Congratulations on that, Sakurano
Jmb, on 15 August 2012 - 07:22 AM, said:
Fine, if you want off topic here comes how Obama did a major flop.
Operation Fast and Furious, at first I was like many assuming it was only one office of the ATF, however, considering the cover up both Holder and Obama are doing, it indicates it goes much higher.
Another little fun fact: 99 members of the Senate voted to ban such operations unless the firearms can be tracked at all times. Obama VETOED the bill in favor of his plan on recycling the M1 Carbine, a weapon that is around 70 years old. Yeah, that will stop the arming of the cartels. Just because he says Holder won't let it happen again doesn't mean the next president won't do something similar, he failed to look at the long term there. Add in Obama using his Executive Override and you get a cover up of other such gun running operations. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised.
And before someone says its Bush's fault, Operation Fast and Furious started in Mid 2009 going into 2010. The operation you may be thinking of may be Operation Wide Reciever in I believe 2007, which was similar but utilized all agencies that may be involved (FBI, CIA, ATF, etc) and was under cooperation with the Mexican government. Someone explain to me how one office of one agency thought they could do when all those agencies combined said it was next to impossible to track the firearms in the hands of the cartels?
Romney will probably fail as president, Obama has failed. Either way the options suck.
I'm not sure I quote agree with the logic here. Judging the whole of a president's effects based on a couple of gun-related issues is just not a very sound way to go about politics. What about economics? What about energy? Environmental concerns?
Economically, it's hard to judge Obama. Positive job growth of note wasn't going to happen in the aftermatch of the 2008 collapse, and in the past two years, Congress has stonewalled any efforts to do much of anything. With that said, there are some studies that have shown he might have literally prevented the loss of millions of jobs (
http://www.propublic...n-creating-jobs)
More importantly, though, I think looking at where jobs did well over his presidency is revealing. Of course, Obama has his supporters like to toss around charts like
this one, but what's more revealing than just the average of the past several years is that job performance seemed to be best when we were actually following Obama's policies. During the periods of greatest stimulus spending, job increases were highest; they've since leveled out, yes, but note that that's as that spending slows down, and Congressional Republicans stagnate the government. Correlation isn't a guarantee of causation, true, but it's clear that when we were actually
doing what Obama wanted, things were going okay, and on the whole, they could be doing worse. I just read an article about a month ago (that, naturally, is now buried in the interwebz forever) that said the US has been doing better on jobs than our European counterparts for the most part. So we've been doing better than many of our peers in a similar situation, or at least an unspecific article in some news source that I allegedly read claimed as much
And of course, lest the inevitable cries of "runaway spending" erupt, despite the huge stimulus, Obama has actually presided over one of the
smallest spending increases in recent history. I think achieving what we've seen without a huge increase in spending is a showing of, at worst, some level of competence on the part of the president.
His environmental policies haven't been the Second Coming, or anything, but they've been better than we've gotten from any Republican administration by a long shot, in a long time. This is the first administration in a long time (ever?) to take any tangible steps towards mitigating anthropogenic climate change, if not through big changes to carbon emissions. Instead, the focus has been on smaller groups of nations, specifically the
Climate and Clean Air Coalition, which are targeting albedo-affecting black carbon and methane emissions, the biggest steps in the right direction we've taken in the US since, well, ever. Fuel economy for vehicles has also increased. He hasn't done anything groundbreaking, but existing protections have been maintained or strengthened, and so, it's been a competent showing.
In the related area of energy, solar and wind production have increased about half again (which is quite huge), investments have been made in actual
research, something we haven't seen in a Republican president since...(ever?), from stimulus funds for Polywell fusion to creating ARPA-E. These have all been smaller steps than any sane person would like, but they've been the biggest steps we've taken in a decade. Again, I guess the word to describe the policies here might not be
amazing, but
competent certainly fits.
There's also foreign policy to consider, but I won't pretend to be in a position to comment intelligently there. I study ecology, not geopolitics.
I don't think Obama is the greatest thing since sliced-bread, far from it, but there are areas where he has put up a competent showing. That's about all anyone can ask of most presidents.
Edited by Catamount, 15 August 2012 - 08:22 AM.
8
It's like last election we had McCain...and Obama...not much choice.
