When Barack Obama first met his Auntie Zeituni at an airport in Kenya in 1988, his late father's sister told him, "Welcome home," and kissed him on both cheeks. Obama was on a pilgrimage to the land where his African father lived apart from Obama's American mother.
Barack Obama's foreign policy is beginning to take shape. Semantically, it's a sharp repudiation of the policies of the George W. Bush administration. In reality, it's something like a continuation of Bush policies. Or, if you want to distinguish between the allegedly confrontation-minded policies of Bush's first term and the more accommodationist policies of his second term -- a distinction that I think is exaggerated but has something to it -- then it's something like the second Bush term. With, of course, some differences.
California may be the Golden State, but it has been a while since people have called it that without a trace of sarcasm. With its double digit unemployment rate, difficult to balance budget, and crumbling infrastructure, California these days is anything but golden.
American voters want -- and President Obama campaigned on a platform of -- European-style government at American tax rates.
There's trouble around the Democratic campfire. The party has the White House and solid congressional majorities. But what it doesn't have is everyone on the same page, strumming the same chords, singing the same tune.
Team Obama fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner Sunday afternoon, just a short time after Treasury man Tim Geithner told the television talk shows that some banks will need large amounts of new TARP-money government assistance -- even though the bankers don't want it.
While the leaders of the world's largest economies debate stimulus and regulation in London, let us hope they do not forget about crime and punishment.
The tombstone for General Motors really should have read 1908-2008.
He might be nervous and insecure. After all, he's got the biggest, hardest job in the world. It's not like he's been preparing for it all his life; nine years ago he was commuting between Chicago and Springfield, Ill. It's not like he inherited peace and prosperity; he inherited recession, misery and war. It's not like there are any easy victories; getting us out of the various messes we find ourselves in will, at best, be a long, painful and uneven journey.
Last Sunday's New York Times reported: "Mr. Obama will confront resentment over American-style capitalism and resistance to his economic prescriptions when he lands in London.
It seems pretty obvious that the last three presidents -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- once smoked marijuana. OK, Clinton claimed he didn't inhale. Bush refused to say whether he ever used drugs; instead, he coyly alluded to mistakes in his youth. Obama didn't play games in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father" -- he wrote about using marijuana and cocaine as a kid.
Many conservatives think they've found a winner in tarring President Obama and his allies as "socialists." Earnest attempts to explain why "it isn't so" are futile, as is asking people what the heck they mean when they say raising taxes is "socialism."
Roadblocks. That's what Barack Obama has been encountering on the audacious path toward a European-style welfare state he has set out in his budget and other proposals.
What's Bill O'Reilly doing at a benefit for rape victims and their families?
We've had two good weeks of gubernatorial fun in the Crystal Ball, reviewing the early match-ups for the 2010 midterm Governor battles here and here. Now it's time to examine the remaining sixteen statehouses, all currently controlled by Republicans.
As Barack Obama's economic advisers confront choices that vary from bad to worse in their mission to revive the financial sector and the broader economy, it is worth remembering that those choices were in essence inherited by the president, who is still new to his office. Listening to his critics, especially on the right, it would be easy to believe that the president is personally responsible for ballooning deficits, gigantic bailouts, ridiculous bonuses, nationalized institutions and careening markets. It would be easy to believe but entirely false -- and merely the latest episode in an old political con game that is all too typical of Washington.
There was a time when New England sent lots of Republicans to Washington. These were fiscally conservative but socially liberal "Rockefeller Republicans," also found in the Northwest, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states. As the party turned socially conservative and fiscally reckless, many Yankees departed.
With another $2 trillion in federal interventionism announced within the last week alone, the price tag for America's economic "recovery" continues to soar to stratospheric, scarcely-comprehensible heights.
In a world growing more dangerous by the week in this dark spring of 2009, Washington may be the most dangerous city in the world.
