Several state legislatures were inspired rather than dissuaded by the contraception debate in Washington, and are considering their own versions of the Blunt Amendment — keeping alive an issue national Republicans thought they were putting to bed. Arizona, New Hampshire, Idaho and Georgia have taken up bills to expand exemptions for contraception coverage. Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, Idaho and Wyoming lawmakers are moving symbolic resolutions condemning the administration’s contraception coverage rule.

I know I’m not the first to point this out but, still, I hope that all of the so-called liberals who stayed home in November of 2010 because it just didn’t matter whether (corporatist) Democrats or (corporatist) Republicans were in charge, seriously go Cheney themselves. Then, when they’ve opened their eyes, get off their self-righteous asses and go to the fucking polls this November and vote for the Democrat. Any Democrat.

The trouble with the “touchstone” imprimatur is that this fact is basically irrelevant. Ask yourself if we would be materially better off if Obama had made the strong Keynesian argument early on, when only Paul Krugman and a handful of liberal economists supported such a measure. One, it would never have passed (the argument the administration made at the time about attempting a bigger initial stimulus) and two, Obama would have been way out in left field with no policy success to show for it.

Would the public be better educated about macroeconomic theory? If practically the entire global field of professional economics – from Chicago to Berlin – still doesn’t get it, I see no reason to believe that such a campaign would have educated John Q. Public to any great extent.

Obama’s problem isn’t that the public is confused about deficits or the stimulative effects of short-term deficit spending (they actually understand quite well that the government should be focusing on jobs and economic growth before deficits and debt, even Republicans), Obama’s problem is that he’s being blamed to a certain extent for the current economic conditions.

Obama’s rhetorical failure was not coming out of the bi-partisan box when the new Republican House was sworn in and calling on John Boehner to pass a jobs bill every single day since then, putting the responsibility and blame squarely where they belong. His bi-partisan Kabuki has worked wonders on the likes of Chris Matthews and David Frum but it has left the public deeply confused about who is to blame for not fixing our economic malaise.

Obama’s “biggest challenge” isn’t that he failed to differentiate saltwater from freshwater economics, it’s that he failed to differentiate the Democratic brand. That’s what too much fake bi-partisanship will do for you. In this case, not making it clear who is to blame.

I’ll bet. They obviously decided from TARP going forward that they needed to protect the banks to protect the economy. Right or wrong (hopefully, we’ll never have to test the alternative – bankruptcy/restructuring of the banking system), they paid a huge political price for it.

But this is different. A thorough investigation of the banks, forcing them to prove ownership before bankruptcy or even to write down principles isn’t likely to cause economic Armageddon (perhaps, quite the opposite if we can mitigate the current foreclosure crisis). But if they protect the banks from their illegal and immoral practices on these matters, I think Obama seals his fate as a one-term president (may god help us all).

And this is another important decision that could help decide the 2012 presidential re-election.

These aren’t the public option, don’t ask, don’t tell or Guantanimo, where Obama had to show deference to others and nominal supporters were left to defend him by pointing out that he may have had little choice in the matter. He controls these policy decisions, practically unilaterally. And these are both critical issues for liberals and, accordingly, represent major campaign promises; to reform corporatist Washington (as if) and to take on global warming. Even if liberals don’t matter much in the political calculation – too small, too reliable – there are plenty of swing voters who are concerned about global warming and plenty more who are infuriated with what the banks – and the banksters – have gotten away with.

Ultimately, Obama will decide what they, and the fossil fuel industry, get away with this time. And, at the same time, whether his previous coalition of Democrats and Independent swing voters will let him keep his job.

(Psst, Mr. President…Lincoln effectively split the country and drove it to war over the issue of slavery and, in the process, transformed us from a reprobate nation).

Now it’s possible that I may be under-appreciating the great transformational accomplishments of saving the banking industry and giving everyone the right to buy health insurance and compelling them to do so but, either way, this can beg only one question: is this dude losin’ it?

The fact is, with the House passing of the Ryan budget plan, Republicans exposed their king. And with Obama’s subsequent speech on the deficit, it was mated.

President Obama’s long game to marginalize and radicalize Beltway Republicans, while appearing reasonable and open to bi-partisan compromise is over. In the process, he punked not only the GOP, but also the legacy press and his liberal base. To be sure, even as liberals bemoaned his sell-out to the oligarchy, half of the country considers Obama to be a “Socialist”, so he clearly staked out the exact spot he needed to be to survive. For obvious reasons, he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing.

I still would not presume to know what is in Obama’s heart or where he will go from here but it’s pretty clear that this was Obama’s strategy all along: to let the GOP become so radicalized by the Frankenstein base and so extreme in it’s coporatist agenda, that he could pivot into the populist space – a space that is now filling with centrist Beltway journalists writing about income inequality – that “conservatives” created by their extreme partisanship and corporatist overreach. Now let’s see what he does with it.

Either way, on the game that’s been played so far (on all of us), it’s check and mate.

This is very troubling. I’m finding it very hard these days to find anyone who doesn’t sound like a babbling idiot on the Libyan air campaign. Even Jon Stewart goes deep into conflation territory on Libya vs. the unrest in Bahrain and Yemen, where the populace, so far, has not faced genocide from its government. It must be about the oil! Except that the oil industry already had full access to Libyan oil.

I actually I think that we’ve all been rendered nearly brain-dead by thirty years of “conservative” movement dogma, elite failure across the board and Republican shock doctrine policies. So let me say this straight out: Libya isn’t Iraq, Barack Obama isn’t George Bush and Bob Gates isn’t Donald Rumsfeld.

How this military intervention turns out will be determined by the sanity of the mission and the competence of the people executing it. So far, we haven’t been scare-mongered into sending our army into a country that didn’t ask for us to be there, set up our own government based upon failed “conservative” dogma, build a torture program to elicit false intelligence for political purposes, kill 100,000 civilian non-combatants, and maim and displace millions more. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one can make about this administration but, unlike the people previously in charge “of our military interventions of the New American Century,” they’re not a bunch of incompetent psychopaths.

The first is Obama’s political spinelessness. Here’s Mark Thoma on the cowardess behind his inexplicable fold on forcing the Republicans into a corner on taxes:

Obama made it seem as though this is an issue where he won’t compromise, but instead of holding the line and hammering Republicans day in and day out to make it clear who is standing in the way of extending middle class tax cuts, he caves.

Then there’s Obama’s supposed political incompetence. Here’s Digby:

Once you do that then we can get down to the real argument which is over whether the government should tax the wealthy and do more to create jobs. They are obscuring that argument with the deficit obsession for a very good reason — they don’t think they can win it.

But there’s another, more obvious answer: Obama and the Conservadems may think they can win that argument but don’t want the tax cuts for the wealthy to expire or a more progressive tax structure in the future because the plutocrats don’t want it. All the talk of adding to the deficit is more Kabuki, i.e., political lies, for The Village Scribes and still confused liberals. The alternative is to go all-out populist and turn the Party against the ruling oligarchy.

So perhaps the view of Obama as pusillanimous is correct. But what he’s afraid of is nothing less than a corporatocracy that controls everything. That includes the Democratic Party.

Update: Jebus, here’s kos: “He just thinks, time and time again, that showing good faith will win him GOP support. All the while, they laugh in his face.” I’ll say for you smart liberals one more time: bi-partisanship is Kabuki. It’s performed to allow Democrats to do the bidding of the oligarchs without you noticing what they’re really doing. And it’s working.

“Those who didn’t get anything they wanted, it’s time to just buck up here, understand that we can make things better, continue to move forward, but not yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything that we stand for in terms of the initiatives we put forward,” Biden said last night when appearing on the debut of Lawrence O’Donnell’s new show on MSNBC.

Biden said Democrats maybe “didn’t get every single thing they want” on big issues like health care, but said the reform bill that’s taking effect now was an “incredibly significant move that’s progressive and helping people.” He said people were upset health care didn’t include a public option, but said that if Republicans win this fall, “they are going to repeal health care.”

“This is a choice,” Biden said.

That’s true. And I’ve always said that political choices are always the choice of the lesser of evils (right Ara?). And I suspect that tried and true, politically-engaged liberals will make that choice on November 2nd, in spite of “not getting everything they wanted”. The problem for Democrats will be what happens to Obama ’08 voters who otherwise get their politics with the sound turned off. It’s a meta problem, a bigger problem than this election and a centrist problem that afflicts the Democratic Party and the nation.

“We can’t let the debate veer so far into hatred that we lose focus of our common humanity.”

It’s hard to disagree with that sentiment but, the fact is, it makes a poor yardstick by which to measure political speech. Dissent is defensible, even patriotic, inasmuch as it is legitimate. For instance, the Bush Administration’s warmongering, public lies and real subversion of the Constitution deserved strong public reaction (many would say much stronger than it was in our post-9/11 state of shock and stupor). Naked personal hatred for Bush or Cheney wasn’t appropriate or helpful but it becomes hard to tease from righteous anger at their egregious conduct.

The real trouble with Republicans’ (and other “conservative”) political rhetoric isn’t that it’s hateful, it is that it’s lying slander. If you’re going to go all torch-and-pitchfork it needs to be for a valid reason, not because secret socialists Obama, Pelosi and Reid want government to take over the health care system so it can pull the plug on Granny. That makes you a partisan crank (to the degree you fail to inform yourself of the relevant facts) or an outright traitor (to the degree you know it’s a lie).

It is the media’s rejection of empirical truth (along with liberal opinion) that has gotten us to our present dysfunctional and possibly dangerous political state, not its acquiescence to hate speech. Post-modern journalism’s ubiquitous he-said, she-said convention has simply failed to provide a grounding in reality for the vast majority of Americans who haven’t the inclination, skills or time to do the hard work of researching what is true or false out of the competing claims they happen to hear. Add to that the fact that many Americans want to believe certain lies for psychological reasons and a strong public rejection of contrived falsehood becomes even more critical. The corporate press is stuck with the two dominant political parties, just like the rest of us but until it can come to terms with the fact that one of those political entities is dishonest in nearly every expression, and communicate that fact to the public, their lies will continue to make many vulnerable Americans lose focus of our common humanity.

Smart liberals, mcjoan and BarbinMD are taking the Obama Administration’s new offshore drilling announcement as yet more evidence of Obama’s hard-headed naïveté that he’ll earn Republican support for his bi-partisan efforts. Interestingly, mcjoan quotes Chris Bowers who really seems to get it:

A compromise with Conservadems While Republicans have been particularly loud in their support for vastly expanded offshore drilling, this move is likely designed to win over mainly Democratic votes, not Republicans.

Rather than trying to placate green groups, President Obama is playing up how he is charting a unifying course of moderation in opposition to those groups.

To look at it another way, let’s figure out who Obama does not think he will reach:

1) Congressional Republicans – they have quite publicly adopted the position that they will offer unified obstruction to everything Obama attempts since the Stimulus.

2) Republican voters – they’re, well, insanely opposed to whatever they’ve been brainwashed into thinking Obama is attempting.

And who Obama has no need to reach:

3) Liberal Democrats – they’re going to make the only pragmatic choice they can, which will always be the lesser of evils; the Democrat. If we couldn’t be sure that Obama’s hippie-punching would be cost free, the health care reform saga just proved it.

Which leaves “conservative” Democrats, centrist and right-leaning Independents and centrist opinion-makers in the corporate press. Those are the people who Obama can and must persuade to succeed and those are all people who are pathologically and preposterously committed to bi-partisan centrism. And they also either don’t care about, or have much of a clue about, what makes good policy. Get it now?