An interesting-enough post. But WTF, dude? Seriously, WTF?

John Rawls was a great thinker, and Barack Obama is a great man.

To quote John Cleese:

Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.

A phrase you won't hear me say often: a must-read at AMERICAblog:

It's pretty despicable, and gratuitously homophobic. It reads as if it were written by one of George Bush's top political appointees. I cannot state strongly enough how damaging this brief is to us. Obama didn't just argue a technicality about the case, he argued that DOMA is reasonable. That DOMA is constitutional. That DOMA wasn't motivated by any anti-gay animus. He argued why our Supreme Court victories in Roemer and Lawrence shouldn't be interpreted to give us rights in any other area (which hurts us in countless other cases and battles).

 Read more…

Enjoy!

Set your expectations as low as possible, and you won't be disappointed.

But try as you might to be sufficiently world-weary about it, you still might be amazed at the utter valuelessness of this historically historic presidency.

In court papers, the administration said the appeals court ruled correctly in this case when it found that "don't ask, don't tell" is "rationally related to the government's legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion."

Praise him or damn him for it, Bill Clinton famously compromised up a Rube Goldberg form of provisional rights for gays in the military.

A decade-and-a-half on, there is massively more support for gay rights in every segment of American life. Except in Obamaland, that is. Read more…

Even the Times is noticing. Carl Hulse:

Mr. Obama did not mention that the measure he was signing, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, was missing its centerpiece: a change in bankruptcy law he once championed that would have given judges the power to lower the amount owed on a home loan.

[Cramdown] had been stripped out three weeks earlier in a showdown between Senate Democrats and the nation’s banks, including many that are getting big government bailouts.

Getting fucked over by the banksters is one thing. Paying them to fuck you over is quite another. Read more…

(h/t Susie)

Well, there's the future of journalism for you! The "bitter, cling" story was originally buried (per Boehlert's paraphrase: "I'm not going to tell you, it's going to hurt the campaign") by HuffPo blogger and maxed-out Obama contributor, Mayhill Fowler... and then deliberately news-dumped on a Friday. (Hats off, though, to the unnamed HuffPo editor who pushed for the story to come out. You never know where you're going to find an oasis of integrity.)

 Read more…

Glenn:

"The first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law" is how Obama's own White House Counsel described him. Technically speaking, that is a form of change, but probably not the type that many Obama voters expected.

The future is here!

Merriam-Webster:

Truthiness (noun)

1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)

2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

For a brief period, when many Americans had tired of the utter mendacity of the Bush administration and its media lapdogs, Stephen Colbert's coinage — "truthiness" — gained national currency.

Nowadays, invoking that term is an uncool as singing "Who Let the Dogs Out?" Or saying "nowadays." Read more…

The exam. The answers.

WaPo:

Lobbyists score a swift and unexpected victory in President Obama's stimulus plan by channeling billions to electronic medical records.

Barack Obama just gave a shoutout to "little single-payer advocates"! It really made me feel like somebody.

Just like at his inauguration, when he tacked "non-believers" onto a list of American sorts — after a benediction, an invocation from a gay/women/science/atheist-hating asshole, a quote from scripture, malarkey about God-given rights, and a campaign with countless sops to Bible-thumpers and played in the key of religion from beginning to end. Obama mentioned me, therefore I am!

He's made a point to acknowledge all of us "latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal(s)," us "Chablis-drinking limousine liberals," who "seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities." Read more…

I have the rest of the town hall here.

From the White House Briefing Book:

As a closing act for the Transition, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett requested that the Office of Public Liaison create a process by which Americans outside of Washington could come together to present ideas directly to the President – a “Citizen’s Briefing Book.”

The idea was to use the Transition website, change.gov, to create a grassroots version of the research binders that presidents receive every day. But instead of advice from top government officials, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is composed of ideas submitted by ordinary people and reflecting the enthusiastic engagement from the public we saw throughout the course of Change.gov.

125,000 users submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes, with the most popular ideas accumulating tens of thousands of votes each. This book contains some of the top ideas, broken into groups by issue area. You can tell how popular each idea was by looking at the number next to it – it represents how many people voted for the idea, with 10 points awarded for each positive vote.

So how'd that work out for the "enthusiastic public"? Read more…

[Transcript] Nice attitude, huh?

"Got the little torturers up here"? Nope.

"Got the little banksters up here"? Nope.

But just do what any citizen should be able to do and applaud for single payer, and the President who ought to be on your side -- and would be, if his policies were science-based -- diminishes you. Here's the whole thing: Read more…

It's a popular meme: poor (or not-so-poor) people are ruining everything with their emergency-room visits.
 Read more…

Is Obama interested in health care? Is he even paying attention? Or does it just bore him?

[OBAMA] You can expect us to work on health-care reform that will bring down costs while maintaining quality

You know, I was under the impression that maintaining quality wouldn't really be enough. Read more…

Not insane:

During remarks on science and technology that covered topics from climate change to the public-school curriculum, Obama set a goal of devoting 3 percent of gross domestic product to scientific research.

"If there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research, it's today," Obama said in a speech to the National Academy of Sciences, a society of scientists and engineers who give advice to U.S. policymakers.

"Our capacity to deal with a public health challenge of this sort rests heavily on the work of our scientific and medical community," Obama said. "And this is one more example of why we cannot allow our nation to fall behind."

That's a good goal. Read more…

Scandal: Obama presidential-plane "photo-op" in NYC

Heroism: Bush ignores numerous warnings, Cheney never convenes promised Anti-Terrorism Task Force, 3,000 New Yorkers die.

Guess which one resulted in a demand for, and receipt of, an apology....

Via the great Avedon, this excellent essay on populism by John Emerson:

Where are the Pitchforks?

In 1930 or 1940 the average American was dirt poor, whereas Ruy Texeira and others have concluded that the contemporary “poor” demographic is relatively small and hard to mobilize. Furthermore, a high proportion of middling Americans have decided — actively or passively, explicitly or tacitly, for better or worse — that they’re in on the game, and that they shouldn’t rock the big-money boat. (America has been economically successful enough to produce a demographically significant group that thinks of itself as “elite”). Read more…

Speaking Wednesday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she will act next week to begin setting up an investigatory committee to examine and document what went wrong with economic policy and practices. Read more…

Obama has an historically historic opportunity to be one of the great populist presidents, getting the gig at a time when most Americans are keenly aware that far-reaching changes are needed, beginning with shoring up the threadbare safety net.

If "progressives" can do little better than playing the cultural-superiority card vs. the ignorant Bubbas who are too unhip to know racy associations for the word "teabag" — rather than defending and promoting the economic policies that are proven to be the best answer to recessions and depressions — we're just begging the Republicans to become populist heroes. Read more…

[UPDATE 64,000 views, but I'm betting that they're influencers. Numbers will increase, too. Technically, the show was fine, and Obama looked good. And the play? Well... --lambert]

[TYPING LIVE] Why? Costs. Medicare, Medicaid is the biggest driver of the deficit. If you add up the recovery package, and the various economic proposals, that amounts to a fraction of the long term deficit and debt that we're facing. Better to pay now, rather than wait. I want a "universal" health care system. Whether we do it like Europe or Canada. Read more…

Well, no.

But if he was, and a practical sort of Socialist at that, he might be saying things like this and saying them to Bill Moyers: Read more…

plover at Three Bulls! has particularly interesting take in rê Somerby that I thought was worth quoting here.

He condemns people as “tribal”, because, from his standpoint, “tribal” is outside the realm of “rational”. The problem is, it’s not. Tribalism, in a generalized sense, one not limited to reflexive, herdlike behaviors, is one part of what our human brains use to reason about life as a social animal (most of our brains, anyway — the ones that more or less don’t we label things like “autistic”). Declaring oneself an adherent of reason does not mean that one is not using tribalistic modes of thinking. It’s not something a person can think their way out of as it is part of thinking.

... Read more…