#FridayReads, Oct. 12–“The New New Deal” & “The Night Strangers”

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#FridayReads, Oct. 12–The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, Michael Grunwald’s deeply reported revelatory account of how the 2009 Recovery Act put the brakes on the financial collapse, prevented a depression, and jump-started President Obama’s agenda for change by distributing hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus to create whole new parts of our economy such as green energy and electronic medical record-keeping. Grunwald makes clear that the conventional wisdom around the oft-maligned bill is in many instances just plain wrong. For instance, the extent of fraud and corruption was minuscule, “about 0.001%.” He also details in new ways the fact that congressional Repubs–in the period after the election and before the inauguration–resolved on “a strategy of uniform resistance to the president’s agenda, so that Obama would be unable to keep his post-partisan promises.” Joe Biden tells Grunwald that he was told, “For the next two years, we [Repubs] can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back.” So much for the false Romney-Ryan claim that the president has been insufficiently bipartisan.

Also, finished The Night Strangers, the first novel of Chris Bohjalian’s that I’ve read. I’ve posted about it in #FridayReads twice before, as it took me a little while to get going in this contemporary haunted house story set in my old college town of Franconia, NH. But I found it totally engrossing once I got over the initial hump. Interesting characters, especially the evil and diabolical ones, and excellent use of structure in the novel to build suspense. It also had a satisfyingly creepy “Village of the Damned”-type denouement, where it’s clear that the evil, far from being extinguished, is actually free to carry on. I’m sure I’ll read more of Bohjalian’s work.

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Romney Advisor, on CNN to Articulate Mitt’s Foreign Policy, Can’t Do It

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Romney advisor Tara Wall gets roasted by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien in a preview of Mitt’s ballyhooed foreign policy speech to be given later today. In the 5-minute video O’Brien plays back key parts of the 47% tape, in which Mitt describes what he believes is the futility of dealing with the Palestinians; she then contrasts those surreptitiously recorded  statements with the transcript of today’s speech, where he claims to be in favor of a two-state solution. She asks Wall if she can resolve the obvious contradictions, when things get a little surreal. Transcript after the jump.

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Today’s Encouraging Job Figures

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At a doctor’s office right now, but finding I have good wifi so can blog a bit while waiting. It’s great to get word of the upward revision to jobs #s for July & August, the #s for Sept. and the resulting drop in UE rate to 7.8%. Under PBO USA has created more jobs in 4 years than GWB did in 8! The upward revisions show that even though there’s still a long way to go, the national trajectory is definitely moving in the right direction. Meantime, Jack Welch is disgracing himself by pushing out a tweet that ‘Chicago’ has cooked the numbers to give the president and DEMs a boost, as if the Bureau of Labor Statistics were in on a fix. This guy was CEO of a major corporation-what an idiot.

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Don’t Panic*, Continue Doing What We’ve Been Doing

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Two key data points and a message for worried DEMs and other Obama supporters:

1) In today’s Gallup poll President Obama’s job approval rating is 54%, the highest he’s ever had in that poll.

2) Also, in CBS’s snap poll overnight, while it did show improved numbers for Romney on the question of who you think can most help the country (from 30% to 63%), for the president the same figure went from 53% to 69%, still a 6-point edge.

The president’s got most of the country with him. I believe he can keep the people with him. Even though he didn’t do as well in the debate as we hoped he would–I think he was befuddled, unfortunately caught off guard by Romney’s ambidextrous shape-shifting and unabashed dissembling, as TPM’s Brian Beutler’s written–but I would add the president has no small reservoir of goodwill, the truth, and a skillful campaign, all on his side. My message is don’t panic, keep doing what we’ve been doing, especially all the truthtelling and fact-checking that the campaign has done all day–with the blogger community, including this one, pushing out that information–and things will be okay. And we get another crack at Romney/Ryan next week. It’s still a race, but the president remains in a strong position.

*Thanks to the late Douglas Adams for his book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its valuable nostrum, “Don’t Panic.”

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Who “Cares About Your Needs and Problems”?

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While Romney evidently gained more from the first debate, this CBS poll shows President Obama still holds edge on the question of who “Cares About Your Needs and Problems”.

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Sanctions on Iran are Working, Preventing War

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Feeling bad for the Iranian people who are enduring hardship wrought by the West’s economic sanctions, but the majors demos in Tehran today–inveighing against the Ahmadinejad government and religious establishment–show the whole sanctions policy is working. President Obama has insisted they be given a chance to work, and he’s being proven correct. Mitt, Bibi, and other wingers all look silly, having insisted on imminent war. Even Bibi is now altering his stance to favor sanctions. The mullahs have a growing currency crisis on their hands, while the cost of consumer goods has increased four-fold. Instability is brewing. Sanctions that result in curtailment of their nuclear ambitions are a far better option than bombing. Painful though the sanctions are for Iranians, the people are taking their anger out on the regime, where it belongs for their autocratic rule.

Think my outlook is too rosy? Read what Tod Robberson, editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News published yesterday:

“Mitt Romney and his pal, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, face an increasingly uphill battle arguing that the tough sanctions regime put in place by the Obama administration isn’t working. The pressure on Iran’s government to cease its uranium-enrichment program and abide by its international treaty obligations has never been more severe than it is today.

The value of Iran’s currency, the rial, is in free fall. According to Reuters, the rial reached a record low value of 37,500 to the dollar on the free market. A week ago it traded at about 24,600. Between 2010 and 2011, the rial’s value remained relatively steady at between 10,300 and 10,800 to the dollar. According to one report, Iranians lost 660 trillion in rial-based assets because of the plummeting market. This marks an enormous financial crisis for the country.

Heck, things are so bad that, instead of sightseeing in New York last week, the Iranian delegation headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on a shopping trip to Costco to buy stuff like shampoo that they can’t get in their own country. One member of his delegation reportedly has defected.

What has happened since last year to make the currency plummet to less than half its 2011 value? Sanctions, that’s what. . . .

And now, there can be no argument that the sanctions are taking a steep toll on Iran’s government. This helps explain why Israel’s foreign ministry issued a report last week calling for the government to give sanctions more time — in spite of the constant drumbeat of war coming from Netanyahu and Romney.

Yes, Romney can ask for proof that Iran has curtailed its uranium enrichment program as a result, and that’s a fair question. The answer almost certainly is: There is no proof — yet. That’s what the sanctions are all about. At a certain point pretty soon, Iran’s isolation and economic strife are going to reach a breaking point, at which time Tehran will seriously enter negotiations on inspections and agree to international limits on its enrichment activities. Sure beats war.

Romney is going to have to come up with another argument heading into tomorrow’s debates. He can’t even rely on backing from Netanyahu, who appears to be backing away from the hard-line stance he had maintained barely three weeks ago. Read more on that at ForeignPolicy.com,” in a Joel Rubin story headlined Netanyahu Aligns with Obama on Iran.

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