Because it's one of those years again...

And because four different people randomly asked me about this blog in the past couple of weeks, I'm going to fire her back up. I can't promise I'll update as regularly as I like (he said, after not providing an update in 20 months), and I can't say I have the same passion for consuming political news I once did.

Ok, I'm not selling this very well, am I? Let's do a quick rundown of Obama's first 3 years in office:

Foreign Policy: A

He got Bin Laden. He got the troops out of Iraq ahead of schedule. He got Gaddafi for less than a billion dollars and with no lives spent. He's got us prepared for that invasion of Canada we're not supposed to talk about. It's hard to have complaints.

That said... China is our biggest foreign policy concern, and they still own us. And he "got Gaddafi" by following our allies into an illegal (though morally justified) war.

Can't give him an A+. But the reality is he's crushed it on foreign policy.

Economic Policy: C-

We're closing in on two straight years of private sector job growth. Nobody believes me when I tell them that.

That's thanks directly to the stimulus, and indirectly to the bailouts. The obvious problem is that the stimulus wasn't big enough and wasn't targeted well enough, while the bailouts came without strings. Which still burns me right up.

The other problem is that while the private sector grows, the public sector continues to shrink.

That's thanks directly to the decision to renew the Bush tax cuts. It was a gutless move. I don't care that people like Andrew Sullivan think it was great statesmanship.

That said... five months ago I worried that Obama was Herbert Hoover. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure he's not.

Civil Liberties: OMFG WHAT'S GOING ON????

DOMA's dying; Don't Ask Don't Tell is dead; women still have the right to choose (and the gag rule's been lifted); and a whole bunch of other nice stuff has happened.

But... the NDAA is an abomination that is wholly unconstitutional. And SOPA/PIPA will be right there with it, should they pass.

So while Obama has been a great president for civil liberties in some ways, in others he's been pretty openly Bush-ian.

Three long years. And 10 long, money-filled months to the next election.

It's good to be back.

Paulson's Ultimatum

• Really great bit of journalism from The Times this morning about what happened in Paulson's meeting with The Nationalized Nine two days ago. It covers in brief not only what led to the meeting, but what happened in the meeting itself, who said what, and even the terms of the deal.
  

  Indeed, several of the banks represented in the room are in need of capital. And analysts said the terms of the government’s investment are attractive for the banks, certainly compared with the terms that Warren E. Buffett extracted from Goldman Sachs for his $5 billion investment.

  The Treasury will receive preferred shares that pay a 5 percent dividend, rising to 9 percent after five years. It will get warrants to purchase common shares, equivalent to 15 percent of its initial investment. But the Treasury said it would not exercise its right to vote those common shares.

• WSJ has what amounts to a companion piece to the Times article above.
• Ed Chancellor in the Financial Times draws the obvious comparisons to economic collapses of the past. And yeah, it's a *facepalm* bit of reading:

  Bank panics always have the same origin. “Every genuine business panic springs from the same root, which is rank speculation,” wrote one Victorian commentator. Thomas Tooke, the ­early 19th century merchant and author, ascribed the British crisis of 1793 to “a great and undue extension of the system of credit and paper circulation”. A year earlier, Thomas Jefferson, observing the first financial collapse in the independent United States, noted that “our paper bubble has burst”.

• Here's some fun bailout related news, it turns out AIG executives are complete dickheads. The NY Daily News has a story about four of them shooting up pheasants in England while Rome burned. Money quote:

  "The recession will go on until about 2011 - but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine," AIG honcho Sebastian Preil was quoted as saying.

  Preil wasn't the least bit embarrassed that AIG, which got its first $85 billion bailout from the feds last month, needed taxpayer money to stay in business. The hunting trip came the week AIG got a second loan of $37.5 billion.

• On the campaign trail, WaPo points out that Obama's cash advantage has gone a long way towards flogging McCain into submission. The 50 state strategy, which was once considered folly, has forced McCain to lay cash he doesn't have into markets where he didn't want to spend. So even if Obama doesn't win Indiana, Missouri, Nevada or North Carolina, his investments there have served their purpose by forcing McCain to take money out of even more crucial markets like Colorado, Virginia, Florida and Ohio. It's to the point now that Obama doesn't have to defend a single Kerry state, while McCain has to run the table on what's left as a potential toss-up.
• And finally, Time's Mark Halperin asks if McCain has what it takes to rattle Obama in tonight's third and final presidenial debate. I think it's much more likely that McCain loses his cool and starts shouting at the damn kids to get off his damn lawn than he actually lands a knock-out blow, which is what he needs to get him back into this thing. In other words, the last 20 days before the election should be a processional, not a sprint.
  

More than you probably want to know about the bailout

• While we were all googling Tina Fey yesterday, the Senate passed a revised bailout bill by an overwhelming 74-25 margin. Why the hell is the Senate proposing a monetary law of the sort which constitutionally can only begin in the House? I don't know - I must have missed that class in 4th grade. Anyway, the big difference between this one and what was snuffed Monday: $150 billion in tax cuts aimed at small businesses and the middle class, and a bump of FDIC insurance from $100k to $250k aimed at helping out small banks (and taking back whatever money the taxpayers just saved on a tax cut).
  
• In totally unrelated news, the national debt hit $10 trillion yesterday.
  
• The WSJ takes its best crack at supporting the bill, even starting with a quote from Alexander Hamilton. Which is a great way to convince me that this bill sucks, but at least the Journal brings some science as it turns out the manufacturing index plummetted in September almost to recession levels. If the BBC Newshour is to be believed, this is the real reason the bailout was "necessary." And I tend to trust BBC commentators because, after all, they tend to have English accents.
  
• David Ignatius at the Post points out that regular Americans have been just as spend-thrifty as Wall Street, if Debt vs. GDP is any measure.
• How did we get to this point in the first place? The Financial Times says the US have an Asian addiction, using Asian bank reserves "as an enchanted pool of money" that kept inflation artificially low while keeping growth artificially high. Or as Chinese professor Shen Dingli says, "More people understand that America is not as great as it was 10 years ago." I think that's a pretty good summary of the Bush administration.

In other news...

• Barack Obama referenced China's spacewalk last week in the debate which gives me at least some comfort that folks are paying attention to the narrowing technology gap. And now it's not just China, as Iran and Pakistan have joined the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization as well. This, to put it mildly, bears monitoring.
• And lost in all the financial turmoil yesterday was a little bit of armageddon, as the Senate has approved civilian nuclear trade between the US and India. Which would be fine, except for two things: 1) India never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and 2) India and Pakistan were voted "most likely to irradiate each other" at this year's prom. And Pakistan is pissed. Jimmy Carter, in the International Herald-Tribune, rails against the deal.