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A former top official at the State Department wrote Thursday that violent protests that targeted the U.S. Embassy in Iraq were the result of President TrumpDonald John TrumpFive environmental fights to watch in 2020 Lawmakers close to finalizing federal strategy to defend against cyberattacks The 7 big Supreme Court cases to watch in 2020 MORE's foreign policies.

Wendy Sherman, former under secretary for political affairs during the Obama administration, wrote for USA Today thatTrump's failed attempts to deal with Iran and his withdrawal from the nucleardeal with Tehran resulted ina "combustible moment."

"It is President Donald Trumps failed policy toward Iran that has brought us to this combustible moment," she wrote.

"Even as the United States was confronting Iran over its nuclear program and malign behavior elsewhere, we maintained an uneasy coexistence in Iraq, where Tehran holds considerable sway," Sherman continued, adding that the coexistence"was destroyed when Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal."

Sherman went on to fault Trump for "diminishing" the State Department and other agencies she said the Obama administration relied on for diplomacy in such regions.

"Three years into his presidency, Donald Trump owns the events and outcomes in Iraq and Iran, as he does in North Korea, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Middle East, Russia, China and Hong Kong. Having diminished our State Department, intelligence agencies and military, the very institutions that could have helped him construct an effective national security and foreign policy, he is now on his own," she wrote.

Protesters at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad reportedly withdrew and claimed victory on Wednesday after camping outside the compound the previous night.

The protesters are now calling for the nation's parliament to push for U.S. troops to leave Iraq, according to The Washington Post.

On Tuesday, demonstrators stormed the embassy, setting fires and trashing furniture, in response to U.S. airstrikes in Iraq that targeted the Iranian-backed militia group Kataib Hezbollah. Those airstrikes, which killed 25 people over the weekend, followed the death of a U.S. contractor in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base.

Originally posted here:
Top Obama official: Trump to blame for attack on US Embassy in Iraq | TheHill - The Hill

Story Highlights

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Barack Obama and Donald Trump are tied this year as the most admired man. It is Obama's 12th time in the top spot versus the first for Trump. Michelle Obama is the most admired woman for the second year in a row.

Each year since 1948, Gallup has asked Americans to name, in an open-ended fashion, which man and woman living anywhere in the world they admire most. This year's results are based on a Dec. 2-15 poll.

Americans' choice for most admired man this year is sharply divided along party lines: 41% of Democrats name Obama, while 45% of Republicans choose Trump. Relatively few Democrats choose Trump and relatively few Republicans pick Obama, while independents' choices are divided about equally between the two men.

Most Admired Man, 2019, Overall and by Party

What man that you have heard or read about, living today in any part of the world, do you admire most?

After Obama and Trump, no other man was mentioned by more than 2% of respondents. The remainder of the top 10 for men this year includes former President Jimmy Carter, businessman Elon Musk, philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Pope Francis, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, California Rep. Adam Schiff, the Dalai Lama, and investor Warren Buffett.

Eleven percent of Americans named a relative or friend as the man they admire most; 18% named some other living man; and 25% did not name anyone.

The incumbent president has typically been Americans' choice as the most admired man, having earned the distinction in 58 of the 72 prior Gallup polls. When the incumbent president is not the choice, it is usually because he is unpopular politically, which was the case for Trump in 2017 (36% approval rating) and 2018 (40%).

Trump is more popular now than he was in the past two years, with a 45% job approval rating, among his best as president. Coincident with the rise in his job approval rating, the 18% of Americans currently naming Trump as the most admired man is also up, from 13% in 2018 and 14% in 2017. Increased mentions of Trump as the most admired man have come almost exclusively among his fellow Republicans -- 32% of Republicans named Trump in 2018 and 35% did so in 2017.

Obama's 18% mentions among U.S. adults as the most admired man are in line with his 2018 (19%) and 2017 (17%) figures, all of which are high for a former president. Dwight Eisenhower is the only other former president who received double-digit mentions at any point after leaving office.

The post-presidency popularity for Obama and Eisenhower allowed each to finish first a record 12 times. Each man was named most admired man in the year he was elected president and all eight years he was in office, plus three additional years. Obama has finished first during the first three years after he left office, while Eisenhower won once before he ran for president (1950) and twice after leaving office (1967 and 1968).

Historically, it has been more common for a former first lady to be named the most admired woman than for a former president to be named most admired man. Michelle Obama is the sixth former first lady to win, along with Eleanor Roosevelt (1948-1950 and 1952-1961), Jacqueline Kennedy (1963-1966), Mamie Eisenhower (1969-1970), Betty Ford (1978) and Hillary Clinton (2002-2017).

The 10% naming Obama this year is down from 15% last year. The 2018 poll was conducted shortly after she released her bestselling autobiography.

Current first lady Melania Trump finished second this year, mentioned by 5%, with former talk show host Oprah Winfrey, Clinton and teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg named by 3% of U.S. adults each. The remainder of the top 10 for women includes Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

Queen Elizabeth finished in the top 10 for the 51st time, more than any other woman. Winfrey (32 times) and Clinton (28) have also made regular appearances in the top 10. The Rev. Billy Graham has the most top 10 finishes for either gender: a total of 61 between 1955 and 2017 before his death last year.

Most Top 10 Finishes, Gallup Most Admired Poll

Sixteen percent of U.S. adults said they admire a female relative or friend most, while 21% mentioned another woman (outside the top 10) and 27% did not have an opinion.

As with the most admired man list, there are party differences in choice of most admired woman, though not to the same extreme. Michelle Obama was the choice of 23% of Democrats, 7% of independents and 2% of Republicans. Melania Trump was the top vote-getter among Republicans, at 11%.

Trump's popularity grew enough this year to allow him to tie Barack Obama as the most admired man, but not to end Obama's streak of 12 first-place finishes. The results reflect the significant party divide in the U.S., with Republicans overwhelmingly naming Trump and Democrats Obama, and few other men garnering significant mention.

Meanwhile, Obama's wife Michelle has been named as the most admired woman the past two years after 25 years that saw Hillary Clinton finish first 22 times. In fact, Obama has had stronger finishes in the past two years than during her eight years as first lady, when no more than 8% of Americans named her.

View complete question responses and trends.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.

Link:
Obama, Trump Tie as Most Admired Man in 2019 - Gallup

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As the 2010s draw to a close, the end-of-decade retrospectives are rolling in. The New Republic, utterly transformed from its neoliberal warmongering early-2000s self, has a package savaging the Democratic Party's leaders of the period called "The Decade from Hell."

New York's Jonathan Chait, who worked for the old TNR, is annoyed. "Does the Left Have Any Better Ideas Than Obama's?" he asked in a recent piece about the package. They do indeed but this raises a better question: are liberals like Chait ever going to honestly reckon with the disastrous failures of the Obama presidency?

Let's start with the stimulus bungle in 2009, and Chait's book Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail (a book which came out in January 2017 and whose title had to be changed at the last minute, alas.) Back then, the economy was in free fall, and the Obama administration badly fumbled its response. Then-economic adviser Larry Summers bullied Christina Romer (another adviser) into cutting the administration's stimulus package proposal far below what she estimated was necessary to restore economic health. Then it turned out the original estimates of the size of the recession were themselves undershoots the crisis was actually much worse than they thought. Whoops!

This faceplant set the stage for the ensuing pivot to austerity, a decade of economic stagnation, growing backlash politics, trillions in output flushed straight down the toilet, and the election of Donald Trump.

Chait, to his credit, does fault the administration for the lowballed initial bid. Other more hackish administration apologists argue that this was as much as could be gotten, but as The Intercept's Ryan Grim argues in his book We've Got People, the administration did not even try to pressure moderate senators by putting an aggressive stimulus before Congress and blaming them for any economic chaos if it should be voted down exactly what happened with the initial round of the bank bailout under Bush.

However, Chait does drastically overstate the scale of the stimulus. He repeats Michael Grunwald's line that "even Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal only consumed about 1.5 percent of the economy at its largest point." But even if narrowly true, this is quite misleading, because the New Deal was much bigger and went on longer. As economist Bill Dupor writes, "the cost of the Recovery Act was equal to 5.7 percent of the nation's 2008 output. On the other hand, the cost of the New Deal ... was 40 percent of the nation's 1929 output." At bottom, the New Deal was a drastic reordering of the American economy, which produced thousands of pieces of infrastructure that are still in use, and the Obama stimulus was by design a conservative, timid attempt to restore the pre-crisis status quo.

Second, let's consider the foreclosure crisis. The administration's actions here were far, far worse than anything they did on the stimulus as it actively chose to make foreclosure worse. The mechanisms were extremely complicated, as financial analyst Carolyn Sissoko writes, but basically the administration used a variety of tricky, subtle actions to ensure that it was homeowners and the government who ate the losses of the foreclosure crisis, not the banks.

Under direction of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the government largely nationalized most of the mortgage lending system, allowing the banks to quickly shed millions of toxic waste loans off their books. Then Obama reneged on his promise to change bankruptcy law to allow a homeowner to write down the value of their primary mortgage down to its actual market value (or "cramdown"). Then the administration refused to include principal writedowns (or reductions in the amount owed) for the first two critical years in its Home Assistance Mortgage Program (HAMP) basically a slush fund from the original bank bailout granting Obama wide authority to help homeowners and the actual program was such a Kafkaesque nightmare that almost nobody participated.

The reason the administration did these latter things was because cramdown or principal reductions would have created big losses for the banks. As Sissoko writes, "There was a housing bubble. Somebody was going to have to absorb the losses that are created when lending takes place against overpriced assets. Because in the name of financial stability the Fed and Treasury decided that banks weren't going to bear any of the losses on the origination and securitization of bad mortgages, they had to find a way to put the tab to the government and to the public."

The words "home assistance mortgage program" or "HAMP" do not appear in Chait's book. Neither does the "robosigning" scandal, in which the Obama Justice Department arranged for a wrist-slap fine for banks committing industrial-scale mortgage fraud.

Obama's illegal refusal to prosecute Bush-era torturers is not mentioned either in Audacity, nor his illegal justification for their crimes. Neither is his decision to back the CIA to the hilt in its bureaucratic trench fight with the Senate Intelligence Committee over suppressing the Senate torture report recently dramatized in the film The Report.

Centrists like Chait have long pushed the idea that Obama's style of finance-friendly moderation, which dominated the Democratic Party from the 1970s through 2016, is the best possible political stance. The idea that Obama might have been handed a golden opportunity to restore American institutions and bungled it in a doomed attempt to preserve the status quo is not an attractive one for them. So perhaps easier to just not mention the above parade of gruesome failure when boosting up such a "legacy."

Read more from the original source:
The Obama legacy is not what many liberals think - The Week

Former Vice President Joe BidenJoe BidenPoll: Biden remains ahead of Sanders by 10 points 2020 forecast: A House switch, a slimmer Senate for GOP and a bigger win for Trump 2020 predictions: Trump will lose if not in the Senate, then with the voters MORE said that he would be open to nominating former President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court during a campaign event in Iowa over the weekend, The New York Times reports.

The brief statement came as Biden fielded questions from supporters at a stop on his presidential campaign in Washington, Iowa, on Saturday as part of this No Malarkey bus tour in the state.

At the event, Biden was reportedly asked bya supporter whether he would nominate Obama to serve on the bench if he were elected president next year.

Biden reportedly responded, If hed take it, yes.

The stop on Saturday was one of three campaign events Biden reportedly held in Iowa over the weekend as part of the tour.

Onlyone president in U.S. historyhas ever served on the Supreme Court: William Howard Taft. Taft, who held office as president from 1909 to 1913, became chief justice in 1921. He served in the latter role until 1930.

Though Obama has not publicly expressed interest in serving as a justice, his legal background stretches back to his time at the Harvard Law School, where he became the first African American tobe namedpresident of the Harvard Law Review in 1990.

Prior to becoming the nations first black president in 2008, he also worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago before serving in the Illinois state Senate and eventually the U.S. Senate.

Biden is leading national polls for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Read this article:
Biden said he'd nominate Obama to the Supreme Court if 'he'd take it' | TheHill - The Hill

President Donald Trump frequently touts the growth of the stock market as proof hes done a good job for the economy.

Not much is said by Trump overwhyhe thinks he plays a role in the growth of the stock market, nor whether such growth is good for the American people. Reportedly, only half of Americans even invest directly in the stock market, and among those that do, most are doing so primarily through their retirement accounts. Its mainly the already-wealthy who benefit from a rising stock market, the Chicago Tribune has noted.

But even if we go along with the dubious claims that a good stock market is good for America, Trumps stock gains since becoming president arent the best ever seen in recent presidencies.

According to a report from Axios, the stock market has increased by about 42.2 percent under Trumps watch, since his inauguration to this week. Taken in comparison to other presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, thats a higher output.

But its lower than other presidents, too, including George H.W. Bush and Trumps immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, whom Trump is frequently trying to outdo or prove hes better than.

Indeed, during the same period of time, Bush Sr. had a 45.5 percent stock market gain. Obamas was even more pronounced, with Wall Street gains increasing by 56.2 percent.

In comparing the two most recent presidents, Trumps output in stock gains is actually nearly 25 percent slower than Obamas.

Trumps supposed economic prowesses have been challenged as of late. As previously reported by HillReporter.com, one of the current presidents predictions about the stock market proved to be untrue, as he suggested that any attempts at impeaching him would result in a crash on Wall Street.

As it turns out, within the 87 days that the impeachment process took, the stock market flourished, and vastly outperformed previous gains seen in the 87 days prior to the impeachment inquiry being announced in September.

View post:
Stock Market Gains Were Higher Under Bush Sr., Obama, At This Point In Their Presidencies, Compared To Trump - HillReporter.com