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This Week marked the passing of historian John Hope Franklin, investor Jack Dreyfus, NBC newsman Irving R. Levine, and six soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He's waiting to see how the field unfolds.

Maybe he's waiting to see if Joe the Plumber will be her running mate.

And Howdy Doody Jindal joined the "I want Obama to fail" club. I assume he received a nice little cap with big mouse ears from RushBo for joining up.

(Control Room for Reactor 2 - Three Mile Island -1979)

Day Two. The picture was not as rosy as originally planned. Radiation was continuing to leak into the atmosphere and things were a lot more serious than previously thought. Explanations were slow in coming. Original estimates were wrong and officials were hard pressed to put any positive spin on what was shaping up to being a major disaster.

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Liz Trotta is shocked, shocked we tell you, at how the Obama White House is managing its press conferences:

Trotta: You know, Eric, we're really witnessing something historic going on with the presidential news conference. President Obama has taken control of it like no other president I've ever seen. By eliminating, for example, the top newspapers, he's really -- which by the way, as you know, which are viewed as the intellectual muscle of the media -- he's managed to show something different. That is, he's going to tailor the questions and the answers to the way he wants them.

Now, there are competing agendas here. The press is supposed to be there to represent the people. The president is there to protect his policies and he wants to be re-elected. But here we are in the middle of a social and and economic revolution, probably the biggest we've had in the country's history, and nobody seems to be able to get a straight answer.

Instead, what we're presented with is preselected questions in a tightly controlled news conference where, at the beginning, the president reads a very self-serving statement from a large movie screen, and then he calls on people, for example, from Univision, and from Stars and Stripes, and from Ebony.

Now, this isn't to say that these people have a right to get a slice of the pie, but let's face it -- the tough questions are going to come from the big guys in media, and I'm talking about mainly newspaper people here, because the television networks certainly haven't covered themselves in glory.

Trotta was promptly corrected about claiming that the questions were preselected, and she admitted this, saying the questioners were preselected instead, and "that is brand new in the history of press conferences."

Bollocks.

The Wall Street Journal tried trotting out a similar claim this week, and Media Matters promptly destroyed it:

Continue reading »

And so it begins:

The chairman and chief executive of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, is resigning, just hours before President Obama was expected to unveil his rescue plans for G.M. and the ailing American auto industry, a person close to the decision said Sunday.

Mr. Wagoner was asked to step down as part of G.M.’s restructuring agreement with the Obama administration, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because a formal announcement has not been made yet. Mr. Wagoner then agreed to resign.The unexpected move by Mr. Wagoner, who has been at the helm of G.M. for eight years, was not confirmed by the company. A statement about Mr. Wagoner’s future will be issued after the president’s comments, which is expected to be Monday morning.

My Very Good Friend Paul Krugman® is on the cover of next week's Newsweek. Over at the Washington Monthly, Dday writes about the important role he plays in moving the national economic dialogue to the left:

Now, you don't have to agree with everything Krugman says - I've seen some very good critiques of things he's said recently. But he is a serious thinker and this is his area of expertise, and he performs an important function. It's an odd quirk of fate that Krugman has as big a megaphone as he does, and so using it to put pressure on the Obama Administration from the left does several things: 1) provides a counter-weight to the conservative critiques of the President, which are usually so nutty that they pale in comparison to reasoned dissent, 2) forces Obama to at least debate the merits of his proposals rather than dismiss all critics, and most important, 3) gives Obama space on the left to put out an more progressive agenda than otherwise. Bill Clinton sums up the dynamic:

I recently heard an interesting anecdote about the 1993 budget fight. While it is probably the most progressive piece of sizable legislation to pass into law in two decades, it was a grueling fight--passing both branches of Congress by a single vote--and it still could have been better. At the signing ceremony, President Clinton found then Representative Bernie Sanders, and told Sanders that he, Sanders, should have made a much bigger public display of how he, Clinton, wasn't giving enough to liberals in the new budget. Such a public display would have provided Clinton more room to maneuver on the left.

The moral of the story is that if no one is criticizing a Democratic administration from the left, then there is no rationale or political space for that Democratic administration to operate on the left. Such criticism is thus even useful to, and desired by, a Democratic administration. If the left stays quiet, it will not be relevant.

Krugman is fulfilling that role, opening what many have called the Overton window, moving the conversation away from the failed conservative ideas of the past.

As Eric Boehlert says:

We just think everyone would have been better off if the press had paid this much attention to Krugman's work between, say, 2002 and 2006.

I also appreciate Krugman's modesty in reacting to the cover story:

I've long been a believer in the magazine cover indicator: when you see a corporate chieftain on the cover of a glossy magazine, short the stock [...] Presumably the same effect applies to, say, economists.

You have been warned.

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Gen. David Petraeus told CNN's John King that the military didn't order torture while Bush was president. "Was the line crossed? Did you do things which you fundamentally thought were wrong and immoral? " asked King.

"We certainly did not. There were incidents that did and we learned hard lessons from Abu Ghraib and we believe we took corrective measures in the wake of that," said Petraeus.

The General also said that he "wouldn't necessarily agree" with former Vice President Cheney's assertion that President Obama's terrorism policies were putting the country at greater risk.

John Amato:

When Gen. Petraeus says there is a good debate going on about "values," is he saying that under George Bush and Dick Cheney there was no such debate? Was it a veiled swipe at them?

And he did not wholeheartedly support President Obama against the charge from Cheney, who said we are less safer now. He should have been unequivocal in his support for his new commander in chief and said categorically that we are safe.

He's a political animal now that was created by the Bush administration to shift the failure of the Iraq war away from #43 to a general in the military, which was to squash as much criticism as they could from the media. Rove and Co. knew that the media would shy away from leveling tough criticism at the feet of a military man.

CNN transcript:

KING: Do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I do. He is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: General Petraeus, you served in the Bush administration under Vice President Cheney and President Bush. You're now serving in the Obama administration. Are the American people less safe because of this new president, as Vice President Cheney says?

PETRAEUS: Well, I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, John. I think that, in fact, there is a good debate going on about the importance of values in all that we do. I think that, if one violates the values that we hold so dear, that we...

KING: You mean torture?

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You can tell that Karl Rove really chafes at having his own favorite tactics used against his own august personage. Today on Fox News, he told Chris Wallace that the recent Democratic ads calling him out for characterizing President Obama as "arrogant" were a really, really bad idea.

First he notes that the ad really isn't getting much play in commercial airings. Where it's appearing the most is on cable news broadcasts talking about Democrats going after Rove. Mind you, having the newscasters do your work for you in this fashion was one of the more masterful tactics employed by Rove's White House, so that probably adds to his annoyance.

But Rove is just mystified as to why the Obama political team would make him a target:

Wallace: Are you replacing -- I mean, from their point of view, does it make sense to go after Rush Limbaugh, does it make sense to go after Karl Rove?

Rove: No, it doesn't. It just simply doesn't. I mean, look, this is an effort to divert attention from growing concerns about their plans to expand the deficit, expand the budget, borrow a lot more money, and it's pathetic. It's lowering and demeaning to the White House.

That, of course, is a subject on which Rove is expert.

He blames it all on Saul Alinsky, and figures (like Limbaugh) that he's being "frozen". And there's probably some larger sense in which this is true.

But the reality is that he's being targeted precisely because the GOP is so leaderless, that whatever party discipline exists does so because of the work of conservative propagandists like Rove and Limbaugh. Limbaugh gets out the troops, while Rove provides them with talking points and attack strategy.

Dealing with them is not merely a sideshow, but an essential component of passing Obama's agenda through Congress. If Obama can weaken the grip of demagogues like Rove and Limbaugh, then he at least has a chance of peeling off some Republican votes and building a real consensus for passing his economic, energy, and health-care initiatives.

Rove may choose to play the "Who me?" innocent, but he knows perfectly well why he's being targeted.

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(h/t Heather)

A typical Villager philosophy is that a Democratic President must always throw his liberal base under the bus as soon as he takes office to be taken seriously. That litmus test is never applied to Republicans, though. Was there an outcry that George Bush must buck conservatives to appear legitimate to the American people? Of course not.

THIS WEEK's roundtable turned their attention to the budget today, and Paul Krugman agreed that health-care reform is incredibly important to the state of the economy and something he hopes President Obama gets done. Matthew Dowd pivots away and evokes the Villager Mantra:

Dowd: At some point, in order for him to demonstrate to the American public, he at some point -- soon -- he has to take on some significant constituency of the Democratic Party. If he believes in change and he wants to do things, which may be the health-care debate, which he may have to take on, at some point, a constituency. As of yet, he has taken on no constituency in the Democratic party...

The panel immediately went into a discussion on Obama's Afghanistan War plan, which the left is not at all singing praises over, so Dowd was immediately proved wrong. But the idea that President Obama has to attack his own base is ridiculous and patently false. I wouldn't mind President Obama taking on the Blue Dogs or Evan Bayh's power hungry group, but that certainly wouldn't count in the minds of the Villagers.

Digby writes about this in her post: Soljah Politics

What, you don't recall the press insisting after both Bush elections that he needed to repudiate his most enthusiastic followers as often as possible to maintain his credibility?

Oh wait. Sorry. I'm mistaken. They didn't. They just celebrated the fact that Real Americans had insisted that there would be no oral sex in the white house and that the president would throw strikes at Yankee stadium. Even after the Terry Schiavo circus, they didn't say anything about Sistah Soljahing the Republican base. (I suppose they couldn't --- after all, the Republican base are Real Americans unlike the crazy hippies on the left.)

Dowd has no credibility on this since he helped elect Bush for two terms before he "soured on George." Isn't it interesting when the rats jump off a sinking ship?

From Headzup the Week in Cartoons.