Why those who blame the Obama administration for higher gasoline prices are on 'empty'

It seems as though Republican critics of the Obama administration in particular are ecstatic, even gleeful at the recent rise in gasoline prices.

Leaving aside their parochial reasons for this, it's worth rebutting some of the spurious claims that are being made in this regard.

First, there is the claim that the administration contributed to this increase by placing a moratorium on deep water drilling after the BP disaster and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline. Second (and this relates to it) is the ongoing narrative that the U.S. doesn't have enough refining capacity and therefore our supplies of gasoline (and other refined products like heating oil and jet fuel) are limited.

Let's begin with the first claim, that administration actions taken to protect the environment are the cause of the present price spike. There are two basic flaws here: 1) they do not acknowlege the reasons for these actions, and 2) these charges are not true at all.

The reasons why the administration made these decisions are quite plain.

If you go back to after the BP disaster in early 2010, businesses all along the Gulf Coast suffered as beaches were closed, tourists stayed away and the fishing industry suffered severe and lasting damage. More than that, however, the inept and bumbling attempts by BP and its contractors to cap the spill in deep water made it plain that the supposedly fail-safe systems failed, and they had no idea what they would actually do if the system did fail. In this context it was only prudent for the administration to put a six month moratorium on deepwater drilling until the reasons for the leak could be determined and methods to contain and cap such a spill developed. Imagine if they had not placed a moratorium and then another well, somewhere else in the gulf had blown out and created twice the disaster. The President is sworn to protect the United States of America and in the face of demonstrated incompetence by the drilling rig's operators he was right to follow the mantra, 'first do no harm.'

In the case of the pipeline, the project was under study and on a schedule to be decided early next year. Because it crosses an aquifer that supplies drinking water to Nebraska, and because of a rupture in a similar pipeline that spilled crude oil into the Yellowstone river in Montana last year, there was a good reason to proceed with caution. Congress however intervened and forced the President to make a decision within sixty days. Again, the President followed the advice, 'do no harm' and said 'no' to the pipeline.

What of the economic impacts? Virtually none. In the case of crude oil production in the gulf, it was down slightly during the six month moratorium (which only affected deepwater rigs, a fraction of the total) but has since recovered. As we can see from the linked chart, crude oil production was affected far more by Hurricane Ike in September 2008 than any of the minor effects of the moratorium. As to the Keystone pipeline, even if approved it would not be built for years or be operating at full capacity until at least a decade from now, so it's a stretch to tie it to anything relating to present gasoline prices. Further, the administration has almost certainly done far more to reduce demand for gasoline over coming decades by increasing fuel efficiency standards for new automobiles than the drop in the bucket that the Keystone pipeline would increase supply, whether it is eventually built (along a less environmentally sensitive route) or not.

OK, what of limited U.S. refining capacity, also said to be responsible for an increase in gasoline prices? Again, that is false. In fact, last year the United States became a net exporter of refined products. Maybe what we need to do is implement a tax on exports so gasoline produced in American refineries would be cheaper to sell in the United States than abroad.

There are both long and short term reasons for the run up in oil prices. Long term, it is simply a fact that there are billions of people in developing countries (especially China and India) who are now beginning to earn enough money to be able to afford motor vehicles and use fuel. So globally the demand for oil is, and will continue to, increase. The price will also continue to rise with it. The only realistic solution for the U.S. is to get entirely off of that treadmill by moving towards electric vehicles and other alternative sources of fuel. Short term, the increasing tension around the strait of Hormuz certainly plays a part. The west (including the U.S.) has been increasing the pressure on Iran even to the point of risking a war in the strait over the Iranian nuclear program. These sorts of foreign policy complications are inevitable given that much of the world's oil supply comes from a small area along the far end of the Persan Gulf. To assume that the diplomatic temperature around the Persian Gulf does not affect the price of oil is foolish. It does, and right now it is causing us to pay more. However, the President is to blame for this only in terms of the fact that he is not backing off from his stated position with the Iranians. So at least let's get the facts right on that.

GOP gets rabbit ears on the Clint Eastwood Chrysler commercial

Republican Clint Eastwood is catching all kinds of grief for making a commercial for Chrysler saying that "It's time for the second half in America." Of course this aired during the Super Bowl, so the slogan was logical.

But beyond that, it clearly tags with Chrysler's comeback. They are trying to sell cars, and their comeback story is a big part of their sales campaign.

I don't see what the big deal is about it, but some Republicans are upset about the commercial, claiming that it is really about President Obama's re-election campaign and alludes to a second term. That of course is hogwash; the commercial is about selling cars.

This kind of paranoid overreaction does however say a lot about the psyche of a lot of the Republicans who are blasting it. They know that President Obama took a big risk and bailed out Chrysler and General Motors. It has in fact been a smashing success. Unemployment in the city of Detroit has shot down from over 16% when he bailed out the two auto companies to about 9% today. The city is making a comeback, and the resurgent auto industry is the main reason why. Republicans, including Mitt Romney, criticized the President for the bailout at the time. So now that Detroit is back they can't avoid seeing the credit going to the President. Maybe they'd prefer that Chrysler and General Motors not show off their successes until after the election?

They also know that this has been a good week for the president. Following the January jobs report in which almost a quarter of a million net jobs were created, new polls by ABC News and Rasmussen both have Pesident Obama jumping out to a statistically significant lead against Mitt Romney.

Having gambled on the economy failing, and doing everyting they could to obstruct and not cooperate with the President and make it clear they were being uncooperative, the GOP is now on the verge of getting caught in a political no man's land.

So the truth is that Karl Rove, Mark Steyn and some of the other Republicans who have jumped all over Clint Eastwood about this, are spooked. If they hear in the phrase, "second half in America" an echo of Reagan's "morning in America," maybe it's less that the message was overtly political as it is that they know they are on the wrong side of an improving economy, and their negativism won't last until November.

Why I support President Obama without reservation in 2012

Lately, when I've criticized the Obama administration on specific issues where I've disagreed with policy (such as Afghanistan or the extension of the Patriot Act) there are those, especially on the left, who have asked why I still want to see him re-elected, whether it's because I duly admit to being a party hack or simply because he'd 'just be better than the Republicans.'

Although both of the above are true (I am an elected Democratic county party first vice chair, and have no doubt that any of the leading Republicans would continue all of the policies I dislike as well as do many other things I would't like) I am enthusiastically, and without reservation ready to work for the re-election of President Obama in 2012. He is the candidate most qualified to serve as President of the United States during the next four years.

Let me address three main topics as to why the President should be re-elected for another four years, and I will talk about the President here, not about why Republicans are bad.

1. The economy

2. Health care

3. The President's personal temperment and how it relates to the job.

THE ECONOMY

Let's start with the biggest issue, the economy. The criticism from the right about President Obama is two-fold. They argue that he has failed to fix the problems that they acknowlege that he inherited from the Bush administration, and they also argue that he has made things worse by running up the deficit with massive increases in government spending.

In regard to not fixing the problem, it is true that when President Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 7.8% and it is today 8.6%. However, at the time he was inaugurated the U.S. was teetering on the brink of a Depression. We were hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs per month with no end in sight. The President took a Keynesian approach and negotiated the Stimulus bill with Republicans. These negotiations resulted in a bill that was 43% tax cuts (while major elements of spending, such as on school construction were removed from the bill in order to gain GOP support.) Despite these concessions, the GOP followed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's "top priority to make President Obama a one-term President". Therefore the bill, heavily loaded with GOP-sponsored tax cuts as it was, received zero GOP votes in the House and only three in the Senate. Republicans like to claim they were right, and that the stimlulus was a tremendous waste of money that did not work. They cite an erroneous projection made by a staffer (made even before President Obama was inaugurated) that if the Stimulus was passed then unemployment would top out at 8% vs. 8.8% without the Stimulus (which it arguably had exceeded even before the Stimulus took effect.) That the recession was far deeper than even some of the President's economic advisors had foreseen is not the same thing as claiming that the Stimulus didn't work. In fact,
the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has backed up the administration's claims regarding the impact of the Stimulus. So when Republicans claim it did not work, that is what it is-- a claim, not backed by data. It's difficult of course to prove something which did not happen would have, and it is true that the country got out in front of the situation more quickly (TARP) than in 1929, but it is certainly a reasonable conclusion that the Stimulus and other actions taken by the Federal government saved the nation from a Depression similar to the one in the 1930's. What the administration failed to do was take enough credit for the effects of the Stimulus. It was sent out to states with permission for the Governors to spend it as needed in their own states. Some Governors have given the Federal government the credit but others have claimed that there was some kind of economic miracle in their own state without crediting whatever portion of it was due to the stimulus (this means Rick Perry especially, though Jan Brewer here in Arizona is guilty of taking the money without saying thank you too.)

The recovery since then has been bumpy but it is on the upswing. The November 2011 jobs report marked the fifth consecutive month in which private sector job growth has exceeded 100,000. In fact, it would look even better if public sector jobs weren't being cut at a record pace (so if the recovery is slow, it's not a failure of Keynesian economics, but of anti-Keynesian economics of slashing government payrolls in the middle of a down economy.) The Stimulus then was a success, in that it helped the economy land as softly as possible at the bottom of a very deep hole, and we are now crawling out at a steady and gradually improving rate. I believe that as a steward of the economy, President Obama has indeed lived up to his ideals of 'hope.' Things are getting better slowly, but they are getting better and in most states unemployment has fallen substantially over the past year. President Obama does in fact deserve credit for turning the direction of the economy around, from 'declining' to 'growing.' He deserves a chance, having done so, to work on getting it all the way up to speed. The following graph of job gains/losses in the critical period before and after the Stimulus bill passed makes it very plain.



The other area where Republicans have been critical of the President's economic policy is in the area of spending and the deficit. It is true that the Stimulus bill cost $862 billion which was added to the national debt (though as described above, it was necessary because the Depression it was designed to prevent would have been far more deadly to the overall economy.) And the President has conceded that although the Stimulus (as well as TARP) was necessary spending, in the long run the deficit needs to be reduced. I believe that given his explanation for the initial round of spending (and his acknowlegement of why he did it) that's all the explanation that is needed. He spent when he felt it was necessary to spend, so there is no reason to believe he wouldn't cut when he felt it was necessary to cut.

FINALLY let's apply the metrics I used in this post from the day President Obama was inaugurated to see how his economic record is so far:

1. The stock market. The Dow closed at 8281.22 on its last close before Obama was inaugurated, and continued down on that day to close at 7479.09 (a sense of where things were headed.) Today it closed at 12,169.65. This is not only 50% higher than it was when the President took office, but even above the 10,587.60 it was at on January 20, 2001 when Bush was inaugurated. Anyone who says this is anything less than a success (albeit on the narrow metric of how the folks that invest in stocks are doing) clearly has an agenda of running down the President no matter what the numbers say. And sales of luxury items like yachts and luxury cars are doing extremely well this year, bearing this out. Of course, as we've seen though 30 years of 'trickle down' just because the 1% are doing well, does not mean that the 99% are. However it is also true that millions of ordinary Americans are seeing their retirement accounts, IRA's and pensions in much better shape than they were a couple of years ago because of the booming stock market.

2. The Euro exchange rate. When Bush was inaugurated the rate was that it cost $0.94 to buy one Euro. After the economy tanked with Bush in the White House that was $1.32 per Euro the day Obama was inaugurated. Today it is just under $1.31. I'm willing to concede that this is not good news. Essentially the dollar (which represents faith in the American economy) has made only a very small gain against the Euro, which of course we well know that the European economy is now in a severe crisis. The exchange rate had dipped as low as $1.16 per Euro when it looked like a Greek default could be imminent but it has recovered substantially.

3. Net job growth. During the eight years after Bush was inaugurated, we had a net total job growth of 3.8 million jobs. This works out to about 40,000 per month on average. It is true that more than 2 million jobs were lost during the first two years of the Bush administration, so if you take that away then you have a gain of about 6 million jobs in 72 months, or about 83,000 jobs per month after the initial recession (which Bush apologists like to blame Clinton for even though the only big piece of legislation that was passed during the first couple of months of the Bush administration were the tax cuts, which they claimed would spur growth but it did not.) HERE IS THE KEY: even though those who pump up Bush's number by blaming his first two years on Clinton like to fully credit the first year of job losses starting in 2009 to President Obama, as we can see from the chart above the rate of loss turned around almost immediately when the Stimulus was passed, and today, despite the GOP around the country forcing public-sector job CUTS the rate of net job growth (over 100,000 now for the past five months) is STILL substantially higher than the average for the Bush administration AFTER the first two years of recession (!) In fact, during the few occasions when the Bush economy WAS producing substantially more than 100,000 private sector jobs (remember it is still over 100,000 even with the public sector cuts subtracted out) Republicans were trumpeting the same kinds of numbers as a success! Now, I will grant that we need more job growth than this, but the President has gone from a loss of -700,000 jobs per month to +100,000 and going up, so clearly his record on the economy deserves a deeper look. Even in some of the highest unemployment regions, hiring has been picking up and the unemployment rate is lower than it was last year.

4. Price of crude oil. This is the one where Obama takes the biggest hit. It was $34.20 when he took office and a barrel of Brent crude closed at $107.89 today. I was critical of Bush when crude oil prices hit $140 per barrel during his term. While some issues are clearly outside of the ability of the administration to do anything about (Arab spring, increased demand from China and India) it does push energy issues to the forefront. The Obama administration has invested in light rail, higher energy efficiency standards for automobiles and green energy. Those are all long term solutions and perhaps the biggest threat from a GOP Presidency is the threat that all of those things will be reversed and we will be back to the fossil fuel-dependent status quo on energy. That said, conservatives DO have a point that we have to feed our need for oil now. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Keystone pipeline now that it has turned into a political football. Its projected route is in fact unacceptable because it crosses some of the most sensitive regions of the aquifer which supplies the state of Nebraska with everything from drinking water to water needed for wildlife. The question is whether the route can be made environmentally safer. There is an eastern route which crosses only a small, and less sensitive portion of the aquifer. The administration must look for how, given that they will now have only a sixty day window to make that decision, they can mandate that the pipeline misses the aquifer, entirely if at all possible. Similarly, drilling is now resuming in the Gulf of Mexico, but the question is whether the safeguards are in place to prevent another spill. Sadly, there is no evidence that they are. And as we know, there is no plan in place about what to do if such a spill occurs. Maybe they should invent something that will stop it before they go back to deep sea drilling.

5. National debt. It increased under Bush from $5.8 trillion when he took office to $11.8 when he left. Yes, it has continued to increase under President Obama. However, this is one area where he makes perfect sense. There was an immediate crisis when he took office (the loss of more than 2/3 of a million jobs per month.) He did what he had to to stanch the job loss. Yes, it increased the deficit. He's fully owned up to the fact that it did, and is now saying he wants to look for ways to bring it back down in the future. Good. His opponents also like to point to the health care law as 'big spending.' Only that is not supported by the facts: The non-partisan CBO found that the PPACA actually REDUCES the deficit by $143 billion over ten years compared to if it had not been passed. Further, when the new GOP House came in the same CBO found that their attempt to repeal the law in its entirety, if it happened at the beginning of this year, would ADD almost a quarter of a trillion dollars to the deficit! So when a Republican uses 'health care' interchangeably with 'deficit spending' they show they haven't a clue what they are talking about.

HEALTH CARE

Nothing that has happened during Obama's first term is as controversial as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA.) It is true that the final bill does not include a public option (as the President himself had wanted) and that it does include an individual mandate to purchase private insurance (which candidate Obama clearly stated his opposition to during the campaign, and which contrasted him with Hillary Clinton who favored an individual mandate.) Conceded, readily. Given unified GOP opposition, the President needed the votes of all sixty Democrats. That included Blanche Lincoln who stated flatly that she would never vote for anything containing the public option, and Independent Joe Lieberman (who represents a state that is famously the home of several large insurance companies) who was looking for any excuse at all to vote against the bill, even signing onto an agreement that included a Medicare buy in at 55 that he was on record as supporting but then backing out and refusing to back the plan. As we know too, Democrat Ben Nelson (whose state is home to the Mutual of Omaha insurance company) refused to vote for the plan until it included special treatment for Nebraska (the so-called "Cornhusker kickback.") So the plan we got was the plan that was necessary in light of unified opposition from the right and the need to placate, therefore, every single one of fifty-eight Democratic and two Independent Senators. Yes, getting it passed was ugly, but also yes, it did get passed.

Given that there is room for improvement, let's consider what it does do. It sets up exchanges so those who can't afford insurance will receive a subsidy to help them buy it. Maybe we would have preferred a public option (or even single payer if we could get it) but achieving universal coverage (though granted universal coverage that excludes undocumented immigrants, but that's a topic for a different discussion) is a good and firm step in the right direction. When it was passed, there were 51 million Americans without health insurance. Because of changes that have already gone into effect such as an end to pre-existing exlusions and recissions and allowing parents to continue to cover their kids while they are in college, that number has already gone down by two million despite the slow recovery in the economy. When the bill is fully implemented, there will no longer be two classes of people in the emergency room: those who are insured or can pay cash, vs. those who are uninsured and poor and generally have to wait far longer until the people in the first category have all been seen. THIS IS A GOOD THING and those, particularly liberals, who suggest otherwise because of some esoteric argument that the health care bill isn't 'better' are wilfully blind and probably have never been uninsured themselves or know what that means if you are sick or injured but stacked on the back rack waiting for hours on end or sometimes even days to be seen.

Further, the first President to propose and push for a national health care system was Teddy Roosevelt. He left office more than a century ago. That's how long we've been trying, and that's how long conservatives have blocked any kind of insurance reform. THE FACT THAT THIS GOT PASSED AT ALL is, in the words of Vice President Biden, a "BFD." Certainly an achievement for the President.

THE PRESIDENT'S PERSONALITY IS SUITED TO THE JOB

Let's end with the President's basic temperment. He's both thoughtful and careful in thinking through his response to crises and but also willing to be bold and accept the consequences and see things through once he's made a decision. This was first put on display just a couple of months into his term when Somali pirates kidnapped and held for ransom the captain of an American freighter. President Obama gave negotiaters the chance to act but finally when the captain's life was in danger he gave the order to the SEALS to rescue him and use lethal force if that was what it took. Then a couple of months later, when bankruptcy loomed for Chrysler and General Motors, President Obama used TARP funds to aggressively intervene and preserved the core of the American automotive industry, and under American ownership. The success of the two companies since then has vindicated his decision but at the time it was not clear at all that it was the right decision. We've since seen other similar reponses to a crisis (Libya*) or when an opportunity presented itself (bin Laden.) This mixture of coolness when considering options followed by boldness and resolve once it's time to act is exactly what we need in a Commander in Chief. I believe President Obama passes this test while the leading Republicans do not. Mitt Romney is undeniably cool, but his past history to equivocate on issues and (as we saw in the 2008 campaign) adjust his strategy reactively instead of keeping a steady course does not inspire confidence in how he would respond to a crisis. Newt Gingrich has a history of impulsive, 'fly by the seat of his pants' decisons. While his ability to improvise is certainly bold, one has to be concerned about whether he would make the same decision he would make if he took time out to think through his position. His statements on Libya earlier this year highlight this concern. On March 3, Gingrich criticized Obama for not intervening in Libya unilaterally. After Obama, with the backing of the U.N. and the Arab League, participated in a joint intervention with France, Britain and other nations, Gingrich flip-flopped and criticized the intervention. It's perhaps understandable in that as a GOP candidate Gingrich felt the need to criticize the President no matter what he did, but the sudden, whiplash reversal makes one wonder for how long Gingrich really thinks anything through before responding.

President Obama has both characteristics: coolness when it is time to think things through and make a calculated decision, then boldness when it is time to follow through on that decision and see it through, including all consequences and fallout that may result.

So yes, for these reasons I believe, despite my sometimes copious disagreements with the President, that he deserves to be re-elected.

*--I myself questioned the Libya intervention once it took longer than he predicted, but I do give him credit for keeping his commitment to not send any American ground forces and getting completely out once it was done.

Don't be afraid to tell people bad news

What the report out the past day or so about the BP Oil spill makes it clear is how much the administration has been caught up in the whole Washington trap of trying to candy coat everything.

Start with the economy. Even today, most people don't blame Obama for it.

But the reports of 'greenshoots' last year and continuously trying to talk it up have had an effect-- not on the economy, but on the administration's credibility.

Then there is Afghanistan. Remember that the Bush administration's repeated assertions that things were going well in Iraq when they were not destroyed their credibility over time. But it seems as if the Obama administration is repeating the same mistakes. We still have no clear mission, no definition of what a 'victory' even is, and we are losing American soldiers and dumping money into it, for WHAT? Who knows anymore? But whatever it is, is still getting sugar coated by the administration.

So now the oil spill report comes out. The oil spill was another situation that Obama did not create-- it was BP's fault. But now we learn that the administration was continually trying to minimize the apparent scope of the disaster, sticking to numbers that were only 1/60th the actual size of the spill.

My question is, WHY!!?? Why carry BP's water on this and get slicked yourself as a result? I don't understand that. Is it a reflexive reaction in Washington that when you are in control all news must be spun to the positive side?

Americans are adults and would like to be treated accordingly. If the news is bad, then tell us the bad news.

In 1940, Winston Churchill took over from Neville Chamberlin during the most discouraging days of World War II. He made a speech in which he promised the British people, "I have nothing to offer you but blood, tears, sweat and toil." Then a couple of weeks later as German forces closed in on Paris he began a speech with, "The news from France is very, very bad" before going into details. Whatever one might think of Churchill, he set a mold with those two speeches that it would do well for our politicians to follow.

When you only spin all news as good, you close the trap upon yourself. You now own it, any failure to live up to what you've said (i.e. reality) becomes a disappointment, and after enough times of crying "no wolf!" people start to not believe you and all you can do is scream "Happy, happy news, all is well!" all the louder to compensate. Eventually you blow out the amplifier.

This is something it would behoove President Obama to learn as soon as possible.

Right wing waits until the decision has been made to decide which side they are on.

Before President Obama tipped his hand about whether he would retain or fire General McChrystal over comments he and staff working for him made in a Rolling Stones article, very few pundits or media on the right tipped theirs either. Among those who did, there was no clear consensus, and there were plenty of articles that said Obama should fire McChrystal (such as this editorial by conservative icon William Kristol which not only advises Obama to fire McChrystal, but that he should call on David Petraeus to replace him.) I doubt if Kristol will write a follow up editorial praising Obama for doing exactly the way he suggested though.

It is true that the most offensive remarks disparaging both the commander-in-chief and the Vice President) were made by McChrystal's staff, not McChrystal. But a commander is responsible for the attention to duty and following the law of all those under their command. McChrystal understands that.

At least Kristol was willing to say what he thought. Not so many other pundits on the right, including not only a lot of conservative journalists but the mavens of talk radio. Of course the decision was made before most of them were on the air today, but it was amazing how in unison they suddenly all sounded off immediately after the decision was made. It was as if keeping McChrystal was the obvious choice all along and their stated bewilderment at Obama for firing him was chalked up to everything from ego to a secret desire on Obama's part that America lose in Afghanistan to help foment discontent at home.

Now, you can be sure that if the decision had come down to retain McChrystal, then all of the very same right wing reporters, bloggers and talk show hosts would have said that was a terrible decision and showed that Obama was weak and indecisive. They would have still brought up the charge that Obama had an agenda to not win in Afghanistan, just in that case it would have been 'by making sure the soldiers see him as an ineffective C-in-C.'

If you listened to anyone's monologue bashing this decision then you can imagine how they would have sounded bashing the opposite decision.

Because they had that speech already written as well.

Time for America to Come Together in our Best Effort

Let's forget about Rush and Pat and focus instead on what we can do right. This is a time when the United States can come together and show real leadership in the world, and do it for the right reasons.

The pictures we've all seen coming out of Haiti the past few days have been heart-rending, terrifying, gruesome, horrible, painful, and evoke so many other emotions, so diverse but all terrible.

President Obama showed real leadership in moving quickly to help the people of Haiti. He and Secretary Napolitano also showed compassion in suspending deportations to Haiti for eighteen months by granting TPS (temporary protected status) to Haitians currently in the United States; dumping a bunch more people into the current scene of devastation would be unhelpful at best and disastrous at worst. Yes, they are getting some heat from Nativist groups but the real test of leadership is the ability to make tough decisions because they are right.

Right now there is no functioning government there but American relief workers are working shoulder to shoulder with those from many other countries and with those Haitians who are able to help to treat the wounded, bury the dead and rescue the survivors. But that is only this week. Rebuilding Haiti will be a long term project. And the fact is, Haiti was in terrible shape even last Monday, the day before the earthquake. Rebuilding it won't just mean patching together the same concrete buildings that collapsed and killed tens of thousands on Tuesday. It will mean rebuilding it better. Certainly that begins with constructing buildings that will stand up the next time there is an earthquake, but it will mean more than that. It will mean creating a vibrant, dynamic economy, one where people can hope for a future for themselves and their kids in Haiti, instead of only dreaming of escaping in a small boat trying to sneak into the United States.

President Obama also turned to the source that many other Presidents have turned to when they need someone to coordinate efforts like this: former Presidents. He asked former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to help lead this. Not only does this show that this will be a non-partisan effort but he is showing that he trusts ex-presidents to show real leadership on behalf of the United States, as they have in the past (the Gerry Ford spend-your-retirement-on-the-golf-course model is now officially obsolete; even Republicans have to admit that when Jimmy Carter raised the bar for ex-Presidents it was a good thing.)

President Clinton has done things like this before (remember the Tsunami relief effort he headed with the elder President Bush.) He's also been involved in other international efforts, such as last year's retrieval from North Korea of two American journalists.

President George W. Bush has kept a low profile since leaving office (unlike his former Vice President.) So in a sense this is his 'rookie' assignment as an ex-President. And I wish him success. I certainly was very critical of 'Dubya' the whole time he was in office (and there are still things left over from his administration that we need to get to the bottom of,) but I'm willing to give him a clean slate as an ex-president (remember that even Richard Nixon had evolved into somewhat of a senior statesman by the time he died.) This is a good start, and to be honest even while he was President, and for all his warts, Bush Jr. did give significant non-military aid to very poor countries (including Haiti.)

This is a time for America to step forward and do what we can together.

Media narrative wrong; Obama China trip a success.

Last week, President Obama returned from his trip to China.

Many media outlets, including not just the usual right wing echo boxes like FAUX News, but even relatively respected outlets like the Guardian were quick to point to the fact that the Chinese had made no open concessions and pronounce the trip a failure. The naysayers basically said that Obama had gone all that way just to take a walk on the Great Wall.

It is true that the Chinese did not come out and say that they were making concessions, because to them the way that things are presented is a big deal and they don't want to look like they are giving in to the United States. But in the week since then they have made two huge moves, on items that were at or near the top of the agenda when President Obama met his Chinese counterparts.

The first occurred two days ago, when China unilaterally announced a plan to cut carbon emissions by as much as 45% from the level that they would be projected to be at in 2020 if no action were taken. Because of robust projected growth in the Chinese economy the overall emissions will still increase, but by far less than they would have.

China in the past has claimed that they are a 'developing' nation and therefore should be exempt from any carbon emissions standards. During the Bush administration the issue of carbon emissions wasn't even on the agenda during these kinds of meetings but the timing of this announcement within a week after Obama left China makes it pretty obvious that he scored a success on the topic of carbon emissions, even though his hosts waited for a couple of days to announce it so it wouldn't look like a concession.

An even more dramatic shift came yesterday, and on an issue where the Bush administration had no success with the Chinese. China went along with tough language targeting Iran's nuclear program. In the past the Chinese, who have no particular quarrel with the Iranians and prefer to do business with them, have resisted any such move. Again, while the timing of the U.N. vote was not dependent on the President's visit to China, the shift in China's position from previous votes makes it pretty plain that the President scored on this issue too.

I know, I know. The media is like a stampeding herd of cattle, and once they get going in one direction it is tough to move them in another direction. Lately their narrative has been about declining Presidential approval ratings, foreign and domestic policy challenges and other negative stories. So an 'unsuccessful' trip to China fit that narrative and that's how it was reported when the President didn't leave, Neville Chamberlain-style, waving a piece of paper with promises from the Chinese leaders.

But the past few days have made it clear that the media judgment was premature at best, and just plain wrong at worst. On at least two big agenda items, the President got real action from the Chinese.

Out of the mouth of a babe

President Obama held a town hall format meeting today at the University of New Orleans. After entertaining several questions from adults, nine year old Terrance Scott got a chance to ask a question.

Terrance's question: "Why do people hate you?"



I thought the President did a pretty good job of answering the question, explaining that a lot of it is just politics and that there are also some people who are frustrated about the economy, losing their homes, losing their jobs, losing their health insurance, etc.

Of course there are still those who just plain hate the President too, and we all know that. Apparently so does the next generation of America's children.

Media should get it right before they make false claims about the President's polling number..

From heading the headlines you'd think that Republicans were poised to take over the government in 2010. They keep talking about 'Obama's plummeting approval ratings,' or about 'crumbling support,' or various other ways of saying the same thing.

Only that isn't true, and it hasn't been true in at least six weeks.

It is true that between about the last week of June and mid August the President dropped about eight percent in his approval rating, which had been running around 60%in most polls.

A funny thing has happened since then, however for those naysayers who only want to report on his 'declining numbers.'

The funny thing is that according to the RCP average the polls have practically not changed at all in about six weeks. On August 18, the President's approval ran at about 52.0% and his disapproval number was 41.0%. Today it was 52.5% to 40.5% approval-- no change (a half a percent move in the President's direction is not enough to be statistically significant, even in a 'poll of polls' as the RCP average is.) Moreover, the President has enjoyed at least a bare majority supporting him every single day since the start of his term. His disapproval number, which peaked at 44% a couple of weeks ago on September 13, has now dropped by a statistically significant 3.5%.

I know, I know. "President maintains a solid lead in the polls" makes for more boring news copy than "President's poll numbers drop like a rock." But if I read one more story about the President'd declining popularity I think I'm going to puke-- mainly because it is categorically not true.

A century already, and the GOP still wants 'more time?'

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal is the latest to publish the notion that the President should hit the 'reset' button on health care. This notion, pushed by Republicans, is that if he and Democratic leaders simply threw out everything that has been done already and returned to the table on health care reform, they could come up with a wonderful, bipartisan bill that would make everyone happy.

Only I don't believe that this would happen. The real test of how the GOP would react to the Obama administration came back in the first few weeks as Congress debated the stimulus plan. There was a palpable sense of urgency as the economy was in free fall and jobs were being lost at a record pace. Economists gave us dire warnings that if the Government did not put together a stimulus bill quickly then we would almost certainly face a second Great Depression.

Against this backdrop the President took the unusual step of going from the White House over to Capitol Hill and sitting down with Republican leaders to try and work something out. And in the end he did work out a 'bipartisan' bill, in which the original stimulus was shaved down by 20%, all funding for new school contruction was thrown out and he got a bill that is 43% tax cuts. After this, zero Republicans in the house and three in the Senate (including Arlen Specter, who has since become a Democrat) voted for it. In other words, Republicans, including many in the house, were happy to suggest compromises, many of which were included in the bill, but then they lined up and voted uniformly against it.

Given this history, do you really believe that the GOP would really negotiate in good faith on health care?

If you do, just ask Max Baucus. For months he and two other Democrats on the Finance Committee met with three Republicans on the committee, supposedly to work out a bipartisan compromise. Despite word back in late July that the group was nearing a 'consensus' and pressure from the Senate leadership to at least come up with a committee bill by the August recess, he at the request of the Republicans agreed to continue negotiating and come back after the recess. Then two of the three Republicans he had been talking to, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Mike Enzi (R-WY) both came out during the recess and all but pledged to vote against any bill.

Yeah, 'good faith' with these guys is a knife in the back. Baucus was duped into doing what they wanted-- delaying the bill-- and by the time he came back was essentially down to one Republican he might have been able to convince (Olympia Snowe of Maine.) Snowe couldn't support his compromise for other reasons (some of which I agree with, such as the fact that individuals might be forced to pay more than they could afford just to buy insurance.) However, it is clear now that the whole GOP strategy of delaying action on the bill was what was behind Grassley and Enzi even pretending to negotiate.

As far as taking more 'time' because it's better to 'get it right than just get something done' (lofty sounding words often spoken by Republican members of Congress) a bit of history is useful here. As President Obama mentioned in his speech last week, this effort to reform the U.S. health care system and give everyone coverage began under Theodore Roosevelt. That means that there is nobody alive today who was even an adult when this started. We know that's what happened in 1993-1994 also. Republicans asked for more 'time' to be spent on the legislation but even while they were asking for time they were attacking the whole concept of reform from every angle in a (successful) bid to kill it. Then, if the GOP was really interested in 'reform' they had six years when they had control of the House, Senate and White House when they could have done something if they wanted to. So the cry that we need to take more 'time' is disingenuous at best. Senator Jim DeMint made it clear that the GOP wants to make this "Obama's Waterloo." He could give them all the time in the world and they would use it to make sure he lost, not that anything meaningful got passed.

It does seem likely that we will have a bill passed by using reconciliation (probably meaning a more liberal bill; it will be much easier to pass a bill with the public option and be able to lose up to eight Democrats than it would be to pass a bill without the public option at this point since zero Republicans will vote for it either way.) If the use of the reconciliation process is unfortunate, then so is the fact that there does not seem to be any other path forward.

And the GOP has made it that way by blocking every other path.

It's Sept. 11 and in good conscience I have to say it: OUT NOW!

Today is September 11, and a story out today compels me to speak out.

I'M SORRY, MR. PRESIDENT BUT YOUR POLICY IN AFGHANISTAN HAS NO DIRECTION, AND WE SHOULD GET OUT!

I fully support this administration on nearly every issue, most especially health care reform. I supported President Obama last year and continue to support his domestic agenda. And even in foreign policy, his early moves to get out of Iraq (though still far too slow for me) and his changing the tone from one of U.S. hegemony in the world towards more international cooperation are welcome changes.

But he's making a huge mistake by pouring American forces into Afghanistan.

Back when we went to war there in October 2001, I fully supported President Bush in his pursuit of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government that gave him shelter.

But that was eight years ago, and President Bush bungled the job by de-emphasizing the Afghan war in the spring and early summer of 2002, when the Taliban had been driven into a small sliver of land, and one more concerted offensive could have finished them off (and probably netted all or most of the senior al-Qaeda leadership at the same time.) President Bush turned down the heat then and focused on Iraq, a country a thousand miles away that had nothing to do with the 9/11 terror attacks.

So bin Laden got away, the Taliban regrouped while we were otherwise preoccupied with Iraq and even spread across the border into Pakistan, and today we see that the leading U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Billy McChrystal says that he sees no major signs of al-Qaeda in the country. Apparently they've moved on to Pakistan and elsewhere. This is a very important story, because remember we originally went into Afghanistan to get rid of al-Qaeda. Well, if al-Qaeda is gone, then who are we fighting, and why?

So if we are not there hunting al-Qaeda what are we doing? Propping up 'democracy?' That's a joke. We've been seeing the notoriously corrupt Karzai government steal an election right in front of us. Karzai will win the recount and be selected President again. But he will have no more legitimacy than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has in Iran. To suggest that we in any way accept a fraudulently elected leader as legitimate is to make a mockery of our own belief in democratic values. Mr. Karzai has no more legitimacy if the results of this election stand than the Taliban do. Neither was chosen by the people. So don't say we are in Afghanistan to support 'democracy' because we haven't seen any real democracy there. Ultimately for the Afghans to ever live in a true democracy they have to want it enough to fight for it themselves.

What we do see is in essence a civil war between the Taliban and the Karzai government. It is true that the Taliban have a reprehensible political and legal system in place in the areas which they control, and that life is especially horrible for the female half of the population. However, is that a reason to lose American lives over? I don't see it. The problems of Afghanistan belong to Afghanistan. The United States should be ready to lend a hand (both financially and with good advice) if asked, but there is really no good reason for maintaining U.S. troops there anymore.

Does that mean that we just give up searching for al-Qaeda terrorists? Not at all. Leaving with our army doesn't preclude continuing to collect intelligence, the use of special forces for quick, defined missions (such as if we have good intelligence about where bin Laden is), or of working behind the scenes with his local enemies (there are plenty, after all) to get to bin Laden that way. What successes we have had recently have been through the use of Predator and Reaper drones, unmanned aircraft that have gotten several al-Qaeda operatives (mostly on the Pakistani side of the border.) There is no reason why those sorts of operations couldn't continue.

I recently wrote a post entitled Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it about the uncanny similarity between our fruitless search for bin Laden to our similarly fruitless search despite sending an American army to march all over Mexico searching for Pancho Villa in 1916. One point I made was that as long as we were there, Villa essentially had nothing to worry about from his local enemies because he was giving the 'yanqui' the proverbial finger. But once we left so did his protection, and there were people in Mexico who knew how to find him much better than we did (and they eventually did catch up with him too.) It is certainly prudent to continue to keep an eye out for bin Laden but like a baseball that's gotten lost in the woods, there comes a time when the effort (and in this case that means American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars) expended outweighs the diminishing chance we have of finding what we are looking for. If you want to blame George Bush for that because the trail has grown cold while we were off fighting in Iraq for more than half a decade, go ahead. But it's time to get our army out and limit our looking to our intelligence service, satellites and other sources.

But the bottom line is that neither President Bush nor President Obama has articulated why we are still fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, what exactly we hope to accomplish there, what constitutes 'success,' and most importantly, what our exit strategy is.

In his speech the other night President Obama pointed out that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are more than it would cost to reform health care (and that is true, based on CBO numbers.) But for that comparison to be any more meaningful than just a few numbers on paper, we have to quit bleeding our treasury just as so many Americans have bled their lives into the soil of those two nations all the way on the other side of the planet.

Imagine that: paying for health care reform by bringing all our soldiers home. Now THAT'S what I call a real world solution.

For more information: http://rethinkafghanistan.com

NOW they like the speech.

This is almost too funny for words.

After jumping all over President Obama's speech last week and doing everything they could to encourage kids to not see it (and with at least some success too) the right is suddenly doing everything they can to get kids to at least read it.

Unlike the Marxist indoctrination they all thought he was going to give, he gave a speech that frankly hits some pretty conservative values. He talked about studying hard. He talked about staying in school. He talked about his own and his wife's experiences and how they learned to keep moving forward and never quit. He talked about listening to parents and teachers. He said that no matter what one's personal circumstances were, that was not an excuse for not trying. He finished with "God bless you, and God bless America."

So now that they got millions of kids to not watch the President, how is the right reacting? Well, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that every child should read the speech. Here in Arizona, superintendent of instruction Tom Horne, who just last week urged kids to boycott the speech, claiming it would be 'messianic' in tone, is now saying that he liked the speech.

So now that the opportunity is over, they want kids to go back and see the speech they wanted them to miss earlier.

Well, just like the right always is. Always a day late and a dollar short.

President to say 'God' in public school classroom. Fortuitously censored by the right so lots of kids won't hear it.

Well, tomorrow is the day when President Obama will speak to the kiddies, and thousands of followers of right wing talk radio have either promised to pull their kids out of school or even forced their local schools to not even carry the webcast (I know, I know. I'm too sensitive about this, the truth is that these parents were just as angry a generation ago when President Ronald Reagan spoke to students via television.)

Craig at Random Musings has posted the text of the President's remarks tomorrow.

Mostly it's pretty innocuous stuff, telling kids about how important his mother felt it was to make him study and why they should do it and about how they should listen to their parents. He goes on to point out that no matter what their circumstances are, they have no excuses if they don't study and get the education they need. Study hard, stay in school, listen to your parents and your teachers. You know, the standard Marxist/socialist propaganda that the right was up in arms about.

But then he finishes with this shocking last line:

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Wow! Those right wingers were right after all keeping their children at home or pressuring the school districts not to show the speech. There really is something in it they will never hear their teachers say in a classroom. The word, GOD is in the speech. In fact he says it twice in that last line.

Now you know and I know that if you or I or your kids' third grade teacher said, 'God' in a public school then the big, bad ACLU would come and haul us into court and put us on trial for intolerance and have us sent to an atheist re-education camp where we would be forced to learn secular humanism. Isn't that true, right-wingers?

But here we have the President of the United States saying the word, 'God' and it will be webcast right into hundreds of thousands of classrooms all over America.

Wow! Good work, right wing wackjobs. Thank you for saving so many children from hearing the word, 'God' spoken in a public school. Atheists all over America will owe you a debt of gratitude.

Far right leaves all sanity behind over President's school webcast

President Obama, entering his first new school year, has decided to greet the kids returning to schools with a webcast.

This is hardly something new, and President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush did essentially the same thing, except that the internet had not been developed yet so they used television. Their broadcasts to the kiddies went off with relatively little controversy (mostly about how it might impact school schedules to accomodate the broadcast.)

But right-wing nut radio (the same folks who have gotten even GOP members of Congress so scared that they have to publically profess doubts about whether Obama was even born in Hawaii to avoid being run out of town by their Kool-aid guzzling 'base') has jumped all over it and is claiming that Obama is either overtly or subliminally planning to brainwash and indoctrinate their kids during the webcast, which is likely to run for only a few minutes.

School districts have been deluged with calls from talk radio listeners who have threatened to keep their kids home from school and several cowardly school districts around the nation have even decided not to carry the webcast at all.

I wonder how many parents who actually do make good on their threat to keep their kids home to protect them from the few deadly minutes of Presidential webcast will make darn good and sure they aren't indoctrinated by forcing them to listen to a whole day of Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

And what is the President going to say that is so horrible?

Well, we don't know yet although the White House plans to release the text of the webcast a day in advance. However I'm willing to go on record that he's not going to be quoting from the "Karl Marx Reader."

My best guess is that he will say some even more controversial things, stuff that will really give the right fits:

* Work hard.
* Stay in school.
* Don't do drugs.
* Listen to your parents.

If nothing else, I hope that it gives school administrators who have canceled it fits-- when they realize how stupid they look over it.

It's time for the President to lead

With the health care debate in full swing, with members of congress and Senators out there seeing their meetings being disrupted by organized action by the right wing, I think that a lot of Democrats have at least been wondering why the President isn't taking more advantage of the absence of congress from Washington to control the news. And he could be saying (or at least have his administration saying) plenty: As Nate Silver points out, the administration has already cut taxes on 98.6% of working Americans. But not very many people know that because no one in the administration has actually bothered to point it out. In fact, with Republicans out there screeching about hypothetical tax increases that haven't even been written by anyone yet, probably more people incorrectly think the administration has already raised taxes than correctly know the administration has lowered them. This administration should also point out that a relatively modest investment in auto bailouts plus cash-for-clunkers (which total less than the amount given to just a couple of banks) has saved hundreds of thousands of jobs in factories, parts suppliers and dealerships. What are they waiting for? To win an "aw-shucks" award for being humble?

After all, isn't this the time when he has the podium all to himself if he wants it? I will grant that there are certain events (such as the North American summit and the annual presidential speech to the VFW) that he is obliged to attend, and last week was a good time for him to go on vacation, with the Senate still in session and focused on confirming Justice Sotomayor.

But that's done and over with now. Now is the time for the President to lead, to inspire. And if he wants to talk about health care then he shouldn't just go out and spout statistics like he did in the news conference a few weeks ago on the subject, he should be talking about the battle his mother had with insurance companies just to get her cancer treatment covered (that resonated on the campaign trail.) He should be talking about how our lack of preparedness for the swine flu coming back this winter is exacerbated by the fact that people with no insurance may not seek treatment right away and in the meantime could spread the virus rapidly throughout the whole population-- darn right, this is a national security issue. And one which will in the end also cost a lot of people some serious money. He should be talking about people like my neighbor who was recently ripped up by two pit bulls only a block from my house and had to be helicoptered to and spent a full week in the hospital(story is here) as she saved the lives of her young children by taking the attack herself, and why she shouldn't have to worry whether she can pay all the bills for something that was no fault of hers.

The President is at his best when he is talking about the big picture, with passion. And it's time for him to be at his best.

Now is the time the President's supporters need to step up

Much has been made about the President's stepping up and taking on Sen. Jim DeMint who pretty much came out and said that the plan is to delay, then defeat the Obama health care proposal so that it could become Obama's 'Waterloo.'

The President was exactly right to shine a spotlight on DeMint's remark since it makes it very, very crystal clear that the focus of Republicans in Washington is not to reform anything but to defeat the President, pure and simple.

And considering that we have a for-profit health system in which sick people and their very lives are treated as a commodity and bought and sold like stocks and bonds, and in which those who are uninsured and can't pay are sent to the back of the line and often receive worse health care than in many third world countries, there needs to be some serious reform.

But here is my question: WHY DID THE PRESIDENT HAVE TO CALL OUT SENATOR DEMINT PERSONALLY? Where the HECK are his supporters?

Sure, he could have sent Joe Biden out, as the traditional job of the Vice President is to get his hands dirty taking on the opposition. However sending out the Gaffe-prone Biden, who was chosen mainly because he is qualified to be President (imagine that) if something should befall Mr. Obama, would be taking a big risk in itself. So not finding any other supporters willing to call out Senator DeMint, the President decided he had to do it. And he did it very effectively, no question about that. But it makes one wonder why he had to do it at all. Come on, Democrats-- quit standing on the sidelines. This will only get done if everyone, especially elected office holders, get behind reform.

Presidential approval holding steady at 60%

Lately the conservative side of the wonkisphere has been all a-twitter (literally).

Note: I'm not sure if anyone else has used the term 'wonkisphere' yet but if not I will use it to describe those of us who look forward to the release of every new poll the way a loyal fan of Star Trek waits for the newest Priceline.com commercial just to see something new, and read political tea leaves the way an archeologist reads pottery shards.

They are feeling blessed with new life since this week the Realclearpolitics Presidential approval poll average dipped below 60%. Right now it registers at 59.6% (that's right, whole numbers just are so pedestrian for us denizens of the wonkisphere.) The RCP average is an average of several of the most recent polls taken on approval of the President.

Now, I'm not sure exactly what 60% is supposed to mean. To me it's just a number. But when a President is above that number he is perceived to be a Goliath, perhaps vulnerable to a single well placed stone but otherwise crushing any who dare to get in his way. Below 60%, all of a sudden the armor comes off and out steps a mere mortal. That's when the other side doesn't just sling an occasional 'test-stone,' to try and find the chink in the armor, but out come the rhetorical darts and arrows and the poisoned pens for a full out frontal assault.

A closer examination of the polls that are currently being used by the average suggests that they should go ahead and sheathe the darts and quiver the arrows and cap the pens. The seven polls in the current incarnation of the RCP average are the Gallup tracking poll, the Rasmussen tracking poll, and polls from Marist, Associated Press/GfK, Quinnipiac, USA Today/Gallup and Democracy Corps, which states up front that it is a Democratic polling firm (interestingly enough though Democracy Corps has often given Obama approval numbers below the RCP average.)

Of these polls, Marist actually shows that Obama actually went up a point from the last time they were polled. They showed he had approval of 55% on April 21-23 and this month that has gone up to 56%. Democracy Corps, the last time they polled (May 10-12) had Obama with an approval rating of 58% and it is now up to 59%. Quinnipiac shows the reverse numbers, with Obama falling from 59% on April 21-27 to 58% now. Obama's best marks come from the AP poll, at 64% approval, and that is also the same number where they had him on April 16-20. The only even marginally significant decline among the five standard polls is in the USA Today/Gallup poll. They have him at 61% today and his approval was 64% when they polled it at the end of March.

As for the tracking polls, it is true that Gallup (the same organization that showed Obama with a slight decline when they polled with USA Today) shows Obama's approval slowly going down. Or does it? It appears so, but then if you look back a little further, the 60% today is higher than it was near the end of March or beginning of April.

Rasmussen tracking has Presidential approval at 58%. However, Rassmussen has not showed it at 60% since March 4. So in fact 58% is good with this outfit.

Excluded from this average because their last polls are too old are several organizations that in the past have showed Obama with high marks for approval. These include CBS News, Pew Research, Ipsos/McClatchey, Fox News (!), CNN/Opinion Research, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times(not the same as CBS News) and NBC/Wall St. Journal.

So it appears that this result is more a factor of the specific pollsters used this go around (and their differences in polling methods) than it is a function of any underlying trend.

Barack Obama has been remarkably steady around 60% for at least the past two months, and I believe this trend will continue.

Don't worry, Goliath is alive and well, which should make the right happy because they can go back to slinging stones.

Ebullient about Sonia!

President Obama has made his first Supreme Court pick, Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor. And it's a great choice.

The one point that Republicans have is that her compelling personal story-- raised by a single mother in a tenement in the Bronx and doing well enough in school to earn her own way into Princeton University-- is irrelevant to how qualified she is as a judge.

So let's focus on how qualified she is as a judge. The answer is very. Academically, there is no question about her intellect. Sotomayor graduated Summa cum Laude, at the top of her class at Princeton. Then she went on to Yale Law School and earned her law degree.

After school she earned a reputation as a tough and effective prosecutor, which led to her appointment to the federal bench eighteen years ago by President George H.W. Bush. Later she was appointed to the second circuit court by President Clinton, and has served on that court-- one step below the Supreme Court for more than a decade.

Conservatives tried to kneecap Sotomayor early on in the process. They sent hitman Jeffrey Rosen, who wrote a scathing critique, all based on 'anonymous sources.' Those anonymous sources questioned her intelligence, apparently following after Karl Rove's tactics of attacking someone's strength first. Only Rosen failed miserably, since he couldn't find anyone willing to put their name on the record so it ends up looking like a bunch of unsubstantiated innuendo. For all you can tell, Rosen's 'anonymous source' might have been himself.

They will bring up Sotomayor's comments in the past suggesting that judicial decisions should also be made with a view as to their impact on those directly affected and on others. This is a good thing however. As a baseball fan, I am grateful that Sotomayor considered the interests of fans and of the public when she issued a ruling in 1995 to force players and owners back to the negotiating table. Baseball, as I've noted on several occasions, still has not recovered as "America's pastime" (in third place in most measures of fan popularity behind football and basketball, and not all that far ahead of NASCAR.) Sotomayor is the reason why baseball resumed in 1995 at all, and in retrospect it is clear that she made the right decision.

They will likely bring up the case of Ricci vs. DiStefano, the New Haven, CT case in which the results of a test were thrown out by the city. Conservatives are criticizing Sotomayor for being a member of a three judge panel which sided with the city and ruled against the plaintiff. However, the fact that the case even worked its way up to the second circuit should be proof that it was never the slam-dunk case conservatives seem to believe to begin with, so if she doesn't agree with them then she is not the first. I doubt it will be a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court either (though it will be interesting to see how David Souter casts his vote on the case.) If Sotomayor and her colleagues on the panel can be faulted it is for not being more explicit in their opinion, but not forgoing a lengthy opinion in a case which is decided by a panel is by no means unusual (and the justice who penned the opinion in the case was one of the other panel members anyway.)

As far as her position on the court, keep in mind that Souter is considered part of the court's liberal wing anyway. We have essentially a 4-1-4 split on the court-- four liberals, four conservatives and Anthony Kennedy the guy everyone is trying to convince. The only way that Sotomayor really helps the liberal wing is that we are replacing Souter, a guy who hated every minute of his work on the Supreme Court, with a justice who is enthusiastic about the opportunity and at 54 will probably be on the court for a long time. The two justices with serious health issues, Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, remain on the court.

In fact, while Sotomayor is certainly liberal on many issues, she isn't necessarily always liberal. In her only ruling on abortion in fact, she backed the Bush administration's anti-abortion stance in dismissing the suit on the part of abortion rights groups to force the administration to reverse the so-called 'Mexico City rule' and provide funds for foreign organizations that counseled abortion. Sotomayor ruled on the case in 2002 that the government had the freedom to direct U.S. funds to or not to foreign interests. In another ruling that is at odds with liberal orthodoxy she struck down a law used by the city of White Plains, NY to ban religious displays in a city park. So clearly she will have a few surprises in store, though I expect that she will probably be about as liberal as David Souter was (a justice who surprised his Republican backers twenty years ago.)

On the other hand, I don't want a pure doctrinaire liberal either. I want someone who thinks things through and one hallmark of that is occasional unpredictability. All in all, I am very happy with President Obama's choice.

The 'slippery slope' is what we've been on for decades. Chrysler reorganization really IS 'chapter 11.' And not just in legal terms.

Earlier this week, President Obama oversaw a marathon negotiating session which failed to produce an agreement to avert bankruptcy filing by Chrysler because a small number of preferred stockholders (according to reports, mainly hedge fund managers) held out. Following the all-night the administration annouced that the automaker was indeed going to enter bankruptcy. After that, the administration announced that the United Auto Workers (UAW) would command a majority stake in the company as it emerges from bankruptcy and that the hedge fund managers would in effect go to the back of the line to be paid from any assets sold off through the bankruptcy process.

My first reaction was that this arrangement tickled every progressive bone in my body. It was the fault of a few hedge fund managers after all, that the bankrupcty occurred in the first place. And hedge fund managers won't get much support from the public (I've not seen a survey on their popularity but I suspect that if there was one, hedge fund managers would likely score someplace between Dick Cheney and Bernard Madoff.) And giving the company to the union that represents the people who actually make the product, I mean what could be more progressive than that? The only thing that made it better to contemplate was to think of all the conservatives reading it and just putting their head in their hands and shaking it slowly back and forth. Sweet revenge for all the times I did that when the Bush administration did something by assertion that seemed way over the top.

On second thought though, there may be a reason why I had the same reaction then as conservatives have now. And it's a reason that should transcend partisanship, though we are where we are precisely because people with an agenda have used partisanship as one of several vehicles to drive that agenda. And that agenda is to empower the federal government, and in particular the executive branch, at the expense of the rule of law, civil rights and fundamental Constitutional rights.

To understand the danger, realize that whatever one may think of hedge fund managers, it is a long standing principle in contract law that the creditors of a company that is in bankrupcty court receive payment in a certain order. The hedge fund managers are what is known as preferred shareholders, meaning that legally they should be paid (which payment can be in shares of the new, post-bankruptcy company) before other shareholders (and certainly before the UAW.) That's not a matter of opinion, and I may consider it to be a grossly unfair arrangement (which I do) but it is nonetheless the law and it is not up to the President to rewrite the law and make changes in it. There is a way to make changes in the law, of course, which is to go through Congress, but Congress was not asked to vote on this.

And the fact of the matter is that if it is possible for the President to change the law by executive fiat and give a company to the union then what exactly prevents him or some future President from using exactly the same logic to seize your home and give it to the bricklayer, the gardener or the baby-sitter? The answer is that if this case is the precedent then there is nothing to prevent it.

Before conservatives think I'm with them on this though, I'd like to point out that this only continues a trend which has been ongoing for decades. With the singular exception of Jimmy Carter (during whose four years most of the civil protections from governmental overreach that we do have now were enacted) every President since Calvin Coolidge first appointed J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director in 1924 has pushed things in pretty much the same direction. Just to cite one recent example, some of you may remember the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was accused of plotting to plant a 'dirty bomb' and held without being charged for years in a military prison in South Carolina. After losing several appeals over the whole issue of habeus corpus protection, the Bush administration finally found one judge who would rule in their favor. As soon as they did they immediately did file charges against Padilla (though they did not charge him with anything related to a 'dirty bomb') and eventually managed to get him convicted on a single count-- that he had been to Afghanistan for training--- even while failing to gain a conviction on more serious charges. They filed the charges when they did specifically to make sure that the case would not be appealed to the Supreme Court which might have sided with all the lower courts and overturned their 'precedent.'

Now, I'm sure some conservatives will argue that the Padilla case is somehow 'different' than the Chrysler case. But if fact it is not. Both involve the President asserting a new legal and Constitutional standard where there was not one before. And if you are a conservative that still thinks that Padilla precedent is a good thing, I'd ask you whether you still like the idea that the Obama administration now has the authority to detain, using secret evidence, any U.S. citizen they say is an 'enemy combatant' without charging them as a crime for as many years as they want to. Because they now do have that 'right' courtesy of the Bush administration.

And therein lies the rub. What has enabled a decades long assault on civil rights has been a mixture of always finding the right 'bogeyman' (nazis, communists, mobsters, left wing subversives, right wing militias, drug dealers, criminal gangs, foreign terrorists, child molesters, Wall street crooks-- all have had their turn to scare us into surrenduring some measure of civil liberty) and partisanship. Whether it was Democrats foolishly supporting Bill Clinton's post Oklahoma City domestic surveillance bill or Republicans supporting the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretaps during the Bush administration, no one has ever taken a moment to ask why the mountain of powers that have already been given to the Presidency isn't enough already.

And we have already forgotten that Clinton's raid on Waco was entirely legal-- because of Reagan's 'war on drugs' legislation that ensured that federal agents could just come in unannounced and start shooting if there were allegations that drugs were on the premises. Someone had made such an allegation (though it turned out be false) and that was all the legal justification that was needed to charge in with guns blazing away.

Instead of looking at this kind of stuff with a partisan hue, colored by the administration that is then in power (i.e. "Democrat good, Republican bad" or the reverse) maybe the right way to look at is is always to be skeptical.

The worst thing about any kind of expansion of Federal powers is that they will still be there for all future Presidents. And in this area, it seems that Democratic and Republican administrations have been literally pulling the rope together and all sending us sliding down the same slope, a slope that leads down to.... where? I don't know but I fear to contemplate it.

We don't know who the nominee is yet but the 'party of no' is already against him or her.

If I read this article right, It won't matter who the President picks as a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

Phone lines around Washington began burning this morning as conservative organizations kicked off preparations for the fight over President Obama's eventual Supreme Court nominee.

Associate Justice David Souter's decision to step down at the end of this term has awakened a long-dormant network of conservative organizations that will do their best to augment — and at times pressure — Senate Republican efforts to frame Obama's eventual choice....

Groups like the American Center for Law & Justice, the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary and the Committee for Justice will all prepare background research on potential nominees, setting up the eventual, inevitable attacks on the nominee as a left-wing extremist....

Interpretation: It won't matter who Obama picks. You will hear the same attacks anyway, just because it is an Obama pick.