Barack Obama’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post today is a bit of a disappointment. It reads like political boilerplate. And it’s unnecessary: the President is far more effective when he speaks–and he has gotten a bit more pointed in the past few days, making it clear that the sort of “stimulus” that Republicans support [...]
On January 21, I wrote about the discovery of the photograph that led to the now-ubiquitous Shepard Fairey “Hope” image of Obama, gazing up and out into the middle distance. The photographer, Manny Garcia, who now works for Bloomberg, told me at the time, quite sincerely, that he did not want money or lawyers, but [...]
The Wall Street Journal has this dispatch today on the efforts of Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring the bacon-like-substance back to his home state of Nevada. For the past few weeks, Mr. Reid has worked behind the scenes on a plan backed by a broad range of industries that would allow companies to pay [...]
In this story for TIME.com, Massimo Calabresi points to one of the trickier calculations that every President–and especially a new one–must face: How much to defer to Congress on legislation. Ultimately, of course, Congress writes every line of every bill, and the leaders and committee chairmen on Capitol Hill have a better feel for what [...]
We already know that Obama plans to officially announce Joshua DuBois’ appointment to be director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships tomorrow, as well as the unveiling of his newly-formed Presidential Advisory Council of the same name. But I’m told by a religious leader who will be part of the Council [...]
Where things stand.
On the Daschle debacle and how Obama should think about restructuring the stimulus package.
Two administration officials just finished briefing White House reporters about the details of President Obama’s new plan to restrict Wall Street compensation. (As a condition of the briefing, I cannot tell you the names of the officials who spoke; reporters objected to this condition at the outset to no avail.) The briefing did shed some [...]
Let’s leave aside the fact that if Dick Cheney and his alleged boss had been more vigilant–if they had listened to the Clinton appointees like Sandy Berger who warned about Al Qaeda, if they had paid attention to their own intelligence reports (notably the one on August 6, 2001)–the September 11 attacks might never have [...]
Here’s the latest from me about President Obama and Speaker Pelosi’s relations. There’s also a report out today that Blue Dog Rep. Jim Cooper told Liberadio on Sunday that he got “quiet encouragement” from Obama’s staff to organize a letter signed by 55 House Dems criticizing Pelosi for not putting the stimulus through regular order. [...]
