Howard Kurtz

Wow, Howard Kurtz was erratic even when he had good editors and now at Daily Beast he is verging into total incompetence. His naive whitewash of the Tucson shooting is embarrassing and shameful.

Can he really be stupid enough to write this: "This isn't about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map; it's about a lone nutjob who doesn't value human life"?

Apparently. The lesson here is clear: inflammatory rhetoric, while poisoning politics for those of use who think of ourselves as rational and stable, can set off the mentally ill, and it is not just the "fault" of the mentally ill. It's like the pathetic shill on TV Sunday who once again proffered the feeble NRA excuse that it's not guns that are responsible since most gun owners are adult. The problem is that a mentally unstable young man, with a documented history of disruption and borderline violence, can get an automatic weapon so easily.

It is not a sign of unity or compassion to bury our heads in the sand like Kurtz would have us do and pretend that, hey, what can you do, there's nutjobs out there? The Pima County sheriff has a much better grasp of what's going on than this useless pundit.

Update: And let's add Peter Beinart, another Daily Beast contributor, whose temporizing pseudoliberalism pretty much destroyed The New Republic to the list of white-washers.

William Daley

I don't really have a problem with William Daley as White House chief of staff, though his work for JP Morgan Chase is disturbing in light of the role Wall Street is now playing in the nation's economy and politics. But he is certainly the cabinet-level stature that Chris Matthews was calling for, and as some have pointed out, he is at least a "grown-up." Perhaps, as E.J. Dionne says, his very presence will reassure the corporate world and give Obama more leeway to veer left, though I think that's optimistic.

What's noticeable is that naming the White House chief of staff is not only front-page news, but lead story news. Don't think that was the case when Nixon named Haldeman and Ehrlichman, though they may be the reason why it is so newsworthy now. But I think it also means that people no longer perceive the president as making his own decisions, and see him rather as an arbiter of advice rendered. Certainly in the first half of Obama's term, decision-making remained totally opaque and it would be disappointing to think that Obama himself made so many bad decisions.

Steven Pearlstein

This Washington Post columnist hit a home run today with his passionate denunciation of Republicans' use of "job-killing" as a hot button description of Democratic policies to distract from the job-killing aspect of their own policies.

Here is Pearlstein's stirring conclusion: "So the next time you hear some politician or radio blowhard or corporate hack tossing around the "job-killing" accusation, you can be pretty sure he's not somebody to be taken seriously. It's a sign that he disrespects your intelligence, disrespects the truth and disrespects the democratic process. By poisoning the political well and making it difficult for our political system to respond effectively to economic challenges, Republicans may turn out to be the biggest job killers of all."

'Wealthy'

I never did understand why Obama and the Democrats latched onto the $250,000 threshold as defining the "wealthy" in the whole tax cut debate.

Just this week, the president explained that Robert Gibbs would be leaving the White House because he's been working for "relatively modest pay." Yet, Gibbs' $172,000 salary, along with the earnings from wife, a practicing attorney, would almost certainly put them in that category of "wealthy."

There's no question Gibbs will make more money working as a "private consultant" for the Obama reelection campaign, but the president's remark exposes the hypocrisy of his rhetoric.