Tag Archives: The Hill

International news, national news, political news

Obama takes measured tone regarding Trump

U.S. President Barack Obama holds a news conference at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. August 4, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

President Barack Obama quite possibly might have written the book on delivering “measured responses” to shocking developments.

He is finishing up his final world tour as president and he told our nation’s allies in Greece, then Germany and now in Peru to “wait and see” how the new president acts before passing judgment.

That is wise advice, indeed, from the man who is awaiting the day Donald J. Trump takes office as the next president of the United States. That the next president is Donald Trump and not Hillary Rodham Clinton lends the shock value to recent developments regarding the transfer of power in Washington, D.C.

As Obama noted in Europe, a political candidate says things that occasionally are vastly different than what he or she might say as an officeholder. Campaign rhetoric differs vastly from governing rhetoric, he said.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/306963-obama-take-a-wait-and-see-approach-to-trump

Many millions of Americans are hoping that’s the case with regard to Trump and his wild and fiery campaign rhetoric.

Trump’s transition from real estate mogul/TV personality to the highest profile public official imaginable is well under way. He’s made some missteps in this transition, but he’s also made some good choices.

As The Hill reports: “Obama emphasized that seeing the ‘complexities of the issues’ upon becoming the President-elect can shape and modify thinking.

“’Reality will force him to adjust how he approaches many of these issues,’ Obama added. ‘That’s just the way this office works.’”

I rank the selection of Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff as a sound decision. That’s about it, so far, at least in my world view.

President Obama’s advice to the world leaders about Trump would do us all well back home. I’ll be critical of decisions he makes, but I’m going to remain quiet about how I believe he’ll lead the country until he actually takes hold of the levers of power.

national news, political news

‘Ground game’: critical to victory

campaign_groundgame_getty

Political pundits and media commentators I guess have become enamored of football terminology to describe political campaigns.

They keep referring to the “ground game.”

A report from The Hill tells us that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s ground game is far superior to Republican Donald Trump’s game.

It means, I guess, that the Clintonistas are better — politically speaking — at blocking and tackling than the Trumpkins.

http://thehill.com/campaign/302231-clinton-holds-huge-ground-game-advantage-over-team-trump

This is a critical element in the campaign that has been evident for months. Clinton’s precinct-by-precinct, state-by-state apparatus has been in full mojo since before the party’s nominating conventions. They have ramped up considerably in these final days before the end of balloting.

As The Hill reports: “’Campaigns are won on the ground which is why we invested early to organize and register voters in this historic election,’ said Lily Adams, a spokeswoman for Clinton’s campaign.

“By contrast, Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and state parties employ just 1,409 staffers in 16 states. Lindsay Walters, an RNC spokeswoman, said the RNC has paid staffers in 24 states across the country.”

That compares to the Clinton staffing level of 5,138 staffers in 15 battleground states.

What are they doing? They’re telephoning voters. They are registering new voters. They’re setting up get-out-the-vote drives, arranging for transportation for shut-ins to vote.

The Trumpkins are showing “little interest in investing in a ground operation,” according to The Hill.

Since I’m no longer predicting outcomes, I’ll just conclude that if the “ground game” is as critical as the pundits, pollsters and pols say it is, then Clinton is going to cruise on Nov. 8 to a historic election victory.

However …

As I’ve noted before — throughout this campaign — nothing about it is normal. The Clintonistas had better take nothing at all for granted as they head for the finish line.

Donald Trump, after all, wasn’t even supposed to win the Republican nomination for president of the United States … for crying out loud.

legal news, national news, political news

Let’s stop the ‘consequences’ talk

ginsburgruth_012814getty

How about settling down just a bit, Republican members of Congress?

They’re all up in arms over remarks Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made about presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, about how she cannot imagine a country with Trump as president.

Rep. Randy Weber of Texas said Ginsburg ought to resign. Trump said the same thing. As the Hill reported: “The recent comments of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg on Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump are the antithesis of Lady Justice and in direct violation for what the highest court in the land stands,” he said. “Justice Ginsburg’s actions must be met with consequences. I agree with Donald Trump that she should resign.”

http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/287537-house-republican-ginsburgs-actions-must-be-met-with-consequences

While I agree that Ginsburg crossed a line, violated an unwritten rule about justices getting too politically partisan, let’s take heed of what the framers did when they wrote the U.S. Constitution.

They created an independent branch of government called the “judicial branch.” Judges get lifetime appointments to their posts. The idea was to enable them to be free of political pressure brought by the executive or legislative branches of government.

The founders got it right.

Ginsburg didn’t need to pop off as she did about Trump. But she isn’t the first justice to get involved in politics. In the earliest years of the Republic, justices ran for political office while sitting on the Supreme Court.

That kind of overt politicking, of course, hasn’t occurred in many years.

I don’t expect the Supreme Court to hear cases involving Trump while Ginsburg is sitting on that bench. However, I don’t doubt the justice’s ability to judge any case involving Trump fairly.

Although the framers had the right idea when they created an independent judiciary, they could not possibly remove politics from its actions.

I bring you Bush v. Gore in 2000, in which five Republican-appointed justices stopped the ballot-counting in Florida with GOP candidate George W. Bush leading Democratic opponent Al Gore by 537 votes out of more than 5 million cast in that state. Bush won Florida’s electoral votes and became president by the narrowest of margins.

Do you think politics played any role in that decision?

Well, that’s how the system worked.

As for the present-day dustup over Justice Ginsburg’s remarks, she made them, but let’s quell the talk about “consequences.”

Ginsburg was entitled to say what she said.

media news, national news, political news, Uncategorized

Polling put to a new kind of test this election cycle

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The media obsession with polls, “horse races” and determining who’s up and/or down continues.

The Hill has given us the latest read on how this presidential campaign will turn out.

The conclusion? Polling data may be skewed beyond all recognition because of the high unfavorable ratings of both major-party nominees-to-be.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/281910-doubts-creep-into-trump-clinton-polls

The pollsters are having difficulty taking their findings to the bank. Republican presumptive nominee Donald J. Trump’s favorable ratings are in the tank; Democratic frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plus-side scores are right behind Trump’s.

Voters’ fickleness puts more guesswork into the polling, according to The Hill.

Will it be a high-turnout or low-turnout election? My own guess is that it’ll be the latter. Voters might decide the choices between the major-party picks are so dismal that they’ll just sit it out. They might not want to consider a third option because that ticket has no chance of winning.

Then again …

Some pollsters think the turnout will be high as voters are motivated to vote against the other candidate.

The anti-Clinton voter bloc will be set to vote for Trump. And vice versa.

All of this seems to be the ingredients tailor-made for a patently miserable campaign.

Hey, hasn’t Trump himself declared he has no intention to “change”?

My fellow Americans … we are in for a rough ride to the finish line.

 

medical news, national news

‘Moonshot’ cancer initiative must go beyond Obama years

Vice President Joe Biden points at President Barack Obama during the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)

Why do I get this nagging knot in my gut that President Obama’s so-called “moonshot” effort to find a cure for cancer isn’t getting enough attention on an important aspect of it?

It will have to continue long past the day that Barack Obama leaves the White House for the final time as president.

He turned to Vice President Biden during his State of the Union speech and made Biden the leader of the effort to find a cure for cancer. The president now wants to commit $1 billion toward that goal.

But the 44th president has less than a year to go. There won’t be a cure found before he leaves office. Who’s going to keep fighting that fight? Who’s going to lead the effort?

Would it be Biden, who leaves office the same day as Barack Obama? It ought to be.

We all know someone who’s been affected by this killer. Many of us have endured treatment and therapy ourselves.

There’s certain to be opposition to the president’s call for such a major expenditure. My hope is that we can muster the kind of national will that we managed to find for the actual moonshot initiative launched by President Kennedy in 1961.

According to The Hill: “In any type of major ambitious efforts, unless you set your sights high, you’re almost guaranteed to not get to the type of success that we all want,” an administration official said. “There’s a reason the vice president is aspiring big, it’s the only way we’re going to push the envelope and make this kind of progress.”

True enough. This project, though, is going to require a lot of attention that must persist long after the current administration leaves office.

Whoever succeeds Barack Obama has to commit with the same fervor to the fight to cure cancer.

One demonstration of that commitment would be to keep Joe Biden on the job.

 

local news, national news, political news

Obama fails to channel LBJ

claire

Claire McCaskill calls herself a “friend and supporter” of Barack Obama.

But the Democratic U.S. senator from Missouri has issued a candid assessment of the job her fellow Democrat has done as president of the United States.

The president’s major failing, according to McCaskill? He did not learn how to work with Congress.

The Hill reports on McCaskill’s remarks about Obama: “But one of the president’s shortcomings is that sometimes he sees the world through his eyes and doesn’t do, I think, enough work on being empathetic about how other people view things.”

McCaskill blisters president

In truth, McCaskill might be a bit behind the curve when critiquing the job the president has done.

I don’t think he’d mind my saying this, but a now-retired college administrator told me much the same thing during the president’s first term in office.

Former Amarillo College President Paul Matney and I were having lunch one day when Matney lamented the president’s testy relationship with congressional leaders. Matney wished that the president would employ the skill that the late President Lyndon Johnson used to great effect.

Johnson, of course, rose from the Senate to the executive branch of government, as Obama has done. LBJ served as vice president from 1961 until Nov. 22, 1963. Then he became president in the wake of tragedy.

When LBJ moved into the Oval Office, he harnessed all his legislative skill to shepherd landmark legislation through Congress. He was a master of working not just with fellow Democrats, but with Republicans.

Matney bemoaned that President Obama had not developed that kind of bipartisan rapport and it cost him dearly.

McCaskill now — near the end of Barack Obama’s presidency — echoes much of what Paul Matney said years ago. LBJ’s legacy, which was tainted for many years after he left office in 1969 by the Vietnam War, is beginning to look better all the time.

He understood that he needed the legislative branch to make government work, that he couldn’t do it all alone.

As Sen. McCaskill has noted, Barack Obama hasn’t seemed to have learned that lesson.

 

national news, political news, religious news

The doc softens his view of a Muslim president

deadstate-Ben-Carson

It turns out that Dr. Ben Carson doesn’t really and truly think no Muslim could serve as president of the United States.

The good doctor is right to change his mind … more or less.

Sharia law at issue

Carson  — one of 15 candidates seeking the Republican presidential nomination — said on “Meet the Press” that Islam is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Thus, he said, he couldn’t ever condone the idea of a Muslim running for president.

Now he says something different — and much more reasonable.

He believes now that if a Muslim were to disavow Sharia law then, by golly, he’d be all right with a Muslim running for — and possibly becoming — president of the United States.

You see — and I am sure Dr. Carson knows this — the Constitution is a secular document to which all presidents swear to defend and protect.

His purported fear of Sharia law was nonsense on its face when he said it over the weekend.

Anyone who takes the oath swears to set his or her religious faith aside when performing the duties of the public office. Sen. John F. Kennedy faced accusations during the 1960 presidential campaign that he would take orders — as a Roman Catholic — from the Vatican. He torched that concern with one speech in September 1960 in which he would promise fealty only to the Constitution were he to win the election.

According to The Hill newspaper: “If someone has a Muslim background, and they’re willing to reject those tenets [of Sharia law] and to accept the way of life we have, and clearly will swear to place our Constitution above their religion,” the 2016 hopeful said in a Monday night interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel, “then I would then be quite willing to support them.”

There you have it. Reason and sanity have taken their rightful place in this discussion.

national news

‘N-word’ burns my ears, even when POTUS uses it

Barack Obama’s use of the “n-word” the other day in an interview made me cringe.

OK, he’s the president of the United States. He’s partly of African-American descent. The subject of his media interview was racism. So he’s entitled, I guess, to use the word.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/245793-obama-uses-n-word-to-provoke-talk-about-racism

But I hate the sound of the word. I hate seeing it written. I hate hearing it spoken. In the words of one of my sons, “It makes my ears bleed.”

The use of the word had become a staple of black comedians’ efforts at some sort of self-deprecation. They have felt it’s OK to use the word, drawing laughs in the belief of audience members that “It’s all right for them to use the word.”

Where I come from, it’s not all right for anyone to use a word intended as a racial slur.

That includes gang members who tag buildings with the word and who use it in casual conversation among themselves.

Rap artists have bastardized the word with crazy spellings meant for mispronunciation. It’s not the actual “n-word,” but you hear it said and you know what it means.

According to The Hill, Obama told an interviewer: “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n—– in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.”

The comments, of course, have come in the wake of that hideous massacre in Charleston and the intense debate it has launched — yet again — over whether racism still poisons our society.

Of course it does.

I get what the president says about the impolite use of the “n-word” and whether it can bring an end to the racist strains that infect so many of us today. Striking it from our vocabulary, though, is a start.

national news, political news

No diversity on Democratic bench? C'mon!

The Hill newspaper has a headline that shouts that actual and potential Democratic candidates for president lack “diversity.”

The Democratic “bench” is too, um, bland … or some such thing.

Hold on here.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/239460-democrats-have-no-bench-and-no-diversity-in

The trio of mug shots that accompany the news story attached here tell me something quite different.

* Hillary Rodham Clinton is, quite obviously, a woman. She was first lady for eight years from 1993 until 2001. She served in the U.S. Senate and then as secretary of state. Enough said there.

* Jim Webb is a former U.S. senator from Virginia. He’s a Vietnam War veteran. He saw combat as a Marine. He served in the Reagan administration, not exactly a bastion of progressive principles.

* Bernie Sanders is an independent U.S. senator from Vermont. He’s a card-carrying, say-it-loud-and-proud socialist. He makes no bones about his share-the-wealth philosophy.

I won’t mention Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who keeps saying she isn’t running.

Oops. I just did.

Those three individuals look pretty diverse to me. They each bring a different set of governing principles to a presidential campaign.

Only one of them, Clinton, has declared her candidacy. Webb has formed an exploratory committee, while Sanders is keeping his options open.

I get what The Hill means, though, about the lack of “diversity.” It refers to the Republican field that so far has two Hispanic candidates — Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. There well might be a woman, Carly Fiorina, in the mix as well. An African-American, Ben Carson, is likely to run.

Let us not dismiss the potential Democratic primary field as being bland and one-note boring.

Among the possible field of three — Clinton, Webb and Sanders — one can find plenty of ideological diversity.

national news, political news

Did Kerry 'mock' protester? I don't think so

The media are reporting that Secretary of State John Kerry “mocked” a young woman who shouted during his testimony at a congressional hearing that the United States should stop killing innocent people while striking out against the Islamic State.

I believe the media have it wrong. The link attached to this brief post is of Kerry’s response to the protester.

Kerry mocks protester during ISIS hearing

I didn’t hear a mocking tone in his stern lecture to the individual about the damage that ISIL is doing all by itself to innocent victims.

The Hill also takes note of Kerry’s own anti-war protests during the Vietnam War, in which he served heroically as a U.S. Navy swift boat commander. He came home to take up the cause for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and he testified eloquently before Congress about why the United States should get out of that terrible conflict.

OK, so he protested once. He then went on to serve in the Senate and in 2004 ran as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

He knows war. He knows the damage it does. He knows of its insanity. And he most certainly understands the rights of citizens to protest against U.S. policy.

He didn’t “mock” the protester.