Obama the 4th Best President in History

[onmyknees]

No narrative needed.

I'm the fourth best president in American history ~ Barack Obama - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxvSjDkF7HE&feature=player_embedded)

[Dino Velvet]

Of Haiti???

[Faldur]

President of the country club?

[Erika1487]

Wow I guess he really is so full of shit he can't see the forest for the trees! It makes me feel sooooo much safer knowing he has his hand on the 'red phone' :smh The good news is it's less than yr to he is out of office.

[trish]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/bruni-newt-gingrichs-self-adoration.html

[trish]

Any one can make up a cartoonish chart. They're designed to reconfirm and solidify opinions you're already predisposed toward. The trick not allowing that to happen to yourself. It's very difficult to resist. The best thing to do is simply not propagate propaganda.

[Stavros]

Trish -brilliant...but shouldn't that be Conservative strategies to rescue Conservatism from failure? I dont see much connection between Christianity and the conservatives in the US, but I understand the points you are trying to make.

[thombergeron]

The video clip you mistakenly posted quotes Obama as saying, "I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history."

Forgive me for being all literal and pedantic, but where's the video clip of Barack Obama claiming to be the "4th best president in history"?

Also, seems to me that "modern" would disinclude the 18th century.

[Ben]

I don't consider this "tracking" poll good news or bad news. I remain ambivalent about Obama. Didn't expect anything from him or his administration. I knew he was being deceitful with all that hope and change.
And Sarah Palin was right.

Sarah Palin: "How's That Hopey-Changey Stuff Working Out For Ya?" - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y02iZcTjHo)

Gallup: Obama job approval surges

By BYRON TAU (http://www.politico.com/reporters/ByronTau.html) | 12/26/11 3:40 PM EST


According to the latest Gallup tracking poll, more Americans approve of the job that President Obama (http://www.politico.com/tag/barackobama) is doing than disapprove for the first time since this summer.
The latest Gallup survey shows that 47 percent of Americans now say they approve of the way that President Obama is handling his job. This is a 5 percent improvement since the Dec. 16-18 Gallup survey (http://www.politico.com/politico44/2011/12/poll-roundup-obama-up-congress-down-108103.html) and marks the first time the president's numbers have been in positive territory since July. The number of Americans who say they disapprove of Obama's job performance has fallen to 45 percent, down 5 points from Dec. 16-18.
The trend lines are good news for President Obama's team, with his Gallup numbers slowly climbing this month. It's too soon to draw sweeping conclusions, but it seems that the standoff with House Republicans (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70782.html) over the payroll tax cut did no damage at all to the president — and a further climb in the polls could mean that the White House won a significant public relations victory (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70803.html) during the payroll tax cut debate.

[russtafa]

President of the country club?what's he polling in the popularity polls?Our shit head prime minister is dragging her ass in the polls

[Ben]

what's he polling in the popularity polls?Our shit head prime minister is dragging her ass in the polls

People shouldn't expect much from politicians. I mean, Americans were so irrational with respect to Obama. Exceedingly irrational. I mean, one only had to do a basic research project and look at his history and background and voting record. He was and is the antithesis of hope and change. It was a meaningless catchphrase.
All politicians lie. It's part of their core job description.
Don't know much about Julia Gillard. All I know: she doesn't support same-sex marriage.
She simply serves the institution of government. Like any other politician. Government is about one thing and one thing only. Power. And what do governments want? More power. Which essentially means: she doesn't serve you or I.... Enough said....

[Ben]

Daniel Craig: Pols are 'sh**heads'

http://images.politico.com/global/2011/12/111226_daniel_craig_605_ap.jpg 'That’s how they become politicians, even the good ones,' Daniel Craig said. | AP Photo


By TIM MAK (http://www.politico.com/reporters/TimMak.html) | 12/26/11 11:03 AM EST
Actor Daniel Craig put on a display of straight-talk that might have endeared him to voters had he been on the campaign trail, telling Men’s Journal that politicians are “sh**heads” who “stab you in the f**king back.”
“Politicians are sh*theads,” he said in an interview that appears in the January edition of the magazine, which is on newsstands now. “That’s how they become politicians, even the good ones. We’re actors, we’re artists, we’re very nice to each other. They’ll turn around and stab you in the f**cking back.”
Craig said that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had done unprecedented outreach to celebrities, but that he had turned off to the idea.
“Tony Blair started it much more than anybody’s ever done. ‘Go and have tea at 10 Downing Street’,” he said. “…You immediately are aligning yourself with a political party.”
The “James Bond” and “Girl With A Dragon Tattoo” actor said that he doesn’t have the grasp of knowledge to articulately speak on politics, unlike fellow actor George Clooney.
“George has his finger on the political pulse, and he’s one of those guys who can get up and talk, and I don’t have that,” Craig said. “If someone shoves a microphone in your face and says, ‘Explain yourself,’ you have to have a 100 percent understanding of why you’re doing it, and unless you’re 100 percent, don’t f**king do it, leave it alone, let your work speak for itself.”
Craig also talks about what’s it’s like to be under a microscope because of his celebrity.
“I’m not a politician - you don’t need to know everything about me, you don’t get to see my tax returns,” he says. “If you sell yourself and give yourself up and share your innermost secrets, don’t be surprised when that bites you in the end.”

[Ben]

Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles

by Glenn Greenwald
GuardianUK...
Tuesday 27 December 2011 20.00 GMT

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/12/27/1325014009721/Illustration-by-Belle-Mel-007.jpg

Illustration by Belle Mellor


American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.
The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.
In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/23/us-usa-campaign-romney-poll-idUSTRE7AM1N920111123)), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.
In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.
In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/obama-the-moderate-conservative/) in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".
Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).
How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically?
But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election.
It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.
But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-cheney-fallacy); waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens (http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/obama-defends-awlaki-assassination) far from any battlefield and without due process?
Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney (http://www.salon.com/2011/01/18/cheney_72/), have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy (http://www.salon.com/2011/11/13/gop_and_tp_on_obamas_foreign_policy_successes/singleton/) question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.
In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.

[onmyknees]

Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president

Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles

by Glenn Greenwald
GuardianUK...
Tuesday 27 December 2011 20.00 GMT

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/12/27/1325014009721/Illustration-by-Belle-Mel-007.jpg

Illustration by Belle Mellor


American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show.
The Republican presidential primaries – shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November – has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president.
In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/23/us-usa-campaign-romney-poll-idUSTRE7AM1N920111123)), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest.
In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.
In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/obama-the-moderate-conservative/) in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".
Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).
How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically?
But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election.
It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.
But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-cheney-fallacy); waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens (http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/obama-defends-awlaki-assassination) far from any battlefield and without due process?
Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney (http://www.salon.com/2011/01/18/cheney_72/), have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy (http://www.salon.com/2011/11/13/gop_and_tp_on_obamas_foreign_policy_successes/singleton/) question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.
In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.



Ben....it becomes tedious after awhile for moderate fiscal conservatives, and social libertarians to hear Greenwald and Krugman tell us Obama is one of us. Krugman, Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Frank Rich, Tom Hartman, Tom Friedman, and every staff writer at the NY Times can tell me every day from now until Nov. 2012 that Obama's a Republican moderate, and we ain't buyin' it. I hope Obama and Greenwald are not counting on any cross over "moderate" Republican votes, because they're going to be very disappointed.
But the underlying premise is false: Obama is moderate because some of his proposals are less extreme than his other policies??? Surely, a flat income tax would be less sweeping than eliminating the income tax. It’s doubtful, though, that Greenwald would describe a flat-tax GOP president as “moderate.”

[Ben]

U.S. Troop Withdrawal Motivated by Iraqi Insistence, Not U.S. Choice
by Yochi J. Dreazen (http://www.nationaljournal.com/reporters/bio/21)
Updated: October 22, 2011 | 10:12 a.m.
October 21, 2011 | 1:42 p.m.

http://cdn-media.nationaljournal.com/?controllerName=image&action=get&id=12526&format=homepage_fullwidth (http://cdn-media.nationaljournal.com/?controllerName=image&action=get&id=12526&width=990&height=) Evan Vucci/AP
President Obama speaks in the briefing room of the White House on Friday.

President Obama’s speech formally declaring that the last 43,000 U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year was designed to mask an unpleasant truth: The troops aren’t being withdrawn because the U.S. wants them out. They’re leaving because the Iraqi government refused to let them stay.
Obama campaigned on ending the war in Iraq but had instead spent the past few months trying to extend it. A 2008 security deal between Washington and Baghdad called for all American forces to leave Iraq by the end of the year, but the White House -- anxious about growing Iranian influence and Iraq’s continuing political and security challenges -- publicly and privately tried to sell the Iraqis on a troop extension. As recently as last week, the White House was trying to persuade the Iraqis to allow 2,000-3,000 troops to stay beyond the end of the year.
Those efforts had never really gone anywhere; one senior U.S. military official told National Journal last weekend that they were stuck at “first base” because of Iraqi reluctance to hold substantive talks.
That impasse makes Obama’s speech at the White House on Friday less a dramatic surprise than simple confirmation of what had long been expected by observers of the moribund talks between the administration and the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which believes its own security forces are more than up to the task of protecting the country from terror attacks originating within its borders or foreign incursions from neighboring countries.
The White House said Obama was pleased with the coming troop withdrawal because it kept to his “core commitment” – frequently enunciated during the campaign – of pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year. “We never wanted a residual force in Iraq,” a senior administration official insisted.
In Washington, many Republican lawmakers had spent recent weeks criticizing Obama for offering to keep a maximum of 3,000 troops in Iraq, far less than the 10,000-15,000 recommended by top American commanders in Iraq. That political point-scoring helped obscure that the choice wasn’t Obama’s to make. It was the Iraqis’, and recent interviews with officials in the country provided vivid evidence of just how unpopular the U.S. military presence there has become -- and just how badly the Iraqi political leadership wanted those troops to go home.
Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, for instance, is a hugely pro-American politician who believes Iraq's security forces will be incapable of protecting the country without sustained foreign assistance. But in a recent interview, he refused to endorse a U.S. troop extension and instead indicated that they should leave.
"We have serious security problems in this country and serious political problems," he said in an interview late last month at his heavily guarded compound in Baghdad. "Keeping Americans in Iraq longer isn't the answer to the problems of Iraq. It may be an answer to the problems of the U.S., but it's definitely not the solution to the problems of my country."
Shiite leaders -- including many from Maliki’s own Dawa Party -- were even more strongly opposed, with followers of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatening renewed violence if any American troops stayed past the end of the year. The Sadr threat was deeply alarming to Iraqis just beginning to rebuild their lives and their country after the bloody sectarian strife which ravaged Iraq for the past eight and a half years.
The only major Iraqi political bloc that was willing to speak publicly about a troop extension was the Kurdish alliance which governs the country’s north and has long had a testy relationship with Maliki and the country’s Sunni and Shia populations. But even Kurdish support was far from monolithic: Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish lawmaker considered one of the most pro-American members of parliament, said in a recent interview that he wanted the U.S. troops out.
"Personally, I no longer want them to stay," Othman said. "It's been eight years. I don't think having Americans stay in Iraq will improve the situation at all. Leaving would be better for them and for us. It's time for us to go our separate ways."
The opposition from across Iraq’s political spectrum meant that Maliki would have needed to mount a Herculean effort to persuade the fractious parliament to sign off on any troop extension deals. His closest advisers conceded that such a deal would have virtually no chance of passing.
“Passing a new agreement now in the parliament would be very difficult, if not impossible,” Sadiq al-Ribaki, who heads Maliki’s political bloc in parliament and has long been one of his closest political advisers, said in a recent interview. “It’s a nonstarter for most of the parties and MPs.”
Maliki himself said in a recent Reuters interview that U.S. troops could only remain in Iraq if they had no immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, an absolute nonstarter with the Pentagon. The hundreds of U.S. troops who will be left behind to guard the mammoth American embassy in Baghdad and its consulates in Erbil and Basra -- and to man an embassy office dedicated to weapons sales to the Iraqis -- will have limited diplomatic immunity. Even so, American civilian officials will primarily be guarded by private security contractors, not U.S. troops. The State Department has talked of hiring as many as 8,000 such guards.
Obama’s Iraq remarks glossed over America's unpopularity in Iraq and his own administration’s failed efforts to sell the Iraqis on a troop extension.
“The last American soldier will cross the border from Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success and knowing the American people stand united in our support for our troops,” Obama said. “Today I can say that our troops in Iraq will definitely be home for the holidays.”
That will undoubtedly be a good thing for the troops and their families, who have endured years of separation and constant fears of losing loved ones to the grinding conflict. The final withdrawals could also help salve some of the still-gaping political wounds left by the Bush administration’s initial decision to launch the invasion, a war which has been opposed by most Americans virtually from the start of the conflict in March 2003.
Ironically, a war launched, at least in part, to bring democracy and political freedom to Iraq will now come to an end precisely because of the free expression of those opinions. Iraqis from all backgrounds and beliefs wanted U.S. troops to leave. Come Dec. 31, for better or for worse, they’ll get their wish.

[Ben]

Obama's Сhange: From kidnapping & torture to assassination - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMOp1tk5Z5o)

[SWM4TS]

The video clip you mistakenly posted quotes Obama as saying, "I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history."

Forgive me for being all literal and pedantic, but where's the video clip of Barack Obama claiming to be the "4th best president in history"?

Also, seems to me that "modern" would disinclude the 18th century.

Couldn't have said it better. There really is no need for someone to complicate matters with misleading youtube title's and texts that are not represented in the video. Misdirection and spin should be left to the politicians and media, they do more than enough, no need for the general public to aid in this.

[Ben]

Who’s a real progressive? (http://www.salon.com/2012/01/10/what_makes_a_progressive_president/singleton)

Obama and Paul both hold positions anathema to liberals. Voters need to choose which ones to overlook

By David Sirota (http://entertainment.99.salon.com/writer/david_sirota/)

http://media.salon.com/2012/01/paul-obama-copy-460x307.jpg Ron Paul and Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton/AP

It’s rather sad that nearly every article written by a non-libertarian about Ron Paul begins with a disclaimer that the writer is not endorsing Paul for president. Yet, with a virulent case of Ron Paul Derangement Syndrome plaguing partisan Obama loyalists, it bears repeating if only to preempt future mischaracterizations and slander: I am not endorsing Ron Paul for president.
That said, I believe the argument being forwarded by progressive-minded Paul supporters is significant because it embodies a calculating pragmatism that highlights uncomfortable truths both about liberal priorities and about presidential power.
To review the basic Paul profile: When it comes to government social spending and regulation, Paul is more antithetical to progressive goals than any candidate running for the White House. This is indisputable. At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare and civil liberties, Paul is more in line with progressive goals than any candidate running in 2012 (or almost any Democrat who has held a federal office in the last 30 years). This, too, is indisputable.
In seeing Paul’s economic views, positions on a woman’s right to choose, regulatory ideas and ties to racist newsletters (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/ron-paul-newsletter-controversy-15236337) as disqualifying factors for their electoral support, many self-identified liberal Obama supporters are essentially deciding that, for purposes of voting, those set of issues are simply more important to them than the issues of war, foreign policy, militarism, Wall Street bailouts, surveillance, police power and civil liberties — that is, issues in which Paul is far more progressive than the sitting president.
There’s certainly a logic to that position, and that logic fits within the conventionally accepted rubric of progressivism. But let’s not pretend here: Holding this position about what is and is not a disqualifying factor is a clear statement of priorities — more specifically, a statement that Paul’s odious economics, regulatory ideas, position on reproductive rights and ties to bigotry should be more electorally disqualifying than President Obama’s odious escalation of wars, drone killing of innocents, due-process-free assassinations, expansion of surveillance, increases in the defense budget (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2010/02/too_big_to_fail.html), massive ongoing bank bailouts and continuation of the racist drug war.
By contrast, Paul’s progressive-minded supporters are simply taking the other position — they are basically saying that, for purposes of voting, President Obama’s record on militarism, civil liberties, foreign policy, defense budgets and bailouts are more disqualifying than Paul’s newsletter, economics, abortion and regulatory positions. Again, there’s an obvious logic to this position — one that also fits well within the conventional definition of progressivism. And just as Obama supporters shouldn’t pretend they aren’t expressing their preferences, Paul’s supporters shouldn’t do that either. Their support of the Republican congressman is a statement of personal priorities within the larger progressive agenda.
Hence, we reach one of those impossible questions: From a progressive perspective, which is a more legitimate camp to be in? In terms of ideological allegiance to the larger progressive agenda, I don’t really think there’s a right or wrong answer. But in terms of realpolitik, there’s a strong case to be made that Paul’s progressive-minded supporters understand something that Obama’s supporters either can’t or don’t want to: namely, that a presidential election is a vote for president, not a vote to elect the entire federal government. As such, when faced with candidates whom you agree with on some issues and totally disagree with on other issues, it’s perfectly rational — and wholly pragmatic — to consider one’s own multifaceted policy preferences in the context of what a prospective president will have the most unilateral power to actually enact.
With Paul, it just so happens that most of the ultra-progressive parts of his platform (and legislative career) correspond to the presidential powers that are most unilateral in nature. As President Obama so aptly proved when he ignored the War Powers Act (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june11/warpowers1_06-15.html) during the Libya conflict and started drone wars in various other countries, a president can start and end military conflicts with the stroke of a pen — and without any congressional check on power. Likewise, as President Obama showed when he assassinated American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and then his family (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/18/us-yemen-awlaki-idUSTRE79H71E20111018) without so much as a single criminal charge, a president can now trample or expand civil liberties with the stroke of the same pen. The president also appoints the chairman of the Federal Reserve bank, which now unilaterally grants trillions of dollars in bailouts without intervention from Congress. And, as President Obama proved with his administration’s crackdown (http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/10/california_medical_marijuana_crackdown.php) on California’s marijuana laws, a president has far more operational control over the drug war than the congressional committees charged with oversight.
By contrast, the policy areas where Paul is most at odds with progressives are the areas Congress has far more control over — specifically, budgets and regulatory statutes.
So, for instance, Paul’s radical proposals to eliminate major social programs are certainly objectionable, and, if he were president, those proposals would certainly have an impact on the overall political debate. But the Constitution mandates (http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec9.html) that the federal budget is the purview of Congress. That explains why the final budget so often looks so different from the budget initially proposed by the president — and why a President Paul wouldn’t be able to do to the budget what he could do unilaterally to, say, America’s war policy. Likewise, President Paul may want to get rid of civil rights and clean water regulations, and his executive power over appointments and agency rule-making could certainly do great harm to the enforcement of those important regulations. But again, unlike wars, civil liberties, bailouts and domestic police power, Congress has far more control over those regulatory statutes than any single president — and additionally, many of those statutes permit private legal action (suing, etc.) as an (albeit, imperfect) means of enforcement.
Of course, an Obama supporter might argue that the set of issues they can agree with Paul on are less monumental than the set of issues they agree with Obama on. But don’t mistake such a conversation-ending declaration as fact. On the contrary, it’s merely a subjective opinion — and a debatable one at that. Indeed, Paul supporters would make a compelling case that it’s exactly the opposite — that the progressive side of Paul’s program relates to more pressing issues than Obama’s progressive positions in this, the age of multitrillion-dollar bailouts, deficit-exploding defense budgets, assaults on the most basic tenets of the Bill of Rights and what the Pentagon now calls “the era of persistent conflict” (http://www.army.mil/aps/08/strategic_context/strategic_context.html) (read: Permanent War). And they have a strong case to make that by virtue of the modern presidency Paul would be guaranteed to actually enact the progressive parts of his program, whereas the progressive parts of President Obama’s program are more a question of congressional politics (a good example of that truism was the healthcare bill, which went from a mildly progressive White House proposal to a public-option-free boondoggle (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-05/health-insurer-profit-rises-as-obama-s-health-law-supplies-revenue-boost.html) for the insurance and drug industries by the time Obama and his lobbyist friends (http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-na-healthcare-pharma4-2009aug04,0,3660985.story) finished massaging it through Congress).
In holding this pragmatic view, it doesn’t mean Paul’s progressive-minded supporters believe in the reactionary tenets of Paul’s agenda (eliminating major social programs, opposing civil rights laws, ending all taxes, having a history associated with racist newsletters, etc.) any more than it means Obama’s progressive-minded supporters are thrilled with all of the president’s ultra-conservative actions (wars, mass killing of civilians, trampling of civil liberties, bank bailouts, a racist drug war, etc.). It only means that there’s a calculation at work — one that takes into account the realities of presidential power.
Is this calculation reasonable, or at least defensible within the progressive coalition? I’d say yes (even though, again, I’m not endorsing Paul). To paraphrase the most standard apologia Democratic partisans use to defend President Obama (one overused with regard to Obama, IMHO), a president is not a Superman or a savior — on the issues in which he doesn’t have unilateral control, he has to work with Congress and therefore isn’t always the sole “decider” of policy outcomes. That’s especially the case at a moment when Washington is more gridlocked than ever.
Faced with that reality, and sick of a political system that is paralyzed by the Manichaean blood sport of red-versus-blue, many voters of all stripes are focusing primarily on the issues that the president has total control over. These issues, after all, are hardly insignificant — and they are the ones a presidential election can instantly change.
Paul’s progressive supporters seem to understand that truism, while many Obama supporters find it too inconvenient to acknowledge. That’s fine. In fact, that’s what democracy is all about — the freedom to make your own choice. But don’t think the choice being made by Paul’s supporters is so obvious a progressive litmus test when the same reductionism used to tar and feather those supporters (“they’re racist because of his newsletters!”) could be used against Obama backers (“they’re baby killers because of the president’s wars!”).
Despite media hype and activists’ glib talking points, such election choices between imperfect candidates are not so simple, nor should they be when a truly informed vote means factoring in the unspoken nuances of presidential power.

[trish]

Here’s an interesting article by Andrew Sullivan (who was and still is an avid Reagan supporter).

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html

Below is chart of the Non Farm Payrolls in the U.S. (NFP) from Jan/2001 to Jan/2012. NFP has alway been and is considered a significant economic indicator. You can see the NFP plummet has the end of the Bush administration. No, the graph is not included to prove it’s all Bush’s fault. Rather the chart nicely displays how the current administration saved us from depression and has kept us above water. The later progress is admittedly slow over the last two years, but then that’s when the GOP took over the house.

[stimpy17]

I think I'd rather have a real man at the helm of this country insted of a golf playing apologist.

[hippifried]

They all play golf, spud.