michael | The Obama Diary

Posts Tagged ‘michael

May

Rise and Shine

Categories: All Photos, All Videos and Articles
Tags: background, Barack, checks, dowd, maureen, michael, Obama, Penny, President, Pritzker, tomasky, tweets, ut

stupidity

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Brian Beutler: The least surprising news of the week is that getting dressed down at the White House correspondents dinner did nothing to persuade Maureen Dowd and other opinion makers that their fantastical depictions of presidential power are actually puerile and lazy. Less than a month after Republicans rejected Obama’s budget — Chained CPI and all — gauzy platitudes about leadership are back in vogue.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Jake Sherman reports that the very people Obama’s supposed to “lead” to a budget deal (or a deal on anything) are perhaps more dysfunctional and reactionary than at any point since they came to power.

More here

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Pritzker-Froman-split-cropped-proto-custom_28

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TPM: President Obama is set to nominate Penny Pritzker as his administration’s next commerce secretary and Michael Froman as U.S. trade representative, according to a White House official. Obama is scheduled to announce the nominations at 10 a.m. ET Thursday at the White House before leaving for Mexico.

More here and here

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Today is the National Day Of Prayer, so bow your head and thank God for the Tea Party, which dresses up racism in a veil of Liberty.
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Top Conservative Cat (@TeaPartyCat) May 02, 2013

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Michael Tomasky: I don’t mind being called an Obamabot. I mean, I’ve written a few columns about the guy that were brutal, toughing than anything Dowd’s written, especially at the time of the debt ceiling fiasco. But I understand the game, and it doesn’t bother me.

I have something I wish to make crystal clear, however. If it seems to you (I mean you, pumpkinface!) that I’m always excusing Obama, you’re misreading me. I am instead seeking to cast blame where it properly belongs. And that is almost always the Republican Party. I’ve said all this a jillion times before, but it is simply not a mainstream political party in the traditional American sense. It is a radical oppositionalist faction, way beyond the normal American parameters both in terms of ideology and tactics. And that needs to be pointed out, unfortunately, again and again and again.

More here

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If you think it's smart to destroy evidence for your terrorist friend, I am going to suggest to you that maybe you're not college material.
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(@pourmecoffee) May 02, 2013

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May

This and That

By Chipsticks 130 Comments

Categories: All Photos, All Videos and Articles
Tags: Barack, charles, conference, dowd, Lawrence, maureen, Mel, michael, o'donnell, Obama, photos, Pierce, President, press, tomasky, videos, watt, whpc

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Greg Sargent: Top liberals throw their weight behind Obama’s housing pick

The news that Obama has nominated Congressman Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Administration, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is potentially a huge deal, with possible long term consequences for untold numbers of struggling homeowners — and, by extension, the health of the economy. There are two key questions to be asked about Watt, who would replace the Bush-appointed Ed DeMarco, who has been widely pilloried by liberals for refusing administration requests to allow Fannie and Freddie to offer debt relief to distressed home borrowers.

More here

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President Obama congratulates U.S. Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC) after nominating him to be the next director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency

…. with Tom Wheeler, the President’s nominee to replace the outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman

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The single most under-reported story of the last 4 years is the Republican Party’s unhinged hatred of Barack Obama: washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-lin…

— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) May 1, 2013

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Charles Pierce: Noted sprawler-across-staircases Maureen Dowd has fashioned herself another Chronic Ward of a newspaper column today on her now-regular theme of what a wimpety-wimp-wimp Barry Obama is, and why she never should have let him take her to prom instead of the hunky Andrew Shepherd from The American President who, while admittedly fictional, never would take this guff from actual human beings like John Boehner and Eric Cantor …

…. Dowd once again seems to be writing from an assisted-living facility on the far side of a world Beyond The Planet Of The Ultra-Vixens.

…. It is the president’s job to get Congress to behave? Where in Article I does that part of the job description appear? It is the job of the voters not to elect morons. It is the job of the non-morons in the congressional leadership to keep the morons from driving the entire train over a cliff. When those two checks fail, as they obviously have, it still is not the job of the president to be the country’s chief moron-wrangler. I think we are heading into the endless thicket of Dowdian Daddy Issues here again…..

Full majestic post here

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Feb

Rise and Shine

By Chipsticks 174 Comments

Categories: All Photos, All Videos, Articles and Michelle Obama
Tags: Barack, beautiful, day, jobs, michael, Michelle, Obama, photos, President, tomasky, toons, valentines, videos, You're

Hey, what other photo would I use on this date?!

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Today:

9:35: President Obama departs the White House

11:30: Arrives in Decatur, Ga.

12:10: Visits a pre-kindergarten classroom at College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center

1:20: Delivers remarks at Decatur Community Recreation Center

2:40: Departs Decatur

4:25: Arrives at the White House

4:50: Participates in a “Fireside Hangout” with Google+ to discuss his State of the Union Address

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More here: Steve Benen

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Love this:

Michael Tomasky: …. A lot of commentators are amusing themselves by pointing out that very few of Obama’s long list of State of the Union goals are likely to make it into law while he’s in office. I say that seeing as how he’s a pretty smart man, he knows this. But he’s doing it anyway. Because he’s thinking more about history than his story, and because he understands that if he wants to be a transformational president, the change he initiates is going to have to continue well past his time – and yes, the great presidents have all thought this way.

…. Obama knows that fighting climate change and getting universal pre-school and doing something to help the working poor are big jobs, long jobs. They’re certainly not going to happen under the current legislative configuration, and they’re probably not going to happen while he’s in office ….. his play is to inch us toward those goals however he can …. He might not be the guy who’s there to sign the bill. But he’s okay with that, too.

…. If three or four of these things pass in the next four years, great, all the better. But if they pass in the eight years after he’s done, everyone will know who put them in motion. And I have little doubt Obama will be happy to share the credit with the then-sitting president, whoever she may be.

Full post here

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President Obama’s post-SOTU OFA call – thanks a million Pamela!

The sound is pretty low, so turn it up!

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NYT: President Obama’s call in his State of the Union address to “make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America” rallied advocates across the country who have long argued that inequity in education begins at a very young age.

In details that emerged early Thursday, the administration proposed that the federal government work with states to provide preschool for every 4-year-old from low- and moderate-income families. The president’s plan also calls for expanding Early Head Start, the federal program designed to prepare children from low-income families for school, to broaden quality childcare for infants and toddlers.

More here

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I’m not an Andrew Sullivan fan, but he has a pretty spectacular take-down of Rubio’s SOTU response if you’d like to read it – here

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Oh go on then, more romance:

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MoooOOOooOOOoooorning! More in a while, that was severely rushed!

Feb

The Justice Department Memo: Some Non-Hysterical Balance

By Chipsticks 35 Comments

Categories: Articles
Tags: balance, Barack, department, Justice, memo, michael, Obama, President, tomasky

Michael Tomasky: …. I’ve now read the DoJ white paper that justifies the killing of US citizens. It’s certainly not something that makes the breast swell with pride. But it does make me wonder what I would do in this situation, and I can’t honestly come up with easy answers. While I don’t condone what the Obama administration is doing here, I’m also suspicious of high-horse denunciations, because I think the question of whether an American forfeits his due process rights when he joins an enemy army is a complicated one.

…. There’s no doubt that a sentence like “the president has the power to order the assassination of American citizens” sounds positively despotic. However, these are people who have gone off and joined Al Qaeda. If an American citizen of German descent had gone back to heimat Germany in 1934 and joined the Nazi Party and worked his way up such that he was involved in the plotting of attacks against American soldiers, and Roosevelt had order him killed, no one would have batted an eye in 1940s America…..

… I’ve never been a hard-line civil libertarian. My civic-republican instincts cut against that, because I feel that citizenship confers not just rights but responsibilities….. There’s always the possibility of the case where we might find out too late, and a large number of Americans could die. Presidents live with that responsibility every day. If that responsibility were mine, I can’t honestly say what I’d do, and I don’t think anyone can.

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