Tag Archives: Barack Obama

International news

Pipe down, Fidel; your time is up

fidel

Fidel Castro apparently holds a grudge.

The former strongman/dictator/supreme leader of Cuba isn’t quite so keen on President Obama’s recent visit to the nation.

While many of Cuba’s current leaders — such as Fidel’s brother, Raul, the country’s current strongman/dictator etc. — have expressed pleasure at Obama’s visit, ol’ Fidel isn’t quite so enamored of the idea.

He lambasted President Obama’s visit, saying that Cuba doesn’t need gifts from “the empire” to succeed.

Obama didn’t visit Fidel while he was in Cuba. Perhaps if he had he could have charmed the irascible revolutionary leader who came to power in 1959 and only recently handed the reins of government over to his kid brother Raul.

Fidel Castro’s ironfisted rule outlasted 10 U.S. presidential administrations. All of them, until the current president, had decided to maintain the economic and diplomatic embargo on Cuba.

I agree with Fidel that the embargo was useless and irrelevant during the last quarter-century of its existence. Its practicality disappeared along with the Soviet Union in 1991; in truth, it really wasn’t a viable option for the United States predating that event.

It’s weird, though, to wonder why Fidel Castro isn’t yet willing to bury the hatchet in his on-going conflict with the United States.

Settle down, El Comandante. Life is going to get better in your nation now that we’ve resumed travel, trade and communication with Cuba. For that, you should be grateful.

 

national news, political news

‘Transformational’ takes on new meaning

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There once was a time in politics when those who practice the craft sought to become “transformational” figures.

Barack Obama saw himself in that light in 2008. Ronald Reagan, too, was considered a “transformational” candidate. The Gipper reshaped the political landscape with his landslide victory in 1980. The jury is still out on Obama’s impact.

Thus, the term was thought to constitute high praise.

These days, “transformational” seems to have taken on a new meaning.

And it’s not flattering in the least.

Donald J. Trump and Rafael Edward Cruz have “transformed” the political craft into something cheap, tawdry, childish, petulant and utterly without substance.

They’ve been bickering over social media about their wives.

And as the accompanying New York Times essay seeks to explain, they seem to treat women — even the women in their lives — as objects.

They’ve lowered the bar to new depths.

Yes, the candidates have quarreled over the Internet about insults, innuendo, threats and retribution against their wives.

It has been a disgraceful exhibition that in normal election cycles would have no place anywhere near two leading major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States.

I am quite certain the rest of the world is laughing hysterically at what has become of the formerly great political party known as the Republican Party.

The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Chuckleheads.

Please, spare me the bleating by “true Republicans” that Trump isn’t one of them. He’s chosen to line up on the Republican side of the gate in this race for the White House, so the GOP must accept that he’s now one of their own.

And Cruz? His response to the Brussels terrorist attack was the Mother of All Doozys. He wants to beef up police patrols in “Muslim neighborhoods.” Yeah, boy. That’ll show them Muslims what we’re all about here.

Is there a greater Islamic State recruitment tool — other than Trump’s stated desire to ban all non-American Muslims from entering the United States — than this?

But instead of debating the idiocy of such a policy pronouncement, we’re left to wonder what in the name of political sanity has become of a party that features two men quarreling out loud about the nasty things being said about their wives?

This is the new definition of “transformational” politics.

We’ve transformed what the late Robert F. Kennedy used to describe as a “noble profession” into something not worthy of a middle-school food fight.

 

legal news

Can POTUS interpret Senate silence as ‘consent’?

checks balance

Who is Frederick W. Ford?

Never heard of him? Neither had I until I saw an article posted on LinkedIn. He’s a lawyer and mediator. I guess he’s pretty knowledgeable about constitutional law and related matters.

He has posited a fascinating idea for President Obama to consider.

Let silence be your guide. That’s his notion that the president ought to follow with regard to placing Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.

The article is attached to this blog post. I encourage you to read it all of it. The crux of his argument is that the Senate has the constitutional duty to “advise and consent” to the nomination of federal judges. But what if the Senate remains silent on the issue? What if senators don’t hold hearings and don’t debate the nomination fully?

Ford said the president can take their silence as a form of tacit “consent.” He lays it out there in a lot legal mumbo-jumbo that, frankly, I don’t get; a lot of it is in Latin and I don’t speak the language.

I get the sense that Ford thinks Obama ought to do it. Just call a swearing-in ceremony and have the man take his oath — and then take his seat on the bench when it reconvenes this October.

Senate Republicans want to wait for the next president to make the appointment.

The current president doesn’t want to wait.

Wouldn’t that simply send the Senate into apoplectic shock if Barack Obama follows the advice offered by someone named Frederick W. Ford?

 

 

national news, political news

Sen. Moran stands up for integrity

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jerrymoran

I’m now going to salute a Republican member of used to be considered — maybe some folks still think it is — the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

Stand up, U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas. Take a bow.

You, sir, are standing on a critical principle, which is that Kansans sent you to the Senate to do your job and you are insisting that your senatorial leadership follows your lead.

Good luck with that.

Moran told a town hall gathering earlier this week that he wants the Senate to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court. He is bucking the edict handed down by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who says the Senate should wait until after the election this November to consider an appointment made by the next president of the United States.

Moran, a conservative Republican representing a blood-red Republican state, is in no serious danger of losing his Senate seat this fall. Still, to hear him say that his party’s Senate leader is wrong is, well, uplifting.

Moran isn’t endorsing Garland’s nomination. He told the town hall group that he cannot imagine President Obama ever nominating someone to his liking.

But he said he is obligated to do his job as a U.S. senator.  “I think the process ought to go forward,” he said.

He said it’s better for his constituents to tell him he “voted wrong on nominating  somebody than saying I’m not doing my job.”

Moran joins two other GOP senators

It’s one thing for a senator such as Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire or Mark Kirk of Illinois — who also have called for hearings and a confirmation vote — to say they’ll meet with Garland and want to consider his nomination.

It’s quite another for someone representing a safe Republican state — whose re-election this fall is a virtual certainty — to weigh in on the side of senatorial responsibility.

If only the obstructionist who leads the Senate would follow suit.

legal news, national news, political news

If only the VP hadn’t said what he said …

Supreme-Court-blue-sky

Vice President Joe Biden delivered a stern message today to some university students and faculty members

about the obstruction occurring in the U.S. Senate.

It’s threatening the core of our republic, he said. Senate Republicans must not obstruct President Obama’s effort to fill a Supreme Court vacancy; they must allow nominee Merrick Garland to have a hearing, then they must debate the merits of his nomination and they must then vote on it.

True enough, Mr. Vice President.

But what about those remarks you made in 1992 about whether President George H.W. Bush should be able to nominate someone to the high court in an election year? Today’s Republicans are seeking to block Obama’s pick because this, too, is an election year and they want the next president to make the selection.

The GOP has beaten the vice president over his remarks then.

What they don’t say is that Biden also declared that he would support a “consensus candidate” in an election if one were to be presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Biden chaired at the time.

Biden told the Georgetown law students and faculty members: “Dysfunction and partisanship are bad enough on Capitol Hill. But we can’t let the Senate spread that dysfunction to another branch of government, to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

It’s fascinating to me that then-Sen. Biden’s remarks now have become known as the “Biden Rule,” which has never existed.

I won’t defend Biden for making his remarks in 1992. He was wrong to suggest that a sitting president shouldn’t be allowed to perform his job if he had been given the chance to do so. President Bush did select a Supreme Court justice in 1991, when he nominated Clarence Thomas to take the seat vacated by the death of Thurgood Marshall.

However, I won’t condemn Biden for holding that view. He did, after all, add the caveat that he would support a consensus candidate for the Supreme Court.

The here and now stands on its own.

The vice president is correct to insist that today’s Senate should stop its obstruction and allow the president to fulfill his constitutional duty — and do its own duty to give an eminently qualified nominee the fair hearing he deserves.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Listen to the VP, senators, about doing your job

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biden

Vice President Joe Biden is going to lecture the U.S. Senate on something about which knows a thing or two.

He wants his former colleagues to do the job they took an oath to do, which is vote on whether to approve a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Biden will deliver his message in remarks at Georgetown University.

At issue is the nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia. Senate Republicans — many of them, anyway — are digging in on the nomination. They don’t want to consider a Barack Obama appointment, contending that it’s too late in the president’s second term. He’s a “lame duck,” therefore, the task of appointing a justice should fall on the next president.

That, of course, is pure malarkey.

Barack Obama is president until Jan. 20, 2017. He wants to fulfill his constitutional duty and he’s urging the Senate to do so as well.

Oh sure. The balance of the court is hanging here. Scalia was a devout conservative ideologue — and a brilliant legal scholar. Garland is a judicial moderate; he’s also a scholar; a man viewed widely as supremely qualified.

How does Biden — who served in the Senate for 36 years before being elected vice president — figure in this?

As vice president, he’s the presiding officer of the Senate. Of course, he votes only to break ties. He doesn’t actually run the place. That task falls on the majority leader, who happens to be a Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

It’s been McConnell’s call to obstruct this nomination.

Biden, though, does have a number of friends in both parties who serve in the Senate. Is there any hope that he can get through to them? Probably not, but when you’re vice president of the United States, you have the bully pulpit from which to preach an important message to those who need to hear it.

 

International news

Meanwhile, Obama meets with dissidents

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In other news …

President Barack Obama took time during his visit to Havana, Cuba to meet with Cubans opposed to their government’s oppression of its citizenry.

How about that, folks?

Critics of the president’s visit to Cuba took him to task for failing to schedule a meeting with Cuban dissidents. Yes, I was one who said the president should do so as well.

What did the president do?

He met with several folks at the U.S. Embassy in Havana — how strange it is to make such a reference — and praised them for exhibiting “extraordinary courage” in the face of the communist government’s ham-handed approach to dealing with political dissent.

Can a U.S. president force the leaders of another sovereign nation to change its policies? Of course not. It’s not our call, or anyone else’s call, for that matter.

It’s still wholly appropriate for a visiting head of state — particularly if that head of state leads the world’s premier nation — to call attention to the courage of those who speak out against tyranny.

For doing so, Barack Obama should earn high praise from those who criticized his trip in the first place.

Will he get it? Something tells me the president isn’t exactly holding his breath.

 

International news, national news, political news, Sports news

Obama still went to a ballgame …

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President Barack Obama has been second-guessed — big surprise there, right? — about his decision to attend a baseball game in Havana in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Brussels.

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich said if he was president, he would have packed up his gear and returned to D.C. immediately to take charge of the U.S. response.

That’s fine, governor. Except that you aren’t the president. The man who’s in the hot seat now says quite clearly that the terrorists’ aim is to disrupt the lives of everyone in the world — and he would have none of it. As he told ESPN: “The whole premise of terrorism is to try to disrupt people’s ordinary lives … it’s always a challenge when you have a terrorist attack anywhere in the world.”

Indeed, let’s look back at what President Bush said in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Didn’t he say quite the same thing, that we should go about our daily lives without fear? Didn’t say something like, “Go shopping”?

Barack Obama offered the nation’s support to the Belgians who are reeling in the wake of this horrific attack. He has dispatched military and intelligence officials to assist and help coordinate the pursuit of the monsters who did this deed.

As has been noted here and elsewhere, the president of the United States is never disconnected from the world.

So what if he went to a ballgame?

I’m pretty sure the state-of-the-art intelligence apparatus we all pay for is on the job.

 

national news, political news

Define whose ‘awful legacy,’ Mr. President

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Bubba and The Worst President Evah

Former President Bill Clinton is paying the price for speaking without maximum precision.

So is the presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The 42nd president, while speaking on his wife’s behalf, asserted it is imperative that voters erase what he called the “awful legacy” of the past eight years.

That’s it. Awful legacy. He didn’t identify whose legacy to which he was referring.

Pundits, politicians and just plain folks were left, therefore, to presume he meant the president’s “awful legacy.”

The borrow a term: Oops!

The Hillary Clinton campaign immediately sought to clarify what he meant, which was the legacy of the Republican-controlled Congress that, according to the campaign, has obstructed President Obama at every turn along the way.

OK, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t say “Congress’s awful legacy.” Then again, neither did he say “Barack Obama’s awful legacy.”

However, since the president is the Main Man in any political discussion, we are left to presume the former president was talking about his successor.

Right?

President Clinton, of course, has gotten into this kind of word-parsing mess before.

Recall his grand jury testimony during the Lewinsky Scandal when he sought to tell the panel, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” That verbal miscue has become embedded in U.S. political lexicon.

I doubt this one will endure quite as long.

Still, for a seasoned politician — which Bill Clinton certainly is — to speak so imprecisely in the heat of a critical campaign really does make some of us wonder: What in the world did he really say — or mean?

Perhaps he can blame it on jet lag.

 

International news

About those human rights abuses …

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U.S. foreign policy abounds with hypocrisy.

We support some nations while opposing others, citing issues in those nations we oppose that are commonplace in the nations with which we are friendly.

I bring to you … Cuba.

President Barack Obama is visiting the island nation, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in Cuba since Calvin Coolidge.

His foes back home keep yammering about the human rights abuses that the communists in Havana are guilty of committing. Why, we can’t allow Americans to travel freely there; we can’t commence trade with Cuba; we can’t let our guard down.

What’s the deal, then, with other nations with which we have reasonably healthy relationships?

The People’s Republic of China? Saudi Arabia? Egypt? Vietnam?

Sure, we have differences with many nations around he world, including those I’ve just mentioned.

But the communists who run governments in China and Vietnam treat their citizens badly whenever they speak out against their leaders. The Saudis refuse to grant full rights of citizenship to roughly half of their citizenry; I refer, of course, to women. What’s more, the Saudis are known to execute criminals in public.

My point is simply this: Let’s stop the griping about Cuba’s human rights record, suggesting that it’s a disqualifier for U.S.-Cuba relations. Yes, let’s keep the pressure on Cuba to do better.

We can bring the change we want there by engaging them fully.