Nation-Building

The GOP is in full obstructionist mode regarding the economic stimulus plan - there's an excellent summary at myDD of the GOP's general strategy:

The GOP's main contention has been now for over 30 years that by reducing the top tax rate on personal and corporate income that a large increase in aggregate total savings would result. Yet the savings rate of American households has been declining for more than a decade and it now stands at the lowest level of the post-WW II era. Since 2003, the combined annual net savings of households, businesses, and government have declined to about one percent of gross national income. So if increasing the savings rate is the goal so as to thus increase investment, cutting taxes hasn't worked.

And yet the GOP continues to pitch the idea that tax cuts lift the economy. Well, the Democrats are batting now and they shouldn't swing at balls outside the strike zone. To continue the metaphor, this is the GOP's set up pitch. They want the stimulus to fail and they know full well that the gravity of the situation portends an extended economic downturn that they will look to blame increasingly on the Democrats on the hope that Americans have short memories when it comes to assigning blame. That's their game plan. They want the President and the Democrats to strike out. Tax cuts pacifies their base but not ours and doubly does next to nothing when it comes to lifting the economy. For them, it's a win-win. But it's a lose-lose for the American people.

The reality is the tax cutting regimen has been a race to the bottom for most Americans. The top 300,000 Americans collectively now enjoy almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980 and equaling levels not seen since just before the onset of the Great Depression. Earlier this year, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report finding that 70 percent of the benefits of the capital gains and dividends loopholes will go to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers in 2009. Same as it ever was for the GOP. The game is the same as always, starve the government of funds and you might just prevent a national health care system. It's time for a different course.

A different course indeed - and Obama has the popular mandate to do so. As Obama said to the GOP leadership (in a meeting on his second day as president - unprecedented!) - "I won."

“We just have a difference here, and I’m president,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Cantor, according to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who was at the meeting.

Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Obama was being lighthearted and that lawmakers of both parties had laughed.

Mr. Cantor, in an interview later, had a similar recollection. He said the president had told him, “You’re correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won, so we’re going to prevail on that.”

“He was very straightforward,” Cantor added. “There was no disrespect, but it was very matter-of-fact.”

In other words, it's time to try something different and there isn't any reason to play by the GOP playbook anymore. That's what winning entails: elections have consequences, regardless of what the sore losers whine about.

Labels: economy, President Obama, Republicans

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More Obama Derangement Syndrome, this time from Leon at RedState, who labels Obama as "corrupt" and "morally deparaved":

as we will remember in two short days, all is not morally well in America. Barack Obama is sure to have a lengthy honeymoon with many people, who will be willing to overlook his essential moral emptiness for as long as it appears that he is doing a competent job of running his Administration. As for me, it is my hope for America that Obama’s moral emptiness will be exposed through his actions for all to see, and in such a way that we will not continue to allow ourselves to sweep it under the rug.

I anticipate that after Obama's (second) term as president ends, these will be the same voices calling for him to be impeached.

Labels: Obama Derangement Syndrome, Redstate

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The Senate testimony of Steven Chu for Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration gave a very specific, detailed look at how the new Administration will treat nuclear energy as a priority. The NEI Nuclear Notes blog, which follows the commercial energy industry, has compiled a list of excerpts from the testimony in which Chu is questioned on specifics about how he would promote nuclear power. Chu answered a number of questions from Senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, about the various issues including waste storage and loan guarantees. I think this final back and forth with Senator Mary Landrieu served as a good summary:

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA): My question is, to follow-up, and I ask this, because, not because it hadn’t been asked ten times to you this morning, but I think, in asking, you’ll understand how many of us feel about nuclear. You’ve had a least six or seven questions. Mine’s going to be the eighth. It’s just apparent to us, mainly based on the great leadership of Senator Domenici, who is with us, I think, this morning, and others, the importance of getting off the dime on nuclear. So would you just briefly state again what are your number one, number two, and number three strategies to move us forward on nuclear?

Steven Chu: The first is to accelerate this loan guarantee program for the several [new] nuclear reactors, their need to start, to restart the nuclear industry. So that, certainly, you’ve got to get going as you say. I agree with you, Senator. The other question, and it’s a concern of other Senators, is that we need to develop a long range plan for the safe disposal of the waste. And this is something that’s the responsibility of the Department of Energy. And that has to go forward as well, because you have to develop that concurrently with the starting of this industry again. And so those are [inaudible], in my mind, the two highest priorities. The third is that there is research that has to be done. Again, because reprocessing has the potential for greatly reducing both the amount and lifetime of the waste and to extend the nuclear fuel.

Sen. Landrieu: Well can we, can this committee count on you to go to bat in the atmosphere of these troubled financial markets? Can we count on you to go to bat with the Administration to make sure that the energy sector of this country is given priority, in terms of stabilizing markets so that we can get a lot of this done with government, you know, not being done by the government but supported by the government?

Steven Chu: Yes. It’s been said again and again on the importance, for example, of that $18.5 billion loan guarantee program that to start moving in that direction.

That's a very refreshing attitude. It should be noted that we are, as seemingly always, behind the Chinese when it comes to commercializing nuclear energy:

While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People's Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won't be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.

To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.

The pebble-bed design is the future of nuclear energy and as the excellent article in Wired points out, makes the traditional nuclear industry obsolete. We need to catch up, and quickly.

Labels: environment, Nuclear, President Obama

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Obama Derangement Syndrome is here to stay. This lunatic says that Obama is "evil" and prays for the President to fail:

I do not hesitate today in calling on godly Americans to pray that Barack Hussein Obama fail in his efforts to change our country from one anchored on self-governance and constitutional republicanism to one based on the raw and unlimited power of the central state.

It would be folly to pray for his success in such an evil campaign.

I want Obama to fail because his agenda is 100 percent at odds with God's. Pretending it is not simply makes a mockery of God's straightforward Commandments.
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Nowhere in the Bible does it teach us to obey evil rulers. Nowhere.

This is a time for principled biblical resistance, not phony Christian appeasement.

To summarize, Obama wants "unlimited central government" and he is evil because this conflicts with the Commandments (I must have missed the one where it says, Thou Shalt Not Vote Democrat).

This is rather poor sport of me, nutpicking like this, but it serves a useful purpose in pointing out that there is a regressive resistant core of idiocy, racism, and intolerance in every society, no matter how enlightened the mainstream is. This guy's ravings would do Mullah Omar or Osama bin Laden proud.

Labels: Obama Derangement Syndrome

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During the election, the McCain campaign slogan was "Country First". This was seized upon with glee by GOP partisans as a rebuke against Obama, who (it was implied) put himself first instead of his country. Now, however, in losing the election, these same fair-weather patriots would prefer that McCain put Party above Country - clearly their concept of Country was a subset - the so-called "Real America" - that shared their political views and agenda. John McCain's principles and patriotism have now become a point of contention instead of pride for these small-minded partisan fools.

Case in point - RedState has already told McCain to go "suck a lemon". A more official rebuke comes from Rick Santorum, former GOP Senator for PA, who frets that John McCain might seek to re-burnish his credentials as a maverick by working amicably with president Obama:

McCain was once the mainstream media darling, back when he joined Democrats on a host of issues. He prized his maverick moniker and used it to propel himself onto the national scene in the 2000 Republican presidential primary. Early in the Bush years, he shored up his status as the media's favorite Republican by opposing Bush on taxes and the environment.
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In McCain's mind, however, losing the presidency will not be the final chapter of his life story. He knows the path to "Big Media" redemption. Working with the man who vanquished him in November will show them all the real McCain again.

Remember, it was this onetime prisoner of war who led the charge to open diplomatic relations with Vietnam. If that past is prologue, and McCain's legislative record is any guide, he will not just join with Obama but lead the charge in Congress on global warming, immigration "reform," the closing of Guantanamo, federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, and importation of prescription drugs.

Santorum's concerns are well-founded, as it turns out. The New York Times has more detail on the evolving Obama-McCain relationship:

As contenders for the presidency, the two had hammered each other for much of 2008 over their conflicting approaches to foreign policy, especially in Iraq. (He’d lose a war! He’d stay a hundred years!) Now, however, Mr. Obama said he wanted Mr. McCain’s advice, people in each camp briefed on the conversation said. What did he see on the trip? What did he learn?

It was just one step in a post-election courtship that historians say has few modern parallels, beginning with a private meeting in Mr. Obama’s transition office in Chicago just two weeks after the vote. On Monday night, Mr. McCain will be the guest of honor at a black-tie dinner celebrating Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Over the last three months, Mr. Obama has quietly consulted Mr. McCain about many of the new administration’s potential nominees to top national security jobs and about other issues — in one case relaying back a contender’s answers to questions Mr. McCain had suggested.

Mr. McCain, meanwhile, has told colleagues “that many of these appointments he would have made himself,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a close McCain friend.

Fred I. Greenstein, emeritus professor of politics at Princeton, said: “I don’t think there is a precedent for this. Sometimes there is bad blood, sometimes there is so-so blood, but rarely is there good blood.”

Reaching out to a former rival is unprecedented in American politics, but that's the entire point of Change. Obama is wise to solicit McCain's counsel, because the real solutions ahead will require working together for the sake of the nation rather than any one party or electoral cycle.

Related - discussion at myDD and at Washington Monthly.

Labels: McCain, Obama, President Obama, Republicans

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The Bush Administration is essentially over:

The president will be the president until 12 noon Tuesday, but most of his employees will be gone by the close of business Friday.

They’ll turn in their BlackBerrys, laptops, building passes and gym keys.

And by the time the weekend is out — before the new administration can reverse course on waterboarding or SCHIP or anything else — teams of painters and carpet cleaners will have wiped away any hint that they ever set foot in the White House

The moment did not pass unnoticed at Daily Kos, either:

It's 5:00 PM in the Eastern time zone, which includes Washington DC. 5:00 PM is the standard end of the workday. It's Friday, the end of the week. Monday is a federal holiday, so the mass of federal employees will not be working. On Tuesday President-elect Barack Obama will become President Barack Obama, our nation's 44th president.

Some White House staff will be kept on for the next few days. Certainly in the defense, foreign policy and domestic security areas there are Bush appointees who will--and should--remain on call or at their desks between now and Tuesday. The could still be some late-night activities happening with some of the legal staff. But in terms of devising, implementing and enforcing policies, as of this moment, the Bush administration is effectively over.

I watched the President's farewell address yesterday and found myself somewhat nonplussed by the rather muted final curtain call. The President (yes, still THE President - until Tuesday!) emphasized the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as one of his main achievements, which only underscores just how rarely a President ever has to travel by commercial airlines. I assume Citizen Bush will sing a different tune the first time he takes his shoes off at IAH.

It is important to credit the President where due - we may have disagreed on the means, but it is certainly true that no terrorist attack followed the events of September 11th 2001 on American soil. Of course, the rest of the world is another matter, and Osama bin laden remains free and alive in the hinterlands of Pakistan, so should another terror attack from Al Qaeda take place again (god and justice forbid), then the failure of the Bush Administration to take bin Laden to justice will be a partial responsibility. Hopefully President Obama's increased focus on Afghanistan will make it a moot point and bin Laden will finally face justice. But even then the threat won't end. Still, the fact that we did not suffer an attack again here at home is an important one.

Also, I think the President deserves much credit for his sensitivity to Islam. I know many muslims will read this statement and be aghast, but I've argued before that President Bush did everything he could to keep the rhetorical war aimed squarely at terrorists and not muslims. The fact that the Republican Party waged a war on muslims anyway provides excellent contrast to the President's actions, and muslims should recognize and applaud him for it. The story of the Eid stamp alone sis evidence enough.

The other major area in which President Bush deserves kudos I think is in Africa policy. As many have pointed out, the Bush Administration has provided billions in aid to fight AIDS, as well as other initiatives that have had a significant and non-negligible impact on the lives of millions of Africans. As the BBC notes,

Since [2003] the US has pumped $18bn (£12bn) into fighting HIV/Aids - much of it in Africa.

By 2007, 1.3 million Africans were on medication, much of it paid for by the Bush administration.

Not that Pepfar is without its critics.

Some have attacked the US for preventing any funding for programmes that support abortion in any form.

Others suggested that it has downplayed the need to promote the use of condoms.

But no-one denies that the funding has made anti-retrovirals widely available, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

The story on aid is much the same.

The US has backed programmes to cancel $34bn (£23bn) worth of debt for 27 African states.

At the same time aid to Africa has risen to $5.7bn (£4bn) dollars a year by 2007.

And, as anyone who has ever been to a refugee camp in Africa will testify, almost all the food aid to be seen comes from American farmers - aid worth $1.23bn (£0.85bn) in 2007.

Mr Bush's Malaria initiative has seen the disease halved in 15 African countries.

I think that Africa is a quiet victory for the president - one that earned him no votes or popularity ratings, but which was indeed a mission of mercy and compassion. President Bush did not erase African suffering outright but he did help ease a portion of it, for a time, and that is a truly great thing.

In fact, I recall this political cartoon from the early days of the Bush Administration:


One might redraw that cartoon today with Barack Obama and Joe Biden instead, and ask just what they have in store for Africa. I hope they step up to the plate and exceed President Bush's example and commitment. Africa deserves no less.

Farewell, President Bush. And first advice to President Obama - check the White House keyboards for missing O keys.

Labels: President Bush, President Obama

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