Executives from six of the nation's largest insurers were grilled about their company's policies before members of Congress. Nancy Cordes reports.
What's Your Favorite Summer Blockbuster? Our Reporter Rates the Summer Hits...
Ever rated a movie that you haven’t seen? ABC's John Berman has -- watch his video below to see what he thought of this summer’s blockbusters (that he hasn’t had a chance to watch -- yet). And chime in below...
Obama: Lies, trust, action'tis season
by Mark Silva
With all the fuss this week over the congressman who accused the president of lying, all the apologies, the rebukes and the morning-afters, the unanswered question when all is said and done might be who believes whom.
Charles Krauthammer, the conservative, prize-winning Washington Post columnist, says President Barack Obama "doesn't lie... He's too subtle for that.'' And the columnist rolls out a litany of examples today examining Obama's "relationship with truth.''
Yet much of the American public apparently still places a lot of confidence in the president's penchant for telling it like it is.
For all the "TelePrompTer President" criticism that Obama draws from detractors, eight in 10 Americans say he is a good communicator.
And nearly two-thirds of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center say that Obama is trustworthy. A similar number view him as a strong leader, according to the survey of 1,006 adults conducted Sept. 10-15.
The president's overall job-approval rating in this survey has held at 55 percent, little changed since July, but well below the 63 percent mark that Pew measured at the 100th day of the Obama presidency.
But it's not only the president's approval ratings that have slipped since his inauguration (down from a peak of 69 percent to a near-low of 51 percent in the latest Gallup track, which measured a low of 50 not long ago. It's also these measures of trustworthiness and leadership.
If 83 percent viewed Obama as a good communicator in the latest, September, survey from Pew, 92 percent had in February. If 69 percent viewed Obama as "well-organized'' this month, 81 percent had in February. If 65 percent viewed him as a strong leader in the latest poll, 77 percent had in February. And if 64 percent viewed the president as trustworthy in the latest survey, 76 percent had in February.
There's also a slide in the share of people who view Obama as being able "to get things done.'' It's 58 percent of those surveyed, in the September Pew poll, down from 70 percent in the February survey.
" In most cases,'' Pew President Andrew Kohut writes, "the falloff in positive views mirrors the decline in his job approval ratingfrom 64% in February to 55% today.''
Chalk it up to relations with Congress, perhaps, that haven't gone as smoothly as Obama had hoped they would when he promised a new era of cooperation. Chalk it up to Obama's own insistence on confronting some of the toughest issues in townholding off on the most volatile one, immigration reform, until he can get through health-care reform first.
Then again, some, such as Krauthammer, may chalk up declining confidence in the Obama White House to the president attempting to sell a pig in a poke. That's what Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who yelled, "You lie,'' during Obama's speech to Congress, was trying to say.
Wilson ultimately had to apologize for the way he said it.
This is how Krauthammer says it:
The president promises not to sign a health-care bill that "adds one dime to our deficits... period.'' Yet the proof that the president offers of that promise cannot be delivered, Krauthammer argues: The promise that the president made in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week to require further spending cuts if the savings envisioned in the health-care initiative don't materialize.
"Every Congress is sovereign,'' Krauthammer writes. "Nothing enacted today will force a future Congress or a future president to make any cuts in any spending, mandatory or not. ''
Obama promises that illegal immigrants will not be covered by the health-care reforms he is seeking. "The problem is that laws are not self-enforcing,'' the columnist writes. "If they were, we'd have no illegal immigrants because, as I understand it, it's illegal to enter the United States illegally. We have laws against burglary, too. But we also provide for cops and jails on the assumption that most burglars don't voluntarily turn themselves in.''
Obama promises to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. "That's not a lie,'' Krauthammer writes. "That's not even deception. That's just an insult to our intelligence. Waste, fraud and abuse -- Meg Greenfield once called this phrase "the dread big three" -- as the all-purpose piggy bank for budget savings has been a joke since Jimmy Carter first used it in 1977.''
Speaking of Jimmy Carter: He attempted to speak some truth this week, too, and was roundly denounced for lying about the motivation behind the most extreme criticism for the president, the inability of people to accept the fact that a black man is president.
The White House said the president doesn't accept thatcriticism for him is not tied to "the color of his skin.'' Obama is attempting to keep a focus on health-care reforms.
Obama, still widely viewed as a great communicator, runs much of the table of the Sunday talk shows this weekend: ABC News' This Week, CBS News' Face the Nation, NBC News' Meet the Press, CNN's State of the Union and the Spanish-language Univision. He is sitting for a series of interviews with the hosts of these shows this afternoon at the White House.
The president heads into this "media blitz'' with a solid majority of Americans viewing him as trustworthynot a bad perch for a president making an unprecedented public appeal.
The ratings aren't what they were in February. But this is not February. This is what the president is calling 'the season for action'' on health care.
How the season plays out will have a lot to do with what all these numbers look like at the end of the yearnot only in the way people view his communicative skills, leadership and trustworthiness, but also his ability to get things done.
Ex-CIA Directors Seek To Halt Interrogations Probe
In a letter to President Obama, seven former chiefs warned that investigations into harsh interrogation techniques during the Bush administration could discourage CIA officers from doing the kind of intelligence work needed to counter terrorism and could inhibit foreign governments from working with the U.S.
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