Category: Politics

Insight Into Obama’s Dad Surfaces

Long-lost article by Obama’s dad surfaces – Ben Smith and Jeffrey Ressner – Politico.com

Now, a long-forgotten essay written 43 years ago by Obama’s father has surfaced, and its contents reveal much not only about the senior Obama’s grasp of economic theory but also the iconoclastic politics that, his son would later write, sent him into the spiral of career disappointment that concluded with his death in 1982 in his native Kenya.

Parts of the article, titled “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” have been making the rounds on several small blogs over the past week, but Politico is now reproducing the entire piece in its original form online for the first time.

Don’t Blame Trade

A Speech About Nothing – New York Times
Barack Obama delivered a speech in Pittsburgh on Monday on the economic stresses facing American workers. In the speech, he devoted one clause in one sentence to the single biggest factor affecting the workplace: technological change. He then devoted 45 sentences to one of the least important: trade deals.

Economists differ over how much outsourcing will change the American job market in the future, but there is little evidence that trade has been a major cause of job loss or even wage stagnation so far. As Robert Z. Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote in a recent study: “The recent increase in U.S. inequality … has little to do with global forces that might especially affect unskilled workers — namely, immigration and expanded trade with developing countries.”

And yet all Democratic domestic policy discussions have to start with trade and, in 99.9 percent of the cases, end with trade. Continue reading “Don’t Blame Trade”

Obama Bashed For Telling It Like It Is

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog
As soon as I think Obama’s pandering too much on economics, he says something this blunt and wise. Of course people get nasty and scared and cling to old shibboleths when they’re feeling vulnerable on economics! That’s the entire history of our country. Read Benjamin Friedman’s brilliant Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.

How either McCain or Clinton try to pass this off as “elitism” is just goofy. Obama’s problem is that he’s a lot more honest than either of them. He sees the world more accurately, and when he speaks truth in that direction, he gets chastised by the Boomers with their quintessential ideological view of things.

Yes, we need to connect to middle class ideology again, just like around 1880-1910. But this time it’s a global middle class ideology, so trade protectionism isn’t the answer, unless you’re looking to resurrect fascism again, which I’m sure would seem familiar enough to McCain, given his age, but for the Millennials, that stuff is ancient history. We’ve got to connect to this rising global middle class. That’s where the ideological struggle of the future lies.

Billion-dollar IT failure at Census Bureau

Billion-dollar IT failure at Census Bureau | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com

The US Census Bureau faces cost overruns up to $2 billion on an IT initiative replacing paper-based data collection methods with specialized handheld devices for the upcoming 2010 census. The Bureau has not implemented longstanding Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendations and may therefore be forced to scrap the program. Harris Corp., the contractor associated with this incompetently managed initiative, was awarded a $600 million contract to develop the handhelds and related software.

Managing an $11 billion initiative is a daunting task and unforeseen problems are inevitable. Nonetheless, the GAO, going back to January, 2005, repeatedly identified significant procurement, management, and operational risks associated with this project.

Mrs. Obama’s Lucrative “Public Service”

The Corner on National Review Online
As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.

“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service.

What she doesn’t mention is that the helping industry has treated her pretty well. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office. And that does not count the money Mrs. Obama receives from serving on corporate boards. She would have been O.K. even without Jack’s magic beans.

Many Blacks Fear Obama’s Asssassanation

Many Blacks Fear for Obama’s Safety – TIME
For many older blacks, the barometer for gauging hopes and fears is the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But concern about Obama’s safety transcends racial lines. He has white supporters who see him as an inspiring, youthful advocate of change in the mold of Robert F. Kennedy, and they are mindful of Kennedy’s assassination just two months after King’s.

Pam Hart, the principal of a multiracial elementary school in the Philadelphia suburb of Cheltenham, said she is struck by the contrast between some of the black students there, innocently excited about Obama’s candidacy, and the more anxious perspective of older people who lived through the violence of the 1960s.

Superdelegates For Sale

Capital Eye – Seeking Superdelegates
Because superdelegates will make up around 20 percent of 4,000 delegates to the Democratic convention in August–Republicans don’t have superdelegates—Clinton and Obama are aggressively wooing the more than 400 superdelegates who haven’t yet made up their minds. Since 2005 Obama has given 52 of the undecided superdelegates a total of at least $363,900, while Clinton has given a total of $88,000 to 15 of them. Anticipating that their intense competition for votes in state primaries and caucuses will result in a near-tie going into the nominating convention, the two candidates are making personal calls to superdelegates now, or are recruiting other big names to do so on their behalf. With no specific rules about what can and can’t be done to court these delegates, just about anything goes.

Will the Real Obama Please Stand Up

Here we have the Left-wing citing a litany of links to prove that Obama is a right-winger.
Make Them Accountable / He ain’t a saint: A citizen’s guide to Barack Obama

And then we have the leading Right-wing magazine saying that “Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal‘s 27th annual vote ratings.”

As long as Obama can continue to succeed by just delivering his formidable inspirational message, he can be the “Big Tent”, which will continue to be filled with our hopes. As he said in his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic Convention: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.”

Just like the business cycle, there is the political cycle. There was the Kennedy-era swing to the left and the Reagan counter-swing to the Right. Now with both houses and the presidency held by the Republicans the swing is going back the other way again. With the same party leading the House, Senate & Presidency, the Democrtas will over-reach, just like the Republicans just did, and there will be another counter-reformation. That is the rythmn of life, of change. You can make the analogy back to the counter-reformation against Martin Luther’s revolt from the Catholic Church (the dominant political party of the Middle ages). So if its the Democrats turn, I would gamble on Obama, an unknown, over Hillary, a known.

A school-mate, from a prominent Republican family who is working for Obama, says he is a quick-study and may surprise us. If the Democrats blow it, then the pendulum will swing back again to undo the damage.In the meantime it would really mess with the rest-of-the-world’s head and their preconceptions about the US to elect Obama, especially the Jihadists.

Two-Buck Huck

Two-Buck Huck – Outposts – Op-Extra Columnist – Opinion – – New York Times Blog
Huckabee revels in the class war. He’s Two-Buck Huck, and darn proud of it. He likes nothing better than playing the Hick from Hope. He and his wife lived in a trailer for a while, he points out. His son killed a dog one summer, “a mangy dog” at that, as Huckabee explained to the befuddled national press corps. He said he used to eat squirrels, cooking them up in his popcorn popper. Ewwwwhhh!

And what’s up with that Chuck Norris shadow, following him everywhere like a late-night rerun? To the establishment, Norris is a B-lister with a bad hair dye and a ’70s-era karate shtick. They prefer Bruce Willis – bald Republican action hero.

Huckabee has been telling people in Iowa that Republican higher-ups would never let him become the nominee because he “has a hick last name.” Wow. I’d like to be in on that focus group.

“For my family, summer was never a verb,” he says. Take that, Mitt Romney and your perfect family, costumed in Ralph Lauren casual wear down by the shore. And this: “Wall Street types are afraid to death of a guy like me.” You mean, a guy who lost 110 pounds and cooks squirrels in his popcorn popper? Thanks for Caroline Collier pointing this out.