150 Reasons Why Barack Obama Is the Worst President in History (12 page)

102.
Illegal Scientific Exchanges With China

It took 22 years for the United States to develop and deploy the new F-22 Raptor. The F-22 is a superb aircraft which looked likely to maintain U.S. aerial superiority for a decade or two in to the future. But, in September of 2012, China unveiled two new fighter jets which bear an uncanny resemblance to the American F-22.
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How did China do it?

They got the technology from us.

China gets technology this by any means necessary. They’ll buy it when its for sale and steal it when its not.
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Congress has said our military technology is not for sale. Obama, by his actions, says that it is.

Not only has Obama facilitated scientific contacts between the United States and China, but he has facilitated
illegal
scientific exchanges between the United States and China.
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In 2011, Congress, as part of a spending bill, prohibited using government funds to pay for scientific exchanges between the United States and Chinese governments. Obama’s Administration ignored Congress, claiming that a prohibition on the use of federal funds for something does not prohibit federal employees doing it anyway. Obama may not be above using faulty logic to get what he wants, but that doesn’t mean the Obama Administration didn’t break the law. But it’s even worse knowing they broke the law to help China—and there is no good explanation for wanting to do that.

103.
Failure to Hold Bankers Accountable

Many Americans wonder why no bankers have gone to jail over the events which lead to our financial meltdown in 2008. While Americans were losing jobs and their home values were collapsing, the bankers got bailed out and started awarding themselves huge bonuses. It all appeared rather unfair, as if someone were getting special treatment.

And, it seems, the bankers
were
getting special treatment. Cronyism inside the Department of Justice, and political donations made to the Obama campaign are the likely reasons for Barack Obama and Attorney General Holder’s failure to criminally charge any Wall Street bankers, according to a report by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI).
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One of Holder’s deputy Attorney Generals actually had $20 million worth of work
done
for the ill-famed AIG Insurance firm at the heart of the 2008 financial crash.
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Obama was also collecting more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates for president.

From the GAI report:

In the weeks before and after the Senate report on Goldman Sachs, several Goldman executives and their families made contributions to Obama’s Victory Fund and related entities, and some contributors maxed out at the largest individual donation allowed, $35,800. Five senior Goldman Sachs executives wrote more than $130,000 in checks to the Obama Victory Fund. Two of these executives had never donated to Obama before and had previously only given small donations to individual candidates.
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For Obama, the line between right and wrong is on a check made out to his campaign. As long as it is signed, and there are a lot of zeros on it, nothing is wrong.

104.
Operation Fast and Furious

Project Gunrunner was a project of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive (ATF) designed to track and interrupt the flow of American firearms to Mexican drug cartels. Operations began under the Bush Administration and were continued under the Obama Administration. Operation Fast and Furious (2009-2011) was the largest gunwalking operation under the project, delivering roughly 2,000 firearms across the border. But, the operation was seriously compromised, the ATF lost track of hundreds of firearms, and an unknown number of these firearms would later be linked to various crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry.
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The Mexican government claims at least 150 Mexicans have been killed or wounded with “Fast and Furious” weapons and that not a single cartel leader has been caught using one.
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Naturally, the Obama Administration tried to cover it up. They even tried blaming President Bush for the operation, even though Operation Fast and Furious started nine months into Obama’s term.
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Attorney General Eric Holder even claimed to have no knowledge of the operation. When a congressional investigation took place, Obama asserted executive privilege and refused to provide any documents about it, resulting in an historic vote by Congress to hold the Attorney General in contempt, which passed with bipartisan support.
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The first congressional report on the investigation released in July of 2012 faulted five ATF employees for the botched operation.
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The Justice Department claimed vindication, but a second report, released at the end of October, found several failures of the Justice Department as well.
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A third report on the Justice Department’s obstruction of the investigation has yet to be completed.

At least 150 people, including Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, were murdered with firearms provided by the U.S. Government. Obama and Holder have not only lied about the operation, but have done whatever they can to stonewall the investigation. So much for transparency.

105.
Protecting A Corrupt Senator

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was reelected in 2012 despite late-breaking allegations that he paid underage prostitutes for sex in the Dominican Republic.
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In 2009, Republican Chris Christie narrowly defeated the scandal-plagued incumbent governor Jon Corzine, so the risk of the Democrats losing a valuable Senate seat was very real in 2012 with Menendez on the ballot.

The underage prostitution scandal may have broken too late to swing the election, but Menendez avoided another scandal in late October with the help of the Obama Administration.

Menendez had employed a Peruvian intern on his campaign who was not only an illegal immigrant, but a registered sex offender. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had planned to arrest and deport him on October 25, but was asked by the Department of Homeland Security to delay the arrest until after the election, thus saving Menendez from another scandal that could have swung the election against him.
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106.
Obama’s Enemies List

What is so bad about making it on to Obama’s Enemies List? Lots of things, not least of which is the fact that President Obama controls the investigative powers of the Executive Branch.

Frank Vandersloot learned this the hard way. Vandersloot donated a substantial amount of money to the Republican Party early in 2012, and apparently, this was brought to the attention of President Obama and his minions. Named on Obama’s Enemies List in April of 2012, Mr. Vandersloot suddenly found himself the target of both IRS and Department of Labor audits – the IRS looking into his taxes while the Department of Labor looked in to the visa status of the workers on his Idaho cattle ranch.

Another individual on Obama’s Enemies List was top Romney donor Sheldon Adelson. In the summer of 2012, Obama’s Justice Department began an investigation of alleged money laundering by several executives of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, owned by Adelson.
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Were these just coincidences, or an attempt to scare off others who might want to donate to Obama’s opponents?

107.
Pay to Play

Presidents giving ambassadorships to big donors and bundlers is a common practice, and Barack Obama is no exception. Some donors outright expect such assignment as a reward for their loyalty. Just before Obama’s second term began, the
New York Times
explained,

As Mr. Obama begins his second term in the White House, the donors and bundlers who raised more than a billion dollars to get him there are pressing hard for appointments. The sheer scale of Mr. Obama’s fund-raising machine has led to an especially intense scramble for plum ambassadorships, with as many as 300 people vying for just 30 or so positions, according to several people involved in the process.
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The number of people expecting appointments is so large, rules were set up for Obama’s big donors who want a plum ambassadorship: volunteer for more than one country and be ready to serve for only two years so Obama can award the post to someone else who has donated big money.

Ambassadorships aren’t the only things that come with a price. White House access also can be bought. According to a
New York Times
analysis, about 75 percent of Obama donors who gave $100,000 or more, got to visit the White House.
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Some of them were first time donors to Obama or the Democratic Party, and their donations sometimes coincided with their visits.
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One such donor was Sanjiv Ahuja, the CEO of Lightsquared, a Virginia-based satellite broadband company. Ahuja donated more than $30,000 to the Democratic Party.
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His White House meetings often coincided with his attendance at Obama fundraisers.
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The donations also coincided with Obama’s Federal Communications Commission giving, “favorable regulatory decisions and other special treatment, while driving its competition out of business,” according to the
Daily Caller,
which obtained documents and communications on the matter.
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This kind of inappropriate pay-to-play has been a common occurrence in the Obama Administration.

The United States government has stockpiled about $1 billion in smallpox vaccines—more than sufficient to inoculate/treat the entire population of the United States should an enemy carry out a biological attack upon the United States using the smallpox virus. The government pays about $3 a dose for this. This is good—while the chances of us ever needing it is extremely low, it is nice to know it’s there. So, given this, why did Obama and his Administration aggressively push through a no-bid contract for Signa Technologies to provide 1.7 million small pox vaccine doses at $255 per dose? Plus, these particular doses, because of a variety of dangers, cannot be tested on human beings. So we don’t know if they work, at all.

As it turns out, the CEO of Siga, Ronald O. Perelman, is a long-time Democrat party donor. Andy Stern, one time boss of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which has donated about $27 million to Obama’s political campaigns also sits on the Siga board.
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The Pritzker family of Chicago have been long and generous donors to Obama. In 2011, they got a very sweet deal from the FDIC essentially forgiving them $144 million owed on a Pritzker family bank that failed back in 2001. 1,400 depositors of that bank—who were owed more than $10 million—were stiffed.
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Given all of this pay to play activity in Obama’s Administration, it appears that Obama’s 2011 executive order requiring government contractors to disclose their political donations was just a means of making it easy for Obama officials to ensure that government contracts go to those who have paid the piper.
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Since George Orwell’s dystopian novel
1984
was published, the term “Big Brother” has become synonymous with big government. The notion that anything described in the novel could happen in the United States, the land of the free, has long seemed implausible.

Barack Obama has actively sought expanded powers of domestic surveillance and has used the powers of the government to threaten and attack his political enemies in ways that would make the Inner Party of Orwell’s Oceanian society proud.

108.
Obama’s Enemies List

It’s scary to think that a president could maintain a list of private citizens for whom he would use government resources to attack, discredit, and destroy. Desperate to hold onto power, Barack Obama did just that by using a campaign fact-checking microsite to identify and vilify private citizens who were donors to Mitt Romney’s campaign. These donors were identified Twitter and disseminated via email to supporters. In one such instance, Obama tweeted a call for his supporters to demand that the Koch brothers make public the names of donors who had joined them in setting up political action committees for the 2012 campaign.
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Obama attempted to intimidate not just the Kochs, but anyone who wanted to work with them as well by getting his most rabid supporters to denounce the donors and try to make life miserable for them.

Even Democratic pollster, strategist, and commentator Douglas E. Schoen called this a “misuse of government power” which “diminishes the prestige of the Oval Office and damages our social consensus.”
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109.
White House Snitch Line

In August 2009, a rather Orwellian blog post on the official White House blog called on Obama’s supporters to submit “scary chain emails and videos,” “rumors,” “emails,” and even “casual conservation” to a specific White House email address so the Obama Administration could “keep track of all of them.”
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Later, Obama’s reelection campaign would follow suit with an “Attack Watch” page, on which registered Obama supporters could denounce their fellow Americans for expressing anti-Obama opinions.
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This was not a clearinghouse where Obama supporters could obtain talking points to refute attacks against Obama – it was a page for Obama supporters to report on fellow citizens who were speaking ill of the President. This kind of thing might be typical in countries ruled by dictators, but it is completely contrary to American values and the right of free speech.

Whether with government resources, or his campaign, Obama’s thin skin motivated him to ask his followers to treat his opponents as criminals who ought to be reported to authorities.

110.
Data Mining the American People

Even if you weren’t an Obama supporter in 2012, depending on your online activity, you may have been flagged by his campaign as a potential voter, and unwittingly provided them with personal data. According to
Politico
in March of 2012,

Obama for America has already invested millions of dollars in sophisticated Internet messaging, marketing and fundraising efforts that rely on personal data sometimes offered up voluntarily — like posts on a Facebook page— but sometimes not.

And according to a campaign official and former Obama staffer, the campaign’s Chicago-based headquarters has built a centralized digital database of information about millions of potential Obama voters.
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There was enough concern about this data-mining operation that Obama’s campaign data director had to pen an op-ed denying any Orwellian intentions.
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Ironically, Obama was doing this while talking up the need to protect the privacy of the American people on the internet.
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He is clearly more interested in protecting his power than your privacy.

111.
Increase In Electronic Government Spying

Obama, like many Democrats, was a loud and vocal opponent of the Bush Administration’s efforts to intercept communications between persons inside the United States and suspected terrorists overseas. According to them, this was a sinister attempt to eavesdrop on American citizens at random, and thus a gross violation of civil liberties.

Naturally, once Obama became president, he started to sing a different tune.

In 2010, the
New York Times
reported that the Obama Administration wanted to make it easier for the government to monitor domestic internet communications.
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According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), there has been a 64 percent growth in electronic spying by the United States government since Obama took office in 2009.
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In September of 2012, the Obama Administration argued in federal court that the public has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in cell phone location data, and that the government can obtain these records, which can detail a person’s movements as recorded by wireless carriers, without a warrant.
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Further blemishing Obama’s record on civil liberties, his Administration green lighted a giant government database of information on millions of citizens, even ones not suspected of terrorism or any crime at all.

The
Wall Street Journal
first reported on this in December 2012,

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.
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Why does Obama want to make it easier to read your email, or listen to your phone calls? For someone who once taught Constitutional law, he seems to be awfully ignorant of the Fourth Amendment.

112.
Threatening Gallup for Unfavorable Polls

Every politician seeks to control the debate; to set up coverage in the most favorable light to himself and the worst for his opponent. But when the Obama Administration was faced with a series of negative polls from Gallup during the 2012 campaign, the Obama Administration decided to teach Gallup a lesson.

Initially, David Axelrod, one of Obama’s senior advisors, had contacted Gallup to complain about Gallup’s polling methods. When Gallup defended their methods, the Department of Justice joined a lawsuit which had initially been filed against Gallup in 2009 by a disgruntled former Gallup employee.
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The screws were turned; Gallup, and all organizations, were being taught that if they didn’t do what Obama wanted, then the full power of the United States government would be directed against them.

113.
Amnesty via Executive Order

How can a man sworn to uphold the laws of the United States of America get around that oath? Well, if he lacks a certain level of honesty, then all he has to do is cook up some doublespeak to cover his actions. Obama wanted Congress to pass the DREAM Act – an act which would have allowed, among other things, the children of illegal immigrants to remain in the United States under various circumstances, effectively granting them amnesty. When Congress failed to pass the legislation, Obama was in quite a pickle: he had promised Latinos action on immigration reform and he hadn’t delivered. Meanwhile, Election Day was closing in and Latinos were expressing, in polling, a lack of enthusiasm for re-electing Obama. So, Obama decided he had the power to implement legislation unilaterally via executive fiat.

Using an executive order, Obama directed our border security agencies to not deport any illegals who would have been covered by the DREAM Act, had it been passed. The system of checks and balances in our Constitution, designed to protect the country from tyranny, was effectively circumvented, because Obama felt that he could be the sole decision maker on our country’s immigration policy.
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114.
Indefinite Detentions of American Citizens

As a candidate, Obama spoke out against not just the indefinite detention of American citizens, but even against the indefinite detention of foreigners caught supporting terrorist groups. Obama promised he would “restore” habeas corpus, the provision in American law that no one may be detained by government without being formally charged with a crime.
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The election of Obama to the Presidency was to be an end to the allegedly unconstitutional acts of President Bush. And, so, one would think that when a federal judge ruled the provision for indefinite detention in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to be unconstitutional, that would be the end of it.
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Not quite.

As soon as that federal judge had ruled that indefinite detention was out of the NDAA, Obama Administration attorneys filed for an emergency stay on the order, and got it.
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That they got the order is no surprise: the courts are usually willing to give a lot of leeway on national security matters to the Executive branch, at least until a final ruling has been made. What is shocking is that Obama would seek an emergency stay on the order throwing out indefinite detention of American citizens. What does he want that power for?

115.
Stimulus Money, Jobs Saved or Created in Phantom Districts

Despite a weak economy still suffering from high unemployment, Obama argued that his 2009 Stimulus worked. Regularly referring to jobs “saved or created” by the stimulus, Obama painted a picture of himself as the man who single-handedly saved our economy.

To help document the success of the stimulus, a government website, recovery.gov, was set up as part of the stimulus bill. This site tracked how and where the stimulus money was spent, and how many jobs were “saved or created.”

There was, however, a major problem. The website was reporting on money spent and jobs “saved or created” in congressional districts that did not exist.
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According to Watchdog.org, there were 440 non-existent congressional districts that received $6.4 billion in stimulus funds, to “create or save” nearly 30,000 jobs.
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There were other problems with the website as well: According to recovery.gov, a single lawn mower purchased with stimulus funds to cut grass at an Arkansas cemetery “saved or created” fifty jobs.

Really?

Despite the absurdity of the data, the Obama Administration had been using the recovery.gov stats to prove that the stimulus bill was a success. Stimulus recipients were blamed for input errors, but the site could have easily been designed to prevent inaccurate data from being inputted, a feature the Obama Administration apparently didn’t think was necessary.
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There were also questions about how stimulus money recipients can know how many jobs were “saved or created” because of the money they received. Instead of being a beacon of government transparency, recovery.gov became a huge database of faulty data used by the White House to overstate the success of the stimulus bill.

116.
The Not-So-Transparent Administration

On his first day in office, Obama issued a presidential memorandum instructing federal agencies to “to usher in a new era of open Government.”
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He also issued an executive order reversing changes to the Presidential Records Act made by the previous administration, claiming to hold himself and his records to “to a new standard of openness.”
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In retrospect, this seemed to have more to do with implying his predecessor ran a secretive government than with making his own government transparent. An analysis by
Bloomberg News
found the Obama Administration failed to meet his own alleged standard of transparency.

Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information: The cost of travel by top officials. In all, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act.
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Despite that seemingly sincere call on his first day for more open government, the Obama White House also spent years fighting the release of the White House visitor logs from his inauguration to September 2009.
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117.
Proposing Orwellian Changes to The Freedom of Information Act

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which was signed into law on July 4, 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson, empowers private citizens to request the disclosure of government documents, as long as they are not deemed as too sensitive for release. There have been changes to the law since it was first enacted, but a recent change proposed by Obama’s Justice Department is quite disturbing. Historically, when FOIA requests are denied, a reason for the denial is supposed to be given. But the new rule, proposed by the Obama Administration, would “direct government agencies who are denying a request under an established FOIA exemption to ‘respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist,’ rather than citing the relevant exemption.” Both left and right leaning government transparency advocates called the proposed rule change “Orwellian.”
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