New York Times reporter Scott Shane tells Terry Gross about the Obama administration’s justification of the President’s personal approval of the names on the kill list:

I don’t think it’s that [President Obama is] blood thirsty and really enjoys trying to put people’s names on lists to be killed. I think there’s a certain wariness — probably a proper wariness — that any president would have towards agencies. Agencies kind of want to do what they’re good at doing, or what they’re job is. So certainly, according to what we’ve heard, both the CIA and … the element of the military that does these strikes, are pretty aggressive. They want to find targets and kill them, and so I think the role of the White House …. was really one of restraining the agencies, double-checking the agencies, making sure that — at this sort of broader strategic, political level — there was good judgment being exercised…

Image by photoranger54 via Flickr

I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

— Barack Obama in an interview with ABC News

If you look at [President Obama’s] strategy for 2012, he’s basically been really honest about the fact that he’s going to be attacking the Republican Congress right and left. This era of Barack Obama trying to be this bipartisan uniter seems to be over, at least for now.

— Jodi Kantor on the 2012 Democratic Strategy.

On today’s Fresh Air, Michelle and Barack Obama: A Powerful Partnership

www.Army.mil (by The U.S. Army)

clarajudgypants:

Michelle Obama in 2009 at the Congressional Black Caucus dinner in Washington. Photo credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times

Tomorrow: Jodi Kantor on The Obamas

Wall Street helped him as a candidate, but he needed to turn on his heel once it was clear he was going to win the presidency and say, ‘Thank you guys, but I need people who will give Wall Street medicine and give Wall Street very Rooseveltian medicine.’ He didn’t do that. Instead he brought in Tim [Geithner] and Larry [Summers], who are not Wall Street guys but who are affectionate and attentive toward Wall Street. That was a key moment where the president lost his way.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind paints an unflattering picture of rivalries and dysfunction within President Obama’s first economic team in his book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.

Despite the funny phrasing, at the heart of the idea of leading from behind is the empowerment of other actors to do your bidding or, as in the case of Libya, to be used as cover for a policy that would be suspect in the eyes of other nations if it’s branded as a purely American operation

— Ryan Lizza on the phrase ‘leading from behind’ which has recently become a hot-button topic among political pundits after Lizza wrote in The New Yorker that an Obama advisor had used the term to describe Obama’s actions in Libya. [Lizza on Fresh Air today]

New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza details President Obama’s response to the ongoing uprisings in the Middle East and explains why the president’s actions — in Egypt and then in Libya — say a great deal about the administration’s foreign policy strategy: ”The hinge of the story of his first term will be the uprising in the Middle East that will allow our foreign policy, to allow our interests and our values to align in a region where they have not been aligned for a very long time.”

npr:

A Libyan opposition soldier raises the independence flag over a highrise building in Misurata after Gaddafi forces were defeated in the city center. Photo courtesy of Misurata Freedom Group.

Today: The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza details how recent clashes in the Middle East have remade President Obama’s foreign policy.