Shared resolve, common aspirations, common concern, common ground ... over and over throughout the address, he speaks to interdependence and facing the enormous challenges together. Whether one is religious or not, there's no escaping the fact that Obama has a master's touch at mining the rhythms and themes of the world's dominant religions to make his points about political and societal inclusion. The full text of the address can be found ... on the White House website.
Yglesias says: Let’s Call Pirates “Pirates”
Annie Lowery becomes the second person I’ve heard make the suggestion that we shouldn’t call the Somali pirates “pirates”
At one point, the pirates seemed a welcome distraction. Not so much any more — people are dying, Somalia is a failed state. Second, as others have suggested, we should stop calling them pirates and start calling them something like “maritime terrorists,” to end any remaining romanticization.
I don’t really understand the appeal of this suggestion. What the Somali pirates are doing—hijacking ships at sea through force and threats of force—is exactly what “pirate” and “piracy” have always referred to. “Terrorism” is a pretty different concept. If some Palestinians were to blow up an Israel-bound cruise ship, I would want to call those guys “maritime terrorists” which would denote an activity pretty different from simply robbing the cruise ship.
Insofar as people have overly romantic ideas about pirates, they ought to be disabused of those notions. I recommend Under the Black Flag as an interesting exploration of the fairly grubby reality of “classic” pirates along with the romance that nonetheless managed to attach itself to their exploits.
Daily Kos' DemfromCT's terrific - Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
Sunday punditry.
NY Times editorial: In case no one has noticed, Obama is better than Bush.
Not only are Mr. Obama’s words and tone better, his policies are better. He opposed the Iraq war and has begun planning an orderly withdrawal of American troops. He is trying to engage Iran after 30 years of mutual isolation. And he has promised an active effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reaffirmed support for a two-state solution — a goal that Israel’s newly elected prime minister says he does not share.
No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counternarrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can’t recognize that the world has changed or should change. Even at the cratered Citigroup, a technical analyst was moved to write a report last month urging his peers to stop living in “denial” and recognize that we are witnessing the end of “25 to 30 years worth of excess.” The “new normal” in lifestyle, wealth creation and profitability of companies, he wrote, “may be a shadow of the past.”
Maureen Dowd: Can we talk about gays? And that Iowa is cooler and more progressive than California?
Thomas Friedman: Costa Rica, baby. Learn to be like them (eco-energy friendly) before it's too late.
David Broder: Since data has shot to hell my ideas about bipartisanship and a George Bush resurgence, let me restate myself. It's all about independents and it behooves Obama to appear to be bipartisan because independents like it when he does. They just about outnumber Republicans, you know. And even though "these political independents are now as numerous as self-identified Republicans and are closing the gap on the Democrats" precisely because they are leaving the Republican party in droves, I'll say nary a word against Republicans. It all must be bad for Democrats. Somehow. Come back next week and I will have thought of why. (P.S. Apparently I have never heard of leaners.)
Pew:
R2K:
Pardon this parochial comment, but I’m especially proud that the University of Virginia does not award honorary degrees. Why? Because two centuries ago, our founder, Thomas Jefferson, perceived the unbecoming nature of such degrees, and he forbade them. This is yet another reason to celebrate the 266th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth this Monday, April 13.
Conservative critics used Obama's recent diplomatic trip to demonize the president. Unfortunately for them, their histrionics don't seem to be working...
More Republicans need to realize that point before they turn themselves into the big dog's political fire hydrant. If they don't, that's the very best they could hope for.
Last week, the White House named four progressive religious leaders mentioned in Jones' book -- a rabbi, a gay former Methodist minister, an Indian American Muslim and a progressive evangelical -- to Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The addition of these four literally gives a seat at the table to those whose views have been muted or simply overlooked by the mainstream media.
Note to Roger Pearson: By all means; bring it on.
Mr. Pearson, one of the rare Democrats to ever hold the position of Greenwich first selectman, has hinted that he might challenge U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd in a party primary election in 2010.
Pollster.com: The final word on polarization.
And sometimes the news is good
Benen: PUBLIC ENDORSES CHANGE IN CUBA POLICY....Lives will be saved by this decision. It's not often that I write about anything I can describe as unequivocally good news - hell, I don't think I've ever been able to do that. But make no mistake - lives will be saved by this decision.
Sometimes the news is, in fact, good.
The White House plans to "abandon longstanding restrictions on family travel and remittances to Cuba." It was the right position for Obama to take during the campaign, and it's encouraging to see him follow through.But will Americans perceive the change in U.S. policy as somehow "soft on communism"? Apparently not.
President Obama is getting ready to visit to the Summit of the Americas next week amid rising reports the administration is planning to announce new rules on family travel and remittances to Cuba. Do Americans back a plan to relax some of the current restrictions on that island nation?
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Friday suggests the answer is yes. Nearly two thirds think the United States should lift its ban on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba. And seven in ten think it's time to re-establish diplomatic relations with that country.
Support for the policy change has increased over the last three years.
On the Hill, Democrats support the change, and leading Republicans support the change. With the polls this one-sided, the administration should have the political support necessary to move away from the same ineffective policy both parties have embraced for far too long.
One can only support continued failure for so long before it gets ridiculous.
kos says Not good riddance
I'm not sure how a quote that discusses the reasons that newspapers are in danger of extinction somehow translates to "good riddance".
I'm not celebrating the demise of ink, I've just been pointing out that 1) the industry shot itself in the foot with a variety of stupid decisions, including the refusal to evolve with the times, and 2) that quality journalism is being conducted in alternate media, from television, to the internet, to advocacy groups, to even alt-print publications. There is nothing inherently valuable about newspapers. What's valuable is information, and it can be gathered by people -- both pros and amateurs -- across a variety of media platforms.
Pointing out the obvious isn't "celebrating". Sometimes, it's just really about pointing out the obvious.
- Speaking of the media ...
Benen: 'INNOCENCE' IS RELATIVE....
There are two key angles to keep in mind when it comes to former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens' (R) recent legal developments. One, the prosecutorial misconduct in Stevens' trial was egregious and unacceptable, and the Justice Department was right to dismiss the charges. Two, the prosecutors' wrongdoing doesn't change the fact that Stevens still appears to be very, very guilty.
There's been a bizarre push of late -- in Republican circles and among political reporters -- that Stevens has somehow been exonerated. In one particularly egregious example, MSNBC's Chris Matthews concluded, "[T]he charges should never have been brought, there should never have been a prosecution."
That's nonsense. To its credit, the New York Times does a nice job today pushing back against the notion that Stevens should suddenly be seen as pure as the driven Alaskan snow.
When a federal trial judge tossed out the ethics conviction of former Senator Ted Stevens last week, his lawyers promulgated the story of an innocent man victimized by unscrupulous prosecutors.
But the five-week trial of Mr. Stevens offered a different version of him, and only a discrete part of that was directly affected by the discovery of repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct.
The disclosures that prosecutors had withheld information from the defense did little to erase much of the evidence that Mr. Stevens, who had been a powerful and admired political figure in Alaska, regularly and willingly accepted valuable gifts from friends and favor-seekers that he did not report.
Stevens chief lawyer said his client "is innocent of the charges as if they had never been brought."
But there's more to it than that, and the available evidence points to clear wrongdoing. Indeed, the NYT spoke to two of the jurors involved with Stevens' trial, and both agreed that the prosecutors' misconduct did not, in their view, point to Stevens' innocence.
In fact, two jurors have said that the dismissal of the case because of the prosecutors' actions did not make Mr. Stevens innocent in their view. As one put it, "The only thing this proves is that the prosecution messed everything up."
The irony is, if the prosecutors had stuck to the rules and played it straight, they probably would have won their conviction anyway.
Zachary Roth noted the other day a series of media reports "painting an overall portrait of Stevens as an innocent, unfairly victimized by an overzealous government." That's simply not what happened. Kudos to the Times for pushing back against the misleading conventional wisdom.
Times Editorial: The First Showdown on Health Care
Benen: PAWLENTY'S SHORT MEMORY....Republican senators are hyperventilating over the possibility that Democrats might try to pass health care reform with only a majority vote — depriving them of the chance to try to block legislation with filibusters that can only be overcome with the votes of at least three-fifths of all senators.
How quickly they forget. When the Republicans controlled Congress they used the same expedited procedure to ram through controversial measures, including the enormous tax cuts for the wealthy that plunged the federal budget deep into deficit.
There are reasons to be wary about resorting to the expedited process, known as budget reconciliation. But it is a weapon that the Democrats would be foolish to give up without evidence that Republicans will truly cooperate in fashioning meaningful reform. Not one Republican in the House or the Senate voted for the budget resolutions, and only three supported the stimulus bill.
Other than dealing with the economic crisis, health care reform is the most essential item on the Congressional agenda. It is imperative to lower the cost of health care, improve its quality, and cover tens of millions of uninsured Americans.
The Obama administration has proposed sensible ways to finance broader coverage and to improve some aspects of the health care delivery system but has left it to Congress to thrash out most of the issues. Members of both parties are trying to reach consensus. But on some issues, like how much to rely on public or private plans, they remain far apart.
The House version of the budget resolution has authorized the use of reconciliation for health care reform; the Senate’s has not. Soon after Congress returns to work on April 20, a conference committee will have to decide which view will prevail.
If reconciliation is endorsed, the budget resolution will direct relevant committees to prepare health care legislation that can be merged into a single bill and then passed by a simple majority of those voting. That would make it easier to adopt such important measures as a tightly regulated insurance exchange for those without group coverage, a new public plan to compete with private plans, and mandates that employers contribute to the cost of covering their employees.
The reconciliation approach is not bulletproof. It is primarily designed to deal with spending and revenue issues that affect the deficit. Under current rules, senators can seek to remove any provisions deemed extraneous or “merely incidental” to such budgetary concerns. Nobody is quite sure how the Senate parliamentarian would rule on such items as tighter regulation of private insurers or creation of a new public plan or incentives to improve the coordination of care.
Republicans are also complaining that reconciliation limits the hours of debate and the opportunity for amendments. But Congress has already been wrestling with health care reform in multiple committees, so the need for more posturing in floor debate is not apparent. There are also dire warnings that resorting to reconciliation will poison the atmosphere for bipartisanship. That may well happen, but so far most Republicans have shown little appetite for cooperation on anything.
Reconciliation is not a weapon that should be deployed immediately. The conferees should agree on language that would allow it to kick in by a date in the fall if the two parties cannot agree on a reform bill. A bipartisan agreement would be nice, but what the country needs right now is effective health care reform.
Usually, when lawmakers "wholeheartedly support" something, they vote for it.Republicans say the budget proposed by the Obama administration will require higher taxes in the future and unfairly loads debt onto future generations.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Saturday that President Barack Obama has talked about tax relief, but his budget suggests he'll be raising taxes.
"I thought President Obama's proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes for small businesses was a pretty good idea. And his pledge to lower taxes for middle-class Americans was something Republicans wholeheartedly supported," Pawlenty said in the GOP radio and Internet address. "But the budget that Congress is considering doesn't provide that tax relief."
Republicans "wholeheartedly supported" the president's tax-cut package from February? I seem to recall universal GOP opposition to the bill. Maybe congressional Republicans "wholeheartedly supported" the White House proposal the same way Obama is going to "cut" military spending.
The GOP must have declared "opposite week" and forgot to tell people.
Benen hears TINY VIOLINS, PLAYING IN THE BANK LOBBY....
The New York Times reports today on "signs of growing tensions between the White House and the nation's banks." Apparently, industry executives are "bracing for fights with the government over repayment of bailout money and forced sales of bad mortgages."Reading over the piece, I'm not sure what the problem is, exactly.
Some of the healthier banks want to pay back their bailout loans to avoid executive pay and other restrictions that come with the money. But the banks are balking at the hefty premium they agreed to pay when they took the money.
Hmm. When the federal government rescued these institutions from collapse, the deal was the banks would pay back the money and then some. The banks agreed. Now, the banks no longer like the deal.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration wants weaker banks to move more quickly to relieve their balance sheets of the toxic assets, the home loans and mortgage bonds that nobody wants to buy right now. But the banks are resisting because they would have to book big losses.
Hmm. Banks that were reckless enough to take on the toxic assets don't want to take a loss on their bad bets.
Finally, there is increasing anxiety in the industry that the administration could use the stress tests of the 19 biggest banks, due to be completed in the next three weeks, to insist on management changes, just as it did with General Motors when officials forced the resignation of its chief executive after examining that company's books.
Hmm. Those who made reckless decisions while bringing their institutions -- and the global economy -- to the brink of collapse are worried about their job security.
So, it appears there are "signs of growing tensions between the White House and the nation's banks" because the banks don't believe in consequences?
NYTimes: Crisis Altering Wall Street as Big Banks Lose Top Talent
AP IMPACT: Chinese drywall poses potential risks...
There is an air of exodus on Wall Street — and not just among those being fired. As Washington cracks down on compensation and tightens regulation of banks, a brain drain is occurring at some of the biggest ones. They are some of the same banks blamed for setting off the worst downturn since the Depression.
Top bankers have been leaving Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others in rising numbers to join banks that do not face tighter regulation, including foreign banks, or start-up companies eager to build themselves into tomorrow’s financial powerhouses. Others are leaving because of culture clashes at merging companies, like Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, and still others are simply retiring early.
This is certainly a concern for the banks losing top talent. But other financial experts believe it is the beginning of a broader and necessary reshaping of Wall Street, too long dominated by a handful of major players that helped to fuel the financial crisis. The country may be better off if the banking industry is less concentrated, they say.
...
- Yglesias: Bank CEO Pay Restrictions
Tyler Cowen says it’s hard to really think of a practical way to control the compensation of bank executives. And on one level, I’m sure it is. But lots of things are hard. And I don’t genuinely believe that the reason we allow these obscene levels of compensation is that the top people are putting time and effort into this problem but it turns out to be just too dang hard.One thing to keep in mind is that norms and pure positional competition seem to play a large role here. European executives are well-paid, but not nearly as well-paid as American executives, and the main reason seems to be that that’s just how it is and there’s a path-dependence to it. So measures to curb socially destructive levels of compensation don’t necessarily need to be airtight to be effective. What would be needed would be some consistency of purpose from the top to try to shift the norms and incentives and so forth in steady ways over time and get you into a new equilibrium.
- STEVE LOHR (New York Times) With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?:
In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet.
Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead.
But choosing a career is a guess about the future in which economics is only part of the calculation. Prestige, peer expectations and the climate of public opinion also matter. And early indications suggest new career directions that are tethered less to the dream of an immediate six-figure paycheck on Wall Street than to the demands of a new public agenda to solve the nation’s problems.
The deep recession has clearly battered industries — and professions — whose economics were at risk before the downturn. Law firms are laying off lawyers as never before and questioning the industry’s traditional unit of payment, the billable hour. Journalism is reeling from the falloff in advertising and the inability of newspapers and magazines to make a living on the Web.
Still, the industry whose troubles are having the greatest impact on the rethinking of careers, especially at the nation’s elite universities, is the one at the center of the country’s economic downturn — finance. For years, the hefty paychecks and social status on Wall Street proved irresistible to many of America’s brightest young people, but the jobs, money and social respect there are much diminished today.
“In choosing careers, young people look for signals from society, and Wall Street will no longer pull the talent that it did for so many years,” said Richard Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “We have a great experiment before us.”
What will the new map of talent flow look like? It’s early, but based on graduate school applications this spring, enrollment in undergraduate courses, preliminary job-placement results at schools, and the anecdotal accounts of students and professors, a new pattern of occupational choice seems to be emerging. Public service, government, the sciences and even teaching look to be winners, while fewer shiny, young minds are embarking on careers in finance and business consulting. ... ... ... ....
PARKLAND, Fla. – At the height of the U.S. housing boom, when building materials were in short supply, American construction companies used millions of pounds of Chinese-made drywall because it was abundant and cheap.
Now that decision is haunting hundreds of homeowners and apartment dwellers who are concerned that the wallboard gives off fumes that can corrode copper pipes, blacken jewelry and silverware, and possibly sicken people.
Shipping records reviewed by The Associated Press indicate that imports of potentially tainted Chinese building materials exceeded 500 million pounds during a four-year period of soaring home prices. The drywall may have been used in more than 100,000 homes, according to some estimates, including houses rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina.
"This is a traumatic problem of extraordinary proportions," said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat who introduced a bill in the House calling for a temporary ban on the Chinese-made imports until more is known about their chemical makeup. Similar legislation has been proposed in the Senate.
The drywall apparently causes a chemical reaction that gives off a rotten-egg stench, which grows worse with heat and humidity.
Researchers do not know yet what causes the reaction, but ....
So, it appears there are "signs of growing tensions between the White House and the nation's banks" because the banks don't believe in consequences?
ReplyDeleteYES. JESUS.
What don't you people get about this? They want the money, all of the money, and they don't want to have to pay for it.
I mean, after seven trillion dollars can we at least stop asking coy questions about this?