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- Barack Obama's speech to the Turkish parliament today not only fulfills a transition-era goal to make a major speech in a Muslim country within the first year of his administration, but also makes a laudable effort to reconcile the present Turkish government with its Armenian population, who have yet to receive a recognition of the genocide committed under the Ottomans nearly a century ago. Of course, Obama alone isn't going to provide moral credibility to the United States, but he is deliberately taking the necessary steps to set the stage for American moral leadership in the world.
- It's amazing that anyone would get worked up over North Korea's latest cry for attention, another failed missile launch designed, I guess, to prove the DPRK needs to be taken seriously as a world power. Meanwhile, over the weekend in Prague, the president reiterated his commitment tonuclear arms reduction, using the DPRK test launch to argue the UnitedStates has a "moral responsibility" to lead a global effort to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear stockpiles. The president also made some frank remarks in Strasbourg about the role American exceptionalism plays in making foreign policy decisions that are well worth reading.
- I think there is a lot to cheer in Defense Secretary Robert Gates' new spending priorities outlined today, particularly the shift away from expensive and pointless G.I. Joe toys to a more Special Forces-oriented and counterinsurgency approach to fighting terror and insurgents. Of course the defense budget, like so much else of the president's agenda, is more than likely to founder on the shoals of Congress.
- The New York Times' Charles Blow voices some concerns about the direction the anti-Obama conspiracists are heading and wonders if there's anything to the fact that background checks for firearm purchases have increased vastly since the election. Is this really that surprising? The sort of people that are going to be drawn to such nonsense are the folks that Dave Weigel photo-documents here: paranoid, absurdly individualist, and armed to the teeth. It is in their nature to be lone wolves, not an organized movement, which is why there have been some efforts by would-be high-minded conservatives to separate themselves from the wingers. But this is still a country where Michele Bachmann can talk about "re-education camps" and not be mocked, and where Sean Hannity can allude to the book-burning rallies that accompanied Natalie Maines' criticism of President Bush as the essence of patriotism.
- Scott Horton reports that Senate Republicans are threatening to filibuster some of Obama's "controversial" legal appointments unless the administration ceases its efforts to declassify certain torture memos from the Bush administration. The blackmail angle is certainly new, but obstruction has clearly become the GOP's favored alternative to actual governing.
- Weekend Remainders: The Washington Post reports what was probably inevitable -- the grassroots organization assembled for Barack Obama's election is ill-suited to generating excitement about things like budgets; the religious right becomes more de-politicized; Nate Silver locates the three variables that tell you when a state will vote against a gay-marriage ban; the Obama administration is still finding it hard to say no to the lords of Wall Street; and Congress loves the scum of the earth -- payday loan companies.
--Mori Dinauer
