Mediaboss Marketing

Michelle might be well on her way to joining her husband with the distinction of a Grammy Award for the Best Spoken Word Album. It comes as her standing for president in the upcoming 2020 US elections looks less likely with every day, though fans of the ex-FLOTUS will be made up that she might enter a separate hall of fame.

Michelle was nominated for the Grammy award late last month for the audiobook version of Becoming her 2018 memoir about life as a black woman in America and The White House.

Should she win, Michelle will join several other former White House occupants and Grammy winners, all of whom have triumphed in the spoken-word category.

Barack won a Grammy for his audiobook recording of Dreams From My Father in 2006, and another in 2008 for his The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

On hearing that she had been nominated, Michelle tweeted: So thrilled to receive a GRAMMYs nomination!

A third added: Congratulations Mrs. Obama and well-deserved!

Your book and audio are wonderful and certainly a winner!

Best wishes and good luck on the GRAMMY Awards.

Thanks for you and your beautiful familys service to the US!

There are several other nominees in the Best Spoken Word Album section.

Others include Michael Diamond, Adam Horovitz, Scott Sherratt and Dan Zitt, Eric Alexandrakis, John Waters and Sekou Andrews and The String Theory.

Former President Bill Clinton grabbed his first Grammy in 2004 in the spoken word category album for children, for his narration of the book Wolf Tracks and Peter and the Wolf.

Then, in 2005, he won the spoken world album category for his memoir My World and Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy, respectively.

Go here to see the original:
Michelle Obama shock: Ex-FLOTUS on her way to joining Barack with illustrious award - Express.co.uk

Barack Obama repeatedly abused his executive power as president. That is worth noting because we now have House Democrats and their buddies in ideological clothing insisting that abuse of power is sufficient grounds for impeachment. They are talking about President Donald Trump, of course, and have cleverly selected a transgression equivalent to saying you are guilty because you abysmally do what all presidents do.

Back in the days when the founders were arguing about constitutional content, some wanted to be able to impeach a president for such things as maladministration. James Madison, who agreed that the right to congressional impeachment was crucial for governmental stability, said heaven help us. Where would you draw the line, he wanted to know. Would any kind of administrative stumble be enough for action?

We therefore ended up with a Constitution saying impeachment required treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors with some saying that phrase at the least implies malfeasance as serious as treason and bribery.

You dont get that in Trump delaying military aid to Ukraine and asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Vice President Joe Biden. Ukraine got the aid and, according to the U.S. secretary of defense, at no military disadvantage. Biden never got investigated, though his own conflict of interest was twice as startling as that of Trump, who had plenty of reason to be concerned about corruption even if Biden is now striving to be president.

But on to Obama who never talked about fake news but proved himself more quiver-worthy to free press principles by his administration spying on reporters and, in national security cases, threatening reporters with jail if they did not reveal their sources. The administration also set records on refusing requests for governmental information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Obama, please remember, made appointments requiring congressional acquiescence without congressional acquiescence. It has been noted that he worked things so that, in the Chrysler bailout, creditors did not get the money due them under law. A bunch of it went to Democratically beloved unions instead. As other seekers of the truth also report, he started regulating the internet despite congressional requirements that he do no such thing.

In implementing Obamacare, he rewrote Obamacare in concert with his congressional talents, and there were 22 times he said he could not constitutionally give reprieves by himself to illegal aliens, nevertheless finding it convenient to do as much during an election campaign.

Obama made a deal with Iran that let it keep the means of producing nuclear weapons and enabled it to keep inspectors outside of military bases while the administration said some of its violations in trying to buy nuclear technology were not violations because the tricksters were caught. The power abuse was refusing to submit the deal to Congress for treaty verification just possibly leading to something less threatening.

Back in the states, it turned out that the Internal Revenue Service was denying tax breaks to certain non-profit conservative organizations while giving them to non-profit liberal organizations. The department came up with excuses that wouldnt fool a first-grader, but, then, we the people are all in kindergarten.

Also, pretending the Founders never wrote a Constitution, Obama unilaterally gave us a court-snubbed Clean Power Plan that would have changed state laws while raising utility rates sky high and deterring climate change by an undetectable speck.

Remember, by the way, how the administration illegitimately told universities they could forget federal funds if they indulged in due process in going after men accused of sexual misdeeds? Standards of fairness do not apply to men because, well, they are men and therefore in need of abuse of power.

Obama was among our most autocratic presidents, especially when you consider how he also set records for new liberty-shriveling regulations, but I am not saying he should have been impeached. I am saying that some of his offenses were as bad as Trumps.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com.

Read more:
Should Barack Obama have been impeached for abuses of power? - Grand Island Independent

Iowa swung fiercely to Trump. Will it swing back in 2020?

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) Few states have changed politically with the head-snapping speed of Iowa.

In 2008, its voters propelled Barack Obama to the White House, an overwhelmingly white state validating the candidacy of the first black president. A year later, its Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage, adding a voice of Midwestern sensibility to a national shift in public sentiment. In 2012, Iowa backed Obama again.

All that change proved too much, too fast, and it came as the Great Recession punished agricultural areas, shook the foundations of rural life and stoked a roiling sense of grievance.

By 2016, Donald Trump easily defeated Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Republicans were in control of the governors mansion and state legislature and held all but one U.S. House seat. For the first time since 1980, both U.S. Senate seats were in GOP hands.

What happened? Voters were slow to embrace Obamas signature health care law. The recession depleted college-educated voters as a share of the rural population, and Republicans successfully painted Democrats as the party of coastal elites.

Those forces combined for a swift Republican resurgence and helped create a wide lane for Trump.

The self-proclaimed billionaire populist ended up carrying Iowa by a larger percentage of the vote than in Texas, winning 93 of Iowa's 99 counties, including places like working-class Dubuque and Wapello counties, where no Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower had won.

But now, as Democrats turn their focus to Iowas kickoff caucuses that begin the process of selecting Trumps challenger, could the state be showing furtive signs of swinging back? Caucus turnout will provide some early measures of Democratic enthusiasm, and of what kind of candidate Iowas Democratic voters who have a good record of picking the Democratic nominee believe has the best chance against Trump.

If Iowas rightward swing has stalled, it could be a foreboding sign for Trump in other upper Midwestern states he carried by much smaller margins and would need to win again.

Theyve gone too far to the right and there is the slow movement back, Tom Vilsack, the only two-term Democratic governor in the past 50 years, said of Republicans. This is an actual correction."

Iowans unseated two Republican U.S. House members and nearly a third in 2018 during midterm elections where more Iowa voters in the aggregate chose a Democrat for federal office for the first time in a decade.

In doing so, Iowans sent the states first Democratic women to Congress: Cindy Axne, who dominated Des Moines and its suburbs, and Abby Finkenauer, who won in several working-class counties Trump carried.

Democrats won 14 of the 31 Iowa counties that Trump won in 2016 but Obama won in 2008, though Trump's return to the ballot in 2020 could change all that.

We won a number of legislative challenge races against incumbent Republicans, veteran Iowa Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Link said. I think that leaves little question Iowa is up for grabs next year.

Theres more going on in Iowa that simply a merely cyclical swing.

Iowas metropolitan areas, some of the fastest growing in the country over the past two decades, have given birth to a new political front where Democrats saw gains in 2018.

The once-GOP-leaning suburbs and exurbs, especially to the north and west of Des Moines and the corridor linking Cedar Rapids and the University of Iowa in Iowa City, swelled with college-educated adults in the past decade, giving rise to a new class of rising Democratic leaders.

I dont believe it was temporary, Iowa State University economist David Swenson said of Democrats' 2018 gains in suburban Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. I think it is the inexorable outcome of demographic and educational shifts that have been going on.

The Democratic caucuses will provide a test of how broad the change may be.

I think it would be folly to say Iowa is not a competitive state," said John Stineman, a veteran Iowa GOP campaign operative and political data analyst who is unaffiliated with the Trump campaign but has advised presidential and congressional campaigns over the past 25 years. I believe Iowa is a swing state in 2020.

For now, that is not a widely held view, as Iowa has shown signs of losing its swing state status.

In the 1980s, it gave rise to a populist movement in rural areas from the left, the ascent of the religious right as a political force and the start of an enduring rural-urban balance embodied by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin.

Now, after a decade-long Republican trend, there are signs of shifting alliances in people like Jenny OToole.

The 48-year-old insurance industry employee from suburban Cedar Rapids stood on the edge of the scrum surrounding former Vice President Joe Biden last spring, trying to get a glimpse as he shook hands and posed for pictures.

I was a Republican. Not any more, OToole said. Im socially liberal, but economically conservative. Thats what Im looking for.

OToole is among those current and new former Republicans who dot Democratic presidential events, from Iowa farm hubs to working-class river towns to booming suburbs.

Janet Cosgrove, a 75-year-old Episcopal minister from Atlantic, in western Iowa, and Judy Hoakison, a 65-year-old farmer from rural southwest Iowa, are Republicans who caught Mayor Pete Buttigiegs recent trip.

If such voters are a quiet warning to Trump in Iowa, similar symptoms in Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats also made 2018 gains, could be even more problematic.

Vilsack has seen the stage change dramatically. After 30 years of Republican dominance in Iowas governors mansion, he was elected in 1998 as a former small-city mayor and pragmatic state senator.

An era of partisan balance in Iowa took hold, punctuated by Democratic presidential nominee Al Gores 4,144-vote victory in Iowa in 2000, and George W. Bushs 10,059-vote re-election in 2004.

After the 2006 national wave swept Democrats into total Statehouse control for the first time in 50 years, the stage was set for Obamas combination of generational change, his appeal to anti-Iraq War sentiment and the historic opportunity to elect the first African American president.

We were like a conquering army, prepared to negotiate terms of surrender, said Cedar Rapids Democrat Dale Todd, an early Obama supporter and adviser.

Todd was one of a collection of Iowa Democratic activists who gathered at a downtown Des Moines sports bar last year to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Obama's historic caucus campaign.

Just across the Des Moines River in the state Capitol, there was a reminder of how much the ground had shifted since those heady days.

Republicans control all of state government for the first time in 20 years. Part of their wholesale conservative agenda has included stripping public employee unions of nearly all bargaining rights, establishing new voter restrictions and outlawing abortion six weeks into a pregnancy.

It was in line with Republican takeovers in states such as Wisconsin that were completed earlier, but traced their beginnings to the same turbulent summer of 2009.

On a Wednesday in August that year, throngs flocked to Grassleys typically quiet annual county visits to protest his work with Democrats on health care legislation.

Thousands representing the emerging Tea Party forced Grassleys last event from a community center in the small town of Adel to the town park, where some booed the typically popular senator and held signs stating, Grassley, you're fired.

The events became a national symbol for uneasiness about the new president's signature policy goal.

The previous April, Iowa's nine-member Supreme Court Democratic and Republican appointees had unanimously declared same-sex marriage legal in the state. A year later, Christian conservatives successfully campaigned to oust the three Supreme Court justices facing retention, waving the marriage decision as their cause.

Four years later, Democrats had high expectations of holding the retiring Harkin's Senate seat. But Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley lacked Harkin's populist appeal, and was beaten by state Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iraq War veteran from rural Iowa who painted Braley as an elitist lawyer.

By 2016, Republicans had completed their long-sought statehouse takeover, in part by beating longtime Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal.

We tried in many cases to win suburbia, but we just couldn't lay a glove on it," Gronstal said. We just could not figure out how to crack it in Iowa."

The answer for Democrats in Iowa is much the same as the rest of the country: growing, vote-rich suburbs.

Dallas County, west of Des Moines, has grown by 121% since 2000, converting from a checkerboard of farms into miles of car dealerships, strip malls, megachurches and waves of similarly styled housing developments.

It had been a Republican county. However, last year, long-held Republican Iowa House districts in Des Moines western suburbs fell to Democrats.

It was the culmination of two decades of shifting educational attainment with political implications.

Since 2000, the number of Iowans with at least a college degree in urban and suburban areas grew by twice the rate of rural areas, according to U.S. Census data and an Iowa State University study.

Last year, a third of urban and suburban Iowans had a college diploma, up from 25% at the dawn of the metropolitan boom in 2000. Rural Iowans had inched up to just 20% from 16% during that period.

The more that occurs, the more you get voter participation leaning toward Democratic outcomes than has historically been in the past, Swenson said, noting the higher likelihood of college-educated voters to lean Democratic.

Since 2016 alone, registered Democrats in Dallas County have increased 15%, to Republicans 2%. Republicans still outnumber Democrats in the county, but independent voters have leaped by 20% and for the first time outnumber Republicans.

There is now a third front, Gronstal said. We can fight in those toss-up rural areas, hold our urban base, but now compete in those quintessentially suburban districts.

Though Trumps return to the ballot in 2020 shakes up the calculus, his approval in Iowa has remained around 45% or lower. A sub-50 rating is typically problematic for an incumbent.

Another warning for Trump, GOP operative Stineman noted, is The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Polls November finding that only 76% of self-identified Republicans said they would definitely vote to re-elect him next year.

With no challenger and 10 months until the election, a lot can change.

Still, thats one in four of your family thats not locked down, Stineman said.

There are also signs Iowa Democrats have shaken some of the apathy that helped Trump and hobbled Clinton in Iowa in 2016.

Democratic turnout in 2018 leaped from the previous midterm in 2014 from 57% to 68%, according to the Iowa Secretary of State. Republican turnout, which is typically higher, also rose, but by a smaller margin.

Overall turnout in Iowa, as in more reliably Democratic-voting presidential states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, was down in 2016, due mostly to a downturn in Democratic participation.

The trend was down, across the board," said Ann Selzer, who has conducted The Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll for more than 25 years. "So it doesnt take much to create a Democratic victory in these upper Midwestern states.

I think the success in the midterms kind of made people on the Democratic side believe that we can do it, Selzer said.

Perhaps, but Trump has his believers, too.

Here is the original post:
Iowa swung fiercely to Trump. Will it swing back in 2020? - mySA

Why was there a five-year delay in passing the Caesar Act? What was stopping the US administration? Bilal Farouk, a member of the Syrian-American Council, says that after "Caesar" arrived at the United States, in an attempt to prepare the Act, "we knew the reasons preventing the Act from being passed in Congress and the person who had been disrupting the process."

Bilal adds that after Caesar left Syria and with the aid of jurists to permit him to share the documents he had attained, he was listened to in the beginning, in an attempt to figure out whether or not any Americans were among those who were murdered. This would have allowed for the issue to become one of the US public opinions. However, after seeing the images, it became apparent that the problem was much bigger than that. It became evident that the issue went beyond imposing sanctions to protect civilians.

When the Act was proposed at the beginning of 2016, Barack Obama was still the President of the United States. When the Act was drafted, the tone was different; it had humane objectives to protect civilians and prisoners. It did not include international sanctions on other countries and did not include the oil industry or the army. It was widely supported, and it was imagined that it would pass through the parliament.

At the end of his term, Obama was ready to celebrate the nuclear deal with Iran. He feared that passing this Act may affect the nuclear deal. He called the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, Nancy Pelosi, on Friday, only a few days before the Congress was supposed to vote on the Act. According to reliable sources from Pelosi's office, he asked her to withdraw the vote.

After that, civil organizations that followed up the issue tried, once again, in the hopes that it would be re-proposed for voting. In the beginning, the process of passing the legislation was that of independent Act, and it was supported by the vast majority of the Congress. This is what happened after Trump was elected, and the Republicans took over the Senate. The Republican Senator of Kentucky, Rand Paul, known for his relations with Russia and for supporting Bashar Assad, prevented it from being passed in the Senate because this type of Act cannot pass without getting the vote of the entire Senate.

Rand Paul disrupted the passing of the Act in the Senate for three years. He would bounce it back to Congress to vote on it and refer it to the Senate to no avail. Consequently, Syrian organizations decided to communicate with US attorneys and civil organizations to find a way to pass the Act. It was agreed that the Act would be included in the budget Act of the Department of Defense. That way, it would not need to be approved by the entire Senate. It received 74 votes.

Last year, there was an attempt to include the Caesar Act in the budget, but it was challenged by problems that faced Trump in Congress after Democrats took over. This led to a shutting down of the US Government for 35 days as a result of Trump's insistence on including the infamous wall on the border of Mexico in the budget. This suspended the ability to pass any proposition or Act during that time, primarily that the budget cannot be referred to the President to be signed unless it received partisan agreement and the majority of both Congress and Senate members.

This year it was different; Syrian organizations succeeded in including the Caesar Act in the budget.

Bilal concludes by saying that "Caesar" was documenting the corpses and linking them to the victim's name and number, so the information he was gathering was dangerous. He confirmed that "Caesar" is not in the US and that he goes to Washington from time to time to meet with Congress members and US security agencies. However, he worries that if his identity was revealed, he would be murdered by the Russian, Syrian, or Iranian security agencies. This is what has happened and continues to happen to others.

Go here to see the original:
Obama Obstructed 'Caesar Act' to Save the Nuclear Deal With Iran - Asharq Al-awsat English

Listen in on a conversation with former First Lady Michelle Obama in Anaheim.

Tickets are now on sale for an April 2 visit by Obama to the Honda Center. The conversations moderator has yet to be announced.

Obama, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, started her career as a lawyer in Chicago before later working in the Chicago mayors office and at universities. As first lady from 2009 to 2017, she championed initiatives combating childhood obesity, supporting military families and veterans, encouraging higher education and pushing for more educational opportunities for girls around the world.

Last year she published her memoir, Becoming.

Before her stop in Anaheim, Obama will hold a similar appearance at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento on April 1.

Tickets start at $99; seating is in the lower bowl and on the floor. A limited meet and greet VIP package is available for $3,000.

See more here:
Tickets on sale for Michelle Obama in conversation at the Honda Center - OCRegister