Week Two Damage Report: Obama Takes First Trip On Air Force One, Promises To Neuter USA’s Nuclear Arsenal, And Yet Again Does Not Keep His Word
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Here we are folks. Week two in change of the ObamaNation (Abomination, get it? har har), and what a week it’s been. Just to recap:
Blackwater Gets Booted From Iraq
“Moderate” Muslim Leader Reveals There Are No Such Thing As “Moderate” Muslims
Nancy Pelosi Makes An Ass Of Herself,
And Again…
The point i’m trying to prove is that Washington is spiraling ever out of control, and leading the downhill charge is none other then President Barrack Hussein Obama Himself:
When Pigs Fly
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama embarked Thursday on his first trip aboard Air Force One, jetting off on a quick hop in hopes of pushing his economic rescue package through Congress.
The run to a House Democrats’ retreat in Williamsburg, Va., is a telling choice for Obama’s first trip outside the Washington area.
“He’s saying that he’s willing to go anywhere and talk to anybody in order to get a recovery and reinvestment plan that moves this economy forward,” press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
For the short flight, Obama took the traditional blue-and-white 747, not one of the smaller jets that fill out the presidential fleet. Air Force One, with its history and distinctive markings, makes a statementâ€â€especially on the commander in chief’s maiden voyage.
On departing from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base, Obama broke from tradition as he boarded Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on the South Lawn. He seemed to stun the marine standing at attention by reaching out to shake his hand. The marine obliged, shaking the president’s hand before returning to a steady salute.
Some White House staff members slipped out of the West Wing to catch a glimpse of Obama’s first Marine One takeoff.
At the Air Force base, Obama climbed up the stairs and headed straight on the plane, with no wave to observers below. Gibbs said the president had enjoyed the chopper ride. “He said, `Pretty smooth,’” Gibbs said.
Before Thursday’s trip, Obama had been on a smaller jet that serves as a presidential plane, when he flew from Chicago to Washington in the days before his inauguration. But it was not known as Air Force One, as that designation applies to any plane the president is on.
As for other recent presidents, George W. Bush’s first flight as president may sound familiar. Two weeks after his swearing-in, and following the bitter 2000 recount battle, he went to a resort near Pittsburgh to talk to skeptical Democratic lawmakers. The subject was his tax cuts.
For Bill Clinton, the first flight was to Detroit for a televised town hall meeting, a format seized on during the 1992 campaign. Calling on the first questioner, Clinton said: “I suspect this is going to be about, well, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’”
In 1989, Bush’s father, a former Navy pilot, took his first Air Force One trip as president to the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia. Long before his son’s notorious “Mission Accomplished” speech, Bush spoke on an aircraft carrierâ€â€about wasteful military spending.
Ronald Reagan, at 69 the oldest man to assume the presidency, took a more leisurely approach. His first out-of-town trip was by helicopter to a restful weekend at Camp David in Maryland. His maiden Air Force One trip was to Californiaâ€â€and a restful weekend at his ranch in the Santa Ynez mountains.
Presidents invariably reveal their personality on board.
The garrulous Clinton would restlessly roam the jet, chatting with aides and reporters or sitting down to play hearts. The younger Bush usually stayed put up front and hardly ever saw the press compartment; aides had warned him offhand remarks there could cause trouble. (AP)
Clinton’s Bright Idea: Make Us More Vulnerable
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration, reversing the Bush administration’s limited interest in nuclear disarmament, is gearing up for early negotiations with Russia on a new treaty that would sharply reduce stockpiles of nuclear warheads.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has notified Congress and her staff that she intends to get started quickly on talks with the Russians, who have voiced interest in recent weeks in settling on a new treaty calling for cutbacks in arsenals on both sides.
The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires at the end of the year. It limited the United States and Russia to 6,000 nuclear warheads each. The American stockpile is believed to be about 2,300 warheads, and the Russians’ even lower.
Clinton’s spokesman, Robert Wood, said the new administration was serious about negotiating reductions in nuclear weapons. A replacement treaty for START “will be put on a fast track,” Wood said.
President Barack Obama said during the campaign that he would seek verifiable reductions in all U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons. Clinton told Congress last month that deep reductions were the goal.
Clinton has told her staff she intends to get started quickly on talks with the Russians, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the subject.
Some key arms control posts in the new administration have not been filled, however, and that might slow preparations for talks.
“I can’t give you a time frame when we will be able to complete a review,” Wood said in an interview Thursday. In that vein, he said, the administration was “clearly committed to reducing the numbers” but has not decided how deep to slash.
Internal talks on what position the U.S. should take in overall disarmament have begun within the State Department and with the White House, said officials aware of the discussions. Those discussions are expected to accelerate when the key posts are filled, said the officials, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly.
While the officials said they hoped the nomination process and Senate confirmation would not take long they did not know when the administration would be ready for talks with the Russians.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the private Arms Control Association, said “it appears that reductions down to 1,000 warheads are possible.” That would be a cut of more than 50 percent on the U.S. side.
In 2002, President George W. Bush and Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed on a treaty that sets as a target 1,700 to 2,000 deployed strategic warheads by 2012. (AP)
Big Surprise, Obama Lies
WASHINGTON – As a presidential candidate last summer, Barack Obama promised that his administration wouldn’t award federal contracts to religious groups that only hire members of their own faith. As president six months later, he said his White House would consult lawyers to determine what hiring practices were acceptable on a case-by-case basis.
The executive order Obama signed on Thursday expanded his Republican predecessor’s White House faith-based office. It also fell shortâ€â€at least for nowâ€â€of what Obama outlined during that July campaign speech.
Candidate Obama said then he had no problem with groups requiring their employees to belong to the same faith, but only in the parts of their activities and outreach that were not supported by U.S. taxpayer dollars.
“First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against themâ€â€or against the people you hireâ€â€on the basis of their religion,” Obama said while standing outside a Zanesville, Ohio, community center. Behind him was a podium labeled “Stronger Together: Faith and Community.”
“Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs,” Obama said.
Former President George W. Bush wanted to allow religious charities that receive federal money to perform social services to be able to hire or fire staffers based on their faith. He never was able to get Congress to go along, so he established more limited rules along those lines by executive order.
Obama’s move on Thursday could be a first step toward reversing Bush’s rules. The executive order allows Joshua DuBois, the new head of Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, to talk with the attorney general’s office and White House counsel to “seek the opinion … on any constitutional and statutory questions involving existing or prospective programs and practices.”
But because it did not specify that he never would allow taxpayer-funded hiring based on religion, it frustrated some of Obama’s supporters. Some even wanted him to scrap the entire Bush-era office.
“Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state. But I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that ideaâ€â€so long as we follow a few basic principles,” Obama said.
Those principles now are in the hands of administration lawyers. (AP)
And there you have it kids… Stock up on your canned goods and ammo. Dig yourself in, its going to be a long four years. But we’re going to take it one week at a time…







