Obama's State-of-the-union Address: Ways To Judge Its Success

President Jimmy Carter has died today, December 29, after receiving more than a year of hospice care at his home in Plains, Ga. President Carter will be remembered for living out his devout Baptist faith through his pursuit of peace and support for human rights as well as acts of service, such as building homes for Habitat for Humanity.

Jimmy Carter was not a president of the first rank, but he managed by dint of unceasing effort to become an iconic world leader, with an inspiring, if often contentious, legacy as a dogged peacemaker and a decent and ethical problem-solver. His presidency—beset by a horrible economy, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages in Iran—was a stunning political failure but a greater substantive success than was recognized when he was crushed for reelection by Ronald Reagan in 1980. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In today’s world of perpetual military intervention, it’s striking that not a single bomb was dropped or shot fired in combat by American forces on Carter’s watch, and his leadership helped prevent at least five wars—in Panama, Israel, and Iran when he was president, and in Haiti and North Korea after he left office.

ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who won the presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, endured humbling defeat after one tumultuous term and then redefined life after the White House as a global humanitarian, has died. He was 100 years old. The longest-lived American president died on Sunday, more than a year after entering hospice care, at his home in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he and his wife, Rosalynn, who died at 96 in November 2023, spent most of their lives, The Carter Center said. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “Our founder, former U.

Judd Legum: “Musk spent nearly $300 million to elect a president with a virulently anti-immigrant agenda and now is telling Trump’s anti-immigrant supporters to ‘Fuck yourself in the face.’” “Unclear who Musk thought was voting for the guy who blamed immigrants for all of America’s economic problems.”

Washington Post: “The country is girding for the return of Donald Trump, who many here see as an existential threat to Canada’s security. He has threatened to slap 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, levies that could crush the economy of a country that sends nearly 80 percent of its exports to its southern neighbor.” “And he has taken to mocking embattled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the ‘governor’ of the ‘great state of Canada’ in middle-of-the-night social media posts that officials here have sought to cast as lighthearted ribbing but others view as not-so-neighborly and not-so-funny.

“Losing to a twice-impeached convicted felon has left a small, but growing, number of Democrats wondering if their party brand is so toxic that they should shed the label — particularly in battleground and red states,” Politico reports. “The deliberations, some of which are taking place in private, reflect the extent to which Trump’s win has made the party unsure of what to do next.