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Giant hog farms are making people sick. Here’s why it’s a civil rights issue.

by JoleenPercy Posted on November 6, 2014

WHOLE HOG

Giant hog farms are making people sick. Here’s why it’s a civil rights issue.

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6 Nov 2014 9:23 AM

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Giant hog farms are making people sick. Here’s why it’s a civil rights issue.

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The foul stench and pollution caused by North Carolina’s industrial swine farms has long impacted the quality of life — and the health — of nearby residents. This is a civil rights issue, according to environmental justice advocates. Earthjustice filed a complaint in September against the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), alleging that the pollution disproportionately affects African-American, Latino, and Native American communities living near the farms.

Since DENR gets money from the EPA, the complaint made its demands under the auspices of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

Complainants hope that in the year 2014, the Office of Civil Rights will enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and EPA’s implementing regulations, and will respond with the full force of law — withdrawing DENR’s funding, if need be — to protect communities of color from the injustice of being forced to live and work near inadequately regulated industrial pollution sources.

And yes, we’re talking about the injustice of a whole lotta poop, but it’s no joke. More than 2,000 high-density farms in eastern North Carolina store the urine and feces of 9.5 million swine in “open-air cesspools” and then spray all that liquid manure onto nearby fields. That means nitrates, harmful bacteria, and parasites leach into the groundwater. Ammonia and hydrogen sulfide and feces particles can permeate the air. Nearby residents — who, according to a recent study on the issue, are at least 1.5 times as likely to be people of color — get asthma attacks, bronchitis, runny noses and eyes. There’s even been a study linking North Carolina’s hog farms to high blood pressure. Ugh.

The civil rights complaint is new territory for the DENR, reports the News & Observer:

DENR spokesman Drew Elliot said the agency is reviewing the complaint. “This civil rights process is not one we’re very familiar with,” he said. “It’s not something we deal with very much.”

Ouch. Well, perhaps it’s time they did. There are a lot of complaints to be leveraged against factory farms, but that certainly includes their impact on the folks living downwind.

Source:
Density Of Industrial Hog Farms In North Carolina Prompts Civil Rights Investigation

, MintPress News.

Environmental groups: NC swine farms discriminate against minorities

, The News & Observer.

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Giant hog farms are making people sick. Here’s why it’s a civil rights issue.

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What you need to know about the next big climate report

by Chandra7325 Posted on October 29, 2014

What you need to know about the next big climate report

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29 Oct 2014 10:40 AM

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What you need to know about the next big climate report

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The rumblings are starting: There’s a big climate report on the way. But wait — you’ve heard this one before, right? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — its report already came out recently, didn’t it? More than once, come to think of it?

Well, yes, but there is still one more IPCC report coming out this Sunday, Nov. 2. It’s related to the others, but is also sort of different. For starters, a leaked draft uses stronger words to describe the climate threat we face if we don’t take strong action, words like “severe, pervasive and irreversible,” according to the AP.

The IPCC’s latest big survey of climate research has been unveiled in installments over the past 13 months, and what comes out on Sunday is the final summary, called a “synthesis report.” Its authors are meeting in Copenhagen this week to wrangle over the final wording and ultimately put the finishing touches on it.

The panel intends for this assessment report to guide international negotiators as they work, in the run-up to the big Paris climate summit in December 2015, to hammer out an agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The U.N. hopes nations will find a way to squeeze through the ever-shrinking window of opportunity and cut a deal to keep the planet from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the goal scientists have set to avoid the worst impacts of climate change — before we blow right past that target.

Rajendra Pachauri.

Kris Krüg

Opening the IPCC meeting on Monday, Rajendra Pachauri, the group’s chair, acknowledged that stuff doesn’t look super great right now. But he called on these U.N. negotiators to resist despair. The AP:

“May I humbly suggest that policymakers avoid being overcome by the seeming hopelessness of addressing climate change,” Pachauri said. “Tremendous strides are being made in alternative sources of clean energy. There is much we can do to use energy more efficiently. Reducing and ultimately eliminating deforestation provides additional avenues for action.”

Representatives of participating nations have been telling the IPCC what changes they’d like to see in the summary report before it becomes final. One leaked draft had more than 2,000 suggestions for changes. From the British news website Responding to Climate Change (RTCC), which got its hands on the draft:

The UK wants the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study to focus more [on] the “risks of delaying action” as well as the “co-benefits of action”.

US comments say the study should stress how richer countries could be affected by future extreme weather events. “There are very few references to the vulnerability of wealthier countries to climate change,” they write.

The US also says the final IPCC synthesis report, which pulls together three 1,000+ page studies released in the past 12 months, needs to be more accessible to readers without deep technical knowledge of climate issues.

“This document should be prepared so as to be effective for the people who will only read the gray boxes. This report is a story, of what happens if we don’t act, and what can happen if we do … it should be an effective story.”

Not all comments addressed big-picture concerns, RTCC notes.

“I have zoomed 150% in the pdf and have a huge monitor. The [Figure SPM 4] has a low resolution which makes it hard to read on paper,” a Danish official writes.

You can’t get much past those Danes.

The IPCC, a group affiliated with the U.N., has been putting together reports since 1988. Thousands of climate scientists volunteer their time to summarize the latest and best research out there on climate change. The group put out its first assessment report in 1990, and then three more in 1995, 2001, and 2007. (See John Upton’s excellent “WTF is the IPCC?” for more background.)

The panel has been working for over three years on this latest report (they do take their time). The gargantuan assessment report (sometimes referred to by wonks as AR5, for “assessment report 5”) is made up of three working-group reports, which are each quite long, and then the big summary that’s due out on Sunday.

The first part, you may recall, came out last September. From the first of the three working groups, it reiterated that humans are the main driver of climate change, at least since 1950, and highlighted research indicating that oceans have been absorbing more heat since the 1990s than in previous decades. It put the target for total CO2 we could release into the atmosphere at 1 trillion tons — and we’ve already released more than half of that.

The second working group released its report in March of this year. It looked at vulnerable communities and adaptation, and found the world to be frighteningly underprepared. And the third working group’s report came out in April. It looked at mitigation — wonk-speak for cutting emissions — and methods of doing so justly through global cooperation.

AR5 is intended, more than past reports, to prompt some action. U.N. climate summits haven’t yielded binding global agreements. Environmentalists are calling last week’s E.U. agreement to cut emissions a “weak compromise.”

There’s one more annual, high-level U.N. negotiating session on climate before the big 2015 conference, and it convenes in December in Lima, Peru. “The [IPCC] report will be a guide for us,” Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal told Reuters. At the Lima meeting, negotiators hope to lay the groundwork for a plan that will be put into action the following year in Paris. Many see that conference as the last chance to work out a deal that will keep the climate from spinning too far out of control.

Source:
IPCC Chairman Pachauri Urges Governments To Keep Up Hope Amid Climate Change Battle

, The Associated Press.

US and UK call on UN science panel to stress climate risks

, Responding to Climate Change.

U.N. climate change draft sees risks of irreversible damage

, Reuters.

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These Guys Were on the Deepwater Horizon When It Blew Up

by RRIAbraham Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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After the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform exploded in June 2010, killing 11 workers and sending roughly five million barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, much of the media coverage featured sludge-covered seabirds, empty shrimp baskets, and other environmental impacts. But for Doug Brown, the catastrophe was even more immediate. He was the rig’s chief engineer, standing in the control room when a deafening blast sent him flying and turned his workplace into a fiery, oil-soaked hell.

In The Great Invisible, a documentary about the blowout and its aftermath that premieres today in Los Angeles and New York, Brown breaks into tears as he recalls the “incoherent screamings of pain” of his coworkers: “I saw men completely lose control.”

This virtually untold side of the Deepwater Horizon story emerges from a melange of archival footage (including home videos shot onboard the rig) and original interviews with rig workers and family members of men who died in the disaster. They speak of pride at working on one of the world’s most advanced drilling rigs, terror at the explosion, and the post-traumatic stress and guilt that still haunt them.

Above all, they tell of their betrayal by Transocean, the rig’s owner, and BP, its operator—companies to which they gave their best years, and which they now blame for systematically walking back basic precautions in the months preceding the explosion. The film is equally critical of the federal government, which has resumed selling offshore drilling leases while offering no new rig-safety regulations.

The Great Invisible also paints a vivid portrait of life in the bayou fishing communities where filmmaker Margaret Brown (no relation to Doug) grew up—communities still reeling four years after the spill. I spoke with Brown about producing a film that is as much an exploration of America’s love-hate relationship with the oil industry as it is a critique of a few miscreant companies—and about how she encouraged her emotionally scarred central characters to speak out for the first time.

Climate Desk: You grew up in southern Alabama. How did your own background affect your filmmaking approach?

Margaret Brown: That’s pretty much why I made the film. My dad was sending me pictures of his house with the orange oil booms they put out during the spill. It was weird to see your home surrounded by the booms. It was really emotional. And then I started talking to people in the area, and everyone was super depressed. It’s not like a hurricane where people know how to respond. In a hurricane, there’s a drill if you grow up down there. With this, nobody knew what to do. There was a lot of uncertainty and depression. And that was what I responded to.

Filmmaker Margaret Brown

When we first went down there, there were so many cameras on the beach for like two or three months. And then it went away. I was curious about what would happen when all the other cameras left—when that image went off the news of the plume of oil leaking. The minute that was gone, all the reporters were gone. I stayed four years. I was curious what it would be like to make a film about something everyone knows about. How do you make that novel and fresh?

The film changed. It started with me wanting me to make something about where I grew up, and turned into something about the larger question of how Americans relate to petroleum. I wanted to see if I could make something personal, but also where people can watch it and understand a little more about what happens when we fill up our car. Hopefully people would have the same kind of thought process that I did, learning about how deeply entrenched the government is, how it makes so much money off offshore leases—which is probably a big answer to why things aren’t changing.

CD: Which of your initial assumptions were challenged or changed as you made the film?

MB: I think just the scope of what we talk about when we talk about oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. And after watching all the grandstanding in Congress, I really did think something might change in terms of safety regulations. Maybe that’s naïve. But this is the first major oil spill where something hasn’t changed. It made me a little more cynical.

But I think it’s a timely moment. People are realizing climate change is real in a way they didn’t 10 years ago. I think the film is part of the conversation, but it’s not the answer. I think people see it in a really simple way, like it’s either “Boycott BP!” or “Drill baby drill!” There’s no real understanding of the huge expanse in between, and that’s frustrating to me. We are all connected to what BP is giving us.

The spill happened, and then nothing happened. I hope the film can address why nothing happened, and I think a lot of that is Congress. But also that, the minute it got off the news, people stopped thinking about. It seemed like, “Okay, they capped it. It’s gone.” But actually, there are no new safety regulations. It’s not gone.

Doug Brown was chief engineer on the Deepwater Horizon when the rig exploded in 2010. Courtesy Margaret Brown

CD: How did you get the workers and their families to open up?

MB: That was the hardest part, actually, those interviews. Rig hand Stephen Stone and Doug Brown were absolutely the hardest people to get to agree to be in the film. I think that was mainly because of the PTSD they’d suffered from the accident, and they and their wives weren’t sure if being in the film would be better or worse for them. I think they’re still not sure. We still talk about it. But I think mainly the consensus has been that it’s been cathartic and positive to share their story. Those stories of how their lives have changed, and how they haven’t gotten paid, and what happens when you witness this—the guilt and the troubling feelings, the suicidal feelings. It’s some of the scariest stuff there is. They were super brave to be in the movie, because in that industry I think people sort of follow the leader, and those guys decided to speak out and be whistle blowers.

Doug had tried to kill himself, and it was really hard to get them to open up. I spent hours with his, Meccah, on the phone talking, and crying sometimes, because I think they thought at first that I was a spy from Transocean. They had such a level of mistrust and being messed around with by those companies that they didn’t believe that I was an independent filmmaker. So I went from being a spy to someone you would talk to. They felt that Doug had been so loyal to that company, and was so proud of his job. To go from that to feeling like—I mean, Doug struggles with a lot of guilt for something that he had little to no control over. And it’s interesting to me who feels guilt in this film—and who should feel guilty.

The workers are proud of what they’re doing. There’s a sense of bringing oil to the American people and providing energy. If you just look at it from the left, and how bad BP is, you’re going to miss a lot of what’s really going on.

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These Guys Were on the Deepwater Horizon When It Blew Up

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If Wendy Davis Thinks She Can Win an Election by Pointing Out Her Opponent’s Disability, She’s Wrong

by HollyChowne Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wendy Davis just released an ad attacking Greg Abbott, her opponent for governor in Texas, which is, to be blunt, bullshit. It’s offensive and nasty and it shouldn’t exist. She’s basically calling Abbott a cripple.

There are a lot of good reasons not to like Greg Abbott. The fact that he’s in a wheelchair isn’t one of them.

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If Wendy Davis Thinks She Can Win an Election by Pointing Out Her Opponent’s Disability, She’s Wrong

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt on What It Means For Him to Be a Proud, Male Feminist

by JuliNiesagjojq Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt produced a thoughtful video exploring what it means for him to identify as a feminist and the nuances surrounding the label.

“To me it just means that your gender doesn’t have to define who you are,” Gordon-Levitt explains. “That you can be whatever you want to be, whoever you want to be, regardless of your gender.”

Acknowledging feminism’s complexities, the actor goes onto dispel notions positioning feminism as somehow “anti-men” and that the movement might even be old-fashioned.

“The facts are pretty contrary to this, if you actually look at the evidence of salaries vs. salaries for men,” he sayd. “There’s still a definite disparity.”

Earlier this year, Gordon-Levitt first revealed he was a proud feminist on the Ellen Degeneres Show, explaining his mother’s influence on his views of women and gender equality.

“It’s worth paying attention to the roles that are sort of dictated to us and realize that we don’t have to fit into those roles — we can be anybody we want,” he told Degeneres.

Just another reminder to Pharell, boys and girls can both be feminists, too.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt on What It Means For Him to Be a Proud, Male Feminist

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Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

by AltaG65eacunv Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The Census Bureau released its annual poverty report today, and the headline number shows that the official poverty rate declined from 15.0 percent to 14.5 percent. This decline was driven entirely by a drop in the number of children living in poverty.

This gives me an excuse to make a point that doesn’t get made often enough. You’ll often see charts showing that the overall poverty rate has remained roughly the same since the late 60s, and that’s true. But this is largely due to more generous Social Security benefits, which have reduced elderly poverty from over 30 percent to under 10 percent.

There’s been no such reduction among working age adults. In fact, just the opposite. The low point for working-age poverty was about 9 percent, reached in 1968, and since then it’s steadily increased. There are small variations from year to year, but basically it went up to about 10-11 percent in the 80s and then increased to 13.6 percent during the Great Recession. It’s stayed there ever since.

The safety net has helped most of these folks tread water, but it doesn’t change the fact that the market economy has gotten steadily bleaker for the poor over the past 40 years. It’s great that we’ve made such significant inroads against elderly poverty, but aggregates can fool you about the rest of the country. Among everyone else, poverty has only gotten worse and worse.

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Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

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Dot Earth Blog: A Closer Look at the Ebola Epidemic in the Context of Ecological Health

by Myrna Posted on September 9, 2014

There’s a chance the Ebola outbreak could spur increased conservation and surveillance in ecosystems that might harbor dangerous pathogens. Original article: Dot Earth Blog: A Closer Look at the Ebola Epidemic in the Context of Ecological Health ; ; ;

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Dot Earth Blog: A Closer Look at the Ebola Epidemic in the Context of Ecological Health

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Contact: Wandering Troubador Sean Rowe’s Inner Madman

by ShirleeDahlenbu Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sean Rowe Jacob Blickenstaff

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Sean Rowe began his music career 10 years ago in his hometown of Troy, New York, playing covers in bars for a living. Now based in Woodstock, Rowe (rhymes with Tao) is still known for his emotive interpretations of other people’s songs at his live performances, which are as likely to happen at a private house concert as a club or festival stage.

Tomorrow, Rowe releases Madman, his third album on ANTI- records. The songs—while mixing elements of his early influences of soul, early rock, and slide-guitar blues—often feel more like incantations calling for deeper awareness, reflection, and personal connection. The video for Madman‘s title track is a good introduction into his world, a humble and unvarnished road diary of the people he meets, the living rooms he visits, and the walks he takes in the woods. I spoke with and photographed Rowe in Brooklyn. The following is in his words:

If I really sat and analyzed what it is I’m doing, I would be exhausted just thinking about it. Because it’s a lot. Sometimes I want to tour everywhere and just perform and that’s all I want to do, and then I remember, “Oh yeah, I have a family and that’s the most important thing in the world to me, and I want to get that down right.” I love being a dad, I feel like I’m really good at that. But it requires a lot of energy to be a really good parent—being present, which I feel like I’m really struggling with, being away a lot. Balancing all that is just mad. That’s kind of where the song “Madman” came out of. I put a lot of myself into the record this time around.

And the city has a way just to make you forget,
about half the stuff you love and things you don’t know yet.

That was the first line. I sat on the song for four years. I had the line, and I had the chord progression, but it never finished itself. You gotta wait until it comes out. I realized after some time what the song was really about. The city life—I don’t think we’ve quite evolved to live that lifestyle. As exciting as it can be, and as great as the idea-sharing possibilities are, I don’t think physically we were made to walk on pavement and to be as absent-minded as the city can make you. It creates a certain mentality that is only good if you are dealing with the laws of modern society. It’s not really a universal feeling. I think it can be distracting; it can take you away from a real lasting sense of place.

When I was younger, I liked to think that I was leading some kind of esoteric existence, dreaming of being some kind of hermit or vagabond wandering into the woods to live off the land. But touring has showed me so many different kinds of lifestyles that are equally valid. People are people—some good, some bad. I don’t think that what I do is particularly virtuous other than I think it’s important to get in touch with your surroundings on a very basic level. Although there is spirituality in it for me, I think it is just a good practice to be aware of your neighbors, not just people, but plants and animals. It gives you a better feeling about everything. I think everybody can relate to that. I left my phone at the gig last night, and my wife and I were joking that it was God’s way of forcing me to be quiet for a little bit.

What I’m doing with the house concerts is about connecting with the fans in a direct way. House shows are pretty intense, just by the nature of the way they work. They aren’t open to the public. The people who contact me to do them are really big fans and they just have all their friends and their family come. Most of the people have never heard of you before and usually I’ve never met the hosts. And the first time they’re seeing me play is in their living room. It’s a pretty raw experience. It’s a beautiful thing, though. Music has a way of breaking down a lot of walls. It takes away the awkwardness pretty quickly and gets you in the door. One of the great things is really getting to know people, seeing what they do for a living, how they got to where they are. There’s a lot of humility in it. There’s really no pretense, there can’t be.

When I started out playing in bars it was primarily to pay the bills, because bars were the only places that would pay. That means having to play a lot of cover songs, because people want to hear what they already know. But I had always chosen the covers that I loved to play. I don’t have to play covers now, but I enjoy doing it, because if I can bring something different to it and keep the intent of the song intact, then I’ll do it. For example, I cover a song by Richard Thompson called “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” which is one of those songs that you really don’t touch. I think that I play it because I can keep the emotion alive that was intended.

Everything is up for grabs in songwriting, It doesn’t matter if you’re in the woods or a high-rise apartment, you have to be open to every kind of experience to be a good writer. My baseline lifestyle is centered on trying to live as naturally as possible. It just feels really good; it’s not the kind of thing you need to over-explain. I’ve learned not to force what I do onto other people, but for me it’s really exciting to get out there and harvest wild food and spend time in nature.

I don’t think about it too much when I’m in the process of writing. I’ll certainly try to wrap myself around the song as much as possible, but once the song is done, it has a way of becoming more than the sum of its parts. And then it just becomes the song as a whole entity. It’s like a comedian who knows something will be funny but he can’t really prove it yet; he can take something small and seemingly insignificant that he knows must be happening to everybody else, too. It’s a lot like that in songwriting, you just trust that this stuff happens to everybody.

Sean Rowe Jacob Blickenstaff

“Contact” is a series of artist portraits and interviews by Jacob Blickenstaff.

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Contact: Wandering Troubador Sean Rowe’s Inner Madman

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ISIS Is America’s Legacy in Iraq

by WillCotakarf Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Whatever your politics, you’re not likely to feel great about America right now. After all, there’s Ferguson (the whole world was watching!), an increasingly unpopular president, a Congress whose approval ratings make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list. Abroad, from Libya and Ukraine to Iraq and the South China Sea, nothing has been coming up roses for the US Polls reflect a general American gloom, with 71% of the public claiming the country is “on the wrong track.” We have the look of a superpower down on our luck.

What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly good. Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.

In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS). It’s a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda rejected it, so brutal that it’s brought back crucifixion, beheading, waterboarding, and amputation, so fanatical that it’s ready to persecute any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it’s made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon. If you’ve got a label that’s really, really bad like genocide or ethnic cleansing, you can probably apply it to ISIS’s actions.

It has also proven so effective that its relatively modest band of warrior jihadis has routed the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as the Kurdish pesh merga militia, taking control of a territory larger than Great Britain in the heart of the Middle East. Today, it rules over at least four million people, controls its own functioning oil fields and refineries (and so their revenues as well as infusions of money from looted banks, kidnapping ransoms, and Gulf state patrons). Despite opposition, it still seems to be expanding and claims it has established a caliphate.

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ISIS Is America’s Legacy in Iraq

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Barack Obama Loathes Congress as Much as You Do

by YTVBrianna Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein responds to a New York Times article about President Obama’s chilly relationship with his fellow Democrats:

Obama does see socializing with Hill Democrats as a chore. But there’s a lot that Obama sees as a chore and commits to anyway. The presidency, for all its power, is full of drudgery; there are ambassadors to swear in and fundraisers to attend and endless briefings on issues that the briefers don’t even really care about. The reason Obama doesn’t put more effort into stroking congressional Democrats is he sees it as a useless chore.

The Times article…never names a bill that didn’t pass or a nominee who wasn’t confirmed because Obama’s doesn’t spend more time on the golf course with members of Congress. The closest it comes is…not very close. “In interviews, nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers and senior congressional aides suggested that Mr. Obama’s approach has left him with few loyalists to effectively manage the issues erupting abroad and at home and could imperil his efforts to leave a legacy in his final stretch in office.”

This is ridiculous. There are no issues erupting at home or abroad where the problem is that House or Senate Democrats won’t vote with the president. There’s no legislation of importance to President Obama’s legacy that would pass if only House Democrats had spent more time at the White House. I’ve listened to a lot of Democratic members of Congress complain about Obama’s poor relationships on the Hill. Each time, my follow-up question is the same: “what would have passed if Obama had better relationships on the Hill?” Each time, the answer is the same: a shake of the head, and then, “nothing.”

I’d probably give a little more credit to schmoozing than this. But only a very little. At the margins, there are probably times when having a good relationship with a committee chair will speed up action or provide a valuable extra vote or two on a bill or a nominee. And Obama has the perfect vehicle for doing this regularly since he loves to play golf. But for the most part Klein is right. There’s very little evidence that congressional schmoozing has more than a tiny effect on things. Members of Congress vote the way they want or need to vote, and if they respond to anyone, it’s to party leaders, interest groups, and fellow ideologues. In days gone by, presidents could coerce votes by working to withhold money from a district, or by agreeing to name a crony as the local postmaster, but those days are long gone. There’s really very little leverage that presidents have over members of Congress these days, regardless of party.

Obama is an odd duck. It’s not just that he doesn’t schmooze. As near as I can tell, he has a barely concealed contempt for Congress. He doesn’t really enjoy playing the political game, and not just because it’s gotten so rancid in recent years. Even if Republicans were acting like a normal political party these days, I still don’t think he’d enjoy it much. And yet, he spent years campaigning for the top political job in the United States. It’s a little bit of a mystery, frankly.

Source – 

Barack Obama Loathes Congress as Much as You Do

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