Is the Obama Cool-Aid Poison ?

Of everything that President Barack Hussein Obama said on the final night of the Democratic Convention that was held in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was nothing that stuck more with me then hearing Obama defend Americas Relationship with Russia. That was a clear hypocrisy, The Russians are not our allies, as a matter of fact, and they are and make no doubt about it “our enemy”.  Obama makes Russians love Americans again Obama makes Russians love Americans again Barack Obama stated during his visit to Moscow that lifting the notorious Jackson-Vanik amendment would be one of the biggest priorities of his administration, Itar-Tass news agency reports.
“US President Barack Obama acknowledged that it was the problem of the US administration. He said that lifting the amendment would be one of the priorities of his administration,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.  Making a speech at the US-Russian Business Forum, Obama acknowledged that billions of dollars had been lost in the trade with Russia just because the US laws had not been renewed.  “We want Russia to be selling us goods, and we want Russia to be buying from us,” Obama said. "Our fortunes are linked, and yet so much potential remains untapped.” Annual trade between the countries totals $36 billion, which is about 1 percent of U.S. trade with the rest of the world. The percentage has remained “virtually unchanged since the Cold War,” Obama said. “That $36 billion is about the same as our trade with Thailand, a country with less than half the population of Russia. Surely we can do better.”  “We have to promote transparency, accountability [and] rule of law, on which investments and economic growth depend,” Obama said. “And so I welcome very much President Medvedev’s initiatives to promote the rule of law and ensure a mature and effective legal system as a condition for sustained economic growth," Obama said.  Obama and Medvedev did not conceal the problems connected with the deployment of the US missile defense system in Eastern Europe. We heard only one thing from the United States: all decisions have been made, and they don’t touch upon you. Our position is different. We believe that those decisions do touch upon Russia,” Dmitry Medvedev said after the talks with Barack Obama in the Kremlin.  As for other agreements, Russia agreed to open its airspace for US planes flying to Afghanistan. In addition, military officials of the two countries signed a new agreement on cooperation. It goes about the forms of cooperation, which were interrupted after the war in South Ossetia. As for the Jackson-Vanik agreement, the question remains open. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said July 7 that the new US administration would do everything to cancel the amendment. However, there is no guarantee that it will happen some day.  The USA approved the amendment in 1974 to cut its trade with the USSR over the decision of the Soviet government to restrict the emigration of Jews from the USSR. The amendment continues to exist many years after the collapse of the USSR.  Has Obama really pushed the reset button? NO He has not!  “It may be a good start.  However, I personally do not trust the Russians. The top level talks have begun – many people in the United States and in Russia were dreaming about that for years. The agreement about the number of nuclear warheads and the transit of US cargoes to Afghanistan is obviously a very important achievement. However, many things still remain unsolved, particularly the missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic,” a senior spokesman for the Institute for the USA and Canada, Anatoly Utkin told Pravda.Ru.  It is impossible to rest the relations during a couple of days. The talks were conducted in the friendly atmosphere, which is extremely important. The Russian’s hate America they always have and they always will.  President Obama sought to rekindle his 2008 message of “hope” Thursday night, promising to lead America to a “better place” if they will grant him another four years in office and dismissing his Republican opponent as someone who is not ready for the pressures of the Oval Office.

The man who four years ago ran for the highest office in the land as a first-term senator presented himself on stage at the close of the Democratic convention in Charlotte as the experienced, battle-tested choice. No longer had the upstart, Obama leveraged the power of his incumbency to make his own case, as he and Mitt Romney now dive into the general election race. “I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention. The times have changed and so have I,” Obama said, after formally accepting the party’s nomination. “I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.”  Obama, who, like Romney, will campaign in New Hampshire and Iowa on Friday, urged his 2008 supporters not to lose faith. He cautioned that the vision of “hope” and “change” would only fizzle if they vote him out of office. “If you turn away now, if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible … well, change will not happen,” Obama said. “If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void. ... Only you can make sure that doesn’t happen.”

 

 

The president stressed that he still has the “hope.” “As I stand here tonight, I have never been more hopeful about America. Not because I think I have all the answers. Not because I’m naive about the magnitude of our challenges,” he said. “I’m hopeful because of you … If you share that hope with me, I ask you tonight for your vote.”  The crowd erupted in cheers as Obama was joined onstage by his family, as well as the vice president and his family, at the end of the address and the trademark convention confetti rained down on the crowd. Vice President Biden spoke before Obama, as he accepted the nomination to be the Democratic running mate. The meat of Obama’s speech was heavy on policy, as he laid out a series of specific goals for a second term like recruiting 100,000 math and science teachers, cutting tuition growth in half, and cutting the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Obama made a similar set of goals and pledges in his 2008 address, and several of them have not been met. Romney’s campaign, in a brief statement reacting to Obama’s speech, knocked the latest goals as more empty rhetoric. “Tonight President Obama laid out the choice in this election, making the case for more of the same policies that haven't worked for the past four years,” Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades said in a written statement. “He offered more promises, but he hasn’t kept the promises he made four years ago. Americans will hold President Obama accountable for his record – they know they’re not better off and that it’s time to change direction. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will restore America’s promise and deliver a better future for our country.” Obama, though, pointedly described Romney as not ready for the job of commander in chief. He mocked the Republican candidate for his gaffe on a recent foreign trip in which he questioned London’s preparations for the Olympic Games. “You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally,” the president said. Obama stressed the myriad security threats facing the country and said, “You can choose leadership that has been tested and proven.” He cited on his resume, as Biden did, the decision to take down Osama bin Laden.

 

 

“My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy,” Obama said, “but from all that we’ve seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly.” Though heavy on foreign policy in his speech, Obama spent quite a bit of time during the address talking the economy and budget. He slammed Republicans for wanting to extend all the Bush-era tax rates Obama wants to let them expire for top-earners and for their budget plans, including one to turn Medicare into what Democrats call a “voucher” system. He accused Republicans of “sticking it to the middle class” with their deficit-reduction blueprint. The address helps set the stage for the general election battle, which will play out at a furious pace over the next two months in battleground state campaign swings, national debates and the rapid-fire volley of political ads funded by the campaigns and the well-funded groups like super PACs supporting them. Neither campaign is taking a breather after back-to-back conventions. The Obama and Romney teams are charging out of the nomination ceremonies on Friday with dueling events in the small swing state of New Hampshire. Obama and Biden are set to campaign in Portsmouth, while Mitt Romney campaigns in Nashua. Regardless of any “bump” either candidate might enjoy out of the conventions, the election is expected to be close and hard-fought. The match-up has been airtight for months, with polls showing many voters disappointed by the state of the economy but unsure whether to back Romney as the alternative. Obama, who said Thursday his message of hope “has been tested” by the economic crisis and other challenges, said voters face “the clearest choice of any time in a generation” at the ballots in November. The president asked voters for more time. “I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy. I never have. You didn’t elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth. And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades,” he said. “It will require common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one. … But know this, America: Our problems can be solved. Our challenges can be met. The path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place.”

 

 

The setting for Thursday’s Obama nomination address was less grand than his nomination address in 2008. That speech was held in the Denver Broncos’ stadium in Colorado and had the former senator speaking with a backdrop of stately columns. This year, Obama was originally planning to speak at another outdoor area: the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte. But concern about heavy rain and lightning, the campaign said, forced them to make a last-minute decision to move the nomination address indoors to the smaller Time Warner Cable Arena, where the rest of the convention was held. The decision left out thousands of ticket-holders, as the campaign urged them to stay home for the convention’s final night. Over the course of the Democratic convention, speaker after high-powered speaker made the case for why Obama deserves another four years. They touted achievements like the federal health care overhaul, the auto bailout, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, and the take-down of bin Laden. The endorsements followed a weeklong bashing of the Obama administration by Republicans at their convention in Tampa, Fla. Romney, as his central argument, claimed that the White House cannot claim the country is better off today than it was four years ago. Senior Romney-Ryan campaign officials say the campaign will launch an enormous media offensive on Friday, the day after President Obama accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for a second term. The push will include ad buys in several states that will cost tens of millions of dollars.  Aides said more than a dozen new ads, each tailored to different regions and segments of the electorate, will begin airing Friday, aimed at dramatically shifting the dynamics of a contest that Romney-Ryan aides acknowledge, in terms of the hard realities of the electoral map, have until now favored the Obama-Biden ticket.  "Time is short," said one campaign aide. "We have $100 million we've just raised. If you look at our burn rate to date and our cash on hand, there's not much more we can spend on infrastructure. So we've got to start spending our general election funds in a big way, because you know what the value of that money is on the day after the election? Zero."  Romney-Ryan aides see their recent fundraising edge, in conjunction with spending by the Republican National Committee, as a critical weapon in their battle against the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. But they also know the advantage will be nowhere near as marked as it was for Mitt Romney during the Republican primaries, against under-funded opponents like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.  Former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, an adviser to the Romney campaign, said this week that its strategy going forward will be to "carpet bomb" the president and vice president.  Romney-Ryan officials did not repudiate such talk; indeed, one official, in said in a statement, likened the offensive that will begin Thursday to the "daisy cutter" bombs used in the Iraq war. I have made the decision that I will support who ever wins this Presidential race, rather it is Obama or Romney, America needs to heal up and get strong again….I am confident that if we can all find a common thread as Americans, that we can and will come back together as what we are most famous for, “One Nation Under God” ~ Donnie Bolena