User:Sam/sandbox



Barack HUSSEIN Soetoro Obama II (born in Honolulu, Hawaii, August 4, 1961) is the 44th President of the United States. A member of the Democratic Party, he is also apparently a devout Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, gay, atheist, Martian, Egyptian Antichrist.

Obama is the first self-identified African American to be elected to the presidency, a turning-point marking the end of racism in the United States.🇱🇮

In October of 2009, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his stunning success in not being George W. Bush.

A lot of Americans are wary of Obama as they do not believe — and may never believe — he is actually an American. This fear of an ethnic "other" is compounded by a fiery political climate in which some critics have called him a socialist or "Kenyan anti-colonialist."

Background
Barack Obama was ("allegedly") born in Hawaii, where he spent his childhood. He later studied political science at Columbia University, New York City, and law at Harvard, Massachusetts.

Prior to his election as President in 2008, Obama had previously served as a community organizer, Senator for Illinois, and a member of the Illinois State Senate. Obama was introduced to the world during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when he gave a keynote speech that aspired to post-partisan solutions.

President Obama's wife, Michelle, is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law. She formerly worked in hospital administration, and has promoted the "" campaign to fight childhood obesity. The couple have two daughters, Sasha and Malia.

2008 primary and caucus out-of-dates
He won the Iowa caucus and South Carolina primary, and a bunch of others on Super Tuesday. He went twelve-for-twelve in February and won Vermont in March. In May, he won North Carolina, whereupon he was declared the "presumptive nominee" by many pundits.

Towards the end of the race, he succeeded in maintaining a marginal lead over Hillary Clinton, in what became a two-way race.

On May 14, he received the endorsement of John Edwards, the third-place former candidate. He also gained the support of Chris Dodd, another former candidate, and a half-dozen or so Kennedys.

By the end of the primary/caucus season, June 3 2008, he had garnered enough pledged delegates and endorsements from superdelegates to claim the Democratic Party nomination. This was confirmed further when Senator Clinton suspended her campaign on June 7, 2008, and pledged her support to Obama, effectively giving him the nomination. Clinton further sealed the deal, and also attempted to set the party back on the path to unity behind Obama by using her speech at the Convention to call for his nomination by acclamation (rather than going through the tedious process of delegate counting and voting).

One of the central themes of his campaign was an emphasis on "the politics of hope" — his motto was "change you can believe in." The extent of these changes is up to debate.

2008 presidential election



 * August 23, 2008: Obama chose Senator Joseph Biden as his Vice-Presidential candidate.
 * August 28, 2008: Barack Obama was nominated by acclamation as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, making him the first African-American to become the presidential candidate for a major political party in the U.S.
 * November 4, 2008: Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential Election.
 * January 20, 2009: Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States.

2012 presidential election

 * April 3, 2011: Obama declares candidacy.
 * August 5, 2012: Obama officially nominated in Democratic Party

Actions as President
President Obama's term in office has been distinguished by starting with a deep recession that has left unemployment above 9% for more than a year, a political environment of steadily-increasing vitriol and obstructionism, and a general continuance of Bush-era policies in national security and trade. The largest shifts in actual policies that have occurred have been with foreign policy; while the U.S. did engage in military intervention in Libya, it was a markedly different style of attack when compared to the full commitment of Iraq and Afghanistan. This was of a piece with the inclusive rhetoric espoused by President Obama, as well as with his generally centrist (moderate-right by European standards) approach — we can't see any socialism there.

Obama has been criticized for getting the federal budget deficit to unprecedented levels, forgetting that the budget for 2009 was actually a series of continuing resolutions that kept spending at roughly the same as Bush's era. Keeping in mind the fact that Bush did not include war spending as part of his budgets, and the fact that the majority of debt is due to the recession, Obama has managed to decrease the overall rate of deficit spending, though obviously it's still present.

Fulfillment of campaign promises
While Obama's presidency is an improvement from the previous Bush-era domestic and foreign policies, a large number of his campaign promises remain stalled or completely broken. Some examples:


 * Early in his campaign, Obama promised to abide by the voluntary spending limits required for public financing, but then went "never mind" when he saw the shitload of money he was raking in.
 * Obama said that he would not go after medical marijuana dispensaries, but then did so, a sign that the War on Drugs won't die anytime soon.
 * On January 22, 2009, President Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay within a year and for those incarcerated within to be dealt with as quickly as possible. No change has occurred and Guantanamo continues with little reduction in inmates (and it's not helping with a large amount of Republican states disapproving).  Some abortive attempts at moving them to other states or countries have met with very limited success — essentially, no one wants them.

On the other hand, Obama has fulfilled many of his promises on other issues, mainly foreign policy and gay rights:


 * On February 27, 2009, Obama set the date of the Iraq War's end to be August 31, 2010. As of December 2011, virtually all troops have left and the war is officially over. The number of troops in Afghanistan has sharply spiked, nonetheless, as Obama has pushed military spending to all-time highs, though after the death of Osama Bin Laden troops are expected to withdraw soon.
 * On January 30, 2009, the abortion funding "gag rule" (preventing any clinic anywhere in the world that receives US funding from mentioning the evil abortion word) was rescinded, along with other Bush-era executive orders. This actions was shortly followed on February 9, 2009 by the lifting of restrictions on stem-cell research.
 * With regards to health care, President Obama extended the S-CHIP program, and enacted the Affordable Care Act (or "Obamacare") on March 23, 2010, with the aid of united Congressional Democrats. The Act, a fairly balanced implementation of universal health care, has been widely criticized on the left for perceived failings (such as the lack of a public option, which Obama did not as enthusiastically support as he did in his campaign) while attacked hysterically from the right.
 * The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill signed on July 21, 2010, comprehensively regulated banks and insurance companies, ending the Bush-era financial bailouts and stopping "too big to fail" banks. This remains one of Obama's most popular legislation, with over 60% of Americans approving.
 * He has told his Attorney General to cease defending DOMA, even though the Republican-led Congress has said they would fund the defense of DOMA themselves.
 * In 2011, the restrictions in the DADT policy were eliminated, and gay and lesbian soldiers are allowed to serve openly. The military was even ordered to allow gay marriages in public buildings if straight marriages are allowed there.

Human rights record
Obama has mainly been criticized for his somewhat disappointing actions concerning human rights in the wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan:
 * On January 23, 2009, a mere 72 hours after taking office, Obama authorized an armed strike against a village in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan — an ally of the United States (although the area being bombed, the tribal belt, is not under control of Pakistan's government), because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency, and had killed 40 of them — "According to the Pakistani press, the strike not only killed the four Arab fighters and a Punjabi militant, but also the Pashtun host and some of his family members. A few hours later, missiles slammed into another residence near the village of Wana in a nearby tribal agency, South Waziristan, killing 10. Pakistani sources disagreed over whether there had been any foreign fighters at all at the second target, with locals claiming that 10 family members, including women and children, were the only victims. Villagers in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt sometimes rent to the Arab fighters because they are sympathetic to their struggle, but sometimes they just need the money."
 * On February 14, 2009, the United States, for the second time in a month, bombed a house in Pakistan that was being used as a hideout by the Taliban. Twenty-seven militants were killed.
 * On September 30, 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both of whom were American citizens living in Yemen, were killed by a drone strike. Though both had been deemed terrorists, this action has been criticized for possibly violating the Fifth Amendment.
 * On May 26, 2011, he signed an extension of the PATRIOT Act, which has been criticized by the left and civil libertarians as allowing violations of the Fourth Amendment.
 * On December 31, 2011, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, which codifies the President's authority to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects without trial (there is currently a dispute over whether it changes existing law or not, due to apparently contradictory passages in the bill on the matter).

Islam
Many people have tried to smear Obama by claiming he is a Muslim (which, as Colin Powell rightly pointed out, shouldn't be a smear, but, alas, it is in practice), since his father (who was African) was (or perhaps he may have been an agnostic or even an atheist). However, Obama is a staunch Christian, and often injects Jesus and God into his speeches. The myth of Obama's connections with Islam originated during his original campaign for the United States Senate. Ironically, there was a Muslim member of Congress elected only two years later: Congressman Keith Ellison. The Religious Right happened to target the wrong man.

Birthers

 * Main article: Obama citizenship denial

Additionally, many attempted to discredit the Obama campaign by claiming that he was not born in the U.S., a requirement for any U.S. president. Given that there is no evidence for him being a Martian, Muslim, gay or Communist, this has been the last refuge of those who, frankly, just can't stand that a black man with a foreign name won an election.

Marxism
Some of Obama's more hysterical opponents attempt to make the supporter of capitalism look like a Marxist by quote mining him, completely ignoring such glaring counter-evidence as the fact that he advocated for bailing out certain large corporations instead of nationalizing them. This is the same stuff that FDR had to go through.

In his first run for the State Senate, he received (without so much as a by-your-leave, mind you ) the endorsement of the "New Party," a highly obscure Marxist outfit that was aiming to reintroduce electoral fusion on a national level. Of course, no one outside the moonbat community actually noticed this until the wingnut community, scraping the dregs for any excuse to use "Obama" and "communist" in the same sentence, happened upon it. Therefore, the New Party is most known today for the right-wing fit this nomination provoked. The nomination is so obscure that, by Wikipedia rules, it cannot be mentioned in the article on Obama. This prompted Conservapedia to call Wikipedia "fascist."

Lack of phony patriotism


Unlike many in the political arena, Obama does not routinely wear a flag pin in his lapel, possibly because he can remember which country he's President of without having to look at it every few minutes. However, he did wear one given to him by a veteran at one speech, and has continued to wear one sporadically during his campaign, notably at major political events.

In yet another horrific public display, Obama was observed not putting his hand on his heart while the National Anthem was being sung.

Obligatory religious nuttery
In his 2006 "Call for Renewal" speech, Obama, responding to secularists critical of the Pledge of Allegiance that they filed suit to have the practice discontinued, declared that "It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase 'under God.'"

He appointed Hillary "respecting atheists is offensive" Clinton to Secretary of State.

Vacations
Among a certain section of the country, it is widely believed that Obama has spent too much time on vacation, playing golf. It is an article of faith for some conservatives that this is yet another way in which he has been a demonstrably poor President. Unfortunately, Obama's vacation days are half of Reagan's (at this point in his presidency), and a third of the time George W. Bush spent on vacation at this point in his presidency.

Abundance of melanin, etc.
His other major issues with winning over people include:


 * His name terrifies illiterate rednecks:
 * Barack (rhymes with Iraq, also means "blessed" in Swahili--derived from the same Semitic language root as Baruch in Hebrew)
 * Hussein ('nuff said)
 * Obama (spelled by Faux News as Osama)
 * His skin color terrifies racist morons.
 * His alleged use of mind-control terrifies quacks.
 * His refusal to foam at the mouth or to cater to people's worst hatreds and fears has failed to motivate the extreme left; he continues to blindly stick with this strategy even though his opponents successfully use such methods to motivate their base.

Several conservative blogs and commentators, suffering from a huge case of sour grapes over the election, have stated that Barack Obama is the first affirmative action President. This quite idiotic and clearly bitter accusation is completely at odds with observed polling behavior related to race, known as the Bradley effect, where people of ethnic minorities get fewer votes in reality compared to polls. No one believes he is the second affirmative action President.