Entries for April 2009

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

In one of his first acts as president, in an example of putting the cart way, way out in front of the horse, Barack Obama issued an order closing the detention facility used to house suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

What neither the order then nor the administration now have resolved is the problem of what to do with the detainees once the Gitmo facility is closed. One alternative, which has been much in the news, has been to transfer them to facilities inside the United States, where they can either be tried or released into the general population.

Predictably, this idea does not sit well with any number of folks who fear the possibility of having a suspected terrorist for a neighbor.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Bloomberg is reporting that Thursday morning Barack Obama will announce that Chrysler LLC is being placed in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection that will—eventually, once all the details are worked out—lead to an alliance with Fiat SpA, the Italian automaker, among other details.

I have to confess that has me a little confused.

Obama is the president of the United States, not the chief executive office of Chrysler LLC or any other automobile company. Maybe I missed something but it seems to me it's not the job of the president to announce that a company is going into Chapter 11 or, for that matter, coming out of it. Well, it might be the job of a company president, but it's not the job of the U.S. president.

On the other hand I am quite willing to concede that this may be what Obama means when he talks about the ways he has begun "the work of remaking America," as he did Wednesday in St. Louis at an event marking the end of his first 100 days in office.

Since entering the White House he has increasingly blurred the line separating the public sector from the private one.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

At the end of his first 100 days in office, President Barack Obama can look back on an extraordinary run of luck. He swept a change-oriented congressional majority into Congress with him, the ideological divisions within his party have been minimized and the Republicans are nearly prostrate over their failure to counter his proposals in anything resembling an effective way.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

When the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, they assumed it was a fluke. That Bill Clinton's embarrassing missteps on energy taxes, midnight basketball, healthcare, and other issues had cost them control of the Senate and, for the first time in 40 years, the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Democrats assumed they would be out of power for just a little while. Well, as we know, it turned out to be just a little bit longer than that.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Keith Olbermann, the host of an eponymous news and entertainment program on MSNBC, makes great sport of tossing angry rocks in the direction of conservatives and Republicans. He comes across as very tough when he dishes out his scorn. But, thanks to a new site on the Internet, we may soon be able to find out whether or not he can take it.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Every year, Citizens Against Government Waste, which, as its name implies, is an organization that works to fight waste in government, releases a pamphlet documenting what it believes are wasteful expenditures by the federal government.

The book, which this year runs to 60 pages, helps fuel the outrage now directed at congressional earmarks and other forms of suspicious spending. And it's something that every American taxpayer should read.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Despite giving lip service to education reform, the Obama administration has decided to put an end to the very successful D.C. school voucher program. This despite a United States Department of Education report that found students in the nation's capital that were provided with vouchers allowing them to attend private school through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program had made statistically significant gains in reading achievement.