Tag: Barack Obama

Newspaper runs Obama assassination ad

A Pennsylvania newspaper published an advertisement on Thursday calling for the assassination of President Obama. The ad, buried in the classifieds, says:

May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, & Kennedy!

According to this item at the Daily Kos, the ad — published in the Times Observer of Warren, Pa. — appears to have made it into the paper by accident. Publisher John Elchert is quoted as saying, “It is unfortunate that it made it to press. The person who took the ad didn’t recognize the significance of the names. We canceled the ad and turned the information over to the authorities.”

In an apology published in today’s edition, the Times Observer reports that the identity of the person who placed the ad was provided to local police, who in turn alerted federal authorities. (Via Greg Mitchell. The story is currently leading Romenesko as well.)

Image from Capitol Beat, which has also been covering the story.

All appellate judges are activists

At TPMDC, Eric Kleefeld posts a statement from U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., saying that he’s concerned Judge Sonia Sotomayor might allow her “personal race, gender, or political preferences” to exert an “undue influence” over her decisions as a Supreme Court justice.

You’re going to hear a lot of this in the days and weeks ahead. Conservative critics seem to be oblivious to the fact that white men have both a race and a gender. I highly recommend Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker profile of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has emerged as a conservative activist judge whose world view is very much informed by his race and gender.

To listen to conservative critics of “activist” judges, you’d think that appellate judges would always reach the same conclusion as long as they are competent and free of bias. But we all know that’s not the case, and that judges are heavily influenced by their personal beliefs.

Sotomayor, for instance, is already under fire for her role in a New Haven affirmative-action case that has been appealed to the Supreme Court. But as Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree pointed out on CNN last night, “the Supreme Court will probably decide the case 5-4. Now, she’s going to be wrong. Maybe she is. But four justices on this court right now will agree with her.”

In other words, she’s a liberal, and she’s well within the mainstream of liberal jurisprudence.

It was interesting that President Obama announced the Sotomayor pick on the same day the California Supreme Court upheld a voter-approved constitutional amendment that outlaws same-sex marriage. The vote was 6-1. Earlier, the court had created a right of gay marriage by a margin of 4-3.

The California rulings show just how important the courts are in American life — and how judges, reading the same laws, come to entirely different conclusions. If that’s activism, then all appellate judges are activists.

Obama won the election, which means that we’re going to get liberal activist judges rather than conservative activist judges. That’s the way things are supposed to work.

Let the games begin

President Obama will reportedly nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Although none of the candidates on his short list has a reputation for being a liberal fire-breather, Sotomayor is probably the most provocative given her ruling in a high-profile affirmative action case in New Haven.

A ruling Sotomayor made in 1995 ended the eight-month-long major-league baseball strike. So she sounds like a fine choice to me.

David Brooks almost gets it right

David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times is smart and useful in its treatment of the similarities between the national-security policies of President Obama and those of George W. Bush after 2003 (though I think a more reasonable date to pick would be 2005), and of the differences between the Bush team and Dick Cheney during the waning years of the Bush White House.

But Brooks misses entirely why Obama has been more successful in selling those policies. It’s not just that Obama is more skillful at it, and understands public leadership better than Bush ever did. More than anything, it’s that when Bush finally moved away from the abject failures of the Bush-Cheney years, they were his failures.

Bush may have begun doing the right thing — or, at least, he may have begun doing the wrong thing less often — but he no longer had any credibility. Thus, by the time Condoleezza Rice had begun moving foreign policy in a less-insane direction, Bush had already irretrievably cast himself as a malleable tool.

Nor are the choices Obama is making today — on Guantánamo, on torture photos, on military tribunals — the sorts of things that will gain any real support on their own merits. Rather, most reasonable people see them as the least-bad decisions he could make given the “mess” that he inherited from Bush, as he put it yesterday.

Again, not an argument Bush could have made.

Singling out Obama for his religion

I haven’t done any research on this, so I’m running the risk of being wrong. But it seems to me that Catholic leaders used to reserve their venom for pro-choice elected officials who were also fellow Catholics. I could point to any number of examples, but you may recall there was some buzz during the 2004 presidential campaign that John Kerry would be denied communion because of his pro-choice stance.

So it strikes me as an unfortunate escalation for Catholics who oppose abortion rights to protest Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Obama to speak at the university’s commencement and to award him an honorary degree. As the Boston Globe’s Michael Paulson reports, Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, a well-known conservative Catholic, is the latest to take part in the protest, as she has refused to accept an award on the same platform as Obama.

Trouble is, Obama is not a Catholic, or even a conservative Protestant. Rather, he is a member of the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination that supports abortion rights (notwithstanding the fact that he quit his UCC church over statements made by his former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright). Indeed, the UCC is part of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which issued a statement shortly after Obama’s inauguration praising him for overturning Bush administration policy on global reproductive-health assistance.

Are Notre Dame’s critics — including Mary Ann Glendon — suggesting that a Catholic university can’t honor a non-Catholic if his religious beliefs differ from Catholic doctrine? It certainly sounds that way, doesn’t it? How far do they intend to go with this?

A disturbing profile of Geithner

The New York Times’ monumental profile of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is pretty disturbing.

Despite Geithner’s clear pattern of getting too close to the bankers he was supposed to be regulating during his time as president of the New York Fed, he still manages to come across as a man of integrity. So that’s not the issue.

Rather, the issue is that Geithner came to trust those bankers far more than he should have, a mindset that led him to get it wrong consistently.

It seems pretty clear that President Obama would have been better served by an outsider, albeit one with the technical expertise to see us through the financial crisis. Geithner’s got the technical expertise, but is simply too close to see the big picture.

Iranian-American journalist gets eight years

Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi has been sentenced to eight years in an Iranian prison, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports. The dispatch begins:

An Iranian court convicted journalist Roxana Saberi of espionage and sentenced her to eight years in prison today following a closed, one-day trial earlier this week, according to international news reports. Her lawyer said he will appeal. “Roxana Saberi’s trial lacked transparency and we are concerned that she may not have been treated fairly,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “We call on the Iranian authorities to release her on bail pending her appeal.”

You have to wonder if Saberi has been caught up in the byzantine workings of internal Iranian politics. President Obama has attempted to find an opening to the regime. Iranians who don’t want to see any contacts between Iran and the United States obviously stand to benefit from Saberi’s imprisonment.

Obama now pretty much can’t — and shouldn’t — have anything to do with the Iranian government unless it releases Saberi. Which it won’t.

Here is a link to the CPJ’s online petition demanding freedom for Saberi. I’m going to go sign the Facebook version right now.

More: I see that the petition is now closed. But I joined the CPJ’s Facebook group, and urge you to do the same.

Still more: According to Global Voices Online, an Iranian blogger says Saberi is being held so that she can be used as a pawn in a prisoner swap.

Photo of Saberi with former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

Power Line’s new math

At Power Line, John Hinderaker says a chart on budget deficits put out by the Congressional Budget Office shows President Obama’s claim that he’ll reduce deficit spending is “a bald-faced lie.”

Really? Hinderaker reproduces the chart, so have a look. What I see is that the deficit hits a mind-boggling $1.8 trillion or so during the current fiscal year, 2009, which ends on Sept. 30. We already knew that, and we know the reason: it’s the government’s response to the current economic emergency — the stimulus package, bailouts, etc., etc.

After that, though, both the White House and the CBO agree the deficit will shrink quite rapidly until around fiscal 2012 or ’13. Then the two sets of figures start to diverge. But that’s not really of much importance, is it? As Obama observed last night, adjustments will be made along the way.

Forced to choose between Hinderaker’s interpretation and my own lying eyes, I’ll go with the latter.