Right Wing Nut House

Yes, campaign promises are a dime a dozen and few people believe most of them.

But even for someone who promised the moon to so many, Barack Obama’s campaign promises are being quietly shelved or thrown under the bus at an unusual rate.

His tax policies are in ruins. And many of his prized ideas are now going to have to be financed through tax increases on every working American or their cost added to the ever ballooning deficit - the result of George Bush’s massive bailouts.

Then there’s his personnel choices which hardly give substance to his call for “change.” The establishmentarians he has hired on to run his national security and economcs shops fall laughably short of any promise for a “fresh breeze” to blow through Washington - more like a fetid wind of revolving door government.

Does this make Obama a failure? Not hardly. In a sense, it might have done more good than we realize at this time. Disabusing the new president of some of his more problematic notions of governance could very well moderate some of his policies and cause him to scale back some of his more grandiose plans on education ($4,000 tax credit in exchange for “community service”), the environment (1 million hybrids on the road by 2015), and most of all, the “middle class tax cut” which could add another half trillion to the deficit.

You could certainly blame some of Obama’s problems on the Bush deficits but not all. Much of Obama’s problem lies with his dishonest accounting of how he was going to pay for his programs to begin with. That, and a shortsightedness about the vagaries of the oil market will now doom almost all of his domestic initiatives to the ash heap.

With oil trading at below $50 bbl and OPEC apparently unwilling to cut production very much, the Obama team is quietly shelving one of the cornerstones of their economic program - a “windfall profits tax” on the oil companies.

Obama’s promise to give every American family a $1,000 “energy rebate” seems to have come a cropper of - what else - reality.

Obama and Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on the Obama-Biden long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief.

How about his other tax raising proposal - the one he was going to foist upon the rich? That, too, has gone the way of the dinosaurs as his broken promise will now raise taxes on everybody because he plans to roll back the Bush tax cuts when they expire at the end of 2010.

To argue, as Obama defenders try to do, that this is not a tax increase is laughable. When you pay X amount in taxes one year and the following year you pay Y amount, with Y being a larger sum of money than X, most kindergartners - and maybe even some liberal economists - would call that a tax increase. And those tax cuts affected people in all income brackets - not just Obama’s idea of who is or who isn’t “rich.”

How about those 5,000,000 “green jobs” that were going to be funded by the oil tax revenue that was going to be invested in new technologies? Gone, along with the silly notion that taxing oil companies will create more oil or even bring down the price of the commodity. The market proved more efficient than anything or anyone in the US government in deciding how much people will pay for energy.

Do the math. Obama was expecting hundreds of billions of dollars from this tax to fund his social welfare schemes. He was expecting tens of billions more by increasing taxes on “the rich.” He either must shelve almost all of his program or raise taxes on everybody - substantially.

From Reuters:

President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday.

“President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel,” an aide on Obama’s transition team said. “They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that.”

Oil prices have fallen from a record $147 a barrel in July to under $50 this week.

Obama, who signaled early in his campaign for the White House that he would take an active approach to oil markets as president, had planned to use the revenue from a windfall profits tax to fund a tax rebate for low- and middle-income families struggling with high energy prices.

But the aide said Obama’s presidential campaign had already taken the price drop into account six weeks ago. When Obama laid out his economic plan for the middle class in mid-October, revenue from a windfall profit tax was not included because of the price change, he said.

Oil companies steadfastly opposed a tax, saying it would stifle exploration and innovation.

Obama is whistling past the graveyard if he thinks he can fund the massive giveaway that polls show was the major reason for his electoral win. With trillion dollar deficits staring him in the face it would be fiscal madness to advance the kind of broad based rebate and handout that he so proudly pushed when running for president.

The dash of reality about revenue that this pullback represents calls into question some of  the primary goals of his Administration. Unless he is willing to push marginal tax rates much higher than he said during the campaign, it appears he will have to renege on that promised giveaway  of hundreds of billions of dollars.

There are few human beings on planet earth more annoying than Deepak Chopra, the touchy-feely, New Age Guru whose fetid, gooey, and completely banal nostrums regarding health and healing have reached a new low in the history of civilized thought.

He is, in short, a first class idiot.

To prove my point, Dorothy Rabinowitz writing in the Wall Street Journal caught this fakir blaming America for the attacks in Mumbai:

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that “If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules.”

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that “our policies, our foreign policies” had alienated the Muslim population, that we had “gone after the wrong people” and inflamed moderates. And “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.”

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on — matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir — which had caused so much terror and so much violence. “That’s not Washington’s fault,” he pointed out.

Blogger Betsy Newmark has it about right:

It takes a seriously twisted world view to pivot immediately to finding a way to blame America for terrorists storming hotels and other soft targets to gun down people innocently going about their business. Rabinowitz ties this view to the handwringing over a report that the majority of people in the Middle East think that 9/11 was a put-up job done by the United States and Israel.

Reading Chopra’s writings at Huffington Post is a mind altering experiences; you are forced to alter your perception of how anyone could be so remarkably oblivious to their own idiocy.  It is impossible to reconcile in your mind the idea that anyone could take such a lightweight seriously.

For instance:

On November 7, 2008, at 9:45am , I, Deepak Chopra, took a vow of
non-violence in my thoughts, in my speech and in my actions. I, then,
also had an opportunity to ask the almost 500 people attending the plenary session for the Alliance for a New Humanityin Barcelona if they would join me in this commitment.

I first asked them to close their eyes, put their awareness in their hearts and ask themselves honestly and seriously if they were willing to take a vow.

I told them that a vow is a sacred commitment from which there is no going back. It is like a child that is born, who cannot return to the womb.

I told them if they were ready to take this vow, they should stand up.

People stood up, one by one at first, then in groups of twos and threes, and finally in tidal waves, until more than 450 people had stood up and taken the vow.

Following this, everybody agreed to have at least two people in their lives take the vow. The two in turn, would have two others join them in taking the vow. Our immediate goal now is to get 100 Million people across the world to take this vow. In the meantime, we will be setting up ways to measure and support the dramatic effects this tidal wave of shift in consciousness is going to create.

Ahem…their “immediate goal was to get 100 million people across the world to take this vow?” The “dramatic effects of this tidal wave?”This kind of simple minded, feel good sophistry is what Chopra excels in foisting on his legions of worshippers who mistake his syrupy treacle for serious thought.The idea that such a task is even possible would never cross the mind of anyone except a simple minded dolt.

Here’s what passes for political analysis from Chopra commenting on Obama’s election:

The most sober comment came from Obama himself, when he pointed out that his win wasn’t the change the country is seeking but only the chance for change. Happily, he’s wrong in several regards. We will see immediate change globally. The rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the neocons’ attempt to create an American military empire.

In the end, the most moving comment came from Sen. John McCain in his concession speech. Like all the candidates who have stood for the Republican cause since the Reagan revolution, McCain couldn’t resist the temptation to employ “junk politics and immorality” in his campaign. But he went out honorably by saying that America “isn’t a country that hides from history.” That hasn’t been true for the past eight years. Let’s hope it’s gloriously true from now on.

So we’ve been “hiding from history” the last 8 years? What planet has this guy been visiting during the Bush Administration? More likely, he hasn’t a clue what history is and therefore believes that sticking ones head in the sand about terrorism and all the evil in the world passes for facing history square in the face.

Chopra delights in trivializing the momentus and obscuring the obvious. One need only read his “political” writings at Huffington Post to become lost in a sea of the most mind boggling shibboleths, inane platitudes, and nauseating screeds against Republicans you can find anywhere on the internet. No one bothers critiquing his thinking anymore because frankly, there is so little in the way of intellectual meat in his scribblings that any such effort isn’t worth the pixels that would be expended in trying to explain the depth of his stupidity.

Read the rest of Rabinowitz’s piece to get a good laugh.

The blog will go dark for 4 days as I take some time off to decompress and recover my wits.

Now some of you would say I had little or no wit to begin with. I beg to differ. You must differentiate between some of my recent scribblings which, an objective observer might indeed say, were “witless” and the meandering thoughts that course through my head which pass for “wit.”

The former is a result of not having had a true day off in a very, very long time. As many of you know, I am Associate Editor at The American Thinker (where I post 5 or 6 blog posts everyday) as well as being employed as Chicago Editor of Pajamas Media. Both of those jobs are in addition to posting a daily essay on this site. The election and its aftermath gave me a case of burnout that I can only now address by taking some time off at Thanksgiving.

When doing something you love becomes a chore, you know it’s time to step back and recharge the batteries. Writing has not been any fun at all for most of this month and since I believe the last time I took a day off was probably the last time Sue and I went to Reno which was just about 2 years ago, I think I’ve earned a little R & R this weekend.

As far as the latter, I will spend most of this weekend catching up on some reading and trying to stay away from the internet except to find out what’s happening in the world. A little football, some movies (I might watch the LOTR trilogy - all special editions), and a lot of napping.

And of course, eating. I have been given permission to go off my diet (I’ve lost 48 pounds since September) and will glory in the feasting. I am too old to carouse and go out wenching but Sue has volunteered to make my stay at home more than worthwhile.

I’ll be back at it come Monday.

Pat Ruffini was kind enough to reply to my post from yesterday where I asked how his plans to counter the left’s online advantage fit in to reform of the Republican party.

My point - either not well made or Pat chose not to respond specifically - is one of timing. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does creating this online juggernaut occur in a vacuum? Is it dependent on what the Republican party does to reform itself? Are the two goals mutually exclusive or is their some kind of symbiosis involved where the rightroots’ efforts lead to reform of the party or vice versa?

Pat referred to my “strawman” argument as one of tactics. Au contraire, mon ami. First, if by “strawman” Pat means I was deliberately misrepresenting his position, that was not my intent. If he took it that way, I’m sorry. I am 100% behind Pat’s efforts and, as an aside, believe him to be the best individual to get this idea off the ground and in motion.

Having said that, I believe there to be a disconnect in Pat’s reasoning that would be fatal to his efforts. Quoting from his response:

I would break down the three things the GOP needs to do as follows:

• Rebuild our infrastructure. There is no question that the left has us beat online and in the new forms of alternative media. We need a strategy for addressing that. This is a main focus of Rebuild the Party but not the only one.
• Find our message. In the absence of a new Reagan or better infrastructure, we need to find a compelling message that resonates. We need to be more centrist / more conservative. We need to focus more on social issues / fiscal issues. Etc. etc. We hear a lot of this lately. Henke has a framing for this that I like: the unifying narrative.
• Find new leaders. Only when people have a leader they can rally behind will the movement be activated. This was certainly true of Obama.

The right answer is that we need all of the above. None of these can happen without the other. Perhaps the largest failings of the Bush years can be attributed to the fact that we had a new leader without an ideological revival at the same time.

Rick is right that new technology will be for naught if we keep spending like drunken sailors. Tactics cannot overcome structural deficits or crappy, uninspiring messaging. Good marketing cannot dress up a bad product.

“Rebuilding infrastructure” was not my impression of what The Next Right and Rebuild the party.com was all about. I thought Pat was in the business of creating a whole new ball of wax - online activism, fundraising, candidate recruitment - everything the left is now doing online as well as transplanting some of the Obama model to the right. Certainly we can piggyback some of that on an existing organizational template through the RNC or some other party department but the bulk of what must be done has to be accomplished if not in opposition to the party (do they really want 5 million people trying to tell them what to do?) then certainly independent of it.

As for the “message” or Henke’s “narrative,” that indeed, refers to tactical matters that I agree is vitally important but not relevant to my critique. And whether or not finding a “Reagan” is even possible given the nature of politics and the fact that The Gipper was a World-Historical figure who by definition comes along once in a generation or two would be an iffy proposition at best.

So is wondering about whether the chicken or the egg comes first in this reform process a question of “tactics” or is it a fundamental question regarding the viability of Pat’s ideas? By reforming the party, I think we are both talking about not only issues but structural changes as well (Pat addresses this at RTP.com by calling for RNC reform). I am not sure that the way the national party’s thinking is organized at the moment, Pat’s online ideas fit entirely in the party’s plans for the future. I’m sure they’re grateful for the efforts and would give their right arms for the kind of organization Pat is talking about but are they going to be a help or a hinderance?

So my question from yesterday about why conservatives should exert the energy to become more active before the party takes the necessary steps to reform itself both issueswise and organizationally stands. Indeed, if that question can’t be answered, it puts Pat’s entire enterprise at risk in my opinion.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show,, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, more transition talk as I welcome Ed Lasky, NewS Director of the American Thinker, Jennifer Rubin of Contentions, and Clarice Feldman for a roundtable discussion focusing on Obama’s personnel picks for his economic, foreign policy, and Department of Justice teams.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn have a nice write up in today’s Washington Post regarding their new web effort Rebuild the Party.com. The website features a list of endorsers that constitutes a who’s who of the rightysphere as well as a plan they would like to see the GOP adopt that, includes the recruitment of 5 million new Republican online activists, reorganizing the RNC, developing a new fundraising model, and rebuilding the grass roots infrastructure of the party.

All ambitious goals to be sure. But are they achievable?

Everybody agrees the GOP must become more web savvy and that a better connection has to be made to conservatives online. Few would also argue with the notion that efforts must be made to catch up to the Democrats in online fundraising and organization. But then we have the problem with the Republican party itself and its refusal to get serious about the kinds of reforms that would make a conservative like me proud to belong once again.

If Ruffini wants me to promote candidates, raise money, and urge volunteers to work for campaigns he better put a burr under the ass of the party leadership and get them busy on changing just about everything about the organization that contributed to its defeat these last two elections. These are not just technical adjustments or changes around the edges. We are talking about fundamental alterations in people, policy, and ideology that would make the Republican party worth getting excited about again.

Republicans are about ready to fall into a couple of traps that losing parties apparently can’t avoid when the dust settles following a debacle such as they have experienced the last two election cycles. The first is the belief that the reason for being rejected by the voters is that their candidates weren’t “pure” enough ideologically and that only by pushing forward “true conservatives” can the GOP find its way back.

I don’t dispute the necessity for putting up more conservatives for office. But the idea that you can have some kind of lock step litmus tests to determine who a “true” conservative might be is nuts - and counterproductive. There are plenty of competitive congressional districts where one of those “true” conservatives would get slaughtered by most Democrats. When 70% of the country does not identify itself as “conservative,” you are deliberately setting up the GOP for defeat if you advocate only “real” conservatives receive support.

There are candidates that would be completely acceptable to the vast majority of conservatives who would fail some of the litmus tests given by the base. A party that seeks to diminish its ranks by making membership dependent on a rigid set of positions on issues is a party doomed to maintaining its minority status. The Democrats made the exact same mistake in 2000 and it cost them in 2002 and 2004.

Only when they stopped listening to people like Kos and recruited dozens of candidates that reflected the realities of their specific district did they break through in 2006 and 2008. These candidates were not hard left ideologues but much more pragmatic in their politics. That didn’t mean they were “conservative” or even “moderate.” It means they were attractive candidates with decent name recognition, well funded, well organized, and in tune with local concerns. And they wiped the floor with our guys.

The other trap the GOP appears to be springing on itself is the idea of “me-tooism.” “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” may have worked for Bugs Bunny, but to see Republicans seeking to alter the disastrous Bush/Obama policies on bailouts only by proposing less money or nibbling around the edges rather than uniting to oppose these fundamental alterations in American society only proves that the vast majority of them are not worthy of conservative support. On this, the most important issue that has come before the Congress in a generation, the GOP is failing the test.

Pat believes that changes in the party can be effected by uniting the conservative community online and forcing the GOP to make necessary alterations. I believe he is being overly optimistic. What should come first, party reform or rightroots activism? What good would all of Pat’s great ideas be if they came to fruition and the GOP was still a party of pork-loving, deficit embracing, open border hugging, lobbyist kissing corrupt hacks? Is Ruffini saying that by initiating the kind of activism he is looking for online that the party will, either naturally or by osmosis, magically reform itself into an organization that conservatives would feel justified in backing?

This, is not an insignificant point. As is stands now, the rightroots are more conservative than they are Republican. And the noises being made by many GOP officeholders are not encouraging. The transformation of our economy into some kind of quasi-socialist managed disaster is going on with barely a peep from Republicans. Yes there are some like Senator Inhofe who are trying to hold the line. But if the GOP is interested in employing the conservative online community in a bid to help the party back to power, it would be helpful if a few more congressmen and senators joined the fight, proving that they were worthy of conservative support by acting like, well, you know, conservatives.

In the end, despite the undoubted genius of Ruffini and his friends, I can’t see him making much headway until the Republican party rediscovers its fundamental philosophy and its primary purpose for existing; to elect honest and ethical candidates who espouse conservative values . Not litmus tests but rather shared principles of governance with room for disagreement and debate.

Can Ruffini’s template for conservative activism and organization goad the GOP into that kind of a reformation? I think Pat is counting on that happening. But from where I’m sitting, it would appear to be an uphill battle to motivate online conservatives to join a cause where their activism would be exploited by those who don’t share their principles or care for their opinions.

There were times last night during the showing of the 24 2 hour preview Redemption that it felt like the production team had recaptured some of the magic lost during last year’s abysmal season. Here was Jack Bauer in his element, taking on an entire squad of bad guys with just a couple of pistols and a few sticks of dynamite, blazing away, dropping his enemies with the precision of the killing machine he has proven to be over the years.

But the show lacked much in the way of suspense, was entirely predictable (who didn’t guess that once the kids started for the embassy that Jack wouldn’t trade his freedom for their asylum?), and failed to involve the audience in what should have been the emotional crux of the show; Jack’s inner turmoil about coming to grips with what he believed he was forced to do at CTU.

The short, unsatisfactory scene where Bauer discusses his wanderings since the end of Season 6 with his special forces buddy Carl Benton (played with heart and understated competence by Robert Carlyle), who runs a mission for kids orphaned in a previous genocide, didn’t reveal much as far as Jack’s motivations for running away from the Senate subpoena. In very un-Jacklike fashion, he made it known he valued his “freedom,” intimating that he didn’t want to go to jail for what he had done at CTU. Or is the real reason he is gallivanting around the globe is that he is trying to run away from his personal demons - the faces that haunt his dreams of the people he killed or tortured?

Perhaps this will be fleshed out as the season goes on - otherwise there’s a great big blank spot for Jack’s motivations.

Some may think the story line about child soldiers to be unworthy of Bauer but I found it horrific and compelling. The opening scene where the new “recruits” were drinking some kind of alcohol and forced to kill the government official was shocking and realistic.

Best of all was the portrayal of the United Nations lickspittle. Now it should be said that there are many brave, courageous UN peacekeepers and relief workers out there who have given their lives for their mission. But there are way too many Charles Solenz’s, the cowardly UN peacekeeper (played with suitable ambivalence by Sean Cameron Michael) who ends up betraying Jack and the kids. The show’s POV of the United Nations was definitely negative and definitely not PC - a pleasant surprise and one that bodes well for the rest of the season.

Jon Voigt is a good choice for Jack’s nemesis, arms dealer Jonas Hodges who, we discover in the last scene, has some very powerful friends in government as he is standing with other movers and shakers immediately prior to the inaugural. His tentacles appear to be long and deep as he not only has an in with the former administration but also apparently has cronies with the Secret Service.

Our first femal president is Allison Taylor a Hillary look-alike played by Cherry Jones, a fine character actor (she was brilliant in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs as a police officer). I don’t trust her. When the outgoing president offered her a drink, she refused on the grounds that it was “too early in the day.” A good politician knows it’s never too early for scotch.

Beyond that, she acts just as you’d expect a liberal Democrat to act. When told that we had no economic or compelling national interest in the tiny African country of Sangala she wanted to send troops anyway. Only when there is absolutely no way anyone could construe the US sending troops to a country for selfish reasons will a liberal shoulder the burden of a war. It’s counterintuitive but there you have it.

The one other character of note who will be seen when the season gets underway on January 11-12 with the usual 4 hour extravaganza is First Son Roger Taylor played with studied indifference by Eric Lively. But it’s not him that I will look forward to seeing. It is his extremely hot girlfriend Samantha portrayed by Canadian Carly Pope. The show always seems to get at least one hottie who proves to be a femme fatale. My guess is that Samantha is tied up with Hodges in one way or another.

All told, the plot of Redemption was satisfactory if not spectacular, the acting workmanlike, the production values scintillating as usual (no one blows stuff up like 24), and the African locations gave it a nice ring of authenticity. The villains appear to be suitably evil (although how I long for the truly diabolical fanaticism of Marwan, the Islamic terrorist with the nuke fetish). The idea of a female presidency doesn’t bother me even though the First Guy appears a little emasculated to me.

In short, the preview was not a disappointment but hardly a huge success. It showed us that the season has the potential for some excitement but could also tail off into a quagmire of touchy-feely, politically correct nonsense.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

The maneuvering began before Barack Obama was even elected president. A genuine political scramble was on as Illinois politicians great and not so great let it be known subtly and not so subtly that they wouldn’t say no if Governor Rod Blagojevich tapped them to fill out the unexpired portion of Obama’s term in the United States Senate.

There are so many issues and personalities involved in the decision-making process that the selection promises to be controversial no matter who is chosen. It would take the wisdom of Solomon to sort out the confusing, conflicting currents of race, faction, and family in order to arrive at a consensus so that the Democratic Party in Illinois doesn’t fly apart at the seams.

And smack dab in the middle of the maelstrom is the current governor, Milorad “Rod” R. Blagojevich, proud Serbian-American. He is also a man on the cusp of becoming the fourth Illinois governor out of the last seven to be indicted for corruption. He was mentioned prominently and not in the best light, during the trial of Obama friend, financier, and patron Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted of fraud in connection with a statehouse “pay to play” scheme. Federal prosecutors have leaked the information that they think they have enough on the governor for an indictment, largely — it is believed — because Rezko is singing to the feds in exchange for a lighter sentence. There is also a move among members of his own party in the Illinois House to impeach him. The governor is not only unpopular in the state, he is spectacularly and universally hated. A recent poll conducted by the Chicago Tribune found that just 13% of residents approved of the job he was doing.

In short, Governor Blagojevich might want to hurry the process of selecting Obama’s replacement along since he may not be sleeping in the governor’s mansion much longer. He claims he wants to settle the matter before Christmas. If so, he will probably be able to make that deadline — barely — before either resigning in disgrace or being kicked out by members of his own party.

If it were only Blagojevich who had input into the decision it would still be difficult, but at least the governor would avoid incoming fire from several factions with a huge interest in who will replace the new president in the Senate. And there is no interest group making more noise and demanding consideration than African Americans.

They’ve got a good case. Once Obama formally resigns from the Senate, that body will be left with no African Americans serving. There are two prominent African Americans in Illinois who may have the inside track as well as a few other blacks not as well known but who might be on Blagojevich’s short list .

One candidate, Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, who served as Mayor Daley’s staff chief and headed up the powerful Transit Board in Chicago, is a long time friend of both Michelle Obama (who she hired for the Mayor Daley’s staff years ago) and Barack. But she has  removed her name from consideration because she is destined for the national stage, being named Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President. She is also currently busy as co-chair of the Obama transition effort.

The other major African American contender is Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., son of former presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson and a power in Chicago politics. If Blagojevich wanted to open a can of worms, he could do no better than select the younger Jackson to replace Obama. It would tick off Mayor Daley, anger a rival faction of African Americans in the city, and worry many downstate Democrats who feel Jackson would be a millstone around their necks in 2010.

Jackson carries a lot of political baggage. He once disrespected Mayor Daley’s father, the former Mayor Richard M. Daley, very publicly. He has opposed Daley in his efforts to expand O’Hare airport, desiring that the government build a new airport in his district. He has also clashed with Governor Blagojevich on several issues and railed against the corruption of his administration. A congressman since 1995, Jackson ran an abortive campaign for mayor in 2006, smartly dropping out when the Democrats achieved a majority in the House of Representatives. It would have been an uphill fight to pull enough liberal white, African American, and Hispanic votes to beat Daley who is very popular with many minority groups, especially Hispanics.

Jackson wants to replace Obama badly. He was first out of the box, making it known in October that he would be “honored and humbled” to take Obama’s seat. He actually commissioned a Zogby poll showing him in the lead among all candidates who had been mentioned.

He is also very liberal — a fact not lost on downstate Democrats who have figured out how to run in previously Republican territory and believe that having Jackson at the top of the ticket in 2010 might very well set them back and allow the Republicans to retake control of one or both houses in the legislature.

Given all this, it appears that Jackson would only have an outside shot at being chosen. That leaves two potential candidates — one not very well known and another known all too well as one of the more colorful characters in Illinois politics.

At age 73, state Senate leader Emil Jones has had a long career as a Chicago Machine politician. Starting as a sewer inspector, Jones worked his way up the ranks and is now one of the most powerful politicians in the state. His own campaign kitty funds dozens of Democratic senators in their runs for office, making him a force not only on the Senate floor where he rules with an iron fist, but also in the corridors and cloakrooms where his legendary powers of persuasion are put to use in service to what some see as his own agenda.

Jones, who is retiring from the state Senate in 2010, has said he wouldn’t turn the job down. In fact, some observers believe he would make a perfect replacement for Obama. He almost certainly wouldn’t run for re-election, thus clearing the way for a battle royal among all the current crop of Senate hopefuls in a free for all primary in two years. African Americans would be happy. Daley would be happy. Obama might even like to see his former mentor get a nice reward at the end of his career. And Governor Blagojevich could breathe a sigh of relief — temporarily — as he would have avoided a bruising fight.

But Jones, as Roger Simon of Politico points out, has some major drawbacks:

He was one of Obama’s political patrons, is close to the governor and is an African-American, yet I got snorts of derision when I ran his name past some other Illinois sources of mine. That’s because Jones is from the old school — he started out as a sewer inspector, which is not bad training for a life in politics — and is not a modern, ready-for-TV candidate, possessing an orator’s tongue. He is a Chicago pol — the ring tone on his cell phone is the theme from The Godfather — but he would be a “place holder” only and would not run in 2010.

So Jones would appear to be out of contention. The other dark horse candidate from the African American community is Congressman Danny Davis. But Davis has many of the same problems that Jones has. He is 67, a former Chicago alderman, and while he is well spoken and knowledgeable, he may have too much baggage to be a good choice to run in 2010. He once accepted a trip to Sri Lanka paid for by the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group. He is also a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. If downstaters thought they might have problems with Rep. Jackson in 2010, Davis might be their worst nightmare.

Other candidates include the lieutenant governor, longtime Democratic office holder Pat Quinn. However, Quinn may be busy moving into the governor’s mansion if Blagojevich is booted out or if he resigns. Then there’s Congressman Jan Schakowsky, a popular Democrat from Chicago’s near north side. If Blagojevich wants to choose a woman, she would be one option.

The other female option open to Blagojevich is one of the more compelling figures in Illinois politics. Tammy Duckworth is an Iraq War veteran who lost both her legs in combat and ran a spirited campaign in 2006 against Peter Roskam, who was vying to replace 16-term Congressman Henry Hyde. Although losing that race, the Asian-American won national attention both for her heroism and her anti-war advocacy.

Now serving as Blagojevich’s veterans affairs chief, Duckworth has made known her desire to be selected to be Obama’s replacement. And Obama himself may have sent a signal of who he might be favoring. When the president-elect laid a wreath at a soldier’s memorial in Chicago this past Veterans Day, at his side was Tammy Duckworth. Now it is true that Duckworth is head of veterans’ affairs for the state. But Obama didn’t have to have anyone by his side. The fact that he chose Duckworth may give us some sense of who he might wish to see in his Senate chair next January.

Duckworth also has a stellar list of supporters including Illinois’ other senator, Dick Durbin, who recruited her to run for Congress in 2006. Her campaign that year was managed by Rahm Emanuel, and she had David Axelrod as a media advisor.

A female war veteran, an up and coming star of the Democratic party in Illinois, a young (40), intense campaigner with a compelling personal story, a choice that would please the new president, and someone who could run very well downstate — Tammy Duckworth would seem to solve a lot of Governor Blagojevich’s headaches.

But this is Illinois. And if there is anything about politics in this state that is consistently true it is to expect the unexpected and take nothing for granted.

This article originally appeared at Pajamas Media

If you’ve been reading a lot about the economic situation here and around the world, you can’t help but be struck by how terrible the future looks to a lot of “experts.”

Is this a function of the media realizing that apocalyptic news sells and less dire forecasts are given short shrift? Or is there really a consensus that we are in for horrible times?

I honestly don’t know enough to say one way or another. Here at home, the massive trouble that CITI is in promises to give us the biggest bailout yet. And there are some “experts” saying that the entire financial industry of the United States will soon be nationalized:

It’s not preferable, but all major U.S. financial companies will eventually be under government control because the alternative is so much worse, Hugh Hendry, chief investment officer at hedge fund Eclectica Asset Management, said Friday.

“All financials will be owned by the U.S. government in a year,” Hendry said. “I bet you.”

Nationalizations take dramatic losses from the private sector and places them on the larger balance sheet of the public sector, he said.

“It’s not good,” but society is vulnerable and society is going to have to intervene, Hendry said.

I don’t know Mr. Hendry from Adam but CNBC thinks enough of him to quote his prediction and include a video of his remarks. Does that make him an expert? Got me.

And its even worse overseas - if you believe the foreign press. Iceland is all but bankrupt, the product of their state bank going belly up. But what about Great Britain?

The scale of our problems has still not been understood. In essence the domestic banks are largely bust. The Government’s £500 billion bailout plan is primarily designed not to keep banks lending to small firms and to homebuyers but to prevent an unimaginable financial calamity.

Banks provide the very foundations and plumbing of the entire economy. A failure of confidence in them could still bring the entire capitalist edifice tumbling down.

It suits ministers, however, to maintain the bogus claim that the bailout is about sustaining bank lending. True, that would be a helpful side-effect, but is not the main purpose. Indeed, a gentle and gradual reduction in the indebtedness of individuals and companies is still needed.

At the risk of hyperbole, we should not be worrying about whether this is going to be a thin Christmas for retailers (it is), but whether Britain and the West are about to plunge into a years-long economic Dark Age - complete with mass unemployment and social unrest.

I don’t think you can get more depressing than that. But how true is it? The Times is a respected publication and all we have to go on if we want to glean the truth out of all this is the reputation of the media outlet from which we are getting this information.

No one denies that there is a crisis. No one is underestimating the potential for catastrophe. My problem - our problem - is that in this, a time when honest appraisals of the situation are needed, we have little or no confidence that our newspapers, radio programs, or the cable newsnets are delivering what they are supposed to be giving us; the facts of the situation and not trying to scare us into buying their product or watching their programs by hyping the bad news.

I think things are as bad as many are saying. But then we get a piece like this from Daniel Gross at Slate.com:

All this historically inaccurate nostalgia can occasionally make you want to clock somebody with one of the three volumes of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s history of the New Deal. The credit debacle of 2008 and the Great Depression may have similar origins: Both got going when financial crisis led to a reduction in consumer demand. But the two phenomena differ substantially. Instead of workers with 5 o’clock shadows asking, “Brother, can you spare a dime?” we have clean-shaven financial-services executives asking congressmen if they can spare $100 billion. More substantively, the economic trauma the nation suffered in the 1930s makes today’s woes look like a flesh wound.

“By the afternoon of March 3, scarcely a bank in the country was open to do business,” FDR said in his March 12, 1933, fireside chat (now available on a very cool podcast at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s Web site). In 1933, some 4,000 commercial banks failed, causing depositors to take huge losses. (There was no FDIC back then.) The recession that started in August 1929 lasted for a grinding 43 months, during which unemployment soared to 25 percent and national income was cut in half. By contrast, through mid-November 2008, only 19 banks had failed. The Federal Reserve last week said it expects unemployment to top out at 7.6 percent in 2009. Economists surveyed by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank believe the recession, which started in April 2008, will be over by next summer. (Of course, back in January the same guys forecast that the economy would grow nicely in 2008 and 2009.) But don’t take it from me. Take it from this year’s Nobel laureate in economics. “The world economy is not in depression,” Paul Krugman writes in his just-reissued book The Return of Depression Economics. “It probably won’t fall into depression, despite the magnitude of the current crisis (although I wish I was completely sure about that).”

Is Gross just more levelheaded than the others? He makes a convincing case but so do some of those predicting Armageddon.

I believe this is a crisis of confidence in our media - a result of many years of being conditioned by their biases, by their laziness to remove those biases, and by the nature of the news business itself and what it has become. The left likes to talk about the “corporate media” but it’s actually worse than that. Over the last 30 years, there has been a consolidation of media outlets into gigantic conglomerates while the actual number of independent media channels has dropped precipitously.

It isn’t that they’re “corporate” that makes them suspect, or more accurately, not trustworthy. It is that there are so few alternatives out there. I have no doubt that most publications and TV networks actually make an effort to deliver the news as accurately as they are able - given constraints about needing to turn a profit and stand out from the crowd. But that doesn’t change some basic facts. An empire like Rupert Murdochs’ was unthinkable 30 years ago. Every town over 50,000 or so used to have 2 or even 3 newspapers published daily. (50 years ago it was 4 or 5 dailies). If you want to listen to the radio today, you have 3 or 4 huge companies that own the overwhelming majority of popular local stations. Television has a handful of owners despite hundreds of stations.

No wonder the news sounds so much the same.

That doesn’t solve our problem of knowing who to believe, who to trust in this crisis. I suppose we have to make an effort to get as much information as we can and use our own best judgment as to what we should take away from each news or opinion article we read. This is probably good advice as it relates to any news we choose to digest be it on the internet or through some other media outlet.

But somehow, I can’t escape the feeling that our media is letting us down in this crisis and that I am probably not the only one disappointed in their performance so far.

This blog post originally appears at The American Thinker 

Here, in the winter of conservative blogger’s discontent, a small ray of sunshine has peeked through the black clouds and brightened what has otherwise been an unrelenting skien of gloom and doom.

I am talking about how president-elect Barack Obama has tacked to the center by reaching out for establishment Democrats and Clintonites to fill in the first blanks of his administration’s personnel sheet and the reaction to that by our blogging friends on the left. And then there’s the sore spot that is Joe Lieberman and the monumental sense of betrayal felt by the Kos Kids that the “traitor” wasn’t boiled in oil and his bones made into a xylophone.

Now, truth be told, the leftosphere has it all over conservative bloggers when it comes to organizing for fundraising, grass roots activism, and internet political action. To give you an idea of the discrepancy between right and left on the internet, I recently sent a congratulatory telegram to the RNC for finally hooking up all 50 state parties via Western Union telegraph. All that is left to do is build a time machine so that the Republican party can make that Great Leap Forward into the 20th century and perhaps start using that new fangled invention by Alexander Graham Bell he calls “the telephone.”

Do you think I’m being facetious? Well, maybe a little. But listen to Pat Ruffini, perhaps one of the most tech savvy guys on the right, as he explains the technological advantages Obama and the Democrats have at the present time:

Obama is not President-elect without the internet. He would not have been the nominee without the internet. And had we had a much closer race in the general election, two, three, four points, maybe, had we not maybe had this economic crisis crop up, the internet and the youth vote would have been the deciding factor in the general election as well. He’s got a network of ten million people on e-mail that are now going to be called upon to pass his agenda. So every member of Congress can expect at a minimum a couple thousand phone calls when one of his bills comes up, because he’s built this huge network that he’s now going to unleash on passing his policy agenda. Beyond that, he went into cell phones numbers, you know, announced his vice presidential pick by cell phone. He’s got a database of six to eight million cell phone numbers. Some think, I would be surprised if Republicans have a database of six to eight thousand cell phone numbers. So that is a huge, those are huge numbers, huge advantages, and it’s going to have to be, I think our number one priority tactically, like David said, we’re going to have a rich, vibrant debate about what our message should be. But I think everybody…and there is going to be plenty of disagreement on that. But I think everybody can agree, in this particular area, in technology, is something we need to get serious about fast.

So when I see the sharp end of the stick for the Democrats - the netroots - wailing and gnashing their teeth that Obama has “betrayed” them with his personnel picks and by not kicking Lieberman out of the party, I can’t help but smile and be heartened that it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

Assistant Editor at The New Republic Jim Kirchick:

“With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head,” wrote David Sirota on the popular liberal blog OpenLeft, decrying the serial betrayals of Obama and the congressional Democratic majority. The Democratic Party, he wrote, has “faced no real retribution” for its manifold heresies, something that Sirota believes he and his band of angry bloggers must change. “We better understand why this happened,” he fumed.

Allow me to provide an answer. You don’t matter.

That the Netroots - the fabled bloggers who, in 2004, carried Howard Dean from being an unknown governor of a small state to a Democratic presidential front-runner - are not the potent political force that the media portrays was confirmed this past week when Senate Democrats resisted their “demand” that Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman be punished for endorsing John McCain for President (Lieberman was reelected as an independent in 2006 and caucuses with the Democrats). Ever since Nov. 4, when Democrats increased their majority beyond the point that Lieberman’s allegiance was necessary for them to maintain control over the Senate, punishing Lieberman has been the primary goal of liberal bloggers. For weeks, they pounded their keyboards, huffed and puffed on their Internet radio shows and called on their readers to flood the offices of Democratic senators with phone calls and e-mails demanding that Lieberman be stripped of his chairmanship over the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Yet on Tuesday, Democrats voted an overwhelming 42-to-13 to let Lieberman keep that chairmanship.

“He wasn’t sanctioned,” seethed Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos. “And Senate Democrats trying to make that claim are dishonestly trying to cover up the extent of their betrayal of the American people’s vote for change.”

Given the intensity of blogger rage over Lieberman, one can understand how their defeat at the ends of their own party would lend itself to hyperbole, but when did the “American people” appoint Markos Moulitsas their spokesman? And while there are many ways to interpret the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, that voters across the country wanted Joe Lieberman to be stripped of his committee chairmanship is not one of them.

I can understand the rage of the netnuts over Lieberman and disgruntlement over Obama’s national security choices.They helped out in destroying Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and here’s Obama on the verge of naming her Secretary of State. How bellicose of Obama! Couldn’t he find someone who voted against the war who was qualified?

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winner in economics and a critic of corporate globalization. He should be Treasury Secretary.

Senator Russ Feingold is a champion of civil liberties. He should be Attorney General.

Robert Greenstein is head of Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He would make a much better OMB director.

Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, would be a tremendous Secretary of Labor.

And if Obama really wanted change, if he really wanted to honor progressives who backed him early on and then did the grunt work against McCain, he’d nominate Dennis Kucinich as Secretary of State.

That sure would indicate a welcome departure from empire as usual.

Well, it would be a departure from sanity at least.

Taking pleasure in another’s discomfort is not very grown up of me, I know. I should be solicitous of the left’s disappointment. I should give them words of tenderness and understanding. I should forswear criticism while encouraging them to keep the faith. I should allude to all the good things they’ve got and not despair.

Nahhhhh…