President Obama has Betrayed us

He's Just Another Politician

 * "The Intellectual Dishonesty of Obama..."
 * "Yes, the GOP is obstinate. We get it. But assigning the White House some blame is no false equivalence."
 * "But it's my belief that Obama has overstated his obstacles to success on taxes, immigration, climate change and other issues. The candidate of unbridled optimism in 2008 is now cynical, bowed and nearly beaten – a leader whose excuse for failure amounts to, I can't lead because Republicans won't let me. By the way, that is not a conservative talking point; it's rooted in dozens of conversation I've had in the past 17 months with Democrats."
 * "Sargent makes a reasonable point. However, Democrats had control of both chambers of Congress when Obama took office in 2009, and most voters weren't happy with the result. Furthermore, Sargent's prescription for a better state of politics is exactly what's wrong with the system. "Winning elections" is all the matters in Washington. Obama promised better."
 * "Rarer still is one side 100 percent right, which is why Obama is guilty of false purity. Obama's intellectual dishonesty has prevented him from learning on the job, which is what's required of great presidents – the kind who overcome obstacles that others whine about."
 * "The White House accidentally identified the CIA’s top official in Afghanistan on Sunday, sending his name to reporters traveling with President Barack Obama on a short Memorial Day weekend visit to the U.S.-run Bagram Air Base outside Kabul." (source)
 * President Barack Obama lists assets worth between $1.95 million and $7.15 million, of which $1 million to $5 million were in Treasury notes, according to financial disclosure forms (source)
 * The candidate made taking care of veterans a pledge and a priority, but hundreds of thousands of them are stuck in a long waiting line for disability decisions. (source)
 * President Barack Obama is promoting advances in energy efficiency as part of his broader campaign to confront climate change. He is drawing attention to the effort at a Wal-Mart store, angering labor and pay equity advocates. (source)
 * Bill Moyers criticized President Barack Obama on Friday for his decision to seemingly leave the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the hands of the anti-net neutrality forces he opposed as a candidate. (source)
 * Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday that he was told not to “acknowledge” or “discuss” the secret drone program when becoming the government’s top spokesman.(source)
 * So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best when it comes to such measures. The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement prices to coal companies. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change negotiations. (It’s hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen summit.) And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth. Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would save. If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just the obvious and easy. (source)
 * As a Presidential candidate in 2008, Obama promised to fix the VA. Now 6 years later the agency is worse than ever.
 * "But Mr. Obama and his team would benefit, as they begin the second term, by acknowledging that many of the biggest problems facing the administration flow directly from the man at the top. Mr. Obama is a lousy manager. As chief executive he gets a C — and then only if graded on a curve that takes into account his predecessor’s managerial weaknesses." (Source: Op-Ed, NY Times)
 * 7 Inauguration Promises Obama Never Fulfilled:
 * 1) Making Unpleasant Decisions And Standing Up To Narrow Interests: Though Congress passed the sweeping Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in 2010, two-thirds of the rules have yet to be finalized. That’s thanks in part to bank lobbying, which has weakened or slowed down the process of making the rules.
 * 2) Lay A Foundation For Growth: Obama oversaw a net gain in jobs during his first term, but many of the jobs created during the past four years aren’t the kind that “lay a foundation for new growth.” Instead, about three-fifths of the jobs created during the recovery were low-wage, according to an October report from the National Employment Law Project. On election night 2012, Obama pledged to create new jobs for the middle class; we’ll see if he lives up to the promise.
 * 3) Infrastructure BuildingThough President Obama’s stimulus plan is perhaps best known for its infrastructure spending, only $100 billion of the $787 billion went to overhauling infrastructure, according to Ezra Klein. In addition, Congress punted on overhauling the nation’s highway system by voting to keep funding at current levels for the next two years, the National Journal reports.
 * "Yet, it is no small irony that the anti-inequality movement that cleared the path for Obama’s presidency would find its supposed personification in a chief executive who has spoken less about poverty and race than any Democratic president in a generation. And that the Baptist preacher from Georgia who stood for nonviolence would never have condoned the militaristic actions of a president whose escalated use of drone warfare kills innocents around the world." (source: Fredrick Harris, professor of political science and the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University)
 * "Fast-forward to today. Guantanamo remains open, warrantless wiretapping continues, and drone strikes have accelerated, leading to the deaths of innocent civilians and a burst in support for anti-American forces in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Instead of breaking with the Bush era, Obama has codified and permanently institutionalized the “war on terror” framework that has characterized American foreign policy since the September 11, 2001 attacks. And they have done all of this largely in secret, refusing to open up about how drone strikes are decided on. So while torture has been thrown out of the American playbook, other black marks remain. Obama has done everything but restore “core constitutional values” to how the U.S. conducts itself around the world." (Salon, January 2013)
 * "President Obama on Thursday signed a bill granting him — along with George W. Bush and future ex-presidents — lifetime Secret Service protection, reversing a 1990s law that limited post-presidency security." (Source)
 * In White House councils, John Brennan has been privy to the most secret U.S. intelligence programs. Outwardly, he has been the administration’s most public defender of one of President Barack Obama’s most controversial practices — the expanded use of armed drone aircraft to kill terrorism suspects overseas.
 * "Obama advisor who had decried ‘war on terror’ now defends drones"
 * This is the second time that Obama has sought to put Brennan at the helm of the CIA, and his confirmation process is likely to revisit old controversies over U.S. counterterrorism measures undertaken by the administrations of Obama and George W. Bush. (source)
 * "JON MEACHAM: It's a little worse than normal.  Because even though he was there, my sense is he doesn't particularly like people and politicians who don't like people are kinda in the wrong business."' (source)

Obama's Unprecedented Attack on American Freedoms

 * It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined – in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week’s controversy over the DOJ’s pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.Source
 * Obama behaves like a centrist who leans tentatively left on certain social programs but boldly right on military force and civil liberties. His supporters, who have watched him duplicate and codify some of the Bush administration’s most damaging civil liberties violations, are now reduced to wishful thinking that an authentic Obama will soon step forward and return the country to the constitutional footing that was abandoned after 9/11. (Source: TheNation)

Obamacare is a failure

 * Despite the fact that Affordable Care Act has been in place for four years by now, more than one million low-income Americans who are dependent on community health centers are still going uninsured, according to a new report conducted by researchers at George Washington University.(source)
 * Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes on Wednesday twice refused to say whether she would have voted for President Barack Obama's signature health care law. (source)
 * "By tying doctor pay to patient satisfaction scores, Obamacare’s “pay for performance” system is going to disproportionately hurt minority doctors." (source)
 * President Obama and the Democratic Party dug themselves into a deep hole by claiming the Affordable Care Act would cut the nation’s health care costs when in fact it will raise them. It’s the gift that will keep on giving to opponents of the law.

The ACA cannot cut costs because its proponents subscribed to the wrong diagnosis of the U.S. health care crisis. They accepted the conventional wisdom that overuse of health care services is the most important reason why per capita health care costs are double those of the rest of the industrialized world, and that overuse is caused by two chronic failings among American doctors: They routinely order services patients do not need and fail to provide them with obviously beneficial preventive ones that would keep them healthy and minimize later need for medical interventions. (source: Truthdig)
 * "[T]he Left pretends that [the ACA] is a radical step forward to justice, when actually it is a very modest reform of the existing – exceedingly, unsustainably expensive – system, based largely on onetime GOP proposals, while the Right is in high dudgeon mode over this allegedly vast expansion of state power, when really it’s a huge gift to the insurance industry (a Republican stalwart). Moreover, the ACA manages to do the nearly impossible, namely increasing access to healthcare only very modestly, at considerable taxpayer expense, while doing essentially nothing about controlling spiraling costs, not least because that would upset trial lawyers (a Democratic constituency)." (source)

He's Betrayed his Biggest Supporters

 * "...Black women, Obama’s single largest voting demographic, have been the subject of no executive orders, no White House initiatives and no pieces of progressive legislation. Ninety-six percent of black women voters voted for Obama compared to 87 percent of black men. Seventy-six percent of Latinas voted for the president compared to 65 percent of Latino men.

Though black and other women of color who are a part of the LGBTQ community will benefit from this latest executive order, no initiative has explicitly addressed the structural issues of racism, classism, poor education, heavy policing and sexual and domestic violence that disproportionately affect black and Latina women." (source)