So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive?

I cannot claim credit for this. The author remains ananymous though. I am genuinely interested in your reaction and comments.
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"If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?


If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had visited Austria and referred to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?


If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States, would you have said that he is clueless?


If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in Texas, would you have thought he was a self important, conceded, egotistical idiot?


If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?


If George W. Bush had mis-spelled the word "advice" would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoe as proof of what a dunce he is?


If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?


If George W. Bush's administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually get what happened on 9-11?


If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?


If George W. Bush had created the position of 32 Czars who report directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

If George W Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?


So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything?


Don't worry. He did all this, and more, in his first year as president -- so you'll have three years to come up with an answer."

Jerry Brown 2010 | A Few Facts about Governor Moonbeam

1969: Elected to Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.

1974: Elected governor of California, succeeding Ronald Reagan, who had defeated his father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, in 1966.

1976: In the middle of his first term, Brown runs for president. Loses to eventual nominee, Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter.

1978: Property-tax cutting Proposition 13 passes. Brown opposed the measure, but later called himself a "born-again tax cutter."

1980: In the middle of his second term, Brown again seeks the Democratic nomination for president. He finishes a distant third behind Sen. Edward Kennedy and the eventual nominee, incumbent President Carter.

1982: Brown doesn't seek a third term and instead runs for U.S. Senate, losing to Republican Pete Wilson.

1980s: After losing to Wilson, Brown studies Buddhism in Japan.
1989: Elected chairman of the California Democratic Party.

1991: Briefly explores running to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston.

1991: Brown makes his third run for president. Often clashes with eventual nominee, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

2010: Announces campaign for California governor.


Opposed Prop. 13 before he was for it: Tax surpluses that accumulated during Brown's administration led to the voter revolt that produced 1978's property-tax-cutting Proposition 13. Brown opposed Prop. 13 when it was proposed. (After it passed, he called himself a "born-again tax cutter.") Even the hint of opposition to Prop. 13 is political uranium in California.

Opposes the death penalty: Brown has proposed many severe punishments for criminals over the years, but the former seminarian's lifetime opposition to the death penalty has been a staple of many campaigns run against him. It will be again this year - as a majority of Californians support it.

Oakland public school system: Though he had no direct control over the schools as mayor of Oakland, Brown promised to transform the city's public schools after he took office in 1999. In 2003, the state took over the district after loaning it $100 million - one of the largest bailouts in history. The district returned to local control in 2009.

Oakland crime: Upon assuming office in Oakland, Brown promised that "by the time we're finished, there will be a lot less crime in Oakland than there is in Walnut Creek." The number of homicides rose from 60 when Brown began as mayor to 109 in 2003 before falling slightly by the time he left office. Overall crime dropped during his tenure in office.

Outtakes from his "We the People" radio show: Brown's comments on his 1995-98 talk show on KPFA in Berkeley are rife with attack-ad fodder, which Brown defends as provocative talk show bait. Like his take on the prison system: "Here's the real scam - the drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners."

Blaming Brown for gridlock: Drive-time radio ads are coming that criticize Brown's '70s-era support of high-occupancy-vehicle lanes and a slowdown of highway construction as a contributor to the state's snarled traffic.

Rose Bird: As governor, Brown appointed Bird to be chief justice of the state Supreme Court. After she invalidated the death sentence of every case she reviewed, voters in 1986 made her and two others the first judges unseated from the court. To voters older than 45, Bird's name is shorthand for "liberal judges."

Same-sex marriage: Brown signed a state law banning same-sex marriage as governor, and later defended that law and a similar ballot measure as attorney general. Then he changed position and refused to defend the voter-approved Proposition 8, which re-enacted those laws as a state constitutional amendment.

Gray Davis: The governor recalled by California voters in 2003 was Brown's chief of staff as governor.

Does the fire still burn? After running for president three times, mayor twice, U.S. Senate once, and alternately embracing and trashing party politics, voters can expect to hear plenty about Brown's unusual career path.

Such nonsense | BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

WASHINGTON -- In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O'Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board -- and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country's problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn't. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

It's 2010 and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama's two signature initiatives -- cap-and-trade and health care reform -- lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: "America the Ungovernable." So declared Newsweek. "Is America Ungovernable?" coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model, while America flails about under its "two parties ... with their duel-to-the-death paralysis." The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.

Yet, what's new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic -- and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

And then, of course, there's the filibuster, the newest liberal bete noire. "Don't blame Mr. Obama," writes Paul Krugman of the president's failures. "Blame our political culture instead. ... And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable."

Ungovernable, once again. Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about "extremists" trying "to eliminate the filibuster" when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: "Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama's (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. ... But in this case there's a simpler explanation: Barack Obama's job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed."

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise -- expanded coverage at lower cost -- led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections -- Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That's not a structural defect. That's a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself -- despite the special interests -- through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

Charles Krauthammer is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner, 1984 National Magazine Award winner, and a columnist for The Washington Post since 1985.

Bad economies in states to worsen: governors

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The already gloomy conditions of states' economies are set to worsen, according to preliminary survey findings from the National Governors Association released on Saturday.

"The situation is fairly poor for a lot of states around the country. In fact, most states," Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, who is chairman of the association, said at a press conference at its annual meeting.

"What we're finding out from a fiscal standpoint is that the worst is yet to come," Douglas said.

In a survey conducted last week of 45 of the 50 states, the group found that states have $18.8 billion of budget gaps yet to be closed in fiscal 2010. This comes after they have already imposed measures to eliminate budget imbalances totaling $87 billion in the fiscal year, which for most started last summer.

In the budgets they are drafting for fiscal 2011, states foresee shortfalls of $53.6 billion and for fiscal 2012 $61.6 billion.

"Economists have declared the national recession over. But for those who are still unemployed, for those who have lost their homes, it's clear that as a nation we have a long way to go," said Douglas, who added that states' revenues have plummeted for four quarters in a row.

States' economic recoveries usually lag national recoveries because of state governments' increased spending on help for the unemployed and declines in tax payments.

All states except for one, Vermont, are required to balance their budgets, so during the recession they have drastically cut spending on basic programs, laid off workers and boosted revenue through raising taxes and fees.

The $787 billion stimulus plan the U.S. Congress passed a year ago included the largest transfer of money from the federal government to states in the nation's history. But for many states, most of its funding will run out by December.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, also at the press conference, said the stimulus had delayed problems but not solved them.

Douglas said the governors will press President Barack Obama for more help when they visit the White House on Monday.

The survey also found that this fiscal year 38 states are bringing in far less revenue than what they had estimated at the beginning of the year and 21 states had to cut their budgets by more than 5 percent.

Just as states are gasping for money, they are confronting a crisis in healthcare, said Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer.

Over the weekend the governors  will discuss how to reduce healthcare costs as the federal push to reform the country's health insurance and medical treatment systems bogs down in Congress.

"I expected... we would be talking about implementing a new national health plan," Douglas said about preparing for the meeting. "Here we are. It hasn't happened."

The healthcare program for those with low incomes, Medicaid, is jointly administered by the states and the federal government and eats up large parts of most states' budgets. As people have lost their jobs and employee-sponsored health insurance during the longest and deepest recession since World War Two, they have turned to Medicaid and further strained the system.