Progressive One

I t’s a cliché that definitive judgments of a presidency take time to develop. Presidents praised in their own era — think of John F. Kennedy — are often subject to revisionist reappraisals by later historians, and the process also works in reverse.
Yet as Barack Obama prepares to vacate the White House, we can say this much with confidence: The 44th president was a conscientious and intelligent leader who espoused humane values, inspired millions of Americans and successfully fulfilled some of his most significant promises.
They include skillfully managing a recovery from a recession he inherited; protecting the rights of racial minorities and gay, lesbian and transgender Americans; combating international terrorism without engaging in religious stereotyping; providing health insurance to tens of millions of Americans who had previously gone without; and promulgating a Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon pollution from power plants.
His administration joined with other nations in forging an agreement with Iran that blocked its path — at least for a 10-year period — to developing a nuclear weapon; it endorsed the Paris Agreement on climate change; and it ended an anachronistic and counterproductive Cold War policy of refusing to deal with Cuba.
Obama’s White House was free of the corruption that tarnished the administrations of some of his predecessors. And Obama throughout his tenure displayed dignity, even in the face of vicious and sometimes racist attacks that no other president has had to endure.
There were also disappointments, at home and abroad, including his failure to persuade Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform or to close the infamous detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Ultimately, despite coming to office as the anti-George W. Bush, Obama was unable to extricate the United States militarily from the Middle East and Afghanistan.
On election night in 2008, Obama told a jubilant crowd in Chicago that “on this date, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.” The 47-year-old first-term senator, the first African American to be elected president, encouraged his supporters — and the country — to “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.” In the flush of his improbable victory, such a magical transformation briefly seemed possible.
Of course, partisanship and pettiness persisted, frustrating many of Obama’s legislative initiatives, not to mention a nomination to the Supreme Court that the Republican Senate shamefully refused even to consider. The sad truth is that Obama’s election didn’t usher in a post-partisan America any more than it did a post-racial one. He leaves behind a divided and acrimonious nation.
Republicans argued that the president has only himself to blame for the partisan chasm that prevented much of his domestic agenda from being enacted. More generally, they accused him of high-handedness and a propensity to short-circuit the legislative process with executive actions such as his temporary legalization of some immigrants in the country illegally and his aggressive use of recess appointments, for which he was reprimanded by the Supreme Court. But Obama’s unilateralism was mostly a response to Republican obstructionism.
On foreign policy, Obama campaigned on a platform of ending the wars that had cost so many Americans lives in the aftermath of 9/11, including the ill-considered invasion of Iraq. In his speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, he promised to “end this war in Iraq responsibly and finish the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
U.S. troops did completely withdraw from Iraq at the end of 2011. But the rise of Islamic State persuaded Obama to order air strikes there and deploy 5,200 U.S. troops in “train, advise and assist” roles. In Afghanistan, Obama’s advisers warned him that complete withdrawal of U.S. troops would undermine the weak central government in its battle with the Taliban; some 8,400 U.S. troops will remain after Obama leaves office.
But if Obama has been too interventionist for some of his supporters, he hasn’t been interventionist enough for some of his critics — particularly when it comes to Syria. He has been criticized — including by some members of his own State Department — for not taking military action against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad in an attempt to end that country’s civil war.
The Syrian civil war has been a humanitarian disaster, yet we understand Obama’s concern that a U.S. effort to topple Assad — directly or in alliance with supposedly moderate Syrian rebels — would have dangerous consequences, including the possibility of involving the U.S. in another major war in the Middle East. Overall, Obama’s use of U.S. military force has been prudent and pragmatic; we would recommend his careful approach to his successor, who inherits a dangerous and increasingly disordered world.
And speaking of that successor, Obama’s dignity and gravitas seem, of course, only more appealing as the Trump presidency approaches. The incoming president, who fired up his political career by cynically questioning Obama’s citizenship, has betrayed a reckless, petulant, bullying demeanor that threatens his ability to do the job. Trump may not embrace many of Obama’s policies; but he would serve himself and the country well by studying the way his predecessor conducted himself.

Progressive One

Icon Obama
Faith in Christ Ministries, West 46th Street near South Western Avenue, Los Angeles, 2010. () Luis Meat Market, West 42nd Place at South Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, 2013. () Cheers Soul Food Cafe, 7414 S. Main St., Los Angeles, 2010. () A. and J. Tires, 9154 Livernois Ave., Detroit, 2014, top, and 2015. () Mugshot Bar & Grill, 17305 Harper Ave. and Guilford, Detroit, 2010. () Fair Party Liquor Store, 6541 Gratiot Ave., Detroit, 2013. ()
Photographs and text by Camilo José Vergara
B arack Obama’s face started showing up on the walls of schools and tire shops, bars and carnicerias right after his election in 2008. I’ve been photographing inner city murals for four decades, and in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Detroit, Obama is the only U.S. president — aside from, occasionally, JFK — who is in serious rotation in the wall-painters’ pantheon.
Obama is often portrayed with symbols of American power — the flag, an eagle — or in a lineup of African American greats from neighborhood VIPs to Martin Luther King Jr. and the first lady. In a South L.A. mural by Chuy Vasquez, a beaming Obama replaced a flag-draped MLK in 2013. The new image, which is still in place, puts Obama above and behind white, black and brown children pledging allegiance, the Statue of Liberty, a farmer at work and a giant parrot in the colors of the Mexican flag. (Two smaller images aren’t in the frame: a Central American pyramid and Christ atop a globe.)
“ Obama es el presidente ,” Vasquez told me, describing his work. “ Obama es para todos .” Something for everyone — one muralist’s version of the Obama legacy.
Documentary photographer Camilo José Vergara is a National Humanities Medal awardee.
His latest book is “Detroit Is No Dry Bones.” camilojosevergara.com

timofrock

Wow!

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Rivers

Obama's legacy was a whole lot of change, and very little hope. None of the change was good. Obama's legacy is Trump. Now, sit back and watch a REAL president go to work.

Progressive One

you are fking hilarious......

timofrock

Boo hoo...

Progressive One

BACK STORY
King’s lost cause: Vietnam
Expanding his focus beyond civil rights to the war cost him many allies
THE REV. Martin Luther King Jr., protesting the Vietnam War in 1967, called the conflict “an enemy of the poor.” The backlash was swift and widespread. (Agence France-Presse)
By Matt Pearce
In January 1967, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. packed several suitcases and secluded himself on the coast of Jamaica, far from the telephone, far from the crises roiling America.
It would not go down in history as one of his most famous trips. King was trying to finish writing a new book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” But the answer King found would change the course of his activism until his death.
Back in the U.S., tensions were rising. Congress had passed civil rights protections after his campaigns in the South, but many black Americans remained crushed under poverty. Younger black activists were beginning to question King’s strategy of nonviolence, which had won him a Nobel Peace Prize three years earlier.
And the nation was at war. While flipping through Ramparts, a leftist literary and political magazine, at a Jamaican restaurant, King came across a 28-page photographic essay documenting children who had been scorched by U.S. military napalm attacks in Vietnam. King pushed a plate of food away.
“I looked up and said, ‘Doesn’t it taste any good?’ ” Bernard Lee, an associate, later recalled to one of King’s biographers. King replied, “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.”
Fifty years ago this year, King began agitating against the Vietnam War, a lesser-remembered chapter of his career in which the preacher once again launched an unpopular battle against the prevailing opinions of the establishment, the broader public and even some allies.
The war is widely viewed as a catastrophic mistake. But in remembrances today, on the national holiday bearing his name, it’s likely that few public figures will harken back to King’s solemn “ Beyond Vietnam ” speech at the Riverside Church in New York, where he said, “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’ ”
America’s entanglement in Vietnam dated back to the end of World War II, when France wanted to keep control of its Indochina possessions and the Vietnamese rebelled. The U.S. had provided advisors for France’s failed effort to quell the rebellion.
In the 1960s, the U.S. allied itself with South Vietnam, claiming that a takeover by communist-led North Vietnam would pave the way for communism to spread throughout Southeast Asia. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. escalated bombings and troop deployments.
In the beginning, the public had largely accepted politicians’ arguments that the war was necessary, though a growing number of protesters were starting to raise their voices.
King was not the first black activist to take a bold public stand against the war. His wife, Coretta, spoke at an antiwar rally in Washington in 1965. Stokely Carmichael, in his famous “Black Power” speech in October 1966, called the Vietnam conflict “an illegal and immoral war.”
While King was in Jamaica, James Bevel, a fellow leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, made a surprise visit to tell King he’d had a revelation: “Why are you teaching nonviolence to Negroes in Mississippi but not to Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam?” Bevel said, according to historian Taylor Branch in his book “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68.”
King had previously publicly expressed some concerns about the war, but Johnson posed a major strategic conundrum. Johnson had been one of King’s greatest allies in Washington and had helped shepherd through Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Democratic president also had championed antipoverty programs, another cause of King’s.
But the growing war also had come under Johnson’s leadership.
“There was a strong feeling that to get the antipoverty programs — the support they needed — King should not publicly oppose Lyndon Johnson’s policies, because that would push him out of the circle of people who Johnson relied on for supporting his domestic agenda,” said Clayborne Carson, an editor of King’s papers and the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
King pushed ahead. Clarence Jones prepared one of the earliest speech drafts, which King rejected.
“He said, ‘Clarence, I thought you were my radical,’ ” King’s aide recalled in an interview with the journalist Tavis Smiley, adding that he told King, “I don’t quite understand what you mean.”
King said the speech was too wishy-washy. “The Vietnam War is either morally right or morally wrong — it’s not ‘on the one hand’ or ‘on the other hand,’ ” King told Jones.
The speech was refined, and on April 4, 1967, in front of a packed church audience, King called the war “an enemy of the poor” that was swallowing the nation’s young men and its resources for antipoverty programs like a “demonic, destructive suction tube.”
King complained that black soldiers who couldn’t get their full rights at home were doing a disproportionate amount of the fighting in Vietnam. He also said that it was becoming difficult to tell young radicals in America not to pursue their agendas using violence when that’s what the nation was doing abroad.
Above all, the war was a symptom of a larger problem with American society, King said, calling for a rapid shift “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.”
“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” King said.
Public condemnation came quickly.
“Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence,” the Washington Post said in an editorial. “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people.”
An April 16 news article in the Los Angeles Times described King’s antiwar views as “extreme,” and the next day, the newspaper ran an editorial cartoon captioned “Dr. King takes the plunge,” showing him diving head-first into an empty swimming pool labeled, “Vietnam criticism.” One opinion poll from that spring showed that 73% of Americans disagreed with King’s antiwar views.
King caught flack from his own allies. The NAACP’s board of directors unanimously voted that combining the civil rights and antiwar movements was a “serious tactical mistake.”
Donations to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began to drop.
King also lost his biggest ally in Washington. “Once he took the stand against the war, he was really not welcome at the White House anymore,” Carson said.
Ultimately, King’s speeches and rallies were not instrumental in ending the war. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968 on April 4, one year to the day after the “Beyond Vietnam” speech. His antipoverty and job campaigns had minimal effect, and the war didn’t end until 1975.
“The last three years of his life, he failed,” Carson said.
“The ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is played 100 times as much as the Riverside speech,” he said. “Probably every American knows the words — ‘I have a dream,’ ‘Free at last’ — those phrases.”
But when Americans listen to King speeches and see his memorials, Carson said, “you don’t see that phrase where he’s talking about the United States as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’ ”
matt.pearce@latimes.com

Progressive One

A millennial whisperer
SUPPORTERS at Obama’s farewell address. Millennials appreciate the way he championed their causes. (Joshua Lott AFP/Getty Images)
By Morley Winograd and Michael Hais
P resident Obama will be seen by historians as the first president to bring millennial values to the challenges of the Oval Office. He isn’t a millennial (in fact he has two millennial children), but his leadership style and beliefs reflect America’s largest and most diverse cohort. And while much of the rest of America is divided on how well he has performed as the nation’s 44th president, Obama has won overwhelming approval from the millennial generation, born 1982-2003.
More than three-fourths of millennials (77%) approved of Obama’s job performance in a mid-December Pew Center survey, surpassing even the previous high mark the group gave him — 73% — just after his first inauguration in 2009. For much of his administration, millennials were only marginally more positive about the president than the rest of the population, but once his departure from office drew closer and the contrast between him and either of his potential successors — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — became clearer, millennial approval of the president’s job performance shot up by about 15 percentage points, accounting for just about all of the increase he has enjoyed in his final year in office.
Some of the enthusiasm stems from millennials’ perception that Obama tackled the issues they care about most. Almost half of millennials (46%) credit the president with making significant progress “toward solving the major problems facing the country,” a far greater percentage than for any other generation. Only 10% of millennials, compared with 30% of older generations, think he made things worse.
Millions of millennials have health insurance because Obamacare allowed them to remain on their parents’ plan. Theirs is the only generation in which a majority tell pollsters they support the Affordable Care Act. Millennials in particular have also benefited from Obama’s initiatives to reduce the interest rates on student loans and allow millions to convert loan repayments to a percentage of income rather than a more onerous flat amount. In addition, the president’s improved job-performance marks, especially their latest rise, reflect improvements in the economy that millennials now see in their incomes.
But more than any specific benefit, millennials appreciate the way Obama has championed their causes and created a more tolerant America.
One in five millennials has an immigrant parent, and most in the generation credit the president with trying to find a comprehensive solution to the immigration issue, especially for the youngest “Dreamers” who found new hope under the president’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order. By carefully building a foundation of support of gay rights, Obama’s leadership also helped enshrine same-sex marriage among our constitutional protections. According to Pew surveys, close to three-quarters of millennials view immigrants and immigration positively (76%) and support gay marriage (73%); less than a majority of older age groups agree.
Finally, Obama’s daily demonstration, as our nation’s first African American president, that race should not be a barrier to achievement has reinforced millennials’ desire to include everyone in the group and to celebrate their own diversity. In fact, some of the president’s finest millennial “whisperer” moments happened when he addressed the question of race in America, including his eloquent speech on the topic as candidate Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary. In an interview with NPR, he couched his answer to a question about political correctness with a defense of tolerance that fits millennial attitudes: “Don’t go around just looking for insults,” he said, quoting advice he has given his daughters. “You’re tough. If somebody says something you don’t agree with, just engage them on their ideas.”
It’s not surprising that the same set of Americans that overwhelmingly approve of Obama would disapprove of the man who will replace him as president on Jan. 20. Already 64% of 18- to 29-year-olds disapprove of Trump’s performance as president-elect, the highest disapproval rating of any age group in Pew’s January survey.
Millennials will represent more than 1 out of 3 Americans by the end of this decade. Despite Trump’s electoral college win in November, it seems likely that millennial attitudes will dominate American political discourse and policy decisions in the coming years. It’s not clear now how much this generation’s demographic and political importance shaped Obama’s presidency and how much the cause and effect ran in the other direction. But it is clear that the optimism the president expressed in his farewell address is based in large part in his faith in his children’s peers:
“This generation coming up — unselfish, altruistic, creative, patriotic — I’ve seen you in every corner of the country. You believe in a fair, just, inclusive America; you know that constant change has been America’s hallmark, something not to fear but to embrace, and you are willing to carry this hard work of democracy forward. You’ll soon outnumber any of us, and I believe as a result that the future is in good hands.”
And with that the country’s first millennial president left the stage.
Morley Winograd and Michael Hais are co-authors of “Millennial Makeover, Millennial Momentum and Millennial Majority.” They wrote this essay in association with Community Advocates, Inc. in Los Angeles.

Rivers

And, you are fking stupid....

Rivers

It is 3 days until the stuttering enemy-agent Muslim-excusing prancing pusillanimous embarrassing lawless defiling vote-faking unctuous careless warmongering hypocritical sniveling whining overreaching disreputable sulking treacherous squandering odious disgusting backstabbing election-corrupting robbery-inclined formulaic plundering indolent callous violence-agitating motherless-punk puerile intruding sickening wicked sullen wretched venal psychopathic grifting peculiar furious (and fast) gratuitously-opining lame-duck faithless charlatan spying-for-enemies shallow fake irrational mumbling imbecile dejected slothful acrimonious demanding trivial putz juvenile delinquent odiferous malicious reptilian detestable conniving Marxism-loving peevish America-surrendering sly villainous undignified shameful touchy unwelcome exhausting abominable indecisive moronical stomach-turning depressed meddling corrupt predatory impoverishing personal-history-concealing dangerous Kenyan born Muslim communist POS scumbag leaves office!

Progressive One

Your hatred is really amusing....and indicative of being driven by other factors.....good for you......

Rivers

Yeah, I hate incompetence, cowardice, egotists, narcissists, radical socialists, liars, etc....which is what your idol Obama is. It's amazing how low you leftists will lower the bar when your candidate is in office...they can be corrupt, inept, incompetent, pathological liars, radicals, and you morons think they walk on water. Your idiol, Obama will go down in history as the worst president in U.S. history. And, watch Trump UNDO his whole failed legacy!

Progressive One

I think the opposite...Obama has been the best President since Clinton and other than LBJ and Lincoln and FDR, the rest were scrubs.....so to each his or her own.........

Rivers

Man, you really lower your bar on expectations don't you. You really like incompetent liars for your leaders! Obama will go down in history as the worst, Clinton wasn't much better, LBJ was just an asshole, who got us ass deep into Vietnam, FDR dragged out a depression for about 12-14 years longer than it should have lasted (never met a tax he didn't like), and Lincoln is the only good one you mentioned...a true leader, but then he was a Republican.

Progressive One

Obama will go down in racists history as the worse for being black. American History will show he saved us from a depression and righted the ship...look at how ObamaCare is rising in the polls....even in red states..no sense in arguing with you people.........Obama was bad from Day according to the bigoted right...........