Tag Archives: obama

Republicans Coming On Strong in Last Week Before Election

by RicardoEGAG Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s now seven days until Election Day, and unfortunately things are trending pretty badly for us liberal types. The ABC/Washington Post poll on the right shows that Democrats and Republicans are pretty much all planning to vote for their own party next week, which leaves the election in the hands of independents. That turns out to be grim news. We can argue all day long about whether independents are “really” independent, but at this point it doesn’t matter. They represent about a third of the electorate, and at the moment they favor Republican candidates by nearly 20 percentage points.

There doesn’t seem to be any specific issue driving this. People are just generally unhappy. A huge majority think America is on the wrong track; Obama’s approval rating remains mired only slightly above 40 percent; and far more people blame Democrats than Republicans for the rising dysfunction of the federal government.

That last point is especially galling for Democrats, but it’s a win for Republicans and yet another sign of change in the way Washington is likely to work in the future. Republicans have discovered that a sufficiently united party can obstruct everything and anything but largely escape blame for the resulting gridlock. This lesson has not been lost on Democrats, and it bodes ill for the future regardless of who wins our next few elections. There’s just no reward for getting things done these days, and this probably means that less and less will get done. That’s Political Economy 101 for you.

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Republicans Coming On Strong in Last Week Before Election

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John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

by Florencia4409 Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Three months ago, John Boehner threw a bone to the tea-party faction that was nipping at his heels and demanding action against the lawless tyrant Obama and his executive orders that routinely defied both the Constitution and the duly enacted laws of the land. The bone took the form of a planned lawsuit against the administration because it had delayed certain aspects of the employer and employee mandates under Obamacare.

At the time, I was perfectly OK with Boehner doing this. Why not let courts decide this kind of dispute, after all? That’s what they’re for. What’s more, unlike most of the tea party complaints about lawless behavior, this one seemed at least defensible. And yet, three months later, we still have no lawsuit. Why? Simon Lazarus and Elisabeth Stein suspect that it has to do with Boehner asking for some legal advice from the Congressional Research Service and then quietly getting a report that he wasn’t expecting:

CRS reports such as this one are generated in response to requests by members or committees of Congress, though the CRS does not make public the identity of the requester or requesters. This particular report — of which House Democrats were unaware until it appeared — bears the earmarks of an inquiry, requested by the Speaker or his allies, to give some color of legitimacy to their charges of rampant presidential illegality. Instead, the result validates the lawyers’ maxim not to ask a question when unsure of the likely answer.

The Report offers two conclusions: First, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), no rulemaking procedure was necessitated by the Administration’s initial one-year delay in enforcing the employer mandate, past the ACA’s prescribed January 1, 2014 effective date….Second, the Report states that, when, in February 2014, the Administration announced an additional year’s postponement of full enforcement of the mandate, until January 1, 2016, “informal rulemaking procedures” appeared to be required. In fact, as the report’s authors reference, the Administration had engaged in precisely the type of informal rulemaking process that, the report concluded, was called for. The Administration’s action finalized a September 2013 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, making adjustments in response to comments from interested parties, precisely as prescribed by the APA.

In other words, having been asked whether the Obama administration had crossed all its t’s and dotted its i’s, the CRS’ answer was unequivocal: yes it had. In bland CRS-speak, this seems like a veritable finger in the eye — or perhaps, a blunt warning to the Speaker to drop the lawsuit project.

Oops. This doesn’t mean Boehner can’t still file his lawsuit, of course. It was all pretty much symbolism and bone-tossing in the first place, so it hardly matters if he ends up losing the case a year or two from now. But it could have proven embarrassing, especially if the CRS report became public, which, inevitably, it did. This stuff never stays under wraps forever.

So perhaps Boehner has decided to hold his fire. He has bigger fish to fry right now, and I doubt he was ever all that excited about the lawsuit anyway. For now, it’s become just another shard on the ever-mounting bone pile of tea party outrage about a president doing stuff they don’t happen to approve of.

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John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

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Elizabeth Warren’s Latest Comment About Running For President Is the Most Cryptic Yet

by FrankieReeder Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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With 106 weeks until the next presidential election, speculating about a potential Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) candidacy is like going on a long car ride with a six-year-old. “Are you running?” No. “How about now?” No. “Now?” No. “Now?” No. “What about now?” No. “Are you running?” No. “Are you running?” exasperated sigh “Aha!”

But Warren does continue to do the things people who are considering a run for president tend to do—flying to Iowa to rally the troops on behalf of Rep. Bruce Braley, for instance, and going on tour to promote a campaign-style book. Her latest venture, a sit-down interview in the next issue of People magazine, isn’t going to do much to quiet the speculation, even as she once more downplayed the prospect of a run:

Supporters are already lining up to back an “Elizabeth Warren for President” campaign in 2016. But is the freshman senator from Massachusetts herself on board with a run for the White House? Warren wrinkles her nose.

“I don’t think so,” she tells PEOPLE in an interview conducted at Warren’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for this week’s issue. “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

She just doesn’t see the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being one of them. Not yet, anyway. “Right now,” Warren says, “I’m focused on figuring out what else I can do from this spot” in the U.S. Senate.

“Amazing doors”; “I don’t think”; “right now”—what does it all mean? Warren’s not really saying anything we haven’t heard from her before. But after then-Sen. Barack Obama’s furious denials about running for president eight years ago, no one’s ready to take “no” for an answer. At least not yet, anyway.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Latest Comment About Running For President Is the Most Cryptic Yet

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Voter’s Boyfriend to Obama: "Mr. President, Don’t Touch My Girlfriend"

by HTAPhilipp Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama was in Chicago on Monday to cast an early vote for the midterm elections. He did so while standing next to fellow voter Aia Cooper. Cooper’s boyfriend, who was also standing nearby, issued a remarkable warning to the president:

“Mr. President, don’t touch my girlfriend.”

With Cooper laughing, but clearly mortified, the exchange that follows is just priceless. (Well played, Mr. President.) Watch below:

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Voter’s Boyfriend to Obama: "Mr. President, Don’t Touch My Girlfriend"

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Here’s How President Obama Is Using the ‘Oil Weapon’—Against Iran, Russia, and ISIS

by JonathaBateson Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was heinous. It was underhanded. It was beyond the bounds of international morality. It was an attack on the American way of life. It was what you might expect from unscrupulous Arabs. It was “the oil weapon”—and back in 1973, it was directed at the United States. Skip ahead four decades and it’s smart, it’s effective, and it’s the American way. The Obama administration has appropriated it as a major tool of foreign policy, a new way to go to war with nations it considers hostile without relying on planes, missiles, and troops. It is, of course, that very same oil weapon.

Until recently, the use of the term “the oil weapon” has largely been identified with the efforts of Arab producers to dissuade the United States from supporting Israel by cutting off the flow of petroleum. The most memorable example of its use was the embargo imposed by Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) on oil exports to the United States during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, causing scarcity in the US, long lines at American filling stations, and a global economic recession.

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Here’s How President Obama Is Using the ‘Oil Weapon’—Against Iran, Russia, and ISIS

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Take Two: Are Americans Really in Love With War?

by XLBAntoine Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday I wrote that the American public is “in love with war.” This was obviously a bit of a rant, born of frustration with our seemingly bottomless tolerance for addressing foreign policy problems in suitably small countries with military force. Greg Sargent pushed back with some polling evidence, and Daniel Larison takes things a step further:

Far from being “in love” with war, a better way to think of the public’s reaction is that they have been whipped into a panic about a vastly exaggerated threat by irresponsible fear-mongers. Most Americans support the current intervention because they wrongly think it is necessary for U.S. security, and they have been encouraged in that wrong view by their sorry excuse for political leaders.

I got this same kind of pushback from several people, but I really think this is a distinction without a difference. As it happens, my primary point was actually the same as Larison’s: that the American public is very easily whipped into a war frenzy. In the case of ISIS, all it took was a couple of atrocities on YouTube; a bit of foaming at the mouth from the usual TV permahawks; and a presidential decision to take action. Obama didn’t even need to wave the bloody shirt. In fact, he’s been relatively restrained about the whole thing. Still, he did commit us to military action, and that was enough. Public support for bombing ISIS went from 39 percent to 60 percent in a mere twelve weeks.

Does this mean the American public is in love with war? Or merely that when a war is proposed, they can be persuaded to support it pretty easily? I submit that there’s not really a very big difference between the two.

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Take Two: Are Americans Really in Love With War?

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Mitt Romney Takes Another Crack at Explaining the 47 Percent

by Carmell8860 Posted on September 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a recent interview with Mark Leibovich, Mitt Romney offered up a new excuse for foolishly venting to a supporter during the 2012 campaign about the perfidy of the “47 percent” (i.e., the folks who take no personal responsibility for their lives and just want lots of free bennies from the government). Here it is:

Romney told me that the statement came out wrong, because it was an attempt to placate a rambling supporter who was saying that Obama voters were essentially deadbeats. “My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man,” Romney said. “If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.” I had never heard Romney say that he was prompted into the “47 percent” line by a ranting supporter. It was also impossible to ignore the phrase “If I had to do this again.”

David Corn calls bullshit:

That supporter was not rambling. Here’s what he asked: “For the last three years, all everybody’s been told is, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’ How are you going to do it, in two months before the elections, to convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself?” That was a straightforward query, succinctly put, not rambling at all. It was Romney who took the point to the next level and proclaimed that a specific number of Americans were lazy freeloaders who could not and would not fend for themselves.

But I don’t think this is fair. “Rambling” and “ranting” are Leibovich’s words, not Romney’s. All Romney says is that he was “speaking in a way that reflected back to the man.” And that’s true. In fact, this was pretty much my guess about what really happened that night, and I suggested at the time that it revealed a lot about Romney’s execrable people skills. After all, every candidate has to interact with true believers, many of whom are also rich donors.

A politician with even a tenuous grasp on how to handle this kind of pressure knows what to do: you redirect. You can’t tell these folks they’re crazy, of course….But you can’t really agree with them either….So you soothe. I get where you’re coming from. And then you back away. Maybe you blame it on polling data….Maybe you change the subject….Maybe you appeal to authority.

….But you handle them. Except that apparently Romney can’t. And that’s pretty weird, isn’t it? He has more experience handling the titanic egos of rich people than anyone in politics. If anyone should be able to stroke big-dollar donors without saying anything stupid, it ought to be Mitt Romney.

This is basically what Romney is fessing up to. He wanted to pander to this questioner, but he didn’t have the skills to do that off-the-cuff in a safe way. So, since he thought he was speaking privately, he just went ahead and gave him the full pander instead.

Whether Romney really believed what he was saying is sort of irrelevant. I figure he probably did—sort of—though I suspect that if he’d been in a different mood he would have said something a little different. But what we really learned from this episode is that Romney had neither the guts to stand up to a rich donor nor the people skills to soothe and redirect in a safe way. In other words, he’s not really the kind of guy you want to be president of the United States.

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Mitt Romney Takes Another Crack at Explaining the 47 Percent

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Obama Threatened Far More Often Than Any Previous President

by NonaBoothe Posted on September 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Carol Leonnig has a piece in the Washington Post today about a botched Secret Service response to a 2011 shooting at the White House:

The suspect was able to park his car on a public street, take several shots and then speed off without being detected. It was sheer luck that the shooter was identified, the result of Ortega, a troubled and jobless 21-year-old, wrecking his car seven blocks away and leaving his gun inside.

The response infuriated the president and the first lady, according to people with direct knowledge of their reaction. Michelle Obama has spoken publicly about fearing for her family’s safety since her husband became the nation’s first black president.

Her concerns are well founded — President Obama has faced three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Service’s threat assessment.

Gee, I wonder why?

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Obama Threatened Far More Often Than Any Previous President

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GOP Donor: Elect a Republican Sheriff in Case Obama Seizes Dictatorial Power

by PollyWillshire Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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As DeKalb County, Alabama, prepares to elect its next sheriff, one local Republican has taken it on herself to ask voters a tough question: In the likely scenario that President Obama suspends the 2016 elections and seizes dictatorial power, can the local citizens count on a Democratic sheriff to oppose him?

Betty Mason, a Republican donor who is married to a longtime leader of Alabama’s Republican Party, posed the question in a letter she mailed last week to voters in DeKalb County, which covers a rural community in the northeast corner of the state.

“Obama is determined to be a dictator with the executive orders he signs,” she wrote. “He has left the US Constitution in shreds. If Obama decides to run again (against US law) or declares a National Emergency to suspend elections in 2016, what will our Democrat sheriff do? I am concerned he will go along with this lawless president.”

The county’s current sheriff is Jimmy Harris, a Democrat, who is running for reelection. Mason encouraged voters to support his challenger, Republican Rex Leath, who is the assistant police chief of Collinsville. “Leath has pledged to defend our citizens even against a lawless President,” she declared.

Mother Jones asked Leath if he shares Mason’s concerns about the president’s autocratic aspirations. “Oh, I sure do,” he says. “I would hope every American in the country would…I don’t really know what he is capable of doing at this point. If martial law is declared by the president, he can’t be removed from office.”

Here’s a copy of the letter, which was tweeted by a local resident:

Mother Jones couldn’t reach Mason, but her husband, Frank Mason, confirms that she wrote the letter. He added that the couple helped Leath organize the campaign event referred to at the bottom of the letter.

“Based on what Obama has done, I don’t know what he might do,” Frank Mason says. “I just don’t really know.”

Leath didn’t know in advance that Mason was writing to voters—but he says she’s glad he did. “It was a very sweet letter,” Leath says. “Very well written.”

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GOP Donor: Elect a Republican Sheriff in Case Obama Seizes Dictatorial Power

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Republicans Already Planning Big Fight Over Nominee They Don’t Even Know Yet

by MaryannBXK Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation yesterday. The tea party show horses are already in full war cry mode:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) issued a political call to arms for conservatives, saying that outgoing senators should not vote on the nominee during the post-election lame-duck session. “Allowing Democratic senators, many of whom will likely have just been defeated at the polls, to confirm Holder’s successor would be an abuse of power that should not be countenanced,” Cruz said in a statement.

This is pretty plainly part of Cruz’s ongoing effort to be king of the tea party wing of the GOP, since it obviously makes no sense otherwise. Unless Cruz is suggesting that they should be banned completely, then of course business should be conducted during lame duck sessions. What else is Congress supposed to do during those few weeks?

In any case, since Congress has no intention of doing anything worthwhile for the next two years, this means they’ll have plenty of free time for dumb fights that allow them to one-up each other for the tea party vote. The rules of the contest are simple: the dumber and more outrageous your rhetorical firebombs aimed at President Obama, the better you do. It’s sort of like a video game for cretins. I’m sure it’s going to be a barrel of fun.

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Republicans Already Planning Big Fight Over Nominee They Don’t Even Know Yet

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