President Obama: The First 100 Days - Page 2

God, that's great. I love how 50 posts down, people are still making jokes about Clinton having his pants off in the office. Clearly, this is not the only message board where people don't read the thread before they post!

My favorite is the third "I'm surprised he's not wearing a backwards hat" post. That little gem has replay value like a Broken Lizard film.

I know religion is a touchy topic around here and that's fine but I thought this story needed telling. So I go to church yesterday, and I kid you not, at least 5 times during the bible study part someone brought up Obama. Once because they're sure he's going to mandate abortion (an exaggeration but still) and several other times using really shitty analogies that I'm still trying to make sense out of.

# of times George Bush was mentioned in the last 8 years. You guessed it.....ZERO.

It's a good thing I don't go to church for the people. Fucking neanderthals. I love Texas and I hate Texas. This was one of those times that really makes me hate it.

Obama keeps his super BlackBerry

More transparency

Shuts down ghost prisons

The awesome keeps coming.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/wo...n.html?_r=1&hp

I really hope they don't fuck this up. I'd be lying if I didn't think about the stuff mentioned in the article.

Between articles like these and the whole "starting with the wrong foot with the press" stuff I'm seeing, I'm getting nervous.

...oh, Christ, it's only been three days. Somebody shoot me.

**sigh**


They have a name for people like you. That name is "recidivism." Repeat Offender!

So something that happened in 2007 reflects badly on Obama? You know, they STILL haven't found Amelia Earhart, what the hell is he waiting for?

Huh ... the article brings up a valid point, and it will be the one thing that could backfire on those executive orders. That's why they're not closing Guantanamo next year, it's a bit more complicated and they'll need a year to iron out all the details (which I'm betting they don't have all the answers now).

...and the beat goes on:

And THIS is the reason that we needed this man running our country. I couldn't be more pleased with him. For the most part even the Conservative nutjobs I work with are surprised with what he is doing.

The whole TIm Geithner thing still bothers me.

It should. Did you watch the hearings? It's grounds for termination from a federal post, let alone giving someone a pass so they can be bumped up.

What got me was the fact that his former employer, IMF pays half their employees pallroll takes for them..So not only did he not pay, he stole as well.

and he is somehow the best man for the job?

Videos of Arcade Fire at the party. Born in the USA and Intervention.

Great first week for Obama. I wonder how he and the Missus will celebrate.

These expectations are getting re-goddamn-diculous.

I love the nervous laugh from off-camera and the complete obliviousness of the speaker. That this was on a Fox station makes it perfect.

Something to watch: Obama Sides With Bush in Spy Case.

The article title is far too sensational -- this is more of a procedural move but the eventual conclusion might be on the bad side.

I hope that's a timex.

Alright, so everyone is all excited about the flashy wonderful executive orders. I get it. What I don't get is how little contempt, outrage, disappointment, and dismissal there is concerning Geithner's appointment. How the fuck is it even possible for him to take the position? This card gets pulled a lot I know, but had Bush tried to appoint him...

I am looking for a genuine answer here, or some side of things I don't see. He's got 350B left of TARP to dole out (with the first couple of hundred already good and disappeared while totally unaccounted for) for chrissakes, and he's blaming TurboTax for 30k worth of mistakes.

Another day, another departure from the old days.

Obama gives an interview (full transcript) to Al Arabiya:

Or as Foxwould like to say starts already negotiating with terrorists:

And he also made great leaps towards making the US fix the environmental issue!

I just watched the Al Arabiya interview. Was that logic that was coming out of his mouth? I'm confused. And a little scared.

It's good to be the president.

Times are changing indeed. Maybe now the MPAA wouldn´t ban posters for Zack and Miri anymore since it is presidentially approved.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Cheney...last_1011.html

This, of course, occurred well after Cheney claimed to have severed 'all ties with Halliburton.'

Look, I hate the equivocation game as well. Cheney did that, so it's okay that Geitner fucked up his taxes? No, not at all, but here is your answer to 'if Bush had tried to appoint him.' Bush didn't try to appoint a crook, he was on the same ticket with one.

With Geitner, we are talking about not properly accounting for your income as 'self-employed.' Geitner was working for the IMF, which is an international organization. If he did use TurboTax to calculate his taxes, it's obvious that TurboTax does not account for the particulars of such a situation. In that case, he is guilty of poor judgment, but it is not a crime. The fines and missing taxes were paid. It certainly looks bad, but I don't think it is or should be a confirmation killer. There is a reasonable explanation for why this happened, and there is the suggestion of wrong-doing. The wrong-doing is, at this point, simply a suggestion. There is no legal case against him, the fact is IMF employees are taxed in a very peculiar and obscure fashion, and the discrepancy was dealt with. No one is going to hold Dick Cheney's feet to fire over the $8 million he earned in a clear conflict of interest, and he's not going to give it back. Jumping all over $30,000 that has been repaid seems, unfortunately, a bit partisan.

But it's politics! Fuck yeah, let's get partisan on this shit. There is absolutely no way the $350 billion left in TARP could be handed out any more haphazardly or irresponsibly than in the way Paulson handled it. $350 billion is already gone, scattered to the four winds. The treasury has independently secured another $1.2 trillion to back bad assets in the banks with absolutely no oversight. The banks have used huge chunks of this money to buy other banks (Bank of America got billions to help it buy Morgan Stanley, and now that Stanley's bad assets belong to BoA and BoA is posting losses, BoA needs more money), lobby congress for more money (and to oppose the Union rights bill), and buy jets and shit. Yes, Obama voted for the bill. I was against the bill. It was and is a bad bill. It was also a necessary bill - to the degree that nation's markets have not seized up completely, throwing the banks a lifeline was absolutely critical. However, Paulson botched the job. His own vested interests on Wall Street occluded good judgment. The banks aren't dead quite yet, but they're not doing any lending either (Citi is a dead bank walking).

And now, as we discuss putting money into the nation's infrastructure (instead of just giving it all to the banks) in the new stimulus package, everyone is getting concerned by the costs involved. The fact is, infrastructure stimulus should have been handled with the first package. That it wasn't points to the failure of leadership in both parties. The Dems inability to deliver a 'clean' bill (the kind that Obama requested, and has been pretty consistent in seeking) is a black mark against Pelosi, Reid, and the rank & file. The Republicans sudden concern for 'massive government spending' is a continuing joke. Perhaps they could have said something as Reagan, Bush I and Bush II ran up 90% of the current leviathan debt.

The only person in government who seems to be serious about dealing with the residual fallout of the credit crunch, as it pertains to most Americans, is President Obama. [Dealing with the roots of the problem are a bit more difficult, and probably will involved huge sums of money as the Banks' bad assets are isolated into a national 'bad bank'; that, or the banks will have to be nationalized.] Jobs are being lost, the infrastructure is crumbling, growth is going into reverse, we are tumbling into a global recession. Direct and dynamic stimulus is needed now.

I realize a lot of the bill is backloaded, in that much of the direct stimulus isn't to be released for quite some time. This confuses me, it enrages me, and I don't know who to blame for that. it's stupid. Spend the money, spend it now. Our government hasn't had any fucking problem doing that for well on two decades now (a couple Clinton years being the exception). We reach a point where this modus operandi actually becomes beneficial and everyone starts clucking about 'out of control spending.' If we could get a quarter of the $2-5 trillion already shelled out to the banks (estimates vary!) back and put that into creating jobs and fixing roads and building energy grids and water desalinization plants, this thing would be looking a lot better. But we've crossed that bridge, and the motherfucker has collapsed behind us.

Let Geitner handle the TARP. The country, quite literally, does not have time to fuck around. We've been doing that for 8 years.

$335,000,000 FOR STD PREVENTION IN ECONOMIC STIMULUS BILL? Why on earth does the CDC need that much money?

We just declared a "War On Skanks". FOX News. 35 minutes ago.

Thank you Zhukov, that's exactly what I was looking for.

And that Obama pic is very unfortunate. Reminds me of the Jesus statue or picture or whatever that has the kids head in his lap.

which is a shame, as a country we need our skanks, but a clean skank is a good skank!

Let's hope we are ready for the pull-out.

Fuck yes.

I'm watching a White House Briefing with the Press Secretary, and the way that he's dodging a question about Geithner appointing a Goldman-Sachs lobbyist... it sounds exactly the same. Exactly. It's the same bullshit. This man has no answers, just stuttering spin. This is so completely frustrating.

That does disappoint. The Lobbyist Rule is good in theory; the revolving door between government and high-level corporate interest is disgusting. Raytheon first, now Goldman Sachs . . . I do understand that occasionally a waiver will have to issued, as some jobs are too important, and some qualified people would legitimately violate the rule of the law, if not the spirit, but I don't see how either one of these rises to that level.

If I may be cautiously hopeful on the effect of these rules: I think it is crucial to stop government officials working for specific laws, that benefit specific corporations, and then joining the board or lobby of those same corporations for huge windfalls as soon as they leave government. That absolutely has to stop.

An argument can be made that you have to pick your people from somewhere, and sometimes these conflicts are unavoidable. I don't like it, but the real proof will be if ex-officials are held over the fire about obtaining plumped positions for corporate entities. We'll see, I guess, but the precedent already set is disheartening.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/...ates-left.html

Didn't know where to post this. Good news for 2010?

Yet House Republicans are still delusional enough to think that THEIR policies are the ones Americans really need and are for the good of the country. Retarded Fucks!

Republicans are looking like petulant children regarding the bailout, while Obama has extended his hand for negotiations. I have a feeling Obama is going to have to fuck up royally in the next four years to lose in 2012 due to the Republicans' actions and the pathetic slate of GOP candidates: Palin, Romney, Jindal etc.

I'm just glad that in the midst of all of this, Obama has the time to communicate with America 140 characters at a time:

http://twitter.com/POTUSbarry1961

"people are hanging up ziggy comics everywhere around here. it's driving me crazy"

"steve just laughed at "putin." THAT'S A REAL GUY'S NAME, STEVE"

"biden wants to go grab a bag of sliders. helicopter is on the back lawn. should i???"

It's good to know that even the President of the USA gets a craving for sliders every once in a while.

Fuckin A'.

Although I say Pelosi should introduce the pres to a little something known as In-N-Out.

That's great.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert..._b_161240.html

I'm not liking this shift into "Obama might make mistakes, but at least he's not Bush!" standard that Obama and the media in general from cultivating. To me there have been standards set by great leaders and great Presidents which I think our Commander in Chiefs should try to acknowledge or even emmulate, and the scape-goating of some Obama's decisions over the past few weeks on the "He's Not Bush" platform is only going to be detrimental in the long run when the honeymoon phase starts to wear off.

Then again, he could be a perfect leader for the next four or eight years and none of this will matter. It's just sort of the principle of the thing.

I honestly don't know if Obama could've played the politics behind the stimulus bill any better. There was very little chance that the House Repubs were going to do anything else than all vote against this. First of all, they're ideologically opposed to spending on the poor, second, they have a partisan need to be critical of the Dems, and last but not least, their constituents are super conservative. Remember, the House GOP blocked the Paulson bailout bill too.

As a national party, the Repubs under Bush were the YES party until Katrina. Now they are in danger of becoming the NO party under Obama. It'll be interesting to see what shape the Senate bill takes. I'd love to see less tax cuts, more infrastructure spending, and a tighter focus on economic multipliers. I mean, what do the Dems have to lose at this point? Obama put on a good faith, public show to court the GOP and they basically blew him off.

At this point, all I'd like to see is an okay bill get better as the legislation process moves forward in the Senate and in the final negotiations.

At this point, the House Republicans are so marginalized by their own stubborn idiocy, that the Blue Dog Dems are effectively functioning as the conservatives. If the Republicans just aren't going to play ball, why bother talking to them? That means Obama and Pelosi can spend more time on the Blue Dogs, making them happy, and making sure the happy Democratic rainbow coalition doesn't go in a bajillion pieces.

Hear hear. I'd all but forgotten that politics is the art of the possible.

House Republicans got zero input into the the Pelosi Bill. None. It was nice that Obama met with them. But the only change that came out of the meeting was Obama pressuring Pelosi to drop part of the funding for family planning clinics.

Also, the bill is being sold as a stimulus package. To crib from David Brooks' NYT column today, a stimulus, to have its intended effect, needs certain safeguards or parameters. Larry Summers, one of Obama's top economic advisers, said a stimulus must be timely, targeted, and temporary, as well as not raising deficits beyond "a year or two at most." The monstrosity Pelosi and friends drafted is a long-term, budget-busting spending program that borrows hundreds of billions over the next six years to fund virtually every Democratic pet project proposed in the last 3 decades. It creates a dozen new bureaucracies and establishes a new floor for future budgets that are far beyond tax revenue. It's a way to use the crisis to do almost everything the Democrats have ever wanted to do, so long as a few morsels are in there that could arguably be called a stimulus.

There is nothing else the Republicans could have done other than vote en masse against such an irresponsible and hastily written bill meant to greatly expand the federal bureaucracy at a time when it's the private sector that needs the boost. Particularly when the Republicans were completely shut out of the process by Congressional Democrats. They weren't even allowed to offer up amendments for a vote. Again, it's largely not a stimulus bill. It's Democratic wish fulfillment. And they are exploiting the economic crisis to do an end-around on the usual budget process. Let the House Democrats own it. If it works, great. Democrats get all the credit and become a permanent majority. If it makes things worse or has no effect, we know we need something different from our spending bills and our representatives in Washington. It's just good to see the Republicans returning to their principles regarding fiscal responsibility that they seemed to have abandoned a decade or more ago.

Now the Republicans have come out with the Anti-Obama. Michael Steele.