FDR Madison Square Garden 1936

Tiré d'un commentaire de Jan Ting qui pose la question: Imaginez-vous Obama prononcer un tel discours?

"“For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Historians and economists can argue all they want over how effective FDR’s various initiatives were in stimulating the economy and creating jobs. But the American people re-elected President Roosevelt not just once, but an unprecedented three times, each time by overwhelming majorities, making him the longest-serving U.S. president.
Americans in hard times want a president who is fighting for them. Whether particular initiatives succeed or fail, get passed or get blocked, get upheld or overturned by the courts, is all less important than having a leader who understands their suffering and who is working every day to make their lives less difficult. They had that in FDR.
Will we see the same understanding and responsiveness in President Obama’s jobs plan to be announced on Thursday?"

http://blog.cagle.com/2011/09/on-jobs-obama-should-channel-fdr/

Obama et l'emploi: trouver le Roosevelt en lui

J'aimerais bien qu'il cherche un peu plus de Theodore Roosevelt, mais cet analyste préfère Franklin D.!

"How did President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first term respond to unprecedented unemployment in the Great Depression? He threw everything he could think of at it, an alphabet soup of spending programs and jobs programs, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, and the National Industrial Recovery Act.

FDR created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Civil Works Administration to distribute stimulus funding to states and cities. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave training and employment to millions of young unemployed Americans. The Works Progress Administration provided employment for additional millions of Americans. Social Security was created to provide relief and old-age pensions. The National Labor Relations Act strengthened the rights of American workers to bargain collectively.

Whenever one of his ideas was blocked by Republicans or overturned by the courts, he would just try something else. The deficit spending forced the Roosevelt administration to both borrow more money, increasing the national debt, and raise taxes.
The passionate opposition to FDR’s jobs program exceeded the enmity directed at President Obama today. But FDR responded in kind."

http://blog.cagle.com/2011/09/on-jobs-obama-should-channel-fdr/

Obama et le Congrès: sortir du carré de sable!

David Gergen propose au Président de présenter SON plan d'action pour créer des emplois.

"At the moment, as the press is reporting, the debate within the Democratic Party -- and within the White House -- is whether the president should present a bold, sweeping, liberal plan for jobs and growth or whether he should present a more modest plan that makes a bow to bipartisanship.
Hard-core Democrats are clamoring for boldness, knowing there would be no chance of passage but hoping that it may rally the base for the 2012 elections. Advocates of a more cautious, bipartisan plan argue that it would be more likely to pass and would also make the president seem like the adult in the room. (Why does the White House always want him to be the adult in the room? Why not the leader?)
The trouble with both of these strategies is that they are unlikely to produce real results for real people. Clearly, the first will hit a stone wall. But there is a high probability the second will, too. There have been times in the past when the second course would have been wise -- and would have shown more leadership -- but the atmosphere has become so rancid that it likely won't work now.
If Obama puts forth a modest plan that he calls bipartisan, it will inevitably be laden with programs Democrats favor -- investment in roads, bridges, schools, etc. -- and maybe one or two tiny items Republicans like. But hard-core conservatives will immediately brand the whole thing as "the Obama plan" and dismiss it out of hand. And for the next several weeks, the president will hit the road, rallying people behind his plan, while the GOP doesn't budge.
Where does that get us in actually creating jobs? It sounds more like a recipe for allowing each party to set up its arguments for the 2012 elections. Just what we need: more posturing, more bickering, and little progress.
There is a third course that does seem to have at least a possibility of working. That is: Let the president come forward with a detailed plan that he favors. Having taken the lead, let him then ask the Republicans to come to the White House in 10 days with their own plan. (Boehner is giving a speech on the economy and jobs in Washington on September 15.) And then let them sit down at Blair House and see if they can agree on a package -- three items from the Democratic column, three from the Republican.
We have a pretty good idea of what the Republicans would want: a cutback or moratorium on regulations, tax cuts for business, and the like. Democrats won't like a lot of it, just like Republicans won't like a lot of Obama's notions.
So what? As FDR saw, what is important is to try something, experiment, give hope. Otherwise, with the economy at what economists call "stall speed" and unable to achieve "escape velocity" (and the president's own Office of Management and Budget today projected unemployment of 9% or higher through 2012), we are looking at a long, cruel time ahead.
The real choice, then, is not between bold vs. modest next Thursday night. The real choice is between same 'ole, same 'ole vs. action. So far, the only good news is that we got a little of the silliness behind us."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/01/gergen.obama.jobs.speech/index.html?hpt=po_r1

Obama the great caver...

Cour suprême: le premier amendement n'est pas pour tout le monde!

Un clin d'oeil amusant à la "manière The Onion"...

Supreme Court Rules First Amendment Does Not Apply To Annoying Man (Season 1: Ep 3 on IFC)

Hillary Clinton: "meilleure" qu'Obama? L'avis de Dick Cheney

Il fait toujours de la politique!

"Hillary Rodham Clinton isn't president, but Dick Cheney says that if she were in the White House rather than Barack Obama, then things might be different today in the country.

Cheney isn't getting into specifics, but he does think that "perhaps she might have been easier for some of us who are critics of the president to work with."

The former vice president tells "Fox News Sunday" that it's his sense that the secretary of state is "one of the more competent members" of the Obama administration and it would be "interesting to speculate" about how she would have performed as president.

Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic nomination to Obama, who went on to beat Republican John McCain in the general election. Obama named Clinton as the country's top diplomat"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/04/dick-cheney-hillary-clinton_n_948446.html

DSK: réactions à son retour

"Smiling and waving silently, he stepped off an Air France flight Sunday at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport a different man from the one who, just four months ago, had been the pollsters’ favorite to beat President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s presidential elections.
Few expect Strauss-Kahn to return to French politics soon, but his supporters have been eagerly awaiting his return after three months of legal drama in the U.S. that they saw as unfairly hostile to him.
“I’m moved, I always believed in his innocence. I wanted very much for this to be over,” Michele Sabban, a fellow Socialist Party member, said on i-Tele television.
Residents of Sarcelles, a working class Paris suburb where Strauss-Kahn is mayor, were largely enthusiastic and empathetic about his return.
“I’m happy for him. It’s the end of an ordeal. Now ... we should leave him alone a little bit,” resident Laurent Giaoui told The Associated Press.
A prominent member of Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party, Xavier Bertrand, shrugged off Strauss-Kahn’s appearance in Paris. “Like many French people, I have lots of others worries in my head,” he said on Europe-1 radio. “I have a hard time imagining” Strauss-Kahn back in politics, he said.
Strauss-Kahn flew in to Paris from New York’s JFK Airport early Sunday and gave a brief wave upon leaving the arrivals hall. Pushing a luggage cart, he did not speak to the large crowd.
His wife, respected former TV personality Anne Sinclair, was at his side, beaming widely. Riot police protected him and the area. The two then drove to one of their homes, on Paris’ tony Place des Vosges. The crush of reporters was so thick that Strauss-Kahn had trouble reaching and opening his front door.
The last time he tried to take an Air France flight out of JFK, Strauss-Kahn was pulled out of first class minutes before takeoff by police. They were investigating the maid’s claim that hours earlier, Strauss-Kahn had forced her to perform oral sex and tried to rape her."

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/au_revoir_dsk_b6MpPyRlO0fRpUHKLPijiM

Peine de mort: même plus un enjeu politique?

Le gouverneur du Texas Rick Perry, candidat républicain pour l'investiture de son parti, est à la tête d'un état qui exécute chaque année un grand nombre de détenu. On pourrait croire que certaines statistiques pousseraient les américains à s'interroger sur la question. Il semble que non... La peine capitale n'est pas un enjeu de la course de Perry.

"But in a measure of how much the electorate’s passions have shifted, Perry’s death penalty record isn’t looking like it will have much of an effect on his White House ambitions — as a positive or a negative. That’s a big change from the days when Bernard Shaw pressed Michael Dukakis at a 1988 debate about whether he’d still oppose the death penalty for someone who’d raped and murdered his wife, or when Bill Clinton took time off the trail in 1992 to attend the execution of a brain-damaged cop killer.

“The public is a lot more ambivalent than they had been, say 15 years ago,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. “They see it as a grayer issue now.”

A recent Gallup Poll showed the majority of Americans — 64 percent — support the death penalty for convicted murderers, but the issue has fallen from the forefront of the electorate’s interests.

That’s made the death penalty a “secondary issue,” Dieter said. “It may be a character issue. It may be an issue that people do have an opinion on, but I don’t think that it’s an issue that they vote on.”

People on both sides of the issue agree.

“The death penalty is not, at least so far, a public policy issue that people are animated about in terms of this election cycle,” said Cully Stimson, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

Most of the upcoming Texas executions are as uncontroversial as capital punishment gets — a man who murdered his wife in front of their 5-year-old daughter and killed a San Antonio police officer, for example. But they’re scheduled to intersect with some of the highest-profile days of the fall campaign for Perry, who’s still introducing himself to the electorate. Just one day after the debate sponsored by CNN and the Tea Party Express on Sept. 12, Texas is set to execute 31-year-old Steven Woods, convicted of robbing and killing a man in Denton County in May 2001. Two men, 47-year-old Cleve Foster and 44-year-old Lawrence Brewer, are set to be executed in the days immediately preceding the Orlando debate hosted by Fox News and the Republican Party of Florida and the state party’s Presidency 5 straw poll Sept. 24.

The issue doesn’t seem as if it will play a significant role during the primary campaign, and if it does, it’s likely to be to Perry’s advantage: Though all the Republican candidates favor the death penalty, none of them have a record on it. Perry’s support for capital punishment will be yet another element of his executive experience to stress and another way of appealing to the base over Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman — neither oversaw executions during his time in office, since Massachusetts has no death penalty and Utah didn’t exercise the one on its books during Huntsman’s tenure."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/62209.html

Obama est Président parce qu'il est noir!

Déclaration pour le moins spectaculaire du républicain Joe Walsh associé au Tea party.

"...the tea party star and also tea party embarrassment -- apologized Thursday after he called President Obama "idiotic" earlier in the week.

After an appearance on MSNBC Friday to talk about the comment, Walsh may be apologizing yet again soon.

Host Martin Bashir asked Walsh to explain his past comments that Obama was only elected to the presidency because "he was black, he was historic."

In response, Walsh doubled-down:

"I think that we elected the president for who he was, a historic figure and made the country feel good to elect him, and we did not vet him, and your profession did not vet him as much as we should."
Walsh is skipping Obama's jobs speech before a joint session of Congress next week, but he assured Bashir that race had nothing to do with that decision.

White, black, brown, yellow, you name it, we have a president right now who is bankrupting this country and destroying job creation in the country, and i think it is purely political for him to call a Joint Session of Congress to announce some jobs plan."

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/tea-party-rep-obama-is-president-because-hes-black-video.php?ref=fpb

French flies: DSK!

Caricature virus informatique: les 25 ans du premier virus