All Posts Tagged With: "Barack Obama"

An aunt in the country illegally and a half-brother arrested on drug charges in Kenya: how are these Barack Obama’s problem?

If your aunt or brother did something illegal, should your reputation be besmirched if you had no involvement in their illicit activities? Does blood relation now automatically qualify you as a conspirator to any of your relatives’ bad choices?

In his weekly address, President Barack Obama announced that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is preparing a new strategy for reviving our financial system, and urged the swift passage of an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.

If Republicans can’t have a perfect bill to stimulate the economy,
they’d rather have no economy at all.

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While I have no regrets about my vote and support for the current president I am thoroughly disgusted by the “do as I say, not as I do” that Obama has demonstrated with his appointments of former lobbyists in direct contradiction to his much touted ethics order. Hypocrisy grates on me more than most other irritants. I will call Obama on it just like I called out the previous administration and others on it. Campbell Brown is spot on with her commentary on the matter:

Unfortunately, we are again asking the president to explain why exactly he announced, with great fanfare, new ethics rules if he had no intention of abiding by them.

The Obama administration is yet again asking for a waiver to its very own rules about hiring lobbyists.

This time, it is the new treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. He wants a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs to be his top aide at the Treasury Department.

My view is simple: Mr. President, if you want to hire former lobbyists because you think they are the best people to do the job, then hire former lobbyists. Just don’t hold a big news conference first to tell us how your administration is going to be so different from previous administrations in that you won’t be hiring lobbyists.

Don’t make your disdain for lobbyists and your pledges that they won’t wield influence in your administration a centerpiece of your campaign.

It’s the hypocrisy and the double-talk that makes so many of us so cynical. Do what you think is best for the country. Just be straight with us about how you’re going to do it.

“This was not a drive-by P.R. stunt, and I actually thought it might be. It was a substantive, in-depth discussion with our conference, and he’s very effective. He knows that the debt and the deficit are huge long-term problems as well and he made a compelling case. He sounded, frankly, a lot like a Republican.”

—  Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee

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[Hat tip: Sullivan]

From CNN:

Closing the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility is necessary and President Barack Obama’s decision to set a one-year deadline on doing so was probably the only way to get it done, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says setting a deadline is the only way to ensure Guantanamo Bay is closed.

“I believe that if we did not have a deadline, we could kick that can down the road endlessly,” Gates said Tuesday afternoon before the House Armed Services Committee. “My experience in making anything work at the Department of Defense is, the only way I get anything done is by putting a deadline on it and making people understand that the deadline is meaningful.”

Obama has been criticized by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, among others, for announcing a decision to close the detention facility before there were solid plans on what to do with those held there.

Gates said most of the detainees could either be tried or transferred elsewhere, leaving a small group whose circumstances are more difficult to figure out. But he said detainees would not be just let out.

“I can’t imagine a situation in which detainees at Guantanamo who were considered a danger to the people of the United States would simply be released here,” he said.

Who says (with any intellectual honesty) that Obama’s not reaching across the aisle and listening to Republicans? From TPM:

House Democrats are likely to jettison family planning funds for the low-income from an $825 billion economic stimulus bill, officials said late Monday, following a personal appeal from President Barack Obama at a time the administration is courting Republican critics of the legislation.

Several officials said a final decision was expected on Tuesday, coinciding with Obama’s scheduled visit to the Capitol for separate meetings with House and Senate Republicans.

The provision has emerged as a point of contention among Republicans, who criticize it as an example of wasteful spending that would neither create jobs nor otherwise improve the economy.

Under the provision, states no longer would be required to obtain federal permission to offer family planning services — including contraceptives — under Medicaid, the health program for the low-income.

That’s one less thing the GOP can use as an excuse not to work with the president on this stimulus plan. So far it has been the president who has done the most compromising, at the detriment of his own party, to try to achieve compromise and agreement. I don’t see the same effort on the part of the GOP to come to a consensus. Are the Republicans going to be part of the solution or just an obstacle to any solution?

Whether it’s the illiterate, irrational ramblings of local bloggers or the perfidious, phantasmic rantings of national commentators, the far right has declared all out jihad against the new president, pulling out all the stops — like truth, reality, facts, evidence, logic, reason, rationality — and spreading fear, distortions, misrepresentations and all out lies. I may address some of the local blogger silliness another time, but here’s an example of some of the ridiculous commentary on the national stage.

Marc Thiessen, former chief speechwriter for former President Bush, has been stirring the pot in the last couple of days. Yesterday, I posted about his “twisted op-ed” in Thursday’s Washington Post in which he proffered a very distorted view of the Bush legacy. In a post at National Review Online yesterday, Thiessen ratchets up the rhetoric to unabashed fear-mongering and hysterics:

The CIA program he is effectively shutting down is the reason why America has not been attacked again after 9/11. He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London’s Canary Warf, and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots. It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent responds:

Obama is already “the most dangerous” President ever?

Here’s the thing about this. You have here an assertion that crosses over from mere opinion into verifiable or disprovable assertion. If you’re going to say that someone has already proven himself to be dangerous, as opposed to merely being potentially dangerous, you need to point to empirical evidence of this, such as lives lost to foreign threats on your watch. There haven’t been any such lives lost under President Obama yet, unlike other past Presidents.

This type of hysteria is not only foolish, it’s absurd. From Rush Limbaugh to countless, unflinchingly-loyal-no-matter-how-often-proven-wrong, diehard right-wing bloggers, there is a cacophonous chorus of toxic rhetoric desperately wishing and unabashedly rooting for this new president to fail. It astounds me. I’m not sure why exactly; I’m not sure why I expect more from this crowd.

No matter how strongly I disagreed with President Bush’s policies and actions, I never wanted him to fail as president. I would fight his agenda, but I never rooted for him to fail. Why would I? His failures negatively impacted me and my country. It’s like despising my boss so much that I rooted for him/her to fail, even though his/her failure could very well negatively impact me and my job!

It’s this type of irrational fear-mongering and hateful rhetoric that makes me worry more for this country than anything George Bush has done or Barack Obama may do. The cancer of “us vs. them” selfishness and refusal to find common ground is dividing this country in ever more irreparable ways. We are doing more harm to our own country than any terrorist could ever do. “United we stand, divided we fall.” We are a nation divided. If we do not find a way to come together, we will fall.

In his first weekly address since being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, President Barack Obama discussed how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan will jump-start the economy.

In a word, “NO!” FactCheck.org debunks the prevalent meme amongst right-wing bloggers and “news” outlets:

For much of the past week, several right-leaning news sites have compared an estimated $160 million price tag for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration to a $42 million tally for George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration. Those numbers are accurate as far as they go, but not comparable.

The Associated Press and ABC News both report that Obama’s inauguration could cost between $160 and $170 million, while Bush raised a net total of $42.3 million to cover the costs of his inauguration, according the New York Times and others, based on the report Bush’s committee filed with the Federal Election Commission a few months after the event.  But those aren’t direct comparisons; the Obama estimates include the cost of security, while the figure for Bush’s inauguration does not. Continued

Tags: Barack Obama, bullies, costs, debunked, distortions, FactCheck.org, facts, George W. Bush, inauguration, lies, right-wing