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[Legion]

171) Spent $402,721 on underwear that detects the presence of cigarette smoke

In May 2013, it was reported that the Obama administration had spent $402,721 on underwear that detects the presence of cigarette smoke.

172) Rewarded one of his biggest campaign fundraisers by nominating him for the ambassadorship to Canada

In April 2013, it was reported that Obama had nominated Bruce Heyman to be the ambassador to Canada. During Obama’s election campaign, Heyman had raised more than $1 million for Obama.

173) Hired a retarded man to sell illegal drugs and guns, and then arrested him for doing so

In April 2013, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:

“ATF agents running an undercover storefront in Milwaukee used a brain-damaged man with a low IQ to set up gun and drug deals, paying him in cigarettes, merchandise and money, according to federal documents obtained by the Journal Sentinel.”

“For more than six months, federal agents relied on Chauncey Wright to promote ‘Fearless Distributing’ by handing out fliers as he rode his bike around town recommending the store to friends, family and strangers, according to federal prosecutors and family members.”

“Wright, unaware that the store was an undercover operation being run by agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, also stocked shelves with shoes, clothing, drug paraphernalia and auto parts, according to his family.”

“Once authorities shut down the operation, they charged the 28-year-old man with federal gun and drug counts.”

“Wright’s IQ measures in the 50s, about half of a normal IQ, according to those familiar with him. Wright’s score is classified as mildly or moderately disabled, depending on the IQ scale used.”

[Legion]

174) Secretly obtained phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors

In May 2013, Associated Press reported: "The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news."

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s news-gathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.

Soon afterward, it was reported that obtaining these phone records had required approval from Eric Holder, Obama’s Attorney General.

This has had a very dangerous and harmful effect on the media’s ability to report the news. In June 2013, Gary Pruitt, the president and chief executive of Associated Press, said: “Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us… In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person … This chilling effect on news-gathering is not just limited to AP. Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well.”

175) Asked contractors to disclose their political donations before bidding on government contracts

In April 2011, Obama asked contractors to disclose their political donations before bidding on government contracts.

[Legion]

176) Tried to deport German family that had fled Germany over Hitler’s ban on homeschooling

In Germany in 1938, Adolf Hitler outlawed homeschooling. He said “Give me a child when he’s seven and he’s mine forever.”

Hitler’s ban on homeschooling is still in effect today. In 2006, Katharina Plett was arrested for homeschooling her own children. Her husband and their children fled the country. In 2008, Juergen and Rosemary Dudek were sentenced to 90 days in jail for homeschooling their own children.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their homeschooled children fled Germany after the police showed up at their house to enforce Germany’s ban on homeschooling. They came to the United States in 2010 and were granted political asylum, which gave them legal permission to live in the U.S. as political refugees However, in March 2013, the Obama administration argued in federal court in favor of deporting them and sending them back to Germany. This means that Obama does not consider them to be political refugees, and that he does not consider Germany’s policy of jailing homeschooling parents to be a form of persecution.

177) Said, “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends”

Obama said “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ — if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election — then I think it’s going to be harder. And that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2nd.”

This is a rare instance of a promise that Obama actually kept instead of broke. A huge number of the things on this list can be explained by that one simple sentence.

[Legion]

178) Falsely accused a law abiding news reporter of being “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation

James Rosen is a law abiding reporter for Fox News. However, the Obama administration falsely labeled him as “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation when it applied for a warrant to read his emails.

The New York Times wrote of this:

With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible “co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.

Leak investigations usually focus on the source, not the reporter. But, in this case, federal prosecutors also asked a federal judge for permission to examine Mr. Rosen’s personal e-mails, arguing that “there is probable cause to believe” Mr. Rosen is “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in the leak.

Though Mr. Rosen was not charged, the F.B.I. request for his e-mail account was granted secretly in late May 2010. The government was allowed to rummage through Mr. Rosen’s e-mails for at least 30 days.

Michael Clemente, the executive vice president of Fox News, said on Monday that it was “downright chilling” that Mr. Rosen “was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter.” Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, added on Tuesday that treating “routine news-gathering efforts as evidence of criminality is extremely troubling and corrodes time-honored understandings between the public and the government about the role of the free press.”

Obama administration officials often talk about the balance between protecting secrets and protecting the constitutional rights of a free press. Accusing a reporter of being a “co-conspirator”… shows a heavy tilt toward secrecy and insufficient concern about a free press.

The Washington Post wrote of this: "The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

Beyond that, the administration’s actions shatter the president’s credibility and discourage allies who would otherwise defend the administration against bogus accusations such as those involving the Benghazi “talking points.”

If the administration is spying on reporters and accusing them of criminality just for asking questions — well, who knows what else this crowd is capable of doing?

Ann E. Marimow, who broke the Rosen story, obtained the affidavit by FBI agent Reginald Reyes seeking access to Rosen’s private e-mails. In the affidavit, Reyes stated that “there is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed or is committing a violation” of the law against national security leaks. The affidavit detailed how the FBI had monitored Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department and tracked his various phone calls with the suspected leaker, analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.

Rosen’s supposed crime? Reyes got his evidence from an e-mail from the reporter: “I want to report authoritatively, and ahead of my competitors, on new initiatives or shifts in U.S. policy, events on the ground in [North Korea], what intelligence is picking up, etc. . . .

I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses. In short: Let’s break some news, and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it, or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.”

That is indeed compelling evidence — of good journalism.

Obama established an ominous precedent.

[Legion]

179) Let Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate himself for lying under oath

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder lied under oath. He said that he had nothing to do with monitoring the emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen. But it turns out that it was Holder’s own signature on the search warrant.

Even the liberal Huffington Post said that Holder should be fired over this.

Holder could have gotten five years in prison.

So, did Obama fire Holder?

Of course not!

Instead, Obama asked that Holder be investigated – not by an independent investigating committee – but by Holder himself!

[Legion]

180) Used Obamacare to illegally give the IRS additional powers without approval from Congress

In May 2013 the Washington Post wrote: "The law allows the Department of Health and Human Services to set up federal health exchanges in the holdout states. But the statute makes no mention of the IRS providing credits and subsidies through federal exchanges.

The IRS resolved this conundrum by denying its existence. In a May 2012 regulatory ruling, it asserted its own right to provide credits outside the state exchanges as the reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous law. But the language of the law is not ambiguous. And health scholars Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon, in an exhaustive recent analysis, find no justification for the IRS’s ruling in the legislative history of Obamacare. “The statute,” they argue, “and the lack of any support for the IRS rule in the legislative record put defenders of the IRS rule in the awkward position of arguing that it was so obviously Congress’ intent to offer tax credits in federal exchanges that despite a year of debate over the PPACA, it never occurred to anyone to express that intent out loud. A better explanation is that the PPACA’s authors miscalculated when they assumed states would establish exchanges.”

So: The IRS seized the authority to spend about $800 billion over 10 years on benefits that were not authorized by Congress. And theIRS scandal put this decision in a new light. What was the role of politics in shaping this regulatory decision? What pressure was applied?

[Legion]

181) Used environmental regulations to shut down an ambulance while it was taking a patient to the hospital

In May 2013 the Washington Post reported: "A Wednesday shootout on the streets of Washington Highlands left a cop injured and a carjacking suspect dead. But before the suspect expired, he went on an unusual ambulance ride that involved moving him from one vehicle to another on the shoulder of Interstate 295. While this might appear to be another story of Fire and Emergency Medical Services dysfunction, the story is rather more complicated. As WUSA-TV explains, newer-model diesel engines are required by federal regulations to have emission-control features that, in some circumstances, require the motor to shut down for “regeneration” — a process in which the exhaust system burns off trapped soot. The need for regeneration can be unpredictable. The transfer to a second ambulance delayed 34-year-old Nathaniel McRae’s arrival at a hospital by seven minutes. FEMS insists the wait did not play a role in his death".

[Legion]

182) Had “a serious management problem” with his refusal to fire bad workers

A 2011 USA Today article on federal employees states: “The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. White-collar federal workers have almost total job security after a few years on the job. Last year, the government fired none of its 3,000 meteorologists, 2,500 health insurance administrators, 1,000 optometrists, 800 historians or 500 industrial property managers.”

Wow! Those must be excellent workers, right?

Actually, no. The article also says: "“San Francisco State University management professor John Sullivan, an expert on employee turnover, says the low departure rates show a failure to release poor performers and those with obsolete skills. ‘Rather than indicating something positive, rates below 1% in the firing and layoff components would indicate a serious management problem,’ he says.”

A serious management problem?

So who exactly was the highest ranking manager of the federal government?

It was Obama.

[Legion]

183) Illegally solicited donations from health insurers

In May 2013, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius solicited donations from health insurers to help pay for Obamacare. Such soliciting is illegal.

184) Chose an economic advisor who wanted roads and bridges to be built by unqualified workers

Obama chose to have Robert Reich be his economic advisor. Regarding Obama’s “stimulus,” Reich said:

“I am concerned, as I’m sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high skilled people… And therefore, in my remarks I have suggested to you, and I’m certainly happy to talk about it more, ways in which the money can be — criteria can be set so that they money does go to others… people who are not necessarily construction workers or high-skilled professionals.”

185) Pressured unions to reduce the amount of health insurance coverage for their employees

In May 2013, the New York Times reported: "Say goodbye to that $500 deductible insurance plan and the $20 co-payment for a doctor’s office visit. They are likely to become luxuries of the past.

Expect to have your blood pressure checked or a prescription filled at a clinic at your office, rather than by your private doctor? Then blame the so-called Cadillac tax, which penalizes companies that offer high-end health care plans to their employees.

Although the tax does not start until 2018, employers say they have to start now to meet the deadline and they are doing whatever they can to bring down the cost of their plans. Under the law, an employer or health insurer offering a plan that costs more than $10,200 for an individual and $27,500 for a family would typically pay a 40 percent excise tax on the amount exceeding the threshold.

Tom Leibfried, a legislative director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., one of the unions whose plans were vulnerable to the tax, says the demand that workers pay more for their care is a perennial aspect of labor negotiations. “We’re very concerned about the hollowing out of benefits in general,” he said. “What the excise tax will do is just fuel that.”

[Legion]

186) Falsely said “We believe in the free market”

In June 2013, Obama said, "We don’t think that top-down solutions are the right way to go. We believe in the free market. We believe in a light touch when it comes to regulations. We believe in the free market.”

Obama was lying. The free market means that in the business world, it is the customers, not the government, who pick winners and losers. But this list contains a huge number of instances where Obama tried to use the government to pick winners and losers in the business world.

[Legion]

187) Falsely said “We believe in a light touch when it comes to regulations”

In June 2013, Obama said, “We believe in a light touch when it comes to regulations.”

He lied. For example, after Obamacare was passed, Obama added 20,000 extra pages of regulations to it.

[Legion]

188) Said Catholic schools are “divisive” but did not say the same thing about other religious schools

In June 2013, Obama said: “If towns remain divided – if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden – that too encourages division and discourages cooperation.”

I can understand why a person might criticize religious schools in general. But for Obama to single out one religion in particular as being divisive, while not saying the same thing about all religious schools in general, is a double standard.

189) Favored a new tax on Christmas trees so the money could be used to subsidize Christmas trees

In November 2011, Obama proposed a new tax on Christmas trees, so that the money could be used to subsidize Christmas trees. If this had been a Rube Goldberg cartoon it would have been funny. But to suggest it as an actual government policy was absurd.

[Legion]

190) Betrayed the people of the city that helped him launch his political career

As part of his effort to get Obamacare passed, Obama repeatedly promised that people could keep their current health insurance if they liked it.

More than any other city, the people of Chicago helped to get Obamacare passed. Chicago is where Obama chose to live when he first got into politics. The people there launched his political career and voted him into office.

And this is how Obama repaid them. In May 2013, the Chicago Tribune reported: "Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to start reducing health insurance coverage next year for more than 30,000 retired city workers and begin shifting them to President Barack Obama’s new federal system. The move is aimed at saving the city money. Once the phaseout is complete, those retired workers would have to pay for their own health insurance or get subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. The city-subsidized coverage is particularly important to retired workers who aren’t yet eligible for Medicare

Henry Bayer, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, said the uncertainties of the Affordable Care Act and the state insurance exchanges they would create make the city’s plan hard to assess.

“This uncertainty will cause anxiety and fear for tens of thousands of seniors who gave their working lives to public service — men and women whose retirement savings are already under attack in the name of ‘pension reform.'” Bayer said.

[Legion]

191) Proposed military interventionism in Syria

In June 2013, Obama proposed that the U.S. get involved in Syria’s military conflicts.

192) Planned to use military snipers to shoot innocent lions and cheetahs in the wild

In June 2013, Obama was planning to use military snipers to shoot innocent lions and cheetahs in the wild.

However, after the media reported on his plans, Obama got embarrassed, and cancelled his plans.

[Legion]

193) Refused to fire or prosecute more than 1,000 IRS employees who illegally used their IRS credit cards for their own personal use

During Obama’s first term, more than 1,000 IRS employees illegally used their IRS credit cards for personal purchases, but Obama refused to fire or prosecute them.

194) Defended intelligence chief who lied under oath

In March 2013, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, falsely stated under oath that the NSA was not gathering data on millions of U.S. citizens. In June 2013, after it was reported that Clapper had lied under oath, Obama defended him, instead of firing him.

195) Had the Secret Service visit a law abiding citizen who had criticized his policies on Twitter

In April 2013, Obama sent the Secret Service to visit the home of Tom Francois, a law abiding citizen who had criticized Obama’s policies on Twitter.

The Secret Service admitted that Francois had not made any threats against Obama.