David Corn

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From the start, Obama ought to have been barking orders and imposing demands on BP and the federal agencies—and doing this in public view. Not micromanaging, but commanding. During a massive catastrophe, citizens expect to see someone in complete charge. While Obama obviously was overseeing the federal reaction, his engagement was not always on public display. For weeks, the White House kept pointing to only one example of White House pressure on the response effort—forcing BP to drill two relief wells, not merely the one the oil company planned to pursue. (These relief wells will be used to plug the leak once they are completed, perhaps as early as August.) In recent days, Obama has stepped up his command presence, calling on BP to improve its claim process and to provide payments to oil rig employees out of work due to the drilling moratorium imposed in reaction to the Gulf spill.

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This problem does not lend itself to the usual powers a president wields and defies the customary ideological divides. Right-wingers can't say, let the market sort it out. And liberals can't call for a new government program. Neither approach would stop the oil that is now gushing through BP's cracked pipes. (Libs, though, are right to urge a complete reappraisal of offshore drilling and to demand an effective regulatory system to prevent another catastrophe.) And firing a government official -- such as Elizabeth Birnbaum, the head of the Interior Department's Minerals Management Services (who resigned on Friday) -- won't slow the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The White House has repeatedly pointed out that the federal government -- including the mighty U.S. military -- does not have the technical means to repair a hole at the bottom of the sea.

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Politics Daily

Forget Obama and David Brooks -- Because It Is About Race

Obama may be right that it's not the overriding issue. What's happening is the continuation of a political culture war. But race is certainly a part of this ongoing conflict.

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whereIstand interview with David Corn

Will microblogging replace blogging?

 

I don’t think it will replace it. Microblogging is maddeningly frustrating because of the length of words. You don’t get to put sources in. A lot of tweets come with links to blog posts or articles so they’re more like the traditional news ticker, like when they invented the wire service news ticker. It didn’t replace newspaper stories.

 

Microblogging is far more convenient but it’s not enough to replace a good blog post, which goes into detail about an event or provides deeper analysis.

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Mother Jones

An organized mind at work is a wonderful thing to watch. During his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama placed the mind of his presidency on display, and it was wonderfully organized. The speech—a State of the Union stand-in—presented a clear, mostly left-of-center agenda for his presidency and a series of forceful rationales for his proposed actions. Obama offered all this up with a now-familiar fair dose of charm and grace. It's been years since any BMOC in Washington has presented such an extensive and well-articulated plan for—dare one say it—change.

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Wapo

Also unsettling is Obama's decision to re-up Gates at the Pentagon. Gates is certainly an improvement on his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. He's no ideologue. And by placing a Bush appointee who happens to be pragmatic in charge of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, Obama might avoid a bruising political wrangle over his Iraq policy. But on Gates's watch, there has been little, if any, progress in Afghanistan. And Gates has not truly taken on the Pentagon's biggest domestic problem: its bloated, out-of-control budget.

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Moore's right. The health care system in the United States is a bad deal for many Americans. (Don't get me started about Oxford, which routinely denies almost every claim I submit for my family.) He glosses over some of the problems overseas (the French social welfare system is under much pressure), but he debunks the hyperbolic scare-'em criticisms hurled at the Canadian and British systems by free-marketeers who defend the U.S. system.