Tag Archives: Barack Obama

national news, political news

Congress sees spike in approval rating … what gives?

 

Given my occasional fascination with public opinion polls, I want to share an observation about RealClearPolitics’ average of polls.

It is that public approval of Congress has spiked up about 10 percentage points since Donald J. Trump became president.

Why is that? I think it’s a legitimate question. I might have the answer, although I could be coming at this from deep left field.

It well might be that the public sees the president of the United States as the greater threat to the nation’s stability. RCP’s average of polls puts Congress’s approval rating at more than 22 percent. During the eight years that Barack Obama was president, the RCP poll average usually pegged Congress’s approval in the low teens, occasionally dipping into single digits.

Might it be that the public saw Congress less favorably during President Obama’s time because respondents were concerned about the continual obstruction orchestrated by the Republican Party leadership?

Moreover, might it now be that the RCP polling reflects a public view that Congress can act as a check against the current president’s reckless rhetoric and fickle policy pronouncements?

Just thinking out loud, dear reader.

Your thoughts?

legal news

No pity for Preet Bharara

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Preet Bharara doesn’t need any pity.

Indeed, he needs a hand-clap or two for standing up to the president of the United States.

Here’s what he did.

Bharara served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a post to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. After the 2016 election, Donald J. Trump reportedly asked Bharara to stay on the job. The federal prosecutor agreed.

Trump took the oath of office, then in a stunning reversal, he sought the resignations of all Obama appointees who had stayed on after the former president had left office.

Bharara was one of them. He refused to quit. What did the president do? He fired him today.

This sequence speaks quite directly to the utter aimlessness of the new administration. The president says one thing, does another and then strikes out against those who try to hold him accountable for the statements he makes.

Bharara will land on his feet. He’s a first-rate lawyer. He’ll likely end up in private practice somewhere and will make a handsome living. Or, he might run for public office.

Or, he might go on a speaking tour, where he’ll also make a lot of money telling the nation about the caprice that the current president seems all too willing to demonstrate.

Oh, and it’s interesting too that the president hasn’t denied — via Twitter or any other medium — that he ever asked the prosecutor to stay on the job.

business news

Trump takes premature credit for job growth?

Donald J. Trump will be able eventually to take credit for job growth.

Just not yet.

It’s interesting to me that some of the chatter today regarding the Labor Department jobs report deals with whether the president should deserve any credit for the big spike in employment.

He doesn’t deserve it. Not this early.

The United States added 235,000 non-farm jobs to payrolls in February. Unemployment ticked downward to 4.7 percent. How did Trump’s economic policies contribute to this trend? They didn’t.

You’ll recall that when Barack Obama took office in 2009, job numbers were plummeting. It took a bit of time for the president’s economic stimulus package to take effect. The former president didn’t deserve blame for falling jobs figures at the beginning of his term.

I also should say he didn’t deserve all the credit for the spectacular job growth that ensued. He deserved some of it.

Eight years later, the nation’s job growth has continued. Joblessness has been cut in half. The annual federal budget deficit has been pared by two-thirds.

Obama handed this economic growth off to Trump. The new president eventually will be able to take some of the credit if the job growth continues well into the first year of his presidency and beyond. I am willing to give him the credit he deserves.

This silly discussion, though, about whether he should crow about job growth during his first full month in office succeeds only in one thing: It rivets attention directly onto the president of the United States, which is all part of the way this guy rolls.

business news, national news, political news

‘Phony’ jobs numbers now become ‘real’

Donald John Trump is demonstrating yet again just why he makes me sick to my stomach.

The U.S. Labor Department today announced that 235,000 non-farm jobs were added to payrolls in February, the first full month of Trump’s presidency; the jobless rate declined to 4.7 percent.

Those are impressive figures. What does the president say?

He declares those numbers are “real” even though he said multiple times during his campaign for the presidency that the Labor Department was cooking the books during Barack Obama’s presidency. He called the job growth registered during President Obama’s time in office “fake”;  he said the numbers were phony; he said the “real jobless rate” was much greater than what the Labor Department was reporting.

As White House press secretary Sean Spicer said today, quoting the president: “They may have been phony in the past but they’re real now.”

Now they’re real?

Trump sickens me for many reasons. At many levels. You name it.

He lies, slings innuendo around, insults his foes, boasts openly about his own prowess.

The Trumpkins lap this crap up, giving this clown license to keep making patently, demonstrably untrue statements.

The job figures are impressive. The president should simply have acknowledged them as progress toward the nation’s continuing economic recovery.

But no-o-o-o! He had to remind millions of us why we detest him.

International news, national news, political news

By all means, subpoena those FBI records

You go, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham!

The South Carolina Republican has said that he is ready to demand records from the FBI for any warrant requests that would have been made to wiretap Donald John Trump’s offices in Trump Tower.

Graham, along with Rhode Island Democratic U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, have asked the FBI for any information regarding the outrageous claim that Trump made asserting that former President Obama wiretapped his offices.

One big problem exists regarding what Trump has alleged. He has offered not a shred of evidence to back up what he has said via Twitter. Nothing, man! No proof. No basis.

Graham and Whitehouse are as alarmed as millions of other Americans — such as yours truly — about what Trump has done. He has accused his predecessor as president of the United States of breaking the bleeping law!

It is that assertion for which Graham wants some documentation. Either the president can prove what he has alleged or he cannot. If he can prove his offices were bugged, then we have a scandal of major proportions. If he cannot prove it, well, then we have another scandal of major magnitude.

“We request that the Department of Justice provide us copies of any warrant applications and court orders — redacted as necessary to protect intelligence sources and methods that may be compromised by disclosure, and to protect any ongoing investigations — related to wiretaps of President Trump, the Trump Campaign, or Trump Tower,” Graham and Whitehouse wrote.

If the FBI doesn’t deliver the goods on request, Graham said he is ready to order those papers delivered to Capitol Hill.

national news, political news

Here comes the dreaded ‘I-word’

The “I-word” has entered the discussion of Donald J. Trump’s troubles involving the Russians, his use of Twitter and a scathing accusation he has made against his predecessor as president of the United States.

One of the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars, law professor Laurence Tribe, believes the president’s reckless use of Twitter to accuse Barack Obama of tapping his phones might be grounds for impeachment.

There you have it, correct? Not exactly.

Tribe, I shall stipulate, is a liberal-leaning fellow who more than likely didn’t vote for Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

But he’s no dummy as it regards the U.S. Constitution and what it allows or disallows.

Tribe’s thesis simply is that the president’s use of a social medium constitutes a reckless disregard for due process and that it implies a certain unfitness for the office he occupies.

Readers of this blog no doubt know what Trump did. This past weekend, he awoke at his Mar-a-Lago estate early one morning and blasted out a tweet that accused former President Obama of “ordering” spooks to tap Trump’s offices at Trump Tower while looking for proof that Trump was colluding with the Russians to swing the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor.

Nasty stuff, right? You bet it is.

It’s also unproven. You see, Trump didn’t offer a shred of proof to back up that ridiculous contention. He has accused President Obama of committing a felony, given that the president cannot “order” a wiretap, which must come from a federal judge, who must have “probable cause” to issue such an order.

The rule of law doesn’t enter into Trump’s tendency to engage in these Twitter tantrums. He just fires this crap into cyberspace. Consequences? Who cares about ’em?

Meanwhile, Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress are demanding Trump provide some basis for this ridiculous assertion. None has been forthcoming.

Spoiler alert: I don’t think we’ll ever see any such basis.

In the meantime, the I-word is out there.

I agree that the bar for impeachment must be kept high. President Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 was based on a sex scandal and his failure to adhere to his oath to be truthful to a federal grand jury that questioned him about it. I don’t believe those events met the standard for impeaching a president of the United States … but that’s just me.

This Trump story is far from being resolved. The president had better come up with something provable to back up his contention that President Obama broke the law.

Or else …

medical news

Politics can be so very brutal among conservatives

Politics is fickle, unfaithful and cruel.

Donald J. Trump scored big election victories in some of the nation’s most conservative congressional districts. And yet … many of those members of Congress representing those districts might be about to turn their guns on the president over his endorsement of what they call a “light” version of the Affordable Care Act.

The American Health Care Act has been put forward. The president is on board with the plan that offers tax credits for people seeking health insurance; it contains many of the features popular with the Affordable Care Act, which the AHCA is designed to replace.

Congress’s more conservative members, though, dislike it. They’re digging in. They’re fighting among themselves, not to mention with the president.

What to do? That’s the problem facing the master negotiator Donald John Trump as he tries to persuade the hard-core among his Republican brethren that the AHCA is worth approving and sending to his desk.

This is a tough sale to make with those among the GOP who just don’t want anything on the books that resembles — even in the slightest sense — something that was enacted at the behest of the former president, Barack Hussein Obama.

We’re likely now to see if the negotiator in chief is as good at this political game as he bragged about incessantly on his way to the White House.

national news, political news

Uh, Mr. President? Listen to Sen. McCain — for once!

John McCain has laid it on the line to the president of the United States.

If you’re going to make an explosive allegation against your predecessor, Mr. President, it is imperative that you tell Americans the “basis on which” you are making that allegation.

That’s what McCain has told Donald J. Trump to do.

Trump ignited a firestorm over the weekend when he rolled out of the sack at 6 in the morning and fired off a tweet that said President Barack Obama “ordered” a wiretap of Trump’s offices in New York.

No proof. No evidence. No attribution. Nothing accompanied the tweet. But the flames began burning out of control.

McCain says a simple tweet isn’t good enough.

To my ears, it sounds as though the Arizona Republican — and 2008 GOP presidential nominee — doesn’t exactly believe what Trump has asserted.

At issue, of course, is the reported relationship between Trump’s campaign and Russian government officials. Trump asserts that Obama had the phones bugged so he could eavesdrop on Trump’s campaign officials to learn whether there was a relationship with a foreign government during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump has accused Obama of breaking the law. He has essentially called his predecessor a felon. Presidents cannot order phones to be bugged. These things occur through a warrant issued by a federal judge at the behest of the Justice Department.

Sen. McCain is insisting that Donald Trump tell us the basis of his wild-ass allegation.

Well, Mr. President? What is it? Talk to us. You are the president of the United States of America. You owe us — your bosses — a complete and thorough explanation.

national news, political news

Sanders is right: Trump is a liar

Bernie Sanders is correct: The president of the United States is a liar. He might even be a pathological liar.

He has lied continually. He does it on purpose, which defines someone who lies.

Donald J. Trump needs to produce evidence to back up his latest lie, which is that “it is a fact” that Barack Obama ordered the wiretap of the president’s offices in Trump Tower.

He hasn’t done so. He didn’t produce any evidence of his previous lies. Not the Muslims cheering the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11; or that Ted Cruz’s father might have been complicit in President Kennedy’s assassination; or the millions of illegal immigrants voting for Hillary Clinton.

He has lied every time he has said those things.

To “lie” is to willingly, knowingly tell a falsehood.

That’s what Sen. Sanders, I-Vt., has said. He stands by his statement. He is right. Trump is a liar.

And this is the guy who got elected president of the United States of America?

Spare me, please, the rejoinder that “all politicians lie.” Trump’s troops kept telling us that their guy “tells it like it is.” That’s different, presumably, from pure lies.

And also you may spare me the red herring that Bill Clinton “lied” about his affair with the intern, which got him impeached by the House of Representatives. I know that he lied under oath to the grand jury; I also know that was the ostensible reason for his impeachment. He paid his dues for lying.

Trump, though, hasn’t paid anything for these lies he has told. He got elected even as he lied his way all along the campaign trail.

He is lying now by suggesting that Barack Obama ordered the wiretaps.

And for that reason, Bernie Sanders should stand his ground.

medical news

AHCA to replace ACA … at what cost?

Finally, the Republicans who run the legislative branch of government have produced a replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act.

I will need some time to digest all of it. It’s a complicated issue, one that requires a lot more brain wattage that I can generate at the moment.

It’s called the American Health Care Act. It’s supposed to be better than the ACA — and no, I won’t refer to the ACA by its colloquial name that attaches it to the name of the 44th president of the United States.

Complications abound with AHCA.

It removes the government mandates that require citizens to have health insurance; it relies heavily on tax credits to enable Americans to purchase insurance; it doesn’t monkey around with pre-existing conditions; it allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans.

The big question? Its cost.

How will Congress pay for this new program? We haven’t yet heard that explanation.

President Obama has said he’d welcome changes to the ACA that improve it. Yes, we now have a replacement idea on the table. It took Republicans eight years to come up with this alternative. They yapped and yammered during the two terms of the president’s tenure about how “terrible” the ACA was for health care, while pledging to repeal it once they got one of their own into the White House.

Here we are.

The debate will go forward now on whether the AHCA is better than the ACA.

The bottom line — for me, at least — is whether the 20 million or so Americans who now have insurance will be able to keep it at a cost they can afford.