There are about a million reactions to the news that President Obama now supports same-sex marriage (for the record, I say good for him), but two in particular caught my eye. One is from E.J. Graff of The American Prospect, who titles her post “I Am Gobsmacked,” and the other from Andrew Sullivan. Both posts …
President Obama has finally given up on getting the Republican minority to allow an “upper-down” vote on his nominee for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and put Richard Cordray on the job via recess appointment. Good. As Mike Konczal argues here, the Senate Republicans were effectively practicing nullification. They don’t like the Bureau and the …
News item: The Obama administration is abandoning its plan to immediately tighten air-quality rules nationwide to reduce emissions of smog-causing chemicals after an intense lobbying campaign by industry, which said the new rule would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs, officials said Friday. My response to industry would have been “Prove …
Continue reading ‘Whatever happened to the green agenda, Obama?’ »
So as any sane person could have predicted the Republicans are in an uproar about President Obama taking a vacation. It’s a crock of fake outrage, of course (see Greg Sargent, here). Obama has taken fewer vacation days than GWB or even Reagan at comparable points in their first terms. But what really makes this …
I quoted Drew Westen’s essay about Obama in my previous post. Now comes Jon Chait: Westen’s complaint against Obama is rooted primarily in a lack of factual understanding of what Obama has done. Westen castigates Obama for promising not to support entitlement cuts without higher revenue and then turning around and supporting a deal doing …
Drew Westen, an Emory U. professor of psychology and sometime consultant to Democrats, asks a pertinent question in today’s NYT: What Happened to Obama? Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us …
Andy Kroll at Mother Jones: The president has boasted that his deal with the GOP will usher in an era featuring “the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was president.” Um, Mr. President, you blithering idiot, the US population in 1960 at the end of Ike’s term was 179,323,175. The population in …
From what I can tell the only thing the President absolutely held the line on was no further debt ceiling negotiations until after the re-election campaign of 2012. I see where his priorities lie.
Yesterday afternoon I suggested that President Obama ask the American people to call their Representatives in the US House and exhort them to get a debt ceiling deal done. Well, he did and they did. Behold my power! Caveat: I have no idea what the mix of calls is/was. For all I know every Tea …
(I originally posted this yesterday at Google +) Here’s a novel approach to the debt ceiling dilemma: raise it unilaterally. How? Not based on some strained 14th Amendment reading, but based on the argument that the “necessities of state, and on the president’s role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order, charged with taking …