Trump's Big CON: "The Most Corrupt Administration in Recent History"

"To put it simply, the Obama administration may have been the least corrupt administration in recent history, despite eight years of Republican screeching about a series of non-scandals. In reaction, those same Republicans gave us what is already without doubt the most corrupt administration in recent history. . .

The charges Republicans made [about the IRS] were utterly bogus.

And here’s the broader context: The same was true of pretty much everything that Republicans tried to turn into a scandal during the Obama presidency. Every time a story would emerge of bureaucratic bumbling or questionable behavior — which happens in every presidency — they would cry, 'Now we’ve got him! This shows the rot at the heart of the administration!' They would unleash a thousand subpoenas and hearings and fist-shaking speeches, and the result would be … nothing.

Or at least not much of anything: no sinister orders from the White House, no criminal malfeasance, no far-reaching conspiracy. Solyndra was a government loan to encourage a nascent industry that didn’t pan out (in contrast to the many such loans that did). 'Fast and Furious' was a mid-level screw-up that started in the George W. Bush administration. And Benghazi — in response to which Republicans mounted no fewer than eight separate congressional investigations — was a tragedy in which four people died, not a scandal. Now that Hillary Clinton is no longer a political threat, Republicans have ceased pretending they ever cared about Benghazi at all (there’s a trial going on right now in federal court of a man accused of orchestrating the attack; you probably haven’t heard about it).

In fact, not only was there a notable dearth of small scandals during the Obama years; he was the first president in decades to go through two full terms without a major scandal. Bush had the Iraq War lies, Clinton had Monica Lewinsky, Reagan had Iran-Contra, Nixon had Watergate — all scandals in which the president himself was directly implicated in wrongdoing. Nothing of the sort touched Barack Obama.

And it was not for lack of Republicans trying. For six of his eight years, they had subpoena power and the firm conviction that if they just looked hard enough they’d expose to everyone what a fraud he was — a foreigner, a criminal, the leader of a malevolent scheme to destroy America from within. And they couldn’t do it.

So they rallied around Donald Trump, a figure of uncommon corruption even before he ran for president. Someone who continually lied about his real estate holdings, who ran pyramid schemes and other blatant scams on unsuspecting marks (he eventually had to pay $25 million to the victims of Trump University), who had decades of connections to both Russian and American mobsters, who engineered business bankruptcies that left his creditors holding the bag while he slithered away unharmed, who had a habit of stiffing contractors, who ran a skeevy modeling agency full of exploited foreign models, who had been fined for allegedly violating anti-trust laws, who had a history of employing and underpaying undocumented workers. This was their champion, by almost any measure the most corrupt individual ever elected to the White House.

So was anyone surprised that once he took office, Trump monetized the presidency, refused to give up his holdings, hid his tax returns, hired his family members and fostered an atmosphere in which half his appointees seem to think it’s no problem to use taxpayer money to charter luxurious private planes for their travel? Of course not. No one is surprised.

So the next time a Democratic president is elected and Republicans once again start braying about how corrupt he or she is and how there are shocking scandals waiting to be discovered if only we turn over enough rocks, let’s not forget this history."

Read the Washington Post, What the bogus IRS ‘scandal’ tells us about Republican corruption.

Trump's Big CON: After an Isolated and Pampered Life, He is Clueless (and As We Are Learning a 'Bigly' Liar)

UPDATE:  "Donald Trump believed he could convince China to pressure North Korea to stop its nuclear activities. Then President Xi Jinping tutored him on the history of the region.

'After listening for 10 minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,' Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, recounting the session at Mar-a-Lago. 'You know, I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.'

This comment is funny because, in 2011, Trump claimed that he has read “hundreds of books about China over the decades,” including works by Henry Kissinger, American journalists and Chinese novelists. Looking to do more business with Beijing, he provided a list of 20 books about China to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, that he said had helped him understand the country, its politics and its people. 'I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind,' Trump said six years ago. His list had some surprising titles on it, including 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.'

Color me skeptical that Trump has read anything by Amy Chua."

Read the Washington Post, Trump doesn’t know much about history. It’s making his on-the-job training harder.

Just another example that "Trump tells the truth only when he cannot think of a lie."

"To Trump, the world is 'a mess,' as he said during a White House news conference this week with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. . .

'It’s crazy what’s going on,' Trump said. 'Whether it’s the Middle East or you look at — no matter where — Ukraine — whatever you look at, it’s got problems, so many problems.'

'Right now,' he concluded, 'it’s nasty.'

What a time to be alive.

To ordinary Americans, the gulf between the worldviews of the United States’ two most recent leaders could not be more vast.

But historians and foreign affairs analysts said that, despite their apparent contradictions, both things can be true. The world is always a mess. Bad things happen. There are crises. People die.

The question, they said, is how a president responds to the mess and how he frames the threat and the response to the public — a challenge made more difficult in an age of immediate and nonstop news from across the world.

'President Obama constantly reminded us that our own times are not uniquely oppressive,' said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and author at Rice University. 'There’s a feeling due to the 24-7 news cycle that everything is a crisis mode, when the fact of the matter is, Americans have it better now than ever before.'

Throughout his campaign, Trump railed about the dangers and threats to Americans: inside the country in the form of undocumented immigrants and violent inner cities, and abroad in the form of Islamic State terrorists, swarms of refugees and rapacious U.S. trading partners.

Time and again, Obama sought to counter Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric by putting the purported threats in broader context and cautioning Americans not to succumb to fear or anger. . .

A war here, an environmental disaster there, and suddenly 'everybody is shouting and everybody hates each other,' Obama said. 'And you get kind of depressed. You think, ‘Goodness, what’s happening?’?'

But, Obama emphasized, 'if you had a choice of when to be born and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, whether you were male or female, what religion — but you had said, ‘When in human history would be the best time to be born?’ — the time would be now.'"

Read the Washington Post, Obama said there was never a better time to be alive. Trump thinks a ‘nasty’ world offers nothing but problems.

Trump's Make America Hate Again!

UPDATE III:  Read these Washington Post articles:

Video shows Pennsylvania teenagers celebrating, shouting ‘white power’ after Trump win, 

This Indiana church was defaced with ‘HEIL TRUMP’ graffiti — and is keeping it,

White Texas teens chant ‘build that wall’ at Hispanics during high school volleyball match,

‘I voted for Trump! You lost!’: White Starbucks customer accuses barista of ‘discrimination’,

A hiker wore a bandanna for sun protection. Then she found an anti-Muslim note on her car., and

Alabama officer fired over racist meme calling Michelle Obama ‘fluent in ghetto’.

UPDATE II:  "Trump has vowed to ban Muslims from entering the country and to force deportation of Mexicans. He has ridiculed the disabled. He has accepted without criticism the enthusiastic support of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups that were previously on the fringes of society. He has invoked standard anti-Semitic tropes in his political advertising. And he has made clear that he believes grabbing and groping women is appropriate behavior."

Read the Washington Post, ‘Political correctness’ has become a codeword for hate. 

UPDATE: Read the Washington Post, Japanese American internment is ‘precedent’ for national Muslim registry, prominent Trump backer says and A Tenn. jail official called the KKK ‘more American’ than Obama. Now he’s out of a job.

Read these Washington Post articles:


Is Trump’s new chief strategist a racist? Critics say so.,

A Baylor student was shoved and called the n-word. This is how the school responded.,

Police officer who drove with Confederate flag at ‘Love Trumps Hate’ rally resigns,

Restaurant denies free Veterans Day meal to black veteran after man in Trump shirt accuses him of lying,

A man in KKK robes waved a Trump flag at a bonfire in Connecticut, police say,

‘Ape in heels’: W.Va. mayor resigns amid controversy over racist comments about Michelle Obama,

‘Why white women shouldn’t date black men’ fliers discovered at Southern Methodist University.

Obama the Socialist Failure, More Proof

UPDATE:  I figured it out. First he tried to destroy America with high gas prices Republi-cons claimed would soon be $5-10, even $15/gallon.

Now he's trying to destroy America with low oil prices.  "Forget $2 gas. Gas is getting close to the $1 mark in some parts of the country. "

Read CNN, Gas is near $1 a gallon in some places.

He's a sneaky you-know-what (use your favorite term to describe Obama).

Another representation of Obama's failure to fulfill Republi-con delusions, on December 11, 2015:

Read also:

Obama the Socialist Failure: Lower Unemployment, Deficits, Gas Prices and Inflation (What More Could He Do To Destroy America) and

Obama's Failure to Fulfill Republi-CON Predictions.

Who's Your White Daddy?

UPDATE:  Michael Reese Coffman, 57, was no sweet, young, innocent choir boy.

From Escambia County, LA (OK, legally it's FL, but practically it's Lower Alabama, believe me, I know).

2001 CF 004158 A

2001 CF 004159 A

2004 MM 020380 A

2004 CF 001442 A

If the links don't work, check the clerk's website here, and if you find no records, somebody important, with something to hide, read this post before you.

I'll check Santa Rosa County, LA (you know what I mean) later. 

"Michael Reese Coffman, 57, of Milton was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 after being convicted of conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of a mixture and substance containing methamphetamine."

Obama recently granted him 'early release.'

Read the Pensacola News Journal, Obama grants 2 local men early release.

Guess who Coffman's daddy is/was?

Hint: see Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office, SRSO History.

Some in the local community think the early release was granted for a reason other than merit.

What do you think?

The Many, Many Republi-CON 'Benghazi' Myths and LIES

UPDATE V:  "The Republican candidate’s claims about Hillary Clinton and Benghazi fall apart under scrutiny."

Read Slate, Rubio Is Lying About Hillary Lying.

UPDATE IV:  After years of investigations, and an eleven hour hearing, "the truth about Benghazi: Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong. And Republicans can’t stand it."

Read Slate, The Benghazi Hearings Sham.

UPDATE III: "If there were some truly damning piece of information that the committee had discovered about Clinton in the course of their investigation, then all the public relations and spin in the world wouldn’t save her from their efforts. For instance, for some time Republicans have been obsessed with a conspiracy theory which has it that Clinton issued a 'stand down' order to the military, telling them not to go save the Americans who were in danger in Benghazi. Had that been something other than a bizarre fantasy of the most fevered quarters of the right, Benghazi would have been her undoing.

But that turned out to be fiction, and all the other efforts to find some shocking malfeasance on her part failed. Why did it have such a profound effect when Kevin McCarthy justified the Benghazi committee’s work by saying it had brought down Clinton’s poll numbers? Not because he provided some theretofore unknown piece of information, or because everyone was shocked at the very idea that the committee was political. It had an impact because it supplied a vivid illustration of a fundamental truth. That meant reporters could repeat it, refer to it, and use it to frame their subsequent discussion of the issue.

Read the Washington Post, Why the Clinton Benghazi testimony isn’t accomplishing what Republicans hoped, which notes at the end:

"[O]ver the long run, the facts can’t be escaped."

UPDATE II:  "So now we know: One of the principal reasons Republicans spent so much public money investigating the tragic Benghazi episode was to bring down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the likely successor to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), told Fox News’s Sean Hannity explicitly on Tuesday night that the Clinton investigation was part of a 'strategy to fight and win.' . .

McCarthy’s statement gave Democrats what they have long sought: a rather strong public hint that this investigation was never on the level. 'This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public,' said Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat. 'The core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.' Clinton’s defenders hope McCarthy’s statement might prod the media to pay attention to the current behavior of the accusers and not just the past behavior of the accused."

Read the Washington Post, Kevin McCarthy’s truthful gaffe on Benghazi.  

UPDATE:  Read also, the Wall Street Journal, House Report Finds No Attempt to Mislead Public Over Benghazi (subscription required).

"A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Debunking a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria. . .

The House Intelligence Committee report was released with little fanfare on the Friday before Thanksgiving week. Many of its findings echo those of six previous investigations by various congressional committees and a State Department panel."

Read AP, House intel panel debunks many Benghazi theories.

The article quotes Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the committee's chairman, and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat, in a joint statement saying that the committee "spent thousands of hours asking questions, poring over documents, reviewing intelligence assessments, reading cables and emails, and held a total of 20 committee events and hearings."

Slavery, America's Original Sin

"[A]lthough 'The Civil War' may have ended with a surrender, the issues over which the war was fought are far from settled.

'I think in some ways, the subsequent films have convinced me only more certainly of our thing about the war, that it was the central event. Race is one of the things of American culture. I’ve taken a lot of criticism for saying that,' [documentarian Ken] Burns told me when we met in a New York editing studio in May. 'So, doing ‘Jackie Robinson,’ has echoes with Ferguson. Doing ‘Central Park Five’ has echoes back to Emmett Till and some of the realities of slavery. All of the way the Ferguson municipality behaved to its own citizens, its majority citizens, is not dissimilar to the way Jim Crow sharecroppers experienced the pernicious substitute for slavery: ‘Well, if we can’t own you, we have to pay you something, it won’t be very much, but we’re going to own every other aspect of you. And by the way now, since you’re no longer my property, I can kill you with impunity, because you’re not valuable to me.’ … And while there was no law that protected African Americans in slavery, and there were supposedly laws that protected them afterwards, they weren’t applied, and in many cases as we learn with chilling regularity, still aren’t applied.' . .

Burns doesn’t have much patience for narratives about the Civil War that suggest that its causes were anything other than race, pointing squarely at the South Carolina articles of secession: 'Is there the words ‘states’ rights’ in their articles of secession? No. Is the word ‘slavery’ there? Yes. Many times.'

'People say, ‘Oh, it’s about states’ rights.’ ‘It’s about agricultural economics.’ ‘It’s about political differences.’ ‘It’s about social differences,'' he said, running through the list of justifications. 'Yeah, the social differences based on a society that keeps people free or doesn’t pay their laborers. That pays for work or doesn’t pay for work. Right? That creates huge, different societal differences. And certainly it’s political, because as the equilibrium of power that the South had dominated in the presidency and in Congress is being challenged by new states that are increasingly less interested in slavery, they’re interested in taking their ball and going home. That’s the political reality. And the economic stuff? Yeah, they’re afraid that someone’s going to pass a law that’s going to deny them their single greatest wealth, which is the ownership of 4 million other human beings, in 1861 … Slavery is why the Civil War happened. And slavery is still this original sin that Americans have to figure out, somehow, how to transcend and overcome.”

And he’s sharply aware of the way these kinds of obfuscations persist in contemporary political discourse.

'So if the president wasn’t born in the United States, that’s another way of saying the n-word. If he’s Muslim, that’s another way of saying the n-word. All of these things are code, new racial code, for words that now have, at least in public, lost their respectability,' Burns continued, marveling at the way the end of the Civil War only forced white supremacist language and practices to mutate to fit their new circumstances.

Read the Washington Post, From slavery to Ferguson, Ken Burns sees an unfinished Civil War. 

Obama the Moderate and Republi-CON Extremism

UPDATE IV:  "One of the administration’s closest allies was Clarence Thomas."

Read Slate, Is the Supreme Court More Liberal Than Obama?  

UPDATE III:  "Obama has governed as a moderate conservative—essentially as what used to be called a liberal Republican before all such people disappeared from the GOP. He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal, something no conservative would deny today. (Ultra-leftist Noam Chomsky recently called Nixon 'the last liberal president.')

Here’s the proof: . .

Cornell West nailed it when he recently charged that Obama has never been a real progressive in the first place. 'He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,' West said. 'We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency.'

I don’t expect any conservatives to recognize the truth of Obama’s fundamental conservatism for at least a couple of decades—perhaps only after a real progressive presidency. In any case, today they are too invested in painting him as the devil incarnate in order to frighten grassroots Republicans into voting to keep Obama from confiscating all their guns, throwing them into FEMA re-education camps, and other nonsense that is believed by many Republicans. But just as they eventually came to appreciate Bill Clinton’s core conservatism, Republicans will someday see that Obama was no less conservative."

Read The American Conservative, Obama Is a Republican. 

UPDATE II:  The problem says another political scientist "is radicalism and irresponsible behavior, not ideological extremism." 

Read the Washington Post, 'The Republican Party is severely dysfunctional, not severely conservative'.

UPDATE:  "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. . .

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations. . .

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking. . .

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site."

Read the Washington Post, Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

Remember, stupidity in the case of partisan extremism is no virtue.

"Placing blame equally on Democrats and Republicans for the stalemate over the debt crisis only encourages more bad behavior." Read The New York Times, The Centrist Cop-Out, which notes:

"Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

True, Republicans insist that Mr. Obama is a leftist seeking a government takeover of the economy, but they would, wouldn’t they? The facts, should anyone choose to report them, say otherwise."

And the way to prove it is to call the Republi-CON bluff.

Admit It, It Was a Good Speech

"The president delivers his single most accomplished rhetorical performance, and it’s one you should watch rather than read."

Read the Atlantic, Obama’s Grace. 

In 2016, It's Either Sound Like Obama, or Sound Crazy

"The moment a GOP 2016 contender stops sounding like an uber-hawk on foreign policy, they sound very much like Barack Obama."

Read the Washington Post, The trouble with Jeb Bush not sounding crazy on foreign policy.

No one proves this better than the Donald.

And it's not just true on foreign policy, think healthcare.

Luther For President in 2016

"The White House Correspondents' Dinner has become a strange event. It is, ostensibly, an evening when the president and the press can come together to share a few lighthearted laughs. But it's evolved into a recital of brutal truths — albeit one neither side ever really admits happened.

The joke of President Obama's performance on Saturday was that he wasn't joking. Everyone just had to pretend he was. Take this section, from the official White House transcript:

After the midterm elections, my advisors asked me, "Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?" And I said, "Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.’" (Laughter and applause.)

Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. (Laughter.) New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do. (Laughter and applause.)

The tip-off there is, "It's the right thing to do." That's not a joke. That's Obama's actual justification for the aggressive executive actions of his second term — "fuck it, it's the right thing to do." But the norms of politics are such that he typically has to frame his actions as routine, dull, even necessary. He has to search for precedent and downplay the consequences.

It's only on the evening of the White House Correspondents' Dinner when he can say what everyone already knows: his actions are huge, they are controversial, they push the norms of American politics, but fuck it, at a moment when American politics seems increasingly broken, Obama has decided to just go ahead and do what he thinks is right.

Then there was this line:

A few weeks ago, Dick Cheney says he thinks I’m the worst President of his lifetime. Which is interesting, because I think Dick Cheney is the worst President of my lifetime. (Laughter and applause.) It’s quite a coincidence.

It's funny, sure. But he's not kidding. It's just the thing Obama can't usually say. The humor is in the shock of him actually saying it.

But the place where Obama stopped being polite and started getting real was when he brought out Luther, his personal anger translator. This was, itself, a way of giving up the game. The Luther joke comes from the Comedy Central sketch show Key and Peele, and the point of it is that Obama, as the first black president, is not allowed to express his anger, as America is terrified of angry black men. And so he's got Luther — the angry black man who can say what he can't. . .

There are no jokes there. There's just Obama saying what he has to say and Luther saying what Obama actually believes.

And what Obama believes is that the press is often sensational, trivial, and fearmongering. He thinks they hype negative stories for weeks on end and then refuse to admit their mistake when the horror fizzles. He thinks he gets the blame for catastrophes but little credit for solutions. He thinks the media has a deep bias toward negative stories (which, of course, we do).

But if Obama is annoyed at the press, he is appalled at Republicans who deny climate change — and are trying to block him from taking action to stop climate change. Obama believes global warming a generational threat, and so when he sees James Inhofe, the chair of the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works, throwing snowballs on the chamber's floor, well, his thoughts on that would likely be seen as unpresidential if he gave them voice."

Read Vox, The joke was that Obama wasn’t joking. 

The Republi-CON "Obama Hates America" Myth

UPDATE:  "Conservatives will harrumph to the contrary, but relative to his peers, Obama has had a remarkably clean, scandal-free presidency."

Read Slate, Obama’s Gift to Hillary Clinton.  

"There is simply no question that, in his own telling, Barack Obama believes that the United States is an exceptional, great, splendiferous nation—the world's most powerful force for good. And he will be happy to explain to you, at great and occasionally repetitive length, why he holds that belief, as the video above indicates. (Among his America-themed speeches, some of which we took clips from: Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote in Boston, his March 2008 speech on race relations in Philadelphia, his 2008 nomination-acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, his election night remarks at Chicago's Grant Park in 2008, his inaugural address in 2009, his June 2009 speech in Cairo, his 2012 State of the Union address, his 2012 Democratic National Convention speech in Charlotte, his 2012 election-night speech in Washington D.C., his 2013 inaugural, his September 2013 address to the United Nations, his December 2013 speech on economic mobility in D.C., his 2014 State of the Union, his May 2014 commencement address at West Point, and his post-election press conference in November 2014; click links for transcripts.*)

. . . [N]no one could seriously read or watch Obama's remarks and come away with the overall impression that he is anything but relentlessly positive about the United States."

Read Slate, Watch Barack Obama Talk About How America Is the Greatest Country on Earth in 13 Different Speeches, or watch

More Pandering to Birther Buffoonery

UPDATE III:  He's back for 2016.

Read Slate, Donald Trump Will Save America From Boring Grownup GOP Primary, which notes that Republi-cons hoped "to avoid having such "eccentric" candidates this time around might be cringing at Trump's continued harping on President Obama's birth certificate, but there's not too much they can do to keep him under wraps."

UPDATE II:  Is your local congressman a birther?

It seems our congressman can't decide.  Read the Pensacola News Journal, Rep. Jeff Miller suspends Twitter account over 'birther poll'. 

UPDATE:  Donald Trump has helped Obamney win over the birthers, now all he needs is America's '9/11 truthers, alien abductees, doomsday preppers, Sasquatch hunters, and Sasquatches or Sasqui.'

Watch the Colbert Report, Donald Trump's Creative Truth & Mitt Romney's Poll Numbers:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Of course, some doubters think the Trump is bloviating ignoramus.  

Based upon the Pastor's self professed 10-year law enforcement background and experience, I'm waiting for the arrests that he claims are imminent.

In the meantime, the birthers are proving themselves buffoons again, with their racist lies.

Did you know that in 1990, "an obscure publication known as the New York Times had written about his election as head of the Harvard Law Review, and noted, 'His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.'"  (From the Washington Post, The birthers are back! The birthers are back!)

Yet in Arizona, the Arizona secretary of state, Ken Bennett and former Republican president of the Arizona Senate, who is planning to run for governor in two years, is 'pandering to crackpots — and humiliating himself in the bargain.' 

"Never mind that Hawaii has confirmed publicly and repeatedly, since before the 2008 presidential election, that Mr. Obama was born there; that the Hawaii Department of Health has released both the short and long forms of the president’s birth certificate; and that all this information, along with clear-as-a-bell explanations, is available to the public online. [To birther buffoons] none of that is sufficient proof for the Show Me Your Papers State. . .

Everyone knows that birthers — the few that remain against the overwhelming facts of documentary evidence — are half-baked clowns who live for their pet conspiracy theory. . .

Fine. Let the buffoonery play through its final act. We’re confident that, in the end, Mr. Bennett will ensure that Arizona’s ballot includes the name of the president of the United States, all the while insisting, disingenuously, that his actions were merely an instance of due diligence.

But by threatening to exclude Mr. Obama from the ballot, Mr. Bennett transformed what should have been a farcical sideshow of the 2012 election into an actual menace to democracy. He legitimized the lunatic leanings of the United States’, and his party’s, most extreme elements. He put it in the minds of radicals everywhere that elected officials, for the shabbiest reasons (or none at all), can float the idea of bending ballot rules and suffer no adverse consequence.

In the process, he shamed Arizona on the 100th anniversary of its statehood, giving it the appearance of a banana republic that’s come unhinged under the influence of partisan fever."  (From the Washington Post, In Arizona, more birther buffoonery.)

And while one would think that "[w]henever the “birther” movement rears its head, sensible people argue that the press should just ignore it, since it’s so far out on the lunacy spectrum. . .

Mr. Bennett is not just your ordinary, garden-variety birther. He is co-chairman of the Mitt Romney campaign in Arizona. "  (From The New York Times, The Romney Campaign Joins the Birther Brigade.)

Alas, after embarrassing Arizona once again (you may remember that a "bill requiring presidential candidates to provide proof of citizenship in Arizona was vetoed last year by" the Republican governor), Bennett "received the 'verification in-lieu of certified copy' from officials within the Hawaii Department of Health that we requested in March . They have officially confirmed that the information in the copy of the Certificate of Live Birth for the President matches the original record in their files.'"  (From the Washington Post, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett satisfied Obama was born in United States.)

I can't wait to hear how our Resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators (AKA Pastor Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Poppins)), who plagiarize lies to salvage his malicious fantasy campaign to brand Obama as an outsider, as un-American, as non-American, will explain it all to his sycophants on Friday.

For more on the birthers racists fantasies, see these prior posts:

This Post is For All You Birthers Out There

Republi-Cons Have No Shame, Judge Edition

The Spin of Pastor 2+2 Does Not = 4, AKA Pastor Dred Scott or Pastor Truthiness (Formerly Known as Pastor Poppins)

Don't Be Duped by the Birthers

The Republi-CONs Ugly Political Cynicism

"Questioning this affirmation involves a serious charge — an accusation of the worst sort of cynicism. And it is simply not the role of a Christian layman to publicly dispute the self-identification of other Christians, especially in a political context. It is a practice that can lead down ugly alleys of sectarianism."

Read the Washington Post, Scott Walker and judging the faith of another.

Republi-cons might also read the Constitution they claim to so dearly love. 

Obama the Socialist Failure: Lower Unemployment, Deficits, Gas Prices and Inflation (What More Could He Do To Destroy America)

UPDATE XI:  Another graphic representation of Obama's failure to fulfill Republi-con delusions "about inflation, the dollar, and, well, the whole economy the past few years. . .

It was a weird thing to be worrying about. Inflation was just 1.7 percent when Ryan brought up dollar debasement (in early 2011). It's 1.2 percent now. And, as you can see below, rather than being debased, debauched or otherwise devalued, the dollar is actually up 13 percent against a broad index of currencies over this time. Even if you judge the dollar against a basket of commodities, which you shouldn't, since those prices are set in world markets beyond the Fed's control, there hasn't been anything resembling 'debasement': Brent oil has fallen from $100 to $53 and gold from $1,362 to $1,211."

Read the Washington Post, The inflation chicken littles were so wrong: The dollar is on a tear, which included the following graph:

UPDATE X:  "On March 6, 2009, former George W. Bush adviser Michael Boskin offered whatever the opposite of a prophecy is when he said that 'Obama's Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.' Now let's set the scene. Obama had been in office for less than two months at that point, and in that time, stocks had admittedly fallen a lot as markets worried that the big bank bailout known as TARP wouldn't actually be enough to save the banks. It got so bad that Citigroup briefly became a penny stock.

Boskin, though, didn't think that this once-in-three-generations financial crisis was to blame for the market meltdown. Instead, he blamed it on Obama for ... talking about raising taxes? 'It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street," Boskin philosophized, "as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy.' What followed was the usual conservative jeremiad against higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes on the poor, and deficit spending. Obama's trying to turn us into Europe, and that's why markets are pricing in the possibility of a Great Depression—not the dying economy he inherited."

Read the Washington Post, Now that the Dow has hit 18,000, let us remember the worst op-ed in history, which included the following graph:

UPDATE IX:  After a weekend of price cutting at stations, gas for less than $2 can be found in 13 states across the country. Two weeks ago there was only one gas station in the country selling gas that cheap.

Read CNN, Gas for less than $2 is now widespread.   

UPDATE VIII:   What an unmitigated failure Obama has been trying to destroy the economy and country.

Gas prices continue to tumble. 

Read the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Gas prices could drop to $2 gallon in some parts of country by end of year.

And "[s]even years after the credit bubble burst, just two of the 12 countries that went through systemic financial meltdowns in 2007 and 2008 have reclaimed enough ground to reach their previous peaks in per-capita GDP: the United States and Germany. And Germany isn’t looking so hot these days, given that it’s teetering on the edge of deflation.

Many of the other countries that also went through “systemic crises” — as categorized by the work of Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — still have years to go before fully recovering. The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine will likely wait until 2018 before reaching their pre-crisis peaks in per capita GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund. Even countries that didn’t technically experience a systemic crisis when we did (such as China and Japan) appear to be in serious trouble. As the Economist recently put it, the United States is looking increasingly like a 'lonely locomotive.'"

Read the Washington Post, How the U.S. economy got its mojo back. 

UPDATE VII:   After predictions of $5-10/gallon for gas, prices are below $3/gallon.

"The gas price tracking app GasBuddy reports that 46% of gas stations around the country are now charging less than $3 per gallon, compared with just 3% one year ago."

Read Time, Last Time Gas Prices Were This Cheap, It Was January 2011.

Another Obama failure! ;-)

UPDATE VI:  Still a socialist/communist failure, Obama can't even destroy the economy.

Read the Washington Post,  Rebounding economy fills state coffers with record tax revenues and The New York Times, Tax Revenue Rockets Up, Helping Lessen the Deficit, Treasury Department Says.

UPDATE V:  Republi-con "predictions about the impact of these policies since they first began in late 2008 have been wrong so far.

Inflation has not spiked, and the value of the dollar has not collapsed. At this point, in fact, there are more worries about deflation than inflation.

But thanks to the tea party influence in the GOP — in particular the Fed-bashing Rand and Ron Paul wing of the party — ripping the Fed and the bigger role it is playing in the economy has become more a litmus test for party loyalty, regardless of whether the dire predictions have come true."

Politico, GOP warnings have not met Fed policy reality.

With respect to David Farragut would say of Republi-cons, damn the facts, full bull ahead!

UPDATE IV:  So much for those invisible [Republi-CON] bond vigilantes'.

"The consumer-price index dropped 0.1 percent, reflecting cheaper energy, clothing and new cars, after a 0.2 percent gain the prior month, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington."

Read Bloomberg, Consumer Prices in U.S. Decline for First Time in Six Months.

Now Obama has fail to create the Republi-con's imaginary hyperinflation.  

UPDATE III:  After predictions of $5-10/gallon for gas, prices are near $3/gallon.

Read The Wall Street Journal, Halloween Treat: U.S. Gasoline May Fall Below $3 a Gallon. 

Another Obama failure! ;-) 

UPDATE II:   Another Obama's failure, and lost opportunity to destroy capitalism:  Read USA Today, S&P says shrinking U.S. deficit boosts debt outlook. 

UPDATE:  More evidence of Obama's failure:  "The S&P 500 has risen more than 25 percent over the last year. It’s risen more than 100 percent since President Obama was inaugurated. 

[Even] wages might pick up soon. After all, most everything else is. Housing prices are rising faster than at any time since 2007. Autos are doing great. Consumer confidence just hit a five-year high. These aren’t just the kinds of numbers that foretell recovery. They’re the kinds of numbers that lead to recovery. A rising stock market doesn’t necessarily mean more jobs anytime soon. Rising housing prices and car sales almost certainly do."

When will they impeach this 'Republi-con failure'? [Note: Obama has completely failed to fulfill Republi-con dreams and fantasies.]

Did you know that "the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared an astonishing 62% (sixty-two percent!) since the Kenyan Socialist Barack Obama seized the White House in a violent Saul Alinsky coup."


The last president was a much better at destroying capitalism, when he "left office the Dow was 25% lower than it was when he took office eight years earlier", and the economy was losing nearly 800,000/month.

Read Wonkette, Dow Soars 62% Since Obama Took Office; Do Stocks Have Liberal Bias?

For more on Obama's socialist failures, read The Republi-CON 'Obama's a Socialist' Myth.

Republi-CON "Not Being Nice Enough to the French" Hypocrisy

UPDATE:  "GOP prez hopefuls like Rick Perry now love France more than anything, as long as it allows them to attack Obama."

Read Salon, GOP’s new French love affair: The romantic story of how it fell in love with an old foe.

"The conservatives are guilty of a bit of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in criticizing the Obama administration for snubbing a people they not long ago called cheese-eating surrender monkeys."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans’ inconsistent attacks on Obama’s Paris response. 

I Dare, I Double-Dare the Republi-CONs to Impeach Obama

UPDATE IX:  "Asked at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast about the chatter, Ryan offered this:

    . . . [The Republicans’ differences with the White House do] not rise to the high crime and misdemeanor level.

Read the Washington Post, Paul Ryan just nailed the impeachment question.

UPDATE VIII: Republi-cons have been asking for impeachment since early 2009, soon after Obama took office.

Read the Washington Post, Impeachment talk is back. Here’s a timeline of how we got here. Again.

I warned about blowback (see below.)

UPDATE VII:  "Politically, the Boehner suit is a fool’s errand because it won’t do what he wants it do. Rather than tamp down talk of impeaching Obama, it will lead to an increased clamor for it. Yeah, Boehner said, “I disagree” when asked about Sarah Palin’s impeachment blabber. But, look, Boehner’s caucus is filled with folks who have wanted to punish the president for various and sundry “offenses” since at least 2010."

Read the Washington Post, Boehner’s ‘political stunt’ will lead to Obama’s impeachment.  

UPDATE VI:  "Okay -- so, who's talking about impeachment? People who want to build lists and raise money. No one is floating this idea unless it's attached to an ask. As Erik Wemple reported, the reason Palin's column did not appear at Fox News -- the reason Breitbart scooped it -- was that it was shopped by SarahPAC."

Read Slate, "Impeaching Obama" is Just a Fundraising Gimmick (for Now).

Reminds me of another scam:

BREAKING NEWS! -- Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) Engaged in a Scam and Swindle to Get Birthers' Money!!

And remember, it's been more than three months since Birther Fool's Day, Bwahahahaha!!!!

UPDATE V:  "Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) said today that he plans to sue President Obama for violating the United States Constitution with what Boehner called 'his outrageous practice of accomplishing things.' . .

Ripping the President for his 'willful insistence on doing things,' Speaker Boehner said that his lawsuit was intended 'to restore the inaction and inertia that have been the hallmarks of our democracy.'"

Read The New Yorker, Boehner Calls Obama’s Practice of Accomplishing Things Unconstitutional.

UPDATE IV:  "The graphic below shows the frequency with which presidents have issued executive orders. Republicans are right: President Obama is absolutely unique…in how infrequently he issues them! The last president to issue executive orders at such a slow rate was Grover Cleveland who served from 1885-1889 & 1893-1897. What’s more, Republican complaints about President Obama’s use of such powers is a bit ironic, given historically Republican presidents use executive orders more frequently."

Read The Brookings Institution, Obama's Executive Orders; A Reality Check.

UPDATE III:  "After going out on a not-so-wobbly limb to suggest that Republicans would push to impeach President Obama if they succeeded in retaking the Senate, George Will’s Sunday column read like a real threat. . .

I’d be a little more sympathetic and understanding if I didn’t know that Republicans had it in for Obama before he stepped into the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2009.

Robert Draper’s book, released in April 2012, reports on a several-hours-long dinner of leading Republicans held the night of Obama’s first inauguration where they agreed to oppose the new president on everything. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), now the incoming House majority leader, is quoted as having said at the dinner, 'If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority. We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.'

Michael Grunwald’s book, released in August 2012, added new information that extends the timeline of Republican recalcitrance. The Post’s Greg Sargent found the ah-ha paragraphs on page 207.

    Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. 'I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,' he recalls. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. 'The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,'" Biden says.

    The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.

The plan all along has been to crash the Obama agenda and then climb on top of the wreckage and seize power. Not only are Republicans complicit in the 'failures' they rail against, but they are also the reason the president has had to resort to executive action to get some things done. Even Will agrees Obama is within his authority to do this. He just doesn’t like the degree to which he has done it. Poor dear."

Read the Washington Post, Speaker Boehner’s Obama impeachment dress rehearsal. 

UPDATE II:  "George W. Bush is conspicuously absent . . . from every Republican discussion of impeachment. As he must be. If Bush enters the conversation, then McCarthy and company must explain why his administration didn’t meet the conditions of 'high crimes and misdemeanors': why Fast and Furious is impeachable but Operation Wide Receiver, its predecessor, was not; why 'the willful misleading of the American people' and 'the provision of false information to Congress' about an anti-Islamic video is a dereliction of duty but doing the same about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is not; and on and on. Only by making a convincing case on those issues can Republicans demonstrate theirs is a principled rather than partisan position."

Read U.S. News and World Report, Not Serious.

UPDATE : More empty talk of impeachment.

Read The New York Times, Ignoring Qualms, Some Republicans Nurture Dreams of Impeaching Obama and Time, The Escalating GOP Call to Impeach Obama. 

No, with all that empty talk of impeachment, I triple-dog-dare the Republi-CONs to impeach Obama.

Read Businessweek, Why the GOP Might Try to Impeach Obama Over Benghazi and Huffington Post, Impeach the President!... But Make It Quick.

But beware the blowback.  Read the grio, Why no one takes impeaching Obama seriously. 

The Republi-CON 'Obama's to Blame For the Child Immigrant Problem' Myth

UPDATE II:  "It was a good idea back in 2008, in the final days of the Bush administration.

With almost no opposition, Congress passed a new law to protect immigrant children from sex traffickers trying to bring them to the United States. It required judges to hold hearings for youngsters from countries other than neighboring Mexico and Canada, preventing them from possibly getting turned away at the border. . .

Why does it take so long for a hearing?

One reason is that Congress has failed to provide enough money for timely hearings".

Read CNN, Unintended consequences: 2008 anti-trafficking law contributes to border crisis.

UPDATE:  More Republi-con hypocrisy:

"In the two weeks since President Obama announced that, in the absence of congressional action on immigration reform, he was planning to go it alone on addressing the problem, many conservatives have accused the White House of overstepping its executive authority.

Now some Republicans are making the opposite claim: that the president isn’t doing enough to take advantage of his ability to do something about the flood of children detained at the border from Central American nations without waiting for the law to change. During an appearance on Meet the Press, Michigan Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican who chairs the House intelligence committee, said , “The president has tools in his toolbox that he can do immediately to stop this.”

Specifically, Rogers suggested that Obama—who has asked Congress for $3.7 billion to deal with the issue—can simply begin returning the children home, despite a 2008 antitrafficking law that gives children entering the U.S. from countries other than Canada or Mexico legal protections that prohibit speedy deportation."

Read Businessweek, On Immigration, Republicans Say Obama Is Exercising Too Much Authority, and Not Enough.

Actually, the problem began with a law passed in 2008 by the "unanimous consent in the House of Representatives" and Senate. 

Read National Journal, Why We Don't Immediately Send the Border Kids Back. 

So many of the very same Republi-cons who are complaining now voted for the law in 2008.

Obama the Thrifty

UPDATE III:  "The basics are straightforward and unambiguous: The Congressional Budget Office yesterday reported that the federal budget deficit will fall to 2.8 percent of GDP this year, almost one-third below what it was in 2013.

As a percent of GDP, not only will that be the lowest deficit since 2007, the drop from 9.8 percent in 2009 to 2.8 percent in 2014 is the largest five-year reduction in federal red ink since the end of World War 2, that is, in almost 70 years.

Read Forbes, Why No One Is Celebrating The Much-Lower Deficit.

UPDATE II:  Read the Washington Post, Think Obama’s a huge spender? Then you need to see these two charts.  The article includes this chart:

So tell me again, which party is the real big spender?

  

UPDATE:  "[I]f you want to see government responding to economic hard times with the “tax and spend” policies conservatives always denounce, you should look to the Reagan era — not the Obama years. . .

As many economists have pointed out, America is currently suffering from a classic case of debt deflation: all across the economy people are trying to pay down debt by slashing spending, but, in so doing, they are causing a depression that makes their debt problems even worse. This is exactly the situation in which government spending should temporarily rise to offset the slump in private spending and give the private sector time to repair its finances. Yet that’s not happening.

The point, then, is that we’d be in much better shape if we were following Reagan-style Keynesianism. Reagan may have preached small government, but in practice he presided over a lot of spending growth — and right now that’s exactly what America needs."

Read The New York Times, Reagan Was a Keynesian. 

"Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an “inferno” of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has. . .

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%."

Read Market Watch, Obama spending binge never happened, which includes these two graphs:

Trying To Understand Republi-CON Hatred of Obama, Is It Because They Consider Him an Uppity Black Man?

"To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era. . .

[In a recent] column in National Review by Quin Hillyer, a conservative pundit, think-tank fellow, and former candidate for the GOP nomination in Alabama’s first Congressional district . . . [he said:]

'Every time decent people think the scandals and embarrassments circling Barack Obama will sink this presidency, we look up and see Obama still there — chin jutting out, countenance haughty, voice dripping with disdain for conservatives — utterly unembarrassed, utterly undeterred from any assertion of power he thinks he can get away with, tradition and propriety and the Constitution be damned. The man has no shame, no self-doubt, not a shred of humility, no sense that anybody else has legitimate reason to question him or hold any other point of view.'

It is bizarre to ascribe haughtiness and a lack of a capacity for embarrassment to a president whose most recent notable public appearance was a profusely and even flamboyantly contrite press conference spent repeatedly confessing to “fumbles” and “mistakes.” Why would Hillyer believe such a factually bizarre thing?

One answer is that, by the evidence of this column, Hillyer believes all sorts of factually bizarre things. But most African-Americans, and many liberal whites, would read Hillyer’s rant as the cultural heir to Northup’s overseer: a southern white reactionary enraged that a calm, dignified, educated black man has failed to prostrate himself. . .

Hillyer finds nothing uncomfortable at all about wrapping himself in a racist trope. He is either unaware of the freighted connotation of calling a black man uppity, or he doesn’t care. In the absence of a racial slur or an explicitly bigoted attack, no racial alarm bells sound in his brain. . .

Conservatives have made endless jokes based on the strange premise that Obama is unable to express coherent thoughts unless reading from a teleprompter, defined health-care reform as 'reparations,' imagined a Reagan-era program to subsidize telephone use for the indigent is actually 'Obamaphones,' or complained when black entertainers or athletes socialize with the First Family. The accusations of racism that follow merely confirm to conservatives that black-on-white racism is a canard, that the balance of oppression has turned against them.

Conservatives can transport themselves for two hours into the hellish antebellum world of 12 Years a Slave and experience the same horror and grief that liberals feel. What they cannot do, almost uniformly, is walk out of the theater and detect the still-extant residue of that world all around them."

Read New York Magazine, 12 Years a Slave and the Obama Era.