Things Are Moving

As the last week has shown, the end-of-the-year crush is on. As the nation digs itself out from a crippling snow storm and a devastating recession, decisons are being made on the fly. Especially within the U.S. Senate where the race is on to pass health care reform before the week is out. The largely septuagenerian chamber held cloture vote on an amendment at 1 a.m. last night. If the Senate can keep up this pace, it looks like the Democrats will succeed in passing health care reform and President Obama will keep yet another of his campaign promises.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate race in Kentucky is heating up, and it is fly-by-night candidate Rand Paul who finds himself in hot water, embroiled by a scandal that has him closely associating with white-nationalist satanic death metal heads. Actually, Dr. Paul might gain votes among some crowds for these shenanigans, but I can't imagine the recent revelations will help him in the Republican primary.

On the world front, the death of Ayatollah Montazeri, a moderate Iranian spiritual leader, has spurred echoes of the Twitter Revolution. Obama is turning out to be quite the statesman, brokering a compromise agreement in Copenhagen after arriving to a summit in complete disarray. There is a good chance that these standards will make it through the Senate next year. The Obama administration is also making progress towards a new disarmament treaty with Russia. If I recall correctly, Mr. Obama wrote an undergraduate thesis on strategies for nuclear disarmament and thus successful negotiation and passage of a new arms treaty would be the culmination of almost 30 years of work.

David Axelrod became the first member of the Obama Administration to acknowledge their slipping poll numbers in the media. In 2010 it will be interesting to see if Obama can dig himself out of the hole - and take his party with him.