Checks and balances? Fuck that noise, if the vice president does it it's not illegal.

Conflicts of Interest? The company contracted to do constuction work in Iraq also happened to be owned by the Vice President?

hrm....

I would not say Obama is the dumbest leader of USA has had but he needs to do the right thing for the world and his country as a whole.

Obama needs to stay on good close terms with Israel just like the other US Presidents before him. He should not show any weakness to the Islam Middle eastern world. To do so would be detrimental to USA and the whole world. Nail the Middle east with those bombs and keep up the war efforst in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Terrorists must be eliminated.

Obama making friends with Middle east leaders or any other dubious leaders such as Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwean leader) and that South American extremist leader (Chavez) would be a sign of American weakness. Never show weakness to your mortal enemies.

More weapons and US support must be given to Israel, peace to Middle East must be returned. Arabs only no violence and terror. Muslims arabs have to be put in their place and dealt with force to keep them under the power of Israel and maintain peace in that troublesome region of the world.

Why? I dont see any point in supporting Israel. It is nothing but a giant waste of money.

Give more weapons to Israel? So they can continue to invade everyone around them? Sometimes they are partially justified, but Israel crosses the line. Obama should become buddies with muslim leaders and try to convince them to stop being aggressive, and use the U.S. leverage over Israel to stop them from being aggressive, too.

No, he needs to do the right thing for the US. The world did not elect him, we did.

Final-Fan, Give Obama time, I am sure he will do as many things to piss you off as Bush did.

From the research I have done on the 92 presidential election, that does not seem to be the case. I addressed this in another thread before the 08 election transpired: If one looks at the exit polling from the 92 election, one will find that had Perot not been on the ballot, 38% of his voters said they would have voted for Clinton and 38% said they would have voted for Bush. The same thing happened along ideological lines. Perot received an equal number of conservatives and liberal votes (18%) and received 21% of the moderate vote. Reagan was the last Republican to win the moderate vote as it almost always breaks Democrat. There are factors that hurt Bush (30-49 age group and gender) and some that hurt Clinton (moderate vote, 18-29 age group and union households). Now, exit polling is imperfect, but it is the best data available for the preferences of Perot supporters.

I think the 1912 election is a prime example of what you described. It is indubitably apparent that Roosevelt and the Progressives split the Republican vote.

While I am not willing to go that far, you raise a very valid point.  Why are we the ones always caving to Israel?

RealMafoo, give him time to actually BE a president.  2 months!  2 months is all he has had.  People said he might not even have the experience needed to be president and now he is holding his own against one of the toughest situations that a president can face.  No president is "fully" prepared to do what he is trying to do, but its not even clear that Obama is doing anything wrong in his process.  You have just established this hate mentality toward him.  What seems like a stupid decision at the time, may end up being the most brilliant decision ever made by a president.  That's why basic History courses only go up to about 30 yrs before present day, because it is hard to interprete and cast judgement on history until it "becomes" history.  We have to be able to examine the events years in the future to see the full impact and to see how exactly everything took place.  You cannot start criticizing Obama based on immediate decisions over the last 2 months to try to stabilize the US national economy. 

Stabilize the US national economy.  (not even considering that AND the global economy while trying to handle all other presidential issues) Do you even realize how big of a job that is??  He has much more information and much more intelligent advising than you will ever get here.  He is getting numbers, projections, advice, and calculations from economic experts concerning every corner of our nation's system.  All of which he is going to have to understand and absorb during the limited time he has to make decisions.  The most YOU can do is send an email to your representatives, like Words of Wisdom already suggested to you, or perhaps climb the ladder yourself and hope people vote for you so you can change things more directly.  But with your rashness, I would say you would probably end up being the typical politician, full of twisting and rationalizing the situation to suite your own agendas and emotions on any given topic (to fit how YOU view things), something that I really do not think Obama has been doing.  But again, We'll see won't we?  Years into the future.  At least give the guy a freakin year before casting him aside.  Most people gave Bush another term before deciding on him.  Don't use Bush to create some generalization of what Obama is like, simply because you don't like how popular he is, that he is different than most past presidents, that he is democrat, or whatever your reason is for having such deep seated hate.  I'm sorry, but I'm just tired of hearing you continually going back to basic and empty criticisms without offering enough educated reasons why you feel such.  Go into history and show specific examples of company spending, governmental policy, statistics concerning the housing market and bank loans and then relate that to Obama and show beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is making the wrong decisions given the timeframe with which he needed to act before the economy were to spiral out of control with consideration to the advice he was recieving and his overal longterm plans and then maybe you'll have something to talk about.  Otherwise this is just a topic to cater to your dislike for Obama.  In which case you are just looking for some sort of gang mentality to make you feel better about yourself and superficially warrant your hate.

/endrant.