As of 3AM this morning I’m about a quarter of the way through the third season of West Wing, so obviously there is much to come that I am not aware of, as this post from Ian Millhiser makes clear. In it, Millhiser reviews the Bartlett administration and finds it as lacking in a way that ostensibly mirrors the Obama administration.

The Obama administration officially released its budget for fiscal year 2013 yesterday. it’s basically a long, vaguely political document that is effectively meaningless, dead on arrival in Congress, another package of ideas destined to go nowhere. The reason isn’t just GOP obstructionism; the Democrats could have passed much of the Obama agenda when they had very large majorities in both houses, but they chose not to.

While some are calling yesterday’s change of policy with regard to contraception coverage a win-win for both the Catholic church and the Obama administration, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops does not see this as a win. Instead, they see it as one small little step, and they are pressing for much, much more.

The first amendment’s protection of religious liberty is not a license for religious organizations or individuals to disregard any law or regulation they don’t like. If the White House wants to end this fight, that’s the argument they’re going to have to make to the public. Instead, they have allowed the USCCB to set the terms of the debate, and the USCCB is quite happy to continue doing so.

This isn’t over, folks. Not by a long shot.

Now that the frothmentum is building for Mr. Sad Sweater Vest and his inspiring message that a solid defeat is preferable to a hollow victory, it’s worth asking whether the GOP arrived at this place all by itself.

Despite having criticized the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and the rise of Super PACs, President Obama’s re-election campaign has decided to fully endorse the use of their own allied Super PAC. Passing legislation about campaign finance reform was simply not a priority for the Obama administration.

It’s a sad commentary on our media that the President had to answer questions yesterday about drones for the first time, and the questions didn’t come at a White House press briefing or major print interview, but in a virtual YouTube town hall with members of the public. FDL’s Kevin Gosztola covered this at The Dissenter last night, but there’s more to say about the disconnect between the concerns of the media and the concerns of ordinary Americans in that.

During last night’s “Your Interview with the President” event sponsored by Google+, President Obama and Google completely and shamefully ignored the dominant questions — about marijuana — submitted by the American people. Questions about marijuana policy reform dominated almost all of the top “most popular question” slots, but Obama ignored them.

So far every attempt by Obama to directly reach out to young voters through some form of online question and answer system has resulted in young adults overwhelming voting to confront the President with questions about our government’s marijuana policies. It happened with his transitional website Change.gov, his first Youtube townhall and with the White House’s new “we the people” petition site. Now it’s happened again.

But Jerry Ford would have thought it was too conservative… But as usual, Obama benefits from who his opposing critics are. Such as this man, best known for defending endless wars fought for illegitimate reasons with the tactic of implying treason upon their opponents.           Well, that is timely criticism indeed [...]

In an attempt to defend President Obama’s foreign policy decisions the Center for American Progress has released a terribly misguided one page chart comparing the Iraq war and the Libya war. The chart’s basic message is that Obama is better than Bush, because Obama is much more thrifty when he launches a war, even an illegal one based on lies.