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Obama vacation brings rest, relaxation and rebuke

Posted on July 17, 2010 by admin| Comments Off

(CNN) — President Obama and his family arrived Friday for a weekend getaway in Maine, but along with a little rest and relaxation comes criticism that the president is taking it easy with the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis in a critical phase.

The Obamas plan to spend the weekend on Mount Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park. The trip marks the president’s third weekend vacation since the oil disaster began in April.

The Republican National Committee launched a website blasting what it considers Obama’s “leisure activities or missteps” during the oil disaster, like playing golf, attending concerts and vacationing in Asheville, North Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; and now Maine.

Obama has also faced criticism for scheduling a trip up north, instead of vacationing in the Gulf, as he advised other Americans to do.

“Presidents are certainly entitled to vacation, just like everybody else, but there is a fine line as to when presidents should do it, what they should and where they should do it,” said Brad Blakeman, a former member of President George W. Bush’s senior staff and the deputy assistant for appointments and scheduling.

Video: Obama’s ‘good news’ on oil spill

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“Presidents have to be cognizant of the fact that everything they do is going to be scrutinized,” said Blakeman, who also is a professor for Georgetown University’s Semester in Washington program.

Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said the Republican criticism is “galling,” considering Bush’s frequent trips to Camp David and his home in Crawford, Texas.

“Barack Obama is working as hard as any president that we’ve had in recent history and certainly harder than the most immediate previous president,” he said.

CBS’s Mark Knoller, who keeps track of presidents’ comings and goings, calculated that Bush spent all or part of 977 days at Camp David or in Texas during his two terms.

Blakeman noted that visits to those locations were working trips and not getaways. Bush’s staff would travel with him, and work would continue as usual. The Crawford ranch was known as the “Western White House” because of the infrastructure there.

As for calls that Obama should vacation in the Gulf, Simmons said, “Where he chooses to take his days off should really be up to him. We don’t want to get into a situation where the president is making familial vacation decisions based upon polling or political maneuvers.”

Scott Stanzel, Bush’s deputy press secretary who often traveled with the president when he was away from the White House, said that changing locations provided a good opportunity to escape the hustle and bustle of Washington.

“President Bush, on the weekends, would often go to Camp David because the size of the bubble you are in expands, so you can go out for a walk or bike ride without having to arrange security detail,” he said.

Stanzel was in Crawford with Bush for a number of crises that could not have been planned for, like the conviction of Saddam Hussein, the death of President Ford and the assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto.

Bush was notified of Bhutto’s death immediately and delivered a statement to the press pool. “It would have almost been like we were at the White House in terms of the teams that would convene and talk about the issues surrounding that assassination,” Stanzel said.

The problem for Obama, Stanzel said, is the visuals that could come out of his trip. A picture of Obama playing golf alongside images from the Gulf could send a negative message.

The president is the president wherever he is.
–Paul Begala, former adviser to President Clinton

Paul Begala, a CNN contributor and former adviser to President Clinton, said that vacationing or not, “The president is the president wherever he is.

“I thought it was silly when people attacked Bush for going on vacation, so I’ll be consistent and say it’s silly when people attack President Obama for going on vacation,” he said.

“Of all of the concerns that Americans may have, they do not need to worry whether President Obama is a hard-working man. They may agree or disagree with his policies, but there is just no doubt that the guy is busting his rear end.”

Obama vacation brings rest, relaxation and rebuke

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Carte Goodwin to succeed Senator Byrd – for now

Posted on July 16, 2010 by admin| Comments Off

By

Tarini Parti,

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Political leaders bid farewell to West Virginia’s favorite son

Posted on July 2, 2010 by admin| Comments Off

Charleston, West Virginia (CNN) — He was raised an orphan of the West Virginia coal mines years before the Great Depression.

On Friday — as his body made a final return to the state he loved — Sen. Robert C. Byrd was remembered as a political titan, champion of the poor, and defender of the Constitution.

Political leaders from both parties and every corner of the country came together at the start of the Independence Day weekend to pay homage to America’s longest serving member of Congress, who died Monday at the age of 92.

President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were among the mourners who gathered at a memorial service in Charleston for the veteran legislator.

Byrd was “somebody who knew how to keep the faith with his state, with his family, with his country and his Constitution,” Obama said, standing before a packed, sun-splashed state capitol. “His life bent towards justice … (and) immeasurably improved the lives of West Virginians.”

Video: Pres. Obama: Byrd a ‘Senate icon’

Video: Sen. Robert Byrd remembered

He “possessed that quintessential American quality,” Obama said. “And that is a capacity to change, a capacity to learn … and a capacity to be made more perfect.”

Victoria Kennedy, the widow of Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, said her husband considered him “a modern incarnation of ancient virtues. A Roman of West Virginia.”

“Someone will take Robert Byrd’s seat,” she said. “But no one will ever take his place.”

Byrd, who first entered Congress at the end of the Truman administration, was known as a master of the Senate’s arcane rules and a staunch defender of congressional power.

His speeches often were laced with poetry and references to the Greek and Roman classics. He typically punctuated his remarks by the brandishing of a well-worn pocket copy of the Constitution.

Over the course of his long public career, Byrd came to be “seen as the very embodiment of the Senate,” Obama said. But “his passion for the Senate’s past … was not an obsession with the trivial or the obscure.” It was born of a recognition of the fact that “we are not a nation of men. We are a nation of laws.”

Byrd also was known as the “King of Pork,” using powerful positions in Congress to steer federal spending to his home state — one of the nation’s poorest. Much of that funding famously went toward infrastructure improvements, most notably road and bridge construction.

Clinton recalled an occasion when, soon after he became president, he told Byrd that “if you pave every single inch of West Virginia, it’s going to be much harder to mine coal.” Byrd, in response, said that “the Constitution does not prohibit humble servants from delivering whatever they can to their constituents.”

Byrd’s remains lay in repose in the Senate chamber on Thursday — a rare honor accorded to only two other senators since World War II. His casket was displayed on the same catafalque used for Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Thurgood Marshall, among others.

“The Senate was Robert C. Byrd’s cathedral (and) West Virginia was his heaven,” Biden said Friday. “There’s not a lot of hyperbole in that.”

Obama has ordered flags on federal buildings to fly at half-staff through Tuesday, except on Independence Day. A proclamation issued by the president said the order was given “as a mark of respect for (Byrd’s) memory and long-standing service.”

Byrd will be buried Tuesday after a funeral service in Arlington, Virginia.

CNN’s Alan Silverleib contributed to this report.

Political leaders bid farewell to West Virginia’s favorite son

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Obama more emotional on fatherhood in 2008

Posted on June 21, 2010 by admin| Comments Off

Washington (CNN) — The day after official Father’s Day festivities, President Obama used his bully pulpit to stress the importance of responsible parenting at events in Washington.

The commander in chief, or perhaps father in chief, said Monday that, “without hesitation, the most challenging, most fulfilling, most important job I will have during my time on this Earth is to be Sasha and Malia’s father.”

Obama marks Father’s Day with launch of mentoring program

On Father’s Day 2008, Obama took a more pointed tone when delivering a controversial speech on fatherhood. Before a predominantly African-American audience, then-candidate Obama chastised absentee fathers, specifically addressing black men in the community, saying, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. …Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.”

Obama continues to talk openly about being abandoned by his father as a child. During my interview with him in July 2008, the candidate unleashed the kind of raw emotion, insight and color we rarely see from him today as president.

Video: Obama: ‘Be a good father’

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Here is our conversation:

Suzanne Malveaux: Your father was largely absent, how did that impact you?

Barack Obama: Well, you know, I think it had a profound impact except, you know, more as an object lesson of what it’s like growing up without a father in the house.

My father had a reputation of being this larger than life figure: charismatic, very smart and very engaging. And all of those things were true. He was part of that first generation of Africans who moved West to get an education and intended to bring it back to develop their country. And he made a great impression on people, but he also was a tragic figure not only because he didn’t stay with my mother and me, but he generally had trouble providing stability for his other children and his subsequent wives. And he was somebody who was incredibly brilliant, but also because of the tensions from leaping from a small African village to Harvard and being part of this modern world, he never resolved those tensions.

He fought, when he got back to Kenya, against tribalism and nepotism, but was ultimately consumed by it and blackballed from the government, ended up having a serious drinking problem, was in a severe car accident and ended up dying a tragic and bitter man.

So when I think about his impact on me there are some superficial things. He went to take me, when I was 10 years old, to see a jazz concert, and I became a real jazz buff after that. He gave me my first basketball, and it was only later that I realized that that had been the case and might have been part of the reason why I became so obsessed with playing basketball. But for the most part what I understood from him was an absence, and I vowed that when I became a father one of the most important things that I could is be a presence in my children’s lives.

Malveaux: That visit when you were 10 years old at that time — was there anything in your 10-year-old mind that you thought you could do to get him to stay?

Obama: No, I don’t think that’s how 10-year-olds think. If you’ve got this person that suddenly shows up and says, “I’m your father and I’m going to tell you what to do,” and you don’t have any sense of who this person is and you don’t necessarily have a deep bond of trust with him. I don’t think your reaction is how do I get him to stay? I think the reaction may be, what’s this guy doing here? And who does he think he is?

So it was only during the course of that month, by the end of that month that I started to open myself up to understanding who he was, but then he was gone. I never saw him again. That was the last time I saw him. He would write to me occasionally. He wrote me letters, and we would talk on the phone intermittently, but it was not until I traveled to Kenya and heard from relatives of who he had been and the story that he had lived that I think that I fully was able to understand him and obviously in some ways understand myself.

Malveaux: You said, “Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his mistakes and in my case both may be true.” Can you explain?

Obama: If you don’t have a father there, it means you’re always grappling against this image that you don’t fully understand. If you have a father in the house, you’re going to have arguments; there are going to be tensions, you’re going to see his flaws but also see his good qualities, and so there’s something very concrete against which you can learn from and match up to.

In my case, you had this person who was almost a myth in our family about how smart he was, about how well he did in school, how well-spoken he was and so forth. So that was something to live up to — high expectations.

On the other hand, here’s somebody who wasn’t there and that I would come to learn was an alcoholic and somebody who had not treated his family well. So that was something that you felt that you had to make up for. And I think that certainly in the early part of my life grappling with that legacy was part of who I was and is still part of who I am.

Obama more emotional on fatherhood in 2008

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Healthy Homework Happiness Part 2

Posted on February 9, 2010 by admin| Comments Off

Continuing from the last post discussing homework, there are another couple of circumstances to discuss. Last time we discussed how to help your child with their homework without doing it for them. This time we are going to talk about what to do if a child refuses to do it, or doesn’t bring it home. We will also touch on a homework routine and how to manage it. There are plenty of adult education classes in Naples, parenting being a popular one, and I would recommend parents take one if they feel unsure about their skills. For the most part, you’ll be fine as long as you research and take advice in the spirit it’s given.

If your child consistently refuses to do homework or never brings it home it can lead to strife both at home and at school. It helps to create rules, boundaries and limitations as soon as your child begins school. Set a rule that says homework when they get, it must be brought home and begun at a certain time. Also create a unique consequence for not doing it. Whatever consequence you choose, ensure it’s unique and only lasts for 24 hours, or until your child next brings work home so they have the opportunity to redeem themselves.

Hope is important here, if a punishment lasts longer than a day, the child might feel trapped and helpless, which will further exacerbate the problem.

To manage this situation, you’re going to have to work with the teacher. It might be worthwhile creating a homework log that the child is responsible for keeping. This should list the homework assignments each day and be initialed by the teacher. You will need to check this every day and keep this up until such time as the behavior has been eradicated.

Forgetting to bring homework home, or the log should also result in punishment. This is also something you want to train your child out of. We can’t help forgetfulness sometimes, but there needs to be a consequence for it. There certainly are in adulthood and that’s what we are preparing them for.

Giving a child a homework routine is a good way of getting them into the habit of doing it. A popular mistake parents seem to make is by giving them a time when it must be completed. This isn’t such a good idea, because sometimes it’s going to take longer and they will feel a failure if it does, even if they have done great work. It might also force them to rush the assignment, which we don’t want either.

A better idea is to give them a begin time. After school is the best time of day. Give them a healthy snack then set them to work. Tell them they must get their work done, but not give them a time limit. Use the lure of play, going outside or other motivation for completing it. Don’t be afraid to use the climate here in Naples, parenting is about blackmail too. Tell them they can go outside in the sunshine once they have finished, and you have checked it. There’s nothing like the lure of play to get a child motivated.

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