Sen. Jay Rockefeller unloaded on lawmakers Tuesday, accusing some of blocking efforts to solve urgent problems during Barack Obama’s presidency “because he’s the wrong color.”
Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who will retire at the end of the year, made his comments during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on transportation funding, saying he’s confounded by the “lack of will to keep ourselves from dropping into rivers and rolling over bridges that are no longer there.”
“It’s an American characteristic that you don’t do anything which displeases the voters, because you always have to get reelected here,” he added. “I understand part of it. It has to do with — for some, it’s just we don’t want anything good to happen under this president, because he’s the wrong color.”
The National Day of Prayer turned overtly political when a Republican Teaparty speaker stood at the podium and called President Obama the “abortion president.”
The occasion of course, was supposed to be nonpolitical and nonpartisan. That is why James Dobson, Founder of the Conservative Christian advocacy group called Focus on the Family was ask to take part in the activities.
But anyone who knows James Dobson, knows that any and every occasion – even a religious activity – could be easily transformed into lunacy and right-wing propaganda. And the intended religious activities of the National Day of Prayer was no match for Dobson’s politics.
“President Obama, before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president,” Dobson said, in an apparent lie at the National Day of Prayer. “This is something that he really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a sense is the abortion president.”
Dobson’s speech was so vile and disrespectful, Democratic Representative Janice Hahn walked out in the middle of his speech. In an interview with The Huffington Post Rep. Hahn called Dobson’s speech “inappropriate” and a violation of the nonpartisan Day of Prayer.
“He goes on about healthcare and providing abortions,” Hahn told HuffPost, “and at that point I stood up and I point my finger at Dr Dobson and I said, ‘this is inappropriate!’ And I walked out.”
They are some people who respect the significance of a National Day of Prayer, a day when both sides put away their politics and commune as one people. And then there are those who just don’t know when to stop. Who don’t respect the boundaries even as laid out in the religious context of a National Day of Prayer. We’ll call those disrespectful people “Christian Conservatives.”
Ed Henry has been working hard, overtime even to get under President Obama’s skin. His boss over at Fox demands it, so every chance Henry gets, he goes after the president with suggestive questions. The answers from the president usually don’t matter, it’s the message in Henry’s question that counts to his boss at Fox and the people who watch that station.
Take this question for example. The president is wrapping up an overseas trip, presently in the Philippines. At a press conference, Fox’s Ed Henry decided that this would be the perfect place to criticize the President’s foreign policy and asked this suggestive question:
“As you end this trip, I don’t think I have to remind you there have been a lot of unflattering portraits of your foreign policy right now. And rather than get into all the details or red lines, excedera, I’d like to give you a chance to lay out what your vision is more than five years into office, what you think the Obama doctrine is in terms of what your guiding principle is on all of these crises, and how you answer those critics who say they think the doctrine is weakness.”
But Henry probably didn’t get the memo that the president was in his second term and has no reason to sugarcoat his answer. From his podium, Obama looked at Henry and saw straight through him. He knew what Henry was doing and decided that a good smack down of the Fox worker was in order.
The President:
“Well, Ed, I doubt that I’m going to have time to lay out my entire foreign policy doctrine, and there are actually some complimentary pieces as well about my foreign policy, but I’m not sure you ran them.”
The President then went on to attack those criticisms, point by point, noting that “Typically, criticism of our foreign policy has been directed at the failure to use military force,” and asking “why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve just gone through a decade of war at enormous costs to our troops and to our budget? And what is it exactly that these critics think would have been accomplished?”
“My job as Commander-in-Chief is to deploy military force as a last resort, and to deploy it wisely,” he continued. “And, frankly, most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American people had no interest in participating in and would not advance our core security interests.”
On Syria, the President pointed out that his critics “say, no, no, no, we don’t mean sending in troops,” and asked “Well, what do you mean?”
“Well, you should be assisting the opposition — well, we’re assisting the opposition,” President Obama said, then asked “What else do you mean? Well, perhaps you should have taken a strike in Syria to get chemical weapons out of Syria. Well, it turns out we’re getting chemical weapons out of Syria without having initiated a strike. So what else are you talking about? And at that point it kind of trails off.”
On Ukraine, the President asked of those critics, “What else should we be doing? Well, we shouldn’t be putting troops in, the critics will say. That’s not what we mean. Well, okay, what are you saying? Well, we should be arming the Ukrainians more. Do people actually think that somehow us sending some additional arms into Ukraine could potentially deter the Russian army? Or are we more likely to deter them by applying the sort of international pressure, diplomatic pressure and economic pressure that we’re applying?”
“The point is that for some reason many who were proponents of what I consider to be a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven’t really learned the lesson of the last decade, and they keep on just playing the same note over and over again,” the President said. “Why? I don’t know.”
President Obama went on to take another shot at the political media, telling Henry that the U.S. doesn’t take actions “because somebody sitting in an office in Washington or New York think it would look strong. That’s not how we make foreign policy. And if you look at the results of what we’ve done over the last five years, it is fair to say that our alliances are stronger, our partnerships are stronger, and in the Asia Pacific region, just to take one example, we are much better positioned to work with the peoples here on a whole range of issues of mutual interest.”
Every time the question gets ask, I always expect the president to say that his biggest regret was being President of the United States. I mean, who could blame him?
Since Barack Obama became president, he has had to put up with the most vile, the most racists, and the most disrespect any other president has ever had to deal with in recent memory. But yet, the man finds a way to push on.
So yes, when that question is ask I always expect him to say the presidency was his biggest regret. But he never answers the way I expect him to.
While visiting with students at a town hall at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, the question was once again asked, ‘what is your biggest regret?’
The leader of the free world, the man who arguably is the most powerful man in the world, said that not spending more time with his mom was his biggest regret.
“I realized that there was a stretch of time from when I was, let’s say 20 until I was 30 where I was so busy with my own life that I didn’t always reach out and communicate with her and ask her how she was doing and tell her about things,” Obama said. “You know, I was nice and I’d call and I’d write once in a while, but this goes to what I was saying earlier about what you remember in the end, I think, is the people you love.”
Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, passed away in 1995 from uterine cancerPresident Obama: ‘I regret not having spent more time with my mother’ living arrow 10×10, just weeks before her 53rd birthday. Four months earlier, Obama had published Dreams from My Father; a year later, he won his first election, the Illinois state Senate seat.
The Senate passed their version of immigration reform over a year ago, but House Republicans have failed to address the Senate’s bill or any bill containing the words immigration reform.
“Unfortunately, Republicans in the House of Representatives have repeatedly failed to take action, seemingly preferring the status quo of a broken immigration system over meaningful reform,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House.
“I urge House Republicans to listen to the will of the American people and bring immigration reform to the House floor for a vote,” Obama said.
He repeated that plea in a private conversation with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican said.
The Senate legislation, unveiled on April 16, 2013, and passed by the full Senate in June, has remained stalled in the Republican-led House, despite a strong vote by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
And still, the Republicans are stuck on stupid! They’re still talking about repealing a law that is helping the economy, and helping millions and millions and millions of Americans! And as they talk about repeal, they have no idea on what to replace the law with if they somehow manage to repeal it.
President Obama announced Thursday that 8 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, calling the feat a success story that Democrats should “forcefully defend and be proud of” in the face of Republican election-year attacks on the law.
The enrollment figure, revised upward from the 7.5 million signups that the administration had announced earlier this month, renewed hopes at the White House that Democrats will be able to overcome the initial rocky rollout of the health law in the fall as they battle to maintain control of the Senate in the midterms this fall.
“This thing is working,” Obama said at an afternoon news conference. Of the GOP, he added: “They said no one would sign up. They were wrong about that. They are wrong to try to repeal a law that is working.”
The final figure is well above the White House’s initial target of 7 million signups.
Republicans, who have fought the law since it was passed by a sharply divided Congress in 2010, escalated their call for the law to be repealed after the problems with the enrollment Web site, which repeatedly broke down in its first few months. Obama’s job approval ratings dropped, and Democrats worried that the bad headlines would harm the party at the ballot box.
But a buoyant Obama said the better-than-expected enrollment news should convince Democrats to not shy away from embracing his signature domestic achievement.
“I don’t think we should apologize for it, and I don’t think we should be defensive about it,” he said. “I think it is a strong, good, right story to tell. I think what the other side is doing and what the other side is offering would strip away protections for those families.”
And yet, another reason for the nitwits in the Grand Old Party to blame Obama. This time, they’re accusing the president of inciting a right-winger into killing Jews.
Erik Rush, another favorite of the far right Republicans and a competing voice of Republican reasoning, has figured out the real reason for the shooting at two separate Jewish facilities where three people were killed last weekend. As far as he is concerned, it’s all Obama’s doing.
On his radio show Tuesday, Rush accused the Obama administration and the media of promoting “anti-Israel sentiment” and “fomenting racial discord between various races.”
“The anti-Semitic tone that is being tolerated, in my view, by so many in this country and as a result of the tone I believe that the administration and the press have set, they’ve chosen to capitalize on every racist incident that has happened when it is in the interests of their agenda or their ratings, fomenting racial discord between various races, between blacks and whites and the anti-Israel sentiment has become pretty much epidemic,” Rush said. “I’m kind of surprised that we haven’t seen more in the way of anti-Semitic violence.”
President Obama flew to Texas to herald the “winds of change” that blew through the 1960s — but first, he had to protect First Lady Michelle Obama from a stiff breeze on the tarmac.
Arriving in Austin aboard Air Force One, the president and Mrs. Obama walked down the stairway as a gust threatened to give the first lady an awkward Marilyn Monroe moment.
The wind lifted the first lady’s pleated skirt “enough, above the knee, for the president to reach over and hold it down” to avert an incident, according to a pool reporter who was there.
The first couple laughed at the flap as they walked down the stairs.
The president wouldn’t say it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And his silence on the matter doesn’t mean others aren’t see in the truth.
We’re talking about racism and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is pointing a finger directly at the problem – the Republicans.
In a recent interview, Pelosi was asked if she thought racism was the foundation of the Republicans’ opposition to the president, more specifically in reference to immigration. She basically answered yes.
“I think race has something to do with them not bringing up the immigration bill. I’ve heard them say to the Irish, ‘If it was just you, it would be easy,’” Pelosi said, when a reporter asked if race was a factor in Republicans stances and how they treat the president and others.
“I think generally speaking, they are disrespectful of the representatives of the president’s administration,” Pelosi said, adding that she didn’t “want to go to that place” about whether the GOP were disrespectful to the president.
In an interview with USA Today, baseball great Hank Aaron took a careful look at the racism he faced when he was in pursuit of breaking Babe Ruth’s record, and he came to the conclusion that not much have changed since the racist letters he received back then and the things President Obama is going through now.
Mr. Aaron shared parts of one of the letters he kept all these years, a portion of which read “[y]ou are not going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it. Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. My gun is watching your every black move.”
When asked why he kept the letters, he said “[t]o remind myself that we are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record. If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There’s not a whole lot that has changed.”
“We can talk about baseball. Talk about politics,” he continued. “Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated. We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country.”
“The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”
You can thank Samsung for this one. Because of the mini controversy that erupted when the selfie above was taken, the White House is now considering a ban on all selfies with the president.
Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz took the selfie with Obama Tuesday during the team’s visit to the White House. The pic appeared spontaneous at the moment, but it was revealed a day later that the act, taken with Ortiz’s Samsung Galaxy Note 3 phone, was actually a public relations stunt orchestrated by the Korean telecom conglomerate.
“Maybe this will be the end of all selfies,” White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer said about the incident Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “(Obama) obviously didn’t know anything about Samsung’s connection to this.”
“Someone who uses the President’s likeness to promote a product… that’s a problem with the White House,” Pfeiffer added. “We’ve had conversations with Samsung about this and have expressed our concerns.”
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