So who thinks Obama is doing a good job?

[sideoutshu]

Serious question.

From reading some of these other posts, and how people have such inalienable certainty that the recent elections couldn't POSSIBLY be a commentary on the country's feelings about Obama. What do you think?

Is it that you believe this couldn't have been a referendum on Obama cause he is doing so well? If so:

1. What has he done that you would consider a success?

2. Do you think there is a realistic chance that he will deliver on what he said he would deliver during the election. If so, what progress have you seen?

3. With knowledge that 45% of the country now believes the economy is Obama's fault, and not Bushs, how long until the "Bush left us in a mess" excuse doesn't fly anymore?

4. How do you reconcile your belief with the many broken and unfullfilled promises he already has to his discredit? (Gitmo, Iraq withdrawal, indefinate detention, lobbyists, pay as you go, transparency, etc.)

Please don't bother to respond if your answer is going to be one of the following:

a. It has only been 11 months! (that is nearly 1/4 of his term and he has control of both houses of Congress)

b. It's all Bush's fault!

c. Any introduction of Fox News into the conversation, or any of the non-clever nicknames you read off of Daily KOS.

d. Any talk of religion.

e. Any talk of Haliburton.

[conviction]

I think he's done a terrible job:

1. Economy: We were prior to the crash consuming way to much whether it came to housing and just our materialistic goods and at the same time producing too little. The natural response of the market to these unsustainable rates was to have a recession so the market could correct itself. The recession was a dose of medicine we needed to take. Unfortunately Obama tried to side-step it with massive spending and try to get the people consuming again. Unfortunately all the consuming is off of borrowed money and debt. The market needs to recover by balancing out production and consuming and Obama has failed miserably by taking just pumping more debt into an already debt-riddened system.... F

2. No real change and broken promises: Nothing new to our Presidents BUT he campaigned hard on being "trustworthy" and the American's thought he was a "good man" and a "man of the people". Bull****.... He's pumped more people into the war (it's now his war in Afghanistan). He continues to torture prisoners, and evidence of doing more so than Bush. Not to mention all the other promises, but in addition I will guarantee with our unstainable debt of 1.5 trillion this year alone Obama MUST raise taxes and that's when you will see the real backlash against Obama, Sideout.

[Nevada_Ballin]

i think he's doing the best he can with what he got coming into office. We were deep into the downward spiral at that time. Shambled economy and 2 mid-east wars, not an ideal situation and not one that could be easily, immediately fixed by signing a few bills.

The bigger question may be, would things be any different if McCain had won, cuz he was the alternative to Obama - if so, what and why?


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[sideoutshu]

Originally Posted by Nevada_Ballin

i think he's doing the best he can with what he got coming into office. We were deep into the downward spiral at that time. Shambled economy and 2 mid-east wars, not an ideal situation and not one that could be easily, immediately fixed by signing a few bills.

The bigger question may be, would things be any different if McCain had won, cuz he was the alternative to Obama - if so, what and why?
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But he knew what he had coming into office, yet he still made all of these promises he couldn't keep.

You didn't answer any of the questions. What has he done successfully? Where are you seeing progress? What about withdrawal, GITMO, detention, lobbyistsw, transparency, etc?

It's tough to say with McCain, becuase he still would have been working against a hostile Congress. Obama has it as easy as you possibly could.

[theanalogkid]

Well, he inherited TARP from the previous Administration, but he continued down that line by taking over Chrysler and GM and then sold Chrysler to Fiat for pennies on the dollar.

He's just following the Bush Administration's plan for exiting Iraq, and is using the same Bush strategy of throwing a bunch of troops in Afghanistan and hoping it will solve the problem.

He's failed on transparency, and continued the 'national security' use against warrantless wiretapping cases.

He's also continuing to work on the SECRET (No transparency) ACTA treaty, which would change the Internet as how we know it, since Hollywood and other Media corporations have blown so much money up his ***. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Co...rade_Agreement

If you said George W. Bush was doing the above, I wouldn't know the difference.

[Nevada_Ballin]

Originally Posted by sideoutshu

But he knew what he had coming into office, yet he still made all of these promises he couldn't keep.

You didn't answer any of the questions. What has he done successfully? Where are you seeing progress? What about withdrawal, GITMO, detention, lobbyistsw, transparency, etc?

It's tough to say with McCain, becuase he still would have been working against a hostile Congress. Obama has it as easy as you possibly could.

Cuz the questions don't mean much - a bunch of "what do you thinks" with a public opinion poll. It'll be total regurgitation of things we've seen in these threads for the past 4 months.

As for McCain... he was for economic stimulus, he was for staying in Iraq, he wasn't gonna go transparent, he wasn't gonna close Gitmo, etc. So, Obama is giving you nothing different than what yhe GOP candidate was gonna give anyway - one would think that would make the GOPers happy based on Obama's actual policy action. But nope. Don't wanna admit Obama is doing what McCain would have done anyway


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[sideoutshu]

Originally Posted by Nevada_Ballin

Cuz the questions don't mean much - a bunch of "what do you thinks" with a public opinion poll. It'll be total regurgitation of things we've seen in these threads for the past 4 months.

As for McCain... he was for economic stimulus, he was for staying in Iraq, he wasn't gonna go transparent, he wasn't gonna close Gitmo, etc. So, Obama is giving you nothing different than what yhe GOP candidate was gonna give anyway - one would think that would make the GOPers happy based on Obama's actual policy action. But nope. Don't wanna admit Obama is doing what McCain would have done anyway

Thanks for turning this post into your own talking points memo. Now back to the point.

Do you think Obama is doing a good job? And how do you support your position? Why is that so hard to answer?

[TheRealist]

So, for all the libertarians here... (from what I can tell analog/conviction for sure)

If the U.S. had not been so heavily bogged down in debt previous to this recession (let's say only 10% of GDP circa late 2007), would you have considered the stimulus justified? Or is a stimulus never justifiable according to your rationale?

Not debating, just curious.

[resnor]

How does what McCain would have done apply to whether or not Obama is doing a good job? Obama is not doing a good job...and if McCain were in office doing the same things, I'd have the same attitude.

[R-ILLA]

Originally Posted by Nevada_Ballin

Cuz the questions don't mean much - a bunch of "what do you thinks" with a public opinion poll. It'll be total regurgitation of things we've seen in these threads for the past 4 months.

As for McCain... he was for economic stimulus, he was for staying in Iraq, he wasn't gonna go transparent, he wasn't gonna close Gitmo, etc. So, Obama is giving you nothing different than what yhe GOP candidate was gonna give anyway - one would think that would make the GOPers happy based on Obama's actual policy action. But nope. Don't wanna admit Obama is doing what McCain would have done anyway


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C'mon just answere the questions.

[theanalogkid]

Originally Posted by TheRealist

So, for all the libertarians here... (from what I can tell analog/conviction for sure)

If the U.S. had not been so heavily bogged down in debt previous to this recession (let's say only 10% of GDP circa late 2007), would you have considered the stimulus justified? Or is a stimulus never justifiable according to your rationale?

Not debating, just curious.

No, you have to ask yourself what is the stimulus really trying to do? It's trying to stop a market correction from happening. It's really only prolonging the suffering, and any jobs created by it are really temporary and most come from the government.

No stimulus would have been needed because this disaster was completely avoidable.

No the CRA didn't cause this mess, nor were the Democrats solely blamable.

Who was really at fault.

The government had poor oversight, the CDO and CMO markets were not regulated at all, and there was no transparency. None of the companies had to disclose how much of these securities they were holding. As a result the credit freeze happened because no bank knew how much another bank was holding, and they wouldn't even do overnight lending because they had no idea if the bank was going to go under the next day.

The people who defaulted on their mortgages are also to blame. Some defaulted cause they lost their job, I can't really put the blame on them too much other than they should have saved up enough money to cover themselves if they were in between jobs. The people however who decided they wanted more house than they could afford went and got mortgages with the thought that the worse that was going to happen is they'd have to sell the house, because at that point homes kept their value pretty much, and no one figured houses could drop in price.

There were also people who got 0% down mortgages. Usually you put down 10-20% in cash on a mortgages, but these people were getting a loan from another company and using that as the down payment.

Then there were the people with the No Doc or NINJA mortgages, where you wouldn't have to prove you made X amount of $, or had any assets, you just had to say I make a lot of money and have a lot of assets, but I don't want to prove it to you so I'll just pay higher fees and take a higher interest rate. There was wide spread fraud with these loan officers, who would write down stuff that wasn't true, but made the person look like they were an acceptable risk.

Did the banks even care, no they didn't, because they would just sell the loan off to someone else, so it didn't matter if they defaulted they were off the hook.

Ever see those 80 year old people getting thrown out of their houses awhile back on TV? Well they aren't victims they did it to themselves. They took out large Home Equity Loans on the inflated values of there houses with the thought they would just sell the house if they couldn't make the payments. Well the house prices dropped so they couldn't pay off the loan even if they sold the house. It's their own fault.

Banks are largely responsible. People like to blame the CRA here and say the government forced these people to give out loans to people that shouldn't have had them. It's crap. These banks didn't care if they were making these loans, they'd sell them off to other banks or institutions like Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. They also didn't not understand the risk of a CMO or CDO and those that did that spoke up at places like Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers were fired. Even people in government when the whole effort to get people into homes was started back in the 90s were forced out of government when they wanted oversight by people like Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. There wasn't much arm twisting of the Bush Administration either when the banks wanted the rules changed for Subprime lending.

What's the worst thing the people in these banks thought was going to happen. They'd be fired, but after making millions so it didn't matter.

I seriously doubt there won't be another financial meltdown, the CMO and CDO markets are still unregulated, and the banks will just pay off the politicians to water down the regulations that are being talked about in Congress.

[RicoVacilon]

So who thinks we need a redundant thread?

[Nevada_Ballin]

Originally Posted by R-ILLA

C'mon just answere the questions.

My very first sentence answered the questions.


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[RicoVacilon]

Originally Posted by Nevada_Ballin

i think he's doing the best he can with what he got coming into office.

Here's his first sentence for the lazy ones. . .

I will respond to his first sentence--on the big issues he may be doing the best he can with what he got, but there are other issues not getting as much press that he has failed miserably on. Patriot Act, torture, continuing the war on the same schedule Bush had, etc. I'm not too cool with that.

[conviction]

Originally Posted by TheRealist

So, for all the libertarians here... (from what I can tell analog/conviction for sure)

If the U.S. had not been so heavily bogged down in debt previous to this recession (let's say only 10% of GDP circa late 2007), would you have considered the stimulus justified? Or is a stimulus never justifiable according to your rationale?

Not debating, just curious.

Well my basis of opinions usually land on the Libertarian view but I wouldn't count out a stimulus in different situations. I think a stimulus should be used to just stimulate the economy, but we would have to do it on a basis where we could recover the debt. Sometimes the economy needs a kick start but you cant live off an debt-consuming economy