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Poll on FaceBook: “Should Obama be killed?
Some Democrats have also expressed skepticism about the deal, saying the majority of party members had wanted the public option.
“One of the ideas that’s been kicked around is to have some kind of public option as a back up,” Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told reporters today. “I don’t know yet. I have some concerns myself — the public option under the majority leader saves. Are we going to lose those savings?”
Meanwhile, liberal groups expressed frustration with the deal. Liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org urged its members to sign a petition calling on members of Congress to include “a real public health insurance option.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who is spearheading health care negotiations, will stay mum on the details until he has a cost assessment from the non-partisan CBO, which is likely to come by the end of this week.
In a hastily arranged news conference Tuesday evening, Reid would only tell reporters that the 10 Democratic negotiators, which include five liberals and five conservatives, “worked through a real problem here” and “have a broad agreement” on “consensus that insures the American people win.”
He would not say what’s in the agreement, but added that reports that the public option are gone are “not true” and people “will be surprised by what we sent to CBO.”
“Not everyone is going to agree on every piece we sent over, but that doesn’t mean we don’t agree on what we sent over,” Reid said.
Even if the secret deal were to get broad support and pass, Democrats will still have to overcome hurdles in ironing out the differences between the Senate and House bills — the latter includes the option of a government-run insurance program.
Democratic leaders will also have to appease their party members who wanted a strong public option included in the legislation.
Most Republicans oppose the option of a government-sponsored health insurance plan altogether, and have focused their efforts chiefly on targeting Medicare cuts in the Senate bill. The secrecy of the deal and the closed-door negotiations that led to it could also lend weight to transparency concerns that Republicans are making.
The U.S. and China exchanged barbs Wednesday at the Copenhagen climate talks, underscoring the abiding suspicion between the world’s two largest carbon polluters about the sincerity of their pledges to control emissions.
U.S. chief negotiator Todd Stern urged China to “stand behind” its promise to slow the growth of the country’s carbon output and make the declaration part of an international climate change agreement.
China rejected that demand, and renewed its criticism of the U.S. for failing to meet its 17-year-old commitment to provide financial aid to developing countries and to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases warming the Earth.
“What they should do is some deep soul-searching,” said Yu Qingtai, China’s chief climate negotiator.
The remarks during separate news conferences reflected the heavy lifting that remains in the 10 days before 110 heads of state and government conclude the summit, which aims to create a political framework for a treaty next year to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
President Barack Obama helped break the ice in the troubled negotiations last month, saying he would deliver a pledge at Copenhagen to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by around 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. It will be the first time the U.S. has committed to a reduction target.
China responded a day later, announcing it would voluntarily reduce the carbon intensity of its industry by up to 45 percent, meaning its emissions would continue to grow but at a rate lower than the economy.
Stern said China’s announcement boosted optimism before the conference, but didn’t go far enough.
“What’s important is not just that they announce them domestically but they put them as part of an international agreement,” Stern said.
Whatever actions the Chinese take to slow emissions growth should be transparent, he said, “it’s not just a matter of trust.”
The Chinese delegate accused the Americans and other wealthy countries of insincerity when they signed the 1992 climate convention promising voluntary carbon reductions. The convention was amended five years later in Kyoto, making reductions mandatory for most industrial countries. The United States rejected the protocol because it did not include China or India.
During the talks Wednesday, the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu seized the initiative with a demand that the conference go beyond a political deal and negotiate a new protocol with the same legal standing as Kyoto.
Tuvalu and other island nations are threatened by rising sea levels that scientists say will engulf low-lying areas as Arctic ice sheets and mountain glaciers melt.
“Our future rests on the outcome of this meeting,” said Tuvalu delegate Ian Fry.
But in an unusually open split among the developing countries, China refused to support Tuvalu’s motion for an open debate on its draft protocol. The procedural rebuff doomed the island state’s initiative.
Outside the conference hall, about 100 activists hastily arranged a noisy demonstration in support of Tuvalu, prompting U.N. police to close off the plenary area and to eject anyone in the hall without the correct badge.
Environmental campaigners have threatened disruptions over the weekend, raising fears of violence and rioting.
Danish police raided a building that the city of Copenhagen had loaned to political activists and found shields and fluorescent tubes filled with a mixture of oil and paint, apparently meant to be used in Saturday’s protest, said police spokesman Rasmus Bernt Skovsgaard. No arrests were made.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson, meanwhile, said her agency’s decision that greenhouse gases should be regulated would be a dual path of action by the Obama administration and Congress.
The EPA determined Monday that scientific evidence clearly shows they are endangering the health of Americans, and that the pollutants — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. That means the EPA could regulate those gases without congressional approval.
The EPA decision was welcomed by nations that have called on the U.S. to boost its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Those nations believe Obama could act more quickly and bypass legislation slowly working through Congress.
The full Senate has yet to take up legislation that cleared its environment committee and calls for greenhouse gases to be cut by 20 percent by 2020, a target that was scaled back to 17 percent in the House after opposition from coal-state Democrats.
“We have been fighting to make up for lost time,” Jackson said, referring to the Bush administration’s rejection of Kyoto.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — Find behind-the-scenes information, blog posts and discussion about the Copenhagen climate conference at http://www.facebook.com/theclimatepool, a Facebook page run by AP and an array of international news agencies. Follow coverage and blogging of the event on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/AP_ClimatePool.
Watch him explain — at the Victory Fund’s Gay and Lesbian Leadership gala, no less — why his office specifically told Blue Shield/Blue Cross not to comply with the court order:
Berry’s answer is pretty confounding — it’s clear he can hardly believe it himself. If you didn’t watch the video, he says that the Justice Department has pretty much advised him that “Neither I nor the President have the authority to do this.” Er? You don’t have the right to comply with a court order?
Regardless of what the judiciary branch has told Berry, the administration has 30 days to comply with the court order — or appeal it. Ignoring it isn’t an option — though the Bush Administration might have led some people in the Justice Department to think it is.
At the same San Francisco event where Berry spoke, openly lesbian Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and openly gay Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) told the audience that a bill on benefits for domestic partners is expected to hit the House floor by the end of the year.
If it passes, hopefully no gay person will ever have to deny another gay person same-sex benefits again.
Poll on FaceBook: “Should Obama be killed?” Wow…
by mazpantz [Subscribe]
Mon Sep 28, 2009 at 11:34:30 AM PST
So apparently someone has started a facebook poll that asked if Obama should be killed. Before you go searching for it, don’t waste your time because Facebook has already disabled the app.
I’ll be the first one to point out how the left is being hypocritical by criticizing the right for their crazy protests (tea parties and such). I mean I think we had just as many crazy protesters doing embarrassing things when Bush was in office. Granted Bush did worse things than Obama so some of the protesting and outlandish statements were more warranted than the ones the right is throwing at Obama but the point is both sides have their fair share of crazies.
But this, this is bad. This is definitely the worst I’ve seen. We have all see the war crimes protests and polls, but I have never seen a poll asking if Bush should be killed, this is definitely a new low. Not only is it a new embarrassing low for U.S. politics but it’s downright dangerous. I suspect the creator of the poll will be getting a visit form the party-van at some point today.
Here’s the story with a picture of the now deleted poll: http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo…
President Barack Obama laid out a slate of job-creating ideas in a speech at the Brookings Institution Tuesday – a sort of “stimulus lite” — but carefully avoided saying how much the new plans would cost.
Obama touted the success of his stimulus and economic recovery efforts so far this year and endorsed a series of new ideas, including tax cuts for small business, new infrastructure spending on highways, rail and other projects, and a so-called “cash for caulkers” program that would give rebates to people who retrofit their homes to be more energy efficient.
Obama’s remarks represent a sort of political doubling down on the idea of federal stimulus spending. Indeed many of the ideas he mentioned are extensions of or additional funding for, items that were included in his $787 billion stimulus package earlier in the year.
It comes at a moment in which Republicans have been gaining political traction with the voter anger over bailouts and deficits in Washington. Obama acknowledged the political truth that the bailouts have not been popular: “There has rarely been a less loved or more necessary emergency program than TARP,” he said, referring to the $700 billion bank bailout program. As “galling” as the assistance was, he said, the program helped stave off economic disaster.
“Our work is far from done,” Obama said. “For even though we have reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who have been swept up in the flood.”
Obama called the more than 7 million Americans who have lost their jobs since the recession began a “staggering figure” and a “continuing human tragedy.”
“It speaks to an urgent need to accelerate job growth in the short term while laying a new foundation for lasting economic growth,” he said.
But the president did not say how much all this will cost.
Instead, he sought to remind voters about how dire the economic picture was when he took office, reminiscing about briefings he got from his economic team soon after he was elected. And he joked about the scale of the problem that landed on his plate: “Having concluded that it was too late to request a recount,” he said, “I tasked my team with mapping out a plan to tackle the crisis on all fronts.”
In a conference call with reporters before the speech, senior administration officials also avoided offering any specific price tag for the new effort. The official said the reduced cost of bank bailouts gives them as much as $200 billion in additional “fiscal room” for spending and reducing the projected deficit, which was calculated assuming that the government would spend the entire $700 billion allocated to TARP.
read ViaPolitico
For the second month in a row we find Barack Obama’s national approval rating at 49%, with 47% of voters disapproving of him. He has the support of 83% of Democrats, 46% of independents, and 11% of Republicans. None of those numbers have really changed from our November poll.Support for Obama on health care has hit another new low with just 39% of voters now expressing approval of his health care plans and 52% opposed. 90% of respondents who said they were opposed to Obama’s plan said it was because it involved the government too much in health care with just 6% saying their opposition was because it didn’t create enough government involvement. This would seem to refute other recent polling that suggested a large amount of opposition to Obama on health care was coming from the left.
Obama gets better marks on Afghanistan with 47% of voters saying they support his approach there to 37% who are opposed. Not surprisingly he gets more support from Republicans on this issue than health care (30% compared to 5%) and less from Democrats (63% compared to 69%). His Afghanistan stance isn’t doing anything to help his overall standing with GOP voters though- even among those who say they agree with him on this issue his approval rating is only 13%.
Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.
Finally 20% of voters, including 35% of Republicans, support impeaching Obama for his actions so far. I’m not clear exactly what ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ they are using to justify that position but there may be a certain segment of voters on both the right and the left these days that simply think the President doing things they don’t agree with is grounds for removal from office. I don’t think Obama has a lot to worry about on that front.
Full results here
