Our President's weekly address. On the budget, taking on critics proactively.


Ackerman: All Mixed Up Like Pasta Primavera

This is a fantastic story in both senses of the term: elegantly written and reported by the Washington Post's Anthony Shadid; and substantively a Good Thing. Shadid reports on the emerging political coalitions in Iraq that, for the first time since the invasion, cross sectarian lines. I like this anecdote between Sunni hardliner Saleh Mutlaq -- whom I once saw taking care of business in a Green Zone hotel two years ago -- and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who have been bitter sectarian and political rivals for three years:

Mutlak draws backing from among the still-numerous supporters of Hussein's Baath Party in Sunni regions, and he has long pushed for reconciliation with its members. Despite his reputation as a Shiite hard-liner when he came to power in 2006, Maliki echoed the call this month. In a speech, he urged Iraqis to reconcile with rank-and-file Baathists, those he described as "forced and obliged at one time to be on the side of the former regime."

He declared that it was time "to let go of what happened" in the past.

Mutlak said he told Maliki in a meeting two months ago that "there was a time when you stood against me on those issues. 'You should be happy I changed,' he told me." Smiling in the interview, Mutlak joked that first the prime minister "stole the government from us, and now he's trying to steal our political speech from us."

Read the whole piece for a flavor of the complex coalition forming that's taking place in Iraq. Much of it concerns alliances of convenience in the south, where Maliki will break bread with followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, despite their war last year. And much of these alliances are furtive and prone to collapse as the factions test each other. But that's what's so broadly significant. Since the occupation began, politics had been a subset of sectarian activities -- violent and otherwise. For that dynamic to erode is to mean Iraq has a chance at being a functional, healthy, successful state.

This is entertaining, but Shuster needs better arithmetic skills to demonstrate Bachmann's hackitude. In the second section she actually would have been correct-ish had she said "total" instead of "average." It's Shuster who needs a math lesson. Her total earmarks amounted to $3.7 mill, not her average earmark. The average earmark that he put up - $2.1 mill - was $330 mill/158 earmarks. Taking out Bachmann's $3.7 mill from the, and dividing the remaining total earmarked dollars by the number of remaining congresscritters, you get $46.6 mill per rep.




Benen on SANFORD'S EXPLANATION....

Twice South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) has asked the Obama administration to let him undermine the economic recovery efforts. And twice, OMB Director Peter Orszag has respectfully declined.

So, yesterday, Sanford announced that he will officially reject $700 million in federal stimulus money for his state, a decision that isn't going over well among struggling families in South Carolina.

Today, the governor has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, explaining the rationale for his decision. It's a reasonably detailed, 900-word piece, but this summary sentence gets at the root of Sanford's thinking.

In the end, I just don't believe a problem created by too much debt will be solved by piling on more debt. This doesn't strike me as an unreasonable or extremist position.

That's exactly the explanation I wanted to see, because it makes clear where Sanford is coming from. Why would he reject stimulus aid in the midst of a severe recession? Because the governor believes the current crisis was "created by too much debt." And if the crisis were created by too much debt, Sanford's response would be perfectly sensible.

The problem, of course, is that Sanford is completely wrong. His analysis is not even close to reality, and it's unsupported by any evidence at all. But it at least offers us some insight into why a governor would deliberately choose to undermine the interests of his constituents -- he starts with a lack of economic understanding, follows it up by misdiagnosing the problem, and then concludes by making a misguided decision based on foolish assumptions.

Good to know.