Politics Obama - Actually doing a good job?

rogue49 · Oct 1, 2012

heh...it's just like Eddie Murphy's character in "The Distinguished Gentleman" is told.
Doesn't matter what you pick, you'll get paid either way.

Oh well, I'm not naive enough to think that our reps aren't getting theirs...nor do I really care that much, unless outlandish.
Might as well enjoy some reverse trend of some lawyers actually gunning for citizen protectionism.
I know my health likes it.

Whistle-Blower Lawyers Throw Support Behind Obama
By ERIC LIPTON - October 1, 2012

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration has cracked down on corporate fraud, lawyers representing whistle-blowers have reaped multimillion-dollar rewards. Now, as they seek to sustain these historic payouts, they are serving as generous donors to the president’s re-election campaign.

Lawyers in the tight circle who specialize in filing fraud claims with the federal government on behalf of clients with evidence of wrongdoing have raised more than $3 million so far for President Obama. The administration, meanwhile, has paid out $1.6 billion to whistle-blowers during his tenure, with law firms taking a cut in some cases of up to 40 percent of the proceeds.

The lawyers have contributed directly to Mr. Obama’s campaign, served as “bundlers” who solicit contributions from others, donated to the Democratic National Committee and written large checks to Priorities USA, the “super PAC” supporting Mr. Obama’s re-election efforts. They have also donated heavily to Congressional Democrats.

Their support comes as Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has called for repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed new oversight of the financial services industry and expanded the government’s whistle-blower program to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has set aside $430 million for payouts. Business groups have also pushed for legislation imposing a cap on payments to whistle-blowers, arguing that rewards reaching as high as $104 million, as happened in one case, have turned anti-fraud efforts into a lottery.

“The risks are enormous there will be real pullback because of pressure from the industry that has paid billions in penalties,” said John R. Phillips, one of the nation’s top whistle-blower lawyers, who has raised more than $200,000 for Mr. Obama’s re-election from colleagues, after first working in 2008 to help Mr. Obama get elected.

The fund-raising is already a flash point in Washington, where lawmakers have been divided along partisan lines over the administration’s efforts to regulate the financial industry and the political parties have long been at odds over trial lawyers and class-action suits. On the campaign trail, Mr. Romney has cast himself and fellow Republicans as champions of business and the president and Democrats as hostile to business interests.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents many of the companies that have been targets of the whistle-blower investigations, has criticized the lawyers’ efforts, particularly their aggressive outreach for potential clients.

“If someone is defrauding the federal government or investors, they should have the book thrown at them,” said Matt Webb, senior vice president for legal reform policy at the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform. “But increasingly, this is not just about exposing wrongdoing. It is about trying to generate as much money and fees for the firms handling the cases.”

Some of the industry’s most important players, including lawyers from Mr. Phillips’s firm, played a central role in advising the Securities and Exchange Commission on the rules creating its whistle-blower program, including a provision to broaden the list of who was eligible to file a claim. In the last year, whistle-blower law firms have hired several top S.E.C. officials who helped write those rules. They include Jordan Thomas, who has started a new S.E.C. whistle-blower unit at Labaton Sucharow, a New York-based firm whose employees have contributed to the Obama campaign.

“We have had hundreds and hundreds of inquiries,” said Mr. Thomas, who has sought out clients and promoted his firm’s practice in speeches nationwide, an Internet blog and YouTube videos. “Our phones are ringing off the hook.”

The push to crack down on Medicare fraud, for example, started long before the Obama administration, with many cases initiated by the Justice Department under President George W. Bush. But the Obama administration has been particularly aggressive in pursuing them.

Since January 2009, $13.2 billion has been collected by the federal government from companies through the False Claims Act, the primary whistle-blower tool, with about $9.4 billion of that involving alleged health care fraud. The federal government has recovered more overall in financial penalties against drugmakers since 2009 than in the previous 18 years combined, with whistle-blowers credited for helping initiate about three quarters of the cases, according to a recent study by Public Citizen, a nonprofit group.

Among the biggest False Claims Act settlements was a $2 billion fine against GlaxoSmithKline, accused of illegally promoting one of its blockbuster drugs, which could translate into a more than $100 million bounty for the whistle-blowers, two of whom were represented by Mr. Phillips’s firm. In May, Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay an $800 million fine, which included an $84 million payment to the whistle-blowers, four former Abbott sales staff members, who tipped off authorities about illegal marketing of an anti-seizure drug to children and elderly patients. The lead whistle-blower was represented by Grant & Eisenhofer, a Delaware-based firm whose managing director has also served as bundler and contributor to Mr. Obama.

The S.E.C. whistle-blower program targets fraud that harms investors or consumers through a securities law violation, while the health care cases typically involve cheating the Medicare or Medicaid programs. No big fines have resulted yet from the S.E.C. program because cases typically take several years to develop. But the office is receiving on average 10 tips a day, and got nearly 3,000 in its first year.

Mr. Phillips and other lawyers said their contributions are unrelated to their work and he said they have sparred with the Justice Department during Mr. Obama’s tenure because of its efforts to minimize payouts to whistle-blowers. Corporate lawyers who defend companies, he added, typically make more money on a case than the whistle-blower attorney does.

Still, the ranks of lawyers seeking to represent whistle-blowers has grown quickly in the last several years, as the value of the awards has skyrocketed. Lawyers at dozens of these law firms nationwide have contributed to Mr. Obama, campaign finance records show, while only a sprinkling of checks have been written from employees at the same firms to Mr. Romney.

The single biggest fund-raiser is John Morgan, a Florida-based lawyer. He has collected more than $1.7 million for Mr. Obama’s re-election or for the Democratic National Committee, making him one of the campaign’s biggest bundlers nationwide. He has also raised money for Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat running for the United States Senate. Ms. Warren served as interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also created as part of the Dodd-Frank law.

Mr. Morgan, in an interview, said his support for Mr. Obama and Ms. Warren was entirely motivated by his admiration for their leadership in Washington. But his fund-raising blitz occurred just as he was expanding his personal injury and trial law practice into the whistle-blower field, with a television advertising campaign and new Web site, named whistle-blower-attorneys.com.

“America is full of crooks who are defrauding the government and investors every day,” Mr. Morgan said. “We are talking about billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. We win one case and it will pay for our entire national advertising budget.”

Sean McKessy, a former corporate attorney who leads the new S.E.C. Whistleblower Office, said he welcomed the support of the outside lawyers. Whistle-blowers get paid only if the claim is substantiated and results in a fine of at least $1 million — meaning there is no incentive to flood the agency with frivolous complaints.

“There is an extraordinary important role that good lawyers that understand the regulatory process can play,” Mr. McKessy said, adding that individuals can also submit a tip without hiring a lawyer at all, although many do.

At a recent gathering of whistle-blower lawyers at a Washington hotel, several hundred of them sipped on glasses of wine and cocktails as they began a series of meetings with senior officials from the Justice Department, the S.E.C. and Medicare programs — as well as Mr. McKessy — to compare strategies on how to bring in more corporate wrongdoers.

“The way you get more hunting dogs showing up is you feed them,” said Patrick Burns, director of communications at a group that calls itself Taxpayers Against Fraud, the legal industry group that sponsored the conference. “And the Justice Department is cooking with Crisco right now.”
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Charlatan · Oct 1, 2012

I am always astounded at the double think of certain types of Republicans. They want to see high wages and a growth in the middle class and yet they shout (some might say scream) for the very policies that have seen a depression of wages and the gutting of the middle class. It's astounding to watch really.

Baraka_Guru · Oct 1, 2012

Charlatan said: ↑

I am always astounded at the double think of certain types of Republicans. They want to see high wages and a growth in the middle class and yet they shout (some might say scream) for the very policies that have seen a depression of wages and the gutting of the middle class. It's astounding to watch really.
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It's like how they love liberty except when they don't.

Joniemack · Oct 1, 2012

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

It's how they love liberty except when they don't.
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It's like how they hate taxes except for low-middle class wage earners.
It's like how they're all for religious freedom except if the religion is Islam.
It's like how they hate big government unless it's in a woman's vagina.
It's like how they love the democratic system of voting except when they want to suppress it.
It's like how they hate bailing out big financial institutions except...they obviously don't hate it enough to agree that regulatory actions should be taken.
It's like how they love isolationism except when there's a chance to bomb foreigners.
It's like how they hate the import of Chinese manufactured products but they love Walmart.

Having too much fun. Gotta stop.

samcol · Oct 2, 2012

Surprise! Obama ignores a law to aid his reelection

BY GABRIEL MALOR

In case you missed it over the weekend, the Obama administration's Friday afternoon document drop was a memo from the Department of Labor telling defense contractors not to provide legally-required notice to thousands of employees that they are about to be laid off, if automatic spending cuts agreed to by the President and the Congress take effect.
Translation: President Obama wants to prevent thousands of employees, especially in swing-state Virginia, from being told that they are going to be laid off due to Department of Defense funding cuts. Because of the timing of the cuts, those notices would have been sent to employees just prior to the election in November. The man who signed those funding cuts into law would like to avoid that.
When the administration first proposed this idea back in June, defense contractors patiently explained to the reelection-obsessed President that there is a law, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification ("WARN") Act of 1988, that requires federal contractors to tell employees 60 days in advance of expected layoffs. There are quite a few layoffs expected for the end of the year as a result of a genius agreement between President Obama and Congress to cut astonishing amounts of funding for the Department of Defense. Companies that fail to meet their obligations under the WARN Act can be sued by their former employees. Defense contractors indicated that they would not be ignoring their legal duty under the WARN Act.
"Sequestration," as the policy wonks termed it, was intended to be such an obvious disaster that it would spur Obama and Congress to work together to solve their differences. Like many bright ideas from Washington, D.C., it has failed miserably. As a result, many defense contractors should be preparing to issue layoff notices. The Obama administration's solution for these companies -- and for Obama's electoral hopes in Virginia -- was tucked in the Friday guidance: Simply don't warn employees that they're about to be fired and the Department of Labor will pay the legal bills after fired employees sue for violating the WARN Act.
This is utter lawlessness. Obama is asking these companies to break the law and obligating the taxpayers to foot the bill. Ironically, the WARN Act is just the sort of employee protection that Democrats have traditionally championed. But that went right out the window the minute it complicated a Democrat's reelection effort.
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how kind and carrying of barrack.

roachboy · Oct 2, 2012

what we know is that reality is not a big factor for the right.

Ralph Reed's Group: An Obama Victory Means "He Can Complete America's Destruction" | Mother Jones

rogue49 · Oct 2, 2012

Hey, I've never doubted that Obama was a politician.

And as a politician, he'll leverage everything to his advantage and cover his ass.

But as long as his same actions work to my advantage and cover my ass.
And do it better than the other person he's competing against.

That's how to win my vote.
And why they call it politics.

samcol · Oct 2, 2012

oh look conserviland just dropped a shocking bombshell video.... from 2007... that was already released.... this is looking good for mccain/palin

roachboy · Oct 2, 2012

i saw the usual idiocy on drudge. we'll see if the right's sleaze machinery can make something of this. risky move, though. it plays to a lot of problematic areas for populist conservatives. might not be worth it. but i doubt that will stop them.

Joniemack · Oct 2, 2012

samcol said: ↑

how kind and carrying of barrack.
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Sometimes it's all in the spin, samcol. This close to election day, nothing can be taken at face value.

After Obama guidance, Lockheed won't issue layoff notices this year - The Hill's DEFCON Hill

The administration and Democrats have argued the layoff-notice threat was a political ploy because there was never going to be a need to fire employees en masse on Jan. 2. They pointed to guidance from the Pentagon that said contracts would not be canceled on the day the cuts begin.
Bob Stevens, Lockheed’s CEO, created a firestorm in June when he threatened to send out notices of potential layoffs to all 123,000 of his employees on Nov. 2 — four days before the election — due to the WARN Act requiring companies to give 60 days’ notice of mass layoffs.
The Obama administration pushed back in July, telling contractors it was “inappropriate” to issue the notices tied to sequestration, but Lockheed and a handful of other contractors said they were likely to do so anyway.
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Political staging.

redux · Oct 3, 2012

When Lockheed spends nearly $8 million annually on lobbying and $2.3 million in political contributions, they dont expect any push back.

rogue49 · Oct 3, 2012

Man, am I tired of the whole fuckin' bluffing game...either way.
Just get something done.

rogue49 · Oct 5, 2012

Is he doing a good job yet??
Good enough, not enough
How good do you want it??

Aceventura · Oct 5, 2012

rogue49 said: ↑

How good do you want it??
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Historic norms for recoveries would be nice.

As Incomes And Wealth Shrink And Job Growth Remains Slow, Americans Lose Hope In Obamanomics - Investors.com

Joniemack · Oct 5, 2012

Aceventura said: ↑

Historic norms for recoveries would be nice.
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Aside from the Great Depression, which prior recessions qualify as comparable norms?

rogue49 · Oct 6, 2012

Boy...friggin' roller-coaster goes day by day now...
People are reacting to their emotions to the media cycle like watching a tennis match.

One moment, the "whole election" is in the bag for Obama.
The next after what was basically a mediocre debate either way, but one was a bit more animated...Romney is on "The Rise"
And now, with Obama throwing out a few fiesty words after the fact...and some numbers going is way, he was put "Back On Track".

It's like watching the headlines reporting on the stock market, seeing a 20 point decrease...calling it a DROP or Stocks Dive.
Our reporting has gotten so tabloid...

How Obama reset his campaign
By: Glenn Thrush - October 5, 2012

Nobody had to tell President Barack Obama he had whiffed when he walked off the stage in Denver Wednesday night — nor was he in the mood for a lot of advice.

“You could tell he was pissed,” said a person close to the president, “But it wasn’t like the end of the world. It was like, ‘That wasn’t good. The next one has to better.’ No apologies. No hand-wringing.”

That night, after a brief, terse chat with his advisers backstage at the University of Denver arena — “He had real clarity about what had happened,” one of them told POLITICO with a chuckle — Obama hopped in his limo, “The Beast,” and sped off to a nearby DoubleTree with wife Michelle.

He had had enough of politics for the night.

Like he does almost every time something goes wrong, Obama eschewed the mea culpas — he’s not big on apologies in front of his staff — and shut down to think things over with the adviser whose company he values most in times of trouble: himself.

At first, Obama didn’t think his performance was a complete disaster. But he began Thursday morning by watching excerpts of his own performance and was especially struck by his own tentative, grim demeanor — especially when he and a more relaxed Mitt Romney were broadcast in split-screen. It was worse than he thought, according to one person close to the situation. He was subdued but positive on a conference call with staff.

He huddled with his inner circle — David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett, Anita Dunn, Ron Klain and Jim Messina — and settled on the theme they hammered all of Thursday — a direct attack on Romney that accused him of out-and-out lying on his tax-cut claims and portrayed the former Massachusetts governor as a two-faced imposter willing to say anything to win.

Hours after arguably the worst debate performance of his career, Obama charged that Romney is a different man than the guy he faced Wednesday. But it was the president who seemed to be a totally different guy on Thursday. Gone was the distracted, deer-in-headlights mumbler. In his place, suddenly, was someone doing a pretty good impersonation of Obama ’08.

His mood was radically different Thursday — not just calm but buoyant, loose, focused. It reminded several aides close to the president of his response to Hillary Clinton’s stunning comeback win in the New Hampshire primary in 2008. It’s a cliché in his camp that Obama only feels really motivated when his own destruction is in sight, but the magnitude of his lousy performance clearly motivated him as he plunged back into campaigning.

“That’s not surprising,” said Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs, now a campaign surrogate. “He’s been through all of the ups and downs for a long time in this business. If there’s one thing I know about him, it’s this: He’s not going to get rattled and he’ll be more than ready the next time.”

With Obama, it’s not just about will — it’s always about mood, too. For all that’s been written about his flop in front of roughly 67 million viewers, the reality, according to the people who know him best, is that he just wasn’t in the right headspace. The president had too many conflicting thoughts bouncing around his head and could never quite reconcile his desire to attack Romney with his fear of alienating voters by appearing angry or unpresidential. The result was a muddle that has given Romney new life.

Obama had always planned to play it pretty safe, but his advisers expected him to be more aggressive, peppering Romney with requests for specifics on his deficit and tax plans. They also figured on him smiling a whole lot more, a key part of winning the body-language battle.

And, to the puzzlement of Democrats, he didn’t mention two of the most effective attack lines — Bain Capital and Romney’s “47 percent” video.

On Thursday, Plouffe told reporters on Air Force One that the omissions weren’t deliberate.

“Sure, there might have been an exchange where that came up,” he said of the video.

Plouffe said Obama planned to make “adjustments” at the second of three presidential debates but dismissed the notion that his boss had gone “soft” by holding too few press conferences and sitting down for too many powder-puff interviews on “The View” and elsewhere.

“I said it over the weekend — people are itching to write the Romney comeback story, so it was already leaning in that direction,” Plouffe said.

For his part, Obama waited about 12 hours to start spinning his own post-debate comeback tale.

The first public sign of that new narrative — and Obama’s whipsaw transformation from drip to draw — was his appearance before a 12,000-person crowd at a park in Denver Thursday morning, when he rolled out his new, tougher attack on Romney: the Sesame Street assault.

“Thank God somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird,” he said. “We didn’t know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit. … Elmo, too?” But it wasn’t the joke that struck a top Obama adviser watching from stage right, it was the way the boss was gripping the lectern — left hand grabbing the front, right hand in his pocket.

“Look,” the person said, “That’s what he does when he’s really into it.”

Obama adopted the same posture a few hours later when he arrived in Madison, Wis., a liberal college town where he was greeted by his biggest crowd of the 2012 campaign. On Twitter, Romney supporters noticed the difference in Obama’s energy, too — and chalked it up to the presence Thursday of the teleprompter that had been absent the night before.

But the president and his entourage seemed to draw real energy, and a soupçon of solace, from the 30,000 supporters who showed up and the thousands more who lined North Park Street to wave at his motorcade.

Obama’s closest friend in the West Wing, Jarrett, sat with him as they drove in and seemed giddy at the crowd that rolled up Bascom Hill, first aiming her iPhone camera from field level, then ascending the camera riser for a better view, finally asking the technician who operated a hydraulic lift nearby to take her up for a better view.

“I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney,” Obama said hours earlier at the Denver rally. “But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. But the fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.”

That might be true, but Obama will have to face that fellow again in less than two weeks at a town hall debate in Long Island, N.Y. And Romney’s performance has left real doubts, from Obama on down, about the president’s capacity to rack up a victory big enough to erase the memory of Wednesday’s defeat.

If Thursday’s Obama performance was any indication, he’s more likely to compensate for his shortcomings outside the debate hall — at rallies that fire up a base that had been less than enthusiastic earlier in the year and more recently has been inclined to believe he will trounce Romney.

“It’s not a positive by any means,” an Obama aide said. “But for our supporters, the debate was sort of helpful because they have assumed the race was locked up. It isn’t. But that message hasn’t been getting through. This might scare them.”

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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Aceventura · Oct 7, 2012

Joniemack said: ↑

Aside from the Great Depression, which prior recessions qualify as comparable norms?
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Depending on how we define recession we get different answers but to start here is a chart of comparable norms:

Two Charts Imply Current U.S. Recession May Be Longest in History - Seeking Alpha

this chart looks at the common economic definition of recession. Assuming this definition the Bush recession actually started in 12/07 and was over before Obama started his Presidency. However, President Obama calls the initial period of his Presidency the "Great Recession" - I really don't know what this means and what he thinks he did to corrected it - but whatever he did many economic indicators are lagging relative to past recoveries. And we may be at the brink of a double-dip recession or the start of a new one - depending on one's perspective.

Joniemack · Oct 7, 2012

First of all Ace, the chart does not define an economic recession. It only measures the duration of each recession.

Secondly, I gather that you feel it's accurate to compare the breadth and scope of of the 2007-2009 recession to all other post WWII recessions? Your opinion is not widely held. In fact, I don't know of any economists who have had to go out on a limb by saying that it was indeed the worse economic recession since the Great Depression and would result in a much longer period of recovery than past recessions.

Yet you hold Obama responsible for not proving the economists wrong.

A horse sprains an ankle, he might be up walking in a few weeks. A horse breaks a leg, he's shot. Bush broke the horse's leg. Obama has managed to save the horse's life and at least the animal is standing up now.

redux · Oct 7, 2012

Aceventura said: ↑

... However, President Obama calls the initial period of his Presidency the "Great Recession" - I really don't know what this means and what he thinks he did to corrected it - but whatever he did many economic indicators are lagging relative to past recoveries. And we may be at the brink of a double-dip recession or the start of a new one - depending on one's perspective.
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It was certainly the worst jobs loss (over 2.5 million in 2008) and the worst yearly economic growth (-5 to -8% in 2008) in any single year since the Great Depression.

Joniemack · Oct 7, 2012

redux said: ↑

It was certainly the worst jobs loss (over 2.5 million in 2008) and the worst yearly economic growth (-5 to -8% in 2008) in any single year since the Great Depression.
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A mere bag of shells. Ace wears rose-colored contacts. "All things being equal" is his mantra to ensure that all things can and should be regarded as equal.

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