The Republican Nomination For President: The Race For The Race For The White House

If you take an ineffective drug and you die, the drug did not kill you, the disease you hoped it might cure did.

Yes, Obama was killed during his administration and I'm glad for that. He gave the green light to the mission, but how many presidents would not have done the same thing?

Four months after Obama entered the White House, Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., briefed the President on the agency’s latest programs and initiatives for tracking bin Laden. Obama was unimpressed. In June, 2009, he drafted a memo instructing Panetta to create a “detailed operation plan” for finding the Al Qaeda leader and to “ensure that we have expended every effort.” Most notably, the President intensified the C.I.A.’s classified drone program; there were more missile strikes inside Pakistan during Obama’s first year in office than in George W. Bush’s eight. The terrorists swiftly registered the impact: that July, CBS reported that a recent Al Qaeda communiqué had referred to “brave commanders” who had been “snatched away” and to “so many hidden homes [which] have been levelled.” The document blamed the “very grave” situation on spies who had “spread throughout the land like locusts.” Nevertheless, bin Laden’s trail remained cold.

[....indications that they've found bin Laden....]

Obama, though excited, was not yet prepared to order military action. John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.” The C.I.A. intensified its intelligence-collection efforts, and, according to a recent report in the Guardian, a physician working for the agency conducted an immunization drive in Abbottabad, in the hope of acquiring DNA samples from bin Laden’s children. (No one in the compound ultimately received any immunizations.)

In late 2010, Obama ordered Panetta to begin exploring options for a military strike on the compound.

[....]

On March 29th, McRaven brought the plan to Obama. The President’s military advisers were divided. Some supported a raid, some an airstrike, and others wanted to hold off until the intelligence improved. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault. Gates reminded his colleagues that he had been in the Situation Room of the Carter White House when military officials presented Eagle Claw—the 1980 Delta Force operation that aimed at rescuing American hostages in Tehran but resulted in a disastrous collision in the Iranian desert, killing eight American soldiers. “They said that was a pretty good idea, too,” Gates warned. He and General James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, favored an airstrike by B-2 Spirit bombers. That option would avoid the risk of having American boots on the ground in Pakistan. But the Air Force then calculated that a payload of thirty-two smart bombs, each weighing two thousand pounds, would be required to penetrate thirty feet below ground, insuring that any bunkers would collapse. “That much ordnance going off would be the equivalent of an earthquake,” Cartwright told me. The prospect of flattening a Pakistani city made Obama pause. He shelved the B-2 option and directed McRaven to start rehearsing the raid.

What newly elected president comes to office with presidential experience? By your apparent logic, every president should be elected to a second terms since they will have four more years of presidential experience than their opponent.

I'm sick of inspirational political leaders. I want someone who has executive experience and is competent.

Oh and forgot to address...

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

What newly elected president comes to office with presidential experience? By your apparent logic, every president should be elected to a second terms since they will have four more years of presidential experience than their opponent.

This is what you said originally:

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

I'm sick of inspirational political leaders. I want someone who has executive experience and is competent.

As of January 2013, Obama will have had four more years of experience than Romney in the very executiveiest of executive positions.

Despite the message being pushed by the media (liberal and conservative), if the NH primary is any kind of indication, the GOP electorate is not languishing in "anyone but Romney" doldrums.

Of course you do since you believe (with virtually no justification) that Obama has been a competent president.

Notwithstanding a clearly biased site called "Cut The Crap," there are quite a few people, including economists, who believe Obama's policies worsened and lengthened the recession. TARP (a Bush program) stopped the freefall, not Obama's stimulus disaster.

A Missouri steel company in which former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s (R) Bain Capital was the majority shareholder went bankrupt, laid off more than 750 workers, and had to turn to the federal government for a bailout of its pension funds in 2001, according to a special report from Reuters.

Romney, whose time as CEO of Bain Capital has been a centerpiece of his campaign, as he has criticized President Obama for not having experience in the “real economy,” opposed both the 2008 bank bailouts under President George W. Bush and Obama’s rescue of the auto industry. But when Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems went belly-up less than a decade after Bain became its majority stakeholder, the company, which had been in operation since 1888, had to turn to a federal insurance agency to bailout its pension program in large part because Bain had “saddled” it with “such a heavy debt load”:

Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 (258 pounds) a month.

What’s more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company’s underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

While Romney’s firm benefited from a federal bailout, he has been a vocal critic of such bailouts while on the campaign trail. At different times, Romney both supported and derided the federal bank bailouts, but he most recently referred to the Troubled Asset Relief Program as a “slush fund” that “should be shut down.” When Obama proposed bailing out the auto industry in 2009, a rescue that was ultimately successful, Romney famously criticized the plan in a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

And while Bain drove Worldwide Grinding Systems into bankruptcy, it didn’t share in the misery. According to Reuters, Bain made at least $12 million from the invesment, and added another $9,000 a year from the company via management consulting fees. Meanwhile, by 1995, the company was carrying debt that amounted to 10 times more than its annual operating income. Six years later, it was bankrupt. “Romney cost me lots and lots of sleepless nights and lots and lots of money,” Ed Stanger, who worked at the plant for more than 30 years, told Reuters.

The Kansas City steel mill isn’t the only chink in Romney’s “job creator” armor. American Pad and Paper (AMPAD), acquired by Bain in 1992, closed two plants, laid off hundreds of workers, and eventually went into bankruptcy. Several companies owned by Bain laid off thousands of workers, even as Bain made handsome profits from its investments — and boosted those profits by abusing offshore tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Though he left Bain more than a decade ago, Romney is still making millions a year from the firm thanks to a lucrative retirement package. His campaign, meanwhile, finally admitted that its claims that Bain created 100,000 jobs under Romney’s leadership were bogus.

Although the polls made pretty good predictions of the election outcome tonight, forecasting turnout is harder. So far it looks like rumors of a record Republican turnout in New Hampshire were greatly exaggerated.

With 85 of 301 precincts reporting, 52,191 voters have cast a ballot in the Republican primary so far. That projects to about 185,000 votes statewide, as compared with about 240,000 votes in the Republican primary in 2008.

The drop-off in turnout looks worse for Republicans since a higher fraction of voters - about half this year, compared to 37 percent in 2008 - are independents. That means that turnout among registered Republicans could alone be off by nearly 40 percent from 2008.