Barack Obama

IN POST DATED NO­VEMBER 12, 2013, I in­cluded a chart with com­par­isons of the state of the union and its economy when Bush left of­fice and where it is now after six years of Obama. I wrote that these fig­ures “form the basis for a strong, im­pres­sive ar­gu­ment for just how good a job that Obama and his fellow De­moc­rats have done since the débâcle of the Bush ad­min­is­tra­tion that was dri­ving this country into the ground.  [Read more] “I’m out campaigning in jeans and tennis shoes!”

DE­BACLE DAY should be the name of Elec­tion Day 2014 for the De­mo­crat Party. I mean, what weren’t the de­moc­rats thinking about? After the elec­tion, I re­ceived these fig­ures from a newsletter from the De­mo­c­ratic Con­gres­sional Cam­paign Com­mittee (DCCC).

They deal with five in­di­ca­tors of the state of our union at the time that Obama took of­fice (Jan­uary 2009) and today (No­vember 2014). [Read more] “what weren’t the democrats thinking about?”

CHAR­LENE DILL, 32-year-old mother of three and part-time vacuum cleaner sales­person, col­lapsed and died on a stranger’s floor. She was at an ap­point­ment to try to sell a cleaner, one of jobs she worked to try to make ends meet for her family. Her death was a re­sult of a doc­u­mented heart con­di­tion and equally un­doc­u­mented con­se­quen­tialism that could have been prevented. [Read more] “charlene dill and the consequences of consequentialism”

PRES­I­DENT OBAMA ad­dressed the na­tion and the world ON Sep­tember 10, 2014, con­cerning his con­cerns with the in­sur­rec­tions and ter­rorist ac­tiv­i­ties of Muslim groups in the Middle East. His an­nounce­ment opened with “My fellow Amer­i­cans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and al­lies to de­grade and ul­ti­mately de­stroy the ter­rorist group known as ISIL.  [Read more] “the closest the world has come to nuclear war since 1962”

WE DON’T WATCH TV! That is, we have no cable ac­cess and never turn on the local chan­nels. Our set is strictly for watching videos, all of which we pull from the King County Li­brary System. This does not mean that we do not see tele­vi­sion shows: if enough people rec­om­mend a given se­ries, we get the first season and watch. [Read more] “skepticism vs. propagandism and the obama golf habit”

“THERE WAS A STUDY DONE that found out on­line con­ver­sa­tions that were in­ter­cepted and stored by the NSA—nine out of ten were not from for­eigners. They are from or­di­nary cit­i­zens, and I want to read this: ‘Many files . . . de­scribed as use­less by the an­a­lysts had a star­tlingly in­ti­mate, even voyeuristic quality. [Read more] “bill maher identifies new political species: the “non-apoplectic obama hack””

AC­CORDING TO the Cam­paign for Amer­i­ca’s Fu­ture’s Pro­gres­sive Break­fast email newsletter for April 4, 2014, the March jobs re­port notes that there were 192,000 new jobs but the un­em­ploy­ment rate re­mained at 6.7%. They then com­plain that this is “more of the same: an economy growing too slowly to make a major dent in con­tinued mass un­em­ploy­ment.” [Read more] “march jobs report nothing moving (unless you compare it to the bush jobs reports)”