ObamaOdrama

NPR reports that Justice David Souter is planning to retire from the Supreme Court at the end of the current term handing Obama his first opportunity to legally shape the future of the country.

Factors in his decision no doubt include the election of President Obama, who would be more likely to appoint a successor attuned to the principles Souter has followed as a moderate-to-liberal member of the court’s more liberal bloc over the past two decades.

In addition, Souter was apparently satisfied that neither the court’s oldest member, 89-year-old John Paul Stevens, nor its lone woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had cancer surgery over the winter, wanted to retire at the end of this term. Not wanting to cause a second vacancy, Souter apparently had waited to learn his colleagues’ plans before deciding his own.

I guess it had to happen Souter or later. Okay, I’m sorry about that but no where as sorry as John Sununu should be for recommending Souter in the first place.

Brace yourselves for the follow-up joke…

Politico reports that the Service Employees International Union has asked both CNN and Fox News to pull health care ads by Conservatives for Patient’s Rights.

The union has also started an e-mail campaign targeting Fox to “stop the swift-boating of health care.”

The cease-and-desist letter ratchets up a friction between progressive groups supporting President Barack Obama’s health care reform effort and Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, an opposition organization led by Florida health care entrepreneur Rick Scott.

The 60-second ad, which began running this week, claims Obama wants to drastically increase government control of health care and features critical remarks from physicians from Britain and Canada about their country’s nationalized health systems. A spokeswoman for Conservatives for Patients’ Rights said the ads are “fully documented.”

But the SEIU letter said the ad should be pulled for overstating the power of a newly established federal board on comparative effectiveness research and misrepresenting the views of the two featured physicians.

“This advertisement is false, deceitful and a distortion,” the letter states.

Didn’t the SEIU run an $2.1 million ad attacking John McCain during the presidential race quoting him as saying “I know a lot less about economics… I still need to be educated” when in fact John McCain candidly admitted in a WSJ interview?

“I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

Wait.. I guess SEIU does know something about falsehood, deceit, and distortion.

On Wednesday, the House passed the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (HR 1913) also known as the Mathew Shepard Act by a vote of 249 - 175 expanding federal hate crime laws. The bill also expands federal jurisdiction to attacks based on actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

While the Senate has yet to schedule a vote on the bill, many supporters are surely optimistic since Obama supports the bill and Democrats hold the majority in Congress.

The whole notion of special hate crime laws is absurd and disingenuous. Frankly, it’s discriminatory. When do we consider a violent crime committed against a particular person more reprehensible than another? Murder is murder and the victim’s race, color, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability shouldn’t matter.
Should this bill pass, justice will no longer mean the same thing for different people… so much for equal justice for all.

Obama opened his third presser with prepared statements addressing the swine flu crisis, the passage of the $3.4 Trillion budget resolution, economic crisis, and a short recount of his 100 days in office. Obama then proceeded to take questions from a list of pre-selected reporters creating another dull, rehearsed exchange like previous press conferences.
However, there were a few highlights… and I do mean few.

Jake Tapper kicked things off by pressing Obama on whether he believed the Bush administration authorized torture through the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique. Citing higher ideals and values, Obama affirmed waterboarding was torture in his opinion and in the “opinion of many who’ve examined the topic.” But as is his tendency to ramble on when off-script, Obama revealed despite all his higher ideals he is firmly commited to torturing the former administration with this distraction.

First, Obama actually conceded that waterboarding might have produced valuable intelligence but quickly followed up with the position that the CIA could have gotten the information in some other “non-enhanced” way. But in a follow-up question about the classified CIA documents showing the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques posed by Mark Knoller, Obama contradicts his own assertion that other techniques would have produced the same results.

I have read the documents. Now they have not been officially declassified and released. And so I don’t want to go into to the details of them. But here’s what I can tell you, that the public reports and the public justifications for these techniques, which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques, doesn’t answer the core question.

Which is, could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques? And it doesn’t answer the broader question, are we safer as a consequence of having used these techniques?

Well, it seems like a simple matter of releasing these classified documents doesn’t it? Don’t count on it though. Do you think if “non-enhanced” CIA interrogation techniques produced actual results there would have been any need for waterboarding? It took waterboarding Kaleed Sheik Mohammed 183 times for him to spill the beans… put two and two together.

At a town hall meeting in St. Louis today, Obama took a swipe at Fox News and the Tea Party protestors while addressing a question about saving social security.

So, you know, when you see — those of you who are watching certain news channels that — on which I’m not very popular — (laughter) — and you see folks waving tea bags around — (laughter) — let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we’re going to stabilize Social Security. Claire and I are working diligently to do basically a thorough audit of federal spending. But let’s not play games and pretend that the reason is because of the Recovery Act, because that’s just a fraction of the overall problem that we’ve got.

Well, Obama may now be aware of the Tea Parties that occurred on April 15th, but he apparently still doesn’t get them… news flash.