Presidential Signing Statement Has Taken The Power Away From The People

I wish the the government wouldn't promise so many things, it would result in less lies :)

thnx mike here's a story i posted up yesterday about more bs going on in the background..http://current.com/items/90321654_while-us-watched-michael-jackson-congress-pass...

When Obama starts approaching Bush record signing statements call me!

It will never happen look at the numbers.

Um, wait a minute.

From the ..er, "article"-

"When Congress offers you a bill, do you promise not to use presidential signage to get your way. He responded, “YES”

Later, after detailing what Obama has now put into practice, the article says "It is a far cry from President Obama saying, “I will absolutely not use signing statements to change a bill passed from congress”,

But, that's not what he said. That's not even what you said he said.

I don't like this at all,"meet the new boss,same as the old boss" pattern.

Is our Presidency just a Mafia boss ?

What's happening to,"We The People" ?

Let the guy try to fix the 8 year mess. I hope he does use it from time to time after all he was elected by a constitutional majority unlike congress. Someone has got to put a constraint on somethings.

I agree that he didn't outright lie but what he said was at least very misleading. He should have been honest and said "I will use it only when necessary and appropriate." but he didn't, he said what people wanted to hear just like thousands of other politicians. Ethics are only meaningful when action is difficult not when it is easy.

bullpcp,

Certainly your interpretation is one that can reasonably be drawn from his statement -- but I would suggest another, equally reasonable interpretation. People listened to his statement and heard what they WANTED to hear rather than what he actually said.

The precise meaning of words is, of course, critically important in the context of law and political power. But our culture has for many years been one that has place very little value on TEACHING children either the precise meaning of the words in their own language OR the importance of then USING those words in a manner appropriate to their meaning. I

am certainly not immune to this problem, either...but in any given thread on this site every other post seems to toss out words the meaning of which the author grasps incompletely at best. In a better world, the author would be sufficiently embarrassed when caught doing so to actually LOOK THE WORD(S) UP IN A DICTIONARY! But no, I have compared posts on many occasions and found the same author misusing the same words over and over and...

But given this problem (which is growing worse, by the way, fed in part by the Twitter Culture -- or as I prefer to call it, the Culture of Twits), is it any wonder that we have such deep and intractable difficulties with communication in this country? There are literally hundreds of examples that could be drawn just from the articles on this site over the past month.

One would be the appointment of "czars" by President Obama and the fact that some among the unibrow constituency on this site cannot seem to fathom the possibility that the word "czar" could have any other meaning than "king." So, of course, they set their hair (and brows) afire and run around looking like idiots, proclaiming that Obama has just apointed a baker's dozen American kings.

Paraphrasing Popeye, Obama said what he said and that is ALL that he said. The towering idiot who initially posted this article couldn't even get THAT right, substituting his own statement for the one made by Obama. If people can't even understand the words the President ACTUALLY used, they are going to be rather pressed to understand his meaning when those reporting his comments can't even manage the relatively easy task of transcription...Sigh.

Yes, Montesooma, please do educate me. In this case, at least, words alone are not sufficient to describe my joy at having discovered a Master like you, at whose feet I may learn. I beg your patience. I am slow and unworthy, but I will strive to live up to your high standards.

Oh Sweet Mystery of Life, at Last I Found You...