I had exactly a twenty-dollar bill. It came to twenty-one and change... I offered him my cell phone, my wallet. I said i live right around the corner. I come in here all the time....Read More......
I said 'Can you just give her the pump. She's on the floor wheezing... I didn't know if an ambulance would get there on time. He said there was nothing he could do for me.
Robert Gibbs is the other guest on "Meet." So, we may be treated to more garbled and incoherent answers about the President's views on DADT.And, as you'll see, that's exactly what we got. The last time Gibbs wasn't completely illogical on DADT was during the transition. At AMERICAblog Gay this mornuing, Tim Beauchamp posted that video. I also posted this "Meet the Press" video at there, too.
But yesterday in federal court, an attorney for the oil giant sent shockwaves throughout the Gulf region by suggesting that BP may seek shelter under the $75 million liability cap polluters can invoke under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.Read More......
U.S. District Judge Carl J. Barbier, who's presiding over the more than 300 consolidated lawsuits against the company, was taken aback when BP attorney Don Haycraft floated the idea of the liability cap. Barbier replied simply that "BP said it would pay whatever [is] necessary." Steven Herman, a plaintiffs attorney in the case, also registered surprise. "We're shocked over here to hear the defendants now bring up this $75 million cap," he said. "We were under the impression it was waived."
“Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”That is utter nonsense. It's difficult to find an administration more political, more worried about what people think (at least people on the right), than Team Obama. When have they ever forged ahead with "the right thing" to hell with the consequences? That simply is not the way they operate. The President starts a negotiation by looking for the lowest common denominator, the thing least likely to make waves with the opposition, and then, after a comfortable period of time doing next to nothing, rallies around whatever is left.
"But I keep a checklist of what we committed to doing, and we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we talked about during the campaign. And I hope as long as I’m president, I’ve got a chance to work on the other 30 percent."That's a tad disingenuous. On health care reform, he didn't push for what he promised - he didn't even try - and was forced to settle for much less than he could have gotten. Is that really a full accomplishment, getting a B- when you could have gotten an A? And how about the stimulus, another "promise kept": The President failed to ask for the full amount needed, and now the economy is in the crapper while Democrats prepare to lose control of the House, and possibly the Senate. How is that a full success?
“It’s not that we believed our own press or press releases, but there was definitely a sense at the beginning that we could really change Washington,” another White House official told me. “ ‘Arrogance’ isn’t the right word, but we were overconfident.”No, arrogance is the right word. This is a group of people who think they are so right that they don't need anyone else's help. Other than bad people who won't help them anyway. It's an odd mixture of arrogance and insecurity, really (thus the constant right-wing outreach).
The biggest miscalculation in the minds of most Obama advisers was the assumption that he could bridge a polarized capital and forge genuinely bipartisan coalitions. While Republican leaders resolved to stand against Obama, his early efforts to woo the opposition also struck many as halfhearted. “If anybody thought the Republicans were just going to roll over, we were just terribly mistaken,” former Senator Tom Daschle, a mentor and an outside adviser to Obama, told me. “I’m not sure anybody really thought that, but I think we kind of hoped the Republicans would go away. And obviously they didn’t do that.”They thought the Republicans would just go away? That is beyond naive. How could any Democratic leader lead based on the assumption that the Republicans would simply go away on their own? In other words, Obama didn't feel the need, or desire really, to fight back.
Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, though, is among the Democrats who grade Obama harshly for not being more nimble in the face of opposition. “B-plus, A-minus on substantive accomplishments,” he told me, “and a D-plus or C-minus on communication.” The health care legislation is “an incredible achievement” and the stimulus program was “absolutely, unqualifiedly, enormously successful,” in Rendell’s judgment, yet Obama allowed them to be tarnished by critics. “They lost the communications battle on both major initiatives, and they lost it early,” said Rendell, an ardent Hillary Clinton backer who later became an Obama supporter. “We didn’t use the president in either stimulus or health care until we had lost the spin battle.”Note how Rendell mentions "using the President" too late in the game on HCR and the stimulus. That's a point I've been making for over a year: That the President sat back and refused to get involved until it was too late on far too many policies. Apologists argued that the President had little role in legislating. Those of us who have actually worked in legislating know that the apologists were wrong. And now Rendell confirms it.
The other side would like more ideological rigidity. Norman Solomon, a leading progressive activist and the president of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said Obama has “totally blown this great opportunity” to reinvent America by being more aggressive on issues like a public health care option. Other liberals feel the same way about gays in the military or the prison at Guántanamo Bay. “It’s been so reflexive since he was elected, to just give ground and give ground,” Solomon told me. “If we don’t call him a wimp, which may be the wrong word, he just seems to be backpedaling.” Solomon added: “It makes people feel angry and perhaps used. People just feel like, Gee, we really believed in this guy, and his rhetoric is so different than the way he’s behaved in office.”Spot on.
As a senior adviser put it, “There’s going to be very little incentive for big things over the next two years unless there’s some sort of crisis.”There was very little incentive over the past two years either. Well, to be more precise, there was an incentive to do a few big things, and then cave on them from the outset. Read More......
A new survey in Germany shows that 13 percent of its citizens would welcome a “Führer” – a German word for leader that is explicitly associated with Adolf Hitler – to run the country “with a firm hand.”Read More......
The findings signal that Europe’s largest nation, freed from cold-war strictures, is not immune from the extreme and often right-wing politics on the rise around the Continent.
The study, released Oct. 13 by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party, revealed among other things that more than a third of Germans feel the country is “overrun by foreigners,” some 60 percent would “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 17 percent think Jews have “too much influence.”
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