Seriously. Thanks Obama

Busy with real life stuff so outsourcing all my posts today. Betty Cracker finds a bucket full of good news:

1. Colorado, Washington get OK from feds on marijuana

2. Federal Tax System Will Recognize Married Gay Couples Even If Their States Do Not

3. HHS Extends Medicare Benefits To Married Gay Couples

Plus the executive order on guns. Not a bad day’s work. Thanks, Obama!

The gun order closes a loophole that allowed convicted felons to subvert background checks by taking possession of firearms through a corporation and shut down the reimportation of military weapons from abroad. Click over for the supporting posts.

Read More

Blaming Obama

This takes Obama Derangement Syndrome to a new level.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

To be clear, the question specifically asked, "Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?"

In other words 73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA. And people wonder why we can't have an informed debate on anything in this country anymore?

Read More

Personal trivia

My friend and former employer gets invited to the occasional White House function but this encounter on the Vineyard happened by chance. Tom has spent every August there for many years.



Boston Globe tells me:

One diner who kept his distance was Northampton attorney and Obama fund-raiser Tom Lesser, who happened to be at the restaurant with his wife, Maggie Spiegel, and their daughters Grace and Elisabeth. Obama stopped to say hello and, before leaving, took a quick selfie with the girls. Patrons applauded as the president and first lady departed.

I watched those girls grow up. I still have a note from Gracie that she left for me when she was about five years old. They're both gorgeous young women with fabulous careers now. [photo credit Martha's Vineyard Gazette]

Read More

Grimm assessments

New York Congressman Michael Grimm is appalled Obama would use his executive power to do nice things for the peoples because, founding fathers never intended that to happen.

Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) said recent executive actions by President Obama, including a plan to extend high-speed Internet connections to virtually every school in the nation, demonstrate a "blatant" attempt to subvert the will of the American people.

"It's just a flagrant, you know, arrogant disregard not just for the current Congress," Grimm said in an interview with Fox News. "Look, it's not about me personally. That's not what this is about. You think about who is the Congress? It really — it is the voice of the people."

Or, if you're a Republican Congressman in John Boehner's House of Dysfunction, you're the voice of a handful of crackpots, but hey -- they're loud . But what's more interesting is new evidence of the GOP's emerging plan to blame their planned government shutdown on Obama.

"I really do believe because of political reasons, it's more advantageous for the president to keep us divided so that he can make these end runs and use these administrators and the people he puts in charge to just go around the Congress to do an agenda that he knows ultimately the people are not going to support," Grimm said.

Greg Sargent flagged the first inklings of the GOP's bizarre strategy last week and the GOPers are staying on message. They're floating this theme among the pary faithful while they're home in their districts. Last week in Virginia:

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.-10th), speaking in Loudoun County today, said he believes President Barack Obama wants a federal government shutdown in the fall.

If the government shuts down, Obama, a Democrat, will use the closure to score political points against Republicans and "stick it to them," [U.S. Rep. Frank] Wolf said. “I believe the president wants us to shut it down … I think he'll literally come at us,” Wolf, a 30-year incumbent, said.

And I believe Frank Wolf is "literally" either a flagrant liar or a raging lunatic who shouldn't be allowed within 50 miles of Capitol Hill. But the point is the GOP felt it necessary to come up with a ploy to shift the blame for a government shutdown using the defense: Obama made us do it. Finding that simultaneously hilarious, pathetic and terrifying.

Read More

Send in the creepy clowns

I usually ignore these sort of lame-ass stupid crackpot shots at Obama but this show of disrespect to our POTUS at a Missouri rodeo wasn't just an obscure and brief reference in some movie. This was a sustained charade at a family event with lots of children in attendance.

"The announcer wanted to know if anyone would like to see Obama run down by a bull," the posting said. "The crowd went wild. He asked it again and again, louder each time, whipping the audience into a lather."

Another clown then apparently joined the performance.

"One of the clowns ran up and started bobbling the lips on the mask and the people went crazy," the posting said. "Finally a bull came close enough to him that he had to move so he jumped up and ran away to the delight of the onlookers hooting and hollering from the stands."

Real lesson for the kids in civil discourse and tempered political disagreement there. Of course it's nothing new and not really worth making a huge deal over it. The main reason I'm mentioning it at all is because nobody has asked, "WTF is that broomstick in the photo all about?"

Read More

What the left could love about the NSA Presser

Time was when President Obama's forceful style at today's presser would have had "teh left" exploding with approval on the social nets. Those days are over. Opening with the appointment of a blue ribbon commission to study the NSA didn't thrill the spectators. We've seen that movie many times before and it rarely has a satisfactory ending.

That's not to say there wasn't a couple of (largely ignored) satisfying moments hidden in the Q & A. The two standout quotes for me came first in answer to Major Garrett's question on appointing a new head for the Federal Reserve. Obama answered in part:

But the other mandate is full employment. And right now, if you look at the biggest challenges we have, the challenge is not inflation; the challenge is we’ve still got too many people out of work, too many long-term unemployed, too much slack in the economy, and we’re not growing as fast as we should. And so I want a Fed chairman who’s able to look at those issues and have a perspective that keeps an eye on inflation, makes sure that we’re not seeing artificial bubbles in place, but also recognizing, you know what, a big part of my job right now is to make sure the economy is growing quickly and robustly, and is sustained and durable, so that people who work hard in this country are able to find a job.

Seem to remember many calls for exactly this statement from the bully pulpit. Saw the sum total of one tweet from someone else having noticed it. Neither have I seen any recognition for the strength of Obama's defense of the ACA outside of one tweet afterward from Ed Henry, who asked the question.

[Obama]: Now, what’s true, Ed, is, is that in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law -- it has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not -- it looks like there may be some better ways to do this; let's make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. [...]

Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned...

And let me just make one last point about this. The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea. What you should be thinking about is how can we advance and improve ways for middle-class families to have some security so that if they work hard, they can get ahead and their kids can get ahead.

Read the transcript for the full remarks. Our POTUS delivered as brilliant a defense of Obamacare as is possible for a black President leading during the biggest resurgence of institutional racism since the days of Jim Crow. That deserves more notice than it's likely to get.

Read More

Obama fights back at last

It's about damn time our President accepted his political opponents are irredeemable crackpots who care only about their own political power and dropped the nice guy routine. You can't meet people halfway when their definition of compromise is they get everything they want and you get to take all the blame for their inhumane agenda. But it is interesting to see how our "liberal" media plays the change. David Graham at The Atlantic lays it out under the headline, Forget the Charm, Keep the Offensive: Obama's Aggressive New Strategy.

Get that? Republicans can say any damn offensive thing they please, vandalize our system of government, advance the most obvious lies about the President's policy proposals, sabotage our economy, deliberately ignore the most pressing problems facing the nation and relentlessly attempt to destroy every vestige of humane government policy while wasting millions of our money on their political chicanery and the media merely transcribes it without any colorful adjectives that might even faintly suggest they're destroying America as we know it. But now that the President has finally decided to fight them on their own damn terms, he's aggressive. On the offensive. You can almost hear the word uppity just dying to get out.

But leaving the media's long entrenched GOPcentric mindset aside, I for one welcome the newly combative Obama. He's the President dammit. He was elected by a landslide by present day standards and this is what people stood in eight hour long lines for. A real fight. Republicans are out of control. They need to called out. Let them whine. It only exposes their weakness and their perfidy.

[Big thanks to Michael J.W. Stickings of The Reaction (Twitter: @mjwstickings) for kindly linking in.]

Read More

Obamacare, it's lowering costs

There was some article going around a week or so ago where one of the big health insurers was claiming rates would rise by something like 384% because of Obamacare. Which unsurprisingly turns out to be pure bullcrap. The news out of California, our biggest state with some 7.1 million uninsured residents, is rates are going to be significantly lower than even neutral observers had predicted.

I couldn't access the original New Republic piece. Apparently you need to be a subscriber now to read it, but Ed Kilgore has a good summary:

Based on the premiums that insurers have submitted for final regulatory approval, the majority of Californians buying coverage on the state’s new insurance exchange will be paying less—in many cases, far less—than they would pay for equivalent coverage today. And while a minority will still end up writing bigger premium checks than they do now, even they won’t be paying outrageous amounts. Meanwhile, all of these consumers will have access to the kind of comprehensive benefits that are frequently unavailable today, at any price, because of the way insurers try to avoid the old and the sick.

Ed has the numbers and a policy that was expected to cost $450 a month will actually be $300 and that's before the government subsidies kick in. For healthy 20 years old, the subsidies will completely cover a bare bones policy and a single individual making under $45k a year, estimated to be about 12% of the population, will get generous subsidies as well finally making health care affordable for just about everybody. And this is even with major insurers opting out of the exchanges.

And it's not just in California. Obamacare is lowering rates in other states too because, competition.

We've see this happen in other states. Earlier this month, rate proposals released by insurance companies in Washington state showed some people's premiums would actually go down. Premera Blue Cross had estimated that premiums would rise about 50 percent to 70 percent. When Oregon released proposed health care premiums online in May, two insurers requested the chance to adjust their rates — to make them lower. Why is this happening? "The premiums and participation in California, Oregon, Washington and other states show that insurers want to compete for the new enrollees in this market," the Kaiser Family Foundation's Gary Claxton told The New Republic. The glories of the free market.

This is why the GOPers keep trying to repeal it. Their greatest fear is it will succeed and prove the reformers, and Obama, were right.

Read More

Don't want to go to war no more

Second day analysis is coming in on Obama's foreign policy speech and this NYT editorial sees what Obama did there:

President Obama’s speech on Thursday was the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America. For the first time, a president stated clearly and unequivocally that the state of perpetual warfare that began nearly 12 years ago is unsustainable for a democracy and must come to an end in the not-too-distant future.

Our POTUS effectively declared the war on terror over. No more axis of evil. No more existential threat to justify deploying combat assets to fight a ground war that doesn't have a home ground. Obama is calling for a return to law enforcement and intelligence gathering for such preventative measures as are possible in fighting small cell groups and radicalized individuals.

Unsurprisingly, Charlie Pierce has the most astute analysis of Obama's speech. Definitely read it all but here's the punchline:

The process of making the presidency an office with far more power in foreign affairs than the Founders intended took decades. The process of putting a sharp edge on that office took less than one. Give this president some credit. At least he knows what a deadly weapon his office is.

Yes, Obama's speech was only words but I believe this counts as the use of the bully pulpit his critics so often claim he refuses to use. He's calling for an end to the forever war. He's asking America to calm down and restore some of those freedoms we gave up for supposed security. He's asking to have some of the executive war powers rescinded. But he can't make his rhetoric come to fruition alone. Congress needs to do its part, so maybe targeting them for some criticism would help acheive the goals Obama laid out. It's worth a try.

Read More

Obama redefines the war on terror

President Obama gave a foreign policy speech this afternoon. Do yourself a favor. Read the whole speech before you read any of the instant punditry and take it as gospel. If you're out of free reads at the NYT, Booman has it and he also has one of the more temperate takes on it.

It was a huge and complex speech. A speech that takes some time to process fully. Maybe it was just too complicated in a world that now operates mostly in 140 character quips and expects on demand gratification. The initial wave of analysis I've seen was rife with cherry picked points that offer a ride on favored hobby horses.

Predictably, drones emerged as the first complaint. Obama didn't disown their use. He was honest in his assessment of their necessity. He didn't make false promises that they won't be used again. What was mostly ignored is that he acknowledged they were problematic and pledged to work towards making their use more transparent and accountable. What also won't be mentioned much is the appropriate Congressional committees were informed before every strike. And I suppose I'll lose whatever liberal cred I have left when I say, I agree with Obama. Given the choices, none of which are good, drones are still a better choice than any other option. I don't want our country to be killing people. But I honestly think, Obama doesn't either and he's making the best choices he can under the circumstances. He's not wrong when he says it's the best way to minimize civilian deaths.

I've seen him accused of passing the buck to Congress. Not sure how that works, when Congress is the body that has the responsibility for setting the parameters. Obama tried to close Gitmo practically on the first day he took office. Congress wasted no time in making it illegal to do so. Never understood what executive action progressives think he should have taken to override Congress. Funny, I thought we hated executive overreach. Don't see how he could do much more than say this.

"There is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened."

Obama also addressed everything from surveillance on the media to prosecuting leakers to the incremental destruction of our civil rights under the aegis of national security. Much of it was more aspirational than operational. Given the political reality, don't see how he could do much more. But the most important part of the speech was clear and bold. He promised to work to rescind the AUMF. He won't sign another extension. No other president will be able to wage an undeclared war under that ill-advised leftover legacy of the Bush administration.

That's big. He deserves some praise for that, dammit. I'm thinking historians will be kinder to Obama in the future than the media and the internets are to him in the present.

Read More

President Obama, cool, calm, collected

Some insights from former speechwriter Jon Favreau, on how President Obama deals with media driven scandals. Worth a read in full, but here's the standout grafs:

In the case of the AP phone records, Obama the former constitutional-law professor cares deeply about the balance between freedom and security. This is the president who began the foreign-policy section of his inaugural with the words “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” And he wants Congress to debate and finally pass a media-shield law. But can you imagine if the president of the United States had quashed a court-ordered subpoena in an independent investigation he wasn’t even supposed to know about? A subpoena aimed at finding the person in his own administration who leaked classified information that may have jeopardized American lives? Talk about a political scandal. [...]

That is who he is. The handwringers and bed wetters in the D.C. punditocracy should know that Barack Obama will never be on their timeline. He does not value being first over being right. He will not spend his presidency chasing news cycles. He will not shake up his White House staff just because of some offhand advice offered to Politico by a longtime Washingtonian or a nameless Democrat who’s desperately trying to stay relevant. And if that means Dana Milbank thinks he’s too passive; if it means that Jim VandeHei will keep calling him arrogant and petulant; if it means that Chris Matthews will whine about him not enjoying the presidency, then so be it. He’ll live.

We could use some of that "not valuing being first over being right" ethic in our punditocracy right now. In fact we could use a metric ton of it. Not that we will get it as long as the big money is in chasing news cycles and creating outrage.

Read More

Obama Derangement Syndrome is destroying us

The only surprise here is Sen. Pat Toomey was so explicit in admitting his fellow GOP Senators suffer from terminal ODS. He explains why the Manchin-Toomey admendment failed.

"In the end it didn't pass because we're so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it," Toomey admitted on Tuesday in an interview with Digital First Media editors in the offices of the Times Herald newspaper in Norristown, Pa.

This is not exactly news. It's been the publicly announced prime directive of the Republican party since the day Obama was sworn into office. And that's just in the Senate. John Boehner's House GOPers are so badly infected they won't even support GOP trickery that would have severely damaged Obamacare because it gave the appearance of helping Obama. Boehner's crackpot caucus are apparently so stupid they couldn't grasp the strategy.

Not sorry that one failed but the greater concern is the crackpots have no interest in governing. They see their job as obstructing governance. Their hero is Andrew Breitbart who told them to never retreat, never surrender. It makes them feel powerful to kill compromise bills. Wolverines baby. They're rebels. Their only nod to actual governance is introducing symbolic bills based on crackpot conspiracy theories passed around among themselves in viral emails.

So the Village punditry mewling about Obama's failure to lead this pack of lunatics to sanity can kindly shut the pie hole about juice. Republican leadership can't even get the crackpots to support their own damn party. If instransgient Republican obstructionism is the definition of lame duck, then Obama has been a lame duck since day one of his presidency. Meanwhile our people have no jobs. They have no money. And our national infrastructure is slowing crumbling while the DC media trades insider jokes on the twitter all day.

Read More

Make them laugh

Echoing some rumblings I've seen among our DC insider media on the twitter, Ezra declares Obama wasn't really joking at their celebrity bash.

Obama’s speech at the White House correspondents’ dinner was well received, and for good reason — it was very funny. But there were a lot of moments when Obama seemed to be subverting the rules of the evening in order to get away with telling harsh truths that he could later claim were just jokes.

“Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress,” the president said. “‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”

Everyone laughed. But do you detect an actual joke there? And lest you think I’m cutting the punchline, here’s Obama’s next sentence: “I’m sorry. I get frustrated sometimes.”

Screw that noise. It's supposed to be a roast. You can't hear it in a written transcript but in the instant, Obama's comedic timing was impeccable. Jay Leno can only dream of mastering the delivery of topical humor as well as Obama did. The jokes were funny because they were true.

Read More

Fun at the George W Bush library opening

Trick title. These pro-forma ceremonious occasions are never really fun. Though I'll admit, Barbara Bush's remarks in this pre-opening interview were amusing. Even she's had enough of political dynasties. She thinks her Jebby is the best man for the job but should opt out of 2016 anyway. And of course, there's the usual media concern trolling on what it all means to Obama's agenda.

Read that stuff if you're interested. All I have left to say is in pictures. This one is my very favorite of the lot I've seen. That's Daddy Bush in the pink socks. Finding it oddly endearing.


[Charles Dharapak photo via twitter]

This one truly speaks a thousand words that will never be spoken aloud in public.


[Charles Dharapak photo via twitter]

I leave it to you to guess what Babs is thinking at that moment.

Addendum: Charlie's take is always worth reading. Especially this point.

The coverage of the opening of this vast temple to prevarication and ruin is not about bricks and mortar. It's about an attempt by the courtier press to absolve itself of a dereliction of duty that rivaled even that of the president in question... (That dereliction of duty, it should be noted, now and forever, began with the coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, and the disgraceful performance of the elite political press corps towards Al Gore.)

In some way, this library is more a standing testament to the greatest media fail in history than it is to W's eight year reign of error.

Read More

Sure as death panels and no taxes

Who could have predicted?

1) GOP says no budget deal without "entitlement" cuts.

2) Obama gives them "entitlement" cuts.

3) Republicans say no budget deal because:

Well Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) — who also happens to be chairman of the House GOP’s re-election committee — just showed how it’s done, saying Obama’s budget “lays out a shocking attack on seniors.”

“I’ll tell you when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taken $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine certainly and around the country,” he said on CNN Wednesday afternoon.

White House strategery team really can't be the only ones who didn't see this coming. It's equally clear the GOP crackpot caucus won't buy any deal -- ever. Even if he gave them every single thing they wanted and didn't ask for a thing in return the crackpots wouldn't take the deal because, if Obama wants it, they don't want him to have it. So what's the point of pissing off the entire rest of the electorate except for Very Serious Pundits who nobody listens to outside of the Beltway bubble?

Think Obama needs better consultants.

Read More

Chain of fools

In the interests of my blood pressure, decided long ago to save my outrage for things that are clearly imminent. So I'm not all that exercised about Obama's new budget even though it's said to offer up the chained CPI on Social Security. Matt thinks it's dangerous but it's not scaring me yet. Looks like just another deal that isn't meant to happen.

It's a budget proposal. A political document that has more to do with messaging than policy. I do agree with Charlie Pierce though. Offering up yet another dismal grand bargain with these kind of optics is stupid politics and reinforces the false choices that should belong solely to the Republicans.

This is what Jim DeMint believes, after a few years in a sweet government job, from which he will derive a sweet government pension, and which enabled him to move sweetly into a quasi-governmental job at which he produces nothing at all except hot air. Nice work if you can get it. This is what they all believe. They believe that the problem with Social Security is that...it...works. This is why any economic compromise with these people is guaranteed to hurt all the wrong people.

I'm guessing the White House consultants decided Obama needed to piss off the liberals to appease the Village elders with a show of making tough choices. That may work. Twitter told me E.J. Dionne loved it. But the hundreds of millions of voters who get their news in 30 minutes on the teevee, all they're going to internalize is newscasters very seriously telling them -- again -- Obama wants to cut Social Security. After he and Joe explicitly promised not to touch Social Security. If there's some eleventy dimensional chess strategy here which leads to energizing the Democratic vote in 2014, I'm not seeing it.

Read More

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose

All the cool kidz and other important journos are having a little snarkfest over Obama's poor showing on the basketball court this morning. Seems clear to me these people either have never hung around with children or else are the kind of cutthroat competitors who would stop at nothing to beat a youngster at a game. I look at this video and see a man who isn't trying to win. Seriously, look at Obama's form on these shots. Especially his hands.



Not saying he didn't legitmately miss a couple of those, but does it really look like he was focused on sinking most of those shots? It doesn't to me. Of course, I cheat to lose whenever I play a game with kids myself, at least until they get good enough to really beat me. You have to be subtle so they don't know you're doing it.

Maybe that's coloring my interpretation, but I've seen Obama shoot baskets before with adults. He's a much better player than he was in this little event. But can you imagine what the media would have done if he had sunk every shot and overpowered the kids shooting against him? It would been a right wing freakout complete with a Drudge siren along the lines of: Arrogant Obummer mean to kids, usurps their fun time to show off. Who needs that?

Read More