Obama Laments Poverty In Baltimore, Pushes TPP

In a surreal moment at Tuesday's joint-press conference, President Barack Obama addressed the unrest in Baltimore by lamenting the effects of poverty in America's inner cities which was then immediately followed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pronouncing his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement destined to exacerbate poverty in America.

President Obama noted that the problem of poverty had to be an integral part of any discussion about the situation in Baltimore and that creating economic opportunities was part of the solution. Obama even went on to cite the destruction of America's manufacturing base as one of the culprits for stagnation and despair.

All this while pushing TPP:

And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty; they’ve got parents — often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves — can’t do right by their kids; if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead, than they go to college. 

In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks — in those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem. And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.

All solid points which make the TPP support even more unusual given that economists have said it will do little to nothing to create new jobs while allowing corporations greater power to outsource existing jobs later. TPP will lead to the NAFTA scenario of companies shifting manufacturing to countries out of the country, what one prophetic commentator once called a "giant sucking sound."

President Obama's lamentations on poverty might be taken more seriously if he was not actively working to impoverish more Americans. Obama has defended TPP as "the most progressive trade deal in history" and, much like the White House's "most transparent administration in history" claim, it sets a low bar and fails to meet it.

Senator Corker Accuses Obama Of Trying To Get Out Of Middle East

As far as accusations go this is one of the ones an American politician wants to be on the receiving end of. Senator Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-TN) has publicly accused President Barack Obama of trying to get America out of the Middle East.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Senator Corker said he believed President Obama's grand strategy was to get America out of the Middle East entirely. Corker speculated that this would be achieved by the US empowering Iran to provide a balance to Sunni power in the region while distancing itself from Israel which would allow the US to remove itself from the middle of the conflict and ultimately the region as a whole.

Sounds like a pretty good idea.

“It’s become very evident as to what the administration is doing relative to the Middle East,” Corker said. “The administration’s view is that in order to extract ourselves in the Middle East, we need to move away from our relationship from Israel and we need to more fully align ourselves with Iran, so we create this balance in the Middle East between Iran and its influence and the Arab Sunni influence in the region.” He added: “That seems to be our strategy. And that’s what’s creating all of this turmoil in the region.”

Unfortunately, as anyone who has watched a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting will easily deduce, Corker has no clue what he is talking about.

To credit President Obama with even having a grand strategy is foolish., let alone one so profound. From the divisive drone program in Yemen, to the Libyan nightmare, to arms dealing with the new Egyptian junta, to perpetual 180s on who the enemy in Syria really is, Obama has proven that there is no "plan" just a series of ad hoc PR campaigns - what one commentator called "rice pudding."

That being said, if Team Obama wants to adopt a grand strategy for the Middle East it would seem prudent to give the one Corker laid out serious consideration.

Republican Senators Try To Sabotage Iran Deal With Letter To Tehran

None dare call it treason? A group of Senators has sent a letter to the government of Iran claiming that any agreement reached between Iran and the White House is likely to only last as long as the Obama presidency. Under the guise of "enriching the knowledge" of the government in Tehran, the letter lays out the Senators' view of the severe limitations of President Obama's authority related to any deal he reaches on Iran's nuclear program.

The message of the letter is clear - the hawks in Congress plan on sabotaging any deal any way they can and are willing to break basic protocol and well delineated separation of powers to do so.

The letter was reportedly organized by neoconservative Senator Tom Cotton with signatures from all the Republican leadership as well as 2016 presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. The decision to send the letter to Tehran marks a severe escalation in a battle between pro-Israel hawks in Congress and the White House - a battle that seemingly reached crescendo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to a joint session of Congress where he was given prime Washington real estate to bash President Obama to raucous applause.

Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber's entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process. 

“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the senators wrote. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

Has foreign policy moved out of the executive branch? What would have happened had Democrats in Congress tried to sabotage President Bush like this?

On the one hand it's interesting to see the imperial presidency challenged like this, on the other this kind of knee capping during a negotiation to prevent a war and stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons is straight up reckless. Is this the new normal or just the latest episode of Obama derangement syndrome?