Was Obama gay marriage policy announcement really made in "Soft lighting"?

[enhanced_deficit]

Not a fan of DGP overall but this shows him in a different light next to his handlers / masters. Does anyone know if gay marriage policy annoucement by him was made in soft lighting?



"In a private lunch at the White House, Mehlman advised Obama that backing gay marriage could reassert his character strength from 2008, appealing to young people, Republicans and independents and beyond by seeming to take a bold stand without regard to the political consequences. On Nov. 10, 2011, Mehlman sent Plouffe a full write-up of how the president should announce his support — in a joint interview with the first lady, conducted by a female journalist and “all 3 should be sitting. Soft lighting” — as well as a full suggested script for the president to use.



That script wasn’t far off from what Obama eventually said as he went public with his “evolution,” and though he did the interview solo, he did do it with as Mehlman advised, with a female interviewer (ABC’s Robin Roberts).
But he did it six months after Mehlman sent Plouffe the email, and only after Biden forced him. The first lady and Jarrett, Becker writes, were pressuring Obama to pull the trigger, but his own personal and political anxieties held him back.
Then came Biden. “I think you may have just gotten in front of the president on gay marriage,” his communications director, Shailagh Murray, told him on the car ride back from the studio."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/joe-biden-gay-marriage-white-house-response-105744.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3_MqgeoD5Y

Joan Rivers Calls President Obama Gay, Says First Lady Is 'Tranny' (Video)
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...t-obama-716738

Hillary Clinton Admitting She is AGAINST Gay Marriage and FOR Iraq War

[muh_roads]

People are allowed to change their opinions. Many people here were former democrats and neocon voters before jumping on board with Ron.

Leviticus and other old testament stuff is full of bile & hate like old Muslim teachings. New testament, as far as I know, never had one thing in it that was anti-gay.

Jesus could've been bi- for all we know. If he truly loved men & women equally.

[enhanced_deficit]

Agreed, people are allowed to change their views after winning elections or for political opportunism or based on campaign bundler's demands. Hence Gitmo is still open, tax payers funded wars in Iraq/Afghan are still raging and expanding to other mideast regions, drones are still taking out weddings.

Now that you raised this point, do you think DGP's change of stance on gay marriage was an honest change of beliefs or political opportunism based on calculated motives?

Guess the underlying question is, do you see him as an honest man who is final decider OR a puppet/frontman ?

[Zippyjuan]

He has tried to close Gitmo but Congress has made it very difficult for him. He has been releasing more prisoners lately. http://www.newsweek.com/closing-gitm...ongress-301286 They passed laws banning any trials or release in the US and deny or limit funds to conduct trial in Cuba.

This helps explain why the pace of transfers out of Guantanamo has dramatically increased, with more detainees leaving the prison in the past two months than in the previous three years combined.

Including the five Guantanamo detainees transferred to Oman and Estonia on January 14, 2015, a total of 27 detainees have been moved out of the prison since mid-November 2014—a substantial increase compared with the total of 19 detainees transferred from 2011 to 2013. That leaves only 122 detainees at Guantanamo, of which 48 already have been cleared for transfer—a process that requires the approval of the secretaries of defense, state, justice and homeland security, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence. These detainees are waiting to be sent home or resettled in another country.

Of the 74 detainees that have not been approved for transfer, 33 are slated for prosecution or have been prosecuted already. Current law enacted by Congress prohibits bringing any detainees into the United States for trial in federal criminal court. That leaves the Guantanamo military commissions as the only available avenue for prosecution of at least some of these detainees. Progress has been incredibly slow, however, and while 10 men in this group of 33 have been charged, none are currently close to an actual trial.

The slow pace is not the only problem with the military commissions, as serious questions remain about whether the commissions are consistent with international and domestic law. In spite of these questions, however, the commission process has at least presented the hope of resolution for some detainees. And paradoxically, being convicted of war crimes in a military commission is actually the surest ticket out of Guantanamo.

Just eight detainees have been convicted since the military commissions were created in 2002, but two of those convictions were overturned on appeal. The vacating of these two verdicts did not affect the detention status of the detainees, as they already had been transferred out of Guantanamo and were living freely in their home countries. Of the remaining six convictions, three of the detainees were quickly transferred out of Guantanamo—with two living freely—to their home countries.

In 2009, when Obama took office, there were 245- it is down to 122 so progress, though extremely slow, has been made.

[Occam's Banana]

Now that you raised this point, do you think DGP's change of stance on gay marriage was an honest change of beliefs or political opportunism based on calculated motives?

I see no reason to think it was either.

Obama's official announcement in support of gay marriage was not political opportunism. If anything, it was more like "damage control" - which became necessary when Joe Biden made some remarks in the middle of the 2012 campaign season which forced Obama to reveal his preferred policy before he had intended to do so. For electoral reasons, Obama would have preferred to delay his open support for gay marriage until after his re-election as a "lame duck" to his final term in office (when he could safely say, "To hell with what voters think about it").

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...riage-Decision