Obama and Reagan - O'Reilly

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Physicist: Obama Chosen By The Russians 20 Years Ago To Be POTUS

Birther Report:

68Truthseeker: Physicist claims he was told in 1992 'The USA will have a black, Soviet agent as president soon' Interview with Physicist Thomas Fife by Geopolitical Analyst, Jeff Nyquist. - Hat tip SA.

Jimmy Carter's Controversial Nuclear Targeting Directive PD-59 Declassified

http://www.nsarchive.org
William Burr - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski sitting to the right of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. While Brzezinski kept Vance in the loop on the nuclear targeting review, eventually the State Department was cut out. (Photo from National Archives Still Pictures Branch, RG 59-SO, box 18) Zbigniew Brzezinski's military assistant Colonel William E. Odom played a central role in drafting PD-59 (Photo from William E. Odom Papers, box 30, Library of Congress Manuscript Division). President Jimmy Carter greeting Secretary of State Edmund Muskie at a reception at the close of the administration. (Photo from National Archives Still Pictures Branch, RG 59-SE, box 8, file VS-121-81) An exmple of the extensive press coverage of PD-59 during August 1980, The Washington Post, August 6, 1980.

Washington, D.C., September 14, 2012 – The National Security Archive is today posting - for the first time in its essentially complete form - one of the most controversial nuclear policy directives of the Cold War. Presidential Directive 59 (PD-59), "Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy," signed by President Jimmy Carter on 25 July 1980, aimed at giving U.S. Presidents more flexibility in planning for and executing a nuclear war, but leaks of its Top Secret contents, within weeks of its approval, gave rise to front-page stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post that stoked wide-spread fears about its implications for unchecked nuclear conflict.
The National Security Archive obtained the virtually unexpurgated document in response to a mandatory declassification review request to the Jimmy Carter Library [See Document 12]. Highly classified for years, PD 59 was signed during a period of heightened Cold War tensions owing to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, greater instability in the Middle East, and earlier strains over China policy, human rights, the Horn of Africa, and Euromissiles.
In this context, the press coverage quickly generated controversy by raising apprehensions that alleged changes in U.S. strategy might lower the threshold of a decision by either side to go nuclear, which could inject dangerous uncertainty into the already fragile strategic balance. The press coverage elicited debate inside and outside the government, with some arguing that the PD would aggravate Cold War tensions by increasing Soviet fears about vulnerability and raising pressures for launch-on-warning in a crisis. Adding to the confusion was the fact that astonishingly, even senior government officials who had concerns about the directive did not have access to it.
With other recently declassified material related to PD-59, today's publication helps settle the mystery of what Jimmy Carter actually signed, [1] as well as shedding light on the origins of PD-59 and some of its consequences. Among the disclosures are a variety of fascinating insights about the thinking of key U.S. officials about the state of nuclear planning and the possible progression of events should war break out:

• PD-59 sought a nuclear force posture that ensured a "high high degree of flexibility, enduring survivability, and adequate performance in the face of enemy actions." If deterrence failed, the United States "must be capable of fighting successfully so that the adversary would not achieve his war aims and would suffer costs that are unacceptable." To make that feasible, PD-59 called for pre-planned nuclear strike options and capabilities for rapid development of target plans against such key target categories as "military and control targets," including nuclear forces, command-and-control, stationary and mobile military forces, and industrial facilities that supported the military. Moreover, the directive stipulated strengthened command-control-communications and intelligence (C3I) systems.


• President Carter's first instructions on the U.S. nuclear force posture, in PD-18, "U.S. National Strategy," supported "essential equivalence", which rejected a "strategic force posture inferior to the Soviet Union" or a "disarming first strike" capability, and also sought a capability to execute "limited strategic employment options."


• A key element of PD-59 was to use high-tech intelligence to find nuclear weapons targets in battlefield situations, strike the targets, and then assess the damage-a "look-shoot-look" capability. A memorandum from NSC military aide William Odom depicted Secretary of Defense Harold Brown doing exactly that in a recent military exercise where he was "chasing [enemy] general purpose forces in East Europe and Korea with strategic weapons."


• The architects of PD-59 envisioned the possibility of protracted nuclear war that avoided escalation to all-out conflict. According to Odom's memorandum, "rapid escalation" was not likely because national leaders would realize how "vulnerable we are and how scarce our nuclear weapons are." They would not want to "waste" them on non-military targets and "days and weeks will pass as we try to locate worthy targets."


• An element of PD-59 that never leaked to the press was a pre-planned option for launch-on-warning. It was included in spite of objections from NSC staffers, who saw it as "operationally a very dangerous thing."


• Secretary of State Edmund Muskie was uninformed about PD-59 until he read it about in the newspapers, according to a White House chronology. The State Department had been involved in early discussions of nuclear targeting policy, but National Security Adviser Brzezinski eventually cut out the Department on the grounds that targeting is "so closely related to military contingency planning, an activity that justly remains a close-hold prerogative and responsibility" of the Pentagon.


• The drafters of PD 59 accepted controversial ideas that the Soviets had a concept of victory in nuclear war and already had limited nuclear options. Marshall Shulman, the Secretary of State's top adviser on Soviet affairs, had not seen PD-59 but questioned these ideas in a memorandum to Secretary Muskie: "We may be placing more weight on the Soviet [military] literature than is warranted." If the Soviets perused U.S. military writing, it could "easily convince them that we have such options and such beliefs." Post-Cold War studies suggest that Shulman was correct because the Soviet leadership realized that neither side could win a nuclear war and had little confidence in the Soviet Union's ability to survive a nuclear conflict.

Background

When Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977, he inherited nuclear weapons targeting policies from his Republican predecessors, who had sought ways to give U.S. presidents alternatives to the terrifyingly massive and rigid pre-planned options of the Single Integrated Operational Plan [SIOP]. To make nuclear threats more plausible and to give presidents more choices than the SIOP attack options, in January 1974, Richard Nixon signed National Security Decision Memorandum [NSDM] 242. A few months later, in April 1974, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger signed Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy [NUWEP] which provided guidance for the creation of limited, selective, and regional attacks, with more detail for major attack options. Among the goals set for Major Attack Options in the NUWEP was the destruction of "selected economic and military resources of the enemy critical to post-war recovery," including political and military leadership targets. With respect to economic recovery targets, the NUWEP called for inflicting "moderate damage on facilities comprising approximately 70% of [the Soviet or Chinese] war-supporting economic base."
The perception that the NSDM-242 exercise had not given the President more options for crisis-confrontation situations [see Document 1 below] led the Carter White House to initiate a nuclear targeting review that eventually produced PD-59. The Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff [JSTPS] had shown proficiency in creating massively destructive "pre-planned" nuclear strikes against Soviet military targets, but the Carter White House saw them as largely irrelevant. As Bzezinski explained, the "very likelihood of all out nuclear war is increased if all out spasm war is the only kind of nuclear war we can fight." Starting with the premise that conflict was more likely to start in Central Europe or Northeast Asia, the architects of PD-59 believed that high-tech reconnaissance systems could give the president and his advisers a "look-shoot-look" capability to improvise targeting during war. In this way, they could strike Warsaw Pact forces on the move with nuclear weapons instead of launching SIOP attacks against major military targets in the Soviet Union.
The JSTPS had responsibility for the SIOP, under the direction of an Air Force general who wore a second hat as Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command. In this capacity, he had a powerful influence in the military bureaucracy. Brzezinski aide William Odom saw little value to the massive SIOP attack options, believing that a flexible targeting system could help provide an adequate deterrent, but he could not wish SAC and the SIOP out existence because its leaders believed that those options were critical to the national defense. Thus, PD 59 was necessarily a bureaucratic compromise by providing for pre-planned attack options, including launch-on-warning but also flexibility to prepare war plans on "short notice" and strategic reserve forces for later stages of a conflict. War plans could range from massive attacks to "flexible sub-options" against broad classes of targets. To ensure that attack plans could be improvised, PD-59 mandated the creation of "staff capabilities" in the military and at the Pentagon that could "develop operational plans on short notice … based on the latest intelligence."
War plans developed under PD-59 were to "put the major weight of the initial response on military and control targets." Target systems would include tactical and strategic nuclear forces, military command centers, conventional military forces including armies in motion, and industrial facilities supporting military operations. Dropping "critical" recovery targets as a priority, pre-planned options would include "attacks on the political control system and on general industrial capability" either promptly or as "relatively prolonged withholds" that could be attacked later in a conflict. Yet the initial press coverage of PD-59 was slightly misleading by suggesting that targeting before the directive had focused on urban centers; the SIOP had always given priority to military targets and had provisions for excluding attacks on urban-industrial complexes unless Moscow had already attacked U.S. cities.
That the White House had initiated a major review of nuclear targeting remained largely secret until President Carter signed PD-59. [2] Nevertheless, the administration's interest in acquiring capabilities, such as the MX ICBM, for counterforce strikes against Soviet strategic targets had been in the news before the existence of the PD leaked. [3] In early August 1980 headline in national newspapers brought out the larger secret: the existence a new directive changing nuclear war planning, with the first story appearing in the Boston Globe on 3 August 1980. The news stories correctly emphasized key elements of PD-59, that it sought capabilities for "prolonged but limited nuclear war," and that it gave priority to military and leadership targets, and a capability to "find new targets and destroy them" once a war began. [4]
The press coverage cited "shudders" among former government officials such as Herbert Scoville who worried that the search for "less fearsome options for using nuclear weapons would reduce the inhibitions for employing them." Moreover, Federation of American Scientists Director Jeremy Stone asked "Who would be there to turn off the war if we nuked Soviet command centers?" Stone warned about pressures for "firing on warning", although the language on launch-on-warning was one element of the PD that stayed secret. [5] Those concerns dovetailed with private misgivings among State Department officials, such as Marshall Shulman who worried that the reported emphasis on the role of leadership and C3I targets could "only increase Soviet perceptions of vulnerability" and introduce "further instability in the strategic balance."
Newspaper stories about PD-59 raised questions whether President Carter and his advisers had adequately consulted Secretary of State Muskie and the State Department before or after signing the PD. Muskie first learned about the PD from the press coverage, which then noted his "unhappiness that he knew so little about the new doctrine." This became an issue at the State Department, which did not have a copy of the directive and where senior officials argued that the Department should be involved in the "formulation and assessment of national security decisions that have significant foreign policy implications." Muskie's top advisers recommended that he seek an understanding with President Carter that this should not have happened and should not happen again, but whether the two reached a meeting of the minds on this point is not clear.
One of the purposes of the PD was to influence more detailed guidance on nuclear targeting. Top-level officials at the Pentagon and the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff would use the ideas codified in the directive to develop more detailed instructions for shaping the production of pre-planned options and for developing "look-shoot-look" capabilities. By October 1980, Secretary of Defense Brown had approved the latest Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy to provide guidance for targeting in a crisis [see Document 21] Yet the ink had hardly dried on Brown's NUWEP when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter for the presidency; in October 1981 the new administration supplanted PD-59 with National Security Decision Directive 13, "Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy." NSDD-13 influenced NUWEP-82 which replaced Brown's guidance.
NSDD-13 remains largely classified, but years later, Odom wrote that it "carr[ied] the general thrust of PD-59, but with less comprehension of what was needed," and that "little or nothing of consequence was done to pursue this doctrinal change." [6] Future declassifications may test the accuracy of Odom's judgments. In any event, PD-59 (as well as NSDM-242) set the mold for target planning during the decades that followed, during and after the Cold War era. According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, "the process for developing nuclear targeting and employment guidance … has remained virtually unchanged since 1991." Presidential directives and secretary of defense guidance approved during the George W. Bush administration included familiar themes. They provided for a planning structure "designed to avoid an 'all-or-nothing' response to a nuclear attack," identified "potential adversaries" and "scenarios" requiring pre-planned options, and emphasized a "capability to rapidly develop new options." While President Obama has set a nuclear-free world as a policy goal, it is unlikely that nuclear planning arrangements will change significantly in the foreseeable future. 
More: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb390/

Path to Power: How Mitt Romney Will Govern If Elected

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Path to Power: How Mitt Romney Will Govern If Elected from National Journal and National Journal on FORA.tv

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What else you don't know about Obama boyhood

WND/ By Aaron Klein

Editor’s note: In 2008, WND thoroughly vetted Barack Obama’s radical background. Many of those original exclusive reports, almost entirely ignored by the establishment news media, currently are being utilized four years later by some media outlets in the lead up to this year’s presidential election. From now until Election Day, WND will present original investigations into Obama and his radical ties with bonus updates.

Although the Washington Post this past week featured an extensive profile of Mitt Romney’s high school days, which alleged the presidential hopeful engaged in bullying, the news media has yet to probe important aspects of Obama’s early education that may evidence later radical ties.

In 2009, WND exposed Obama’s attendance in a church Sunday school that espouses far-left politics and served as a sanctuary for draft dodgers from the Students for a Democratic Society during the time Bill Ayers was a leader in that organization.

WND had caught up with Rev. Mike Young, pastor of First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, who affirmed the congregation where Obama attended Sunday school as a boy has “always” been involved in political activism.

“The Sunday school has always been and to this day still is involved in political activism,” said Young.

“We are involved in community organizing, helping churches in foreign countries, social justice issues, like making sure inmates get dinner,” said Young, speaking from Hawaii.

While Obama’s membership as an adult in the controversial Trinity United Church of Christ has received widespread media attention, almost nothing has been reported about his Sunday school attendance at First Unitarian, a far-left activist church that may have helped provide the president’s initial political education.

Andrew Walden, publisher and editor of the Hawaii Free Press, dug up newspaper clippings from that period as well as print editions of “The Roach,” an SDS publication describing the group’s draft-dodging activism, including at the Unitarian church.

The SDS connection to Obama’s boyhood church is instrumental. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama notoriously brushed off Ayers’ extremism as irrelevant since most of the Weathermen radical’s violent actions were carried out when Obama was a kid.

“This is a guy [Ayers] who lives in my neighborhood … the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago – when I was 8 years old – somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense,” Obama said in 2008.

Obama, however, likely learned values during his Sunday school days at the First Unitarian in the early 1970s.

After living from age 7 with his mother and step-father in Indonesia, where he was enrolled as a Muslim under the name “Barry Soetoro” in public schools, Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 11 in 1971 to reside with his grandmother. His mother moved back to Hawaii in 1972 and stayed there until 1977, when she relocated again to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

In his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama recounts on page 17 moving to Hawaii and being enrolled in the Unitarian church.

When Obama’s maternal grandmother died in November 2008, the memorial service, attended by the then-presidential candidate, was held in Honolulu’s Unitarian church.

First Unitarian Church of Honolulu

According to an account in the Tampa Tribune, when Young reminded Obama at his grandmother’s memorial service that he attended the church’s Sunday school as a kid, Obama’s eyes lit up, and he turned to his wife, Michelle, and said, “Hey, that’s right. This is where I went to Sunday school.”

Young recounted to WND in 2009 how the bathrooms for the main sanctuary were in full use after the service. Obama said he had to use the restroom, so Young directed Obama and his secret service detail to instead utilize the upper floor facilities, located at the church’s Sunday school operations.

“When he returned,” Young recalled, “I asked Obama if the Sunday school looked familiar. He said it didn’t, but I explained to him we recently remodeled.”

Notorious hotbed of far-leftist activism

Young came to the Honolulu church in 1995. He claimed to WND the church and Sunday school is non-partisan. However, just as it is now, during Obama’s attendance in the early 1970s, the church was a hotbed of far-leftist activism.

The church notoriously granted sanctuary to U.S. military deserters recruited by the SDS. The deserters’ exploits at the church were front page news for months in 1969, including articles in the New York Times.

Eventually, the police raided the church as well as another nearby Honolulu worship house, Crossroads, that was also providing sanctuary to draft dodgers.

Aside from its early connections to the SDS, Young confirmed to WND his church was instrumental in founding the League of Women Voters and activating a local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The church is still active is liberal politics. It reportedly helped to launch the Save Our Constitution effort to fight the constitutional amendment on same-sex marriages. In 2003, the church sponsored a Death with Dignity poll that collected a 72 percent response in favor of end-of-life legislation.

In February 2003, the Unitarian church celebrated its 50th anniversary at a ceremony replete with “Liberal Religion for 50 Years” T-shirts.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported bumper stickers on cars outside the church gave insight into its members’ beliefs: “No War.” “If you want peace, work for justice.” “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Meet President Obama's Old Girlfriends... Read His Love Notes

theblaze.com/ Jonathon M. Seidl

A new book due out next month, “Barack Obama: The Story,” by Washington Post reporter David Maraniss finally reveals the identity of two of Obama’s long-lost girlfriends. As if that wasn’t fascinating enough, it also includes excerpts of the love letters he sent to one of them and diary entries from the other.

Obama during his Harvard years

“The six page excerpt [published in Vanity Fair] focuses on two of Obama’s early girlfriends. One, named Alex McNear, Obama met at Occidental College before he transferred to Columbia,” the Post writes in a teaser. “She came to New York for a summer, the start of a long-distance, letter-based relationship in 1982.” The other, Genevieve Cook, was a diplomat’s daughter he met at a party.

Alex McNear

Maraniss got a hold of many of the letters Obama sent to McNear. And those letters, Maraniss writes in an excerpt for Vanity Fair, reveal “the loneliness of Obama’s New York existence.”

One letter featured Obama’s reaction to McNear writing a paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

“His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy,” Maraniss writes. Here‘s what he’s talking about:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex? [Emphasis added]

“He was trying to find his place in the whirl of humanity, while at the same time refining the literary riffs that filled up page after page of his journals,” Maraniss adds, then delivers another passage from the same letter:

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

Mysterious “New York girlfriend” revealed

As for the other girlfriend, Genevieve, Obama told Maraniss she’s the mysterious “New York girlfriend” Obama talks about in his “Dreams of my Father” memoir. “She was white,” Obama writes in his book. “She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime.”

That girlfriend’s identity has long been a mystery, which has added to theories that Obama’s book was not his work alone. Maraniss addresses this to a degree, and recognizes Obama has said his “New York girlfriend” was a “compression” of several relationships:

Genevieve Cook (via Washington Post)

Obama did not name this old girlfriend even with a pseu­donym—­she was just “a woman” or “my friend.” That she remained publicly unidentified throughout his rise to national prominence became part of the intrigue of his New York period’s “dark years” narrative. His physical description was imprecise but close. Genevieve is five-seven, lithe and graceful, with auburn-tinged brown hair and flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes. Her voice was confident and soothing. Like many characters in the memoir, he introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race. To that end, he distorted her attitudes and some of their experiences, emphasizing his sense that they came from different worlds. Decades later, during an interview in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description in his memoir was a “compression” of girlfriends, including one who followed Genevieve when he lived in Chicago. [Emphasis added]

Later in the excerpt, Maraniss explains more:

In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend.
One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.None of this happened with Genevieve. She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright.

“It is an incident that happened,” Maraniss quotes Obama as saying in a decades-later interview said, but it wasn’t with her.

“That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them. So that was a consideration. I thought that [the anecdote involving the reaction of a white girlfriend to the angry black play] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends. And so, that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all … so that was an example of sort of editorially how do I figure that out?”

Genevieve, however, takes an important role in the book beyond her identity. Maraniss also includes entries from her diary, which include plenty of fascinating observations about a young Obama and offer a glimpse into his psyche.

“In Barack Obama she had found a kindred soul, dislocated, caught in between,” Maraniss explains. “But she could see that this also led to distance and caution, a sensibility in Barack that she described with a particular metaphor: the veil.”

Her diary gives details:

Friday, March 9, 1984
It’s not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma … but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others’ cards out of their hands for careful inspection—without giving too much of your own away—played with a good poker face. And as you say, it’s not a question of intent on your part—or deliberate withholding—you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart—legitimate, admirable, really—a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … but I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil.
Thursday, March 22
Barack—still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.
Tuesday, April 3
He talked quite a lot about discontent in a quiet sort of way—balancing the tendency to be always the observer, how to effect change, wanting to get past his antipathy to working at B.I.

Later that year she wrote about some of the difficulties the pair had living together:

Monday, December 10
After a week of Barack and I adjusting to each others constant presence and his displacement, I expect that this week will make it hard to be alone again when he has gone [to Hawaii for Christmas]. We got very irritated w/ each other Fri. night and Saturday, talked about it.
Thursday, December 13
Induced a flare-up yesterday between Barack and me over a suddenly felt irritation at doing the breakfast dishes. Then I was less than honest when I broached my irritation w/ Barack in the vein of, I’m going to tell you I’m irritated, but only because I don’t want to be, and expected him to just let it roll off his back … living w/ someone, you inevitably turn your private frustrations out on that person, because that kind of projection is such a basic and pervasively influencing ego defense mechanism. And too, as one is so unaware of the other person’s living reality, I had not taken into account Barack’s feeling of being displaced and in the way. In the end he said I know it’s irritating to have me here, and I wanted to say and mean, no of course it isn’t, but I couldn’t. That has been the biggest surprise, that rather than enjoying his extended presence like a very long weekend, as I think I thought I would, and reveling in the comfort of reliably having someone to eat dinner with, and talk to and go to sleep with, I’ve been …resentful I suppose—no—as he said, impatient and domineering How beneath the surface things are after all.

Genevieve also told Maraniss more about that time in both her and Obama’s lives in an interview. According to her, Obama struggled heavily with finding his identity, so much so that “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body”:

Genevieve and Barack talked about race quite often, as part of his inner need to find a sense of belonging. She sympathized and encouraged his search for identity. If she felt like an outsider, he was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? He confessed to her that at times “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” At some point that summer she realized that, “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black.

“Memoir and biography are two very different things,” Maraniss concludes in an interview with Vanity Fair. “In the introduction to ‘Barack Obama: The Story,’ I say that his memoir is a remarkably insightful exploration of his internal struggle but should not be read as rigorous factual history.”

And that alone could sell books. For both men.

You can read the entire fascinating article from Vanity Fair here.

Four years later Clinton warms Obama

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Vice President David Petraeus? | Shadow Government

Shadow Government/By Paul Miller  

After Republican leaders rightly criticized Senator Obama, a former state legislator with merely two years in the U.S. Senate, for being unqualified to be commander-in-chief and leader of the free world during the 2008 campaign, it would be an irony if they selected Marco Rubio, a former state legislator with merely two years in the U.S. Senate, as vice president in the 2012 election.

Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie will almost certainly not be the vice presidential nominee for the simple reason that they don't want to be president. Both declined to run for the top job because, if rumors are to be believed, they were unwilling to undergo the rigors and personal scrutiny that a presidential campaign brings. If they were unwilling to do so for the presidency, why would they do so for the much lesser prize of the vice presidency?

Paul Ryan, meanwhile, is too valuable to the GOP in the House. As one of the more serious-minded legislators in the party, he would be wasted on the vice presidency.

Besides which, the vice presidential nominee almost never makes an actual difference in the election. The great myth is that the presidential nominee should pick a VP from a swing state in order to win more votes there. The problem is, that never happens. Perhaps once in American history has the VP delivered his state and swung an election: LBJ bringing Texas to give JFK the prize in 1960. That's it, just once.

So it comes down to this: Who is actually qualified to be president? That's the question Mitt Romney should be asking in selecting his running mate. That's the only criterion that should really matter. There are very few people in the country with a plausible claim to being qualified for the presidency. Unfortunately, Bob Gates has definitively retired, reducing the number of candidates by one.

That leaves David Petraeus. Petraeus served as commanding general of both wars the U.S. fought over the last decade, headed up central command, and is now director of the CIA. And, of course, he had the courage and professionalism to serve in a deeply unpopular war and, remarkably, come out with his reputation enhanced. Probably no person alive has a better grasp of the international situation, America's role in the world, and the limitations and capabilities of American power.

Petraeus has nearly universal name recognition and is one of the most well-respected figures in the country. A year ago only 11 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him, according to Gallup, half that of Christie. And as a non-partisan figure he has not been tarnished by the partisanship and mud-slinging of recent years. Additionally, Petraeus would bring foreign policy expertise to the ticket, balancing Romney's focus on economic issues. If Obama really intends to claim that his foreign policy accomplishments should earn voters' respect, there is no one in the country with more credibility than Petraeus to take Obama's argument apart.

He would bring gravitas and seriousness to a campaign season that, so far, has been more memorable for the parade of not serious GOP challengers who, thankfully, had the decency to drop out. His intelligence and ethic of public service would be a good match for Romney's own. I admit "Romney-Rubio" has a nice, almost poetic ring to it; it rolls off the tongue beautifully. "Romney-Petraeus" has too many syllables. It sounds like something out of a technical manual, or a nickname for a loophole in the tax code. On the other hand, they might actually govern competently, which counts for something.

Inside the U.S. Secret Service - National Geographic

Marco Rubio: 'If I Do a Good Job as Vice President'

By ForaTv

Mail - Did somebody say Colombian prostitutes?

Possible security breach: Secret Service agents had president’s schedule in rooms

By Isolde Raftery, msnbc.com

The Secret Service agents who brought prostitutes back to their hotel rooms in Colombia last week had copies of the president’s schedule in their rooms, which raises the issue of a potential security breach, officials told Reuters.

Secret Service personnel were in Cartagena in advance of President Barack Obama’s arrival at the Summit of the Americas, a trade conference, over the weekend. At least 11 were placed on administrative leave and flown back to the United States on Saturday when it came to light that they had hired prostitutes. Their security clearances have since been pulled, NBC News has learned.

The story might have been kept a secret had it not been for a disgruntled woman who claimed she had not been paid by one of the agents. She argued with two Secret Service agents and then went to Colombian police. Local police reported the matter to the U.S. Embassy, Reuters reported.  

 

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Jeb Bush propone a Marco Rubio como candidato a vice presidente

elnuevoherald.com/ Alfonso Chardy

El ex gobernador Jeb Bush, uno de los pilares republicanos de la Florida, ha propuesto que si Mitt Romney se convierte en el candidato a la presidencia elija al senador cubanoamericano Marco Rubio como su compañero de fórmula y primer candidato hispano a vicepresidente.

En una entrevista el miércoles al diario Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Bush declaró que Rubio sería el compañero ideal para Romney porque es el “mejor orador” en la actual política estadounidense. También señaló que proyectaría una imagen dinámica y daría optimismo al mensaje de los conservadores.

“Marco Rubio”, dijo Bush al diario, es “dinámico, alegre, disciplinado y de principios”.

“Es el mejor orador de la política estadounidense hoy, un buen hombre de familia”, precisó.‘‘

Agregó que Rubio, quien en una ocasión fue voluntario en una de sus campañas para gobernador, no es sólo “un conservador consistente sino que ha logrado encontrar la forma de comunicar un mensaje conservador lleno de esperanza y optimismo”.

Bush destacó que él no tiene ambiciones a la vicepresidencia y reiteró que Rubio es la mejor opción.

Jaryn Emhof, secretaria de prensa de Bush, confirmó las declaraciones el jueves a El Nuevo Herald.

A su vez, Alex Burgos, vocero de Rubio en Washington, dijo que éste no tiene intención de ser candidato a la vicepresidencia.

“Como el senador Rubio ha dicho en muchas ocasiones, él no será el candidato a la vicepresidencia”, dijo Burgos.

Algunos analistas opinan que la negativa de Rubio puede ser una formalidad, a fin de no lucir ansioso por el cargo.

La mención de Bush es sumamente significativa. El miércoles, el ex gobernador brindó su respaldo a Romney.

JFK's Women: The Scandals [Documentary]

Dick Cheney recovering after heart transplant

By NBC News, msnbc.com and news services

Updated at 7:14 p.m. ET: Former Vice President Dick Cheney was recovering Saturday at a hospital in Falls Church, Va., after undergoing a heart transplant, his office said.

Cheney was in the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, his office said in a statement.

Cheney, 71, who served as vice president in the George W. Bush administration, has had a long history of heart trouble and has been on the cardiac transplant list for more than 20 months.  More >>

Obama Not Natural Born

Uploaded by freedom1776flag

Never Before Seen 1991 Video Of A Harvard Protest Shows Barack Obama Defending A Radical Law Professor

Do I miss something?
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Business Insider/ Michael Brendan Dougherty

Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed discovered this little gem of a video, in which then-law student Barack Obama spoke at a protest in favor of Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell. 

Kaczynski explains what the protest was all about. 

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of "critical race theory," which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard's denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school's professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — "until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty," and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.

Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as "the first black president." He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.

Probably the most amazing thing about it is the fact that Obama's speech-giving style is so little changed since his days at Harvard. Obama has the same soaring cadence, dramatic pauses, and light-hearted jokes that you find in almost every one of his speeches. 

Here's the video:

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-1991-video-of-a-harvard-protest-shows-barack-obama-has-always-given-great-speeches-2012-3?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business%20Insider%20Select&utm_campaign=BI%20Select%20Recurring%202012-03-07#ixzz1oTJ3v582