They also threatened the sellers with revocation of their licenses if they refused to sell to know cartel buyers. There are several reports of gun stores complaining about having to sell weapons they knew were being purchased for this purpose and being told by the DoJ to keep selling.
Essentially, the DoJ instructed, and then threatened, legal gun sellers to violate federal and state laws in order to facilitate the sales of guns to know traffickers with no plan on doing any real tracking of the movement or use of those weapons.
They had the serial numbers of the sold weapons. So more accurately, they had no plan for any type of 'real-time' tracking, they just wanted to see what crime scenes the weapons would show up on to see how they there used and by who; not the greatest plan.
He may have but you seem to forget that for the last two years of Bush's term the Democrats controlled congress and therefore the federal purse strings.
So who exactly was in charge of federal spending during the bailouts?
The Dems didn't even bother with Bush on the final budget of his Presidency but opted instead to keep issuing extensions until Obama could take office and sign their budget into law.
Bush definitely had his spending problems and was no financial genius but at least he knew enough to understand the problem with the housing bubble well before it burst and tried to do something, only to be blocked in congress by the likes of Barney Frank.
For the hundredth time in this thread, budgets cannot be filibustered; they require a simply majority vote (51 votes) to pass.
The Senate hasn't passed a budget for the simple reason that Harry Reid doesn't want to pass a budget. What's his reasons are exactly can be discussed in depth but fearing the Republican filibuster it is not one of them.
Budgets cannot be filibustered according to Senate rules. Even better they require a simple majority vote to pass the Senate.
So any time the Harry Reid decides to propose a real budget that he can get 50 or his fellow Dems to support it could be passed the same week and the Republicans could do absolutely nothing to stop it. How do you think Obamacare got passed in the first place? The Senate Dems used the filibuster proof budget process to pass it when they could come up with the 60 votes they would have needed otherwise.
Calling bills they are trying to pass 'budgets', while good enough to fool a lot of partisans and give them some talking points about obstructionist Repubs, doesn't actually make it a budget.
Each house of Congress passes it's own budget using it's own rules. When they don't agree the reconciliation process is used to match the two budgets up and try and come to a compromise. That's a little hard to do when only the House has passed a budget and the Senate refuses to and before you bring up filibusters, remember, budgets are exempt from the filibuster process and only require a simple majority (51 votes) to pass.
The budget in the Senate requires a simple majority vote to pass and cannot be filibustered. How are the Republicans prevent Harry Reid from passing a budget exactly>
Read above, the budgetary process in the Senate is a simple majority vote (51 votes to pass). It cannot be filibustered and does not require a super majority.
It was through the budgetary reconciliation process that the Dems managed to pass Obamacare because they knew there was no way for it to get 60 votes if submitted as a simple bill.
Budgets are NOT subject to filibustering, how do you think Obamacare got passed with less than 60 votes. Learn the law and stop drinking the kool-aid. I'm not even American and I understand that basic principle of American Federal politics.
Senate Dems haven't passed a budget in 4 years because senate Dems haven't wanted to pass a budget in 4 years, that's it that's all. The Republicans had absolutely nothing to do with the Dems shirking their legal responsibility to pass a budget.
Now the odds of the House Budget (which has been passed every year) and the Senate budget (which at this point is a distant memory) agreeing with each other is slim to none, but that's what the reconciliation process is meant for. Each group puts their cards on the table and then they trade back and forth until something is finalized. As it stands only 1 group (the House) is showing it's cards and the other group is just making excuses.
In many provinces it is actually illegal to charge patients for health related services.
In Ontario, for example, it is not technically illegal to operate certain health related services privately (private clinics are most peoples sources for family doctors) but those clinics cannot charge their patients (they can directly charge foreigners for these services). All cost must be processed through OHIP (the Ontario provincial health plan) and they have set prices for services. This creates an extremely inflexible system where expansion of services happens at a snail pace because the Provinces don't have money to spend on expansion and private industry doesn't want to expand because at OHIP prices they could never recover their costs.
Other provinces have different rules so in some places it is actually possible to just pay to get an MRI, although those services are usually still very limited.
I've always preferred a system where private clinics could have public/private hours where they take provincial health care patients for a certain percentage of their time (with an average patient/hour rate calculated by looking at local hospitals turnaround times to make sure they aren't skimping on public service) but then can take private patients for the rest. I would figure no one could complain over a 75/25 public/private split but you'd be surprised at how many people simply hate the idea that a person can 'jump the line' if they have money even if it meant that because of that system the line would be much shorter for everyone. It's very much a cut off your nose to spite your face mindset.
It's not necessarily about the cost of the drug, it's simply that under a government controlled system the treatments that can be prescribed for certain illnesses are limited to the Provincial guidelines.
If a drug that exists in Canada is only listed as acceptable for conditions A and B in your province, a doctor would have a very tough time prescribing it for condition C. This means having to go through a provincial review board for permission, even when clinical trials and standard procedures in the US say it is an acceptable treatment for C. It usually comes down to a simple cost/benefit analysis and in a single payer system where even the treating physicians are working for the government, once the decision is made against you, you're SOL.
Cancer drugs are a prime example of this where some drugs, despite their effectiveness on certain patients who may have originally received treatment in the US, are denied as treatments in Canada because they are not on the approved list for that particular type of cancer. This leads to the patients bringing the Province to court in the hopes of overturning their decisions, which may happen but even in the good cases where it does may take years.
Canada and the US are only close on ER times, not on testing times or even treatment times.
In Canada, if you're not considered an emergency the timing for your treatments and testing is usually measured in months. In Ontario, for example, the provincial wait time for a CT scan is 37 days. It's 93 days for an MRI. And those are both averages (taken directly from the official Ontario government website). In many places it's not unusual to see triple digit wait times.
If you have a really good doctor who knows how to game the system you might be able to get that cut down by a couple of weeks but it's still not a same day or same week process and you really don't have too much choice in the matter. I know at least two people in the last couple months who were told that if they had the means they would be better off driving a couple hours south and getting some tests done in the US. The only issue there is that you have to make sure to pick the right facility. Not all MRI's are created equal.
There is a big difference in people leaving your country for often questionable and untested treatments (although you help make the GPs point by pointing out it's often the FDA (big government) which restricts the access to these treatments) vs leaving for the tried and true treatments which there is simply a horrific waiting line for.
Up here in Canada there are tonnes of stories of people who live near the border crossing over for day trips to receive same-day testing for things they are on months long waiting lists to receive back home. There are also a lot of cases of people going across the border to receive drug treatments in the US for drugs that while legal in Canada, are not on the approved drug list for certain conditions so are not covered for use. In most provinces you do not have any choices about extra health insurance to help cover those costs either, if the provincial plan doesn't cover it you are out of pocket for the whole cost if you can even get a doctor to prescribed the treatment for you.
Under a fully socialized medical system you as a consumer do not have the option to shop around for a different alternative to your current health care insurer. What the government says is law and getting them to change, even when you have the backing of the medical community, is a long and very time consuming process.
It's definitely not the best solution but at least in the US you can look for other companies to sign up with and while that process can be hard (again, often helped by the governments interference such as limitations on inter-state insurance) it does mean that 1 denial of service is not the end of any chance you have of help.
And yet Bush had no trouble working with Dems when necessary (the last two years in office for example the Dems controlled both houses on congress). He even worked directly with Ted Kennedy in getting 'No Child Left Behind" passed (not that that was great legislation just pointing out that he had no problems working with people who were on the opposite side of the isle).
Obama on the other hand has pretty much no history of working with anyone of opposing views and for all the legislation that Bush signed or powers he tried to pull into the office of the Presidency, Obama has kept all of the bad ones (doubling down on most) and tried to centralize even more power into the WH, openly talking about going around congress if they wouldn't do what he wanted and creating czar position for everything under the sun.
switch people from full time employees to part time has been going on for years.
But you don't usually write legislation that makes that the most attractive move for small to medium companies to make.
The fines the ACA forces on employers who don't provide health care is (this is only applied to companies with more than 50 employees - another incentive to lay people off):
(# of full times employees - 30) * the per employee fine amount
So while part time workers count towards the 50 employee check but are not part of the penalty formula.
By that formula it's extremely attractive for companies to cancel their health care coverage and limit workers hours and reclassify them as part time (which means a lot less income and not just a name change) and because of other penalties, taxes and conditions it's not even necessarily worth their while to hire additional part timers to pick up the slack.
There are already larger companies starting to reclassify their subsidiaries as independent entities to make it easier to minimize their number of full timers for this formula because it just makes financial sense to drop health care for your employees if the cost of the fine is millions less than the cost of care.
End result, the average take home pay goes down, fewer companies provide health care and now workers who previously had health care covered by their employer are now forced to spend even more of their money on buying plans themselves.
You can always tell good legislation when they back load all of the big affects to happen after the next election.
While a lot of the benefits of the ACA have already been put in place the fun stuff that actually puts the strains on business (and is what is making companies across the US switch people from full time employees to part time and drop their health plans altogether) doesn't kick in until this year or next.
But of course the 800,000 jobs the CBO predicted would be lost because of the ACA is just a 'rounding error' according to Obama's team
Republicans passed several bills in the House, including several jobs bills, that had enough bipartisan support in the senate to pass easily but Harry Reid has refused to even bring them to the floor for a vote so how is it that the Republicans are the obstructionists?
The Senate on the other hand has refused to even propose a budget for more than 3 years when they are legally obliged to pass one every year, and before you try crying about filibustering by the Repubs, budgets only require a 51 person vote to pass and cannot be filibustered by the Repubs. Basically the Senate, under Reid's leadership has become the roadblock to any meaningful legislation being passed and it has less to do with Republican obstruction than just poor leadership on his part.
From the news report I saw, once the problem was found they just re calibrated it and things continued normally.
I think the biggest issue with electronic voting is having ballots so full of names and propositions that they try to cram so many things on one display that a slight miscalibration can cause issues like this.
It's nice that residents of certain states get to vote on every government position down to assistant dog catcher and every proposal that managed to get 20 people to sign a petition but how about splitting up elections; Federal vs. State. Would taking the time to vote on two different days (possibly even years apart) be that much of a burden? Here in Canada we have provincial elections and federal elections and never the two shall meet. The ballots are much simpler (because of our Parliamentary system usually consisting of a single position with 4 or 5 names to choose from) and easy to count through whatever method you choose.
So your theory is that a network that even in it's highest rated time slot only gets around 3 million viewers is somehow able to single handedly force a partisan divide in a nation of 350 million? That would be akin to me blaming the dumbing down of America on MSNBC.
I'm pretty sure the divide is being driven by people who think Fox news is the biggest threat to democracy and the source of all political doom in the US or for that matter focus on any single media source as the cause. The cause is much more widespread and has more to do with the fact that we live in a world where people feel the need to share their views 24/7 for every little thing in their lives, and much less to do with what 1 television station chooses to play.
For the record, Fox news is the #1 CABLE news channel which places them far behind any of the big three networks news coverage. ABC, CBS and NBC average 22 million viewers for their evening broadcast while FOX News averages about 1.9million (that's about half of 1% of the US). For some special occasions like the debates FOX occasionally beats even the networks but that is a very rare occurrence. In some extreme partisan minds the fact that an opposing viewpoint gets even that small sliver of airtime is enough to get them all worked up but that's more a reflection of them and much less an issue with Fox News.
And how much is it to add an additional 32gb or 64gb to your iPad if you hit your storage limit? $20 or $49 like the Surface or more? Oh wait...
Not that I have a Surface or any plans to buy one but my guess is that when you build a device that's meant to be essentially a laptop replacement and you also include expansion slots so people who need more memory can buy it off the shelf at any corner store for relatively cheap, preloading it with everything including the kitchen sink doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Yeah I'm sure a lot of it will go unused but it's not like storage space is going to be an issue for someone with a Surface, unlike an iPad where what you buy is what you have and if you ever want to store that one extra video on your tablet without deleting something it will cost you another $800 investment to get the next model up.
It amazes me that so few people have any understanding of how the actual government of the US works.
For the final two years of Bush's term the congress was controlled by the Democrats (hence his inability to pass tighter controls on mortgage policies which he along with several other Republicans were pushing for). It's understandable that you don't know that since they seem to always forget to mention the fact that the very same people sitting in power now were also the same people sitting in power then.
For those not familiar with the roles of the parts of the United States government, it is the congress, not the President, who introduces and passes bills into law and controls all spending. The President's only true power is that of the symbolism of the office and the power to veto. Symbolism can only get you so far in pushing your agenda and the veto pen, while powerful, cannot be abused too much without completely destroying your credibility.
A strong President knows how to use both to work with congress to get his agenda moving, even if it requires some compromise to work with the other side whereas a weak President will try to force his agenda down Congress's collective throats and end up accomplishing nothing when they decide to flex their actual powers.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't quite explain how Lisa Jackson used the email of fictitious employee 'Richard Windsor' to conduct official EPA business off book.
They also threatened the sellers with revocation of their licenses if they refused to sell to know cartel buyers. There are several reports of gun stores complaining about having to sell weapons they knew were being purchased for this purpose and being told by the DoJ to keep selling.
Essentially, the DoJ instructed, and then threatened, legal gun sellers to violate federal and state laws in order to facilitate the sales of guns to know traffickers with no plan on doing any real tracking of the movement or use of those weapons.
They had the serial numbers of the sold weapons. So more accurately, they had no plan for any type of 'real-time' tracking, they just wanted to see what crime scenes the weapons would show up on to see how they there used and by who; not the greatest plan.
He may have but you seem to forget that for the last two years of Bush's term the Democrats controlled congress and therefore the federal purse strings.
So who exactly was in charge of federal spending during the bailouts?
The Dems didn't even bother with Bush on the final budget of his Presidency but opted instead to keep issuing extensions until Obama could take office and sign their budget into law.
Bush definitely had his spending problems and was no financial genius but at least he knew enough to understand the problem with the housing bubble well before it burst and tried to do something, only to be blocked in congress by the likes of Barney Frank.
Probably because Warcraft introduced the Pandarens to their story a year before Kung Fu Panda was even a glimmer in Michael Lachance's eye.
But I'm sure neither company really cares who was first since they have both made boatloads of money off their respective properties.
For the hundredth time in this thread, budgets cannot be filibustered; they require a simply majority vote (51 votes) to pass.
The Senate hasn't passed a budget for the simple reason that Harry Reid doesn't want to pass a budget. What's his reasons are exactly can be discussed in depth but fearing the Republican filibuster it is not one of them.
Budgets cannot be filibustered according to Senate rules. Even better they require a simple majority vote to pass the Senate.
So any time the Harry Reid decides to propose a real budget that he can get 50 or his fellow Dems to support it could be passed the same week and the Republicans could do absolutely nothing to stop it. How do you think Obamacare got passed in the first place? The Senate Dems used the filibuster proof budget process to pass it when they could come up with the 60 votes they would have needed otherwise.
Calling bills they are trying to pass 'budgets', while good enough to fool a lot of partisans and give them some talking points about obstructionist Repubs, doesn't actually make it a budget.
Each house of Congress passes it's own budget using it's own rules. When they don't agree the reconciliation process is used to match the two budgets up and try and come to a compromise. That's a little hard to do when only the House has passed a budget and the Senate refuses to and before you bring up filibusters, remember, budgets are exempt from the filibuster process and only require a simple majority (51 votes) to pass.
The budget in the Senate requires a simple majority vote to pass and cannot be filibustered. How are the Republicans prevent Harry Reid from passing a budget exactly>
You CANNOT filibuster a budget.
Read above, the budgetary process in the Senate is a simple majority vote (51 votes to pass). It cannot be filibustered and does not require a super majority.
It was through the budgetary reconciliation process that the Dems managed to pass Obamacare because they knew there was no way for it to get 60 votes if submitted as a simple bill.
Budgets cannot be filibustered; they require a simple majority vote to pass. Bills can be filibustered till the cows come home but budgets cannot.
At any time the Dems can get 51 of their own party to agree on something they can pass a budget through the senate.
Budgets are NOT subject to filibustering, how do you think Obamacare got passed with less than 60 votes. Learn the law and stop drinking the kool-aid. I'm not even American and I understand that basic principle of American Federal politics.
Senate Dems haven't passed a budget in 4 years because senate Dems haven't wanted to pass a budget in 4 years, that's it that's all. The Republicans had absolutely nothing to do with the Dems shirking their legal responsibility to pass a budget.
Now the odds of the House Budget (which has been passed every year) and the Senate budget (which at this point is a distant memory) agreeing with each other is slim to none, but that's what the reconciliation process is meant for. Each group puts their cards on the table and then they trade back and forth until something is finalized. As it stands only 1 group (the House) is showing it's cards and the other group is just making excuses.
In many provinces it is actually illegal to charge patients for health related services.
In Ontario, for example, it is not technically illegal to operate certain health related services privately (private clinics are most peoples sources for family doctors) but those clinics cannot charge their patients (they can directly charge foreigners for these services). All cost must be processed through OHIP (the Ontario provincial health plan) and they have set prices for services. This creates an extremely inflexible system where expansion of services happens at a snail pace because the Provinces don't have money to spend on expansion and private industry doesn't want to expand because at OHIP prices they could never recover their costs.
Other provinces have different rules so in some places it is actually possible to just pay to get an MRI, although those services are usually still very limited.
I've always preferred a system where private clinics could have public/private hours where they take provincial health care patients for a certain percentage of their time (with an average patient/hour rate calculated by looking at local hospitals turnaround times to make sure they aren't skimping on public service) but then can take private patients for the rest. I would figure no one could complain over a 75/25 public/private split but you'd be surprised at how many people simply hate the idea that a person can 'jump the line' if they have money even if it meant that because of that system the line would be much shorter for everyone. It's very much a cut off your nose to spite your face mindset.
It's not necessarily about the cost of the drug, it's simply that under a government controlled system the treatments that can be prescribed for certain illnesses are limited to the Provincial guidelines.
If a drug that exists in Canada is only listed as acceptable for conditions A and B in your province, a doctor would have a very tough time prescribing it for condition C. This means having to go through a provincial review board for permission, even when clinical trials and standard procedures in the US say it is an acceptable treatment for C. It usually comes down to a simple cost/benefit analysis and in a single payer system where even the treating physicians are working for the government, once the decision is made against you, you're SOL.
Cancer drugs are a prime example of this where some drugs, despite their effectiveness on certain patients who may have originally received treatment in the US, are denied as treatments in Canada because they are not on the approved list for that particular type of cancer. This leads to the patients bringing the Province to court in the hopes of overturning their decisions, which may happen but even in the good cases where it does may take years.
Canada and the US are only close on ER times, not on testing times or even treatment times.
In Canada, if you're not considered an emergency the timing for your treatments and testing is usually measured in months. In Ontario, for example, the provincial wait time for a CT scan is 37 days. It's 93 days for an MRI. And those are both averages (taken directly from the official Ontario government website). In many places it's not unusual to see triple digit wait times.
If you have a really good doctor who knows how to game the system you might be able to get that cut down by a couple of weeks but it's still not a same day or same week process and you really don't have too much choice in the matter. I know at least two people in the last couple months who were told that if they had the means they would be better off driving a couple hours south and getting some tests done in the US. The only issue there is that you have to make sure to pick the right facility. Not all MRI's are created equal.
There is a big difference in people leaving your country for often questionable and untested treatments (although you help make the GPs point by pointing out it's often the FDA (big government) which restricts the access to these treatments) vs leaving for the tried and true treatments which there is simply a horrific waiting line for.
Up here in Canada there are tonnes of stories of people who live near the border crossing over for day trips to receive same-day testing for things they are on months long waiting lists to receive back home. There are also a lot of cases of people going across the border to receive drug treatments in the US for drugs that while legal in Canada, are not on the approved drug list for certain conditions so are not covered for use. In most provinces you do not have any choices about extra health insurance to help cover those costs either, if the provincial plan doesn't cover it you are out of pocket for the whole cost if you can even get a doctor to prescribed the treatment for you.
Under a fully socialized medical system you as a consumer do not have the option to shop around for a different alternative to your current health care insurer. What the government says is law and getting them to change, even when you have the backing of the medical community, is a long and very time consuming process.
It's definitely not the best solution but at least in the US you can look for other companies to sign up with and while that process can be hard (again, often helped by the governments interference such as limitations on inter-state insurance) it does mean that 1 denial of service is not the end of any chance you have of help.
And yet Bush had no trouble working with Dems when necessary (the last two years in office for example the Dems controlled both houses on congress). He even worked directly with Ted Kennedy in getting 'No Child Left Behind" passed (not that that was great legislation just pointing out that he had no problems working with people who were on the opposite side of the isle).
Obama on the other hand has pretty much no history of working with anyone of opposing views and for all the legislation that Bush signed or powers he tried to pull into the office of the Presidency, Obama has kept all of the bad ones (doubling down on most) and tried to centralize even more power into the WH, openly talking about going around congress if they wouldn't do what he wanted and creating czar position for everything under the sun.
switch people from full time employees to part time has been going on for years.
But you don't usually write legislation that makes that the most attractive move for small to medium companies to make.
The fines the ACA forces on employers who don't provide health care is (this is only applied to companies with more than 50 employees - another incentive to lay people off):
(# of full times employees - 30) * the per employee fine amount
So while part time workers count towards the 50 employee check but are not part of the penalty formula.
By that formula it's extremely attractive for companies to cancel their health care coverage and limit workers hours and reclassify them as part time (which means a lot less income and not just a name change) and because of other penalties, taxes and conditions it's not even necessarily worth their while to hire additional part timers to pick up the slack.
There are already larger companies starting to reclassify their subsidiaries as independent entities to make it easier to minimize their number of full timers for this formula because it just makes financial sense to drop health care for your employees if the cost of the fine is millions less than the cost of care.
End result, the average take home pay goes down, fewer companies provide health care and now workers who previously had health care covered by their employer are now forced to spend even more of their money on buying plans themselves.
You can always tell good legislation when they back load all of the big affects to happen after the next election.
While a lot of the benefits of the ACA have already been put in place the fun stuff that actually puts the strains on business (and is what is making companies across the US switch people from full time employees to part time and drop their health plans altogether) doesn't kick in until this year or next.
But of course the 800,000 jobs the CBO predicted would be lost because of the ACA is just a 'rounding error' according to Obama's team
Republicans passed several bills in the House, including several jobs bills, that had enough bipartisan support in the senate to pass easily but Harry Reid has refused to even bring them to the floor for a vote so how is it that the Republicans are the obstructionists?
The Senate on the other hand has refused to even propose a budget for more than 3 years when they are legally obliged to pass one every year, and before you try crying about filibustering by the Repubs, budgets only require a 51 person vote to pass and cannot be filibustered by the Repubs. Basically the Senate, under Reid's leadership has become the roadblock to any meaningful legislation being passed and it has less to do with Republican obstruction than just poor leadership on his part.
From the news report I saw, once the problem was found they just re calibrated it and things continued normally.
I think the biggest issue with electronic voting is having ballots so full of names and propositions that they try to cram so many things on one display that a slight miscalibration can cause issues like this.
It's nice that residents of certain states get to vote on every government position down to assistant dog catcher and every proposal that managed to get 20 people to sign a petition but how about splitting up elections; Federal vs. State. Would taking the time to vote on two different days (possibly even years apart) be that much of a burden? Here in Canada we have provincial elections and federal elections and never the two shall meet. The ballots are much simpler (because of our Parliamentary system usually consisting of a single position with 4 or 5 names to choose from) and easy to count through whatever method you choose.
So your theory is that a network that even in it's highest rated time slot only gets around 3 million viewers is somehow able to single handedly force a partisan divide in a nation of 350 million? That would be akin to me blaming the dumbing down of America on MSNBC.
I'm pretty sure the divide is being driven by people who think Fox news is the biggest threat to democracy and the source of all political doom in the US or for that matter focus on any single media source as the cause. The cause is much more widespread and has more to do with the fact that we live in a world where people feel the need to share their views 24/7 for every little thing in their lives, and much less to do with what 1 television station chooses to play.
For the record, Fox news is the #1 CABLE news channel which places them far behind any of the big three networks news coverage. ABC, CBS and NBC average 22 million viewers for their evening broadcast while FOX News averages about 1.9million (that's about half of 1% of the US). For some special occasions like the debates FOX occasionally beats even the networks but that is a very rare occurrence. In some extreme partisan minds the fact that an opposing viewpoint gets even that small sliver of airtime is enough to get them all worked up but that's more a reflection of them and much less an issue with Fox News.
And how much is it to add an additional 32gb or 64gb to your iPad if you hit your storage limit? $20 or $49 like the Surface or more? Oh wait...
Not that I have a Surface or any plans to buy one but my guess is that when you build a device that's meant to be essentially a laptop replacement and you also include expansion slots so people who need more memory can buy it off the shelf at any corner store for relatively cheap, preloading it with everything including the kitchen sink doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Yeah I'm sure a lot of it will go unused but it's not like storage space is going to be an issue for someone with a Surface, unlike an iPad where what you buy is what you have and if you ever want to store that one extra video on your tablet without deleting something it will cost you another $800 investment to get the next model up.
It amazes me that so few people have any understanding of how the actual government of the US works.
For the final two years of Bush's term the congress was controlled by the Democrats (hence his inability to pass tighter controls on mortgage policies which he along with several other Republicans were pushing for). It's understandable that you don't know that since they seem to always forget to mention the fact that the very same people sitting in power now were also the same people sitting in power then.
For those not familiar with the roles of the parts of the United States government, it is the congress, not the President, who introduces and passes bills into law and controls all spending. The President's only true power is that of the symbolism of the office and the power to veto. Symbolism can only get you so far in pushing your agenda and the veto pen, while powerful, cannot be abused too much without completely destroying your credibility.
A strong President knows how to use both to work with congress to get his agenda moving, even if it requires some compromise to work with the other side whereas a weak President will try to force his agenda down Congress's collective throats and end up accomplishing nothing when they decide to flex their actual powers.