This government SUCKS

Image courtesy Mandy Howard

There is just so much wrong with this atrocious Obama regime that posting it all in the Most Wanted section would completely overwhelm it. So here we go:

By any measure, Barack Obama had head handed to him vis-à-vis Syria:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gets to stay in power — and keep his chemical weapons for a year — under a Russian-sponsored deal that critics slammed as undermining American leverage in the Mideast.

Under the pact reached Saturday by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Assad must submit an inventory of his chemical arsenal this week but has until mid-2014 to dispose of it.

Kerry said the first inspection of Syrian weapons will be in November and destruction will begin sometime next year.

The UN Security Council is expected to back the deal with a resolution that could bring sanctions if Syria fails to comply.

There is no threat of the use of force in the resolution. Putin wouldn’t have it.

The predictable media was quick to comfort Obama:

CNN’s State of the Union host Candy Crowley asked Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) if the U.S. really cared whether Russia had the diplomatic edge in the deal over Syrian chemical weapons, which provides a framework for the destruction or removal of them over the next year.

Barney Frank notes that the Bush bank bailout made money for the US while the Obama auto bailout lost money:

BARNEY FRANK, FORMER CONGRESSMAN (D-MASSACHUSETTS): First of all, many of the banks didn’t want this money. It’s not that we did it for them. But secondly, the federal government made money on the advances to the banks. What cost us money was the automobile industry bailout. But we made money on the banks.

HENRY PAULSON, FORMER BUSH TREASURY SECRETARY: We got all the money back plus $32 billion.

There are now 70 armed Federal divisions and the EPA is now a police force:

The recent uproar over armed EPA agents descending on a tiny Alaska mining town is shedding light on the fact that 40 federal agencies – including nearly a dozen typically not associated with law enforcement — have armed divisions.

The agencies employ about 120,000 full-time officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests, according to a June 2012 Justice Department report.

Though most Americans know agents within the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Prisons carry guns, agencies such as the Library of Congress and Federal Reserve Board employing armed officers might come as a surprise.

Obama decided he wants to know everything about your sex life and without a doubt it has a political end.

The Obama regime has released 3,000 illegal alien sex offenders.

Licking his wounds from the Syrian exchange, Obama yells “SQUIRREL!” and turns attention back to the economy:

In a report released late Sunday, the White House is trumpeting the steps President Obama has taken over the last four-and-a-half years to address the economic downturn, the worst since the Great Depression, and linking them to the recovery.

Probably not a good idea.

For the fifth month in a row industrial production failed to meet expectations.

There are signs we could be slipping into another recession:

With so many candidates dropping out of the race, one has to wonder why the attraction of the ‘most-powerful’ job in the world is fading. Perhaps it is not wanting to stuck between the rock of the ‘broken-market-diminishing-returns’ of moar QE and the hard place of an economy/market that is sputtering and needs moar. As Bloomberg’s Rich Yamarone notes, There’s a little known rule of thumb in the economics world: when the annual growth rate of key U.S. indicators falls below 2 percent, the economy slides into recession in the next 12 months… and more than one of them is flashing red.

Obama will likely tell you that the unemployment rate has dropped to 7.3% but that’s only because 90 million people are no longer in the workforce. They’ve given up hope.

Americans are participating in the workforce at the lowest level in 35 years, according to government data released Friday, as lackluster job growth fails to offset the droves of people who have given up looking for work.

According to the Labor Department, the economy added a disappointing 169,000 jobs in August. In addition, the government lowered its estimate of the number of jobs created in June and July by 74,000 positions.

The grinding pace of recovery has hollowed out the workforce. Government data showed that only 63.2 percent of working-age Americans have a job or are looking for one, the lowest proportion since 1978. Nearly 90 million people are now considered out of the labor force, up 1.7 million from August 2012.

The employment gap between the rich and the poor is at a record high.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The gap in employment rates between America’s highest- and lowest-income families has stretched to its widest levels since officials began tracking the data a decade ago, according to an analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press.

Rates of unemployment for the lowest-income families – those earning less than $20,000 – have topped 21 percent, nearly matching the rate for all workers during the 1930s Great Depression.

The income gap between the rich and the poor is the widest its been since the “Roaring 20’s”

The last time the top 10% of the US income distribution had such a large proportion of the entire nation’s income was the 1920s – a period that culminated in the Great Depression and a collapse in that exuberance. As AP reports, the very wealthiest Americans earned more than 19% of the country’s household income last year — their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market crash. And the top 10% captured a record 48.2% of total earnings last year. Analysis by Emanuael Saez shows that, based on IRS data, in 2012, the incomes of the top 1% rose nearly 20% compared with a 1% increase for the remaining 99%. Economists point to several reasons for widening income inequality including globalization and technology. However, as John Taylor explains in his recent WSJ Op-Ed, using this as a lever for Obama’s “middle-out” policies – higher tax rates, more intrusive regulations, more targeted fiscal policies – will not revive the economy. More likely they will perpetuate the weak economy we have and cause real incomes—including for those in the middle—to continue to stagnate.

Obama finally gave up on trying to recycle Larry Summers. For those without a long term memory (i.e. liberals) Summers was one of the idiots who convinced Bill Clinton not to regulate derivatives. Then, to make it worse, he blamed Bush.

Nor has Summers ever owned up to his responsibility for deregulation in the 1990s, which led directly to the financial disaster. In an extraordinary TV interview in January 2012, which Felix Salmon of Reuters and others have written about, Summers maintained precisely the same line he had previously taken: He couldn’t see far enough over the horizon; the future was utterly unknowable. Summers said that when he sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000—creating essentially a global laissez faire market in over-the-counter derivatives—credit default swaps hadn’t even been invented yet. So how could he have known what was to come? “If you want to assign responsibility, if you take a market that essentially didn’t exist in the 1990s, that grew for eight years from 2001 to 2008, and then brought on a major collapse, if you were looking to hold people responsible, you would look to … officials of the Bush Administration,” he said.

One has to admit he was a perfect fit for this wretched administration.

Uncovered emails showed that Lois Lerner lied through her teeth about the IRS targeting conservatives.

Yet another reason for her silence has been unearthed by a 2011 email released by the House Ways and Means Committee in which the woman who claimed she had done nothing wrong admitted that the tea party was not only targeted, but targeted at her direction, in response to the Citizens United case that so outraged President Obama because it reaffirmed the free-speech rights of those who oppose him.

In the February 2011 email, Lerner advised her staff — including then-Exempt Organizations Technical Manager Michael Seto and then-Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz — that a tea party matter is “very dangerous” and something “Counsel and (Lerner adviser) Judy Kindell need to be in on.” Lerner added: “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

While the IRS was busy harassing conservatives, Eric Holder, who advised black churches on their roles in the 2012 election (separation of church and what, you say?), also coached black churches on how to skirt the IRS tax code.

At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats.

This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president.

But that same year, top officials with both the IRS and Justice Department — including the IRS commissioner and attorney general — met in Washington with several dozen prominent black church ministers representing millions of voters to brief them on how to get their flocks out to vote without breaking federal tax laws.

And of course, none of this is Obama’s fault. The fault, says Obama, belongs to Republicans.

“And the problem that we’ve got right now is, you’ve got a portion of Congress whose policies … just want to, you know, leave things alone. They actually want to accelerate these trends.”

Those nasty Republicans are blocking poor Barry’s efforts to redistribute wealth. If only they would allow him to discourage outsourcing of jobs.

“I think the president can stop it,” Obama said, when asked about the growing income gap. “The problem is that there continues to be a major debate here in Washington, and that is, how do we respond to these underlying trends?”

Obama promoted his efforts to increase funding for education, infrastructure, and research and development programs, and he trumpeted his push to reform the tax code to discourage outsourcing.

Obama and his liberal brethren routinely label this a “tax break for shipping jobs overseas” but there simply is no such thing. Enacting such a measure would yield a whopping $17 million per year.

Yeah, that’ll fix everything. What it won’t do is stop companies from moving jobs overseas.

The State Department continues to obstruct the Benghazi probe:

The State Department willfully obstructed a congressional investigation of the deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, last year, according to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

State Department officials routinely refused requests for documents on its investigation into the September 2012 attack, including interview transcripts and summaries of eyewitnesses to the attack, according to a committee report obtained by The Hill.

Additionally, members of the independent Accountability Review Board (ARB) tasked with reviewing the events that led up to the Benghazi attack were rife with “actual and perceived conflicts of interest” with State, the committee’s report adds.

The investigation itself is going nowhere, and Hillary let senior State officials completely off the hook.

“The ARB blamed systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies within two bureaus, but downplayed the importance of decisions made at senior levels of the Department. Witnesses questioned how much these decisions influenced the weaknesses that led to the inadequate security posture in Benghazi,” the report stated. “The ARB’s decision to cite certain officials as accountable for what happened in Benghazi appears to have been based on factors that had little or no connection to the security posture at U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya.”

Republicans wanted Congress to live by the same rules as we serfs do:

In 1995, the newly elected Republican Congress passed a Congressional Accountability Act to fulfill a promise made the previous year in the Contract with America. For the first time, the Act applied to Congress the same civil-rights employment and labor laws that lawmakers had required everyday citizens to abide by. With some lapses, it’s worked well to defuse public outrage about “one law for thee, one law for me” congressional behavior.

Chuck Grassley wanted to make sure that was also true of Obamacare:

In 2009, Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) decided that the principle deserved to be embedded in Obamacare, and he was able to insert a provision requiring all members of Congress and their staffs to get insurance through the Obamacare health exchanges. “The more that Congress experiences the laws it passes, the better,” said Grassley. Although his amendment was watered down before final passage to exclude committee staff, it still applies to members of Congress and their personal staffs. Most employment lawyers interpreted that to mean that the taxpayer-funded federal health-insurance subsidies dispensed to those on Congress’s payroll — which now range from $5,000 to $11,000 a year — would have to end.

Naturally, the Senate screamed and Obama casually rewrote the law without the benefit of the Constitution. Sen David Vitter tried to get a vote on his bill to change that and the gates of Hell opened:

Angry Senate Democrats have drafted legislation that dredges up a 2007 prostitution scandal involving Vitter.

and

The Congressional Leadership Empire decided to strike back at Vitter. Politico reported that several Democratic senators have asked staff to draft legislation that would deny federal health subsidies to anyone who votes for the Vitter plan, even if Vitter’s plan doesn’t become law. An even more spiteful draft bill would bar subsidies to any lawmaker or aide found by a congressional ethics committee to have “engaged in the solicitation of prostitution.” In 2007, Vitter’s phone number was found in the records of the “D.C. Madam,” the owner of a high-end prostitution ring. Back then, Vitter held a news conference with his wife standing next to him and apologized for a “serious sin” that he refused to discuss further. He was reelected with 57 percent of the vote in 2010.

That is how much democrats suck.

And finally, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose husband serendipitously landed a railway-to nowhere contract worth $600 million in April, wants to define “journalism.”

That Congress is attempting to define “journalist” at all in order to expand protections after a number of high-profile leak cases and ensuing Justice Department prosecutions caused blog impresario Matt Drudge to call Ms. Feinstein a “fascist” on Twitter, suggesting that the law would subvert a free press by giving institutional advantage to government-approved media outlets.

“Federal judge once ruled Drudge ‘is not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer,’” Mr. Drudge, proprietor of the massive news aggregator site Drudge Report, Tweeted Friday. “Millions of readers a day come for cooking recipes??!”

On its face, the proposed shield law doesn’t affect the First Amendment, which at any rate doesn’t guarantee anybody’s right to publish whatever they want. The bill simply adds extra protections against being forced to testify about sources for established reporters and freelancers with a “considerable” amount of publishing experience. It also allows a judge to make a declaration as to who’s a journalist and who’s not in an attempt to build the shield as wide as possible.

It’s fairly obvious that the intent of Feinstein is open the doors for lawsuits against Drudge and bloggers who do not align themselves with the mentality of the regime.

The economy sucks. Obama’s foreign policy sucks. This government sucks.

Thanks for reading. I was hoping to feel better after this rant.

I don’t.

DrJohn

DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.

DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.

Except for liberals being foolish.