Spot On

The linked article is a must-read. I couldn't agree more.

My experience with the Obama Administration has been that they play a low-key game and get things done. This frustrates progressives who want the Obama Administration to be about carthartic acts repudiating conservative world views first, and results second. In the media there will always be the contrarian need to judge any speech not by whether it achieved the Administration’s goals, but rather by a perceived lack or surfeit of emotion/policy details/ponies.

David Frum, The Honest Conservative

Remember Jim DeMint?

Here's what American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum has to say about that:

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

...

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
...
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

Must Read

...This.

“He wasn’t a jihadi, but I told him he should have been arrested for stupidity,” the CIA agent told New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer in an interview. Ms. Mayer’s book The Dark Side goes on to explain that two National Security Council staffers — senior terrorism expert General John Gordon, and legal adviser John Bellinger — sought to brief President Bush about reports that an innocent man was being held at Guantanamo Bay. Before they could reach President Bush, however, they were intercepted by David Addington, legal counsel to vice-president Dick Cheney, who said, “No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it!”

It is worth revisiting Mr. al-Rabiah’s case as America debates whether lawyers who did pro-bono work for Gitmo detainees desserve praise or scorn. Liz Cheney, William Kristol, Marc Thiessen, and Andrew McCarthy are among the folks who argue the latter — all either helped air or defended a television advertisement calling the subset of these lawyers who now work in the Obama Justice Department “the al Qaeda seven.” In the New York Times, Mr. McCarthy wrote, “Only criminal defendants are entitled to counsel, and those who represent them do indeed perform a constitutionally valuable function. It has never been the law, however, that war prisoners are entitled to counsel to challenge their detention as enemy combatants.” He goes on to assert that “the lawyers chose to offer themselves, gratis, to our enemies for litigation the Constitution does not require. They did so knowing that this litigation would be harmful to the war effort.”

Orin Kerr, a law professor who blogs at The Volokh Conspiracy, has published a devastating take-down of Mr. McCarthy’s argument. It is worth reading in full. I’ll excerpt just one sentence: “McCarthy strangely overlooks the basic fact that much of the litigation for the Guantanamo detainees concerns whether they are in fact the enemy.” Even as an abstract argument, Professor Kerr’s point is persuasive, as are all parts of his rebuttal. But the wrongheadedness of the Cheney/Kristol/Thiessen/McCarthy view can be fully appreciated only by looking at how it played out in a particular case.

Read the whole thing...

Must Read DKos FDA Diary

Quick link to great diary about how our President is reviving the FDA. Maybe now we can eat spinach or jalepenos or take medicine without seeing it on a lawyer's tv ad 6 months later...

In February 2009, he also called for a full review of all departments at the FDA.

In March, he appointed two esteemed professionals--Margaret Hamburg and Joshua Sharfstein--as commissioner and principal deputy commisioner of the FDA and announced establishment of the Food Safety Working Group to meet regularly with cabinet officials and help advise the president on food safety issues and needs of the department.

These were clearly steps in the right direction. Since taking over, Hamburg's FDA has conducted several raids of manufacturers of items like soaps and food products, closing the companies down for poor sanitation and, in some cases, prosecuting owners. A maker of tuna salad sandwiches was closed after:

Recent FDA inspections found evidence of widespread and active rodent and insect infestation, filthy conditions, and poor employee practices, such as allowing food-processing utensils to lie on the floor near live insects.

Why Are You Still Talking, Dick?

From his trusty outlet Politico:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term “war on terror” and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

Finally, this garbage gets solid pushback from our side:

A senior Democrat said in response: “It’s telling that in attacking the president and the administration, that Vice President Cheney did not condemn the attack against our nation on Christmas Day.”

I'm pretty surprised to see this from Dick:

“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war."

Are there any "hard core terrorists" left at Gitmo, or did Dick and his little buddy let them all go in 2007?

Change is (still) Good

My first reaction to the "underwear bomber" story was that my trip tp India next month is going to be a huge pain in the ass, with all kinds of inconveniences that do zero to actually stop attacks.

My second reaction was to notice that, despite Republican politicians trying to get that ol' fear fest going again, the national response is much different. The President didn't give some stupid macho speech. Instead, he gathered information and then announced that there had been failures in the intelligence community and that they will be addressed. I have no doubt. Gone are the Bush days of seeming to think that admitting any kind of mistake at any level of the federal government was an admission of weakness. Gone are the days of "heck of a job Brownie!" and giving medals for failure.

Business as usual is no longer acceptable. I have no doubt from the President's speech today that there will be something that hasn't been seen in the last near decade. Accountability. Speaking of accountability, why am I not seeing either of these stories on TV?

Chris Good at The Atlantic has a statement from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House homeland security committee, calling for the administration’s nominee to run TSA, Erroll Southers, to receive an up-or-down vote in the Senate:

Erroll Southers, an experienced, highly-qualified nominee, continues to be held up in the Senate by someone who obviously puts process ahead of progress. If TSA is to become the kind of nimble, responsive organization the American people deserve in times like this, it will need a Senate-confirmed administrator. If nothing else, the events of last week highlighted this lack of leadership.

Remember: DeMint is holding up the new TSA chief not because of any concerns over Southers’ qualifications. He’s holding Southers up because Southers is too pro-labor. Because the last thing you want for the safety of the nation’s airports is for the individuals responsible for their security to earn a fair wage.

ABC breathlessly reported that the bomber was trained by someone that WAS RELEASED FROM GITMO!!!!!!!!11!!1! AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!! (by the Bush admin. in 2007. Oh wait, that didn't actually make it onto the news broadcast - just the online article.)

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

Good riddance to the (failure at every business venture daddy bankrolled) "CEO President." Welcome to the "I expect results" President.

These Guys Must Be In On It!!

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is clearly a socialist muslim kenyan weatherman front:

Some critics charge that the new policies pursued by President Obama and the 111th Congress generated the huge federal budget deficits that the nation now faces. In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.