After his news conference, Mr. Obama is heading out to San Bernardino, California, where he will meet with the families of the victims of the terror attack there.
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Amanios greatly admired Obama, raising money for his 2008 campaign even through the immigrant from Eritrea was still not eligible to vote, said Tekleab, who worked as a field staffer on the president’s 2012 re-election campaign.
“While the clemency initiative is just one prong in the larger effort to reform sentencing practices, it is one to which we are strongly committed”, Yates said.
It’s the most commutations Obama has issued at one time.
“As hard as this is for them and the entire (country), they also represent the strength and the unity and the love that exists in this community”, he said.
Obama applauded his Affordable Care Act for slashing the percentage of US citizens without health benefits down to 10 percent “for the first time since records were kept” – which he said amounted to 17 million additional Americans getting coverage.
While Obama has always been at odds with the Republican-dominated Congress, he gave “kudos” to House Speaker Paul Ryan and his predecessor, John Boehner, with helping to lay the foundation of a bipartisan budget agreement. Obama has faced withering criticism from Republicans, as well as some Democrats, for taking a cautious approach to fighting the extremists – an approach he defended again Friday.
The president thanked Congress for ending the year on a high note: Lawmakers on Friday easily passed a $1.1 trillion spending package to fund the government through next September, averting the risk of a government shutdown until next fall.
“Early investment… ignited a clean energy industry boom”, Obama said.
Obama said finding a political transition that maintains the Syrian state and initiating a cease-fire allow all the parties to focus on the primary mission of destroying the Islamic State and its allies in the region.
At a White House news conference Friday, Obama said “lawless areas” in the Middle East must be eliminated as havens for the extremists.
“I’m not wild about everything in it, but it is a budget that invests in our military and our middle class”, he said.
“But we’re going to have to recognize that no government is going to have the capacity to read every single person’s texts or emails or social media”.
If Obama appeared eager to wrap up his final task of the year, it might be for good reason.
Obama wants to make progress on two issues on which he has been long thwarted by Congress: toughening up gun regulations and closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He also weighed into a controversy sparked in this week’s CNN Republican presidential debate as some candidates questioned whether the United States had erred in toppling Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 in an intervention meant to avert a threatened genocide but which left behind what is now effectively a failed state and an opening for ISIS to build terrorist training camps.
“After decades of dedicated advocacy, marriage equality became a reality in all 50 states”, the president said.
Still, Obama contended about Syria, “Five years later, I was right”.
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“I think they figured it would be the easiest way logistically for him since he was already heading this way”, Yoder said.
