Obama the Bully: Threatens To Blame Fiscal Cliff On GOP

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Barack Obama, petulant as usual, was considering using his State of the Union speech to blame Republicans for the impasse in dealing with the “fiscal cliff.” The Journal wrote:

Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn’t reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

This was just before Boehner’s Plan B went down in flames after conservative Republicans balked at Boehner’s attempt to reach a “compromise.”

Obama using his bully pulpit to blame Republicans? Why is the Journal reporting this breathlessly as if it’s news?

On his failure to pass immigration reform this past September, as he condescendingly pretended to be “naïve” about those big, bad Republicans:

I confess I did not expect — and so I’m happy to take responsibility for being naive here — that Republicans who had previously supported comprehensive immigration reform — my opponent in 2008, who had been a champion of it and who attended these meetings — suddenly would walk away. That’s what I did not anticipate.

Read more here.

Anti-Obama sales outpace pro-Obama nearly fourfold at popular online clothier

This past week, anti-Obama merchandise outpaced sales of pro-Obama merchandise 79 percent to 21 percent at the online clothing store CafePress, which has been tracking sales of election-relevant items.

CafePress, an online custom merchandise shop, launched its 2012 “Election Meter” at the beginning of November but has been tracking the trends in candidate merchandise sales since April.

According to the clothier, the “Meter” successfully predicted President Obama’s victory in 2008. This week’s data represents a stark contrast to Obama’s sales during the 2008 election cycle.

“As CafePress saw four years ago (and four years before that), the T-shirt economy has a history of predicting presidential winners,” said CafePress Director of Marketing Marc Cowlin in April. “In 2008, Obama was a consistent fan favorite on CafePress, surpassing sales of McCain t-shirts and gifts by more than 30 percent in the weeks leading up to the election.”

According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, when matched against an unnamed Republican, Obama leads by a razor-thin 43.8 percent to 43 percent.

Read more here.

Obama heckled by Occupiers in New Hampshire

Watch This Russian News Anchor Give the Middle Finger While Mentioning Obama

Secret Service Searched Occupy D.C. Camp For Person Who Shot At White House

Protestor Ralph Wittenberg told TPM on Tuesday evening that authorities came through “searching for a so-called terrorist who shot at the White House, with no warrant, they went into everybody’s tents.”

A person handling media requests for Occupy DC confirmed the searches and said they were led by the Secret Service. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Talking Points Memo on Facebook

Police have been trying to locate 21-year-old Oscar Ortega Hernandez, a mentally ill man from Idaho who authorities say is connected to the incident, which apparently took place on Friday.

Agents began investigating after gunshots were heard on Friday night, but NBC Washington reports that agents didn’t discover the bullets until Tuesday morning.

One bullet hit an exterior window of the White House but was stopped by the bulletproof glass behind the historic glass. An additional round was found on the exterior of the building, the Secret Service told the news channel. Authorities recovered an AK-47 rifle near the scene.

Read more here.

Obama’s Deceit

I have had it with this President’s blatant dishonesty. His speech was appallingly deceitful and misleading. This President, has spent more money and added more debt than any other President in history. This is not political rhetoric, this is simply fact! Barack Obama’s budget deficit in March of 2011 was larger than the deficit for all of 2007!

According to Obama’s 2012 Budget Proposal, under Historical Tables, the budget deficit under George Bush first peaked in 2004 at $412 billion dollars. Between 2005 and 2007 the budget deficit declined by $252 billion to reach its low, under Bush, at $160 billion. If the tax cuts and wars, both occurring in 2001 and 2003, caused our current financial situation, how did the deficit fall between 2004 to 2007? Because Tax Cuts increase revenue to the government by allowing people and business to invest more of their own money. As people invest they conduct taxable transactions which bring in revenue to the government.

So where did Obama come up with the claim that he inherited a trillion dollar deficit? In 2008, the deficit under Bush climbed to a new high of $458 billion. The reason for the climb was the fiscal stimulus and emergency spending as a result of the financial crises. However, this number is somewhat misleading. The fiscal year for 2008 ended in October of that year, pushing much of the onetime emergency spending on the 2009 budget. When you add that spending onto the budget baseline, you come up with a deficit for 2009 of $1.4 trillion. While Obama is correct that he is not solely responsible for the 2009 budget, he is lying by not informing the American people most of the deficit was “one time emergency spending.” He, Barack H. Obama, chose to put that spending in the baseline budget for the next decade. Thus, we have $1 trillion dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see.

The President claimed that we didn’t “pay for” the tax cuts. Excuse me Mr. President, when someone takes a pay cut, do they have to “pay for it?” A tax cut means the government simply takes less of YOUR money, what is there to pay for? This, seemingly innocuous, difference comes from the President’s view that government has a right to your money. To Obama, it is not your income, but governments’, and government not taking all of your money is an act of compassion. Obama believes that by leaving more of your money in your pocket, it is the equivalent of government sending you a check! If government sends you a check, that means government must “pay for” the tax cut. Unbelievable!

Obama’s Speech

Now for a few little excerpts from Obama’s speech yesterday. As you read this, you really need to try to remember that this man, our president, has referred to the private sector as “the enemy.” This would mean that the people who work within the private sector – especially those who make the higher incomes – are enemy operatives. Obama is a man who believes that America’s greatness comes from government, not in any sense from the dynamic of people working and cooperating together in a free market system protected by the rule of law. If you love government and detest the private sector, then this is your guy and nothing is going to change your mind.

So … here we go with some snippets:

* As a country that values fairness, wealthier individuals have traditionally born a greater share of this burden than the middle class or those less fortunate. This is not because we begrudge those who’ve done well – we rightly celebrate their success. Rather, it is a basic reflection of our belief that those who have benefited most from our way of life can afford to give a bit more back. Moreover, this belief has not hindered the success of those at the top of the income scale, who continue to do better and better with each passing year.

Well now THAT is pretty impressive. Obama managed to hit ALL the of the most commonly used leftist class warfare terms in one paragraph. It’s just not FAIR that these people have all this money. They only have all that money because they were LUCKY, and you really want the government to make them GIVE IT BACK, don’t you? Give back? I give from what I have earned, not from what has been first given to me.

* But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program – but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts – tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

Obama is right about losing our way over the last decade when it comes to government spending. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But cutting tax rates for wealthy Americans is not the problem here, the problem is exactly that: government spending. Kevin Williams reminds us: “Repealing all of those Bush tax cuts, for rich and middle class alike, gets you about $3 trillion — over ten years. The deficit is running from a third to almost half that every year. Will not balance. Does not compute.” But that’s not all: “You want to tax Club 1 (millionaires) to get rid of the deficit, you have to hit each of those 200,000 households with an average tax hike — not an average tax bill, but tax increase — of $6 million. And a lot of those Club 1 households don’t have $6 million in income to start with, much less $6 million left after the taxes they’re already paying.” According to the Heritage Foundation: Above-average spending, not below-average revenues, accounts for 92 percent of rising budget deficits by 2014 and 100 percent by 2017.

Pay attention for a second … absorb this figure … digest it … try to really understand what you are about to hear or read and put it up against Obama’s class-warfare, tax-the-rich rhetoric. The Wall Street Journal has gone over the tax statistics for 2008. That is the last year for which this particular statistic is readily available. In 2008 the total taxable income of everyone in this country who made over $100,000 was $1.58 trillion. Now we’re not talking $200K or $250K and we’re certainly not talking about “millionaires and billionaires.” We’re talking about people who made over $100,000. Now …if you taxed these people at 100%; in other words, if you took every penny of taxable income from every soul who earned over $100,000, you wouldn’t have enough money to cover Obama’s budget deficit for THIS YEAR!

Tax the rich? Yeah … that’s the way out of this mess. But Obama isn’t looking for a way out … he’s looking for a way IN. He’s looking for keys to the White House for another four years, and he knows that ramping up wealth envy and engaging in class warfare is the surest way into the hearts and minds of his core constituency.

Next snippet:

* To their credit, one vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that. Those are both worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history.

Wait a minute! Isn’t Obama the man who said he was going to fundamentally transform the United States of America? But Obama’s transformation was away from liberty and toward more government. That’s OK. The evil Republicans are moving to less government. That’s simply not acceptable to Obama.

* Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy … They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

Yup .. it’s a Republican attack on our senior citizens. Frighten the seniors and you have their votes in 2012.

* Some will argue we shouldn’t even consider raising taxes, even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It’s just an article of faith for them. I say that at a time when the tax burden on the wealthy is at its lowest level in half a century, the most fortunate among us can afford to pay a little more … And I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me. They want to give back to the country that’s done so much for them. Washington just hasn’t asked them to.

Oh yeah .. had to get this idea that wealthy people only got that way because of luck, and they should give some of that stuff back thing in there again. Like I said, it was a campaign speech, not a serious policy speech.

Ayers affirms he wrote Dreams from my Father

The New Dayton Police Officers

It seems they needed to hire a few new police officers in Dayton, so they had a little test that they gave to potential recruits. There was a problem with the test. You see, the Department of Justice is a little unhappy with the number of blacks who failed this exam. So the Obama administration has decreed that the test will be given again, and this time the passing score will be lowered so that more blacks will pass.

Let’s cut to the chase here. What does this mean if you are now, or you are soon to become, a black police officer in Dayton, Ohio, every time you encounter a citizen –, whether it be a traffic stop, or some other law enforcement situation — that citizen is going to presume that you, as a black police officer, are less qualified for your job then the white police officers in Dayton. Now you may not like what I have just said, and you can scream racism until the aardvarks come home, but you know what I have this right. Virtually every citizen of Dayton knows or soon will know that the qualifications on the police exam have been lowered for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to facilitate the hiring of more black police officers. The fact is that many black applicants did pass the test, and that there are many veteran of black police officers in Dayton, who have shown their qualifications to serve in that office over the years. This, though, will have no bearing on public perception. If a white motorist is pulled over by a black police officer he’ll be thinking to himself, “Oh great, I’m getting stopped by an affirmative action cop. Just my luck.” It is unfortunate, but this will probably result in black police officers in Dayton being treated with less than the respect that they deserve for the job that they do. But for the Obama Justice Department it’s not about qualifications, it’s about race.

In effect, Obama’s Department of Justice has said that actual qualifications come in second behind race when it comes to choosing the next recruitment class for the Dayton Police Department.

Obama vs Obama

Drudge is currently highlighting the similarity between President Obama’s justification for today’s military action against Libya with what President Bush had to say about Iraq at the commencement of the war (strangely, both on March 19). Equally striking I think are some similarities – and contradictions – between the President’s decision on Libya and his objections to action in Iraq which he laid out in his famous 2002 speech:

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.

He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.

Ah, but the President has a clear rationale in the case with Libya – right? Sure he does. A rationale that boils downs to the fact that Gadhafi is a brutal, ruthless dictator who is threatening to butcher his own people. (People, it might be noted, who have taken up arms in an attempt to butcher him.)

And like with Saddam, Gadhafi poses no imminent threat to the United States or to his neighbors. And also like Iraq, critics have noted that we are now faced with a military engagement of undetermined length, cost, and consequences.

The key difference in this case, is that these critics do not include Barack H. Obama.

It’s not news to anyone I think that the Barack Obama of 2002/2003 was about as anti-war as any mainstream political figure could possibly be, especially in the wake of 9/11. But to further illustrate the point, here are some images – rarely seen I think – of another anti-war rally in Chicago in March 2003, just prior to the launch of the initial attacks on Iraq.

Read more here.