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POPS Helen's Got Questions! "Is he going to fight for it or not?" Thomas snapped. "We're going to work to get choice and competition into health-care reform" was Gibbs's vague response. Thomas took that as a no. "You're not going to get it," she advised. "Then why do you keep asking me?" Gibbs inquired. "Because I want your conscience to bother you," Thomas replied. The room erupted; Gibbs reddened. Actually, conscience isn't the problem for Gibbs and his boss; it's spine. Thomas's question got at an Obama administration trait that is puzzling opponents and demoralizing supporters: Why isn't the president more decisive and forceful? On many of the most pressing issues -- the public option in health reform, troop levels in Afghanistan, sanctions against Iran -- the administration has hewed to hemming and hawing. On Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House on Thursday, environmental activists were demanding to know why Obama wouldn't, as they put it,
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POPSWhy Obama’s Town-Hall Appearances Won’t Help
I Don't Want People To Thinking I Just Have A Bunch Of Plants In Here First, anyone expecting a real town-hall forum to occur with Obama in attendance is deluding themselves. Even the press " even Helen Thomas " criticized Obama the last time he held a “town-hall meeting” on health care. Each of these three meetings will carefully screen attendees and get the questions in advance, to minimize embarrassment to Obama. Beyond that, town-hall meetings won’t solve the problem of national rejection of ObamaCare. People want insurance reform, but they don’t want a government takeover of the system. The big problem is the legislation itself. If Obama wants to fix that, then he needs a meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, not the people of Bozeman and Portsmouth. The legislators who have to hold town-hall meetings without Obama won’t get to use the Secret Service to screen attendees. They need to connect to their constituents in order to get re-elected in 2010
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POPS"Lover's Spat" a'la White House Press Corps Helen Thomas: Not Even Nixon Tried to Control the Media Like Obama http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=50445 Helen Thomas, the veteran White House reporter who thinks there aren't enough liberals in the press, reached her breaking point yesterday with the Obama White House's attempts to manage the news. She publicly scolded Obama's team for handpicking the questions at a faux virtual town-hall event on health care and then insulted President Obama by saying he is worse than Richard Nixon. First the video from the daily White House press briefing, where Chip Reid of CBS joined Thomas in grilling press secretary Robert Gibbs about the town hall http://www.aim.org/on-target-blog/the-press-corps-gets-feisty/
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POPSObama Running Scared
Some 47 million Americans are uninsured -- many because some employers have dropped coverage in the economic downturn. Others lack insurance because pre-existing illnesses deny them access to private insurance. There also are millions with no way to pay for soaring health insurance payments because they have lost their jobs. Nearly all Republicans and some moderate Democrats oppose any public plan option. These are the same lawmakers who receive many government-provided perks including health insurance. In his remarks to the AMA, Obama warned against "scare tactics" and "fear mongering" by opponents of the public plan option, which the President said should be available to those who have no health insurance. Obama rejected the "illegitimate concern that's being put forward by those who are claiming that a public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system." Obama should tear a page out of LBJ's vote-getting manual and shame the heartless opponents. The hea
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POPSTrue Grit November 27, 1931: Concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein impresses a Vienna audience with his performance of Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. The pianist refused to give up his career after losing his right arm in World War I. 1981: John Kennedy Toole is posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Confederacy of Dunces. His gritty mom, Thelma Ducoing Toole, had enlisted the initially skeptical Walker Percy to help get the book published after Toole’s suicide. 1993: Andrew Wiles announces that after many years of work he has solved the seemingly unsolvable Fermat’s Last Theorem. Mathematicians discover a small error, but Wiles resolves it within another year. October 2008: After a decade spent lobbying, high school dropout Alvin Sykes sees the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act " named for the black teenager brutally murdered in 1955 for reportedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi " signed into law, largely because of his relentless efforts.
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POPSParody Of Obama's White House Correspondents' Dinner Speech But hey, who am I to talk about family problems? I'd read you the list of all my half-brothers, but it's longer than the stimulus bill. You guys heard about my half-brother Samson, right? Yeah, when he was heading over here for my inauguration, he ran into a... well, a bit of a problem in England. Got kicked out. Turns out they'd already met their weekly quota on child molesters. Oops! And don't even get me started on my Auntie Zeituni. I'm the first president to deal with so much hassle from an alien since Independence Day. Speaking of the news, interesting item today: A Saudi judge has said it's okay to slap your wife if she spends too much. And you still wanna know why I bow to them? Boy oh boy, I'm in for it now. Should I look? I'm gonna look. Oof. Yeah, I know. I know. You gotta believe I love you, baby, but next time could you maybe wear the four-hundred-dollar shoes to the homeless shelter?
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POPSU.S. Foreign Aid to Israel Illegal due to Israel's WMD The official report of Israel's nuclear weaponry makes it illegal for the U.S. to provide foreign aid to Israel! Note too that Obama recently "ducked" the question from the most veteran reporter in Washington, Helen Thomas (a real journalist). This demonstrates the real fear of the Israeli Lobby by Obama too. Why not uphold the law? Why the deliberate blindness toward Israel? Here is a push-point to challenge and change U.S. foreign policy and cut spending. By law, the U.S. would have to cease providing billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel if it determined the country had a nuclear weapons program. That's because the so-called Symington Amendment, passed in 1976, bars assistance to countries developing technology for nuclear weapons proliferation.
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POPSOh Dear, a Liberal at Obama's First Presser? Politico's Michael Calderone exhibits symptoms of amnesia when he asks, "What if Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh were up front at Bush's press conferences in the East Room?" They may not have been, but only because the Bush admin. hired a hooker to lob softball questions to the president. Not that right wing radio hosts didn't get their own presidential moments -- just not at press conferences. They got their's in private face-to-face meetings that Calderone seems to have completely forgotten about. On The Flintstones , when Fred had amnesia, a second knock on the head brought him out of it. Someone give Mike a good whack, maybe that'll work.
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POPSGroundhog Day Update - The Real Story Back in Pennsylvania, Phil refused all questions from the media but did attempt to chew off Keith Olbermann's face, to the delight of the crowd. "Sure and that's what happened to Helen Thomas as well" claimed an anonymous citizen.
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POPSDems Launch Petition Against Rush So...is this the Liberals first shot fired to get the "Fairness Doctrine" going again? First Obama, now the Dem. Congressional Campaign Comm. Last week, Helen Thomas told everyone that it was her "job" to "tell the truth"; but no one listens to her. Rush "tells the truth" and he has the new President and online petitions telling people not to listen to him and express their outrage. Hello...we have a First Amendment. Rush is a private citizen. People can turn him off if they don't like him; at least that's what I've been told to do with people whose opinions I disagree with. Is this the beginning of "State" controlled airways? Someone has suggested that "Descent is the new racism".
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POPSFreedom House: Wie frei sind die USA wirklich? Beim Kampf für Demokratie und Menschenrechte vergessen die USA ihre Probleme im eigenen Land. Das meint die Demokratieorganisation Freedom House. Die Häftlingsrate ist zehnmal so hoch wie in Westeuropa und mehr als 2000 Kinder sitzen lebenslänglich im Gefängnis. Zu den Demokratiedefiziten gehört nach Ansicht von Freedom House auch die Todesstrafe, die in den meisten anderen Demokratien längst abgeschafft ist. In den Vereinigten Staaten sitzen 3000 Menschen in der Todeszelle. Aber trotz aller Defizite ist Freedom House überzeugt, dass die Vereinigten Staaten ein freies Land mit starken Selbstkorrekturmechanismen bleiben. Schließlich würden die meisten Skandale irgendwann von der Presse aufgedeckt, Fehlentscheidungen der Regierung von Gerichten oder vom Kongress korrigiert. "Freiheit ist in Amerika ein seit über 200 Jahren andauernder Prozess", sagt Stuart Eizenstat.
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POPSYou Go Girl! Helen Thomas appears to be the only member of the media who believes we should all be aware of what is going on behind our backs. In fact, what's going on right in front of our faces while Bush and his scourging cabal thumb their noses at us. Torture has been mentioned briefly by anchors and news sources but then it fades away... The fact that we have used this hellish force on fellow human beings, is something that should never fade. I can't do much, for that matter almost nothing but whenever I can call attention to this dreadful act, I will! I'll spread the word or feelings from the rooftops (or maybe just youtube) about how abominable torture is. But what is even more frightening than torture is that we Americans, have elected leaders who not only use this immoral practice but hold it up as a useful tool touting "the end justifies the means". I think it's more like an end to society and the beginning of anarchy. Also watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISuY0o1Hxno
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