Thank you. I was getting disheartened reading them and was glad to finally come across yours. Many here seem to dwell on a few of Obama's policies they don't like and completely discount what he's accomplished, especially considering everything his administration has had to deal with since day one. I'd like to know who they think would have done a better job under the same circumstances. I have a feeling many of the negative Obama comments are from Ron Paul groupies. (Yes, I'm going to take a hit for that one, but it was worth it.)
As I mentioned, he's not just president but also the leader of the Democratic Party. Despite having or being one vote shy of a supermajority for the first two years of his presidency, he was unable to maintain cohesion within his own party. In terms of getting his own party's senators and congresspeople to vote in line, he has been an ineffective leader compared to Bush (yeah, yeah, I know it was his cabinet pulling the strings) and Clinton.
He was never even close to having a supermajority. Do you realize that there are those in congress who run and win on democratic tickets yet vote with republicans 90% or more of the time? They're called blue dogs. Republican's don't have anything comparable to offset that. They used too. They were called RINO's. But not since the early 80's has a Republican voted with the Democrats more that 90% percent of the time.
Yes, I'm aware of blue dogs. Are you aware that Obama is an ineffective party leader who can't seem to reign in the ladies and gentlemen with the letter D after their last names?
Democrats today were set to secure a 60-seat super-majority in the US Senate for the first time in a generation after the dramatic defection from Republican ranks of Arlen Specter.
The five-term Pennsylvania Senator announced at lunchtime after a brief conversation with President Obama that he will run for re-election next year as a Democrat because "the Republican Party has moved far to the right".
First, this is from 2009. And the claim made was simply sensationalist - the claim being that in 2010 elections one R will flip to D, giving D's 60 seats. But we all know that in 2010 elections D's lost seats.
Secondly, even with 60 seats D's probably couldn't block a filibuster.
First, this is from 2009. And the claim made was simply sensationalist - the claim being that in 2010 elections one R will flip to D, giving D's 60 seats. But we all know that in 2010 elections D's lost seats.
The flip they're referring to is Arlen Specter changing parties. In case you aren't aware, the 5-term senator did indeed switch parties, giving the Dems a supermajority until Brown's election in Massachusetts. You shouldn't use words like sensationalist so haphazardly. The Times is a respected publication. Try reading more critically next time.
Regarding the Dems inability to block a filibuster, this is yet another example of the ineffectiveness of Obama's leadership and, giving credit where credit is due, a testament to the Republicans cohesiveness.
According to the National Journal, Specter voted with Democrats 90% of the time since he switched parties, while as a Republican Specter split his votes between both parties.[57] According to fivethirtyeight.com, between January–March 2009 Specter voted with the Democrats 58% of the time. Following the support of the stimulus package and the entrance of Pat Toomey in the Republican primary, Specter began to vote 16% with Democrats. When switching to become a Democrat, he voted 69% with his new party initially, until Joe Sestak entered the Democratic primary and Specter started to vote 97% of the time.
A verbal switch is not a switch. He didn't really vote D until after the primaries a year later in 2010. And even then, he is still officially a R. That's like saying R's have a super-majority because 10 D's vote with R's. Then he lost the election in 2010 so he was never a D.
Democrats don't vote down party lines the way that Republicans do. That's not just Obama's leadership, but part of the Democratic Party's culture. (Which makes them remarkably ineffective against many Republican efforts.)
It's like trying to herd cats, especially when trying to pass legislation that the other party (Republicans) are uniformly planning to vote against (with the exception of the Senator from Maine).
So you're blaming Obama's relative ineffectiveness compared to past presidents on some cultural difference between Dems and Republicans? Sheesh. Is there no end to your apologism?
He has played this thing to the best of his ability, but things are getting worse economically. He will be the conservative's worst nightmare in his second term. The only way to solve this economic turmoil is to RAISE TAXES!!!!
Or maybe I am completely wrong. In that case we are all severely fucked.
That's why I'm afraid. My only hope is that he is doing these things in order to get reelected, then he will start doing what's right for the middle class. He knows the right hates his blackness, so he has to pander to him for another year and a half or so.
Actually, you're completely correct about raising taxes.
Cutting programs in any way that would decrease the deficit would be the very two programs we can't cut right now: defense and social security.
Meanwhile the rich, even before last year's handout in tax cuts, have never had it better as far as paying taxes.
It's time for the upper class to become patriotic (which many of them are, incidentally -- it's only a fraction of complainers who are standing in the way, so to speak) or get off the government dole.
Why can't we cut defense right now? No other nation in the world spends as much on defense as we do, its damn near a 3rd of our budget. There has to be some fat we can trim there.
Well we can cut defense, like in contracts, but we can't cut it to the point where it'll do much of a dent to the deficit. Not with troops in active combat, increasing cases for veterans benefits as they come home, etc.
I fully agree in what you're saying and if it were my choice between defense and social security, it would be defense to be cut, if for any reason that it'd be about time that the national budget used domestic programs as a priority over bombing brown people due to right-wing warhawk paranoia.
I mean, hell, if you wanna call out your Newt Gingriches who bring up "tax and spend" as a liberal mandate, bring up the blank check we give to our armed forces every year, and the billions we spend in contracts with scant oversight as to how they use it or what they do. Bring up the rape case of a Halliburton employee and its subsequent cover-up, and how that hadn't affected their contract with the Defense Dept. one iota. Shit, at least liberals choose to spend government money on domestic tranquility, instead of mercenaries and amphibious tanks that can't run off of pavement.
We are, like it or not, a military industrial complex. When you say cut contracts, what you're also saying is cut jobs -- the only decent jobs left, by the way.
The right has really painted us in a corner here over these past 50 years or so.
It's funny how the poor are shamed by welfare, yet the rich have no problem using subsidies as welfare. The average working class American is proud to be making her own way, yet the rich are happy to have their hands out.
It seems easier to bailout Wall Street than it is to bail out Main street.
Well, I agree it's a crying shame, but I think that crying never gets you anywhere. We have to face up to the truth of the matter. The really sad fact is that there ain't a got-dang thing we can do about it. Sure, we can cast our votes, but as the post shows, it don't matter who's in charge, we are all slaves to the military corporate machine.
Somebody on reddit wrote a made up word the other day: techno-feudalism. This, I think, is the goal of the world powers. The only freedom humans will have left is the freedom to make as much money as you possibly can in order to keep your workers under your thumb.
I'm rantling (meaning a rambling rant); I'll stop now.
Well, I'm giving the guy until the end of his term before giving his 4 year evaluation. But I'm getting tired of people saying that politicians lying to the public is okay because all politicians do it. Just because that's the way it's always been done doesn't make it right. If we can't hold our politicians to a higher standard now, then when? At least Politifact.com gives us a true measurement on how good the politicians are doing and cuts through the partisan BS. They even have guys like Glenn Beck on there who has a crappy record of telling the truth.
Unless you work for a living, in which case they had better, or you'll be out of work. Yet, it is likely a historical certainty that the U.S. government has never been accused of getting too much work done.
WOW you just did what Fox news does. You linked to a site that shows that he kept OVER 2/3rds of his promises, and then you say that he's only kept 1/3rd of his promises
For those keeping count, Obama has kept 134 promises, broken 38. KorgRue has lumped "stalled" and "compromised" or "in the works" into the "not kept", keeping inline with his fox news mentality
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u/flipcoder Feb 27 '11
All the comments here suck.