No, that may explain the muted enthusiasm on the Left for Obama, it does not explain the intensity of the opposition to him on the Right.

My, my …. how Obama did rehabilitate the decrepit Republican Party.

How so?

Thomas Mann and Norman Ormstein have an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post. It is their take on what will and won’t work to fix our political system.

Seems to me that this is not just a story telling problem.

A piece of this is on the audience. To the extent the story is being told and disseminated, the quality of the listening is less than above reproach.

Jeffrey Toobin has an excellent article in The New Yorker – ” Money Unlimited”.

If you are interested in how Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the execrable Citizens United decision, this article is must reading.

The article is a fascinating and disturbing behind the scenes look at the Roberts’ Court.

You think the real problem is the half-assed fire department. I place the majority of the blame on the arsonists.

econobuzz @21

By overplaying the encampment tactic, energy was wasted and focus lost.

By failing to run the anarchists out, lots of goodwill was dissipated.

Occupy was a brilliant political moment. It appeared last autumn that this moment might grow into a successful political movement. Unfortunately, a series of serious tactical blunders has made that possibility seem remote.

In his first two years, this president helped pull the economy back from a depression, rescued the American auto industry, passed a health care reform law 100 years in the making, signed Wall Street reform, DADT repeal, the woefully under-appreciated student loan reform, New START, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the biggest overhaul of our food-safety laws in 70 years, new regulation of the credit card industry, a national service bill, expanded stem-cell research, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, net neutrality, the most sweeping land-protection act in 15 years, and health care for 9/11 rescue workers, among other things. (That’s just his first two years. In his third, Obama also ordered the strike that killed bin Laden and helped oust Gadhafi in Libya.)
 

In my opinion the most corrupt political act ever perpetrated in US history was the crooked election of Rutherford B. Hayes. It cost hundreds of millions of people their freedom and has poisoned our politics for over 130 years.

Yes, he is a Democrat. His ideology is in line with Democratic Presidents back through FDR.

Nate Silver, who writes the excellent FiveThirtyEight Blog for the NYT, did an analysis of Obama’s ideology in response to charges that he was a moderate Republican. Silver’s analysis concluded:

” It is almost certainly an exaggeration, therefore, to conclude that Mr. Obama’s positions are similar to those of a Republican of the 1990s. His DW-Nominate scores are considerably to the left of even the most liberal Republicans of the 1990s — and slightly to the left of most 1990s Democrats.”

Obama is not a liberal. The Democratic Party is not a liberal party.

Obama is slightly left of center. The political mean of the Democratic Party is to right of him.

This is not new. Democratic Presidents and the Democratic Party have occupied this political terrain for at least a half century.

They do so because they have calculated this political terrain affords them the best opportunity to win elections. Although my personal political beliefs are to the left of this terrain, I think their political calculus is correct.

To claim that by authoring this opinion Justice Sotomayer is embracing torture is as wrong-headed as when the Right claimed Chief Justice Warren was embracing criminality in authoring Miranda.

Fitzgerald is quoted as saying: “The rich are different from you and me.” And, Hemingway is quoted as responding: “Yes, they have more money.”

Beyond that, my experience is that they are not all that different. Like all other economic groups they come in all flavors and in about the same proportion of of good, so-so and bad.

cocktailhag, Thanks for the well written essay and civil discussion.