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Trump has, in fact, gone out of his way to attack Obama, as in his recent nonsensical reversal wherein he attacked Obama for his lack of response to Russian meddling in the 2016 election: "Obama did NOTHING," Trump tweeted. He went on to accuse Obama of colluding with the Russians! By now the world is familiar with this Trump ploy: He engages in unscrupulous business deals, so he labels Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary." He lies, so he calls Ted Cruz "Lyin' Ted." On and on. Anyone who calls him out on any failure gets the same accusation hurled back in his or her face, and -- to a shocking extent -- this trick works. Or it works with Trump supporters, who don't seem to care if he wrecks their health care, allows factories to poison their water, or provides massive tax cuts for the rich people they admire so much. THIS is making America great again. The truth is, Obama confronted Putin directly about intervening in our political system and put in place sanctions, though he clearly didn't do enough. "I feel like we sort of choked," one former colleague of Obama has said, according to an article in the Washington Post. This is too bad, as the Russians pulled off the crime of the century, possibly derailing Clinton, a tough critic of Russia. Today we have an incompetent President who (for reasons we might discover soon enough) appears unwilling to oppose the Russian regime.

Obama's weak responses to Trump have been troubling. I don't know why he didn't simply open the intelligence files on Putin to the American public, saying: "My God, look what the Russians are trying to do! Put up your guard!" There can be no sound reason for not alerting the people of this country to a major attack on their most cherished right, the right to vote.

I'm also unhappy about Obama's response to Trumpcare. His language was strong enough:

Again and again, Trump strikes and Obama turns the other cheek. What's going on here?

There is a longstanding Christian tradition of turning the other cheek, and that's usually the best approach to abuse. But one should remember that Jesus also turned over the tables of merchants and moneychangers in Herod's Temple in Jerusalem. He accused them of transforming the holiest site in Judaism into a "den of thieves." (Mark 11:17) I wonder if the analogy here, with Trump and his cohorts, isn't more apt than we think.

But quietism seems misguided in this context. Political life is where we create a community. What is government but our community made visible? If we are to create a community that takes pride in how it cares for its own, one that promotes decent values, such as humility and tolerance and the wish to share, we have no choice but to step forward, to declare ourselves and speak up for our values.

Obama needs to find his voice now in ways that, during his time in the Oval Office, he was too often reluctant to do, perhaps fearing the immense power of the bully pulpit

But now there is a real bully in the pulpit, and Obama -- like the rest of us -- has no choice but to speak, and to act.

My hope for Obama is that, in his post-presidency, he steps forward boldly to say whatever feels true in his mind. And he must do so in the most public ways. I would urge him to speak up, not indirectly on Facebook, but to declare himself more publicly and without reservation, revealing his ideas, his passions. There may be some fatal flaw here, of course, one that disallows a full-throated singing of his song. But I hope it isn't so.

View original post here:
Why isn't Obama hitting back at Trump? - CNN

A bit too friendly.

"I feel like we sort of choked." That is the killer quote in an extraordinary Washington Post investigation into how Barack Obama responded to intelligence last year that Russia was running a sophisticated influence operation against the 2016 elections.

It's attributed to a former senior Obama administration official, but it captures the view of many Democrats and now many opportunistic Republicans. President Donald Trump got in on the action on Monday morning when he tweeted: "The real story is that President Obama did NOTHING after being informed in August about Russian meddling."

It's tempting to grant Trump this point, despite Trump's own insistence during his campaign that there was no evidence Russia meddled in the election at all. Obama was the commander-in-chief when Moscow hatched this operation. It was his duty to defend our election.

But this isn't entirely fair. To start, by the time the CIA had gathered the intelligence in August about how President Vladimir Putin himself was trying to elect Trump over Hillary Clinton, the servers of the Democratic National Committee and other leading Democrats were already breached. Obama's government did inform state election officials about the prospect of hacking of voter rolls and helped make them more resilient. In the end, the Russians spread fake news and distributed the messages they hacked. They had the good fortune of a Republican candidate willing to amplify the pilfered emails. But there is no evidence that Russia changed the vote tallies or took voters off the registration rolls.

What's more, Trump himself had in the final weeks of the election suggested the vote itself would be rigged. Had Obama been more public in warning about the Russian influence operation, he would risk undermining the legitimacy of the election in the eyes of Trump's supporters, essentially aiding Russia's plan to undermine it before any votes were cast.

Rather than asking why Obama didn't do more to stop Russian meddling, the better question is why President Vladimir Putin thought he could get away with this interference in the first place. In every respect, the U.S. is more powerful than Russia. It has a much larger economy. Its military is superior. Its cyber capabilities are greater. Its diplomatic position is stronger. So why did Putin believe he could treat America like it was Estonia?

The answer is that Obama spent the first six years of his presidency turning a blind eye to Russian aggression. In his first term, Obama pursued a policy of "reset" with Moscow, even though he took office only five months after Russia had occupiedtwo Georgian provinces in the summer of 2008. In the 2012 election, Obama mocked his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, for saying Russia posed a significant threat to U.S. interests. Throughout his presidency, Obama's administration failed to respond to Russian cheating on arms-control agreements. His diplomacy to reach an agreement to temporarily suspend progress on Iran's nuclear program made the U.S. reliant on Russian cooperation for Obama's signature foreign policy achievement.

In the shadows, Russian spies targeted Americans abroad. As I reported in 2011 for the Washington Times, Russia's intelligence services had stepped up this campaign of harassment during the reset. This included breaking into the homes of NGO workers and diplomats. In one case, an official with the National Democratic Institute was framed in the Russian press on false rape charges. In 2013, when the Obama administration appointed Michael McFaul to be his ambassador in Moscow, the harassment got worse. McFaul complained he was tailed by cameramen from the state-owned media every time he left the Embassy for an appointment. He asked on Twitter how the network seemed to always know his private schedule.

The Washington Post reported that these incidents continued throughout the Obama administration. In June 2016, a CIA officer in Moscow was tackled and thrown to the ground by a uniformed guard with Russia's FSB, the successor agency of the KGB.

In 2011, the former Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Christopher "Kit" Bond, told me: "It's not the intelligence committee that fails to understand the problem. It's the Obama administration.

This lax approach to Russia was captured in the memoir of Obama's former defense secretary, Robert Gates. He wrote that Obama at first was angry at his FBI director, Robert Mueller, and his CIA director, Leon Panetta, for recommending the arrest in 2010 of a network of illegal Russian sleeper agents the FBI had been tracking for years.

"The president seemed as angry at Mueller for wanting to arrest the illegals and at Panetta for wanting to exfiltrate the source from Moscow as he was at the Russians," Gates wrote. He quoted Obama as saying: "Just as we're getting on track with the Russians, this? This is a throwback to the Cold War. This is right out of John le Carr. We put START, Iran, the whole relationship with Russia at risk for this kind of thing? Gates recounts that the vice president wanted to ignore the entire issue because it threatened to disrupt an upcoming visit from Russia's president at the time, Dmitry Medvedev.

After some more convincing, Obama went along with a plan to kick the illegal spies out of the country in exchange for some Americans. But the insight into the thinking inside his Oval Office is telling.

Eventually, Obama responded to Russian aggression after its stealth invasion of Ukraine in 2014. He worked closely with European allies to impose sanctions on Russia for their violation of Ukraine's sovereignty. But he never agreed to sell the Ukrainians defensive weapons. In the final years of his presidency, as Wired magazine has recently reported, the Russians engaged in bold cyberattacks against Ukraine's electric grid. So far, the U.S. has not responded openly to that either.

Even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Obama policy toward Russian aggression was inconsistent. As Foreign Policy magazine reported in May, Obama's State Department slow-rolled a proposal from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations to lay out a set of options to punish Russia's client Syria for its use of chlorine bombs against its own citizens in 2014. Russia and the U.S. forged the agreement in 2013 to remove chemical weapons from the country. In 2015, the Obama administration did nothing to deter Russia from establishing air bases inside Syria, preferring instead to support John Kerry's fruitless efforts to reach a cease-fire agreement with Russia in Syria. That inaction now haunts the U.S. as Russia declared its own no-fly zone this month in Syria, after U.S. forces shot down a Syrian jet.

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All of this is the context of Putin's decision to boldly interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections. Perhaps Putin would have authorized the operation even if Obama had responded more robustly to Russia's earlier dirty tricks and foreign adventures. But it's easy to understand why Putin would believe he had a free shot. Russia probed American resolve for years. When Obama finally did respond, it was too late to save Ukraine and too late to protect our election.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

(Corrects year Russia built air bases in Syria in 15th paragraph.)

To contact the author of this story: Eli Lake at elake1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net

Originally posted here:
Obama Choked on Russia Long Before the 2016 Election - Bloomberg

Those who covered their eyes at the sight of Donald Trump playing tennis may fare no better watching him try to throw it down on a basketball court, especially if hes going one-on-one with President Obama in NBA 2K17 where, unlike Trump, Obama has also hosted NBA teams at the White House.

This is the latest hypothetical matchup from Shady, the YouTuber and prolific creator of NBA 2K videos, some serious and some others not so.

Though Obama throws down, functionally he's merely a foil in the derpification of Trump summarized neatly by Trump's reaction in transition at 0:44. A little post-production was necessary to knock the Donald's hairpiece off at 0:55, but did you notice the Knicks were wearing their Latin Nights jerseys when Derrick Rose slips on it?

Trump gets kicked in the head and knocked to the ground on a savage jam at 1:53, but what might be the best burn of this video is the free throw sequence beginning at 1:15. I'll let you savor that by yourself. The music is Alphacat's 2015 spoof of Drake's "Back-to-Back," the diss track Drake used to dunk all over Meek Mill that year.

Originally posted here:
Watch Obama and Trump go one-on-one in NBA 2K17 - Polygon

The Trump administration Tuesday announced plans to scrap an Obama-era environmental rule that had been attacked as federal overreach by farmers and property-rights groups.

The Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers said they would withdraw Obama's 2015 "waters of the United States" or WOTUS regulation, which expanded the number of waterways covered by the federal Clean Water Act. The agencies described a withdrawal process as an interim step and promised a broader review of which waters should fall under federal jurisdiction.

"We are taking significant action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nation's farmers and businesses," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said, adding that the re-evaluation would be "thoughtful, transparent and collaborative with other agencies and the public."

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks to employees of the EPA in Washington this past February (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

The EPA and the Army Corps said dismantling the Obama rule would not change existing practices because the measure has been stayed by the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati in response to opponents' lawsuits.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said the move showed "the West has won in the battle over the Obama administrations WOTUS rule.

"This regulation would have been a disaster for rural communities in the West and across the country, giving Washington near-total control over water resources," Ryan added. "The livelihoods of American farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs were at stake."

The debate over which waterways are covered under the Clean Water Act has dragged on for years and remains murky despite two Supreme Court rulings.

The Obama rule expanded the definition of "navigable waters to include intermittent streams -- that is, streams that sometimes had no water in them at all. Environmental activists say the ruleis essential to protecting water for human consumption and wildlife.

"Clean water is vital to our ecology, our health and our quality of life," John Rumpler, senior attorney with Environment America, told the Associated Press. "Repealing the Clean Water Rule turns the mission of the EPA on its head."

In February, Trumpsigned an executive order directing the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to review Obamas expanded definition of navigable waters with a view to rescinding it.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Read the original post:
EPA moves to nix Obama's 'waters of the US' regulation - Fox News

Every once in a while, as often as a blue moon or a politician forgoing the use of the word frankly, I utter a soft Right on in response to something President Trump has done or tweeted. This occurred recently when he took Barack Obama to task for his weak and tardy response to Russias meddling in the U.S. election. For a moment there, Trump forgot that Vladimir Putin can do no wrong.

But for that rare moment, the president was absolutely right. The Obama administrations response to Russian meddling was ineffective and oddly torpid. It was also secretive. For the longest time, only some in the U.S. intelligence community and a few people in the Obama White House knew what the Kremlin was up to. Most of Congress, not to mention the American people, were kept in the dark. Why? After all, it was our election.

Of course, Trump had his own harebrained take on what happened and who might have benefited. Somehow, Obamas weak response to the Russians was supposed to benefit Hillary Clinton. If anything, Putin had become a virtual Trump volunteer, all but chanting Lock her up, lock her up, in the safe space created by thick Kremlin walls. Putin had come to hate Clinton for her statements questioning the legitimacy of his own election. One does not question Putins legitimacy. He has that in common with Trump.

Russian meddling in the 2016 election has produced a very rare bipartisan approach to a foreign policy challenge, combining incompetence (Obama) with chaotic indifference (Trump) so that Putin has been allowed to mess with our election with close to impunity. Oh, two Russian rest houses in Maryland and New York were closed, some intelligence operatives operating under diplomatic cover were given the boot, and additional sanctions were imposed, but mostly this caper was widely successful. It may not be true that Russia managed to fiddle with the vote; Moscow did, however, mess with Clintons head, employing WikiLeaks to keep her off-balance. The Obama administrations response to Russian meddling was entirely characteristic of a president who was respected by many but feared by few. When Obama finally approached Putin at a summit in Hangzhou, China, and reportedly told him hed better stop or else, Putin essentially blew him off. He demanded proof. As Putin no doubt knew, red lines with Obama were opportunities for further study.

But Obama is no longer president. Some of the tougher penalties Obama ordered up but never used are on Trumps desk. Yet the new president continued to dismiss the unanimous finding of the entire U.S. intelligence community that Russia meddled in the election. Trump variously called the whole thing a hoax and said that maybe it wasnt the Russians but some guy in his home in New Jersey. (Chris Christie? Tony Soprano?) Actually, it was some guy at home in the Kremlin.

(Whitney Leaming,Osman Malik/The Washington Post)

The question is: What is Trump going to do about it? And the further question is: Why does the answer appear to be nothing? Can it be that he actually thinks the story was concocted by all 17 intelligence agencies? Can it be that he is somehow so indebted to Putin that his hands are tied and his mouth muzzled? And what could so compromise the president of the United States? Does he owe rubles to the Russians? Did the Russians catch Trump on tape reading a history book? He would, of course, be destroyed.

As always with Trump, the Republican Party has taken a stand on principle that it will have none. The Russians violated American sovereignty, and few in the GOP protest. The man in the Oval Office appears either inhibited or so befogged by keen feelings of victimization, that the United States the worlds sole superpower, remember? cannot respond to what amounts to an attack on our way of life.

There was yet another moment when I cheered Trump. That was in April when he authorized the missile strike on a Syrian air base after its military had used chemical weapons on civilians. He did what Obama had refused to do, he did it without months of study and it was successful. He now has the credibility that unfortunately matters in the schoolyard of international affairs the willingness to use force. I am not suggesting that he do something similar to Russia it is a nuclear power, after all but I am suggesting that he do something or explain, in possibly more than 140 characters, why he will not. In the meantime, the United States appears weak.

Cmon, Donald, make America great again.

Read more from Richard Cohens archive.

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For once, Trump is right about Obama - Washington Post