SmartRemarks

I’d been meaning for  several days to write about the Obama administration’s appointment of Charles (Chas) Freeman to the chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council. It was a praiseworthy choice that promised new perspectives on foreign intelligence and international relations… and therefore, unsurprisingly, it was controversial in certain corners. But I hadn’t gotten to it yet when the news broke this past Wednesday that, in the face of a barrage of criticism from those corners, Freeman had withdrawn his name from consideration for the position.mild

This is a huge disappointment. It’s also a harbinger of policy battles to come. So I’m still going to write about it. Settle in, this is going to be a long one…

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Tags: Afghanistan, Charles Freeman, Dennis Blair, diplomacy, international, Iraq, Israel, Obama, Palestine

President Obama has the useful political skill of being a chameleon of sorts, looking different depending on context and, especially, the eye of the beholder. By and large this has worked for him; he and his programs are more popular now than when he was elected. All the same, there’s been a great deal of media attention lately to a backlash of sorts against the Obama administration. Most of it comes from the usual suspects, fire-breathers like Rush Limbaugh and his CPAC cohorts. They charge that Obama is doing exactly what he promised (horrors!) and it’s even worse than they expected, and isn’t it terrible how this rush toward Euro-style socialism will be the ruin of this country? We can easily enough dismiss these types as right-wingers who never supported him and never would under any circumstances, and who are too busy right now presiding over the self-destruction of the Republican party to do any great harm.

Some of the criticism is a little more temperate, though… and comes from factions of the right who did at least conditionally support Obama. They’re now arguing that he isn’t what they took him to be, since they thought he was A Moderate Like Them, when in fact he’s A Radical Ideologue. The most prominent invocation of this argument recently showed up in a piece by David Brooks, one of the New York Times‘ pet conservative columnists. He starts by drawing conclusions pretty much the diametrical opposite of my own (and most other analysts’) about Obama’s proposed budget, and veers off wildly from there: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: cabinet, conservatism, David Brooks, federal budget, Obama

Just going from the press coverage, of course. I haven’t read the actual FY 2010 federal budget the administration presented to Congress. (Have you ever tried to read a federal budget? Even in outline form, they’re large. And arcane. The legislators themselves don’t usually bother. They have staff lobbyists for that sort of thing…)

Anyway, I’m going to tackle this one in bullet-point format, starting with the largest category:

Good Things About Obama’s Budget

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Tags: climate, Congress, economy, education, energy, environment, federal budget, health care, Obama, taxes

Wall Street. A term that designates not only a physical place, but a symbol, a way of thinking. It’s the capital of investing (embodied in the stock market), the capital of high finance (embodied in the banking system), the capital of… capital. It’s the hub of the economy, domestically and internationally.

And it’s the single biggest stumbling block in the Obama administration’s attempt to get the economy back on track.

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Tags: Alan Greenspan, banking, economy, financial crisis, nationalization, Obama, Paul Krugman, Timothy Geithner

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Obama’s address tonight may well have been the first presidential speech I’ve ever seen that genuinely lived up to the full meaning of the word “presidential.” The first time in my life we’ve had real, effective leadership in Washington. So this is what it looks and sounds like!

It’s sincerely heartening these days, of course, just to hear a presidential speech delivered in complete, grammatical sentences, shorn of angry fearmongering and brazen paralogia. But Obama had to achieve far more than that. He had a tightrope to walk, having to avoid being too doom-n-gloomy (and thereby get accused of talking down the economy) but also avoid making unrealistically rosy promises (and thereby get accused of empty politicking). The times we are in are indeed, as he phrased it, “difficult and perilous,” yet he had to make clear that they are not insurmountably so.

He pulled it off.

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Tags: Bill Kristol, economy, education, energy, financial crisis, George Lakoff, health care, media, Obama, polling, Rachel Maddow, Republicans, State of the Union

After much Congressional wrangling and pontificating, Obama was finally able to sign the economic stimulus bill yesterday.

What exactly does this mean?

Make no mistake: this bill is less than it could or should have been. Really, there should have been only two guiding principles in putting this bill together:

1) Figure out every worthwhile project on which public funds could reasonably be expended—public or private, state or federal, “shovel-ready” infrastructure or long-term investment.

2) Fund them all.

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Tags: economy, Obama, Republicans

It’s a nice refreshing tingly feeling, isn’t it, to watch a president who clearly not only understands complex economic concepts, but is even capable of boiling them down into simplified versions for the press? (Even if he’s occasionally visibly frustrated by the need to do so.) Bush always came across as just barely in command of the PowerPoint version of reality some adviser had walked him through, and painfully incapable of going into greater depth about anything.

The corporate media, of course (at least so far as I saw on NBC), was preoccupied with the fleeting meme that strategically speaking, Obama should have done this a week ago. That, however, utterly misses every point worth getting.

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Tags: economy, media, Obama, television

It’s been far longer than I intended since my last post. Sometimes time just runs away from you. So let me just toss off a few ideas that have crossed my mind in recent days, and get caught up…

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First off:  the wrangling in Washington over the new “economic stimulus package” has been interesting to watch. Obama has gone out of his way to be as “post-partisan” as promised, extending an olive branch to Republicans the likes of which Dems never saw under eight years of Bush, wining and dining them, inviting input… and in response they basically gave him the finger. (Although, anxious not to alienate a public who likes him, they tried to shift their ire toward the Democratic leadership.) And the usual suspects in the punditocracy backed them up.

Basically, the GOP’s goal right now seems to be to shrink the stimulus bill down to something so small and weak that it won’t be effective… and then to blame their opponents for its ineffectiveness. All while the country at large continues to suffer, of course.

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Congress, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, economy, Final Crisis, House of Representatives, Illinois, Legion, Obama, Republicans, Senate, super-heroes, television, Tom Geoghegan, unemployment

President Barack Obama. Has a nice feeling as it rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

It feels like taking a deep breath of fresh, clean air after eight years of holding your breath.

This kind of enthusiasm about the inauguration of a new president is unlike anything in living memory—certainly not mine, at least, and I’ve heard the same thing from folks considerably older. It’s a wonder to behold.

Obama’s name and image are everywhere. He’s on book and magazine covers, he’s on banners hanging over city sidewalks. He’s on soda bottles and baseball caps, coffee mugs and children’s drawings on refrigerators. At the gym yesterday I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt reading “I (heart) Obama.” Major newspapers have published extra print runs of their Nov. 5 victory editions to sell off at $5 or $10 a pop.

Americans are ready, more than ready, to feel optimistic and idealistic again. After eight years of oppressive despair and decline, the country has (not for the first time in its history) won itself a second chance, a chance to correct the errors of its ways… and proved it deserved that chance, all at the same stroke… by the actions of its citizens at the ballot box.

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Tags: climate, diplomacy, economy, Grant Park, inauguration, Obama, polling

If anyone wonders how (A) a nation can move step-by-step down the path toward fascism, or (B) why the mainstream press in this country is held in such increasingly dismal regard, this week’s cover story in Newsweek provides a searing case study.

Co-authors Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas—both award-winning, Ivy League-educated journalists who move in the highest circles of academia, media, and politics; IOW, the very definition of establishment credibility—have decided that one of the key issues facing the incoming Obama administration, when confronting the boundaries of presidential power, is (as the cover blurb puts it), “What Would Dick [Cheney] Do?”

And Editor-in-Chief Jon Meacham—he who recently resuscitated the meme that “America is a center-right country”—heartily endorses this angle, writing inside the magazine that the cover feature addresses how “the urgent question now is whether President Obama will hew to [the anti-Cheney] dogma or whether, confronted with the realities of office, he will begin to see virtue in the antiterror apparatus Cheney helped Bush create.”

This, in the aftermath of an election that decisively and unequivocally repudiated the disastrous policies of Bush and Cheney—even Bush himself used the word “repudiated” in his semi-self-aware press conference today!—is what our establishment media wants us thinking about.

Where does one begin?

Well, with getting one’s gorge to subside. But after that…

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Tags: Constitution, Dick Cheney, fascism, FISA, George W. Bush, journalism, media, Obama, Rachel Maddow