Citizen Cartwright

How much of Obama's jammed agenda can he jam through?

Just look at the president's schedule this week and you get the sense of his vast agenda, the narrow window for results and the need to keep his promises to constituencies in the runup to the elections, The Associated Press says.

Of course, at the top of the list is health care. But on Thursday he talked exports and immigration. On Friday, he assesses the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan with his national security team and then talks with his science and technology advisers.

Earlier in the week, Obama met with senators on climate change. He's been promoting his education agenda of raising standards and graduation rates.

Then there's the financial regulation overhaul. Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. said Thursday he'll move ahead with his own bill without Republican support.

It's rollout day for Obama's budget

What's a president to do about simultaneous high unemployment and record deficits?

This president is choosing to spend about $100 billion on a jobs bill.

But that adds to a deficit that the administration says will peak at nearly $1.6 trillion this fiscal year before it starts dropping next year.

And deficits over the next 10 years will average 4.5 percent of the economy, a level considered dangerously high by economists.

Here's a primer on the way the budget process works.

Reacting to Obama's State of the Union speech

Yes, he gives a great speech, but his long laundry list of proposals didn't draw much enthusiasm from the media.

He offered few concrete suggestions for ending partisan fighting, the Los Angeles Times said.

He "gave little indication how he would change the dynamics that have frustrated much of his agenda so far," according to The New York Times.

"In promising to 'do our work openly,' Mr. Obama did not quite convince that he has a new plan for doing it better," The Washington Post said in an editorial.

The Associated Press compiled a variety of reactions from lawmakers and others.

Obama's do-it-himself panel on the national debt

The president is expected to announce during his State of the Union address on Wednesday that he'll create a bipartisan commission to find ways to bring down the national debt.

The Senate on Tuesday voted down a proposal to create such a panel, with Republicans fearing tax increases and Democrats fearing cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

The debt could nearly equal the value of the country's entire economic output by 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Tackling the trillion-dollar deficit

President Obama is expected to propose during his State of the Union speech on Wednesday a three-year freeze on domestic spending.

Non-security discretionary spending amounts to about $447 billion out of this year's $3.5 trillion federal budget.

Meanwhile, the president's plan to create a task force to figure out how to bring down the deficit is opposed by the left and the right and is likely to be rejected by the Senate, The Associated Press says.

Political polarization

The 65 percentage point gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ average job approval ratings for President Obama is the biggest for any president in his first year in office, according to the Gallup pollsters.

Obama's presidency, one year on

The president was sworn in a year ago Wednesday, and while Americans still like him personally, they don't like the way he's handled the economy and health care, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

They prefer smaller government and fewer services to bigger government with more services 58 percent to 38 percent, the poll says.

And such "anti-statism" actually is as old as the nation itself, John Judis wrote awhile back in The New Republic. Those early Americans identified strong government with the British monarchy and saw it as a threat to their economic and political freedom, he says.

Then, in the first half of the 20th century, business lobbies and Republicans managed to align "free enterprise" with the "American way of life" and liberal or progressive "statism" with socialism, communism and fascism, Judis says.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt got his programs through, it was because the country was scared — and he had a working majority of 71 of 96 senators and 332 of 435 House members, according to Judis.

In Obama's case, while the public was scared about the economy when he took office, concern has shifted from the failure of the market to the failure of the government to revive it, Judis says.

If you've come across other explanations of what's going on, please share them with Citizen Cartwright's readers.

Obama's airline passenger bill of rights

The Department of Transportation announced on Monday a new rule prohibiting airlines from keeping domestic flights on the tarmac for more than three hours without deplaning passengers. And the airlines must provide food, water, operable lavatories and, if necessary, medical attention.

To the victor go the spoils

While President Obama said he would change business-as-usual in Washington, his big fundraisers have gotten big jobs as in the past, according to a USA Today analysis.

More than 40 percent of Obama's top fundraisers have received ambassadorships and executive branch posts, says the paper, which lists who's gotten what.

USA Today

Safety in the sky

An $11 million, nearly four year NASA survey of pilots shouldn't be used to measure safety trends because deficiencies in the survey design have made the data unreliable, the National Research Council reports.

The Associated Press

National Academies release