4/7: You Go, Gates!

Bloggers are buzzing about the defense budget proposed by Defense Sec. Robert Gates, which includes "deep cuts in many traditional weapons systems but new billions of dollars for others, along with more troops and new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan." Liberal bloggers are praising Gates for demonstrating "that the Obama administration is serious about finally shedding the legacy of the Cold War and building a military that is suitable for the 21st century." Another blogger writes: "You'd almost think that this budget was planned in the interests of national security rather than either defense contractor and lobbyist satisfaction or providing new toys for the boys." While some lefty bloggers worry that Gates' proposals are "too audacious" for Congress to accept, others are hopeful that Gates' background as a GOPer and a George W. Bush appointee will provide the Obama admin. with the necessary political cover.

Conservative bloggers, on the other hand, are accusing Gates of initiating "a hollowing-out of the military." Righty bloggers are particularly upset about Gates' proposal to cease production of the F-22, a fighter jet that they consider "a key to total air superiority". Michael Goldfarb warns that "ending production of the F-22...will seriously jeopardize America's current dominance of the skies" and predicts that this proposal will be "extremely controversial in Congress" (a prediction which quickly proved correct).

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Liberal bloggers (Bok, digby, Drum, McCarter) are outraged that GOP senators are reportedly threatening to filibuster Obama's legal nominees if he declassifies the Bush-era interrogation memos.
• Conservative bloggers (Lewis, Hinderaker, Hawkins) are accusing Obama of sounding too apologetic in his speech to the Turkish parliament.
• Liberal bloggers (Blue Texan, Lewison, Benen) are criticizing Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) for claiming that the Serve America Act will establish "re-education camps for young people."

DEFENSE BUDGET: Nixon Goes To China

Liberal bloggers are praising the defense budget proposed by Def. Sec. Robert Gates, which includes "deep cuts in many traditional weapons systems but new billions of dollars for others, along with more troops and new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan":

• The Huffington Post's Max Bergmann: "The budget laid out by Gates gives a clear indication that the Obama administration is serious about finally shedding the legacy of the Cold War and building a military that is suitable for the 21st century. In fact, this budget closely resembles what many progressives have been calling for on defense over the last few years."
• The Reality-Based Community's Mark Kleiman: "New DoD budget in brief: Less F-22's, gold-plated Presidential helicopters, cruisers, amphibians, aircraft carriers, missile defense. More Predator drones, intelligence/ surveillance/ reconnaissance, special forces, Army choppers, F-35s, F-18s. You'd almost think that this budget was planned in the interests of national security rather than either defense contractor and lobbyist satisfaction or providing new toys for the boys. So far, Obama's decision to keep Gates is looking pretty good."
• TAPPED's Robert Farley: "Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has struck a staggering blow to a number of defense programs. [...] This is why Bob Gates is still secretary of defense; Obama didn't believe that such cuts would be possible under a Democratic secretary."
• Obsidian Wings' hilzoy: "It remains to be seen whether this survives Congress. But I'm really glad to see the administration take this on."

DEFENSE BUDGET II: The Audacity Of Gates

Some liberal bloggers are wondering if Gates' proposals are too audacious:

• Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias: "These are important shifts and this is audacious policy. Frankly, you've got to worry that it may be too audacious. The defense budget looks the way it looks because that's how the key players in congress want it to look, and I don't really know what Robert Gates or Barack Obama can do about that."
• Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "[Gates is proposing to cut] a lot of platforms. Question: is going after so many programs at once (a) brilliant or (b) insane? I can make a case for either, but I can't quite convince myself which one it is."

Other liberal bloggers think Gates' background as a GOPer and a Bush appointee will help provide the Obama admin. with the necessary political cover:

• AMERICAblog's John Aravosis: "Gates [is] not just cutting some defense programs and increasing others, but proposing a total restructuring of our entire military -- something the Republicans will likely flip out over, since they really do enjoy their big toys (come on Aaron and Lindsey, you know you do). What's interesting, of course, is that Gates isn't just Obama's defense secretary. He was George Bush's defense secretary. So we basically have George Bush's war guy proposing this restructuring. [Richard] Nixon just went to China, folks. And Barack Obama orchestrated the entire thing by keeping Gates on in the cabinet. Not too shabby, this new president."
• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "I can imagine that President Obama asked Gates to stay on precisely for days like today -- Republicans might, just might, be slightly less willing to attack the administration on Pentagon spending with a Republican Defense Secretary hand-picked by Bush-Cheney."

Firedoglake's Spencer Ackerman: "[I]f Gates were a Democratic defense wonk, I think it's fair to say, this budget submission would be pretty much inconceivable. A Democrat would have to build up a lot of credibility within the Pentagon; would have to work with [Gen. David] Petraeus and [Gen. Raymond] Odierno on Afghanistan and Iraq; would have to build a relationship on the Hill; and would probably end up running out the clock on all of that before getting around to a massive apple-cart-overturning about the most entrenched issues in the Pentagon budget. By keeping Gates, Obama's got a plan for withdrawal from Iraq that has attracted no significant Pentagon or uniformed acrimony; a refocus on Afghanistan with same; and a sprawling, huge, massive, ginormous, Herculean effort at getting rid of Pentagon bloat in the third month of his presidency. Gates is like the Abdul Sattar abu Risha of the GOP foreign-policy establishment."

DEFENSE BUDGET III: Save The F-22!

Conservatives are criticizing Gates' proposed budget:

• Commentary's Jennifer Rubin: "[O]ne wonders what arguments have persuaded [Gates] to reverse course and abandon these [missile defense] programs. The message to Iran and North Korea is clear: their provocations will be tolerated and we will not take the necessary steps to protect ourselves. Obama is the un-Reagan -- attempting to achieve peace through weakness. Our allies and foes are no doubt watching with interest."
• Townhall's Hugh Hewitt: "Against the backdrop of wild spending and massive deficits, the Pentagon cuts are startling. The first mission of the federal government is the nation's defense, and the president's budget spends billions on unnecessary and wasted spending while taking the knife to the country's weapons' systems. [...The military] needs the weapons of the next generation to remain capable of winning on the battlefields where it fights. Americans are right to worry that a hollowing-out of the military has begun.
• RedState's Moe Lane: "[E]ven if you consider all of these programs pork, there's a ludicrous amount of nonmilitary pork that has been enshrined into federal law. Asking the question of why it's acceptable to trim fat/meat/bone here and not elsewhere inevitably leads to the suspicion that the administration has decided that the net vote loss ratio is most favorable to the Democratic party here. Which is another way of saying that the White House has just subordinated American military policy to its domestic political strategy."

Conservative bloggers are particularly upset about Gates' proposal to end production of the F-22 fighter jet:

• Hot Air's Allahpundit: "Missile defense isn't even the worst cut, in my very poorly informed opinion. Scaling back the F-22 -- a key to total air superiority -- is."
• The Weekly Standard's Goldfarb: "Ending production of the F-22, a far more capable air superiority fighter than the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (which still has many obstacles to overcome before entering mass production), will seriously jeopardize America's current dominance of the skies. It will also be extremely controversial in Congress, where a not insignificant number of legislators represent the workers who assemble and manufacture the aircraft's component parts."
• Hewitt: "As recently as December, the Times ran a story reporting that the Air Force wanted 60 more F-22s, and though the cost of the additional planes was estimated at $9 billion, in the era of trillion dollar deficits, that seems hardly the sort of expenditure that would cause a blink of an eye, especially given the number of jobs that will be lost if the plane's production lines are shuttered."

GOP SENATORS: Nobody Stonewalls Like They Do

Liberal bloggers are buzzing about Scott Horton's report that GOP senators are threatening to filibuster Obama's legal nominees if he declassifies the Bush-era interrogation memos:

"Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to 'go nuclear' over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration's abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents."

Lefty bloggers are angrily denouncing the GOP's tactics:

• digby: "[I]t appears the Senate has taken Dawn Johnsen and Harold Koh hostage and are threatening to go nuclear if the president doesn't agree to hide [Dick] Cheney's torture secrets. [...] Let's hope Obama stands up to them. If he shows weakness with the Republicans on this, there will be no end to it when it comes to judicial nominees. And it is vitally important that Obama balances out the courts after the past 25 years of centrist to far right appointments."
• Firedoglake's Phoenix Woman: "As it turns out, the Republicans are stonewalling Johnsen and Koh because they don't want to suffer any form of accountability for their actions, especially their wholehearted backing of torture. [...] Spread the word, folks. They were hoping to get away with their stonewalling by keeping it under wraps. But the more We the People squawk, the more sunlight hits them."
• hilzoy: "[W]hat the Republicans are doing is really unprecedented. First, the President has traditionally been given deference in the choice of his advisors. If some President wants to have someone in his cabinet, the presumption is that he ought to be able to do so, absent illegality or some sort of manifest incompetence. [...] Second, what the Republicans are trying to do is to dictate to the President a matter that is purely his prerogative: deciding whether or not to unclassify documents. This is insane: it's as though Obama threatened to withhold funding for the Senate unless [KY Sen.] Mitch McConnell fired some staffer he didn't like. [...] And the combination -- holding appointments hostage while trashing people's reputations in order to keep Obama from making a decision he plainly has the right to make -- is unconscionable."
• Drum: "These memos must be real time bombs. So much material has been released already, both officially and otherwise, that I've long assumed we already knew everything the Bush administraton had done -- in broad terms, anyway. But apparently not. If these memos just confirmed our use of things like stress positions and black sites, it's hard to imagine they'd prompt such ferocious opposition. There must be some truly new -- and truly gruesome -- disclosures in them."

Liberal bloggers are still urging the Obama admin. to release the Bush memos:

• Daily Kos' mcjoan: "Republican obstructionism is not a good enough reason for President Obama to reverse himself on one of his primary pledges: transparency. In fact, it's a pretty great political set-up for making the Republicans look even worse -- they're really fighting to protect torturers? Bottom line, those memos have to be released."
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "There is absolutely no justification whatsoever to continue to conceal these memos, and the fact that the GOP will stomp its feet and obstruct nominees doesn't come close to constituting an excuse for ongoing concealment."
• TAPPED's Adam Serwer: "This is a question of justice, and a question of democracy. Obama has said before that no one is above the law. For the administration to disobey a court order to release these memos flies in the face of that assertion. The Republicans trying to prevent disclosure by blocking Obama's legal nominees have already shown their contempt for the idea that the law applies to everyone, that some rights are inviolable, and that the American people have a right to know what their government does in their name."

OBAMA: Blaming America First?

Conservative bloggers are criticizing Obama's speech to the Turkish parliament:

• Townhall's Matt Lewis: "If the notion that a President of the United States can improve the image of his country by apologizing for a past President (as well as for his own nation's past actions) angers you -- it ought to. [...] By breaking the tradition of not criticizing your own country abroad, Barack Obama has undermined this nation in an attempt to be popular with Europeans and the Muslim world -- and to perceived as a 'reasonable' American."
• Power Line's John Hinderaker: "Obama's seemingly compulsive need to apologize to foreign audiences on behalf of the United States cannot be explained as a rational approach to diplomacy. As Paul [Mirengoff] suggested here, the roots of Obama's America-bashing seem to lie in a combination of ideology and psychology."
• NRO's Victor Davis Hanson: "In this great age of atonement, in a mere two or three days the world has been reminded that (1) the U.S. has been arrogant; (2) dismissive and derisive to Europe; (3) was a slave-owning society; (4) practiced genocide against native Americans; (5) did not let blacks vote; (6) was the only nation to have used nuclear weapons; (7) embraced torture; (8) alienated the world under Bush, and on and on. The subtext has been that those of a different race, of a different era, or under a different president have done terrible things, which I, from my own moral Olympus, must now apologize for."

Meanwhile, Right Wing News' John Hawkins criticizes Obama for saying, "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation." Hawkins writes: "This country was founded by Christians seeking religious freedom and Christian principles shaped our founding documents and our culture. This nation would not be a great nation without Christianity and it will not remain a great or moral country without the majority of its citizens remaining Christian."

BACHMANN: Still Taking Crazy Pills

Once again, liberal bloggers are blasting Rep. Bachmann for making an inflammatory statement. This time, they're criticizing her for claiming that the Serve America Act mandates the creation of "re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums":

• Firedoglake's Blue Texan: "I didn't think it was physically possible, but over the weekend, the performance artist known as Michele Bachmann out-crazied herself. [...W]e have a sitting Congresswoman telling people that the government is going to brainwash their kids in modern-day gulags. There's going to be a lot more Pittsburghs if this kind of talk continues, I'm afraid."
• Balloon Juice's John Cole: "I just can't think of anything clever to say regarding the latest outburst from Bachmann. This woman is clinical."
• Daily Kos' Jed Lewison: "Bachmann's nutty theory is straight out of the conservative playbook, accusing the Obama Administration of taking away basic freedoms held by Americans. It's no different than Fox's absurd claim that Obama wants to impose Sharia law, or their irresponsible attempts to fuel fear of a gun ban, and it's yet another sign of just how badly broken the modern GOP is -- and of how careless they are with the facts. Hopefully it's not necessary to point out that there are no government sponsored political 're-education camps' -- whether mandatory or voluntary. If you need more proof, FactCheck.org has debunked Bachmann's conspiracy theory."
• Benen: "First, there's nothing in the legislation requiring public service. It's about expanding service opportunities for those who choose to pursue them. Second, support for the expanded community service programs was bipartisan. The bill passed the Senate with 79 votes, and passed the House with 275 votes. Bachmann apparently believes some of her own conservative Republican colleagues backed an initiative to mandate public service and force young people into re-education camps that only exist in her twisted imagination."

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan: "It's now very clear just what happened in Pittsburgh when Mark Poplawski killed three policemen. He was acting out of far right conspiracy theories, and was armed with an AK-47. [...] The only person responsible for these murders is Poplawski. But it's a reminder that whipping up paranoia can lead to unintended consequences, especially as gun sales go through the roof in the wake of Obama's election. When someone like Michele Bachmann talks about the Obama administration forcing people into re-education camps, or forcing a global currency on the US, and other insanities, she needs to know the tinder box she is busy throwing matches into."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: What's Wrong With Nuclear Proliferation?

NRO's Mark Steyn is disturbed by Obama's goal of establishing "a world without nuclear weapons":

"The wish for 'a world without nuclear weapons' is not merely a pacifist delusion but one that obliquely subscribes to the false equivalence so assiduously promoted during the Cold War. I wouldn't lose a moment's sleep if I read in the paper that New Zealand and Switzerland had decided to become nuclear powers. It's not the technology (which can't be un-invented, any more than the rifle or the spear or the sling could). It's the regime. North Korea and Iran going nuclear is not the same as Norway and St. Lucia going nuclear. It is so depressing to see the president of the United States mired in obsolete Cold War non-proliferation bromides.

Consider two possible responses to the inevitable Iranian nuclearization:

a) The Sunni Arab dictatorships (Saudi Arabia and perhaps Egypt) decide to go nuclear rather than live under Iran as the regional hegemon.

b) The Sunni Arab dictatorships knuckle under the Iranian nuclear umbrella and Teheran becomes the de facto controller of Arab oil supply and much else.

I'm not sure proliferation wouldn't be the least worst option.

It's not just embarassing to hear the so-called 'leader of the free world' talking like a 14-year old who's been up in his room listening to 'Imagine' for too long. I fear this presidency has the makings of global tragedy."

LEST WE FORGET: Assimilate This

From Overheard in New York:

Cashier: Wow, you speak really good English. Where are you from?
Hipster Asian dude: I'm from Tokyo and I've been taking classes since I was three so I'm really articulate and speak great English.
Cashier: Really?
Hipster Asian dude: Fuck no. I'm from Queens.