NY Times editorial:
President Obama was right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values.
National National Journal chart
Journal has a detailed issue about the Southern regional party aka the GOP. This chart snippet is just a snapshot.
Republican strength in the South has both compensated for and masked the extent of the GOP's decline elsewhere. By several key measures, the party is now weaker outside the South than at any time since the Depression; in some ways, it is weaker than ever before.
Also from National Journal, video report on the FDA's move to regulate tobacco.
The Opinionator (NY Times) collects reaction to the Obama and Cheney speeches. You wonder, sometimes, about how unintelligent and unreal the right's reactions are, speaking as if the GOP's isn't the unpopular minority position. Bill Kristol is a great example:
Obama’s is the speech of a young senator who was once a part-time law professor–platitudinous and preachy, vague and pseudo-thoughtful in an abstract kind of way. . . . Cheney’s is the speech of a grownup, of a chief executive, of a statesman.
You know, the kind of grown-up statesman that GOP insiders want to just go away.
Harold Meyerson:
The dizzying downward spiral of the Republican Party continues apace. Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that the percentage of Americans who answer to the name Republican is down to 22 percent -- about as low as a party can go in a two-party system.
David Brooks:
Do I wish he had been more gracious with and honest about the Bush administration officials whose policies he is benefiting from? Yes. But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.
NY Times on H1N1 in NYC:
Across New York, emergency room visits began to surge on Saturday, as schools closed like falling dominoes and word spread of an assistant principal who was in critical condition with swine flu; he died on Sunday night...
In accordance with city guidelines, "We’re no longer routinely testing children who don’t have underlying conditions," said Dr. Joy Nagelberg, chief of pediatric emergency medicine at Schneider.
"The overwhelming majority, you would look at them and say that they’re fine," she said. "You would be surprised that they’re here at all."
Like all flu seasons, it's worse in some places, easing up in others.
Paul Krugman: bobswern's rec diary has more comment on Krugman.
That didn’t take long. Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. Indeed, it’s now clear that even as they met with the president, pretending to be cooperative, insurers were gearing up to play the same destructive role they did the last time health reform was on the agenda.