Michael Tomasky's Blog

I notice Harry Reid said yesterday that he'll schedule a Senate vote on the Ryan plan soon (no date set):

Reid said that he wanted to see if Republicans in his chamber would be as supportive of the plan as those in the House. But his hope, he added, was that the Ryan budget would ultimately fail (as is likely to happen in a Democratic-controlled Senate).

What do we make of this announcement, coming today, that Robert Gates will leave the Pentagon to be replaced by Leon Panetta, current CIA head, who will in turn be replaced by David Petraeus, who will himself be replaced in Afghanistan by Marine General John Allen?

First of all, Gates has been, I think, a very good Pentagon chief, as I've written before. It probably hasn't been easy for a Texas Republican to work inside a Democratic administration, but he's done so with to me eye very little of the kind of signal-sending that Republicans in those situations sometimes do, subtly undermining the commander in chief. He carried out the don't ask don't tell repeal. Where he disagreed, on Libya, he just said so plainly and somehow without being melodramatic about it. But when the order came he carried it out. He and Obama did disagree on the size of cuts to the Pentagon budget, and Gates' posture of $178 billion over five years fell short of what many Democrats and a small number of Republicans are looking for (the Pentagon budget is more than half a trillion dollars a year, equivalent in real dollars to its cold war-era heights).

What does President Obama think he is gaining from these moves?

Defense Secretary Panetta: Yes, another alumnus of Congress. Ugh. But Panetta has a reputation of handling the CIA well, and that is not an easy job, as the place has the nasty rep of either undermining or capturing its outsider chiefs. I think this move signals that Obama plans to take the defense budget way down, and that Panetta's expected job will be to hold the place together and sell the spending cuts to the few remaining hawks in Congress.

Well it's sort of a slow news day on the politics front, and since we're tying up loose ends around here, I thought I might write a more general post in which we all consider the question: Who is the most appalling American of the Tomasky blog era (back to mid-2008, I think)?

After giving the matter a full three minutes' consideration, my list of the top five contenders would look like this. And this is limited to people involved in politics, which excludes not only murderers and such like but also Bernie Madoff and the heads of all those banks who helped ruin the country:
1. Certain former half-term governor
2. Donald Trump (with a bullet!)
3. Michele Bachmann
4. Andrew Breitbart
5. Karl Rove

Jon Chait has a funny post at TNR. He was reading Ryan Lizza's new New Yorker piece on Obama's foreign-policy shifts and quotes this Lizza passage:

"The project of the first two years has been to effectively deal with the legacy issues that we inherited, particularly the Iraq war, the Afghan war, and the war against Al Qaeda, while rebalancing our resources and our posture in the world," Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama's deputy national-security advisers, said. "If you were to boil it all down to a bumper sticker, it's 'Wind down these two wars, reëstablish American standing and leadership in the world, and focus on a broader set of priorities, from Asia and the global economy to a nuclear-nonproliferation regime.' "

The bumper sticker problem is endemic for American liberalism. On foreign policy, it's actually a murky split, with ideologies cutting across both party coalitions. But on economics, there's a persistent phenomenon of conservatives having clear bumper-sticker answers and liberals lacking them. That's because, as I've argued before, conservatism is philosophically anti-government in a way that liberalism is not philosophically pro-government. "Market good, government bad" fits on a bumper sticker. So does "Government good, market bad." The problem is that the former pretty well describes the Republican philosophy, while the latter describes the philosophy only of a tiny socialist fringe operating mainly outside the two-party system.

Liberalism is forever in search of a philosophy that can fit on a bumper sticker. It's always failing, because a philosophy of leaving the free market to work except in cases of market failure, and then attempting to determine which intervention best passes the cost-benefit test is never going to be simple.

Obama's Alabama visit: every once in a while, politics can be put aside

It's good to see that President Obama is headed to Alabama Friday. These are the deadliest tornadoes in the US in 37 years, with more than 200 people dead in Alabama alone. Devastating. The thing to do was definitely not to stay in Washington and bicker with aides about what was actually happening, as this other president did in 2005 during Katrina.

Late Wednesday, the president declared a federal emergency in Alabama and dispatched Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency [Fema], to inspect the damage.

Fugate, a former Florida state emergency management director, said Thursday that the federal government will take its cues in offering aid from state leaders.

Our subject this week: what else? Endings. Of all sorts, as you'll see. Let us just proceed, shall we? I've made it a bit easier than usual because I hope everyone scores well this week!

1. Scholars generally regard this as the last play Shakespeare wrote by himself, in 1611; source material included a contemporary account of a sailing trip to Bermuda written by an ancestor of Lytton Strachey.
a. All's Well That Ends Well
b. Pericles, Prince of Tyre
c. The Tempest

Here's a little interesting news from Justin Elliott of Salon about the man who's always had great relations with "the blacks":

In an episode early in Donald Trump's career, his New York real estate company was sued by the federal government for discriminating against potential black renters. After a lengthy legal battle, it ultimately agreed to wide-ranging steps to offer rentals to nonwhites.

The journalist Gwenda Blair reported in her 2005 Trump biography that while Fred Trump had sought to combat previous discrimination allegations through "quiet diplomacy," Donald decided to go on the offensive. He hired his friend Roy Cohn, the celebrity lawyer and former Joseph McCarthy aide, to countersue the government for making baseless charges against the company. They sought a staggering $100 million in damages.

A few months after the government filed the suit, Trump gave a combative press conference at the New York Hilton in which he went after the Justice Department for being too friendly to welfare recipients. He "accused the Justice Department of singling out his corporation because it was a large one and because the Government was trying to force it to rent to welfare recipients," the Times reported. Trump added that if welfare recipients were allowed into his apartments in certain middle-class outer-borough neighborhoods, there would be a "massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants, but communities as a whole."

In 1978, the government filed a motion for supplemental relief, charging that the Trump company had not complied with the 1975 agreement. The government alleged that the Trump company "discriminated against blacks in the terms and conditions of rental, made statements indicating discrimination based on race and told blacks that apartments were not available for inspection and rental when, in fact, they are," the Times reported. Trump again denied the charges.

It's not clear what happened with the government's request for further action (and compensation for victims), but in 1983, a fair-housing activist cited statistics that two Trump Village developments had white majorities of at least 95 percent.

The one radical thing about Barack Obama is his race, his name. Of course, there is nothing innately radical about being black or having Hussein as middle name; what is radical is that he has those attributes and is sitting in the Oval Office. And even now, more than two years after the fact, this is deeply disturbing to many people, and, at the same time, the easiest way to arouse visceral opposition to him. Let's be even plainer: to do what Trump has done (and he is only the latest and loudest and most spectacularly hirsute) is a conscious form of race-baiting, of fear-mongering. And if that makes Donald Trump proud, then what does that say for him? Perhaps now he will go away, satisfied that this passage has sufficiently restored his fame quotient and television ratings. The shame is that there are still many more around who, in the name of truth-telling, are prepared to pump the atmosphere full of poison.

I don't want to make this long or sentimental. Given the previous announcement, the quiz, today's video and now this, I can see how one who isn't particularly moved by my departure could conclude that I'm milking this a little. But I still think a proper farewell is called for, as I have a few things to say and people to thank.

First of all, I am very excited about the new gig. Those of you who aren't from America may not be able to see it this way, but when you grow up in the America I grew up in, studying American journalism and dreaming of being one of those people whom everyone reads, there are basically five lodestars: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. They're still the biggest brands in US print news. And that makes "columnist for Newsweek" a well-nigh impossible position to turn down. Besides which, The Daily Beast is a pretty tasty morsel in its own right, I have always thought as a reader. And an opportunity to work for Tina Brown is a chance to work for one of the great editors of our time.

In his last ever Tomasky Talk, Michael looks into the future of the 2012 Republican nomination race, the presidential election itself and how taxation will be the clincher

I know: Friday was my last day with the Guardian. But I haven't started my new gig yet, and if an event like this doesn't bring a journalist out of temporary retirement, then he better be checked for a pulse. So I huddled with Matt Seaton, and we agreed that a few hundred words on how the killing of Osama bin Laden will impact Barack Obama's political fortunes were in order.

First, the obvious: Obama is certainly a stronger president today than he was two days ago. I watched the ceremony today in which he bestowed posthumous medals of honor on two US servicemen who fought in the Korean war. The tributes to these two men, both of whom sacrificed their lives to save their men, would have been sincere and moving in any case.