President Obama discusses steps he’s taking to ensure that more goods and products stamped “Made in America” are sold in the United States and around the world.

by Glynn Wilson

More Americans trust President Barack Obama to influence the direction of the country than the Republicans in Congress. According to the latest Gallup poll on the subject, 46 percent of Americans say they want the president to have more influence over the direction the nation takes in the next year, while 42 percent said they would rather have the Republicans in Congress calling the shots.

U.S. preferences have been closely divided on this question since early 2011 after Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives. But President Obama has consistently had a slim advantage, suggesting a real lead for him, according to Gallup.

In general, Democrats want Obama to have more influence and Republicans want the Republicans in Congress to have more influence. Independents are more likely to prefer Obama.

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Exactly three weeks until the first Republican presidential nominating contest in Iowa, front-runners Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have two different challenges, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Romney faces a challenge with the Republican primary electorate, trailing Gingrich nationally by 17 percentage points as nearly two-thirds of Republicans view him as either liberal or moderate.

Gingrich, meanwhile, faces a challenge with the general electorate, as half of all voters say they wouldn’t vote for him in November, and as he trails President Barack Obama by more than 10 percentage points in a hypothetical contest, while Romney’s trails the Democratic incumbent by 2 points.

“Romney has not caught on [with Republican voters],” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “And Gingrich is so deeply flawed.”

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In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will “take our country back” from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don’t realize is, there’s a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren’t yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it’s only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country.

Corporate Interests, Republican Insiders Built the Tea Party

Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview

Obama Speaks from New Orleans on the Fifth Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

Full text below…
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Guest Column
by Johanna Polsenberg
Gulf Coast Restoration Network

On Wednesday, August 25, I attended the second public meeting of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Fortunately, my immediate and lasting impression is that the Commissioners are extremely well-chosen and broadly experienced, highly capable experts. They demonstrated throughout the long day that they are committed to understanding and helping to correct the institutional failures, both in the government and corporate culture, that allowed for this catastrophe.

President Obama established the Commission in May to provide recommendations on how the U.S. can prevent future devastating blow-outs and spills from offshore drilling. During the first public meeting, held in New Orleans in mid-July while the oil was still gushing, the panel heard emotional and highly charged testimony directly from the people working on and impacted by the spill.

In comparison, I expected this second meeting on regulatory oversight of offshore drilling to be somewhat dry and boring. On the contrary, I found myself riveted, largely because it was continually astonishing just how vastly under-regulated offshore drilling has been, and how poorly prepared we seem to be to continue our current level of drilling, let alone handle an expansion.

One of the most compelling witnesses for me was J. Robinson West, who served in the Reagan Administration and now owns and runs a huge global energy consulting firm.

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More Disapprove of BP Than President Obama

With the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico seemingly capped, Americans are split down the middle over whether the federal government should maintain a moratorium on most offshore oil drilling in the Gulf, or lift it and allow drilling to resume before November, according to the latest Gallup Poll on the subject.

Americans as a whole are also divided over whether BP should be allowed to drill for oil in the same area again in the future, and the gender and partisan differences on this question are similar to those seen for lifting the Gulf oil drilling moratorium.

This survey makes clear, however, that far more people blame the British Petroleum corporation than the president of the United States or the government for the massive mess in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP’s Ratings Improved, but Still Negative

Despite Americans’ divergent views about future oil drilling in the Gulf, they share a common reaction to BP’s handling of the 2010 oil spill — one that is overwhelmingly negative. While more Americans approve of BP’s handling of the situation than did so in June, 64 percent still disapprove.

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.

Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”

On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.

Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.

I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.

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A reader from Montana with a relative in attendance sent us this link this morning, an amazing piece of footage showing we now have a president in the White House who not only knows who Galileo was, but opens up the White House lawn to kids interested in something other than Easter eggs — the science of space.

On the South Lawn, A White House ‘Star Party’

It was 400 years ago, the president told the students, that Galileo built his first telescope and began probing the universe.

“Galileo changed the world when he pointed his telescope to the sky. Now it’s your turn,” Obama said. “Don’t let anyone tell ya that there isn’t more to discover.”

The event was dreamed up as an effort to promote science literacy.

On Friday morning, NASA will crash a spacecraft and a rocket booster into a shadowy crater at the moon’s south pole in an attempt to see if frozen water lurks there beneath the lunar surface. Such water would be highly useful to a lunar base should astronauts return to the moon.

NASA Crashes Rocket Into the Moon Friday

We’ll be watching. Will all those fans of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck?

Nah, they will be holding a special prayer meeting asking god to kill this president, simply because he has black skin. That’s some distorted view of Christianity, wouldn’t you say?