Monet's Garden in Giverny, France. From the Huffington Post.
"Barack Obama will get a chance to follow a long line of American presidents who have had setbacks at home. He will go abroad. His long-delayed Asian trip this week - India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan - is by chance perfectly timed. Asian powers are showing a striking - and growing - interest in American power."
The East China Sea Dispute: Short-Term Victory and Long-Term Loss for China? from the Brookings Institution
"Other long term trends may go against China, despite its superficial victory. On other issues—overall relations with Japan, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, a dispute over currency exchange rates with the United States, business and commerce practices, and even with the Norwegian Nobel Committee which awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident—it is questionable whether China’s recent tough tone and actions will be beneficial to China."
A Plan B for Obama from Foreign Policy Magazine
"A stagnant economy. Declining American influence. Dictators on the march abroad. And a more Republican Congress coming soon. Barack Obama is in big trouble. But it's never too late. Foreign Policy has a plan, 14 in fact, for how the president can find his mojo again."
A number of both good and bad proposals put forth here.
The Economy is Growing -- But Jobs Aren't Following from Huffington Post
"An economy growing 2 percent a year might be tolerable in normal times. Today, it's a near-disaster. A growth rate of 5 percent or higher is needed to put a major dent in the nation's 9.6 percent unemployment rate. Two reasons why that's unlikely well into next year and maybe beyond:"
What's Really Behind that $1.3 Trillion Deficit? (Justin Fox) from Reuters
"Why is it so big, though? Is it because of all that stimulus and bailout spending? Or is something else going on?"
Why I Still Love Obama (Curtis Sittenfeld) from Slate
"When I see Obama on television, I'm unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile. He just makes me proud, and perhaps this is where I should admit that if there are two categories of Obama critics—conservatives who never liked the guy and have in some cases become unhinged since he was elected, and centrists or Democrats who voted for him but now feel let down—I suspect that, in the visceral nature of my response to our president, I have more in common with the unhinged nut jobs. By this I mean that my Obama admiration is a kind of emotional inverse of the right-wing Obama antipathy."
HERE! HERE!
What Heads Will Roll? (Michael Tomasky) from the Guardian [of the UK]
"There's a case to be made, of course, for dumping the whole lot of them, up to and including Axelrod. Yes, this was going to be bad in any case with 9.6. unemployment. But it didn't have to be this bad."
I agree that heads DO need to roll at this point.
Sarah Palin: Ms. Conspiracy for President? (Richard Cohen) from the Washington Post
"The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture, enemies that only the natives can see, a passion about the ridiculous and a blowtorch kind of sincerity that incinerates logical thinking."
The Anti-Palin Cabal (Jonathan Chait) from the New Republic
"I see two serious problems with the establishment's anti-Palin campaign. The first is a coordination problem. Palin has very intense support…."
MARTIAN NUGGET!!
Slug-like Dunes on Mars from Discovery News
"Just in case you didn't think Mars could get any more alien, here's an intriguing photograph taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2007. What are those dark objects?"
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