Attacking Paul Ryan, But Not the National Debt

By Alan Caruba

The White House and Democrats have been attacking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, for having the audacity to put forth budget plans, something the Democrats in the Senate have failed to pass for well over a thousand days at this point.

The first words out of Rep. Steve Israel’s mouth, a Democrat from New York, were the pathetic blather about “billionaires.” Most Americans aren’t billionaires or even millionaires and are more concerned about the rising costs of gasoline, food, and everything else than whether the rich pay more taxes. In point of fact, the rich pay the vast bulk of the income taxes and some forty percent of workers pay none at all. If you earn more than $250,000 a year, Democrats think you’re rich.



Harry Reid

 Never mind that most of us are trying to live within our own budget, the Democrats have resisted passing any kind of a budget to address a looming fiscal crisis of their making. That was why voters in 2010 returned control of the House, where all appropriations are authorized, to Republicans. If they had done the same for the Senate, we might actually have had some budgets, but Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has ensured that every effort to address the fiscal mess fails.

The White House and the Senate, despite the Simpson-Bowles Commission, despite the so-called “super committee”, and despite the plans put forth by Ryan, have utterly failed to do anything but spend, spend, and spend. To do so, they must borrow, borrow, and borrow.

In February, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that annual spending over the Obama era had climbed to a projected $3.6 trillion this fiscal year from $2.98 trillion in fiscal 2008; more than 20%. It added up to an increase of about $5 trillion in just four years. This year will mark the highest deficit—the difference between government revenues and government spending—since 1946!

Robotically and moronically, the Democrats keep calling for higher taxes and even the CBO has concluded that the 2012 tax hike (ending the Bush tax cuts) on capital gains, dividends, estates and small businesses would impede economic growth, reducing it 1% the next year and raising the specter of unemployment rising from 8.5% to 9.1%--increasing the jobless to 750,000.

As The Wall Street Journal put it, “the CBO’s facts plainly show that Mr. Obama has the worst fiscal record of any President in modern times. No one else is even close.”

In addition to the tired rhetoric about billionaires and millionaires, the Democrats are also lying about Ryan’s plan as it relates to Medicare, claiming it wants to deprive older Americans of its benefits, but as Ryan points out, “Our budget’s Medicare reforms make no changes for those in or near retirement.” Without reform, Medicare will go broke as will Social Security.

Ryan’s plan “spurs economic growth with bold tax reform—eliminating complexity for individuals and families and boosting competitiveness for American job creators. Led by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, our budget consolidates the current six income tax brackets into just two brackets of 10% and 25%”, the latter for corporations in order to permit them to be more competitive with nations that tax their corporations at a far lower rate than ours”, currently near the highest in the world.

“We reject calls to raise taxes,” says Ryan, preferring to close tax loopholes.

In brief, the Ryan budget would produce savings in federal spending of $5.3 trillion over ten years and reduce the deficit by $3.3 trillion. It proposes a 10% reduction of the federal work force over three years through attrition and it offers reforms to Medicaid, among others to pull the nation back from the brink of catastrophic collapse and default.

You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to know what is wrong with the way Obama and his Democrat trolls are running the government, despite Republican efforts to apply the brakes. They have increased spending to $3.8 trillion despite the fact that the government only takes in about $2.1 in revenue.

In just one term, Obama is on pace to borrow $6.2 trillion. The debt rises by $4.2 billion every day, $175 million per hour, nearly $3 million per minute.

Without a Republican in the White House and Republican control of both the House and Senate, the United States of America—you and I—are headed off a cliff. All the lies Obama tells between now and November 6, 2012 will not change that.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Why Obama Will Lose in November

By Alan Caruba

I received a campaign letter from Michelle Obama the other day. This is especially surprising because I am a registered Republican; hardly a likely prospect to contribute to her husband’s reelection efforts.

“Every day I learn about the challenges and the struggles—the doctor bills they can’t pay or the mortgage they can no longer afford,” said the text. The “fairness” theme, a socialist meme, was expressed. “American prospers when we are all in this together, when hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded, when everyone—from Main Street to Wall Street—does their fair share and plays by the same rules.”

The fact is, however, America has not been prospering for the last four years during which Barack Obama has been President. And everyone knows it. The U.S. sovereign debt rating was downgraded for the first time while he occupied the Oval Office. Federal spending (25% of GDP) is the highest since World War Two. Federal debt (67% of GDP) is the highest since just after the end of World War Two, and the nation has experienced, not only the longest recession, but the highest unemployment since the 1930s.

In the first nineteen months of his time in office, Obama added more federal debt than was amassed by all U.S. Presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.

I have two theories about the November 6 election. (1) That it will be an overwhelming defeat for Obama or (2) that it will be so close we could see a situation comparable to the Bush-Kerry election in 2004. Had Kerry won, the vice president would have been John Edwards who was carrying on an affair during that campaign and who currently faces jail for misuse of campaign funds.

Obama’s Achilles’ heel is, of course, Obamacare. As Robert Bluey of The Heritage Foundation notes, recent polls indicate that 53% of Americans favor repeal and more than half (57%) say that the Supreme Court should strike it down as unconstitutional. Fully 60% of physicians believe the law will have a negative impact on overall patient care.

The Congressional Budget Office revisited Obamacare this past week and concluded that 20 million Americans could lose their employer-sponsored health benefits and 49 million more Americans could become dependent on government-sponsored health care. Projecting through 2022, Obamacare could cost as much as $2.134 billion and the employer-mandate penalties could hit $221 billion.

There’s another reason why Michelle Obama was writing to me last week. As Karl Rove noted in a Wall Street Journal March 14 commentary, “Many of Mr. Obama’s 2008 donors are reluctant to give again” to his campaign. “As the Obama campaign itself reported, fewer than 7% of 2008 donors renewed their support in the first quarter of his re-election campaign, well below the typical renewal rate.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee are burning through current donations so fast that the White House has told this year’s congressional candidates that they will not receive any funding support for their campaigns because Obama needs all the money.

While Obama’s 2012 campaign is already showing signs of stress, other issues will impose great pressure. Unemployment affects most American families either directly or because some member of the family or a friend is unemployed. Even the unemployed vote!

The price of gasoline continues to rise and there is nothing the White House can do to reduce it. Releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that exists for use only in an emergency will not do it and Americans are well aware that this administration has opposed or thwarted every effort to drill for more oil on federal lands. The failures of “green energy” companies that have cost Americans billions in loan guarantees are well known. A President who hypes “algae” as an energy solution will be seen as a fool and/or a complete charlatan.

Recent polls indicate how close the 2012 election may be. Obama has lost ground among female voters. In a head-to-head match-up with Mitt Romney, women voters back Obama 49%, but that is seven points lower than 2008. A Rasmussen poll found that 59% of likely voters asked whether Obama is more liberal or more conservative than they are answered that he was more liberal. Of these likely voters, 65% who are also union members thought Obama was more liberal than themselves.

Polling firms have been asking Americans to self identify themselves as conservative or liberal for decades. In February 2012, Gallup polling revealed “that in every single state with the exception of Massachusetts” conservatives outnumbered liberals. The Battleground Poll conducted by George Washington University in collaboration with Democrat and Republican polling organizations found that 58% of Americans described themselves as “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative”, while only 37% described themselves as “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.”

A conservative campaign message will win in 2012 and this explains why the Republican primaries are all about candidates striving to describe themselves as a “true conservative.”

Even the mainstream media show indications of less Obama support. When even The Washington Post rejects Obama’s lies about U.S. oil reserves, as it did on March 15th, it suggests there may be a growing, wider level of disenchantment with the man they embraced in 2008.

Obama will lose in November. It may be a very close election or it may be an overwhelming rejection, but the polling numbers and the state of the economy will be the deciding factors.

Memo to Michelle Obama: The “fairness” message is not working. The appalling failures—“stimulus” anyone?—of Obama’s first term will ensure that there will be no second term.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Primary Marathon

By Alan Caruba

I have a suspicion that most people have lost interest in the Republican primaries beyond getting a quick update of who won, who came in second, third, and the usual question of why Ron Paul is running at all.

The primaries are a marathon that requires the men who want to be president to endure physical and emotional challenges that would likely kill anyone who lacked the will power and stamina to travel from state to state, give the essentially same speech over and over again, and be interviewed from early morning to late evening, responding to the same questions ad infinitum.

Running a primary campaign is a major business enterprise and, at this point, the only man with experience in the world of business and finance appears to be winning the delegate count needed to challenge the President.

If you’re sick of hearing about the outcome of primary elections, here’s what lies ahead:

March 17 – Missouri
March 18 – Puerto Rico
March 20 – Illinois
March 24 – Louisiana

April 3 – Washington, D.C., Maryland, Wisconsin
April 24 – Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island

May 8 – Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia
May 15 – Nebraska, Oregon
May 22 – Arkansas, Kentucky
May 29 – Texas

June 5 – California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota
June 26 – Utah

And then! There’s the Republican National Convention August 27-30 in Tampa, Florida.

All this provides employment to everyone involved in the campaigns, everyone in the media who provides news coverage, and scores of vendors who will produce all the paraphernalia we associate with elections.

At the center of the vortex will be the candidates and surrounding them will be the endless questions of who’s ahead and who may drop out, et cetera, et cetera.

I do not know why we select our candidates in this fashion. I assume the process has evolved over the many years of the republic. No one seems to have come up with a better way of doing it, but in the end we are selecting a man to lead the nation (and the world) who will wield more power—for good or ill—than can be imagined.

It is a cliché to say that this will be the most important election of our lifetimes, but it is true.

If Barack Obama remains in office the financial destruction of the nation will be completed, the reduction of our military power will continue, the government takeover of critical elements of our economy will continue, and the America that lives in our hearts and imagination will cease to be.

There is no mystery to ending the recession we entered after the 2008 financial crisis; the longest since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Any economist will tell you how to do it. Anyone who runs a business, large or small, will tell you.

There is no mystery to reducing the flow of regulations that throttle innovation and expansion. Entire government departments and agencies need to be eliminated and Congress must be “encouraged” to stop passing massive bills it has not read! Show them the door!

There is no mystery to getting Barack Obama reelected. Republicans and independent voters just need to stay home.

The primary elections are a test of the resolve of American voters to get the real change they need and want.

It is a political IQ test.

They are the marathon we all must run if we are to reclaim and renew the America we love.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

It's the Economy, Stupid!

By Alan Caruba

It is interesting to see how intently foreigners are watching the run-up to the 2012 national elections, particularly as regards whether President Obama could be reelected. Hardly a day goes by that I do not receive inquiries from places like South Africa, Israel, or England. Some offer comments on my Facebook page, but the concern is the same, can Obama be defeated?

To borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That will be the deciding factor as Democrats , Republicans, and independents go to the polls in November. The news for Obama is bad. Unfortunately, the news for millions of out-of-work Americans it is even worse.

On February 28, the National Federation of Independent Businesses and a coalition of business groups were in the D.C. Court of Appeals to argue their challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules regarding greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that there is no correlation between such gases—mainly carbon dioxide—and a non-existent global warming probably won’t even be discussed. A spokesperson for the NFIB said, “For the small business community, the constant churn of costly and carelessly promulgated regulations has become too great a burden to bear.” Guess who all those small business owners will be voting against in November?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) keeps doing something that is unexpected from most government agencies; it keeps telling the truth. In mid-February it issued a report which said that, after three years of Obamanomics, the nation has seen the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Trust a Democrat President to repeat all the errors of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who prolonged the Depression for ten years while he held office.

The “official” unemployment rate has hovered around or exceeded 8 percent and this is expected to continue through 2014. The CBO noted that the level of long-term unemployment—those looking for work for more than six months—is over 40 percent! That is the highest since 1948 when the data was first collected.

Hans Bader, Counsel for Special Projects with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently noted that “The official unemployment rate is going down, but that’s partly because many long-term unemployed people went into Social Security Disability, citing ailments such as depression. Now they have a monthly government check, they are never, ever going back to work, and they are no longer treated by the government as unemployed.” This is governmental slight-of-hand to lower the rate of unemployment while contributing to it.

Writing in OpenMarket.org in February, Bader noted that a good part of the unemployment problem in the nation is a severe shortage of skilled factory workers. “In recent years, government officials have depicted white-collar jobs for college graduates as the way to go,” said Bader who noted that, while seeking to increase spending on colleges, the administration has been “slashing spending on more useful vocational education that could lead to work in manufacturing.”

An indication of how poorly the government solution to the need for skilled manufacturing employees has been is the fact that the private sector has stepped up to solve the problem. The National Association of Manufacturers has endorsed a National Manufacturers Skills Certification System to fill the gap. In partnership with community colleges and trade schools, the program offers “a relatively inexpensive path to meeting the human capital demands of U.S. advanced manufacturers.”

It has not gone unnoticed that Obama’s stimulus billions did not produce any “shovel ready” jobs and wasted public funds on a range of “green” industries, many of whom, like Solyndra, have gone belly up. Overall, the “green” industries involving solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars have proven to be sinkholes of money that generate few jobs compared to the rest of the nation’s manufacturing sector.

Finally, after three years of the most anti-energy administration since Jimmy Carter, the rising price of gas is going to have a devastating affect for Democrats and Obama on public perceptions on Election Day.

To those foreign correspondents asking whether Obama will be reelected, I keep saying that the present economy with its slow “recovery” and the high rate of unemployed, combined with the government’s crushing load of irrelevant and odious regulations, is as good an indicator as any regarding the outcome of the November general elections.

If foreigners are as much concerned with U.S. elections as Americans, all the debates, daily silliness of political news coverage, and largely irrelevant social issues suggest that November will represent, like the 2010 elections, a massive voter movement away from “hope and change” to a Republican candidate that offers an alternative economic policy to four more years of the disaster called Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Clinton Years

By Alan Caruba

PBS recently aired a two-part television documentary on Bill Clinton, his life, and his two terms in office from 1993 to 2001.

Following the years of economic growth and optimism from the Reagan-Bush41 era, it may have just been inevitable that the voters wanted to put a younger man in the White House. At the time, few of us realized how seriously demented, Al Gore, Clinton’s choice for his vice president, would turn out to be.

Mostly, though, I think of how deeply flawed Clinton was and how the presidency seemed to exaggerate and exacerbate those flaws of character and judgment. The worst part of it was that, even before he was elected, the voters knew he was a womanizer. The Gennifer Flowers affair erupted during the first campaign and, with Hillary by his side, he just brushed it aside and so did the voters.

A man who will cheat on his wife, will cheat on his partners in business, and just about everyone else. Bill Clinton demonstrated that and yet the voters either ignored or forgave him the long trail of women he exploited with or without their consent including a sordid relationship with a very young White House intern.

What the PBS documentary demonstrated was that Clinton was bitten by the presidential bug early in life, possibly when he met John F. Kennedy as part of a group of boys tagged as having potential for public service. That brief moment seemed to say that he knew he was going to be President one day, no matter what it took.

Clinton was blessed with a high level of intelligence. There is, however, often a disconnection between intellectual skills and moral judgment. We see this repeated and reported day after day when men who have achieved status and wealth just throw it away. In the private sector it is a private tragedy affecting its victims, but in the public sector, it puts everyone’s welfare and future at risk.

Clinton, like Barack Obama, arrived in the White House without any experience in the military. Not only that, he didn’t like or trust the men who protect our liberties and take an oath to protect the Constitution and to obey the Commander-in-Chief. Clinton almost immediately tried to eliminate the ban on homosexuals in the military, having to finally settle for “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell.” Obama eliminated even that.

Clinton was fortunate enough to have had no big or small wars on his watch, but there was massive slaughter in Rwanda he later regretted he did nothing to deter or stop, but neither did the United Nations.

What I recall of the 1990s was that it was so different from the previous Reagan years. Ronald Reagan believed Americans could achieve anything if the government would just get out of the way.

Clinton was an old style, liberal Democrat who thought government exists to get involved in everyone’s life in every way possible. Americans used to hate that, but from the 1930s through the 1960s, first Social Security and later Medicare got them used to being on the government dole. Comparable programs exist in every department of the government.

In the 1980s, there were many missed cues as to what was coming on 9/11. The first attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 1993 was treated as a criminal case and not something perpetrated by a shadowy group calling itself al Qaeda. By 1996, however, its leader, Osama bin Laden, had issued a declaration of war against America. In 1998 al Qaeda blew up U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

With the 1979 advent of the Iranian Islamic revolution, anyone paying any attention had to know that a new, very dangerous force had been unleashed in the world. The former Soviet Union discovered that in Afghanistan when al Qaeda and local mujahideen forced them out in 1989 with the covert assistance of the U.S.

My memory of those eight years was that, throughout it all, the Clinton administration seemed to be stepping in post holes, stumbling from one misadventure to another.

When Bill turned the revision of the U.S. healthcare system over to Hillary, the two of them ran into a buzz-saw of popular resistance. Later, Obama would encounter the same response with Obamacare and it spawned the Tea Party movement after it was forced through a Democrat Congress.

What is it about liberals that they cannot learn any lessons from history and remain determined to expand government where it was never intended to go? Education. Healthcare. Energy. The Environment. Try finding any of those words in the Constitution. (Yes, Republican presidents have done this too.)

Bill Clinton became only the second President in U.S. history to be impeached. He had lied to a grand jury and a federal judge, demeaned the office of President with a sex scandal, and he got away with it! Congress voted against impeachment.

By virtue of a 1994 Republican victory that reclaimed power in Congress after some forty years, Clinton would later lay claim to the biggest budget surplus in a very long time.

The parallels between the Clinton and Obama administrations are those of inexperience, arrogance, and poor judgment. Clinton, however, loved his nation while it is doubtful one can say that of Obama.

What the documentary also demonstrated was that Democrats have a very different moral system than Republicans. The fact that so many people of faith find a home in the Republican Party suggests the difference is very real.

They are the people President Obama derides as those “who cling to their guns and their religion.”

Looking back at the Clinton years and waiting for the Obama years to end, that’s probably a good thing.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Political Absurdities

By Alan Caruba

At various points in any election year, the campaigns achieve moments of total absurdity that are passed off as news, usually with a straight face.

When certain Republicans begin to refer to “vulture capitalism” you know such a moment has arrived because, if Republicans are not all about capitalism, there is not much else for them to discuss. By capitalism I mean the state of the economy, workplace and trade issues, taxes, and everything else involved with paying one’s bills and becoming filthy rich if possible.

Republicans read The Wall Street Journal. Democrats read The New York Times. I rest my case.

The other recent absurdity was President Barack Obama telling NBC’s Matt Laurer that he deserved a second term. As if driving the U.S. debt up to $15 trillion wasn’t enough, apparently Obama wants to stick around so he can cancel another project that could create 20,000 jobs like the Keystone XL pipeline.

It is patently absurd for Obama to claim that his administration has “created” new jobs, but that is his campaign message these days. How many are unemployed? Have given up looking for a job? The only jobs government creates are government jobs and those have exploded in Obama’s first term. The rest of the time government is usually a huge obstacle to the private sector when it wants to do the same thing.

The greatest absurdity of all of the 2008 campaigns was that a totally unknown Senator from Illinois, there for barely two of a six year term, should emerge as the “messiah” of the masses to save America.

From what? Answer: the dreadful financial mess based on the idiotic notion that government should be in the housing and mortgage business.

This genius then proceeded to spend the first two years of his presidency telling everyone that it was all George Bush’s fault, thus ignoring the many times Bush warned Congress against the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac implosion. Sadly, Rasmussen Reports says 40% of Americans do think it is Bush’s fault.

Obama’s “solution” to the mess was a multi-billion-dollar “stimulus” that, by now, everyone agrees was a political slush fund and a failure. Then he borrowed more money than any president in U.S. history—including FDR who had to fund World War Two. It’s a long list of blunders, but the bottom line is massive stagnant unemployment and a housing market that’s still in the tank.

Why does every national election always seem to produce at least one candidate who uses the process to advocate ideas that most voters regard as absurd and, of course, I refer to Ron Paul’s view that we should pull back all our military from their foreign missions. While I agree we should stop getting into wars without Congressional consent—something the Constitution requires—that rule has been ignored since World War Two.
Since then the U.S. has engaged in wars of every description while the members of Congress could be found whistling in the hallways of the Capital in the hope people wouldn’t notice. The United Nations has offered cover some of the time, but we went into Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq with only the flimsiest pretense that they were not military actions.

Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich opined that the U.S. should put a colony on the Moon. This was so absurd that even Saturday Night Live lampooned it. What is absurd, however, is the way Obama has ended the U.S. space program to the point we have to hitch a ride with the Russians. Worse, however, was Rick Santorum’s recent assertion that Mitt Romney “rigged” the outcome of the CPAC straw vote. The last candidate who ran on moral issues was Jimmy Carter. Consider yourself warned.

I personally regard the term “flip-flopper” an absurdity because I have never known of any politician who has not changed his mind and, frankly, would not want to vote for one so inflexible he or she could not change with the times.

What’s really absurd have been the directions various presidents have taken the nation in the recent times. Lyndon B. Johnson not only expanded the war in Vietnam, but he threw in the War on Poverty for good measure. In retrospect, it was a total failure. Richard Nixon ended his presidency with the Watergate scandal. Jimmy Carter drove the oil industry out of the U.S., reduced our military strength, and was such a dismal failure he only lasted one term.

I’m thinking that Obama will follow in Carter’s footsteps and we shall look back on “cash for clunkers”, Solyndra, and, of course, Obamacare, and ask ourselves, what were we thinking? The answer is that a majority of the voters were not thinking!

Neither Carter, nor Obama are aberrations. They were the result of the hardcore twenty-five to thirty percent of the voters who are irredeemably liberal, vote Democrat, and for whom reality and facts are of no importance.

Then there are another percentile who identify themselves as Democrats without realizing that our current financial crisis was created by Democrats! Republicans will reliably vote for their party’s candidate and that means a thin sliver of self-identified independents will decide the November elections.

All elections bring out the absurd in everyone, candidates and voters alike. We fall in love with one, experience the rapture of supporting them, and then wake up the day after the election and spend the next four years feeling like a recovering junky.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

I'm Outta Here

By Alan Caruba

Those who follow politics more intently than I will no doubt be able to identify why, specifically, various incumbent Senators and Representatives have decided not to run for office in the 2012 elections, but as of this writing 43 incumbents have made it known they will not seek reelection.

Among the one hundred members of the Senate, five Democrats, three Republicans, and one Independent have made it known they will not seek office again thus far. In the House, thirty-four members have decided not to run; twenty are Democrats and fourteen are Republicans.

The Senate is composed of one hundred members, two from each State, while the House, based on population distribution, has 435 members, subject to districting that often favors one party over another. There are “safe” seats in districts that have a preponderance of one party’s registered voters.

The 112th Congress has 51 Democrats in the Senate, 47 Republicans and two independents that presumably vote with either party, but tend to favor one over the other. The slight majority of Senate Democrats cedes control to that party while, in the House, the Republicans control its agenda. The House has 240 Republicans, 192 Democrats, and three vacancies.

President Obama is running against a “do-nothing” Congress and it is worth remembering that, for the first two years of his term, Democrats controlled both chambers. More than 1,000 days have passed without a published budget. This is because Democrats do not want the public to know how much money is being spent or, to be more accurate, wasted.

The 2010 elections shifted power in the House to the Republican majority, largely due to the Tea Party movement that in time may be the next generation of Republican Party leadership. There used to be a Republican “establishment” but that is now largely a thing of the past.

Nor can it be said to have been a “do-nothing” Congress if one considers that it passed Obamacare, his signature piece of legislation. Its constitutionality will be decided when, in March, it comes before the Supreme Court in a case brought by 28 State attorneys general who deem it unconstitutional for its mandate that Americans must buy health insurance whether they want to or not. A federal government that can require you to buy anything is one with far too much power.

The Constitution exists to limit the power of the federal government.

In the Senate, Ben Nelson (D) of Nebraska whose vote was deemed critical to the passage of Obamacare has announced he will not seek reelection. Several other powerful members such as Jon Kyl of Arizona (R), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) of Texas, and Kent Conrad (D) of North Dakota will leave. The independent, Joe Lieberman, is not seek reelection in Connecticut, nor the fiery Jim Webb (D) of Virginia, Jeff Bingaman—generally regarded as non-partisan, though a Democrat—joins Herb Kohl (D) and Daniel Akaka (D) of Hawaii who has served in both Houses since 1975.

Many factors play in such decisions. Sometimes it is simply age, the recognition that it is time to retire. Other times it is the change in the political climate from liberal to conservative that would favor an opponent. An unpopular President whose defeat might take down many of his party’s members is a significant factor in the 2012 elections.

The role of the Tea Party in the 2010 elections is certainly on the minds of many Democrat incumbents in the House who will not run for reelection. One of the most powerful members of the House, Barney Frank (D-MA) has announced he will not run for reelection and his role in protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the 2008 financial collapse is no doubt a factor.

Ron Paul (R-TX), currently running for the GOP nomination, will not seek reelection and his candidacy is more of a last hurrah for his Libertarian views than a serious bid for the office of President. Keeping politics in the family, his son Rand (R) serves as a Senator from Kentucky.

Six Democrat House members from California are not seeking reelection. Given its size and population—California has 53 districts—there is not much to be made of those deciding not to run again.

Power in Congress is a numbers game of how many members are from the two main political parties, but it is also a question of longevity which lifts members into the chairmanship of powerful congressional committees when they remain there for many years.

I think the system would be vastly improved if there were term limits for members of Congress just as there is for the presidency.

Presently, Congress is held in such low esteem according to the polls, the President’s decision to run against it would appear to be a wise—very political--decision, but while his personal popularity remains intact, polls indicate a significant dissatisfaction with his performance in office.

It will be interesting to see how many Democrat incumbents conclude they cannot win with Obama at the top of the ticket and bail out—no pun intended. It is an indicator, but hardly the only one.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Liberal Lunacy

By Alan Caruba

Conservative commentators read what liberals have to say if only to get a glimpse into their current memes on various topics. It is always daunting because one cannot do this without coming away convinced that they are lunatics, devoid of any sense of history or reality, both of which they routinely invent to defend their opinions.

A recent case in point is New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, whose January 22nd, Sunday commentary was titled “Showtime at the Apollo.” Ms. Dowd has been disappointed with Barack Obama for a long time, but she still struggles to find something laudatory while at the same time revealing just how defective he is.

Call it schizophrenic journalism; a liberal writer for a liberal newspaper who is torn between the party line and what she is forced to witness.

“For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.” Eight seconds out of three years is not much to cheer. Dowd was referring to Obama’s “seductive imitation” of singer Al Green and a song that begins “I, I’m so in love with you.” Oh, please!

The event was a fund-raiser at the Apollo Theatre in New York’s Harlem. Dowd noted, however, that “Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician.” Surely a columnist who has written about politics for so many years had to know that, but the liberal media was and is too busy spinning fantasies about him.

Blame Bush Syndrome

“The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal”, opined Dowd and then immediately destroyed what little credibility she has by saying Obama had been “dragged down by W’s recklessness.”

One might think we were passed the Blame Bush mantra, but what is spectacular is the way Dowd and other liberals ignore the fact that Democrats had been in control of the 103rd Congress since January 3, 2007.

Liberals hate facts. For example, on January 3, 2007, the Dow Jones closed at 12,621.77. The GDP growth for the previous quarter was 3.5%. The unemployment rate was 4.6%. Bush’s economic policies had set a record of 52 straight months of job creation.

Dowd might well have been unaware that George W. Bush had, on seventeen occasions, asked Congress to stop the recklessness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would cause the September 2008 financial collapse based on trillions in “sub-prime mortgages” the two “government sponsored entities” had pressured banks to make. Then they purchased and bundled them into what would become known as “toxic assets” that nearly destroyed the nation’s banking system.

Dowd quoted Obama’s view of the critiques he’s received, when he said that he didn’t go to a lot of Washington parties and that the Washington press corps “just doesn’t feel like I’m in the mix with enough with them”, blaming him for being “cold and aloof.” Obama is cold and aloof. He and the press mix all the time at various White House and other events, but Obama claimed he couldn’t do more because “I’ve got a 13-year-old and 10-year-old daughter.” How lame an excuse is that?

Truman had Margaret. Clinton had Chelsea. Bush-43 had twin girls. Come on!

Anyone with any memory of Obama’s early press conferences can recall what disasters they were the minute he stopped reading from his TelePrompter and tried to answer their questions. He virtually stopped engaging in press conferences after two years.

Referencing a fellow New York Times reporter’s new book, Jodi Kantor’s “The Obamas”, Dowd concludes that the president disdains “the irrational nature of politics.” Well, yes, the failures of Congress are irrational insofar, as a recent report concluded, “Congress ended its least-productive year in modern history after passing 80 bills—fewer than during any other session since year-end records began being kept in 1947.”

Kantor’s book suggests that “they (Barack and Michelle) feel over-assaulted and under-appreciated.”

The obvious conclusion, said Dowd, was that “We disappointed them.” I assume this is irony.

To her credit, Dowd pointed out that “They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics. No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House,” adding that “The Obamas truly feel like victims.”

No, Maureen. The real victims are the millions of Americans out of work, some with mortgages that cost more than their homes are worth, while the price of gas and everything else rises, and their president cannot come up with a better campaign theme than “economic fairness.”

I’d feel sorry for Maureen Dowd and all the other liberal loonies except that it is their political philosophy and programs that have gotten us into this mess.

Feeling sorry for the Obamas is not at the top of my list of political priorities. Listening to them feel sorry for themselves while dining on steak and lobster, vacationing in expensive and exotic places, and demanding that “millionaires and billionaires” should pay more taxes is as pathetic as it gets.

I don’t expect Maureen Dowd and her fellow liberal pundits to stop desperately making excuses for the worst president in the history of the nation. It just reinforces my belief that they are all mentally defective.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Election Year Reality and Insanity

By Alan Caruba

There is something about an election year that seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. Having settled on a candidate, they defame the opponents and the motives of those that support them. This is greatly aided by the charges that fly backward and forward among the primary candidates themselves. It’s not pretty, but it is the way a democracy works.

A conspiracy theory I keep hearing and reading is that Obama will create “an emergency” and declare martial law, putting himself in complete charge. I keep telling people that the nation is filled with millions of people who have taken an oath to protect and preserve the Constitution and they run the gamut from everyone who ever served in the military to law enforcement personnel, to members of the Secret Service. The likelihood that all would stand aside and let Obama have his way is, to my mind, very small.

All this is testimony to the growing fears about Barack Hussein Obama and there is ample evidence for concern as he seems to have very little regard for the Constitution and a decidedly Leftist approach to politics and governance.

By contrast, I have seen so much factual information; hard cold data, to suggest Obama not only won’t get elected, but will likely suffer a historic defeat. To keep the insanity at bay, it would be a good idea to get familiar with some of it.

Over at Big Government.com, Wynton Hall authored “It’s the Math, Stupid! Devastating Facts About 2012."  With a great big hat tip to him, here they are:

1. Every day, the U.S. government takes in $6 billion and spends $10 billion. This means that every day the federal government spends $4 billion more dollars than it has.

2. The real unemployment rate is a jaw-dropping 11 percent.

3. Every fifth man you pass on your way to work is now out of work.

4. College graduates are now 34% less likely to find a job under Obama than they were under President George W. Bush.

5, Every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now relies on food stamps.

6. The ravages of the Obama economy now mean that more Americans live under the federal poverty line than at any time in U.S. history since records have been kept.

7. Under President Barack Obama, every fifth child in America now lives in poverty.

No one gets reelected with that level of misery extent in the nation. The days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt are long gone. This is the age of Fox News and the Internet.

Karl Rove, whom George W. Bush called “the architect” for his political acumen, took note of Obama’s inclination to link himself to FDR and to Truman. “In many ways,” Rove wrote in December, “his situation is significantly different than that of his Democrat predecessors. For one thing, a year out from the 1948 election, Gallup measured Mr. Truman’s job approval rating at 54%, whereas Mr. Obama’s is 43%--substantially lower than any president who has won re-election.”

Let me repeat that. “Substantially lower than any president who has won re-election.”

Obama may run against a “do-nothing Congress” as Truman did, but today’s House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, has been active enough to produce 29 bills intended to spur economic growth. Of those pieces of legislation, 21 remain stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate

Indeed, voters may well wish that Obama had done a lot less. After comparing himself to Johnson, FDR and Lincoln in a “Sixty Minutes” interview, even a casual look at his stimulus package has falling flat with voters, 62% of whom, according to an Ipsos/Reuters November poll, believe that they did little more than create more debt. Obamacare is even less popular.

Blue-collar Americans took notice when Obama delayed the XL Keystone pipeline that would have generated 20,000 construction jobs and an estimated 118,000 spin-off jobs.

Kimberly A. Stossel who writes Potomac Watch for The Wall Street Journal, noted in November that, mostly due to the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts, “the Obama administration has done more to kill working-class industries than any modern predecessor, adding that “Among the reasons the GOP regained control of the House in 2010 was the fact that “the white working class surged to give the GOP a record 63% of their vote.”

As Rove noted, “America is not a nation of amnesiacs.” And neither should you be. Keep the facts cited in mind.

Remain calm and come together behind whoever the GOP selects as its candidate.

No desertions.

No faint hearts.

No conspiracy theories.

No third parties.

Just the defeat of Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Pundits, Primaries and Polls

By Alan Caruba

In the event you did not read about it at the time, the Prohibition Party met in June 2011 and nominated Jack Fellure as their presidential candidate. The Socialist Party USA held their convention in October, nominating Stewart Alexander. The Constitution Party will meet in April and the Libertarian party will gather in May 2012. The Green National convention will not be held until July.

You are likely to hear a lot about the 2012 Republican national convention at the end of August in Tampa, Florida and the Democratic national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina in early September.

To save you any anxiety involved with the latter, Barack Hussein Obama will be the Democratic nominee unless someone checks the U.S. Constitution which specifically states that only a “natural born” (both parents must be citizens) American can run for or be President.

The nominees of the two major parties will be determined by state primaries and the one receiving the most attention at this point is Iowa’s on January 3, 2012. Why anyone takes this primary seriously defies the imagination. Iowa caucuses have selected the widely known choice of both major parties with few exceptions. It did surprise folks when Mike Huckabee won in 2008, but his run quickly faded. You have to go back to 1972 for the George McGovern choice that surprised voters.

As this is being written, there is an orgy of news coverage of various polls in which the candidates for nomination rise and fall like the tides. There is little substance to these polls that are the subject of intense news coverage.

It is naïve to think that the liberal mainstream media does not try to influence the outcome with its selective coverage. Recall that just a few weeks ago, Herman Cain was the choice and now they’re claiming Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul will run away with the Iowa vote.

President Obama’s poll numbers regarding his performance in office are so low that his prospects of reelection even at this date are doubtful. The economy, as always, will be the deciding factor and it will not significantly improve by Election Day.

Political operatives will pay far more attention to the New Hampshire primary on January 10, followed by the January 21 primary in South Carolina, and January 31 primary in Florida. Despite several dozen other state primaries, the party convention nominations will have largely been determined by the January primaries.

Politics in America is a blood sport. So much money depends on their outcomes that literally millions are spent to secure victory. The federal government has become a giant spigot of income redistribution. It is so over-leveraged that it must borrow forty cents of every dollar it spends. This year’s outlay of campaign dollars will no doubt top a billion dollars.

Self-interest will be the driving factor among the donors with ideology a close second. Despite being castigated by President Obama, Wall Street will predictably be a major donor to the Democratic Party. Rent-seeking corporations such as General Electric will not be far behind.

I would recommend that you not get caught up in the journalistic frenzy over the entire primary process. Obama will be the Democratic Party nominee and Mitt Romney is likely to be the Republican Party’s choice. It is a cliché, but true nonetheless, that in times of economic crisis, people vote their wallet

Suffice to say I will not be voting for the Prohibition, Green or Socialist Party candidates.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What We Have Here is a Failure to Negotiate

By Alan Caruba

In the movie, “Cool Hand Luke” the warden of a prison camp utters the now famous line, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” The decision of the Democratic members of the Congressional Super Committee to refuse further discussion of revenue issues is a failure to negotiate.

I have a friend, Jim Camp, who is one of the world’s authorities on negotiation, a coach to international corporations and others that engage in multi-million dollar deals requiring major negotiation skills. When the news was reported on Wednesday that the Democratic members had walked away from the negotiation table, I picked up the phone to ask for his reaction.

“We live in an era when the conventional wisdom is that compromise is the goal,” said Camp. “The real goal is a valid mission and purpose. What’s missing is that the committee as a whole is not focused on the real mission which is the best result for the American people and the nation. Instead, their goal is political gamesmanship, a massive over-reach by both parties to the negotiation.”

Based on more than twenty years of coaching negotiations, Camp said "Tactics do nothing more than create conflict." The news media reports on tactics, but Camp said “Neither party is negotiating to the benefit of the American people.”

What is at stake? It’s not whether Democrats or Republicans “win” the Super Committee negotiation.

Created under the Budget act of 2011, the law was passed the first two days of August when the nation’s $14.294 trillion debt ceiling was raised to avoid a potential national default. It was the fourth increase of the mandatory borrowing cap during President Obama’s first term; one that saw the first down-grade of the nation’s top credit rating in its history.

Consisting of six members each from the House and Senate, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, the official name for the Super Committee is the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. The amount of debt is comparable to the annual Gross Domestic Product, meaning that every dollar the economy earns is equal to the amount of debt that exists.

In the basic terms, Democrats want to raise revenue through taxation to address the debt and permit for more spending. Republicans have committed themselves to avoid such an increase during a period of recession.

The decision to walk away from the negotiation reflects one of Camp’s major warnings. “To act according to how you think the other side will react to you and your actions creates great conflict. To think you know what someone is going to do or say based on how you impact them is to attempt suicide.”

It would be naive to think that the Democrat and Republican members of the Super Committee are not negotiating with an eye on the 2012 elections. As a November 10 Wall Street Journal editorial notes, Republicans have offered a plan "to raise revenues by $500 billion over 10 years as part of a tax reform that would lock in lower rates in return for giving up deductions. Democrats have rejected it, which is puzzling since it would achieve so many of their stated goals."

Refusing to negotiate makes sense only if Democrats are positioning themselves to blame the Republicans for the failure to avoid another potential down-grade of the nation's credit rating. It's not the truth, but the truth is often a rare commodity in politics.

“What we are witnessing,” said Camp, “is a textbook definition of incompetence.”

All negotiation, says Camp, is based on emotion. When both sides share a vision of the end result of the negotiation it can move forward. When emotions blind one or both sides, it is doomed.

As a recent Los Angeles Times editorial noted, in order to slash federal borrowing by at least $1.2 trillion over the coming decade, “members will have to bridge a deep partisan divide over taxes, spending programs, and the effect of government spending on the economy.”

That is the mission, the purpose of the Super Committee, and the editorial warned that “If they have any doubts about the need to cut a deal, however, they should turn their attention to what’s happening on the other side of the Atlantic.”

The turmoil in Europe, based on decades of excessive borrowing and spending by several nation-states, is a reflection of how critical it is for the Super Committee to achieve its mission.

Automatic cuts, not guided by the need, for example, of maintaining our military strength could have disastrous consequences if the U.S. was perceived as weakened and vulnerable by its enemies. Diminishing our military capabilities at this time is not an option.

The Super Committee is an admission of the failure of the U.S. Congress to fulfill its responsibility to conduct the nation’s borrowing and spending in a prudent fashion and it’s been a failure in which both Parties have participated for a very long time.

The deadline for the Super Committee to reach agreement is November 23, the day before Thanksgiving and one side has walked away from the table.

I wish the Super Committee could bring Jim Camp in to help resolve the impasse. Simply stated, failure is not an option.

Editor’s note: Jim Camp is the founder of the Camp Negotiation Institute and the author of “Start with No” and “No, the Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home” which has been translated into twelve languages.

© 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

Obama is Determined to Destroy America

By Alan Caruba

It is astonishing that Barack Obama seemingly learned nothing from the 2010 national elections in which the Republicans regained control of the House with a net total of 63 seats. For the Democrats it represented the greatest loss in the House midterm election since 1938, which occurred nearly ten years into the Great Depression.

It is the House that determines the spending and borrowing to maintain the nation, though the President traditionally sends a budget. Obama did not. Indeed, as Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has said, Obama has never put anything on paper. Negotiating Obama's demands have changed week to week and now day to day.

What has happened to “No drama Obama”? The present impasse, topped by an angry press conference late Friday afternoon is entirely of his making. Neither the White House, nor the Democrats in Congress have put forth any plans, let alone any numbers, other than to propose tax increases, now euphemistically called “revenue” increases.

The 2010 Democrat losses in the House are largely attributed to the passage of Obamacare, a piece of legislation that was not only widely protested, but that led to the Tea Party movement and new members of the House representing its common sense agenda. The House subsequently voted to repeal Obamacare and it is being contested in the courts by 26 States.

What Americans have witnessed over the first two years of his term is Obama’s continual blaming of all problems on either his predecessor or the Republicans in Congress. What they are witnessing is the duplicity of a man who appears incapable of telling the truth from day to day.

The nation is in for a week of “high drama”, all of which could have been avoided had Obama agreed to any of the proposals put foreword by Republicans from Paul Ryan to members of the so-called “gang of six.” In the Democrat controlled Senate there has been nothing but obstruction.

One senses that this is exactly what Obama wants. While saying he does not want the U.S. to default on its obligations, what better way to destroy the nation than to destroy its “full faith and credit” regarding its debts?

The emphasis the Founding Fathers put on the necessity to meet the nation’s debts can be found in Article VI of the Constitution. “All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.”

Article I, section 7, states “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.”

There is no mystery as to how the U.S. can recover from the present recession. Government spending must be reduced. Tax rates must be reduced for corporations and the middle class to encourage investment, growth and more employment. Entitlement programs will have to be revised to ensure they can meet their obligations. They represent sixty percent of all government expenditures.

A government that must borrow forty cents of every dollar to pay its debts and whose current debt of $14 trillion equals the entire annual gross domestic product of the nation is endangering the present and future economy for present and future generations of Americans.

At this writing, it looks as if Obama intends to deliberately implode the nation’s ability to meet its obligations and he has used the most raw fear tactics to achieve his goal, falsely claiming that Social Security checks would not be sent, that the military would not be paid.

If ever a President was begging for impeachment the time for such action has arrived. The evidence that he was ineligible to run for office and to hold it is beyond question, if only because he was not a “natural born” American whose both parents were citizens. His father was a citizen of Kenya.

Raise the debt ceiling. Impeach Obama. America must be set free. What he is attempting to bring about is the worst “change” imaginable in the nation’s history.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Boy President

By Alan Caruba

Any parent or teacher who has tried to hold a conversation with a self-centered, petulant child or teenager knows how frustrating it is to try to get beyond the “I want it and you won’t give it to me” stage. This is the point at which we, the Republican leadership, and others in Congress have arrived with a little boy named Barack Obama.

I know he’s going to turn fifty soon. I know he is married and the father of two girls. I know that outwardly he is an adult, but the “inner child” of Obama has always been on display because it is also the outer child. No need to tick off the evidence of self-indulgence in a job that provides limousines, helicopters, and jet planes, along with all the other perks for the man in the Oval Office bubble.

This may explain why Obama appears to be so detached from the reality of the current financial crisis. All presidents inherit problems from the previous administration and in 2009 no one is suggesting the financial stability of the nation was not challenged.

Here, though, is the problem. After a failed “stimulus” program, after an obscene increase in the nation’s debt, and after the imposition of Obamacare, this president has been in full retreat from virtually every policy he enunciated when taking office. The lone exception has been a relentless attack on the provision of energy to fuel an economy in freefall. The Environmental Protection Agency has become his engine of destruction.

Reality is closing in on President Obama and he still thinks that staged events like his “Twitter” conference will let him escape. Intended to appeal to younger voters, it was impossible to not notice how inarticulate Obama is and how he falls back constantly on trite phrases about “millionaires and billionaires”, “corporate jets”, and the disparity between the rich, the middle class, and the poor.

His abiding theme has been “fairness”, but life is not fair. You don’t get to choose to be born into wealth or poverty. You don’t get to choose your race. Your family’s genetic history may include being prone to cancer or heart attacks. What we can influence, however, is how hard we study in school, whether we choose a vocation or profession, work hard toward acquiring it, and most of all, our attitude about ourselves and others.

The contempt the Boy President feels toward taxpayers is evident in the boldfaced lies he tells about the current tax system, the fact that reducing tax rates actually increases government revenues, and the obvious fact that the federal government is spending too much money.

The nation that delivered itself into his hands was one devoted to profligate spending. In June, the Institute for Truth in Accounting (IFTA) announced the completion of a comprehensive study of all fifty state’s assets and liabilities, including pension and retirement obligations.

Founder and CEO of the Institute, Sheila Weinberg, stated that, “If the governors and legislatures had truly balanced each state’s budget, no taxpayer’s financial burden would exist.” This is an issue of truth versus the razzle-dazzle needed to justify the demands from public service unions that have burdened taxpayers.

“A state budget is not balanced if past costs, including those for employee’s retirement benefits, are pushed into the future.” Only four states, Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, have assets available to pay their debt and obligations.

The U.S. is, we’re told, $14.2 trillion in debt, but this figure likely involves financial obfuscation and is likely far worse if one looks too closely. Others say that the U.S. collects enough revenue to pay off its debts and suggest that the “ceiling”, constantly increased over the years, is largely a piece of political theatricality.

When it comes to who actually pays taxes in America, there is ample evidence that, as of April 15th of this year, nearly half of all Americans would have paid no federal income tax because they owed none under the present tax code. Obama’s demands for fairness look odd under such circumstances.

According to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group, Americans who earn less than $30,000, those who are elderly, and those who are single with children paid no income tax. Not owing federal income tax is not the same as not paying any taxes. Workers are subject to payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare programs. In addition, they pay a wide range of sales taxes as anyone who has checked their telephone bill or filled up their gas tank can testify. A plethora of hidden taxes cut into the income of even the poorest among us.

In 2007, writing in The American, a journal of the American Enterprise Institute, Stephen Moore laid out the facts. Then as now, “a big portion of the federal income tax burden is shouldered by a small group of the very richest Americans. The wealthiest one percent of the population earns 19 percent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab.”

The Bush tax cuts resulted in “more investment, more hiring by businesses, and a stronger stock market,” said Moore.

The Boy President’s demands for more revenues to spend on more federal programs are baseless and his past performance to date has been disastrous.

Fox News analysis and commentator, Brit Hume, recently said, “This President is in as full of a political retreat as this town has seen in many years. He was elected to fix the economy, but people think he and his party have failed and have exploded the nation’s debt in the process.”

The Republican leadership, if it is to have any hope of defeating him in 2012, must now press its advantage and exact, not just short-term compromises, but major reductions in what passes for a Democrat budget…if such a thing even exists.

In the present crisis, Republicans have as much at stake as the Boy President and, indeed, the entire nation.

Obama, increasingly desperate and spasmodically lying to everyone, needs to be driven from office like Frankenstein fleeing from the villagers with their pitchforks and torches.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Destroying the Dollar

By Alan Caruba

Something I never thought I would ever see in my former hometown, a wealthy New Jersey suburb of New York City, was a Dollar Store, but one opened recently in a former supermarket. Dollar Stores are giving Wal-Mart, Target, and similar outlets a run for their money and it’s not hard to see why. The local one has just about everything you could need and all for astonishing low prices.

In countless ways people are looking to save money these days. The looming problem, however, is the question of what happens when Americans wake up to learn that even a dollar can no longer buy anything?

“When Faith in U.S. Dollars and U.S. Debt is Dead the Game is over – And that Day is Closer than You May Think” is the cheery title of an article recently posted on EconomicCollapse.com.

There’s a reason why both the mental condition and the financial condition are called a Depression. It’s hard to be happy about anything when your nation’s currency is not worth the paper on which it is printed. The Federal Reserve’s answer, some fear, is to print more money and to continue to buy U.S. debt with it. It is doubtful, however, this Ponzi scheme will continue.

There isn’t a day that goes by when some U.S. government agency doesn’t send me a news release to announce that it is giving millions for something and, if our elected leaders are negotiating a solution to this insane spending and giving, there is precious little evidence of it.

New unemployment numbers are up. The administration continues to churn out thousands of pages of new regulations. It has stalled the energy sector from oil and gas exploration that could create thousands of jobs. And China is divesting itself of U.S. securities, anticipating a bad outcome for our economy.

Meanwhile, the so-called “entitlement” programs represent sixty percent of all the money the government spends. Without some changes, these programs are unsustainable. The Democrats’ answer is to depict Republicans as wanting to kill grandma.

The Gross Domestic Product

In a Mid-May article posted on American Thinker.com, Randal Hoven spelled out a number of facts that are overlooked in the political battles between liberals and conservatives. “The entire debate is about a difference that is less than 4% of GDP. According to International Monetary Fund figures, government in the U.S. is spending 41% of GDP in 2011. The current debate is about whether government spends 40% or 44% of GDP.”

The government is absorbing far too much of the Gross Domestic Product for its own purposes. We are in a league shared by Greece and other nations with a serious financial crisis.

While the federal and state governments plunders every cent they can extract from those still fortunate to have a job, any investments, or will die at some point, both Republicans and Democrats have participated in expanding government since the last Great Depression.

While President Obama’s constant blaming of George W. Bush for his first two years became a joke, Hoven notes that Bush expanded Medicare with a prescription program and many of the “liberal” programs we conservatives denounce occurred while Bush was president. “No Child Left Behind”? Bush. Outlawing light bulbs? Bush. Ethanol subsidies? Bush.

The absurdity of President Obama’s mantra that millionaires and billionaires be taxed more ignores the fact that such taxes, even if we took all of their money, would barely cover the rate at which government spends and wastes such income.

While negotiations, we’re told, are occurring or will, the greatest impediment is Obama’s open disdain and dislike for Republicans. This cannot be underestimated in terms of finding a solution.

At the heart of our current problems is that, having inherited a financial crisis, Obama devoted the last two years to a government takeover of both the health care industry and the financial sector with two bills, each of which exceeded 2,000 pages and vastly expanded government bureaucracy.

More government control of the economy is the last thing this nation needs at this time. Or any time.

Social Security will be insolvent by 2037 and, together with Medicare, they have unfunded liabilities of $107 trillion in today’s dollars. That is seven times the size of the U.S. economy and ten times the size of the national debt.

The real problem for the United States is the falling confidence and faith in the U.S. dollar. It is the default reserve currency of the world. Just about everything trades in U.S. dollars. It’s not only Americans losing faith in our government’s ability to maintain its value, it is everyone else.

In April, Standard & Poor’s downgraded its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative.” It warned that the U.S. could lose its prized AAA rating. Unless Congress and the current occupant of the White House take specific steps to fix Social Security and Medicare, the dollar compared to other major national currencies will continue to fall. It has fallen 17% since 2009. Moody’s rating service has also issued its own warning.

Pretty soon, nobody will want to buy U.S. securities used to currently borrow 41 cents of every dollar the government spends. The U.S. borrows about $168 million every single hour.

In April, CNSnews reported that “the federal government made $125 billion in ‘improper payments’ in fiscal 2010, more than eleven times the total 2010 spending by the U.S. State Department.”

That’s a government that doesn’t know what it’s doing and isn’t in a hurry to fix it.

That’s why a Dollar Store just opened in one of the most affluent suburbs of New Jersey.

I know the economists and others keep saying that the Recession that began in 2007, ended in 2009. I know they can and will cite all manner of good economic indicators, but if faith in the U.S. dollar continues to falter, it won’t matter.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Liberals Attack America's Security

By Alan Caruba

“Exactly thirty years after Bolshevism consumed St. Petersburg and Moscow, it created a firestorm in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In October 1947 the U.S. Congress held dramatic hearings on the subject of Communist infiltration in Hollywood.”

Now, decades after repeated attacks on U.S. embassies, U.S. Marines in Beirut, the USS Cole, and, of course, nearly a decade since 9/11, Rep. Peter King is holding hearings on Islamic radicalization in America, the kind that led to the murder of soldiers at Fort Hood and which The Wall Street Journal identified as “more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil.”

The similarities between the 1947 House Committee on Un-American Activities and Rep. King’s hearings are remarkable and, in both cases, the mainstream media played an extraordinary role in depicting them as a witch hunt. That metaphor was used by playwright Arthur Miller when he wrote “The Crucible” and Miller’s application to join the Communist Party of United States of America was one of the items the Committee made public.

Along with revelations that many Hollywood scriptwriters were CPUSA members, sworn to obey Russia and their Soviet masters and that a number of Hollywood stars had been duped by Communists to lend their names to anti-American activities has long been subsumed by a relentless campaign to depict the Committee as Un-American, not those working to undermine America. At the heart of that campaign, then and now, was the mainstream media and those in academia.

Liberals will always embrace totalitarian governments and movements. From Jane Fonda to former President Jimmy Carter, liberals have always seen America as the enemy and worked to further the aims of our enemies.

The opening quote to this commentary came from “Dupes”, a book by historian Dr. Paul Kengor that reveals not only the names and activities of Communist dupes in America from the years just following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the present day.

That history has been largely re-written by the many liberals in the nation’s media and in its colleges and universities. Among the most famous advocates of the Soviet Union were leading academics and, today, the revolutionaries of the 1960s, including some who bombed U.S. facilities, are found on America’s campuses, indoctrinating new generations.

To give you an idea of how great the threat to America truly is, Rep. King and his family have been protected, according to the Associated Press, by “round-the-clock security” provided by the New York Police Department and the Nassau County, N.Y. police.” Capitol police secured the congressional hearing room and surrounding areas, as well as his office.”

And, then, true to the media agenda to undermine and disparage the current and past hearings, the Associated Press report noted that “Critics have likened them to the McCarthy-era hearings investigating communism.” Bingo!

You would have to have read the March 10 Wall Street Journal editorial to learn that, among the efforts by jihadists to attack America being investigated, there were “plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline.”

“Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan’s November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.”

And the White House response in all these cases was, “Do not jump to conclusions.” The Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, led by Janet Napolitano and the Attorney General, Eric Holder, have choked on the words “Muslim terrorist” or even the word “terrorism.”

If you want to see how the purpose of these hearings will be twisted, you need only pay heed to the top ranking Democrat on the committee, Bernie Thompson of Mississippi, who said he believes the hearings could be used to “inspire terrorists.”

Only terrorists don’t need to be inspired by a U.S. Congressional Committee. They are already inspired by the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Watching the Democratic Party Implode

By Alan Caruba

It’s déjà vu for me as I think back to the last two years of Jimmy Carter as his “progressive” program of “sacrifice” and his impotence in the face of the Iranian hostage taking of U.S. diplomats left him looking weak and overwhelmed by events.

George W. Bush did not appear to be anything more than a garden variety Republican President until September 11, 2001. It transformed his presidency from peace to war and Bush had the right instincts for war, but wars in the post-WWII era all seem to stall and stalemate.

No one was in much of a mood to listen to George W. in the final years of his second term. The voters served up a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2006. If this reminds you of the November 2010 elections that transferred power to the Republicans, you’re right

The leviathan of independent voters has moved restlessly back and forth between Democrats and Republicans looking for either party to address the nation’s problems.

While the House changed hands in 2010, the margin in the Senate fell sufficiently for the Republican Minority Leader to have some clout there. Harry Reid has begun to bend to the new reality.

Most effected, however, is President Obama. Politics, events in far-off places, and unpopular domestic decisions have gelled into a general public discontent.

Symbolically in recent weeks Robert Gibbs, his original press secretary, left and was replaced by Jay Carney. While Gibbs was facile, Carney is uncertain, hesitant, and weak at the podium. Then came news that the new social secretary at the White House was an openly gay man, a high profile job historically held by a woman. Two surprising and I predict bad choices.

People talk about turning points in history and I would suggest that, so far as the White House is concerned, those new faces will be regarded in retrospect as a turning point.

The timing was especially bad for the White House as the Democratic Party was once again revealed to be the hostage of the union movement and what people saw on their television screens was ugly and thuggish. Cowardly Democrat Wisconsin senators ran away.

In times when millions of Americans are out of work, union members left their jobs to descend on the state house in Madison, Wisconsin and to hold rallies in Trenton, New Jersey demanding they retain their privileged status. It looked bad. It smelt bad.

Beyond our shores events mercilessly erupted as nations in the Middle East and Africa were caught up in a contagion of anger against a rogue’s gallery of despots and monarchs. The White House issued statements that literally conflicted, one with the other, on a day to day basis. If there was a coherent foreign policy it was barely detectable.

Unprepared, incompetent, the façade surrounding the Obama presidency continued to crumble.

It is an implosion. It is the failure of “progressive” ideas that have not changed and have not worked for a century dating back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt.

It revealed the contempt this President and the Democrats have for the Constitution; ballooning the government with schemes like Obamacare to grow an already too large government larger and more intrusive.

Every new piece of legislation added more people to the government payrolls while ordinary Americans watched the cost of everything rise. So-called stimulus plans did little more than retain government workers or put a bandage on Medicaid behind the façade of short-term construction projects.

We are living in ugly times and Obama’s lies are falling on deaf ears.

The Democrats can no longer convince people that acres of wind farms or solar panels can even begin to provide the electricity the nation needs.

The Democrats cannot make a case for $40,000 electric cars when the nation’s entire transportation structure is based on gasoline and diesel.

The Democrats can no longer justify refusing to let American companies drill for American oil, particularly when it always cheaper than imported oil.

The Democrats forced legislation on voters who showed up, a million strong, in Washington to demonstrate their opposition.

The Democrats ran away from state legislatures rather than debate and vote.

The Democrats favor the unions over the vast majority of non-union workers.

The Democrats will not defend the sanctity of marriage or of life.

Throw the bums out.

© Alan Caruba, 2011