Quote of the Day

Obama has another two or three weeks to prove he's not an idiot.

-- Kevin Drum (via)

(The context, btw, is Obama's relentless willingness to negotiate with Lucy about whether she'll pull the football away the Republicans, despite the latter's blindingly obvious bad faith. (Remember, however: they think they're doing well.))

In general Drum's on a roll today. Even better than the above-linked post is this post about the hopelessness of our tottering empire (via):

The strongest country in the world — my country — is allowing its economy to decay before our collective eyes even though we know how to stop it. But we're not going to. We're just going to let it happen.... We need: a big stimulus now aimed at infrastructure development. A credible plan to close the long-term deficit that acknowledges the need for tax increases to be part of the solution. A serious and sustained effort at reining in healthcare costs and broadening access. A collective decision to cut out the culture war nonsense and figure out how to improve our educational system with no more than modest spending increases. Real financial reform, not the weak tea of Dodd-Frank. Less spending on empire building and much, much more spending on real sustainable energy development and engineering.

But we're not going to do this stuff. As near as I can tell, we're not even going to do one single thing on this list. We're not even going to try. In fact, they're all so far from being realistically achievable that it's sort of foolish to even waste breath writing about them.

Word.