Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Obama blaming Trump for his bad economy?


Drudge’s headline is that President Obama is playing the race card. I’d rather say that he is playing the “blame card” or what he does whenever reality and “hope and change” collide.   
This is the story at the New York Times:
President Obama said in a radio interview airing on Monday that Donald J. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, is exploiting the resentment and anxieties of working­class men to boost his campaign. 
Mr. Obama also argued that some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African­American to hold the White House. Demographic changes and economic stresses, including “flatlining” wages and incomes, have meant that “particularly blue­collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck,” Mr. Obama said in the interview with National Public Radio. 
“You combine those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear — some of it justified, but just misdirected,” the president added. “I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign.”
First of all, I have to laugh because the Democrat Party has been exploiting economic anxiety or stress as long as I can remember.   We’ve been hearing about “blue collar blues” even when there was nothing to sing the blues about. We had 4.8% unemployment when President GW Bush was running for reelection but all you heard from Senator Kerry that things were horrible.  
Second, and more important, the Obama years have not been good for blue collar workers. To be fair, it’s not all Obama’s fault since there are forces in play that have hurt U.S. workers for years.   
At the same time, President Obama is not talking to those blue collar white workers who were an automatic vote for Democrats.    
Instead, he talks about global warming or “climate change”, a couple of foreign topics to a guy fearing job losses or watching his pay check shrink.   
He talks about legalizing illegal immigrants, something that many of these blue collar workers see as a threat to their wages or even jobs. Add gun control to the message and President Obama speaks a language that they don’t understand between New York City and San Francisco.
In other words, he does not seem to be aligned with working people, no matter how many times he claims to be.
Yes, Mr Trump is talking about blue collars issues but it has nothing to do with President Obama’s skin color. It has to do with economic performance. Fair or unfair, it’s his economy!
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"Santa Claus & Los Reyes Magos", memories of Cuban American Christmas.



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Monday, December 21, 2015

Another Secretary of Defense talks?

Secretary Hagel is now the latest to say something negative about President Obama’s managerial style.  
Mr. Hagel now claims that the White House tried to destroy him:
In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine published Friday, he said he remains puzzled why White House officials tried to “destroy” him personally in his last days in office, adding that he was convinced the United States had no viable strategy in Syria and was particularly frustrated with National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who he said would hold meetings and focus on “nit-picky” details.
“I eventually got to the point where I told Susan Rice that I wasn’t going to spend more than two hours in these meetings,” Hagel told Foreign Policy. “Some of them would go four hours.”
Hagel is far from the first former Pentagon chief in Obama’s administration to later criticize the president and his staff. But he just might be the most unlikely. A former Republican senator from Nebraska, he saw eye-to-eye with Obama on many national security issues before he was nominated. Like Obama, he also was a strong critic of President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq — one of the first in the Republican Party.
The two men also still have a friendly relationship, Hagel told Foreign Policy. Nonetheless, he just took several large steps down the same road as Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, who preceded Hagel at the Pentagon and later laid out their grievances in memoirs written after they left office.
Panetta followed last fall with his own book, saying Obama had a “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and too frequently “relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.” In an interview promoting the book, he added that the president had “kind of lost his way” and was partly to blame for the collapse of the Iraqi government last year because he didn’t press harder to keep American troops in the country in 2011, ahead of a complete military withdrawal.
God only knows if the White House tried to destroy Secretary Hagel.  
At the same time, there is a pattern here going back to Secretary Gates and Panetta.
It goes like this:   
1) They Secretary of Defense makes a presentation but the President does not want to hear it; and, 
2)  Secretary gets frustrated and decides to spend time with family.
From Iraq to Afghanistan to ISIS, this is a president who thinks he’s smarter than anyone else. He’s invested in 2008 promises and speeches that have no thing to do with reality. His worldview is rooted on fantasy make believe. It runs counter to men like Panetta, Gates, and Hagel, who are living in the real world.
The net result of his “I’m smarter than everyone approach” is pulling out of Iraq prematurely, drawing lines in Syria, closing Gitmo and a perception that we are weak. It’s a foreign policy that even Secretary Clinton will soon be running away from.
Wonder how long before Secretary Carter decides that he needs to spend more time with his family too?
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The week in review with Bill Katz of Urgent Agenda




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Sunday, December 20, 2015

A chat with Rick Johnson, author



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A look at the GOP debate with Barry Casselman



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The big stories of Latin America with Fausta Rodriguez-Wertz



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Saturday, December 19, 2015

I guess that Democrats want you to watch the Cowboys vs Jets tonight

The Democrat National Committee wants you to watch the NFL on Saturday night, pre-conference NCAA basketball games, the NHL, the NBA, or even baseball documentaries on the MLB network.   
Anything but Hillary’s debate is the word, as the NY Post editorial tells us: 
Over on the Republican side, they’ve delivered the three largest audiences ever for prez-primary debates. And seven more Republican debates are ahead; the Democrats have just three after Saturday.
The saddest thing about this “shield Hillary” approach is that it robs Democrats of a fair primary fight. Yes, it’s hard to see how socialist dinosaur Bernie Sanders or lightweight prettyboy Martin O’Malley is going to beat her — but they could at least push her to stand up for the party’s principles.
(Assuming it still has some.)
Worst of all is the message this sends about the frontrunner: Namely, that the last thing her supporters want is for the American public to hear what she has to say.
Yes, it is sad. It is very sad for the country, even those of us on the other side who would like to see what the Democrats have to offer.  
Yet, this is how little the Democrats think of their front-runner. They want you to vote for her but not hear anything that she has to say, from national security to economic development.
This is not a coronation but rather an outrage!
Maybe Democrats will take this and turn their cheeks. Maybe they are so desperate to keep funding Planned Parenthood or select the next Supreme Court vacancy that they are willing to put up with a candidate on mute mode.
Again, the Democrats owe their supporters, and the country, more than an ethically challenged candidate who’s afraid of answering questions!
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Venezuela, Argentina, US-Cuba, Mexico and other stories of 2015



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Friday, December 18, 2015

Argentina: Will new President Macri go after his predecessor?



Argentina just devalued its currency, one of President Mauricio Macri’s first economic moves. Devaluations are often necessary but they do shock the population with higher prices or inflation. I remember living through a devaluation in Mexico in 1982. They have a huge impact on locals, specially the ones who work or live in a dollar economy.
There is also talk in Argentina of opening up investigations against former President Fernandez:
A federal prosecutor is trying to revive a criminal complaint filed by Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who died in mysterious circumstances earlier this year.
Mr. Nisman had accused Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, then the president, of trying to shield former Iranian officials he suspected of planning a 1994 bombing of a Jewish center here in exchange for trade benefits.
It’s a very tough call for President Macri.   
On one hand, it’s always poisonous to investigate your predecessor. Don’t get me wrong. President Fernandez’ administration was corrupt and there are many locals looking for some justice. Again, the political reality is that it emboldens the opposition and makes governing impossible.
On the other hand, someone has to investigate Mr. Nisman’s mysterious assassination and the information about shielding Iranian officials.  How can you have a serious political system when prosecutors are assassinated the day before they are going to make their case to Congress?
My recommendation is that President Macri goes forward with the Nisman investigation, from the standpoint of figuring out who killed him or protected the killers. He can go down this path and stay within the track of a crime investigation.
It won’t be easy, from the economy to his corrupt socialist predecessor, as we wrote a couple of weeks ago.
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