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If there was ever a "gang that couldn't shoot straight," it's the Obama administration.

Following are some of the more misguided, ineffective and/or egregious actions that the president and his administration have taken to date:

In what may turn out to be the most misguided action of many, Obama's signing of an Executive Order to close Gitmo within one year is proving to be an example of a tendency to shoot from the hip, without thinking his policies through.

Immediately upon taking office, Obama launched into a reckless spending spree amounting to trillions of dollars, and by the administration's own estimate the total projected ten-year budget deficit will be approximately $9 trillion.

One of the more amazing aspects of Obama's seizing control of General Motors and Chrysler was the little noted fact that the person the administration put in charge of managing this complex assignment was an unknown 31-year-old staff member who had no experience at all, none, not just in business but in any other type of enterprise, such as government or the non-profit field.

Two recent examples of the administration's misplaced priorities reveal an attitude that's hard to fathom. We can't drill for oil anywhere in America or in our own coastal waters, but The Wall Street Journal has reported that we have agreed to "lend $2 billion to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance oil exploration off the country's coast near Rio de Janeiro." So, we can buy oil from Brazil but we will not permit drilling off the coast of Florida, while the Chinese and the Russians have both made deals with Cuba to drill in Cuban waters that are only 90 miles from the U.S., in an area that intrudes into our coastal territory.


Although the administration has paid out just 10% or 12% of the $787 billion stimulus appropriation, they have also encouraged massive expenditures for dubious results. For example, a giant utility, AEP, proposed a $670 million project with the goal of reducing the earth's temperature by an imperceptible 0.000092 degrees Celsius over the next 85 years?

Within days of declaring that "earmarks" would no longer be tolerated, Obama signed legislation that included almost 9,000 earmarked expenditures.

Team Obama was notably ineffective in vetting applicants for appointment to various positions in his administration, such as approving people who were guilty of evading taxes. Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle are two examples.

Other failings of the Obama administration's policies that are too numerous to detail here include appointing czars to oversee and/or manage almost every aspect of the free market, opposing the expansion of nuclear power facilities in the U.S., closing Yucca mountain to storage of nuclear waste, responding to the financial meltdown by bailing out companies that clearly should have been allowed to fail, among others.

Obama's assertion that he would be a "Uniter" not a "Divider" has proven to be nothing more than campaign rhetoric. He has exhibited a tendency to take it personally when people don't agree with him, for example, frequently referring to those who oppose his health care plan as un-American or dupes of an orchestrated assault by the Republican party.

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