Obama did not spell out exactly how he would pay for the measures contained in his nearly $450 billion American Jobs Act but said he would send his proposed specifics in a week to the new congressional supercommittee charged with finding budget savings. White House aides suggested that new deficit spending in the near term to try to promote job creation would be paid for in the future – the “out years,” in legislative jargon – but they did not specify what would be cut or what revenues they would use.
Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due.
I miss Presidents who said stuff like “The Buck stops here”. Obama barely admits that he’s seen the Buck. Heck he won’t even say for sure if the Buck exists. But if it does exist, he’s sure someone else has the Buck. Again, if there is a Buck.
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt. ” – Sen Barack Obama (2006)
“We either save this country or we do not. And to save it, we must seek solutions.” – Sen Marco Rubio (2011)
Brian Williams: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?
Leon Panetta: You know, Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees, but we also had information from other sources as well. So it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.
Williams: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?
Panetta: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were — you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.
Williams: So, final point, one final time: enhanced interrogation techniques, which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years, that includes waterboarding.
The president’s first budget led to a debt spiral, but he excused it because of the financial and economic crisis. The president’s second budget led to a debt spiral, but he excused it because the Bowles-Simpson commission was going to fix it. The president’s third budget led to a debt spiral, but he whined that he had to do that because Republicans might criticize a real budget.
The comparison to the House budget was so shaming he was compelled to give a speech on a new “plan” to end the greatest threat facing this nation. But there was no plan. Just another speech. And today, more whining.
So Boeing management did what it judged to be best for its shareholders and customers and looked elsewhere. In October 2009, the company settled on South Carolina, which, like the 21 other right-to-work states, has friendlier labor laws than Washington. As Boeing chief Jim McNerney noted on a conference call at the time, the company couldn’t have “strikes happening every three to four years.” The union has shut down Boeing’s commercial aircraft production line four times since 1989, and a 58-day strike in 2008 cost the company $1.8 billion.
This reasonable business decision created more than 1,000 jobs and has brought around $2 billion of investment to South Carolina. The aerospace workers in Puget Sound remain among the best paid in America, but the union nonetheless asked the NLRB to stop Boeing’s plans before the company starts to assemble planes in North Charleston this July.
The NLRB obliged with its complaint yesterday asking an administrative law judge to stop Boeing’s South Carolina production because its executives had cited the risk of strikes as a reason for the move. Boeing acted out of “anti-union animus,” says the complaint by acting general counsel Lafe Solomon, and its decision to move had the effect of “discouraging membership in a labor organization” and thus violates federal law.
Nobody is appointing the requested number of members: “Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) named only two senators, while Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appears to have settled on only one. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is also expected to pick fewer than four representatives. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has not said how many she will appoint.”
“The Oval Office, I always thought I was going to have really cool phones and stuff…. I’m like, c’mon guys, I’m the president of the United States. Where’s the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up? It doesn’t happen.”
Consider this a trap well set and sprung. Frustrated that the Senate won’t pass any budget bill while the House continues to negotiate to the brink of a government shutdown, John Boehner proposed a one-week CR to keep government open for a week and to secure defense funding through the end of the year. A few minutes ago, the White House stated categorically that it would veto the one-week CR if it passes the Senate in an e-mail blast, underscoring in original (replaced by boldface – DRH):
“The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 1363, making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2011, and for other purposes. As the President stated on April 5, 2011, if negotiations are making significant progress, the Administration would support a short-term, clean Continuing Resolution to allow for enactment of a final bill.
“For the past several weeks, the Administration has worked diligently and in good faith to find common ground on the shared goal of cutting spending. After giving the Congress more time by signing short-term extensions into law, the President believes that we need to put politics aside and work out our differences for a bill that covers the rest of the fiscal year. This bill is a distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise for funding the remainder of Fiscal Year 2011 and avert a disruptive Federal Government shutdown that would put the Nation’s economic recovery in jeopardy. The Administration will continue to work with the Congress to arrive at a compromise that will fund the Government for the remainder of the fiscal year in a way that does not undermine future growth and job creation and that averts a costly Government shutdown. It is critical that the Congress send a final bill to the President’s desk that provides certainty to our men and women in military uniform, their families, small businesses, homeowners, taxpayers, and all Americans. H.R. 1363 simply delays that critical final outcome.
“If presented with this bill, the President will veto it.“
Really? Will Obama really argue that he can’t abide a one-week CR so much that he’s willing to shut down the government and leave the troops without income for an indeterminate amount of time? This statement concedes that this bill takes the troops out of the line of fire in the budget debate. Kirsten Powers recognized the obvious, remarking on Twitter: “Can’t believe Obama fell for the “funding the troops” trick. He’ll have to change position on veto threat.”
Wow. Given the way the media has been playing up the “shock and horror” of troops in the field not getting paid, would Obama seriously veto?
It’s, like, totally bad for John Yoo to praise Obama, cuz he really wouldn’t do it unless he thought it would make Democrats totally feel bad. Or something.
Quote from Our Maximum Leader, ca. 2007 :
“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
As a rhetorical device, particularly as a political rhetorical device, the false choice has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any. The phrase has become a trite substitute for serious thinking. It serves too often to obscure rather than to explain.
President Obama has employed the false-choice device in assessing financial reform, environmental regulation, defense contracting, civil liberties, crime policy, health care, the deployment of troops in Iraq, Native Americans, the space program and, most recently, the situation in Libya.
On his South American trip, he pulled off a false-choice trifecta, citing “the old stale debates between state-run economies and unbridled capitalism; between the abuses of right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing insurgents; between those who believe that the United States causes all the region’s problems and those who believe that the United States ignores all the problems.” All three, Obama said, “are false choices, and they don’t reflect today’s realities.”
The false-choice dodge takes three overlapping forms. The first, a particular Obama specialty, is the false false choice. Set up two unacceptable extremes that no one is seriously advocating and position yourself as the champion of the reasonable middle ground between these unidentified straw men.
You’d think that one of the easiest thing to do would be to find a really cool quote from Dr Martin Luther King. Well, apparently, the White House set itself to the task… and failed. They needed a cool quote to have stitched into the Oval Office rug; here’s how it turned out, according to the WaPo -
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.
Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.
For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.
A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.
So… basically, The People are meant to rise up and… print short PDF files of old talking points. And, um, spread them around the, um, community and stuff.
C’mon … “Final March”? Has the Stench of Doom on it, dunnit? Maybe they could call it the “Healthcare Trail of Tears” or the “Bataan Health March”?
