Quotes from Barack Obama

1. “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I choose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.” (Obama in his book “Dreams of My Father.”)

2. "…be unified in service to a greater good. I intend to make it cause of my presidency. It’s because you have an obligation to yourself, because your individual salvation depends on collective salvation, because its only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential. If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists to protect them and to promote their common welfare, all else is lost."

3. "This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created and share its benefits more equitably."

4. "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful and just as strong and just as well funded."

5. "I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

And this revealing statement from a radio interview in 2001:

6. "If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the courts. I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote – I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in the society, and to that extent as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution at least as it’s been interpreted and more important interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state governments must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground [Can you say “ACORN”?] that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Kd-YJCdp0&feature=related

7. Now just as there was in Teddy Roosevelts time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who for the last few decades has said let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. The market will take care of everything, they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes, especially for the wealthy, our economy will grow stronger. Now it’s a simple theory, and we have to admit that it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumber sticker [laughter] But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” [Applause]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBrm_bjrQQ8

(Edited by William Dwyer on 3/27, 12:31pm)

Post 1

Tuesday, March 27, 2012 - 1:17pm

William:

3. "This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created and share its benefits more equitably."

... jarringly followed by...

"The market will take care of everything, they tell us....But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

...unless it is working in service to the new Emperor Wannabees.

He went to Harvard, it is said. I think the phrase is 'attended.'

He looks damn good, too, when he spouts this ... same old tired crap.

Smooth, even.

Post 2

Thursday, March 29, 2012 - 7:38pm

David Brooks is the really smart house-broken "conservative" at the NY Times.

Quote ....

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

... Unquote

http://sistertoldjah.com/archives/2009/08/31/david-brooks-and-barack-obama-a-love-story/
(Edited by Ken Bashford on 3/29, 7:43pm)

Post 3

Friday, March 30, 2012 - 5:31am

My reply to post 2: David Brooks was seduced by a slick charlatan.

Post 4

Sunday, April 8, 2012 - 6:43pm

Picking up where you left off, Bill ...

8. "[Paul Ryan's budget plan] is so far to the right it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal".

Really? It's that bad to balance a budget not even abruptly, but gradually, over several years? It's "so far to the right"? Really? What does it mean to be to the left, then? Would perpetually running an annual deficit of, say, a trillion dollars or more (until the country collapses) would that be considered to be "to the left"? If the annual deficit was between, say, a quarter trillion and a half a trillion dollars, then would that be considered centrist -- so that annual deficits of under a quarter trillion would be considered to be "to the right"? Is a balanced budget economics and math, or is it just petty politics?

9. "[The upcoming presidential election will be a choice between a country in which] a shrinking number of people do exceedingly well while a growing number struggle to get by [versus one in which] everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules."

Really? Everyone playing by the same rules, huh? What about GE and Solyndra? Do they play by the same rules as the rest of us or do they get special deals (as outlined in the book: Throw Them All Out)? Talk about an unpresidential hypocrite.

10. "I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington, which is why I've cut taxes for small business owners 17 times over the last three years."

Show me the list of tax cuts. Also, what about ObamaCare, which is a looming and an uncertain level of "tax" on all businesses? And most importantly, what do these small business owners have to say? It's one thing to say that you've done a lot for them, it's another thing for them to say that they are ready to hire. Do they say that -- now that they've got their 17 tax cuts -- do they say that they feel confident investing in new employees in order to accommodate their expanding businesses? Are their businesses exanding in the first place? Why not? Do you have anything to do with that?

11. "These investments [Medicare, Social Security, EPA] aren't part of some scheme to redistribute wealth from one group to another. They are expressions of the fact that we are one nation."

In the first place, do we need expressions of that fact? Does being one nation automatically mean being a collectivist nation? Is that what "one nation" means?

12. "[Paul Ryan's budget plan] is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who is willing to work for it."

Oooh, balancing the budget is sooooo radical! Balancing the budget is antithetical to our entire history? Whatever!

13. "You can be sure that with cuts this deep, there is no secret plan or formula that will be able to protect the investments we need to help our economy grow."

But you just said that "the true engine of job creation is the private sector". Now you are saying that in order for the private sector (the markets of the economy) to grow, then government has got to first do things (besides get out of the way). So, which is it, Mr. President? Pick one and stick with it.

14. "For much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics. They keep telling us that if we'd convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, our economy will grow stronger. ... the results of their experiment are there for all to see. ... In this country, broad based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few ... It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class."

First of all, you don't convert such "investments" (taxes) into tax cuts. That implies that there are these 2 things: (1) the taxes and (2) the tax cuts. In reality, there is only one thing: taxes. You either have them or you don't, but it's not 2 different things. Second of all, the results that are "there for all to see" are not the result of free markets, but that of an increasingly socialized country (year over year). Thirdly, "trickle-down" is a metaphor, not a literal statement (e.g., where 100-dollar bills slide down some kind of children's-game "Chutes and Ladders" slide from the wealthy few to the poor). And fourthly, what is it that grows a middle class?:

Which of the following leads to a strong and growing middle class?

a) capitalism
b) socialism
c) fertilizer
d) anabolic steroids

Seriously. Which one grows the middle class?

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 4/08, 6:48pm)

Post 5

Monday, April 9, 2012 - 8:22am