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Source:  Business Insider

Poll Watch: Obama and the Issues

Here, from Pollster.com is your Obama polling fix:

Realignment: The Fight Begins

As can be seen on the graph below,popularity for Obama's health care plan is decreasing:


As is the President's popularity as a whole:


This is actually good, both for the President and the country, because sheer political self-preservation is forcing the President to be public about the hard choices required.

GOP Leadership Crisis Resolved

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan:

Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

The Great Recession

From the Washington Post:

Unemployment: It's Not over yet

Things might not get better until 2013.

Right Leninism: Special Needs Division

From YouTube via  Andrew Sullivan:

Conservatism versus The Lenist Right

From ThinkProgress, thanks to Andrew Sullivan:

Journalism Misfeasance Watch: Pfizer and New London

From the Columbia Journalism Review:

It’s surprising to see how much of the press has just whiffed on a big story on Pfizer’s decision to close its New London, Connecticut, R&D headquarters. This one went right down the plate with the wind blowing out to left field—and most everybody can’t be bothered to swing.

Remember New London? You probably ought to, and journalists certainly should. It was the defendant in the infamous Kelo v. New London case where the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the government could take private property and give it to another private interest.

The Review notes the media crickets chirping (including the local Connecticut media) for four days, exclusive of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, and asks:

What took so long and why have other papers been missing on this? Are our institutional memories that short? Are we staffed that thin? Are we that disconnected from our readers?

Yes.

Postscript:  The Boston Globe published an editorial on the subject five days after the event and one day after the original post of the CJR article.

The meltdown of the Leninist Right: You Are There

Lou Dobbs was finally called on some of the urban legends he uses in his commentary and has his obligatory tantrum:



The country is going through a period that just might return it to sanity.  That does, however present a threat to the Leninist Right currently masquerading as conservatives within the Republican Party.

So they do what Leninists always do when under threat: They demagogue the issue, with no respect for the facts.



Murdoch's game plan is out of the Communist Party playbook, circa 1933.

It's going to be an interesting couple of years...

The Great Realignment (Health Care)

There is a big stink among pro-choice activists that the Stupac amendment to the health care plan (which forbids any federally augmented insurance paying for abortions) was included in the version that passed the House.

The problem is that anti-abortion Democrats were the margin of victory, as was stated by House Whip James Clyburn:



What I suspect is happening is the beginning of a realignment, under Obama, where the Democrats become the party of both liberalism and conservatism.  If I'm correct, there is gonna be a lot of screaming from "progressives" and Right-Leninists alike.

Obama Job Approval: Health Care

From Pollster.com:

The World According to Palin

From The Mudflats:

This, folks, is a panic attack:

And always remember to wear your socks in TV; otherwise you look like a menopausal male prostitute.

Colbert on Lieberman:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Joe Lieberman Is a True Independent
www.colbertnation.com
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Favorability: Sarah Palin

Favorability: Obama

National Job Approval: Obama

Obama's Wilsonian Realism

There was an interesting post on the BBC webpage about the actual effects of Obama's Iran policy: 

In an apparent shift from the Bush administration's efforts to foster regime change in Iran by financing opposition groups, the Obama White House has all but dismantled the Iran Democracy Fund.

While the move has been criticised by neo-conservatives in the US, it has been welcomed by Iranian human rights and pro-democracy activists.

The controversial program was initiated by the Bush administration in an effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran by financing Iranian NGOs.

While heralded by some in Washington, reactions in Iran to the program were overwhelmingly negative.

This goes to a structural and conceptual flaw in public foreign policy discussions.  There is a false distinction made, in my opinion, between realists and Wilsonian internationalists, wherein human rights are seen as a binary choice.  This ignores the history of infantilism in the history of international relations.   For example, the history of the West would have been different had Kaiser Wilhelm II not fired Bismark in a fit of pique.  Without Bismark to continuously adjust German foreign policy to fit shifting European power dynamics, World War I was inevitable.

Much of America's foreign policy disasters of the past nine years are not a result of Bush's conservatism (however defined), but his infantilism and his dependence on equally infantile (but profoundly ruthless) advisors.  Thus, for short-term domestic political reasons, the G.W. Bush Administration wrecked the U.S. position in the Middle East.

This had Orwellian consequences, since Americans are not unique in their predisposition to think in a binaric fashion; the Bush Administration became, in essence an outreach arm of the Iranian Foreign Ministry with its neocon component serving as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's propaganda ministry. Anything the United States said or did had the oppostite consequence in the reigon.

What we have is the paradox of Obama advancing human rights in Iran by avoiding engagement, much to the disgust of the Iranian government and its co-belligerents at the Weekly Standard.

Aides: Obama wants public option, but might not get it.

From DailyKos TV