UPDATE: latest addition, #15, in crass political move, advisors on ESCR canned by Obama in his latest broken promise on putting science where it belongs
--
Well, that didn't take long. I guarantee I'll be updating and bumping this post. And, look, I'm not talking about 'campaign promises' or 'written down and notarized promises' or whatever, I'm talking about stuff Great Leader said he would do or paths he would follow that he tossed out the window.
-
1.
During his vice-presidential debate, Vice President Biden laid out the following policy of the Obama Administration:
IFILL: Let's try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?
BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that.
On their very first minute in office the Administration
called for the repeal of the bipartisan Defense of Marriage Act. No reasonable interpretation of DOMA exists other than it is designed to allow states to choose not to 'redefine what constitutes marriage'.
YES, I understand that Obama also
promised to see about getting rid of DOMA (although he would have been better positioned to do so as a Senator (yes, he was a Senator for a few minutes!) than as President). However, you cannot proclaim that you are against the redefinition of marriage AND for the right of states to choose for themselves AND THAN campaign for the repeal of a law that allows states to choose for themselves with the result that states (and their citizens) would then LOSE the right to choose for themselves whether to redefine marriage or have a handful of judges in a faraway state redefine it for them, making it illegal for a state to choose not to accept said redefinition. Put in a less tortured manner - Obama said he wanted states to be able to redefine marriage if they wanted but he was against the redefinition personally, but now he is actively campaigning for the repeal of a law that preserved states' rights and, effectively, forces every state in the nation to accede to the redefinition of marriage ordered by a handful of judges against the will of the people even in those states.
-
2.
Vice-President Cheney
offered some advice to the incoming administration. He told them that before they started changing everything from a national security standpoint, they should step back and actually review the situation on the ground before making rash decisions. Great Leader agreed:
"I think that was pretty good advice, which is I should know what's going on before we make judgments and that we shouldn't be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric."Less than 24 hours later, 'making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric' Great Leader was changing security policies, signing no less than 4 directives to this effect.
-
3.
Great Leader promised Planned Parenthood that the first legislation he would sign if elected was the Freedom of Choice Act, which would strike down all bars to abortion nationwide, including striking down notification laws for minors and legalizing partial-birth abortion. On Jan. 29, Great Leader signed his first legislation, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which is a statute of limitations work-around for pay disputes.
-
4.
Great Leader said there would be
no lobbyists in his administration, signing an order to that effect. Immediately after signing it he began issuing waivers for lobbyists to work in his administration, including William Lynn, Mark Patterson, and William Corr with reports that the number of lobbyists now in the administration
is at least 12.
-
5.
Great Leader promised that “
As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.” His signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the very first bill he signed,
violated this promise as it was not made available until after it was already signed.
-
6.
“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” (Barack Obama, September 12, 2008, Dover, NH).
Unless everyone in a family making under $250,000 is getting a waiver on the cigarette tax hike Obama just signed, he's broken this promise. And the "read my lips" press coverage is...where, exactly?
-
7.
From his inaugural address:
We'll restore science to its rightful place...
Yet in his first month Obama will sign a trillion dollar spending bill that actually flies in the face of science. Literally hundreds of practitioners of the science of economics, including some of the most respected, have publicly proclaimed that they do not agree that massive deficit infrastructure spending is a proper solution. Some of Obama's highest economic advisors, practitioners of this science themselves, have written/spoken to the effect that
infrastructure spending is one of the least effective stimulus tools but that
tax cuts greatly spur an economy. Two modern historical examples are available for sober, scientific evaluation: Japan in the 1990s and the US leading to and during the Great Depression. In neither case did deficit infrastructure spending lead to recovery and economic scientists are instead concluding that they worsened or lengthened the downturns. The scientists that support the Obama/Pelosi/Reid plan are unable to present a single instance when deficit infrastructure spending avoided or repaired an economic downturn - instead they rely on a belief without foundation that in those examples, the government simply did not spend enough fast enough - this despite the claims of
one of FDR's own officials proclaiming that they were spending more than they ever had before and it did not work, but only produced debt. It is also noteworthy that the claims of the scientists that support the Obama remedy for 'more, faster' can not only not point to a single instance when this was successful and is contradicted not only by opponents, but it is directly contradicted by Congress' own official economic scientists at the Congressional Budget Office, who have advised the government that the proposed massive deficit spending will:
*
Not be quick -
piddling tax cuts don't kick in for at least 3 months, a tiny fraction of the infrastructure funds will be spent in 2009 and maybe half will be spend through 2010; and
*
Cause more problems as a result of its size - the massive deficit spending will instead cripple future economies to the point that several tenths loss of GDP growth can be expected purely attributable to this spending binge
In short, after pledging to "restore science to its rightful place", in his first chance to put his money where his mouth is, literally, Obama is listening to those that place their faith in a theory for which experimentation has never produced success and has always produced failure, and is deliberately ignoring a theory with demonstrated results (tax cuts) and
explicitly ignores the scientists that have demonstrated success in their field, that are employed as advisors on this science, and that is the primary governmental office for evaluating this science.
I suppose an example might be if Obama hired some advisors on oil spills who claim that oil spills are bad, then, when presented with an opportunity to either facilitate or prevent an oil spill, he decided to facilitate an oil spill against the previous findings of his advisors, the EPA, and a huge segment of the environmental science community because he and a bunch of other lawyers thought that it would be helpful to the environment and he had a few environmental scientists heavily invested in hitching their boat to his that were willing to say that maybe the problem with prior oil spills was that the oil was not leaked quickly enough or in large enough quantity for the spill to produce beneficial effects, few of which seem to actually be tied to oil.
-
8.
"The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months."from the official Barack Obama website: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq/ accessed on 2-24-09 at 5:42 PM.
AP story:
link:
"Obama's plan would pull out all combat troops 19 months after his inauguration, although he had promised repeatedly during the 2008 campaign that he would withdraw them 16 months after taking office."
Additionally:
The withdrawal plan — an announcement could come as early as this week — calls for leaving a large contingent of troops behind, between 30,000 and 50,000 troops, to advise and train Iraqi security forces and to protect U.S. interests.
Also staying beyond the 19 months would be intelligence and surveillance specialists and their equipment, including unmanned aircraft, according to two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public.
The complete withdrawal of American forces will take place by December 2011, the period by which the U.S. agreed with Iraq to remove all troops.
That remnant that the 'original' plan called for is now 30-50 thousand plus troops. Additionally, the
actual withdrawal date will be the date agreed upon by the
Bush administration that they negotiated with the Iraqi government - the Iraqi government that they supported, assisted, and, yes, held accountable for their own security - as demonstrated by their conductance of largely independent military actions against terrorists and their providing their own security for the January 2009 elections.
-
9.
Obama promised, as a candidate, that he would rein in earmarks. Yet he's already signed the massive, trillion dollar spending spree bill that is so laden with pork "it practically oinks" (see 10 below). Now his people are saying that he will again break that pledge and sign a budget that is porked up with over 8,500 earmarks that could run as high as $7.7 billion (that used to be "real money" before Obama and his Democrat compatriots started spending trillions).
From the AP:
President Barack Obama will break a campaign pledge against congressional earmarks and sign a budget bill laden with millions in lawmakers' pet projects, administration officials said.
Administration budget chief Peter Orszag and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel both downplayed the $410 billion spending bill and signaled Obama would hold his nose and sign it.
Orszag said: "We want to just move on. Let's get this bill done, get it into law and move forward."
Said Emanuel: "That's last year's business."
The House last week passed the measure that would keep the government running through Sept. 30, when the federal budget year ends. Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, identified almost 8,600 earmarks totaling $7.7 billion; Democrats say the number is $3.8 billion.
Either way, it is far more than Obama promised as a candidate. He refused earmarks for the economic stimulus package he championed and a children's health bill.
He similarly pledged to reject tailored budget requests that let lawmakers send money to their home states. Orszag said Obama would move ahead and overlook the time-tested tradition that lets officials divert millions at a time to pet projects.
"We want to make sure that earmarks are reduced and they're also transparent. We're going to work with the Congress on a set of reforms to achieve those," said Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Obama's top hands assigned responsibility to their predecessors and President George W. Bush. Blaming Bush-era proposals for deficits, Obama wanted to set up his own budget that would start Oct. 1, which he proposed last week with a bold goal of cutting the deficit by half within his four-year term.
"First, this is a $1.7 trillion deficit he inherited. Let's be clear about that. We inherited this deficit and we inherited $4 trillion of new debt," Emanuel said. "That is the facts."
Interesting items I underlined, aren't they? First there's the blatant lie the AP spews here (see 10 below). Also, there's Emanuel blaming Bush for budgets passed by
Democrats and Obama himself. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you can "inherit" something from yourself.
The best part of this mess is that the bill
apparently contains an earmark that Obama himself put in when he was in the Senate! From the Post:
As Jonathan Allen of Congressional Quarterly reports, Obama, who took a "no-earmark pledge" during his presidential campaign, is listed as a cosponsor of a $7.7 million set-aside in the FY09 omnibus spending bill approved by the House on Wednesday.
Woops. That's not at all what White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
On Wednesday, Gibbs said of earmarks in the bill, "There aren't any from him that I know of in that omnibus largely because there weren't any that were requested last year."
Going to that CQ report:
President Obama, who took a no-earmark pledge on the campaign trail, is listed as one of dozens of cosponsors of a $7.7 million set-aside in the fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill passed by the House on Wednesday...
No changes are expected to the earmarks requested by other lawmakers who ended up in top jobs in the Obama administration months after they sought set-asides for special projects in the bills that became the omnibus (HR 1105).
The catchall bill is an accumulation of leftovers from 2008 — spending measures that weren’t enacted before the 110th Congress expired. It’s moving through Congress now because a temporary extension of funds to run the government will run out after March 6.
Obama’s name jumped out on a list of many earmark cosponsors because he and his staff have been so emphatic about his no-earmark stance.
“I think you can take one sign of the president’s seriousness on this that there aren’t any from him that I know of in that omnibus largely because there weren’t any that were requested last year,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday...
Overall, the president, vice president, the White House chief of staff and the four Cabinet secretaries who were in Congress last year showed up in the records of the House and Senate Appropriations committees as the sponsors or cosponsors of hundreds of millions of dollars in pet projects in the $410 billion spending bill...
Transparency, particularly on earmarks, also has been a watchword for Obama during his campaign and the early days of his presidency.
He has pledged to revamp the earmarking system and said last year that he would abstain from making requests.
“We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress’ seniority, rather than the merit of the project,” he said last April in making his announcement.
When asked for comment, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said Thursday, “We will send you information as soon as it’s available.”
-
10.
Obama said there were no earmarks in the trillion dollar spending spree bill. Despite the fact that the "traditional" (how sad is that to read...) earmark process was not followed, there seems little denying that the spending spree contains numerous
earmarks. Among them is a rail line from CA to Las Vegas championed by the ethically-challenged Democrat head of the Senate Harry Reid and a coal plant that, just coincidentally, exactly matches one that showed up in a previous earmark.
-
11.
I'll let
Ari Fleischer tell this one:
FLEISCHER: Frankly, I think the RNC, Michael Steele, should not have taken the bait on this whole issue. They fell into a silly political trap. But what I find most distressing though, Joe, is didn't President Obama say he wanted to change the way politics was done in Washington, be post-partisan. He talked at the inaugural address about not engaging in childish things and his Chief of Staff engages in one of the biggest childish things imaginable. This whole food fight over Rush Limbaugh is a distraction from the economy from health care and the things he should be working on. It just makes me think Barack Obama is like every other politician who just seeks political advantage...
FLEISCHER: Joe, listen to this. Here's what Barack Obama said in his inaugural address. We've come to proclaim the end of petty grievances, the recriminations that have strangled our politics. He cited scripture, and then he said, the time has come to set aside childish things and then his staff engages in those very things that his inaugural address talked about. You know, Barack Obama has huge popularity, but I think he is planting the seeds which could hurt him down the road if he really is no different from anybody else. And that's what I think this episode shows...
FLEISCHER: You know, Mike, how it works, you plant the bomb and you see where it goes off. But isn't that what he said he would stop in Washington? 2004 he said there's not a red America, there's not a blue America, there's a United States of America. My point is, what he is doing and what people on the cable shows have all picked up on, is exactly what people get weary of Washington for. And it's what every politician does. He wanted to be different, and I think he's squandering that chance to truly be different, especially to Republicans who question his policies, but really thought he might be a different type of leader. That's the big problem I have with all of this. This is – this reminds me a lot of the lipstick on a pig issue during the campaign raised against Barack Obama. It's foolish, who needs to get into that?
-
12.
Same promise broken as in #6 - although I hasten to note that this is a
pending broken promise. I'll update if he either changes his mind AGAIN, or will remove the qualifying language once he signs this tax hike on everyone that gets health insurance from an employer, not just those earning over 250k.
Administration Is Open to Taxing Health BenefitsThe Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.
The proposal is politically problematic for President Obama, however, since it is similar to one he denounced in the presidential campaign as “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.” Most Americans with insurance get it from their employers, and taxing workers for the benefit is opposed by union leaders and some businesses.
In television advertisements last fall, Mr. Obama criticized his Republican rival for the presidency, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for proposing to tax all employer-provided health benefits. The benefits have long been tax-free, regardless of how generous they are or how much an employee earns. The advertisements did not point out that Mr. McCain, in exchange, wanted to give all families a tax credit to subsidize the purchase of coverage...
At a recent Congressional hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat whose own health plan would make benefits taxable, asked Peter R. Orszag, the president’s budget director, about the issue. Mr. Orszag replied that it “most firmly should remain on the table.”...
When Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, advocated taxing benefits at a recent hearing of the Finance Committee, which he leads, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner assured him that the administration was open to all ideas from Congress...
The latest government figures, for 2007, show that 70 percent of the 253 million people with health insurance received at least some of their coverage through employers. Employment-based insurance covers three-fifths of the population under 65...
Some big businesses consider nontaxable employment benefits a tool for recruiting and retaining workers...
I left in that last sentence as a historical footnote - employers really started offering health after WW2...know why? Because the government started telling companies how much they could pay people - so companies had to offer other things to attract talent. Sound familiar?
-
13.
Obama and his Democrat chorus attacked Bush for 'cooking the books' and funding some military efforts with supplemental funding requests instead of waiting for normal budget schedules (note that the Dems refused to even
do a budget for 2008-2009). Well, now Obama is asking Congress to 'hurry' and approve supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan (even though they just DID a budget) - and as a bonus he's got money in there for other stuff, too.
President Barack Obama asked Congress on Thursday for $83.4 billion for U.S. military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, pressing for special troop funding that he opposed two years ago when he was a senator and George W. Bush was president...
Obama is also requesting $350 million in new Pentagon funding to deal with Mexican drug cartels and conduct other security activities along the U.S.-Mexico border, along with another $400 million to help Pakistan in counterinsurgency efforts along the Afghanistan border.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, acknowledged that Obama has been critical of Bush's use of similar special legislation to pay for the wars.
I note elsewhere that the AP has whitewashed this story to remove the two mentions that make clear this hypocrisy.
-
14.
"what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.... What I want to emphasize ... is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches."Do I even need to present an argument to prove this obvious lie is a promise broken, or is there sufficient evidence in the public consciousnes already? If you really must ask (I must, I must) - Spending request: $3.5 trillion. Proposed cut: $17 billion. And how was this dubbed by Great Leader - proposing 0.5% cuts to spending hikes? "A New Era Of Responsibility". Go ahead and laugh...might as well.
-
15.
From his inaugural address:
We'll restore science to its rightful place...
Apparently in a fascist society, science's rightful place is flushed down the toilet.
From IBD:
The president's Council on Bioethics is summarily dismissed when it disagrees on the need for more federally funded embryonic stem cell research. The scientific method doesn't include firing those who disagree with you.
Inspectors general are apparently not the only ones to pay for annoying the White House by doing their job. The 18-member council existed to provide the president with advice on the moral and ethical implications of the rapid advances in science and medical research. It exists no more...
The president's executive order overturned restrictions put in place by Bush and permitting federally funded ESCR research only on 21 stem cell lines already in existence. For that decision, which did not stop such research funded privately, he was said to have declared war on science. Critics ignored the fact that Bush was the first president to fund ESCR research at all. President Clinton had spent nothing...
On one side you had the likes of Princeton's Robert George, who talked of the latest studies showing embryos were genetically unique and identifiable human beings no different from the adults they would become.
On the other side, you had people like our nation's leading neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga, who argued that being human meant having a heart and a brain, of which an embryo had neither.
They certainly did not ignore, as the administration apparently has, the very real scientific progress being made by non-embryonic adult stem cells...
Posts
