Obama’s Second Term and Veterans Get the Shaft

I keep on hearing that an Obama second term will be different than the first. That without the constraints of having to worry about being reelected he’ll be freer to do what he thinks is right. And that the Republicans will, without the pressure of their goal to limit him to one term, turn conciliatory. And that angels will suddenly appear everywhere to lend a helping hand. And that there will be no more crippling disease. And famine will end. Everywhere.

As for the second term, if Obama thinks that Wall Street has done anything to injure the economy and remains unrepentant, then he could show us right away that he means business by accepting the resignation of Wall Street’s #1 lackey, Timothy

Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury. Neil Barofsky, the former Inspector General of TARP, has said in his recently published book that Geithner was a Wall Street enabler. This is Geithenr’s response and the accompanying commentary as reported in http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/07/geithner-deeply-offended-by-charges-in-new-barofsky-book/1#.UF93Ia7tOSo an excerpt of which follows: “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he is “deeply offended” by an assertion in a new book that he is too cozy with some of the country’s biggest financial institutions and mishandled the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout fund. “You know, I’m deeply offended by that,” Geithner said. “I find that deeply offensive. You know, it’s the result of a urban myth. … A lot of people thought and wrote in publications of record that I spent my life at Goldman Sachs rather than as a public servant, which is what I’d done with my life. A lot of people thought the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was a bank — a private bank — rather than the fire station of the financial system.”
“Geithner has never worked at Goldman Sachs, but he’s been incorrectly cited in the media as having worked for the investment bank during his time in the Obama administration.
On Twitter, Barofsky wrote today he never accused Geithner of spending years at Goldman Sachs.”
“Geithner resorts to straw men,” Barofsky wrote on Twitter.

As John Stewart might say, when is a 58 to 40 vote a loser? When the US Senate is involved. Led by Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jeff Sessions of Alabama the Republicans just eked out enough votes to block the bill. The standard Republican bullshit was the excuse – that it was too costly. They should just get a big rubber stamp with those words and mail it in. Coburn, who never said no to a war that a.) Was pointless and useless, and b.) Cost a whole bunch of bucks, couldn’t find it in his heart (and brain) to support the troops. The official unemployment rate among veterans is about 40% higher than the national average (which as we know is ridiculously high). Coburn and Sessions were joined in their opposition among others by John McCain and Lindsay Graham, who are also notorious for leading America into war and then standing treating the troops like so much fodder. By the way, per his actions and words, McCain would like to have US troops fighting in Syria and Libya. The Daily Kos sums it up –
“…more ways and better ways to hire veterans” doesn’t include a friggin’ jobs program targeting more than 700,000

unemployed vets, because McCain joined 39 other sanctimonious dickheads on Wednesday to defeat the $1 billion appropriation (yeah, in RepublicanWorld 40 beats 58). Like most of the GOP bottom-feeders, McCain objected to the Veterans Job Corp bill on fiscal grounds, unlike almost a decade ago when they voted, without any budgetary qualms, to send men and women to war. In their warped world, going to war involves no fiscal constraint, but taking care of veterans after war is just too damn expensive.”

McCain, by the way is just a shell of what he once was considered. Per Frank Rich’s excellent article Embed in Red, which appeared in New York magazine a week ago, Glenn Becks sums up McCain this way “…as a relic who crept out of the time capsule to show where we’ve been and where I don’t ever want to go again.”