The Politico describes the stakes in Obama's upcoming Big Speech on health care and includes this public plan puzzler:
The problem is that Obama risks alienating either the right or left wing of his party by staking out a clear position on the public plan.
And whomever he irks will walk up to the microphones in the Capitol Rotunda and blast away, drowning out the message of party comity he’ll try to project with the speech. He’s also likely to take heat if he tries to dodge.
I don't know how he can pull it off, but if Obama ditches the public plan he will have to include some soaring Bush-bashery as well. Or figure out a way to declare his support for gay marriage and the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell as key parts of health reform. Should be quite a speech next week; I'll hope to tune in after the Yankees finish up.
OBAMA - I HAVEN'T LED BECAUSE I WAS TOO BUSY BEING DUPED BY REPUBLICANS - Krauthammer puts it differently and nominates two Republican villains for the Obama speech:
I think the way they are headed is to try to say — have the president do a nod to the discontent and the anxiety that was generated over the summer.
But then, I think if they are smart and politically cynical — which I think they are — what they will try to do is say that the reason the president could not be specific is because while negotiations were going on with Republicans, specifically the “Gang of Six” in the Senate, he wanted to not preclude any possible agreements or compromises.
But now that the Republicans have walked away — and I suspect he will attack Senators Grassley and Enzi specifically — and say: Well, now that the Republicans are going to be entirely obstructionists…now I will be specific, and now this summer of discontent — in which I had to be either evasive or ambiguous or at least open — is over. The Republicans have forced my hand, and now I'm going to say x, y and z.
OK, for the inside the Beltway crowd these are perfectly plausible whipping boys. But is Obama really going to explain to the country that he was misled by two Republicans of whom most of us have never heard? Maybe he will be sly and expalin he was misled by Evil Republican Leaders, hoping that we guess that Cheney and Rove were projecting their nefarious Mind Rays again.
BR:
If you close down servers, end users have nothing to connect to. It would be like having a tv when none of the networks were broadcasting.
Cyber attacks, breaches and invasions are a serious national security threat, and the point at which the cure becomes more dangerous than the disease is extremely hard to determine. Granting the President carte blanche gives me the willies too, but I do think we need to have an emergency plan in place. I'm just not sure what it should look like, alas.
The relative ease with which every computer and computerized function could be knocked permanently out of commission by an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear detonation is space is really scary too. As far as I know, nobody has figured out how to defend against that, or how to handle the devastation if it happened.
Posted by: JM Hanes | September 04, 2009 at 02:03 PM
PeterUK, love those film nuances. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and Fahrenheit 451 with Julie Christie. I'll never forget those riverbank scenes. And you're so right, they'd lose tracking ability.
And Clarice, how beautiful, too.
JMH, thanks for the further data. I wonder how many servers exist in the US. We'll have to get our own server on St. Jane's. I think they only cost about $20,000, when I checked some years ago before Tahiti got net connection.
So, am I right to conclude overseas servers would be useful as backups if Senate Bill 773 goes through, both for users and our national defense system?
I wonder if there's such a thing as an untraceable server. For example, where it seems to be located in Timbuktu, but actually is in Reykjavik. Hee, I can just see it now, an Obama Server SWAT ("SS") team arriving at the mud huts in the middle of the Sahara :)
Posted by: BR | September 05, 2009 at 05:09 AM