With Republicans blaming the stimulus for every sagging stock price and shrinking paycheck, you could hardly begrudge the White House for touting some good economic news these last few weeks. In late July, the Commerce department reported that GDP had shrunk by an unexpectedly mild 1 percent, prompting the president to observe that, “in the last few months, the economy has done measurably better than expected.” A week later, it was the labor market that brought a pleasant surprise. Upon learning that the economy shed just 247,000 jobs in July (the least since last August),.the president took to the Rose Garden to suggest that “the worst may be behind us.”

Recently, in two separate conversations, I heard senior Democratic officials remark that they were taken aback by the right’s distortions in the health care debate.

My initial reaction was surprise: What did they expect? We’ve seen distortions like this before. But in just the last few days, I’ve come around to their point of view. Even the distortions of the 1994 health care debate pale in comparison. It’s as if we’ve hit a new low, at least in policy debates: Instead of arguments that are unrelated to reality, we’re getting arguments that are the very opposite of reality.

One recent Friday evening, in a darkened, wood-paneled Baltimore concert hall, audience members rose up in their seats, yelling, clapping, and singing–in the middle of a classical music performance. To be fair, this wasn’t exactly “classical music.” It sounded like Rachmaninoff and sometimes Bach, but the pianist, Gabriela Montero, wasn’t playing from a book or memory; she was creating music on the spot.

Today’s New York Times story on Hugo Chávez’s latest outburst of all out weird–a principled crusade against the corrupting bourgeois influence of golf–ticked all the boxes for a minor email-this-story sensation: bizarre juxtaposition of disparate news themes (check), outright Woody Allenesque lunacy on the part of a Latin autocrat (check), ease of transformation into water-cooler fodder (check).

Before long, the State Department had been goaded into an appropriately snide response, ensuring the story stays in the headlines for that extra 24 hours or so–more if, as seems almost certain, Chávez jumps at the chance to shoot back something zany and over-the-top answer at Foggy Bottom.

You know what the debate over energy and climate change could really use? The sort of calm, thoughtful, reasoned town-hall discussions that have made the health-care discussion such a delight this summer. Luckily, the American Petroleum Institute is planning to fill the void:

I’m a big fan of Neil King and Jonathan Weisman, the two Wall Street Journal reporters who penned today’s front-page story about Obama’s hunger for details. And, in many respects, it’s actually a very good story–you learn a fair amount about Obama’s decision-making style. Unfortunately, what you learn has very little to do with the stated premise of the piece, which is that Obama is an incorrigible micromanager.

Both Jon Chait and Zubin cite this excellent Nate Silver post bringing some data to bear on whether the unemployment rate will pass 10 percent. Silver’s argument is partly a response to my point that, as the economy improves and people not previously considered part of the labor force start looking for jobs, the ranks of the unemployed will swell (and the unemployment rate will rise) even if the pace of job losses slows or we start creating jobs. Says Silver:

The conservative attacks on health care reform and Barack Obama’s
economic plan seem to have reached a fever pitch this week. Their
obsession with the topics has been matched only by the inanity of most
of their critiques. Why are the conservative talking points on these
issues grounded in such weak arguments? Is there something else at play
here?

Today, Barack Obama will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 16 recipients. What should be a joyous affair, however, has been the subject of growing controversy due to the selection of Mary Robinson–a former United Nations official who presided over the notoriously anti-Zionist 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. For this, Obama has earned himself much criticism from the American Jewish community. Though her “failure of leadership” in her UN post is widely known, a source in the Obama White House that Robinson was “not fully vetted.” And, in spite of Robinson’s history, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tried to wave the issue away when he said that, “There are statements that obviously, that she has made that the president doesn’t agree with, and that’s probably true for a number of the people that the president is recognizing for their lifetime contributions.” Is it possible that the White House selected Robinson without knowing the extent of her unsavory record?

Nicholas Schmidle, fellow at the New America Foundation and author of To Live Or To Perish Forever, argues that if Al-Qaeda decides to throw its weight around in the selection process for the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Obama’s Af-Pak strategy will be put to the test.