Usa Thread

[kamui]

Our Dictator In Chief

 

This is from Mark Knoller of CBS. The pilots and crew of Air Force One are flying more hours than a rookie on a beer run.

 

 

 

They are tired of it too, and are adding more crew to Air Force-1, I know this for a fact because I'm one of the instructors that trains the crews. Our company (Atlas Air) has had the Air Force-1 and E-4 contract for over two years and I've been doing it for about 8 months now.

 

Last year (2010) Obama flew in Air Force One 172 times, almost every other day.

 

White House officials have been telling reporters in recent days that the Democrat doesn't intend to hang around the White House quite so much in 2011. They explain he wants to get out more around the country because, as everyone knows, that midterm election shellacking on Nov. 2nd had nothing to do with his health care bill, over-spending or other policies, and everything to do with Obama's not adequately explaining himself to his countrymen and women.

 

And with only 343 days remaining in Obama's never ending presidential campaign, the incumbent's travel pace will not likely slacken. At an Air Force-estimated cost of $181,757 per flight HOUR (not to mention the additional travel costs of Marine One, Secret Service, logistics and local police overtime), that's a lot of frequent flier dollars going into Obama's carbon footprint. And everyone of US are paying for this YES, You & I

 

We are privy to some of these numbers thanks to CBS' Mark Knoller, a bearded national treasure trove of presidential stats. According to Knoller's copious notes, during the last year, Obama made 65 domestic trips over 104 days, and six trips to eight countries over 22 days. Not counting six vacation trips over 32 days.

 

He took 196 helicopter trips, signed 203 pieces of legislation and squeezed in 29 rounds of left-handed golf. Obama last year gave 491 speeches, remarks or statements. That's more talking than goes on in some entire families, at least from fatherly mouths.

 

In fact, even including the 24 days of 2010 that we never saw Obama in public, his speaking works out to about one official utterance every 11 waking hours. Aides indicate the "Real Good Talker" believes we need more.

 

Related: Obama spends nearly half his presidency outside Washington, plans to travel more

 

Related: Vacationer-in-Chief Spends $1.75 Million to Visit Hawaiian Chums

 

Obama has spent over $100 million taxpayer dollars flying around in Air Force One, and probably another $100 million on his entourage. Obama is just another tin-pot dictator living lavishly at the expense of his subjects.

 

And we seniors have to "tighten our belts" because we aren't getting a COLA again this year... and none last year!

 

THANKS TO ALL WHO HELPED PUT THIS GREEDY WINDBAG IN OFFICE!!

 

NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS SPENT SO MUCH MONEY FLYING AROUND THE WORLD SPENDING TAX PAYERS MONEY IN HISTORY!!

 

Sometimes I think some you Americans are really small minded people. Complaining about the fact that the president is traveling too much...

 

As if Obama and his family could - or even should - travel on the cheap.

 

But this article doesn't come as a surprise, since it is not the first of this kind. Before there where complaints that his summer holiday was too expensive (Martha's Wineyeard) or the the stupid allegation by Fox and co. that Obama's trip to India last year did cost 200 mio USD _per day_. This would be more than the war in

Tip to Mumbai

 

Anyway, spending for Airforce One is just peanuts in the US government's budget.

Compare this to the military budget of 663.84 billion USD (2010). In the year 2000 it was below 300 billion USD.

 

Strangely most Americans seem to ignore the military budget when talking about exploding costs.

[Steve]

Kamui I thought the article was petty. It gets that way at times, from both parties. Dems talked about Bush's vacations as well. The fact is the President never really has a vacation. He has to be available 24/7 for all things. He delegates some of it but he has to be kept abreast of all manner of things.

 

I like to stick to things that are pertinent when discussing the presidency. I had a discussion with a coworker who commented on one of the candidate's voice. WTF?! Who gives a damn?! That should be way down on the list, way down. If Teddy Roosevelt, one of our greatest Presidents (his face is on Mt. Rushmore along with Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington) would not have been elected today because he had a high pitched whiny voice. He said how the president looks and speaks is important. I agre

 

Is a guy capable and honest? Everything else should be far down the list. Very far.

[Flashermac]

<< And we seniors have to "tighten our belts" because we aren't getting a COLA again this year... and none last year! >>

 

Something tells me this is old, since SS is getting a slight COLA increase next year.

 

The main reason for these emails and complaints is that the average American is having a tough time financially. And yet we see our leaders going on holidays all over creation, living like royalty. At a time of financial crisis, it would be nice if the politicians at least looked like they were suffering a bit. It is hard not to think of "Let them eat cake."

 

And when our wonderful President wanted to make an issue over the budget some time back, he announced that SS payments (paid for by the recipients), Medicare (paid for by the recipients), the military (who damned well earn they money) might not be getting paid on time. The SOB never once said that the Prez and Veep might not be getting paid, his cabinet not get paid, Congress not get paid etc. It was only the little folks who would have to suffer. Obama can really be a douchebag at times.

[Hugh_Hoy]

Heard that recently the First Lady couldn't wait another 30 minutes to accompany Barry on AF 1. So they had to put her on another bird to she could leave without him. True or not, I dunno. But it wouldn't surprise me.

 

That's ok. The more flights the better. I mean, the law of averages...5555555555

 

HH

[kamui]

US Congress rules that pizza is a vegetable

Does this look like a vegetable to you?Image: Jyoti Das via Flickr

PIZZA CAN BE classed as a vegetable – at least according to a decision made by the US Congress. Who knew?

 

American lawmakers have ruled that the amount of tomato paste in pizza sauce means that pizzas can be counted as a vegetable.

 

The bizarre move, which was decided in a vote on the annual spending bill for the Department of Agriculture, happened for purely political reasons.

 

The crucial bill had oversight over subsidised school meals, and the department was seeking to restrict pizza, chips and starchy vegetables from the menu for school children in a bid to combat child obesity.

 

MSNBC reports that politicians had been lobbied heavily by the frozen food industry who didn’t want to see a major revenue stream cut off given how often pizza is found on the menus of school canteens in the US.

 

School meals subsidised by the government are mandated to include a certain amount of vegetables and the Department of Agriculture’s plan would have pushed pizza-makers at least partly out of the school lunch business.

 

The salt industry, potato growers, and some conservative politicians who said that the federal government shouldn’t be involved in telling children what to eat, also lobbied against the change.

 

After some debate, Congress voted that anything containing two tablespoons of tomato sauce can be labelled a vegetable, putting pizza into the vegetable categor

 

The Obama administration is fighting to make school lunches healthier in the face of a growing obesity problem across the country.

 

http://www.thejourna...282033-Nov2011/

 

[Flashermac]

When I was a high school student (and Victoria was still the Queen), we always got kosher pizzas. No meat allowed, just cheese and veggies on top. I wonder who decided that, since we didn't have that many Jewish kids in school. Of course, this was Los Angeles.

 

No candy machines or soft drink machines on campus, only fresh fruit machines. Times have changed.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flashermac]

Newt Gingrich To Obama: Let's Debate, You Can Use Your Teleprompter

 

 

"I've already said that if he wants to use a teleprompter, then it would be fine with me. It has to be fair. If you [were] to defend ObamaCare, wouldn't you want a teleprompter?" Gingrich asked.

 

"Now, just for a second I'm going to go in the detour and I'll try to explain why I've been and he'll say yes. There are two reasons. The first, is ego. Can you imagine him looking in the mirror? Graduate from Columbia, Harvard Law, editor of the Law Review journal.] The greatest articulator in a Democratic book?"

 

"How is he going to say that he's afraid to be on the same podium as a West Georgia College student?"

 

My link

[Flashermac]

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B

 

 

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

 

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

 

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

 

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,†says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.â€

 

The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

 

The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma -- investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort -- and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.

 

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.†It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

 

“TARP at least had some strings attached,†says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.â€

 

Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.†He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.

 

more

[Flashermac]

CURL: Does Obama really want to win?

 

My link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Steve]

The secret Fed bailout shows just how arrogant and how much hubris they have. Fact is both Obama and Romney have the balls to do anything about. Paul and possibly Johnson are the only two in the race who would.

 

I'm more upset at the American people than anyone. In this victim society, we all blame the media. F*ck the media, people are lazy. We have more access to the truth these days than we ever did in our history.

 

The pizza thingy shows how much they are bought off. Also, biologically tomatoes are fruits. They get clasified as veggies but they are fruits.

 

Its all bullshine. What gets me is that some of us think that one party will fix things. Its always a lesser of two evils proposition.