Change2008
Some on the Left Souring on Obama
JOSH GERSTEIN, The Politico: Barely four months into his presidency, Obama is confronting growing dissatisfaction among members of his liberal base, who feel spurned by a series of his early decisions on issues ranging from guns to torture to immigration to gay rights.
The list got longer last week as Obama reversed his earlier decision to release photos of detainees abused in U.S. military custody and announced plans to try some terror suspects before military commissions — though on the campaign trail he railed against earlier versions of the tribunals.
A few, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, have even hurled the left’s ultimate epithet — suggesting that Obama’s turning into George W. Bush.
The building anger comes at a critical moment — just as Obama’s about to announce his choice for the Supreme Court. Fulfill their dreams of a “liberal Scalia,” a firebrand from the left, and much would be forgiven.
This is Not George Bush’s Budget
Mike Madden | Salon: “Elections have consequences” is one of those political clichés that gets thrown around a lot in this city, especially in the first few months of a new administration. But President Obama’s $3.5 trillion budget proposal, released Thursday, actually reminds you that clichés become clichés for a reason: They’re true.
There were proposals to save money by modernizing the healthcare system, only paying for treatments that are proven to work, and by eliminating federal farm subsidies to the biggest…
President Obama Reads 10 Letters Per Day from the Public
ABC News: Every day President Barack Obama is handed a special purple folder. The folder contains ten letters, and every day President Obama takes time to read them.
Are they from world leaders? From members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Members of the intelligence community? No, these letters have been culled from the thousands the White House Correspondence Office receives each day from Americans who have taken the time to sit down and write to their president.
“They help him focus on the real problems people are facing,” says Axelrod.” He really a absorbs these letters, and often shares then with us.”
In his first week in office, President Obama requested that he see 10 letters a day “representative of people’s concerns, from people writing into the president,” recalls [White House Spokesman] Gibbs, “to help get him outside of the bubble, to get more than just the information you get as an…
Obama’s Press Conference Answers Three Grade-Levels Higher Than Bush’s First
Mark Nickolas, Political Base: So, I just finished comparing the transcript of President Obama’s first presidential press conference this evening with the very first one that former President George W. Bush conducted back on February 22, 2001.
I copied each full transcript into separate Word documents. After doing that, I deleted the introductions by both men (since those are largely or fully scripted) and then deleted all reporter questions from the transcripts. What you have left are simply the answers that each president offered, off-the-cuff and unscripted, to all questions.
Then I ran Word’s readability tool. Guess what? Bush’s answers were spoken at 7th grade level. Obama’s at a 10th grade level.
Have You Drank the Obama Kool Aid Yet? Julio Has…
Meet Julio. Julio works at McDonald’s and asked President Obama a question about jobs and the economy, and was “very” excited to do so:
Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss?
Created by an Obama supporter, this video is open to interpretation. A video morphing all the presidents of the United States into one another from Washington to Obama:
Barack Obama Action Figure
Telegraph: A Japanese company is selling a realistic Barack Obama toy as an action figure:
The Trash Was Historic, Too: 130 Tons of Inaugural Garbage
Petula Dvorak, Washington Post: Washington trash trucks hauled away at least 130 tons of garbage after the inauguration of President Obama, with more to go. National Park Service workers picked up almost 100 tons on the Mall and near the White House.
Because most trash cans had been removed for security reasons and a record-breaking crowd gathered downtown, the mountain of rubbish left behind was of historic proportions. “More than any Fourth of July, more than any event we’ve seen,” Park Service spokesman William Line said.
The detritus included handwarmer packets, bottles, food, newspapers, blankets, gloves, coolers and a table or two, in addition to items bought from street vendors. “They left behind Obama hats, Obama bags, Obama socks,” said Mafara Hobson, spokeswoman for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D). “People left behind a lot of trash. A lot of it was the vendors along the parade route, too.”
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Obama Leadership Rates As High as Bush’s After 9/11
Paul Steinhauser, CNN: A national poll suggests that three-quarters of the public thinks President-elect Barack Obama is a strong and decisive leader, the highest marks for a president-elect on that characteristic in nearly three decades. Seventy-six percent of Americans questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Wednesday said Obama is a strong and decisive leader.
“That’s the best number an incoming president has gotten on that dimension since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “The public’s rating of his leadership skills is already as high as George W. Bush’s was after 9/11 and easily beats the numbers that both Bush and Bill Clinton got at the start of their first terms in office.”
Just six in 10 felt that Bush was a strong leader when he took office in 2001. After the attacks of September 11, that number rose to three in four. Sixty-seven percent…
Barack Obama to Swear into Office on Homosexual Atheist’s Bible
Dennis DiClaudio, Comedy Central’s InDecision 2008:
Well, it seems to be official.
Barack Obama will be taking the Oath of Office on January 20, 2009, with his right hand planted firmly on the Bible owned by a man who neither believed in a personal god nor preferred the company of women in the bedroom.
That’s right. He somehow managed to score the same Bible on which fellow Illinoisiate Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president.
By deliberately choosing the Bible of Abraham Lincoln — a man who, if not an absolute homosexual, certainly had strong homosexual leanings, and who believed in neither the Bible nor a personal god — Obama seems to be giving aid and comfort to the enemies of American values.
Obama Inauguration Speech Generator
A grassroots internet campaign helped Barack Obama get elected. Now he’s calling for the internet’s assistance one more time — to help him craft the best inauguration speech ever…
Barack Obama Will Swear Into Office on Homosexual Atheist’s Bible
Dennis DiClaudio, InDecision 2008: Well, it seems to be official. Barack Obama will be taking the Oath of Office on January 20, 2009, with his right hand planted firmly on the Bible owned by a man who neither believed in a personal god nor preferred the company of women in the bedroom.
That’s right. He somehow managed to score the same Bible on which fellow Illinoisiate Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president
Such a thumbing of the nose at all the good old fashioned family values on which this country was founded will almost certainly come as a blow to all the decent Americans who were hoping that anti-gay rights Christian Pastor Rick Warren’s prayer at the inauguration was a signal to their ranks that he would be continuing the current administration’s policy of coddling them.
No such luck. By deliberately choosing the Bible of Abraham Lincoln — a man who, if…
GOP’s Dirty Tricks Revealed: Map of Robocalls and Smears
The McCain Campaign and its allies have begun an unprecedented nationwide negative campaign that uses robocalls, direct mail, and other techniques to quietly poison voters’ information with lies and fear tactics. This map is an effort to track some of the most toxic attacks — all of which are approved by the McCain campaign or its Republican partners.
McCain Employing GOP Operative Accused Of Voter Registration Fraud
Sam Stein, HuffPost: John McCain’s campaign has directed $175,000 to the firm of a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states.
According to campaign finance records, a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the RNC and the the California Republican Party, made a $175,000 payment to the group Lincoln Strategy in June for purposes of “registering voters.” The managing partner of that firm is Nathan Sproul, a renowned GOP operative who has been investigated on multiple occasions for suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms and even spearheading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to hinder the Democratic ticket.
In a letter to the Justice Department last October, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said that that Sproul’s alleged activities “clearly suppress votes and violate the law.”
Obama’s Iraq Plans Vindicated As U.S. Agrees to Leave Iraq by 2011
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent: Iraq and the United States have finally agreed on a security pact which would mean that US forces would withdraw from Iraq by 2011, American and Iraqi officials said yesterday.
The accord became a major test of strength between the Iraqi government and Washington since negotiations began in March with the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, pictured below, demanding US concessions on the date of the troop withdrawal and immunity for US troops. The pact replaces the UN Security Council resolution enacted after the American invasion of 2003.
The agreement still needs to be approved by the council of Iraqi leaders, the cabinet and the Iraqi parliament. Mr Maliki saw the highly influential Shia religious leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, last week and was assured that he would not stand in the way of the pact if approved by parliament.
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The Man Behind The Whispers About Obama
JIM RUTENBERG, NYTimes: The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”
That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian. The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background. Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.
But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the…
Christopher Hitchens: ‘McCain Lacks Temperament To Be President; Palin Is Simply A Disgrace’
Hitchens on Slate: The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace.
It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her — her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations — were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she…
Canada’s Banking System Kept High and Dry By Strict Regulation
David Friend, Canoe.ca (TORONTO): High banking standards have kept Canada’s financial institutions afloat and out of the kind of trouble that has sunk many of their international peers, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said last week. Flaherty, who met Friday in Washington with finance ministers from industrial countries to co-ordinate efforts to deal with the global economic crisis, said Canadian banks have been bolstered by strict government monitoring of their capital.
“We’ve had a couple of financial institutions in Canada that ran the risk of falling outside the capitalization requirements,” he said during a news conference on Wednesday. “We required them… to maintain the appropriate capital requirements and raise capital as necessary, which was done months ago.”
