President Obama just announced in a news conference that all American troops in Iraq will be withdrawn by the end of the year, and the troops will be home for the holidays.

This was expected, but it’s still monumental. After spending trillions of dollars and suffering thousands of American casualties, we’re finally leaving Iraq.

The U.S. was open to keeping trainers in Iraq past the end of the year, but the Iraqi government would not grant immunity to American soldiers, so we told them to forget it.

The primary races are in full gear, but we’re starting to see themes emerge for the fall mid-term elections.

President Obama looks like he’s itching for a fight, and that’s good news. George W. Bush did a great job helping Republicans in the 2002 mid-terms, and Obama seems determined to nationalize the elections and get the Democratic base energized for a tough 2010 cycle. He had some great lines:

“After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No. You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”

The President also used his old mopping metaphor, saying that Democrats were busy cleaning up the GOP’s mess, only to have Republicans criticize: “Hold the broom better. That’s not how you mop.”

“Don’t tell me how to mop,” Obama said.

Here’s a good article detailing all the childish gloating from the right. This is another example of how low our politics have sunk in recent years. Conservatives used to rail against liberals for alleged “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” but the contempt and hatred for Barack Obama has reached bizarre levels on the right. Frankly, they sound like a bunch of dumb teenagers taunting a rival team.

Paul Krugman has been tough on Barack Obama at times, but he’s behind him on health care. Today he mocks the media for focusing on everything but the actual policy issues.

The talking heads on cable TV panned President Obama’s Wednesday press conference. You see, he didn’t offer a lot of folksy anecdotes.

Shame on them. The health care system is in crisis. The fate of America’s middle class hangs in the balance. And there on our TVs was a president with an impressive command of the issues, who truly understands the stakes.

Mr. Obama was especially good when he talked about controlling medical costs. And there’s a crucial lesson there — namely, that when it comes to reforming health care, compassion and cost-effectiveness go hand in hand.

Of course, the policy issues are too boring for our brain-dead media when compared to all the drama surrounding the process.

Krugman also focused on one of the most important policy developments over the past several days.

I don’t know how many people understand the significance of Mr. Obama’s proposal to give MedPAC, the expert advisory board to Medicare, real power. But it’s a major step toward reducing the useless spending — the proliferation of procedures with no medical benefits — that bloats American health care costs.

And both the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have also been emphasizing the importance of “comparative effectiveness research” — seeing which medical procedures actually work.

So the Obama administration’s commitment to health care for all goes along with an unprecedented willingness to get serious about spending health care dollars wisely. And that’s part of a broader pattern.

Many health care experts believe that one main reason we spend far more on health than any other advanced nation, without better health outcomes, is the fee-for-service system in which hospitals and doctors are paid for procedures, not results. As the president said Wednesday, this creates an incentive for health providers to do more tests, more operations, and so on, whether or not these procedures actually help patients.

MedPAC was originally created by Republicans to look for ways to cut costs in Medicare and Medicaid, so you would think they would be openly in favor of this development of giving this panel real power, but most Republicans are too busy trying to kill the reform effort.

Since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, we’ve seen the lunatic fringe on the right push the limits of idiocy. Since his election, the levels of insanity on the right have grown exponentially.

The “birther” movement has set a new standard, even by the standards of the loony right wing. They make the teabaggers looks like sober economic scholars.

Naturally, Jon Stewart, the most trusted newsman in America following the death of Cronkite, has a field day with this one.

Pay particular attention to his smackdown of Lou Dobbs, who brings up “questions” surrounding Obama’s place of birth several days after a guest host ON HIS OWN SHOW completely debunks the asinine story. Further proof that Lou Dobbs is a complete buffoon. Why is this clown still on CNN?

I enjoy reading Peggy Noonan because she’s never shy about her point of view. She also writes beautifully.

That said, for every great column, she produces at least two clunkers. Today’s column, with the subtitle of “The unbearable lightness of Obama’s administration,” is particularly bizarre. Here’s the introduction.

He is willowy when people yearn for solid, reed-like where they hope for substantial, a bright older brother when they want Papa, cool where they probably prefer warmth. All of which may or may not hurt Barack Obama in time. Lincoln was rawboned, prone to the blues and freakishly tall, with a new-grown beard that refused to become an assertion and remained, for four years, a mere and constant follicular attempt. And he did OK.

Such impressions—coolness, slightness—can come to matter only if they capture or express some larger or more meaningful truth. At the moment they connect, for me, to something insubstantial and weightless in the administration’s economic pronouncements and policies. The president seems everywhere and nowhere, not fully focused on the matters at hand. He’s trying to keep up with the news cycle with less and less to say. “I am angry” about AIG’s bonuses. The administration seems buffeted, ad hoc. Policy seems makeshift, provisional. James K. Galbraith captures some of this in The Washington Monthly: “The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind the program.”

What a jumbled mess. She sounds like all those journalists who were lecturing Obama early in the campaign that he had no chance of winning if he stayed calm and refused to go negative on Hillary.

She asserts there’s “something insubstantial and weightless in the administration’s economic pronouncements and policies,” when liberals and conservatives recognize that Barack Obama has proposed the most daring and ambitious budget of our generation. Conservatives hate the budget for that very reason – Obama wants to fundamentally change how we meet the challenges of health care, energy and education. Somehow, Peggy Noonan has missed all that, getting distracted by the daily Washington soap opera that plays out on cable TV.

Barack Obama is trying to put out a bonfire cause by years of irresponsible behavior in Washington and on Wall Street. His critics are howling that he hasn’t snapped his fingers and slayed this economic monster with a silver bullet. The bottom line is this – Obama and Bernanke have put together a sensible package of programs that just might get us out of this mess. Of course, Ms. Noonan has nothing to say about the actual substance.

She isn’t comfortable with Obama’s style, probably because she’s been in Washington so long she can’t process anything other than the scripted nonsense of previous administrations. She shouldn’t confuse message discipline with sound policy. Obama is selling his policies on his terms, and he refuses to treat the American people like idiots. Critics might quip that he comes across as “professorial,” but many Americans appreciate a President who doesn’t try to turn every policy proposal into a dumbed-down soundbite.

Barack Obama has always excelled when it was time to give a big speech, and he delivered again tonight. He explained the crisis we face, along with his plans to address it. Some of mentioned that Obama needed to offer some hope, and that of course was an easy task for Obama.

But, he took things much further. he laid down the gauntlet on his agenda. He made it clear that he was committed to addressing energy, health care and education – this year!

One of the interesting details was his reference to finding $2 trillion of spending cuts over the next 10 years that he wants to cut. He mentioned farm subsidies for large agri-business and “cold-war” weapons systems as necessary cuts. The political fights here will be significant, but he made it clear he was willing to make serious cuts.

If you’re interested in a closer study of Obama’s speech and the importance of his rhetoric, dig around the web. A lot of sites are popping up about this subject and you can always find good discount printing options to get copies of his speeches for personal reference.

I’m listening to Obama’s remarks as he closes his Fiscal Responsibility Summit, and it’s rather stunning to see an interactive session that includes the President, and other leaders of our government like John McCain and Steny Hoyer. It was particularly interesting to hear John McCain speak and be supportive of the Obama Administration’s goal to get control of the military procurement process.

When looking at the list of attendees, it seems clear that Obama is serious about his goal to address the serious fiscal issues facing this nation. We are wasting billions of dollars with an inefficient health care system and wasteful weapons programs.

There seems to be some consensus on the potential of cutting corporate tax rates in exchange for closing loopholes.

Coupled with Obama’s aggressive, and honest, budget proposal, this might help generate some serious momentum for fiscal discipline.

In a sea of terrible economic news, Intel offered some great news by announcing a $7 billion investment.

On a day when all of Washington was grappling with the collapse of the American economy, President Barack Obama desperately needed some good news. And he got it from Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who was in town to announce that his company, which makes microprocessors for personal and business computing, would spend $7 billion over the next two years to build advanced manufacturing facilities in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico.

So grateful was the president for this bit of private-sector economic stimulus that he called Otellini at his hotel room to congratulate him. And he took advantage of the call to do a little lobbying, asking for Otellini’s support in the debate over the economic stimulus package.

It was Otellini’s first conversation with the president, and he was impressed. “He’s very quick,” Otellini said. “He’s a natural.”

Otellini supports the stimulus plan, and that’s also a plus for Obama.

Given the horrible news coming from tech giants like Cisco, this news from Intel is even more important. Many of the tech giants are sitting on piles of cash, so hopefully we’ll see more investments.

Barack Obama’s first news conference ranks up there as one of the best presidential news conferences I’ve ever seen. He was thorough and eloquent in all of his answers. He knew his facts, and he was very clear with his arguments. He continued his tone of bipartisanship, yet he made it clear he wouldn’t take political cheap shots from a party that just doubled our national debt over the past eight years.

He did not hold back when discussing the gravity of the crisis we are facing, and he made it clear that extraordinary efforts would be needed on many fronts. This situation will not be fixed by one policy proposal. We need to attack this on many fronts.

It’s a stark contrast to the past eight years, and we now have a president who is able to project competence and analytical skills. He was able to explain his positions with clarity, and he avoided sound bites in favor of long answers that actually answered the questions.

Some Republicans are giddy over the partisan fight that occured with respect to the stimulus package, but they are overmatched in this fight and will likely regret making this a partisan issue.