Reports that General David Petraeus is giving a speech at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics on March 24 is ginning up speculation that he’s running for president.

Mark Ambinder:

News that Gen. David Petraeus is venturing out of his Centcom comfort zone late this month to the state of New Hampshire is catnip for a certain chunk of obsessives who believe that Petraeus wants to run for president (and be nominated as vice president) in 2012. Petraeus has said he’s not interested, in public. So do most would-be candidates at this stage. So ignore that for now. Here’s what I can add:

First, as James Pindell notes, Petraeus lives in New Hampshire. He’s registered to vote there as a Republican.

Petraeus attends a lot of fancy private dinner gatherings in Washington. I have never been to one of these gatherings, but I’ve spoken with several folks who’ve attended several of them, and they all seem to come away with the impression that Petraeus is far more interested in exploring his political options than he says publicly.

He’s speaking at St. Anselm’s College, the site of many historic political moments — Ronald Reagan paid for his microphone there. No one runs for president without speaking at St. A’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

I presume but don’t know that Petraeus will run as Republican. Maybe he’d run as an independent. How does Petraeus fit in with the Tea Partiers, the Libertarians, the Social Conservatives? He certainly upstages Mitt “No Apology” Romney by sheer force of conviction. He’s not a terribly good political speaker, though, even though he gets the politics of large institutions quite small. Also, he’s small in stature. Do not be mislead into believing that a candidate’s height — even a general’s height — doesn’t matter. Wes Clark can tell a few stories about that.

Laura Rosen and Ben Smith dutifully pass along the report without commentary.   Matt Yglesias thinks a Petraeus run “slightly ridiculous” but,

I’d really sort of like to see the guy run for the GOP nomination. Presumably we’d see Mitt Romney slamming him as soft on terrorism and Petraeus would be slamming Romney for supporting Obama-style socialism on health care. It’d be kind of awesome.

At any rate, just thinking about it is a reminder that one reason these high-level military officers seem like appealing candidates is precisely because they get to be famous media celebrities without engaging in that sort of annoying political cut-and-thrust. But recall that as soon as Wesley Clark became a candidate, he started looking a lot more politician-y than he had before. It would be the same with anyone. Americans have a very low opinion of politics and politicians and people who act like politicians, but in practice the political system requires politicians to act like that. So anyone outside the arena looks appealing until he steps into the arena.

Despite my longstanding cautions against Petraeus fetishism,  I like and admire the man.  He’s a genuine soldier-scholar-statesman.

General Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Class of 1983.  He subsequently earned MPA and Ph.D. degrees in international relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and later served as an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the US Military Academy.  He also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University.

Awards and decorations earned by General Petraeus include two awards of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Defense Superior Service Medal, four awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal for valor, the State Department Superior Honor Award, the NATO Meritorious Service Medal, and the Gold Award of the Iraqi Order of the Date Palm.  He is a Master Parachutist and is Air Assault and Ranger qualified.  He has also earned the Combat Action Badge and French, British, and German Jump Wings.  In 2005 he was recognized by the U.S. News and World Report as one of America’s 25 Best Leaders, and in 2007 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential leaders and revolutionaries of the year and one of four runners-up for Time Person of the Year.  Most recently, he was selected in a poll conducted by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals and was chosen by Esquire magazine as one of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century.

But Matt’s right: Petraeus is held in such high esteem precisely because of the contrast between his military bearing and the namby pamby styles of our political leaders.  But one can’t run for president without becoming a politician.  At least, not if you’re other than a vanity candidate running solely for the platform ala Alan Keyes, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader.

Petraeus is an enormously competent and successful general.  He’s got celebrity on par with Colin Powell and has likely surpassed Norman Schwarzkopf.  Right now, conservatives can view him as exactly the sort of guy they’d like leading their charge.   We know very little about his political beliefs and, by definition, the more we know the less some will like.   He hasn’t had  to tell us what he thinks of health care reform, abortion, school prayer, campaign finance reform, capital punishment, torture, detainment, electronic surveillance, or pretty much any other controversial public policy issue.  And, especially for conservatives who like him, the natural tendency is to presume that he holds exactly the same positions they do.  (Then again, I said that about Barack Obama, too, and it didn’t bear out until well after the inauguration.)

MoJo’s Adam Weinstein notes that Bob Dole and others are touting Petraeus and that centrist Republicans are especially enamored of him.

But on further review (and ignoring the obvious concerns about militarism in electoral politics), a Petraeus candidacy might be healthy for the GOP—and for the country. He publicly supported the Obama administration’s now-stalled plan to shutter Guantanamo Bay’s detention facility and end torture. He holds a doctorate from Princeton and has surrounded himself with intellectuals, left and right, in and out of uniform, who embrace out-of-the-box thinking—no small feat in the military’s often stultifying bureaucracy.

Most important, Petraeus has reportedly identified himself as a “Rockefeller Republican,” a rare breed of urbane, educated, big-state social liberal that’s been excommunicated from the Grand Old Party of late (see also Crist, Charlie; Chafee, Lincoln). Since Barack Obama’s election, the GOP has sought to co-opt ultraconservative, right-wing, and Tea Party anger as its brand of choice, effectively marking moderate Republicans as Godless traitors. But who’s going to level such attacks on the uniformed, mythical superman who averted disaster and “pacified” Iraq? He could debate the ins and outs of health care policy without being labeled a socialist. He could shut down military tribunals and expand diplomacy without being called an Al Qaeda sympathist. He could discuss the finer points of social policy without being shouted down as a pinko libertine.

In effect, only someone of Petraeus’ unassailable stature could force mainstream Republicans back to the political center—and whether or not it’s enough to win an election in 2012 or 2016, his candidacy could be an undeniable victory in America’s protracted war with rightist extremism.

A noble thought but, of course, ultraconservatives, right-winger, and Tea Partyers are a large part of the Republican nominating electorate.  It’ll be a neat trick winning their support while pulling the party back to the center.

Dana Carvey debuts his Obama impression on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno:

The bit about having to explain to the audience who Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan were is amusing as well. And it’s not just affect: It’s true.  Back in my teaching days, one of the things I always tried to remind myself is that anything that happened more than four or five years ago was completely meaningless as a reference point for the students.

Bonus coverage: Carvey does Al Gore and others:

Carvey’s as good with impressions as anyone since Rich Little. If he weren’t such a nice guy, though, he’d get accused (unfairly) of racism for some of his ethnic gags.

via FOD via Glenn Reynolds.

Professional iconoclast Stanley Fish has been predicting for a while that people would come to miss George W. Bush once the heated controversies of the moment had faded and the big picture emerged. Now, he sees evidence that he was right.

A perhaps more substantial sign incorporates a sign famous (or infamous) in the Bush presidency. The March 8 cover of Newsweek reproduces the famous 2003 photograph of Bush on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln. The president is in the left of the picture, striding away from the famous banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.”

Those words haunted Bush for the next five years, but now, Newsweek reports, they may play differently because — and this is emblazoned on the cover — we may have “Victory At Last.” It has to be said, declare the cover-story’s writers, that “now almost seven hellish years later . . . something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq”; and, they add (eerily echoing Bush’s words in 2003), this development “most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.”

Of course, one might disagree with that assessment, but the fact that it is made in the lead article of a major mainstream magazine tells its own story. It is a story that intersects with another, the story of the precipitous decline in Barack Obama’s support and of a growing suspicion, found on the left as well as on the right, where it is much more than a suspicion, that the politics of change may have been a slogan with less promise in its future than “Mission Accomplished.” (The imminent passage of a health care bill keeps being predicted, but so far no “victory at last.”)

Analyses of how this has happened are plentiful and varied, but most agree that it had something to do with the summer of 2009, when the town meetings that seemed a good, nicely democratic idea in the spring turned into a recruiting device for the angry crowds that would become the Tea Party.

At the same time, Bush profited from the fact that he kept a low profile and didn’t snipe at his successor, a task left to his vice president, who therefore took upon himself the enmity and scorn previously directed at his former boss. Dick Cheney was, in effect, a lightning rod, and he was joined in that function by Sarah Palin, who slid neatly into the slot Bush had occupied in the mind of all good liberals for eight long years. Hatred and contempt of Palin is now the favorite pastime of those who have abandoned the cowboy from Texas and transferred their obsessive animus to the belle of Alaska (who, I say again, is more formidable than many in both parties believe.)

Meanwhile, Bush’s policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who — yes, that’s right, George W. Bush.

And now, right on schedule, Bush has resurfaced (just as I imagined him doing a year ago last September ) to join Bill Clinton in a humanitarian relief effort. He is officially a member in good standing of the ex-presidents club, and the longer he lives the more his reputation will be burnished. To be sure, his post-presidency resume is still thin, but we can expect it to be beefed up by good deeds, ceremonial appearances and the activities that will surround the building and opening of his library at Southern Methodist University. We’ll see Bush the tour guide and Bush the patron of historical scholarship and, perhaps, even Bush the seminar leader.

And the judgment of history? Well, I’m not that foolish, but I will venture to say that it will be more nuanced than anything the professional Bush-haters — indistinguishable in temperament from the professional Obama-haters — are now able to imagine. He will not go to the top of the list, but neither will he be the figure of fun and derision he seemed destined to be only a year ago. You heard it here.

This all strikes me as reasonable up to a point.   Frankly, given how low the opinion of Bush was when he left office — with many proclaiming him The Worst President Ever — he has nowhere to go but up.

Will Bush ever be regarded as a great president in the tradition of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, and Reagan?  Nope.  But he wasn’t an awful president, either.   And, depending on how Iraq shakes out, he might even be thought of as a pretty good one.

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were both viewed as, at best, mediocrities when they left office.  Both are rated much more highly with the advantage of perspective.

In hindsight, the Iraq War won’t be viewed as a debacle along the lines of Vietnam.  I don’t know that it’ll ever be viewed as a great success — and I say that as someone who has reluctantly supported the effort since 2003 — but the cost in American lives has been small in any historical sense and the possibility for significant, positive regional impact remains.

Additionally, I think, Bush’s handling of Katrina disaster will be more fairly judged in hindsight as a series of unfortunate events uncontrollable from Washington.  FEMA was dispatched quickly but the infrastructure simply wasn’t in place — in still isn’t — to deal with an unprecedented flood in New Orleans.  Nor did it help to have an incompetent mayor and governor mucking things up.   But given the bitterness of the moment, it was easy to just shrug it off as Bush not wanting to lift a finger to help out a poor, predominately black city.

Fish is also right on the whole series of things that Democrats in general and Obama in particular railed about under Bush that are now quietly being adopted.   Bush had to make a lot of hard decisions and made many of them badly.  But, in many of those cases, the alternatives were awful, too.   We all mocked Bush for repeatedly pointing out during the 2004 debates that being president was “hard work.”  But, it turns out, it actually is.

When President Obama invited Republican Congressional leaders to join him for a televised health care summit, they reasonably feared it was “a trap” in which the contrast between the contrast between a smooth talking Commander-in-Chief and Podunk legislators would make them look small.   Clearly, Obama intended it as a PR gambit that would showcase him at his best and bully the Republicans into making concessions in order to appear reasonable.

It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.

Like most Americans, I had more pressing things to do with my time than watch a seven hour gabfast. Earning a living, for example, took precedent.  But the journalists whose job it is to report on these things and help establish the Conventional Wisdom seem to agree that the Republicans came out just fine.

WaPo’s Chris Cillizza pronounces an odd mix of Winners — Tom Coburn, Obama,  the process, the Senate, Paul Ryan, and C-SPAN — and Losers — Harry Reid, John McCain, genuine discussion, the public option, and the cable networks.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush saw no clear winner.  And that, because we’re grading on a curve, means the GOP won.

President Barack Obama’s Blair House health care summit was billed as political theater — but it was so dull in parts, it’s hard to imagine anyone would demand a repeat performance.

And boring never looked so beautiful to House and Senate Republicans.

Seven thick hours of substantive policy discussion, preening and low-grade political clashes had Hill staffers nodding at their desks, policy mavens buzzing — and participants declaring the marathon C-SPAN-broadcast session a draw.

But in this case, the tie goes to Republicans, according to operatives on both sides of the aisle — because the stakes were so much higher for Democrats trying to build their case for ramming reform through using a 51-vote reconciliation tactic.

“I think it was a draw, which was a Republican win,” said Democratic political consultant Dan Gerstein. “The Republican tone was just right: a respectful, substantive disagreement, very disciplined and consistent in their message.”

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who is also somehow CBS’ chief political consultant, agrees.

The political world watched the proceedings at Blair House looking for theatre: instead, a policy fight broke out. This time, both sides came armored, and there was no referee. It was a wash — and the tie goes to the Republicans.

The key question on the table was not whether Democrats and Republicans could come up with ways to compromise; it was whether the White House could move public opinion in a way that helps Nancy Pelosi get the votes she needs to pass the Senate bill in the House. That’s unlikely.

[...]

Indeed, Republicans were successful when the focus of the debate was on process — the details of the deals that Democrats and the White House struck with key states and the (seeming) lack of transparency. The Democrats have an answer to this: if you want to find a pure debate on a pure bill, you’ll have to look to…another universe entirely, because this is how legislation gets done.

But the Democratic answer is callous, and Republicans know it: this debate is not about a weapons system, it’s about a fifth of our economy, it’s about life and death — and deals that take health care goods from one state and transfer them to another just don’t play.

Slate’s John Dickerson splits the difference. Apparently, both Obama and the Republicans won, which means the Democrats lost.  Except, of course, Obama.  Who won.

If the White House health care summit was political theater, here’s a 30-second review: President Obama won. So did congressional Republicans. Democrats in Congress need another act. This is not because Obama is such a better speaker and advocate for the legislation than his allies, though he is. It’s because Democrats didn’t get much political benefit from the event.

Obama ran for office promising to reach out to the other party. He said he would try to find areas of common agreement, and when his opponents had a legitimate philosophical disagreement, he would not question their motives. He did all of that in the session. Obama was not the crazy liberal caricature of GOP attacks during the seven-hour iron-bottom discussion. (Which may itself have been bad for the health of the people in the room.)

Republicans came out ahead for the same reason: They did not look like hell-bent obstructionists. This isn’t to say that they tried to meet the president halfway. They didn’t even try to meet him a quarter of the way. Repeatedly they called on him to start over. The president tried to get the room to focus on areas of agreement, and though several Republicans—notably Sen. Tom Coburn and Rep. Dave Camp—worked in that spirit, several others (hello, Reps. John Boehner and Eric Cantor) did not.

[...]

This is why it wasn’t a good day for congressional Democrats. According to strategists involved in 2010 races, fence-sitting Democrats needed to see Obama change the political dynamic. He needed to show how health care reform could be defended and how Republicans could be brought low. He did neither. White House aides and the president himself said he was going to press Republicans for how their plans would work, but he did that only twice—and mildly. There was no put-up-or-shut-up moment.

Obama debated Republicans vigorously and with precision—but it looked like a debate among people with actual philosophical differences, which in part it was. After an in-the-weeds debate about how the Congressional Budget Office accounted for premium increases, it became clear that the debate was between Democrats who want to set minimum standards for coverage and Republicans who want the market and individual choice to rule. The Democratic plan is more expensive but covers more people. The Republican plan is cheaper and doesn’t.

As it played out, the event didn’t look like one reasonable person aligned against a company of hooting morons. As Obama said during the lunch break: “The argument Republicans are making really isn’t that this is a government takeover of health care, but rather that we’re insuring the—or we’re regulating the insurance market too much. And that’s a legitimate philosophical disagreement.” Obama continued to affirm this view by saying things like this: “Neither of these proposals is radical. The question is which one works best.”

Of course, the only opinion that really matters is that of David Gergen. He’s like the provost or something:

The folks in the White House just must be kicking themselves right now. They thought that coming out of Baltimore when the President went in and was mesmerizing and commanding in front of the House Republicans that he could do that again here today. That would revive health care and would change the public opinion about their health care bill and they can go on to victory. Just the opposite has happened.

HotAir’s AllahPundit about sums it up, though, with this:

Obama’s problem today was that he couldn’t fly solo; he tried to, speaking for more minutes at the meeting than either the Democrats or Republicans did, but surrounding him with sad sacks like Reid and Harkin was bound to dilute the effect.

All in all, I’d say that the real winner were those of us who didn’t spend seven hours watch.

W.H. deputy chief of staff Jim Messina (left) is likely to head the campaign, while senior adviser David Axelrod may reprise his role as Barack Obama's campaign muse. Photo: AP photo composite by POLITICO

In an EXCLUSIVE, Politico’s crack staff has learned that Barack Obama is running for president in 2012.

President Barack Obama’s top advisers are quietly laying the groundwork for the 2012 reelection campaign, which is likely to be run out of Chicago and managed by White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, according to Democrats familiar with the discussions.

In yet another shocker, he also hopes to win:

But the sources said Obama has given every sign of planning to run again and wants the next campaign to resemble the highly successful 2008 effort.

And, you know who’ll be running the campaign?  Why, the same people:

David Axelrod, White House senior adviser, may leave the West Wing to rejoin his family in Chicago and reprise his role as Obama’s muse, overseeing the campaign’s tone, themes, messages and advertising, the sources said.

David Plouffe, the Obama for America campaign manager, described by one friend as “the father of all this,” will be a central player in the reelect, perhaps as an outside adviser.

Truly exciting stuff.

UPDATE: Steven Taylor does a content analysis of Politico’s reporting, deconstructing the language.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, right, and Army Secretary John McHugh, testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010, before the the Senate Armed Services Committee. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke)

In something of a reversal of recent statements, the senior leadership of the Army and Air Force warned Congress about moving too fast to end the ban on gays serving openly.

Top Army and Air Force officers said Tuesday they would be reluctant to overturn a 17-year policy that prohibits gays from serving openly in the military without more time to ascertain it won’t hurt the services.

“I do have serious concerns about the impact of a repeal of the law on a force that is fully engaged in two wars and has been at war for eight and a half years,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey told Congress. “We just don’t know the impacts on readiness and military effectiveness.”  As Casey cautioned the Senate Armed Services Committee against moving too fast to repeal the law, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz made similar remarks before the House.

The carefully crafted comments indicate reluctance among the military’s senior ranks to act anytime soon on President Barack Obama’s plan to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.  Obama says the policy is wrongheaded and should change. Defense Secretary Robert Gates agrees but wants to move slowly, and has ordered a lengthy assessment on how to lift the ban without affecting troops and their families.

Officials expect the study to be complete by the end of the year, but that it could be several more years before the repeal is fully implemented.

Gates, JCS Chairman Mike Mullen, and CENTCOM chief David Petraeus have all recently said that lifting the ban could be accomplished without much problem.  But today’s statements aren’t terribly surprising: This is a major cultural change and the military is a conservative institution.

The change is coming; the question is whether to implement it immediately or over the course of a few years.  The latter is the default position.

So far, I’ve heard three speakers at CPAC, plus various introducers and emcees.  Let’s just say that teleprompter-related jokes are already getting old.

I get the desire to make fun of Barack Obama.  Really, I do.  It’s what one does at a convention of an opposition political movement.  Especially one where the audience skews young.

But, gee whiz, the fact that he gives speeches using a teleprompter is hardly particularly noteworthy, let alone funny.  Ronald Reagan was called “The Great Communicator” and used a teleprompter without shame.  It’s just how modern public speakers refer to notes.

The AP is reporting that the Obama Administration is set to announce that it will provide loan guarantees for new American nuclear power plants.

The Obama administration’s planned loan guarantee to build the first nuclear power plant in the U.S in almost three decades is part of a broad shift in energy strategy to lessen dependence on foreign oil and reduce the use of other fossil fuels blamed for global warming.

President Barack Obama called for “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants” in his Jan. 27 State of the Union speech and followed that by proposing to triple loan guarantees for new nuclear plants. He wants to use nuclear power and other alternative sources of energy in his effort to shift energy policy.

Obama in the coming week will announce the loan guarantee to build the nuclear power plant, an administration official said Friday. The two new Southern Co. reactors to be built in Burke, Ga., are part of a White House energy plan that administration officials hope will draw Republican support.

I am definitely all for this. Nuclear power is a much safer, cleaner source of energy than coal. This is long overdue.

h/t Dodd Harris

Image Credit: Sarah Elzas

Steve Chapman runs down Obama’s record on gun control:

On the list of issues for which Obama is willing to put himself on the line, gun control ranks somewhere below free trade with Uzbekistan.

So he has proposed nothing in the way of new federal restrictions on firearms. Even the “assault weapons” ban signed by President Clinton—and allowed to expire in 2004—has no visible place on his agenda.

Not only that, he’s approved changes that should gladden the hearts of gun-rights supporters, a group that includes me. He signed a law permitting guns to be taken into national parks. He signed another allowing guns as checked baggage on Amtrak. He acted to preserve an existing law limiting the use of government information on firearms it has traced.

As a pro-Second Amendment guy, I’m heartened by this. One of the right’s biggest victories in the past twenty years has been to make gun control very politically hard to support–and that’s a good thing.

Image Credit: Really Good Magazine

Professor Amy Bishop has been charged with three counts of murder.

UAH professor Dr. Amy Bishop has been charged with murder in connection with a deadly shooting that killed three people and injured three more Friday afternoon.

Huntsville police spokesman Sgt. Mark Roberts said Bishop was charged Saturday morning with one count of capital murder.

Personally, I’m outraged that Bishop is being charged by civilian law enforcement. Indeed, I’d be willing to wager that she was Mirandized, to boot. This despite the fact that she clearly committed an act of terrorism against a government institution. Shockingly, by all accounts it also appears that the Obama Administration is going to also idly standby and allow her to be tried in the same jurisdiction that her crime was committed in. Outrageous!

By trying Bishop in civilian court, we’re only going to embolden other tenure-track professors to commit the same crime. But of course, Obama’s going to let this happen. He himself was an untenured professor and clearly sympathizes with Bishop.

Disgusting.

Alabama’s Richard Shelby has placed a hold on all nominations until a 2008 earmark for Redstone Arsenal is released. The Mobile Press-Register:

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, is blocking Senate action on executive branch nominations, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said this afternoon in an e-mail.

In response to a question from the Press-Register, Reid spokeswoman Regan Lachapelle confirmed that Shelby has placed a “blanket hold” on most pending nominations.

By placing a hold, a single senator can stop the Senate from voting on a particular nomination, often as a way of gaining leverage on an unrelated issue. It is not clear when Shelby placed the hold or how many nominees are affected. While individual holds are not unusual, Gary Jacobson, a congressional expert at the University of California at San Diego, said he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold.

TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro adds:

According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track. The two programs Shelby wants to move forward or else:

- A $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers. From CongressDaily: “Northrop/EADS team would build the planes in Mobile, Ala., but has threatened to pull out of the competition unless the Air Force makes changes to a draft request for proposals.” Federal Times offers more details on the tanker deal, and also confirms its connection to the hold.

- An improvised explosive device testing lab for the FBI. From CongressDaily: “[Shelby] is frustrated that the Obama administration won’t build” the center, which Shelby earmarked $45 million for in 2008. The center is due to be based “at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal.”

Needless to say, people aren’t amused.

Steve Benen:

The abuse, the arrogance, the corruption … it’s just breathtaking. Shelby is proving himself to be little more than a petty, greedy thug, undermining our system of government until he’s been paid off to his satisfaction.

[...]

What’s more, it’s additional evidence, as if more was needed, that congressional Republicans are simply out of control. At a time when the nation needs strong institutions, GOP lawmakers have not only gone mad, they’re also tearing down governmental touchstones like the United States Senate.

It’s inexcusable and unsustainable. Something’s gotta give.

Josh Marshall:

This is more like just a stick up. Gimme my money and I’ll give you your Senate back! Worse than a squeegee man and not much better than a bank robber, Shelby is shutting down the president’s ability to appoint anyone to anything until he gets his way. In a sense Shelby’s gambit is little different from what countless other senators of both parties have done in the past, using the senate rules to get the White House’s attention to pry some money free from the federal government. But the scale is unheard and the moment is different. The only mystery about this one is which is more outrageous — Shelby’s hold or the fact that the rest of the senators of both parties allow it.

Joe Gandelman:

I’m sure McCain and talk radio hosts who have been blasting the Democrats for their demonstrably craven political behavior on this issue will be making Shelby an issue as well.

Ezra Klein:

This is really no way to run a government.

Kenton Kelly (aka Dennis The Peasant):

Republicans should always remember that Barack Obama is President of the United States largely because of people like Richard Shelby (and George W. Bush)… Republicans who talk about ”fiscal restraint” to the gullible while engaging in the exact behavior they decry in Democrats.

Indeed.

Still, while I’m no fan of Shelby — I still harbor ill will over his malicious and slanderous 1986 campaign against Jeremiah Denton — nor of the use of holds as leverage for unrelated matters, I’m inclined to cut him some slack here.

First, he’s up for re-election this year, so bringing millions of dollars home to Alabama during troubled economic times is especially important to him.   Second, at least one of these projects was previously approved — and I don’t know what Shelby gave up to make that deal — under the previous administration.  Third, when we’re incurring federal debt in the trillions of dollars, it’s hard to begrudge a few measly million for what sound like perfectly valid national security-related projects. [Update: Oops -- misread the first figure; obviously, this is real money we're talking about.]

Is the use of a blanket hold a sleazy way to get the job done?  Yup.  But I’m not sure what other leverage Shelby has.  The state is represented by two Republican Senators, neither of whom are named Olympia Snowe.  With a Democratic president and 59 Democratic Senators, he has to use every trick in the book to fight for his state.

UPDATE:  Yes, I wish this wasn’t how spending decisions were made in Washington.  I’d much prefer a needs-based approach.  But I don’t expect Shelby to unilaterally disarm, either. So long as we’re spending ridiculous amounts in pork, I expect him to fight for Alabama’s share.

UPDATE II: If John Cole and Marci Wheeler are correct, and the 2008 bid was awarded in error and thereafter rescinded by the Air Force, then most of the above is moot and Shelby is unjustified in this action even by the low standards of hardball politics.  Unlike Cole and Wheeler, I’m not upset by Shelby’s preferring “foreign” companies doing business in Alabama over “domestic” ones up north.  But using an extreme tool to get pork for the state after losing a legitimate bid is wrong, whereas using it to get back something legitimately awarded and subsequently stolen is within the bounds of fair play.

UPDATE III: Steven Taylor and Ezra Klein have backgrounders on the hold process.  I agree with both that the privilege is too subject to abuse; indeed, its very existence is absurd in most conceivable circumstances.  And Steven is likely right that the projects in question aren’t really “pork” in a meaningful sense.

Matthew Yglesias reports that the Obama Administration is proposing a Discretionary Spending Freeze from 2011-2013.

On an exciting phone call with progressive internet writers earlier this evening, a senior administration official outlined the Obama administration’s plan to call for a freeze in non-security discretionary spending spending starting with the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Described as an effort to balance concern with a “massive GDP gap” in the short run and “very substantial budget deficits out over time,” the plan calls for the FY 2011 budget to be higher than the FY 2010 budget, but then for non-security discretionary spending to be held constant in FY 2012 and FY 2013. (Let me note right here that all of the reporters on the call, myself included, screwed up and forgot to seek clarification as to whether this is a nominal freeze or a real dollar freeze).

The freeze would not apply to the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, or to the foreign operations budget of the State Department. The official emphasized that the freeze is not the only element of the administration’s plans for deficit reduction, just the only element he was prepared to discuss on this particular call. “This is only one component of an overall budget,” he said, “you’ll see other components on Monday.”

So is this an across-the-board freeze like we’ve heard Republicans call for? No, it’s “not a blunt across the board freeze.” Rather, some agencies will see their budgets go up and others will go down, producing an overall freeze effect. The senior official sought to portray this as not just a question of spending less money, but of getting our money’s worth—cutting (unspecified) ineffective programs and spending more on programs that work.

Presumably, we’ll get more detail about this during the State of the Union and the inevitable spin afterwards. I’m not opposed to a discretionary spending freeze in the slightest, but from a fiscal perspective, leaving out “the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, or to the foreign operations budget of the State Department” leaves out pretty much most of the Federal budget from the freeze. Not to mention debt service, which can’t be frozen either. My back of the envelope calculation is that this will end up freezing about 25-30% of the discretionary budget.

Better than nothing, I suppose. Hopefully, the target of the most cuts in the rejiggering of the budget is corporate and farm subsidies. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

It’s also worth mentioning that during all three Presidential debates, Obama was fervently opposed to this type of spending freeze. Any takers on a bet that this becomes more of the focus of the media discussion than the actual budget proposals?

The 65 percentage-point gap between Democrats’ (88%) and Republicans’ (23%) average job approval ratings for Barack Obama is easily the largest for any president in his first year in office, greatly exceeding the prior high of 52 points for Bill Clinton.

So begins Jeffrey Jones‘ introduction of a new Gallup poll.  Here’s the graphic illustration:

It didn’t start out that way.

Overall, Obama averaged 57% job approval among all Americans from his inauguration to the end of his first full year on Jan. 19. He came into office seeking to unite the country, and his initial approval ratings ranked among the best for post-World War II presidents, including an average of 41% approval from Republicans in his first week in office. But he quickly lost most of his Republican support, with his approval rating among Republicans dropping below 30% in mid-February and below 20% in August. Throughout the year, his approval rating among Democrats exceeded 80%, and it showed little decline even as his overall approval rating fell from the mid-60s to roughly 50%.

Jones continues:

Thus, the extraordinary level of polarization in Obama’s first year in office is a combination of declining support from Republicans coupled with high and sustained approval from Democrats. In fact, his 88% average approval rating from his own party’s supporters is exceeded only by George W. Bush’s 92% during Bush’s first year in office. Obama’s 23% approval among supporters of the opposition party matches Bill Clinton’s for the lowest for a first-year president. But Clinton was less popular among Democrats than Obama has been to date, making Obama’s ratings more polarized.

Of course, Bush had the unifying impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to boost his first-year numbers.

So, is this gap is about Obama?  About Republican frustration?  About Democratic optimism?  Or simply a result of a steadily more polarized society?  Probably, some combination.    But the last would certainly seem to be the most powerful.

Prior to Ronald Reagan, no president averaged more than a 40-point gap in approval ratings by party during his term; since then, only the elder George Bush has averaged less than a 50-point gap, including Obama’s average 65-point gap to date.

We’ll see if Obama ultimately tops Bush — who seemed untoppable a year ago.  But it sure seems likely.    It’s the nature of a permanent campaign and, as Jones observes, a radically different information climate:

The way Americans view presidents has clearly changed in recent decades, perhaps owing to the growth in variety, sources, and even politicization of news on cable television and the Internet, and the continuing popularity of politically oriented talk radio. The outcome is that Americans evaluate their presidents and other political leaders through increasingly thick partisan lenses.

Not only is there more information out there competing for eyeballs — with hype, fear, and anger as the chief selling points — but no one has to ever hear the opinions of people who disagree with them unless they really want to.  If you’re getting all your news from Fox or MSNBC, you’re simply going to have a different outlook on the world than was the case when everyone was watching one of three national anchormen presenting 22 minutes of news each night in a Midwestern accent.

In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today ruled that the right of corporations to engage in political speech, including campaign and issue advertising,  is protected by the First Amendment.

AP, “Justices Block Key Part of Campaign Law”

The Supreme Court threw out a 63-year-old law designed to restrain the influence of big business and unions on elections Thursday, ruling that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress. The decision could drastically alter who gives and gets hundreds of millions of dollars in this year’s crucial midterm elections.

By a 5-4 vote, the court overturned two of its own decisions as well as the decades-old law that said companies and labor unions can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads. The decision threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

[...]

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

Adam Liptak, NYT, “Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits”

The 5-to-4 decision represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

[...]

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

[...]

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.

Instead of deciding the case in June, the court set down the case for a rare re-argument in September. It now asked the parties to address the much more consequential question of whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, along with part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that upheld the central provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Kenneth Vogel, Politico, “Court decision opens floodgates for corporate political spending”

The Supreme Court on Thursday opened wide new avenues for big-moneyed interests to pour money into politics in a decision that could have a major influence on the 2010 midterm elections and President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

The long-awaited 5-4 decision overruled all or parts of two prior rulings by the court that allowed governments to restrict corporations and unions from spending their general funds on ads expressly urging a candidate’s election or defeat. But the decision upheld disclosure requirements for groups like the one that brought the case.

The decision, handed down in a special session of the court, is generally expected to boost Republicans more than Democrats, because corporations and corporate-backed outside groups tend to align with conservatives and also often have access to more money than unions or liberal outside groups.

Such assessments are quite premature.   The ban on soft money contributions was expected to greatly advantage the Republicans, too, and wound up hampering John McCain, the major Republican sponsor of the bill, in his bid for the presidency.   The parties and the campaigns always find clever new ways to circumvent the rules and, for a variety of reasons, the Democrats — and especially the Obama campaign — were much better at adapting to the new system last go-round.

President Obama has already issued a denunciation of the ruling.

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.  It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.  This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.  That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue.  We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision.  The public interest requires nothing less.

But the Court ruled widely on a Constitutional principle, rather than issuing a narrow statutory interpretation.  Any attempt to get around the ruling by statutory means is likely to be met swiftly and harshly.  So, it’ll be interesting to see how the Democrats try to craft response legislation.

Dahlia Lithwick is peeved by the ruling, which she dismisses as “judicial activism” because “[t]he court had to reach out far beyond any place it needed to go to strike down century-old restrictions on corporate spending in federal elections.”

So Kennedy doesn’t really find his voice today until he gets to the fist-pounding bits: “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach.” And: “When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

As Stevens says in reading his dissent, none of that has anything to do with the court’s decision to topple decades’ worth of legal architecture that had never been questioned in the courts. And Kennedy’s visceral terror of speech bans (the word “ban” appears 29 times in his 57-page opinion) and “censorship” seems to override any sort of temperate assessment of either the facts of the case before him, the lack of substantial record in the lower courts, the significance of the cases he is overruling, or the consequences of today’s opinion.

But the Court clearly signaled it was going to do this upon re-argument.  And, presumably, lawyers petitioning the Court are loathe to challenge establish High Court precedent, preferring instead to find narrower grounds to plead their case.

She’s also unhappy with the expansion of the age-old fiction of corporate personhood.

Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is “to confuse metaphor with reality.” Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

No, corporations are not literally people and there are some obvious differences in how they’re handled.  For the most part, though, corporations and organizations are simply collections of citizens organized for various purposes.   The idea that  shouldn’t be allowed to run advertising against candidates seeking to do harm to their interests is outrageous.  So, too, is the notion that their ads are more likely to win over voters than any of the hundreds of competing ads.

Rick Hasen makes a rather odd argument:

Though the decision deals with federal elections, expect state and local corporate and union spending limits to be challenged, and to fall, throughout the country. There are many responses to Justice Kennedy’s reasoning. He wrongly assumes that corporations or unions can throw money at public officials without corrupting them. Could a candidate for judicial office, for example, be swayed to rule in favor of a contributor who donated $3 million to an independent campaign to get the candidate elected to the state supreme court? Justice Kennedy himself thought so in last year’s Caperton case. And yet he runs away from that decision in today’s ruling.

The Court has let stand limits on candidate donations, though.   And, frankly, it would be easy enough for courts to craft a rule requiring judges to recuse themselves from hearing cases where either party was a contributor — certainly, where either party had donated large sums.

It left in place one requirement: that the corporate and union groups unleashing the attack ads have to disclose who they are (and for that, Kennedy had everyone’s vote but Justice Thomas’.) But given the history of money and elections, why should we think that disclosure alone will be enough to deal with the problems of corruption and inequality that threaten our government?

But those are problems without a solution. You and I don’t have the same access to or influence over my Representative, Senators, or President that organized interests do and we never will. Beyond the fact that they have much more ability to give money and influence voters, the mere fact that they’re organized makes it easier for them to claim to represent large numbers.  The laws overturned today were never going to substantively change any of that.

Beyond that, Congress’ purported rationale for nearly four decades worth of campaign finance law has been to get the appearance of corruption out of the system.  But, as we’ve seen time and again, money continues to flow in ever larger amounts — probably because government’s reach has expanded so vastly over the years.  So, to the extent that political speech is achieved by spending money on television advertising — and thus protected by the 1st Amendment — it’s hard to argue that a “compelling interest” that’s not being achieved or likely to ever be achieved is worthy rationale.

Various sources are reporting that after vociferous labor reaction against taxing “Cadillac health plans”, the White House and labor groups have apparently reached a deal whereby members of labor unions who would be affected by the tax will have a temporary exemption.

Under the terms of the proposed deal, the threshold for families would be raised to $24,000, and would exempt certain benefits like vision and dental, according to a Democratic source.

Collectively bargained plans would be exempted until 2017, to provide workers with a real opportunity to renegotiate their benefits packages, which were designed under current law and excluded from taxation.

Raising the exemption level and exempting vision and dental would probably help avoid impacting any of the relatively small number of middle-class families impacted by the tax, which is probably a good thing. However, there’s simply no excuse for the exemption for plans covered by collective bargaining agreements, even if its temporary. Especially since, as Megan McArdle notes, the temporary exemption will likely turn into a permanent one.

Now, before there’s too much anti-union grousing, it’s worth noting that CNN reports that the AFL-CIO was also pushing for a straight income-based exemption.

One of the sources familiar with negotiations said that in addition to protecting health plans negotiated under collective bargain agreements, labor leaders are pushing to expand the deal to exempt health plans for all Americans making under $200,000 a year.

If that’s true, kudos to the union for pushing for that.

The bottom line, though, is that if the Administration wanted to mollify labor, then they should have implemented the income exemption and dumped the union exemption. Doing it the other way around, as they appear to have done, is interest-group politics at its absolute worst.