EQUIPOISE

EQUIPOISE, Nice find by David Brooks to compliment President Obama on his confident, calm, and reflective response to a series of multiple crises from the oil spill to the collapse of Greece and to the alleged terrorist plots. Brooks' comments reflect the reason why Barack Obama obtained the largest number of popular votes in American history. As Peggy Noonan, Reagan's speechwriter, noted in her eulogy to her old boss "character does matter". While I love to swim in the ideological broth of American politics, I have to be honest that the American voter doesn't vote on ideology, something today's Republican party seems to have forgotten. This is especially true in American presidential politics where people take the measure of the man. President Obama wants to be a transformational President but my fears are that he absolutely must be if the country is able to turn the corner into a brigher future. But it is nice to be reminded by a conservative writer that our President is Cool.

The employment numbers are coming out tomorrow. Preliminary reports show that about 200,000 jobs were created this past month. Vice President Biden had predicted that the economy would show in a few months job creation at 250,000 to 500,000 per month. All this is good until you realize at this pace, the job losses from the Great Recession would only be recouped in roughly three years. That's with a strong recovery. As President Obama stated in Iowa, American businesses have used this recession to become more efficient and cost-cutting and hence may not be hiring back the employees they laid off. In out of the way places like MIT, NASA and a wind turbine plant, President Obama has been talking about his future for the American economy post-Recession. Without a basic economic transformation of this country, we are looking at a status quo of roughly 8% unemployment and the development of a permanent underclass that will require an expansion of a welfare safety net.

There seems to be one good development. Gotcha Politics, which we no longer can afford, seems to be failing. The Gulf Oil spill as Obama's Hurricane Katrina seems not to be gaining any traction. Rasmussen buried the findings about how the President rates on his handling of the crisis way down in his latest poll numbers. 20% rate the President's handling excellent, 23% good, 28% fair and 26% poor. Given his overweight to Republicans, the President is doing well.

Bad news for the birther cause. Governor Linda Lingle, the Republican Governor of Hawaii, gave an extended radio interview where she voiced her annoyance with all the requests for the President's birth certificate. She recalled how she was campaigning with John McCain in 2008 and began to take endless calls from her office on the subject. She had her own Health Director, a physician, to go personally view the birth certificate in the birth records of the Department of Health. She told her radio interviewer that Barack Obama was born at Kapi'olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii and that's the end of the matter. The Free Republic have absolutely gone nuts over this interview.

Mountebank. A nice find of Keith Olbermann to describe Rush Limbaugh but it can apply to so many on our cultural scene. One prime candidate is Rev.Rekers, who rented a male companion for his overseas vacation. The escort named "Lucien" agreed to be interviewed by a Miami paper in the wee-wee hours of the morning and admitted he was paid to have sex with the minister and once a day performed a naked massage on the clergyman. Lucien called his specialty the Long Stroke, a complex massage that entails a caress "across his penis, thigh..and his anus over the butt cheeks". With the teabagging visual I mentioned yesterday, conservatives will have a fuller array of sexual techniques at their disposal.

Franklin Graham showed up this morning at the Pentagon parking lot to pray, even though he was disinvited to the Pentagon's National Prayer Task Force meeting. Franklin accuses the President of being too tolerant of islam but too dismissive of Christians like himself. Billy's son claims that Christians are being persecuted for their beliefs and will soon not be able to prayer in public. As Jesus told his disciples in Matt. 6:6, you pray to God in private.

Joe Lieberman's bill to strip Americans of their citizenship is going ahead. The State Department would make the decision unilaterally and it would be automatic. Jonathan Turley pointed out that the bill would be instantly unconstitutional. But he also pointed out that the State Department's own terrorist list is fraud with problems. So if you have one ambiguity about what support means for an alleged terrorist group, and add it to the ambiguous nature of the terrorist designation in the first place, you have a royal legal mess. For instance, the ANC was only taken off the terrorist list last year, despite three democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa. So, should Randall Robinson be automatically stripped of his American citizenship for his years of advocating the cause of the ANC? Contrary to what Joe Lieberman and John McCain think, a person stripped of their citizenship still receives Miranda rights.

Back to more of the Omar Khadr trial. The disgraced interrogator continued to testify in the trial. He said that they used the fear of rape on Khadr. He said that they used 4 big black guys to catch little Afghan boys in the showers at the Bagram Air Force Base. The Afghan captives were afraid of being gang-raped to death by these American soldiers. So the interrogators used this fear and told Khadr himself that he would be raped once he was transported to Gitmo. He said that the detainees were chained into stress positions and routinely trussed up into a cage "in one of the worst places on Earth". They called Omar Khadr, then a teenager, 'Buckshot Bob' because he had three holes in his body from wounds and shrapnel in his face.

J Street has a new poll of the American Jewish community on U.S.-Israel relations.
69% firmly support active American engagement in bringing about Middle East peace, even if it means publicly disagreeing with or exerting pressure on both Arabs and Israelis. It was 66% eight months ago;
69% support the U.S. working with a unified Hamas-Fatah Palestinian Authority government to achieve a peace agreement with Israel, even when informed the U.S. does not recognize Hamas due to its status as a terrorist organization and its refusal to recognize Israel. The Truman Institute at Hebrew University reported that 69% of Israelis also think Israel should negotiate with a joint Hamas-Fatah government;
By a 76-24% margin, American Jews support a two-state, final status deal between Israel and the Palestinians along the lines of the agreement nearly reached eight years ago during the Camp David and Taba talks;
By a 69-31% margin, American jews opposed Avigdor Lieberman's calls for requiring Arab citizens of Israel to sign loyalty oaths as well as his threats against Arab members of the Knesset.

Marco Rubio has reversed his position on the Arizona immigration law because of the recent revisions. J.D. Hayworth is asking that the Phoenix Sons apologize for their opposition to the llaw. SIEU has announced it's going to boycott Arizona.

Charlies Crist. now feeling his freedom as an independent, has suggested he will veto the Flordia abortion law requiring women watch ultrasound pictures of the fetus prior to abortion.

A new candidate for best political ad is the Democratic Party's "Demon Sheep II", which attacks Carly Fiorina for her incompetence as HP CEO, her outsourcing 28,000 California jobs to India, buying two yachts and 7 jets and her golden parachute package of $21 million. Nice job but they didn't get her placing HP profits in offshore bank accounts to avoid US taxes, which she is on record as saying, and her love of the Celtic Tiger. But there is still time for more.

Haley Barbour says the oil spill in the Gulf "isn't especially damaging to offshore drilling."

President Obama threaten to veto the financial reform bill if it contains the GOP consumer agency, which he called "worse than the status quo" and he's made noises over the provisions to audit the Fed. The beat goes on.