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Fox News Shuns Obama Q&A, MSNBC Gets Snitty When He Encourages Senators To Turn Off TV

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/03/fox-news-shuns-obama-qa_n_447537.html

The hopes and prospects for peace aren't well aligned -- not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.

The prize "seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership," Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.

The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.

The Nobel committee's concerns were valid. They singled out Obama's rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.

Right now Iran's nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama's efforts to contain Iran.

The administration of US President Barack Obama is seeking reforms to the country's healthcare system, in order to give 46 million uninsured Americans the opportunity to at last have coverage in the event of illness. Many of those who are uninsured are people with mental illness who were released from health facilities - and on to the streets with nowhere to go - during the 1970s. A large number of these unsupported people turned to crime to make ends meet, and were later imprisoned.

The House has approved a nearly $97 billion spending bill funding the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The measure includes $1 billion in military and economic assistance to Pakistan. Lawmakers stripped a provision that would have granted $80 million toward the closure the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The final vote was 368-to-60, with a bloc of fifty-one antiwar Democrats voting in opposition. The Senate Appropriations Committee, meanwhile, has approved a $93 billion version of the bill that includes the Guantanamo funding but bars the transfer of any prisoners to US soil.

Read more at Democracy Now

Peter Schiff Obama is Digging us into a deeper hole

That's what president Obama is giving the Wall Street banks. Politico did not use good judgment in running this "Inside Obama's bank CEOs meeting," piece.

The basic point is that everyone who took part in this meeting had an interest in making it appear as though President Obama is taking a hard line with the banks. After all, the rich bankers who wrecked the economy are not very popular right now. Most people probably do not consider President Obama's plan to give them another trillion dollar bailout (equal to 300 million SCHIP kid year years) the best use of taxpayer dollars as the unemployment rate rises towards double-digit levels.

It serves both the bankers and President Obama to have President Obama seen as being tough on the banks, even as he hands them this money. Maybe he really only did give the bankers one glass of water and maybe he really did speak sharply to them. But, the bank chieftains were probably happier with this reception than they would have been with a gourmet lunch and music that didn't come with the $1 trillion.