Stocks are mixed following earnings from retailers
U.S. factory growth readings mixed, but both show expansion
http://currenteconomictrendsandnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/79abc__p-89EKCgBk8MZdE.gif
Workers assemble Motorola phones at the Flextronics plant that will be building the new Motorola smart phone ”MotoX” in Fort Worth, Texas September 10, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Mike Stone
Iranian hard-liners hurled shoes and eggs at President Hassan Rouhani’s car after his arrival in Tehran, following his historic phone conversation with Barack Obama – as the country appeared split over Tehran’s potential rapprochement with the West.
Both opponents and supporters gathered outside Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport on Saturday as Rouhani returned home from his trip to the UN General Assembly in New York.
Up to 100 hard-line Islamists chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and some of them pelted the presidential motorcade with eggs and shoes – a gesture considered a serious insult in Islamic culture.
“When Mr Rouhani became president, Obama signed an order imposing new sanctions against Iran on cars and other things, with his own handwriting,” said one of protesters, as quoted by AP. “This is a clear sign that [Americans] are in no way seeking talks, but unfortunately this [phone conversation] happened.”
The small contingent of police present at the airport could not prevent demonstrators “from attacking Iran’s president,” tweeted Thomas Erdbrink, Tehran bureau chief for the New York Times. He said that Rouhani was trying to keep smiling as his security guards tried to “shield him off with an umbrella, then pulled him into car and drove off.”
The hardline protesters were outnumbered by about 200 to 300 Rouhani supporters, who appeared at the site to cheer the president and welcome his diplomatic efforts to ease Tehran’s international isolation and get sanctions against republic lifted. They greeted him with placards, thanking him for seeking peace instead of confrontation.
“I think the younger generation is happy that the first contact [between Iran and the US] is being established after 30 years,” one of the Rouhani supporters said. “I think it’s very positive for us, as we are under such a pressure, sanctions, et cetera.”
Police reportedly separated the rival demonstrators.
Video: /files/news/20/96/c0/00/original_889980_iran.mov
During his trip to the United States, Rouhani had a 15-minute phone talk on Friday with President Obama, breaking over three decades of silence between the two nations. Compared to his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the recently-elected Iranian leader also softened his tone on the country’s controversial nuclear program.
Upon his arrival in Iran, Rouhani said that he told Obama that Tehran’s nuclear program was “not only a right of the Iranian nation and a matter of development, but also – and more importantly – it is a matter of national pride for the Iranian people.” He told journalists that Obama said that he acknowledged the nuclear rights of the Islamic republic.
According to Rouhani, he also told Obama that “with the window that the Iranian people have opened, there is not much time left for talks with the P5+1 and resolving the nuclear issue and that this matter should be speeded up.” The US president replied that he shared that view and would ask Secretary of State John Kerry to hasten the process.
President Barack Obama, asked for a third time at Friday’s press conference if he’d still use force against President Bashar Assad’s regime even if Congress fails to back the move, finally told reporters they shouldn’t hold their breath for an answer.
“You’re not getting a direct response,” Obama said.
It was a statement that summed up the messaging approach his administration has taken for nearly three weeks — ever since the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that prompted the president’s push for a strike on Syria — as it’s pushed a series of confusing, often contradictory lines of argument.
This past week alone, Obama found himself walking back a top aide’s assertion that he’d be disinclined to order an attack on Syria without congressional authorization, even as Secretary of State John Kerry told the Huffington Post that Obama “reserves the right in the presidency to respond as appropriate to protect the security of our nation.”
The president also distanced himself from his own 2012 statement that the use of chemical weapons represented “a red line” that would warrant American action — disclaiming ownership of a standard that he had originally described in starkly personal terms, saying the action “would change my calculus … would change my equation.”
And he said Friday he didn’t want to make a World War II analogy to argue for action in Syria — just before, in the very same sentence, comparing the current state of affairs in Syria to Nazi Germany’s bombing of London in 1940.
Meanwhile, he and his advisers are consistently defining potential American involvement in the Syrian conflict by what it’s not — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — even as they use rhetoric that often sounds airlifted from the run-up to those conflicts.
Even the president’s political arm seems confused. Organizing for Action made no public comments about Obama’s Syria push for five days after he announced he was asking Congress to weigh in, then declared its neutrality.
The next day, it directed its Twitter followers to watch U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s full-throated defense of intervention at the Center for American Progress.
None of this has served to build any momentum, among the public or the Congress, for Obama’s Syria plan. Even those who support action in Syria are blaming the White House for its failure to clearly articulate why Congress and the public should back the president’s policy.
“You have to be convinced that this is a worthwhile endeavor,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of Obama’s chief allies on Syria, told constituents at a town hall meeting Friday.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who also favors intervention, has tweaked Obama for his failure to galvanize congressional or public support. Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck played up the importance of Obama’s decision to address the nation on Syria Tuesday — while playing down the possible impact.
“The speaker has consistently said the president has an obligation to make his case for intervention directly to the American people,” Buck said Friday. “Members of Congress represent the views of their constituents, and only a president can convince the public that military action is required. We only hope this isn’t coming too late to make the difference.”
It isn’t that the president has been silent on the issue — it’s that the message from both Obama and his top advisers has been too fractured to be truly convincing. As the White House argument for action in Syria has evolved, aides and allies have offered competing explanations for it, and have yet to settle on a straightforward and compelling pitch for why an American strike in Syria is necessary.
Taken together, it all paints a picture of an administration at times as confused and conflicted as the Congress it aims to win over.
For instance, on the key question of whether Obama would act in Syria without congressional approval, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that he didn’t know what would happen if Congress said no. “Well, I can’t tell you what the president’s going to do because he hasn’t told me,” Kerry said.
Then Friday morning, NPR broadcast an interview with Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken in which he said Obama would be disinclined to order an attack without the blessing of Congress.
“The president of course has the authority to act, but it’s neither his desire nor his intention to use that authority absent Congress backing him,” Blinken said.
Four hours later, Obama was already walking that line back. Told exactly what Blinken had said, Obama characterized it as a misreading of his aide’s words.
“I don’t think that’s exactly what he said,” Obama said. “But I think I’ve answered the question.”
He had not.
The administration is pitching slightly different messages to the public and to Congress. Congress hears specifics, with in-depth conversations about what inaction would mean for Iran and Hezbollah — a pitch that doesn’t resonate as well with the public at large.
“Members understand that more than the broader public,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama National Security Council spokesman.
It isn’t just the hypotheticals that pose a headache for the administration — even the seemingly direct arguments Obama administration officials make have been a bit muddied.
For the past two weeks, Kerry has been comparing Assad to Saddam Hussein and Hitler, saying the trio are the only leaders to use chemical weapons on their own people in the last century. This week, he argued for aid to Syrians by pointing, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, to an incident shortly before U.S. involvement in World War II in which a boatload of Jewish refugees was turned away from the coast of Florida.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) upped the ante at the White House Tuesday, saying “never again” — a nod to the Holocaust — should the U.S. turn a blind eye to people being massacred. And Obama himself on Friday compared the situation in Syria to Nazi Germany’s bombing of London in 1940.
But the administration has also argued that the past actually isn’t a guide to why there’s a need for action in Syria, or to the potential pitfalls that could await. Top officials from the president on down have stressed almost daily that Syria is not Iraq. And the president himself said Friday he was “not drawing a analogy to World War II” other than to highlight the similarity between the domestic unpopularity of U.S. intervention early in that conflict and the anemic support for Syria intervention in current polls.
Past aside, the present environment has posed its own set of messaging challenges. The White House just can’t seem to consistently answer the question: How much of a threat, if any, does the situation in Syria pose to the United States?
The president and his top aides have certainly left the impression that lack of action in Syria could harm U.S. national security, arguing that if Assad’s chemical weapons use goes unpunished, it could lead to the further development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
“Failing to respond to this breach of this international norm would send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes, and terrorist organizations that they can develop and use weapons of mass destruction and not pay a consequence,” Obama said Friday. “And that’s not the world that we want to live in.”
But Obama said Friday that he had the luxury of seeking congressional authorization precisely because there was no immediate threat to the United States or its allies.
“I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed a imminent, direct threat to the United States,” Obama said.
If the danger were truly immediate, he said, he would have acted first and allowed lawmakers to ask questions later.
“In that situation, obviously, I don’t worry about Congress. We do what we have to do to keep the American people safe,” Obama said. “I could not say that it was immediately, directly going to have an impact on our allies. Again, in those situations I would act right away.”
Then, a day after saying the threat posed by the chemical weapons attack was neither “imminent” nor “direct,” Obama used his Saturday radio address to call it “a serious threat to our national security.”
None of this has rallied the public to the cause of attacking Syria. Nor are the administration’s efforts Monday and Tuesday, with Obama to appear on network television and to address the nation, likely to move people in his favor, said Clinton White House speechwriter Michael Waldman.
“The president’s speech will be one element of a public campaign here, but its important to remember presidents almost never can rally the public toward military action in advance, especially with a big speech,” Waldman said. “The public is almost always skittish about military action. Once it begins, then people rally around the military and rally around the flag.”
If the present landscape is murky, the future seems completely uncharted territory for the administration, which has been far from clear about how the action being discussed would help it attain concrete goals in Syria, about its vision for a likely endgame — or about its views of the forces who stand to gain ground if the United States takes aim at Assad.
For instance, when Obama met with congressional leaders at the White House Tuesday, he emphasized that a bombing campaign is part of “a broader strategy that will allow us to upgrade the capabilities of the opposition” fighting the Assad regime, something McCain had pressed him on the day before.
By Friday, the only mention Obama made to an opposition was the opposition he faces in Congress. There was little framing of his goals in intervening in Syria beyond punishing Assad. A White House website focused on the Syria conflict — which went live late in the week — didn’t do much to clarify, offering just one sentence on mission objectives, but no detail on any opposition forces or preferred political outcomes.
In the face of a messaging flop on this scale, even the Obamaland political snark hasn’t held up.
Minutes after Obama announced he’d seek congressional authorization on Syria, former adviser David Axelrod took to Twitter to dub Congress “the dog that caught the car.”
But by Friday he was all in earnest. Sure, the president has been pitching Syria action for weeks now. But he hasn’t made the sale. And so the priority for Obama, Axelrod told “Morning Joe,” had to be generating a message that resonates on the Hill.
“[Obama] needs to make the case and give them the arguments and the cover, frankly, for a yes vote,” he said.
Obama’s upcoming address to the nation is intended to help Congress relay a more unified administration narrative back in their districts. “When you go on TV and do a speech, that’s an address to the nation, it’s because Congress thinks they need help explaining it to their constituents,” Vietor said.
It may be the administration’s last, best hope to budge the needle — but it only works if the story the president relays Tuesday doesn’t require any more explanations of its own.
U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement about the violence in Egypt while at his rental vacation home on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard in Chilmark August 15, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing
WASHINGTON |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – By canceling a military exercise with Egypt but not cutting off U.S. aid, President Barack Obama sought on Thursday to show his displeasure at the Egyptian army’s violent crackdown on protesters – without totally alienating the generals.
Obama announced the move a day after at least 623 people were killed, according to Egypt’s Health Ministry, as troops and police used force against protesters seeking the return of President Mohamed Mursi, who was toppled by the military on July 3.
Critics argued that Obama had done too little, too late and that his administration has repeatedly sent mixed messages – among them its failure to brand Mursi’s ouster a military coup – thereby eroding its ability to influence events.
A bipartisan group of U.S. Middle East experts said the cancelling of the military exercise was necessary but fell far short of what is needed to meet U.S. objectives in Egypt
“The president’s failure to suspend aid to the Egyptian military is a strategic error that undercuts those objectives and weakens U.S. credibility, after repeated calls by the U.S. administration for Egyptian authorities to avoid bloodshed have been disregarded,” members of the Working Group on Egypt said in a statement.
Former U.S. officials said Obama’s decision reflected his balancing act since the army ousted Egypt’s first freely elected president, an action the United States appeared to tacitly condone by its decision not to call for Mursi’s restoration.
The White House has tried to appear to support democracy in Egypt, while protecting the U.S. strategic interest in Egypt’s stability, its peace treaty with Israel and its military cooperation with the United States, including privileged access to the Suez Canal.
In his desire to maintain some links to Egypt’s generals, Obama on Thursday canceled the biennial Bright Star military exercise with Egypt rather than cut the $ 1.55 billion in aid – including $ 1.3 billion to the military – that Washington gives Cairo annually.
GOOD OPTICS, LOW COST?
A former senior U.S. military official said Bright Star had long since lost any luster for the Pentagon, which sees it as an antiquated, largely tank-on-tank exercise out of sync with the U.S. military focus on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“This was a very low-cost, almost irrelevant move (by) the administration because the exercise is inconsequential and in some ways irrelevant,” said the former official. “This makes for good optics, but it doesn’t have any costs associated with it.”
A second former U.S. official said that in calling off the exercise, the Obama administration appeared to have found “an instrument that is useful, without being damaging to the overall relationship with the military.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel issued a statement on Thursday saying he had called Egypt’s army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and warned him the recent violence was putting defense cooperation with Egypt at risk. But he said Washington would maintain its military relationship with Cairo.
Several former U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration seemed to have concluded that it has relatively little influence over the generals, who regard themselves as being in a life-and-death fight against Egypt’s Islamists.
“I don’t think it’s going to have any meaningful impact on their behavior,” said the second former official. “I believe they have decided that it is in their interest to get a grip on this situation, control it and then master it.”
In a statement released in Cairo on Friday, Egypt’s presidency said Obama’s remarks condemning the crackdown were not based on “facts” and would strengthen and encourage violent groups.
EXISTENTIAL STRUGGLE?
“The Egyptian military views this as an existential struggle,” said a third former senior U.S. official. “While our assistance is desirable, it is not existential.”
The former officials also stressed that Egypt’s army has the backing of key Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, which have promised the military-backed government some $ 12 billion in financial support.
In a statement released on Thursday, the UAE foreign ministry made no secret of where its sympathies lay.
“The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs re-affirms its understanding of the sovereign measures taken by the Egyptian government after having exercised maximum self-control,” it said in a statement posted on its website.
“What is regretful is that political extremist groups have insisted on the rhetoric of violence, incitement, disruption of public interests and undermining of the Egyptian economy, which has led to the regretful events,” it added.
The financial assistance already provided by the Gulf states dwarfs the U.S. aid.
TIGHTROPE OR RAZOR BLADE?
Amy Hawthorne, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East and member of the Working Group on Egypt, said the Obama administration’s response to the violence was inadequate and sent mixed messages.
“What Obama is trying to do is tread this cautious path between taking too strong of a path in either direction, which is understandable given the pressures he trying to balance,” said Hawthorne, a former State Department official.
“But at a certain point we have to look at this with more clarity. The current approach hasn’t been working and it’s time to try something else to send a stronger message,” she added.
The first former U.S. official said Washington had managed to alienate all major parties by trying to strike a middle ground.
“We have alienated the military because of our stand on democracy, we have alienated the Muslim Brotherhood because of our stand on interests,” he added. “And trying to walk that thin line unfortunately has not been a tightrope for the president, but has ended up being a razor blade.”
(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Warren Strobel and David Brunnstrom)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is making his case for an immigration overhaul and for avoiding a big increase in student loan interest rates as he meets with the bipartisan leadership of Congress. He also is expected to brief the top four lawmakers on his recent diplomatic outreach to China and efforts to find international consensus on Syria.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were meeting Tuesday in the Oval Office with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The meeting comes at the height of Senate debate over immigration legislation and as student loans interest rates are poised to double on Monday if Congress doesn’t act.
Obama last met with the four leaders on March 1.
Congress News Headlines – Yahoo! News
