Obama Backers Tied to Lobbies Raise Millions
by Eric Lichtblau
The New York Times
October 27, 2011

WASHINGTON — Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.

At least 15 of Mr. Obama's "bundlers" — supporters who contribute their own money to his campaign and solicit it from others — are involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies. They have raised more than $5 million so far for the campaign.

Because the bundlers are not registered as lobbyists with the Senate, the Obama campaign has managed to avoid running afoul of its self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists.

But registered or not, the bundlers are in many ways indistinguishable from people who fit the technical definition of a lobbyist. They glide easily through the corridors of power in Washington, with a number of them hosting Mr. Obama at fund-raisers while also visiting the White House on policy matters and official business.

As both a candidate and as president, Mr. Obama has vowed to curb what he calls the corrupting influence of lobbyists, barring them not only from contributing to his campaign but also from holding jobs in his administration. While lobbyists grouse about the rules, ethics watchdogs credit the changes with raising ethical standards in Washington.

But the prevalence of major Obama fund-raisers who also work in the lobbying arena threatens to undercut the president's ethics push, raising questions about whether the campaign's policies square with its on-the-ground practices, some of those same watchdogs say...

Time to get 'er done

With A Stroke Of His Pen Obama Strikes Back At Citizens United

Is it my imagination or is Obama's hair going white? 

President Obama Has Written Personal Checks To Help Struggling Americans

Republicans in Congress have largely refused to help struggling Americans this year, so what can President Obama do about it? Turns out the President throws on his Superman cape and helps financially struggling Americans by giving them money from his own pocket.

The President reads ten letters a day, and according to a new book by Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow, the President will occasionally write personal checks to struggling Americans in an effort to do something to ease their pain.

“Some of these letters you read and you say, ‘Gosh, I really want to help this person, and I may not have the tools to help them right now,” the President told Saslow. “And then you start thinking about the fact that for every one person that wrote describing their story, there might be another hundred thousand going through the same thing. So there are times when I’m reading the letters and I feel pained that I can’t do more, faster, to make a difference in their lives.”

While Congressional Republicans continue to do nothing about the suffering of the American people, President Obama is taking an active role on a more personal level. He’s literally using his own money to help Americans in need. That’s the kind of compassion that Republicans lack. President Obama could teach the Christian Right Wing a thing or two.

 DaveInVA wrote: 
  Tell me this isn't ginned-up propaganda to support the Republican's voter suppression efforts.

 hippiechick wrote: 



He is also a frequent guest on Morning Joe.

Fake signatures may mean Obama didn't actually qualify in Indiana

Very interesting, this man is on Charlie Rose

The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs – review

Jeffrey Sach's latest book is a diagnosis of current social and financial ills

Quote of the day: “Today, my understanding is we’re going to have a hearing on Richard Cordray, who is my nominee to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ... He has a good reputation. And Republicans have threatened not to confirm him not because of anything he’s done, but because they want to roll back the whole notion of having a consumer watchdog.” —President Obama at a press conference this morning

 romeotuma wrote: 
I watched the whole press conference. Very good! He explained all the issues, including Solyndra and Fast & Furious, or whatever that was.

I'm still a believer.

 Beaker wrote: 
Like Ronnie?

Okay, to be fair, that guy was practically MADE of Teflon. Sheesh, nothing stuck to him. Obama clearly is not so equipped.

 Beaker wrote:  The whole thing makes me sick. What a bunch of idiots.

Sorta reminds me of the Iran-Contra mess. I expect a whole lotta 'I can't recall's.

In Praise of Extremism
By Frank Rich
New York Magazine
September 26, 2011

What good did bipartisanship ever do anybody?

That Obama has so long held to his faith that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there's the United States of America," as he intoned in his glorious 2004 keynote at the Democratic convention, is in part because that's who he is. But it's also because he's all too susceptible to Washington Establishment groupthink (which is how he was seduced into the jobless Summers-Geithner "recovery" in the first place). From the moment Obama arrived at the White House, the Beltway elites have been coaxing him further down the politically suicidal path of appeasement and inertia even as his opponents geared up for war.

As these elites see it, Obama must always hold his fire because we are perennially just one step away from the nirvana of national unity, no matter how glaring the evidence to the contrary. A classic example was a David Brooks column headlined "The Grand Bargain Lives!" published on July 22 of this year and predicting an Obama-John Boehner mind meld on a far-reaching debt-reduction deal. That same day, embarrassingly enough, those negotiations collapsed, with Obama complaining that Boehner hadn't returned his calls and Boehner stating that "the deal was never reached, and was never really close." Brooks, who also flogged the unheeded Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission as "the only way to realistically fix this problem," has merely picked up where the Polonius of bipartisan Washington punditry, David Broder of the Washington Post, left off when he died in March. So beguiled was Broder after the "Gang of Fourteen" halted filibusters (temporarily) on judicial appointments that in 2007 he wrote that Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell had "forged a personal relationship of unusual trust," setting off a "powerful current toward consensus building" in the Senate.

This delusional faith in comity reached its apotheosis in the debt-ceiling showdown. With the reliable exception of Paul Krugman, who shuns Washington and calls centrism "the cult that is destroying America," almost every Establishment observer in our own time bought into the magical thinking that the radical Republicans would never go so far as to risk a default of the American government. Only when the tea-party cabal in the House took Washington hostage did it fully dawn on the Beltway gentry that the country was in danger. But even now, Obama keeps being urged to make nice with the rebels so that he can woo independents, who, we're constantly told, value bipartisanship every bit as much as the pundits do. The "all-important independent voters," as the "Lexington" columnist at The Economist recycled the conventional wisdom earlier this month, "are said to be looking for a president who defuses partisan tensions, rather than inflaming them." Said by whom? Mainly other Washington bloviators...

"Maybe it's time to have some provocative language in this country," Perry said at his maiden debate. It is time, and Obama is certainly capable of giving as good as he gets. The Washington hands who assume Perry and his constituency will self-destruct are as misguided as those who thought the conservative movement couldn't survive provocative language like the 1964 Goldwater mantra "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Extremism in defense of liberty may be a vice, but so is retreat in the face of extremism. The many who would have Obama surrender without a fight in 2012-whether Beltway wise men addicted to bipartisanship, vain and deluded third-party entrepreneurs, or White House strategists chasing phantom independents-are fiddling while America burns. If Obama succumbs to their siren call again, he will too.

 mzpro5 wrote: 
It's funny because I was thinking of Oliver North as well. He may have pled the fifth, but he was able to make some of those congressmen look like the naive partisans they were. He also had good reason to be silent. It would be interesting to find out how many people who pled the fifth during congressional testimony were later convicted of a related crime.

Actually invoking 5th Amendment rights while testifying before Congress is fairly routine.  From the McCarthy "reds under the bed" witch hunts, to the mob hearings to the public humiliations of big bankers in the wake of their scandals, people have used their Fifth Amendment rights.

There's a difference between being called in front of Congress, and being an indicted person being tried for a crime.  Pleading the Fifth in a criminal trial is a risky move, because the outcome can be harsh and for keeps.  But in front of Congress you can invoke your 5th Amendment rights all day and you still get to go home, free as a bird, and in no more legal jeopardy than if you hadn't.

 imnotpc wrote: 
I've seen a fair amount of big wigs take the 5th before Congress. Oliver North immediately comes to mind.

And the number of stupid things supposedly educated people have said before Congress is huge. And as far as "smart" people saying stupid things on TV - where to start?

I'll see if I can find some videos demonstrating the above.

 mzpro5 wrote: 
Perhaps, and I'm sure that's the official reason. But Congress holds hearings like this just about every day they are in session, and it's extremely rare to have someone plead the fifth. The CEO of a half billion dollar company under investigation should be smart enough to know not to make off the cuff remarks on national TV.

 imnotpc wrote: 
From the article:

"Harrison and Stover are on the hot seat. Anything they say in their defense — even an off-hand remark — can and will be used against them. Their lawyers would be fools if they didn’t insist that their clients take the Fifth Amendment. "

 romeotuma wrote:  I think this is the kernel of the problem. He came into office bearing an olive branch, only to receive a gauntlet across the face.

The Book on Barack
by Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
for the October 3, 2011 issue

...Suskind, without stanching the flow of his tale, is able to elucidate how it came to pass that the Reagan-through-Bush II reign of financial deregulation, along with cybernetic chicanery, defective and incomprehensible financial "products," and banking greed unmoored from social, personal, and fiduciary responsibility, created a monstrous "debt machine" that turbocharged inequality of wealth, inflated bubbles, diverted talent and investment from making things to making bets, bilked millions on the edge to enrich thousands on the heights, and ended—if it ended—by pushing the poor, the middle class, and the real economy into the abyss.

"Confidence Men" offers support for some of today's standard progressive gripes about the President, and for a few of the conservative ones. Obama was green, and not just environmentally. He had no managerial experience, while his only Washington experience was two active years in the Senate—and it showed, at least inside the West Wing. He made Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff instead of Tom Daschle, who, besides engineering quicker passage for a better health-care bill, might have tamed the policymaking chaos of raging staff egos and Presidential reticence. For the highest economic posts Obama picked Geithner and Summers, who were implicated in the deregulatory status quo and wary of fundamental reform—Team B, Suskind calls them—while passing over Team A, the heterodox skeptics, such as Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee, who had guided him through the campaign, when his prescience about the coming crisis and his sureness when it struck had sealed his November victory. Team B underestimated the severity of the economic debacle. For that reason—and also to woo conservative congressional Democrats and, futilely, Republicans—Obama's stimulus proposal was too small and too larded with relatively ineffectual tax cuts. Had he demanded more but still got only what he ended up with, he might have received more credit for forestalling a depression and less blame for the feebleness of the jobless "recovery." Chronically, within the White House and on Capitol Hill, he sought consensus as a starting point—the tranquillity of resolution without the catharsis of conflict.

"On the way to his inauguration, Obama got word that Republicans in the House had committed, as a bloc, to oppose his stimulus plan," Suskind writes. A few pages later, he describes the newly sworn-in President as "a man with little experience wielding power but the fastest of learners." The fastest? Not always. Obama took the oath of office determined to change the way things were done in Washington, by which he meant a turn toward civility, comity, coöperation, and mutual respect—honest debate and earnest, public-spirited compromise. He did not grasp how profoundly the transformation of the Republican Party into a disciplined, nearly monolithic agent of radical reaction and ruthless obstruction—a transformation that has only accelerated since that day—had changed things already. Perhaps he did not wish to grasp it. In recent weeks, though, he has surprised disdainful opponents and dispirited supporters alike with the passion and firmness of his drive for urgent job spending, responsible debt reduction, and equitable taxation. A President may learn more from the frustrations of power than from the wielding of it. But in this President's case the learning has been perilously slow.