‘Nobody’s hands are clean’: Obama urges reflection amid Israel-Hamas conflict

Former President Barack Obama cautioned against ignoring the complexities of the Israel-Hamas war, warning that “all of us are complicit.”

“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” he said in an excerpted interview with Pod Save America released Saturday. 

Reflecting on his presidency, Obama posed the question, “Well, was there something else I could have done?”

Barack Obama warns progressives to avoid 'circular firing squad'

Barack Obama warned on Saturday that US progressives risk creating a “circular firing squad” at a time when prospective presidential candidates are competing fiercely against each other to run against Donald Trump.

The former president was speaking in Berlin, at an Obama Foundation event.

Pentagon misled Obama administration on gun background check problem, document shows

Devin Kelley shouldn’t have had a gun. He’d pleaded guilty in a 2013 court martial to beating his wife and young child, which barred him from owning a firearm under federal law. But the Air Force never sent records of his guilty plea to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as the law requires, so Kelley’s background check came back clean when he bought a Ruger AR-556 rifle in April 2016.

Last November, he used that rifle to kill 26 people and injure 20 more at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

The World as It Is review: Ben Rhodes' Obama legacy defence has weak spots

Ben Rhodes is the Barack Obama speechwriter and national security staffer who helped drive the Iran deal and negotiated the thaw between the US and Cuba. Over time, he earned his fair share of enemies. Indeed, he has the tire marks on his back to prove it.

Last month, days before Donald Trump’s decision to junk the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Observer and Ronan Farrow reported on the efforts of Black Cube, an Israeli intelligence-gathering firm, to discredit Rhodes and other Obama administration officials – just as Black Cube abetted Harvey Weinstein in his attempt to silence his victims. Five years ago, voices from the Pentagon derided Rhodes and others as jihadis in the White House after they opposed continued aid to Egypt in the aftermath of the military takeover.

Witnessing the Obama Presidency, from Start to Finish

Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw his Presidency as a struggle over narrative. “We’re telling a story about who we are,” he instructed his aide Ben Rhodes early in the first year of his first term. He said it again in his last months in office, on a trip to Asia—“I mean, that’s our job. To tell a really good story about who we are”—adding that the book he happened to be reading argued for storytelling as the trait that distinguishes us from other primates. Obama’s audience was both the American public and the rest of the world. His characteristic rhetorical mode was to describe and understand both sides of a divide—black and white, liberal and conservative, Muslim and non-Muslim—before synthesizing them into a unifying story that seemed to originate in and affirm his own.

The Politics of Race and the Photo That Might Have Derailed Obama

It’s useful, almost ten years after his election to the Presidency, to recall how much of the opposition to Barack Obama during his first run for that office was conducted via image, and the promise—or, really, the threat—of images to come. The way he looked was inextricable from the rest of his appeal as a potential leader, and so, perhaps, a game of subliminal, symbolic tit for tat was to be expected. The latter months of Hillary Clinton’s losing 2008 primary campaign were characterized by a Pyrrhically effective, subtly racialized populist appeal to the people she referred to, at one point, as “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” in states such as Michigan and Ohio. As Clinton chugged beers and downed shots of whiskey at every notch along the Rust Belt, her campaign disseminated photos of Obama looking especially black or exotic, or standing next to figures of questionable repute. There was the image of Obama dressed in traditional Somali robes and a turban, released in mysterious synch with the ongoing rumors that he was a crypto-Muslim and that, as a kid living in Indonesia, he had been educated at a madrassa. (The Clinton campaign denied spreading that one.) Then, after the controversy over Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his more bombastic political utterances from behind the pulpit, pictures of Wright and Obama together, in better times, flooded the Internet and the airwaves.

Obama tells Prince Harry: leaders must stop corroding civil discourse

Politicians, and others in positions of power, should stop corroding civil discourse and seek to unify society, the former US president Barack Obama said in a rare interview conducted by Prince Harry for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Obama did not mention his successor, Donald Trump, by name, but said social media could lead to facts being discarded and prejudices being reinforced, making public conversation harder. “All of us in leadership have to find ways to recreate a common space on the internet,” he said.

Have Democrats lost 900 seats in state legislatures since Obama has been president?

If President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for middle-class tax cuts and programs won’t go anywhere in the new Republican Congress, why did Obama even spend time discussing it during last week’s State of the Union?

"Because it’s something for people to run on," said Cokie Roberts as part of a Sunday pundit analysis on ABC’s This Week.

FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

It Took Two to Make Russian Meddling Effective

If there is one thing The Washington Post’s story on the Obama administration’s anemic response to Russian meddling in the 2016 election makes clear, it’s that it took two to make the meddling effective.

There is a reason the tactics Russia used on the American elections—which are similar to things they’ve done in former Soviet republics and in Europe—are referred to as “asymmetric warfare”: They embody the art of leverage, of doing a lot with a little. As former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress in May, the Russians “succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and at minimal cost.” The whole operation, according to Clapper, cost a mere $200 million—a pittance in military spending terms. But the Russians used that money not the way a conventional army would, but the way a band of guerrillas would, feeling around for pressure points, and pressing—or not. Though, as Bloomberg reported this month, the Russians were clearly exploring ways to attack voting infrastructure in parts of the country, it still appears they ultimately decided not to pull the trigger, sticking instead with the hack-and-dump and the manufacturing of fake news. “It was ad hoc,” an Obama administration official told me shortly after the inauguration. “They were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick.”

Barack Obama Refutes Authoritarianism: 'The Future Does Not Belong to Strongmen'

In a speech on Tuesday in front of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, former President Barack Obama offered ominous warnings about the dangers of authoritarian rule and several implicit critiques of the Trump administration.

Obama opened with a quick survey of the "old divisions and fresh hatreds" that are currently dominating news headlines. "It seems like the international order ... is being constantly tested and the center may not hold," he said. Times of social and economic stress "lead people to search for certainty and control," he continued. "They can call for isolationism or nationalism, or they can suggest rolling back the rights of others."

'Progress does not always move in a straight line': Obama in Montreal

He gives good speech.

Barack Obama has the unique gift of being able to couch everything he did — including his shortcomings — in reams of mellifluous, stirring words. Read anything he ever said about gun control in the U.S. or the Assad regime in Syria, and you never would guess that these were two notable failures of his administration. His words compensate for those failures, and bring goosebumps to his many successes.

Obama's carefully political post-presidency

Democrats hoping that Barack Obama will use his first big post-presidential address in Boston on Sunday to slam President Donald Trump or lay out a vision for the party will be disappointed.

Obama won’t speak directly about the Democratic Party, the midterm elections or the 2020 campaign. That will come in the fall, when he resumes doing Democratic fundraising.

“Giant blind spots”: Elizabeth Warren says Barack Obama does not understand the “lived experience of most Americans”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., criticized former President Barack Obama and her own political party for selling out to corporate donors and failing to stay in touch with the working class in an interview with The Guardian on Monday.

“I think President Obama, like many others in both parties, talks about a set of big national statistics that look shiny and great but increasingly have giant blind spots,” Warren told the magazine, “that GDP, unemployment, no longer reflect the lived experiences of most Americans … And the lived experiences of most Americans is that they are being left behind in this economy.”

Larry Summers Had the Power to Punish Wall Street. Now He’s Slamming Obama’s Gentle Treatment.

As head of Barack Obama’s National Economic Council during 2009 and 2010 at the height of the foreclosure crisis, Larry Summers broke many promises to help homeowners while simultaneously dismissing Wall Street’s criminality. Now, after the Obama administration has left power and Summers has no ability to influence anything, he finds himself “disturbed” that settlements for mortgage misconduct are full of lies. Those of us who screamed exactly this for years, when Summers might have been able to do something about it, are less than amused.

Comey tried to reveal Russian plot before election — Obama administration officials blocked: report

FBI Director James Comey attempted to go public as early as the summer of 2016 with information on Russia’s campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election, but Obama administration officials blocked him from doing so, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Newsweek.

Well before the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence accused the Russian government with tampering with U.S. elections in an October 7 statement, Comey pitched the idea of writing an op-ed about the Russian campaign during a meeting in the White House’s situation room in June or July. “He had a draft of it or an outline, he held up a piece of paper in a meeting and said, ‘I want to go forward, what do people think of this?’” says a source with knowledge of the meeting , which included Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security director and the national security adviser.

Barack Obama Radically Expanded Our Appreciation of African-American History

Among its other accomplishments, the presidency of Barack Obama—you do remember it?—featured an unmistakable expansion of public appreciation for African-American history. This was especially true as his time remaining in the White House dwindled away: From the opening of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African-American History and Culture to the designation of a site in South Carolina as the nation’s first national park devoted to Reconstruction, the Obama presidency ended with considerable emphasis on how the nation conceives of African-American history in public spaces. In many ways, and despite whatever uncertainties lie ahead, Obama’s attempts to memorialize more of the African-American experience enhanced the meaning of what it means to be an American.

Five Reasons that President Obama Was Right to Commute Chelsea Manning’s Sentence

On Tuesday, three days before the end of Barack Obama’s term as President, the White House announced that he had commuted the sentences of two hundred and nine people, including Private Chelsea Manning, who was arrested, in 2010, for giving hundreds of thousands of files classified as secret—the revelation of which caused diplomatic tumult and other difficulties for the United States—to WikiLeaks. Manning had been court-martialed and sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison. Under Obama’s order, she will be released in May, after being incarcerated for more than six years. Here are five reasons that Obama’s decision on Manning was the right and just move.

“We were heard for the first time”: President Obama leaves an incredible legacy on LGBTQ rights

In March 2009, Mara Keisling visited the White House. It was an event that has now become typical; Keisling estimates she’s been in the White House dozens of times since then. But back then, it was a big deal — even historic.

“As far as I know, I was the first trans person invited as a trans person to the White House,” Keisling, who’s the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), told me. She thought back to the first trans policy session she took part in at the White House, noting the tragic irony that it was held in the Indian Treaty Room — a place that symbolizes the many broken promises the US government has made to Native Americans.

Rush To Repeal Obamacare Draws Warning From Another GOP Senator

More Republicans are expressing anxiety over plans to repeal Obamacare before reaching agreement on a replacement plan.

And now one GOP senator has said clearly the two steps should happen simultaneously.

The senator is Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and during an interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily” on Thursday, he said, “I think when we repeal Obamacare, we need to have the solution in place moving forward.”