Redemption through Recovery

The story of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) is about to become as inspiring as possible. She will become a living memorial and reminder of those who did not survive the psycho assassin's bullets that day. She will become a powerful symbol for the Left of resilience and, ultimately, courage in the face of dark, reactionary forces that sometimes scare us out of our convictions.

However, as her mother so correctly notes in the upcoming Diane Sawyer piece with Giffords, her astronaut husband, family, doctors and therapists, she now has a message that rises above, that is larger than politics:

A special person made that much more special by the calamity visited upon her, and by her character as revealed in her recovery from it.

A living symbol and beacon.

Six Months Later

Nearly six months after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head by an assailant who managed to kill six people including a 9-year-old girl, the first photos of Rep. Giffords since then were released today, via Facebook, including:



The other photo on the page, which I'll decline to share here, shows the cavity that was created on the left side of her head, and a drooping left eye. Reports are not of a 100% recovery, but great progress, now at yet another critical juncture as Rep. Giffords still has difficulty with more complex language, and accompanying frustration, the latter of which would seem to indicate that she's got her wits together inside, just has a hard time with expression.

Rep. Giffords cannot have an MRI to determine brain damage in the most specific way possible, as she has bullet shrapnel lodged in her brain, presumably with the larger pieces having been removed. Since MRIs operate on magnetism, the damage could be horrific.

It's hopeful, certainly, but one wonders if the Congresswoman will seek another term next year or retire at that time. Her name has been floated as a Senatorial candidate; obviously she would need to recover more completely.

While it's difficult not to be furious at the scumbag who did this, Rep. Giffords' smile and progress engender more hope than anger at this moment. You can write her a note or just leave a comment on the Facebook page here.

Strong

The Midterm Election race has been joined today, as President Barack Obama visited Detroit with a particularly powerful speech at a Chrysler plant. Key quote: "I want the 'just say no' crowd to look you in the eye and say you were a bad investment." Watch for yourself -- the Prez at his best, with something to crow about, appearing to have saved the U.S. auto industry, now on its first upswing since the recession started:

More goodness with the link above, particularly the tear-filled signing of the Tribal Law and Order Act, benefiting Native American communities.

Mark my words: the GOP won't know what hit them this November. Or maybe they will: a President Obama leading America out of recession and into the future...and a Tea Party dragging them down.

What You Need

If you want to know why our not-so-new-anymore President is making the decisions he is about our economy, The New York Times Magazine has a lightly edited 50-minute interview transcript, Obama alone with David Leonhardt. It's all fast, fascinating, smart stuff that fills in the gaps of how he's working with his advisers on the inside:

I think that one of the things that we all agree to is that the touchstone for economic policy is, does it allow the average American to find good employment and see their incomes rise; that we can’t just look at things in the aggregate, we do want to grow the pie, but we want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions and occupations and genders and races; and that economic policy should focus on growing the pie, but it also has to make sure that everybody has got opportunity in that system.

I also think that there’s very little disagreement that there are lessons to be learned from this crisis in terms of the importance of regulation in the financial markets. And I think that this notion that there is somehow resistance to that — to those lessons within my economic team — just isn’t borne out by the discussions that I have every day.

If anything, the only thing I notice, I think, that I do think is something of a carry-over from Bob Rubin — I see it in Larry, I see it in Tim — is a great appreciation of complexity.

The stuff on health care is very, very important -- Obama talking about the high cost of terminal care, up to 80% of all health cost, and the difficulty of society makings decisions on end of life care via public health policy. And the closer is, well, night and day from what we've endured for eight whole years:

I knew even before the election that this was going to be a very difficult journey and that the economy had gone through a sufficient shock and that it wasn’t going to recover right away.

In some ways it’s liberating, though, in the sense that whether I’m a one-termer or a two-termer, the problems are big enough and fundamental enough that I can’t sort of game it out. It’s not one of these things where I can say, Oh, you know what, if I time it just right, then the market is going to be going up and unemployment will be going down right before re-election. These are much bigger, much more systemic problems. And so in some ways you just kind of set aside the politics.

What I’m very confident about is that given the difficult options before us, we are making good, thoughtful decisions. I have enormous confidence that we are weighing all our options and we are making the best choices. That doesn’t mean that every choice is going to be right, is going to work exactly the way we want it to. But I wake up in the morning and go to bed at night feeling that the direction we are trying to move the economy toward is the right one and that the decisions we make are sound.

Here's this week's address, President Flu Advisor.



Obama is the new normal.