Obama

Obama’s besetting political fault is his automatic adoption of the tone of command, accompanied by a persistent reluctance to be seen as the source of the policy he commandeers.

Obama acted on the assumption that the establishment is one and irreplaceable, and must be served in roughly its present form. This assumption he seems to have acquired between the summer of 2008 – the time of his capitulation on domestic surveillance and his Aipac speech affirming support for Israel – and the National Archives Speech on security a year later. The trajectory was completed by the sacking last November of Greg Craig as White House counsel: Craig was the lawyer who drafted Obama’s original plan for the closing of Guantánamo.

Lex on Muni CDS

Always eager to deflect blame for fiscal lapses, state officials have pointed the finger at a small but growing market for municipal credit default swaps. There is no evidence, however, that banks are acting as anything but bond market facilitators. The first and loudest protests have come from – surprise, surprise – the state with the highest CDS prices, California. Treasurer Bill Lockyer has expressed indignation that prices imply California is riskier than many developing nations. With its intractable deficit, dysfunctional politics, powerful unions, inability to devalue and taxpayers who can decamp to states with lower taxes and better services, the CDS market may be right.

Mark Lillo on Tea Party Jacobins

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets............The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.