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- Unsurprisingly, there's been a big conservative push back against the Obama-Gates Defense budget that has only been assisted by inaccurate media reports that the budget's spending increase is somehow a "steep cut." First you've got the conservative trope that Obama wants to weaken the military and rely on his "his charm and eloquence" instead. Then there's the conspiracy theory that Obama plans to take the "cut" funding and use it to finance a wasteful liberal agenda. Finally there's the right-wing think tank fear-mongering that would have us believe that the would-be spending cuts put us only 33 minutes from total annihilation at any given moment -- frak!
- I find it odd that The New York Times' David Sanger would be surprised that Barack Obama produced no "grand strategy" on his recent overseas trip and instead "pushed what might be called, with a notable exception or two, an anti-Bush doctrine." The folly of grand strategy -- laid bare precisely during the Bush years -- was that a region-based strategy was eschewed in favor of a sweeping "freedom agenda" that assumed liberty and Western values could be achieved simply by using the military to topple local tyrants.
- I do not know which is more baffling: that Salon pays Camille Paglia to publish the highlights of her dementia, or that The Washington Post pays Michael Gerson to use 718 words demonstrating to his readers that he doesn't know how to read a poll.
- Matt Miller makes a good, if obvious, point about taxes at The Daily Beast. Namely, that at some point in the future, Barack Obama will have to raise them in order to address the budget deficit. But Miller's advice that Obama ought to start laying the groundwork for this inevitability now -- purportedly to cushion the blow with the public -- isn't convincing. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I don't think that mere candor on taxes is enough to make the public more open to a hike. Nate Silver has more on what the polls say.
- Did the election of Mike Quigley to IL-05 last night hold national significance? Is it a referendum on the president and his agenda? Of course not. It was a special election. But the amount of attention paid to it compared to the still-unresolved NY-20 race is telling of the way these things are covered in the press.
- Remainders: Glenn Beck goes Red Dawn-lite and Gretchen Carlson claims Social Security is currently insolvent on Fox News; Mark Udall will vote for cloture on EFCA; Michele Bachmann (with an assist from the local press) keeps the "energy tax" lie alive; and Al Franken won the recount court battle for a very good reason -- his campaign was prepared for it.
--Mori Dinauer
