Who bailed out the banks - Obama

To make things worse Obama increased the debt 10 Trillion more than ALL fucking presidents combined. Talk about ruining the economy Its a noose on the necks of Americans for generations

The root cause was Democrats wanting home ownership for more people, which happen to be those who could not afford a house. Dodd/Frank led the way . Republicans tried a few time to curb/ change it but failed. Banks complied and wrote bad loans and sold them to larger banks and they packaged these bad loans to look attractive and the house of cards tumbled.

Katrina -- You seriously want to go there--- New Orleans and the storm that hit Jersey shore and Long Island ... Fucking disaster years later --- Yep your boy really hit it out of the park with the help didn't he?

9/11 waning completely ignored. Bullshit.. Clinton had Bin Laden had full intelligence to get him and did nothing.

I don't know if you have you head in the sand or up your ass.

Stupid?....well, that's the pot calling the clear glass pitcher black.
Far better leader?!? If only I thought you might be joking, but I know you aren't.
Show me something Obama suggested that's worse than a single one of these Bush/republican plans
Free Bailouts-a Bush/republican idea, repeatedly, getting nothing for it.
9/11- warned about but completely ignored by Bush.
Katrina-do I need to say a word?
The second great depression- (according to republicans)-caused by republicans removing the safeguards put on the stock market and banks, allowing them to play fast and loose, totally screwing our economy.
Iraq-again, do I need to say a word?
Putting the Iraq war 'off the books' to try to blame Obama for the cost that was ignored during Bush-uh...yeah, keep trying that.
Cutting taxes while raising spending outrageously-that was Bush
Raising the national debt more than any president before him-I know fox told you that was Obama, but it was really Bush. Even the first years when federal income was severely depressed (thanks to the economy Bush left us with) he didn't spend like Bush, if you look at the REAL numbers, not the white washed, no war, no homeland security, no bailout numbers the republicans pretend are real.

Because the republicans decided that their plan was to obstruct ANY idea from Obama (clearly stated BEFORE he took office, and followed through), it didn't matter a whit how he led, they refused to follow. It's not about his leadership, it's about the republican leadership thinking that beating Obama is more important than governing. Refusing a 10-1 deal where for every $1 in raised taxes they get $10 in spending cuts....and they said NO! Get real for once, it's not Obama's leadership or lack thereof that's screwing us, it's partisan politics being more important than the nation...and we all know which side plays that game more often and harder. (EDIT: I do admit that both 'sides' play that game, however.)
10 votes total? What the F*&K are you talking about. You mean 10 REPUBLICAN votes in the house? You are simply wrong he only got 10 votes total.
"The House has never failed to pass an annual budget resolution since the current budget rules were put into place in 1974. However this spring noted that the GOP-led Congress didn’t pass a final resolution in 1998, 2004 and 2006."
..."And the politics of the moment are a far cry from last year, when the House and Senate easily passed Obama’s first budget on the president’s 100th day in office. The budget measure last year did not attract any GOP support."
Well...enough said. I know you won't really take any of this to heart, you drank the fox news koolaid long ago and facts no longer matter.

It's not so much racism as xenophobia. The Russians might be white, but during the cold war, they may as well have been Martians.

And no, I don't believe Americans support drone strikes because the "get" to kill brown people. It's simply that they don't care as much about them.

You're deluding yourself if you think otherwise. It goes way beyond terrorism. And it's not even a US issue either.

Look at other tragedies, natural disasters, etc.

Katrina killed 1800 people. Undoubtedly a significant event. The 2004 tsunami killed nearly a quarter of a million people, but which one got more media coverage in the developed world?

So, once again, answer the question. Would you have been ok with the British government drone striking Ireland in the 80s?

The issue is a concern for the southern part of Louisiana. It is said we lose one football field of protection (from hurricanes) each year - to erosion.

New Orleans does have a levy system along, Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and various canals. There has been maintenance on them since Katrina.

Didn't like Treme half as much as I enjoyed The Wire. It just doesn't seem relevant... (not unlike how i feel about the Federal government after Katrina)

The reason that it's crazy in Baton Rouge is that it's Louisiana. I used to live in Louisiana, so I know. Did you see what happened there after Hurricane Katrina? If you think the federal gov't was to blame for that insane crap, you've never lived there. My wife and I watched the news and said to each other, "that behavior is exactly what you would expect in a dire situation." FEMA could have been stationed on every corner before the hurricane hit and you still would have had people crying afterward because the rain got in their drinks.

This video makes me miss my old home.

Graffiti art has been big here since Katrina. It also has been controversial. There was a ANTI-graffiti vigilante, The Gray Ghost, who painted out graffiti around the city. He made the mistake of painting over a legitimate mural.

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/blogofneworleans/archives/2011/08/04/vigilante-vigilante-the-gray-ghost-speaks

He and Banksy got into it.

http://weburbanist.com/2010/09/11/banksy-vs-the-gray-ghost-in-new-orleans/

I think interpreting resource officer = armed guard is a bit of a stretch, but I'll admit that was my initial reaction too. I interpreted it as "I'll leave it up to the individual school to decide what they want"

which is probably the right thing to do.

As I write this, Immediately to my right, on the sift, is an ad that says "Obama says, Ban Guns!" say no!"

So the strawman is still standing. Nowhere, no how is anyone...ANYONE going after anyone's guns. Yet in the minds of certain people.....

If it weren't for the fact that hundreds, if not thousands of innocents would be probably be killed, I'm to the point of saying that if these assholes think the gov't is tyrannical, let them revolt. Let's see how far they get, they don't have popular support, they don't have military support. If you want to live free or die and you think you aren't free, then put your money where your mouth is asshole and do something about it.

I'm sick of the whining and the conspiracy theories. put up or shut up. They think gov't is tyrannical, but they do nothing, guns were unlawfully confiscated during Katrina, but they did nothing.

We've got people who honestly think the recent shootings were all staged. Prove it or shut the fuck up. Talk is cheap.

I hear a lot of whining from people like this, but not any action.

I don't care if you're pro or anti gun regulation. I don't care if you have hundreds of guns

I welcome ANY honest discussion over the roles of firearms in America, Which is precisely why you cannot invite the NRA to the discussion. They're obviously biased. They are a lobby organization. They profit when guns profit. You can't be objective when your livelihood is determined by gun sales.

It's another case where effective government is hampered by private money.

In any case, the problem with what happened during Katrina depicted in this video has nothing to do with gun confiscation, it has everything to do with shitty cops making bad decisions. The video conflates these idiot cops beating up grandma with gun confiscation. two completely separate issues.

I am pro gun regulation, but yeah unless someone can explain to me a really good reason WHY they were confiscated (which I'm obviously not going to get from THIS biased video), I would be against gun confiscation in this situation as well.

The problem isn't gun regulation, the problem is appropriate enforcement of said regulation. This was a failure of New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass for giving that order to confiscate weapons. This was a failure of enforcement, not of regulation.

Are we going to hear about that from this video? nah, it goes against the NRA's profit motive. The only message of this video is play off your fears, not to inform.

It's really funny that part of the title of this video is "The Untold Story" because it seems they're not telling the rest of the story.

what this video does not mention is the huge contingent of blackwater mercenaries that were sent to new orleans during katrina.
*quality

Yeah Katrina is something no one should forget and we're not talking about what FEMA didn't do for the people there-It's what they did with the National Guard TO the people of Louisiana. Forced entry and confiscation of firearms. Illegal and criminal.

Be careful. All* right wingers are capable of doing the right thing when its blasted into their face. It's the other 99.9% of the time that it's just the other asshole's problem.

edit* - MOST - just remembered Katrina

Let's take things in stride here.
1. Al Gore has the highest electricity useage in the entire country in Tennessee. That kinda tells you all you need to know about what he says and does.

2. Super Storm Sandy doesn't mean anything is necessarily happening anymore than the fact that California hasn't had any major earthquakes or storms for approximately 5 years. The south aka Katrina and such largest storms were in CA and the East got almost nothing

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0211/Behind-mid-Atlantic-snowstorms-a-rare-weather-pattern

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/weather-climate/index.html

Please realize there are many other articles out there that point this pattern out.

None of that means that we shouldn't be good stewards of the land and such. However, Mr. Chomsky and anyone over the age of 40 has been alive for the death by heat in the 60's, the ice age of the 70's, the Sagan predictions of over population death of us all, to the Al Gore death of climate change heat, to the newly recognized studies put out in Europe about how the temperature actually declining and the high's were 13 years ago.

The simple fact of the matter is this: We have many more safeguards in place and to say that our rivers, streams, automobiles hell, even airplanes don't burn cleaner and more efficiently is just plain not paying attention.

@Yossarian FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina was a fucking disaster.

If you treat people as children incapable of thinking ahead and worrying about disasters and such, you'll likely get more of that reckless behavior. Let them come up with their own solutions that don't involve imposing costs on others to support a failure of an institution, and they'll eventually learn to deal with problems more responsibly.

If it bothers you that an insurance company might take 10, 20, or 30% profit, why doesn't it bother you when government wastes a much bigger percentage of your tax dollars doing the same thing with no profits to show for it?

I'd appreciate it if you'd continue this discussion in the appropriate topic, not on my profile, thanks.

@enoch let me see, charity = helping people (preferably) in need. Disaster relief = helping people in need (due to some disaster). Help me understand why I can't compare the two.

@dgandhi did FEMA do such an amazing job after Katrina that I don't know about? Because there's a very long article on Wikipedia detailing all the criticisms, somebody should remove it.

Government is not wasteful just for being large, it's wasteful for being a monopoly. It's so easy to conceive of the evils of a single corporation becoming a monopoly, but when it comes to government, the issue strangely never comes up.

I understand that's most likely because we can't avoid government being a monopoly, it's the nature of the beast, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it smaller.

You bring up good points about division of labor. What about competition, does that matter in modern society or will that also be overlooked?

If we use this $35B figure, which is allegedly what government needs to do disaster relief work poorly, can't we bring it down by subtracting all the money wasted, or will the private corporations have to operate at the same level of exorbitance?

Does it have to be a single gigantic institution, why can't smaller organizations be triggered in unison by a big disaster?

Also, why does it have to be entirely non-profit, what about the insurance business, doesn't it revolve around risk management and dealing with unlikely events like disasters?

Yes, we pay for a disaster relief infrastructure, but we don't have a choice in the matter, and that knowledge is what makes FEMA a disaster. In our moment of most dire need, we can only count on FEMA and nothing else. They abuse their privilege by being wasteful and inefficient.

Governments are not the only organizations capable of preparing and dealing with disasters, and they're very far from being the best at it.