Tag Archives: Barack Obama

national news, political news

Time for some candidate ‘culling’

run-web

I know it’s still early and that anything can happen in this 2016 campaign for the presidency.

But that ol’ trick knee of mine is throbbing and I’m sensing it’s time for some serious candidate culling to occur in both the Democratic and Republican primary fields. No, I don’t mean “culling” in the way you “cull” a herd of elk.

But it’s becoming clear that the public is focusing on a select few of these folks seeking to succeed Barack Obama as president.

The Democrats:

Say so long, please, Martin O’Malley, Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb. No one is talking about any of you fellows.

It’s still all about Hillary and Bernie. Hillary Clinton shined at that Democratic joint appearance. Bernie Sanders stumbled a bit, but played to his base. He had ’em standing and cheering in the Las Vegas “debate hall.”

Oh, and what about Vice President Biden? Stay tuned for that announcement — whatever it is.

The Republicans:

Where do I begin?

Chris Christie? You’re toast. Jim Gilmore? You never were in the game. Rand Paul? You had us then you lost us. John Kasich? As much as I like you, hit the road, sir. Bobby Jindal? B’bye. Lindsey Graham? See ya. Mike Huckabee? You, too. Rick Santorum? Your time is up. George Pataki? Pfftt!

Rick Perry and Scott Walker already are gone.

We’re left now with, um, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio and I’ll throw in Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz.

The first three are the “outsiders.” Rubio is a young Senate gun. Bush is, well, a Bush. Cruz is the TEA Party’s current favorite son.

It’s a bit sad, actually, that some of these folks are being ignored by the media — and that means the public. Some of the Republicans running are thoughtful, experienced and nuanced individuals who have a lot to say.

The public, though, is being swept away by the outsider cadre, led — so far — Trump, whose major claims to fame are his wealth, his reality TV gig, his gorgeous wives … and his big mouth.

The rest of the large combined bipartisan field, though, is ready to be thinned out.

 

national news, political news

President serving role as ‘comforter in chief’

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roseburg

Presidents of the United States have a number of unwritten roles in their job description.

The current president, Barack H. Obama, is going to perform one of them Friday when he stops in Roseburg, Ore., to throw his arms around a community shattered by an unspeakable tragedy.

However, at least one of his critics, Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, thinks such a task is too political and that Americans are “sick and tired” of politicians who “politicize everything.”

Give me a break.

Dr. Carson is wrong, period.

Roseburg was stunned by the deaths of nine people at Umpqua Community College by a gunman who then took his own life. It was yet another case of gun violence that resulted in the massacre of innocent victims. Is the president enraged by what happened? Of course he is … as I’m sure Dr. Carson is angered as well.

But this task of offering comfort to the stricken is part of the job description that the president inherits whenever he takes the oath of office.

Presidents of both parties have been called upon to perform the task of comforter in chief. However, Carson told “Fox and Friends” today: “When do we get to the point where we have people who actually want to solve our problems rather than just politicize everything? I think that’s what the American people are so sick and tired of.”

Well, as the president said the other day in the wake of the Roseburg massacre, if a tragedy calls out for a political solution, then so be it.

 

 

national news, political news

Wrong direction for U.S.? Check out the numbers

barack

It intrigues me greatly how the naysayers manage to hog all the attention and persuade people to believe things that aren’t true.

Check out the link here: Trend is good

FactCheck.org is a website run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. It’s known to be a credible source for those who wish to know the facts about the political rhetoric being tossed around.

We’ve heard much over the past, oh, six-plus years about how Barack Obama’s presidency has led the nation into oblivion.

Hmmm. FactCheck.org says something quite different about the trend since Obama took office in January 2009.

Jobs are up; joblessness is down; energy production is up; energy imports are down; the number of uninsured Americans is down; the stock market is way up.

It’s not all peaches and cream. Food stamp recipients have increased; home ownership is down; median household income is down.

Yet, despite the evidence to the contrary, we keep hearing from presidential candidates that America is going straight to hell. One of them wants to “make America great again.” Others label the president’s policies as disastrous, dangerous, lawless.

Are we in the perfect place? Of course not. Far from it. We’re still fighting that war against international terrorists that, in my view, is likely to be ongoing long after many of us have departed for the Great Beyond.

However, as the political season heats up and the rhetoric starts churning, let us look at the big picture and take the stump speech sound bites and laugh lines with the skepticism they deserve.

national news, political news

What’s happened to the budget deficit?

BudgetDeficit

Remember the federal budget deficit?

Do you also remember how Republicans used to rail against it and how Democrats used to ignore it? Republicans said the deficit would keep growing and would bankrupt the nation. Democrats insisted that the government needed to “invest” public money on public projects.

Flash back to the 1980 presidential campaign.

  • GOP nominee Ronald Reagan’s campaign ran TV ads that parodied House Speaker Tip O’Neill and the Democrats in Congress as wasteful spenders. President Carter oversaw a deficit that “ballooned” to about $40 billion.

Reagan won the election in a landslide.

What happened then? President Reagan fought for tax cuts and exploded defense spending. The result: the federal deficit effectively tripled.

Let’s move ahead to the 1992 election.

  • Democratic nominee Bill Clinton ran against President George H.W. Bush, proclaiming “It’s the economy, stupid.” The nation was struggling through a recession. Clinton won the election. Then the Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 mid-term election.

What happened after that? The Democratic president, working with the Republican-led Congress, balanced the budget. Clinton left the White House in 2001 and the budget was running a hefty surplus.

  • Republican George W. Bush was elected in 2000. Then came the 9/11 terrorist attacks. President Bush pushed through more tax cuts, but then took the nation to war against terror groups overseas. The result of that effort? The deficit returned and exceeded $1 trillion annually.

But the argument evolved into something else. It didn’t matter that the deficit was exploding, the president and his allies contended, because it constituted a minuscule portion of the Gross Domestic Product. Didn’t the vice president at the time say, “Deficits don’t matter”?

Well, I guess they did.

  • OK, now we come to the 2008 election. The economy has tanked. Financial institutions are going under. The housing market has crashed. So has the auto industry. The deficit was exploding.

Democrat Barack Obama won the election. He got Congress to kick in billions of dollars to jump-start the economy and bail out some of the leading industries.

What happened then? The economy began to recover. The jobless rate, which zoomed to 10 percent, began inching its way back down. Today it stands at 5.1 percent.

Oh, the deficit? It’s been cut by two-thirds.

It’s still too great. It’s a long way from the surplus delivered by President Clinton and his friends in the GOP-controlled Congress.

However, the traditional argument delivered by Republicans that deficits are bad and that Democrats are to blame for spending us into oblivion no longer is relevant.

Just think: The presidential campaign that’s unfolding before us has been called one that defies all conventional wisdom.

I believe the history of the federal budget deficit suggests conventional wisdom got tossed aside long ago.

 

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Is Trump … a socialist?

income tax

Let’s see how this goes.

Donald Trump wants to eliminate the tax burden for individuals who earn $25,000 or less annually, and for families that earn $50,000 a year. He would allow them to pay no federal income tax — none, zero.

He wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent; wealthy Americans would get a reduction in their income tax from 39.6 percent to 25 percent.

But … he vows to eliminate hundreds of loopholes that he says in effect will generate more revenue for the government and grow the economy. Trump said his plan is going to “cost me a fortune.”

Is the leading Republican presidential candidate a socialist in the mold of, say, Barack H. Obama, who also has argued for reducing the tax burden low-income Americans?

My strong hunch is that the GOP faithful are going love this plan, as it’s coming from a Republican. When something like this comes from a Democrat, well, he’s just another wealth-distributing socialist who’s intent on “destroying the American dream.”

Uh, Mr. Trump? What about that national debt?

Trump tax plan

national news, political news, religious news

Religion takes center stage

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Bobby Jindal says Donald Trump isn’t really a Christian.

Ben Carson said — initially, at least — that a Muslim isn’t fit to be president.

Mike Huckabee says Barack Obama is trying to “criminalize” Christianity and that the president is a “pretend” Christian.

Can we stop — please! — with the religion rhetoric?

Jindal was just the latest to ridicule another Republican presidential candidate’s statement of faith. Trump had spoken to the Values Voter Summit and proclaimed his deep Christian faith. Jindal followed him and said Trump has never read the Bible and that he believes only in himself.

Religion has no place here

I kind of get where Jindal, the Louisiana governor, is going with the Trump jabs. Trump opened himself up to the ridicule by proclaiming to a group of zealous conservatives that he’s one of them. Jindal, I suppose, has the right to challenge one of his rivals’ assertions in that regard.

But this continual back and forth regarding candidates’ faith is getting tiresome and, frankly, it misses a critical point about electing the next president of the United States.

The point is that the president is head of a secular state and government. We can argue until hell freezes over about what the founding fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution. But the finished document is as secular as it can possibly be.

The First Amendment spells it out. Congress shall make no law that establishes a state religion, it says. Isn’t that enough evidence of what the founders intended when they established the Bill of Rights in the nation’s government document?

So, let’s cut the talk about who’s a real Christian?

It does not matter.

 

 

national news, political news, State news

What would LBJ think of today’s political climate?

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LBJ

JOHNSON CITY, Texas — What would Lyndon think of what happened today?

We’ve spent the past three nights in President Johnson’s beloved Texas Hill Country and it was in this tranquil environment that we heard the news out of Washington — that House Speaker John Boehner is resigning his speakership and his congressional seat at the end of October.

The reaction from across the political spectrum? Well, President Obama — with whom Boehner has had many enormous differences — called him a “patriot” and a “good man.”

The reaction from the right wing of the speaker’s Republican Party? They cheered the news. Good riddance, Mr. Speaker.

Right wingers are smiling at the news. They want the speaker out of there.

Which brings me back to Lyndon Johnson.

LBJ was a proud Democrat. He also was a supreme legislator, thought by many to be the greatest Senate majority leader in the history of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

He took his legislative skill with him to the vice presidency and then — in that spasm of violence on Nov. 22, 1963 — to the presidency.

How do you suppose he earned the legislative kudos? He earned them by knowing how to compromise and how to get his friends in the other party to join him in enacting critical legislation. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, enactment of Medicare? All three of those landmarks were achieved with bipartisan support engineered in large part by the president of the United States.

Today, the mood and the atmosphere is different. Arch-conservatives — and, for that matter, ultraliberals — would rather fall on their proverbial grenades than compromise with politicians they see as enemies, and not just adversaries.

Lyndon Johnson would be an unhappy man were he to rise from his grave in Stonewall and see what has happened to the two great political parties that at one time knew how to work together to get things done for the common good.

In that respect, the president likely would throw his arm around Speaker Boehner, wish him well and hope for the return of better days atop Capitol Hill.

 

 

religious news

Obama ‘pretends to be a Christian’? Really?

Bible2

How in the world does Mike Huckabee possibly know what’s in another man’s heart and soul? What on God’s Earth qualifies him to make such a claim by saying another man “pretends to be a Christian”?

That’s what the former Arkansas governor and current Republican candidate for president has done with Barack Obama.

He said the president “pretends to be a Christian,” suggesting quite openly that the president’s profession of faith in Jesus Christ — which he has made several times during his presidency — is somehow inauthentic.

Huckabee has stepped in it with this ridiculous assertion.

What’s more, he contends that the president and his administration are making it more difficult for Christians to worship as they please.

Let’s hold on here.

I would challenge Gov. Huckabee to offer a single example of how Christians these days are less able to worship in their church. He needs to provide specifics on how individuals are being punished or harassed or ostracized by the federal government because of their religious faith.

If he’s referring to the case of Democratic Rowan County (Ky.) Clerk Kim Davis, who’s made news by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples based on her religious belief, well, that argument is a non-starter. Davis took an oath to serve all the people and she has no right under the secular law to which she swore to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

As a friend of mine noted on social media, the only authority that can judge someone’s faith “isn’t from Arkansas.”

national news, political news

Birther issue becomes complicated

birther

One would have thought — at least I did — that the birther issue that dogged Barack Obama for his entire first term as president would have ended when he got re-elected in 2012.

Silly me. What was I thinking?

Now we have another presidential candidate with a citizenship issue to resolve — in the eyes of some.

It’s getting complicated.

Ted Cruz is the problem. Why?

Well, the junior U.S. senator from Texas in fact was born in another country … Canada, to be exact. His mother is an American; dad is a Cuban. But the Republican presidential candidate’s citizenship has been resolved because of his mother’s heritage. The Constitution only requires that one parent needs to be a citizen in order to qualify someone to run for president.

That didn’t matter with critics of President Obama, whose late mother also was an American. He was born in Hawaii, one of our states. He has produced a birth certificate that confirms what he has said all along.

Then someone stood up in a New Hampshire town hall discussion the other day and declared that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim.

Donald Trump, another GOP presidential candidate, was running the meeting. He didn’t come to the president’s defense on that nonsensical statement.

Why not? Well, according to some, Ted Cruz’s presence on the national political stage complicates it for Trump.

If he comes to Obama’s defense, then he all but admits his own questioning of the president’s constitutional eligibility was a sham. If he defends Cruz, then that, too, eliminates his own ridiculous doubts about whether Barack Obama was qualified to hold the office to which he’s been twice elected.

Ted Cruz is qualified to run for president. Barack Obama is qualified to hold that office.

Politicians have apologized in the past for making false statements … haven’t they?

Isn’t it time for Donald Trump to come clean and admit he, um, made a mistake?

national news, political news

‘I didn’t say anything’

trumpdonaldtwo09192015getty

Donald Trump’s defense against criticism of his non-reaction to the birther nimrod at his town hall audience?

“I didn’t say anything.”

Well, Mr. Trump. That is precisely the point of the criticism that’s come your way.

Trump gets hammered again

The guy stood up and said President Obama wasn’t born in this country, that he’s a Muslim and that the nation needs to get rid of “the problem,” which he said are Muslims.

Trump said the news networks — CNN, Fox, MSNBC — have been all over his backside in the past because he talked too much. Now that he’s kept his mouth shut, that’s cause for criticism. Trump doesn’t get it … he said.

Well, the Republican presidential candidate should have told that town hall birther that he is wrong about the president and that he is wrong to suggest we should “get rid” of millions of American citizens simply because they worship a particular faith.

No, Trump didn’t say anything.

He buttoned his lip at precisely the wrong moment.