From the President’s remarks at the White House Iftar dinner:

Now, that’s not to say that religion is without controversy. Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities -– particularly New York. Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan. The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country. And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is just unimaginable. So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. And Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.

But let me be clear. As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. (Applause.) And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

Strong language from Obama. That’ll set off the right-wingers.

Glenn Greenwald say it’s “one of the most impressive and commendable things Obama has done since being inaugurated.”

– by Gadget

Unbelievable.

– by Gadget

I’ve been waiting for an electronic version of Matt Taibbi’s latest in-depth analysis — this time, of the Obama administration’s Financial Reform bill. Well, here you go; it’s a doozy. Matt digs out all the admin-Congressional maneuvering, unpackaging the deals and naming the ugly names — insider reporting at its best.

For me, this bottom-lines the bill. First, a taste from the introduction, and then I’ll gloss the piece with a “good guys–bad guys” list — all you need to know about your Congressional Betters, in one chocolate-covered post.

From Taibbi’s introduction (my emphasis):

But Dodd-Frank [the Financial Reform bill] was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America’s financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn’t have the stones to wipe out our country’s one dependably thriving profit center: theft.

It’s not that there’s nothing good in the bill. In fact, there are many good things in it, even some historic things. [List of good things in the bill; check the article for details.]

All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?

In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.

The article is Taibbi at his researching best, and the writing is wonderfully clear.

Now for my good guys–bad guys lists. But first some context — the two big issues in the bill, two things real reform needed, were these:

1. The Levin–Merkley amendment, which implemented the “Volker rule” forbidding FDIC-insured banks from laying bets with their own money (in effect restoring Glass–Steagall), and
2. The Blanche Lincoln amendment, which would have forced commercial banks to spin off their derivatives business.

Needless to say, both failed. From the article, Volker-rule good guys are:

• Carl Levin (D-MI) & Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who fought for it hard and got knee-capped for their trouble by both parties.
• Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), a strong supporter of the Volker rule in the House.
• Barney Frank (D-MA), who agreed to re-introduce the amendment in conference talks, after Brownback and Reid stripped it out (see below).

Volker-rule bad guys:

• Sam Brownback (R-KS) & Harry Reid (D-NV), who worked together to kill a Brownback amendment to which Levin–Merkley was attached, then bring back the Brownback amendment clean.
• Scott Brown (R-MA), who demanded many changes to the amendment in exchange for his vote, after Barney Frank got the amendment resurrected.
• Chris Dodd (D-CN), powerful chair of the Senate Banking Committee, who used Brown’s intervention as ground cover for even more evisceration, on behalf of this guy —
• Tim Geithner, whom Taibbi says “acted almost like a liaison to the financial industry, pushing for Wall Street–friendly changes on everything,” and who was clearly fronting for unnamed others in the administration (go ahead, guess).
• Chuck Shumer (D-NY), Lloyd Blankfein’s BFF (you have to read the Shumer section; it’s priceless), who like a blade-wielding pro sliced the last vestiges of meaningful restriction from the amendment.
• Barney Frank (D-MA), who upheld these last-minute Senate changes by refusing Kanjorski’s request to block them in the House version.

Yep, Barney Frank is on both lists. Good guys on Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives rule:

• Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and a small group of Dem stalwarts who stayed on the Senate floor, ready to object if Chris Dodd tried to swiss-cheese it in the middle of the night (yes, Maria Cantwell, whom I wrote about here expressing doubts).

And that’s about it. Guess whose name is missing? Bad guys on Lincoln’s derivatives rule:

• Chris Dodd (D-CN), who tried to substitute his own swiss cheese version for Lincoln’s, only to be blocked by Cantwell & crew. (Wonder where Dodd’s next office will be? Wall Street? K Street? Thank-you Street?)
• Barney Frank (D-MA), the House New Democrats Coalition (click to read the list), the Treasury dept, influential FDIC chief Sheila Bair, and NY mayor Michael Bloomberg, all of whom were strongly opposed.
• Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) herself, who gutted the amendment for good, once she got past Bill Holder in the Arkansas Dem primary.
• Little-known Blue Dog Collin Peterson (D-MN), who went even farther than Lincoln did in eviscerating its restrictions (apparently Peterson wants to make soup from the left-over entrails).

And there you have it. Our fine friends in Washington. The name of the bill? Dodd–Frank, of course. The name of the article? “Wall Street’s Big Win”. As I say, money enables Republicans and neuters Dems.

I’d hang onto these lists. Keep your enemies in front of you if you don’t want their arrows in your back.

GP

– by Gadget

One more cross-posted Prop. 8 post because we got the answer to the question of whether the President supports the Prop. 8 decision. Not really.

Earlier today, a White House spokesperson provided a tepid statement earlier today to Kerry Eleveld:

“The President has spoken out in opposition to Proposition 8 because it is divisive and discriminatory. He will continue to promote equality for LGBT Americans.”

Clearly, we have different definitions of what LGBT equality means. For LGBT Americans, it means full equality. For Obama, it means separate, but equal:

Nevertheless, Obama has also publicly opposed same-sex marriage, and a White House aide said the president’s position has not changed.

“He supports civil unions, doesn’t personally support gay marriage though he supports repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, and has opposed divisive and discriminatory initiatives like Prop. 8 in other states,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

That might have worked in 2008. It won’t work in 2012.

And, this “White House aide” spoke anonymously. Can some reporter, maybe at the briefing, get this on-the-record?

If Obama wants to “promote equality for LGBT Americans,” he can support full equality, not “separate, but equal” civil unions. That’s so 2008. And, it has to change.

Please sign our open letter to President Obama asking him to come out in support of full marriage equality. It’s time for Obama to get on the right side of history. And, we have to let him know that’s where he needs to be.

– by Gadget

- Pay Down Your Credit Card Bill. See if you qualify for a credit card bailout.

Related posts:

1. A Second 2010 Economic Stimulus in President Obama's New Job Programs Focusing on Small Business, Infrastructure and Home Energy Efficiency
2. How To Prepare for Tax Increases Next Year In this Sluggish Economy
3. More Stimulus Tax Breaks and Hiring Credits in Obama's 2010 Small Business Recovery Plan

– by Gadget

US President Barack Obama is to appear on daytime talk show The View, where he reflected on challenges he has faced.

– by Gadget

– by Gadget

This is a both drive-by and a heads-up. (How’s that for a mash-up of south-central LA and corporate metaphors?) Rachel had an excellent long piece yesterday about the use of scary-black images to manipulate easily frightened whites.

Who’s the manipulator? Shirley Sherrod said on the tape, “That’s when it was revealed to me that y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have.” (h/t The Nest)

That girl is really in trouble now. Rachel didn’t mention it, but pre-Civil Rights days, the way the rich Southern elites manipulated the poor white sharecropper, was always to shout . . . Well, fill in your favorite n-word here (mine is “Nutella”).

But I wanted to point out this, from one of the (ahem) embedded Fox News bits in Rachel’s later segment about the Fox reaction:

Notice the use of “burrowed.” Apparently criticism along these lines — “Right-thinking burrowed embeds perverting the Obama administration” — has some force, since the Right-thinking are now doing their usual Mirror-Mirror trick to turn it around: “Radical Left-thinking burrowers perverting the Obama administration; oh my!”

The sign that Movement Conservatives are afraid of a given criticism — the sign that they think the crit is strong and might stick — is the use of Mirror-Mirror to kill it. (Mirror-mirror; it’s not me, it’s you. Mirror-Mirror; I’m not the racist, you are.)

By the way, the whole Rachel Fox-reacts segment is here, and it’s a nice one. Watch and enjoy.

GP

P.S. For more on “Mirror-Mirror” (or as I sometimes call it, the “180-Tell” since what they say is exactly 180-degrees wrong), see this great piece by Billmon, now writing at Daily Kos. (He calls it “mirror image,” but that’s just because he’s a better writer and I don’t want to steal.)

The specific disinformation technique in play is one I call “mirror image” (or, when I’m in a Star Trek mood, “Spock with a beard”). It consists of charging the opposing side (i.e. the enemies of the people) with doing exactly what you yourself have been accused of doing, typically with a hell of a lot more justification.

“Mirror image” was Rove’s standard response on those relatively rare occasions when the Bush White House seemed to be losing control of the media narrative.

Thus, when Richard Clarke blew the whistle on the Bush White House sleepwalking past the CIA’s warnings about Al Qaeda in the summer of 2001, the White House quickly constructed a competing story line in which Clarke himself was the official responsible for flubbing the response.

Likewise, when the Democrats began making noises in early 2004 about using Bush’s somewhat, er, questionable, accounts of his National Guard service against him, the Republicans quickly rolled out counterclaims that John Kerry had lied about his war record. [my emphasis]

You get the idea; child’s play, as only children can do it.

– by Gadget

The Obama administration recently won the legal right to indefinitely imprison people without charges. In the eyes of many people, Obama has now successfully rewritten the US Constitution.

On June 9, a three judge panel in the Washington DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the government, stating that detainees taken from outside of Afghanistan and relocated to Bagram (in Afghanistan) have no right to contest their imprisonment in US Federal Court due to the fact that Afghanistan is a war zone (unlike Guantanamo). Long story short, non-citizens captured by the US have no right to appeal if they are held in a war zone, even if they were arrested and transported into a war-zone.

The Obama White House lawyers argued that prisoners in Afghanistan have no right to habeas corpus, regardless of where they were captured, simply because the US authorities sent them to Afghanistan.

The Bush administration also argued the same thing regarding Bagram. Obama, just like Bush, also wants to detain people in order to prevent hypothetical future “crimes.” Oddly enough, Barack Obama has criticized similar Bush policies regarding detention as “neither effective nor sustainable.” In order to make his own policy of prolonged detention “effective and sustainable,” Obama aims to set up a new “legal regime” outside of the current court and military commission system.

Right-wing judge John Bates, who was appointed by Bush, surprisingly disagreed with the ruling because even he knows that the President should not have the right to detain people anywhere.

There has been speculation that Obama could possibly have the US-Mexico border labeled as a war zone in order to detain immigrants indefinitely.

We communists, socialists, and anarchists knew from the very beginning that Barack Obama would bring only half-hearted, and arguably worthless, “change.” Despite those pseudo-Marxists who wanted to give the Democrats another chance, the majority of communist groups knew he was just another criminal. If you want real change, join us!

– by Gadget

President Obama just delivered remarks in the Rose Garden on unemployment stating that “it’s so essential to pass the unemployment extension that comes up for a vote tomorrow.”

Obama had three people standing with him who have been unable to find jobs even as their unemployment benefits have been or will be exhausted. And, he noted how the Senate GOPers have changed the tradition this time:

And, for a long time, there’s been a tradition under both Democratic and Republican Presidents to offer relief to the unemployed. That was certainly the case under my predecssor when Republican Senators voted several times to extend emergency unemployment benefits.

But, Obama went further and noted the hypocrisy of the GOP Senators:

And, I have to say after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, the same people who didn’t have any problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn’t offer relief to middle class Americans…who really need help.

Obama also blasted the GOP talking point that people on unemployment don’t want to work, “That attitude reflects a lack of faith in the American people.”

Obama exposed just how craven the GOPers have been:

It’s time to stop holding workers laid off in this recession hostage to Washington politics. It’s time to do what’s right. Not for the next elections, but for the middle class.

He asked Senators to put politics aside. Unfortunately, the current crop of Republican Senators, led by Mitch McConnell, never put politics aside. They’ll sacrifice American workers who have lost their jobs — and, then totally disrespect the unemployed by claiming they don’t want to work. The President needs to keep hammering the GOPers for what they did to the economy and what they’re doing now to hurt those most affected by the economic crisis.

With the addition of Senator Byrd’s replacement, Carte Goodwin, the Democrats should be able to secure cloture with the votes of Maine’s Snowe and Collins.

– by Gadget