if you haven't read Andrew Sullivan's How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics, you should. Sullivan is a better writer than most, and makes a better case than most:
A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.
Want to
better understand the Affordable Care Act?
As a companion to their recently released comic book, M.I.T. health care economist Jon Gruber and illustrator Nathan Schreiber teamed up with the Center for American Progress to produce an three-minute animated explanation of how the health reform law works:
Politico:
The returns are sure to cause problems for Romney — running in a recession with every one of his many millions of dollars revealed isn’t the image he’ll want, and it’s almost inevitable that some of his investments will run him into political trouble.
But he was going to be pressed to release them at some point ahead of November, and the intensity of attacks he’s been facing since Monday night’s debate suggest that he’s only hurting himself by not having released them already.
“It doesn’t seem to make sense to me,” said Chip Saltsman, who managed Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign. “Now that he’s really put himself in to a box on this, he’s going to have to release them sooner than April. My guess is there’s lots of fun stuff in there.”
It’s a replay of Romney’s bumbling initial response to the attacks on his Bain record, a campaign appearing to be caught flat-footed as a narrative that could last through the general election took hold.
John Farmer:
As he moves closer to the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney has come under fire as a private sector manager who embraced “creative destruction” of jobs and even corporations in pursuit of profit.
Just how much “creative destruction” he practiced will continue to be debated through the next couple of GOP primaries and into the November general election, if he wins the nomination.
But there can be no doubt about his most successful effort at “creative destruction.” It involves his moderate-to-liberal record in Massachusetts as governor and in a losing U.S. Senate fight against Ted Kennedy.
Romney has either denied or disowned just about all his public positions as a Bay State politician.
Bill Frezza, Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a Boston-based venture capitalist, has some thoughts about the right to fire.
Romney didn’t say that he likes firing people, despite the fact that reporters and pundits continue misquoting him. He said he likes being able to fire people. No one—except maybe Donald Trump—actually enjoys firing people. It’s a miserable experience for both parties. One of the biggest reasons that I left management to become a venture capitalist is that I hated firing employees. Now I only have to fire non-performing CEOs. This is still painful but it results in fewer sleepless nights than terminating a low level employee who may have a hard time landing on his feet.
Romney isn't running for capitalism spokesmodel, he's running for President of the United States. And sporting a tone-deaf ear and a complete lack of empathy that even Frezza can articulate without much effort won't help Romney get elected.
So who's winning the argument between Frezza's point of view and the Occupy movement? Well, via The Fix:
The political problem for Romney in all of this is not that he’s wealthy. (President Obama is quite wealthy in his own right thanks to the success of his books.)
It’s that the way Romney talks about money can make him seem drastically out of touch with average people — an issue that is exacerbated by the fact that he is running for president in a time of incredible economic hardship. (In a new Washington Post-ABC poll, 55 percent said the biggest problem facing the country is “unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy” while 34 percent said the biggest issue is “over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity”.)
Eugene Robinson:
But as for heartlessness, well, it comes with the turf, right? Bain was just serving as an instrument of “creative destruction,” and if workers lost their jobs, if they had to raid their children’s college funds to pay their mortgages, if perhaps that money ran out and they ended up losing their homes, in the long run they’ll still be better off. Or the country will be better off. Or something.
In any event, capitalism means never having to say you’re sorry. Perish the thought that anyone would critically examine this ethos except in a “quiet room.”
ut to the horror of radical free-market ideologues, the myth of no-fault capitalism is under scrutiny. No one is arguing against markets, which are indeed the best way to create wealth and thus the best weapon against poverty. No one is arguing that investors who risk their capital in a company should not be able to reap rewards. What the ideologues ignore, however, is that workers also have “capital” at risk — in the form of mind and muscle, creativity, loyalty, years of service. Why is this investment so casually dismissed?
Dana Milbank:
Following Mitt Romney on the campaign trail is a painful yet familiar experience.
Painful, because of the wince-inducing moments when you realize that, for all of Romney’s success in imitating human attributes, there remain glitches in the matrix that reveal him to be different from the rest of us...
Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an “authentic inauthenticity problem.”
And that is precisely why his struggle is so familiar. He is the political reincarnation of Al Gore, whose campaign I covered with an equal amount of cringing a dozen years ago.
Actually, he's Al Gore without the charm, morals and sense of responsibility. But thanks for bringing Gore up, Dana. You still owe the country a big time debt for that.
About the tea party:
Helen Branswell (a terrific science reporter):
The World Health Organization says it will take a role in helping sort through an international scientific controversy over two bird flu studies that the U.S. government deemed too dangerous to publish in full.
The scientific and biosecurity communities have been mired in heated debate over the issue for weeks. Voices from both sides have been calling on the WHO to take a lead role in the discussions, saying any solution must be international in scope.
In an interview Sunday, a senior WHO official said the agency will pull together international talks aimed at fleshing out the issues that need to be addressed and then work to resolve them.
And more flu stuff from
Lynne Peeples:
"Changes in flight patterns -- length, stopovers -- can bring together bird species that otherwise wouldn't intermingle," said Jeffrey Shaman, an environmental health scientist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, lead researcher of the preliminary study.
And while mixing with feathered strangers, particularly on water, birds can share viruses orally and fecally. Multiple versions of the flu may then enter a bird's cells, genetically mingling into a "radically different" viral strain "to which the human population has never been exposed," and are therefore susceptible, Shaman explained.
"That's what seeds a pandemic," Shaman told The Huffington Post. Other animals and their viruses may also participate in the pool party. The virus behind the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for example, was a mixture of genetic material from human, bird and pig flu.
In the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Shaman and his colleague, Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health, found that the last four major flu pandemics -- in 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009 -- all followed a climate pattern called La Nina, which brings colder-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and generally results in cooler global temperatures. One of these episodes, which occur every two to seven years, is currently underway.