Douglas General MacArthur
Address to the Joint Meeting of the U. S. Congress
April 19, 1951
Washington D. C.
Part 4 of 4 (conclusion)
Total Length approximately 36 minutes. Divided into four parts, each about 9 minutes.
General Douglas MacArthur, former commander of Allied forces, first in World War II and then in Korea, gives his farewell address before the joint meeting of Congress on April 19, 1951. President Truman relieved MacArthur of his command over differences in opinion on strategy in Korea. In a final Address to Congress, MacArthur defends his conduct of the Korean War. “Old Soldiers never die,” he famously says, “they just fade away.”
Duration : 0:8:53
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John McCain is rapidly making his temperament an inescapable issue in the presidential campaign. Does the nation really want so much drama in the White House? McCain’s performance in recent days has been, to put it charitably, erratic. In an attempt to show leadership on the financial crisis, he has called Americans into ranks — long after hostilities began. Meanwhile, back in much-reviled Washington, the generals with cooler heads and a clearer picture of the battlefield are doing their jobs, minus all the histrionics.
Thus far, an objective observer would have to say that Congress has behaved well in the days since Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson delivered a three-page ransom note that said, and I paraphrase, “Give me $700 billion, or I’d hate to see anything bad happen to that nice economy of yours.”
Our elected representatives took seriously the urgency of the crisis. They did not fall into partisan bickering. A rough consensus began to emerge: It is important to act expeditiously but not to panic. It is unwise to give this administration — or any administration — a blank check with absolutely no oversight, as Paulson had sought. Paulson, the White House or somebody should explain why this plan will work and why some other plan wouldn’t work better. And the corporate executives who put their companies at risk and then turn to the government for a bailout should not be rewarded with multimillion-dollar compensation packages subsidized by the taxpayers.
Negotiations between a Democratic Congress and a Republican administration on these and other points seemed to be proceeding at lightning speed, given the usual pace of such things in Washington. But then, for reasons known only to himself, in charged McCain to rescue the unimperiled. Said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who has been the lead negotiator for the Democratic majority in the House: “Now that we are on the verge of making a deal, John McCain airdrops himself in to help us make a deal.”
At face value, McCain’s sudden “suspension” of his campaign and his call to delay the first presidential debate can be seen as pure politics. Lately, McCain has been sliding in the polls, and Barack Obama has been rising. The Wall Street crisis markedly accelerated these trends. Late September is not the time to let your opponent widen his lead.
Changing the subject, which the McCain people have raised to an art form, wasn’t an option this time — the public is hardly in the mood for another Paris Hilton ad — so the campaign had to try to somehow get out in front of the crisis. Given McCain’s initial assessment that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, that wasn’t going to be easy.
The solution was to try to make it look as if McCain were leading the heroic effort to save the American way of life. To do this, he had to portray the negotiations over a rescue plan — which had been making orderly progress — as stalled and in shambles. “We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved,” McCain said, calling on everyone to “temporarily set politics aside.”
But in trying to put himself at center stage, McCain managed to insert politics into the situation. The first issue all week on which congressional Democrats and Republicans split along party lines was whether McCain’s noisy intervention demonstrated boldness or bluster.
The surest way to derail any prospect of a timely rescue plan would be to have Obama and McCain get involved in the nit and the grit of the negotiations. The reason is obvious: The two major-party presidential candidates would never really abandon the campaign with less than six weeks left before the election. They’d just be shifting it to a venue where it could do maximum damage. The anodyne joint statement from the two campaigns Wednesday highlighting the urgency of the situation was about the most constructive thing Obama and McCain could do, next to staying the out of the way.
McCain succeeded in focusing attention on himself, but not necessarily in a good way. Voters may see this not as an illustration of brave leadership but as another example of McCain’s “ready, fire, aim” approach to dealing with any crisis. Putting himself at the center of events — making any situation all about him — is more than a political tactic for McCain. It’s his nature, and I wonder if most Americans won’t be unnerved at the prospect of electing a president who’s always so ready for his close-up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/25/AR2008092503603.html?sub=AR
Duration : 0:8:39
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Duration : 0:5:5
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Douglas General MacArthur
Address to the Joint Meeting of the U. S. Congress
April 19, 1951
Washington D. C.
Part 3 of 4 (Link to Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M87s_I-c-Xw )
Total Length approximately 36 minutes. Divided into four parts, each about 9 minutes.
General Douglas MacArthur, former commander of Allied forces, first in World War II and then in Korea, gives his farewell address before the joint meeting of Congress on April 19, 1951. President Truman relieved MacArthur of his command over differences in opinion on strategy in Korea. In a final Address to Congress, MacArthur defends his conduct of the Korean War. “Old Soldiers never die,” he famously says, “they just fade away.”
Duration : 0:8:34
Read the rest of this entry »
President Obama outlines challenges facing the nation and lays out his priorities for meeting them in an address delivered in the House chamber before a joint session of Congress. February 24th, 2009. Part 4
Watch part 5 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMLvlc-hAmk
Watch part 3 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5B6NB4G0cM
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Duration : 0:9:9
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And we have an e-mail question from Rebecca in Jackson, Tennessee: “Michael, I’m a fan. I’m glad you brought attention to so many important issues. But why didn’t you support Hillary? If more media people like you had supported Hillary instead of being misogynistic “maybe we would have a Democratic president in 2008.”
MICHAEL MOORE: I did support Hillary Clinton when she ran for Senate. And I’ve always been a big supporter of her. I wrote about her in my first book, a chapter called “My Forbidden Love for Hillary.” I have always had a great deal of respect for her. I didn’t support her in the primaries for one simple reason: she voted for the war. And I couldn’t endorse her or support her as a result of that. But she’s done so many great things, and continues to do great things for this country. And I think people respect that. You know, there’s some issues that just become the issue for you. And of course, the war is a big defining issue for me.
KING: All right. We’re going to have a couple of clips back to back here. It concerns the candidates and health care.
MOORE: You know, ask anybody on Social Security how well that system works. You know, the government — the Republicans, they love to run against the government. The government is of the people, for the people and by the people. It’s we the people. That’s the government. So they’re really against us when they say they’re against the government.
In fact, they do a great job actually of running for office and then proving, once they’re in charge, that the government doesn’t work very well under their leadership…the government’s job, in part, is to defend the country against attacks or imminent attacks. That wasn’t the case here. There was no threat from Saddam Hussein. We all know that now. And this horrible war was started — you know, McCain keeps talking about the surge, the surge, you know, the great surge. The surge, you know — whatever the surge has done, it was only to clean up a mess that he and Bush started.
I mean, the surge is not going to bring back those 4,000-plus soldiers who have died, those American soldiers. It’s not going to bring back the 100,000 dead Iraqis. The surge is not going to return the half a trillion dollars we’ve already spent on this war. The surge isn’t going to do any of that. That’s the real harm and the real trouble that’s been caused here.
But I just want to answer your question on the health care thing, because I do want to say something critical about Barack Obama’s plan. His plan still leaves the insurance companies at the table. They should not be anywhere. Private, profit making insurance companies should not be around a universal health care plan, because they are there to make a profit. We should never talk about a profit when we’re talking about helping people who are sick.
So — but the Congress has a great plan, the Democratic Congress. There’s 91 co-sponsors for the John Conyers bill. With a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president, I think that bill will pass Congress. And I don’t think the Democratic president, Barack Obama, is going to veto the Democratic Congressional bill. So that’s my hope. We’ve got to get people elected to Congress.
KING: A call from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Michael and Larry. My question is this: how can John McCain declare war on lobbyists, when lobbyists run his campaign?
MOORE: Lobbyists do run his campaign. We’re starting with Karl Rove’s protege, Steve Schmidt, who runs the campaign. I just read in the paper here today that Sarah Palin’s convention speech was written by a Bush speech writer. So you’ve got George Bush’s speech writer — George Bush’s people running the convention, running the campaigns for these people. If anybody has any doubt that this isn’t going to be just four more years of George W. Bush, just look at the people in charge of the campaign. And all lobbyists — the best example of the lobbyists, actually, Larry, is the — one of McCain’s chief advisers is a lobbyist for the nation of Georgia. And they’ve paid this man hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby for them. And John McCain, boy, he was right there on the first day there. You know, it seems to me now, as we look at the whole situation, it’s a little more complicated than just saying, we’re all Georgians.
And how much I’d like to know of what he did there when that took place between the Russians and the Georgians. It had to do with this chief adviser, who’s on the payroll for the nation of Georgia. We don’t need this anymore.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0809/05/lkl.01.html
Duration : 0:9:55
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President Obama outlines challenges facing the nation and lays out his priorities for meeting them in an address delivered in the House chamber before a joint session of Congress. February 24th, 2009. Part 2
Watch part 3 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5B6NB4G0cM
Watch Part 1 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSMsVBdcE68
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Duration : 0:10:1
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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama struck a balance between grim economic reality and a more hopeful outlook on Tuesday to try to reassure worried Americans their country will emerge from crisis “stronger than before.”
Riding high in opinion polls, Obama was careful to include a sober assessment of the economic emergency in his first speech to Congress, seeking to temper expectations that his administration’s rescue efforts would yield quick fixes.
But the politician whose memoir was called “The Audacity of Hope” and who won the White House in last November’s election amid chants of “yes, we can” was also back in stride, telling recession-weary Americans to expect better days ahead.
“While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken, though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover,” Obama said in the televised speech.
“And the United States of America will emerge stronger than before,” he told a chamber packed with lawmakers, cabinet members and invited guests.
The Democratic president also leveled a barrage of indirect criticism at his Republican predecessor George W. Bush for the country’s economic plight and bloated debt, warning that the “day of reckoning” had arrived.
Five weeks after taking office, Obama pressed the case for his economic plans while laying out a broad agenda, including a much-anticipated push for a healthcare overhaul and energy independence, to help build momentum for his young presidency.
The primetime State of the Union-style address to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives came against a backdrop of growing anxiety across the country in the face of the worst financial meltdown in decades.
While his public support is strong, Wall Street remains skeptical of his economic remedies.
Jittery investors sent U.S. stocks to a 12-year low on Monday, but the markets rallied on Tuesday on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s assurances that the country’s troubled banks should be able to weather the downturn without being nationalized.
Trying to show he would make good on his promise of fiscal responsibility, Obama said he had identified $2 trillion in budget cuts over the next decade.
Obama, who rolls out his first budget proposal on Thursday, has vowed to halve the annual deficit by the end of his term.
Duration : 0:9:4
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President Obama outlines challenges facing the nation and lays out his priorities for meeting them in an address delivered in the House chamber before a joint session of Congress. February 24th, 2009. Part 5
Watch part 6 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVH2Q5FBaC4
Watch part 4 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzH_4qJHXJE
visit: http://firedoglake.com
Duration : 0:9:3
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Lawrence Lessig shares just how independent Senator Scott Brown really is.
Also, the Pew Center reports that trust in government is at its lowest point ever. Larry Lessig shares how we can change that through Citizen Funded Elections.
Help pass major campaign finance reform and support citizen funded elections. Call your elected official to support the Fair Elections Now Act. The act includes a voluntary opt-in that allows candidates to limit contributions to small donors only. The Fair Elections Now Act aims to limit the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case: Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.
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Duration : 0:3:29
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