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Almost two-thirds of Israelis thought that statement was untrue, and 15 percent gave no answer. President Obama has just a 33 percent favorable rating in Israel, as opposed to a 50 percent disapproval rating. Even those who favor Obama are split evenly on whether or not he will prevent Iran from going nuclear.
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Nat Hentoff does not think much of President Obama.
And now, the famous journalist says it is time to begin looking into impeachment.
Hentoff sees the biggest problem as Obama’s penchant to rule by executive order when he can’t convince Congress to do things his way.
The issue jumped back into the headlines last week when, just before his first Cabinet meeting of 2014, Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone … and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions.”
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The new USA Today/Pew Research poll found Obama’s Friday speech failed to make a mark with the public. Nearly half of those surveyed said they heard nothing about the speech, with 41 percent saying they had heard a little about Obama’s reforms and 8 percent saying they heard a lot.
Seventy-three percent who knew of Obama’s proposals said his NSA changes won’t do anything to increase privacy protections, with 21 percent saying the reforms will work.
The poll found that by a 70-to-26 percent split, Americans said they should not have to give up their privacy to prevent terrorism.
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The president, as he often does when facing a nettlesome problem, used his executive powers to implement changes. In his address on Friday, Obama said he’s approved a “new presidential directive for our signals intelligence activities both at home and abroad.”
The directive, Obama said, would strengthen oversight of intelligence and ensure trade and investment relationships are taken into account when spying. The president also went on to order a transition away from the bulk data collection program in its current form — and restrict the ability of analysts to access that database during the transition.
Some House Democrats said executive actions alone were not enough.
“It is now time for Congress to take the next step by enacting legislation to appropriately limit these programs,” Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., said in a statement, adding that Congress must “trust but codify” when it comes to the president’s promises.
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So who is responsible for this state of affairs? Consider the trillion and a half dollars handed over to the banks and other financial institutions shortly after Obama took office. This money was supposed to be extended as credit to businesses — including small businesses — in a bid to supercharge the economy according to the old Keynesian formula.
Instead it went directly into the markets, where it triggered the growth of the current market bubble, generating plenty in the way of paper profits, bonuses, and so forth along the way.
Also consider the $65 billion a month handed to the banks in the form of “quantitative easing.” This was supposedly the brainstorm of Ben Bernanke. But Bernanke is nobody’s idea of an independent agent. Any notion that he was acting outside of a framework created by Obama is ludicrous. This money did more of the same — slipping essentially unearned income into already well-upholstered pockets, and all at the bidding of none other than Barack Obama.
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At the same time, the report disputes continued U.S. insistence that the Syrian government was at fault, a position that almost prompted the United States to launch military attacks on Syrian chemical depots.
The chemical attack, in which some estimates of deaths from the attack approached 1,800 people, occurred in the Ghouta area then under Syrian opposition control in the midst of the Syrian civil war.
The report concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered the sarin was too short to have been fired from Syrian government locations, even though the Obama administration, based on what it says was technical intelligence, said – and still insists – the gas attack was from the government forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The report said a large canister to hold the chemicals was placed on top of the rocket, limiting the capability of the rocket.
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“African American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties,” Obama told the New Yorker’s top editor during a series of interviews published on Friday.
The legalization efforts in Washington state and Colorado should be accepted and measured, Obama said.
“It’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished,” he said.
In 2012 state ballots, Colorado and Washington voters made marijuana consumption legal.
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“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol,” the president said an interview with “The New Yorker” magazine.
Smoking marijuana is “not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy,” Obama said.
Obama’s administration has given states permission to experiment with marijuana regulation, and laws recently passed in Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana recently went into effect. The president said it was important for the legalization of marijuana to go forward in those states to avoid a situation in which only a few are punished while a large portion of people have broken the law at one time or another.
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Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer had a rare moment of praise for President Barack Obama’s speech on NSA surveillance — even if it was a bit backhanded. “It was 90 percent smoke and mirrors and very little substantive change, which is what we need,” he said Friday, calling it “a terrific speech.”
Krauthammer spoke to Fox News’ Bret Baier on Friday about the president’s speech on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, where he promised largely superficial changes to the contentious mass collection of Americans’ metadata. Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul said “it doesn’t sound to me like he’s really going to change,” while the American Civil Liberties Union said “the president should end — not mend — the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding American’s data.
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“A new congressional study details the laxity in security in Benghazi prior to the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. There was plenty of blame to go around…
Grade: D+
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