Barack Obama

[ila]

Originally Posted by randolph

Hey, come on Tracy, blaming Obama for these security screw ups is ridiculous. We have had these problems in the last few administrations. It is the bureaucracy that is the problem. I have been to Washington and seen the incompetence and self centered administrators wallowing in politics. We spend billions on the CIA and they get conned by a Jordanian the same way Bush/CIA got conned by an Iraqi. What we need is a lean and mean security division that has its act together. Since Obama is releasing the report to the public, it sounds like he means business to get these jerks shaped up.

So Obama is not to blame for current security screwups, but Bush is to blame for previous security screwups? Do I have this right, randolph? After all that is what you just posted in the quote.

[randolph]

Originally Posted by ila

So Obama is not to blame for current security screwups, but Bush is to blame for previous security screwups? Do I have this right, randolph? After all that is what you just posted in the quote.

OK, I guess I was not clear. Bush/Cheney "wanted" to believe Iraqi informers in order to justify invading Iraq. Also, Cheney was intimately involved with the Iraqi shenanigans. Also, Bush/Cheney avoided getting serious about Bin Laden because having him alive justified their continued "anti terrorist program" in Afghanistan. Certainly, as head of state, Obama is ultimately responsible for what goes on in his administration. I just think the two situations are very different. I think Obama is serious about getting Bin Laden and resolving the Afghanistan mess he inherited from Bush/Cheney. I don't think any president since FDR has the challenges Obama has. How to clean up the Middle East mess, the financial mess, the Palestine mess, the Iran problem, the N. Korea problem, the unemployment problem. All of these issues were escaberated by the Bush/Cheney administration.
As a new president I wish him well, for all of us sake. He needs all the help he can get. He doesn't need any more screwups in his administrations anti-terrorist efforts, that's for sure.

[randolph]

I just read an article by Tom Burghart on www.globalresearch.ca
Titled; "Who Would Benefit Politically from a Terrorist Incident on American Soil? The Strange Case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab"
I am not into conspiracy theories but his article is interesting. Politically, the Republicans benefited enormously from 9/11. He presents the question who would now benefit politically from a successful terrorist attack on the US? Humm, it certainty isn't President Obama and the Democrats.

[TracyCoxx]

Originally Posted by randolph

I just read an article by Tom Burghart on www.globalresearch.ca
Titled; "Who Would Benefit Politically from a Terrorist Incident on American Soil? The Strange Case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab"
I am not into conspiracy theories but his article is interesting. Politically, the Republicans benefited enormously from 9/11. He presents the question who would now benefit politically from a successful terrorist attack on the US? Humm, it certainty isn't President Obama and the Democrats.

"Who benefits politically" seems to imply some kind of sneaky underhanded thing. Why does it benefit republicans? For no other reason other than because they handled the problem. They didn't ignore the problem and they went on the offensive. The Bush administration also kept terrorism out of America from 9/11/01 on to the end of his terms. That's no small feat, as BO is finding out. He's already got the Fort Hood attack and the nearly successful xmas jet bombing under his belt.

BTW, why is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka Underwear Bomber, not being tried as an enemy combatant? He's not a US citizen. In his indictment there's no mention of terrorism or Al Qaeda even though we know that he is a part of Al Qaeda and he was caught with a bomb in is pants on a jet.

BO today claimed full responsibility for the security failings. Great. Let the heads start rolling. National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter was on a ski trip when the xmas bomber incident occurred. What did he do when he heard the news? Continued with his ski trip. Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano says the system works. She's turning that department into a joke. But BO says he's not firing anyone.

Plus all the other stuff like inflating the deficit by over $2 trillion, pushing for national health care that no one but the far left wants.

I'm seeing fewer and fewer people on here defending him. Let's just call it like it is. Can we all agree that BO is a failure?

[TracyCoxx]

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01...y6068237.shtml

An aggregate of 21 Gallup and USA Today/ Gallup polls from 2009 show that 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservative, while 36 percent identify as moderate and 21 percent identify as liberal. In 2008, by contrast, moderates matched conservatives at 37 percent while 22 percent called themselves liberal.

So let me get this straight. National Health care is a liberal plan. So why is a representative government such as ours going full speed ahead for this plan when only 21% of the country is liberal?

They know they're doing something terribly wrong because they're putting this bill together behind closed doors. Here is Obama lying to us 8 times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMf6kW_1Nw

[randolph]

Originally Posted by TracyCoxx

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01...y6068237.shtml



So let me get this straight. National Health care is a liberal plan. So why is a representative government such as ours going full speed ahead for this plan when only 21% of the country is liberal?

They know they're doing something terribly wrong because they're putting this bill together behind closed doors. Here is Obama lying to us 8 times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMf6kW_1Nw

In the last election, a majority of the voters voted for universal health care, we are a "democracy" right? The democratic majority was charged with coming up with a plan the people want. Instead, they came up with a plan the drug and insurance companies want. So the voters are frustrated and pissed off with good reason. It looks like we actually have a plutocracy rather than a democracy, greed rules!

[randolph]

* The Wall Street Journal www.wsj.com

* OPINION: DECLARATIONS
* JANUARY 7, 2010, 6:33 P.M. ET

The Risk of Catastrophic Victory
Obama is in the midst of one. Can the GOP avert one of their own?

*
By PEGGY NOONAN

Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory. If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise.

If health care does not pass, it will also be a disaster, but only for the administration, not the country. Critics will say, "You didn't even waste our time successfully."

What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a miscalculation on the part of the president. The administration misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and began his work under the spirit of 2008?expansive, part dreamy and part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated ,the president ran into the spirit of 2009?more dug in, more anxious, more bottom-line?and didn't notice. At the exact moment the public was announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second, the administration decided to devote its first year to health care, which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything, but not right away.

This is an excellent article, well worth reading the rest of it.

[The Conquistador]

Originally Posted by randolph

In the last election, a majority of the voters voted for universal health care, we are a "democracy" right?

Wrong. We are a republic, not a democracy. Totally big difference there.

Main Entry: de?moc?ra?cy
Pronunciation: \di-ˈm?-krə-sē\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural de?moc?ra?cies
Etymology: Middle French democratie, from Late Latin democratia, from Greek dēmokratia, from dēmos + -kratia -cracy
Date: 1576
1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2 : a political unit that has a democratic government
3 capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the United States <from emancipation Republicanism to New Deal Democracy — C. M. Roberts>
4 : the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5 : the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

Democracy=majority rule

Main Entry: re?pub?lic
Pronunciation: \ri-ˈpə-blik\
Function: noun
Etymology: French r?publique, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public — more at real, public
Date: 1604
1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified republican government of a political unit <the French Fourth Republic>
2 : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity <the republic of letters>
3 : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Yugoslavia


Read the part in italics. "Governing according to law". Democracy is a system based on the wants of the collective. If enough people get pissed off or want something for some reason, it becomes law no matter how irrational it may be. This is why there is no mention of the word "democracy" anywhere in the US Constitution.

The word "republic" is mentioned because it denotes a system governed by a predetermined set of laws, in our case, The US Constitution. The Constitution is a construct and all the laws and powers of the government that is beholden to it must fit within the construct.

A government mandate of "universal healthcare" is inherently unconstitutional because it does not fall within what the powers of the government are entitled to do according to the United States Constitution.

Some will try to use this quote from the Preamble to justify "UH":

Originally Posted by The United States Constitution"

promote the general Welfare,

and they will be wrong. Why you ask? Let's ask what some of the guys who WROTE the Constitution had to say about the "General Welfare" clause:

"They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one...."
-- James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, elaborated upon this limitation in a letter to James Robertson:
"With respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. If the words obtained so readily a place in the "Articles of Confederation," and received so little notice in their admission into the present Constitution, and retained for so long a time a silent place in both, the fairest explanation is, that the words, in the alternative of meaning nothing or meaning everything, had the former meaning taken for granted."

"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817

Healthcare is an individual need and thus must be looked after by the individual himself, not by a government entity.

[TracyCoxx]

Originally Posted by randolph

In the last election, a majority of the voters voted for universal health care, we are a "democracy" right? The democratic majority was charged with coming up with a plan the people want. Instead, they came up with a plan the drug and insurance companies want. So the voters are frustrated and pissed off with good reason. It looks like we actually have a plutocracy rather than a democracy, greed rules!

As Postman says, we're a republic, not a democracy. At least we're supposed to be. Our democratic representatives, which constitute a majority, are failing at representing us.

In the 2008 election the people did not vote for health care. There was a big mindless push for "change" where no one (especially the media) was asking what kind of change BO was talking about. The election was going McCain's way, until the financial problems showed up, and BO made it work for him.

The people voted for what they thought would fix the economy, and for what they thought would create more jobs. The administration insults the American people by passing enormous spending bills that will do neither, and only dumps obscene amounts of money into their pet projects. Then they concentrate all their efforts on health care, which no one was clamoring for.