Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news, political news, State news

Who's going to jump in '16?

It’s getting fun watching the prospective candidates for president in 2016 start hedging whether they’re actually going to make the plunge.

The latest apparently is Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who might run for the Republican nomination in two years.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/219692-rubio-decision-to-run-in-2016-wont-depend-on-bush

Rubio says his decision won’t depend on whether former Florida Gov.Jeb Bush decides to run. Rubio says he hasn’t talked to the former governor, but the fact that he’s talking about it at all suggests — to me, at least — that he’s got Jeb on his radar.

So, let’s ponder these other possibilities:

* U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan says he likely won’t run if his 2012 Republican presidential nominee running mate Mitt Romney jumps in. No word from Romney what he plans to do if Ryan goes ahead with a run.

* Vice President Joe Biden likely will consider backing out of the Democratic contest if former senator, former secretary of state and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton decides to go for it.

* Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas wants to seek the GOP nomination, but will he go if another talkative Texan, lame-duck Gov. Rick Perry jumps into the race?

* And is Perry going to make the leap if Cruz decides it’s his time to run?

Of all the fascinating what-ifs to ponder, I’m interested mostly in the Texas two-step that might play out between Perry and Cruz.

Perry’s been to the well once already. He flamed out badly before the first primary took place in New Hampshire. He’s trying to re-craft his brand. Cruz is the still-quite-new junior senator from Texas who entered the upper congressional chamber in January 2013 with his mouth blazing away. He hasn’t shut his trap since.

Both of these guys have never seen a TV camera they didn’t like. Cruz is especially enamored of the sound of his voice and the appearance of his face on TV.

It’s going to be tough for both of them to run for president, each trying to outflank the other on the right wing of their already-extreme right-wing party.

Who will jump in first? And will the other one back away?

And what about Ryan and Romney, Biden and Clinton, and Rubio and Bush?

This is going to get tense.

International news, national news, political news

Why so many speeches at these hearings?

This is not exactly a scoop, but I thought I’d ask it anyway: Why do members of Congress have to make speeches when they’re assembled to seek answers to questions from key government officials?

http://www.politico.com/livestream/

It’s happening as I write this brief blog post.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is quizzing Secretary of State John Kerry about the U.S. plan to defeat and destroy the Islamic State. But without fail, from senators on both sides — Democrats and Republicans — are embarking on long-winded soliloquies before getting to whatever question they want answered from the nation’s top diplomat.

Kerry, of course, knows the score. He served in the Senate for nearly three decades and engaged in some tiresome speechmaking while grilling witnesses before the very committee he once chaired.

Many of out here in the Heartland know what gives, too. Politicians by definition usually are in love with the sound of their own voices. So they want to hear themselves being heard, yes?

I’m reminded of the time during Senate confirmation hearings to decide whether Samuel Alito should join the U.S. Supreme Court. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee gave each senator 30 minutes to “ask questions” of the nominee. Then it came to Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. CNN put a clock on Biden, who then pontificated for more than 28 minutes.

Biden eventually asked the question and Alito had less than two minutes to respond. Time ran out and the chairman called on the next senator.

I’d much rather hear what a witness has to say hear for the umpteenth time what a senator of House member thinks about this or that issue.

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Obama, Clinton set to lock arms?

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s probable campaign for the presidency is putting the man in whose administration she once worked into a complicated bind.

President Barack Obama clearly wants a Democrat to succeed him on Jan. 20, 2017 when the new president takes the oath of office. It’s been reported repeatedly that Obama and Clinton have developed a complicated relationship.

It once was testy, such as when they campaign against each other for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Sen. Obama then said to Sen. Clinton, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” Obama then won the presidency and appointed her as secretary of state.

It was then that she swallowed the Obama Kool-Aid, so to speak, and endorsed his foreign policy initiatives.

Now she’s back in “private life,” if you want to call it that. She’s written a book and is embarking on a nationwide book-promotion tour for “Hard Choices.” One of those choices might be to put some daylight between her world view and the view shared by her former political benefactor, the president.

Obama, Clinton start ’16 dance

And … oh, yes, the president’s complications get even more so. He has this vice president, Joe Biden, who also is thought to want to run for president. Vice President Biden has been indispensable at times, helping broker budget deals with his Senate pals and offering advice on a wide range of foreign policy issues and/or crises.

Their relationship also has been up and down as well. Still, Biden is the No. 2 man in the Obama administration.

Does the president choose between two of his most high-profile associates? How does he pick one while throwing the other one over? If it’s Clinton over Biden, how does the vice president continue to serve loyally and speak out publicly for the president? If it’s Biden over Clinton, how does the president deal with Hillary’s husband, the formidable 42nd president of the United States and one of the more effective surrogates Obama has employed on occasion?

It’s getting crowded at the top of the Democratic Party political pecking order.

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VA mess … now there's a scandal

Internal Revenue Service vetting of conservative political action groups’ claims of tax exempt status?

Pffft. Big deal.

Benghazi … Shmenghazi.

Sure, it’s a bigger deal, but it doesn’t rise to the level of “scandal.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs and allegations that it delayed veterans’ health care so long that vets actually died while waiting? Now that is a hyper-serious matter that needs to be resolved thoroughly.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/eric-shinseki-senate-scandal-veterans-affairs-treatment-delays-106715.html?hp=l6

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki — a Vietnam War combat veteran and a former Army chief of staff — says he is “personally angered and saddened” by the allegations. He’d better be. Shinseki is now fighting to keep his job after the American Legion — in a rare statement of outrage — called for his resignation in light of the growing scandal.

At issue is the death of at least 40 veterans who were awaiting health care at the Phoenix, Ariz., VA hospital. Many of the vets’ names were on a secret waiting list that reportedly was designed to conceal lengthy waits that didn’t meet VA standards.

As a veteran myself who a year ago enrolled as a Veterans Administration patient at the hospital here in Amarillo, I have a number of concerns. The most notable of those concerns is whether such delays are being orchestrated at the Thomas Creek VA Medical Center in the city where I live. There was a time I wouldn’t have dared ask that question out loud, but given what has happened in Phoenix, is it possible that other such disgraceful activities are occurring across the Department of Veterans Affairs’ vast health care network?

The situation at the VA clearly is FUBAR, which in military parlance means — and this is the cleaned-up version — “fouled up beyond all recognition.”

President and Mrs. Obama have made veterans care a signature issue as the administration winds down the Afghanistan War, having already ended U.S. involvement in the Iraq War. Michelle Obama, along with Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Biden, have been champions for the cause of ensuring that our veterans receive the best health care possible.

One only can imagine what the response to this mess has been inside the West Wing of the White House, not to mention in the living quarters upstairs. I’m hoping the president has tossed some furniture around and is demanding answers to what has happened in Phoenix.

Gen. Shinseki, you have some serious explaining to do.

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Immigration reform is essential

Vice President Joe Biden is mostly right when he declares that undocumented immigrants “are Americans already.”

He told the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that all they want to is to become integrated fully in American society. That’s why he supports immigration reform.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/201972-biden-illegal-immigrants-already-americans

I, too, want immigration reform.

I want it especially for a specific category of illegal immigrants: those who were brought to this country when they were children by parents who sneaked in under the radar — and who have grown up, come of age and established their lives as full-blown Americans.

Those are the innocent victims in this debate over how and whether to enact serious reform of our immigration policies.

The effort contains a lot of provisions. One of them is an idea supported, believe it or not, by the likes of Republicans George W. Bush and Rick Perry, two Texas governors who know up close how difficult it is for these quasi-Americans to live in the shadows.

Perry has been criticized unfairly by the tea party/nut-job wing of his party for recognizing that immigrants who are technically hear illegally have assimilated into American culture and deserve to live as Americans openly.

I remain hopeful that Congress eventually will do right by those who want to become Americans by giving them the so-called “pathway to citizenship” contained in the immigration overhaul that is awaiting full congressional approval.

Do I predict it will happen? Not on your life. Eternal optimist that I am, my hope does spring eternal.

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‘There isn’t a Republican Party’

Vice President Joe Biden occasionally gets mocked and ridiculed because he tends to say some off-the-wall things.

This link contains a curious truth about the state of a once-great Republican Party.

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/biden-republican-party

It is that, as Biden noted, the Republican Party has morphed into perhaps three sub-parties.

If you watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech and then listened intently to the so-called “Republican response” to it, you heard three responses.

One came from a Washington state member of Congress, Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, speaking for the “mainstream” or “establishment” wing of the party; another came from a senator, Mike Lee of Utah, who spoke for the tea party wing of the GOP; then came the response from Rand Paul of Kentucky who spoke for, well, the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party.

The budget deal that was worked out by the Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., divided the party along two fissures.

Then this week we saw Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, force fellow Republicans to cast a vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling without strings, which he did to embarrass members of his own party — and in the process he incurred the wrath of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who’s facing a tough primary challenge from the tea party wing at home.

The vice president said, “I wish there was a Republican Party. I wish there was one person who would sit across the table from us, make a deal, make a compromise, and know when you got up from that table, it was done.”

He added, “All you had to do is look at the response to the State of the Union. What were there, three or four?”

A Texas Panhandle Republican, the late state Sen. Teel Bivins, used to lament how Republicans occasionally would “eat their young.”

Bon appetit, GOP.

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LaGuardia airport like ‘Third World country’?

Vice President Joe Biden is prone to overstatement at times, which I guess every American knows already.

How about when he recently compared New York’s LaGuardia Airport like a Third World country.

Mr. Vice President, I’ve flown in and out of LaGuardia. Yes, it’s crowded and old. Third World country-like, however, is a serious stretch.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/06/biden-laguardia-like-a-third-world-country/?hpt=hp_t2

If you’ve flown into Belize City, or Phnom Penh, or Hanoi or Delhi, well, those are Third World airports. Actually, Hanoi and Phnom Penh have undergone serious upgrades and reconstruction since the times I flew into those terminal.

Athens’s airport — the one in Greece, the Cradle of Western Civilization — once looked like it began operating during Greece’s Golden Age. It, too, has been replaced by a modern, gleaming terminal.

I guess the vice president’s larger point is that infrastructure needs serious help in the United States. We keep falling farther behind other countries in the quality of our transportation amenities, and that includes airports, highways, bridges and rail lines.

“Just in the last decade the United States has fallen 20 spots when it comes to the quality of infrastructure in America. It’s embarrassing and it’s stupid. It’s stupid. That puts us literally behind. They rank us behind Barbados. Great country, one airport,” he said.

“Look folks, not a joke, we need to reinvest and modernize our whole infrastructure, especially in rail,” Biden added.

The country needs investment in these things. Yes, “investment” means spending money. These projects create jobs and, yes, move people around more efficiently and safely.

I’ll excuse Joe Biden’s overstatement about LaGuardia. His larger point is worth heeding.

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Biden multi-tasks: peace talks with memorial service

Vice President Joe Biden took advantage of a key opportunity today to visit with Israeli President Shimon Peres about the need to keep peace talks going with the Palestinian Authority.

Biden presses Israel on peace talks

Biden went to Israel to attend the memorial service for the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who died over the weekend at age 85.

The VP’s message was that Israel should recognize Palestinian autonomy while seeking guarantees of its own security.

For his part, Peres told Biden that the Palestinians aren’t the “enemy.

“They are our neighbors and our friends,” he said, adding that terrorism is “destroying their fabric.”

That’s a realistic view of life in that terribly troubled region.

“Anytime that you have a leader from the United States as significant as Vice President Biden sitting down with the prime minister of Israel, which Vice President Biden will be doing while we’re here, there’s an opportunity for progress,” she said. “Every time there is an opportunity for progress, for the United States to be in a position to help Israel in the cause of crafting and finalizing a two-state solution, we take that opportunity.”

I’m reminded of what the great Winston Churchill once said about the value of talking. “To jaw-jaw always is better than to war-war,” Churchill said.

Keep jawing.

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What’s so new about Gates’s memoir?

Robert Gates is a great American patriot.

He served two presidents with honor and distinction as defense secretary. He’s an expert in national security issues. I honor his service and thank him for it.

His new book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” has the political class all a flutter in Washington.

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2014/01/08/bob_gates_scathing_indictment_of_obamas_white_house_107021.html

My question is this: Why is this such a huge deal?

Yes, he criticizes President Obama’s alleged lack of commitment to the Afghanistan War; he says Vice President Biden has been wrong on every decision the White House faced; he says the West Wing’s grasp on national security power is tighter than since the Nixon years.

Gates’s book is no different than many memoirs written after key government officials leave office. They have this habit of spilling the beans on their bosses once they’re clear of the place. Presidents of both political parties have fallen victim to this kind of remembrance.

Gates is no different.

What’s been interesting has been the emphasis certain media have placed on the book.

Conservative media, for instance, have devoted many hours and column inches to Gates’s criticism of President Obama and Vice President Biden. Other media outlets take note that Gates saved arguably his harshest criticism for Congress, half of which is controlled by Republicans, the other half by Democrats.

Gates has been pretty thorough in his trashing of the political establishment in Washington, now that he’s gone.

I’ll stipulate that I haven’t read the book. I plan to read it once I get through the other books I received as Christmas gifts.

I’m betting I won’t see anything I haven’t read before.

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Rep. Ryan makes sense on Meet the Press

I thought my ears were playing tricks on me today when I listened to the “Meet the Press” interview with Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray, co-chairs of the congressional committee that hammered out the two-year budget deal that passed overwhelmingly in the House the other day.

There was Ryan, a stalwart tea party Republican — and the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012 — sounding reasonable and accommodating. He noted that compromise requires both sides to give a little. He said it was good to sit down with the Democrat Murray to understand what she believes and where she stands on budget matters.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/12/15/sen_patty_murray_rep_paul_ryan_tout_budget_deal_in_joint_mtp_interview.html

Ryan also noted that the 2012 presidential election, which he and Mitt Romney lost to President Obama and Vice President Biden, served as a wakeup call to Republicans. The other side won and we lost, Ryan said.

Therefore, it was time to start working with those on the other side, not against them.

Therein lies the key to the budget deal that has enraged the right-wingers of the GOP and made more than a few left-wing Democrats unhappy. The message from Ryan and Murray? Live with it and let’s back to governing.

It’s nice to realize I wasn’t hearing things after all.