More ammo for the GOP

[sirs]

Again, it's theirs to lose, come Nov.

The Seven Most Disturbing Moments So Far in Barack Obama's Presidency

Picking out the most disturbing moments of Barack Obama's presidency is kind of like trying to choose the wettest parts of the ocean. Other than his "Even a blind squirrel sometimes gets a nut" moment where he said "yes" when the SEALS asked if they were allowed to kill Osama Bin Laden, his entire presidency has been one long, slow motion bamboo shoot sliding under the country's fingernails. So, everyone reading will probably be able to think of a few national nightmares that aren't included.

7) Obama bows to a Saudi King: Had Obama spent his childhood entirely in the United States, he probably would have known that real Americans don't bow. Unfortunately, since that's a lesson Obama hasn't learned, Americans have had to endure their President humiliating himself and by extension, the rest of the country, by servilely bowing to foreign leaders. Perhaps the worst of these was the tyrannical, fanatical Saudi king. As Newt Gingrich has said, "I want America to become so energy independent that no American president ever again bows to the Saudi king." No American President should have ever bowed to him in the first place.

6) Obama sides with a foreign leader against an American state: It's bad enough that Obama has been persecuting Arizona for enforcing illegal immigration laws when his administration won't do the job. However, in a despicable display Barack Obama held a joint press conference at the White House with Mexican President Felipe Calderon that featured both of them criticizing Arizona's immigration law. If only there had been someone there to represent America at that event.

5) Obama shoves through history's single most wasteful spending bill. The very first thing Barack Obama did after he was elected was push through the largest and most wasteful spending bill in human history. Most calculations of the cost of the bill came in somewhere between 800 billion and 1.2 trillion dollars. The whole purpose of the bill was supposed to be to create jobs and the Obama Administration claimed the bill would keep unemployment below 8%. Conservatives almost universally said the bill wouldn't work and it received no GOP votes in the House along with only 3 in the Senate (Snowe, Collins, and Specter -- before he changed parties). So, who turned out to be right about a bill that cost more than FDR’s New Deal AND the war in Vietnam combined in today's dollars? Not Obama. We've now had 38 straight months of above 8% unemployment, the longest streak since the Great Depression.

4) The manned space program comes to an end: Putting a man on the moon is one of America's greatest accomplishments and the catalyst for a wide range of scientific achievements. Under Obama, America's Space Shuttle program was ended and in a twist so bizarre you wouldn't buy it if you saw it in a movie, NASA's mission has been changed to getting children excited about math and science, expanding international relationships, and doing Muslim outreach.

3) Paul Ryan alerts Tim Geithner that the economy ends in 2027: In one of the most amazing exchanges in the history of American government, after Tim Geithner presented the Obama Administration's stratospherically high long-term budget projections, Ryan showed off a chart created by the CBO estimating that America's economy will shut down in 2027 because of out-of-control government spending. In other words, in 15 years life as you know it in America is over because of the Obama Administration's spending and Obama has absolutely no intention of doing anything about it.

2) Obamacare passes: Never before in American history has one party been arrogant and paternalistic enough to push through a massive entitlement program that was wildly unpopular with the American people and had zero votes from the opposing party. If it isn't stopped, Obamacare will destroy America's health care system by dramatically driving up the cost of care, rationing care, instituting death panels, driving tens of millions of Americans off their health care policies, adding trillions to the debt, and dramatically reducing the number of doctors available to treat patients. Of course the future of medicine in this country could be worse....well, that is if any of those zombie movies turn out to be right.

1) America loses its AAA rating: Despite the fact that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner assured Americans that there was "no risk" America would lose its AAA credit rating, America did indeed lose its rating for the first time since 1917 because of Barack Obama's adamant refusal to cut spending. It's worth noting that another credit rating company, Egan-Jones, downgraded the United States AGAIN just a couple of weeks ago from AA+ to AA. Unless something changes, historians will point to the Obama downgrade as the very moment when America started to come down like the Hindenburg.


This doesn't even include the Crony Capialism with the likes of Solyndra, or the far worse Fast & Furious disaster, and now cover-up

[sirs]

Again, it's theirs to lose, come Nov.

The Seven Most Disturbing Moments So Far in Barack Obama's Presidency

This doesn't even include the Crony Capialism with the likes of Solyndra, or the far worse Fast & Furious disaster, and now cover-up

Of all the myriad scandals of the Obama administration, there is one, largely ignored by the mainstream media, that could actually be its worst.

That scandal is the operation run from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the Justice Department, known as "Fast and Furious," through which the federal government actually encouraged and even ordered American gun shops to sell guns -- against the store owners' better judgment -- to "straw" purchasers who were funneling guns to Mexican drug gangs while the ATF sat back and watched and did nothing.

As Katie Pavlich shows in her remarkable and eye-opening new book, "Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up," the whole scheme was either absolutely harebrained or, as some have more ominously theorized, intentionally designed to manufacture "evidence" for tightening gun control legislation.

Pavlich exposes how extreme gun control measures have been a top political goal for President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other important leaders within the administration -- and she draws the lines that link this goal directly to the implementation of Fast and Furious. Just as importantly, she shows how the administration has shamelessly tried to obscure those links.

The operation resulted in the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the murder or wounding of some 200 Mexican citizens.

In the operation, there was no attempt to track the weapons sold, and some agents who tried to follow the purchasers were told to stand down. Not only that, but our government kept Mexican authorities wholly in the dark about the operation. Allowing these guns to "walk" into Mexico without surveillance and behind the backs of Mexican authorities guaranteed they would end up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels and only be recovered after crimes had been committed, which is exactly what occurred.

As one ATF agent testified to Congress, "you can't allow thousands of guns to go south of the border without an expectation that they are going to be recovered eventually in crimes and people are going to die."

In their reports on Fast and Furious, congressional investigators concluded that the Department of Justice "had much greater knowledge of, and involvement in, Fast and Furious than it has previously acknowledged." Indeed, Attorney General Holder claimed that he had been unaware of Fast and Furious until a few weeks before May 3, 2011, but it was shown that he had received numerous memos about it much earlier, which he later insisted he had not read.

Rep. Darrell Issa has said that the DOJ has spent more time and resources trying to protect the careers of its officials who knew about the operation than in holding accountable those who were involved. In fact, the evidence shows that the only ones who have been punished are those who blew the whistle on the operation, while those who were engaged in wrongdoing have been rewarded -- reassigned or promoted with their pensions still intact.

Meanwhile, the DOJ, according to the committee report, "has blamed everyone except for its political appointees for Fast and Furious." Ken Melson, then the ATF's acting director, said that the DOJ is "circling the wagons to protect its political appointees."

Though Holder told the House Judiciary Committee his office was working "tirelessly to identify, locate and provide relevant information" to Congress, Republican representatives and senators say he and his department have been stonewalling their investigation. Sen. Charles Grassley said that Justice was withholding some 74,000 pages of relevant documents from the investigators.

The ongoing investigation also reveals a disturbing lack of coordination and cooperation among the ATF, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, all of which are under the domain of Holder's DOJ. One deputy attorney general, upon being confronted with this issue, just casually replied, "We will look into it."

The committee's report said that everyone involved was blaming others: The ATF pointed the finger at the Justice Department for encouraging the operation, and Justice blamed the U.S. attorney's office in Arizona for implementing it. DOJ officials who could have stopped the operation blamed their staffs for not bringing critical facts to their attention. Making matters worse, U.S. attorney's office personnel have taken the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify before Congress, or the DOJ has prohibited them from appearing before Congress at all.

Katie's book is a real reporter's book, loaded with interviews with inside sources, including conscience-stricken government agents who are appalled by the politicization of the ATF. She quotes ATF agent John Dodson, who says, "I have never heard an explanation from anyone involved in Operation Fast and Furious that I believe would justify what we did."

[sirs]

The $5 Trillion Man: Debt Has Increased Under Obama by $5,027,761,476,484.56

In the 39 months since Barack Obama took the oath of office as president of the United States, the federal government’s debt has increased by $5,027,761,476,484.56.

Although he has served less than a term, Obama is now the first American president to see the federal government's debt increase by more than $5 trillion during his time in office.

During the full eight years that George W. Bush served as president, the federal government's debt increased by $4,899,100,310,608.44. (Rising from $5,727,776,738,304.64 to $10,626,877,048,913.08.)

The $5,027,761,476,484.56 that the debt has increased during Obama's presidency equals $16,043.39 for every one of the 313,385,295 people the Census Bureau now estimates live in the United States.

At the close of business on Jan. 20, 2009, the day Obama was inaugurated, the federal government’s debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08, according to the U.S. Treasury. By the close of business on April 16, 2012—as many Americans were working to finalize their 2011 tax returns to meet an April 17 filing deadline—the debt had reached $15,654,638,525,397.64.

The $5,027,761,476,484.56 in additional debt that the U.S. government has taken on during the 39 months that Obama has been president is more debt than the federal government accumulated in the first 219 years of the Republic.

The total federal debt did not exceed $5,027,761,476,484.56 until March 14, 1996, when President Bill Clinton was in the last year of his first term in office. On that day, the national debt rose from $5,025,887,531,178.79 to 5,035,165,720,616.33.

The GOP's race to lose