Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi called for a national day of mourning, as France 24 reports.
** QUICK HITS.Despite a frenetic push by activist bloggers, the funding bill sought by President Barack Obama for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq easily passed both houses of Congress and is on its way to the White House for signature. … The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the world’s largest stem cell research project, today approved another $68 million in research grants and another $40 million for training scientists. … Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who broke her elbow while hurrying to the White House on Wednesday afternoon, worked from home today and cancelled all public appearances, including an event with actress Angelina Jolie to mark World Refugee Day. Her foreign travel schedule is up in the air now. She’ll have surgery to repair the fracture sometime next week. … Nevada Senator John Ensign, who resigned his Senate Republican leadership post yesterday in the wake of disclosure that he’d carried on an affair with a staffer married to another staffer, doubled his partner’s salary during the affair. He also employed her son.
** U.S. POSITIONING ANTI-MISSILE SYSTEM IN HAWAII IN ADVANCE OF NORTH KOREAN LAUNCH. In its latest act of provocation, as mentioned earlier, North Korea is talking about conducting a long-range missile test in the direction of Hawaii, sometime in July, perhaps around the 4th of July. So today in Washington Defense Secretary Bob Gates revealed that the Obama Administration is positioning an anti-missile unit in Hawaii.
“We do have some concerns if they were to launch a missile … in the direction of Hawaii,” Gates told a news conference. The defense secretary said he had approved the deployment of THAAD missile defense weaponry to the US state and radar “to provide support” in case of a possible North Korean missile attack. And he said that ground-based defenses in Alaska were also at the ready.
“I would just say I think we are in a good position should it become necessary to protect American territory,” he said. The Theatre High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) weaponry is designed to shoot down ballistic missiles.
** TOP REPUBLICAN RULES OUT ANTI-REID RUN. Former Nevada Congressman Jon Porter, touted as a top prospect to take on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the 2010 Nevada Senate race, has demurred. Porter narrowly lost his re-election bid last November to Democrat Dina Titus, but some believed he could take on Reid, who has shaky Silver State numbers. Porter today flatly took himself out of contention. And so Reid still has no major Republican opponent.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … OBAMA’S CAIRO ADDRESS: THE REACTION AND THE REAL WORLD.
** HUGE “DAY OF MOURNING” RALLY STAYS PEACEFUL IN TEHRAN. There was a huge rally today of more than 100,000 people in Tehran, says the BBC, in a sixth day of protest of the proclaimed landslide re-election of radical Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The rally also honored the eight protesters killed so far in Tehran by the pro-government Basij militia, and another eight killed elsewhere in the country.
Leading opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former Iranian prime minister who also sits on the powerful Expediency Council, though he does not participate, called for restraint and calm.
The regime is making some moves to try to defuse the situation, without giving ground on the election’s outcome. The Guardian Council of powerful clerics invited the losing presidential candidates to discuss their grievances on Saturday. And Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an unusual move, will deliver the sermon at Friday prayers.
Khamenei will probably use the occasion to demonstrate widespread popular support for the regime. But there is no question that it has acquired a big reformist opposition. And that there is serious infighting amongst elites.
It’s an intriguing conundrum for President Barack Obama. On the one hand, the emergence of a huge reformist opposition in Iran is a major plus for his call for engagement with the Muslim world. On the other, as president he has an agenda to pursue with Iran, and barring the unlikely, Ahmadinejad gets another four years in office. To the extent that the US is seen as meddling in Iranian politics, it provides the usual ready-made “Great Satan” excuse for intransigence.
** SCHWARZENEGGER REITERATES BUDGET STANCE. In a speech this morning in Fresno on California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reiterated his position. A weeks-in-the-making budget conference committee approach, adopted on a party-line vote, is a non-starter due to its inclusion of $2 billion in another round of tax hikes, this time on oil production and tobacco products. And that the budget reserve that Democratic legislative leaders want to raid to continue programs is illusory.
The budget conference committee, chaired by Assemblywoman Noreen Evans with major input from Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, has painstakingly looked for ways to cut social safety net programs without ending them outright. It also rejected another pay cut for state employees.
But the question, as always as I’ve seen in both the Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger years, is where are the votes?
Schwarzenegger, who received a long and very enthusiastic introduction from new Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearingen, took some questions from the audience. The first consisted of a speech from a local elected official unhappy about Schwarzenegger’s plan to raid local funds for part of his budget solution, something backed by all the state players. Swearingen, in her introduction, had pointedly noted that it would loaning money to the state, not giving it.
Another audience member was upset about the Central Valley not having enough water and accused Schwarzenegger of doing nothing about it. The Valley is a hotbed of support for a few new dams, a fact which seems lost on many elsewhere in California with seemingly assured water supplies. Schwarzenegger, who has actually championed action on water throughout his governorship, had one of his allies in the Latino Water Coalition, Orange Cove Mayor Victor Lopez, come onstage and talk about his experience.
So is California closer to its latest budget solution? Or is everyone involved merely playing their assigned roles?
More protests today in Iran, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discusses the crisis. Clinton broke her elbow yesterday rushing to the White House.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama has received his daily intelligence and economic briefings and has met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
At 10 AM Pacific, Obama meets with Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office.
At 12:15 PM Pacific, Obama and Biden Obama and Vice President Biden meet with Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell in the Oval Office. They’ll be discussing the status of Obama’s proposed peace talks on Palestine and Israel.
At 1 PM Pacific, Obama meets with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in the Oval Office.
At 4 PM Pacific, Obama delivers remarks at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee/Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
Biden delivers remarks at that fundraiser earlier.
Biden also meets with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
And Biden swears in former Mississippi Governor and ambassador to Saudi Arabia Ray Maybus as the new Secretary of the Navy.
Maybus, readers may recall, ran into my Game Day correspondent Patricia Duff the day before the New Hampshire primary and told her that Obama had the ability to make a major breakthrough in Southern states in the general election. It seemed very blue sky at the time, but proved to be accurate.
Obama is also closely monitoring several crises: In North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
North Korea may launch a long-range missile toward Hawaii next month, and continues saber-rattling rhetoric and acts, running a patrol boat up to the edge of the Northern Limit Line overnight.
With the Iranian regime cracking down on foreign journalists, citizen journalism in the form of text messages, e-mail, Twitter, and YouTube video is filling the gap. But observers are noting that it is impossible to verify much of it, making it ripe for manipulation.
Iran, of course, is the big ponderable, if not imponderable.
In a bid to dampen continuing protests against the promptly declared landslide re-election of radical Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a powerful body of clerics, the Guardian Council, has invited Ahmadinejad’s election rivals to meet with them and present their grievances.
In other action, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is on Capitol Hill again today meeting with senators. Her confirmation hearing is in a few weeks.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is testifying on behalf of the new financial regulatory approach the administration wants.
And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set for surgery next week. She broke her elbow hurrying on her way to the White House yesterday afternoon.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks this morning in Fresno on California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
Schwarzenegger appears at 10 AM at the Tower Theatre for the Performing Arts in Fresno.
Schwarzenegger then holds private meetings and discussions in and around the Capitol.
** OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT: NORTH KOREA, AGAIN. President Barack Obama changed the old kabuki in dealing with his second North Korean crisis. The first time around, back in April, dealing with a long-range missile test that failed to place a satellite in orbit, Obama treated the effort as more of the same rather baffling attention-seeking by the Hermit Kingdom. This time, after a string of provocations including an underwhelming underground nuclear detonation, a series of missile launches, and the imprisonment of two California-based journalists, Obama went in another, tougher, direction that may lead to a naval confrontation. … From my June 12th column.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. … From my June 8th column.
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $37 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
NBA Finals MVP Kobe Bryant said today at a victory rally in Los Angeles for the world champion Lakers that he has every intention of returning for another championship season next year.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … OBAMA’S CAIRO ADDRESS: THE REACTION AND THE REAL WORLD.
** QUICK HITS. California’s Democratic legislators, after weeks of work in the budget conference committee, have come up with a plan that purports to solve the state’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis with more cuts and more tax hikes, on oil production and tobacco. It also raids a budget reserve that probably no longer exists. This plan has no present prospect of passage. … A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on the multi-faceted agenda of President Barack Obama finds that 37% think he’s doing too much. But 60% think he’s handling it all well. … I can tell you that it’s not easy keeping up with it all. … Industrial production in Mexico declined by more than 13% in April.
Another massive opposition rally today in downtown Tehran against the Iranian government. This is amateur video supplied to the AP. The government is blocking foreign journalists from covering events outside their offices.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, summoned the Swiss ambassador, who represents American interests in Tehran, to complain of “interventionist” statements by American officials, state-run media reported. America and Iran broke off diplomatic relations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
President Obama said a day earlier that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling.” But he has also said he was “deeply troubled by the violence” in Iran and that democratic values needed to be observed.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry officials, without being specific about which comments they were reacting to, expressed displeasure, the official IRNA news agency reported. The Canadian chargé d’affaires was also summoned.
Despite the government’s attempts to block communications among the opposition, calls for more mass defiance continued. …
The sense of threat against the opposition was growing. Reuters reported that Mohammadreza Habibi, the senior prosecutor in the central province of Isfahan, had warned demonstrators that they could be executed under Islamic law.
President Barack Obama always anticipated having to deal with Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But their positions are much more disputed than they anticipated.
** GALLUP POLL: MOST AMERICANS FAVOR GOVERNMENT LIMITS ON EXECUTIVE PAY. The new Gallup Poll has some striking information. 59% of Americans favor the federal government limiting executive pay at major corporations.
This comes as President Barack Obama rolls out new financial regulations, in addition to the “pay czar” he created earlier to limit executive compensation at companies receiving federal bailouts.
Seventy-seven percent of self-identified Democrats favor the government’s taking steps to limit executive pay, as do 56% of independents. More Republicans oppose (56%) than favor (42%) the idea.
Older Americans are less supportive of the federal government’s trying to encourage limits on executive pay. Those aged 65 or older divide about evenly, with 46% in favor of and 44% opposed to government intervention in executive pay. That compares with a solid majority of 63% support among Americans younger than age 65.
Additionally, only a slim majority of upper-income Americans, 51%, favor government limits on executive pay. Support is higher among Americans at lower income levels.
Notwithstanding yesterday’s poll purporting to show that 40% of Americans (and 22% of Democrats!) are conservatives, America is actually a social democratic country. Albeit one with a lot of twists that the left frequently does not grasp.
** NEVADA SENATOR ENSIGN QUITS REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP POST IN WAKE OF AFFAIR WITH STAFFER. Senator John Ensign, chairman of the US Senate Republican Policy Committee, stepped down this morning from the job, the number four Republican leadership post in the Senate. Ensign, who ran the Senate Republican campaign committee and had been testing the waters for a 2012 presidential race, admitted yesterday that he carried on an affair in 2007 and 2008 with a campaign staffer who was married to a member of his Senate staff.
The Silver State’s Ensign has been a great favorite of the hard right around the country, which excoriated San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom – one of its bete noires for his role in ramming through a short-lived local gay marriage law in 2004 – for doing much the same thing with his appointments secretary who was married to his campaign manager, both of whom subsequently resigned and one of whom, Newsom’s partner, went into rehab.
Iran’s radical Islamist Revolutionary Guard military structure is threatening online media with force if they do not self-censor in the wake of last Friday’s hotly disputed presidential election win for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama has received his daily intelligence and economic briefings and has met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
At 8:40 AM Pacific, Obama meets with financial regulators in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
At 9:50 AM Pacific, Obama delivers remarks laying out a comprehensive financial regulatory reform plan in the East Room.
At 11 AM Pacific, Obama meets with Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan in the Oval Office.
At 2:45 PM Pacific, Obama delivers brief remarks and signs a presidential memorandum regarding federal benefits for gays and lesbians from the Oval Office.
Obama is also closely monitoring several crises: In North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has private meetings and discussions today in and around the Capitol, focusing mostly on California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
After weeks of work, the Legislature’s budget conference committee has accomplished relatively little, and deadlines set by the state’s controller and treasurer to avert a looming cash crunch are beginning to fall.
It’s up to about $17 to $18 billion of the $24 billion shortfall, and includes tax hikes with scant hope of passage.
** OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT: NORTH KOREA, AGAIN. President Barack Obama changed the old kabuki in dealing with his second North Korean crisis. The first time around, back in April, dealing with a long-range missile test that failed to place a satellite in orbit, Obama treated the effort as more of the same rather baffling attention-seeking by the Hermit Kingdom. This time, after a string of provocations including an underwhelming underground nuclear detonation, a series of missile launches, and the imprisonment of two California-based journalists, Obama went in another, tougher, direction that may lead to a naval confrontation. … From my June 12th column.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. … From my June 8th column.
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
China and Russia are summiting in Moscow, agreeing that North Korea must be kept in check.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $36 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
President Barack Obama, summiting today at the White House with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, declared that North Korea presents “a grave threat” to the world as well as the Korean Peninsula and urged it to heed the warnings of its allies Russia and China as well as the global community.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … OBAMA’S CAIRO ADDRESS: THE REACTION AND THE REAL WORLD.
** QUICK HITS. President Barack Obama, in a few interviews with the business press today in advance of tomorrow’s announcement of a new financial regulatory agency, noted that Wall Street seems to be fast forgetting how close America came to melting down due to wildly risky financial decisions taken in secret. … Taking Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s frational agreement with his Cairo agenda as a starting point, Obama is dispatching his Mideast special envoy, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, to Paris next week to meet with Netanyahu in order to jumpstart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. … Amidst a tidal wave of global disapproval, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed that there will be a limited recount of the hotly disputed presidential race and again asked Iranians to stand behind the system. Look for a smaller margin of victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And perhaps a few more concessions. … Count on America dealing in a realpolitik way with what the new administration expected since last year.
** THE POLLSTERS ON CALIFORNIA’S CHRONIC-TURNED-CHAOTIC BUDGET CRISIS. California’s leading public pollsters, Field Poll director Mark di Camillo and Public Policy Institute of California chief Mark Baldassare, did their usual post-election analysis at today’s monthly luncheon of the Sacramento Press Club. It was an indicative event with regard to the current state of state politics.
A relative handful of those in attendance were practicing journalists, tracking the fast diminishing state of state political journalism, and most of the questions (or speeches) after the presentations were posed by non-journalists.
After a lengthy awards ceremony of scholarships for the journalists of tomorrow (hmm …), the two Marks, as they are known, began their presentations and lunch was served. In days past, had that occurred, I would film the event and eat at the end of it. Not this time. Only a few journos I saw, at least of those few who paid for the lunch, eschewed the dining in favor of note-taking.
What the Marks had to say was actually quite familiar for those who’ve been paying attention. In theory, as their polls foretold for the past few years, California voters want to deal with the chronic budget crisis with a combination of cuts and taxes. Since that is not what happened last month, there are other explanations.
One, offered by Baldassare, is that the special election electorate was unrepresentative, and thus doesn’t show what people really want. Of course, people also express their opinions by opting out.
Another, offered by di Camillo, is that the public doesn’t trust the system, regarded as dysfunctional, with its money. The pols (who guarded their perks and voted their staffs big pay hikes while pushing through a big tax hike) have to show that they’re serious about reform in order to wring more revenue out of the electorate.
Both agreed that the great majority of voters, whether they voted last month or not, don’t know much about where the money comes from or where it goes. Most voters, as Di Camillo pointed out, believe that somewhere between $10 and $20 billion of state spending is sheer waste, easily cut. They don’t know that most of the money goes to education and health and welfare, and is required by law to do so. The only major area of spending they want cut is in prisons, presumably because few voters are in prison themselves.
As for tax hikes, in theory, a majority of voters wants tax hikes to maintain popular programs. So long as the taxes are on somebody else. But as Di Camillo pointed out, support for ending the two-thirds legislative vote required to pass a budget or any tax hikes starts out under 50%. Because people don’t trust the spenders to spend wisely.
And Prop 13, that disruptive 1978 warhorse authored by a cranky landlord lobbyist by the name of Howard Jarvis, is still sacrosanct. Not only do the great majority of voters not want any change in residential property taxes, amongst the lowest in the nation, they don’t want to do the split roll, as it’s been known for years, raising taxes on corporate property. Why not? Because the economy is down and Californians don’t want to risk any nascent recovery.
So what taxes are popular? Well, maybe an oil severance tax. Maybe a tax on people who make over a million dollars a year. Maybe taxes on tobacco, and alcohol, and, a new one, porn. Because those are bad, you know, and presumably only indulged in by a minority.
But in political reality, what might work? And this question, one of the few posed by a journalist, albeit a former one, superlib Peter Schrag, the former Sacramento Bee editorial page editor, presumed that the public is upset after the next round of budget cuts that makes a difference to most.
Well, those would be targeted tax hikes. On a minority of people. Tied to specific spending programs. And not the discretionary spending that has mopped up billions of dollars – for early child development, a boondoggle for Hollywood director Rob Reiner’s nipped-in-the-bud political career, or for special mental health services — that might better have been spent on preserving and improving fundamental programs.
What about making the sales tax make sense – that is to say, make it cheaper but broader — in a service/high tech economy? Nope.
Baldaassare, who’s part of the California good government lobby, which I agree with in many respects, said that California voters want fundamental change. I think that is a stretch from their current state of being fed up and behind the curve.
Oh, and who is the only politician Californians really like, now that Schwarzenegger – having lost his public rapport after being closeted for months in meetings with pols, and charting a seemingly inconstant course over the years – is seen as “one of them?” That would be Barack Obama, of course.
Any parallels to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a bete noire of the right for doing much the same thing in the libertine City by the Bay, are entirely non-coincidental. Though it is unknown if Ensign’s partner had a serious drug problem.
An aide in Ensign’s office said the affair took place between December 2007 and August 2008 with a campaign staffer who was married to an employee in Ensign’s Senate office. Neither has worked for the senator since May 2008. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the developments.
The aide declined to comment on whether Ensign would resign. Ensign scheduled a news conference in Las Vegas for later Tuesday. Ensign did not participate earlier Tuesday in a vote concerning the ailing travel industry, an unusual absence considering the topic’s relevance in his home state.
“I know that I have deeply hurt and disappointed my wife, my children, my family, my friends, my staff and the people of Nevada who believed in me not just as a legislator but as a person,” Ensign said.
Ensign’s wife, Darlene, also released a statement about the affair.
“Since we found out last year we have worked through the situation and we have come to a reconciliation. This has been difficult on both families. With the help of our family and close friends our marriage has become stronger,” Mrs. Ensign said.
Ensign is currently chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, one of the top Republican leadership posts.
Another top Nevada Republican, Governor Jim Gibbons, also landed in hot water for allegedly assaulting a Las Vegas cocktail waitress in a Vegas casino garage after they’d spent the evening drinking together. Gibbons was also married.
And Republicans wonder why they’re having trouble coming up a serious challenger in Nevada to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
** OBAMA SAYS HE’S BREAKING PATTERN WITH NORTH KOREA. President Barack Obama engaged in summitry today with South Korea’s president after a string of provocations from North Korea.
At a news conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, Mr Obama said the US would “vigorously” pursue an end to the country’s nuclear programme.
North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test on 25 May, before test firing a number of short-range rockets. “Under no circumstance are we going to allow North Korea to possess nuclear weapons,” said Mr Lee.
Mr Obama said that he and his South Korean counterpart had agreed that a new UN resolution designed to halt North Korea’s nuclear ambitions should be fully enforced. And he pledged to end a cycle of letting North Korea create a crisis in order to be rewarded with concessions from the international community.
“This is a pattern they’ve come to expect,” Mr Obama said. “We are going to break that pattern.”
** NEW GALLUP POLL: MANY MORE CONSERVATIVES THAN LIBERALS, BUT …The new Gallup Poll shows 40% of Americans calling themselves conservatives, versus only 21% calling themselves liberals.
35% say they are moderates.
But as the saying goes, what’s in a name? While only 3% of Republicans say they are liberal, 22% of Democrats say they are conservative. I don’t think there’s more than a handful of conservatives in the Democratic Party.
With global imagery getting away from it, the Iranian regime held a rally of pro-Ahmadinejad backers in central Tehran today. The video was provided to news organizations by Iran’s state-run Press TV. Iran has forbidden foreign journalists to report on demonstrations.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama focuses today on the North Korean crisis. He may comment again today on the situation in Iran.
Obama has had his daily intelligence and economic briefings.
At 7:30 AM Pacific, he meets one-on-one with President Lee Myung-bak of the Republic of Korea in the Oval Office.
At 7:45 AM Pacific, he holds an expanded meeting with President Lee in the Oval Office.
At 8:35 AM Pacific, Obama and President Lee hold a joint press conference in the White House Rose Garden.
At 9 AM Pacific, Obama holds a working lunch with President Lee in the Old Family Dining Room.
At 10:20 AM Pacific, Obama meets with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
At 1:30 PM Pacific, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with Secretary of Defense Bob Gates in the Oval Office.
Obama is also closely monitoring several other crises: In Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Iran, of course, is emerging from a tumultuous election in which the ruling clerical establishment is continuing to intervene on behalf of radical Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The foreign media is being strictly limited in the wake of major demonstrations around the country, with a dozen protesters killed in the process. Journalists there for the election attempting to stay on in the country in the post-election period are having their visas denied.
Ahmadinejad, after delaying his departure for a day, is at an international conference in Russia.
Pakistan, where the Army’s offensive against the Taliban is going well but the refugee problem has swollen.
Afghanistan, where new commanding General Stanley McChrystal formally took charge yesterday.
Obama is also monitoring as well as the only fractional support for his agenda with the Muslim world articulated Sunday by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
North Korea is threatening war on the Korea Peninsula if its plans to develop nuclear weapons and advanced missile technology are interfered with.
** OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT: NORTH KOREA, AGAIN. President Barack Obama changed the old kabuki in dealing with his second North Korean crisis. The first time around, back in April, dealing with a long-range missile test that failed to place a satellite in orbit, Obama treated the effort as more of the same rather baffling attention-seeking by the Hermit Kingdom. This time, after a string of provocations including an underwhelming underground nuclear detonation, a series of missile launches, and the imprisonment of two California-based journalists, Obama went in another, tougher, direction that may lead to a naval confrontation. … From my June 12th column.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has private meetings and discussions today in and around the Capitol, focusing mostly on California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
After weeks of work, the Legislature’s budget conference committee has accomplished little, and deadlines set by the state’s controller and treasurer to avert a looming cash crunch are beginning to fall.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. … From my June 8th column.
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $38 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
Speaking today in Chicago, President Barack Obama told the American Medical Association convention that universal health care is the answer, that “fear tactics” distract from the overall and failure to move will lead to health care consuming a spiraling upward share of the gross domestic product.
** QUICK HITS. President Barack Obama, following his Oval Office meeting today with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said regarding the crisis in Iran that he’s “deeply troubled by the violence that I’ve been seeing on television.” But he did not offer a judgment on the legitimacy of Friday’s presidential election, noting that neither US nor international observers were present to monitor it. … Obama, pitching for universal health care today at the American Medical Association convention, got some boos today from doctors who want him to limit medical malpractice awards, which he’s not doing. … Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa won election today as second vice president of the US Conference of Mayors, putting him on course to be head of the organization in two years. Assuming he’s not governor, naturally. … San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is an active candidate for the Democratic nomination, didn’t attend the annual conference in Providence, Rhode Island. His professed reason is to avoid crossing a picket line, but he has big budget woes to take care of in the City by the Bay and increased criticism for his many absences. … Some California public employee unions are targeting a Republican legislator or two with direct mail campaigns to try to get them on board a tax hike plan. Maybe they should have started doing that last month, when their TV advertising was about how ineffective Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed state spending limit would be.
** 12 REPORTED DEAD AT THE HANDS OF IRANIAN SECURITY FORCES. Demonstrations against the declared landslide re-election of radical Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took place today in Tehran and other Iranian cities, with 12 protesters reportedly killed by police and security forces.
President Barack Obama did not address the situation when he returned to the White House this afternoon following his health care reform speech in Chicago. The State Department says it’s “deeply troubled” by the events taking place in Iran.
UPDATE: Following his return to the White House, President Barack Obama is expected to address unfolding violent suppression of protests in Iran at 2 PM Pacific.
The envoy rejected claims that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s preconditions for the establishment of a Palestinian state as presented in his policy speech Sunday were unattainable. “Netanyahu did not abandon the possibility of a Palestinian state, rather, there was a problem with the term ‘state,’ because the world interprets a state as a sovereign entity.”
Of course, if Palestine is not “a sovereign entity,” then there is no possibility of support from around the world, or of peace.
** SOME CALI DEMS CALL FOR TAXES, AGAIN. BUT WHERE ARE THE VOTES? With an impending deadline looming, as usual, state Assembly Democrats appear ready to unveil a call for higher tobacco taxes and a new oil severance tax during the Legislature’s budget conference committee. The committee’s been at it for weeks and hasn’t gotten very far. This might break part of the impasse. But the question, as always – as I’ve noticed, and noted throughout the entire decade, in both the Davis and Schwarzenegger Administrations – is where are the votes?
** NOTE TO FORUM POSTERS: If you don’t want people to wonder why your weblink leads nowhere, delete the incomplete “http” that the new software “helpfully” places in the website prompt. Or rely on me to explain it to the curious. Or not …
Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu delivered a quarter of a loaf yesterday in response to President Barack Obama’s agenda of an independent Palestine and an end to West Bank settlements.
MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK
Another big week in presidential politics. Perhaps a big week in California politics, defined as much by what doesn’t happen as by what does.
President Barack Obama pushes his universal health care agenda, with a major address today to the American Medical Association in his hometown Chicago. He’s pushing to keep the public option alive in the plan.
But conservatives, and most Republicans, as they made clear over the weekend, want to kill the public option, as they say it will lead to socialized medicine, which is what the right called Medicare 45 years ago. Obama would like it to be a bipartisan bill, but it can be done on a majority vote basis in both houses. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has said her house will vote on it at the end of July.
This week will also see major developments in several geopolitical crises.
In Iran, the declared landslide victory of radical Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears likely to stand with the support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, the regime is given pause by the outcry against it, and Ahmadinejad has just postponed a scheduled trip to Russia.
In the linked crises of Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Stanley McChrystal took command earlier today in Kabul and will begin implementing his strategies with a large handpicked leadership team he’s brought with him.
Pakistan sees the Taliban, in the face of the Army’s offensive (urged by Obama), losing and falling back, reduced for now to terrorist bombings. But there are nearly 3 million refugees as a result, and a humanitarian crisis looms.
North Korea is continuing to bluster in the face of tougher sanctions against it on Friday by the UN Security Council, including the right to challenge shipping on the high seas. Will they move forward with another threatened nuclear test and missile launch? Or not? South Korea’s president comes to Washington on Tuesday to summit with Obama.
Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, in his speech replying to Obama’s Cairo address 10 days earlier, on Sunday, endorsed an independent Palestine. But with many caveats which are non-starters for now. And he refused to stop the settlements by right-wing religionists in the disputed West Bank. In part because they are part of his tenuous coalition and would turn against him in a moment.
In California politics, we’ll see this week if the Legislature’s budget conference committee can make any actual progress on closing the state’s $24.3 billion deficit, most of it occasioned by a dramatic drop in revenue.
The anti-government and ultra-government factions that dominate state Capitol politics – making it less relevant to California as a whole – are continuing to grind in dysfunction in this fundamental crisis.
Also, a state commission charged with recommending a serious revamping of the state’s tax structure, which is far too dependent on the fortunes of high-income taxpayers, and also has quite a few loopholes, is meeting this week.
Oh, and the desultory 2010 governor’s race will continue. Nothing has changed the dynamic of the contest, in which frontrunner Jerry Brown, the former-governor-turned-attorney general, leads one or two Democratic candidates who may end up running, and two super-rich Republicans pushing cuts-only budget solutions with no specifics snipe at one another.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama focuses on health care reform today in Chicago.
Obama has flown this morning on Air Force One from Andrews Air Force Base to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
Obama received his daily intelligence and economic briefings on Air Force One and conferred with senior advisors not on board via secure teleconference.
At 9:15 AM Pacific, he delivers remarks at the American Medical Association’s annual conference at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
The event will be roadblocked on all cable news nets.
At 10:50 AM Pacific, Obama departs Chicago on Air Force One en route to Andrews Air Force Base.
At 12:25 PM Pacific, he arrives at Andrews Air Force Base, where he embarks on Marine One for the flight over to the White House.
At 12:40 PM Pacific, Obama arrives at the White House.
At 1:15 PM Pacific, he meets with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the Oval Office.
Obama is also closely monitoring several crises: In Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and North Korea.
Iran, of course, is emerging from a tumultuous election in which the ruling clerical establishment is continuing to intervene on behalf of radical Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Pakistan, where the Army’s offensive against the Taliban is going well but the refugee problem has swollen.
Afghanistan, where new commanding General Stanley McChrystal formally took charge this morning.
And North Korea (see my column linked to below).
He is also monitoring as well as the only fractional support for his agenda with the Muslim world articulated yesterday by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
Obama is monitoring the hard-fought presidential election in Iran, where radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supposedly easily won what had been a very close-fought contest with former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, a moderate who has drawn huge crowds, and two other candidates.
Ahmadinejad was running under 50% in pre-election polling, which would have drawn him into a run-off against Moussavi, who was either close behind or perhaps a bit ahead.
But Iranian election officials say that Ahmadinejad won in a landslide, with 62.6% against Moussavi’s 33.8%.
Opponents of the regime are demonstrating in Tehran and elsewhere. But it is difficult to say how many and where. Al Jazeera reports that security police are blocking journalistic access and have shut down many streets in the capital city.
Obama Administration officials are expressing “skepticism” about the Iranian election results, noting drily that it is unlikely that Moussavi would lose his own hometown.
** OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT: NORTH KOREA, AGAIN. President Barack Obama changed the old kabuki in dealing with his second North Korean crisis. The first time around, back in April, dealing with a long-range missile test that failed to place a satellite in orbit, Obama treated the effort as more of the same rather baffling attention-seeking by the Hermit Kingdom. This time, after a string of provocations including an underwhelming underground nuclear detonation, a series of missile launches, and the imprisonment of two California-based journalists, Obama went in another, tougher, direction that may lead to a naval confrontation. …
Los Angeles fans celebrated another Lakers world championship last night in downtown LA. Only 25 were arrested. The victory parade is Wednesday. The Lakers closed out the Magic last night in Orland, Florida, winning the NBA Finals four games to one.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has private meetings and discussions today in and around the Capitol.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. … From my June 8th column.
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $37 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
Communications systems remain shackled, opposition leaders have been arrested, and protests continue in the wake of the declared landslide re-election victory of radical Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s presidential election Friday. His principal opponent, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who drew huge crowds, is urging that the election be “nullified.”
** OBAMA TODAY – SUNDAY. President Barack Obama has no scheduled public events today.
Obama is monitoring the events in Iran. His administration has expresssed skepticism about the outcome, which is out of phase with recent polling there.
The European Union, France, and Germany have all criticized Iran’s election.
Obama is also monitoring several other crises.
North Korea, which I describe in the column linked below.
Pakistan, where the army offensive against the Taliban is going well, but has produced a large refugee problem.
And Israel, where conservative Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu today delivered a speech responding to Obama’s Cairo address, going along with only one-half of his two points of challenge for the embattled nation.
Netanyahu refuses to halt settlement by conservative religionists in the disputed West Bank.
With Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government-reported landslide re-election flying in the face of pre-election polling pointing to a very close race, supporters of former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi are demonstrating. Text messaging has been shut down throughout Iran since the dawn of election day, as have opposition web sites. The Internet has slowed to a crawl.
** DEMOCRACY, IRANIAN STYLE. Agence France Press reports Saturday afternoon that in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s purported landslide re-election victory, all mobile phone service has been cut off in Tehran, and popular media and social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook are being blocked.
All text messaging continues to be blocked throughout the country, as has been the case since dawn on Friday, election day.
** OBAMA TODAY – SATURDAY. President Barack Obama has no public events today.
Obama is monitoring the hard-fought presidential election in Iran, where radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supposedly easily won what had been a very close-fought contest with former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, a moderate who has drawn huge crowds, and two other candidates.
Ahmadinejad was running under 50% in pre-election polling, which would have drawn him into a run-off against Moussavi, who was either close behind or perhaps a bit ahead.
But Iranian election officials say that Ahmadinejad won in a landslide, with 62.6% against Moussavi’s 33.8%.
Opponents of the regime are demonstrating in Tehran and elsewhere. But it is difficult to say how many and where. Al Jazeera reports that security police are blocking journalistic access and have shut down many streets in the capital city.
Obama Administration officials are expressing “skepticism” about the Iranian election results, noting drily that it is unlikely that Moussavi would lose his own hometown.
Obama is also monitoring North Korea’s response to yesterday’s action by the UN Security Council, where expected tough new sanctions against North Korea finally materialized yesterday afternoon.
** OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT: NORTH KOREA, AGAIN. President Barack Obama changed the old kabuki in dealing with his second North Korean crisis. The first time around, back in April, dealing with a long-range missile test that failed to place a satellite in orbit, Obama treated the effort as more of the same rather baffling attention-seeking by the Hermit Kingdom. This time, after a string of provocations including an underwhelming underground nuclear detonation, a series of missile launches, and the imprisonment of two California-based journalists, Obama went in another, tougher, direction that may lead to a naval confrontation.
One of the world’s great sporting events, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, is underway now in the French countryside. This is the 77th annual running of the world’s endurance sports car racing championship. Here’s a tour round the beautiful 8.5-mile course in a Jaguar D-Type back in 1956.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has no scheduled public events this weekend.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. …
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record last July 11th, crude oil closed at $72.04 per barrel on Friday. Energy markets are closed on the weekend.
This is up about $38 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
For his 85th birthday, former President George Herbert Walker Bush did what many advised his son to do – take a flying leap.
** IRAN: BOTH SIDES CLAIM VICTORY. Both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his principal challenger, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, are claiming victory in today’s fiercely contested presidential election. There was a huge turnout, apparently some 70%, with polling places staying open hours later than scheduled. The state-run news agencies are reporting that Ahmadinejad is ahead, but the numbers aren’t really adding up. We won’t have a full count until tomorrow. Whether we get a real count is another question.
** SCHWARZENEGGER REITERATES BUDGET STANCE. In a noontime speech today in the northern San Diego County town of Escondido, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger re-stated his position on California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
I’m calling on the legislature to send me a budget immediately that closes the entire $24 billion deficit. We cannot have a piecemeal approach here — we have done that in the past — or do it by steps or phases while praying that maybe our revenues come back and that our economy comes back. It won’t happen. Such a miracle doesn’t exist. The treasurer, the controller, the legislative analyst, the Department of Finance and also every economist, is saying that our revenues will continue to fall and our economy has not yet bottomed out. George Skelton from the Los Angeles Times put it best yesterday when he said, “There is no miracle cure; just cut deep and soon.” That’s exactly right. …
Now, in July we should receive the bipartisan recommendation from our Tax Modernization Commission. Now, that’s very important, as you know. As I said, it’s one of the reasons why we have this financial problem, is because our tax system is outdated. This will be a tremendous opportunity here to make our revenues more reliable.
Right now our tax system reflects Wall Street’s economy rather than California’s economy. Last year California’s economy has actually increased, even though people always think that our economy went down but our economy has increased by 0.4 percent. Normally it increases by around 3 to 4 percent. So we increased by 0.4 percent but our revenues have plummeted by more than 20 percent. We need more stability and less volatility and that’s because we are relying on 1 percent of Californians to pay 50 percent of the taxes. …
I’ve heard accusations that I tried to shut down state government. I don’t have to shut down state government because when they don’t produce a budget on time we will run out of cash and therefore our government will shut down by itself. So the answer is just very simple — we have a $24 billion gap and we must resolve this gap. This is the only way to do it: We must sit down, work together, Democrats and Republicans. We have no choices other than just confronting this reality.
Schwarzenegger spoke before a very supportive crowd in a town that gave him some 80% of the vote in his two landslide elections as California’s governor. After his speech, he took several questions from the crowd. But even there there was something of a disconnect, as one man asked Schwarzenegger to have the state help build a new stadium in San Diego. The action superstar rather patiently explained that the state is not really in a position to do that.
In answer to another question, Schwarzenegger said he would be willing to avoid his proposed taking of $2 billion in local revenues, if legislators could agree on more cuts in such areas as state worker health care and foster care.
This, I think, sets up the first searches of sovereign shipping by the US Navy since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Deputy Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo said the resolution provides “a strong and united international response” to North Korea’s test in defiance of a ban imposed after its first underground atomic blast in October 2006. …
China’s U.N. Ambassador Zhang Yesui said the nuclear test had affected regional peace and security and strongly urged Pyongyang to promote the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. He said the resolution demonstrates the international community’s “firm opposition” to the atomic blast, “but also sends a positive signal” by calling for the resumption of six-party talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program. He also said it showed the council’s determination to resolve the issue “peacefully through dialogue and negotiations.”
The resolution seeks to deprive North Korea of financing and material for its weapons program and bans the country’s lucrative arms exports, especially missiles.
It does not ban normal trade, but does call on international financial institutions not to provide the North with grants, aid or loans except for humanitarian, development and denuclearization programs.
North Korea reiterated Monday in its main newspaper that the country will consider any sanctions a declaration of war and will respond with “due corresponding self-defense measures.” On Tuesday, the North said it would use nuclear weapons in a “merciless offensive” if provoked. …
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT.
Voting wrapped up today in Iran’s hard-fought presidential election. Turnout was heavy and the outcome won’t be known today.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama has had his daily intelligence and economic briefings in the Oval Office.
At 7:30 AM Pacific, he meets with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
At 11:30 AM Pacific, Obama meets with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown in the Oval Office.
At 11:50 AM Pacific, Obama meets with California Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in the Oval Office.
At 12:30 PM Pacific, he meets with Prime Minister Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe in the Oval Office.
Obama is monitoring the hard-fought presidential election in Iran, where radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in a tough contest with former Prime Minister Mir Houssein Moussavi, a moderate who has drawn huge crowds, and two other candidates.
He is also monitoring the UN Security Council, where expected tough new sanctions against North Korea have not yet materialized.
The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Orlando Magic last night in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, 99-91. The Lakers lead the series, three games to one, and can clinch the championship Sunday in Orland.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the San Diego area this morning to deliver a speech on California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
Schwarzenegger will speak at the Escondido Center Theatre at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. …
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $37 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
President Barack Obama, speaking today at a town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, declared that “there is no alternative” but to fix a broken health care system.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT: NORTH KOREA, AGAIN.
** NORTH KOREA: READYING FOR ANOTHER “TEST” AS U.N. MOVES TO MORE SANCTIONS? The United Nations Security Council is proving slower than anticipated in levying tough new sanctions against North Koreas for its recent string of international provocations, climaxing over the weekend with the sentencing of two California-based journalists to 12 years at hard labor for unspecified “grave crimes.”
Meanwhile, North Korea may be prepping a third underground detonation of a nuclear device. The first was in October 2006 and the second was last month. Both were underwhelming in terms of yield, well below the weapons used in 1945 by the US against Japan.
North Korea may also be prepping a long-range missile test. Its last such, early this spring, was something of a dud. The Hermit Kingdom sought to place a satellite in orbit. But failed miserably at the task.
One reason for the slowness of UN Security Council action is that the draft resolution would give other nations legal sanction for naval interdiction of North Korean shipping to see if nuclear materials and technology or advanced rocketry is being sent elsewhere in the world.
Think of it as a “quarantine” in reverse. That’s the phrase then President John F. Kennedy used to describe his sending the Navy to inspect shipping coming into Cuba.
** SCHWARZENEGGER DENIES ANY EMERGENCY BORROWING. As things drag on in California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis, here’s the text of a letter just sent by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to his one-time Democratic bete noire on fiscal matters, state Controller John Chiang.:
Dear Mr. Chiang,
First, let me express my thanks for the work you and your office have done and continue to do to manage the state’s cash flow. I know how difficult it has been for you, the Treasurer and my Department of Finance to keep up with our deteriorating budgetary and cash situation, but you have all done an excellent job under very difficult circumstances.
I know that you agree with me that issuing a Revenue Anticipation Warrant (RAW) without enactment of the solutions we need to bring our budget back into balance would be irresponsible. Last April, I authorized the establishment of the General Cash Revolving Fund (GCRF) in anticipation of issuing a RAW as needed. I have informed legislative leaders that under no circumstances will I agree to issue a RAW to paper over our current budget shortfall.
Therefore, pursuant to Government Code Section 16381, I hereby revoke the authorization to transfer money from any special fund and other state accounts to the General Cash Revolving Fund. This revocation ends any chance that the state could issue a RAW and helps to clarify that our only alternative to running out of cash is to enact the budget solutions needed to restore the 2009-10 budget to balance.
Sincerely,
Arnold Schwarzenegger
** GALLUP POLL: REPUBLICANS FAR MORE NEGATIVE ON THEIR OWN PARTY. For all the negativity spewing forth these days from Republican ranks on President Barack Obama, what’s especially noteworthy is how negative Republicans have gotten to be about their own party.
The new Gallup Poll shows that nearly 40% of Republicans have a negative view of their own party, while only 7% of Democrats feel that way about the Democratic Party. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Democratic Party is far more popular amongst Americans than the Republican Party.
Among all Americans, the poll shows a 19-point advantage for the Democratic Party over the Republican Party when it comes to the two parties’ respective favorable images — a finding little changed from last November, when Gallup last updated the parties’ images. Fifty-three percent of Americans today have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, compared to just 34% who have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. …
For the entire U.S. population, the top four categories of images that come to mind first when Americans think about the Republican Party are:
Unfavorable
Conservative
Favorable
(Tie) Lost their way and Caters to the rich
The top four categories of images of the Democratic Party are:
Liberal
Favorable
For the people/working, middle, lower class
Socially conscious/Progressive
Other than the generic positive and negative responses given by the partisans and opponents of each party, the data reinforce the basic images that generally are associated with the parties; i.e., the Republican Party as conservative and more for the rich, and the Democratic party as liberal and more for the working, middle, and lower classes. All in all, as suggested by the partisan breakout of responses discussed above, the Republican Party has more negative images associated with it than does the Democratic Party.
President Barack Obama asked his campaign supporters to push for universal health care at the beginning of this week. He holds a town hall meeting today on the issue in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama has had his daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
He then departed the White House for Andrews Air Force Base, where he boarded Air Force One and flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin.
At 10:10 AM Pacific, Obama holds a town hall meeting on health care reform in Green Bay.
The event will be roadblocked on all cable news nets.
At 12:05 PM Pacific, Obama departs Green Bay en route to Andrews Air Force Base on Air Force One.
At 1:55 PM Pacific, Obama lands at Andrews Air Force Bay and embarks on the Marine One helicopter en route to the White House.
At 2:10 PM Pacific, Obama lands on the South Lawn of the White House.
Obama has given some conflicting signals on health care reform.
On the one hand, he is getting much more directly involved in its drafting than he was in the congressional passage of his early economic stimulus bill. But it’s unclear how involved he will be.
And after a recent private meeting with a bipartisan group of senators, some came away thinking that Obama wants a bipartisan bill. But a key Obama ally, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has previously said that it will be a Democratic, majority vote bill.
Meanwhile, Obama’s new commander for Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, was confirmed late yesterday by the Senate and is already on his way to Kabul, along with a large handpicked cadre of officers and NCOs – drawn in large part from his previous outfit, the top secret Joint Special Operations Command – forming his leadership team.
Defense Secretary Bob Gates is in Brussels, Belgium for the NATO defense ministers meeting. He is briefing his counterparts on the new command structure in Afghanistan.
He is also telling them that there is no sign that North Korea is preparing to retaliate militarily for an expected new round of UN sanctions against the Hermit Kingdom, including naval interdiction of shipping to check for nuclear materials or advanced rocketry.
Carrie Prejean, the Miss California who stirred up a firestorm of controversy by opposing same-sex marriage only to be retained last month by Miss USA pageant owner Donald Trump, was fired yesterday by Donald Trump. She was supposedly not living up to her contract.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has private meetings and discussions in and around the Capitol on California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
He has no scheduled public events.
Schwarzenegger met yesterday with the Los Angeles Times editorial board, telling them he would rather have state government shut down than kick the can down the road with emergency borrowing.
Meanwhile, in the face of an impending cash crunch, the Legislature’s budget conference committee continues its work at what might be described as a deliberate pace.
Schwarzenegger and state Senate Democrats disagree on the size of the crisis, with the latter wishing to use a large budget reserve in an earlier version of the budget to avert some cuts and stave off a state takeover of some local government funds. But Schwarzenegger is going with the latest projection from the Legislative Analyst Office in which the budget deficit is $3 billion greater. That seems consistent with the latest figures from Democratic state Controller John Chiang, who reported yesterday that revenues for March are sharply lower than projected in Schwarzenegger’s May budget revise.
Meanwhile, legislative Republicans are fine with Schwarzenegger’s cuts. Except, that is, to the prison budget, one of the few areas of the budget that the public actually wants cut.
And Assembly Democrats, prompted by the largest union representing state workers, whose ranks are otherwise likely to be significantly thinned, say they are thinking about more tax hikes.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. …
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $38 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
Seven key nations agreed today to a new round of sanctions against North Korea following its recent string of international provocations, including the sentencing of two California-based journalists to 12 years in a prison labor camp. The UN Security Council will take up the crisis again shortly.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … OBAMA’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT.
** QUICK HITS. AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrooke said today after his post-trip debrief with Vice President Biden that the Pakistani Army offensive against the Taliban is going well but that the real problem now is the nearly 3 million people displaced from their homes. And, while some are staying with friends, that they need to either get back to their homes ASAP or find good quarters soon to avoid an outbreak of cholera. … Iran’s presidential election is winding down toward election day on Friday and incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is increasingly flailing. The opposition rallies are bigger than his and he is all but conceding a big vote against him in Tehran – where he was mayor prior to winning the presidency. Ahmadinejad has launched increasingly wild attacks against his opponents, and will need to rely on a split ballot in order to win re-election. … The UN Security Council permament members have reportedly just agreed on a tough resolution against North Korea. Signing off are traditional North Korean allies China and Russia. More to follow …
** MORE CALIFORNIA BUDGET CHAOS. Since 12 noon, a few more developments in California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
State Controller John Chiang, a Democrat who was Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s regular bete noire in earlier budget fights, sounded more alarums about the state’s revenue plunge. In May, he notes, state revenue was $827 million below the latest projections found in the Governor’s May Budget Revision.
“Without immediate solutions from the Governor and Legislature, we are less than 50 days away from a meltdown of State government. This presents a terrible threat to California’s economy and to the State’s delivery of basic public services,” said Chiang. “A truly balanced budget is the only responsible way out of the worst cash crisis since the Great depression.”
Personal income taxes were $475 million below (-23.0%) estimates in the May Revision. Corporate taxes were down $84.4 million (-25.8%), and sales taxes fell by $109 million (-3.3%).
Chiang again echoed what Schwarzenegger has been saying: Balance the budget now, rather than do part of the job and hope for increased revenue down the line.
At his press avail following his latest unveiling of a greentech vehicle, the Chrysler Peapod, Schwarzenegger was adamant in insisting that he will not approve a RAW (revenue anticipation warrants) sale. And he insisted that Democratic legislators who want to raid the reserve in his May budget revision are being unrealistic, as that reserve is already likely gone as the deficit has probably increased since then.
“We have 27% less revenues than a year ago,” he noted, though the state’s economy itself has actually been flat during the period. (Or grew by 0.4%, as he prefers to say.) He attributes this, as does former Governor Gray Davis, to the boom-and-bust nature of the state’s tax structure, reliant on higher-income earners who aren’t making that money now.
And you see from the state controller’s figures that the sales tax revenue is down only a few percent below the administration’s latest projections while personal and corporate income tax revenue is down another 25% or so.
Meanwhile, the biggest union representing state workers (teachers are not employed by the state), the Service Employees International Union, has dropped a million dollars on a TV ad to air in the LA, San Diego, Bay Area, and Sacramento markets calling for tax hikes to balance the budget.You can look at it here, if you like.
As NWN has reported before, when SEIU and other public employee unions opposed to the special election intiatives ran a TV ad during the campaign, that ad made no mention of tax increases, which it now says are what the public wants. Instead, the ad attacked from the right, claiming that the proposed state spending limit – which SEIU and its allies naturally oppose – would have been ineffective.
** GALLUP POLL: TOP REPUBLICAN LEADERS ARE LIMBAUGH, CHENEY, AND GINGRICH.The new Gallup Poll shows that the figures ranked highest as Republican leaders are right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the latter barely edging out Senator John McCain.
Interestingly enough, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin barely register in this regard, though they are in a dead heat as frontrunners for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.
Asked to name the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” Republicans across the country are most likely to name three men: Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and Dick Cheney. Democrats are most likely to say Limbaugh speaks for the GOP, followed by Cheney. Both Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly say Barack Obama is the main person who speaks for the Democratic Party, although Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to mention Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. …
The responses to the Republican leadership question provide hard evidence that there is in fact a significant leadership vacuum confronting the GOP today. Forty-seven percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents could not come up with a single name in response to the party spokesperson question. In contrast, a much lower 17% of Democrats could not name an individual as the person who speaks for their party.
Additionally, no one person dominates even among Republicans who are able to name someone who speaks for their party. Radio talk-show host Limbaugh, former Speaker Gingrich, and former Vice President Cheney — although at the top of the list — are all mentioned by only 9% or 10% of Republicans. The only other individuals named by more than 1% of Republicans are Sen. John McCain at 6%, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele at 2%, and former Massachusetts Gov. and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, also at 2%. Of notable interest is the fact that less than 1% of Republicans name George W. Bush in response to the question. This reflects at least in part that Cheney has been highly visible and outspoken since leaving office, while Bush has largely remained silent, publicly.
Democrats are most likely to name Limbaugh as the person who speaks for the Republican Party (18%). Since Limbaugh is not a popular person with Democrats, the frequency with which Democrats name him is no doubt a negative characterization of the GOP from those who identify with the rival party. The talk-show host is followed on Democrats’ list by Cheney at 12%, then McCain and Bush at 5% each. Gingrich is apparently not on the Democrats’ radar as much as he is on Republicans’; the former speaker receives 4% mentions from Democrats, compared to the 10% mentions he receives from those who identify with his own party. (This past Monday, Republicans gathered for a House and Senate campaign committee fund-raiser in Washington, and Gingrich gave the keynote address.)
Investigators sift through the jihadist bombing of a luxury hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, the latest retaliation for the offensive against the Taliban. Amongst the casualties were five United Nations officials. The UN has shut down operations in Peshawar indefinitely.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in the Oval Office.
At 7:30 AM Pacific, Obama meets with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
Biden is off to the Naval Observatory to meet with special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke on his recent trip there and the status of the Pakistani Army’s ongoing offensive against the Taliban.
At 9 AM Pacific, Obama and Biden have their weekly working lunch in the Private Dining Room of the White House.
At 1 PM Pacific, Obama meets with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in the Oval Office.
At 1:45 PM Pacific, Obama and Biden meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.
Topics on tap include the growing crisis with North Korea, the situation in Pakistan, and a looming confrontation with Israel over its policy of settling conservative religionists in the disputed West Bank.
Middle East special envoy George Mitchell held meetings yesterday with top Israeli leadership.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who had an unscheduled private meeting in the White House last week with Obama during his session with National Security Advisor General Jim Jones, came out for prompt movement to a new Palestinian state today.
Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who had a contentious meeting with Obama a few weeks ago in the Oval Office, delivers his response to Obama’s Cairo address on June 14th.
The Los Angeles Lakers lost Game 3 of the NBA Finals last night in Orlando, Florida, 108-104. That marks the Magic’s first ever win in an NBA Finals game. The Lakers lead the best four-of-seven series, two games to one. Game 4 is on Thursday night in Orlando.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shows off the Peapod today in Capitol Park. That is a low-speed, four-passenger neighborhood electric vehicle with a top speed of 25 miles per hour, legal to travel on roads with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour or less.
Sounds perfect for him, don’t you think?
Schwarzenegger also meets with the Los Angeles Times editorial board to discuss California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
Meanwhile, in the face of an impending cash crunch, the Legislature’s budget conference committee continues its work at what might be described as a deliberate pace.
Schwarzenegger and state Senate Democrats disagree on the size of the crisis, with the latter wishing to use a large budget reserve in an earlier version of the budget to avert some cuts and stave off a state takeover of some local government funds. But Schwarzenegger is going with the latest projection from the Legislative Analyst Office in which the budget deficit is $3 billion greater.
Meanwhile, legislative Republicans are fine with Schwarzenegger’s cuts. Except, that is, to the prison budget, one of the few areas of the budget that the public actually wants cut.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. …
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. … From my June 4th column.
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $37 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
A Guantanamo detainee is arraigned in New York this afternoon. Said to be an Al Qaeda operative who served as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, Ahmed Gailani is charged with taking part in the bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Though he is being held in super-max security, the Senate opposes this sort of move.
Virginia state Senator Creighton Deeds crushed McAuliffe, a fixture in national Democratic politics for decades, 49.2% to 26.7%. Former state legislator Brian Moran finished just behind McAuliffe with 24.1%. As I’ve been noting, McAuliffe had no real bona fides as a Virginian, other than the fact that he’s spent decades as a Washingtonian. Which is, you know, next door. A few years back, McAuliffe, native New Yorker who went to school in the nation’s capital in preparation for a life in politics, considered running for governor of Florida. But he didn’t meet the state’s residency requirement.
** QUICK HITS. Famed national Democratic fundraiser and Clinton strategist Terry McAuliffe tries to pull out a win tonight in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary. The former Democratic national chairman and campaign chairmn for Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton now trails a Virginia state senator in all available public polls after leading earlier in the contest. McAuliffe has had difficulty establishing his bona fides as a Virginian. … The Pakistani Taliban, losing ground in the face of a major army offensive against them, carried out another big terrorist attack, bombing a Peshawar luxury hotel. Their earlier attack on a mosque backfired. … Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger continues his disaster budget tour tomorrow with a Los Angeles Times editorial board meeting. …
** CALIFORNIA’S CHRONIC-TURNED-CHAOTIC BUDGET CRISIS … Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, off to Fresno to meet with the Fresno Bee editorial board, met this afternoon in the Capitol with a number of big city mayors from around the state. Despite his past backing for the local government cause, he’s saying he is having trouble avoiding raiding funds normally targeted for local government, which would cause still more cuts in local services.
Schwarzenegger also met privately with state Controller John Chiang and state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who reiterated that the state is in a severe and fast impending cash crunch.
Meanwhile, state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg today said Senate Democrats will go along with another big round of budget-cutting but oppose taking local government funds and want to all but drain the state’s budget reserve to preserve elements of the state’s workfare, children’s health care, in-home elder care, and college student aid programs. Schwarzenegger says that the reserve is already spoken for by increases in the deficit.
** GALLUP POLL: AMERICAN SATISFACTION WITH NATION SAME AS MONTH AGO, OVER DOUBLE THAT WHEN OBAMA BECAME PRESIDENT. The new Gallup Poll shows satisfaction with the state of the nation at a low ebb compared to the norm, but far above what it was at the end of the Bush/Cheney Administration.
Only 17% of Americans were satisfied just before President Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20th. It’s now double that, but the advance has plateaued over the past month. The overall number is brought down dramatically by opposition to Obama from an increasingly hardcore Republican Party.
Though Americans’ satisfaction is still more than double what it was when President Obama took office, it is noteworthy that satisfaction has leveled off over the past month, rather than continuing the trend of positive improvement recorded from March through early May. It remains low on an absolute basis. The all-time high on this measure in Gallup’s 30-year history of asking the question is 71% in February 1999 and the all-time low is 7% last October.
The past month has no doubt seen a mixed bag of news, including President Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe, a jump in the U.S. unemployment rate to 9.4%, the government-backed bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler, Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, Obama’s commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, and the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller.
Throughout all of this action, Republicans, independents, and Democrats showed measurable swings in their satisfaction levels, but Gallup now finds satisfaction almost identical to one month ago among each of these three groups. About half of Democrats (48%) are satisfied, as are 31% of independents and 15% of Republicans.
** SOTOMAYOR CONFIRMATION HEARING SET FOR JULY 13TH. Senator Pat Leahy’s office has announced the Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing to serve as a US Supreme Court justice begins on July 13th. Sotomayor, who fractured her ankle yesterday while hurrying through New York’s LaGuardia Airport en route to Washington for more meetings, seems to on track for a relatively easy confirmation as the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.
** REPUBLICANS RAISE $14.5 MILLION. House and Senate Republicans raised $14.5 million at their big fundraiser last night in Washington. The take was overshadowed by the will she/won’t she melodrama around Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s on/off/on/off speaking appearance at the event.
She didn’t speak. But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich did. He claimed that President Barack Obama has “already failed.” And that Obama demonstrated his naivete in geopolitics by referring to himself as a “citizen of the world.”
Actually, John F. Kennedy did the same thing in his Inaugural Address, judged among the best in American history. Ronald Reagan did the same thing on several occasions. As did … You see where this is going.
Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has had a cool reaction to President Barack Obama’s insistence on an end to West Bank settlements. US special envoy George Mitchell is in Israel today meeting with leaders to press the point.
** REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE. There’s no question that timing is, as it were, of the essence in politics. Consider the timing of President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, coming as it did just two days before the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
Most focus simply on the Cairo speech. But that speech exists in a larger context, alongside the speech over the weekend in Normandy which bookended it on Obama’s second big international tour.
On Thursday in Cairo, Obama gave his rhetorical best to reposition a mostly peaceful America in the future of the Muslim world. On Saturday in Normandy, he reminded of America’s glittering, and far more martial, past. …
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced North Korea’s sentencing of California-based journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama has received his daily intelligence and economic briefings in the Oval Office.
At 7:30 AM Pacific, he meets with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
At 10 AM Pacific, he delivers remarks on the notion that new tax or entitlement policies should be paid for – known as PAYGO – in the East Room.
At 11:30 AM Pacific, Obama meets with Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee in the State Dining Room.
At 1:30 PM Pacific, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with Secretary of Defense Gates in the Oval Office.
Earlier in the day, Biden hosts representatives from national law enforcement groups to announce their support for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in the Eisenhower Executive Office Bldg.
Obama, Biden, and Gates will be discussing the Pakistani Army’s offensive against the Taliban, which is apparently going well, the status of the recent deployment of 7000 Marines to Afghanistan, and North Korea’s threat of nuclear war if the increasingly erratic Hermit Kingdom is interfered with.
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, is in Egypt today meeting with President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. His message? That the time to push for a two-state solution – Israel and Palestine – is now and that the continued settlement of the West Bank by conservative religionists should end.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has no planned public events today.
He has private meetings and discussions in Sacramento and Fresno, largely around California’s chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis.
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. …
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $35 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
7,000 Marines have arrived in southern Afghanistan, the first third of President Barack Obama’s surge of additional US forces to push back the increasingly aggressive Afghan Taliban. Part of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, designated Task Force Tarawa during the invasion of Iraq, the unit is now designated Task Force Leatherneck.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … REMEMBERING AMERICA: OBAMA’S D-DAY SPEECH AND TWO DAYS IN JUNE.
** QUICK HITS. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is attending tonight’s big Republican Congressional fundraiser in Washington. But she’s not speaking. She seemed to be the keynoter at first, and was announced as such, only to deny it. Then she was on in a role subsidiary to that of the new keynoter, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Then she was suddenly off, so as not to steal his thunder. As it were. Now she is attending, but won’t speak. Just the sort of focus a spiraling political party needs. … The march to same-sex marriage doesn’t seem so sure a thing today as New York’s state Senate changed from Democratic majority to Republican majority with two anti-gay marriage Dems switching parties. A gay marriage bill that passed the Assembly has, obviously, stalled out in the upper house. … Another poll today shows former Democratic National Chairman and longtime Clinton impresario Terry McAuliffe trailing in tomorrow’s Virginia Democratic primary for governor. Who’s ahead? A state senator named Creighton Deeds. … Rosario Marin, a one-time US treasurer who served as secretary for consumer affairs in the Schwarzenegger Administration before revelations that she was getting big speaking fees from corporations her agency helped regulate, will have to pay a $5400 fine if the staff of the Fair Political Practices Commission has anything to say about it. The body votes later this month on the recommendation.
** AMIDST NORTH KOREAN CRISIS, SOUTH KOREA’S PRESIDENT IS COMING TO WASHINGTON. South Korean President Lee Myung Bak will meet with President Barack Obama and other top US officials at the White House on June 16th. The trip comes after a series of provocative moves by the rather mysterious North Korean regime – including an underground, if underwhelming, nuclear weapons test, a series of missile launches, and shrill warnings about the interdiction of its shipping to look for destructive weapons – culminating in the kangaroo court sentencing of two American journalists to 12 years at hard labor. (See item below.)
There’s been a longstanding pattern through the Bush and Clinton administrations of North Korea setting up provocations and backing away after being bought off. It may be that the Obama Administration is no longer going to keep buying the same horse.
** GALLUP POLL: OBAMA RATED HIGHEST ON FOREIGN POLICY. The new Gallup Poll shows President Barack Obama receiving his highest issue rating on foreign affairs.
Obama has a 67% favorable rating. His job approval ratings is 62%. 59% approve his handling of foreign affairs, while 55% approve his handling of the economy, terrorism, and the situation in the Middle East.
Obama gets his lowest ratings on the federal budget deficit and controlling federal spending, much the same thing, with 46% and 45%, respectively.
He only gets a 47% approval rating for his handling of the rather baffling North Korean regime. (With 33% disapproving.)
Considering that the economy is still not in recovery, his approval on economic policy is striking.
And Obama may be getting more aggressive with North Korea, which has become highly provocative.
North Korea on Sunday sentenced two California-based journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, to 12 years in prison for alleged “grave crimes.” The two work for former Vice President Al Gore’s San Francisco-based Current TV.
MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK
Another busy week in presidential politics and in California politics.
President Barack Obama focuses more on domestic issues this week, following his just concluded big international tour, though some major happenings are on tap in the international arena. He’s getting more directly involved in the congressional crafting of universal health care legislation. And he’s accelerating spending from the economic recovery act, with a goal of 600,000 jobs this summer from public works and employment programs.
In California, the Legislature continues picking through Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s draconian budget proposal. While there’s some talk of another round of tax hikes, Democrats seem to have little actual stomach for that. Meanwhile, legislators are considering a wave of governmental consolidation, perhaps doing away with many commissions and departments.
And the desultory 2010 governor’s race continues. Frontrunner Jerry Brown, the former governor, who has not announced his candidacy, is adding to his fundraising edge while doing a very active job as state attorney general. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose city is in the midst of a major budget crisis, tries to pick up his fundraising pace with another out-of-state trip today, this one to New York.
Back to Obama. Despite earlier promises of cooperation, private insurers are pushing back against Obama’s desire to include a public option in the universal health care legislation. If Obama wants that, he will have to engage. Otherwise, Congress may fold.
The accelerated recovery spending comes after criticism that economic stimulus funds are being spent too slowly. But it also comes as concerns grows that the federal deficit is getting too large.
Obama inherited a record budget deficit from the Bush/Cheney Administration, which in turn inherited a record budget surplus from the Clinton Administration. But Obama is adding rapidly to what he inherited.
Although his plan is to focus more on domestic issues this week, geopolitics has its own momentum.
Iran holds its presidential election on Friday. Incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of the globe’s great boogeymen, is engaged in a vicious fight for re-election. Iranian politics is quite turbulent, and there is no figure more turbulent than he. The first non-cleric to hold the Islamic Republic’s presidency, Ahmadinejad counters by claiming a direct line to the Mahdi to justify his radical politics. But Iran’s economy has suffered under his leadership, and he is polling under 40% in a multi-candidate field.
Israel is contemplating its moves in response to Obama’s insistence on no new settlement in the West Bank. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu said yesterday that he will make a major speech of his own sometime in the next week or so.
Obama will send his Middle East special envoy, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, to the region this week to follow up on his Cairo speech.
Israeli’s new conservative government has generally had a supportive-on-the-surface but cool reaction to Obama’s move, and have re-stated that they intend to continue allowing religious conservatives to settle in the West Bank. Far right elements have just distributed a poster around the country depicting Obama with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Then there is North Korea. Firing off missiles, conducting an underwhelming underground nuclear test, earning lots of attention in the process. Now the Hermit Kingdom has sentenced two California-based journalists to 12 years of hard labor in a prison camp, for alleged but unspecific “grave crimes” against the state.
The two, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were in China along the border with North Korea researching the sex slave trade. They either wandered into North Korea and were arrested, or were nabbed by zealous North Korean troops venturing over the border.
Yet another provocation by North Korea, which has Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying it may be time to put the country back on the terrorist state list.
Meanwhile, 7,000 Marines have just arrived in Afghanistan, the first wave of the 21,000 additional troops sent there as part of the Obama surge to stabilize the country and counter recent Taliban gains.
The Marines, the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, will be working in southern Afghanistan, a hotbed of Taliban activity and home to the world’s largest opium poppy-growing area.
Most of the additional troops to follow will also be working in the south of the country.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is back in the White House following his tour of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany, and France. First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha are heading back to Washington today following a weekend of sightseeing in Paris.
Obama has had his daily intelligence and economic briefings and has met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
At 8:45 AM Pacific, Obama meets with the Cabinet in the State Dining Room.
He will announce plans to accelerate spending from the economic recovery act to promote public works projects and summer youth employment.
The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Orland Magic in Game 2 of the NBA Finals last night in LA, 101-96 in overtime. The Lakers lead the championship series, which moves to Orlando on Tuesday, two games to none.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger holds a press conference with education officials at Calabasas High School to talk up his plan to use digital textbooks as a way to stretch resources and rapidly update learning materials for students rather than keep using outdated books.
** REPOSITIONING AMERICA: OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH AS THE ULTIMATE IN EVENT MARKETING. In the biggest example of event marketing that comes to mind, President Barack Obama used his ballyhooed speech today at Cairo University to reposition America in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
“I have come here,” he said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
The fact is that Obama didn’t really say anything new. The positions he laid out are positions he had in his campaign. But he did say it all at once, and quite well. He did say it in a 50-minute address aimed directly at the Muslim and Arab worlds. He did say it in Cairo, largest city in the Arab world and a critical city in the history of Islam. And he did say it at the leading modern university in Egypt in an event co-sponsored by the world’s chief center of Arabic literature, the ancient Al-Azhar University.
In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. The context is the key to the effort.
In an even larger sense, the message is himself. Both who he is, and who he is not. …
** TERMINATING THE DARKNESS: HOPE FLOATS, BUT ANXIETY ABIDES. Is the era of the dark comic book movie fable coming to an end? Or is it more a matter of a spate of seemingly underperforming dark would-be blockbusters? … From my May 31st column.
** THE AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY OF CALIFORNIA’S PROP 8. The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, last November’s successful initiative against same-sex marriage is all the more tragic in that the initiative never should have passed in the first place. …
The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It’s the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding by the California Supreme Court, has made it. …
Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election. … From my May 26th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in two wars in the region, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S CALIFORNIA. Here is my series of five columns on the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Los Angeles Times in debate last fall, prior to the global economic meltdown, with Pulitzer Prize-winning former Times reporter/editor Bill Boyarsky, whose columns are also included. Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
This is up about $35 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, due in part to some positive economic signs and in part to geopolitical jitters over Pakistan and North Korea.
| Comments (46) |