Both the Congress and the White House should take the lead together. We learned what happens when the Congress is left to take the lead by itself on a major policy initiative. The President needs to lead. Hopefully we will see that leadership tonight.
CNN has the story now as well - note the following:
Pentagon Spokesman Geoff Morrell deflected repeated questions about the policy at Wednesday's Pentagon briefing, directing reporters to take their questions to the White House.That's the problem, the Pentagon keeps deferring to the White House, which keeps deferring to the Hill. The White House and the Hill need to take the lead together. And in the meantime, the President needs to finally issue that Stop Loss policy ceasing the discharges of gay and lesbian troops pending the legislation repeal.
"We continue to work on this problem," said Morrell. "But I'm not going to get into it with more specificity than that."
Oh, and Joe and I will be live-blogging the State of the Union starting at 8pm Eastern. The speech is at 9. We'll be using a new chat software that will permit us to blog it real time. Our readers can continue to leave their thoughts in the comments section, but you can also pose questions to us via the chat software - we'll see them, but they won't be posted publicly unless we post them ourselves (with so many readers, chats can quickly become a mess with too many people posting at once).
So, to reiterate, starting at 8pm Eastern feel free to post your comments in the comment section of the SOTU open thread that we'll put it, and feel free to submit questions to use via the chat program that you'll see embedded in the post. It's cool software, we can even post polls and things. Hopefully it's an enjoyable experiment. We'll also be feeding Joe's and my Twitter feeds (@joesudbay and @aravosis) into the chat, and finally, my Twitter feed will also be published live on CBSNews.com along with a number of other liberal and conservative bloggers, you can follow it live already here.
