History > 2013 > USA > Politics > White House / President (II)

President Obama Speaks on Trayvon Martin

President Obama makes a statement about Trayvon Martin

and the verdict of the court trial that followed the Florida teenager's death

Published on Jul 19, 2013

YouTube > White House

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHBdZWbncXI&feature=c4-overview&list=UUYxRlFDqcWM4y7FfpiAN3KQ

Profiling Obama

July 28, 2013
The New York Times
By BILL KELLER

FOR much of his public life, Barack Obama has been navigating between people who think he is too black and people who think he is not black enough.

The former group speaks mostly in dog-whistle innuendo and focuses on proxy issues to emphasize Obama’s ostensible otherness: his birth certificate, his supposed adherence to “black liberation theology” (presumably before he converted to Islam), his “Kenyan, anticolonial” worldview. Jonathan Alter’s recent book on Obama’s presidency sums up these notions as symptoms of “Obama Derangement Syndrome” — a disorder whose subtext is more often than not: he’s too black.

On the other side are African-Americans and liberals who are disappointed that Obama has not made it his special mission to call out the racism that still festers in American society and rectify the racial imbalance in our economy, in our schools, in our justice system.

“It has, at times, been painful to watch this particular president’s calibrated, cautious and sometimes callous treatment of his most loyal constituency,” the radio and TV host Tavis Smiley told The Times’s Jodi Kantor last year. That was one of the gentler rebukes from the not-black-enough camp.

Obama believes he best serves the country, and ultimately the interests of black Americans, by being the president of America, not the president of black America. Even when he speaks eloquently on the subject, as he did in his 2008 speech in Philadelphia, he presents himself as a bridge between white and black rather than the civil rights leader-in-chief. And even when his administration has undertaken reforms that address racial injustice — reinvigorating the moribund civil rights division of the Justice Department, for example — he does not call a news conference and make a big deal of it. This is certainly calibrated and cautious. But callous?

Obama’s remarks on the death of Trayvon Martin — “could have been me 35 years ago” — reanimated the old divide. From the he’s-too-black sideline the president was predictably accused of indulging in “racial victimology” and “race baiting.” On the other side, some of those who had yearned for Obama to be more outspoken seized on his riff as a turning point; the president, a Detroit radio host exulted, “showed his brother card.” Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who has known Obama for 25 years, told NPR he felt like “turning cartwheels” when he heard the remarks, and he declared he would now have to rethink a book-in-the-works, in which he had planned to criticize the president’s timidity on race.

“It seems to me he threw caution to the wind,” Ogletree told me. “It opens up a whole new chapter of Barack Obama.”

Does it? I, too, found Obama’s words moving in their emotional warmth and empathy. But if you go back and read them, now that the heat of the moment has cooled, you will see they are carefully measured and completely consistent with what he has said in his writing and speaking since he entered public life. The warrior against racism that critics on the right deplore and critics on the left demand is nowhere to be found. His comments on the pain and humiliation of racial profiling, which got the most attention, reprise a theme that goes back at least to his days as a state senator. His respectful treatment of the court that acquitted Martin’s killer and his nod to the pathologies of the black underclass got less notice.

“He basically says, try to understand this issue from the perspective of people different from yourself,” said Thomas Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania historian who has written a book-length study of Obama and race. “And he says it to black folks and white folks.” But somehow listeners on both sides hear what they expect to hear, Sugrue said, on one side “a prophetic Martin Luther King Jr.,” on the other side “a pent-up Black Panther waiting to explode.”

There’s a name for that: racial profiling. People may no longer give Obama suspicious glares in department stores or clutch their purses when he enters an elevator, but they have typecast him according to their own fears and expectations of a black man in the White House. They are still profiling Barack Obama.

Those who hope his Trayvon talk signaled a new presidential activism on race will be watching two litmus tests. The first is whether Obama’s Justice Department will file a civil rights suit against George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch enthusiast who shot Martin dead. The N.A.A.C.P. says more than a million people have signed petitions calling for Justice to prosecute Zimmerman for a hate crime. The second is whether the president will offer a cabinet post to Ray Kelly, the New York police commissioner who has presided over the aggressive stop-and-frisk policing of mostly black and Latino men. Obama’s public praise of Kelly as a possible secretary of homeland security prompted anger and amazement, some of it on this page. Was the president indifferent to Kelly’s role as, in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words, “the proprietor of the largest local racial profiling operation in the country,” or simply inattentive?

My guess is that the president will navigate those straits as he always has when race looms, carefully and without fanfare. If he is true to form, he will quietly pass over Kelly, because it’s now clear the appointment would become a major distraction from his agenda, because racial profiling is a lifelong personal sore spot for Obama, and because he has other, less polarizing options. He will leave George Zimmerman’s fate to Attorney General Eric Holder, who seems likely to conclude that a hate-crimes case would not stick and would be seen as putting politics over law. (The federal statute says it’s not enough to prove Zimmerman pursued Martin because of his race; the government would have to prove that racial prejudice was his motive for killing the teenager.) In his remarks on the case, Obama seemed to hint that the feds would not step in where the state has already ruled.

So if Obama’s Trayvon moment was not the debut of a new, more activist president, was it at least the beginning of a national conversation about race? If so, I doubt it will be a conversation led by the president. When race came up in an interview published in Sunday’s Times, he promptly segued into a discussion of economic strains on the social fabric.

And that’s O.K. President Obama has an economy to heal, a foreign policy to run, a daunting agenda blockaded by an intransigent opposition. Randall Kennedy, another Harvard law professor who has studied Obama and criticized him for a lack of audacity, says frustration should be tempered by realism. “My view of Obama is as a Jackie Robinson figure,” Kennedy told me. “Jackie Robinson breaks the color barrier and encounters all sorts of denigration, people spitting on him, and because he was a pioneer he had to be above it all. ... People expect Obama now to all of a sudden jump into this totally messy issue of race and the administration of criminal justice? It’s completely implausible. To do it would require a major investment of political capital.”

And, come to think of it, why is that his special responsibility anyway?

“There’s sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk’s burden,” said Benjamin Jealous, president of the N.A.A.C.P., when I asked him about Obama’s obligation. “Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.”

Wouldn’t you like to hear John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or Chris Christie or Rick Perry own up as candidly as the president has to the corrosive vestiges of racism in our society? Now that might be an occasion to turn cartwheels.

Profiling Obama, NYT, 28.7.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/
opinion/keller-profiling-obama.html

White House Muted in Response

to New Mass Killing

of Egyptian Protesters

July 28, 2013
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s response was once again muted on Sunday after the second mass killing of Egyptian demonstrators in three weeks, as Western diplomats worked behind the scenes to calm the tensions, and lawmakers expressed scant support for cutting off American aid to Egypt.

One leading Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who heads the Intelligence Committee, said Congress should consider suspending $1.5 billion in annual American aid to Egypt in response to the Egyptian security services’ attack on Saturday that killed at least 72 people and wounded hundreds more. “We have to relook at granting aid,” Ms. Feinstein said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “The ball is in Egypt’s court.”

But other Democratic and Republican lawmakers, while condemning the second mass killing of demonstrators following the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, stopped short of calling for cutting aid to Egypt.

Spokeswomen for the State Department and the White House’s National Security Council declined to comment on Sunday. In a statement on Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry called the violence “a pivotal moment for Egypt” and urged its leaders “to help their country take a step back from the brink.”

Mr. Kerry, who talked by telephone with Egypt’s interim vice president and foreign minister on Saturday, added, “In this extremely volatile environment, Egyptian authorities have a moral and legal obligation to respect the right of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.”

Also on Saturday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expressed deep concern over the violence in Egypt and urged restraint in a phone call with the Egyptian army chief, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, a Pentagon spokesman said in a statement.

President Obama, in his first punitive response to Mr. Morsi’s ouster, last week ordered a halt to the delivery of four F-16 fighter planes to the Egyptian Air Force. But the White House has emphasized that the decision did not have implications for the $1.5 billion that Ms. Feinstein mentioned, which it has said it does not want to cut off for now.

The administration is reviewing that aid but has carefully avoided referring to Mr. Morsi’s ouster as a coup d’état, which could force its suspension on legal grounds.

“This is a real point of definition of what kind of Egypt is going to come out of this,” Senator Feinstein said Sunday, adding that she was putting Egypt’s new civilian leadership and Army generals — the real power in the country — on notice.

Diplomats were trying on Sunday to defuse the political crisis in Egypt, as supporters and opponents of Mr. Morsi continued to clash. Violence broke out at the funerals of Mr. Morsi supporters who were killed by Egyptian security forces on Saturday, leading to at least one death on Sunday.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, arrived in Cairo in what appeared to be an attempt to mediate the standoff between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organization that backs Mr. Morsi and demands his reinstatement.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Ashton said she would be meeting with General Sisi, with members of the Brotherhood, with civilian leaders in the interim government, and with youth activists. Ms. Ashton has also asked to see Mr. Morsi, who has been detained by the military since he was deposed July 3. The army declined a similar request by Ms. Ashton two weeks ago.

The spokeswoman did not say whether Ms. Ashton was carrying a specific proposal to end the impasse.

A Brotherhood spokesman, Gehad el-Haddad, said that he knew of no proposal, but that the group was open “to every patriotic initiative.”

The United Nations human rights chief, Navi Pillay, sharply condemned the bloodshed in Egypt on Sunday, warning that political violence was leading the country to a disaster.

Egypt’s leaders continued to blame the protesters for the bloodshed on Saturday, even as videos circulated on the Internet that clearly showed police officers and plainclothes gunmen firing at the rally. Prosecutors said a preliminary investigation found the protesters had tried to block a central bridge, and clashed with police officers who tried to stop them, according to state media.

The prosecutors said Sunday that the clashes had led to fatalities on both sides and that 73 pro-Morsi protesters had been arrested and faced charges including murder. That seemed to contradict statements by the interior minister, who said Saturday that police officers had been injured, but did not mention any fatalities. Other American lawmakers speaking on the political talk shows on Sunday also condemned the violence in Cairo.

“We’ve had a positive relationship between the United States and the Egyptian military,” Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said on the ABC program “This Week.” “But we should make it clear in Egypt, as we made it clear in Libya and in Syria, that firing on your own people is unacceptable by any government.”

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee, echoed the comments of other lawmakers in recent days of the need for the United States to walk a fine line with its once-staunch ally in the Middle East.

“We’ve got to be careful that we don’t inject ourselves too much into the situation because it’ll probably make it worse,” Mr. Chambliss said on “This Week.” “But we also need to send a very clear and very strong message to the Egyptian military that we’re not going to tolerate, from a friendly-nation relationship standpoint, the kind of violence that we saw over the weekend.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo.

    White House Muted in Response to New Mass Killing of Egyptian Protesters,
    NYT, 28.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/us/politics/
    white-house-response-muted-to-new-mass-killing-of-egyptian-protesters.html 

Obama Says Income Gap

Is Fraying U.S. Social Fabric

July 27, 2013
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

GALESBURG, Ill. — In a week when he tried to focus attention on the struggles of the middle class, President Obama said in an interview that he was worried that years of widening income inequality and the lingering effects of the financial crisis had frayed the country’s social fabric and undermined Americans’ belief in opportunity.

Upward mobility, Mr. Obama said in a 40-minute interview with The New York Times, “was part and parcel of who we were as Americans.”

“And that’s what’s been eroding over the last 20, 30 years, well before the financial crisis,” he added.

“If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” he said. “That’s not a future that we should accept.”

A few days after the acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case prompted him to speak about being a black man in America, Mr. Obama said the country’s struggle over race would not be eased until the political process in Washington began addressing the fear of many people that financial stability is unattainable.

“Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot,” Mr. Obama said. “If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested. Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction.”

Mr. Obama, who this fall will choose a new chairman of the Federal Reserve to share economic stewardship, expressed confidence that the trends could be reversed with the right policies.

The economy is “far stronger” than four years ago, he said, yet many people who write to him still do not feel secure about their future, even as their current situation recovers.

“That’s what people sense,” he said. “That’s why people are anxious. That’s why people are frustrated.”

During much of the interview, Mr. Obama was philosophical about historical and economic forces that he said were tearing at communities across the country. He noted at one point that he has in the Oval Office a framed copy of the original program from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 50 years ago, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

He uses it, he said, to remind people “that was a march for jobs and justice; that there was a massive economic component to that. When you think about the coalition that brought about civil rights, it wasn’t just folks who believed in racial equality. It was people who believed in working folks having a fair shot.”

For decades after, Mr. Obama said, in places like Galesburg people “who wanted to find a job — they could go get a job.”

“They could go get it at the Maytag plant,” he said. “They could go get it with the railroad. It might be hard work, it might be tough work, but they could buy a house with it.”

Without a shift in Washington to encourage growth over “damaging” austerity, he added, not only would the middle class shrink, but in turn, contentious issues like trade, climate change and immigration could become harder to address.

Striking a feisty note at times, he vowed not to be cowed by his Republican adversaries in Congress and said he was willing to stretch the limits of his powers to change the direction of the debate in Washington.

“I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security,” Mr. Obama said. But he added, “I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.”

Addressing for the first time one of his most anticipated decisions, Mr. Obama said he had narrowed his choice to succeed Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve to “some extraordinary candidates.” With current fiscal policy measurably slowing the recovery, many in business and finance have looked to the Fed to continue its expansionary monetary policies to offset the drag.

Mr. Obama said he wanted someone who would not just work abstractly to keep inflation in check and ensure stability in the markets. “The idea is to promote those things in service of the lives of ordinary Americans getting better,” he said. “I want a Fed chairman that can step back and look at that objectively and say, Let’s make sure that we’re growing the economy.”

The leading Fed candidates are believed to be Lawrence H. Summers, Mr. Obama’s former White House economic adviser and President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, and Janet Yellen, the current Fed vice chairwoman and another former Clinton official. The president said he would announce his choice “over the next several months.”

More clearly than he did in three speeches on the economy last week — the next is scheduled for Tuesday in Chattanooga, Tenn. — Mr. Obama in the interview called for an end to the emphasis on budget austerity that Republicans ushered in when they captured control of the House in November 2010.

The priority, he said, should be spending for infrastructure, education, clean energy, science, research and other domestic initiatives of the sort he twice campaigned on.

“I want to make sure that all of us in Washington are investing as much time, as much energy, as much debate on how we grow the economy and grow the middle class as we’ve spent over the last two to three years arguing about how we reduce the deficits,” Mr. Obama said. He called for a shift “away from what I think has been a damaging framework in Washington.”

The president did not say what his legislative strategy would be. Even as he spoke, House Republicans were pushing measures in the opposite direction: to continue into the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 the indiscriminate across-the-board spending reductions — known as sequestration — that Mr. Obama opposes, and to cut his priorities deeper still.

Republicans are also threatening to block an increase in the government’s borrowing limit — an action that must be taken by perhaps November to avoid financial crisis — unless Congress withholds money for his health care law.

Mr. Obama all but dared Republicans to challenge his executive actions, including his decision three weeks ago to delay until 2015 the health care law’s mandate that large employers provide insurance or pay fines. Republicans and some legal scholars questioned whether he had the legal authority to unilaterally change the law.

The delay in the employer mandate, which mostly affects large businesses that already insure workers but are worried about federal reporting requirements, was “the kind of routine modifications or tweaks to a large program that’s starting off that in normal times in a normal political atmosphere would draw a yawn from everybody,” Mr. Obama said.

“If Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case,” he said. “But there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency.”

The president’s latest campaign for his agenda began as national polls last week showed a dip in his public support. The declines were even greater for Congress and Republicans in particular, in their already record-low ratings.

Mr. Obama said he would push ahead with a series of speeches that lay out his agenda ahead of the fights this fall with Congress. “If once a week I’m not talking about jobs, the economy, and the middle class,” he said, “then all matter of distraction fills the void.”

    Obama Says Income Gap Is Fraying U.S. Social Fabric, NYT, 27.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/us/politics/
    obama-says-income-gap-is-fraying-us-social-fabric.html

Barack and Trayvon

July 19, 2013
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

On Friday President Obama picked at America’s racial wound, and it bled a bit.

Despite persistent attempts by some to divest the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy of its racial resonance, the president refused to allow it.

During a press briefing, Mr. Obama spoke of the case, soberly and deliberately, in an achingly personal tone, saying: “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

With that statement, an exalted black man found kinship with a buried black boy, the two inextricably linked by inescapable biases, one expressing the pains and peril of living behind the veil of his brown skin while the other no longer could.

With his statements, the president dispensed with the pedantic and made the tragedy personal.

He spoke of his own experiences with subtle biases, hinting at the psychological violence it does to the spirit — being followed around in stores when shopping, hearing the locking of car doors when you approach, noticing the clutching of purses as you enter an elevator.

It is in these subtleties that black folks are forever forced to box with shadows, forever forced to recognize their otherness and their inability to simply blend.

In “The Souls of Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois described this phenomenon thusly:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Surely, much has changed in America since Du Bois wrote those lines more than a century ago — namely, bias tends to be expressed structurally rather than on an individual level — but the “two-ness” remains. The reality of being marked, denied and diminished for being America’s darker sons persists, even for a man who rose to become one of America’s brightest lights.

And while words are not actions or solutions, giving voice to a people’s pain from The People’s house has power.

On Friday the president reached past one man and one boy and one case in one small Florida town, across centuries of slavery and oppression and discrimination and self-destructive behavior, and sought to place this charged case in a cultural context.

It can be too easy when speaking of race, bias, stereotypes and inequality to arrive at simplistic explanations. There is often a tendency to separate legacy traumas and cultural conditioning from personal responsibility, but it cannot be done. The truth is that racial realities are complicated, weaving all these factors into a single fabric.

There is no denying that an enormous amount of violence — both physical and psychological — is aimed at black men. That violence is both interracial and intraracial. Too many black men inflict that violence on one another, feeding a self-destructive cycle of victimization until hope is crushed to the ground and opportunity seems beyond the sky.

All of this must be considered when we speak of race, and those conversations cannot be a communion of the aggrieved. All parties must acknowledge and accept their role in the problems for us to solve them. Only when the burden of bias is shared — only when we can empathize with the feelings of “the other” — can we move beyond injury to healing.

Yes, we should encourage young black men to value themselves and make better choices that reflect that value.

But we must also acknowledge that poverty is sticky and despair, dogged. The legacy effects of American oppression — which destroyed families, ingrained cultural violence, and denied generations of African-Americans the luxury of accruing and transferring intergenerational wealth — cannot simply be written off.

Most blacks don’t believe that racial prejudice is the whole of black people’s problems today, or is even chief among them. According to a Gallup poll released Friday, only 37 percent of blacks believe that the fact that they, on average, have worse jobs, income and housing is “mostly” because of discrimination.

But it would be hard to argue that bias plays no role, even if it’s immeasurable.

That’s why there was value in the president of the United States acknowledging his “two-ness” on Friday and connecting with Trayvon Martin — because we can never lose sight of the fact that biases and stereotypes and violence are part of a black man’s burden in America, no matter that man’s station.

We could all have been Trayvon.

    Barack and Trayvon, NYT, 19.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/opinion/blow-barack-and-trayvon.html

President Obama’s Anguish

July 19, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama did something Friday that he hardly ever does — and no other president could ever have done. He addressed the racial fault lines in the country by laying bare his personal anguish and experience in an effort to help white Americans understand why African-Americans reacted with frustration and anger to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

Mr. Obama’s comments during a surprise appearance at the White House press briefing crystallized the dissonance around this case. In the narrow confines of the trial, all talk of race was excluded, and the “stand your ground” element in Florida’s self-defense law was not invoked by Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyers. But in the broader, more profound and more troubling context of Mr. Martin’s death, race and Florida’s lax gun laws are inextricably interwoven.

On the first, Mr. Obama said: “The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments.” The jurors, he added, “were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict.”

But on the broader context, Mr. Obama eloquently rebutted those — like Representative Andy Harris, a Republican, with his dismissive “get over it” remark on Tuesday — who said that the verdict should have ended discussion of the case, especially talk about race and gun laws.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”

He said there are “very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store” or “the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”

“That,” he said, “includes me.”

Mr. Obama said African-Americans are also acutely aware that “there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.”

He said it would be naïve not to recognize that young African-American men are “disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence.” But using those statistics “to then see sons treated differently causes pain,” he said.

Mr. Obama called on the Justice Department to work with local and state law enforcement to reduce mistrust in the policing system, including ending racial profiling. He also called for an examination of state and local laws to see whether they “are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case.”

Mr. Obama raised questions about the message that “stand your ground” laws send, telling a citizen that he “potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation.”

Mr. Obama noted that Mr. Zimmerman did not invoke that defense. But he said it was still relevant. In one of the most powerful parts of his remarks, he said: “I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?”

If the answer is “at least ambiguous,” Mr. Obama said, “we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

Mr. Obama said Americans needed to give African-American boys “the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them.”

He said he was not talking about “some grand, new federal program” or even a national “conversation on race,” which he said often ends up being “stilted and politicized” and reaffirms pre-existing positions.

In a way, Mr. Obama began that conversation with these remarks, while speaking directly to African-Americans who have longed to hear him identify with their frustrations and their anger.

It is a great thing for this country to have a president who could do what Mr. Obama did on Friday. It is sad that we still need him to do it.

    President Obama’s Anguish, NYT, 19.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/opinion/president-obamas-anguish.html

President Offers

a Personal Take on Race in U.S.

July 19, 2013
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — After days of angry protests and mounting public pressure, President Obama summoned five of his closest advisers to the Oval Office on Thursday evening. It was time, he told them, for him to speak to the nation about the Trayvon Martin verdict, and he had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say.

For the next 15 minutes, according to a senior aide, Mr. Obama spoke without interruption, laying out his message of why the not-guilty ruling had caused such pain among African-Americans, particularly young black men accustomed to arousing the kind of suspicion that led to the shooting death of Mr. Martin in a gated Florida neighborhood.

On Friday, reading an unusually personal, handwritten statement, Mr. Obama summed up his views with a single line: “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

That moment punctuated a turbulent week marked by dozens of phone calls to the White House from black leaders, angry protests that lit up the Internet and streets from Baltimore to Los Angeles, and anguished soul-searching by Mr. Obama. Aides say the president closely monitored the public reaction and talked repeatedly about the case with friends and family.

Several people who have had conversations with Mr. Obama’s top aides said a president who has rarely spoken about America’s racial tensions from the White House was particularly torn about appearing to force the hand of Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general, when it comes to any investigations in the case.

The White House’s original plan — for Mr. Obama to address the verdict in brief interviews on Tuesday with four Spanish-language television networks — was foiled when none of them asked about it.

Instead, he appeared in the White House briefing room with no advance warning and little of the orchestration that usually accompanies presidential speeches. Mr. Obama spoke for 18 minutes, offering his own reflections and implicitly criticizing gun laws and racial profiling methods — both of which, critics say, played a role in Mr. Martin’s death.

Mr. Obama continued to avoid criticizing either the conduct of the trial or the verdict, in which a jury found a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., George Zimmerman, not guilty of all charges in the killing of Mr. Martin in February 2012.

But in the most expansive remarks he has made about race since becoming president, Mr. Obama offered three examples of the humiliations borne by young black men in America: being followed while shopping in a department store, hearing the click of car doors locking as they cross a street, or watching as women clutch their purses nervously when they step onto an elevator. The first two experiences, he said, had happened to him.

“Those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida,” Mr. Obama said. “And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”

For black leaders who had beseeched the president to speak out — inundating White House officials with phone calls — his remarks were greeted with a mixture of relief and satisfaction.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mr. Obama had no choice but to confront mounting concern among African-Americans about the Martin case and recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action and voting rights.

“At some point, the volcano erupts,” Mr. Jackson said.

From the moment the verdict was announced on Saturday night, black activists had called on Mr. Obama to express the anger and frustration of their community. The pressure only increased after he issued a carefully worded statement urging respect for the jury’s decision.

“We needed this president to use his bully pulpit,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist and host on MSNBC, who urged Mr. Obama’s advisers to have him speak out.

The parents of Mr. Martin, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, said they were “deeply honored and moved” by Mr. Obama’s comments. “President Obama sees himself in Trayvon and identifies with him,” they said in a statement on Friday. “This is a beautiful tribute to our boy.”

For some black activists, however, Mr. Obama’s remarks were too little, too late. Tavis Smiley, a radio host who has long been a critic of the president, said the president has chosen to “lead from behind” on race issues.

The president’s advisers selected the White House briefing room as the location for Mr. Obama’s remarks during the Thursday meeting, calculating that it would be less formal than a full-dress speech — but would shield him from the questions he would likely face in a longer interview about why he had waited days after the verdict to speak.

The advisers said Mr. Obama was anxious to confront the issue of race in a way that he has not since he ran for president in 2008. In a landmark speech to defuse the political storm over his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama spoke about what he called “the complexities of race” in America.

As president, Mr. Obama has only periodically returned to the subject. And on the few occasions that he has, it has often been in reaction to an event — a black Harvard professor’s arrest, or Mr. Martin’s death. A month after Mr. Martin was killed, Mr. Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

The president’s remarks on Friday were different: more expansive, more personal and more reflective of the concerns of fellow blacks. His comments mirror public opinion among African-Americans, according to polls.

A telephone poll conducted June 13 to July 5 by Gallup found that blacks were “significantly less likely now than they were 20 years ago to cite discrimination as the main reason blacks on average have worse jobs, income, and housing than whites.” It found that 37 percent of blacks today blame discrimination. In 1993, 44 percent said the same.

Mr. Obama has also shown more willingness to speak in personal terms. At Morehouse College in Atlanta in May, he told graduates, “Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down.”

His remarks Friday were also reminiscent of the tone in his speeches during his trip to Africa earlier this month. After standing in the cell that Nelson Mandela occupied for 18 years, Mr. Obama told a South African audience, “You’ve shown us how a prisoner can become a president.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama brought that message home, urging Americans to be honest with themselves about how far this country has come in confronting its own racial history.

“Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can?” he asked. “Am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.”

Jodi Kantor contributed reporting from Truro, Mass.

    President Offers a Personal Take on Race in U.S., NYT, 19.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/us/
    in-wake-of-zimmerman-verdict-obama-makes-extensive-statement-
    on-race-in-america.html

Transcript:

Obama Speaks of Verdict

Through the Prism

of African-American Experience

July 19, 2013
The New York Times

Following is a transcript of President Obama’s remarks

on race in America in the White House briefing room.

(Transcript courtesy of Federal News Service.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I — I wanted to come out here first of all to tell you that Jay is prepared for all your questions and is — is very much looking forward to the session.

Second thing is I want to let you know that over the next couple of weeks there are going to obviously be a whole range of issues — immigration, economics, et cetera — we’ll try to arrange a fuller press conference to address your questions.

The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week, the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling. I gave an — a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday, but watching the debate over the course of the last week I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.

First of all, you know, I — I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle’s, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they’ve dealt with the entire situation. I can only imagine what they’re going through, and it’s — it’s remarkable how they’ve handled it.

The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there are going to be a lot of arguments about the legal — legal issues in the case. I’ll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues.

The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a — in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works.

But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naïve about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context.

We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.

And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

I think the African-American community is also not naïve in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.

So — so folks understand the challenges that exist for African-American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it or — and that context is being denied. And — and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.

Now, the question for me at least, and I think, for a lot of folks is, where do we take this? How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction? You know, I think it’s understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family.

But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, are there some concrete things that we might be able to do? I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it’s important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government — the criminal code. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.

That doesn’t mean, though, that as a nation, we can’t do some things that I think would be productive. So let me just give a couple of specifics that I’m still bouncing around with my staff so we’re not rolling out some five-point plan, but some areas where I think all of us could potentially focus.

Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it’d be productive for the Justice Department — governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.

You know, when I was in Illinois I passed racial profiling legislation. And it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing.

And initially, the police departments across the state were resistant, but actually they came to recognize that if it was done in a fair, straightforward way, that it would allow them to do their jobs better and communities would have more confidence in them and in turn be more helpful in applying the law. And obviously law enforcement’s got a very tough job.

So that’s one area where I think there are a lot of resources and best practices that could be brought to bear if state and local governments are receptive. And I think a lot of them would be. And — and let’s figure out other ways for us to push out that kind of training.

Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than defuse potential altercations.

I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the Stand Your Ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

Number three — and this is a long-term project: We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?

You know, I’m not naïve about the prospects of some brand-new federal program.

I’m not sure that that’s what we’re talking about here. But I do recognize that as president, I’ve got some convening power.

And there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that — and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed — you know, I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was obviously a tragic situation. And we’re going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.

And then finally, I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. You know, there have been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.

On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s a possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

And let me just leave you with — with a final thought, that as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. I doesn’t mean that we’re in a postracial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are. They’re better than we were on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.

And so, you know, we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues, and those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days I think have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long, difficult journey, you know, we’re becoming a more perfect union — not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.

All right? Thank you, guys.

Copyright © 2013 by Federal News Service, LLC, 1120 G Street NW, Suite 990, Washington, DC 20005-3801 USA. Federal News Service is a private firm not affiliated with the federal government. No portion of this transcript may be copied, sold or retransmitted without the written authority of Federal News Service, LLC. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the original work prepared by a United States government officer or employee as a part of that person’s official duties. For information on subscribing to the FNS Transcripts Database or any other FNS product, please email info@fednews.com or call 1-202-347-1400.

    Transcript: Obama Speaks of Verdict
    Through the Prism of African-American Experience, NYT, 19.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/us/politics/
    transcript-obama-speaks-of-verdict-through-the-prism-
    of-african-american-experience.html

Judge Challenges White House Claims

on Authority in Drone Killings

July 19, 2013
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday sharply and repeatedly challenged the Obama administration’s claim that courts have no power over targeted drone killings of American citizens overseas.

Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the United States District Court here was hearing the government’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by relatives of three Americans killed in two drone strikes in Yemen in 2011: Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric who had joined Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who had no involvement in terrorism; and Samir Khan, a 30-year-old North Carolina man who had become a propagandist for the same Qaeda branch.

Judge Collyer said she was “troubled” by the government’s assertion that it could kill American citizens it designated as dangerous, with no role for courts to review the decision.

“Are you saying that a U.S. citizen targeted by the United States in a foreign country has no constitutional rights?” she asked Brian Hauck, a deputy assistant attorney general. “How broadly are you asserting the right of the United States to target an American citizen? Where is the limit to this?”

She provided her own answer: “The limit is the courthouse door.”

The case comes to court at a time when both the legality and wisdom of the administration’s use of targeted killing as a counterterrorism measure have come under question in Congress and among the public. The debate, including the first public discussions of drone strikes by Congress and a major speech by President Obama on May 23, has raised the possibility of a role for judges in approving the addition of Americans to the so-called kill list of suspected terrorists or in signing off on strikes.

Mr. Hauck acknowledged that Americans targeted overseas do have rights, but he said they could not be enforced in court either before or after the Americans were killed. Judges, he suggested, have neither the expertise nor the tools necessary to assess the danger posed by terrorists, the feasibility of capturing them or when and how they should be killed.

“Courts don’t have the apparatus to analyze” such issues, so they must be left to the executive branch, with oversight by Congress, Mr. Hauck said. But he argued, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has in the past, that there are multiple “checks” inside the executive branch to make sure such killings are legally justified.

Judge Collyer did not buy it. “No, no, no,” she said. “The executive is not an effective check on the executive.” She bridled at the notion that judges were incapable of properly assessing complex national security issues, declaring, “You’d be surprised at the amount of understanding other parts of the government think judges have.”

Despite Judge Collyer’s evident frustration with parts of the Obama administration’s stance, legal experts say the plaintiffs face an uphill battle. They are Nasser al-Awlaki, father and grandfather of two of the men killed, who wrote about their deaths on Wednesday in The New York Times, and Sarah Khan, mother of Samir Khan. Only Anwar al-Awlaki was deliberately targeted, officials say; Mr. Khan was killed in the same strike, while Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed by mistake in a strike officials say was intended for a suspected terrorist who turned out not to be present.

The relatives filed suit late last year, but not against the military and the Central Intelligence Agency, which carried out the strikes, because such lawsuits usually fail on technical grounds. Instead, they sued four officials in charge of the agencies at the time: David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director; Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary; and two successive heads of the Joint Special Operations Command, Adm. William H. McRaven and Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Votel.

The lawsuit is known as a Bivens action, after a 1971 Supreme Court ruling that permitted citizens to sue government officials personally under some circumstances for violating their constitutional rights.

The government is asking that the lawsuit be dismissed on several grounds. Mr. Hauck said decisions about targeted killing should be reserved to the “political” branches of government, the executive and legislative, not the judiciary. In addition, he said, allowing a lawsuit against top national security officials to proceed would set a dangerous and disruptive precedent.

“We don’t want these counterterrorism officials distracted by the threat of litigation,” he said.

Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union, representing the plaintiffs, argued that the claims had extraordinary importance because they involved the deaths of Americans at the government’s hands. “The entire goal of Bivens is deterrence,” to discourage officials from infringing the rights of Americans, Ms. Shamsi said.

“The court still has a role to play in adjudicating whether or not a citizen’s rights have been violated,” she said.

At one point, when Mr. Hauck referred to the Constitution, Judge Collyer, 67, who was appointed by President George W. Bush and also serves on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, interrupted to note that the Constitution prescribed three branches of government, and that she represented one of them.

“The one that’s normally yelled at and not given any money,” she said, sounding as if she was not entirely joking. “The most important thing about the United States is that it’s a nation of laws.”

The judge said that she believed the case raised difficult questions and that she would “do a lot of reading and studying and thinking and try to reach a decision as soon as I can.”

    Judge Challenges White House Claims on Authority in Drone Killings,
    NYT, 19.7.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/us/politics/
    judge-challenges-white-house-claims-on-authority-in-drone-killings.html

Contraceptives Stay Covered in Health Law

June 28, 2013
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Despite strong resistance from religious organizations, the Obama administration said Friday that it was moving ahead with a rule requiring most employers to provide free insurance coverage of contraceptives for women, a decision that has touched off a legal and political battle likely to rage for another year.

The final rule, issued under the new health care law, adopts a simplified version of an approach proposed by the government in February to balance the interests of women with the concerns of the Roman Catholic Church and other employers with religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptives.

After considering more than 400,000 comments, administration officials refused to budge on the basic principle. The rule, they said, is very similar to their proposal. An exemption is included for churches. But many Catholic hospitals, schools, universities and other religious institutions will have to take steps so that coverage is available to employees and their dependents.

The issue figured prominently in last year’s elections as President Obama and other Democrats pressed their advantage with female voters. At the same time, Catholic bishops waged a national campaign arguing that the federal policy infringed on religious freedom and violated the church’s social and moral teachings on birth control and abortion.

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the group was reviewing the final rule.

Democrats describe the mandate for coverage of birth control as one of the chief benefits of the 2010 health care law, a boon to women and their health.

“The health care law guarantees millions of women access to recommended preventive services at no cost,” said Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. “Today’s announcement reinforces our commitment to respect the concerns of houses of worship and other nonprofit religious organizations that object to contraceptive coverage, while helping to ensure that women get the care they need, regardless of where they work.”

Republicans say the requirement shows how intrusive and onerous the law is.

The rule does not satisfy the concerns of certain religious organizations or businesses whose owners have religious objections to contraceptive coverage.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, said Thursday that the owners of Hobby Lobby, a craft store chain that describes itself as “a faith-based company,” could pursue their case against the rule.

Eric C. Rassbach, a deputy general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has represented plaintiffs in that case and others challenging the law, said the final rule did nothing to meet the objections of his clients.

“The government tinkered with some mechanisms in the rule, but did not really get at the religious conscience questions,” Mr. Rassbach said. “So there is a fundamental conflict that will have to be resolved in court.”

Under the rule, women are to have access to contraceptives without any premium, deductible, co-payment or other fees.

Some religious employers do not want their employees to have coverage of contraceptives, even if someone else pays for it.

A number of federal judges deferred decisions until the White House issued a final regulation. Publication of the rule clears the way for courts to act.

Under the new health care law, employers with more than 50 employees will generally be required to offer health insurance to employees, or the employers will be subject to financial penalties.

Among the “essential health benefits” that must be provided are preventive services. In particular, the administration says, most health plans must cover sterilization and the full range of contraceptive methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration, including emergency contraceptive pills, like those known as ella and Plan B One-Step.

Under the rule issued Friday, the government said certain “religious employers” — primarily houses of worship — may exclude contraceptive coverage from their health plans for employees and their dependents. In effect, they will be exempt from the federal requirement to provide contraceptive coverage.

The rule also lays out what it describes as an accommodation for other nonprofit religious and church-affiliated organizations, like hospitals, universities and charities, that object to contraceptive coverage but do not qualify for the exemption.

Under the rule, these organizations will not have to contract, arrange or pay for contraceptive coverage to which they object on religious grounds.

Instead, the administration said, such coverage will be “separately provided to women enrolled in their health plans at no cost.”

Under this arrangement, a nonprofit religious employer must notify its insurer that it objects to contraceptive coverage. The insurer must then notify people in the health plan that it will arrange or pay for contraceptive services as long as they remain in the health plan.

Many employers serve as their own insurers and hire outside companies to administer benefits and pay claims. In such cases, the administration said, the “third-party administrator” must inform people in an employer-sponsored health plan that it is “providing or arranging separate no-cost payments for contraceptive services.”

Administration officials said the cost of contraceptive services would, for insurers, be offset by savings that result from the fact that women would be healthier and will have fewer births.

To reimburse third-party administrators for the cost of contraceptive services, the government said it would reduce the fees charged to certain health insurance companies for the privilege of selling insurance in federal marketplaces, or exchanges, being established in more than 30 states. Insurers will then be required to share some of those savings with third-party administrators for the self-insured health plans of religious employers that object to contraceptive coverage.

The reduction in user fees would reflect the cost of contraceptive services, as well as “an allowance for administrative costs and margin,” or profit. The government would require third-party administrators to provide detailed information about the payments they made or arranged.

Federal officials had difficulty explaining how these arrangements would work in practice. They said they were leaving the details to employers, insurers and third-party administrators.

The Labor Department said it had the authority to require third-party administrators to provide, or arrange for an insurance company or other entity to provide, payment for contraceptive services.

The final rule is the administration’s fourth attempt in 20 months to articulate a policy requiring contraceptive coverage.

Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said: “Today’s ruling strikes a fair balance between religious liberties and the reproductive rights of all women. Access to contraception shouldn’t be dictated by a woman’s employer.”

But Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, which promotes Catholic education, said the final rule did not respect the religious freedom of religious employers. “Now the lawsuits can proceed,” he said.

    Contraceptives Stay Covered in Health Law, 28.6.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/us/politics/
    final-rule-issued-for-contraceptive-coverage.html

Clean Air Act, Reinterpreted,

Would Focus on Flexibility

and State-Level Efforts

June 25, 2013
The New York Times
By JUSTIN GILLIS

With no chance of Congressional support, President Obama is staking part of his legacy on a big risk: that he can substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by stretching the intent of a law decades old and not written with climate change in mind.

His plan, unveiled Tuesday at Georgetown University in Washington, will set off legal and political battles that will last years.

But experts say that if all goes well for the president, the plan could potentially meet his stated goal of an overall emissions reduction of 17 percent by 2020, compared with the level in 2005.

“If the question is, ‘Will this solve our emissions problem?’ the answer is no,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “If the question is, ‘Could this move us along the path we want to be on?’ the answer is yes, it could.”

In his speech, Mr. Obama said he would use executive powers to limit the carbon dioxide that power plants could emit. He also called for government spending to promote the development of energy alternatives, and committed to helping cities and states protect themselves from rising seas and other effects of climate change.

But formally, the main thing he did on Tuesday was order the Environmental Protection Agency to devise an emissions control plan, with the first draft due in a year. Experts say he will be lucky to get a final plan in place by the time he leaves office in early 2017.

Mr. Obama is trying to ensure continuation of a trend already under way: emissions in the United States have been falling for several years. But at the global scale, they are rising fast, and as the president acknowledged, it will take much stronger international action to turn that around and head off the worst effects of climate change.

“For the world at large, the United States is just one piece of the puzzle,” Mr. Levi said.

Already, glaciers are melting, heat waves and heavy rains are increasing, the food system is under stress and the sea is rising. The best that can be hoped for, scientists say, is to limit the damage, or slow it enough to provide society more time to adjust.

The president recognized that in his plan, calling for more steps to help the country prepare, from strengthening sea walls to hardening the electrical grid.

The heart of Mr. Obama’s plan, however, is lowering the country’s emissions using administrative remedies, an effort to sidestep a recalcitrant Congress. The success of that goal will depend on how far the administration is able to stretch the boundaries of the Clean Air Act, signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that it can be used to regulate greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide emissions, but figuring out how to do that within the technical requirements of the law will be a major challenge.

The administration’s thinking appears to have been influenced by a proposal from an environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The group urged a creative approach, calling on the federal government to set a target level of greenhouse gases for each state, taking account of historical patterns. A state generating a lot of power from coal, then exporting it to other states, would not be unduly penalized, for instance.

As the environmental group envisions it, states would meet their goals by tweaking the overall electrical system, not just by cracking down on individual power plants. States might urge companies to produce more renewable power, for instance, but they could also retrofit homes and businesses to reduce energy waste, or encourage the use of clean-burning natural gas instead of coal.

States would presumably be allowed to use market signals, like a price on greenhouse emissions, to achieve their goals, as California and nine Northeastern states are already doing.

It is unclear how much all this might cost at the retail level. The Natural Resources Defense Council argues that even if prices go up, electric bills for many consumers could actually decline as their homes were retrofitted to use less energy.

The fossil-fuel industry and its allies in Congress are certain to argue that the president’s plan will be ruinously expensive and require the shutdown of numerous coal-burning power plants. Republican leaders immediately condemned the plan as a job-killer and framed it as an attack on coal.

The political attraction of a state-led approach is that it would move a lot of the nitty-gritty decision making out of Washington. But, for that very reason, it would entail legal risk. The Clean Air Act, written in the heyday of environmentalism, basically envisions commandments from Washington ordering utilities to clean up the air, not flexible approaches.

While carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached a historic level of 400 parts per million last month, emissions from the United States have been falling, partly because of the weak economy but also because of the newfound abundance of natural gas from hydraulic fracturing. Gas has displaced a lot of coal in power generation; such switching cuts greenhouse emissions nearly in half for a given amount of electricity produced.

Other factors, like tougher building codes, are contributing to the decline. And transport emissions are falling in part because of one of Mr. Obama’s policies: tough fuel-efficiency measures for new cars.

But modest reductions already achieved in the United States and other Western countries are being swamped by rising emissions from the East. So the real question is whether technologies can be developed, and then deployed worldwide, that allow for continued economic growth and rising energy use with minimal greenhouse emissions.

In his speech, Mr. Obama sought to reclaim global leadership on climate change for the United States. His plan includes ideas and money for making global progress.

Daniel P. Schrag, head of Harvard’s Center for the Environment, said the president’s plan would succeed only if it created market conditions unleashing the creative power of American capitalism, calling forth greater innovation in the energy industry.

Mr. Obama nodded to that point in his speech, noting that “countries like China and Germany are going all in” on the clean energy race. “I believe Americans build things better than anybody else,” he said. “I want America to win that race, but we can’t win it if we’re not in it.”

John M. Broder contributed reporting.

    Clean Air Act, Reinterpreted, Would Focus on Flexibility and State-Level Efforts,
    NYT, 25.6.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/science/earth/
    clean-air-act-reinterpreted-would-focus-on-flexibility-and-state-level-efforts.html

Obama Calls Surveillance Programs

Legal and Limited

June 7, 2013
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Obama offered a robust defense of newly revealed surveillance programs on Friday as more classified secrets spilled into public, complicating a summit meeting with China’s new president focused partly on human rights and cybersecurity.

Mr. Obama departed from his script at a health care event in California to try to reassure Americans that he had not abused government authority by collecting telephone call logs and foreigners’ e-mail messages. But the disclosure hours later of secret contingency planning to target other countries for possible cyberattacks made his get-together with President Xi Jinping later in the day all the more awkward because cyberattacks by the Chinese are high on the American agenda.

The latest of three documents published over three days by the British newspaper The Guardian added to the understanding of the Obama administration’s approach to national security in an age of multifaceted threats and became another factor in the renewed debate over the balance between privacy and security.

The identity of the person who gave those documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post is not known, but The Post has described its source as a career intelligence officer angry at “what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy” by the Obama administration.

Once a critic of President George W. Bush’s hawkish policies, Mr. Obama was ready with an explanation for why he has preserved and extended some of them when a reporter asked him at the health care event if he could assure Americans that the government was not building a database of their personal information. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

But he argued that “modest encroachments on privacy” were “worth us doing” to protect the country, and he said that Congress and the courts had authorized those programs.

A National Security Agency telephone surveillance program collects phone numbers and the duration of calls, not the content, he said. An Internet surveillance program targets foreigners living abroad, not Americans, he added.

“There are some trade-offs involved,” Mr. Obama said. “I came with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly.” In the end, he concluded that “they help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

But the disclosures united liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans in accusing him of abandoning values he once espoused. “We believe the large-scale collection of this information by the government has a very significant impact on Americans’ privacy, whether senior government officials recognize that fact or not,” Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, wrote in a joint response to the president’s remarks.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat and an Obama ally from Illinois, rebuffed the president’s contention that Congress had been kept abreast of the programs, saying only a handful of top leaders are regularly briefed.

“To say that there’s Congressional approval suggests a level of information and oversight that’s just not there,” he said in an interview. He added that the sort of data mining revealed in recent days “really pushes the role of government to the limit.”

Advocates of Congressional intervention said public pressure could revive legislation to at least force more transparency about the programs. “The timing has never been better to revisit our past decisions,” said Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican.

But it was not clear whether there would be a popular backlash to the programs beyond some outrage on Twitter and Facebook, and even critics like Mr. Durbin were skeptical. Many Americans interviewed around the country on Friday shared concerns about their civil liberties but expressed a certain grudging resignation as well.

In Congress, the main vehicle for any changes, a reauthorization of the 1978 law that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, passed only last December and is not due for renewal for five years. During the debate last winter, the Senate voted on a bipartisan basis to reject amendments to force transparency or curtail surveillance.

Moreover, beyond Mr. Durbin, Congressional leaders and senior lawmakers on the intelligence committees expressed few qualms. The House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said Mr. Obama must be more forceful in explaining the programs but declined to discuss his own position. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, dismissed concerns. “Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn’t anything that is brand new,” he said.

Just hours after the president spoke, The Guardian posted online a copy of a classified directive Mr. Obama signed last year laying out conditions under which the president could order cyberattacks against another country, akin to the attacks on Iran’s uranium enrichment plant.

The directive ordered the government to “identify potential targets of national importance” against which offensive cyberoperations “can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power.” That means, in essence, that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command and the intelligence agencies would maintain lists of targets around the world that could be damaged more effectively, and more covertly, by a computer attack than by a missile or bomber attack.

As previously reported, the document says only the president can authorize offensive cyberoperations, just as only he can authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The directive also reserves the right to take “anticipatory action against imminent threats” to protect critical infrastructure in the United States, including power utilities, cellphone networks and financial markets.

That raised the possibility that the United States could strike first if it feared a large attack from China or another country. Officials have blamed China for a variety of computer spying and cyberattacks, a subject featured on Mr. Obama’s agenda with Mr. Xi in Southern California.

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said the revelations would not hinder the president’s discussions with Mr. Xi.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington,

and Jackie Calmes from San Jose, Calif.

    Obama Calls Surveillance Programs Legal and Limited, NYT, 7.6.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/national-security-agency-surveillance.html

Obama Plans 3 Nominations for Key Court

May 27, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama will soon accelerate his efforts to put a lasting imprint on the country’s judiciary by simultaneously nominating three judges to an important federal court, a move that is certain to unleash fierce Republican opposition and could rekindle a broader partisan struggle over Senate rules.

In trying to fill the three vacancies on the 11-member United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit at once, Mr. Obama will be adopting a more aggressive nomination strategy. He will effectively be daring Republicans to find specific ground to filibuster all the nominees.

White House officials declined to say who Mr. Obama’s choices will be ahead of an announcement that could come this week, but leading contenders for the spots appear to include Cornelia T. L. Pillard, a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center; David C. Frederick, who often represents consumers and investors at the Supreme Court; and Patricia Ann Millett, a veteran appeals lawyer in Washington. All three are experienced lawyers who would be unlikely to generate controversy individually.

Several legal advocates who have been in communication with the West Wing said officials had repeatedly discussed those names in recent months.

Often called the second most important court in the country, the Washington court has overturned major parts of the president’s agenda in the last four years, on regulations covering Wall Street, the environment, tobacco, labor unions and workers’ rights.

With the confirmation last week of Sri Srinivasan, Mr. Obama’s first successful nominee to the court, it now has four Democratic appointees and four Republican appointees. But of the six additional “senior” judges, who previously served full time on the court and still regularly hear cases, five were appointed by a Republican president, giving the court a strongly conservative flavor.

“The court is critically important — the majority has made decisions that have frustrated the president’s agenda,” said Nan Aron, a liberal activist who has called for Mr. Obama to be more aggressive in nominating judges. “Our view is that balance must be restored on that court, and the empty seats must be filled.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said last week that the court’s rulings were “wreaking havoc” on the country.

Republicans in Congress are already preparing to do battle. Having approved Judge Srinivasan this month, Republican senators are pushing a proposal to eliminate the three empty slots from the court by shifting them to circuits in other parts of the country.

If that strategy, which Democrats have compared to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failed attempt to change the size of the Supreme Court, does not work, Republicans could filibuster Mr. Obama’s nominees to prevent them from joining the court. Republicans currently hold 45 of the Senate’s 100 seats, and 41 are needed for a filibuster.

“The whole purpose here is to stack the court,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said of Democratic efforts to fill the court’s vacancies.

Mr. Obama’s decision to make the nominations all at once is part of a broader strategy by Democrats to shine a spotlight on what they say is Republican obstruction in the Senate.

Democrats cite the case of Caitlin J. Halligan, a former New York State solicitor general, whom Mr. Obama twice nominated to fill one of the vacancies on the Washington circuit court. Republicans filibustered her nomination both times.

Republicans deny that they are obstructing the president’s nominees and say Mr. Obama’s picks are being confirmed more quickly than were President George W. Bush’s nominees when Democrats controlled the Senate. Republicans recall the case of Miguel Estrada, a lawyer nominated to the Washington circuit court in 2001. Democrats blocked his nomination with a filibuster.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said the Democratic accusations are “nonsense.”

“This is part of the majority’s attempt to create the appearance of obstruction where none exists,” Mr. Grassley said last week in a speech on the floor of the Senate. “It is a transparent attempt to manufacture a crisis.”

Democrats say Republicans in the Senate have violated long-standing traditions by routinely requiring 60 votes to approve even the most uncontroversial legislation or nomination.

Democrats are preparing to escalate the dispute this summer by scheduling numerous confirmation votes in a short period of time. If, as Democrats expect, Republicans block those nominations, Mr. Obama and his allies hope the public will notice.

With enough public pressure, some Democrats hope that they could change the Senate rules to prohibit filibusters on judicial nominations and in some other areas.

“A single blocked nomination may not generate much publicity, but by blocking so many nominees at once, the Republicans are overplaying their hand,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, told reporters on Thursday. “The other side must be careful. If they think they can win a debate over whether the Senate should change its rules, they might very well be mistaken.”

In the meantime, the Washington circuit court continues to churn out decisions, some of which are undermining the president’s hard-fought legislative and executive agenda.

In one case in 2011, a three-judge panel of the court — randomly chosen from among the full-time and senior judges, as is typical — struck down an important Wall Street regulation. The regulation, part of the banking legislation that was championed by Mr. Obama after the economic collapse in 2008 and passed by Congress, would have made it easier for shareholders to propose their own nominees to corporate boards of directors.

A similar panel last year struck down efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate air pollution across state lines. A third panel ruled in January that Mr. Obama could not make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in the face of Republican efforts to block his picks.

Democrats say the confirmation of Mr. Obama’s likely nominees would make it more conceivable that the president’s agenda would get a fair hearing.

Ms. Pillard has worked at the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. She has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court, including Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs in 2003, in which, to the surprise of many, she persuaded a court that had been protective of states’ rights to allow suits against states under the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Mr. Frederick served as a law clerk to Justice Byron R. White and worked in the Justice Department, spending five years in the solicitor general’s office. He has argued more than 40 cases before the Supreme Court.

Ms. Millett served in the solicitor general’s office for a decade and has argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government. She now leads the appellate practice for one of Washington’s largest law firms.

Lawyers close to the administration said they did not know whether other candidates were also being considered.

Adam Liptak contributed reporting.

    Obama Plans 3 Nominations for Key Court, NYT, 27.5.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/us/politics/
    obama-plans-to-nominate-3-judges-for-key-court.html

Obama’s Forgotten Victims

May 22, 2013
The New York Times
By MIRZA SHAHZAD AKBAR

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — WHEN Barack Obama ran for president of the United States in 2008, his message of hope and change gave us, the citizens of lesser republics, hope that he would close Guantánamo and shut down programs where extrajudicial killing or bribing foreign heads of state with American taxpayer dollars had become standard practice.

Instead, a few days after his inaugural address, a C.I.A.-operated drone dropped Hellfire missiles on Fahim Qureishi’s home in North Waziristan, killing seven of his family members and severely injuring Fahim. He was just 13 years old and left with only one eye, and shrapnel in his stomach.

There was no militant present. A recent book revealed that Mr. Obama was informed about the erroneous target but still did not offer any form of redress, because in 2009, the United States did not acknowledge the existence of its own drone program in Pakistan.

Sadaullah Wazir was another victim of hope and change. His house in North Waziristan was targeted on Sept. 7, 2009. The strike killed four members of his family. Sadaullah was 14 years old when it happened. A few days after the attack, he woke up in a Peshawar hospital to the news that both of his legs had to be amputated and he would never be able to walk again. He died last year, without receiving justice or even an apology. Once again, no militant was present or killed.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to deliver a major speech on drones at the National Defense University today. He is likely to tell his fellow Americans that drones are precise and effective at killing militants.

But his words will be little consolation for 8-year-old Nabila, who, on Oct. 24, had just returned from school and was playing in a field outside her house with her siblings and cousins while her grandmother picked flowers. At 2:30 p.m., a Hellfire missile came out of the sky and struck right in front of Nabila. Her grandmother was badly burned and succumbed to her injuries; Nabila survived with severe burns and shrapnel wounds in her shoulder.

Nabila doesn’t know who Mr. Obama is, or where the Hellfire missile that killed her grandmother came from. As she grows older, she will learn about the idea of justice. But how will she be able to grasp it if she herself has been denied this basic right?

The civilian victims of drone strikes have not been let down just by Mr. Obama. Their own government is equally culpable; Pakistan has been complicit in several strikes.

I have brought litigation on behalf of more than 100 civilian victims and their families before the provincial High Court in Peshawar and lower courts in Islamabad, the capital, to demand that the Pakistani government exercise its duty to protect the lives of its citizens.

A growing number of civilian casualties has raised the question of the efficacy of drone strikes in killing militants. Clearly Fahim, Sadaullah and Nabila were not menaces to America who had to be attacked in a brutal and lawless manner. According to the revelations in a recent McClatchy News Service article, the C.I.A. has no idea who is actually being killed in most of the strikes. Despite this acknowledgment, the drone program in Pakistan still continues without any Congressional oversight or accountability.

The burden of accountability is not exclusively on the American side. It is widely believed that the Pakistani government not only gives tacit consent for such strikes but also provides ground intelligence to the United States.

In response to our lawsuit, the Pakistani government has claimed that there is no written, verbal or tacit consent for such strikes nor any intelligence sharing. It cites two joint parliamentary resolutions declaring drone strikes a counterproductive violation of sovereignty and a request to stop such strikes. But Pakistan’s former military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, painted a different picture in a CNN interview in April, admitting that he consented to a number of strikes during his tenure as president.

In a recent landmark ruling on one of our drone lawsuits, the Peshawar High Court categorically ordered Pakistan’s government to end its duplicity and defend its citizens’ right to life by demanding that America halt drone strikes and compensate civilian victims.

People in Waziristan do not expect much of their government, but they at the very least deserve justice and a right to live.

If Mr. Obama will not end the strikes that are killing innocent Pakistanis, it is the duty of our government to stop America’s extrajudicial campaign of killing on our territory, just as it is the Pakistani government’s duty to eliminate the menace of terrorism from the country — but within the bounds of law and adhering to the principles of due process.

Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a lawyer

and former special prosecutor

for Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau

is co-founder and legal director

of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights,

a legal aid organization.

    Obama’s Forgotten Victims, NYT, 22.5.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/opinion/
    the-forgotten-victims-of-obamas-drone-war.html

The President and the Hunger Strike

April 30, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama said a lot of important things on Tuesday about the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It is a blight on the nation’s reputation. It mocks American standards of justice by keeping people imprisoned without charges. It has actually hindered the prosecution and imprisonment of dangerous terrorists. Even if Guantánamo seemed justified to some people in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, those justifications are wearing thin. It is unsustainable and should be closed.

We were pleased that Mr. Obama pledged to make good, finally, on his promise to do just that. But that reaction was tempered by the fact that he has failed to do so for five years and that he has not taken steps within his executive power to transfer prisoners long ago cleared for release. Mr. Obama’s plans to try to talk Congress into removing obstacles to closing the prison do not reflect the urgency of the crisis facing him now.

As of Tuesday morning, Charlie Savage reported in The Times, 100 of the 166 inmates at Guantánamo are participating in a hunger strike against their conditions and indefinite detention. Twenty-one have been “approved” for force-feeding, which involves the insertion of a tube through their nostrils and down their throats.

Mr. Obama defended the practice. “I don’t want these individuals to die,” he said.

Most people don’t. But a recently published bipartisan report on detainee treatment by the Constitution Project said “forced feeding of detainees is a form of abuse and must end.” The World Medical Association has long considered forced feeding a violation of a physicians’ ethics when it is done against a competent person’s express wishes, a point that was reinforced on April 25 by Dr. Jeremy Lazarus, president of the American Medical Association, in a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

There is no indication that the inmates being force-fed were unconscious or incapable of making decisions. And virtually all inmates at Guantánamo have never been charged with any crime and never will be. Nearly 90 have been cleared for release, and another large group can never be tried because they were tortured or there is no evidence they were involved in a particular attack. Only six are facing active charges before a military tribunal.

Mr. Obama was asked about the hunger strike at a White House news conference. “I think it is critical,” he said, “for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists.”

Mr. Obama said permanent detention without trial is “is contrary to who we are. It is contrary to our interests.”

Mr. Obama correctly said that Congress passed malicious laws that restrict the use of federal money to transfer Guantánamo detainees to other countries and prohibit sending them to be tried in federal courts, which, unlike the military tribunals, are competent to do that.

But those laws were lent political momentum by the Obama administration’s bungling of an attempt to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in a federal court. And, since then, Mr. Obama has approved a dangerous expansion of military detention of terrorist suspects.

If he is serious about moving toward closure, there are two steps proposed by the American Civil Liberties Union that could get the ball rolling. He could appoint a senior official “so that the administration’s Guantánamo closure policy is directed by the White House and not by Pentagon bureaucrats,” the A.C.L.U. said, and he could order Mr. Hagel to start providing legally required waivers to transfer detainees who have been cleared. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has urged Mr. Obama to urgently review the status of those prisoners — a primary issue for the hunger strikers.

The hunger strike is an act of desperation over policies even Mr. Obama says cannot be defended. It is his responsibility to deal with it — and close the prison.

    The President and the Hunger Strike, NYT, 30.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/opinion/
    president-obama-and-the-hunger-strike-at-guantanamo.html

Obama Takes a Turn as Comedian in Chief

April 27, 2013
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Accustomed to the role of target, President Obama exacted a light-hearted revenge on his tormentors in the news media and Congress on Saturday night with a joke-filled riff at the capital’s premier star-studded gala.

Mr. Obama took smiling aim at Rush Limbaugh, Representative Michele Bachmann, Senator Marco Rubio, Sheldon Adelson, Senator Rand Paul, President George W. Bush and, of course, his favorite network, Fox News, as he addressed the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association.

A running theme of his comic address was his continual disagreements with Congressional Republicans. The president mocked critics in the opposition and the news media who keep jabbing him for not reaching out more to the other party. “'Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell? they ask,” he said. “Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”

He pointed out that after last year’s defeat in the presidential election, Republicans were looking for ways to reach out to minorities. “Call me self-centered, but I can think of one minority they could start with,” he said. “Hello! Think of me as a trial run. See how it goes. If they won’t come to me I will come to them.”

The president noted that he attended the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum a few days earlier and said that he was beginning to think about his own. He said he was contemplating putting up a structure next to Mr. Bush’s, then showed a picture on a video screen of the Blame Bush Library, with a billboard pointing to the new library in Texas and the words “His Fault.”

Mr. Obama expressed some frustration with critics who suggest that he should be more effective, singling out a column by Maureen Dowd of The News York Times that compared him unfavorably with the fictional commander in chief in “The American President,” a movie starring Michael Douglas. Noting that Mr. Douglas, who played the title character, was in the audience, Mr. Obama jokingly asked for advice.

“Michael, what’s your secret, man?” he asked. “Could it be you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy? Could that have something to do with it? I don’t know. Check in with me.”

The president also poked fun at himself. Recalling that he was criticized for saying that Kamala Harris of California was the country’s best-looking attorney general, he said: “As you might imagine I got trouble when I got back home. Who knew Eric Holder was so sensitive?”

    Obama Takes a Turn as Comedian in Chief, NYT, 27.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/us/politics/obama-takes-a-turn-as-comedian-in-chief.html

Obama Not Rushing to Act

on Signs Syria Used Chemical Arms

April 26, 2013
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Friday that he would respond “prudently” and “deliberately” to evidence that Syria had used chemical weapons, tamping down any expectations that he would take swift action after an American intelligence assessment that the Syrian government had used the chemical agent sarin on a small scale in the nation’s civil war.

Mr. Obama’s remarks, before a meeting here with King Abdullah II of Jordan, laid bare the quandary he now faces. The day after the White House, in a letter to Congressional leaders, said that the nation’s intelligence agencies had assessed “with varying degrees of confidence” that the Syrian government had used sarin, the president said he was seeking further proof of culpability for chemical weapons attacks. It is a laborious process that analysts say may never produce a definitive judgment. But Mr. Obama is also trying to preserve his credibility after warning in the past that the use of chemical weapons would be a “game changer” and prompt a forceful American response.

“Knowing that potentially chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria doesn’t tell us when they were used, how they were used,” Mr. Obama told reporters in the Oval Office. “We have to act prudently. We have to make these assessments deliberately.”

“But I meant what I’d said,” the president added. “To use potential weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line with respect to international norms and international law. And that is going to be a game changer.”

At the same time, the White House cited the Iraq war to justify its wariness of taking action against another Arab country on the basis of incomplete or potentially inaccurate assessments of its weapons of mass destruction. The press secretary, Jay Carney, said the White House would “look at the past for guidance when it comes to the need to be very serious about gathering all the facts, establishing chain of custody, linking evidence of the use of chemical weapons to specific incidents and actions taken by the regime.”

As Mr. Obama and his aides walked a fine line on how to confront the evidence about chemical weapons, they engaged in an intensified round of diplomacy with Arab leaders to bolster support for the Syrian opposition and to try to develop a consensus on how to deal with the escalating strife.

In addition to King Abdullah, Mr. Obama met in recent days with leaders from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the Saudi foreign minister. Next month, he will meet Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, which borders Syria and is among the countries most exposed to the threat of a chemical weapons attack.

“If their policy is premised on not going it alone, even in response to chemical weapons,” said Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress, “you’re going to need a lot of people reading from the same song sheet.”

The more pressing problem, Mr. Katulis said, was that the president’s strong warnings to Syria “are running ahead of their policy.” In his remarks, King Abdullah did not address the American suspicions about chemical weapons or Mr. Obama’s warnings, but expressed confidence that the president, working with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries, could “find a mechanism to find a solution.”

A major focus of the meeting, a senior administration official said, was coordinating more robust aid for the Syrian opposition. The United States pledged last weekend to double its nonlethal assistance, and the official said it was working with regional allies to direct it to reliable opposition groups.

On Friday, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain echoed Mr. Obama’s cautious assessment of the use of chemical weapons, saying that there was limited but growing evidence that such weapons had been used, probably by government forces.

The British government, like the Obama administration, is concerned about avoiding a repetition of the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when the presence of unconventional weapons, cited as justification for military action, had not been corroborated.

Mr. Cameron said that while definitive information was limited, “there’s growing evidence that we have seen, too, of the use of chemical weapons, probably by the regime.”

“It is extremely serious; this is a war crime, and we should take it very seriously,” he added.

Still, Mr. Cameron said, the British authorities were trying to avoid “rushing into print” news about the use of chemical weapons. And he repeated that Britain had no appetite to intervene militarily.

“I don’t want to see that, and I don’t think that is likely to happen,” he said. “But I think we can step up the pressure on the regime, work with our partners, work with the opposition in order to bring about the right outcome. But we need to go on gathering this evidence and also to send a very clear warning to the Syrian regime about these appalling actions.”

The United States has called on the United Nations to carry out a thorough investigation of the suspected use of chemical weapons by the government. But the government of President Bashar al-Assad has so far not allowed United Nations inspectors into the country, and backed by its supporter Russia, it is insisting on limits to the scope of the investigation.

“As long as Damascus refuses to let the U.N. investigate all allegations, and as long as Russia provides the regime with political cover at the Security Council, it may be impossible for Washington to meet that standard,” Michael Eisenstadt, director of the military and security studies program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in a report.

The risk of not responding now, even with less than definitive proof, Mr. Eisenstadt said, is that it could embolden Mr. Assad to use chemical weapons on a wider scale. American officials said the administration had privately warned the Syrian government not to take that step.

On Thursday, the head of the United Nations agency for disarmament sent another letter to Syria demanding “unconditional and unfettered access” for inspectors investigating the use of chemical weapons, said Martin Nesirky, the spokesman for the secretary general.

The top inspector for the team of some 15 members, the Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom, is due in New York on Monday to brief Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, on its work.

“Members of that team have been collating and analyzing the evidence and information that is available to date from outside,” Mr. Nesirky said, adding that there was a concern about the evidence degrading.

Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker from Washington,

Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, Alan Cowell from London,

and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.

    Obama Not Rushing to Act on Signs Syria Used Chemical Arms, NYT, 26.4.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/world/middleeast/white-house-in-no-rush-on-syria-action.html

Obama Must Walk Fine Line

as Congress Takes Up Agenda

April 7, 2013
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — The days ahead could be decisive ones for the main pieces of President Obama’s second-term agenda: long-range deficit reduction, gun safety and changes to immigration law.

With Congress back this week from a recess, bipartisan groups of senators who have been negotiating about immigration and gun violence are due to unveil their agreements, though prospects for a gun deal are in question as the emotional impact of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., has faded and the National Rifle Association has marshaled opposition. And on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will send his annual budget to Capitol Hill intended as a compromise offer, though early signs suggest that Republican leaders have little interest in reviving talks.

Members of both parties say Mr. Obama faces a conundrum with his legislative approach to a deeply polarized Congress. In the past, when he has stayed aloof from legislative action, Republicans and others have accused him of a lack of leadership; when he has gotten involved, they have complained that they could not support any bill so closely identified with Mr. Obama without risking the contempt of conservative voters.

Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, called this predicament Mr. Obama’s “Catch-22.” And Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said he had often seen it at work since 2010 while negotiating with Republican lawmakers to reach a long-term budget agreement.

At times, Mr. Warner said, Republicans would urge him to get Mr. Obama more involved, saying, “Gosh, Warner, we’ve got to have the president.” Other times, he said, the same lawmakers would plead otherwise, saying, “If the president comes out for this, you know it is going to kill us in the House.”

“Everybody wants him involved to the right degree at the right moment,” Mr. Warner said, “but not anytime before or after.”

The challenge for Mr. Obama became evident as soon as he took office, when Republicans almost unanimously opposed his economic stimulus package even as the recession was erasing nearly 800,000 jobs a month. The author Robert Draper opened his recent book about the House, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” with an account from Republican leaders who dined together on the night of Mr. Obama’s 2009 inauguration and agreed that the way to regain power was to oppose whatever he proposed.

Though Mr. Obama was able to prevail over Republican opposition in his first two years as president because Democrats had majorities in the House and the Senate, that changed when Republicans won control of the House in 2010, giving them a brake to apply to the president’s agenda.

Other than the stimulus experience in early 2009, the moment that most captured that polarization for the White House occurred a year later. In early 2010 Republican senators, including the minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, demanded that Mr. Obama endorse bipartisan legislation to create a deficit-reduction commission. But when he finally did so, they voted against the bill, killing it.

Now the president’s three pending priorities are shaping up as test cases for how he and Republicans will work together — or not — in his second term.

Each measure — on the budget, guns and immigration — in its own way illustrates the fine line that Mr. Obama must walk to succeed even with national opinion on his side. Privately, the White House is optimistic only about the prospects for an immigration bill, which would create a path to citizenship for about 11 million people in the country illegally.

That is because an immigration compromise is the only one that Republicans see as being in their own interests, given their party’s unpopularity with the fast-growing Latino electorate. In contrast, most Republicans see little advantage in backing gun legislation, given hostility toward it in their states or in districts throughout the South and the West and in rural areas. A budget compromise would require agreeing to higher taxes, which are anathema to conservative voters, in exchange for Mr. Obama’s support for the reductions in Medicare and Social Security that they want.

Yet even on immigration, many Republicans are weighing their party’s long-term interests in supporting a compromise against their own short-term arguments for opposing one: antipathy remains deep in conservative districts to any proposal that would grant citizenship. That calculation also holds for Republicans planning to seek the 2016 presidential nomination.

Against this backdrop, Mr. Obama early on outlined elements that he wanted in the immigration and gun measures. Then he purposely left the drafting to Congress. Senior aides, mainly the chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, and the deputy chief of staff, Rob Nabors, check in daily with senators. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stays in touch with his former Senate colleagues about the gun bill talks.

On immigration, Mr. Obama had wanted to propose his own measure because he had promised Latino groups he would do so. But Senate Democrats advised against it, fearing an “Obama bill” would scare off Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has presidential ambitions. Indeed, Mr. Rubio’s office once issued a statement to deny that he was discussing immigration policy “with anyone in the White House,” even as it criticized the president for not consulting Republicans.

“I think he’s handled it just perfectly,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Democratic leader who is part of the bipartisan negotiations on both issues, said of Mr. Obama. “He’s mobilizing public opinion. He’s staying on top of the issues and being helpful. But at the same time he’s given us — in the House and Senate — space to craft a bipartisan agreement.”

While Mr. Obama is said to be actively involved in the immigration talks behind the scenes because of that bill’s better odds, on gun measures like tighter background checks of firearms purchasers he is waging his fight mostly in public settings far from Washington. On Monday he will travel to Connecticut to meet again with the families of those killed in the school shooting in Newtown last year. At the University of Hartford, he will give another speech calling for passage of gun legislation.

Even Democrats say these speeches are having no effect on Republican lawmakers. Mr. Schumer and Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, spoke again over the weekend but have been unable to reach a deal, raising interest in a fallback proposal that two other senators — Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia — are working on.

Yet White House aides predict that if the gun issue dies, Mr. Obama will at least get credit for trying and Republicans will be blamed by the majority of Americans who favor tighter controls.

On Sunday, Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, intensified the White House’s efforts to shame Republicans who are threatening to filibuster a Senate vote on gun measures.

“Now that the cameras are off and they are not forced to look the Newtown families in the face, now they want to make it harder and filibuster it,” Mr. Pfeiffer said on the ABC News program “This Week.”

On the budget, Mr. Obama has tried both strategies — negotiating personally with Speaker John A. Boehner on a “grand bargain” for taxes and entitlement-program reductions, and when that failed, letting Congress try, which also failed. Now, with the bipartisan effort moribund, the president has decided he has no option but to publicly take the lead to revive negotiations with hopes of drawing some Republican support.

So the budget he is sending to Congress will embody his last compromise offer to Mr. Boehner in December. For the first time, Mr. Obama is formally proposing to reduce future Social Security benefits, if Republicans will agree to higher taxes on the wealthy and some corporations.

Republican leaders already have rejected the overture, based on early reports about it. But Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Mr. Obama is “showing some signs of leadership that’s been lacking. I’m encouraged.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama is to dine with a dozen rank-and-file Republican senators, hoping they might deal with him on the budget, as well as on immigration and gun measures.

    Obama Must Walk Fine Line as Congress Takes Up Agenda, NYT, 7.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/us/politics/
    obama-must-walk-fine-line-as-congress-weighs-agenda.html

Remarks by President Obama on Gun Violence

March 28, 2013
The New York Times

The following is the complete transcript of President Obama’s remarks

on gun violence on Thursday in Washington.

(Transcript courtesy of Federal News Service.)

KATERINA RODGAARD: Good morning.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Morning.

MS. RODGAARD: First, I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart the president, the vice president, for inviting me to speak here today. Never in a million years did I think an average citizen such as myself would ever get an opportunity like this.

My name is Katerina Rodgaard. I reside in suburban Maryland, and I am the mother of two beautiful young children. I have a unique background, both in the performing arts and in law.

I have been personally affected by gun violence. As a dance teacher, I lost one of my students at the massacre at Virginia Tech.

Reema Samaha was a bright, beautiful, talented dancer who lost her life. It was stolen from her at the age of 18. I will never forget her presence in my classes and her enthusiasm for dance.

As the mother of a first-grader, I cannot even look at my own daughter without thinking about the poor, innocent victims at Sandy Hook. My heart breaks for them and their families and the families of the eight children every day who are killed by guns in this country.

After losing Reema and seeing the horror at Sandy Hook, my reaction was that I no longer felt it was safe to raise a family in this country. I felt I either needed to leave the country or do something. As an attorney, I vowed to do something, because that -- I feel that my rights to feel safe in this country and the rights of our children to feel safe in this country are paramount and worth fighting for.

I have never been an activist before, but I have found a voice with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and I am proud and honored to help them fight for better laws in this country.

I am also honored to acknowledge Vice President Joe Biden, a strong proponent of gun violence prevention measures in the Senate for decades and now in the White House. He also an advocate for the rights of women and children. As mothers, we are eternally grateful for your support.

Enough is enough. The time to act is now.

I am now extremely honored to introduce to you the president of the United States of America, Barack Obama. (Applause.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause continues.) Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Katerina, for sharing your story. You know, Reema was lucky to have you as a teacher, and all of us are fortunate to have you here today. And I’m glad we had a chance to remember her.

Katerina, as you just heard, lost one of her most promising students in Virginia Tech, the shooting there that took place six years ago. And she and dozens of other moms and dads, all victims of gun violence, have come here today from across the country, united not only in grief and loss, but also in resolve and in courage and in a deep determination to do whatever they can as parents and as citizens to protect other kids and spare other families from the awful pain that they’ve endured.

As any of the families and friends who are today can tell you, the grief doesn’t ever go away. That loss, that pain sticks with you. It lingers on in places like Blacksburg and Tucson and Aurora. That anguish is still fresh in Newtown. It’s been barely a hundred days since 20 innocent children and six brave educators were taken from us by gun violence, including Grace McDonnell and Lauren Rousseau and Jesse Lewis, whose families are here today.

That agony burns deep in the families of thousands, thousands of Americans who’ve been stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun over these last hundred days, including Hadiya Pendleton, who was killed on her way to school less than two months ago and whose mom is also here today, everything they live for and hope for taken away in an instant.

We have moms on this stage whose children were killed as recently as 35 days ago.

I don’t think any of us who are parents can hear their stories and not think about our own daughters and our own sons and our own grandchildren. We all feel that it is our first impulse as parents to do everything we can to protect our children from harm, to make any sacrifice to keep them safe, to do what we have to do to give them a future where they can grow up and learn and explore and become the amazing people they’re destined to be.

That’s why in January, Joe Biden, leading a task force, came up with and I put forward a series of common-sense proposals to reduce the epidemic of gun violence and keep our kids safe. In my State of the Union address, I called on Congress to give these proposals a vote. And in just a couple of weeks, they will.

Earlier this month, the Senate advanced some of the most important reforms designed to reduce gun violence. All of them are consistent with the Second Amendment. None of them will infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners. What they will do is keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people who put others at risk. This is our best chance in more than a decade to take common-sense steps that will save lives.

As I said when I visited Newtown just over three months ago, if there is a step we can take that will save just one child, just one parent, just another town from experiencing the same grief that some of the moms and dads who are here have endured, then we should be doing it.

We have an obligation to try.

In the coming weeks, members of Congress will vote on whether we should require universal background checks for anyone who wants to buy a gun so that criminals or people with severe mental illnesses can’t get their hands on one. They’ll vote on tough new penalties for anyone who buys guns only to turn around and sell them to criminals. They’ll vote on a measure that would keep weapons of war and high- capacity ammunition magazines that facilitate these mass killings off our streets. They’ll get to vote on legislation that would help schools become safer and help people struggling with mental health problems to get the treatment that they need.

None of these ideas should be controversial. Why wouldn’t we want to make it more difficult for a dangerous person to get his or her hand on a gun? Why wouldn’t we want to close the loophole that allows as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases to take place without a background check? Why wouldn’t we do that?

And if you ask most Americans outside of Washington, including many gun owners, some of these ideas, they don’t consider them controversial. Right now, 90 percent of Americans -- 90 percent -- support background checks that will keep criminals and people who have been found to be a danger to themselves or others from buying a gun. More than 80 percent of Republicans agree. More than 80 percent of gun owners agree.

Think about that. How often do 90 percent of Americans agree on anything? (Laughter.) It never happens.

Many other reforms are supported by clear majorities of Americans. And I ask every American to find out where your member of Congress stands on these ideas. If they’re not part of that 90 percent who agree that we should make it harder for a criminal or somebody with a severe mental illness to buy a gun, then you should ask them, why not? Why are you part of the 10 percent?

There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t get this done. But the reason we’re talking about it here today is because it’s not done until it’s done.

And there some powerful voices on the other side that are interested in running up a clock of changing the subject or drowning out the majority of the American people to prevent any of these reforms from happening at all.

They’re doing everything they can to make all our progress collapse under the weight of fear and frustration or -- their assumption is, is that people will just forget about it. I read an article in the news just the other day wondering, is Washington -- has -- has Washington missed its opportunity because as time goes on after Newtown, somehow people start moving on and forgetting?

Let me tell you, the people here, they don’t forget. Grace’s dad is not forgetting. Hadiya’s mom hasn’t forgotten. The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things -- that’s not who we are. That’s not who we are.

Now, I want to make sure every American is listening today. Less than a hundred days ago that happened.

And the entire country was shocked, and the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different.

Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.

If there’s one thing I’ve said consistently since I first ran for this office, nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change. And that’s why it’s so important that all these moms and dads are here today, but that’s also why it’s important that we’ve got grass-roots groups out there that got started and -- and are out there, mobilizing and organizing and keeping up the fight. That’s what it’s going to take to make this country safer -- going to take moms and dads and hunters and sportsmen and clergy and local officials, like the mayors who are here today, standing up and saying this time really is different, that we’re not just going to sit back and -- and wait until the next Newtown or the next Blacksburg or the next innocent, beautiful child is gunned down in a playground in Chicago or Philadelphia or Los Angeles before we summon the will to act.

Right now members of Congress are back home in their districts, and many of them are holding events where they can hear from their constituents. So I want everybody who’s listening to make yourself heard right now. If you think that checking someone’s criminal record before he can check out a gun show is common sense, you’ve got to make yourself heard. If you’re a responsible, law-abiding gun owner who wants to keep irresponsible, law-breaking individuals from abusing the right to bear arms by inflicting harm on a massive scale, speak up. We need your voices in this debate.

If you’re a mom like Katrina (sic), who wants to make this country safer, a stronger place for our children to learn and grow up, get together with other moms, like the ones here today, and raise your voices and make yourselves unmistakably heard.

We need everybody to remember how we felt a hundred days ago and make sure that what we said at that time wasn’t just a bunch of platitudes, that we meant it. You know, the desire to make a difference is what brought Corey Thornblatt (sp) here today. Corey (sp) grew up in Oklahoma, where her dad sold firearms at gun shows. And today she’s a mom and a teacher. And Corey (sp) said that after Newtown, she cried for days -- for the students who could have been her students, for the parents she could have known, for the teachers like her, who go to work every single day and love their kids and want them to succeed.

And Corey (sp) says, my heart was broken and I decided now was the time to act, to march, the time to petition, the time to make phone calls because tears were no longer enough.

And that’s my attitude. Tears aren’t enough. Expressions of sympathy aren’t enough. Speeches aren’t enough. We’ve cried enough. We’ve known enough heartbreak.

What we’re proposing is not radical. It’s not taking away anybody’s gun rights. It’s something that if we are serious, we will do.

And now’s the time to turn that heartbreak into something real. It won’t solve every problem. There will still be gun deaths, there will still be tragedies, there will still be violence, there will still be evil, but we can make a difference if not just the activists here on this stage but the general public, including responsible gun owners, say: You know what? We -- we can do better than this. We can do better to make sure that fewer parents have to endure the pain of losing a child to an act of violence.

That’s what this is about. And if enough people like Katrina (sp) and Corie (sp) and the rest of the parents who are here today get involved, and if enough members of Congress take a stand for cooperation and common sense and lead and don’t get squishy because time has passed and maybe it’s not on the news every single day, if that’s who we are, that’s our character that we’re willing to follow through on commitments that we say are important, commitments to each other and to our kids, then I’m confident we can make this country a safer place for all of them.

So thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless America.

Copyright © 2013 by Federal News Service, LLC, 1120 G Street NW, Suite 990, Washington, DC 20005-3801 USA. Federal News Service is a private firm not affiliated with the federal government. No portion of this transcript may be copied, sold or retransmitted without the written authority of Federal News Service, LLC. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the original work prepared by a United States government officer or employee as a part of that person’s official duties. For information on subscribing to the FNS Transcripts Database or any other FNS product, please email info@fednews.com or call 1-202-347-1400.

    Remarks by President Obama on Gun Violence, NYT, 28.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/us/remarks-by-president-obama-on-gun-violence.html

Months After Massacre,

Obama Seeks to Regain Momentum on Gun Laws

March 28, 2013
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — With resistance to tougher gun laws stiffening in Congress, a visibly frustrated President Obama on Thursday implored lawmakers and the nation not to lose sight of the horrors of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn.

“The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things?” Mr. Obama said in remarks at the White House, surrounded by relatives and friends of victims of gun violence, including some from Newtown. “That’s not who we are. That’s not who we are. And I want to make sure every American is listening today.”

The president has just a small window in which to persuade Congress to back a series of gun control measures that will come up for a vote in the Senate early next month. And his remarks, delivered in an impassioned and off-script manner, were aimed at reviving the impetus that gun-control advocates fear they are losing as more time passes since the shootings.

A filibuster threat is growing in the Senate. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has said a ban on certain styles of semiautomatic weapons is virtually assured of defeat. And a senior Republican senator who opposes the president’s efforts, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, is now floating a competing gun bill.

These complications only add to the strain surrounding negotiations over a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the background check system for gun purchases — talks that have so far drawn the support of only one Republican, Mark Kirk of Illinois.

As senators at the heart of those negotiations returned to their home states this week, their staffs continued to try to reach consensus back in Washington. But they have yet to produce anything more than an outline of what legislation might look like.

Mr. Obama’s appearance, from the East Room of the White House, suggested just how delicate the situation had become. Rather than read from teleprompters, he seemed to speak extemporaneously much of the time and expressed irritation in a way that he generally does not. At some moments, he paused and took a breath as if collecting himself and circled back to some of his points for emphasis.

“Shame on us if we’ve forgotten,” he said.“I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”

The renewed push by the president, who will travel to Colorado next week to rally support for new gun measures, is just one piece in a broader nationwide effort, timed to coincide with the two-week Congressional recess, by gun control groups like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s coalition.

At the same time, the National Rifle Association is activating its base, ensuring that Congressional offices and town hall meetings over the next week will be swamped with competing agendas on how to combat gun violence.

“What we face right now is the most dire threat to the association and to our freedom,” said Andrew Arulanandam, an N.R.A. spokesman.

Indeed, gun rights activists are being challenged by a highly coordinated and expensive effort to defeat them, not to mention a galvanized group of voters who were outraged by the Newtown shooting and have pledged to volunteer.

The Brady Campaign this week began a campaign to call and e-mail thousands of supporters, urging them to attend more than 150 Congressional town hall meetings, many in Republican-leaning states where Democrats are up for re-election.

“Basically we’re saying, ‘Drop everything. There’s a town hall tonight,’ ” said Brian Malte, the director of mobilization for the Brady Campaign.

People will be equipped with talking points like poll numbers that show 9 out of 10 Americans support universal background checks, including 7 out of 10 N.R.A. members. And they will be encouraged to ask their senators and representatives direct questions like, “Do you support universal background checks?” Mr. Bloomberg’s group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said it was convening 120 events across the nation in support of gun measures, including in Columbus, Ohio; Durham, N.C.; and Golden, Colo. The group began a $12 million ad campaign aimed at 15 senators this week.

“Americans want this, and today Americans are making their voices heard,” said the group’s chairman, John Feinblatt.

In at least two crucial cases, senators appear to be listening. Two of the senators who were the subjects of efforts of the mayors’ group, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Joe Donnelly of Indiana are now signaling their support for expanded background checks.

Other senators are digging in. Five Republican senators have now signed on to a pledge to filibuster “any additional gun restrictions.” They include Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas. On Thursday, Marco Rubio of Florida and James Inhofe of Oklahoma announced their intentions to join the filibuster as well.

As the gun control debate played out on Thursday, Connecticut officials unsealed several search warrants itemizing the enormous cache of guns, ammunition, knives and swords that were seized from the home and car of Adam Lanza, who shot and killed 20 first graders and 6 educators in Newtown last December.

David Wheeler, whose 6-year-old son, Benjamin, was killed in the massacre, said in an interview that he and his wife, Francine, hoped the details of the warrant would affect change in gun-control laws and in the communication among law enforcement officials about people who might pose a threat. “We’re starting to get tired of the insanity in Washington and Hartford,” he said. “It’s absolutely despicable, really. I would hope that some of these details will spark enough soul-searching to get something done.”

Details about the items seized at the Lanza home underscored the difficulty gun-control advocates face in Congress. Much of the arsenal would remain legal under even the most far-reaching gun-control measures being considered. But two of the guns Mr. Lanza brought with him to the school, the Bushmaster XM15-E2S he used in the killings, and a Saiga-12 shotgun found in his car, would be outlawed under the assault weapons ban proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California.

Opponents of stronger gun-control laws have long said that new laws would arbitrarily single out certain weapons while ignoring issues like deficiencies in the mental health system. “The president asserts his new gun proposals will reduce violent crime, yet provides no evidence that these or any other law would have prevented tragedies such as Newtown,” Senator Lee said. “While having Congress vote on new gun laws may make the president feel like he’s doing something constructive, the proposals’ primary effect would be to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens.”

Mindful of the fact that passions are rising among gun rights activists as they seem to be ebbing in the other direction, Mr. Obama sought to draw on the emotion and revulsion around the Newtown shooting.

“We need everybody to remember how we felt 100 days ago and make sure that what we said at that time wasn’t just a bunch of platitudes, that we meant it,” he added. To lawmakers, he added sternly, “Don’t get squishy because time has passed and maybe it’s not on the news every single day.”

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from New York,

and Elizabeth Maker from Connecticut.

    Months After Massacre, Obama Seeks to Regain Momentum on Gun Laws, NYT, 28.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/us/politics/obama-makes-impassioned-plea-for-gun-control.html

The Drone Question Obama Hasn’t Answered

March 8, 2013
The New York Times
By RYAN GOODMAN

THE Senate confirmed John O. Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday after a nearly 13-hour filibuster by the libertarian senator Rand Paul, who before the vote received a somewhat odd letter from the attorney general.

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ ” the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., wrote to Mr. Paul. “The answer to that question is no.”

The senator, whose filibuster had become a social-media sensation, elating Tea Party members, human-rights groups and pacifists alike, said he was “quite happy with the answer.” But Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers — and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed.

What, exactly, does the Obama administration mean by “engaged in combat”? The extraordinary secrecy of this White House makes the answer difficult to know. We have some clues, and they are troubling.

If you put together the pieces of publicly available information, it seems that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat. Back in 2004, the Pentagon released a list of the types of people it was holding at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants” — a list that included people who were “involved in terrorist financing.”

One could argue that that definition applied solely to prolonged detention, not to targeting for a drone strike. But who’s to say if the administration believes in such a distinction?

American generals in Afghanistan said the laws of war “have been interpreted to allow” American forces to include “drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list,” according to a report released in 2009 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then led by John Kerry, now the secretary of state.

The report went on to say that there were about 50 major traffickers “who contribute funds to the insurgency on the target list.” The Pentagon later said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

That statement, however, was not very clarifying, and did not seem to appease NATO allies who raised serious legal concerns about the American targeting program. The explanation soon gave way to more clues, and this time it was not simply a question of who had been placed on a list.

In a 2010 Fox News interview, under pressure to explain whether the Obama administration was any closer to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that “we have gotten closer because we have been able to kill a number of their trainers, their operational people, their financiers.” That revelation — killing financiers — appears not to have been noticed very widely.

As I have written, sweeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict stretches the laws of war beyond recognition. But this is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance, disclosed last May in a New York Times article, that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.

Mr. Holder’s one-word answer — “no” — is not a step toward the greater transparency that President Obama pledged when he came into office, but has not delivered, in the realm of national security.

By declining to specify what it means to be “engaged in combat,” the letter does not foreclose the possible scenario — however hypothetical — of a military drone strike, against a United States citizen, on American soil. It also raises anew questions about the standards the administration has used in deciding to use drone strikes to kill Americans suspected of terrorist involvement overseas — notably Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Is there any reason to believe that military drones will soon be hovering over Manhattan, aiming to kill Americans believed to be involved in terrorist financing? No.

But is it well past time for the United States government to specify, precisely, its views on whom it thinks it can kill in the struggle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist forces? The answer is yes.

The Obama administration’s continued refusal to do so should alarm any American concerned about the constitutional right of our citizens — no matter what evil they may or may not be engaged in — to due process under the law. For those Americans, Mr. Holder’s seemingly simple but maddeningly vague letter offers no reassurance.

Ryan Goodman is a professor of law and co-chairman

of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University.

    The Drone Question Obama Hasn’t Answered, NYT, 8.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/opinion/the-drone-question-obama-hasnt-answered.html

Cry About the Real Wolf

March 6, 2013
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

The White House horribly botched its messaging on the sequester.

The Obama administration desperately wanted to define the sequester’s immediate job casualties and calamitous disruptions.

In a way, Obama’s strategy was understandable, and may well have worked on a different group of Republicans from the present crop, which is constitutionally opposed to anything that this president supports.

It’s like one of those Warner Brothers cartoons where Bugs Bunny argues with Yosemite Sam and then takes Sam’s position only to have Sam continue to disagree out of spite and anger and ignorance. In our version, Sam then threatens to blow the economy to smithereens. It would be funny it weren’t so tragically real.

The White House wanted to cause enough outcry that it would pressure Republicans into a deal that would avert indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts.

But the outcry never came. Republicans gambled that it never would. They called the White House’s bluff.

The public had grown numb with the sky-is-falling hysterics in Washington, so much so that few were paying close attention to the sequester. A CBS News poll issued this week found that only 28 percent of Americans said that they were paying very close attention.

Many Republicans played down the sequester’s potential fallout, while fact checkers castigated the White House for exaggerating it.

This seems to have won some converts among the tangentially engaged electorate.

Sure, most people preferred some balance of spending cuts and tax increases, and a plurality blamed Republicans in Congress for not coming up with a deal, according the CBS News poll. But the percentage of people who said that the sequester would either be good for the country or wouldn’t have a real impact was equal to the percentage of people who believed that it would be bad for the country.

And, since the country didn’t fall apart during the first week of the sequester, many Americans may be even more open to the argument that the administration was crying wolf. In fact, the Dow Jones industrial average hit a record high this week, and there were no long lines at airports for any reason other than a brewing snowstorm.

But remember that in the story of the boy who cried wolf, ultimately, a real wolf does show up after all the false cries, and that very real wolf destroys a vulnerable flock.

The lesson, as applied to our present dilemma, is that alarmism erodes credibility, but real danger can still lurk.

The pain of the sequester is that kind that lurks: a slow, creeping disaster mainly affecting those Americans on the fringes who are barely inching their way back into a still-bleak job market — or hopelessly locked out of it — and poor Americans too old or too young to participate in it.

That is how the effects should always have been framed: not as a danger to air travelers and contractors, but as a prowling danger to the most vulnerable in our flock.

Not framing it this way harkens back to a larger problem in our culture: a failure, or outright unwillingness, to acknowledge America’s poor — both working and not — and to appreciate their struggle.

When I think about the effects of the sequester, I can’t help thinking about the people in my hometown in rural north Louisiana and in places like it.

In my hometown, the median family income is less than $30,000, and poverty rates are staggeringly high, according to the American Community Survey. This isn’t necessarily because people don’t take work if they can find it, but because much of the work they can find doesn’t pay a living wage.

So they supplement their salaries with the public benefits they’re eligible to receive.

The town is also home to the Head Start program for the area, and some of the only professional jobs available are at the school.

It is in places like this, places full of the working poor who don’t take airplanes or own stock, that the effects of the sequester will be all too real.

The director of the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the sequester could cost 750,000 jobs this year. Those are not likely to be lost from the top down but from the bottom up. And the estimate of job losses isn’t simply a factor of government pink slips, but the blow to the private sector when billions of dollars are withdrawn from the larger economy.

Pundits and politicians have mocked the cuts for being small in the grand scheme of an enormous national budget, but those are the callous waggings of tongues that have never given voice to the fear of poverty or tasted the bitterness of hunger.

For the rest, the less fortunate, those trying their best to feed their families and praying that illness passes over their houses, these cuts will be no joke.

Those are the people the White House and Congressional Democrats should highlight: good people dealt a poor hand and trying to make good of it.

There is another America, unseen and uncelebrated, where the wolf is ever sniffing at folks’ heels.

    Cry About the Real Wolf, NYT, 6.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/opinion/blow-cry-about-the-real-wolf.html

Obama Picks Foundation President for Budget Chief

March 3, 2013
The New York Times
By ANNIE LOWREY

WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the president of the Walmart Foundation, as his budget chief, a White House official said on Sunday.

Ms. Burwell, if confirmed by the Senate, would step into the role amid heated budget battles with Congressional Republicans. Federal agencies have started to implement the budget cuts known as sequestration — $85 billion in blunt, across-the-board spending reductions that were meant to force Democrats and Republicans to reach a long-term deal to pare the deficit.

In addition, the temporary measure that is financing the government will run out at the end of March, setting up another potential fight between the White House and Republicans in Congress.

A native of West Virginia, Ms. Burwell is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, where she was a Rhodes scholar. In the 1990s, she served in a variety of economic policy roles in the Clinton administration, including as a top aide to Robert E. Rubin, then the Treasury secretary, and as a staff member of the White House’s National Economic Council.

Ms. Burwell would bring a new voice to an administration that has developed a reputation for insularity, and she would provide some gender diversity to a circle of top White House aides that is dominated by men.

Ms. Burwell would be only the second woman to hold the title of budget director, after Alice Rivlin, an economist now at the Brookings Institution, who held the job in the Clinton administration. Ms. Burwell’s selection, which was expected, was to be announced on Monday.

She has worked in the nonprofit world since leaving politics, spending much of the 2000s at the Gates Foundation, the $36 billion fund that finances global health and poverty-eradication programs. She has led the billion-dollar Walmart Foundation, the charitable organization with ties to Wal-Mart Stores Inc., since late 2011.

The budget office helps the White House develop its spending policies, including its overdue budget proposal for the 2014 fiscal year, which begins in October. That budget might include many of the economic priorities Mr. Obama laid out in his State of the Union address, like a major expansion of early childhood education programs.

Ms. Burwell would take over for Jacob J. Lew, now the Treasury secretary, who left the budget post in early 2012 to become the White House chief of staff. Jeffrey Zients has held the title of acting director since then.

    Obama Picks Foundation President for Budget Chief, NYT, 3.3.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/us/
    politics/obama-picks-foundation-president-for-budget-chief.html