Abbreviated pundit round-up

post from Daily Kos on 20 January 2011 07:30:15 AM. © Daily Kos

E.J. Dionne recalls President Kennedy's inaugural address, 50 years ago today:

On Jan. 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national interest to universal aspiration.

...

A great speech includes lines so memorable that pedestrian orators eventually transform them into cliches. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." This muscular call for sacrifice has launched a thousand lesser speeches.

"Civility is not a sign of weakness" and "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate" - staple references whenever politics becomes particularly vicious.

"The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." And the torch gets passed again and again, whenever a younger politician is marking out generational territory.

It was a compact speech - at 1,355 words, it was less than twice the length of this column. Kennedy, wrote the historian Robert Dallek, insisted that it be brief because "I don't want people to think I'm a windbag." He needn't have worried.

Gail Collins bids a be-sure-to-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out farewell to Joe Lieberman:

On Wednesday, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut announced that he won’t be a candidate for re-election in 2012. Normally people look particularly appealing when they’re promising to go away. This time, not so much.

...

Plus, he isn’t really leaving. He’s got two years of his term left, during which he will be looking for “new opportunities that will allow me to serve my country.” Do you think that means something involving a large salary and a chance to make multitudinous TV appearances, or a Peace Corps stint in Burkina Faso? Let me see hands.

Meanwhile, the LA Times thinks we'll miss him when he's gone:

When Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut announced Wednesday that he wouldn't seek a fifth term, there was hardly a wet eye in the house. It's hard to find anybody, conservative or liberal, who has nice things to say about Lieberman, who is so disliked in his home state that the threat of competition from a former pro-wrestling promoter was apparently enough to scare him away from the 2012 Senate race. But we suspect Lieberman's detractors will miss him more than they realize.

Yeah, right.

George Will does the tired "government is the problem" routine:

The idea that America's problem of governance is one of inadequate resources misses this lesson of the last half-century: No amount of resources can prevent government from performing poorly when it tries to perform too many tasks, or particular tasks for which it is inherently unsuited.

Matt Miller has a proposal for the Republicans who want to repeal health care:

Republicans need to pass a law that the Congressional Budget Office certifies will cover the same number of uninsured as the Democratic health reform does - 30 million. And it has to do it at lower cost.

If I were President Obama, this is what I would be saying this week. And in the State of the Union address next week. And every time the question comes up.

The logic is simple. If Republicans are serious, they have to accept that it's a national priority to make sure that every American has basic health coverage. Thirty million isn't enough, of course, because the ranks of the uninsured still hover around 50 million. But since Democrats could only muster the will to cover 30 million, that's all we can expect the GOP to match as a measure of seriousness. (Though I'd be happy to see them shame Democrats with a plan to cover more).

New York Times:

A few Congressional Democrats and Republicans will be sitting next to each other on Tuesday night during the State of the Union address, straying from their glowering bunkers on opposite sides of the aisle. It’s a lovely idea, intended to show that ideological divisions do not require personal rancor. But it is essentially a gesture to the cameras, and it should not obscure what remains a wide and fundamentally deep aisle between the parties.

Doyle McManus:

On the most important domestic issues of the day, our two political parties don't merely lay out competing arguments; they inhabit alternative realities.

Inhabiting alternative realities. That's a polite way of putting it, don't you think?

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Six In The Morning

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 20 January 2011 07:30:00 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Let The Show Trials Begin After All Who Needs Real Jurisprudence U.S. Prepares to Lift Ban on Guant?namo Cases WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is preparing to increase the use of military commissions to prosecute Guant?namo[...]

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Extended family of former Tunisian dictator
arrested

post from AMERICAblog News on 20 January 2011 07:00:17 AM. © AMERICAblog News

There's little doubt the alleged corruption extended beyond just the president. At the same time as the extended family was held, the government announced that all political prisoners were now released. Protests against the government appear to be settling.

Some 33 members of ousted Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's family have been held, state TV says.

It said that they were arrested as they tried to leave the country.

In a televised speech, interim leader Fouad Mebazaa vowed a "total break" with the past, an independent justice system and media freedoms.

In a separate development, the new government said it had freed all political prisoners. The reported move comes after weeks of mass protests.

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Departures of Two Public Men

post from Connecting.the.Dots on 20 January 2011 07:00:10 AM. © Connecting.the.Dots

Robert Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy by marriage and in spirit, died this week at the age of 95 just as Joseph Lieberman, 68 announces he is leaving the Senate next year, offering a contrast in public figures.

Shriver, brother-in-law of JFK and Robert, the first director of the Peace Corps who later led LBJ's "war on poverty," was a modest man. Lieberman, who claims to have been inspired to run for public office by President Kennedy, is not.

As Gail Collins puts it, "Normally people look particularly appealing when they?re promising to go away. This time, not so much.

?'I can?t help but also think about my four grandparents and the journey they traveled more than a century ago,' he said in his speech. 'Even they could not have dreamed that their grandson would end up a United States senator and, incidentally, a barrier-breaking candidate for vice president.'?

On the same New York Times editorial page, Bono writes an appreciation of Shriver, who also led the Special Olympics for the mentally disabled, "Bobby Shriver--Sarge?s oldest son--and I co-founded three fighting units in the war against global poverty...We may not yet know what it will take to finish the fight and silence suffering in our time, but we are flat out trying to live up to Sarge?s drill."

My friend Michael Harrington, whose book "The Other America" inspired the war on poverty, once described Shriver's spirit. After a deep breath outdoors and saying, "Great day to be on the slopes, eh Mike?" they went indoors to work in an office until dark.

Lest anyone defend Lieberman from this comparison on the grounds that he did not come from great wealth, Collins says of Lieberman who helped torpedo the public option in health care as "The Senator from Aetna":

"(P)eople with principles have to take an independent stand. But Lieberman?s career has taught us how important it is to do that with a sense of humility. If you?re continually admiring yourself as you walk away from your group, eventually people are going to feel an irresistible desire to trip you."

Joan Didion summed him up in 2004 when he was running for vice-president as a Democrat before backing McCain and addressing the Republican convention four years later:

"Senator Lieberman, who had come to the nation's attention as the hedge player who had previously seized center stage by managing both to denounce the president [Bill Clinton] for 'disgraceful' and 'immoral' behavior and to vote against his conviction (similarly, he had in 1991 both voiced support for and voted against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas) was not, except to the press, an immediately engaging personality...

"His speech patterns, grounded in the burdens he bore for the rest of us and the personal rewards he had received from God for bearing it, tended to self-congratulation."

They still do.

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Thursday Open Thread

post from My Left Wing - Front Page on 20 January 2011 07:00:00 AM. © My Left Wing - Front Page

There is no end. There is no beginning.
There is only the passion of life.

Federico Fellini

Born January 20, 1920

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Is This the Ultimate Buy-and-Hold Stock

post from Jutia Group on 20 January 2011 07:00:00 AM. © Jutia Group

As investors continually seek out new investment ideas, it can get very tiresome. Just when you've found certain appealing stocks, they move up to your price target or . . . → Full Story: Is This the Ultimate Buy-and-Hold Stock?

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Gold Today: Danger Signs and Opportunities

post from Jutia Group on 20 January 2011 05:25:32 AM. © Jutia Group

We were pleased to have special guest Claus Vogt, of the Weiss Group, join us on the radio program this week. I have a great deal of respect . . . → Full Story: Gold Today: Danger Signs and Opportunities

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Swiss WikiLeaks banker fined, but not jailed

Earlier this week, Rudolf Elmer handed new data to WikiLeaks in the UK before heading back to Switzerland for his sentencing. Elmer was found guilty of breaking Swiss banking laws, but was only fined. BBC:

A judge in Zurich did so even though the leaked documents referred to accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Judge Sebastian Aeppli fined Rudolf Elmer, 55, more than 6,000 Swiss francs ($6,250; £4,000).

But he rejected prosecution demands to give Elmer an eight-month prison sentence.

Elmer also said that he had handed confidential Julius Baer banking files to tax authorities, and later the Wikileaks website run by Julian Assange, because he had wanted to expose tax evasion by businessmen and politicians.

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Capital punishment: Tucson provides another
teachable moment

Suppose that Timothy McVeigh had not been put to death for his horrific crime of blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. It?s quite possible that in the nearly ten years since he was executed at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, IN. he would have provided information that could have [...]Related posts:

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Privacy is for the Gated Community only

Your right to privacy is going to require you to not need a job...or benefits. Well, so much for that penumbra.[...]

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