Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott.

But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road--being ourselves. Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as a disbelief in the ability of our white peers to understand us. But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity -- not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience -- then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.

Pop culture has laid the groundwork for that recognition. Barack Obama's coalition -- the young, the black, the urban, the hip -- was originally assembled by hip-hop. Jay-Z and Nas may be problematic ambassadors, but their ilk are why those who thought Barack and Michelle were giving each other a "terrorist fist jab" were laughed off the stage. We are as physically segregated as ever, yet the changes in media have drawn black idiom into the broader American narrative.

-- TA-NEHISI COATES

RonaldReagan RonaldReagan RonaldReagan RonaldReagan RonaldReagan . . .

Good grief, the Republicans are doing it yet again. Even though they were thrashed in the 2008 election, as well as in the 2006 congressional elections, they still apparently persist in believing that they can resurrect their political fortunes by convincing everyone that it's 1981 and that our clocks are still set on Gipper Standard Time.

Such was the spectacle . . . as the six male candidates for the national Republican party chairmanship met in Washington, ostensibly to debate each other, and wound up invoking RonaldReagan 10 times in the first 48 minutes. Somebody please get these guys a compass, for their own sake, and point it toward the future.

-- DICK POLMAN

By agreeing to channel up to 40 percent of the stimulus through tax cuts, Obama is essentially calling the GOP's bluff. He's saying, "You guys are making a principled argument that tax cuts can be a more efficient way to stimulate the economy. I'm accepting that argument in large part. So rather than spend a lot of money helping low- and middle-income people, I'm going to get that money to them via tax cuts."

At which point he's kind of backed them into a corner. If the GOP accepts, then great. If they turn around and say, "Well, when we said tax cuts, we actually meant tax cuts for wealthy people, not for low- and middle-income people," then it becomes blindingly obvious that they weren't making a principled argument at all. They were trying to shake Obama down on behalf of their rich cronies.

-- NOAM SCHEIBER

Anybody else miss out on the shopping gene? Other people who are not Keira Knightley seem to enjoy it, though. Now that my kids are getting older -- they turn 13 in a couple of weeks -- they are showing signs that it only skipped a generation, which is how I wound up spending my Friday night at the Montgomery Mall. And seeing for myself what deep trouble we are in: No one was there, shoppers or salespeople, to the point that I began to have horror-flick fantasies. (Oh no, it's the Rapture and we've been left behind at the Montgomery Mall? How humiliating.) Because no one can afford new inventory, it was also like a visit to the Island of Misfit Toys (and Sweaters) -- with everything good and pawed over, and prices so marked down that the signs might as well have said, What Were We Thinking? (I saw the same crèche I bought in Assisi a couple of years ago for about 20 times the price, marked down by 50 percent. But even in flush times, what nincompoop was ever going to spend 700 bucks for three plastic wise men?)

-- MELINDA HENNEBERGER

Remember that $9 billion that seems to have simply disappeared into thin air in Iraq? Add another $25 billion to the money the Bush Administration has just pissed away through incompetence, in this case by failing to implement recommendations made by Inspectors General.

Just two more weeks of suffering under the epic incompetence of the "MBA President."

-- EMPTYWHEEL

The longer I observe the neocons the more I realize that for many of them, war is a natural state of being, even a vocation. Some actually view a martial society as more noble than a peaceful one, and believe in war as both morally good and socially beneficial. I am much more interested in conservatism as a temperament that recoils from violence, rather than being attracted to it. And while I see war as a necessary evil, I have been forced by the Iraq debacle into a much better grasp of its limits and its potential for catastrophe. Others seem emboldened by an occupation they are now declaring a "success."

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

By reaching outside the intelligence community and picking Leon Panetta for CIA chief, Barack Obama is sending a signal that he is not going to put up with the kind of nonsense that went on at the agency when George Bush was president.

The war carried out by partisans at the CIA where leaking classified information to undermine policy as well as attempting to defeat the president at the polls in 2004 will not be repeated under the leadership of Panetta, of that you can be certain.

This is a good, smart choice by Obama.The stated reasons -– Panetta was not involved in the rendition or torture programs -– are good, sound reasons but beyond that, Panetta was known both at OMB where he was director and at the White House where he was chief of staff as a ferocious in-fighter. Obama needs a bulldog at Langely if he is going to be free of the poisonous antagonism that made the relationship between the intelligence agencies and Bush so dysfunctional. Plus, Panetta will clearly be seen as "The President’s Man" -- a perception that will come in handy for both men.

-- RICK MORAN