"The White House meeting drew such media interest that press secretary Robert Gibbs said he looked forward to facing no more questions about what beers each man would drink. For the record, it was Bud Light for Obama, Sam Adams Light for Gates, Blue Moon for Crowley and nonalcoholic Buckler for Biden."
Instead, Obama was stuck choking down dishwater mixed with rubbing alcohol, just to avoid the Dijon mustard backlash from the arugula-phobes on the right.
If Obama had ordered a faux-Belgian brew with an orange slice on the side, he would have been pilloried on the right by the anti-endive police and the Chablis-and-brie-conspiracy crazies.
I would have expected Biden to go with vodka on the rocks, and I wonder if he doesn't drink or if the event planners hope to shift the center of the culture war by throwing in this not-so-obvious pick.
The POTUS does not need to involve himself in a low level city problem?
Tell that to Terri Schiavo, who got an act of the Republican congress and the GOP president's opinion all up in her business.
A GOP butt-in-ski is perfectly fine for the FOX-Limbaugh-Drudge echo-network when a wedge issue is just what is needed to get their guy reelected, but Obama's out of line for answering the question when he's asked about a friend to whom he had just spoken.
I see.
Obama was wrong for distracting the press from the healthcare debate, which he arguably may have intended to do, since negotiations were falling apart.
Hot off being selected America's Most Trusted Newscaster, Jon Stewart gives Lou Dobbs hell for backing up those trigger-happy birth certificate conspiracy nuts.
Just three days after his own CNN show debunked the cranky conservative conpiracy theory, Dobbs then said of such foolishness, "There's a lot of questions remaining, and seemingly the questions won't go away, because they haven't been dealt with."
A day earlier, MSNBC's Chris Matthews took on California Congressman John Campbell, a sponsore of the "Birther bill" which would require "future presidential candidates" (one in particular running in 2012) to provide a copy of their original birth certificate.
Matthews accuses Campbell of subtly "appeasing the wacko wing of his party" when the congressman appends "as far as I know" after Matthews presses him to admit that Obama's an American citizen.
CNN competes with FOX Noose to scrape the bottom of the barrel, because both stand ABSOLUTELY no chance of catching up with network TV news.
While rejecting CNN's craven struggle to live up to Roger Ailes journalistic standards, can we PLEASE stop accepting FOX lying about how popular they are?
Any of the national network TV anchors are more than twice as popular, even Katie. Combined, that's a LOT of people who don't choose FOX Noose.
Twenty-six million compared to 3.4 million? Most people are not FOX zombies.
Add CNN and MSNBC. It's 30 million non-FOX viewers, almost ten times as many.
Enough rightwing mythologies... hubris... and arrogance... misplaced anger... Dobbs spewing lies about Obama, like someone's rejected stalker.
"Limp-minded Lilly-livered Lefties"
Can you IMAGINE Brian, Charlie, Katie, Brokaw, Stephanopoulos, Schieffer, Koppel, Jennings, Russert, Cronkite, Brinkley... any of them acting the way Dobbs does.
They would NEVER even be in this position, and if they found themselves there, like Dan Rather, they'd have the decency to resign.
Today, we're looking at the Obama bank bailout that didn't happen under an administration routinely noted to have simply followed its predessessors's lead.
"According to GAO, the government has disbursed approximately $339 billion and promised $102 billion more. That leaves some $259 in the fund plus the $70 billion banks have repaid."
Of the $700 billion bank bailout passed in a panic last October, then-treasury secretary Hank Paul gave $350 billion to the banks, with the rest pending the new administration's request and approval by Congress.
There's $328 billion unspent or uncommitted left in the fund.
Mind you, the amount spent includes cash allocated to each of the following programs, collectively known as a bank bailout, but little understood in its parts:
Capital Purchase (100s of banks, big & small): $133.068 Bln
Automotive Industry (GM & Chrysler): $79.966 billion
Since Obama took office, , only five no-name banks have taken more than $100 million in bailout funds in exchange for company shares.
Starting on page 4 of the July TARP Transaction Report, only two no-name banks have sold $200 million in shares to the Treasury. Only Discover, at $1.2 billion, and Hartford, at 3.4 billion, have broken $1 billion.
Gone are the money-salads served to BofA, Citibank, Goldman, JPMorgan-Chase, Morgan Stanly, and Wells Fargo... $10-25 billion per plate... between October and January.
They don't say so here, but it seem that the semblance of conditions the Obama administration put on bailed-out banks, weak though that criteria seems, compared to what you'd think is needed, have been onerous enough to keep the banks from being particularly interested in taking the rest of the money.
"Another option, favoured by many Democrats and the president, is for the government to step in with a results-based plan of its own, to compete against the private industry.
"Mr Obama should use it as a threat, rather than implement it now. If the private sector does not meet certain cost-cutting targets in, say, five years, a public-sector plan should automatically kick in. Such a prospect would encourage hospitals and doctors to accept a painful but necessary reform now."
That's a philosophical argument about pseudo-liberal market incentive that has nothing to do with what's happening on the ground.
HillaryCare served notice to the megalo-conglomerate corporate medical complex in 1993, and the industry has done nothing but make matters worse since then. We're NOT starting this argument over again from scratch, as if the industry has been caught off guard by the problem
The GOP and healthcare industry SAID they could do better but promptly wrought inarguable greed: 50 million are uninsured while countless numbers buy HIGH-premium, HIGH-deductible, LOW-service plans that reap billions in profit for an industry that is completely unmoved by the plight of the sick and dying: the distressed, lame, and injured who they drive from their membership roles as soon as corporate cost is incurred.
It's just cruel by now to give the industry five MORE dreadful years to come around to their senses and offer something kind, caring, and intentionally effective.
"The sticker-shock for an insurance mandate is really just a reflection of the second big problem: the overall cost structure of American health care. Indeed, one of the worst things about Mr Obama’s oddly hands-off approach to health reform is that he is concentrating on a symptom, not the underlying disease."
The $1.5 trillion estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is based on Senate proposals that do not include Obama's public plan or the projected cost reductions that such an extraordinary force of competion would bring to the market.
This newspaper is NOT clear about the problem at all:
With the threat of healthcare reform on the table, everyone's costs are already accelerating. A number of friends have gotten their notification of this increase in the mail, because the industry is gouging the population in anticipation of the regulation and competition with which you suggest the industry ought to be threatened.
THAT's how this industry responds to the threat of government competition, by getting ahead of the inevitability of it through price hikes.
Your fair-warning scenario has ALREADY played out, and it's time to fix healthcare for PEOPLE and patients, and forget about fixing it for a dysfunctional corporate oligarchy that has held the Pursuit of Life and miracle of healing in a greedy death-grip for so friggin' long.
Isn't that exactly what we're doing when we say we should all collectively invest in the best public health system possible?
We're capitalizing a public healthcare system and spreading the risk across a society that WILL benefit together by covering everyone.
That's everyone taking a risk, and there's no high horse in saying that the current system is leaving SO many people behind.
I would suspect the ironic argument against the public option comes from those who DON'T want to take the risk and invest in constructive competition to the current industry of balkanized consumers and colluding proprietors
Tell me I'm on my high horse, but DON'T tell me the insurance industry has ANY interest in fixing this problem. When a large number of modern industrialized countries do this better, at half the cost, it's obvious my high horse has a valid point to make.
To the insurance industry and its culture of life-defying greed, I say, "Neigh!"
Indeed, I agree and welcome your theory: we each should invest our capital gladly, those that have any, and risk it in the most constructive, competitive public healthcare sector ever.
...for a community that revels in visibility battles over prescriptive language, Obama's backroom maneuvers give LGBT groups nothing to fundraise about, no cause célèbre to swaddle in a gay flag and nurture as a victim of intolerance.
"Obama added that he was working with the Pentagon, as well as Congress, to end 'Don't Ask Don't Tell.' He called this period a 'transition' toward that end but said it had to be done pragmatically, so the new policy works in the long-term."
Too many LGBT people will be left feeling unsatisfied and clammy after repeal of DOMA and DADT... after passage of ENDA and the hate crimes bill gives them no more reason to feel good about themselves than they already have.
"We've been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration." Since there is no elegant ratification of an amendment to the Constitution, one reemphasizing that "This Means Everybody!"... what other process is there but incremental passage of legislation?
What is there besides successive stages that will never really satisfy a community that clings to a pseudo-mythology regarding the glorious day daddy will say it's okay to be gay and everybody listens?
Unless the LGBT community learns to celebrate the occasional incremental success as raucously as it laments injustice and occasional setbacks, there will never be any feeling of accomplishment this generation can internalize as self-identification with citizenship.
"Gibbs did emphasize that when Obama faces re-election in 2012, DADT will have been repealed."
There will be no one event, after which the gays can say, "Now, we're accepted."
Obama is saying something when he tells us it's not for him to tell you to be patient...
"...anymore than it was for others to counsel patience to African-Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago.
"But I say this: We have made progress, and we will make more. And I want you to know that I expect and hope to be judged not by words, not by promises that I made, but by promises that my administration keeps." The LGBT community is expecting an emancipation proclamation that will make the world a safe place to be gay all at once.... and it's not going to happen. It can't happen, and holding Obama to that expectation is unfair to him and the people you convince that such a situation is even possible.
Celebrate the incremental successes, the repeal of DOMA and DADT... passage of ENDA and the hate crimes bill, because no single advance can deliver what we're looking for all at once.
"I'm not sure we should be applauding the president for passing the buck, however eloquently he is while he does so." — Dan Savage, sex advice columnist
LGBT leadership will sell its community short if it should never celebrate until the battle is completely won.
