Mark Schmitt, November 17, 2008:

The massive resistance Republicans posed to Clinton in 1993 is impossible to imagine today. The Republican coalition is utterly shattered, and the angry white Palin wing of the party, for all its visibility, is a minority even within a minority. [. . .] Obama, like other reconstructive leaders, will have to challenge some of the assumptions and institutions that come from the old era, just as FDR couldn't make lasting change until he had broken the Supreme Court's prevailing beliefs about the limits to government involvement in the economy. In one of the first articles about Obama's political career, from when he was first running for the Illinois Senate in 1995, he is quoted as telling the crowd that "it's time for politicians and other leaders to ... see voters, residents, or citizens as producers of change. ... What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?"

Fast forward to September 7, 2010, Steve Benen complaining about the WaPo:

Wipeout:

Two months before the 2010 midterm elections, likely voters now favor the Republican over the Democratic candidate in their congressional district by 53-40 percent, the widest GOP margin on record in ABC News/Washington Post polls since 1981.

The economy is why.

Speaking for me only

Update: The Dove Center has been denied a permit to build a bonfire. It says it will proceed anyway. Can't they be arrested? Too bad it's not considered arson, then they could be denied bond. The damage they are causing is serious. In Afghanistan, they believe the entire U.S. is behind this:

"We know this is not just the decision of a church. It is the decision of the president and the entire United States," said Abdul Shakoor, an 18-year-old high school student who said he joined the protest after hearing neighborhood gossip about the Quran burning.

There are calls for death to Obama and the U.S.

Protesters, who gathered in front of western Kabul's Milad ul-Nabi mosque, raised placards and flags emblazoned with slogans calling for the death of Obama, while police looked on.

I do not think this is free speech. It's intended to provoke, and capable of provoking, a violent response with resulting injury or death. Terry Jones is not a Christian, he's a hate-monger, a radical and a charlatan. I hope people stop imbuing him with a sense of legitimacy by referring to his group as a church. It's a radical, fundamental sect and there's nothing Christian about it. [More...]

Intemperate?

[T]he covert theocratic agenda of the [Beck] coalition needs to be emphatically pointed out to the American People at every possible moment[. . . .] The fundamental fact is that most Americans [. . .] don't want to live in a "Christian Nation" theocracy and they need to be shown that this is indeed the covert agenda of Beck and his ominously named "Black Robed Regiments."

An excerpt from Markos' "American Taliban"? No, that's Ed Kilgore of the Democratic Strategist. Will weenie liberals condemn this intemperate attack? (FTR, I think Beck's agenda is to make a lot of money.)

Speaking for me only

Oliver Willis:

No doubt the accomodationist left will clutch their pearls and the righties will reach for their fainting couches, but Petraeus is spot on.

Gen. David H. Petraeus on Tuesday denounced plans by a Florida church to burn copies of the Koran this weekend, saying the demonstration could ‘endanger troops’ and damage the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. ‘It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems,’ Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said in a statement.

(Emphasis mine.) Now what, weenie liberals? FTR, I do not think Petraeus should be commenting on this in any way. I am not offended by his comparison, but I think the military should not be making comments on these types of events. Stick to discussing military policy issues (I realize that he see this as a military policy issue, but it is too close to discussing what is acceptable speech for me.)

Speaking for me only

Demand is the bottom line. I'll hire more people when there is more demand for my product. - New Jersey small business owner

I spent some time yesterday with a small business owner in New Jersey and I asked him about the different tax incentive proposals being bandied about by the Obama Administration. His reaction? He'll take the the extra money but it won't spur him to hire workers or make capital investments. What will? He said "demand is the bottom line. When demand for my product goes up, then I'll increase capacity, by hiring or making capital investments."

This sentiment echoes the expressions of former Bush Treasury Secretary and Alcoa chairman Paul O'Neill ("I had a rule when I was in the private sector for 25 years, including 13 running Alcoa, and that is, don't hire people unless you have somebody demanding goods that you can't produce with the people you already have.") Robert Reich makes a similar point:

Obama's Former Budget Director:

In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.

(Emphasis supplied.) It should not require giving the wealthy and corporations a tax cut in order to give the middle class a tax cut. Only the political incompetence of Democrats and their bureaucrats would make this so. It is at the heart of the political and policy failure of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress on the economy. Peter Orzag's first column for The New York Times illustrates why the Dems are poised to receive a crushing defeat in November. There are other flaws in Orzag's analysis:

Anyone else feel like tonight is Sunday? I'm even doing laundry while catching up on the TV shows I missed the past few days.

I see Obama is proposing a new spending bill to make jobs. (Reuter's Factbox on the proposal is here.] Either I'm still in holiday mode or I don't care much what he does, it's too little too late.

Obama announced a proposal to spend $50 billion in the next year on roads, railroads and airport runways. The modernization plan, a more formal version of a long-standing pledge to improve the nation's crumbling infrastructure, is one of several economic proposals he is to make this week.

[More...]

In the October issue of Vanity Fair, a new expose on Sarah Palin.

The Guardian has the highlights in case you don't want to wade through it:

• She managed to spend $3,000 (of campaign funds) on underwear (including Spandex girdles). More on the shopping spree here.
• She calls on angels to protect her from demonic attacks
• She's a bad tipper
• Her Facebook and Twitter feeds may be ghost-written
• The McCain Campaign gave her books to increase her learning curve on issues
• She doesn't hunt

Sarah's response, according to the Guardian: [More...]

De Telegraaf reporter John van den Heuvel interviewed Joran Van der Sloot at Miguel Castro Castro prison last week. The interview is airing on the program "RTL Extra: Joran Speaks" in the Netherlands this evening. This promo for it is pretty funny, you don't even have to understand Dutch to get the point -- or the hype.

Aside from Joran saying he accepted Natalie Holloway's mother's offer of money because she had made his life miserable for five years, there's not much new.

Joran is locked down 23 hours a day. He teaches English to the prison guards in his cell. He's looking forward to moving to the "foreigner's wing" of the prison soon because he won't be so isolated. He's not fearful of the move. [More...]

HBO's new original series, Boardwalk Empire, starring Steve Buscemi, takes place in Atlantic City in 1920. (Full cast and character descriptions here.)If it sounds like the Sopranos in an earlier time era, it may be because Terence Winter and Martin Scorcese are involved.

Will reliving Prohibition's spectacular failure every week reduce enthusiasm for the War on Drugs? It's hard to miss the connection.

The show starts Sept. 19, and from the many trailers, available on You Tube (I skipped the one in the Times, it's preceded by a long commercial), the show looks like a winner. HBO could use a winner after Treme, which I thought was a dud.

(Larger version here.)

I'm back from Aspen. Sunday was another spectacular day. I took these photos of the Roaring Fork River during a morning walk that began in Jaffe Park, about a mile from Woody Creek. The trail runs along the east side of the Roaring Fork River, just south of the Smith Road bridge and joins up with the Rio Grande trail, that takes you into Aspen. (The Rio Grande trail extends 41 miles, from Aspen to Glenwood Springs.)

More photos here and here . [More...]