Tag Archives: obama

President Obama Starts to Focus on the Middle Class

by JacobHaralson Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

One of the hot topics of conversation in progressive circles these days is the middle class. Democrats support plenty of programs that provide benefits to the poor (Medicaid, minimum wage, SNAP, etc.), but what about programs that benefit the middle class? What do Democrats do for them?

By coincidence, this week provides a couple of examples of programs that are targeted more at the middle class than the poor. First up is President Obama’s proposal to fund two years of free community college for everyone. As Libby Nelson explains, Pell Grants already make community college free for most low-income students:

The most radical part of Obama’s free community college proposal isn’t that it’s free — it’s that it’s universal….So the best way to look at the Obama free college plan is as a promise to the middle class. Families who earn too much for federal financial aid but aren’t wealthy enough to afford thousands of dollars of college bills are rightly feeling squeezed as tuition prices rise.

This might not be the most effective way to spend federal money. But it’s politically smart. To see why, look at pre-K. Most of the research on pre-kindergarten effectiveness is about whether it helps poor children catch up to their peers from wealthier families. But in 1995, Georgia decided to use lottery winnings to make free pre-K available not just to the poor, but to any family who wanted to join.

Two decades later, Georgia’s universal pre-K program is very popular, championed by liberals and conservatives alike. And the reason it’s managed to stay relatively apolitical and noncontroversial is that it’s universal, Fawn Johnson wrote in National Journal last year. A program just for the poor “would be about class warfare,” one Georgia Republican told her.

Elsewhere, Greg Sargent notes that new rules governing overtime wages could benefit middle-class workers:

Obama will soon announce a rules change that governs which salaried workers will get time-and-a-half over 40 hours under the Fair Labor Standards Act….“The spotlight is now on raising wages,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told me. “Raising wages is the key unifying progressive value that ties all the pieces of economic and social justice together. We think the president has a great opportunity to show that he is behind that agenda by increasing the overtime regulations to a minimum threshold of $51,168. That’s the marker.”

….A lower threshold could exclude millions. In raising his voice, Trumka joins Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressive Senators who have urged a threshold of $54,000, and billionaire Nick Hanauer, who is urging $69,000. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that raising the threshold to a sum approximating what the liberal Senators want could mean higher overtime pay for at least 2.6 million more people than raising it to $42,000. EPI says setting it at over $50,000 could mean over six million people, or 54 percent of salaried workers, are now covered.

Both of these proposals would primarily benefit middle-class workers which makes it unlikely that either of them will get any support from Republicans or from the business community. But they’re worth pursuing anyway. At least they let everyone know whose side each party is on.

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President Obama Starts to Focus on the Middle Class

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The House Just Voted to Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline

by Oliver9602 Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

The House of Representative voted overwhelmingly Friday to approve construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. But even with 28 Democrats joining nearly all Republicans in voting “yea,” supporters of the project still fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to override President Barack Obama’s promised veto.

The State Department, which has jurisdiction over the proposed pipeline because it would cross an international boundary, is currently in the process of determining whether the project is in the national interest. The House bill would circumvent that process and force approval of the pipeline. In a statement today reiterating its veto threat, the White House said Obama opposes the bill because it “conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures…and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests.”

The debate will now shift to the US Senate, which is planning to vote on the pipeline next week. Late last year, Senate Republicans came within one vote of the 60 needed to pass a bill to approve the project. With Republicans now in control of the Senate, the Keystone bill will likely pass next week. But as in the House, pipeline supporters will struggle to attract sufficient Democratic votes to override a presidential veto.

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The House Just Voted to Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline

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Nebraska Supreme Court clears the way for a Keystone decision

by DavidKitchen Posted on January 9, 2015

Nebraska Supreme Court clears the way for a Keystone decision

By on 9 Jan 2015 11:06 amcommentsShare

President Obama recently cited a pending court case in Nebraska as a reason for delaying his final decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. The court has now ruled in the case, so that excuse for inaction is gone.

From The New York Times:

The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Keystone XL pipeline to be built through the state, removing President Obama’s chief reason for delaying a decision on the project.

Gov. Dave Heineman had approved the Keystone project after the pipeline company, TransCanada, proposed a route that avoided Nebraska’s ecologically delicate Sandhills region. In making their decision, the Nebraska justices effectively overturned a lower court’s ruling that had blocked a state law giving the governor the right to approve the pipeline project.

Both opponents and supporters of the proposed pipeline are now calling on Obama to make a damn decision already.

Oil-loving Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), new head of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee: “Today’s court decision wipes out President Obama’s last excuse. He’s had six years to approve a project that will increase U.S. energy supplies and create closer ties with our nearest ally and neighbor, and he’s refused to act.”

350.org Executive Director May Boeve: “President Obama is now free to act and reject Keystone XL outright. No matter the route, as long as the pipeline is carrying tar sands oil it is a global warming disaster and fails the President’s climate test.”

More immediately, though, the Nebraska decision puts Secretary of State John Kerry in the hot seat. From Politico:

Friday’s ruling will let the State Department resume its almost-completed review of the Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, which the department halted in April amid uncertainty about the Nebraska case.

State Department officials have indicated it could still take months for Secretary John Kerry to offer his own judgment on whether building Keystone would be in the interests of the United States.

Meanwhile, the House is gearing up to approve a bill today that would push through Keystone, and the Senate is expected to do the same next week — even though Obama has already threatened to veto the measure.

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Nebraska Supreme Court clears the way for a Keystone decision

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Obama Is the Most Liberal President Since LBJ — But That Doesn’t Really Mean Much

by Heike2245hgux Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michael Gerson thinks that Democrats have regressed to the bad old days of 70s liberal excess, when the American public rebelled against lefty craziness and finally installed Ronald Reagan as president to get the country back on track. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats eventually got their party back in power by moving toward the center, but over the past six years that’s all been thrown overboard. “President Obama has now effectively undone everything that Clinton and the New Democrats did in the 1980s and ’90s,” he warns.

Ed Kilgore, who was there, throws up his hands in irritation:

Since Gerson appears to assume that Clinton was strictly about appropriating conservative themes, I guess he cannot come to grips with the fact that the Affordable Care Act was based on the “managed competition” model that a lot of New Democrats preferred to Clinton’s own health care proposal, or that Obama’s “cap-and-trade” proposal was relentlessly and redundantly promoted by the New Democratic think tank the Progressive Policy Institute. Just about everything Obama has proposed on tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and even national security policy has been right out of the Clintonian playbook. Has Gerson noticed that Obama’s not real popular with people on the left wing of the Democratic Party?

There’s a weirdly schizoid nature to Obama’s presidency. If you were to call him the most liberal president since LBJ, you’d be right. There’s really not much question about it.

But that’s not because he’s some kind of wild-eyed lefty. It’s because there have only been two other Democratic presidents in the meantime, and both of them were relatively conservative. It’s easy to forget now, but Jimmy Carter’s strength in the 1976 Democratic primaries was largely based on his appeal to evangelical Christians. This spawned the ABC movement—Anybody But Carter—midway through the primaries, but it was motivated not by Carter’s liberalism, but specifically by a fear among liberal Democrats that Carter was too conservative for the party. And he was. In office, Carter governed mostly from the center left, infamously opening himself up to a crippling primary challenge in 1980 from Ted Kennedy.

Ditto for Bill Clinton, who explicitly ran and governed as a centrist liberal. So is it fair to say that Obama is the most liberal president of the past half century? Sure, in the same way that it’s fair to say that a Honda Civic is faster than a Toyota Corolla or a Chevy Cruze. But that hardly makes the Civic a speed demon.

Still, even with all that said, Obama is, in fact, more liberal than previous Democratic presidents of the past half century. He’s rhetorically more liberal than Clinton, for example, and he’s rarely felt the need to do any Sister Souljah-ing. What’s more, while he may have made occasional noises about entitlements and budget deficits, he’s got nothing like either welfare reform or bank deregulation on his record. Everything he’s done has been pretty much in the mainstream liberal tradition.

Plus there’s one more thing: Obama has been far more effective than either Carter or Clinton. That obviously makes him seem more effectively liberal than his predecessors. But this isn’t really due to either a fervent commitment to radical populism or to shrewd management of the lefty agenda. It’s because Obama enjoyed a huge Democratic majority in Congress for his first two years. When that went away in 2010, so did much of his success.

So two things are true: Obama is the most liberal president since LBJ and he’s also a fairly standard-issue mainstream Democrat. Obamacare, in particular, doesn’t make him a radical. It just makes him lucky to have had a Congress willing to pass it.

After 30 years of ascendant Reaganism, it’s probably normal for conservatives to feel that any kind of liberal agenda is extremist almost by definition. But that’s little more than an unwillingness to accept the normal pendulum swings of American politics. As Kilgore points out, Obama’s tax policy, education policy, infrastructure policy, trade policy and national security policy have been to the left of George Bush, but not really much different from anything Bill Clinton would have done if he’d been able to. In the end, Obama is a Honda Civic to Clinton’s Toyota Corolla. A little faster, but still not exactly a thunderbolt.

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Obama Is the Most Liberal President Since LBJ — But That Doesn’t Really Mean Much

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Elizabeth Warren Slams GOP for Hypocritical Push on Keystone XL

by SteveBathrjlwxk Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is attacking Republicans for trying to force the Obama administration to approve the Keystone XL pipeline while simultaneously promising Democrats a renewed spirit of bipartisanship in Congress.

“There’s going to be an energy hearing on Wednesday, and right now, the Republicans say they’re going to move forward on the Keystone pipeline,” Warren said Monday. “If we’re going to move forward on something how about something that more of us can agree on?”

“A bill that’s about energy conservation, energy efficiency, and about jobs and has strong bipartisan support. There is a place we can start.”

Separately, Warren told the editorial board of MassLive.com that the GOP’s push for Keystone belied the party’s purported eagerness to work with Democrats. “This tells me that with the Republican rhetoric that they are going to find things for us to work together on—their actions don’t match their words.”

Warren’s criticisms came a day before the White House formally announced that President Obama will veto legislation forcing his hand on the pipeline. Senate Democrats have previously expressed confidence that Republicans would be unable to override a veto.

“I think there will be enough Democratic votes to sustain the president’s veto,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday.

During last month’s end-of-year press conference, the president signaled his skepticism over the pipeline’s purported advantages for Americans, calling it a “nominal” benefit for US consumers and a boon for Canadian oil producers.

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Elizabeth Warren Slams GOP for Hypocritical Push on Keystone XL

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Will Obama Get Answers From Mexico’s President on the Disappearance of 43 Students?

by BartSochab Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto arrived in Washington to meet with President Barack Obama. Familiar topics, such as trade and the economy, are high on the leaders’ agenda. But Peña Nieto’s record on security—particularly the 2014 disappearance of 43 Mexican students taken by police and believed to be dead—will likely dominate this week’s meetings. So too will the sheer scope of Mexico’s eight-year drug war: Since 2007, it’s estimated that more than 100,000 Mexicans have been killed and some 20,000 disappeared.

Since taking office in 2012, Peña Nieto has enjoyed an “extraordinarily close” relationship with the Obama administration, and—rhetorically, at least—has sought to move from the militarized response to organized crime that characterized the presidency of his predecessor, Felipe Calderón. Nevertheless, human rights organizations and activist groups are calling on Obama to demand answers from Peña Nieto for the Mexican government’s failures. In a letter to Obama, Human Rights Watch claimed that Peña Nieto’s government “has largely failed to follow through on its own initiatives” to make the country safer, and called on the president to “ask Peña Nieto to explain exactly what steps he is taking to ensure that Mexico prosecutes abuses.”

The students’ disappearance isn’t just a Mexican problem. Under the Merida Initiative, a joint security partnership, the United States has given more than $2 billion to Mexican security forces since 2008. The funding—provided by American taxpayers—come with conditions, including that Mexico investigate police abuses. “Despite unequivocal evidence—including cases documented in the State Department’s own reports—that Mexico has failed to meet these requirements, your administration has repeatedly allowed the funds to be released,” Human Rights Watch wrote in the letter.

In a Monday press release, a senior White House official expressed the administration’s “strong belief” that those responsible for the students’ disappearance will be brought to justice, and nodded at the Mexican government’s arrest of more than 70 suspects. “I’m certain that this will be a part of the conversation tomorrow,” the official said.

The Obama administration’s assurances did not mollify the dozens of protesters who greeted Peña Nieto at the White House on Tuesday morning. Andrea Adum, who made the trip from Staten Island, said she wanted to see a stronger response, including reconsideration of Merida and the ousting of Peña Nieto’s government. “We know the government did nothing” to investigate the students’ disappearance, she said. The 70 arrested, she claimed, were “people the government were looking to blame, to try to calm the protesters down.” Protester Arnoldo Borja was pessimistic too: Nothing constructive will happen between the two leaders, he predicted. “It’s been massacre after massacre” in Mexico, he said. “After this, then what?”

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Will Obama Get Answers From Mexico’s President on the Disappearance of 43 Students?

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The Itsy Bitsy Ambitions of John Boehner

by MohamedVirtue Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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You can’t accuse John Boehner of starry-eyed idealism:

When I ask him to name his top priority, he lays out not a grand legislative bargain but a seemingly modest managerial goal that has eluded him for much of his time at the top: exercising enough control over his conference to pass spending bills through regular order.

Um, OK. That seems doable. But I’m not so sure about this:

The idea of a Boehner-Obama bargain late in the game is no idle fantasy….Boehner told me “bipartisanship” was in fact one of his top priorities for 2015, and, in private, in the wake of the 2013 shutdown debacle, Boehner told his inner circle that he has no problems passing big legislation “by working directly with the Democrats” if his own conference defies him again.

….That’s the way it worked in December: Two-thirds of Republicans joined about one-third of Democrats to pass a Boehner government-funding plan….When I asked Boehner if he worried Republicans would slam him for dealing with Democrats, he blew a puff of smoke and answered, “I don’t care.”

It’s true that during the recent lame-duck session, Boehner was willing to pass a compromise budget that alienated much of his own caucus and required lots of help from Democrats to pass. But will he be willing to do that when it comes to a “big deal on taxes, entitlements and government spending, trade and immigration”? I have my doubts, no matter how much we hear that Boehner and Obama are really tighter buddies than you’d think. It’s not just that Boehner really, truly has to be willing to defy a big chunk of his caucus, after all. He also has to be willing to take the risk of making genuine compromises in order to get a sizeable chunk of Democrats on board. Outside of budget deals, I’ve simply seen no evidence that Boehner is willing to do that—or, even if he is, that he has the mojo within his own caucus to get most of them to agree to such a deal.

But we’ll see. Maybe Boehner will surprise us. I just wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

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The Itsy Bitsy Ambitions of John Boehner

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Republicans Will Never Allow Guantánamo To Be Closed

by NorbertoXPF Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess you can add this to the list of President Obama’s executive actions designed to circumvent an unhelpful Republican Congress:

In a series of secret nighttime flights in the last two months, the Obama administration made more progress toward the president’s goal of emptying the military prison at Guantánamo Bay…Now 127 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, down from 680 in 2003, and the Pentagon is ready to release two more groups of prisoners in the next two weeks; officials will not provide a specific number.

President Obama’s goal in the last two years of his presidency is to deplete the Guantánamo prison to the point where it houses 60 to 80 people and keeping it open no longer makes economic sense.

Hmmm. Will Republicans be willing to close Guantánamo if it no longer makes economic sense to keep it open? Color me skeptical. This is a tough-on-terrorism issue, not a budget issue. If I had to guess, I’d say that Republicans would refuse to close Guantánamo if there were even a single prisoner left there. If it becomes a US version of Spandau, well, that’s just fine. Closing it is for appeasing, weak-kneed, liberals, not rock-jawed severe conservatives.

In fact, I could easily see this becoming a stock question during the Republican primaries. “Would you ever close Guantánamo?” The candidates will then take turns trying to top each other with ever more absurdly hawkish answers, the same way they did with immigration in 2012. Like this:

Candidate 1: I will never close Guantánamo. These are the most dangerous people in the world.

Candidate 2: Not only wouldn’t I close it, I’d expand it.

Candidate 3: Expand it and make it more secure. I’d build a moat.

Candidate 4: And an electrified fence.

Candidate 5: I’d take away their Obamacare!

At that, everyone would look admiringly at Candidate 5 and silently give him the victory.

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Republicans Will Never Allow Guantánamo To Be Closed

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Quote of the Day: Obama’s Clean Record Is Evidence of How Corrupt He Really Is

by RosalynNewdegat Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Jonah Goldberg, explaining the “culture” that causes Hillary Clinton’s supporters to attack 2016 primary opponent Jim Webb even if she hasn’t asked them to:

She’s created an infrastructure. The incentives are in place. The culture exists. It’s a bit analogous to Lois Lerner at the IRS. She didn’t need to be told by the White House to target conservative groups. She simply knew what she had to do.

I guess this is where we are. Even Darrell Issa’s committee report—Darrell Issa’s!—was forced to concede that whatever the IRS did or didn’t do in its targeting of nonprofit political groups, there’s no evidence the White House was involved in any way. This creates a real pickle. What’s a good conservative to do?

Answer: simply declare that the White House was involved—in fact, so deeply involved that there was no need for actual marching orders. The very lack of evidence is the best evidence we have of massive, deep-seated corruption in Obama’s inner circle. Case closed!

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Quote of the Day: Obama’s Clean Record Is Evidence of How Corrupt He Really Is

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Obama’s Foreign Policy: Frustrating, Perhaps, But Better Than Most of the Alternatives

by LeiaDeloach Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

I guess I missed this in the coverage yesterday about the official end of the war in Afghanistan:

The ceremony in Kabul honoring 13 years of mostly-American and British troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan had to be held in a secret location because the war has gone so badly that even the capital city is no longer safe from the Taliban.

That’s from Max Fisher, who also provides us today with a “highly subjective and unscientific report card for US foreign policy.” As top ten lists go, this one is worth reading as a set of interesting provocations, though I think Fisher errs by focusing too heavily on military conflicts. There’s more to foreign policy than war. Beyond that, I think he often ends up grading President Obama too harshly by judging him against ideal outcomes rather than the best plausible outcomes. Giving him a C+ regarding ISIS might be fair, for example, since it’s quite possible that quicker action could have produced a better result1. But a D- on Israel-Palestine? Certainly the situation itself deserves at least that low a grade, but is there really anything Obama could have done to make better progress there? I frankly doubt it. I’d also give him a higher grade than Fisher does on Ukraine and Syria (I think that staying out of the Syrian civil war was the right policy even though the results are obviously horrific), but a lower grade on China (A+? Nothing could have gone better?).

Overall, I continue to think that Obama’s foreign policy has been better than he gets credit for. He’s made plenty of mistakes, but that’s par for the course in international affairs. There are too many moving parts involved, and the US has too little leverage over most of them, to expect great outcomes routinely. When I look at some of the worst situations in the world (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Israel-Palestine) I mostly see places that the US simply has little control over once you set aside straight-up military interventions. Unfortunately, that’s a big problem: the mere perception that an intervention is conceivable colors how we view these situations.

Take the long, deadly war in the Congo, for example. Nobody blames Obama for this because nobody wants us to send troops to the Congo—and everyone understands that once a military response is off the table, there’s very little we can do there. Conversely, we do blame Obama for deadly civil wars in places like Iraq and Syria. Why? Not really for any good reason. It’s simply because there’s a hawkish domestic faction in US politics that thinks we should intervene in those places. This, however, doesn’t change the facts on the ground—namely that intervention would almost certainly be disastrous. It just changes the perception of whether the US has options, and thus responsibility.

But that’s a lousy way of looking at things. US military intervention in the broad Middle East, from Lebanon to Somalia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya, has been uniformly calamitous. In most cases it’s not only not helped, but made things actively worse. No matter what Bill Kristol and John McCain say, the plain fact is that there’s very little the US can do militarily to influence the brutal wars roiling the Middle East and Central Asia. Once you accept that, Obama’s recognition of reality looks pretty good.

For the record, I’d give Obama an A or a B for his responses to Syria and Ukraine. Is that crazy? Perhaps. But the hard truth is that these are just flatly horrible situations that the US has limited control over. When I consider all the possible responses in these regions, and how badly they could have turned out, Obama’s light hand looks pretty good.

1Or maybe not. But it’s plausible that it might have.

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Obama’s Foreign Policy: Frustrating, Perhaps, But Better Than Most of the Alternatives

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