Estimate $1.4 Billion taxpayer dollars spent on Obama family last year

[jaminjim]

I kinda doubt that Bush Jr. flew to his ranch in Texas every day and a half. That's what it would take for him to fly home more times than Obama played golf holes.

 

[jaminjim]

You need to research how they made a lot of their profits. Not what you think.

 

[Humble2drive]

You need to research how they made a lot of their profits. Not what you think.

If you did the research, why don't you just post your findings instead of telling others that they need to do it?

 

[jaminjim]

If you did the research, why don't you just post your findings instead of telling others that they need to do it?

It will be retained longer if you find out how they did it.

 

[jaminjim]

Here is an article about some of the profits that I'm talking about.

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress - Bloomberg

I don't know if there is more stuff like this going on, but if there was a audit of the Federal Bank we could know for sure. Right?

 

[zero3nine]

Whoever said W flew to TX more times than O has played HOLES of golf needs a reality check.

That would be around 2000 times. W was pres. for about 2900 days. You're saying he flew there 2 out of 3 days while president. He wouldn't have had time to do anything else.

So he couldn't have planted the bombs in the levees or the trade centers. No time for illuminati meetings with the Bilderbergers, no time to be commanding the black helicoptors, and certainly not enough time to be secretly distributing crack in the ghetto.

Nope.... He was just flying back and forth all the time. Bet be probably left the engines running too.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Humble2drive]

Here is an article about some of the profits that I'm talking about.

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress - Bloomberg

I don't know if there is more stuff like this going on, but if there was a audit of the Federal Bank we could know for sure. Right?

Good article. It would be safe to assume that much more of this goes on and it will keep trickling out to the public over time.
On another note, any loans obtained would need to be accounted for as liabilities and would reduce profits.

 

[Turtle]

Whoever said W flew to TX more times than O has played HOLES of golf needs a reality check

Whoever took that ridiculous statement literally needs a sarcasm check.

 

[Pilgrim]

The high spending levels during President Obama's term in office can not be characterized as "out of control". Congress controls the appropriation of funds. There is a reason our system is set up like that.

It would be correct to say that Government spending during the Obama administration has been extremely high but, it would not be correct to blame the President for that total amount.

"The truth is that the nearly 18 percent spike in spending in fiscal 2009 — for which the president is sometimes blamed entirely — was mostly due to appropriations and policies that were already in place when Obama took office.
That includes spending for the bank bailout legislation approved by President Bush. Annual increases in amounts actually spent since fiscal 2009 have been relatively modest. In fact, spending for the first seven months of the current fiscal year is running slightly below the same period last year, and below projections."

FactCheck.org : Obama’s Spending: ‘Inferno’ or Not?

Once again FactCheck.org is making up their own facts related to an article by James Nutting for the WSJ website MarketWatch. An article in the American Spectator does a good job of explaning how Nutting's fantasy just doesn't square with reality.(bold emphasis mine)

Obama worked with Pelosi's Democrat Congress to pass an additional, $410 billion, supplemental spending bill for fiscal year 2009! As Ann Coulter, far sharper than Nutting and relying on far better economists, explains, "Obama didn't come in and live with the budget Bush had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill that Bush refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March 10, 2009." But in the fairy tale by Nutting, who appears to have been a lot more than one toke over the line when authoring his story, that spending is attributed to the evil and notorious President Bush.Next in 2009 came a $40 billion expansion in the SCHIP entitlement program, as if we didn't already have way more than too much entitlement spending. But that was just a warm-up to the biggest single spending bill in world history, Obamacare, enacted in March, 2010. That legislation, not yet even counted in Obama's spending record so far because it mostly does not go into effect until 2014, is now scored by CBO as increasing federal spending by $1.6 trillion in the first 10 years alone, with trillions more to come in future years. Indeed, as explained in detail in my 2011 book, America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, that is surely still a gross underestimate.
After just one year of the Obama spending binge, federal spending had already rocketed to 25.2 percent of GDP, the highest in American history except for World War II. That compares to 20.8 percent in 2008, and an average of 19.6 percent during Bush's two terms. The average during President Clinton's two terms was 19.8 percent, and during the 60-plus years from World War II until 2008 -- 19.7 percent. Obama's own budget released in February projects the average during the entire four years of the Obama Administration to come in at 24.4 percent in just a few months. That is an enormous, postwar record, undeniable spending binge. These are facts, not opinions over which reasonable people can differ.

The American Spectator : Plenty of Nutting

 

[Humble2drive]

Once again FactCheck.org is making up their own facts related to an article by James Nutting for the WSJ website MarketWatch. An article in the American Spectator does a good job of explaning how Nutting's fantasy just doesn't square with reality.(bold emphasis mine)

The article that I referenced sited 49 references of which only 1 was from nutting. The article is not related to Nutting, in fact it rejects his conclusions:

Our own analysis leads us to conclude that Obama deserves responsibility for somewhat more fiscal 2009 spending than Nutting or Mitchell assign to him, as we’ve noted. Spending in that year shot up an incredible $535 billion. Nutting and Mitchell hold Obama responsible for only 26 percent of that increase, but we conclude that Obama can fairly be assigned responsibility for as much as 38 percent.

We also disagree with Nutting’s conclusion that Obama’s increases are the lowest since Eisenhower. Not only should Nutting have measured Obama’s increases from a lower base, in our judgment, he also fails to take account of inflation, which has been extraordinarily low during Obama’s term.

You are quoting an opinion from American Spectator which is an obviously conservative source with a conservative spin.
I quoted factcheck.org which bills itself as non-partisan.
It would be reasonable to expect that any thing that American Spectator would opine on would be different from the facts presented on factcheck.
This in no way indicates that factcheck is "making up" facts as the same could be said about American Spectator.

This is the state of this election and how the Internet has contributed to confusing the issues. Those who stick to conservative sites will believe them, those that stick to liberal sites will believe those and those that review unbiased, liberal and conservative sites might have a chance of getting to the truth.
Or maybe not.

 

[jaminjim]

Those who stick to conservative sites will believe them, those that stick to liberal sites will believe those and those that review unbiased, liberal and conservative sites might have a chance of getting to the truth.

Not unless you research it yourself, going to the Congressional records might be the place to start.

Or maybe not.

Or probably not.

 

[Pilgrim]

The article that I referenced sited 49 references of which only 1 was from nutting. The article is not related to Nutting, in fact it rejects his conclusions:
You are quoting an opinion from American Spectator which is an obviously conservative source with a conservative spin.
I quoted factcheck.org which bills itself as non-partisan.
It would be reasonable to expect that any thing that American Spectator would opine on would be different from the facts presented on factcheck.
This in no way indicates that factcheck is "making up" facts as the same could be said about American Spectator.

Facts are facts regardless of the messenger. Spending and debt has risen under Obama to unprecedented levels not seen since WW2 in spite of the fact that the Iraq war is over and the one time expenditure for TARP has come and gone. The Democrats had filibuster-proof control of Congress for the first two years of Obama's administration and they did NOTHING to curb spending - instead they increased it. This "blame it on Bush" nonsense just doesn't hold water, especially considering that the Democrats controlled the House for Bush's last two years. And of course FactCheck.org bills itself as nonpartisan - in spite of the fact that it's a division of the Annenberg Foundation at the Univ. of PA which is liberal as the day is long.
Bottom line - govt spending under Obama is at 24.4% of GDP; in 1946 it was 24.8% of GDP. He has added over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR every year he's been in office. But of course his rates of "increases in spending" haven't been excessive compared to those of other presidents; his first year was a record level of spending and he's stayed at or near that level every year since 2009. He's been like a relief pitcher in baseball that comes in with the bases loaded and keeps giving up runs without striking anybody out.

 

[Turtle]

I quoted factcheck.org which bills itself as non-partisan.

Fox News bills itself as Fair and Balanced. Well, OK then.

If you wanted to deceive people who are trying to differentiate between truth and lies on the Internet how would you do it? If you were extremely devious and had no conscience, you might set up a Web site with some official and unbiased sounding name that claims to be the encyclopedia of truth to be used as a tool for anyone who has the same biased view and wants to make believe to "back it up" with what they would like you to think is "indisputable fact." If you are really good at it you will use careful wordsmithing to avoid projecting bias in individual articles, and instead be selective in the facts you use and which facts you want to check.

That's precisely what FactCheck.org, and others like it do, and are. Most telling, perhaps, about FactCheck.org is the overall number and kind of articles they do publish. They have an awful lot of articles defending president Obama, and their criticisms of him are with regards to mostly inconsequential issues.

This is the state of this election and how the Internet has contributed to confusing the issues.

That's an interesting observation, and one that merits setting the stage of a real eye-opener (for many people) by bring up an interesting book on the very subject. I know that citing book titles and what they're about is about as snore-boring as a lengthy post of mathematical equations on wind resistance, but bear with me. It comes together pretty well, if I do saysomyself.

There is a book called The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Messages Shaped the 2008 Election. The book lauds the brilliance of how Obama used the media, the Internet in particular, to both raise money and get his messages out to people. It's a good book, a good read, albeit quite a biased one. The book was written by a woman named Kathleen Hall Jamieson. More on her later. It's good, trust me.

She also wrote a book called Everything You Think You Know About Politics…and Why You’re Wrong, which explores why the American public, seemingly so eager for "unspun" information about candidates and their positions, invariably ends up being and feeling manipulated by our political process. It deals with how political campaigns really work, and how well-crafted communications can make or break a campaign, how voting patterns can be both predicted and manipulated, and how campaign promises fit in with all of it.

In addition, she also wrote Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy, which details how effective communication can both deceive and distract people while subverting the actual democratic process in making people believe the ideas they have been fed are ideas they came up with on their own. It claims to be an unbiased look at how the media manipulates information, but it is decidedly left leaning. She details the correct way to craft an attack ad so that it doesn't come off as being a mean, attack ad. But mostly she subtly demonstrates that 'what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not always what is heard', which is they key to successful manipulation. It is a decent book for someone wanting to get information on how to really watch the news and political campaigns, and for many a way to recognize when they are being manipulated. In fact, it is used as required reading in many high school and college political science and communications classes.

I bring up these three books to show that Kathleen Hall Jamieson is arguably one of the world's most foremost experts in communication and deception, political in particular, because she is. The woman really and truly knows what she's talking about. She is also an unabashed liberal, a socialist, and quite proud of it.

So, who, exactly, is this woman? Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

The Annenberg School for Communications? The Annenberg Public Policy Center? Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes, I remember, FactCheck.org is a "Project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center".

So, we have one of the world's foremost experts on political deception, a socialist, in charge of the self-billed "non-partisan" FactCheck.org.

You think there might maybe, possibly be a slight chance that "non-partisan" might actually be a clever deception for political purposes? No? Yes?

But wait, there's more! Between 1995 and 2001 the Annenberg Projected funded massive public school reforms for 18 selected school systems that started out as a noble idea, but didn't really work out that way. One of the largest grants to one of the largest public school systems was the $49 million given to Chicago's public schools. The Chicago group in charge of the Annenberg Challeng was headed by a man named William Ayres, an associate professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the founder of the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that conducted a campaign of bombing (with real bombs) public buildings (including police stations, the U.S. Capitol Building, and the Pentagon) during the 1960s and 1970s in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

One of William Ayres' first actions as the head of the Chicago Annemberg Challenge was to appoint a Chariman of the Board for the Challenge. The person appointed to that position was a man named Barak Obama. Yeah, that one.

Over the years the Obama-Ayres association and connection has been proven to be a close one, with Ayres having direct input to Obama during his 2008 election campaign. Back during the Obama campaign days when questions were asked about the Obama-Ayers connection, Obama defenders would cite that the Annenberg for whom the foundation was named was conservative and a friend of Reagan. That's true, Walter Annenberg was an ardent conservative who wasn't hesitant to use his many publications to further a conservative view of things. But, in the last few years of his life as he gave direct control of the foundation to others, and most observably since his passing, the foundation has gone the way of supporting some views that are decidedly not in line with Reagan or any other conservative.

If you want to see some well-crafted, world-class political spin and deception by one of the world's foremost experts in political spin and deception, check out the facts on that one at FactCheck.org. It's a real hoot when you know the "rest of the story" - the truth - and puts FactCheck.org in a considerably different light. FactCheck.org quickly begins to look about as unbiased as MediaMatters.org.

Those who stick to conservative sites will believe them, those that stick to liberal sites will believe those and those that review unbiased, liberal and conservative sites might have a chance of getting to the truth.
Or maybe not.

The trick is figuring out which is unbiased, which is liberal, and which is conservative, because 'what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not always what is heard'.

For a very telling illustration of just how biased FactCheck.org really is, check out the "Viral Spin" page of their Web site. Every one of the stories either defends Obama directly, or has a defense of liberal bias. Not one story on there defends any conservative or a conservative issue. Not one.

 

[davekc]

This is why I have to go to Fox for the facts.

NBC screws up again.

MSNBC caught in another big video gaffe | Fox News

 

[muttly]

MSNBC,NBC. That news company is "gone" .

 

[Pilgrim]

Back to the subject matter of the OP:

Judicial Watch is investigating yet another Obama personal vacation, trying to get a sense of costs passed on to American taxpayers. This time, our investigation focuses on the security costs associated with First Daughter Malia Obama’s trip to Mexico during Spring Break 2012.

JW Sues for Cost of Obama Daughter's Spring Break Trip