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On June 29, 2011, President Barack Obama held a press conference regarding the nation's budget deficit. During the conference, President Obama mentioned corporate jet owners six times, criticizing their desire to maintain an accelerated depreciation tax break. The President's comments were met with strong criticism from aircraft manufacturers and members of the aviation community. Based on the underlying assumption that new information is rapidly incorporated into stock prices, the press conference likely had a negative impact on the stock returns of aircraft and aircraft parts manufacturers. This paper uses a financial events study to determine whether or not the press conference significantly hurt the stock prices of aircraft manufacturers.

This qualitative study examined 45 education speeches presented by President Obama and leaders of the U.S. Department of Education from January 2009 through December 2010. These speeches were interpreted with the use of critical discourse analysis and reviewed through the lens of interest convergence theory. The first aim of the researcher was to uncover the underlying ideologies represented in the Obama Administration’s education speeches. The second objective was to understand how those ideologies impacted the Administration’s proposed reform ideas. Specifically, the researcher was interested in how the underpinning ideologies and proposed solutions affected the education of poor students of color. The researcher found four primary ideologies in the education speeches. First, every speech was coupled with an economic agenda. Second, the speakers displayed great concern over America’s ability to remain a global economic leader. Third, there was an emphasis on the role of education in promoting equal opportunity and a belief in the American Dream. Finally, the speakers showed a deficit‐oriented perception of students of color. The researcher discovered that economic ideologies inspired the Obama Administration’s proposed solutions. As such, the author argues that the Obama Administration utilized interest convergence by focusing on the economic self‐interests of white policymakers. This study concludes with the author’s recommendations for change in the education of poor students of color. The author calls for strategic alliances throughout group identities in order to achieve educational equity.

President Bush’s Executive Order 13279 (December 12, 2002) encouraged the government to work with faith-based organizations to provide human services (i.e., Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, employment, homelessness services, and health care) to serve America’s low-income populations. Faith-Based Initiatives, and now President Obama’s Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships Initiative have created the foundation for further partnerships between faith-based organizations and local, state, and federal governments. Limited information exists regarding the overall effectiveness of the programs in encouraging churches, specifically African American churches, to engage in services delivery. This study explores the perceptions of church leaders that influence faith-based organizations, specifically African American churches in the southeast region of Washington, DC, to provide human services. The District of Columbia has eight local wards: southeast Washington encompasses Wards 7 and 8, and has a high concentration of poverty and African Americans. The District of Columbia Department of Human Services (2010) reports that in the year 2009, 97% of Ward 7 residents were African American with 26% residing in poverty; 94% of Ward 8 residents were African American with 35% residing in poverty. The work of early sociologists, W. E. B. Dubois and Franklin Frazier is utilized to frame the theoretical background (Ethnic Identity Model) for this study. Additionally, this study relies on an African American church analysis by Lincoln and Mamiya (1990) to highlight the historical and current role of the African American church. The purpose of this study was to examine the churches of southeast Washington, DC and the level of human services provided between 2000 and 2010, during both the Bush and Obama Administrations, to understand the perceptions of the factors that influenced the level of human services during the same time frame. The study utilized a qualitative design with descriptive statistics to shed light on human service delivery of faith-based organizations in the African American community. A semistructured interview was performed on a convenience sample of 20 pastors/church leaders of churches in southeast Washington, DC. These 20 churches were identified through the District of Columbia’s yellow pages and, additionally, other data sets including advocacy organizations and community groups. This study found that neither President’s Bush’s or Obama Faith Based Initiative significantly influenced the level of provision of human services by African American Churches located in Wards 7 and 8 of southeast Washington DC. Also this study found that the majority of African American churches in wards 7 & 8 in Washington DC are more flexible and able to determine the types of services they provide by the presenting community needs. The study results will inform policymakers about whether, and how, the churches’ role in service delivery changed after the implementation of President Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. Presidents Bush and Obama view churches and community-based organizations as strong frontline resources to address desperate challenges related to poverty, but little is known about the effectiveness of their initiatives. The results of this analysis will assist churches, community organizations, and policy formulators in providing information that will help policymakers to make more informed decisions about the potential impact of churches for service delivery in the African American community. It will also provide information about barriers to participating as partners with the government.

Intervention in Libya is an anomaly in President Barack Obama's foreign policy during his eight years in the office. This thesis aims to analyze the decision-making process leading to this unprecedented step. Using Graham Allison's Bureaucratic Politics Model, the purpose of this analysis is to investigate the influence of some presidential advisors and allies on his final decision. Data for this study were collected using President Obama's public statements, biographies of several members of the administration, and secondary academic sources. After some general context, the thesis closely examines the selected period from the first protests in Libya on February 15 to the beginning of the Operation United Protector on March 31. This timeframe of forty-five days is further divided into the week-by-week process tracing analyses. The development on the ground in Libya is merged with changes of attitude in the American administration and changing alliances among the members of the advisory team of the President. The Bureaucratic Politics Model is used to analyze specific tactics used by American officials to impose their preferred scenario. The study also tests the applicability of several new methodological approaches within the Bureaucratic Politics Model like the palace politics perspective,...

The thesis identifies and further examines the role of propaganda in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, more specifically in the period around the annexation of the Crimean peninsula by the Russian Federation in March 2014. Critical discourse analysis is employed in order to analyse selected speeches of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, relevant to the topic and in the period under investigation. The first chapter introduces a theoretical framework on propaganda in international relations, its definition, history and research. The methodology is described in detail in the second chapter. The historical context of the conflict is provided at the beginning of the empirical part of the thesis closely followed by a detailed analysis of the selected speeches. The findings support the prediction that there is a presence of propaganda identified within the speeches of both political leaders, thus in the conflict itself, and offer valuable insights into the hidden meanings and possible motives behind its use. The study advances our understanding of the phenomenon and helps us to expose and confront propaganda further.