Have a perfect Friday 😉
Talk to ya tomorrow
Friday – Public events:
12:0PM: The President tours Landover UPS Facility in Maryland
12:20PM: The President delivers remarks at the UPS Facility
Archive for March, 2011
31
Mar
11
‘obama’s momentous april’
President Barack Obama points to Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew during a meeting with senior advisors in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 31, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Robert Shrum (The Week): April is the unforgiving month that will make or break the Obama presidency. It will be a fitting climacteric for a half-term in power that has been an unremitting succession of crises….
In Libya, the president brilliantly passed the first test, securing a multilateral, Arab-sanctioned coalition that took control of the skies above the battleground just in time … He then endured domestic, often nakedly opportunistic criticism…
Now comes the really hard part. Having intervened, the only acceptable outcome is victory – not the partition of Libya, and surely not the resurgence of a mad dictator …
…Mike Rogers, the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who doesn’t seem very smart about the issue, opposes arming the rebels because we don’t know enough about them. But we know all we need to about Gadhafi … maybe Rogers is smart in a cynical and unworthy way, willing to see Gadhafi win if that means Obama loses.
But the politics doesn’t stop there. Most presidents facing a foreign crisis don’t have to contend with a simultaneous domestic threat. Obama does – in the form of a government shutdown or a refusal to raise the debt limit…
On the budget and the debt limit, the Republicans who control only one house of Congress are compelled more to demanding than actually negotiating, pressured internally to hold America hostage to a know-nothing Tea Party fringe….
….Obama, on the campaign trail and in office, has displayed a remarkable combination of patience and then decisiveness. He’s won the big ones. But they don’t come much bigger than they have this month.
The Republicans have a sad sack of 2012 candidates. Their best hope may be a mayday for this presidency. But if I were them, I wouldn’t count on Obama buckling in Libya or bending to Boehner. Instead, for this president, for the country, and for progressive principles here and in the world, April could be both the most trying and, in the end, the best of months.
Full article
President Barack Obama greets four-month-old Alia, daughter of William Jawando, Deputy Associate Director of Public Engagement. March, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
See poll here
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann speaks to millions of Tea Party Patriots at the “Continuing Revolution” rally on Capitol Hill, March 31
Steve Benen: …Tea party organizers had high hopes for their rally today in Washington, DC – high enough hopes that they arranged for Fox to give it live coverage.
Then something sad happened. Just a few dozen people showed up. And Fox, naturally, blamed the weather.
Sen. Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite who has an incentive to exaggerate the crowd size, said 200 people showed up, but if the media footage is at all accurate, even that pathetic number is inflated.
Put in this way: the number of reporters and Republican lawmakers, when combined, rivaled the size of the attendees. That’s not good.
As for Fox News blaming the weather, let’s not forget that tens of thousands of progressive activists showed up in the snow in Wisconsin a few weeks back. With federal spending on the line, today’s Tea Party crowd was less than 1% as big … because of a little rain? That’s just sad.
Chances are, this little get together will be forgotten by dinner time, but part of me wonders if it might end up having the opposite of the intended effect. The goal was to offer a right-wing show of force – with a shutdown deadline looming, lawmakers were supposed to think to themselves, “I better not cross those throngs of activists who gathered at the Capitol on March 31.”
But the point is, practically no one showed up. How many members of Congress will be afraid to cross “those tens of activists” who were on hand today?
Full article here
😆
31
Mar
11
laughing stock
Thank you Nonya for reminding me of this post from December 2009 – here’s yet another person who doesn’t remember the President from his youth in Hawaii 😉
WZAK: A former Manoa resident sent President Barack Obama an old photo of the two of them taken while they were third-grade classmates at Noelani Elementary School, requesting an autograph more than six months ago. He recently received the autographed picture back, as well as a personally signed thank-you note.
Scott Inoue, now a chiropractor in Stockton, Calif., said the small, black-and-white photo had been stashed away for almost 40 years at his childhood home in Manoa. For some reason, Inoue said, as he was growing up he always remembered that photo and wondered what became of “Barry”.
The Obama Diary 
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