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Joel Stein, Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2008

You are embarrassing yourselves. With your “Yes We Can” music video, your “Fired Up, Ready to Go” song, your endless chatter about how he’s the first one to inspire you, to make you really feel something — it’s as if you’re tacking photos of Barack Obama to your locker, secretly slipping him little notes that read, “Do you like me? Check yes or no.” Some of you even cry at his speeches. If I were Obama, and you voted for me, I would so never call you again.

Obamaphilia has gotten creepy. I couldn’t figure out if the two canvassers who came to my door Sunday had taken Ecstasy or were just fantasizing about an Obama presidency, but I feared they were going to hug me. Scarlett Johansson called me twice, asking me to vote for him. She’d never even called me once about anything else. Not even to see “The Island.”

What the Cult of Obama doesn’t realize is that he’s a politician. Not a brave one taking risky positions like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, but a mainstream one. He has not been firing up the Senate with stirring Cross-of-Gold-type speeches to end the war. He’s a politician so soft and safe, Oprah likes him. There’s talk about his charisma and good looks, but I know a nerd when I see one. The dude is Urkel with a better tailor.

All of this is clear to me, and yet I have fallen victim. I was at an Obama rally in Las Vegas last month, hanging at the rope line afterward in the cold night desert air, just to see him up close, to make sure he was real. I’d never heard a politician talk so bluntly, calling U.S. immigration policy “scapegoating” and “demagoguery.” I’d never had even a history teacher argue that our nation’s history is a series of brave people changing others’ minds when things were on the verge of collapse. I want the man to hope all over me.

Still, I can’t help but feel incredibly embarrassed about my feelings. In the “Yes We Can” music video that will.i.am made of Obama’s Jan. 8 speech, I spotted Eric Christian Olsen, a very smart actor I know. (His line is “Yes we can.”) I called to see if he had gone all bobby-soxer for Obama, or if he was just shrewdly taking a part in a project that upped his Q rating.

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, February 10, 2008

What if a presidential candidate held what she billed as “the largest, most interactive town hall in political history” on national television, and no one noticed?

The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton’s elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.

The same news media that constantly revisited the Oprah-Caroline-Maria rally in California ignored “Voices Across America: A National Town Hall.” The Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to press bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to avoid making news. Like the scripted “Ask President Bush” sessions during the 2004 campaign, this town hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne questions (“What else would you do to help take care of our veterans?”) merely cued up laundry lists of talking points. Some in attendance appeared to trance out.

But I’m glad I watched every minute, right up until Mrs. Clinton was abruptly cut off in midsentence so Hallmark could resume its previously scheduled programming (a movie promising “A Season for Miracles,” aptly enough). However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.

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Sam Stein, The Huffington Post, February 9, 2008

Ann Coulter wasn’t officially invited to speak at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference — many on the right were still upset at the bad publicity she brought last year after calling John Edwards a “faggot.” But to no one’s surprise, she showed up anyway, commandeering the spotlight.

Speaking before the Young America’s Foundation, who invited her over CPAC’s objections, the conservative author spent most of her time viciously attacking her party’s new presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain.

No topic was out of bounds, including the five years McCain spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“I know that [he was a POW],” Coulter declared, “because he mentions it more often than Kerry mentions he was in Vietnam. There were hundreds of POWs and we are not going to make all of them president. Can’t we find a POW who doesn’t want to shut down Guantanamo.”

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Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, February 21, 2007

Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.

Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S. political history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his party’s energies on topics other than ending the war by saying he just couldn’t fit Iraq into his busy schedule. “We have the presidential election,” Reid said recently. “Our time is really squeezed.”

There was much public shedding of tears among the Democratic leadership, as Reid, Pelosi and other congressional heavyweights expressed deep sadness that their valiant charge up the hill of change had been thwarted by circumstances beyond their control — that, as much as they would love to continue trying to end the catastrophic Iraq deal, they would now have to wait until, oh, 2009 to try again. “We’ll have a new president,” said Pelosi. “And I do think at that time we’ll take a fresh look at it.”

Pelosi seemed especially broken up about having to surrender on Iraq, sounding like an NFL coach in a postgame presser, trying with a straight face to explain why he punted on first-and-goal. “We just didn’t have any plays we liked down there,” said the coach of the 0-15 Dems. “Sometimes you just have to play the field-position game….”

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Robert Scheer, TruthDig, February 8, 2008

Curb your enthusiasm. Even if your favored candidate did well on Super Tuesday, ask yourself if he or she will seriously challenge the bloated military budget that President Bush has proposed for 2009. If not, military spending will rise to a level exceeding any other year since the end of World War II, and there will be precious little left over to improve education and medical research, fight poverty, protect the environment or do anything else a decent person might care about. You cannot spend well over $700 billion on “national security,” running what the White House predicts will be more than $400 billion in annual deficits for the next two years, and yet find the money to improve the quality of life on the home front.

The conventional wisdom espoused by the mass media is that Bush’s budget is a lame-duck DOA contrivance, but that assumption is wrong. The 9/11 attacks have been shamefully exploited by the military-industrial complex with bipartisan support to ramp up military expenditures beyond Cold War levels. This irrational spending spree, which accounts for more than half of all federal discretionary spending, is not likely to end with Bush’s departure. Which one of the likely winners from either party would lead the battle to cut the military budget, and where would the winner find support in Congress? Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have treated the military budget as sacrosanct with their Senate votes and their campaign rhetoric. Clinton is particularly clear on the record as favoring spending more, not less, on the military.

John McCain, who previously distinguished himself as a deficit hawk and was almost in a class by himself in taking on the rapacious defense contractors, has thrown in the towel with his inane support for staying in Iraq till “victory,” even if it should take a century. It is simply illogical to call for fiscal restraint while committing to an open-ended war in Iraq that has already cost upward of $700 billion. Bush’s request for $515.4 billion for the Defense Department doesn’t even include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which accounted for nearly $200 billion over the last budget year and which will cost at least $140 billion in 2009. Add to those numbers $17.1 billion for the Department of Energy’s weapons program and over $40 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and other national security initiatives spread throughout the federal government, and you’ll see that my $700-billion figure underestimates the hemorrhaging.

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Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers, February 5, 2008

I received the coded message from “Shallow Throat” — the high-ranking GOP mole in the Bush Administration — and quickly arranged a Bethesda meeting at the place I was housesitting.

ST didn’t even wait to sit down on the sofa before starting the vent: “Everytime I think you and your Democrat friends have some smarts, and are showing some moxie that might lead to a turnaround in public policy, you screw it up.

“You guys fell right into Karl Rove’s trap,” said ST, taking off the new wig and wraparound shades. “The public is ready for a MAJOR political shift. You had a chance to nominate someone who would represent a real difference between Bush and his manipulators, but you sent Kucinich and even Edwards packing. Now the two left in the race are centrist Dems –with potentially huge negative numbers — who are beholden to the same corporate/lobbying interests that stand behind Bush and Cheney and McCain and Romney. In short, the powers-that-be can’t lose no matter which party gets into the White House. Not much will really change.”

“Wait a minute,” I replied. “First of all, you have to admit that Kucinich and Edwards were belittled, made the butt of jokes, and mostly ignored by the corporate mass-media. Such treatment made it virtually impossible for them to gain any traction in the public polls and imagination. But, more importantly, are you really telling me that you don’t see any significant differences between Obama and Clinton, and them and the Republicans they’d be running against?”

“In style yes, but in substance not so much,” said Shallow Throat. “On the major issue, for example, the ongoing Iraq occupation, the two Dems are reluctant to move quickly. They seem, in their own ways, to accept the Republican premise that America needs to be the policeman of the Middle East, with a sizable and presumably permanent strike force stationed at U.S. bases in Iraq, what Bush calls ‘protective overwatch’ of the region. Both Clinton and Obama voted to fund the war, though Obama (not in the Senate at the time) was against it before it started, unlike Clinton: She refuses to concede that her vote to authorize Bush to use force was a mistake; she professes to be shocked, shocked!, that Bush shortly thereafter used the force she voted to give him.

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Today the world just got a little safer and a little saner. Willard Mitt Romney has suspended his campaign to become the first shape shifting president. For those of us that survived Romney’s four years as Governor of Massachusetts we breathe a collective sigh of relief for the rest of the country that has now been spared a Romney presidency.

Since he entered Massachusetts politics, Romney has morphed from a moderate, gay loving, gun hating Republican that ran against Democrat Ted Kennedy for Senate to a “true” gay hating gun toting conservative that has now failed in his bid for the presidency. Every time Willard changed his position we laughed as he suddenly blended in with what was popular at that very given millisecond. Never one to have any core beliefs Mitt changed his policies like the rest of us change our underwear.

So Romney is gone and so are some of his millions. Romney spent millions and millions of his own money to introduce himself to the rest of the country. His problem in this race was that the more the voters got to know him the more they disliked him. Same thing happened in Massachusetts. The longer Romney stuck around the more the people of Massachusetts disliked him. All that money for nothing.

There are whispers that Romney is now eying a possible 2012 run for the presidency. Should be interesting to see what Romney has morphed into by then.

Jeanne Cummings, Politico.com, February 8, 2008

With John McCain poised to win the Republican nomination, Democrats are already gathering ammunition to use against him in the general election.

In more than a few instances, the best fodder has been provided by the candidate himself.

A case in point: As the economy was rising late last year as a major issue for voters, McCain in New Hampshire delivered this grenade, with its pin still in it: “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he said. “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”

Those are not the only words that will come back to haunt him in November.

From the economy to Iraq to immigration to abortion, the Arizona senator’s lengthy voting record and his primary season offerings to the Republican Party’s conservative wing provide a deep vein for opposition researchers to mine for shifting positions and policy inconsistencies.

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, February 8, 2008

The economic news has been fairly dire this week. The credit crunch is getting worse, and a widely watched indicator of trends in the service sector — which is most of the economy — has fallen off a cliff. It’s still not a certainty that we’re headed into recession, but the odds are growing greater.

And if past experience is any guide, the troubles will persist for a long time — say, into the middle of 2010.

The problems now facing the U.S. economy look a lot like the problems that caused the last two recessions — but this time in combination.

On one side, the bursting of the housing bubble is playing the role that the bursting of the dot-com bubble played in 2001. On the other, the subprime crisis is creating a credit crunch reminiscent of the crunch after the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s, which led to recession in 1990.

Now, you may have heard that those recessions were short. And it’s true that the last two recessions both officially ended after only eight months.

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