WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will seek to keep 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan after the war formally ends later this year and then will withdraw most of those forces by 2016, senior administration officials said Tuesday. Obama’s decision is largely in line with what military commanders have been seeking and will allow the president […]
barack obama
Posted inLetters
M. Morin: An extremely dangerous president
I recently received information from Citizens Against Government Waste that included a letter from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The data included facts about Obamacare that reinforce my fear of Barack Obama as an extremely dangerous president. There is no question that he can read; what he doesn’t seem to understand is simple arithmetic — how […]
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Posted inNation / World, National Sports, sj-web
Obama welcomes Red Sox to White House
What an honor! Thanks for the #selfie, @BarackObama pic.twitter.com/y5Ww74sEID — David Ortiz (@davidortiz) April 1, 2014 WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama welcomed the World Series champion Red Sox to the White House Tuesday, praising their triumph on the field while hailing them as a symbol of their city’s “grit and resilience” in the wake of last […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Austin Bay: Putin’s deep strategy relies on energy
Here’s the bottom line for our moment in time: Vladimir Putin’s Smart Thuggery has exposed Barack Obama’s Smart Diplomacy as a pompous mix of faculty lounge jive, utopian balderdash and reckless weakness. Cunning thugs running countries behave like cunning thugs running criminal cartels, or for that matter, running banks, honky-tonks or day-care centers. Cunning thugs […]
Posted inNation / World, sj-web
Obama seeks $300 billion for roads, railways
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is asking Congress for $300 billion to update the nation’s roads and railways. Obama plans to make the proposal Wednesday at the Union Depot rail and bus station in St. Paul, Minn. The Highway Trust Fund finances federal highway and transit programs but is forecast to go broke as early […]
Posted inLewiston-Auburn
Obama’s call for higher wages gets mixed reaction in Maine
AUBURN — President Barack Obama’s call in Tuesday’s State of the Union address for employers to pay workers a minimum of $10.10 per hour got a mixed reaction in Maine on Wednesday. Obama did not say he would propose legislation to boost the federal minimum wage. He did that last year and it was not […]
Posted inNation / World, sj-web
Fact Check: Do President Obama’s claims add up?
WASHINGTON — It seems to be something of an occupational hazard for President Barack Obama: When he talks about his health care law, he’s bound to hit a fact bump sooner or later. So it went Tuesday night, when he declared Medicare premiums have stayed flat thanks to the law, when they’ve gone up. As […]
Posted inNation / World, sj-web
Analysis: Obama’s agenda more bite-sized than bold
The president’s State of the Union address Tuesday was an amalgam of modest proposals designed to chip away at some of the same problems he’s been working on all along: persistent unemployment, middle-class insecurity, lagging schools and more. “Let’s make this a year of action,” Obama exhorted members of Congress arrayed before him. “That’s what […]
Posted inNation / World, sj-web
Obama proposes new limits on NSA phone collections
WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking to calm a furor over U.S. surveillance, President Barack Obama on Friday called for ending the government’s control of phone data from hundreds of millions of Americans and immediately ordered intelligence agencies to get a secretive court’s permission before accessing such records. Still, he defended the nation’s spying apparatus as a […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Connie Schultz: Appreciating Obama for his mindfulness
The longer Barack Obama is our president the more grateful I am that I first met him as a fellow writer. I may not always agree with him, but I never doubt that he’s thought it through. He is, by nature, a reflective man. Learning back in 2006 that he processes life through the time-honored […]