If nothing else, one has to admire President Obama’s sheer chutzpah.  Today he made an appearance at a House Republican retreat, giving a short speech and then taking questions.  Congressman Steve King (R-IA) tweets:

President Obama just told us that most of Healthcare negotiations took place on CSPAN and that he’s a centrist and not an idealog.

Oooo-kay.  I mean, how do you even respond to that, other than to ask,  “What color is the sky on your planet, Mr. President?”

Excellent, excellent stuff.  Ten minutes of awesome.

As with last year’s February address, I have some thoughts on the President’s State of the Union speech, in no particular order:

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In an apparent effort to come to grips with the fiscal angst that helped to propel Scott Brown to victory in Massachusetts last week, the Obama administration is floating the idea of a net spending freeze on non-defense discretionary spending for the next three years.

This news has been greeted by large segments of the port side of the political spectrum with a predictable amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Ezra Klein, for example, is sobbing into his sippy cup both that the president is tacitly conceding the argment on spending and that he didn’t use the gesture to extract any policy concessions from either the Blue Dogs or Republicans.  (How Ezra imagines that, after the Massachusetts debacle, Mr. Obama has any political leverage on spending issues is beyond me.)

Nor has the starboard side of the political spectrum been particularly impressed by the move.  House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) criticized the idea as like unto “announcing that you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” and John McCain is presumably savoring the irony of Mr. Obama embracing an idea that he ridiculed during the presidential campaign.

My own take on this is, shall we say, nuanced.  It’s true that non-defense discretionary spending is a comparatively small portion of the federal budget (about 17%), and that it does not include the portions of the budget (principally entitlement spending) that are at the center of the country’s fiscal problems.  It’s also true that a spending freeze simply arrests the growth of government; this isn’t a true spending cut.  Next year’s budget will only be about one half of one percent smaller than it would have been otherwise, and the freeze would thus do virtually nothing to put the country back on stable fiscal footing.  So it would be easy to take Mr. Boehner’s view of things.

Instead, though, I’m inclined to give Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt.  While I can hardly expect the man to repudiate Keynesian idiocy and embrace Austrian economic theory, if the looming prospect of an electoral repudiation has resulted in him having a mini-come-to-Jesus moment on spending, that’s something to be celebrated and encouraged.  What is it that they tell addicts?  The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and something that’s going to save a little taxpayer money and restrain the growth of government even a little bit is better than the big fat nothing that we’ve been getting for far too long from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Now there’s an iPhone app which enables users to get live video streaming of “the President’s public events at the White House, frequent web chats with Administration officials, and other events like key speeches and press briefings.”

The site further proclaims: “This is just the first step for WhiteHouse.gov’s mobile platform.”  Is there anybody out there, anyone at all, who felt that something was desperately missing from their life because the White House heretofore lacked a mobile platform?

Yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 plots, in federal district court rather than before a military tribunal.

I am surprisingly sympathetic to a lot of the arguments in favor of this, most notably that we ought to have enough civilizational confidence to trust our civilian justice system with the like of KSM.  That said, though, I cannot help but regard Holder’s decision as an example of either profound cynicism or profound stupidity, either of which ought to result in his boss, the president, firing him.

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That’s really the only word to describe it when the gender politics grievance-mongers who were part of the president’s coalition turn on him for being insufficiently inclusive.

<montyburns>Excellent.</montyburns>

For sufficiently generous definitions of “bipartisan”, i.e., “party-line Democrat plus one liberal Republican”.

I liked this, from Mike Cannon: “President Obama wants to put people in jail if they don’t buy health insurance. Give that man a peace prize.”

Whatever legitimacy and credibility the Nobel Peace Prize may have once enjoyed, it officially jumped the shark when Oslo awarded the thing to Yasser Arafat — a terrorist who was moderate in comparison to other terrorists only in that he didn’t talk about destroying Israel and murdering her citizens within range of Western videographers.  Nowadays the award is little more than an attaboy for those individuals who make the necessary genuflections to Oslo’s preferred global politics of transnational multiculturalism; witness, for example, recent awards to Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Al Gore in 2005, neither of which were occasioned by the recipient actually accomplishing anything praiseworthy or even noteworthy in the service of peace.

But Oslo appears to have finally outdone itself, awarding this year’s prize to President Obama despite nominations having closed a mere eleven days after his inauguration.  The committee’s rationale?

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee said.

It appears that even the Norwegians are susceptible to the blandishments of Hopenchange.  Take it away, Times of London:

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace…

Mr Obama becomes the third sitting US President to receive the prize. The committee said today that he had “captured the world’s attention”. It is certainly true that his energy and aspirations have dazzled many of his supporters. Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement.

Rarely do I find myself in agreement with David Frum, who is perhaps the second-biggest tool in the right-wing firmament after Conor Freidersdorf.  But I think he had an interesting take on this:

That Nobel was not a gesture of Obama-worship by left-leaning Norwegians. It was the very opposite: It was a pre-emptive strike against Obama, an attempt to neutralize him. How can a Peace Nobelist strike Iranian nuclear plants? Or wage a protracted war in Afghanistan? Or tell the Palestinians, “Sorry, that’s the best offer, take it or leave it”? The hope of course is that he cannot.

We’ve heard a lot over the past few years about radicals trying to achieve their aims through “lawfare.” Here’s a new concept in asymmetric conflict: “prizefare.” The Nobel Committee was not rewarding Obama. It was attempting to geld him.

I’m uncertain the Norwegians are that sophisticated given their childlike faith in transnationalism, but assuming they are, attempting to advance one’s goals by stroking this president’s prodigious ego is undoubtedly playing the odds.