This blog is dedicated to progressive and liberal thought. It also discusses new technology, how technology affects privacy and developments in Russia, China, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Rightardia fully supports the rights of workers to organize, the feminist movement, and all Americans regardless or ethnicity, sex or gender.It uses humor, satire and parody to expose conservative thought for what it truly is: BS! Rightardia contributes to the DNC, DCCC, DSCC and MoveOn.Org.
Showing posts with label President Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Barack Obama. Show all posts
"SEMINOLE — President Barack Obama is throwing a rally Saturday at St. Petersburg College's Seminole Campus and residents could be affected — even if they aren't going to see the speech.
Doors will open at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, college officials said. Obama will take the stage at 10:55 a.m., the White House said. The president was scheduled to arrive at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport around 11 p.m. Friday and stay overnight in St. Petersburg.
Traffic near the event could be affected throughout the morning. Some things to know:
Closures/Traffic: The official motorcade route has not been released, but officials said at least one major road — 113th Street — will be closed for a few hours."
This week, the President attended the Team USA basketball game, hosted the Baylor University Lady Bears basketball team, and proposed a STEM Master Teacher Corps, while the First Lady traveled to Philadelphia for 'Let's Move!' and to Birmingham to tour tornado recovery,
The Vice Presidnet spoke to seniors about retirement security, and the administration hosted a Google+ hangout on local foods.
Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
This week, the President traveled to Colorado Springs to survey fire damage and honor responders, he also celebrated Independence day with a Naturalization Ceremony at the White House and a picnic for military families on the South Lawn.
That's June 29th to July 5th or "The Freedom Everybody is Looking for."
President Barack Obama is coming out swinging against Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, releasing two television ads slamming his rival.
Typically putting out such scathing spots means the sitting president is in trouble, but a new Bloomberg poll shows that's not the case.
Jay DeDapper has the story.
Obama is a Chicago street fighter and these ads are mild compared to some GOP ads we have seen in years past. The ads have been effective and have broken what appeared to be a political stalemate.
Romney's record in MA was hardly exemplary. He tired to run the state as a CEO and used an impersonal approach that alienated both political parties.
Mittens left office with a 56 per cent disapproval rate and missed more than 200 days in the governor's mansion during his last year in office.
He vetoed 800 bills and 640 were overturned by the MA legislature. Rightardia believes Mittens would be a gridlock president.
This week, the President traveled to Honeywell International in Minnesota, to highlight efforts to help veterans find good paying jobs, urged Congress to support the Paycheck Fairness Act and to not let interest rates double on student loans on July 1st.
That's June 1st to June 7th or "Roll up our sleeves and never quit."
Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
This week, the President honored Memorial Day and the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, signed bipartisan legislation reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, and welcomed Former President Bush and Former First Lady Laura Bush for the official unveiling of their portraits.
That's May 25th to May 31st, or "Each of them loved this country . . . more than life itself."
May 25 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama accused Mitt Romney of trying to return to policies that crippled the U.S. economy as he renewed an appeal from his 2008 campaign for the nation to "come together around a common purpose." Peter Cook reports on Bloomberg Television's "In The Loop."
Rightardia is glad the president has taken the gloves off. A lot of distortions are coming out of the GOP about the economy.
The Democrats also also starting to attack Romney's performance as MA governor that was hardly exemplary.
Some Democrats are worrying about Wall Street fundraising, but Rightardia has seen some of the numbers and most of that Wall Street money is going to Republicans who are unwilling to reign in Wall Street excesses with regulation.
This afternoon, President Obama made the trip across town to the Washington Auto Show to look at some of the incredible new vehicles being built by Detroit.
Let me just say, when you look at all these cars, it is testimony to the outstanding work that's been done by workers -- American workers, American designers. The U.S. auto industry is back. The fact that GM is back, number one, I think shows the kind of turnaround that's possible when it comes to American manufacturing.
By Ryan Teague Beckwith, Congress.org
President Obama set a new record last year for getting Congress to vote his way, clinching 96.7 percent of the votes on which he had clearly staked a position
That was a bit less than 4 percentage points higher than the previous record, set by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, according to an annual study by Congressional Quarterly.
Congressional Quarterly has compiled statistics on presidential support since 1953. Editors select the votes based on clear statements by the president or authorized spokesmen before the vote.
In all, Congress took 151 votes in which Obama had taken a position ahead of time.
His wins in his first year in office included votes for creating a massive economic stimulus package, bailing out the auto industry, allowing the Food and Drug Administration regulate tobacco and confirming Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
But they also included key moves toward overhauling the health care system, regulating financial services and reducing greenhouse gases which have not yet passed both chambers of Congress.
That unfinished work will be taken up in the second session, which begins Tuesday. Obama’s ultimate success will depend on how well his second year in office goes.
“If this Congress passes both health care reform and climate change legislation on top of the economic stuff, it will go down as a historic achievement,” says Rich Fleisher, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York City. “But unless they continue to manage the agenda in a way that is very, very careful, that could all fall apart.”
In the House, Obama won 68 votes and lost four.
Among the losses: a vote to disapprove further spending on a bank bailout and a July vote to pass a food safety overhaul. Both were temporary setbacks since Congress eventually ended up supporting the president’s position.
In the Senate, Obama won 78 votes and lost one.
The Republican win there came on an amendment which would have barred spending money to transfer detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to the United States. In the end, the bill allowed the transfer under certain conditions.
To build this record, Obama relied heavily on Democratic majorities with only occasional support from the GOP. As in the health care overhaul, he also had to keep the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate in line.
“How you begin to understand his success is as a triumph of party government,” says Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. “He’s got the large and unified majorities, and those are the enabling conditions for his record high support score.”
This is much different from Johnson, who achieved the previous record by overcoming a divided Democratic caucus.
Reporting and statistical analysis by Shawn Zeller, John Cranford and Rachel Bloom.
Posted by Jesse Lee on January 09, 2010 at 06:00 AM EST
The
President discusses the benefits of health reform that Americans will
receive in the first year, and how reform will help build a new
foundation for American families.
As the Obama Administration heads toward its second year in the White House, political commentators discuss his biggest obstacles.
When Rightardia hears Obama associated with the term 'messiah,' we think the commentator must be an evangelical.
Democrats have high expectations for the president, but we have never looked at him as someone who will resolve all of America's ills.
We believe Obama's foreign policy has been successful and expect a Start II treaty with Russia to materialise shortly. Hillary may also have some successes in the Middle East.
On the domestic side of the House, we want health care wrapped up so the president can concentrate on employment. That issue will make or break him in the 2010 elections.
TALLAHASSEE — Florida's powerful trial lawyer lobby admitted Wednesday that it was behind an ugly race-baiting flier in a recent North Florida Senate election.
"Morally and politically, it was indefensible," said Scott Carruthers, executive director of the Florida Justice Association, the trial bar group, who said its leaders had no knowledge of it. "I accept full responsibility for not having done everything to stop that piece from going out."
The flier juxtaposed images of the Black Panthers, President Barack Obama, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and black marchers holding a large ACORN banner. The caption read: "Is this the change YOU want to believe in? Violence and intimidation at the voting booth."
The admission sheds new light on the growing practice in Florida of electioneering groups known as 527s that transfer large sums of money among each other to buy ads to influence voters while concealing their affiliations.
Those tactics exploded in recent weeks in the Senate election after a federal judge struck down a law requiring such groups to quickly disclose their contributions and expenses. Now they can wait until long after the election.
The controversial flier also may have damaged the trial bar's reputation with African-American legislators. Said Rep. Joe Gibbons, a former president of the legislative black caucus: "An apology won't do."
"Armed thugs may try and scare you away from the voting booth," read the text of the mailer, a message still volatile in Jacksonville since the 2000 presidential recount. The city was the epicenter of the recent Senate election in which Republican John Thrasher, a former House speaker, overcame a barrage of trial-lawyer attacks to defeat three rivals.
The mailer included a tear-off absentee ballot request form and was the trial bar's way of building a pool of persuadable absentee voters through a phony political group. The so-called Conservative Voters' Coalition was a 527 political organization acting as a front for the trial bar.
Lawyer David Ramba created the new organization and the trial bar enlisted Republican campaign consultant Bill Helmich to design the mailer.
The money for the mailer came from a trial bar-aligned 527 group, the similarly named Conservative Citizens for Justice, which sent a check for $68,999.53 to pay for the piece to go to 88,000 Jacksonville area homes on Aug. 18-19.
source: Steve Bousquet And Marc Caputo, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau
In Print: Thursday, September 24, 2009
We lost two of the Kennedy brothers to political assassinations in the same era that Martin Luther King was gunned downed. We now have Astroturfers, Tea Baggers and Birthers showing up at Obama town hall meeings bearing arms.
The security for the president has had to be tripled. President Barack Obama receives more than 30 potential death threats a day and is being protected by an increasingly over-stretched and under-resourced Secret Service, according to a new book.
Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year that President George W. Bush received according the author of In the President's Secret Service.
This afternoon the President continued his conversation on health reform with a roundtable at the Children's National Medical Center, a conversation that has taken him to every region of the country and encompassed every imaginable perspective on health care reform.
It has been a conversation that has brought more people and more stakeholders into the fold supporting strong reform than ever before, and taken us further down that road than ever before. And so it is no surprise, perhaps, that those who feel they would profit financially or politically have come out swinging furiously to try to kill reform.
Surrounded by those who heroically do everything they can to help the young and the ill, today the President made clear that whereas those special interests and their voices in Congress have stopped change in the past, they would not win this time:
And over the past decade, premiums have doubled in America; out-of-pocket costs have shot up by a third; deductibles have continued to climb. And yet, even as America's families have been battered by spiraling health care costs, health insurance companies and their executives have reaped windfall profits from a broken system.
Now, we've talked this problem to death, year after year. But unless we act -- and act now -- none of this will change. Just a quick statistic I heard about this hospital: Just a few years ago, there were approximately 50,000 people coming into the emergency room. Now they've got 85,000. There's been almost a doubling of emergency room care in a relatively short span of time, which is putting enormous strains on the system as a whole. That's the status quo, and it's only going to get worse.
If we do nothing, then families will spend more and more of their income for less and less care. The number of people who lose their insurance because they've lost or changed jobs will continue to grow. More children will be denied coverage on account of asthma or a heart condition. Jobs will be lost, take-home pay will be lower, businesses will shutter, and we will continue to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on insurance company boondoggles and inefficiencies that add to our financial burdens without making us any healthier.
So the need for reform is urgent and it is indisputable. No one denies that we're on an unsustainable path. We all know there are more efficient ways of doing it. We just -- I spoke to the chief information officer here at the hospital and he talked about some wonderful ways in which we could potentially gather up electronic medical records and information for every child not just that comes to this hospital but in the entire region, and how much money could be saved and how the health of these kids could be improved. But it requires an investment.
Now, there are some in this town who are content to perpetuate the status quo, are in fact fighting reform on behalf of powerful special interests. There are others who recognize the problem, but believe -- or perhaps, hope -- that we can put off the hard work of insurance reform for another day, another year, another decade.
Just the other day, one Republican senator said -- and I'm quoting him now -- "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." Think about that. This isn't about me. This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses, and breaking America's economy.
And we can't afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care. Not this time. Not now. There are too many lives and livelihoods at stake. There are too many families who will be crushed if insurance premiums continue to rise three times as fast as wages. There are too many businesses that will be forced to shed workers, scale back benefits, or drop coverage unless we get spiraling health care costs under control.
Barack Obama's campaign arm is expanding its health care ad buy into the districts of key conservative House Democrats.
Late Friday night Organizing for America and the Democratic National Committee announced the expansion of the "It's Time" ad purchase, which uses personal stories of health care struggles to drive home the need for reform. The initial purchase was on national cable and in eight states with critical Democratic and moderate Republican Senators.
Now the scope of the campaign is expanding. The ad will appear in the media markets that corespond with 15 congressional districts of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Eleven of those districts belong to Democrats, including Rep. Zack Space (Ohio), Rep. John Barrow (Georgia), Rep. Jay Inslee (Washington), Rep. Mike Ross (Arkansas), Rep. Bart Gordon (Tennessee), Rep. Baron Hill (Indiana), Rep. Charlie Melancon (Louisiana), Rep. Mike Doyle (Pennsylvania), Rep. Jim Matheson (Utah), Rep. Bart Stupak (Michigan), and Rep. Jerry McNerney (California).
The four Republican districts belong to Rep. Fred Upton (Michigan), Rep. Mary Bono Mack (California), and Rep. Greg Walden (Oregon), Rep. Sue Myrick (North Carolina),
The US Senate is calling for a probe into whether former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the concealment of clandestine CIA operations from Congress, the details of which have not been revealed so far.
Last week the House Select Committee on Intelligence announced that CIA director Leon Panetta told them about the order. According to them, the CIA has kept Congress in the dark for the past eight years.
Committee head Dianne Feinstein called the failure to inform Congress “a big problem, because the law is very clear.”
“I think that if the Intelligence Committees had been briefed, they could have watched the program. They could have asked for regular reports on the program. They could have made judgments about the program as it went along. That was not the case because we were kept in the dark. That’s something that should never, ever happen again,” she said.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said on Sunday a formal investigation into the matter the Bush administration’s decision to keep Congress in the dark is needed.
Although some call the concealing of the information from Congress illegal, others view the scandal as an attempt to provide political cover for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. Recently, Pelosi accused the CIA of misleading her in 2002 about the use of waterboarding, or simulated drowning, during the interrogation of terror suspects.
Republicans have publicly called the attacks on Cheney a witch hunt and also say the controversy only creates obstacles for the CIA’s work.
“This continued attack on the CIA and our intelligence gathering organizations is undermining the morale and capacity of those organizations to gather intelligence,” AP quotes Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire as saying.
As for President Barack Obama, he has been reluctant to probe Bush-era torture and anti-terrorism policies so far. Nor has he shown any willingness to hold Cheney accountable.
Earlier, the media suggested the secret CIA program in question was linked to either domestic surveillance without judicial oversight or harsh interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists.
Now US media, citing their own sources, mostly say that it is unrelated to the two controversial counterterrorism programs launched by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the program was aimed at killing or capturing Al Qaeda operatives. The Journal quoted unnamed former intelligence officials as saying that CIA spent some money on planning and possibly some training, but that the initiative has never become fully operational.
Legal provisions
The law in question, the National Security Act of 1947, is not equivocal about the necessity to inform Congress of CIA operations:
“The President shall ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”
The Act still provides room for maneuver for the CIA director and other officials, stipulating the obligation is fulfilled “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”
