Really? I thought he looked like a grade-A shmuck, and I said so at the time. He looked like a child wearing his father's clothes and pretending to be a man.

Funny you should mention his father. I remember thinking at the time that he'd managed to surpass the sheer, unashamed, over-the-top cheesiness that his father showed by having a campaign event at a flag factory.

Very interesting post, and I hate to sully it with semantics, but ... oh, who am I kidding, I love semantics.

Obama is a very cautious man.

I suggest that he is a careful man. Cautious men (and women) do not run for President. Certainly Obama's campaign was careful and deliberate and rock-steady in the execution, but the fact of the campaign itself shows that he's willing to make bold moves.

Making bold moves carefully strikes me as a good approach.

"The Office Of The President Elect"

That was a pretty clear sign that he was going to overreach right from the start.

Yeah, it's always a "pretty clear sign" of blatant overreaching to call something what it is.

Barack Huessin Obama

is no William Jefferson Clinton.

Thank goodness.

There's been a long history of a 2-tiered justice system in this country, generally partitioned by race and class. The Bush Administration -- building on precedents set (or at least reinforced) by the Reagan Administration -- has been developing two additional tiers. One is the group of people we really don't like and/or are convenient political props (aka "unlawful enemy combatants" et al). The other is a group of people even more immune to legal strictures than their race and/or class would make them anyway (aka the oligarchs and those who directly serve their interests).

Someday the little people may cut the throats of the big people. If that happens, I may take up knitting.

I hear Madame Defarge gives lessons.

Alas, I fear the result would be perls before swine.

It sounds like some folks here are desperately looking for someone to blame their guilt on. Possibly because that's an easier way to feel better about themselves than actually doing something, however small the beginning.

You forgot "... and get paid for it."

I'd like to think if I was that bad at my chosen profession, I'd find a different one. But then, perhaps being right isn't what Friedman et al are being paid for.

How is this a walk-back? What conflicting signals?

Alex, was there a paragraph that was unintentionally omitted?

It's particularly funny when wingers criticize Dems for this, given Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc, etc.

One day, humans will develop genes that make us smart enough not to trust evil malicious leech clowns. It may not be for eons, but one day, it WILL come.

Oh sure, but as evolution results in smarter borrowers, it'll also result in evil malicious leech clowns that are better at sucking the life-blood of the economy.

The only way to get a jump on the process will be to genetically engineer smarter humans. Unfortunately, the gene therapy will be so expensive that we'll need to take out second double-reverse mortgages to afford it.

Ah well, maybe in the meantime we can do some radical things like re-regulating the market and funding basic personal finance courses in high schools.

There's only one shopper with a purse large enough to make a difference in this kind of mess -- and that's the U.S. government.

Right now that large purse is essentially filled with fairy gold. It may be a good idea to use it anyway, all things considered, but we'd better not forget that the US government -- we taxpayers, really -- don't have any real money in that purse.

Yeah, that was pretty funny.

Of course, Palin doesn't have the advantages of Obama's other background. I mean, she was never a community organizer ... which I understand is something like a being small-town mayor, except that community organizers actually help improve people's lives.

I live in Tucson and it doesn't look the same as it did even six months ago. Peggy Noonan and the WSJ are ideologically driven whereas money isn't.

Money itself is a theoretical concept, but the current implementation of that concept is certainly ideologically based. Clearly, though, the ideology of the current implementation of money doesn't cause it to behave the way that the ideologies of Noonan et al say that it should behave.

It's not January 20th, 2009. Then and only then will we be in a recession. Around January 21st, Miz Noonan will be seeing all sorts of signs....

Signs of a recession, or signs of the Apocalypse?

(Obama is the Anti-Christ, dontcha know.)

"The point isn't whether or not he used power," Wallace said. "First of all you're simply making suppositions based on no facts whatsoever..."

Which, ironically, is a supposition by Mr. Wallace based on no facts whatsoever. But given that he works for Fox News, I suppose that's allowed. Expected, even.

My guess is that wealthier Americans will (no surprise) feel very little of the pain of the recession -- many work in protected fields, like medicine ...

Just FYI, the hospitals in my neck of the woods have all taken big enough financial hits that they've had to lay off people and postpone equipment purchases. I understand that projections for next year aren't rosy.

Part of the financial hit is from decreased (read: non-existent) investment revenues, part from a decision among insurers to change payment categorizing rules for hospital stays (to their massive benefit and patients' loss, of course), and part from the fact that some medical problems can be "lived with" if the alternative is between that and falling further behind on the mortgage or rent.

Actually, that doesn't get Wallace off of the hook. The phrase was "personal political gain". Being a supposed "war President" -- which was arguably both the result of and the excuse for some of Bush's crimes -- surely helped Bush and many of his enablers win in 2004.