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Barack Obama Tag

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 21 Comments
PRECIOUS! During an interview with NPR, President Barack Obama advised president-elect Donald Trump not to abuse the executive orders privilege:
Should President-elect Trump, once he's inaugurated, use his executive powers in the same way that you have? I think that he is entirely within his lawful power to do so. Keep in mind though that my strong preference has always been to legislate when I can get legislation done. In my first two years, I wasn't relying on executive powers, because I had big majorities in the Congress and we were able to get bills done, get bills passed. And even after we lost the majorities in Congress, I bent over backwards consistently to try to find compromise and a legislative solution to some of the big problems that we've got — a classic example being immigration reform, where I held off for years in taking some of the executive actions that I ultimately took in pursuit of a bipartisan solution — one that, by the way, did pass through the Senate on a bipartisan basis with our help.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 11 Comments
White House staffers placed four snowmen in the Rose Garden for Christmas decorations, but a few decided to use them as pranks on President Barack Obama after he called them creepy:
In an Instagram post this weekend, Souza showed a snowman decoration looking in on Obama through a window in the Oval office. Many online saw the photo and commented the snowman looked as if it were stalking the president. In the post, Souza explained it was part of a prank.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 19, 2016 32 Comments
Shades of "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" . . . On today's Morning Joe, Mike Barnicle claimed that Barack Obama had a "great, outstanding" presidency, "with a few minor ripples like Syria." So the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, traceable to Obama's abandonment of his red line, is a "minor ripple?" How callous can Barnicle be? And as bad as was Obama's failure on Syria, it is just one of a string of fiascos at his feet, from the rise of ISIS, to Iran, Libya, and on the domestic front, a record number of people out of work and on food stamps, and the slowest recovery in modern history.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 01, 2016 7 Comments
With President-elect Donald Trump a month away from taking the White House, President Barack Obama's administration has put pressure on Cuba's regime to make deals with GE and Google for the companies to operate on the island:
White House officials are unsure how Mr. Trump, the president-elect, will approach Mr. Obama’s Cuba policy. He has said he would reverse the effort to build relations, and this week wrote on Twitter that “if Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate the deal.”

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 30, 2016 13 Comments
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden received praise when they said neither one would attend the funeral of Cuba's oppressive dictator Fidel Castro. It was too good to be true. It seems Obama used a loophole to avoid sending a U.S. delegation to the funeral...by sending two U.S. officials. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest stated that Obama will send Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and acting U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis. Despite them being U.S. officials, it is not considered an official U.S. delegation "because the president did not abide by the formal process for naming a delegation." Oh, but it's totally okay because Rhodes planned on traveling to Cuba this week anyway.

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 28, 2016 17 Comments
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest has announced that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will not attend the funeral for Cuba's oppressive murderous dictator Fidel Castro, who died this weekend:
In an effort to halt a series of questions about the potential attendance of various individual government officials, Earnest would confirm only that the president and vice president would not travel to Cuba for the funeral service. He pointedly refused to rule out that Secretary of State John Kerry would attend, but would not confirm his attendance, either.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on November 21, 2016 26 Comments
Recently, there has been one bright spot for me remaining a California resident: The sheer entertainment value offered by the dramatic response of our leading politicians to President-elect Trump. For example, our state's representatives are lining up to work actively against our new President. The apparent goal is to make California to Trump what Texas was to Obama.
In the early morning hours after Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States, California Senate leader Kevin de León and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon were on the phone grappling with what comes next.

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 21, 2016 42 Comments
President Barack Obama has said that he will not constantly criticize President-elect Donald Trump once they transition, but he will speak up if a certain situation arises:
"As an American citizen who cares deeply about our country, if there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislative proposal or battle or go to core questions about our values and ideals, and if I think that it's necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, I'll examine it when it comes," Obama told reporters.

Posted by New Neo on November 20, 2016 19 Comments
There's long been speculation about what President Obama will be doing after January 20, 2017. Much of it has centered around ideas connected with the international scene, particularly the UN and the post of Secretary-General. But by custom, that position has never been filled by anyone who is a citizen of a Security Council nation, so it's a career trajectory that's highly unlikely for Obama. What's more, about a month ago Obama himself expressed some thoughts on the subject of his plans. To understand what he might have been referring to, it helps to take a look at the results of the Obama years, not on the international level but at the local level of the states. During Obama's presidency, the Republicans have pretty much taken over at the state level, as this chart illustrates:

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 10, 2016 18 Comments
President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama met at the White House for around 90 minutes to discuss transition of power. Trump called Obama a very good man and hopes to work with him in the future, while Obama called the meeting excellent:
Obama said the two men talked about foreign policy and domestic policy and said he was encouraged by Trump's interest in working together during the transition. "As I said last night, my No. 1 priority in the next two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures our President-elect is successful," Obama said.

Posted by Mary Chastain on November 09, 2016 40 Comments
The 2016 elections season has finally ended, which means speeches galore today. I planned on making them Quick Takes, but the ones from Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Hillary Clinton, and President Barack Obama surprised me with their class and humanity I feel they deserve more attention. Hillary showed a human side that didn't make much of an appearance on the trail. She congratulated Trump, told her supporters that they "owe him an open mind and a chance to lead."

Posted by Mary Chastain on October 25, 2016 19 Comments
In March 2015, President Barack Obama told CBS News that he did not know Hillary Clinton used a private email system when she served as secretary of state and claimed he learned about it from the news just like everybody else. Well, Wikileaks posted an email that proves otherwise: Obama Knew Hillary Email This was in March 2015. He repeated the same thing to 60 minutes in October 2015.

Posted by Mary Chastain on October 21, 2016 3 Comments
Wikileaks has dumped a few emails with President Barack Obama's personal email address that he used in 2008 when it published more emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. At the time of these emails, Podesta served as co-chair of Obama's transition team. https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/789188917736071169 Obama used the email address [email protected] when he had a Blackberry.

Posted by Mary Chastain on October 19, 2016 10 Comments
In May, Texas and 12 other states filed suit against the Obama administration when it issued a transgendered bathroom policy across the nation in public schools. U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor put a freeze on the policy in August when he found the "administration did not follow proper procedures for notice and comment in issuing the guidelines." Well, today, Judge O'Connor rejected the "administration's request to narrow a nationwide injunction banning enforcement" of the policy." He made a few changes to his original ruling, but now the Department of Education cannot "bring new cases enforcing transgender students' access" to these "intimate facilities."
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