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The paper discusses the characteristics of modern American presidential political rhetoric with special reference to Barack Obama’s speeches in which he addressed the highly publicized killings of black Americans. Three of the analysed speeches contain Obama’s rhetorical reaction to the judicial decisions not to indict the police officers responsible for the killings, while one speech gives his immediate reaction to the mass murder of black parishioners by a white supremacist. The study is based on the discourse-linguistic analysis of attitudinal meanings and their functions, which are conceptualized as evaluative frames. Evaluative frames are used to highlight different kinds of discourse participants through judgments of behaviour, attributions of emotions and evaluations of semiotic phenomena and objects. The theoretical framework for the different categories of evaluative frames is based on the theory of news framing and theory of evaluative language within systemic-functional linguistics. The findings of the analysis show that Obama uses an interplay of positive and negative evaluations of different kinds to transcend racial categorizations and avoid a direct attribution of blame. When he acknowledges the continuing relevance of the racial divide in US society, he often applies evaluative frames in such a way that they unify rather than divide the discourse participants on both sides of the divide.

En octubre del 2002, un misil Hellfire lanzado desde un Predator impactó en el vehículo que transportaba a uno de los responsables de los atentados contra el USS Cole dos años atrás. Este evento dio inicio a una nueva estrategia antiterrorista basada en los ataques con drones. Un total de 563 ataques fueron ejecutados durante los dos mandatos de Obama, siendo este numero 10 veces mayor a los ataques llevados adelante por su predecesor, George W. Bush. Este trabajo busca problematizar cuál fue el impacto de los drones en la doctrina militar y qué efectos tuvo en la estrategia antiterrorista durante la Administración Obama (2009- 2017). Para esto se analizará la re/evolución de los drones a lo largo de la historia, sus aspectos positivos y negativos, y las operaciones llevadas adelante por la CIA y las Fuerza Armadas estadounidenses, buscando dilucidar si la utilización progresiva de los drones es justificada por su efectividad a la hora de cumplir objetivos y de hacer frente a a enemigos irregulares

Exceptionally not grounded on the rhetorical penetration of the great theoretical schemes of international relations and foreign policy areas of academic knowledge but grounded, instead, on the juxtaposition of the new Obama Administration's main electoral promises on foreign policy related matters with a series of empirical data on the current state of the world, the aim of these remarks is that of providing the reader with a down-to-Earth introductory background to the future of US' foreign policy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Excepcionalmente no basado en la penetración retórica de los grandes esquemas teóricos de las áreas de conocimiento académico de las relaciones internacionales y la política exterior, sino en la mera yuxtaposición de las principales promesas electorales de la nueva Administración Obama con una serie de datos empíricos sobre el estado del mundo, la intención que anima estos apuntes es la de proporcionar al lector un trasfondo introductorio realista al futuro de la política exterior estadounidense.

This essay constitutes a preliminary effort to explain the state fantasy with which Barack Obama hegemonized an alternative to the biopolitical settlement normalizing George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror (Pease 2009). In what follows, I intend to argue that Obama has not utterly displaced Bush’s Homeland State of Exception but that Obama’s governmentality presupposes it as the structuring logic through which he transformed the US state’s relationship with domestic and planetary peoples. I will be interested in particular in the role that Obama’s complex negotiation with the congeries of racial fantasies that he found condensed in the figure and the film Black Orpheus played in Barack Obama’s governmentality.

In this paper, I argue that the sociocultural structuring property of whiteness has been utilized to marginalize President Obama and effectively undermine his presidential authority. Whiteness functions in a largely invisible and ostensibly deracialized way to normalize the interests, needs, and values of whites, while at the same time marginalizing and devaluing the voice of people of color. Analyzing the health care debate through this theoretical lens generates insights into how the debate reproduced the system of racial oppression, and how whiteness functions in political discourse.

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The article presents an analysis of the health care reform proposed by the administration of US President Barack Obama, with a focus on the main issues addressed by the reform. The author focuses on what he considers the three main pillars of the US health care reform, which are regulation of the health insurance marketplace, health insurance mandate, and expansion of the federal government's role in the American health care industry. Topics discussed include economic inequality in the United States, reform of the Medicare system, and expansion of the Medicaid system.