zero

Last week's big news was that despite Obama's going all out to win Republican support for his stimulus bill, adding in tax cuts and cutting out funding for STD prevention that made Republicans feel icky, the stimulus still managed to attract exactly zero Republican votes.

So what to make of it? Reactions follow...

Dylan Mathews:

There's no economic argument - none - to be made for business tax cuts as a stimulus component. When Marty Feldstein and Joe Stiglitz agree on an element of fiscal policy, there's really no controversy within the profession on the matter. The only reason to include them was to curry favor with Republicans in Congress and get a wider margin of victory. Obama liked this logic, so the business tax cuts stayed. And they bought him a grand total of 0 Republican House votes, with eleven Democratic defections thrown in for good measure. Bipartisanship fail.

This stimulus will still pass in the end, and it's probably better to get something through fast than to repeat the fight in order to get a better deal. But I hope that Obama is taking away the right lesson from this. He tried cooperating. He reached out to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, even though he didn't need their support. And they screwed him. They had their choice between having an input into policy and becoming irrelevant, and they decided they'd rather be irrelevant. So here's hoping Obama helps them stay that way.

Amanda Marcotte:

As you could have predicted, the benefit gained to Democrats for letting Republicans whine and cajole until crucial items were rewritten in the bill was.....shit. The song and dance did not get a single Republican vote, and 11 Democrats also voted against the bill. The lesson should be simple---Republicans are lying when they pretend to object to this small bit or that, and concessions offered to get their votes will equal knives planted firmly in your back. Despite this lesson, I guarantee that Republicans will be able to whine and cry until more concessions are granted in the Senate, at what point none of them will vote for the economic stimulus package. After years of being told to shove it up their ass, you'd think Democrats would enjoy the opportunity to tell Republicans to shove it up their ass, but that's not going to happen, I guess.

Here is the blunt reality: Republicans will gladly fuck over this country and ruin the lives of each and every one of you if they think that they'll get some political advantage from it. They can't be dealt with like reasonable people.

Chris Bowers:

Cool. While we will need two Republican votes to pass the stimulus through the Senate, I'm glad no Republicans supported it in the House. Not only does it offer a clear contrast between the parties, not only does it give good reason to re-write the legislation without any concessions to Republicans when the bill is reworked in conference, but it puts a quick end to the "bi-partisan" charade of the last few days.

As demonstrated on so many occasions, most recently by the 95% drop in Republican support for TARP, almost all Republicans in Congress are bad faith actors. You can't compromise or appeal to people whose motives are simply to oppose you, rather than to actually stand for any principles or values (except, I guess, the principle of opposing you). The sooner congressional Republicans make their purely contrarian motives clear, as they have done in this case, the sooner we can move on to just passing good legislation. Let's drop futile attempts to appease those who caused our problems in the first place, and stay focused on cleaning up the mess they left.

Hilzoy:

I'm glad it passed. I'm also glad that Obama tried as hard as he did to get bipartisan support, and I don't think that the fact that he didn't get it shows that the attempt was misguided. There are good reasons to try for bipartisan support regardless of how likely you think you are to succeed.

If you do succeed, then both parties have some ownership of the stimulus bill, neither will be as eager to politicize it, and it will be harder for either to use it to beat up the other. This is good. If you try hard, and publicly, to attract Republican support, but fail, then Republicans look like intransigent ideologues who would rather try to score political points than actually deal with the serious problems the country faces. You, by contrast, look reasonable: you tried to reach out, but your efforts were rejected.

Kos:

It would be stupid for Republicans to try and obstruct the bill, but there's no political reason for them to support it. Democrats have the votes to do pretty much whatever they please. So it's best to lay out a competing agenda (i.e. more tax cuts for the rich!) and then use those distinctions to start building their new messaging. Worst case scenario for Republicans, the stimulus works and they're toast in 2010 anyway. Best case, the stimulus does little to help the nation's economic recovery, and they can play the "change" card next election.

Matthew Yglesias:

I would imagine the crude calculus is something like this. In 1993-94 the GOP minority relentlessly sought to obstruct a new president's legislative agenda and were rewarded with a big electoral win in 1994. In 2001-2002 the Democratic minority relentlessly sought to compromise with a new president's legislative agenda and were rewarded with a big electoral defeat in 2002. Simplistic lesson is that there's no upside to cooperation.

The lesson I would hope the administration learns here is this: He needs to spend less time seeking political cover to mitigate the downside to possible policy failure, and more time trying to implement the best policies he can.

Josh Marshall:

I hear a lot of talk about whether Obama's governing approach can be 'bipartisan' if a good number of Republicans don't vote for his Stimulus Bill. But that dubious point seems to be obscuring a more obvious and telling reality: the Republican leadership in both houses has decided that it's in their political interest to oppose the Stimulus Bill no matter what.

In the most cynical of evaluations, it's not clear to me that they're incorrect. If the stimulus is judged a success, their political gain from adding more votes to what will be seen as Obama's bill will not be that great. So they're figuring that only failure will work for them politically; and they judge that they want Obama to own it entirely.

Atrios:

If I were advising the Republicans I would've told them to vote against the stimulus package. I would tell them to make the point clearly that if they were in charge, the bill would be a different bill. They're a competing political party and they need to, you know, highlight the fact that their vision for America is actually different. I appreciate that members of both parties don't always toe the line completely, but on a bill as big as this it makes perfect sense for it to play out as it did.

Of course the flip side is that Dems should've pushed the best plan that could pass the Senate instead of pushing some pointless fantasy about bipartisanship.

Glenn Greenwald:

Republicans aren't interested in "bipartisanship" except to the extent that they can force Democrats to enact their policies even though they have only a small minority thanks to being so forcefully rejected by the citizenry. And why should they be interested in bipartisanship? Why should they vote for a stimulus package that they don't support and that is anathema to what their most ardent supporters believe? It's very hard to find any virtuous attribute of the contemporary Republican Party, but one thing that can be said for them is that -- unlike Democrats, whose overarching desire in life is to please the needy harmony fetishists by adopting as many GOP views as possible -- Republicans are willing to incur criticisms by opposing what they oppose and supporting what they support.

Nate Silver:

But does it do the [Republican] party as a whole any good for having opposed the bill unanimously? With headlines like the one in the Associated Press, it's hard to imagine so. Their unanimous opposition reads as an emphatic rejection of the President and the President's attempts at "bipartisanship". And the President is very popular right now.

Tristero:

The rejection of bipartisanship by the Republicans should be perceived in terms of their long term strategy. They know that the depression has just begun. The worse is yet to come. How bad will it be? Far worse than anyone so far has imagined, and we've all imagined it as pretty bad. It will exceed our most extreme fantasies. (In fact, my father, who turns 100 next month (!) said this is shaping up as much worse than the thirties; I think he may be right.) The GOP knows that no feasible stimulus plan, no matter how large or well-crafted, can avert catastrophe. They intend to refuse to go along with anything Obama proposes, wait until disaster hits,and then - counting on the country's short memory span as well as the complicity of the media - blame Obama, Democrats, and liberalism for destroying the economy.

Obama also knows that economic disaster cannot be avoided and that it will be far worse than anything anyone alive - other than centenarians like my Dad - has ever seen; that's why his inaugural address was so grim. He also knows that no stimulus plan will work. And he knows he will be blamed for it when the misery adds up. Therefore, he is trying like hell to get the GOP to sign up, at least partially, for his proposal so he can spread the blame, This is after all, a time-honored political tactic, used by Bush, for example, to claim bipartisan authorization for the invasion of Iraq.

Since the GOP won't ever play - they're not stupid about their self-interest, after all - what is to be done? First, like Duncan, I think the Obama administration must propose the most responsible stimulus package they can, focused entirely on serious efforts to prop up the economy rather than appeasing the Republicans' special interests. Furthermore, they must propose legislation that protects as much as possible the middle class and the poor from the economic tsunami the Bush administration unleashed on this country and that has only begun to be felt. It may not work in staving off an economic collapse, but the crash will be so bad that any amelioration of its effects will be useful.

Naturally, Obama needs to take the high road and continue to call for "bipartisanship." But, as the GOP continuously refuses to go along, the Democratic party, and progressives, must attack on two fronts. First, they must accuse the GOP of lack of patriotism, of refusing to support the president in a time of extreme crisis. Second, they must never, not for a single news cycle, let the country forget that a Republican president, and a Republican legislature is to blame for the dreadful shape of the US economy.

Remember: as Limbaugh said, Republicans want the president and his policies to fail. Their refusal, to a person, to vote for the stimulus bill demonstrates that they expect the worst to happen no matter what is done. They intend fully to exploit that. Remember Carter's "maliaise" and Reagan's "morning in America?" Republicans see a repeat of that dynamic, but this time on steroids. That is why we must never let the country forget who wrecked the economy: George W. Bush, his Republican enablers in Congress, and the literally bankrupt philosophy of conservatism.

Clive Crook:

One of the things the country likes best about its new president is his taste for consensus. Barack Obama campaigned as a moderate, open to the views of people who disagree with him. His appointments seem to reflect the same attitude: He has chosen mostly centrists, including many veterans of the Clinton administration, with other viewpoints represented too. In planning his fiscal stimulus, Obama made a point of reaching out to Republicans in Congress. This attitude is widely admired, but one must ask whether Obama's preference for moderation, accommodation, and consensus is what these times require.

The economy's plight is extreme. Bold and unusual remedies are needed. This necessary radicalism, if you want to call it that, is not straightforwardly partisan, to be sure. This is not a matter of listening to one particular faction and ignoring everybody else. But at the same time, you cannot get to the right policy merely by trending to the middle and splitting differences between Democrats and Republicans.

Ryan @ The Bellows:

We are, for the most part, avoiding past policy mistakes. Monetary policy remains close to as easy as it can be, and Democrats are pressing ahead with a stimulus plan that will be large enough to have an effect. Credit markets continue to thaw. The crucial task of shaping up the banking system remains, and remains difficult, but Obama has convened an extremely talented group of economists to address the problem. Things can still go wrong, but we could be doing far worse.

The important thing to remember is that conditions will continue to look bad, even as we make progress. Many of us have never seen a recession like this, and we will watch in (understandable) dismay as unemployment rates continue to rise through (in all likelihood) all of 2009. That is unavoidable. We have sustained a massive financial shock, and a massive, subsequent shock to global demand. Try as we might, things will get worse before they get better.

But so long as we remain calm and avoid doing anything stupid — like starting trade wars, or deciding we need to balance the budget right this moment — we'll make it through this. But as I think about the House vote on stimulus, I have to breathe a sigh of relief that November went as it did. This is a serious time, and there's only one serious party in Washington.

snapshots

George Packer on the inauguration speech:

There were echoes of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, but President Obama uttered no words today that will be quoted in a hundred years. He has never been a real stem-winder or a coiner of unforgettable phrases; what he's always been is a great explainer, who pays the rest of us the highest compliment—the appeal to reason. Today he explained why Americans need to grow up, and the tone and vision of his speech—sober, realistic, clear-minded, undaunted—were absolutely equal to the occasion and the times, down to his requisite scriptural passage: "The time has come to set aside childish things."

He delivered something better than rhetorical excitement—he spoke the truth, which makes its own history and carries its own poetry.

Frank Rich:

PRESIDENT Obama did not offer his patented poetry in his Inaugural Address. He did not add to his cache of quotations in Bartlett's. He did not recreate J.F.K.'s inaugural, or Lincoln's second, or F.D.R.'s first. The great orator was mainly at his best when taking shots at Bush and Cheney, who, in black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life" and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Such was the judgment of many Washington drama critics. But there's a reason that this speech was austere, not pretty. Form followed content. Obama wasn't just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture. We did so while a supposedly cost-free, off-the-books war, usually out of sight and out of mind, helped break the bank along with our nation's spirit and reputation.

We can't keep blaming 43 for everything, especially now that we don't have him to kick around anymore. On Tuesday the new president pointedly widened his indictment beyond the sins of his predecessor. He spoke of those at the economic pinnacle who embraced greed and irresponsibility as well as the rest of us who collaborated in our "collective failure to make hard choices." He branded as sub-American those who "prefer leisure over work or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame." And he wasn't just asking Paris Hilton "to set aside childish things." As Linda Hirshman astutely pointed out on The New Republic's Web site, even Obama's opening salutation — "My fellow citizens," not "fellow Americans" — invoked the civic responsibilities we've misplaced en masse.

The austerity of Obama's Inaugural Address seemed a tonal corrective to the glitz and the glut. The speech was, as my friend Jack Viertel, a theater producer, put it, "stoic, stern, crafted in slabs of granite, a slimmed-down sinewy thing entirely evolved away from the kind of Pre-Raphaelite style of his earlier oration." Some of the same critics who once accused Obama of sounding too much like a wimpy purveyor of Kumbaya now faulted him for not rebooting those golden oldies of the campaign trail as he took his oath. But he is no longer campaigning, and the moment for stadium cheers has passed.

Last weekend, Bob Woodward wrote an article for The Washington Post listing all the lessons the new president can learn from his predecessor's many blunders. But what have we learned from our huge mistakes during the Bush years? While it's become a Beltway cliché that America's new young president has yet to be tested, it is past time for us to realize that our own test is also about to begin.

This is insane:

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

What the hell have they been doing for the last 6+ years?

Al Qaeda is worried:

Soon after the November election, al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader took stock of America's new president-elect and dismissed him with an insulting epithet. "A house Negro," Ayman al-Zawahiri said.

That was just a warm-up. In the weeks since, the terrorist group has unleashed a stream of verbal tirades against Barack Obama, each more venomous than the last. Obama has been called a "hypocrite," a "killer" of innocents, an "enemy of Muslims." He was even blamed for the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which began and ended before he took office.

"He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection," an al-Qaeda spokesman declared in a grainy Internet video this month.

The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.

With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.

If you haven't read the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" do yourself a favor and read it ASAP. It's just four pages, but it packs a punch. I just found out about it via this DKos entry (that is also worth reading) that draws parallels between the story and Guantanamo Bay.

(Bebeto Matthews/AP/File)

George Mitchell is a renowned negotiator, having brought peace to Northern Ireland. Now he's been tapped to resolve the most intractable conflict of all: Israel/Palestine. He may be just the man for the job.

(not everyone's happy though: there's a concern Mitchell will be "even-handed," rather than reflexively supportive of Israel. How politicians can say shit like that and not get howled off the stage is beyond me.)

You New Yorkers should keep an eye out for this guy's subway art:

saturday night music blogging

enjoy...

"I won."

WSJ:

The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.

But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.

Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

The statement was prompted by Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona , who challenged the president and the Democratic leaders over the balance between the package’s spending and tax cuts, bringing up the traditional Republican notion that a tax credit for people who do not earn enough to pay income taxes is not a tax cut but a government check.

Obama noted that such workers pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, property taxes and sales taxes. The issue was widely debated during the presidential campaign, when Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, challenged Obama’s tax plan as “welfare.”

With those two words — “I won” — the Democratic president let the Republicans know that debate has been put to rest Nov. 4 .

DKos provides an apt video from the campaign:

At the same meeting Obama advised his Republican colleagues that:

"You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done."

Obama's Weekly Address:

Bob Herbert:

We’ve been watching that something this week, and it’s called leadership. Mr. Obama has been feeding the almost desperate hunger in this country formature leadership, for someone who is not reckless and clownish, shortsighted and self-absorbed.

However you feel about his policies, and there are people grumbling on the right and on the left, Mr. Obama has signaled loudly and clearly that the era of irresponsible behavior in public office is over.

No more crazy wars. No more torture, and no more throwing people in prison without even the semblance of due process. No more napping while critical problems like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global warming, and economic inequality in the United States grow steadily worse.

“We remain a young nation,” Mr. Obama said in his Inaugural Address, “but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

Michael Hirsh:

on Wednesday, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the appointment of two permanent envoys to major trouble spots—George Mitchell to the Mideast and Richard Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was perhaps the surest sign of all that Obama intends a 180-degree reversal from the ultimatum-heavy approach of the Bush administration, which saw diplomacy mainly as an exercise in stating terms for surrender, whether to Iran, Hamas or North Korea (except over the last couple of years). "Anything short of relentless diplomatic efforts will fail," Clinton said, making it clear that Holbrooke and Mitchell would each be spending much of the next four years away from home. Both men, Holbrooke and Mitchell, gained fame by ending what seemed to be intractable conflicts, Bosnia (Holbrooke) and Northern Ireland (Mitchell). "There is no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended," Mitchell said.

There's some interesting backstory on Holbrooke's portfolio.

Ugh:

In his last few months in office, former President George W. Bush's Administration pushed through over 150 "midnight regulations," many of them weakening existing environmental protections. Although Obama is now in charge, most of Bush's new rules are on the books, and changing them will take time and effort from an already burdened White House. "The Obama Administration will be saddled with reversing harmful Bush rules at the same time that Obama wants to enact his own agenda," says John Walke, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

That's no accident. In May 2008, then White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten issued a memo instructing federal agencies to finalize any new regulations by Nov. 1, 2008. At the time, the White House said the memo was meant to head off the rush of last-minute rulemaking that usually jams up the final months of any outgoing Administration. But it also had a tactical purpose: new regulations require 30 to 60 days from their official publication in the Federal Register to take effect. (Regulations that have an "insignificant" economic effect — less than $100 million — need 30 days; bigger rules need 60.) By finalizing midnight regulations at the beginning of November, the Bush Administration ensured that most of the rules would be in effect before Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20 — in some cases, just before.

They include regulations that allow mountaintop-removal mining projects to pollute streambeds with leftover dirt, and a Bush move to begin to permit drilling for oil and gas on the Outer Continental Shelf. Worse, they also include a drastic weakening of the Endangered Species Act, allowing federal agencies to bypass expert advice from federal scientists on whether proposed projects would have an impact on endangered species, essentially cutting the heart out of the act.

With an economy in meltdown, two wars to fight and a need to find his feet quickly, Obama may not have the time to rewrite Bush's rulebook, even if it does hurt the planet. "It's a huge burden on a new presidency that already faces more than its fair share of burdens," says Vickie Patton, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund. Bush's messes won't be cleaned up easily.

Marc Ambinder considers what the first hundred days might look like.

A staffer reports that the mood at the Dept of Education has changed dramatically.

Yesterday:

Glinda

HRC arrived at the State Dept today and it sounds like they couldn't be happier to have her. Apparently Rice wasn't well liked:

One thing seems clear regarding Condoleezza Rice’s stewardship of the State Department: she did not command the admiration of many of those who worked with her. The reaction of State Department employees as Hillary Clinton arrived this morning apparently bears comparison to the liberation of Paris at the end of World War II.

There are great hopes for Hillary at State. I met last week with a number of career State Department employees and was surprised when one said she was looking forward to the “Glinda Party” next week. I asked her: if Hillary was Glinda, the Good Witch of the South from the Wizard of Oz, did that make Condoleezza Rice the Wicked Witch of the West?

“You’re on to it,” she said.

You can hear the enthusiasm, especially when she says she welcomes debate and original thinking:

a new day:

more on this here

You seriously can't make this shit up:

Former French President Chirac hospitalised after mauling by his clinically depressed poodle

Former French President Jacques Chirac pictured in his car with his pet, Sumo, the white Maltese Poodle (file photo). The president has been bitten by his dog.

The Freewheelin' Obamas:

Obama action figure:

I'm not sure America is ready for this:

My President is black:

99 problems but a Bush ain't one: