President Obama Avoids Medical Marijuana, War On Drugs Questions In Reddit AMA
Source: blogs.forbes.com - Wednesday, August 29, 2012
President Obama brought reddit to its knees when he agreed to do an AMA (ask-me-anything) interview on the site. Unfortunately “ask me anything” is not the same as “I’ll answer anything.” I wasn’t surprised to learn that President Obama was doing a reddit AMA (Ask-Me-Anything.) The format is basically a digital townhall style interview with anonymous people online, and lots of celebrities have shown up at one time or another, including comedians Louis CK and Stephen Colbert, as well as various other famous types (and many not-famous types.) The President has shown up on The Daily Show, appeared in Google Hangout townhalls, and made enormous use of social media and the internet in his campaigns. We’re well into the heady days of campaign season at this point so it’s only natural to see the president reach out to the internet this way. (I do wonder, however, if the Romney camp blew all this off as another meeting between the President and the American Medical Association.) This is one of those moments where my past beat – covering the prisons and the War on Drugs – and my current beat, covering technology, collide head-on. In any case, it’s no more surprising that Obama avoided answering questions about medical marijuana, the role that the federal government plays in enforcing drug laws, or the broader conundrum of the War on Drugs. President Obama has never really given off the impression that he takes these issues seriously. PresPaul Ryan and the Post-Truth Convention Speech
Source: www.theatlantic.com - Thursday, August 30, 2012
Paul Ryan's speech was well-written, well- delivered, and well-received. All of that was evident to anyone watching on TV. It had a number of nice smilingly vicious hit lines -- starting with the masterful "staring up at the faded Obama posters" riff -- plus a note of encouraging uplift at the end. It was also profoundly dishonest in ways large and small. Small : telling the sad story of the closing of the Janesville GM plant, and clearly implying that this was one more casualty of the Obama-unemployment era. Whereas of course the plant was shuttered before Obama even took office. Medium: telling that story on the assumption that no one would say, "Wait a minute: wasn't Obama the guy who was pushing the big auto-industry bailout, which your nominee and your party opposed? So wouldn't there have been a lot more closed plants if you'd had your way?" Large : blasting Obama for not enacting the outlook of the Simpson-Bowles commission, without noting that Ryan himself was on the commission and voted against its recommendations because they included tax increases as well as revenue cuts. Large : blasting Obama for proposed cuts in Medicare without noting that Ryan has proposed those same cuts and much more. Let's assume that Ryan knows the "real" answer on these points. If he's from Janesville, he know when the plant shut down. If he was on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, he knows how he voted. So just as a personal matter, I wonder how
