While the Obama administration has verbally renewed its commitment to immigration reform, many Hispanic activists believe it may be too little, too late. Jorge Ramos, a popular anchor at the Spanish-language network Univision, told The Daily Beast’s Bryan Curtis that Obama has broken his promise to take up immigration within the first year of his presidency. “At this point, we can say Barack Obama broke a promise,” Ramos said. “It’s that simple. … We might have to wait years because that promise wasn’t kept.”
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Those responsible for fixing America’s teeth aren’t smiling about the job the president is doing. According to a very early poll conducted last spring by an outlet we weren’t too familiar with, less than a third of dentists approved of the job Obama was doing in office. When scoring the president’s performance, more than half of the mouth doctors gave the Obama a grade of D or F. Their gripes seem to run far afield of the tooth industry. One dental worker snapped, "If we have another terrorist attack (God forbid), it will be Obama’s fault, pure and simple."
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The tension between the White House and America’s labor unions reached a boil during the run-up to the Senate primary between Blanche Lincoln and Bill Halter in Arkansas last month. Unions spent millions on Halter, hoping he would upset Lincoln. When Lincoln won, the White House crowed “Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise.” One union leader snapped back, “Labor isn’t an arm of the Democratic Party.”
Brian E. Chilson / AP Photo
Obama may consider John F. Kennedy a hero, but he seems to be no lover of space exploration like his role model. In February, Obama told NASA to give up its program directed toward putting men back on the moon in 2020. Astronauts launched themselves into a fit of pique. This April, more than two dozen former spacemen penned a later to the president protesting his slimmed-down ambitions for the U.S. in outer space. “America is faced with the near-simultaneous ending of the Shuttle program and your recent budget proposal to cancel the Constellation program. This is wrong for our country... we are stunned that, in a time of economic crisis, this move will force as many as 30,000 irreplaceable engineers and managers out of the space industry,” they wrote.
Chris O'Meara / AP Photo
Tech entrepreneurs gave big to Obama during the campaign. Last week, The Daily Beast’s Peter Lauria traveled out to Sun Valley, where the Information Age big wigs gather annually to swap stories, and found they weren’t so sanguine anymore. Yahoo’s Terry Semel said he worried about the “negative relationships” developing between the White House and the banks. The best defense Google CEO and Obama favorite Eric Schmidt could muster for the current state of affairs was, “Everybody is in a sort of funk.” When asked if he thought the administration was anti-business, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes smiled silently for a few seconds then said, “I think it’s time for a glass of wine.”
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Not far from Sun Valley, another gaggle of glitterati gathered in Aspen last week. And they, too, expressed dismay with the direction of the White House’s economic policy. “The real problem we have,” real-estate mogul and publisher Mort Zuckerman told The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.” Arianna Huffington piled on: “He said jobs were going to be his No. 1 priority—there’s a huge disconnect between Washington and what’s going on out in the country.”
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All the Karzai brothers really want is for Barack Obama to get out of their business. Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, wants some autonomy to run the country. While his brother would just rather keep his affairs private—he has been accused by the U.S. of earning a fortune in drugs, intimidating rivals, and keeping suspicious links to the CIA. Relations between Hamid Karzai and Obama have been noticeably tense, not least because of an ill-conceived threat Karzai made behind closed doors in April to join the Taliban. That one didn’t go over well in Washington.
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The retail giant has been especially vocal in its criticism of Obama, ever since the 2008 campaign when it actively tried to dissuade its employees from voting for him. Wary of strengthening labor unions, the company made its workers attend mandatory meetings ahead of the election to hear Walmart’s views on the matter. “The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" one employee said at the time. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote.”
Gregory Bull / AP Photo
Back in the heady days of 2008, the Cuban leader praised Obama as “intelligent” and “refined.” But in a rare TV appearance this week, El Comandante railed against the United States. Castro criticized it and Israel for, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “what he believes is their campaign to fuel a perilous global arms race.”
Reuters
With “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act back in the news, gay activists are expressing frustration with the Obama administration’s lack of progress. The Daily Beast’s Linda Hirshman reported that there is a level of anger in an unexpected place: members of the Clinton gay-rights team, who say Obama is dragging his feet on gay rights in general and should certainly not be fighting to preserve the anti-gay legislation that Clinton himself signed into law.
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Many were impressed when the president demonstrated his quick reflexes by swatting a fly during an Oval Office interview last June. Animal-rights activists, however, took none too kindly to the performance. “He isn’t Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act,” a PETA member protested. The group sent Obama a “Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher,” hoping the White House would enforce a catch and release program when it came to flying insects.
Carolyn Kaster / AP Photo
Scientists thought things couldn’t get much worse than they were during the Bush administration. But even though Obama said he would be more supportive of scientific research, the community feels that in practice, he has only delivered more of the same. Specifically, scientists say that Obama has prioritized political concerns and allowed officials to get in the way of their work. “We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration,” one activist lawyer told the Los Angeles Times.
Gerald Herbert / AP Photo
Many parts of the Muslim world aren’t too thrilled with the United States, regardless of who is in the White House. But despite his best efforts to reach out to them, Barack Obama’s approval rating in Muslim countries is still falling. In Pakistan, the number of Muslims who approve of Obama fell from an already low 13 percent to 8 percent, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project. Among Muslims in Turkey, his ratings fell from 33 percent to 23 percent, and in Egypt—a country that receives billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. government—they went from 41 percent to 31 percent.
Nishanuddin Khan / AP Photo
It wasn’t Obama’s bowling score that offended Special Olympians, so much as the joke he made about it later on national television. Trying to be self-effacing about the 127 he posted, he instead came off as insensitive when he said, “It's like—it was like Special Olympics, or something,” on The Tonight Show. Realizing his gaffe, Obama immediately tried to make amends by phoning Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver to apologize and pledge his support to the organization.
Charlie Litchfield, Idaho Press-Tribune / AP Photo
