Happy Independence Day! I mean that with all sincerity. A quick scroll of the posts I missed over the last week or so tells me a little hope is in order. Be forewarned: This post will not tell you how miserable our government is, or how awful our lives are, or how corporations own us all. If you were looking for that, skip over this one and look around. You'll find plenty here and elsewhere to reinforce that belief.

I am by nature an optimist. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the snark and snipe games as much as the next guy, but my natural inclination is to see the good rather than the bad. Despite popular themes, far more good has come out of the past 18 months of the Obama administration than bad. And that good is only now beginning to hatch. Is it as good as it gets? No. Can it be better? Sure, just ask any of the folks who lost their unemployment benefits (thanks to Republicans) or have exhausted them. Even so, what I see is a half-full glass that needs to be filled more, but still offers a refreshing break.

How many of you can count the number of accomplishments this administration has actually delivered over the past 18 months? Some friends of mine are working on a detailed list now, and the number of substantial, documented, quantifiable accomplishments of this President is well over 300. So far.

300 substantial positive changes in 18 months. That's a remarkable number, certainly far more than we'd have seen if Almost-President McCain and Quitter Palin had been elected. Accomplishments that invest in present and future. Some correct past mistakes. Others seek to establish a strong foundation to build a future for us all. Still others affirm a commitment to opportunity for all of us.

Here are a few easily-forgotten examples.

• Offshore tax haven closure, which benefited rich investors, outsourcers and corporate tax dodgers. [Reference]
• Reformed Credit Card laws, adding consumer protections against predatory credit card lenders [Reference]
• Doubled federal funding for clean fuel research [Reference]
• Expanded Pell grants, enabling more low-income students to go to college. [Reference]
• Established climate change as a policy priority and set benchmarks for efficient energy standards. [Reference]

These accomplishments stand next to the ones most obvious: Turning the economy around, restoring our international standing, initiating a call for an end to nuclear proliferation worldwide, and getting universal health care passed, to name a few.

For those of you who are already sputtering "but, but, but...." and pointing out how each of the initiatives I listed or mentioned are impure, or somehow flawed from the original vision, I offer this: Legislation is an act of Congress. The health care bill, for example, teetered on the very, very edge of what was legislatively possible given the players in the House and in the Senate. One look at the vote counts should be all it takes to understand what that means. Changing one small provision could have killed the entire effort. Instead, we have a future which includes coverage for all, and subsidized coverage for those who cannot afford any health care, covered or otherwise.

All of this -- all 300 separate accomplishments -- are a down payment on future progress. This is what change looks like. It looks incremental, not immediate, and moves slower than any of us want. Some say it wears the tarnish of compromised promises. I say it wears the patina of unrivaled effort.

It is July 4, 2010. In 4 months, there will be an election. What is said today matters to that election of tomorrow. Ignoring what has been done in this short time will not win those elections. Using what has been done in 18 months to build upon a better, more progressive Congress will not only win elections, it will lay the foundation for more progress and more opportunity to rebuild what conservatives have spent the past 40 years tearing down.

Blue America is already working toward that future. If hope is kept at the forefront -- yes, HOPE -- we will make opportunities to perfect and refine the work in progress.

Hope pushed our founding fathers to sign their names to a Declaration of Independence. This country was founded on hope and optimism, not despair and criticism.

Digby is right:

I don't cut President Obama much slack --- the job is too important for that and he doesn't need patronizing sycophants --- but on Independence Day it pays to remember that the election of the first black president is still, as the Veep would say, a Big F$@#ing Deal:

I wonder too about whether President McCain would really care enough to do this for the baby turtles in the Gulf.

Know hope.

Cross-posted to odd time signatures

We were gonna post this really nice cake for Sarah Palin's birthday today but the person we hired to bake it, quit unexpectedly. Quit! Just like that. What a quitter. You trust someone, expect them to take their position seriously, and they just up and quit. In fact, I'll never trust that Quitty McQuitter again as long as I live.

Open Thread below...

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Bill O'Reilly, last night on his Fox News show, discussing Sarah Palin:

O'Reilly: The perception that the governor is dumb comes almost exclusively from the left, does it not?

Well, no doubt there are a lot of people on the left who consider Sarah Palin dumb. But they're hardly alone.

Peggy Noonan:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

Kathleen Parker:

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

... If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

Parker again:

Of course, there’s a difference between a lack of polish and a lack of coherence. Some of Palin’s interview responses can’t even be critiqued on their merits because they’re so nonsensical. “Let Sarah be Sarah” has become the latest rallying cry among my colleagues on the right. She’ll be fine if we just leave her alone, they say. Between prayers, I might add.

David Frum:

I think Sarah Palin was a huge mistake...Americans can be pretty jokey about their government when times are good, but when times are bad, they want to know do -- can you do the job? And when you have a candidate who so obviously has never thought about any of the issues that are going to be important to the next administration and whose knowledge is so shallow, it makes people -- it doesn't just make people offended, it makes them afraid.

David Brooks:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

You don't have to be a liberal to conclude that Sarah Palin is not what they call "the sharpest tool in the shed" back in Alaska. You just have to be someone not consuming the Republican Clap Louder Kool Aid.

The Urban Dictionary has just added a new phrase:

Pullin' a Palin

1. Quitting when the going gets tough; abandoning the responsibility entrusted to you by your neighbors for book advances and to make money on the lecture circuit.

2. Bizarre move that will damn ambitions for higher office.

I bet when people saw Jade they were convinced that David Caruso was pullin' a Palin.

Please feel free to use this new term in a sentence in the open thread below...