ObamaOdrama

Back in June, as the Democratic presumptive presidential nominee, Obama made the following statements at an annual American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC) meeting in Washington:

“There’s no greater threat to Israel or to the peace and stability of the region than Iran.”

“The danger from Iran is grave and real and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.”

Speaking before 300 major APAIC donors on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel addressed how Obama plans to eliminate that threat:

Thwarting Iran’s nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, according to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Israeli TV reports said Monday that Emanuel made the comments in a closed-door meeting the previous day with 300 major AIPAC donors.

Last month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Israel that it risks losing Arab support for combating threats from Iran if it rejects peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Clinton said Arab nations had conditioned helping Israel counter Iran on Jerusalem’s commitment to the peace process.

Not really a surprise considering back in June, Obama also said:

“As president of the United States, I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place of my choosing…”

And backed that statement up with a special Nowruz YouTube message for Iran’s mullahs.

Just another example of the Obama administration pushing the reset button.

Corky Boyd over at Island Turtle posted an incredibly revealing morning talk radio interview with bankruptcy attorney Tom Lauria who represents a handful of hedge funds holding Chrysler debt.  In the interview, Tom Lauria revealed that the Obama administration threatened to destroy his client’s reputation via “the full force of the White House Press Corps” if the client didn’t accept the government’s proposed Chrysler restructuring plan.

Here is the tape of Beckman’s interview of Lauria. The relevant portions begin at the 1:30 mark. Listen to it.

Lauria: Let me tell you it’s no fun standing on this side of the fence opposing the President of the United States. In fact, let me just say, people have asked me who I represent. That’s a moving target. I can tell you for sure that I represent one less investor today than I represented yesterday. One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House Press Corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight. That’s how hard it is to stand on this side of the fence.

Beckman: Was that Perella Weinberg?

Lauria: That was Perella Weinberg.

Naturally, the White House denies the claims.  It appears that so does Perella Weinberg (bold text added for emphasis)?

Suggestions have been made that the Perella Weinberg Partners Xerion Fund changed its stance on the Chrysler restructuring due to pressure from White House officials. This is incorrect. The decision to accept and support the proposed deal was made by the Xerion Fund after reflecting carefully on the statement of the President when announcing Chrysler’s bankruptcy filing. In considering the President’s words and exercising our best investment judgment, we concluded that the risks of potentially severe capital loss that could arise from fighting this in bankruptcy court far outweighed any realistic potential upside.

We have a very specific mandate from our investors, and that is to carefully weigh investment risks and rewards. It is not our investment mandate to pursue political or risky legal campaigns with our investors’ money. This was our assessment of investment risk and reward, nothing else.



While we did and still do believe that the lenders would be justified in pressing their objections under conventional bankruptcy law principles, we believe a settlement would now be in the best interests of all parties in the context of avoiding a drawn out contested bankruptcy litigation proceeding, and we encourage our colleagues in the loan syndicate to pursue this immediately.

In outlining the plan for Chrysler’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy announced on Thursday, April 30 and Obama’s recent statements about shrinking the financial sector by heavily regulating risk-taking, there is no mistaking Obama’s position. 

When Obama wants to change the fundamentals of what makes America the strongest economy in the world, when he looks to lesser economies for direction, and he punishes individuals for the benefit of others, it’s clear the Obama doesn’t think very highly of capitalism or those who practice it.

Fox News reports:

The Justice Department acknowledged Saturday that the Obama administration is considering reviving the military commission system that the president criticized in the past for prosecuting terrorism suspects held at a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But the system would likely include changes, particularly ones to afford greater due process to the accused, the Justice Department said in a statement in response to a story by The New York Times.

Following a town hall meeting in northern Virginia on Saturday, GOP leaders seemed to revel in Obama’s apparent change of heart.

“I think that President Obama is learning now that he is in office that a number of the things that he campaigned against and opposed, he was actually wrong on,” former presidential candidate Mitt Romney told FOX News.

Having based his entire presidential campaign on attacking the Bush administration and its policies to distinguish himself as an agent of change, it would appear that Obama’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.

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.