It’s going to be a long four years

Is it just me or are others also tired of seeing Barack Obama and hearing his teleprompter? It seems Obama makes a TV appearance almost every day in person or on the TV news reels. Watching him is difficult to avoid if you want to keep up with news, even on Fox and other cable channels. Obama is still revered by the press and most talking heads despite his incredible record of lies and misleading comments. For sure any Republican in office or not would be reamed for any of the things the teleprompter makes Obama say. Surely a Republican President saying even some of the Obamarisms would be pilloried and hounded out of office by the press after convincing the public of the Republican’s incompetence.

The above are not idle, unsubstantiated accusations, as the following examples will show.

1. "Obama criticized pork barrel spending in the form of 'earmarks,' urging changes in the way that Congress adopts spending proposals. Then he signed a spending bill that contains nearly 9,000 earmarks, some that members of his own staff added in last year when they were still members of Congress. 'Let there be no doubt, this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability,' Obama said." -- McClatchy, March 11, 2009. This year's budget deficit: $1.5 trillion.

2. Obama says Federal Departments must cut costs in their departments by $170 million -- a whopping .0027%, in a budget of over $3 trillion.

3. "The White House says the president is unaware of the tea parties." -- ABC News, April 15, 2009.

4. First the 2010 census was sought to be moved out of the Department of Commerce and into the White House. Politicizing the census affects how federal aid is distributed and electoral districts are drawn. ACORN – the disreputable community organizing arm of the Democrat Party – will be participating in the census. What do you suppose ACORN will do with the census?

5. Obama selected Nancy Killefer for the new administration job, First Chief Performance Officer -- to police government spending. But Killefer is discovered to have had a tax lien on her DC home in 2005 for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help. She was another Obama appointee who had to withdraw for tax problems.

6. Obama said if the 790 billion stimulus bill was not passed immediately, the country would suffer a catastrophe - then "President Obama promptly took off for a three-day holiday getaway” (before signing the bill into law). -- New York Post, February 15, 2009.

7. Obama had a chance to reduce unemployment but then eliminated a "buy American" provision in the stimulus bill.

8. Obama released the torture memos thereby making American citizens at risk to prosecution by international tribunals. A UN lawyer said the US is obliged to prosecute lawyers who drafted the memos or else it violates the Geneva Conventions.

9. After dissing our best friend, England, by returning a gift to the United States of a bust of Winston Churchill, Obama followed up by giving British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a carved ornamental penholder from the timbers of the anti-slavery ship HMS Gannet. Obama also gave the British Prime Minister 25 DVDs that don't work in Europe. Not to make Brown the only disrespected British leader, he gave the Queen of England an iPod full of his own speeches.

10. Obama demonstrated his thoroughness in vetting political appointees by tapping quite a few with tax problems. Everyone is familiar with Tom Daschle’s appointment as our country’s health czar and discovery of his extensive tax cheating that caused his withdrawal, but he is only one of many.

I believe the most egregious was appointing Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary; an appointment that would put him in charge of the IRS. It didn’t deem to matter to Obama and the Democrat-dominated Senate that Geithner had failed to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes and that he also employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. He was confirmed anyway.

Here are a couple of other lesser known inappropriate appointments:

Annette Nazareth was nominated for Deputy Treasury Secretary. She withdrew her name for undisclosed "personal reasons" after a month long probe into her taxes.

Obama appointed Louis Susman, who is one of Obama’s biggest fundraisers, as the new US Ambassador Great Britain. Susman is a lawyer and banker from the president's hometown of Chicago and not an experienced diplomat; another slap in the face to our English friends. Telegraph, February 22, 2009.

Candidates for ambassador to the Vatican -- including Caroline Kennedy -- were turned down by the Holy See because they supported abortion.

11. The teleprompter said in an attempt to show what Obama is doing to cut taxes, "We have begun to modernize 75% of all federal building space, which has the potential to reduce long-term energy costs by billions of dollars on behalf of taxpayers. We are providing grants to states to help weatherize hundreds of thousands of homes, which will save the families that benefit about $350 each year. That's like a $350 tax cut." – Only problem this has nothing to do with cutting taxes but it sounds good to an audience mesmerized by Obama and doesn’t actual hear what he says. [Is this the tax reduction for 95% of Americans Obama promised in his campaign?]

12. Obama wrote a letter to Russia’s President Dmitri Medvedev, and offered to drop plans for a missile shield in Europe in exchange for Russia's help in resolving the nuclear weapons issue in Iran. Medvedev embarrassed Obama (again) when he said he would not "haggle" on Iran and the missile shield.

13. Obama was one of the vigorous opponents of President Bush’s Iraq policies and the Iraq war but he changed horses in the middle of the stream and asked Congress for an extra $83.4 billion to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a special funding measure of the kind he opposed while in the senate. As a candidate, Obama promised to cut the cost of military operations.

14. Obama bows to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at a G-20 meeting in London but his staff later says "It wasn't a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he's taller than King Abdullah."; but Queen Elizabeth is even shorter than the Saudi King and she didn’t merit a similar response when Obama shook her hand (furthermore the “bow” was quite explicit on the video tape).

15. After saying he wouldn't have lobbyists in his administration, Obama made 17 exceptions in the first two weeks in office.

16. Before Obama would speak at Georgetown University April 14th, the administration asked the university to cover up all signs and symbols -- including the letters "IHS" in gold, a symbol for Jesus.

17. Showing his belief in the super power of the federal government over free enterprise, Obama fired Rick Wagoner as president of GM, threatened to fire Vikram Pandit as CEO of Citigroup and anyone the administration doesn't like from any company.

18. On Earth Day Obama took two flights on Air Force One and four on Marine One to get to Iowa, burning more than 9,000 gallons of fuel (and he says he is concerned about the environment).

19. Obama floated a plan to tax injured military personnel for cost of treatment of their wounds. "President Obama's plan to require private insurance carriers to reimburse the Department of Veterans Affairs for the treatment of troops injured in service has infuriated veterans groups who say the government is morally obligated to pay for service-related medical care." -- Fox News, March 17, 2009.

20. Obama failed to consult Congress, as he had promised, before carving out exceptions to the omnibus spending bill he signed into law – “breaking his own signing-statement rules two days after issuing them -- and raised questions among lawmakers and committees who say the president's objections are unclear at best and a power grab at worst." - Washington Times, March 24, 2009.

21. In March, Barack Obama sent his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and spokesman Robert Gibbs, out to attack a non-politician -- Rush Limbaugh (but Obama came out the loser in this episode).

22. Forced banks that didn't want TARP money to take it, then added on stipulations about pay and government control after the fact. After Obama’s Treasury Secretary secretly forced Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch, he criticized the bank for overpaying.

23. "In America, there is a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." -- Obama in Strasbourg, France

24. In the third sentence of his first speech as president, Obama said, "44 Americans have now taken the presidential oath." The correct number is 43, as Grover Cleveland served twice. (Don’t forget his reference to “all fifty seven states” during the campaign.)

25. After saying "The United States government has no interest in running GM. Your [GM] warranty will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been, because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warranty," GM is given $15.4 billion in loans from the government and turns over a major portion of the company to the United Auto Workers union.

26. Did you know the Obama Administration is trying to shut down a lawsuit filed in federal court against Iran by former US embassy hostages? The lawsuit alleges that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage-takers who interrogated the captives.

27. Ten days before his inauguration, the President's chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Rohmer, released a report describing what to expect economically during the first 100 days and beyond. It presented two starkly different scenarios: one good (if the stimulus were to be passed), and one terrifyingly bad (if we did nothing). Amazingly, the report estimated that if the stimulus package were to pass, the unemployment rate would not go above 8% at any time until at least 2014.

Unemployment is already almost 9%.

28. "Don't think we're not keeping score, brother." -- Obama to Representative Peter DeFazio, after the Democratic congressman voted against the stimulus bill.

29. Who can forget the photo op to take a picture of Air Force 1 in a flyover that scared the pajeeses out of New Yorkers still shaking from 9/11? Nothing is too lame for the Narcissist President if he thinks it will enhance his image.

30. Contending that Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal is not a tax increase is just a plain lie.

It’s going to be a long four years.