To trim (the budget) or not to trim (the budget)? Robert Reich answers the question.
A bit of follow-up on right-wing paranoia about the Obama/Chavez meeting. I’m just watching Andrea Mitchell interview Michael O’Hanlon about whether President Obama showed some sort of dangerous weakness in happily shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. Mitchell played a clip of the always cartoonish Newt Gingrich and then noted that conservatives are drawing the analogy to John Kennedy’s famous meeting with Nikita Krushchev in which the latter sized Kennedy up as a lightweight and — so the argument goes — thus believed he could push Kennedy around during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Now, Kruschev? Really? I’m not sure I can imagine a better illustration of the sort of parodic paranoia I’m talking about. We do realize that the US has the most powerful military in the world and Venezuela has little ability to project military power beyond its own borders. It’s a non-entity militarily, even compared to Iran and North Korea. Will he be emboldened into calling Obama el Diablo? Maybe provocatively give away more books?
Late update: Here’s the video:
Behind the scenes on Obama’s trip to the Summit of the Americas.
Fresh off our earlier national humiliation, we just received a note from TPM Reader SR. And SR points out that in the second image of our Obama at the Summit of the Americas slideshow we see President Obama shaking hands with the dog of the President of Mexico. He even seems a bit to be bowing to the dog.
You can see the awful truth here.
The notorious Otto Reich on the baleful consequences of the the Obama/Chavez handshake and book acceptance …
“I worked for three presidents. I don’t think that would have happened with President Reagan or either one of the President Bushes. They should not have put President Obama in that embarrassing situation because this is very much an anti-U.S. book. Anti-Europe as well. It’s a book that’s about 30 years old, written by a far-left Latin American, a very unknown author. And now Chavez has put this book on top of, I’m told, the Amazon sales list.”
How will we show our faces again on Amazon?
Obama not ruling out legal consequences for the lawyers for provided the legal arguments for torture. That would be BYB — Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury.
Matt Cooper looks at what was missing in this year’s Pulitzers.