As you undoubtedly know already, this morning saw Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s departure from the White House, an admission so anticlimactic that President Obama had little choice but to joke about it:

THE PRESIDENT:  Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the least suspenseful announcement of all time.  (Laughter.)  As almost all of you have reported — (laughter) — my chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has informed me that he will be leaving his post today to explore other opportunities.  (Laughter.)

But what intrigues me is how this fait became accompli so quickly.  You see, just three weeks ago, the President was kicking the can of Rahm’s exit down the road:

“I think right now, as long as he is in the White House, he is critically focused on making sure that we’re creating jobs for families around the country and rebuilding our economy,” Obama said in an interview, aired Thursday, with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “And you know, the one thing I’ve always been impressed with about Rahm is that when he has a job to do, he focuses on the job in front of him. And so my expectation is, he’d make a decision after these midterm elections. He knows that we’ve got a lot of work to do. But I think he’d be a terrific mayor.”

Contrast that with the unsubtle shove that Jane Hamsher noted at the beginning of this week:

OBAMA: I think that Rahm will have to make a decision quickly, because running for mayor of Chicago is a serious enterprise and I know this is something he is thinking about….

I’ve been busy this month with moving and other distractions, so maybe I missed something… but what happened?  I mean, Rahm’s (ahem) shortcomings have been discussed widely behind his back at the White House — but what changed in barely more than two weeks to make his eviction a matter of such urgency?

The floor is open for your suggestions and eleven-dimensional theories.

Finally!!  A US President calls for an end to the ludicrous tax breaks that keep fossil fuel prices artificially low!  But you have to really push this, Mr. President, you have a golden window of opportunity here.  If you wimp-out now, it will be years if not decades before another President can address this.

Better not forget the extra foam, barrista, this gun has a hair-trigger!

Regardless of how lame the Obama Administration has been, the recent and upcoming SCOTUS rulings on gun control should be a wake-up call about how wrong the Naderites were about how there is ”no difference between the Democrats and Republicans.’  Shrubya had 8 years to replace retiring liberal and moderate justices with reactionary activists.  The result?  Sometime this summer you are going to wake up one morning in a country where all gun control laws have been abolished.

You can get a preview of things to come by watching the gun nuts parade around with their weapons in our restaurants and national parks.  I bet it won’t be long before we have some dramatic shootout, where one of these unhinged, delusional vigilantes tries to stop an armed robbery and blows away some poor coffee patron.  Or maybe a couple of these loons will shoot at each other, thinking they are stopping a robber!  Hard to guess, but I’m sure it will happen soon, and sure it will be bloody.

Given the current extremists in the court, my guess is that we are one lawsuit away from a similar overturn of Roe v. Wade.

So stop your whining, suck it up and work hard to make Obama successful, now and in his next run – because we are just one Scalia or Thomas heart-attack away from an appointment of a real justice and a non-loony majority.

Reuters reports this afternoon:

President Barack Obama said on Friday the recession-hit U.S. economy was showing “glimmers of hope” despite remaining under strain and promised further steps in coming weeks to tackle the financial crisis.

“We’ve still got a lot of work to do,” Obama told reporters after a meeting with economic and regulatory teams plus Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke. But he added, “We’re starting to see progress.”

Obama spoke a day after encouraging trade and jobless figures pushed stocks higher, and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers predicted the economy would emerge from a sense of “freefall” by the middle of the year.

With the Treasury Dept. and Federal Reserve trying to hush up any suspicions of major banks failing the current “stress tests,” it seems like the Obama administration has decided on conscious strategy of encouraging positive thoughts about the economy.

Presumably they’re smart enough to know there’s no way to happy-talk their way out of a genuinely deep hole (remember what they did to John McCain for saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” last fall?). But even so, maybe Obama and company think a little optimism will help keep the economy from plunging further into the ground.

The most charitable interpretation of Team Obama’s timidity in challenging the banksters is that a bolder approach would intensify the sense of crisis, with counterproductive results. Extending George Soros’ metaphor that the financial system is “on life support,” the argument would be that you don’t want to unplug the machines at the patient’s weakest point and say, “Now or never — get up and walk!”

At the same time, of course, it’s useless to keep the patient on life support if you don’t ever do anything about the underlying disease. And so the point of continued artificial support is to give more gradual treatments (e.g., the“further steps in coming weeks” promised in the Reuters story) time to take effect.

Thus, a little public optimism may not necessarily be a mirror to reflect reality, as the old saying about art goes, but rather a tool for helping to shape it — nudging stock prices higher, making people feel less nervous about spending money, and as a result buying more time to implement the serious measures that are really needed. Um, assuming that the will to take those steps actually exists.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Josh Marshall caught this snippet in a Politico article on the meeting between President Obama and the CEOs of major banks last Friday:

“These are complicated companies,” one CEO said. Offered another: “We’re competing for talent on an international market.”

But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. . . .

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

It’s a nice quip, demonstrating the commonsense grasp on things that appeals to many of us who voted for Obama. But many of us are also concerned that such clear thinking has gotten lost in translation between the president and his top financial appointees’ plans to deal with the current meltdown. A joint profile of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner published last night by ProPublica and the Washington Post gives a vivid example:

In September 2005, Timothy Geithner made one of his most visible moves as a supervisor of the U.S. banking system. He summoned the nation’s top financial firms and their regulators to streamline an antiquated system that threatened Wall Street’s boom.

. . . Geithner’s summit, held at the New York Fed’s fortress-like headquarters near Wall Street, was a success. By fall 2006, the new system had all but eliminated the logjam, helping derivatives trade more efficiently.

. . . Although Geithner repeatedly raised concerns about the failure of banks to understand their risks, including those taken through derivatives, he and the Federal Reserve system did not act with enough force to blunt the troubles that ensued. . . .

. . . Looking back at his time at the New York Fed, Geithner said: “I wish I had worked to change the framework, rather than to work within that framework.”

That same sense of caution seems to have afflicted Obama and his economic team to date, as they resist calls for bolder action and treat the banksters who created the current mess as delicate, yet powerful interests who mustn’t be spooked — to the extent that Obama compared them to suicide bombers a couple of weeks ago.

This isn’t the first administration to feel intimidated, and its ambitions constrained, by the perceived power of Wall Street’s reaction (anyone remember James Carville’s famous quote about wanting to be reincarnated as the bond market?).

But in a moment of such importance, I can’t help but ask: Mr. President, why are you standing on that side of the pitchforks?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

The New York Times reports tonight, although without any proper attribution to Lewis Carroll:

U.S. Bank Bailout to Rely in Part on Private Money

Wall Street helped produce the global financial and economic crisis. Now, as the Obama administration prepares to unveil a revised bailout plan for the banking system, policy makers hope Wall Street can be part of the solution.

Administration officials said the plan, to be announced Tuesday, was likely to depend in part on the willingness of private investors other than banks — like hedge funds, private equity funds and perhaps even insurance companies — to buy the contaminating assets that wiped out the capital of many banks.

The officials say they are counting on the profit motive to create a market for those assets. The government would guarantee a floor value, officials say, as a way to overcome investors’ reluctance to buy them.

Details of the new plan, which were still being worked out during the weekend, are sketchy. And they are likely to remain so even after Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner announces the plan on Tuesday.

Apparently, those reports of Obama continuing Bush’s “faith-based” initiatives are barely scratching the surface…

Via the news pane at TPM, the Wall Street Journal‘s Washington, D.C., blog reports this afternoon:

The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.

But… challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

Kind of nice of him to remember that, isn’t it?  But wait, there’s more:

… other Democrats echoed the sentiment. As he left the White House, House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina was asked about Republican complaints that Democrats aren’t listening to what their GOP colleagues have to say. “We’re responding to the American people,” he said. “The American people didn’t listen to them too well during the election.”

Good for Obama and the Democrats.   A clear test is being applied by the GOP and the Beltway establishment to see whether the new administration has the stomach to make “change” more than just a slogan.

If Obama & Co. define bipartisanship as simply accepting whatever crumbs the Republicans will allow them, they’re doomed.  If, however, they define it as understanding the center of where the country (rather than the D.C. elite) is politically, then pushing to accomplish what needs to be done regardless of partisan obstacles, they might be able to pull it off.

When Obama proclaimed in his inaugural address, “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them,” my reaction was, well, fine, but he better bring the earth-moving equipment with him — because his opponents aren’t going to believe the ground has shifted until they see it firsthand.

Less than a week into his administration, it’s already become time for Obama to back up his claim.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Shame somebody hasn’t put together a ‘fantasy U.S. Cabinet’ game.  I’d really like to see:

Secretary of Defense: Wesley Clark

Secretary of Interior: Bill Richardson

Secretary of Health & Human Services: Howard Dean

Lots of other positions, including Treasury, Attorney General (Damn you, Spitzer!), Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, HUD, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veteran’s Affairs.

I’d just abolish the misbegotten “Homeland Security.”  Or at least give it a non-Nazi name, like “National Security” or something.  Nah, better just get rid of all those fuckers and any money we are wasting there.

What do all of youse think?