Stop Government Crime: Send 'em Packing

See Ya' around, Fellas

Why the Obama / Holder stonewalling of the operation fast and furious investigation proves they both should be sent packing this November.

Is Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress because of his role in the “Fast and Furious” cover-up? The U.S. House Oversight Committee voted 23-17 that Holder be held in contempt. A vote by the full House of Representatives met in June, to force Holder to releases the documents he has been concealing.

Whatever the House does, Holder has already proven his contempt for Congress. President Obama has himself taken a lead role in the cover-up by claiming that “executive privilege” allows him to withhold documents from congressional investigators.

The full House could vote for either criminal contempt or civil contempt. A criminal contempt resolution would be referred to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who would be required to bring the case before a grand jury. The maximum punishment for criminal contempt of Congress is one year in federal prison and a $1,000 fine. Since the attorney who would have to prosecute the criminal contempt case works for Holder, it is unlikely that a criminal conviction would result.

Alternatively, and more likely, the House could vote for civil contempt. Then, the House could bring a civil case in court, asking the judge to order Holder to turn over the documents. If Holder refused a court order, the judge could impose sanctions on Holder, such as fines.

The Obama/Holder administration’s cover-up of “Fast and Furious” is apparently designed to keep the scandal out of the public mind until the November elections are over. Much of the pro-Obama national media, such NBC/MSNBC, have ignored “Fast and Furious,” or have “covered” the story with a pro-Obama spin.

Because of the “Fast and Furious” operation, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered on Dec. 14, 2010. And according to the Mexican attorney general, “Fast and Furious” guns have been used in at least 200 murders in Mexico. Among the victims was a Mexican state attorney general’s brother, who was tortured to death.

If Holder is allowed to get away with this, what crimes and cover-ups might take place during a second Obama term? If, during the first term, putting guns in the hands of murderers was accepted as a useful means for promoting gun control, what could a second term bring?

Here are some of the reasons why Holder is in contempt of Congress:

whistleblower

On Oct. 12, 2011, the House Oversight Committee sent a subpoena, a legally compulsory demand for documents to Holder. The subpoena specified 22 particular types of documents that Holder was required to produce for the committee. The October subpoena came after six months of Holder’s defiance of previous subpoenas. The Oversight Committee knew that Holder was withholding documents because whistleblowers had provided the committee with documents that Holder had not delivered.

Since last October, Holder has not produced anything in 13 of the 22 subpoena categories. Since the House investigation began in early 2011, the Department of Justice has produced about 7,600 pages of documents for congressional investigators. But the department’s own files on “Fast and Furious” include over 70,000 more pages of documents that have not been produced.

Those pages withheld from Congress were given to the DOJ’s own inspector general. The DOJ’’s internal self-investigation of “Fast and Furious” has been going on since February 2011. When asked why the DOJ’s self-investigation is taking so long, DOJ explained that the investigators were trying to reach “consensus.” It seems very possible that no “consensus” will form until after the November elections, if they reach a consensus.

For some of the subpoena categories, Holder’s DOJ has asserted that the documents cannot be provided because they relate to an ongoing criminal investigation. Yet legal experts say this fact in itself is not sufficient to deny Congress all access. Among the possible accommodations are that some documents could be made available to congressional staff to read but not to copy.

           

Notably, the DOJ’s criminal investigations seem to be proceeding so slowly as to delay any disclosures until after the election.

On the morning of the contempt vote, President Obama personally invoked “executive privilege” to justify the withholding of the documents. Obama was apparently relying on a subtype of the privilege, called “deliberative process privilege,” which protects the confidentiality of some discussions among executive branch personnel.

Unlike some legal privileges such as the priest-penitent privilege, the deliberative process privilege is not absolute. In particular, as the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the case of United States v. Nixon 1974, the privilege is not to be used to cover up evidence of wrongdoing. Given the Obama/Holder administration’s obduracy, the issue will probably have to be resolved by a court.

Let’s take a look at the 13 categories of documents for which the Holder DOJ has refused to provide anything to Congress.

Sharyl Attkisson

(1) Communications between the DOJ and the White House about “Fast and Furious.” Among the communications sought are those involving Associate Communications Director Eric Schultz, who screamed at CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson in October 2011 because of her continuing investigation of “Fast and Furious.” These documents might reveal a lot about the White House’s role in the cover-up.

Among the mainstream media, CBS’s Attkisson has been the leader in reporting on “Fast and Furious.” Like the congressional investigators, she, too, has been stonewalled by the Obama administration.

Lanny Breuer

Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, she has requested the administration provide copies of “Fast and Furious” related communications involving Holder, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and other top DOJ officials.

All of the CBS News requests were denied in whole or in part. Some of the documents that were “produced” were mostly blank pages. And for most of the requests, the administration took more than a year to respond.

Notably, Breuer and his staff had the legal responsibility to approve the wiretap applications that were part of “Fast and Furious.” The Obama/Holder administration spent 2011 claiming that the applications did not describe the “gun-walking” tactics that were the core of “Fast and Furious.” But in May 2012, whistleblowers provided the House Oversight Committee with copies of the wiretap applications, which did describe the gun-walking tactics. Holder then claimed that neither Breuer nor his staff even read the wiretap applications before approving them, although federal law requires them to do so.

CBS also sent a FOIA request to the FBI about the murder of Border Patrol Agent Terry. That request was entirely denied on the basis that there is an ongoing investigation of his murder. Terry was murdered in December 2010. Taking a year and a half (with no end in sight) to investigate the murder of a federal agent is not exactly fast-paced. The existence of an “ongoing investigation” is a common pretext to keep Congress and the public in the dark.

CBS points out that the FBI has already provided some Terry records to the media without jeopardizing the investigation. Further, the FBI has failed to provide a log of the withheld documents.

(2) The second category of documents that the Obama administration has totally refused to provide to Congress is communications between the DOJ and the White House about President Obama’s March 22, 2011, interview on the Spanish-language channel Univision. During that interview, Obama insisted Holder had never approved “Fast and Furious.” How was he so sure? What did the White House know at that point?

Jaime Zapata

(3) The third category is “Documents and communications referring or relating to the murder of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata.” Agent Zapata was murdered in Mexico by a drug trafficking organization. The killers’ guns came from Texas, delivered by a known gun smuggler whom BATFE had failed to arrest.

(4) “Reports of Investigation (ROIS) related to ‘Operation Fast and Furious.’” These relate to items in category 5, below.

Matt Axelrod

(5) Communications about the items in category 4 between and among Matt Axelrod (associate deputy attorney general, who works with DOJ criminal division head Breuer), Kenneth Melson (acting director of BATFE during “Fast and Furious”) and William Hoover (regional BATFE director for the area including Arizona).

Former BATFE Acting Director Melson testified to Congress, “It appears thoroughly to us that the department is really trying to figure out a way to push the information away from their political appointees at the department.” Documents in categories 4 and 5 could shed light on DOJ efforts to push all the “Fast and Furious” blame away from Obama’s political appointees.

 

Kenneth Melson

(6) “All communications sent or received between Aug. 7, 2009, and March 19, 2011, between and among former Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual; Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer; and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz.” This relates to the DOJ concealing the existence of “Fast and Furious” from American officials in Mexico at a time when the Americans in Mexico noticed a “surge” in crime-gun smuggling in Mexico—a surge that was caused by “Fast and Furious.”

               

Carlos Pascual

As Mexico’s ambassador noted in a June 1 speech in Washington, “Fast and Furious” has “poisoned” Mexican public opinion against the U.S. This is one reason why people who do not care at all about guns should care about the Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” program profoundly damaging American interests abroad.

Bruce Swartz

(7) FD-302 reports related to “Fast and Furious” targets and suspects. These are investigative summaries written by the FBI. After the “Fast and Furious” program was shut down, Hope MacAllister, who was BATFE’s lead case agent for “Fast and Furious,” reportedly provided some of these FBI reports to BATFE’s top management.

The issues in items 7-10 all involve alleged failures to share information between three organizations that are part of the federal Department of Justice: BATFE, FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Under “Fast and Furious,” BATFE told Arizona gun stores to sell rifles to obvious “straw purchasers.” These buyers were not purchasing firearms for themselves, but instead were buying on behalf of someone who could not legally buy a gun in the United States. Straw purchases are a federal felony.

Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta 

The straw purchasers whom “Fast and Furious” was enabling were apparently working for a Mexican named Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta who, in turn, was procuring the guns for a higher-up in a drug-trafficking organization.

In May 2010, Celis-Acosta was caught bringing arms, magazines and ammunition into Mexico. If “Fast and Furious” had been a genuine investigation, the capture of Celis-Acosta would have been the perfect time to arrest him, shut down his gun smuggling operation and offer him a reduced sentence in exchange for providing information about his superiors.

Instead, MacAllister let Celis-Acosta go based on his promise that he would keep in touch and cooperate with BATFE. Unsurprisingly, he never called back and vanished into Mexico. He was eventually captured in February 2011, after the December 2010 murder of Agent Terry had resulted in “Fast and Furious” being terminated a month later.

According to the Arizona Daily Star, when BATFE finally arrested Celis-Acosta in February 2011, BATFE discovered that he was working for Eduardo and Jesus A. Miramontes-Varela, who were procuring guns for the Sinaloa cartel. According to media reports, the brothers were also protected informants for the FBI.

Why did the FBI and DEA let “Fast and Furious” go on so long when they knew that BATFE’s supplying Celis-Acosta with murder weapons for cartel killers would never lead to the prosecution of an important cartel leader? Congress wants to know, and Attorney General Holder seems to want Congress not to know.

Even if the Miramontes-Varela brothers had not been protected FBI assets, “Fast and Furious” would have been an outrage. Putting more than 2,000 murder weapons into the hands of deadly drug cartels is not exactly an acceptable way to catch a pair of gun-smuggler bosses.

(8) FBI or DEA documents involving the “targets, suspects or defendants in the ‘Fast and Furious’ case.” This is similar information to item 7: The FBI and DEA’s knowledge of, and relationships with, the Miramontes-Varela brothers and Celis-Acosta.

(9) “Any investigative reports by the FBI or DEA relating to the individuals described to committee staff at the Oct. 5, 2011, briefing at Justice Department headquarters as Target Number 1 and Target Number 2.” This one apparently relates to information from a closed-door briefing, and perhaps relates to items 7-8.

(10) DEA documents about Celis-Acosta: this item is similar to item 8.

(11) FBI laboratory documents involving the investigation of Border Patrol Agent Terry’s death. These relate in part to the DOJ’s claim that Terry was not murdered with a “Fast and Furious” gun, since the particular gun that killed him cannot (supposedly) be ascertained.

(12) “All agendas, meeting notes, meeting minutes and follow up reports for the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys between March 1, 2009, and July 31, 2011, referring or relating to ‘Operation Fast and Furious.’” These would help reveal who at the DOJ leadership knew about “Fast and Furious“and when they knew it.

(13) Surveillance tapes from Lone Wolf Trading Co. between Oct.  3 and Oct. 7, 2010. Lone Wolf was one of the gun stores that BATFE tricked into selling “Fast and Furious” guns by falsely telling the owner that all the guns were carefully tracked once they left the store, and the guns would never be allowed into the hands of someone who would do harm. The dates relate to a break-in at Lone Wolf.

Larry Alt

It is a crime to attempt to obstruct a congressional investigation, but that is precisely what Holder’s BATFE appears to be doing. For example, a few days after whistleblowing BATFE Agent Larry Alt notified his superiors that he was going to testify before Congress, BATFE claimed that Alt had illegally downloaded $8 worth of applications on his government-issued cell phone.

When Alt’s phone was searched, there were no such applications—not surprising, since those applications are not compatible with his particular phone. Alt denies downloading the applications, yet while BATFE’s retaliatory “investigation” continues, he is denied all pay raises, transfers or promotions.

Attorney General Holder likewise stonewalled a November 2011 question from Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley asking the name of the DOJ official who leaked documents in an attempt to smear and retaliate against a BATFE whistleblower. Holder refused to divulge the person’s name.

According to the contempt resolution, “For over a year, the department has issued false denials, given answers intended to misdirect investigators, sought to intimidate witnesses, unlawfully withheld subpoenaed documents and waited to be confronted with indisputable evidence before acknowledging uncomfortable facts.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy

Led by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the House of Representatives showed its displeasure by cutting $1 million from the Justice Department’s General Administration fund—the fund that pays for Holder and his inner circle.

However, President Obama says that if the bill is not changed, he will veto it. He objects to provisions in the law that end the system of rifle registration that his administration created (with no congressional authorization) in the four Southwest border states.

 Joe Donnelly

Although Holder and his media enablers claim that trying to make Holder end the cover-up is just Republican partisanship, Indiana Democrat Joe Donnelly, a U.S. representative who is his party’s nominee for U.S. Senate, disagrees. Donnelly told “The Daily Caller,” “There has been a serious allegation of federal law enforcement misconduct and we need to get to the bottom of this issue without playing partisan politics.”

Holder and his allies insist the investigation is just election-year politics. The fact is, if Holder had cooperated with the congressional investigation that began in early 2011, the investigation could have been finished last year.

Instead, the Holder DOJ sent the committee a letter in February 2011 containing the flagrant falsehood that the DOJ had never allowed guns to “walk.” That letter was not retracted until 10 months later—half a year after BATFE employees had described under oath to Congress the gun walking in horrific detail.

129 U.S. representatives have said that Holder should resign or be fired over “Fast and Furious,” or co-sponsored a House resolution of “no confidence” in him. So have three U.S. senators and two governors. Most importantly, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, has said that Holder should be removed.

Last year, since the true scope of “Fast and Furious” became apparent, NRA began calling for Holder’s dismissal. Speaking at the NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits in St. Louis this past April, Romney said, “I applaud NRA leadership for being among the first and most vocal in calling upon Attorney General Holder to resign or get fired.”

If Romney is elected president, Holder will no longer be attorney general. But if Obama is re-elected, the deadly culture of impunity at the Department of Justice, exemplified by the “Fast and Furious” cover-up, will continue. The result for constitutional rights could be catastrophic.

Time For A Fiscal Examination Of President Obama

Here we stand at the gate of yet another general election campaign, but this time around the very existence of America and our constitution are at stake. The U.S. has never before had a President who thinks so little of the American people that he imagines he can win re-election running on the opposite of reality. But that is the reality of President Obama today.

It became apparent some weeks ago when the President talked on the stump about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth, under Obama, is actually lower than that of previous Presidents.  This was startling to a lot of people, who looked into it and found the man had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama’s Presidency. The President was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture!  But you know, why would he go out there waiving an article that could immediately be debunked?  Maybe because he thought it was true.  That’s more alarming, isn’t it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender.

President Obama promised to reduce the federal budget deficit by the end of his term, in the fiscal year 2013, to something more than $5 trillion. That would be roughly half of what it was projected to be when he took office. His blueprint for getting there, however, mostly reflects economic growth and the end of stimulus spending, not significant program reductions.

          

He said he would reinstitute a pay-as-you-go rule that calls for spending reductions to match increases and would shun what he said were the past few years' "casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks. He called the long-term solvency of Social Security "the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far" and said reforming health care, including burgeoning entitlement programs, was a huge priority.

The president’s biggest challenge is the unsustainable long-term fiscal imbalance, driven by fast-growing health care costs. Obama has said his health care initiative would be a big step toward fiscal reform because the changes he proposed would begin controlling costs for Medicare and Medicaid. He also promised to address the government’s third big entitlement program, Social Security, but Democratic Congressional leaders are opposed.

In a sense, the economy’s problems provided him an opportunity to make progress on other campaign pledges through the $787 billion two-year stimulus package that Congress passed a month after he took office. Beyond relief for the unemployed and hard-hit states, it included down-payments on a raft of Mr. Obama’s promises, for energy, education, environmental and health programs, and for tax cuts for the middle class and small businesses.

But the tax cuts and the domestic programs were squeezed after 2010, when the stimulus ran out. Now, Mr. Obama is under pressure to reduce annual budget deficits projected to average over $1 trillion a year through the next decade.

President Obama campaigned on the promise of a sharp break from the Bush era on social issues like abortion, embryonic stem cell research and gay rights. He has only partly delivered with his defense of marriage act and the repeal of “Don’t ask don’t tell.

Mr. Obama moved quickly to lift Mr. Bush’s limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and to repeal the so-called Mexico City rule, which prohibited tax dollars from going to organizations that provide abortions overseas. But while he promised to work for legislation codifying a woman’s right to have an abortion, he now says that is “not my highest legislative priority.”

On gay rights, Mr. Obama fulfilled a major campaign promise in late October, when he signed legislation expanding the federal definition of violent hate crimes to include those based on sexual orientation. But the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, remains on the books despite Mr. Obama’s pledge to work to undo it. And the president has acted on the promise most important to gay rights advocates: reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

The CBO did not calculate the gross debt, but Obama's budget shows it rising to $17.1 trillion in 2013 and $23.1 trillion in 2019. The 2019 figure will be more than 100 percent of the estimated gross domestic product, the largest percentage since just after World War II, we’ll owe this debt to ourselves, our children and grandchildren.We'll also owe it to foreigners, mainly the Chinese, who are firing shots across our bow that they may not keep acquiring our debt.

The Federal Reserve is buying U.S. Treasury bills to keep interest rates artificially low. If foreigners refused to buy,  as what occurred with British debt in 2009, interest rates would surge, damaging prospects for economic growth and investment.

Republicans have been charging -- almost chanting -- that Obama's budget spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much, but they shamelessly ignore Bush's irresponsibility and their own, when they were in control of Congress.

Obama has held an "entitlement summit, there he promised not to "kick the can down the road" and to kill government programs that don't work, but even he admitted in his press conference that he has not supplied details. 

While the president and his minions play smear games against Romney and Ryan, the economy is figuratively burning down. The nation will be plunged into a deep recession during the first half of next year if Congress fails to avert nearly $500 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts set to hit in January, congressional budget analysts said.

The massive round of New Year’s belt-tightening, variously known as the fiscal cliff or Taxmageddon, would disrupt recent economic progress, push the unemployment rate back up to 9.1 percent by the end of 2013 and cause economic conditions that will probably be considered a recession, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said.

But the president refuses to deal with that mess until after the election, by then, we’ll be well on our way to the recession. The irresponsibility is staggering, unemployment would go over 9 percent as the economy contracts another .5 percent.

The Obama team seems convinced that it can win the election on smears and tactics, It’s either in denial or oblivious to the fact that actual events, and real things like the economy may motivate voters. And it seems never to have dawned on the team that it needs concrete policies of its own. 

Refusing to play on that terrain, the Romney-Ryan team has latched onto a smart strategy, talk about issues, point to evidence in the real world, offer actual policies and rebut forcefully the merits of the Democratic spin. That might not work. But it’s nice to think that facts and reality matter more than bile, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent to bamboozle us. Really, if that isn’t the case, our democracy has bigger problems than the recession.

The Federal Reserve's balance sheet has tripled bailing out financial institutions, it's buying long-term government debt. It's printing money, which can lead to inflation, a weak dollar and high interest rates. Our entire economic ship has got to be turned around from borrowing to saving. It's going to be hard.  It's going to be hard. Obama has got to take concrete steps to demonstrate that his promises have meaning and reassure China and other creditors -- and do it soon.

Let The Record Play

Why isn’t Obama talking about his record while serving in the office of the presidency? We should all take heed and listen to the campaign that he is waging today, for it is a campaign of hate, fear, lies and racial division, So, since he won't talk about his record, I will, your friendly neighborhood "Black Conservative" you know, the one that they'll claim does not exist.  

He’s too humble.  He isn’t the fourth best; he’s the best of all the best.  At being an arrogant, pathological narcissist who is so in love with himself that all the failure in the world isn’t enough to make him question even for a moment that he is the messiah, and the only messiah with whom we should have to do.

Obama is messiah

Obama’s two signature “accomplishments” are his “stimulus” and what is most appropriately called ObamaCare.  They are both so rotten and so unpopular that he is not mentioning them at all as he runs for re-election.
Obama is reduced to making an argument that itself manifest his colossal God’s gift to not only women but hell, all mankind view of himself: he is saying that without him and his stimulus, we would have plunged into the Great Depression. Let's forget the fact that, when it comes to housing - the thing that created the economic collapse in 2008. We saw the hypocrisy of the excuses when the stimulus was such a failure that Obama stated claiming that he’d created “or saved” jobs.

Professor Gregory Mankiw

Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw said, “There is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University said “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?”

Such a barometer had never been used in American history for good reason.  And if Bush had tried to use it to claim that his agenda was really working out – just look at how many jobs he’d “saved” – the media would have rightly been all over him as a liar from hell for trying to pass such absurdity off.

Allan Meltzer

But not now.  Obama is messiah.  He cannot be wrong.  If the stimulus clearly didn’t work on the physical level of reality, then it must have worked on the metaphysical level.
The unemployment rate has gone down, but it has “gone down” with the massive caveat that nearly three million people are giving up and abandoning the workforce completely (which means they no longer count against Obama’s unemployment record) for everyone who actually finds a job.

The truth is that Obama has lost 2.5 million jobs since he took office.  These jobs have simply ceased to exist under Obama, as measured by the labor participation rate.  The truth is that if Obama were measured by the same labor participation rate that Bush was measured by when he left office, unemployment would be at over 17.3% according to an analysis by Reuters, rather than the 8.3% Obama is being lauded for by media propaganda.  I mean, dang, even liberal Ezra Klein affirms that the real unemployment rate ought to be 15 percent.

But Obama doesn’t have to worry.  The number has gone down – no matter how falsely that number is calculated or what it hides – and the mainstream media says Obama is doing a wonderful job.

                 
Analysis, which was released on July 8, ranked the 20 states with the highest average unemployment through May 2011: the first column shows the actual unemployment rate over the labor force; the second column reflects the number of discouraged workers added to the unemployment rate (also compiled from Census Bureau data) and if you’re a teenager, life really sucks for you.

Obama has screwed all the people he promised that he would save.  Even the reliably liberal Washington Post acknowledges that blacks have been set back decades under Obama’s misrule.  Black unemployment is TWICE the national average under Obama, and even überüberlib Maxine Waters is saying that rabid black support for Obama is hurting the black community.  And the black congressional caucus is tired of making excuses for this failed leader.

Who’s right???  And who’s totally freaking wrong???

Democrats are genuinely evil people. But to some extent they actually have good intentions, the road to hell is paved with democrat intentions.  Paved high and deep and wide.

           

Obama’s time in office has been a failure.  This is the 41st month of 8%+ unemployment… the longest period in post-WWII America.  The last time things dragged on this long was when a Democratic president launched a major stimulus program, “The New Deal”.

So the more stimulus, the worse things get and the more Democrats will want. It’s a vicious circle.

Since Obama’s policies have been a failure, it’s necessary to change the subject from the economy to Romney's tax record in order to muddy up the water  witch means throwing out some red meat to the masses.

                  

But during all of this time we’re not talking about the economy. It’s all a distraction. The economy is terrible. We are 11 million jobs down versus what we had before the botton dropped out in 2008, and quarterly growth is decreasing (because of the stimulus). He'll say anything in order not to   discuss the economy! 

President Obama promised to reduce the federal budget deficit by the end of his term, in the fiscal year 2013, to something more than $500 billion. That would be roughly half of what it was projected to be when he took office. His blueprint for getting there, however, mostly reflects economic growth and the end of stimulus spending, not significant program reductions.


The president’s biggest challenge is the unsustainable long-term fiscal imbalance, driven by fast-growing health care costs. Obama has said his health care initiative would be a big step toward fiscal reform because the changes he proposed would begin controlling costs for Medicare and Medicaid. He also promised to address the government’s third big entitlement program, Social Security, but Democratic Congressional leaders are opposed.

Beyond relief for the unemployed and hard-hit states, it included down-payments on a raft of Mr. Obama’s promises — for energy, education, environmental and health programs, and for tax cuts for the middle class and small businesses.


But the tax cuts and the domestic programs were squeezed after 2010, when the stimulus ran out. Now, Mr. Obama is under pressure to reduce annual budget deficits projected to average over $1 trillion a year through the next decade.

President Obama campaigned on the promise of a sharp break from the Bush era on social issues like abortion, embryonic stem cell research and gay rights. He has only partly delivered.

Mr. Obama moved quickly to lift Mr. Bush’s limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and to repeal the so-called Mexico City rule, which prohibited tax dollars from going to organizations that provide abortions overseas. But while he promised to work for legislation codifying a woman’s right to have an abortion, he now says that is “not my highest legislative priority.”

On gay rights, Mr. Obama fulfilled a major campaign promise in late October, when he signed legislation expanding the federal definition of violent hate crimes to include those based on sexual orientation. But the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, remains on the books despite Mr. Obama’s pledge to work to undo it. The president has delivered on the promise most important to gay rights advocates: reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

Overthrowing the Constitution  

For a man that spent ten years of his life teaching the constitution, he sure seem to violate quite often. 

 

 In signing ACTA, Obama has leapfrogged over the U.S. Constitution, critics charge. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was signed by the United States and several other countries on October 1 with little fanfare.

In wake of the recent uproar (and subsequent shelving) of the proposed United States’ bills SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), however, many Americans are now turning their fears toward ACTA.

This is not surprising, as critics say that ACTA would censor the Internet even more severely than either SOPA or PIPA would have done. This treaty would trump all local and national laws.

Which is part of the reason critics, constitutional scholars, and one Senator is challenging Obama’s constitutional right to sign this treaty.

Obama claims that he signed it as an “executive agreement” which does not require Congressional approval. However, everyone else categorizes it as a treaty, which does require such approval.

But even if we let Obama bask in his delusion of signing an “executive agreement,” Constitutional experts say that he still does not have a right to sign it in the matter of copyright and patent laws.

The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which it charges with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property. 

Remember N.D.A.A.? well a considerable setback for a president eager to ravage the due process rights of the American people, Federal Judge Kathleen Forrest granted a preliminary injunction striking down those sections of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 which sought to provide Obama with the power to indefinitely detain citizens without benefit of their 5^th Amendment rights.

Signed very quietly into law on New Year’s Eve, the controversial Act has been roundly criticized as unconstitutional by groups on both the political left and right. Of greatest concern was Section 1021, which grants the United States military authority to exercise police powers on American soil. Upon order of the president and at his sole discretion, agents of the military are empowered to detain “until the end of hostilities” anyone the president wants detained. 

Senator Carl Levin

Nothing could more plainly reveal the rank corruption and lust for power of this Manchurian Candidate than his involvement in crafting and then misrepresenting the final text and authority of the NDAA. According to Democrat Senator Carl Levin, it was Obama himself who demanded American citizens be included under the detention law and that the President have exclusive authority to invoke the statute. “The language which precluded the application of Section 1021 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved…and the administration asked us to remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section,” said Levin after the NDAA was signed into law.

Yet in his signing statement, Obama wrote that he had in fact forced Congress to “revise provisions that otherwise would have jeopardized the safety, security and liberty of the American people.” So rather than the grand inquisitor, committing to prison any American citizens he chose to view as enemies, Obama claimed to be their champion and savior, protecting them from the excesses of an over-zealous Congress! He went on to say “I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.” 

“My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.” This of course was an outright lie, given the expressed meaning of the statute as Obama himself had demanded it be written. Leave it to Barack Obama to demand he be given absolute authority over the American public, yet claim in the next moment that he will not take advantage of it! The Department of Justice, which defended the NDAA before Judge Forrest, will undoubtedly appeal her ruling. It is a judicial process Americans must watch closely as the free exercise of our Constitutional rights depends upon the outcome.

Higher unemployment, declining incomes and crushing debt is not a new normal. It is a result of misguided policies. In a world weary of war and economic crises, and concerned about global climate change, the consensus is that Obama has not lived up to the lofty expectations that surrounded his 2008 election and Nobel Peace Prize a year later. Many in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America were also taken aback by his support for gay marriage, a taboo subject among religious conservatives.