What a Wonderful World

Somewhere on the road in Montana.

Here's to George Packer

I love this guy. From today's post:

"I would like to see these malefactors of great wealth apologize to the country. I would like to see them organize their own press conference in a lineup on Wall Street and, in the manner of disgraced Japanese officials, bow low to the pavement, express contrition, and beg their countrymen’s forgiveness. Such a scene would go some way toward cleansing the smell of the financial crisis.

Of course, nothing like this is going to happen. So instead, like the parents of two-year-olds, the next Congress should summon them to Washington and publicly punish these executives who, in Kohlberg’s terms, “see morality as something external to themselves, as that which the big people say they must do.”

Read the whole post here>>

On This Day in History

1520
Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean after passing through the South American strait that now bears his name.

How Many Ways Can You Say "Fuck You Karl?"

This is what I'd like to see, wouldn't you?

Thanksgiving Cheer From Obama
He's assembled a first-rate economic team.
That's the title of a piece by KARL ROVE aka Turd Blossom!

Where Does He Get the Nerve?

From the man who gave us George W. Bush, comes some tight, insightful analysis from his highly paid perch at the Wall Street Journal.
Here's the link if you want to inflict some pain on yourself post Thanksgiving.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122783239069463007.html

Can someone please just put this joker out to pasture? He and his party have wrecked the country, wrecked their own party and are liars and frauds. And so I suppose we can assume that if people like Karl Rove still have jobs peddling bullshit at WSJ, then not enough has changed in America.

Thanksgiving

Does this not bust open your heart?

A lot of what I post on this blog references other sites and other writers. I'm trying to bring a wide range of commentary and opinion and reporting to this site and to my legions of followers. I've spent the last two years digging up various points of view and thought it might be useful to call upon them as we look at how Obama makes the transition from long shot candidate to President. But today I'm just going to post up some thoughts of my own on this "defining moment" in our history.

First I never thought that Obama could be elected. I think this had less to do with the fact that he's black, (you've heard about this right?) but that he was smart and thoughtful - actually, super-smart and thoughtful. And that he went to all the right schools and was an extremely well spoken, articulate politician. We just don't seem to elect people like that to the Presidency. Or, it might be that people who are like that don't seek the Presidency because they are, well, so damn smart. Why would they do it? They know too much. Then of course there is the issue that super smart, thoughtful people don't know how to throw hard elbows which is mandatory for a successful national campaign. But! This super smart, thoughtful presidential candidate plays basketball - AND he's from Chicago. So if anyone knows how to throw an elbow it's going to be him.And throw them he did.

I used to live in a place - Baltimore - that had more than its share of the black underclass. I can't help but wonder what it feels like in that community to see a guy like Barack Obama as the President. The black underclass in America hasn't had a piece of good news in a long, long time. Not only that but the so called Black Leaders - the Jesse Jackson's and Al Sharpton's of the world were almost worse than useless. They were excuse makers -- cynical manipulators who were more interested in themselves than in telling the truth.

And the truth was (and is) that any chance that the black underclass has in America is not going to come out of articulating long-held grievances and government programs. It's not going to happen by telling people what's wrong or what has been wrong or who fucked things up.

My own two cents is that the black underclass has to see what is possible and to see themselves inside that possibility. Which is true for anyone of us. And so now they HAVE seen. They have seen that any fucking thing is possible if a black man in America can be elected President.

It is going to be beyond fascinating to watch this man take power and wield power. I don't care how old you are and how many political seasons you have attended; this is new. There has never been anything like this before. Are you fucking glad to be alive or what?

You Have to Read This

This is a little off topic. But if you want to know how truly corrupt our financial system is - at its core - then read this thing to the bitter end. Utterly fascinating.

The End of Wall Street's Boom
by Michael Lewis in Portfolio.com

Here's an excerpt:
"I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance."

Brennan Bails (Out)

What a world. As if we needed another sign that the blogoshpere is a power center.
John Brennan took himself out of consideration for CIA mainly owing to the criticism he received from blogs. I'll update which blogs later, but for now, we can certainly say that Andrew's blog - The Daily Dish - was a big, fat hairball caught in the throat of this appointment.
More later.

Uh-Oh

Seriously. This is not good.
The leading candidate for CIA for Obama is, according to a fairly wide-range of observers, a continuation of Bush-Cheney. His name is John Brennan.

Here is Marc Ambinder:
"Democratic and national security sources say that former National Counterrorism Center head John Brennan remains the favorite to be nominated director of the Central Intelligence Agency even as his pending appointment raises the hackles of some Obama advisers because of his ties to George Tenet and controversial programs."

Raises the hackles? I'd go way beyond that. How about "this potential appointment threatens to unleash holy hell on the Obama transition effort?"

There were very few bloggers who were more adamant in their support of Barack Obama than Andrew Sullivan. From his widely read and highly influential Atlantic magazine piece, "Goodbye To All That" that made a compelling case for Obama's election, to his campaign season evisceration of John McCain (who Sullivan had admired) Sullivan has been Obama's number one fan.

But there's trouble in paradise. From today's Daily Dish:

"It's fine not to uproot the entire agency and to have some continuity. But for Obama to appoint a Bush-Cheney apologist to the CIA? How on earth did this idea get this far?

It may be that Brennan will stop torture under any euphemism. But the trouble with this area of policy is that it is necessarily secret and so trusting the people running the CIA is essential. I don't trust Brennan. On the question of torture, it is absolutely vital that there be a clean break with Bush-Cheney at the top of the agency. Many CIA staffers have been implicated in war crimes, and their cover-up. If you were to de-Cheneyize the entire place after eight years of entrenchment, you'd have few people with real skills left. So the top leadership is vital. It needs to signal that there is no longer any doubt that the US is abiding by Geneva, including Article 3, in all its branches of government.

The least we know is that Brennan is ambivalent about this. Ambivalence on this matter is unacceptable. We haven't fought for decency and reform and a return to American values for so long to be turned back now. We didn't work our butts off to elect Obama only to get Bush another four years at CIA. If Brennan emerges as the pick, those of us against the continuation of war crimes and the prosecution of war criminals will have to oppose him strenuously in the nomination process. We will, in fact, have to go to war with Obama before he even takes office.

And if Obama doubts our seriousness, I have three words for him. Yes we can."




Message to the Obama camp. Don't go there. One of the most powerful forces behind your election to the Presidency was/is the belief that the country would leave behind the most toxic and vile chapter in our history. The belief was that we were returning to the better angels of our nature. Do. Not. Disappoint.

Must Reading

From The Perils of Populist Chic

"The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them."

Read the entire post here>>

Who Is Judge Abner Mikva?

From Al Giordano- Re: Hill as Secretary of State


Judge Mikva told the New York Times today:

"The vetting of Mr. Clinton's myriad philanthropic and business dealings is "complicated, and it may be the complications that are causing hesitation on both sides," said Abner J. Mikva, one of Mr. Obama's closest supporters and a White House counsel during the Clinton administration. "There would have to be full disclosure as to who all were contributors to his library and foundation. I think they'd have to be made public."

While aides to the president-elect declined Monday to discuss what sort of requirements would make it possible for Mrs. Clinton to serve as secretary of state, they said Mr. Obama would not formally offer her the job unless he was satisfied that there would be no conflicts posed by Mr. Clinton's activities abroad.

Associates of the Clintons said that Mr. Clinton was likely to have to make significant concessions and that he was inclined to do so. Among other things, they said, he would probably have to agree not to take money for speeches from foreign businesses that have a stake in the actions of the American government. Another obvious issue, Democratic lawyers said, would be whether Mr. Clinton's foundation should accept money from foreign governments, businesses or individuals for the foundation's philanthropic activities and if it should disclose those donors publicly.

The problem is it's going to require some sacrifice by him," said a former Clinton aide who is not involved in the discussions but did not want to be identified because the talks are confidential. "If he's not willing to do that, it could blow up."

One proposal, floated by Mr. Mikva and several other aides involved in the vetting process, would be for Mr. Clinton to separate himself from the activities of his foundation, including raising money.

It's not just what he does or says - it's the fact that the foundation is involved with foreign countries, some of which might well be in conflict with U.S. policy," Mr. Mikva said. "It's more than a legal problem - there are ethical problems and appearance problems."

Here's Giordano again:
God bless that man. Abner Mikva is a national treasure, one that has lived long enough with a front row seat to history to cut through the bull and identify what is most important in these hours of decision.

Mikva has stirred the hornet's nest. His words got Politico's Ben Smith out of bed and on the phone with Chicago.

Lot's of voices crowding the airwaves that Hillary is a really poor choice for Secretary of State. My question is, if she couldn't manage a presidential campaign without embarrassing public squabbles, how does she run the State department?

Have You Heard? The Prez Can Actually Speak

Watch CBS Videos Online

Why I Love James Wolcott

On Sarah Palin:
"If she were any more grating, she could cut cheddar."

Hillary for Secretary of State

Even though Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo can't understand why Hillary would want to vacate what is essentially a lifetime Senate seat, I'm thinking Hillary is not going to walk away from the chance to become the next Secretary of State.

The nation and the world had no problem seeing her as the next president. She knows everybody, probably on a first name basis. I'm not sure how Biden is going to take this, since he is no slouch when it comes to international affairs.

But she is a person with enormous candlepower. Go Hillary.

Update:
From the "holy shit look at this" file:
Al Giordano isn't buying the Hillary as Sec. State story.


He thinks this is a media freak show instigated by Hillary supporters and a "hungry for news' media and that the intent of the Hillary people is to make sure that Bill "Judas" Richardson and John 'the Traitor" Kerry don't get the State department gig.

Check it out:

"The whole thing is a media freak show being served up by members of the Clinton factions in the Democratic party and obliged by a national media (some of them also Clinton noisemakers) in search of a story. The speculation is not because Senator Clinton wants the job, but because her people so desperately want to muddy the waters and throw up a roadblock to either New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson or Massachusetts Senator John Kerry - two of the leading contenders - serving in the post, whom they consider turncoats for having endorsed Obama vs. Clinton earlier this year.

After Richardson backed Obama, Clinton advisor James Carville called him a "Judas."

The whole post is here>>

Late Update from Marc Ambinder:
The CW in Washington is that Obama wants Clinton in his cabinet more than Clinton wants to be in the cabinet, the theory being that the moment she steps into the administration, she loses her power base, she loses her Senate seat forever, and she loses her voice on domestic policy. She concedes her political identity. Actually, on policy: uncuriously silent in all this is Sen. Joe Biden, who has strong foreign policy ideas of his own and a bigger platform to share them with Obama. Would Clinton become a glorified PR tool for Obama if she accepted the job? A Powell, rather than a Rice?

Delicious, no?

Transition Morsels

Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has a great post on how the Obama camp is managing the transition. Reasons to be hopeful.

Democrats who survived the transition from George H.W. Bush to William Jefferson Clinton are a bit in awe these days of what Barack Obama is doing and how he is doing it.

Of the Clinton transition, one very senior and longtime Clinton adviser said: "No one would have imagined how quickly it all got screwed up."

In 1992, the only Democrats who had run the White House in the past quarter century had worked for Jimmy Carter -- and Carter's tenure didn't exactly inspire confidence. Clinton had James Carville -- the most brilliant Democratic strategist at the time, and he had a lot of young guns. But he did not have a John Podesta to walk him through what it took to ran the White House, and certainly not a Rahm Emanuel.

Read the whole post here>>

Change dot Gov, baby!

Essential reading from the great George Packer at The New Yorker.
An excerpt from The New Liberalism - How the Economic Crisis Can Help Obama Redefine the Democrats;

"Instead, Sunstein suggested as the governing philosophy of an Obama Presidency the idea of “deliberative democracy.” The phrase appears in “The Audacity of Hope,” where it denotes a conversation among adults who listen to one another, who attempt to persuade one another by means of argument and evidence, and who remain open to the possibility that they could be wrong. Sunstein pointed out that “deliberative democracy” has certain “preconditions”: “It requires an educated citizenry, a virtuous and engaged citizenry that has sufficient resources—and Madison sometimes spoke in these terms—that they could actually be citizens, rather than subjects.”

And here is our good friend Abe again.

"Obama links the concept with Lincoln, who was as consequential a President as Roosevelt but in ways that were less obviously partisan and ideological. In his first inaugural, just five weeks before Southern militiamen fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln urged his countrymen, “Think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.”

And if you were wondering why everything seems to suck when Republicans hold the White House, here is why.

"According to David Axelrod, among the books that Obama has read recently is “Unequal Democracy,” by the Princeton political scientist Larry M. Bartels. It attributes the steep economic inequality of our time not to blind technological and market forces but to specific Republican policies. Bartels writes, “On average, the real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans.” For decades, rising inequality coincided with conservative electoral success, because voters were largely ignorant of the effects of tax-code changes and other economic policies, those in power were unresponsive to the concerns of working-class citizens, and broader income growth occurred in election years. In other words, the causes of inequality are essentially political—an insight that suggests that Obama might use economic policy to begin reversing a decades-long trend."

Change dot gov, baby! Read the entire piece here>>

Keep Your Eye on This Place

http://change.gov

More web-based brilliance from the Obama camp.

.................................................................................
Is History Repeating Itself?

This is absolutely fascinating. If you ever wondered how facility with language played out in leadership and politics, this is your book. I've always been amazed at national politicians who are tongue tied. I could never understand how a person who cannot articulate, could think and lead and inspire and do all those things that leadership asks of a person. And we do seem to have some evidence (especially lately) that there might be a correlation between poor language skills and poor leadership skills. Now here's the big question. Will Obama's astonishing facility with language deliver the leadership and vision we all really need right now?

Here's the book and an excerpt from the review. The link is below.

LINCOLN

The Biography of a Writer

By Fred Kaplan

A former Illinois state legislator, with a short stint in Congress under his belt, comes to national prominence with speeches that showcase his eloquence. He is, according to the author of this new book, something of a cool customer: calm and graceful under pressure, “a difficult man to read, who loved jokes and stories” but who was otherwise remarkably self-contained.

This former lawyer runs as “a stoic moderate,” embracing the virtues of “balance, temperance and restraint”; as a campaigner he emphasizes a reasoned “analysis of issues rather than personalities.” His poetic gifts as a writer, shaped by a lifetime of avid reading, are matched by a lawyer’s appreciation of precision; his writings project “a persona of dignified but amiable authenticity,” and do so with a “concision of phrasing and logical tightness.” In his run for office he is criticized for being too inexperienced to be president and for failing to support the troops, because he’d questioned an American invasion of a country he claimed was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.” His vision of America is an optimistic one of reconciliation — to “help make strangers into neighbors,” in the words of this biographer, “to create sympathy between regions and nations, and, by inference, between the North and South.”

Sound familiar?

The whole review is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/books/07book.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

148 Years Ago Today

This somber looking guy was elected President. How cool is it that it was November 6, 1860 when Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election? And it was of course, Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. And had an ability to craft language that meets the moment and the test of time.


The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

From the Emancipation Proclimation --

“That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do not act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”


I wish I was the first one to say this, but I'm not. The Civil War is finally fucking over.

Yes I Can

Rahm Emmanuel signs on as President Elect Obama's White House Chief of Staff. Big league move. Brick by brick, the pieces of a successful presidency are being laid. Fun to watch.



From Rahm Emmanuel's Wikipedia page:

One of his proudest moments during the Clinton administration "was an event that touched his political sensibilities and his personal ties to Israel: the 1993 Rose Garden signing ceremony after the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine. Emanuel directed the details of the ceremony, down to the choreography of the famous handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat."^[16]

At this point of his political career he was known for his intensity. Notably, he reportedly told British Prime Minister Tony Blair, prior to Blair appearing in public with Clinton for the first time after the Lewinsky scandal, "This is important. Don't fuck it up."^[17] Emanuel is said to have "mailed a rotting fish to a former coworker after the two parted ways."^[16] On the night after the 1996 election, "Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting 'Dead! ... Dead! ... Dead!' and plunging the knife into the table after every name."^[2] His "take-no-prisoners attitude" earned him the nickname "Rahm-bo".^[16]

Do you think that the Obama administration wants to get stuff done? I do.

update: I am possibly the last person on earth to know that Rahm Emmanuel was the model for Josh on West Wing. I was never a devotee but I'm planning on becoming one.

"In What Respect is Africa a Continent Charlie?" Ooooppps!

I guess if your father is a Kenyan and therefore is actually from a country in Africa, then you probably know that Africa isn't a country. Then again if you're Sarah Palin and you're from Wasilla, maybe you're not so sure about Africa. Just for the record Sarah baby, here's a map of Kenya.

Here it is from everyone's favorite source, Fox News:

However, perhaps one of the most astounding and previously unknown tidbits about Sarah Palin has to do with her already dubious grasp of geography. According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, there was great concern within the McCain campaign that Palin lacked "a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, a heartbeat away from the presidency," in part because she didn't know which countries were in NAFTA, and she "didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself."

It was a hoax! Calling Jason Blair!

Here We Go

Well. I confess I never thought this would happen. It has seemed to me that we pretty much have no use for highly-educated, literate types in this country...We don't hate them exactly, (well maybe in the REAL America they do) we just never consider electing them president. There is some sort of suspicion about academia and books and ideas. People get freaked out.

But man. This guy. Brainiac with sharp elbows. And a writer! And a common touch. And that middle name. You got some politician here America.

This blog is going to chronicle how our man is doing. After all, we got him elected. But how's he going to do?

The first thing I've seen is Rahm Emmanuel for chief of staff. I'm on board with this. Have a look at this post from Marty Peretz at TNR.

I've known Rahm since before the Clinton imperium, and I've known his brilliant brothers even longer than that. In fact, I think I hired Zeke both as an intern at TNR and a teaching fellow at Harvard.

Rahm is sassy, alright. But a very serious person, and most serious in the ethics of policy and politics.

He is an old-fashioned liberal in the sense that he is afraid neither of the concept of equality nor the reality of military power.

Here's your model for the Obama presidency. This is change for the Democrats, at least.

That works for me. But Rahm is being coy. He hasn't accepted yet. I'm wondering about Tom Daschle. Where is he? Is he second fiddle here?

Stay tuned for an astounding, rock 'em sock 'em ride through history. And be the FIRST to follow this blog.