Tag: Pres. Obama

Montana Judge Who Sent Email Implying Pres. Obama’s Mother Had Sex With Dogs Says He Isn’t Racist

Trish
MontanaJudge
Judge Cebull

To those who say that all racism is in the South (and that all those in the South are racist), I give you Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull from the state of Montana.

His honor, appointed to the bench by Pres. George W. Bush, thought this email was appropriate to circulate among six “old buddies:”

The forwarded text reads:

“Normally I don’t send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine.

“A little boy said to his mother; ‘Mommy, how come I’m black and you’re white?’” the e-mail joke reads. “His mother replied, ‘Don’t even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you’re lucky you don’t bark!’”

The judge, upon being ratted out by one of those buds, quickly apologized, saying it’s not that he’s racist, it’s just that he hates Pres. Obama.

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Reagan Placed a Higher Tax Burden on Americans Than Obama

Trish

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein recently refuted the Republican/Tea Party touchstone that Obama has placed a higher tax burden on Americans than other presidents. Klein shows you have only to look to Ronald Reagan for evidence.

Today’s problems, Klein says, are radically different from Reagan’s era, and they began under Clinton, who allowed the crumbling of the wall between insured and uninsured investing and the deregulation of the mortgage industry, and were exacerbated under Bush II, who continued deregulation and used deficit spending to finance tax cuts for the rich and the war he declared in Iraq.

Contrary to popular belief, taxes are lower under Obama than they were under Reagan. In 1983, when Reagan was trying to get the economy out of recession, revenues were 17.5 percent of GDP. In 2010, when Obama was trying to guide the economy into a recovery, revenues were 14.9 percent of GDP.

Taxes are so low under Obama in large part because of the Bush tax cuts and the effects of the financial crisis. But they’re also low because of the tax cuts passed by Obama in the stimulus bill.

Klein adds that the long-term outlook under the Obama plan is good.

In 1988, when Reagan left office, revenues were 18.2 percent of GDP. Under the Congressional Budget Office’s alternative-fiscal scenario — which is their most realistic projection — revenues only rise to 18.4 percent of GDP by 2021. If Obama manages to pass his most consistent tax-policy demand and sunset the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000, that would rise by less than half a percentage point. In other words, taxes were never as low under Reagan as they are under Obama, and Obama’s policies would not lead to a significantly different tax burden than Reagan’s policies did.

Finally, Klein notes that Obama isn’t done yet so while we can definitively rate Reagan’s initiatives, Obama’s are a work in progress.

Factcheck.org Confirms President’s Record on Job Growth, Proves Romney Lies When He Says Obama Has Created No Jobs

Jon Ponder

photo-sotu-2012

The 18 debates among the Republican presidential wannabes have been such horrific clown shows that both Sen. John McCain, the GOP 2008 nominee, and Bush’s propaganda czar Karl Rove have expressed concern that they are harming the party.

The debates have also been veritable blizzards of lies, particularly about Pres. Obama’s record. None of the candidates is a smoother or more practiced liar than Mitt Romney, who has made his political career out of changing his positions in order to get votes.

In his State of the Union speech last night, the president addressed one of Romney’s often-repeated lies — that no jobs have been created since Obama took office.

Pres. Obama: In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s.

Factcheck.org confirms the president’s statement even while griping a little about what he didn’t say — and in doing so puts the lie to Romney’s oft-repeated claim that no jobs have been created since the Obama took office in the depths of the Bush recession:
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Andrew Sullivan Debates Obama’s Record with Bay Buchanan

Jon Ponder

The venue for this debate is Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN. Meanwhile, Fox is signaling that it is terrified of this story. The network’s spokesmodel hosts have been trashing Sullivan’s article while refusing to invite him on to debate it. (They even blurred his name on a graphic of the Newsweek cover.)

The biggest surprise is that Andrew Sullivan is surprised that the GOP’s propaganda network won’t allow its viewers to hear a dissenting view:

I knew from afar that they were a propaganda channel. Now, in this close-up personal interaction, you realize just how deep the rot goes. This is a channel dedicated to money, power and entertainment, in that order.

In Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan Takes on Obama’s Critics on the Right and Left

Jon Ponder

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Note: The complete transcript of the interview is published below.

Writing in the cover story of the current issue of Newsweek, titled, “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” Andrew Sullivan goes after the right wing for its ongoing, deliberate mischaracterizations of the president as a “a radical leftist attempting a ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American way of life.” He writes:

chart-job-growth-bikini-dec-2011You’d think, listening to the Republican debates, that Obama has raised taxes. Again, this is not true. Not only did he agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts, affecting 95 percent of taxpayers; he has cut the payroll tax, and recently had to fight to keep it cut against Republican opposition. His spending record is also far better than his predecessor’s. Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama. Again: imagine Bush had been a Democrat and Obama a Republican. You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor—except, of course, that Obama has had to govern under the worst recession since the 1930s, and Bush, after the 2001 downturn, governed in a period of moderate growth. It takes work to increase the debt in times of growth, as Bush did. It takes much more work to constrain the debt in the deep recession Bush bequeathed Obama.

The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed. The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right.

But Sullivan, who is a conservative-leaning independent today but was, in the 1990s, as a British citizen living and writing about politics in the United States, a Republican Party sympathizer, also takes on Obama’s critics on the left:

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