From TPM:
A new Gallup poll finds an overwhelming majority of Americans, 69%, in favor of allowing gays to serve openly in the military — it’s so big in fact, that even self-identified conservatives are for it.
The polling internals show 58% of conservatives in favor, plus 86% of liberals and 77% of moderates, for the overall top-line of 69%.
Fix it. Now. There is no excuse.
He hasn’t given it yet, but I suspect he’s going to nail it. And I don’t say this because I’m an Obama fanboy (I think a perusal through my archives will sort that). I say it because I’d don’t think you can grow up the way he did* and come out of it with the sort of certainty of superiority and righteousness that has previously plagued US presidents. To be clear, I think that Obama is compromised on any number of issues, but I don’t think he is (or can be) on what is the most central issue here – the basic recognition of the humanity and plight of the Islamic (and particularly, the Palestinian) world. Whether he will have the political fortitude to hold the necessary line with Israeli politicians in the future is a another issue. But this one – the genuine acknowledgment of humanity – he won’t get wrong. And that’s something.
*the way I did. Which is an explicit recognition of my perspective, here.
Update: here’s the text. Still looking for a video of the full speech.
Back in January, I noted that the Bush Administration was imposing a hefty import duty on Roquefort cheese, in retaliation for the EU daring to have some food safety standards. But just last week, common sense and civility broke out:
Food lovers breathed a sigh of relief today when news broke that the U.S. was dropping threatened tariffs on luxury food imports from Europe.
“Cheese war ends, everybody wins,” Foreign Policy declared in its Passport blog, encouraging its readers to enjoy a celebratory cheeseburger.
These taxes–which would have pushed the markup on French Roquefort cheese from 100 percent to a whopping 300 percent–never actually went into effect. But the food world had been making provisions just in case.
Obama saved your cheese. Rejoice.
Obama needs to get honest about this, and quickly:
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates poured more cold water on the idea that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed anytime soon. “If we do it,” Gates said, “it’s very important that we do it right, and very carefully.”
[ . . . ]
Back in January, of course, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said, in no uncertain terms, that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would be repealed. But the administration’s been slowly walking that back ever since.
Greg Sargent catches this gem – Obama’s campaign site slamming the same Bush Admin secrecy policies that now he appears willing to keep.  Sargent further notes:
This underscores what a major turnabout this is and how difficult it will be for the Obama administration to justify this politically going forward. Yesterday White House spokesman Robert Gibbs visibly struggled as he defended the current use of the state secrets privilege while saying Obama still condemns Bush’s use of it.
This also creates a major political dilemma for some Democratic Senators, such as Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy, who have aggressively criticized use of the state secrets privilege but have been largely silent on Obama’s current use of it.
The public heat needs to be turned up on all involved. “Oh, that was just a campaign line” is not an acceptable excuse.
Marshall writes:
What is so damaging about this isn’t the money — which is almost trivially small compared to the many hundreds of billions we’ve already committed. The problem is what appears to be the president’s mortifying impotence in the face of bankers and financiers who created the problem. The president speaks and acts for the federal government, which is to say, the American people, who have mobilized more than a trillion dollars and all powers of the state to repair the damage emerging out of the financial sector. And with all that, he’s jacked up on a employment agreement between a company the government now owns and derivatives traders who sank the world economy and may quite likely be looking at criminal charges for their activities in the not too distant future?
Anyone can look at that and see that the equation of power and accountability is all screwed up.
Quite.  And really, I hope you’ll click over and read the whole thing. It nails the current state of affairs. Here’s the end:
Whether Geithner and Summers are too close to the people on Wall Street, either through interest or affinity, is an interesting and possibly important question. But fundamentally Obama needs to start showing that he’s in charge, that he’s operating as the American people’s advocate and that he has the power to do it — which these stories of getting jacked up by some Gordon Gecko wannabes in London just terribly undermines. But to do that, to show that, it has to be true. And that might require some real changes in policy and possibly in personnel too.
The hits keep on coming:
Just when you thought it was impossible to find more proof of the bungling of the bailout … Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), chairman of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, announced this morning that his panel had found 13 of the top 23 recipients of TARP owing the government $220 million in back taxes.
Making matters worse was the fact that any company getting TARP aid had to certify to the Treasury Department that they didn’t owe back taxes before getting their share of the bailout, as Lewis explained. It appears that Treasury took the bailed-out businesses at their word rather than asking to actually see their tax records.
This was a foul-up under Bush/Paulson, but the Obama Administration needs to turn around and look at those posters that put them there.  They need to take that CHANGE a bit more seriously, or they’re going to take it on the chin. To be clear, they’re not approaching the financial sector in any fundamentally different way than did the Bush and Clinton Administrations, so it would be unfair to say that they’re any worse than what came before. But that’s not the measure they’ve set for themselves, nor is it one that anyone should be willing to let them skate on.
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