Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"Dick Cheney, wrong then, wrong now," the ad states.

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‘Political Brain’ author: Obama sounds like Dukakis and George Bush, Sr.

As Joe and I have noted before, it was only a matter of time before the "left of the left's" disappointment with President Obama seeped into more mainstream voices in the Democratic party, and started to damage Obama's brand and the perception of his character. Today we have Cynthia Tucker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writing a story about how an expert is comparing Obama to failed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and failed President George H.W. Bush, and not in a good way.

“It’s remarkable that a new president gets elected with super-majorities, that the president wouldn’t use people’s legitimate anger as a tool for change, when he ran on change,” Westen said....

“When people are anxious and angry, they look to their leaders for a way to channel that anger that is productive. That is part of what leadership is. (But) this president and his leadership team believe that leadership is channeling hope, and even touching anybody’s anger and anxiety is off limits. It’s the politics of Dukakis,” Westen said.

“What I think the White House hasn’t gotten is that if the public is angry and anxious and you don’t talk about that anger, and it doesn’t look like you feel it, you start to look like George H.W. Bush in the recession (of the early 1990s). Out of touch,” Westen said.

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Federal Reserve: Recession ended in August

Let's hope that this time the Fed got it right. Don't get your hopes up for a strong recovery because all signals point towards a very slow recovery that could last for years. Whether it's a 3 or 5 or 10 year recovery is still up for debate but let's be glad that the bottom may have been hit last month. With a bit of luck, we won't see a double-dip drop.

With the economy on the mend, Federal Reserve policymakers last month felt comfortable slowing the pace of one of its economic revival programs and not changing any others, according to documents released Wednesday.

Minutes of the central bank's closed door deliberations, held Aug. 11-12, also showed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues striking a much more hopeful note about the economy's prospects compared with an assessment made in late June. Many Fed officials saw "smaller downside risks," the documents stated.

Fed officials expected the pace of the recovery to "pick up" in 2010, but there was a range of views — and considerable uncertainty — about the likely strength of the upturn because of concerns about how consumers will behave.

After being pounded by the recession, consumer spending finally appeared to be leveling out, the housing market was firming and manufacturing was stabilizing, the Fed said. Plus, the outlook for other countries' economies improved, auguring well for the sale of U.S. exports.

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Chief economist at Goldman Sachs: Stimulus turned zero growth to 3.3%

Not that we trust anyone on Wall Street, but still, this is rather huge:

For the third quarter, economists at Goldman Sachs & Co. predict the U.S. economy will grow by 3.3%. "Without that extra stimulus, we would be somewhere around zero," said Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for Goldman.

The big test, as the article notes, is what happens after the stimulus money is spent, and no longer providing a boost to the economy. Still, this is good news, and good ammunition for the administration to use to show why the stimulus mattered. Too bad the Republicans didn't vote for it. Read the rest of this post...

Obama to address joint session of Congress next week

According to Stephanopoulos, Obama will give a speech before a joint session of Congress next week on health care.

Maybe he'll describe "the spirit" of health insurance reform to Congress. That should work. Read the rest of this post...

Axelrod: Public option is dead. Now Obama is going to get engaged.

Typically, you get engaged before you cave, in order to avoid having to cave.

Axelrod has also confirmed that Obama considers the public option dead. But he thinks the "spirit" of Obama's campaign promise on what we were told was his signature issue lives on. Seriously. The spirit.

As to the fate of a government option plan to compete with private insurance, Axelrod suggested the controversial concept is gone but not forgotten: "The spirit that led him to support a public option is still very much at play here and so you know he wants competition. He wants choice. "

What other campaign promises does President Obama now consider null and void, even though their spirit lives on? Not to mention, is this what we should expect on every issue from the President - that he won't fight for anything he's promised, let the Republicans roll him, then he'll finally come in at the end and accept any deal, now matter how bad, now matter how much money it costs, so long as he can claim victory and use the "win" for the next election? If he's willing to do this on what he claimed was the most important issue of his presidency - health care reform - then no promise, no issue, and no constituency is safe.

This is not leadership. Read the rest of this post...

Palin's great idea: Claim Bristol's baby as her own

Okay. Just read this excerpt from Vanity Fair's interview with Levi Johnston. Now, this is Levi talking about his baby and the scheme contocted by the grandmother of the baby:

Even before Palin became John McCain’s running mate, she seemed worried about what a grandchild would do to her political career. According to Johnston, she had a plan for how to handle her daughter’s unexpected pregnancy.

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?” We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.

Great idea. (But, hadn't we heard this idea somewhere before?) Read the rest of this post...

Obama average approval 50.6%, disapproval 44.3%

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Mission creep in Afghanistan

An interesting point I hadn't thought about:

Yet, eight years of war with no end in sight leaves other military experts vexed. "Having to a great extent captured, killed, and seriously disrupted the al-Qaeda leadership and training infrastructure in Afghanistan, the necessity, and therefore strategy for this war, has gotten away from us," Air Force Major Jeremy Kotkin, a strategist with the U.S. Special Operations Command, wrote Monday in Small Wars Journal, an independent counter-insurgency blog. "We have transferred the consequence of the very real threat of al-Qaeda to the Taliban, to fields of Afghan poppies, and to the political and economic shambles that was and is Afghanistan." Such mission creep, he argues, has made the nation's task in Afghanistan far tougher than originally intended.

Then again, we did blow up their country - albeit justifiably - so doesn't that leave us with a greater obligation than simply disrupting Al Qaeda? Or at some point, does the moral imperative of "leaving the country a better place than we found it" get overridden by the reality that it's not clear if we can accomplish that goal at all? Read the rest of this post...

"Lord of the Flies" in Kabul? I'm not convinced.

I've seen the photos, and I'm going to take a contrary point of view on this. From what I've seen in the pictures at least, I'm not too upset. Providing security in Afghanistan, of all places, has got to be a nasty job, so I'm willing to cut some slack in how these guys get their jollies during their time off. The photos, in my view, prove absolutely nothing - they're hardly Abu Ghraib. The other allegations alleged, perhaps. But we need to see the evidence - these photos, in my view, don't constitute evidence of much other than some of the guys being damn hot. Read the rest of this post...

Obama won't push for public option, administration officials want Obama to Sista Souljah Dems in Congress & liberal base

Obama isn't going to push for the public option, top administration officials now tell Politico. So they're flip-flopping again. But worse yet, they're now saying they want to Sista Souljah Democratic lawmakers and the liberal base who are pushing Obama to keep his promises.

Considering it was the falling out with the liberal base that was the precursor to the public at large talking about whether the president has the backbone for the job, it's not entirely clear how picking a larger fight with that base is somehow going to resuscitate Obama's sinking poll numbers, and damaged brand:

On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done.

The goal of health care reform is supposed to be to pass a good bill, not to lift Obama's numbers for the next election. The very fact that people in the White House see public anger at Obama's broken promises as an "opportunity" is a large part of the problem. It's also a large part of the reason a lot of people are wondering whether Barack Obama is any different than any other politician who promised one thing then did what was politically expedient.

It's simply amazing that the strategy of trashing the base has now plunged Obama to 49% in the polls, reinvigorated a near-dead Republican party, split the once-unified Democratic party, and put the President's number one policy agenda in peril, and yet some in the White House think it's worked so well, they need to ramp it up some more. They don't seem to realize that the debate isn't over some arcane provision of legislation, it's over whether the President has the character needed to lead our country. Every time Team Obama has picked a fight with the left, they've lost, and the public perception of the president's character has suffered as a result. Americans don't respect someone who betrays their friends.

If the President thinks trashing the very people who got him into office is going to save his presidency, it's going to be a very ugly next couple of months, and a rather ugly four years for the Democratic party.

PS Apparently, with next week's "plan" that Obama will be offering on health care, none of it is really that big a deal, he's willing to drop all of it if Republicans want:

Obama's specifics will include many of the principles he has spelled out before, and aides did not want to telegraph make-or-break demands.

Then why offer it at all?

Back and forth, and back and forth does not a leader make. Read the rest of this post...

GOP party head in Florida says it's "socialism" to have the president talk to school kids about working hard

The thing is, it's crazy, but crazy like a fox. What's important here isn't that the majority of us think these guys are nuts. Rather, we have yet another GOP leader speaking to his base and repeating the key word "socialist," mixed with a juicy threat to your children (which the GOP usually reserves for gay-baiting, but it's also useful when stirring up hate against a black man). The goal is to further radicalize the GOP base, period. Why? Because Democrats have proven that the rabidization of the tea bag class works.

The Republicans have sent their paranoid minions to townhall meetings across the country and not just scared the bejeesus out of Democrats, but they've effectively knocked the health care reform express off the tracks. Unless Democrats take this extremism on, and embarrass the GOP into stopping the (literal) madness, it's only going to continue, and will probably even ramp up some, causing even more consternation among Democrats, and more damage to our agenda. (Here's what Obama is actually doing with the kids next week.) Read the rest of this post...

Wednesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Okay, what's in the news today? The Washington Post our leaders "are studying the reasons why the Taliban appears, for the moment at least, to be winning." Winning. Jesus Christ. The Taliban and al Qaeda did have those eight years to plan, rearm and practice while George Bush ignored them so he could invade Iraq. We'll be living with Bush's mistakes for a very long time -- even as they morph into Obama's crises.

And, the H1N1 really seems to be causing serious concern for our leaders and health experts. This doesn't seem like the run-of-the-mill concern. The best advice is: Wash your hands. I do. I carry a little bottle of a hand sanitizer with me. Some of my friends mock me for that. But, soon enough, they'll all be doing it, too.

War and disease. Not very upbeat, but some things never change... Read the rest of this post...

Australian economy racing along

The stimulus there is working in a big way.

Australia's economy grew at its fastest pace in over a year last quarter as aggressive policy stimulus drove a revival in consumer and business spending, supporting the case for an early rise in interest rates.

The annual pace of growth of 0.6 percent was also the highest of any developed nation, one reason investors are betting it will lead the world in reversing past rate cuts.

As a result the local dollar rose while bill futures slipped as investors priced in a greater chance the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) might tighten as early as November.

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Report: Gordon Brown involved in release of Megrahi

Not good news for Brown. He insisted the decision was up to the Scottish courts though the pressure from the UK government's highest levels are increasingly obvious.

Gordon Brown and David Miliband were last night drawn directly into the furore over the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing when it emerged that Britain told Tripoli that the prime minister and foreign secretary did not want to see him die in prison.

In a major setback for Downing Street, which has insisted the release was entirely a matter for Edinburgh, it emerged that a Foreign Office minister intervened last February to make clear to Libya that Brown and Miliband hoped Abdelbaset al-Megrahi would not "pass away" in prison.

Amid warnings from Tripoli that allowing Megrahi to die in prison would amount to a "death sentence", Bill Rammell, then a Foreign Office minister, passed the message to Abdulati Alobidi, Libya's Europe minister, during a meeting in Tripoli.

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Putin ignites new anger during WWII cermony

What else is he really going to do after spinning about the glory of Josef Stalin for the past decade? Completely classless but then again, we already knew that about Putin. What a way to ruin an opportunity to bringing old enemies together, even if only for a day.

The Kremlin and its spin doctors have accused Poland of plotting with the Nazis to invade Russia and of gleefully joining in Germany's carve-up of Czechoslovakia.

Moscow's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, warned today of a new showdown between Russia and Europe over the rewriting of history, highlighting the deep gulf in perceptions of the causes and effects of the war 70 years later.

"Freedom came from the east," said Lavrov. "Russia, once again, fulfilled its historic mission to save Europe from forced unification and its own madness.

"Victory was achieved at too great a price for us to simply let it be taken away from us. That is where we draw the line. If someone wants to have a new ideological confrontation with Europe, then historical revisionism and attempts to turn history into a practical political instrument is a direct path toward this confrontation."

So freedom was installing a brutal dictatorship? Who would have known? Read the rest of this post...

Astronomy photographer of the year

Some great astronomy photographs, check them out. (This one might be my favorite, because of the brown band, and the notion that we can actually see it.) Read the rest of this post...

Dodd says Obama needs to 'step up'

I happen to think Dodd is right, but putting that aside, this story is interesting because you now have US Senators, not just "the left of the left," in essence questioning Obama's leadership on the health care reform issue. That will only feed the debate as to whether Obama has handled this issue well, and more generally, what his leadership skill set really is, or is not. This is an example of what happens when you don't nip problems in the bud. They tend to metastasize. Read the rest of this post...

Bank of America agrees to pay money already obliged to pay

Why this is being promoted as a big deal is a head scratcher. It's not as though they're going to be paying back all of the borrowed money. For some reason BofA believes that if they pay back some of it they will get a pass on the TARP pay restrictions. I wonder where they are getting such ideas though we can guess.

Several banks, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have already repaid aid they received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Doing so removed those firms from having their executive compensation packages approved by Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration's pay czar.

Bankers worried that the pay rules put them at a competitive disadvantage in retaining talented employees. Bank of America is awaiting Feinberg's approval of its 2009 executive pay packages.

Bank of America isn't looking to pay back all of the $45 billion it received in TARP aid at once, according to the paper, but may give back the $20 billion it received in January to help it absorb teetering investment bank Merrill Lynch.

Tell me again about this "competitive disadvantage" issue because it's not clear where the superstars who created this recession would go. Worst case they go out and create new businesses that compete with the "too big to fail" problems that we're stuck with. A dose of capitalism wouldn't be such a bad thing in this case. Read the rest of this post...