Leadership

[driveby]

The White House political and legislative operations were said to be livid with the announcement by several large U.S. companies that they were taking multi-million or as much as a billion dollar charges because of the new health-care law, the issue was front-and-center with key lawmakers. By last Friday, AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., and AK Steel Holding Corp. had all announced that they were taking the one-time charges on their first-quarter balance sheets. More companies were expected to make similar announcements this week.

 

"These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general," says a White House legislative affairs staffer. "Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative websites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It's BS."

 

On Friday White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were calling the CEOs and Washington office heads of the companies that took the financial hits and attacked them for doing so. One Washington office head said that the White House calls were accusatory and "downright rude."

 

The companies are taking the charges because in 2013 they will lose a tax deduction on tax-free government subsidies they have had when they give retirees a Medicare Part D prescription-drug reimbursement. Many of these companies have more than 100,000 retirees each. AT&T may have more than three-quarters of a million retirees to cover.

 

"Most of these people [in the Administration] have never had a real job in their lives. They don't understand a thing about business, and that includes the President," says a senior lobbyist for one of the companies that announced the charge. "My CEO sat with the President over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the President what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general. First the President didn't understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying. Frankly my boss was embarrassed for him; he clearly had not been briefed and didn't know what was in the bill."

 

It isn't just the President who didn't understand his own proposal. Late Friday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, announced that they would hold hearings in late April to investigate "claims by Caterpillar, Verizon, and Deere that provisions in the new health care reform law could adversely affect their company's ability to provide health insurance to their employees."

 

Neither Waxman or Stupak -- who betrayed the pro-life community by negotiating for more than a week with the White House to ensure his vote on the health care bill -- had anything more than a cursory understanding of how the many sections of the bill would impact business or even individual citizens before they voted on the bill, says House Energy Democrat staff. "We had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them," says a staffer. "When they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them. They really believed this bill would immediately lower costs. They just didn't understand what they were voting on."

 

NOT WHAT THEY EXPECTED

So much for President Obama's promises to build better relations with America's friends and allies overseas. Just 15 months into his administration, Obama has managed to alienate most of the major European allies, this time having a State Department functionary announcing in Brussels that U.S.-EU summits will no longer be held annually, and only when there are particular issues to be decided.

 

State Department officials, some of whom were holdovers from the Bush Administration, say the reasoning for the U.S. to end the annual summits, which had been held since 1991, was in part due to Obama and his team's feeling " slighted" by European leaders and their staffs, such as French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, both of whom have come away less than impressed with Obama's style and substance.

 

During Obama's much heralded European visits last year, he and his team were met with lukewarm enthusiasm by his fellow leaders. Obama responded by, as host last November, meeting with his counterparts for only three hours and sending Vice President Joe Biden to spend the rest of the time in the summit, including the official lunch. Other than a 15-minute meeting in the morning with Merkel (which on the schedule was supposed to be a half-hour), the summit meeting, Obama had an almost open schedule on that day, with only a late-afternoon meeting with Sen. Blanche Lincoln on the agenda.

 

Then in February Obama announced that he would not attend a U.S.-EU Summit in Madrid, Spain, scheduled to take place in May, thus ensuring the meeting would be canceled.

 

The Obama Administration got off to a rocky start diplomatically when it embarrassed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown by giving him official White House presents -- U.S. formatted DVDs that could not played in Great Britain due to different formatting, for example -- that created the impression Obama didn't seem to care much for Brown. He later, in meeting Queen Elizabeth II gave her an iPod, loaded with podcasts of his major speeches.

 

"People may not have liked some of the Bush Administration's style, but at least President Bush came to meetings and was gracious," says a current State Department staffer. " I won't say that the Europeans are missing Bush, but they feel that President Obama just doesn't care about the 'special relationship' that has existed between American and Europe. He's made it worse, not better."

 

link

[Ursa Majoris]

Stupak -- who betrayed the pro-life community

 

Stopped reading right here. Whole thing is BS.

[driveby]

Stopped reading right here. Whole thing is BS.

natch

[wiegie]

I read the whole thing to the end and found it fitting that the last sentence:

" I won't say that the Europeans are missing Bush, but they feel that President Obama just doesn't care about the 'special relationship' that has existed between American and Europe. He's made it worse, not better."

is so amazingly laughable that it makes it impossible to take anything else in the article seriously at all

Edited March 29, 2010 by wiegie

[driveby]

I read the whole thing to the end and found it fitting that the last sentence:

 

is so amazingly laughable that it makes it impossible to take anything else in the article seriously at all

you guys are determined to stubbornly hang on to the bitter end aren't you? kudos.

[wiegie]

you guys are determined to stubbornly hang on to the bitter end aren't you? kudos.

yes, I stubbornly held on to the bitter end of the article hoping it would get better. it didn't

Edited March 29, 2010 by wiegie

[detlef]

you guys are determined to stubbornly hang on to the bitter end aren't you? kudos.

If, by disregarding a story laced with crap like what Ursa and wegie pointed which, even if those things don't bother you, is essentially complaining that an industry that's been bilking the American people for mad cash for decades is now going to make a bunch less money is, "stubbornly hanging on"?

 

Then yes, that's what I'm doing.

 

Seriously the, "But if we can't bend everyone over, then we won't have enough money to pay our employees" argument is getting sort of old.

[driveby]

Which part is crap?

 

The part where Obama doesn't know or care how business operates?

The part where nobody who voted for the bill read it, and if they did had no clue what it meant?

Or the part where Obama seems to have gone out of his way to piss off the Europeans?

[Azazello1313]

I read the whole thing to the end and found it fitting that the last sentence:

 

is so amazingly laughable that it makes it impossible to take anything else in the article seriously at all

 

I would like to hear a serious argument as to how exactly the obama administration has significantly improved our relationships with our allies. because I don't think they really have. mind you, I don't think they have made them significantly worse either (except for israel, but I actually blame them more than us for that one). that is simply not how this stuff works. if anything is "amazingly laughable", it's the idea that foreign relations is some sort of likeability contest.

[wiegie]

I would like to hear a serious argument as to how exactly the obama administration has significantly improved our relationships with our allies. because I don't think they really have. mind you, I don't think they have made them significantly worse either (except for israel, but I actually blame them more than us for that one). that is simply not how this stuff works. if anything is "amazingly laughable", it's the idea that foreign relations is some sort of likeability contest.

uh, why are you arguing with me here when you agree with me that the article is wrong about Obama having made things worse?

[Azazello1313]

uh, why are you arguing with me here when you agree with me that the article is wrong about Obama having made things worse?

 

I was responding to an issue you brought up by offering my own thoughts. you probably don't need to be quite so defensive

 

if you agree that relations with our allies aren't any better or worse than they were under bush, and that such notions are pretty silly to begin with, then we have nothing to argue about

[Pope Flick]

natch

 

 

 

I thought we had stopped caring what Old Europe thought of us anyways.

[Dr. Sacrebleu]

Which part is crap?

 

The part where Obama doesn't know or care how business operates?

The part where nobody who voted for the bill read it, and if they did had no clue what it meant?

Or the part where Obama seems to have gone out of his way to piss off the Europeans?

 

I live in Europe.

I won't try to argue all your other points, but that last part in the article is utterly, totally, and completely wrong.

Obama's standing amongst European citizenry is still stratospherically high. And while there has been some tension between sarkozy and obama, to say that Obama has made things worse is preposterous. Just remember how much the french hated Bush, and the fact that we didn't send any troops to Irak just to remember the french relationship with Bush then.

[wiegie]

Which part is crap?

...

Or the part where Obama seems to have gone out of his way to piss off the Europeans?

Obama's standing amongst European citizenry is still stratospherically high.

Oh Sac, don't you know anything? It's clear that Obama went out of his way to try to piss off the Europeans and, like with everything else he has attempted, he just failed.

[Azazello1313]

Obama's standing amongst European citizenry is still stratospherically high.

 

which means next to squat, except that his politics are closer to their own than his predecessor's.

[Ursa Majoris]

which means next to squat, except that his politics are closer to their own than his predecessor's.

If it's true that the opinion of the citizenry means squat, then we can safely ignore the Teabag folks since they are citizenry too.

 

Glad that's settled.

[detlef]

If it's true that the opinion of the citizenry means squat, then we can safely ignore the Teabag folks since they are citizenry too.

 

Glad that's settled.

I'd like to think we can simply ignore them without casting the entire citizenry into the same pot.

[Azazello1313]

If it's true that the opinion of the citizenry means squat, then we can safely ignore the Teabag folks since they are citizenry too.

 

Glad that's settled.

 

would you say the tea party movement's opinion of gordon brown is particularly relevant for british politics?

[driveby]

Oh Sac, don't you know anything? It's clear that Obama went out of his way to try to piss off the Europeans and, like with everything else he has attempted, he just failed.

Obama Slights Our Friends, Kowtows to Our Enemies

By Michael Barone

 

Barack Obama's decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia -- to a democracy with the world's largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century -- is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America's friends and kowtow to our enemies.

 

Examples run from Britain to Israel. Early in his administration, Obama returned a bust of Churchill that the British government had loaned the White House after 9/11. Then Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that don't work on British machines and that Brown, who has impaired vision, would have trouble watching anyway.

 

More recently, Obama summoned Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, permitted no photographs, laid down non-negotiable demands and went off to dinner.

 

Some may attribute these slights to biases inherited from the men who supplied the titles of Obama's two books. Perhaps like Barack Obama Sr., he regards the British as evil colonialists. Or perhaps like his preacher for 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he regards Israel as an evil oppressor.

 

But the list of American friends Obama has slighted is long. It includes Poland and the Czech Republic (anti-missile program cancelled), Honduras (backing the constitutionally ousted president), Georgia (no support against Russia), and Colombia and South Korea (no action on pending free trade agreements).

 

In the meantime, Obama sends yearly greetings to (as he puts it) the Islamic Republic of Iran, exchanges friendly greetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, caves to Russian demands on arms control and sends a new ambassador to Syria.

 

What we're seeing, I think, is a president who shares a view, long held by some on the American left, that the real danger to America often comes from America's allies.

 

This attitude goes back to Gen. Joseph Stilwell's feud against China's Chiang Kai-shek in World War II. As Barbara Tuchman writes in her definitive biography, Stilwell thought Chiang was undercutting the U.S. by not fighting hard enough against the Japanese. He may have shared the view common among some "old China hands" -- diplomats and journalists like Edgar Snow -- that the Chinese communists were preferable.

 

After China fell to the communists, the old China hands got a fair share of the blame, and liberals who opposed military support of Chiang were vilified. This lesson was not forgotten.

 

In his first book on Vietnam, David Halberstam argued that the Diem brothers were not fighting hard enough against the communists. I remember him telling a group at the Harvard Crimson at the time how the U.S. needed to replace the Diems in order for liberals to avoid a political backlash like that against the old China hands.

 

The idea that allies can cause you trouble is not totally without merit. The Cold War caused us to embrace some unsavory folks. Democratic administrations supported military takeovers in Brazil in 1964 and Greece in 1967, just as a Republican administration supported one in Chile in 1973.

 

But liberals tend to forget the first two examples and remain fixated on the third. They see history as moving inevitably and beneficially to the left and bemoan American alliances with what they see as retrograde right-wing regimes.

 

They want us to look more favorably on those like Chavez and Fidel Castro, who claim they are helping the poor. Somehow it is seen as progressive to cuddle up to those who attack America and to scorn those who have shown their friendship and common values over many years.

 

And so Obama, the object of so much adulation in Western Europe, seems to have had only the coolest of relations with its leaders. The candidate who spoke in Berlin is now the president with no sympathy for the leaders of peoples freed when the wall fell. They are seen as impediments to his goal of propitiating Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Joseph Stalin is now an honored hero.

 

Obama's concessions to Russia have not prevented Russia from watering down sanctions against Iran. And Obama's display of scorning Netanyahu has not gotten the Palestinians to sit down face-to-face with the Israelis, as Netanyahu has promised to do.

 

Obama proclaims that through persistence he can make the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and the Palestinians see things our way. The evidence so far is that they are making him do things their way -- and that our friends are wondering whether it pays to be on America's side.

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

What, no mention of Obama's overratures to Russia netting an agreement to cut our nukes by 1/3 each?

 

FAIR AND BALANCED!

[Azazello1313]

What, no mention of Obama's overratures to Russia netting an agreement to cut our nukes by 1/3 each?

 

those "overratures" are overrated.

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

Palin Tells Constitution-Loving Tea Partiers: We Don’t Need A President Who Is A ‘Constitutional Law Professor’

The Tea Party movement loves to express its affection for the Constitution. The Los Angeles Times writes, “Adherence to what supporters deem to be a strict interpretation of constitutional principles is a key tenet of the tea party movement.” Yesterday’s Tea Party rally in Searchlight, NV, for instance, was filled with imagery of the Constitution. Protesters carried signs that read “I honor the Constitution” and “What about the Constitution don’t you understand?” Rally attendee Norman Halfpenny, a 77-year old retired Marine Corps veteran, said, “We need to get our Constitution back.”

 

In her speech at the rally, Sarah Palin of course paid homage to the Constitution. “Our vision for America is anchored in time-tested truths that the government that governs least governs best, that the Constitution provides the path to a more perfect union — it’s the Constitution,” she exclaimed. And so it’s extremely puzzling that Palin introduced this new attack line against President Obama yesterday:

 

In these volatile times when we are a nation at war, now more than ever is when we need a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor lecturing us from a lectern.

 

Ironically, the crowd cheered wildly at Palin’s line. Watch it:

 

 

Perhaps the Tea Partiers feel more comfortable with an “MBA President” who leads the country into economic and international crises.