I Wanted to Impeach Bush. Now I Want to Impeach Obama

Below is an article written by a left-wing activist who called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. Unlike so many of his comrades, he believes that since Barack Obama is carrying out many of the same policies set in place by his predecessor, Obama deserves to be impeached, as well. While conservatives may disagree with some — though perhaps not all — of the author’s criticisms, he is joining a growing number of leftists and Democrats angered, nervous, or ready to jump-ship on the Obama presidency. A recent poll posted on DailyKos found 13 percent of liberals support impeaching Obama. Whatever their motivation, we applaud their consistency in calling out a president of their own party. If enough conservatives speak out, perhaps a few Congressmen will show the same courage. Click here to sign the petition to impeach Obama. — The Ed.

David Swanson, American Chronicle

Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean, while Bush was president, predicted that Bush’s successor would be one of two things, either the best or the worst president in history. He, or she, would either undo the damage and prosecute the crimes, or protect the criminals and continue the abuses. Obama has protected the criminals, continued many of the abuses, more firmly established the power to commit those abuses, and expanded abusive powers beyond what Bush ever attempted. I’m not trying to quantify and determine whether Obama has grabbed “more” new abusive powers than Bush did. I’m simply pointing out that, as with previous presidents, Obama has retained the powers bequeathed him and added some…

The Education Department pushes corporatization, privatization, and testing. The trade agreements are all corporate…President Obama is taking the budget from the Bush years, adding to the military, and cutting or freezing everything else. The budgetary crisis in state governments and in people’s homes continues to worsen. The Wall Street and corporate bailouts that Obama helped Bush impose on us have only escalated since Obama moved to the White House…Obama has not added as much to the military budget as Bush did, but he has added to Bush’s largest military budget, enlarging it further each year — and with activist groups and news reports tending to falsely report that he’s cutting it…For a time, Obama had more troops and mercenaries in the field than Bush had ever had.He stood in front of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives and tossed habeas corpus into the trash bin…This is Bush-Cheney-level secrecy with the pretense that it isn’t. And it’s worse. Obama has set records for rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests and for prosecutions of whistle blowers…

So why not impeach Obama? I clamored for the impeachment of Bush. I say Obama is as bad or worse. Why am I such a corrupt hypocrite that I haven’t built a movement to impeach Obama? Well, I’ll tell you, as I’ve told people more times than I can count. Obama should be impeached and convicted and removed from office. Obama should be prosecuted for his crimes. So should his subordinates. (Emphasis added.) So should his predecessor, his subordinates, and all corporate co-conspirators. The reason I can’t get 20 people into the streets to demand Obama’s impeachment (and if I did, they’d want him impeached for being born in Africa to aliens from Planet Socialism) is that nobody in Congress is even pretending to give a damn. We were able to produce a sizeable movement for impeachment when Bush was in office, because a lot of Democrats in Congress, especially in 2005 and 2006, pretended they were on our side. I say “pretended” as a way to indicate not that they didn’t agree with us, but that they were not committed to trying very hard.

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Obama Considering Secret $6 Billion Bailout for Puerto Rico

Jonathan Strong, Daily Caller

The Obama administration is eying a secretive tax deal critics charge is an indirect bailout for Puerto Rico to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars.

The U.S. territory, desperate for revenues in the midst of the recession, surprised industry with a $6 billion tax on foreign firms – including a significant bloc of U.S. pharmaceutical firms – late October in a rare weekend legislative session without any public debate in advance.

But now U.S. taxpayers, not the firms, could end up footing at least a significant chunk of the bill.

Gov. Luis Fortuño signed the new tax into law Oct. 25. That day, the Washington, D.C.-based whiteshoe law firm Steptoe & Johnson issued him a legal brief arguing U.S. firms should receive money from the U.S. government to offset the Puerto Rico tax increase, which Fortuño sent to the Internal Revenue Service, where a decision is pending.

The international tax law in question is complicated, but experts agree the tax, and the request, are an unusual use of portions of the tax code intended to avoid double taxation on U.S. firms in countries that have reciprocity treaties with the U.S.

“We would call it creative,” said James Hines, an expert on international tax issues and the L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. “It’s an unusual tax for sure.”

It’s an “indirect bailout,” said Dan Mitchell, an international tax expert and senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Factions within the IRS are fighting over the decision.

“The IRS is very careful about giving away U.S. taxpayer dollars,” said Roberto Monserrate, assistant executive vice president for the Puerto Rico Manufacturers Association. “This is big money we’re talking about.”

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Obama’s Coming Bank Grab?

Ben Johnson, FloydReports.com

If you have enjoyed owning a car company, you’re going to love getting voting representation in several banks nationwide. Barack Obama’s Treasury Department is already “monitoring” 19 banks and may appoint new board members. The trouble? They took TARP money and have fallen behind on their payments. Almost as troubling, the mainstream press is presenting things as though they had never been better. Zachary A. Goldfarb at The Washington Post writes:

The Obama administration has begun monitoring the high-level board meetings of nearly 20 banks that received emergency taxpayer assistance but repeatedly failed to pay the required dividends, according to Treasury Department officials and documents. And it may soon install new directors on some of their boards.

The moves come as the number of banks that failed to make at least one dividend payment to the government rose to 132 in the last quarter. These “deadbeats,” as they are sometimes called, are virtually all community lenders and collectively received billions of dollars in taxpayer assistance.

In addition to those firms, seven others have failed, resulting in the total loss of the government’s investment.

The number of banks that have missed six or more dividend payments has reached 19, up from seven during the previous quarter. Under the government’s agreement with those firms, the Treasury now has the right to monitor their boards and appoint new members.

So much for the Barack Obama who said last April, “I don’t want to run auto companies, and I don’t want to run banks.” (To properly understand Obama, you must replace “don’t” with “desperately.”) He may insist he does not want to engage in this behavior — and he repeats it again, and again, and again.

The story goes on to reveal “a fifth of banks in the program, almost all of them small community lenders, are not paying the government dividends on time,” meaning they too are en route to an Obama-appointed bank board. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that as many as 98 bailed-out banks, which received $4.2 billion in TARP funds, are in danger of failing based on an analysis of their third quarter earnings results.

Will the new appointees….

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Christmas is About Jesus, Not More Debt

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, FloydReports.com

During this Christmas season of cheer and good tidings, a universal message is going forth. They are all united — from Barack Obama, to Martha Stewart, to Wall Street banks, to the Federal Reserve — and even your local mall agrees: please borrow to spend more this Christmas.

Americans since 2008 have been tightening their belts, and they have paid down more than $150 billion in consumer debt. This is a remarkable feat and a testimony to the diligence, hard work, and frugality of the American citizen. In contrast to the people, we are embarrassed that our government is encouraging irresponsible and spendthrift behavior.

Little wonder the finances of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve are in a shambles. When times are tight, overspending and excessive debt is never the answer. Americans intuitively understand this and they are making tough choices to avoid bankruptcy. Barack Obama would be smart to follow their example.

But governments never really tighten the budget. We all learned years ago the idiocy of government accounting when they proclaimed they were making “budget cuts” when spending and borrowing was going up every year. This would be akin to us saying, “We want a Porsche, so we will cut the budget and get a Corvette,” when our salary could only cover payments on a Toyota Corolla.

This upside-down idea was in the news again this week with the bailout of Ireland….

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A President for “His People,” Not “We the People”

Larry Klayman, WorldNetDaily

In the year 2008, 232 years after our Founding Fathers declared their independence from the British crown, thanks to the incompetency and arrogance of the George W. Bush administration and its Republican Party, which left the nation and the world in economic and international ruins, Barack Hussein Obama, a politician far to the left of mainstream America, was elected president of the United States. Because of their minority numerical status, it was not black people who elected Obama, but whites who were fed up with the Bush years. While I did not vote for Obama – and disagreed strongly with his political ideology – I was nevertheless proud that America could elect a black president and overcome centuries of racial prejudice. In fact, I joked with friends that the Germans, French, and other Western Europeans were also initially elated with the choice, since “they were just happy that they did not now have a black head of state.” Europe could have never elected a black man, given its much deeper ingrained prejudice against the race. So with Obama’s ascendency to the throne, we American whites felt good about ourselves, if nothing else.

But in the last two years, this pride has turned to deep-seated resentment and horror – as we have witnessed Obama seemingly favoring his own race and true religious allegiance over whites, Christians and Jews. On the eve of the congressional elections of 2010, when most experts predict that Obama’s Democrats will lose control of at least the U.S. House of Representatives, it has become increasingly clear to not only tea partiers, but also most of the white Judeo-Christian electorate, that President Obama is not a ruler for all of the people, but rather “his people.”

And, how did we arrive at this sad and frightening conclusion?

First, there were the trillion-dollar bailouts, much of which were earmarked for black minority contractors. These bailouts were not only economically stupid, but the money was dolled out in a discriminatory way.

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