Category: Barack Obama
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.”
Snake Handling and Other Religious Challenges
| Categories: Barack Obama, Religion, Islam, Rick Warren, Reinhold Niebuhr, gay marriage, Rita Nakeshima Brock I hadn’t meant to write anything about Rick Warren. Really, what’s to say other than it’s depressing to have a homophobe on the national stage at the inauguration of a candidate who has brought hope to so many? Hope to the homophobic was not what all those gay and lesbian Obama volunteers had in mind, I’m sure.
Barack Obama may be a master politician, but he’s shown himself a bit greener when it comes to religion, that dangerous third rail of modern political life. Oddly, his secular humanist mother who married two Muslims taught him a lot about what I think of as Christian values. He turns the other cheek. He refuses to lie about his enemies. He cares for the poor. He embraces strangers.
But here’s the point I think he doesn’t get: in religion, unlike politics, you can’t just slice it down the middle and find consensus.
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