I Am So Proud of Our President

For over 3 1/2 years, by all measures our president has had to deal with the worst economic environment since FDR, the most obstructionist opposition, and keep us safe from terrorists all while weathering attacks from the RW hate machine that has no parallel in modern times to any other extreme fringe political group.

He has handled it all with grace and dignity and even been able to joke about it from time to time. If there ever was a president that deserved 4 more years, it is our president. While no political figure has ever had my complete support and loyalty, Obama has come closer than anyone in my adult life to earning my respect and support.

If you disagree with my assessment, go ahead and tell me why you think another candidate for president deserves your loyalty and support. I’m really not interested in your assessment of my opinion of our president. If you can’t support your candidate and can only run down the other guy, you’re not worth listening to anyway.

 

But the other guy is so worthy of being mocked. His business past is basically about draining money from other businesses and laughing about it later when they collapsed. His religion may be an off-shoot of the most popular religion in America, but it's not exactly welcomed by that majority...and it's creator and creation back in the day is absolutely worthy of mocking and ridicule.

Obama, on the other hand, is part of that religious majority...and he isn't interested in becoming rich by blanking other people over for their money.

I'll take Obama's morals over Romney's, any day. To me morals are the most important aspect of a President.

 

If you could peel yourself away from moen's MSNBC-inspired garbage you would know that the examples the BO campaign was trying to use against Romney actually occured after Romney was no longer with the company (he didn't tell you that, did he?). Cory Booker knew it that's why he spoke out against BO's tactics.
You also know BO is taking a ton of campaign cash from Bain, right?
So, what was that about morals, again?
Did you know Bain, under Romney's leadership, is responsible for the success of Seely, Staples & Domino's (among others)?

 

Riiiiiight! Because Romney left Bain before the the company went bankrupt, a bankruptcy he set in motion, it doesn't count? Right? Well, let's see the facts of the case:

The steel company declared bankruptcy in 2001

Romney took a leave of absence from Bain Capital in February 1999 to serve as the President and CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee.



GST Steel: a “Profitable Failure” where “Every promise they made was broken.”

Romney and Bain made millions from a steel plant that went bankrupt after Bain dramatically increased the company’s debt. Workers lost their jobs and promised health and retirement benefits. Because Bain underfunded the company’s pension fund, a federal agency was needed for a $44 million bail out.

In 1993, Romney’s Bain Capital purchased a steel company and renamed it GS Technologies. To gain control of the company, Bain put up $8 million and quickly had the company take on new debt in order to distribute dividends back to Bain and cover new expenses – helping Bain earn back part of its initial investment.

In 1995, Romney’s Bain had GS acquire another firm, adding over a hundred million in new debt. By then, Bain had forced the company to hold $378 million in debt, which was ten times the annual income of the company and “the company was not on a sustainable course.”

At the same time, Romney’s firm was ordering changes that undermined safety and productivity at the company and installing people who knew little about the steel industry. A worker remarked, “When Romney and Bain came in, it was painfully obvious that they didn’t have a clue about anything to do with a steel mill.”

From 1997 to 1999, losses at the company increased by 300% and it was clear the company could not survive.

By the time the company legally filed for bankruptcy, Romney and his firm had made at least $9 million in profit. Former company officials said the mill, which had been operating since 1888, could have dealt better with market fluctuations if Bain had not forced the company to take on unsustainable debt. A finance professor remarked that using debt to pay large dividends to Bain left the company less prepared for a downturn.

Because Romney’s firm had forced the company to take on hundreds of millions in debt to pay themselves and finance acquisitions, ultimately leading it towards bankruptcy, “GS said it was shedding the guarantees it had promised its workers in the event of a plant closure - the severance pay, health insurance, life insurance and pension supplements that had been negotiated during the 1997 strike.”

Additionally, “records show that the mill's Bain-backed management was confronted several times about the fund's shortfall, which, in the end, required an infusion of funds from the federal Pension Benefits Guarantee Corp.” A federal government agency had to spend $44 million to bail out the pension plan that had been underfunded by Bain.

Reuters called GS one of Bain’s “profitable failures” and a former worker who saw the demise of the plant firsthand said, “Every promise they made was broken. Every promise. Except the fact that they did make a lot of money off of it. They kept that one.”

 

I just love to say "Our President" because it drives the RW'ers nuts.

 

Solyndra, Fast and Furious, Corzine, Black Panthers, Wright, Ayers, Catholics, Black Panthers (again), etc., et al, and on and on. If Obama has any morals, the only ones to see them work for or take as gospel NBC and their lies.

 

Funny that the Right-wing hate machine thinks that their silly narrative-based criticisms have anything to do with reality. Every time they bring up one of these manufactured issues and complain that the major news organizations won't cover them because they are obviously in Obama's pocket, I get a good laugh. Hey, you forgot to mention Obama’s fake birth certificate. Or him being a secret Muslim. Or his famous health care death panels. Or any number of other hair-brained Right-wing conspiracy theories.

Keep manufacturing these non-issues. I need the entertainment.

I did notice that you guys have nothing nice to say about your newly minted nominee. Of course I could have guessed that but you could at least manufacture something for the poor sod!

 

Bain behaves like a parasite. It attaches itself to a company, drains it's resources for Bain's benefit, then leaves when the "host" is about to die.

Do we really want a parasite like Romney sucking off America's resources so he and his buddies can reap the benefits? Didn't we allow enough of that with Jr.? Will enough people ever learn?

I'm guessing that yeah, people are tired of these parasites, and that we'll see in November if I'm right or not.

 

LOL
Speechless. Are both of you getting morning emails from Axlerod and Wasserman Shultz? This has become a comedy

 

Again, no support for anyone on the other side just criticism of your political foes. How telling.

 

And pathetic.

 

This is the Obama hate crowd after all. Hard to ever change their spots and all.

 

You have to know the spots are there before you can change 'em...and that's one of the hardest things for anyone to do. That said, Obama is indeed our President... ...and I wouldn't want it any other way.

 

To be honest, I can't even come up with a rationalization of 'lesser of 2 evils' in this election. And no matter who wins, they and we are screwed. Our problems have become too big to fix themselves and our politicians have become too small to fix them willingly.

Regardless of the outcome, I predict that shortly after the election, the term 'Austerity' will make its way into the US political conversation. $15.7 Trillion and climbing....and that doesn't include you state and local debt.

 

I understand where you are coming from, Stu... with the exception that I do support Obama, of course.

My pov is that the troubles are mostly the result of the two parties failing to cooperate in any meaningful manner. The "give and take", the compromise, just isn't there... the sides are too determined to have it their way, or no way at all.

As for the debt...I've been researching various economist's views and from what I can tell, quite a few of them suggest that our debt is a good thing. Mind you, I differ with all of them on the idea of inflation being a good thing too...so in that respect I'm radical...but to believe debt is a good thing? Really? In their defense, they approach the subject from a business standpoint, whereas I approach it from an amateur's pov.

 

That has got to be the whackiest propaganda you've posted from the far left. I will say this: if tens of trillions of dollars in debt is good, BO is working on being great....I suppose if enough fools are convinced our massive debt is good BO will be a shoo in for re-election.

 

Just to clarify, via The Economist (December 31st, 2011):

http://www.economist.com/node/21542174

 

David this is what IQ said and not what you posted

"As for the debt...I've been researching various economist's views and from what I can tell, quite a few of them suggest that our debt is a good thing. Mind you, I differ with all of them on the idea of inflation being a good thing too...so in that respect I'm radical...but to believe debt is a good thing? ​

​

Really?"​

I do not know why you thought it would be a good idea to distort what he said?​

Would you like to tell us why ?​

 

It's called doing a "Breitbart" You take something out of context make it seem like it means something else and then beat your political enemies with a lie.

Alternative names are O'Keefeing and Roved. The truth is the the real casualty.

 

It's very difficult to have any respect for a president who promised so much, but delivered so little:

May’s Jobs Report Disappoints Across the Board

Well, this is a bad employment report — across the board. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy created just 69,000 jobs in May -- the fewest in a year -- and the unemployment rate crept up to 8.2 percent.

As is always the case in an election year, voters have their eyes firm on the trend of that headline unemployment number. In the accompanying video, my Daily Ticker colleagues Aaron Task and Henry Blodget talk to Politico's Morning Money columnist and Wall Street reporter Ben White about the political implications of this grim payroll number.

After a decent start to the year, President Obama "cannot make the case clearly, at least at this point, that the economy is recovering strongly under his leadership and it opens the door wide for Mitt Romney to say, 'I've got a set of policies that could create faster job creation,'" says White who thinks it is going to be a "razor tight" election. "If [the unemployment number] stays where we are now, sort of bouncing around 100,000 or if we go back above, I think it is still a 50-50 race."

In a recent column, White does however note that the economies in most of the swing states are performing better than the national average (with the exception of Florida). But May's rise in the unemployment rate to 8.2% muddles this story and won't help Obama come election day, he says.

Without further ado, here are a few takeaways from the May report:

Spring Slowdown. Once again, the jobs figures testify to a slowing of growth in the spring. But the gloomy data extend beyond the headline payroll jobs figure. The economy is growing and demand continues to rise. But that's not translating into more work or significantly higher wages. The average workweek for private sector sectors fell in May by .1 hours — i.e., six minutes. Manufacturing, which has been a pocket of strength, showed signs of weakness. The manufacturing workweek fell .3 hours to 40.5, and factory overtime fell sharply. Hourly earnings crept up a smidgen in May, and over the past year have risen just 1.7 percent.

Labor Force Rises. There's an odd wrinkle here. The unemployment rate is derived from the household survey, in which BLS calls people and asks them about their employment status. The rate is calculated by dividing the number of people estimated to be unemployed into the size of the labor force. When the labor force shrinks, the unemployment rate can fall even if the number of people who say they're working doesn't rise. But that's not what happened this month. In May, according to the BLS, the labor force actually grew by 635,000 — which means a lot of people who had been sitting on the sidelines jumped back in. The number of people employed, according to the Household survey, rose by 422,000 in the month.

The Conservative Recovery Continues. Europe isn't the only area where austerity and reduced government spending are impacting employment. Virtually every month for the past few years, the private sector has added jobs while the public sector (local, state and federal government) has cut jobs. That continued in May. The private sector added 82,000 payroll jobs in May while government cut 13,000 positions. Since February 2010, the private sector has added 4.27 million jobs, while the public sector has cut 1.028 million jobs since May 2010.

The Trend Isn't Your Friend. There was another way in which the May report reversed recent trends. Every month, when it reports the figures, BLS goes back and revises the figures it had reported for the prior two months. For much of this recovery, the trend has been for BLS to discover jobs that hadn't been originally reported and revise the prior months' totals higher. But not this month. In May, BLS revised the gains for the two previous months lower. March's figure, originally reported as a 120,000 gain, had been revised upward to 154,000 in April, was revised back down to 143,000. The April figure, originally reported as a gain of 115,000, was revised to a gain of only 77,000.

Labor Market Frustration Rising. Despite the general trend of more job openings and declining first-time unemployment claims, this report shows that the jobs market softened in May. In addition to reporting the headline unemployment rate, BLS publishes alternative measures of labor force frustration — e.g., rates that include workers who have given up, or who are working part-time but would prefer to work full-time. BLS compiles all such measures in the U-6. After falling for much of the past year, it rose in May — to 14.8 percent.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/may-jobs-report-disappoints-across-board-132202740.html