One of the more constant critiques of this Presidency is that Barack Obama has failed to teach a generation of willing listeners a story about his beliefs and his values, something that will outlast his term in office and provide a blueprint for the future. This isn’t true. He’s teaching a fundamental lesson. It just may not be one that progressives value.

With news of the “hybrid” plan coming out of the Senate, all of us have to be wondering “What is the White House thinking?!?” Here is a little run down of just that.

I talked to Franken via phone today, as he returned home from a funeral for a soldier killed overseas. His remarks tomorrow are really connected to the fear that we are seeing a flickering out of the American dream. “We have the greatest disparity in income since the 1920s. The middle class dream is fading, and we’re losing the argument on the economy. We need to gain back the initiative, and convince people that it’s ridiculous to be gutting Medicare, to essentially end it, in order to give huge tax cuts.”

This week, I am at Netroots Nation #6 in Minneapolis, and I had planned to bring you a video all about one of the themes I saw running through the first day of panels, speeches and briefings. . . I had planned to bring you video, but I am only here through Sunday and that is probably not enough time to upload my usual eight-or-so minutes because the speed of the internet connection here is pre-millennial. . . again.

If you really want more bipartisanship, the only real solution is to promote more viable political parties.

Now, ten years after 9/11, with Osama bin Laden dead, in a broad bipartisan vote, the United States Senate moved forward with another extension of the “temporary” Patriot Act. The vote was 74-8. Both the support and the very limited opposition to this extension were near-even slits along party lines; true bipartisan efforts.

Regardless of how you feel about the quality of Massachusetts health care reform, then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s role in its passage was a perfect example of the bipartisan compromise ideal that President Obama claims to love so strongly. Yet Obama is now actively trying to punish Romney for taking part in the bipartisanship Obama thinks is lacking.

Here you have McConnell openly admitting the reason there is a bipartisan fetish among the elites in Washington is that it totally destroys democratic accountability.

The only thing wrong with Paul Krugman’s column today is that he doesn’t mention David Brooks by name. But you can see Brooks in every inch of this critique of whiny Republicans who, when challenged on their nonsense, retreat to the higher moral ground of calling their opponents “uncivil.” Krugman hits on this strategy, which essentially is one of working the refs. It allows Republicans to say basically whatever they want in public, and when called on it, they turn from aggressors to martyrs against the big, bad, mean left. As he said in a blog post earlier this week, this is what people do when they know they’ve been beat.

In a press announcement that basically signaled an imminent government shutdown, President Obama announced that his Administration would not support the one-week stopgap with $12 billion in cuts readied by House Republicans. “There’s no excuse to extend this further,” the President said in an appearance in the White House briefing room. “We will not put off something that should have gotten done several months ago.”