[Time] The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he's a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

[Andrew Sullivan] You hear it everywhere. Democrats are disappointed in the president. Independents have soured even more. Republicans have worked themselves up into an apocalyptic fervor. And, yes, this is not exactly unusual.

A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.
 

By Mark Perry, Exclusive, Foreignpolicy.com, Jan. 13, 2012

Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation [....]

The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad's efforts. "It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," the intelligence officer said. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought [....]

The report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush "went absolutely ballistic" when briefed on its contents [....]

The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers [....]

By Matt Bai, New York Times Sunday Magazine, online Jan. 12, and in print Jan. 15, 2012

I met Karen Martin, a few days before New Year’s, at a cafe in Greenville, the hub of conservative politics in South Carolina. A 54-year-old refugee from the North Shore of Massachusetts, Martin is the lead organizer of the nearby Spartanburg Tea Party. Another Tea Party leader described her to me as a grown-up, and in fact, Martin turned out to be the kind of activist — ideology notwithstanding — who makes you feel hopeful about the new age of political uprising. She recounted how she burst into tears at the moment she realized, watching the news in 2008, that children growing up today wouldn’t have the economic opportunities that she did. She talked about how the Tea Party would need to mature and become more politically sophisticated in the years ahead. “I think the movement is just too young and too emotional,” she said.

Then our conversation turned to Mitt Romney, and Martin’s sunny countenance darkened. “I don’t know a single Tea Party person,” she said, slowly drawing out her words, “who does not despise Mitt Romney to the very core of their being.” I searched her face for levity or compassion, but found neither [....]

In every presidential campaign since 1980, the presumed front-runner and establishment favorite has come into South Carolina bruised and imperiled, having lost in Iowa or New Hampshire. And in every instance, that candidate has managed to win the primary and go on to win the nomination.

This year, though, that dynamic has reversed itself, and South Carolina has become the only possible firewall for the conservative base that hopes to stop the front-runner. If the discontented activists who stormed the party in 2010 can’t find a way to take out the establishment’s chosen nominee here, of all places, then they might as well slap those Romney/Rubio bumper stickers on their S.U.V.’s now and get it over with [....]

By Alexander Kim, Asyl Osmonalieva, Inga Sikorskaya, Bakhtiyor Rasulov, Lola Olimova, IWPR, Jan. 6, 2012

In Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, police and politicians recruit women as professional campaigners or just as troublemakers.

[....] IWPR interviews with hired “activists”, police and commentators in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan reveal that hiring female labour is an effective way of creating a stir, at little cost and at arm’s length. Despite considerable differences in the way such women are deployed in the two states, they are typically from marginalised groups and in need of an income [....]

The phenomenon of hiring female protesters is so common that they have acquired the jocular collective nickname OBON – “special-assignment female units” – by analogy with the OMON riot police [....]

By Luca Di Leo, Jon Hilsenrath and Michael S. Derby, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 12, 2012

[....] The transcripts, available on the Fed’s website, provide full details of Fed officials’ individual views during the eight Federal Open Market Committee Meetings, with the traditional five-year lag (the minutes, released three weeks after FOMC meetings, only give a summary.)

Highlights of the transcripts include: [....]

Also see:

In Fed Officials’ 2006 Meetings, No Deep Worry on Housing
By Binyamin Applebaum, New York Times, Jan. 12/13, 2012

Top Federal Reserve officials did not seriously consider the possibility that problems in the housing market would bring about a recession, according to newly released transcripts.

And:

Fed’s image tarnished by newly released documents
By Zachary A Goldfarb, Washington Post, Jan. 12/13, 2012

John Nichols, The Nation, online January 11, 2012.

Never in the modern history of the Republican Party has a field of GOP presidential candidates been so united and so aggressive in opposing collective bargaining rights for workers. More than a century and a half has passed since a young Republican Party positioned itself as a tribune of the working class; but until recent years, savvy Republicans continued to compete with Democrats for labor endorsements and the votes of union members in industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even Ronald Reagan—who justifiably earned the enmity of labor with his summary firing of air traffic controllers in 1981—made a big deal about his Teamsters endorsement in 1984. Even if his actions did not match his rhetoric, Reagan showed up at union conventions during his presidency, telling a 1981 carpenters union convention that he respected “the sacred right of American workers to negotiate their wages,” adding that “collective bargaining…has played a major role in America’s economic miracle. Unions represent some of the freest institutions in this land. There are few finer examples of participatory democracy to be found anywhere.”  And Reagan wasn’t the last Republican to try to connect with labor. As recently as 2007, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee appeared at the International Association of Machinists convention and received its endorsement in that year’s GOP primaries.

Today, however, the party’s contenders are not just refusing union invitations. They are making unionbashing central to their campaigns. Antiunion zealotry has become a core premise of the GOP, and it extends far beyond the presidential race....

....

Fierce disdain for labor rights has become a focus of the 2012 campaign, as GOP candidates have been stumbling over one another in a rush to announce their determination to assure that there is no power in a union. In the final debate before the New Hampshire primary, the eventual winner of the race, Mitt Romney, said that passing laws making it harder for unions to organize workers and bargain on their behalf “makes a lot of sense.” Texas Governor Rick Perry argued that erecting structural barriers to union organizing is the way to make a state a powerful “magnet” for job creation.

Closing:

Abraham Lincoln once urged his fellow partisans to recognize that “labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Unfortunately, as the events of 2011 and the campaign of 2012 amply illustrate, the Republicans are no longer the Party of Lincoln.

Wolf Blitzer takes a break from his busy schedule starring as a sycophantic Muppet on CNN to pen a blog post as sycophantic Muppet on CNN's web site.  His thesis: Rich politicians surely are noble creatures for getting out there on the campaign trail instead of enjoying their upper crust lifestyle.  The pudding gets a bit richer when he erases all hope that he might somehow be talking about a real person somewhere by naming the current crop of animatronic GOP hopefuls as the specific people that he is actively admiring.

Yes, Wolf Blitzer took time out of his day to write about how gosh darned swell Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman, Ron Paul and Rick Perry all are.  Like, as human beings.  Like, by name.  Words cannot express what a vacuous piece of human detritus hides behind that beard.  Are we still operating under the assumption that Blitzer is a journalist?

h/t Alex Pareene @ salon.com

By Nour Malas, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 11, 2012

BEIRUT—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Tuesday he wouldn't relinquish power and is determined to steer the country through a historic crisis, in a rare address that several regime opponents saw as setting the stage for redoubled violence.

President Assad vowed to use an "iron fist" to fight terrorists, the government's characterization of its opponents.

He also slammed the Arab League publicly for the first time since it sent observers into Syria last month to oversee a ceasefire agreement, casting further doubt over the prospects for the one on-the-ground diplomatic initiative trying to help end the deadly conflict. He mocked the pan-Arab body as historically incompetent and called its wealthy Gulf Arab monarchies unfit to advise on democratic reforms [....]

By Jeffrey Toobin, Daily Comment @ newyorker.com, Jan. 10, 2012

[....] as the debates last weekend in New Hampshire suggested, the G.O.P. appears to have taken a more extreme step in terms of rolling back the Constitutional right to privacy.

[....] when pressed by George Stephanopoulos in the debate Saturday night, Romney went beyond mere opposition to Roe. He said he thought Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that first made explicit the right to privacy, was also wrong. “I don’t believe they decided that correctly,” Romney said. In this, the front-runner was eagerly seconded by Rick Santorum, who said the Justices “created through a penumbra of rights a new right to privacy that was not in the Constitution.”

In Griswold, the Court ruled that a Connecticut law banning the sale of contraceptives, even to married couples, was unconstitutional [....]

With only 23% reporting (although this will change), they're already calling the New Hampshire primary for Obama who's received 81% of the votes thus far cast.

Gallup's weekly Economic Confidence Index ratings are up significantly from their summer lows, improving by an average of two points each week since early October. If the index continues on that trajectory, economic confidence would cross into positive territory by mid-April, in plenty of time to benefit President Barack Obama's re-election bid.