Posted without much comment

Apparently, the GOP doesn't think that Obama's first month in office has been a smashing success.


if only he'd been a bit more bipartisan, I guess.

Obama in a nutshell...

Here are the last eight minutes of so of Obama's speech on Lincoln yesterday, delivered in Springfield, IL. (The first part of the speech is also available at YouTube). If you want to get a sense of the governing philosophy of this administration, and understand the stark differences between Obama's belief in the role of government and that of the GOP, this is a tremendous illustration. Aside from the stunning oratory and the succinct and well designed historical context, this speech brings into high relief the differences between the Luddites who have placed themselves into opposition to the President and this administration, which is founded upon the fundamental belief that the government has a vital and irreplaceable role to play in making this country work for all of its citizens, particularly in troubled times such as today.

This speech highlights the difference between those who would spend a trillion dollars on a pointless and unnecessary war and then advocate broad-based tax cuts in order to starve the government of any ability to act when the inevitable bills came due, and a party who believes that our government has a vital role in providing services and infrastructure for its citizens so that as a polity we are a better thing. It is the same argument that surrounded the fundamental optimism and pessimism of Locke and Hobbes, and if we haven't been living in the ultimate manifestation of a Hobbesian nightmare for the past eight years, I'm not sure what we would call it.

Make Them Stop

Watching functional morons like Mitch McConnell rail against the stimulus plan as pork laden tax and spend liberal policies, rather than just about the only thing we can do to stave off a complete economic collapse, begs the obvious question as to why we would listen to the the very individuals who are responsible for this mess. Krugman points out that the approaches to the current crisis really reflect the fundamental world views of the parties, rather than some sort of true economic debate.

You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad.

Listening to McConnell, Shelby and the like try to wrap their parochial world view around the crisis at hand is more than maddening, it can only be compared to listening to Cheney and Bush criticizing the new administration for not continuing the absurd policy of poking the hornet's nest that they relentlessly bashed for the past eight years. At what point will the American people stop listening to the folks who are directly responsible for our current mess? More importantly, can the Obama administration call these jokers out for the charlatans and blockheads that they are?

Digby calls out the Dems for their approach. She's right.

Your Republican Party....

When they aren't blaming our current economic woes on immigrants and scolding Obama for being a tax and spend liberal (stimulus? bailout? what-evah), the loyal opposition is getting down to serious business:

When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.

Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package. He's apparently not a fan of the economic rescue package, according to members of the group.

If nothing else, GOP aides are using the appearance to get staffers to attend the 9 a.m meeting.

“In case you weren’t planning to attend CWG tomorrow morning, you might want to reconsider because Joe the Plumber will be joining us!” Kimberly Wallner, an aide to South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, wrote in a message to her e-mail list this afternoon.