... you use far too many words and this keeps your writing at a lower level (and less read) than I know you can achieve. I recommend practicing the red pencil.

Of course Obama is going to assert the power to hold prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. What choice does he have? The alternative would be to deny he had the power and yet hold them anyway. Why do I say that? Because practically the first thing he did as president was set a year-long task of figuring out how shut down the concentration camp. Thus the very act that brought rejoicing throughout the blogosphere, including here, guaranteed that Obama would defend his power to keep the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay for more than a year.

It should take no more than a paragraph to say, ‘I supported Policy X, not realizing it entailed Policy Y. Ho, ve! What a mess.’ That’s the kind of article I would prefer to see next time.

I've actually been surprised by the degree to which some of my left-wing comrades have been demanding greater tyranny of Democrats in Washington. Perhaps they do not adhere to the Leader principle, but they demand tyranny nevertheless. The most shocking case for me was BradBlog -- BradBlog, a voting-rights-heavy site, for heaven's sake -- encouraging the Democrats, Harry Reid specifically, to deny New Hampshire a Senate seat in retaliation for Norm Coleman exercising his legal rights under Minnesota law. My head spun 720 degrees when I saw that. BuzzFlash also has been bad.

So, yes, lefties don't adhere to a Leader, and that's a wonderful thing, but perhaps there is a tendency to tyrannize by committee, about which we have to be careful.

Speaking of Beltway journalism, McClatchy headline: "GOP lawmakers tout projects in the stimulus bill they opposed."

Republicans' actions speak louder than words: they are factually embracing Obama's agenda while giving empty, meaningless "blather" to their constituencies. Moreover, Obama literally did get all the necessary explicit Republican support to get his bill passed, and thus the nay votes were also, to some degree, empty, meaningless "blather".

Bills like this, over which there is any disagreement, start out more popular than they get later on, for the same reason that impulse shopping exists. This is like BuzzFlash leaping on something William Safire or Maureen Dowd wrote because it happened to coincide with the prejudice of the day; instead question that prejudice!

In any case, Barack Obama has to do what he believes in, because otherwise he will start to look phony the way politicians often do, and, voila, Obama would lose his appeal. And he would look impatient. AFAIC Obama should go right on reaching out to Republicans even if he has to keep pulling it back to avoid having it chopped off, if only because that's what the American people voted for, and deserve.

It's easy to see why we need to be critical of Barack Obama, at least for those who have developed the skill of imagining oneself in another person's shoes. Imagine yourself as Barack Obama, and wanting to do the right thing, but surrounded with scoundrels and idiots and afraid of what they can do--you have to be careful. You will have difficulty doing the right thing unless those with whom you actually agree make it painful to do otherwise.

(For example, what we saw with the FISA-gutting bill was likely, in part, Obama's realization that FISA-gutting was so important to the weak, corrupted scoundrels who run Congress that they would thwart any attempt to enforce FISA, regardless of popular pressure; I mainly wish that Obama had found a better way to acquiesce than to lie to the public about what was in the bill.)

Air America's Richard Greene actually made that argument about murderers, though leaving himself wiggling room by suggesting that it wasn't his view, just one that was reasonable to discuss. He noted that OJ Simpson killed only two people, and that trial was a big PITA, so imagine what a PITA it would be to try Bush, who killed thousands of people. Instead let's move on and raise the minimum wage some more, or whatever.

I was shocked. This is what we were up against.

The reaction to the Rick Warren choice makes me think it was a right decision. People need to get control of their adrenal glands, and the only way to do that is through slow desensitization.

I would suggest, only half-jokingly, that Obama follow this up with a tribute to Ronald Reagan and a few photo ops with Newt Gingrich, followed by a toast to Noam Chomsky.

It's such a shame that on the day of Paul Weyrich's passing so many of my fellow lefties are reminding me of him, if only just a little.

Digby today reminded me of the 1980s, when Barry Farber and his Soviet emigre buddies were warning that Glasnost and Perestroika were a clever plot to put the hammer and sickle flying over the White House: it was, they thought, the beginning of the end. Instead, of course, the Soviet Union was more quickly bankrupted than otherwise and collapsed right there and then. My point is that people’s endocrine glands go crazy, and Obama is giving us the opportunity to gain more control, like he has. He's been doing this for a long time already, and it's part of how he got elected.

This article means nothing to me unless I have some means to compare current and past trends. In particular raising the case of Kennedys isn't too helpful, because that's been going on for half a century already, which is a big fraction of the existence of this nation.

Making matters worse, a schoolchild can easily come up with examples from the past. Quincy Adams was the son of John Adams. Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of William Henry Harrison. TR and Eleanor Roosevelt were related, and FDR more distantly. That's six presidents and a president's wife right there.

There is nothing clear about this supposed trend.