President Obama was finally politically cornered, including by the unscripted remarks of Vice President Biden. Anyone who attributes courage to Obama in making this announcement is in a bemused state of mind. Obama’s calculation was electoral through and through. And the White House was definitely getting the news that major gay donors would not be signing checks until he “evolved” already. Also, millions of ordinary gay voters were finding it harder to suppress mounting moral revulsion at being played like extras in every election.

Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Here’s a brief list of insane things that are apparently common knowledge among the billionaire class:

• That President Obama and the Democratic Party have treated wealthy finance industry titans maliciously and unfairly.
• That the fact that they are perversely wealthy and growing richer during a period of mass unemployment and staggering debt is a sign that the economy is functioning correctly.
• That poor people, and not the finance industry, are responsible for the financial crisis and subsequent recession.
• That the ultra-wealthy are wealthy because they are smarter and work harder than everybody else, and that they are resented for their success.
• That the ultra-wealthy in general, and finance industry executives in particular, are the victims of widespread prejudice akin to that faced by ethnic minorities.

There can be no reasoning with people this irrational.

While delivering his remarks at the 2012 White House Correspondents' Dinner, comedian Jimmy Kimmel addressed the issue of marijuana legalization.

"What is with the marijuana crackdown? Seriously, what is the concern? We will deplete the nation's Funyun supply?" Kimmel said. "Pot smokers vote too. Sometimes a week after the election, but they vote."

Kimmel then posed a challenge to the crowd, which was made up of celebrities like Kim Kardashian and George Clooney.

"I would like everyone in this room to raise your hand if you've never smoked pot," Kimmel said.

Few hands went up.

Noting the crowd's reaction, Kimmel addressed Obama directly.

The debate surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act illustrates the impoverishment of our political life. Here is a law that had its origin in the right-wing Heritage Foundation, was first put into practice in 2006 in Massachusetts by then-Gov. Mitt Romney and was solidified into federal law after corporate lobbyists wrote legislation with more than 2,000 pages. It is a law that forces American citizens to buy a deeply defective product from private insurance companies. It is a law that is the equivalent of the bank bailout bill—some $447 billion in subsidies for insurance interests alone—for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. It is a law that is unconstitutional. And it is a law by which President Barack Obama, and his corporate backers, extinguished the possibilities of both the public option and Medicare for all Americans. There is no substantial difference between Obamacare and Romneycare. There is no substantial difference between Obama and Romney. They are abject servants of the corporate state. And if you vote for one you vote for the other.

But you would never know this by listening to the Democratic Party and the advocacy groups that purport to support universal health care but seem more intent on re-electing Obama. It is the very sad legacy of the liberal class that it proves in election cycle after election cycle that it espouses moral and political positions it will not pay a price to defend.

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama. With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the party of moneyed greed and unfettered imperialism.

WASHINGTON -- Looking to a Supreme Court decision in the health care case months away, President Barack Obama has locked horns with Chief Justice John Roberts over how historically significant a decision striking down the mandate would be.

"We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce -- a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner," Obama told reporters on Tuesday, defending his Affordable Care Act in the face of news stories predicting a loss at the high court. "So we're going back to the '30s, pre-New Deal."

Lochner. It's a name familiar to lawyers, but barely known to the general public. Referring to a 1905 Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York, that struck down a state law capping bakers' weekly hours, the epithet harkens back to an era, stretching roughly from the 1890s through the 1930s, when a conservative Supreme Court struck down liberal economic regulations at the state and federal levels.

Invoking Lochner's specter of aggressive judicial activism has long been the legalese equivalent of brandishing a cross before a vampire.

Few would quarrel with President Barack Obama's point that the Republican Party has drifted to the right in recent years, disavowing ideas it once embraced — even created. But making that case in a major campaign speech, Obama ignored realities in his own Democratic ranks.

For one, it was opposition from coal-state Democrats that sank cap-and-trade legislation to control greenhouse gas emissions, not just from those arch-conservative Republicans.

For another, if Republicans have moved to the right on health care, it's also true that Obama has moved to the left. He strenuously opposed a mandate forcing people to obtain health insurance until he won office and changed his mind.

Obama's speech to news executives Tuesday at the annual meeting of The Associated Press was perhaps his most aggressive dressing down of the Republicans yet this campaign season. Mitt Romney, his likely GOP rival for the presidency, speaks to news leaders Wednesday.

Several points in Obama's address gave an incomplete accounting to his audience. Here are some of his statements and how they compare with the facts:

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OBAMA: "You'd think they'd say: `You know what? Maybe some rules and regulations are necessary to protect the economy and prevent people from being taken advantage of by insurance companies or credit card companies or mortgage lenders.'"

THE FACTS: As zealous as they sound on the subject, Republicans aren't proposing to throw out all regulations. Romney, for one, proposes changing, but not repealing, the Sarbanes-Oxley law that tightened accounting regulations in response to corporate scandals. He does want to repeal the Dodd-Frank law toughening financial-industry regulations after the meltdown in that sector, and he wants environmental rules loosened to spur energy production.

Even in the heat of GOP primaries, however, Romney wasn't talking about throwing out the federal rulebook. "We don't want to tell the world that Republicans are against all regulation," he said. "No, regulation is necessary to make a free market work. But it has to be updated and modern."

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OBAMA: "Cap and trade was originally proposed by conservatives and Republicans as a market-based solution to solving environmental problems. The first president to talk about cap and trade was George H.W. Bush. Now you've got the other party essentially saying we shouldn't even be thinking about environmental protection; let's gut the EPA."

THE FACTS: Obama is right that cap and trade was a Republican idea — first put in place to control sulfur dioxide emissions, or acid rain, under the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that passed overwhelmingly. The idea is to cap overall emissions of a certain pollutant while letting companies trade pollution allowances, essentially using a combination of the government and private market to make the environment cleaner.

But in recent years, cap and trade failed when Democrats controlled the Senate and the House. Moreover, Republicans argued the legislation was not a truly market-driven mechanism. It would have auctioned off pollution allowances to companies, raising money for the government to help offset higher energy bills and invest in cleaner energy technologies.

They wanted a system that would distribute the allowances for free, letting the private market determine their value. That's how it worked with acid rain.

Republicans have not abandoned the notion of environmental protection, although the presidential primary rhetoric — all geared to more drilling and energy production — could lead one to think so.

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OBAMA: "There is a reason why there's a little bit of confusion in the Republican primary about health care and the individual mandate, since it originated as a conservative idea to preserve the private marketplace in health care while still assuring that everybody got coverage, in contrast to a single-payer plan. Now suddenly this is some socialist overreach."

THE FACTS: Again, true. But not the whole story.

Many Republicans into the 1990s, and in some cases beyond, supported the idea of requiring people to have health insurance, even if they disagreed with Democrats on how universal coverage should work. Now that idea is decidedly purged from the GOP mainstream.

But until he became president, Obama, too, thought a mandate was a bad idea. In the 2008 campaign, it was his "core belief" that everyone would get health insurance, without the coercion of a mandate, if only high-quality coverage were affordable.

He relentlessly criticized his primary opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton in debates, speeches, ads and mailers for proposing a mandate, taking it so far that she waved one of his mailers in the air and barked, "Shame on you, Barack Obama," slamming "your tactics and your behavior in this campaign."

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OBAMA: "At the beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut in 2003. We were promised that these tax cuts would lead to faster job growth. They did not. The wealthy got wealthier. We would expect that. The income of the top 1 percent has grown by more than 275 percent over the last few decades to an average of $1.3 million a year. But prosperity sure didn't trickle down."

THE FACTS: You wouldn't know from his statement that taxes in 2001 and 2003 were cut across the board, not just for the wealthy. President George W. Bush's package trimmed rates for all taxable income levels, doubled the child tax credit and substantially raised the amount of money people can put in individual retirement accounts. The political fight these days is over whether to keep extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest. Obama supports keeping the lower rates for the rest and has pushed similar tax cuts of his own — excluding the wealthiest, however.

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Associated Press writers Dina Cappiello and Tom Raum contributed to this report.

"Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," the president concluded. "And I just remind conservative commentators that for years what we have heard is that the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint; that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I'm pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step."

The president's defense of the law comes at a time when few others are confident in its future. The oral arguments from last week prompted intensely nervous reactions within Democratic circles and chatter that the White House had fumbled the legal case. The president's legal team could have tried to move the ruling till 2014, some argued, when the individual mandate goes into effect.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Once, long ago, Evie looked after “Barry” Obama, the kid who would grow up to become the world’s most powerful man. Now, his transgender former nanny has given up her tight, flowery dresses, her brocade vest and her bras, and is living in fear on Indonesia’s streets.

Evie, who was born a man but believes she is really a woman, has endured a lifetime of taunts and beatings because of her identity. She describes how soldiers once shaved her long, black hair to the scalp and smashed out glowing cigarettes onto her hands and arms.

The turning point came when she found a transgender friend’s bloated body floating in a backed-up sewage canal two decades ago. She grabbed all her girlie clothes in her arms and stuffed them into two big boxes. Half-used lipstick, powder, eye makeup — she gave them all away.

“I knew in my heart I was a woman, but I didn’t want to die like that,” says Evie, now 66, her lips trembling slightly as the memories flood back. “So I decided to just accept it. ... I’ve been living like this, a man, ever since.”

Indonesia’s attitude toward transgenders is complex.

The earth-shattering scoop that will blow this baby wide open can now be revealed: 14 years ago Obama attended a play in Chicago.

Yes! A play!

The subject of this nefarious play: the dreaded Saul Alinsky.

Countering the efforts of educational reformers—including President Obama and his Race to the Top crew—to blame teachers for student failures, researchers are finding that the growing gap between the affluent and the poor is the real villain.

“As the children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich, we risk producing an even more unequal and economically polarized society,” wrote Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor of education and sociology.

Louis Freedberg, executive director of the respected public education research organization EdSource, called Reardon’s research a “dramatic illustration of the impact of inequality on how children do in school.” The findings were included in a story in The New York Times on Feb. 9 on the academic achievement gap between rich and poor. The story brought to wide public attention an important part of the income inequality debate that has been generally overlooked.

The Obama administration released a "framework" for corporate tax reform yesterday, proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and pay for that by closing various corporate tax loopholes.

The "framework" isn't really a corporate tax reform proposal. It is a message document, framed in a bitterly partisan election year when no reforms are about to take place. So what is the message?

The president wants to show that he's sensitive to business complaints about the complicated tax code with the highest nominal rates in the industrial world, outraged at the loopholes and scams built into the code, committed to providing incentives for businesses to create jobs here at home, and stout in opposing more corporate tax cuts unlike his Republican opponents.

But a brief look at the framework shows how truly limited and conservative our debate has become. The corporation lobby has won the fight before it has begun by defining the terms of the debate.

The proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights would give people greater control over what information Internet companies can gather about them. It’s great news for us, but a possible headache for tech companies.

Every few weeks, it seems, we’re hit with some new scandal when a tech company gets caught invading the privacy of its users. Now the Obama administration is saying enough is enough, and has proposed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that it hopes will lead to new regulations on tech companies.

“The president is wrong.” So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Those four words headline the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former U.S. Sen., and now Obama campaign adviser, Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama’s recent announcement that he will accept super PAC funds for his re-election campaign. Feingold writes: “The President is wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super PACs—organizations that raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and the richest individuals, sometimes in total secrecy. It’s not just bad policy; it’s also dumb strategy.” And, he says, it’s “dancing with the devil.”

...

As I interviewed Feingold, just hours after he was named one of the 35 Obama campaign co-chairs, I asked him if he was an odd choice for the position. Feingold responded: “How about a co-chair that’s proud of him for bringing us health care for the first time in 70 years? How about a co-chair who thinks that he has actually done a good thing with the economy and helped with the stimulus package, and we’ve had 22 months of positive job growth? How about a co-chair for a president that has the best reputation overseas of any president in memory, that has reversed the awful damage of the Bush administration, who in places like Cairo and in India and Indonesia has reached out to the rest of the world. Believe me, on balance, there’s no question. And finally, how about a co-chair of a president who I believe will help us appoint justices who will overturn Citizens United?”

Until then, as the Obama campaign “dances with the devil” of super PACs, perhaps campaign co-chair Russ Feingold will help us follow the money.

The pres­i­dent did some­thing agile and wise the other day. And some­thing quite im­por­tant to the health of our pol­i­tics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cos­mic bat­tle be­tween good and evil. No, said the pres­i­dent, we're not going to turn the ar­gu­ment over con­tra­cep­tion into Ar­maged­don, this is an hon­est dif­fer­ence be­tween Amer­i­cans, and I'll not see it es­ca­lated into a holy war. So in­stead of the gov­ern­ment re­quir­ing Catholic hos­pi­tals and other faith-based in­sti­tu­tions to pro­vide em­ploy­ees with health cov­er­age in­volv­ing con­tra­cep­tives, the in­sur­ance com­pa­nies will offer that cov­er­age, and offer it free.

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year's presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party's super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign's decision to seek Super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined "Another Campaign for Sale." The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits.

The president is ‘very sensitive’ to concerns about his policy mandating that Catholic institutions provide contraception coverage—but did the administration incite the enraged response to fire up young liberal voters?

...
With Rick Santorum opposed to contraception and Mitt Romney declaring he would cut family planning from the federal budget, Charlie Cook wonders if the White House deliberately picked this fight now, knowing where it would go. He points out that for all the talk about Republican primary turnout being down, Democrats aren’t that keen on their guy either. The White House says this was not a political decision, that once the nonpartisan, nongovernmental Institute of Medicine recommended that contraceptives be included as part of women’s preventive health care, the die was cast.

“This will in a lot of ways be a faultline in this election,” says Bill Burton, who is with the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action. The election won’t turn on these kinds of cultural issues, but they can generate emotion and passion. Obama’s job approval is just above 50 percent among younger voters, a group that gave him 66 percent of their vote in 2008. “They’ve got to get young people jazzed up, and there are very few issues that get young women more jazzed up than contraception,” says Cook. Indeed, the Obama campaign website highlights the issue of contraception, along with the fact that it will be free once the Affordable Care Act is implemented.

In a recent interview with Diverse magazine, Professor Cornel West attacked his former Princeton colleague and newly minted MSNBC host Professor Melissa Harris-Perry.

West called Harris-Perry a "liar" and said that, "[s]he's become the momentary darling of liberals, but I pray for her because she's in over her head. She's a fake and a fraud. I was so surprised how treacherous the sister was."

West and Harris-Perry have disagreed publicly before in their varying assessments of President Barack Obama. West and talk show host Tavis Smiley have consistently been harsh on Obama and what they see as his lack of concern for the black community and the poor.

Harris-Perry's view of the Obama administration has been more balanced often based on analysis of process and structural impediments to sweeping change that many feel President Obama promised. West sees Harris-Perry, and her MSNBC colleague Reverend Al Sharpton, as conciliators to the administration and questions why a civil rights activist like Sharpton wouldn't be more harsh in his critique, questioning why he is so close to the administration.

The administration claims its decision to force Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraceptives is ‘balanced”—so why, when religious liberty was weighed against access to birth control, did freedom lose?

It’s hard to escape the feeling that the Obama administration is trying to run America’s Catholic charities and institutions out of business.

How else to explain the mean-spirited decision mandating that Catholic institutions be required to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives, and the “morning-after pill,” which violates their fundamental religious beliefs?

A second term for President Barack Obama would allow him to expand his replacement of Republican-appointed majorities with Democratic ones on the nation's appeals courts, the final stop for almost all challenged federal court rulings.

Despite his slow start in nominating judges and Republican delays in Senate confirmations, Obama has still managed to alter the balance of power on four of the nation's 13 circuit courts of appeals. Given a second term, Obama could have the chance to install Democratic majorities on several others.

Fourteen of the 25 appeals court judges nominated by Obama replaced Republican appointees.

The next president, whether it's Obama or a Republican, also has a reasonable shot at transforming the majority on the Supreme Court, because three justices representing the closely divided court's liberal and conservative wings, as well as its center, will turn 80 before the next presidential term ends.

The three justices are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leader of the court's liberal wing, conservative Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy, who leans conservative but on some issues provides a decisive vote for the liberals.

The next high court opening would cause a titanic confirmation fight if it would allow a Republican president to cement conservative control of the court by replacing Ginsburg or if Obama could give Democratic appointees a working majority for the first time in decades by replacing Scalia or Kennedy.

The prospect of such dramatic change on the Supreme Court, along with the justices' strikingly high-profile election-year docket could heighten the judiciary's importance as an election issue, said Curt Levey, who heads the conservative Committee for Justice. The justices will hear arguments on Obama's health care overhaul in March and Arizona's immigration crackdown in April. The court also could soon decide whether to hear a Texas affirmative action case challenging the use of race as a factor in college admissions.

Even one new justice can produce dramatic change. Justice Samuel Alito replaced the more moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and shifted the outcome in cases on abortion, campaign finance and other key issues, even though both were appointed by Republicans.

Openings on the circuit courts of appeals get much less attention, but those courts have the last say in most legal disputes that are appealed in the federal system. Only about 80 cases make it to the Supreme Court every year.

There are still more Republicans than Democrats on the circuit appeals courts and on the entire federal bench. But if Obama merely filled existing vacancies, Democratic appointees would be the majority on the influential court of appeals in Washington, where four current Supreme Court justices once served, and the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans also maintain their edge on the 10th Circuit in Denver only because two judgeships are empty.

Two other appeals courts on which Republicans have comfortable majorities could shift over the next four years. The Chicago-based 7th Circuit has four judges in their 70s who were chosen by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit, Judge Emilio Garza, a Republican appointee, will take senior status in August, a move that will open a seat while Garza takes a smaller caseload. Two Reagan picks in their 70s remain on the court.

Twelve Reagan appointees now in their 70s remain on circuit appeals courts or, in the case of Scalia and Kennedy, the Supreme Court.

Republican presidents, in recent decades, have been more aggressive than Democrats in filling those seats with younger, more like-minded lawyers.

Many nominees of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in their early 40s, some even in their 30s, and with reputations as bold conservatives. By contrast, Obama has frustrated some liberal interest groups mainly by favoring older nominees over younger ones who might be the Democratic equivalents of some of the Reagan and Bush picks. Obama's two youngest appeals court nominees, Goodwin Liu and Caitlin Halligan, were stymied by Republican filibusters in the Senate.

The average age of Obama-nominated appeals court judges is more than 55 years old, higher than any president's going back to Jimmy Carter, according to the liberal interest group Alliance for Justice. The age of these judges matters in an era when presidents regularly look to the circuit appeals courts as the pool for Supreme Court candidates. Younger judges have a chance to develop a record that presidents can examine, yet still be young enough to be considered for the high court.

Alito and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas all became appellate judges in their early 40s. Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee, and Justice Elena Kagan, a Democrat, would have been on the appeals court in Washington before their 40th birthdays had senators not blocked their confirmations. Roberts had to wait another decade before becoming an appeals court judge, while Kagan is the only justice who did not serve as an appellate judge.

Obama's picks have yet to surprise anyone with their decisions, said Levey, head of the conservative interest group. "So Obama's liberal critics can rest assured that if he's re-elected, his transformation of the appeals courts will make a big difference in the law."

Party labels do not always foretell a case's outcome. During recent challenges to the Obama administration's health care overhaul, Republican appeals court judges in Cincinnati and Washington cast deciding votes upholding the law, while a Democratic appointee in Atlanta voted to strike down the requirement that most people buy health insurance or pay a penalty.

Still, there is wide agreement that Obama picks have sharply altered the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had been dominated by conservative, Republican appointees.

President Barack Obama on Thursday tied his proposal to raise taxes on wealthy Americans to his faith, telling leaders gathered for the National Prayer Breakfast that Jesus’s teachings have shaped that conclusion.

The rich should pay more not only because “I actually think that is going to make economic sense, but for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required,’” Obama said at the Washington Hilton, delivering remarks at an annual event that every president has attended since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The activation of the administration's long dormant task force on criminal misconduct in the financial collapse, with New York's progressive attorney general Eric Schneiderman as co-chair, could be the most fateful political and economic development of the election year. There are still immense pitfalls ahead, as Wall Street allies inside the administration and on Wall Street itself try to reduce Schneiderman's role to that of symbolic fig leaf.

But President Obama has done something potentially momentous for which he deserves our praise, even if he himself does not fully grasp the implications. The significance of the shift is still in play, of course, and will be made clearer as events unfold over the next several weeks.

Some skeptics in the progressive community have raised questions both about the upside for Schneiderman and his motives. Given the administration's feeble record on prosecutions to date, the critics are right to flag the likelihood that people like Attorney General Eric Holder and SEC enforcement chief Robert Khazumi will try to sandbag Schneiderman. But my reporting suggests that they underestimate both the man and the dynamics that have been set loose.

The surprising move raises several questions.

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Finally, a presidential candidate came out and honestly addressed the biggest problem in our economy, the enormous debt overhang in our mortgage market. A few days ago, Mitt Romney was at a forum in Florida talking about foreclosures, and his comments were actually refreshingly honest about our housing and banking situation and the need for a debt write-down.

We're just so overleveraged, so much debt in our society, and some of the institutions that hold it aren't willing to write it off and say they made a mistake, they loaned too much, we're overextended, write those down and start over. They keep on trying to harangue and pretend what they have on their books is still what it's worth.

Mitt Romney was pointing out that the banks are carrying debt on their books at inflated values. When was the last serious politician to make that point, openly? There's more.

This president would be far more believable with a populist message if he had been walking the talk since he first took office.

We are all the political hostages of Obama's mixed messages. We have no choice but to go all out for his re-election. If he fails to win, we will inherit a country in which the Right completes the destruction begun under Reagan and furthered under both presidents Bush. We will have a country with less liberty, less social justice, more extremes of inequality, and democracy itself will be increasingly at risk.

But we also need Obama to win and to govern as a true economic progressive. His failure to do so thus far not only denies the country the broad-based recovery that we need, but blunts a populist appeal that is a natural public response to the hosing that regular people have taken from financial elites. That failure permits cultural anxieties to displace economic ones. As a result, Obama's re-election is only a 50-50 proposition, even against an unstable carnival pitchman like Newt Gingrich or a glass-jawed fraud like Mitt Romney.

WASHINGTON -- Hell hath no fury like a lobbyist scorned. Former Democratic senator and current head of the Motion Picture Association of America Chris Dodd threatened to cut off campaign contributions from Hollywood to the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama.

In an interview with Fox News about the White House's recent statement on controversial anti-piracy legislation, Dodd said:

Candidly, those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake ...

You just can’t get rid of zombie Larry Summers. He can get drummed out of Harvard. He can see the deregulation policies he pushed in the Clinton Administration lead to a financial meltdown. He can preside over a sluggish economy for two years during the Obama Administration, after which Congress flips to the opposition. And he just keeps falling upwards.

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

WASHINGTON -- Doubling down on President Barack Obama's bold recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the White House announced Wednesday that Obama would also use his recess powers to fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency charged with enforcing labor law.

The move is sure to further infuriate Republicans, many of whom feuded all last year with an NLRB they view as overly union-friendly and anti-business.

The labor board lost its quorum yesterday as the term of board member Craig Becker came to an end -- essentially crippling the agency, no doubt to the pleasure of many conservatives. Although the recess appointments will probably be challenged legally by business groups, the move could allow the board to continue operating without disruption. According to the White House, Obama plans to appoint union lawyer Richard Griffin, current Labor Department official Sharon Block, and NLRB counsel Terence Flynn.

Labor groups who had applauded the NLRB for many of its recent decisions quickly hailed Obama for the appointments.

The Republicans handed President Obama a nice tactical victory when they caved in just before Christmas and agreed to extend the payroll tax cut on Obama's terms (with no offsetting program cuts.) But the extension deal is only for two months, which means the battle will be fought all over again in February.

You could say this is double-stupidity on the Republicans' part, since the public will be treated yet again to a debate in which the Democrats want to tax millionaires in order to spare working people a tax hike, while Republicans defend the very rich and demand further cuts in valued programs as the price of avoiding a tax increase on ordinary Americans.

But maybe it's Democrats who have set themselves a trap. Some Social Security advocates contend that Obama's nice partisan victory is hollow if not Pyrrhic.

WASHINGTON — Baby boomers take note: Medicare as your parents have known it is headed for big changes no matter who wins the White House in 2012. You may not like it, but you might have to accept it.

Dial down the partisan rhetoric and surprising similarities emerge from competing policy prescriptions by President Barack Obama and leading Republicans such as Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.

Limit the overall growth of Medicare spending? It's in both approaches.

Squeeze more money from upper-income retirees and some in the middle-class? Ditto.

Raise the eligibility age? That too, if the deal is right.

WASHINGTON -- Indefinite military detention of Americans became the law of the land Saturday, as President Barack Obama signed a defense bill that codified that authority, even as he said he would not use it.

The National Defense Authorization Act states how the military is to be funded, but also includes a number of controversial provisions on arresting and holding suspected terrorists, which at first drove Obama to threaten a veto.

He retreated from that threat after Congress added provisions that took the ultimate authority to detain suspects from the military's hands and gave it to the president. Congress also clarified that civilian law enforcement agencies -- such as the FBI -- would still have authority to investigate terrorism and added a provision that asserts nothing in the detention measures changes current law regarding U.S. citizens.

Still, the signing on New Year's Eve as few people were paying attention angered civil liberties advocates, who argue that the law for the first time spells out certain measures that have not actually been tested all the way to the Supreme Court, including the possibility of detaining citizens in military custody without trial for as long as there is a war on terror.

My political prediction for 2012 (based on absolutely no inside information): Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State -- a position he's apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President.

So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton.

Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that's been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.

The GOP is engaged in a wholesale effort to redefine the government help that Americans take for granted as an effort to create a radically new, statist society. Consider Romney’s claim in his Bedford speech: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing—the government.”

Obama believes no such thing. If he did, why are so many continuing to make bundles on Wall Street? As my colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Krugman have been insisting, Romney is saying things about the president that are flatly, grossly and shamefully untrue. But Romney’s sleight of hand is revealing: Republicans are increasingly inclined to argue that any redistribution (and Social Security, Medicare, student loans, veterans benefits and food stamps are all redistributive) is but a step down the road to some radically egalitarian dystopia.

Obama will thus be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went. And here’s the irony: By raising the stakes of 2012 so high, Republicans will be playing into Obama’s hands. The GOP might well win a referendum on the state of the economy. But if this is instead a larger-scale referendum on whether government should be “inconsequential,” Republicans will find the consequences to be very disappointing.

But there is one thing we can do right now that doesn't really hurt the chances of the president getting re-elected and doesn't help Republicans one bit. It is an idea that Occupy Iowa came up with. In the Iowa caucuses you can vote for "uncommitted." In fact, since the 1970's "uncommitted" has won twice on the Democratic side and it beat Bob Dole in 1980. Of course, the Republican Party has shut down this option on their side. They say you can vote that way in the GOP field but they will not register those votes or send those delegates. Of course, they're the GOP; they have no interest in your dissent.

But if all of those people were to go and participate on the Democratic side, they might have an effect. If "uncommitted" beat President Obama on the Democratic side in Iowa, that would make some news. That might even get the attention of The Establishment. So far, he has only responded to right-wing pressure. He is the consummate politician, so if there was actually a little bit of pressure on his left he might have to respond to it, especially during an election season. Wouldn't it be amazing if President Obama acted like a progressive on some issue because he was worried about the voters?

By the way, this strategy also has the benefit of being accurate. I am "uncommitted" toward Obama.

I noted in February that John Kenneth Galbraith and Marriner Eccles explained 50 years ago that inequality causes crashes, and that many modern economists agree.

I just found a slighter older statement saying the same thing.

Specifically, the well-known Greek historian Plutarch – who died in 120 A.D. – said:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Given that the level of inequality in America today is one of the greatest in history, it is not surprising that the republic is ailing so badly.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- When the Democratic National Committee picked Charlotte to host its September 2012 convention, city leaders saw it as a boost to the local service economy. Hotels would be filled, restaurants would be booked, and party spaces would be rented. Up until a few months ago, officials only had to worry about the would-be traffic congestion on Trade Street as lobbyists shuffled to the next cocktail party. But now, they have to be concerned about feistier visitors known as Occupy Wall Street.

If Charlotte officials fear having another Chicago '68 on their hands, they're hoping to take one essential weapon out of the hands of activists: their tents. On Oct. 27, the Charlotte city manager released a draft ordinance that makes camping on public property a "public nuisance" and would prohibit "noxious substances," padlocks and other camping equipment that city officials fear could impede traffic and create public safety issues.

The Charlotte City Council has not yet voted on the ordinance, and some argue its language is vague and may violate First Amendment rights.

The president's speech Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas -- where Teddy Roosevelt gave his "New Nationalism" speech in 1910 -- is the most important economic speech of his presidency in terms of connecting the dots, laying out the reasons behind our economic and political crises, and asserting a willingness to take on the powerful and the privileged that have gamed the system to their advantage.

Here are the highlights (and, if you'll pardon me, my annotations):

Today Barack Obama channeled one of American history's truly transformative figures by visiting the tiny Kansas town where Teddy Roosevelt gave his "New Nationalism" speech over a century ago. It's refreshing to see him invoke Roosevelt, who was a powerful and fearless agent of change both inside and outside the White House.

But echoing the populist chords of the First Progressive Era isn't without its risks. The speech that Roosevelt gave in Osawatomie, Kansas in 1910 could serve as a beacon for the President and his fellow Democrats. But that speech also warned that there's a price to be paid for promises betrayed.

Barack Obama is heading back onto the campaign trail, running as a champion of the middle class and even hoping to harness the Occupy movement's public anger at Wall Street.

But the higher he soars with his populist rhetoric, the more he calls attention to the enormous gap between the promise of hope and change that he campaigned on in 2008 and the actions he has taken as president -- especially regarding the economy, which is still stagnating, and Wall Street, which remains unpunished and unbowed even after causing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

As a result, voters will inevitably be asking themselves: Who is this guy, really? Does he mean what he says? Will he do what he says? And would a second-term Obama be different?

One answer to why Obama underperformed is laid out in searing detail in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ron Suskind's latest book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.

David Brooks, man without a political party, is embittered today that President Barack Obama didn't create a political party for him. I have to admit, the party that David Brooks seems to want sure sounds like a wonder! It will declare the end of politics as usual, and stoke positivity, and popularity will trump populism, and -- I suppose through the sheer force of its goodness! -- quash all other political interest-seekers of their interest seeking. Life will be one long campfire song. But Obama now wants to pass the "Buffett rule," and so the dream of a country for self-described "saps" is dead. What is a self-described "sap" doing writing about politics, anyway? That seems to demonstrate that Brooks is a glutton for disappointment.

The author makes the case that Obama does not have a chance to win in 2012 unless he carries the heartland, including rust-belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. There are aspects of Obama's record which are laudable, but his record isn't going to be enough with the economy still in such terrible condition. Obama will have to retool with another aggressive round of remedial action to turn things around. None of these ideas are brand new, but they are cast in a starkly political light here.

 

How can Obama recast the economic discussion? Here's my best shot:

First, he must acknowledge Americans' sense of being stuck and then explain why recovery from this downturn has been so painfully slow -- in particular, the impact of the financial collapse and our excessive debt burden, private as well as public.

Second, he must display some humility and acknowledge that he didn't get everything right. It was a mistake not to underscore the difficulty of our circumstances right from the start. It was a mistake to predict that unemployment would peak at 8 percent if his stimulus bill were enacted. While it was necessary to save the big financial institutions from a total meltdown, it was a mistake to ask so little from them institutions in return. And it was a mistake to act so timidly in the face of a housing and mortgage crisis that has cost the middle class many trillions of dollars in lost wealth.

Third, he should emphasize what most Americans believe: without the steps his administration took at the depth of the crisis, there might well have been a second Great Depression. Sure, "It could have been much worse" isn't much of a bumper sticker, but it's a place to start, and it has the merit of being true.

Fourth, what he has done so far has not only halted the decline but has yielded more than twenty consecutive months of growth in private sector jobs -- progress that would be more noticeable if states and localities hadn't been shedding so many employees in response to the squeeze on their budgets.

Fifth, while most Americans didn't like it when his administration intervened to save GM and Chrysler, it was the right thing to do, not only for auto workers, but for much of the heartland's economy as well. Allowing these two firms to dissolve would have broken the back of regions already struggling with double-digit unemployment. Leadership means doing what's necessary and right, even when it's unpopular.

Sixth, we now have the opportunity to build on the foundation laid during this painful period in our history. Obama can emphasize steps such as: a bold new response to housing foreclosures and underwater mortgages; an infrastructure bank that mobilizes both domestic and foreign capital to put Americans back to work on projects that will strengthen our economy; and a tougher stance vis-à-vis Chinese policies that have taken their toll on American workers and firms. And yes, we need to come together around fundamental spending and tax reform that can stabilize our fiscal future without further undermining the hard-pressed middle class.

That's the guts of the affirmative case Obama can make.

(Reuters) - Protesters hope to shut down Wall Street on Thursday -- home to the New York Stock Exchange -- by holding a street carnival to mark the two-month anniversary of their campaign against economic inequality.

Protest organizers acknowledged that the "day of action" could be the group's most provocative yet, and could lead to mass arrests and further strain relations with city authorities.

President Barack Obama challenged Republican leaders on Tuesday to put his entire $447 billion jobs plan to a vote, rather than breaking it up, to show American voters "exactly where members of Congress stand."

Obama, a Democrat facing a tough re-election battle in November 2012, sent bills for trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama to a seemingly receptive Congress on Monday but the mood in Washington has otherwise been fractious as his jobs package comes apart at the seams.

The CLASS Act was inserted into the Affordable Care Act as a sort of tribute to the late Ted Kennedy, the bill’s longtime champion. It enacts a federal long-term care insurance program, a kind of public option for long-term care. The Obama Administration, emails now show, didn’t like it from the beginning. And now, there are signs that they may not put it into practice.

By now, probably everyone reading this is already sick of America’s quadrennial political spectacle—the one in which politicians and media outlets ask us to believe that there remain vast differences between our two political parties. It’s like cheaply staged pornography on a red and blue set, with words like “polarization,” “socialist” and “extremist” comprising the breathless dialogue in a wholly unconvincing plot.

Some of this tripe can be momentarily compelling, of course. And as the 2012 election climax draws nearer, many Americans will no doubt submit to the fantasy. But before that happens, it’s worth looking a few levels beneath the orgiastic presidential campaign for a last necessary dose of nonfiction, if only to remind us that the parties are often two heads of the same political monster.

The relevant comparison here is with the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Today many progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option; but Clinton failed to pass any kind of meaningful healthcare reform whatsoever. Others argue that Obama has been slow to push for equal rights for gay Americans; but it was Clinton who established the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy Obama helped repeal. Still others are angry about appalling unemployment rates for black Americans; but while overall unemployment was lower under Clinton, black unemployment was double that of whites during his term, as it is now. And, of course, Clinton supported and signed welfare “reform,” cutting off America’s neediest despite the nation’s economic growth.

Today, America’s continuing entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan provoke anger, but while Clinton reduced defense spending, covert military operations were standard practice during his administration. In terms of criminal justice, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which decreased judicial disparities in punishment; by contrast, federal incarceration grew exponentially under Clinton. Many argue that Obama is an ineffective leader, but the legislative record for his first two years outpaces Clinton’s first two years. Both men came into power with a Democratically controlled Congress, but both saw a sharp decline in their ability to pass their own legislative agendas once GOP majorities took over one or both chambers.

Barack Obama’s politically expedient decision to betray and abandon his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, exposed his cowardice and moral bankruptcy. In that moment, playing the part of Judas, he surrendered the last shreds of his integrity. He became nothing more than a pawn of power, or as Cornel West says, “a black mascot for Wall Street.” Obama, once the glitter of power fades, will have to grapple with the fact that he was a traitor not only to his pastor, the man who married him and Michelle, who baptized his children and who kept him spiritually and morally grounded, but to himself. Wright retains what is most precious in life and what Obama has squandered—his soul.

It’s getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled “Dixie” while the banking system imploded. But it’s time for Democrats to admit that their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around.

Barack Obama's betrayal will resonate in history long after he has become just another name on the over-priced celebrity speaker circuit. It is a betrayal of far more than the youthful idealists and loyal progressives who put him in the White House. Obama has unmoored the Democratic Party from its foundations -- philosophical and electoral. No longer is it an expression of the persons, programs and ideas that crystallized with the New Deal and which dominated the country's politics for sixty years. Its future is that of ad hoc assemblage of hustlers and special interests whose sole claim to govern will be that it is not the amalgamated Tea/Republican Party. Obama, by this Oedipus-like act of patricide, has also betrayed the country that voted for an enlightened leader with a social conscience -- a country in desperate need of the opposite to the fate he has laid on us.

For President Obama, August is indeed the cruelest month.

In 2009, the president ended his "honeymoon" period with the public, with the largest one-month drop in his job approval poll numbers he has ever experienced. In 2010, Obama hit an all-time low for monthly approval numbers. This would be followed, within the next two months, by his lowest daily approval average and his highest daily disapproval average.

This August, President Obama set new all-time lows in approval and all-time highs in disapproval, across the board.

August just isn't a very good month for Obama. There's simply no other way to state how dismal Obama's poll numbers were last month. A quick look at the new chart shows this plainly.

the intervening two years have shown me -- and yes, commenters, I know, I'll get back to doing cartoon voices just as soon as this post is completed -- that this president has committed two profound strategic blunders.

One is based on the circumstances he faced on taking office. The economy was in a shambles. When that happens in this country, history tells us there's a big wave of populism that sweeps through the population most severely affected by economic turmoil. Sometimes it's left-wing populism; sometimes it's right-wing populism. I think the president had the moment, and the option, to select which direction that populist wave would break. Had he gone left-wing populist, directing the anger of Main Street at -- to quote Teddy Roosevelt -- the "malefactors of great wealth," it's quite possible that he could have cornered the market on populism. Leaving that field vacant opened a big market for right-wing populism, which conveniently swooped in, in the form of the Tea Party. Yes, I'm suggesting that Barack Obama, not the Koch Brothers, is primarily responsible for the rise of the Tea Party.

The second strategic blunder has to do with misunderstanding his opposition. What was it about Mitch McConnell saying in 2009 that his primary goal was the defeat of President Obama that President Obama didn't understand?

Obama's speech before the workers in Detroit did not include the words debt or deficit, nor did it include admonitions that people ought to "eat their peas."

Instead, the president stood up for the besieged labor, quoting Harry Truman from a Labor Day speech 63 years earlier, which said, "the gains of labor were not accomplished at the expense of the rest of the nation. Labor’s gains contributed to the nation’s general prosperity."

Obama, accustomed to speaking about the need for "shared sacrifice," spoke instead on Monday about shared prosperity.

“We have no place else left to go but home,” said one official at a major environmental group, speaking on background Friday. “So the enviros come out looking weak once again because of today and we’re all screaming bloody murder.

“But you know what,” the official said. “At the end of the day, I don’t think the White House is unhappy to hear us complain.”

That could be a dangerous assumption for the administration to make, warned activist Ralph Nader, the former Green Party candidate who siphoned off enough votes in 2000 to deny the White House to Al Gore.

“I know [Obama] thinks all these people voted for him and they have nowhere to go in 2012 because the Republicans are worse,” said Nader, speaking during yet another day of White House protests against a proposed tar-sands-oil pipeline from Canada. “But they can stay home.

Per the Washington Post: "It is coincidental," said spokesman Jay Carney at the recent press briefing. "There are a lot of factors that go into scheduling a joint session of Congress for a speech. You can never find a perfect time. ... There are many channels to watch the president and to watch the debate."

What is not reported is whether the White House press corps broke into laughter at Carney's remarks or just rolled their eyes in disbelief. But the damage was done.

More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term.

With President Obama capitulating to John Boehner on when he'd be permitted to deliver his jobs speech to Congress, Michael Tomasky wonders whether the president will ever fight for policies he believes in.

WASHINGTON -- After a vacuous back-and-forth over whether or not the president would be invited to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Sept. 7, or Thursday, Sept. 8, the White House buckled to GOP demands and chose the latter date.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney emailed a statement to the press Wednesday evening, emphasizing that the administration had consulted GOP leadership before it requested to speak on Wednesday. But, he added, the president was willing to move the date back to accommodate House Speaker John Boehner's concerns.

If you didn’t see Jon Stewart’s summer break sign-off Thursday night, in which he summed up the right’s “class warfare” hysteria over demands that the rich go back to paying the same tax rates they paid during the Clinton boom years, you’ve got to give this two-part clip your eyes for just a couple minutes:

At the end of a largely wonky, data-driven piece of analysis written for Bloomberg News, Krueger discounted the incessant focus on the unemployment rate -- which does not count jobless people who have grown so discouraged that they have given up looking for work -- arguing that the real action is found in the so-called employment-to-population ratio, which measures what slice of working age Americans are employed. The ratio then sat at a dismal 58.4 percent, just off the low reached the previous December, meaning that the supposed resumption of economic growth was not putting large numbers of jobless people back to work.

Even back when the economy was still technically expanding between 2002 and 2007, Krueger noted, the percentage of working age people then employed never got back to where it had been before the previous recession in 2001, at a peak of 64.7 percent.

"What this indicator tells me is that we weren't creating enough jobs long before the recession that began in December 2007," Krueger declared. "If this pattern holds, even in recovery, it points to a much deeper and disturbing problem for the U.S. economy."

Curiously, Krueger ended his piece right there, without suggesting what we might do to fix this "deeper and disturbing problem," one that is now beyond argument, given that the pattern has indeed held.

President Obama has only one option as he ponders a world economy teetering on the edge: He needs to go big, go long and go global.

Obama should not be constrained by what the tea party might allow subservient Republican leaders in Congress to do. He should state plainly, eloquently and in detail what he thinks needs to happen. Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.

With a stinging budget defeat behind them and unemployment in the black community soaring to 16 percent, members of the Congressional Black Caucus say they’re done waiting for Barack Obama to fight their battles for them.

Instead, the 43 African-American lawmakers say they’re taking matters into their own hands and will carry the fight to Tea Party Republicans, whom they blame for Obama’s latest lurch to the right.

“The Tea Party discovered something. That is if they organize, if they talk loud enough, if they threaten, if they register to vote and elect a few people, they can take over the Congress of the United States,” said Rep. Maxine Waters. “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”

The president is sounding like a fighter these days. He even says he'll be proposing a jobs bill in September -- and if Republicans don't go along he'll fight for it through Election Day (or beyond).

That's a start. But read the small print and all he's talked about so far is extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits (good, but small potatoes), ratifying the Colombia and South Korea free trade agreements (not necessarily a job-creating move), and creating an infrastructure bank.

An infrastructure bank might be helpful, depending on its size.

Which is the real question hovering over the entire putative jobs bill -- its size.

Some of the president's political advisors have been pushing for small-bore initiatives that they believe might have a chance of getting through the Republican just-say-no House. They also figure policy miniatures won't give aspiring GOP candidates more ammunition to tar Obama as a big-government liberal.

But the president is sounding as if he's rejected their advice.

That's good policy and good politics.

It is unfathomable that yet another Texas blowhard governor has emerged as a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination. The persistent appeal of the mythology of Texas as a model for the nation defies the lessons of logic and experience, and yet here we are with Rick Perry, a George W. Bush look-alike, as a prime contender to once again run our nation into the ground.

To begin with,

WASHINGTON -- Seeking a jolt for the economy, President Barack Obama will lay out new ideas for speeding up job growth and helping the struggling poor and middle class in a major speech in early September, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.

The president's plan is likely to contain tax cuts, jobs-boosting infrastructure ideas and steps that would specifically help the long-term unemployed. The official emphasized that all of Obama's proposals would be fresh ones, not a rehash of plans he has pitched for many weeks and still supports, including his "infrastructure bank" idea to finance construction jobs.

I’m told White House political operatives are against a bold jobs plan. They believe the only jobs plan that could get through Congress would be so watered down as to have almost no impact by Election Day. They also worry the public wouldn’t understand how more government spending in the near term can be consistent with long-term deficit reduction. And they fear Republicans would use any such initiative to further bash Obama as a big spender.

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

At a town hall meeting in Decorah, Iowa, President Obama answered this question from a teacher:

Q Many unions, especially public sector unions, helped you get elected in 2008. Those public sector unions and their members gained their salaries and benefits through collective bargaining. Recently, those benefits have been under attack. And I realize that this is a state issue mostly, but what can you do to help support collective bargaining in the states and, most of all, support the public sector unions, the middle class, many of whom are union members? Thank you. (Applause.)

His answer was typical of the mixed bag he typically offers on labor issues. On the one hand, there was the strong general support for union rights:

And on the other hand he stuck the knife in a little deeper.

What a year. Rage in London, Egypt, Athens, Damascus. All real. Just a metaphor in the new “Planet of the Apes” film? No, much more. Warning: More rage is dead ahead. Across our planet a new generation is filled with rage. High unemployment. Raging inflation. Dreams lost. Hope gone. While the super -rich get richer and richer.

Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America’s future. From forces outside, yes. But far more deadly, from deep within our collective psyche. We have lost our moral compass. We are self-destructing.

Crackpot warning? No. This warning comes from the elite International Monetary Fund. A recent IMF report looked at “the causes of the two major U.S. economic crises over the past 100 years, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007,” writes Rana Foroohar, an economics editor at Time magazine. 

“There are two remarkable similarities in the eras that preceded these crises. Both saw a sharp increase in income inequality and household-debt-to-income ratios.” And in each case, “as the poor and middle-class were squeezed, they tried to cope by borrowing to maintain their standard of living.”

But the rich “got richer, by lending, and looked for more places to invest, bidding up securities that eventually exploded in everyone’s face. In both eras, financial deregulation and loose monetary policies played roles in creating the bubble. But inequality itself — and the political pressure not to reverse it, but to hide it — was a crucial factor in the meltdown. The shrinking middle isn’t a symptom of the downturn. It’s the source of it.” Today the consequences of the meltdown still haunt us — there’s more to come.

The next bubble

There’s a new bubble blowing. No one can stop it ... soon it will explode.

Get it? There’s enormous “political pressure not to reverse” inequality till it “explodes in our faces.” We deny the inequality between rich and the other 99%. The rich are addicts. More is never enough. They thrive on greed, blind to the needs of others. Worse, they have no commitment to America as a nation. From Forbes billionaires and signers of “no new taxes” pledges, to Mitch McConnell’s un-American willingness to sabotage the economy to deliver on his main promise to make Obama a one-term president.

WASHINGTON -- Last week, two 17 year olds were critically injured in Oklahoma when they were pulled into a grain augur while on the job. Responders had to cut the augur to free the boys, who were flown to a hospital with severe leg injuries.

Yet the White House continues to sit on new child labor rules proposed last year by the Department of Labor that some safety advocates say could have prevented that accident.

Here's the dilemma we face as progressives and as a country. The Republicans have been captured by the far right. Ordinarily, that would be good news for Democrats. The Republicans may well nominate someone too crazy for most Americans to vote for. There is also the beginning of a serious backlash against the Tea Party among the general electorate (though not among the Republican base).

Through the smog of rhetoric and demagoguery, more and more Americans are coming to correctly blame Republicans for the obstructionism on the budget agreement that helped trigger panic in financial markets. With so many far-right Republicans having picked up House seats in the 2010 midterm, the election of 2012 could be a good year for a Democratic comeback.

Good news, right?

The only problem is that we have our own albatross in the White House. Barack Obama is not likely to have coattails. And his own strategy for dealing with prolonged stagnation neither motivates voters nor fixes what ails the economy. Oh, and it divides his own party. Talk to elected Democrats on the subject of Obama off the record, and you get unprintable rage.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is expecting an earful from regular folks, including supporters, over their frustrations with Congress and some of Obama's decisions when he sets out on a three-day, campaign-style bus tour of Midwestern states next week.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that people of all political persuasions will see Obama in their towns in Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, and will use the occasion of the presidential visit to take their concerns straight to the top.

Hey, kids, remember a few days ago, when Politico ran a statement from a "senior Obama adviser" saying, "There's a weirdness factor with Romney, and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public?" And also the word "weird" was used by "Obama's advisers in about a dozen interviews" in reference to Romney? Which made it pretty clear that the Obama re-election strategy against Mitt Romney was just to straight up call him a weirdo all the time? Well, all of that is now null and void, as David Axelrod made clear on Morning Joe today that anyone using the word "weird" would be fired from the campaign.

The word "weird" gets you fired? That's extraordinary.

During World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt was commander-in-chief, I observed the president quite closely. I once joined him and Admiral William Leahy (first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) for lunch at his desk in the Oval Office. Just before I left for boarding school, I had lunch on the lawn beside the West Wing with my grandfather's running mate in the 1944 presidential election, the senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman--just the three of us. Over chicken sandwiches my grandfather reviewed the war's progress and his problems with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in planning for the post-war era. But the conversations at cocktail hour and supper gave me a real sense of how Roosevelt personally exercised his responsibilities as commander-in-chief of our armed forces.

An appeals court has ruled the individual mandate to purchase health insurance included in President Barack Obama's health care reform law unconstitutional, Reuters reports.

NEW YORK -- When Cornel West recently spoke to The Huffington Post about media coverage of African American issues, the Princeton professor argued that President Obama is avoiding journalists who’ve offered tough critiques of his administration, such as PBS host Tavis Smiley. "Obama won’t touch him with a 10-foot pole," West said.

On Wednesday, Smiley backed up West's viewpoint during a C-SPAN sit-down with him to discuss their 16-city poverty tour.

There will be no magic potion, no instant formula for Democrats and progressives struggling to come back from their disastrous 2010 election losses.

They had hoped that Tuesday’s recall elections in Wisconsin would provide a narrative-changing breakthrough, proof-positive that the overreaching conservatives who now dominate the Republican Party had ignited a middle-of-the-road voter rebellion and inspired a legion of labor and liberal activists who would offer a definitive riposte to the tea party.

What happened instead was not without promise for Democrats, but it was also a sign of the resiliency of conservative activism—and the power of conservative money.

The whole thing is nuts. The economy is a shambles, saved from a free fall only by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented promise of free money for banks for at least two years. That’s how long a seven-member majority of the Fed’s Open Market Committee expects it to take for significant relief to take hold for the 25 million Americans who can’t find full-time employment.

As Maureen Dowd just put it in her Sunday column, the debt ceiling audience has staggered away from a "slasher flick still shuddering... The gory, Gothic melodrama on the Potomac is a summer horror blockbuster -- without the catharsis." The shuddering had to come from the audience facing what psychologists would call their shadow side -- the worst, most atavistic part of our nature that we have avoided facing until now.

In this case, it is the rise of the job killers -- no-compromise Republicans who would rather sink the economy that raise revenues to pay down the debt. They are being led by the Tea Partiers, a mix of racists, misogynists, birthers -- mostly white and less educated -- who want to take back America at least a century.

President Obama is a strange man whose sincere desire to restore cooperation and civility to government is admirable, but for nearly three years has been unreciprocated. Despite that, he seems unwilling to be president. What a contrast he makes to George W. Bush, in his boots and with his swagger—the Decider who promised “to create chaos, to create a vacuum” in every corner of the world if that were necessary to save America from the mortal threat he saw everywhere, and ruthlessly started out keeping that promise. He left Obama with the wreckage.

As Democratic disgust with Obama’s debt fumbling spreads, Clinton supporters recall her '3 a.m. phone call' warnings—and angry, frustrated liberals are muttering that she should mount a 2012 challenge.

Of all the ways President Barack Obama tried to rationalize his surrender to the Republicans, none was more infuriating than when he said the deficit deal would lead to the “lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.”

Since Eisenhower was president? That was half a century ago—before the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and federal aid to education, including Head Start.

“These programs defined America as a decent, yes, a Great Society,” Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Monday during the debate on the so-called compromise debt settlement. What President Obama supported, he said, was “tantamount to repeal of the Great Society.”

Barack Obama is a lot of things—eloquent, dissembling, conniving, intelligent and above all, calm. But one thing he is not is weak.

This basic truth is belied by the meager Obama criticism you occasionally hear from liberal pundits and activists. They usually stipulate that the president genuinely wants to enact the progressive agenda he campaigned on, but they gently reprimand him for failing to muster the necessary personal mettle to achieve that goal. In this mythology, he is “President Pushover,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently labeled him.

This storyline is a logical fallacy.

This article takes a bit of a turn that you might not fully expect from the above excerpt. David Sirota makes the case that Obama is not only far more conservative than many Progressives expected him to be, but that he has also been extremely effective in getting the outcomes he wants. The fact that Obama appears to be caving in to the Republicans at every turn is just political theater.

Now that the debate over raising the nation's debt ceiling has been temporarily resolved, the White House has pledged, once again, to "pivot" to jobs.

If the promise is giving you a sense of déjà vu, you're not alone.

After Democrats railed against letting energy companies keep their tax breaks in the debt deal, the Obama administration handed out more than $12 million for research to help oil and gas drilling.

The die has been cast. Obama’s “nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists,” as an editorial in the normally sedate New York Times described the deal to raise the debt ceiling, is a disaster in the making. It rules out a vigorous government response to the persistent economic stagnation in which joblessness, housing foreclosures and an ever-widening gap between the top 2 percent and the rest of Americans have become the norm.

But to use the word “capitulation” is too kind, since this president, as was Bill Clinton before him, is clearly one of those “New Democrats” who welcomes the opportunity to jettison the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as outmoded political baggage. Otherwise, why would Obama have reached for a “grand bargain” in which he even put Social Security and Medicare cuts on the table before the Republicans rolled him?

President Barack Obama touted his debt ceiling deal Tuesday, saying, “We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession.” Yet that is what he and his coterie of Wall Street advisers have done.

In the affairs of nations, Alexander Hamilton wrote in January 1790, “loans in times of public danger, especially from foreign war, are found an indispensable resource.” It was his first report as secretary of the treasury to the new Congress of the United States. The country had borrowed to fight the Revolutionary War, and Hamilton proposed a system of public debt to pay those loans.

The history of the U.S. national debt is inexorably tied to its many wars.

foreigners hold of the United States. This was displayed during the ignorant and solipsistic debate over when or whether the United States will pay its debts, which concluded Tuesday with a promise that it will soon be renewed. The debate was conducted as if foreign lenders had no role in the affair, and as if “the full faith and credit” of the United States were not a guarantee freely offered to those who in the past chose to purchase American bonds and other obligations.

The belief held by members of the House of Representatives and the Senate that the U.S. is the greatest country in history is good enough for them, and in their view ought to be good enough for everyone else.

The bombshell dropped alongside the debt limit deal yesterday, aside from Gabrielle Giffords’ return to Congress, was Joe Biden telling a group of House Democrats that the President was prepared to “invoke the 14th Amendment” in the event of the debt limit failing to pass. I’m not sure entirely what he means by that, but there are enormous implications.

The President said all along that the only way to raise the debt limit was to raise the debt limit through legislative action. He was unmoved by the claims that it could be raised through other means. Now we hear through Biden that, as a fail-safe, there was a way for Obama to use his power as chief executive to avoid a default.

Given that information, 95 House Democrats went along with the sugar-coated Satan sandwich anyway.

WASHINGTON -- The proposed so-called "super Congress," created by congressional leaders in the debt deal and required to find $1.5 trillion in debt reduction over the next ten years, could wind up making those decisions behind closed doors, away from the public eye.

The text of the budget deal reached by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders contains few specific public disclosure provisions for the committee. The standing committees of Congress are allowed to send suggestions for ways to reduce the debt to the super committee members, but there is, as yet, no provision for the disclosure of those reports. The final report is required to be publicly disclosed upon completion, however there is no requirement that the report be placed online. There are also no official requirements for web-casting of committee meetings.

WASHINGTON -– The White House has one important tool in its arsenal to influence congressional talks over further deficit reduction measures in the coming months: the expiry of Bush-era tax cuts at the end of 2012.

After President Barack Obama presented the outlines of a deficit-cutting deal on Sunday, White House officials stressed that he would veto any attempt to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans beyond next year unless other measures to reform the U.S. tax code were agreed.

It’s hard to overstate the extent of the president’s capitulation to the right. Conservatism will be the driving force in U.S. politics for years to come, argues Michael Tomasky.

Back when George W. Bush and Karl Rove were wrecking the country, my liberal friends and I had many a hearty laugh about Rove’s boast that he was realigning American politics. Yep, we thought, but toward the left! Those hopes seemed vindicated when Barack Obama won the presidency. But just as Bush and Rove helped revive liberalism, it now seems plausible that Obama is ushering in a conservative era. The former did it through rank incompetence, while the latter is simply handing the Republicans the keys to the house and saying “take what you want.”

The most distressing outcome of the deficit hysteria gripping Washington may be what Barack Obama has revealed about himself. It was disconcerting to watch the president slip-slide so easily into voicing the fallacious economic arguments of the right. It was shocking when he betrayed core principles of the Democratic Party, portraying himself as high-minded and brave because he defied his loyal constituents. Supporters may hope this rightward shift was only a matter of political tactics, but I think Obama has at last revealed his sincere convictions. If he wins a second term, he will be free to strike a truly rotten “grand bargain” with Republicans—“pragmatic” compromises that will destroy the crown jewels of democratic reform.

President Barack Obama loves to quote the lyrical closing lines of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, calling on “the better angels of our nature” to overcome partisan hatreds and political divisions. Obama cited those words in his own inaugural proclamation and rested his hand on Lincoln’s Bible when he took the oath of office. He has come back to those angels again and again ever since. A search of Google and the White House Web site turns up half a dozen examples. He used the phrase to eulogize Ted Kennedy, to chide a would-be Quran burner in Florida, and to say goodbye to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Obama, it seems, sees better angels just about everywhere. Even as he traveled in India this week he talked about his efforts to live up to the example of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and, yes, Abraham Lincoln.

But in light of today’s real-world politics, Obama should think a little harder about the context in which Lincoln summoned those better angels on March 4, 1861.

At this desperate hour, Barack Obama surely has to be thinking hard about invoking Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, and getting on with it. With the House Republicans now rejecting a proposal (Harry Reid’s) that is 100 percent cuts and no revenues, there can be little question in the minds of most non-Kool-Aid-swilling Americans about the identity of the unreasonable party. Indeed it could be argued that acting unilaterally now is the only responsible move. Bill Clinton, well-versed in dealing with Republican implacability, told Joe Conason’s National Memo that he would pursue this course. And yet one senses the president is highly reluctant to do it. Why?

 

Three explanations strike me as plausible, although none of them is particularly defensible at this point,

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The first reason would be the straightforward and obvious one that he and his handlers fear the political repercussions. Some Republicans, and certainly the right-wing noise machine, will crow for impeachment. Obama and his White House are not exactly a group that itches for a fight.
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The second reason Obama probably won’t act alone has more to do with his political philosophy. He apparently really believes—still!—in civic-republican notions of government as an arena for reasoned deliberation. That he could still think this is akin to a child believing in Santa Claus until he’s 15—but apparently he does.
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The third reason the president probably won’t do it is related to the second, but it’s more personal. Unilateral action would be at odds with Obama’s image of himself. In his article, MacGillis defined thoughtfulness Obama style as “the notion that the leadership of the country should be entrusted not on the basis of résumé and platform, but on the prospect of applying to the nation's problems one man's singularly well-tempered intelligence.” This is pretty obviously a dead-on description of Obama’s view of himself and his potential as president.

for those who missed the first time I linked to it, here’s Bruce Bartlett — an economic adviser to Ronald Reagan — explaining why Obama is indeed a moderate conservative in practical terms.

I await the frothing-at-the-mouth comments.

here is no question that Barack Obama is one of our most enigmatic presidents. Despite having published two volumes of memoirs before being elected president, we really don’t know that much about what makes him tick. The ongoing debate over the deficit and the debt limit is clarifying what I think he is: a Democratic Richard Nixon.

To explain what I mean, I first have to tell some history.

This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns. What should have been an uneventful moment in which lawmakers make good on the nation’s contractual obligations has instead been seized upon by Republican hypocrites as a moment to settle ideological scores that have nothing to do with the debt.

Hypocrites, because their radical free market ideology, and the resulting total deregulation of the financial markets, is what caused the debt to spiral out of control this last decade. That and the wars George W. Bush launched but didn’t have the integrity to responsibly finance. The consequence was a banking bubble and crash leading to a 50 percent run-up of the debt that has nothing to do with the “entitlements” that those same Republicans have always wanted to destroy. 

Even Barack Obama has put cuts in those programs into play,

One of the gimmicks being discussed is for a "super-Congress" that would come back with a long-term deal for the actual Congress to vote up or down -- a kind of mutant hybrid of the Bowles-Simpson Commission and the Gang of Six, on steroids.

I don't trust that end-game, because it gives too much power to all the forces of austerity that have been too dominant in this debate all year. And it creates too much risk of Democrats being stampeded to give up too much on Social Security and Medicare and get too little in the way of tax hikes on the rich in return.

The New York Times had a very instructive chart today, by the indispensable Teresa Tritch, showing that most of the budget shortfall going into the financial crisis was the result of the Bush tax cuts and wars -- and that most of the rest of it since 2008 was the consequence of lost revenues from the recession itself. It had very little to do with public spending. This is the kind of detail that gets lost in the contrived hysteria.

My guess is that the Republicans are so intoxicated with their own negativity that they will not be able to get to yes, even though Obama keeps trying to give away the store. The House Republican Caucus, in thrall to the Tea Party, is just too locked in to the premise of no new revenues under any circumstances

So then we are left with the president's powers under the 14th Amendment, an approach that Obama seemed to rule out last week, but may need to come back to.

Most observers assume reason will eventually prevail in the debt debate. But Michael Tomasky asks if GOP rhetoric has made compromise unthinkable for the right.