From CBS news: So far, President Obama has taken 61 vacation days after 31 months in office. At this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush had spent 180 days at his ranch where his staff often joined him for meetings. And Ronald Reagan had taken 112 vacation days at his ranch
So he has taken 1/3 as much vacation as Bush, and 1/2 as much as Reagan at this point in their presidencies.
Never Forget.
You are the honey in the lion.: 8 Lies Republicans Want Us To Believe
1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budgetreduced that to $1.29 trillion.2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts…
Hey, I’m disappointed with Obama’s conservatism too, but do we really want to give the economy back to the GOP? They have a terrible history of killing the economy, as we saw in the early and mid-70s and in the early 80s and in the early 90s and in the 00s. The Democrats are simply better at managing the economy than the Cons are. Obama has swung us out of a nosedive and the Cons are tricking some people into thinking we would have been in the clear if we had just given more tax cuts to the mega-rich.
“I think we all matured maybe a little bit,” said Chantal Guerrero, now a 17-year-old senior at Sarasota Military Academy. “… But since we were only 7, I’m not sure what kind of impact it had, because we didn’t know how things were before.”
Florida Students With Bush On 9/11 Saw Change Sweep Over Him
FACT: Obama has cut taxes more than George W. Bush.
“Typical Republican Voter” Captured and Quarantined by Bill Maher
Yep, sums up the entire Republican Party and its voters perfectly.
Oblivious to reality!!
Eight False Things The Public “Knows” Prior To Election Day
VIA OurFuture.org
Here are eight of the biggest myths that are out there:
1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.3) President Obama bailed out the banks.
Reality: While many people conflate the “stimulus” with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be “non-reviewable by any court or any agency.”) The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.4) The stimulus didn’t work.
Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.
Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.
Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is “going broke,” people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.
Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.
Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on “welfare” and “foreign aid” when that is only a small part of the government’s budget.
(via silas216)
Source: leftish
WikiLeaks: U.S. troops Handcuffed Children and Shot Them in the Head
According to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, U.S. troops willfully massacred an Iraqi family in the town of Ishaqi in 2006, handcuffing and then shooting 11 people in the head including a woman in her 70′s and five children ages five and under.
McClatchy is reporting that the soldiers then called in an air strike on the house to cover up evidence of the killings.
This account differs sharply from an official version of the 2006 incident, which indicated that coalition forces captured an al Qaeda in Iraq operative in the house, which was destroyed in a firefight. The WikiLeaks cable, however, corroborates accounts by Ishaqi townspeople and includes questions about the incident by Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
The cable is dated twelve days after the incident, which took place March 15, 2006. In it, Alston says that autopsies performed in Tikrit on bodies pulled from the wreckage of the farmhouse indicated that all of the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.
If true, this action, although not as egregious as the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, wherein 347-504 unarmed civilians were shot to death by U.S. forces during the Vietnam conflict, still speaks volumes about war and the atrocities committed for war’s sake.
Read the original article (Warning: Graphic Images)
I guess war crimes and crimes against humanity, cease to be of importance when you’re the USA (and when Obama’s got your back, ensuring your immunity).
Nearly any other developed country in the world - Bush (and Blair) would be at the International Criminal Court right now.
But hey, I guess ‘democracy’ has it’s perks.
This and many more human rights violations by USA.
Source: anticapitalist
Activate the Mechanism!: Andrew Sullivan - I'm tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him...
Bruce Bartlett tallies it. The damage this single president did to the core of the country’s fiscal health - and our ability to weather a storm like 2007 - 2009 - is hard to find parallels with. Money quote:
Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of…
Christian apologetic/existentialist/progressive/interdenominationalist/freethinker/some agnosticism, library assistant, liberal blogger, Unite Blue member, DJ, respectful 2 all!
