President Liar, Year One 2008-2009

By Alan Caruba

After years of hearing liberals tell us that any criticism of President Obama is because he is Black, it seems to me they ought to admit that he got elected because he is Black. In the interest of accuracy, he is half-Black and half-White. I say this because the media has now begun calling the shooter of Trayvon Martin a “White-Hispanic.”

Beyond that, it was apparent to anyone watching and listening to Barack Obama that a moron was running for office; one willing to say anything for five minute’s advantage. He literally lied his way into the Oval Office.

One need only revisit Obama’s campaign and his first year in office to grasp how audacious his capacity for lying was and is.

In June 2008 he was boasting that he was “the only candidate who isn’t taking a dime from Washington lobbyists” at the same time his fundraising team included 38 members of law firms that had earned $138 million to lobby the federal government. He had 79 “bundlers”, five of them billionaires, who tapped their personal networks to raise at least $200,000 each.

On October 24, 2008, Charles Krauthammer wrote “First, I will have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory.” Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, on October 31, 2008, wrote “If Barack Obama is not a Socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.” So, yes, we were warned and, yes, a majority of voters refused to acknowledge the obvious.

An editorial in the January 8, 2009 Daily Mail, a British daily, characterized Obama’s ascent to power as a “Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality” adding that it was a victory for Hollywood, for “a man who is no friend of freedom”, “a victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than family” and presciently, “a victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation.”

Following his election Obama was being either ignorant or deliberately lying when he told a November 2008 Governor’s Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles that “Few challenges facing America—and the world—are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Not one single word of this was true and, a year later in 2009, a cache of emails between so-called climate scientists revealed that global warming was a hoax based on phony computer models Moreover, a perfectly natural warming cycle had already ended in 1998!

Is there anyone who does not know that Obama’s stimulus plan turned out to be a massive and costly failure? The answer is yes and some of them will vote for Obama in November. Lenin called them "useful idiots."

By February 2009, Bradley R. Schiller, a professor of economics, writing in The Wall Street Journal wrote “President Barack Obama has turned fear-mongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package. This fear-mongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics.”

As voters ready themselves to vote in November, it would be wise to revisit the way Obama hid his true past from them in 2008 and since. His college records were sealed, his Indonesian adoption records were sealed, his passport file was sealed and, of course, his official birth records were sealed. He has since provided a birth certificate that an investigation by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio recently asserted was a complete forgery. His first executive order in office was to put these and other documents off limits to public examination.

As 2009 came to a close, virtually all of Obama’s initiatives were in shambles, not the least of which was his foreign policy and, in particular, his Middle East policy. He alienated Israel and the Arab League refused to provide any kind of peace gesture. Despite efforts to soften the public perception of Palestinians, they are still shelling Israel with rockets from Gaza.

By the time 2009 was history, Obama had given the Queen of England an iPod preloaded with 40 show tunes, bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, praised Marxists Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez, announced he would meet the Iranians with no pre-conditions, announced the termination of the U.S. space program the day after the North Koreans tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, wanted to try CIA agents on charges of torturing terrorists, wanted a civil trial for the mastermind of 9/11, and wanted to shut down Guantanamo. He put a card-carrying Communist and admitted tax cheats part of his administration, and that’s just the short list!

In lieu of the likelihood that Obamacare, to which he devoted his first year in office, will be struck down by the Supreme Court, his open microphone gaff in which he urged the Russians to wait until he is reelected so he can give them more U.S. missile technology secrets and reduce our nuclear arsenal, and countless other deceptions, Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, described  his tete-a-tete with Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev as “creepy.”

“What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith,” wrote Noonan.

As millions of Americans still struggle with unemployment, the rolls of Food Stamp recipients grow, the mortgage crisis continues, gas prices increase, and much of the world holds Obama in contempt, the lies just keep coming, the class and race warfare is being ramped up, and media chatteratti continue to talk up his chances of being reelected.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama Attacks Nutrition

By Alan Caruba

While watching a television commercial for some prescription medication, have you ever wondered why something it states may kill you or cause serious side effects ever was permitted to be marketed to the public?

For decades I have taken a full range of vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements every morning. I don’t get head colds or any unwanted side affects. In my seventh decade, I enjoy exceptional good health. An annual physical check up is always the same. I am fine.

Millions of Americans benefit from a daily regimen of vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements. Athletes use whey protein powders. Body builders take amino acids. Others augment food products that lack sufficient nutritional value. Their health and wellness is now threatened by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Banning Health!

On the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend, the FDA published a 47-page document that would ban all nutritional and supplemental ingredients by requiring them to file documentation involving multi-million-dollar testing and the regulations would be retroactive to 1994!

This will destroy the manufacturers of these products because most are small companies that could not afford such costs. It’s not like there is a vast body of information that demonstrates any threat to health from vitamins and minerals. Quite the contrary. There is ample information on their benefits. There are libraries filled with books devoted to this.

Who would benefit from such regulation of the natural supplement industry? Big Pharma. The same pharmaceutical companies that have a long record of putting forth FDA-approved medications that later prove to be lethal are looking to use the regulatory powers of FDA to literally increase levels of illness.

In the same way Obamacare has been demonstrated to not only be unconstitutional, but also a threat to the health of millions—especially senior citizens—this callous administration now threatens to remove from the shelves of stores that sell nutritional supplements, from pharmacies, and from supermarkets and other outlets, the vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements on which millions depend for wellness.

This constitutes a criminal conspiracy and Congress, which has ceded its law-making authority to the FDA, must hear from everyone in order to stop this assault on everyone’s health.

Frank Murray, the former editor of Better Nutrition, Great Life, and Let’s Live, is the author and co-author of fifty books on health and nutrition. They include Natural Supplements for Diabetes, Health Benefits Derived from Sweet Orange, and 100 Super Supplements for a Longer Life. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

One of Murray’s books, Sunshine and Vitamin D, notes that “With the hundreds of clinical trials published on Vitamin D in recent years—I read one study with 132 references—it is obvious that the ‘sunshine vitamin’ no longer has to play second fiddle to the other vitamins.” The same can be said for vitamins A, B, C, and E. All have amply demonstrated their value. Add to them, zink, potassium, selenium, and other mineral supplements. All those prostate advertisements are about herbal supplements!

The Obama administration that has made obesity its pet project is also famous for photos of the President eating every kind of fast food. It is rank hypocrisy, but the proposed FDA ban is literally life threatening.

Write, email, and fax your Representative and Senator to ensure that Congress intervenes with the FDA in the same fashion it is struggling to protect us against an out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency. In particular, contact the members of  the House Oversight and Government Reform committee.

Your life and the lives of your loved ones literally depend on stopping this attack on real nutrition.

Americans are losing the freedom they take for granted as Big Government intrudes on every personal choice they make. The Obama administration has demonstrated its total indifference to America’s senior citizens' access to affordable medical care and now all Americans' ability to access nutritional supplements.

You are being “protected” into an early grave!

© Alan Caruba, 2011

President Bobblehead

By Alan Caruba

As President Obama’s head moved robotically from left to right and back again while his eyes followed the scroll of text on the teleprompters, I began to think about this ever-present factor for all his speeches and why this man is president at all.

It’s not that he isn’t in a world of trouble two-and-a-half years into his first and mercifully last term in office. All presidents “inherit” a variety of problems from their predecessor, but not all presidents—none in fact—spend all their time blaming their predecessor. If there are problems, the presumption is that they were elected on their promises to solve them.

Ronald Reagan asked “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The voters said no and he served two memorable terms. The nation is now immeasurably worse off than just two-and-a-half years after Obama’s election.

Obama has exacerbated the problems he encountered that first day in the Oval Office and added several horrors, not the least of which is called Obamacare.

Behind the avalanche of words regarding Barack Obama is the central issue of whether he should be president. Anyone else would have been impeached by now. The news media of the 1970s that revealed the corruption of the Watergate scandal, with notable exceptions, now remain silent on this issue.

On July 22, Jeffrey T. Kuhner, writing in The Washington Times, bluntly said “President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors…Mr. Obama should be impeached” and was met by wall-to-wall indifference. It wasn’t even a topic for the cable news 24/7 chattering class.

Earlier this year, after reading Dr. Jerome R. Corsi’s book, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”, I opined that Obama would likely be forced to resign based on the weight of evidence that he was not only ineligible to hold the office under the terms set forth in the U.S. Constitution, but that there was ample evidence that even the Social Security number he was using was fraudulent.

That’s how naïve I am, but I should have realized that the U.S. court system has systematically dismissed cases brought to expose his ineligibility, mostly on the basis that the complainant had no “standing” to do so. If a citizen, operating under the same Constitution as the President has no standing, who does?

Most certainly the Obama administration’s Department of Justice would not take any action. If it prefers to sue the State of Arizona for trying to defend its own border with Mexico, and wouldn’t prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party who were videotaped trying to intimidate white voters, the likelihood of the DOJ doing anything involving a constitutionally ineligible President is slim to none.

Corsi’s book, 392 pages of fact-piled-on-fact, begins by asserting that “no legal authority has ever verified Barack Obama’s legal eligibility to be president, that glaring inconsistencies and blackouts in his life narrative has caused widespread doubts among the American populace, and that, in fact, a compelling body of evidence exists that Obama is not a natural-born citizen as is required of all presidents by Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution.”

“No usurper of the office of the president of the United States can be tolerated if the Constitution is to have enduring authority,” said Corsi.

“The test in the upcoming presidential election of 2012,” said Corsi, “is whether or not President Obama will get a second pass on having to present his eligibility credentials to the American public.” Most certainly the birth certificates he has offered thus far either do not meet that test or are complete forgeries.

There is no greater peril to the nation than to have its guiding legal instrument casually ignored. This is written prior to the Republic candidate’s Iowa debate on Fox News Channel, but I would bet the subject of Obama’s ineligibility and usurpation of the office of the presidency will not be mentioned.

© Alan Caruba 2011

Parsing the (Very) Bad News

By Alan Caruba

The dictionary says “parse” means to break down into component parts of speech with an analysis of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part. The Caruba definition means to take all manner of bits of information and try to make sense of any of it, in part or in whole.

Part of the problem is that there are so many “experts” in the world, PhDs which often translates to “piled higher and deeper.” The lesser degrees are often lacking as well. A college education today is obscenely expensive and, as many employers will tell you, of dubious value when it comes to the mastery of skills that were formerly acquired by the sixth grade.

A recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek was devoted to the year in review and perhaps the most astonishing statistical data it offered was the way Americans are “stuck in the middle” when it comes to opinions on all the major issue which the nation must address, half are for and half are against. Whether it’s gun ownership, doctor-assisted suicide, how to deal with illegal immigrants, government control of healthcare, or whether President Obama is doing a good job, one is led to believe that we are totally divided pro and con.

The key phrase here is “led to believe” because the data was largely drawn from Gallup surveys, the Pew Research Center, the National Journal, and other sources. As much as I regard Gallup, Rasmussen, Zogby and other gatherers of today’s instant “truth”, I remain skeptical of all these polls. Opinion is fickle, subject to the economy, one’s religion, race, age, gender, political values, and yesterday’s events.

Most certainly, taking at face value anything “the government” has to say on any topic is the height of folly. It exists as the instrument of anyone and any political party that holds the reins of power. As such it disgorges masses of “information” that is intended to herd the public in directions that will ensure they remain in power while, at the same time, often engaging in the most appalling abuses of power, including neglect of duty.

History is testimony to the most egregious errors of judgment by presidents and congresses that arrived with their biases and ideologies intact. We want to know what principles a president adheres to. Some like Reagan believed in America’s greatness, its exceptional place and role. Others like Obama arrived with their views carefully hidden behind meaningless phrases such as “hope and change.” Obama’s first executive order was to deny access to his entire life’s paper trail of documents.

My first profession was that of journalist and from that I developed a lifelong search for factual information, historic and current, with which to make sense of events. Even when I segued into public relations, I insisted that it be fact-based, i.e. the truth!

I collect the “news” all the time and maintain vast files of data that go back years. On my desk today are stacks of items culled from all manner of sources, most of which I regard as reliable, but The New York Times is high on my list of the greatest collection of liars and fools since the glory days of Pravda, the state-controlled Soviet newspaper.

A recent Times editorial was titled “Comeback Against Malaria” citing “insecticide-treated bed nets” to protect people from mosquitoes that transmit the disease. No where does it mention the way the Environmental Protection Agency, ignoring the science, banned DDT, effective December 31, 1972, and thus condemned millions to an early, unnecessary death. If African and other nations plagued by this mosquito-borne disease could begin to spray DDT, it would drastically reduce malaria worldwide. The Times will not tell you that.

Another news item reports that Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security Secretary, has announced that her department is creating “a new task force to battle the effects of climate change on domestic security operation.” This is just one example of the Obama administration’s insane devotion to the totally debunked hoax of “global warming”, now renamed “climate change.” Suffice it to say it has nothing to do with homeland security and is beyond the reach of any government on planet Earth.

Piers Corbyn of Weather Action, a London-based, independent forecasting firm, has proven infinitely more accurate than the British government’s debased weather agency. He is predicting extreme weather for December 25-31 in Britain. Much of the weather forecasts of the U.S. government are corrupted by computer models that use manipulated “global warming” data from government agencies such as NOAA and NASA. Thank God for weather satellites.

Much of the data collected worldwide is from weather stations either positioned on “heat islands” known as cities or simply non-existent. The best computers in the world cannot include data on clouds, a major indicator, because even meteorologists have no idea why they do what they do, changing from moment to moment. Similarly, it is still virtually impossible to predict earthquakes or when volcanoes will erupt.

The government consistently refuses to tell the public that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since the late 1990s. Winters for decade to come will be harsher and longer. Crops will fail. Food prices will rise. The latest “compromise” that extended income tax rates also wasted billions on corn-based ethanol production mandates that even environmental organizations now oppose.

The latest Census reports that the U.S. population is up an astonishing 27 million in just ten years! Immigration, legal and illegal, accounted for three-quarters of that growth. This growth is exceeded by only two other decades in the entire history of the nation! Either we change our immigration policies, reducing this flood of humanity, and lock down our southern border or you won’t be able to recognize America in the space of a few decades.

So, parsing the news remains critical if we are to understand or make sense of anything happening in the U.S. and around the globe. One thing seems clear, like all empires based on economic and military strength, power is moving elsewhere after a half century since the end of World War II that positioned the U.S. as a “superpower.”

The nation has wasted its potential on “entitlement” programs that are trillions of dollars in debt into the foreseeable future. The national debt is owned by our grandchildren!

The government is in the process of locking up its vast natural resources from use by its own citizens. It is seizing vast tracks of the nation’s landmass. It is restricting all new offshore oil exploration and extraction, and will force coal-fired power plants to close despite the fact that coal provides half of all the electricity generated nationwide.

U.S. currency is being systematically devalued because the government failed its oversight of the financial marketplace and its central bank, the Federal Reserve.

Because the government was permitted to intrude in the housing market in the name of “social justice”, it is in a state of complete collapse.

The same will occur to our healthcare system if Obamacare is permitted to move ahead.

The news is bad. We have precious little time to reverse the process.

© Alan Caruba, 2010