40 Reasons Not To Re-Elect Barack Obama

[Warph]

   

40 Reasons Not To Re-Elect Barack Obama

By John Hawkins
8/24/2012


1) Obama took 700 billion dollars out of the Medicare program and put it into his wildly unpopular health care program. This is despite the fact that even Obama has admitted,

Medicare in particular will run out of money, and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will put that money back into the Medicare program where it belongs, while Obama won't.

2) Barack Obama's stimulus plan cost more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, and putting a man on the moon — combined and it was a complete and utter failure -- more than 800 billion dollars that accomplished nothing of significance.

3) If Barack Obama is re-elected, Obamacare will go into effect in 2014. This will lead to huge doctor shortages, exploding health care costs, companies dropping insurance, death panels, much longer waits to see a doctor, and a dramatic deterioration in the quality of American medical care.

4) Do you believe that your taxes should go up in the next four years? Well, Barack Obama does,

"Nobody's looking to raise taxes right now. We're talking about potentially 2013 and the out years." — Barack Obama

5) Even the left-wingers at Politifact admit that Obama broke his promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.

6) America lost its AAA credit rating for the first time since 1917 on Obama's watch.

7) Even though Barack Obama keeps blaming do-nothing Republicans for his myriad of failures, the Republicans in the House have passed multiple budgets while Barack Obama and the Democrats in the Senate haven't pushed a budget through in the last three years. That's a big deal because passing a budget is one of the most basic duties of Congress. A Congress that can't pass a budget is like a mechanic who can't handle an oil change.

8 ) Barack Obama called George Bush "unpatriotic" for adding so much to the debt. Yet, Obama added more debt in 3 years and 2 months than Bush did in both terms.

9) "Do you think it's okay for Barack Obama's campaign contributors at Solyndra to receive a 535 million dollar government loan, approved by one of Obama's fundraisers, even though it was known that the company was in trouble and there was an excellent chance it wouldn't be able to pay back the loan?"

10) Barack Obama is touting his interference on behalf of his union cronies at General Motors and Chevrolet as a big "success." The cost of that "success" for the taxpayers? 25 billion dollars.

11) Obama selected Tim Geithner, a man who was a tax cheat, to be his Treasury Secretary. That's bad enough, but then Obama spent his whole first term lobbying for tax increases and accusing other people of being greedy for wanting to keep more of their own money. When even the Treasury Secretary refuses to willingly pay all of his taxes, maybe the problem is that you're spending too much, not taxing the American people too little.

12) Under the "Cash for Clunkers" program, Obama spent 3 billion so he could buy and destroy perfectly functional cars. This was mind-numbingly stupid, but it was supposed to at least cause a major spike in auto sales and improve gas efficiency. The program is now almost universally recognized as a failure on every count.

13) Barack Obama put an end to NASA's manned space flight. In other words, because of Obama we no longer even have the same capabilities that we had in 1969. Meanwhile, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says the "foremost" mission of NASA is now Muslim outreach. Yes, really.

14) Despite the fact that Obama had a disastrous first term, he hasn't even put forth a second term agenda. After one of the worst four year runs of any President in American history, Obama's message to the voters is, "Trust my judgment when it comes to deciding what we'll do differently."

15) "If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, 'Well, it must be 'cause I was just so smart.' There are a lot of smart people out there. 'It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.' Let me tell you something: If you've got a business, that–you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." -- Barack Obama

16) After BP had a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama exacerbated the crisis and dramatically slowed down the clean-up with his incompetent handling of the whole affair. Obama performed so poorly that even James Carville and Chris Matthews were publicly criticizing him.

17) "No, no. I have been practicing...I bowled a 129. It's like — it was like Special Olympics, or something." — Barack Obama. Classy!

18) We were told that George W. Bush was a cowboy who was making the world hate us. Yet, as Chuck Norris notes,

The Washington Times reports that, according to a poll by even two left-leaning groups, "A majority of Americans say the United States is less respected in the world than two years ago and believe President Obama and other Democrats fall short of Republicans on the issue of national security."

In February 2012, Gallup reported that "Americans continue to express much greater dissatisfaction than satisfaction with the United States' position in the world, and their views have improved little since hitting a low point in 2008."

19) "But I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking." — Barack Obama. In 2008, Barack Obama ran as a moderate, bipartisan reformer who was going to change the tone in Washington. He has governed as a hyper-partisan, arrogant, divisive, polar opposite of the man he pretended to be in 2008.

20) Although liberals and conservatives disagree on who's to blame for Obama's poor performance as President, there seems to be general agreement that he hasn't done very well. Of course, you can't tell Obama that.

Oprah: What grade would you give yourself, for this year?

Obama: Um, good solid B+

...Oprah: So B+, what could you have done better?

Obama: Well B+ because of the things that are undone. Health care is not yet signed. If I get health care passed we tip into A minus.

21) Despite claiming to be in favor of traditional marriage to get elected, Barack Obama betrayed Christians by coming out in favor of gay marriage.

22) The First Amendment rights of the Catholic Church are being violated under Obamacare. Despite its long recognized religious opposition to contraceptives and abortifacients, Obama is demanding that Catholic hospitals go against their faith to remain open. Every last Catholic bishop in the United States opposes Obama's anti-Christian policy and it will likely lead to numerous Catholic hospitals shutting down if Obama is re-elected.

23) Barack Obama despicably played the race card by telling Hispanic Americans that Republicans were their "enemies."

And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, we're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's gonna be harder – and that's why I think it's so important that people focus on voting on November 2.

The President of the United States shouldn't be trying to pit different groups of Americans against each other based on the color of their skin.

24) "The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. . . . What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that's just a fact." — Barack Obama on the arrest of his friend, Henry Louis Gates.

25) The "Justice Department" helped put guns in the hands of drug cartels via Operation Fast and Furious that were used to kill hundreds of Mexican citizens and at least one American, Brian Terry. After stonewalling a congressional investigation, Barack Obama asserted executive privilege to try to keep the truth from coming out about the biggest scandal since Watergate.

26) We essentially have an open borders policy in America now for illegal aliens who haven't committed felonies in the United States.

27) Barack Obama is illegally trying to implement the DREAM Act by fiat, despite the fact that it failed to get through Congress.

28) The fence on our southern border was supposed to be completed in 2009. Not only has it not been completed, but the virtual fence has been put off until at least 2016.

29) Because Barack Obama is so out of touch, he thinks that "the private sector is doing fine.".

30) Obama has blocked the keystone pipeline and ANWR while he has held up offshore drilling in the Gulf and demonized oil companies. It's hard to say how much more you're paying at the pump because of Barack Obama, but we can be sure the amount is considerable.

31) In 2011, nearly 1 in 7 Americans were on food stamps. Is setting a record for putting the most Americans on food stamps really the sort of achievement that should merit a second term?

32) Despite the billions of dollars that were spent on TARP, U.S. home ownership is at a decade long low. So is the number of Americans who say their home is worth more than they paid for it. Home prices are the lowest they've been since 2002.

33) The staggering cost of the new regulations that the Obama Administration has implemented on American businesses over the last 3 1/2 years? 84 billion dollars.

34) Obama sent BILLIONS of dollars of YOUR TAX DOLLARS overseas as part of the stimulus package. The stimulus may have been a complete failure here in America, but I'm sure the companies in China, Spain, and South Korea sure loved pocketing our money.

35) In a more competent administration, what happened with Johnson Controls, Inc would have been a big scandal. That company was given 300 million dollars of stimulus money and used it to create.....150 jobs. That's 2 million dollars per job created. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has performed so poorly, in so many ways, that this minor disaster has barely even been a blip on the radar.

36) George W. Bush started the TARP program, but Barack Obama supported the program, continued it, and made it worse. The cost of bailing out all those "too big to fail" fatcats who wanted capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down? At least 34 billion dollars of taxpayer money although that dramatically understates the real cost because many banks paid back the TARP money with other funds that they received from the government.

37) We've had the longest streak of above 8% unemployment under Barack Obama since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, according to the Obama Administration, his stimulus bill was supposed to have produced 5.6% unemployment by now.

38) The terrible jobless numbers don't really give you a sense of how badly Obama has done as President because those who quit looking for jobs are no longer counted in the numbers. We've had the most rapid decline in labor force participation in recent history under Obama -- from 65.7% in 2009 to 63.7% in 2012.

39) Under Barack Obama's leadership, we've had the weakest economic recovery of any country, anywhere in the world since 1970

40) "Look, I'm at the start of my administration. One nice thing about the situation I find myself in is that I will be held accountable. You know, I've got four years. And, you know, a year from now I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress. But there's still going to be some pain out there. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition." -- Barack Obama on the economy in February of 2009.

[Warph]

 

Stingy Liberals
By Jeff Jacoby
8/22/2012

There are 366 major metropolitan areas in the United States, and a comprehensive new study by the Chronicle of Philanthropy ranks them on the basis of generosity -- the percentage of income the median household in each city gives to charity. According to the Chronicle, the most generous city in America is Provo, Utah, where residents typically give away 13.9 percent of their discretionary income. Boston, by contrast, ranks No. 358: In New England's leading city, the median household donates just 2.9 percent of its income to charity.

Provo's generosity is typical for its region. Of the 10 most generous cities in America, according to the Chronicle's calculations, six are in Utah and Idaho. Boston's tight-fistedness is typical too: Of the 10 stingy cities at the bottom of the list, eight are in New England -- including Springfield (No. 363) and Worcester (No. 364).

What's the matter with Massachusetts? How can residents of the bluest state, whose political and cultural leaders make much of their compassion and frequently remind the affluent that we're all in this together, be so lacking in personal generosity? And why would charitable giving be so outstanding in places as conservative as Utah and Idaho?

The question is built on a fallacy.

Liberals, popular stereotypes notwithstanding, are not more generous and compassionate than conservatives. To an outsider it might seem plausible that Americans whose political rhetoric emphasizes "fairness" and "social justice" would be more charitably inclined than those who stress economic liberty and individual autonomy. But reams of evidence contradict that presumption, as Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks demonstrated in his landmark 2006 book, Who Really Cares.

However durable the myth, wrote Brooks (who now heads the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank), there is no getting around the data. For years, academic research and comprehensive national studies have confirmed that Americans who lean to the left politically tend to be much less charitable than those who tilt rightward. The Chronicle of Philanthropy's new report is only the latest in a long series of studies corroborating that fact.

In 1996, for example, the wide-ranging General Social Survey asked a large sample of Americans whether "the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality" -- a key ideological litmus test. Thirty-three percent of respondents agreed; 43 percent disagreed. The two groups differed sharply in more than their politics. The conservatives -- those who opposed government programs to reduce inequality -- were significantly more likely to donate money to charity than the liberals. And among those who did donate, conservatives gave away, on average, four times as much money per year.

Though there is a strong link between religious belief and philanthropy, it wasn't just churches the conservatives were giving to. "They gave more to every type of cause and charity: health charities, education organizations, international aid groups, and human welfare agencies," Brooks noted. They even gave more "to traditionally liberal causes, such as the environment and the arts."

None of this was what Brooks had anticipated when he began his research. "I expected to find that political liberals ... would turn out to be the most privately charitable people," he says. "So when my early findings led to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error.... In the end, I had no option but to change my views."

The Chronicle's new study, which is based on IRS records from 2008 (the most recent available), accounts for regional differences in the cost of living. It calculates charitable giving only from discretionary income -- the dollars left over after paying for taxes, housing, and food. But the economic differences are not nearly as significant as cultural differences. In parts of the country where conservative values dominate, charity tends to be high. Where liberalism holds sway, charity falls. "Red states are more generous than blue states," the Chronicle concludes. The eight states that ranked the highest in charitable giving all voted for John McCain in 2008. The seven lowest-ranking states supported Barack Obama.

Of course this doesn't mean that there aren't generous philanthropists in New England. It doesn't mean selfishness is unknown on the right. What it does mean is that where people are encouraged to think that solving society's ills is primarily a job for government, charity tends to evaporate. The politics of "compassion" isn't the same as compassionate behavior. America's generosity divide separates those who understand the difference from those who don't.

[Diane Amberg]

 Considering how much we donate to various charities, that definitely proves for once and all that I am in no way a liberal.

[Warph]

Considering how much we donate to various charities, that definitely proves for once and all that I am in no way a liberal.

You mean, no way you're a 'stingy' liberal

[Diane Amberg]

Very funny. I'm not stingy, just frugal, and a moderate bird at that.

[jarhead]

Quote from Diane:
and a moderate bird at that.

Uh, Diane--I think that quote belongs in the "miscellaneous thread " poke--poke

Miscellaneous
Jokes, word games and topics not related to other boards.

[Diane Amberg]

Ha!