But Don't Take My Word For it...

This is David Brooks' reaction to Jindal's speech, via TNR:

"We Believe Americans Can Do Anything"

That was the recurring catchphrase from Bobby Jindal's GOP response to Obama's speech. And it didn't get much smarter from there. Jindal's speech felt like it could have been directed towards middle schoolers - the type of audience that Karl Rove believes America is. If anything, it demonstrated the GOP's inability to engage and help solve the current problems plaguing the country.

So you're supposed to PAY your taxes?

Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority leader from South Dakota and Obama's nominee for director of Health and Human Services, pulled out of the running today a week or so after it was revealed that he failed to pay more than $100,000 of taxes over the past several years. So, apparently, ends the nascent second-chance political career.

This in addition to the withdrawl from consideration by Nancy Killefer, White House performance officer, earlier in the day, also for tax reasons. I guess Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary nominee whose tax problems have been well documented over the past several weeks, got lucky because he was the first one we learned about. Things might've been different if Daschle's and Killefer's problems had preceded him.

So Obama's honeymoon officially lasted about a week. Since then, problems with his nominees and the looming fight over the stimulus plan have given him loads of problems. How will he handle it? There's nothing we can do but wait and see.

Does Obama Sound 'Elitist' Now?

Now this is a guy that we can relate to.

'“Even as he is sober about these challenges, I have never seen him happier,” Mr. Axelrod said. “The chance to be under the same roof with his kids, essentially to live over the store, to be able to see them whenever he wants, to wake up with them, have breakfast and dinner with them — that has made him a very happy man.”'

The Floodgates Have Opened....for now

In this joyful article, the Washington Post recaps Obama's first week in office:

"In his first seven days in office, Obama has banned the use of controversial CIA interrogation tactics, ordered the closure of the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and begun planning for the drawdown of troops in Iraq. He also imposed stringent limits on lobbyists, unveiled an $825 billion stimulus plan, and ordered a halt to any last-minute rules and regulations put in place by his predecessor."

Music to my ears/eyes/senses. Eventually his ambitions will run up against reality, but for now let's enjoy the sensation of an elected official following through on his promises.

Fox News is Scared of Obama

Stewart: "If you don't stick to your values when you're being tested...they're not values! They're hobbies."

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Fox News Fear Imbalance

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Well, This Complicates Things...

The New York Times reports that Said Ali al-Shihri, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee that was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007, has become al-Qaeda's head honcho on Yemen. Yikes. Maybe the closing of Gitmo really isn't going to be as simple as most of us want it to be. There are some undeniably bad people down there, people that are our enemies and that should be either put in prison or otherwise neutralized.

So Bush/Cheney was right about one thing - we are being threatened by nasty, potentially unreformable people. But by torturing the detainees and leaving them in legal limbo, Bush/Cheney jeopardized the very thing that they were trying to protect: our safety. As more Guantanamo and other secret prison torture cases come to light and more of them are thrown out of court, like this one, you have the potential that really dangerous guys get put out on the street and end up as al-Qaeda commanders.

Now that Obama wants to close Guantanamo, the thorny question of what to do with these prisoners becomes a real problem. The Bush administration refused to deal with the question, as it refused to deal with all other questions, and was happy to hold the men indefinitely. It's not going to be that easy for Obama. Do you let these guys out on the street and cross your fingers that they don't become terrorists? Do you try them in civilian court and risk losing? What if you "know" that someone is a terrorist but, due to torture or other evidence problems, you can't "prove" it. Then what?

These are tough questions and they make me glad that I'm not in Obama's shoes right now.

The Inauguration

What else can I say other than it was awesome?

Bush's Ignorance

A recently released study found that ideology affected hiring practices at the Justice Department from 2001 -2007. In particular, the study found that a man named Bradley Schlozman, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, altered the hiring process to weed out candidates with perceived ties to liberal organizations.

I’d be shocked if this came as a big surprise to anyone. The Justice Department’s hiring process caused a scandal a few years ago and led to the resignation of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It was only a matter of time before investigations “proved” what everyone already knew.

If we take away any lessons from the past eight years, it should be that insulating oneself from dissenting opinions is an easy way to screw everything up. Bush, Cheney, and their cronies systematically eliminated dissenting opinions at all levels of government. Their willful ignorance led directly to the disaster in Iraq; to torture; to the failures during Hurricane Katrina, and maybe even to our current economic problems.

The Bush administration is so insulated from dissenting opinion that, even in his last press conference, Bush himself refused to admit that America’s standing in the world had suffered. He’s either lying or completely, blissfully ignorant. I’m not sure which is worse. But I am sure that the way the Bush administration went about governance was disastrous for America and harmful to the world. I hope Obama, and all of our future presidents, can learn from the terrible mistakes.

Hitchens Hates Hillary

Christopher Hitchens at Slate wants the Senate to reject Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. He says:

"Why is Sen. Clinton, the spouse of the great influence-peddler, being nominated in the first place? In exchange for giving the painful impression that our State Department will be an attractive destination for lobbyists and donors, what exactly are we getting? George Marshall? Dean Acheson? Even Madeleine Albright? No, we are getting a notoriously ambitious woman who made a fool of herself over Bosnia, at the time and during the recent campaign, and who otherwise has no command of foreign affairs except what she's picked up second-hand from an impeached ex-president, a disbarred lawyer, and a renter of the Lincoln Bedroom."

The guy has a point. I’ve never been a big fan of H.C., and her ridiculous performance in this election cycle didn’t win me over. That being said, I think Hitchens underestimates Hillary’s abilities and overestimates Bill Clinton’s potential influence on Obama’s administration.

Since when does the Secretary of State dictate foreign policy? Condoleeza Rice is an extreme example of how impotent a Secretary can be. I doubt Hillary will be as toothless, but I can’t imagine her openly defying Obama on questions of importance. He’s the boss, and if she’s openly insubordinate to a successful and popular president, she’s not going to win herself any votes in 2012 or 2016. She’s smart enough to realize that, and so is Obama, and so is Bill.

I don’t think Obama’s team is, as Hitchens puts it, “wide eyed.” They dealt with the bad Bill Clinton during the primary, after all (I’m thinking of the “race card” incident). They know he has uncomfortably close ties with all kinds of shady foreign characters. Obama was adept at handling both Clinton’s during the primaries when he was their rival. What makes Hitchens so sure that he’ll be unable to manage them when he’s the Boss Man?

Obama on Food

I've written before about my thoughts on the food industry in this country. Lots of others have also expressed hope that Obama might begin to do something about our over-reliance on King Corn. Alas, according to the New York Times:

Although Mr. Obama has proposed changes in the nation’s farm and rural policies and emphasizes the connection between diet and health, there is nothing to indicate he has a special interest in a radical makeover of the way food is grown and sold.

You can't really blame the guy. The economy's in the crapper and we're fighting two wars, after all. I suppose food policy can wait. For now.

Torturing the Shoe-Thrower

The Egyptian shoe-throwing journalist being held in an Iraqi prison has, according to his brother, who recently visited him in prison, been tortured. As a result:

Uday al-Zaidi said his brother had said: “After the torture and the cold-water shower, I told them to bring me a blank sheet of paper and I would sign it, and they could write whatever they wanted. I am ready to say I am a terrorist or whatever you want.”

This is the point that people often miss about the reasons why governments (including ours) torture people. It’s not that we actually believe we’re getting sound information. Those who are tortured are often willing to say anything at all, even confessing to crimes that they did not commit, in the hopes that the torture will cease. Governments then take those sham confessions and hold them up to ‘prove’ that the torture was effective and that a criminal has been outted. That’s what Hitler did; it’s what Stalin did; it’s what North Korea still does. And now, apparently, it’s what the US-backed Iraqi government does.

Torturing has never been about acquiring reliable information. It’s about cowing your opponents, real and/or imagined, into submission; and it’s about governments trying to legitimize oppressive tactics by conjuring fake confessions from battered inmates.

I hope Obama follows through on his promises. This isn’t what America should stand for.

Obama's Economic Appointments

A close friend of mine told me this morning that he “wished he had voted for Hillary.” Why Hillary? “At least we would have known what to expect,” was his answer. He was upset at Obama’s recent appointments to high level economic positions within his administration. "Where is Krugman?" my friend wondered. He believes that Bill Clinton bears a portion of the blame for the current economic disaster. After all, his main economic advisor was Alan Greenspan and if we’re going to blame “the last 30 years” of economic policy for our current predicament, we can’t arbitrarily ignore eight of them.

Because Clinton and his faintly neo-liberal economic team bear at least some blame for our current mess, my friend argued, then the last thing we should be doing is putting the same guys back in power to fix the problem that they had a hand in creating.

That’s a fair point, but only if you believe that economic policymakers are the ones who are going to fix the economy by themselves. As my Dad pointed out, one of the primary responsibilities of political leadership in a crisis is to instill confidence, and to banish fear. It was FDR who said in 1933, after all, that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Even if you have a sound economic framework, it’s not going to be ok unless people are willing to spend and invest their money. And they’re not going to do that unless they’re confident that they’ll be protected.

So Obama has two priorities for the next several months: first, to ease people’s fear; second, to appoint people who are capable of fixing the structural problems.

The calm and deliberate manner in which he’s made his economic appointments will go far in easing people’s fears. When Joe Shmoe turns on the TV and sees that several Clinton advisors are back in power, he’ll think “well I didn’t do so badly during the 90s. Maybe things aren’t as bleak as I had feared.” The hope is that at some point in the not-so-distant future, Joe Shmoe and the rest of us will start investing and spending again.

That being said, my friend’s concerns about the structural changes that will be made to the economy in the next six months are well-founded. As my friend put it, if your drunk friend just drove your car into a wall, you wouldn’t let him drive it again just because he promised he was sober. You’d get the DD.

So is it a good idea to bring in the people who helped screw things up to help fix everything? Obama seems to think so, and from what I’ve read in interviews and short biographies, these guys seem to recognize that times have changed and that their economic ideologies need tweaking. Will it be enough? Or will we shortly revert to free-market ideologies that help the rich and screw everyone else? Who knows, but I’m 100% certain that we have a better chance with Obama than we ever would have had with McCain. Or Hillary for that matter.

At the very least, I hope I persuaded my friend to give Obama a chance to be inaugurated and make policy before he jumps ship. Was I successful? And are there other already-disillusioned Obamacons out there? We’ll see on both counts.

Out With the Old...

How sad and frightening is it that the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on the face of the earth, is totally ignored by the other Most Powerful People in the World. Bush was so incompetant, so bullish, so wrong about everything, that the elected leaders of the world can't even bring themselves to shake his hand.

It makes me doubly glad that we elected Obama. I'm sure that, at the very least, he'll be shaking everyone's hand.

Beginning of the Big Fix?

The New York Times reports that Obama claims his campaign promises to big-time investments in new energy technology remains at the top of his agenda. Cool. My only question is: when Obama says that "millions of new jobs will be created," what types of jobs does he mean? I know that back during the New Deal a lot of guys my age signed up for jobs working on roads, parks, bridges, etc.

But what types of clean-energy jobs can I, and people like me, hope for in the coming years? I don't have a research/science background and I can't imagine that my next career move is installing solar panels. I wonder if my primary function will simply be to buy whatever cool new 'green' technologies make their debut over the next decade.

Obama's Victory

Throughout the prolonged primary/presidential contest, Obama’s mantra was that he was going to “change politics.” That message inspired, so it seemed, thousands of new voters, especially young ones and African American ones. Watching Obama’s huge rallies, I was convinced that the political demographics had really changed. I expected a huge turnout on Nov. 4th, and for Obama to be carried to victory on a swell of young/black/new voters.

As it turns out, that’s not quite what happened. Turnout was significantly higher than in 2004, 64% to 55%, but among the young voter demographic turnout wasn’t markedly different than usual. I’ve read reports that even without the overwhelming youth and black vote, Obama would’ve won. What pushed him over the top was that almost no independents voted for McCain, with most of them saying that antipathy towards Palin was what sealed their decision.

That’s disappointing to me in a couple of ways. There was such enthusiasm among my friends and family that I was sure everyone in all parts of the country was feeling. I was sure that people would be drawn to Obama’s decency, intellect, and character and choose to vote for him as opposed to the old fuddy-duddy.

But what really happened was that people hated Palin so much that they decided to vote for Obama. That brings up the scary thought that, had McCain chosen someone else, he might have won. And that’s what disappoints me. To me, Obama had seemed so fresh, new, and perfect for the situation. I wanted the rest of America to believe that along with me. But it turns out that they didn’t, really.

What Obama really succeeded in doing, I guess, was to energize the Democratic base more than we’d been energized before and making sure key constituencies (blacks especially) got out there and voted. I’m not sure how much expanding he did, especially when you consider that he got less votes in Ohio than Kerry did in 2004, and he only won because 300,000 Republican voters who voted for Bush in 2004 stayed home for McCain in 2008. Was that because they just couldn’t quite bring themselves to vote for Obama, and thought that a non-vote for McCain was the same as a vote for Obama, or was it simply because they were uninspired and unorganized this year? Who knows.

Still, Obama’s victory is important because it shows us Democrats that there are a lot of people out there who think like we do, and that the important thing is organizing and building a community. I just hope that the next 4 years justify our faith in him.

Obama's Speech in Richmond 10-23-08

I felt as though I wanted to save this one.