President Lyndon Baines Johnson nationalized the old Texas sentiment of confidence and respect: "He’s someone to go to the well with."

As we approach the end of the Bush-Cheney administration, we are presented with the consequences of eight years of nihilistic politics, greed-and-crony finance, and feeding of hatreds and division among our brothers and sisters.
 
That catastrophic bequest is the lack of confidence and fading liquidity in our financial system that threatens to squander our life savings, and kill innovation and the common effort.

The legacy of Bush-Cheney is the loss of confidence and respect, the belief that we’re all in this together with men and women who are people we would go the well with.

-via mal contends

Update: No doubt about it: Obama won the debate

The political assessment of the show:
 
A condescending, patronizing, old man insulted a younger, smarter, more knowledgeable candidate whose respectful nature and command of the issues saw Obama stand his ground and become the change candidate surpassing the commander-in-chief barrier many causal voters have been waiting for.

McCain used the terms doesn’t “understand” repeatedly, but the facts aside, McCain came across as ungraceful and arrogant, even a bitter man seeing his self-perpetuating myth dissipate.
 
We’ll see if this assessment is reflected empirically in the coming days.

Drill, drill, drill, for oil along the U.S. coastline, cries our president!

And if he means it, if he really thought this was a solution, he could reverse an executive order - an environmental order first laid down by, get this, his Dad in 1990 - but he won't do it.

The Richard Nixon years (1969-1974) saw an acceleration of warrantless surveillance and presidential claims of executive power to wiretap and spy on American citizens under the umbrella of national security and the acclaimed inherent power of the presidency to engage in action deemed necessary to protect national security just as President Nixon perceived this obligation.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make the same claims for themselves.

Such Nixonian claims led Congress to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, mandating the government to demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant before placing Americans under surveillance for national security rationales within the United States.

FISA negated claims of inherent executive power to engage in extra-Constitutional programs and action.

William R. Steiger, son of the late Wisconsin Congressman William A. Steiger (1967- 1978) and advisor to former Gov and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, is skewered in a page one Washington Post piece today as a political hack.

“A specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services,” reads the piece.