The things you discover only after Obama is re-elected [Reader Post]

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Over at Huffington Post Robert Greenwald discovers that Obama has been killing children with drones

During my recent trip to Pakistan as part of our upcoming documentary film, Drones Exposed, I was struck most by the stories told to me by children who had experienced a U.S. drone strike firsthand. The impact of America’s drone war in the likes of Pakistan and Yemen will linger on, especially for the loved ones of the 178 children killed in those countries by U.S. drone strikes.

War Costs’ latest video (with accompanying report) brings attention to the children who have died as a result of drone strikes. The video names some of the children who perished in these strikes, and points out the obfuscation tactics of American officials who will not own up to the significant amount of civilian casualties that have occurred due to this legally- and morally-dubious policy.

In addition to the video, War Costs offers this report detailing the effects of drone strikes on children. The findings come mainly from the diligent investigative reporting of TBIJ and the groundbreaking reports on the impact of drone strikes by Stanford and New York University researchers (Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan) and researchers at Columbia University (The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions).

In an effort to compel answers about why these innocent civilians have died without acknowledgement or explanation from the U.S. government, War Costs is calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to debate and pass Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill that calls for more transparency regarding U.S. drone strike policy.


The hat was too tight

Dana Milbank discovers that Obama lied about being transparent:

“My administration,” President Obama wrote on his first day in office, “is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Those were strong and hopeful words. Four years later, it is becoming more and more clear that they were just words.

………

But these don’t amount to the “unprecedented level of openness” Obama promised. The few advances that have been made are mostly administrative changes that will end with the Obama administration. “We haven’t seen that many, if any, legislative initiatives from the White House,” Weismann lamented at Monday’s gathering of the open-government advocates.

Consider the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, a bill with bipartisan support that would make it easier to track government spending by requiring agencies to report expenditures in a uniform way online. The legislation is so uncontroversial that it passed the House on a voice vote. But the Obama administration raised objections — and the transparency law has yet to see the light of day.

All those new jobs over the last five months? We discover that three quarters of them were created by the government:

Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments.

By November, according to data BLS released today, the total number of people employed had climbed to 143,262,000, an overall increase of 847,000 in the six months since June.

In the same five-month period since June, the number of people employed by government increased by 621,000 to 20,559,000. These 621,000 new government jobs created in the last five months equal 73.3 percent of the 847,000 new jobs created overall.

Greg Mankiw discovers Barack Obama is no uniter:

Back in 2008, when President Obama was running for his first term, he promised to be a post-partisan leader. While a Democrat, he said he would accept good ideas when they came from Republicans. At the time, I believed him, at least to some degree. And I wrote about it in this NY Times column.

Sadly, I was wrong. The short version of the story is this: As a candidate, President Obama campaigned on a platform of raising taxes on the rich. Yet he and his economic advisers also said they wanted to raise dividend taxes only slightly, from 15 to 20 percent. For reasons I explained in the Times article, keeping dividend taxes low was a position bolstered by good economics. Now, however, the president wants to raise dividend taxes to ordinary income tax rates (plus, for high-income taxpayers, the new tax of 3.8 percent that is part of the Obamacare legislation).

To be it another way, he campaigned as a moderate, willing to concede that the other party had some good ideas on tax policy. Once in office, he gave up on those ideas.

A similar thing happened with Bowles-Simpson. During his first term, he appointed a bipartisan panel, which concluded we could address our long-term fiscal problem with lower tax rates and a broader tax base. Now, the President goes around the country lambasting that approach.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether President Obama is a good or bad president. But the claim that he has tried to transcend partisanship and find a middle ground is just impossible to square with the facts.

The Labor Department discovers it overstated job gains in September and October:

The Labor Department revised job growth in previous months downward somewhat. October growth fell to 138,000 from an initial estimate 171,000, and September’s declined to 132,000 from 148,000.

Funny how we discover these things only after Obama was re-elected. Next I imagine that we’ll discover Obama is a redistributionist.

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Do you think it possible that these reporters who “have seen the light” might be joining a Tea Party? I know, I have a wild imagination. Let me have some dreams. If the reporters joined a Tea Party, do you think it would be reported?

These reporters couldn’t have reached these epiphanies before the election? Conservatives have been trying to to explain these stories and more to the MSM for months and have been pilloried for it. “Sorry” is hardly adequate for such journalistic incompetence.

@Ditto:

It’s not incompetence. They do these things on purpose.

Which is not to say that incompetence is not rampant in the news industry. It is.

THEY hired many on the election working for OBAMA,
I remember the UNION BOSS saying they had 40 thousand people at work to push the OBAMA WINN,
can you imagine so many UNION MEMBERs working for ONE FOCUS,
what did they do?, how did they do it? was it ligit? did they have a tool to get OBAMA IN ?
AND NO ROMNEY IN ANY BALLOTS IN MANY TOWNS, HOW DID THEY SUCCEED TO DO IT?
the votes in the future should have THE DEAD DEMOCRATS BANNED, THE ILLEGAL BANNED,
THE TWICE VOTING BY ONE BANNED,
THOSE WHO CANNOT RECITE THE CONSTITUTION BANNED, THE CRIMINAL BANNED,
THE WELFARE RECIPIENTS BANNED as long as they benefit from the TAXPAYER,
THEY DON’T PAY TAXES, SO WHY WOULD THEY CARE ABOUT THE COUNTRY,

He left one out…..Obama is “creating more terrorists” with his actions. He’s creating more ill will towards US. And bombing terrorists back, “only makes them mad”. And that if he simply stopped doing it (the “smart” thing to do)…all this terrorism would go away.

Beyond that…these are “not the people who attacked us on 9/11”. Why are we invading their country and attacking them???? He should be bombing Afghans. Oh…wait…Afghan’s didn’t attack us on 9/11 either. Nor did the Taliban. Oh well…another lost cause.

Those dimmycrats love their rockets/push button killing don’t they. Sort of like eating packaged meat from the store and not realizing it came from an animal. You get used to it. Where are the progressives getting up in Rice’s face with blood on their hands…waving them, calling them baby killers, etc. No..they are just upset the President hasn’t been as open as they “thought” he’d be and tell them exactly how many such strikes have killed children….as if any number would be acceptable??

There really aint no such thing as “innocent civilians” — even in overrun countries there are many collaborators and “go along to get along” types — any underground patriots still have as much to fear from their neighbors and co-workers as they do any “enemy”

@Budvarakbar: Plus the Obama doctrine is “If they’re dead they’re guilty.”

those new jobs are with OBAMA IN GOVERNMENT AT AVERAGE 80 THOUSAND pay A YEAR,
compare to the non GOVERNMENT JOBS AT 50 THOUSANDS pay A YEAR, those are the ones paying for the GOVERNMENT JOBS WITH THEIR TAXES,

My father in law spent the last part of WWII in a German Luft Stalag that was right next to a concentration camp for French resistance fighters. Shall I even mention here what they did to those people? They usually kept one hanging/rotting on the barbed wire just for a reminder.

I admire our country..for second guessing ourselves..and constantly subjecting ourselves to the most severe scrutiny and moralistic standards. But, if you have to know..there is no other country on earth that would do the same. Not one. They aren’t even up to the daily standard of US that they despise. But “we” go far beyond that. We question ourselves…even over things that are most effective for us. WE give up advantage. We give up our lead. We surrender our position…so as to test the waters to see ..if we truly are in trouble…or not.

We question whether we are desperate. We strive to maintain our humanity despite what we go through.

So, I say…it’s fine/ok to question. There is nothing wrong with trying to hold our nation to a higher standard than anyone else in the world would EVER even venture to try to live up to. But, when the bullets start flying and flesh starts burning….you should be on the line. If you can’t be on the line you should load. If you can’t load..then you should carry the wounded. If you can’t carry the wounded then you should carry supplies. If you don’t want to do that…then you should just walk over to the other side and take what’s coming to you.

@Dc: #10
This is why I have said that the ones on the front lines are the ones keeping me free. The rest of the ones in the military are supporting the ones on the front lines, so they are doing their part to keep me free.

Something else we can do is to KEEP telling our reps in congress that we want the biggest, baddest, military in the world, so that all other other countries will know that if they mess with us, they will loose. I remember when, if a country was messing with ONE American citizen in the wrong way, our government would go after that country until our citizen was safe. Now, the politicians have to contact American businesses that have branches in those countries and find out how our actions will affect their bottom line. If it would cost too much to go after that country, then the USA wouldn’t do much, if anything to help the individual.