Obama criticizes Hoekstra on congressman's home turf.

[j-kid]

By Anne E. Kornblut
HOLLAND, Mich. -- President Obama took a shot at Rep. Pete Hoekstra during an event here Thursday, subtly taunting the Michigan Republican - who was seated in the front row - as among those who opposed the federal stimulus package but showed up at a groundbreaking ceremony funded by it.

Obama welcomed Hoekstra during his opening remarks. At the same moment, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs sent a note to reporters pointing out Hoekstra as a "great quote opportunity!" in the audience. Hoekstra, who is running for Michigan governor, has been a vocal critic of the stimulus package.

"There are some folks who want to go back - who think we should return to the policies that helped to lead to this recession," Obama said later in his comments honoring a new advanced battery factory being built by the company LG Chem. "Some made the political calculation that it's better to obstruct than lend a hand. They said no to the tax cuts, they said no to small business loans, they said no to clean energy projects. It doesn't stop them from coming to ribbon cuttings -- but that's OK. "

Hoekstra, interviewed afterward, called Obama's remarks "unpresidential."

"It demeans the office of the president. It's disappointing. It is unpresidential," Hoekstra said. "This is my home district. These people are paying the taxes that he's handing out today. I'm here to respect the office of the president, and I don't think he reciprocated."
He said he would have preferred to spend the money on lower taxes rather than subsidies for new factories.

By Anne E. Kornblut | July 15, 2010; 2:25 PM ET
Source:

[johnnycakes]

Re: Obama criticizes Hoekstra on congressman's home turf.

Sort of like Hitler criticising Stalin isn't it.?

[j-kid]

Re: Obama criticizes Hoekstra on congressman's home turf.

Not really. That is a bit extreme.

[johnnycakes]

Re: Obama criticizes Hoekstra on congressman's home turf.

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: J kid</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Not really. That is a bit extreme. </div></div>

Hitler killed some 50 million people.
Stalin killed tens of millions.
Obama, the Congress of the United States and all their predecessors over the long history that they have existed but especially in the 20th century are responsible for the deaths of the same number of innocents.

The reason you think I am being extreme is that you, obviously, have no clue as to the evil that is the United States.

I have the inclination but unfortunately, not the time to give you the education you'd need to understand what I am saying. If you choose to do so you can go back through all my posts since 2001 or so and get a fairly good idea of what I am telling you.

I will do this. I will give you the basics.
Since the Wilson presidency back around 1917 United States foreign policy has been predicated upon the prevention of socialism and the expansion of capitalism and in the latter half of the 20th century neo-liberal capitalism.
This involves direct intervention as in the Congo, Angola and many other countries in Africa and probably most of the countries in the Western Hemisphere. It also involves economic oppression such as is being visited upon Cuba. It involves control of the media to control peoples thinking. The CIA buys reporters all around the world.
It involves subverting elections as the U.S did in post-war Greece and Italy and in more countries than you'd imagine possible.

All this to prevent socialism because the people who own 80% of the wealth of the United States are rich and powerful and do not want to give up their wealth and privilege. Moreover they do not want the people of the world to have an equal share of the wealth of the world.

Under capitalism today tens of millions of people die from the effects of poverty which is directly caused by capitalism. Just this morning on NPR I heard a story in which it was claimed that in Africa a child dies from malaria every 47 seconds. Malaria is both preventable by means of mosquito netting that costs about $3.00 and treatable with medicine that the dead and dying cannot afford.
Over ten million die annually from starvation or diseases those weakened by malnutrition cannot fight off.
How many die from HIV/AIDS?

They do not care if a child dies of malaria every 47 seconds just so they can have five houses and ten cars and more money than 10,000 people need to live a simple life instead of dying when they are four years old.

Obama, Hoekstra and all the rest and all their predecessors support this policy of controlling the wealth of the world for the benefit of a handful.
They support it not by a few votes because only most think this way but unanimously.

You do the math.
Multiply say, 15 million deaths per year from the effects of the poverty that is forced upon half of the world's people by 50 years.

That's easily more people than Hitler and Stalin killed AND those deaths continue year after year because of the United States with a very little help from a few friends like Britain and Israel.

Okay... that's just a brief intro into the reality. You can and should spend a lot of your spare time in the next five years or so catching up on the reality and then I will guarantee you that you will not find my thinking extreme.

I would ask you to do this although people who are on the right and people who disagree with what I think have usually refused to do it and that is to go to the &quot;Killing Hope&quot; website and read the 29 page introduction. I do not ask you to read the book although you'd have a far better understanding of the world and what the United States has done to it if you did but just read the 29 page introduction.

http://killinghope.org/bblum6/Intro2004.htm

When you've read it, come back and let me know what you think

[Wendy]

Re: Obama criticizes Hoekstra on congressman's home turf.

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> Hoekstra, interviewed afterward, called Obama's remarks &quot;unpresidential.&quot;</div></div>

Anytime Barack call them out on their hypocrisy – it is always “unpresidential

[johnnycakes]

Re: Obama criticizes Hoekstra on congressman's home turf.

Regarding President Change:

from Alexander Cockburn an article reprinted at Znet,


The Fall of Obama
By Alexander Cockburn

Source: CPMonday, July 19, 2010
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The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no “good” American president. It’s an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being finished.

The nation’s first black president promised change at the precise moment when no single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama’s first year in office. Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer. By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.

Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid. Obama reveres the capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his campaign treasury with millions of dollars. The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave to BP.

It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years America’s policy – under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World. The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland, and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

No stimulus program, giving money to cement contractors to fix potholes along the federal interstate highway system, is going to bring those jobs back. Highly trained tool and die workers, the aristocrats of the manufacturing sector, are flipping hamburgers – at best – for $7.50 an hour because U.S. corporations sent their jobs to Guangzhou, with the approval of politicians flush with the money of the “free trade” lobby.

It is not Obama’s fault that across 30 years more and more money has floated up to the apex of the social pyramid till America is heading back to where it was in the 1880s, a nation of tramps and millionaires. It’s not his fault that every tax break, every regulation, every judicial decision tilts toward business and the rich. That was the neoliberal America conjured into malign vitality back in the mid 1970s.

But it is Obama’s fault that he did not understand this, that always, from the getgo, he flattered Americans with paeans to their greatness, without adequate warning of the political and corporate corruption destroying America and the resistance he would face if he really fought against the prevailing arrangements that were destroying America. He offered them a free and easy pass to a better future, and now they see that the promise was empty.

It’s Obama’s fault, too, that, as a communicator, he cannot rally and inspire the nation from its fears. From his earliest years he has schooled himself not to be excitable, not to be an angry black man who would be alarming to his white friends at Harvard and his later corporate patrons. Self-control was his passport to the guardians of the system, who were desperate to find a symbolic leader to restore America’s credibility in the world after the disasters of the Bush era. He is too cool.

So, now Americans in increasing numbers have lost confidence in him. For the first time in the polls negative assessments outnumber the positive. He no longer commands trust. His support is drifting down to 40 per cent. The straddle that allowed him to flatter corporate chieftains at the same time as blue-collar workers now seems like the most vapid opportunism. The casual campaign pledge to wipe out al-Quaida in Afghanistan is now being cashed out in a disastrous campaign viewed with dismay by a majority of Americans.

The polls portend disaster. It now looks as though the Republicans may well recapture not only the House but, conceivably, the Senate as well. The public mood is so contrarian that, even though polls show that voters think the Democrats may well have better solutions on the economy than Republicans, they will vote against incumbent Democrats in the midterm elections next fall. They just want to throw the bums out.

Obama has sought out Bill Clinton to advise him in this desperate hour. If Clinton is frank, he will remind Obama that his own hopes for a progressive first term were destroyed by the failure of his health reform in the spring of 1993. By August of that year, he was importing a Republican, David Gergen, to run the White House.

Obama had his window of opportunity last year, when he could have made jobs and financial reform his prime objectives. That’s what Americans hoped for. Mesmerized by economic advisers who were creatures of the banks, he instead plunged into the Sargasso Sea of “health reform,” wasted the better part of a year, and ended up with something that pleases no one.

What can save Obama now? It’s hard even to identify a straw he can grasp at. It’s awfully early in the game to say it, but, as Marlene Dietrich said to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, “your future is all used up.” the website for the well informed.