Happy Anni-vers-a-ry, Mis-ter Pres-i-dent!

Happy anniversary, Mr. President!

We've only confirmed just over half of your appointees, disabling your management capacity, and then blame everything on you for not solving our collective action problems (at least those of us who didn't already blame you from day one). Mwwwaaahhh!

ps- Don't worry, you needn't manage. We've left corporate interests to run your bureaucracy though complex contracting schemes anyway! And as Harold Seidman points out, the public bureaucracy's parallel private bureaucracy--businesses that perform contract work for government--are heavily interested in maintaining the status quo. For the politically astute (but not policy-astute), using private companies also helps reduce the number of civil servants on the public payroll, as Clinton was well aware. Yet as Paul Light has shown, it exponentially increases the number of total workers on the payroll indirectly. The tangible and measurable number of total federal workers is an important consideration for presidents who need to pursue policy under conditions of anti-public-service sentiment from the public. The downside to these arrangements is, of course, loss of accountability and the resistance of private firms to changes in the public bureaucracy. So, good luck with all that, Mr. President!

Brown in MA... whatever.

Dems deserve what they got. An incompetent and complacent campaign lets the Repubs give Obama a male stripper for his anniversary! How nice.


"I'm Scott Brown. And this is my truck."

Can't argue with that platform! :)

And then there's the whole "terror, terror, everwherror" mantra!

Fear and loathing wins every time.

Opening the Healthcare Debate: Why Obama Didn't "Lie" as much as Told a Constitutionally Uneducated Public What They Wanted to Hear

I think it's curious that anyone would expect these healthcare reform deliberations to be public. I have never seen a bill written from floor debate, have you? I have seen plenty of symbolic, ceremonial, and non-substantive crap come out on the floor though. The idea that Obama has any control over the way our legislature deliberates is a serious misinterpretation of our separation of powers. He can promise he will demand openness in Congress until he's blue in the face. Unless we choose to rewrite the Constitution, there's nothing he can do about it. The problem with most of the media debate is not whether they argue for or against open debate in Congress. It's that they all seem to place the blame on the president as to what Congress chooses to do. This is at least an underestimation of the homogeneity of Democrat preferences, to think they would all congeal to the president's prerogative and ignore their own reelection incentives by engaging in ugly open deliberation. But more importantly, it seems to be a vast misinterpretation of our Constitution. Obama did, in fact, campaign on openness in government. And, in comparison to Bush, he has certainly made executive branch operations more transparent. In my opinion, however, not enough so. His campaign promise to open deliberations on the healthcare debate in Congress, however, is as ludicrous as the fact that anyone thinks he could do anything about it. Finally, and back to my original point, candor and dealmaking is what democracy is all about. Compromise is often ugly. The sausage is not fun to watch being made. No one ends up looking good, except those whose best incentive is to obstruct compromise in the name of a status quo. They would love to open the process to expand conflict to the point of killing compromise. And, that, more than anything is why this criticism is getting so much traction from propagandists like Brietbart.