Great post of the day

The Booman asks Can I Vent? Why, yes, you certainly can:

Yesterday was probably the most embarrassing day yet for the progressive blogosphere during the short reign of the Obama administration . ,. . As soon as he won the presidency, you started bitching about his appointments. As soon as he became president, you started bitching about his messaging, his framing, his agenda, and his lack of deference to your opinion. I want to know where the point was in this process when Obama was supposed to conclude that you were his allies and that you were responsible for his victory. . . .
You call him a warmonger, but he gets the Nobel Peace Prize. He ends torture and allows his Attorney General to investigate it, and you call him a torturer. He tries to enact health care reform with a robust public option and you accuse him of seeking every opportunity to sell-out to the insurance industry. He bails out the cratering financial services industry and prevents a second Great Depression, and you accuse him of selling his soul to corporate CEO's. I'm not saying that all of these criticisms lack validity. I'm not saying that people shouldn't advocate for the things they care about passionately. I just want to know where you get the fucking idea that an anonymous White House staffer who gets asked about all this criticism would feel obligated to show you deference and respect.

I have been increasingly upset by the negative, carping tone which some supposedly progressive bloggers are adopting in talking about Obama -- its always fun to be snarky, I know, but its just a Republican frame to call him an empty suit, all talk no walk, egotist, and the like. I'm glad Booman has started calling this out.
UPDATE: A Booman commenter lists what Obama HAS done in the last nine months:

1)Passed a stimulus act that pulled us back from the brink of an honest-to-God Great Depression II.
2)Passed the Ledbetter act that corrected an unbelievable injustice in employment discrimination law.
3)Pulled more concessions from Iran than Bush got in 8 years of senseless saber-rattling.
4)Increased the minimum wage, sorely needed by the workers in this country who currently have lower real wages than they did in 1970, even as our GDP has grown 18-fold.
5)Made it to the homestretch on the healthcare reform we've been trying to pass for 40 years.
6)Set a real timetable for getting out of Iraq.
7)Oversaw the killing of Al-Qaeda's top man in Pakistan and a host of other terrorist leaders.
8)Finally reworked our military budget from an ancient and ineffective cold-war focus to a high-tech-focused counterinsurgency tool...something Bush never even touched, even as his "war on terror" rhetoric reached a fever pitch.
9)Managed just enough threats against the banks that they've started repaying the TARP money Bush paid out.
10)Started the process of re-regulating the banking/insurance/investment industry for the first real time since the 1930's.
11)Begun placing Guantanamo prisoners elsewhere in preparation for closing the base.
12)Got the politics and pressure out of the Department of Justice.
13)Denounced torture and rescinded the absurd legal theories that allowed it.
14)Threaded the needle on unrest in Iran.
15)Dramatically modernized White House communications and technology, improving the flow of information to the public.
16)Started over 2500 highway projects, with bidding so fierce that the costs are below expectations and should allow even more projects than expected.
17)Created a $2500 tuition tax credit to help shore up our woeful debt-burden on families.
18)Reworked our student loan programs to great improvement.
19)Created and started execution of a plan to save the auto industry. (All you people screaming about 9.8% unemployment should stop and think what it would be if GM and Chrysler had been allowed to fail as prescribed by conservative economics.)
20)Stabilized Pakistan with $5B in aid.
21)Created the Office of Urban Policy and reversed Bush cuts to inner-city anti-gang/anti-gun policies, policies experts say are instrumental in reducing crime.
22)Added over 2 million acres of Federally-protected wilderness.
23)Dramatically improved America's image abroad.

Oh, and appointed the first Hispanic justice to the Supreme Court. Now, you can quibble with the details here or there, but its patently untrue to say that Obama and his administration isn't getting anything done.

Images of soldiers

Just a couple of photos I noticed -- from BAGnewsNotes, this photo ran in the New York Times under the title Four Marines:



and from Daily Kos, this little girl's dad is going to Iraq and she couldn't let go of his hand:

Hope

Josh Marshall gives the best description I have read today about what Obama's Nobel Prize signifies:

. . . the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.

Marshall nailed it.
I have been appalled today by some negative and carping commentary from the right and the left.
The prize is a signal about how happy the world is that America doesn't seem to be totally crazy anymore.

Fool me twice

The Cons started talking about a "new role" in Afghanistan two years ago but nobody was really listening. Then last fall during the election campaign, Harper suddenly announced that Canadian troops would leave Afghanistan by 2011.
Canadians believed him.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me -- now MacKay is saying we will stay after all and Warren Kinsella helpfully explains the apparent contradiction:

They've been lying. That's the bottom line. And if they get their lusted-after majority, Canada will be there long after 2011.

Quel suprise!

Priorities?

Chaos erupts at Cobo as thousands jockey for aid detnews.com The Detroit News


I know its fun to read news stories about political scandals, but sometimes I think we are paying too much attention to circuses and not enough to bread.
The economy is so bad in Detroit that 50,000 people showed up at a stadium yesterday to apply for a federal grant to help pay their mortgage and utilities. There was almost a riot and people thought there were going to be trampled.
This is in a city which got rid of its Democratic mayor last year because some text messages showed he had an affair with someone. And in a state which got rid of its Democratic governor this year because some intercepted phone calls showed he might have been thinking about taking a bribe.

Great line of the day

Salon reports about how William Ayers "confessed" to writing Obama's book and a bunch of right-wing bloggers actually believed him:

The Daily Beast e-mailed Ayers looking for comment, and got this response from him: "You've all lost your minds. Best of luck in the twilight zone.”

Emphasis mine.

Monty Python is 40

So many choices, and just about all of it stands up.

The kitten whisperer strikes again

Like Alison, I thought Harper's musical performance was cute.
But a political master stroke? No, not even close.
For one thing, its pretty tough to rag Ignatieff for being an elitist when there's our Steve playing a grand piano on stage with to Yo Yo Ma.
And the Conservative brain trust probably won't be using any clips in the commercials during the next campaign -- "I need somebody to love" isn't likely to be a Con catchphrase.
Now, if he had been playing The Sting . . .

Shoe shine

My husband was talking today about shining his shoes and now I can't get this great song out of my head


Fred Astaire with Leroy Daniels, a "real-life Los Angeles shoe shiner and sometime actor whose rhythmic shining technique made him the inspiration for the song Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy."

Good, bad, ugly

Good: It's always good when Lance Mannion talks about movies.
Bad: These people are nuts!
Ugly: Even these athletes don't look good wearing this. Canada's ballyhooed Olympic gear looks like the shapeless stuff you find on the sale racks at Zellers ... oh, wait...

Two kinds of people

Emily Yoffe (Dear Prudence) on the difference between phoning and texting:

I think the world is beginning to divide into two groups of people. Those who love to shout into the cell phone that there was too much mayo on the turkey sandwich they had for lunch, and those who prefer to text this crucial information.

Mr. President, we cannot allow a mine-shaft gap!

Right-wing anti-Obama journalist John Perry says if Obama doesn't give the generals more troops for Afghanistan, he should be afraid of a military coup:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic. . . . Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

These people are nuts.

Great line of the day

Nancy Nall says Roman Polanski is guilty, guilty, guilty.

The older I get, the more com­fort­able I am with sit­u­a­tions that are muddy, com­pli­cated, filled with icky peo­ple on both sides but still have a clear right/wrong dis­tinc­tion, and this is one of them. . . . No real prac­ti­cal pur­pose will be served by lock­ing up Polan­ski at this point, but (shrug).

UPDATE: Sorry, I should have included more of Nall's text to explain her view more fully, which is that irregardless of Polanski's record of artistic accomplishments, he should still have to serve out whatever jail term he is given.

All of the above

Rabble is running a poll:

What was the most disturbing thing that came out of the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh last week?
--The heavy-handed police repression of protesters
--The news that Canada would co-host the G20 in 2010
--PM Harper's assertion that Canada 'has no history of colonialism'

Too bad they don't have a button for "all of the above".

What Juan Cole says

Whenever Iran or the Middle East are in the news, I go to Juan Cole to see what he is saying about it. In his piece about Iran's Qom Enrichment Facility he provides a useful summary of the problem:

Julian Borger and Patrick Wintour of the Guardian report that Iran was forced to acknowledge the site because Western intelligence had picked it up in satellite photographs and then gathered information on it by other means. Ahmadinejad is correct in saying that by the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has not done anything illegal, insofar as the site has not gone operational and Iran is giving 6 months notice. However, the Iranian government had additionally pledged to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006 that it would alert the UN to any new new nuclear facility immediately. So Iran may not have broken the law but it has broken its word.
For Iran to break its word on this matter is, moreover, as serious as for it to break the law. (This self-destructive and overly cocky way of proceeding in Tehran was the subject of my column for Salon this week, asking if Ahmadinejad is intent on turning his country into an international pariah.) Iran's enemies, who want it put under severe economic sanctions of the sort that turned Iraq into a fourth-world country, and ideally would like to see the regime in Tehran overthrown-- if necessary by military means-- will point to the secret development of a new enrichment site as a sign of Tehran's essential deviousness.
. . .the law and the facts of the matter are less important than the determination of Europe and the US that Iran not develop even the Japan option. And this Qom facility and the delay in notification are powerful political arrows in the sanctions quiver.

And here's his conclusion:

I am personally opposed to further sanctions on Iran unless they are very carefully targeted so as not to harm ordinary people. Regimes running oil states are not very vulnerable to sanctions. Moreover, sanctions against Iran are deeply unfair if Israel, India and Pakistan are held harmless for ignoring the NPT altogether and for developing their bombs. In fact, the way the UNSC is proceeding against Iran is such as to destroy the NPT, because any country in its right mind would prefer to withdraw from it and just do as it pleases, a la Israel, than to submit to it and have that submission be a pretext for sanctions, even where the signatory country had done nothing contrary to the letter of the law.
Finally, I leave readers with a caveat. There may be less to the Qom plant than meets the eye. Beware the Hype.