America Elected an Ignoramus

By Alan Caruba

I do not write unpleasant things about Barack Hussein Obama because he is a Democrat, a far-left liberal ideologue, a confirmed liar, or the sock-puppet of whatever cabal that chose him long ago to be the President. I write unpleasant things because he is all of these things, but also because he is the most stupid man to have ever held the office of President.

As far back as January 2, 2010 I wrote that Obama had “a make-believe life” because there was no proof that anything he claimed in his two memoirs, written by the age of 45, was true. His resume listed “community organizer”, an amorphous term that could mean anything, as his primary occupation. By October 2010 the Washington Times published a commentary of mine that said “millions of Americans are beginning to ask: Is President Obama just a moron?”

Even prior to his election, he had ensured that his entire paper trail of birth certificates, passports, college records, and other items most people can produce in under five minutes were “sealed” from public review, despite the fact that most modern presidents have had to submit their personal records, short of a colonoscopy exam, for examination. Among his first executive orders was one issued on January 21, 2009 to ensure none of these records saw the light of day.

When he finally produced a birth certificate, forensic analysts deemed it a forgery.

So, what really occurred on Election Day in 2008 was that a majority of voters, guided by an adoring mainstream press, elected an enigma. He rewarded their obsequiousness by being the first President since Grover Cleveland to not attend their annual Gridiron dinner.

Since then, anyone paying any attention has had to conclude that Americans elected an ignoramus, based solely on his own words and actions.

Here’s just a quick look at some of them.

Hans Bader, a scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, addressed recent examples of Obama’s ignorance when he mocked Republicans as members of the Flat Earth Society in Columbus’ day for their skepticism of his green energy policies, among which was a hearty endorsement of algae—pond scum, but Columbus’ contemporaries knew the Earth was round, but doubted he could reach Asia via the Atlantic Ocean. Bader noted that Obama “falsely attributed to Muslims the invention of printing and even falsely claimed that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States as a new nation.”

The problem for many Americans, mostly registered Democrats and self-identified liberals is that his gaffes are dismissed despite the evidence that his policies have proved to be huge failures. His “stimulus” program wasted billions without producing any jobs, shovel-ready or not. We still have an 8.2% unemployment rate.

The fate of Obamacare will be decided shortly by the Supreme Court after 26 States brought suit against it as unconstitutional, but Obama, who was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and taught constitutional law, apparently has not read the document, claiming the judges are “unelected” (they are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) and therefore have no right to pass judgment despite Marbury v Madison that established the Court’s role of judicial oversight.

Obama’s disdain and contempt for just about everyone except Muslims is astonishing. He has insulted just about every element of American society and many world leaders. In ways large and small this has been a constant element of his presidency. After gratuitously insulting doctors, bankers, and the insurance industry, he pushed hard to provide the planner of 9/11 a civil trial without all the protections afforded by the Constitution—in New York City.

Between January and July 2009, Obama sent a bust of Winston Churchill back to the British embassy. He gave the Queen of England an iPod with 40 show tunes, photos of his inauguration, and two of his speeches. Former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was given a box set of 25 DVDs, all in a format that does not work in England. Later, eager to empty Guantanamo, he authorized the transfer of some detainees to a British protectorate, Bermuda, without consultation with the UK.

Obama’s contempt for Catholics has long been on display before the Obamacare demand that they jettison their consciences regarding the sanctity of human life. His nomination of Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic apostate, as Secretary of Health and Human Services earned her a warning from Bishop Joseph Naumann not to present herself for Holy Communion.

His antipathy for Israel and its Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu has been on display from the beginning of his term, at one point admonishing the Israelis for building new housing in their own capitol and at another suggesting they retreat to their 1967 borders, a suicidal notion that Israelis found appalling.

At one point he said, “One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify issues.” His campaign motto was “Yes we can.”

Early on, he sent Air Force One to do a low fly-by of New York City for a photo op, neglecting to tell anyone there and generating 9/11 flashbacks and panics. Then he embarked on a global trip that quickly was dubbed his “apology tour” for an America about which he could little good to cite. At one point, he actually bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. We do not dip our flag to any other and no U.S. President bows to any other state leader, let alone a monarch.

His ignorance has been on display for so long the public hardly takes notice. “I’ve now been in 57 states. I think one left to go,” he said during his 2008 campaign. He referred to “Austrian” as a language when no such language exists; Austrians speak German.

His ignorance of economics is legendary. He referred to a “profit and earnings ratio” when the correct term is price-to-earnings (P/E). He still thinks that, as long as the Federal Reserve can print money out of thin air, the nation can never go broke.

He actually believes the economy will improve if taxes are increased; something that has never before happened in the history of the nation.

Whole books can and will be written about Obama’s ignorance and failures of judgment that Americans will have to live with for a very long time, especially as future generations try to dig out from his tripling of the national debt, the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression, and a housing market that has yet to have rebounded.

Add in gas prices Americans have never seen since gasoline was invented to power our cars and you have a man who is not what he claims to be and is too stupid to be the President of the United States, let along serve as a White House tourist guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Does Obama Want to Lose? Yes!

By Alan Caruba

It seems like a bizarre notion, but does Barack Obama want to lose the election in November?

I think he does!

One is struck by the way Obama has visibly aged in the job. He may well have grown weary being POTUS.

By any rational standard, one would say he wants a second term, but Obama has always operated in a fantasy world where mere words are supposed to translate into reality. And he has repeatedly talked about being a one-term president.

He is, after all, his own invention; the author of two memoirs of a life that had little achievement to point to other than getting elected first to the Illinois legislature and then to the Senate where he lingered a bare two years before running for president.

I raise the question because Obama seems to be deliberately irritating the very people who are supposed to be his “base”; the hard core liberals, the Hollywood crowd, youth, and unions, among others. His partisanship has put Congress into total gridlock.

When members of the Occupy movement showed up in Washington, D.C., one of them threw a smoke bomb onto the White House lawn. Others who have been camped out in a park there are likely to be tossed out if for no other reason than the place is overrun with rats and has become a public health hazard.

The decision to stop the Keystone pipeline is a deliberate offense to the unions that have contributed millions to his campaign. Why? It pleased the environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. Americans, however, understand the pipeline represented both jobs and oil, two things they deem worth having.

Then there are all the vacations Obama and his family takes. They have one thing in common. They are ostentatiously expensive. Obama or Michelle always seem to be going on vacation or returning from one. The characterization may be unfair, but perception is everything.

Americans are very keen on their military and, of all the government programs Obama could have chosen to trim, he’s had the knives out for the Pentagon since he took office. While a war-weary public was likely pleased when he withdrew troops from Iraq (neither Bush, nor Obama had a choice as the Iraqis made it clear they wanted U.S. troops out), the fact remains that the main news out of Iraq these days are bombings as the Sunni versus Shiite conflict has returned. Afghanistan remains a millstone.

Even in the face of a clear threat, it is unlikely that Obama would respond militarily between now and Election Day. The most likely scenario, however, would be an Israeli decision to strike at Iran before it becomes a full-fledged nuclear threat. It must be said, however, that Obama and other NATO nations have positioned some military assets in the Persian Gulf, but would he pull the trigger? It’s doubtful.

The most obvious problem Obama faces is unemployment. It’s variously set at anywhere from 11% to 20% depending on the part of the nation you’re discussing. It still is far too high everywhere and he gives every impression of being, if not indifferent to it, at least in no hurry to address it. Most certainly none of his programs have reduced it. His alleged “stimulus” was little more than a political slush fund that added billions to the national debt and failed.

Every President is subject to “events” and the likely default of Greece and financial troubles of several European nations are likely to impact the national election as Americans try to sort out what effect it will have here. Obama has already presided over the first downgrade of America’s debt rating and we shall surely be reminded of that in the months ahead.

The other event will be the Supreme Court hearing of the case against Obamacare in March. They may not issue a decision right away or they might issue one just before November 6th.

There are two lines of thought about the forthcoming national election. Past Presidents were relieved to leave office despite its power and prestige. (1) Obama may not like being President and (2) he has concluded that he will be defeated. He gives the impression of not caring about public opinion anymore.

The only people publicly defending him seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder. Either they haven’t paid attention to what a disaster his term has been thus far or they just don’t think it’s his fault.

I think he will go through the motions, but I also think a majority of voters no longer believe a word he says anymore.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

35 Reasons Why Obama Will Lose in 2012

By Alan Caruba

One could make a very long list of reasons why Barack Obama will lose in the November election. Here’s a short list why Obama has already worn out his welcome among the majority of Americans, including some of those who formerly supported him.

As Obama delivers his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, his theme will be “economic fairness”, but more net jobs have been lost on his watch (1,663,000) then any previous president going back to Harry Truman, none of whom presided over such an economic disaster.

1. Blamed all problems on George W. Bush, not the Democrats who had controlled both chambers of Congress since January 3, 2007 until 2010 when the Republicans gained control of the House.

2. Obamacare: challenged by 28 States as unconstitutional, subject of a Supreme Court hearing in March.

3. Supported passage of Cap-and-Trade carbon regulation legislation.

4. A strong advocate of “global warming”; revealed to be a hoax in 2009.

5. His failed multi-billion dollar “stimulus” program.

6. Admitted there were no “shovel-ready jobs.”

7. Mortgage refinance plan deemed a complete failure.

8. Appointment of White House policy “Czars”, one of whom was a Communist.

9. Failed foreign policy; Israel, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

10. Mishandling of BP oil spill; slow to react, shut down all drilling in Gulf of Mexico.

11. Abortive outreach to Muslims

12. Bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia.

13. Stopped the building of the XL Keystone pipeline. Has opposed offshore and domestic oil drilling

14. The Solyndra “Green energy” bankruptcy whose loan guarantee cost taxpayers a half billion dollars.

15. The “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.

16. Sued Arizona for trying to control illegal immigration.

17. A rogue Environmental Protection Agency.

18. Highest federal spending since World War II.

19. Highest budget deficit since World War II.

20. Highest federal debt since just after World War II.

21. Increased federal debt more than all Presidents from Washington to Clinton combined.

22. Highest long-term unemployment since the 1930s.

23. Lowest employment (58.1% if population) since 1983.

24. Lowest home ownership rate since 1965.

25. First downgrade of U.S. debt rating in nation’s history.

26. Refused to support the Defense of Marriage Act.

27. Wanted to shut down Guantanamo.

28. Has expressed hostility to banking sector, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, coal industry, oil industry, and other sectors of the economy.

29. Attempted to stop Boeing from building a manufacturing unit in South Carolina.

30. Government takeover of General Motors.

31. Authorized military action in Libya without Congressional approval.

32. Advocates major cuts to Pentagon budget for U.S. military

33. Continues to hide college records, passport and Social Security number information.

34. Questions exist about whether he is a “natural born” citizen as required by the U.S. Constitution.

35. Does not tell the truth.

And Obama gives little indication that he likes America, its values, its history, its military, and its role in the world.

I could go on, but voters who ignore any or all of these factors, keeping Barack Obama in office for another four years, would doom the nation to a Third World status, to default, and the end the greatest experiment in freedom and liberty the world has ever known.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's Keystone Debacle

By Alan Caruba

Future historians may conclude that President Obama’s decision to reject a permit for the building of the XL Keystone pipeline was a key factor in his defeat for a second term in 2012.

One can only hope that, in the course of the campaign, Republicans will focus public attention on the deliberate “no energy” policies of the Obama administration that have thwarted the creation of jobs, the generation of electrical power for homes and businesses, as well as fueling our transportation needs.

The Obama administration policies also meant that billions in tax revenue have been lost. Tapping U.S. energy reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil would also be a major step toward greater national security, freeing the nation from dependence on foreign oil.

In a recent article posted on The Heritage Foundation’s website, Rob Bluey reported that “oil and natural gas production on federal lands is down by more than forty percent (40%) compared to ten years ago.”

“Under the Obama administration, 2010 had the lowest number of onshore leases issued since 1984. The Obama administration held only one offshore lease sale in 2011.”

Following the President’s announcement regarding Keystone, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, Thomas Pyle, said that “Tens of thousands of American jobs died today because of the president’s rejection of the Keystone EL pipeline permit. For more than two years, the administration has delayed, hoping to get past 2012 without having to reveal the president’s true anti-job, anti-energy agenda. Because of today’s announcement, Americans will continue to send $70 billion overseas every day to purchase foreign oil.”

The secret President Obama wants to keep from Americans is that the price of domestic oil is always cheaper than foreign oil. Oil industry expert, Seldon B. Graham, Jr. says that this price deferential is “never reported by the media. The media only reports Wall Street speculators’ guesses of oil prices six months in the future…the U.S. price is always lower than the OPEC price.”

In February 2011, a CNS News article reported that “A new study says drilling on Alaska’s Outer Continental Shelf could make Alaska the eighth largest oil resource province in the world—ahead of Nigeria, Libya, Russia and Norway.”

In announcing the decision on the Keystone pipeline, the President boasted that, under his administration, “domestic oil and natural gas production is up”, but Bluey pointed out that “The vast majority of America’s new oil and gas production is happening on private lands in states like North Dakota, Alaska, and Texas.” Private, not public lands. One result is that North Dakota’s unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, the lowest in the nation.

Who favored the president’s decision?

An environmental organization, Green for All, hailed the decision. Its CEO, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, said, “This project would have helped Big Oil and their allies get richer at the expense of American workers and permanently damaged our environment.” How does it help to kill 20,000 jobs and an estimated 100,000 related to the pipeline?

The Sierra Club, another environmental organization, claimed that the pipeline would bring “toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada to refineries and ports in Texas.” If it was corrosive, it could not be transported by a pipeline, but ethanol which is mandated for use in gasoline is so corrosive it cannot be transported by pipeline and requires fleets of trucks instead. Echoing Green for all, the Sierra Club said, “Thank President Obama for standing up to Big Oil and rejecting the Keystone XL oil pipeline.”

Friends of the Earth, another environmental organization, branded Big Oil as “one of the most profitable and most unscrupulous industries on the planet.” Profits equal dividends for investors in oil companies. Profits equal jobs for thousands of Americans. Profits ensure that more oil can be discovered and extracted…except on federal lands and offshore because of present administration policies.

By contrast, James M. Taylor, a Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy of The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, said, “The Obama administration has confirmed the fears of everyday Americans that it is more interested in paying off environmental extremists and other far-left groups than it is in laying the foundation for a growing economy.”

“The Obama administration’s decision to block construction of the Keystone XL pipeline demonstrates as poignantly as a slap in the face that President Obama is either completely out of touch with the American people or is callously indifferent about our ongoing economic woes,” said Taylor. “I suspect that in the November elections voters will severely punish President Obama for this foolish decision.”

I suspect Taylor is right!

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's "Fairness" is Pure Communism

By Alan Caruba

It is clear that Barack Obama’s main campaign theme is going to be about “fairness.” This is one of those words like “hope” and “change” that can mean many different things to different people. No one can ever accuse Obama of clarity. He is a consummate sloganeer, but the results of those slogans hardly represent anything resembling fairness. Or success.

The one incontrovertible fact about life is that it is not fair.

Some are born into wealth and some into moderate means and some into poverty. Moreover, some are born with inherent gifts and talents, while others are not. Some are born into “dysfunctional” families where a parent or parents are alcoholics or use illegal drugs, in jail or just gone.

The list of the plus and minuses in life are long and varied; city-born, country-born; the lure of gang life versus the expectation of rising early to do farm chores. Inner city schools versus suburban ones with greater budgets and opportunities. There is no real fairness and those who see the obstacles and overcome them do so because of an innate desire to achieve their goals.

One young man who comes to mind was born to a white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in Hawaii with a black father, Barack Obama Sr., from Kenya who in fairly rapid order divorced her and returned to an African wife he already had. His mother then married another foreigner, Lolo Soetoro, a Muslim from Indonesia, moving to Jakarta with her young son whom he adopted. When that marriage collapsed, she turned the care of her son over to her parents. One might not consider this the most promising beginning in life.

Barack Obama, however, got lucky. His grandparents ensured he attended a private school, Punahou, where he received an above-average education. He enrolled in colleges, eventually making his way to Columbia University and onto Harvard University Law School. Much of the information regarding his academic life remains shrouded. Indeed, we only “know” what Obama told us in two “memoirs” written at an early age about a life of relatively little achievement until politics propelled him into office in Illinois and then to the U.S. Senate where he spent barely two years before seeking the presidency.

Where did fairness play a role in any of this? Was it “fair” to be biracial? Was it fair to secure an education at well-respected institutions to which others were not admitted? So much of Obama’s life seems to hinge on remarkable, impenetrable happenstance and good fortune, but at this point he tells us that he is obsessed with the issue of “fairness.”

In a speech in December he talked of everyone engaging in “fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.” It sounds nice, but it has nothing to do with hard work, self-improvement, personal motivation, and good values.. We look around us in any office or workplace and can pick out one or two that fit this description while the rest engage in psychological warfare and backstabbing.

For all this talk of fair share and fair play, Americans have lived through three years of Obama and have nothing to show for it beyond massive unemployment, lost homes, dislocation, food stamps, graduating into the world with a national debt that is equal to the Gross Domestic Product.

There are fewer real opportunities, no matter what one’s background or resume may be. It is fair the nation has been saddled with six trillion dollars in new debt since he took office? It is fair that future generations must pay this debt?

Obama is obsessed with what he regards as the unfairness of the income tax system, forever decrying what he perceives as differences in the rate the wealthy pay. In fact, the wealthy pay far more taxes than most Americans and some 40% of Americans pay no tax whatever.

The National Taxpayers Union’s figures for 2009 reveal that the top 1% of taxpayers paid 36.73%, the top 5% paid 58.66%, the top 10% paid 70% to the point where the top 50% paid 97.75%. The rest paid a mere 2.25% of incomes taxes that year. Is that fair?

Obama’s belief in the redistribution of income is hardly fair. Taking money from decent, hard-working Americans and giving it to those who won’t work or came here illegally hardly fits the description of fairness. It is, however, the classic definition of “economic justice” which gave us the 2008 financial meltdown when bad housing loans nearly destroyed the banking system.

As Mitt Romney campaigns in South Carolina for its primary election, a collection of yelping dogs are nipping at his heels, crying about how horrible it was that he was a practitioner of venture capitalism, cruelly destroying jobs, and growing wealthy. Newt Gingrich called it “vulture capitalism.” It is all a distortion of the truth and, worse, betrays a total lack of understanding of capitalism, the greatest job creator in the history of the world.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial, “Bain Capital has been a net job and wealth creator.” Citing just one example, Staples, Romney’s investment enabled the company to grow to a point where it currently employs 90,000 people. Also noted was the fact that some of Bain’s investments did not pan out. That is the nature of capitalism and it is often not fair.

Americans got burned by Obama’s “hope and change” mantra in 2008 and those who fall for his “fairness” mantra in 2012 will suffer a similar fate.

As for me, I am going to cast my vote for a man who made his wealth within and because of a system that rewards risk and the ability to pick more winners than losers.

I am going to avoid a president who has proven to be the biggest loser this nation has ever seen.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits

By Alan Caruba

It’s a little known event, perhaps because its participants want it that way, but as the new year is poised to begin, the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits gathered at an undisclosed location for their annual review of all the predictions they made regarding things that did not occur, all the events that did occur—taking them by complete surprise, and to exchange notes on their thoughts regarding 2012.

The philosopher Aristotle had it right when he said “Stuff happens.”

This particularly applied to the third year of Barack Hussein Obama’s extended vacation as President of the United States of America. He ended the year comparing himself to previous presidents whose shoes he is not fit to shine and whose bathwater he is ill equipped to draw.

On January 2, 2010, I wrote that I thought Obama’s life, at least in the chronology and facts that were presented to the public, was a pure fiction, make believe.  By then Americans had experienced a year’s worth of ineptitude that left anyone paying any attention astonished. It was just one blunder after another.

Even more astonishing is that no court, no one in Congress, and no one in the Republican Party has dared to say that the man was and remains ineligible to be President. Plenty of other people have said it. My friend, Dr. Jerome Corsi, wrote a whole book about it; two in fact.

The glaring truth that no one wants to address is the fact that his father was a citizen of Kenya and, as such, the terms of the U.S. Constitution which require that only “natural born” citizens—those whose both parents are U.S. citizens—can hold the office of President.

When you add in the serious doubts over the authenticity of his birth certificate—declared a fake by document experts and the dubious authenticity of his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he never worked a day in his life, and you have enough evidence to send him packing in less than 24-hours.

Even so, the Democratic Party will put him on the ballot again to run for office in 2012. The legality of this is no more likely to be challenged than it was in 2008, though some are trying. The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits was left to scratch their heads and mumble about the strangeness of this.

There was one thing they agreed upon. Barack Hussein Obama is the worst President the nation has ever had to endure.

No other president even comes close. He is the first to preside over the first U.S. sovereign debt downgrade in American history.

He has been responsible for the highest level of federal spending (25% of GDP) since World War Two and, in a comparable fashion, the highest level of federal debt (67% of GDP) since then as well.

Employment is the lowest since 1983 and long-term unemployment (45.9%) is the highest since the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression.

The rate of home ownership (59.7%) is the lowest since 1965 and the percentage of taxpayers paying income tax is the lowest in the modern era. At the same time, the level of government dependency (47%), those persons receiving one ore more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.

Obama and his economic advisors have achieved this in just three years while others in his administration were authorizing millions in loan guarantees to “Green” companies going bankrupt with alarming predictability or producing heavily subsidized products that no one wanted to purchase. Others we’re told were unaware of a Department of Justice program to run guns to drug cartels in Mexico. Plans to shut down Gitmo were quietly shelved. The Bush-Cheney policies were quietly extended.

Within twenty-four hours of the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Baghdad was besieged by bombings while the prime minister was busy trying to arrest and indict the vice president. You cannot make up stuff like this.

We are now mere months away from the Supreme Court hearing a case regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare. It is normal for judges who have had any previous involvement in a case or those close to it to recuse themselves from participating, but the Obama administration is so marked by a lack of ethics that his former Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now an Associate Justice, has still not announced her decision.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Obamacare, the federal government can require you to spend your money on things you do not want and may not need.

This is why the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits ended in a state of mass confusion and despair. Just like it did in 2010.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

America's Communist President

By Alan Caruba

In his extraordinary book, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century”, the historian, Dr. Paul Kengor, stated in his introduction that “We now know that American Communists and their masters in Moscow were acutely aware that they could never gain the popular support they needed to enlist the support of a much wider coalition that could help them push their private agenda.”

Most threatening, however, was Dr. Kengor’s discovery that “it was nothing short of stunning to research this book during the presidential bid of Barack Obama and hear so many of the names in my research surface repeatedly in the background of the man who became president of the United States of America. The way in which so many names and themes from the Cold War past aligned and made their way into Obama’s orbit was chilling.”

Obama’s December 8th speech in Osawatomie, Kansas revealed to anyone paying any attention that the President is a Communist. Speaking of the nation’s economic system that has created the greatest wealth for the most people anywhere, Capitalism, Obama said, “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

No one would argue that capitalism is “fair”, nor would they argue that life is “fair.” These are things that never were and never will be, but Obama’s reelection campaign theme will be that Americans are suffering because of Capitalism, because of a lack of fairness.

In a December 8 Washington Times commentary, Jeffrey T. Kuhner wrote, “There is only one problem with the White House’s narrative: It’s completely false. Mr. Obama is not a defender of the middle class but has been its mortal enemy. His policies have impoverished working-and-middle-class Americans.”

Other than the utterly brain-dead liberals for whom facts are meaningless, most Americans understand, as Kuhner pointed out, “His massive stimulus failed to restore economic recovery…his trillion-dollar deficits and skyrocketing debt have mortgaged the future of our children…Obamacare suffocates businesses, stifles job creation, and adds another unsustainable entitlement. It is creeping socialized medicine, which is wrecking the world’s finest health care system.”

Rush Limbaugh denounced the speech as “alien to American ideals and principles…your vision for this country is not rooted in any—not one—American tradition.”

Obama’s history, what is known of it given his extensive efforts to hide the facts that are usually available about a candidate or president, is testimony to the fact that he is a Communist and the only reason this remains clouded to many Americans has been the shameful failure of the Fourth Estate, the liberal mainstream media, to expose it.

He remains in office due to the failure of both the media and the Republican Party to cite the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against anyone holding the office who is not a “natural-born” American. Obama’s father was a Kenyan, a subject of Great Britain. He should not have been on the Democratic Party ballot and he should not be in the Oval Office as this is written.

Many of the known facts about Obama were published in Dr. Jerome Corsi’s 2008 book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.” Thirty-five pages of footnotes citing the documentation of the facts cited were there for anyone to read. Obama was born into a family of Leftists. As a youngster he was mentored by Frank Marshal Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA.

Of his early college years, Obama said in his memoir that at Occidental, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

Obama’s political career began with a fund-raiser in the living room of two dedicated, self-identified Communists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. As Dr. Corsi pointed out, “The problem is that Obama sought out his relationships with the Alinski organization, the Ayers-Dohrn radicals, the scandal-ridden (Antoin ‘Tony’) Rezko, Reverand (Jeremiah) Wright and black-liberation theology, and Farrakhan and the Black Muslims. At the time he wanted these ties.” In the course of his 2008 campaign he rejected all efforts to tie him to these individuals.

The appointment of the many “czars” to oversee and guide the actions of government departments and agencies became the subject, first of ridicule, followed by the realization he was infiltrating the government with known radicals of different stripes. The one that quickly gained attention was Van Jones, an avowed Communist. When that became known, Jones resigned.

The Osawatomie speech was classic Obama. In the past he has sought to align himself with former presidents and this time around it was Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive. As Americans have sought to peel away the many layers of deceit surrounding Obama, the single abiding factor in his life is Communism. The views he expressed were a combination of class warfare and an attack on Capitalism.

In 2008 Americans, reeling from the financial crisis that all too conveniently began in the final months of the Bush43 presidency, were duped into believing that a man with nothing more than a message of “hope and change” was a messiah that would lead the nation out of its problems.

Obama was and is the first Communist President of the United States of America. We have a President who rails against “millionaires and billionaires”, corporations, Wall Street, and all other aspects of our Capitalist economy.

We have a President and a Democratic Party that have tipped their hat to the Occupy Wall Street radicals.

We have a President and a Democratic Party totally aligned with the unions in America, some of which put the auto industry in jeopardy, others in the public sector that have plundered state treasuries with sweetheart deals for pensions and health plans, and who we have seen thuggishly oppose the restructuring of collective bargaining. It is why a close ally of Obama, Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SIEU), praised the Chinese Communist economic model in a December 1 Wall Street Journal article.

And we now have a President who says Capitalism “doesn’t work” and “It has never worked.” That is utterly absurd, but it reveals his ideology and his goal of fomenting a Communist revolution in America by bankrupting the nation to achieve it.

Obama is a horrid aberration, the result of a combination of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, and the education community to dumb down Americans and make them ready for the Communist America that Obama advocates.

Communism did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is alive and well in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and in Venezuela. The soft form, Socialism, has brought a number of European nations to ruin and threatens the U.S.

In 2010 Americans returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. We must finish the job in the Senate and in the White House in 2012. If we do not, the America we love will perish.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

America's Biggest Turkey: Barack Obama

By Alan Caruba

The 2012 national elections will be held on November 6 and I naturally want to get out ahead of all the other pundits and their predictions about its outcome. I cannot tell you who the Republican winner will be, but I can tell you that Barack Hussein Obama will be known as a former President.

He has most certainly turned out to be the biggest loser—a turkey—to hold the office of president. I can look back over my writings in 2008 and say “I told you so!” to anyone who voted for Obama.

It was surreal to watch how the mainstream media went out of its way to ignore the fact that there were virtually NO FACTS to cite regarding Obama-the-candidate. Any candidate who had gone to the extent of hiding the ordinary “paper trail” that all of us leave when we attend school, college, serve in the military, acquire a Social Security card, travel, or simply acquire friends and acquaintances, surely had something to hide.

To this day, no one seems to recall being in college with Obama, though he attended Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. Surely you would think someone would pen a word or two of their memories of him. No student in the classes he taught on the Constitution at the University of Chicago has shared those days. If he dated anyone prior to Michelle, they remain incognito.

Like the fictional Shadow, Obama seemed to be able to “cloud men’s minds” when it came to any recall or inquiry about him.

The appalling performance of the mainstream media to get Obama elected was captured by Howard Kurtz, a columnist for The Washington Post who, on November 17, 2008, reported that NBC News was coming out with a DVD titled “Yes We Can: The Barack Obama Story” and that ABC and USA Today were following suit to rush out a book about the election.

“We seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking,” said Kurtz. “Whew! Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed ‘Generation O’?” Kurtz asked, “aren’t media people supposed to resist this kind of hyperventilating?”

The confidence I have in my prediction that he will be unemployed as of the afternoon of January 20, 2013 lies in the fact that he has spent the last three years being rebuffed on one policy or another, not the least of which was the Affordable Health Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.

Rejected by 26 States that brought suit against it, Obamacare’s constitutionality will be addressed by none less than the U.S. Supreme Court; a decision that may come in the spring of 2012. Given the court’s long record of precedents on comparable decision, it’s toast. Recently, in the electoral battleground State of Ohio, voters resoundingly rejected its mandate requiring everyone to buy health insurance under penalty of a fine.


2009 Inaugural Trash

In March 2010 an estimated one million people representing the Tea Party movement marched on Washington, D.C. to protest against passage Obamacare. They were a sharp contrast to the revelers that showed up for Obama’s inauguration and literally left tons of trash in their wake. We have seen this repeated by the Occupy movement participants.

There’s a term in boxing when a boxer has been hit hard enough to make him groggy, “stepping in post holes”, as he staggers around the ring. It seems an apt term for Obama who is finding fewer supporters and defenders beyond the hard core of liberal Democrats.

From promises to close Gitmo to efforts to try Islamic terrorists held there in civil courts, Obama was rebuffed.

Obama’s promises regarding jobs to be created by his “Stimulus” have proved baseless and costly.

On the numbers alone, Obama has been a disaster for America. Obama has presided over the first downgrade in the nation’s credit rating in its history. Federal spending has been the highest (25% of GDP) since World War II. Federal debt (67% if GDP) has been the highest since World War II.

Long-term unemployment (45.9%) is the highest since the 1930s. Those dependent on the government, receiving federal benefits (47%) is the highest in American history.

Obama’s aggressive anti-energy policies are costing jobs from the Gulf of Mexico to the now delayed Keystone XL pipeline and all points in between. Scandals involving the bankrupt Solyndra, a solar panel company and other “green energy” investments and loans are costing him support. This is true as well wherever coal is mined and where they drill for natural gas and oil.

Americans grew tired of his non-stop speeches and gaffs, with or without the Tele-Prompters that became a national joke. Now they must endure a year of his constant campaigning and his non-stop lies about Republicans and everything else.

His penchant for never accepting blame manifested itself in another punchline, “It’s George Bush’s fault.”

In 2010, voters returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. Does anyone at this point seriously think that these and other factors point to an Obama victory in 2012?

He will be defeated and by a margin that will astound everyone.

© 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

Obama's Delusions of Grandeur

By Alan Caruba

Did Obama really think that a 2,000-page takeover of the nation’s healthcare system, passed late on the night before Christmas 2009 in the Senate was going to go unnoticed or unprotested?

Indeed, it was protested when a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. in September 2009 to demand its defeat.

The obscenely misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed because all the Democrats in the Senate voted for it, but in the House 34 Democrats in addition to all the Republican members voted against it on March 21, 2010. The President signed it into law on March 23, 2010.

By November 2010, political power in the House passed from the Democrats to the Republicans and in almost every election before and since Republicans have been the people’s choice. The House voted to repeal Obamacare and that bill sits idle in the Senate that is still controlled by Democrats.

The Supreme Court is expected to take up the case brought against Obamacare by 26 state attorneys general and various amicus curiae. It would be justice, indeed, if it were declared unconstitutional before the November 2012 elections. A new Congress controlled by Republicans would finish it off no matter how the Supreme Court decides, but Obamacare has had a dangerously disruptive affect on the economy.

I have been saying that Obama is a moron since well before it became fashionable to doubt his alleged intelligence. I saw little evidence of it and now, like many others, I am seeing evidence of a man under intense pressure and—to be generous—not handling it well.

We expect our presidents to be able to take the heat. It is the job description.

We learned belatedly that President Nixon was a raving paranoid, convinced that everyone was plotting against him when, in fact, he was plotting against them. He even kept an “enemies list”. The result was the Watergate scandal and it took impeachment proceedings in Congress to finally get him to resign. His successor, Jerry Ford, granted him a pardon and promptly lost the next election. Unfortunately for America, it was won by Jimmy Carter.

I was therefore not surprised when New York Post columnist, Michael Goodwin, made the same connection, writing “While there is no indication Obama is walking the halls of the White House late at night, talking to the portraits of former presidents, as Richard Nixon did during Watergate, the reports explain his odd public remarks.”

In a similar fashion, a recent column by David Limbaugh titled “Obama’s Behavior is Getting Worse” spells out the reasons to doubt his intelligence and judgment, while focusing on his personality and the price we all pay for his failures. Elections have real consequences.

What we know about Obama at this point is that he is a hardcore narcissist who will not take the blame for anything. This is an unpleasant trait in children, but we know, too, Obama is extremely immature.

We know that he spends taxpayer’s money on all manner of foolish things such as loan guarantees to Solyndra and countless other “Green” enterprises that yield either bankruptcy or slim returns. He threw billions at the nation’s unemployment problem without success and, incredibly, is insisting that Congress authorize more of the same.

We know that his “answer” or “fix” for any problem is to give another speech either before a joint session of Congress (usually reserved for a State of the Union speech or the declaration of war). on the campaign trail, or in a hasty press conference where any serious questions evoke the rather tiresome blaming syndrome.

Lately everything is the Republican’s fault even though Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years he held office and still control the Senate. The President’s own party is dragging its feet on his latest “jobs” bill.

For a President of all the people, he makes no secret of the fact that he has no love for people who use corporate jets, for businesses of any size, for bankers, for Wall Street, for physicians and their patients, and people who don’t want to join a union.

Most certainly, he has been actively engaged in bankrupting the nation, achieving in two and a half years (with the authorization of a Democrat-controlled Congress) a national debt that exceeds the total achieved by every prior President from George Washington to George H.W. Bush.

This reflects his penchant for self-indulgence which has been seen in his vacation choices, the lavish lifestyle he maintains in the White House, and his frequent visits to the golf course. His wife seems to think she is the National Nanny, forever hectoring everyone about what and how much they should eat. The administration tried to pass her off as someone who shops at Target!

The worst aspect of all of this is the contempt other nation's leaders feel for him and, in particular, his judgment which impacts events worldwide. He is a great embarrassment for his inept handling of foreign relations. Ironically, after decrying George W. Bush’s conduct of the war on terror, he has adopted every single aspect of it.

His energy policies have favored no energy as his administration attacks coal, oil, and natural gas extraction and use. Unleashing the energy industries would generate thousands of jobs and billions in tax revenue. Lacking adequate energy, America will begin to resemble a Third World nation.

In so many ways, his election has proven disastrous whether it is for the 14 million Americans who cannot find work or those whose homes have been foreclosed. It is a national shame that so many are on food stamps and other government handouts.

We have witnessed a mainstream news media that debased itself, first by ignoring his thin resume and then by ignoring to whatever extent is possible the damage he has done and continues to do.

All Americans must now wait out the election process until November 6, 2012. The good news is that his party will suffer greatly at the polls and America will be rid of Barack Hussein Obama on January 20, 2013.

The nation has taken wrong turns in the past and reversed course. It will do so again.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Jimmy Carter Redux

By Alan Caruba

I actually remember watching and listening to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech given 32 years ago on July 15, 1979. It marked a distinct turning point for the president because it addressed the already large loss of confidence in his leadership and judgment. It confirmed most voters judgment.

The address to the nation has since been called his “crisis of confidence” speech. It was, like most of Carter’s policies, a massive failure, and I had the same feeling when I listened to President Obama’s recent speech to the joint session of Congress, an occasion usually reserved for the State of the Union or a declaration of war.

And yet, and yet, we are living with many of former President Carter’s policies that were so wrong then and are so wrong now. If you were around then, I recommend you read the speech and, if you were born since then, it will amaze you how many really bad ideas Carter put forth that you are still hearing today from President Obama.

Jimmy Carter, a largely unknown Democrat former Governor of Georgia was swept into office on a wave of revulsion against the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal. Had that not occurred it is likely he would not have had much of a chance despite his toothy smile and grab-bag of loony liberal ideas. Four years later, voters voted for a conservative former Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. They kept him around for a second term throughout the 1980s.

On that long ago evening Jimmy Carter thought the best way to address the nation’s mounting economic and energy problems was to blame the voters. It wasn’t his fault. It was ours.

But it was his fault.

As Seldon B. Graham, Jr., the author of “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High”, an oil industry engineer and lawyer, put it, “Globalist Jimmy Carter harmed the USA with a domestic oil windfall profits tax (in 1980), causing a severe recession, (and) loss of half a million jobs…” The windfall profits tax caused US-based oil companies to look elsewhere for oil and to lay off petroleum industry workers here.

Carter, just as Obama, did not understand that profits are what all businesses require in order to expand and invest in their future. It is the same misguided thinking that has Obama saying that “loopholes” in the tax code that encourage oil exploration and extraction should be closed. They are not “loopholes.” They are the same kind of tax policies that are extended to countless businesses.

If we fast-forward to today, we would understand that oil companies annually pay more than $30 billion per year to federal, state, and local governments in order to produce energy in the U.S. Contrast this with the more than a half-billion dollars taxpayers lost when the Obama administration backed a loan to the now bankrupt “green” energy, solar panel firm, Solyndra.

The fact is that America is home to more than 160 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The US is the third largest producer of oil in the world. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal with several centuries’ worth to be mined. The amount of natural gas that can be accessed by fracking technology is incalculable. And the Obama administration can’t even make up its mind about a new oil pipeline from Canada, an economic partner from whom we import a considerable amount of oil already!

We should be energy independent, but Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Barack Obama in 2011 are still blathering away about solar energy. What did Carter want back then?

“I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of the nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.” Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. Reagan removed them. Obama has promised to do the same, but hasn’t.

Carter said, “when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.” We’re still waiting.

In a nation that was the world’s leader in the manufacture of automobiles, Carter proposed “an extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems.” Obama talks about high speed trains that no one wants or needs in the era of airline travel. Created in 1970, Amtrak has never made a profit.

In 1979 Carter said, “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.”

A September 14th Rasmussen poll asking if the nation was going in the right or wrong direction yielded the following analysis: “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters say the country is heading down the wrong track, showing little change from last week. Since January 2009, voter pessimism had ranged from a low of 57% to a high of 80%. This time last year, 65% said the U.S. was heading down the wrong path.”

If Obama wasn’t a far-Left liberal, wasn’t getting some extraordinarily bad advice from those he brought into the White House, and wasn’t a raving egomaniac, he might pause and stop playing political games to blame Congress and Republicans for the present economic crisis. If in the name of “social justice” the federal government--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--wasn’t in the mortgage business, there would not have been a crisis.

The problem for the rest of us is that Obama’s crisis is our crisis too as jobs melt away and businesses large and small wait to see how much more damage his proposals will do to the nation's economy. His solution was to throw a trillion-dollar “stimulus” at the problem in 2009. He has just proposed a half-trillion dollar solution.

Except for the usual percentage of liberals who think Obama will “stop the rise of the seas”, the rest of the nation is left to wait for next year’s elections. That’s our “solution.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Whiff of Secession and Nullification

By Alan Caruba

In May Rasmussen Reports took a survey of a thousand adults asking if they believed that States have the right to secede. “One-in-five Americans believe individual States have the right to break away from the country, although a majority doesn’t believe it will actually happen.”

That a Tea Party movement sprang to life in the midst of the protests against Obamacare and then was instrumental in transferring political power in the House of Representatives in the 2010 election cannot be dismissed. People—lots of them—are increasingly wary of the central government, particularly one that has burdened them with more debt in the last three years than in the entire prior history of the nation.

In October, Pelican Publishing Company will publish “Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century” in which a number of scholars edited by Donald Livingston, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, examine the implications of secession, possibly by regional groupings of States, from the present federal government.

Prof. Livingston is a political philosopher and scholar, the author of two books on the British philosopher David Hume and may well be one of a handful of people who have given serious thought to the question of whether the present Union has either outlived its usefulness or, worse, become a sinkhole of power aggregating to itself total control over the States.

The Tenth Amendment clearly states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

That is true, but I doubt there is a single Governor of any of the fifty States who cannot enumerate the ways the federal government has wrested power from them while imposing costs. When Arizona finds itself the object of a federal legal suit to prevent it from trying to control its border with Mexico, you know there’s a problem.

In an article, “Decentralization for Freedom”, by Prof. Livingston, he raises some issues that are increasingly troubling to a growing number of Americans. He addresses the measures States can take “to protect their citizens from usurpations by the central government.” Among these are the passing of resolutions. “A continuous flood of resolutions from the States about the constitutionality of this or that issue (and widely publicized) would serve to educate the public.”

Thereafter, Prof. Livingston recommends a resort to the Tenth Amendment by State legislators and governors in order to recover usurped authority. We are beginning to see another measure, the refusal to accept federal funding as regards its centralized control of education.

Resistance to Obamacare is based on the question whether the federal government can require individual citizens to purchase something they do not want. The House has passed a measure to repeal it, but it is stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Reverse the situation and you have a federal government telling Americans what they cannot buy, as in the case of the 100 watt incandescent light bulb in use since the days of Thomas Edison.

“Genuine federalism in America can be recovered only by political action in the name of the State’s own authority and not by Supreme Court legalism,” says Prof. Livingston.

“To all of this it is often said that State interposition, nullification, and succession were eliminated as policy options by the Civil War. Brute force, however, cannot settle moral and constitutional question.” While Lincoln did “save the Union”, he did so at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the destruction of the South.

Clearly the central government has grown so large, so unwieldy, so wasteful, and so unresponsive to the problems and costs it has imposed that people are beginning to wonder why 435 Representatives in the House and 100 in the Senate should control the lives, the economy, and the education of more than 300 million people in fifty sovereign States.

The President virtually makes law with “executive orders” and the nine members of the Supreme Court exercises final authority of the constitutionality of laws. Congress is so divided by raw partisanship it is barely functioning.

“The only remedy,” says Prof. Livingston “is territorial division of the Union through secession into a number of different and independent political units.”

“The current central government of the United States hates inequality, but it also fears the people,” says Prof. Livingston, noting that “There is no law an American State can pass that cannot be overturned by the arrogant social engineers of the Supreme Court who in the last fifty years have played with the inherited moral traditions and federative policy of the American people like a quack with a hapless patient.”

“Constitutionally, this means that the States must reassert their sovereignty under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and recall those powers they have allowed to slip out of their hands to the central government.”

This is not a call for anarchy. It is the realization that the modern presidency has aggregated to itself powers it does not have or, in the case of Libya, is ignoring the War Powers Act that limits its ability to engage the nation in conflicts Congress does not ultimately authorize.

It is the realization that every United Nations treaty the United States signs deprives it of its sovereign rights.

It is a call for consideration that regional groups of States with common interests might provide better government within such groups, leaving to the central government the responsibility to protect the nation via a common military, conduct foreign affairs, and return to the gold standard that would protect the value of a common currency.

When one-in-five Americans give credence to the right of secession, it is clear that the problems being experienced in all fifty States, the massive regulation of all activities within those States, the imposition of a centralized “core” curriculum to be taught in all schools, is arousing a rediscovered sense of liberty among Americans.

What steps must be taken to retain that liberty and even to restructure the Union are as yet undetermined, but they are increasingly entering the public debate.

There is no debate that something is terribly wrong when a president is elected whose eligibility and legitimacy is in serious question while the courts do nothing to address this critical constitutional issue and the Congress does nothing while sending bills for his signature.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The General Motors Debacle

By Alan Caruba

I received an email from my friend, Seldon B. Graham, Jr., a veteran of the oil industry, possessing both engineering and law degrees. I first became aware of him through his book, “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High.”

“After years of my campaigning for transparency and full disclosure, the media still does not give the American public the actual price of OPEC foreign oil or the actual price of U.S. oil. Who in America knows that the actual price of OPEC foreign oil last week was $119.82 per barrel? Who in America knows that the actual price of U.S. oil, which is always lower than OPEC foreign oil, last week was $4.86 cheaper? Now, you are some of the very few who know.”

“Why isn't the media disclosing the actual oil prices to the public? Someone might figure out that American consumers could save $4.86 x 3.3 billion barrels of foreign oil annually = $16 Billion annually if US oil replaced foreign oil imports. Doesn't everyone in America want cheaper gasoline?”

I don’t know anyone in America who doesn’t want cheaper gasoline except for President Barack Obama and his Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu. And therein lies the problem because, between moratoriums on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, obstacles to increased drilling in Alaska (not even including ANWR), and the general ban on any offshore drilling along U.S. coastlines, the likelihood that Americans will have access to their own less costly oil, barely exists.

It really doesn’t get much dumber than this unless, of course, you consider the Obama administration’s bailout of General Motors. Amidst a bevy of costly bailout measures in 2009, Obama stepped in to “rescue” GM when, in fact, all it had to do is step aside and let the company file for bankruptcy, get restructured, and begin again. Countless companies, large and small, do this every year. The rescue, however, was not about GM so much as it was the United Auto Workers, a union that was largely responsible for putting GM in the poor house.

Fast forward to 2011 and reports that the U.S. government, Treasury, plans to sell off “a significant share of its remaining stake in General Motors Co. this summer.” Despite a much heralded initial public offering of stock last November, beginning in January 2011, the stock’s value had fallen 18 percent, “to about $31, which is $2 below its IPO price.

In January, Investor’s Business Daily grabbed reality by the scruff of its neck, shook it, and reported, “The bailout of General Motors wasn't supposed to cost taxpayers. In fact, the promise was that taxpayers would profit. Now the government says the bailout's a loser. No one should be surprised. Washington has handed out $50 billion to General Motors and another $35 billion to Chrysler and GMAC to keep those companies in business. Taxpayers were told their money wouldn't end up lost in a rat hole.”

A variety of factors have contributed to shareholder and investor confidence in GM and The Wall Street Journal cited “the rise in gas prices” as one of them because it “hurt sales of big, highly profitable trucks.”

It didn’t help that the Obama administration insisted that GM step up its electric car program, always notoriously unprofitable, or that the steering wheels on some Chevy Cruze models literally came off in the driver’s hands!

Of the 61 percent ownership the government once owned, it is now down to 26 percent, but to break even, the government would have to sell at $53 per share whereas it is now priced at less than $30 per share, a new low as of April 19.

The original “investment” was $50 billion. Estimates of the sell-off of remaining shares suggest a loss of more than $11 billion if the shares were sold now.

It’s one thing if some speculator takes a loss and that happens all the time, but when it is John Q. Public’s money, the expectation is that would be more cautiously managed. Nothing about the GM bailout suggests this. The dismal results of the alleged “stimulus” funding that was supposed to generate thousands of jobs can be summed up in the statistic that only 45% of Americans are working these days.

No matter which way the taxpayer turns, the decisions made by the Obama administration has resulted in the loss of billions, an unemployment rate that resembles some third world nation, and obdurate resistance to the proposed GOP budget that calls for cutting spending and reducing the debt.

Don’t expect anything like that to occur so long as this hapless, clueless gang controls the White House and the Senate.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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

The "One" Returns

By Alan Caruba

OZYMANDIAS
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Occasionally, when I am watching or listening to Barack Hussein Obama, I am reminded of the poem, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley was an English romantic poet who hung out with Lord Byron and John Keats, all authentic literary giants. Shelley died at age 30 from drowning. Bryon contracted a fever, dying in Greece at the age of 36. Poor Keats died at age 26. All were dead by 1824. Rediscovered by later generations, they gained immortality.

“Ozymandias” is a poem about a life of over-weaning pride that ends poorly and forgotten. Obama has the first part down. After all, he wrote two memoirs about his life and deep thoughts before he was elected to be the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2004.

By 2007 Obama hit the presidential campaign trail and ended Hillary (and Bill) Clinton’s dreams of returning to the White House. He gave her a consolation prize. He then defeated yet another lame Republican candidate simply by showing up, being younger, and being able to read a TelePrompter better.

What Obama’s campaign is now remembered for is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, telling Joe the Plumber he wanted to redistribute everyone’s wealth, and for throwing his grandma under the bus.

From a very young age, Obama believed he would become President. It might better be called a fixation or obsession.

Obama only met his birth father once in 1971 at age ten, but here again this idea of fixation plays a role. In reality his father was a bigamist (he had a wife or two back in Kenya when he married Obama’s momma), a drunk (he died behind the wheel while soused), and fancied a political career in Kenya that never materialized. One of Obama’s two memoirs was titled “Dreams From My Father.” Yeah, sure.

After Obama Senior, his mother married an Indonesian who adopted their son. His formative years were spent there until his mother divorced again and shipped Barack to Hawaii to be raised by his white grandparents. Progressives, they were friends with Frank Marshall Davis, a communist, one of Obama’s many very left wing influences and associates over the years.

I think that, early on, Obama decided to become the communist messiah to America, but like all communists, he kept that part of his political philosophy a secret from the voters, while dropping hints of it in his memoirs.

When Obama returns from his vacation in Hawaii, he is going to face the toughest two years of his life. Not since 1946 have the voters turned so deliberately on a Democrat president. In 2010 they voted in a Republican majority to the House and narrowed the Democrat margin in the Senate.

Obama called it “a shellacking” but it is better described as a rejection.

Other presidents in the modern era lost their party’s majorities in Congress. Clinton comes to mind and, of course, George W. Bush. Obama’s loss was more than just political, it was personal.

Beyond Congress Obama will have to deal with a vibrant, energized movement, the Tea Party that intends to ensure the Republicans trim government spending and turn back the policy gains Obama put in place with Obamacare at the top of the list.

As far as the rest of the world’s movers and shakers are concerned, Obama is little more than a charming cocktail party guest with little to offer than small talk and leftist bromides.

Only one thing is certain. Obama will be running for re-election the minute he returns to Washington, but he is going to need more than his former vacuous “hope and change” motto and there is small chance of that. In a very real way, the nation has already moved beyond him.

When I see Obama these days, I think of Jimmy Carter, a pathetic former president soundly rejected by the voters, the “author” of endless, largely unread books, and grateful that anyone takes notice of him.

When you see Jimmy Carter today, you’re looking at Barack Obama in fifteen or twenty years.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

President Barack O-Blunder

By Alan Caruba

With the two-year anniversary of the Obama administration coming in January, combined with the results of the midterm elections and the plunge in the president’s approval polls, it’s worth taking a moment to look at just some of the almost daily blunders of Barack Hussein Obama.

Chief among them must surely be the way he has engineered a down-to-the-wire problem regarding the extension of the Bush era tax cuts and then blamed the GOP for the Democrat’s failure to admit the obvious; raising taxes at this time would harm the economy. He has literally held all taxpayers hostage and, as of this writing, the issue is still not resolved in Congress.

As Henry Lamb, the chairman of Sovereignty International, noted just before Obama was sworn into office, “Much of the world sees Obama not simply as the first black president, but as the first president to accept global governance to be more important than U.S. governance. His Berlin speech last July promised ‘a new global partnership’ and a new ‘global commitment’ to ‘save the planet.’”

It’s not as if Obama did not signal his intentions. His inaugural speech on January 20, 2009, laid out the path to the present crisis of confidence that caused voters to transfer political power in the House to Republicans and narrow the Democrat control of the Senate.

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” He promised to “roll back the specter of a warming planet.” The former is absurd, the latter was a lie.

Obama has overseen the diversion of billions in subsidies to wind and solar farms, and biofuel producers. The global warming hoax was exposed in November 2009 when thousands of emails revealed that the scientists involved had rigged the data to support it. European nations are slashing their subsidies to these alternative energy producers who managed to run up everyone’s electric bill.

In a February 2, 2009 opinion published in The Washington Post, Obama announced his “recovery plan” saying, “With it, we will create or save more than three million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.” Currently, the official unemployment rate is 9.8%, but an estimated 20 million Americans are without work.

The Stimulus bill has since been shown to be a failure in many ways, not the least of which is the cost of the interest to be paid on the billions borrowed to implement it. Housing foreclosures continue apace. The promised jobs did not materialize and those that did cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Many were temporary.

If domestic policies rapidly proved to be a failure, Obama’s foreign policies were no less. Still advocating a two-state solution to Israeli-Palestinian peace, Obama has rejected any support for the only real ally America has in the Middle East, Israel, evoking a response from Bibi Netanyahu, its Prime Minister, that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.” No surprises here because after six decades there has been no progress in securing Palestinian cooperation.

Virtually unreported, the Obama administration authorized $20.3 million be given as “migration assistance” to Palestinian “refugees” and “conflict victims” in Gaza, thus facilitating the importation of potential Islamic terrorists into America.

By March 2009, pollsters Douglas E. Schoen and Scott Rasmussion reported that “Polling data show that Mr. Obama’s approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001. It continues to head south.

The blunders continued on a weekly basis. There was the proposal to shut down Guantanamo, the closing of CIA interrogation centers worldwide, and hints that 9/11 perpetrators would be given civil, not military, trials. A recent civil trial of a terrorist involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nigeria came within one count of acquitting him on all charges.

By July 2009, columnist Patrick J. Buchanan warned that “Obama’s first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II. The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole economy.”

Questions about the “czars” appointed to guide U.S. policy were being raised because many appeared to have more power than the President’s cabinet. There was a California water czar, a car czar, a climate czar, a domestic violence czar, a Great Lakes czar, a pay czar, a Sudan czar, a technology czar.

A green jobs czar, Van Jones, had to resign when it was revealed he was a communist. Perhaps the worst, Carol Browner as an energy and environment czar, was formerly a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. Along with EPA director, Lisa Jackson, she is leading the effort to regulate carbon dioxide “emissions” despite the fact that planet Earth generates the vast bulk of CO2 and it is essential to all plant growth and thus all life on Earth.

By the end of his first year in office Obama had offended the Queen of England, bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, praised the Marxist Daniel Ortega, endorsed the Socialist, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and told the Mexican president that violence in his country was the result of Americans buying illegal drugs and selling arms to the cartels.

By June 2010 the Wall Street Journal was reporting that “Americans are more pessimistic about the state of the country and less confident in President Barack Obama’s leadership than at any point since Mr. Obama entered the White House, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.”

It was Obamacare that finally turned many Americans against the Obama presidency. It represented the government takeover of one sixth of the nation’s economy and the destruction of the patient-doctor relationship. Despite almost universal opposition, it was forced through the House and Senate. The midterm elections in November translated opposition into a historic loss for the Democratic Party.

The political pundits are now openly talking about Obama being a one-term president or calling for Obama to announce he will not run for office in 2012. The question remains whether the nation can survive two more years of a president so prone to blunders, bad judgment, and an ideology opposed to economic growth and national sovereignty.

© Alan Caruba, 2010