Tag Archives: Politics News

May 15, 2013 · 11:01 AM

Two scandals deflated, one persists

Salon – Joan Walsh

The Obama administration started Tuesday mired in three scandals the GOP seemed able to tie “into one ‘Big Brother Obama’ storyline,” in the words of Greg Sargent, and ended it appearing to face political culpability on only one, the Department of Justice’s broad subpoenas obtaining phone records from the Associated Press. It’s not to say Benghazi or the IRS mess went away, but the GOP’s creepy plot line got a whole lot less plausible.

The Benghazi “scandal” lost velocity thanks to CNN’s Jake Tapper reporting that an email key to the notion that the White House doctored talking points to protect the State Department didn’t at all read the way ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported it. Karl quoted White House national security communications advisor Ben Rhodes’ email specifically saying the talking points should “reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department,” but the actual email obtained by Tapper didn’t mention the State Department at all. Karl ended the day with the shocking admission that while he’d reported on air that he’d “obtained” the emails in question, and wrote online that he’d “reviewed” them, in fact he’d only heard about them from the notes of a source – presumed to be a House GOP staffer.

Amazingly, Karl insisted Tapper’s reporting didn’t challenge the basic facts of his story, even though he acknowledged for the first time that he hadn’t actually “obtained” or “reviewed” the actual emails, but rather had notes about them read to him by his source. The fact that Karl put the purported email from Rhodes within quotation marks – which in actual journalism means you’re reading a direct quote from someone – seriously damages his credibility. But the ABC reporter reported concluded his self-defense by blaming the White House for failing to release all the emails – rather than blaming his source for misleading him, or himself for misleading his readers by using quotes around the Rhodes email.

Here’s hoping ABC News explains why the paraphrased depiction of notes about an email from a hostile source wound up within quotation marks attributed to Rhodes, and whether that’s the news organization’s policy.

On the IRS mess, the day closed with the release of the Inspector General’s report on the improper review of applications by Tea Party-related groups for tax-exempt “social welfare” status. The report blamed “inadequate management” for the review process, which began under Bush-appointed leadership, and it reads like everyone’s worst nightmare of incompetent government. But it finds no evidence that anyone higher than middle management was responsible for the review. Moreover, although it’s clear that groups with Tea Party or Patriot in their names came in for more scrutiny and delay than most liberal groups,  more than two thirds of the groups flagged for review had nothing to do with the Tea Party. And none of the conservatives were denied tax-exempt status, though many faced long delays.  Ironically, the only group that saw its status denied (for 10 of its chapters) was Emerge America, which works to elect Democratic women to office.

Within hours, President Obama sent a scathing statement about the IG’s findings, calling them “intolerable and inexcusable” and promising that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew would make sure all of its recommendations to correct the flaws in the IRS’s review process were implemented.

It’s the DOJ’s subpoena of phone records for 20 AP phone lines used by at least 100 reporters, in pursuit of a government official who leaked information about the U.S. foiling another al Qaida underwear-bomb plot, that has the capacity to damage the Obama administration. This White House is already shadowed by the fact that it has prosecuted more government “leakers” – also known as whistleblowers – than all previous administrations put together.

As Marcy Wheeler explained in Salon, the DOJ’s own guidelines require it to go directly to the news agency in question with its subpoena, which would have given AP the right to negotiate over it, or challenge it in court. The DOJ may subvert that requirement if going to the news agency would “pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.” Since the investigation into the identity of the leaker was already big news – in fact, congressional leaders in both parties had demanded it – it hardly constituted a secret operation that would be blown by negotiating with the AP.

So did Tuesday’s developments on the Benghazi and IRS fronts break scandal fever in the Beltway? Sadly, no. On Wednesday MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” remained scandal central, setting the day’s agenda. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s wispy, fact-light “President Passerby” seems to be the top talking point: Even if some of the smoke is clearing, Obama hasn’t done enough personally to put out the fires. That’s leading the Drudge Report as I write.

Obama is not without blame here; the AP scandal particularly seems to stem from his administration’s overall approach to secrecy. With hindsight, he probably should have directed Jack Lew to take bolder steps on Friday night, when the IRS story broke. On Benghazi, the Beltway is determined to punish the president for insisting the talking points scandal is a “sideshow” – when that’s exactly what it is.

As I wrote Monday, before the AP news, some of the same bad actors who paralyzed the country during the Clinton years over phony scandals are getting ready to do it again. It’s too bad the genuine overreach by the DOJ is going to give some progressives understandable pause about wholeheartedly defending the administration. But people need to acknowledge that two of these three scandals were concocted by the GOP outrage machine.

Meanwhile, the headline crawl on “Morning Joe” announced: “U.S. deficit shrinks far faster than expected.” But the words sat there silently, drowned out by noise about mostly made-up scandals.

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April 25, 2013 · 8:01 AM

Obama: Washington Is ‘Not As Functional As It Could Be’

Obama Bush

No S**t Sherlock!

The Huffington Post

* Former presidents also due to attend dedication

* Memorial service for Texas explosion victims on the agenda

* Fundraiser will aim to help Democrats in midterm elections

U.S. President Barack Obama is in Texas to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with former President George W. Bush in what could serve as a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggle against terrorism, from the Sept. 11 attacks to the Boston Marathon bombings.

Obama is due to attend the dedication on Thursday of Bush’s presidential library at Southern Methodist University, along with former presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter and hundreds of Bush administration alumni.

While Democrat Obama and Republican Bush have deep political differences, they share a common belief that the United States must defend itself against violent extremism.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks defined Bush’s eight years in the White House and last week’s Boston Marathon bombing handed Obama another challenge to homeland security.

Obama, at a Democratic fundraiser soon after he arrived in Dallas on Wednesday night, said he was looking forward to attending the Bush library dedication and that he would project a bipartisan spirit.

“One thing I will insist upon is whatever our political differences, President Bush loves his country and loves its people and…was concerned about all people in America, not just those who voted Republican. I think that’s true about him and I think that’s true about most of us,” Obama said.

Bush told ABC News that the Boston attacks reminded him of his time in the presidency.

“I was deeply concerned that there might’ve been an organized plot,” Bush told ABC News. “I don’t know all the facts… But I was deeply concerned that this could’ve been, you know, another highly organized attack on the country. And it still may be. Again, I don’t know all the facts.”

Certain issues require a common response regardless of political party, said David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Center at the University of Southern Illinois.

“They may get to the office as a conservative or a liberal but there are real forces that move them to the pragmatic center on a variety of issues and national security is one of them,” Simon said.

But Obama was also looking to a time when more Democrats could be elected to Congress. His first stop in Dallas was at a fundraiser that brought in $600,000 for the Democratic National Committee at the home of major Democratic donor Naomi Aberly.

It is his third fundraiser this year for his party in the hope that Democrats can wrestle control of the House of Representatives from Republicans and add to the Democrats’ Senate majority in 2014 midterm elections.

Without adding Democratic seats, Obama may find it difficult to overcome Republican opposition to many of the priorities of his second term, such as closing tax loopholes enjoyed mostly by the wealthy and stricter gun control.

“Washington is not, how should I put this charitably, it’s not as functional as it could be,” Obama said.

Still, he told the Democratic donors, he plans to keep talking to Republicans as he has in recent weeks to try to find common ground, even though “some of you may think I’m a sap” for doing so.

Thursday’s dedication of Bush’s library and museum has put Bush, the 43rd U.S. president, back in the limelight he has largely avoided since leaving office in January 2009.

At the time, the United States was laboring under the burden of two wars and a collapsed economy. Bush’s approval rating at the time was 33 percent. A Washington Post-ABC poll this week put his approval rating at 47 percent, basically equal to Obama’s.

The museum exhibits cover major points of Bush’s presidency and offer visitors an opportunity to decide how they would have responded to those challenges.

A central feature of the museum concerns the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Obama has found himself pursuing some of the same policies that Bush began, such using drones on military targets and trying to overhaul U.S. immigration laws.

Obama is expected to speak at the dedication along with the former presidents.

“Regardless of the times when they served and their political and policy differences, there is a commonality of experience that the president believes binds them together,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney.

After visiting Bush in Dallas on Thursday, Obama is scheduled to attend a memorial service at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for the 14 people killed when a fertilizer plant exploded last week in West, Texas. (Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Karey Van Hall, Toni Reinhold and Lisa Shumaker)

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April 17, 2013 · 4:44 PM

SENATE KILLS BACKGROUND CHECK AMENDMENT

 

Background-Check Amendment Fizzles

The Huffington Post

The Senate failed to muster sufficient support Wednesday for a gun-buyer background check bill that’s supported by nearly 90 percent of Americans, voting the measure down in a procedural vote that likely dooms any major legislation to curb gun violence.

The measure — painstakingly crafted by the bipartisan duo of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) — was seen as the key to getting the first measure in decades to address the sorts of mass slaughters that so recently horrified the country in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six teachers were gunned down, and in Auroro, Colo., where moviegoers where killed in a theater.

The amendment failed 54 to 46, falling short of the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster of the measure, even as victims of the Sandy Hook shootings watched from the Senate gallery and activists at a vigil outside the Capitol read the names of people slain since then, hoping to prompt action.

Passage of the background check amendment had been seen as key because it represented a bipartisan agreement in a highly polarized debate, and would have preserved a major part of the overall bill that many advocates against gun violence saw as a minimum step toward stemming gun massacres.

Stronger measures up for a vote also appeared headed for failure, including a ban of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. The only significant steps that all sides agreed on were stemming illegal trafficking of weapons and improving mental health efforts.

The background check measure would have expanded the current check system to cover sales of weapons on the Internet and at gun shows.

Democratic aides privately conceded that with the failure of background checks, the rest of the bill would likely go down. One described it as a “pyrhic victory,” noting that a majority of the Senate backed the bill that is so popular outside the halls of Congress. “It’s the farthest we’ve come,” said the aide, speaking on background to talk freely.

The aides saw little hope of it being resurrected, although leaders kept that option open.

Opponents argued that the expanded check system would have laid the groundwork for a national registry of gun owners, although the measure expressly forbid such a step with a 15-year jail sentence for anyone who tried to do that.

They also called it a useless step that would achieve little.

“Expanded background checks would not have prevented Newtown,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Neb.) said.

But Toomey said his amendment would have at least been a modest step in the right direction.

“The goal was to see if we can find a way to make it a little bit more difficult for people who have no legal right to have a gun for them to obtain it,” Toomey said. “That was the goal.”

The Seante failed to meet it.

 

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March 25, 2013 · 10:40 AM

Supreme Court To Hear Affirmative Action Case

Apparently the majority Justices of the Supreme Court want another shot at dismantling Affirmative Action.

The Huffington Post

The Supreme Court is broadening its examination of affirmative action by adding a case about Michigan’s effort to ban consideration of race in college admissions.

The justices already were considering a challenge to the University of Texas program that takes account of race, among many factors, to fill remaining spots in its freshman classes. The Texas case has been argued, but not yet decided.

The court on Monday said it would add the Michigan case, which focuses on the 6-year-old voter-approved prohibition on affirmative action and the appeals court ruling that overturned the ban. The new case will be argued in the fall. A decision in the Texas case is expected by late June.

The dispute over affirmative action in Michigan has its roots in the 2003 Supreme Court decision that upheld the use of race as a factor in university admissions. That case concerned the University of Michigan law school.

In response to the court’s 5-4 decision in that case, affirmative action opponents worked to put a ballot measure in front of voters to amend the state constitution to outlaw preferential treatment on the basis of race and other factors in education, as well as government hiring and contracting. In November 2006, 58 percent of Michigan voters approved the measure.

Civil rights groups sued to block the provision the day after the vote. In November, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 8-7 to invalidate the ban as it applies to college admissions. It did not address hiring or contracting.

The appeals court said the constitutional amendment is illegal because it prohibits affirmative action supporters from lobbying lawmakers, university trustees and other people who ordinarily control admissions policies. Instead, opponents of the ban would have to mount their own long, expensive campaign through the ballot box to protect affirmative action, the court said.

That burden “undermines the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change,” the court said. The 6th Circuit divided along ideological lines, with its more liberal judges in the majority.

In the Texas case, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas is suing to overturn the school’s use of race among many factors to fill out its incoming freshman classes. The bulk of the slots go to Texans who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.

The Michigan case is Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 12-682.

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January 7, 2013 · 5:31 PM

Entitlement reform” is a hoax

I have a feeling that a lot of people knew this already…but this is for those who might not know…

Salon – Robert Reich

No, Social Security won’t contribute to future budget deficits

It has become accepted economic wisdom, uttered with deadpan certainty by policy pundits and budget scolds on both sides of the aisle, that the only way to get control over America’s looming deficits is to “reform entitlements.”

But the accepted wisdom is wrong.

Start with the statistics Republicans trot out at the slightest provocation — federal budget data showing a huge spike in direct payments to individuals since the start of 2009, shooting up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase.

And Census data showing 49 percent of Americans living in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing — up from 44 percent in 2008.

But these expenditures aren’t driving the federal budget deficit in future years. They’re temporary. The reason for the spike is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically, including 22 percent of our children.

What about Social Security and Medicare (along with Medicare’s poor step-child, Medicaid)?

Social Security won’t contribute to future budget deficits. By law, it can only spend money from the Social Security trust fund.

That fund has been in surplus for the better part of two decades, as boomers contributed to it during their working lives. As boomers begin to retire, those current surpluses are disappearing.

But this only means the trust fund will be collecting from the rest of the federal government the IOUs on the surpluses it lent to the rest of the government.

This still leaves a problem for the trust fund about two decades from now.

Yet the way to deal with this isn’t to raise the eligibility age for receiving Social Security benefits, as many entitlement reformers are urging. That would put an unfair burden on most laboring people, whose bodies begin wearing out about the same age they did decades ago even though they live longer.

And it’s not to reduce cost-of-living adjustments for inflation, as even the White House seemed ready to propose in recent months. Benefits are already meager for most recipients. The median income of Americans over 65 is less than $20,000 a year. Nearly 70 percent of them depend on Social Security for more than half of this. The average Social Security benefit is less than $15,000 a year.

Besides, Social Security’s current inflation adjustment actually understates the true impact of inflation on elderly recipients — who spend far more than anyone else on health care, the costs of which have been rising faster than overall inflation.

That leaves two possibilities that “entitlement reformers” rarely if ever suggest, but are the only fair alternatives: raising the ceiling on income subject to Social Security taxes (in 2013 that ceiling is $113,700), and means-testing benefits so wealthy retirees receive less. Both should be considered.

What’s left to reform? Medicare and Medicaid costs are projected to soar. But here again, look closely and you’ll see neither is really the problem.

The underlying problem is the soaring costs of health care — as evidenced by soaring premiums, co-payments, and deductibles that all of us are bearing — combined with the aging of the boomer generation.

The solution isn’t to reduce Medicare benefits. It’s for the nation to contain overall healthcare costs and get more for its healthcare dollars.

We’re already spending nearly 18 percent of our entire economy on health care, compared to an average of 9.6 percent in all other rich countries.

Yet we’re no healthier than their citizens are. In fact, our life expectancy at birth (78.2 years) is shorter than theirs (averaging 79.5 years), and our infant mortality (6.5 deaths per 1000 live births) is higher (theirs is 4.4).

Why? Doctors and hospitals in the U.S. have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.

For example, almost 95 percent of cases of lower back pain are best relieved by physical therapy. But American doctors and hospitals routinely do expensive MRI’s, and then refer patients to orthopedic surgeons who often do even more costly surgery. There’s not much money in physical therapy.

Another example: American doctors typically hospitalize people whose diabetes, asthma, or heart conditions act up. Twenty percent of these people are hospitalized again within a month. In other rich nations nurses make home visits to ensure that people with such problems are taking their medications. Nurses don’t make home visits to Americans with acute conditions because hospitals aren’t paid for such visits.

An estimated 30 percent of all healthcare spending in the United States is pure waste, according to the Institute of Medicine.

We keep patient records on computers that can’t share data, requiring that they be continuously rewritten on pieces of paper and then reentered on different computers, resulting in costly errors.

And our balkanized healthcare system spends huge sums collecting money from different pieces of itself: Doctors collect from hospitals and insurers, hospitals collect from insurers, insurers collect from companies or from policy holders.

A major occupational category at most hospitals is “billing clerk.” A third of nursing hours are devoted to documenting what’s happened so insurers have proof.

Cutting or limiting Medicare and Medicaid costs, as entitlement reformers want to do, won’t reform any of this. It would just result in less care.

In fact, we’d do better to open Medicare to everyone. Medicare’s administrative costs are in the range of 3 percent.

That’s well below the 5 to 10 percent costs borne by large companies that self-insure. It’s even further below the administrative costs of companies in the small-group market (amounting to 25 to 27 percent of premiums). And it’s way, way lower than the administrative costs of individual insurance (40 percent). It’s even far below the 11 percent costs of private plans under Medicare Advantage, the current private-insurance option under Medicare.

Healthcare costs would be further contained if Medicare and Medicaid could use their huge bargaining leverage over healthcare providers to shift away from a “fee-for-the-most-costly-service” system to a system focused on achieving healthy outcomes.

Medicare isn’t the problem. It may be the solution.

“Entitlement reform” sounds like a noble endeavor. But it has little or nothing to do with reducing future budget deficits.

Taming future deficits requires three steps having nothing to do with entitlements: Limiting the growth of overall healthcare costs, cutting our bloated military, and ending corporate welfare (tax breaks and subsidies targeted to particular firms and industries).

Obsessing about “entitlement reform” only serves to distract us from these more important endeavors.

Edit: Emphasis is mine

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Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

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January 6, 2013 · 4:14 AM

Welcome to the new Civil War

Welcome to the new Civil War

In a recent discussion with a friend, I mentioned how news pundits constantly use the phrase: “Our country has not been so ideologically divided since the Civil War.”

My friend’s question was “why the Civil War analogy…?  The following piece tends to address this question.

Salon

Lincoln’s unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns

On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.

If only it had been so. What an affluent slave owner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.

It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction  fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.

So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

Edit Note:  Emphasis are mine

Continue reading here…

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January 3, 2013 · 4:06 PM

The wingnut trifecta

The wingnut trifecta

In this instance, Joan Walsh says what most pundits won’t…

Salon

Crazy GOP claims that Hillary Clinton is faking her illness slur the country’s three most popular Democrats

Right-wing claims that Hillary Clinton faked illness to avoid testifying about the Benghazi tragedy would be funny if they weren’t so ugly. It’s the wingnut trifecta, smearing our most popular past Democratic president, Bill Clinton, along with our current president, Barack Obama, and the current 2016 front-runner, all with one shot. Imagine birtherism crossed with the worst of the hateful anti-Clinton lies, like the “Vince Foster was murdered” claim. That’s Hillary-health trutherism.

But so far right-wingers claiming that Clinton somehow faked her concussion have gone virtually unchallenged on Fox News and right-wing sites like Newsbusters and the Daily Caller. Everyone from Charles Krauthammer to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton have gotten into the act. Even after reports that Clinton also suffered a dangerous blood clot between her brain and skull, Bolton not only failed to apologize, he suggested that she was dodging Benghazi questions in order to protect her 2016 chances.

This is crazy. Obviously, the Benghazi-coverup stories began as a way to hurt Obama, by alleging that he wasn’t telling the truth about Libya because he didn’t want to reveal that al-Qaida was a factor in the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, especially at the height of election season. After the election, the claims continued, and they mainly focused on the Sunday-show statements of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. They managed to torpedo Rice’s chances to succeed Clinton as secretary of state.

Now they’re going after Clinton herself, and no doubt some of it is designed to hurt her 2016 chances, even though she herself insists she won’t run. It’s remarkable to me how few mainstream, respectable Republicans have come to Clinton’s defense.  The Washington Post’s  Kathleen Parker did so today, in a column that declared “the attacks on Clinton during her illness, essentially attacks on her character, have been cruel and unfair.” But Parker is the rare Republican known for fairness and honesty (she was an early public critic of Sarah Palin, when others merely trashed the V.P. nominee anonymously).

It would be nice to see the three amigos, Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte, who cruelly and vindictively railroaded Susan Rice, get together and tell their wingnut friends the same thing. But tolerating Clinton health trutherism is like tolerating birtherism for the GOP: You don’t necessarily share in the craziness (and in the case of birtherism, the racism) that inspires it, but you benefit from its toxic half-life nonetheless.

I talked about the crazy Benghazi allegations on “Hardball” today and I was surprised to find myself in strong disagreement with the Daily Beast’s Lauren Ashburn. Ashburn acted shocked at the Clinton slurs; I argued they’re just the latest outbreak of Clinton-Obama derangement syndrome. But even more significant, Ashburn tried to declare that both sides are somehow equally to blame for the “incivility” of our current political debate, claiming that someone (she didn’t say who or where) had wished death on former President George Bush when the news broke that he was in the intensive care unit.

I’m on record, often, saying that false equivalence about haters on the right and left is dangerous. To equate Democrats and Republicans on this front, you’d have to imagine, say, Susan Rice suggesting something that crazy, not to mention unethical, about Mitt Romney’s secretary of state, had the 2012 race ended differently. And you can’t equate some random commenter on the HuffPost with people like Krauthammer and Hannity who have regular perches atop Fox News. That would be like Chris Matthews wishing death on the former president; it would never happen.

Watch my segment with Ashburn and Michael Smerconish…

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October 22, 2012 · 4:04 PM

Crash Course on Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Successes

Today I researched  President Obama’s foreign policy achievements in the last four years, in order to  prepare for  watching the debate tonight.  The entire debate will be on Foreign Policy.   This relevant article appeared in the Huffington Post on 07/06/2012.  

Here’s what I found…

The Huffington Post 

[...]

By any reasonable standard, Obama’s first-term foreign policy record is nothing short of astounding. On issue after issue, Obama has shown a steady — indeed, steely — resolve that has earned him major kudos from foreign policy specialists in both parties. Consider, for example, the following:

    • Two major U.S. land wars, both started by George W. Bush, are winding down. Obama, to the consternation of his base, pushed for a major “troop surge” in Afghanistan, but he alsostared down his top generals and resisted their demand for a prolonged counterinsurgency and nation-building campaign. The Taliban is reeling, and the American pull-back, starting this summer, is real. Obama also resisted pressure to reverse the Iraqi withdrawal and wisely brought in members of the Bush-era negotiating team to help seal and bless the deal.
    • Obama boldly intervened in Libya to oust dictator Muammar Gadaffi and to protect Western oil supplies, and he did it with minimal financial cost and no U.S. troop casualties. Moreover, in contrast to his predecessor, he didn’t act unilaterally but weighed in behind Europe and NATO. Republicans who charged the president with reckless “adventurism” have ended up with egg on their face. In fact, respect for multilateralism is back — and under Obama, it’s no longer just the “soft” option.
    • Obama has forged the closest American defense ties with Israel of any recent U.S. president, including Bush, while continuing to push for Israeli concessions on a Palestinian homeland. Obama has moved deftly, even winning strong support from the Israeli public, which says it wants its leaders to consult with Obama before taking future military action.Support from American Jews, despite concerns over friction between the White House and the Israeli Prime Minister, is holding steady.
  • Obama has also made China a key strategic priority, confronting Beijing on human rights, trade warfare, and economic spying, while bolstering America’s military presence in the Pacific. Donald Trump may think America is getting snookered but most Americans, it turns out, see Obama’s actions as judicious. In fact, leading foreign policy conservatives, includingRobert Kagan, who was a national security adviser to John McCain, and has periodically advised Romney himself, have strongly praised Obama’s entire Asia policy.

Some of Obama’s strongest foreign policy critics, in fact, aren’t on the right but on the left, which is disappointed that Obama hasn’t closed the base at Guantanamo, has eagerly embraced “drone” warfare, and has denied more Freedom of Information Act requests than his predecessor. But such criticism — while justified in some areas — is short-sighted overall. Obama has initiated some seismic shifts in national security doctrine that have a real chance of reducing the prospect of global war. Most notably:

    • Obama has quietly but forcefully revised the Pentagon’s long-standing “two-war” strategythat required an enormous conventional force structure supported by hundreds of American military bases. Under a new Obama plan, the number of soldiers in the Army and the Marines will decline by a remarkable 10-15 percent over the next decade, and a possible36 percent over the long haul. And base closures, already on the increase, will accelerate. The Obama shift means, in effect, that the U.S. is no longer contemplating a protracted land war on its own.
  • Just as dramatic are the significant steps that Obamas has taken to reduce the threat of nuclear war by shrinking American and Russian nuclear weapons arsenals to their lowest levels ever. The arms reduction process actually started under the first George Bush, but Obama is proposing to take it much further, tackling the more difficult deep-cuts, especially in tactical weapons, all the while working with Russia to force smaller nuclear states to slow or eliminate their own weapons programs.

What does Romney have to offer, by contrast? A return to Bush-era neo-conservativism managed by the same people who brought us the Iraq war, and who see any retreat from American unilateralism as a sign of military weakness. They include former Bush State department officialsEliot Cohen and John Bolton, who’ve been pushing Romney to attack Obama for abandoning Israel and for crippling America’s nuclear and conventional war capabilities. They’re also suggesting that Obama is weakening the United States in the face of threats from Iran and failing to intervene decisively to bring down the regime in Syria.

Fortunately, much of the foreign policy establishment, including Republicans like former Secretary of State James Baker, aren’t biting. In fact, there’s even growing concern over Romney’s call for a huge increase in U.S. defense spending over and above what the Pentagon under Obama is seeking. Romney’s spending hike would cost the Treasury an additional $2.1 trillion, undermining the GOP’s ostensible commitment to deficit-reduction, without necessarily enhancing U.S. defense capabilities.

How much does foreign policy matter? In the end, in a close race, it could matter a lot. One foreign policy expert, Bruce Jentleson, has noted that 8-10 percent or more of U.S. voters consistently say that foreign policy drives their vote. And the fact is, even those voters who say they’re mostly concerned about their “pocketbook” still form powerful impressions about candidates and their leadership abilities based on more than their records as economic “stewards.” These days, most voters know that America lives in a global world and that domestic and foreign policy are related, even if they’re not always sure how. It’s really up to the president to show how his handling of the trade deficit, increases in defense spending, or the threat of war can directly affect whether the economy grows or stagnates.

Some Obama successes, like his adroit handling of China, are inextricably tied to future jobs growth, in part through the recapturing of American jobs via “in-sourcing,” It makes no sense not to make this connection more explicit. Other foreign policy accomplishments could help the president with specific voter groups, including disillusioned youth and veterans, both of whom are showing strong signs of defection. Obama’s nuclear and conventional force reductions, for example, could galvanize his peace supporters but, as long-term deficit-busting measures, could appeal more widely, too.

In short, Obama seems to have a real opening on foreign and defense policy, which is something of a rarity for a Democratic presidential candidate. But he needs to seize this advantage now, before Karl Rove & Co. begin launching the kind of national security attack campaign that helped derail John Kerry’s bid for the White House in 2004. Developing a broader reelection narrative will allow voters to appreciate just how much is at stake in the election this November. It will also sharply contrast the two candidates’ leadership abilities and their fundamentally different visions for how America should confront the deeply intertwined global and domestic challenges of the 21st century.

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September 25, 2012 · 12:10 AM

Obama May Do Social Security Reform During Lame Duck Session, Senate Democrats Worry

Obama Social Security Reform

Many people realize that President Obama has had to cave in to Republicans on a few issues; for instance in order to get an emergency bill passed for unemployed workers or the  9/11 First Responders Health Care Bill.

However, this time if the POTUS does a quid pro quo with a promise to reform Social Security, the backlash will be loud and clear…

Huffington Post - Sam Stein

Concern is mounting among some Senate Democrats that President Barack Obama will make a deal with Senate Republicans during the lame-duck session that would result in changes to the benefit structure of Social Security.

One of the most progressive voices in the caucus, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), said he was heartened to hear Obama tell the AARP last week that he’d be open to raising the cap on income that’s taxed for purposes of paying into the Social Security trust fund. Sanders also applauded the president for taking off of the table any reform language that resulted in the “slashing” of benefits (several Social Security advocates, disagreeing with Sanders, said they were worried such language was counterproductive, as it opens the door for cuts that could be deemed minor).

But the Vermont Independent worried that all of this could be posturing for the lame-duck session immediately after the election, when lawmakers are expected to rush to find another “grand bargain” on tax and entitlement reform to stave off the so-called fiscal cliff.

“That’s exactly what’s going to happen,” Sanders said of Social Security being on the proverbial table, “Unless someone of us stops it — and a number of us are working very hard on this — that’s exactly what will happen. Everything being equal, unless we stop it, what will happen is there will be a quote-unquote grand bargain after the election in which the White House, some Democrats will sit down with Republicans, they will move to a chained CPI.”

Continue reading here…

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