President Obama will be awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Distinction during his visit to Israel next month, according to a report in the Times of Israel.
Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to receive the honor, which was announced by Israeli President Shimon Peres’s office on Monday.
“Barack Obama is a true friend of the State of Israel, and has been since the beginning of his public life,” said Peres in a statement announcing the decision.
If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.
A broad mandate this is not.
I have begun a number of drafts and even a few completed essays (if you want to call them that) on this and related issues, but have not been happy with any of them as a whole. So here is my final attempt, made up of several unfinished essays of my “I’m a Left-leaning Mormon and I’m voting for Obama despite being Mormon and having issues with Obama.”
This is a unique situation for me, and perhaps that uniqueness requires far too much context. I am a Mormon. Romney and I share the same religion. However, we are culturally different. While we both went to BYU and served missions, and both wear those garments you are all so fascinated with (sorry to disappoint you but they aren’t magic. Rather they are outward expressions and reminders of promises I have made with God that are made sacred through my keeping those promises, not because of any inherent power) the similarities end after that .
One of the difficulties I have engaging with Mormon studies is that far too often it assumes a shared inner-mountain (ie. Utah ie. White) culture as Mormonism, at times superseding topics of religious concern. I felt far more at home as a Mormon in inner-city Washington D.C. than I did in Utah. Moving from suburban Portland to Salt Lake City was a bigger culture shock than moving from Brooklyn to Stillwater, Oklahoma.
On being a Left-wing/what-have-you Mormon
Read moreThe “disposition matrix” has been developed and will be overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is “to augment” the “separate but overlapping kill lists” maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as the centralized clearinghouse for determining who will be executed without due process based upon how one fits into the executive branch’s “matrix”. As Miller describes it, it is “a single, continually evolving database” which includes “biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations” as well as “strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols”. This analytical system that determines people’s “disposition” will undoubtedly be kept completely secret; Marcy Wheeler sardonically said that she was “looking forward to the government’s arguments explaining why it won’t release the disposition matrix to ACLU under FOIA”.
Classic Lewis Black from last night’s Daily Show
Obama Trade Documents Leaked, Shows POTUS Gave Power To Corporations To Violate National Sovereignty
A critical document from President Barack Obama’s free trade negotiations with eight Pacific nations was leaked online early Wednesday morning, revealing that the administration intends to bestow radical new political powers upon multinational corporations, contradicting prior promises.
The leaked document has been posted on the website of Public Citizen, a long-time critic of the administration’s trade objectives. The new leak follows substantial controversy surrounding the secrecy of the talks, in which some members of Congress have complained they are not being given the same access to trade documents that corporate officials receive.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been so incensed by the lack of access as to introduce legislation requiring further disclosure. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has gone so far as to leak a separate document from the talks on his website. Other Senators are considering writing a letter to Ron Kirk, the top trade negotiator under Obama, demanding more disclosure.
Under the agreement currently being advocated by the Obama administration, American corporations would continue to be subject to domestic laws and regulations on the environment, banking and other issues. But foreign corporations operating within the U.S. would be permitted to appeal key American legal or regulatory rulings to an international tribunal. That international tribunal would be granted the power to overrule American law and impose trade sanctions on the United States for failing to abide by its rulings.
The terms run contrary to campaign promises issued by Obama and the Democratic Party during the 2008 campaign.
“We will not negotiate bilateral trade agreements that stop the government from protecting the environment, food safety, or the health of its citizens; give greater rights to foreign investors than to U.S. investors; require the privatization of our vital public services; or prevent developing country governments from adopting humanitarian licensing policies to improve access to life-saving medications,” reads the campaign document.
Yet nearly all of those vows are violated by the leaked Trans-Pacific document. The one that is not contravened in the present document — regarding access to life-saving medication — is in conflict with a previously leaked document on intellectual property (IP) standards.
“Bush was better than Obama on this,” said Judit Rius, U.S. manager of Doctors Without Borders Access to Medicines Campaign, referring to the medication rules. “It’s pathetic, but it is what it is. The world’s upside-down.”
Paula Smith, who sells the sticker below, on why it’s not racist. And if the above quote isn’t enough to make your brain explode, read where she explains how the “N-word” isn’t about race.
Obama, once again, underestimates the American people. We love our remedies short sighted, stupid, made of bumper-sticker logic, and not solutions.
During President Obama’s “Twitter Town Hall” at the White House today, we learned he has more in common with George W. Bush than just the desire to prolong various wars in the Middle East.
