Tag Archives: Hamid Karzai

January 19, 2013 · 1:26 AM

“My God, What Have We Done?”: White House Staffers React to Insane Online Petitions

Death Star Petition

My favorites were the petition for a Death Star and a petition to stop petitions…

Mother Jones

It’s not all laughs for the White House staffers who deal with petitions demanding Obama build a Death Star or create a Joe Biden reality TV show, but they don’t mind.

As White House officials were busy pondering new gun violence prevention measures, preparing for the coming debt ceiling showdown with Republicans, and meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Obama administration on January 11 also issued an official decision: the US government would not construct the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station, commonly known as the Death Star from Star Wars Episode IV.

This was no joke. Well, almost no joke. “The Administration does not support blowing up planets,” the official White House statement read. “Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?” The response also address the dubious claim that such a large-scale federal undertaking would be a tremendous boon for the American economy. (The Galactic Empire has since issued a press release mocking the Obama administration for its decision.)

This official declaration was compelled by the White House’s own rules. Under its We the People initiative, anybody with internet access can petition the White House on any matter, and if a petition gains 25,000 signatures, the president—or his people—have to respond. Well, that’s how it worked until Tuesday. After being hit by all sorts of, shall we say, nonserious petitions like the Death Star one that reached the 25,000-signature benchmark, the White House has raised the bar. From now on, a petition will require 100,000 signatures in order to win White House attention. (When WTP debuted, the threshold was a measly 5,000.) But that fix may still not block the frivolous—the Death Star request drew over 34,000 signatures, and other ludicrous posts have managed to surpass the 100,000 mark—and some White House officials connected to the We the People project say (on background, of course), What were we thinking?

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September 3, 2012 · 12:16 PM

Top Ten Clint Eastwood Empty-Chair Falsehoods

 

It’s a slow news day, so when I ran across this article by the much respected Juan Cole…it was a no-brainer.  I had to share it.

Juan Cole – Informed Comment

You can’t see me, but I’m talking to Clint Eastwood sitting spectrally in an empty chair, and I am replying to his confused rant.

1. Mr. Eastwood, you called the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay penitentiary a broken promise. President Obama was prevented from closing Guantanamo by the Republicans in Congress, which refused to allocate the funds necessary to end it. Do you remember this this Washington Post headline, “House acts to block closing of Guantanamo”?

2. Mr. Eastwood you called “stupid” the idea of trying terrorists who attacked New York in a civilian courtroom in New York. But what would have better vindicated the strengths of America’s rule of law, the thing about the US most admired abroad? Mr. Eastwood, perhaps you spent so many years playing vigilantes who just blew people away (people who in the real world we would have needed to try to establish their guilt or innocence) that you want to run our judicial system as a kangaroo court.

3. You complained that there are 23 million unemployed Americans. Actually there are 12.8 million unemployed Americans. But there are no measures by which W. created more jobs per month on average during his presidency than has Obama, and there is good reason to blame current massive unemployment on Bush’s policies of deregulating banks and other financial institutions, which caused the crash of 2008.

4. You criticized President Obama for giving a target date for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan of 2014, and alleged that Romney said, “Why don’t you just bring them home tomorrow morning?” But George W. Bush set a target date of 31 December, 2011, for withdrawal from Iraq, and did so in negotiation with the Iraqi parliament. Was that also a bad idea? Have you considered that NATO allies and the government of President Hamid Karzai may have demanded an announced withdrawal date as a prerequisite of continued cooperation with the US there? And, just for your information, Gov. Romney hasn’t called for US troops to withdraw from Afghanistan immediately.

5. Mr. Eastwood, you made fun of Joe Biden as the ‘intellect of the Democratic Party.’ Vice President Biden was chair or ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for decades, helped to save the Bosnian Muslims from genocide, and passed the Violence against Women Act. I haven’t always agreed with him myself, but he has been among our more thoughtful contributors to American foreign policy. You, on the other hand, like to pretend to shoot down large numbers of people over the course of a violent two-hour fantasy.

6. You criticized President Obama for ‘talking about student loans.’ The Republican Party, especially Paul Ryan, wants to take away the government-backed loans on which millions of students depend, at a time when student indebtedness is at an all-time high. Just because some people are way overpaid for play-acting doesn’t mean that ordinary people don’t need student loans to get the credentials that allow them to make a better life for themselves.

7. Mr. Eastwood, you criticized President Obama for saying he is an ‘ecological man’ but flying in Air Force One. Under President Obama, non-hydro forms ofgreen energy in the United States have doubled from 3 percent of electricity production to 6 percent. Obama’s tax credits have been a big reason why. In contrast, Mr. Romney wants to get rid of credits for wind energy, which will hurt the Iowa economy, e.g., and is in the back pocket of Big Oil, so that he will stand in the way of green energy. I think doubling renewables rather offsets an occasional jet ride. And, it is Obama’s policies that will get us to the solar-driven airplane, not Romney’s.

8. You made fun of Obama because he has a law degree from Harvard. I just want you to sit in your empty chair for a while, and think about that.

9. You called Mr. Romney a ‘stellar businessman,’ but his business appears to have been to send American jobs to China.

10. I don’t know who suggested to you that you address us at the end and say, “Make my day,” with the implication that we should vote Romney-Ryan. But what I remember is, that phrase is a threat you are going to do bad things to us.

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May 1, 2012 · 8:19 PM

Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan: A guide

TPresident Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai greet the press before signing a strategic partnership agreement at the presidential palace in Kabul on Wednesday.he Week

Obama secretly flies to Kabul to sign a partnership deal with Karzai and give a nationally televised speech. How did he keep the trip under wraps?

President Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan Tuesday, in a globe-spanning trip that was shrouded in secrecy, and which coincides with the one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death. After landing, Obama met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to sign an agreement outlining the prolonged cooperation between the two countries, even after the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2014. Obama is also set to make a televised address to Americans at 7:30 p.m. EST. Here’s what you should know about Obama’s Afghanistan trip:

Why exactly is he there?
Obama isn’t just a commander-in-chief, says Ben Feller of theAssociated Press. He’s also “an incumbent president in the the early stages of a tough re-election campaign.” Obama will officially launch his re-election bid on Saturday, and this trip is a shrewd reminder to voters that since taking office, Obama has ended the war in Iraq and strategized an orderly finish to U.S. combat in Afghanistan, too. Timing the visit to the one-year anniversary of the daring Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden can also be read as a political move, especially after his campaign used the raid to attack GOP rival Mitt Romney. Of course, the president is also in Afghanistan to sign the Strategic Partnership Agreement.

What is this agreement?
The deal is “designed to send a strong message” that, though the U.S. is reducing its footprint in Afghanistan, it is not abandoning the region, says ABC News. And while the deal is “more symbolic than substantive,” says Mark Landler at The New York Times, it nonetheless marks a crucial transition in America’s thorny relationship with “a staunch, if faraway and complicated, ally.” And remember, says Feller, that the agreement, while light on details, allows the U.S. to potentially keep troops in Afghanistan to train Afghan forces and target al Qaeda.

How did the White House keep this visit a secret?
As is routine for presidential trips to war zones, a sparse team of White House officials and select members of the press corps were instructed to keep the visit a “closely guarded secret,” says Zeke Miller at BuzzFeed. The group boarded Air Force One very early Tuesday morning, landing at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Field at 10:20 p.m. local time. “Flying under the cover of darkness,” saysABC News, Obama boarded a waiting helicopter and flew the 40 minutes to Kabul to meet with Karzai. After signing the agreement, he flew back to Bagram, where he will make his speech to Americans. It will be 4 a.m. in Afghanistan when the president speaks.

Did anybody find out about the trip in advance?
“Almost everyone in the U.S. media knew about this six hours” before the White House gave official word, says Dylan Byers at Politico. A local Afghan news organization called TOLONews tweeted that Obama landed in Afghanistan at 9:19 a.m. EST, and several Western media outlets picked up the news, including The Huffington Post and New York Post. The White House quickly scrambled to squash the reports, frantic “to keep word of Obama’s trip out of the press until he was out of harm’s way,” says Miller. Officials began issuing stern denials, demanding that all related posts and tweets be taken down.

Did media outlets oblige?
For the most part, and to a “remarkable degree,” says Byers. The Post was among the last news outlets to take its post down, though the newspaper leaked a self-congratulatory statement from its editor in chief: “With due respect to the White House and out of an abundance of caution, the Post removed the story from its website. We are impressed the White House believes the Taliban, while hiding in caves and dodging American drones, are, like millions of others, avid readers of nypost.com.”

Sources: ABC News, AP, Buzzfeed, CNN, NY Times, Politico

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December 3, 2010 · 1:42 PM

Obama arrives in Afghanistan on surprise visit

Politico

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan – President Barack Obama arrived here tonight on an unannounced visit to thank U.S. forces and meet with American officials.

Air Force One touched down at the sprawling air base at 8:35 pm local time after a 13-hour flight from Washington. Obama, dressed in a brown leather bomber jacket and dark slacks, was met by Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry.

Obama is expected to remain on the ground for only three hours in what had been planned as a six-hour visit. Bad weather will prevent him from leaving the base to go to Kabul, where he had been scheduled to meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Instead, Obama will talk to Karzai on a videoconference.

Obama is then scheduled to go to the base hospital, where he will visit with patients and present Purple Hearts to four of the wounded. He will then address troops — most of them from the 101st Airborne Division — after an introduction from Petraeus.

The surprise visit comes as Obama and his national security advisers are in the middle of a review of the administration’s war strategy almost a year to the day he announced a troop surge in Afghanistan in a speech at West Point. But the White House stressed that the main point of Obama’s trip is for him to thank the troops for their service, particularly during the holiday season.

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