Thread: All the president’s ego

from WhiteHouseDossier.com: http://www.whitehousedossier.com/201...memorate-dday/

It’s D-Day and President Obama is hitting the beaches – of sunny California!

Instead of scheduling a brief event to mark the 68th anniversary of America’s brutal landing on the shores of Normandy, Obama is already on his way to San Francisco, where he will hold two fundraisers before moving on to Beverly Hills to stage two more.

Obama failed to mark D-Day with either a speech or a written proclamation both last year or the year before. He did give a speech in 2009, the 65th anniversary of the event.

Is anyone REALLY shocked that Obama is storming the beaches of California and ignoring D-Day for a THIRD YEAR in a row??

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

from WhiteHouseDossier.com: http://www.whitehousedossier.com/201...memorate-dday/



Is anyone REALLY shocked that Obama is storming the beaches of California and ignoring D-Day for a THIRD YEAR in a row??

Just curious....is this something that all the other president consistently acknowledged?

yes ...

W.W.O.D. ?

Yahoo!'s Walter Shapiro unravels the mystery of what a second-term Obama presidency would look like.

The Obama enigma: How would a hyper-cautious risk-taker approach a second term?
2 hrs 6 mins ago

Mitt Romney has aired a series of gauzy TV spots trying to help voters get over the perceptual challenge of imagining him in the Oval Office. “What would a Romney presidency be like?” asks the off-screen male narrator in a thrilled tone implying that any day now you too could be a partner at Bain Capital. The specifics in the Romney ads are GOP boilerplate (“End Obama Era of Big Government”), but what is really being peddled is Reaganite optimism (“It’s the feeling we’ll have that our country’s back”).

All this is standard fare for the out-of-office candidate in economic hard times. Similar upbeat sentiments were displayed in the iconic Barack Obama 2008 campaign poster and by Bill Clinton ending his 1992 convention speech with a play off the name of his boyhood home in Arkansas, “I still believe in a place called Hope.” But incumbent presidents running for a second term (Ronald Reagan 1984 aside) cannot get away with offering voters tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Just imagine Obama borrowing his reelection slogan from 1950s British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: “You never had it so good.”

In truth, except for extreme partisans on both sides, it is difficult to conjure up an Obama second term. Yes, we can mentally see him in the Oval Office in 2016, maybe a little greyer than today, but fundamentally the same person. We can hear his campaign rhetoric: “I’m running for president because I want to do something about our debts and our deficits in a balanced and responsible way,” the president declared at a fund-raiser Tuesday night in Philadelphia. (Memo to Obama speechwriters: Words like “balanced” and “responsible” rarely get the blood rushing in partisan politics.) But the reality of a reelected President Obama somehow remains frustratingly out of reach.

I have been wrestling with the Obama second-term mystery – and will continue to do so in this column (along with scrutinizing Romney) until the election. Governing in modern times is not a linear exercise in which you can project the future simply based on a straight-line extension of the present. Over the past four decades, all two-term presidencies have been mired in unexpected sadness and often scandal: Richard Nixon (Watergate), Reagan (Iran-contra), Clinton (Monica Lewinsky and impeachment) and George W. Bush (war weariness, Hurricane Katrina and the financial meltdown). On the other hand, whoever is elected in 2012 – and no matter what policies he pursues – may eventually preside over a return to robust economic growth as the world rebounds from the longest downturn since the Depression.

The complexity and elusiveness of Obama, even after 41 months in the White House, is a motif of two ambitious recent journalistic attempts to explain him. In the current issue of The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza, the magazine’s Washington correspondent, confronts the question directly in a 12-page article subtitled, “What would Obama do if reelected?” Lizza’s short answer, based on the likely tightness of the election, can be summarized in this sentence: “Whatever a mandate is, Obama won’t have one.”

David Maraniss, the author of the long-awaited biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” which ends with the future president heading to Harvard Law School at age 27, comes at things obliquely. Again and again, Maraniss marvels at the quirks of fate that produced Obama. He devotes hundreds of novelistic pages to bringing together Stanley Ann Dunham (the unhappy 17-year-old daughter of an itinerant furniture salesman) and Barack Hussein Obama (the already married non-believing son of a Kenyan convert to Islam) in introductory Russian class at the University of Hawaii.

To Maraniss, the recurring theme in Obama’s biography is “his determination to avoid life’s traps.” That partly explains Obama’s “caution” and “his tendency to hold back and survey life like a chessboard, looking for where he might get checkmated,” in Maraniss’s words. Jerry Kellman, who hired the youthful Obama as a community organizer in Chicago, told Maraniss in one of the most revealing quotes in the book that his protégé “was one of the most cautious people I’ve ever met in my life. He was not unwilling to take risks, but was this strange combination of someone who would have to weigh everything to death, and then take a dramatic risk at the end.”

So how would a hyper-cautious risk-taker approach a second term wrested from a divided electorate?

Much would depend, as Lizza makes clear, on the makeup of the new Congress and the political lessons that the Republicans derive from Obama’s reelection. Both Obama and Romney have so far failed to prepare voters for the epic economic reckoning that is slated to occur during the 55-day lame-duck period between the election and the end of 2012. Obama (his term ends on January 20) and the current Congress will have to reach agreement to prevent the expiration of all the Bush tax cuts, the elimination of the 2-percent temporary reduction in payroll taxes, the end of extended unemployment benefits and an automatic $110-billion slash in both domestic spending and the Pentagon budget. At stake is about $500 billion, which is roughly 3 percent of the entire economy.

How that Great Reckoning will play out – along with another congressional fight over the federal debt ceiling looming in early 2013 -- will partly shape the economic contours of the next four years. The possibilities range from a grand bargain in which the White House and congressional Republicans give up ground on taxes and spending to a continuation of the scorched-earth politics that have repeatedly put the economy in jeopardy. Perhaps the best chance for an agreement is if both Obama and the Republicans feel chastened by the election returns.

Lizza, who interviewed top presidential advisers, envisions a reelected Obama able to prevail on one major domestic policy issue before everything halts for the 2014 elections. (A second-term president almost invariably loses congressional seats during his sixth year in office). The squishiness of Obama’s governing vision shines through as his advisers bounce from refinancing the housing market to enacting a carbon tax to pursuing immigration reform to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. It is axiomatic in politics that if everything is a top priority then nothing really is. And right now, the Obama agenda is mostly a laundry list of familiar Democratic if-only nostrums.

Make no mistake, it is still early in the campaign season for both Obama and Romney to articulate their innermost dreams about the presidency. If their Oval Office roadmaps for 2013 still seem murky after the convention acceptance speeches, then there will be ample reason for complaint. But there is a particular risk for Obama as the incumbent in keeping his plans under wraps for too long. In 2005, Bush built his second-term domestic agenda around Social Security privation – with disastrous results, in part, because he had never stressed the issue during the 2004 campaign.

In his biography, Maraniss recounts a disastrous meeting that Obama held with black ministers as an apprentice community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. (A bowdlerized version of this incident appears in Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams from My Father.”) Afterwards, Obama said, “Let’s make sure we understand what just went on so we can go from here and not make this kind of mistake again.”

With the economy sputtering and health-care reform hanging by a thread before the Supreme Court, that can also serve as a partial description of Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office. What the president has learned from his mistakes is ultimately the biggest question if the voters grant Obama a second term.

http://news.yahoo.com/the-obama-enig...ond-term-.html

comments

If you spend half of your term working on something that could be labeled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court then you have a problem. Adding more debt in one term than the previous guy did in two is also not a good sign.

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NATIONAL BUDGET (minus 8 zeros)

Annual family income $ 23,017
Money the family spent $ 36,499
New debt on credit card per year $ 13,482
Existing balance on credit card $ 157,672
Romney planned budget cut per year starting in 2016 MAYBE, in his best-case scenario $ 5,000
Obama's deficit reduction plan, per year $ 3,600
Interest on national debt paid in 2011 $ 4,544
(sources USdebtclock/​treasurydirect/Romney website/Obama's budget proposal)

"I, however, place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy"..."I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple." - Thomas Jefferson

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams

On July 3, 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama said this: "We now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic."

So, what does he call nearly $16 Trillion in debt?

And again, Romney's plan reduces the deficit little/no more than Obama's.(Maybe even less over the course of 4 years since Romney's doesn't fully kick in untill 2016...And Romney's first priority is actually across the board tax cuts and increased military spending, decreasing government revenues while adding to expenditures.(The possible 2016 cuts would barely cancel these things out....)

R vs D isn't working. They've been in power for over 100 years and look where we are.

I'm voting third party - Gary Johnson 2012

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I see four more years of economic stagnation and high unemployment. Obama would have to appease Iran by abandoning Isreal because of the threat of Iranian nuclear missles able to reach the USA. More holding back oil production in favor of green energy which might have some advantage decades from now. Higher taxes for everyone and more job killing regulations. Deficit levels unseen even in Greece. Scary prospect.

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Day One... President Obama will make arrangements for his 130th round of golf. He will see the results of stagnant job growth and find new ways to blame the GOP, Europe, the Tsunami or perhaps Herbert Hoover.

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Poking holes in Obama lore: A new biography on the president’s life
By Jake Tapper, Richard Coolidge & Sherisse Pham | Power Players – 18 hrs ago.

<div><iframe frameborder="0" width="576" height="324" src="http://d.yimg.com/nl/ynews/powerplayers/player.html#vid=29778374&browseCarouselUI=show"></iframe></div>

A new biography of President Obama pokes holes in the president's own memoir. David Maraniss's "Barack Obama: The Story" takes readers on an international journey through Indonesia, Kansas, Hawaii, Chicago -- the meandering path that shaped Obama before he landed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "The moment that overwhelmed me was actually in Indonesia, in Jakarta," said Maraniss, where 7-year-old Obama -- then called Barry Soetoro, taking the name of his stepfather -- lived. Obama, said Maraniss, didn't know the language, and wasn't a rich kid going to the international school. He was one of the neighborhood kids at the neighborhood school.

"When I was there, in those alleys, and thinking about that Barry Soetoro becoming President Obama, that was kind of uh, an amazing moment," Maraniss said.

The president does not show up in Maraniss 's book until chapter seven -- the first six are spent following stories from Kansas and Kenya that result in the creation of Barack Obama. The president was especially close to his maternal grandmother, Madelyne Dunham. "When I interviewed the president for this book we talked a lot about Madelyne and he's a fan of "Mad Men" the TV show, and he said Madelyne is Peggy. She started as a secretary and then became vice president of a bank," said Maraniss. "You know if anybody's wondering, 'How did Obama pay for college?' and so on, grandmother Madelyne really paid for a lot of that. She was hardworking and invested almost her whole life into her grandson."

Dunham passed away the day before her grandson was elected President of the United States. He spoke emotionally about her death at an appearance in North Carolina, tears rolling down his face as he remembered the woman who was so important to him. "The interesting thing there is, she was not an emotional person. She did not hug Barry and say I love you," said Maraniss. "She wasn't that kind, but she was very dependable. And he really, she was the only rock in his life."

Some of the things the president did in his youth could be stored as ammunition by his current political adversaries. Obama already acknowledges the fact that he was something of a pot head in high school, but Maraniss's book provides a lot more details.

"Barry Obama was talking about TA which meant total absorption, he had inhaled the whole car full of, of marijuana," said Maraniss. Picture Spicolli from the 1980s classic "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" tumbling out of a van chock full of smoke. "That's pretty much it, yes, that was the 'choom gang' and their 'choom wagon,'" Maraniss said, laughing.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/power-pl...101710020.html

comments

"I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13 when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites." ~ Barack Obama (Dreams From My Father)

"I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically."
~ Barack Obama (Dreams From My Father)

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Did they say anything about cash for clunkers and summer of recovery? obama had thousands and thousands of decent cars bought and destroyed with taxpayer dollars instead of giving them to needy families...

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There is/was a racket where you could get an $8,000 credit for buying an electric car. People would buy an electric golf cart with street legal lights that were souped up to do 25 mph for $6,000 and use them around the "gated communities" that they live in and pocket the extra $2,000.

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Obama admitted that the women in his books were composites like Julia. Has this man EVER told the truth about ANYTHING?? Who is Obama & WHERE DID he REALLY come from????

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The Jake Tapper video above--is better than reading the article.

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As a retiree, I travel much of the time and talk to people from all over the country. The RV crowd is usually the older crowd, say 50+, most who have retired. But the range of people I talk to daily is actually from about 8 to 80. The point is, I cannot name a dozen people who will vote for Obama in 2012. This is bizzare, because in 2008, it was about 50/50, I personally thought he could balance the budget like he promised and could turn the economy around. I was so wrong. I will vote for the other party this time. And personally, I dont give a rats about his upbringing. Hell, most people that I know grew up hard, worked their way through college or industry or the military and were successfull. These books are worthless.

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

Lech Walesa was deemed "too political"; to accept Medal of Freedom on behalf of Jan Karski
By Doug Powers ; June 1, 2012 01:58 PM

A brief addition to Wednesday's ; Obama ticks off Poland.

President Obama "Polish death camp" remark (for which Obama just sent Poland a "letter of regret" http://news.yahoo.com/obama-says-reg...110255389.html ) was the headline-maker from the Medal of Freedom ceremony earlier this week, but there were other controversies churning beneath the surface. One of them, according to the Wall Street Journal by way of Rory Cooper at NRO http://ht.ly/biMqe was the exclusion of Lech Walesa: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...sj_share_tweet

A New York Post editorial speculates that "too political" might have been an excuse for avoiding a man tied to the memory of Ronald Reagan, or for that matter, steering clear of someone who actually earned his Nobel Peace Prize. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...ent=Editorials

However, the WSJ indicates that it’s more of a grudge: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...sj_share_tweet

If Walesa was in fact deemed too "political" for the Medal of Freedom ceremony, the White House had a weird way of keeping it non-political: http://ht.ly/biMqe

**Written by Doug Powers http://michellemalkin.com/2012/06/01...too-political/

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A true freedom fighter was too political but the reconquista racist on steroids Delores Huerta was not?

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Lech Walensa was too political? The head of the democratic socialists of America, Dolores Huerta wasn’t? obama has no values or even a logical sequence of values. All your morons that give to Harvard and Occidental, how’re your dollars working for you now? I think you should endow a chair of critical thinking, a science lost to these two pandering institutions. political hack

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No to Walesa, the Polish Reagan, but yes to Tool Huerta, who is Obeyme’s biggest suck up. A pox on these traitors:
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/o...ical-socialist

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Walesa is a TRUE HERO. Obama doesn’t know the meaning of the word and is apparently “uncomfortable” referring to him that way, and “uncomfortable” in the presence of an actual patriotic anti-communist hero.

I am taking real comfort in Rush's program to day. He is giving all the incredibly good news about the well known dems, including Bill Clinton, who are speaking out against Obama and praising Romney's capitalism.

My husband says the dems are like rats running from the sinking ship named Obama before he hits the iceberg. Obama seems to be crashing and burning as we speak. The democrats up for re-election this year are desperately distancing themselves from this loser

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Lech Walesa effectively backs Romney
By Holly Bailey, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 5 hrs ago.

GDANSK, Poland--Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Poland, effectively endorsed Mitt Romney during a meeting with the GOP presidential candidate Monday.

Walesa, a co-founder of the Solidarity movement in Poland which challenged Communist rule during the 1980s, urged Romney to "get your success" in the upcoming election. "I wish you to be successful because this success is needed to the United States, of course, but to Europe and the rest of the world, too," Walesa told Romney ahead of an hour-long meeting between the two men. "Romney, get your success! Be successful!"

It was Romney's second meeting of the day in Gdansk, a brief stopover before the candidate heads to Warsaw, the final stop of his week-long overseas tour. Romney's campaign noted the candidate visited Poland at Walesa's invitation. It was a sly dig at President Barack Obama, whose diplomatic relationship with Polish officials has been strained since 2009, when the Obama administration canceled an air missile defense system set to be built in Poland. The move was viewed as a concession to Russia.

Earlier Monday, Romney met with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Protestors rallied outside--including a group of people who chanted Obama's name. Others waved a large sign in Polish in support of Ron Paul.

On his way out of town, Romney, his wife, Ann, and son Josh visited two prominent memorials in Gdansk. They laid a wreath at Westerplatte, where the first shots of World War II were fired. Before heading to the airport, they stopped at the Solidarity Monument, one of the most revered spots in Poland, which marks where the Solidarity movement began

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/l...171407303.html

Romney speaks about freedom in Poland; lapdog media focus on aide’s ‘kiss my azz’ remark

Posted at 9:11 am on July 31, 2012 by Twitchy Staff

http://twitchy.com/2012/07/31/romney...my-ass-remark/


Maybe Romney aides wouldn’t have to dress down the lapdog media if they gave up their quest for an Olympic medal in Synchronized Narrative Weaving, at least while visiting a memorial to Poland’s war dead.

This is why I call him President Rerun
By Michelle Malkin • September 4, 2012 10:47 AM

President Rerun has earned and re-earned his nickname untold times over the years.

The RNC put out an ad last night that sums it up perfectly: “We’ve heard it all before.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=fZgQhnNRSuw

Like I tweeted last night, the DNC in four words: Reuse. Recycle. Redistribute. Retrograde.

His tendency to ‘recycle’ his remarks are renowned throughout the world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erYpX...layer_embedded

http://michellemalkin.com/2012/09/04...esident-rerun/

Obama grades performance: Incomplete
By Doug Powers • September 4, 2012 12:20 PM

“Incomplete” is actually good news for those who fear the day anybody in this administration says “our work here is finished.”



From Politico: http://www.politico.com/politico44/2...in-134278.html

President Obama’s assessment of his first term hasn’t changed since the last time he weighed in.

Asked to grade his first term in an interview with KKTV in Colorado, Obama said: “You know I would say incomplete…but what I would say is the steps that we have taken in saving the auto industry, in making sure that college is more affordable and investing in clean energy and science and technology and research, those are all the things that we are going to need to grow over the long term.”

The grade — typically given by teachers to students with unfinished work — is what Obama has given himself a number of other times.

When you were in school and turned in unfinished work at the deadline, what grade did that usually translate to? Here’s the video:

http://www.kktv.com/video/?autoStart...clipId=7684894

Using his own grading scale, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCN5-ovvFL0 Obama’s looking at an “F” — and likely voters agree:

A majority of voters believe the country is worse off today than it was four years ago and that President Obama does not deserve reelection, according to a new poll for The Hill.

Fifty-two percent of likely voters say the nation is in “worse condition” now than in September 2008, while 54 percent say Obama does not deserve reelection based solely on his job performance.

Only 31 percent of voters believe the nation is in “better condition,” while 15 percent say it is “about the same,” the poll found. Just 40 percent of voters said Obama deserves reelection.

Judging from this new RNC video, one thing Obama has definitely earned an “A-plus” for is consistency of rhetoric.
http://michellemalkin.com/2012/09/04...esident-rerun/

**Written by Doug Powers http://michellemalkin.com/2012/09/04...ce-incomplete/



Here is Paul Ryan’s response. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...ncomplete.html

"Four Years Into A Presidency And It's Incomplete?"

"The president is asking people just to be patient with him," Republican Party vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan said on CBS's "This Morning" today about Obama's grade for himself. "Look, Charlie, the kind of recession we have, we should be bouncing out of it creating jobs. We're not creating jobs near the pace [we] could."

"That's why we're offering big solutions to the big problems we have today and I would just say, if you take a look at the president's policies he calls them 'investments.' It's borrowing money and spending money through Washington, picking winners and losers. Spending money on favorite, you know, people like Solyndra or Fisker. Picking winders and losers in the economy through spending, through tax breaks, through regulations does not work," Ryan observed.

"If that kind of economics work, we would be entering a golden age along with Greece," Ryan said of Obama's spending policies. "So I think the 'incomplete' speaks for itself and that is why I think that we are going to win this and get this country back on the right track because we're offering bold solutions."