Watering Down Bills Is Nothing New for Obama

Techdirt reports that the U.S. House of Representatives, under pressure from the White House, watered down a bill called the U.S.A. Freedom Act, which allows a similar form of pervasive meta-surveillance of all Americans currently in effect.

Watering down important bills is nothing new for Pres. Obama. As a senator in the Illinois legislature, he introduced a bill requiring nuclear power companies to notify the public when public groundwater had been contaminated by radiation.

As the bill was debated in the legislature, every rewrite watered down the bill until the final result was a suggestion that nuclear power companies notify the public, which "suggestion" had been the previous state of affairs. Soon afterward the bill failed to pass because it had become meaningless.

Surprise! Exelon Nuclear became Obama's largest fundraiser. David Axelrod, Obama's chief political strategist, became a consultant to Exelon Nuclear. Yet Obama bragged in Iowa, as he continued to leapfrog from one office to another, that he had passed nuclear legislation. He did no such thing.

So it should surprise none of us that he continues to do more of the same as president. His Sunday before Memorial Day 2014 photo op saluting American troops in Afghanistan does nothing to help the veterans dying in America on secret waiting lists. Nobody at the Veterans Administration has been fired, not even the director of the Phoenix, Arizona VA Hospital where 40 veterans died on a secret waiting list while waiting months for an appointment. Pres. Obama is waiting for an "investigation" before acting. He wants to know the "facts."

Yet in 2007 while campaigning to be president, he promised to fix what was wrong with the VA. The president appears to lack urgency when facing serious, in-our-faces domestic problems. He's opaque and secretive when he promises us that the National Security Agency (NSA) will stop spying on every American and then secretly fixes it so that the spying will continue.
Is it any wonder that his approval rating continues to drop? If more people knew the truth about Pres. Obama, his lies, his character flaws, and his lack of urgency in solving problems, his approval rating would surely be lower.