The Daily What finds it:
The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre has been experiencing heavy rains as of late, so a bunch of kids got together and decided to do the only reasonable thing you’d expect a bunch of kids to do in such a situation: They grabbed their surfboards and headed down to the city’s open sewer system.
He's taking the usual slew of tactical hits as his opponents try every single line of attack and pound every day, squeezing every ounce of agitprop from the news cycle. His numbers are gliding downward (although not by much), his foreign policy gains are structural and have as yet no tangible results, a critical Mid-East ally, Israel, is doing all it can to destroy his credibility with the Muslim world, his health insurance reform is still not passed, the debt is simply staggering (and the GOP's willingness to blame it all on him is as shameless as it can be convincing to those who know nothing and think less), etc etc.
And yet I remain absurdly confident that he is on the right path. Why? This rare moment of Beltway perspective helps explain:
No pain, no gain? In a way, last week epitomized President Obama’s 10 months in office. There was lots of seemingly short-term pain — members of Congress calling for his Treasury secretary to resign, more P.R. snafus over the stimulus, the chattering class criticizing his Asia trip, and his approval rating dropping below
50% for the first time in Gallup’s poll.
But there also was long-term gain — the Senate on Saturday moving one step closer to passing health-care reform and a growing economic consensus, via the New York Times, that the stimulus is working despite all the P.R. headaches it has caused. Indeed, this short-term pain/long-term gain for Team Obama occurred during the presidential campaign. For all the hits they took (Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, “bitter,” the PUMAs, Bill Ayers, Landstuhl, even Joe the Plumber), they were always working toward the prize (270-plus electoral votes). And remember this: If you simply judged the last three months of the 2008 campaign by which campaign “won” the daily news cycle, McCain came out ahead. That’s perhaps the best example of the short-term/long-term.
I think Obama's handling of the economic crisis has been about as good as it reasonably gets; I think his handling of Iran is equally adroit; I find his relentless emphasis on reality in Afghanistan a good sign; I suspect the only way to get health insurance reform is the way he has attempted; I think the stimulus was necessary and sufficient; and I think unemployment will be coming down when he runs for re-election. On those issues I differ with him on – accountability for war crimes and civil rights – I can see the cool and cunning logic of his moves so far. The depth and complexity of the problems he faces remain immense. Perhaps he will prove incapable of surmounting them. But his persistence matters here. And we are not yet a year in.
He is strategy; his opponents are tacticians. And in my view, their tactics are consigning them to a longer political death than if they had taken a more constructive course. I could be wrong on all this, of course. History makes fools of us all. But this is my take as of now. And my relief at his being there remains profound.
The Iranian regime is using SMS to warn people not to protest:
The reports come ahead of Student Day on December 7, which the opposition has vowed to “turn green” in support of the Green movement backing opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi.
One blogger posted a picture of the cautionary SMS, which states: “Respected citizen, based on our information, you have been influenced by the antisecurity propaganda of the foreign media. If you get involved in any illegal protest and get in touch with the foreign media…” The image is cut off after that, but according to other sources, the message threatens that the person “will be considered a criminal according to several articles of the Islamic law and dealt with accordingly.”
And the political executions continue. I believe these moves are signs of desperation in the coup regime. But we will see on December 7 if the Green Movement can still command the people.
The signs above that signing table are priceless.
Two Sarah Palins.
"To see what is in front of our nose needs a constant struggle," – George Orwell.
Goldblog makes a phone call:
I called the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., Dr. Thomas Ice. The Pre-Trib Center is one of the preeminent evangelical institutions in this country arguing for literal Bible prophecy, and especially for pre-millenial dispensationalism, a complicated belief system that concerns the conditions that must obtain on Earth before Jesus can return (“Pre-Trib” is short for “pre-tribulation.”) [Ice said,] “Over forty percent of the world’s Jews now live in Israel. What Sarah Palin probably believes is that this is the first regathering,” when the Jews all migrate to Israel.
“This is a condition for the second regathering, the regathering in belief, when the Jewish nation is converted. Then there will be the battle of Armageddon, because remember, Satan wants to wipe out the Jews to prevent the Second Coming, but Jesus comes to rescue the beleaguered Jews. We believe that the Jews are going to be converted so that they can call on Jesus to rescue them from Satan.”
And people wonder why she wants more Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Or why we read sentences like this in the press:
She quizzed [Billy Graham] on the presidents he’s known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.
The fear on my part is that if the neocons lose the conservative elite on the Middle East (as the objective evidence keeps piling in), they will double-down by throwing in their lot even more comprehensively with the Palin “Bring-On-Armageddon” crowd. The only thing worse than the pathological anti-Semitism of the Islamists is the pathological philo-Semitism of the Christianists that ends with the real elimination of Jewish people from the face of the earth – through mass conversion to evangelical Christianity.
Tyler Cowen counters Yglesias:
As I understand it, the apparently fiscally responsible portions of the bill come from a) eventual cuts in Medicare spending, and b) rising taxes on some health insurance plans and they come later of course. Few Congressional representatives are willing to do these things today, so should we predict they will be done in the future? (The same problem plagues Waxman-Markey, by the way, so these back and forth rhetorical debates are becoming quite common.) In my view, policies structured in this manner are simply another way of doing deficit spending.
Martha Stewart is asked about Palin.
The Dish 