November 2008 Archives

Thanksgiving is always a wonderful time of year, but this year for the first time in a long time we've got a lot to be thankful for on the political level.

Here's just some of the things worth celebrating today:

• 67 million: The number of votes cast for Barack Obama
• Less than 8: The number of weeks left in the Bush Presidency
• 140,000: The number of American troops serving in Iraq who can begin looking towards the day they will return home.
• $700 billlion: The size of the FDR-style stimulus plan being considered by some Senate Democrats
• 66%: Percentage of young voters who supported Obama
• 42: The maximum number of Republican Senators
• 255: The minimum number of Democratic Representatives
• 29: The number of Democratic governorships
• 6.5 million: The number of donations made online to Barack Obama's campaign
• $80: The average size of those donations.
• Half a billion dollars: The amount of money raised by the Obama fundraising juggernaut
• At least 6: The number of solo national TV interviews conducated by Sarah Palin since the election.
• 3: The number of solo national TV interviews conducted by Palin before the election.
• 0: The number of press conferences held by Sarah Palin during the campaign.
• More than 0 but less than 1: The number of press conferences held by Sarah Palin since the campaign ended.
• 4: My favorite excuse in Dave's top 10 list of Sarah Palin's turkey slaughter excuses.
• Infinite: The amount of laughter Sarah Palin's post-election foibles have brought to America.
• 35%: Percentage of CT voters who say they would re-elect Joe Lieberman in 2012.
• 4 out of the last 5: Presidential elections in which the popular vote was won by the Democratic candidate.
• 4 out of last 4: Days in which the stock market has gone up
• 4 out of last 4: Days in which Barack Obama has made a major economic policy announcement.
• 13 out of 24: Seats held by women in New Hampshire's state senate
• 27: Number of state legislatures in which Democrats control both chambers
• 0: The number of turkeys pardoned by this post.
• 0: The number of turkeys slaughtered by this post.
• 54: The number of days until Barack Obama is President of the United States Of America

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today marks the third and final day of President-elect Obama's economic team rollout, and the headline announcement is the creation of a White House economic review board, of which former Fed chief Paul Volcker will serve as chairman and University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee will serve as staff director.

This announcement, of course, brings to mind one of the funnier moments from the campaign: the mini-debate between Goolsbee and McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz Eakin in which Goolsbee fired off a string of one-liners including the accusation that the list of ingredients on a box of Fruit Loops had more details in it than McCain's economic plan. Here's video for your viewing pleasure:

I just finished 24: Redemption (from DVR), and man, was it a letdown. My problem wasn't with the quality of the production, or anything like that. In fact, if anything, that was better than normal.

My beef is that it wasn't obvious to me that this was just a 2 hours special until about 2/3 of the way through the show. Maybe it was obvious to everbody else, but I had been under the impression that this was the beginning of the new season. Nope, it's not. It was just a random two hours of 24...which is kind of an oxymoron.

So that means we might as well have called this "two" or "one-twelth" or "two-twentyfourths." Or maybe just the mother of all bait-and-switches.

Whatever, I shouldn't complain. TV hasn't been decent since the Sopranos went off the air anyway!

In other news, I'm about to head to Seattle for a few days for Thanksgiving. I'll probably be posting to some extent, but until after the holiday weekend, things will be fairly sporadic.

I don't know what's cooler: Nevada's GOP Lt. Gov. says he'll be indicted but is till considered a top candidate for U.S. Senate...or that YouTube has gone widescreen (the video plays in 16:9 format, even though the splash image is messed up):

genderanalyzer.com claims to be able to determine whether a website author is male or female.

It got jedreport.com right -- 91% male.

On the other hand -- and I suppose it could be right about this -- it thought there was 98% chance that Playboy.com was written by a woman.

Don't tell anybody, but Obama is actually a progressive. Greg Sargent captures an important dynamic:

This is probably too obvious to point out, but the game here is that Obama is working to frame GOP obstructionism in advance. By simultaneously claiming a mandate while approaching Republicans with "humility" and a request for their help, Obama is boxing out Republican opponents in advance, laying the groundwork to cast them as partisan and hostile to the people's will.

That's why it's still lost on yours truly why people are seeing Obama as "centrist" based on his bipartisan gestures and tone or his "pragmatic" staff pickes. This stuff is just about positioning in advance, and the real tell will lie in his actual policies.

For years, decades in fact, bipartisanship has meant that Democrats should do what the GOP wants. Now, Obama is turning that on its head. Bipartisanship now means that Republicans have every right to get out of the way and help the new government -- which happens to be a Democratic one -- do the business that they were elected to do.

Yowzahs, she's a darn fool, ain't she?

I've been a little confused over the past few weeks as folks have debated whether or not the Obama Administration will be "delaying" the tax increase planned for upper-income taxpayers.

It was my understanding that Obama's plan all along was to simply wait for the tax cuts to expire. (Recall that Bush made his tax cuts temporary as a budgeting gimmick. Unless extended, they expire in 2011.)

I might have this wrong -- it could have been that he planned to accelerate their demise by one year. But I'm fairly confident that he didn't ever plan to immediately seek to rollback the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, because I remember John Edwards having a more aggressive schedule than either Obama or Clinton.

Keith O. is back on air (nice to have him back, though David Shuster was pretty good in his absence) -- and he's going to watch Palin's turkey of an interview all over again. Was this her jump the turkey moment? Har...

Update: 5:36PM -- They took the blur away too.

Update: 6:02PM. I hadn't noticed this wink until just now. Hah!

Mark Halperin is now calling coverage of the 2008 campaign "the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," saying that it was "extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Apparently, in Mark Halperin's tin-foil world, most political reporters in 2008 were biased for Obama because of their hidden desire "to see his face etched in stain glass and on Mt. Rushmore simultaneously."

Wingnuts will love it, but how will other reporters take to Mark Halperin throwing them under Rush Limbaugh's bus?

I thought this was the key point of President-elect Obama's economic team announcement this morning:

I want to see it enacted right away. It is going to be of a size and scope that is necessary to get this economy back on track. ... I think the most important thing to recognize is that we have a consensus, which is pretty rare between conservative economists and liberal economists that we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape, and that is focused on the 2.5 million jobs that I intend to create during the first part of my administration. We have to put people back to work.

Here's video:

A bit late getting up, but MSNBC has a live feed:

Update (9:53AM): Live broadcast over.

In the meantime, a bit of Rahmbo:

So the Feds are guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup assets and pumping another $20 billion into Citi's coffers. Well, I can't say that I blame Citi for getting what it can during this climate.

What I can say is that the stimulus plan had better be closer to $1 trillion than $500 billion, because the thing that is really going to set this economy going and get things balanced again is putting people back to work, modernizing our infrastructure, and building a new energy economy. And while we're at it, we've got to make sure that we pay as much attention to the need for health care reform as we are to the need for a stable banking system.

The bottom-line is that average Americans need to see some of the benefits of all this bailing out, and they need to see it soon.

What an accomplishment:

Florida State safety Myron Rolle was awarded a Rhodes scholarship Saturday. He is the first major-college football player of his generation to win what is considered the world's most prestigious postgraduate academic scholarship.

Now he has to decide between heading to Oxford or entering the NFL draft.

...24 premieres in 4 minutes. (Yes, it's a guilty pleasure. I love that show. And Entourage, too.)

Earlier this week I posted speculative take on the political factors that may have come into play in the apparent appointment of Gov. Napolitano to be DHS Secretary.

Leaving aside the substantive reasont to appoint her to the post, the basic political issue is that by bringing her to DHS, the most likely challenger to John McCain in 2010 is now out of the equation, giving him a much easier path to re-election. (The governer had led McCain in some polls by as much as 8 points.)

My conjecture was that given the timing of Obama's meeting with McCain, the swift moves by McCain to seek re-election, and the leak one day later that Napolitano was headed for DHS, it seemed likely that Obama and McCain had reached some sort of agreement: McCain would support key elements of Obama's agenda (most likely on energy and global warming), and Obama would help clear McCain's path to staying in the Senate.

If I'm right, there's nothing nefarious about it at all. This would be a classic example of presidential politics at its best, in fact: aligning personal interests of an ambitious senator with the national interest.

In fact, one of Obama's greatest strengths -- in my view, at least -- is that I think he really understands how to aquire and exercise power. He's not always the greatest glad-hander or back-slapper, but he consistently makes good strategic decisions, and this would be one.

Now that's a long preamble to the point of this post. Let's continue with the assumption that there was some sort of an arrangement between Obama and McCain. The substantive payoffs are obvious, as long McCain keeps up his end of the bargain.

The question is, on a political level, what has Obama given up -- if anything? It turns out that Obama probably hasn't given up anything at all.

First, it's entirely possible that no matter what he was going to select Napolitano for his cabinet. If that's true, he basically got something for nothing.

Second, and more importantly, John McCain isn't Arizona's only Republican Senator -- there's also John Kyl.

John Kyl is up in 2012, and 2012 would be a perfect time for Napolitano to run for U.S. Senate, after serving 3+ years as DHS Secretary and with the support of Obama's groundgame in Arizona.

Moreover, as obnoxious a campaign as McCain ran, as horrible a President he would have been, John McCain is a better senator than John Kyl. (And not just because Sarah Palin isn't on McCain's senate staff!)

If I had the opportunity to choose who to replace, Kyl or McCain, it would be Kyl in a heartbeat. And my bet is that's exactly how things are going to play out, with the added bonus of McCain being helpful on energy and global warming issues.

According to the pool report, President-elect Barack Obama is playing hoops this afternoon in Chicago, where the weather is sunny and bright and a crisp 41 degrees.

...watching Joe Lieberman suck up to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party was enjoyable this morning, at least as far as watching Joe Lieberman can ever be enjoyable.

I'm guaranteeing a loss (for the 'Hawks) in today's game against Washington.

Now if that's not bulletin board material...

I'm experimenting with a new Flash Video player -- hopefully this works for you (it's a bit clunky right now, but it can play stuff that other players can't).