National

"The sound you may hear in the background is that of the goalposts of American punditry being moved up and down the field. Not so long ago the common wisdom held that Bush 43 was shredding our alliances with a swaggering unilateralism, refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the early 21st century world. Now, in the blink of the historical eye, Obama is being routinely maligned as professorial, an ineffective multilateralist (a damning combination, that) who is acting like a latter-day Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary who was willing to entertain the possibility of talks with the Axis in 1940." Ah, the Washington Talking Head. Perennially Schizophrenic.

Alright. I think we have posted every picture taken of Delaware, ever. So we are going to take a break from our Daily Delawhere picture and start a new series called the "Daily Elsewhere picture" for a few weeks. I have taken lots of pictures over the years in various different locales, as my real world job allowed me to travel to places that I probably would have never gone to voluntarily. I will not give you any hints as to where the picture was taken. You have to guess. Some will be easy. Some will be hard. Here is your first one....

The graphic on the right is amazing. I think we can safely say that racists became more vocal and proud of their racism upon the election of a black President, which is something that most observers, myself included, did not see happening. And that is because their racism could now be legitimatized as partisan opposition. Meanwhile, A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that "Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington." This goes against what we see in the media and what is espoused by pundits. According to them, President Obama should have wrestled Putin and a Siberian Bear to death on live TV by now, and defeated Russia, all the while without provoking a thermo nuclear holocaust that would surely result from any war with Russia. And last week, when the 250 girls in Nigeria were kidnapped, the first question asked by Erin Burnett on CNN was "Why isn't the US doing anything?"

From Mike Mahaffie on Flickr.

From Mike Mahaffie on Flicker.

My apologies for being incommunicado this week. My real life job had me traveling everywhere and working late nights. So let's get caught up on some polling goodness and good job numbers:

The latest jobs report has a clear and comforting message for the White House and nervous Democrats: the economy is not tanking again. The April report, showing a bigger than expected gain of 288,000 jobs, should quiet fears of another spring slowdown and revive hopes for faster growth the rest of this year.