Gary Hart: President stuck between rock and a hard place

Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart makes a good point on his blog about how the President has control of the national security, yet he cannot escape it. Perhaps Obama can turn the tide?

It has been powerfully argued that the national security state, inaugurated in 1947 and greatly expanded ever since, created a more powerful national executive than our Founders anticipated and that this power structure now both handcuffs the president and compels him to become a virtual monomaniacal figure. [“Entangled Giant,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009, Gary Wills]

The National Security Act of 1947 was the statutory basis for defining America’s role in the world post-World War II and for conducting the Cold War.  It established a new Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the United States Air Force as a new military service.  For more than six decades, it has also been the source of authority for the president as commander-in-chief.

Despite the fact that our Constitution, Article I, section 8, gives Congress solely the power to “provide for the common defense” and “declare War,” it is not accidental that no declaration of war has been authorized since 1941, even while we waged war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens of other venues.  Presidents now decide when and where we will wage war.

Gary Wills bolsters his provocative argument by listing all of the George W. Bush “security” measures quietly adopted and approved by the new Obama administration.  His argument is not that President Obama was a closet neo-conservative who managed to fool the voters.  Rather, he says, the national security state has become a kind of powerful prison with the president as warden.  He has authority over it, but he cannot escape it.

HuffPost’s Malcolm Glenn praises Obama’s support of Michael Bennett

Glenn wrote that Sen. Bennett’s re-election race for 2010 is flourishing with the recent endorsement from President Obama and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, leaving former Colorado House of Representatives speaker Andrew Romanoff in the proverbial dust. He even goes as far as slamming Romanoff:

Romanoff was an early choice for progressives following former Senator Ken Salazar’s appointment as Interior Secretary last year, and the disappointment was palpable when the low-profile former school superintendent got the head-scratching nod from Governor Bill Ritter.

But what’s there to love on the left from Romanoff? Idealists make up the base in Denver’s Democratic political circles, but is a career politician really the man the state’s progressives think can be their biggest champion?

Wade Norris of SquareState.net had something to say about that:

I don’t know where to begin, except to say, as I have journeyed around the state to rural Colorado – it has been apparent that Andrew Romanoff’s support does not reside alone in “Denver’s Democratic circles”. Saying that AR owes his strength to idealists in Denver shows a lack of understanding about the Democratic Party of Colorado.

I know Andrew Romanoff. He once spent an hour on a Friday night explaining to me the intricacies of TABOR (Taxpayers’ Bill Of Rights) and how it would affect higher education funding for an article I was writing for the college newspaper. I’ve followed his campaign and I think he has some great accomplishments under his belt. I simply don’t know Bennett, but he seems to have a lot of support, which could have more to do with inner politics than his strength as a candidate, or that he’s raising more money. It will be an interesting race.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/malcom-glenn/potus-knows-best-why-obam_b_291374.html

President Obama on Meet The Press Sept. 20, 2009

Part 1:

Part 2:

Free Press advocates for reform, not bailouts for newspapers

Free Press, a media reform outlet, in a press statement, called on President Obama to provide leadership to help reform the press in the United States, but without bailouts. Craig Aaron, senior program director of Free Press:

“President Obama’s leadership is needed to put the future of journalism on the national agenda. Now is not the time for bailouts, but it is a moment for forward-looking policies that will support local and diverse media ownership, encourage experiments and innovations, and invest in a world-class public media system. Our concern should not be for newspapers — or not just newspapers — but rather for newsrooms and keeping reporters on the beat.”

Obama said to a group of newspaper editors Friday:

“Journalistic integrity, you know, fact-based reporting, serious investigative reporting, how to retain those ethics in all these different new media and how to make sure that it’s paid for, is really a challenge,” President Obama told editors from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade. “But it’s something that I think is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy.”

Leading U.S. Socialist Says Obama is Not One of Them

I know this is kind of old news, but for those who haven’t heard:

Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization, has said in an interview with Politics Daily that President Obama is not “any kind of socialist at all,” calling him a “market” guy.

“He’s not challenging the power of the corporations,” Llewellyn added. “The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far reaching. He says we must have room for innovation, but we had innovation — look where it got us. So I just…I can’t..I mean it’s laugh out loud, really.”

Llewellyn offered his belief that Republicans have historically called opponents “socialists” in order to stop moderate reforms, and that the new stickiness of the Obama/socialist association is one part misinformation, one part ignorance. “The Republicans are doing the same thing they did when Roosevelt was president — confusing somebody who is trying to save capitalism from itself with somebody who is trying to destroy it. (Obama) is not trying to destroy capitalism.”

Llewellyn further added about a single payer health care system:

“We’ve always been single payer people. We were for single payer back when Clinton proposed health care reform, and we’ve done a lot of work to educate people about that. But single payer is not what I would call a “socialized” medical system. It doesn’t make health care professionals employees of a government-run entity; it just says who is going to write the check.”

He added further about socialism:

“They [Republicans] always use socialism to try to defeat moderate reforms…just because something is government run doesn’t mean it’s socialist. I’ve never heard anybody say we have a socialist army.”

Examining health care numbers

Republican senators and congressmen and women could be taken more seriously on healthcare reform if they did more than just boo and shout out “you lie!” at a presidential address. Some of their cohorts on the Web seem to be making the case for them, but their points don’t seem to be entering the main debate on TV and on talk shows.

Take David Harsanyi of The Denver Post. In a column from June Harsanyi tries to dissect the estimates of people who are uninsured. I don’t hear politicians pointing this out much:

According to the CBO, 45 percent of the uninsured are uninsured for four months or less, which seems like a pretty positive number to me.

Then, another portion of uninsured Americans already qualify for an existing government health insurance program — and government already controls 46 percent of spending on health care — for which they have not signed up.

The CBO estimates that as many as 15 percent of the chronically uninsured are already eligible for help. The Urban Institute (hardly advocates of free-market fundamentalism) found that 25 percent of the uninsured qualify for some program.

Surely, most citizens will concur that health care is too expensive (though most citizens would likely concur that everything is too expensive) and something should be done. So when Obama tells us that 46 million Americans are uninsured, he is implying that 46 million people can’t afford health insurance. That, too, is absurd.

In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Is Health Insurance Affordable for the Uninsured?,” Stanford economists say that “based on a plausible range of definitions and assumptions . . . health insurance is affordable for between one quarter and three quarters of adults who are not insured.”

Turns out that 8.4 million uninsured Americans are making $50,000 to $74,999 and 9.1 million more are making more than $75,000. Health insurance is just incompatible with their lifestyles, I guess.

And take these numbers from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office:

The commonly cited estimate of 40 million uninsured comes from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Based on a large nationally representative sample, the CPS has been collecting data on health insurance status since 1980.

Although the CPS is intended to measure the number of people who lack health coverage for a whole year, its estimate more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point in time during the year. Data from three federally sponsored national surveys–the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)–yield estimates of the number of uninsured at a particular point in time that are very similar to the CPS estimate of about 40 million (see Summary Figure 1). In contrast, data from SIPP and MEPS indicate that 21 million to 31 million people are uninsured for an entire year.

Still, even as recent as September 10, 2009, the Census Bureau sticks to their numbers:

The number of people with health insurance increased from 253.4 million in 2007 to 255.1 million in 2008.

The number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008.

Between 2007 and 2008, the number of people covered by private health insurance decreased from 202.0 million to 201.0 million, while the number covered by government health insurance climbed from 83.0 million to 87.4 million. The number covered by employment-based health insurance declined from 177.4 million to 176.3 million.

The number of uninsured children declined from 8.1 million (11.0 percent) in 2007 to 7.3 million (9.9 percent) in 2008. Both the uninsured rate and number of uninsured children are the lowest since 1987, the first year that comparable health insurance data were collected.

Although the uninsured rate for children in poverty declined from 17.6 percent in 2007 to 15.7 percent in 2008, children in poverty were more likely to be uninsured than all children.

What no one denies though is that our health care does need to be reformed. The U.S. spends the most on health care in the world yet the World Health Organization ranks us 37 out of191 countries based on our performance. People are denied important procedures due to ridiculous pre-existing conditions. I think maybe it’s time we modernize with the rest of the first-world countries.

The commonly cited estimate of 40 million uninsured comes from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Based on a large nationally representative sample, the CPS has been collecting data on health insurance status since 1980.

Although the CPS is intended to measure the number of people who lack health coverage for a whole year, its estimate more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point in time during the year. Data from three federally sponsored national surveys–the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)–yield estimates of the number of uninsured at a particular point in time that are very similar to the CPS estimate of about 40 million (see Summary Figure 1). In contrast, data from SIPP and MEPS indicate that 21 million to 31 million people are uninsured for an entire year.

MoveOn Rally for Health care in Denver Tomorrow

MoveOn in Denver is going to be holding a rally for health care reform tomorrow. Here are the details:

Big insurance is fighting to stop real health care reform. Tomorrow, we’re gathering at rallies nationwide to send a strong message that we’re sick of Big Insurance–and we demand a public health insurance option, now!

Where: Triangle Park 7th and Lincon (in Denver)

When: Tuesday September 22nd at 12:00 PM

What: We’ll hear stories from individuals who are suffering under our broken health care system, and deliver a letter to Big Insurance, demanding that they stop denying us care.

President Obama ‘happy to look at’ newspaper legislation

From Romenesko at Poynter.org:

The president told Dave Murray that “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.” He added: “What I hope is that people start understanding if you’re getting your newspaper over the Internet, that’s not free and there’s got to be a way to find a business model that supports that.”

Despite this being the industry I’m going to work in, I’m tired of the bailouts. Plus newspapers got themselves into this mess, they have to buck up, innovate nd dig themselves out. To start editors and publishers should start listening to their younger employees on how to be up to speed with technology. We shouldn’t be rewarding bad business practices by bailing out every ailing industry. I do agree with the president that the industry has become more opinion than fact.

Where’s My Change

This was a commentary I wrote and posted on February 4, 2009.

Commentators have been blabbing for the past week about whether the “honeymoon” period is over for President Obama.

It’s a bad analogy, but yeah it is over.

I’m disappointed, but not surprised, and disillusioned with the way this administration is turning out, namely that the stimulus package is disgustingly huge and may not do much of anything, and that we’re going to be giving more money to financial institutions rather than helping people out of their bad mortgages. And if he wants to cut taxes, how about cutting the payroll tax as former National Economic Council Director Lawrence Lindsey has proposed?

With Afghanistan, I think his administration has their head in the clouds if they think they can do what Russia failed to do with 150,000 troops, with 60,000
of our troops. How about we use the Afghan military or just handle the thing diplomatically so we can get off our empirical warpath?

That is not to say I am not pleased with some other things Obama has done (ie, ordering the closure of the Guantanomo Bay detention center, signing the S-CHIP and equal pay bills) but even capping pay for his top staff at $100,000 and capping executive pay for troubled banks receiving government money at $500,000 (not including the banks that already got money) are really just smooth political gestures meant to make the people think he means business. And I guess at least one cabinent member–treasury secretary Timothy Geithner–who didn’t pay his taxes while he worked for a globalist bank–the IMF–that keeps poor countries poor is alright because “we need him.”

Ultimately New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd laid out my frustrations best today:

“Unlike W. and Dick Cheney, who heroically resisted acknowledging their historically boneheaded mistakes, President Obama summoned a conga line of Anderson, Katie, Brian, Chris and Charlie to the Oval Office to do penance, over and over.

‘I think I messed up. I screwed up,’ he confessed to Couric.

He told the anchors that the man who helped make him president, Tom Daschle, had made ‘a serious mistake’ by not paying taxes on a car and driver. (It should have been a harbinger of doom when Daschle began sporting those determined-to-be-hip round red glasses.)

Mr. Obama admitted that ‘ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.’

It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

Before he recanted, his hand forced by a cascade of appointees who ‘forgot’ to pay taxes, his reasoning was creeping perilously close to that of the outgoing leaders he denounced in his Inaugural Address: that elitist mentality of ‘we know best,’ we know we’re doing the ‘right’ thing for the country, so we can twist the rules.

Mr. Obama’s errors on the helter-skelter stimulus package were also self-induced. He should put down those Lincoln books and order ‘Dave’ from Netflix.

When Kevin Kline becomes an accidental president, he summons his personal accountant, Murray Blum, to the White House to cut millions in silly programs out of the federal budget so he can give money to the homeless.

‘Who does these books?’ Blum says with disgust, red-penciling an ad campaign to boost consumers’ confidence in cars they’d already bought. ‘If I ran my office this way, I’d be out of business.’

Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.

As Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, put it, there were so many good targets that he felt ‘like a mosquito in a nudist colony.’ He was especially worried about the provision requiring the steel and iron for infrastructure construction to be American-made, and by the time the chastened president talked to Chris Wallace on Fox Tuesday, he agreed that ‘we can’t send a protectionist message.’

Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as ‘wasteful’ by Republicans ‘amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.’ All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.

The Democratic president has been spending so much time trying — and failing — to win over Republicans that he may not have noticed the disillusionment in his own ranks.

Betrayed by their bankers and leaders, Americans were desperate to trust someone when they made Barack Obama president. His debut has left them skeptical about his willingness to smack down those who would flout his high standards or waste our money.”

To the blind Obamaniacs and Democratic party faithful, I still think the man is capable of greatness, but I’m not one of those people who always stands idly by the president. And no I don’t think I could do a better job as president, that’s why I voted for him, to see if his rhetoric that he was the president of the people would hold true when he got into office. I’m still waiting.

We Are All Responsible

This commentary was written and posted on April 6, 2008.

I received an e-mail forward the other day with a column by the conservative columnist Charley Reese entitled “The 545 People Responsible For America’s Woes.” In it the anti-authoritarian, supposedly currently registered Democrat, rails against these 545 – 100 senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices – for being the primary people responsible for America’s woes. Though it was written during the 1980’s (as far as I can tell) this forward included an updated version of the column with fresh, contemporary references, added so with the fresh, contemporary sloppiness of our digital age. Nonetheless what he had to say then is even more true now:

“It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of [300] million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts – of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem, from an unfair tax code to defense overruns, that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.”

I agree with what Reese said (especially his slam against the Federal Reserve), and that we need a major change in who are in these 545 roles and how they conduct themselves. I think we need a complete rebuilding of this government and I am disgusted, but not surprised, with the power our government, and all governments, exert over it’s people. But also by placing all responsibility on these 545 people we simply continue to engage in America’s favorite social activity: the Blame Game. It’s a self-serving game that, as far as I can see, has not brought progress from an evolutionary or social perspective. This perspective usually produces only losers, no winners. And with this seemingly most important of elections we don’t seem to be letting go of this bad habit of placing blame.

Too often in the past few years we’ve been keen to engage in a “woe is me” attitude. And now we’re angry and we want a change. Congress and the then-Texas governor appointed as “president” arrogantly went into Iraq despite international protest, but did so with the support and complicity of the majority of this society. Kerry indeed lost by a fairly tiny margin (3 percent), but not tiny enough to me, not as tiny as in 2000. The country should have been overwhelming in getting behind anyone besides this neocon flunky. The majority of society was complicit in letting him back in, only to jump on the Bush-bashing bandwagon two years later, when, after six years, people woke up to how badly they were being screwed. Blame these 545 people all you want, but our hands are not clean of blood either.

I was only 18 at the time, yet I didn’t need to do much research to know this war was wrong and would that it would be a disaster. But Americans, rather than uniting after 9/11 for the common good, to help heal the pain we had suffered and ensure it not happen again, engaged in our favorite pastime: bloodlust. We have more access to information than most of the rest of the world, yet the majority of our citizens, and the Congress who approved the war, let their boiling blood deafen themselves to the truth. Now we’ve engaged ourselves in conflicts that have diverted us so far from our original intentions. We have helped to create so much damage and make so many enemies that another world war seems inevitable.

Yes, Sen. McCain and Sen. Clinton voted us into this destructive war, and now we can point fingers at them to prop up our own candidate. But one of the main philosophies of Sen. Obama’s campaign that I have embraced is his attempt to empower people to make change in their own communities. That even if he does win the presidency we can’t just pass the blame onto someone new, or blame Obama if he screws up.

Despite Sen. Obama’s promises to make things better, all of us must stop finger pointing and blaming him and the other politicians. The time has come for us to take personal and collective responsibility by working hard to bring about those changes we say we want as American citizens. As one of the slogans in Sen. Obama’s campaign says, “We are the hope we’ve been waiting for.” For example, I strongly champion Senator Obama’s campaign promise to provide around $4,000 to each college student who’s willing to devote a certain number of hours to community service. Despite my relative lack of volunteer work in the past few years, I think that is what our, frankly, selfish and self-serving society needs. But Sen. Obama cannot bring this about by himself. Empowerment means all of us have to work to achieve this goal.

People who call themselves patriots talk up our “great democracy” all the time yet those same people vote against their best interests and allow their government to commit atrocities in their name, often out of willful ignorance. Even in a fake democracy — we actually have a democratic republic — the people still have significant say in how their country should be run, as we saw in the 1960’s. As it took extreme conditions for those people to rise up, so will it for us now. I fear that even though people are becoming more aware and are getting ready to act, we’ll not be ready to do so early enough.

Reese also wrote in a 1993 column: “But regardless of whose fault it is, most politicians today are not human beings. You want to pry open their mouths and shout into the darkness, ’Hello! Is there a human being in there?’ Buried under all that lust for office, all that fear of offending a contributor? I know there must be.” The audacity of hope indeed. The time to hope or wait around for a human to appear (or expect that seemingly human politician remains human after inauguration day) has passed for us. We’ve reached the point of no return.

Rome fell for a reason. Britain (mostly) retracted its empire for a reason. Americans, and indeed human beings everywhere, are slow to learn from their mistakes. I hope it’s not too late to save this country as we know it. My only hope is that when we — Americans and the other six billion supposedly “inferior” human beings — do rebuild, that we learn from the hasty, vengeful and arrogant ways that nearly brought us to our complete demise. If we don’t play the Blame Game, then the rebuilding will be done by everyone. All of us will bear responsibility–including the 545 individuals–for creating a society that does not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Then we won’t have any 545 people, no Clintons, no McCain, no Obama to blame, from whom to expect the results. There will be no all-powerful 545 people responsible for helping rebuild our society and in preventing the mistakes of the past. In that, we are all responsible.