Oil, Gas and Lies

By Alan Caruba

Why some people are having difficulty identifying the cause of the present high cost of gasoline at the pump as the direct result of the last three years of Barack Obama’s energy policies is one of those great mysteries.

By “energy policies” I mean his administration’s opposition to access to the billions of barrels of oil on federal lands.

I mean his Energy Secretary’s earlier opinion that high gas prices are good for the economy, abandoned as they climb to and passed $4.

I mean Obama’s lies about the recent increase in oil production when he knows it is occurring on private and state owned land, not federal land.

I mean his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.

I mean the waste of billions of taxpayer’s dollars on “renewable energy” firms, many of which have already failed, along with the sales of the Chevy Volt, whose production has been discontinued.

I mean two amendments to the Senate transportation bill that would have created new taxpayer-funded subsidies for natural gas vehicles, extended the production tax credit to underwrite wind energy, and revived the Treasury grant program that gives taxpayer money for the installation of solar panels and other renewable technologies.

I mean the impact his policies are having on everyone’s wallet and its drag on the economy as his policies drive up the cost of gasoline and everything dependent on transporting goods anywhere…and that is everything!

Just how dumb do you have to be not to grasp that when Obama took office on January 20, 2009, oil was selling at $38.74 a barrel and the average retail price of gasoline was around $1.90 a gallon. Today, oil is trading at more than $108 a barrel and gasoline is closing in on $4.00 a gallon. As they say, do the math.

In early March, speaking in Nashua, New Hampshire, Barack Obama said, “Let’s put every single member of Congress on record. You can stand with oil companies or you can stand up for the American people.” This consummate liar is using the same pathetic message and damage done by Jimmy Carter---who got voted out of office after a single term as president.

In his 2005 book, “Why Your Gasoline Prices are High”, Seldon B. Graham, Jr, a graduate of West Point, used his fifty years of experience in the oil industry described what happened when, in 1981, Congress passed a windfall profits tax. “It was a death notice for USA oil. Many U.S. oil and gas companies went bankrupt…and those which survived were forced to go overseas to explore and drill in foreign countries.”

At the very time when the Middle East is in turmoil, the Democrats want to repeat the same blunder of 1981.

In a nation that sits atop billions of barrels of untapped oil in federal lands such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, domestic oil reserves in the lower 48 states, the Gulf of Mexico, and the vast untapped reserves off the nation’s continental coasts, the Obama administration has restricted oil companies from exploring and drilling in areas where new reserves of oil and gas are known to exist, shortened lease terms, and has slowed down permit approvals.

That is the equivalent of declaring an energy war on the nation. Moreover, in a virtual secret, the Obama State Department is involved in a deal to turn over seven Alaskan islands to Russia. One of them is the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined and who knows how much oil lies beneath them?

Oil prices are set by the market principles of supply and demand. By aggressively thwarting access to America’s abundant oil reserves, the Obama administration is deliberately keeping prices high and forcing them higher.

As Jack Gerard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a press conference on March 8, “When crude prices are high, the price at the pump is also high. With a 42-gallon barrel of crude oil topping $106, refiners pay more than $2.50 for each gallon of crude they must purchase. Add in the almost 50 cents per gallon on average in gasoline taxes and you have over $3.00 of what consumers are now paying at the pump.”

Simply by announcing his intent to open new areas for exploration and production, President Obama could signal the market and put downward pressure on today’s and tomorrow’s gasoline prices. This is exactly what happened when President Bush lifted the moratorium on the East and West Outer Continental Shelf back in July 2008. It resulted in a 12% decline in the price per barrel.

Why are we paying more? Why are U.S. dollars going to oil-producing nations that do not like America? Why are we competing for oil with China, India and other emerging economies when we have enough oil, gas, and coal to be energy independent for the next century or longer?

The reason is the policies of the present and past administrations going back to the days of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. The answer given by the White House is greedy oil companies and Wall Street “speculators.” It is a lie.

The worst of it, as a recent Wall Street Journal article explained, “Oil can’t go much higher without derailing the economy…at some point, oil prices overwhelm everyone,” wrote Liam Denning. Keeping them artificially high can have no other purpose than to continue the destruction of the nation and the President knows it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Running the USA into the Ground

By Alan Caruba

I needed a mattress cover so I went over to the local dollar store today and discovered they have them in every size but twin. I returned home. I went online to Bed, Bath and beyond. With a few keystrokes I not only had the exact item I wanted, I also received an email confirmation of the sale and a notice that once shipped, I will be able to track its delivery from the warehouse to my front door.

If only the federal government operated with such efficiency. Instead, we have a government that has been operating on “continuing resolutions” for over a thousand days due to a lack of a budget. An essential job of the executive branch is to produce a budget, but if you don’t have one, you can egregiously waste billions.

Everybody else has a budget, but not the federal government.

As we head into an election year, even more political madness and maneuvering will ensue. As a Wednesday editorial in The Wall Street Journal said:

“The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play. Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.”

Serendipitously, the Journal also ran an opinion by Peter J. Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuits against six top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced last week, are a seminal event. For the first time in a government report, the complaint has made it clear that the two government-sponsored enterprises played a major role in creating the demand for low-quality mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis.”

“More importantly, the SEC is saying that Fannie and Freddie—the largest buyers and securitizers of subprime and other low-quality mortgages—hid the size of their purchases from the market. Through these alleged acts of securities fraud, they did not just mislead investors; they deprived analysts, risk managers, rating agencies and even financial regulators of vital data about market risks that could have prevented the crisis.”

One member of Congress, among many who protected Fannie and Freddie, who will not be indicted, is Rep. Barney Frank who is retiring with full pension and benefits, no doubt more wealthy than he arrived.

A new book by Peter Schweizer, the William J. Casey Fellow at the Hoover Institute is titled, “Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich off Inside Stock tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism that would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.” At this point, the only bipartisan activity in Congress is the way, on both sides of the aisle our elected representatives increase their personal wealth. The book so rattled Congress it is now holding hearings on the extraordinary premise of requiring its members to obey the same laws as the rest of us!

A familiar theme of those of us that comment on government is its size, its waste of public funds, and its general inefficiency. It is a government that sends millions in checks to dead people. It is a government that has turned the process of flying anywhere into a nightmare because of its one-size-fits-all idiotic approach to getting on an airliner. The Israelis accomplish this with far less inconvenience to passengers and their system works.

My contention is that our metastasizing government has gotten progressively worse from the days of the Great Depression and now we learn—if we did not already know—that it was two “government sponsored enterprises” that brought about the mortgage crisis that plunged the nation into a pretty good imitation of the Great Depression.

Now we are forced to watch Congress play political gamesmanship while millions of Americans are out of work.

Now not a week goes by without another “green” enterprise going belly-up, taking our money with it or one of those wonderful electric cars has batteries that are likely to catch fire. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy just released a report that estimates that each of the Chevy Volt cars sold thus far has as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it—a total of $3 billion thus far. We never needed electric cars.

What kind of idiocy throws money away when the U.S. sits atop reserves of oil that are so vast they could end imports?

What kind of President refuses to permit Canada to ship its ample oil to Houston for refining?

Why are we holding our breath hoping that Congress will let us purchase Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era?

Little wonder that the polls demonstrate the record-setting low esteem in which Congress is held. It is running the nation into the ground. To the belated astonishment of everyone, the nation is led by the President whose greatest achievements have been to destroy jobs and plunge the nation into unimaginable debt.

November 6, 2012 cannot come soon enough.

A majority of the electorate wanted “change” in 2008. Let’s give it to Congress in 2012. Let’s support candidates who want to significantly reduce the size of the federal government, restructure the “entitlement” programs, and reduce the debt before it impoverishes the next generation and the one to follow.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama's First Thousand Days

By Alan Caruba

After the brief period of intoxication with candidate Obama’s rhetorical skills, the promise of “hope and change” became the business of governing a nation still reeling from a major financial crisis and issues of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the euphoria subsided, reality in the form of growing numbers of unemployed, the homes that continued to be foreclosed, and the growing realization that Obama’s attitudes toward America and his view of the world were antithetical to our well-being and completely out of touch with what was actually occurring.

John F. Kennedy’s first thousand days in office included continuing and expanding the nation’s space program. Obama has, in effect, shut it down. The Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba was sobering and the expansion of U.S. participation in Vietnam’s civil war became a national tragedy, but Kennedy’s assassination, his martyrdom, as well as the myth of Camelot that included his beautiful wife, Jackie, lives on.

By contrast, Obama’s first thousand days, a marker in time he recently passed, has been one long series of astonishingly bad judgments that have his polling numbers heading south. There is a widespread and persistent view that he has taken America in the wrong direction.

As the 2012 campaign begins to gain momentum it is worth taking a moment to briefly review the record.

He has overseen the tripling if the national debt. It stretches to the Moon and back. For the first time in the nation's history its Triple-A credit rating has been reduced.

Billions spent as a “stimulus” to the economy have done little more than waste taxpayer’s money. It was and is a political slush fund, not much different from similar programs during the New Deal era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is distinguished by its emphasis on “green jobs” that are best symbolized by the Solyndra scandal; jobs created that are each measured in millions “invested.”

Obama’s focus from the beginning, however, was the imposition of universal health care in the form of a 2,000 page piece of legislation dubbed “Obamacare” which has already been repealed by the House and will be the subject of a Supreme Court case to determine its constitutionality or lack of it. Americans hate it.

All administrations have their scandals and Obama’s is no exemption. Still festering is the ATF program, “Fast and Furious”, that actually facilitated the sale and transfer of guns to the drug cartels operating out of Mexico. The Attorney General appears to have been caught in a lie regarding his knowledge of it. It cost the life of at least one Border Patrol officer and who knows how many victims of the cartels.

In addition to the many “czars” Obama appointed to oversee public policy---many of whom not vetted by Congress---his cabinet appointees have proven to be ideologues more interested in advancing the global warming hoax and restrictions on America’s access to its vast energy reserves than facilitating a greater degree of energy independence and job creation.

The Environmental Protection Agency has literally gone rogue, requiring Congress to constantly pass legislation to restrain it from further damage to the economy.

Obama’s greatest contribution to life in America has been to make Americans so jaded that they no longer even ask if he was or is eligible to be President. He has boldly hidden virtually all of the paper trail of his life from public examination and the “birth certificates” he has offered have been, according to experts, forgeries.

Throughout his first thousand days, he has expressed contempt and disdain for almost every aspect of American society; its “millionaires and billionaires”, for the “corporate jets” used to facilitate travel in the pursuit of business expansion, for Wall Street "fat cats", for the entire medical profession who he suspects of recommending expensive treatments to patients when a cough drop will do. But oh how he loves those unionized teachers!

More recently his support of thuggish union behavior has been on display along with support of the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters that mock American values in favor of vague demands for “social justice.”

In pursuit of a second term, he is using class warfare and the race card. He is claiming falsely that Republicans have never offered him a jobs program when it is perfectly obvious they have.

He has gone from having a Democrat-controlled Congress from 2009-to-2010 that had to be bribed and threatened to pass his Obamacare law to the loss of the House of Representatives, largely due to the spontaneous rise of the Tea Party movement. His latest “jobs” legislation, introduced in an unprecedented joint session of Congress, was unable to secure even the support of Democrats.

There is a word to describe his first thousand days. It is “failure.” As this is being written, he has some 460 days left of what is surely his first and last term in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Flirting with the Great Depression 2.0

By Alan Caruba

POLITICO Breaking News:
August 5, 2011

“Credit rating agency S&P has downgraded U.S. debt from AAA, the first debt downgrade in U.S. history, the Associated Press reported.”

When a nation’s debt equals its entire annual gross domestic product, it is bankrupt. It can still produce goods and services, but it will likely encounter fewer customers worldwide as they too are drawn deeper into their own debt crises.

When it must borrow billions daily just to meet its obligations to other nations and individuals who have purchased its treasury notes, it is has reached a point of “moral hazard” that threatens the wealth of every single citizen.

When it raises its “debt ceiling” to $14.58 trillion, the amount its Congress permits, and one day later its Treasury Department announces that its debt reached 100% of its GDP, it is in serious financial difficulty. Not since 1947 when the U.S. was recovering from the cost of World War II have we reached this point.

The nasty “debate” in Washington over the debt ceiling included the Republican demands that we reduce our spending and Democrat demands that we raise taxes. Those advocating sanity were called “terrorists” and “extremists.” The shallow reductions agreed to were stretched over ten years and barely begin to address the immediate financial crisis. Harder decisions were pushed off on a "super committee" that no one expects to agree on anything.

This news is bad enough for the United States of America, but it affects many other nations around the world in exactly the same way the Crash of 1929 did, leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s and putting in motion the events that led to World War II.

Does history repeat itself? Apparently so.

What is happening in America is happening around the world. Greece, a nation of 11 million people, had by 2009 managed to run up its debt to more than $500 billion. Its fellow members of the European Union took notice even though Greece accounted for only two percent of the EU’s economy. A year earlier, the tiny nation of Iceland, population 300,000, had literally bankrupted itself when its debt went from $8 billion in 2001 to more than $48 billion in 2007.

On September 29, 2008, the Irish cabinet held an emergency session by phone because the implosion of its housing market threatened to bring down its financial system. To avoid a bank run, it guaranteed all deposits and, not long after, England did the same thing.

Many people find history boring, but it does provide lessons and what America and its lenders all face is the potential for The Great Depression 2.0. The gyrations on Wall Street and worldwide are evidence of global fears.

In America, the Congress merely applied a band-aid to a gaping wound, the result of the “solutions” instituted during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the entitlement program of Social Security and, in the 1960s, the addition of Medicare. In the 1930s, the federal government guaranteed mortgages by creating Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac.

When the financial crisis arrived in 2008, they owned half of all the mortgages issued by the nation’s banks. The government was forced to step in and seize both “government sponsored entities” to avoid bringing down the nation’s financial system. At the same time, it agreed to buy up the “toxic assets” owned by a number of banking firms and by the insurance giant, AIG. Billions in public funds were allocated to this.

There probably was no alternative.

In the same way the government in the 1930s initiated all manner of programs to put Americans back to work, the Obama administration created a “stimulus” program while, at the same time, taking ownership of Chrysler and General Motors. The Federal Reserve reduced interest rates close to zero, lending banks and nations billions. By contrast, during the Great Depression the government had allowed hundreds of banks to fail which, in hindsight, contributed the nation's ills.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected to end the Depression, but after nearly eight years of the New Deal has passed, FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., addressed the House Ways and Means Committee on May 9, 1939, to say, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Unemployment remained high and would remain high until World War II intervened in 1941.

Much has changed since the 1930s, but much has not.

In 2010, power in the House of Representatives was returned to the Republican Party, but the debate over the debt ceiling revealed the difficulty it had marshalling support for raising it. Many new Tea Party caucus Representatives opposed it. Others argued that only massive spending cuts could remedy the growth of the nation’s debt. In the Senate, controlled by the Democrat Party, any deal that did not include raising taxes was dead on arrival.

Other than the so-called “stimulus” programs, the President devoted all of 2009 to legislation dubbed Obamacare that would have created a government takeover of twenty percent of the nation’s economy. By May 2010, a million people marched in Washington, D.C. to protest it. It has since been repealed in the House and has 26 States allied against it in the courts.

In the 1930s, efforts to keep the world’s economy from imploding found little political support for the measures needed to sustain an integrated world economy. In the modern era of globalization, the same problems have been encountered and, sadly, the United States has shown little taste for reducing its spending as it continues to borrow until, at some point, other nations decide to put their money elsewhere. So far that has not happened.

The United States’ financial future is in peril without a significant downsizing of the federal government and the international economy faces similar challenges as nations share similar debt levels that exceed their ability to meet their obligations.

It will take a minimum of a decade to meet the USA’s present need to reduce spending and reduce the burden of its borrowed debt. Let us hope the voters in 2012 take the first steps toward the political resolve needed by returning power to the Republican Party in the Senate and the White House. Then let us hope they show real political courage.

Let us hope it doesn’t take another world war to focus our attention on survival of a different kind.

Editor’s Note: This commentary was greatly aided by data in the “Lost Decades” by Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden, recently published by W.W. Norton & Company.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Unleashing Americans

By Alan Caruba

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My father was a certified public accountant, as is my older brother. I not only lacked any arithmetical skills, I spent much of my early years ignoring the ups and downs of the economy, thinking that these matters were beyond my comprehension. What I failed to understand was that the economy was as much a creature of meddling politicians as economic theories.

I was born in the midst of the Great Depression and have now lived long enough to be caught in a new one. I know that economists and others say we are in a Recession, but it feels like a Depression to me and to the millions of other Americans who are out of work and being laid off weekly. It feels like one to those who suffered foreclosure on their homes. It feels like one every time we go to the supermarket and gasp in disbelief at the cost of groceries.

The unimaginable debt that Americans have incurred by borrowing far too much as a nation and as individuals with credit cards, and the ease with which one could borrow against home equity, has now forced us to deal with the reality of a financial crisis that began in late 2008 when the housing bubble burst.

Historically, it started far earlier when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, elements of the 1930s New Deal, were created to bring “social justice” to the housing market. By the time of the 2008 implosion, they owned more than half of all mortgages issued in the nation.

While the politicians seek to position themselves to blame the other party, the saving grace is that in 2010 voters returned power in the House to Republicans; doing so by electing a large number of “Tea Party” candidates pledged to reduce the debt and reverse what have been the disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Despite the breathless reporting of the 24/7 news channels, the parade of politicians on both sides explaining their positions, the real news is that Americans are finally engaged in a real debate over the debt and the nation’s future. In 2012 they will vote to change course and, just as European nations that also borrowed too much, they will have to accept austerity measures.

A lot of government programs and, indeed, whole agencies and departments should be ended.

It’s not the death of socialism in America, but it is the recognition that a government that seizes and redistributes the wealth of working Americans must be reversed, revised, and reduced in size and scope.

Too much taxation, too much regulation, too much borrowing, and too much wasteful spending is what the national debate is all about and it is a long overdue debate.

In the land of the brave and the home of the free, Americans want to be free to decide what kind of light bulbs they can purchase, what kind of cars they can drive, and end all the other restrictions that make doing business in America an expensive, unrealistic nightmare.

In a way, the infatuation with a completely unknown, untested, and inexperienced president has been a wake-up call. Barack Obama was packaged to be a celebrity, a “messiah”, when all he really was, was an ill-prepared, standard issue Marxist. He surrounded himself with economic advisors and unvetted “czars” who shared his belief that one last, big push could “transform” a nation that was more in need of a sensible budget than grandiose and failed socialist solutions.

The result was the appalling Obamacare law that attempted to seize twenty percent of the nation’s economy. The House has voted to repeal it. Twenty-six States have gone to court to have it nullified. A Republican president and Senate in 2012 will end it.

Obama and the “green economy” advocates around him have dumped billions into wind and solar energy companies that could not exist without government subsidies coupled with government mandates for their use. Combined, wind and solar provide less than three percent of the nation’s electricity and will never meet its needs.

The nation’s auto industry, once the envy of the world, is almost entirely controlled by the government that, even in the midst of the debt ceiling debate, was being told it must produce lighter, more dangerous automobiles to meet unrealistic demands that they provide more mileage per gallon. You cannot get more energy from a gallon of gasoline than you can from any other source of energy that is ruled by the laws of physics.

Openly scornful of fossil fuels, the Obama administration has rendered the nation more dependent on foreign oil and waged war on coal and now natural gas.

The Obama moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wreaked havoc on the oil industry, pursuing the same policies of earlier administrations that have thwarted exploration and extraction of the billions of barrels of U.S. oil that go untapped and unused. Oil rigs have been departing the Gulf to other nations, along with thousands of jobs and millions in the revenue they contributed to the economy. The vast resources of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge remain off-limits even though only the tiniest part of the refuge would be affected.

We suffered a socialist “stimulus” that stimulated nothing but an increased multi-trillion dollar debt.

I think America has turned an invisible corner and that as soon as we rid the nation of President Obama and his tax-and-spend Democrat supporters in Congress, the nation will begin to correct its borrow-and-borrow-some-more profligate ways. A smaller, less intrusive government may emerge in the years, the decades ahead.

The entrepreneurial energies of Americans will be unleashed if that occurs. The present Recession/Depression will join all the previous ones we have been through. We have all been chastened and we will conclude it wasn’t just Barack Obama’s policies, but decades of socialist policies dating back to the earliest days of the last century.

If that occurs, our children and grandchildren will have the excessive burden of debt lifted from them and American’s energy, innovation, and optimism will prevail.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Tea Party is Making Obama Look Good

By Alan Caruba

"There are plenty of ways out of this mess, but we are almost out of time," said President Obama on Friday morning. It only took from his Monday address to Friday’s to make Obama look good and, for that, we can thank the intransigent Tea Party element of the Republican Party.

When presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) says she will never vote to raise the debt ceiling, she is being unrealistic because the “ceiling” simply allows the nation to continue borrowing to meet its massive financial obligations. The time for cutting spending lies ahead and the Tea Party can play a role in that, but right now the United States of America is looking default in the eye and risking a downgrade of our historic AAA credit rating.

It is ironic that the author of much of the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt, achieved over three short years in office, can talk about the Republicans resisting Speaker John Boehner’s proposed legislation and correctly say they are risking “taking down the nation.”

A nation this sharply divided between Republicans and Democrats has gone to the mat at the eleventh hour far too many times whether it was TARP or Obamacare. The 2010 elections that gave power to the GOP in the House was a good step in the right direction insofar as it curbed Obama’s efforts to spend the nation out of the deep financial hole created over decades. It gave, however, majority power to only one element of Congress, the House, leaving the Senate in the hands of Democrats. There can be no change in the White House until 2012.

You don’t, however, cure the spending built into the nation’s budget, but putting its credit rating in jeopardy or giving President Obama the opportunity to scare senior citizens, veterans, contractors and everyone else with threats their checks are not going to be in the mail. That’s a recipe for anarchy.

Up to now the Republicans have made a succession of very good moves—all of which have been rejected by President Obama. The plan put forth by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) provided for $6.3 trillion in spending cuts in the first ten years. It will take ten years to winnow a debt that has been building since the introduction of “entitlement” programs in the 1930s and 1960s.

As Peter Ferrara who has conservative credentials as long as your arm wrote in The American Spectator, the Ryan plan would “drive federal spending to 15% of GDP, well below the postwar historical average of 20%. Ryan’s budget included tax reform to get the economy booming again, with a 25% top income-tax rate for incomes over $100.000 a year, and a 10% rate for incomes below that.”

Lest we forget, noted Ferrara, “the first act of the new GOP House majority was to vote to repeal Obamacare. That means $1 trillion in spending cuts, and $500 billion in tax cuts, during the first ten years alone, as scored by the CBO.”

The Tea Partiers in the House do not want to take yes for an answer when it comes to the gains that can be secured if the debt ceiling is raised and the 2012 elections promise to put a GOP candidate into the Oval Office and capture power in the Senate. They can have it all if they support Speaker Boehner.

As Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly A. Strassel noted Friday morning, referring to Speaker Boehner’s prolonged negotiations with President Obama, “Instead he realized that this White House had no intention of agreeing to serious debt reduction and that it cared primarily about tax hikes. His decision to call off the talks earned him some catcalls, but it reset the political dynamic.”

That was evident in President Obama’s Monday primetime address to the nation that was universally seen as offering no plan and no leadership. By Friday morning the dynamic had changed as Speaker Boehner became the man unable to achieve a resolution to the current crisis; all because Tea Party dead-enders could not see their way clear to a compromise.

This is precisely why the President is effectively beating up the Republicans in Congress.

As Strossel correctly noted of Speaker Boehner and the House Tea Partiers, “What he did do this week is position his party to take credit for a bill that averts a crisis, cuts more spending than any Democrat thought possible, and exposes the White House’s insincerity on the deficit and economic prosperity. The Republicans who yesterday undermined (the) bill now bear sole responsibility for whatever political fallout comes next.”

If that is four more years of President Obama, it will be because Tea Partiers refused to compromise, to be realistic, and to understand that you don’t turn around decades of bad social legislation in a day.

They now have a weekend left to see the light or take down the Republican Party and the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Turning Point for "Entitlement" Programs

By Alan Caruba

The result of all the drama emanating from Capitol Hill and the White House has been to get a lot of people wondering about the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the “debt ceiling”, the limit on how much the federal government is permitted to borrow, must be raised. It is essentially an accounting fiction because, since 1960, it has been raised 78 times; 49 times by Republican presidents and 29 times by Democrat presidents.

What makes it an issue now? $14.3 trillion dollars worth of U.S. debt.

It is not just the size of this debt, probably the greatest that any nation has ever owed in history, it is that it was initially due to a financial rescue program in 2008 when President Bush and Congress sought to avoid a collapse of Wall Street and banks. The TARP funds were eventually repaid.

Part of the current debt is due to massive spending programs by the Obama administration, allegedly to “create or save” jobs and “stimulate” the economy. They did neither.

The Obama spending programs were, in essense, Democrat slush funds parceled out to the party’s faithful to ensure that teachers and other public service workers would be retained, that General Motors and Chrysler could avoid the normal bankruptcy procedures that would have restructured both companies—and likely reduce union power, and that favored contractors could receive funding for “shovel ready projects.”

A long term, on-going problem has been the current and future debt is attributed to meeting the obligations of Social Security, introduced in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to the high costs of Medicare and Medicaid. The latter became law on July 30, 1965 as an amendment to the existing Social Security legislation.

In sum, both programs reflect the Democratic Party’s commitment to “social justice” (wealth redistribution) that began in the early part of the last century. Republicans were not immune to this. President George W. Bush added to the costs of Medicare with prescription coverage.

The battle on Capital Hill is between the Democrats, led by President Obama, who wants to raise taxes in the midst of what is called a recession but is truly a Depression 2.0. Raising taxes is what President Roosevelt did and it simply prolonged the Great Depression by sucking money out of the free market economy.

On the other side of the non-negotiating table are the Republicans who, thanks to the Tea Party members of the House, have been forced to reclaim their reputation as a party devoted to limited government and prudent fiscal policies.

It is assumed by all that the debt ceiling with be lifted. It is unknown whether the nation’s credit rating of AAA will be reduced as the result of a failure to substantially cut spending and, far more importantly, meet its obligation to repay its debt. Indeed, the central issue is all about credit.

A nation that must borrow billions every day to meet its obligations cannot afford to lose a rating that is rooted in the very beginning of its history when Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, insisted that all Revolutionary War debts be paid in full.

Social Security is the largest government benefit program in the world. It represents more than 20% of the federal budget and, together with Medicare/Medicaid, they accounted for 53% of total federal outlays in Fiscal Year 2008, with net interest payments accounting for an additional 8.5%.

Here’s the rub. At the time that Social Security was created, somewhere between 10 and 14 workers were paying into the system for every recipient receiving a check. By 2010, the ratio was about 3 workers paying in for 1 taking out.

Social Security is unsustainable.

When President Roosevelt was pitching Social Security, he promised that no worker would ever pay more than 1% of their income into the system. By 2010, self-employed persons like myself were paying 15.3% of their income into Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

President Roosevelt promised that Social Security would be self-sustaining and that its benefits “should not come from the proceeds of general taxation.” In practice, although a “trust fund” was set up, every dollar contributed to Social Security has gone into the general revenue fund and has been spent by Congress in any manner it saw fit.

In 1935 no one expected that Americans would routinely be living into their seventies, eighties, and nineties. The age at which recipients could begin to draw benefits was 65 and that coincided with the average lifespan nearly 80 years ago. Today, men on average live to age 78 and woman outlive them by a wide margin.

In the same fashion that the House has voted to repeal Obamacare and 26 States have joined together to argue in court that it is unconstitutional, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid have arrived at a moment in time, a turning point, when both must be dismantled—assuming of course that the Congress and White House manage to avoid a financial catastrophe for all Americans.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama is Boring Us to Death

By Alan Caruba

About halfway into his fifteen minute televised address on Monday evening, it occurred to me that Obama is literally boring Americans to death. He was elected to a great degree based on his eloquence and he delivers a speech well, but last night’s speech is the one we have been hearing since January and earlier.

I really don’t give a hoot about “millionaires and billionaires.” Heck, I want to be a millionaire!

“Corporate jets”? What’s that all about? Even Playboy’s Hugh Hefner once had a corporate jet. I would love to have a private jet if only to avoid having to go through airport security these days.

“Corporate taxes”? US corporations pay the highest tax rates of virtually every other nation. Yes, they look for loopholes. You would, too!

“Hedge fund managers”? I don’t know any. Are they doing something criminal? No. They are making bets on the economy. Better that than blowing the money in a casino.

Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan, bestselling author, and now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, last Saturday wrote “The president, if he is seriously trying to avert a debt crisis, should stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility, which would be well received. It is odd how he patronizes those with more experience and depth in national affairs.”

And then she said, “He should keep his face off TV. He should encourage, cajole, work things through, be serious, get a responsible deal, and then re-emerge with joy and the look of a winner...” Noonan concluded saying, “he should choose Strategic Silence. Really, recent presidents forget to shut up. They lose sight of how grating they are.”

Obama’s first year in office was distinguished by his being on television all the time, from The View to late night comedy shows. He loves the camera, loves the attention, and loves himself to the point of an unseemly, off-putting narcissism.

Instead of taking Noonan’s advice, he has become the National Mosquito, always buzzing around somewhere in the room.

Why was the Monday night speech necessary? Both Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat, and John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, a Republican, have concluded that Obama had to be cut out of the discussions regarding the necessity to raise the debt ceiling because he was a hindrance to achieving any deal. To put it more bluntly, both concluded that Obama could not be trusted.

Reid and Boehner have essentially cut Obama out of the process. They have asserted the independence and the role of the legislative branch. Together they will send Obama a debt ceiling bill and tell him to take it or leave it. If he finds a reason to veto it, they will over-ride his veto and the rest of us will know that Obama’s agenda has always been the destruction of the nation.

Obama’s polling numbers reflect the growing realization of his arrogance and his incompetence. The advisors he chose and the programs he initiated have all proved to be failures and very costly ones at that. Unemployment rates today equal those of the Great Depression. Millions are on food stamps. Economic growth is an anemic one percent or so. Even people who don’t listen to presidential speeches or follow the news that closely know he is a loser.

There will always be at least 20% of voters who will support Obama no matter what happens. They are the true believers, the core that Democrats have always depended upon, unions, minorities, and federal employees.

The political pundits all said that the speech was aimed at the independents, always the most critical factor in recent national elections. The problem for Obama is that the next election isn’t until November 2012 and people tend to have very short memories. A lot of voters don’t make up their minds until they are in the booth. A year and a half from now is an eternity for these “undecideds.”

The speech was a bore, a repeat of all the poll-tested words and phrases he will repeat between now and November 2012. He’s become a windup doll, the White House Chatty Cathy.

It would be nice if we could ignore him and millions of American wish they could. The bad news is that he’s not going away for at least a year and a half. The good news is that he’s about to be neutered by both the Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Week In Review

By Alan Caruba

It often seems to me that the constant flow of news diminishes our ability to take it all in and make sense of it. I was thinking about this as I read the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal last Saturday.

It was the day after the drama surrounding the potential shutdown of the federal government. At the eleventh hour, President Obama announced that an agreement had been struck to keep it going. What kind of government do we have that cannot create a budget for the year ahead and keep itself going in a rational fashion?

It wasn’t about funding, though. It was about the clash between the conservatives who want to save a government from further profligate spending and eventual doom, and the liberals who have controlled the Congress since 2006 when the general unhappiness with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other factors weakened confidence in the Bush administration..

The numbers tell the story. With Barack Obama installed in office, the debt has soared to levels that threaten the existence of the greatest republic on earth. Dick Morris, the political commentator, summed it up in October 2010. “From the moment George Washington took the oath of office until Obama did, America had borrowed $9 trillion, Under Obama, it has borrowed $3.2 trillion more, in less than two years”

Consider the advice of Cicero to the Roman Senate in 55 P.C., "The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."

In 2008, too conveniently just before the election, a financial crisis hit the nation. It’s been downhill ever since and there are a lot of people who have been happy to see the world’s only superpower slip into debt and be led by a fool who cannot distinguish its friends from its enemies.

The headlines of articles in the Journal’s weekend edition are worth thinking about.

• Deadline Drama Over Budget
• Farm Subsidies: Sacred Cows No More
• Obama’s Budget Aim Was to Stay Above the Fray
• Debt Ceiling Looms as Next Big Fight
• Activists Give Boehner a Nod of Approval
• Inflation Drives the Markets

In world news the headlines were:

• Egypt Rallies Swell Against Military
• Syria Kills at Least 20 Protesters
• Bahrain Divisions Grow, Fanning Fears
• Rebels Fight U.S. For Funds It Seized (Libya)
• Portugal’s Bailout to Require Deep Cuts

You can draw your own conclusions from this snapshot from last week, but for me it is a picture of a nation is serious trouble with a very unserious President in the Oval Office. Elsewhere in the world nations where Islam is the predominate religion appear to have wearied of the current crop of despots that have held all the power, but they have few other options than their military, part of the oppression, or Islam, another form of oppression.

In the Journal’s “World Watch” section with four short news items, one was about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in Iraq for a few days to discuss the scheduled departure of U.S. troops in December. He told the Iraqi leaders, “The U.S. is willing to stay beyond 2011, if invited.”

Unmentioned is the way Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has centralized all power in his office and his cabinet. The parliament has been stripped of its participation in setting policy. Some might call that a dictatorship. Little changes in the Middle East except the players. As often as not, the choice is between the bad and the worse.

I think it is time America stop trying to solve everyone else’s problems and begin to pay some serious attention to our own. It will be painful. From 1776 when the American Revolution commenced through to June 21, 1788 when the Constitution became official there never was a year when Americans did not face painful choices.

The Civil War was painful. The hundred years of segregation that followed was painful. The Great Depression from 1929 until the beginning of our participation in World War Two in 1941 was painful. In 1945 all we wanted was peace, but the specter of communism forced us to enter upon a near half century of Cold War until the Soviet Union collapsed.

We will not be of much use to the rest of the world if we do not put our own house in order. We will have betrayed our children and grandchildren if we do not. Last week’s headlines about our domestic affairs began in the wake of the Great Depression when the nation turned to socialism. It was continued by the generation of the 1960s and by their children.

It must end before America too suffers the fate of failed empires and failed states.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Harm a President Can Do

By Alan Caruba

The announcement that Barack Hussein Obama will run for reelection was greeted with little fanfare and less surprise. In order to raise money, he needed to make it official and he was quick to join Rev. Al Sharpton, a man with a dubious history of histrionics, at a Harlem event.

Even with the data available, two years into his first term, it is difficult to grasp how much harm he has done to the nation as its elected leader.

Despite the fact that, until November 2010, the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, he was so busy during his second year that he could not find time to present Congress with a budget. The government shutdown is pure political theatre and should be avoided. If it comes, it will be the result of a political calculation that the President can benefit from it.

Obamacare, the hallmark of his political legacy, is opposed by 26 U.S. States and has been declared unconstitutional in a federal court. The House has voted to repeal it. Hardly a week goes by without finding billions in new costs buried within its pages, all of which expand the size of government beyond imagination.

In two years, the nation has accumulated debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as its entire prior history since the day George Washington took office. In January 2009, when President Obama was sworn into office, the national debt was $10.627 trillion. Today it is $14.052 trillion and rising.

The leadership that the world has long looked to America to provide has dissipated. The nations of the West, in particular the European socialist nations, have also spent themselves into penury. Portugal is the latest to cry out for help. Greece, Ireland, Spain, all once among the great powers, have drained their coffers with cradle-to-grave assurances that the government would always pick up the tab.

After two years in which every regulatory obstacle, including an illegal “moratorium” on deep water drilling for oil was imposed, the price of West Texas crude oil went from $38.74 a barrel to $99.02. Other commodities, soybeans, sugar, and corn have all seen similar increases. The price of corn has more than doubled in just twelve months.

America has enormous reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas. It has long been a giant agricultural economy, but all this potential wealth is being throttled by men and women in the Obama administration who think Americans must be forced to change their driving and eating habits. In a consumer-driven economy, they want Americans to consume less.

When President Obama was sworn in, there were 2,600,000 long-term unemployed. Today there are 9,193,000 Americans in that category. People living in poverty in America have, in just two year’s time, gone from 39,800,000 to 43,600,000. This occurred during a time when massive “bailouts” were undertaken by the government. They are now widely regarded as failures.

The greatest automotive manufacturer in the world, General Motors, is for all intents and purposes owned by the government. Auto union jobs had to be saved even if taxpayers had to have their taxes diverted for that purpose. Having brought the company to ruin with outrageous work, wage, health, and pension demands, they were still to be rewarded by the Obama administration. The heads of public service unions, among the largest in the nations, have enjoyed an open-door policy at the White House.

Having been elected by campaigning against the war in Iraq, President Obama expanded the number of troops in Afghanistan. While U.S. troop presence in Iraq was being reduced, the President suddenly engaged the nation militarily in Libya without any authorization from Congress.

With one glaring exception, no cohesive foreign policy regarding the Middle East exists. Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, an ally of the United States, surrounded on all sides by enemies and threatened daily by Iran, has been abandoned.

Egypt’s Mubarack was publicly abandoned, but Iran’s Ahmadinejad’s stolen election evoked no response when people took to the streets in Tehran to protest it. Col. Gadhafi remains in control of Libya. Syria’s dictator was called “a reformer.”

Domestically, the President calls for windmills to produce energy when they remain one of the least practical means, sustained solely by government subsidies and mandates. The factory in which he made the call belongs to a Spanish company. His call for solar energy is equally fatuous. High speed rail is yet another foolish initiative.

The last two years have been testimony to the harm a President can do to a nation and yet, despite the obvious harm being imposed on millions of Americans, the President continues to enjoy the support of people for whom the growth of the government, the increase in spending, and the nation’s loss of leadership in the world is not understood and will not be until it is too late to reverse the damage.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Sitting Together

Government as a Criminal Enterprise

By Alan Caruba

The Obama administration is “one of the most corrupt administrations in modern times” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) Sunday, January 2st. As the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, we can expect some explosive revelations.

The larger question is how long can a nation survive when its east and west coasts are occupied by liberals who are so out of touch with reality they cannot understand why the rest of the nation would disagree with them about anything? Two States alone, California and New York, are so broke and so laden with red tape they exist by mercy alone.

Liberals are people who still think bigger government, more regulations and more spending is the answer to every problem and need.

These are people who still talk about “global warming”, often in the midst of a raging blizzard.

These are people who refuse to consider the daily headlines of Muslim bombings of Christians, often in their churches, poses a threat to Western civilization.

In the middle, in “fly over country”, the bulk of the population simply stares in disbelief at the White House and Congress and keeps asking, “What are those people thinking?”

Having sent a small army of new people, conservatives, to the House of Representatives and narrowed the Senate’s ability to do further damage, these are independents who now expect change of a different kind than Obama’s.

It’s not so much change as a “return” to smaller government, less borrowing and spending, and such, but those days essentially ended in the last century as progressives got an income tax written into the Constitution, took away the right of State legislatures to name Senators who would represent their State’s interests, and then went on a binge of “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

A century of liberal government has bankrupted the government.

Indeed, just about anything one wants to do, go to college, start a small business, begin raising alpacas, whatever, the government will provide a loan or a grant or a tax exemption. The federal government determines how much each State receives for road and bridge repair, for its school systems, for just about everything for which States were formerly responsible.

The so-called Stimulus Act was nothing more than Representatives and Senators throwing every state and local project into a huge spending bill and then claiming it would create jobs. As has been the case for decades, the only jobs that get created from such largess are government jobs, while businesses large and small are required to waste thousands of hours and thousands of dollars filling out government forms.

There’s a word for that. It’s called communism. To avoid the ugliness of that, it is also called socialism, but it is still communism when the government makes the most important decisions about virtually everything affecting one’s life.

The financial collapse of 2008 was the result of the utter failure of two “government entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that so distorted the housing mortgage marketplace that it finally collapsed from an excess of incoherence. No one knew who owned the mortgage. Not Fannie or Freddie, not the banks, investment firms or AIG that used them as “bundled” assets.

The current bank failure rate is testimony to the need to shut down Fanny and Freddy.

Those mortgages were loans made to people that often didn’t have a job, bought homes so large they were beyond their ability to make the monthly payments, or just got fired and couldn’t pay. Whose fault was that? The lenders who knew they could turn around and sell the mortgage to Fannie and Freddie, and stick the American taxpayer with the cost to the tune of billions.

Beyond the mortgage fiasco, there is the government’s steady erosion of American’s vast energy industries. They cannot drill for oil anywhere. They cannot mine coal. If, however, you want to build a wind or solar farm, the government will give you millions to produce minimal amounts of electricity and require utilities to purchase it.

Or perhaps you want to be an ethanol producer? The government requires that all gasoline be mixed with ethanol, thus raising the cost per gallon for a chemical that actually reduces the mileage you’d get without it. In addition, since it’s mostly made from corn it forces up the cost of feed to livestock which in turns forces up the cost of meat at the supermarket and the countless other food products that utilize corn in some fashion.

In a free market ethanol would not exist. Even Al Gore has disowned it!

What kind of government would insist on regulating carbon dioxide, claiming it is causing “global warming” when it is obvious to everyone there is no “global warming” and CO2 is not causing anything except the growth of every form of vegetation on planet Earth.

When a government lies that much to everyone in an effort to control all energy use, it has become a criminal enterprise.

While all this is going on, that same government is borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, mostly from China, to keep the monstrosity it has created going. Our government is flat broke.

When you add in a President who thinks America is too arrogant and represents people who eat too much, drive too much, and need to expect less if they get sick, it is little wonder people are beginning to lose faith in him.

We need a lot of change in a big hurry or one day we will all wake up and there will be no United States of America because it had to default on nearly $14 trillion in present debt. That's equal to our current Gross Domestic Product. The U.S. dollar continues to lose its value and we have two more years of a President who cannot sign more spending bills fast enough.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Any Fool Can Understand the Commerce Clause

By Alan Caruba

I am not a lawyer. I never wanted to be a lawyer. I have some friends who are lawyers and I forgive them and occasionally have to employ them. America, at the federal, state, and local level generates so many laws that the system requires a legion of lawyers to deal with them. The result is a general lack of respect for all laws short of the Ten Commandments.

The U.S. Constitution, in effect since June 21, 1788 when New Hampshire became the ninth State to ratify it, is a remarkable document, not the least for being the oldest functioning constitution of any nation at this point in time. What I like best about it is that anyone can read and understand it.

Until the progressive era in the U.S. that began in the 1900s and went bonkers in the 1930s, the Constitution underwent a number of judicial interpretations that largely affirmed the intentions of the Founding Fathers who wrote it. This was made easier by the existence of the Federalist Papers, letters and writings by the Framers, who clarified its various elements.

The Constitution was not foisted on Americans. It was, after the collapse of the Articles of Confederation, widely discussed and debated. With the addition of the Bill of Rights, all the original States signed onto it. There have been only 27 Amendments because, wisely the Framers contrived to make the process as difficult as possible. They also fashioned an instrument of governance intended to slow down the entire legislative process.

Americans understand that passing 2,000-plus page bills that have not been read or attempting to pass such bills hurriedly during the “lame duck” session of Congress, many of whose members have been voted out of office, is an obscenity, an offense to the intent of the Constitution.

Anyone reading Article One, Section 8, understands it enumerates a number of powers allocated solely to the Federal government such as the coining of money, declaring war, and such. It was always understood that the federal government is limited to the exercise of the Constitution's enumerated powers.

One of those powers is “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…” That is the commerce clause.

The meaning of commerce was limited to “trade and exchange” of goods and transportation for this purpose. The purpose was to make “regular” such activity; to provide laws to ensure that business would be conducted properly between the States or with foreign nations to everyone’s mutual benefit.

What the commerce clause does not authorize is the right of the federal government to compel a citizen to involuntarily purchase anything.

The “linchpin” of Obamacare is the requirement that everyone must purchase health insurance or to suffer a financial penalty for failing to do so, but the federal government has restricted the free purchase of health insurance across State lines, thus inhibiting competition that would allow for lower rates. There is a touch of schizophrenia in this.

As Judge Henry Hudson recently ruled in the case of Virginia v. Sebelius, on December 13, “Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market. In doing so, enactment of the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision (the individual mandate) exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article 1.”

“The Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is neither within the letter, nor the spirit of the Constitution.”

That should be the end of the issue and the end of Obamacare, but as the late Justice Rehnquist noted in one decision, “it is illuminating for purposes of reflections, if not for argument, to note that one of the greatest fictions of our federal system is that the Congress exercises only those powers delegated to it, while the remainder are reserved to the States or to the people.”

The growth of the powers Congress has arrogated to itself is the singular greatest threat to freedom and liberty in America. This is why so many individual States have joined in the several cases brought against Obamacare.

Failing a common sense ruling on this case by the Supreme Court, the States have but one option left and that is nullification. They can, individually and together, pass laws to restrict the implementation of Obamacare.

Meanwhile, the incoming 2011 Congress can and should do everything in its power to defund and otherwise thwart this assault on liberty.

In 2012, Americans can rid themselves of the current usurper of the office of the presidency, a man whose first executive order, #13489, issued on January 21, 2009, was directed at hiding all essential documentation of his legitimacy.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Video: Democrat Demogoguery in the House

Thou Shalt Not

By Alan Caruba

Is there anything that some special interest group or some government agency doesn’t want to forbid you from eating, driving, wearing, using, and enjoying? We live surrounded by a multitude of “thou shalt not’s.”

Throughout history people have been afflicted with rulers and others who felt compelled to create lists of things forbidden to them. In matters of moral behavior, the Decalogue, otherwise known as the Ten Commandments, is quite sufficient to get you through life. Generally speaking, everything else from dress, food, and fun should be an individual decision so long as no one else is harmed.

The biggest “success” story among the lifestyle puritans are the endless restrictions on smoking. The biggest crock is the claim that “secondhand smoke” killed a lot of people who did not puff on a cigarette, cigar, or pipe. Worse, millions in “stimulus” money, public funds, have been allocated to anti-smoking campaigns.

As just one example, Georgia’s Dekalb County’s Board of Health received $3.2 million for an anti-smoking campaign and it is just one of four urban areas that have received such funding. A total of $650 million is being wasted in this fashion. How many jobs will this create? None.

My late Father lived into his early 90s and I cannot recall a day he did not light up his pipe, nor the sweet perfume of the smoke as it wafted around the house. My late Mother, who never smoked a day in her life, also lived well into her 90s.

Mother was a cookbook author who taught classes in gourmet cooking and dining for three decades in the adult schools where we lived. An authority on wines and liquors, we had a wine cellar in the basement fit for royalty; apparently all that wine had no adverse affect and likely prolonged her life, Dad’s and mine.

Americans love fast food. We love our McDonald’s, our Burger King’s, the many pizza franchises, Red Lobster’s, Olive Garden’s, Outback, and all the other wonderful places to take the family or a date. They all remain the object of scorn and scolding by endless self-appointed “consumer advocates” They and every other thing we eat are blamed for an alleged epidemic of obesity. Do I care if someone is fat? No. It’s none of my business.

Claiming that fat people cost taxpayer’s money is absurd. Many come from a long family line of hefty ancestors. Surely all those people who are genetically disposed to cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses cost money as well, particularly if they have lost their jobs and no longer have health insurance.

I am concerned about illegal drug use, mostly because it fuels the Mexican drug cartel wars that are killing Americans foolish enough to wander into bandito land. I yield to my libertarian inclination to think that we could eliminate a lot of wasted time and money if we just legalized drugs and let those foolish enough to use them pay taxes for the privilege.

I know that drug users, like alcoholics, underage drinkers, and a wide variety of solid citizens will drink and drive, but that’s why we have police and jails. Nothing will stop it except perhaps for bartenders who refuse to sell “one more for the road.” You could close every liquor store in sight and people, as in the bad old days of Prohibition, would find a way to have a drink or two or three.

I grew up in a time when kids rode bikes without mandatory safety helmets, drank water from the garden hose, played ball in the street, and lived to tell about it. We were told “don’t talk to strangers” and it was good advice. We were told to be home for dinner, a time set aside for the entire family to sit down together and discuss the events of their day.

I dislike the eco-freaks who demand that everyone buy a hideously expensive electric car when the ones we do buy are marvels of technology while there’s an estimated thirteen trillion untapped barrels of oil sufficient to keep them running on high octane for a very long time to come. Consumers will save an estimated five billion dollars if the government allows the ethanol mandate to end this year.

I don’t frankly want to hear that every single thing I buy is not sufficiently “Green” or that my “lifestyle” is an offense to planet Earth. I harbor the notion that the Earth doesn’t care and that these annoying people will complain that my ashes were despoiling the Atlantic Ocean when I pass from this mortal coil.

I have a friend who lives in a cabin in the backwoods of Missouri with two dogs as his companions. In the past he has enjoyed a fair degree of success as an author and other literary endeavors, but these days, when not earning a living as an editor, he is into the distilling arts and sciences, making some excellent hard cider and other potable potions. For his 51st birthday, he has signed off social networking on Facebook and yanked his blog from the Internet. To his longtime friends he said you know my phone number and address.

He is a happy man, having earlier rid himself of a crazed wife and dodged a potential one for whom he was the perfect “fixer-upper.” An unfortunate investment in a saloon in the methamphetamine capitol of the U.S. did not pan out. He accepts the fact that the nation is broke and that he cannot do a damn thing about it, nor does he expect Congress will do anything sensible to avoid this outcome.

I find his attitude refreshing though it is my “job” to warn against the coming collapse.

It is, however, the nature of all people elected or appointed to any position of power, no matter how low or high, to thereafter enlist an army of bureaucrats to enforce a multi-volume encyclopedia of regulations intended to save us from ourselves and to behave exactly as they want us to. I don’t like any of these people.

I wish all those harridans, hypocrites, and others who think they know better how you and I should live our lives would all be transported to the dark side of the Moon.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Election Fatigue

By Alan Caruba

It’s a lot like the marathon experience of “hitting the wall” when you have to push on to get to the finish line. It’s election fatigue.

Elections give media news people hundreds of hours to speculate, to evaluate, to discuss what is occurring in every district of every State, to report which candidate is ahead or behind, to trot out a new poll every day, until those who have probably made up their mind long before refuse to listen to another word.

There are, of course, thousands of words that follow an election and it must be said that the 2010 midterms were quite literally historic. As Karl Rove noted, “Tuesday’s election was epic. Republicans gained over 60 seats in the House and six in the Senate. They’ll now occupy eight additional governor’s mansions and at least 500 more seats in state legislatures.”

“The Republicans picked up more House seats than in any election since 1938, leaving the Democrats with the smallest number in the House since 1946,” and, predicted Rove, “Democratic losses could get worse in the next election. In 2012, three times as many Senate Democrats as Republicans face the voters—and many are from red states. Two more years of voting for the Obama agenda could do them in.”

The question in the minds of most Americans is how does all this translate into solving the awesome problems facing the nation and, more particularly, what does it mean to my future?

Everyone is going to have a different answer to the latter question because everyone has their own specific circumstances. I would not, for example, want to be a new college graduate right about now. The likelihood is they will be moving back in with mom and dad while others will be struggling to hold onto their homes.

While it is likely that the Bush tax cuts will remain, the temptation of States like California and other big spenders to raise taxes exists. The great challenge of our times is to shrink government at every level to an affordable size. Something is very wrong when the largest union in the nation is for government workers. It is inherently wrong that this union can give money to candidates when that money comes from members being paid with public funding.

The answer to the former question, the personal impact the post-midterm nation will have, involves the potential for a huge inflation, a continued devaluation of the U.S. dollar, a stagnant employment prospect as few jobs are created, and for some the prospect of being laid off from work or running out of the funds put aside or invested for retirement.

Real reduction of government is needed, but few believe it will occur. We have a bloated federal government workforce, many of whom are earning twice what a comparable private sector job would pay. There are entire federal departments and agencies that could be pared without being missed.

There are some important policy changes that could significantly improve the job sector and the mythical “energy independence” politicians love to talk about. You don’t just poke a hole in the ground and get oil. It takes time. Involves a lot of risk, and it takes lots of money.

Big Oil is in the business of risk and would spend the money if it was permitted to drill in and offshore of Alaska where vast amounts of oil are known to exist. There’s oil in the Dakotas and there’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico where the Obama administration is deliberately rendering thousands unemployed by slowing the permitting process. When you think oil, also think natural gas. The oil companies are as interested in it as crude.

Let’s stop handing out billions in tax credits and other funding for “Green energy”, wind and solar power. Few projects are more stupid than a proposal to build the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant in the Southern California desert. It just got the green light (no pun intended) from the Obama administration to the tune of $6 billion.

While the Greens are always screaming bloody murder about endangered species and the destruction of “pristine” land, this one project will take up 7,025 acres of federally owned land near Blythe, California. The cost of the transmission lines that will be needed is ridiculous when a single coal-fired or nuclear plant could produce many times more dependable, 24/7 megawatts of electricity than this blanket of solar panels ever will.

Barack Obama is still talking about a fictitious and fraudulent “climate change”, i.e., global warming at a time when most of the world has concluded that there is no global warming and when the largest carbon credit exchange in the U.S. just closed its doors.

Therein lies the real problem. Granted that the election has been a blow against the Obama agenda, Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton who moved to the center after his midterm losses.

Obama is a very different animal. He is still capable of doing a lot of harm from the Oval Office and, as we have seen, he is not shy about doing it. This is an administration that added $2.7 trillion to the national debt, including a record $1.4 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2009 and a $1.3 trillion deficit for FY 2010.

That’s why we must shake off election fatigue and be as relentless in the two years ahead as those through which we have passed. Obama is punishing America because he doesn’t like America.

He must be politically neutralized. It won’t be pretty.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Are Liberals Just Nuts?

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has tried to discuss, debate, or argue political issues with a liberal eventually concludes they are dealing with someone too deranged to be influenced by facts. The midterm election defeat of Democrats in the House and the narrowed margin of control of the Senate mean nothing to liberals whose explanations ignore reality.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, explained the defeat in almost classic liberal terms. “Well, anger certainly continues to be all the rage in the corridors of American politics,” he pouted in an commentary titled “Man Up, America!” ignoring the fact that Nancy Pelosi--a woman--wielded the power in the House that produced the largest turnover of seats since 1938.

Ignoring the possibility that two years of legislative insanity that forced Obamacare on an unwilling majority of Americans, of stimulus bills that were nothing more than pork, of financial reforms that ignored the source of the mortgage meltdown, Carter concluded that “The general anti-Obama rage out there is palpable, adding that the “hatred for Obama” had “more to do with race than anything else.”

This “white, conservative and independent Americans are all bigots” mantra ignores the fact that Obama made history as the first black man to be elected president and that it could not have happened if a lot of white people had not voted for him, starting with the Iowa primaries in a very white State.

“What makes today’s fury more worrying,” Carter continued, “is the fact that angry right-wing extremists tend to carry guns in disproportionate numbers to their liberal counterparts.” Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, it was Obama talking about people “who cling to their guns and religion” instead of turning their lives over to an all-powerful central government.

Nearly a million “angry right-wing extremists” turned up in Washington, D.C. to peacefully protest passage of Obamacare without a single arrest or incident. They were summarily dismissed by a very arrogant White House that was too busy forcing “healthcare reform” on the majority of Americans to pay attention to how many of them were unemployed.

There is an aspect of psychology called “projection” when one accuses someone of the very characteristics found in themselves. “What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums”, asked Carter. We call them liberals.

Compounding the failure, refusal or inability to accept the reality that liberal, Democrat actions, led by President Obama and enacted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, we have learned that the Speaker has made it clear that she wants to retain her power as the new House Minority Leader.

Historically, House Speakers who have presided over a loss of power resign, but not Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, her letter to the Democratic caucus cited “the most productive Congress in a half century” without apparently taking any notice that its legislative program led to a loss of 61 seats in the House. “We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back,” she said, citing the programs that were responsible for a crippled party in Congress.

Under normal conditions, the current Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, would be expected to be elected by the Democratic caucus to replace Madame Pelosi, but there does not appear to be anything “normal” about those who lost or those who survived.

Pelosi wants the Democrat Seal of Approval for two of the worst years Americans have been through and, of course, Democrats have been in control of Congress since 2006, halfway through former President Bush’s second term. Stimulus hasn’t worked. Unemployment is higher now than when Obama was elected. Obamacare, passed by Democrats who hadn’t even been allowed to read the bill, and a multitude of other ills resulted in a massive rejection of Democrats in Congress.

What have liberals learned from this? Nothing! The swift decline of confidence in Obama is attributed to his skin color. The economic stagnation is the fault of Wall Street. The rise in healthcare premiums will be blamed on insurance companies, not Obamacare. The anger of the electorate is blamed on angry, white-wing conservatives even though Tea Party candidates did not all get automatically elected to office.

On the Saturday following the elections, Rasmussen Reports summed up the situation for Obama as follows:

“Still somewhat in shellshock following Tuesday’s elections, President Obama so far seems content to blame the messenger, not the message.”

“In other words, the American people would really like his agenda if he had just explained it better. We’ll see.”

“Voters have mixed feelings about the tone the president set at his first post-election press conference on Wednesday. Most, in fact, are not confident that the president can work with the new Republican majority in the House to do what’s best for the American people.”

“Just before Election Day, the majority of voters said the election was a referendum on the president’s agenda and that he should change course if Republicans win control of the House. But most also don’t expect him to make that change.”

Obama got elected on a message of hope and change, but voters did not like the change and are running out of any hope that he understands what happened on Election Day.

That’s what happens when liberals are given power and that is why the next two years will be continued resistance to the changes voters want. Expecting them to rationally interpret the elections is a waste of time.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Nancy is Ready for her Close-Up

I, for one, am hoping the Democrats elect Nancy Pelosi to be the Minority Leader in the House. She will be a constant reminder of the pathetic depths to which the party has fallen and an inspiration to rid the Senate of Harry Reid, increase the GOP margin in the House, and elect a Republican President in 2012.

Impatient Americans

By Alan Caruba

Americans are an impatient people. There’s a reason why every manner of labor-saving device was invented here and why we are in love with every kind of device that lets us instantly communicate with one another.

In an earlier era, it might have taken longer for a majority of Americans to realize just how awful President Obama’s legislative and other policy initiatives were for the nation, but a plethora of punditry on countless Internet websites and blogs alerted them even while the mainstream media was trying to deceive them as they had with their support for candidate Obama.

As an aside, media prognosticators are predicting that daily newspapers are essentially all dinosaurs and many, if not most, will be gone in a decade or so. The general rule is that new technology, the Internet, drives out old technology, dead-tree newspapers.

The other factor is that most daily newspapers with their liberal outlook have simply been abandoned by subscribers who have tired of seeking real news amidst the propaganda. Prediction: none of the news weeklies will be around in five years or less.
When even the National Enquirer and Star Magazine are filling for bankruptcy protection, you know the times they are changing. Survivors, however, may be the nation’s many weekly newspapers because, like politics, all news is local.

Impatience with a Congress that was so clearly out of touch with most constituents has resulted in a historic turnover of power to the Republican Party and it is a far more humble party than its heyday during George W. Bush’s two terms, the latter of which saw Americans return Democrats to power.

Americans had already grown weary of the war in Iraq that had begun in 2003 and had little enthusiasm for the nation’s military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001. Throughout history, great empires have fallen because they got over-extended in such conflicts.

Making matters worse for any administration is the growing perception that the Middle East is psychotic; a place where reason takes a backseat to a seventh century religion that dominates its politics and social life. Watching Muslims blow up mosques filled with other Muslims is sufficient to convince many Americans that no amount of military power or billions in foreign aid will change anything.

Only one nation in the Middle East poses any kind of military threat and that is Iran. The minute it actually acquires nuclear weapons will be the hour in which Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and various Gulf States sit down at the table with Israel to discuss and plan ridding itself of this threat. The Iranian leadership—not its people—are certifiably crazy.

Americans will be looking to a Republican controlled House to rid the nation of Obamacare and begin to address over-spending, joblessness, and other issues, but the next two years will be spent in triage, trying to stop the bleeding until the patient can make it to the operating room and that will require the election of a new president and a Republican Senate.

So Americans are going to have to strive to be patient while the many Republican governors redistrict their states to aid a victory in 2012. They will have to content themselves with legislative maneuvers to defund Obamacare or remove many of its more noxious mandates. Also on the To-Do list will be to put the Environmental Protection Agency in manacles before it utterly destroys the economy with crazed greenhouse gas emissions regulations.

There is little that can be done to turn around the decades-old disastrous energy policies that have stalled the construction of the many new coal-fired and nuclear plants needed to provide the electricity that is the very breath of life to the nation. The Obama administration will also continue to thwart any oil exploration and drilling, and how much of a priority this will be in the new Congress is unknown.

Meanwhile the White House has announced that, upon his return from India, President Obama will sit down with the Republican leadership of the House along with their Democrat counterparts including the noxious Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It is likely to be little more than a photo-op because this president is deaf to partisanship or the reversal of his plans to destroy the nation.

This means that that a less frightening two years is ahead with the hope of real change in 2012. The economy is barely improving and is likely to remain stagnant, even with the extension of the Bush tax cuts. A Mount Everest of federal regulations will have to be eliminated to get the economy moving again.

And then there are the unknown and unpredictable “events” that will occur. 9/11 was one such event in 2001.

On September 18, 2008, there was a little reported electronic run on U.S. banks that withdrew $550 billion before the Federal Reserve stepped in to stop it. It blew away the charade of the nation’s housing market that involved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Privatizing both should be a GOP priority. Americans have yet to have been told who withdrew those billions.

Other events over which there is no control such as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes could play a role. We’ve seen how the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico undermined confidence in the Obama administration.

Two years isn’t really that long a time, but a lot can happen and it will call for patience and perseverance.

© Alan Caruba, 2010