Retro 1 - Part 1, The Obama Presidency- The End Of An Error - Broken Promises and Lies

We originally ran this post back in October at around the 100 day mark of the final days of the Obama Presidency. We ended up running about seven blog posts which did a deep dive into the activities, acomplishmentsand failures of this Presidency. We found very little in the way of accomplishments but dozens and dozens of cases of falures and disasters, from the economy to foreign affairs to the basic concept of integrity. We are going to rerun those post over the next week or so as we close in on an end of an error, the Obama Presidency.

Part 1, The Obama Presidency - The End Of An Error - Broken Promises and Lies

As we near the end of the Obama Presidency, I thought it would be a good idea at the 100 day mark to review what he has done to and for this country over the past eight years. Before we do that, though, let me repeat my previous background statements on my past political actions:

• I have never voted for a Republican Presidential candidate in my life and I have been voting since the the Nixon era.
• Until 2010, I have never voted for a Republican for national office in my life.
• I am not affiliated with nor do I associate myself with the Republican Party, conservatives or people like Donald Trump.

Okay, now that we understand where I am coming from, let me just say that in my opinion Barack Obama has been the most inept, most divisive, most narcissist and worst diplomat in my lifetime to reside in the White House. From the economy, to race relations, to the national debt, to foreign relations to government operations, to blatant disregard for existing laws and the Constitution, in just about any measure we are far worse off as a nation than prior to him coming into office.

We will breaking down the failures and disappointments of this administration into some broad categories that will take us a number of days to cover as we analyze “The Obama Presidency - The End Of An Error.” Today we start with:

Broken Promises and/or Lies

These disappointments are related in that many times it is tough to tell whether the President actually believed the things he promised and then failed to deliver them (incompetence) or he just outright lied in order to get what he wanted. I cannot tell which is which, which is why the following incidents of broken promises and/or lies are grouped together:

Obama promised if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under the Obama Care legislation. This was not a truth since millions of Americans lost access to their current and favored doctors as a direct result of Obama Care’s tenets.

Obama promised if you like your current health insurance policy, you can keep your current health insurance policy. This was not a truth since millions of Americans lost access to their current and favored health insurance policies as a result of Obama Care tenets.

Obama promised that the average American family could see their annual health insurance costs go down by up to $2,500 a year. This was not a truth since Obama Care policies costs, for both the premiums and deductibles, have been going up every year since the legislation was passed and was often much higher than the insurance premiums and deductibles people had prior to the Obama Care legislation taking effect.

Obama promised that getting access to an Obama Care health insurance policy was going to be a really simple online process which it was not. The Obama Care online processes, were slow, inaccurate, difficult to navigate, and opened up millions of Americans to a high chance of identity theft.

Obama promised that Obama Care would “bend the cost curve” of health care costs in this country but health care costs in this country and the cost of Obama Care policies continue to grow significantly year over year.

Obama promised that enacting the Obama Care legislation would not add a single dime to the Federal government deficits or the overall national debt but the legislation will likely add at least a trillion dollars to the national debt over the next ten years.

Obama promised to go through the Federal budget line by line to weed out wasteful spending which he did not do.

Obama promised to reduce the annual Federal government deficit by 50% by the end of his first term. Instead, he presided over four consecutive Federal budget deficits that exceeded a trillion dollars year, multiple times larger than any previous annual Federal deficit.

Obama promised to devote every waking moment of his life to serving Americans if elected President, foregoing private time, recreation time, and vacations and he then spent the next eight years playing over 300 rounds of golf, attending a record number of political fundraisers and taking exotic vacations around the world.

Obama promised that all Obama Care negotiations would be aired on C-SPAN which they were not.

Obama promised that all pending legislation would be put up on the Internet for public review for five days before he signed it but that never happened.

Obama promised we would have our troops out of Afghanistan by 2014 but two years after that deadline U.S. troops are still in the country. 

Obama promised that he would close the terrorist prison camp at Gitmo but it is still open and many of those terrorist suspects that he has released have returned to the world of terrorism around the world.

Obama lied to the world, to the nation and the families of those who were killed by a terrorist attack at Benghazi, falsely and willingly claiming that the cause of the terror attack at our consulate at Benghazi was an unknown YouTube video.

Obama promised to operate the most transparent Presidency ever and ended up operating one of the most secretive administrations of all times, ignoring Congressional requests and subpoenas, blocking and delaying many, many legitimate Freedom Of Information Act requests, persecuting and prosecuting more government whistleblowers than all previous Presidents combined, and spying on and hounding legitimate journalists.

Obama promised that his economic stimulus plan would create a plethora of “shovel ready jobs” but ended up creating very few legitimate and enduring jobs.

Obama falsely claimed that the Supreme Court had never overturned any law that Congress had passed.

Obama promised that lobbyists would be excluded from high ranking positions in his administration, a promise that never occurred as many lobbyists ended up taking jobs high up in his administration.

Obama stated that the IRS was not targeting or violating the First Amendment rights of anyone but it is now apparent that the administration conspired with the IRS to block any political groups or citizens that were not consistent with the views of the administration.

Obama lied when he said that he did not say there was a red line that would result in dire consequences if the Syrian government used chemical weapons on its citizens when he actually did say there was a red line that should not be crossed.

Obama promised that he was not spying on innocent Americans but it was later clear that his administration, via the NSA, was spying on just about every American’s electronic communications.

And his biggest lie or broken promise of all: “I, Barrack Hussein Obama, pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Let's stop our broken promise/lies list here but let me give you one more source of Obama lies. The Politifact website, an organization that is supposed to be an unbiased source for facts and realities, tends to give Democrats and liberals the benefit of the doubt when it comes to political statements. Thus, whenever it declares that a liberal or Democrat has lied, you know it must have really passed the smell test. The following link to their website lists 71 other Obama lies, most of which did not make our list above:

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/statements/byruling/false/?page=4

That will complete this first section of our review of the Obama administration. Twenty lies or broken promises that this President has made that bring the integrity of his entire Presidency into question. More reviews of different aspect of his Presidency in the following days as we approach the end of an error.

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

April, 2016, Political Insanity, Part 3: Liberal Hypocrisy, Non-Transparency Of Obama, and The Failed War On Drugs Is Srtill Failing

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

It looks like our politicians have been especially insane over the past month or so let’s get started a day early with the latest insanity from today’s American politicians:

1) Democrats and liberals always seem to be at the front of the line when it comes to political correctness and claiming that they are more sensitive to the needs of minorities. So it is especially fun when we find out that they can be as prejudiced and non-politically correct as those they accuse of the same fault.

Such is the recent case of religious insensitivity of Nevada Senator Harry Reid. According to the Washington Post, Reid supposedly urged a Muslim Democrat from his home state to terminate the Muslim’s Congressional campaign during a private meeting in 2015.

Jesse Sbaih, who came to the U.S. from Jordan 29 years ago, says Reid told him drop out of the Congressional race since a “Muslim cannot win this race.” According to Sbaih: “I did not feel that this was an issue. They made it an issue. I just turned 40. Been in this country for 29 years. And it’s just absolutely shocking that this occurred.” As proof, Sbaih gave the Post emails and text messages sent during the time of the meeting. In one exchange, Sbaih told a Reid ally that he was “profoundly disheartened and saddened that the Democratic Party is refusing to accept a candidate like me because of my religion and ethnicity.”

A Reid spokeswoman, of course, denied the allegations and called Sbaih a liar. Imagine what would have happened if a conservative or Republican had told a Muslim not to run for office because of his or her religion. The political correctness police and critics would have been in full howl. And since this story comes from the Washington Post, which is usually a strong media ally of anything Democratic, I would tend to believe that Sbaih is telling the truth and the Reid spokeswoman is not. Insanely hypocritical.

2) Jake Tapper is a CNN news reporter and one of the few people on CNN that actually has the nerve to question Obama and other Democrats when they are hypocrites. The Washington Free Beacon recently reported on how while Obama has been lecturing the media and press on how to do their jobs, Tapper correctly points out that the press’s job has been so much more difficult during the Obama administration because of how non-transparent it is. This non-transparency is in direct opposition to Obama’s campaign promise to operate the most transparent Presidency ever.

Details from the article include the following observations and realities: 

• Justin Elliott, a Pro Publica reporter, stated earlier in March: “In fact, FOIA [Freedom Of Information Act] has been a disaster under his watch.”
• Elliot went onto say that as a result of a FOIA lawsuit, government documents have been uncovered that prove the Obama administration aggressively lobbied against making the transparency of government operations even more transparent.
• In 2015, the Associated Press found that the Obama Presidency had set a record for censoring or denying access to information to government information requested under FOIA.
• The AP also found that the backlog of unanswered FOIA requests across all government entities had risen by 55% to more than 200,000 unfulfilled requests.
• According to the article, another recent analysis found that the administration set another record of failing to to respond to 130,000 requests for information under the FOIA.
• Tapper pointed out that the administration has even used the Espionage Act to go after more whistleblowers than all previous Presidential administrations COMBINED.
• Leonard Downie, a former Washington poster executive editor, is on record as saying that Obama had the “most aggressive” administration towards the press since Richard Nixon, which is saying something since helped to crack the Watergate scandal back during Nixon’s time in office.

Despite all of this evidence of how dangerous and opaque this administration has been, Obama still thinks that he has operated a transparent administration.The insanity and his denial of reality is mind boggling.

3) One of the major failures of not only the Obama administration but also of every other Presidential administration for the past fifty years has been the failed war on drugs. Americans still get high, we still lock up millions of people for being involved with illegal drugs, almost 50,000 Americans die every year from drug abuse, and the lost war on drugs has created some of the most violent and wealthiest drug cartels/gangs in the world.

Just how wealthy has this administration and every other administration’s failed war on drugs made the Mexican drug cartel leaders? According to a recent report on the Free Patriot website, a report that is claimed to be based on pictures and reports published by the Mexican Attorney General’s office and verified by Snopes, the following was found after a raid at the home of a drug cartel leader:

• A large solid gold statue of the Virgin Mary.
• 357 Magnum semiautomatic guns with solid gold hand grips.
• One of the largest gun collections in the world on display.
• A man made cave under his luxury home with a hot tub.
• More than one black jaguar on site.
• Eight lions were found on the property.
• A rare white tiger was on site.
• A large art collection including some pieces that were illegal to own and some that were stolen.
• About $200 million in cash, mostly American $100 dollar bills. That was stashed in multiple nooks and crannies throughout the house.

• There was also a ton of cash in other currencies.
• There were other gold machine guns and pistols.

Insanity that so much wealth had fled south of the border to create such a wealthy and violent criminal organization, all because in the many decades since Nixon declared war on drugs, every President since then, including Obama, has showed no desire, creativity, or ability to come up with a strategy that alleviates the pain that drug addiction causes and denying so much wealth to those that exploit those addicted to drugs. 

That will do it for today’s insanity from our politicians. Five decades of politicians that have yet to understand that the war on drugs is lost and we need something else to treat those that become addicted, an Obama administration that is the farthest thing from being transparent despite Obama’s promise to operate the most transparent administration ever and his delusions that he actually thinks he does, and the hypocrisy of Harry Reid and other liberals who chastise those for not being politically correct but who are just as bigoted and biased as those that accuse of being intolerant, at least when it comes to Muslims running for office in his state. 

More insanity tomorrow and beyond.

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:

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

September, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: The Non-Tranparency Of Obama, The Incompetence of the IRS, The Fraud in Medicare, and The Nothing of John Kerry

The start of a new month means it is time to check in on the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Every month since this blog began in 2009, we have conducted monthly reviews of stupid government programs, inane political comments, wasteful government spending, and other burdens and insanity that the politicians in this country constantly rain down on us and our families.

Unfortunately, what used to take a day to cover has now morphed into multiple posts every month just to keep up with the ineptness and craziness of today’s politicians. This month will be no different. If anything, the insanity seems to be increasing and intensifying as we continue to sense that we are being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of this country.

The proof to this theory continues below and for the next week or so:

1) One of Obama’s big selling points when he was first running for president is that he was going to operate the most transparent Presidential administration in the history of this country. There would be no secrets during his time in office, citizens would know just about everything that was going on in the Federal government.

Unfortunately, we have shown many times in previous posts how this became just another failure of this Presidency. Information request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have been stymied a record number of times by this administration. Journalists have been spied on and investigated for negative reporting by this administration as they try to keep secrets that should be put out in public.

Well, according to a short article recently published by Reason magazine's website, this secrecy and lack of transparency should come as no surprise. The article discusses and shows an official government letter received from a Mr. Taylor D. August. Apparently Mr. August’s official job title at the Department of Education is "FOIA Denial Officer." 

Yes, apparently in at least one Federal department under the Obama administration, there is an “officer” whose job title apparently puts him in charge of actually finding ways of denying FOIA requests. Makes you wonder if every Federal department now has a similar “officer” whose job is to deny lawfully requested documents and information from the Federal government.

Hardly seems like Obama is living up to his promise to be the most transparent President of all time when he has formalized personnel in the Federal government to do just the opposite, stifle and deny request for information and government transparency. Another lie, another deception, another failure.

2) The IRS has been around a long time. Given its longevity, one would have hoped that it had is methods and procedures down pat from a long trail of experience. One would have hope that but as usual when it comes to government bureaucracies, you would be wrong.

According to a new report from IRS’ Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, or TIGTA, some of the IRS’s outside contract employees had access to taxpayer data despite not having undergone required background checks. Obviously, this opens up the possibility of massive identify theft of millions of Americans:

“TIGTA found that taxpayer data and other [Sensitive But Unclassified] information may be at risk due to a lack of background investigation requirements in five contracts for courier, printing, document recovery and sign language interpreter services.” 

Instances of failed security included:

• The Inspector General cited on instance where the IRS gave an outside contractor a CD disc containing 1.4 million taxpayer names, addresses and Social Security numbers. None of the contractor personnel who worked on this contract were subjected to a background investigation.
• The TIGTA found 12 service contracts for which employee background checks were required by the contract but some contractor personnel did not have background investigations done prior to working on the contracts. 
• The TIGTA also found 20 contracts for which some contractor personnel did not sign nondisclosure agreements. 

So, it is not just criminal identity theft thieves we need to worry about. We also have to worry about our own government who is endangering the very personal financial information they are entrusted to protect, despite decades of experience handling such information.

3) Many times in past insanity posts we have shown how wasteful and negligent the Federal government and the Washington politicians who operate it are with taxpayer wealth. Inefficiencies, fraud, and other wastes of tax payer dollars are widespread throughout every single government entity. 

A recent article from the CATO Institute, written by Nicole Kaeding, confirmed nothing has changed as it relates to wasteful spending, at least within the Medicare program. She lists out some of the current wasteful Medicare spending:

• She first cites a Washington Post article that exposed the fact that 80% of motorized Medicare wheelchair claims are “improper," leading to billions and billons of dollars spent unnecessarily every year. 
• Government Accountability Office (GAO) research estimates that Medicare’s “improper payments” amount to $44 billion, or 8% of total expenditures.
• Additionally, the GAO found Medicare to be a “high risk” program for its “vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” 
• GAO chastised the program for its inability to control the wasteful spending problem and declared that Medicare “has yet to demonstrate sustained progress in lowering the rates [of improper payments].”
• But the CATO article goes on to say that the GAO might be kind in its criticism since other experts such as Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University estimate the wasteful spending closer to 20% of claims or $120 billion annually.
• Although the Federal government’s Medicare Fraud Strike Force “has charged nearly 1,900 defendants who have collectively billed the Medicare program for more than $6 billion” since 2007, $6 billion is next to nothing when the program spends hundreds of billions of dollars every single year, illustrating just how widespread the issue is.

If the $120 billion Medicare wasteful spending estimate is accurate, that is equivalent to every U.S. household spending and wasting about a $1,000 a year and getting nothing in return. A situation that I find disgraceful, that just one government program unnecessarily costs every household $1,000.

Much like the IRS, the Medicare program has been around for decades and the political class and government bureaucracy still have not figured out how to run it efficiently and effectively and fraud free. No wonder the Federal government has run up an almost $18 TRILLION national debt when it possibly loses over $100 billion every year for no societal benefit in return from just Medicare. 

And the sad thing, those who operate this program and others that also waste taxpayer dollars, seem to have no concept or plan on how to fix what they have severely broken.

4) One last piece of insanity for today. As most informed people know, the following international crises are going on today around the world:

• An American journalist was beheaded on video by terrorists in Iraq.
• Libya continues to disintegrate into a civil war.
• Russia and the Ukraine are fighting each other in Europe.
• Israel and the Palestinians are fighting each other in Gaza.
• Syria is still in the midst of a terrible civil war.
• Islamic terrorists are rampaging through Africa.
• North Korea and Iran are still working diligently on becoming nuclear weapons powers.
• Refugees are flooding our borders from Central and South America.

There are international crises going on everywhere, crises that should have the attention of our top international diplomat, Secretary of State John Kerry. But in a sad comparison to the children’s game, “Where’s Waldo?,” one would have to ask, in the face of all of these international trouble spots, “Where’s Kerry?”

Well, two weeks ago, of all places, Mr. Kerry was in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. Why was he there in the face of all the international turmoil cited above? He was there to lay a wreath at the Guadalcanal American Memorial to honor American soldiers killed in the Solomons in World War II. While this was a nice gesture and honor to those who fought there, you really have to question whether this was the right priority for him in these trying times.

And to add insult to injury, he did not talk about international affairs in his public comments. Instead, he focused on….wait for it…. Climate change: “But more importantly, we have $25 million in Asia Pacific climate change adaptation. We have another $25 million in mitigation programs. I know it’s of great concern to you. And in addition to that, we have huge historical ties that we respect enormously.” 

While the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central America are disintegrating, Kerry is handing out American taxpayer money to the Solomon Islands to fix “climate change,” even though the planet has not warmed in over 19 years. And besides, how is climate change the overriding priority of the Secretary of State?

This is just another example of our politicians not having the will, intelligence, or ability to address and fix real problems, forcing them to address trivial things like climate change in the Solomon Islands, the name of an NFL football team, etc.

That will do it for today. More insanity, more wasteful spending, and more horrible priorities from the worst set of politicians ever to serve in office. More of the same to follow.

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:

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

Government Gone Wild, Part 2: Why We Do Not and Should Not Trust The Obama Presidency

Yesterday, we reviewed the latest scandal and attack on liberty by the Obama administration and the amazing and horrifying fact that the administration had secretly obtained a secret warrant from a secret court to get the details on the calling habits of millions of Verizon customers. The administration is trying to convince us that their obtaining every Verizon call will somehow make us safer and protect our freedoms even as our privacy is being grossly violated.

The details of our disgust and review can be accessed at:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/06/government-gone-wild-part-1-verizon.html

Today, we will focus on notable quotes but failed promises from this President as it relates to the current and massive privacy intrusions by his administration and the subsequent lack of trust in any thing this administration says. The bottom line is why should we trust him and his administration now when his history of promising but always falling short or reneging on his promises is so strong.

Tomorrow, we will review a set of insightful tyranny quotes from people living today and in the past that will put this assault on the Constitution by the Obama administration into perspective. But before we do any of this, let’s set the stage:

• As we reviewed yesterday, the government has obtained millions and millions of call log information from Verizon.
• The administration has been using the IRS to harass, sabotage, and deny the rights of Tea Party and conservative Americans to exercise their freedom of speech.
• The administration has been using the IRS to harass, sabotage, and deny the rights of various religious organizations to exercise their freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
• The administration denied “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to about two dozen Americans during the siege of the U.S. consulate at Benghazi by denying rescue support during a terrorist attack, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of four brave Americans.
• The administration was caught secretly obtaining and tracking down information on news journalists.
• The administration has made a habit of denying Freedom of Information Act requests and viciously going after brave government whistleblowers who report government's illegal acts.
• According to news reports from several weeks ago, the IRS apparently illegally obtained the health records of about 10 million Americans, including every California state judge, and now faces a California class action suit.
• According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks, not just Verizon, and also includes emails and Web searches, the NSA has also has confiscated and cataloged credit-card transactions records, and the NSA has also obtained data from Internet-service providers such as data about email or website visits, several former government officials said.
• As if confiscating American’s electronic activities is not enough, Britain's Guardian newspaper, which broke the original story on the NSA snooping, has reported that it has seen documents showing how the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ has had access to America's "Prism" system since at least June 2010 and thus, had access to American citizens‘ calling habits.
• At the behest of a Freedom Of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Homeland Security has released a long-awaited 2011 assessment of the civil liberties impact of its policy of conducting “suspicionless” searches (i.e. the seizing and searching of American electronic devices within border areas without just cause, due process, or a warrant) of electronic devices at any U.S. border; not surprisingly, the ACLU calls the results of the DHS assessment “disappointing” for civil liberties advocates.

Okay, in the face of all these recently uncovered attacks on liberty, let’s look Obama’s record on quotes and trust (remember that for the first two years of his Presidency, President Obama‘s party had filibuster proof majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, he and his party could have done anything they wanted from a legislative perspective):

• "As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions." Four years later, Gitmo is still open, the American taxpayer continues to pay billions of dollars to manage and expand the facilities there, long time inmates are in the midst of a hunger strike and forced feeding, and the President recently promised to again to close the facility but admitted he had no idea how to do it. Failed promise.
• "After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home [in June 2011]… [O]ur troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own." Thus, this promise would have had most of our troops and financial resources out of the country by Afghanistan by December, 2012 if the President was able to hit the 18 month target. The U.S. military will be in Afghanistan at least until 2014, and possibly longer, along with the associated taxpayer cost. Troop withdrawals have been modest since these statements. Failed promise.
• President Obama's stimulus package passed in 2009 and cost the American taxpayer over $800 billion. The administration boldly stated that if the stimulus package was not implemented, the U.S. unemployment rate would go as high as 8%. His stimulus program promised to get unemployment under 5% by May 2013 without millions dropping out of the labor force to get to that level. Well, the stimulus package was passed and the unemployment soared over 8% and stayed there for a record number of months, only recently dipping below 8% and only because so many Americans stopped looking for a job. Failed promise.
• "Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected," said the President in one of the bigger understatements of his administration. One of the biggest catch words of the stimulus program was that the money would be put to work immediately in so-called “shovel-ready” jobs. These jobs would be good paying, solid, long term jobs that built roads, repaired bridges, retrofitted schools, and did other good for society immediately. Several years later, even the President realized that there were no shovel ready jobs. Instead, the administration spent taxpayer wealth on replacing windows in a national park building that had been shut down and would never be reopened, a study of insects on an island half way around the world, and hundreds of other equally inane and useless programs, none of which were shovel ready jobs. Failed promise.
• "I won't stop fighting to open up government... we have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history." Unfortunately, the Obama administration is even more secretive and unethical than the Bush administration. Failed promise.
• "But I want you all to know, I will not rest until anybody who's looking for a job can find one -- and I'm not talking about just any job, but good jobs that give every American decent wages and decent benefits and a fair shot at the American Dream." The Independent Journal Review claims that the President has taken at least 57 vacation days since making this statement in late 2009. But worse, he has held dozens of photo op meetings with NFL, NHL, NBA, college, and other sports teams that have been crowned champions in their respective sports. He has spent hours and hours talking about his college basketball picks during March Madness. He has probably attended hundreds of political fund raisers, including one within 24 hours after the attack and deaths at the Benghazi consulate. The overwhelming, most critical issue facing the President was the economy and jobs and he spent a lot of wasteful time on useless activities that had nothing to do with being President and reducing the unemployment rate. Failed promise.
• “Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you. First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.” But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that at least 7 million Americans will lose their current health insurance coverage as a result of his so-called health care reform legislation. Failed promise.
• “Now, add it all up, and the plan (Obama Care) I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion.” But the latest reputable estimates put the current cost not at $900 billion but almost double that amount, over $1.7 TRILLION. Failed promise.
• "This Administration (Bush administration) puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide…I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our Freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens, no more National Security letters to spy on American citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient." These words came from Senator Obama back in 2007. Looks like he really blew this promise, given his approval of wiretapping every Verizon customer, the seizing of Americans’ electronic devices in border areas, the confiscation of internet records, etc. Failed promise.

And these examples do not even cover all of the failed promises, e.g. cutting the Federal government spending deficit in half in his first term, a number that he actually sent to record high levels. For a more detailed list of failed promises, access the following link that lists out 19 of the President’s more blatant failed promises:

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/06/58005-president-obamas-broken-campaign-promises/1/

In light of all these disgraceful invasions of privacy and the multitude of failed promises by Obama and his administration, he now has the audacity of putting forth this quote this past week: "If you can't trust us, we're going to have some problems." WE are not going to have problems, you, Mr. President, have a canyon wide trust and integrity problem. How can we believe anything you tell us, given your administration’s recent anti-liberty actions and your history of failed promises?

This is truly the face of tyranny. Government intrusion and abuse of privacy in a democracy. The silencing of whistleblowers. Using government agents and agencies to silence political opponents and religious freedom. And then accusing the governed of having a trust problem. Despicable and disgusting.

But possibly we can learn from others, from today and in the past, when it comes to tyranny and how to handle it since tyranny of this scope has never been seen to this degree in this country. This education process starts tomorrow as we continue this series of “government gone wild.”

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.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
 

The Transparent Failure Of Obama's Transparency Promise

One of President Obama’s greatest assets is that he makes grandiose, bold commitments of what his administration is going to do for the American people and the nation. When he came into office, he promised to “usher in a new era of open government” and “act promptly” to make information public.

One of President Obama’s greatest liabilities is that he rarely, if ever, fulfills those promises. Consider his track record:

• One of the first acts he was going to do when elected in 2008 was to shut down the prison facility at Guantanamo since it was a symbol of U.S. repression. As of today, nearly four years later, the prison is still open with no sign it will be shut down any time soon.
• He promised, that unlike George Bush, he would not go around Congress and appoint any high ranking government bureaucrat without Congressional approval and hearings, a promise that he has broken numerous times.
• He promised that his economic stimulus program would get unemployment well below 6% and prevent it from ever going over 8%. Unfortunately, his administration oversaw an all time record for consecutive months having an unemployment rate over 8%.
• He promised that he would slash the annual Federal government spending deficit in half by the end of his first term but ended up setting sky high record deficits every year of his first term, incurring a total national debt of over $5 TRILLION in just four short years.
• He promised that he would never raise taxes in a weak economy on any American, something he canot wait to do now.
• He promised he would quickly disengage U.S. forces in Iraq and ended up taking three years to do it and using the existing Bush exit plan.
• He promised to slash earmarks, thinly disguised misuses of taxpayer wealth by incumbent politicians to finance their reelection campaigns, but was unable or unwilling to do so.
• At his swearing in ceremony, he swore to uphold the Constitution and laws of the land and then ignored both during his first four years in office by engaging our military in the Libyan civil war without Congressional approval, ignoring court orders by a Federal judge relative to the Gulf oil drilling moratorium, unilaterally declining to enforce the tenets of the DOMA law (a law that should have never been passed but was the law of the land, requiring the administration to enforce it), and sanctioned the first official government assassination of an American citizen without due process of law.

We could go on with other broken promises but you get the idea. Great at promising, pitiful in delivering on those promises. But probably his biggest lie/disappointment has been the promise to operate the most transparent Presidential administration ever. No secrets, open government, high transparency. Not surprising, this is also a failed promise, a very large failure across all Federal entities:

1) Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, is involved in the latest Obama administration embarrassment over transparency when it came to light that she has been conducting EPA business using two email accounts. One account is a publicly known and used, official email account.
Another email account that she has been reportedly using for private EPA business is listed under the Richard Windsor, a moniker that very few people knew was actually Ms. Jackson. Richard Windsor is a family dog from Ms. Jackson’s childhood. Obviously, at least on the surface, this appears to be a way for a top Obama administration official to bypass those nasty laws on transparency, freedom of information requests, and Congress.

According to a recent article on the same topic from the Washington Times on November 17, 2012, government open-records laws are supposed to make information available to the public now and for posterity at the National Archives, the government agency that gathers official correspondence. There are strict rules on the use of email addresses, and the rules prohibit using private emails to try to bypass open-records laws.

The EPA claims nothing was amiss here, just an EPA official doing business like many of her predecessors that also may have had alternative, secretive emails. Obviously, there are two problems with this excuse. First, just because previous people had secret email accounts does not make it right, legal, or transparent, as promised by Obama.

And second, experts in this area of governance are not buying this somewhat lame excuse, quoting from a recent article from Politico:

• “I don’t know any other agency that does this,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which asked EPA’s inspector general on Tuesday to investigate the matter. Even if Jackson needs a separate email account, Weismann asked, “why would you pick a fictitious name of someone of different gender? To me it smacks of ... trying to hide.”
• Another expert, Bradley Blakeman, a former senior Bush aide who later Freedom's Watch, stated in a broadcast interview that the EPA arrangement “smells.”
• “What good reason, if we use common sense, would there be for a high government official to have a fictitious email account?” he asked.

Good question, Mr. Blakeman. Congress is investigating, as are some government inspector generals, to see if this was an actually attempt to undermine and undercut government transparency rules, regulations, and promises.

2) But the intrigue of hidden emails to possibly avoid transparency does not stop at the EPA. The Washington Times article cited above reported on similar hanky-panky at the Department of Energy. According to the article, a Congressional committee, the Science committee, investigating this hidden email scandal found that Jonathan Silver, the Energy Department’s loan officer, “explicitly directed others to keep loan guarantee communications secret by not linking public and private email accounts, and sent emails detailing official government business using his private email account.”

One instance of using hidden emails to conduct secret business might be an accident. However, two departments using hidden emails to conduct secret business is a trend. If we find another department doing the same shenanigans, we have a scandal and a confirmed broken promise of the Obama administration.

3) A November 21, 2012 article on the Info Wars website cited a Washington Post story which reported the Obama administration had secretly signed off on a secret cyber security Presidential directive that would allow intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency (NSA), to secretly operate on the networks of private companies, such as Google and Facebook.

This directive would greatly expand the NSA’s authority and ability to spy on citizens and companies. In response to this obvious direct hit on freedom and privacy, lawyers from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding that the Obama administration release the text of the directive for review.

Unfortunately, for liberty and transparency, the NSA denied the FOIA request. The NSA contends that it does not have to release the directive since it is a confidential Presidential communication and it is classified. So much for transparency.

The EPIC plans to continue the legal battle for transparency on this issue, which we wish them luck on. However, this is not the first time that the EPIC and this not-so-transparent administration have clashed over the release of government information:

• In testimony to Congress earlier this year, EPIC explained that the NSA has been a “black hole for public information about cybersecurity.”
• EPIC is also currently involved in an ongoing lawsuits involving the secret nature of the NSA’s secretive relationship with Google
• Another EPIC lawsuit, this one four years old dating back to in 2008, is also being pursued relative the NSA’s cybersecurity authority.

Again, so much for transparency, a concept that is critically important when it comes to freedom and the authority of government to spy on its own citizens without debate, without judicial overview, and without consent.

4) If you are like most Americans, you are probably not aware of what the government calls “fusion centers. These “centers” are regional government centers that collect information on American citizens. Quite simply, they are domestic spying operations, as defined by Wikipedia: “A fusion center is an information sharing center, many of which were created under a joint project between the Department of Homeland Security and the US Department of Justice‘s Office of Justice Programs between 2003 and 2007."

They are designed to promote information sharing at the Federal level between agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Justice, US Military, and state and local level government. As of July 2009, the Department of Homeland Security recognized at least seventy-two fusion centers.
In other words, fusion centers are domestic spying and analysis centers located around the country. Now, I understand there are reasons for secrecy and security when it comes to protecting citizens. However, not unexpected, given what we have already discussed, earlier this year the Department of Homeland Security has more or less unilaterally decided that fusion centers will be exempt from Freedom Of Information request and other inquiries.

Thus, most, if not all, Americans will never know if they are under investigation or if their names and personal information have somehow gotten identified and stored by one of these fusion centers, making them a perennial suspect in the government’s eyes. The concept of freedom of information was to ensure that these types of domestic spying activities were open to the air and sunshine of disclosure and discussion in our democracy.

To unilaterally decide not to share the processes and information that the government is collecting on innocent Americans (remember the quaint concept of “innocent until proven guilty”) is not consistent with the concept of liberty. It is certainly not consistent with the concept of government transparency.

  5) But apparently this lack of transparency in the Obama administration is not related to just national security and spying. Bloomberg ran an investigation that they ran in an article in late September regarding the utter failure of the Obama administration of fulfill a simple FOIA request:

• Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the simple disclosure of public information unrelated to national security.
• The request was the travel cost of top government officials.
• Bloomberg found that just eight of the 57 Federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act.
• Nineteen of the twenty Cabinet level requests were not fulfilled in time to be in compliance with Federal disclosure laws.
• In an ironic twist of government incompetence and secrecy, the Department of Justice, which is charged with monitoring how well Federal entities react to FOIA requests, also failed to release the travel details of top officials at three of its affiliated agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in according to the legal requirements and law.
• Some agencies tried to minimize FOIA compliance by illegally trying to charging requestors of information thousands of dollars for the information.
• According to the article, the Obama administration claimed almost half a million exemptions to the FOIA laws and guidelines in 2009, about 50% more exemptions claimed than in the final year of the Bush administration.

According to experts on government disclosure compliance:

• “When it comes to implementation of Obama’s wonderful transparency policy goals, especially FOIA policy in particular, there has been far more ‘talk the talk’ rather than ‘walk the walk,’” said Daniel Metcalfe, director of the Department of Justice’s office monitoring the government’s compliance with FOIA requests from 1981 to 2007.
• “I don’t think the administration has been very good at all on open-government issues,” said Katherine Meyer, a Washington attorney who has been filing open records requests since the late 1970s. “The Obama administration is as bad as any of them, and to some extent worse.”
• “In a 24/7 world, it should take two days, it should take two hours. If it’s public, it should be just there,” according to Eric Newton, senior adviser at the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based group that promotes citizen engagement, said agencies have no excuse not to rapidly disclose travel costs.

So it is not just national security that the Obama administration officials think should be shielded form the daylight of disclosure. Hardly the behavior you could have expected form a Presidential administration that claimed it would be the most transparent ever. Given these five sets of examples, it is clear that this group of politicians and bureaucrats, from Obama on down to most government agencies, will never receive an award for their transparency.

But wait...the Obama administration did get recognized for his transparency back in March of 2011:

(http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0311/not_a_secret_anymore_a00ccd98-0d9e-4822-8936-168f3a51b959.html).

But we do not know anything about the transparency award since the ceremony was closed to the press and the public, totally consistent with Obama‘s transparency failures. Another promise broken, to the detriment of freedom and liberty.

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.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w