Tag Archives: Barack Obama

International news, national news, political news

Trump’s cuddling with Kremlin gets more curious

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Suffice to say now that Donald J. Trump has become the Kremlin’s candidate for president of the United States of America.

The Republican presidential nominee thinks Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is a more effective leader than President Obama. He relishes the high praise Putin has heaped on him. Trump says what the heck, let the Russians re-annex Ukraine. He says that NATO allies will need to demonstrate their financial commitment to the defense of western Europe in the event of a Russian attack on, say, the Baltic States.

Now the candidate has ventured onto Russian-sponsored television to criticize the American president and, oh yeah, the U.S. political press.

There was a time when such conduct would be seen as a virtual disqualifier for a presidential candidate. No longer … I guess.

The network on which Trump appeared with that highly esteemed American “journalist” Larry King proclaims itself to be independent. It’s not. It is financed by the Kremlin and has faced repeated criticism of being in the Kremlin’s hip pocket.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-attacks-us-foreign-policy-political-press-corps-on-state-owned-russian-television-network/ar-AAiFCfQ?li=BBmkt5R&pfr=1

Does this man Trump have any clue about the boundaries one must not cross? Ever?

He’s just crossed another one.

Sure, one-time candidate Barack Obama was criticized harshly for speaking ill of American policy while standing on foreign soil. It once was thought that partisan divides ended “at the water’s edge.”

Trump has just picked that old adage out of the trash bin, crumpled it up once again, and then tossed it back.

But … it won’t matter to those who cling to this idiotic notion that Trump merely is railing against “political correctness.”

Shameful, indeed.

national news, political news

Pence breaks with Trump on Obama’s birth

FILE - In this Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015 file photo, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence announces that the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services has approved the state's waiver request for the plan his administration calls HIP 2.0, during a speech in Indianapolis. Pence said Wednesday that he regrets the "confusion" caused by a memo about a planned state-run news website and will scrap the project if it doesn't "respect the role of a free and independent press." (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

 

The Republican Party’s presidential ticket has at least one voice of reason, and it’s not the man at the top of the ticket.

No. The reasonable, sane voice comes from the vice presidential nominee, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who has broken with presidential nominee Donald Trump on the most outrageous element of his campaign for the White House: that Barack Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii, one of the nation’s 50 states.

Pence said he accepts that President Obama is duly qualified to hold his office, that he isn’t a foreign-born imposter that Trump has alleged for longer than Obama has been president.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/pence-trump-obama-birther-comments-2278404

So, there you have it. Pence is on board. Will his running mate — the goofball reality TV celebrity/real estate mogul/politician buy in?

I don’t really care. Trump’s assertion of President Obama constitutional illegitimacy is laughable on its face.

media news, national news, political news

Moderators become part of the campaign ’16 story

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Admit it if you dare.

You’ve been wondering who would moderate the three joint appearances scheduled with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican nominee Donald J. Trump.

Now we know.

Lester Holt of NBC will do the first one; ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper will co-moderate the second; Fox’s Chris Wallace gets the call for the third one.

This normally wouldn’t be a y-u-u-u-u-g-e deal, except for what happened in the first GOP gathering in 2015 when Trump bristled openly at the first question posed by Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, who had the “gall” to ask Trump about his previous statements about women. You know, the “fat pigs” stuff.

Trump didn’t like the question. Not only that, he kept up the feud through much of the GOP primary campaign, refusing to participate in a later event moderated by the same Megyn Kelly.

He demonstrated a preposterous level of petulance.

He made the media the issue, which plays well with the Republican base, given that they hate the media, too.

Moderators aren’t supposed to become part of a political story. This year they have been. Remember, too, when CNN’s Candy Crowley in 2012 corrected GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s assertion that President Obama didn’t refer to the Benghazi attack as an act of terror.

Oh, but this is a new era. Trump has ensured that the media will become part of the narrative because, as he discovered, the base of his party’s voters love gnawing on that red meat.

Will he go after Holt, or Raddatz, or Cooper or Wallace?

Or, will any of them provoke a fiery response with a question that Trump deems to be untoward?

Gosh, I’m getting all tingly now just waiting for it.

legal news, national news, political news

Judge Garland’s future hangs in election balance

FILE - In this May 1, 2008, file photo, Judge Merrick B. Garland is seen at the federal courthouse in Washington. President Obama is expected to nominate Federal Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

Merrick Garland isn’t allowed to campaign actively for partisan political candidates.

You see, he must follow certain judicial canons that prohibit him from such activity.

I’m betting he’s chomping at the bit nonetheless.

Garland is the federal judge who has been nominated for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. President Obama made the nomination, only to run straight into a Republican roadblock erected by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who said the president shouldn’t get to fill the ninth seat on the court; that task should belong to the next president.

McConnell made that demand believing the next president would be a Republican. Then the GOP nominated Donald J. Trump. My gut tells me now that McConnell isn’t too keen on Trump, who I believe is going to lose the presidential election to Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That eventuality puts Garland back in the driver’s seat.

If Clinton wins, then McConnell well might feel the necessity to proceed with Judiciary Committee hearings and then a floor vote on Garland’s nomination during a lame-duck congressional session.

If Hillary Clinton is the next president, then it’s almost certain that she will nominate someone who is more to the left than the centrist Garland, who Obama chose because of his superb judicial temperament — and the fact that the Senate approved him overwhelmingly to a seat on the D.C. District Court in 1997.

There’s another calculation McConnell needs to make: Clinton’s victory well could swing the Senate’s balance of power back to the Democrats. And that makes it even more critical for the Republicans — who would run the Senate until the new folks take office in January — to at least exert some measure of control over the proceeding.

Yes, this election is important. Don’t you think?

national news, political news

9/11 to bring relief from campaign

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Now, for a little good news regarding the dismal campaign for the presidency of the United States.

Both major-party nominees — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Donald J. Trump — have agreed to suspend campaigning for a day.

That day will be Sept. 11, which happens to be the 15th year since the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and crashed a third jetliner into a Pennsylvania field.

An aside: I hesitate to use the word “anniversary” to define this event … if you get my drift.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/trump-clinton-september-11-campaigns-227559

We all remember how we heard the terrible news. We all remember the horror, the shock, the grief, the sickening feeling we felt as we watched the events unfold on that terrible day.

That day ought to be a day of reflection over what happened and a day of solemn prayer for the nation that continues to fight on against the evil forces that seek to destroy us.

It has become something of a tradition since 9/11. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry suspended their campaigns in 2004, as did Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008; indeed, Obama and McCain appeared together at an event at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. In 2012, President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney held events, but those events memorialized the victims of the attack.

We need not hear the candidates’ yammering on this solemn date.

national news, political news

Is it ‘Dr.’ David Plouffe these days?

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Now, now, now, David Plouffe.

Let’s not venture where we do not belong.

Not long ago, I — among others out here in the peanut gallery — got all over Katrina Pierson, a spokeswoman for Donald J. Trump, for issuing what amounted to a medical diagnosis of Hillary Clinton.

Pierson said the Democratic presidential nominee suffers from “dysphasia,” a neurological disorder.

“Ugghh!” we all thought. Knock it off, Ms. Pierson, we said.

Now it’s Plouffe weighing in, declaring that Trump — the Republican nominee — is a “psychopath” and that he “meets the clinical definition” of psychopathic behavior.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/08/28/david_plouffe_donald_trump_is_a_psychopath_–_he_meets_the_clinical_definition.html

To his credit, “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd called Plouffe down for issuing his own diagnosis, pointing out that he doesn’t have a medical degree or a degree “in psychology.”

Plouffe kind of shrugged and admitted he isn’t trained as a shrink.

David Plouffe is a brilliant political strategist, having engineered Barack Obama’s winning presidential campaign in 2008 and later serving as a senior political adviser in the White House.

He’s no doctor. So, let’s cease the medical diagnoses.

As Todd told Plouffe, “This is what gets voters so frustrated.”

national news, political news

Now … about that doctor’s note

donald health

As long as we’re talking about records — or the lack thereof — let’s visit briefly about that strange doctor’s note Donald J. Trump produced that proclaimed him the most physically fit presidential candidate in world history.

OK, so I exaggerated that description.

Trump pulled this note out in late 2015 to tell us that he is fit as a fiddle. Dr. Harold Bornstein has been the Republican presidential nominee’s physician since 1980. Now we hear that the doc wrote it in five minutes while sitting in a limo that Trump had sent for him.

Some of the language that Dr. Bornstein used to describe Trump’s physical fitness for the presidency seemed, well, a bit unusual and not written in the kind of tone one expects from a medical doctor. It doesn’t read like a clinical analysis.

Trump’s blood pressure is “astonishingly excellent.” His stamina is “extraordinary.”

And get a load of this. According to Politico: “It begins ‘To Whom My Concerns,’ and says that Bornstein’s most recent medical examination of Trump ‘showed only positive results’ — medical terminology that usually indicates confirmation of a certain condition.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-doctor-letter-227464#ixzz4IX8HKzAn

Trump said he would produce a “full medical report.” He showed us the letter instead. Here it is:

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/trump_health_record.pdf

It’s worth mentioning here because Trump and his surrogates keep suggesting that Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health isn’t up to par. A spokeswoman who lacks any medical training has diagnosed dysphasia in Clinton. Former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani has said repeatedly that something is physically wrong with Clinton.

So, here’s what we ought to do.

Let’s all insist that both candidates produce detailed medical reports on their physical condition that do not contain such hysterical and flowery descriptions of the candidates’ well-being.

Trump and his surrogates have started this idiotic questioning of Clinton’s health. Trump also has insisted that Barack Obama isn’t a real American and has questioned the president’s academic record.

It’s time now for Donald Trump to deliver the real goods on his own physical condition.

Oh, and those tax returns, too!

national news, political news

Presidential ‘vacations’ … don’t occur

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Barack Obama is back at his post in the Oval Office.

He’s making decisions, doing things that presidents do during the course of their regular work day.

Welcome back to the People’s House, Mr. President. But I am not going to ding you for spending some time away from the place with your wife and daughters.

Presidents don’t take “vacations” the way you and I do. They do not “get away from it all.” The “all” follows them wherever they do. The guy with the “football” — the briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes — is never more than a few yards from the commander in chief. The president gets national security and domestic issue briefings daily. He’s never off the clock.

Now, I say this having already said that the president needed to go to Louisiana to tour the horrific flood damage. He could have taken a day from his “vacation” to hug some folks in trouble.

He chose not to do that, going instead to Louisiana after returning to the White House. Well, no harm done.

All this yammering about the president’s “vacation” ignores the point I’ve tried to make here. I’ve never — ever — made presidential vacations an issue. President George W. Bush spent many more days away from the White House than his successor. Big deal, man! President Bush had the same security briefings while he was cutting brush at his Central Texas ranch. Same with Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

So, let’s stop carping about presidential “vacations.”

They don’t exist the way you and I experience them. That’s because the president of the United States occupies the most demanding job on the planet.

national news, political news

‘Outreach’ to African-Americans lies beyond Trump’s grasp

Donald J. Trump is trying to pander, er, reach out to African-American voters.

The Republican Party’s presidential nominee is plotting a curious course in that direction.

He’s held a couple of rallies in recent days. One was in suburban Milwaukee, Wisc., the other was in suburban Detroit, Mich.

I emphasize the “suburban” aspect for a specific reason.

He was standing in front of virtually all-white audiences telling them, apparently, about how terrible life has become for black residents of inner-city neighborhoods. “What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump asked, supposedly speaking over the heads of those who were standing in front of him. He was asking the larger audience that wasn’t there, the African-American voting bloc that — as of this moment — is giving the GOP nominee about 1 percent of its support.

It’s been reported that an avowed segregationist — the late Alabama Gov. George Corley Wallace — polled 3 percent of the black vote when he ran as an independent candidate for president in 1968.

A better, more sincere way to reach out to Americans is to speak to them directly. Venture into their neighborhoods. Look them in the eye, tell them you care about them and offer them demonstrative evidence that you have cared for them before.

Other politicians have employed that strategy while campaigning for African-American votes. I think specifically of the late Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

Sure, President Clinton has had his hiccups regarding race relations, such as his occasionally frosty relationship with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and with Barack Obama and the time he scolded the rap singer Sister Souljah for spouting lyrics that promoted violence.

As for RFK, well, those of who are around at that time remember vividly his venturing into an Indianapolis neighborhood the night of April 4, 1968 to tell the black audience before him that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had just been assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Many of America’s cities erupted in violence that night. Indy, though, remained calm.

These days, such “outreach” by a leading politician consists of screeds shouted from podiums in affluent neighborhoods.

I’m trying to imagine Donald Trump following RFK’s example.

Nope. I can’t picture it.

political news, State news

Trump confounds them by holding rally … in Texas!

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Donald J. Trump has said many times how he has surrounded himself with “the best people” to run his presidential campaign.

If they are “the best,” one can ask, why do they keep sending him (a) to states he has no chance of winning and (b) to states he has virtually no chance of losing in the upcoming election?

As Ross Ramsey of the Texas Tribune points out, Trump is coming to Austin — the one in Texas — for a political rally this week.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/08/22/analysis-texas-august-funny-place-trump-rally/

It’s an interesting call.

Trump, the Republican nominee, is losing all the battleground states to Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, North Carolina … they all need to hear from the GOP candidate.

Texans appear to have their minds made up. They’re going with Trump — apparently — even though a recent PPP poll said Trump leads Clinton by just 6 percentage points. That marks a significant whittling of the margin that Mitt Romney won by in 2012 over Barack Obama.

Trump, though, is going to stage a rally in Texas.

Go figure.

Shoot, as long as he’s in Texas, he ought to fly Trump One — or whatever they’re calling that jet of his — to Amarillo, where I know he’d get a hero’s welcome.