Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up 0
The Wednesday funnies, complete with opinions.
Thomas Frank on the WaPo’s influence peddling PR disaster:
Even in Washington, it’s unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to “alter the debate,” as the Post’s flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city’s scourge of public corruption — the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others — seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.
It was a moment of rare, piquant hypocrisy. Let us take it slow and savor every drop.
Dear Diary: No one understands me. It’s like I’m speaking some Eskimo dialect or something. Andrea Mitchell follows me all the way to Kanakanak Beach and I get a French manicure and set up this huge photo op for her, even though she spooked the salmon.
Todd and me are in our cool fishing bibs. Piper’s helping out on the boat. It’s an amazing day that shows how our Creator favored my beloved Alaska, gatekeeper of the continent, and makes a great shot for all the network reporters up here to milk. This progresses me away from my image as some kind of flaky “rogue diva” and back to my image as a tough huntin’ and fishin’ gal.
Kathleen Parker: C’mon folks. With Sarah, it’s all about money.
Meanwhile, getting real, can we stop pretending that Palin is interested in anything other than her own ambition?
Henry S. Rowan, WSJ:
“Ford to City:
NY Daily NewsDrop Dead.” That was the New York Daily News headline in 1975 when President Gerald Ford promised to veto any federal bailout of a bankrupt New York City. President Barack Obama has responded in similar fashion to California’s current plea for help, explaining that many other states have severe budget problems. Besides, the Recovery and Reinvestment Act just gave the states $140 billion.
This is the right response…
But without serious reform, California’s outlook is dismal.
Michael Gerson: Obama’s tanking, so’s the economy, and his health reform sucks. We’re doomed, doomed I tells ya. Bush’s stewardship, (which I was a part of) insured it, and no one knows that better than me (but I’m not talking about it.)
James Pethokoukis: Obama’s first stimulus was a dud. Here are 5 better plans, at least on paper. Of course, you’d have to abolish the Senate to a few of them passed, but let’s not get too practical, here.
Harold Meyerson: So the institutions are buying in to health reform.
But if you measure the administration’s campaign by the degree of street heat on legislators to enact a universal plan, the results look far less rosy. Though most Americans support the provision of universal coverage and a public plan, a mass movement for health-care reform doesn’t exist. And the efforts of the administration and of the groups promoting universal coverage aren’t likely to conjure it up…
If Obama doesn’t want to use his mega-list to pursue his mega-goal, supporters of universal coverage might ask him, as Abraham Lincoln once asked the notoriously inactive Gen. George McClellan, to borrow his army as long as he isn’t using it.
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