Speaking Saturday night at the annual awards banquet of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, President Barack Obama hammered on the theme of job creation.
** OBAMA TODAY – SUNDAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington, DC, the State of Washington, and California.
Obama has received the daily intelligence and economic briefing in the Oval Office.
Obama then departed the White House and flew on Air Force One to Seattle, Washington,
At 11:50 AM Pacific, Obama arrives in Seattle, Washington.
At 12:35 PM Pacific, Obama delivers remarks at a DNC event at a private residence in Seattle.
At 2:05 PM Pacific, Obama delivers remarks at a DNC event at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.
At 3:10 PM Pacific, Obama departs Seattle on Air Force One en route San Jose, California.
At 5 PM Pacific, Obama arrives in San Jose.
At 6:25 PM Pacific, Obama delivers remarks at a DNC event at a private residence in Silicon Valley.
At 7:45 PM Pacific, Obama delivers remarks at a DNC event at a private residence in Silicon Valley.
Obama will be in California all day on Monday, doing a Silicon Valley town hall at LinkedIn and moving on to fundraisers in San Diego and Los Angeles.
On Tuesday, Obama flies from Los Angeles to Denver, Colorado, where he tours a high school, speaks about the American Jobs Act, and holds a fundraiser.
Meanwhile, Libyan rebel forces have secured most of the small desert towns, including the city of Sabha, which had remained in the hands of diehard Gaddafi regime loyalists. On Saturday, they pushed into the center of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte. But today, facing fierce resistance, they pulled back.
The whereabouts of the deposed dictator remain unclear.
And a giant dead NASA satellite, expected to fall to Earth Friday giving North America the miss actually fell to Earth early Saturday. Where did it fall? Early forecasts were that it might hit North America after all.
While the government is being quite vague about it all, the debris, most of which should have burned up during the atmospheric re-entry, apparently fell into the Pacific Ocean.
Meanwhile, the long vaunted Florida Republican Straw Poll on Saturday saw former pizza mogul Herman Cain win, with frontrunning Texas Governor Rick Perry second.
This follows a California GOP convention straw poll win by Ron Paul. And of course Michele Bachmann’s supposedly big win in the Iowa straw poll.
Remember how I trashed straw polls a few months ago as ridiculous exercises hyped by the media?
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Libya is nine hours ahead of Pacific time, Iraq is ten hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is eleven and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – SUNDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Brown is working his way through some 600 bills which he must decide upon by October 9th.
Two odd columns today by old-time political types.
Former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown does a weekly, chatty, self-oriented Sunday column in the San Francisco Chronicle marked by a lot of amusingly wrong forecasts.
Today he claims that Jerry Brown doesn’t know that state budget revenues are coming up short of forecast, which will then trigger additional automatic budget cuts.
Decades long Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters says something similar today as well.
Actually, Brown is well aware of this. It’s why he vetoed legislation to steer the process away from the budget cuts trigger mechanism.
Which was covered here at the time, and which Brown himself made plain in his veto message.
At Saturday’s ruling United Russia Party conference in Moscow, Prime Minister, former President, and United Russia chairman Vladimir Putin announced that he will run next year for president. Current President Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s former chief of staff, will — assuming, as we should, that Putin wins the election — become prime minister and chairman of United Russia.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … 9/11 AT 10+: DID OSAMA BIN LADEN WIN AFTER ALL?
** OBAMA TODAY – SATURDAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington.
Obama has received the daily intelligence and economic briefing in the Oval Office.
At 5:35 PM Pacific, he delivers remarks at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Phoenix Awards at the Washington Convention Center.
Palestinian leaders defied pressure from the US yesterday and formally applied for full membership in the United Nations. The UN Security Council will begin taking up the matter next week, with many possibilities for resolution as the Middle East Quartet powers (US, EU, UN, Russia) announced an accelerated negotiation timeline which may or may not be relevant.
But that negotiation is to run on a separate track. If in fact it runs at all. It hasn’t for quite some time.
As for the UN application, Palestinians leaders said today that they will give the UN Security Council two weeks to act on it. The US and others would prefer a much slower walk than that.
The fast-emerging BRIC powers — Brazil, Russia, India, China — all back the Palestinian play at the UN. But the US is lobbying other nations on the Security Council furiously, hoping to avert the Palestinians gaining the needed nine of the 15 Security Council votes for approval without a veto. Because the US desperately wants to avoid having to use its veto power to back Israel once again.
If the Palestinians lose at the Security Council, they have several other options. They can go to the UN General Assembly and seek a two-thirds vote to gain full membership on grounds of gross human rights violations.
Or they can go to the General Assembly and, on a majority vote, become a non-member state with permanent observer status like the Vatican — the Palestinians are currently an observer mission — which affords them membership in some UN agencies and the ability to become parties to important global treaties with leverage over relations with Israel.
This latter is the compromise position being pushed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who increasingly is taking on the role of broker in regard to the Arab world with the Obama Administration forced into backing Israel rather playing a mediating role.
Speaking of the BRICs, in what should have been a surprise to no one, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev today announced in Moscow that they will switch jobs in next year’s Russian national elections.
President Medvedev, a personal friend of Obama, will defer to his former boss the former president with regard to the presidency, moving over to the prime minister post that Putin currently holds.
Putin, who is not a personal friend of Obama — he pointedly delayed Obama’s big speech last year in Moscow after forcing the president to travel out to his dacha and detaining him in lengthy conversation — will, absent the upset of all time, return to the presidency next year. This will enable him to preside over the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where Putin has a huge estate.
It will also enable him to unleash more of his rather waspish view of the US on the global stage. Putin is driving the Russian bid to open up the Arctic to petrochemical development as the greenhouse effect increases and the ice cap recedes.
Russia, of course, is one of the world’s greatest powers in oil and natural gas and a competitor of the US in the aerospace and arms businesses. It also has an improved relationship with the US.
But much of the tone of that is due to Medvedev. If the US continues to flounder, Putin won’t hesitate much to take advantage.
In his weekend video/radio address, President Barack Obama urges that states have greater flexibility to find innovative ways of improving the education system.
In other action, Libyan rebel forces have secured most of the small desert towns, including the city of Sabha, which had remained in the hands of diehard Gaddafi regime loyalists and today pushed into the center of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte. The whereabouts of the deposed dictator remain unclear.
And a giant dead NASA satellite, expected to fall to Earth yesterday giving North America the miss actually fell to Earth early today, perhaps somewhere in North America. I say perhaps because the government isn’t saying. Most debris was expected to burn up on re-entry. If someone was hit, we would, probably, have heard about it.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Libya is nine hours ahead of Pacific time, Iraq is ten hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is eleven and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – SATURDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Brown is working his way through some 600 bills which he must decide upon by October 9th.
As expected, he signed compromise legislation yesterday under which online retail giant Amazon will begin collecting California sales tax in a year if Congress doesn’t come up with a national solution in an election year.
Brown also signed legislation to help pave the way for needed refurbishments for the America’s Cup competition in San Francisco Bay as the famed international sailing championship points to 2013.
These bill signings were packaged as job creation events, and done away from the Governor’s Office as Brown raises his public profile again.
** MEG WHITMAN TO RUN CALIFORNIA (ICON)! The 2010 Republican nominee for governor of California is back. And apparently out of her leading role in her mentor Mitt Romney’s formerly frontrunning campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. She won’t be running California, but she will be running a California icon.
Months after losing in a landslide to Governor Jerry Brown, billionaire Meg Whitman is back at the helm of a big Silicon Valley company. The former eBay CEO, who waged the biggest-spending non-presidential campaign in American history last year, only to be crushed by Brown, 54% to 41%, joined the board of Silicon Valley icon Hewlett-Packard in January. And today, with the HP board firing its third CEO in six years — a spate which began with Carly Fiorina, who also lost in a landslide last year in her bid against Senator Barbara Boxer — Whitman became the CEO of the Palo Alto-based firm founded by high tech legends David Packard and William Hewlett.
If she’s not simply an interim choice, and nothing emanating from HP is indicating that now, Whitman seems an odd choice.
Her entire background is in consumer products, and non-technical consumer products at that. Procter and Gamble, Disney, Stride Rite, FTD, Hasbro, plus her management consultant stint at Bain. Yes, she was head of eBay, but eBay uses technology, or more accurately, a technology platform, to sell stuff, it does not sell technology.
HP, in contrast, was arguably the principal seedbed of Silicon Valley. (Yes, there is an argument about it, but for purposes of this little piece, let’s let the point stand that HP is a high tech archetype.)
HP was a very big-time hardware company. It became famed for scientific calculators, for those who needed more than a slide rule. (If you’re asking, “what’s a slide rule?” we’re getting onto a telling tangent.) It produced scientific instruments. It produced large computers, then known as mini-computers. It later produced personal computers and laptops, not to mention very fine printers, and a promising new tablet which it just dumped.
I got one of its great LaserJet printers back in the day, for a godawful amount of money. I have an HP ink jet printer in this office. But I don’t use it for much other than photography, and I’m not a big photographer, as I don’t print things out very often. Which begins to get at HP’s problem. … From my September 22nd column.
** T2 AND ALIENS ANNIVERSARIES POINT UP THE PROBLEMS WITH TODAY’S ACTION MOVIES. After a summer of action films, many of them rather indifferent, it’s useful to consider two classic movies having their 20th and 25th anniversaries.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out in 1991; Aliens in 1986. Both directed by a guy best known in some circles for a movie about an old boat that sank and some other picture about a planet filled with nine-foot tall blue people, T2 and Aliens stand in very sharp contrast to latter-day action flicks.
T2 has a polish and, yes, a beauty that makes it appear timeless. Aliens, now 25 years old, looks rougher than that. But the movie is a flavorful mix of the creepshow suspense of the original Alien and the martial virtues of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, with an anti-corporatist twist and tremendous narrative drive.
What do each these movies have that the action movies of today generally don’t? … From my September 18th essay.
** OBAMA AND THE REPUBLICANS: TWO CONTRASTING NIGHTS. … From my September 9th column.
** THE FARM WORKERS AND JERRY BROWN MAKE UP, FOR NOW. … From my September 7th column.
** JERRY BROWN FINDS POST-BUDGET FOCUS. … From my September 1st feature.
** WHY OBAMA WAS RIGHT ON LIBYA AND BIN LADEN AND WRONG ON AFGHANISTAN. … From my August 31st essay.
** OBAMA’S BIG DISCONNECT. … From my August 22nd column.
** FROM GOVERNATOR TO MOONBEAM. … From my January 3rd, 2011 feature.
** 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, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, 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.
** 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 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, 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.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil closed on Friday at $79.85 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Energy markets are closed on the weekend.
This is up about $46 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down $34 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
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| Comments (27) |
Good RT news video on Putin and Medvedev’s office switch.
Good weekend address on education by President Obama.
That’s very democratic…
lol
Jonas Blane says:
September 24, 2011 at 11:45 am
Good RT news video on Putin and Medvedev’s office switch.
This is another very good speech by Barack.
Jonas Blane says:
September 24, 2011 at 11:51 am
Good weekend address on education by President Obama.
Finally??
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … 9/11 AT 10+: DID OSAMA BIN LADEN WIN AFTER ALL?
Yes.
Who said anything about democracy?
>Capitol Boy says:
September 24, 2011 at 2:14 pm (Edit)
That’s very democratic…
lol
Jonas Blane says:
September 24, 2011 at 11:45 am
Good RT news video on Putin and Medvedev’s office switch.
It’s one of his more disposable efforts, I’m afraid.
>Capitol Boy says:
September 24, 2011 at 2:19 pm (Edit)
This is another very good speech by Barack.
Jonas Blane says:
September 24, 2011 at 11:51 am
Good weekend address on education by President Obama.
Premier Putin’s decision was inevitable.
More Libya War video today?
Excellent speech by Barack at the CBC!!
Hahah…
Bill Bradley says:
September 24, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Who said anything about democracy?
>Capitol Boy says:
September 24, 2011 at 2:14 pm (Edit)
That’s very democratic…
lol
Jonas Blane says:
September 24, 2011 at 11:45 am
Good RT news video on Putin and Medvedev’s office switch.
Good news video of President Obama’s Congressional Black Caucus speech.
Bill, my suggestion that HP hire Carly was not entirely serious. But thn given this board….
This sure doesn’t sound good…
WB: Putin, who is not a personal friend of Obama — he pointedly delayed Obama’s big speech last year in Moscow after forcing the president to travel out to his dacha and detaining him in lengthy conversation — will, absent the upset of all time, return to the presidency next year. This will enable him to preside over the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where Putin has a huge estate.
It will also enable him to unleash more of his rather waspish view of the US on the global stage. Putin is driving the Russian bid to open up the Arctic to petrochemical development as the greenhouse effect increases and the ice cap recedes.
Medvedev acted with Putin’s permission.
What new video today?
Lots.
In most instances, I’m sure.
>sergei says:
September 26, 2011 at 7:28 am (Edit)
Medvedev acted with Putin’s permission.
It will work out.
>Requiem says:
September 25, 2011 at 6:34 pm (Edit)
This sure doesn’t sound good…
WB: Putin, who is not a personal friend of Obama — he pointedly delayed Obama’s big speech last year in Moscow after forcing the president to travel out to his dacha and detaining him in lengthy conversation — will, absent the upset of all time, return to the presidency next year. This will enable him to preside over the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where Putin has a huge estate.
It will also enable him to unleash more of his rather waspish view of the US on the global stage. Putin is driving the Russian bid to open up the Arctic to petrochemical development as the greenhouse effect increases and the ice cap recedes.
There has been some turnover. Then there is the amnesia factor …
>larry says:
September 25, 2011 at 5:32 pm (Edit)
Bill, my suggestion that HP hire Carly was not entirely serious. But thn given this board….
I’m waiting for something definitive.
>Jonas Blane says:
September 25, 2011 at 10:22 am (Edit)
More Libya War video today?
Indeed.
>sergei says:
September 25, 2011 at 2:38 am (Edit)
Premier Putin’s decision was inevitable.
Yes.
I told my gnrmadother how you helped. She said, bake them a cake!
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