Obama Gets His Butt Kicked in First Debate

If it was close I'd spin it, it wasn't.    The ship sailed and Obama was left standing on the dock.    Better luck next time.

President Obama Hard at Practice for the Debate

Lets face it the Bush Tax cuts should not be a part of the conversation today.   They should have been allowed to expire as originally scheduled.   Obama created his own problem in this area by being weak and surrendering to republican pressure.  Just a thought for the future, many people prepare and practice for a debate, just something to consider. 

Romney was Prepared

Last night Obama had the opportunity to close the door on the Romney campaign and sew the election up but he blew it.   Had Obama not showed up at all the famous Eastwood empty chair would have done a better job.   The President was so rattled that at times he made no sense at all, rambling and completely missing what ever point he was originally chasing.   Normally a, uh, good speaker, uh, yet his conversation, uh, at the debate, uh, was scattered, uh, with so many uhs that it was bothersome to the listener.

Jim Lehrer Attempted Moderating the Debate

The people around Obama are yes men that are letting him live in a bubble and the President is so used to being treated special that he was unable to handle a Romney who came to attack and fight.   The moderator had zero control over either party or the subject matter or the time.   Other than the opening introductions Jim Lehrer had as much control as a back row audience member.

As soon as Romney realized that he could lie unchallenged it was katie bar the door and off to the races.   Obama failed again and again to challenge Romney's version of the truth.   At points Romney even replaced the moderator.

Obama spent the night intently watching his shoes ignoring the first rule of debating, look at and pay close attention to the things the person who wants your job is saying.

Advice From Sam

And Now its time for a poem.   Wake The Fuck Up by Samuel L. Jackson with a slight change by ACVDN.

Sorry, my friend, but there's no time to snore.
And out-of-touch millionaires just declared war.
On schools, the environment, unions, fair pay, and telling the truth
We're all on our own if Romney has his way.
One more bad debate night and hope will fade away.
Romney is against safety nets, if you fall, tough luck.
So I strongly suggest President Obama, that you wake the fuck up.



Here's what Obama's supporters are saying, that should wake you up.

Love or Hate Him, Michael Tells the Truth

Michael Moore rants about Obama's debate, blames John Kerry. 


Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore went on a Twitter rant over President Obama's performance on Wednesday night at the first presidential debate. 

The progressive activist said Obama's debate performance was lack-luster and failed to fire up the base.    "Fire all debate consultants now,"  he tweeted, adding  "This is what happens when you pick John Kerry as your debate coach."

Obama's Debate Teacher

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) stood in for Mitt Romney in Obama's debate preparation.

Moore was not pleased with debate moderator Jim Lehrer either, tweeting that he might have been coached by Clint Eastwood.  Eastwood, addressing the Republican National Convention in late August, spoke to an empty chair on stage.

Bill was let Down

Political commentator and comedian Bill Maher, who has given a million dollars to the super-PAC supporting Obama, similarly blamed Lehrer for what he called a win for Romney.

Romney won the debate, Obama had the facts on his side, and Lehrer sucked.   Next debate, get Seth Macfarlane to host!    — Bill Maher 

At one point in his Twitter rant, Moore asked first lady Michelle to "give him the signal" and urged Obama not to pull his punches.  He also asked if former President Clinton, who has become a mainstay on the campaign trail for Obama, could substitute for the president.

Is Bill Clinton coming in to sub for the next quarter? O! Wake up! Attack! That is not john McCain over on that podium!  — Michael Moore 

Pundits across the networks were resoundingly negative about President Obama's performance during Wednesday's debate, with most expressing disappointment that he was not more aggressive in the first face-to-face meeting of the two candidates.

Big ED won't Spin

MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz, along with a panel of other commentators appearing on the left-leaning network, said the president had failed to respond to Mitt Romney's claims on healthcare.

"I thought the president tonight was disappointing when he allowed Mitt Romney to talk about $716 billion in Medicare and the president did not come out and explain it and go after it," he said. Speaking on Current TV, former Vice President Al Gore also expressed concern that Obama didn't answer Romney's 
claim on Medicare.

Al knows about bad debating

“I thought he handled the Medicare answer well but ... he allowed Gov. Romney to make that $716 billion charge that was completely blown away at the Democratic convention, and then, all of a sudden, it is back again, and somebody that just tuned in for the first time might think, oh, well, President Obama is cutting all this money out of Medicare and Romney is going to ride to the rescue,” he said.

The first debate, in Denver, focused on the economy, and most liberal pundits agreed with Schultz's observation that Romney was "in his wheelhouse when he was talking about the economy."

Chris  Mattthews

But most expressed stronger opinions on Obama's failure to perform, with left-leaning MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews, also speaking on MSNBC, lambasting Obama for "enduring the debate rather than fighting it."

"What was [Obama] doing tonight?   He went in there disarmed, he was like, 'An hour and a half, I think I can get through his thing and I don't even look at this guy.' Whereas Romney, I love the split screen, staring at Obama, addressing him like the prey — he did it just right," he said, visibly frustrated with Obama's performance.

Former Obama adviser Van Jones also praised Romney for what he said was a strong performance that Obama might not have been prepared for, as it took pages right out of Obama's own book.

“He did not expect Romney to be able to throw that kind of heat,” he said on CNN.    “Romney was able to out-Obama Obama, on the connection piece, on the authenticity piece, on being able to tell the story. I think that they had the wrong strategy," he added.

Even famously liberal talk-show host Bill Maher was lukewarm on Obama's performance.   "I can't believe i'm saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter," he tweeted.

Teleprompter didn't attend debate

And former adviser to President Clinton, James Carville, speaking on CNN, said that he had "one overwhelming impression."

James Carville

"It looked like Romney wanted to be there and President Obama didn't want to be there ... it gave you the impression that this whole thing was a lot of trouble," he said, adding that "Romney had a good night."

Ed Rendell: Obama 'looked lethargic, disinterested, passive'

That overarching sentiment was summed up by Matthews.

"What was Romney doing? He was winning," Chris said.

Big Bird Responds to Presidential Debate

What Did I Do To Mitt?

Big Bird who's giant meaty yellow tucas is on the line if Romney wins commented on the termination threat by the GOP leader.  To bad Big Bird is not politically minded, he would have done better in the debate last night, than that empty chair with the gone golfing sign on it.  Romney is famous for saying he likes to fire people and now he is stretching his target to include birds.  Whats next Mitt?  Send Mr. Ed the talking horse to the glue factory?  Deport the Taco Bell dog?

Want a piece of me?   Go for it Mitt.

Here's what Tony Soprano had to say.  "Romney promising to do a hit on Big Bird's funding was the most interesting comment in that whole screwy debate.  It moved me from unecided to supporting Obama 2012.   Nobody and I mean nobody, messes with the bird."

Hands Off The Bird

Big Bird commented  "My bed time is usually 7:45, but I was really tired yesterday and fell asleep at 7!  Did I miss anything last night?"

We Don't Stay Up Late

Big Bird earned a shout-out from Romney during the debate when the GOP presidential nominee pledged that as president he would eliminate the federal subsidy to PBS, home of the beloved children's show.

“I like PBS; I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too,” Romney said to debate moderator Jim Lehrer, the host of PBS's "NewsHour." “But I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for."

The Big Bird mention quickly became a popular moment of the debate, prompting conversation on Twitter and Facebook and launching high numbers of Google search queries.   The morning after the event, Big Bird and PBS are still trending nationwide on Twitter, where concern for his fate prompted creation of multiple accounts not associated with PBS or Sesame Workshop, including @FiredBigBird, which already has more than 27,000 followers.

Sherrie Westin, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer for the nonprofit organization behind  "Sesame Street,"  told CNN's "Starting Point" on Thursday that Sesame Workshop receives very little funding from PBS. She explained that the nonprofit raises its funding through licensed products and philanthropic sponsorship.

"You can debate whether or not there should be funding of public broadcasting," she said.   "But when they always try to tout out Big Bird, and say we’re going to kill Big Bird — that is actually misleading, because Sesame Street will be here.”

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Fact Check on Debate

President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney spun one-sided stories in their first presidential 

debate, not necessarily bogus, but not the whole truth.

They made some flat-out flubs, too. The rise in health insurance premiums has not been the slowest in 50 years, as Obama stated. Far from it. And there are not 23 million unemployed, as Romney asserted.

Here's a look at some of their claims and how they stack up with the facts:

OBAMA:   "I've proposed a specific $4 trillion deficit reduction plan. ... The way we do it is $2.50 for every cut, we ask for $1 in additional revenue."

THE FACTS:   In promising $4 trillion, Obama is already banking more than $2 trillion from legislation enacted along with Republicans last year that cut agency operating budgets and capped them for 10 years.   He also claims more than $800 billion in war savings that would occur anyway.    And he uses creative book keeping to hide spending on Medicare reimbursements to doctors.   Take those "cuts" away and Obama's $2.50/$1 ratio of spending 
cuts to tax increases shifts significantly more in the direction of tax increases.

Obama's February budget offered proposals that would cut deficits over the coming decade by $2 trillion instead of $4 trillion. Of that deficit reduction, tax increases accounted for $1.6 trillion.   He promises relatively small spending cuts of $597 billion from big federal benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid. He also proposed higher spending on infrastructure projects.

ROMNEY:   Obama's health care plan "puts in place an unelected board that's going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have. I don't like that idea."

THE FACTS:   Romney is referring to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel of experts that would have the power to force Medicare cuts if costs rise beyond certain levels and Congress fails to act. But Obama's health care law explicitly prohibits the board from rationing care, shifting costs to retirees, restricting benefits or raising the Medicare eligibility age. So the board doesn't have the power to dictate to doctors what treatments they can prescribe.

Romney seems to be resurrecting the assertion that Obama's law would lead to rationing, made famous by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's widely debunked allegation that it would create "death panels."

The board has yet to be named, and its members would ultimately have to be confirmed by the Senate.   Health care inflation has been modest in the last few years, so cuts would be unlikely for most of the rest of this decade.

OBAMA:   "Over the last two years, health care premiums have gone up — it's true — but they've gone up slower than any time in the last 50 years. So we're already beginning to see progress.   In the meantime, folks out there with insurance, you're already getting a rebate."

THE FACTS: Not so, concerning premiums. Obama is mixing overall health care spending, which has been growing at historically low levels, and health insurance premiums, which have continued to rise faster than wages and overall economic growth.   Premiums for job-based family coverage have risen by nearly $2,400 since 2009 when Obama took office, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. In 2011, premiums jumped by 9 percent.   This year's 4 percent increase was more manageable, but the price tag for family coverage stands at $15,745, with employees paying more than $4,300 of that.

When it comes to insurance rebates under Obama's health care law, less than 10 percent of people with private health insurance are benefiting.

More than 160 million Americans under 65 have private insurance through their jobs and by buying their own policies. According to the administration, about 13 million people will benefit from rebates. And nearly two-thirds of that number will only be entitled to a share of it, since they are covered under job-based plans 
where their employer pays most of the premium and will get most of the rebate.

ROMNEY  on the failure of Obama's economic policy: "And the proof of that is 23 million people out of work.   The proof of that is 1 out of 6 people in poverty.   The proof of that is we've gone from 32 million on food stamps to 47 million on food stamps.    The proof of that is that 50 percent of college graduates this year can't find work."

THE FACTS:   The number of unemployed is 12.5 million, not 23 million. Romney was also counting 8 million people who are working part time but would like a full-time job and 2.6 million who have stopped looking for work, either because they are discouraged or because they are going back to school or for other reasons.

He got the figure closer to right earlier in the debate, leaving out only the part-timers when he said the U.S. has "23 million people out of work or stopped looking for work."   But he was wrong in asserting that Obama came into office "facing 23 million people out of work."   At the start of Obama's presidency, 12 million were out of work.

His claim that half of college graduates can't find work now also was problematic.   A Northeastern University analysis for The Associated Press found that a one-fourth of recent graduates were probably unemployed and another quarter were underemployed, which means working in jobs that didn't make full use of their skills or experience.

OBAMA:   It's important "that we take some of the money that we're saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America."

THE FACTS:   This oft-repeated claim is based on a fiscal fiction. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for mostly with borrowed money, so stopping them doesn't create a new pool of available cash that can be used for something else, like rebuilding America. It just slows down the government's borrowing.

ROMNEY:   "At the same time, gasoline prices have doubled under the president. Electric rates are up."

THE FACTS:   He's right that the average price has doubled, and a little more, since Obama was sworn in.   But presidents have almost no influence on gasoline prices, and certainly not in the near term.   Gasoline prices are set on financial exchanges around the world and are based on a host of factors, most importantly the price of crude oil used to make gasoline, the amount of finished gasoline ready to be shipped and the capacity of refiners to make enough to meet market demand.

Retail electricity prices have risen since Obama took office — barely.   They've grown by an average of less than 1 percent per year, less than the rate of inflation and slower than the historical growth in electricity prices.   The unexpectedly modest rise in electricity prices is because of the plummeting cost of natural gas, 
which is used to generate electricity.

OBAMA:   "Gov. Romney's central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut — on top of the extension of the Bush tax cuts, that's another trillion dollars — and $2 trillion in additional military spending that the military hasn't asked for. That's $8 trillion.   How we pay for that, reduce the deficit, and make the investments that we need to make, without dumping those costs onto middle-class Americans, I think is one of the central questions of this campaign."

THE FACTS:   Obama's claim that Romney wants to cut taxes by $5 trillion doesn't add up. Presumably, Obama was talking about the effect of Romney's tax plan over 10 years, which is common in Washington. But Obama's math doesn't take into account Romney's entire plan.

Romney proposes to reduce income tax rates by 20 percent and eliminate the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax.   The Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group, says that would reduce federal tax revenues by $465 billion in 2015, which would add up to about $5 trillion over 10 years.

However, Romney says he wants to pay for the tax cuts by reducing or eliminating tax credits, deductions and exemptions.   The goal is a simpler tax code that raises the same amount of money as the current system but does it in a more efficient manner.

The knock on Romney's plan, which Obama accurately cited, is that Romney has refused to say which tax breaks he would eliminate to pay for the lower rates.

ROMNEY:    "What would I cut from spending?   Well, first of all, I will eliminate all programs by this test, if they pass it:    Is the program so critical it's worth borrowing money from China to pay for it?"

THE FACTS:    China continues to be portrayed by Romney and many other Republicans as the poster child for runaway federal deficits.   It's true that China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, but it only represents about an 8 percent stake.   And China has recently been decreasing its holdings, according to the Treasury Department. 

Some two-thirds of the $16 trillion national debt is owed to the federal government, with the largest single stake the Federal Reserve, as well as American investors and the Social Security Trust Fund.

OBAMA:   "Independent studies looking at this said the only way to meet Gov. Romney's pledge of not ... adding to the deficit is by burdening middle-class families.   The average middle-class family with children would pay about $2,000 more."

THE FACTS:   That's just one scenario. Obama's claim relies on a study by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group.  The study, however, is more nuanced than Obama indicated.

The study concludes it would be impossible for Romney to meet all of his stated goals without shifting some of the tax burden from people who make more than $200,000 to people who make less.

In one scenario, the study says, Romney's proposal could result in a $2,000 tax increase for families who make less than $200,000 and have children.

Romney says his plan wouldn't raise taxes on anyone, and his campaign points to several studies by conservative think tanks that dispute the Tax Policy Center's findings.   Most of the conservative studies argue that Romney's tax plan would stimulate economic growth, generating additional tax revenue without shifting any of the tax burden to the middle class.   Congress, however, doesn't use those kinds of projections when it estimates the effect of tax legislation.

ROMNEY:   "Right now, the CBO says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect next year."

THE FACTS:   Romney is making selective use of the Congressional Budget Office's March findings on how employers might adjust to the new health law.   The neutral Washington scorekeeper actually gave Congress four scenarios — ranging from a net increase in employer-provided coverage for 3 million people to the decrease of 20 million that Romney cited.

Here's why:   The law offers tax incentives for companies with more than 50 workers that provide coverage and penalties for those that don't.   The analysis says it's difficult to say how companies will behave, with some making a purely economic calculation and others concluding that continuing coverage may be essential to pleasing workers in a competitive environment.   "As a result, any projections of those effects are clearly quite uncertain," the study's authors concluded.

ROMNEY on cutting the deficit: "Obamacare's on my list. ... I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. ... I'll make government more efficient."

THE FACTS:   Romney has promised to balance the budget in eight years to 10 years, but he hasn't offered a complete plan.   Instead, he's promised a set of principles, some of which — like increasing Pentagon spending and restoring more than $700 billion in cuts that Democrats made in Medicare over the coming decade — work against his goal. He also has said he will not consider tax increases.

He pledges to shrink the government to 20 percent of the size of the economy, as opposed to more than 23 percent of gross domestic product now, by the end of his first term.   The Romney campaign estimates that would require cuts of $500 billion from the 2016 budget alone.   He also has pledged to cut tax rates by 20 percent, paying for them by eliminating tax breaks for the wealthiest and through economic growth.

To fulfill his promise, then, Romney would require cuts to other programs so deep — under one calculation requiring cutting many areas of the domestic budget by one-third within four years — that they could never get through Congress. Cuts to domestic agencies would have to be particularly deep.

But he's offered only a few modest examples of government programs he'd be willing to squeeze, like subsidies to PBS and Amtrak.   He does want to repeal Obama's big health care law, but that law is actually forecast to reduce the deficit.

ROMNEY:   "Simpson-Bowles, the president should have grabbed that."

OBAMA:   "That's what we've done, made some adjustments to it, and we're putting it before Congress right now, a $4 trillion plan."

THE FACTS:   At first, the president did largely ignore the recommendations made by his deficit commission headed by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson. He later incorporated some of the proposals, largely the less controversial ones.   He did not endorse some of the politically troublesome recommendations, such as trimming popular tax deductions like the one for home mortgage interest.

Where It Goes Next

One presidential debate down, and two to go. Meanwhile, it's back to the campaign trail.

Somehow Obama has all the comeback lines today he lacked last night at the debate, good writers working over night.   Lets hope none of the yes men who sourround him are blowing smoke up his keester and telling him he did a good job, his performance was poor.

President Barack Obama will begin the day campaigning in Colorado and end it in Paul Ryan's home state of Wisconsin.  Many observers described his performance at Wednesday night's debate as subdued, and some basically labeled it a debacle.   Those same observers will be looking for whether there is a bounce back in Obama's step Thursday.

Mitt Romney, widely labeled the winner in Wednesday's showdown, will campaign with Ryan in Virginia. He'll also be watching to see if the debate puts a bounce in his standing in the polls.

Vice president Joe Biden will be in Iowa Thursday. He and Ryan meet on the debate stage next Thursday in Danville, Ky.

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