President Barack Obama

First word of the injury came in a statement from press secretary Robert Gibbs nearly three hours after the incident.

The White House did not initially name the person who caused the injury, but identified him later Friday as Rey Decerega, director of programs for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

The president had gone to nearby Fort McNair to indulge in a game of basketball, one of his favorite athletic pursuits. It was a five-on-five contest involving family and friends. Among the players were Obama’s nephew, Avery Robinson, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Reggie Love, Obama’s personal assistant, who played at Duke University.

The White House said the injury happened during their fifth and final game when Decerega turned to take a shot and hit Obama, who was playing defense, in the mouth with his elbow.

Obama was later spotted by reporters through an upstairs White House window holding what appeared to be a compress against his mouth, while the White House Christmas tree was being delivered outside.

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“It’s an outrageous political act that will do great damage, long-term, to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say,” Cheney told “FOX News Sunday” in a no-holds-barred interview.

In blunt, unsparing language, Cheney accused President Obama of setting a “terrible precedent” by allowing an “intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration.”

He said the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a probe into alleged abuse of prisoners under the prior administration “offends the hell out of me,” as he seemed to question Obama’s fitness as commander-in-chief.

“I have serious doubts about his policies,” Cheney told FOX News’ Chris Wallace in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “Serious doubts, especially, about the extent to which he understands and is prepared to do what needs to be done to defend the nation.”

As evidence, Cheney pointed to Obama’s decision last week to assert White House control over a newly formed unit that will interrogate terrorists. The new arrangement shifts control of such interrogations away from the CIA and toward the FBI, although oversight will be exercised by the National Security Council, which is located in the White House and reports directly to the president.

Administration officials are vague about which agency will retain ultimate authority. Obama spokesman Bill Burton initially said the new unit “will report to the director of the FBI,” although the Justice Department, which encompasses the FBI, insisted the unit is “not a sub-unit of the FBI or the Justice Department.”

Burton explained: “Just like other interagency processes, if there are disagreements, the different agencies are able to come together and make a decision.”

Cheney ridiculed the new unit, which will be known as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG).

“It’s not even clear who’s responsible,” he marveled. “The Justice Department is, then they claim they aren’t. The FBI is responsible, and they claim they aren’t. It’s some kind of interagency process by which they’re going to be responsible for interrogating high-value detainees.

“If we had tried to do that back in the aftermath of 9/11, when we captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, we’d have gotten no place,” he said.

Cheney predicted the new unit will be incapable of effectively interrogating “people that may have knowledge about imminent attacks.”

“They’re going to have to have meetings and decide who gets to ask what question and who’s going to Mirandize the witness,” he said. “I think it’s silly. It makes no sense. It doesn’t appear to be a serious move in terms of being able to deal with the nation’s security.”

Cheney warned that curtailing the CIA’s role in interrogations is a grave mistake.

“I think it’s a direct slap at the CIA. I don’t think it will work,” he said. “It moves very much in the direction of going back to the old way of looking at these terrorist attacks — that these are law enforcement problems, that this isn’t a strategic threat to the United States.”

But Cheney reserved his strongest criticism for Holder’s decision Monday to appoint a prosecutor and open a criminal investigation into alleged abuses by CIA agents who interrogated terrorists during the administration of former President George W. Bush. The former vice president accused Obama of breaking a promise not to prosecute the agents.

“We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn’t be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration,” Cheney said. “Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they’re reversing course on that.”

In January, just days before he took office, Obama assured CIA agents they need not worry about prosecution.

“We need to look forward, as opposed to looking backwards,” the president-elect said. “At the CIA you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up.”

In April, after disclosing classified documents that detailed the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, Obama said: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution.”

“Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” the president added. “For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted.”

At the time, Holder added: “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.”

In his interview with FOX News, Cheney disputed the administration’s assertion last week that the decision to go after the CIA agents was made by Holder, not Obama.

“If you look at the Constitution, the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land,” Cheney said. “The attorney general’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the Cabinet. The president’s the one who bears this responsibility.”

Cheney said it was disingenuous of Obama “to say, ‘Gee, I didn’t have anything to do with it,’ especially after he sat in the Oval Office and said this wouldn’t happen. Then Holder decides he’s going to do it. So now he’s backed off and is claiming he’s not responsible.

“I just think he’s trying to duck the responsibility for what’s going on here,” Cheney concluded. “And I think it’s wrong.”

Cheney pointed out that the Justice Department already investigated all the cases in question during the Bush administration and decided to prosecute only one contractor, who received a jail sentence.

“The matter’s been dealt with the way you would expect it to be dealt with by professionals,” Cheney said. “Now we’ve got a political appointee coming back, and supposedly without the approval of the president, going to do a complete review, or another complete investigation, possible prosecution of CIA personnel.”

He added: “A review is never going to be final anymore now. We can have somebody, some future administration, come along 10 years from now, 15 years from now, and go back and rehash all of these decisions by an earlier administration.

Cheney vigorously defended the CIA.

“In the intelligence arena, we ask those people to do some very difficult things, sometimes, that put their own lives at risk,” he said. “They do so at the direction of the president. In this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions.

“It’s a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community.”

source: foxnews.com

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Currently on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard – not all that far from “Kennedy Country” in Massachusetts, where the Kennedy family has a compound in Hyannis Port – President Barack Obama released a statement regarding the state’s esteemed Senator, Edward M. Kennedy, who died Tuesday.

From Blue Heron Farm, in Chilmark, Mass., the president, who said he “spoke earlier this morning to Senator Kennedy’s beloved wife, Vicki,” and who also sent everyone’s “thoughts and prayers [to] his children Kara, Edward, and Patrick; his stepchildren Curran and Caroline; the entire Kennedy family; decades’ worth of his staff; the people of Massachusetts; and all Americans who, like us, loved Ted Kennedy,” called Kennedy, 77, “a colleague, a counselor, and a friend.”

“[Even] though we have known this day was coming for some time now, ” said Obama, “we awaited it with no small amount of dread.”

Also on Wednesday it was announced that Kennedy would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, alongside his assassinated brothers John and Robert.

Highlighting how the late “Liberal Lion of the Senate,” as Kennedy was nicknamed, championed the underdog, as well as the elderly and all those in pursuit of the American Dream, Obama said, “The Kennedy name is synonymous with the Democratic Party. And at times, Ted was the target of partisan campaign attacks. But in the United States Senate, I can think of no one who engendered greater respect or affection from members of both sides of the aisle.”

On a personal note, Obama said, “His seriousness of purpose was perpetually matched by humility, warmth, and good cheer. He could passionately battle others and do so peerlessly on the Senate floor for the causes that he held dear, and yet still maintain warm friendships across party lines.”

The president concluded, “His extraordinary life on this earth has come to an end. And the extraordinary good that he did lives on. For his family, he was a guardian. For America, he was the defender of a dream.”

source: people.com

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Spurred on by the success of their efforts to dominate the news at Democratic town hall meetings, conservative groups are reporting increases in membership lists and are joining forces to plan at least one mass demonstration in Washington next month. But the conservative mobilization has also created an unusual dilemma for Republican leaders, who want to turn the enthusiasm into election victories next year but find themselves the target of ire from many of the same activists.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the GOP’s Senate campaign committee, was booed at a “tea party” rally in July for his support of bailing out the financial services industry. And one of the party’s most reliable conservatives, Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, was shouted down at a recent town hall meeting when he criticized a conservative broadcaster and tried to counter claims that children would soon be forced to receive swine flu vaccinations.

“You cannot build a movement on something that is not credible,” said a frustrated Inglis, referring to the vaccine issue and other false rumors being spread by some more aggressive critics of the health bill. “Going door to door, I found opposition tending toward hostility,” added Inglis. “At town meetings, the hostility went straight through to hysteria.”

Some GOP leaders, such as former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, have tapped into the unrest — with Palin stoking fears on her blog of “Obama death panels” that would result from the health care legislation.

Others are still trying to figure out how to balance the desires of the base with the need to appeal to moderate swing voters who might be turned off by high-volume rhetoric. Whether they find that balance could determine whether the GOP can win back independents who voted overwhelmingly for Obama last year but now, according to several polls, are questioning their commitment to him.

The GOP might take comfort in a new Gallup survey which shows that more than a third of independents who have followed the protests have gained sympathy for the protesters’ views, while just 16 percent have lost sympathy for them. About 35 percent of independents approve of Obama’s handling of health care policy.

But Republican leaders eager to win the middle on other issues such as immigration have failed in recent years to appease the conservative base. Complicating matters now is that some activists have mounted their anti-health care overhaul effort largely outside the party machinery. Instead, they are relying on Internet social networking sites to recruit volunteers for town hall meetings and spread YouTube videos. One new group, Smart Girl Politics, has drawn about 10,000 participants using the networking site Ning.

“I don’t know that anybody would want to be associated with either party at this point,” said Michelle Moore, a suburban St. Louis business owner and mother of two who joined Smart Girl Politics and has helped drive activists to four town hall meetings hosted by Missouri’s Democratic senators.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who for years has served as a moderator of sorts between factions of the conservative movement, said the new insurgency is all “fed up” with Obama but not unified around a leader.

There is some organization to the conservative agitation.

About a dozen groups, including the large and well-financed FreedomWorks, led by former GOP Rep. Dick Armey, are sponsoring a march on Washington on Sept. 12.

Another longtime conservative group, the 60 Plus Association, purchased a nearly $2 million cable TV ad buy alleging that the Obama plan would put seniors’ well beings in jeopardy.

Republican officials hope those efforts will dovetail with signs of a GOP resurgence. Leaders are trying to rebrand the GOP as the party of fiscal discipline, fighting Obama on his economic stimulus plan, attacking his proposed global warming legislation as a massive tax increase and, now, portraying his health care agenda as a socialist takeover of the private sector — messages that GOP strategists had hoped might appeal nicely to the base and the middle.

But the newly energized grass roots don’t appear ready to let Republicans off the hook for supporting recent government bailouts of automakers, banks and Wall Street investment giants, even if Obama and the Democrats were the primary targets for their anger.

When conservative Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., addressed a mid-April anti-tax rally in Greenville, S.C., members of the audience booed and turned their backs to the speaker. His crime against conservative orthodoxy: Barrett had voted in late 2008 for the Wall Street bailout bill.

“I know you are mad,” Barrett told the crowd. “I know you are frustrated and I hear it. You may boo, you may turn your back. But I have devoted my life for the conservative cause. We are fighting for you and I will never turn my back on you.”

Cornyn’s status as a party campaign leader was no shield against catcalls at an Austin rally sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, one of the conservative groups involved in the town hall protests. Although he joined them in railing against “more spending and more government” in Washington, Cornyn was called a “traitor” and heckled throughout his speech to the Fourth of July crowd, apparently because of his support for the Wall Street bailout.

Another strand of the conservative movement burst onto the scene at a town meeting held this summer by moderate GOP Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware. He was confronted by a woman asking why Congress was not more aggressively pursuing claims that Obama was not born in the U.S. He drew a hailstorm of boos and roars when he insisted that Obama was a U.S. citizen.

In many places, tensions between conservative activists and the party establishment have gone beyond catcalls to frontal political assaults. In Florida, conservatives have backed a primary challenge to Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for the U.S. Senate. He is viewed with suspicion from the right because of his support of global warming legislation and Obama’s stimulus plan. In Indiana, even a Republican as conservative as GOP Rep. Dan Burton — a leader of the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton — is being opposed by several Republicans who say he has lost touch with the cause.

Inglis, who first came to Congress as part of the 1994 conservative class, now faces a primary challenge because of recent departures from party dogma on the Iraq war and some environmental issues. After he was besieged by activists at this month’s angry, unruly town meeting, Inglis sent the YouTube clip of the confrontation to his supporters and donors with the message: “This is what the opposition looks like.”

Source:

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I’ve posted several times about how confusing a slowdown in the rate at which things get worse (the second derivative) with an actual improvement (the first derivative) has led to some ridiculous claims about economic improvement. Keith Hennessey has a similar complaint:

He [Obama] said this first after the 2nd quarter GDP report showed a 1.1% decline, and again after last Friday’s jobs report showed the U.S. economy lost 247,000 jobs in July. The President is making a common error by looking at the rate of change of a rate of change….

Wrong. Things are still getting worse, but more slowly. The mistake is looking at the direction of a trend on a graph of a rate of change. When you’re looking at a graph that displays a rate of change, “things are getting better” if the latest point is above the horizontal axis, and things are still getting worse as long as you’re below zero. The economy is still losing jobs, and so we are not yet “pointed in the right direction.”

….Friday’s jobs report was good news because the bad news beat expectations, and because it signaled that things might turn around more quickly in the future. But the President is wrong – the U.S. economy is not yet pointed in the right direction.

Let’s look at some pictures. First, the apparent good news:

But all this means is that jobs are being lost at a slower rate–jobs are still being lost:

Hennessey notes that different people are interested in the two different derivatives:

People in Washington try to show they’re sophisticated by focusing on the first graph, “Employment is still declining, but less rapidly. That’s good, right?” Yes, and there is an important distinction between “good news” and “headed/pointed in the right direction.”

* Financial markets care about expectations and rates of change. What will the future look like relative to today? Does the new data make my predictions of the future look better? Markets (and economists) focus on the first graph.

* People working in the real economy care about present levels. Do I have a job today? How big is my paycheck? This is better captured by the second graph.

If you focus on the former, Friday’s jobs report was good news. The 247,000 jobs lost in July was fewer than expected, and it raised people’s expectations about the future path of the economy.

From an employment standpoint, the economy will be headed in the right direction when the number of people employed is increasing – when the second graph turns upward, or when the first graph crosses into positive territory. A minimum break-even threshold is about +100K jobs per month – that’s roughly the number of jobs needed to keep up with population growth and keep the unemployment constant.

Once again, mathematical literacy is important.

Source: scienceblogs.com

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