HE'S IKE, THE LEFT IS TINA:

Obama sweetens stimulus for GOP: Big tax cuts would go to businesses. Still, fast passage with broad support will be tough. (Jim Puzzanghera and Christi Parsons, January 6, 2009, LA Times)

Obama is proposing to devote about $300 billion to tax cuts in a stimulus package that may total as much as $775 billion. About half of those cuts would be tax credits of up to $500 for workers earning less than $200,000 a year, although details of the plan are being worked out. The package also contains about $100 billion in business tax cuts that many conservatives have been advocating.

"I think he would like to have a large bipartisan vote in favor of this package. And he knows, even before we mentioned it, that the way to do that is obviously for it to have elements that are appealing to Republicans," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after a 90-minute meeting that Obama held with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders Monday.

"I think he's already been listening to the suggestions we've made," McConnell said.

Obama puts Panetta in unfamiliar waters (BEN SMITH, 1/6/09, Politico)

The choice drew criticism from some surprising sources-like Obama's former Democratic Senate colleagues, Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller, who dourly noted Panetta's lack of background at the agency.

And it got equally praise from some equally surprising quarters Obama probably doesn't care much about-such as neoconservative hawks Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

Panetta is "a very smart, very capable guy with a lot of experience - I think he's the right sort of person to take a shot at improving the place," said Perle, an agency critic who, as chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, was an architect of the Iraq war, and called the quality of the CIA's analysis "appalling."

"It's going to take somebody from outside to right that ship, if it can be done," Perle said.

Feith said the appointment could suggest that Obama had learned the lesson of Bush's first term, in which CIA Director George Tenet - a Clinton holdover - was a bitter rival to some in the White House.

"One possible implication of appointing somebody from the outside is that the president recognizes that there are serious problems at the CIA and he wants somebody who is not a part of those problems," said Feith, who was Bush's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 6, 2009 12:51 PM