Month: January 2009

We will not know just how thoroughly the Bush-Cheney administration gutted the Constitution until we see exactly what they decided and how. Here’s a staggeringly long list of memos designed to give the president any power he wanted to hunt down anyone he wanted, and to torture them at will.

I understand:

As they consider the size and scope of the $800-billion-plus economic recovery plan, 46% are worried that the government will end up doing too much while 42% worry that it will do too little.

Larison sighs:

The Republican stimulus vote was remarkable in how politically tone-deaf it was. The bill as presented to the House shouldn’t have passed, but it is striking how unwilling the Republican leadership was to back a popular piece of legislation. When confronted with a similar situation in September over the bill authorizing the TARP–the Democrats had a majority but wanted, indeed needed, Republican votes for provide bipartisan cover–the Republican leadership caved and backed a bill their constituents hated and endorsed a measure of dubious merit. Of course, that was four months ago when it might have done them some good electorally. Having blown the obvious opportunity to tap into populist outrage over the bailout, which was supported by perhaps a third of the electorate at most, the leadership now decides to make their stand opposing a bill that commands support from a broad majority of the country, and they do so at a time when their stand, such as it is, will be forgotten by the time the midterms come around.

And a better hat.

If you haven’t read Ta Nehisi’s profile of Michelle Obama, please do. It’s surprising and then totally convincing in a way Juan Williams should surely understand:

On the night of his victory, Barack Obama talked about Ann Nixon Cooper, a black woman who, at the age of 106, had voted for him. But when Obama told her story, he presented her not just as someone who’d been born a generation after slavery and had seen segregation, but as a woman who’d seen the women’s-suffrage movement, the dawn of aviation and the automobile, the Depression and the Dust Bowl, and Pearl Harbor. He presented Nixon Cooper as an African American who was not doubly conscious, just conscious. That is the third road that black America is walking. It’s not coincidental that two black people from the South Side are leading us on that road. If you’re looking for the heralds of a “post-racial” America, if that adjective is ever to be more than a stupid, unlettered flourish, then look to those, like Michelle Obama, with a sense of security in who they are—those, black or white, who hold blackness as more than the losing end of racism.

And even on the Wheel Of Fortune, the culture changes.

There’s nothing inherently wrong or cynical about the GOP opposing Obama’s stimulus package. It may be politically stupid (I suspect it is); it may even be insincere (did these people ever really stop Bush’s out-of-control spending?); but a few raspberries against a highly popular and talented president are a sign of democratic health. Imagine if we’d had more of that in, say, 2002? Will Wilkinson explains.

Could newspapers cease to exist? A report from 1981. My favorite quote:

"We’re not in it to make money.  We’re probably not going to lose a lot, but we’re not going to make much either."

Not so much. Benen:

In our reality, Obama did make "centrist compromises," and liberals in the Democratic Party didn’t like it. Obama did the opposite of Bush’s style of governing — he engaged the congressional minority, listened to their ideas, and weakened his own bill to garner a larger majority. House Republicans insisted on a worse bill, Democrats wouldn’t give them one, so the GOP voted against it. Halperin inexplicably believes that’s Obama’s fault.

Ross has a sharp post on Obama and the culture wars:

…what makes Obama promising to liberals isn’t his potential to "end" culture-war battles – it’s his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear. So waiting a day to reverse the ban on overseas funding for groups that provide abortions, for instance, isn’t a compromise in the culture wars, or an act of moderation – it’s a way of making a victory for the left seem like an act of moderation to people who aren’t that invested in the issue.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that Ross is still at war. And if he wants to end all legal abortion and keep gay couples out of the zone of family, he should be. But the middle is not where Ross is.