I love TPM but posts like this are embarrassing:

Big Sigh of Relief for NY-Dems

The NYDN says Rudy will announce tomorrow that he won’t run for senate next year. Which is pretty good news for the NY Dems and Sen. Gillibrand since he was running way ahead of her in the early polls.

I talk to a lot of New York State Democrats and (1) no one thought there was any chance that Rudy would run and (2) no one thought that, if Rudy ran, he’d have a chance of winning. This reaction from Philip Anderson is pretty typical. Rudy is a terrible campaigner who tends to poll well early on in races because of warm memories of the days when he was America’s mayor.

I thought everyone knew this after the 2008 Republican primary.

Let’s just stop pretending that Rudy has a future in politics at the state or national level.

Here.

Let’s just forget your host is an ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, acrimonious, conflict-seeking jerk who takes every opportunity to needle people but who (barely) is redeemed by a love for animals, and spend this thread talking about positive things.

And I was talking about Anne Laurie.

*** Update ***

An action shot for the lovers:

Be back after I shake out the blanket, vacuum, and shower.

*** Update ***

Top this for good news:

Happy thoughts? I can do that. My cousin, who was in a coma for 7 weeks with H1N1, walked 36 feet today, is beginning to be able to speak again (even with a trach) and is set to kick rehab butt. You go girl!

1.) Ezra Klein-

Thanks to the magic of Google, it’s easy enough to revisit the plan (pdf) Obama campaigned on in light of the plan that seems likely to pass. And there are, to be sure, some differences. The public option did not survive the Senate. The individual mandate, which Obama campaigned against, was added after key members of Congress and the administration realized that the plan wouldn’t function in its absence. Drug reimportation was defeated, and a vague effort to have government pick up some catastrophic costs was never really mentioned.

***

But whether you love the Senate bill or loathe it, whether you’re impressed by Obama’s effort or disappointed, it is very hard to argue that the bill Congress looks likely to pass is fundamentally different from the approach Obama initially advocated. “The Obama-Biden plan both builds on and improves our current insurance system,” the campaign promised, and on that, for better or for worse, they’ve delivered. You can debate whether Obama should have lashed himself to such an incremental and status-quo oriented approach, but you cannot argue that he kept it a secret.

Paul Krugman:

There’s a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn’t the man progressives thought they were voting for.

But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that

(a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders

(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive

Now it’s true that many progressives were ardent Obama supporters, with their ardency mixed in with a fair bit of demonization of Hillary Clinton. And maybe they were right — but not on policy grounds. (I still remember people angrily telling me that if Hillary got in, she’d fill her economics team with Rubinites).

So what you’re getting is what you should have seen.

There have definitely been compromises, and there have been letdowns. There have been mistakes, and there have been broken promises. I’m not thrilled with the slow pace of Gitmo, I’m not thrilled about any number of things, but I see slow progress. But there have also been unrealistic expectations- Obama was always a risk averse, cautious, careful person- I remember the many discussions we had here regarding Obama as poker player versus John McCain and his reckless love of roulette, and we used to agree that a cautious poker player who studies the opposition and thinks long ball and treats us like adults was desirable.

I’ve said repeatedly that the only people who really believed that Obama was a left-wing radical were the people on the left who wanted him to be but refused to pay attention and those on the right who wanted to destroy him. I think I’m still pretty right, and it is why I’m not disillusioned. I think my take on the guy was pretty accurate, and still is.

I like this look:

Saw this on twitter and it made me laugh.

Yet another positive development:

Policy wonks and deficit hawks weren’t the only ones paying attention when President Obama signed the Fiscal Year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act last week. HIV activists, public health experts and communities of drug users celebrated—not for what’s in the appropriations bill, but for what’s not in it: a ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs, which has appeared in the federal budget every year since 1988.

After two decades, this change is a historic achievement. Obama had already missed one opportunity to lift the ban, neglecting to pull it out of his budget in May. Still, that same month former Seattle chief of police Gil Kerlikowske was sworn in as the director of national drug control policy, calling for a new common-sense approach to drug addiction. When the drug czar calls for an end to the war on drugs, it’s clearly the start of a new era.

Unlike during the Clinton administration, when there was only mixed support for needle exchange—in 1998, drug czar Barry McCaffrey convinced Bill Clinton to renege on his stated intention to lift the ban—all of the top brass in the Obama administration are on record in favor.

It really is a sign of how dysfunctional our national dialogue is that something as common sense as needle exchanges is politically off limits. And that isn’t even getting into the rest of our insane drug laws.

BTW- I was mocking them earlier, but is it just me, or is the Nation pretty good reading lately?

The Chris Matthews and Darcy Burner (who is really charming and I wish had won last year) discussion about Joe Lieberman on Hardball is going to be one for the ages, and really highlights the unreality of this notion that somehow we could have gotten a radically different bill out of the Senate.

If anyone has the video, let me know.

Great piece by Jonathon Chait in TNR.

Douthat:

True, if Republicans had played ball, they would have been in a position to eliminate the public option, demand deficit neutrality, and so forth … but they had Democratic centrists to do that work for them, and they won all those battles, to some extent at least, without having to vote for the final bill. Whereas winning the larger war, over the design of the legislation, was probably beyond their capabilities whatever negotiating strategy they took.

According to the CBO, the Senate bill saves 130 billion over the first decade. Isn’t that BETTER than deficit neutral? Or are we just aiming to meet the soft bigotry of low expectations we’ve come to expect from the GOP?

New airplane regulations:

The federal government will impose big fines starting this spring on airlines that keep passengers waiting on runways too long without feeding them or letting them off the plane.

Airlines that let a plane sit on the tarmac for more than two hours without giving passengers food or water, or more than three hours without offering them the option of getting off, will face fines of $27,500 a passenger, the secretary of transportation announced on Monday.

“This is President Obama’s Passenger Bill of Rights,” said the secretary, Ray LaHood. Various proposals by that title have been introduced in Congress in recent years, but none has passed.

Sounds good, but I’ve been told if Obama used his bully pulpit and really got in front of the issue, he could have gotten rid of airline delays completely. In other news:

The White House Press Office sent out a statement today announcing that President Obama signed the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010 into law on Saturday.

That bill contained Franken’s anti-rape amendment. Funny how that works- the House and Senate send him good bills, and he signs them.

Kaplan “economics columnist” Robert Samuelson has a bizarre, content-free, anti-Obama screed today. I’m not going to link, but here’s a sample:

Barack Obama’s quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America’s long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He’s championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country’s long-term interests. “This isn’t about me,” he likes to say, “I have great health insurance.” But of course, it is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved “universal” health insurance. He’ll be disappointed.

[....]

What it’s become is an exercise in political symbolism: Obama’s self-indulgent crusade to seize the liberal holy grail of “universal coverage.” What it’s not is leadership.

There is very little substantive criticism of the plan and a lot of citations of poll numbers.

I’ve had a hard time figuring out where the media’s arrogance meme comes from. I don’t think Obama strikes many voters as arrogant, whatever their problems with him might be. I tend to think it comes from the obvious contempt he has for media elites.

There’s something rich about such a self-absorbed group accusing of Obama (or anyone else) of thinking it’s all about him.

Krugman and Kevin Drum both have pieces about the filibuster today. Drum on how to get the ball moving on filibuster-reform:

So what would it take to get people to care? One answer: a high-profile supporter. If Sarah Palin suddenly tweeted that the filibuster is a threat to democracy, for example, everyone would start talking about it. But who else is a plausible candidate for this? The president, of course, but he’s not going to. Anyone else?

Another answer: a popular, high-profile issue that gets blocked repeatedly by a 40-vote minority. Unfortunately, genuinely popular, high-profile issues generally don’t get filibustered. That’s why Supreme Court vacancies are filled pretty quickly but appellate court vacancies aren’t. So it’s not clear what issue would fit the bill here.

And a third answer: some kind of fabulously effective grass roots campaign. That seems pretty unlikely to me, though. Any other thoughts?

The filibustering of anything and everything is going to get worse, not better. Republicans are likely to break even or pick up seats in the Senate and they’re likely to attribute their gains elsewhere (the Senate is particularly unfavorable for them in terms of picking up seats, it’s almost a certainty that they’ll pick some seats in the House) to the power of teabagging.

Too many people outside California regard the California IOU disaster as some quaint thing that happened in a crazy part of the country. That crazy part of the country contains over 10% of the country’s population. If it can happen there, it can happen at the national level, not with IOUs per se, but with even more catastrophic results.

Today’s entry is from Naomi Klein:

I hear Obama is also responsible for a run on o’s.

How do we go about changing the way bonuses are paid amongst our bankster and financial betters? It seems to me one of the biggest problems is that the way their pay structure is set up, they are encouraged to do reckless crazy things in the short term to get insane bonuses, and then when the shit hits the fan, they can just jump ship and a bunch of people who had nothing to do with their decision making are left to pick up the pieces. Recently, that has been you and me.

Is there any way to curb this. Is there any way to structure bonuses based partially on the past performance, but paid out over a five year period, to take into account the future performance of the company. A huge tax rate on bonuses unless they are paid out over time? If the company does poorly because of your decisions the next couple of years, your bonus disappears. Ideally, wouldn’t we want these folks working more for salary than for bonuses?

Just throwing some thoughts out there.

And yes, I know this will cause all sorts of howls of socilaism and government control.

We can talk about anything but HCR.