The President takes on Bain.
Using Bain as a weapon
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Tag Archives: Obama
Political quote of the day
At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has pledged to support an amendment to the United States Constitution defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. And yesterday, Romney said that he even opposes civil unions:
My view is the same as it’s been from the beginning. I don’t favor civil unions if it’s identical to marriage, and I don’t favor marriage between people of the same gender. If a civil union is identical to marriage other than with the name, why, I don’t support that.
Jobs under Obama
The jobs situation is bad. But how bad, and how much can Obama be blamed and how much credit should he get for the recovery in jobs so far? It is not at all obvious. Here are the statistics:
(image via CNN Money)
Apple in the Oval Office
Check out this picture of the President’s daily briefing. Notice what they are using?
(via Daring Fireball)
Obama can be tough
Whoever the Republican nominee is, he will have to face an effective orator.
Good news for Obama
US payrolls are up by 243,000 in January (vs. expected 150,000) and the jobless rate has dropped to 8.3% in January, the lowest level since February, 2009.
Political quote of the day
For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic activated their immune systems — hence the ‘birther’ movement and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right’s aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them.
Andrew Sullivan v. Stephen Colbert
You can read Sullivan’s powerful defense of President Obama in Newsweek here.
Sullivan pushes back against the right
Imperialism quote of the day
Glenn Greenwald
“Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.
– Glenn Greenwald, “The killing of Awlaki’s 16-year-old son“. (via The Quotation of the Day Mailing List)
Related articles
- New reality: US assassinates it own citizens with no due process (boingboing.net)
- Awlaki’s 16-year-old son killed by US drone (boingboing.net)
- Ron Paul Condemns Obama Admin For ‘Assassinating’ U.S. Born Anwar al-Awlaki (mediaite.com)
- White House “Star Chamber” recommended killing US citizen al-Awlaki; evidence of operational role “patchy” (americablog.com)
- Al-Awlaki And The Law (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
Political quote of the day 2
This is not class warfare. It is math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.
– President Obama making the case for a new tax on the very, very wealthy, who also happen to capture an overwhelming share of the benefits from the economy as a whole.
Political quote of the day (updated)
By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.
– Representative John Fleming, (R-LA) explaining why a small business owner like him cannot afford a tax increase. The more these guys talk like this, the stronger will be the support for Obama’s tax proposal among the millions in this country who are not in the top 1% of earners and many of which are unemployed.
Update:
Related articles
- Feeding your family: almost as bad as paying taxes (themoderatevoice.com)
- Idiot Quote of the Day (bokertov.typepad.com)
- Wealthy Republican congressman apparently pays workers less than $11,400 per year (dailykos.com)
Political quote of the day
Image via Wikipedia
Fire somebody. No — fire a lot of people. This may be news to you but this is not going well. For precedent, see Russian Army 64th division at Stalingrad. There were enough deaths at Stalingrad to make the entire tea party collectively orgasm.
– James Carville, giving advice to President Obama.
Close up reporting on the bin Laden raid
The New Yorker this week has an article detailing the killing of Osama bin Laden. Worth a full read.
Excerpt:
When the helicopter began getting away from the pilot, he pulled back on the cyclic, which controls the pitch of the rotor blades, only to find the aircraft unresponsive. The high walls of the compound and the warm temperatures had caused the Black Hawk to descend inside its own rotor wash—a hazardous aerodynamic situation known as “settling with power.” In North Carolina, this potential problem had not become apparent, because the chain-link fencing used in rehearsals had allowed air to flow freely. A former helicopter pilot with extensive special-operations experience said of the pilot’s situation, “It’s pretty spooky—I’ve been in it myself. The only way to get out of it is to push the cyclic forward and fly out of this vertical silo you’re dropping through. That solution requires altitude. If you’re settling with power at two thousand feet, you’ve got plenty of time to recover. If you’re settling with power at fifty feet, you’re going to hit the ground.”
The pilot scrapped the plan to fast-rope and focussed on getting the aircraft down. He aimed for an animal pen in the western section of the compound. The SEALs on board braced themselves as the tail rotor swung around, scraping the security wall. The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried. With the Black Hawk pitched at a forty-five-degree angle astride the wall, the crew sent a distress call to the idling Chinooks.
James and the SEALs in helo two watched all this while hovering over the compound’s northeast corner. The second pilot, unsure whether his colleagues were taking fire or experiencing mechanical problems, ditched his plan to hover over the roof. Instead, he landed in a grassy field across the street from the house.
No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. Mark and his team were inside a downed helicopter at one corner, while James and his team were at the opposite end. The teams had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course.
Political quote of the day
Voters’ Pavlovian reaction may simply be that fiscal austerity equals pain, which could complicate Republican messaging in the long-run.
– Nate Silver, counter-intuitively arguing that yesterday’s stock market crash could help the President’s re-election chances.
