Posted on 03 November 2009 by trouble97018
Posted: November 3, 2009 01:14 AM
I had arranged to meet David Plouffe on Saturday afternoon at a Starbucks on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. The night before, a copy of his new book, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory, was waiting for me when I checked into my hotel at midnight. I flipped it open, read a few lines and was hooked. I spent the rest of the night reading it.
Plouffe has written the most important political book of the year (for reasons I’ll get to in a moment). It’s also completely gripping. It reads like a thriller. Even though you know how it ends, you quickly get caught up in every twist and turn of perhaps the most remarkable campaigns in American history.
Along the way, I found myself tearing up when I read about the campaign volunteer who had scrimped and saved (“Grabbed some ramen on the weekends… Didn’t take the girl to a movie”) so he could donate ten dollars to Obama, and laughed at the funny-in-retrospect tales from the trail (like David Axelrod’s BlackBerry crashing at a crucial moment because of glazed donut getting stuck in the trackwheel.) Source
Posted on 21 August 2009 by trouble97018
First Posted: 08-20-09 02:54 PM | Updated: 08-20-09 03:52 PM
It’s fashionable in media circles right now to treat the “public option” as nothing more than the political football du jour, to discuss it only in the context of vote counts and political strategizing, to write it off as a particularly hysterical obsession of the political “left”, and — oh, yes — to declare it dead.
But the fate of the public option is not yet sealed. And it’s much more than just a bargaining chip. The concept of offering health care consumers a government-run alternative to the rogues that comprise the modern American insurance industry not only has a powerful appeal to the general populace, it’s central to effective health care reform, both symbolically and concretely. Source
Posted on 18 August 2009 by trouble97018
Obama may be incapable of being combative. But can’t he say unequivocally what he does and does not want?
Salon
By Robert Reich
Aug. 18, 2009 | Latest word from the White House is that the President still supports a public option but is also standing by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s remark last weekend that a public insurance plan is “not the essential element” of healthcare reform. So where, exactly, is the White House on the public option? Just about where it is on the question of whether it agreed with Big Pharma to bar Medicare from using its bargaining clout to get lower drug prices — or didn’t. In other words, we don’t know.
Universal healthcare is President Obama’s biggest issue, and he needs strong public support if he’s going to overcome the vested money interests in Washington. Which brings us to the question of where the people who voted for Obama stand on all this. Source
Posted on 18 August 2009 by trouble97018
Huffington Post
Founder, FireDogLake.com
Posted: August 17, 2009 11:46 AM
The headline in The Hill says it loud and clear:
Obama picks public option fight with liberals
Many people are rightly upset that the White House is sending stronger and stronger signals that they are willing to jettison a public option. What was once the defining feature of the Obama health care plan has now been dismissed with a bipartisan flourish. “[I]t’s both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else,” he says. Source
Posted on 14 August 2009 by trouble97018
Posted on 14 August 2009 by trouble97018
by David Michael Green
www.opednews.com
The events of recent decades have been ominous.
The events of recent weeks more so.
It’s not so much, I guess, the visage of obese, over-fifty, white men angrily wrecking even the tattered remnants of the democratic process in this country that is most disturbing. We’ve seen that before.
I think it’s the willful ignorance translated into incoherent, and in fact ironically self-defeating, rage that I find most discouraging. Can we really live in a country populated by so many fools, people who can so readily, proudly and belligerently be made into tools of their own destruction? Can the greatest political, economic, cultural and military power on the world’s stage possibly be so incredibly backward at its core? Source
Posted on 12 August 2009 by trouble97018
Salon
Heads should roll — beginning with Nancy Pelosi’s!
By Camille Paglia
Aug. 12, 2009 | Buyer’s remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at — representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that he was elected to do.
Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? It’s rumored that the White House counsel may be booted, following Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, and I hope it’s a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys. Source
Posted on 23 July 2009 by trouble97018
Huffington Post
Retired Seattle police chief, member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Posted: July 22, 2009 11:24 PM
Nothing like a question from out of left field to elicit some bare-boned truths about policing, race, and stupidity.
President Obama in a televised news conference, billed as an attempt to shore up allied support and win converts for his health care plan, turned to Chicago Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet for the final question of the evening. Did Ms. Sweet ask about universal health care? The ups and downs of a single-payer system? The heartburn of quaking Blue Dog Democrats over the cost of the Obama plan? Bill Kristol’s blinkered, ideological suggestion that Obama’s critics on the right sniff the blood and “Go for the Kill?” No. Source
Posted on 13 July 2009 by trouble97018
NY Times
Published: July 12, 2009
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress rightly required new background checks for the nation’s 1.5 million port workers. Unfortunately, the checks, which became mandatory for all port workers this spring, rely on F.B.I. and state criminal records that are incomplete and out of date.
The bad data has been catastrophic for port workers across the country. According to a new report by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for workers, the federal government has mistakenly denied credentials to tens of thousands of people. They have either lost their jobs while awaiting clearance or gone without paychecks for six or seven months until the denials were finally reversed on appeal.
Congress can fix this problem by speeding up the approval process and requiring the F.B.I. to verify the accuracy of criminal records before issuing background reports. Source
Posted on 10 July 2009 by trouble97018
The following letter was mailed to President Obama yesterday. It won’t do any good but it did make me feel better.
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
July 8, 2009
Re: Indefinite Detention
Mr. President:
The Wall Street Journal, in a story put online on July 8, 2009 claims that your administration will not free Gitmo detainees who have been acquitted. Is this true?If it is, I can only say one thing.
Have you lost your bloody mind?!!! You are going to destroy the entire justice system.
You are supposed to be a Constitutional scholar. I say supposed to be; because I am certainly not seeing anything resembling knowledge of or even respect for our founding document.
By locking these people up for what they might do you have now descended into science fiction and not even Bush managed that. I never thought I would live to see the day that people would be locked up for pre-crimes but that is what you are advocating.
I cannot believe I worked to get you into office. During the primary here in Oregon, Kate Nowak, our paid staff campaign member, put a large piece of paper up and encouraged people to put down the changes they wanted. I was one of the first to put something on the sheet. “I WANT MY CONSTITUTION BACK” Mr. President, you are not giving us the change we need.
As far as I’m concerned, scratch Obama and you get Bush. I won’t be voting for a Republican in 2012.But I won’t be voting for you either sir. I will retain my affiliation as a Democrat but any money I have will go to carefully selected candidates, who won’t be you. To me you are just another neocon. You disappoint me.
Susan Cass
Columbia City, Oregon
