Scott's DiaTribes » Barack Obama

Obama and Ignatieff dicuss Omar Khadr.

Scott Tribe — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:48:15 +0000

True to his word, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and (presumably) Bob Rae discussed Omar Khadr with the President today. Here’s part of the discussion President Obama had with Iggy over the Khadr file, as made public by the Liberal leader:

The leader of the official Opposition said Obama told him that the detainees are being classified at different levels. But he did not indicate in which category Khadr was being placed. The president indicated he “was glad to know that the Canadian party is concerned about Mr. Khadr,” Ignatieff said. Ignatieff (also) said he told Obama if the Liberals form a government in the future that “we would be helpful to the Americans in respect of this and other matters relating to getting us beyond the Guantanamo Bay world.”

As Harper is trying to still ignore this issue, it’s good that Ignatieff did raise it and bring it both to the public’s and the President’s attention. That subtle little bit at the end there by Iggy saying that the Liberals would do all they could to help Obama close down Guantanamo was also a subtle little dig at the total inaction on the part of the current Conservative government, and a way of letting Obama and his administration know that Liberals believe part of this process is repatriating Omar Khadr.

UPDATE: H/T to Impolitical about finding the CTV interview with Bob Rae’s impressions of the meeting with Obama, and the issues discussed.

UPDATE 2: Nice picture of Iggy and Obama over at Warren’s site. A good picture for Ignatieff to keep when he becomes Prime Minister.

Canadians can lobby Obama to not exempt tarsands from environmental regulations

Scott Tribe — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:30:16 +0000

I saw this link mentioned by a prominent left-wing columnist at Facebook, and was very interested in it.

This is a picture of a proposed ad Avaaz.org wishes to run in the Wednesday version of the Washington Post a day before Obama is scheduled to visit Canada (to prevent eye injury from squinting, click on ad to enlarge and read in full):

Their mission statement on this ad reads as follows:

When Barack Obama visits Canada on Thursday, Harper will desperately try to push him to agree to exempt dirty tar sands oil from global regulation – effectively undermining the global deal we need to stop catastrophic climate change. We need to make it clear to Obama that Canada’s citizens do not support our Prime Minister’s climate wrecking. Scroll down to help fund an ad in the Washington Post the day before Obama leaves. There will be a lot of media attention, so our message will get heard if we can place a large ad funded by thousands of Canadians.

If you support this ad and its message, here is where you can go to contribute.

Yes they did.

Scott Tribe — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:14:00 +0000

Congratulations to the President-elect and Vice-President elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The last 8 years of Bush misery are now over and will soon be a distant memory.

Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama

Scott Tribe — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:22:59 +0000

I’ve been a tad busy today, so I didn’t hear about retired General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama until this afternoon. That’s big news for Obama, and bad news for Mccain. I know there are folks down there on the progressive side of the ledger who still say that Powell was complicit in the Bush Administration’s false information on Iraq and will never forgive him for that, but opinion polls in the US still show him with a very high favourable rating amongst the American public, and this endorsement will do a lot for independents and moderate Republican voters, as well as military voters still undecided on who to vote for.

I’m sure most of you have seen the endorsement he gave on Meet the Press already, but I found his post-interview to be even more revealing of why he endorsed Obama. He really slammed his own Republican Party for not running on issues and for drifting too far to the right-wing, and questioning the judgement of McCain for his pick of Sarah Palin as well as his reaction to the financial crisis.

Snap polls immediately after debate favour Obama

Scott Tribe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:29:04 +0000

I didn’t watch the Mccain/Obama debate last night, so I don’t have an opinion on who won or who lost, but I note that all the snap polls and study groups this AM favour Obama. Some mention is made of how McCain came across as angry and not ever looking at Obama while debating.

So, if you watched the debate, what was your impression?

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Wow.

Scott Tribe — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:09:32 +0000

I just finished watching Barack Obama’s acceptance speech as candidate for the Democrats as President Of the United States.

Wow.

This wasn’t just soaring rhetoric; he laid out some of the policies he wanted to do, and he was taking it to John McCain and the Republicans and going head-on against the attacks they’ve been levelling against him. He was also being pretty gutsy in laying out that he respected those who disagreed with him on gay marriage, guns, abortion, social security, etc. Talk about being bold for bringing up all those right-wing boogeymen topics.

Full text of speech here, but you really need to see it to capture the significance of the speech. I’d say historic, but I’ll wait to use that phrase if/when he’s elected as President of the United States, and I do believe he will be. I’ve said elsewhere that in the end, I think Obama is going to get over 300 Electoral Votes and win comfortably. If he keeps up performances like tonight, and performs this way in the debates, McCain and the Republicans won’t know what hit them.

UPDATE: NBC’s Chuck Todd details how the response from the McCain camp shows even they were taken aback by the power of this speech:

UPDATE 2: Check out what a Republican consultant said on CNN tonight: “whoever didn’t get picked for Republican VP today may be a lucky Republican.”

Obama’s move to the centre/right.

Scott Tribe — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:23:30 +0000

There’s been a backlash against Barack Obama in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party for his reversal on the controversial FISA legislation.� He changed course from a year ago when he vowed to oppose this law from passing and supported the passage of this law that offers retroactive immunity to telecom companies for obeying illegal orders by President Bush and his administration to eavesdrop on American citizens in the name of fighting terrorism,� without a warrant, back several years ago.

This new FISA law is a sore spot for libertarians and liberals alike because it not only prevents Americans from suing these telecom companies for allowing that illegal activity, but it more importantly will cover up what exactly Bush and his administration were doing� (and there has been some disclosure that Bush and his administration were getting the telecoms to do this BEFORE� Sept 11, 2001 occurred); another sore spot is that this law is written in a way that more or less forces the FISA court to rubber-stamp any of this activity.

Many liberal/progressive Democrats feel that Obama has helped to push the country back to pre-Richard Nixon days, when there were basically no laws or rules in place on spying on Americans.� The US administration and its law enforcement agencies could spy at will back then, which is why after Watergate and its revelations, the original FISA Court was brought into existence in the first place. This new FISA law seems to revert back to those ugly days, and� the outrage amongst the liberal Democratic bloggers was so great, Obama was forced to get on his own website and issue a statement to them why he voted the way he did – an explanation that not many believed or accepted. Many charge him with “caving” in to Republican fear-mongering.

It is fair to point out that it wasn�t just him that caved on this FISA vote – the Democratic Congress leadership did as well – most likely as an attempt to prevent being called “wimps” on national security and to try and prevent that being used as an attack either on them or on Obama in the upcoming congressional and presidential elections. In essence, they caved on the issue for political expediency and political cover, rather then stand up and fight this on principle.

Obama knows (as do the Democratic leaders) that he has the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in a bind. They�re sick of Bush, so he�s taking the rather safe calculation that despite FISA, they won�t stay at home or vote for McCain. I don�t think this cave-in was necessary, (several polls on this issue showed that the US public did not like what the US government and the telecoms were doing) but Democrats aren�t exactly renowned for having spines when faced with either caving or standing up to Republican fear-mongering on national security.

There is already talk amongst the Democratic blogosphere of making an example of some of the Democratic enablers in Congress of this new law by running challengers against them the next time Democratic primaries roll around (think of them as the same as the party elections up here to select candidates for each riding).� Will they do the same thing to Obama and or vote for Mccain, or vote for the minor candidates, or not vote at all? I find that highly unlikely.� While the US is in a 2 party setup, this is going to occur. The liberal Democrats have a choice: either try to get more progressives to run and get elected to Congress and reform the party from within, or else they’ll need to split and form a “Progressive Party”.� For now, they’ve chosen the former.

As for the new FISA law, like the Military Commissions Act, it will probably take a split decision Supreme Court decision to overturn this law, rather then a Congress that abdicated its responsibilities, and that is what the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations are going to ask the US Supreme Court to do. In the meantime, progressives in the US are going to have hold their noses and vote for Obama, because if they don’t, their reward for punishing Obama is 4 more years of Republican rule – at least at the presidency – and a continuation of the Bush policies.

The US Democratic Race is over – Hillary to endorse Obama this weekend.

Scott Tribe — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:44:39 +0000

Check it out:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will endorse Senator Barack Obama on Saturday, bringing a close to her 17-month campaign for the White House, aides said. Her decision came after Democrats urged her Wednesday to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around Mr. Obama. Howard Wolfson, one of Mrs. Clinton�s chief strategists, and other aides said she would express support for Mr. Obama and party unity at an event in Washington that day. One adviser said Mrs. Clinton would concede defeat, congratulate Mr. Obama and proclaim him the party�s nominee, while pledging to do what was needed to assure his victory in November.

Congratulations to Hillary Clinton for a hard-fought campaign, and congratulations as well for finally realizing the stark numbers reality of the situation and not stretching this into a Convention fight in August.

Whitewash?

Scott Tribe — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:38:40 +0000

I agree with a couple of my blogging acquaintances – there are other stories worth discussing besides Bernier. It appears from this story by Jim Travers that there are folks inside the civil service not very happy with the Lynch Report which basically claimed it couldn’t find who leaked the Canadian government’s notes questioning Barack Obama’s truthfulness on re-opening NAFTA to the Associated Press. Those people have started talking , and according to them, the source of the leak appears to have come directly from the PMO, and it started� with them sending it to a Republican friend of theirs in Washington:

Multiple sources say the Canadian note questioning the Democrat frontrunner’s public promise to reopen NAFTA was leaked from the Prime Minister’s Office to a Republican contact before it made American headline news…Contradicting Friday’s inconclusive report, they claim the controversial memo was slipped to the son of Wisconsin Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. Frank Sensenbrenner is well connected to Harper’s inner circle and, at Ottawa’s insistence, was briefly on contract with Canada’s Washington embassy to work on congressional relations. Contacted yesterday morning, Frank Sensenbrenner did not seem surprised and agreed to an afternoon interview. But he did not call at the agreed time and did not respond to repeated emails.

As Impolitical does, I also point to this alleged transfer of the document — this memo apparently was passed by someone in Lynch’s office to a PMP official, who gave it to Ian Brodie, the chief aide to Harper, and then a few days later that memo got faxed to the Associated Press. Someone in Lynch’s office passed this on, but the investigation of who leaked this was given to Lynch himself – Harper’s top deputy minister in the civil service?

That screams whitewash or cover up to me.� It also screams that folks in the PMO/PCO were trying to give their Republican buddies in Washington a helping hand in trying to cripple Obama’s chances at winning� the presidency. If he does win the Presidency in November, and our current Cons. government is still here in power (perish the thought), does anyone not think Obama isn’t exactly going to be appreciative of the meddling in that election the� Canadian Conservative government apparently tried to do?

Hopefully, that irritant will be gone by then, in the form of an election of our own ridding this land of the Conservative stain that has developed in Ottawa.

PS – I know Bernier is still a big story, but I’d hope to see some of the opposition questions today directed at the government in QP over this.

Book it, bank it!

Scott Tribe — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:51:39 +0000

Obama IS going to be the Democratic candidate for the President of the United States. I’ve been saying that for a while now whenever I came across skeptics or Hillary supporters up here claiming he couldn’t or wouldn’t win the Democratic race, and I think the voting results a couple of days ago should remove all doubt. The mainstream media in the US has come around to that conclusion too, and the TIME front-page article is one example.

He has weathered Jeremiah Wright (twice), and has shown that while he bent a bit, he did not break.� There were predictions by media down south and up here and in some of the blogs that these episodes would finish him, or show his “unelectability”, but he has proved them wrong.� I believe he will prove them wrong again in the Fall campaign.

Once Dems unite behind Obama and focus their vitriol on McCain and expose him for the hypocrite he’s been on many issues, not to mention wanting to stay in Iraq for 100 years or as long as it takes – whatever comes first -� not to mention voters wanting a break from the current administration under a very unpopular President, I think McCain is going to get decisively beaten by Obama. The� congress, I predict,� is also going to elect increased Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, because of the bad brandname the Republicans have right now, but also because Obama is going to have long coattails for Democratic candidates to use to get elected – particularly out in the Midwest and West.

That will be my new “book it, bank it” statement; I believe both the legislative and executive branch of government will be in solid Democratic hands come the end of that election, with President Obama leading the way. Hopefully by then, not only will we have a progressive government and President in place in Washington DC, but we will have a progressive government in Ottawa as well to compliment him on the things that need to be worked on urgently by North America – global warming/climate change being a key one.

UPDATE@2:46pm: Some of the bloggers up here like Jason who preferred Hillary are starting to think it’s time for Clinton to step down – moreso because some of the race language she’s bringing into this. Democratic bloggers down south and pundits are also reacting harshly to this. What (the) Clinton(s) is (are) now doing is nothing but destructive politics.