Category: Barack Obama
Lower Manhattan, Our Gettysburg?
Some very foolish things have been said about the proposed Cordoba Muslim Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan, the majority of them, it seems to me by people who wouldn’t know how to find the site if they were dropped off at the closest subway stop.
Corporate Supreme
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| Categories: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, John McCain, CBS, President Reagan, cabletelevison, Politics, Obama Administration, healthcare policy, government regulation, Hillary Clinton, Supreme court, Roberts court, Samuel Alito, Warren Court, Citizens United v. FEC, campaign finance Years ago, when I was in a quandary about the direction of my career, I got some sound advice: Never fall in love with a corporation, because it’s constitutionally unable to reciprocate.
This week, the Supreme Court created a limited redress to that issue in Citizens United v the Federal Elections Commission, giving corporations unfettered permission to spend their general funds on the campaigns of politicians they favor, and turning them into “a real live boy” as Slate put it. Who says money can’t buy you love? If the Rehnquist court handed Republicans the presidency in 2000, it’s hard to believe the Roberts court hasn’t handed them the Congress in 2010.
The Limits of Narrative
| Categories: Barack Obama, CBS, Talk Radio, foreign policy, Vietnam war, Afghanistan Even before President Obama spoke Tuesday night, the news had leaked that he had authorized 30,000 new troops for Afghanistan.
I didn’t think his speech would reassure me, but it did. A little. What a pleasure it is to hear a president with a sophisticated mind, an ordered thought process and the vocabulary to match them! For people like me, it’s the ultimate seduction.
Is Our Can-do on Vacation?
A year ago, most of America seemed convinced that healthcare reform was imperative. Would we prefer Hillary’s plan or Barack’s? The debate was furious, but most people considered it intolerable that 47 million Americans had no health insurance.
You’ll never convince me that things have gotten better since then. Employment, through which most Americans receive health insurance, has plummeted. In most states, unemployment hovers around ten percent. President Obama says that 14,000 people lose their health insurance every day. COBRA payments, through which the unemployed can extend insurance for eighteen more months, are often prohibitive. Strapped for tax revenue, many states keep tightening the reimbursement of Medicare and Medicaid costs to providers. (I chronicled in an earlier post called Strong Medicine how these cuts finally demolished a business that had been in my family for more than a hundred years.)
Isn't it cinematic?
| Categories: Barack Obama, Economics, Obama Administration, Education Funding, gay marriage, Entertainment I’m wondering—was I the only blogger to watch both the Academy Awards and the president’s prequel State of the Union Address? Two different worlds, of course, but often they conflate in the mind of this electronic onlooker, especially when you throw in the Obama Administration’s first state dinner with all those fancy gowns.
My reaction when I heard about timing of the dinner was, “They’re going to miss the Oscars.”
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