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America stands at a cross-roads and the next four years could be a period of complete economic stagnation coupled with continually exploding national debt edging the United States to a Greece-like fate with an ever diminishing position of power in the world, or it could be a period of recovery, healing and restoration of America’s world status. President Obama has been given another for years to form America’s political path. Which Obama will return to office, the arrogant and dismissive man who did not even speak to Republican leadership for the last year of his first term and who rammed Obamacare down the throats of a disapproving American people, or a new man who will reach across the aisle to work with Republicans?
I would say that it should be obvious to President Obama that the 2012 election was in no way a mandate of his policies, but then this is the man who thought he won the first Presidential debate until even MSNBC made it clear that he was delusional. What is clear is that Obama can no longer blame Bush for his continued failings (although one his campaign spokesman was quoted as saying “an economic crisis of this severity could take 8-10 years to fix.”) Obama operated in his last two years of his first term as if he was campaigning rather than governing. He has just won his last election before he can collect his $500,000 a year for life plus benefits government pension, and as he told Russian President Putin he “will have more flexibility to govern in his last term.”
In his second term President Clinton moved to the middle, worked with Republicans and helped restore a thriving United States economy. Many from the right will say that Clinton’s success was due to external factors and luck, but the truth is that Clinton did move to the middle, did create new bridges to the Republican party and was far more effective in his second term than he had been in his first.
If President Obama makes this unexpected move to the middle, I am hopeful that Republicans will work with him to restore our economy, to create jobs and to stop the explosive growth of our national debt. Controlling the House, Republicans can block much of what the President’s agenda if the President doesn’t extend an olive branch. Compromising and working with Republicans is the only hope the President has to push through any significant legislative changes. There are several incredibly frightening deadlines staring the country in the face in the next few months that will have huge consequences likely throwing the country into a recession/depression far deeper than the one President Obama inherited.
President Obama has failed to have any budget approved by Congress since April 29, 2009. If you run your own business it would be unthinkable to operate without a clear and detailed budget for a single year let alone more than three years. (Failure to adopt budget) Because of this failure, both parties (I could never figure out the Republican’s complicity with this one) entered into a politically expedient agreement that put off tax and budgetary decisions until after the election. This decision came with a ticking time bomb called sequestration.
President Obama has already blown through the “final” deadline of September 6 and unless agreement can be reached by all parties then the Department of Defense will immediately suffer an 11% budget reduction which will lead to at least 100,000 eliminated jobs. All other federal departments are likely to suffer similar budget reductions. (Impact of sequestration) Needless to say, this kind of irresponsible, partisan action is likely to throw the country into an economic free fall. The automatic triggers of sequestration can only be avoided by a truly bipartisan effort which will require the President to make a real effort to work with Republicans.
Needless to say, I am dubious that the President has it in him. I think he is a deeply arrogant man who thinks that he is simply right and that everyone else is simply wrong. As stated earlier, not only did Obama not try to work with Republicans in the past two years, he has rarely even spoken to them. There is really not even time to let the election wounds heal. If efforts are not immediately started to create agreement, the draconian impacts of sequestration will become a reality. I really hope that I am wrong, but I am not holding my breath.
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The big difference between WillyBubba and Obama is that Willybubba had enough patriotism in him to at least try to do his job.
What we have here is the result of an EEO hiring. Never hire someone based on the color of their skin. If you do, you are hiring a failure.
I’m not sure WillyBubba ever cared much for doing his job. Newt & the House had to drag him to the table, kicking & screaming several times (welfare reform, budget). Willy was more concerned with maintaining power, like King Barry is.
Arrogant?
Arrogant is LOSING an election and expecting the winner to come to you hat-in-hand.
Right-wingers keep pretending that the lack of bipartisanship is all Obama’s fault, yet we KNOW that republicans decided to OBSTRUCT Obama’s entire agenda from the start.
What about the 15 prominent republicans (including Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan) who met on Obama;s inauguration night and made a pact to obstruct all of Obama’s agenda?
The event serves as the prologue of Robert Draper’s book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.”;
“The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:
Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyle did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it—please?’)
Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)
Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)
Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.”
And then there’s Mitch McConnell’s famous statement;
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
McConnell made those remarks in an interview that appeared in the National Journal on Oct. 23, 2010.
Yeah, keep denyin’ reality, keep blamin’ Obama, keep makin’ mountains out of molehills, in short; don’t give up on the crazy, cuz we dems LUV it, especially come election time.
“The automatic triggers of sequestration can only be avoided by a truly bipartisan effort which will require the President to make a real effort to work with Republicans.”
It works both ways. The Republicans will need to make the effort to work with the president as well. They lot the election. They don’t get to call the shots unilaterally, yet it would appear they still intend to try to do so. John Boehner has just come out again saying that he will not agree to any tax increases. He is continuing the inflexibility the Republicans have shown ever since President Obama was first sworn in.
If we are to have a bipartisan agreement, tax increases on those with the highest incomes will need to be considered. Short term, there is simply no other way to raise revenue. And the myth that raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 will cost jobs and slow growth is just that, a myth. Most with that level of income are doctors, lawyers, and other highly paid professionals who are not going to lay anybody off if they have to pay a few thousand dollars more in taxes. And to suggest that someone running a business that allows them to pocket a million dollars a year will decide to shut it down if they have to pay $40,000 more a year in taxes is ludicrous.
If it is the refusal of the Republicans to agree to a tax increase on incomes over $250,000 that sends us over the fiscal cliff, the Republicans will be solely to blame.
Here is another way of looking at it , courtesy of Robert Reich:
“To hear the media report it, President Obama is proposing a tax increase on wealthy Americans. That’s misleading at best. He’s proposing that everyone receive a continuation of the Bush tax cuts on the first $250,000 of their incomes. Any dollars they earn in excess of $250,000 will be taxed at the old Clinton-era rates.
I am not going to copy his whole article here, but it is well worth reading. It points out the falsity of the Republican position. Here is the link for those interested in fully understanding the argument against the Republican position:
http://robertreich.org/post/26903999855
Roger, it makes no sense to focus on this tiny segment of the American people well below the rich (who pay almost exclusively 15% capital gains tax) and have them pay more than 50% of their income in many states in just income taxes while 50% of the country pays ZERO income tax. In addition, these additional taxes are just good political talking points and will not even scratch the surface of the correcting the deficit. It is a pure “show no dough” political move.
During one of the very early Republican primary debates, a moderator asked the candidates which of them would be opposed to a deficit reduction plane that had 10 parts spending cuts to 1 part tax increases.
Every single one of them raised their hands.
And it’s the PRESIDENT that has to move to the middle?
The Republicans just spent the last 4 years running against a fiction, a phantom. The fiction that says President Obama is the most liberal President we’ve ever had, a socialist, a man who wants to destroy the country. Seriously! He wants to destroy the country.
Your post shows us that the election changed nothing. At least for you.
How far to the left of, say, Dennis Kucinich would you say the President is?
When faced with healthcare reform, the President failed to put single-payer on the table and eventually signed a moderate position that didn’t even include a public option.
When faced with the next steps in Afghanistan, did he take the Kucinich position and bring all troops home immediately? No, he sent 30,000 more troops.
When faced with the option of increasing or decreasing drone attacks on al Qaeda, did he take the liberal position and decrease them?
When faced with the option of prosecuting government officials who promoted torture, did he take the liberal position and go after them? No, he said we needed to “move on.”
Are taxes on the middle class higher now or lower than when Obama took office?
Are deportation of illegal aliens higher now or lower than when Obama took office.
Geesh. I could go on and on. You continue to fail to understand this President. You’re opposing a fiction, a person that doesn’t exist. The very title of your post presents a false choice (as if there can’t be some other more nuanced possibility).
Well done. Keep convincing yourself of the fiction. The American people saw through all of that to the moderate, careful, thoughtful President that they decided to keep in office.
Elections have consequences. The Republican Party should have thought about that way back when the Big Money Rothschilde neocons pressed in and did a little media smoke and mirrors to take out the people’s candidate -Ron Paul – and dub in neocon conman Zionist puppet Romney. America does not stand a crossroads. America teeters on a precipice. The Republican Party stands at the crossroads. You know – the crossroads you go out to at midnight to meet the Devil and trade your eternal Soul for a little transitory glory. Learn to judge a tree by the fruit it bears. Something tells me Petraeus left because he had been ordered to start a war with Iran by via some dirty rotten CIA ‘crisis initiation’ plot and he wouldn’t do it. He understood it would BE understood transparently by the public and in history. And why is the top civilian intelligence agency being chiefed by all these military generals? Here’s a zinger for you – since the President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces in wartime and since the war on terror will go on forever – we now have a dictator who can do whatever he wants and that power extends right out to our local boot stomping cops. And it is perfectly constitutional. They’ve got the tasers and the forced-medication stalls to prove it.
“It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires. It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer”
- Bill Kristol, on “Fox News Sunday” Nov. 11, 2012.
First, this line about “millionaires” is just a catchy line that promotes class warfare. Most “millionaires” pay taxes at the 15% capital gains rate and will be completely unaffected by the tax increase. The ones you are hurting are the ones that are having current earnings taxed at a disproportionately and inherently unfair rate. For purely political reasons we are choosing to crush a tiny segment of the population that is below the rich and above the middle class and ail produce negligible actual increase in collected tax dollars even assuming (which I find ridiculous) the assumption that these additional taxes will not retard job growth.
America is misspelled on the poster. Is that on purpose? But it is a great poster, nonetheless. Roberts body language shows his hands behind his back. He is smiling PROUDLY and watching hussein sign away our nations’s liberty. That is shocking. However, it goes along with his cowardly and traitorous approval of obamacare. Rpberts epilepsy has rattled his brain, for sure. What happened to his concept of justice I cannot say. Supporting hussein shows Roberts has gone over to the dark side in more ways than (The) Won.
The poster came from the credited outside source. I think the misspelling was intentional, but I can’t speak for the creator of the poster.
Geoff, you keep using the 15% rate of the super wealthy as justification for not raising taxes on those of us with big incomes but who have to work for our money. Are you suggesting the tax rate on dividends and capital gains should go up to reduce this unfairness? 25%? 35%?
Roger, I am saying that it makes no sense to raise taxes on one group simply because it makes a nice sound bite even though it will do NOTHING to reduce the deficit or balance the budget. We spend more on aide to foreign countries than we will collect with these additional taxes. That makes no sense to me.
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