President Barack Obama addresses the American Tea Party rallies (and Fox News) by saying he welcomes a serious discussion of the issues and, specifically, how to pay for health care in this CNN clip.
National Public Radio’s intrepid Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg got there first on Thursday with the news that Justice David Souter, a mere youngster at 69 compared to some of the senior citizens on the highest bench, is nevertheless sick and tired of Washington D.C. and is headed back to New Hampshire at the end of the court’s current term. He’s confident, opines Totenberg, that the new prez will select a replacement in tune with Souter’s own moderate-to-liberal bent. She predicts Obama will pick a woman as Souter’s replacement, but says the choice won’t do much to change the court’s conservative bent.
Right away the predictions started to fly on who that replacement might be: Read the rest of this entry »
The first 100 days of the president’s administration is usually used as a report card to judge its success or gauge where it might be for the rest of its term. However, the closing of President Obama’s honeymoon may not even be the news headline as reports of Arlen Specter switching parties overshadows the president. This completely arbitrary 100th-day-mark might underscore more the status of the Republican Party than anything else.
President Obama announced on Earth Day new initiatives to harness alternative energy including wind, solar, and ocean currents. During his speech, Obama made it clear that his new initiative was not only intended to address threats of climate change but could also create new jobs.
Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline…. The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy.
It is refreshing to finally have a president who recognizes that “environmentally friendly” doesn’t mean “bad for the economy.” A video (after the jump) demonstrates how a green economy can actually create jobs. The new initiative will lease federal waters to harness wind and ocean currents as a renewable source of energy. These facilities must be designed, materials need to be bought, their construction needs to be contracted, staff needs to maintain it – all are positions waiting to be filled.
It’s a tangled web, so maybe that is why it is not exactly evening news material. But the revelations this weekend that former AG Alberto “I know nooooo-thing” Gonzalez blocked a criminal investigation into a member of Congress as a political favor is explosive stuff. Here’s a recap from Mother Jones:
Everyone is entitled to a presumption of innocence–at least in a courtroom–but it is certainly suspicious that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has not denied the most recent allegations against him. My CQ colleague Jeff Stein reported late Sunday night that Gonzales had blocked a preliminary FBI investigation into Democratic Representative Jane Harman, who had been captured by NSA eavesdroppers telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would try to use her clout to lessen espionage-related charges filed against two AIPAC officials. In return for her assistance, the suspected Israeli agent reportedly offered to help Harman become chair of the House intelligence committee. On Tuesday, The New York Times confirmed much of the story–including the piece about Gonzales: that the then-AG killed the inquiry because Harman, then the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, could help the Bush administration defend its use of warrantless wiretaps.
So there are two lines of inquiry that official investigators ought to follow. First, whether Harman broke the law by offering to lean on the criminal investigation of AIPAC for help in advancing her career. (The Times reports that the suspected Israeli agent promised that media mogul Haim Saban would threaten to hold back donations to Rep. Nancy Pelosi if she did not award Harman the top slot on the intelligence committee; Saban’s spokesperson did not respond to the Times’ request for comment.) Second, whether Gonzales stopped a criminal investigation because the target (Harman) could help the Bush administration. Harman has put out a very carefully-worded denial that’s full of holes. Gonzales, though, hasn’t said anything. That’s not very reassuring. Shouldn’t a former attorney general be able to declare that he never halted an investigation as a favor to a lawmaker who was doing the administration a favor? If not, there’s a problem–and a problem (no matter Barack Obama’s penchant for leaving the past behind) deserving a thorough examination by someone with subpoena power.
The CQ story: http://static.cqpolitics.com/harman-3098436-page1.html?docid=hsnews-000003098436
And the NYT folo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/us/politics/21harman.html?_r=1&hp
This week I was joined by ABC Action News anchor Brendan McLaughlin and Democratic consultant Ana Cruz. We discussed, according to my pre-production notes and links:
Download it or listen on the player after the jump:
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor
Ben Luongo is a USF political science graduate student. He will be graduating this spring.
I wanted to follow up on my last piece which was on the tea party protests, so I attended Tampa’s tea party at 5 p.m. on Wednesday. I previously wrote that the debate on Obama’s spending has suffered from the failure of both sides to provide reasons for their arguments. I therefore attended the event with the hopes of understanding some of the tea-partiers’ reasons for their concerns.
Here is what we talked about: Read the rest of this entry »
President Barack Obama is giving a major economic speech at midday, reviewing what he has done about the economy in his first 12 weeks in office and why, a much more cogent argument for change and economic revolution than you will hear at any Tea Party tomorrow.
“It is simply not sustainable to have a 21st century financial system that is governed by 20th century rules and regulations that allowed the recklessness of a few to threaten the entire economy,” the president said. “It is not sustainable to have an economy where in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based too much on inflated home prices, maxed out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets; or an economy where the incomes of the top 1 percent have skyrocketed while the typical working household has seen their income decline by nearly $2,000.”
Obama then turned to the Bible for an analogy.
“There is a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells the story of two men,” he said. “The first built his house on a pile of sand, and it was destroyed as soon as the storm hit. But the second is known as the wise man, for when “…the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house…it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
“We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.”
He called for more scientists and engineers and fewer financial pencil-pushers and manipulators, as well as a transition to a clean-energy carbon emissions cap. And Obama said people who focus on cutting “a few earmarks” or slashing the National Endowment for the Arts misses the bigger picture, that the deficit is driven by entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare. Changing the health care system, then, is crucial to a long-term solution.
And he rightly puts some blame on the culture in Washington and the media’s shortening attention span. “For too long, too many in Washington put off hard decisions for some other time on some other day,” he said. “There’s been a tendency to score political points instead of rolling up sleeves to solve real problems. There is also an impatience that characterizes this town – an attention span that has only grown shorter with the twenty-four hour news cycle, and insists on instant gratification in the form of immediate results or higher poll numbers … instead of confronting the major challenges that will shape our future in a sustained and focused way.”
The full text after the jump.
By Alexandra Koutsogiannopoulos
PoHo Contributor
Alex is the program director for the United Nations Association-USA’s Tampa Bay Chapter and is an occasional guest on the Political Whore podcast.
President Barack Obama recently outlined his plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The following is a brief report of his statements about what he wants to do:
In announcing a plan on Friday that could be his signature foreign policy effort, Mr. Obama said that he would send more troops — some 4,000 — but stipulated that they would not carry out combat missions, and would instead be used to train the Afghan Army and the national police.
… Mr. Obama framed the issue as one that relies on one central tenet: protecting Americans from attacks like the one that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.
He started poorly but turned tradition on its head by bypassing the major daily newspapers and calling more niche publication writers. In his second prime time presser, President Barack Obama kept domestic issues front and center.
From The Fix’s Chris Cillizza:
As weakly as Obama started the press conference, he finished it just as strongly — taking a question on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and turning it into a forceful argument for why patience is a virtue in politics and policy. He was reasonable, thoughtful and convincing. And, it’s always good to either open or close strong — although Obama’s advisers would have probably preferred a stronger opening given that the audience was likely the highest right around 8 p.m.
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.
Last Friday afternoon’s soaring (and dizzying) deficit numbers produced by the Congressional Budget Office were the last thing the Obama administration needed. Between that and what can only be labeled bailout fatigue that has exploded after the AIG debacle, there is a fear that one of the President’s most ambitious and far reaching goals of his presidency – reforming health care – could be on life support before the specifics of the plan are already announced.
OK, so the Special Olympics joke bombed, prompting a White House clarification and apology. But the rest of President Barack Obama’s historic appearance on late night television Thursday was easy sledding.
“The president of the United States is here,” Tonight Show host Jay Leno said in prepping the audience, as if they didn’t already know. The rest of the interview was just like a soft-rock radio station: soft and easy. This from Joe Garofoli in the San Francisco Chronicle:
If this is what the interviews on Leno’s new 10 p.m. show is going to be like, politicians are going to be lining up for a turn wacking softballs out of the batting cage. This was the first time that a sitting president had showed up on a late night show, but Leno’s first few “questions” according to the transcript included the word “Wow” a lot.
Wow.
Not a lot of news to be made here. Obama appeared relaxed and confident, and got off the best lines. “In Washington it’s a little bit like ‘American Idol,’ except everybody is Simon Cowell.”
Hihooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
The full transcript after the jump:
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor
Ben Luongo is a USF political science graduate student. He will be graduating this spring.
I watched Dick Cheney’s first interview since he left the vice-presidency on John King’s State of the Union Sunday public affairs talker. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I shouldn’t have thought it would be different from any other Cheney interview. I knew that Cheney would continue to defend all of Bush’s Iraq war policies – he has always demonstrated unshakable confidence in previous interviews. However, his confidence in his decisions often makes him appear clueless to the consequences of those decisions.
Unfortunately, the interview was just another display of thoughtless and tiresome arguments, with the most aggravating statement said by Cheney being “with respect to Iraq, at the end of now six years, is that we have accomplished nearly everything that we had set out to do.”
Here is the problem with that line:
President Barack Obama didn’t get to the White House by being a dumbass, politically at least. He sees the growing populist rage at companies that are getting bailout dollars from hardworking taxpayers and squandering it on bullshit like AIG’s bonuses.
Today, with the story threatening to overwhelm his recovery agenda, Obama is trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
From The New York Times:
“In the last six months, A.I.G. has received substantial sums from the U.S. Treasury,” Mr. Obama said. He added that he had asked Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner “to use that leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”
In strongly-worded remarks delivered in the White House East Room before small business owners, Mr. Obama called A.I.G. “a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed.”
“Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses at all, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Mr. Obama said. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?”
By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.
As the Dow Jones Industrials and the S&P 500 continued their dismal descent last week, conservative commentators appeared proud that they alone have deciphered the reason why – it’s President Obama’s economic proposals, of course.
From the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial on Friday:
What’s worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President’s policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession.
And on the next page, former Bush 41 Economic Advisor Michael Boskin wrote under the doomsday headline “Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow:”
It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.
And so on. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly led off virtually every one of his “Talking Points” segments by also blaming the president’s “Socialist spending sprees” as further evidence that Wall Street is not impressed.
But is this really correct? One political theorist laughed when I asked him this last week.
Jennifer Stone-Anderson called Friday in a near panic. For those who don’t recall, she is the Tampa Bay artist who covered her 2004 Saturn Ion with her own art depicting Barack Obama, his agenda and hope. She’s behind in her car payments and is trying to sell the Obama Car, which I wrote about back in October:
The south St. Petersburg resident showed off her rolling campaign ad in our parking lot today, pointing out the giant globe that’s really a lit-fuse bomb; Arlington National Cemetery (”where our soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried”); a pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness; and the admonition to recycle (curbside or otherwise) in St. Pete but not to “recycle Bush-McCain.”
Stone-Anderson said she painted the white Ion with acrylics she had leftover at home, on and off, weather permitting, for two months.
But her attempts to sell the Obama Car aren’t meeting with much success. She put it up for auction on eBay and got only one bid. For 99 cents. It cost her $60 to list it, she says.
The problem? She isn’t really selling a car, in her way of seeing it. She’s selling her artistic creation on the car.
“People are looking at the car, and I’m looking at the art,” says Stone-Anderson.
She won’t name her price but asked interested buyers to contact her (ASAP!) at twentyfivecats@yahoo.com.
The weather is warming, the oak pollen is covering the ground in dark mustard yellow, so it must be time for the annual attempt by state lawmakers to kill the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission.
From TBO.com:
State Reps. Rich Glorioso, R-Plant City, and Faye Culp, R-Tampa, say the county panel duplicates work done by state and regional agencies and creates obstacles for developers. They cite complaints from builders who have to get permits to fill wetlands from the local panel, as well as from state and federal regulators.
“I say we’ve got three organizations looking and doing the same thing. Why?” Glorioso asked Friday.
Culp, at a Feb. 27 House committee meeting, said she would like to “wave a magic wand and delete” the EPC.
Civic watchdog and former Hillsborough County Commission candidate says longtime EPC foe Frank Matthews is behind this attempt and the past ones.
“Behind this initiative is Frank Matthews representing statewide development interests,” said Layne, who lobbies against such laws in Tallahassee for her Coalition 4 Responsible Growth. “This is the same attorney that came into Hillsborough County over a year ago and tried to abolish EPC through a number of the County Commissioners. As you know, the public’s interest prevailed so far, but this is a very dangerous session. The Legislators are looking at putting Florida Forever on permanent hold to abolishing the Department of Community Affairs (our state’s growth management watchdog) to waiving impact fees and concurrency for transportation and schools. All in the name of economic stimulus.”
More evidence that sanity has returned to the White House, as President Barack Obama is set today to once again allow federal research dollars to be used in stem-cell investigations.
The AP reports:
Obama was to sign an executive order and memo Monday in an East Room ceremony, a long-promised move that would fill a campaign promise. Advisers said it was part of a broader declaration on science that would guide the administration’s policies on matters ranging from renewable energy to climate change.
“I would simply say this memorandum is not concerned solely – or even specifically – with stem cell research,” said Harold Varmus, chairman of the White House’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. He said it would address how the government uses science and who is advising officials across federal agencies.
The proposed changes do not fund creation of new lines, nor specify which existing lines can be used. They mean that scientists, who until now have had to rely on private donations to work with these newer stem cell lines, can apply for government money for the research, just like they do for studies of gene therapy or other treatment approaches.
At the same event, the president planned to announce safeguards through the National Institutes of Health so science is protected from political interference.
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor
Ben Luongo is a USF political science graduate student. He will be graduating this spring.
The New York Times on Tuesday reported on a letter President Barack Obama sent to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev supposedly offering to terminate the development of the missile defense system in Europe if Russia became a key player in halting Iran’s nuclear program. Later that day, Obama clarified the content of the letter saying that the NYT article didn’t “accurately characterize the letter.”
“What I said in the letter is what I have said publicly, which is that the missile defense that we have talked about deploying is directed toward, not Russia, but Iran, and what I said … was that, obviously, to the extent that we are lessening Iran’s commitment to nuclear weapons, then that reduces the pressure for, or the need for a missile defense system.”
The NYT article may have mischaracterized the letter if it led readers to believe that the White House was using the missile defense system in Europe as a bargaining chip. I don’t believe that was the intention of the article nor do I think that Obama plans on using the system as a bargaining chip. There is another concern though – that the topic of the defense system even came up at all in the letter. Here’s why…
eric_jotkoff VP Biden coming to Miami on Thursday. Speaking to the AFL-CIO, he will talk about how a strong middle class needs a strong labor movement
25 minutes ago from web
Who won this round?
The White House today is touting new estimates on job creation from the stimulas bill by the end of 2010. That’s $28 billion worth of asphalt-layin’, engineerin’, project managin’, right-of-way buyin’ work.
Florida gets $1.3 billion of that, with $52 million of the state’s share going to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, the second-biggest allocation after Miami.
The administration’s press release from today is after the jump.
Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher — John McCain’s go-to guy during the presidential campaign anytime ol’ Mac needed to stand beside someone nuttier than he was — is making some waves at the annual CPAC gathering. Here’s the video:
I’m confused. Was Joe ever in the military? I find no record of his service, yet he’s such a booster that he feels shooting congresspeople is OK if they dis the troops. (And let’s be honest: Can you name ANY elected official who has been stupid enough to say something derogatory about the military and remained in office? Yeah, me neither.)
And another question for Joe: If you’re so gung-ho for America’s armed forces, why not join up and do some good? I hear we’re going to send another 17,000 husbands/wives/sons/daughters to Afghanistan in the coming months. Perhaps you’d like to enlist and join our fighting men and women on the front lines? It’s put up or shut up time, Joe. Enlist. Or, if you choose not to, please seek counseling. There’s clearly some violence in you that needs to be addressed.
The president announced this morning his plans for Iraq, which include ending combat operations and leave-behind force of 35,000-50,000. He had support from former presidential rival John McCain.
From the NYT:
President Obama heads to one of the nation’s most storied military bases Friday morning to unveil plans to pull most troops out of Iraq by August 2010 and he has support from an unlikely quarter – Senator John McCain, the Republican he beat in last year’s election.
Mr. McCain and other Republicans emerged from a meeting with Mr. Obama at the White House on Thursday evening reassured that the president’s withdrawal plan is responsible and reasonable. After securing assurances from Mr. Obama that he would reconsider his plans if violence increases, Mr. McCain and the Republicans expressed cautious support.
Speaking on the Senate floor on Friday before the president’s speech, Mr. McCain credited the opportunity to pull troops out to the surge of troops that President George W. Bush ordered two years ago with Mr. McCain’s support and he cautioned that Iraq remains fragile so Mr. Obama should stay flexible and listen to military commanders.
So, just why did MSNBC commentator Christ Matthews whisper “oh god” into a hot mic just as La. Gov. Bobby Jindal pranced out of a side room to deliver his rebuttal speech on behalf of the Republicans last night? Did he know just how poorly Jindal was going to perform? How far Jindal would fall short of expectations? How nonsensical his analogy about Hurricane Katrina was? Is Matthews able to see into the future?? If so, Chris, who is going to win the NCAA football championship this season?
Answer: Matthews tells Politico that he gasped because he was “taken aback” by the absurdity of the entrance. “I was taken aback by that peculiar stagecraft, the walking from somewhere in the back of this narrow hall, this winding staircase looming there, the odd anti-bellum look of the scene. Was this some mimicking of a president walking along the state floor to the East Room?”
Credit: Whitehouse.gov
From the White House, as Barack Obama speaks:
Excerpts of the President’s address to the joint session of Congress tonight:
We have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.
Well that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.
From the “Consider the Source” File:
As President Obama preps for his first address to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m., the punditocracy is going wild with predictions and desires of what he will/should say. He’s catching heat for being a doomsayer so far instead of the hopeful candidate whose pop art depiction graced untold Hope posters. This is a tough speech for him: he must be hopeful and realistic at the same time. He must explain how his borrowing trillions of dollars from the Chinese squares with his desire to cut deficit spending. He has to roll out an austere budget proposal yet still pad it with social programs and safety-net spending that his party demands.
The New York Times sets the table for him by polling and finding Obama remains enormously popular:
President Obama is benefiting from remarkably high levels of optimism and confidence among Americans about his leadership, providing him with substantial political clout as he confronts the nation’s economic challenges and opposition from nearly all Republicans in Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans.
Jacob Heilbrunn uses that poll data as his jumping off point for labeling Obama’s speech on the economy tonight as the epitaph for the conservative movement:
…these two men, Bobby Jindal and Charlie Crist, representing both the split ideology of the Republican Party and its new, swarthier face.The Indian-American vs. the Greek-American.
The big question that will remain for GOP voters in a little less than four years: White hair or dark?
The Republican Party’s anti-Obama stimulus gambit appears not to be paying off. A poll by AP/GfK shows the public widely is siding with Obama and Democrats in Congress on the economic recovery plan — and panning the GOP.
Obama’s approval rating on the economy is 68 percent. The Democrats in Congress get a 49 percent approval, while Congressional Republicans score only 33 percent approval.
Words fail me, so we’ll go right to the video:
Sure, sounds like the new president hasn’t lived up to the seven vows in this speech. They are, as posted with this video:
1. Make Government Open and Transparent [PoHo: OK, it's too early in his administration to tell.]
2. Make it “Impossible” for Congressmen to slip in Pork Barrel Projects [the stimulus bill was certainly a failure of this promise]
3. Meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public (republicans shut out)
4. No more secrecy
5. Public will have 5 days to look at a Bill [PolitiFact agrees he broke this promise.]
6. You’ll know what’s in it (Republican Senators didnt know)
7. We will put every pork barrel project online
What do you think?
Lincoln reads "The Pet Goat" to his son, Tad
It’s Presidents Day, our annual ignored holiday that pretends to pay homage to the 42 men who have held the highest office in the land. C-SPAN rescues a brutally slow news day with its annual survey of historians and their rankings of the presidents, best to worst.
Atop the list is the old rail-splitter himself, is-he-bi-or-is-he-not Abraham Lincoln. George “No, I didn’t have to pick splinters out of Martha’s vagina because of my wooden teeth!” Washington wins you the place bet, and Franklin D. Roosevelt completes the trifecta.
Sure, some of the rankings are nostalgia-oriented, throwbacks to a time when the press and public didn’t ask so many questions of its leaders. As the LA Times points out:
It may not be a coincidence that the top five presidents of all time, as ranked by the cable channel’s panel of 65 historians, all come from the era before video clips and television.
Would Abe still be No. 1 if we’d seen a million replays of that vintage Civil War footage of him hitting his burly head on the log cabin door?
Or would a bald George Washington be No. 2 if his powdered wig had gotten blown out of the presidential carriage in a Washington wind, revealing the shiny presidential pate?
Or FDR, TR and Harry Truman at Nos. 3, 4 and 5 if we’d heard audio tapes of their candid opinions of Henry Wallace, William Howard Taft and Strom Thurmond, respectively?
As evidence suggesting that absence does make the memory grow softer, Bill Clinton slipped up from No. 21 in 2000 to No. 15 now, Ronald Reagan up to 10 from 11 and Bush I from 20 to 18. His son, Bush II, remains mired at No. 36 since he became a former president nearly four weeks ago. Hasn’t budged a notch.
So if Dubya is No. 36 on the list, you ask, which six presidents were worse than he was? Well, you know from my headline that James Buchanan was the worst. The other five The other five are after the jump plus a funny American History video from Robert Wuhl:
