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- Barack Obama continues to display a trait guaranteed to annoy his supporters: clearly articulating the nature of a problem, and then refusing to throw his weight behind a solution. The president's remarks last night won't put liberals at ease. To look at the big picture, House Democrats want the Senate to act first on a reconciliation bill before they vote for the final Senate bill and its amendments, Senate Democrats want the House to make the first move and are waiting for leadership from the president, and Obama wants the Senate to move before he gets behind the effort. No wonder people are frustrated.
- Lawrence Lessig on what ails the country: a corrupt "Fundraising Congress" that is trapped in a cycle of dependency on lobbyist and corporate money. It's a familiar argument for anyone who has followed Lessig's political advocacy career, and his diagnosis, I think, is spot-on. Less convincing is his belief that Barack Obama, perhaps uniquely, squandered an opportunity to do something about it. It's impossible to assess whether coming out strongly in favor of changing Congress would have been enough to fix the problem, although some of the specific reform ideas he throws out -- particularly changing campaign finance law -- are sound. Read the whole thing.
- From the better-late-than-never file, Dana Milbank has finally gotten off the tire swing and declared that he misses the old John McCain from a decade ago. The Maverick was always a myth, of course, but compared to the vindictive warmonger that is the John McCain running for re-election in a hostile conservative environment, I'd take the figment-of-the-imagination John McCain any day.
- Freshly inaugurated Sen. Scott Brown, in claiming that the stimulus did not create a single job, has more or less proven the Larison Theory of Tea Party Support -- allegiance aligns with acceptance or rejection of the stimulus. Bonus circumstantial evidence: dead man walking Gov. Mark Sanford flying to Washington, hat in hand, after spending the better part of last year decrying the stimulus and promising to reject it.
- The Internet is hardly novel, so I am surprised to read discussions about who has the "edge" on the Internet, politically. In 2003 or thereabouts when all this stuff was new, the question of how technology would affect media and politics was legitimate. But it's clear now that technology is a tool, and who has leveraged Twitter the best is not a particularly interesting question. Look at it this way: if Michael Steele had rolled out an awesome GOP.com Web site instead of the joke du jour of the blogosphere, would we be saying right now that the awesomeness of the new GOP.com Web site is a major factor in the Republican comeback?
- Remainders: In light of this whole Shelby brouhaha, I'd like to endorse Steve Benen's "bring on the recess appointments" approach to filling government posts; Gallup discovers that most Americans have opinions on political systems that they define with their own imaginations; Newsweek notices that people earning over a quarter million dollars aren't exactly struggling; Tom Tancredo has the courage of his convictions to let everyone know that he is a bigot; and while this post examining the 2010 Obama legislative strategy is worth reading for the analysis, the LBJ quote alone is worth the price of admission.
--Mori Dinauer
