pattygreen

He's doing a good job of spending this Nation into Oblivion. That's what a good job he's doing!

Were you talking to me? or someone else?

There aren't any , IMO.

Hypocrisy is a horrible thing, I agree with that. What you say about Jesus, loving the less fortunate and lifting others up, I agree with also. Yet, hating hypocrisy does not make facts any less true. Conservatives and liberals alike are not able to practice what they preach. We are born unto sin. It is not possible for mankind to practice what they preach. Thus our need for the Savior. Why do you think God had to send Jesus into this world to take our punishment for us? Because we are not able to live here without practicing what is right, even if we know what's right. God knows this. Man knows this. Even if we know what's right, we can't live it. This shows how much our Creator loves us. He would suffer death for us to ensure that dispite or sins, we will always be with Him throughout eternity. Also, all believer's in Jesus have a "free passport" into heaven. (That's a different way of saying it, but it's still true none the less.) All it takes is the faith to believe. Once a person has that, they recognize their sinfulness and confess it, then they ask God to make them a part of his family and He does. It's that simple. They may now enter into Heaven when they die without condemnation.

When my tax dollars are being wasted on things that are not detrimental to the need and good of society, then, yes, I oppose it. By detrimental, I mean the people can NOT live without it. In other words, We would roll over and die as a society if the government didn't pay for it. (BTW, I'm talking about right now, not what's already been spent in the past and can't be given back) Right now, in this bad economy, if it's not detrimental to the need of society, it should not be spent. Patrick henry said : “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” Thomas Jefferson said: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” Ronald Reagan, while not a founding father, put it this way, “Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself.” Ben Franklin said: “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” The original intent for the government of the United States of America was to keep the peace and settle disputes and to stay out of the way and out of the pocketbooks of the American people. Man, we sure have “progressed”. The Federal Government was not supposed to expand as it has over the years. Some, and I stress some, government is always needed. You feel more government is needed and I feel less is needed and that the federal government has crossed over the line in the past many years. Their good intent to help society has turned into a dependency upon them that needs to be severed.

You know, Cleo's, it's very difficult to talk with people who are soooo dense. I have told you many times that I am not opposed to paying taxes. Why do you continue to go there? Taxes pay for the important things that this country needs, like infastructure, defense, police, fire fighters, and the like, you know, what the government was originally set up for. What I am opposed to is the give aways to those who will not work and other free handouts. Some examples are pork spending, money towards your home purchase, free college, money towards the purchase of a new car, housing expenses, corporate funding, welfare and the like. You know, the stealing!

Sin is within all of us. ALL of us. The only difference, and I stress that, between a Christian's sin and an unbeliever's sin is that one is going to be forgiven when they face the judgement after their life is over, and one is not. Period. So, to go through a laundry list of Christian conservatives who sin and do wrong is pointless, for EVERY man sins and does wrong, conservative or liberal. ALL sin. So, I understand that many conservatives have done terrible things. So what? Many liberals have also. Even so, conservatives have a moral conscience that they follow, whether they sin or not. And most of the controversial issues that we face have to do with moral stands. (abortion, gay marriage, liberty, spreading the wealth around, etc)

Well, I thought it was very funny!

A better one. lol

Jack Webb schools Obama. lol

Conservatives are far more intelligent than liberals. Liberals think that they have all the answers and they actually put themselves quite high on a pedestal. They think that the rest of the country would fall to pieces without thier intelligence and it is rather demeaning to others. You're confusing fear with morals. What you feel is something that conservatives "fear" is actually conservatives going along with their moral convictions. We don't "fear" Healthcare, we choose to have control of our choices where HC is concerned. We don't want our government getting any bigger than they already have gotten, which is too big for anybodies good. It's morally wrong to steal from people when they work hard to earn a living for the things they want in life. That's not 'fear', that's taking a moral stand on sin. Yes, sin. It is wrong to take from someone and give it to someone else without their consent. We don't "fear" gay people. We just believe it is morally wrong for gay people to commit the acts they do and expect others to find it acceptable. We don't want God's beautiful plan of marriage for a man and a woman to be distorted by their sinfulness. It's not fear, it's a moral stand. We don't "fear" women's choice. We just take a stand morally on the issue of infant murder. It's definitely NOT fear. It's ALL ABOUT MORALS. (which Liberals usually don't have much of). (Segregation is a totally seperate issue from those others. There is no sin in the color of ones skin, therefore, it should NOT have been a policy in the first place )

I don't trust the CBO. They work for the government.

ON Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that, if enacted, the latest health care reform legislation would, over the next 10 years, cost about $950 billion, but because it would raise some revenues and lower some costs, it would also lower federal deficits by $138 billion. In other words, a bill that would set up two new entitlement spending programs — health insurance subsidies and long-term health care benefits — would actually improve the nation’s bottom line. Could this really be true? How can the budget office give a green light to a bill that commits the federal government to spending nearly $1 trillion more over the next 10 years? The answer, unfortunately, is that the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out. In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion. Gimmick No. 1 is the way the bill front-loads revenues and backloads spending. That is, the taxes and fees it calls for are set to begin immediately, but its new subsidies would be deferred so that the first 10 years of revenue would be used to pay for only 6 years of spending. Even worse, some costs are left out entirely. To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office’s tabulation. Consider, too, the fate of the $70 billion in premiums expected to be raised in the first 10 years for the legislation’s new long-term health care insurance program. This money is counted as deficit reduction, but the benefits it is intended to finance are assumed not to materialize in the first 10 years, so they appear nowhere in the cost of the legislation. Another vivid example of how the legislation manipulates revenues is the provision to have corporations deposit $8 billion in higher estimated tax payments in 2014, thereby meeting fiscal targets for the first five years. But since the corporations’ actual taxes would be unchanged, the money would need to be refunded the next year. The net effect is simply to shift dollars from 2015 to 2014. In addition to this accounting sleight of hand, the legislation would blithely rob Peter to pay Paul. For example, it would use $53 billion in anticipated higher Social Security taxes to offset health care spending. Social Security revenues are expected to rise as employers shift from paying for health insurance to paying higher wages. But if workers have higher wages, they will also qualify for increased Social Security benefits when they retire. So the extra money raised from payroll taxes is already spoken for. (Indeed, it is unlikely to be enough to keep Social Security solvent.) It cannot be used for lowering the deficit. A government takeover of all federally financed student loans — which obviously has nothing to do with health care — is rolled into the bill because it is expected to generate $19 billion in deficit reduction. Finally, in perhaps the most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting, the legislation proposes to trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future. Instead, Congress is likely to continue to regularly override scheduled cuts in payments to Medicare doctors and other providers. Removing the unrealistic annual Medicare savings ($463 billion) and the stolen annual revenues from Social Security and long-term care insurance ($123 billion), and adding in the annual spending that so far is not accounted for ($114 billion) quickly generates additional deficits of $562 billion in the first 10 years. And the nation would be on the hook for two more entitlement programs rapidly expanding as far as the eye can see. The bottom line is that Congress would spend a lot more; steal funds from education, Social Security and long-term care to cover the gap; and promise that future Congresses will make up for it by taxing more and spending less. The stakes could not be higher. As documented in another recent budget office analysis, the federal deficit is already expected to exceed at least $700 billion every year over the next decade, doubling the national debt to more than $20 trillion. By 2020, the federal deficit — the amount the government must borrow to meet its expenses — is projected to be $1.2 trillion, $900 billion of which represents interest on previous debt. The health care legislation would only increase this crushing debt. It is a clear indication that Congress does not realize the urgency of putting America’s fiscal house in order. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was the director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2003 to 2005, is the president of the American Action Forum, a policy institute.

Caterpillar claims Health Care Reform Bill will hit their bottom line for $100 million. John Deere claims it will cost them $150 million. AT&T claims it is $1 billion. No matter what the cost is or which corporations are impacted, the one thing for certain is that the tax payer will foot the entire bill. photo credit: theqspeaks Well, here we are. Some people believe that “Large Corporations” have this unlimited resource or “Pot of Money” that they simply pull out when they need to pay the bills. Then, what ever is left over goes to the “Big Wigs“, who buy mansions and fancy cars to show us how important they are. There is an opinion that we can lay the tax burden on ” Large Corporations” instead of the “little” guy and that the “little” guy will pay less as a result! Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way. It just ain’t so!!! First of all, large companies don’t pay for tax increases. Technically they do, but realistically, all taxes are eventually paid by the people who buy their products. That’s a fact no one can argue! The Basic Business Model People invest in the stock of large corporations in order to gain a “fair” return on their money. If a company can not return more on a person’s money than the person can get by putting in a nice safe savings account at the bank then the person would not, or at least should not, invest in that company. Therefore, it is imperative that a company make a reasonable profit so it can return to it’s investors a fair return on their money. The price of products are usually determined by the cost it takes to provide them as determined by all of the expenses (cost) required to produce and deliver that product or products to the market place. It is also limited by the competitiveness of the industry the company participates in. Never the less, you simply take (labor, material, utilities, advertising, health care benefits, warranty expense, taxes and all other costs and add a margin for profit. The amount of margin is usually limited by the competitiveness of the industry that company competes in. If expenses(cost) such as health care benefits or taxes go up, then it simply increases the total cost of producing the product or products. In order to maintain profitability or margin, the price of the product must then either go up or other expenses(cost) must go down. If the price goes up the consumer pays the increased cost of the health care or taxes in the increased price of the product. The alternatives to increasing prices are not any better. What if the price of the product doesn’t go up? When health care costs and/or taxes go up, there are four things a company can do to maintain margin. Increase the price of the product in which case the consumer pays more for the same product. This is not a very viable solution if the company is to remain competitive in their industry. Everyone loses! Cut jobs sometimes called improving productivity. Everyone loses! Reduce benefits or wages paid to it’s employees. Everyone loses! Move the jobs to somewhere that doesn’t have the same tax burdens or benefit costs (aka China, Mexico) Everyone really loses (unless you are from China or Mexico)! Other Things A Company Can Do Some will argue that there are other things you can do such as reduce material cost, reduce you utility cost, or even reduce your quality? However, I will argue that in the big picture all of those have a chain reaction to your suppliers and/or consumers that results in the same reduced jobs, reduced benefits, and increased prices to consumers and real tax payers. Reducing material cost simply puts the same burdens on your suppliers to reduce jobs and lower expenses. Reducing utility usage puts the burden back onto the utility supplier to do the same as above and then next the coal companies, etc.,etc.. Reducing quality results in increased warranty cost, increased consumer costs or lack of competitiveness. Who Pays for it? … You do! I do, We do! … Nobody else! The government produces nothing. They pay for nothing. Everything they do, every job they add or create, every thing they supposedly pay for, every tax they impose on large or small businesses, every give away program they create is paid for from the taxes they collect from you. The Government doesn’t make money. Every cent they spend they get from us!

3-24-10 Print This Article Forward to a Friend The Real Cost of Health Care Reform by Kim Trobee, editor Tax increases are likely to top $500 billion over 10 years. The enactment of health care reform marked the beginning of one of the biggest tax hikes in American history. And families will pay the price. President Barack Obama signed the reform into law Tuesday and ushered in a massive tax increase for the American people. Democrats touted the plan as a way to reduce the deficit, but a closer inspection by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) shows a cost in new taxes of more than $500 billion over 10 years. Such numbers will have a chilling effect on an economy that is already struggling. "You can’t take $500 billion out of the economy and not have anybody notice it," said Ryan Ellis, tax policy director at ATR. "There’s going to be quite a lot of pain." Robert Book, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, said nearly all Americans will be affected. "There are a number of taxes in the bill designed to pay for health care," he said. "Most of these taxes are broad-based taxes that apply to pretty much everybody." And that means American families will ultimately pay a steep price. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that insurance premiums for a family of four will increase by $2,100 a year.

The Real Cost of Health Care Legislation Are these folks disingenuous or dreaming? March 23, 2010 3:43 PM When White House chief of staff Rahm Emanual lobbied Democratic Representative Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania last week to vote for the health care bill, he argued it would cut the deficit. “You ran because you care about the deficit,” he told Altmire, according to the Washington Post. “This is north of $1 trillion in deficit reduction.” Shortly after the bill passed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered the exact number, claiming the bill would save “the taxpayers $1.3 trillion.” Are these folks disingenuous or just dreaming? It has to be one or the other. Why? Because the evidence of spending projections for health care legislation passes tell a simple and unchanging story. The projections never come close to capturing the magnitude of spending that actually occurs. They prove to be wildly off the mark compared to real-life expenditures. Take Medicare, enacted in 1965. The initial projection was it would cost $9 billion a year by 1990. The actual figure for 1990 turned out to be $67 billion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the baseline for Medicare in 2010 is $521.3 billion, which includes $55.3 billion for the prescription drug benefit approved in 2003. Or take one part of Medicare, the End Stage Renal Disease program (ESRD) that entitles every sufferer, regardless of age, access to dialysis. It was created in 1972 and its spending for 1974 was projected at $100 million. The real cost was $229 million. In 2007, ESRD cost $23.9 billion, nearly 6 percent of Medicare’s overall spending that year. Or take Medicaid’s program of “disproportionate share hospital” payments. Passed on 1987, it was projected to cost less than $1 billion in 1992. Its actual cost in 1992: $17 billion. The program’s cost would still be ballooning if it hadn’t been brought under control by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. These faulty projections are not exceptions to the rule. They are the rule. The projection for the first year (1948) of the National Health Service in Britain was 260 pounds, far below the real cost of 359 pounds. The under-projections have continued to miss the actual demand for health services. In Massachusetts, the universal coverage plan was predicted to cost $472 million in 2008, but the price tag turned out to be $628 million. Now Governor Deval Patrick wants to cap insurance rate increases to less than 5 percent annually, which would force insurance companies to cut payments to providers or quit the program. In 1994, Tennessee sought to control Medicaid spending with a new program called TennCare. By 2004, costs had more than tripled. One thread that runs through all these breathtakingly erroneous projections is the lowballing of volume, which is always far greater than expected. This shouldn’t be a surprise. When offered a free good or a good that’s highly subsidized and thus cheaper than its real cost, people act in a fairly rational way. They demand more of the good than they would if they had to pay for it out of pocket. Not only that, there are invariably more people who are demanding more of that good. The new health care program, assuming it’s implemented in 2014, is not likely to escape this phenomenon. Besides, its cost is under-estimated by the Congressional Budget Office in other ways due to assumptions imposed by the bill’s sponsors, congressional Democrats. To make matters worse, the cost is also affected by the practice in Congress of minimizing a measure’s spending to enhance its chance of approval. Adding all this up, the unavoidable conclusion is the newly enacted health care bill – Obamacare -- has approximately zero chance of cutting the deficit. History says it will drive up the deficit, and history doesn’t lie. Fred Barnes

This a great youtube video that shows exactly how Obama's spending compares to Bush's. If you don't like to click on links, then you can look it up yourself. It's called The National Debt Road Trip.

Obama's trillions dwarf Bush's 'dangerous' spending By: Byron York Chief Political Correspondent February 24, 2009 President Barack Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, are seen in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, Feb. 23, 2009, before they addressed the National Governors Association regarding the economic stimulus package. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) Pelosi and Reid called Bush's budgets "dangerous" and "unpatriotic," but with Obama, they've changed their tune Back in 2006, when Democrats were hoping to win control of the House and Senate, party leaders worked themselves into a righteous outrage over the issue of out-of-control federal spending. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the Republican budget “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” because it increased the amount of U.S. debt held by foreign countries. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Republicans of going on “an unprecedented and dangerous borrowing spree” and declared GOP leadership “the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of our country … no other president or Congress even comes close.” You won’t find too many defenders of George W. Bush’s record on spending these days, even among Republicans. But a check of historical tables compiled by the Office of Management and Budget shows that the spending that so distressed Pelosi and Reid seems downright modest today. After beginning with a Clinton-era surplus of $128 billion in fiscal year 2001, the Bush administration racked up deficits of $158 billion in 2002, $378 billion in 2003, $413 billion in 2004, $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006, $162 billion in 2007, and $410 billion in 2008. The current administration would kill to have such small numbers. President Barack Obama is unveiling his budget this week, and, in addition to the inherited Bush deficit, he’s adding his own spending at an astonishing pace, projecting annual deficits well beyond $1 trillion in the near future, and, in the rosiest possible scenario, a $533 billion deficit in fiscal year 2013, the last year of Obama’s first term. And what about the national debt? It increased from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in the Bush years, leading to dramatically higher interest costs. “We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years,” Pelosi said in 2007. “That’s fiscal irresponsibility.” Now, under Obama, the national debt — and the interest payments — will increase at a far faster rate than during the Bush years. “We thought the Bush deficits were big at the time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told me this week as he prepared to attend Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility Summit. “But this is going to make the previous administration look like rank amateurs. We could be adding multiple trillions to the national debt in the first year.” At some point last week, the sheer velocity of Obama’s spending proposals began to overwhelm even experienced Washington hands. In the span of four days, we saw the signing of the $787 billion stimulus bill, the rollout of a $275 billion housing proposal, discussion of Congress’s remaining appropriations bills (about $400 billion) and word of a vaguely-defined financial stabilization plan that could ultimately cost $2 trillion. When representatives of GM and Chrysler said they might need $21 billion more to survive, it seemed like small beer. The numbers are so dizzying that McConnell and his fellow Republicans are trying to “connect the dots” — that is, to explain to the public how all of those discrete spending initiatives add up to a previously unthinkable total. Obama’s current spending proposals, Republicans point out, will cost more than the United States spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the general war on terror and Hurricane Katrina in the last seven years. And that’s before you throw in the $2 trillion fiscal stabilization plan. “This is big government, man,” McConnell exclaimed, his matter-of-fact manner giving way to sheer amazement. “It makes previous attempts at big government pale in comparison — they’re going to go beyond the New Deal and the Great Society by far.” The new spending guarantees that the problems that so disturbed Pelosi and Reid just a couple of years ago — high interest payments and an increasing number of foreign debt-holders — will get worse. Yet so far, the Democratic leaders have refrained from using words like unpatriotic, irresponsible and dangerous to describe Obama’s budget. Of course, they would never use such phrases to attack their own team. But the most important thing to understand about Pelosi and Reid is that while their rhetoric has changed, their substance hasn’t. Back in the Bush days, when they were denouncing Republican over-spending, they were also pushing the congressional leadership to spend more, not less, on just about everything. Now, returned to power, they’re doing the same thing. Only bigger. Byron York

You wanted a list of his broken promises. Well, there you have them.

And a list from of promises that expired during the campaign: IRAQ STATEMENT: “Based on the conversations we’ve had internally as well as external reports, we believe that you can get one to two brigades out a month. At that pace, the forces would be out in approximately 16 months from the time that we began. That would be the time frame that I would be setting up,” Obama to the New York Times, November 1, 2007 EXPIRATION DATE: March 7, 2008: Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, to the BBC: “You can’t make a commitment in whatever month we’re in now, in March of 2008 about what circumstances are gonna be like in Jan. 2009. We can’t even tell what Bush is up to in terms of troop pauses and so forth. He will of course not rely upon some plan that [Obama has] crafted as a presidential candidate or as a US senator.” Also: July 3, 2008: “My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything I’ve said, was always premised on making sure our troops were safe,” Obama told reporters as his campaign plane landed in North Dakota. “And my guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. And I’m going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold.” STATEMENT: On June 14, Obama foreign-policy adviser Susan Rice called the RNC’s argument that Obama needed to go to Iraq to get a firsthand look “complete garbage.” EXPIRATION DATE: On June 16, Obama announced he would go to Iraq and Afghanistan “so he can see first hand the progress of the wars he would inherit if he’s elected president.” DEBATES STATEMENT: May 16, 2008: “If John McCain wants to meet me, anywhere, anytime to have a debate about our respective policies in Iraq, Iran, the Middle East or around the world, that is a conversation I’m happy to have.” EXPIRATION DATE: June 13, 2008: Obama campaign manager David Plouffe: “Barack Obama offered to meet John McCain at five joint appearances between now and Election Day — the three traditional debates plus a joint town hall on the economy in July [on the Fourth of July] and an in-depth debate on foreign policy in August.” IRAN STATEMENT: “We can, then, more effectively deal with what I consider to be one of the greatest threats to the United States, to Israel, and world peace, and that is Iran,” Obama speaking to American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Chicago, March 5, 2007 EXPIRATION DATE: “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny . . . They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.” – May 20, 2008 STATEMENT: Question at the YouTube debate, as the video depicted leaders of the countries, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?” “I would,” Obama answered. July 27, 2007 EXPIRATION DATE: May 10, 2008: Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign-policy adviser to the Democratic candidate: “But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work.” JEREMIAH WRIGHT/TRINITY UNITED STATEMENT: “I could no more disown Jeremiah Wright than I could disown my own grandmother.” –Barack Obama, March 18, 2008 EXPIRATION DATE: on April 28, 2008, Obama cut all ties to Wright, declaring, “Based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought.” STATEMENT: Obama said on March 18, 2008, that his church, Trinity United, “embodies the black community in its entirety” and was being caricatured. EXPIRATION DATE: On May 31, 2008, Obama resigned his membership at Trinity United Church. JIM JOHNSON STATEMENT: Criticism of running-mate vetter Jim Johnson’s loan from Countrywide was “a game” and that his vice-presidential vetting team “aren’t folks who are working for me.” June 10, 2008 EXPIRATION DATE: June 11, 2008, when Obama accepted Johnson’s resignation. FISA STATEMENT: Obama spokesman Bill Burton on October 24, 2007: “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.” EXPIRATION DATE: June 20, 2008: “Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.” NUCLEAR ENERGY STATEMENT: “I am not a nuclear energy proponent.” Barack Obama, December 30, 2007 EXPIRATION DATE: The above statement actually was the expiration date for his previous position, “I actually think we should explore nuclear power as part of the energy mix,” expressed on July 23, 2007; the above statement expired when he told Democratic governors he thought it is “worth investigating its further development” on June 20, 2008. NAFTA STATEMENT: Tim Russert:: “Senator Obama . . . Simple question: Will you, as president, say to Canada and Mexico, ‘This has not worked for us; we are out’?” Obama: “I will make sure that we renegotiate, in the same way that Senator Clinton talked about. And I think actually Senator Clinton’s answer on this one is right. I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced. And that is not what has been happening so far.” February 23, 2008 EXPIRATION DATE: June 18, 2008, Fortune magazine: “’Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,’ he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA ‘devastating’ and ‘a big mistake,’ despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy. “Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? ‘Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,’ he answered. “‘I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally,’ Obama said. ‘I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.’” PUBLIC FINANCING STATEMENT: “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” Also, a Common Cause questionnaire dated November 27, 2007, asked “If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?”, Obama checked, “Yes.” EXPIRATION DATE: June 19, 2008: Obama announced he would not participate in the presidential public financing system. WORKING OUT A DEAL ON PUBLIC FINANCING STATEMENT: “What I’ve said is, at the point where I’m the nominee, at the point where it’s appropriate, I will sit down with John McCain and make sure that we have a system that works for everybody.”Obama to Tim Russert, Febuary 27. EXPIRATION DATE: When Obama announced his decision to break his public-financing pledge on June 19, no meeting between the Democratic nominee and McCain had occurred. WELFARE REFORM STATEMENT: “I probably would not have supported the federal legislation [to overhaul welfare], because I think it had some problems.” Obama on the floor of the Illinois Senate, May 31, 1997 EXPIRATION DATE: April 11, 2008: Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing” it. Obama to the New York Times. GAY MARRIAGE STATEMENT: “Barack Obama has always believed that same-sex couples should enjoy equal rights under the law, and he will continue to fight for civil unions as president. He respects the decision of the California Supreme Court, and continues to believe that states should make their own decisions when it comes to the issue of marriage.” – campaign spokesman, May 5, 2008 EXPIRATION DATE: June 29, 2008: “I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states . . . Finally, I want to congratulate all of you who have shown your love for each other by getting married these last few weeks.” — letter to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION STATEMENT: “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.” – interview with Relevant magazine, July 1, 2008 EXPIRATION DATE: July 5, 2008: “My only point is that in an area like partial-birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be defined through physical health, It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases.” — statement to reporters. DIVISION OF JERUSALEM STATEMENT: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” – speech before AIPAC, June 4, 2008 EXPIRATION DATE: June 6, 2008: “Jerusalem is a final-status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties” as part of “an agreement that they both can live with.” – an Obama adviser clarifying his remarks to the Jerusalem Post

Eighteen lies from his first 100 days: 1. “As President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.” 2. “I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA].“ 3. Opposed a Colombian Free Trade Agreement because advocates ignore that “labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis.” 4. “Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.” 5. “If we see money being misspent, we’re going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it.“ 6. “Yesterday, Jim, the head of Caterpillar, said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off.” 7. “I want to go line by line through every item in the Federal budget and eliminate programs that don’t work, and make sure that those that do work work better and cheaper.” 8. “[My plan] will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell.” 9. “Instead of allowing lobbyists to slip big corporate tax breaks into bills during the dead of night, we will make sure every single tax break and earmark is available to every American online.” 10. “We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress’s seniority, rather than the merit of the project.” 11. “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.” 12. “Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe the United States has to be frank with the Chinese about such failings and will press them to respect human rights.” 13. “We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights.” 14. “Lobbyists won’t work in my White House!“ 15. “The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.” 16. “I’ll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we’ll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills.” 17. “Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.” Obama is 1-for-11 on this promise so far. 18. A special one on the 100th day, “The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing I’d do.”

RECOVERY.GOV STATEMENT: “We will launch a sweeping effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov.” – President Obama, January 28, 2009 EXPIRATION DATE: “More than two months after some of the funds were released, [Recovery.gov] offers little detail on where the money is going . . . The government [spent] $84 million on a website that doesn’t have a search function, when its purpose is to ‘root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government.’” April 2, 2009

MILITARY TRIBUNALS STATEMENT: “Somebody like Khalid Sheik Mohammad is gonna get basically, a full military trial with all the bells and whistles.” September 27, 2006 EXPIRATION DATE: Ongoing. “President Obama is planning to insert himself into the debate about where to try the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, three administration officials said Thursday, signaling a recognition that the administration had mishandled the process and triggered a political backlash. Obama initially had asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to choose the site of the trial in an effort to maintain an independent Justice Department. But the White House has been taken aback by the intense criticism from political opponents and local officials of Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian courtroom in New York.”

GUANTANAMO BAY STATEMENT: Executive order stating, “The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” January 22, 2009. EXPIRATION DATE: November 19, 2009: “Guantánamo, we had a specific deadline that was missed.”