How Darrell Issa will conduct the vital business of the House Oversight Committee when he takes over as chairman isn’t clear yet. When the California Republican describes his plans in the mainstream media, he strives to sound reasonable, bipartisan and public-spirited; but when speaking with media outlets and personalities, such as Rush Limbaugh, he sounds like a hard-line right-winger aiming to revive the paranoid partisan style of the Gingrich era — which would be more in keeping with the reputation he has already established. He displayed the fugue state that preoccupies him when he denounced President Obama on CNN as “the most corrupt” occupant of the Oval Office in modern times – and then withdrew that accusation with an apology.

Now Issa has announced that he expects the Oversight committee and its subcommittees to hold nearly three times as many investigative hearings over the next two years as Henry Waxman, an active and successful chairman, ran during the final years of the Bush administration. He may consider the federal government (and the White House) to be bottomless pits of waste, fraud and abuse, but are there really three times as many troubling issues for Issa and his colleagues to study now as there were in the Bush years?

The answer is yes, so long as the threshold for investigation is absurdly low, such as the question of whether federal agencies are spending too much money on signs to identify construction projects funded by stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Road signs displaying the names of various government officials and agencies are neither new nor scandalous, but local Republicans have been whining about the erection of signs bearing the president’s name and the Recovery Act logo as examples of Soviet-style propaganda. For months, Issa has been riding this issue, promoting stories in local newspapers that suggest waste, wrongdoing and political misuse of funds, with hints that the Recovery Act symbol bears a suspicious resemblance to the 2008 Obama campaign logo. Last August, World Net Daily, which did so much to promote phony scandals a decade ago, urged its gullible readers to “report” the ARRA signs to Issa’s office (under the byline of the foul-mouthed Swift boat hoaxter Jerome Corsi).

This week, Issa indicated that he will continue to pursue such small-time, seemingly bogus concerns with a tweet linking to an article complaining about stimulus project signage in the Greeley Gazette: “Citizen-watchdogs & new technology made this (http://tinyurl.com/28egdr5) possible … how can we do more of this? Would love your thoughts.”

It is hard to imagine that road signs represent more than a minuscule fraction of 1 percent of the $787 billion stimulus budget, but then again Republicans constantly bemoan minor spending items — such as congressional earmarks — that actually have almost no real fiscal impact. Perhaps their budgetary record is historically so miserable because they just can’t do the arithmetic. But that can scarcely be true of Issa, an entrepreneur who earned his own huge fortune and is still the wealthiest member of Congress.

Certainly Issa should provide serious oversight of the stimulus spending, which is a fundamental congressional responsibility assigned to his committee. He ought to stop taking potshots at road signs — and instead start examining the administration’s record in selecting and contracting projects.

Of course, that might not be quite as much fun as stirring up the Tea Party rubes with diversions like the road sign “issue.” According to the independent watchdogs at Pro Publica and Politifact, the administration has succeeded in contracting stimulus projects at considerably lower cost than originally anticipated so far. Lower bidding has meant millions of dollars saved, with those saved funds in turn financing thousands of additional projects — and many thousands of jobs — across the country.

One paragraph, from Marc Ambinder, that explains why the sudden departure of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is an unambiguously good thing for America:

Emanuel obsesses about the New York Times, and stays in contact with a dozen or more reporters each week. Rouse knows many reporters, but he is not a schmoozer, an information trader, or likely to return late night e-mails with provocative subject headings. He won’t be as accessible to the White House press corps, or to parts of it, as Emanuel was. Rouse does not share Emanuel’s conviction that the White House must govern principally through the Times.

President Barack Obama reprimanded top Pentagon officials last year for pressing publicly for a troop increase in Afghanistan.

That’s according to “The Promise,” a book on Obama’s first year in office by Newsweek writer Jonathan Alter. It goes on sale May 19.

The book says Obama laid into Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen in an Oval Office meeting last October.

Obama was irked by the leak of a confidential report by Gen. Stanley McChrystal calling for an expanded military presence in Afghanistan, and by McChrystal saying he could not support a strategy relying on special forces and unmanned drone attacks.

Obama was conducting a lengthy review of operations in Afghanistan at the time. He largely sided with the generals and agreed to deploy 30,000 more troops.

In October, 2008, the ACLU issued a report outlining the policies needed to restore civil liberties and America’s constitutional framework in the wake of the Bush assault, entitled “Actions for Restoring America.”  On the one-year anniversary of Obama’s inauguration as President, the ACLU has issued a new report — pointedly and revealingly entitled “America Unrestored” — which details Obama’s record in these areas.  Although there have been a few isolated bright spots (the DOJ’s intensified domestic enforcement of civil rights laws), Obama’s overall civil liberties record has been extremely disappointing, and this report from the ACLU (with which I consult) comprehensively documents the failures.

The key to understanding Barack Obama is one simple fact: He received more Wall Street money than his Republican rival John McCain and his rivals for the Democratic primary nomination. What did the investment bankers and hedge fund tycoons think they were getting for their investment? Progressive supporters of Obama might have hoped that he would turn the clock back before Reagan and promote a new New Deal. But Obama’s financial backers had no problems with the “Reagan settlement” that Bill Clinton had ratified in two terms, just as Eisenhower in two terms had ratified the “Roosevelt settlement.” Obama’s supporters in the corporate elite thought that the country had taken the wrong course, not in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, but in 2000, with the election of George W. Bush. The second Bush had destabilized the post-1980 system, by becoming — to the surprise of everyone who thought he would be like his father — the tribune of the wacky neo-Confederate right. Obama’s task was to bring about a restoration of the pre-W status quo that would be acceptable to center-right Democrats and moderate Republicans, while keeping the wingnuts at bay and buying off the progressives with rhetoric and token gestures.

Sure, there have been accomplishments by this president in his first year, as with any president. But the disappointments are more deeply felt, particularly by gay people like me.

Rather than moving boldly forward with his party’s big majority in Congress, Obama set out from the beginning, on almost every issue, to bring Republicans aboard, seemingly at all costs. It was a fool’s errand since the Republican Party has long defined itself as the party of “no way.” From civil liberties and economic policy, to the war in Afghanistan and healthcare, Obama pandered to conservatives in his first year but has nothing to show for it except headaches for himself and his party.