I often enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan’s column, The Daily Dish [1]. In today’s post, [2]Sullivan chastises Chris Matthews (and other journalists) for attacking Barack Obama’s alleged lack of legislative achievements. In reality, Obama has been quite active in the legislative arena and Chris Matthews should have known better than make these spurious attacks. Here are a few of the things Obama has accomplished:
* Ethics Reform: Obama was the Senate’s point person on ethics reform, and sponsored or co-sponsored the bills that made up what the Washington Post called [3] “the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet.” I’m also a fan of this bill [4], which I think of as the Journalists, Bloggers, and Citizens’ Muckraking Empowerment Act: it creates a searchable database of recipients of federal grants and contracts.
* The Lugar-Obama initiative [5] to strengthen the Nunn-Luger framework for securing loose nukes, and to extend it to securing and destroying stockpiles of conventional arms. (For instance, shoulder-fired missiles that could be used against passenger airlines, fired at our forces, or used to make any number of ongoing conflicts more deadly.)
* Various bills concerning the response to Hurricane Katrina, including an amendment [6] putting strict limits on the use of no-bid contracts after disasters, requiring [7] planning for the evacuation of people with special needs and senior citizens, creating [8] a National Emergency Family Locator System, etc [9].
See The Daily Dish for more.
Print this post [10]
[11]