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Out-Foxed and Out-Flanked: The Incredible Shrinking Obama Presidency

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With each passing day, President Barack Obama’s once bright and shining star grows dimmer and dimmer as winter — and unemployment — casts its long shadow of discontent across America.  The recent loss of 63 Democratic seats in the House of Representatives last month, shrinking the Democrats’ hold on Washington and flipping the House to new Republican leadership in January and the stunning Wikileaks debacle, landed more body blows to the White House, which seems to be reeling from their political misfortunes.

Elected under the rubric of “change” and  a new politics in 2008 that reflected the “no drama Obama” rationality and insistence upon respectful political discourse (it takes two to have a conversation,) Obama soon found out just how disinterested the Grand Old Party was about respecting his mandate.  They didn’t care that he was victorious by winning with 53 percent of the popular vote and by garnering a whopping 365 electoral college votes.

Nor did they respect him, as they promptly set out with vengeance to show him just how little regard they had for the first black president of the United States.

There was no honeymoon for Obama, just as there was none for Bill Clinton, the last Democrat to be president.

From the beginning of Obama’s presidency, the Republicans and their allies have worked assiduously to undermine his credibility and have achieved significant success in casting doubt among the American public about whether he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii (even former Republican Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle verified Obama was born in Honolulu’s Kapiolani Women and Children’s hospital,) and have convinced a substantial number of Americans, nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they wrongly think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent reported in March 2009, according to a recent Pew poll  taken last summer.  The White House was so concerned about the polling results that it was forced to issue a statement reasserting that the president is a self-professed Christian.

A political maxim taught from time immemorial, that every blow landed by one’s opponent should be immediately returned, was haughtily dismissed as “old politics” (i.e. Clintonian like, thus the “old politics”) by the Obama White House, to their great detriment.  The relentless media-pounding applied by Republican surrogates went un-returned by Obama’s “new politics,” driving down his polling numbers.  Coupled with a protracted legislative health care reform fight that went curiously undefended by the White House during the summer of 2009, Obama miraculously pulled victory from the jaws of defeat when he signed the health care reform bill into law, only to maddeningly run away from this incredible achievement during the recent elections.

Since Bill Clinton’s election to the presidency in 1992 the Republicans have been on a hell-bent destructive path of no holds barred and scorched earth approach to governance as participants in our two-party system via their tactics of obstruction, denigration, defamation, blocking, filibustering and lying repeatedly about the aims and intentions of Democrats elected to the White House and on the Hill.  The cumulative effect of these strategies has resulted in fewer Americans trusting government, and now in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, more and more feel that America’s best days are behind us.

In this environment with Democratic blood on the water, the president looks more naive and politically incompetent with each passing day.  As Howard Fineman reported yesterday at the Huffington Post, he does not seem to enjoy the rough and tumble of legislative battle and continues to underestimate the Republican appetite to drive his White House into further retreat.

His lack of experience as a legislator was betrayed this week when Obama announced the White House had had a good meeting with the GOP leadership about issues they could “work together on.”  Obama’s understanding was put into stark relief in less than 24 hours as the Republicans reflected their “good will” by informing Senator Harry Reid they would filibuster all issues, including unemployment compensation, before the Senate in the remaining days of the lame duck session, until the Bush tax cuts are extended to all Americans, regardless of income.

Official unemployment figures hover at nearly 10 percent across America and that does not include thousands of unemployed who have not worked in over two years.  Many parts of the country have slid into depression-like circumstances:  food pantry demands continue to rise; homeless families numbers are up; food stamp demands continue to rise and the underemployed have lost their health insurance and other benefits as demands for public assistance fall to local and state governments, who are also cash strapped as revenues have dried up.  Many educated workers in their 50s and 60s have lost their homes, wiped out their IRAs and 401ks just to survive, believing they will never return full-time to the work force with previous levels of income and compensation.

This is the situation that faces President Obama and the Democratic Party.  If this president is unable to persuasively address the basic needs of a battered middle class and convince them that he will lead us out of this terrible morass, he will be a one-term president and deservedly so.

In the aftermath of the midterm elections, Obama has not demonstrated he is up to the task.  He needs to roll up his sleeves and get engaged in this political fight for the country and his presidency.  We are waiting, but time is running out on Barack Obama and his once believed great promise.

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JD Vance Schooled by German Ambassador Over Defense of Far-Right ‘Nazi-Lite’ Party

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January 2, 2025

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Vice President-elect JD Vance, the Republican Senator from Ohio, is facing criticism both domestically and internationally for endorsing and seemingly defending an op-ed by Elon Musk that is supportive of a far-right German political party reportedly linked to neo-Nazis.

The New York Times late last month described the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, as “a group with ties to neo-Nazis whose youth wing has been classified as ‘confirmed extremist’ by German domestic intelligence.” The paper of record also noted that AfD has been “called a threat to German democracy” by Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz and others.

“News that members of the AfD attended a secret meeting with the Austrian extreme-right provocateur Martin Sellner, who has admitted to once being a member of a neo-Nazi group and has called for deporting migrants en masse, led to large protests early this year,” The Times also reported. “Then, starting in May, a leading light of the party was twice given a hefty fine for using Nazi-era slogans during campaign stops.”

On Thursday, Vance reposted a thread containing what is allegedly Musk’s op-ed translated into English, titled, “Only the AfD Can Save Germany.”

READ MORE: Republicans Use New Year’s Attacks to Push Border Narrative and Fast-Track Trump Nominees

The Vice President-elect then wrote: “I’m not endorsing a party in the German elections, as it’s not my country and we hope to have good relations with all Germans. But this is an interesting piece. Also interesting; American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite, But AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.”

Vance’s remarks were quickly criticized, with some discussing post-World War II German reunification in 1990, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, to explain how geography has little to do with opposing Nazism. Others suggested Vance’s geographic claim was actually wrong.

And despite Vance’s claim, The Economist as some noted, in 2019 reported: “Post-war population transfers changed politics across Germany,” and added that “a new paper finds an uncomfortable overlap between the parts of Germany that support the afd and those that voted for the Nazis in 1933. At first glance, the link is invisible. The Nazis fared well in northern states like Schleswig-Holstein; the afd did best in the former East Germany.”

Germany’s Ambassador to the U.S., Andreas Michaelis, politely schooled the right-wing American Senator slated to be sworn in as Vice President in just weeks.

“Interesting observation, Senator JD Vance,” Ambassador Michaelis wrote. “Historical context can be tricky – while some areas you are referring to resisted the Nazi party early on, others did not, or later became strongholds of the regime. Germany’s history reminds us how important it is to challenge extremism in all its forms.”

READ MORE: Trump Calls for CIA to Act Inside US, Raising Legal Concerns, During Midnight Tirade

The Bulwark’s Cathy Young blasted the Vice President-elect.

“Vance is now literally channeling old-time Soviet propaganda by portraying the communist-controlled areas of Germany as the most genuinely anti-Nazi,” she observed. “Yes, AfD is most popular in former East Germany, partly b/c people there never got an education that stressed the evil of racism.”

Berlin-based journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker James Jackson responded to Vance by offering a cartographic refutation.

Last month, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) wrote that the “AfD‘s mission is to rehabilitate the image of the Nazi movement. One leader’s license plate is an open tribute to Hitler. A top AfD official said about migrants, ‘We can always shoot them later…or gas them.’ Another described Judaism as the ‘inner enemy’ in Germany.”

READ MORE: US Sanctions Russian and Iranian Entities for 2024 Election Interference Attempts

 

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

 

 

 

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Republicans Use New Year’s Attacks to Push Border Narrative and Fast-Track Trump Nominees

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12 hours ago

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January 2, 2025

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Despite the suspects in both New Year’s possible terror attacks being Americans and either current or former U.S. military personnel, House and Senate Republicans are leveraging the incidents to advance Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant “America First” agenda, calling for closing down the border and pressing for swift confirmation of the President-elect’s highly controversial national security nominees—including those described by some as “unqualified” or even “dangerously unqualified.”

“First and foremost, close our border,” U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a former Green Beret, told “Fox & Friends when asked what should be done to protect the nation from further attacks,” The Daily Beast reports. Waltz is Trump’s nominee to become Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), also known as the President’s National Security Advisor (NSA).

“I can’t emphasize enough, close the border, secure our sovereignty, you know, and that is completely unacceptable,” Waltz also said on the right-wing cable channel. “The entire world knows that we have an open border. They intend to hit us, and they are pushing people into our interior to do just that.”

The suspect in the deadly New Orleans attack was a U.S. citizen from Texas, and the “suspected driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded Wednesday outside the Trump International Las Vegas Hotel has been identified as active duty Army soldier Matthew Livelsberger, according to an official briefed on the probe,” CBS News reported.

The Daily Beast Thursday afternoon reported the “man suspected of being behind Tesla Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas was a ‘big’ supporter of Donald Trump and voted for him in November, a senior law enforcement official tells the Daily Beast.”

READ MORE: Trump Calls for CIA to Act Inside US, Raising Legal Concerns, During Midnight Tirade

“The U.S. Senate must confirm President Trump’s national security team as soon as possible. Lives depend on it,” wrote U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) at 1:29 PM on January 1.

“The U.S. Senate must confirm President Trump’s national security picks as soon as possible,” said U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), barely one hour later, at 2:44 PM on January 1.

U.S. Senator John Thune (R-SD), who will become Senate Majority Leader, called the New Orleans attack “a clear example of why the Senate must get President Trump’s national security team in place as quickly as possible.”

U.S. Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), also pushed the border control narrative, on Fox Business on Thursday.

Eric Columbus, who served as special litigation counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of General Counsel, responded to Weber’s remarks by calling it a “Great opportunity for Dems not to defend Biden but to insist that the GOP take the danger seriously and reject nominees plainly unsuited to the task — like [Kash] Patel and [Tulsi] Gabbard.”

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, just endorsed by Trump for a second term, declared Thursday that the New Orleans attack—whose suspect is a Texan and former military—the FBI is investigating as terrorism—is the reason House Republicans passed “the strongest border security act ever passed by Congress.”

READ MORE: US Sanctions Russian and Iranian Entities for 2024 Election Interference Attempts

Republicans, Johnson also said, have repeatedly expressed concerns about what he called “the wide-open border” in a Fox News segment on the possible domestic terrorism attack in New Orleans. Johnson discussed “the idea that dangerous people were coming here in droves, potentially setting up potentially terrorist cells around the country.”

Punchbowl News on Thursday reported the “New Orleans attack could help limit confirmation drama” for Trump’s “most-controversial” national security nominees, and specified them as “Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth, FBI nominee Kash Patel, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), the nominee for director of national intelligence.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump Medicare Pick Dr. Oz Says Uninsured ‘Don’t Have Right to Health’ in Resurfaced Clip

 

Image via Reuters

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Trump Calls for CIA to Act Inside US, Raising Legal Concerns, During Midnight Tirade

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15 hours ago

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January 2, 2025

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President-elect Donald Trump, in an angry midnight rant, criticized the United States on multiple fronts and called for the Central Intelligence Agency, a U.S. civilian foreign intelligence entity, to conduct investigations within the United States—a move potentially unlawful and contrary to its charter, and a possible threat to Americans’ civil rights. Hours later, he appeared to directly blame President Joe Biden for the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, currently under FBI investigation as an act of terrorism.

Declaring America a “disaster,” and a “laughing stock all over the World,” Trump, early Thursday morning, alleged the U.S. has “open borders,” and “weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership.”

He also claimed the “DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors” are “incompetent and corrupt” and “have not done their job,” but rather, “spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself.”

“Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to our Country,” Trump declared, never specifying what he was railing against, before calling for the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate.

READ MORE: US Sanctions Russian and Iranian Entities for 2024 Election Interference Attempts

“The CIA must get involved, NOW, before it is too late. The USA is breaking down – A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it. See you on January 20th,” Trump announced, referring to his upcoming inauguration, before closing with his slogan.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, pointing to Trump’s Truth Social post, reported that the President-elect “again seems to connect the attack in New Orleans to the border.”

The suspect in that attack is a 42-year-old American from Texas, a U.S. military veteran, who is believed to have plowed a pickup truck into people celebrating on historic Bourbon Street in New Orleans early on New Years’ Day, killing 14 or 15 people, and injuring many others. The attack is being investigated by the FBI as an act of terrorism, according to multiple reports.

“The FBI said the suspect, who was killed in a firefight with officers, had an ISIS flag in the vehicle at the time of the attack,” CNN reported Thursday.

Despite the suspect being an American and a veteran, Trump had implied the attack had been carried out by an undocumented immigrant.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump had claimed Wednesday. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!”

Reporting that Trump had “shared anti-immigrant misinformation moments after an inaccurate report from Fox News,” HuffPost notes that “Fox News had reported minutes prior to Trump’s Truth Social post that the vehicle used by the suspect had crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, from Mexico two days before the attack. Just over an hour later, the conservative network retracted that reporting, saying its sources had advised that the truck crossed the border on Nov. 16 apparently driven by someone else. Later in the afternoon, it reported that the truck never crossed over from Mexico.”

As Raw Story reported Wednesday afternoon, Fox News delivered an on-air fact check of Trump’s remarks.

“Now the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in a statement, meaning into our country, but to be clear,” Fox News justice correspondent David Spunt told viewers (video below), “the suspect was born in the United States, he served in the United States Army, he was a veteran, the FBI is the lead agency in this investigation going through the social media and any other accounts associated with the suspect.”

READ MORE: Trump Medicare Pick Dr. Oz Says Uninsured ‘Don’t Have Right to Health’ in Resurfaced Clip

Later Thursday morning, Trump doubled down, this time directly attacking President Joe Biden.

“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER. What he and his group of Election Interfering ‘thugs’ have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA,” Trump posted to his Truth Social account.

In 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA, “directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration.”

“Under the 1947 act setting up the C.I.A., the agency was forbidden to have ‘police, subpoena, law enforcement powers or internal security functions’ inside the United States. Those responsibilities fall to the F.B.I., which maintains a special internal security unit to deal with foreign intelligence threats,” The Times had reported.

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump Claims Dems Will Use ‘All Sorts of Tricks’ to Stall Controversial Nominees

 

Image via Reuters

 

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