Mediaboss Marketing

When former President Barack Obama said he was heartened by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators numbering more than 30,000 who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

In whats shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isnt just staying behind in Washington. Hes working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular America First agenda.

Hes doing it through a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action. Normally youd expect an organization set up to support a politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office, but not Obamas OFA. Rather, its gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.

Since Donald Trumps election, this little-known but well-funded protesting arm has beefed up staff and ramped up recruitment of young liberal activists, declaring on its website, Were not backing down. Determined to salvage Obamas legacy,its drawing battle lines on immigration, ObamaCare, race relations and climate change.

Obama is intimately involved in OFA operations and even tweets from the groups account. In fact, he gave marching orders to OFA foot soldiers following Trumps upset victory.

It is fine for everybody to feel stressed, sad, discouraged, he said in a conference call from the White House. But get over it. He demanded they move forward to protect what weve accomplished.

Now is the time for some organizing, he said. So dont mope.

Far from sulking, OFA activists helped organize anti-Trump marches across US cities, some of which turned into riots. After Trump issued a temporary ban on immigration from seven terror-prone Muslim nations, the demonstrators jammed airports, chanting: No ban, no wall, sanctuary for all!

Run by old Obama aides and campaign workers, federal tax records show nonpartisan OFA marshals 32,525 volunteers nationwide. Registered as a 501(c)(4), it doesnt have to disclose its donors, but theyve been generous. OFA has raised more than $40 million in contributions and grants since evolving from Obamas campaign organization Obama for America in 2013.

OFA, in IRS filings, says it trains young activists to develop organizing skills. Armed with Obamas 2012 campaign database, OFA plans to get out the vote for Democratic candidates its grooming to win back Congress and erect a wall of resistance to Trump at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

It will be aided in that effort by the Obama Foundation, run by Obamas former political director, and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, launched last month by Obama pal Eric Holder to end what he and Obama call GOP gerrymandering of congressional districts.

Obama will be overseeing it all from a shadow White House located within two miles of Trump. It features a mansion, which hes fortifying with construction of a tall brick perimeter, and a nearby taxpayer-funded office with his own chief of staff and press secretary. Michelle Obama will also open an office there, along with the Obama Foundation.

The 55-year-old Obama is not content to go quietly into the night like other ex-presidents

Critical to the fight is rebuilding the ravaged Democrat Party. Obama hopes to install his former civil-rights chief Tom Perez at the helm of the Democratic National Committee.

Perez is running for the vacant DNC chairmanship, vowing Its time to organize and fight ... We must stand up to protect President Obamas accomplishments; while also promising, Were going to build the strongest grass-roots organizing force this country has ever seen.

The 55-year-old Obama is not content to go quietly into the night like other ex-presidents.

Youre going to see me early next year, he said after the election, and were going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff.

Added the ex-president: Point is, Im still fired up and ready to go.

Paul Sperry is the author of The Great American Bank Robbery, which details the link between race-based housing policies and the mortgage crisis.

More here:
How Obama is scheming to sabotage Trump's presidency - New York Post

NewsBusters (blog)

Spiro Agnew's Media Legacy: Trump, Obama and Time Magazine NewsBusters (blog) The difference in the treatment of Presidents Obama and Trump by the media can perhaps be best symbolized by two Time magazine covers in December of 2008 and 2016. Both men were newly elected presidents of the United States. Both were selected as ...

Continued here:
Spiro Agnew's Media Legacy: Trump, Obama and Time Magazine - NewsBusters (blog)

President Barack Obama and Mrs. Obama have selected the Harry Walker Agency (HWA) to coordinate their respective speaking engagements, a spokesman said. | AP Photo

The Harry Walker Agency will coordinate speaking engagements for former President and first lady, Barack and Michelle Obama,, who will be represented by two attorneys for contract negotiations regarding potential book deals, a spokesman said Friday.

President Barack Obama and Mrs. Obama have selected the Harry Walker Agency (HWA) to coordinate their respective speaking engagements, Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement. In addition, Attorneys Robert Barnett and Deneen Howell will manage contract-negotiations with potential publishers for the former president and Mrs. Obamas respective books.

Story Continued Below

The former president and first lady join former White House press secretary Josh Earnest and former President Bill Clinton in relying on the Harry Walker speakers bureau. POLITICO Playbook reported in November that Earnest had signed on with the agency for post-administration speaking gigs.

Its unclear when the Obamas will begin the speaking circuit or when any of their potential books will be published. Both have been largely silent since leaving the White House three weeks ago.

Barack Obama late last month issued a statement through his spokesman supporting the protests around the country against President Donald Trump and his executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations.

Citizens exercising their Constitutional rights to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake, he said through his spokesman, who added that the former commander in chief was heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country.

Most recently, images surfaced this week of the president learning to kitesurf in the British Virgin Islands with Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.

I have also wanted to learn foilboard surfing, the English business mogul wrote in a blog post. So we decided to set up a friendly challenge: could Barack learn to kitesurf before I learned to foilboard? We agreed to have a final day battle to see who could stay up the longest.

Obama won, kitesurfing twice as far as Branson foilboarded.

I had to doff my cap to him and celebrate his victory, Branson noted. After all he has done for the world, I couldnt begrudge him his well-deserved win.

Originally posted here:
Michelle and Barack Obama gear up for speaking, book deals - Politico

Joe Pizarchik spent more than seven years working on a regulation to protect streams from mountaintop removal coal mining.

It took Congress 25 hours to kill it.

Story Continued Below

The rule is just one of dozens enacted in the final months of the Obama administration that congressional Republicans have begun erasing under a once-obscure law much to the dismay of agency staffers who hauled those regulations through the long process to implementation.

My biggest disappointment is a majority in Congress ignored the will of the people, said Pizarchik, who directed the Interior Departments Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement from 2009 through January. They ignored the interests of the people in coal country, they ignored the law and they put corporate money ahead of all that.

The arrival of a Republican president opened the door for GOP lawmakers to employ a rarely used legislative tool, the Congressional Review Act of 1996, to nullify executive branch regulations issued since mid-June. The act allows lawmakers to sandblast recently enacted rules with a simple majority vote as they did last week to the stream regulation, which the Interior Department had completed in December.

President Donald Trump is expected to sign off on that repeal, along with others moving through the Capitol.

Congress has successfully used the 1996 law only once before, but Republicans are wielding it now to slash away potentially dozens of late-term Obama rules. That has left officials who spent years working on those rules feeling rubbed raw.

Its devastating, of course, said Alexandra Teitz, a longtime Democratic Hill aide who joined Interiors Bureau of Land Management in 2014 as a counselor to the agencys director and worked on a rule to curb methane waste from oil and gas production. A House-passed Congressional Review Act resolution targeting that rule awaits action in the Senate.

Pizarchik and other former Obama administration officials called the rapid repeal process intensely unfair. The 1996 law says any repeal must come within 60 legislative days after a rule becomes final.

If there had been more time and Congress had not rushed this through but had actually deliberated on what was in the rule, [then] the results would have been different, Pizarchik said.

But proponents of the repeal process maintain that it is a blunt but necessary tool.

Its important that Congress have a say in the rules that are applied in this country, said James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation. The CRA just makes it easier for Congress and the president to make sure the rules and actions of the agencies reflect their priority.

The House took up a repeal resolution for Pizarchiks stream rule shortly before 2 p.m. Feb. 1. The Senate wrapped up its vote all Republicans but one were joined by four Democrats shortly after 3 p.m. Feb. 2.

Thats about as fast as a measure can clear Congress, and the swiftness has former Obama officials wondering if lawmakers even understood the regulations they voted to kill.

I cant venture to say that that many people, when theyre being honest, have actually read the rule, said Brandi Colander, who was Interior's deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management before leaving in September for the National Wildlife Federation.

I think that when cooler heads really can prevail and you push the politics to the side, we should really be asking ourselves, should we be able, with the stroke of a pen, without requiring people to read it and not even giving these rules a chance to see the light of day is that actually good governance? she added.

Congressional Republicans have been railing against the stream rule since 2011, when a leaked Interior Department document estimated it could kill 7,000 jobs in the ailing coal industry. Interior called that only a preliminary estimate, and it said in December that the rules toughened cleanup requirements could even bring a small net increase in jobs.

Teitz similarly argued that the Bureau of Land Managements methane waste rule would have generated revenue for the energy industry, which could have sold the gas that the regulation would make it capture. But Republicans backed by oil and gas companies still made it a top target.

People are looking for scalps, she said. Its an Obama rule so lets drag it down whether or not its actually costly to industry.

Before this year, the only time Congress successfully used the review act to repeal a regulation was in 2001, when it blocked the Labor Departments Occupational Safety and Health Administration from enforcing an ergonomics rule intended to reduce the risk of musculoskeletal disorders in the workplace.

Sixteen years later, wounds are still open for some officials who helped write that rule, though they say they have become more adept at fighting back.

Charles Jeffress, who was head of OSHA for most of former President Bill Clinton's second term, said the Labor Department knew the rule was vulnerable to a review-act repeal but was eager to finish the regulation, so it was not a big part of the consideration and planning.

Ross Eisenbrey, OSHAs policy director from 1999 to 2001, echoed Jeffress.

[The Congressional Review Act] had never been used, he said. I dont think it had been high on peoples minds. It was out of our control anyway because [the final rule] took so long.

Jordan Barab, who had worked on the ergonomics rule, fought to save it when he moved to the AFL-CIO after the 2000 election. There was an incredible amount of misinformation about the rule, he said, and its supporters didnt really have a chance to organize effectively to oppose the CRA resolution.

To go through all that work. .. and to have Congress overturn it is a travesty, Barab said.

Opponents of the Congressional Review Act also object to one of its lesser-known provisions: Once Congress blocks a rule, the agency cannot ever issue a new one that is substantially the same. Although that provision has never been tested in court, Eisenbrey said it has a chilling effect, and he noted that the Obama administration never revisited the ergonomics issue.

Why would an administration risk putting all the years of effort into a rulemaking, all the political capital to do it, knowing somebody could take the rule to district court and have it blocked in an instant because the judge says its similar enough? he said.

Disagreements over the review act have been largely academic since 2001, particularly after Democrats opted not to use it on any George W. Bush-era rules. But now, supporters of the targeted rules are preparing to fight back.

Pizarchik is already working on ideas to write a new version of the stream rule under a future president, though he declined to share any details. He also hinted someone could mount a constitutional challenge to the review act itself, which critics have long argued tramples on the separation of powers.

I believe theres a good chance that, in a legal challenge, that a court will overturn Congress actions here as an unconstitutional usurpation of the executive branchs powers, he said.

More here:
Swift repeal of Obama rules leaves former staffers steaming - Politico

The most valuable lesson I learned about speechwriting from my former boss, first lady Michelle Obama, is this: Say something true.

The first, most foundational question any speaker should ask is not, What will make me sound smart, or witty, or powerful? or What does the audience want to hear?

Story Continued Below

It is: What is the deepest, most important truth I can tell at this particular moment? From her frank comments on race and gender over the years, to her remarks on the campaign trail last fall, every speech Michelle Obama gave was her answer to that questionand audiences appreciated it. Amid the bland, calculated language that has become the dialect of modern politics (We need to support hardworking middle-class American family values!), genuine words stand out and have a special kind of power to move and inspire.

During this past election, however, other national leaders took a very different approach. The pacifist priest, Father Daniel Berrigan, once described it well when he spoke of the danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence. Its that moment when we try to drown out an inconvenient truth with a flood of words: explanations, rationalizations, justificationsanything to assuage our addled conscience and quiet that inner moral voice telling us things we do not wish to hear.

Members of Donald Trumps party saw that he lied with impunity, lashed out at the smallest provocation and took pleasure in demeaning and humiliating others. They acknowledged that certain statements he made were racist and misogynistic. And they clearly suspected that he was dangerously unfit for the presidency. Yet rather than voicing what they felt in their gut to be true about him, they chose to verbalize it away, helping legitimize his candidacy for the most powerful job on Earth.

Examples included: I need to support my partys nominee. We cant let Hillary Clinton win. Ill vote for him, but I wont endorse or defend him. I wont un-endorse him, but I wont campaign for him.

Perhaps they thought he could not win. Perhaps they thought he could not do that much damage if he did. Both of these assumptions have now been proven wrong. Yet, many of these individuals still seem to be talking themselves out of telling the truth about who Trump is and how he behaves.

Just consider their responseor lack thereofto his travel ban. Many Republican politicians surely realized the shocking cruelty of closing our doors to Syrian families whove been vetted for up to two years and who are fleeing a bloodbath. They must have been troubled by the stunning incompetence with which this executive order was drafted and executed. And they almost certainly heard the warnings from experts that it presents a serious threat to our national security. Yet, only a small minority of Republicans in Congress have dared to speak out against it.

Save for a few notable exceptions, Trumps bizarre and disturbing comments defending Russian President Vladimir Putin on Fox News received a similarly tepid response. Ditto for his false claim that 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted for Clinton. Ditto for his glaring financial conflicts of interest. Ditto for his attacks on our judiciary. The list goes on and on.

We cannot know for sure what is going through the minds of those who have been silent or have responded meekly to such appalling words and actions from the president who is now the standard-bearer for their party. Some might agree with him, but for those who dont, we can guess it may be something like this: A number of my constituents like Trump, so I better keep my mouth shut. I dont want to anger the president because he could make my life difficult. Hardly anyone else in the party is sticking their neck out about any of this, so that must mean its OK to stay quiet. This is just the price we have to pay to move our agenda forward.

Such words are cyanide for moral courage. They are the enemy of integrity, compassion and common sense. When we say never again this is precisely what we meanthat we must never again talk over or talk away the truths we need to speak to, and about, those who misuse power.

During her time as first lady, whether reacting to videotaped boasts about sexual assaultIt is cruel. Its frightening. And the truth is, it hurtsor urging us to go high when they go low, Michelle Obama showed us what it means to speak such truths. She verbalized her moral impulsesperiod.

To be sure, our former first lady is neither a Republican nor a politician. It may be far more costly for Republicans to do as she did with respect to a president from their own party, particularly one known to take revenge on those who oppose him. But Trumps vision for our nation is such a radical departure from what many of them have claimed to stand for, and his character and temperament so obviously unsuited to the presidency, that political expediency and party loyalty are shamefuland dangerousexcuses for staying silent.

Those who have the courage to resist Trump may be rewarded by constituents who appreciate their honesty. Or they may be primaried by his supporters and lose their seats. Given that history is generally not kind to those who ignore the dictates of their consciences at times like this, either outcome would likely be better than their current acquiescence.

A small number of clear-eyed folks like Senator Ben Sasse seem to understand this and have spoken the truth about Trump forcefully and consistently from the very beginning. Its time for all decent Republican leaders to do the same.

Sarah Hurwitz is a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. She served as the chief speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama from 2010-2017.

Read the rest here:
What Would Michelle Obama Do? - Politico