President Obama has demanded that defense chiefs review their strategy in Afghanistan before going ahead with a troop surge, the Sunday Times reported.
There is concern among senior Democrats that the military is preparing to send up to 30,000 extra troops without a coherent plan or exit strategy.
The Pentagon was set to announce the deployment of 17,000 extra soldiers and marines last week but Defense Secretary Robert Gates postponed the decision after questions from Obama.
Along with Obama's closing Guantanamo Bay, suspending prosecution of Al Qaida prisoners for 6 months, and pussifying interrogation techniques to the point that they can no longer yield information...
Now Obama's delaying much-needed troop-deployment of 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, that would turn the tide in that theatre of war. After Obama gave lip-service during the campaign to INCREASING troops there, he is actually doing the opposite.
If Obama were an islamic manchurian candidate, or a sleeper agent to carry on William Ayers' wet dream to destroy America, I couldn't possibly be surprised at this point. Is it by idiocy or intent that Obama is on the path toward destroying our country?
And I'm still reeling from the series of tax-evading and otherwise scandal-laden nominations: 1) Bill Richardson (under investigation, withdrew in disgrace) 2) Tom Daschle (tax evasion upwards of $100,000, withdrew in disgrace, but Obama would have kept him anyway, if he didn't resign) 3) Tim Geithner (tax evader, who will ironically be our treasury secretary, i.e. he will be the chief officer to enforce the laws that he himself has broken. A certifiably corrupt nominee, who is somehow supposed to rally public trust and lead our economy out of corruption that he himself is already proven guilty of. ) 4) Eric Holder likewise will head the Justice Department, enforcing the laws that he himself has undermined, in his legal defense on behalf of terrorists. 5) Leon Panetta (nominated for CIA dierctor. Beyond that he has largely tried to destroy the agency he would lead, He likewise has evaded taxes on $700,000 in speaking appearances.) 6) Jeffrey Immelt (CEO of G E, a failed exec who is arguably one of the corporate elites who caused our economic collapse, not to mention the collapse of his own company's stock, and trading with America's enemies, is now appointed by Obama for the "economic advisory recovery board")
Plus two other women appointees of Obama's,whose names I've forgotten, who have illegal nanny troubles, who were paid tax free and under the table.
And not to mention the number of former lobbyists Obama has "waived" his own ethical standards to shove on us anyway. Only nominees removing themselves from the running has removed ANY of these people from joining the Obama White House.
Where are Obama's "higher standards" for holding office ?!? Every time someone fails to meet Obama's alleged standards, he "waives" standards and railroads them through anyway.
SAN FRANCISCO — In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration apparently surprised a panel of federal appeals judges Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.
In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights for the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects were taken secretly to other countries and tortured. The Bush administration argued that the case should be dismissed because even discussing it in court could present a threat to national security and relations with other nations
President Obama had harshly criticized the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees during the campaign, and has broken with the previous administration on such questions as whether to keep open the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a lawyer for the government, Douglas N. Letter, made the same state-secrets argument on Monday, startling several judges on the panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.
“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.
“The change in administration has no bearing?” she asked.
“No, your honor,” he said once more. The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.
That produced an angry response from Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case.
“This is not change,” he said in a statement. “This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”
A Justice Department spokesman, Matt Miller, said the government did not comment on pending litigation, but he seemed to suggest the Obama administration would invoke the privilege more sparingly than its predecessor.
“It is the policy of this administration to invoke the state secrets privilege only when necessary and in the most appropriate cases,” he said, adding that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had asked for a review of pending cases in which the government had previously asserted a state secret privilege.
“The Attorney General has directed that senior Justice Department officials review all assertions of the State Secrets privilege to ensure that the privilege is being invoked only in legally appropriate situations,” he said. “It is vital that we protect information that, if released, could jeopardize national security.”
The court papers describe horrific treatment in secret prisons. Mr. Mohamed claimed, for example, that during his detention in Morocco, “he was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution, and death.”
Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., told the judges that many of the facts that the government is trying to keep secret are scarcely secret at all, since the administration’s rendition program and the particulars of many of the cases have been revealed in the news media and in the work of government investigations from around the world. “The only place in the world where these claims can’t be discussed,“ Mr. Wizner said, “is in this courtroom.“
What the A.C.L.U. is asking, he said, is that the case be allowed to go forward, and giving the courts a chance to decide on a fact-by-fact basis based on classified information revealed solely to the judge by the government, what should be allowed to be discussed.
But Mr. Letter said that the lower court judge, James Ware, did receive classified information and came to the correct conclusion in dismissing the case last year. He urged the judges to pore over the same material, and predicted “you will understand precisely, as Judge Ware did, why this case can’t be litigated.”
In a related matter, Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, proposed on Monday the establishment of a “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees and other issues, like the firings of United States Attorneys by the Justice Department. The commission, he said, could grant immunity to witnesses to explore the facts without the threat of criminal prosecution.
I applaud Obama for verifying the Bush administration's stance that national secrets are more important than the ACLU's mission to destroy the nation. I know it will upset some that it violates his campaign promise of exposing the secret programs.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama pressed Congress Monday night to urgently approve a massive economic recovery bill, using the first prime-time news conference of his presidency to warn that a failure to act "could turn a crisis into a catastrophe." With the nation falling deeper into a long and painful recession, Obama defended his program against Republican criticism that it is loaded with pork-barrel spending and will not create jobs.
"The plan is not perfect," the president said, addressing the nation from the East Room of the White House. "No plan is. I can't tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans."
When the stimulus bill passed the House, not a single Republican voted for it. On Monday an $838 billion version of the legislation cleared a crucial test vote in the Senate by a 61-36 margin, with all but three Republican senators opposing it.
Obama said the federal government was the only power that could save the nation at a time of crisis, with huge spending outlays and tax cuts that he contended could save or create up to 4 million jobs.
"At this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life," Obama said.
Rejecting criticism, he said that 90 percent of the jobs created by the plan would be in the private sector, rebuilding crumbling roads, bridges and other aging infrastructure.
"The plan that ultimately emerges from Congress must be big enough and bold enough to meet the size of the economic challenge we face right now," Obama said.
Again and again, he stressed that the economy is in dire straits.
"This is not your ordinary, run of the mill recession," he said. Obama said the United States aims to avoid the kind of economic pain that Japan endured in the 1990s — the "lost decade" when that nation showed no economic growth.
"My bottom line is to make sure that we are saving or creating 4 million jobs," he said, and that homeowners facing foreclosure receive some relief.
While Obama stressed the economy in the opening minutes of the news conference, he also faced questions on foreign policy, and was asked how his administration would deal with Iran, a nation accused by the United States of supporting terrorism and pursuing nuclear weapons.
The president said his administration was reviewing its policy toward Iran "looking at places where we can have constructive dialogue." He also said it was time for Iran to change its behavior.
"My expectation is in the coming months we will be looking for openings that can be created where we can be sitting across the table face to face," Obama said.
He said that Iran must understand that funding terrorist organizations and pursuing nuclear weapons are unacceptable.
On the economy, Obama took a swipe at Republicans for criticizing the stimulus bill as wasteful. He pointed out that he inherited the current economic crisis and a doubling of the national debt from eight years of the Bush administration.
Yet, he also acknowledged that some components of the bill would not create jobs, as GOP critics have complained. While such spending plans might be worthy, he said, "those programs should be out of this."
Obama spoke a day before his administration was to announce new policies to rescue the ailing financial industry. A major goal of that program is to persuade hedge funds, insurance companies and private equity firms to buy into some of U.S. banks' riskiest investments.
"The credit crisis is real and it's not over," Obama said. He faulted the way the first $350 billion of the $700 billion bailout program was spent. "We didn't get as big of a bang for the buck as we should have," he said.
He said the government would work with banks to take bad debts off of their books so they will start making loans again. He said his goal was to restore market confidence.
Obama said he did not know whether more bailout money would be needed and, if so, how much that might be.
Is this the guy that campaigned on hope, and promised to get rid of "the politics of fear"?he looks a lot like him.
WASHINGTON – Despite President Obama's vow to open government more than ever, the Justice Department is defending Bush administration decisions to keep secret many documents about domestic wiretapping, data collection on travelers and U.S. citizens, and interrogation of suspected terrorists.
In half a dozen lawsuits, Justice lawyers have opposed formal motions or spurned out-of-court offers to delay court action until the new administration rewrites Freedom of Information Act guidelines and decides whether the new rules might allow the public to see more.
In only one case has the Justice Department agreed to suspend a FOIA lawsuit until the disputed documents can be re-evaluated under the yet-to-be-written guidelines. That case involves negotiations on an anti-counterfeiting treaty, not the more controversial, secret anti-terrorism tactics that spawned the other lawsuits as well as Obama's promises of greater openness.
"The signs in the last few days are not entirely encouraging," said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed several lawsuits seeking the Bush administration's legal rationales for warrantless domestic wiretapping and for its treatment of terrorism detainees.
The documents sought in these lawsuits "are in many cases the documents that the public most needs to see," Jaffer said. "It makes no sense to say that these documents are somehow exempt from President Obama's directives."
Groups that advocate open government, civil liberties and privacy were overjoyed that Obama on his first day in office reversed the FOIA policy imposed by Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft. The Bush Justice Department said it would use any legitimate legal basis to defend withholding records from the public. Obama pledged "an unprecedented level of openness in government" and ordered new FOIA guidelines written with a "presumption in favor of disclosure."
But Justice's actions in courts since then have cast doubt on how far the new administration will go.
In a FOIA case seeking access to the rules governing the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse — a computer database containing 1 searchable documents about Americans and foreigners — Justice lawyers told a district court here Thursday, "It is not clear that the new guidelines, once issued, will be retrospective to FOIA requests that the agency already has finished processing."
They asked the court to rule instead that the FBI has done enough. The bureau has reviewed 878 pages, withheld 76 and released some portions of 802.
To withhold some material, the FBI cited discretionary FOIA exemptions and ones that require balancing privacy and public interests. David Sobel, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that advocates civil liberties in cyberspace and brought the lawsuit, said those decisions might come out differently under the new guidelines.
The issue isn't retroactivity, Sobel said. "The issue is whether the new administration is going to devote legal resources to fighting old battles now that the president has announced a fundamental change in the government's approach to FOIA."
Other lawsuits in which Justice's civil division has expressed opposition to delays until the administration writes its FOIA guidelines and uses them to review Bush decisions:
• One seeking documents about the Automated Targeting System used by Customs officers to screen all travelers leaving or entering the country.
_A case seeking records of lobbying by telecommunications companies to get legal immunity for cooperating in warrantless domestic wiretapping.
• A case seeking Justice's legal opinions justifying that wiretapping. One of the plaintiff attorneys, Meredith Fuchs, of the National Security Archive, a private group that publishes formerly classified government documents, said, "I'm somewhat surprised they did not take the opportunity to look at these again, but maybe it's because the administration doesn't have all its top Justice appointees in office yet."
• Three cases seeking Justice legal opinions about detention and interrogation of terrorism detainees. Civil division attorney Caroline Wolverton wrote the ACLU's Jaffer that Justice would proceed "consistent with the principles" in Obama's FOIA order "and also with due regard for the legitimate confidentiality interests of the executive branch and the national security interests of the United States."
Jaffer called that "a nonresponse response."
So far, Justice has expressed willingness to review Bush decisions in two cases, only one because of FOIA changes.
Only in Sobel's lawsuit for anti-counterfeiting treaty documents has Justice joined a plaintiff to obtain a court delay to give the administration time to write FOIA guidelines and use them to "review its determinations on the documents at issue."
But that case is unusual because Justice is represented by its Office of Information and Privacy, not by the civil division which handles all the other FOIA lawsuits. The information and privacy office provides governmentwide guidance on how to obey the FOIA. Attorneys in these cases worry that the information and privacy office doesn't have the clout of the much larger civil division and may not control administration policy.
The civil division has sought a delay to review one case — involving three 2005 Justice legal memos on the definition of "cruel and unusual" interrogation tactics. But its request didn't mention the new FOIA policy. Instead it said Obama's Jan. 22 executive order on detention and interrogation might alter the government position.
Even if the new administration reviews Bush decisions, that's no guarantee the outcome will change.
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration used a different legal tool to preserve secrecy: the state secrets privilege it invoked a record number of times to have lawsuits thrown out. On the same day, however, civil division attorney Douglas Letter cited the state secrets privilege in asking a federal appeals court to uphold dismissal of a lawsuit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected terrorists to allied foreign nations where they would be tortured.
Three times Letter assured the judges his position had been approved by Obama administration officials.
"This is not change," said ACLU executive director Anthony Romero. "President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged" on his promise to end "abuse of state secrets."
FOX Business Network has won a victory against the Treasury Department in its Freedom of Information Act request for details about the government’s bailout plan.
Judge Richard J. Holwell of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said in a decision Friday that the government is directed to comply with FOX Business’s request under the FOIA “within 30 days and to produce a Vaughn index with 45 days.”
That means Treasury must comply with FOX Business’s request by Monday, March 23, and must produce a Vaughn index by Monday, April 6.
A Vaughn index details which documents have been withheld and why.
FOX Business sued Treasury on Dec. 18 over failure to provide information on the bailout funds or respond to FBN’s expedited requests filed under the FOIA.
The initial request, filed on Nov. 25, sought actual data on the use of the bailout funds for American International Group (AIG: 0.5389, -0.0611, -10.18%) and the Bank of New York Mellon (BK: 22.82, -0.51, -2.19%), and an additional request, filed on Dec. 1, sought similar data on the bailout funds for Citigroup (C: 2.02, -0.49, -19.52%).
FBN asked the Treasury Department to identify, among other issues, the troubled assets purchased, any collateral extended, and any restrictions placed on these financial institutions for their participation in this program.
I'm glad Obama pushes for more transparency in government.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's Justice Department sided with the former Bush administration on Friday, saying detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, department lawyers said the Obama administration agreed that detainees at Bagram Air Base cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detentions. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.
"The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we'd hoped," said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Air Base. "We all expected better."
In midyear last year, the Supreme Court gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention. With about 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and thousands more held in Iraq, courts are grappling with whether they, too, can sue to be released.
Three months after the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, four Afghan citizens being detained at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions in U.S. District Court in Washington. Court filings alleged that the U.S. military had held them without charges, repeatedly interrogating them without any means to contact an attorney. Their petition was filed for them by relatives since they had no way of getting access to the legal system.
The military has determined that all the detainees at Bagram are "enemy combatants." The Bush administration said in a response to the petition last year that the enemy combatant status of the Bagram detainees is reviewed every six months, taking into consideration classified intelligence and testimony from those involved in their capture and interrogation.
After Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush's legal argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself.
"They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.
The Justice Department argues that Bagram is different from Guantanamo Bay because it is in an overseas war zone and the prisoners there are being held as part of a continuing military action. The government argues that releasing enemy combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel there to consider their legal cases, could threaten security.
The government also said that if the Bagram detainees had access to the courts, it would allow all foreigners captured by the United States in conflicts worldwide to do the same.
It Is not the first time that the Obama administration has used a Bush administration legal argument after promising to review it. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a review of every court case in which the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, a separate legal tool it used to have lawsuits thrown out rather than reveal secrets.
The same day, however, civil division attorney Douglas Letter cited that privilege in asking an appeals court to uphold dismissal of a lawsuit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected terrorists to allied foreign nations that tortured them.
Letter said that Obama officials approved his argument.
i hope whomod's wife still has 911 on speed dial....
The Pentagon said Wednesday that top military officers and civilians had to sign a letter promising to keep details secret as they work on the military's budget.
Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters that Secretary Robert Gates made the unusual request out of concern for national security. He said the department didn't want any leaks to "unravel" the budget process.
"This is highly sensitive stuff involving programs costing tens of billions of dollars, employing hundreds of thousands of people and go to the heart of national security," he said. "And so he wants this process to be as disciplined and as forthright as possible.
"And he thinks that by having people pledge not to speak out of school, if you will, on these matters while they are a work in progress, that you'll create a climate in which you can ultimately produce a better product, because people can speak candidly with the confidence that it will not be leaked," he said.
Gates remained as secretary under Obama after serving under President Bush, but this year is the first time he is requiring the non-disclosure statements.
Republican Senator John McCain on Monday launched a broadside against former rival President Barack Obama, arguing he failed to live up to his commitment to change Washington by backing a $410 billion spending bill stuffed full of lawmakers' pet projects.
Officials have said Obama would likely sign the spending bill because it was wrapping up business left over from the previous administration but necessary to fund government operations through September 30.
McCain said the projects -- known as "earmarks" -- directly violated Obama's vow to get tough on spending.
"In his pledge last September, President Obama said 'We need earmark reform and when I'm president I will go line by line to make sure we're not spending money unwisely,'" McCain said on the Senate floor.
"So what's brought to the floor today, 9,000 earmarks, billions and billions of dollars of unneeded and wasteful spending," he said.
McCain has tried for years to eliminate earmarks, which represent a small fraction of U.S. spending. On the campaign trail he frequently criticized Obama for seeking earmarks during his early years as a senator.
"If it sounds like I'm angry ... it's because I am," the fiery McCain said. "The American people want the Congress to act in a fiscally responsible manner."
I really wish McCain hadn't tried to be the better man in the campaign. Being honest cost him the job and now we're stuck with a dud that loves to spend other peoples money.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
WASHINGTON – Acknowledging it's an "imperfect" bill, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he will accept a $410 billion spending package that includes billions in earmarks like those he promised to curb in last year's campaign. But he insisted the bill must signal an "end to the old way of doing business."
The massive measure funding federal agencies through the fall contains nearly 8,000 pet projects, known as earmarks and denounced by critics as pork.
Obama defended earmarks when they're "done right," allowing lawmakers to direct money to worthy projects in their districts. But he said they've been abused, and he promised to work with Congress to curb them.
"I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it's necessary for the ongoing functions of government," Obama declared. "But I also view this as a departure point for more far-reaching change."
In a sign of his discomfort with the bill, Obama planned to sign the bill quietly rather than in public. He declined to answer a shouted reporters' question about why.
Running for president, Obama denounced the many pet projects as wasteful and open to abuse — and vowed to rein them in.
Explaining his decision, Obama said that future earmarks must have a "legitimate and worthy public purpose", and the any earmark for a private company should be subject to competitive bidding rules. Plus he said he'll "work with Congress" to eliminate any the administration objects to.
But he acknowledged that earmarks have bred "cynicism", and he declared, "This piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business."
White House officials in recent weeks have dismissed criticism of the earmarks in the bill, saying the legislation was a remnant of last year and that the president planned to turn his attention to future spending instead of looking backward.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama wouldn't be the first president to sign legislation that he viewed as less than ideal. Asked whether Obama had second thoughts about signing the bill, Gibbs' reply was curt: "No."
Obama's modest set of reforms builds upon changes initiated by Republicans in 2006 and strengthened by Democrats two years ago. Most importantly, every earmark and its sponsor must be made public.
In new steps — outlined in concert with House Democratic leaders Wednesday morning — the House Appropriations Committee will submit every earmark to the appropriate executive branch agency for a review. And any earmark designed to go to for-profit companies would have to be awarded through a competitive bidding process.
But perhaps the most tangible change may be Obama's promise to resurrect the long-defunct process by which the president proposes to cut spending from bills that he has signed into law.
Under this so-called rescissions process, the White House sends Congress a roster of cuts for its consideration. Congress is free to ignore the cuts, but both Obama and senior members like Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., say they want to use it to clean out bad earmarks that make it through the process.
But Obama declined to endorse a stronger process advocated by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others, that would have required Congress to vote on a presidential rescission earmark package. Senior Democrats dislike the idea even though many of them backed it in the early-to-mid 1990s.
During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel-spending ways. Yet the bill sent from the Democratic-controlled Congress to the White House on Tuesday contained 7,991 earmarks totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the Republican staff of the House Appropriations Committee.
The 1,132-page bill has an extraordinary reach, wrapping together nine spending bills to fund the annual operating budgets of every Cabinet department except Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs. Among the many earmarks are $485,000 for a boarding school for at-risk native students in western Alaska and $1.2 million for Helen Keller International so the nonprofit can provide eyeglasses to students with poor vision.
Most of the government has been running on a stopgap funding bill set to expire at midnight Wednesday. Refusing to sign the newly completed spending bill would force Congress to pass another bill to keep the lights on come Thursday or else shut down the massive federal government. That is an unlikely possibility for a president who has spent just seven weeks in office.
The $410 billion bill includes significant increases in food aid for the poor, energy research and other programs. It was supposed to have been completed last fall, but Democrats opted against election-year battles with Republicans and former President George W. Bush.
By the end of four years I predict this will be the single longest thread in RKMB history
Journalist Howard Fineman on the Today Show, discussing Obama's approval of the pork spending bill:
he was faced with a situation that he said he couldn’t change. But of course that’s what his campaign is about. The important thing politically in Washington, Matt, is everybody's trying to take their measure of Barack Obama, and frankly, they think they can roll him, based on the evidence of this thing.”
For a president to be seen as toothless this early in his tenure bodes very badly. And not just in terms of his domestic agenda. Our foreign enemies are taking his measure too. If Barack Obama is seen as unable to stand up to Nancy Pelosi, surely that will embolden thugs, knaves and terrorists around the world.
As stunning as was that opening indictment, Fineman was far from finished:
“Inside the Beltway, it looks like the Congress and not the President is in charge.”
Rahm Emanuel was brought in to control Congress, but it’s worked the other way around.
“He’s got to not only be a popular president but a powerful one and make his will fact in Washington and he really hasn’t done that in the details.”
“He’s a great explainer—hasn’t always explained everything. He’s a detail guy—hasn’t always focused on it. He’s an interesting combination of energy and patience and a little bit of passivity. He’s allowed the Congress to dictate terms on the stimulus package, allowed them to dictate terms on this new funding bill. And he’s probably going to let them dictate the terms on health care. He’s satisfied to be a bottom-line guy, not the out-front guy.”
Asked by Lauer whether Joe Biden might be the blunt-spoken person required, Fineman laughed it off: “they’ve decided to say that anything Joe Biden says, he and he alone is responsible for. He’s the gabby uncle you don’t want to pay too much attention to. So no, he’s not the guy.”
“[Geithner] has hurt him a lot . . . The reality is Larry Summers really runs things behind the scenes.”
“For an explaining-type guy [Obama], it hasn’t worked so far.“
The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.
The proposal is politically problematic for President Obama, however, since it is similar to one he denounced in the presidential campaign as “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.” Most Americans with insurance get it from their employers, and taxing workers for the benefit is opposed by union leaders and some businesses.
So, far from cutting taxes on the middle class, there is a good chance Obama will raise their taxes.
But wait, there's more:
In television advertisements last fall, Mr. Obama criticized his Republican rival for the presidency, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for proposing to tax all employer-provided health benefits. The benefits have long been tax-free, regardless of how generous they are or how much an employee earns. The advertisements did not point out that Mr. McCain, in exchange, wanted to give all families a tax credit to subsidize the purchase of coverage.
"We're going to have to make sure that every single dollar is well spent. If we see money being misspent, we're going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it," said Obama, who triggered an audible gasp from his audience with an announced appearance at the meeting.
"You've got this wonderful mission and, you know, it's rare where you get a chance to put your shoulder to the wheel of history and move it in a better direction -- this is such an opportunity."
The chief auditor overseeing the spending of the $787 billion in stimulus funds is warning that some waste or fraud is regrettably inevitable.
In prepared testimony before the House oversight committee, Earl Devaney says the challenge for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board he chairs is to significantly minimize any such loss.
Devaney warns that he thinks federal agencies will have great difficulty attracting and hiring enough contract professionals to minimize the risks associated with moving the money fast enough to accomplish the recovery act's goals.
Even the reliably liberal Associated Press is starting to notice a trend:
Barack Obama's optimistic campaign rhetoric has crashed headlong into the stark reality of governing.
In office two months, he has backpedaled on an array of issues, gingerly shifting positions as circumstances dictate while ducking for political cover to avoid undercutting his credibility and authority. That's happened on the Iraq troop withdrawal timeline, on lobbyists in his administration and on money for lawmakers' pet projects.
But the shifts could take a toll over time if they become a persistent pattern and the public grows weary. His overall job-performance marks could suffer and jeopardize his likely re-election campaign in 2012. People could perceive him as a say-one-thing-do-another politician and the Democratic-controlled Congress could see him as a weak chief executive.
Obama's moves and maneuvering for political cover run the gamut.
He spent most of the campaign promising to bring combat troops home from Iraq 16 months after taking office, though he left himself wiggle room.
After directing his commanders to map out a responsible pullout, President Obama adjusted that timeline to 19 months and said 50,000 troops, about one-third of the current force, would remain.
While campaigning, Obama frequently swiped at lobbyists, saying, "When I am president, they won't find a job in my White House."
Then he took office and had to fill thousands of positions. He did allow former lobbyists to join his administration. But he imposed ethics rules barring them from dealing with matters related to their lobbying work or joining agencies that they had lobbied in the previous two years. In several cases, he has made outright exceptions.
Obama the candidate pledged to curb spending directed at lawmakers' pet projects; they're known in Washington as "earmarks." Obama the president signed an "imperfect" $410 billion budget measure that included 8,500 earmarks.
He had little choice. The measure, a holdover from last year, was needed to keep government from shutting down. But to blunt the fallout, Obama outlined guidelines to ensure tighter restraints on the spending and made a new promise: Future earmarks won't become law so easily.
As for politics, Obama campaigned as a new-style leader who chastised partisanship and renounced divisiveness in Washington. But as president, Obama's White House aides wasted little time pouncing on Republicans and mocking conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh as the GOP's leader.
On fiscal matters, Obama the candidate urged Americans to tighten their belts. Once in office and saddled with recession, though, he signed a $787 billion stimulus measure and outlined a $3.6 trillion budget plan that will plunge the nation deeper into the red. But again he paired the proposal with a new promise, to cut the deficit by more than half by the end of his first term.
Of course, being the reliably liberal Associated Press, the reporter finds that breaking promises is actually quite presidential:
It's the same delicate dance each of his predecessors faced in moving from candidate to president, only to find he couldn't stick exactly by his word. Each was hamstrung by his responsibility to the entire nation and to individual constituencies, changes in the foreign and domestic landscapes, and the trappings of the federal government and Washington itself.
Once in the White House, presidents quickly learn they are only one part of the political system, not in charge of it. They discover the trade-offs they must make and the parties they must please to get things done. Inevitably, they find out that it's impossible to follow through completely on their campaign proposals.
For now at least, Obama's deviations have served only to invite occasional cries of hypocrisy from some Republicans and infrequent grumbles of disappointment from some Democrats. He has popularity on his side, and it seems people mostly are chalking up his moves to much-needed flexibility at a difficult time.
Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for office promising to balance the budget. But he reversed course when he took over a country in depression and doled out a spending prescription to revive the economy. He made other shifts as well.
The ailing public didn't view him as wishy-washy or politically calculating, but rather as a president who was experimenting in hopes of finding policy to fix the problems. His charm and communication savvy allowed him to get away with it.
Historians agree that seems to be the model Obama is trying to emulate. "I didnt come here to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation — I came here to solve them," he said Saturday in his radio and Internet address. A charismatic orator, he's trying to govern with a pragmatic posture while projecting a willingness to compromise.
His mantra these days: "We will not let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals."
President Barack Obama holds his second primetime news conference at 8 p.m. Tuesday and, much like the first, the economy will be center stage.
But instead of selling his stimulus package to a country that welcomed the jolt, the president now has to explain why, once again, taxpayers must foot the bill to prop up Wall Street.
Obama is seeking to cool the white-hot anger, both in Congress and in the public, over the AIG bonuses by rolling out a series of new regulations to rein in Wall Street’s excesses.
But should his crackdown go too far, he risks turning away the very financial titans he needs to take part in his new plan — a public-private partnership to clean up the bank balance sheets that are clogging up the credit markets.
In short, it’s no easy task.
And that doesn’t even mention the sales pitch for his ambitious budget, full of tax increases and new spending, that has been met with ambivalence by members of Congress from both parties.
For all his challenges, Obama got some much-needed good news Monday – and we’ll start our 10 questions there.
1) You’ve dismissed the stock market’s frequent zig-zags, but do you think Monday’s rally in the Dow amounted to a Wall Street stamp of approval for your bank bailout plan?
Earlier this month, Obama called the stock market “sort of like a tracking poll in politics” – with daily ups and downs that are largely meaningless, a mantra his aides also have picked up. But that was when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was mostly heading south, and it served their interests to minimize its short-term importance.
But over recent weeks, the market has had a mini-recovery, punctuated by the Dow rocketing up nearly 500 points Monday – the same day Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rolled out the administration’s new solution to help banks. The rally offered a nice salve for the embattled Geithner, whose first bailout rollout was met with a 380-point plunge. But the administration has resisted seizing on the market spike, to avoid backtracking on its never-mind-the-Dow talk.
2) Given that 15 of the top 20 AIG bonus recipients are now returning their bonuses, do you think the House acted too hastily to pass a bill levying a punitive tax on those individuals?
Top Obama officials have made little secret of their frustration with the AIG episode and the knee-jerk reaction of Congress. While assuring that, yes, the president was angry over the bonuses, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said last week that Obama’s “main priority is getting the financial system stabilized, and he believes this is a big distraction in that effort.”
Now, as New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo methodically recoups the money from AIG executives, the conventional wisdom is increasingly that Congress overreacted.
Obama is loathe to criticize his allies on the Hill, but said on “60 Minutes” Sunday that it’s important not to “govern out of anger.” He could send a message tonight to the Wall Street bigs he needs on the toxic asset plan by stating more strongly his unease with last week’s vote.
3) You talked on “60 Minutes” about missing the ability to talk to everyday Americans, but can you tell them for a moment how this economic downturn is impacting you and your family?
The president and first lady are, by virtue of book royalties and a healthy government salary, financially secure and able to send their daughters to an expensive private school. But a recent Business Week estimate concludes that they’ve lost six-figures in the market to date, much of it in mutual funds. Further, both Obamas come from modest roots and have relatives who have not similarly prospered.
Can Obama relate – “feel the pain,” to borrow from another Democratic president – to average Americans who have been hit hard, without lamenting problems that are mild as compared to those in the country who have lost their home, their job or both?
Recall the famous question directed at then-President George H.W. Bush at the pivotal Richmond, Va., debate in 1992 and his fumbling reaction.
4) Wall Street is, understandably, coming in for significant blame over the current financial crisis. But what responsibility, if any, do average Americans bear for the problem?
Obama may not be inclined to deliver tough love, but it’s true that the housing foreclosure crisis was spurred in part by people who bought homes beyond their means.
Yes, the financial industry made it easy by handing out loans too freely. But as a president who rode to office partly by touting the virtue of personal responsibility, shouldn’t Obama tell some of those pitchfork-wielding Americans that buying that $400,000 McMansion on a salary of $50,000 a year helped create the problem?
Presidents Clinton and Bush both trumpeted the gains in homeownership on their watch without regard to the fact that not everyone who bought could afford to pay. Obama, without discouraging this particular fulfillment of the American Dream, may need to be more direct.
5) On health care, you included a government-run insurance option in your campaign platform. Is that a must for comprehensive legislation? Also, some in your own party have expressed concern about paying for health care by, in effect, raising taxes on upper-income taxpayers, as you have proposed. Are you willing to pay for it through other means?
Battle lines are already being drawn on health care reform, with Republicans voicing strong objection to a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, and Democratic leaning groups increasingly standing up for the public-private mix.
As part of his health reform plan, Obama said he would provide a choice of public and private insurance options, so one government-run plan, a vastly expanded Medicare, would compete with private insurers. Liberals like it because because they don’t trust profit-minded insurers. Industry is fighting in, because they believe government is an unfair competitor and would cut into their profits, while not improving care.
Obama has yet to say whether he would support a package without the public option. Is he willing to give it up for the sake of a bipartisan bill? Such a move would infuriate an element of his base.
And his proposal to put a $634 million “down-payment” on health care through rolling back tax deductions for families making more than $250,000 a year has already met resistance from key Democrats on tax-writing committees. But if not that, how would Obama pay for his plan?
6) How many appointees have received waivers from your new ethics rules barring lobbyists from working in government?
The White House has conceded, in dribs and drabs, that a wide range of appointees to senior posts – the most senior being Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn – are former lobbyists. But other administration allies who lobbied for non-corporate entities have been barred by the same policy, like a senior official from Human Rights Watch.
The White House hasn’t offered a clear statement on which appointees deserve waivers, and which don’t. But the issue is causing consternation among Obama’s allies, and cries of hypocrisy from his critics. And so much for transparency -- the White House also doesn’t regularly disclose the waivers. Will Obama say how many there are?
7) Larry Summers told New York Magazine last summer that he hoped you didn’t believe what you said about renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, while you were touting your opposition to the treaty on the campaign trail. So where do you stand now -- will changing NAFTA become a priority for you, or not?
Obama has conceded he went too far in attacking NAFTA to win over blue-collar voters in Ohio. And in fact, his early talk as president has been generally pro-trade, particularly with close allies. He’s interested in strengthening labor and environmental standards in the treaty but only if “not disruptive” to trade, he said in Canada.
Now, the question of how the White House handles trade agreements during the current economic crisis remains open -- and is being closely watched by Obama’s labor friends, who want him to take a more protectionist stance. U.S. allies are watching too – Mexico already has slapped $2.4 billion in tariffs on American goods after Congress restored restrictions on Mexican trucks crossing the border.
8) Throughout the campaign, you said Afghanistan represented the central front in the battle against Islamic terrorism but on “60 Minutes,” you said there must be an “exit strategy.” How long do you expect to keep American troops on the ground there?
If the battle against al Qaeda is going to take as long as many national security experts expect, then American troops may have to remain in Afghanistan for a sustained period of time, well past Obama’s first term.
The president is sending 17,000 more U.S. troops to the country to curb the growing violence there ahead of August elections, but he has not given a comprehensive speech yet on his policy toward what is widely seen as the new Iraq. His policy review is expected out Friday.
It’s an issue on which Obama has to watch his left flank and specifically the dovish wing of the Democratic party that was among his earliest supporters. Though little noticed, there were a few thousand anti-war protestors in Washington last weekend. One of the chants: "Hey, Obama, yes, we can. Troops out of Afghanistan."
9) Appearing before a crowd chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei rebuffed your video outreach to this country last week. Is there any hope of reaching a new, less contentious relationship with Iran?
Analysts are split on the success of Obama’s videotaped greeting to Iran on the occasion of a secular Persian holiday. Some say the negative response from Iran’s top religious leader demonstrates that the gap between the U.S. and Iran is impossible to bridge. Others said that Obama may draw a warmer response from other segments of Iranian society, and that the video demonstrates a clean break with President Bush’s unsuccessful efforts to strong-arm Iran into dropping its nuclear program.
Obama’s attempt, even if a failure in the short-term, may gives him leverage if he wants to tighten sanctions or take other hostile action toward Iran, by demonstrating to the Europeans, Russia and China that he made a good-faith effort at reaching out.
10) Most modern presidents have found it useful to confer with the other living presidents because of their unique insights and perspective. Can you tell us which presidents you have consulted since entering the White House and generally what you discussed?
Obama famously met with all the current living presidents before he was sworn in, but the group was tight-lipped about their conversations. On the day he announced his Iraq troop withdrawal plan, he called President George W. Bush from Air Force One to brief him on the move. And just last week, former President Jimmy Carter was spotted leaving the White House.
Just what sort of advice has Obama gotten from his brothers in the most elite fraternity in the world?
What a pleasure it was to see British Member of Parliament (MP) Daniel Hannan disembowell Gordon Brown with a dull rusty knife:
He could just as easily be saying this to lying sack of shit Barack Obama, who is in the process of putting our salvageable economy on the same unbelievably wrong course.
Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes.
Originally Posted By: Barack Hussein Obama on December 20, 2007
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday issued his first signing statement, reserving a right to bypass dozens of provisions in a $410 billion government spending bill even as he signed it into law.
In the statement — directions to executive-branch officials about how to carry out the legislation — Mr. Obama instructed them to view most of the disputed provisions as merely advisory and nonbinding, saying they were unconstitutional intrusions on his own powers.
Mr. Obama’s instructions followed by two days his order to government officials that they not rely on any of President George W. Bush’s provision-bypassing signing statements without first consulting Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. In that order, Mr. Obama said he would continue the practice of issuing signing statements
EXCLUSIVE: You've heard this shocking "fact" before -- on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.
-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it to reporters on a flight to Mexico City.
-- CBS newsman Bob Schieffer referred to it while interviewing President Obama.
-- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at a Senate hearing: "It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors ... come from the United States."
-- William Hoover, assistant director for field operations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified in the House of Representatives that "there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in, or interdicted in transport to Mexico, originated from various sources within the United States."
There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:
It's just not true.
In fact, it's not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.
What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."
But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.
"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.
Video:Click here to watch more.
A Look at the Numbers
In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced -- and of those, 90 percent -- 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover -- were found to have come from the U.S.
But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.
In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.
So, if not from the U.S., where do they come from? There are a variety of sources:
-- The Black Market. Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.
-- Russian crime organizations. Interpol says Russian Mafia groups such as Poldolskaya and Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.
- South America. During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.
-- Asia. According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.
-- The Mexican Army. More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.
-- Guatemala. U.S. intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns and drugs, including most of America's cocaine, along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border. On March 27, La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK-47s on the border. Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Ixcan, a border town.
'These Don't Come From El Paso'
Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, recently displayed an array of weapons considered "assault rifles" that are similar to those recovered in Mexico, but are unavailable for sale in the U.S.
"These kinds of guns -- the auto versions of these guns -- they are not coming from El Paso," he said. "They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don't get these guns from the U.S."
Some guns, he said, "are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way -- the fully auto versions -- they are not smuggled in across the river."
Many of the fully automatic weapons that have been seized in Mexico cannot be found in the U.S., but they are not uncommon in the Third World.
The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years -- but those grenades and the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are unavailable in U.S. gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in October and a TV station in January were made in South Korea. Almost 70 similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala.
"Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semi-automatic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California," according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
Boatloads of Weapons
So why would the Mexican drug cartels, which last year grossed between $17 billion and $38 billion, bother buying single-shot rifles, and force thousands of unknown "straw" buyers in the U.S. through a government background check, when they can buy boatloads of fully automatic M-16s and assault rifles from China, Israel or South Africa?
Alberto Islas, a security consultant who advises the Mexican government, says the drug cartels are using the Guatemalan border to move black market weapons. Some are left over from the Central American wars the United States helped fight; others, like the grenades and launchers, are South Korean, Israeli and Spanish. Some were legally supplied to the Mexican government; others were sold by corrupt military officers or officials.
The exaggeration of United States "responsibility" for the lawlessness in Mexico extends even beyond the "90-percent" falsehood -- and some Second Amendment activists believe it's designed to promote more restrictive gun-control laws in the U.S.
In a remarkable claim, Auturo Sarukhan, the Mexican ambassador to the U.S., said Mexico seizes 2,000 guns a day from the United States -- 730,000 a year. That's a far cry from the official statistic from the Mexican attorney general's office, which says Mexico seized 29,000 weapons in all of 2007 and 2008.
Chris Cox, spokesman for the National Rifle Association, blames the media and anti-gun politicians in the U.S. for misrepresenting where Mexican weapons come from.
"Reporter after politician after news anchor just disregards the truth on this," Cox said. "The numbers are intentionally used to weaken the Second Amendment."
"The predominant source of guns in Mexico is Central and South America. You also have Russian, Chinese and Israeli guns. It's estimated that over 100,000 soldiers deserted the army to work for the drug cartels, and that ignores all the police. How many of them took their weapons with them?"
But Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, called the "90 percent" issue a red herring and said that it should not detract from the effort to stop gun trafficking into Mexico.
"Let's do what we can with what we know," he said. "We know that one hell of a lot of firearms come from the United States because our gun market is wide open."
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, was paid about $5.2 million in compensation by hedge fund D.E. Shaw during the past year, according to financial disclosure forms released on Friday by the White House.
Officials from D.E. Shaw were not immediately available for comment. Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary, was a part-time managing director of the firm after stepping down as president of Harvard University.
Summers was also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major Wall Street firms and financial institutions, including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, the forms showed.
