Of Tea and Race

A blogger at True Slant somehow tries to link the exceedingly weird Amy Bishop shooting incident to racism and the Tea Party movement. Bill Jacobson responds...

There is no actual link between Alabama-Hunstville shooter Amy Bishop and the Tea Party movement.

By all accounts, Bishop was extremely liberal and a huge Obama fan (to the point of being described by someone who knew her as being obsessed with Obama).

...It would be easy to dismiss the attempt to link Bishop and the Tea Party movement given the absurdity of the connection. After all, Bishop loves Obama, so how could the "anti-Obama" nature of the Tea Party movement have caused Bishop to do anything?

It's just that these things have a way of working their way into the mainstream media, regardless of how outlandish the supposed connection.

The link between Bishop and Tea Parties is absurd on its face -- it's a lot more easy to link her to Democrats than Tea Partiers (and in reality, linking her to either is stupid and insensitive to the victims of her awful crime). But the link to racism with the Tea Parties is almost equally absurd. The author at True Slant stated this regarding a NY Times article about the Tea Parties...

The New York Times didn’t address the issue of the Tea Party’s white makeup, but the article did describe the movement’s geographical connection, in Idaho, to the white supremacists Richard Girnt Butler and Randy Weaver.

That's actually not the extent of the connection in the article -- a civil rights activist quoted in the article saw questions about Obama's birth certificate as a proxy for racism and intolerance and "painfully familiar cultural and rhetorical overtones." And there is at least one reference to how most of the people at Tea Party meetings are white, contrary to what True Slant says.

But that's it -- they can't establish that any actual racism from Tea Party adherents, but the biggest link is geographical. By that linkage, I must be a huge supporter of President Obama, since I live within 15 miles of D.C.

Worse yet, the proxy for racism now seems to be whether there are enough minorities that are part of a movement. I know folks who are attending Tea Parties, and they're not racists. But it's absurd to claim that they need a minority like me ( or several such people) to show up to prove they're not racists. I guess I should expect this from Keith Olbermann, but I think it reflects a reality that is obsessed with race. Here's an excerpt from Olbermann's recent statement to the Tea Party folks...

And I know phrases like "Tea Klux Klan" are incendiary, and I know I use them in part because I am angry that at so late a date, we still have to back back that racial uneasiness which has to envelop us all. And I know if I could only listen to Lincoln on this of all days about the better angels of our nature, I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid.

But let me ask all of you who attend these things: How many black faces do you see at these events? How many Hispanics, Asians, gays? Where are these people? Surely, there must be blacks who think they’re being bled by taxation. Surely there must be Hispanics who think the government should have let the auto industry fail. Surely there must be people of all colors and creeds who believe in cultural literacy tests and speaking English. Where are they? Where are they?

Do you suppose they agree with you that they’ve just chosen to attend their own separate meetings, that they’re not at your Tea Party because they have a Tea Party of their own to go to?

...Fear is a terrible thing – so is prejudice, so is racism. And progress towards the removal of any evil produces an inevitable backlash. The Civil War was not followed by desegregation, but by Jim Crow and the Klan. The Civil Rights legislation of the 60s was not followed by peace, but by George Wallace and anti-busing overt racism. Why should the election of a black President be without a backlash?

But recognize what this backlash is and maybe you can free yourself of this movement built of inherited fears and of echoes of 1963 or 1873. Look at who is leading you and why. And look past the blustery self-justifications and see the fear – this unspoken, inchoate, unnecessary fear of those who are different.

If you believe there is merit to your political argument, fine. But ask yourself, when you next go to a Tea Party rally, or watch one on television or listen to a politician or a commentator praise these things or merely treat them as if it was just a coincidence that they are virtually segregated. Ask yourself: Where are the black faces? Who am I marching with? What are we afraid of? And if it really is only a President’s policy and not his skin, ask yourself one final question: Why are you surrounded by the largest crowd you will ever again see in your life that consists of nothing but people who look exactly like you? Good night and good luck.

Now, I know that I'm looking at this from a different perspective than a liberal. They tend to look at the issue and believe, that when the vast majority of faces at a Tea Party gathering are white, that there is an underlying current of racism there, one that perhaps the Tea Party folks don't recognize but that exists. But Olbermann's expectation that there will be backlash to the election of a black president is like a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that basically makes it certain that we need to examine all criticism of this President from people of other races with a detailed analysis of whether the criticism is tinged with racist sentiment. That's insane on its face.

Leaving aside the fact that telling people they're closet racists probably isn't the best way to get them to change their opinion or consider your point of view, I don't understand why the lack of minority faces at a political meeting establishes some kind of racist thought. Olbermann analogizes the situtation to baseball prior to Jackie Robinson, when the game was segregated, and people like Olbermann's pre-teen father assumed that Satchel Paige just didn't want to play for the New York Yankees.

But Olbermann misses the point entirely -- baseball was rigidly segregated by the owners of the teams under an unwritten "Gentleman's Agreement". Yes, the rule was unwritten, but it was understood by everyone in the game, and rigidly enforced by Commissioner Landis during his tenure. This is one reason why Branch Rickey's decision to sign Jackie Robinson was such a big deal.

Last I checked, there's nothing stopping anyone of any color from attending a Tea Party meeting or rally. Considering the rather decentralized structure of the Tea Party movement, there's probably no way to have such an agreement, even if there was a desire to do so. And there's no proof of either.

Bottom line, it's silly to allege such stuff, because it can come back and bite you. More importantly, it demeans what racism really is, and eventually leaves people unable to discuss legitimate political disagreements with one another.

No Cats Were Harmed In The Writing Of This Post

I'm not going to take a position on eating cat stew. I don't like cats in the least, but I can't imagine they taste good, and I think Jules Winfield would agree that cats are also filthy animals.

A Good Start, Mr. McDonnell

My new governor takes on some sacred cows in his first budget proposal...

Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) has privately recommended cutting $730 million from K-12 education and $300 million from health programs, as well as changing the state retirement system and requiring 10 days of furloughs for state employees, all to help offset a $2.2 billion budget shortfall over two years, according to sources familiar with the plan.

The K-12 reductions would loosen the state's basic educational standards while reducing funds for support staff, supplemental salaries for coaches and teachers who serve as club sponsors, and health insurance for teachers.

The health cuts would reduce mental-health treatment beds by 232, take 5 percent in funds from community service boards that offer substance abuse and mental health treatment programs, and freeze enrollment for a program that provides insurance to low-income children.

The governor is also recommending millions of dollars in trims to public libraries, shuttering some state parks and phasing out all public broadcasting support over four years.

My biggest complaint is that he isn't cutting enough, but this is hopefully just a start. The actual budget is slightly different than those reported cust, but it's still a better than decent start. And McDonnell's rhetoric, while sympathetic, is a lot better than the woe-is-me stuff from the other side...

"All the cuts gave me heartburn,'' McDonnell said. "All of them were difficult because I know that behind every cut there is a Virginian -- somebody in this room or somebody out of the 7.8 million people we have -- that might be affected by that."

Reponse to the proposed reductions was swift.

"We're really throwing kids in the poorest districts under the bus,'' said Robley S. Jones, director of government affairs for the Virginia Education Association, which represents teachers. ''Honestly, I don't know what school systems like Lee and Petersburg are going to do."

"Governor McDonnell, state legislators, and other officials must be aware that cutting funding to community mental health services, reducing Medicaid provider reimbursement rates, and eliminating acute inpatient beds puts extraordinary pressure on an already overburdened system," said Mira Signer, executive director of NAMI Virginia. "Individuals with serious mental illness need to be able to access treatment and services at the time when they go looking for them; if they aren't available due to waiting lists or too few providers, there are consequences."

"Virginia ranks 48th among the states for Medicaid spending per capita and 45th in Medicaid spending as a share of the state budget," says Laurens Sartoris, president of the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association. "Virginia's Medicaid program already is extraordinarily lean. There comes a point when cuts of this magnitude will hurt all Virginians and cause long-term damage to Virginia's health care delivery system."

You know what, guys? Make do with less. The money funding these budgets comes out the pockets of people who have to do that in the midst of a recession. They lose their jobs, take pay cuts, and work harder for less. Unlike the federal government, states can't print money, and raising taxes drives people (and jobs with tax revenue) out of state. Kudos, Governor. Now let's cut some more.

One Small Step for Democrats

For Democrats, the first step is admitting you have a problem. E. J. Dionne pulls that off, but fails to identify what the real problem is...

If you want to be honest, face these facts: At this moment, President Obama is losing, Democrats are losing and liberals are losing.

Who's winning? Republicans, conservatives, the practitioners of obstruction and the Tea Party.

The two immediate causes for this state of affairs are a single election result in Massachusetts and the way the United States Senate operates. What's not responsible is the supposed failure of Obama and the Democrats to govern as "moderates." Pause to consider where we would be if a Democrat had won the Massachusetts Senate race last month. In all likelihood, health reform would be law, Democrats could have moved on to economic matters, and Obama would be seen as shrewd and successful.

But that's not what happened, and Republican Scott Brown's victory revealed real weaknesses on the progressive side: an Obama political apparatus asleep at the switch, huge Republican enthusiasm unmatched by Democratic determination, and a focused conservative campaign to discredit Obama's ideas, notably his economic stimulus plan and the health-care bill.

The Obama administration argues that both the stimulus and the health bill are better than people think. That's entirely true, and this is actually an indictment -- it means that on the two big issues of the moment, Republicans and conservatives are winning an argument they should be losing.

Dionne goes on to claim that the stimulus is working, a claim that is questionable at best, as illustrated by Reihan Salam. I also tend to believe that when a large enough majority thinks something is true, it's probably illustrative of an underlying fact -- so when only 6% of the public thinks the stimulus is working to create jobs, that's not just a messaging problem. I think this reflects the underlying reality -- the stimulus may have created jobs, but no one thinks it was a good return on our investment of $787 billion. And the President's claims that the stimulus staved off a depression are ridiculed even by stimulus supporters like Megan McArdle.

But hey, maybe it is a messaging problem. I'm fully in favor of the Democrats pursuing this line of stupidity, because it probably won't lead to any more bad legislation and will boot them out of the House majority come November. So I'm not going to spend any more time identifying the real problems for them - it's not like they're listening.

The Health Care Follies Continue

Peter Suderman points to a survey that shows 57% of Americans want Congress to start over on healthcare reform. The basic gist of the poll boils down to the emerging reality on healthcare -- Americans find a lot of individual pieces of the reform attractive in the abstract (no bar on pre-existing conditions, expansion of Medicaid to more low-income people, subsidies to purchase insurance), but they don't want to pay for it. Or they want to pay for it on credit and never pay the bill, which appears to be the way we'd go.

The more interesting debate is one Megan McArdle is referencing, which is whether the benefits of health care insurance are worth the costs. That's a debate that may not be settled soon, but in the debate she answers one argument ("If insurance is so unnecessary, why do you have it?") in a way that illustrates how screwed up our system is...

But the answer as to why I have health insurance is simple: my employer pays for it. If my employer didn't pay for it, I wouldn't have it. I'd buy a catastrophic policy from a reputable insurer to cover any amount that might bankrupt me, and self-insure for everything else. That would probably cost me a little more than what I pay The Atlantic for my first-dollar coverage, so I opt for the first-dollar coverage. It's not like I get the money The Atlantic is spending on my benefits back if I choose to go without.

But do I think I would be noticeably more likely to die if I did give up my policy? Certainly not for the next twenty years, because I am unlikely to get cancer much before 65, and everything else that might kill me would be treated on an emergent basis, where insurance probably wouldn't affect my outcomes nearly as much as the fact that I am an upper middle class professional with a (soon to be) husband who writes about health care policy for a living and a father who used to work for the New York City health and hospitals corporation, both of whom will no doubt be sitting on top of the doctors and the hospital bureaucracy to make sure I get excellent care. At 65 I qualify for Medicare, if it hasn't bankrupted the government.

Morbidity? Maybe. But we're more likely to take out a second mortgage to cover physical therapy than we are to go without.

I'm pretty sure my life would be, on net, better if I had the cash wages and a catastrophic policy instead of the health benefits. As someone who's moderately sickly, I've spent a lot of my life worrying over false positives from tests of dubious pertinence, and no time at all treating conditions we caught early. But the system is not set up to facilitate real insurance; it's set up to hide the cost of medical treatment from as many people as possible, because we have developed a social belief that no one should have to consider the cost of medical care, except maybe your friendly neighborhood bureaucrat.

This is one of the problems with the debate that has occurred with health care reform -- we're starting from our current system. So far as I can tell, there wasn't actually a good reason for the development of a system of health care payment whereby our employers pay for our health care -- it was little more than historical accident and the tax system. And so, we have a system whereby insurance exists to cover the perfectly foreseeable and planned for things in life -- your physicals, your mammograms, etc. We largely don't do this with other forms of insurance -- for example, you don't pay for a car insurance policy with the expectation that it will take care of your oil changes. You buy car insurance in case your car gets wrecked or suffers serious damage. McArdle's idea of buying a catastrophic injury policy covers that point.

Now this doesn't answer the question of whether it would be a good idea to institute a single-payer system to cover everyone, or some lesser system designed to make certain people are covered, per the unpopular plans Congress is considering. But it does tell us that our starting point for this discussion is probably less than optimal.

Of course, none of this matters for the politics of the debate. The upcoming health care summit next weekend (which I would only watch if I were paid to do so) is a Hail Mary pass for Obamacare. It will probably generate lots of press attention, but its questionable what it will accomplish. As Ross Douthat notes, this probably won't go anywhere...

Even in the unlikely event that the two sides approach the conference in good faith, they’ll still probably end up talking past each other. One difficulty, as Slate’s Chris Beam has pointed out, is that the White House and the Republicans agree on the idea of bipartisanship, but not its definition. For President Obama, being “bipartisan” means incorporating a few right-of-center proposals into an essentially liberal legislative package. For Republicans, it means doing only those things that legislators of both parties can agree on — a far more stringent standard, and one that would produce a very different bill.

Hence the frustration on both sides with the way the health care debate has proceeded. To Democrats, the right’s complaints about having its ideas ignored are purely cynical. Doesn’t the proposed legislation include ideas endorsed by prominent conservative economists? Don’t some of its proposals resemble those championed by John McCain? Didn’t Democrats eschew a single-payer approach in favor of a reform that retains a role for private insurers?

To conservatives, this misses the point: It isn’t the details of the bill that they object to, it’s the overall design. The right seeks a functioning marketplace in health care, subsidized but not micromanaged by the government. However many small steps the Democratic legislation takes in that direction, its biggest step goes miles the other way — toward a world where consumers are required to buy a particular kind of health insurance, insurers are required to sell it to them, and the cost of health care gets held down, ultimately, by price controls and bureaucratic supervision.

But if conservatives are understandably annoyed by the liberal claim that the bill is already bipartisan, Democrats have a legitimate frustration of their own. Republicans keep insisting that they share the goals of reform, they just want a more incremental and less polarizing approach. But when it comes time to put forward actual proposals, they tend to fall back on ideas that are neither particularly bipartisan nor particularly responsive to the central issue animating the Democrats’ reform effort — the problem of the uninsured.

Actual negotiations, then, would require that each party address the other’s frustrations.

Democrats would need to put the overall structure of the bill up for debate, instead of just offering concessions around the edges. Republicans would need to show up with proposals that have more heft, and more bipartisan appeal, than their predictable calls for interstate purchasing and tort reform.

Douthat mentions a couple of decent right-of-center proposals with heft that exist, but I'm pretty sure none of them will get much discussion. The Obama Administration still wants to find a political solution that will make the current bills more popular, which is the reason for the summit -- it's another opportunity for Obama to try to sell the reform package that the public's not buying. This may provide him with some benefits, since he's likely posing as the moderator (yeah, right) between Congressional leaders, who aren't exactly likable to the public, whichever party they come from (Mickey Kaus also pointed out that the invitation to the summit wasn't all that inviting). But I don't think this will help save health care reform -- I think most Congressional Democrats of a moderate stripe are concerned with political survival right now, and they don't think passing the health care bill that currently exist will help that goal. And since Congress spent the last seven months or so (and counting) fighting largely over this topic, it's not likely the public has the patience to see them spend more time on it.

I don't know if healthcare reform is dead or not. I know there's 260 or so days until Election Day, and each day that passes without a bill makes one less likely. For opponents of this plan, that day can't come soon enough; for its proponents, they'd really love more time. That should tell us something about whether the bill would ever be popular.

Latest Sign of the Apocoplyse

They're making a Smurfs movie. I knew Avatar was going to lead to bad things.

Prove To Me That The Sky Isn't Falling, Then

Docto Zero over at Hot Air names the biggest killer of all-time...

Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.

I couldn't pretend to be an expert on climate science or on DDT (okay, I could pretend -- but it would probably be as bad as a Jimmy Fallon comedy routine). But the folks who believe in manmade global warming have a problem right now -- they've based their argument largely on the idea that manmade global warming is settled science, and that the folks who disagree are either complete idiots or are acting out of monetary self-interest. Unfortunately, the data to support the claims for man-made global warming has come into question. This doesn't disprove the theory, but it should mean that the people supporting it need to provide more evidence. Unfortunately, they seem to have the idea of proof backwards, as the former head of the East Anglia Cimate Research Unit seeks to shift the burden of proof to skeptics...

Jones said he might submit a correction to Nature. But he nonetheless attacked bloggers and other critics for "hijacking the peer-review process... Why don't they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers," he said.

Ed Morrissey gets the response to this idiotic question right...

Well, let’s see — could it be because we’re not the people advancing extraordinary claims about man-made influence on global weather patterns? This must be some new, previously unknown tenet of the Scientific Method, wherein people who point out errors, bias, bad process, and unsubstantiated claims from scientists are somehow required to disprove their unsupported hypotheses. It’s apparently no longer incumbent on Jones and his colleagues to substantiate their own conjectures with actual science, rather than use badly-lifted speculation from media interviews and unsupported propaganda from advocacy groups.

Maybe Doctor Zero is on to something. I'm also guessing that this makes a cap and trade bill this year as likely as the Sixers winning the NBA Title.

The Miracle Braves' Secret Weapon -- Swastika Caps?

This might be the best bit of research I've seen in a long time. After finding a picture of a Hall of Famer wearing a cap with a swastika on it, Tom Schieber tracks down the backstory. Put simply, stories like this are why Al Gore invented the Internet.

TV Nostalgia Of The Day

A new series, inspired by loyal reader ST. These are the moments of television past that YouTube was designed to bring back to us.

I confess -- I really like Saved By the Bell.

Yes, that probably cuts down my credibility by approximately 97% (assuming I had any left). But NBC's Saturday morning TV show from the early '90's is still going strong in reurns, even though Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski would now be in their mid-30's. But the show has given us so much -- even today, we get the sheer horror of the words "Screech Powers" and "celebrity sex tape" in the same sentence thanks to Dustin Diamond's decline into child-celebrity noteriety (and really, who saw that coming?). The real blessing will come years from now, when my daughter watches an episode and assumes that the show accurately chronicles what my high school life was like (in case she reads this, I would fit in well as one of the non-speaking background nerds).

If I'm going to post from this show, there's a ton of good choices, but only one episode is the defining memory. However, we'll post two clips from the same episode -- one because there's nothing cheesier than a Saved By The Bell music video (it also helps that this is the one with Tiffani Amber-Thiessen in tights), and the second because it is the definition of overacting.






You're welcome.

The Latest Reason Why Unions Continue To Become Less Popular

Watching this report pisses me off to no end.



Forced unionization of child-care providers via the state legislature -- this is exactly the type of stuff that leaves people thinking their politicians are corrupt to the core and working solely for special interests. To be perfectly fair, the child care providers are receiving taxpayer subsidies, so it's within the government's right to restrict how much money they should receive. But handing that taxpayer money to a union doesn't exactly strike me as something taxpayers want -- at least the subsidies for low-income taxpayers to get child care services might be something the majority supports. Having a portion of those subsidies directly sent to a union strikes me as something even a majority of union members would oppose. And yet Michigan's government does it.

Oh, well it's not like Michigan has any examples of industries that might have been adversely impacted by unions.

The Narrative

John Ellis does a good job encapsulating what I was trying to say before about messaging not being Obama's problem, but does so in a much grander way and gets to a more important point...

It's not a staff issue that is causing the President's political deflation. And it's not a communications issue (as in: if only the Obama Administration communicated their ideas better, everything would be okay). It's not even a political issue; the GOP doesn't have a national act to speak of and Democrats continue to hold solid majorities in both Houses of Congress. The Obama Administration's problem is narrative.

Specifically, the Grand Narrative of our time is The Reckoning and the Restructuring. The Reckoning is all this debt coming home to roost. The Restructuring is what we're going to do about it.

The Reckoning is plain for all to see. Consumers are broke, companies are reeling under massive debt loads, and the US government is underwater as never before. Compounding these problems is an avalanche of unfunded liabilities that will soon come due. To cite just one small example, for the first time in its history, Social Security will run cash negative this year. The cost of Medicare is set to explode as baby boomers retire. You know all this. There's no point repeating all the scary numbers.

The Reckoning requires restructuring. Restructuring is not avoidable, it is inevitable. The sooner we do it, the less painful it will be for all concerned. Specifically, we must decide how to make our pension system (Social Security) and our current national health care system (Medicare and Medicaid) sustainable. We must restructure our debt. We must get 15% more performance out of our military on 15% less budget. We must get 25% more performance out of all other government services on 25% less expenditure.

In addition, we need to think about what taxes to raise, whether we sell land, whether we acquire nation-states or territories (Africa states? Siberian land?), whether we merge with Canada to form a more robust (and energy independent) mega-nation. These are the big issues of US restructuring. And they are all on the table.

Except they are not. The Obama Administration keeps talking at us like its 1998 and we can have a "green" jobs program and national health insurance and "cap and trade" legislation and $250 million criminal proceedings for homicidal Islamic psychopaths in downtown Manhattan. We don't have $250 million for the KSM trial in Manhattan. Everybody knows that except, apparently, the Obama Administration.

(hat tip: Jim Geraghty, whose post about this is equally worthwhile of a read). I'm not endorsing a call to merge with Canada, unless they agree to ban curling first. Seriously, Ellis is on to something important here. People who work in private industry have seen friends, colleagues, competitors, etc. all lose their jobs. They have cut back on spending at the personal level, and small businesses have tightened their belt. But what they see from government spending and future deficits scares the hell out of them. I know, because I'm legitimately worried. Our politicans are not solving the problem of fiscal solvency -- they're simply kicking the can down the road. They may claim that the problem is systemic, and they maybe right. But the system needs a repair, or our children really will see a lower standard of living and less opportunity.

Album Cover Nostalgia

A new recurring series inspired by the Lord of Truth. We all remember certain album covers fondly -- here's one more.

Quite frankly, this is my favorite album cover of all time. The album itself is pretty good, but I loved this cover when I was a kid -- an angelic child taking a drag on a Marlboro somehow epitomizes the spirit of what rock and roll should be better than words ever could.

New Jersey Wants To Recall A Senator -- But Do They Really Want Him Back?

Speaking of people getting sick of Washington doing business like it always has, New Jersey has a movement afoot to recall one of its U.S. Senators. I couldn't begin to evaluate the arguments on each side, but this is an interesting Constitutional issue. I'm rooting for anything that makes Congress more chaotic, so here's hoping the case moves forward.

Things Are Getting Ugly

Jim Geraghty mentioned this in his Campaign Jolt newsletter this morning, but it's good to see other people mocking the White House for its decision that messaging has been the problem. The White House strategy was explained by the Washington Post...

White House officials are retooling the administration's communications strategy to produce faster responses to political adversaries, a more disciplined focus on President Obama's call for "change" in Washington and an increasingly selective use of the president's time.

The messaging adjustments are the result of an end-of-the-year analysis in which White House advisers said the president's communications team had not taken the initiative often enough and had allowed drawn-out debates in Congress, and relentless criticism by Republicans, to drown out his message.

"It was clear that too often we didn't have the ball -- Congress had the ball in terms of driving the message," communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. "In 2010, the president will constantly be doing high-profile things to be the person driving the narrative."

Senior White House aides described the changes as an aggressive response, aimed at producing fresh momentum for the president's faltering agenda and regaining the advantage ahead of the congressional midterm elections in November.

Vice President Biden's appearances on two Sunday morning talk shows were part of the new response -- in this case, to rebut former vice president Richard B. Cheney's accusations that the administration is weak on terrorism. Biden, who taped one of the shows in advance, said his predecessor was attempting to "rewrite history."

Obama's surprise news conference last week -- his first in nearly seven months -- is another example. After a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders, Obama faced the media to declare his willingness to work with Republicans. But he warned: "I also won't hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that's rooted not in substantive disagreements but in political expedience."

I am reasonably certain that in the history of mankind, there has been no situation that been made better by having Joe Biden speak. Let's put that stupid idea aside for a second. Jonah Goldberg makes the point more succintly on the rest of this strategy...

So wait, the multiple trips to Copenhagen, the five-Sunday-show-in-one-day-marathon, three joint session addresses to Congress in one year, the prime-time news conferences, the state dinner, the speech in Cairo: These don't add up to "constantly" doing "high profile things"? What's he going to do in 2010, wrestle an alligator in the Map Room? Crown himself Holy Roman Emperor? Challenge the pope to a game of Boggle?

Is messaging a problem? Sure, in so far as it's been bad thus far. But the problem here is that they're trotting out the same basic tactic -- more Obama! Now with a side of Biden! I know people who were sick of seeing the President on TV last March, when he insisted on giving us his NCAA picks and hobnobbing on The Tonight Show. And they aren't even conservatives.

Aggressive political pushback can indeed be very effective in brining people to your side -- but it's usually far more effective in rallying your base than attracting independants and the other side.

Obama's newfound willingness to work with the GOP isn't going to get conservatives to trust him, because he only discovered it after he lost the 60th vote in the Senate. Add in the statement about obstinancy, and they're probably thinking this is politics as usual from the President.

As for independants, I'm at a loss to understadn how pushing for bipartisanship while simultaneously attacking the other side for failing to engage accomplishes much, other than getting voters a bit more angry at incumbents... hearing people argue about how the other side's not being bi-partisan is pretty much one more piece of evidence that Washington doesn't get it. and since your party is the one featuring more incumbents, I'm not sure the strategy does much for it. Perhaps it will help the President, but it's a little difficult for him to run against his own Congress. And it probably leads them to conclude they should run against him as well.

This is turning into some dangerous political territory for the President -- and I haven't even mentioned Evah Bayh yet. Tom Maguire is right that Bayh sounded like he's thinking about a primary challenge to Obama, but that might be a stretch, considering he pretty much screwed his party over with no time to get a decent replacement on the ticket. That's not a good strategy for someone who might pursue a primary fight... although an Independent run could still fly, if Bayh hadn't already said he's out for 2012. This retirement's so weird that I'm inclined to take him at his word -- even he's sick of Washington.

And when people who are establishment get sick of the place... well, I wouldn't start investing pitchfork futures... yet.

One of The Most Important Baseball Debates

On days when there's still three feet of snow piled up outside, there's nothing that makes me feel better than thoughts of summer. And the upcoming start of baseball, where all good and decent people can come together to root for the annihilation of the Great Satan, a.k.a. the New York Yankees. As we prepare for the season, it's nice to see someone put together the all-important All-Mustache Team (hat tip: Craig Calcaterra). Although I'm upset at the lack of recognition for Alvaro Espinoza's "I put this on with a crayon" look. Seriously, I think you need at least a team for each league.

Sometimes People Really Are Awful

There are people out there who are lower than pond scum, despite not being criminals. Cassy Fiano discusses one of them - a Marine's wife who left her then-deployed husband for a Marxist, then informed him by writing him a Dear John letter. It's bad enough that you do it... but bragging about it? And suggesting others do it? Ugh.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

Someone at the left-wing dishrag had way too much fun writing this headline: Gay Guardsman Has Returned to Drills With His Unit. (hat tip: Tom Maguire) In their defense, I'm not sure that my high school paper would have passed on that headline, either.