Obama

In case you were wondering, Trump is telling you lies. Syria is run by a horrible dictator. He is the kind of dictator that makes you want to bring back assassination of foreign leaders. The idea of putting him down is hardly an extreme one, once you know what he does and has done. There was a moment in time, in 2013, when Obama tried to stand up to Assad, but failed to push back when Assad pushed him. Assad read the US system better than most foreign dictators do, it seems. You see, in the United States, a president can't just go to war. Congress authorizes war. Once that authorization…
What really happened the night Osama Bin Laden was killed by Hillary Clinton and her SEAL Team? Or, was it like this? Check out this maximally LOL item at Slate for all the details.
Two related, but contrasting, items on Brexit. The climate change connection to Brexit is unclear and mostly negative. It is simply true that we benefit from international unity when addressing a global problem, and the EU is a powerful forward looking entity that could address climate change more effectively than the collection of individual nations in the EU otherwise might. With the UK out of the EU, AGW may be somewhat harder to address. Or, maybe not so much. The EU is still only one entity among several dozen, so having this small shift may not be that big of a deal. But the Brexit-…
This is an excellent moment to revel in the complexity of life, and argument, and to appreciate the value of the honest conversation. A candidate is the presumed nominee when she or he obtains the required number of pledged delegates to be at 50% plus a fraction in the total pledged delegate count. This is because a candidate must have a true majority to win the nomination when the delegates are all counted up at the convention, and the pledged delegates are required to cast their lot with the candidate they are pledged to, assuming that candidate exists at the time of the convention.…
President Barack Obama said Donald Trump "doesn't know much about foreign policy...or the world generally" in response to Trump saying Japan and South Korea should obtain nuclear weapons.
I'm going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth. Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don't matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We've seen a few debates, there's been a lot of speeches, but you ain't seen nothing yet. And…
Yes, I know, that headline sounds wrong. But I worded it carefully and I assure you it is far more correct than many other headlines we are seeing, about the "historic loss in Congress" with the 2014 election. The truth is, the party in the White House tends to lose house seats with every midterm election. Over the last half century there have been only two exceptions to that. Also, the second midterm for an 8 year presidency tends to do a bit worse than the first. In addition to that for the most part, a president's popularity rating drops from the first day of the first term through…
Here is a small selection of responses and reactions to President Obama's climate change speech. Michael Mann: 'The most aggressive and promising climate plan' from 'executive branch in years' Michael Mann is director of Penn State University's Earth System Science Center, and a genuine hero, who has been attacked by the climate denial nexus, which has tried to destroy his career. And he is fighting back. His brief statement on President Obama's climate speech needs to be read in its entirety, but here are some key points... President Obama acts on climate change by enforcing the law The…
No time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. "I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it is not going to protect you from the coming storm. Ultimately we will be judges as a people and as a society and as a country on where we go from here ... push back on misinformation, speak up for the facts, broaden the circle of those who are willing to stand up for our future, convince those in power to reduce our carbon pollution … invest…
On Tuesday, President Obama will make a speech outlining his administration’s plans to address climate change. The Right Wing has already responded by calling those concerned with climate change “Terrorists.” How have the progressive and left wings responded? Badly. Very badly. Here is a selection, some paraphrased to ensure anonymity (though these are all public), of comments by people that I know are well meaning climate change activists or otherwise concerned about global warming and such. Obama’s speeches and verbal plans make no difference. It’s what he DOES that counts. He’ll say: “…
A letter signed by (so far) 145 former Obama campaign staff calls on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. There is no doubt that President Obama's action on climate change will be a large part of his legacy, and at this point, President Obama's position on Keystone XL is unclear. It is true that the Obama administration is doing some good things (like this) but building the Keystone Pipeline is one of the worst things he could allow to happen. Frustrated with this situation, the people who helped put President Obama in the White House, twice, are speaking out. Here is the…
From Bloomberg President Barack Obama is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they have to consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects, from pipelines to highways. The result could be significant delays for natural gas- export facilities, ports for coal sales to Asia, and even new forest roads, industry lobbyists warn. “It’s got us very freaked out,” said Ross Eisenberg, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a Washington-based group that represents 11,000 companies such as Exxon-Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Southern Co. (SO…
This is not directly climate related, but it does pertain to the media and its abject failure to take its responsibilities towards democracy more seriously.  Via The Huffington Post, I read these strong words from an angry press towards a secretive Whitehouse Administration: Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can say a broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV have today expressed extreme frustration to me about having absolutely no access to the President of the United States this entire weekend. There is a very simple but important…
This is the part of President Obama's 2013 inaugural address that resonated with me the most: We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn…
Seen on RedState.
Via Thngsbreak, we have the charming Lord Monckton back at it with all out Birtherism: The diligent, unpaid heroes who have been investigating the dodgy document for more than a year on behalf of the people of Maricopa County, Ariz., have found a long list of irregularities in Mr. Obama’s identification documents. I have used the investigators’ list to draw up a schedule of probabilities – one for each individual irregularity. The probability that the “birth certificate” and other Obama identity documents are genuine is just 1 in 75 sextillion. Funny, that was just about the same odds I gave…
I'm so proud of my home state for affirming equality for all in the ballot box rather than in the courts. I was born and raised in Maryland, although I've spent more of my adult life in Virginia, one of the big things I've noticed in the divide between the two states (and I love both of them) is that Marylanders do a better job at taking care of each other, and running an effective state with high quality services. Marylanders believe government can work, and generally (outside of Baltimore) it does. Marylanders also reject bigotry, and with question 4 (the Maryland Dream act) and question…
Bottom line: In the popular vote, Obama will win over Romney by a surprisingly small margin, if he wins. People generally think Obama is going to win, as per this graphic: But the actual "I'm voting for X" numbers are 50% Obama, 47% Romney. That is within the margin of error. The poll, which is here, indicates that while the numbers are close, Obama's support is slightly (but only slightly) more enthusiastic than Romney's. Obama has a good approval number compared to Romney's but for some reason people, who are apparently all idiots, think that Romney will do a better job than Obama at…
This has been a year of some wonderfully crazy new conspiracies. Birtherism is actually looking pretty banal next to the "Obama is gay-married to a Pakistani" conspiracy, the "Obama is a Jihadist sleeper agent conspiracy, the Aurora conspiracies, job numbers conspiracies, polling conspiracy theories from America’s least-accurate pollster Dick Morris, and, my former favorite, the Obama is buying bullets for the Social Security Administration to kill all Americans conspiracy theory. Now the American Spectator is publishing a new crackpot conspiracy theory that I think rivals my former…
This morning, my inbox had a handful of interesting data that are totally unconnected to each other, each interesting in its own right, and together, a veritable potpourri of bloggyness. So, here goes: First, Don Prothero at Skeptiblog has written one of those posts you want to keep handy next time you need to refer to Noah's Ark. The title of his post is "Ship of Foolishness" but I'm going to catalog it under Noah’s Ark compared to the Titanic. Here's the embedded data comparison: I gotta get me some of that Gopher Wood. Ok, I said these different data comparisons were not related to each…