Here’s an interesting observation from James Fallows of The Atlantic. His post notes the correlation between obesity/median income map and the 2008 presidential election map. Yes, states that have the highest number of fat and poor people voted for John McCain. Check out his blog for more.
John Edwards had won the Democratic nomination in 2008? Christopher Beam of Slate.com imagines the repercussions in light of news of his affair with Rielle Hunter and quasi-confirmed reports that he’s her child’s baby-daddy.
Despite what some political pundits have said, don’t make light of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to rescue two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, held captive in North Korea yesterday. Not long ago these two journalists were accused of crossing into North Korea illegally and committing “hostile acts,” and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. Instead, Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee arrived home this morning some 20 hours after President Clinton’s plane landed in North Korea. In short, his efforts may very well have saved their lives.
David Gregory, host of “Meet the Press” on NBC, said today on “Morning Joe” that President Clinton’s trip “made sense for several reasons.”
Certainly, there are questions about what this means for the future of American diplomacy. George Stephanopoulos, host of “This Week” on ABC News, wrote this morning,
The smile on Kim Jong-Il’s face said it all.He squeezed every ounce of benefit from the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. A coup for Clinton too. For the White House? More of a dilemma. They had to send Clinton once the North Koreans asked for him.
Yesterday, writing for the WashingtonPost.com, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, observed,
While the United States is properly concerned whenever its citizens are abused or held hostage, efforts to protect them should not create potentially greater risks for other Americans in the future. Yet that is exactly the consequence of visits by former presidents or other dignitaries as a form of political ransom to obtain their release. Iran and other autocracies are presumably closely watching the scenario in North Korea. With three American hikers freshly in Tehran’s captivity, will Clinton be packing his bags again for another act of obeisance? And, looking ahead, what American hostages will not be sufficiently important to merit the presidential treatment?
But is that accurate? After all, as Maureen Dowd of The New York Times notes, isn’t North Korea substantially more harmful on the world stage? In July, North Korean test-fired 4 short-range missiles. She writes,
But the former Bush bullies have no credibility on diplomacy. They spent eight years wrecking it, and the score for them on North Korea is 0-6; zero meetings with Kim and enough plutonium for six nuclear bombs.
Bill Clinton will bring back valuable information about Kim’s mental and physical health. If we’d had that sort of information about the snubbed Saddam, we would have known that he was in his own spiral of doom, trying to bluff his neighbors, with no need for our shock and awe.
Kim Jong Il is reported to be suffering from many life threatening ailments including kidney failure and pancreatic cancer, and he was rumored to have had a stroke last year.
Talking Points Memo has created a series of Twitter rooms for political junkies. You can follow Elected Dems on Capitol Hill, Elected Republicans on Capitol Hill, Democratic and Liberal Insiders, Republican and Conservative Insiders, and Reporters and Bloggers. These “rooms” aggregate feeds so that you can view them easily and they refresh automatically. It’s a great feature.
From Frank Rich in today’s New York Times,
The test for Obama is simple enough. If the fortunes in American households rise along with Wall Street’s, he is home free — even if his porous regulatory fixes permit a new economic meltdown decades hence. But if, in the shorter term, the economic quality of life for most Americans remains unchanged as the financial sector resumes living large, he’ll face anger from voters of all political persuasions.
. . . The issue has never been whether Obama is doing too much but whether he will do the big things well enough to move us forward. Now that the hope phase of his presidency is giving way to the promised main event — change — we will soon find out.
My Middlebury College classmate, Brian Deese, is the subject of this flattering profile in The New York Times regarding the dismantling of General Motors. Mr. Deese, on leave from Yale Law School, found his way first to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and then to Barack Obama’s where he has been working on automobile industry issues. Well, it turns out that his smarts and his political savvy earned him the respect of just about everyone, including Gene Sperling and Larry Summers, currently the head of the National Economic Council.
“Brian grasps both the economics and the politics about as quickly as I’ve seen anyone do this,” Mr. Summers said. “There he was in the Roosevelt Room, speaking up vigorously to make the point that the costs we were going to incur giving Fiat a chance were no greater than some of the hidden costs of liquidation.”
But now, according to those who joined him in the middle of his crash course about the automakers’ downward spiral, he has emerged as one of the most influential voices in what may become President Obama’s biggest experiment yet in federal economic intervention.
While far more prominent members of the administration are making the big decisions about Detroit, it is Mr. Deese who is often narrowing their options.
Thumbs all the way up.
President Barack Obama:
I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished.
The Obamas ate at Blue Hill, a West Village restaurant and attended “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” the Tony-nominated August Wilson play.
The Republican National Committee is pissed, of course. Understandable. Notes The New York Times,
Times Square was even more frenetic than usual, as throngs of pedestrians — certainly including many tourists — lined several blocks waiting to catch a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Obama.
(Thumbs Up: @jessicadean)
President Barack Obama selected Second Circuit Appellate Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee for the United States Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice David Souter who is retiring. If confirmed, she would be the first Hispanic on the court and only the third woman.
Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post said, she is a “pick heavy with historic significance but also a sign of the confidence the president has in his political standing.”
Jeffrey Rosen writing in The New Republic had this to say,
I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. It’s possible that the former clerks and former prosecutors I talked to have an incomplete picture of her abilities. But they’re not motivated by sour grapes or by ideological disagreement–they’d like the most intellectually powerful and politically effective liberal justice possible. And they think that Sotomayor, although personally and professionally impressive, may not meet that demanding standard. Given the stakes, the president should obviously satisfy himself that he has a complete picture before taking a gamble.
UPDATE: Ever the opportunist, Mike Huckabee issued this terse response to the announcement (NOTE TO STAFF: Before you go blasting the nominee you might want to get her name right).
UPDATE II: Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Sen. Mark Pryor weigh in on the Sotomayor announcement.
UPDATE III: Zack Stovall gets in Huckabee’s grill about calling Ms. Sotomayor by the wrong first name. Meanwhile, Jason Tolbert’s walking Huck’s line saying it’s no big deal. And David Kinkade wonders what the hell Mr. Huckabee was so excited about in the first place that led him to believe he needed to issue a quick statement.
UPDATE IV: Karen Tumulty of TIME has the back story on Ms. Sotomayor’s selection. Note this: Republicans have seen a 9% drop in support among Hispanics between 2004 and 2008. Also, not that Alberto Gonzalez is an authority on anything, but he did offer this gem to Wolf Blitzer: “this is a powerful message, a powerful message of hope and opportunity through this appointment, just like there’s a powerful message sent when an African-American is elected president or an African-American or a Hispanic is appointed as attorney general of the United States. It’s a powerful message that a president listens to. And this president obviously did.”