Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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Is Cruz qualified to run for POTUS?

National political media are starting to probe the issue of a possible presidential candidate’s constitutional qualifications.

The target this time is junior U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas.

http://us.cnn.com/2013/08/13/politics/natural-born-president/index.html?sr=sharebar_facebook

Let’s flash back to 2008 when another candidate came under amazing scrutiny. He was then-junior U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois. Some folks on the right said he couldn’t run for president because, they alleged, he was born in Kenya, homeland of his late father. Obama’s late mother, however, was an American citizen. Sen. Obama had said all along he was born in Hawaii, the 50th state of the U.S., in August 1961. That wasn’t good enough for the critics, who kept harping on his birth.

Eventually, Obama settled it by producing his birth certificate. He was re-elected in November 2012 and the yammering — save for a few crackpots on the far right — has stopped.

Now we have Cruz. The senator indeed was born in Canada. His father is Cuban. His mother is American. Cruz acknowledges he was born north of our border. And that has some folks questioning whether Cruz — who might run for president in 2016 — is qualified under the Constitution.

Article II stipulates that only a “natural born citizen or a “citizen of the United States … shall be eligible for the office of president.” Scholars have interpreted that to mean that Cruz could serve as president, given that his constitutional qualifications were earned at birth by virtue of his mother’s citizenship.

I tend to believe Cruz is qualified under the Constitution to serve as president, which means Obama would have been qualified to serve as well — had he been born in a foreign country, which he wasn’t.

Let’s wait to see how this Cruz story plays out. My bet, as I’ve noted already, is that the left won’t make Cruz’s birthplace nearly the issue that those on the right sought to do with Barack Obama.

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Hey y’all, the deficit is shrinking

I consider myself a deficit hawk. I dislike as much as anyone the idea that the government spends more money than it receives.

It is with that stipulation that I hail news that the federal budget deficit is shrinking. Dramatically, I should add.

http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130813/BIZ/308130307

The Congressional Budget Office — which is about as nonpartisan and unbiased as it gets — pegs the 2013 federal deficit to be at $670 billion. That’s still a lot of money to be in the hole. It’s also about half of what the annual deficit totaled when President Obama took office in January 2009.

The cause for the shrinkage? More revenue created by more taxes being paid by more Americans getting back to work.

Interesting, don’t you think?

Yet the critics keeping yammering about the president’s “failed economic policies.”

Another report out this week shows that immigration reform would help grow the economy significantly over the next two decades, thus putting downward pressure on the deficit. How does that happen? By allowing undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and work in the open while they set out on that vaunted “path to citizenship.”

Another “failure”? I think not.

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S.C. senator faces rightie challenge

I don’t know why I should give a damn about what happens in South Carolina.

But I do.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, is facing a 2014 GOP primary challenge from South Carolina state Sen. Lee Bright who thinks Graham is too supportive of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, among other issues.

http://thehill.com/video/in-the-news/316779-graham-challenger-launches-campaign-with-attacks-on-immigration-civil-liberties

Bright is looking like a dim bulb here.

Graham isn’t exactly a flaming lefty. Far from it. He’s as conservative as most Republicans in the Senate. He votes the party line more than 90 percent of the time. He’s also a talented military lawyer who understands a thing or two about presidential prerogative, which means that presidents — by virtue of their election — have the right to pick qualified judicial candidates. Yes, the Senate has the right under the Constitution to confirm those appointments. It’s rare that senators do not go along with presidential picks.

President Obama has selected qualified judges throughout his time in the White House. The problem with many of them, according to those on the right, is that they share Obama’s more liberal view of jurisprudence. That’s no reason by itself to oppose someone.

And no, this is not a partisan concern with me. I’ve argued the same thing on behalf of Republican presidents as well. President George W. Bush’s selections for the high court weren’t exactly my favorites, but he had the right to pick qualified individuals to serve — and he did.

I’m a big believer in presidential prerogative. Lee Bright apparently doesn’t share that belief, especially when the president belongs to the other party.

Lindsey Graham, to his credit, gets it.

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Presidents never take ‘vacation’

Presidents of the United States of America do not take vacations the way you and I take them.

Got that?

Thus, it was with some dismay that I heard Michael Smerconish — sitting in for Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball show this afternoon — chronicle he number of days recent presidents have taken time away from the Oval Office.

President Obama is spending a few days in Massachusetts with his wife and daughters. He’s playing a little golf, showing his girls a little attention and in general acting like a husband and father. He’s also receiving national security briefings and is being told constantly about developments around the world and in the huge country he governs.

Smerconish ticked off the number of so-called vacation days Obama has taken this far in his presidency. He noted that President Clinton took fewer days at a similar stage in his presidency and also noted that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush took far more days away during their time in the White House.

Big bleeping deal!

Smerconish did say that he, too, never has begrudged presidents for taking time away. Good for him.

None of this matters not one bit as far as I can tell. Oh sure, some of Obama’s critics have needled him for taking time away to play golf. I believe they need something — anything — with which to gripe about him.

And remember how White House reporters complained about George W. Bush’s vacations at his ranch in Crawford, Texas — in the middle of the summer when the heat was unbearable? I reckon they aren’t complaining now about covering Obama’s vacation in posh Martha’s Vineyard.

Whatever. As Smerconish noted, presidents deserve some time away from the grind to stay sharp and remain grounded in things that really matter — such as their families.

Even when they’re “vacationing,” presidents are on the clock. Always.

Enjoy yourself, if you can, Mr. President.

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What happened to new freedoms, Russia?

Two decades ago, the Soviet Union receded into history. Russia was reborn supposedly as a country where its citizens could live in freedom.

It’s now painfully obvious, however, that freedom in Russia has its limits.

Freedom doesn’t include gay people.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/gay-russians-seeking-refuge-131300654.html

The Russian government has issued some kind of mandate that makes it illegal for homosexuals to demonstrate for their rights. One of the results of this crackdown has been an outmigration of Russians to other countries. Gay Russians no longer are welcome in their country. As the link attached here notes, Vancouver, British Columbia, is seeing a significant increase in Russians fleeing to that city on the Pacific Coast of Canada.

The communists who founded and later ruled the Soviet Union seized many people’s freedom. They couldn’t own property. They couldn’t acquire wealth, or worship freely. They couldn’t speak out against their government without fearing for their lives. They couldn’t love whomever they wished.

The commies are gone from power — more or less — and the Russian Federation has restored many of the aforementioned freedoms. The government, though, has declared in effect that it is illegal to be gay.

Is it any wonder, then, that President Barack Obama — who keeps speaking out on behalf of the rights of all the world’s citizens — and his Russian colleague, Vladimir Putin, can’t get along?

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Cornyn vs. Gohmert? Really?

Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka reports that U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert is being pushed to challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Texas Republican Party primary.

Please, please, say it is so.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/gohmert-v-cornyn

Gohmert is running neck and neck with Rep. Steve Stockman of Friendswood in the contest to be Texas’s goofiest Republican member of Congress. Gohmert enjoys tremendous strength among the party’s tea party wing. Cornyn — the former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice — is a more “establishment-type” Republican, meaning that his support comes from the more mainstream sources.

Gohmert remains committed to the notion that the president may have been in a foreign country. His list of idiotic statements in recent years has become the stuff of legend.

It puzzles me, though, as to why Cornyn might become a tea party target. As head of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, Cornyn has earned his spurs criticizing President Obama at every turn. He certainly was no shrinking violet during last year’s presidential campaign, as he tried repeatedly to derail the president’s successful re-election effort.

That doesn’t appear to be good enough.

What would happen if Gohmert were to run? He’d likely lose the primary, but that would mean he’d also surrender his House seat in 2014. But whoever his East Texas constituents send to the House to succeed him remains a dicey proposition.

If next year’s Texas primary features these two gut-fighters, though, it’ll embody the intraparty warfare that’s brewing between those who want government to do something and those who want it to do nothing.

I’m hoping Gohmert runs. Texans need a good laugh.

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We’re polling ourselves to sleep

This just in: Hillary Rodham Clinton might win Georgia’s electoral votes if the election were held today.

Got that? But here’s the kicker. The next presidential election ain’t happening until November 2016. That’s more than three years from now. As the saying goes, it might be a dozen lifetimes away from now. Heck, it might be a hundred, or a thousand lifetimes.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/georgia-2016-poll-hillary-clinton-95343.html?hp=l3

It’s all kind of interesting, I suppose, to release these polls on the spot. But they matter not one little bit in the grand scheme.

HRC might not run. I’m betting she will, though, especially when she sees polls that show her putting places like Georgia in play. President Obama lost the state in 2012, but not by landslide proportions.

So much of this polling just feeds the frustration some of us out here in Flyover Country have about the national political media. They’re obsessed with the horse race aspect of these campaigns. Yes, they do cover the issues — such as what candidates say about the economy, national defense, the environment, the big stuff.

The public seems to demand so much of this horse race coverage that the media fall into the trap of reporting on all these polls even when there still are years remaining until the next election.

Enough of the polling, already.

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POTUS is misdirected on port sites

A friend and former colleague brought something to my attention overnight that I must share here.

Seems the president of the United States needs a lesson in Geography 101. My friend was scolding me a bit because I needled Gov. Rick Perry for not knowing where he was when he delivered remarks the other day from a podium in New Orleans, La. He said he was in Florida at that moment. Not good, right? My pal wants me to apply the same level of zeal to critiquing Barack Obama as I did to the Pride of Paint Creek.

President Obama said this on Jay Leno’s talk show Tuesday night:

“If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, or Jacksonville, Florida — if we don’t do that, those ships are going to go someplace else.”

Ouch, Mr. President.

All of those ports face the Atlantic Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.

Shouldn’t the leader of the Free World know better? I’m quite sure the president’s many critics on the right will ensure that he gets his share of fiery criticism.

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Obama snubs Putin, gets cheers from both sides

President Obama’s decision to forgo a bilateral summit meeting with Russian President/strongman Vladimir Putin has drawn high praise from, get this, Republicans as well as Democrats.

http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/global-economy/316061-obamas-canceling-of-putin-meeting-draws-bipartisan-praise

Obama is going to Moscow to attend a meeting of the G-20 nations. He’d been scheduled to meet privately with Putin prior to the economic summit. Then something happened. Putin decided to grant temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who’s been on the lam as U.S. authorities have implored to answer for leaking national security secrets to the rest of the world.

Obama’s decision was the right one as it sticks it in the eye of Putin, who has shown little interest in cooperating with his so-called American “partners” in trying to resolve the Snowden matter.

In truth, Obama has few options to persuade the Russians to hand Snowden over to U.S. authorities. The United States has no extradition treaty with Russia, so the Russians are free to act as they see fit. That doesn’t mean the American president has to take it lying down.

Barack Obama’s canceling of the bilateral summit has embarrassed Putin on the world stage.

To which many of us would say: Putin had it coming.

As the link attached to this blog notes, U.S.-Russia relations are heading for the deep freeze, which of course is nothing new.

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Explain those fears, Mitt

Mitt Romney talked some sense in trying to curb some congressional Republicans’ enthusiasm for shutting down the government while defunding the Affordable Care Act.

Bravo, Mitt! The right-wing rogues within his party — the folks who never quite trusted the centrist-leaning former Massachusetts governor — are out of control. They’re the tea party new guys who don’t quite understand the consequence that will cascade down on them if they succeed in shuttering the federal government.

http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/07/19914511-romney-re-enters-gop-fray?lite

But then Romney veered off into a strange little tangent about what has happened since President Obama’s re-election — in which he defeated Romney by nearly 5 million votes.

“I must admit. It has been hard to watch or read the news,” he said. “What we feared would happen, is happening.”

What?

I kind of wish Romney would go into detail about what is happening that upsets him so much, or what is happening that would have been different if President Romney were at the helm.

Let’s see: We’ve added about a million jobs since Obama’s re-election; unemployment is down to 7.4 percent, which isn’t great but it surely is a lot better than the 9 percent jobless rate the president inherited when he took office in January 2009; the budget deficit has been slashed significantly; we’re continuing to kill terrorists around the world.

Have we reached a state of geopolitical nirvana? Of course not. The Obama administration has committed some serious mistakes. Those errors, though, do not rise to the level of “scandal” that’s being portrayed in the right-wing mainstream media.

My threshold question to Mitt, though, is this: How would any of this been different had you been in charge?