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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (39012)	11/24/2009 5:08:47 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

What a lame duck Obama is. Everything that goes wrong is President Bush's fault. 2011 should teach him a few lessons.

To: lorne who wrote (39012)	11/25/2009 3:48:54 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

What President Obama should do on U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan: (America looks pretty nearly evenly SPLIT on the question.) USA TODAY GALLUP POLL usatoday.com What President Obama should do on U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan: Begin to withdraw ---------------------------------- 39% Increase by 40,000 -------------------------------- 37% Increase by less than 40,000 ------------------- 10% Keep the same as now ---------------------------- 9% Source: USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,017 adults Friday-Sunday. Margin of error: +/ 4 percentage points.

To: lorne who wrote (39012)	2/1/2010 3:32:42 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

At What Point Does Obama Take Responsibility? Obama 2.0: The ultimate insider By ALAN BOCK Register Senior Editorial Writer abock@ocregister.com Published: Jan. 29, 2010 Updated: 3:57 p.m. Beyond the feisty and sometimes almost conversational tone and the interesting impulse to keep on pushing for some version of Obamacare even though it appears to be mathematically impossible to get it done this year, several things about President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address seem worthy of note. The first is related to the decision to keep pushing significant steps likely to lead toward a more comprehensive government takeover of health care despite the obvious fact that the political climate on the issue has changed drastically against it. President Obama made a gesture toward taking some responsibility for the sea-change in a country that almost universally wished him well a year ago – Gallup had him at 67 percent job approval last January but 49 percent this January. But it was a limited gesture. The president argued that "the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, 'What's in it for me?'" So the problem wasn't with the substance of any of the various reform proposals, but with the process – all that unsightly congressional sausage-making and horse-trading – and with the president's failure to explain it properly. This from a president who gave numerous speeches and interviews about health insurance reform including a previous address to a joint session of Congress. Not allowed to intrude into President Obama's ruminations was the possibility that the more Americans learned about the various proposals – two significantly different versions are still pending – to reshape 16 percent of the U.S. economy into a one-size-fits-all mold, the more of them decided on the merits that it was either not essential or downright objectionable. Related to this rhetorical trope was the atmosphere of a campaign speech by a principled and incorruptible outsider determined to take on the corrupt and sleazy Washington establishment, and "the numbing weight of our politics" and "politicians [who] tear each other down instead of lifting this country up" while "TV pundits reduce serious debates into silly arguments." It's not that there isn't a good deal of truth in such criticisms of the ways of a "Washington" he invoked more as an epithet than a place. But at what point does a president of the United States take responsibility for his part in feeding the atmosphere of distrust? Barack Obama has been president for a little more than a year, during which time his party has had a theoretically filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (a rare occurrence) and a substantial majority in the House. During that time he has engaged in a goodly share of partisan sniping while making only empty gestures toward the will-o-the-wisp of bipartisan cooperation. He's the ultimate insider. Yet he took no responsibility for the poisonous atmosphere in Washington, trying to make believe that he is still quite above it all. Finally, the criticism of the Supreme Court, practically shaking his finger at the six of its nine members sitting in front of him, was highly unusual, demagogic and – especially egregious for a former professor of constitutional law – highly inaccurate. As Tony Mauro pointed out in the Blog of Legal Times, an archive search could find only nine references to the Supreme Court in State of the Union messages since 1913, most of them welcomes to the justices in the room. In 1988, Ronald Reagan did call for a school prayer constitutional amendment, an indirect jab, and in 1922 Warren Harding called for a constitutional amendment to permit regulation of child labor. But no president in the past – at least in a State of the Union message – offered so scathing a critique of a particular court decision. Halfway through the president's peroration – "Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections" – Justice Samuel Alito was seen to shake his head slightly and mouth the words "not true" silently. He has been criticized for this gesture, and probably rightly so. It is considered important that the high court maintain the image of serene detachment from day-to-day politics. If his gesture was wrong, however, on the merits Justice Alito was right. As UCLA law professor Adam Winkler noted – at the Huffington Post, no less – "the court did not overturn 'a century of law.' The provision upended by the court was only seven years old. It was a novel innovation of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law adopted during the Bush administration. "There is 'a century of law' restricting direct corporate contributions to candidates. Last week's decision didn't address that law." The McCain-Feingold law banned independent commercials that even came close to looking like electioneering by advocacy groups organized as corporations (as almost all of them are) like the NRA and ACLU during the 30 days prior to a primary and 60 days prior to a general election. This was an egregious limitation on First Amendment rights. If the admonition that "Congress shall make no law" restricting freedom of speech was meant to protect anything, it was to protect political speech, and the time just before an election is just when speech should be at its freest. McCain-Feingold's outrageous restriction was unconstitutional on its face and richly deserved to be overturned. That President Obama considers it an outrage suggests that he holds freedom of speech in contempt. Perhaps more important, his criticism was utterly inaccurate. Even his projection that the ruling could lead to foreign corporations influencing U.S. elections was misplaced. Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1996, which prohibits independent political commercials by foreign nationals or foreign companies. The Supremes didn't change that law. A president slip-sliding away from taking responsibility and indulging in inaccurate demagoguery? Surely that couldn't happen here! ocregister.com