Category: White House

Geithner As Sociopath: The Interview

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In an interview with Liaquat Ahamed at The New Republic Timothy Geithner reveals his good German.

In response to the idea of justice, his response was that it, “wasn’t his thing.”

LA: One of the ways that people have figured out in the past to reconcile the politics was to go populist. That was what Roosevelt did. You, on the other hand, had been resolutely against that. You refer to it as Old Testament justice, implying that while it may be emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t serve any purpose.

 TG: I never used that phrase as a pejorative description. I just used it as a simple shorthand to refer to the understandable need people had for justice. But the President didn’t ask me to come do this to be the architect of a political strategy. I never felt that was my thing. I had some views on the issue, but I didn’t give them much weight. I thought my job was to figure out the financial parts.

(emphasis mine)

Justice doesn’t matter, and notwithstanding his protestations, he ridiculed it as, “Old Testament justice”.

He knows that his job is to be the lick-spittle watchdog for the banksters.

Note however that the Cossacks work for the Czar

Obama Makes Gun Control Proposal

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It is pretty much what I expected, with the high point for me, being the directive to the CDC to resume studies on the public health effects of gun violence:

The 23 executive actions Mr. Obama signed on Wednesday were largely modest initiatives to toughen enforcement of existing laws and to encourage federal agencies and state governments to share more information. Mr. Obama lifted a ban on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun violence and directed that a letter be sent to health care providers saying doctors may ask patients about guns in their homes.

This, along with legislative proposals proposing closing the gun show loophole on background checks, and expanding the ability of federal agencies to track guns, are probably going to be the most significant.

By virtue of legislation (literally) written by the NRA over the past few decades, federal agencies have been prohibited from collecting date to examine the problem, or to determine which dealers are knowingly selling to criminals.

It was more than I expected.

OK, This Might Be Some Obama Eleventy Dimensional Chess

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As a result of Obama suggesting that he might issue some executive orders on the enforcement of federal gun control laws, a number of Republicans, including former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese, are suggesting that Congress might impeach him for this:

Former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese, now a prominent emeritus official at the Heritage Foundation, became the latest conservative to warn that President Obama could risk impeachment if he takes executive action on reducing gun violence in an interview Monday night.

Speaking with Newsmax, Meese said Congress may have to consider impeaching Obama if he were “to try to override the Second Amendment in any way” with an executive order. He did allow that there are some executive actions related to guns that Obama could take wouldn’t be impeachable.

I’m beginning to think that this is a response that Obama is encouraging, because, absent finding him in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, there is no way that the Republicans don’t end up with egg on their face if they pursue this.

Impeachment?  Over tighter enforcement of gun laws?  After some deranged lunatic murdered 29 people, including 20 children?

This is a level of stupid that simply boggles the mind.

Obama must be busy trying to stifle an evil overlord laugh.

Dean Baker on Timothy Geithner, That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

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This is positively brutal:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s departure from the Obama administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy across Europe after the defeat of Napoleon.

This was an impressive diplomatic feat – given the widespread popular contempt for Europe’s monarchical regimes. In the same vein, protecting Wall Street from the financial and economic havoc they brought upon themselves and the country was an enormous accomplishment.

Just go read it.

What a Surprise, Another Cave

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Another Cave

Yes, as a final f%$# you to the average American, the White House has ruled out the platinum coin:

The Treasury Department will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to get around the debt ceiling. If they did, the Federal Reserve would not accept it.

 That’s the bottom line of the statement that Anthony Coley, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, gave me today. “Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” he said.

 The inclusion of the Federal Reserve is significant. For the platinum coin idea to work, the Federal Reserve would have to treat it as a legal way for the Treasury Department to create currency. If they don’t believe it’s legal and would not credit the Treasury Department’s deposit, the platinum coin would be worthless.

The idea of minting a platinum coin to invalidate the debt ceiling comes from a few key sentences tacked onto the 1997 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act. “Notwithstanding any other provision of law,” it reads, “the Secretary of the Treasury may mint and issue platinum coins in such quantity and of such variety as the Secretary determines to be appropriate.”

Even if you decide that you will not do this, you do not take this off the table without getting something in return.

At best, it’s a kind of mania with the Obama, he wants to be seen as the reasonable person in the room, even when in a situation where this does not work, at worst, he’s getting everything that he wants, which includes savaging Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

But of Course

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The very first person goes to jail over CIA torture, and it’s the whistle-blower:

Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.

In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.

“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.

Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.

Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”

On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.

In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.

This is about scaring people out of being whistle-blowers.

This is about the “most open administration in history” doing its level best to create a completely secret and unaccountable executive.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Richard Nixon was the worst president the US had from 1933 to 1973 1974, and the best president the US had from 1969 through 2013.

If that does not make you depressed, then I want whatever it is that you are smoking.

Obama Will Definitely Nominate Hagel for Secretary of Defense

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How do I know this, because in 1998, Chuck Hagel aggressively gay bashed James Hormel when he was nominated to be ambassador to Luxemberg:

The nation’s largest LGBT rights group on Thursday called “unacceptable” comments former Sen. Chuck Hagel made in 1998 opposing a Clinton administration nominee because he was “openly aggressively gay.”

The 14-year-old comments about Clinton’s nominee to be ambassador to Luxembourg, James Hormel, came to light Thursday as Hagel is a front-runner to be nominated by President Obama for defense secretary in his second term.

Human Rights Campaign spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz also said, however, that “we do not know … how [Hagel’]s views have evolved over time” and that the group “look[s] forward to hearing from Senator Hagel on these issues should he be nominated.”

The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which works to support out LGBT presidential appointees, noted that times have changed since Hormel’s nomination.

This would not be a SecDef who will move aggressively on removing the last vestiges of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the military.

His nomination, absent a serious and sincere mea culpa, would be a finger in the eye of the LGBT community, which would give Obama the sort of “Sister Souljah moment” opportunity that he loves so much, which is why I think Hagel will be nominated by Obama.

Obama has lost………Markos Moulitsas Zúniga?!?!?!?

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As in “Kos” of Daily Kos, who is thoroughly unimpressed with Obama appearing to cede ground on core Democratic Party values:

If President Barack Obama has a flaw, it’s his obviously overwhelming desire to appear reasonable and conciliatory and “work together” to find “compromise” and “get things done”. Bipartisanly. With a sane, reasonable, conciliatory opposition, that approach would make sense. But after four years of getting slammed by Republicans eager to destroy his presidency, Obama still hasn’t learned the lesson. He still thinks he’s going to get rewarded for being the “adult in the room.” Yeah, everything I’ve put inside scare quotes is a joke. A bad, painful joke.

So there’s nothing better than headlines like this one, in the Washington Post, to deliver the lesson to the White House to, well, just quit being the Capitulator In Chief:

A rough 24 hours for the White House

You see, Obama had drawn a line in the sand, and then—to no one’s surprise—ended up capitulating on everything he said he’d never capitulate on.

While I think that Kos is entitled, and in fact justified in his disappointment, but I think that he is being naive about what is going on.

Barack Obama is not negotiating with himself, and he is not incompetent, he is getting exactly what he wants.

He is a conservative “Blue Dog in everything but name” Democrat; he is a Reagan revolution “Democrat” who thinks that our social safety net is too generous, and that taxes on the rich will destroy the economy.

Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest solution is usually the best.

You have two alternate theories.

The 1st theory is that Obama is unable to learn and he is a poor negotiator, but he went to Harvard Law, which is arguably one of the best training grounds for negotiation in the country, and was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, which means that he had to out do the greatest legal minds of his generation.

The 2nd theory is that this is pretty much what Obama wants.

So, which theory seems simpler to you?

This is corrupt, and It Would Be a Political Winner for Republicans, and I Want Them to Pursue This

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Naked Capitalism has been writing for some time about how the SEC’s chief of enforcement, Robert Khuzam, has been hostile to the idea of actual enforcement, particularly with regards to reports from whistle blowers, but the latest case is indisputably corrupt:

Two days ago, we said it was time to fire the SEC’s chief of enforcement Robert Khuzami, who has not provided the tough policing warranted by the biggest financial crisis in the agency’s history. Our call was based on compelling evidence of failure. Specifically, a year and a half after Dodd Frank created a $450 million whistleblower fund, which Khuzami confirmed had produced hundreds of high quality leads, the agency had taken only one referral far enough to merit a payout, that of a measley $50,000. We stressed that this was an astonishing lapse:

… whistleblowers are insiders and therefore should in many cases have access to the sort of internal documents that would serve to substantiate conduct and save the SEC a ton of time. In other words, this should be a prime, potentially its best, source of leads, since the SEC would be further along in case development if any of these tips had meat (ie, both damning info and on target with a clear violation).

We didn’t anticipate that the story of Khuzami’s negligence would blow so big so quickly. Today, the Financial Times reported that three separate whistleblowers charged that Deutsche Bank had mismarked up to $12 billion in exposures to make it look healthier in 2008 and 2009 than it was, yet the agency had not acted on these allegations. And this level of window dressing most assuredly would make a difference.
………

 Khuzami’s position is hopelessly conflicted. He was general counsel for the Americas for Deutsche from 2004 to 2009, so this behavior took place on his watch. Although he has recused himself from this probe, that’s inadequate. Recusal does not work when the people working on the matter in the end have the party with the conflict as their boss. They can’t pursue any real dirt that could implicate him without hurting themselves. If it came to naught, they’d still fear the risk of reprisal if he survived. And if he were forced to leave, they’d be faced with a new boss who might not be at all to their liking.

 The only way to have an effective investigation is either to have Khuzami resign or to have the matter handed off to a completely independent firm (and even that’s a stretch, both from the agency side, and from the dearth of firms with decent securities law expertise that would be willing to face off against a major bank. Just as with the bankruptcy bar, you either work for the banks [the creditors] or against them [for the debtors]). It’s also a wee bit too cozy that Deutsche’s current general counsel is also a former SEC head of enforcement. And KPMG, the accountant that blessed all this highly dubious financial footwork, and Fried Frank, which led an investigation initiated by Deutsche and apparently found nothing much wrong, also don’t come out looking very good.

When you look Republican investigations of alleged Obama corruption, what is clear is that they are trying to gin up a false bullsh%$ like Benghazi and “Fast and Furious”.

This one is real, and it’s an accusation that would serve to benefit the Republicans politically, and unlike the investigatory theater that Darryl Issa favors.

Additionally, such an investigation might lead the white house to get tougher with the banksters, because it is clear that one of the administration’s conceits, notwithstanding the rapidly spinning revolving door (Elizabeth Fowler anyone?), is that they are a model of probity, and this, along with the political consequences, might produce some meaningful action.

Obama Has Apparently Switched to a High Fiber Cereal

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

Because he has stopped negotiating with himself, and he is simply putting forward his favored solution to Republicans, and demanding proposals from them:

Amid demands from Republicans that President Obama propose detailed new spending cuts to avert the year-end fiscal crisis, his answer boils down to this: you first.

Mr. Obama, scarred by failed negotiations in his first term and emboldened by a clear if close election to a second, has emerged as a different kind of negotiator in the past week or two, sticking to the liberal line and frustrating Republicans on the other side of the bargaining table.

Disciplined and unyielding, he argues for raising taxes on the wealthy while offering nothing new to rein in spending and overhaul entitlement programs beyond what was on the table last year. Until Republicans offer their own new plan, Mr. Obama will not alter his. In effect, he is trying to leverage what he claims as an election mandate to force Republicans to take ownership of the difficult choices ahead.

His approach is born of painful experience. In his first four years in office, Mr. Obama has repeatedly offered what he considered compromises on stimulus spending, health care and deficit reduction to Republicans, who either rejected them as inadequate or pocketed them and insisted on more. Republicans argued that Mr. Obama never made serious efforts at compromise and instead lectured them about what they ought to want rather than listening to what they did want.

So the Republicans have been shocked, that gambling is going on he’s decided to stop conceding at the start of talks.

BTW, the Republicans have now to been forced to make a real in response, only it’s completely number and specifics free. Yes, the propose raising medicare age to 67, which won’t save any money, because the 65-67 year old’s will need insurance subsidies, unspecified loophole closing (gee, they don’t want to be the first ones to propose cutting the mortgage deduction?):

The offer makes no mention of how to handle a looming battle over the federal debt limit, which will soon need to raised above $16.4 trillion. Nor does the offer provide any suggestions for how to carry out the debt-reduction framework and avoid the fiscal cliff. GOP aides said those details are open to negotiation.

“There are multiple ways to get this done,” said one senior GOP aide who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. “The details need to be filled in later.”

(emphasis mine)

The Republicans want to make the Democrats propose specific cuts, and then bludgeon them them with that in 2014.

Do not expect the GOP to bargain in good faith, they are hostage takers, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Your Morment of Eric Arthur Blair*

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Barack Obama, who has prosecuted more whistle blowers under the espionage act than all the Presidents combined, just signed the whistleblower protection act:

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) is praising President Obama’s signing of S. 743, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA), into law earlier today. The legislation provides millions of federal workers with the rights they need to report government corruption and wrongdoing safely. The bill reflects an unequivocal bipartisan consensus, having received the vote of every member in the 112th Congress, passing both the Senate and House of Representatives by unanimous consent over the past couple of months. The text of the bill can be read here.

It’s like something out of The Onion.

*You know, George Orwell.

F%$# That

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Yes, I am quoting Repo Men

John Boehner is say that
tax cuts for the rich should be extended for a year as a start of negociations:

Obama’s proposal is at odds with the position of House Speaker John Boehner, who earlier Friday said all the tax cuts — including those for the rich — should be extended until next year to provide more time to work out a bigger deal on taxes and spending cuts.

 “I’m proposing that we avert the fiscal cliff together in a manner that ensures that 2013 is finally the year that our government comes to grips with the major problems that are facing us,’’ Boehner said.

I will make a point here: John Boehner cannot be trusted, so tax increases on the rich pigs™ need to be passed at the start.

I should be clear here:  I do not mean that the Orange Avenger of Congress® is tremendously dishonest by the standards of the Republican party,* but rather that he is incapable of keeping his promises, because is arguably the most incompetent and most ineffectual House Speaker in at least the past 100 years.

If he promises something, get it in your hand before moving on to the next item.

*Which is kind of like saying that he is the world’s tallest midget.

No Prosecutions of Banksters, People are Finally Noticing

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At least the reporters at McClatchy are noticing:

Running for re-election, President Barack Obama frequently blames Wall Street and the deep financial crisis it caused for the underperforming economy. He doesn’t advertise that no major honcho of finance has been jailed under his watch for the mess, however.

The lack of a high-profile arrest and trial is all the more surprising given that Obama has tried to stain his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a creature of Wall Street.

Past financial crises have always had antagonist. The savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s had banker Charles Keating. The CEO of collapsed energy trader Enron, Kenneth Lay, became the face behind a drive to revamp accounting laws in 2002. Both men were prosecuted for and convicted of financial crimes.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the subsequent Great Recession, there’ve been plenty of scapegoats but no important actor fitted for pinstripes.

Why not? There’s no single compelling answer to that question.

“Some people (in regulatory agencies) believe that the folks at the Treasury and the Fed felt that pursuing chief executive officers would delay the economic recovery and continue to destabilize the financial system,” said John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who frequently testifies before Congress on securities law. “They had that point of view. Whether they had any influence over the Department of Justice is very uncertain.”

Yeah, very uncertain.

The issue is not the influence of the Treasury Department over the Department of Justice.

Not prosecuting is the official policy of the President.  His response to wrongdoing whenever someone connected (CIA torturers and Dick Cheney) or powerful (banksters) is to say that he will “look forward, not back.”  (But he’s going balls to the wall prosecuting medical marijuana).

Whether Treasury has influence does not matter.  This is the a directive from Potus.

As an aside, McClatchy was just about the only major US news org to treat the run up to Iraq with any skepticism.

What I want, and what a solid majority of Americans want, is some bankster heads on a pike.

Obama’s Torture

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It looks like there is going to be testimony offered on the torture of Pfc. Bradley Manning by the military with the active support of the administration:

A comprehensive motion containing allegations and evidence from the defense for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, was filed on July 27. The 110-page motion, which Manning’s defense lawyer said should “shock the conscience of the court” during a motion hearing this month, included a request to the Fort Meade court to dismiss all charges with prejudice because he was subjected to “illegal pretrial punishment” while imprisoned at the Quantico Marine Brig for nine months.

The defense’s motion was not approved for publishing; however, two other motions involving the defense’s request for witnesses to appear during argument on “unlawful pretrial punishment” were posted to the defense’s website. One of the motions reveals Manning will likely take the stand to give testimony on how he was subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment”—what many have called cruel and inhuman treatment or even torture. His testimony may include what he knows about a video of his interrogation at Quantico, which the government claims does not exist.

Obama knew, or was deliberately and willfully blind to Manning’s torture.

He admitted this in an open press conference, when he said:

With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.

Manning was arrested in 2010.

Everything that has been done to him, in what is a transparent attempt to coerce Manning into providing false testimony against Julian Assange to allow for a prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act.

One of the positions of the Obama administration is that officials should not be prosecuted for matters of policy.

I could not disagree more. (Roll prosecushun kitty)

We won’t begin to fix the damage done to core rights, and the concept of the rule of law until the most senior members of the executive branch face criminal prosecutions.

I Gotta Read This Book

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Neil Barkofsky’s book on his experiences monitoring the TARP, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, and the Bush administration comes off better than the Obama administration:

The Huffington Post described a scene in a forthcoming book by Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of TARP, where Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner delivered a string of F-bombs during a discussion about transparency. I’ve read the book, and while that’s an amusing diversion, it’s nowhere near the headline story.

The important moment in the book for me comes conveniently after Barofsky recounts this FDL News item, one of my HAMP horror stories. Barofsky shows how HAMP’s faulty design led to all sorts of problems like this, with trapped borrowers, extended trial payments, no-doc modifications, and eventually unnecessary foreclosures. Barofsky mused that Treasury didn’t care about the suffering of borrowers under HAMP, and the issue came up in a meeting with the Treasury Secretary, which was also attended by Elizabeth Warren, then the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, another TARP watchdog.

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

This is a revelatory moment for Barofsky in the book, and should be for everyone reading. Geithner’s concern, first of all, was with how the banks would respond to the program, not how homeowners would respond to it. In fact, homeowners are quite besides the point. Regardless of their situation, they will be one of the 10 million foreclosures, in Geithner’s construction. His goal was merely to space out the foreclosures and give the banks time to earn their way back to health, mostly through the other parts of the bailout, that enabled them to earn profits.

I will note that the Cossacks work for the Czar, and notwithstanding all the turnover on the economic side of his cabinet, Geithner has been a constant.

This is going on because this is what Obama wants.

Most Transparent Administration Ever

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Have you heard the latest? The FDA spied on outside critics in an attempt to find out who were the whistleblowers.

The f%$#ing F f%$#ing D f%$#ing A was engaged in a f%$#ing witch hunt and coverup?

Un-f%$#ing-believable:

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.
What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.
Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.
F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices.
While they acknowledged that the surveillance tracked the communications that the scientists had with Congressional officials, journalists and others, they said it was never intended to impede those communications, but only to determine whether information was being improperly shared.
The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.
The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.
A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

There is a saying, “A fish rots from the head,” and this is completely in line with the Obama administration’s jihad against whistle blowers.

So How Are We Not Terrorists?

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In the New York Times, they have an article on how the Obama administration selects people for their kill list, and according to sources, among those flagged, “Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.”

We are sending drones with missiles after 17 year old children.

And what is whispered in the article is that a political electoral calculus is motivating much of this, which does not make this better.

I am Disappointed in Myself

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You see, I’ve been watching the kerfuffle over Obama and gay marriage since Biden’s statement on Sunday, and what appeared to be a full on weasel by Obama, or at least his Press Secretary Jay Carney, from which I inferred that the President would give the weasel answer.

I had been drafting my scathing response to this in my head for days, so when he actually made a clear and unambiguous statement I was surprised.

But my first reaction wasn’t surprise.  My first thought was, “Son of a bitch!  I have to rewrite now!”

At least I had the basic level of self awareness to be ashamed.

Obama Supports Gay Marriage

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In an interview with ABC, Barack Obama has announced that he now supports gay marriage:

Before President Obama left the White House on Tuesday morning to fly to an event in Albany, several aides intercepted him in the Oval Office. Within minutes it was decided: the president would endorse same-sex marriage on Wednesday, completing a wrenching personal transformation on the issue.

As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand by embracing the idea of same-sex unions in a Sunday talk show interview.

Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September. Yet many of the president’s allies believed he would not do so, trusting instead in his strong support from gay voters for having ended a ban on openly gay people in the military and disavowing a federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Such caution was understandable, the allies said, given the unpredictable fallout the president would face by taking a clear stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day, before what is likely to be a close election. Mr. Obama’s closest advisers say only the timing was in question. Mr. Biden’s unexpected remarks undoubtedly accelerated the timetable.

Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women. Certainly, they thought, he would be asked his position on same-sex marriage by one of the show’s hosts, who include Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters about Mr. Obama’s stance. After the Tuesday morning meeting, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, contacted ABC and offered a wide-ranging interview with the president for the following day.

Oh snap. They took a scoop away from the ladies of The View. There will be consequences.

All joking aside, this is an unambiguous good.

BTW, the best comment I’ve heard about this so far was made by Kurt_T (His web site, www.kurttrue.com should be coming on line shortly):

Hahahaha! I really DID want people to marry their pets and climb Mount Rushmore in nipple clamps and buttless chaps! And this makes it all possible!

Suckers!

OK, I’m off to the Kinko’s to print up some recruitment materials for your children.

-kurt_t
President and Supreme Cher Impersonator for Life
Secret Gay Agenda

The timing was disappointing though, it seem to be calculated to avoid any impact on the North Carolina hate amendment vote, for which the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans rightly castigates him, (scroll down) though partisan considerations might have informed his statement.