Paul Begala at
The Daily Beast:
Barack Obama is a remarkably gifted politician. But his cardinal political error has been that at times he seems to lack the imagination to even conceptualize how truly nihilistic, irresponsible, partisan, and, yes, crazy his Republican opponents are. The last Democratic president saw the Republicans shut down the government, squander millions on partisan witch hunts—including taking 140 hours of sworn testimony investigating President Clinton’s Christmas-card list—and drag the country through an impeachment process. Despite that history—and despite that Obama may be dealing with Republicans who are even more ideological and self-destructive than in Clinton’s day—he still expressed a blind faith in their reasonableness. How quaint.
This faith in the reasonableness of others is quintessentially American. We are, after all, a nation born of the Enlightenment. John Locke, the intellectual godfather of the American Revolution, said, “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.” But John Locke was a 17th-century English philosopher, not a 21st-century Tea Party nihilist. Obama, sadly, is not dealing with Mr. Locke—nor with Mr. Spock—but rather with zealous partisans who would, it seems, gladly harm the country in order to hurt the president. Highly illogical, perhaps, but real.
Our president, however, is nothing if not smart. And so he has adapted. Instead of sitting with Boehner and Cantor and McConnell, seeking to appeal to the cool light of reason, which failed so miserably in previous budget showdowns, he is barnstorming the country, basking in the warm glow of popular approval. Whereas once he seemed to prefer the prophet Isaiah’s entreaty, “Come now, let us reason together,” now he seems to be channeling the prophet Ezekiel: “I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes.” Fortunately for our nation, the president seems to have hit upon a strategy that works.
Let's go below the fold for more analysis on the latest top news stories.
Rick Perlstein's must-read at The Nation:
So: the “sequester.” That too-clever-by-half notion, born of last year’s debt ceiling negotiations out of the White House’s presumption that, when faced with the horror of heedless, profligate, across-the-board budget cuts to all manner of popular government programs, the Republicans’ “fever would break”—remember that?—and the Loyal Opposition would somehow come to agree to a reasonable, “balanced” deficit reduction package. It all seemed so cut and dried in those palmy days, just a few months ago: who could possibly imagine a major American political party could possibly let such madness actually go into effect?
Um, me? I wonder how many folks within the White House, gaming out whether Republicans might not just call the bluff, bothered to consider the fact that an embrace of heedless, profligate, across-the-board budget cuts to all manner of popular government programs is a key component of hardcore conservative ideology. [...] Did anyone in the White House notice how many conservatives, including ones in positions of governmental power, after Mitt Romney’s recorded back-room admission that he couldn’t get elected because 47 percent of the electorate is addicted to suckling on the federal teat, responded that what he said was absolutely correct? [...] And what could the White House have predicted conservatives would say to those who point out that pulling the rug out from under huge chunks of federal spending will spur a recession? They could have predicted that many would say exactly what they have said: that since it’s excessive federal spending that causes recessions, what’s wrong with cutting excessive federal spending?
Bottom line: didn’t anyone whose job it is to think about such things consider that at least some powerful Republicans—not all, it is true—would relish sequestration as a marvelous thing, a historic opportunity, a gift from Obama to help further the cause they’d been proclaiming as sacred for generations: to shrink the federal government small enough so they could someday drown it in Grover Norquist’s proverbial bathtub? “Once these cuts take effect, thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off and tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids,” said Obama. Did he ever consider that to a lot of Republicans, that would sound like a wish list?
Haley Sweetland Edwards at
The Washington Monthly looks at how rule-making can affect the president's major policies:
It may seem counterintuitive, but those big hunks of legislation, despite being technically the law of the land, filed away in the federal code, don’t mean anything yet. They are, in the words of one CFTC official, “nothing but words on paper” until they’re broken down into effective rules, implemented, and enforced by an agency. Rules are where the rubber of our legislation hits the road of real life. To put that another way, if a rule emerges from a regulatory agency weak or riddled with loopholes, or if it’s killed entirely—like the CFTC’s rule on position limits—it is, in effect, almost as if that part of the law had not passed to begin with.
As of now, there’s no guarantee that either Obamacare or Dodd-Frank will be made into rules that actually do what lawmakers intended. That’s partly because the rule-making process is a dangerous place for a law to go.
Patrick Murphy look at how DOMA affects military families:
Last December, U.S. Marine Corps. Captain Matthew Phelps got down on one knee and proposed to the person he loved most in the world. It was one of the happiest moments of his life. The fact that it occurred in the White House made it all that much sweeter. Pictures of the moment went viral, popping up all over Twitter and Facebook.
Amazingly, while most Americans can recognize how special that moment was, our government continues to deny its significance. That’s because Matthew is gay, and due to that fact alone, his soon-to-be husband, Ben Schock, will be denied hundreds of benefits that we routinely give to military families.
Jay Bookman looks at corporate profits and points out that...:
...conservatives continue to argue that the business climate under President Obama stifles profitability.
He then links to this chart:
In the chart, the share of the national economy, or GDP, going to workers’ paychecks is in blue. The share of the economy that is going to after-tax corporate profits is in red.
It's a chart that makes the conservative claim that big business needs more corporate welfare all that more illogical.