If you’re having a good day, I apologize in advance that I am about to ruin it.
This week’s sign that the Apocalypse is upon us is yesterday’s revelation (sorry, religious pun) that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has opened a political action committee. She has given it the imaginative and creative name of SarahPAC.
PACs raise money for candidates to spend on other candidates—or, more often, themselves.
I probably don’t have to spell it out for you, but just in case, this is a disturbing sign that Palin plans to run for president in 2012.
AAAaargh.
Since Palin is already on Facebook, we can at least hope that she’ll be playing a lot of GeoChallenge between now and then.
President Obama spent some time Tuesday meeting with Republicans on Capitol Hill, trying to assuage their concerns about and objections to the massive spending that is the centerpiece of his $825 billion stimulus package.
Politico has this great article about how, even though the men and women on each side played nicely and used their manners, Obama and his ideological opposites just couldn’t find common ground.
Well, that’s not exactly true. They did find some common ground, and Obama addressed it before he had even arrived on the Hill: He sent word to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi through U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) that she could forget her grand idea about packing $200 million in contraceptive funding into the stimulus bill.
The speaker is, by all accounts, a heroine to abortion-rights activists, and she figured she’d take her newfound expanded majority out for a spin. She even appeared on ABC News to defend the contraceptive funding as stimulative.
What a dope.
Pelosi may be the speaker, but she’s obviously clueless when it comes to tactical politics. Here was the new Democratic president, was set to square off with Republicans in the Senate over his most important initiative yet. The GOP was on its heels, struggling to find a message; they didn’t like the big spending, of course, but they didn’t have a handle on any tangible examples to lend heft to their opposition.
Enter Pelosi with a gift for the GOP.
In the contraceptive plan, Republicans found an easily communicable rallying point. Here was an example, they said, of wasteful and inappropriate spending: What were Democrats doing inserting money that wouldn’t create jobs or stimulate the economy into a bill that is supposed to create jobs and stimulate the economy?
Message delivered. Americans began wondering whether Obama’s stimulus package was beginning to go the way of the ill-fated and basically useless TARP program.
So Obama, on his way to meet with Republicans and anxious to show that he’s serious about listening to their concerns, picked up the phone and sent a message to the ambitious but reckless speaker: Knock it off. Forget about the contraception provision. And for goodness’ sake, please don’t “help” me anymore.
Well, maybe not quite in those words. But that was the gist.
As for the bipartisan summit that followed, the result was probably a foregone conclusion: Obama wouldn’t budge on plans to give all working Americans, even those who don’t pay taxes, a tax cut, and Republicans politely explained that they just can’t support the president’s plan ...
... But it was nice of him to ask.
When it was over, the president and the Republicans emerged—though not together—and expressed their respect for one another while noting the ideological divides that will mark their relationship throughout the next four years. And that’s where the real news was made.
All in all, the meeting didn’t accomplish much in terms of shaping the stimulus package itself. But it was an important opportunity for the new president and his political foes to feel each other out, get a handle of sorts on what to expect from each other.
... And Obama began to lay critical groundwork for how he will pursue future initiatives, like health care reform, in Congress.
As one of 18 members on the committee, Bell will help develop federal policy recommendations and communicate with Congress and Obama Administration officials about the education improvement priorities of state boards of education, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
According to its mission statement, the NASBE “exists to strengthen State Boards as the preeminent educational policymaking bodies for students and citizens.“
Bell has represented District 3 on the SBOE since 1995.
See also:
The Alabama Republican Party’s news release congratulating Bell.
If you watch “The Late Show with David Letterman,“ you’ve probably seen one of the segments Dave likes to call, “Know your (Current Events, Cuts of Meat, German World Cup Soccer Players, Pets of Celebrities, Overweight Bush Administration Officials, etc.).“
Of course, my favorite is the current events category. But then, I’ve never been much of a cook ... or a fan of E!
Anyway, CNN brings us a helpful take on Dave’s fun game: Click here to Know Your Obama Cabinet Members.
It’s not as easy as you may think. Sure, you know that Hillary’s heading State and that that dude who didn’t pay his taxes is now in charge of the IRS. But can you name the nation’s new energy, veterans’ affairs or interior chiefs? How about America’s new ambassador to the United Nations, or President Obama’s national security adviser?
Don’t worry; with a little time and effort, you can be impressing your fellow employees at the water cooler (i.e., “I really have high hopes for what Orszag will be able to do with OMB. He could really shake things up over there”).
And while we’re on the topic, anyone want to take any shots at who Obama will get for the still-vacant Commerce spot? I still like Alex Sink.
We’ve talked a lot about race over the last couple of weeks—about what President Obama’s election and inauguration mean for race relations in this country and whether that election and inauguration mean that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s dream for racial equality has been fulfilled.
I said that it didn’t, and in making my argument, I pointed out that as legal barriers to equality have fallen, social barriers have been erected between blacks and whites. In other words, as King’s dream was coming closer to reality in one realm, it has slipped further away in another.
And I’m watching this new president with curiosity—curiosity about how the man whose political triumph supposedly embodies the fulfillment of King’s dream can advance that dream by espousing policies, like affirmative action and hate crimes legislation, based on race. You don’t minimize race as a factor in society, I have said, by emphasizing it as a factor in public policy.
Today I give you another curiosity—congressional testimony from Robert Reich, a senior Obama economic adviser and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, in the House Ways and Means Committee on Obama’s economic stimulus package.
Here’s the takeaway:
The Obama Administration wants to structure the stimulus to the affirmative exclusion of professional Americans, to include the middle class, and white construction workers. Not construction workers generally or the entire industry itself, mind you; WHITE construction workers. To the best of my understanding, Reich seems to be OK with Hispanic, black or other minority construction workers receiving stimulus dough.
Back in the old country, we called this REVERSE DISCRIMINATION.
Rangel wants to write this discrimination into the bill by way of a funding formula, and Reich assures him that it can be done.
Rangel delights in Reich’s agreement to the plan and notes that the Administration need not worry with opposition from the middle class—because, you know, they’ll be too busy trying to keep their jobs.
Reich adds that governors, who have spent decades in their home states and were elected to their executive posts by the millions of people they represent—governors, who are presumably more familiar with the needs of their respective states and where stimulus money can be best used—governors and the state legislators with whom they work should have absolutely ZERO input in the Obama plan to stimulate their individual state economies. Governors should be “given a choice of either signing on the bottom line, or not,“ Reich says.
(Full disclosure alert: I am married to a white construction worker—a white construction worker whose company recently had to let another white (though female) employee go because of the economy. Apparently, Robert Reich and Charlie Rangel want to try to help people like her keep her job ... but they couldn’t be less concerned about whether my husband, the father of our three daughters, keeps his.)
I haven’t been able to find anything about this exchange in the mainstream media. If you have, please let me know.
In the meantime, watch this three-and-a-half-minute video.
Take the yellow notes, which are spliced in throughout the clip, for what they are: Peanut gallery commentary. But know that the words of Reich and committee chairman U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) stand on their own.
