Visual source: Newseum
Timothy Egan pens a thought-provoking piece on liberals and President Obama:
As president, he’s been a sober, cautious, tongue-shackled realist — a moderate Republican of the pre-crazy, pre-Tea Party era. Having failed to come up with a Big Idea to guide his presidency, he will sink or swim now on strengths that don’t lend themselves to large rallies or passionate enthusiasm. Sobriety and moderation, by definition, are boring.
Urban liberals, labor, blacks and Hispanics, environmentalists, the young – the core of Obama’s army in 2008 — are disappointed in the president of August, 2011. They’re right when they say he caved on the debt talks: the evidence is House Speaker John Boehner’s boast that he got 98 percent of what he wanted from the president.
But instead of waiting for an arm-flapping populist to emerge from the genteel summer redoubt on Martha’s Vineyard, the left should focus on the coming ground war, and try to fill Congress with new people who can at least tell fact from fiction.
Jennifer Rubin on Rick Perry:
Perry dipped a toe in the national media market with an appearance on the Laura Ingraham radio show. Obviously at home in the talk show milieu he let loose: “With all due respect to anybody that’s out there either directly or indirectly criticizing me because I speak plainly, I call it like I see it. Look, I am not an establishment figure, never have been, and frankly, I don’t want to be. I dislike Washington; I think it’s a seedy place. Our country is in trouble and I don’t have the privilege to sit on the sideline and watch our country be destroyed economically by a president who has been conducting an experiment on the American economy for the last two and a half years.”
So is D.C. “seedy” or does he just not approve of the current White House occupant? Here’s the thing: When he does his anti-Washington shtick he sounds like someone who doesn’t have the patience or the skill to govern from there. He’s going to have a tough time governing in a place for which he already has shown contempt.
Ronald Reagan certainly was the ultimate advocate of reducing the federal government’s role. (“Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem.”) But he didn’t make it his business to slam institutions and officials, or to display contempt for Washington itself. I frankly can’t recall any president doing that.
Camden Fine of the Independent Community Bankers of America on the Fed's interest rate decisions:
In my view, the Fed’s policy is nothing more than a backdoor bailout for the Wall Street mega-banks and investment houses; it amounts to the back of the hand for the community banks of this country. The Wall Street money houses are basically getting free money that they can hedge and arbitrage worldwide to make baskets of money, while local banks are stuck with deposits costing more than the federal funds rate, sluggish loan demand and a 2.20 percent 10-year Treasury. For the extended future, earnings contractions will accelerate as the investment portfolio prepays and runs off, and capital will be difficult if not impossible to raise, stifling growth on America’s Main Streets.
The more than 7,000 community banks in this country did not create this crisis, but they have been asked to pay for it over and over again. Surely the Fed has more bullets in its monetary policy arsenal than turning its guns on the very players in our economy that create jobs and support small business. Once again, Wall Street gets a bailout — on the backs of Main Street’s banks, small businesses and hardworking Americans.
The New York Times on the shortage of vital drugs:
A widespread shortage of prescription drugs is hampering the treatment of patients who have cancer, severe infections and other serious illnesses. While some Republican politicians have railed against the imaginary threat of rationing under health care reform, Congress has done nothing to alleviate the all-too-real rationing of lifesaving drugs caused by this crisis.[...]
The shortages are forcing health care providers to buy more expensive products in the absence of cheap generics. Unscrupulous wholesalers have made matters worse by scooping up scarce drugs and offering them to hospitals at markups that often reach 20 times the normal price or more, according to a recent survey.
Steve Kornacki on George Pataki and his yawn candidacy:
The more basic reason why Republicans have tuned out his cries for attention is that he's simply not relevant anymore, and really hasn't been for a while. Sure, he ran one of the country's largest states for 12 years, but he wasn't even the most famous Republican from New York during that time -- Rudy was. Nor did he rack up any particularly notable achievements as governor, no innovative policy advances that captured the national media's interest or established him in conservative circles as the One To Watch. He came across as a thoroughly average, thoroughly boring governor. And now he comes across as a thoroughly average, thoroughly boring former governor whose name hasn't been on a ballot since 2002.
And finally, for your Friday morning chuckle: Joe the Plumber is seriously contemplating a Congressional bid:
It may have been years since you last gave a thought to Joe Wurzelbacher, the Ohio man whose question about taxes to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 became a viral sensation, but now the man known as "Joe the Plumber" is back, and may run for Congress. [...]
"I like the idea of it -- just regular Americans running. If a regular guy runs, right away the media's going to attack him," Wurzelbacher said. "What kind of education does he have? What does he know about this? My answer to that is, regular Americans aren't experts, but dammit, look where the experts have gotten us. Maybe we need some regular guys in there. That's what I've been doing the past two and a half years, just encouraging regular Americans to run. Tell the liberal media to go to hell and I don't care what you guys say about me, I'm going to try to fix this country."