1. Spending, not tax cuts — as pretty much any economist who’s ever bothered to, you know, read the history of the Great Depression will tell you, FDR nearly killed his own recovery by pulling in spending too soon. Had it not been for the massive Keynesian opportunity presented by WWII, the US would likely have been mired in recession – or worse – through most of the ’40s. Unfortunately, most of the money spent on recovery to date has gone to financial institutions. It’s debatable whether or not that was the best, or most necessary, use of taxpayer money, but what’s NOT debatable is that much of that money went to shore up the balance sheets of banks, and not into the kind of direct investments that both create jobs and long-term economic strength — the trains, roads, ports, and sewers that we so desperately need to rebuild in America. Don’t let the budget hawks fool you — America needs MORE spending, not less.
2. Restraint, not populism — It’s a strong temptation, no doubt, for an embattled President to turn to populism in this crisis. The President needs to resist this urge. Stoking the gathering fires of classism and populist anger isn’t a way to win in the long term. It’s anti-elitist fervor which has been the Democrats undoing for most of the last 20 years. Playing to the hairy knuckles crowd just re-orders the line at the guillotine; better to lead.
3. Renewed commitment to health care — The President’s big problem on health care is that he’s failed to outline a solid vision for what, exactly, health care reform is going to accomplish. Is it to reduce costs? Provide universal coverage? Improve quality of care? The GoP has succeeded in scuttling reform because, without a clear vision for what health care reform IS, they’ve been able to find something in it for everyone to hate.

I’m pretty much expecting the President to take the opposite approach on all of these points, but a guy can hope, right?

* I suppose I should use a song title from US band (not the UK’s Stone Roses) to preface my preview of the SotU.

*Yeah, I know. We’ll also be asking one another “What was retirement again?”

Can you imagine what this would be like if breaking a filibuster still required 67 votes? Jiminy Christmas!

President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday defended his choice of a popular evangelical minister to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, rejecting criticism that it slights gays.The selection of Pastor Rick Warren brought objections from gay rights advocates, who strongly supported Obama during the election campaign. The advocates are angry over Warren’s backing of a California ballot initiative banning gay marriage. That measure was approved by voters last month.

But Obama told reporters in Chicago that America needs to “come together,” even when there’s disagreement on social issues. “That dialogue is part of what my campaign is all about,” he said.

Sure, as a red-blooded blue-stater, I’m mildly offended.  I’ll even turn up my nose and give a little sniff of indignation.

[sniff]

There now.  With that out of the way, I can get back to admiring Obama’s political savvy.  With one fell stroke, he manages to reach out to a group Democrats considered unreachable only, like, five minutes ago.  He also puts the aspersions about the Good Reverend Wright behind him forever.  And the tradeoff?  Offending an interest group that pretty much has no choice but to vote Democratic.  Genius!

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats have scrapped plans for another vote on expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, thus sparing Republicans from a politically difficult vote just weeks before elections this fall.

Before the summer recess, Democrats had vowed repeatedly to force another vote on the popular program. But Democrats say they have shifted course, after concluding that President Bush would not sign their legislation and that they could not override his likely veto.

Sometimes it feels like being led by a pack of ferocious, ravenous kittens.

With respect to the wider campaign, almost all of the attacks were old ones, and they didn’t really stick before, so I’ll be curious to see if there are any further reaching effects.

Finally, if McCain follows this with a reprise of his infamous Green Screen performance from a few weeks ago, the campaign dynamic might turn into a weird Obama versus Palin contest, with McCain as figurehead.

For one possible answer to what Obama’s thinking, Kevin Drum pointed me at a Newshoggers post that makes a compelling argument that I haven’t seen anywhere else. The bookends on the post drive the point home:

In the past couple of years, one of the most reliable indicators of a winning Democratic issue is when the conservative movement Id is at the forefront of the public debate. It is ugly, repulsive and oozing with pus, and it alienates marginally attached Republican voters and winnable for the GOP Independent and Democratic voters. We want more of the conservative Id in the forefront of the conversation…

…The conservative Id is ineffective and counterproductive to advancing the GOP’s political fortunes, and it is not something that should inspire fear in Democrats. Instead it should be welcomed as a golden opportunity to create a sharp and sustained politics of contrast that works.

In other words, if the race-bait genie won’t go back in the bottle, it is damn well not going to skulk in the shadows in this campaign. Make the genie–the fetid rot at the heart of today’s GOP–stand front and center and put on its show, singing and dancing and implying LBJ’s famous turn of phrase–the right will get bolder and bolder pushing the racist associations, and eventually O’Reilly or Hannity or even McCain with his famous short temper will take the next step and make a lynching joke, or a porch monkey reference, or something along those lines.

The thing is, for the race baiting to really work in the way that the right wants it to work, it has to be something that you can’t confront directly. It has to be like a dream, or an overheard snippet of conversation between two people whose voices you don’t recognize, or something that you catch a glimpse of out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, it’s gone. And Obama’s speech shows he will have none of that. If the implied and subtextual “Nigra, Nigra, Nigra” turns into an explicit “Nigger,” there will be pandemonium, and all bets will be off. And really, who thinks the noise machine, the Limbaughs, the Hannitys, and the O’Reillys can be controlled, or can control themselves? Who thinks it won’t go there?

Obama is using lots of words, and relatively complicated arguments, but at least one of the messages he’s attempting to send to the media, to the right, and to the electorate, is very simple, and goes something like this: “Are you sure you want to go there? I mean, are you really sure that you want go there, because you’ll lose control of it. You’ll bring back images of fire hoses and dogs and segregated water fountains and the American flag used as a spear. That’s where it will go, because this country’s racial history is ugly, and you seem to have forgotten that our racial civility is only the thinnest of veneers. You’re still sure? Okay then. Bring it.”

(I laughed out loud when I saw a line in Ron Paul’s wikipedia page excusing the candidate’s poor performance for being related to the use of “landline polls,” but I see that’s been updated to “traditional phone polls.)

So it’s interesting to see that Pew’s latest finding that cell phones do not significantly affect poll results. There you go.

No and Double No.

Even Arthur Laffer, the guy who invented the “curve” that launched a thousand specious Wall Street Journal op-eds, is ambivalent on the subject.

Now, do really high marginal tax rates have deleterious effects on incentives? Yes, probably. Consider the story of Denmark, where 63% tax rates have caused some Danes to seek work in lower-tax EU countries.

Fortunately, here in the US, FDR, JFK, Reagan, and others lowered marginal tax rates on the wealthy from a staggeringly high 90-something percent to the much more reasonable 30-something percent. We’ve cut taxes over and over again. We don’t need to cut them anymore. In fact we’re wealthy enough that we could repeal Bush’s tax cuts, take taxation back to Clinton-era levels (still below 40% for the top rate) and have revenue for all sorts of awesome stuff like universal health care.

The commission is taking up one of the most racially sensitive issues of the two-decades-old war on drugs. Jurists and civil rights organizations have long complained that the commission’s guidelines mandate more stringent federal penalties for crack cocaine offenses, which usually involve African Americans, than for crimes involving powder cocaine, which generally involve white people. The chemical properties of the drugs are the same, though crack is potentially more addictive.

The Bush Administration, of course, opposes the plan, despite the fact that:

Nearly 86 percent of inmates who would be affected by the change are black; slightly fewer than 6 percent are white. Ninety-four percent are men.

I realize, it’s not quite this simple, but wouldn’t it do the black community a world of good to have that many men, many of them surely nonviolent offenders and fathers of young children, back home again? Y’know, “family values” and such.

What’s even greater about Bobby Jindal is that I’d probably detest the guy if I ever met him in person — he’s just the sort of hyper-motivated super achiever I moved out to Seattle to avoid.  Point is that I’d detest him for who he is, and not because of what he looks like.

Now if we could only get to the day when every American was truly judged “on the content of their character.”  I’m ecstatic to know that it’s at least still possible.

For example, Steve Benen argues that the Democrats have plenty of “ideas,” from Iraq to universal health care to foreign policy, and are just “fighting for the power to implement [them].” He also cites Jon Chait’s famous case against new ideas in The New Republic which reminds us how scarily uninformed most voters are and, therefore, how little “ideas” actually have to do with elections.

Ezra Klein agrees with Benen:

As a reporter, I focus on policy ideas. And damn it, I’m drowning. Bai seems to think Democrats need a health care plan, but I could show him no fewer than 20 fully-realized plans and outline the basic areas of consensus — and they’re broad — that outline the Party’s essential orientation on the issue. Same goes for pension planning, trade adjustment plans, or any and every other element of social policy you can think of.

Attempting to counter Ezra, Shadi Hamid writes:

Ezra, I think, is mistaking “good plans” for “big ideas.” They are not the same thing, and that’s precisely the problem we’re facing. We do have a lot of great policy plans that will make a tangible difference in people’s lives. What we don’t have, however, is a narrative, a vision, a framework, a thread, a worldview, even – let’s say it – an ideology (in the non-pejorative sense).

One could easily argue that it’s Hamid that’s making the mistake: he’s mistaking “big ideas” for “a good marketing strategy.” Either way, it seems like everyone’s in agreement. You have (1) a bunch of things you want to accomplish, and (2) you need to sell it to the American people. Whichever step you decide to label the “idea,” the underlying process remains the same.

President Bush announced an initiative on Monday to shore up the Palestinian president and to begin building a Palestinian state, signaling that his administration will use its remaining months to make a major push for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

North Korea — done:

The chief U.S. nuclear envoy expressed optimism after a day of meetings Tuesday with his North Korean counterpart, saying no new obstacles to progress on disarmament have emerged following Pyongyang’s shutdown of its sole operating reactor.

“I think we’re all in the same ballpark,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said after the meetings with Kim Kye Gwan ahead of nuclear talks in Beijing.

“We had a good discussion – at this point there are no show-stoppers,” he told reporters.

Hill repeated his desire to have the North disable its nuclear facilities by the end of the year, following its weekend shutdown.

“I laid out my view on how this could be done, and I think we had a good discussion on that basis,” he said.

Hill said he would meet Wednesday ahead of the formal resumption of six-nation negotiations with the Chinese hosts to gauge whether the proposed timeframe was feasible.

And now Iran — because Bush definitely doesn’t reward bad behavior or anything:

The United States is ready to hold new direct talks with Iran on the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, where the Bush administration accused Tehran of supporting Shia insurgents, the State Department said Tuesday.

“We think that given the situation in Iraq and given Iran’s continued behavior that is leading to further instability in Iraq, that it would be appropriate to have another face-to-face meeting,” spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

He said no date for the talks, which would be held in Baghdad, had yet been arranged.

Is a pattern emerging? All you have to do is wait out any President’s eight years and you’ll get whatever you want!

On a recent episode of 30 Rock, an NBC sitcom about the making of a Saturday Night Live–like comedy show, a dilemma arises when the cast’s only black actor goes missing.

“Can I play Barack Obama?” asked an opportunistic white cast member.

The answer, of course, was no.

It just so happens that the real Saturday Night Live is faced with that very conundrum every week.

Only one current cast member, Kenan Thompson, is black, which would seem to be a desirable trait in portraying Mr. Obama.

But Mr. Thompson—who starred in a movie called Fat Albert—possesses a body type that makes him better suited to execute impressions of Al Sharpton than the lanky Illinois Senator. The result: an Obama-free show.

A spokesman for Lorne Michaels, the show’s longtime producer, said that there was no word yet on who the show would cast as Mr. Obama, or when an Obama character would make its debut.

“We’ll know when we know,” the spokesman, Marc Liepis, said in an e-mail. “Truthfully, there’s no timetable on these things.”

. . .

[Former SNL cast member Tim] Meadows suggested that a few of the white cast members could potentially try to play Mr. Obama until Mr. Michaels found a more permanent fit. But he also warned that “for a white guy to do Barack Obama, it would have to be approached very cautiously.”

That doesn’t seem to be a risk that the show’s producers are eager to take.

The two Democratic leaders of the General Assembly’s judiciary committee say they intend to introduce a bill legalizing gay marriage, even though Gov. M. Jodi Rell has said she would veto such a measure.

“This is obviously not the most important issue [facing] the legislature,” said Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven and one of the co-chairmen of the judiciary committee. But, he added, “this is inevitable.”

Opponents vow to fight it. Brian Brown, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut and one the leading voices against same-sex marriage, called for an amendment to the state Constitution defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Acknowledging that winning legislative approval of such a measure was highly unlikely, he urged a non-binding referendum on the matter.

. . .

Two years ago, the legislature made history by permitting same-sex couples to enter into civil unions. While granting same-sex couples nearly all of the rights and responsibilities available to married couples, civil unions are not recognized by most other states or the federal government. Many gay rights activists view civil unions as an acceptable compromise and say they have helped many couples. But they also view the law as inherently unfair and have failed a lawsuit seeking full-fledged marriage. Senate GOP leader Louis DeLuca of Woodbury rejected the claim that marriage is a civil right. “Isn’t that what civil unions were supposed to address?” he asked during the Family Institute press conference. “Now they want that name as well. As someone whose been married 53 years, I resent it.” But Becca Lazarus, a 12-year-old who lives in Windsor with her two dads, doesn’t see it that way. She said her friends don’t understand why her parents can’t marry. “They don’t understand what a civil union is,” Lazarus said during the Love Makes a Family press conference. “but everyone knows what marriage is.”

Completely leaving aside the matter of whether same-sex couples should be able to marry*, I wonder if it’s wise for marriage-rights advocates to move this quickly. While Connecticut residents might be happy and comfortable with going in just two years from civil unions to marriage, it strikes me as potentially counterproductive for gay rights advocates elsewhere. I’m assuming (not so much assuming as being unable and too lazy to locate the exact numbers) you have a higher number of Americans who support civil unions than gay marriage and I wonder if what’s happening in Connecticut — not even happened, mind you, but simply that some lawmakers are proposing it — makes or might make that margin uneasy about even plain old civil unions.

Add to that is the geographic proximity of the states leading the charge for gay rights — Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey — and I also wonder if that middle ground of people is freaking out that there might be some domino theory of gay marriage going on.

I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world to see how civil unions work in practice before moving on to something more contentious like full marriage on par with what hets get. If not for those who were initially unsympathetic towards providing legal protections to gay couples then for the people working hard in other places to get civil union laws passed.

*And although I resent that I have to say this because it should be totally unrelated to the matter at hand, I would describe myself as pretty strongly pro-gay marriage.