President Barack Obama will be accompanied by his wife Michelle and daughters Malia, 12, and Sasha, nine, and are expected to stay at the historic Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark.

Bill Burton, the deputy White House press secretary, said that the US president was “going to spend a little time recharging his batteries” at the Massachusetts island ahead of the November midterm elections.

Obama Vacation

“There will be some hiking, some time at the beach, some time at the ice cream store – all the sort of things you do when you’re at Martha’s Vineyard. You enjoy the people and the good food.”

He is also expected to work on his swing at Mink Meadows golf club in Vineyard Haven and to work out every day, as he did when the First Family visited Martha’s Vineyard last year.

The tally of vacation days for an American president has become a contentious issue in recent years. President Bill Clinton conducted a poll about where best to holiday. President George W. Bush spent a total of 879 days on holiday in his eight years in office, according to Mark Knoller of CBS, the unofficial statistician of the presidency.

Mr Bush was usually working at his Prairie Chapel ranch in Texas, which was named the “Western White House” during his long summers there when he was accompanied by dozens of staff.

Mr Obama’s holidays have been particularly scrutinised in the last year, as he has come under fire for his handling of the US economy as well as the Louisiana oil spill. A poll released this week found that only four in 10 approve of his handling of the economy.

He was questioned last year for choosing to stay on the elitist Martha’s Vineyard during a severe recession, while in July he was criticised for taking his family to Maine rather than visit the Gulf of Mexico coast line. He subsequently took his family to Florida last weekend.

Although he appears to take more holidays than his predecessors, they have usually been very short. His five this year will total just 20 days – he did not accompany his wife and youngest daughter to Marbella, Spain. As well as Florida, Maine, and an 11-day stay in Hawaii over Christmas and New Year, he and his wife spent two days in Asheville, North Carolina in April.

His holidays also tend to be interrupted by major events. During the President’s first holiday of the year in his native Hawaii he spent much of his time grappling with the fallout from the failed terrorist attack by the Christmas Day “underpants bomber”. His last break in Martha’s Vineyard was interrupted by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy.

Source:  Telegraph

Filmmaker Spike Lee appeared on MSNBC’s “Countdown” Tuesday night to discuss his new documentary on Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill and their effects on New Orleans. Unsurprisingly, he had some sharp critiques at the ready.

Obama Puppet for BP Says Spike Lee

Lee said that American greed stood to bring down the country: “We have people in office appointed and voted in and people in big business positions who only care about the dollar bill, and there are people [who] get harmed, people [who] die. They say that’s the cost of doing business.”

Lee also said that he thinks the U.S. government has been a puppet for BP.

(Excerpt) Read More Here

The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation, according to an audit released Tuesday.

The report by the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction offers a compelling look at continued laxness in how such funds were being spent in a country where people complain basic services like electricity and clean water are sharply lacking seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The audit found that shoddy record keeping by the Defense Department left the Pentagon unable to fully account for $8.7 billion it withdrew between 2004 and 2007 from a special fund set up by the U.N. Security Council. Of that amount, Pentagon “could not provide documentation to substantiate how it spent $2.6 billion.”

The funds are separate from the $53 billion allocated by Congress for rebuilding Iraq.

The report comes at a critical time for Iraq, which four months after inconclusive elections squabbling political factions have still not agreed on a new government.

Despite security gains made since 2008, bombings remain near a daily occurrence that compound the frustrations and fears of Iraqis increasingly weary of the political crisis — one many say reflects how the country’s politicians are more interested in their own interests than those of the nation.

The continuing impasse was highlighted on Tuesday when Iraqi lawmakers gathered for the second time this month only to indefinitely postpone the parliamentary session because there was still no decision on the new government.

Acting speaker Fouad Massoum told reporters that the postponement was designed to give the political blocs more time to discuss contentious issues and agree on the distribution of positions in the new government.

“With every delay, the suffering of the Iraqi people and security risks are increasing,” lawmaker Salman al-Jumaili told reporters, criticizing the move.

The U.S. audit is unlikely to do anything but further stoke that frustration felt by Iraqis who continue to suffer from poor infrastructure despite the billions spent.

The audit cited a number of factors behind the inability to account for most of the money withdrawn by the Pentagon from the Development Fund for Iraq.

It said most of the Defense Department organizations that received DFI money failed to set up Treasury Department accounts, as required.

In addition, it said no Defense Department organization was designated as the main body to oversee how the funds were accounted for or spent.

“The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss,” the report said.

Calls to Iraqi officials for comment went unanswered.

The Defense Department, in responses attached to the audit, said it agreed with the recommendations laid out in the report about establishing better guidelines for monitoring such funds, including appointing an organization to be responsible for overseeing such funds mostly likely by November.

The audit found that the U.S. continues to hold about $34.3 million of the money even though it was required to return it to the Iraqi government.

The audit did not indicate that investigators believed there were any instances of fraud involved in the spending of these funds.

The DFI includes revenues from Iraq’s oil and gas exports, as well as frozen Iraqi assets and surplus funds from the now-defunct, Saddam Hussein-era oil-for-food program.

With the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq shortly after the start of the U.S. invasion in 2003 until mid-2004, about $20 billion was placed into the account.

The Iraqi government had agreed to allow the U.S. continued access to the funds after the CPA was dissolved in 2004, but it revoked that authority in December 2007.

In other developments, seven people were killed in a series of bombings and apparent assassinations in Baghdad and Mosul, a northern city where al-Qaida is believed to still have a strong presence. Among those killed were two women shot dead in their home by gunmen and a Baghdad electricity official who died of wounds sustained after a morning roadside bombing.

Source

Scottish officials say US memo giving grudging support to freeing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi undermines president’s criticisms

Barack Obama is under growing pressure to release a letter that reveals the US grudgingly supported freeing the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds.

The letter was sent to Scottish ministers by a senior diplomat at the US embassy in London last August, eight days before Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from prison because he was dying from inoperable prostate cancer.

Obama’s administration has refused to allow publication of the letter, in which the US says allowing Megrahi to live at home in Scotland would be “far preferable” to sending him back to Libya under the prisoner transfer deal brokered by former prime minister Tony Blair in 2007.

(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk …

His message for the fall elections, which are looking ominous for his Democrats, is that Republicans caused the nation’s economic troubles, but he and the Democrats are starting to fix them. So stick with the Democrats and don’t go back to the GOP.

Things Could Be Worse Will Be Obama's Message To Voters

“This is a choice between the policies that led us into the mess or the policies that are leading out of the mess,” Obama said recently in Las Vegas.

Trouble is, it’s a tough sell to voters who’ve seen little progress.

Unemployment is stuck near double digits and polls show many voters have decided Obama’s policies are to blame, not his predecessor’s.

Obama often frames the argument by saying that Republicans had their chance to drive, then drove the car into a ditch and shouldn’t get the keys back. But voters may be concluding that Democrats, who control the White House and both chambers of Congress, have had their chance at the wheel, too, and haven’t gotten very far.

“From the American public’s point of view, the people in charge at this point are the people who own the problem,” said Andrew Kohut, head of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

Obama’s challenge for the next four months is to turn that perception around.

So he’s traveled, from Buffalo, N.Y., to San Francisco, reminding voters of the mess he faced when he took office: a shrinking economy, lost jobs, weak markets, an economic crisis becoming international in scope.

Now, even though unemployment hasn’t dropped to the 8 percent level the administration once projected, the economy is gradually picking up and adding jobs, the president says. Putting Republicans in power, he contends, would reverse the momentum.

But the White House knows it can’t just be about blaming George W. Bush, though the former president’s enduring unpopularity helps Obama’s case. Obama must try to take it a step further and get voters to view Republicans now running for office as little more than extensions of Bush who would advance the ex-president’s same policies.

“This isn’t about relitigating history,” said Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. “This is about history repeating itself.”

Will the strategy work in an election year roiling with anti-incumbent sentiment? That’s not yet clear, though it hasn’t appeared to boost Democrats’ standing much so far. Midterm elections typically deal a drubbing to the president’s party anyway, and for Democrats it could mean losing control of the House.

Republicans say they intend to keep the focus on Obama’s policies, which they cast as deficit-busting, big-government boondoggles. “Democrats can attempt to spin it any way they want, but unfortunately for them this election is going to be a referendum on the president and his party’s failed economic policies,” said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

But Obama’s pickings were slim when it came to campaign themes.

The narrative that worked so well when Obama was a presidential candidate offering himself as a transformational figure who could change Washington is no longer at his disposal. He can hardly claim to have delivered on that promise because he hasn’t changed Washington, at least not much, as he’s acknowledged.

Obama’s stacked up a remarkable, if controversial, string of legislative successes, from last year’s economic stimulus bill to the health care law and now the financial overhaul bill. But his vaunted eloquence on the campaign trail has often seemed to desert him as he’s tried to sell those policies to the public. To the 14.6 million people out of work nothing else much matters anyway.

At the same time, the desire for change that Obama helped ignite is still burning. But this time it may work against him. As Bush recognized shortly before leaving office, calling for change is a luxury denied to incumbents.

“I was the guy in 2000 who campaigned for change. I campaigned for change when I ran for governor of Texas. The only time I really didn’t campaign for change is when I was running for re-election,” Bush told ABC News in December 2008.

In the end, trying to convince voters that things are moving in the right direction, although not as fast as he or they would like, might be the only message Obama can reach for.

“Is it the best that they can do, I think, is really the question. And I’d have to say yes, it is,” said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.

So Obama tells voters every chance he gets that things would be a lot worse if not for the stimulus bill and other steps he took. At least the recession never became a depression, the president says.

Proving a negative is a hard argument to make, but Obama keeps at it. He has little choice.

Sometimes, the president sounds confident the message will get through.

“Americans don’t have selective memory,” Obama told NBC News recently. They’ll remember “the policies that got us into this mess as well.”

Other times, he doesn’t sound so sure.

“I know that sometimes people don’t remember how bad it was, and how bad it could have been,” Obama said in Racine, Wis.

So this election year, instead of beckoning voters to change the future, Obama is just hoping they’ll remember the past.

Source

Mr Obama’s forays this week will include visits to Michigan plants of GM and Chrysler, both of which were kept alive by last year’s federal bail-out and are now adding jobs, and a trip to New Jersey to highlight the effects of last year’s $787bn stimulus.

Mr Obama’s trips follow an increasingly grim pattern of poll findings, which show deep-rooted scepticism among the US public about the effects of the stimulus and his approach to the economy in general.

According to a Pew Research poll last week, only 35 per cent of Democratic voters believe the stimulus “helped keep unemployment from getting worse”.

In spite of the ubiquitous billboards proclaiming infrastructure work funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, only 45 per cent of Democrats believe it has improved roads and bridges in their area.

More ominously for the White House, a majority of Americans believe the administration’s priorities have been skewed towards companies and the wealthy.

Fifty-three per cent said Washington’s economic policies have helped large banks “a great deal” and 31 per cent felt the wealthy had benefited similarly. This compares with only 7 per cent believing Mr Obama had helped the poor and 2 per cent that he had helped the middle classes “a great deal”.

Given that the large majority of Democrats agree with these statements, Mr Obama faces an even steeper hill than many had supposed in the build up to the mid-term elections in November.

The president’s biggest problem will be to convince core Democratic voters that it is worth coming out to vote. Polls also showed a widening “enthusiasm gap” between motivated Republicans and indifferent Democrats.

“We can’t afford to slide backwards,” Mr Obama told the Netroots convention in Las Vegas, a group of liberal bloggers and activists who wield large influence over the Democratic base, in a recorded message on Saturday.

“That’s the choice America faces this November, between going back to the policies that led us into the mess and moving forward with the policies that are getting us out.”

The gap between what Mr Obama has achieved in Washington over the past 18 months, including the largest stimulus in history, a healthcare reform bill and a Wall Street bill that he signed into law last week, and what voters believe about Washington is wide and growing.

Economists said there was little Mr Obama could do between now and November to change the facts on the ground, which continue to be dominated by the near double-digit rate of unemployment. But the White House believes that it can, at least, tarnish the ­Republican party for ­having allegedly failed to mend its ways.

Last week’s Senate vote extending unemployment insurance to the long-term jobless, much of which will be backdated after months of wrangling over the $34bn (£22bn, €26bn) measure, will be highlighted as a case in point. It came with just two Republican votes – from Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

The White House also believes it can remind voters of the Republican party’s history by forcing them to vote some time before November on prolonging the tax cuts for the wealthy that were pushed through by George W. Bush.

The Democrats will also try to push through a bill to incentivise banks to lend more to small businesses, which only 2 per cent of Americans believe have been helped a “great deal” by Mr Obama, according to Pew. Again, Republicans oppose the measure.

“[Republicans] would permanently keep in place the tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans – the same tax cuts that have added hundreds of billions to our debt,” Mr Obama said in his weekly address to the nation at the weekend. “These are not new ideas. They are the same policies that led us into this recession.”

Source

He was giving the key note speech at a Washington Institute For Near East Policy and started it out with a “joke” that borders on anti-Semitic, teaching the crowd that Jews are just greedy merchants in the same vein as Shakespeare’s Shylock…

From Yid With Lid Blog

Barack Obama Plays Race Card for 2010 Election

Obama speaks with unusual demographic frankness about his coalition in his appeal to “young people, African-Amerins, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 [to]  stand together once again.”

Watch Video Here

Source:  Politico

President Barack Obama doesn’t plan at this time to give back almost $1 million in campaign contributions from employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

“We make these decisions on a case-by-case basis, and in this case we have not accepted contributions from specific individuals accused of wrongdoing, nor have we advocated for positions that big Wall Street banks generally favor,” Hari Sevugan, a Democratic National Committee spokesman, said in a statement.

Corruption

Obama, 48, received the contributions in 2007 and 2008 for his White House bid.

Donations from the bank’s employees have become an issue for political candidates from both parties after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a fraud lawsuit April 16 against Goldman Sachs.

Obama was asked about the contributions in an interview yesterday with CNBC.

“I got a lot of money from a lot of people,” he said. “And the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors all across the country.”

Obama said his desire to change Wall Street rules was clear throughout the campaign.

“Anybody who gave me money during the course of my campaign knew that I was on record, again in 2007 and 2008, pushing very strongly that we needed to reform how Wall Street did business,” he said.

Biggest Money Sources

Obama received the money from employees and their family members, making Goldman Sachs second only to the University of California as his biggest source for donors in 2007 and 2008, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.

In the president’s adopted home state of Illinois, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat Obama once held has said he will return about $21,000 from Goldman Sachs employees.

Mark Kirk, a five-term congressman from Chicago’s northern suburbs, said he wanted to “err on the side of caution” as the SEC case unfolded and would return the money.

Kirk announced the decision after his Democratic opponent, Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, called on him to give back the contributions.

Obama and Democrats in Congress are proposing the most sweeping changes to financial regulation since the Great Depression and the president plans to deliver a speech on the subject today at the Cooper Union in New York.

Goldman Contributions

Kirk ranks sixth so far among House and Senate candidates for donations from Goldman employees during the 2010 election cycle, the center’s data shows. The top five are Democratic Congressman Michael McMahon of New York, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, and three other New York Democrats: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Representative Scott Murphy and Senator Charles Schumer.

Goldman Sachs and its employees and family members gave $5.9 million to candidates in the 2007-2008 election cycle, the Center for Responsive Politics data shows. Three-quarters of that went to Democrats, the non-partisan group said.

The SEC filed a civil suit alleging Goldman failed to tell investors in a 2007 collateralized debt obligation that hedge fund Paulson & Co., which planned to bet against the CDO, helped select the underlying assets. The bank has denied the SEC’s accusations.

For Obama, Wall Street provided three of his seven biggest sources of contributors for the 2008 presidential campaign. In 2007 and 2008, Goldman Sachs employees and family members gave him $994,795, Citigroup Inc. $701,290, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. $695,132.

Source:  Bloomberg

While Goldman Sachs’ lawyers negotiated with the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially explosive civil fraud charges, Goldman’s chief executive visited the White House at least four times.

Goldman Sachs Boss Visited White House at least four times

White House logs show that Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein traveled to Washington for at least two events with President Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign received $994,795 in donations from Goldman’s political action committee, its employees and their relatives. He also met twice with Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers.

No evidence has surfaced to suggest that Blankfein or any other Goldman executive raised the SEC case with the president or his aides. SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro said in a statement Wednesday that the SEC doesn’t coordinate enforcement actions with the White House or other political bodies.