Category: Barack Obama

Shocking!

The Times Online:

China rounds up dissidents as President Obama touches down in Beijing

Chinese officials have rounded up dozens of Beijings’s tiny coterie of activists and petitioners in case any dissident tries to approach President Obama, who arrived in the city today.

The arrests continued to gather momentum even as Mr Obama told an unprecedented question-and-answer session with Shanghai students that freedom of information and expression were vital for a stronger, more creative society.

Among those detained was Qi Zhiyong, a dissident who lost a leg during the crackdown on the student-led protests in Tiananamen Square in 1989. He said that he had been held for trying to organise a human rights seminar on November 9 in a Beijing park. He and fellow organisers had planned for the seminar to last until the end of President Obama’s visit.

He had applied to police to stage a protest during Mr Obama’s visit “to press him to pay attention to human rights in China, people’s livelihoods and the relatives of jailed people, as he comes only to talk about climate change”.

Mr Qi said he was being held in the Beijing suburbs and had been charged with unlawful assembly and disturbing the social order.

As during the Olympics, the act of merely petitioning to lawfully to hold a protest was met by the Chinese government with arrest and imprisonment. And as is always the case under the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, there is no rule of law, only rule by law:

Also detained was the activist Zhao Lianhai, who attracted the attention of the authorities last year when he organised an online support group for parents of the thousands of children who fell sick after being fed tainted milk powder last year.

The activist group Human Rights in China said that Mr Zhao was handcuffed and taken from his home late on Friday night by police officers who searched his house and took away computers, a video recorder, a camera and an address book. When he refused to go with them, because the summons did not state a cause, the police filled in a summons for “provoking an incident”.

These are the actions of a government that deserves no support from President Obama.  It is tremendously disappointing that he  validates their hold on power by saying nothing or worse than nothing. He continued to support the “One China” doctrine and glossed over China’s ongoing illegal military occupation of Tibet as “differences”:

Mr Obama voiced public recognition of Tibet as a part of China – a remark that Beijing values. President Hu stood beside him impassive when he referred to the exiled Dalai Lama whom Beijing blames for unrest in Tibet and has branded a “jackal in monk’s robes”. Washington, Mr Obama said, supported the early resumption of talks between Beijing and the Dalai Lama “to resolve any concerns or differences the two sides may have”.

This is not leadership. It’s bland, ineffectual, and immoral passivism in the face of gross human rights abuses genocide and a brutal military crackdown.  Am I surprised? No, not terribly. But I am disappointed nonetheless.

No One Could Have Predicted…

No one could have predicted that a behind-closed-doors deal between the White House, Max Baucus, and the pharmaceutical industry to voluntarily cut their costs would not be honored by Big Pharma.

But the drug makers have been proudly citing the agreement they reached with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee chairman to trim $8 billion a year — $80 billion over 10 years — from the nation’s drug bill by giving rebates to older Americans and the government. That provision is likely to be part of the legislation that will reach the Senate floor in coming weeks.

But this year’s price increases would effectively cancel out the savings from at least the first year of the Senate Finance agreement. And some critics say the surge in drug prices could change the dynamics of the entire 10-year deal.

I expect we’ll see strong defenses from both Baucus and the White House of the pharmaceutical industry, accompanied by continued efforts to legislate any required cost schedules for brand-name prescription drugs. We will continue to be asked to trust Big Pharma and not cut into their bottom line by bulk negotiating drug prices, importing from Canada, or reducing the patent lifetimes that keep generics off the market.

The reason we’ll still see the White House and Baucus stand by Pharma is that they are both afraid of the pharmaceutical industry spending hundreds of millions of dollars in television advertising attacking reform. Now, the slight voluntary cost cuts in exchange for no negative ads will be traded in for maintaining the status quo in exchanged for no negative ads.

Cynics, myself included, have long expected that health care reform would be reform in name only. I never really expected that it would so literally be reform in name only, as we’re now seeing from the White House’s deal with Big Pharma resulting in literally no change in costs to consumers. Hopefully today’s news will show Baucus, the White House, and other Democrats on the Hill that non-binding verbal agreements are simply not going to be honored by the pharmaceutical industry. The only answer is to legislate reform. If the administration and leading Democrats on the Hill can’t see that, they will hopefully at least be clear-eyed about the electoral consequences for fake reform.

Shock: PRC Racism

I’m sure there’s  a lot of what follows that could be connected to cultural obtuseness and a simple lack of understanding that in America we don’t really talk or think the way the Chinese government is suggesting President Obama thinks. But then again, most of this is straight up racism. A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry has suggested that since President Obama is black, he should support what the Chinese government says was an abolition of slavery in Tibet.

A Chinese government spokesman said Barack Obama should be especially sympathetic to China’s opposition to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan independence, as a black president who lauded Abraham Lincoln for helping abolish slavery.

…

After Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. president said he would not have been able to reach that position without the efforts of Lincoln, said Qin.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” said Qin.

“Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States.”

Beijing calls the Dalai Lama a dangerous “splittist” encouraging Tibetan independence, a charge he denies. He says he is merely seeking true autonomy for Tibet, which last year erupted in riots and protests against the Chinese presence.

China’s stance was like Lincoln’s, said Qin.

“Thus on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said Qin.

Wow.  Just wow.

There’s so much historical inaccuracy, abject racism, and ignorance in Qin’s statement to unpack, it’s hard to know where to start.

On the American Civil War: the union government had not previously conquered an independent confederacy prior to the South leaving the union. The US was always one united country, north and south, prior to the South’s attempt to leave the union and establish their own government. That effort lead to a brutal, bloody war and was only resolved through shattering violence. Today the North and South is strongly united and the North maintains no occupying military presence in the South.

Contrast this to Tibet and China. Tibet, a historical independent country with documented independence going back hundreds of years, was invaded by the Chinese army under Mao in 1949. It has been occupied illegally since then and remains a totally militarized territory where tourists, foreigners, and journalists are subject to massive restrictions of movement.

Or, to put it more succinctly, there is no similarity between Lincoln’s role to preserve the union during the Civil War and Hu Jintao’s current crackdown in Tibet to maintain China’s military occupation.

Also, just because Barack Obama is an African-American, it does not mean he will blindly embrace whatever position the Chinese government fantasizes Abraham Lincoln would hold with regard to Tibet and China.

The Chinese government has been putting immense pressure on President Obama to say Tibet is a part of China and cancel all meetings with the Dalai Lama. There’s certainly some evidence that their pressure has been working. But I have to imagine that even if the Obama administration is inclined to relax American support for the Dalai Lama and Tibet, this sort of racist, anti-historical insanity from the Chinese government will slow Obama’s movement to where China wants him to be. At least, one would hope that he doesn’t let crap like this influence his foreign policy strategy.

Change

obama-dover

This might actually be one of the biggest differences between President Obama and President Bush.  The AP notes:

Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, visited the families of hundreds of fallen soldiers but did not attend any military funerals or go to Dover to receive the coffins.

Seeing the human consequences of a war are critical to any leader understanding it, as far as I’m concerned. Obama is doing the right thing here.

Shortsightedness Is A Problem

I understand that there’s always a strong desire for folks at the White House to never hear public criticism from allied groups or Democratic politicians, but this assault on AFSCME’s  president Gerry McEntee by an anonymous White House official is really absurd. There are going to be many fights, health care is just one of them. But it is one that the White House has waged with the benefit of surrogates and allies like McEntee and his union members’ dues fighting in the field. AFSCME is one of the coalition partners of Healthcare for American Now (HCAN), the leading Democratic/progressive field campaign that has been working in support of reform (disclosure: my employer, SEIU, is a member of HCAN). That is, McEntee’s union is one of many that has been helping create the political environment necessary to allow for a strong reform bill to land on President Obama’s desk.

McEntee is one of the labor leaders who has been pushing most publicly back against the administration for not fighting harder for the public health insurance option and other key reforms Obama promised his health care agenda would contain while on the campaign trail. Gunning at him through anonymous quotes isn’t just petty, it’s stupid. It makes it harder for AFSCME to be an effective advocate for change on health care and it makes it less likely that AFSCME or any other progressive organization will want to be the tip of the spear for the administration’s agenda again. After all, no one is going to appreciate being attacked as McEntee was by an anonymous White House official.

David Waldman points out that there is a real imbalance here between the pressure the White House will publicly put on allies like McEntee and the complete lack of pressure being placed on Democratic senators who are actually holding up key parts of the reform package.

“Allies” don’t pass this thing. Senators do. Keeping “allies” in line is about keeping up appearances. Keeping Senators in line is about getting results.

Now, you could certainly argue that you use the soft touch with Senators, since they’re a prickly bunch. But what does a hard line with “allies” get you, really? What’s “unity” worth, exactly? What’s it good for?

You’ll get unity if you pass decent reform and are seen fighting for it. You’ll need unity if you plan to shush critics, pass a piece of crap and call it a win.

This is not a sustainable model for governance. The Obama administration is at risk of burning out their allies, while showing Democratic Senators that they have little to fear for being obstructionist and forcing reform to the right. Hopefully they realize this is the case and will cut this frustratingly short-sighted behavior out soon.

The World According to Wingnuts

Barack Obama has only been in office for about nine months, but in that brief time the leading voices of the Republican Party have provided the rest of us with a telling system for evaluating what is good and what is bad in the world.

Earlier this month we learned that when America loses, it is time to cheer. Erick Erickson of RedState, one of the true leaders of the online right and an elected official in Georgia to boot, celebrated Chicago’s loss of the 2016 Olympics. He wrote, with great prescience:

Hahahahaha.

I thought the world would love us more now that Bush was gone.

I thought if we whored ourselves out to our enemies, great things would happen.

Apparently not.

So Obama’s pimped us to every two bit thug and dictator in the world, made promises to half the Olympic committee, and they did not even kiss him.

So much for improving America’s standing in the world, Barry O.

Maybe now perhaps we can hope he will mature a bit on the issues of foreign affairs. But I doubt it.

And today, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in international relations, including taking major strides towards ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Obviously this doesn’t quite jibe with Erickson’s forceful conclusion that Obama hasn’t improved America’s standing in the world.

One would think that Erickson would welcome the arrival of what he wanted to see Obama do – improve our standing in the world. Sadly, you’d be wrong. And so we arrive at the second lesson from Greater Wingnutia during the Obama administration: you should get upset when America wins.

Erickson chimes in:

I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news.
…

So in less than two weeks of entering office, Obama did something to qualify. What was it? Not closing Gitmo? Continuing the Bush administration’s policies in the War on Terror but no longer using the name? Or pronouncing a policy of abject American capitulation to our enemies?

The Peace Prize reaffirms it s a joke. But now a sad joke.

Not surprisingly, while Erickson leads the way in booing America’s success, he is by no means alone. Greg Sargent has compiled a number of rapid responses from top Republican bloggers and pundits, all expressing their profound discontent that America has succeeded. Republican Party chair Michael Steele was not one to be left out of the America bashing, issuing this petulant statement in response to our national success:

“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’  It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.  One thing is certain – President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”

Clearly the Republican Party is well represented by its leading voices online, as there isn’t an inch of daylight between Steele’s churlish sentiments and Erickson’s hyperventilating temper tantrum.

Sargent also notes that while there is a bevy of Republicans loudly booing this great day in the history of American foreign relations, they are putting forward the same response as another frequent critic of the United States of America…the Taliban.

“We have seen no change in his strategy for peace. He has done nothing for peace in Afghanistan.”

There you have it.  The only people who are booing America’s success as loudly as the Republican Party are the fucking Taliban.

Your modern Republican Party, ladies and gentleman.

Update:

Joining the Republican Party and the Taliban as the only people vocally condemning Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize…wait for it…Hamas!

But Islamist movement Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since routing pro-Fatah forces from the narrow coastal strip in June 2007, said the award was premature.

“He did not do anything for the Palestinians except make promises,” said Hamas spokesman Samir Abu Zuhri. “At the same time, he is giving his absolute support for the (Israeli) occupation.”

The GOP, the Taliban and Hamas… all you need to know folks.

Bob Herbert Is Shrill

Apparently the lack of ideas to drive job creation is something of a buggaboo for Herbert.

A massive long-term campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — which would put large numbers of people to work establishing the essential industrial platform for a truly 21st-century American economy — has not seriously been considered. Large-scale public-works programs that would reach deep into the inner cities and out to hard-pressed suburban and rural areas have been dismissed as the residue of an ancient, unsophisticated era.

We seem to be waiting for some mythical rebound to come rolling in, magically equipped with robust job creation, a long-term bull market and paradise regained for consumers.

It ain’t happening. …

The Obama administration seems hamstrung by the unemployment crisis. No big ideas have emerged. No dramatically creative initiatives. While devoting enormous amounts of energy to health care, and trying now to decide what to do about Afghanistan, the president has not even conveyed the sense of urgency that the crisis in employment warrants.

Urgency is most certainly needed, but beyond urgency — which, last time it was present about a year ago resulted in a massive bailout for Wall Street speculators who created the financial crisis — we need a commitment to infrastructure and to creating real jobs on real projects that improve the quality of life in America. Trying to do this on the cheap, with money going to the private sector but no public works, will not create jobs nor will it solve the looming infrastructure crisis of a country that runs on systems that are nearly 100 years old or more.

Obama, China & Tibet

Some right wing blogs have found a recent Washington Post article that lays out the decision by the Obama administration to not meet with the Dalai Lama during his visit to Washington this week. The justification offered by the administration is basically that they are prioritizing Obama’s November visit to China and have many key issues that they want to discuss then and worry that Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama, as every recent American president has when HHDL is in Washington, would piss off the Chinese government and impede negotiations on other issues.

Moe Lane of RedState writes in response to the question of whether it’d be worse to have the Obama administration shun the Dalai Lama at the request of the Chinese government or of their own volition:

to answer Doug’s confusion as to which is worse; it’d be if this was done unilaterally. If we negotiated to this it’d at least imply that we got a concession in return, which would be something, from a realpolitik point of view.

Welcome to the Obama administration and the frustrations that come with it Moe! The Obama administration, along with key Democratic leaders like Max Baucus and Harry Reid, have defined their negotiation strategy by compromising before even sitting down at the negotiating table, ensuring that we make concessions when none are guaranteed in return from the GOP. I guess it’s unfortunate that some Republicans are now finding that what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander.

Sadly, this decision regarding HHDL’s visit to DC is not the first time the Obama administration put human rights and democracy on the back burner when it comes to China. The WaPo story notes:

Before a visit to China in February, for example, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said advocacy for human rights could not “interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate-change crisis and the security crisis” — a statement that won her much goodwill in Beijing. U.S. Treasury officials have also stopped accusing China of artificially deflating the value of its currency to make its exports more attractive.

There you have it.  Of course the flip side of this is that Obama’s decision regarding this visit by the Dalai Lama isn’t really a change of policy course with regards to US-Sino-Tibetan relations. Clinton already charted that. What is new is that now the right is choosing to make hay about an issue that they’ve been silent on…until it’s possible to take a hit at President Obama on it.

Obama is fundamentally wrong to forestall US action on the Tibetan question. He should meet with the Dalai Lama now and he should do it not at the Capitol or in some lesser room in the White House, but in the Oval Office itself — something no American president has done with the Dalai Lama. Obama will have that opportunity shortly after his visit to China in November and whether or not he takes that important step will be determinative, in my view, of whether this administration will fail  in its responsibility to further the cause of human rights and freedom for Tibet and in China.

Sirota on Obama & Primaries

David Sirota identifies a crucial problem with President Obama’s engagement on behalf of incumbents in Democratic Senate primaries: he’s stymieing primaries of people that are holding up his legislative agenda. Or, more specifically, he’s squashing primaries that would have the effect of either moving the incumbent to the left or replacing him with a more liberal Senator.

So, again, why is the White House trying to crush primaries? I’m not expecting him to back primary challengers…but why is he trying to crush them, instead of simply staying out of the races entirely? I mean, I get why incumbent Senators or House members don’t want to face primaries – they just want an easy ride. The vexing question is why the president would try to help them crush primaries, when those primaries would help it pass its legislative agenda?

In Sirota’s column on the same subject,  he gives a very harsh critique of Obama’s justifications for trying to crush these primaries.

Hence, in trying to prevent or weaken primaries against incumbents, Obama is not merely signaling a royalist’s disdain for local democracy. He is exposing a corrupted pol’s willingness to prioritize country club etiquette over policy results. If his agenda ends up being killed, that cynical choice will be a key cause of death.

It’s what the Democratic elite does – protect the members of their club from the indignant Democratic rabble. It’s unfortunate that a President who waged a successful primary campaign as an outsider with little experience would so quickly slide into the mold of the people he came to Washington to change.

Arguably the best thing that happened to the chances of Obama’s agenda succeeding, at least on health care and labor reform, was Joe Sestak’s decision to primary Arlen Specter from the left. In the course of this year, Specter moved from opposing a public option to supporting single-payer health care. That would simply not have been possibly if Specter wasn’t fighting for his political life in a Democratic primary. He moved from being an opponent to the health reform policy package Obama supports to being an advocate for one even stronger than what is under debate in Washington.

That is what makes Obama’s efforts to quash primaries in Pennsylvania and Colorado and New York so odd. It undermines his agenda to have more conservative Democrats in the Senate, especially ones that are not being challenged to move to the left by primaries. Even if the liberalism of Specter, Gillibrand, and Bennett is temporary, it is better than nothing, as it ensures that at lest 25-50% of Obama’s first term is spent with these people behaving like liberal Democrats and not moderate Republicans.  The only explanation that I see is that Obama doesn’t believe in primaries; he supports “kicking away the ladder” after he and his peers have climbed up it. Who knew that the President would have such an aversion to democracy in the Democratic Party?

What Carter Said

It looks like former president Jimmy Carter has been reading Atrios:

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” Carter told NBC in an interview. “I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shared the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans”

Continued Carter: “And that racism inclination still exists. . . . It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”

The irony of Duncan Black’s writing style on the critiques, questions, and attacks on Obama lies in the confrontation of something that America is generally not comfortable to confront. It surely was a great triumph and step forward in race relations that we elected an African-American president last fall. But it was not the end of racism. It was not the end racial tension. It did not mark the end of hate.

Amidst everything surrounding Joe Wilson’s screetch against Obama, yesterday right wing blogs and talk shows were up in arms that somewhere in America, a fight had taken place on a school bus and a white child was beaten by a black child. That, somehow, became presumed to be racially based and President Obama’s fault. Brad at Sadly, No! takes apart an anecdote that underscores the fundamental racism driving the right’s* critique of Obama. Responding to Dan Riehl’s account of being on the same DC Metro car as a number of African-American youths following the 9/12 rally, Brad writes:

Again, let’s consider what Riehl has just told us. He prefaced his own 9/12 story by referring to it as “dangerous times.” But what did these “dangerous times” consist of? That’s right — a couple of black kids talking smack in the back of a subway car!

Not every Republican criticizing Obama is being driven out by racism. But it’s clear that a significant, vocal, and visible contingent of the American right is fueled by racist fears. These fears lead teabaggers to denounce Obama as simultaneously a Nazi, communist, fascist, socialist, Muslim Kenyan. The commonality these conflicting concepts all have is that they cast Obama as a dangerous Other.

What happens next is to be seen. But I can’t imagine any sober observe will look at this situation where a significant portion of the gun-toting right believes the President is an un-American Other who is out to destroy the country and think it is not perilously dangerous. There is a serious onus on Republican leadership and media figures to beat back the racism they are currently promoting with abandon, before something awful happens.

*At least the tea party segment of the right and those in the media and elected office who support them.