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The health care law, Catholics and birth control

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Becky Bowers - Feb. 10 (Fact Check) - Is President Barack Obama’s administration requiring the Catholic Church to provide birth control coverage to nuns? As rhetoric rises in a clash between Catholic leaders and the federal government over a rule requiring co-pay-free coverage of contraceptives in most health plans, here’s a guide. What the rule says The newly final rule stems from the Affordable Care Act of 2010 — what Republican presidential candidates call "Obamacare." It affects the health plans employers offer their ... >>More

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Karl Rove ‘offended’ by Clint Eastwood’s Chrysler ad

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Rachel Weiner - Feb. 07 (News Report) - A Chrysler ad aired during the Super Bowl Sunday night has inspired ire among some Republicans and admiration among some Democrats — with both sides seeing a political message that boosts President Obama.

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The State of Obama’s Facts

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson, D’Angelo Gore, Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, Ben Finley, Lori Robertson - Jan. 25 (Fact Check) - The president’s State of the Union address got the facts right — mostly. Obama said “the Taliban’s momentum has been broken” in Afghanistan. But targeted assassinations continue, and at least one independent foreign policy expert says the enemy may just be waiting until the U.S. leaves. The president said a get-tough tariff on tire imports from China has saved more than 1,000 U.S. jobs. But tire industry officials say Chinese imports have simply been replaced by imports from other countries. He took credit for putting “more boots on the border than ever before.” That’s true, but the big increase was under George W. Bush. And a decrease in illegal border crossings is due mainly to the lack of jobs in the U.S., experts say. Often the president’s facts and figures were accurate — but not the whole story. It’s true (barely) that Bush issued more new regulations than Obama at the same point in their presidencies — but Obama didn’t mention that his cost more. The president pointed proudly to increased oil drilling, increased U.S. oil production, and declining dependence on imports. But understandably he passed over any mention of chronically high gasoline prices, which hit a record of sorts last year. And he boasted of recent increases in jobs — which still number nearly 1.7 million fewer than when he took office.

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Fmr. Obama Adviser: Focus on U.S. Inequality in Election-Year SOTU Has Occupy Wall Street's Imprint

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 25 (News Analysis) - In his last State of the Union speech before the November election, President Obama defended his record addressing the financial crisis and called for greater economic fairness. He warned that Wall Street would no longer be allowed to play by its own set of rules. But the bulk of the speech dealt with the economy. We get reaction from Jared Bernstein, former chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and past member of President Obama’s economic team.

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The New York Times public editor's very public utterance

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Clay Shirky - Jan. 13 (Opinion) - Thursday, Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of the New York Times, went to his readers with a question : "I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Brisbane (who, as public editor, speaks only for himself, not the Times) referred to two recent stories: the claim that Clarence Thomas had "misunderstood" a financial reporting form when he left out key information, and Mitt Romney's assertion that President Obama gives speeches "apologising" for America. Brisbane asked whether news reporters should have the freedom to investigate and respond to those comments. The reaction from readers was swift, voluminous, negative and incredulous. "Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB." "If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, ...

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Obama-GOP battle turns ruthless

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

CNN - By David Frum - Jan. 09 (Opinion) - Watch the Republican primaries, and you can feel: the American political system is working. The GOP is discarding the unqualified and irresponsible candidates and rapidly converging on the person in the race who could actually do the job of president. But the week's second biggest political story shows a very different reality: a political system careening toward crisis. This is the story of the battle over President Barack Obama's nomination of Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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Obama: Recess appointment is his "obligation"

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

USA Today - By Aamer Madhani - Jan. 04 (News Report) - In a speech in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Obama made it official that he would install the former Ohio general as the head of the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through recess appointment and hammered Republicans for blocking Cordray's appointment.

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Barack Obama's campaign says it doesn't accept lobbyist donations

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Louis Jacobson - Jan. 04 (Fact Check) - In late December, President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign made a fundraising pitch that, among other things, touted the measures his campaign is taking to distance itself from lobbyists: "We don't take a dime from D.C. lobbyists or special-interest PACs -- never have and never will." A reader pointed out this claim and asked us if it’s true. First, we checked with the Obama campaign, and a spokeswoman confirmed that the campaign does not accept money from federally registered lobbyists, either making direct donations themselves or serving as "bundlers" who solicit and package donations from others. To enforce that policy, the campaign continually reviews the federal lobbyist registry. On the surface, the Obama campaign’s claim seems plausible. But we think it’s important to add some context about how this pledge is phrased. A key issue is how you define the word "lobbyist."

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Urging Obama to Stop Rush to Iran War

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Ray McGovern, Elizabeth Murray - Dec. 31 (News Analysis) - President Obama needs to put an abrupt halt to the game of Persian Roulette about to spin out of control in the Persian Gulf. If we were still on active duty at the CIA, this is what we would tell him:

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Latinos unhappy with President Obama's deportation policy, poll finds

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By David Lauter, Washington Bureau - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - The Obama administration has presided over a record number of deportations of illegal immigrants, and 59% of Latinos disapprove. But Obama is still favored over potential GOP nominees.Latinos by a 2-1 margin disapprove of how President Obama is handling deportations of illegal residents, but by an even larger margin, Latino voters favor him over Mitt Romney, according to a new survey by the Pew Hispanic Center.

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Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Greg Miller - Dec. 28 (Special Report) - The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential. In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents. ...

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Wary Hispanic voters favor Obama over GOP rivals

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Peter Wallsten - Dec. 28 (News Report) - President Obama holds a wide lead among Hispanic voters when matched against potential Republican challengers, even as Hispanics grow wary of his administration’s stepped-up deportation policies and less supportive of his overall job performance, according to a new poll.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Springtime for Toxics

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Dec. 25 (Opinion) - The E.P.A. just did a very good thing in releasing new rules on mercury and air toxics for power plants. And, of course, Republicans are furious.

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EPA issues strong limits on mercury emissions from smokestacks

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Neela Banerjee - Dec. 21 (News Report) - The Obama administration on Wednesday announced a tough new rule to limit emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxic substances from sources such as power plants, a landmark measure that could prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

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The GOP's Payroll Tax Fiasco

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By WSJ Editorial Board - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest. The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play. Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

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The Whoppers of 2011

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson - Dec. 21 (Fact Check) - Despite what you may have heard in 2011: The new health care law won’t cost many jobs (and they’ll be poorly paying jobs at that). Republicans aren’t proposing to “end” Medicare (and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden has signed onto a modified version of the GOP plan). Most of the “millionaires” who would pay higher tax rates under a Democratic proposal aren’t job-creating small-business owners. President Obama’s mother didn’t really fight to get health insurance coverage as she was dying. And there was plenty more spin and deception in 2011. Obama claimed he pays a lower tax rate than a teacher. Michele Bachmann endorsed a claim that HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Joe Biden claimed rapes quadrupled in Flint, Mich., after police layoffs. And that’s just some of the nonsense we debunked.

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President Obama’s view of fraud “from 40,000 feet” (without an oxygen mask)

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New Economic Perspectives - By William K. Black - Dec. 20 (Fact Check) - Hallucinations occur at high altitude when you become oxygen deprived. Let’s review the bidding on the Bush/Obama record in prosecuting the elite control frauds that drove the ongoing crisis. There are no convictions of the Wall Street elites that made, purchased, packaged, and sold millions of fraudulent liar’s loans. There are no federal prosecutions of the major banks that committed over 100,000 fraudulent foreclosures. There are a few settlements that sound like large dollar amounts, but are merely what even Obama concedes to be the (deeply inadequate) “cost of doing (fraudulent) business.” Fraud pays – it pays enormously and our elites now commit it with impunity as a means of becoming wealthy. We have just witnessed the travesty of Wachovia admitting to criminal conduct in their (grotesquely weak) settlement with the Department of Justice (which has a policy of no longer prosecuting large corporations that commit crimes) – and having the SEC refuse to require Wachovia to make similar admissions in its settlement. All this, the President implicitly or even explicitly concedes.

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Fact checking the AP fact checker

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Power Line - By Scott Johnson - Dec. 20 (Opinion) - According to Pete Yost last week in a superficial AP fact check story: “Republican presidential candidates have claimed that the Obama administration is cleansing government files of references to radical Islam, an assertion so juicy that politicians keep repeating it — even though it’s a wild exaggeration.” But I think the GOP candidates have it right, more or less, and Yost has it wrong. At least they are closer to the mark than Yost. See, for example, Cliff May’s NRO column “What’s Islam got to do with it?” (May cites a report by the Westminster Institute’s Katharine C. Gorka that notes: “Key national security documents have already excised all terminology that associates terrorism with Islam or Islamic concepts such as jihad.”) See also “Obama administration pulls references to Islam from terror training materials, official says.” (The story quotes purposefully ambiguous comments made by Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole at the George Washington University law school. My call yesterday to the Department of Justice for clarification went unreturned.)

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Kathleen Sebelius Pressed On Plan B Decision By 14 Democratic Senators

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Amanda Terkel - Dec. 14 (News Report) - Fourteen Democratic senators, led by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), sent the Obama administration a letter on Tuesday asking for the scientific basis behind its decision to limit access to emergency contraception. Last week, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rejected the Food and Drug Administration's conclusion that the Plan B One-Step pill was safe enough to be placed on pharmacy shelves without an age limit. The decision raised eyebrows because HHS has never before overruled the FDA on a drug recommendation. Many reproductive rights groups openly questioned whether the Obama administration was putting electoral politics above sound science ahead of next year's election.

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Suspect Claims from Obama’s ’60 Minutes’ Interview

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By D'Angelo Gore - Dec. 13 (Fact Check) - President Barack Obama made a couple of questionable claims during a recent interview with Steve Kroft of CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Obama said that “John McCain’s former economist” said that the stimulus “created or saved 3 millions jobs.” Mark Zandi did say that the stimulus created about that many jobs, but … More >>

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U.S. Publicly Shifts Climate Stance in Face of Widespread Criticism -- Then Quietly Backtracks

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 09 (News Report) - Talks at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Durban have entered their last official day, with focus now on a European Union-sponsored road map calling for a new climate treaty to be negotiated by 2015. The treaty would impose binding cuts on the world's biggest emitters of the heat-trapping gases, but would not likely go into effect until 2020. After being publicly heckled by a U.S. college student on Thursday and facing widespread accusations of obstructing the Durban talks, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said the Obama administration supports the E.U. road map. The U.S. State Department later backtracked on Stern's comments by taking the unusual step of issuing a clarification to its position, saying it does not yet support a legally binding deal to cut emissions. When Amy Goodman then tried to question Stern and fellow lead U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing about the apparent retraction, they refused to answer. [includes rush transcript]

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Obama Admin Denounced for "Startling Level of Obstructionism and Defeatism" on U.N. Climate Deal

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 09 (Interview) - For analysis on where the U.N. climate change talks stand, we are joined by two guests who have been closely tracking the role of the U.S. negotiating team over the past two weeks. Kate Horner is a policy analyst at Friends of the Earth, and Michael Dorsey is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College. "In those briefings, we've seen, I think, a startling lack of vision, a startling level of obstructionism, of defeatism," Dorsey says. "And I think one way we could summarize those briefings is that the U.S. State Department diplomacy is about delay... What we've seen the U.S. try to force the world to do here is to sort of throw out the baby that's called Kyoto, which is an agreement that's legally binding, and get the world to drink the dirty water, the bath water that's left behind." [includes rush transcript]

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The Most Important Speech of His Presidency

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Robert Reich's Blog - By Robert Reich - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - The President’s speech today in Osawatomie, Kansas — where Teddy Roosevelt gave his “New Nationalism” speech in 1910 — is the most important economic speech of his presidency in terms of connecting the dots, laying out the reasons behind our economic and political crises, and asserting a willingness to take on the powerful and the privileged that have gamed the system to their advantage.

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Obama Strikes Populist Chord With Speech on GOP Turf

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By A. G. Sulzberger - Dec. 07 (News Report) - Laying out a populist argument for his re-election next year, President Obama ventured into the conservative heartland on Tuesday to deliver his most pointed appeal yet for a strong governmental role through tax and regulation to level the economic playing field.

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Fixing America's jobless problem

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Peter Dreier - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - Thousands of long-term unemployed Americans from across the country have converged on Washington this week to dramatize their plight and to urge Congress to extend federal unemployment insurance benefits and the payroll tax cut, and to pass President Obama's jobs bill.

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