To appreciate what that means, try to imagine a Republican president and Republican Senate majority leader signing off on a bill with pro-union language despite thundering objections from most big businesses.  Your imagination may not be good enough to picture that, which tells you everything you need to know about the asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to labor.

The signing of the FAA bill ends a long-running legislative fight.  It began with something President Obama did right: He appointed members to the National Mediation Board who, in 2010, adopted a new rule governing elections for railroad and airline workers seeking to unionize.  Such workers are covered by the 1935 Railway Labor Act, rather than the National Labor Relations Act that covers most American workers.

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Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.

Punish the Whistleblowers

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After decisively issuing the contraception coverage rule last week, the administration took only a few news cycles, dominated by liberal Catholics like E.J. Dionne fretting about how Obama “botched” the issue, to dispatch surrogates to assuage the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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Dumb because like the targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists rarely cited by columnist commandoes, bombing raids alone can’t achieve the alleged goal: preventing the Ayatollahs from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Slow them down, probably. Stop them, no. Short of a full-scale invasion and occupation of a nation three times larger than neighboring Iraq in population and five times larger in land area, that can’t be done. Global disapproval didn’t stop North Korea, Pakistan or, for that matter, Israel.

Exponentially dumb because it could set the entire Middle East aflame.

You’d think the Israelis, of all people, would recognize that threatening a people with death and destruction hardens their resolve. Yet the New York Times reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “told visitors that he believes the Tehran government to be deeply unpopular, indeed despised, and that a careful attack on its nuclear facilities might even be welcomed by Iranian citizens.”

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No one expected women's lives to be an unbroken series of pregnancies and births anymore. It was better for women that way – but also for children. (Not to mention for husbands, who no longer had to confine sex to the times of the month when women weren't ovulating if they wanted sexual pleasure without a special bonus nine months later.) The church was a wonderful institution, my parents said, but it was very old, and it sometimes took a while to catch up with the times. Kind of like the way Grandma still said "icebox" for "refrigerator."

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In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.”

Gingrich calls Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.”

What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009.

They also point to Census data showing that 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation or subsidized housing. That’s up from 44 percent in 2008.

Finally, they trumpet Social Security Administration figures showing that the number of people on Social Security disability jumped 10 percent in Obama’s first two years in office.

They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

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Was it really possible, I wondered, that Obama had mistaken the U.S. government for the Harvard Law Review, where the emollient balm of his personality persuaded rival factions to reason together? Did he actually believe that the political battles of the Clinton and Bush years could be laughed off as “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation,” easily transcended by an Ivy League raisonneur like him?

I’ve never thought any Chicago politician could possibly be so naive. Rather, Obama appeared to be an opportunistic shape-shifter like most successful candidates, enacting the pose of healer to set him apart first from Hillary Clinton, then Sen. John McCain — two figures hopelessly identified with the Washington trench warfare most Americans had grown heartily sick of. A fresh face, a proverbial outsider. “Mr. Hopey-Changey,” as an embittered Clinton supporter of my acquaintance called him.

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What is more surprising, perhaps, is that Obama is vulnerable on this issue.  After all, no US president has come as close as Obama in reaching a diplomatic breakthrough with Tehran, no other US president has managed to create this degree of international mobilization against Iran, and no other US president has been able to impose so many crippling, indiscriminate sanctions on the Iranian economy.

Iran was fast expanding its influence in the region during the George W. Bush Presidency. “Iran was on a roll,” one Obama Administration official told me. But in the past three years, it has lost its regional momentum. Iran’s domestic political situation is much more unstable following the fraudulent 2009 elections, its source of soft power in the region has take a hit following the Arab uprisings, its economy is hurting under the crushing weight of government mismanagement and sanctions, and its ability to play the major powers against each other has been severely limited since Obama took office.

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That's why David Axelrod hit a nerve -- or a funny bone -- when he sent the photo that graces this story to his Twitter followers Monday, with the quip: "How loving owners transport their dogs." Total cheap shot, playing on the most nagging though politically debatable hit on Romney: That he strapped his Irish setter Seamus to the roof of the family station wagon, in a regulation dog travel crate, for a long ride, and when the dog didn't do well, merely hosed off the car as well as Seamus, then put him back in his crate on top of the car and got back on the road. The increasingly timid and fussy Politifact has dinged Gail Collins for her frequent references to the story, but it dogs Romney (sorry) because of the animatronic ambition it symbolizes.

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First, we got a reminder that there are still 50,000 pages of government record relating to the JFK assassination that are being kept secret, nearly a half-century after that event. That's despite the 1992 passage of the JFK Act, which specifically called for the "expeditious" release of these records.

Second, the New York Times reported on an almost comically long delay in the government response to a Freedom of Information of Act request the newspaper filed in 1997. A response to the Times request was finally sent out earlier this week.

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It now appears that those efforts may have paid off.

The Obama administration has gone ahead with selling arms to the regime despite opposition in Congress.  And we only know about the sale because some anonymous congressional sources came forward to alert the media. Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy has the story:

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The president took a trip to Arizona ostensibly to do something involving jobs and "innovation," and immediately upon exiting Air Force Once, President Obama and Gov. Brewer began arguing. The argument took place outside the earshot of reporters, but they saw Brewer wag her finger, Obama and Brewer talk over each other, and Obama walk away from Brewer while she was still speaking (which, seriously: enraging move, right?).

Brewer then went over to the reporters and said the president was mad about her book, "Scorpions for Breakfast," available now at booksellers everywhere. Drudge soon posted the pool report and the finger-wagging picture. Brewer went on Fox and a local radio show. She posted the picture on her Facebook wall. It was brilliant, really.

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That take on the Obama reelection campaign strategy is in line with what we’ve been hearing for months out of the White House, which previewed the concept to the Washington Post as early as October, just as the Occupy movement was getting underway.

The tension or perhaps contradiction with this strategy is that, as I’ve been documenting, this administration and the Democratic Party are not fundamentally anti-Wall Street institutions. They have deep ties to the financial services industry.

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We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far:

"Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff."

When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile -- but the smile didn’t last long.  There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.

The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff -- arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House.

Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked  as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.

The new guy, Jack Lew – said by those who know to be a skilled and principled public servant – ran hedge funds and private equity at Citigroup, which means he’s a member of the Wall Street gang, too.  His last job was as head of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, where he replaced Peter Orzag, who now works as vice chairman for global banking at – hold onto your deposit slip -- Citigroup.

Still with us? It’s startling the number of high-ranking Obama officials who have spun through the revolving door between the White House and the sacred halls of investment banking. Sure, you can argue that it makes sense that the chief executive of the nation would look to other executives for the expertise you need to build back from the disastrous collapse of the banks in the final year of the Bush Administration.

Remember -- it was Bush and Cheney with their cronies in big business who helped walk us right into the blast furnace of financial meltdown, then rushed to save the banks with taxpayer money. That little fact seems to have been overlooked in the current primaries.

All this brings back memories of Hank Paulson, doesn’t it? Hank Paulson, the $700-million man who became secretary of the treasury for President Bush. Paulson had been head of Goldman Sachs, the rich investment bank.  As his successor at Goldman Sachs, Paulson chose Lloyd Blankfein. Several times, according to Bloomberg News, Rolling Stone,and Paulson’s own memoir, the treasury secretary made sure Blankfein and Goldman got privileged inside information.

But Bush and Cheney aren’t the only ones to have a soft spot for financiers. President Obama may call bankers “fat cats” and stir the rabble against them with populist rhetoric when it serves his interest, but after the fiscal fiasco, he allowed the culprits to escape virtually scot-free. When he’s in New York he dines with them frequently and eagerly accepts their big contributions.  Like his predecessors, his administration also has provided them with billions of taxpayer dollars – low-cost money that they used for high-yielding investments to make big profits. The largest banks are bigger than they were when he took office and earned more in the first two-and-a-half years of his term than they did during the entire eight years of the Bush administration. That’s confirmed by industry data.

And get this. It turns out, according to The New York Times, that as President Obama’s inner circle has been shrinking, his “rare new best friend” is Robert Wolf. They play basketball, golf and talk economics when Wolf is not raising money for the president’s campaign.

Robert Wolf runs the U.S. branch of the giant Swiss bank UBS, which participated in schemes to help rich Americans evade their taxes. During hearings in 2009, Michigan’s Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, described some of the tricks used by UBS: “Swiss bankers aided and abetted violations of U.S. tax law by traveling to this country with client code names, encrypted computers, counter- surveillance training, and all the rest of it, to enable U.S. residents to hide assets and money in Swiss accounts.

“The bankers then returned to Switzerland and treated their conduct as blameless since Swiss law says tax evasion is no crime. The Swiss bank before us deliberately entered United States, actively sought U.S. clients and secretly helped those U.S. clients defraud the United States of America.”

And so it goes, the revolving door between government service and big money in the private sector spinning so fast it becomes an irresistible force hurling politics and high finance together so completely it’s impossible to tell one from the other.

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In his State of the Union address, President Obama will make the case that government has a vital role. His Republican rivals disagree. Mitt Romney charges the president is putting “free enterprise on trial,” while Newt Gingrich merely fulminates about “liberal elites.”

American business won’t and can’t lead the way to more and better jobs in the United States. First, the private sector is increasingly global, with less and less stake in America. Second, it’s driven by the necessity of creating profits, not better jobs.

The National Science Foundation has just released its biennial report on global investment in science, engineering and technology. The NSF warns that the United States is quickly losing ground to Asia, especially to China. America’s share of global R&D spending is tumbling. In the decade to 2009, it dropped from 38 percent to 31 percent, while Asia’s share rose from 24 to 35 percent.

One big reason: According to the NSF, American firms nearly doubled their R&D investment in Asia over these years, to over $7.5 billion.

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But lately, old sci-fi themes are starting to feel a bit too real, what with events dabbling in dystopia and the "fi" now seeming to vanish from our most enduring sci-fi tropes. In the last few years, we've seen sci-fi's Nuclear Dystopia genre in the Fukushima disaster; its Environmental Cataclysm genre in climate-change-intensified weather events; its End-of-the-World genre in fears of an asteroid collision; its Outbreak Catastrophe genre in various epidemics; its Alien Invasion genre in revelations of possible alien life; its Artificial Intelligence Disaster in the rise of robotic warfare (and even automated robotic warfare); and its Authoritarian Dystopia genre in successive presidents' indefinite detentions, assassinations and "kill lists." Now, this month, we are even seeing the rise of sci-fi's Space War genre in real-life geopolitics.

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Which is why it's good news for everyone that the administration isn't going to cave to antiabortion institutions' pressure to let them deny birth control coverage to employees covered by their insurance. Today, it announced that there will be no wider exemption for those groups, only a one-year waiver they can apply for while figuring out how to comply with the law.

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Obama enjoys the three advantages any incumbent president seeking reelection does: four full years to raise money for his own campaign or the national party committees; the political leverage of the office he holds to raise it; and, like incumbents in most cycles, the absence of a primary challenger who might draw down his coffers. Sure enough, and despite a crowded Republican field, by the midpoint of 2011 Obama had already raised more money ($48.7 million) than all of the GOP presidential hopefuls combined ($36.7 million). His campaign has since raised $42 million in both the third and fourth quarters of 2011, with the Democratic National Committee hauling in an additional $51 million during the final six months of last year.

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We don't live in that unspoiled world, however, so the book has become a flashpoint, with right-wingers seizing on tiny unflattering tidbits and Michelle Obama herself telling tell Gayle King that it fosters "an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day that Barack announced, that I'm an angry black woman." I'm on record (on "Hardball" Wednesday) saying I wish the First Lady hadn't felt the need to defend herself; she's one of the most admired women in America, just behind Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, a multiracial feminist troika that itself shows how far we've come. Especially when it comes to her right-wing critics, she shouldn't fight down.

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