At The Plum Line, Greg Sargent, delving into a CBS poll on the health-care reform bill currently in Congress, makes a great point about popular support for reform — and for Obama. Allow me to quote his post in full: Could Obama’s dip to new lows on health care be driven partly by the fact that the reform proposal isn’t ambitious enough? The internals of the new CBS poll suggest that this could be the case: They show that more people think reform doesn’t go far enough in multiple...

For me, “late-night” television means The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, sports, the Food Network, reruns of my favourite shows (Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Family Guy), movies, and pretty much anything else that isn’t on U.S. network TV. Which is to say, no Letterman (or rarely), no Conan, no Fallon, no Ferguson, and, when he was hosting The Tonight Show, absolutely no Leno, whom I consider to be unfunny, irrelevant, given all his success, a sign of American cultural and comedic degradation,...

Politico‘s Ben Smith posts a defence of Obama by a reader, Ellie Light, and I think it’s a really good one. Read it all, but here’s some of it: Right after Obama’s election, we seemed to grasp this. We understood that companies would be happy to squeeze more work out of frightened employees, and would be slow to hire more. We understood that the banks that had extorted us out of billions of dollars, were lying when they said they would share their recovery. We understood that...

Oh, Sarah Palin, will the hilarity of your ignorance and phoniness never end? Sarah Palin’s charming opening debate line for now-Vice President Joe Biden — “Hey, can I call you Joe? ” — was scripted after she repeatedly referred to him as “O’Biden” in preparation sessions, former McCain campaign senior adviser Steve Schmidt told “60 Minutes.” You know, if the whole Palin thing had never happened, if she’d never amounted to anything...

Britain’s Daily Mail: Married couples in France could end up with criminal records for insulting each other during arguments. Under a new law, France is to become the first country in the world to ban ‘psychological violence’ within marriage. The law would apply to cohabiting couples and to both men and women. Would this mean no trash talking during fantasy football season? While it seems initially like a good idea, and while real “psychological violence” can be incredibly...

According to the AFP, Nigeria has “branded new security measures for passengers flying to the United States unfair and said they amounted to discrimination against its 150 million people.” Nigeria, home of failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is one of 14 countries from which all air travellers to the U.S. will be “subjected to extra checks including body pat-downs.” I tend to agree with Nigerian Information Minister Dora Akunyili that “Abdulmutallab’s...

What qualifies me to do a retrospective review of the best films of the decade? Well, I’d like to think that I know a lot about film, that I’ve seen a lot of movies, that I love movies, and that I have good taste. Plus, I’m a blogger, so here you go, like it or not. (Oh, and I was a film critic way back when for The Tufts Daily.) Seriously, it’s been an interesting exercise looking back over the decade in film. These lists don’t mean much — and there are way too...

If, like me, you’re not terribly happy about the (no public option) compromise Senate Democrats have worked out, make sure to read Chris Bowers’s post at Open Left on how there has actually been “real success” here: While it looks like we didn’t get a new public option program, we have received at least: 4 million more people covered by Medicaid, which is a public option, than the July version of the House bill 1-2 million covered by a Medicare buy-in, which is also...

Well, yes, this was a bad defeat for the forces of good: The New York State Senate decisively rejected a bill on Wednesday that would have allowed gay couples to wed, providing a major victory for those who oppose same-sex marriage and underscoring the deep and passionate divisions surrounding the issue. The 38-to-24 vote startled proponents of the bill and signaled that political momentum, at least right now, had shifted against same-sex marriage, even in heavily Democratic New York. It followed...

According to Ezra Klein, Howard Dean, once thought to be a leading health-care guru in the Democratic Party, thinks that “this bill is worthless and should be defeated” — if it doesn’t include a public option. Like Ezra, and as I’ve written here many times, I’m a supporter of the public option and want Democrats to push for its inclusion, preferably in a robust form. But Dean’s comment is just plain stupid. Klein: The strongest public option on the table...

As expected, it was an admirable speech (transcript), regardless of the questionable content, but, then, we’ve come to expect such lofty rhetorical flights from Obama. The tone was serious, which it had to be, and, on the whole, the president made his case effectively, I thought. But do we buy the case? I do not. In making the case for war, Obama sounded at times a lot like Bush. Yes, there was good reason (a solid, defensible rationale) to go to war, and the war, early on, may have been legitimate...

Is Rep. Virginia Foxx crazy? I don’t know, but she certainly says some crazy things. Consider a couple of things she said yesterday: – “Actually, the GOP has been the leader in starting good environmental programs in this country.” Maybe, if you go all the way back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt. More recently, the GOP is the party of global warming denialism and opposition to environmental legislation generally. – “Just as we were the people who passed the civil...

I’m not sure if it’ll accomplish anything, but I think Obama’s efforts to engage the totalitarian military junta that rules Burma* and brutalizes the Burmese people are admirable, yet more evidence of the dramatic shift away from the military-oriented, unilateralist approach that characterized Bush’s foreign policy. “Despite years of good intentions,” said the president, “neither sanctions by the United States nor engagement by others succeeded in improving...

Washington voted for domestic partnerships, but Maine, a similarly blue state (despite having two Republican senators), voted against same-sex marriage. There is no denying that the vote in Maine is a setback for gay rights. Simply put, the anti-gay forces of the right mobilize well, as they showed in California last year, playing to lingering bigotry and fear, and they did again here. Furthermore, there was little support for the same-sex marriage law in rural, more conservative parts of the state....

President Obama may think he’s getting a bill to sign soon, or at least this year, but it looks like Congress will postpone legislation until the new year: Senior Congressional Democrats told ABC News [yesterday] it is highly unlikely that a health care reform bill will be completed this year, just a week after President Barack Obama declared he was “absolutely confident” he’ll be able to sign one by then. “Getting this done by the by the end of the year is a no-go,”...

As most of you who follow this sort of thing have surely heard by now, Dierdre “Dede” Scozzafava, the Republican who dropped out of the House race in NY-23 on Saturday, has endorsed not the Conservative (and new Republican) candidate, Doug Hoffman, but the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens. Given that Scozzafava is a moderate who supports abortion rights and gay rights, and that Owens is the flavour of the day of the far right, and that the Republican Party, Scozzafava’s party, is...

I highly recommend that you not read Bono’s op-ed in Saturday’s Times on Obama and “Rebranding America.” Actually, no, it’s not that bad. It’s hard to stomach Bono, I know, but his activism is admirable, particularly with respect to poverty, and he shows a welcome modesty here (false or not, I leave it to you to judge). So go check it out, if you haven’t already. Here are some of the better passages: So here’s why I think the virtual Obama is the real...

Check out this CBS News article. House Republican Leader John Boehner opposes a bill that would expand hate crime legislation to include gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Currently, the legislation includes race, color, religion, and national origin. His rationale is that hate crimes legislation should only cover “immutable characteristics.” Apparently, sexual orientation is not immutable. And yet, the very idea of immutability is stupid. What is immutable? Is gender immutable?...

Along with Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has introduced an amendment that would, according to USA Today, “exclude illegal immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats after the 2010 Census. It also would require the Census to ask people whether they are citizens.” Well, I like the first part, not the second. I generally favour amnesty for illegal immigrants, with a path to eventual citizenship, but it doesn’t make sense to include...

I think Ed Morrissey is right, more or less, that a “Left-Right consensus” is “building on Polanski.” I say “more or less” because I think that formulation oversimplifies the situation somewhat. It isn’t so much that both liberals and conservatives are coming out against Polanski and his apologists, it’s that pretty much everyone with a modicum of common decency and respect for the rule of law thinks that Polanski ought to get what he deserves, which...

Sen. Tom Harkin: “We will have a bill on the president’s desk before Christmas, a health-reform bill. It will have a lot of good stuff in it. It will have a lot of prevention and wellness programs in there that I’ve been fighting for. And it will have a public option… The question of if it doesn’t isn’t even an option.” Plus, Republicans won’t be involved in putting a bill together: “This will be a proposal by the Democrats to bring a bill on...

Yesterday, I posted on the truth about Roman Polanski, and this was my conclusion: Whatever you think of the cinema and celebrity of Roman Polanski, it is the truth that should matter most, including the truth about what happened over three decades ago. What is that truth? That he drugged and raped a minor, a 13-year old girl (read the sordid details here). That is disturbing — and criminal — but what is also disturbing is how so many in Hollywood have rushed to his defence since his...

As you may know, famed Polish-French director Roman Polanski was recently arrested in Switzerland. In 1977, he was convicted in the U.S. of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” (a disturbing euphemism). He has been on the run ever since, avoiding extradition in Europe while continuing with his career. Polanski has many fans and admirers, of course. I especially like Chinatown and The Pianist, though I generally find him grossly overrated. (Knife in the Water, his early “masterpiece,”...

William Safire — Nixon speechwriter, New York Times columnist, and conservative intellectual — has died at the age of 79. I’ll admit, I never much cared for him — or, rather, for his work: Unlike most Washington columnists who offer judgments with Olympian detachment, Mr. Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay. Critics initially dismissed him as an apologist for the...

Four years ago, I wrote a six-part series at The Reaction — “Democracy in Deutschland” — on the German federal election. It was a fascinating election and a fascinating time in German politics, culminating in the creation of a so-called “Grand Coalition” between Angela Merkel’s center-right CDU (along with its Bavarian sister party, the right-wing CSU) and the incumbent center-left SPD, with Merkel the new chancellor. Surprisingly, perhaps, the coalition...