2011 bits & review.

With the year nearly over . 2012 is going to carry a lot of heavy baggage from 2011. 

 I  for one have seen it all since September 11th , 2001. How the country some how slowly crept into a mess that it is in right now. You might say that 2011 is the climax of a ten year decline in American power .The framework for the year was set in November 2010, when the mid-term elections saw control of the House of Representatives pass to the Republicans, who also made gains in the Senate. This meant that from the start of the new term in January, Mr Obama and the Democrats – who had already lost their filibuster-proof Senate “supermajority” in the by-election for the late Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat earlier in 2010 – would lose the ability to push legislation through Congress.This was to cause impasse after impasse throughout 2011, as the House of Representatives, many of whose newcomers had been elected thanks to the rise of the Tea Party, blocked Mr Obama's agenda. By the end of the year, public approval for Congress stood at a record low of just nine per cent. The year began violently when Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic Arizona congresswoman, was shot through the head in her Tucson constituency. Six people were killed and 13 injured after Jared Loughner, a 22-year-old drop-out, opened fire at a meet-the-voters event in a supermarket carpark. Some were quick to blame the fiery rhetoric of the Tea Party, after it emerged that Miss Giffords had been one of 20 Democrats represented by crosshairs on a US map used by Sarah Palin, the former Republican Vice-presidential candidate, to instruct activists where to target their efforts
The plaudits he received for the speech were rare during a year in which his approval rating tumbled to 43 per cent – lower than Jimmy Carter's as he prepared for his doomed re-election campaign in 1979. Several economic indicators were so bad as to require Mr Obama to break post-war precedent if he were to manage to be re-elected.
Unemployment remained around nine per cent throughout the year, meaning joblessness had not been so high for so long since the Great Depression. The poverty rate climbed to its highest rate since 1983 and growth remained sluggish as fears of a double-dip recession persisted.
It was in this context that the Occupy Wall Street movement, which gave voice to millions disgruntled with the economic status quo, was born in September. it soon spread across the US and the rest of the world. Aides to Mr Obama indicated that he would seek to style himself as the candidate of the “99 per cent” in 2012.
But while he achieved a string of triumphs in foreign affairs – having the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and one of his senior disciples, Anwar al-Awlaki, assassinated and helping to oust Muammar Gaddafi from Libya – the president was repeatedly frustrated on economic and domestic policy.
A shutdown of the federal government was narrowly avoided in April after Mr Obama was forced to accept a $40 billion cut in public spending. A stalemate in December had been averted only after Mr Obama agreed to extend George W. Bush's ruinous tax cuts for another two years.
At the end of July, the US came close to defaulting on its debt when the two parties could not strike a deal to raise the $14 trillion debt ceiling – the limit on what the government can borrow – before the Democrats agreed to $2 trillion in spending cuts.
But in keeping with the year, a “super-committee” of senior congressmen, convened under the terms of the deal to come up with a plan for how the cuts should be made, failed to strike any deal whatsoever, meaning deep cuts to treasured areas including defence should be automatically triggered.
Yet another impasse looked likely at year's end, with Mr Obama threatening to make Congress stay at work through their Christmas holiday until an agreement could be made on extending a cut to the payroll tax, the US equivalent of national security, which he says would benefit middle earners.
Civil and labour rights returned to the agenda, with New York becoming the sixth and largest state to allow gay marriage and battles being fought in Wisconsin and Ohio over the power of trade unions. Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination promised to crack down on both.
Their campaigns, which were approaching their first test in the Iowa caucus as the year ended, dominated the last few months of the year, as one by one the candidates on the Right of the party enjoyed a spell as the leading contender to Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, and the party's heir apparent after losing in his bid for the nomination in 2008.
But the surges in support for Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, and Herman Cain, a former pizza restaurant tycoon from Georgia, eventually subsided, with the latter forced to withdraw following accusations of infidelity and sexual harassment.By the end of the year it was the unlikely figure of Newt Gingrich, the foil to President Bill Clinton as Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s, who managed to secure – and then maintain – polling leads over Mr Romney in three of the four states due to vote on the contest in January.Admitting that he faced a tough re-election campaign in key states such as Florida and Ohio, Mr Obama told supporters in December: “We're going to win this thing”. As they prepared to have their say on a candidate to face him, millions of Republican activists ended 2011 determined that this would not be so.

NOTES & COMMENTS:

Read my next post . I give a critique of President Obama . I score him as failing . Not that I believe  don't that his original true intentions was not  getting America back to stability , and undoing President Bush's 8 years  . The Health Care  issue was a waste , it should not have been Obama's first term fix for the nation . The first duty was to create jobs ,the stimulus money that was flooded toward the public sector only benefited 1 % of the population saving the Banks , the Auto industry , and cash for clunkers ! . If Obama makes back to a second term in office , I hope that he will focus on 'US' rather than giving speeches , and flooding money to corporations and such.