With no further commentary from moi, a "bipartisan" update on the Presidential Election of 2008...

(Broken promises. Okay, okay, my tongue slips at the bottom of this post. BAD CAT...)

From the New York Times...

Link to Original Story

Freezing Out Hope

By PAUL KRUGMAN

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

About that pay freeze: the president likes to talk about “teachable moments.” Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false.

The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.

So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.

Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do. Just ask Federal Reserve officials, who have lately been more or less pleading for some help in their efforts to promote faster job growth.

Meanwhile, there’s a real deficit issue on the table: whether tax cuts for the wealthy will, as Republicans demand, be extended. Just as a reminder, over the next 75 years the cost of making those tax cuts permanent would be roughly equal to the entire expected financial shortfall of Social Security. Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.

But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

There were no comparable gestures from the other side. Instead, Senate Republicans declared that none of the rest of the legislation on the table — legislation that includes such things as a strategic arms treaty that’s vital to national security — would be acted on until the tax-cut issue was resolved, presumably on their terms.

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

So what are Democrats to do? The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they’ll have to strike out on their own. In particular, Democrats in Congress still have the ability to put their opponents on the spot — as they did on Thursday when they forced a vote on extending middle-class tax cuts, putting Republicans in the awkward position of voting against the middle class to safeguard tax cuts for the rich.

It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs.

From the New York Times...

Link to Original Story

Listen to McCain (Mrs.)

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

As the troops waited for President Obama to come into the hangar at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, an Army band serenaded the crowd.

Not with Sousa or the theme from “Patton.” The band — drawn from the 101st Airborne Division and called Nuts after General McAuliffe’s rebuttal to a German surrender ultimatum — jammed to a more resonant tune.

The young female soldier who is the lead singer belted out “I Kissed A Girl” — Katy Perry’s ode to Sapphic smooching.

The lyrics about “the taste of her cherry Chapstick” and “just human nature” offered a cheeky counterpoint to the weighty debate going on half-a-world away as the Senate Armed Services Committee hashed over questions of human nature and sexual tension.

In two days of “don’t ask, don’t tell” hearings, senators discussed the knotty issue of whether gays and straights in the military could shower together without losing battles. Once again, the Democrats waited too long to close the deal, the president showed no leadership, and a campaign promise that was seen as a fait accompli now seems a casualty.

Even after a Pentagon report showing that most troops and their families think that allowing gays and lesbians to be themselves would not be a big deal, even after the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the Senate to repeal the law that demands dishonesty, Democrats were still fending off a snarling John McCain and a few unreconstructed Southerners.

Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the committee, was eager to show that a gay soldier could be just as lethal as a straight one. He read a quote from the Pentagon report: “As one Special Operations force warfighter told us, ‘We have a gay guy [in the unit]. He’s big, he’s mean, and he kills lots of bad guys. No one cared that he was gay.’ ”

Levin read the quote to Gen. James Amos, the commandant of the Marines, who are the most resistant to gays serving openly. “I don’t doubt,” the general replied, “that at any given base or combat outpost that we’ll find men and women that are out there just exactly like that Special Operations soldier, Marine, sailor, whoever he was.”

Yet General Amos said that because of “the very tough fight in Afghanistan, the almost singular focus of our combat forces as they train up and deploy into theater, the necessary tightly woven culture of those combat forces,” he would recommend against the repeal right now.

McCain stressed that we should not make this sort of change while we’re in a bad economy and two long-running wars. So gay Americans who risk their lives get endlessly oppressed because chest-beating straight guys in the Bush era continued deregulation and careened into endless combat missions — and not even in the country hosting Osama bin Laden?

Some Republicans complained about what Senator Scott Brown called “implementing social change in the middle of two battles.” But those battles were designed to implement social change in Islamic countries on an epic scale.

In yet another ludicrous bit of goal-post shifting, McCain said it wasn’t enough that the top two leaders of the military, and many of the troops, favored repeal. Now he wants to hold 13 hearings and solicit the views of senior enlisted personnel around the world, even though, as the Army chief, Gen. George Casey Jr., dryly informed the panel, the military is not a democracy. The five service chiefs agreed that, if asked, they could successfully carry out the changes.

It’s unclear why McCain is being so stubborn and stalling, particularly when those closest to him — his wife, his daughter and his cloakroom buddy Joe Lieberman — have all boldly spoken out on behalf of gays in the military.

It seems a sore point at home: Meghan McCain said the topic would be off-limits at Thanksgiving. And Lieberman, following an indignant McCain on the panel Thursday, asserted, “It’s just wrong and un-American to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation.”

Senator Brown, a lieutenant colonel and a J.A.G. lawyer in the Army National Guard, recalled a visit to Walter Reed, where he “saw a soldier who lost both his legs, lost an arm and lost most of another arm, doing crunches, you know, to try to get his torso strengthened enough so he could still have a viable, you know, and fulfilling life.” He said he did not care if that man, or the other heroes and fallen fighters, were gay or straight.

“I just wanted to know if they gave their limb or their life, you know, with pride and with honor for our country,” he said. Later, he put out a statement saying he supports the repeal.

Tale of two Republicans: In his own fuzzy way, the Massachusetts newcomer was eloquent and inclusive. And in his own grumpy way, the Arizona old-timer was erratic and intolerant.

Gays aren’t risking dying because they’re dying to do makeovers and make-outs in the barracks. They’re going to adapt and fit in. They’re good at that because they’ve had to be.

CAT Track's Editor's Note:

Hey, I bit my catty tongue in the intro...ain't that good enough?!

I'm sure the reader took note...

I didn't even give mention to "The Night of the (Mama) Grizzly"

She Who Must Not Be Named enjoys the attention waaaaaaaaaay too much!

Also not mentioned...

...the TV spin-off:

"Dancing With the Star's Bear Cub"

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...

BTW...

The photo above was taken at a rehersal...sans makeup..."in the wild", so to speak.

If you didn't recognize the "stars", below is a photo taken during the actual show...