What Have We Learned?

As we put the final touches on today's work and get ready to enjoy three days off, we have three things on our minds: the school year is ending, this is Memorial Day weekend, and President Obama's speech on national security and the drone program on Thursday was a stunningly frank and necessary next step in America's path forward.

What Americans hopefully learned from the President on Thursday reminds us of some of the parting words of wisdom we've given or received at the end of school years past. Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly may have been the first major member of the media to understand those words of wisdom that President Obama was imparting - wisdom many Americans have yet to truly grasp.

Whatever your personal political beliefs are, based on both the speech on Thursday and the series of actions the President has set in motion – drafting an official drone policy, admitting responsibility for killing innocents with our drones, publicly taking responsibility for initiating the end to Guantanamo – it should be obvious to anyone with a solid grasp of foreign policy that the era of "perpetual war" in America is finally coming to an end.

This era won't be ended by President Obama alone, though.

As Dave Weigel brusquely but accurately pointed out Thursday afternoon, President Obama called out Congress for their laziness, cowardice, and incompetence in mishandling their responsibilities for ending this era. Congress has known about these drone strikes - "every strike," as President Obama admitted on Thursday - yet has done almost nothing to increase their oversight over the program.

Congress has also done nothing to curtail the document that is at the root of this perpetual war state, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the AUMF - until recently, when Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff stepped up. Instead, they've wasted their time attacking the President and playing politics, making our security situation weaker by gutting necessary security funding, while making it nearly impossible to settle already complex problems like Guantanamo.

As Greg Sargent and others have rightly noted, President Obama's speech and actions are a massive, yet ultimately imperfect, attempt to finally reconcile America's national security policies and actions with the values we claim to have. Yet it's an effort no one else on the national level has had the courage to seriously attempt since those policies and actions were split in 2001. Presient Obama's reconcilliation effort is being punctuated sharply by his plan to end this era not by increasing the powers of his office, but by actually LIMITING the powers of the office of the President, through actions like increased oversight of the drone program by Congress.

There's one other thing Americans learned from President Obama yesterday, with some help from anti-war protester Medea Benjamin.

Ms. Benjamin interrupted Mr. Obama three times during one of the most important policy delivery speeches this President has ever made. While he may have been a bit frustrated by her interruptions, he LISTENED to her, and even directly addressed some of her questions.

In addressing Ms. Benjamin's questions about civilians and the costs of the lives of those we've killed through drone strikes, President Obama said, "It is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in every war. And for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us as long as we live…" That includes the death of the 16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

That the President of the United States would not only show respect to a common citizen who interrupted him during a major speech, but that he answered her questions with humility, honesty and humanity is a lesson that every one of us should never forget: We are NEVER too important, no matter who we are, to address the honest concerns of those for whom we are responsible.

The era of perpetual war is ending. This is not the same country it was thirteen years ago. Hopefully, we can all take what we've learned and make it better.

Summer's Here, The Time Is Right...

To the members of our staff, music isn't just something to set the mood for day, but certain songs also fit into certain times of the year. Whether it's for personal or historic reasons, when summer begins to make its presence known, the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" often finds its way onto our stereos and iPods.

Somehow, that seems appropriate today, in light of the surprising battles that have begun to move forward outside of the major media spotlights.

As Slate's Dave Weigel notes, the filibuster reform battle appears to have kicked open the metaphorical coffin and returned from the dead with a vengeance. Both Sahil Kapur and Greg Sargent also make it clear that the U.S. Senate could easily be "going nuclear" this July, if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid actually goes through with his threat of filibuster reform  this time.

Reid currently appears to be waiting until immigration reform clears the Senate, since "nuking" the Senate would mean forcing a majority-only vote, which - if successful - would change the Senate rules. In most cases, the minority party then would be unable to block the ability of the Executive Branch - and by extension, the Judicial Branch - to function properly, by indiscriminately filibustering Presidential nominees.

While it would be surprising if Reid actually followed through this time, the truly unusual alliances have been popping up elsewhere.

The online sales tax battle has had Republicans in Congress beginning yet another intra-party battle, primarily to see who will get taxed and who can exempt themselves from the tax.

While the American people clearly don't want a broader online sales tax law, the Senate already passed a somewhat bipartisan version of the proposed tax bill earlier this month. Now, the GOP-led House is attempting to push the bill through - and Republicans are being blocked by other Republicans. Major conservative groups have now lined up on both sides of the bill, with big corporations and states hungry for tax revenue on one side, and small businesses and major lobbying groups allied on the other.

Don't think Democrats aren't having their own intra-party battles.

Today, President Obama will give a major address on civil liberties, Guantanamo, and drones. The President is going to fight against Congress - and some members of his own party - as he restarts transfers of detainees from Guantanamo, part of his long-term goal to shut down one of the greatest legal and humanitarian disasters of the Bush era.

At the same time, Attorney General Eric holder released a letter to members of Congress Wednesday, acknowledging the deaths of four American citizens, including terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, all killed by drones during the Obama era.

These two issues will be guaranteed to have Democrats battling with each other about civil liberties and legal procedures with just as much venom as Republicans will be fighting with their own party members over taxes.

None of these battle reports have included the massive public outcry in Chicago where the Board of Education, at the direction of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, voted to close fifty public schools. Or Longmont, Colorado, where a suspect whipped out his AR-15 in the street, in broad daylight, and shot at police. They also haven't included the brutal and bloody public beheading of a soldier by radical extremists in London. Talk about your street fightin' men.

Welcome to summer, folks. It looks like it's gonna be a hot one.

Maybe we'll just stay inside with our laptops for a while, where both the temperature and the tempers are likely to be a bit cooler.

Just don't charge us any sales tax, or we'll have to take things outside.

A Party Out Of Gas

As some of our staff get ready to travel this Memorial Day weekend, we've begun to look at the gas prices around the nation - and cringed.

It should be absolutely no surprise that gas prices are spiking right before Memorial Day. Gas prices go up before Memorial Day every year, as they have for as long as we can remember. This year, it's hitting our Midwest staff especially hard, since gas prices in the entire middle section of the country, from Colorado on the Western edge, to Ohio on the Eastern edge, and from Minnesota southward, all the way to Oklahoma are higher than virtually anywhere else in the country.

Of course, the folks responsible for robbing us all at the pump have the same excuses they've always had: The oil prices are up, or there are refinery problems, or there's tension in the Middle East, or some other lame excuse. Those same tired old excuses may have finally ran out of gas, though, as Americans appear to be moving to hybrids and plug-in electric cars in ever higher numbers. Plug-in sales tripled last year, and both electric and hybrid vehicle sales have had a record year, so far.

It seems Americans are finally tired enough of the oil executives' lies that, as a society, we've moved on to the "tune it out" stage of revulsion.

Which, it seems, Americans are also doing with the scandal-obsessed GOP.

As Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Kevin Drum, and others have been warning for a while now, the Republican Party's constant focus on scandals is on the verge of locking them into a 1998-style setup for the 2014 elections.

Indeed, even Charlie Cook has now noticed that the GOP's fixation on scandals of little or no interest to the public has effectively tied the GOP down to a series of politically dead issues. That's not just the perception of a few members of the media.

As Steve Benen notes, several polls this week from CNN, Pew Research Center, and USA Today, as well as the Washington Post/ABC News poll, all say the same thing. While Democrats keep their attention focused on legislation like the immigration bill - and have earned surprisingly favorable ratings from the American people for doing so - Republicans' slavish devotion to scandalmania has the American people thinking less favorably of the GOP than they have in at least two decades.

Scandalmania 2013 hasn't particularly hurt President Obama either. His approval ratings in multiple polls have nudged up a little recently, not down - a factor that's likely due to the continuing improvement of the U.S. economy, as Nate Silver smoothly lays out.

In our opinion, though, the biggest reason Americans are simply beginning to ignore Republicans is the desperation factor highlighted by Drum, Benen, and Sargent. Even some young GOP Congressional staffers are mocking the delusional witch-hunt tactics of the Congresspeople they work for as crazy.

As every new supposed outrage against President Obama is greeted with hyper-partisan cries for impeachment from Republicans and right-wing media, the American people have just begun to tune out conservatives and the political right.

The same fact now applies to Republicans that applies to the 'muggers' at the gas pump: Americans don't need a whole series of excuses and lies to know the real reason Republicans keep acting the way they do.