The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part 9: The Latest Lies, Incompetencies, and Law Breaking

Over the past week or so we have been reviewing the many ways and perspectives on how the Obama Presidency has been an abject failure:

• We reviewed the many, many lies and deceptions of this administration and this President, from cutting the annual budget deficit in half to promising that you could keep your doctors under Obama Care to many others.
• We reviewed the many high ranking Obama administration officials that have illegally and immorally conducted government business, and likely government shenanigans, using personal, unofficial computers and email accounts, undermining the spirit and letter of the Freedom of Information Act, other laws, and Obama's own promise to operate the most transparent administration ever
• We reviewed the many instances where this administration has either allowed government functions and departments to continue to overspend but under deliver or allowed them to get even worse than when he took office.
• We also reviewed some past posts that we had done previously that laid out numerous reasons and actions that should have already led to the impeachment of this Presidency, based on violations of existing law, judicial rulings, and the Constitution.

Today we will update these transgressions, lies, failures, illegal actions, etc. that have occurred more recently. I will let you decide if they are moral, impeachable, criminal, etc. They are certainly numerous, when considered with the many failures we have already discussed, and are probably not over, given that this administration might actually be in power for another 21 months or so.

Thus, in no particular order, the latest failures of the Obama administration:

1) The administration is trying to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, bypassing existing laws, bypassing Congress, and bypassing the will of the American people, the majority of whom, via polling studies, reject the concept of amnesty for those that entered this country illegally. 

2) In fact, he may also be violating recent judicial rulings, given that an administration lawyer was recently admonished in Federal court by a Federal judge. The administration may have ignored the judge’s previous order that ordered the administration to not move forward with any amnesty activity. Judge Andrew Hanen showed his displeasure about the Obama attorney’s, Kathleen Harnett, explanation of what she said was confusion over the amnesty order and its implementation by telling her, while chiding himself, “Like an idiot I believed that.”

The Judge Hanen then asked the rather extraordinary question concerning President Obama’s integrity. “Can I trust what the president says? That’s a yes or no question.” 

“Yes, your honor,” Hartnett replied.

When a Federal judge questions our integrity, something is very amiss.

3) If Obama had his way, there would be a law that force everyone to vote: “If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country,” Obama said, calling universally mandated voting “potentially transformative.” He apparently is not smart enough to realize that everyone does vote. Those that do not physically go to the polls to vote actually vote their opinion by not formally voting: they are saying that the political class, of which Obama is a prominent member, are not worthy of any effort of voting. 

The solution to low voter turnout is to provide worthy candidates and people who deserve our votes, not putting forth the same, old, tired politicians and then demand that we vote for them. Again, Obama does not understand the root causes of yet another problem.

4) Despite his promise to operate the most transparent Presidential administration ever, the Associated Press recently reported:

• The Obama administration set another record in 2014 for censoring government files or outright denying access to them under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
• The administration took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more often that files could not be found, and refused, a record number of times, to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
• The administration even admitted that in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the Freedom of Information.
• The backlog of information requests grew remarkably by 55% to more than 200,000. 
• Despite the backlogs and violations of Federal law, the Federal government reduced headcount by 375, or about 9%, the number of full-time employees across the Federal government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.

So much for transparency, so much for obeying the law, so much for integrity.

5) A recent study by the Brookings Institute shows how the Obama administration, and those that came before his, have failed the American middle class over the past dozen years or so, according to the Bankrupting America website:

• According to the Washington Post, “Two-thirds of American households are headed by someone who did not earn a college degree. From 2002 to 2013, those households, even as they aged, saw their median incomes fall by 9.4 percent (for those headed by high school graduates) and 17.3 percent (for those headed by high-school dropouts).” Now, obviously, Obama has not been President over all of these years. However, he was at least a Senator for many of these years and a President for the past six years so at least some of the responsibility for this negative trend rests with him. This is especially true since average household income has continued to fall during his administration despite the end of the recession five years ago.
• According to the Washington Post, “The older workers built incomes for much longer, and their peak incomes were higher. The workers who came of age in the 1990s tech bubble and the 2000s housing bubble saw incomes rise faster, but level off much earlier. The 1975 cohort saw its median household incomes rise by 60 percent before it peaked. For the 1982 cohort, it was 70 percent. For the ’91 cohort, it was 50 percent; for the 2001 group, it was just over 20 percent.

According to a recent poll conducted by Pew Research, “72% say that, in general, the government’s policies since the recession have done little or nothing to help middle class people, and nearly as many say they have provided little or no help for small businesses (68%) and the poor (65%). These opinions have changed little in recent years, and differ only modestly across demographic and income categories.”

Obviously, Federal government economic policies in general and Obama's economic policies in particular have done no good for most Americans over recent years.6) Many times this past week we pointed out how Obama has not fixed the many, many operational problems of the Federal government, an obese monster that now provides very little added value to Americans while wasting hundreds of billions of dollars a year. One of the biggest wastes of taxpayer wealth is the Social Security Administration, wasting over $100 billion a year. This is not a surprise since a recent inspector general audit found that over 6.5 million Americans are somehow over the age of 112. The report identified 6.5 million number-holders aged 112 and older for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident.The inspector general audit concluded that government lacks the controls necessary to affix death information on the records of number-holders who exceed "maximum reasonable life expectancies.""We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million number holders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record," the report states. This inability to determine when a holder of a SSN dies allows criminals and illegal aliens to milk the American taxpayer long after the SSN holder has passed. Just another in a long list of operations problems that have gone unresolved under this administration.7) According to recent reporting by CNN’s Jake Trapper, the Obama administration has prosecuted government workers for talking to journalists more than all other Presidencies combined. So much for transparency.8) The President continues to spout that we have a deep heritage of Muslim influences in our history when that is a totally inane and false premise, recently insisting that: “Here in America. Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.” Ah, no it hasn’t, as witnessed by the fact that the President, or any history book, has never provided any set of examples, no matter how small, to back up this false claim.9) Back in February when ISIS brutally beheaded 21 Christians on videotape, the President could not immediately reply since since he was golfing on a Sunday at a private golf course owned by billionaire Larry Ellison.Back in 2014 when an American journalist was brutally beheaded by ISIS, the President spent a few awkward minutes addressing the beheading and then rushed off to play golf.Back 2012 while a U.S. consulate in Libya was under attack and the lives of about two dozen Americans were at risk, the President went to bed early in order to get to a Las Vegas political fundraiser the next day.When an American general was killed in action in Afghanistan, Obama sent no one to his funeral but sent three administration officials to the the funeral of a young man who was killed when he attacked a police officer in Missouri.When Obama traded five dangerous Guantanamo prisoners for one Army deserter, he invited the deserter’s family to visit with him and have a photo op at the White House but did nothing for the soldiers, or their families, who died and were wounded searching for the deserter.Are we seeing a serious problem with moral priorities here with this Presidency?Enough failures for today, be they economic, moral, operational, or others, more to follow tomorrow.

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Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w