what are barack obama's flaws?

its important to bear in mind how bad the last 8-12 years were - that shit isn't gonna all get washed away in 12 months by some Executive Branch magic

speaking of strawmen, mr. strawman-spotter, nobody even remotely suggests anything might "get washed away in 12 months by some Executive Branch magic." that's your kneejerk deflect-criticism-of-the-failing-ass-president move: "hey, you're asking for PERFECTION! you weren't promised perfection!"

DADT is going to be repealed next year - Barney Frank has said so, and the president has signalled this as well

can we hear in advanced how ugly the "compromise" is going to be so we can be braced for it, please?

i have mixed feelings about Bernanke. on one hand, i think that he did a great job during the worst moments of the financial crisis; and (unlike Paulson, Rubin, et. al.) i don't think that he's venal and corrupt. OTOH, he was also complicit in the crisis in that he did little to nothing before everything turned to shit and yes, he seems less than concerned about unemployment (i.e., which is what non-economists think about when they think about the economy at all).

i fall b/w the morbz "god he sucks lol i told you so to the barricades!" camp and the gabbneb/ethan doe-eyed fan-boy camp re Obama. i expected him to be a centrist Democrat (campaign rhetoric/bullshit nothwithstanding), and that's what he's been by and large. doesn't mean that i wish that Obama could be a little more than that or that i am not disappointed with some things that his administration has done, but i am not really surprised either.

i notice when i try to sort out the deeper structural (that word again) problems to why gov't looks and acts the way it does, beyond what any one actor (even a president!) does... stone silence.

Actually, your post was mostly on-the-money, goole.

Four Senators have put a hold on Bernanke going forward, yes?

MOSTLY?

what are goole's flaws?

nobody even remotely suggests anything might "get washed away in 12 months by some Executive Branch magic."

I beg to differ. Complaints about Gitmo still being open fall into this category, for example. Suggestions that he should just withdraw all our troops from Afghanistan do as well, for another example. Or that he could magically make gay marriage legal and repeal the DOMA act... all of these complaints have been lodged against him by the left, sometimes even by posters on this thread (and others), and frankly, they're stupid. These are all things that are left over from the last 12 years of shitty governing, they cannot be reversed quickly.

now there are things I can specifically remember you complaining about - rendition, for example - that are totally legitimate. and its important to hold Obama accountable for that stuff.

stabilizing the economy, ARRA, healthcare reform, closing Gitmo, withdrawing from Iraq, putting the EPA back to work (regulating greenhouse gases, letting CA fuel efficiency standards go forward, etc.)

these are all good things

I must've missed about three o' those.

My ARRA/COBRA discount is expiring in February, wonder if I should spring for the 200% increase...

Matt Taibbi on Obama's financial advisors:

The significance of all of these appointments isn't that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It's that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. "Bob Rubin, these guys, they're classic limousine liberals," says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. "These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they're willing to give a little more to the poor. That's the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else."

what I don't get is why everyone feels so deceived (in:re economic appointments, etc.)?

My parents were all excited about Obama when he was running. Bush had made me so cynical it was hard for me to get excited about anything at that time. I gave in and watched one of Obama's speeches. In an aside, he said "of course we believe in globalization, of course we believe in free trade". i may not like his economic policy but i am not surprised by it. (and really, once he started making his appointments and invited a lot of the clinton establishment back, why is anyone surprised by anything? its not exactly Clinton III but it sure wasn't going to be Mao sending Goldman Sachs out to a "re-education camp")

here's a somewhat contrary view from matthew yglesias:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/if-corporate-america-loves-barack-obama-so-much-why-dont-they-marry-him-or-at-least-support-his-policies.php

"corporate america" and "wall street" not being the same thing, exactly...

but i'm really not a fan of rubinism or larry summers.

Taibbi is good at rabble-rousing outrage as usual, but I don't think his article is very constructive. To read him, you would never suspect there could be such as thing as regulatory overreach. Perhaps there could be some valid reasons why a Congressional committee might want to fine-tune regulations which could have far-reaching impacts on credit-creation and the wider economy, even though a broad-brush approach of "Spank the Banks" might have more populist appeal.

can anyone point me to a reliable chart of US corporate tax rates compared to other countries?

Probably my biggest disappointment with Obama so far is the Afghanistan troop surge, but he's basically been true to his campaign promises there, so I have no justification to feel betrayed.

Taibbi is good at rabble-rousing outrage as usual, but I don't think his article is very constructive. To read him, you would never suspect there could be such as thing as regulatory overreach

Well, yeah, sure, but regulatory overreach never even crossed Obama and his Cabinet's minds, did it?

I'm sure Obama has influence, but regulation is currently wending its way through Congress, so it's a little premature to say what we're going to get at this point.

except Congress doesn't do regulations, the executive branch does

^^^erm no

Congress may have some input but congress writes/passes *statutory* authority, not regulatory authority.

I think basically Congress writes the rules and the executive branch enforces them.

no

In areas where Congress hasn't specifically written a rule, the executive branch has considerable leeway. But it wouldn't make sense for Obama to direct his cabinet to try to reform by working within the interpretation of existing law at this point when a big Congressional overhaul is coming down the pike anyway.

Timely article: "Sweeping bank reform bill clears House"
http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/11/news/economy/financial_regulatory_reform/

"a big Congressional overhaul" = the 2010 midterm elections.

Let's hope not - if it is, it won't be in the direction we want.

In any case, the inclusion of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) in the House bill should be seen as a victory for liberals (and Obama). Banks and Republicans fiercely opposed it.

We'll see.

i like Matt Taibbi b/c he is more than willing to kick the Rubins and Summers (and the Gabbnebs) w/n the Party around and call them out on their pretensions (which is MORE THAN RICHLY DESERVED imho). few things sicken me more than so-called Dems who shit on the middle- and lower-classes almost as much as Republicans do, but think that b/c they're willing to throw the plebes a few more crumbs than Republicans and b/c they don't hate gays and black people or thump Bibles that they are somehow "better" than the GOP (who at least are open in their contempt for the "lower orders.")

where i find Taibbi weak, though, is on just HOW we should have handled the financial world and the economy post-Lehman Bros. -- does he think we should've just let AIG and Goldman Sachs go under (a libertarian/Republican back-bencher view) or something else? maybe i missed the column(s) where he spelled out his ideas, or he just thinks that his role should merely be to point out how the financial sector is taking the American taxpayers for a ride.

b/c they don't hate gays and black people or thump Bibles that they are somehow "better" than the GOP

um, this does make them better than the GOP imho

and not to get all constitutional/administrative law-ish on folks here, but Mr. Que and nate are right -- administrative agencies are either part of the executive branch or independent of either the executive or legislative branches (e.g., the FCC). Congress can delegate "discretionary power" to administrative agencies to regulate in a given area, but not its legislative authority to an administrative agency (the so-called "non-delegation doctrine").

um, this does make them better than the GOP imho

you are right ... i should have said "simply because they don't hate gays and black people or thump Bibles." of course, that line of thinking also applies to lots of libertarians as well as the likes of Rubin et. al.

you would never suspect there could be such as thing as regulatory overreach

He really should give you a job, primo shit-shoveling.

Commenting on political threads now are we? Someone really woke up on the wrong side today.

that Nobel turned out to be an even sicker fucking joke than it seemed at the time; Strangelovian congrats all around, Nordic plaudit dispensers.

"Nordic plaudit dispensers" is terrific prose

I was gonna make it my screenname but then remembered we had a poster named I think "Nordicskillz" a long time ago so deferred to the old guard

he and his speechwriters use too many adjectives

they should use more internet abbreviations amirite

tevs

let me b real srs w/u

make no mist8k

and j0hn by that i mean "tevs" could be the entirety of his nobel speech

what I don't get is why everyone feels so deceived (in:re economic appointments, etc.)?

otm, and that's my only problem with taibbi's article. the sense of betrayal is weird. surely matt taibbi never expected obama to be anything but an establishment incrementalist? yes there was some populist speechifying in the campaign, but there was from mccain and palin too, so what? if you looked at obama's record or read anything serious about his economic views, it was obvious there wasn't much rooseveltian about him (fdr or teddy). there was a reason he got all that money from wall street. i mean, i'm not saying i'm not disappointed; just that i expected to be. taibbi's right on the facts, but sort of wrong on the whole WE WUZ TRICKED thing.

Taibbi's a muckracker though: he's supposed to generate outrage.

Also, like all good writers, he remembers his audience. His pieces run in Rolling Stone, which has always been yay-Obama and the last bastion of complacent liberalism.

oh i know, and i'm glad he's out there. i just don't believe that he personally feels deceived by obama, because i think he's too smart for that. and that sort of undermines the outrage in that article.

where i find Taibbi weak, though, is on just HOW we should have handled the financial world and the economy post-Lehman Bros. -- does he think we should've just let AIG and Goldman Sachs go under (a libertarian/Republican back-bencher view) or something else?

i felt that the gist of what he was saying is that Obama shouldn't have appointed them all to run the economy and tossed his campaign economic advisers to the wayside once he got elected. i also read that as one of the main sources of outrage.

but summers and rubin were campaign economic advisers. obama had a whole bunch of different people. and goolsbee and volcker are still advisers too, in lower-profile spots (which i think was true in the campaign as well). there isn't this big difference between obama the candidate and obama the president that that article is trying to make it appear. i'm sure there were a lot of people who weren't really paying attention to all that during the campaign, there was lots of personal projection about who obama was and what he believed, but if you look at any in-depth discussions of his ideas during the campaign -- like this one -- you hardly get the sense that he was lying about anything or that his ideas have changed very much. the major thing that's happened since that article came out, obviously, was lehman brothers and the collapse and the bail-outs. and people are going to be hashing that whole thing over forever, but obviously that was where the wall street guys really got the upper hand in designing policy, starting with paulson and continuing on through geithner. it's all pretty appalling, but it's not very surprising.

for the rec, I went to some Brooklyn Library discussion btwn Taibbi and David Rees (the Get Yr War On guy, who'd done some door-knocking for Bam) last December, and in front of a 98% Obama-lovin' crowd, I don't recall either of them raising the possibility that BHO's aim was to be a biz-as-usual prez.