Posted on 11/18/2010 10:10:08 AM PST by My Favorite Headache
The liberal Center for American Progress doesnt believe significant GOP gains in the House and Senate should stop the President from implementing more of his polices. The group released a report Tuesday suggesting ways Obama can bypass Congress to accomplish a progressive agenda, and it cites the presidents power as commander-in-chief to make its point.
I think most of the conversation since the election has been about how President Obama adjusts to the new situation on Capitol Hill, Center for American Progress head and former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta told the Daily Caller. While thats an important conversation, it simply ignores the presidents ability to use all levels of his power and authority to move the country forward.
How does one move the country forward? In the centers report, Podesta explains that Obama can use executive orders, rulemaking, and even the armed forces to accomplish important change and that such means should not be underestimated.
What exactly does Podesta think the president should use such powers to accomplish? Among others, the report suggests job creation, quality affordable health care, sustainable security, and a clean energy future.
The report cites specific goals such as mitigating the effects of the militarys Dont Ask, Dont Tell policy, supporting a Palestinian state, and reducing greenhouse gasses by 17 percent by 2020.
The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy, Podesta writes. Congressional gridlock does not mean the federal government stands still.
Statement from John D. Podesta November 15, 2010
In the aftermath of this months midterm congressional elections, pundits and politicians across the ideological spectrum are focusing on how difficult it will be for President Barack Obama to advance his policy priorities through Congress. Predictions of stalemate abound. And some debate whether the administration should tack to the left or to the center and compromise with or confront the new House leadership.
As a former White House chief of staff, I believe those to be the wrong preoccupations. President Obamas ability to govern the country as chief executive presents an opportunity to demonstrate strength, resolve, and a capacity to get things done on a host of pressing challenges of importance to the public and our economy. Progress, not positioning, is what the public wants and deserves.
The U.S. Constitution and the laws of our nation grant the president significant authority to make and implement policy. These authorities can be used to ensure positive progress on many of the key issues facing the country through:
* Executive orders * Rulemaking * Agency management * Convening and creating public-private partnerships * Commanding the armed forces * Diplomacy
The ability of President Obama to accomplish important change through these powers should not be underestimated. President Bush, for example, faced a divided Congress throughout most of his term in office, yet few can doubt his ability to craft a unique and deeply conservative agenda using every aspect of the policymaking apparatus at his disposal. And, after his party lost control of Congress in 1994, President Clinton used executive authority and convening power to make significant progressive change. For instance, he protected more great spaces in the lower 48 states than any president since Theodore Roosevelt, established for the first time significant protections for Americans medical privacy, and urged the creation of the Welfare-to-Work Partnership that enlisted the help of 20,000 businesses in moving more than 1 million welfare recipients into the workforce.
The upshot: Congressional gridlock does not mean the federal government stands still. This administration has a similar opportunity to use available executive authorities while also working with Congress where possible. At the Center for American Progress, we look forward to our nation continuing to make progress.
Read the full report (pdf)
Download the executive summary (pdf)
Download the report to e-readers and mobile devices from Scribd
To speak with our experts on this topic, please contact:
Print: Megan Smith (health care, education, economic policy) 202.741.6346 or msmith@americanprogress.org
Print: Anna Soellner (foreign policy and security, energy) asoellner@americanprogress.org
Print: Raúl Arce-Contreras (ethnic media, immigration) 202.478.5318 or rarcecontreras@americanprogress.org
Radio: Laura Pereyra 202.741.6258 or lpereyra@americanprogress.org
TV: Andrea Purse 202.741.6250 or apurse@americanprogress.org
Web: Erin Lindsay 202.741.6397 or elindsay@americanprogress.org http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/11/executive_orders.html/#statement
He means the stupid voters are getting in the way of running the country correctly, and Barry should rely on the only things he learned from history about commies increasing and retaining power: Crack heads.
The scenario to look at would be New Orleans after Katrina. The military will indeed shoot civilians because they have been convinced that it’s for the overall protection.
Don't forget, Muslims are encouraged to lie to infidels. His oath means nothing.
The ABC's of Media Bias
By: Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, October 14, 2004
IS THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA BIASED against conservatives? Dan Rather remains in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News despite his involvement in recent news stories based on dishonest reporting, fabricated documents and even Internet gossip falsely alleging that President George W. Bush secretly intends to begin the military conscription of students. These stories were obviously designed to damage Mr. Bush in the final weeks before a national election.
And now ABC News has left in place its Political Director Mark Halperin. ABC has done this despite the networks acknowledgement that Halperin wrote a memo that to many seems to direct ABC reporters, anchors and producers to slant its coverage by downplaying the misstatements of Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry and by viewing negatively any misstatements by Republican candidate Bush.
Halperins directive reached ABC people on October 8, the very day that ABC Good Morning America co-host Charlie Gibson would be selecting questions for and moderating the second presidential debate between Bush and Kerry. Did Halperin intend to influence Gibsons decisions in this debate?
Who is Mark Halperin, and does his memo reflect leftwing bias in his shaping of the news at ABC? To find answers to these questions, we need to consider the details of this memo-gate controversy in the light of Halperins past and of the famous radical left-wing father who shaped his political values. As we shall discover, Halperin has veered Left and crossed the line of ethical journalism many times.
Mark Halperin has been the Political Director of ABC News since 1997 and has covered politics and campaigns through four election cycles, reads one of his 2004 biographies posted by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). As Political Director, Halperin is responsible for the planning and editorial content of all political news on the network.
Halperin manages the editorial coverage of politics throughout the ABC News universe, says another official ABC biography, and contributes frequently to ABC News broadcasts.
Mark Halperin weeks before the 2004 presidential election issued his October 8 internal memo to the staff of ABC News that, when it became public, stirred controversy. Critics charged that Halperin was directing ABC reporters to tilt their coverage telling them, in effect, to ignore or minimize misstatements by Democrat Senator John F. Kerry but to attack any misstatements by Republican President George W. Bush.
Halperins memo claimed that the Bush campaign was trying to get away with as much as possible . No comparable criticism was made of Democratic candidate Kerry.
The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done, wrote Halperin.
Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and [makes] mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.
We have a responsibility, Halperin, then 39, continued, to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesnt mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides equally accountable when the facts dont warrant that.
Im sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.
Its up to Kerry to defend himself, of course, wrote Halperin. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.
Mark Halperins idea of what is right may be what is Left. He was born in 1965 in Bethesda, Maryland, the red-diaper baby of hard-Left-connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin. This fact reveals an entire Left-spin universe in which Mark grew up exposed to his fathers comrades and radical ideas.
Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President of the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and Director of the Open Society Policy Center established by eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros.
Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, Morton Halperin graduated from Columbia University (1958) and earned a Ph.D. from Yale University (1961). He taught at Harvard Universitys Center for International Affairs (1961-66). He worked in the Department of Defense 1966-69, then in 1969 became a staff member for the National Security Council (NSC) as senior assistant to Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixons assistant for national security affairs.
In 1970, Halperin resigned to protest, he said, President Nixons decision to move American forces into Cambodia and to intensify the bombing of North Vietnam. Classified details of U.S. bombing in Cambodia had been leaked to the New York Times, and security officials, suspecting Halperin, had been tapping his telephones. Halperin sued the government over what he called this violation of his privacy, prompting public debate over how much privacy someone entrusted with classified military information should have.
Leaving government in 1970, Halperin became a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank.
Since 1961, as in a study he did for the Institute of Defense Analysis, Halperin from inside the government had advocated U.S. nuclear disarmament, even if the Soviet Union did not likewise disarm. In any mutual arms reduction treaty with the Soviets, wrote Halperin in A Proposal for a Ban on the Use of Nuclear Weapons, inspection was not absolutely necessary The United States might, in fact, want to invite the Soviets to design the inspection procedures if they seem interested in them.
In 1966, a year after his son Mark was born, Halperin during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged that the United States should diplomatically recognize the Communist Peoples Republic of China and seek its admission to the United Nations.
After leaving government, Halperin was feted and embraced by many progressive groups that promoted similar views, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
The Soviet Union apparently never contemplated the overt use of military force against Western Europe, wrote Halperin in 1971 in Defense Strategies for the Seventies. The Soviet posture has been, and continues to be, a defensive and deterrent one against a Western attack.
During President Lyndon Johnsons administration Halperin had been in charge of compiling a classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. As David Horowitz and Richard Poe reported:
This secret history later emerged [in June 1971] into public view as the so-called Pentagon Papers. Halperin and his deputy Leslie Gelb assigned much of the writing to leftwing opponents of the war, such as Daniel Ellsberg who, despite his background as a former Marine and a military analyst for the Rand Corporation, was already evolving into a New Left radical With Halperins tacit encouragement and perhaps active collusion Ellsberg stole the secret history and released it to The New York Times Not surprisingly, The Pentagon Papers echoed Halperins long-standing position that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and ridiculed Presidents Kennedy and Johnson for stubbornly refusing to heed those of their advisors who shared this opinion.
In 1975, when Mark Halperin was 10, his father became director of the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS), bankrolled by the Field Foundation and the Fund for Peace (FFP). Much of CNSSs staff came from the ultra-leftist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and from the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), identified in past congressional investigations as a Communist front group. One ubiquitous figure on the Left who helped run CNSS with Halperin was IPS director Robert Borosage. Halperin remained CNSS Director until 1992, when the election of President Bill Clinton brought him back into government.
In February 1993, President Bill Clintons administration announced the appointment of Morton Halperin to the new position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping. Halperin withdrew his name from consideration in January 1994, his nomination stalled by both Republican and Democrat U.S. Senators who refused to consent to so radical a nominee.
Halperin was for many reasons too controversial to win Senate confirmation. He had advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United States, publication of most U.S. military secrets, and an end of all clandestine activities by the U.S. against the Soviet Union and its colony in Communist Cuba.
Concerning the Soviet-Cuban military intervention in Angola, Halperin in the June 9, 1979, issue of The Nation magazine had written, Every action which the Soviet Union and Cuba have taken in Africa has been consistent with the principles of international law.
Morton Halperin during the mid-1970s befriended Philip Agee, a former-CIA-agent-turned-Communist who publicly identified hundreds of purported American Central Intelligence Agency agents. At least one of these agents, Athens station chief Richard Welch, was murdered shortly thereafter. Halperin flew to Europe to help Agee find safe haven after Great Britain expelled him. In the U.S., Halperin opposed legislation to punish the outing of U.S. undercover agents as Agee had done. Halperin has described the CIA as the subverter of everybody elses freedom.
Halperin, as Director of the Washington, D.C. office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in this era also defended the right of The Progressive magazine to publish secret details it had obtained of how to make an atomic bomb.
In 1976, Halperin accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of murdering Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. In 1977 Halperin joined with the National Lawyers Guild to form a legal resources center to oppose police spying and became chairman of the Campaign to Stop Government Spying (CSGS). The conference that launched CSGS was co-convened and controlled by a steering committee of several left-wing organizations, among them the Institute for Policy Studies, the National Lawyers Guild, Halperins CNSS, Philip Agees Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). That same year Halperin co-authored the book The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies.
Morton Halperin is dangerous, said Senator Strom Thurmond of this man, nominated to shape national security policy and to again have access to Americas most highly classified military secrets. After the U.S. Senate refused to confirm Halperin, President Clinton appointed the controversial left-wing activist to several positions that required no Senate confirmation: Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council and consultant to the Secretary of Defense and to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
In 1998, Halperin became director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department. During his tenure 15 State Department laptop computers containing highly classified intelligence information disappeared, one of them checked out to Halperins office. Others were punished for this serious security breach, but Halperin was not.
Morton Halperin in February 2002 became Director of the Open Society Policy Center and has worked closely ever since with its creator, eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros, who committed tens of millions of dollars in 2004 to a variety of efforts to defeat President Bush. One of these Soros-funded political efforts is the Center for American Progress (CAP), launched in summer 2003, one of the Seven Sisters pillars of the lefts Shadow Government.
CAP is also known as the official Hillary Clinton think tank, described by Horowitz and Poe as a platform designed to highlight Hillarys policies and to enhance her prestige as a potential presidential candidate.”
According to a March 1, 2004 report by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation, Halperin and Soros handpicked the President of CAP, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President, second-in-command at CAP, where his son David is a Special Adviser on Campus Outreach. During the years 1997-2000, David Halperin worked as a speechwriter for President Clinton and the National Security Council. Among the Clinton White House email records that mysteriously disappeared when sought by investigators were ones to and from David Halperin, some of which might have involved his father.
This is the family and subculture in which Mark Halperin was raised and his political views were shaped. These are the roots from which his career has grown. In 1987, he graduated from Harvard University, where he was Associate Managing Editor of the Harvard Crimson campus newspaper.
This son of a famous and influential left-wing father joined ABC News in January 1988 as a desk assistant, then soon became researcher for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. For the next four years he worked with the investigative unit of World News Tonight and as a general assignment reporter in Washington. His fathers friends and contacts doubtless gave the rising young star advantages few others could match.
In 1992, Mark Halperin became a full-time off-air reporter traveling with then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clintons campaign. Liberal media insiders have seen Halperins confidential 1992 home movie Elvis and Us, which showed Clintons backstage clowning and antics during the campaign.
During the 1992 campaign, Halperin violated journalistic ethics by providing to Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos a copy ABC had obtained of Mr. Clintons youthful I loathe the military letter written to his ROTC commander, according to Tom Rosenstiels book about ABC Strange Bedfellows. Halperin thereby gave candidate Clinton days of advance warning to prepare his response before facing reporters questions about this letter Clinton had no reason to believe still existed.
Having helped Clinton win, Mark Halperin then covered the President-elects transition to power and was assigned to White House coverage for the first two years of the Clinton administration.
Apparently it bothered neither ABC nor Halperin that this networks White House reporter was the son of high-level Clinton appointee and controversial presidential advisor Morton Halperin. In 1997, the same year Mark Halperin was promoted to Political Director of ABC News, his brother David began a four-year stint as speechwriter to President Clinton.
If ABC News discovered that the public watchdog over a corporation was the son of one high official in that corporation and the brother of another, ABC rightly would report this as a scandalous conflict of interest and a betrayal of public trust. ABC never notified its audience that its reporter Mark Halperin was covering a Clinton White House that employed two members of his immediate family.
The same ought to be said today as Halperin controls ABCs coverage of a presidential campaign in which his father helps control organizations hard at work for the election of Democrat John Kerry. If ABC will not fire Halperin, it should at least practice truth in labeling by disclosing to its audience Halperins partisan paternal political connection to the Kerry election effort.
In the fall of 1994, Halperin became a producer with ABCs Special Events unit in New York. He created the daily ABC News online commentary and notebook The Note that covers each days political events. The liberal Washington Post described The Note as having a core audience of fanatics who swear by its political analysis.
Since 1994, and especially since his 1997 promotion to Political Director of ABC News, Halperin has played a major role in shaping, editing and aiming the networks political coverage and on-air discussions.
Halperins 2004 Bush-criticizing memo was controversial not only in its content but also in its timing. It was delivered to ABC News personnel including Good Morning America co-host Charlie Gibson only hours before Gibson was to select audience questions for and to moderate between the participants of the second Presidential Debate: President Bush and Senator Kerry. It is hard not to see this as Halperin trying to have an anti-Bush influence on how Gibson framed the debate.
Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections, wrote Halperin in The Note. These journalists, he wrote, share liberal political positions on issues such as gun control, homosexuality, abortion and religion.
The liberal establishment press, wrote Halperin, believes President Bush is walking a fine line with regards to the gay marriage issue, choosing between tolerance and his right-wing base. [Halperin never mentioned that Democrat John Kerry, despite having approved homosexual marriage during an interview with a gay magazine, when in front of heterosexual audiences always asserted that he believed marriage is between a man and a woman, apparently siding with the nations right-wing base.]
These journalists, Halperin wrote, share a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nations problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and dont have a negative effect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories.
The press, Halperin wrote, by and large, does not accept President Bushs justifications for the Iraq war in any of its WMD, imminent threat, or evil-doer formulations. It does not understand how educated, sensible people could possibly be wary of multilateral institutions or friendly, sophisticated European allies. [Halperin apparently believes that Iraq coalition allies such as Great Britain, Italy, Denmark and Poland lack the European sophistication he admires. At the time he wrote this in March 2004, the complicity of the United Nations, France and Germany in Saddams Oil-for-Food scandal was already becoming recognized in the national media.]
When told that during an already-scheduled interview with Bill OReilly of Fox News Channel he would asked about his statements about liberal bias in the establishment media, Mark Halperin cancelled the interview.
It is undoubted that lifelong leftist bias will impact ABCs coverage of this years presidential election.
Agree!
Well fags for decades have always preferred a certain branch of the military and it isn’t the Air force pal.
They are monsters - killers without conscience. You all just heard from one, didn't you? There is no precedent in our history for what is about to occur here in America, but there is ample precedent the world over.
The only cost-benefit anaylsis these monsters care about concerns who is left to rule from atop a heap of rubble and corpses.
A new feudalism (or worse) and a world lit only by fire will suit them just fine as long as they think that they will be the ones in the high castle. Most of us dead. The rest of us in chains. Thats their cost-benefit analysis.
Let's say that again: Millions of us dead. The rest of us in chains. And if that's too much to wrap your mind around - it's been done. Over and over again.
So this isn't about politics anymore. It's about who lives and who dies. A simple and brutal calculus.
Well, back to the book. Hopefully, there's be someone left to publish it and someone left to read it.
I doubt that. What did you expect from your Messiah Obongo?
My updated Preparedness Manual it is version H can be down loaded at: http://www.mediafire.com/?zx5772aa15x6xga
I think a public re-reading of the Declaration of Independence is in order.
Hussein may dare to try and use armed force to carry out his regime's orders. He would be a fool to do so--thus, I wouldn't be surprised if he acts accordingly.
I think a public re-reading of the Declaration of Independence is in order.
Hussein may dare to try and use armed force to carry out his regime's orders. He would be a fool to do so--thus, I wouldn't be surprised if he acts accordingly.
We are fast approaching a time of great choosing and you will be required to make a stand to: Choose this day how you will serve; Will you serve unwillingly and at the bidding of others wearing the yoke of socialism or will you hold true to the course of our forefathers standing tall and serving freely? As for me I choose to SERVE THE REPUBLIC!
That’s a valid concern. However, the average 70-yr old American vet is more than a match for a ‘blueberry’, most of them being barely out of the bush.
Don’t worry. Lakin will be found guilty, for guilty he is.
Guilty of keeping his oath, yes.
Unlike the people who will convict him.
Convincing people that right is wrong is what the communist process of “demoralization” is, and I have no doubts that they have been trying to demoralize our military. What I hear from the military lawyers leads me to think they’ve already succeeded.
I’ve pointed out that the exact reasoning used to accuse Lakin would also excuse German soldiers exterminating Jews. Now THAT is demoralized. The people arguing this have learned nothing from WWII. Really, really sad.
OK. Who is surprised by this? It was always there, lurking in the background from the moment Zero began his campain to destroy this country.
Lock and load.
>>Ive pointed out that the exact reasoning used to accuse Lakin would also excuse German soldiers exterminating Jews. Now THAT is demoralized.<<
I think one only needs to look at the lack of support for Lakin from active military to understand what support we the people would get.
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