OK, so Google doesn’t do it only to Republicans. It now prints goofy photos of the Beloved One, too. But surely the media could just print regular photos that the subjects themselves might approve of.
BTW, so what if Gates and Crowley get together over a beer? Even if they shake hands and become best buddies, how is that going to help us have that national dialogue that we’re having?
I think we’re having that dialogue whether he wants it or not. Dunno if a dialogue behind closed doors at the White House will contribute much to it, though.
Headline: “President sees opportunity for national dialogue.”
African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates and the police officer who arrested him last week are likely to get together at the White House soon as President Obama tries to quell a furor his words helped fuel.
“The president sees this as an opportunity to get dialogue going on an issue … that has been historically troubling,” adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation. Axelrod said he expects the meeting to take place but did say when.
So now (by implication) Obama comes out in favor of profiling in airports. I thought it was to avoid this sort of offense that the TSA makes no exceptions for old, slow-moving people who need canes and walkers to get through the airport security line.
I have to say I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement, because I think it was a pretty straightforward commentary that you probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who’s in his own home.
George Bush had his Colin Powell, and now Barak Obama has his Larry Summers.
Colin Powell sacrificed his integrity to give an eloquent speech at the UN, assuring the world of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapon’s of mass destruction. He of course had lots of doubts about it even as he spoke.
And now Larry Summers has told has said President Obama is a defender of free markets.
President Barack Obama’s chief economist on Friday defended White House economic policies against criticism that they amounted to “a kind of back-door socialism.”
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers said Mr. Obama’s interventions “will go with, rather than against, the grain of the market system.”
This of course is complete crap and he knows it, but just as with George Bush, the president needs his people to say things like that.
Summers is now going to have to live with this blot on his record just as Colin Powell has had to live with the one on his.
(I must admit that I was slightly swayed by Powell’s speech at the time. I am not in the least swayed by Summer’s speech. Neither of these men is among my favorite politicians, but I respect both of them enough to be saddened by what they had to do.)
This is just creepy. Yes, a speech can be an important and influential event, but for it to have such an impact so quickly? And how would a reporter have any possible way of knowing these things without doing extensive polling?
Why not just tell us what Obama said and what the crowd reaction was? That’s all we really know for now.
Washington Post headline: “Muslims Seem Won Over by President; U.S. Adversaries Unmoved.”
CAIRO, June 4 — President Obama’s choice of Egypt as the site of his address to the Muslim world endeared him to Egyptians, who are always proud to host a foreigner and show off their history.
That he came to downtown Cairo, instead of heading to the Sinai beach resorts where the country’s diplomatic gatherings are often held, told them he was serious about connecting on a personal level.
When he sprinkled his speech with words from the Koran and balanced support for Israel with a strong call for a Palestinian state, the deal was closed.
Maybe the Washington Post now hires clairovoyants as reporters?
Well, yes, I imagine he is. In the same category:
“Obama appears open to some health insurance mandates” (LA Times headline)
I suspect that Peter Wallsten and Robin Abcarian are two journalists who are just making stuff up — or else printing stuff that President Obama makes up. Here is some of what I mean.
In calling last month for “common ground” on abortion, President Obama launched his search for an unlikely political sweet spot — a popular stance on an issue that has long been dominated by extremes.
This is nonsense. Before Obama came along with his extremist anti-choice, pro-abortion policies, the country had reached an uneasy truce in the abortion wars — a compromise, even. Obama may have said at some time that he is looking for a common ground on abortion, but he says a lot of things. Reporters should keep in mind that this is the same guy who said he is not running an auto company.
But the slaying Sunday of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller has raised the level of mistrust between the very factions that the White House has been trying to bring together.
How do these reporters know the level of mistrust has been raised. And how could the killing of Tiller do that even if it happened, when everybody except a few lone wackos wants his killer to be brought to justice the same as any other killer? The killer didn’t represent the anti-abortion crowd any more than President Obama’s extreme views represent the vast majority of those Americans who want abortion to be legal.
Tiller’s death is a “massive setback” in the search for common ground, said Cristina Page, a New York City author and abortion rights advocate. “It’s sort of like having a family member murdered and then being asked to make nice with the assassin’s family. It’s unnatural.”
Gee, how McCarthyite of her. Nice built-by-association in that “assassin’s family” phrase. OK, so maybe Obama isn’t the only extreme wacko on the pro-abortion side.
Ah, in reading further into the column, I see that the two journalists are at least good enough to quote some people who don’t buy their thesis in paragraph one.
There’s more, but I gotta run.
Not only does Obama have no exit strategy in his war on capitalism, but he has his own equivalent of a WMD rationale. This one is for a war on another front. Now he’s warning about vague cybersecurity threats as a rationale so he can be given great power to somehow protect the internet from these terrible threats.
And it’s ironic that on the same NetworkWorld page with an article that tries to drum up support for Obama’s newest war is this item over in the “Most Read” sidebar: “20 years after Tiananmen, China containing dissent online.”
“The Obama Administration has been whispering to the press that it could start selling its stake within a year to 18 months, and that it hopes to be out of the business entirely in five years.” (–WSJ Review & Outlook)
Yeah, and the Bush administration once hoped to be out of Iraq quickly, too. But “hope” is not the same as an exit strategy.
From Bloomberg.com: “No one is going to be more concerned about future deficits than we are,” Geithner told reporters on the way to two days of meetings that start today in China’s capital.”
Do we have some kind of trend in the making? First Obama says he doesn’t want to run a car company, which is really beside the point of whether he WILL run a car company. Now Geithner says the administration is going to be “concerned” about deficits, which doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s going to do something about future deficit. I would guess the latter is of more interest to the Chinese government than the Obama administration’s “concern,” whatever that is.