Excuse me for complaining.

Krugman Sez:  (via Left Coaster http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/019858.php)
Wednesday :: Apr 13, 2011
Open Thread

by Mary

Paul Krugman has a good summary of the President's budget speech. And he says that this plan is a good place of where to end up at and should not be seen as the starting point of a "meet in the middle" with Paul Ryan's Randian plan. Doing nothing would be better than half a Randian plan.

 

All of the internets Exalted M$M Poobahs just loooove Obama: Reaction roundup: Part II by DemFromCT over at Daily Kos  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/13/966695/-Reaction-roundup:-Part-II David Frum EJ Dionne Aaron Blake Andrew Sullivan has a nice roundup of his own, including Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman,  and Jonathan Cohn Stephen Stromberg nanobot sez:  Are you kidding me?

All of the internets Exalted M$M Poobahs just loooove Obama:

Reaction roundup: Part II

by DemFromCT over at Daily Kos  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/13/966695/-Reaction-roundup:-Part-II

David Frum

EJ Dionne

Aaron Blake

Andrew Sullivan has a nice roundup of his own, including

Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman,  and Jonathan Cohn

Stephen Stromberg

nanobot sez:  Are you kidding me?

 

Glen Greenwald is also underwhelmed
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/13/obama/index.html
When I first began blogging five years ago, I used to write posts like that all the time. I'd lament that Democrats weren't more effectively opposing Bush/Cheney National Security State policies or defending civil liberties. I'd attribute those failures to poor strategizing or a lack of political courage and write post after post urging them to adopt better tactics to enable better outcomes or be more politically "strong." But then I realized that they weren't poor tacticians getting stuck with results they hated. They simply weren't interested in generating the same outcomes as the ones I wanted.
It wasn't that they eagerly wished to defeat these Bush policies but just couldn't figure out how to do it. The opposite was true: they were content to acquiesce to those policies, if not outright supportive of them, because they perceived no political advantage in doing anything else. Many of them supported those policies on the merits while many others were perfectly content with their continuation. So I stopped trying to give them tactical advice on how to achieve outcomes they didn't really want to achieve, and stopped attributing their failures to oppose these policies to bad strategizing or political cowardice. Instead, I simply accepted that these were the outcomes they most wanted, that Democratic Party officials on the whole -- obviously with some exceptions -- weren't working toward the outcomes I had originally assumed (and which they often claimed). Once you accept that reality, events in Washington make far more sense.
                 . . . . . . .
UPDATE: Obama gave a speech today on the budget that many liberals seemed to like -- some more than others.  It was a fine speech as far as it goes -- advocating, among other things, defense cuts and a repeal of the Bush tax cuts and vowing to protect the poor from the pain of deep entitlement reductions -- but I've long ago ceased caring about what Obama says in individual, isolated speeches: especially an Obama now formally in re-election mode.  As I said above, he can be expected to oppose Paul Ryan's plan and "pay lip service to some Democratic economic dogma."  If this becomes a sustained bully pulpit campaign to rhetorically sell these principles to the citizenry accompanied by real action to defend them, that will be one thing:  I'll be pleasantly surprised and will be happy to say so.  But what matters is actions and outcomes.

Kevin Drum at MoJo:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/public-and-debt-ceiling

Really unpopular? Here's a poll in January showing that 71% of Americans oppose increasing the debt ceiling. Here's a pollin February putting the number at 62%. Here's another onefrom March putting it at 60%. And here's one from April that put it at 62% after it was explained that raising the debt ceiling meant the United States might default on its debt.

Now, I don't think these numbers will stay this high once the debt ceiling fight takes center stage and everyone gets a better idea of what it really means to refuse to raise it. Still, like it or not, liberals have long since lost the public opinion battle over the deficit. Poll after poll makes it clear that most people want to cut federal spending and don't want to raise the debt ceiling. Sure, it's a vague sentiment, and it falls apart when you ask them what they want to cut, but the fact remains that the public is largely on the Republican side of this battle right now.

 

From Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2291117/pagenum/2

Liberals will love the president's defense of the welfare state. But Obama's political posture was still aimed at the middle. As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein points out, this is not a liberal budget. The president's approach is founded on the suggestions of his Deficit Commission, which received several Republican votes.

Oh wow!  This place is officially dead.  I remember it when the koolaid drinkers ran amuck and chased away anyone and everyone who didn't agree that Obama was the second coming of Christ.

Where are these bobbleheads now?