Heh.
News photos of President Barack Obama bowing to Japan’s emperor have incensed critics here, who said the US leader should stand tall when representing America overseas. …
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“I don’t know why President Obama thought that was appropriate. Maybe he thought it would play well in Japan. But it’s not appropriate for an American president to bow […]

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Via Atrios, Bob Herbert gets it exactly right.
If Democrats get crushed in the 2010 elections, it won’t be because America has suddenly rediscovered its conservative roots! though wingers like Rush and Glenn Beck will certainly claim this. It will because the jobs situation for a huge chunk of the country sucks, and the Democratic Party […]

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Responding to a conservative blogger who writes about Obama’s supposed lack of love for America, Daniel Larison pens something about Bush that I think is applicable to the broader conservative movement which we’ve battled here for the past however many years:
Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no […]

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Via Sullivan, an interesting comment from Brit Hume in an L.A. Times piece about the Obama-Fox war:
“We may be No. 1, but there is sort of an insurgent quality to Fox News. And that’s kind of our attitude: ‘Hoist a Jolly Roger, pull out our daggers and look for more throats to slit.’
The question, of […]

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Via Sullivan, David Weigel puts his finger on it:
The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk […]

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Taibbi rips Obama and the Democrats. And it’s well-deserved:
We’re coming up on the one- year anniversary of Barack Obama’s election. I think it’s maybe time that we asked ourselves how he’s doing.
He didn’t close Guantanamo Bay, and not only didn’t reject the idea of pre-emptive detention but added spice to his own new version of […]

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You know, it’s great that Obama should go after executive salaries at the companies that got bailout funds and all, but what is this really besides a PR move, some populist window dressing to show America that he’s ticked off too?
Yves Smith:
First, recall Feinberg’s hollow mandate. He is limited to only TARP recipients, not the […]

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Nice piece by Frank Rich on Goldman Sachs, its “blood funnel” (actually Taibbi’s term) - and questions about what Obama actually thinks about all this:
The idea of investing in the real economy — the one that might create jobs for Americans — remains outré in this culture. Credit to small businesses remains tight. The holy […]

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Excellent post by Glenn Greenwald on how conservatism and the GOP under Bush devolved into a cult of personality and how liberalism can avoid the same - and to a large extent already has, in that liberals are far more liable to criticize Obama than conservatives were to criticize Bush.
It’s interesting that one of the right’s […]

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Hilarious. And dead-on.

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Actually, Josh Marshall has the best line on the Obama-Nobel thing:
It’s like when Hitler won the Nobel.
And he’s being snarky. Being serious is Erick Erickson over at RedState.com, who sez this:
I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of […]

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So Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize, and I haven’t been over to Drudge yet, but one can imagine the apoplexy.
I’ve no idea whether Obama “deserves” the prize, what the requirements are, etc. But we do know that this will drive the wingers right around the bend.

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Funny.

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City, who’s now blogging over at TownHall - a right-wing site - asks the question:
Am I a “winger”?

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Joe Klein. That’s gonna leave a mark:
Pete Wehner, like many over at the Commentary blog, suffer from Obama Failure Tourette’s Syndrome…every few hours, like clockwork, they jump up and shout, “He’s Failing! It’s falling apart! He’s cratering!”
I get several e-mails like this every single day of the week. It’s TEH FAILED OBAMA PREZNITZY!!!
And make no […]

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I don’t know that I buy all of this, but portions of it ring a very loud, insistent bell:
Consider America. As good as we are, we have a dark side and our actions often have dark consequences. We are large and cast a large shadow. If we were a more mature people we would simply […]

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Well, I thought it was a tour de force - maybe the best speech I’ve heard him give. There were quite  a few b*tch-slaps in there - the one involving Palin, you could practically hear the contempt dripping from his voice, and given the mendacity of the “death panel” lie, that’s more than appropriate.
I’m not […]

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Via Kos, this is Franklin D. Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith in the NYT:
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S apparent readiness to backtrack on the public insurance option in his health care package is not just a concession to his political opponents — this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has […]

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Pretty soon, it would appear.

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Ain’t this ridiculous? So Obama’s having Gates and the cop who arrested him over at the White House for a brewski - and now this becomes a “controversy”:
Earlier this week the White House indicated each man would drink the beer of their choice — Bud Light for President Obama, Blue Moon for the police officer, […]

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