President-elect Obama's Weekly Address

In the final weekly address of 2008, President-elect Barack Obama calls for the season of giving to also be a season of common purpose and shared citizenship.

Optimism High About Obama Policies, Poll Finds

Interesting story from the Washington Post:

Most Americans are optimistic about the policies that Barack Obama will pursue when he becomes the country's 44th president next month, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, and there is a widespread public desire that he quickly expand his focus beyond the economy, the dominant issue facing the country.

...Nearly seven in 10 are optimistic about Obama's overall policies, including substantial percentages of Republicans and those who backed GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in last month's election (45 and 39 percent, respectively).

More than two-thirds said they think Obama will be able to make significant improvements to the health-care system, and as many expect him to implement policies to reduce global warming -- which 75 percent said he should, including half of Republicans. Sixty-four percent of all those polled said Obama will be able to end U.S. involvement in Iraq.

The full Biden interview on 'This Week'

If you missed the Joe Biden interview on This Week this morning, you can watch the full interview by clicking here.

Biden to appear on This Week tomorrow morning

Vice President-Elect Joe Biden is scheduled to appear on ABC's This Week tomorrow, December 21. Locally, the show can be seen on Channel 9 at 9:00 am. Please tune in!

President-elect Obama's Weekly Address

This morning, President-elect Obama introduced the team of men and women who will head up the nation's major scientific departments.

Life-and-death questions dog health-care debate

Jay Bookman makes some great points in his most recent column:

With a dog’s life at stake, you can think through the problem in terms of cost and benefit. With a human being, it would be inconceivable. And that’s not because an insurance company or other third party would pay most of the bill.

No, you don’t ask the price because with a human life at stake, it wouldn’t matter. You already know that whatever the cost, you’re going to do everything possible to pay it.

And in economic terms, that’s the problem. In theory, a willing seller and willing buyer will work out a fair price, with the potential buyer free to walk away if no deal can be struck. But when you combine a willing seller with a desperate, maybe pain-wracked or hope-starved buyer, the market warps and theory fails. The buyer is in no position to say no, and as a result can’t demand a lower price.

Bunning's questionable financial arrangements

In a story posted today, the Herald-Leader exposes Jim Bunning's shady dealings:

The non-profit Jim Bunning Foundation, which collects the money the former pitcher gets from autographing baseball memorabilia, has taken in more than $504,000, Senate and tax records show.

Of that, Bunning has earned $180,000 in salary for working a reported hour a week.

...Watchdog groups this week said the foundation blurs a number of Senate ethics and Internal Revenue Service rules regarding outside income for members of Congress, legitimate uses for tax-exempt charities and whether Bunning — as a paid employee — improperly dominates the foundation's board.

The Republican attack on working folks

Eugene Robinson has a great column in today's Washington Post, highlighting the Republican effort to blame the current economic crisis on organized labor. Here's an excerpt:

It may be that General Motors, Chrysler and Ford are lumbering, Jurassic beasts that deserve their looming extinction. But only a free-market fundamentalist, a lunatic or a Senate Republican -- perhaps that's redundant -- would conclude that now is the moment to hasten Detroit's demise.

...The thing to do is give the automakers the money to buy some time. This is obvious to the current administration, the incoming administration, a majority in the House of Representatives and the Democrats in the Senate -- but not to the Senate Republicans. They killed the bailout measure by demanding that the United Auto Workers agree to sharp, almost immediate cuts in wages and benefits.

Funny, I don't recall a cry from Senate Republicans for salary caps on the stockbrokers whose jobs were saved in the Wall Street bailout. Nor, to my knowledge, have they demanded that white-collar workers in the auto companies take pay cuts. I do recall lectures from some Republicans in the Senate about how inadvisable it is for government to meddle in the workings of the free market. In my book, renegotiating labor contracts qualifies as meddling.

Marie Cocco likewise addresses the Republicans' tactics:

I must admit that when the danger of a global financial implosion became apparent in March with the taxpayer-backed takeover of Bear Stearns by banking giant JP Morgan Chase, I did not understand how all those worthless Wall Street credit swaps really could be the fault of an overpaid union welder at an auto plant somewhere in Michigan.

Heck. Despite having once listened as Republican leader Tom DeLay gave a House speech blaming the 1999 Columbine High School shootings on mothers who use birth control and the teaching of evolution in schools, I still underestimate the peculiar genius conservative Republicans show in exploiting dire, even tragic, situations to wield a partisan cudgel.

Senate Republicans' effort to break the United Auto Workers union as the pound of flesh they wanted in exchange for loans to teetering automakers -- companies that are on the brink because of a credit crisis they did not cause -- was over the top, even drawing objections from the Bush White House. The administration is now rushing to find money for Detroit somewhere in the huge pot of financial-industry bailouts, lest the automakers go down and take what's left of the economy with them.

It's obvious that the current economy cannot afford a failure of the automakers:

In its latest effort to try and stimulate the U.S. economy, the Federal Reserve cut its key interest rate to a range of between zero percent and 0.25%, and said it expects to keep rates near that unprecedented low level for some time to come.

The central bank typically sets a specific target for its federal funds rate instead of a range. The rate had previously been at 1% and this marks the first time the Fed has cut rates below 1%. Most investors were expecting the Fed to cut rates to either 0.25% or 0.5%.

Unfortunately, Senate Republicans are willing to allow the economy to collapse in order to pick a fight with organized labor. Simply outrageous.

Obama Will Bring Different Approach

CQ Politics has a very good article today:

President-elect Barack Obama is certain to dial back some of President Bush’s views of executive power, including the use of executive privilege to prevent White House aides from complying with congressional subpoenas, a group of scholars said at a Washington conference last week.

The conference, organized by Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich., brought together leading political scientists for one of the first wide-ranging assessments of Bush’s nearly eight years in office.

One consensus was that Bush repeatedly set shaky legal precedents by invoking powers that are implied, but not explicitly spelled out, in Article 2 of the Constitution.

Now a good time for the brain to make a comeback

Stanley Crouch has a good column today. Here's an excerpt:

Last week we learned that Joe the supposed plumber was appalled by John McCain, who made him feel "dirty." Joe was very, very impressed by Sarah Palin, however, whose sincerity he thinks makes her the real deal. That is what is wrong with the Republicans at this very moment, the idea that feelings are more important than facts.

Since Palin is too young and energetic to be suffering memory loss at this point in her life, the only explanation for not knowing the specifics of the vice president's job is the kind of contempt for knowledge that the Alaskan governor would never accept from a fellow lover of the hunt who didn't know the difference between a moose and a cow.

...This is a serious indication of something else. For too long the Republican brain has been placed on the dry ice of fear and smear tactics, pontifications and divisive attitudes based in separating the wheat of the good, common and unsophisticated people from the chaff of elite intellectuals who lived not in small towns but in big cities.

Click here to read the entire piece.

President-Elect Obama's Weekly Address

Earlier today, President-elect Barack Obama named his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The AFP has more:

US president-elect Barack Obama on Saturday tapped Shaun Donovan for secretary of housing and urban development, taking another step in the formation of his future cabinet.

Donovan, currently the New York City Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development, is an architect who previously served in the Housing Department under former president Bill Clinton.

He "will bring to this important post fresh thinking, unencumbered by old ideology and outdated ideas," Obama said in his weekly radio address.

Here's the video of Obama's address:

Gov Beshear coming to NKY

Governor Steve Beshear is coming to Northern Kentucky next week for a town hall meeting. The meeting will be held at 7:00 pm on December 18 at the Grant County High School Auditorium, and he'll be discussing how to address Kentucky's $456 million revenue shortfall.

Please attend if you can. The address is 715 Warsaw Road in Dry Ridge. Here's a map:


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Panel blames White House, not soldiers, for abuse

From the Associated Press:

The physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the direct result of Bush administration detention policies and should not be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Thursday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report concludes that harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA and the U.S. military were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare special forces personnel to resist interrogation by enemies that torture and abuse prisoners. The techniques included forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.

...Administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers -- the work "of a few bad apples." Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., called that "both unconscionable and false."

Click here to read the entire article.

Obama's 'Meet the Press' interview

In case you missed it, here's the video of Obama's appearance on Meet the Press from yesterday morning.

Obama's weekly address

This week President-elect Barack Obama addresses the job loss that our nation continues to endure and offers solutions to the challenges we face. For more information, visit http://change.gov.

Obama to appear on Meet the Press this Sunday

President-elect Barack Obama is scheduled to appear on NBC's Meet the Press this Sunday, December 7. Locally, the show can be seen on Channel 5 at 10:00 Sunday morning. Please tune in!

Is Bunning being obstructionist?

Last Friday, TPM Muckraker pointed out that an anonymous Republican Senator was blocking the appointment of Neil Barofsky:

Earlier this month, the Bush administration nominated Neil Barofsky, a federal prosecutor, to be the Treasury Department's special inspector general on the bailout program. That's a crucial post, given the astronomical sums at issue, the broad authority that Treasury has been given to distribute them, the concerns that have been raised about possible conflicts of interest, and the general urgency of our efforts to prevent an economic collapse.

So you'd think Congress would be doing everything it could to get Barofsky confirmed right away. You'd be wrong.

Last week, Sen. Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the banking committee, issued a little-noticed statement saying that although the nomination "was cleared by members of the Senate Banking Committee, the leadership of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and all Democratic Senators," it was "blocked on the floor by at least one Republican member." (itals ours.)

TPM has been looking into which Republican Senator is responsible for this obstructionism, and here's what they found:

It's looking more and more like -- as we suspected -- Kentucky GOP senator Jim Bunning is the guy who placed the anonymous hold on the nomination of Neil Barofsky to the crucial post of special inspector general for the bailout.

If you'd like to call Jim Bunning to ask him if he's blocking the Barofsky appointment, his office can be reached at 859-341-2602.

Poll: Americans feel good about Obama

The latest poll from USA Today:

President-elect Barack Obama gets soaring marks for his handling of the transition and his choices for the Cabinet, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, even at a time the public is downbeat over the economy.

More than three of four Americans, including a majority of Republicans, approve of the job Obama has done so far — broad-based support he'll need as he faces tough decisions ahead.

By 69%-25%, those surveyed approve of his pick of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his former Democratic primary rival, as secretary of State.

Read the details by clicking here.

Obama’s team realizes world more complex

Today's column by Jay Bookman is excellent. Here's an excerpt:

The national security team scheduled to be announced today by President-elect Barack Obama is a serious, pragmatic group of people, and for that reason alone it provides a welcome contrast to the neoconservative radicals brought into power by President Bush.

Hillary Clinton at the State Department; Jim Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, as national security adviser; Robert Gates, a longtime mainstream Republican, remaining at the Department of Defense — they are also a far cry from the Marxist, pacifist, naive radicals that Republicans claimed would come into power with Obama.

Gates, Clinton and Jones come from very different professional backgrounds, but they share an understanding with the president-elect that diplomacy must be our primary means of engaging with the world, with military power held in reserve and used only as needed.

Click here to read the entire piece.