Wait a second, just wait - has Obama pulled a clever move on me here? His budget seems way too ambitious - in flush times it would seem aggressive, but in current malaise seems down right suicidal - and maybe that's it: he has no expectation of most of his proposals to go anywhere, he in fact doesn't want to even get to try, he wants most of it to be gutted by congress - he then gets to look like he tried to be the great progressive his base yearns for, can blame failures on congress and then is free to pursue a rationally moderate course. Is it possible he's that good a Machievellian? It's a thought - remember, he plans on paying for most of this left wing largesse by assuming the economy's gonna grow at a rate absolutely no one is expecting - is it really credible to believe they're that naive?

Now, don't think when you get right down to it he'd play such a risky game of subterfuge - still, not entirely implausible. Remember, Clinton, under much more favourable economic conditions, had a somewhat ambitiously progressive agenda to begin with and after two years was humbled and forced to moderate and still went on to win a landslide victory in '96 - so certainly plausible that Obama is scheming along those lines. Still, my gut feeling is that he sees himself as the hero of a progressive revolution in America, he imagines that future generations of Democrats will lionize him the way Republicans lionize Reagan and that he and his advisers judge the current economic crisis to be a gift horse whose mouth they decidedly have no intention of peering into.

[story in Politico this morning suggests that both my above suggestions are right - they believe the time is ripe to push through a liberal agenda by leveraging a populist backlash against Wall Street and rich people and they think if they don't really get what they want they can just blame it on congress and get credit for trying. Probably lots of potential pitfalls here but biggest one just outlined by business leader on CNBC: the budget will not incentivize private capital to get back in the market, in fact will have exact opposite effect. You may find whoever runs against Obama in 2012 will be borrowing Clinton's famous tagline from 1992: It's the economy, stupid]

Ha! So nice to be proved right - opinion polls indicate that support for Hamas in Gaza is up since end of war and that if they manage to secure large release of prisoners in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier then hell it'll start to look like they won the thing. To me that invasion was so obviously the wrong move - not, as I said, invasion in general, just that one in particular - makes one wonder how they managed to get it wrong. My guess: the coalitions Israeli politics so often subject - beholden to mucks up decision making process.

With his 'Great Society Redux' budget has Obama demonstrated himself to be the uber liberal I originally feared he was? Get that feeling. Question I'm asking: have they made judgment that they can blame economic woes on rich people and Wall Street and therefore have a populist mechanism for ushering in a liberal agenda like we ain't seen since LBJ was moving his bowels in front of a captive audience? Get that feeling.

addendum: on Kudlow Report young Obama supporter basically confirms this thesis saying essentially who cares if Wall Street is unhappy, Obama's popularity at 65% - someone should tell him that Jimmy Carter's approval rating was at aprox 70% after a month in office - something to look forward to I guess, good golly.

addendumaloosa: just have to say, listening to budget geek at Obama press conference defending tax increases by saying, at pains to say, increases don't kick in for a year therefore ostensibly not during down turn, which I guess would be bad - to which I say: you're admitting tax increases would have a depressing effect - how therefore do you justify applying them then a year from now when, only if all goes well, we will be struggling to rise out of this mess? Makes no sense. You see what I'm saying? You admit tax increases are counter productive under certain conditions and then congratulate yourself for raising taxes under conditions only slightly removed - assuming all goes well - from those certain conditions - makes no fucking sense!

addendadumdum: report in Politico today suggests Pelosi and Obama in conflict because she doesn't think he's pushing a liberal enough agenda. That's a scary thought.

Starting to see evidence that the economic crisis is turning into a idealogical battlefield - and Wall Street's summary rejection of Obamanomics in the form of sharply decreasing values would appear to be a possible manifestation of this conflict. Brooks writes about it in column today, and it's something that I've noticed as well as I watch and listen to the pundits and political operatives vent spleen on rivals: right and left are wondering, are in the throes of an existential conundrum concerning who will be validated and who laid low by events current and yet to come.

I like to think I don't have a particular dog in that fight - but find myself speculating that possibly liberals, sensing an opportunity, are enjoying current dire conditions insomuch as: imagining themselves enlightened folks, it allows them to blame crisis on greed and other crudities while insinuating their high-minded ways would not have fallen so - this may be wrong but is not wholly unreasonable; being ashamed of America and its power and not being fans of power and powerful urges to begin with they possibly enjoy seeing America knocked down a notch or two and, moreover, see in a weakened America the long awaited for chance to remake it in an image more in line with their tastes - remade into a France or something. Certainly, for those who envision Obama as a vanguard for a new world order, fundamental to the establishing of such would be a chastened America. In that sense one hardly need be a communist or even a milquetoast socialist to take pleasure in the fall of Wall Street - just need to be a liberal all giddy with hope.

"... my impression of the state of the economy and the Obama administration's attempts to rescue it... I say impression because as a novitiate in these matters I can't really know, per se... I only have a sense of things... much like a person watching a play from a great distance through a telescope, you can make out the actions and interactions, watch lips move, eyes narrow and brows furrow, but for all that only hazard a guess as to what the damn thing's about... and I would guess this: that at least seventy-five percent of the stimulus plan is a waste of money doomed in the long run to do more harm than good and that will be paid for in part by taking money away from the military, with the effects of which no doubt fated to come back and haunt; that it's foolish to keep the housing market artificially inflated by trying to save the mortgages of people who can't really afford them - I don't see how trying to slow the release of noxious gas from the housing bubble makes any sense... I mean I see how declining values can have a cancerous effect on other values and increase toxicity of assets already toxic enough... still, I don't see how government can ad hoc fix housing prices that will be viewed as legitimate by the market or legitimately arbitrate whose mortgage is worth saving and whose isn't... you're telling me the government is going to tell some poor black family they have to move back to the projects because in objective terms they can't really afford the house they we're duped into buying?... no fucking way... although, if the government ends up taking over the banks in whole or part they'll end up owning the CDOs which means they'll end up owning the mortages anyway which means... I don't know what the fuck it means... ; that, despite the importance of trying to stem the rising unemployment tide, GM and Chrysler should be allowed to fail, declare bankruptcy and begin again within the context of much more viable business models - throwing money at them is akin to tossing good meat to a sick bear chained in your backyard so one day it can get just healthy enough to wriggle free and eat you; that when you get right down to essentials all that really matters is bringing the banking system back to life and that the only way to do that is to kill the bad banks off or kill off the bad assets weighing them down... no idea how you do that but the slow creep of an inevitable nationalization, which seems to be the case now, is decidedly not the answer... if certain banks have to fall let them fall - otherwise spell out the methodology for getting toxic assets off the books... Bernake states that Geitner's plan will work but they've been so laggard in releasing details about how it will work one begins to wonder if maybe they don't know!... anyway, anyway... whatever happens it will be painful, no doubt very painful... but one gets the feeling that too much of what Obama and the democrats are proposing sounds like the spin of people who have ulterior motives trying to convince us that it doesn't have to be so depressingly painful after all... but I think it does and misguided attempts to avoid that reality will just make things worse... true, Obama is on the one hand talking about hardship and travails etc etc - but then with the other hand he's throwing out inchoate trillion dollar promises of salvation, creating an environment of dread and uncertainty and suspicion that has pissed off Wall Street and done little to raise prospects on Main... or so goes the impression I'm getting..."

Interesting - somewhat, anyways - report in Politico concerning lack of CEO types in Obama White House - this dovetails nicely with story that in drafting their stimulus and bank rescue and mortgage relief plans they seemed to make it a matter of policy not to include actual business people in the discussions - which dovetails nicely with fact that all three of those initiatives have been greeted by steep declines and growing protestations of opposition on Wall Street - which dovetails nicely with my oft stated warning that if Obama tries to govern like an intellectual, especially an intellectual with pronounced liberal biases, if he tries to replicate as president the intellectual environment he knew and no doubt savoured as an academic, then we could be in a world of shit here. Certainly there's a world of shit feel to things at the moment.

But does his decision to send a division size 'surge' of troops to Afghanistan counter this sense of a left wing intellectual miasma hanging over ye body politik? Dunno - seems to be some impression out there that this commitment ad hoc in nature - there were reports about exteme rethink going on viz Afghanistan but surge comes without any real declaration of such. Times does report this morning that UAV attacks in Pakistani tribal regions are up this month, which could signal either a more aggressive military posture against Islamists or conversely an attempt to force Pakistan into a more aggressive military posture viz same. Certainly, increased UAV hits are gonna put civilian gov't in Islamabad, which so far has shown itself to be quite spineless, in a delicate position and will most definitely rile up the baddies - so to do such without having some kind of strategy in mind would be a tad dangerous.

Still, I do worry that it's simply a case of Obama realising that having committed to a more aggressive Afghan policy during the election he cannot now back down from it without signaling a potentially ruinous weakness to the evil doers. [and now word comes out that The Big O plans on mitigating burgeoning budget deficits by, among other things, cutting back in military expenditures, re Iraq and Afghanistan - so more confusion the way I read it]

re wistful attempts to defend the stimulus plan:

"... Pascal's wager would not be much help if by choosing to believe in God you increased the likelihood that Satan might be especially motivated to hunt you down and devour your soul - in that spirit Clark does not address argument that over the long haul the stimulus can do more harm than good, his assumptions are all akin to saying not much to lose should stimulus prove ineffective so why not give it a try, a logic that like Pascal's makes the mistake of assuming Satan to be a neutral player..."

"... well, you see, not to be glib of course, but I was reading a story about Somalia, about what a god awful place it is, possibly beyond hope, and how dangerous that hopelessness could potentially be, engendering as it does a most virulent strain of extremism... and I was just thinking, ya know, from a cost/benefit point of view... wondering, would it really be all that wrong just to drop a nuke on the place?... I mean once you sort of have time to get used to the wholesale carnage involved... would it really be that wrong a thing to do? And then of course I started thinking... ya know, wondering about applying a similar cost/benefit analysis to various scenarios... I started thinking 'Hell, there's probably a few places in the world that if ya gave 'em a good nuking it'd be hard to argue against the benefits that could accrue'... once you got past the carnage of course..."

... opinions on Obama apparently delaying action on Afghan troop 'surge' decision despite fact that several high placed officers intimated decision was close at hand? Spin is Obama thoroughly going over issues, ruthlessly deliberating over advice and policy input from the military - ie, doing exact opposite of how Dubbya was perceived to have made such decisions. Mere show? Classic liberal distrust of military establishment? The deadlock of over debating a problem out of fear of making a mistake on such a weighty issue? Doesn't even have to be fear, just realisation that foreign policy debates are not as easily adjudicated as domestic policy debates by simple application of ideological dogma? Or actually a case of responsible due diligence?

Dunno - certainly Gates has been advocating a thorough rethink of the whole Afghan policy so could simply be a reflection of that. Very hard to say - two points though: one, Obama talked up Afghan surge during campaign and therefore to step back now would represent his first serious foreign policy stumble insomuch as potentially undermines military credibility; two, I said at the time his talking up Afghanistan was a load of crap - since he'd built his campaign around opposing the Iraq war the only way he could project military gravitas was to talk tough on Afghanistan but now finds himself at the point where actions have dire consequences and rhetorical flourishes only serve to confuse and obscure that reality.

Again, hard to say what's what here - but am struck by how press only seems to see the ostensible positives of this endless rumination when the potential negatives are so clearly there.

Ok, had enough of this - heard again from liberal, or maybe even wasn't a liberal, whatever - some so called expert going on about how Obama's approach to foreign policy will be an improvement over Bush's because he recognizes that America can't do it alone and therefore is willing to accommodate other view points etc etc etc and how this will make foreign partners more willing to participate - subtext: they'll like us more now because we're becoming more like them. This is idiocy: countries cooperate out of self interest and therefore it is incumbent upon America to make the parameters of that self interest evident as regards itself because what other countries see as important may work to the disadvantage of America - in short, like has nothing to do with it. That your partners have to be happy in some to be determined context is obviously true, but America must substantially dictate that context if it wants to lead and as the most powerful member it has no choice but to lead.

I'm not gonna sit here and judge Obama's presidency after one bloody month [although concerns are rising] but this constant wrapping of the man and his supposed 'approach' to things in this new age gauze is quite frankly disturbing - and full of dangers, the way I see it.

Gregg, the republican, dumps out of joining Obama bipartisan cabinet - some seem to think this is bad for Obama, but I think on contrary good for him and possibly exactly what he was scheming for: if his whole bipartisan thing is a lie, a ruse, which I believe it is, then to have made the 'gesture' only to be spurned by the republicans allows Obama to have cake and eat the bastard too, ie he looks noble and high minded but now has the license to be as partisan as his little heart desires. That he lacks a filibuster proof majority is a problem but the democrats have a ton of cash with which to take their case directly to the people and a president whose only demonstrable skill is giving speeches.

Then again another way to look at it is the republicans are teasing Obama to the left, stranding him on Liberal Fantasy Island with only Pelosi and Reid to keep him company - that could turn ugly for sure - just look how Pelosi screwed him with the porked up stimulus plan [only a screwing if he didn't agree with it and no indication that's the case - in fact maybe he's quite happy to pursue a liberal agenda using insufferable Nancy as his proxy and taking the heat].

Iran ostensibly being open to Obama's offer to 'talk' is being reported in some circles as a great step forward, as proof positive that the 'Obama way' will secure a mutually beneficial understanding - ah, horse shit. Iran has to seem receptive otherwise any future intransigence will look irrational - but the current regime wants the bomb, pure and simple, and no amount of talk is gonna change that. You may be able to float the argument that us making nice with them is merely an attempt to influence the population with the hope that they are approaching the point where they may be willing to reject the machinations of the theocrats and tentatively embrace the West - ok, I wouldn't call that nuts, putting on a good face may have future value - but rest assured that any meaningful conversation Iran and the US are gonna have will only come after one of them has capitulated, and also be rest assured that it will only ever be acceptable if Iran is the one that folds, I don't care what Obama says or thinks or thinks he says. So put your skirts back on, ladies.

Ok, I really don't get it - I watched Obama's presser last night and the man is absolutely fucking ponderous - where does all this praise for his speaking style come from? Sure, he does a damn fine job of reading off the prompter [and what the hell was he doing using a prompter at a press conference?!] - but so did Palin, in fact think she was better quite frankly, and now she's just the butt of 'stupid' jokes - whereas Obama is lionized to a rank somewhere between Pericles and Abe - but tell you one thing for sure, that long-winded, circumloquacious bastard could whittle away at his inveterate prolixity for ages and still not come close to the perfect brevity of a Gettysburg. Nearly sprained my face I was rolling my eyes so much. It's so obvious to me that when the man answers a question his whole focus is on sounding like his reply is ripe with substance, of projecting that image - but generally once you get past the rhetorical tricks you're left with something quite hollow - many of his answers last night were simplistic recitations of left wing talking points larded with clause after dependent clause of near gibberish - but he sounded good, or so it would seem. Now I'm not denying that Obama is a major step up from the sophomoric inanities Bush would fumble through - but still, I flat out don't get it. There's a decidedly irrational element to all this Obama worship.

Then again, it is possible to look at it a different way: that by being distinctly partisan last night, under the guise of sincerely wishing it didn't have to be that way, and thereby owning this stimulus, he could be playing a quite clever game of leaving the republicans seriously exposed should things turn around. After all, the stimulus could be a complete waste of money but if things improve it's gonna be hard to demonstrate that - a very risky game for sure, since a similar but different and possibly greater benefit could fall to the GOP should the turn around not materialize - but potentially a huge payoff.

Aside from some putative tactical 'brilliance' though - I still can't stand the way the guy pontificates - the tightened lips, the raised chin, the eyes narrowed as if he's staring right into the heart of things - very grating stuff and I'm astounded that so few seem to share my displeasure.

What to make of the Zinni screw up? As one anonymous and yet despite that supposedly prominent Democratic insider suggested - just amateur hour on the part of a jejune administration still looking to find its footing? Possibly. Or... maybe symptomatic of a governing style? I've been saying for awhile that Obama's tendency to dance around an argument, to seek many angles and opinions, to come across as so exquisitely rational, which some - most have interpreted as a good thing, may in fact be disingenuous, an illusion meant to distract - or worse, an attempt to in a sense avoid answers by appearing you've got it all covered. Sounds a bit over wrought and conspiratorial I guess, but when I read about all the layers of mediation between staff at the White House and how the Zinni screw up was a result of too many chefs, not enough soup or some other genus of over analyzed gruel - what comes to my mind is not a dysfunctional kitchen [what the hell are you talking about?] but rather a very elaborate [should I say almost Kafkaesque? No, should not - ironically a post and riposte vaguely K-like in its] game of three-card Monte - although, if there's some truth to my suspicions, whether or not Obama is trying to con himself or the giddy legion following after him, I can't say. Suppose no reason couldn't be both.

Obama and his stimulus plan - on the idea of a fiscal Hail Mary to try and slow the decline, I guess I can see the point of that, although there are appealing arguments around that seem to suggest that in the long run, as regards burgeoning debt, will do more harm than good, especially if the plan is flawed, which, to an uninitiated outsider, this one seems to be - but then that's [one of] the problem[s]: subject too complicated to allow for much comment from non-specialists - and when you consider the specialists themselves seem flummoxed - well - although some of the flaws seem so obvious as to give any somewhat rational person pause - and then regardless of the merits they've done such a piss poor job of selling it - people are being left with the notion that the plan can or will rescue the economy which it most assuredly will not - merely a palliative - the real cure lies with daunting tasks of fixing the banks and securing the housing market [if I imagine myself understanding what I think I'm reading].

But I'm more struck by Obama's attitude and what maybe is being revealed - ie, one, that his show of centrism is a bluff and that he is in fact a lefty; two, that he seems sincerely pissed off that republicans are making life difficult for him and this possibly reveals a truth regarding his ego and its fragility; and three, that he is so willing to own this plan - given that its eventual efficacy is very much in doubt, the smart play seems to be to allow the republicans their two cents - just a rookie mistake or again does it say something about his character? That he started out making soothing sounds of bipartisanship re getting the plan passed and now has resorted to shows of outrage and the making of threats which foolishly suggest we're all doomed if this plan isn't passed forthwith - well, interesting turn, no? Geez, if I didn't know better I'd say it looked like he was engaging in partisan politics at its cynical worst [best?] - not that I ever bought his whole new world order yes we can we're all in this together crap - guess I'm just a little surprised that the veil has fallen so quickly.

See A.Q. Khan released from prison - well, house arrest - a house arrest that allowed him to travel abroad on occasion - nice how the Pakistanis took his crimes so seriously.

But that's because he's a hero in Pakistan - which makes one wonder [aside from a general disgust viz the species] if Israel for instance chooses to send a bullet careening through his big brain how bad will the fallout [sorry] be? Cause everyone's gonna suspect Israel should he succumb to a serious bout of lead poisoning - the Jews or the Yanks - either way a load of caterwauling from Muslims should it come to pass I reckon...

"... oh, shit, if you're winning, people will support a war since it's not war itself but uncertainty concerning the outcome that bothers them... well, sure, certain feminine types will always get queasy... but in the main it's uncertainty that hurts... and those vexing, annoying issues of right and wrong... which is why, even when losing, support can linger as a way of keeping at bay nasty questions... people have a strong need to rally to a cause if the cause is existential in nature... which is why people always in general tend to believe they're in the right when they go to war, they're compelled by their natures to do so... and why, the more righteous the cause, the greater the likelihood that something is wrong..."