Mediaboss Marketing

Well said, Jimmy, former President Barack Obama tweeted. | Getty

Former President Barack Obama took to Twitter on Tuesday afternoon to defend his signature legislative achievement, praising late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for blasting Republicans efforts to weaken Affordable Care Act protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

The late-night host used his Monday night monologue to recount his newborn sons emergency surgery. The infant had a heart condition that would likely prevent him from getting health coverage or make his health costs insurmountable for many American families under the GOP health care repeal plan.

Story Continued Below

Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you would never be able to get health insurance because you were born with a pre-existing condition, Kimmel said.

No parent should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child's life, a crying Kimmel added.

Well said, Jimmy. That's exactly why we fought so hard for the ACA, and why we need to protect it for kids like Billy. And congratulations! Obama tweeted Tuesday.

The latest iteration of the GOP repeal bill would allow states to waive protections for pre-existing conditions if they create high-risk pools or similar financial backstops to cover people with expensive medical conditions.

Get the latest on the health care fight, every weekday morning in your inbox.

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.

But these high-risk pools, used by about three dozen red and blue states before the Affordable Care Act, were largely unsuccessful, leaving many people with cancer, diabetes and other expensive diseases with inadequate coverage, or none at all.

Obama last broke his silence on the ACA repeal effort in late March, when the House appeared poised to vote on a repeal package. The former president described Obamacare as a watershed moment in determining that health care is a right for everybody.

Missing out on the latest scoops? Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning in your inbox.

Excerpt from:
Obama tweets praise for Kimmel's slam of GOP repeal bill - Politico

New York Times

A Long, Long Look at Obama's Life, Mostly Before the White House New York Times Rising Star, the voluminous 1,460-page biography of Barack Obama by David J. Garrow, is a dreary slog of a read: a bloated, tedious and given its highly intemperate epilogue ill-considered book that is in desperate need of editing, and way more ...

Excerpt from:
A Long, Long Look at Obama's Life, Mostly Before the White House - New York Times

Specifically, states will be able to grant exemptions to schools experiencing hardship in meeting the 100% whole-grain-rich standard although, even with the changes, at least half of the grains offered in schools must be whole grains. Schools will no longer need to hit the strictest target (PDF) for lowering sodium in foods offered to students. And meal programs will be able to serve students 1% flavored milk instead of fat-free flavored milk.

The National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program are federally assisted meal programs that provide nutritionally balanced lunches for children each school day. Both programs are administered by the Department of Agriculture, though local schools set the prices for meals, offering a sliding scale to students based on family income, as required by federal regulations.

Perdue said that when kids don't eat, they don't get the nutrition they need, and this undermines "the intent of the program."

"A perfect example is in the South, where the schools want to serve grits," said Perdue, who worked as a veterinarian before serving as a Georgia state senator and governor. "But the whole grain variety has little black flakes in it, and the kids won't eat it. The school is compliant with the whole grain requirements, but no one is eating the grits."

Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut, said the argument that food is ending up in the trash "is not supported by the research. There have been studies, ours included, that have found plate waste has not increased."

"What I've studied is whether or not children are eating the lunches, and we found that they are," Schwartz said. "I think what people don't understand about plate waste is if kids are eating, let's say 70% of the fruits and vegetables that they're taking, that means 30% of those are getting thrown away."

Naturally, the volume of waste goes up when fruits and vegetables are added to every plate, she says, but consumption of this important food group has increased as well.

Perdue's proclamation, Schwartz believes, is "slowing down the progress but not completely undoing what's been done."

"My impression has been that the food companies and the school service professionals have been working extremely hard for the last five years to try and improve things and meet these standards," she said.

"The reformulations have been done, is my point. The companies that sell pizza crusts and buns or other grain products to schools, many of them have already reformulated, so they're whole-grain-rich."

Many changes are likely to continue. Although they might allow flexibility for local school districts, Perdue's adjustments to the nutritional requirements also take pressure off the food industry, Schwartz suggests.

"There's not that much that individual food service directors can do to change the sodium in the foods they serve, because they're getting them from companies," she said. "So I feel like this is more of a gift to companies to give them more time to make those changes."

Schwartz believes the impact on an individual child's diet will be small and amount to a slightly higher intake of saturated fat due to the higher fat content in flavored milk.

"But it's not a big jump. It's pretty small," she said. With regard to whole grains and sodium, she believes any gains made in the past will hold with no further improvements made.

"If this really helps, you know, food service directors have more flexibility and stay in the program and continue working towards improving the quality of the food they're serving, then that's OK with me," Schwartz said.

"So school lunch programs are critical for helping a child reach their nutrient goals throughout the day," she wrote in an email. "I'm fine with 1-percent (fat), flavored milk since all milk has important protein, calcium and (vitamin) D that growing kids need."

When it comes to loosening standards that regulate salt, which "has no nutrition benefit and can contribute to unhealthy diet as a whole," and those regulating grains, Altmann is a little less "fine."

"We already know that kids don't eat enough whole grains," she said. "Whole grains are important for growth and development, and I think that all of the grains kids eat should be whole grains whenever possible."

A new USDA report on the nutritional quality, cost and acceptability of school meals as well as student diets will become available by 2018.

"It will be important to assess how much difference these changes make," Schwartz said. "It could have been a whole lot worse from a nutrition standpoint."

See more here:
USDA shifts Obama-era school lunch guidelines - CNN

On April 12, 2017, former Boeing CEO Jim McNerney sat down in the West Wing with President Trump. Trump had, on the campaign trail, advocated abolishing the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that typically subsidizes $10 billion a year in Boeing exports.

On April 13, Trump announced he would fill out Ex-Im's board of directors, thus reviving the agency's ability to subsidize Boeing's overseas customers.

This was a replay from eight years earlier.

Candidate Barack Obama had called Ex-Im "little more than a slush fund for corporate welfare." Obama soon picked McNerney and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt as his manufacturing czar and jobs czar, respectively. GE is arguably Ex-Im's No. 2 beneficiary. Obama quickly came around on the agency, and became Ex-Im's most important ally in Washington.

Access to the White House is extremely valuable for corporations, regardless of who the president is. Everyone in Washington knows this, and now two scholars have confirmed and quantified the profitability to companies of access to the White House.

In President Obama's most impressive act of transparency, he published, regularly throughout his tenure, his White House visitor logs. Jeffrey Brown and Jiekun Huang of the University of Illinois studied those logs from Obama's first month through the end of 2015, and found 2,286 White House meetings between Obama officials and executives of the companies included in the S&P 1,500.

The researchers found two notable things about the companies that made up these 2,286 meetings: That money helped the executives get in the door, and getting in the door helped them make money.

The first finding could be put this way: Access could be bought through campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

"We find that firms that contributed more to Obama's presidential election campaigns are more likely to have access to the White House. We also find that firms that spend more on lobbying, firms that receive more government contracts, larger firms, and firms with a greater market share are more likely to have access to influential federal officials."

Second, they found that access was profitable.

"Corporate executives' meetings with White House officials are followed by significant positive cumulative abnormal returns." That term, "cumulative abnormal returns," in this case basically means how much the stock in question outperformed the S&P 1500 index over the 10 days before and the 30 days after the meeting. "We also find that the result is driven mainly by meetings with the President and his top aides. We find insignificant CARs for canceled visits, suggesting that the actual incidence of the meetings matters for firm value."

Why would a meeting drive up the stock of a company? The authors posit three mechanisms: A meeting could secure a government contract, it could help line up regulatory relief, or it could simply provide inside information that is valuable to a company.

I would add many more ways access to government is profitable. For instance, Boeing's access to the Obama and Trump White Houses seem to have secured support for a subsidy program that has nothing to do with government contracts.

Also, regulatory relief isn't always what companies seek. Google had amazing access to the Obama White House. Google "Internet Evangelist" (definitely not a lobbyist) Vint Cerf served on an Obama board. Google's former top lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin was a top White House official on tech policy, and he traded emails with current Google lobbyists who were supporting the White House's push to further regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality. Here, corporate access to Obama's White House advanced more regulation which would protect Google's current business model.

The researchers had another intriguing finding: "firms with access to the Obama administration experience significantly lower stock returns following the release of the election result than otherwise similar firms."

In other words, their investment in Democrats became a money loser when Trump took over.

For a cynic in Washington, or even just a close observer, there's no surprise in these conclusions. Of course money buys access, and of course access to politicians is valuable. But there's plenty to learn from this study.

First, some people actually believed that Obama had changed Washington and stopped the cash-for-influence game. This study doesn't compare Obama to other presidents, but it shows that the game was alive and well under Obama.

Second, it makes Obama's transparency in this one regard even more laudable. The visitor logs made this study possible and so it showed the country how Washington works. For this reason, especially since Trump has said he won't follow Obama's lead here, Congress should mandate regular and thorough reporting of White House Visitor Logs.

A final lesson: Since big business clearly has more access to government, then bigger government equals a bigger advantage for big business. If government played a smaller role in industry, access wouldn't be so valuable, and the playing field would be more level.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were both correct that the game is rigged in favor of the big guys. This new study helps us see how big government is the rigger.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.

Read the original:
Study documents how profitable access to Obama's White House was - Washington Examiner

Update: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has now called Obama's $400,000 speaking feetroubling. "I was troubled by that," she told SiriusXM's Radio Andy on Thursday.

And later Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called it "unfortunate" -- twice.

The below post, which mentions Warren's past criticism of Obama's handling of Wall Street, is from Wednesday.

Former president Barack Obama reemerged this week for his first formal public event since leaving office, but all people can talk about isa future event specifically, one for which he will be paid his old annual salary for one speech.

News broke Monday that Obama would be paid one of those exorbitant speaker's fees that Hillary Clinton received: $400,000 for speaking at aWall Street conference put on by the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Obama's situation is not the same as Clinton's, in that he cannot run for president again. So taking Wall Street's money, at this point, won't directly affect official U.S. policy that Obama will pursue in the future. Nor is there any rule prohibiting him from receiving the money.

But that doesn't mean the arrangement isn't problematic especially these daysand especially for Obama and his party. Below are a few reasons Obama may want to rethink his decision.

1. It continues to set a dubious precedent

As mentioned above, there is no rule against Obama doing this. None. But there is the precedent that it sets or rather, continues to set.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did this, too, as have Hillary Clinton, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. And the more that Wall Street firms give out-of-office presidents and big-name politicians these paydays, the more they become the norm. Other presidents will know that such payments are on the table, and it risks coloring their decisions with regard to Wall Street and special interests.

Which is already happening with Obama, retroactively. Liberals loved (and miss) his presidency, but if there's one thing the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing is still sore aboutin the Obama administration, it's the lack of prosecutions for anybody involved in the financial crisis. In September, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, requested a formal investigation of why no charges were brought.

And here's Warren in a 2014 interview with Salon:

WARREN: At the same time, picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street.

SALON: You might say always. Just about every time they had to compromise, they compromised in the direction of Wall Street.

WARREN: Thats right. They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes.

Whether fair or not, it's not difficult to look at Wall Street paying $400,000 to Obama as a reward for that. In that way, it's tough on both precedent and Obama's presidency.

2. We have other rules against retroactively cashing in

It's not as though the idea of holding office and then benefiting from it at a later date is a completely novel one. The Trump administration, the Obama administration and Congress have all instituted lobbying bans on their employees, limiting their ability to lobby government after leaving government usually for years.

These bans aren't written because those aides may one day rejoin government and be influenced by having been made wealthy by certain special interests; they're written because it became so normal for former aides to cash inafterward and basically use their government jobs for a future payday on behalf of well-heeled special interests. The prospect of future wealth became a given.

3. Democrats are trying to be the anti-Wall Street party

This whole thing comes at a somewhat inauspicious time for the Democratic Party: Just as Democrats' true identity is in flux, as Sanders's anti-Wall Street messageseems to beascendant, and as President Trump at times co-opted that message in the 2016 election.

That brand of populism clearly has very broad appeal, and now Democrats are being put in the position of deciding whether their former president should take $400,000 from Wall Street for a speech. At the least, it risks suggesting the party's anti-Wall Street posture is in some cases just that posturing.

4. Obama himself discussed the corrupting influenceof such arrangements in his book

Jonathan Cohn tweeted something Wednesday morning that I thought was really interesting. There is actually a section in Obama's 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, that describes the subtle, corrupting influence of arrangements like this.

Here's an excerpt. It's long, but it's worth digesting:

I cant assume that the money chase didnt alter me in some ways.

Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate.

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts theyd received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population that is, the people that Id entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.

And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you dont want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you havent changed Washington, and youve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance of fundraisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders dont quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes.

Obama is talking about politicians who are in office, yes, but he's also talking about how special interests get their hooks in you without you really being conscious of it. He's talking about how taking special-interest money is the easy way out. And that sure seems applicable to today.

Read the original here:
Sanders and Warren are criticizing Obamas $400,000 Wall ...