The important ramblings, rumblings and quixotic opinions of The Vails.
Nemo me impune lacessit
No one provokes me with impunity
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No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
Article 1, Section 9, Constitution of the United States
If this is the law of the land...why in a republic (little r) and as republicans, do we allow mere POLITICIANS to the right to use a "title of office" for the rest of their lives as if it were de facto a patent of nobility. Because, as republicans, this should NOT be the case...just saying...
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Showing posts with label Obama Administration's Incompetence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama Administration's Incompetence. Show all posts
President Obama faced a tough political decision this week on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada. He could order the State Department to approve it, thus alienating his environmental activist supporters, or he could kill the pipeline, thus angering his union allies.
Obama chose to do what he had done 130 times while he was in the Illinois state Senate. He voted present.
The State Department announced Thursday that it would begin developing a second, redundant environmental impact statement for the 1,700-mile pipeline that traverses six states on its route from Alberta, Canada, to Houston, Texas. This buys Obama time well past November 2012. The first environmental assessment, three years in the works, was completed in August. This second assessment will take at least as long the first.
This president isn't serious about changing the dire economic situation this country is in. Instead he's trying to raise a billion dollars so buy the 2012 election.
While on a foriegn trip to China, The Won tells the world that America is lazy. Here is our head of government telling the world that America sucks...
There is something seriously wrong with this picture. Here is a man who really doesn't like our country. He can't stop himself.
President Barack Obama told an international audience that America’s economic difficulties are caused, in part, by laziness, and the cure is more centralized government...In September, Obama told a Florida interviewer that “this is a great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.”
.This is wrong on so many levels. If he wins the election next November, we will deserve everything that happens to us.
You know the president doesn't have a clue what to do about the econimic crisis that faces the nation when he proposes a "Department of Jobs." Holy Shit! More beauracracy, that's what the country needs. We're drowning in it and Mr. Obama wants more of the same. Problem solved...
The administration may also merge the Department of Commerce, the Office of the United States Trade Representative and some economic divisions at the State Department into a new agency, administration officials said. Possible names include the Department of Jobs or the Department of Competitiveness.
That is just what is wrong with the Democratic Party...
Barack Obama, again has refused to take responsibility for the failing economy. The trillion dollar "stimulus package" that his Democratically controlled Congress rammed through along party lines in 2009 has utterly failed in it's declared goal to keep unemployment below 8% (even the biased "politifact.com" finds that Obama said so...and failed misserably.
Even that being said, with regulations as welll as currently existing ones costing the economy $1.5 trillion dollars per year, the EPA is set to ramp up even more costly carbon emissions standards. This will cost at least an additional half trillion dollars. So...
A cascade of bad economic and political news knocked President Barack Obama off his game today, and prompted him to revive his 2008-style criticism of his predecessor, and also to suggest that investors, consumers and even the media are responsible for today’s stalled economy.
The blame-game rhetoric – which pollsters say is counterproductive – came during the White House’s joint press conference with Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. “It is just very important for folks to remember how close we came to complete disaster,” he told the watching TV cameras and reporters.
“The world economy took a severe blow two and a half years ago, and in part that is because of a whole set of policy decisions that had been made, and challenges that have been unaddressed over the course of the previous decade,” he said, standing alongside Merkel, whose economy has rebounded during the last two years.
Of course, it's not his fault, or that of his party...it's ours...you and me. It's the voters fault! That's the ticket, yeah...
“[L]ook, I don’t think anybody — if 54,000 new jobs is the new standard, it’s going to be a very, very rough 2012 for President Obama,” Carville said. “But the three-month average was 160,000. If that is the case, then he will do OK. I can’t tell you what will happen. But yes, if this, if this last jobs number is an indication of future job numbers, it’s going to be very, very rough.”
Things are so bad in this administration ecnomic team, that Austan Goolsbee, who lead the Council of Economic Advisors for only 9 months has resigned to return to academia...where he can teach progressive ideas (that don't work) to future progressive leaders. Mr. Obama in 2009 formed a "dream team" of economic advisors who would "turn the country around."
With Goolsbee’s departure, the collapse of the president’s economic team is nearly complete. The first to leave was the president’s original chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, University of California-Berkeley economist Christina Romer. She holds the distinction of predicting an $800 billion stimulus program would bring joblessness down to 8%. Also gone is Jared Bernstein, the actual architect of the stimulus, and the man who was behind Vice President Biden’s “Summer of Recovery.”
Mr. Obama is out of ideas, and almost out of time, while we're almost out of money. I suspect that he'll keep trying to redistribute it until he's out of office.
Once upon a time, my wife and I were members of the middle class...then came the economic meltdown of late 2008. Since then, we've been barely ekeing by with less than half what were making prior to October 2008. Only at the beginning of this year was I able to find full-time work. My wife yet has...to obtain a job that will give her more than 40 hours a week. Karen-Anne Shiver has an excellent desciption of just what inflation means.
Inflation stalks like a thief in the night, filling the nightmares of homemakers and breadwinners alike.
Inflation is the invisible beast that steals the long-awaited raise before it has a chance to hit the bank account.
Inflation is the disease that ravages the arduously saved dollars of decades.
Inflation is the bandit that steals from the poor while hardly ever even noticed by the likes of the politicians who guilefully prod its crime spree.
Inflation is the monster who gobbles up the goodies of responsible citizens no matter their station.
So, when Obama and Bernanke and all the Fed gurus like Mr. Dudley put their little heads together and formulate a monetary policy, it would really be nice if they remembered — just once — that while the iPads and the Guccis and the golf clubs they love so much are simply wonderful if they cost a little less, the rest of us do have to worry about the rising cost of our groceries and our gas.
In our world, the necessities of life don’t get paid for with other people’s money.
We in the middle class pay the most taxes and fuel the government engine.
It would be nice if we weren’t told to eat our iPads when we notice that our government has set out to deflate the middle class.
But the most telling part is this:
ObamaCare alone has caused a nearly 40% hike in insurance premiums for individual policies such as the one my self-employed husband and I have. The Democrats’ save-the-deadbeats credit card law caused an immediate rise in interest rates for us always-pay-on-time consumers to cover the cost of the mandated write-offs.
The company I work for...offers a great insurance plan, that doubled in cost on January 1...from $248 per month to over $526. Think about just how much of a pay check that eats up when you make $17 hour. Now with a huge increase in both food and gas costs, our barely getting by has placed us back in the "oh shit, how are we going to pay for..." category. Thanks a lot Washington.
The real difference between Libya and Iraq...is an incompetent Democrat started the war with Libya...and a (somewhat incompetent) Republican started the war with Iraq.
Major media keeps talking about the recovery...and how the economy is one the road to recovery. If this is the case...then where are the jobs? My wife and I have been sending out an average of 50-60 resumes each, each week. We've long since begun looking for employment outside of the metro-Baltimore/Washington DC area. Yet, with well over 400 resumes out, collectively, we've only had one phone interview...that has yet to bear any fruit.
Think about that. Just one phone interview. We're both educated and have at least 10 years of management experience under our belts with 20 or so years of total industry experience (I have 20 years in restaurants, 10 years in cabinetry, my wife has 24 years in retail and 17 of that in management positions) yet, no-one is hiring.
We'd move just about anywhere, excepting the failed economic states of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois or California...at our own expense, if only we could find work. But, the Obama Adminstration wants to tell us that "all is well."
However, pretty much all the economic indicators are showing just the opposite...I'm worried, and you should be too.
by Sarah Palin on Monday, November 29, 2010 at 12:17pm
We all applaud the successful thwarting of the Christmas-Tree Bomber and hope our government continues to do all it can to keep us safe. However, the latest round of publications of leaked classified U.S. documents through the shady organization called Wikileaks raises serious questions about the Obama administration’s incompetent handling of this whole fiasco.
First and foremost, what steps were taken to stop Wikileaks director Julian Assange from distributing this highly sensitive classified material especially after he had already published material not once but twice in the previous months? Assange is not a “journalist,” any more than the “editor” of al Qaeda’s new English-language magazine Inspire is a “journalist.” He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?
What if any diplomatic pressure was brought to bear on NATO, EU, and other allies to disrupt Wikileaks’ technical infrastructure? Did we use all the cyber tools at our disposal to permanently dismantle Wikileaks? Were individuals working for Wikileaks on these document leaks investigated? Shouldn’t they at least have had their financial assets frozen just as we do to individuals who provide material support for terrorist organizations?
Most importantly, serious questions must also be asked of the U.S. intelligence system. How was it possible that a 22-year-old Private First Class could get unrestricted access to so much highly sensitive information? And how was it possible that he could copy and distribute these files without anyone noticing that security was compromised?
The White House has now issued orders to federal departments and agencies asking them to take immediate steps to ensure that no more leaks like this happen again. It’s of course important that we do all we can to prevent similar massive document leaks in the future. But why did the White House not publish these orders after the first leak back in July? What explains this strange lack of urgency on their part?
We are at war. American soldiers are in Afghanistan fighting to protect our freedoms. They are serious about keeping America safe. It would be great if they could count on their government being equally serious about that vital task.
This is by an unknown author. I received it from a regular reader.
Government, which grows not out of necessity but by insisting upon itself, needs to slow down. We need to revisit the balance among freedom, cost and security and not continue to double down on bad policies.
The latest is the TSA's (stands for "Thousands Standing Around") directive to be more intrusive in its new "enhanced pat-down" policy. Maybe the TSA seeks to expand its self-serving role, or maybe the unionized agents of the behemoth TSA were just getting bored and wanted a better way to feel up women and explore some new boundaries. Either way, it is unnecessary.
This is the part that will scare Juan Williams: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has told the government - and Muslims - that this procedure violates their religious rights. Now it looks like our government will back off from frisking and even body scanning Muslim women. When female Islamic terrorists blow themselves up, I don't think they are rewarded with 72 virgin men in Paradise. I think they would prefer one good man who cuddles and picks up after himself. We have these in America; they are called gay men.
Since the TSA won't be able to aggressively pat down Muslims, they will now have more time to pat down Irene Smith, the 62-year-old, retired school teacher from Canton, Ohio. Irene, this is your lucky day! If you are subjected to ten "random" pat downs in a row, the eleventh one is free!
In a feeble attempt to justify her decision, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said "women can opt for a same gender pat-down," no doubt something she would like to do herself to other women. So ladies, your choice of who gets to feel you up is either a creepy male who has not even bought you a cocktail yet or a woman in comfortable shoes.
The new body scans are no less troubling. It was recently reported that the U.S. Marshals Service admitted to storing images from courthouse body scans. The TSA is suspected of doing the same, so when the Obama administration started its big push against obesity, it was because they wanted to look at better bodies.
In lieu of full body scans or pat-downs, and to accommodate Muslims, Nancy Pelosi will have her personal California feng shui guy look passengers in the eye and read their Karma. As we know, liberals are OK with their policies being a disaster as long as their stated intentions are good.
To recap the new TSA intrusion, Muslims will be subjected to less security, we average Americans will get more and, as an added bonus, even longer lines at airports.
When the TSA was formed, mall cops from all over our nation had their salaries and job security tripled by becoming government union workers and Democratic voters.
The TSA seems accountable to no one. Increasingly big brother-ish airports have been running a scary message over their PA systems which begins ominously, "Effective immediately: By order of the Department of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration, liquids or gels weighing more than three ounces cannot be carried on planes." Why have they run that for over four years now? This from the same TSA that does not provide shoe horns, and which brought us the confusing color-coded threat levels. If I have it straight, we are supposed to worry when we hit the "lavender" level, but that could be wrong.
If authorities want to assist the flying public, they should taser anyone behind you who is a seat-kicker. Flying is hard enough. I don't like being around kids on airplanes. With all the whining, drooling, fidgeting and childishness, I just feel I am setting a bad example for them.
Why we are so afraid to try to change the TSA? The high-handed, Obama/Pelosi/Reid-like, "it's for your own good" attitude they display somehow discourages inquiry into what the heck they are really doing. Such is the nature of a government bureaucracy or a corrupt church: avow your moral justification and superiority and let no one question what you do.
Sadly, our government, founded on liberty and tasked with "providing for the common defense," is being slowly taken down by deluded notions of political correctness while bestowing equal rights on our enemies. Common sense - and our safety - are being sacrificed.
If there is a simpler, less intrusive and more efficient way to do something, we should try it. Our country was founded by a bunch of folks who thought there was a better way
One of my readers sent this too me, she says that this quote comes from somone who lives in the Czech Republic . Apparently, someone over there has it figured out...
"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."
I don't know who wrote this and I've not been able to come up with an author...if you know please let me know who wrote this.
Remember when people talked about how stupid W was? How he couldn't, wouldn't be able to do anything right. Then came Team Obama...who have insulted our closest allies. First by giving Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of UK a set of DVD's that he can't play, and then by giving Queen Elisabeth an iPod with Obama's speeches on it...now comes this via GatewayPundit via YahooNews:
The U.S. government said Sunday it made an “honest mistake” when it displayed an inverted Philippine flag — which wrongfully signified that the Southeast Asian nation was in a state of war — in a meeting hosted by President Barack Obama.
The Philippine flag was displayed upside down behind President Benigno Aquino III when leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations met Obama in New York on Friday.
“This was an honest mistake,” U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Thompson said in a statement, adding, “the U.S. treasures its close relationship and close partnership with the Philippines.”
What a bunch of morons. This administration is supposed to be filled with smart people, and yet they keep continually doing stupid shit! It's not that difficult a thing to do. But, none of these dolts seem to be able to do a simple Google search to find out even the most basic information.
UPDATE: The Obama Administration is claiming it was an honest mistake (?) that they displayed the Philipine flag upside down.
"This was an honest mistake," U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Thompson said in a statement, adding, "the U.S. treasures its close relationship and close partnership with the Philippines."
In the Philipines, displaying the flag upside daown signifies tha the island nation is in a state of war. This is from an administration that is/was supposed to bring us "smart diplomacy." Yeah right...bunch of morons.
The President marks the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina taking his wife out in the rain on the exclusive resort island of Martha's Vinyard...
Ann Althouse says,
Drudge uses that picture to link to an AP story about Obama's commitment to Katrina victims: "Five years after Hurricane Katrina's wrath, President Barack Obama sought to reassure disaster-weary Gulf Coast residents Sunday that he would not abandon their cause." The AP story has Obama "[s]tanding in front of a large American flag with students arrayed behind him," so why does Drudge show Obama and his elegantly dressed wife entering (or leaving) a fancily gated establishment and mishandling an umbrella? That picture says so much: Obama is distracted by the trivial problems of taking his wife out somewhere expensive while the poor people of the Gulf are waiting and waiting for help. The disapproving glance of his wife gets more attention than the appeals of the hurricane victims. He's fortunate enough to have the kind of weather problem that can be solved by a simple umbrella, which wouldn't be any help at all in a hurricane. And yet his handling of an umbrella in a drizzle is incompetent, so how could he deal with a hurricane? The picture says: How can Obama understand/care/do anything about Katrina?
Mort Zuckerman, the editor of US News and World Report has an excellent column on the world's view of Mr. Obama. In that column he makes the point the much of the world sees Mr. Obama as being weak willed and naive. That's fatal in the leader of the world's leading commercial and military power.
Mr. Zuckerman correctly points out that when the President of France criticizes an American President as not being forceful enough, there's a huge problem. All emphasis is mine:
French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama's speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama's visions.
But his best and most devasting comment is this,
America right now appears to be unreliable to traditional friends, compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies. One renowned Asian leader stated recently at a private dinner in the United States, "We in Asia are convinced that Obama is not strong enough to confront his opponents, but we fear that he is not strong enough to support his friends."
Much of what is now unfolding could have been avoided had the media only followed the unwritten mandate of the fourth estate, that of properly vetting presidential candidates BEFORE elections...doing so afterwards is far too late. Here's my comment from the comment's section:
If you had taken the time to do some basic research, research that the MSM had, and continues to refuse to do, you would have seen a man of very little experience. America, historically prefers to have state governors as a stepping stone to the presidency because having run a state, gives a candidate important exective experience...something both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain lacked.
Mr. Obama has never had to meet a payroll, nor has he ever had to remain within a budget...household budget notwithstanding. Looking at what he has said in the past 20 years. Looking at what he has written in the past 20 years would have given a sharply defined glimpse within the carefully maintained shroud of secrecy that he and his coterie have erected. His earliest mentor, Frank Marshall Davis was a member of the Chicago area communist party "organizer" who was sent to Hawaii to work. "The 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member."
His attendance at a radical church for twenty years, whose senior pastor, Jeremiah Wright, continually rants on racists and anti-semitic topics, was shrugged off. His political career was started in the living room of an American terrorist, who wasn't prosecuted due to police incompetence and was released on a techinicality...
All of these should have rung alarums throughout the media...but were quietly ignored by the media who was in love with the idea of electing "the First Black President" of the US. This same media has only just begun to realize the huge mistake they have made...hence the beginnings of the muted rumblings heard in the distance.
Mr. Obama is a Chicago machine politician, and they way he pursues policy, against the wishes of the public at large (see the passage of the "Health Care 'Reform'" bill, written and negotiated behind closed doors...along with painting anyone who opposes him and his policies as "racists" has angered a majority of the public. Look at his polls as they continue to slide, just as Mr. Carter's did in the last 2 yars of his presidency...but this is the FIRST two years of this president's tenure.
All of this will come to haunt the Democratic Party this fall...I believe that we will see a historic tidal wave against this party and president. At least 80 seats will change hands in the House and as many as 11 in the Senate. Because this President hasn't a clue nor do his closest advisors.
My most important comment though is found in the title "Jimmy Cart Redux Is the Best We Can Hope For At This Point." Unfortunately, we're well past that point. We have a president who is seen as both weak and ineffectual internationally. His standing at home is falling faster than any of his predecessors has, and his ramming through his economically crippling domestic agenda will have the effect of permanetly diminishing the ability of America to recover from what should have been a relatively short recession.
That's from the NRSCC...my view of the Obama Administrations take on this is that there are so many people in the upper ranks of his administration that are from academia, lawyers, they have spent no time actually doing anything substantive. They've spent way too much time THINKING about how government runs, but have never actually done anything. Thinking about how government works is well and good if you're writing a book, or teaching a class, but the actual mechanics of running a government have very little to do with theories of how government operates...
What the real problem here is that Mr. Obama lacks genuine leadership ability. He's never, ever had to show it before in his life...and so he dithers. It took him 90+ days to make the simple decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, that after his senior military advisers took 6 months, at his direction, to come up with an effective plan. Then, because his liberal base balks at any military action, even in his own words, on the "good war", he slit the difference and approved 2/3's of the troops deemed necessary by his advisers.
This is not a man accustomed to leading, he's accustomed to criticizing, to harping and sniping, but not to actually lead anything. The only thing this man does well, is campaign...eventually he (I genuinely hope) will come to understand that campaigning isn't leadership...it's salesmanship. Mr. Bush was a far from perfect president, but he at least took responsibility for the actions of his administration. Mr. Obama has only played politics and attempted to shift blame for everything that has occurred on his watch to his predecessor.
Because he's not been the leader that the left has hoped for, some Democrats have become vocal in their newly found opposition to him. James Carville has been the moost vocal lately, but it took a horrendous oil spill in the Gulf for him to do so. Chris Mathews...of the "shiver down my leg" fame, has started to as well.
“. . . this idiotic cerebral meritocracy has got to step aside and let the people who do things take over…”
We'll see in the coming months, especially after the November elections, how much more vocal those Democrats become. If this fall's elections are as disasterous as some predict, I suspect that Mr. Obama will face opposition in the 2012 Democratic primaries...much as James Earl Carter did by the late Ted Kennedy, that led to Mr. Carter's "retirement by the electorate." (Carter's phrase for his ass-whipping by Ronald Reagan in 1980)
The other message I get from this administration is that they are very happy that the oil spill occured and, if not "purposely" dragging their feet for cleanup and capping efforts, are doing so, so as to show how harmful offshore drilling is. That being said, the damaged well is in 5,000 feet of water, because drilling closer in shore has been prohibited for decades. There are much more easily accessible fields on the continental shelf, but Congress, under pressure of enviromental groups has forbidden development of these areas since the early 1970's. Additionally, if something were to occur in these shallower waters, capping the well would be immensely less difficult to arrange...but, by making this disaster worse, they are encouraging their economically damaging "green agenda."
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