President Barack Obama’s disapproval rating peaked at 55 percent Sunday, according to Gallup’s daily tracking poll.
The news comes just weeks after Obama’s approval rating hit an all time low of 39 percent in a similar Gallup poll. On Sunday, it was marked at 38 percent, with a 3 percent margin of error.
The poll was conducted via telephone interviews with 1,500 adults.
2012 GOP Presidential candiate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) released a statement Thursday lamenting the U.S.’s role in helping bring the 42-year reign of Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafi to the brink of collapse.
Paul called the seemingly successful U.S./NATO mission against Gadhafi’s regime “a loss for our American republic.” The libertarian Texan also warned that Gadhafi’s successor “is likely to be just as bad, or worse, than Gadhafi himself.”
Here’s the full statement:
“The current situation in Libya may be a short term victory for Empire, but it is a loss for our American Republic. And, I fear it may be devastating to the Libyan people.
There is no doubt that Moammar Gadhafi is a bad guy, and that he has brought harm and misery to his country. However, our involvement in another country’s civil war is costly and unconstitutional.
“We have spent over $1 billion on a war that this administration has fought not with the consent of Congress but under a NATO flag and authorization from the United Nations.
It is a serious thing for a President to engage us in a war. He is bound by our Constitution to seek authority from the People, through our Congress, prior to engaging in any military action unless that action is to address an imminent threat to our safety and security. The situation in Libya is a civil war contained within that country’s sovereign borders, and it presented no imminent threat to the United States.
And so, our government continues to spend trillions of dollars in overseas foreign wars while we face unsustainable debt, a looming dollar crisis, and our Constitution seems to lose any meaning. These actions will sink our country if we do not reverse course.
Meanwhile, we must beware of any ‘Mission Accomplished’ euphoria. The conflict in Libya is far from over, and there could very well be war in Libya for a long time to come.
While I hope and pray that the hostility draws to a close and the people there find peace, I fear this is only wishful thinking. We face a situation where a rebel element we have been assisting may very well be radical jihadists, bent on our destruction, and placed in positions of power in a new government.
Worse still, Gadhafi’s successor is likely to be just as bad, or worse, than Gadhafi himself. Alternately, Libya may descend into anarchy like Somalia after the overthrow of dictator Siad Barre. Much like when we removed Saddam Hussein, another thug in Iraq, the likelihood of either a new brutal dictatorship or tribal violence and a protracted insurgency are much more likely than the peaceful transition to democracy we are all hoping for.
With all these problems and the predictable chaos that will likely ensue, we must ask why this administration was so eager to embark on this Libyan operation in the name of ‘humanitarianism.’ Governments in Bahrain and Yemen have this year used military force to put down democratic protestors. The Saudi regime, which practices Sharia Law, has also been repressive, yet we have not intervened there. These countries continue to sell us oil, while Libya had begun to turn their exports toward Russia, China, India, and Brazil. Could this war largely be about protecting our oil interests at the expense of our Constitution?
This episode is all too familiar. We were already involved in two wars that have dragged on years longer than the people who led us into them initially predicted. We can no longer afford to police the world, in terms of both dollars and American lives. We will destroy ourselves if we do not stop, build a strong national defense at home, and focus on trade and commerce with the world instead of Empire.”
In an interview with PBS NewsHour, 2012 Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said he’d call on wealthy Americans to do their part to fix the nation’s lagging economy.
PBS released a brief segment of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full Thursday evening, in which Huntsman said, “As president, I wouldn’t hesitate to call on a sacrifice from all of our people, even those at the very highest end of the income spectrum…I’m not saying higher taxes, but there are contributions they can make too.”
Republicans have generally supported either extending or making permanent the Bush tax cuts on all Americans. The current administration believes, however, that increasing rates on the top two percent of taxpayers would produce $4 trillion in added revenue over the next decade.
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Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, a fierce critic of President Obama’s health care reform plan, is planning to release her own health care plan, according to a report in the Washington Examiner.
The proposal should come forward within weeks, a Bachmann spokesperson told the Examiner in an email.
Bachmann isn’t the only candidate crafting an alternative to legislation spearheaded by the President. Earlier this week it was reported that Mitt Romney intends to counter Obama’s soon-to-be-released jobs plan next month with his own proposal.
Read the full story here.
Following President Obama’s announcement to unveil a new jobs plan in early September, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney announced Thursday that he will give the country a jobs plan of his own on the very same week.
“If it’s a continuation of what we’ve seen in the past, we know it will fail,” Romney said to Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto. “I’m also in Nevada on Sept. 6th, and I will be coming out with my jobs plan, and it will be very different from his. And if we follow my jobs plan we’ll get America working again.”
According to his campaign, Romney’s decision to unveil a jobs plan in September is part of an initiative to begin revealing more heavily detailed policy positions in the coming months.
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:23AM