Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Monday, May 24
by OVAL OFFICE WATCH
May 24, 2010
President Obama’s weekly address HERE
Elena Kagan Confirmation Hearings to Begin June 28 - SEE HERE.
Hoyer: No Plans Yet by Democrats To End Fannie, Freddie Bailouts - GO HERE.
Geithner rejects GOP warnings of Greek-like debt crisis in U.S. - HERE.
Obama says diplomacy, military go hand in hand
Yahoo News.com
WEST POINT, N.Y. – The U.S. must shape a world order as reliant on the force of diplomacy as on the might of its military to lead, President Barack Obama said Saturday as he outlined a foreign policy vision that repudiated the go-it-alone approach forged by his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Addressing nearly 1,000 graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, many of whom will likely head to war in Iraq and Afghanistan under his command, Obama said all hands are required to solve the world's newest threats: terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons, climate change and feeding and caring for a growing population.
The U.S. military is the "cornerstone of our national defense," but Obama said the men and women who wear America's uniform cannot bear that responsibility by themselves. "The rest of us must do our part," he said.
Read article.
Obama names chairmen of Gulf oil spill commission.
USA Today.com
President Obama announced Saturday that former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and former EPA Administrator William K. Reilly will lead a presidential commission investigating the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Graham, a Democrat, is a former Florida governor and senator. Reilly ran the Environmental Protection Agency under Republican President George H.W. Bush. His tenure at the agency included the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
"I can't think of two people who will bring greater experience or better judgment to the task at hand," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
Read article.
Interior Secretary says offshore oil still needed
Reuters.com
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told Congress on Tuesday that the United States will still have to rely on offshore oil drilling to meet its energy needs, despite the massive oil spill that threatens Gulf Coast communities.
"Offshore development is a necessary part of that future," Salazar said at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the oil spill, caused after a drilling rig leased by BP exploded last month.
Salazar said that as the government evaluates new offshore areas for potential oil development, it will conduct thorough environmental analyses, seek public comment and carefully consider worker safety and oil spill risks.
Read article.
Tougher Fuel and Emissions Standards for Cars Ordered by Obama.
Alex Wagner, PoliticsDaily.com
President Obama on Friday signed a memorandum setting a tough new national standard for fuel efficiency that will limit -- for the first time -- the emission of greenhouse gases from American trucks and automobiles.
Surrounded by an audience that included auto industry officials and environmental leaders alike, Obama lauded the efforts of executives from Daimler trucks, Volvo and Cummins Engines, and said their participation was "absolutely critical" in the passage of the regulations. Modeled on standards that California has been seeking to enact since 2002, the industry's support for the program is a significant change from its long-standing objection to regulation.
"A lot of people thought such an agreement was impossible," said the president. "After all, for decades, we had made little headway in improving the fuel efficiency of cars . . . Progress was mired in a lot of old arguments, traded across entrenched political divides . . . We proved that these were false choices." Some, however, have suggested that current broad support for the program is in large part tied to the government's bailout of leading American car companies, including GM and Chrysler, funds which have effectively kept the companies on life support as they fight for survival.
Read article.
U.S. reverses stance on treaty to regulate arms trade
Reuters.com
The United States reversed policy on Wednesday and said it would back launching talks on a treaty to regulate arms sales as long as the talks operated by consensus, a stance critics said gave every nation a veto.
The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush's administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national controls were better.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as long as the negotiating forum, the so-called Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, "operates under the rules of consensus decision-making."
"Consensus is needed to ensure the widest possible support for the Treaty and to avoid loopholes in the Treaty that can be exploited by those wishing to export arms irresponsibly," Clinton said in a written statement.
While praising the Obama administration's decision to overturn the Bush-era policy and to proceed with negotiations to regulate conventional arms sales, some groups criticized the U.S. insistence that decisions on the treaty be unanimous.
Read article.
Pay attention to Greece (but not too much attention)
Scott Hennen, Political Mavens.com
Optimistic that nearly a trillion dollars of bailout funds could help stabilize the economic and civil unrest engulfing Greece, the markets rallied from last week’s bizarre performance to post the biggest one-year gains in more than a year. Hopefully this good news can help silence the chattering classes who are attributing all economic ills to the troubled Mediterranean nation, and end this media-driven frenzy.
So the European Union has just written a 145 billion dollar check to bailout the bankrupt nation of Greece, what can we take away from it? How can the United States learn from one government’s total financial failure? Lesson number one: we are not Greece. Greece consists of only 2% of the entire European Union economy.
We have single states here in the US with bigger GDP numbers than Greece. Take some of those states—-the ones with high deficits (New York, Illinois, New Jersey and California, for instance) —and compare their debt to that owed in vulnerable EU countries like Greece as a percentage of the GDP. Here’s the striking contrast: debt to GDP ratios in high deficit states were below 15% during 2009-2009, while this ratio was well above 60% for vulnerable EU countries, including Greece.
Read article.
America's Suicide By Self Immolation
Ron Ewart, NMJ.us
Successful Suicide: "A self-inflicted fatal wound."
Self-immolation: "Successful suicide by fire."
Does America have a death wish? Or do those in power desire to assassinate the greatest experiment with freedom ever tried on planet earth, and for diabolical reasons? These are the two questions that every American should be asking themselves. The answer could very easily determine the next action for America. If the former is true, then Americans must set about to heal the American culture. If the latter is true, then Americans had better remove the assassins and they had better do it pretty damn quick.
Many remember Jim Jones Peoples' Temple and the 1978 mass suicide of the entire Temple flock, by purportedly a cocktail of poisoned Kool-Aid, in Jonestown, Guyana. Although many of Jones' followers drank the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid voluntarily, others were shot, or forcefully injected with a poison. A direct manifestation of cult radicalism.
"Jones preached a 'social gospel' of human freedom, equality, and love, which required helping the least and the lowliest of society's members. Later on, however, this gospel became explicitly socialistic, or communistic in Jones' own view, and the hypocrisy of white Christianity was ridiculed, while 'apostolic socialism' was preached."
Does any of what Jones preached have a similar ring to it? Could America be on the suicidal path of a Jim Jones Peoples' Temple? Are Americans unknowingly drinking the Kool-Aid of a Jim Jones cocktail? Will we next be asked to sacrifice our freedom, our sovereignty, or worse, our lives, by our leaders, in a case of mass self immolation, or self-induced enslavement? From the mounting evidence, it would seem so.
Read article.
On Track To Become Next U.K.?
Investors.com
Government gobbled up the British economy with amazing speed in the past decade. Here's how it happened — and why something very much like it could happen in the U.S.
It was not so long ago that Great Britain was rightly seen as the most "American" of the major European economies, with a tilt toward free-market capitalism and a relatively lean public sector.
No more. The U.K. is now, in the words of the Cato Institute's Daniel J. Mitchell, "the new France." Its public-sector spending has exploded over the past decade so that it now makes up more than half the economy.
According to the latest figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, government spending was 52.1% of Britain's GDP in 2009. The OECD projects the public sector to hit 53.2% of GDP in 2011.
Read article.
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