How dare he?

Tavis Smiley: Obama Is First President In My Career Not To Invite Me To The White House So?

Stop Taking Bachmann Seriously!

Argh, he wants to spoil all the fun.

Michele Bachmann is “reportedly” ready to form a presidential exploratory committee in early June. Shame on me (and this website) for paying the slightest bit of attention to this foolish and ridiculous spectacle, but here we are. It’s a challenge to decide what, exactly, is silliest about this story. First is the generic issue, independent of Bachmann. “Ready to form a presidential exploratory committee?” What the hell does that amount to? Imagine, sitting down at a restaurant, calling the waiter over, and explaining that you may be ready, at some future point, to form an “exploratory committee” to discuss what you might like to order for dinner.   My guess is you might get a bottle of Perrier poured on your head.

But the media falls all over her exploits. And she bashes the liberal media. Round and round they go, and if they'll ever stop, who the hell knows?


Bachmann has about as much chance of actually getting the nomination as Lindsay Lohan. Does anyone in the world, even Bachmann herself, sincerely believe that this would be anything other than an exercise in vanity and self-delusion?

Influence peddling?

Lest you think Bachmann is just having a bad month or so, the last time my Daily Beast editors embarrassed me into examining her record, I discovered that she had blamed the "Hoot-Smalley Tariff," allegedly passed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for causing the Depression, ignoring the fact that a) it was passed under Republican Herbert Hoover; and b) the Depression was already in full swing when FDR was elected years later.

Well, she's not the brightest light bulb in the bunch, for sure. But, her son is reported as being one of her main advisers.

AOLington Post

for anyone to feel betrayed by Arianna Huffington at this point is silly: The onetime Gingrich disciple has made a career out of serial reinvention; her latest transformation, from progressive doyenne to corporate contessa, is as predictable as it is lucrative. But what makes liberals’ reaction to Huffington’s supposed sellout even more ridiculous is the fact that the success of the Huffington Post had nothing to do with its politics. While the website may have started as “a liberal Drudge,” it has since become, in Shafer’s felicitous phrasing, an “SEO Speedwagon” — devoted to getting eyeballs any way it can, and specifically through search-engine baiting, aggressive aggregation that borders on theft, and slideshows of starlets that rival soft porn. This strategy has worked so well that, as Huffington herself notes, 85 percent of her site’s traffic now comes from nonpolitical content. (For once, she’s being sincere: No ideological cause drives a photomontage of “celebrity boob jobs.”) 

She used to, I well remember, be married to Michael Huffington.

Dealing with the deficit

Paul Krugman is not impressed with the Commission, in the least.

Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

And:


It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

Gerald Seib, of the Wall Street Journal (wherein he qualifies as a moderate), called it differently: Deficit-Cutting Chairmen Call Washington's Bluff.

Matt Miller, who writes a column for the Washington Post (I have an email subscription to his column; I think I first read him on the Daily Beast), opines on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, also. Miller fancies himself "a Radical Centrist." I suppose he does not want to be tarred as a Liberal. Or call himself a Progressive.

21 versus 22. As I wrote in The Post a few months ago, the Bowles/Simpson plan to hold spending to 21 percent of GDP as the boomers age is a dangerous fantasy. All you need to know is that Ronald Reagan ran government at 22 percent of GDP when 76 million baby boomers weren't retiring. Today we're on the verge of doubling the number of folks on Social Security and Medicare. The Bowles/Simpson size of government goal is a fantasy -- it will not happen. Unfortunately, this wrongheaded goal undermines much of what they propose, since it's the organizing feature of their proposal.

2037. The co-chairs don't balance the budget until 2037! The outer limits of the ambition of a commission set up to get our fiscal house in order is thus a 27-year plan to balance the budget? Oy. The most you can say is that it's faster than the plan offered by that other falsely-hailed fiscal conservative, Paul Ryan, whose "Roadmap" wouldn't balance the budget until the 2050s!

He also criticizes them on health care, social security and gas taxes.

Free, or just bad, speech?

The right wing was handed a new topic to rant about; it seems dumb. Juan Williams, who appeared on NPR, and also on Fox (where his moderate voice occupied the left), spoke freely, and got into trouble.

the public radio organization has come under severe criticism — largely from people who are not listeners, it believes — for having fired Mr. Williams, an analyst who was employed by both NPR and Fox News when he said on Fox that he felt fearful when he saw people in “Muslim garb” on an airplane. Some have said his comment was bigoted, but others have rallied to Mr. Williams’s defense, and many conservatives have seized on his firing to resurrect their war against public broadcasting.

Of course, the right wing nuts rant about free speech, and use NPR as a piñata, when it suits them.

Today's Journal

This is what passes for journalism in the Wall Street Journal these days: on top of page A1, a picture accompanied by the caption: The mystery of bad hair days. Inside, the story: Wash Away Bad Hair Days.

Oy vay.

Obama Goes Small

Quick impression: the president went a good way toward reasserting that he is in charge and BP is trouble. The no-nonsense tone, martial imagery ("battle plan"), the three-part plan, the identification of a bad guy (BP's CEO) who is going to be dealt with sternly, who was scolded for "recklessness," and whose company will be paying for the cleanup and damage--not asked, but told to pay, evidently--all of this was good theatrics, and moderately reassuring. But the address struck me as notably defensive in places, such as when  the president tried to explain away why he so confidently, and rather arrogantly, proposed to expand offshore drilling while waving away concerns just three weeks before the explosion. Obama said he was "under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe," which seems like buck-passing to whatever experts were whispering in his ear. I'm all in favor of the moratorium on drilling, a national commission to understand the causes of this disaster, and the idea that we need to move toward developing sources of clean energy. But I thought Obama reached for some pretty cheap platitudes on the latter point. "Seizing the moment," invoking World War II vets and the moon landing are all well and good, but it rang pretty hollow to me. What stood out was that for all his praise of the House climate bill and talk about the "consequences of inaction" and so forth, not once did he utter the phrase, "It's time to put a price on carbon." And that suggests to me that this speech was primarily about containing the damage to his administration, and was not the pivot point in the energy debate that many people were hoping for.

Joshua Green in The Atlantic.

The president says he was assured? Goodness, me, even the president is covering his ass; but, he can't, he's in charge.

It's private

An ad on Fox News. Where else?

Was there looking for the Fox "Fair and Balanced" reporting on this gem, from the candidate who states that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposes governmental strictures on private businesses by outlawing discrimination (he says that only the public domain, and institutions receiving public funds should be so commanded); his latest pronouncements:

Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky today called President Barack Obama's outspoken criticism of BP after the oil spill "un-American" and accused him of putting "his boot heel on the throat of BP."

That's British Petroleum, not to pick on the Brits. And the presidential boot is hardly on the BP throat; a month after the spill the Administration has given the oil company a deadline to come up with alternative means of dispersing the 75,000 barrels a day (not the 5,000 both the company and the government have been touting).


Paul, a rising star of the tea party movement who beat out a GOP favorite to win Kentucky's Republican primary Tuesday, also defended remarks he made about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, saying he's being "trashed" by Democrats who want to ruin his campaign.

Well, that's politics. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

After criticizing the president for attacking BP, Paul moved on to reference the April 5 disaster at a West Virginia mine, which killed 29 people and sparked calls for increased regulation. "We had a mining accident that was very tragic," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "Then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen."

Sensitive, too, this candidate.



BP oil spill reaches delicate wetlands of Louisiana - The Guardian - ‎32 minutes ago‎ Thick sheets of crude oil spread through the delicate wetlands of Louisiana today, as the BP oil spill continued to threaten the American coastline. Company must be unable to act, what with the presidential boot on its throat. BP swamped by criticism; spilled oil keeps coming Reuters.

Depends on your point of view

President Obama was interviewed by Bret Baier of Fox News; that is, he consented to be interviewed by the Fox guy. These days my sympathy for, and support of, the President flags, but these Fox people are quite a breed.

I saw some of the interview on Countdown (with Laurence O'Donneell; I can not abide Olbermann these days). Granted, MSNBC is biased on the liberal side, so the excerpts played dovetailed with their point of view. Nonetheless, in one exchange Baier kept interrupting the President and reading him excerpts from letters received by Fox complaining about the Democrats and the President. In turn, the President said that he receives hundreds and thousands of letters completely counter to the letters Baier quoted. So, it depends on your perspective.

Fox has its own way of looking at things. Here is one article appearing today: Obama's Presidency Is On the Line -- And It Shows by Andrea Tantaros - FOXNews.com. Bret Baier's questions for President Obama revealed the uncertainty of our leader and the direction of our country.

Say what? It is an opinion piece, but, where is this person coming from? The extreme right wing, surely.

El Universal, Mexico City, has this story on its website: EU debe ayudar más a México: WP
El periódico estadounidense The Washington Post asegura en su editorial de este jueves que la estabilidad del país es tan importante como la de Irak, Afganistán o Pakistán.

That editorial is  Is the U.S. doing enough to help dying Juarez?

THE BRUTAL slaying of three people connected to the U.S. consulate in Juarez, Mexico, last weekend has called attention to a crisis that is getting too little attention and resources in Washington: Mexico's desperate battle against drug traffickers. For Juarez, and for the democratic government of Felipe Calderón, this has become a fight for survival -- a war as bloody and as important as those being fought in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. But though Mexican stability is a vital interest of the United States, the federal government's investment in the problem is far below what it should be, on both sides of the border.