Can The Sane Man Save The Crazy People?

Andrew Sullivan makes a plea to President Obama:

And somehow I suspect that at that nadir for Reagan, commentators like Krauthammer and Gerson and Brooks would not be advising him to heed public opinion, give up on his agenda, and recognize that it’s madness to push through policies that were broadly unpopular. Au contraire. Fight, Mr President. Fight. In the end, even the conservatives – perhaps especially the conservatives – will respect you for it.

Today, he quotes the President’s speech in Ohio. He is fighting: (more…)

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More Press Given To Insane Senate Holds

I wrote about this about a week ago, but here are the actual numbers. From Ann Lowery at Foreign Policy:

But President Barack Obama’s first year has brought an unusual number of holds, and on unusually prominent positions. One year into the Bush administration, there were 70 appointees awaiting confirmation. One year into the Obama administration, there are 177. And dozens of those holds are directly affecting the agencies responsible for the United States’ security and foreign policy, amid two wars and an amped-up terrorism threat. The United States has no ambassador to Ethiopia, no head of the Office of Legal Counsel, no director at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, no agricultural trade representative.

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What Happens Tomorrow?

So has anyone heard? There is an election tomorrow. It is the special election to see who will serve out the remainder of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s term in Massachusetts’ Senate seat. To the surprise of just about everyone, the incredibly blue state of Massachusetts (they gave President Obama %61.8 of the vote in November of 2008) is most likely going to give the majority of its vote to a Republican candidate, State Senate Scott Brown, who opposes just about every item on the President’s agenda, while turning heavily against the Democratic candidate, Mass. Attorney General Martha Coakley. For a more complete rundown of what the polls look like going into the election tomorrow, check out Nate Silver’s analysis. The key point:

Overall, while I would probably take Coakley’s side of a 3:1 wager, her situation looks to be increasingly difficult. She is basically relying upon getting solid turnout from a “silent majority” of voters who have done little to make themselves seen and heard. We know that there are a huge number of potential such voters in Massachusetts, which remains a very blue state and which until the past three weeks had not behaved unusually in any obvious way. But the pollsters are no longer seeing and hearing from them.

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