presidency

Kent Snyder, Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign manager and the man credited with pushing Paul into running for President, died at the age of 49 just two weeks after Paul ended his 2008 bid.

Like the man in Blitzer's example, the 49-year-old Snyder (pictured) was relatively young and seemingly healthy* when the illness struck. He was also uninsured. When he died on June 26, 2008, two weeks after Paul withdrew his first bid for the presidency, his hospital costs amounted to $400,000. The bill was handed to Snyder's surviving mother (pictured, left), who was incapable of paying. Friends launched a website to solicit donations.

So where was the personal responsibility here? Not only the responsibility of Snyder, as Paul would say, but the responsibility of Ron Paul himself? Paul brought in $35 million during his 2008 run and employed 250 people, yet he couldn’t give them health insurance? According to Ron Paul his own campaign would be a burden on the system.

This is another example of how people believe anything they are told. They believe Ron Paul has all these great ideas, yet apparently Ron Paul doesn’t even believe so since he doesn’t live up to them. Ron Paul is nothing but another fraud in the broken American political system.

In a time where the big discussion is rather or not we should extend tax cuts to the top 2% of earners in the country, this is what’s happening:

The poverty rate rose to 14.3 percent during 2009 from 13.2 percent the previous year as household income stayed flat and the number of people without health insurance reached its highest level since such data has been collected, the government announced Thursday.

The first year of Barack Obama's presidency started with 700,000 people losing their jobs each month and sensational reports of formerly middle-class families crowding tent cities across the country. The tent cities, it turned out, were there before the recession started, but the rise in poverty was real: For working age people between 18 and 64, 2009 saw the highest poverty rate -- 12.9 percent -- since 1965.

Remember all the crap about “redistribution of wealth” from the 2008 campaign? Well it’s still going on, but not in the way Republicans portrayed it.

The lowest tax levels since 1950?

Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.

Some conservative political movements such as the "Tea Party" have criticized federal spending as being out of control. While spending is up, taxes have fallen to exceptionally low levels.

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

So go ahead baggers and protest the Democrats and their “high taxes”. And let’s have the Republicans out there saying “the Republican Party will lower your taxes”. We all know the truth that historically the party that has raised taxes is the Republican Party, unless you happen to be in that top 2% of the economic wealth of our nation. Of course most of those people are out there saying they should be paying more in taxes.

Last night Sean Hannity went on a tirade complaining that President Obama took three months to decide on his troop increase and even said that this is the first increase the President has committed to Afghanistan.

Hannity somehow seems to forget the 17,000 additional troops that were ordered to Afghanistan only three weeks into the Obama presidency. That’s really supportive of our fighting men and women to just totally ignore their efforts. That’s Sean Hannity – troop hating douche bag.

This is bipartisanship you can believe in:

Former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel will soon have a new role in the Obama administration, he will be named co-chair of President's Intelligence Advisory Board.

In that capacity, Hagel will be charged with overseeing the work of the intelligence agencies for the president and investigating violations of law by the clandestine community. The panel, formerly known as the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, was renamed and stripped of some of its powers in 2008 by the George W. Bush administration.

Hagel never endorsed Obama or Arizona Senator John McCain for the presidency, but he often spoke out on in favor of Obama's foreign policy ideas during the campaign and his wife endorsed Obama just before the election.

Hagel is a very strong pick when it comes to foreign policy. I’m sure a lot of Republicans are seething over this, but let them. Hagel is a Republican and one who came to their senses about the Iraq War. He’s willing to go against the party if he feels something is right, and that’s the kind of leadership we need.

I was just reading Cohen’s latest piece of crap-o-la over at the WaPo. First let’s start with this:

Attorney General Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to see whether any of the CIA's interrogators broke the law. Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators -- they don't know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail -- a wee bit of torture right there. No CIA interrogator can feel safe. The interrogators are about to be interrogated.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, didn’t put Miller in jail – the judge did. Did Cohen forget the very basics of how our justice system operates? Miller was held for contempt of court, and as with any crime a judge passes down the punishment.

But it gets better:

No one can possibly believe that America is now safer because of the new restrictions on enhanced interrogation and the subsequent appointment of a special prosecutor. The captured terrorist of my fertile imagination, assuming he had access to an Internet cafe, knows about the special prosecutor. He knows his interrogator is under scrutiny. What person under those circumstances is going to spill his beans?

America is less safe now? I just got thinking that we are 11 days from marking the attacks and thought of something this would really symbolize. On 9/11 this year we can celebrate the fact that Barack Obama has been able to keep us safer longer into his presidency than Bush. We can twist things on our side too and celebrate that. Barack Obama was able to protect his nation past the 9 month mark. Could Bush do that? No.

I had noticed that Rasmussen seemed to change their way they track presidential approvals once Obama took office.

Rasmussen had always had a variable approval rating system. They ask if you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove or strongly disapprove of the President’s performance. On the surface that doesn’t seem to bad, but during Bush’s term they always combined both approval numbers and disapproval numbers and used that. I remember during Katrina people making a deal over Bush having a 46% approval from Rasmussen, but a vast majority of that number came from the “somewhat approve” category – something people trend more to state.

Now during Obama’s presidency they have changed it. Instead they take the different between strongly approve and strongly disapprove and that is their new “presidential index”. Let’s take today’s numbers:

Obama is given a –12 approval index. That sounds really bad, but if this was done under Bush’s term then Rasmussen would be saying Bush has a 48% approval rating. The later sounds much better.

Sure Obama’s numbers are in trouble right now, but that’s to be expected. People seem out to compare this to the same point in Bush’s presidency. Well at this point in Bush’s first term he was on vacation, something he did quiet a bit. It’s much safer for a President to not do anything, than one being active and trying to fix all the problems he was left with.

A new PEW Research poll is out showing that President Obama is more “polarizing” than any other President.

The poll finds that Obama has very high approval from Democrats, 88 percent, and very low approval from Republicans, 27 percent.
The 61-point partisan gap eclipses George W. Bush’s 51-point gap in his first year, and that was after the long recount and simmering charges from Democrats that Bush stole the 2000 election.

And what serious problems did George Bush deal with at this point in his presidency – using a driver or an iron? President Obama has had to deal with one of the worse economic times in our history, and still remains highly popular. And so what if Republicans aren’t happy. THEY LOST. They have seen the biggest decline of numbers of any party in our nation’s history, and it isn’t looking any better for them. The Republican Party is insignificant.

Of course we can expect the talking heads to paint this poll as proof of major failure for Obama.