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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on August 31, 2011, 05:10:44 AM
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/president-obama-and-the-bush-blame-game/2011/08/30/gIQA4n94pJ_blog.html
Pathetic.
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Obama is like a 12-year old blaming everybody but himself
If im not mistaken Obama threw a shit-load of money at Wall Street
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Is Obama that dumb to not realize that by still blaming Bush it only highlights his own inability to improve the situation and more voters will looking to others in 2012?
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He should stop worrying about who is to blame and instead use his energy to fix it
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He can remind everyone the great success he has had during his presidency. Oh, wait...
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He can remind everyone the great success he has had during his presidency. Oh, wait...
Let's say Perry beats Obama in 2012 - can Perry also blame Bush too?
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Let's say Perry beats Obama in 2012 - can Perry also blame Bush too?
He can blame both. That is the logic that the dumb liberals and democrat supporters on this board have supported.
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He can blame both. That is the logic that the dumb liberals and democrat supporters on this board have supported.
Maybe Obama should blame Chester b. Arthur, Rutherford Hayes, Zachory Taylor, while we are at it.
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Maybe Obama should blame Chester b. Arthur, Rutherford Hayes, Zachory Taylor, while we are at it.
Hell, why not? Have you ever seen a Democrat ever make a mistake? None of their policies ever harmed this nation. NONE.
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(WaPo:) Coincidences don’t happen in presidential politics. Ever.
WaPo ^ | 08/31/2011 | Chris Cillizza
There are no coincidences in presidential politics.
Strategists spend hours poring over every word a president utters, every policy position he takes and every state he visits, a level of attention to detail that makes happenstance virtually nonexistent.
And so, when the White House announced today that President Obama would deliver his much-anticipated jobs speech on Sept. 7 at 8 pm — the exact same day and time that the 2012 Republican candidates are scheduled to debate in California — the idea that the timing was purely coincidental was, well, far-fetched.
It’s clear that this White House saw an opportunity to drive a major — and direct — contrast between President Obama and his potential Republican rivals and took it.
As to whether that’s a good idea, strategists — even within the Democratic party — are divided.
First, let’s get the official line from the White House on the scheduling of the speech.
“It is coincidental,” said spokesman Jay Carney at today’s press briefing. “There are a lot of factors that go into scheduling a joint session of Congress for a speech. You can never find a perfect time. ... There are many channels to watch the president and to watch the debate.”
True enough — but not the whole truth. (The air of “truthiness” one might say.)
Yes, it is hard to schedule a presidential address to Congress. And, yes, there are lots and lots of cable channels.
But, the political reality is that by scheduling the jobs speech at the same time as the debate the White House is trying to force a choice and a contrast.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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What a douchebag.
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lol @ thread title!
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lol @ thread title!
Boom - Boehner just told obama to GFH!
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Boehner to Obama on Joint session date: No
Washington Times ^ | August 31, 2011 | Kerry Picket
Speaker of the House John Boehner sent a letter back to President Obama regarding the president's request for a joint session of Congress on September 7. However, Mr. Boehner told the president that the date would not be available and proposed September 8 instead. Below is an excerpt of the letter:
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
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LMFAO!!!!!
Fuck obama and every dirtbag, douchebag, and dirty diaper still supporting this fraud.
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333 - under your plan to do nothing you've admitted things would be worse right now (perhaps your only honest statement).
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333 - under your plan to do nothing you've admitted things would be worse right now (perhaps your only honest statement).
and be far better, viable, and sustainable in the long term without a looming currency and debt crisis.
Instead - your messiah made things drastically worse on all fronts by pulling a madoff scam on the public.
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and be far better, viable, and sustainable in the long term without a looming currency and debt crisis.
Instead - your messiah made things drastically worse on all fronts by pulling a madoff scam on the public.
Perhaps
But much worse NOW and by letting things get much worse its much less likely that things would be better, more viable etc.... in the future. Wed just be digging out of an even deeper hole with sustantial more misery along the way.
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Perhaps
But much worse NOW and by letting things get much worse its much less likely that things would be better, more viable etc.... in the future. Wed just be digging out of an even deeper hole with sustantial more misery along the way.
No - we are going to have misery for FAR LONGER as a result of not taking the tough medicine in 2008 and breaking up the banks and sending these wall street and govt madoffs to the cleaners.
What we did was not only delay the inevitable, but we blew up a currency and debt bubble in the meantime on top of the collapsing credit bubble via real estate.
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Perhaps
But much worse NOW and by letting things get much worse its much less likely that things would be better, more viable etc.... in the future. Wed just be digging out of an even deeper hole with sustantial more misery along the way.
The debt is still there. The zombie institutions are still there sucking up more resources and producing nothing. There is so much debt across all spectrum that the Fed cannot ever raise interest rates.
We've simply continued to inject more and more heroine and cocaine into the patient. He's "alive" but he isn't getting any healthier. He's a zombie now.
or
Uncle Sam has some very bad wounds and a shit load of parasites sucking him dry. So instead of pulling out the bullets and shrapnel and killing the parasites our govt. just continues to pump more blood into Uncle Sam. Sure he's barely alive, but he's "alive", right? The parasites are still there, the wounds aren't allowed to heal, but he's alive. But the bad news is that we've run out of blood now so we're just going to start cutting it with water and morphine and just up the dosage.
I'm just in an analogy type of mood today.
P.S. - I'm not a "We should have done nothing" proponent or anything. There could have been things done to reassure confidence, let failed and corrupt institutions pay the price etc....but they weren't done. Instead now we have all the players and pieces that created this disaster still alive, still sucking up resources, still doing the things they were doing and just waiting for the next bailout. Not good.
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We did the exact opposite of what should have been done. We bailed out the failed banks and propped up unsustainable and unrealistic debt situations based on fraudulent assessments and valuations, and at the same time - let the productive part of our economy fall by the wayside and get hurt drastically worse as a result.
One could not have possibly handled this situation in a worse fashion than Bush/Paulson/Geithner/obama/Bernake did.
Main Street credit is gone.
Elderly people are getting zero interest on savings and on CD's
Inflation is raging in energy, food, healthcare
TBTF is bigger than ever and has ZERO incentive to loan to small busainess or start ups.
Obama Admn is beyond incompetent and ignorant to the level of criminal.
Wall Street is making money with more scams and schemes and now about to lay off a lot of people.
Housing correction still years off as a result of the pump and dump scams of obama via TALF, HAMP, and the other nonsense.
We passed a Dodd Frank bill which has added a tremendous amount of uncertainty as community banks are getting hammered, TBTF is enshrined, new regs are pouring out daily, etc.
How anyone could remotely or even possibly defend Obama/Geithner/Bernake is beyond my comprehension
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Obama’s 2012 campaign ‘frustrated’ over fight with Republicans
washington post ^ | 9/1/2011 | David Nakamura
Frustrated.
That lone word on the subject line of the e-mail President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign sent to supporters late Wednesday night said it all.
How the president was feeling after two months of near-constant fighting with Congress. How the White House felt after a day when it capitulated in a high-stakes contest of political gamesmanship with House Speaker John Boehner.
“I know that you’re frustrated by that. I am, too,” Obama wrote in the e-mail, which arrived in hundreds of thousands of inboxes between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.
The Obama campaign’s vaunted e-mail list was credited in 2008 with helping him turn out record numbers of grass-roots supporters to the polls in his historic march to the White House. Three years later, Obama was trying to rally the troops again, only this time to help him gain back ground in his bitter dispute with Republicans over how to fix the ailing economy.
The campaign sent the e-mail shortly after the president had backed off his bid to speak to a special joint session of Congress next Wednesday to lay out his plan for creating jobs and boosting the economy. The time slot conflicted with a scheduled debate among Republican presidential candidates the same night in California.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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33,
does it bother you that despite wiping his ass with the economy, our future, and the constitution -
Obama is pretty much tied with the republicans for the 2012 race?
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33,
does it bother you that despite wiping his ass with the economy, our future, and the constitution -
Obama is pretty much tied with the republicans for the 2012 race?
No - he is done. the GOP has not even started running against this disgusting wretch and ghetto thug.
Perry is already ahead and its going to get WAY worse for obama.
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White House: People 'sick and tired' of Washington
By JIM KUHNHENN
The Associated Press
Posted: 7:26 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011
President Barack Obama's chief spokesman says the dust-up with House Republicans over the timing of Obama's economic speech to Congress dramatizes why "people are fed up" with Washington.
Press secretary Jay Carney tells MSNBC "our intention was merely for the president to address a joint session "as soon as possible," to outline his plan for creating jobs.
Carney says "our interest is in not having a political back and forth here at all." He also says that the White House yielded when Speaker John Boehner (BAY'-nur) insisted the speech be next Thursday, instead of Wednesday, because of a GOP debate.
Carney says "Americans are sick and tired of the partisan bickering" in the capital. He argues that Obama wants to focus on "things we can do" to spur the economy.
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September 01, 2011 07:26 AM EDT
Copyright 2011, The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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LMFAO! ! ! !
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White House creating website for online petitions
WASHINGTON -- The White House is making it easier for people to press the federal government to act.
more: abc13.com politics section
It is bringing that age-old constitutional right to petition one's government into the digital age with a new webpage, "We the People," where members of the public will be able to create and sign petitions seeking the government's action on a range of issues.
An official response is guaranteed for any petition that draws enough signatures -- 5,000 names within 30 days -- after it is reviewed by staff and the appropriate policy experts within the administration, according to White House officials who previewed the details for The Associated Press.
The White House planned to launch the page Thursday on its official website,
http://www.whitehouse.gov.
The administration officials requested anonymity to discuss details before the formal announcement.
"When I ran for this office, I pledged to make government more open and accountable to its citizens," President Barack Obama says in the taped announcement. He says the new feature will give Americans "a direct line" to the White House on issues that most concern them.
The online petition program comes as Obama has been urging the public to press their representatives in Congress to act on his ideas for creating jobs and balancing the federal budget.
To emphasize word-of-mouth organizing, a petition's Web address initially will only be known by the person who created it. The address is not supposed to show up anywhere else on the White House website until 150 signatures have been collected, the officials said.
The White House already accepts petitions through its correspondence office and that is not expected to change with the new webpage, according to the officials.
(Copyright ©2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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LMFAO! ! ! !
WHAT A BABY!
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Video: Obama Econ Advisor [Gene Sperling] on Lousy Jobs Numbers: Blame Bush
breitbart.tv ^ | 9-2-11
Obama economic advisor Gene Sperling blamed the economy the president inherited for today's unemployment report which maintains the jobless rate at 9.1 %. Sperling also touted 11 million jobs that have supposedly been "saved" due to the president's spending policies.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.tv ...
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Obama, on US jobs tour, chides Europe on debt woes
ers.com ^ | 9-26-11 | Alister Bull
Posted on September 26, 2011 8:30:09 PM EDT by Justaham
Obama said the U.S. recovery suffered setbacks this year due to problems around the world, including the Arab Spring uprisings that drove up energy prices and worries about the financial health of European countries.
"They have not fully healed from the crisis back in 2007 and never fully dealt with all the challenges that their banking system faced. It is now being compounded with what is happening in Greece," Obama told an audience of about 400 in Mountain View in California's Silicon Valley.
"So they are going through a financial crisis that is scaring the world and they are trying to take responsible actions but those actions haven't been quite as quick as they need to be," Obama said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
LMFAO!!!!!! Wwwaaaahhhhh!!!!!!! Freaking baby.
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Obama's Euro-Crisis Lecture Is 'Pitiful and Sad'
Spiegel.de ^ | 09/28/2011
US President Obama has given the Europeans a harsh lecture on the dangers of their ongoing debt crisis. Offended by the unsolicited advice, Europeans have suggested the US get its own house in order first. Obama's remarks were "arrogant" and "absurd" German commentators say on Wednesday.
Europeans are well aware of the seriousness of their ongoing debt crisis. But they don't, it seems, like to receive lectures from other countries -- especially the United States, which is struggling to deal with its own mountain of debt.
On Tuesday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble curtly rejected recent American criticism of Europe's approach to solving its debt crisis. "I don't think Europe's problems are America's only problems," said Schäuble. "It's always easier to give other people advice."
At an event in California on Monday, Obama warned Europeans that their inaction was "scaring the world." The Europeans, he said, "have not fully healed from the crisis back in 2007 and never fully dealt with all the challenges that their banking system faced. It's now being compounded by what's happening in Greece." He continued: "They're going through a financial crisis that is scaring the world, and they're trying to take responsible actions, but those actions haven't been quite as quick as they need to be."
German observers have reacted angrily to the comments, saying that the US is in no position to criticize other countries, given its own $14-trillion pile of national debt and ongoing wrangling over the country's debt ceiling. Others claim that Obama is just trying to distract attention from the US's problems and point out that the US president was in California to raise funds and voter support ahead of his reelection campaign next year.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
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The mass-circulation Bild writes:
"Obama's lecture on the euro crisis … is overbearing, arrogant and absurd. … In a nutshell, he is claiming that Europe is to blame for the current financial crisis, which is 'scaring the world.' Excuse me?"
"The American president seems to have forgotten a few details. The most important trigger of the financial and economic crisis was US banks and their insane real-estate dealings. The US is still piling up debt … The American congress is crippled by a battle between the right and the left. The banks are gambling just as recklessly as they did before the crisis. The president's scolding is a pathetic attempt to distract attention from his own failures. How embarrassing."
hhhmmmm - seems that they grasp the entire obama presidency far better than do his idiotic supporters.
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Obama evades ‘Fast and Furious’ questions from Latino media
By Matthew Boyle - The Daily Caller 4:14 PM 09/28/2011
During a White House roundtable with three Spanish-language media outlets on Wednesday, President Barack Obama skated around questions about Operation Fast and Furious.
“We’re working very hard to have a much more effective interdiction effort … we are checking southbound transit … to capture illegal guns, illegal cash transfers to cartels,” he said at the morning event with representatives from Yahoo!, MSN Latino, and AOL Latino/Huffington Post Latino Voices. “It is something we’ve been building … its not yet finished, and there’s more work to do,” he said.
Conservative Action Fund treasurer Shaun McCutcheon told The Daily Caller that Obama’s inability to answer basic questions about Operation Fast and Furious suggests the administration is covering up even more about the controversial program.
“The more that comes out about this Fast and Furious scandal, the more we realize that there are very real dangers in a government that is too big to monitor itself,” McCutcheon said in an email. “The Obama administration refuses to take responsibility for the deaths of Americans and Mexicans alike under their watch because of their program.”
Obama blamed budget problems, in part, for what some see as ATF’s incompetence. “Part of the problem is budgetary [and] … we are going to have to figure out ways to operate smarter and more efficiently in investigations without a huge expansion of resources because those resources are aren’t there.”
No reporters at the roundtable pressed Obama further on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program. Operation Fast and Furious was an Obama administration program in which ATF agents facilitated the sale of firearms to Mexican drug cartels via “straw purchasers” who could legally purchases guns in the United States, but were doing so with the intention of trafficking them into Mexico.
House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley have pursued a congressional investigation into the ATF operation over the past several months, and that has led to at least a few high-ranking Obama administration resignations. Their investigations have also revealed that White House officials were aware of Fast and Furious and the ATF tactics the program employed.
Conservative groups are unlikely to let this scandal die down without greater accountability.
“This Fast and Furious scandal reminds us that cronyism is murderous and its politics are dangerous,” Ali Akbar, a political consultant for the conservative Vice and Victory told TheDC. “I’m talking with other conservative groups and we’re not letting this go. We applaud Chairman Issa for pursuing this national tragedy that looks like it trickles all the way up to the top.”
TheDC’s Neil Munro contributed reporting for this story.
Follow Matthew on Twitter
Article printed from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com
URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/28/obama-evades-fast-and-furious-questions-from-latino-media/
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Obama’s excuses are wearing thin
Chicago Sun Times ^ | 10/7/11 | Steve Huntley
Posted on October 7, 2011 7:20:25 PM EDT by Evil Slayer
For years, the ritual response from the White House to the nation’s economic problems was to blame the Bush administration — President Barack Obama inherited this mess. With that excuse wearing thin after nearly three years of his administration and a persistently weak economic pulse, Obama has found a new reason for the country’s woes: Americans grew soft.
“This is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have the same competitive edge that we needed,” Obama told Orlando, Fla., TV station WESH this week. That’s, well, an interesting explanation for the housing collapse caused in large measure by government-promoted lax mortgage loan standards and low interest policies.
Obama’s comment was the latest manifestation of the administration’s proclivity to blame someone else — anyone else — for the failure of its policies to restore the economic vitality of the country.
Lately, Obama and other Democratic leaders have taken to complaining that Republicans are putting party ahead of country by opposing his economic legislation. In other words, the GOP is unpatriotic. That’s a dramatic turnaround for Democrats who angrily bristled whenever someone suggested a lack of patriotism in their criticism of the Bush administration policies.
We should never be surprised by hypocrisy in politics. Still, both parties would do the country and the cause of a more civil discourse a great favor if all insinuations of insufficient patriotism were banned from our politics.
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Obama: Victim or professional victim?
By Sam Youngman - 10/12/11 05:30 AM ET
“Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be sitting here.” — President Obama during the debt-ceiling debate
Those words from the July debt-ceiling standoff offers perhaps the best glimpse into how the unknowable Obama thinks Congress sees him.
All presidents are insecure about their standing and worry their power will be usurped by Congress. And detractors always have reasons for feeling a president is illegitimate.
But when it comes to Obama, whether because of his race, his name or his politics, the perception that he is being treated differently from his predecessors seems to be the largely unspoken belief in the White House and among the president’s fiercest supporters.
And it’s a perception the White House will likely continue to mention, with a wink and a nod, after Republicans stand united in blocking Obama’s jobs bill.
During the debt-ceiling debate, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said she was “particularly sensitive” to the fact that “only this president” has received the kind of attacks Obama has dealt with.
“I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness [targeting] this president,” she said. “Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community, that is the question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully?”
Obama has evidence in arguing he has been treated differently. Raising the debt ceiling had long been a routine practice, a fact not lost on the White House. Of course, as a senator, Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling.
Since Obama has gone on the offensive with his quixotic American Jobs Act tour, he has repeatedly spoken of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) stated top priority of defeating the president.
“I’m also dealing with a Republican … leader who said that his No. 1 goal was to beat me — not put Americans back to work, not grow the economy, not help small businesses expand, but to defeat me,” Obama said during last week’s press conference. “And he’s been saying that now for a couple of years.”
Inside the White House, senior administration officials refer to “the McConnell strategy,” which dictates that no matter what Obama proposes, Republicans will oppose it in hopes of making him a one-term president.
“You get the sense sometimes that if the president went out and said, ‘The sky is blue and the grass is green,’ they would find a way to object to that,” one top White House official said Tuesday.
For the moment, the suspicion that Obama has been treated differently is still below the surface. If it is mentioned at all, it is only in the heat of the moment by fellow Democrats or minorities.
If the president raises the subject, it is always in the context of portraying McConnell and his party as obstructionist.
But that will change. In the intense fire of next year’s campaign, every stone will be turned over, and the narrative that Obama has been treated differently by his political opponents could emerge as an issue.
The question then becomes: Is Obama a victim, or a professional victim? And what does it mean for Obama’s reelection hopes?
The answer is far from clear.
Washington has never tallied a scorecard for a black president, and the president’s reelection effort will in many ways be as unprecedented as his 2008 election.
It’s possible that those people inspired by hope and change in 2008 could come to his defense if they feel like Obama’s efforts, and by extension their own, were constantly undermined by a Congress that never viewed Obama as presidential or repeatedly undermined the economy in a grand effort to make Obama the next Jimmy Carter.
If black voters and other traditional supporters of the Democratic base hold that view, it could put an end to questions about whether Obama’s base will be there in 2012.
It’s also possible that if that view is embraced by the left, it could hurt Obama.
The left is viewed by swing-state independents as the same crowd as the Occupy Wall Street folks, and complaints Obama is being treated differently could lead voters in Peoria to see the president as a whiner trying to misdirect anger toward his ineffective policies by claiming to be a victim.
It’s not difficult to guess which view Republicans would endorse and push.
And it’s unlikely that the supremely cocksure president would ever publicly admit to feeling like he has been a victim of, well, a vast right-wing conspiracy.
But the grumblings are out there. They will grow in volume and frequency as Congress repeatedly clashes helmets in the coming months.
When a verdict on those questions is reached among voters, someone will be punished.
If Obama is punished for claiming victimhood, he loses.
But if Republicans are judged to have targeted Obama instead of the economy, they will pay the price.
Either way, it’s probably fair to say, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be sitting in that position.
Youngman is the White House correspondent for The Hill.
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Obama seeks to put onus on Republicans over jobs (Unemployment Average Bush 5%, Obama 10%)
msnbc ^ | 10/15/2011 | Reuters
Posted on October 15, 2011 8:00:17 AM EDT by tobyhill
President Barack Obama urged Republicans on Saturday to stop picking "ideological fights" and focus instead on job creation efforts as he pressed Congress to begin voting next week piece by piece on his defeated jobs package.
With an eye to the 2012 election, Obama is working with fellow Democrats to break into parts his $447 billion jobs bill -- which Republicans blocked in the Senate on Tuesday -- and challenge their opponents to show where they stand.
He used his weekly radio speech to showcase his strategy to paint the Republicans as obstructionists impeding his drive to improve the economy and reduce stubbornly high unemployment, considered crucial to his re-election prospects.
Republicans have said Obama's original package was laden with what they see as wasteful spending and counterproductive tax hikes for wealthier Americans and that he now seems more interested in demonizing them than working to find common ground.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
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http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/187911-obama-blasts-mocks-senate-gop
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/12/06/obama_now_blames_the_internet_for_job_losses.html
Posted on December 6, 2011
Obama Now Blames The Internet For Job Losses
"Layoffs too often became permanent, not part of the business cycle. And these changes didn't just affect blue collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the internet," President Obama said at a campaign event in Kansas.
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Fucking fail!!!!!!
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December 31, 2011
Obama to Turn Up Attacks on Congress in Campaign
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-to-focus-on-congress-and-economy-in-2012-campaign.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print
HONOLULU — President Obama is heading into his re-election campaign with plans to step up his offensive against an unpopular Congress, concluding that he cannot pass any major legislation in 2012 because of Republican hostility toward his agenda.
Mr. Obama’s election-year strategy is an attempt to capitalize on his recent victory on a short-term extension of the payroll tax cut and on his rising poll numbers. As the stage is set for November, he intends to hammer the theme of economic justice for ordinary Americans rather than continue his legislative battles with Congressional Republicans, said Joshua R. Earnest, the president’s deputy press secretary, previewing the White House’s strategy.
“In terms of the president’s relationship with Congress in 2012,” Mr. Earnest said at a briefing, “the president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C.” Winning a full-year extension of the cut in payroll taxes is the last “must-do” piece of legislation for the White House, he said.
However the White House chooses to frame Mr. Obama’s strategy, it amounts to a wholesale makeover of the young senator who won the presidency in 2008 by promising to change the culture of Washington, rise above the partisan fray and seek compromises.
After three years in office, Mr. Obama is gambling on a go-it-alone approach. In the coming weeks, he will further showcase measures he is taking on his own to revive the economy, Mr. Earnest said, declining to give details.
Mr. Obama has used his executive authority in recent weeks to promote the hiring of returning veterans and help students pay back their college loans. Underscoring the jobs theme, Mr. Obama plans to return to the road, starting with a trip to Cleveland on Wednesday to speak about the economy.
The White House laid out the election-year strategy last week here in Hawaii, where Mr. Obama is vacationing, just as attention turns to the Republican caucuses in Iowa on Tuesday.
The White House has been refining the message since July, when Mr. Obama’s attempts to forge a “grand bargain” with the House Republicans on fiscal policy collapsed and he reverted to a populist, anti-Congress strategy. But it did not gain traction until the last few weeks, when polls began showing that nearly half of Americans approved of the job he was doing, up from percentages in the low 40s during most of the year. House Republicans inadvertently helped him just before they recessed for the holidays when they initially refused to extend the payroll tax cut.
Mr. Earnest said the strategy had successfully planted “the image of a gridlocked, dysfunctional Congress and a president who is leaving no stone unturned to try to find solutions to the difficult financial challenges and economic challenges facing the country.”
Mr. Obama began emphasizing his new strategy in early December with a fiery speech in Osawatomie, Kan., where he said that “breathtaking greed” had contributed to the country’s economic troubles and that this was a “make-or-break moment for the middle class.”
In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama praised Congress for passing the two-month tax cut extension, but made it clear that the lawmakers had acted only under intense public pressure. He also repeated his vow to fight for middle-class Americans.
“As president, I promise to do everything I can to make America a place where hard work and responsibility are rewarded — one where everyone has a fair shot and everyone does their fair share,” he said.
Mr. Obama’s confrontational approach carries risks, since the imprimatur of Congress is still required for important national business. But the budget deal that resolved the standoff over raising the debt ceiling last summer removed a major weapon Republicans had to push the president.
On Friday, for example, Mr. Obama agreed to delay a request to Congress for $1.2 trillion in additional borrowing authority. That will allow lawmakers to come back to Washington to voice their opposition to more red ink. But even if they vote to block the measure, Mr. Obama can veto it, knowing that the Democratic-controlled Senate will not override him.
The president’s antagonism toward Congress evokes that of President Harry S. Truman, whose come-from-behind campaign in 1948 focused on a “do-nothing Congress.” But Republican analysts have pointed out that the national unemployment rate in November 1948 was 3.8 percent — not 8.6 percent, as it is now — and that the American economy was on the upswing.
“Americans expect their elected leaders to work together to boost job creation, even in an election year,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner. “Divided government can be challenging, but that’s no excuse for him to put his presidency on autopilot when so many Americans are looking for work.”
For Mr. Obama, a heavily partisan strategy carries the risk of alienating independent and moderate voters who are fed up with Washington’s gridlock. On the Republican presidential campaign trail, Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, and Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, both point to their legislative successes working with Democrats.
Mr. Obama also risks antagonizing Congressional Democrats, who were angry when administration officials, including the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, criticized Congress without distinguishing between Democrats and Republicans.
Democratic leaders said they were satisfied that Mr. Obama was adequately making that distinction, and they said they understood why he would want to run against a Congress whose Republican leadership had blocked his legislation and declared that its primary goal was to defeat him in November.
“He has been emphatic in stating that he is running against obstructionist Republicans in the House,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “As long as the president includes the word Republican when he says he is running against Congress, more power to him.”
After a year in which the White House often seemed a hostage to the Tea Party contingent in the Republican-controlled House, the administration is savoring Mr. Obama’s victory in December in obtaining a two-month extension to keep most workers’ Social Security payroll tax at 4.2 percent, down from 6.2 percent.
“The significance of that fight,” Mr. Earnest said, “is that it gave the president the opportunity to establish his bona fides on an issue that, at least in recent history, Democrats haven’t fared very well with, which is the issue of taxes.” He pointed to polls that he said showed that Mr. Obama was now more trusted on taxes than Republicans were.
Winning a full-year extension of the payroll tax, Mr. Earnest said, will still be a top priority. He noted that House Republicans were now also arguing that it should be extended for a year, after some initially opposed extending it at all.
“There are certainly other things the president would like to do,” Mr. Earnest said, citing other provisions of the jobs bill. “But in terms of essential, must-do items, the payroll tax cut extension is the last one.”
LMFAO!!!!! Who the fuck voted for this shit show?
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Obama's 2012 Reelection Excuse: Don't Blame Me, Blame Congress
Townhall.com ^ | January 4, 2012 | Donald Lambro
WASHINGTON - President Obama and his top campaign officials have mapped out a new 2012 reelection strategy: run against an unpopular Congress.
Obama, whose job approval polls have been relentlessly stuck at around 43 percent for much of last year, thinks he can convince enough voters that Congress is the cause of all the economic ills that still plague our country.
That's right, the man Mitt Romney has been calling "the great complainer," "the great blamer," "the great excuse giver," will run on a campaign platform that his policies are blameless. Its all the fault of Congress who won't pass his latest economic stimulus plan to borrow and spend more money and raise taxes on investors, small businesses and corporations.
Forget about those lofty promises Obama made in his 2008 campaign speeches about stopping the bickering and changing the tone in Washington. White House aides told reporters last week that he is going to "double down" on what they call an "outside strategy" -- that he is fighting for the middle class against a do-nothing Congress that has become the paymaster of wealthy special interests.
It's going to get ugly, too, because when you attack the Congress, that includes everyone in it -- the Democrats who run the Senate and Republicans who control the House. What will Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi say about that?
But Obama and his aides think the best politics this year is to stay above the fray on Capitol Hill. He doesn't exactly say this, but the implied message to his fellow Democrats -- who will likely lose the Senate in November -- is, "You're on your own."
"In terms of the president's relationship with Congress in 2012... the president is no longer tied to Washington," deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told the Washington Post over the holidays.
No longer tied to Washington? Does he really think he can just walk away from three years of impotent economic stimulus bills and the voters will forget what he proposed, or that it didn't work? Or that he will be able to campaign around the country and ignore the economic and fiscal issues Congress will be dealing with over the course of the coming year?
Obama's legislative war cry last year -- "we can't wait" -- apparently has been changed to "You're gonna have to wait until I'm reelected."
But if he thinks he'll be able to convince enough voters that Congress is to blame for what ails us and that he's kept his promises, Republicans have a lethal counter-offensive strategy ready and waiting to strike back.
For months now, an army of opposition researchers at the Republican National Committee have been digging up every exuberant, exaggerated claim Obama has made in behalf of his policies. Those words are going to be thrown back at him between now and November, reminding the voters that he made over-the-top promises that remain unfulfilled. Among them:
-- That his $800 billion spending stimulus bill would lift two million Americans out of poverty. In fact, the Census Bureau tells us that over six million Americans have fallen below the poverty income line during the past three years of his presidency.
-- That his home foreclosure assistance program would "help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages." Actually, his administration has spent a great deal less than it promised and helped only 2 million, at best.
-- In his 2008 nomination acceptance address to the Democratic national convention, Obama said his plan to invest $80 billlion in clean technologies would create five million new jobs. So far, the money spent on the projects has produced nowhere near that jobs figure and has come under investigation for bankrolling loans sought by wealthy donors to Obama's campaign.
Internal government documents obtained by a House oversight committee found that the program was heavily politicized, and included a fat loan to a solar panel business publicly promoted by Obama that later went bankrupt, costing taxpayers half a billion dollars. A Post investigation last month found that the program "was infused with politics at every level."
-- Appearing on the NBC Today Show in 2009, Obama said that if the economy did not recover within three years, "then there's going to be a one-term president."
These and other Obama remarks will be the source for a tidal wave of Republican videos on television and the Internet over the ensuing year. But none will be more ubiquitous than his claims that he's stablized and turned the economy around since its plunge into the Great Recession.
But official government data draws a starkly different picture: A nearly 9 percent national unemployment rate; a weak economic growth rate that's barely creeping along at a snail's pace 1.8 percent; and millions of discouraged workers giving up and leaving the labor force because they cannot find jobs.
That's the sober reality of the dismal Obama economy: weak capital investment, banks reluctant to lend, home values continuing to decline, college graduates unable to find jobs, and nearly a dozen states permanently stuck in double-digit unemployment.
A recent RNC ad uses Obama's own words to indict his performance as president. An Internet spot titled "It's Been Three Years" shows candidate Obama saying the "real question" is whether or not Americans will be better off in four years.
The ad flashes forwards to a one-on-one interview with ABC News analyst George Stephanopoulos last October in which Obama says "I don't think they're better off than they were four years ago."
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Obama blames Nixon for NOAA
Comments (59) By BYRON TAU | 1/13/12 11:48 AM EST AP Photos
We still have Dick Nixon to kick around, it seems.
President Obama, in announcing a restructuring proposal for the federal government, took a shot at a predecessor, President Richard Nixon — blaming him for the inefficient placement of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration within the Commerce Department.
"If you're wondering what the genesis of this was apparently, this had something to do with President Nixon being unhappy with his Interior Secretary for criticizing the Vietnam War. So he decided not to put NOAA in what would have been a more sensible place," Obama said in remarks today.
Part of his reorganization would move NOAA from Commerce to the Interior Department.
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/obama-blames-nixon-on-noaa-110745.html
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http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/wh-newts-obama-food-stamp-charge-crazy/317526
LOL!!!!
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Obama blames press for his 'cold and aloof' image
Politio44 ^ | 1/19/12 | JENNIFER EPSTEIN
President Obama blames the press for creating the image that he's aloof and disconnected from the rest of Washington, insisting in a new interview that he's just more interested in spending time with his family than in exchanging pleasantries with strangers.
"My suspicion is that this whole critique has to do with the fact that I don’t go to a lot of Washington parties and, as a consequence, the Washington press corps maybe just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix enough with them, and they figure, well, if I’m not spending time with them, I must be cold and aloof," Obama said in an interview with Time Magazine released Thursday.
"The fact is, I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter. And so, no, Michelle and I don’t do the social scene, because as busy as we are, we have a limited amount of time, and we want to be good parents at a time that’s vitally important for our kids."
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
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Obama's game plan: Do nothing
San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 1/26/12 | Debra J. Saunders
Toward the end of his State of the Union speech, President Obama observed that Washington politicians should learn from the example of the U.S. military: "When you're marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails."
Obama recalled the successful Navy SEAL mission, which under his watch took out Obama bin Laden, and observed, "the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other - because you can't charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there's someone behind you, watching your back."
At first blush, it seemed like a stirring call to action. But when you look at the speech as a whole, and in context, it was a sad admission. Obama constantly carps about his lack of support from the Republican-led House. I think the president has decided that he cannot succeed in the face of political opposition. So he is not charging up those stairs.
Unless Washington walks in lockstep behind Obama, he's not going to try to get anything done.
Consider the White House decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. Last week the administration announced that the president denied the project because of "a rushed and arbitrary deadline" of Feb. 21 embedded in a two-month extension of the 2011 payroll-tax holiday. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision," the president lamented.
Obama also lauded the military toward the beginning of his address. "They focus on the mission at hand. They work together," he noted. " Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example."
I can imagine it, but what I see is a president who nixed a shovel-ready job-rich pipeline project that had been under review since 2008, and had passed State Department vetting twice...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
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Good old barack wrote the book on excuses...
It is what he does best.
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Obama: I'm getting 'better as time goes on'
http://thehill.com/video/administration/208775-obama-im-getting-better-as-time-goes-on-at-being-president
By Justin Sink - 02/06/12 07:52 AM ET
During an interview that aired Monday on NBC's "Today" show, President Obama said that he gets "better as time goes on" at his job and that he believes the grassroots movement that propelled him to victory in 2008 will help him win a second term.
"What's frustrated people is that I've not been able to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes. But what we have been able to do is move in the right direction," Obama said.
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Pres. Obama: “Our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes.”
Uh, that’s because the Founders were trying to prevent exactly what you are trying to do, Mr. President. They did not want the Federal Government to dominate the life of every citizen from cradle to grave. They wanted people to be free – to earn their own keep and keep what they earn. What a concept.
(Excerpt) Read more at nation.foxnews.com ...
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OBAMA: I COULDN’T CUT THE DEFICIT IN HALF BECAUSE THE RECESSION WAS DEEPER THAN I THOUGHT
The Blaze ^ | 2/14/2012 | Tiffany Gabbay
Posted on February 14, 2012 10:00:26 PM EST by antidemoncrat
During an interview with WAGA, President Obama attempted to make excuses for his failed promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term in office.
(Excerpt) Read more at theblaze.com ...
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In an interview with Atlanta's local Fox affiliate WAGA-TV Preisdent Obama explains why he was unable to cut the deficit in half in his first term, a promise he made as a candidate.
Obama was lobbed the question by a sympathetic reporter who said he is getting "pelted in the media" for making a campaign promise he did not keep.
"Well we're not there because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of else realized," Obama said about his inability to cut the deficit in half.
"Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office everybody had underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3%, it turns it was close to 9%. We lost 8 million jobs just in a year's span, about half a year before I took office and about a half a year after I took office," Obama said.
"So, the die had been cast and a lot of us didn't understand how bad it was going to get. That increases the deficit because less tax revenues come in and it means more people are getting unemployment insurance, we're helping states more so they don't teachers, etc. The key though is that we're setting ourselves on a path so that we can get our debt under control."
via RCP
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/02/15/obama_gas_prices_on_the_rise_means_the_economy_is_strengthening.html
So now obama is going to blame $5 gasoline on the booimng economy?
That is really funny since I dont remember gasoliner spiking in the 90's or for most of the 2000's until helicopter ben came along and started devaluing the currency.
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Skip to comments.
Obama Budgets Show Weak Recovery Behind Big Deficits
IBD Editorials ^ | February 16, 2012 | JOHN MERLINE
Posted on February 16, 2012 10:17:44 PM EST by Kaslin
President Obama told an Atlanta TV station this week that the reason he's unable to live up to his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half is "because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized."
"Everybody who is out there back in 2009," he went on, "everybody underestimated it," adding that "the die had been cast, but a lot of us didn't understand at that point how bad it was going to get."
It's a convenient excuse, and one that, if true, would help him escape blame for a deficit that will exceed $1 trillion for the fourth year in a row this year, and will still be a sky-high $901 billion next year.
But Obama's own budget documents show that this excuse doesn't hold up very well. Among the revelations:
Not everyone was surprised by the depth of the recession.
A table in a little-read section of Obama's first budget — released in May 2009 — shows that the Congressional Budget Office was predicting at the time that the economy would contract by 3% in 2009. That's not far from the actual 3.5% decline. And the CBO was spot on in its 2010 forecast for a 2.9% gain in real GDP. The actual figure was 3%.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
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Obama's Cynicism For Me, Not For Thee
Townhall.com ^ | February 17, 2012 | Jonah Goldberg
"My rival in this race," President Obama announced early in 2007, "is not other candidates. It's cynicism."
It's now clear that what he meant by this was other people's cynicism -- not his own.
As you may recall, Obama came into office a very inexperienced politician, spouting a lot of hopeful and idealistic rhetoric. He had made a name for himself by refusing to demonize conservatives and Republicans.
For instance, during a Nevada Democratic debate, then-Sen. Obama told the late Tim Russert that, "My greatest strength, I think, is the ability to bring people together from different perspectives to get them to recognize what they have in common and to move people in a different direction."
Whether that was a lie at the time or simply unwarranted self-confidence is unknowable. What is plainly knowable is that it was untrue.
Among modern presidents going back to Eisenhower, Obama has proven uniquely incapable of working with his political opponents. Even Jimmy Carter got his signature airline deregulation bill passed with whopping bipartisan majorities. Bill Clinton got NAFTA, welfare reform and some balanced budgets with Republican help. George W. Bush got Democrats on board for No Child Left Behind and the Iraq war. (Obama's vice president and his secretary of state both voted for it as senators.)
There have been some bipartisan victories on Obama's watch, but he's often been the partisan loser in such fights. For instance, Congress extended the Bush-era tax cuts, much to Obama's dismay. And even on more clear-cut bipartisan victories -- say, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, or the trade deals Obama delayed unnecessarily -- there's little evidence that Obama brought any opponents around to his position. The man just isn't very persuasive.
Now Obama's defenders, starting with the man himself, insist this isn't his fault. He's actually super persuasive and bipartisan, he just suffers from the fact that the Republicans are the most unreasonable politicians ever, so he can't be blamed for utterly failing to work with them. It's like the guy who insists that he's a real ladies' man but can't get a phone number because all of the hot women in the bar just happen to be gay.
Actually, it's worse than that. Everywhere the president goes, he explains that he's failed to get anything done either because the system is broken or because his opponents lack the honor and decency to work with him. Such arguments define cynicism.
But for Obama, cynicism is a vice for other people.
For instance, just this month, after five Democratic senators and several members of his own inner circle (including Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Chief of Staff William Daley), not to mention the unified leadership of the Catholic Church, expressed profound dismay over Obama's decision to force religious institutions to pay for contraceptive and "preventative" services in violation of their faith, Obama insisted that opponents of the move were "cynical."
Also this month, the president proposed a budget that assumes everyone in this country is too stupid to understand what he's up to. It simply pretends there's no debt or deficit problem. It assumes that entitlement spending is nothing to worry about. It "saves" money by cutting spending no one ever planned to spend. And it proposes huge tax hikes nobody believes that even Obama wants.
Why? Because Obama expects Republicans to vote against the budget -- as any responsible legislator of either party would -- so he can then further demonize the "do-nothing Congress" while pretending to be serious about fixing our problems.
By the way, the only part of Congress worthy of that sobriquet is the Democrat-controlled Senate, which hasn't proposed a budget in over 1,000 days (longer than the entire run of the Kennedy administration). Why hasn't it? To make it easier for the Democratic president to demonize his opponents.
Instead of fulfilling his promise to deliver a "new kind of politics" and a new era of idealism, he's made politics more cynical than ever. The case for Obama has become the case against everyone and everything inconvenient to his success. Don't agree with Obama's policies? Well, you can't possibly have a good reason to do that. So you must be racist, greedy, dumb or corrupt.
Meanwhile, Obama casts himself as the humble servant of the 99 percent, even as he forklifts cash from Wall Street into his campaign coffers and exploits the very sort of super PACs he not long ago claimed were a "threat to democracy."
But to point that out is just cynicism.
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Obama doesn't accept responsibility for gas prices
by Joel Gehrke Commentary Staff Writer
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/obama-doesnt-accept-responsibility-gas-prices/388946
President Obama does not "accept responsibility" for high gas prices, his spokesman indicated today, arguing that Obama has done everything he could to bring down the price of oil and blaming the high gas prices on oil price increases caused by global factors.
"The president accepts the responsibility that he identified the next president should accept, which is the need for comprehensive energy policy," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today when asked if Obama "accept responsibility" for the high price of oil and gas. "If you're suggesting that there is responsibility for a rise in the price of oil, it's certainly not because of anything he hasn't done to expand oil production," Carney added.
Asked if he believes it is fair for Americans to blame the president, Carney noted that gas price hikes are "a recurrent problem." He added that domestic oil production is at a record high right now and that Obama has opened "millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico" to drilling.
The conversation today stemmed from yesterday, when Carney was asked about the Keystone XL pipeline. He said that "the president did not turn down the Keystone pipeline," arguing that Republicans prevented a full environmental review from taking place.
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..Obama goes on offense over high gasoline prices
By Jeff Mason | Reuters – 23 minutes ago
....WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As Republican presidential candidates toss barbs at Barack Obama over expensive gasoline, the U.S. president and his team are going on the offensive with a strategy to divert blame and prepare voters for higher costs.
In subtle and not so subtle ways, Obama, a Democrat, is raising the issue of high prices to promote his own policy priorities and blunt criticism from the men vying to unseat him in the November 6 election.
His strategy is both politically- and policy-oriented. The president wants to advance his plans to increase renewable energy sources and reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil.
But he also needs to win the war of words to gain an upper hand over Republicans in Western battleground states such as Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, where people drive a lot and feel the sting of rising prices acutely.
Republicans see many weaknesses to exploit. They blame Obama for not doing enough to increase domestic production of fossil fuels and cite his decision to block a new oil pipeline from Canada as evidence that he is beholden to environmentalists.
Rising gasoline costs have brought the issue to the forefront of the presidential campaign. So Obama has started to pepper his speeches with references to prices at the pump.
On Tuesday he cited the extension of the payroll tax cut as a welcome buffer for workers coping with the cost of gas. On Wednesday he proposed -- not for the first time -- getting rid of tax loopholes that benefit oil and gas companies.
On Thursday he'll go a step further, using a speech in Florida to outline his own accomplishments in the energy arena along with a long-term strategy to keep fuel prices down.
"This is a recurrent problem and it's a problem that reinforces the need that (Obama) identified back when he was a candidate for a comprehensive energy strategy," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. Obama advisers have pointed to growing demand in China and unrest in the Middle East as factors out of their control that are affecting the price of oil.
Average gasoline prices have climbed to their highest February levels on record, hitting $3.53 per gallon last week, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse data.
Gasoline prices have tracked crude oil prices, which have been bolstered by the threat of supply disruptions from the West's standoff with Iran over Tehran's nuclear program.
Some analysts say U.S. prices could hit $4 a gallon or more ahead of the summer when driving demand peaks.
POLITICAL BATTLE
Those prices hurt Obama politically as much as they hurt the country economically, and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum seized on them criticize the president for his environmental record.
"Folks are just starting to be able to breathe a little as the economy starts to come back a little bit, unemployment starts to go down," Santorum said at a campaign event last week.
"All of a sudden they are going to be hit with the same force of wind that hit us in 2008 in the summer that caused us to go into a recession. All because of the radical environmentalist policies of this president," Santorum said.
Carney dismissed Santorum's comments as "random statements by politicians seeking office." Obama is the first president to preside over growth in domestic oil production since President Jimmy Carter, also a Democrat.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, promised at a debate with rivals on Wednesday night that the country would enjoy gasoline prices at $2.50 a gallon if he won the White House.
Analysts and strategists said Obama has few options to bring down gasoline prices in the short term and said his energy policies had evolved from focusing on renewable fuels to promoting nuclear energy and natural gas.
"Basically he's come a long way from the campaign of '08. I think that reflects pragmatism on his part," said Guy Caruso, a senior adviser on energy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Progress or not, Obama has vulnerabilities when it comes to energy. Earlier this year he nixed TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline under severe pressure from environmentalists.
The president blamed Republicans for forcing him to take a decision under a tighter timeframe than the State Department said it needed to study the project.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and off-and-on frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, said that decision was a sign that Obama wanted to please his political base more than he wanted to improve the economy.
VULNERABILITIES, FEW OPTIONS
Analysts say even if Keystone were approved, the increase in oil supplies would not affect gasoline prices for years, but the decision is nevertheless a key flashpoint in the election.
"The juxtaposition of the high gas prices and Keystone has (the White House) understandably nervous, and even though those two ... have almost nothing to do with each other substantively, they create a political narrative that Republicans could be successful in using to paint Obama as anti-energy and pro-high gas prices," a Democratic strategist said.
Politically, Obama's vulnerability over gasoline prices could be especially deadly in Western states that he needs to win to remain in the White House.
Charles Ebinger, director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution, said Republican candidates could gain traction with voters in that region by emphasizing fuel costs, though they -- like Obama -- had few options to suggest to bring prices down in the short term.
"Out there (a candidate) can get some resonance against the president by talking about high gasoline prices," he said.
"If someone comes back at him and says, 'What's your policy Mr. Santorum, Mr. Gingrich, or whomever, to lower gasoline prices today,' I don't think they'll have a good answer."
(Additional reporting by Matthew Robinson and Samuel Jacobs; Editing by Russell Blinch and
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Obama accuses GOP of playing politics with higher gas prices
By Amie Parnes and Andrew Restuccia - 02/23/12 02:26 PM ET
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/212305-obama-accuses-gop-of-playing-politics-with-higher-gas-prices
President Obama railed against Republicans on Thursday for “licking their chops” and using a spike in gas prices as a political opportunity.
Appearing at the University of Miami in a high-profile speech on energy, Obama aimed to deflect the criticism his administration has received for its energy policies and for higher gas prices.
Obama sought to telegraph a message that he is doing all he can to improve energy policy while accusing Republicans of politicizing the issue.
“Only in politics do people greet bad news so enthusiastically,” Obama said before a crowd of students.
“You pay more and they’re licking their chops? And you can bet since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas. I’ll save you the suspense: step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling.
RELATED ARTICLES
•Obama: GOP 'licking their chops' over high gas prices
“We heard the same thing in 2007 when I was running for president,” he continued. “We hear the same thing every year. We’ve heard the same thing for 30 years.”
But Obama said “the American people aren’t stupid” and continued to emphasize that drilling isn’t the only solution to fixing the nation’s energy problems, “especially since we’re already drilling.”
“It’s a bumper sticker,” Obama said. “It’s not a strategy to solve our energy challenge. It’s a strategy to get politicians through an election.
“You know there are no quick fixes to this problem and you know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” he said. “If we’re going to take control of our energy future, if we’re going to avoid these gas price spikes down the line, then we need a sustained, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy — oil, gas, wind solar, nuclear, bio-fuels and more.”
Republicans — both on Capitol Hill and on the campaign trail — believe Obama is vulnerable to attacks on the high gas prices.
Obama’s speech comes after gas prices rose 3.3 cents nationwide overnight, costing consumers an average of $3.61 a gallon, according to AAA.
Republicans also point to Obama’s decision to reject the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline. The White House argues Republicans forced Obama to deny a permit with a timeframe that did not give the administration adequate time to conduct an environmental and health review.
The GOP has hammered Obama on the issue, arguing he is standing in the way of expanded drilling, and GOP presidential candidates have vowed to lower gas prices.
But federal policymakers have very few options to lower gas prices in the short term, according to experts. Gas prices are largely tethered to oil prices, which are set on global markets. Even a dramatic expansion of domestic oil-and-gas production would have little short-term effect on gas prices.
Still, Obama said he has instructed his administration “to look for every single area where we can make an impact and help consumers in the months ahead, from permitting to delivery bottlenecks to what’s going on in the oil markets.”
“And we will keep taking as many steps as we can in the coming weeks,” he added.
Obama touted what the White House calls an “all-of-the-above” energy plan that focuses on reducing reliance on foreign oil, expanding domestic oil production, improving vehicle fuel efficiency and investing in renewable energy.
While calling for a broad plan, the president also stressed the importance of increased oil-and-gas production, a move meant to counter GOP claims that the president has limited domestic drilling.
“Now, we absolutely need safe, responsible oil production here in America,” Obama said. “That’s why under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.”
The federal Energy Information Administration said last month that domestic oil production increased from 5.1 million barrels per day in 2007 to 5.5 million barrels per day in 2010. That number is expected to increase to 6.7 million barrels per day in 2020, the highest level since 1994.
Foreign oil imports into the United States are also expected to drop from 49 percent of liquid fuel consumption in 2010 to 36 percent in 2035. Additional oil savings are expected as a result of the administration’s new vehicle fuel economy regulations, the agency said.
Republicans argue the administration doesn’t deserve credit — they say the increase is the result of actions by previous administrations coupled with advances in technology and increased drilling on state and private lands.
The president again took aim at a slew of tax breaks for oil and natural-gas companies, bashing Republicans and oil-state Democrats for opposing bills to eliminate them.
“It’s outrageous. It’s inexcusable,” Obama said. “And every politician who’s been fighting to keep these subsidies in place should explain to the American people why the oil industry needs more of their money. Especially at a time like this.”
The president outlined a plan to cut $39 billion worth of tax breaks during the next decade in his fiscal 2013 budget request. The president echoed the plan in a tax reform framework unveiled by the Treasury Department Wednesday.
Before his speech, Obama toured the university’s Industrial Assessment Center, where students are taught to become industrial energy-efficiency experts as they help small- to mid-sized manufacturers reduce their energy costs.
The center — in swing-state Florida — is one of 24 nationwide facilities across the nation and is part of the Department of Energy’s Industrial Assessment Program, White House officials said.
While he’s in the battleground state, his 14th visit to Florida since taking office, Obama will attend a string of fundraisers, two in Miami and one in Orlando, in the heart of the crucial I-4 corridor where many of the state’s independent voters live.
This story was posted at 2:26 p.m. and updated at 3 p.m.
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Obama Hits Back at GOP Criticism of Energy Policy
Published: Thursday, 23 Feb 2012 | 3:08 PM ET Text Size By: Reuters Twitter
President Barack Obama hit back on Thursday at election-year Republican criticism of his energy policy, offering a staunch defense of his attempts to wean Americans off foreign oil and saying there was no 'silver bullet' for high gas prices.
CNBC
President Barack Obama addresses a Miami University audience on Thursday, Feb. 23.
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Obama sought to deflect growing Republican attacks over rising prices at the pump, blaming recent increases on a mix of factors beyond his control, including tensions with Iran, hot demand from China, India and other emerging economies, and Wall Street speculators taking advantage of the uncertainty.
U.S. gasoline prices have jumped nearly 9 cents in the past week to an average $3.61 a gallon, and are expected to rise further toward the $4 mark through the summer driving season and the approach of the Nov. 6 election.
In a visit to the University of Miami less than nine months before the presidential election in which he will seek a second term, Obama offered a modest series of proposals aimed at diversifying Americans' fuel supplies and increasing energy efficiency.
"It's the easiest thing in the world (to) make phony election-year promises about lower gas prices,'' Obama said.
"What's harder is to make a serious, sustained commitment to tackle a problem that may not be solved in one year or one term or even one decade.''
Republicans seeking to dislodge Obama from the White House are seeking to pin the higher prices on the Democratic president's tax and environmental policies they say have hindered domestic production and kept the United States at the mercy of imports. They cite his decision to block the Keystone pipeline that would transport Canadian oil to refineries in Texas.
Repeating there would be no "silver bullet'' for America's energy crunch, Obama highlighted steps already taken to expand domestic production and improve fuel efficiency.
The trio of proposals announced in Miami included a $30 million competition in natural gas technologies and a $14 million program to development algae-based fuel.
Obama repeated calls to roll back tax incentives for the oil industry, and urged Congress to renew a clean energy tax credit. Yet he acknowledged he was at odds with Republicans in Congress over energy.
Lawmakers are deeply divided and little legislative action is expected this year.
________________________ __________
LOL.
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Obama: Calls for more drilling are a 'bumper sticker', not an energy plan
Yahoo Finance ^ | 02/23/2012 | Jim Kuhnhenn
President Barack Obama on Thursday assailed Republicans for what he described as a flawed and dishonest strategy for reducing gas prices, predicting his rivals would offer nothing but more drilling and political promises of $2-a-gallon gas. Said the president: "The American people aren't stupid."
"That's not a plan, especially since we're already drilling. That's a bumper sticker," Obama said in a stop at the University of Miami. "It's not a strategy to solve our energy challenge. That's a strategy to get politicians through an election. You know there are no quick fixes to this problem."
Obama spoke as gas has reached the highest price at the pump ever for this time of year: an average of $3.58 per gallon. White House advisers see it as a cyclical occurrence but knew Obama had to address the topic, one of deep concern to consumers and growing fodder for Republicans seeking to unseat Obama.
Obama said gas prices were "like a tax straight out of their paychecks." He promoted an energy agenda of oil, gas, wind, solar, nuclear and biofuel energy. And he took aim at Republicans.
"You can bet that since it's an election year, they're already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas. I'll save you the suspense: Step one is to drill, step two is to drill, and step three is to keep drilling. ... We've heard the same thing for thirty years. Well, the American people aren't stupid."
Obama insisted there are no short-term solutions to high gas prices, and that anyone suggesting otherwise was not being honest. Still, he sought to offer something to anxious voters by saying he had ordered his administration to search for every possible area to help consumers in the coming months.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
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Obama: 'Developing new energy critical'
UPI ^ | 2/23/2012 | staff
U.S. President Obama told an audience in Florida Thursday Republicans are saying "drill, drill, drill," but that's not an energy plan, it's a "bumper sticker."
The president said it was critical to develop diverse energy resources.
He also attacked government subsidies for oil companies.
"Four billion dollars," Obama said. "These are the same oil companies that have been making record profits off the money you spend at the pump. And now they deserve another $4 billion from us?
"It's outrageous. It's inexcusable. And every politician who's been fighting to keep these subsidies in place should explain to the American people why the oil industry needs more of their money. Especially at a time like this."
At the "energy event" at the University of Miami, Obama said: "Right now, we're experiencing yet another painful reminder of why developing new energy is so critical to our future. Just like last year, gas prices are climbing across the country -- except this time, even earlier. And that hurts everyone."
(Excerpt) Read more at upi.com ...
YET BILLLIONS TO WASTEFUL SHIT LIKE SOLYNDRA IS OK?
WTF!
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Obama hits back at Republican criticism of high fuel prices (Obama never accepts any blame)
reuters ^ | 2/23/2012 | Laura MacInnis
Posted on February 23, 2012 8:36:03 PM EST by tobyhill
President Barack Obama hit back on Thursday at election-year Republican criticism of his energy policies, offering a staunch defense of his attempts to wean Americans off foreign oil and saying there is no "silver bullet" for high gasoline prices.
Obama sought to deflect growing Republican attacks over rising prices at the pump, blaming recent increases on a mix of factors beyond his control, including tensions with Iran, hot demand from China, India and other emerging economies, and Wall Street speculators taking advantage of the uncertainty.
U.S. gasoline prices have jumped nearly 9 cents in the past week to an average of $3.61 a gallon, and are expected to rise further toward the crucial $4 mark through the summer driving season and the approach of the November 6 election.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
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http://news.investors.com/articleprint/602120/201202231855/obama-high-gas-price-myths.aspx
Fuck Obama!!!! Fuck you everyone who supports this obamunist!!!
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White House blames Bush for Afghanistan turmoil
Washington Examiner ^ | 2/27/12 | Charlie Spiering Commentary Staff Writer
White House Press secretary Jay Carney today reminded reporters that prior to President Obama's term in office, the Bush administration was responsible for the tumultuous lengthy engagement in Afghanistan.
"The president made clear when he was a candidate for this office and when he took this office, that unfortunately prior to his taking office, because of the focus on Iraq, and the U.S. efforts there, that the original war, if you will, in Afghanistan had been neglected, the strategy there was unclear, and that it was not properly resourced," said Carney, adding that the U.S. goals in Afghanistan would be met with President Obama's "clear eyed" policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at campaign2012.washingtone xaminer.com ...
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you may not like it but that about sums it up :'(
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you may not like it but that about sums it up :'(
So after 3 years - no progress at all has been made by obama correct?
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what was the original reason for going into Afghanistan,to get bin laden,guess what they killed him in case you haven't heard
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Obama Claims Bush Administration Dropped the Ball on Iran
PJ Tatler ^ | March 4, 2012 | Bridget Johnson
Posted on March 4, 2012 2:05:00 PM EST by Kaslin
President Obama sought to convince the crowd at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference today that “when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”
He also placed blame on the Bush administration for letting Iran become the threat it is today, claiming that a policy of putting pressure on Iran was “in tatters” when he took office.
“If during this political season you hear some question my administration’s support for Israel, remember that it’s not backed up by the facts,” the president said.
He also said he has “no apologies” for pursuing the Middle East peace process, which is effectively stalled, while continually pressing that he is a friend of Israel.
“As you examine my commitment, you don’t just have to count on my words,” Obama said. “You can look at my deeds. Because over the last three years, as president of the United States, I have kept my commitments to the state of Israel. At every crucial juncture – at every fork in the road – we have been there for Israel. Every single time.”
“When the Goldstone report unfairly singled out Israel for criticism, we challenged it,” he continued. “When Israel was isolated in the aftermath of the flotilla incident, we supported them. When the Durban conference was commemorated, we boycotted it, and we will always reject the notion that Zionism is racism. When one-sided resolutions are brought up at the Human Rights Council, we oppose them. When Israeli diplomats feared for their lives in Cairo, we intervened to help save them. When there are efforts to boycott or divest from Israel, we will stand against them. And whenever an effort is made to de-legitimize the state of Israel, my Administration has opposed them.
“So there should not be a shred of doubt by now: when the chips are down, I have Israel’s back.”
It was after this that Obama moved on to the topic over which the president is expected to clash with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — Monday night’s gala speaker here — over these few days: Iran.
“Four years ago, I made a commitment to the American people, and said that we would use all elements of American power to pressure Iran and prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” Obama said. “That is what we have done.”
He claimed that when he took office, the George W. Bush administration had left “the efforts to apply pressure on Iran …in tatters.”
“And so from my first months in office, we put forward a very clear choice to the Iranian regime: a path that would allow them to rejoin the community of nations if they meet their international obligations, or a path that leads to an escalating series of consequences if they don’t,” Obama said. “Our policy of engagement – quickly rebuffed by the Iranian regime – allowed us to rally the international community as never before; to expose Iran’s intransigence; and to apply pressure that goes far beyond anything that the United States could do on our own.”
Because of his administration, the commander in chief said, “Iran is isolated, its leadership divided and under pressure.”
He said that he still believes that there can be a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.
“The United States and Israel both assess that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon, and we are exceedingly vigilant in monitoring their program,” Obama said. “Now, the international community has a responsibility to use the time and space that exists.”
The crowd was largely quiet during these comments.
The president acknowledged that there are “no guarantees” that Tehran “will make the right choice,” as suggested by the Islamic Republic’s history.
“I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power,” Obama said. “A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort to impose crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.”
“Iran’s leaders should know that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he added, receiving a standing ovation from much of the audience. “And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”
He asked the crowd to remember the “weightiness” of the issue when considering how to confront Iran.
“For the sake of Israel’s security, America’s security, and the peace and security of the world, now is not the time for bluster; now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in, and to sustain the broad international coalition that we have built,” he said.
Obama said the two countries “may not agree on every single issue … but we agree on the big things.”
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Book: Obama blamed troubles on Fox
By: Mackenzie Weinger
March 19, 2012 12:11 PM EDT
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=3FDB413D-AA2D-498B-AE7E-11894232CCC4
President Barack Obama blamed Fox News for his political woes in a private meeting with labor leaders in 2010, saying he was “losing white males” who tune into the cable outlet and “hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7,” according to journalist David Corn’s new book, “Showdown.”
In “Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party” — which hits bookstores on Tuesday — the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones chronicles the White House from the 2010 midterm elections to the start of the 2012 campaign. The book focuses on key moments of Obama’s presidency, such as Osama bin Laden’s assassination, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Arab Spring, the debt ceiling crisis, and the president’s dealings with Congress.
Corn writes that after the midterm elections, Obama told labor leaders in December 2010 that he held Fox partly responsible for him “losing white males.”
“…Fed by Fox News, they hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7, and it begins to seep in…The Republicans have been at this for 40 years. They have new resources, but the strategy is old,” Corn recounted Obama as saying.
Obama shifted his own tactics in 2011, Corn writes, moving from compromising with Republicans to challenging the tea party. The president, senior adviser David Plouffe and other top administration officials plotted a “secret strategy” — by not unveiling a specific deficit reduction plan and not instantly challenging the House Republicans’ budget cuts — to “draw the GOP into a trap.”
The book also highlights some of the administration’s battles on the economy. Corn writes that when then President’s Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer advocated for more stimulus in a fall 2009 meeting, Obama said, “I can’t get it done. Don’t you understand that?”
And in a meeting with an adviser after the 2010 midterm elections, Obama slammed corporate executives for attacking him.
“I saved these guys when the economy was falling off a cliff,” Obama said, according to Corn. “Now I get nothing but their venom.”
But Obama was more optimistic about his policies the morning after the 2010 election, telling aides he planned to get a tax deal, extend unemployment benefits, ratify the new START treaty, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and pass the DREAM Act and a children’s nutrition bill in the following two months. David Axelrod told Corn he remembered, “We all looked at each other quizzically, ‘What does he see that we don’t?’”
The book goes on to detail how Obama achieved some success in several of his policy aims, such as his outmaneuvering of Sen. John McCain to win the START ratification and his deal to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by letting Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen control how the repeal would be enforced.
And in the budget negotiations of 2011, Obama and then budget chief Jack Lew decided to let House Speaker John Boehner win budget cuts to appease tea partiers in Congress, but Lew negotiated in order to control the impacts on important programs and “in a way, snooker the Republicans,” according to Corn.
Still, after Obama gave a speech in April 2011 calling the House Republican budget a “pessimistic” vision of the United States’ future, the administration ordered Cabinet secretaries and top officials to dial back the rhetoric. “The president is not wild about his message now,” a top Obama adviser said at the time.
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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Obama tries to spread blame on Solyndra, Keystone
FOX News ^ | March 22, 2012
"Obviously we wish Solyndra hadn't gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways Solyndra couldn't compete. But understand, this was not our program per se."
-- President Obama talking to National Public Radio's "Marketplace."
President Obama is on a swing-state campaign blitz this week, looking to stifle voter anger over high energy prices. While the White House is casting the trip as an effort to lay out Obama's vision for future energy abundance, much of the message is aimed at reducing the supply of blame.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
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Obama Distances Himself From Solyndra: "Not Our Program, Per Se"
www.realclearpolitics.co m
In an interview with Marketplace.org (full audio), President Obama defends using U.S. taxpayer money to invest in solar energy projects. During the interview, Obama was asked about Solyndra, one of the more well-known solar panel companies that failed after receiving a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.
However, Obama told Marketplace that "this was not our program." Obama attempts to make the case that this falls on the lap of Congress because they put together the loan guarantee program. Read the transcript below.
Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal : With all respect, it was kind of a gutsy move I think to come to a solar facility. Your administration has staked a lot on clean technology, green jobs. The biggest item most people know about that strategy is, of course, a company named Solyndra, which your administration gave loan guarantees to, that then went bankrupt and has been the subject of many investigations. Are you doing your "all of the above" strategy right if that's what we have to show for it -- Solyndra?
Obama: We are doing the "all of the above" strategy right. Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn't gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn't compete. But understand: This was not our program, per se. Congress -- Democrats and Republicans -- put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries, it's easy to raise money for startups, but if you want to take them to scale, oftentimes there's a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start up companies get to scale. And the understanding is is that some companies are not going to succeed, some companies will do very well -- but the portfolio as a whole ends up supporting the kind of innovation that helps make America successful in this innovative 21st century economy.
Do I wish that Solyndra had gone bankrupt? Absolutely not. And obviously it's heartbreaking what happened to the workers who were there. When you look at the overall portfolio, is it right for us to make sure that we're not just cashing in our chips and letting the Chinese or the Germans develop the technologies that we know are going to be critical in the future? I'm proud to say that we're going to continue to support it.
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Obama on Solyndra Loan: ‘This Was Not Our Program’
Blames 'Congress' and 'the Chinese' for firm’s failure
BY: Andrew Stiles - March 22, 2012 11:08 am
President Obama denied culpability for the failure of solar firm Solyndra in a radio interview on Tuesday, instead pinning the blame on Congress and the Chinese.
The loans initiative used to finance Solyndra was “not our program,” he told American Public Media in response to question about Solyndra’s bankruptcy and subsequent controversy.
“Understand, this was not our program per se,” Obama said. “Congress–Democrats and Republicans–put together a loan guarantee program…to help start-up companies get to scale.”
APM: With all respect, it was a gutsy move I think to come to a solar facility. Your administration has staked a lot on clean technology, green jobs – the biggest item most people know about that strategy is, of course, a company named Solyndra, which your administration gave loan guarantees to, then went bankrupt and has been the subject of many investigations. Are you doing your ‘all of the above’ strategy right if that’s what we have to show for it, Solyndra?
OBAMA: We are doing the all of the above strategy right. Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete. But understand, this was not our program per se.
Congress–Democrats and Republicans–put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries–it’s easy to raise money for start-ups, but if you want to take them to scale sometimes there’s a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start-up companies get to scale. And the understanding is that some companies are not going to succeed, some companies are going to do very well, but the portfolio as a whole ends up supporting the kind of innovation that helps make America successful in this innovative 21st century economy. Do I wish that Solyndra had gone bankrupt? Absolutely not. And obviously it’s heartbreaking it happened for the workers who were there.
Obama has previously argued that the Department of Energy program used to finance a $535 million federal loan guarantee to Solyndra “predates” his presidency.
That’s an exaggeration of the truth, according to FactCheck.org: “Solyndra’s loan guarantee came under another program created by the president’s 2009 stimulus for companies developing ‘commercially available technologies.’”
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Plausible deniability: Obama’s hands were all over Solyndra
The Washington Times ^ | March 22, 2012 | by Henry D'Andrea
Posted on March 22, 2012 8:05:47 PM EDT by Oldeconomybuyer
President Barack Obama today once again thwarted honesty to claim that the failed solar energy company, Solyndra, was not the administration’s program, “per se.”
In an interview with Marketplace.org, the president pivoted from taking the blame for the failed Solyndra deal and instead blamed its rupture on Congress.
What Obama left out of that interview was the immense payday Obama campaign bundlers and investors received from the Solyndra loan deal. Something that the Obama administration had huge participation in.
At the time of its announcement, the Solyndra loan was a disgusting and unethical smokescreen designed to propagandize the American electorate into thinking Obama was serious about job creation and lowering the cost of gas via new energy solutions.
However, when you look deep behind the scenes into the Solyndra loan, you see a much different story. A story of blatant crony capitalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at communities.washingtonti mes.com ...
TOPICS: Business/Economy; Crime/Corruption; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; Click to Add Topic
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/22/obama-tries-to-spread-blame-on-solyndra-keystone
LOL!!!
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President Obama’s Hall of Blame
by Keith Koffler on March 23, 2012, 9:18 am
President Obama has passed the buck to others – mainly George W. Bush – for no less than a dozen problems that characterize his presidency, suggesting time and again that his own policies are not to blame for his difficulties and he is simply doing the best that can be done with the cards he was dealt.
Even so, Obama is aggressively staking a claim for successes for which Bush shares significant or nearly all responsibility, including increased drilling for oil and natural gas, the end of the Iraq War, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
What follows is a roster of Obama’s efforts to assign blame for 12 problems that prevail or have faced him during his presidency. In several cases, the quotes here are just one or two of many that show Obama passing the buck on a particular issue.
Solyndra
“Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete. But understand, this was not our program per se. Congress–Democrats and Republicans–put together a loan guarantee program.”
- March 22, 2012
Afghanistan
“When I came into office there has been drift in the Afghanistan strategy, in part because we had spent a lot of time focusing on Iraq instead. Over the last three years we have refocused attention on getting Afghanistan right. Would my preference had been that we started some of that earlier? Absolutely. But that’s not the cards that were dealt. We’re now in a position where, given our starting point, we’re making progress.”
- March 14, 2012
Iran
“When I took office, the efforts to apply pressure on Iran were in tatters. Iran had gone from zero centrifuges spinning to thousands, without facing broad pushback from the world. In the region, Iran was ascendant.”
- March 4, 2012
The Economy
“We’ve made sure to do everything we can to dig ourselves out of this incredible hole that I inherited.”
- February 23, 2012
The Deficit:
“We thought that it was entirely appropriate for our governments and our agencies to try to root out waste, large and small, in a systematic way. Obviously, this is even more important given the deficits that we’ve inherited and that have grown as a consequence of this recession.”
- November 9, 2011
“When I first walked through the door, the deficit stood at $1.3 trillion, with projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. If we had taken office during ordinary times, we would have started bringing down these deficits immediately.”
- February 1, 2010
The Debt:
“Look, we do have a serious problem in terms of debt and deficit, and much of it I inherited when I showed up.”
- August 8, 2011
“I inherited a big debt.”
- March 29, 2011
Unemployment:
“We inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression, a banking system on the verge of meltdown. We had lost 4 million jobs by the time I was sworn in and would then lose another 4 million in the few months right after I was sworn in before our economic policies had a chance to take root.”
- May 10, 2011
The BP Gulf Oil Spill
“In this instance, the oil industry’s cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship with government regulators meant little or no regulation at all. When Secretary Salazar took office, he found a Minerals and Management Service that had been plagued by corruption for years –- this was the agency charged with not only providing permits, but also enforcing laws governing oil drilling.”
- May 27, 2010
Decline of the nuclear stockpile
“Among the many challenges our administration inherited was the slow but steady decline in support for our nuclear stockpile and infrastructure, and for our highly trained nuclear work force.” (This one was offered up on Obama’s behalf by Vice President Biden).
- January 29, 2010
The Election of Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.)
“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they’re frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
- January 20, 2010
Anti-Americanism
“I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust. Part of this was due to misperceptions and misinformation about my country. Part of this was due to opposition to specific policies, and a belief that on certain critical issues, America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others. And this has fed an almost reflexive anti-Americanism, which too often has served as an excuse for collective inaction.”
- September 23, 2009
The Financial Crisis
“We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we’ve seen in our time. This crisis crippled private capital markets and forced us to take steps in our financial system — and with our auto companies — that we would not have otherwise even considered.”
- June 1, 2009
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8) Unemployment is up.
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palins fault!
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palins fault!
x2
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Welch on Obama: It’s always someone else to blame with this guy
HotAir ^ | April 13, 2012 | Ed Morrissey
Eh, what does this guy know about leadership, anyway? He’s only the most widely respected CEO of the last twenty years or so and the founder of a school that develops leaders in the business world, plus the author of a book or two on the subject. Former GE chief Jack Welch unloaded on Barack Obama yesterday for his chronic lack of leadership, manifest mainly through the ever-expanding universe of scapegoats that Obama cites for the failures of his economic policies. Welch thinks that Obama has become positively Nixonian — or maybe worse (via Instapundit):
President Obama’s “divide-and-conquer” approach isn’t what great leaders do, Jack Welch said Thursday. …
“It was the insurance executives in health care. It was the bankers in the collapse. It was the oil companies as oil prices go up. It was Congress if things didn’t go the way he wanted. And recently it’s been the Supreme Court,” he said.
“He’s got an enemies list that would make Richard Nixon proud.”
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
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If he gets re-elected, nothing will improve and he will continue to blame Bush until 2016. The liberal idiots will continue to believe his rhetoric.
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Email Print 19Comments Share
April 18, 2012
Another Day, Another Administration Witch Hunt
By David Harsanyi
So many imaginary villains and so little time.
This week, President Barack Obama is taking the fight to "oil speculators" and "market manipulation" (nee "free enterprise"), demanding that traders put up more money for transactions and government ratchet up enforcement and monitoring. "None of these will bring gas prices down overnight," Obama helpfully explained in his news conference. "But they will prevent market manipulation and help protect consumers."
No, they won't. They'd probably hurt consumers, and they would doubtlessly raise the cost of doing business. So for a few hundred words, let's treat populist agitation as if it were earnest policy.
Let's start by being thankful for oil speculation -- no matter what the motivation of those involved might be. To begin with, speculation allows companies with exposure to fluctuating commodity prices to hedge against rising costs by locking in. Sometimes the bet pays off; other times it doesn't. But risk and profit are not yet crimes.
Oil speculation also offers consumers and investors information about the future that can help them make informed long-term decisions. Speculators trade commodities based on the information available in the marketplace. They reflect reality; they don't create it.
But sometimes, unfortunate as it is, prices will rise. "Gouging," the close scaremongering cousin of "speculation," helps persuade consumers not to use what they don't need. It incentivizes to modify behavior -- our driving habits or the size of our cars. We conserve more when prices are higher, so we avoid shortages, and producers intensify their production. (Funny how Democrats get this concept when writing energy policy designed to artificially spike fossil fuel prices.)
The president surely understands, as well. He knows that a fungible commodity's price is driven by demand and geopolitical events beyond the control of speculators or, for the most part, Washington. There are billions of people in China, India and elsewhere who are new consumers of oil -- and they are better off for it. We are better off for it.
Or put it this way: Natural gas prices are trading so cheaply that it's no longer profitable to drill for most companies. According to Businessweek, there are only 624 operating drills in the United States, the fewest since April 2002. So I guess natural gas speculators forgot to manipulate the world market this month. Or do oil manipulators only work part time? Confusing.
Where, after all, is the president's evidence that oil speculation is driving up oil prices? The White House "Fact Sheet" on the matter offers plenty of solutions to a problem it hasn't even proved exists. Why are we going to spend another $52 million -- and who-knows-what in political witch hunt trials -- on a theory that plays on assumptions and flourishes in the progressive blogosphere?
Obviously, much of this is driven by political realities and accusations by Republicans that the president isn't doing enough to curb rising oil prices. George W. Bush also talked about manipulation nonsense, and I'm sure it's gone on forever.
So it's also worth noting that Washington, regrettably enough, already has the power to enact the counterproductive regulations the president is asking for. Nothing needs to be passed. It was only last year when Obama formed a special task force designed to find manipulation in the oil market and to ferret out incidents of gas gouging.
It is rare when Washington gives a topic what it deserves. But the Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group has given the American people exactly what the topic deserves: zip.
Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.
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It's Not Obama's Fault
Townhall.com ^ | May 9, 2012 | Rich Galen
For a campaign that has been up-and-running since just about January 21, 2009, the Obama crowd did not have a good "official" first week.
Last weekend, Barack Obama officially launched his campaign for re-election at a rally on the campus of Ohio State University. A couple of things were wrong with the event. About 14,000 people showed up, but the arena holds many more and the traveling press made much of the empty seats.
That's not Obama's fault. It's the fault of the advance team and the campaign, but there you are.
During his remarks, Obama lashed out at Republicans in Congress for refusing to provide infrastructure funds including funds for a bridge connecting Ohio to Kentucky in Cincinnati (homes to Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican Leader respectively).
He told the crowd that people had to drive an hour-and-a-half out of their way just to get to work.
According to the Washington Post's Fact Checker all of that is true except for:
-- The bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati has never been closed.
-- The bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati has bipartisan support to repair it.
-- The project to repair the bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati isn't slated to begin until 2015.
-- The bridge he was talking about connects Indiana to Kentucky.
-- The bridge connecting Indiana to Kentucky has been repaired and is open to traffic.
Ok. That's not Obama's fault. It's the fault of the speech writers, but there you are.
On Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden appeared on Meet the Press and got way off message on gay marriage when he said:
"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual - men and women marrying - are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction beyond that."
Thing is, according to Yahoo! News, "the president has stopped short of endorsing gay marriage, instead articulating that his views are 'evolving.'"
Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, jumped in on the issue by announcing his support for gay marriage, but it is not clear why he thought he needed to do that.
Neither of these are Obama's fault. It's the fault of his Vice President who runs off at the mouth so often the White House staff has taken to calling them "Joe Bombs," but there you are.
Jeff Greenfield who has been observing and analyzing American Politics for about as long as I have wrote a blistering piece detailing four events of Obama's first week including the empty seats and Joe Biden.
But he added the fact that the "April unemployment rate for workers under 25 was 16.4 percent and as many as half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed."
As young voters are a huge piece of the coalition that carried Obama to victory in 2008, anything that dampens their enthusiasm - not being able to find a job would be an example - will likely suppress their vote totals in November.
That's not Obama's fault. That's the fault of George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover, but there you are.
Finally, MullPal and sometimes backdoor neighbor James Carville, on the CNN.com site, wrote:
"Democratic fundraisers, activists, supporters, and even politicians alike have somehow collectively lapsed into the sentiment that the president is going to be reelected and that we have a good shot to take the House back while holding the Senate."
Then he wrote:
"What are you smoking? What are you drinking? What are you snorting or just what in the hell are you thinking?"
James correctly points out that the RealClearPolitics average of national polls has Obama leading Romney "by three-tenths of one percent."
As of last night that had dropped by A THIRD to .2 percent.
That's not Obama's fault. As we saw over the weekend in Europe there is a significant "throw the rascals out" mentality in Europe much as there was in the U.S. less than two years ago in the mid-term elections of 2010.
But, there you are.
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Damn 85847 posts top of the list no doubt.
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Obama to rabbis: I'm vilified because of Muslim name
ynetnews.com ^ | 5/30/12 | Yitzhak Benhorin
Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 1:38:19 PM by ColdOne
During the meeting, Obama told the rabbis that when he was running for Senate some accused him of being the Jewish lobby's "puppet" because of his many Jewish associates in Chicago. Now, he said, the Republicans are trying to portray him as not being supportive of Israel by stressing the fact that his father was Muslim and he has a Muslim name, as well as by claiming that he had been overly aggressive in pushing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to promote the peace process with the Palestinians.
According to the US leader, he had Israel's best interest in mind.
The president further told the rabbis that as a senator he fully backed legislation aimed at preserving Israel's qualitative military edge.
(Excerpt) Read more at ynetnews.com ...
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Blamer in Chief?
2:26 PM, May 31, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/blamer-chief_646332.html
At the unveiling of former President George W. Bush's official portrait at the White House this afternoon, President Barack Obama joined his predecessor and their wives in delivering brief (and at times nice, cordial, and funny) remarks. But there was a seemingly out of place moment during the ceremony when Obama seemed to veer into reiterating his frequent trope that he inherited a bad economy from Bush.
"The months before I took the oath of office were a chaotic time," Obama said, after explaining that the president's job is isolating, and that he and Bush have a connection since so few have held the job. "We knew our economy was in trouble, our fellow Americans were in pain, but we wouldn't know until later just how breathtaking the financial crisis had been."
Obama did note the Bush tried to get it right. "Still, over those 2 1/2 months, in the midst of that crisis, President Bush, his cabinet, his staff, many of you who are here today, went out of your ways--George, you went out of your way--to make sure that the transition to a new administration was a seamless as possible. President Bush understood that rescuing our economy was not just a Democratic or Republican issue, it was an American priority. I'll always be grateful for that."
There were plenty of moments, however, when Obama was gracious to his predecessor. "After 3 1/2 years in office and much more gray hair, I have a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the presidents who came before me, including my immediate predecessor President Bush," Obama said. "In this job no decision that reaches your desk is easy, no choice you make is without costs, no matter how hard you try, you're not going to make everybody happy."
And Obama thanked the previous occupant of the White House for the TV programming in the presidential mansion. "You also left me a really good TV sports package," Obama told Bush. "I use it."
Here's a picture of the portrait:
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Obama administration says jobless rate rise unacceptable
Reuters via Yahoo! News ^ | June 1, 2012
Posted on Friday, June 01, 2012 10:21:10 AM by Oldeconomybuyer
(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration called on Congress to do more to help the economy create jobs, with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis saying May's rise in the unemployment rate was unacceptable.
"Congress has to take some action because while we see the unemployment rate where it is, it's not acceptable," Solis told the CNBC network on Friday.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/obama-well-get-things-done-when-the-republican
Obama: We'll Get Things Done When The Republican “Fever” Breaks
President Barack Obama says he'll fulfill his campaign promises once he wins, because Republicans won't be obsessed with beating him.posted Jun 1, 2012 3:44pm EDT
Zeke Miller BuzzFeed Staff
(Reuters / JASON REED)
President Barack Obama cited a Republican "fever" as the reason why he hasn't been able to make progress on deficit reduction or immigration reform at a Minneapolis fundraiser today.
The remarks are one of Obama's sharpest Republican critiques — equating their recent activism with illness — and are sure to draw condemnation from the right.
From the pool report:
Most of the talk was standard campaign speech, but the president did say he hopes that Republicans will be more cooperative after he wins reelection.
"It will be coming to a head in this election. We're going to have as stark a contrast as we've seen in a very long time between the two candidates. 2008 was a significant election, obviously. But John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. There were some areas where you saw some overlap."
"In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction. The center of gravity for their party has shifted."
He talked of deficit reduction and said "we couldn't' get them to take yes for an answer."
"I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again."
"I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again."
Obama said he expects that after his reelection, Congress will pass a balanced deficit reduction plan, a highway bill, immigration reform.
"My expectation is that if we can break this fever, that we can invest in clean energy and energy efficiency because that's not a partisan issue."
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Fucking delusional. Speechless how delusional this psychotic nut is
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Obama (Again) Blames Bush For Bad Job News
IBD Editorials ^ | June 1, 2012 | Editor
Posted on June 1, 2012 9:04:00 PM EDT by Kaslin
Economy: President Obama has been on the job for nearly three and a half years, but the White House says bad news on jobs is George W. Bush's fault. Time to own up to your own record, Mr. President.
It was the most tepid job growth seen in America in a year, with fewer than 70,000 jobs added for May — less than half what economists expected.
On top of that, March and April's combined job growth was revised downward by almost 50,000. The unemployment rate is again going in the wrong direction, from April's 8.1% to 8.2% in May.
In response to the jobs report, the Dow industrials plunged more than 274 points, or 2.2%, the index's worst day of the year and falling into negative territory for 2012.
Welcome to the Obama "recovery."
The White House says this economy isn't really the president's responsibility. Its take on what the Washington Post called a "dismal U.S. jobs report" as "businesses dramatically scaled back hiring," was this from Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger:
"Today we learned that the economy has added private sector jobs for 27 straight months" — as if lukewarm net job growth that's actually slower than the growth in the labor force should be a cause to break out the champagne in the biggest economy in the world.
Instead of blaming its failed trillion-dollar Keynesian stimulus, plus at least another trillion taking over the country's health-insurance system, the White House disgracefully points a finger at its predecessor.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Editorial; Front Page News; Click to Add Topic
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Nothing but excuses
O’s unserious economic Rx
Last Updated: 12:54 AM, June 4, 2012
Posted: 11:24 PM, June 3, 2012
Charles Gasparino
President Obama greeted last week’s rotten news on unemployment by saying the economy is facing “serious headwinds.” It took him three-plus years to figure that out?
Last Friday’s crummy jobs report followed the grim news that economic growth is below 2 percent. We’re slowing down again, after not speeding up very much — and the storm clouds over Europe threaten to toss the whole world back into full recession. What has this president ever done to help the economy heal?
Fine, Obama took office in the teeth of the Great Recession, with businesses shedding jobs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But that was three-plus years ago.
EPA
Barely even pretending to have a clue: Without real solutions, Obama offers distractions.
As the new president, and with the help of a solidly Democratic Congress, he gave us a bunch of stuff he said would turn things around: Nearly $1 trillion in stimulus spending, which was supposed to kick the economy back into gear; ObamaCare, which allegedly fixes long-term problems; the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, which claimed to tackle the roots of the 2008 meltdown.
Then his party lost big in 2010 — and he apparently gave up on doing anything to help the economy. He even ignored the recommendations of his bipartisan deficit-reduction panel — including its push for tax reform, probably the best economic-growth idea to ever come near this White House.
De facto, he’s standing on the “achievements” of his first two years. But we all know how those turned out.
Dodd-Frank almost assures that taxpayers will have to bail out the “too big to fail” banks in the next blowup, while heaping so many regulations on them that they aren’t lending to small business. For all the handouts given to people with underwater mortgages, housing prices remain depressed. And the twin culprits of the housing bubble, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, remain largely intact, still running up new taxpayer-backed debt.
Meanwhile, the “shovel ready” construction jobs his stimulus package was supposed to create never happened — and the president actually jokes about it. The promised “green jobs” drowned in oceans of red ink at government-backed losers like Solyndra.
They told us the stimulus would bring unemployment down to less than 6 percent by now; it’s 8.2 percent — and rising.
And only Democratic Kool-aid drinkers think ObamaCare’s going to be anything but a growing hit on the economy.
So what does Obama have to say for himself now that his economic plan has so obviously failed?
Well, that Mitt Romney is a greedy fat cat — otherwise, the president’s pretty flummoxed.
Consider what Obama said on Friday after the lousy jobs report: “We knew the road to recovery would not be easy, we knew it would take time, we knew there would be ups and downs along the way . . . We do have better days ahead.”
Great. How exactly are we going to get there, again?
The president’s plan seems to go something like this:
* Washington should pick the winners (and the losers), like Solyndra. These businesses fit his ideological goals, so someday they won’t be miserable failures.
* The government should pick who gets tax breaks; such conglomerates as GE (run by Obama pal Jeffrey Immelt) should pay little if any taxes, while small businesses and families earning $250,000 (not that much in expensive places like in New York) pay much higher tax rates, because they’re somehow “millionaires and billionaires.”
* Hit real millionaires and billionaires with the “Buffett tax” so they can pay for more stimulus spending — no matter that the tax would only cover a few days of added federal spending, or that most of the jobs “saved or created” by the stimulus were pure imagination.
In 2008, Obama seemed like a serious man at a time when the country needed to deal with a serious situation. But he’s proved to be anything but serious when it comes to dealing with the nation’s economic woes.
Reporters in the Obama camp still parrot his line about how President George W. Bush left him with such a mess, or (as one told me on Friday) that Americans just have to get used to a “new normal” of low growth and high unemployment.
I doubt it because he barely even pretends to have a clue. He could be offering something bold and different as voters decide whether to give him four more years; instead, he’s offering the same excuses, the same “solutions” and whatever distractions he can come up with.
“Serious headwinds,” indeed.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/nothing_but_excuses_Ggvp7jlCuTqEODdpcAEQpO#ixzz1wptDOx00
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Business News
France hits back at Obama over Europe debt crisis
Posted: 05 June 2012 2000 hrs
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/1205746/1/.html
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius gives a press conference with his Italian counterpart on June 5, 2012 following their meeting at Villa Madama in Rome (AFP PHOTO/ALBERTO PIZZOLI)
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ROME: French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Tuesday hit back at comments by US President Barack Obama about the threat of the European debt crisis, saying it had originated in the United States.
"The crisis did not start in Europe... Lehman Brothers was not a European bank," Fabius said after talks with his counterpart Giulio Terzi in Rome.
"We should not shift responsibility. We're all in the same boat," he said.
Obama said Saturday that Europe's economic woes were causing trouble for the United States' own economy, after the US unemployment rate rose for the first time in almost a year, spelling trouble for his reelection bid.
"The crisis in Europe's economy has cast a shadow on our own. And all of this makes it even more challenging to fully recover and lay the foundation for an economy that's built to last," he said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
Fabius also said Tuesday the European Union should find a "practical method" to help Spanish banks, adding that Spain was in "a very difficult economic situation."
"We could have expected the borrowing costs to go down but that is not what has happened. We are faced with a considerable difficulty," he said.
"We now have to find a practical method for the Spanish banking system to function without increasing the deficit, which would raise borrowing costs.
"The European system as a whole has to find a solution to avoid suffocation," said Fabius, a former prime minister and finance minister.
"It's urgent. Decisions have to be taken in the next few weeks," he said.
As bond markets charge exorbitant rates to lend to Spain, investors fear that Madrid may be forced to seek external aid to finance a bailout of the country's bad loan-ridden financial system.
Stricken Spanish lender Bankia alone has asked for a total of 23.5 billion euros ($29.4 billion) to help repair a balance sheet that has a vast exposure to the property market, which crashed in 2008.
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Obama Deferred KSM Decision to Holder: 'It's Your Call, You're the Attorney General'
Weekly Standard ^
Posted on Tuesday, June 05, 2012
Obama Deferred KSM Decision to Holder: 'It's Your Call, You're the Attorney General'
Later said he didn't know: "I didn’t know that meant KSM, Obama answered.” 3:25 PM, Jun 5, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
A new book reveals that President Obama deferred a major national security decision to his controversial attorney general, Eric Holder. Instead of deciding himself whether 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tried by a military tribunal or in a federal court, Obama pushed the decision off to Holder.
At a White House celebration, Holder "wasn't going to waste a rare moment along with the president," according to an account from the book Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency by Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman. "He had come with an agenda, and told the president that he was thinking about prosecuting KSM in federal court. Obama had simply acknowledged that he would defer to Holder on the matter: 'It’s your call, you’re the attorney general.'"
Yet, almost half a year later, according to the same book, President Obama reportedly told an aide that he didn't realize his deference on this issue to Holder included KSM.
"Once, the president had peevishly asked an aide whose idea it was to prosecute the 9/11 defendants in civilian courts in the first place," Klaidman writes. "The adviser sheepishly told him it was his, reminding Obama that in his Archives speech he’d insisted that the presumption would be in favor of Article III courts unless military commissions were the only viable option. I didn’t know that meant KSM, Obama answered."
The confusion between President Obama and Holder was perhaps apparent in the decision to try KSM in a New York City courthouse. Holder's announcement was immediately controversial. And after sustained of public outcry (including from Democratic officials in New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg), the decision was reversed.
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President Obama Just Hammered Congress On The Economy And Is Concerned About Europe
Brett LoGiurato|26 minutes ago|224|10
President Barack Obama is giving a speech on the U.S. economy and the European debt crisis, urging Congress to take up his "to-do list" and the Jobs Act he proposed in September.
Obama hit on Congressional Republicans for not moving on his proposals. The speech came a week after a dismal May jobs report gave Republican challenger Mitt Romney and other Republicans chances to hammer him. With the economy expected to be a referendum on the direction of the country on the economy and jobs, that report also sent his chances of re-election spiraling down.
He also remarked on the debt crisis in Europe, saying, it affects the U.S. because Europe is the country's largest trading partner.
Obama cited Italy and Spain's good structural reforms, but advocated against further austerity.
"The situation in Europe is not simply a debt crisis," Obama said.
Of why it's been difficult for reform in Europe, Obama hits Congress again: "Imagine dealing with 17 Congresses instead of just one. That makes things more challenging."
He moved back to the situation at home, commending the private sector for creating jobs but further advocating his jobs plan for help in the public sector. He said the private sector is doing "fine." Specifically, he said, his plan would help hiring among teachers, police, firefighters, and in construction.
"State and local government hiring has been going in the wrong direction," Obama said.
UPDATE:
Obama also got a question about the national security leaks and some suggestions that his administration has been deliberately leaking information to boost his re-election efforts. "The idea that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/president-obama-speaks-on-the-economy-2012-6#ixzz1xDOQzLQz
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After Dismal Week, Obama Pins Blame for Economy on GOP, Europe — Again
By George E. Condon Jr.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/after-dismal-week-obama-pins-blame-for-economy-on-gop-europe-again-20120608
Updated: June 8, 2012 | 1:38 p.m.
June 8, 2012 | 10:48 a.m.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
President Barack Obama pauses as he talks about the economy, Friday, June 8, 2012, in the briefing room of the White House in Washington.
President Obama contended on Friday that the private sector is rebounding, but blamed a shaky Europe and a balky Congress for stunting America’s economic recovery — and demanded that Republicans stop blocking his agenda.
Appearing in the White House briefing room, the president chided House Republicans for ignoring his jobs program, particularly with the worsening situation in Europe. “In light of the headwinds that we're facing right now,” he said, “I urge them to reconsider.”
(RELATED: Obama Points to Europe as Risk to U.S. Economy)
Obama also stressed the impact that the eurozone crisis is having on the U.S. economy, cautiously prodding European leaders. “Their success is good for us. And the sooner that they act and the more decisive and concrete their action, the sooner people and markets will regain confidence, and the cheaper the costs of cleanup will be down the road.”
After a week that the White House and all Democrats fervently wish everybody could forget, it was critical for the president to step forward and combat the notion that the nation’s economic affairs are drifting. He needed to show command, to show that somebody is in charge. Obama needed to counter the message of the past week, and he continued to blame everybody else — primarily Europeans across the ocean and Republicans at home — for the bad news.
That news started a week earlier with a dismal May jobs report. Then former President Clinton undercut the Obama campaign’s message on Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney’s private-sector experience. Then Democrats watched Gov. Scott Walker cruise to a solid victory for Republicans in a Wisconsin recall battle the White House never wanted to see waged. That was followed by more bad news from Europe and another counter-message from Clinton on the Bush-era tax cuts. And don’t forget that Republicans and Romney are now out-fundraising Obama and Democrats. And just hours before the president came before reporters, CNN released a poll showing that a majority of the country — 51 percent — continues to oppose the health care overhaul that is the signature accomplishment of his first term.
It might not have been what The Washington Post called a “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week.” But it was pretty bad.
The president’s answer was to return to the message he’s been testing for a month: It’s all the fault of the Republicans in Congress who are ignoring the To Do list he unveiled on May 8 in Albany, N.Y. The list is a mix of previously announced measures, including tax credits for hiring, mortgage relief for homeowners, and expanded tax credits for clean energy.
Anticipating that message, House Republicans fired back before Obama even spoke. Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, noted that the To Do list “has been ignored in the Democrat-run Senate.” Trying to keep the blame at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Buck, contended that the Republican House already has “passed more than 30 jobs bills that are sitting in the Senate right now.”
The president argued that the economic growth is not as robust as it should be because of layoffs by state and local governments. “Overall, the private sector has been doing a good job creating jobs. We’ve seen record profits in the corporate sector,” he said. “The big challenge we have in our economy right now is state and local government hiring has been going in the wrong direction.”
Republicans, led by Romney, seized on his comment that “the private sector’s doing fine.” In a statement, Romney asked, “Is he really that out of touch?” He added, “I think he’s defining what it means to be detached and out of touch with the American people,” calling Obama’s comment an “extraordinary miscalculation.”
The GOP has been quick to charge that Obama is trying to blame Europe for problems here at home. But the abbreviated press conference, during which the president took questions from three reporters, did provide the sharpest insight yet into both the president’s approach to the European crisis and the amount of his time it is demanding.
“It’s fair to say that over the last two years, I’m in consistent discussions with European leadership and consistent discussions with my economic team,” he said, adding, “This is a global economy now and what happens anywhere in the world can have an impact here in the United States.”
Obama’s concern for the fragility of the European Union and the plight of hard-hit countries like Greece was evident as he tried to strike a careful balance between supporting allied leaders and warning them against policy missteps.
“What we’ve tried to do is to be constructive, to not frame this as us scolding them or telling them what to do, but give them advice based on our experiences here,” Obama told reporters.
In his most expansive comments yet on the situation across the Atlantic, he pointedly warned Greece not to leave the EU. “The Greek people need to recognize that their hardships will likely be worse if they choose to exit the Eurozone,” he said.
Obama also cautiously praised European leaders for coming to the conclusion that they need to stress growth and not exclusively focus on austerity. “They understand the seriousness of the situation and the urgent need to act,” he said. “They’ve got to promote economic growth and job creation. Some countries have discovered it’s a lot harder to rein in deficits and debt if your economy’s not growing.”
The president said EU leaders face “tough” decisions, but that “Europe has the capacity to make them. And they have America’s support.”
He did not add – but could have – that the sooner the continent stabilizes economically, the sooner the president’s reelection campaign can rebound and the less likely it is he will have to suffer through another week as gloomy as the one just ended.
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Obama: Debt, deficits were 'baked into the cake'
Politico44 ^ | 6/12/12 | REID J. EPSTEIN and BYRON TAU
Obama said that the country's budget deficits and big debt were the result of the George W. Bush's two tax cuts, as well as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
"They baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts... and the war," Obama said.
"It's like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, a martini and all that stuff, then just as you're sitting down they leave and accuse you of running up the tab," Obama said.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
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Obama: The GOP stuck me with the tab for a steak dinner
Hot Air ^ | June 12, 2012 | Erika Johnsen
Posted on June 12, 2012 7:52:18 PM EDT by Sir Napsalot
He. Cannot. Be. Serious. And yet, he is. If this doesn’t qualify as playing up the intellectually cheap, populist, class-warfare rhetoric, then I don’t know what does. He’s not just decrying ‘tax cuts for the wealthy’ (a.k.a., here, the Bush-era tax cuts) as a paltry route to prosperity, he’s throwing in a steak-and-a-martini metaphor to really classy it up!
(snip) “Those of us who have spent time in the real world understand that the problem is not that the American people aren’t productive enough,” Obama said during a fundraiser today, after saying that Romney believes that America “automatically” prospers when the wealthy profit. “[Romney says] his 25 years in the private sector gives him a special understanding of how the economy works, [so] my question is why are you running with the same bad ideas that brought our economy to the brink of disaster?” … The president also said that Republicans, not Democrats, caused the current budget crisis. “I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit!” he said. Obama compared Republicans to a person who orders a steak dinner and martini and then, “just as you’re sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab.”
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
LMFAO!!!!!
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http://www.politico.com/multimedia/video/2012/06/obama-debt-deficits-were-baked-into-the-cake.html
So obama cries and blames bush for the deficit he inherited, its worse four years later and he still blames bush?
LMFAO!
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Obama: The GOP stuck me with the tab for a steak dinner
Hot Air ^ | June 12, 2012 | Erika Johnsen
Posted on June 12, 2012 7:52:18 PM EDT by Sir Napsalot
He. Cannot. Be. Serious. And yet, he is. If this doesn’t qualify as playing up the intellectually cheap, populist, class-warfare rhetoric, then I don’t know what does. He’s not just decrying ‘tax cuts for the wealthy’ (a.k.a., here, the Bush-era tax cuts) as a paltry route to prosperity, he’s throwing in a steak-and-a-martini metaphor to really classy it up!
(snip) “Those of us who have spent time in the real world understand that the problem is not that the American people aren’t productive enough,” Obama said during a fundraiser today, after saying that Romney believes that America “automatically” prospers when the wealthy profit. “[Romney says] his 25 years in the private sector gives him a special understanding of how the economy works, [so] my question is why are you running with the same bad ideas that brought our economy to the brink of disaster?” … The president also said that Republicans, not Democrats, caused the current budget crisis. “I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit!” he said. Obama compared Republicans to a person who orders a steak dinner and martini and then, “just as you’re sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab.”
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
LMFAO!!!!!
2008 - he promised to cut it in half. F A I L
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Almost 4 years later and he is still blaming Bush?
Sad thing is that there are people out there, some who even post on this board, that believe that crap. Even sadder is that they actually have the right to vote and make the same mistake again of supporting that imbecile.
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Almost 4 years later and he is still blaming Bush?
Sad thing is that there are people out there, some who even post on this board, that believe that crap. Even sadder is that they actually have the right to vote and make the same mistake again of supporting that imbecile.
Hehe what has the most impact 8 years as president or 4?
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2008 - he promised to cut it in half. F A I L
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WHY IS THIS MAN WHINING? (Obama) (Video)
Powerline ^ | June 14,2012 | SCOTT JOHNSON
Why is this man whining, blaming the federal budget deficit on George Bush three-and-a-half years into his term in office? He must think we’re really, really stupid.
Virtually upon entering office, Obama signed off on enormous spending programs including the monumental stimulus bill. This included a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office involving mind-boggling expansions of federal agencies such as the EEOC. More here and here.
The putative importance of deficit spending has been a doctrinal keystone of the administration. It gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program that held unemployment below 8 percent. At least it gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program. Remember, Mr. President, you didn’t want to let a crisis go to waste?
Obama’s blaming his predecessor for his own record as his first time comes to a close is incredibly unbecoming. Listen to his tone in the video. The whining makes him unlikable. But it is not just the tone that is off.
His comments are ineffective. It’s too soon to rewrite history. We know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is almost to the point where, as Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, every word he says is false, including “and” and “the.”
His comments are mendacious as well, of course. As I say, we know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is not just his comments that are ineffective. His policies are as well, assuming their intent was to foster economic growth. On the contrary, they have retarded economic growth.
His comments are demeaning to his office. This guy is president of the United States. He is whining while wildly stretching the truth. It is unbecoming when a child behaves like this, let alone a president.
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WHY IS THIS MAN WHINING? (Obama) (Video)
Powerline ^ | June 14,2012 | SCOTT JOHNSON
Why is this man whining, blaming the federal budget deficit on George Bush three-and-a-half years into his term in office? He must think we’re really, really stupid.
Virtually upon entering office, Obama signed off on enormous spending programs including the monumental stimulus bill. This included a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office involving mind-boggling expansions of federal agencies such as the EEOC. More here and here.
The putative importance of deficit spending has been a doctrinal keystone of the administration. It gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program that held unemployment below 8 percent. At least it gave us the trillion dollar stimulus program. Remember, Mr. President, you didn’t want to let a crisis go to waste?
Obama’s blaming his predecessor for his own record as his first time comes to a close is incredibly unbecoming. Listen to his tone in the video. The whining makes him unlikable. But it is not just the tone that is off.
His comments are ineffective. It’s too soon to rewrite history. We know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is almost to the point where, as Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, every word he says is false, including “and” and “the.”
His comments are mendacious as well, of course. As I say, we know he is wildly stretching the truth. It is not just his comments that are ineffective. His policies are as well, assuming their intent was to foster economic growth. On the contrary, they have retarded economic growth.
His comments are demeaning to his office. This guy is president of the United States. He is whining while wildly stretching the truth. It is unbecoming when a child behaves like this, let alone a president.
How long to you get to 100,000 posts? 3 weeks?
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Obama's New Message: I Need More Time (To undo damage done by George W. Bush)
Christian Post ^ | 06/13/2012 | Napp Nazworth
In a Thursday speech, President Barack Obama will argue that he needs four more years to undo the damage done under his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
The Obama campaign's new tactic will be to convince voters that they would be worse off with his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, as president because Romney would be similar to Bush, according to an analysis by Andy Sullivan and Caren Bohan for Reuters. Sullivan and Bohan spoke with some Obama campaign insiders for the report.
With the economy in poor shape, many Democrats are coming to the conclusion that they need to contrast Obama's achievements with the state of the economy when he took office in 2009.
Just a month before Obama won election, the nation saw a financial collapse accompanied by a swift decline in home prices. A Monday report by the Federal Reserve quantified the economic devastation of that recession: American's median net worth fell to its lowest levels since 1992.
Obama's new message is reflected by Jonathan Bernstein in a Tuesday article for The Washington Post. The 2012 election is really an election between Obama and George W. Bush, he writes.
Since Obama entered the White House during the deepest part of the recession, Bernstein reasons, the 2012 election will come down to whether voters believe Obama should be held responsible for the economy's current deprivation.
"That's why so many of the campaign messages you're going to hear this year come down to the argument about whether Barack Obama should be rewarded or punished for the current state of the economy, which boils down, in large part, to that Obama vs. Bush question," Bernstein wrote.
In a preview of what's to come, Obama has tied Romney's policies to those of George W. Bush in recent speeches.
"When I hear Governor Romney say his 25 years in the private sector gives him a special understanding of how the economy works, my question is, why are you running with the same bad ideas that brought our economy to the brink of disaster," Obama said.
The setting for Thursday's speech is intended to reinforce Obama's message. Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland is known for its retraining programs which help laid-off workers find new careers in biotechnology, wind power and advanced automotive manufacturing.
Obama will likely use the setting to contrast his proposals for more spending for education and job training with Republican proposals to reduce spending in these areas.
"It's a very successful institution that's a good forum for the president's message. It's likely to appeal to voters whose support he needs," John Green, professor of political science at University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, told Reuters.
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Pathetic. fucking pathetic.
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Still blaming everyone else.
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Obama’s Pity Party
Column: The president lives increasingly in the past
Obama in Cleveland / The Big Lebowski / AP
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BY: Matthew Continetti - June 15, 2012 5:00 am
I can’t be the only person in America who, at about minute 35 in President Obama’s almost hour-long “framing” speech in Cleveland Thursday, wanted to tell the president, as the Dude famously screams at Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, “You’re living in the past!”
Obama’s overly long, repetitive, and by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory address was so soaked through with nostalgia that MSNBC should have broadcast it in sepia tones. The speech—which even the liberal Obama biographer Jonathan Alter called one of the president’s “least successful” political communications—revealed an incumbent desperately trying to replay the 2008 election. But no oratory will make up for a flawed record and a vague, fissiparous, and unappealing agenda.
The president himself forced this abrupt re-launch of his reelection campaign. After a bad week that began with terrible job numbers, proceeded to Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall, and culminated in awful fundraising news, Obama tried to recover last Friday by addressing the press on the state of the economy. Except things went horribly wrong. The president uttered six words—“the private sector is doing fine”—that not only will plague him for the rest of the campaign, but also perfectly captured his complacent attitude toward all things outside the realm of government.
The moment prompted a burst of panic throughout the Democratic hive mind, with media types clucking their tongues at the president’s campaign and party strategists questioning the salience of his message. Yesterday’s event in Ohio was thus intended to serve as a sort of domestic analogue to President Obama’s “reset” with Russia. By the looks of things, it will prove to be just as unsuccessful.
The very idea that Obama has the ability to shape his political fortunes through rhetoric is a backwards-looking myth. It is part of the pop narrative of Obama’s 2008 candidacy, in which the young freshman senator was able to rescue his moribund campaign from the evil Clinton machine by giving a single speech at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner in November 2007. More likely it was Obama’s antiwar stance in an antiwar party that gave him the edge in the Iowa caucuses the following January, but that has not stopped the president or his supporters from having an almost theological attachment to his oratorical prowess.
The evidence in this case, however, is decidedly on the side of the nonbelievers. The Washington Post counts over 500 speeches or appearances where the president has mentioned health care, but his overhaul remains remarkably unpopular. The president’s campaign appearances on behalf of Creigh Deeds in Virginia, Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, and Rep. Tom Perriello in Virginia were unsuccessful, which may have been why he didn’t even bother to campaign in Wisconsin for Tom Barrett (who lost anyway). A televised address last July did not win Obama his lusted-after tax increase on the rich, nor did remarks to a joint session of Congress win passage of his American Jobs Act. Eleven “major” speeches on the economy have not generated a full recovery or prevented economic indicators from backsliding. Indeed, one of President Obama’s few accomplishments has been to prove, definitively, the worthlessness of the bully pulpit.
Obama puts his verbal talents to use by fashioning straw men who flatter his ideological prejudices. There are, for example, only two types of Republicans in the president’s speeches: dead or defeated ones who happened to be reasonable people who acted in good faith, and living and successful ones who “believe that if you simply take away regulations and cut taxes by trillions of dollars, the market will solve all of our problems on its own,” and who want to end “the guarantee of basic security we’ve always provided the elderly, and the sick, and those who are actively looking for work.”
Surrounded by this army of hay, Obama and his staff have discovered a strange and newfound respect for Senator McCain, whom they defeated by seven points three and a half years ago, and who regularly denounced his own supporters when he disagreed with them. “I had some strong disagreements with John McCain,” the president recalled wistfully at a Philadelphia fundraiser Tuesday, “but there were certain baselines that we both agreed on,” such as immigration amnesty, global warming, and the regulation of political speech. And so McCain has become, in Obama’s imagination, the perfect Republican: honorable, moderate, and unsuccessful.
This is part of the president’s attempt to turn 2012 into a replay of 2008. In Obama’s absurd telling, every Republican president prior to George W. Bush would have been comfortable with the economic agenda of the contemporary Democratic Party. Lincoln backed the transcontinental railroad, so obviously he would have supported a $4 trillion government, most of which is spent on checks for old people. Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway System to maneuver troops, civilians, and missiles in case World War III broke out, which naturally suggests he would have supported stimulus bills that pay off public sector and construction unions and finance alternative energy moguls who donate to Democratic campaigns.
In his Cleveland speech, Obama preposterously invoked the memory of Nixon—Richard Nixon—because the second-most reviled Republican in modern memory “created the Environmental Protection Agency.” Ronald Reagan? Forget supply-side economics and the Strategic Defense Initiative and the 1986 tax reform and Iran-contra. “He worked with Democrats to save Social Security,” and “raised taxes to help pay down an exploding deficit.” All is forgiven.
Obama writes these fictional historical portraits not to pay tribute to his antecedents, but to explain, in a self-serving way, his lack of executive achievements. The economy is suffering and the deficit is hemorrhaging, he suggests, only because today’s GOP is so radical and unreasonable. (This is the same party, incidentally, that won 51 percent of the national House vote in the most recent election.)
The country’s troubles, we are told, were caused by Obama’s direct predecessor, whose decapitated head recently made a cameo appearance on HBO. “It’s like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, martini and all that stuff, and then just as you’re sitting down, they leave and accuse you of running up the tab,” Obama told Baltimore donors during one of the six fundraisers he held Tuesday. Of course, not 24 hours later, he stiffed the BBQ restaurant where he had held a Father’s Day lunch with two servicemen and two barbers.
“The problems we’re facing right now have been more than a decade in the making,” he told his audience in Cleveland. He mentioned our “decade” of problems eight times, subtly excusing his inability to improve the domestic situation by diminishing any role he may have had in creating or prolonging it.
The president’s grossest use of nostalgia, however, has to be in his appeals to the aftermath of the Second World War, when “there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own; that we needed certain investments to give hardworking Americans skills they needed to get a good job, and entrepreneurs the platforms they needed to create good jobs; that we needed consumer protections that made American products safe and American markets sound.”
Here Obama conjures up a progressive Eden, when Democrats and liberal Republicans shared the presidency, and Democrats ruled Congress practically without interruption. He holds this rather peculiar and problematic historical situation as a scenario that might be replicated. It can’t. It shouldn’t. One of the reasons America was doing well economically at that time was that much of the rest of the world was a rubble-strewn junkyard. Nor did women or African Americans or gay people exactly participate in this time of “shared prosperity.” Oddly for someone with intellectual pretensions, Obama never asks why the politics of the New Frontier and Great Society came to a fairly disastrous end. He wouldn’t like the answer.
We are left with the paradox of a backward-looking progressive calling on the American people to march forward. No wonder the public is anxious, and worried about the future. Our incumbent president is holding a giant pity party, while failing to address the nation’s challenges in a responsible manner. Like Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak, Barack Obama is a man living in the past. And there is no Dude or Donny to save him.
This entry was posted in Obama Campaign and tagged Bully Pulpit, Cleveland
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The Buck Stops Over There
Blaming Europe for the U.S. economy.
Irwin M. Stelzer
June 25, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 39
Barack Obama doesn’t have George W. Bush to kick around anymore. At least not credibly. Sure, he will continue to argue that he inherited such a mess that his own policies can only be regarded as a smashing success. But it’s been four years since the patient was turned over to the new president for treatment, and the economy’s stubborn failure to recover its robustness tells us something about the efficacy of the Obama medicine. Which makes it increasingly difficult for him to continue to play the blame-GWB game. So Obama has found a new cause of falling growth and stubbornly high unemployment: Europe.
Now, no one can argue that our European friends are paragons. They have fiddled while Athens burned; done too little too late to save Spain’s financial system; forced an exodus of talent such as Ireland hasn’t seen since the potato famine (I exaggerate); replaced democratically elected governments in Greece and Italy with “technocrats”; issued a plethora of communiqués that amused but did not calm the markets; and adopted policies that have driven deficits up by stifling growth. Plenty of stuff to warrant a presidential j’accuse. Except for two things: The American pot is ill-placed to call the European kettle black, and the president’s lack of personal support from his colleagues at the G7, G20, and other meetings makes him a less-than-ideal policy salesman. More important, the president’s attempt to set Europe up as the new fall guy for his failed policies—besides Bush, other alibis have included supply chain interruptions due to Japan’s tsunami—seems, shall we say, lacking in empirical support.
Europeans are disinclined to accept American advice for two reasons. First, our deficit exceeds that of the eurozone as a whole, and according to the latest studies by the Congressional Budget Office, we are in danger of incurring so much debt that economic growth will be well-nigh impossible. Hardly a model to which Europe should aspire. When Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to advise Europeans to step up borrow-and-spend, he was met with scorn. “It’s always much easier to give advice to others than to decide for yourself,” German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble announced to the press, a thought usually expressed in the privacy of a conference room. Second, our political gridlock makes the slow-moving decision process of the eurocracy seem speedy, and our partisan feuding the acrimonious Germany-versus-everyone-else circus in Europe a lovefest. Obama’s pleas to the Europeans to speed up decision-making are, to put it mildly, lacking in credibility.
On a more personal level, Obama has trouble getting a hearing from his European counterparts, I am told by attendees at various G7, G8, G20, and G-whatever meetings. He stands aloof from them, a man apart in gatherings of politicians who are by instinct flesh-pressers. Reliable informants tell me that his colleagues at these meetings would at times do George W. Bush a favor when he needed one for domestic political purposes—they liked him even if they found some of his policies insufficiently pacific.
Obama enjoys no such advantage. This is the man who couldn’t get the Olympics for his hometown of Chicago, and who was treated with contempt by China, and ignored by other nations at a meeting in Denmark when he sought some progress on global warming to advertise to his green constituents. This is also the man whose partner in a diplomatic reset, Vladimir Putin, said he was too busy to attend the G8 and NATO meetings at which President Obama served as host, and then found time between harassing dissidents to hop over to Beijing for a round of meetings.
The president’s lack of standing with his European counterparts is unfortunate. With Germany so far sticking to its austerity über alles policy, an American voice calling for more emphasis on pro-growth policies would be an important counterweight. Never mind: The Europeans will have to work that out with German chancellor Angela Merkel, and persuade her that hardworking Germans should transfer more of their income and wealth to the rest of Europe—a task made more difficult by French president François Hollande’s decision to roll back one of Nicolas Sarkozy’s reforms and lower the retirement age for many workers from 62 to 60 years, while Germans are expected to remain in the traces until 65-67 years of age.
So much for where we are. Now for where we are going. Economists are uncertain, but the consensus seems to be that such growth as our economy will chalk up between now and the election will be insufficient to create enough jobs to make his stimulus program a talking point for the president and his supporters, especially if the recent slowdown in consumer buying persists. No surprise, says the White House: The European contagion has hit our shores. Why, just look at the devastating effect of Europe’s unfolding recession on our exports. Well, let’s look.
While exports have been contributing to our recovery, we remain a nation not highly dependent on peddling stuff to foreigners. To the extent that we do, our leading customers are Canada and Mexico, not widely considered European countries. Last year, total exports accounted for a bit less than 14 percent of our GDP, 22 percent of which went to the EU—or 3.1 percent of GDP. Last month, the month of the miserable jobs report that the president wants to pin on the EU, our exports to that troubled area dropped by some 11 percent, or 0.3 percent of our GDP. If anyone outside of the White House believes that such a trivial drop in shipments to Europe caused job creation here to slow, he has yet to emerge.
Indeed, the mechanism by which Europe’s troubles will reach our shores is, to put it mildly, unclear. Our mutual funds have greatly reduced their exposure to Europe’s banks, and our own banks are in far better shape and less linked to their European counterparts than ever. In fact, it can be argued that Europe’s difficulties have made America more of a safe haven for flight capital, thereby helping to keep both interest rates and inflation here low as the strong dollar puts downward pressure on commodity prices.
There is one contagion mechanism that might, only might, fit the president’s narrative as he attempts to divert attention from his failed policies by pinning blame on Europe—and most especially on Frau Merkel, who continues to link aid to her less fortunate eurozone colleagues to their willingness to rein in their trade unions, reform their labor markets, and take an ax to their public sector payrolls. Wall Streeters, or some of them, contend that a worsening of the situation in Europe, especially a Grexit—Greek exit from the eurozone—will rattle stock markets here, cause a flight from shares, and hit investors in their pocketbooks, with knock-on effects on consumer spending and business investments. But as the estimable Bret Stephens pointed out last week in the Wall Street Journal, previous overseas financial upheavals have had no such effects on the U.S. economy. Do not confuse the instantaneous response of the stock market with a fundamental change in the economy. After the 1997 collapse of Asian currencies, the Dow plunged, but the economy did not, growing at better than 4 percent, a feat it repeated after the Russian ruble crisis. “Bear this not-so-ancient history in mind,” writes Stephens, “as the Excuse-Maker-in-Chief cites another imploding region to explain 1.9 percent growth and 8.2 percent unemployment.”
None of this is to deny that some U.S. companies will find life a bit less pleasant should the European recession deepen and lengthen. They will: Starbucks is already seeing a slight drop in sales in Europe. Nor should we be as confident that we will escape any fallout from a European financial upset and its ripple effects as the president is that we will be hit hard by such an event. If we learned anything from the aftermath of the demise of Lehman Brothers it is that we should not be overly confident in our ability to understand all of the interconnections in global financial markets. So it is not inappropriate to worry. But neither is it appropriate to excuse the president’s inability to cope with our economy’s weakness by a serial hunt for some outside force on which to place the blame. Or the Republicans’ willingness to make it easy for the president to avoid a grand compromise on fiscal policy by elevating a desire for lower taxes on high earners to the sole, or at least the primary goal of economic policy.
In the end the course of the American economy will be determined not in Berlin, but in the voting booths of America, where voters face a choice, not an echo—a choice between a candidate who believes, really believes, that America’s future prosperity depends on an expansion of the public sector, and one who seems more likely to see our salvation in unleashing the private sector by reducing regulations and reforming the tax system. So far, Europe’s voters have been denied a voice in their economic future by a eurocracy skilled at avoiding the ballot box. We are luckier here in America.
Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
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June 18, 2012 4:00 A.M.
Obama’s Revisionism
He predicted a strong economy, but blames his failure on Bush.
By John R. Lott Jr.
Americans’ patience is running thin. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 40 months. Since the recovery started, over 7.2 million Americans have given up looking for work and left the labor force. It is during recessions, not recoveries, that people are supposed to give up looking for work.
But it is obviously all Bush’s fault. At least, that is President Obama’s new take. During his big economic address on Thursday, Obama repeatedly said that the economic problems we face today were “a decade in the making.”
But there is a problem with Obama’s logic. Over the last three-and-a-half years, the president and his administration have continually claimed that the stimulus was working and that a robust recovery was starting. If the legacy of the Bush administration policies was going to hinder the recovery so badly, why did Obama keep on predicting that things were going to get better soon?
Recall that Obama told the Today show’s Matt Lauer in February 2009: “We’re starting to make some progress. But there’s still gonna be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s gonna be a one-term proposition.”
What about his economic predictions concerning the stimulus? On January 9, 2009, the incoming Obama administration predicted that the unemployment rate was going to peak at 7.9 percent during July, August, and September of 2009 and then gradually fall to 5.8 percent in May of this year. Not even close to 8.2 percent, last month’s actual number.
After the stimulus was signed into law in February 2009, following the fourth quarter of 2008’s 6.2 percent drop in GDP, the administration put out new predictions claiming that unemployment would peak at 8.1 percent in 2009 and drop to 6.3 percent by now. Again, that is not even close to what has happened.
In March 2009, when some economists, such as Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, questioned whether the stimulus would produce the promised benefits, Obama supporter Paul Krugman attacked their honesty. In one blog post at the New York Times entitled “Roots of evil,” Krugman accused Mankiw of “more than a bit of deliberate obtuseness” and claimed that “we can expect fast growth.”
Claims that the economy was on the verge of improving go back to the very beginning of the administration. Larry Summers, who then served as Obama’s chief economic adviser, promised on January 25, 2009, that the economy would start improving “within weeks” of the stimulus plan’s being passed. Indeed, Summers touted the “shovel ready” nature of the jobs program as being “timely, targeted, and temporary.” It was supposedly targeted at hiring unemployed workers quickly, within 90 days, and lasting until the private sector was able to get back on its feet.
In March 2009, just five weeks after passing the stimulus, President Obama perceived an upswing and started off a press conference by announcing: “We’re beginning to see signs of progress. . . . This plan’s already saved the jobs of teachers and police officers. It’s creating construction jobs to rebuild roads and bridges.”
Obama declared later, in May, that the massive spending program was “already seeing results” and had created or saved almost 150,000 jobs.
By September 2009, Vice President Biden was gushing: “In my wildest dreams, I never thought [the stimulus] would work this well.”
In April of the following year, the unemployment rate was still at 9.8 percent, but Biden thought that now, for sure, the economy was just about to boom: “Some time in the next couple of months we’re going to be creating between 250,000 jobs a month and 500,000 jobs a month.” The administration touted the summer of 2010 as the “Summer of Recovery.”
But by the end of the next summer, in August 2011, the unemployment rate was still at 9.1 percent. It was no longer possible to claim the stimulus had worked well, so the Obama administration began its strategy of blaming the slow growth and high unemployment on everything but its own policies.
The earthquake in Japan, the debt crisis in Europe, the Arab Spring, and the rise in oil prices have all been blamed for the unprecedentedly slow recovery. But economic growth had already ground to a halt before those events transpired, during the first three months of 2011 — when GDP grew by just 0.1 percent.
If Obama’s economic predictions had come true, he surely would have claimed the stimulus was a success. But with a bad economy, he acts as if he knew that Bush’s policies would keep the economy from growing. Why should anyone trust Obama when he can’t even admit that all these predictions were wrong?
— John R. Lott Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor and the co-author of the just released Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future (John Wiley & Sons).
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Stats of the Day: "Obama Blames" Garners 573,000 Google Results and More
Pundit Press ^ | 6/18/12 | Aurelius
Today, we decided to check out some statistics and facts out on the internet. It was relatively easy to decide what specifically to look for, particularly with a certain person in the Presidency who would like you to believe that he has not been in office a single day.
First off, we seached "Obama blames" into Google. We made certain to actually put it into quotation marks, so that the results had to have the words "Obama blames" in order. In other words, "Obama Blames Polar Bears for Global Warming" might show up, but "Obama: The Blame For Global Warming is Angry Chickens" would not.
The result? 573,000 matches. That's a lot of blame to go around. In comparison, "Bush Blames" receives only 207,000 results, and he was in office twice as long as Mr. Obama. If you search "Obama Blames" without quotation marks, you will find an astounding 10,700,000 results.
...Now for other searches. "Obama whines" produces 14,300 results while "Obama lies" garners 586,000 results. "Obama Cries" nets 51,300 hits and "Obama is a Marxist" gets 768,000 results.
A picture found under "Obama Cries"
(Excerpt) Read more at punditpress.com ...
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Obama Regime Alarmed Egyptian Military Undermining Muslim Brotherhood Victory
Conservative Nation News/Reuters ^ | June 18, 2012
Posted on June 18, 2012 8:39:38 PM EDT by Free ThinkerNY
(Reuters) - The United States expressed alarm that its protégés in the Egyptian army were abusing hopes for democracy by ordering more military rule just as the Muslim Brotherhood was claiming victory in the country's first free presidential election.
The Islamists' self-assurance was contested by the other candidate in the run-off race, a former general who was prime minister when Hosni Mubarak was ousted last year by an army anxious to save itself from the revolution in the streets.
But there was still no result from the two-day poll, although independent officials privately spoke of a likely win for Islamist Mohamed Morsy over military man Ahmed Shafik.
Yet whatever the outcome - and one electoral supervisor said it might not be announced until Thursday - the new president was shorn in advance of much of his power by a decree issued by the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) just as polling stations closed and two days after it had dissolved a new, Islamist-led parliament.
(Excerpt) Read more at conservativenationnews.b logspot.com ...
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NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT
Obama’s ‘They’-Did-It Campaign
By Victor Davis Hanson
June 20, 2012 4:00 A.M.
The next five months should be interesting — given that Barack Obama is now experiencing something entirely unique in his heretofore stellar career: widespread criticism of his performance and increasing weariness with his boilerplate and his teleprompted eloquence.
Starting with his Occidental days, and going on through Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, the U.S. Senate, and the 2008 campaign, rarely has Mr. Obama faced much criticism, much less any accountability that would involve judging his rhetoric by actual achievement.
Yet what worked for so long now does no longer. Obama simply cannot run on 40 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, a June 2009 recovery that sputtered, $5 trillion in new debt, serial $1 trillion–plus annual deficits, and dismal GDP growth. Few believe any more that what he and the Democratic Congress passed in the first two years of his administration worked — and fewer still that the Republicans are to blame in the last 17 months for stopping him from pursuing even more disastrous policies. He cannot turn instead to the advantages of Obamacare, a dynamic foreign policy, national-security sobriety, a scandal-free administration, or stellar presidential appointments. The furor over security leaks makes it harder to keep conjuring up the ghost of Osama bin Laden.
What then to expect if the race remains tight or Obama finds himself behind?
1. There will be lots more “the dog ate my homework” excuses for the dismal economy. The troubles in the EU, the Japanese tsunami, the East Coast earthquake, ATM machines, Wall Street, inclement weather, the Republican Congress, the Tea Party, and George W. Bush have pretty much been exhausted. But there is always hurricane season, a Greek exit from the euro, or a Middle East flare-up. Expect sometime before October to hear that a new “they” upset the brilliant recovery and is to blame for the chronic economic lethargy. One of the strangest aspects of Obama’s rationalizations is their utter incoherence and illogic: He brags that America pumped more oil and gas under his watch, even as he did his best to stop just that on public lands; he brags that he put in fewer regulations than did Bush, even as he boasts that he reined in business; he brags that he had to borrow $5 trillion to grow government in order to save the country, even as he claims he reduced the size of government. Why does Obama try to take credit for things on Tuesday that he damned on Monday? Is his new campaign theme: Despite (rather than because of) Obama?
2. Mitt Romney is a tough target. If Obama once loudly admitted to abuse of coke, Romney quietly confesses to avoidance even of Coca-Cola. His personal life is blameless. His family seems the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. And Romney has more or less succeeded at most things he has attempted. No matter, he is Mormon. Expect legions of Obama surrogates to focus on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially its supposed endemic racism, sexism, and homophobia. Religious bigotry is not especially liberal, but the race/class/gender agenda trumps all such qualms, and in any case Obama and his team have never claimed to be especially tolerant or fair-minded in using any means necessary to achieve noble ends. Whereas the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church were off the table in 2008, Mormonism will be very much on it by late summer.
3. We will read and hear about race 24/7. Racism is not an easy sell today, given that without tens of millions of white voters, Barack Obama would not have been elected. Nor is it easy to condemn America as racist when the white vote in 2008 was split far more evenly than were the 96 percent of African-American voters who preferred Barack Obama. Nonetheless, racial relations are at an all-time low. Almost weekly a member of the Congressional Black Caucus levels yet another bizarre charge of racism, and a Hollywood actor or singer blurts out something that would be deemed racially offensive were he not African-American; the polarization over the Trayvon Martin case threatens to overshadow the polarization over the O. J. Simpson trial; flash mobbing in the inner cities is as much daily fare on the uncensored Internet as it is absent from the network news; and both Barack Obama (the Skip Gates affair, the Trayvon Martin quip, the “punish our enemies” call, etc.) and Eric Holder (“cowards,” congressional oversight is racially motivated, “my people,” etc.) have made it a point to make race essential, not incidental, to their governance. If in 2008 liberals celebrated the election of Barack Obama as proof of a new postracial harmony, in 2012 a tight race will be cited as greater proof of a new ascendant racism. The idea that to elect Obama wins the nation racial exemption, and to defeat him earns condemnation, is illogical. No matter: By late fall, expect a desperate Obama administration to be dredging up the charge overtly, nonstop, and in person.
4. We should look for new furor against the “system” in direct proportion to the praise heaped on it in 2008 for being redeemed. The polls, if unfavorable, will be described as innately biased. The uncivil Rush Limbaugh, talk radio generally, Fox News, and tea-party bloggers, we will be lectured, are subversive, peddle hate, foment violence, and should be silenced. Whereas David Brooks, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Christopher Buckley were recommended reading in 2008, given their balanced and fair-minded critiques of George W. Bush and their appreciation of Barack Obama, in 2012 we will learn that they are right-wing attack dogs for losing their enthusiasm for the first-class mind and temperament of Barack Obama. Whereas a Pat Buchanan on MSNBC railing against Bush’s war and McCain’s neocon advisers was a reminder of how the libertarian Right has positive affinities with the liberal Left, in 2012 such a paleocon “racist” must be kept off the airwaves. Voter-registration laws and voter-ID requirements, remember, are designed to exclude the oppressed and must be relaxed. Advertising has warped American politics. Super PACs are Romney conspiracies. If big Wall Street money went for Obama in 2008 and thereby won investment banking and the stock market exemption from charges of greed and corruption, in 2012 investors may swing to Romney and thereby incite calls to rein in “big money” and furious op-eds about the toxic mix of politics and cash. If Romney outraises Obama, we will hear again the calls for public campaign financing, which were ignored when a cash-flush Obama renounced public financing in 2008. In 2008, academics, foundation people, the Hollywood crowd, journalists, and liberal politicians confessed that they had fallen in love again with an America that had proved it was not hopeless after all; in 2012, America may prove unsalvageable, with thousands vowing to move to Canada.
5. Suddenly around October the world will become absolutely unsafe. In these dangerous times, Americans must forget their differences, come together, and embrace a bipartisan unity — given that it may be necessary, after all, to hit the Iranian nuclear facilities, since we’ll have learned that the bomb may be a reality by, say, mid-November. Just as we have been reminded that Barack Obama has saved us by his brave decisions to use double agents in Yemen, computer viruses in Iran, Seal Team Six in Pakistan, and philosophically guided Predator assassination hits, so too a strike against Iran may suddenly be of vital national-security interest, though keenly lamented by a Nobel laureate nose-deep in Thomas Aquinas. Cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline delighted greens; the war on the war on women pleased feminists; gays are now on board after Barack Obama decided he really did favor gay marriage; Latinos got nearly a million illegal aliens exempted from immigration law. And yet all those partisan gifts have not yet resulted in a 50 percent approval rating or a lead over Mitt Romney. Something more dramatic is needed, given that there are only so many Obama heroics that can be cobbled together and leaked from classified sources.
We do not know who is going to win the 2012 election, only that it will be closer than the 2008 one — and if Obama keeps it up at his present rate he may destroy the Democratic party for a generation. There is no longer an incumbent George Bush to blame. Romney is a feistier candidate than was John McCain. Fundraising is no longer lopsided. The novelty of the first African-American president has become passé. And “hope and change” has been replaced by a concrete record of three and a half years. Given those realities, if his being an unknown quantity was a reason to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, his being all too familiar will be cause for rejecting him in 2012.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
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Obama Backers Use Race as Alibi for Ebbing Support
By Michael Barone - June 25, 2012
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/06/25/obama_backers_use_race_as_alibi_for_ebbing_support_114592.html
As Barack Obama's lead over Mitt Romney in the polls narrows, and his presumed fundraising advantage seems about to become a disadvantage, it's alibi time for some of his backers.
His problem, they say, is that some voters don't like him because he's black. Or they don't like his policies because they don't like having a black president.
So, you see, if you don't like Obamacare, it's not because it threatens to take away your health insurance, or to deny coverage for some treatments. It's because you don't like black people.
This sort of thing seems to be getting more frequent, or at least more open. As White House Dossier writer Keith Koffler notes, HBO host Bill Maher accused Internet tyro Matt Drudge of being animated by racism because he highlights anti-Obama stories.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown if House Chairman Darrell Issa's treatment of Attorney General Eric Holder was "ethnic." Brown agreed, and Matthews said some Republicans "talk down to the president and his friends."
There's an obvious problem with the racism alibi. Barack Obama has run for president before, and he won. Voters in 2008 knew he was black. Most of them voted for him. He carried 28 states and won 365 electoral votes.
Nationwide, he won 53 percent of the popular vote. That may not sound like a landslide, but it's a higher percentage than any Democratic nominee except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
Democratic national conventions have selected nominees 45 times since 1832. In seven cases, they won more than 53 percent of the vote. In 37 cases, they won less.
That means President Obama won a larger percentage of the vote than Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and (though you probably don't want to bring this up in conversation with him) Bill Clinton.
Now it is true that you can go out in America and find people who would just never vote for a black person. But it's a lot harder than it was a generation or two ago, when most voters admitted to pollsters they would never vote for a black president.
And you can probably find some people who usually vote for Democrats but would not vote for a black Democrat. But not very many of them, and they're likely to be pretty advanced in age, and so there are likely fewer of them around than there were four years ago.
My own view is that such voters were more than counterbalanced by voters who felt that, as an abstract proposition in the light of our history, it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president.
In 2008, Obama, who came to national attention by decrying the polarization of Red-state and Blue-state America, had obvious appeal to voters. I think there is a similar, and similarly unquantifiable, factor working for Obama this year: Many voters feel, as an abstract proposition, that it would be a bad thing for American voters to reject the first black president.
Some conservatives complain that there is a double standard, that whites who vote against Obama are accused of racial motives, while blacks, 95 percent of whom voted for him, are not.
I think that's unfair. Members of an identifiable group that has been in some way excluded from full recognition as citizens will naturally tend to support a candidate who could be the first president from that group. In 1960, Gallup reported that 78 percent of American Catholics voted for John Kennedy.
American blacks have suffered exclusion and discrimination more than any other group. And very large percentages of them regularly vote for candidates who share Obama's views on issues.
What's remarkable about our politics in 2008 and today is that most voters seem to be making their decisions based on their assessment of the issues and the character of the candidates.
The fact that some have, at least for the moment, moved away from supporting Obama to opposing him, or remain unsure, reflects not an increasing racism, but the fact that we simply have more information than we had four years ago.
Most of us are disappointed when our candidates don't win. But that's no excuse for phony alibis.
Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.
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Obama: 30 months of excusing bad jobs numbers
Washington Examiner ^ | 7/6/2012 | Byron York
Posted on Friday, July 06, 2012 3:46:43 PM by markomalley
The Obama White House says Americans should not “read too much into” the latest bad news from the jobs front. Employers added just 80,000 new jobs in June — far fewer than needed for a healthy recovery — and the unemployment rate stayed at 8.2 percent.
Not long after the new figures were released, the White House sent out a statement from Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Facing a bleak situation yet again, Krueger said, “It is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.”
If that sounds familiar, it is because that is what the Obama White House has said during month after month of troubling economic reports. The White House has said it so often, in fact, that the Romney campaign has compiled a list of 30 — yes, 30 — examples, going back to November 2009, of the administration cautioning that Americans should not “read too much into” the latest bad economic news. Here, from the Romney campaign, is that list:
June 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/06/employment-situation-june)
May 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/06/01/employment-situation-may)
April 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/05/04/employment-situation-april)
March 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/06/employment-situation-march)
February 2012: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/09/employment-situation-february)
January 2012: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/03/employment-situation-january)
December 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/06/employment-situation-december)
November 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/02/employment-situation-november)
October 2011: “The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. There is no better example than August’s jobs figure, which was initially reported at zero and in the latest revision increased to 104,000. This illustrates why the Administration always stresses it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/04/employment-situation-october)
September 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/07/employment-situation-september)
August 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/09/02/employment-situation-august)
July 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/05/employment-situation-july)
June 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/08/employment-situation-june)
May 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/06/03/employment-situation-may)
April 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/06/employment-situation-april)
March 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/01/employment-situation-march)
February 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/04/employment-situation-february)
January 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/04/employment-situation-january)
December 2010: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/07/employment-situation-december)
November 2010: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/12/03/employment-situation-november)
October 2010: “Given the volatility in monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/11/05/employment-situation-october)
September 2010: “Given the volatility in the monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/08/employment-situation-september)
July 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative. It is essential that we continue our efforts to move in the right direction and replace job losses with robust job gains.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/06/employment-situation-july)
August 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/03/employment-situation-august)
June 2010: “As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/02/employment-situation-june)
May 2010: “As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/06/04/employment-situation-may)
April 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/07/employment-situation-april)
March 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/02/employment-situation-march)
January 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/05/employment-situation-january)
November 2009: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/04/employment-situation-november)
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Obama Rips Clinton Era in Jobs Report Defense
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by John Nolte6 Jul 2012, 11:00 AM
Off-teleprompter, the President is nothing if not a disaster, and this morning in Ohio, fresh off another heartbreaking jobs report for the American people, Obama attempted to wax eloquent to a small group about the beauty of the middle class and how he is its savior. According to Obama, it was his desire to save the middle class that drove him to get into politics and run for the Illinois State Senate.
Emphasis is mine:
The reason I ran for president, the reason I ran the first time for a State Senate seat on the Southside of Chicago, was because for too many people, that bargain, that dream, felt like it was slipping away. We had gone through a decade where people were working harder and harder, but we didn’t see an increase in income. And profits were going sky high for a lot of companies but jobs weren't growing fast enough. And the cost of everything from health care to college tuition to grocery to gas kept going up faster than people's incomes.
So a lot of folks felt like that idea that we could not only live a good middle class life but more importantly we could pass it on to our kids and they could succeed the way we might not have imagined. They could go to college and do some things we couldn’t imagine doing. That felt like it was slipping away from too many people. That's why I got into politics.
We'll get to how factually challenged all of that is in a bit, but Obama's bid for the Illinois State Senate occurred in 1996, which means that he's trashing the results of Bill Clinton's first term. Clinton ran for reelection in 1996 and won in a walk, largely due to an economy that was thriving. Whether you credit Clinton or the Republican Congress (I credit both) for the economic boom of the 90s, for Obama to trash 1996 as a time when the middle class felt the dream all slipping away is not only nonsense to those of us who lived through it; it is also factually untrue.
During 1996, the U.S. economy saw moderately high growth with low inflation and historically low unemployment. Gross domestic product is forecast to have grown 2.8 percent for 1996. The economy created approximately 2.5 million additional jobs in 1996, a 2.1 percent increase from 1995 levels. Inflation again remained low, around 3.0 percent, and the Federal Reserve was reluctant to change interest rates throughout the year on signs of a slowing economy.
In 1996, we were all feeling the effects of an actual recovery after the shallow recession that cost the first President Bush his job. Clinton's opponent, Bob Dole, lost mainly due to the fact that there were no issues for him to hit Clinton with on the only issue that matters, the economy.
As far as the facts: Obama is also near-delusional talking about gas prices, tuition, and the price of health care increasing in 1996. Under Obama, gas prices have exploded, tuition costs are burying students in mortgage-size debt after they graduate college, and the cost of healthcare has increased almost $2500 per family since 2008. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t kiss What Life Was Like In 1996 on the lips right now.
Furthermore, for Obama to stand there after three and a half years in office and trash 1996 as income, the GDP, manufacturing, and job creation under his watch are all falling -- for him to stand there and pretend to be the Guardian of the Middle Class after jamming through ObamaCare against the wishes of the middle class who will most certainly bear the brunt of this monstrous burden -- is what one might call…
The Audacity of Knowing the Media Will Never Fact-Check You.
Somebody needs to get the President a teleprompter stat.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
www.breitbart.com
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http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-administration-repeated-same-line-jobs-numbers-nearly-171329360.html
What a baby. Blame blame blame.
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He is working on roads everywhere spending $, what about some decent paying jobs?
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Obama Now Blames His Trillion Dollar Deficits on Bush Tax Cuts
Gateway Pundit ^ | July 28,2012 | Jim Hoft
Posted on July 28, 2012 11:05:28 AM EDT by Hojczyk
Today Barack Obama blamed his four years of trillion dollar deficits on the Bush tax cuts. From the president’s Weekly Address:
You see, Republicans in Congress and their nominee for President believe that the best way to create prosperity in America is to let it trickle down from the top. They believe that if our country spends trillions more on tax cuts for the wealthy, we’ll somehow create jobs – even if we have to pay for it by gutting things like education and training and by raising middle-class taxes.
They’re wrong. And I know they’re wrong because we already tried it that way for most of the last decade. It didn’t work. We’re still paying for trillions of dollars in tax cuts that benefitted the wealthiest Americans more than anyone else; tax cuts that didn’t lead to the middle class jobs or higher wages we were promised and that helped take us from record surpluses to record deficits.
And, of course, he’ll get away with these completely inaccurate statements.
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Obama Blames State and Local Governments, Congress for 14.1 Percent Black Unemployment
Weekly Standard ^
Posted on Tuesday, August 07, 2012 4:41:52
Obama Blames State and Local Governments, Congress for 14.1 Percent Black Unemployment Daniel Halper August 7, 2012 3:09 PM
In an interview with Black Enterprise magazine, President Barack Obama blames state and local governments, as well as Congress, for over 14 percent black unemployment.
"Black unemployment still stands at nearly 14%. How do you communicate that the economy is headed in the right direction?," the editor in chief of Black Enterprise asks Obama.
"Most economists will tell you that there is no doubt the economy has gotten stronger, but we are digging ourselves out a deep hole. There are a lot more things we could be doing. To get them done, we need cooperation of Congress. We got the payroll tax portion of [my American Jobs Act] done, but what we didn’t get done is the assistance I was proposing to the states to help them hire back teachers, firefighters, and first responders, because one of the weakest parts of this recovery has been state and local government hiring," Obama responds.
"Given the weaknesses of the construction industry, the American Jobs Act proposed that we rebuild schools, roads, bridges, airport, and ports. That would provide small businesses with opportunities as contractors and vendors in this rebuilding process. Again, Congress needs to act."
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, black unemployment in the month of July was at 14.1 percent.
Additionally, Obama was asked, “How do you respond to criticism that your administration hasn’t done enough to support black businesses?”
The president responded: "My general view has been consistent throughout, which is that I want all businesses to succeed. I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America, but the programs that we have put in place have been directed at those folks who are least able to get financing through conventional means, who have been in the past locked out of opportunities that were available to everybody. So, I’ll put my track record up against anybody in terms of us putting in place broad-based programs that ultimately had a huge benefit for African American businesses."
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/08/20/obama_sighs_when_addressing_economy_at_surprise_briefing.html
LMFAO!!!!!!
Blaming the congress again!
Pathetic.
4 more years, 4 more years 4 more years!
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Today, President Obama sent out a campaign email essentially blaming his supporters if he loses. See, he’s supposedly being outspent. And because he’s supposedly being outspent, he’s losing. And he can’t spend more money unless his supporters fork it over.
This is the campaign version of Obama’s entire economic argument: he can’t fix the economy unless he spends more money. And unless we give him more money, he can’t spend it. So if the economy fails, it’s our fault.
Here’s the perverse logic:
Last week, when I was in Iowa, voters told me they were feeling it. The numbers back it up: Our side is getting outspent 2-to-1 on the air there.
But the folks asking me about this don't want an explanation -- they want to know what I'm going to do about it.
And the fact is that solving this problem is up to you ….
We're losing this air war right now.
I don't have as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008, so this whole thing is riding on you making it happen.
Perhaps the most laughable aspect of this latest desperate missive is Obama’s assertion that he doesn’t have “as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008.” He’s done nothing but campaign since the beginning of the year. From January to mid-June, Obama held more than 160 fundraisers. During that same period in 2004, President George W. Bush had held just 79 fundraisers.
Here’s the sad fact for Obama: nobody’s enamored with him anymore. His spendthrift ways haven’t just bankrupted the country – they’ve bankrupted his campaign. And he still blames everyone else.
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LOL - even musicians are mocking obama for blaming bush.
Sent from my iPad
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/obama-debt-compromise_n_1875759.html
Obama blames the election for not getting a deal on the debt and deficit.
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Everbody vote for him again everything has been great... :D
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Michelle Obama: ‘Instead of Pointing Fingers and Placing Blame, Barack Got to Work’
cnsnews.com ^ | 9/17/12 | Melanie Hunter
Posted on Monday, September 17, 2012 7:24:06 PM by Justaham
First lady Michelle Obama, speaking in Gainesville, Fla., on Monday, said that while the nation was on the verge of another Great Depression, President Barack Obama did not assign blame – instead “he got to work.”
“The economy was losing 800,000 jobs every month, and a lot folks wondered whether we were headed for another great depression. Now this is what Barack faced on day one as president. That’s what awaited him, but instead of pointing fingers and placing blame, Barack got to work, because he was thinking about folks like my dad, like his grandmother,” the first lady said.
“Since the day he took office, on issue after issue, crisis after crisis, that’s what I’ve seen, that’s what we’ve all seen in my husband. We’ve seen his values at work. We’ve seen his vision unfold. We’ve seen the depths of his character, courage, and convictions. Here’s proof: Think back to when Barack first took office, and our economy was on the brink of collapse,” she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
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blame blame blame blame blame
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http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/president-obama-falsely-claims-fast-and-furious-program-begun-under-the-previous-administration
What a fucking baby.
Blaming Bush for Fast n Furious.
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Obama: ‘I Bear Responsibility for Everything--To Some Degree’
By Gregory Gwyn-Williams, Jr.
September 24, 2012
Subscribe to Gregory Gwyn-Williams, Jr.'s posts
(AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama said on 60 Minutes on Sunday that he bears responsibility “for everything--to some degree."
“If you ask me what’s my biggest disappointment, it’s that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked,” Obama said.
CBS News's Steve Kroft then asked him: “And you don’t bear any responsibility for that?”
Obama said, “Oh I think that, you know, as president I bear responsibility for everything--to some degree.”
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Obama claim that Bush is 90% responsible for current deficit gets 100% of Pinocchios at WaPo
posted at 10:01 am on September 26, 2012 by Ed Morrissey
I hit this 60 Minutes quote two days ago in yesterday’s OOTD, but it’s worth revisiting in the form of Glenn Kessler’s fact check at the Washington Post. Kessler misses one of the biggest problems with Barack Obama’s response to Steve Kroft’s question, which was about national debt, and Obama responded by talking about deficits — two different issues, although related. I’ll put the question and the longer answer provided by Kessler together, emphases mine:
KROFT: The national debt has gone up sixty percent in — in the four years that you’ve been in office.
OBAMA: Well, first — first of all, Steve, I think it’s important to understand the context here. When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history. And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but ninety percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10 percent of this increase in the deficit, and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.
Now, if the deficit goes up, the solution would be to either spend less or tax more. Obama has done neither in any of his budget proposals, and as I wrote yesterday, his last two budget proposals would have made the situation worse — which is why even his own party gave neither of them so much as one supporter in three floor votes. Furthermore, the FY2009 budget in place when Obama took office was the creation of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate from the year before, and it was signed into law by Obama in March 2009, not Bush, after Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid played keep-away in the fall of 2008. Barack Obama was part of that effort as a member of the Senate.
Kessler skips over these points to address Obama’s argument that the structural deficit is 90% George Bush’s problem. Kessler says it’s the other way around — that Bush policies account for about 10% of the current annual structural budget deficit, and the rest is evenly split between bad projections from the CBO and Obama’s spending and economic policies:
As can be seen above, CBO’s errors in forecasting played a large role in the demise of the projected surpluses. CBO had kept counting on a gusher of capital gains revenue — and then obviously failed to predict the recession of 2008.
But Obama’s policies also played a big role during his presidency. Using the CBO data for the years 2009-2011, here’s a very rough calculation of the contribution to the deficit. To keep things simple, we did not try to allocate interest expense, and we did not include categories of spending or taxes that were difficult to allocate.
The 2009 fiscal year is especially hard because that budget year is so much of an amalgam of Bush and Obama policies; we essentially split the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program between the two of them. Since this is not intended to be exact, but illustrative, we have rounded numbers and percentages:
2009:
•Economic/technical differences: $570 billion (46 percent)
•Bush policies: $330 billion (27 percent)
•Obama policies: $325 billion (27 percent)
2010:
•Economic/technical: $815 billion (51 percent)
•Bush: $225 billion (14 percent)
•Obama: $565 billion (35 percent)
2011:
•Economic/technical: $720 billion (46 percent)
•Bush: $160 billion (10 percent)
•Obama: $685 billion (44 percent)
Clearly, a huge part of the deficit problem — about half — stems from the recession and forecasting errors. But Obama’s policies represent a big chunk as well.
So how many Pinocchios does Obama get? One hundred percent of them:
Obama certainly inherited an economic mess, and that accounts for a large part of the deficit. But Obama pushed for spending increases and tax cuts that also have contributed in important ways to the nation’s fiscal deterioration. He certainly could argue that these were necessary and important steps to take, but he can’t blithely suggest that 90 percent of the current deficit “is as a consequence” of his predecessor’s policies — and not his own.
As for the citing of the discredited MarketWatch column, we have repeatedly urged the administration to rely on estimates from official government agencies, such as the White House budget office. It is astonishing to see the president repeat this faulty claim once again, as if it were an established fact. Four Pinocchios[.]
And as Kessler points out, the real structural bomb to annual deficits has yet to be triggered. ObamaCare may be deficit neutral in its first ten years — which is still arguable, and based on a fiscal shell game — but after that, “all bets are off
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/obama-romney-lied_n_1938926.html
LOL!!!!!
Obama already blaming romney for the loss.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/10/06/Obama-Blames-Kerry
Lol!!!!! Blaming Kerry!!!!
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Obama (blame game) camp: Ryan budget would have cut embassy security
The Hill ^ | 10/07/12 | Julian Pecquet
Posted on Sunday, October 07, 2012 7:03:46 PM by Libloather
Obama camp: Ryan budget would have cut embassy security
By Julian Pecquet - 10/07/12 05:09 PM ET
Democrats are hitting Mitt Romney over the House GOP budget's potential cuts to embassy security as the Republican candidate and his allies on Capitol Hill seek to make inadequate protection in Libya a campaign issue.
Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), put forward a budget blueprint this year that would have cut non-defense discretionary spending by 19 percent by 2014. While the blueprint doesn't specify cuts to embassy security, applying that figure across-the-board would yield a $300 million reduction in State Department funding for the protection, construction and maintenance of U.S. embassies around the world.
"The president certainly doesn’t need lectures on securing our facilities overseas from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who’ve proposed slashing funding for our diplomatic and embassy security by $298 million dollars" just in 2014 alone, an Obama campaign official told The Hill.
"The cuts to embassy security in the Romney-Ryan budget would amount to $170 million more than even under sequestration. Gov. Romney talks a lot about projecting American power overseas, but it’s unclear how he would do that under the budget he’s endorsed that cuts funding for critical State Department programs and security,” the official added.
Back in March, Jeffrey Zients, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, said that “since the House refused to specify what would be cut, we consider the impacts if the cuts are distributed equally across the board.”
The Romney campaign counters that since the Ryan budget didn't specifically recommend cuts to embassy security, it's unfair to draw the conclusion that Republicans would have slashed funding. The campaign says there was no reference made to cutting embassy security because there were no assumed cuts to embassy security.
"The only candidate who has proposed cuts to our embassy security is President Obama," said a Romney campaign official, in reference to the president signing sequestration into law.
But the Ryan budget doesn't exempt embassy security from cuts, either.
The Obama campaign official said House Republicans have left a $900 billion gap in terms of where their cuts would come from over the next decade. Republicans have a responsibility to spell that out, the official said, and until they do Democrats will operate under the assumption that they will be applied across the board.
Romney has in the past endorsed Ryan's budget while seeking to portray himself as a champion of American power abroad. The Republican candidate has said he's “very supportive” of Ryan's budget blueprint and said earlier this year that it would be “marvelous” if the Democratic-controlled Senate passed it, which didn't happen.
But since picking the House Budget Committee chairman as his running mate, his campaign has insisted the GOP ticket will run on Romney’s budget proposals and not necessarily Ryan’s.
Romney has made the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya last month a centerpiece of his attacks on the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Romney and congressional Republicans have questioned whether the compound received adequate security that could have prevented the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans there.
Romney is expected to attack Obama on Libya during a foreign policy speech Monday while images of the burning Benghazi consulate are still fresh on voters' mind. And House Oversight panel chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is holding a hearing on embassy protection Wednesday morning after several whistleblowers complained that the State Department rejected requests for beefed up security.
Among the politically charged evidence already made public ahead of the hearing is a State Department email from May 2012 rejecting the continued use of a DC-3 airplane by Special Forces troops assigned to protect embassy staff in Libya; they were told to use Libyan flights instead to get around the country after commercial flights were reestablished. It's not clear that providing the plane would have made any difference, especially since the security detail left the country in August.
Democrats counter that those kinds of hard choices would only be tougher under Ryan's budget, which Issa himself supported along with all but 10 House Republicans.
Throughout the campaign, Romney has sought to pin the blame on Obama for deep defense spending cuts that are slated to take effect next year if lawmakers fail to find other ways to cut the deficit.
Democrats hope to undermine that hawkish image by raising doubts about his running mate’s budget proposal.
Under so-called sequestration, which Ryan and many other Republicans voted for, funding for diplomatic and consular programs would be cut by about $1 billion next year, according to a Sept. 14 analysis by the White House budget office. That includes a $129 million cut to the “Embassy Security, Construction, and Maintenance” budget category and another $2 million cut to the “Protection of Foreign Missions and Officials” category, for a total of $131 million. The figure is expected to be roughly the same for 2014, because the sequestration cuts remain at roughly the same level throughout the decade.
Ryan, by contrast, phases in the cuts. His budget called for a 19 percent across-the-board cut to non-defense discretionary spending in 2014, according to Zients, much deeper than the 8.2 percent cut under sequestration. Assuming an across-the-board distribution of the cuts, his proposal would have slashed the first category by $298 million and the second by $5 million, for a total of $303 million – $172 million than the cut under sequestration.
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Obama blames economic contraction on ‘bad decisions’
The Hill ^ | 2/02/13 | Keith Laing
Posted on February 2, 2013 8:58:28 AM EST by Libloather
President Obama blamed the recent contraction of the U.S. economy on “bad decisions in Washington” in his weekly address.
The national economy shrank by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to figures released this week by the Commerce Department. The contraction was an unexpected reversal of months of modest economic growth since the end of the recession in mid-2009.
Obama said in his address that the dip was the fault of “bad decisions” being made in Washington.
“We began this year with economists and business leaders saying that we are poised to grow in 2013,” he said. “But this week, we also received the first estimate of America’s economic growth over the last few months. And it reminded us that bad decisions in Washington can get in the way of our economic progress.”
Obama said there were “real signs of progress” in the 2013 economic outlook, citing increases in home prices and car sales.
But he said the unexpected economic contraction showed the wisdom of his “balanced” approached to budget negotiations with Congress.
“We all agree that it’s critical to cut unnecessary spending,” Obama said. “But we can’t just cut our way to prosperity. It hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work today. It could slow down our recovery. It could weaken our economy. And it could cost us jobs – now, and in the future."
Obama said if Congress follows his lead on the economic decisions, “2013 can be a year of solid growth, more jobs, and higher wages.
“But that will only happen if we put a stop to self-inflicted wounds in Washington,” he warned.
“Everyone in Washington needs to focus not on politics but on what’s right for the country; on what’s right for you and your families,” Obama continued. “That’s how we’ll get our economy growing faster. That’s how we’ll strengthen our middle class. And that’s how we’ll build a country that rewards the effort and determination of every single American.”
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The White House and the Department of Homeland Security were unaware of Immigration Customs and Enforcement's decision to release detainees until the agency announced it, administration officials said Wednesday.
"This was a decision made by career officials at ICE without any input from the White House, as a result of fiscal uncertainty over the continuing resolution, as well as possible sequestration," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.
Personnel at Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington were also unaware of the decision until the announcement was made, a department official told POLITICO.
(WATCH: Janet Napolitano: Sequestration would threaten nation's security)
ICE announced Tuesday that it has released several hundred undocumented immigrants in recent weeks as funding cuts loom. The detainees will instead be monitored in less expensive ways, the agency said.
Carney described those released as "low-risk, non-criminal detainees," but several Republican members of Congress have spoken out against the releases.
(Also on POLITICO: Blogs decry illegal immigrant release)
“It’s very hard for me to believe that they can’t find cuts elsewhere in their agency,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told CBS News on Tuesday. “I frankly think this is outrageous…I can’t believe that they can’t find the kind of savings they need out of that department short of letting criminals go free.”
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, on Wednesday asked ICE for details of the agency's decision. "This decision reflects the lack of resource prioritization," he wrote to ICE Director John Morton, "and is indicative of the Department [of Homeland Security]’s weak stance on national security."
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/30/obama-sequestration-_n_3184950.html
wwwaahhhhhhh wwaahhhhh what a baby blaming everyone.
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Obama Blames Congress for Not Closing Gitmo
April 30, 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Fred Lucas
Subscribe to Fred Lucas RSS
5 4
Detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. (AP photo)
(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama declared again his commitment to close the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay, a facility he signed an executive order to close within a year in January 2009.
“It needs to be closed,” Obama said. “Now Congress determined that they would not let us close it and despite the fact that there are a number of the folks who are currently in Guantanamo who the courts have said could be returned to their country of origin or potentially a third country. I'm going to go back at this.
“I've asked my team to review everything that's currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively, and I'm going to re-engage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that's in the best interests of the American people,” he added.
During a presidential news conference Tuesday, a reporter asked, “Mr. President, as you're probably aware, there's a growing hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, among prisoners there. Is it any surprise, really, that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?”
Obama responded, “Well, it is not a surprise to me that we've got problems in Guantanamo, which is why, when I was campaigning in 2007 and 2008 and when I was elected in 2008, I said we need to close Guantanamo.”
“I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe,” Obama said. “It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists.”
The president added that the prison is “not sustainable.”
“We're going to continue to keep over a hundred individuals in a no man's land in perpetuity, even at a time when we've wound down the war in Iraq, we're winding down the war in Afghanistan, we're having success defeating al-Qaida core, we've kept the pressure up on all these transnational terrorist networks, when we've transferred detention authority in Afghanistan – the idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried – that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”
With regards to the terror suspects on a hunger strike, Obama said, “I don't want these individuals to die. Obviously, the Pentagon is trying to manage the situation as best as they can, but I think all of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this.”
He further said these prisoners can be housed in the United States.
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Obama, campaigning again, blames D.C. mess on pols campaigning too much
By Andrew Malcolm
Posted 09:06 AM ET
An amazing scene in Boston yesterday.
Barack Obama returned to the city of one of his biggest triumphs (his 2004 Democrat convention speech) and one of his worst political spankings (the 2010 repudiation by Massachusetts Senate voters of his candidate).
Those were tough days for the ex-state legislator, you may remember. Virginia voters had just rejected Obama's choice for governor. New Jersey voters had just rejected Obama's choice for governor.
Both setbacks were indicators of the rising tide of dissatisfaction over Obama's preoccupation with ObamaCare when what voters really wanted was Joe Biden's three-letter word, "J-O-B-S."
Americans are still waiting for Obama's employment extravaganza. But meantime later in 2010, they turned the House over to Republicans in an historic surge. Obama now says his big goal is to get that speaker's gavel back in the more compliant hands of Nancy Pelosi.
In January, 2010, Massachusetts voters were filling Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, a seat occupied by Democrat bottoms since 1952. As in the middle of last century. Nine years before Obama was born you-know-where.
Hours before polls opened, Obama went up to Boston to campaign for and with Democrat Martha Coakley, as he'd done with his chosen ones in New Jersey and Virginia. Coakley had been slipping in the polls. And the White House wanted to give her one last push across the finish line.
Bay State Democrats responded to the president's special, special-election attention by electing lowly state legislator Scott Brown. Oh, look! He was a Republican.
Brown opted out last year and some Native American woman got in. Then this year Obama needed a new secretary of State to not rescue any Americans abroad surrounded by terrorists. He picked Sen. John Kerry, who represented Massachusetts, although he's moored his yacht in Rhode Island to save on property taxes.
Kerry's departure set up the current contest, a special June 25 election between long-time liberal Democrat Rep. Ed Markey, who's never missed a photo op with a PBS character, and Gabriel Gomez, a former fighter pilot and Navy SEAL turned businessman with his moderate GOP brand and Hispanic heritage. (Scroll to the bottom for a C-SPAN video of the June 5 Gomez-Markey debate.)
Markey has 36 years of Washington maneuvering to Gomez' none. But given the notorious mess in D.C. and Congress' historically low approval, combined with Obama's compounding scandals, Markey's really long tenure on Capitol Hill may not be the best advertisement for a return there.
Harry Hamburg / AP
Harry Hamburg / AP
Markey has been slipping in the polls and the White House wanted to give him one last push across the finish line. So, there they were on-stage Thursday, the guy with 18 House terms and the one with a fraction of a Senate term.
Here are some of the amazing things Obama came out with and their context:
"What’s holding us back right now is inaction in Washington, gridlock in Washington--too many folks in Washington who are putting the next election ahead of the next generation."
So, who is it who's out campaigning for the next election in Boston and Miami on the same day? And who is it who's back in Washington working on the problems?
"I want you to know I've run my last campaign." Really? So, all these fundraising trips on Air Force One are for last year's election? Or, in reality, the next elections in 2014?
According to the president, he awakens every day and asks himself: "How do I make America a magnet for good jobs?" He's been in office now for 1,604 wake-up calls. Where's the beef?
The 44th president said other familiar stuff--the old infrastructure spending line, educating children better, keeping every child safe from gun violence like his hometown isn't. Then, before flying down to Miami for more fundraisers, Obama claimed:
"My only concern is making sure that we advance the interests of the broadest number of Americans and we leave our children a stronger, safer, more prosperous country."
Another concern could be Obama's approval rating. It's seriously sagging beneath the weight of his administration's cascading scandals, which he has yet to explain beyond the infamous Sgt. Schultz line: I know nothing. The latest poll gives Obama only a 44% approval, down from 49% in February, with a disapproval rate of 50%, up from 45%.
The good news for Ed Markey is he's got the real old pro, Bill Clinton, coming in as the campaign closer Saturday. The 42d president may actually help the Senate candidate.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/15/states-expanding-medicaid_n_3599232.html
LOL!!!! BLAME BLAME BLAME
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http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/07/24/obama-blames-five-years-of-a-bad-economy-on-phony-scandals-and-distractions-n1648117
LMFAO!!!!
blaming everyone else still.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/31/world/after-british-vote-unusual-isolation-for-us-on-syria.html?hp&_r=1&
LMFAO!!!!
now we are going to lose UK as an Ally. Good Jon o-TWINK
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/31/obama-middle-class_n_3848366.html
blah blah blah blah
More blaming from this piece of garbage
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He will bomb Syria his last hurrah before leaving office.
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my cat shit outside of the litter box today. wasn't his fault though.
Carter's fault.
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my cat shit outside of the litter box today. wasn't his fault though.
Carter's fault.
;D
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-
;)
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http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/10/18/obama-blames-bloggers-talking-heads-for-the-dysfunction-in-dc-85440
Typical failed posotus -
Obama is a real thug
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/17/Administration-Says-They-Feared-GOP-Subpoenas-During-Creation-of-Failed-Obamacare-Website
Lol
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I wonder who the street thug is going to blame today for the failure of the GhettoCare website?
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-ties-govt-shutdown-obamacare-rollout_763765.html
LMFAO!!!!
blame blame blame blame blame
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-ties-govt-shutdown-obamacare-rollout_763765.html
LMFAO!!!!
blame blame blame blame blame
bbbooommmmmm
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/10/21/krauthammer_obama_never_holds_anybody_in_his_administration_accountable_particularly_himself.html
Obama blames
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http://news.investors.com/politics-andrew-malcolm/102313-676243-obamacare-kathleen-sebelius-obama-out-of-the-loop.htm?p=full
Unreal
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/30/obama-blames-bad-apple-insurers-for-canceled-insurance-plans
Blame bkame. Blame.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/obamacare-fixes_n_4193722.html?ref=topbar
LOL
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http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/04/obama-senior-advisor-blames-insurance-company-for-cancerous-womans-plight
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/obama-health-care-problems_n_4215289.html
ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!! What a welfare leech
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/11/07/the-white-house-effort-to-blame-insurance-companies-for-lost-plans
Obama blames . . . . . . . .
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http://townhall.com/columnists/donaldlambro/2013/11/01/obama-always-blames-everyone-but-himself-n1734023?utm_source=facebook
LOL. Obama blames . . . . .
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That is how libtards lead and govern. By blaming others.
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Woodward: White House Blames Me For Starting Obama Criticism
Free Beacon ^ | 11/10/13 | Staff
Posted on November 11, 2013 12:44:44 PM EST by Nachum
Bob Woodward appeared on Media Buzz with Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz Sunday to talk about his book “The Price of Politics’”and the issues facing the Obama administration in its second term. Woodward claimed that people inside the White House are blaming him for the recent wave of criticism directed at the Obama administration.
As for the mood inside the White House after the failed rollout of Obamacare, Woodward stated, “the temperature’s going up right now as there’s more and more criticism on the president’s comments on Obamacare.”
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/12/why-did-obama-promise-people-could-keep-their-health-insurance-blame-bill-Clinton
LOL - always looking for someone else to blame
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http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/190364-obama-proposal-could-shift-blame-to-insurers
More blame and complain.
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How come nobody on the Left...meaning the MSM ever says a thing about this. Its been his narrative his entire life..certainly since 08'. " What exactly would you say you do here Barry"....."I play golf and kill people with drones".
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Obama is like more street pimp politicians. Remember Ray Nagin, Marion Barry etc? All talk no walk.
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http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/11/obama-to-ofa-website-failure-bred-misinformation-177815.html?hp=l9
LMFAO
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-says-republicans-share-some-blame-for-health-care-laws-failures/2013/11/19/fd096888-5136-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html
GMAFB.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/11/20/why-re-selling-obamacare-wont-be-easy
LOL!!!! O-TWINK still blaming the GOP
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/11/20/why-re-selling-obamacare-wont-be-easy
LOL!!!! O-TWINK still blaming the GOP
We are going back to paper that damn website will never work. Welcome back to the 1970's. I got paper forms from my insurance person like 10 pages.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/25/obama-congress-republicans_n_4335243.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
always an excuse for failure from O-Twink
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http://www.mediaite.com/tv/obama-takes-swipe-at-the-media-on-msnbc-actively-trying-to-divide-and-splinter-us
Blame blame blame
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/12/05/obama_ongoing_obamacare_problems_dont_reflect_on_my_management_style.html
Lmfao. Typical
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President Blasts Congress Recess from Some Hawaiian Golf Course
Townhall.com ^ | January 5, 2013 | Michael Schaus
Posted on January 5, 2014 9:05:35 AM EST by Kaslin
It’s nice to see that despite being on vacation in Hawaii, the President can still carve out some time – between rounds of golf and snorkeling – to insult his political opponents. After all, nothing encourages bi-partisanship in the New Year like a little name calling and mudslinging. While enjoying his multi-million-dollar vacation (oh yeah… you and I paid for that) Mr. Obama decided to chastise Republicans for leaving DC without extending long-term unemployment.
The chutzpah! Via Whitehouse.gov: (Emphasis added)
Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow Americans lost a vital economic lifeline – the temporary insurance that helps folks make ends meet while they look for a job. Republicans in Congress went home for the holidays and let that lifeline expire. And for many of their constituents who are unemployed through no fault of their own, that decision will leave them with no income at all.
Wow. And to think some of us consider roughly 1 ½ years of unemployment generous. Heck, after a year of not working, you’d almost think that a lack of income would become somewhat expected… But the vacationing President (did I mention that he traveled to Hawaii over the Holidays?) wasn’t done with a hypocritical stab at Congressional Republican’s Christmas schedule.
We make this promise to one another because it makes a difference to a mother who needs help feeding her kids while she’s looking for work; to a father who needs help paying the rent while learning the skills to get a new and better job. And denying families that security is just plain cruel.
Denying families extended benefits is just cruel… Well… He won me over. Let’s abolish any limits on unemployment! Maybe we should just guarantee everyone unlimited unemployment insurance! (Apparently there is no specific font-type for sarcasm… My apologies.)
What made Obama’s comments even more egregious (looking past the fact that our golf-loving President just blew a few million tax payer bucks for his “Mele Kalikimaka”) is his inability to recognize his culpability in the unemployment situation of America. Obama has overseen the worst economic “recovery” in history as the worst “jobs President” since the Great Depression.
It’s hard to escape the thought that long-term unemployment would be far less of an issue if our economic situation was – ya know – improving. From the Stimulus bill (remember the trillion dollars of sudden and “necessary” spending that we were told would immediately lower our unemployment rates?), to Obamacare (which greatly increases the financial burden of hiring new employees) the White House has repeatedly implemented policies that discourage economic vitality.
The President is trying to blame Republicans for the symptoms of his economic policies. Jobs, Mr. President, will do far more to cure the chronic unemployment that is rampant in America than a few more government unemployment checks. And jobs do not come from government programs, regulations, or higher taxes… They come from the private sector. The same private sector you have continually threatened with higher taxes, increased regulation, and increased government control.
But at least the million-plus Americans who have extinguished their unemployment insurance know there is a rich guy, on some golf course in Hawaii, who is willing to blame someone for their plight. I mean, heck… That’s almost as good as a job. Right?
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http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/barack-obama-blames-fox-interview/2014/02/02/id/550431?ns_mail_uid=8513055&ns_mail_job=1554687_02032014&promo_code=165BB-1
Pathetic.
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http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/barack-obama-blames-fox-interview/2014/02/02/id/550431?ns_mail_uid=8513055&ns_mail_job=1554687_02032014&promo_code=165BB-1
Pathetic.
Losers always blame others.
He doesn't see any corruption in his administration and libtards refuse to hold him or Clinton accountable.
Yet Christie MUST come clean over the closing of bridge lanes. ::)
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http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/how-obama-became-the-superhero-of-excuses-20140521
blaming everyone else.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/23/obama-blames-structural-design-congress-gridlock
LMFAO!!!!
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http://twitchy.com/2014/05/30/unreal-obama-blames-old-computers-for-va-scheduling-abuses
LMFAO!!!!! Ha ha ha ha!!!!!
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2653672/Now-White-House-says-Hagel-final-call-Bergdahl-criticism-Obama-prisoner-swap-mounts.html
LMFAO - blame blame bame for his failed presidency
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Obama: GOP to Blame for Economy Problems
wallstcheatsheet.com ^ | June 30, 2014 | Sarah Schweppe
Posted on 6/30/2014 10:03:53 AM by John W
While House Speaker John Boehner is suing President Barack Obama over taking too much action, and the president is calling out the GOP for blocking action — going as far as blaming the party for the state of the economy.
In a speech in Minneapolis as a part of a two-day trip, Obama called out Republicans in Congress for blocking votes on legislation. “So far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked or voted down every single serious idea to strengthen the middle class,” he said. “They’ve said no to raising the minimum wage. They’ve said no to fair pay. Some of them have denied that there’s even a problem, despite the fact that women are getting paid 77 cents for every dollar a man is getting paid.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wallstcheatsheet.com ...
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-annoyance-with-congress-boils-over/2014/07/02/fe3ee72e-0206-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html
:D
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Obama: 'Balkanization of Media' Has 'Blocked' My Agenda (shortened title)
Breitbar - Big Government ^ | 8-10-2014 | Matthew Boyle
Posted on August 10, 2014 8:37:00 PM EDT by Sir Napsalot
(snip) “What you’ve seen with our politics, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because of the Balkanization of media so people just watch what reinforces their deepest biases, partly because of big money in politics, is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions,” Obama told the liberal Times columnist. “Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things we need to move forward on. We need to reform our immigration system. That would be good not just for our domestic economy but for our position in the world. You travel around Latin America—nothing would more reinforce an admiration for the United States than us doing that. We need to rebuild our infrastructure. You go to the Singapore airport and then you come back to one of our airports and you say, huh? We’re not acting like a superpower.”
“It’s like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones,” Friedman agreed.
“Exactly,” Obama concurred. ......
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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‘Astounding': Flashbacks shred Obama claim troop withdrawal from Iraq wasn’t his decision
twitchy.com ^ | august 9, 2014
Posted on August 11, 2014 6:36:11 AM EDT by lowbridge
During his statement on the situation in Iraq before leaving for Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama was asked if he regretted pulling the remaining U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. An agitated Obama answered that it wasn’t his decision. In other words, “Bush’s fault”:
-snip
Obama campaigned on and eventually took credit for and celebrated the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and now it wasn’t his decision?
(Excerpt) Read more at twitchy.com ...
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/08/10/Obama-Extremist-Ideology-That-s-Taken-Over-GOP-Balkanization-Of-Media-Has-Blocked-My-Agenda
Ofag blames the media for his failed presidency
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/11/obama-adjusts-iraq-narrative-now-blames-george-w-b
Still blaming others
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http://madworldnews.com/obama-blames-social-media
Blaming FB and social media for perception the world is in the shitter
LMFAO
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http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/exclusive-obama-blames-border-crisis-immigration-reform-delay-n197441
Lmfao
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"My dog ate the constitution, Mooshell ate everything else" - Barack Huissane Obama, Imam
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Obama blames the press for criticisms of his post-beheading golf outing
Hot Air.com ^ | September 7, 2014 | NOAH ROTHMAN
Posted on September 7, 2014 at 3:04:27 PM EDT by Kaslin
Within minutes of addressing the nation following the Islamic State’s brutal beheading of American journalist James Foley, President Barack Obama had resumed his August vacation on the golf course. More than a few observers, even the president’s supporters, said that the decision to continue golfing immediately after announcing to the country that ISIS had executed what administration would later call a “terrorist attack” on the United States was unwise.
On Sunday, Obama acknowledged that he had erred, not only in seeming detached but also in failing to consider the “optics” associated with appearing callous and disinterested in the wake of that attack.
“I should’ve anticipated the optics,” Obama said on Sunday in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. He said that he did not adequately consider how some would feel about his dispassion in the aftermath of that attack on the United States by ISIS.
“But part of this job is also the theater,” he said. “It’s not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters, and I’m mindful of that.”
Displaying compassion for the Foley family and those Americans rocked by this gruesome affront by appearing somber and reserved – even at the expense of a whole day of vacation – is, in Obama’s opinion, just more of the burdensome performance art that the public has come to expect of their commander-in-chief.
That may be slightly more insulting than if he had just golfed away the day and never acknowledged it again.
Obama sounded a bit resentful of the fact that the media had made the post-Foley speech golf outing an issue. “I think everybody who knows me, including, I suspect, the press, understands that that, you know, you take this stuff in,” Obama said. “And it’s serious business. And you care about it deeply.”
“The possibility of a jarring contrast, given the world’s news, is always — there’s always going to be some tough news somewhere — is going to be there,” he added. In other words, one day it’s an American beheaded, another day it’s some other horrible development. There will always be something critics will point to in order to say Obama shouldn’t be golfing. What more do you people want from him?
If Obama’s intention was to convey to the public the depth of his concern over the beheading of Americans by ISIS fighters, he failed to achieve that objective.
A charitable interpretation of Obama’s remarks would allow for the possibility that he was expressing his genuine regret for the hard-edged display that followed the Foley speech in an artless manner. Obama played pundit, as he often does, and sounded callous by making an assessment of the political implications surrounding what the public saw as a lack of empathy for those wounded by Foley’s execution. But the president’s implied scolding of the media for amplifying that criticism indicates that this interpretation of his remarks may be a bit too forgiving.
Obama capped off his venting to NBC’s Chuck Todd by insisting that he needs another vacation, but this time from the Fourth Estate. “Part of what I want is a vacation from the press,” Obama said.
Todd reminded him that his permanent break from professional responsibilities begins on January 20, 2017, but does the vacation really ever end if you’ve already checked out?
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After Saying “I Should’ve Anticipated the Optics” of Golfing After Foley Beheading Speech… Obama
Gateway Pundit ^ | Kristinn Taylor
Posted on September 7, 2014 at 8:02:48 PM EDT by Nachum
Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard points out that contrary to media reports Obama was not contrite in his Meet the Press remarks about going golfing immediately after making a statement while on vacation last month about the videotaped beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS. Obama seemed to blame press coverage—saying he’s looking forward to a vacation from the press–rather than his conduct for the optics of being seen laughing it up on the golf course mere minutes after making a somber statement on what many consider to be an act of war on America.
(Excerpt) Read more at thegatewaypundit.com ...
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Fury as Obama blames intelligence agencies for Isil surprise
With his foreign policy approval ratings at a historic low, Barack Obama meets furious reaction after blaming US intelligence agencies for failing to predict rise of Isil in Syria
President Barack Obama
Mr Obama singled out James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, for blame Photo: REX FEATURES
By Peter Foster, Washington
9:03PM BST 29 Sep 2014
President Barack Obama was facing a fierce political backlash on Monday night after he blamed US intelligence chiefs for being caught by surprise by the sudden rise of the Islamic State (Isil) terror movement in Iraq and Syria.
In a highly unusual step, Mr Obama singled out James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, when asked by a television interviewer whether he had underestimated the threat posed by Isil after its fighters burst across the Syrian border into Iraq this summer, capturing large swathes of territory.
“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Mr Obama told CBS News.
The president’s apparent unwillingness to take responsibility for his administration’s failure to foresee the threat was met with disbelief by both policy experts and senior Republicans, who have long warned of the risks of ceding strategic space to the jihadists in Syria.
“This was the ‘dog ate my homework speech’,” Senator John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate who has long called for Mr Obama to arm moderate rebel forces in Syria, told Fox News, adding that Mr Obama should follow other presidents and admit his mistake.
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“Every president in history had made a mistake, acknowledged it and then moved on. President Reagan with Iran contra, President Clinton in Bosnia, President George W Bush after the debacle in Iraq, when he started the surge - but it doesn’t seem to be in this president’s DNA,” he said.
Mr Obama’s foreign policy approval ratings are at a historic low, with almost 60 per cent of American disapproving of his handling of foreign policy – a number that has not improved since the president began implementing his strategy to “degrade and destroy” Isil.
Frederic Hof, the former State Department special adviser on Syria now with the Rafik Hariri Center in Washington, who argued for greater support for the rebels but later resigned in the face of White House opposition to the policy, said the intelligence community was not to blame.
“I very much doubt that the intelligence community was asleep at the switch while Isil was gaining strength in Syria,” he told The Telegraph, “None of this was exactly hidden from view.
“No doubt President Obama and his advisors were perplexed when it came to policy options, and no doubt the scope and speed of the Isil thrust into Iraq were surprising. But I doubt that the US intelligence community is to blame for any policy shortfalls."
The White House denied that Mr Obama was trying to shift the blame away from himself and onto the intelligence community.
“That is not what the president’s intent was,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, adding the president had “the highest degree of confidence” in the intelligence community.
However Mr McCain warned of ‘blowback’ from the intelligence community which already appeared to be moving to defend itself, with a former senior Pentagon official who worked on Isil intelligence assessments telling the Daily Beast website: “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullsh------.”
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Obama will pay a price for blaming intelligence services for ISIS failures.
American Thinker ^ | 09/30/2014 | Thomas Lifson
Posted on 9/30/2014 9:59:07 AM by SeekAndFind
President Obama’s 60 Minutes interview, taped last Friday and aired Sunday, is turning out to be a disaster for him, and may even be a tipping point of sorts. There are six dimensions to the disaster.
1. By blaming the intelligence community for his failure to act on the ISIS threat, he ensured that a series of damaging leaks will be coming, and they are already starting.
The UK Daily Mail, always far less constrained than the American media when it comes to revealing information damaging to the American progressive establishment, quotes “an administration insider,” summarized in its own bullet points:
•A national security staffer in the Obama administration said the president has been seeing 'highly accurate predictions' about the rise of the ISIS terror army since 'before the 2012 election'
•Obama insisted in his campaign speeches that year that America was safe and al-Qaeda was 'on the run'
•The president said during Sunday's '60 Minutes' program that his Director of National Intelligence had conceded he underestimated ISIS
•But the administration aide insisted that Obama's advisers gave him actionable information that sat and gathered dust for more than a year
•'He knew what was at stake,' the aide said of the president, and 'he knew where all the moving pieces were'
•Obama takes daily intelligence briefings in writing, he explained, because no one will be able to testify about warning the president in person about threats that the White House doesn't act on
This may be a foretaste of what is to come, as intelligence officials realize they will be sacrificial lambs.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-throws-intel-community-under-bus-over-isis-2014-9
>:(
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Obama Mocks American Concern Over Obamacare, Whines About Fox News Again
Townhall.com ^ | October 3, 2014 | Katie Pavlich
Posted on 10/3/2014 11:20:18 AM by Kaslin
When Obama’s Justice Department isn’t monitoring the phone lines of Fox News reporters and their parents, he’s publicly berating them during boring, tired speeches.
During his new but old economic speech yesterday at Northwestern University, President Obama mocked Americans who have concerns about Obamacare limiting their freedom and whined about Fox News.
“While good affordable health care might seem like a fanged threat to the freedom of the American people on Fox News, it turns out it’s working pretty well in the real world,” he said.
Bonus: A second complaint about Fox News was sent out on Obama's official Twitter account.
President Obama: While affordable health care might still be a threat to freedom on Fox News, it’s working pretty well in the real world.— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 2, 2014
Obama's lack of self-awareness when it comes to Obamacare is astounding. While he attempts to insult Fox News, he is actually insulting millions of Americans who have lost their healthcare, lost their doctors, seen their premiums and deductibles skyrocket or lost jobs as a result of the overbearing cost Obamacare puts on the healthcare system and the economy. Obamacare isn’t affordable, it isn’t working and the numbers prove it. Guy broke this down last week after liberal wonk Ezra Klein published a piece titled In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster. In the real world, it’s working.:
A recent Kaiser Foundation poll found that 14 percent of Americans say the 'Affordable' Care Act has impacted their family for the better. The trouble is that twice that number said they've been directly harmed by the law, which was marketed as a win-win for all consumers. Numerous national surveys have consistently tracked the same two-to-one, hurt-to-helped ratio. People's actual experiences are not a product of propaganda-driven confusion.
By the way, why is President Obama stealing Ezra Klein's work? Or is has he put Klein on the payroll? Further, if Obamacare is so great, then why is it that just 36 percent of Democrat candidates support it?
Democrats on the campaign trail are not feeling so hot about Obamacare.
New research from the Brookings Institution’s Elaine C. Kamarck and Alexander R. Podkul shows that only 36 percent of Democrats running for Congress this year have expressed a position in support of Obamacare. Another small segment–25.5 percent–have offered a lukewarm position on the law.
Obamacare is in fact a disaster in the real world. Fox News on the other hand, is a roaring success. Over to you Greta.
"When leaders blame others they sure don't look like leaders, they look absolutely childish and it's distressing President Obama is so quick to blame others."
Greta: Obama should lead, stop picking fights with Fox News 'Off the Record,' 10/2/14: President Obama likes to play the blame game and blaming Fox News was red meat for his base. But he has to realize he doesn't hurt us and only diminishes his office.
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Hugh Jackman Deadlifts 400lbs!
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Obama Blames The Media For His Low Polls
10/08/2014
Americans don’t understand that the economy is doing great because the press is biased against good news, President Barack Obama told a group of prosperous donors Tuesday.
“Frankly, the press and Washington, all it does is feed cynicism,” he insisted, despite getting six years of favorable coverage from establishment newspapers and TV shows.
“Most of you don’t know the statistics I just gave you,” Obama said, after listing a series of cherry-picked data that ignored that roughly 10 million Americans who have given up looking for work, and the $7 trillion in added debt.
“The reason you don’t know [the favorable data] is because they elicit hope. They’re good news … and that’s not what we hear about,” he declared to the roughly 250 supporters who paid up to $1,000 to attend.
“We hear about phony scandals, and we hear about the latest shiny object, and we hear about how Washington will never work,” Obama insisted.
Obama’s complaints about the media are belied by the favorable media coverage he gets.
“Polling news has practically vanished from the Big Three evening newscasts in 2014 as President Obama’s approval ratings have tumbled and the public opposes defining administration policies like ObamaCare,” the Media Research Center reported in September.
In early September, “Gallup found Obama’s approval rating at a record low of 38 percent, yet none of the three broadcast networks bothered to mention this on their evening or morning newscasts.”
In 2012, “from August 27 through October 21, 19% of stories about Obama studied in a cross section of mainstream media were clearly favorable in tone while 30% were unfavorable,” the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism said in November 2012.
For [GOP candidate] Mitt Romney, “15% of the stories studied were favorable, 38% were unfavorable,” it said.
In 2009, the Pew Research Center reported that “as he marks his 100th day in office, President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George [W.] Bush during their first months in the White House.”
“Overall, roughly four out of ten stories, editorials and op ed columns about Obama have been clearly positive in tone, compared with 22% for Bush,” said Pew.
Many other reports — and many reporters too — admit that the established media favors Democratic claims and politicians, including Obama.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/08/obama-blames-the-media-for-his-low-polls/
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In the same vain.....you know when the douchbag libs here cheerlead Barry or say shit doesn't matter. Remember when Ol Barry said there was a line in the sand and then back tracked...there is always fall out.
If you set a red-line, you should stick to it,” remarked a Japanese defense official at a recent conference on extended deterrence in Seoul when asked about the U.S. approach to dealing with Syria. But the question on redlines has shifted from chemical weapons use itself to the idea of credibility and the implications of inaction towards Washington’s key allies around the world.
Iran’s nuclear program is often cited first but there is also the complex situation on the Korean peninsula. Secretary of State John Kerry told the U.S. Senate last week that “North Korea is hoping that ambivalence carries the day. They are listening for our silence.” This point was also brought up this past week by James Miller, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, while meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing, “I emphasized the massive chemical weapons arsenal that North Korea has and that we didn't want to live in a world in which North Korea felt that the threshold for chemical weapons usage had been lowered.”
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240 and the rest of the Barry ball washers were incredulous that Soul and others wanted Barry to keep his word about red lines. Actually nobody wanted to send in troops no matter how much gas Syria uses...except Barry said it was a red line. He should never have said that it was a red line. It encourages the rest of the idiots to do dumb shit....but please don't take my word for it...apparently our Jap friends would also like Barry to keep his word. I'd also like it if u libs would stop telling us how smart he is....he's a fucking babbling retard.
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Obama not being an American citizen, hating this country, being a sympathizer of terrorists, and wanting to destroy this country - this is all part of the plan - create chaos so that it weakens us militarily, economically, commercially, etc.
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240 and the rest of the Barry ball washers were incredulous that Soul and others wanted Barry to keep his word about red lines. Actually nobody wanted to send in troops no matter how much gas Syria uses...except Barry said it was a red line. He should never have said that it was a red line. It encourages the rest of the idiots to do dumb shit....but please don't take my word for it...apparently our Jap friends would also like Barry to keep his word. I'd also like it if u libs would stop telling us how smart he is....he's a fucking babbling retard.
in his defense, only one person was making up stats about ISIS border crossings yesterday, and it wasn't a dem.
Maybe Barry "invented" or whatever fueled ISIS to fight the syrian govt. That's the outcome we're seeing. Maybe they're just doing our bidding on a completely random basis, who knows, but they and syrian govt are killing each other off, which are TWO goals of the USA. So it works. Bombing/invading them now would be a very bad move - let them kill each other thru the winter then we can MOAB their asses when spring breaks and they crawl out of the snow with "mission accomplished" banners.
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Administration points fingers on Ebola
The Hill ^ | October 11, 2014 | Megan R. Wilson
Posted on October 12, 2014 11:05:24 AM EDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice says other countries “haven’t done enough” to help stop the deadly disease Ebola from spreading.
“We are pushing very hard for everybody to do more. This is going to take all hands on deck,” she told NBC’s Chuck Todd, in an interview set to air Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
Ebola has killed more than 4,000 people, mostly centralized to three countries in Western Africa. The outbreak has caused skepticism of international health workers in some of those communities, who fear the workers could be spreading the disease instead of helping cure it.
The outbreak in Africa began in March in Guinea, but has rapidly spread, primarily, to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The Obama administration has also authorized up to 4,000 American troops to go into West Africa to assist in the effort. A smaller advance team in Liberia is already opening up clinics for infected aid workers and testing labs to expedite patient checks for the disease.
A man who traveled to Dallas from Liberia became the single case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States. He died last week from the illness.
Five U.S. airports are stepping up screening measures on passengers arriving from the mostly Ebola-afflicted countries in Western Africa, in addition to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testing airport passengers departing the capitals of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
The disease is only spread through contact with bodily fluids of a diseased person, but as those being treated increase beyond hospital capacities, friends and family members are left to care for the ill – making it likely they will come into contact with those fluids.
Among the many symptoms of the disease are vomiting and excessive bleeding both internally and through parts of the body, including the eyes and nose.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-10-23/the-democrats-coming-blame-game
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Obama always pointing the finger of blame at someone else
By Michael Goodwin
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November 2, 2014 | 1:58am
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Modal Trigger
Obama always pointing the finger of blame at someone else
Barack Obama
Photo: AP
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Michael Goodwin
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In the New York Times the other day, anonymous aides to President Obama trashed Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Kerry was mocked mercilessly, with officials joking “that he is like the astronaut played by Sandra Bullock in the movie ‘Gravity,’ somersaulting through space, untethered to the White House.”
A week before that, The Times reported that, despite Obama’s public efforts to calm fears over Ebola, he was privately seething at health aides’ bungling. In a bid to separate him from the incompetence of his administration, the leakers claimed Obama was “visibly angry” and “demanded a more hands-on approach” from his team.
Then there was the story about Pentagon boss Hagel firing off a memo to national security chief Susan Rice that faulted America’s Syrian policy. Then there was a story about — oh, never mind, you get the picture.
The extraordinary pile-up of crises has turned the usual White House blame game into something more lethal: a shootout in a lifeboat. The presidency is sinking, but we are expected to believe that only the president is blameless.
It won’t wash. The problems cannot be fixed by firing one or two members of the president’s team, or all of them. Something else, something more fundamental, is happening.
Obamaism, a quasi-socialist commitment to a more powerful government at home and an abdication of American leadership around the world, is being exposed as a historic calamity.
We are witnessing the total collapse of a bad idea. Obamaism, a quasi-socialist commitment to a more powerful government at home and an abdication of American leadership around the world, is being exposed as a historic calamity. It is fueling domestic fear and global disorder and may well lead to a world war.
If there is a smidgen of a silver lining, it is that the unraveling, complete with Obama’s shameless attempts to duck responsibility, is playing out on the eve of the midterm elections. Fortunately, voters seem ready to respond by giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress.
I second that emotion, and not just because Obama is a failure. For all his narcissism, he didn’t make this mess alone.
He was aided and abetted by every Democrat in Congress. They marched in lockstep with his cockamamie policies, from ObamaCare to open borders. They protected corrupt leaders in numerous federal agencies, from the IRS to the General Services Administration. They stymied efforts to find the truth about Benghazi and the Fast and Furious gunrunning debacle.
They ceded their constitutional obligations and allowed Obama to crash the system of checks and balances. The vast majority stood silent while he gutted the military and abandoned our allies, including Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and courted Iran, the most menacing nation on Earth.
With painfully few exceptions, Democrats put their loyalty to him above their duty to America.
And now they must be punished. All of them.
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Democrats need to be removed from every possible federal office during the midterms as punishment for the failed Obama presidency, according to Michael Goodwin.
Photo: Getty Images
Normally, I am not a partisan advocate. I am a registered Democrat, though I vote as an independent.
Not this year. This is a national emergency and the only responsible action is to vote Republican for every federal office.
Sparing even a favorite Democrat or two could allow Obama to spin defeat as a minor loss. Most worrisome, if Dems keep the Senate, the election will further entrench a corrupt government and further erode America’s strength and influence.
That is not a chance worth taking. Six years is enough. Collective punishment is the appropriate answer.
If there were any doubts that the Obama Democrats cannot be trusted, look at their scurrilous campaigns. From coast to coast, their message is uniformly odious: Republicans are waging a “war on women” and they are racists.
That’s it. They can’t defend the legislation they passed, the economy they produced or the foreign policy they supported. Most don’t want to be seen with Obama, yet they take the money he raises and follow his lead in exploiting race and gender fault lines.
Scraping the bottom of the rancid barrel, they prove they will do anything to hold on to power. They cannot be allowed to succeed.
It is time for them to go.
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Ten reasons why bluffing, boring, blame-pointing Obama can expect a well-deserved shellacking in the midterm elections
By Piers Morgan for MailOnline
Published: 11:48 EST, 3 November 2014 | Updated: 13:57 EST, 3 November 2014
When Barack Obama was first elected President in 2008, I celebrated by having an exquisitely romantic dinner on a tiny, temporary sand dune in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Like most of the world, I was thoroughly entranced by this dynamic young senator. He seemed so fresh, vibrant, eloquent and smart.
I believed him when he repeatedly cried: ‘Yes, we can!’
And I punched the air as he assured us: ‘Change has come to America!’
We all did.
We thought he could: In November 2008 Barack Obama was a dynamic young senator elected to the White House as a shining, youthful beacon of audacious hope
We thought he could: In November 2008 Barack Obama was a dynamic young senator elected to the White House as a shining, youthful beacon of audacious hope
Well, everyone bar the Republicans who had seen their hopes go up in smoke with John McCain.
Today, six years on, harsh reality has set in.
It turned out that ‘Most of the time we can’t’ and ‘Not much has changed in America’.
Obama’s personal approval ratings have crashed to an all-time low and his Democrat party is facing a humiliating shellacking in tomorrow’s mid-term elections.
He’s gone from being a shining, youthful beacon of audacious hope to a greying, increasingly defeatist purveyor of disappointment.
The Maldives dune where I enjoyed that sumptuous dinner now seems a perfect metaphor for Obama’s administration: it appeared as if by magic and brought such glorious promise and excitement. But as midnight arrived, water began to lap away at my ankles and the very substance of the dune evaporated before my eyes.
I was whisked to safety in a speedboat.
Sadly, that option is not available to the American people stuck on the rather larger Obama-run dune for another two years.
So why has it all gone so horribly wrong?
Here are ten reasons:
Six years later: The boring, greying president, seen here over the weekend campaigning for Pennsylvania Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf, has broken his promises and deserves a shellacking
Six years later: The boring, greying president, seen here over the weekend campaigning for Pennsylvania Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf, has broken his promises and deserves a shellacking
1. HE BREAKS HIS PROMISES. Obama said he’d shut down Guantanamo Bay, then didn’t. He said he’d be more transparent, then we found out his NSA was secretly bugging everyone. He vowed to put a limit on America’s warfare but has continued to wage Drone-led war on numerous fronts. He looked Newtown families in the eye and said he’d get action on gun control - and failed. He insisted he’d make Washington less cynically divisive but it’s never been worse. Above all, he pledged to restore trust in Government and has achieved the complete opposite.
2. HIS FOREIGN POLICY STINKS. He heralded a ‘new dawn’ for the Middle East, but kept American involvement at such minimal levels that ISIS has been allowed to ferment into a potent, dominant terror force in the region. Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Gaza and Syria all burn as Obama fiddles with his golf swing. As for Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama may pride himself on ending America’s involvement as he said he would – but leaving behind complete chaos and borderline anarchy should be a matter for self-reflective sadness at failed missions to instil freedom and democracy, not celebration.
3. HE’S A BLUFFER. Obama made America a laughing stock when he warned Syria’s Assad regime, ‘A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized’ and then blinked when Assad promptly crossed that red line. It’s that kind of spinelessness which emboldened Vladimir Putin to wage imperialistic Russian assaults on Crimea and Ukraine - and ISIS to behead his citizens with impunity. I hate seeing America look weak and I’m not even American.
4. HE CAN’T GET THE ECONOMY OUT OF THE TANK. Nobody can credibly blame Obama for the modern day Great Depression that he inherited, but America’s recovery has been painfully slow and still crawls along like a wounded snail, ravaged by a rapidly expanding $17 trillion national debt. The gap between rich and poor rages ever wider too, making a mockery of Obama’s demand for a ‘more inclusive, fairer’ society.
5. HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE RIGHT THINGS RIGHT. Obamacare should have been his great legacy. Bringing 30 million impoverished, uninsured Americans into the health care system is an achievement of genuine worth. But the launch was so haplessly cack-handed and disastrous that the perception remains of dismal failure even as statistics suggest Obamacare is enjoying an increasing positive performance. The great communicator has lost ability to successfully communicate.
6. HE’S BORING. What happened to the charismatic, courageous, quick-fire political firebrand who charged to victory in 2008? Obama’s speeches have become repetitive and turgid, his pressers a monument to mind-numbing, professorial tedium, and his endless heavily-controlled media interviews a sycophantic, pointless embarrassment to him and the carefully selected journalists who conduct them. No wonder audiences have started running for the exit when he turns up on the stump.
7. HE BLAMES REPUBLICANS FOR EVERYTHING. I’m sick and tired of Obama constantly berating his political opponents for his own inaction. I’m no fan of the way GOP leaders have tried to strangle his every policy at birth – often at the expense of America’s national interest - but that’s the nature of modern politics. He’s the President and has extraordinary powers, not least of which via his personal fiefdom of Executive Orders. Stop incessantly bleating about ‘Washington intransigence’ and damn well lead.
8. HE CAN’T NEGOTIATE. I wouldn’t trust Obama to renegotiate my monthly gardener’s fees. He just doesn’t know how to make a deal. Politics, at its best, is about strong, powerful men and women getting in each others’ faces, arguing the toss about issues they care about, and agreeing points of compromise. Clinton was a master at it. Obama, by general consent, is useless. Donald Trump may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I can tell you this – he’d negotiate way better deals for America than Obama. It’s in his blood.
9. HE’S DONE NOTHING TO IMPROVE THE LIVES OF MINORITIES. Virtually every leading black American I interviewed on my old CNN show believed that the basic living standards of their fellow African-Americans were poorer now than before Obama came to power. Further, they believed that racism is now worse than it was six years ago. Two breath-taking failures on behalf of the very section of population that most helped get him elected.
10. HE PERSISTS IN CALLING US ALL ‘FOLKS’. I don’t why he does this, but I find it incredibly patronising and irritating. I can’t be the only one.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2819111/Piers-Morgan-Ten-reasons-bluffing-boring-blame-pointing-Obama-expect-deserved-shellacking-midterm-elections.html#ixzz3I2vG8UdF
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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Isn't Piers Morgan for England? I could give zero fcks what some fat foreign liberal thinks about our leadership.
screw him. he might be right, he might be wrong, but he's an anti-gun prick, and therefore anyone who cites him considers him to be credible. Screw that. you take that back.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/us/president-obama-left-fighting-for-his-own-relevancy.html
LMFAO - as stupid as ever
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/05/us/president-obama-left-fighting-for-his-own-relevancy.html
LMFAO - as stupid as ever
he still has executive orders, cause he still has the presidency.
maybe cruz will change that with impeachment.
but obama can wake up feisty from a hemmroid and voila, we have amnesty. Stroke of a pen.
I'd say he's still very relevant, as he can still drone bomb, open borders, bomb ISIS (or not!) while the GOP's new senate power gives them two platforms to fruitlessly complain.
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Obama blames
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President Obama’s most pathetic excuse yet
By Post Editorial Board October 6, 2016 | 9:05pm
Modal Trigger President Obama’s most pathetic excuse yet
Barack Obama Photo: Reuters
Yes, President Obama really did just try to blame climate change for horrors now under way in Syria. It was a two-fer in the self-justification sweepstakes — shifting the blame toward a threat he’s crusaded against, and away from his own years of inaction.
At a White House climate-change event with actor Leo DiCaprio, Obama cited “powerful” studies that suggest “droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war.”
Which, he went on, makes man-caused global warming “a national-security issue” — one ignored by “members of Congress who scoff at climate change at the same time they are . . . extolling their patriotism.”
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Look: Syria’s “unrest” started as peaceful protests — which dictator Bashar al-Assad answered with bullets and then barrel bombs, triggering a rebellion.
Obama insisted on staying out — refusing even low-risk steps like setting up no-fly zones to shield innocent civilians, or sending arms to pro-US rebels.
Instead, he mocked the rebels as “pharmacists and dentists” — and ISIS, when it came on the scene, as a “JV team.”
He loudly drew a “red line,” then blinked when the time came to enforce it — saving face only thanks to a lifeline from Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who would later intervene decisively to save Assad.
And climate change had nothing to do with any of it — it’s simply the “threat” Obama wants to fight, rather than the ones he’s actually been faced with.
That he’s still claiming he was right all along isn’t just smug, it’s pathethic.
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So climate change started the Syrian civil war and Hurricane Matthew.
Got ya! :D
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https://www.mrctv.org/blog/obama-blames-white-resistance-and-resentment-his-own-inability-enact-reparations?fbclid=IwAR2ogCy0nU58mZRXIRA1bXJIzkBF8_1KXLrDjxHr0XsgFeSInTlRVJNRyWU
Obama blems whites for not getting reparations to blacks
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/obama-says-he-once-broke-schoolmates-nose-for-calling-him-racial-slur?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=benshapiro&fbclid=IwAR2GIgPK7NB0oeRh7zpJ0ugJjVOR5RY_R_k2nFyC6JhI-2exf1llCdwJJz0
LOL - this gay muslim tranny idiot now claiming to be a tough guy who broke someones' face.
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He will bomb Syria his last hurrah before leaving office.
And Biden bombed Syria for his first hurrah entering office.