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Subscribe to RSSAs President Barack Obama considered adding as many as 40,000 U.S. forces to a backsliding war in Afghanistan in 2009, Vice President Joe Biden warned him that the military rationale for doing so was flawed, a new book about Obama's expansion of the conflict says,” per the AP. “The book, ‘Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan,’ also says that in planning the drawdown of troops two years later, the White House intentionally sidelined the CIA. Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 ‘surge’ forces Obama eventually approved, the book quotes a U.S. official as saying… A previously undisclosed Biden memo to Obama in November 2009 reflects his view that military commanders were asking Obama to take a leap by adding tens of thousands of forces whose role was poorly defined.”
Tapping the ex-pats: “The all-consuming hunt for donors has led President Barack Obama’s campaign to England. And France. And China,” Politico writes. “Obama is tapping the network of American citizens living outside the 50 states more than any other presidential campaign has before, with more than a dozen bundlers who have pledged to raise as much as $4.5 million. The president’s overseas power centers include London, where high-powered execs like Warner Bros. UK chief Josh Berger and Anthony Gardner of Palamon Capital Partners have promised to deliver as much as $500,000 each to the campaign, and Shanghai, where businessman and Technology for Obama co-chairman Robert Roche has committed to bringing in more than $500,000.”
“President Obama today makes his case against Mitt Romney in his GOP rival's backyard, as he heads to New Hampshire and Boston to start a two-day campaign swing,” Tribune’s Memoli notes, adding: “Obama is to focus on the dueling visions for the economy at stake in the November election against Romney during a campaign event in Durham, N.H., a state where the former governor of Massachusetts also has a home. According to a campaign spokesman, Obama ‘will offer Granite State voters the choice to break the stalemate between two economic visions on how to grow to the economy -- one that builds the economy from the middle class out, and the other from the top down.’ The speech will include more of a focus on the deficit, an issue of particular concern to voters in a state where fiscal conservatism is strong, and where the unemployment rate is among the lowest in the nation.”
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Obama ‘will offer Granite State voters the choice to break the stalemate between two economic visions on how to grow to the economy -- one that builds the economy from the middle class out, and the other from the top down.’
Yes! This is exactly what this election is about! Romney's former colleague at Bain, Ed Conard, argues for greater income inequality, in a book on economics he wrote called "Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong"
Conard argues that, when money flows to the thin band at the top, those investors are so rich, they can take greater risks with their money, leading to all kinds of marvelous inventions, and, eventully, job creation. It's a ridiculous theory, given that our overall economy has diminished as income inequality has increased over the last thirty years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/romneys-former-bain-partner-makes-a-case-for-inequality.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Tapping? So that's what They are calling shakedowns nowadays.
Odd how zer0 the Nobel peace prize winner continues the "wars of aggression" even with the failed promises to end them. Iraq still raging they just renamed American troops to non-combat troops guess someone should have told them and the Iraqies/Iranians that! We just hired more and more contracters to pick up the slack.
Afghanistan still raging and the body bags keep coming home.
I found the below very interesting!
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has an interesting column describing some of President Obama’s evolving positions on executive power. He now engages in many of the same practices that he and numerous other liberal Democrats denounced as unconstitutional in the days of the Bush Administration: When George W. Bush was president of the United States, it was an article of faith among liberals that many of his policies were not just misguided but unconstitutional as well…. Obama campaigned as a consistent critic of the Bush administration’s understanding of executive power — and a critic with a background in constitutional law, no less. But apart from his disavowal of waterboarding (an interrogation practice the Bush White House had already abandoned), almost the entire Bush-era wartime architecture has endured: rendition is still with us, the Guantánamo detention center is still open, drone strikes have escalated dramatically, and the Obama White House has claimed the right — and, in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, followed through on it — to assassinate American citizens without trial. These moves have met some principled opposition from the left. But the president’s liberal critics are usually academics, journalists and (occasionally) cable-TV hosts, with no real mass constituency behind them. The majority of Democrats, polls suggest, have followed roughly the same path as the former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh, a staunch critic of Bush’s wartime policies who now serves as a legal adviser to the State Department, supplying constitutional justifications for Obama’s drone campaigns. What was outrageous under a Republican has become executive branch business-as-usual under a Democrat. Douthat does not mention what was perhaps Obama’s biggest reversal on executive power. The man who in 2007 wrote that “[t]he President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” last year waged a war against Libya without any congressional authorization. Even Bush never went that far.
Obamas biggest problem is of course the ability of people not invested in getting him re-elected to play back his endless attacks on GWBush as he continues to double down on everything George did.
My guess is he believes in the quote "No one ever went broke under estimating the American peoples intelligence and ability to forget the past."
But but but George Bush did it doesn't wash if you said it was WRONG then why are you doing it too?
So much for HOPE AND CHANGE is anyone else feeling cheated?
So glad I didn't get duped by this Chicago mob controlled baffoon.
benr- you mean you're getting duped big time by Romney instead! President Obama is no more controlled by Chicago "mob" (amazing since we don't have one) than you are.
No one used Executive Power more than George Bush. You do remember he and Cheney refusing to release minutes about Cheney's meetings with power companies - right? Oh, but that was okay, they're Republicans so they're allowed to do those things! Hypocrite!
Obama/Biden 2012 because Romney is just an empty suit!
I think it's so funny Republicans are accusing President Obama of being "Nixonian" over using his first and only Executive Power card in his entire first term.
They may not be old enough to remember Nixon was a Republican, and one, like Bush JR, they had all agreed at one time never to speak his name.
I will speak his name.
George W is hands down a better President than the one in office currently.
Anyone with an IQ over 2 knows that.
rukidding47 - clearly your IQ is just about 3 because all the rest of us know that George Bush will go down as the absolute worst President in History - not even a race there! Get real and try to grow a brain.