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- Obviously, Barack Obama did not win the Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements. The award is a political statement, an expression of relief that George W. Bush is no longer president. And as surely as the sun rises and sets, American conservatives are outdoing each other in their efforts to point out to the rest of the world that theirs is a special brand of crazy. A couple roundups can be found here and here.
- House Democrats greeted with silence the Senate proposal to include an opt-out public option in their reform bill, but now Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) of the House progressive caucus says his delegation has no intention of abandoning a strong public option in the House's version of the bill. This would be a welcome new approach to Democratic governance -- starting from the left and moving the the "center" -- but since we all know that truly legitimate legislation requires an arbitrary number of votes arrived at by conservatives in the Senate I'm not too optimistic.
- Thomas Edsall makes the important point that reporters in the mainstream media go to such lengths to avoid the appearance of "liberal bias" that the resulting product suffers for it, and that liberal reporters should "own" their liberalism. I agree completely. After all, there is a thriving and blatantly ideologically conservative media that cares not a whit about appearing biased, only they by and large produce bad journalism. There's nothing wrong with partisan media -- as long as it tells the truth and gets the facts right.
- Remainders: Dick Cheney has always struck me as a tough-talking coward of a man; the conservative "tenther" crowd are unprincipled sore losers; people who will not acknowledge the ineptitude of the Bush administration in foreign affairs do not get to level the same criticism at Obama; it's mystifying why Republican congresswomen allow misogyny to dominate in their party; liberal bias runs deep in the English language; and what Obama and the generals are reading.
--Mori Dinauer
