Needlenose

As you undoubtedly know already, this morning saw Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s departure from the White House, an admission so anticlimactic that President Obama had little choice but to joke about it:

THE PRESIDENT:  Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the least suspenseful announcement of all time.  (Laughter.)  As almost all of you have reported — (laughter) — my chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has informed me that he will be leaving his post today to explore other opportunities.  (Laughter.)

But what intrigues me is how this fait became accompli so quickly.  You see, just three weeks ago, the President was kicking the can of Rahm’s exit down the road:

“I think right now, as long as he is in the White House, he is critically focused on making sure that we’re creating jobs for families around the country and rebuilding our economy,” Obama said in an interview, aired Thursday, with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “And you know, the one thing I’ve always been impressed with about Rahm is that when he has a job to do, he focuses on the job in front of him. And so my expectation is, he’d make a decision after these midterm elections. He knows that we’ve got a lot of work to do. But I think he’d be a terrific mayor.”

Contrast that with the unsubtle shove that Jane Hamsher noted at the beginning of this week:

OBAMA: I think that Rahm will have to make a decision quickly, because running for mayor of Chicago is a serious enterprise and I know this is something he is thinking about….

I’ve been busy this month with moving and other distractions, so maybe I missed something… but what happened?  I mean, Rahm’s (ahem) shortcomings have been discussed widely behind his back at the White House — but what changed in barely more than two weeks to make his eviction a matter of such urgency?

The floor is open for your suggestions and eleven-dimensional theories.

Expanding the colony, one house at a time

After feigning interest in the ‘peace talks’ with the Palestinians, Israeli’s PM Whatayahoo gives Obama the finger and lets the West Bank colony expansion ban lapse on the eve of talks.

Hey Barack – the whole purpose of having a client state is to advance your agenda, not theirs!  Give Whatayahoo a call and have a very different discussion with him, remind him why he needs to renew the ban.

Bring it, IDF!

In other Israel-related news, do you figure Israel will shoot anybody on this aid ship?

*Update 9/28/10* Intercepted, nobody shot.

*Update 4:10P* What Juan Cole said.

David Axelrod has a stupidly optimistic prediction that the Repugs will cave on Obama plan to only extend the Shrubya tax cuts after the November election.  He’s totally unclear on the concept – that’s too fucking late!  The Repugs could easily have re-infested the House and there is still a chance they could retake the Senate as well by then.

What the Spineless Dems should do is take this up now before the election, then get priceless footage of Repug candidates filibustering tax cuts.  That might not save Dem bacon, but such footage would be the gift that keeps on giving for the attack ads of tomorrow!

*Update*  Or are they spineless?  Median Senator net worth is $1.7M, Representative $645K, with over 44% of  Congress worth $1M+, and 50 members worth over $10M.  Quite likely they want to extend their own tax cuts.

*Update 3:41PM* Great post by Juan Cole on Dems keeping the Senate this year.  Mostly I love his quote:

“Since there are only two parties in the US, and one has gone bonkers, every election is now a game of Russian roulette for the American republic. But this time, at least, the chamber that has come up looks to be empty.”

(Via the White House, ten days ago.)

Yesterday, the New York Times offered this in an article on the evolving relationship between President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus:

Come December, when the president intends to assess his Afghan strategy, he will be able to claim tangible successes, General Petraeus predicted by secure video hookup from Kabul, according to administration officials.

The general said that the American military would have substantially enlarged the “oil spot” — military jargon for secure area — around Kabul. It will have expanded American control farther outside of Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. And, the aides recalled, the general said the military would have reintegrated a significant number of former Taliban fighters in the south.

“He essentially promised the president very bankable results,” one administration official said. (Others in the room characterized the commander’s list more as objectives than promises.)

Are we really far enough past the financial industry’s free-fall in late 2008 that it’s safe to use “bankable” as a synonym for something meaningful (in a positive sense)?  You’d think, if nothing else, that officials from this politically hypersensitive administration would know better.  For most of us ordinary folks, to say that something is “bankable” still carries connotations of “You might as well cut out the middleman and flush it down the toilet yourself.”

Then again, especially given the immediate caveat that Petraeus’s assurances could prove illusory, maybe the anonymous official’s choice of words was unintentionally accurate.  Certainly our ongoing attempt at occupying Afghanistan would meet a worst-case-scenario definition of a “troubled asset.”

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Sounds like a movie title, huh?  The pic you see isn’t some hillbilly gravel road - it’s a marine waterway chocked with dead marine life – result of the persistent de-oxygenated ‘dead zone’ around the Mississippi mouth in the Gulf of Mexico.  Mostly this zone results from the run-off of fertilizers from our massively over-fertilized and massively subsidized agribusiness farms in our country’s bloated midsection.  But it was perhaps exacerbated by microbial activity as the little critters use up the extra oxygen to break down all that oil from the BP disaster.

Another day, another ecological nightmare, huh?  And all so very preventable.

*Update 9/27/10* Continuing fish die-offs in and around the Delta in the Gulf of Mexico.

carcass of a fish leaks oil when poked. yum!

I’m confused – isn’t this the reason why God created the recess appointment?

As a new poll shows him trailing Megabucks Whitman, ex-governor Jerry Brown of California has decided it’s finally time to begin campaigning to get his old job back:

The political moment that eager California Democrats and some curious Republicans have been waiting for has arrived: Jerry Brown has begun a visible campaign for governor.

He appeared in public Thursday at a sparsely attended rally at Laney College in Oakland, followed by two events in Los Angeles later in the day. . . .

With a TV ad campaign expected to start soon and an accelerated schedule of in-person appearances commencing around the state, the Democrat is ramping up a campaign that many Democrats had been wondering about.

Brown made only a handful of non-fundraiser campaign appearances since the June primary and produced virtually no advertising.

Meanwhile, in almost-completely unrelated national news, President Obama spoke to reporters today and hinted at an election-season economic stimulus proposal — albeit not a very effective substantial one — after months of inaction while unemployed has stayed near 10 percent:

Obama spoke in the Rose Garden after the August jobs report came out better than expected, showing the private sector adding 67,000 new jobs last month and revising upward the numbers from June and July. But unemployment ticked upward to 9.6 percent as more people entered the job market, and the president said it wasn’t good enough. . . .

Administration officials say a big new stimulus bill like last year’s $814 billion measure is not in the offing – nervous lawmakers looking to November’s balloting would not be expected to approve an expensive new measure. But Obama said he’d be proposing a new set of ideas next week. He’s likely to detail them during a speech on the economy Wednesday in Cleveland, midway through an economy-focused week capped by a rare White House news conference.

Obama’s package could include a number of provisions that have languished in Congress for much of the year, including infrastructure bonds for municipalities and extensions for a series of tax breaks for businesses and individuals that expired at the end of 2009.

What do these coincidentally similar events mean?  Maybe that Andrew Card was right back in 2002.

Or, perhaps it’s just that when don’t have enough firepower to win the battle, you save your bullets as long as you can.

Tell me this ain’t so…another rig in the Gulf of Mexico just exploded.

I can’t believe the unmitigated gall of Paul Bremer to suggest that the U.S. should continue to occupy Iraq until it becomes democratic.  WTF?  Seriously, dude, weren’t you the one who fucking disbanded the Iraqi army, releasing 200K well-trained, angry Sunni soldiers into a jobless economy with ready access to Saddam’s old weapon caches?

This line from the linked article made me chuckle:

“The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers…”

Yeah, well I regarded it as a spectacularly dumbass idea the moment Bremer made in in May 2003.  Also, in case you’ve forgotten, Bremer was the dumbass who kept telling us that things were turning a corner in Iraq, and stability was always “just 6 months away.”  Well asshole, it’s now 2010, and the Sunnis are going all “Hurt Locker” on Shi’ite ass, and the corner sure as hell isn’t in sight.

Frankly, I was surprised to hear from Bremer at all – it’s hard to believe he is really either that stupid or delusional.  My guess is this is just the first of a series of salvos from the reactionaries trying to blame the Democrats for the inevitable failure of Shrubya’s Iraqi Fiasco, just like the wrong-wing blow-hards already do about Vietnam (“we won every battle…if only we had nuked Hanoi…blah blah blah”).