Thesis: Obama should drop the presidential gravatas and go full meta, that is, talk to us, the American public, as one of us about the party politics that is rendering his presidency ineffective, thereby solving his Drew Westen-identified broken narrative arc problem, leveraging the totality of his inestimable intelligence and communication skills and exposing the scourge of party politics-born Bachman/Perry false prophets of gravatas — what Krugman likes to call VSPs (very serious people).

Support: Left for the reader as an exercise.

Opening Line Suggestion: “Now, I know I’m both the most credible and least credible person to talk to the American people about politics, but my time as President is short. Moreover, I started my journey to this office as one of you and when I’m done here, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will be one of you again. So here’s what you need to know/read/understand/do to fix what’s systemically broken in American politics today.”

Ian Bremmer’s The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? is on the top of my reading list.

Simply cannot be overstated.

Hi Rob,

The “stuff video” made a strong point about toxins in plastic etc. I thought that you would be pleased to know that your support of the Obama team is being felt in the world of food and drug containers. According to our consultants who do testing for the device and pharmaceutics industry, testing requirements for toxins in polymers have been strengthened in a major way. Under the Bush administration, for polymers with a history such as silicone rubber or titanium, we would put the material under the skin of a rabbit for 90 days and look for inflammation and redness. For plastics that had never been used before in the body, there are a comprehensive list of chronic toxicology and carcinogenicity tests conducted with cells or with living subjects. However, there was no required analytical chemistry component in any of these regulations.

However with the Obama administration we are now required to supplement the biology testing with very sensitive chemical analytical methods. There is an FDA mandated process for leaching all potential “extractable” materials out of the plastic (things like unreacted monomer, additives for mold flow) and then studying each of these extractables for toxic effects. The combination of biologic and chemical analytical methods is a much better way to assure that plastics do not carry toxic chemicals into the body.

Just wanted you to know that your very active support of the current administration has had a practical (albeit expensive) effect. We just came out of a meeting discussing our corporate position on this requirement and we are embracing it. It is the right thing to do.

Maybe there is hope,
[name]

Tremendous.

To the Editor:

By means of two legal fictions, that corporations are people and money is speech, the Roberts court has turned America from a democracy to a plutocracy.

Norman N. Holland
Gainesville, Fla., Jan. 22, 2010

And the runner-up:

To the Editor:

The justices have affirmed a core principle of Republican government: one dollar, one vote.

Stephen Bowles
Santa Barbara, Calif., Jan. 22, 2010

Q: What is the Geithner Plan?

A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world’s largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off–in either case at an immense profit.

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money?

A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

Oi.

@ http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/the-geithner-plan-faq.html

Crucial. This documentary is at least as good as the Milk film…and you can view it online.

And although it’s distracting and off-point, my being is so incredulous, my sense of justice so outraged, that I must repeat the grimly obvious. The assassin of gay rights champion Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone’s was found guilty of manslaughter, not murder, and served less than six years. The facts of the case are that the assassin entered through a window to evade detection of his loaded handgun and extra bullets by City Hall’s security. The assassin entered the Mayor’s office, shot the Mayor three times, reloaded his gun, walked down the hall to Milk’s office and unloaded five bullets into Milk, the final shot an executioner’s close-range shot to the head.

MURDER. Say it with me: MURDER.

And let it never be forgotten.

It’s simple. The car has evolved. Gas guzzlers have gone the way of the dinosaur – there’s a reason they call it “fossil fuel.” In their place we have electric versions of our favorite makes and models being developed by established car companies.

And the evolution of the car means the evolution of the entire transportation model. When we eliminate the dependence on oil, we eliminate the environmental and economic damage that came with it.

The good news is we’re evolving into something very familiar. The Better Place business model is one most of us already experience every day – with our mobile phones.

Think of it like this: we pay mobile providers for minute-by-minute access to cell towers connected together in cellular networks. Truth is, we pay comparatively little – or next to nothing – for the phones themselves. After all, what you’re really buying is air time, not a box with buttons.

The same model works for transportation. Just replace the phone with an electric car, replace the cell towers with battery recharge stations, and replace the cellular networks with an electric recharge grid. Now you’re buying miles, not minutes.

Brilliant concept. Transformative if it works.

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

Sometimes long in the tooth, but so often on point. Keep it up Thomas.

I’m a few years late to this revelation, but lest it not be said: TalkingPointsMemo.com is among the most astute left-leaning national politics blogs I’ve read, routinely exceeding my highest expectations. 

Each day before bed I anticipate the invariable delight to my smoldering cynicism of The Day in 100 Seconds, a Stewart-Colbertian mashed-up drubbing of the day’s hot topics told through shrill banality of network television.

But today was an especially solid TPM moment. I ran across a TPM post titled The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008, a quick read of well-known right-leaning writers’ pithy insights with respect to the state of conservative politics. Like the best of The Economist, the TPM editor ferrets out quotes of exceptional crispness, profundity and self-deprecation, reminding me that failure is tragically far more instructive than success.

Good work TPM. I’m a committed reader. Keep it up.

If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day. Forget the inaugural balls; we can’t afford them. Forget the grandstands; we don’t need them. Just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and let’s swear in Barack Obama right now — by choice — with the same haste we did — by necessity — with L.B.J. in the back of Air Force One.

- Thomas Friedman

via Op-Ed Columnist – We Found the W.M.D. – NYTimes.com

Believe me, I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haute bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.

- David Brooks

via Op-Ed NYT

via VLU

This special edition of The New York Times comes from a future in which we are accomplishing what we know today to be possible.

The dozens of volunteer citizens who produced this paper spent the last eight years dreaming of a better world for themselves, their friends, and any descendants they might end up having. Today, that better world, though still very far away, is finally possible — but only if millions of us demand it, and finally force our government to do its job.

via ObeyGiant