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- It has been frustrating to see the White House and congressional Democrats react in slow motion to the unemployment situation, wasting time with summits and relying too much on optimistic economic forecasts. Moreover, even good news can be bad news when it comes to instilling a sense of urgency about getting a jobs bill enacted. But reading over the president's remarks today, I was relieved to see that Obama clearly understands the nature of the problem, understands how unemployment is related to the deficit, and appears willing to take action.
- The question of how many and what sort of people watch cable news is an interesting one and I wouldn't be surprised if Kevin Drum's anecdotes turned out to be true. Cable news was, after all, originally designed to be a source of constant news. Having to produce news 24 hours a day not only leads to increasing coverage of the inane and trivial, but also attracts viewers who believe they are being well informed by virtue of the fact that they're watching news break because, hey, it's being reported on cable!
- Tucker Carlson's theory that Barack Obama's alleged overreach is a result of his having never truly faced failure is of course easily disproved by summoning widely known facts, but I find the theory interesting insofar as it is the latest incarnation of the evolving criticism that Obama is an empty suit without any real experience, in way over his head. I thought he was supposed to be too deliberative and intellectual -- which is it?
- Ezra Klein's post putting the fight for health-care reform in the context of a larger campaign to achieve lasting progressive influence and power illuminates the danger of an activist left that refuses to accept that there are real limits to what progressives can accomplish in government in the short term, even with large congressional majorities, a pragmatic but left-leaning president, and the winds of change at their backs. Short-term activism is merely unproductive protest. Thinking long term and accepting frustrating defeat along with incremental progress is all in the game if you want to change the status quo.
- It's amazing that a no-brainer like extending the estate tax has to negotiate the rough waters of the United States Congress, passing by 25 votes in the House and facing the principled centrists of the Senate who want to protect the children of multimillionaires from being somewhat less rich. And while the interests of the government might be aligned with the plutocrats, there is not actually an incentive for the government to maintain vast income inequality.
- Remainders: The inability of people to recognize that oil is a finite resource utterly baffles me; if I didn't know better, I'd say somebody must have kidnapped Arlen Specter and replaced him with a fightin' liberal; the worship of a mythologized Ronald Reagan who didn't repeatedly raise taxes continues to be a great source of amusement; and China is not the world's leading economic power, not even close.
--Mori Dinauer
