Backtracking on a firm and fast campaign promise, President Barack Obama now says he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making under $250,000 a year, including the idea in the general tool bag needed to lower the nation’s crippling deficit.

In an interview with Bloomberg Business Week that hit newsstands Friday, Obama declared that a presidential budget commission needs all options of the table, including tax increases and cuts in such programs as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” Obama said. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama pledged repeatedly during the 2008 campaign to exempt households earning less than $250,000 a year from tax increases.

Over the course of time, the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs re-emphasized the president’s pledge, including when White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner were mulling new taxes on the middle class last summer.

Obama also stated in the Bloomberg interview that he believes that limiting the agenda of any bipartisan advisory commission would cripple it from the start.

“What I can’t do is to set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table,” Obama said. “Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some that say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon, you just can’t solve the problem.”

The Bloomberg report noted that the middle class would be the likely target of tax increases, because the administration’s budget already has targeted Americans making more than $200,000 with its proposed $970 billion tax increase over the next decade.

That increase is a product of not extending former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy beyond 2010.

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue warned the U.S. faces a double-dip recession because of the taxes and regulations under consideration by the Democratic Congress and President Barack Obama.

“Congress, the administration and states must recognize that our weak economy simply could not sustain all the new taxes, regulations and mandates now under consideration. It’s a sure-fire recipe for a double-dip recession, or worse,” Donohue said in a speech providing the Chamber’s outlook for 2010.

Donohue said the lawmakers should not let former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire at the end of year and lambasted Democratic efforts on healthcare and financial regulatory reform as well as climate change.

If the tax cuts are allowed to expire, “we will likely end up with even bigger deficits and greater economic misery,” Donohue said.

Many tax lobbyists expect Congress to extend the cuts for people with lower tax rates, but to allow higher rates to be reimposed on those in the top bracket.

He also faulted Obama and Democratic lawmakers for not doing more to create jobs.

Donohue criticized a separate tax on banks floated by the administration on Monday, and said that the rationale for any tax increases would be increased spending, not lowering huge budget deficits exacerbated by the recession.

“We are talking about a massive tax increase in a very weak economy — a tax increase whose clearly intended purpose is not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for more spending,” he said.

He also promised the Chamber would be more involved in the 2010 midterm election than it has been in any other before, and will hold accountable lawmakers who vote against the group’s priorities.

Donohue’s speech follows a year in which the nation’s leading business lobbying group consistently butted heads with the Democratic White House, particularly on Obama’s keystone issues of healthcare and climate change.

The Chamber stumbled at times. Several high-profile members, including Apple, left the Chamber because of the group’s opposition to Obama’s pursuit of climate change legislation. Nike quit the Chamber’s board of directors over the same issue, publicly complaining that the business group was not representing all of its members on the issue.

In October, pranksters pretending to be Chamber officials held a fake press conference announcing the group had shifted its stance on climate change. Chamber officials trekked to the National Press Club after a wire service issued an incorrect story based on a fake news release put out by a group known as The Yes Men.

On healthcare, Donohue said the legislation under consideration by Congress would do nothing to rein in costs and was a prescription for “fiscal insolvency and an eventual government takeover of American healthcare.”

He said the House climate bill would raise energy costs and kill jobs.

Donohue also blasted the administration’s policies on trade, hitting it for not sending to Congress pending deals negotiated by the Bush administration with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.

“We need a bold and aggressive trade policy, something we don’t have today,” he said.

The Chamber is predicting the economy will grow at a rate of about 3 percent in 2010. The business lobby has set out a goal of creating 20 million new jobs over the next 10 years.

As Democrats continue to fail they have nowhere to turn but to blame Bush

WASHINGTON – He says “the buck stops with me,” but nearly a year into office President Barack Obama is still blaming a lot of the nation’s troubles — the economy, terrorism, health care — on George W. Bush.

Over and over, Obama keeps reminding Americans of the mess he inherited and all he’s doing to fix it. A sharper, give-me-some-credit tone has emerged in his language as he bemoans people’s fleeting memory about what life was like way back in 2008, particularly on the economy.

“Yes we can”?

Try “Yes I have.”

While candid about what he called his team’s “screw-up” in the botched Christmas airliner attack, Obama has made a point of underlining all the good he believes his government has done, too.

“Our progress has been unmistakable,” Obama said as the new year began. “We’ve disrupted terrorist financing, cutting off recruiting chains, inflicted major losses on al-Qaida’s leadership, thwarted plots here in the United States and saved countless American lives.”

Yet every time Obama tries to offer a dose of perspective like that, he faces the reality that people live in the moment.

On terrorism, Americans are less concerned about quiet successes than troubling failures, especially one that evoked harrowing memories of Sept. 11, 2001.

On the economy, people prefer good news now, not updates on how things are gradually getting less bad.

The way Obama sees it, the problems he took on — recession, war, health care, a warming planet — were always too huge and complicated to fix that fast.

So he emphasizes progress by taking people back to where he began.

Which means taking them back to Bush.

“I don’t need to remind any of you about the situation we found ourselves in at the beginning of this year,” Obama told people at a Home Depot stop last month. And then he reminded them anyway, detailing a nation in financial freefall when he took office.

The economy now is both groaning and growing.

Gloomy employers just slashed another 85,000 jobs in December, but Obama rarely misses a chance, as he did again Friday, to remind people that, hey, remember the job erosion at the start of the year? About 700,000 a month.

That is true, but it doesn’t matter much to the man or woman who is out of work, a point Obama concedes.

He’s not just trying to give people context. He’s trying to shore up his standing and his party’s, hoping voters will let it all sink in during this big congressional election year.

An overwhelming majority of people say 2009 was a bad year for the country, according to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll. As Democrats head toward midterm elections trying to hang onto control of the House and Senate, half of Americans still think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Obama needs to show that he gets results. And so he describes a year of overlooked achievement since his predecessor left town, addressing a range of problems: hate crimes, tobacco advertisements toward children, pay disparities for women, abuses by credit card companies and many more.

In other words, change from Bush.

Except for when Obama sounds just like Bush with tough words for the enemy.

“We are destroying training camps, disrupting communications and dismantling air defenses,” Bush said of the mission in Afghanistan in November 2001.

Said Obama this week of terrorists seeking to kill Americans: “We are determined not only to thwart those plans but to disrupt, dismantle and defeat their networks once and for all.”

When Obama got heat for his government’s decision to try the Sept. 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a civilian court, he defended it by saying the justice system has handled other recent terror suspects just fine. He spoke of examples during Bush’s administration. “We’ve done this before,” he said.

Even when Obama achieves what he wants, the public doesn’t always seem to share the feeling of success.

He may be close to signing what could be the one of the biggest domestic laws in decades, an overhaul of health coverage in America. The House and Senate have passed separate versions and are trying to give Obama a bill to sign within weeks. But the nasty, noisy partisan fights have left many people soured and confused.

“I suspect he’s just trying as best he can to give people a sense that what they’ve been experiencing, seeing and reading is not an accurate portrayal of what’s actually gotten done,” said Norman Ornstein, a politics scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Obama has openly wondered how some of his work is forgotten so fast.

“I think we have been successful in averting disaster,” Obama said on Dec. 16 about righting the economy. “You know, you don’t get a lot of credit for that, because nobody knows how bad it could have been.”

On this front, Obama often chides the media for what he sees as accentuating the negative and minimizing progress. As on Dec. 4 when Obama mocked the press for saying he had pivoted back from health care to jobs. He insisted that every day is about jobs. “Folks’ attention spans are short,” he said.

Not everyone’s. Nearly 15.3 million people are unemployed, an increase of 3.9 million during 2009, and a lot of Americans seem aware that that problem is far from over.

A Gallup Poll near the end of the year found 25 percent of people — just one in four — feeling satisfied with how things were going in the United States.

“The president himself, not surprisingly, may feel quite satisfied with accomplishments in his first year,” said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. “But we don’t see signs that the American public is positive.”

© Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: December 15th, 2009

Chalk up another 500 jobs to the list of jobs President Obama will need to create or save.

A Pittsburgh-based coal company, CONSOL Energy, will lay off nearly 500 of its West Virginia workers next year and its CEO blames environmentalists dead-set against mountaintop mining who have waged “nuisance” lawsuits for the job loss.

But CONSOL Energy’s political problems are not unique to the mining industry, which has suffered under the Obama Administration. The Environmental Protection Agency is already holding 79 surface mining permits in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. The EPA says these permits could violate the Clean Water Act and warrant “enhanced” review. And, agency went even further in October, announcing plans to revoke a permit for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in West Virginia.

The latest setback for the coal industry was announced on Tuesday when CONSOL Energy said close to 500 workers would lose jobs at their Fola Operations location near Bickmore, West Virginia in February 2010.

CEO Nicholas J. DeIuliis said the poor economy compounded by legal challenges by environmental activists forced CONSOL to slash jobs.

“It is challenging enough to operate our coal and gas assets in the current economic downturn without having to contend with a constant stream of activism in rehashing and reinterpreting permit applications that have already been approved or in the inequitable oversight of our operations,” he said in a statement. “Customers will grow reluctant to deal with energy producers they perceive are unable to guarantee a reliable supply due to regulatory uncertainty. It inhibits the ability to remain competitive.”

The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the Sierra Club, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Coal River Mountain Watch were the various groups active on the legal challenge CONSOL Energy refers to.

OVEC’s Executive Director Janet Keating told the Washington Times she believes CONSOL Energy is using the lawsuit as an excuse to layoff workers, although she says “we don’t hide the fact we don’t like mountaintop mining.”

“The price of coal has dropped in half and I think we are a convenient target, a convenient scapegoat,” she said.

“This ruling does not even go into effect for 60 more days so doesn’t that tell you something?” Ms. Keating added. “Suddenly, all the sudden they are issuing these layoff notices as if the world is ending.”

District Judge Robert C. Chambers handed down the ruling in question on Nov. 24. He said the Army Corps of Engineers violated the law by not giving the public enough information during the public comment period for permits issued by the government, although he wrote the error “did not stem from any wrong-doing on the part of the mining companies.”

Even though the court said not enough information was given to the public, the permit application process for the Fola mine consumed nearly a year and a half, according to court papers. But, environmentalists say they weren’t given the enough specific information during the 30-day public comment period. “How can we make substantial comment if they only give us general information?” Ms. Keating asked.

Judge Chambers said requiring the mining companies to go back through the public approval process would provide the public “meaningful opportunity” to weigh in on the permits as well as “force the Corps to reconsider these permits, possibly with new information.”

“To put it into human terms, we are talking about the jobs of nearly 500 of our employees at the Fola Operations, and the impact such legal interpretations will have on their quality of life and that of their families,” CONSOL CEO Mr. DeIuliis said.

But OVEC maintains CONSOL Energy is putting blame in the wrong place.

“We’re in a recession right now and utilities are using less coal and using more natural gas,” Ms. Keating said. “The manufacturing sector isn’t using the same levels of coal so there are these stockpiles and they are going to wait until the price of coal goes up.”

President Barack Obama’s national security adviser says the door remains open for Iran to work with other countries on its nuclear program. But James Jones also says the “picture is not a good one.”

Jones says the clock is ticking toward the end of the year. That’s when Obama has said it would be clear whether Iran was ready to work with the United States, other U.N. Security Council members and Germany to assure the world it was not trying to build a nuclear weapon.

So far, Iran has rejected calls to enter negotiations, and Obama is believed preparing to seek harsher international penalties against Iran. Jones said “the door remains open” for Iran to change course.

Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and it has a right to enrich uranium to produce fuel for nuclear reactors to generate electricity.

Jones appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

He may have promised to change Washington, but President Barack Obama is continuing one of its most renowned patronage traditions: bestowing prized ambassadorships on big donors.

Of the nearly 80 ambassadorship nominations or confirmations since Obama’s Inauguration, 56 percent were given to political appointees and 44 percent have gone to career diplomats, according to records kept by the American Foreign Service Association.

The latest nomination came this week, when Beatrice Wilkinson Welters was nominated to serve as ambassador to the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.

Welters, a longtime advocate for underprivileged children, and her husband, Anthony, an executive with UnitedHealth Group, generated between $200,000 and $500,000 in donations to Obama’s presidential campaign and an additional $100,000 for his Inauguration, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political giving.

The Welters can be counted among the nearly two dozen Obama bundlers — fundraisers who together organized and solicited more than $10 million in donations during the 2008 campaign — who now are being dispatched to some of the world’s greatest cities.

Charles H. Rivkin, a Los Angeles-based children’s television executive and an $800,000 bundler, is in Paris; Alan Solomont, a Boston-based investor and $500,000 bundler, is in Madrid; Louis B. Susman, a Chicago investor and $500,000 bundler, is in London; and Don Beyer, a Virginia Volvo dealer and $745,000 bundler, is in Bern, Switzerland.

Nicole Avant, a member of a Motown family dynasty who is credited with bundling up to $800,000 for Obama, was granted the coveted and cushy ambassadorship in Nassau, Bahamas.

Beyond the bundlers, Obama’s ambassador ranks are also teeming with good, old-fashioned, loyal Democrats who have given generously to the party but weren’t ranked among his top fundraisers.

Counted on those rolls are newly installed Ambassador to Germany Philip Murphy, former finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee who since 1989 has personally donated nearly $1.5 million to the party; and Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Costa Rica, Anne Slaughter Andrew, an environmental attorney whose husband, Joe, is a former DNC chairman who provided a well-timed endorsement of Obama during the extended 2008 primary against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.

For career diplomats, the selection of amateurs is always galling. “It is time to stop this spoils system and these de facto, three-year-term rentals of ambassadorships,” said Susan Johnson, president of the American Foreign Service Association.

“We believe the appointment of noncareer individuals, however accomplished they may be in their own field, to lead American diplomatic missions should be exceptional and circumscribed and not the routine practice it has become over the last three or four decades,” she added.

The politicization of the diplomatic corps, which began in the 1960s, is of increasing concern to some foreign policy experts, given the rise of terrorism and the need for greater coordination between the U.S. and foreign governments on national security issues.

Diplomatic posts that may once have largely involved ceremonial appearances now can be focused on issues such as human and drug trafficking, kidnappings, war and intelligence sharing. With that worldview, “We believe America is best served by having career foreign service officers, just as we have career military officers,” Johnson said.

Obama never promised an end to the practice of ambassadorial patronage. In an appearance before his Inauguration, he said, “it would be disingenuous for me to suggest that there are not going to be some” political appointments.

But what has surprised some foreign policy experts is how traditionally Obama has defined the word “some”:

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said it is unfair to judge the Obama administration by its first wave of ambassadorial nominations, because most of the openings involve traditional political posts recently vacated by Bush administration appointees.

More career diplomatic posts, which run on staggered, three-year terms, will begin opening up in the next year or two. That should produce a second wave of nominations dominated by professional foreign service officers, he added.

“We’re well-aware of the historical target of career vs. noncareer ambassadors, and we will be right on that target,” said Vietor.

That historic benchmark is roughly 30 percent political appointees to 70 percent career diplomats, and Obama seems on track to meet it.

But Johnson said the career diplomatic community had hoped for more than just the status quo from a candidate who campaigned on a vision of transforming Washington into a city less beholden to special interests and wealthy political benefactors.

“There is a bit of disappointment largely because expectations were raised by the ‘change’ theme of Obama’s campaign and that there would no longer be ‘business as usual’ in Washington,” she said.

Equally disappointing — but perhaps more expected — to career diplomats is that the distribution of assignments shows no sign of changing: The political appointees get the big mansions in big-name countries, while the careerists pack off to Haiti, Zimbabwe, Serbia and other less inviting postings.

To be sure, many of Obama’s new ambassadors are accomplished executives who were schooled in the nuances of diplomacy in corporate boardrooms rather than in foreign capitals.

They also bring to their embassies the gravitas and personal ties needed to cut through the State Department bureaucracy and speak directly to the president when a situation requires it — an asset some U.S. allies have come to expect and demand.

And several of Obama’s chosen diplomats have foreign policy backgrounds and are noted experts in their new areas of work.

For instance, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is a well-known expert on foreign affairs, as is Ivo H. Daalder, ambassador to NATO. Rivkin, the new ambassador to France, is the son of a diplomat and was a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

The president has, occasionally, tweaked the patronage mold.

His selection of then-Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican who had bundled $100,000 for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, as his ambassador to China was a shock to Republicans who had seen Huntsman as a possible GOP presidential candidate. And in choosing Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis as ambassador to Hungary, Obama chose someone who had bundled $100,000 — for Hillary Clinton.

An even more surprising pick was Obama’s choice for ambassador to the Holy See, a coveted post for Roman Catholics. Obama’s choice, Miguel H. Diaz, an associate professor of theology at St. John’s University, has made one political donation in his life: a $1,000 check to Obama’s campaign.

But Dave Levinthal, communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics, said, “At least to date, it’s clear that a notable number of the ambassador nominees have been bundlers, and more have been donors. Those numbers appear to speak for themselves.”

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

Before he headed to a formal dinner with China’s President Hu Jintao, he set aside time to see his half brother, Mark Ndesandjo, and Ndesandjo’s wife, who had flown up from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen where they live.

Describing the meeting Monday as “overwhelming” and “intense,” Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he had long anticipated the chance to welcome his famous brother to China.

“My big brother, you know I think he was on his way to see the president of China. … He came directly off the plane, changed some clothes and then came down and saw us. And he just gave me a big hug. And it was so intense. I’m still over the moon on it. I am over the moon. And my wife. She is his biggest fan, and I think she is still recovering,” he said with a laugh.

Ndesandjo said he bought tickets to fly to Beijing months ago, hoping to reconnect with his brother. The two last met in January when Ndesandjo attended Obama’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., as a family guest.

The three had a long chat, with Obama being introduced to Ndesandjo’s wife, a native of Henan, China, whom he married a year ago, he said. He gave few specifics about what they discussed.

“All I can say is, we talked about family, and it was very powerful because when he came in through that door, and I saw him and I hugged him, and he hugged me and hugged my wife. It was like we were continuing a conversation that had started many years ago,” he said.

Ndesandjo is tall and slim, with close-cropped hair that gives him a strong resemblance to his brother.

The two men did not grow up together. Ndesandjo’s mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.’s third wife. Just before he arrived in Beijing on Monday, Obama had been in a townhall-style meeting with students in Shanghai, where he joked with the audience that a family gathering in his home “looks like the United Nations.”

President Obama’s father had been a Kenyan exchange student who met his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansas native, when they were in school in Hawaii. The two separated two years after he was born.

The senior Obama later met Ndesandjo’s mother as a graduate student at Harvard University, and the two returned to live in Kenya, where Mark and his brother, David, were born and grew up. David later died in a motorcycle accident.

Obama’s mother went on to marry an Indonesian man and he spent part of his young life in Jakarta. His sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is half-Indonesian and her husband is Chinese-Canadian.

Since 2001, Ndesandjo has been living in the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen near Hong Kong and earns a living as a marketing consultant. For most of that time, he has maintained a low profile, with few people knowing his connection to the U.S. president.

But two weeks ago, he went public to launch a new novel, a semi-autobiographical book called “Nairobi to Shenzhen” that features a protagonist who is the son of a Jewish mother and an abusive father from Kenya.

The book, available over the Internet by the self-publishing company Aventine Press, was partly meant to raise awareness about domestic violence, he said. His father beat him and his mother when they were living in Kenya, Ndesandjo said.

“For a long time, I had serious, serious reservations about using that name (Obama) because of the hurt I experienced,” he said. Though he wanted to maintain his privacy, he decided to write the novel because “there are certain things you can do and you really should do because you know it will help people.”

© 2009 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.