President Obama's Checklist Of Accomplishments To Date - Making Jimmy Carter Proud

About a week ago, a Facebook friend posted a short Facebook blurb that listed out the accomplishments of the Obama administration. It was meant to be complimentary of the administration but it had two major faults. First, it was not a very long list, comprising only about a half dozen points or accomplishments. Second, while this Facebook friend listed some of this administration's actions as successes, many Americans would consider these same activities as failures.

For example, this short list of successes included the passage of Obama Care. However, we would view this is an abject failure rather than a success to be proud of since:

1. Obama Care will likely cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their company health care insurance coverage since the legislation was written so poorly that it made it less expensive for companies to pay a relatively small Obama Care fine than continue health care insurance for their employees and retirees, the exact opposite of what the law was supposed to do.
2. Obama Care will add numerous new taxes to the economy, further depressing the economic recovery from the Great Recession.
3. Obama Care will implement almost 2,000 new Federal government guidelines and restrictions on Americans, further reducing our already shrinking freedoms and liberty.
4. The head actuary for Medicare and Medicaid has recently estimated that Obama Care will add over $300 billion to our already disgusting national debt over the next ten years, the exact opposite it was supposed to do.
5. The legislation will never solve the problem of ever escalating health care costs because it never took the time to understand the root causes of the increasing costs.
6. The legislation will have major, difficult, and unnecessary impacts on Americans' life choices including retirement, marriage, and careers.

One person's perception of accomplishment is another's perception of complete failure. Interesting political times we live in. 

Thus, as a rebuttal to my friend's meager six or so Obama administration accomplishments, and to expand on the above list of six Obama Care failures, allow me to present a much longer checklist of administration failures, a list so long it evokes the sour and failure memories of the Carter administration:

• Implement the largest failed economic stimulus program in the history of the country, costing over $800 billion and delivering very little economic growth. Check.
• Implement a series of failed economic tactics including Cash For Clunkers, Cash For Appliances, and Cash for Caulkers. Check.
• Campaign on a promise to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo and then fail to actually close the facility. Check.
• Campaign on a promise to not place former lobbyists in high positions in this administration and then proceed to install former lobbyists in high level positions in this administration. Check.
• Campaign on a promise to significantly reduce the number of earmarks in the Federal government and then proceed to allow billions of dollars a year to be diverted into political earmarks. Check.
• Randomly blame bush. Check.
• Promise to quickly extract U.S. troops out of Iraq and then proceed to use the extended Bush exit plan. Check.
• Renew the freedom destroying Patriot Act with virtually no changes from the Bush administration version and continue not to staff the civil liberty oversight panel required by the law. Check.
• Randomly blame Bush. Check.
• Oversee an incredibly botched and illegal gun running sting operation called Fast and Furious that allowed thousands of military grade weapons to fall into the hands of violent Mexican drug cartels, weapons that have led to the death of an American immigration agent and dozens of innocent Mexicans, weapons that have further destabilized the central Mexican government, and weapons whose sale violated both U.S. law and international treaties. Check.
• Fail to have an effective contingency plan and operations plan in place, reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, when the Gulf of Mexico oil rig accident happened, resulting in widespread ecological damage and economic damage. Check.
• While oil leaked into the Gulf waters from the leaking oil rig, embark on at least two vacations, take two cross country trips for political fund raising, and play numerous rounds of golf. Check.
• Oversee the average cost of a gallon of gasoline go from $1.79 at inauguration to $3.40 in January, a 90% increase (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics). Check.
• Establish a record for average February gasoline prices at $3.53 a gallon. Experts quoted in an Associated Press article forecast the average price will hit $4.50 by April. Check. 
• Oversee the average price of a gallon of fuel oil go from $2.51 a gallon at inauguration to $3.70 in January, a 47% increase. Check.
• Oversee the cost of a pound of ground beef go from $2.97 at inauguration to $3.29 in January, an 11% increase. Check.
• Preside over the first ever downgrade of the United States government credit rating. Check.
• Add TRILLIONS of dollars to the national debt, more than every other President from Washington through Clinton added COMBINED. Check.
• Randomly blame Bush. Check.
• Give out hundreds of millions of dollars to political friends' alternative energy endeavors (Solyndra, Ener1, Beacon, Evergreen, Spectra) and watch them all go bankrupt, taking taxpayer wealth down the drain with them. Check.
• Set records for the most Americans ever on food stamp rolls. Check.
• Endorse and sign legislation to reform the financial services industry, legislation that promptly fell on its face by not foreseeing the 8th largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the collapse of financial services firm MF Global and the possible criminal destruction of over $1 billion in client assets, the exact type of behavior the legislation was supposed to prevent. Check.
• Break the oath of the Presidency taken at inauguration by not enforcing the laws of the land such as DOMA. Check.
• Break the oath of the Presidency taken at inauguration by blatantly ignoring judicial rulings such as the Gulf oil moratorium judicial ruling. Check.
• Randomly blame Bush.
• Break a campaign oath by trampling on the checks and balances tenets of the Constitution by making high level government appointments without Congressional oversight and approval. Check.
• Trample on freedom of speech and freedom of religion rights by forcing religious organizations to forego their religious beliefs in light of secular government mandates. Check.
• Support the repeal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy only after a national Republican organization successfully fought for the repeal through the court system. Check.
• Randomly blame Bush.
• Preside over the worse economic recovery from a recession since the Depression. Check.
• Allow Iran to get three years closer to having nuclear weapons. Check.
• Allow North Korea to get three years closer to having nuclear weapons. Check.
• Fail to foresee or be prepared for the Arab spring and the opportunities and risks inherent in the movement for freedom in the Middle East. Check.
• Trample on the Constitution and the War Powers Act by illegally  involving the U.S. in military in significant military action in Libya without Congressional approval. Check.
• Hold dozens of photo ops with professional and amateur athletic teams, including the Texas Christian University rifle team, but hold few, if any photo ops with inspirational teachers, brave policemen and women, or heroic war veterans. Check.
• Do not develop a workable and coherent national energy policy and strategy that helps the economy and reduces our dependence on foreign energy sources. Check.
• Do not develop a workable and coherent education reform strategy and policy so that we can start educating our kids as well as the rest of the world educates theirs. Check.
• Do not develop a workable, coherent, and compassionate illegal immigration policy that protects and seals our borders and fairly  leverages the contributions of existing illegal immigrants within the country. Check.
• Do not develop a workable and compassionate alternative to our lost war on drugs, threatening to shut down existing marijuana clinics that provide pain relief to untold number of Americans suffering from highly painful diseases and maladies. Check.
• Remain silent and do not try to unite a divided country when political allies slander ordinary Americans having a difference of opinion, allowing these American citizens to be called racists, Ku Klux Klan members, knuckle dragging Neanderthals, a__h___s, terrorists, barbarians, gerbils, and un-American. Check.
• Randomly blame Bush, the Japanese tsunami, ATM machines, and a host of other factors for many of the above failures. Check.
• Manipulate the calculation of the unemployment rate to falsely make it look like the unemployment situation is improving. Check.
• Allow over $500 billion of taxpayer wealth a year to continue to be lost annually to waste, inefficiencies ands criminal activity in major and minor government programs including, but not limited to, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment insurance. Check.
• Wage class warfare of rich Americans against poorer Americans by falsely implying that Warren Buffet's Federal income tax rate is typical of those Americans earning over $100,000 a year. Check.
• Ignore the pending financial meltdown of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in order to not alienate a few voters in November. Check.
• Fail to write the regulations and guidelines needed to implement legislation that was passed in 2008 that cracked down on food stamp fraud.
• Fail to come up with a reorganization plan or termination plan for the dysfunctional and expensive Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA entities. Check.
• Approve the first ever, government sanctioned assassination of an American citizen without due process and institute an official government committee to review and recommend subsequent assassinations of Americans without due process.

I may be wrong but I do not remember Carter coming anywhere close to this number of failures during his entire four years as President. I do not think he set anywhere near the number of records that the Obama administration has set as far as the weakest economic recovery ever, the most failed economic programs, the most Americans ever on food stamps, etc.

I do not think Carter had nearly as many firsts as Obama such as the first government sanctioned American citizen assassination, the first ever U.S. credit downgrade, the first ever TRILLION dollar annual government deficit, etc.

I do not think Carter had nearly as much disdain for individual Constitutional rights, Constitutional tenets. or the rule of law. 

So, no disrespect to my Facebook friend who thinks that her list of a half dozen Obama accomplishments is noteworthy. My above list of over four dozen reasons why the Obama accomplishment checklist of failure trumps that list in my mind. When a President's accomplishment checklist falls below the accomplishment checklist of Jimmy Carter, it is about time to try another President.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein
We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment

Even When The Political Class Solves A Problem, They Rarely Ever Solve The Problem

Even when the political class thinks they have solved a problem, it always seems to be that they never really actually solve the problem. Consider a few historical examples:

- Back in the mid-1980s, Congress demanded that the Defense Department seal the U.S./Mexican border within 45 days in order to address the problem of illegal aliens and illegal drug trafficking. Didn't really solve the problem, given that millions of illegal aliens have since come over the border along with untold tons of illegal drugs more than two decades after their proposed solution. 

- Back in the mid-1970s, the U.S. struggled economically as a result of a number of oil shocks and energy crises. As a result, Congress tried to solve the problem of energy independence by creating the Department of Energy.

That problem solution did not work out real well either. Decades later we still do not have a coherent national energy program and we do not have energy independence. However, we do have another giant Federal government bureaucracy that eats up tens of billions of dollars a year without ever really contributing anything to the lives of Americans, least of all finding a remedy for our energy problems. 

- As a result of corporate accounting scandals at a very small number of American companies back in the 1990s, the political class passed the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation. The law made all U.S. companies develop extensive accounting processes and accountability documents to theoretically prevent future accounting scandals. It was intended to produce advanced warnings if a company was not following generally accepted accounting principles for the intent of defrauding investors or was in dire financial straits.

However, at the onset of the Great Recession, financial companies like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns went bankrupt within a matter of weeks even though there were no advance warnings from the Sarbannes-Oxley processes, i.e. the legislation was a failure at producing advance warnings of dire financial straits.

This failure was proven further when the Treasury Department decided to do "stress tests" of U.S. banks to determine if they were in good financial shape as a result of the Great Recession. Wasn't that was the Sarbannes-Oxley solution was supposed to do?

- Almost thirty years ago, President Reagan commissioned an expert panel to examine the deep problems and pitfalls of the public education system in the United States. Their resulting 1982 analysis and report, "A Nation At Risk," addressed the problems of under educating of kids. The panel's recommendations laid out a detailed blueprint for fixing our schools' problems.

Despite having a detailed problem solution presented to them, the politicians in 1982 and beyond could not even execute the blueprint to fix our schools' problems, resulting in the continuing under educating of our children today.

- As a result of the Great Recession and the failure of Sarbannes-Oxley to foretell when financial services companies accounting results did not match up with their dire financial situation, the political class in Washington passed the Dodd-Frank financial services reform legislation that was supposed to do what the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation did not do, i.e. spot bad accounting and financial hanky-panky.

However, shortly after the legislation was enacted into law, MF Global, a large financial services firm, went belly up in bankruptcy, making it the 8th largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. Unfortunately, none of the prior solutions from the political class in this area, Sarbannes-Oxley, stress tests, and Dodd-Frank identified the oncoming bankruptcy before it happened. As a result, we have another example of political class solutions that do not work.

Even worse, MF Global accounting hanky-panky may have criminally destroyed over $1 billion in customer wealth by commingling company funds with client funds. This is the exact type of misbehavior all of the political class "solutions" was supposed to prevent. Two years into the Dodd-Frank legislation, the results are not encouraging if the 8th largest bankruptcy gets missed by the legislation.

- In 2008, the political class in Congress passed legislation that was intended to cut down on the massive fraud that goes on every day in the Federal food stamp program. We covered one of the typical frauds in a previous post where we reported how food stamp recipients will use their food stamps to buy cases of bottled water, go outside the store and empty the bottles, and then bring the bottles back inside for a cash refund of their bottle deposit.

The 2008 legislation was written to cut down on this type of blatant fraud. However, even though Congress passed the legislation in 2008 and the President signed it right away, the government bureaucracy has never gotten around to writing the rules, procedures, and guidelines for implementing the legislation.

This has resulted in the food stamp fraud continuing, two years after Congress thinks they solved the problem. Thus, laws are passed that theoretically contain solutions but never get implemented by the bloated Federal bureaucracy.

- But the best solution/non-solution situation is currently gathering steam in Congress and it is a doozy. A few months ago we reported on a CBS "60 Minutes" report that illustrated numerous examples in Congress where politicians abuse their positions of power. They use the insider information they come across during their days of governing to personally enrich themselves, turning their Congressional insider trading information into personal wealth.

Apparently, members of Congress do not have to put their financial holdings into a blind trust once in office like the President, Vice President, and other high ranking government officials have to do. They are free to day trade on their financial accounts as much or as little as they please with no constraints on leveraging sensitive, secret information they come across as politicians. A gross, despicable conflict of interest if ever there was one.

However, the report did get Americans aroused so much and so infuriated that Congress is proposing new ethics rules to curb such abuses, as reported in a January 29, 2012 Associated Press report. The Senate version of the legislation would subject any Congressional member to a ban on insider stock trading in additional to opening violators up to Congressional, ethical, and criminal investigative proceedings. 

President Obama signaled his support for the legislation by stating recently: "The House and Senate should send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress and I will sign it immediately. They should limit an elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact."

Great concept but the politicians are already at work creating tunnels around the currently proposed solution. The 60 Minutes report did not stop at Congressional members using insider information to trade on stocks. The report had at least one report where a high ranking member of Congress used his insider trading information to profit off of real estate deals.

The report also showed that while members of Congress already cannot receive outright stock grants from companies, they are allowed to participate in lucrative IPOs of the same companies. The report showed how Nancy Pelosi earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in a two day period by having access to the VISA IPO offering. Apparently, Ms. Pelosi had also had IPO access to nine other IPO offerings.

No where in the Associated Press article does it appear that Congress is willing to cut itself off from IPO access like it should  Whether a politician gets an outright grant of a company's stock or access to the company's IPO, both actions are nothing more than an outright bribe.

The article does report that the House version of this bill would go further than the Senate version by banning real estate deals based on insider information. However, I would bet that this extra bit of control on Congressional enrichment never sees itself into the final legislation.

Thus, follow along on this escapade of the political class where they make much ado about solving a problem but leave themselves giant loopholes to drive through. In this case, IPOs and real estate deals, which will allow them to continue their obsessions with enriching themselves vs. making the country a better place to live. Just like food stamps and water bottle fraud, bad financial services regulations, bad public schools, non-existent energy programs, and leaky borders, it is highly likely that this solution from our politicians will also turn into another non-solution.

For this type of lousy service, we pay over three TRILLION dollars a year. Disgraceful.




We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment