Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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.

 

legal news, political news, State news

Always a political back story

refugees

I am a strong believer in what the Founding Fathers intended by creating an independent federal judiciary.

They gave the president the authority to nominate federal judges for lifetime jobs, pending approval by the U.S. Senate. The intent, as I’ve always understood it, was to de-politicize the judicial branch of government.

It works.

Judge blocks order

Then again, politics always seems to be part of the subplot of every federal judicial decision.

U.S. District Judge David Godbey, for example, today struck down Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ban on Syrian refugees coming to Texas. Paxton cited security concerns in asking for the temporary restraining order. Godbey ruled within hours of the request that Paxton had failed to demonstrate that the refugees posed any kind of threat.

Godbey wrote, according to the Texas Tribune: “The Court finds that the evidence before it is largely speculative hearsay,” the judge wrote. “The [state] has failed to show by competent evidence that any terrorists actually have infiltrated the refugee program, much less that these particular refugees are terrorists intent on causing harm.”

So, it’s fair to ask: Is this judge sitting on the federal bench because a liberal Democratic president, Barack Obama, appointed him? No. He was selected in 2003 by Republican President George W. Bush to serve the Northern District of Texas. Paxton, let’s point out, is a Republican as well.

Does it really matter, then, whether a judge gets picked by a Democrat or a Republican? It shouldn’t. Judges take an oath to uphold the Constitution without regard to political favor. They do, remember, have a lifetime job.

But the politics of this particular issue — the refugee crisis and the political debate swirling all over it — causes one to look carefully at who’s making these decisions.

Judge Godbey appears to have put the law above his political leanings.

business news

OPEC sends a Christmas gift

gas

Bloomberg News reports that the price of gasoline is about to plummet.

Good news, yes? Sure, if you’re a motorist who dislikes pouring money into his motor vehicle fuel tank. I’m one of those.

If you’re a government official who serves a state — such as, say, Texas — that depends on oil revenue to fund government services, well, the news isn’t so great.

My self-interest makes me happy about the news.

OPEC is refusing to cut production of oil. U.S. supplies are at an all-time high. We’re driving more fuel-efficient vehicles these days. We’re developing alternative energy sources. Hey, it’s all good.

I don’t like paying nearly four bucks a gallon for fuel, which is what we were shelling out two years ago. Today, the price of gasoline in Amarillo is around $1.62 per gallon.

It’s interesting, too, to note the silence from Barack Obama’s critics now that fuel prices are heading south. When they were skyrocketing in the other direction about midway through the president’s first term, the critics were blaming him personally for the hardship. These days, he’s getting none of the love.

Does he deserve it? Aww, probably not.

Neither did he deserve the blame when the prices were going the other way.

Thanks, OPEC, for the holiday gift.

Merry Christmas to you, too, OPEC.

International news, military news

Pearl Harbor: Infamy will live forever

attack

Seventy-four years ago today, airplanes swooped in over Honolulu and bombed the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor.

Battleship Row was decimated. The pilots in those planes then took aim at Hickam Field, where the U.S. Army had a substantial air base. More destruction followed.

Japan had committed an act of war against the United States.

The next day, President Roosevelt stood before the Congress and asked for a declaration of war. He got it by the end of the day.

War was a simpler endeavor back then.

One nation attacked another. The victim of that attack then declared war; the nation that did the attacking declared war right back. Both nations mobilized and sent young service personnel to the battlefield to fight it out.

Yes, we remember Pearl Harbor today as a “date which will live in infamy,” as FDR told us.

The young men we sent off to war — or what’s left of them — are old now. They’re in their 90s.

All told, the United States put 16 million men and women into uniform during that terrible period. Last I heard, there were around 2 million of them left.

We owe them everything. Our freedom. Our way of life.

Today, war looks different. We aren’t fighting nations. We are fighting ideologies. We are fighting a cunning and ruthless enemy.

Is a declaration of war possible now, in this era when we’re waging a conflict with an elusive force that stops at nothing to kill innocent victims — in the name of what they call “religion”?

I believe it is. The current president, Barack Obama, has asked Congress for what amounts to a war declaration. He wants a vote to “authorize” continued warfare against an enemy that has committed acts against us that are — in FDR’s words — every bit as “dastardly” as the attack on Pearl Harbor.

War, though, isn’t as simple now as it was then. Politics has gummed up our national resolve.

Still, we ought to keep those brave warriors — the living and those who have passed from the scene — who answered their nation’s call to arms more than seven decades ago in our thoughts today.

Their nation rallied behind them and crushed the tyrants who sought to bring so much harm to the world.

 

International news, military news, national news, political news

President restates anti-terror policy, and then …

barack

President Obama has asked something of Congress that the legislative branch of government isn’t likely to do.

He wants Congress to authorize the commander in chief to keep up the fight against the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations abroad.

The president’s speech from the Oval Office tonight didn’t break much new ground. He restated what he’s already done in the effort to destroy ISIL.

The bombing campaign will continue; we’ll deploy special forces to work with local ground forces in Iraq and Syria; we’ll keep hunting down terrorist leaders; we will work with allies such as France, the U.K. and Germany to pound terrorist targets; and we will seek to negotiate a ceasefire in Syria so that our allies and “other countries, such as Russia” can concentrate on eliminating international terrorists.

Then came the challenge to the other branch of government that needs to buy into this struggle.

Congress must vote to authorize continued action. The British Parliament enacted a similar authorization this past week and within minutes of the vote, British jets took off to hit ISIL targets in Syria.

The president has asked Congress, in effect, to issue a declaration of war against ISIL. Will it happen? I’m not holding my breath.

Republicans who control both legislative chambers seem to believe we need to commit ground troops to this fight. They want to return American service personnel to the battlefield. Air strikes aren’t enough, they say. So, let’s put “boots on the ground.”

The president won’t do that. He reiterated that view again tonight.

However, he has tendered a reasonable challenge to Congress. Let’s put forward a united front to our enemies, authorize the president to continue the fight and demonstrate that the United States is fully committed to winning this war.

My own view is that we’re at war with the Islamic State, then the president needs to ask Congress to issue the declaration of war … and that Congress needs to act.

What we have now on the table is the next-best thing.

Members of Congress, give the president the authorization he seeks to fight this war.

 

International news, military news

Now you tell us, general …

The moment of the falling of Saddam's statue, with the help of the US Army.

Michael Flynn didn’t disclose much that many Americans already didn’t believe or even know.

The retired Army lieutenant general — who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency — told a German newspaper that the Iraq War was a big mistake and that the Bush administration started it on “sketchy evidence” that Iraq had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

Who knew?

History, Gen. Flynn said, won’t be kind as the Iraq War legacy is written over time.

Gosh. Do you think?

I guess my question for the general might be: Why didn’t you tell us before now?

Flynn told Der Spiegel, “When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, ‘Where did those bastards come from? Let’s go kill them. Let’s go get them.'”

I don’t think the emotional part of the response should be criticized. We were angry as hell at what happened. that day.

But to assign complicity for the 9/11 attack almost immediately to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after going after the Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan is where the policy came apart rapidly.

Flynn believes that eliminating Saddam Hussein helped strengthen and embolden the Islamic State, the Sunni terrorist organization that has risen to become a fearsome force in the Middle East. He lays responsibility for that squarely on the Bush administration.

Flynn, though, doesn’t spare Barack Obama from blame in this conflict. According to the Huffington Post: “In a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera’s ‘Head to Head,’ Flynn took aim at Obama’s publicly stated goals to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ the Islamic State, saying that while the administration is effectively degrading the organization, the group cannot be ‘destroyed,'”

He added: “We may cause it to change its name, but we are never going to destroy this organization,” Flynn said. “Destroy means to completely eliminate — he should not have used those words, those were incorrect words to use and he should have been more precise.”

So … the debate goes on.

 

national news

Gun death toll keeps mounting

barack

I totally understand that President Barack Obama has his share of critics.

Moreover, I respect and honor Americans’ right to criticize him, even though I remain generally a supporter of his policies, his vision for the country and the manner in which he has led us.

It’s hard for me to watch this brief compilation of the number of times the president has had to go before the nation in the wake of mass shootings.

San Bernardino, Calif., was just the latest. I am frightfully certain there will be more of those kinds of massacres before the president and his family check out of the White House on Jan. 20, 2017.

And, yes, there will be more of them for the next president to confront.

I am not going to make any partisan statement here about how we should end it. I’m not going to enter the fray that’s erupting already about whether to clamp more gun control laws, or whether the latest shooters were jihadists.

This is a terribly complex and hear-wrenching problem that has gripped the nation by the throat. It won’t let go.

I’m just one American who’s grown weary of watching these events unfold. I try, with no success at all, to imagine how a president musters the will to corral his emotions with every violent spasm that grips the country he governs.

 

International news, military news, national news, political news

Have we — or have we not — contained ISIS?

islam-at-war

One of two key figures in the war against the Islamic State has it wrong about whether American military power has “contained” the terrorist organization.

President Barack Obama said ISIS has been “contained” on the battlefield. He said so the other day and then on the very next day, the Islamic State launched those horrifying attacks in Paris.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee that ISIS is “not contained.”

Who you gonna believe? The politician or the career military man?

I am going to stick with the Marine on this one.

Do I think we’re losing the war? I tend to believe we will be able ultimately to destroy the Islamic State. It’s going to take a lot more than just U.S. air power to do it. More nations already have joined in the fight, most notably France and Russia, two nations that have paid heavily for ISIS’s terror tactics.

Gen. Dunford told the committee — chaired by Republican Mac Thornberry of Clarendon — that “technically we are not at war” with the Islamic State. The word “technically” is critical here. To be at war requires — in the strictest sense — a declaration issued by Congress at the request of the president.

But in reality, we’re at war.

As for whether the general has contradicted the commander in chief and the secretary of defense and whether that puts Gen. Dunford’s status in some jeopardy, I’ll just add one final point.

We put the military under civilian command. Gen. Dunford answers to Defense Secretary Ash Carter and President Barack Obama, both of whom have said one thing about ISIS containment; meanwhile, Dunford has said something else. Yes, I believe Dunford’s time as Joint Chiefs chairman might be coming to a close.

 

national news, political news

Will these justices stay away from SOTU?

Supreme_Court_US_2010

Do you ever hear something from someone and think, “Damn! I wish I’d have thought of that”?

That happened to me today.

One of my Facebook pals wondered out loud if the only mystery surrounding President Obama’s upcoming State of the Union speech would be whether the three most conservative members of the Supreme Court would stay away, as they have done in recent years.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia all have been absent during Obama’s recent speeches before a joint session of Congress.

I’ve long wondered — as have others –whether it is because they detest the president’s politics so much that they’d rather do something else than sit in front of him while he makes policy statement with which they disagree?

Look, gentlemen, this is the last one of these speeches Barack Obama will give as president of the United States. Surely you can find the time — not to mention the courtesy — to attend this speech along with the rest of your colleagues. Chief Justice John Roberts usually attends, and he’s in the conservative camp right along with the three no-show justices.

It might have been a single event that ticked them off. That would be the time that Obama scolded the court for its Citizens United ruling that took the limits off of corporations and enabled them to give unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. Justice Alito was seen mouthing the words “not true” when the president made his critical comments.

That was then. If the scolding is the reason, well, get over it, will you?

The president is entering his final full year in office. The Joint Chiefs of Staff will be there. Most of the Cabinet will be there; custom calls for one of them to stay away in case something catastrophic happens at the nation’s Capitol Building.

I hope all nine justices see fit to make an appearance. They don’t have to applaud. Just be there.

 

national news, political news

One more, and final time, for State of Union speech

obamaSOTU2015

Barack H. Obama is going to get one more chance as president of the United States to lay out his vision of the state of our Union.

On Jan. 12, he’ll take the podium in front of a joint session of Congress and tell us how he thinks we’re doing, where we’ve been, where we’re headed and likely will propose a laundry list of legislative solutions to the nagging problems that never seem to get cured.

This is it, Mr. President. My advice to you, though, is this: Don’t expect to change any minds or sway anyone’s view of the job you’ve done.

Republicans will continue to say the president has all but destroyed American greatness — single-handedly. Democrats will hail the achievements and the rescuing of the nation from a financial collapse.

I happen to belong to the latter category of Americans. Yeah, it’s a shock, I know.

This final State of the Union speech by President Obama will produce the usual applause dominated by the Democrats in the chamber. Republicans will sit on their hands … for the most part while their Democratic “friends” cheer and holler.

While there’s no denying that the world is in difficult straits right now in this fight against international terrorism, there also can be no denying that the American ship of state has corrected its course in the seven years since Barack Obama took the presidential oath of office.

The economy is in far better shape than before. Our annual budget deficit has shrunk by two-thirds. Energy production is up; energy imports are down. Housing has rebounded. Banks are lending money. More people are working today than they were in 2009. Millions of Americans have health insurance now who didn’t have it before.

And oh yes, we’ve been kept safe from terrorists. There’s that, too.

That’s not the view of those who oppose the president.

But what the heck? It goes with the territory.

House Speaker Paul Ryan was correct in his letter inviting the president to speak. They have a duty to find solutions together, he said. Yes, Mr. Speaker, you do.

It’s time to get busy.

Meanwhile, the president will get one more shot at telling the country he leads what many of us out here already know.

The state of our Union truly is strong. We’ve got work to do, but our footing is a lot firmer than it was when the president took office.