Thursday opinions, with spring on the way.

NY Times editorial:

Republicans’ lock-step opposition to comprehensive health care reform seems to be as much a matter of politics as principle. But either way, they have made clear that there is no dialogue or any possible compromise that will persuade them to change their minds.

Hello, reality. How are ya this morning?

WaPo:

President Obama’s endorsement Wednesday of a risky legislative maneuver to complete health-care legislation sent Democratic leaders scrambling to settle policy disputes and assemble the votes necessary for passage in the coming weeks.

No,, it didn’t. Just because it was a surprise to you didn’t mean it was a surprise to everyone else in the world. Don’t you read blogs?

David Broder: This (truly) unusual column bears repeating.

In the space of 10 days, thanks in no small part to my own newspaper, the president of the United States has been portrayed as a weakling and a chronic screw-up who is wrecking his administration despite everything that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, can do to make things right.

This remarkable fiction began unfolding on Feb. 21 in the Sunday column of my friend Dana Milbank…

Lecturing the kids about how to do their job was never so sweet…

Dan Froomkin also looks at the WaPo Rahm coverage:

The latest toxic meme to spread across the pages of my once-beloved Washington Post is that President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, is the one reasonable man in the White House.

Hmm… this Rahm story not going exactly as planned…

EJ Dionne:

Obama’s critics have regularly accused him of not being as tough or wily or forceful as LBJ was in pushing through civil rights and the social programs of his Great Society. Obama seemed willing to let Congress go its own way and was so anxious to look bipartisan that he wouldn’t even take his own side in arguments with Republicans.

Those days are over. On Wednesday, the president made clear what he wants in a health-care bill, and he urged Congress to pass it by the most expeditious means available.

This story is not completely written.

Ezra Klein:

Rep. Patrick Henry’s proposal  to kick Ulysses S. Grant off the $50 bill and put Ronald Reagan in his stead is sort of awesomely tone-deaf. The proposal here is to send the nation’s first black president legislation that would erase the guy who won the Civil War and replace him with the guy who cut a lot of taxes.

But putting the tin ear aside, Henry suffers from insufficient ambition: Personally, I won’t be satisfied until Reagan gets the full Lenin, his tomb exhumed and his corpse on display for all to see. No reason communists should get better treatment than the Gipper!

Frank Newport (Gallup):

[John McCain]: Look, look, there is no doubt in my mind America’s a right-of-center nation and this administration is governing from the left. That’s why the president’s approval rating’s continued to, to decline.

Are the president’s approval ratings continuing to decline? Certainly not recently. Obama’s ratings have of course declined from the point at which he first took office. Obama began with a 67% rating in his first week in office. He had a 50% average last week, more than a year later. But, Obama’s ratings have actually been remarkably stable in recent months, as reviewed in some depth by my colleague Jeff Jones. McCain’s use of the word “continue” implies that Obama’s ratings are still sliding — right up to this point in time. And that’s not the case.

Addition by Evans Politics owner Paul Evans — Thomas L. Friedman: A Word From the Wise:

I was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.

And this contrast is playing out in the worst way — just slowly enough so the crisis never seems acute enough to take urgent action. But, eventually, infrastructure, education and innovation policies matter. Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, which brings me to the subject of this column.

I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Mr. Otellini’s views on start-ups.

While America still has the quality work force, political stability and natural resources a company like Intel needs, said Otellini, the U.S. is badly lagging in developing the next generation of scientific talent and incentives to induce big multinationals to create lots more jobs here.

“The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital equipment credits,” he said. “A new semiconductor factory at world scale built from scratch is about $4.5 billion — in the United States. If I build that factory in almost any other country in the world, where they have significant incentive programs, I could save $1 billion,” because of all the tax breaks these governments throw in. Not surprisingly, the last factory Intel built from scratch was in China. “That comes online in October,” he said. “And it wasn’t because the labor costs are lower. Yeah, the construction costs were a little bit lower, but the cost of operating when you look at it after tax was substantially lower and you have local market access.”

These local incentives matter because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American. Asked if his company was being held back by weak science and math education in America’s K-12 schools, Otellini explained:

“As a citizen, I hate it. As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If I can’t get them out of M.I.T., I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” — Beijing’s M.I.T.

It gets worse….

See Senators to Obama: Stop Sending Tax Dollars to China, Campaign for America’s Future, March 4, 2010, by Scott Paul.

Afternoon Update:

The Tea Party Is All About Race

The Tea Party Is All About Race, The Huffington Post, March 3, 2010, by Bob Cesca.

I was going to open this piece with an analogy about the tea party groups and why they’re treated seriously by the press and the Republicans. The analogy would go something like: “Imagine [insert left-wing activist group here] getting a serious profile in a mainstream newspaper, and imagine serious Democratic politicians appearing at their convention.”

The problem is, when I really evaluated what the various far-left activist groups are all about and compared them with the tea party movement, there really wasn’t any equivalency. At all.

Because when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that’s left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there’s no comparative group on the left that’s similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.

I hasten to note that I’m talking about real racism, insofar as it’s impossible for the majority race — the 70 percent white majority — to be on the receiving end of racism. That is unless white males, for example, are suddenly an oppressed racial demographic. But judging by the racial composition of, say, the Senate or AM talk radio or the cast members playing the Obamas on SNL, I don’t think white people have anything to worry about.

This isn’t an epiphany by any stretch. From the beginning, with their witch doctor imagery, watermelon agitprop and Curious George effigies, the wingnut right has been dying to blurt out, as Lee Atwater famously said, “nigger, nigger, nigger!”

But they can’t.

Strike that. Correction. TeaParty.org founder Dale Robertson brandished a sign with the (misspelled) word “niggar.” So they’re not even as restrained as the generally unstrung Atwater anymore.

House Approves $15 Billion Jobs Measure

House Approves $15 Jobs Measure, The New York Times, March 4, 2010, by Carl Hulse.

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Thursday approved a $15 billion measure intended to spur job creation by granting payroll tax breaks to businesses that hire new workers, hoping to show voters that Congress was doing something about the dismal employment picture. The vote was 217 to 201.

See also Stick A Fork In Sarah Palin, She’s Done – Updated (2x), Daily Kos, March 4, 2010, by grannyhelen.

Video Headlines for March 4, 2010 from Democracy Now!

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DemFromCT is a longtime member of the Daily Kos community with interests ranging from polling to Iraq to bird flu, and has graciously agreed to allow us here at Evans Liberal Politics to publish his articles on an ongoing basis. He is a founding editor of Flu Wiki (www.fluwikie.com) and its sister site, the Flu Wiki Forum (www.newfluwiki2.com). Since its inception in June 2005, Flu Wiki has grown into an international clearinghouse of pandemic influenza information and links.

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