SmartRemarks

Why? Why does a presidential administration that came into office on the diligent labor and fervent hopes of progressives continue to send progressives the message that it doesn’t need them, indeed that it doesn’t even care what they think, that their principles and passions are nothing more than chips to be bargained away as evidence of the White House’s “post-partisan” cred?

Today Barack Obama announced that his nominee to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court will be Elena Kagan, current Solicitor General, former Dean of Harvard Law. After much debate and speculation in the press and online, the decision isn’t really a surprise. It is, however, a major disappointment.

A Supreme Court vacancy is always a huge opportunity, and my personal hopes for Obama’s choice when this one arose could be summed up in just three words: please be bold. I had hoped that with (as it were) strategist David Axelrod whispering in one ear (recently fairly outspoken about the pointlessness of seeking cooperation from the right) and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel whispering in the other (advocating triangulation and expediency, valuing power over principle as ever), for a change Obama might recapture the spirit that animated his campaign and decide that, if the GOP is determined to give him a fight, he’ll make it one with stakes worth winning.

But once again, he didn’t.

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Tags: Elena Kagan, Glenn Greenwald, John Paul Stevens, judiciary, Obama, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Senate, Supreme Court

Either way, it’s definitely disturbing, and (a term I don’t often use) un-American.

What is? The fact that the Obama White House has ordered the CIA to assassinate an American citizen, wherever and whenever he may be found. A man who’s been charged with no crime, much less convicted of one.

The ostensible reason? “Terrorism,” of course.

That this is absolutely unconscionable and inexcusable should go without saying. But apparently it doesn’t, since people I know to be smart, thoughtful liberals have been making excuses for it. So let’s talk about it for a bit.

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Tags: al-Awlaki, assassination, CIA, Constitution, due process, Glenn Greenwald, Obama, terrorism

As the health care reform debate enters what appears to be the home stretch (albeit not for the first time), what Washington is offering us (the citizenry) boils down to a choice between bad and worse. The legislation now under consideration, both the Senate bill and the slight variation on same presented as “Obama’s bill,” is the end result of a process that has methodically stripped away almost everything that made this reform effort worth undertaking in the first place. They’ve thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.

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Tags: Alan Grayson, Bart Stupak, Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, Dick Durbin, health care, insurance, Max Baucus, Obama, Pelosi, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Reid, Republicans, Senate

And no one told me when to run… that’s for damn sure.

New Year’s came and went without me writing a blog post. I was preoccupied with other things at the time, as detailed to some extent in my last couple of entries bookending my computer headaches. But I did make some observations that I think are still worth mentioning, as both the year and the decade rolled over and restarted.

I’m well aware, of course, that both our calendar year and the decades into which we assemble them are completely arbitrary human constructs, and that there’s nothing metaphysically significant about the transition from one random chronological marker to another, despite all the cultural baggage we attach to them. Nevertheless, one of the central components of human consciousness is our capability for pattern recognition, and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century definitely displayed some patterns that are, at the very least, psychologically meaningful.

To put it all in a nutshell… this past decade sucked. Big time.

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Tags: 2009, 2010, climate, George W. Bush, government, internet, journalism, Mark Morford, media, Obama, progress, the future

In the midst of the cesspool of paranoia and paralogia into which the ranting right is dragging so much of our political discourse these days… the latest iterations thereof being the Fox-driven hypocritical demagoguery about ACORN, and (even worse) the WSJ’s incredible suggestion that this(!) of all things somehow merits a special prosecutor…

…a reader comment about the latter on John Cole’s blog put it all into perspective in a way that can’t help but provoke a grin, and that definitely merits sharing:

…does anyone else think that its great that Obama can have all these Czars and communists in the same administration without them trying to kill each other? Team of Rivals, Fuck Yeah! The man’s a diplomatic genius. After this, solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict should be a cakewalk.

Really, what more can be said?

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Tags: ACORN, conservatism, Obama

So, where did I leave off?

…That’s right, there was a speech Wednesday night. A pretty significant one, in fact, for reasons I described at some length.

What of it, then?

I can’t deny that it was a very, very good speech. Rhetorically powerful. And yet, what it says about the direction of health care policy, and thus about Obama and the Democratic Party itself… still remains substantially up in the air.

(Even as every pundit who can string three words together attempts to read the tea leaves and tell us otherwise.)

I’ll try to avoid that kind of divination. But opinions? Analysis? I have those.

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Tags: Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, government, health care, insurance, Obama, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Reid, Republicans, Senate

August is a strange season in politics. In the final weeks of summer last year, we had the incredible (and incredibly short-lived) public buzz surrounding Sarah Palin, before people realized she just used those glasses for looks, not reading. This year’s dog days brought us hordes of astroturf Teabagger Republicans demonstrating that they think public discourse boils down to “whoever shouts loudest wins.”

I’ve sat back and haven’t posted a great deal in recent weeks (although it’s been impossible to avoid following the theater of it all). For one thing, there are better things to do when the weather is nice (not all that common a condition in Chicago). For another, there’s been a lot of justifiable uncertainty and skepticism developing among progressives about exactly where and how Obama and the Democratic party are willing to take a stand, and I’ve been genuinely unsure of my own assessment, wavering from cynicism to optimism sometimes on a daily basis.

But Labor Day is behind us and silly season is over, and the president gave a major speech on health care tonight, and it’s time to take a serious look at where things stand.

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Tags: Democrats, Glenn Greenwald, health care, Obama, Paul Krugman, progressives, Rahm Emanuel

The CIA Inspector General’s report on U.S. torture of detainees was released this week (under court order, thanks to a diligent ACLU lawsuit, after five years hidden from public view). The timing dovetails with Attorney General Holder’s decision to launch an investigation of that torture (albeit a tightly constrained one).

The conduct detailed in the report is barbaric and shameful, and the report moreover makes clear that it was of questionable effectiveness in gaining any useful intelligence information. Most of the media coverage has reflected this straightforward reality.

Then there’s Fox News…

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Tags: CIA, Dick Cheney, DOJ, Eric Holder, Glenn Greenwald, Obama, OLC memos, torture

One could go on at literally exhaustive length about the ins and outs of the current “health care debate” in Washington, but I’ll try to avoid that. The media and the blogosphere have provided a constant play-by-play in terms of both substantive policy and, even more, political strategy. (Jonathan Chait at TNR has been particularly diligent. Meanwhile, much of the MSM seems content merely ringing premature death-knells for reform.) Me, I’ll just try to provide a few observations from a mile-high view.

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Tags: Blue Dogs, Congress, Democrats, health care, House of Representatives, insurance, Medicare, Obama, Paul Krugman, Rahm Emanuel, Republicans, Senate

The New Republic isn’t the place to look for progressive opinion these days (especially on matter of foreign policy), but every once in a while it does offer a reminder of why it used to be considered a liberal magazine. Most recently, TNR’s Ed Kilgore produced quite possibly the best and most succinct summary to date of all the reasons the left has to be disappointed with the Obama administration, including a handy bulleted list.

I can’t really improve on it, so let me just quote the pertinent bits:

Only six months into the Obama presidency, the new administration has already experienced an unusually robust assortment of criticism from fellow Democrats, at least at the elite opinion-leading and activist level … for a wide array of missteps, if not downright heresies. Here are just a few:

• Undertaking expensive and questionably effective “bailouts” of the financial sector instead of simply regulating and/or nationalizing it.
• Using vast political capital to promote a fiscal stimulus package that was too small to work, and allowing Senate ”centrists” to water it down even further.
• Refusing to reverse major elements of the Bush program for surveillance, detention, and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and obstructing efforts to hold Bush officials accountable for violations of civil liberties.
• Moving too slowly to end American military involvement in Iraq, and moving too fast to make new commitments for military action in Afghanistan.
• Deferring to “centrists” and even Republicans in Congress on crucial climate change and health reform legislation at the palpable risk of destroying the progressive nature of these initiatives.
• Failing to honor commitments for immediate action to promote GLBT equality, particularly with respect to the military.

Aside from these specific issues, there’s been a pervasive feeling in many progressive circles that Obama is too cautious, too “pragmatic,” too subservient to Democratic “centrists,” too worried about bipartisanship, too interested in outreach to people who will never support him, and too unwilling to utilize the bully pulpit to articulate and defend progressive principles.

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Tags: Congress, Obama, primaries, progressives