WaPo on swine flu:
"It's alarming and very concerning," said Sari Setiogi, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization in Geneva, which began an investigation of the cause and scope of the outbreak.
President Obama has been briefed about the illness, spokesman Reid Cherlin said, adding: "The White House is taking the situation seriously and monitoring for any new developments.
We'll have an update later today. This public service announcement was brought to you by Daily Kos.
Gail Collins:
Until fairly recently, Connecticut’s slogan was "We’re Full of Surprises," which was really bad. While the state has a long shoreline and nice bed and breakfasts, when you think of Connecticut surprises, you mainly remember the time the governor went to jail. And we will not dwell on the period when Rhode Island christened itself the "Birthplace of Fun" and allowed the tourism division to dot the landscape with 6-foot-tall statues of Mr. Potato Head.
Hey, you think that can top discovering that the mayor of Waterbury, CT was sexually abusing two little girls? Surprise!!
Charles Blow: Homophobic taunting didn't end with advances in marriage rights.
John Nichols:
The release of memorandums prepared by Bush administration lawyers on how--not if, but how--to torture prisoners confronts Congress with the sort of constitutional challenge its risk-averse members have a penchant for ducking.
Well, duh. They're politicians. To them, "that would be a brave thing" is meant as scathing criticism.
Terence Samuel:
The modern-day Republican Party is not so much a political party as it is a cautionary tale. Now we know exactly what a party looks like when it is out of gas, out of ideas, and flailing desperately for survival. At the same time, the current state of the GOP is an undiluted example of how quickly things can change in politics.
Bill Schneider:
Do Americans think that congressional Republicans have a clear plan for solving the nation's economic problems? Nearly three-quarters of respondents in the CNN poll said no.
Obama is resisting pressure to toss spending on health care, education, and energy out of his budget to make it cheaper and easier to pass. Some of the pressure is coming from his own advisers. The president says that pressure is for "instant gratification," encouraged by shorter news cycles and shorter attention spans.
The president is defying that culture. He wants long-term thinking -- something radically different from the norm in American politics.
Charlie Cook:
Right now, many voters are saying, "Spend what it takes to get us out of this horrible recession."
But will they remember that when the recession is over and the bills have to be paid -- or deferred? Could the needed medicine have so many unpleasant side effects that the recovering patient fires the doctor?
All of this is purely hypothetical, of course, because no bottom has yet been reached, no recovery begun, and no blame yet shifted.
Such uncertainty should not drive what Obama and his party are trying to do to get the country out of the recession. But it may explain why the president, in his speech at Georgetown University, gave such a painstaking explanation about what his administration is doing and why.
Jeffrey Simpson:
Deficits are dangerous for liberals, but especially hard for conservatives, to talk about sensibly. A mantra of conservative parties is that deficits are bad, but the way they govern invariably produces deficits, or at least weakens the fiscal position of the government.
...
Twenty years of Republican administrations under three presidents followed this formula: a political campaign based on lower taxes and an attack on "wasteful" spending, followed by lower taxes but higher spending, with resulting chronic deficits.