The Most Important Jobs Report In Four Years

...and it may not actually matter one bit to voters in 2016.  Needless to say, it's a good report: October saw 161K new jobs and the unemployment rate down to 4.9%, but voters really don't seem to care at all about jobs (despite saying they do.)

U.S. jobs continued to gain at a steady pace in October and wage gains accelerated, signs that the labor market and economy made steady progress at the start of the fourth quarter. 

Payrolls climbed by 161,000 last month following a 191,000 gain in September that was larger than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 173,000. The jobless rate fell to 4.9 percent, while wages rose from a year earlier by the most since 2009.

The figures are likely to keep the Federal Reserve on track to raise borrowing costs next month for the first time in 2016. Underlying the steady gains in employment is a balance between hiring managers’ need to keep up with stable domestic demand and the struggle to match more limited labor to skilled-job vacancies. 

“As it continues to tighten up, firms are going to have to resort more and more to more attractive pay to draw people in,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in New York, said before the report. “We’re pretty close to full employment.” 

Workers have been in short supply for 13 straight months, according to the Institute for Supply Management survey of service-industry companies, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy. 

The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 173,000 advance in payrolls. Estimates in the Bloomberg survey ranged from gains of 105,000 to 208,000 after a previously reported 156,000 September increase. 

Revisions added a total of 44,000 jobs to payrolls in the previous two months.

So 205K total new jobs with the upward revisions, but we're still in real danger of giving the country away to a walking orange bankruptcy (both moral and financial) because Obama failed us with 80 straight months of job growth and Clinton's a real bitch or something.

God we're going to miss the man.

Last Call

About this time of silly season, we get the election predictions to be filed away in Future Stupidity.  First out of the gate this week is The Hill's A.B. Stoddard, penning President Obama's epitaph.

President Obama is losing. So says the latest Gallup poll, and so do those swelling numbers in key states like Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia and Ohio.

Democrats say wait, he won the second debate. They are holding their breath, hoping polls next week will show that this week's debate brought the herky-jerk of the campaign back full swing, with Obama back to his September lead in the swing states and poised to win. But with two weeks to go, a sudden surge in voter support for a president as unpopular as this one, in an economy this weak, is simply hard to believe. Conservatives like Karl Rove note that this late in October, no candidate with support higher than 50 percent (see Mitt Romney: Gallup) has ever gone on to lose.

Perhaps Obama lost the presidency weeks ago, on Oct. 3, when he sleepwalked and scribbled through the first debate and helped make Romney a new candidate overnight. It was Obama's night to finish Romney off; behind in the polls, even Romney likely woke up that morning thinking it was over. But Obama underestimated the task, the challenger and the electorate — all in 90 minutes. So a win this week was critical but perhaps not decisive. There is no obvious reason for Obama's performance to reverse the course of the campaign and blunt Romney now. And though there is one final debate next week, a back-and-forth on national security and foreign policy isn't likely to make the sale for anyone who still cannot make up his or her mind.

Doomed!  No reason Obama should be able to win!  Pack it up!  It's over!  Gallup, libtard morons!

Into the file you go then.  We'll see where we are on November 7.

At The Chart Of The Matter

Steve Benen kindly presents compelling evidence to squish "the stimulus failed, this President failed" nonsense on jobs and unemployment:

Despite last week's annual revisions, the same metrics still apply: when jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it's considered evidence of an improving jobs landscape, and when the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are actually being created rather quickly.

And with that, here's the chart -- which reflects the revised, seasonably-adjusted data -- showing weekly, initial unemployment claims going back to the beginning of 2007. (Remember, unlike the monthly jobs chart, a lower number is good news.) For context, I've added an arrow to show the point at which President Obama's Recovery Act began spending money.

Stimulus happens, unemployment claims go down, and they've been decreasing steadily now for 3 years.  The problem is it took Bush roughly one year to cause the damage, and the expectation that President Obama could fix it by any means in that short of a time frame was ridiculous.  But even by November 2010 things were remarkably better by comparison.  Would have been nice if he and the Democrats in Congress who passed the stimulus had gotten a little credit then from the voters.

Would be even better if the voters gave them credit this November, yes?

Last Call

Kevin Drum writes an article entitled "Barack Obama's Had a Pretty Damn Good Presidency" and then proceeds to trash him for about 75% of the article, without a trace of irony.

As long as we're piling on, I'd add a few other items to that list. First,Obama seems to despise the progressive base. He and his associates have made that clear over and over again.Second, he allowed Congress to take the lead on most of his domestic agenda. Whether this was smart or not doesn't really matter. What matters is that it makes him seem almost like an observer of events over the past three years, not a commander-in-chief. Third, from a progressive point of view, his record on national security is pretty bad. No, we're not torturing prisoners anymore, but the NSA surveillance program is still in place, American citizens are being targeted for assassination, the Afghanistan war has been escalated, drone attacks have skyrocketed, the state secrets privilege is still being used with abandon, Guantánamo is still open, and Patriot Act abuse seems to be as robust as ever.

He then lists things the President has actually accomplished...despite being arrogant and subservient at the same time while remaining worse than Bush.  Then he goes back to trashing him and concludes he took the best road available of a number of bad choices.

Now, it's true that any serious accounting also has to include Obama's domestic failures—most notably his feckless housing policy and his inability to pass cap-and-trade—but both of those were very heavy political lifts. (On cap-and-trade in particular, I think in retrospect that it was just flatly never going to happen no matter what Obama did.) There's also his weak record on judicial appointments. So could Obama have done better? Was there a more effective way to deal with an unprecedentedly obstructive Republican Party? On reflection, I doubt it. During Obama's first two years, Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for only 14 weeks. This means that Obama needed two or three Republican votes for every bill, and if he had taken the blustering, partisan attitude that a lot of liberals wanted, he never would had gotten them. Republican obstructionism would have been even more hardened than it was with his more conciliatory attitude. So as annoying as Obama's "most reasonable man in the room" act was to the progressive base, it was probably his best strategy.

Such praise worthy of the ancient deities of yore, a mighty and resounding "meh" echoes through the halls of history.  And Kevin here actually wonders why the President has such a hard time getting across his accomplishments to the American people.

I can't possibly wonder why that would be the case, nor who could possibly be responsible for such a state of affairs.  Sully was right when he said if a Republican POTUS had accomplished what President Obama had done, we'd be carving his likeness into Mount Rushmore.  And yet, we're doing everything we can to hand the country back over to the Banana Splits.

People keep tripping over themselves to come up with explanations as why to President's Obama's most famous first has nothing to do with any of this, of course.  Those excuses, and the constant dogpiling on the President, are both wearing very thin, and we're starting to run out of plausible explanations as to why the liberal media is so invested in the "Is this milk spoiled?  Taste this for me!" theory of the President's accomplishments.

The Short Answer Is No

TPM's Evan McMorris-Santoro asks:

Does Obama Have A Bill Maher Problem?

Yeah, see, I like Evan, I follow him on Twitter, I've cited his articles, but...this?  This is just silly.  To whit:

Faced with what appears to be a losing fight over Rush Limbaugh, Republicans are trying to turn the tables in the condemnation game by urging President Obama to repudiate comedian Bill Maher, who donated $1 million to Obama’s super PAC and has said some nasty things about Sarah Palin and other Republican women.

Republicans think they’re really on to something here. And some observers agree.

If Obama wants to have credibility on the Limbaugh attacks, says Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, president of the Women’s Campaign Fund and a former Democratic House candidate, he’s going to have to show he’ll step up to all sexism when he sees it, even the sexism that comes from huge donors.

“They’re absolutely identical,” Bennett said. “It’s completely unacceptable when Maher said sexist things about Bachmann and Palin. It’s completely unacceptable when Rush called Sandra Fluke a ‘slut.’”

“If you attack one woman, you attack all women, period,” she added. “If it goes uncalled against, we’re saying it’s OK. It’s not.”

This zero tolerance/false equivalence nonsense stuff is exactly how the right gets out of headlocks like this, and McMorris-Santoro goes right for it.  Siobhan Bennett is on FOX News all the time as the "official" voice of "liberals are the misogynists" anyway.  Of course BECAUSE BILL MAHER is going to be the new argument to allow Rush to continue to call women "sluts" and "whores" for the rest of his career.

There is such a thing as intent and amount.  Rush's attacks have been constant and consistent for 20 years now.  Maher has stuck his foot in his mouth of course and he should apologize, but equating the two is like taking a pitchfork to do something about the enemy battalion occupying your town and then being told your pitchfork usage makes you equally morally bankrupt.  Maher has not the political or financial power or the social outreach of Limbaugh.  Nor do Maher's crimes stack up to his either.

It's pointless, and the acceptance of the false equivalence that what Maher did and what Rush did are congruent is nonsense of the highest order.

Evan, you should know better.

Last Call

MoDo The Red is totally breaking up with her crazy, phantom idealistic mirage of what she wanted President Barack Obama to be, which is probably healthy for her in the long run.  But the breakup itself is anguished enough to almost qualify her for a sliver of empathy...almost.  She pulls out every straw man argument she can find and then sets it on fire as the rant (and ladies and gentlemen, this is a rant) consumes her remaining few scraps of humanity as it's ScheduleGate that finally snaps her mind.

NY Times editors should not let Maureen Dowd pen columns while this effing smashed.

Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech.

Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.

The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.

The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.

After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.

“The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”

The arc of justice is stuck at the top of a mountain. Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for. 

He never really loved you, Maureen.  He has an entire country to govern, and despite all the times you watched The Legend of Bagger Vance or The Wiz or hell, even Eddie Murphy in The Distiguished Gentleman,  the entry of Barack Obama to the Oval Office didn't grant magical powers to the office of President of the United States.

There are constraints of the system that President Obama has to operate under, and with the Republicans working as hard as possible to trap him within those constraints and the Village working as hard as possible to create new ones, it's an absolute goddamn miracle that he's managed to accomplish the things he has done.  It's akin to loading a metric ton of Lego bricks into a giant cannon and shooting them straight up into the air with Republicans swooping by on their brooms to melt the bricks with flamethrowers and the Village scatter them with tornado machines only to have the efforts to destroy them be precisely the thing needed to make them all land in a perfect scale replica of Albert Einstein's brain or something.

Then MoDo comes along and kicks the thing apart because she really wanted a model of Shakespeare's Globe theater.  Hence, the breakup as she screeches to declare the end of the Failed Obama Presidency because moving his speech was the Intolerable Mortal Sin of our age.

Jesus wept, we actually do deserve President Bachmann or Perry or Romney, just to finish the country off.  They'll find a way to blame that on Obama too.  "If only he hadn't made me stay home with the crushing ennui of moving his jobs speech to one day later, we'd still have an America..."  Oh, but MoDo is far, far from being alone, just ask Matt Stoller.

No one, not even the president's defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there's any way they can push him off the top of the ticket.

That these questions have not yet been asked in any serious way shows how weak the Democratic Party is as a political organization. Yet this political weakness is not inevitable, it can be changed through courage and collective action by a few party insiders smart and principled enough to understand the value of a public debate, and by activists who are courageous enough to face the real legacy of the Obama years.

Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. The 2010 wipeout was an electoral catastrophe so bad you'd have to go back to 1894 to find comparable losses. From 2008 to 2010, according to Gallup, the fastest growing demographic party label was former Democrat. Obama took over the party in 2008 with 36 percent of Americans considering themselves Democrats. Within just two years, that number had dropped to 31 percent, which tied a 22-year low.

It would be amusingly tragic if Kafka were sill around to write this play.  And we're about to get exactly what we deserve.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

You know, some folks are going to have to eat crow after last night, starting with Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit who went on a tear yesterday with a Moonie Times op-ed bashing Obama's "failed" presidency.  He couldn't have known about the operation to nail OBL.  Well in hindsight, here's your "Sunday Reflection", Instatwit:  If failed Obama the failing failure is a bigger failure than Jimmy Carter, then what does it say about the GOP when Obama continues to beat the entire Republican field for re-election in national polling?

President Obama has gotten no bounce from his reelection campaign announcement, with his job approval rating dropping by 7 percentage points since January, his personal popularity at a career low and 57 percent of Americans disapproving of his handling of the economy. Yet he leads the potential GOP field. 

Kinda rocky for the President, yes.  But it's still worse for the entire Republican primary mess...a field that last I checked was still being led itself by one Donald Trump...and is still losing to Mister "the tendency of everything he touches to turn to crap" as you call him.


And this was all before the news that we zapped Bin Laden.  Crow.  It's what's for dinner, Glenn.  Eat up.

And speaking of the reactions of the right, as PoliticsUSA reports, out of the GOP field only Pawlenty even mentioned President Obama in their reactions to the news...and that was after crediting President Bush first.  Expect the next several days of winger spew to involve either A) "OBL's death doesn't end the terror threat to our nation" or B) "Let's thank President Bush for keeping his promise to bring him in dead or alive!"

Credit Obama?  Won't happen.  Not from the people running for his job.  Other Republicans will...but not anyone running for the GOP's 2012 nomination.  They know that will come back to haunt them in the GOP primaries.  And to them, politics are more important that national unity right now.  They're chasing the birther vote, after all.

Oh, and this.

Exciting New Horizons In Obama Derangement Syndrome

Forget the Village conventional wisdom that the GOP will retake Congress, the stakes are now much higher as Politico's Roger Simon puts his chips on the board.  The notion that Obama won't make it through even his first term has gone from wingnut fantasy to Village conventional wisdom, and the Village always has a stake and seeing its predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies.  Obama's job as President apparently is to manage the polls, and Roger Simon's admission as much is as devastating a damnation of our failed media as it is breathtakingly cynical as he tries to snark his way through what the Village is thinking with such obvious winger fodder as to descend into self-parody:

Honest to goodness, the man just does not get it. He might be forced to pull a Palin and resign before his first term is over. He could go off and write his memoirs and build his presidential library. (Both would be half-size, of course.)

I am not saying Obama is not smart; he is as smart as a whip. I am just saying he does not understand what savvy first-term presidents need to understand:

You have to stay on message, follow the polls, listen to your advisers (who are writing the message and taking the polls) and realize that when it comes to doing what is right versus doing what is expedient, you do what is expedient so that you can get reelected and do what is right in the second term. If at all possible. And it will help your legacy. And not endanger the election of others in your party. And not hurt the brand. Or upset people too much.

Like I was saying earlier, don't rock the boat, don't borrow trouble...

You could not put the conventional wisdom more clearly: It is far better for a president to do nothing than to choose a side. Even if the side he chooses is the right one from an ethical or moral perspective, it is a “blunder” politically because inevitably it will upset some people.

The problem for Obama is that he appears to have taken seriously all the “change” stuff he promised during his campaign. And he has been unable to make the transition from candidate to president.

A candidate says, as Bobby Kennedy did, “Some men look at things the way they are and ask why? I dream of things that are not and ask why not?”

A president says: “What do the polls say?”

A recent CNN poll found that 68 percent of Americans do not want a mosque built close to ground zero. Which should mean: End of story. That’s all she wrote. Let’s move on to the next crisis.

I don't know where to begin.  Stay at the back of the bus.  Don't eat at the front of the lunch counter.  Don't drink from the wrong water fountain.  Don't build Cordoba House too close to ground zero.

But the best part is that Simon tries to cover up what he believes on the second page by going "Just kidding!"

Which may be true. You can go back to the mid-1800s and find a lot of legislators saying that Abraham Lincoln should stop lecturing people about ending slavery and listen to them about keeping it.

And there were plenty of lawmakers who said President Dwight D. Eisenhower was “disconnected from the mainstream of America” when he ordered the 101st Airborne Division to go down to Little Rock, Ark., to make sure some black kids could go to school with white kids.

Both decisions may have been “off-message,” which is about the worst sin you can commit in Washington. But what’s so wrong about being off-message if you are right about the issue?

See, ol' Roger is just reminding us that other Presidents have paid a political price for doing the right thing too.  Frankly, given the speed the Wingers are jumping on this one the nuances of Roger's sarcasm are missed...but the fact remains Simon is oblivious to the fact he's part of the problem here, not the solution.

Hey look, Simon calls the outfit "Politico" not "Do The Right Thing".  He's just being honest, getting re-elected is always the most important thing and he feels Obama is violating this principle to the point where he may have to resign before his first term is up.  That really is how America's political system works, and while Simon mocks it, he's not exactly doing anything to correct the misconceptions laid out in his own online political site.  He's trying to have it both ways, posting a piece of avowed Obama-bashing Drudge bait in order to get eyeballs when he's really going "Haha, I'm just pulling your leg you wacky wingnut guys you!" and maintaining his centrist cred, knowing full well why and how he's doing it by playing the exact political media game he purports to bemoan.

This is your reward in 2010 for taking any sort of principled stand.  Bigots get political power in America.  Those who rock the boat?  Well...not so much.  Guys like Roger Simon see to that.  The Colbert Report this ain't, but depressing reality.

And now the floodgates have opened where Democrats are now taking Simon's advice, offered "in jest", at face value.

We deserve what the GOP will do to us over the next few years.  We really do.

Exciting New Horizons In Obama Derangement Syndrome

The reality:  Obama's not doing so bad.

Still, Obama's approval rating is a bit higher [47%] than the 44 percent approval Clinton scored in August of 1994 and it's also higher than the 42 percent Ronald Reagan got in August, 1982 and the 42 percent George W. Bush got in August, 2006.

The spin: The Obama presidency is effectively over.

There are an array of reasons behind the stunning decline and political fall of President Obama, chief among them fears over the current state of the US economy, with widespread concern over high levels of unemployment, the unstable housing market, and above all the towering budget deficit. Americans are increasingly rejecting President Obama’s big government solutions to America’s economic woes, which many fear will lead to the United States sharing the same fate as Greece.

They're already referring to him as irrelevant and in the past tense with the postmortems and epitaphs after just 19 months.  Obama Derangement Syndrome:  Catch it!

Obama's "Engine, Engine? Number, Nine" Problem

Hey President Obama?  America wants jobs, please.  Obama wants an economic engine but all he's got is that 9% plus unemployment number.

A majority of Americans believes President Barack Obama has neglected job creation and economic fears are weighing heavily on Democrats ahead of November 2 elections, a Reuters-Ipsos poll found on Tuesday.

Sixty-seven percent of voters said Obama has not focused enough on creating jobs, with the economy seen as the country's main problem.

Almost half those polled said they were unhappy with Obama's handling of the economy as unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent. Satisfaction with Obama's performance on the economy dropped steadily from earlier Ipsos polls.

Forty-six percent of registered voters said they would vote Republican at the November congressional elections, as opposed to 44 percent who said they would back Democrats.

Count me along with that 67%.  With the White House predicting 9%+ unemployment into 2012, there's a hell of a lot Obama could be doing right now with the power of the Executive and the Labor Department right now, but he's not.  Moreover, the White House seems resigned to that 9%+ number for another two years easy.

Even worse, he's listening to the anti-stimulus people that the best way out of this mess is to basically have ten million more unemployed than jobs available for another 24 months because...it'll be good for us or something.  After all there are ten million invisible jobs out there, but people are too lazy to get them.  Yeah, that's it.

And yet, the White House is wondering why the President and the Democrats are getting pummeled in the polls.

Irony, Thy Name Is The Village

Politico's John Harris and Jim VandeHai sum up everything that's wrong with the Village in one easy article.

The imminent passage of financial reform, just a couple months after the passage of comprehensive health care, should decisively end the narrative that President Obama represents a Jimmy Carter-style case of naïve hope crushed by the inability to master Washington.

Yet the mystery remains: Having moved swiftly toward achieving the very policy objectives he promised voters as a candidate, Obama is still widely perceived as flirting with a failed presidency.

To recap, the Village's favorite new media politics spot is lamenting how the Obama administration is perceived as a failure by listing all the Villagers who perceive the Obama administration as a failure and giving a public forum to the notion that...the Obama administration is a failure.  All without a shred of self-awareness.  They continue:

The reality is the opposite. You can argue over whether Obama’s achievements are good or bad on the merits. But especially after Thursday’s vote you can’t argue that Obama is not getting things done. To the contrary, he has, as promised, covered the uninsured, tightened regulations, started to wind down the war in Iraq and shifted focus and resources to Afghanistan, injected more competition into the education system and edged closer to a big energy bill.

The problem is that he and his West Wing turn out to be not especially good at politics, or communications — in other words, largely ineffective at the very things on which their campaign reputation was built. And the promises he made in two years of campaigning turn out to be much less appealing as actual policies. 

The Already Failed Obama Presidency as Village tautology, ladies and gentlemen.  When I complain about the Obama messaging shop losing the battle, it's because stuff like this is being said every day and the Village is getting away with it.  "Sure, Obama's done all this stuff and shown he can master the art of getting things done in Washington.  But he's a complete failure!"

What liberal media?

Great Idea, They'll Hate It

Kevin Drum comes up with a very good solution to our stimulus impasse.

Actually, I think there's an easy solution to this quite aside from automatic stabilizers like extended unemployment insurance, which will automatically come down as the recession eases. And that solution is: a temporary payroll tax holiday paid out of the general fund. At this point, if we're going to pass a second stimulus I think it needs to be something that takes effect quickly, and a payroll tax holiday is about the fastest possible stimulus you could ask for. What's more, it's pretty effective, since the benefits primarily go to middle and working class families, who are more likely to spend it than rich families. And making it credibly temporary isn't hard either. Just set it on autopilot with a gradual phaseout: maybe a full holiday for two quarters, followed by a 75% holiday, a 50% holiday, and finally a 25% holiday. Or something like that. That would be easy to stick to and would avoid the problem of withdrawing all the stimulus at once just as the economy was starting to seriously pick up steam.

Would Republicans agree to this? Probably not. But some of them might, and public opinion would probably be pretty favorable even among the tea partiers, who prefer tax cuts to deficit reduction by a margin of 49%-42%.

Republicans would "probably not" agree to this, he says.  That is so terribly precious.

Hey K-Drum, bro?  What part of "Republicans will never, never, never agree to anything that will help the economy and allow President Obama to take credit for passing something usefully bipartisan before the midterm elections" do you not get?

Now January rolls around, I guarantee you a payroll tax holiday is the first damn idea you'll see out of the GOP, but if Obama and the Democrats suggest it, the Republicans will filibuster the hell out of it.

Low Nooners

Nooners hits a new Village Obama Derangement Syndrome low, and that's really saying something.

I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another. 

This goes on for another 1000 words or so, how Obama is just the worst, most incompetent, most aloof, most detached, most wrong President of wrongess that wrongosity has ever spawned in the history of wrongkind, and all of this is just so blindingly obvious after just 18 months that Nooners is just in shock, you see.

Your liberal media is in the tank for Obama, right?  She just completely blows a gasket here and goes full firebagger in the end, declaring the Obama presidency over, and every just really HATES HATES HATES the guy, right?  Best part:

But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We're in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they'll probably get the big California earthquake. And they'll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.  

Damn that government for not stopping earthquakes and oil spills and stuff!  Because the frre market can fix it, right?

I salute you madam.  This column will go down in infamy.  Sully finishes her off:

The premise of Noonan's moronic column is that the federal government, especially the president, should be capable of ending an oil-pipe rupture owned and operated by private companies, using technology that only deep-sea oil companies deploy or understand. And if such a technical issue is not resolved by government immediately, it reveals paralyzing presidential weakness and the failure of an entire branch of political philosophy. Again: seriously? It's Obama's fault that under Bush and Cheney, government regulation of oil exploration was so poor and corrupt, corner cutting appears to have been routine? And this, Peggy, is what governments do, even when run by crazy-ass liberals. Governments do not dig for oil; they merely regulate those who dig for oil. That the government failed to do so under the previous administration does not seem to me to be proof that this administration has failed. 

Too true.  This is Village Idiocy, even for the Village Idiots.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

The phrase "Obama's Katrina" has been thrown around a lot prior to this point, irresponsibly.

The government response to Lake Palin however being this President's Hurricane Katrina moment is absolutely incorrect.  Obama has the opportunity to prove that government can be the solution when it is needed to be the solution.  Steve Benen:

In 2005, Bush failed to take seriously warnings of an imminent natural disaster, and was slow to act after the devastation had begun. The storm killed more 1,500, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and destroyed much of an American coastline.

In 2010, BP was responsible for a disaster that wasn't natural at all. The company didn't warn government officials of an imminent threat; it did the opposite, assuring agencies that this was a manageable problem that BP was equipped to deal with.

Nevertheless, within one day of the explosion at the rig, the Obama administration had dispatched officials and the Coast Guard to the scene. When the problem became more acute, the president dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to the area to help oversee efforts with federal, state, and local officials. President Obama will himself visit the coast tomorrow.

Everything that can be expected of government officials is being done. Media Matters published a timeline of events, and if there's evidence of the administration taking a misstep, it's hiding well.

The magnitude of this disaster is proof that government is sometimes necessary to help.  This is one of those seminal moments when only government can step in and mobilize resources.  And Obama has done so.  Sunday's visit is going to be vitally important, and you're going to see the difference between a Democratic administration and a Republican one.

Obama's got this.

Priced In

Dow's gone up 3,000 points or so since Obama took office.

Of course, it has nothing to do with Obama, it's just the market pricing in a GOP landslide in 2010.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was dissolving Parliament and set a May 6 date for national elections. How does this news translate for the U.S.? Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James, shared his views.

“The upcoming mid-term elections in November is going to be an agenda changer if the liberals continue to focus on cap-and-trade and other programs," Saut told CNBC.

"This can put a headwind in the face of the market." 

Saut said programs such as cap-and-trade are job-killing initiatives. 

“If you get a conservative backlash, you can get an extension of the rally,” he said. 

Yep, the last 15 months in the stock market?  Nothing but the market prescience predicting Republican rule forever and ever starting in November.  Obama's economic legislation?  What did that have to do with anything?  Gosh.

It's not like he's President or anything.  Didn't you know we're a center-right country even when 59% of Congress is Democratic?

Don't You Believe It

Steve M. reminds us that the Teabaggers are the GOP, and that the GOP are the Teabaggers.  There's no separating them in 2010, and that means the country club Taxen Cuten Uber Alles crew and the socially responsible What Would Jesus Do? evangelicals are singing from the same hymnal:  if you would turn your pages to "Destroy Obama By Any Means Necessary" we will begin our service...

But many of the best-known supporters of the tea party movement -- Palin, Bachmann, Gingrich -- are also God-botherers. (Yes, Gingrich -- if that surprises you, you may want to get up to speed.) And while tea party lobbyist Dick Armey has expressed disdain for evangelicals, his group Freedomworks did join with the Family Research Council and other religious right groups for a webcast in response to this year's State of the Union address.

Yes, teabaggers are going to try to keep secular issues in the forefront, in the hope of attracting members outside the Bible Belt who aren't with the religious right program. And there is some tension in the rank and file -- Jonathan Raban attended the recent tea party convention in Nashville and noted (in an article for The New York Review of Books) that some attendees were made uncomfortable by the religiosity of the gathering (and the absence of alcohol at meals):

That evening, our prayer was led by Laurie Cardoza-Moore, the founder and president of a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. We were asked to join hands with our neighbors while Moore delivered a long, impassioned appeal to God, imploring Him to compel the United States to show unwavering loyalty and devotion to the State of Israel. I felt an increasingly steady pressure on my right hand from the woman holding it, as she sang out her "A-mens!"; but my left hand, lightly held by my new partner in skepticism, registered a quick double-blip from her forefinger and thumb that unambiguously said, "Uh-oh."

As we sat down to our steak-and-jumbo-shrimp dinner, my neighbor said, sotto voce, for my ears only, "You know, I phoned my husband last night. I told him that being here has made me realize that I am a liberal conservative."

But the mere fact that there was this religiosity tells you that, once the dust settles and we have dozens of new teabag-friendly members of Congress, they could be a hell of a lot more Christian-rightist than the secular rhetoric of the movement would lead us to expect.

Raban notes that even Joseph Farah's birther speech at the convention was religion-drenched:

He took us on a quasi-scholarly tour of the first chapter of Saint Matthew's gospel, where Christ's genealogy is traced from the patriarch, Abraham, down through many generations to "Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ," then invited us to compare Jesus' unassailable ancestry with Obama's dubious family tree.

Maybe the emergence of excessive religiosity is going to lead to schisms in the movement -- but my hunch is that that won't happen until after the 2010 elections, because there's too much shared rage and the Christian rightists are keeping their issues mostly on the back burner. After their likely big victories? At that point I think the religious rightists are going to step to the fore and push their agenda in Congress. Secular teabaggers will express disillusionment. But by then it'll be too late.

The only religion these guys believe in is "We should be in charge, and by God we will be."   The secular stuff is a puppet show designed to attract the Paulites.  When the only thing you have in common is Obama Derangement Syndrome, you can't expect them to stay friends for too much longer, and Steve's right, they won't.

But you'd better believe once 2011 rolls around, campaign promises will be broken a plenty.  The Birchers, the Birthers, the Paulites, the Club For Growth crowd, the Country Clubbers and the tinfoil hats...they aren't going to make it once the Village declares the Obama presidency to be over in January (no matter what actually happens.)  And from the ashes, the Christian Dominionists will be the boys to beat.

Nostalgia For The Bad Old Days

Over at the NY Times, Stanley Fish asks if you miss George W. Bush yet.

Well it’s a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush’s rehabilitation are beginning to pop up. One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota. Occupying the right side (from the viewer’s viewpoint) is a picture of Bush smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture. Occupying the left side is a simple and direct question: “Miss me yet?” The image is all over the Internet, hundreds of millions of hits, and unscientific Web-based polls indicate that more do miss him than don’t.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Mark Halperin is a gigantic, turgid douchebag.  His opener in his Time article this week:

Who would have thought that one of Barack Obama's biggest missteps as President would be repeating some of the bad habits of George W. Bush? No single factor was more instrumental in Obama's 2008 victory than his pledge to completely reverse the nation's course once in the White House. Instead, over the past year, Obama has mimicked some of Bush's most egregious blunders, leading to much of the political predicament in which the present decider finds himself today.

Just...God.  I don't have the strength to slog through this idiocy either.  After one year, one lousy year, Halperin's already throwing out the worse than Bush card.  Obama has problems, but the ones that Halperin names are so...not...the actual problems...that it makes me want to just scream. 

Sully's right.  Halperin's article is 100% bullshit Village hackery.  He really is consistently the worst actual journalist in the Village, outside of the occasional Chuck Todd nadir.

Last Call

Nate Silver has this chart:



Obama's managed to get a hell of a lot done without FDR's or LBJ's larger majorities in the House and Senate.  FDR had, at one point, 80% of the votes in the House and Senate.

That's unimaginable today.  And yet, Obama's considered a "failure".

Last Call

Time to make the final rounds tonight.  Matt Osborne has a good recap of CPAC:

In a room sponsored by John Birchers and filled with a high concentration of Ayn Randists, Beck called the progressive movement “designed to eat the Constitution.”

Teddy Roosevelt, who tripled the size of the US Navy in a successful bid for global economic empire, came in for special Beckian scorn once again as a “weird progressive.” The bizarre revisionism came within a veiled stab at John McCain.

Sweating from his chalkboard hustle, Beck opined 2010 would be “a very good year. But it is not enough just to not suck as much as the other side.”

A straw poll elected Ron Paul. The crowd booed.  There was shouting over a gay group’s presence.

“I have not heard people in the Republican Party admit yet that they have a problem,” Beck said at his crescendo before a rapt audience. “I haven’t seen the Come-To-Jesus moment from Republicans yet.”

Last year’s CPAC conference will be remembered for Rush Limbaugh rallying the right-wing media industry to create the teabag terror. CPAC 2010 has revealed the divides within the very inner bastion of right-wing politics: the teabagger fail is happening.

Indeed.  Obama Derangement Syndrome has done a pretty good job of uniting the GOP, but they clearly thought that Scott Brown should have caused the Dems to completely fold.

I really think it was question time that turned it around.  Obama knocked the GOP for a loop, and ever since then they've realized he hasn't been broken like they expected him to be.  That's got them scared.  Suddenly they are on the defensive, when Scott Brown had them all on the same page in the playbook.  Now they're looking for what to do next, and they're going on wildly divergent paths.  CPAC showed us that.

The Teabaggers want to lay into the President even harder.  Obama embarrassed them on national TV and they are pissed.  The old school neocons want the Teabaggers to back off and cool down long enough for the Dems to start making mistakes.  But the Teabaggers keep taking the bait.  They can't help themselves.  Obama is exploiting this weakness and he's doing it brilliantly.

We'll see what next week and the summit brings.  Supposedly Obama will be announcing his health care plan tomorrow and then posting the full plan online.  The plan apparently includes limiting rate increases on insurers as well.  This week will be pivotal.  The GOP is divided on how to proceed here, and that's finally given the Dems the chance to take control of the message and get back in the game.

And finally, finally, Obama is making the most of the opportunity.  It's the last one he has for health care reform and he knows it.