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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (9315)	3/16/2009 10:37:40 AM
From: Bald Eagle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 103300

Obama Turns a Cold Shoulder to Britain President Barack Obama hosted his first foreign leader when he met in early March with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — and it was a “diplomatic disaster.” That’s the view of historian Arthur Herman, whose latest book is “Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age.” In an opinion piece published in the New York Post, Herman points to several examples of Obama apparently seeking to downplay the traditionally close U.S.-Britain ties: Obama did not hold a joint Rose Garden press conference with Brown, the “usual protocol” when a president and British prime minister first meet. Instead of citing the decades-old “special relationship” between the two countries, a White House spokesperson referred to a “special partnership.” In the traditional gift exchange between the two leaders, Brown gave Obama a pen holder made from the timber of the first British ship to fight the slave trade, and a signed first edition of the classic 8-volume biography of Winston Churchill by Randolph Churchill and Sir Martin Gilbert. Obama’s gift to Brown was a collection of DVDs of classic American films, including “Psycho,” which are all available in British stores. But Obama had earlier demonstrated his disdain for Churchill, ordering that the bust of Churchill that Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented to the U.S. after 9/11 be returned to the British Embassy. In fact, another Churchill expert, “Churchill: Speaker of the Century” author James Humes, cited a report that when Obama first entered the Oval Office and saw the Churchill bust, he said, “Get that goddam thing out of here.” Herman wrote in the Post: “This was a stunning posthumous attack on the memory of a man who was not only the living embodiment of the Anglo-American special relationship (Churchill was half American), but of its ideological foundations.” That special relationship has seen American and British forces fight together in two World Wars, Korea, the first Gulf War, Bosnia and most recently in Iraq. But the eight volumes of Churchill’s biography “will plainly sit unread on the White House bookshelf — because Barack Obama clearly considers that legacy, like the Anglo-American alliance itself, to be outdated,” Herman observed. The London Daily Telegraph succinctly stated: “Obama has been rudeness personified toward Britain.”

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (9315)	3/16/2009 11:44:22 AM
From: pompsander	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 103300

Perhaps you saw Ben Bernanke on 60 Minutes last night. Very illuminating interview. Bernanke points out the key moment for the current crisis occured at the end of September and the first week of October, culminating in the first TARP legislation in the first week and the fallout from it beginning in week two. While not spoken in so many words last night, Bernanke has implied before that he had trouble getting Bush/Paulson to pay attention to the looming meltdown....and only when it was deadly imminent could he (and others) get focus from the Executive branch. The resulting TARP legislation has pleased no one, partly because it began as Bush/Paulson's "give me a trillion dollars and ask no questions" demand. this exasperated the problem. No time for analysis. We were told it was going to be the end of the world unless we gave in... Yes, Obama has stumbled and his budget is bloated, etc. We could hope for better. (I prefered and still prefer the bad bank approach, which we were told was going to come out of TARP. Still waiting!). But it was not so long ago we had a different executive branch that seemed as clueless as the one now. In fact, they seem terribly similar to each other..... Eating cake or fiddling while the economy begins to melt...plenty of blame for all concerned.