Headlines from the President's Middle East Policy Speech

President Barack Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, Friday, May 20, 2011.


I always find it interesting to scan headlines after a major policy speech.  The startlingly reveal the biases of the sources, or at least the audiences they seek to attract.  Particularly interesting today are those concerning the meeting between President Obama met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.  I haven’t read all these articles, but here are the headlines with the sources and the links to the articles.  What might you speculate about the articles, the papers or their target audiences?
Netanyahu Tells Obama Israel Can’t Return to ‘Indefensible’ 1967 Borders
Bloomberg – Jonathan Ferziger
Netanyahu and Obama long way apart over Middle East peace plans
The Guardian
President Obama supports a two-state solution based on Israel’s 1967 borders …
Wall Street Journal
Bibi and Barack Meet: So Much for the Fireworks
TIME (blog) – Massimo Calabresi
Continue reading

Dear Birthers…

I doubt any documentation would satisfy them.

Dear “birthers”,
Mercifully, you are less present in the news these days, but every once in a while some item passes before my eyes and penetrates my psyche to annoy me again. The fact that Hawaii is still so overwhelmed with requests for the President’s already published birth certificate that the legislature has passed a law authorizing “any Hawai’i department to ignore repeated requests for information from the same person if the department already has responded within a year,” is one example. (HonoluluAdvertiser.com)
Ordinarily I would applaud your sense of civic involvement. If a citizen suspects something is afoul, it’s noble to root it out. But there’s also a time to give up and accept that all the evidence should not only lay your suspicions to rest, but also tuck them in and sing a lullaby. In this case that time was about 15 months ago immediately after the President took the Oath of Office. But you can’t give up and I’m now starting to take your wacko claims personally, an implicit insult to my intelligence.
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Tell the Senate to Pass Health Care Reform through Reconciliation

Health Care Reform Reality Check from the White House SiteThere is a letter circulating in the Senate calling on Majority Leader Harry Reid to pass the public health insurance option through “reconciliation,” which only needs a simple majority in the Senate, rather than the 60 vote “Super Majority.” It is maddening that the Democrats have 59% of the seats in the Senate and yet they can’t seem to control the agenda.
Go to this page to see if your Senator has signed and, if not, to sign the petition to ask them to to so. There is also a link to help you call you member of Congress. Continue reading

Biden Outlines Educational Funding

At a meeting of the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families at Syracuse University yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden outlined some of the reforms proposed by the administration to make higher education more accessible, stating that $100 billion of the funding in the economic recovery bill will go toward improving education and making college more accessible and affordable.  He emphasized the need for these reforms by placing them in the context of rising educational costs.

He said the cost of a college education has risen 10 times as fast as the median income for middle-class families.
The average annual cost of a college education is $34,000 at a private school and $14,000 at a public school, he said.
Last year, college students borrowed $80 billion, a 16 percent increase over the year before.
“This is not a minor issue. This is a big deal,” Biden said.
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via Biden says education funding is ‘big deal’ – RocNow.com.

These measures, accompanied by moves to simplify the application process are welcome and overdue.  I hope the administration is successful in getting them passed.

A Historic Moment for Health Care Reform

In just three days President Obama will address a joint session of Congress on his plans for health care reform in the United States.
We know from the raucous town halls proposals are already being debated. But, we’ve had nothing really concrete, so supposition has run rampant. This has to change.
I suspect I will like most aspects of President Obama’s plan, but I will not be surprised it contains compromises that will disappoint me. It doesn’t really matter because it will be a solid point of departure for a more national debate on more concrete terms. Hopefully it will provide a chance to press the restart button.
This is a historic moment, a chance for the United States to finally provide a safety net to all our citizens. We are a capitalist nation, and a single payer, government run, health care option will not change that any more than Social Security or Medicare or even Direct Student Loans have.
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But don’t take my work for any of this. Watch the speech. Listen to the opposition. Try and understand their arguments. Most importantly, however, check the facts. Because folks are being reckless with the facts.
Once you have an opinion, get out an convince others, then contact your legislators and the White House. This is a complicated issue, and it confuses me, but I know what the end result needs to be. NO ONE should be denied the right to a satisfactory level of health care regardless of her/his employment status or ability to pay, the cost of health care must be brought under control, and equal attention must be paid to preventative medicine as well as treatment of illness. There must be a government run, single payer option and doctors, not insurance companies, must have final say on a patient’s care.
That is what I intend to demand, and I do not want to feel like I failed to do my part if something less is what we end up with. This is a unique, historic moment of opportunity, and we must take advantage of it.

What Beer Will Be Served at the White House Tomorrow

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