The Fast & Furious Presidency Here During Carter's Second Term

Banner graphics of the Fast & Furious display as they appear at Universal Studios, Hollywood. Image Credit: Edmund Jenks (2011)

The Fast & Furious Presidency Here During Carter's Second Term

Fast & Furious is kind of a "Branding" of the Barack Obama regime.

Fast & Furious doesn't exclusively relate to a crazy, progressive-political scheme carried out by a misguided but, ideologically pure 44th Presidency to erode the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The idea, by the Obama Administration to use with Congress and the American people, was to prove that easy access to weapons by Mexican citizens across the Northern border in the United States was the reason for so many deaths of Mexican citizens by Mexican drug cartels. Problem was that Eric Holder's Department of Justice (DOJ) was having trouble finding easy statistics to buttress their contention, so the DOJ (through its enforcement arm - Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - ATF) decided to supply/feed about 2,000 plus assault rifles and high-powered weapons directly to known contacts associated with the Mexican drug cartels so they had serial numbers by which they could trace weapons that "walked" across the border and prove their assertion.

The operation code named Fast & Furious was to develop information on loose weapons sales so that the Obama Administration could make the case to restrict the sale of weapons and reduce the strength of the guarantees put forth by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ... the Right for citizens to bear (own) arms. Sadly, a Federal agent was gunned down and killed with a known Fast & Furious assault weapon. Ten Arizona Sheriffs (elected as Democrats and Republicans) held a news conference this week stating that they feel Attorney General Eric Holder should step down or be fired because they, the Sheriffs, no longer have confidence in the DOJ with Holder as its leader.

Given the recent release of White House communication email memos out of Washington DC, combine with the history of the way this Executive Branch likes to operate ... Fast & Furious could actually be a name given to the way a failed Presidency operates.

Take the recent disclosures about the way Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturing plant and a visible cog in the Obama Administration's "Green Economy" agenda, received over a half a billion dollars of Federal Government venture capital style taxpayer money in the face of many red flags that would point against such a large, irresponsible, and risky move - Fast & Furious!

Fast & Furious banner graphics as they appear at Universal Studios, Hollywood. Image Credit: Edmund Jenks (2011)

This excerpted and edited from Politico -

2010 email on Solyndra: 'Bad days are coming'
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN | 10/4/11 7:08 PM EDT

Top White House advisers and OMB career staffers worried about the political risks from President Barack Obama's Solyndra 2010 visit and also discussed deeper management programs inside the Energy Department's loan guarantee program, according to more than a dozen internal email threads released Tuesday by House Democrats.

"There is an inherent risk in highlighting a single company before they have a track record," Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, wrote to Ronald Klain, Vice President Joe Biden's chief of staff, on May 24, 2010.

"Or even after they have one :-)" Klain replied in a colorful exchange that came just two days before the president's oft-quoted speech at the solar company's Bay Area headquarters.

In another newly released email, an unnamed Office of Management and Budget official responds to a colleague's concern that Obama's visit to Solyndra "could prove embarrassing to the administration in the not too distant future" because of the California company’s problematic finances.

"A cautionary note," the OMB staffer replied on May 25, 2010. "This is a classic problem with startups, but we have to be careful what POTUS says."

The Klain-Jarrett email exchange and the comments from the OMB official underscore how top Obama aides were well aware of the risks they were taking in sending the president to California to speak at Solyndra.

Obama's remarks have been haunting the White House for months, growing only larger after the company went bankrupt last month and FBI agents opened an investigation into Solyndra alongside the Energy Department's inspector general.
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The emails released Tuesday also include a series of exchanges among career OMB officials raising red flags over how DOE was handling Solyndra’s application, as well as the overall loan guarantee program.

"What's terrifying is that after looking at some of the ones that came next, this one started to look better," an unnamed OMB staffer wrote to a colleague on April 2, 2010. "Bad days are coming."

"That's one heckuva day," the OMB colleague replies.

The OMB officials also homed in on PriceWaterhouseCoopers’s independent audit of Solyndra, which contradicted assurances they’d been hearing about the company from DOE officials.

"DOE ... has one loan to monitor and they seem completely oblivious to this issue — and to make it worse it was the key thing I said they needed to watch," one OMB staffer wrote.

"Possible to close and default on one before closing on a second??? Could be a new record," added another OMB staffer.

Heeding calls from Congress, Energy Secretary Steven Chu took aim at government red tape on loan guarantees when he arrived in early 2009, clashing often with DOE’s general counsel, OMB and the Treasury Department.
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"They got them before we did," Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) told POLITICO on Tuesday. "Obviously I think the administration wanted to spin what they felt was an embarrassing situation. Unfortunately for them, it highlighted the problem more than they thought they could spin it."
[Reference Here].

Fast & Furious!

One only has to look at the way this 44th Presidency has chosen to make executive decisions and spread the executive power around, not only to the official group of traditional advisers, the Presidents Cabinet, but throughout its bureaucracy of about 33 Czar appointments and bureaucratic figureheads.

The legislative agenda over these last two years and eight months have given the U.S. citizens a bunch of new debt and regulations that would make even the most detailed policy wonk's head spin.

In the first couple of months alone the Obama Administration was able to pass the 865 billion dollar Stimulus spending bill and quickly thereafter the 410 billion dollar Omnibus Federal Government 2009 funding bill without floor debate or much committee oversight - Fast & Furious!

A year later, President Barack Obama signed into law the CBO rated 1.2 trillion dollar ObamaCare bill, again, without floor debate or much committee oversight. Nancy Pelosi stated that Congress would have to pass the bill and have it signed into law so that everyone could find out what is in it. In May 2010, soon after the bill was signed into law had the CBO revise its projection - The Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of discretionary spending in the law, and found that those costs will “probably exceed” $115 billion over 10 years. At a stroke, this finding erased almost all of ObamaCare’s $143 billion in budget savings based off rushed, incomplete CBO projections given just before the decisive House vote in March 2010 (additional problems with ObamaCare). - Fast & Furious!

Just this past month, the CATO Institute discovered another unaccounted for cost of ObamaCare that could account for another 500 billion dollars of cost over the next ten years. The official budget forecasts ignored the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury 50 billion dollars a year during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation - Fast & Furious!

Obama's rash of new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations could knock down the energy supply by 10%. Currently, the EPA is leading the Obama administration’s Cap and Trade assault on coal with a number of new regulations. Two of the most important are the “transport rule” and the “toxics rule” (Utility MACT). Combined, these regulations will systematically reduce access to affordable and reliable energy - Fast & Furious!

General Motors drives to meet the Federal Government's 2016 35.5 mpg average CAFE standards with the new Chevy Sonic. Image Credit: Edmund Jenks (2011)

The Obama Administration takes over two of three major automobile manufacturing operations based in the United States. General Motors and Chrysler are taken over by the Federal Government and pushes share holders aside (and devalues their investment) to assign a part of the ownership of these corporations to Labor Unions. Further, the Obama Administration issues new, aggressive CAFE standards (the largest mandatory fuel economy increase in history) and has GM push up the VOLT electric-powered car release date with a sales projection of 10,000 units in the first year (2011) ... actual sales (with a $3,700 discount and no corporate federal taxes because they are still owned by the U.S. Govt.) for the transpired 9 months of 12? ... only 3,895 units as of the end of September 2011. In the month of September alone, the company sold just 723 Volts and a major percentage of the 2011 total sales are being used by dealerships to market the lower cost, 42 mpg Chevy Cruze as per Mark Reuss, GM President North America - Fast & Furious!

We could go on and on with the many failures in Obamanomics, employment, and the values wrapped up in receiving the Nobel Peace Prize early in his Presidency and never end the examples upon which Fast & Furious becomes the best branding of the operating style and effectiveness of this 44th Presidency of the United States.

We are not experiencing Carter's Second Term as many dubbed the Obama Presidency going into the first year back in 2009, we are experiencing the "Fast & Furious Presidency" ... the one-term Executive Branch of Barack Hussein Obama!



[Article first published as The Fast & Furious Presidency Here During Carter's Second Term on Technorati]