President Obama - Please just shut up and work with Russia, China and Republicans

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The Petulant Pres still will not stop being the Chicago thug!

I remember back in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for president and people wondered if he had the experience to be commander in chief.

Our economy was crashing, we were up to our necks in wars on the other side of the world, people were fearful of losing their jobs, 40 some million Americans had no health insurance, and 11 million illegal immigrants were somewhere in this great country.

Obama, the new kid on the block, had an answer for everything it seemed.  During that campaign, he made promises to the American people, a lot of promises.

There were big ones like fixing the economy, and little ones like shutting down Guantanamo prison in Cuba.  More big ones like promising to end all wars and bring all our troops home, in his first term no less.

His was a campaign of Hope, Peace, and an end to partisan politics.

When he won the Democratic nomination, he stood between giant Roman columns in Colorado like a conquering Roman emperor.  During the campaign, he even promised thousands of people in Germany, of all places, that peace was on the horizon.

The media loved him with his progressive agenda to give labor unions more power, while Wall Street loved him because he promised Goldman Sachs protection from prosecution.

He railed against too much money in politics while shattering the spending record for campaigns by spending more than a billion dollars to win a job that paid $400,000 a year, or $223.84 per hour.

Media hailed him as the conquering hero when he won the presidency in 2008 with 52.9% of the vote, a margin that slipped to just 51.1% of the vote in his 2012 "landslide" re-election.  Since when did a landslide come from winning less than 43% of the vote.

In truth, Obama became the first winner in our history to get about 25% of the eligible vote, a sad commentary on voting in America.  In case math is difficult for you, than means 75% of the eligible voters did not vote for Obama, or three out of every four did not vote for him.

Here are a few other truths.

We still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and now we are fighting in Syria.

The prison in Guantanamo remains open seven years later.

We helped overthrow bad guys during the Arab Spring of 2010 that left Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen with no leader, while also destabilizing governments in Bahrain and Syria.

We pulled most troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan but both required us to keep some in place or send them back, while we also initiated one of the largest and most expensive bombing campaigns in history in Iraq, the country we liberated just a few years earlier.

Immigration Reform, which he promised the first year, has gone nowhere.

He did get his national health care which he signed into law March 23, 2010, and five years later everyone with insurance is paying more while the number of uninsured Americans today, five years later, is still about 36 million, down from 49.9 million in 2010 but much of it was due to Medicare not new insurance.

The economy is sputtering along as the unemployed stopped looking for work and working people had no increase in salary, since he took office.

There was no action on campaign reform so he spent two billion dollars for re-election, which means he still makes about $223.84 per hour, though he delivered on about none of his many promises.

On the positive side, he wants the minimum wage increased from $7.25 per hour to $9.00 per hour, which is only $214.84 less than he makes.

Of course, George Bush left office seven years ago but Obama still blames many of his problems on Bush.

Then, there is the issue of the dastardly Republicans.  Conveniently, Obama blames them for everything he could not do.  So much for bringing to an end partisan politics, finger pointing, and character assassination.

Over the years, he has broadened his assaults as he blames Russia, Putin, or China for every single problem of the Administration it seems, if he does not blame it on the Republicans.

Unfortunately, his intransient nature regarding his policies, have alienated Russia, China, and Israel at a time when we need them the most.

   

With little over one year left to serve, Obama is alienating the rest of the world and the American public.  it comes from his refusal to work with Russia and China - especially when it comes to terrorism, his indifference to Israel, his Red Lines in the sand and veto threats rather than trying to work with people, and his trashing of anyone who questions anything he has done.

It is a good thing Russia and China understand he is a lame duck, a seriously wounded lame duck, so they have no expectations of anything from him.

Once upon a time American presidents used to build worldwide coalitions to advance causes.  Now he will have to eat a mighty amount of humble pie is he is to receive any help from Russia and China.

Obama and his mouthpieces should just shut up, the world is not interested in his problems, or in hearing why the United States is so weak.  For those who supported Obama, it was a good try but he really had no experience and really never grew into the role of commander in chief.

It is far too late to defend him, the record I reviewed of his broken promises is clear.  Just use your efforts to get him to work with Russia and China because right now they are the leaders of the world and have demonstrated the most maturity when it comes to working with other nations.

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Obamaville March 24, 2015 - Obama Blasts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for Campaign Promises

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In a further sign of the deterioration of relations between the Obama Administration and Israel, the President took the unusual step of blasting the Israeli Prime Minister in news conferences for statements the PM made on the eve of the Israeli elections.

The stunning and decisive victory by Netanyahu seemed to fuel the attacks by Obama who is still outraged that the PM addressed the United States Congress without the approval of the president.

Obama called the promises by Netanyahu "cynical" and 19 times in one news conference, said they would lead to a reassessment by the United States of our relationship with Israel.

Now something is very wrong with the righteous attack by Obama.  This is the same Obama, who made 508 promises in his own 2008 campaign for president and only managed to fulfill 38% of them, and then added more in 2012 he is yet to fulfill.

Therefore, Obama can fail to deliver 62% of the time himself but thinks an election campaign in another country should be free of any campaign promises, and only deal in campaign facts.

Get real Mr. President, it seems all politicians are foot loose and fancy free when it comes to delivering campaign promises.

We do not need to encourage the terrorist world by alienating our only true friend in the Middle East over nonsense such as campaign promises.

For those of you suffering from memory loss, the following are two articles by left-leaning news outlets detailing the failure of Obama to deliver on his own campaign promises.

Do Promises Matter Anymore? Countdown Day 36

Posted: 10/01/2012 7:55 pm EDT Updated: 12/01/2012 5:12 am EST

Howard Fineman, Editorial director, Huffington Post Media Group

WASHINGTON -- In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama was full of promise -- 508 of them to be precise. He was the harbinger of hope in the last dark months of the George W. Bush years.

But with just six weeks to go until Election Day 2012, President Obama has made few new promises and is not repeating many of the original ones. By PolitiFact's accounting, he has delivered on 38 percent of them -- a lousy shooting percentage in the NBA.

Instead, Obama is selling himself based on what he isn't: Mitt Romney. And rather than trying to convince voters that great days surely lie ahead -- a tough sell to a skeptical electorate -- he often offers a litany of reduced expectations, grim economic realism and rueful lamentations about the gridlock in Washington that he, in his innocence, did not expect. His slogan, "Forward," can sound less like an invitation to a glorious Elysium and more like a military command on a bloody battlefield.

The candidate who won on the high-octane power of optimism is now running on the cautious notion that the future ain't what it used to be.

The message, rarely overtly expressed, is that we are facing a tough grind (in terms of tax increases, slow job growth and entitlement cutbacks), and it's better to have a compassionate, user-friendly communitarian in the Oval Office than a wealthy, spreadsheet-and-shredder CEO who was born with a silver foot in his mouth.

The president now leads in this war of attrition and lowered sights.

Despite what the polls say, though, it is not clear the Obama strategy will hold up all the way to Election Day. There are three inherent risks: Voters prefer campaigns of dreams to those of realism. A chance, admittedly slight, remains that Romney will find his voice and a message at the last minute. And voters may yet choose to take one last look at the details of the president's record.

What they will find is that the Obama that is often isn't the Obama that wanted to be. This is not an observation confined to the Rush Limbaugh right; many on the progressive left have said the same thing.

That's where the past promises come in -- and the question of whether they mean much in our promiscuously promissory age.

Only once in any direct and sharp way has the president been confronted with tough questions about a failed promise. When Univision news anchors asked him why he had not won comprehensive immigration reform, or even pushed for it, Obama seemed both surprised and confused that he had been pressed on such an obvious point. The answer he gave -- that the pressures in Congress were just too daunting -- was less than convincing.

The president has kept promises No. 1 and No. 2: He calmly led the fight to bring the United States back from the brink of economic catastrophe (including a workable bailout of the auto industry), and he got a version of a national health care system passed and, as it turned out, sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But he hasn't come close to reducing unemployment to the levels his aides envisioned and predicted, poverty is at an all-time high, and the annual deficit has certainly not been cut in half.
Here's a short list of other, more specific promises compiled by PolitiFact:

• Establish a mortgage foreclosure prevention fund. (Deemed a "colossal failure" by a special inspector general.)

• Close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. (Punted.)

• Create a cap-and-trade system with interim goals to reduce global warming. (Punted.)

• Sign the Employee Free Choice Act, making it easier to unionize. (Couldn't get a must-pass bill through a Democratic Congress.)

• Allow importation of prescription drugs. (Bargained away to big pharma.)

• Sign the Freedom of Choice Act, guaranteeing abortion rights against state legislative encroachments. (Never pushed it.)

• Include a "public option" in the health care plan. (Punted.)

• Bring in the dawn of a new bipartisan era. (Not.)

To that list, I would add one more failure: Public schools in general are not noticeably improving the education of students.

Perhaps lists such as these don't matter anymore. After all, most focus on expansions of federal power that the president was not able to achieve -- failures that Romney has no standing to criticize, given his conversion to Tea Party libertarianism.

It is true that Republicans have opposed the president at every turn, even though their truculence also exposed Obama's lack of deal-making skills.

As for Romney, he isn't making many specific promises, and the ones he is making tend to be of the negative variety: abolishing Obamacare, abolishing the Dodd-Frank bank regulation law, cutting tax rates, abolishing unspecified tax loopholes. His "promise" to "create 12 million jobs" is a laughable non-event, since that is the number of jobs the economy is predicted to produce over the next four years regardless of who is president.

But maybe voters, as cynical as they are these days, have just given up on expecting elected leaders to deliver on their promises. If that is so, how will voters decide whether a president deserves reelection -- or a challenger deserves to replace him?

It's not a promising development.

What Obama Promises To Do Next

Posted: 11/07/2012 1:44 pm EST Updated: 11/07/2012 4:11 pm EST

Dan Froomkin, Joe Van Brussel

WASHINGTON -- Now President Barack Obama has some promises to keep.

His 2012 campaign wasn't nearly as full of measurable commitments as his first one in 2008, but there were still plenty -- some of which are due in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

The most immediate deliverable -- and the one for which he has the clearest mandate -- is a tax hike for the rich.

Obama can deliver that fairly easily because the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year. Without doing anything, he can restore the top marginal tax rate to 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent, restore the estate tax, and raise the capital gains tax cap from 15 percent to 20 percent.

But in that process, Obama also has repeatedly vowed to strike what is often referred to as a "grand bargain" -- a bipartisan deal that would link tax increases for the rich to budget cuts, possibly involving Social Security, in order to start along the path to long-term deficit reduction.

In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Obama restated his biggest promises. "In the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together: reducing our deficit; reforming our tax code; fixing our immigration system; freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do."

But there's no way for Obama to fulfill any of those major promises unless he gets House Republicans to go along. So he has essentially promised to deliver Republicans, starting very soon. 

Of course, he promised to do that in 2008, too.

Post inauguration, Obama's first big deliverable is comprehensive immigration reform providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. In September, Obama told a Miami audience that his inaction on immigration was the "biggest failure" of his first term. In October, he told the Des Moines Register, he is confident he can deliver because he has new leverage.

"Should I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community," he said. But his assumption -- that the GOP will realize it can't afford to keep its hard line position on immigration any longer -- is unproven.

Obama can keep some of his promises even with an obstructionist GOP if he's willing to take bold, unilateral steps that he shrank from in his first term. For instance, Obama has talked about addressing the continued housing crisis; the obvious next step would be to allow principal reductions for troubled borrowers whose mortgages are owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama is expected to start soon by firing acting Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Ed DeMarco.

Obama has promised to reduce air pollution and other environmental hazards, and a more muscular approach to agency rule-making could go a long way in that direction.

But if second-term Obama is focused on establishing a historic legacy, then he's going to have to take on the issue of climate change -- going far beyond the innovation agenda of his first term, and establishing some a carbon tax or emissions caps.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney mocked Obama for having "promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans” in 2008. Environmentalists, by contrast, are hoping the president will now act on that promise. The path to such an agreement is far from clear, however.

Similarly, it's hard to see how Obama can deliver on his most frequent campaign promises, which related to the middle class and job creation. Underlying those promises is his vow to invest in education, research, but most of all infrastructure -- and he can't do that without Congress.

In the same town hall where he discussed his failure to achieve immigration reform, Obama said "the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.” He seemed to be suggesting that the American public help him pressure Congress.

But it's not just Congress. Progressive activists have learned the hard way that Obama himself is best at keeping his own promises when he is held to them by organized and mobilized grassroots campaigns.

Here are some of the major promises made by the Obama 2012 campaign in ads, the Democratic Party platform, Obama's major speeches, debates, and other sources.

Middle class/Taxes

·                                 Return to Clinton-era tax rates for families earning above $250,000.

·                                 Give middle-class families and folks trying to get into the middle class some relief.

·                                 98 percent of families will not see a tax increase.

Job creation/Business/Manufacturing

·                                 Close loopholes that allow companies to deduct expenses when they export jobs.

·                                 Tax breaks for companies that are investing in the United States.

·                                 97 percent of small businesses will not see a tax increase.

·                                 Reduce corporate tax rate to 25 percent, while eliminating many deductions.

·                                 Create a million new manufacturing jobs in the next four years.

·                                 Help big factories and small businesses double their exports.

·                                 Invest in advanced manufacturing.

Energy/Gas/Environment

·                                 By the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas.

·                                 Open more land for oil-and-gas exploration.

·                                 Cut oil imports in half by 2020.

·                                 Develop new sources of energy in America.

·                                 Reduce carbon pollution.

Education

·                                 Hire 100,000 new math and science teachers.

·                                 Create 2 million more slots in our community colleges so people can get job training.

·                                 Cut tuition increases in half over 10 years.

Health care

·                                 When Obamacare is fully implemented, costs will go down.

·                                 Lower Medicare health care costs.

·                                 Improve benefits, cut payments to hospitals and other providers by $700 billion.

Deficit

·                                 Put U.S. on path to cut deficits by $4 trillion over 10 years.

Immigration

·                                 Pass comprehensive immigration reform.

·                                 Give young people a path to citizenship.

Foreign policy

·                                 Transition out of Afghanistan by end of 2014.

·                                 Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.

Gun control

·                                 Keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those who are mentally ill.

·                                 Increase enforcement of current laws.

·                                 Reintroduce assault weapons ban.

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Obama's Whimsical Pollyanna approach to Foreign Policy failed - Now What???

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When President Obama was elected into office six long years ago we were promised everything under the sun and for the most part we have been struggling to find the light at the end of the tunnel of disappointments.

No where was it more true than in the area of foreign policy where the president promised to close Guantanamo prison, get out of Iraq, get out of Afghanistan, bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians, stop Iran, stop North Korea, stop Russia, solve the Middle East peace problems, and, well you've all heard the litany of promises.

Back then it was heresy to say the newly elected Obama had no foreign policy experience, in fact no administrative experience either, but everyone gave him the benefit of the doubt.  For six years the liberal media has ignored, explained away or covered up the astounding failures of Obama and aided the president in blaming any problems on George Bush, as if that meant Obama didn't have to do anything because it was Bush's fault.

Even Franklin Roosevelt, the most effective of all Democrat liberal presidents, who was elected at the beginning of the Great Depression, the one that was still far worse than what Obama inherited, didn't spend the next six years blaming Hoover and the Republicans for the mess we were in.  In fact, he reached out to Hoover to help him put America back to work and then help with World War II preparations.

That would be like Obama asking Romney to help him fix the problems of America because Romney, like Hoover, was experienced, could manage and could create policy that worked.  Needless to say Obama would never stoop so low as to ask a Republican with a mind of his own to help America.  It was far more important to blame everything on the Republicans forever.

Rabid partisanship and inflammatory rhetoric were Obama's tools to deflect criticism and explain away failure and the media let him get away with it as did his own party.  So Obama spent the last six years with an almost disinterested approach to foreign policy.  I mean the one event in which he was personally involved and took an active role was the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the unarmed Bin Laden that is.

Have things changed?  Today his decision to pull troops out of Iraq has resulted in one of the worst blood baths since he took office.  Because of his policy failures we are going to be back in Iraq one way or the other just to help stabilize he Middle East.

So how does our cerebral and aloof president handle this world threatening crisis?  Well, he is out playing two rounds of golf today at a Democrat fundraiser.  Need I say more about his whimsical and Pollyanna approach to foreign policy?

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Obamaville, February 7 - President Obama's True Colors?

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It is only Tuesday and it has already been a weird week in Obamaville.  Maybe it is the weather?  Maybe the fact the Super Bowl is over?  Maybe because today, February 7, is a full moon and the spirits are mischievous?

No matter, with the attention off the Republicans the Obama administration has a strange way of using the available air time.  So far the policies and decisions of the Obama gang the past few days has threatened traditional Democrat bases long taken for granted by the Democrats.

The Roman Catholic Church

First his Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Kathleen Sebelius lowered the boom on the Roman Catholic Church by telling them the federal government now required all Catholic Charities and hospitals to offer free birth control through health insurance (Obamacare) to hundreds of thousands of Catholic employees.

The agency has the noble motto "Our goal is for all Americans to live healthier, more prosperous, and more productive lives."  Notice they say nothing about religion, morality, religious freedom, censorship, or politics.

It is important to note that one out of every six Americans get their health care from the Catholic Church.

Then the Obama Office of the Chief of Chaplains of the U.S. Army forbade Catholic chaplains from reading, in Sunday masses, a letter about a controversial Obamacare mandate from the Catholic Church’s military archbishop. The censorship move, which resulted in the head of Roman Catholic military chaplains calling the Obama administration un-American, sets the stage for a philosophical conflict between Catholic soldiers and their commander-in-chief.

Okay, so now the Obama boys have threatened to drive away the Catholics.

Wall Street and our Super PAC Populist President

Then there is Obama's wavering relationship with Wall Street.  Goldman Sachs led the way in getting Wall Street money to elect Obama in 2008.  In return Obama spent the last three years demonizing Wall Street, corporate America and big business and castigating the Supreme Court for allowing such demons to fund political campaigns.

Today, our trustworthy president who is devoted to his people's agenda reversed himself yet again and decided those demonic Super PACs have found God and can now fund the Obama political campaign.  So he has now gone full cycle, from pro Wall Street in 2008 to anti-Wall  Street in 2009-2012 to pro-Wall Street on February 7, 2012.

I'm not sure how all those liberals that he promised to take on the 1% fat cats will react to him once again embracing the very fat cats he characterized as demons.  This year is so crazy that the Wall Street Occupiers will have to occupy the White House next.

That means the Obama boys have threatened to drive away either the Wall Street fat cats or liberal populists or both.

Latinos and Immigration

The traditional support for the Democrats is also fading away as Obama has failed to bring about immigration reform, has failed to deal with illegal immigration, has failed to move the Dream Act giving illegal kids who attend American schools the right to become citizens, along with broken promises like helping Mexico with the drug war.  Isn't 45,000 innocent Mexican deaths from our drug war about enough?

The Latino population of the United States is expected to exceed 50 million, or roughly 1 in 6 Americans; among U.S. children, Hispanics are now roughly 1 in 4, according to Pew Hispanic Center analysis of U.S. Census Data.

The population numbers released by the Census show the Hispanic population on track to be 900,000 higher than expected as their ranks surpassed census estimates in roughly 40 states. Many of their biggest jumps were in the South, including Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina, where immigrants made large inroads over the last decade.

With over 60% of the 50 million Latino people Roman Catholics, whether they are from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba or South America, this powerful electoral force also is interested in the Obama handling of the church on birth control and abortion.

I guess this was a week the president missed a few bases.
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