Talk:Barack Hussein Obama/update

On this page we'll attempt to update the Barack Obama article - incorporating what we already have with some more recent information.

Ideas

Structuring

This is what I feel should be the general sectioning of the article - I think with an article that we have this much information on, what we mostly need to do is use "See also:" pages rather than go into major details.

Early life U.S. Senate career (with a note on opposition to the Iraq War - which should be followed up on in the presidential primary race) U.S. Senate career Radical endorsements, support, and get out the vote efforts (better language?) Use of filibuster and obstructionism Voted agaist debt ceiling increase Presidential election (things to cover: experience question, jeremiah wright, PUMA) Primary race National election

Presidency Domestic policy Popular Bills (Zadroga, lilly ledbetter fair pay act) Economic plan Stimulus plan Health care The Gulf oil spill Foreign policy Commander-in-Chief Iraq Afghanistan Libya/The Obama Doctine Don't Ask Don't Tell

Ideology (mentioning pro-abortion stance, other things not mentioned above) References See also External links

Rob I've bolded two section that I wonder if they should be sections alone; I do 100% agree that they should be mentioned in the text; are you set on them being sections? If so I'll yield--IDuan 00:58, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

Leave bold for now & let's see what develops; Recovery is ambiguous; while total output (GDP growth) has recovered, we've seen several polls just over the past week where 60-70% of respondents still think the US is in recession (despite the fact GDP growth has recovered over the past year and half). Likewise, it certainly has not been a "jobs recovery". I'd suggest this needs a better name. Rob Smith 01:15, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

I very much agree - that's a misleading section title - I think what I meant was "Proposed Recovery" - or "Recovery Plan". The latter sounds a little better to my ears. I made a few edits below - I'm gonna hold off on doing anything else till you get a chance to take a look and add things.--IDuan01:22, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

I've replaced Recovery with Stimulus, perhaps "Stimulus and budget". Also, Don't Ask Don't Tell seems a little wierd under "Wartime"; is it there solely cause it's a military subject? It could just as easily fit under Idealogy as well (I' not just trying to be argumentative....) Rob Smith 01:40, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

Hmm. Very true. No I think it's definitely a legitimate question. I HAD been thinking that Ideology would just cover what wasn't addressed in the prior sections (since certainly we'd discuss his economic ideology in the "Economic plan" section) - so, yes, I had just placed it under wartime solely because its a military subject. But it is probably more apropos to homosexual rights. I am worried that Ideology will become a bucket of worms, so to speak, only in that it'd be weird to just have a section for DADT under it, so then we'd have to have a super-section for "Homosexual policy", and then super-sections for everything else, making the article very long. I leave it up to you.--IDuan 01:45, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

Alternatively, we can just leave it as is for now. I'm updating the Obama administration article right now, too. That one is structured , "Economic policy", "Foreign policy", etc. Wartime leader is something new. Perhaps, Commander-in-Chief? that would encompass DADT as well as ongoing military operations. Rob Smith 02:08, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

I like that. It's broader and works well. Nice.--IDuan 02:29, 3 May 2011 (EDT)

I took a look at the Wikipedia page on Obama - and I actually like how they organize his presidency - into Domestic policy and foreign policy. I'm going to make some changes to reflect that. I think in the long run it'll actually limit the number of sections we need--IDuan 18:15, 4 May 2011 (EDT)

The actual article

Barack Hussein Obama
44th President of the United States From: January 20, 2009-Present
Vice President	Joe Biden
Predecessor	George W. Bush
Successor	Incumbent (no successor)
U.S. Senator from Illinois From: January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008
Predecessor	Peter Fitzgerald
Successor	Roland Burris
Information
Party	Democrat
Spouse(s)	Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama
Religion	Described in this article

Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961) is the 44th President of the United States. Overcoming a short political career, Obama defeated Republican nominee John McCain for the presidency in 2008, campaigning on promises of "change" after an unpopular administration headed by George W. Bush. In effect, that change has been an embrace of Socialism and liberal policies perhaps before unseen by the White House.

Immediately after entering office, Obama was faced with a recession - one of the most severe since the Great Depression. By and large, his economic policies to combat the recession have, to date, ranged from ineffective to counterproductive. Also on the domestic front, Obama passed a highly controversial health care bill in 2009 that was approved only along party lines. In foreign policy Obama has escalated the Afghanistan War - perhaps to success when on May 1st he announced that the United States had killed September 11th mastermind and terrorist Osama bin Laden - while also initiating (via the United Nations) a conflict with Libya and ending combat operations in the War in Iraq.

Early life

Obama was born in Hawaii to Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. - who had married just six months prior - on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The couple divorced in 1964. Dunham remarried Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When Obama was six, Soetoro returned to Indonesia, and Dunham and Obama followed.

Illinois State Senate career

File:O-2002-antiwar-rally-davidson.jpg

Obama speaking at the October 2002 rally in Chicago organized by Carl Davidson. "[H]e is a brutal man who butchers his own people," nevertheless Obama opposed "dumb wars".

Obama entered the Illinois Senate promising change to a corrupt system. He mixed often radical votes with more pragmatic agreements. Possibly one of his most radical votes was against requiring medical care for aborted children who survive the procedure - in fact the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council ascribed him a 100% rating for his consistently pro-choice votes. He was criticized for using the statehouse as a stepping stone for a more illustrious career: Steven J. Rauschenberger, a Republican, said prior to Obama's election as president: “He is a very bright but very ambitious person who has always had his eyes on the prize, and it wasn’t Springfield. If he deserves to be president, it is not because he was a great legislator.”

The statehouse was majority Republican, so the Senator was sometimes forced to compromise. He formed allegiances across party lines to pass campaign finance reform that banned most gifts by lobbyists, prohibited spending campaign money for legislators’ personal use and required electronic filing of campaign disclosure reports. Obama also helped pass a so-called “driving-while-black bill”, which required the police to collect data on the race of drivers they stopped as a way to monitor racial profiling.

Radical foundation and connection to William Ayers

In 1995 a cadre of like minded individuals gathered in the home of Weather Underground (WUO) terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and William "Bill" Ayers. According to Dr. Quentin Young, "I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress." Dohrn is a veteran of guerrilla warfare training in Cuba prior to the attacks on the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Carl Davidson, webmaster of Progressives for Obama, was told by Fidel Castro at the same time Castro believed the United States was ready for revolution.

Dr. Young related Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer was choosing then Chicago city councilman Barack Obama as her successor. Palmer once served on the executive board of the U.S. Peace Council, a KGB front organization that actively opposed President Ronald Reagan's defense program.

Ayers and Dohrn took credit, and have never denied, responsibility for a series of terrorist bombings which included the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Ayers, Dohrn and Barack Obama's friendship and associations go back to the 1980s. The Ayers/Dohrn group lent notoriety among leftists to launch Obama's career. Ayers, Dohrn and Jeff Jones of the Apollo Alliance authored Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism, the title of which is taken from The Sayings of Mao Zedong, "a single spark can set a prairie fire." The book declares "we are communist men and women." Obama Green Czar Van Jones is a founder of the Apollo Alliance. In response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, Katrina Vanden Huevel of The Nation magazine suggested "we need a Manhattan Project, an Apollo Alliance."

Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 and served there for the next eight years.

President Obama is the first person having ties to a known former terrorist to gain control over America's nuclear weapons. Author and blogger Jack Cashill requisitioned a comparison of the writing style of Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, with Barack Obama's earlier 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, and came to the conclusion that Obama's former boss, Bill Ayers, had ghostwritten Dreams. Ayers confesses to violent acts, planting bombs, says he has no regrets and feels he "should have done more." Later Ayers was to publicly admit that he actually did author the book.

U.S. Senate career

Following a failed campaign for the House of Representatives, Obama ran for the open Senate seat from Illinois in 2004; he won the seat after liberals obtained the release of the confidential and personally embarrassing divorce records of his opponent, Jack Ryan, forcing him to end his campaign and be replaced by the out-of-state candidate Alan Keyes.

The National Journal ranked him the most liberal senator in 2007.

Presidential Election

Main article: Barack Hussein Obama 2008 Presidential campaign

Democrats began calling for an Obama candidacy after liberals lauded his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech.

Campaign to be the Democratic nominee

The race for the Democratic ticket originally seemed Hillary Clinton's to lose, but was ultimately a close race between Clinton and Obama. Clinton would take a slim advantage in the popular vote, while Obama would carry significantly more states and territories. Obama's advantage with super-delegates over Clinton was about 2-to-1. Obama was able to attract the support of liberals by pointing out that he had come out against the Iraq War "from the beginning" whereas Clinton had voted in favor of the war in 2002.

Campaign for the Presidency

Obama campaigned against Senator John McCain in the general election. To the chagrin of Clinton supporters, he selected Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate, whereas McCain selected Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin. The Obama and Biden ticket would win the election, and Obama would become the nation's first African American president.

Jeremiah Wright

One major dilemma that arose for Obama during his campaign was his connection to his preacher Jeremiah Wright. Obama and his wife (raised a Baptist) were members of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a chruch that embraced black liberation theology and its emphasis on empowering so-called "oppressed groups" against "establishment forces". This denomination was the first in America to ordain gays as ministers.

Obama describes his conversion in The Audacity of Hope. The title was inspired by one of Wright's sermons. After 20 years of being an active member, in April 2008 candidate Obama made public statements poised to set him at odds with the man who conducted his wedding and baptized his children. With the negative publicity persisting, a month later Obama ended the friendship, left Wright's church, and blamed the media. Obama claimed “It’s not fair to the other members of the church who seek to worship in peace...", and distanced himself from Wright's sermons as "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in the truth."

Wright had been making inflammatory comments and posting his sermons online for sale. These include the statement "G-d damn America," and in describing the September 11th attacks, "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." In addition, Rev. Wright blamed America saying "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic."

Presidential career

Main article: Obama Administration

Domestic policy

Popular bills

Obama's first act of office was to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act - effectively nullifying the Supreme Court case Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., which ruled that Ledbetter had to have filed a pay discrimination suit within 180 days of the first time Ledbetter was payed less than her male peers; the law made corporations subject to suit within 180 days of each time the employee was unfairly paid.

On January 2, 2011, Obama signed the James Zadroga 9/11 Healthcare and Compensation Act. The act, which afforded 9/11 first responders who were sickened by the dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center health care and compensation, passed Congress after its sponsored agreed to scale down the pricing from 7.4 to 4.2 billion dollars.

Economic plan

See also: Obamunism and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Critics of the Obama administration have coined the word "Obamunism" to describe Barack Obama's socialistic and "fascism light" economic planning policies (Benito Mussolini defined fascism as the wedding of state and corporate powers. Accordingly, trend forecaster Gerald Celente labels Obama's corporate bailouts as being "fascism light" in nature). Obamunism can also refer to Obama's ruinous fiscal policies and reckless monetary policies.

Wall Street firms and banks that were bailed out were among Obama's biggest campaign supporters. Therefore, the Obama administration bailouts of corrupt, unproductive, and reckless Wall Street firms was hardly surprising, although it certainly was not helpful in making the United States economy more productive and prosperous. A 2005 study found that government corporate bailouts are often done for mere political considerations and the economic resources allocated exhibit significantly worse economic performance than resources allocated using purely business considerations. Proponents of free market capitalism said Bernanke should not have bailed out failing firms and instead should have allowed free market capitalism to quickly recover as it did in the depression of 1920 without government intervention (free market capitalists assert that government intervention drags out economic recessions and depressions).

Top trend forecaster Gerald Celente predicts that the corrupt economic policies of the Obama administration will lead to a second great depression (Celente predicted the 1987 US stock market crash, the dot.com crash, the US 2008/2009 recession, and the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s) and may lead to a "second American Revolution" (Celente predicted the tax protests that are now occurring in America). Celente also asserts that the costly and inefficient temporary short term methods that the Obama administration is using to alleviate economic problems in the short term (which is causing massive increases in Obama administration deficit spending) is only making matters worse and will not prevent the worse economic depression in United States history from occurring.

The Obama administration has been sharply criticized for its massive deficit spending and its reckless monetary policy via vast increases in the money supply. Celente predicts that if a "second American Revolution" occurs in a peaceful and productive manner, it may include a third party movement of governance that will advocate a more free market capitalism approach to the American economy and a more strict interpretation of the United States constitution as far as the authors' original intent.

Healthcare

Main article: Obamacare

Gulf oil spill

Main article: Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster

Foreign policy

Commander-in-chief

Iraq

Main article: Operation Iraqi Freedom

Afghanistan

Main article: Afghanistan War

Libya

Main article: Libyan uprising 2011

In February 2011, the political unrest that had spread through the Arab world showed up as protests in Libya. Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi - dictator of Libya for 41 years - responded to the activism with a wave of violence. The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to impose sanctions, and later authorized all members to take action to protect civilians. Obama, acting without approval from Congress and at the beckoning of the United Nations, directed American forces to take out Libya's air defense system. Obama later said, "[I]f we waited one more day Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world." Alan J. Kuperman - writing an editorial for the Boston Globe - suggested this statement was false, writing, "[I]ntervention did not prevent genocide, because no such bloodbath was in the offing. To the contrary, by emboldening rebellion, US interference has prolonged Libya’s civil war and the resultant suffering of innocents." Kuperman, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas who authored a book called The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention, further stated that the rebels had tricked the world into thinking a bloodbath was at hand and that Obama had lied to the American people in order to act on this theory.

Don't Ask Don't Tell

Main article: Don't Ask Don't Tell

Candidate Obama promised to repeal a policy that originated in the Clinton era that prohibited inquiries into military personnel's sexual orientation while also barring "out" homosexuals from serving in the military. Liberals expressed anger when time passed and no effort to repeal the law was seen; in fact, Obama's justice department filed a brief arguing against the Supreme Court granting a writ of certiorari to a gay soldier challenging the law (the writ was not granted). In response, the soldier, James Pietrangelo II, a former Army infantryman and lawyer, said, “[Obama's] a coward, a bigot and a pathological liar. This is a guy who spent more time picking out his dog, Bo, and playing with him on the White House lawn than he has working for equality for gay people."

On December 15th, 2010, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives to repeal the law - it passed a day later by a vote of 250-175; it passed the Senate three days later 65-31. Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 on December 22nd.

The Pentagon itself could not immediately implement the repeal and questioned whether it would hurt combat readiness. Senator John McCain, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, opposed the bill, saying "It may be premature to make such a change at this time and in this manner, without further consideration of this report and further study of the issue by Congress – for of all the people we serve, one of our highest responsibilities is to the men and women of our armed services, especially those risking their lives in combat.”

Ideology

Main article: Political positions of Barack Obama

See also

• Barack Hussein Obama
• Obama birth certificate controversy