The mass hysteria from the right rolled in overnight, just two days after Wanda Sykes appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and gave Rush Limbaugh a taste of his own medicine. Much like when Limbaugh would gleefully sing “Barack the Magic Negro” on a daily basis or when he rabidly, and brutally ripped into Michael J. Fox and his illness – Sykes decided to take it to the next level in her digs aimed at Rush.

Sykes, who was on fire riffed hard on Limbaugh – claiming she was the 20th hijacker on 9/11 but missed the plane because he was so strung out on Oxycontin, and that while Rush “hoped Obama failed”, she hoped Limbaughs “kidneys failed”. Undoubtedly, it was a fun routine – and with anything funny – all hell has broken loose with commentators and politicians alike chiming in on why they hated what Wanda said.

It’s shocking that right wing politicos/talking heads are taking so much (and I sense, contrived) outrage over Sykes stand-up routine. If you simply add up all things “disgusting”, “vile” or any other adjective being used to describe Sykes routine – that Rush Limbaugh has said just over the year or two you would come up with a compilation that would over shadow anything Sykes said to such a degree, it would be silly to even compare the two, and their public commentary.

Technorati Tags: Comedy News, Daily Show, Daily Show Wanda Sykes, Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart Wanda Sykes, video, Wanda Sykes, Wanda Sykes Daily Show, Wanda Sykes Jon Stewart, Wanda Sykes Rush Limbaugh, Wanda Sykes White House Correspondents Dinner

Former US vice-president Dick Cheney says intelligence extracted from tough interrogations of suspected al-Qaeda militants had saved “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of US lives.

“No regrets. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do,” he said on CBS television arguing that techniques decried by critics as torture were essential to break the resistance of captured extremists.

Cheney said, arguing again that al-Qaeda was bent on attacking a US city with a nuclear device:

“I’m convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives,”

But at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association late on Saturday, President Barack Obama skewered Cheney’s doomsday view of the world for comic effect.

“Dick Cheney was supposed to be here but he is very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People,”

In one of his first acts as president, Obama reversed predecessor George W Bush’s approval of harsh interrogation methods such as “waterboarding”, or simulated drowning.

Recently released memorandums detail the reasoning used by Bush administration lawyers to justify waterboarding and other techniques such as sleep deprivation, physical slaps and painful “stress positions”.

Cheney reaffirmed his belief that Obama had made the US more vulnerable to attack, and condemned calls by Democratic lawmakers for the Bush legal officials to face prosecution.

“The memos do exist. I have seen them. I had them in my files at one time. Now everything is part of the National Archives. I’m sure the agency (CIA) has copies of those materials,”

“If we’re going to have this debate, it ought to be a complete debate. Those memos ought to be out there for people to look at and journalists like yourself to evaluate in terms of what we were able to accomplish.”

Obama’s national security advisor, General James Jones, dismissed Cheney’s claim that the US was now less safe from attack.

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” the former supreme commander of NATO told ABC, rebutting Cheney’s arguments for the interrogations and for detaining terror suspects without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

“And I think frankly in the Bush administration, there wasn’t complete agreement with the vice-president on that score,”

Obama, he added, was “absolutely committed” to upholding the rule of law while protecting the nation.

While Bush has kept a low profile since leaving office, Cheney has repeatedly gone on the airwaves to defend his own legacy as probably the most powerful US vice-president ever.

“If I don’t speak out, then where do we find ourselves? Then the critics have free run and there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth,” he said, adding he was prepared to testify in Congress if necessary.

Cheney also heaped scorn on his one-time cabinet rival, former secretary of state Colin Powell, who has been vilified by right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh after endorsing Obama for the presidency.

“If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh, I think,”

“My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican”.

Cheney said there was still “room for moderates in the Republican Party”, but that the party should stay true to its core principles and not “move dramatically to the left”.

The Democratic Party’s national committee responded:

“It’s sad that because Republican leaders in Congress are so devoid of ideas and direction that Dick Cheney has emerged as the party’s leading voice.”

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Dick Cheney, george w. bush, sleep deprivation, torture techniques, waterboarding

President Barack Obama directed his administration Monday to allow unlimited travel and money transfers by Cuban Americans to family in Cuba, and to take other steps to ease U.S. restrictions on the island.

The formal announcement was being made at the White House Monday afternoon, during presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs’ daily briefing with reporters. The official spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the president’s announcement.

With the changes, Obama aims to create new space for the Cuban people in their quest for political freedom and a democratic government, in part by making them less dependent on the Castro regime, the official said.  Other steps taken Monday include allowing gift parcels to be send to Cuba, and issuing licenses to increase communications among and to the Cuban people.

About 1.5 million Americans have relatives in Cuba.Obama had promised to take these steps as a presidential candidate. It has been known for over a week that he would announce them in advance of his attended this weekend of a Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.

“There are no better ambassadors for freedom than Cuban Americans,”

Obama said in a campaign speech last May in Miami, the heart of the U.S. Cuban-American community.

“It’s time to let Cuban Americans see their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. It’s time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime.”

Sending money to senior government officials and Communist Party members remains prohibited.

Restrictions imposed by the Bush administration had limited Cuban travel by Americans to just two weeks every three years. Visits also were confined to immediate family members.  Other steps taken Monday include expanding the things allowed in gift parcels being sent to Cuba, such as clothes, personal hygiene items, seeds, fishing gear and other personal necessities.

The administration also will begin issuing licenses to allow companies to provide cell and television services to people on the island, and to allow family members to pay for relatives on Cuba to get those services, the official said.

Also in that Miami speech nearly a year ago, Obama promised to depart from what he said had been the path of previous politicians on Cuba policy –

“they come down to Miami, they talk tough, they go back to Washington, and nothing changes in Cuba.”

“Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy,”

he said then.

“This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century — of elections that are anything but free or fair; of dissidents locked away in dark prison cells for the crime of speaking the truth. I won’t stand for this injustice, you won’t stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba.”

He also promised to engage in direct diplomacy with Cuba, “without preconditions” but with “careful preparation” and “a clear agenda.”

Some lawmakers, backed by business and farm groups seeing new opportunities in Cuba, are advocating wider revisions in the trade and travel bans imposed after Fidel Castro took power in Havana in 1959.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Cuba, Robert Gibbs

Stephen Colbert, a comedian who plays a slightly goofy conservative Republican, began his Comedy Central TV show The Colbert Report this week brandishing a pitchfork.

“Nation! I am enraged!” he yelled to his audience.

“AIG announced this week that they are giving executives $US165 million in bonuses. Excuse me? That bail-out money is supposed to be used responsibly – in ways we never see, to prop up businesses we don’t understand,”

“Well, the Government says they can’t stop it, but we can, folks! Our founding fathers knew that when the rights of the people get trampled we must become a torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mob, empty of all thought.”

“Let’s go get AIG!” he said, brandishing his pitchfork as his audience cheered wildly.

Colbert’s skit came uncomfortably close to the mark.

Americans – who have spent a year watching jobs disappear by the hundreds of thousands, unemployment rise to a 25-year high of 8.1 per cent, their neighbourhoods decimated by foreclosures and their pension plans slashed by a stockmarket they barely understand – are viscerally angry.

But it is not just outrage at the sheer chutzpah of those at AIG who took bonuses after the company was given $US170 billion of taxpayer funds just to survive.

The AIG bonuses have laid bare the unbridled greed that has driven US-style capitalism in the past decade, confronting even the most staunch defenders of deregulated markets. It has exposed a lack of moral compass in the system and it has rattled Americans’ faith that the best and brightest will rise to the top and be justly rewarded.

Just as disturbing for some Americans, though, are the solutions that President Barack Obama proposes:

- that Government should intervene more strongly, that it should spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars and their children’s tax dollars to rescue companies and banks,

- that it should spend up big on government projects to save the economy.

This isn’t how American capitalism works, either.

It all boiled over this week. Ordinary Americans jammed phone switches at talkback radio stations, flooded blogs and TV stations with emails and deluged their Congressional representatives as the news about AIG and bonuses to executives kept coming.

The company has been forced to enhance security at the Connecticut and London offices of its financial products division, the part of the company at the eye of the storm over bonuses. It was this group of just 350 people whose trade in risky credit default swaps – essentially insurance on the value of mortgage-backed securities – brought the venerable insurance giant undone.

The lawmakers have responded quickly and with a vehemence that is almost as unseemly as Colbert’s mock call to arms. An Iowa Republican senator, Chuck Grassley, went on radio to suggest that the bonus recipients should “follow the Japanese example” and either resign or commit suicide.

Washington has staged its own version of a pillorying. The chief executive of AIG, Edward Liddy, was called before a House of Representatives committee on Wednesday, where he was lectured and harangued about the bonus payments, even though he took over in October at the request of the Government – for a $1 salary – and played no part in writing the bonus schemes. He’d looked into stopping the payments but decided he had no legal avenues.

“Malfeasance” and “a complete violation of trust in the people who invested in your company,” said Representative Stephen Lynch, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

“We have teachers right now across the nation that are receiving pink slips, especially in the state of California. I mean, they’re doing an excellent job, and yet they’re not getting bonuses.”

Liddy was repeatedly asked to name names, which he refused to do, saying he feared for the safety of his staff. Some, he said, had already handed back the bonuses – ostensibly part of a scheme to retain key staff – which range from $US6 million to about US$100,000. Angered at his refusal, Representative Barney Frank said he would subpoena them.

Next week it will be the turn of the Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, for a public flogging as congressmen seek to find someone – anyone – to blame for what the White House called “outrageous” payments.

Meanwhile, President Obama was trying to harness the public anger to drive his push for more regulation and more intervention to stabilise the financial market.

“I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry. What I want us to do, though, is channel our anger in a constructive way,”

Polls show he still has a big stock of political goodwill. Some 59 per cent of people approve of the way he is handling the economy, while 40 per cent disapprove, according to a CNN poll taken last weekend, before the AIG crisis erupted.

The same poll showed that 86 per cent of people want his policies to work, although a smaller number – 64 per cent – think they are more likely to work than fail.

But President Obama is walking a fine political tightrope.

In this volatile environment, that political capital could quickly evaporate, putting at risk not just his future ability to convince Congress to support further measures to save American banks, but also his own chances of being more than a one-term president.

In the short term, keeping the American public’s trust in his ability to handle the economy is paramount.

During the election campaign he faced Republican attacks that he was a socialist or, worse, a communist. The tom-toms have begun to beat again about Obama’s liberal agenda.

Last week Obama hit back, telling a small business round table he was a “strong believer in the free market“.

“I believe that our role as lawmakers is not to disparage wealth but to expand its reach, not to stifle the market but to strengthen its ability to unleash the creativity and innovation that still makes this nation the envy of the world,”

But in trying to impose remuneration caps, he risks giving the Republicans more ammunition to attack, while at the same time raising expectations too high on Main Street that he can curb the excesses of Wall Street.

Just as outrageous as the bonuses was the culture of Wall Street, based on greed, excess risk-taking and a bubble-and-bust mentality, he said on Wednesday.

“The financial regulatory package that we’re designing, as well as the economic policies that we want to put in place, are going to put an end to that culture,”

Obama is also grappling with another serious problem. His Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, who was confirmed despite overlooking $US43,000 in tax, is now a target, thanks in part to his poor performance in selling the Government’s plan for dealing with toxic assets.

Geithner insists he did not know about the AIG bonuses until last Tuesday – just days before the bonuses were paid – but Liddy insists he told the Federal Reserve staff months ago and he assumed they were keeping Treasury and the White House informed.

The who-knew-what-when drama is now consuming the Washington media, even though Geithner was clearly not responsible for the bonuses and commonsense says that he might have had a few more pressing issues on his desk than $US165 million in bonus payments.

Whether it’s fair or not, the newly-minted President has a serious political problem on his hands.

On Intrade, a futures contract is being offered that Geithner will not survive beyond June. On Wednesday, Connie Mack, a junior Republican in Congress, and some traders on Wall Street went so far as to call for Geithner to quit. The Republican leader of the House, Representative John Boehner, said the Treasury Secretary was “on thin ice”.

President Obama, however, expressed “complete confidence” in Geithner and his economic team.

Mr Obama told reporters as he left for California on Wednesday:

“Tim Geithner didn’t draft these contracts with AIG,”

“There has never been a secretary of the Treasury, except maybe Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary War, who’s had to deal with the multiplicity of issues that Secretary Geithner is having to deal with – all at the same time.”

“He is making all the right moves in terms of playing a bad hand,”

But Obama knows that the handling of the economy is the yardstick against which he will be measured by the American people in four years, and selling that message of competence is crucial to his survival.

For the Republicans, too, the AIG bonus affair has thrown into sharp focus the party’s internal conflicts.

Several Republicans gleefully reminded their Democratic colleagues this week that they did not support government bail-outs in the first place. The decision to bail out AIG was the policy misstep, not the bonuses themselves.

Others, heeding the public outrage, were more focused on how to prevent such payments in the future.

By Thursday, when a bill to tax the AIG payments at 90 per cent went to a vote, it seems that outrage and free-market capitalism had claimed roughly even numbers.

Eighty-seven Republicans, joined by six Democrats, voted against the bill. Boehner described the bill as a “sham” which would not work.

But 85 Republicans voted alongside 243 Democrats for the measure, which needed a two-thirds majority. The Senate is due to vote on a similar bill next week.

Obama’s success in crafting a new, more morally-centred form of US capitalism will need the support of some of those Republicans down the track.

His huge agenda of regulating the markets more effectively will be just one plank in an agenda that is, perhaps, more weighty than any other in history.

Technorati Tags: AIG, barack obama, Stephen Colbert, Tim Geitnet

If ever the world would have forgiven a man for not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, it would have been now. No one would blame Barack Obama if he focused exclusively on the economic crisis, pushing the foreign policy in-tray to the back of his desk. After all, there’s only so much even a Messiah can handle.

For all that, the new US President has crammed a slew of foreign policy moves into his first six weeks, any one of which would have made big news in normal times.

Instead, in the age of global economic meltdown, they have had to fight for more than fleeting media attention.

Most visible have been the big declarations, whether announcing the beginning of the end of the Iraq war, avowing that “the United States of America does not torture” or ordering that Guantanamo be closed.

In just the last week, we’ve had the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, dispatching officials to Syria as well as inviting Iran to talks on the future of Afghanistan – extending a hand to two states previously consigned to outer darkness.

The start of the month brought the revelation that Obama had written a secret letter to his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, hinting at a deal in which Moscow would lean on Iran, urging it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons, in return for the US scrapping its planned installation of a missile defence system in Russia’s eastern European backyard. A gesture to cap it all: the Obama Administration has moved to ease trade and travel restrictions with Cuba.

The question – 50 days into the administration – is:

is there a common thread of logic running through these moves, one that we might describe, however prematurely, as the Obama doctrine?

The first unifying theme, sounded minutes after he took the presidential oath, is a repudiation of the legacy of his predecessor. Obama is determined to signal to the world that he is the unBush. Some on the left and right alike have suggested that this is more symbolic than real, that in fact the basic lineaments of US policy remain in place.

Obama will keep rather a lot of troops in Iraq until the end of 2011, just as the Bush administration planned; he has intensified US involvement in Afghanistan, sending 17,000 more troops; and Robert Gates, George Bush’s defence secretary, remains in this post under Obama.

Put that to the Obama team and they don’t wholly deny it. The US did not become a different country on January 20, they say; its interests have not changed overnight.

What no one denies is that there is a clear advantage for the US in the rest of the world believing that a profound change has come about. Which is why the declaration by the Vice President, Joe Biden, that the US is pressing the “reset button” has become the current catchphrase of US diplomacy.

A benign assessment of the Obama record so far would see two other early traits.

The first is a readiness to speak the truth. Asked by The New York Times last week whether the US was winning the war in Afghanistan, he replied tersely: “No.”

After the Bush years, when those who followed the evidence were dismissed as dullards imprisoned in the narrow-minded confines of the “reality-based community”, such candour is a relief!

Second, there are some signs of imaginative thinking. Deploying the veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process, George Mitchell, to the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of those ideas that seems obvious – but only because it makes so much sense. The same goes for allocating the Afghan-Pakistan, or “Afpak”, file to the hardball maestro Richard Holbrooke.

But plaudits surely go to Obama’s direct appeal to Medvedev, with its echoes of the former US president John Kennedy’s resolution of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Just as JFK agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey if the Soviet Union took theirs away from Cuba, so Obama implicitly made a similar offer to Russia: you get Iran to back down and I’ll remove my interceptor missiles and radar stations from Poland and the Czech Republic. If such an initiative were to work, the knock-on effects would be multiple.

Take one: Israel has long hinted that if its friends were to make the Iranian threat go away, it would respond by moving forward on the peace track. For a long while that was assumed to mean military action against Iran. But if Obama’s Russia gambit were to succeed – and the critics claim Gates started work on these lines a year ago – the goal of an Iranian nuclear freeze, with all its ancillary benefits, would be achieved without a shot being fired.

To be clear, this is not guitar-strumming hippie dovishness, as the escalation in Afghanistan confirms – though one administration official warns against overinterpreting that move. It is a “time-buying exercise”, he says, ensuring things don’t get worse on the ground while the White House undertakes a strategic review of the entire Afpak region, from where, it argues, every major al-Qaeda attack since September 11, 2001, has emanated.

I’m told this was the thrust of Biden’s message to NATO’s North Atlantic Council in Brussels this week: not some kind of “wussy multilateralism”, with lots of cosy meetings and platitudes, but a “results-oriented” desire to get things done – and the belief that that only happens when the world acts in concert.

To be sure, these are only the early signals in the early days. But from a President with his hands full, they are encouraging.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, barack obama, george w. bush, President

US President Barack Obama will on Monday wipe out another contentious aspect of his predecessor George Bush’s legacy by removing curbs on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

The president will sign an executive order reversing a policy that critics say has hampered the fight into finding treatments for grave diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes, a senior administration official said.

The official would not divulge the exact wording of the order, but confirmed, on condition of anonymity, that it would be in line with Obama’s campaign vow to restore funding to embryonic stem-cell research.

The move will spark delight among scientists who have long campaigned for the Bush policy to be overturned, but was already running into fire from social conservatives and right-to-life groups.

Obama spelled out his campaign policy on stem-cell research last August in a list of answers to the Science Debate 2008 scientific lobby group.

Obama wrote:

“I strongly support expanding research on stem cells,”

“I believe that the restrictions that President Bush has placed on funding of human embryonic stem-cell research have handcuffed our scientists and hindered our ability to compete with other nations.

“As president, I will lift the current administration’s ban on federal funding of research on embryonic stem cell lines created after August 9, 2001 through executive order, and I will ensure that all research on stem cells is conducted ethically and with rigorous oversight.”

Reports about Obama’s plans for Monday were immediately condemned by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

Perkins said:

“Today’s news that President Obama will open the door to direct taxpayer funds for embryonic stem-cell research that encourages the destruction of human embryos is a slap in the face to Americans who believe in the dignity of all human life,”

John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives said government money should be used to fund alternative stem-cell research that does not involve destroying an embryo.

Boehner said:

“Republicans enthusiastically support adult, cord blood, and pluripotent stem cell research that have shown so much promise in recent years,”

“The question is whether taxpayer dollars should be used to subsidise the destruction of precious human life.

“Millions of Americans strongly oppose that, and rightfully so.”

Bush barred federal funding from supporting work on new lines of stem cells derived from human embryos in 2001, allowing research only on a small number of embryonic stem-cell lines which existed at that time.

He also several times vetoed legislation passed by Congress backing the research.

Obama reportedly told Democratic lawmakers shortly after his inauguration in January that he would guarantee lifting Bush-era restrictions on federal funding of stem-cell research.

He also co-sponsored legislation while a senator that would have permitted using federal funding for stem-cell research.

His campaign said in a statement last year:

“Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that we owe it to the American public to explore the potential of stem cells to treat the millions of people suffering from debilitating and life-threatening diseases,”

Bush argued that using human embryos for scientific research — which often involves their destruction — crossed a moral barrier and urged scientists to consider other alternatives.

Embryonic stem cells are primitive cells from early-stage embryos capable of developing into almost every tissue of the body.

The Obama administration took aim at another controversial Bush administration policy on Friday, vowing to rescind a rule that would allow health care workers to deny medical care such as birth control or abortion to patients if it clashes with their morals.

The Department of Health and Human Services filed a proposal to “rescind in its entirety” the so-called refusal or conscience rule, which was pushed through by former president George W. Bush on December 18, a month before Obama took office.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, george w. bush, John Boehner, stem cell research, Tony Perkins

THE radio talkback host Rush Limbaugh has said he wants to see President Barack Obama fail, warning that the core free enterprise values of the nation are “under assault” and its very survival is at stake.

Limbaugh, who in the absence of a clear leader of the Republican Party is being championed by some as its intellectual voice, delivered an hour-long diatribe against the President and his policies at the Conservative Political Action committee forum in Washington.

“There are going to be more controls over what you can and can’t do, how you can and can’t do it, what you can and can’t drive, what you can and can’t say, where you can and can’t say it,”

Limbaugh’s take on the Obama budget, which includes tax rises for the wealthiest 5 per cent of Americans and an emissions trading scheme which will raise the cost of electricity to pay for health-care reforms and green energy projects, is helping to galvanise the Republicans into opposing key elements of it.

Eric Cantor, a leading congressional Republican, said the budget “obviously has raised a lot of concerns”.

He foreshadowed opposition to a second top-up $US410 billion spending bill now working its way through Congress.

“What we see in this budget, frankly, is an attempt, again, to try and stimulate the economy through government expenditure. And, you know, at best what that can do is redistribute wealth. It can’t create jobs; it can’t create wealth,”

The head of the White House Budget Office, Peter Orzag, hinted that the Administration might be prepared to use procedural tactics to ram through its health and energy proposals, by treating them as budget bills which require only a 50 per cent vote to pass instead of a 60 per cent vote to end a filibuster in the Senate.

Meanwhile the Obama Administration is gearing up for another week of difficult financial news, beginning with the likelihood that American International Group, the world’s biggest insurer, will seek a further $US30 billion in government capital when it reports a record quarterly loss of $US60 billion later this week. The company has already received $US150 billion in taxpayer funds, but is deemed too big to fail.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is due to give evidence on the budget outlook. There will also be a raft of figures released on unemployment statistics, consumer credit and spending.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Ben Bernanke, Economy, eric cantor, Rush Limbaugh

The shaggy dog story surrounding the identity of America’s first canine appears to be over.
Michelle Obama has confirmed that the first family is seeking a stray Portuguese water dog to be their family pet, and hope to find one by April.
In an interview with People magazine, Michelle Obama said the family wanted to find one of the dogs after the family returns from a spring break.
The first lady told the magazine:

“Temperamentally they’re supposed to be pretty good,”

“From the size perspective, they’re sort of middle of the road – it’s not small, but it’s not a huge dog. ”
“And the folks that we know who own them have raved about them. So that’s where we’re leaning.”

However the family jury is still out about a suitable name for the presidential pooch. Obama said she was less than convinced by some of the names suggested by daughters Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.

“Oh, the names are really bad. I don’t even want to mention it, because there are names floating around and they’re bad,”

“You listen and you go – like, I think, Frank was one of them. Frank! Moose was another one of them. Moose. I said, well, what if the dog isn’t a moose? Moose. I’m like, no, come on, let’s work with the names a little bit.”

President Obama promised his daughters a dog as a reward for their forbearance of the rigours of the presidential campaign.
The list of breeds in contention was narrowed by Malia’s allergy to dogs, making it necessary that the first family pick an allergy friendly breed.
Presidential pets have long been a focus of intense interest. Every president since Calvin Coolidge, elected in 1923, has had at least one dog in the White House, according to dogsinthenews.com.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, dog, malia, Michelle Obama, sasha, White House

With his first month as President in the bag, Barack Obama is receiving an unparalleled level of support from the American public in regards to his ability to handle, and in this case fix, the shattered economy. In fact President Obama has the largest lead over opposition party in overall trust to handle the economy as any U.S. President has had in over 20 years.

Even sky high approval ratings, President Barack Obama still has some undeniable challenges in front of him in regards to the post-partisanship government he spoke of so often throughout his long and hard fought presidential campaign. Nonetheless Obama clearly holds the upper hand, both in overall approval and on the dominant issue of the day. He leads the Republicans in Congress by 61-26 percent in trust to handle the economy, the biggest such lead for a president in ABC News/Washington Post polls since 1991.

Obama’s overall approval ratings are definitely strong, in both the literal and historical sense, currently hovering at 68 percent of Americans approving of the job he has done so far. However when you look closely at the polls internal findings you will find that the partisanship is as glaring as ever with 90 percent of Democrats approving of Obama’s performance thus far, and only 37 percent of Republicans happy with the newly elected President. This sharp party line divide among American’s is nearly identical to the numbers that accompanied George W. Bush in his first term which was hot off the heels of the controversial 2000 election and its subsequent outcome.

As mentioned above, the partisanship divide is as clear cut as ever before, but with that said it also becomes important to point out that many American’s are giving the President credit for his attempts at bringing the two sides together. More or less, a healthy majority of American’s recognize that while it may not be working yet, Barack Obama is undoubtedly attempting to forge a healthy middle ground between the Democrats and Republicans:

While President Barack Obama cannot be happy with the ultra-partisanship we are currently seeing, regardless if he is being recognized for trying to bring the two political factions together, it begs the question; how bad is this split for Republicans? According to the same ABC News/Washington Post poll — the hyper partisanship appears to be a bigger downfall for the Republicans, whose party remains on life support after what the majority of Americans fee was a disastrous Bush presidency. Below are the numbers – and it won’t take long until you see that if anyone is hurting from the inability to work together, it is the elected officials of the right:

• The Democratic Party leads the Republicans by 56-30 percent in trust to handle the country’s main problems. That has slightly improved from 56-23 percent in December, as congressional Republicans found a unified voice in opposition to the stimulus. But the December number was the Republicans’ worst in ABC/Post polls since 1982; they still have far to climb.
• Fifty percent of Americans approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are doing their jobs, while 44 percent disapprove – if hardly a barn-burner, still the Democrats’ best in two years, since April 2007, just after they regained control of Congress. And their Republican counterparts are a good deal weaker: 38 percent approve, 56 percent disapprove. (Democratic gains have come mainly in two groups: among Democrats themselves, and among liberals. Seventy-seven percent of Democrats now approve of their own party; just 55 percent of Republicans feel the same about theirs.)
• The Democrats are holding the edge in partisan affiliation they’ve built since 2004, when the public soured on the Iraq war and the Bush presidency in turn. Thirty-six percent in this poll identify themselves as Democrats, just 24 percent as Republicans. On average in 2003, by contrast, the parties were at parity, 31 percent apiece.

I have also attached a graph that pretty much reinforces the bumbers cited above — You will see just how much the public’s trust level in terms of the economy has dropped off for Republicans starting back in 2005 and plummeting at a fairly steady rate ever since:

Some constants have remained throughout this first month. For instance,young people still support Barack Obama at an unprecedented rate. Among young adults, or as they are being referred to nowadays, “Millennials” (those between the age of 18 and 30) his overall approval rating peaks at a startling 84 percent, compared with 59 percent in his weakest age group, seniors (this was a trend we saw throughout the primaries and general election as well.) There are income gaps here as well; among people with incomes less than $50,000, 66 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the economy; among those in $100,000+ households, this drops to half. Two possible reasons: Better-off Americans are more apt to be Republicans. And they’re in Obama’s cross hairs on taxes — and their awareness of it.

If you are interested in seeing the entire ABC/Washington Post poll regarding Obama’s first month in office you can do so by clicking here. It is really quite interesting and unfortunately, familiar to what we have seen throughout the past couple of years. The main difference  is that now it’s Republican’s who are in the doghouse, and many would say it’s rightfully so.

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Breaking news, Breaking political news, Breaking Politics News, Democrats, george w. bush, GOP, latest Polls, Latest Presidential Polls, Obama

US President Barack Obama is vowing to tackle trillion-dollar budget deficits facing the nation after he launched an unprecedented spending program aimed at helping the troubled US economy get back on its feet.

In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Obama said that he and his administration were determined to do

“all we can to get exploding deficits under control as our economy begins to recover.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the provisional US budget deficit in fiscal 2009 will balloon to a record $US1.2 trillion.

The deficit for fiscal 2008 which ended in September reached $US438 billion, or 3.1 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the office said in a report last month.

However, the figures do not include the cost of a huge $US787 billion economic stimulus plan signed by Obama into law last Tuesday.

Roughly one-third of the stimulus funds will be spent on tax cuts, totaling $US286 billion, in an effort to boost consumer spending, a key engine of the world’s largest economy.

Leading Republicans and other critics said the mammoth spending plan was mortgaging the nation’s future, for which America’s “children and grandchildren will pay a hefty price.”

But Obama said he was now determined to put spending under control, saying that work on the deficit will begin on Monday, when he will convene a fiscal summit of independent experts, unions, advocacy groups and members of Congress to discuss how the trillion-dollar deficit could be cut.

He promised to further tackle the issue in Tuesday’s address to the nation, in which he planned to outline urgent national priorities

On Thursday, the White House releases a budget blueprint, which Obama said is “sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we don’t, and restoring fiscal discipline.”

A senior administration official told AFP that Obama planned to cut the federal budget deficit by half by end of his first term.

Savings will be made by cutting spending on the war in Iraq and by eventually raising taxes for the “wealthiest Americans,” the official said.

The official did not specify how much money a person must make to be categorised as the “wealthiest.” But during the election campaign, Obama included into this group people making more than $US250,000 a year.

Obama used his radio address to again showcase his recovery plan, saying that because of it, “three and a half million Americans will now go to work doing the work that America needs done.”

He announced that, starting this Saturday, employers had begun reducing taxes for 95 per cent of working American families as mandated by the stimulus package.

By April, the average American family will begin to keep an additional $US65  each month.

But the president acknowledged that signing the stimulus plan into law was only a first step on the road to economic recovery.

He said a complete recovery will require stemming the spread of real estate foreclosures and falling home values, stabilising and repairing the banking system in order to restore the flow of credit to families and businesses and reforming the broken regulatory system that made the crisis possible.

“None of this will be easy,” he cautioned.

“The road ahead will be long and full of hazards. But I’m confident that we, as a people, have the strength and wisdom to carry out this strategy and overcome this crisis.”

Technorati Tags: barack obama, Economy, federal deficit