Why Obama Will Lose in November

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2012

It's the Economy, Stupid!

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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

Whatever Happened to...?

By Alan Caruba

In the run-up to the South Carolina primary election on Saturday, it strikes me that the overwhelming coverage of the campaign process has shoved some important stories to the sidelines.

There is noticeably little coverage of the nation’s obscene unemployment problem; one that is comparable to the Great Depression.

With ample good reason, we no longer hear anything about (a) global warming or (b) climate change. We don’t hear “renewable energy” stories in the wake of the Solyndra scandal or the demise of comparable “Green” companies, but Obama’s decision to refuse to permit the XL Keystone pipeline was a reminder that all his talk about job creation is just that—talk.

The rising price of a gallon of gasoline is never mentioned in the news, up from $1.86 when Obama took office to $3.40 now. That sort of thing used to get incumbent presidents defeated in the past.

Events beyond our shores continue whether we are in a primary season or not.

The future of the European Union is still somewhat precarious. Whether the Euro continues as the currency of the EU is an important issue affecting America’s trading partners. The U.S. Sovereign debt rating has already been reduced but now nine EU nations have been put on notice as well.

The Obama/Clinton foreign policy in the Middle East continues to erode. Egypt, a major player, is moving into Islamist—anti-American, anti-Israeli—control. For decades, the Muslim Brotherhood was suppressed as a political force in Egypt and today they have emerged as the biggest player. Egypt is moving out of our orbit of influence.

Iran continues inexorably toward acquiring the capacity to make its own nuclear weapons. Its growing desperation regarding the sanctions is generating a lot of bellicose threats. The entire Middle East is silently praying that Israel attacks and disables its nuclear capabilities. Anything else is morally indefensible.

Following the withdrawal of U.S. troops, Iraq is in shambles once again with bombs going off in its cities and little likelihood it will be able to function as a nation despite its vast oil riches. Libya has lots of oil, too, but it is still struggling to create a functioning government in the wake of Gaddafi’s overthrow. Syria has everyone in the Middle East on edge watching to see if Assad can avoid what appears to be his inevitable overthrow. His late father, though, did just that by slaughtering thousands.

The seemingly endless political debates continue minus Jon Huntsman who is backing Mitt Romney and Rick Perry who has endorsed Newt Gingrich. Pretty soon we shall be calling Romney “Teflon Mitt” because the voters appear to be bored with all the sniping from his opponents regarding his success in the private sector. Newt Gingrich seems to have no idea what capitalism is or does.

Even the calumnies heaped on the Tea Party movement don’t get much attention these days. We have learned, however, that the current Congress has been the least productive, accomplishing less in 2011 than any other year in recent history. Records have been kept since 1947. In light of the disaster called Obamacare, that is probably a good thing.

One trend is noticeable. With the exception of the Keystone decision, any news that might harm the reelection of President Obama is hard to find in the mainstream media.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Election Year Reality and Insanity

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No desertions.

No faint hearts.

No conspiracy theories.

No third parties.

Just the defeat of Barack Hussein Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Media Amnesia

By Alan Caruba

We are now in a countdown to November 6, 2012, Election Day, and the mainstream press will shift more intensely into coverage of the campaigns; first for the Republican nomination of the candidate to oppose Barack Obama, and then through the interminable ups and downs of the campaign for the presidency.

We got a taste of it with Politico.com, an arm of The Washington Post that permits its liberal bias to be reported with a more barehanded approach. It was Politico.com that broke the Herman Cain story of sexual harassment allegations in the 1990s and issued some seventy “stories” about it in the space of three or four days. The women who filed the complaints and who financially benefited from the National Restaurant Association’s settlements have wisely recused themselves from going public.

About the only thing we have actually learned is that Herman Cain, who had a ten-day heads-up on the story, handled it poorly. As someone who has earned his bread in public relations, watching him stumble around with several different versions of what he remembered and what he knew was painful. That said, the story is likely to go away because such allegations by unnamed women are (a) commonplace in the business world and (b) most decent people don’t like that kind of “gotcha” journalism.

As U.S. troops are finally withdrawn from Iraq, news coverage of that nation is going to disappear from the front pages unless the bombings occurring with increasingly regularity there continue. Don’t expect the media to connect the dots to ask or even identify who’s setting off those bombs or why.

Both the existential and actual threats to Israel are also likely to get short shrift despite the fact that mere days after Israel released more than a thousand Palestinian terrorists to gain the return of a single soldier, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Sderot in southern Israel were under missile attacks from Gaza. No longer being attributed to Hamas, a group calling itself Islamic Jihad is getting the credit for the forty rockets and mortars fired over a two-day period in late October.

As Dore Gold, an Israeli statesman noted, “The real explanations for the decision of Islamic Jihad to attack at this time, however, are not to be found in the Gaza Strip, but rather in Tehran.” Islamic Jihad, Gold pointed out, “is a very different organization than Hamas.” Yet another effort by the Israelis, the 2005 forced evacuation of the Gaza Strip’s Jewish population to placate the Palestinians, has not accomplished anything more than a launch site for endless rocketing.

The media will continue to monitor the events in Europe as its Eurozone monetary system continues to collapse, likely taking the European Union with it. It is one of those ideas by the continent’s elitists and intelligentsia that ignored hundreds of years of history behind the sovereign states there or the economic disparities between them. It is doubtful such coverage will provide anything more than the daily he-said, she-said accounts as the individual nations go their own way. The site of many U.S. exports and investments, it will further harm our tenuous economy as well.

The campaign here at home will be page one news, but may serve to mask the incipient scandals of the Obama administration such as Solyandra and other failing green energy companies that received huge loan guarantees. Nor will the administration’s efforts to keep the southern border open to the flow of illegal aliens get much attention as it continues to sue states like Alabama and Arizona for trying to deal with the consequences.

The Great Depression 2.0

The one story the media cannot suppress is unemployment. Last week the media trumpeted the announcement that the “official” rate of 9.1% decreased to 9%. These government-generated statistics are a farce. It is likely closer to 22% because those who have given up looking for work and other factors are conveniently ignored. Unemployment is as bad as it was during the Great Depression, but don’t expect the media to report that.

In the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, it is likely that the Obama administration will exploit the distraction offered by the election campaign to continue its destruction of the nation’s energy sector; the one sector responsible for actually adding new jobs since 2003. The Environmental Protection Agency is desperate to impose new regulations to further its agenda of killing jobs and exercising total control over every aspect of our lives. Don’t expect much coverage.

There are some early indications that the media have grown disenchanted with Obama. They put him in office with their crazed propagandistic coverage in 2008, but he has proven to be a very big disappointment. This portends that their coverage of his reelection campaign will be treated like kryptonite, the substance that weakened Superman.

It is not putting it too strongly to say that, with notable exceptions, the mainstream media has failed and even deceived Americans for too long now, from the bogus global warming hoax to the installation of Barack Obama in the Oval Office. They think they know what is best for us, but they often have only the slimmest grasp of what is actually occurring at home and around the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Public Fears of a Gangster Government

By Alan Caruba

Even though it has changed ownership over the years, I still go to the bank branch where I have conducted my affairs since I was in my teens and that is a long time ago. Bank of America runs it now and, by all reports, it is financially sound. Even so, these days, people tend to worry about such things.

A check on the number of banks that have failed thus far in 2011 reveals that it is in excess of a hundred and the year is not over yet. The process is overseen by the FDIC or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The U.S. government has layers of agencies responsible for the regulation and oversight of the financial community, but it doesn’t look like they’re doing a good job of it.

There’s the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. The latter regulates the U.S. monetary system along with monitoring the operations of holding companies that include traditional banks and banking groups.

Most famously, the Securities Exchange Commission which, despite having serious concerns called to its attention, totally missed identifying Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme. That is called lax enforcement and it appears to be the case across the spectrum of government's financial regulatory entities.

The Commodities Futures Trading Commission has regulatory responsibilities over the market for futures contracts. The traders it regulates formerly dealt primarily with commodities, but now they speculate on government securities like Treasury bonds and those of other nations. It is called sovereign debt.

The recent collapse of MF Global would have fallen under their purview. Reportedly there are major questions regarding about $633 million that is missing from MF Global’s customer accounts. A subpoena seeking information from its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. has been issued.

What makes MF Global stand out is the fact that the firm was one of a handful of prime dealers with the Federal Reserve, purchasing and selling U.S. treasury bonds in addition to speculating on foreign ones. Reports indicate that the firm had bet big on the soundness of Europe’s financial state. Some of the European Union’s nations have been in serious trouble for many years.

As I noted in an earlier commentary, the European Union may well come apart as a result of the monetary problems of Greece along with Spain, Italy, and others. In financial terms, what sank MF Global was that it was over-leveraged and unable to meet obligations to its investors. It was reportedly “worth” $41 billion when it closed its doors.

Here’s where it really gets scary. At one time Jon Corzine, the chairman and chief executive officer of MF Global, was under serious consideration to be Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury. That job went to Timothy Geithner who had managed to “accidentally” underpay his income taxes despite an impressive resume. Between Obama, Geithner, and Congress the national debt and deficit has skyrocketed.

The Obama administration and the Congress in which both branches were controlled by Democrats until 2010 is now famous for excessive spending of the national treasury, crony-capitalism, massive unemployment. The business community is understandably reluctant to expand or invest until Obama is long gone and Republicans control the Senate as well as the House.

For example, instead of allowing General Motors to go through bankruptcy and restructuring, the Obama administration intervened with a huge bailout, leaving its creditors unprotected against the loss of their investment. The Chevy Volt, an electric car whose production was foisted on GM continues to go begging for buyers.

Solyndra investors, for the most part, were similarly shafted when it declared bankruptcy, sticking taxpayers with the cost of a half billion dollar loan guarantee. At the end of October, Beacon Power which received a $43 million loan guarantee declared bankruptcy. This looks to repeat itself with other “renewable energy” companies that advanced claims for wind and solar energy, but cannot compete with traditional energy providers without various government mandates for the use of the pitiably small amount of electricity they generate.

Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in five jobs created since 2003 have come in the energy sector, specifically oil and gas drilling!

The Constitution does say the federal government should “promote the general welfare” that that has been so twisted beyond its original meaning and intent that we now have a federal government that is literally out of control; one that has become a speculative investor with our money.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are either broke or soon will be. Was this ever truly a function of government?

Meanwhile, under Obamacare, the federal government has asserted the right to require Americans to purchase health insurance or face a stiff fine for failing to do so. That issue has been challenged by 26 states and is making its way to the Supreme Court. If it agrees that it is constitutional, look for massive state-by-state nullification efforts. It would be a major crisis.

The collapse of the housing market predates the Obama administration and was the most predicable crash of the modern era. By 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two “government entities”—meaning their credit was backed by taxpayers even though they acted as private financial entities—owns about 50% of all the mortgages in the nation. After 2008, the federal government seized control of both.

As Bill O’Reilly recently noted, “Now we learn that the mortgage agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, in business with the federal government, paid almost $13 million in bonuses to their top executives in 2010. That is an outrage because those agencies currently owe the American taxpayer $141 billion.”

Why wasn’t this function left solely to banking institutions? Why did the federal government intervene in the housing market? The answer is the progressive belief in “social justice” as a function of the federal government. The programs instituted in its name are now broke and a huge burden on states and citizens alike. Blame has been assigned to the banks, a favorite whipping boy, but it is misplaced.

Like everyone with savings accounts, living off their pension funds and watching their 401K plans decline in value many are beginning to worry about an Obama administration that would happily seize those personal assets by declaring some kind of national emergency.

How bad is it? The liberal New York Times recently published an article, “New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government”, noting that “Not only do 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing, but 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track and 84 percent disapprove of Congress—warnings for Democrats and Republicans alike.”

The Republicans, however, unanimously opposed the passage of Stimulus I and the latest “jobs bill” otherwise known as Stimulus II. Indeed, even the Democrats have opposed Stimulus II despite an absurd joint session of Congress in which Obama demanded “pass this bill now.” In the House, Republicans have led the effort to repeal Obamacare. Harry Reid, the Democrat Majority Leader in the Senate has thwarted consideration of the bill there.

As conservatives are known to opine, the government has to become much smaller and that taxes, particularly in a time of recession, be lowered. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has already redefined “millionaires” to include your local dry cleaner.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Who Are You Calling "Soft"?

By Alan Caruba

Barack Hussein Obama’s contempt for Americans is so huge he cannot hide it.

Recall his view that some Americans are so backward that they “cling to their guns and religion.” Some historians might argue that America was built on its preference for guns and religion. There is a reason why, after guaranteeing the rights of free speech, the press, and the right to peacefully assemble for the redress of grievances in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment makes it abundantly clear that those same citizens have a right to own and bear arms.

Religion has played such an essential role in our history that, if were it not for a group of very religious people we now call the pilgrims, America might be a very different place. The right to worship freely and in the manner of our choice is deeply embedded in the national culture.

Most recently, Obama said that Americans have gone “soft”. Imagine that?

This from a man who has a fleet of limousines, a helicopter, and a jet plane at his disposal; a man that lives in a mansion provided by his fellow citizens, fully staffed to ensure that all his personal needs are attended to and one who gets to attend events in that mansion where celebrities provide the entertainment.

If anything, we are being led by the first metrosexual who’s more concerned about the crease in his slacks than the fact that his policies have done nothing to lift the nation out of its most recent financial crisis (we have had many before).

Obama, whose memory seems to extend no further back than his last speech, is an idiot.

We recently recalled the loss of three thousand fellow Americans on 9/11 ten years ago, but Obama is oblivious to the fact that Americans who he considers “soft”, repaired the damage done to the Pentagon, cleaned up the debris at Ground Zero, and are well on their way to building splendid new skyscrapers, plus a memorial to the dead. The Twin Towers are being replaced with, appropriately enough, a Freedom Tower.

History also informs us that the “greatest generation” had spent ten years suffering through the Great Depression prior to responding to a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, declaring war on both the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany. Starting from scratch we and our allies defeated both by 1945. Was that generation “soft” because, thanks to a bumbling, Keynesian government, many previously had to stand in soup lines for a warm meal?

Obama is a perpetual embarrassment to most Americans—save for the twenty to twenty-five percent who want to hold civil trials for the likes of the Islamist fanatics who are still plotting to kill us.

While the media has been quick to credit Obama with the killing of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al Alwaki, they have ignored the fact that those actions were made possible by George W. Bush who restructured our intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities to coordinate in ways they had never done before.

Obama signed the capture or kill orders, but the machinery was created by his predecessor. It was Obama who wanted to close Guantanamo and prosecute the CIA interrogators who secured the information used to degrade and destroy al Qaeda.

As for Americans being soft, I doubt that Obama has ever attended or watched a football game; a quintessentially American sport involving brute force, combined with speed and athleticism that requires extraordinary skills. Obama is far more likely to be found playing golf; a fine sport, but not one that fills stadiums.

No one suggests that Obama did not “inherit” a nation facing an economic crisis, but it wasn’t, as Obama kept saying for his first two years in office, Bush’s fault. It was the result of bad government programs dating back to the days of the Great Depression. They were that same kind of "stimulus" programs that Obama has used to run up the national debt.

Now he has the gall to blame Americans for being “soft” while 14 million are unemployed, others have lost their homes to foreclosure, and the rest struggle to raise their families, pay their bills, and tend to the needs of their community.

It is a terrible thing to have elected a big baby, a petulant, self-indulgent child to the highest office of the land, along with a Vice President who is a babbling fool.

To hear him call the rest of us “soft” is a rebuke that will be answered in November 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Unemployed Imbeciles Gather to Protest

By Alan Caruba

I confess I have not paid much attention to the Occupy Wall Street protest. Watching New York cops arrest whole bunches of them on the Brooklyn Bridge for obstructing traffic was briefly entertaining, but it occurred to me I had no idea why they were protesting except for the fact that they were mostly young, mostly unemployed, and mostly led by the usual demonic Communists that have a beef with American exceptionalism.

As a sign of the times, Occupy Wall Street has a spiffy website, but it is filled with the most ignorant nonsense right out of the Communist Manifesto. Apparently the protesters have identified banks and corporations as the enemy. If you ask bankers and Wall Street folks, they will tell you the enemy is the federal government and they would be right.

Bankers and Wall Street want stability and predictability. They want to pile up money and loan it out to make more money or they want to sell stocks and make bets on which will go up and which will not. It’s called Capitalism and it works unless the government gets deeply involved in telling them what to do and picking winners and losers in the free market.

In the case of the most recent financial crisis, the government got into the home mortgage market back in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac were set up to purchase mortgages from banks in order to “stimulate” the housing market.

You can read the U.S. Constitution from beginning to end and not find the words “housing market” in there anywhere. The house of cards the federal government created, combined with the pressure brought to bear on bankers to make “ninja” loans (no job, no assets) resulting in the 2008 meltdown when the “bundled” mortgages turned out to be worthless and generally untraceable. Wall Street didn’t create this, Washington did.

Of course, none of this means anything to those protesting in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. It’s not a protest. It’s an excuse to party. Occasionally Leftist celebrities show up and shake hands with “the people” to give them a thrill. Then they go back to their tenured university faculty jobs, making movies and being hideously overpaid for doing so, and looking for a dictator to hug.

Journalists who have tried to determine what the protest is about have come up empty. Brad Knickerbocker, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, noted that “there’s no 10-point list of demands to be nailed Martin-Luther-like to the business and media establishment’s door.”

Cornell West, a Princeton University professor said, “It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands. We’re talking about a democratic awakening. We’re talking about raising political consciousness.” Yada, yada, yada.

West is apparently unaware that the political consciousness of Americans has already been raised by the worst presidency in the history of the nation or that Republicans are heatedly debating who they want to elect to replace it. Democrats, too, because quite a few are looking at Mitt Romney with something close to affection.

Andrew Goodman of The Wall Street Journal reported that “Many of the protesters are young. Joblessness seems to be a persistent theme.” No surprises here. Goodman reported that a list of grievances has been circulating among the protesters and, “Among the complaints: bank executives who received ‘exorbitant’ bonuses not long after receiving taxpayer bailouts” and, even I would be happy to protest that.

An October 3rd Gateway Pundit report has listed 13 Occupy Wall Street demands and they read like an Obama-inspired wet dream. They include a universal single payer healthcare system, guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment, free college education, a trillion dollars in infrastructure projects, a trillion dollars in “ecological restoration”, open borders migration, and the immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.

They are the demands of imbeciles.

You can find a lot of them camped out in lower Manhattan these days. Just wait until the nights turn really cold. They will go home to mommy and daddy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What Debt? Obama's Insane Spending Binge!

By Alan Caruba

There’s a reason that President Obama wants to increase taxes. His administration cannot spend your money fast enough.

A visit on Tuesday morning to the websites of various federal departments reveals that this administration can find an excuse to spend millions on anything. Here’s a quick tour.

In the wake of the Solyndra scandal in which taxpayers were, in the words of Investor Business Daily, “put on the hook for at least the first $75 million if the company should default and with “a minimum of five green firms going bankrupt” the U.S. Department of Energy, on September 13, announced a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to Mojave Solar LLC for the development of the Mojave Solar Project.

On the same day, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a $32.5 million grant “to finalize expansion plan of Boston’s South Station” for the purpose of expanding and enhancing the historic station on the grounds that it estimates a “50 percent increase in high-speed intercity passenger rail travel in the coming years.” And we all know how accurate estimates are, eh?

Three days later, the DOT provided $22 million to the Maryland Department of Transportation for a study of replacement options for the Susquehanna River Bridge on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C. Why not spend the money on actually replacing the bridge? On September 19, DOT awarded $25 million to the city of Charlotte, N.C. for a streetcar line “to improve access to jobs, housing, and schools.” Why money from other States should gift Charlotte with a streetcar line when the nation has a $14 trillion debt might have something to do with the fact that the Democratic Party National Convention will be held there in 2012.

In the midst of a recession that officially does not exist, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD), on September 15, announced $93 million in grants to 39 local projects “to conduct a wide range of activities intended to protect children and families from potentially dangerous lead-based paint and other home health and safety hazards.” HUD estimates there are “nearly 7,000 high-risk homes” because “providing healthy and safe homes for families and children is a priority.” Keep in mind that lead-based paint was banned for residential use in 1978, more than three decades ago.

On September 15, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services announced awards totaling $10 million “to aid 129 organizations across the country that would like to become community health centers. The funds came from the Affordable Care Act, but at the same time Obamacare cuts billions from Medicare, reducing payments to hospitals and to individual physicians providing care to America’s growing population of the elderly. Go figure.

At the Department of Commerce, on August 30, they were celebrating a $2.9 million “investment to expand access to capital for area small businesses and entrepreneurs.” One of them was a new $75.6 million Convention Complex in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that broke ground that day and we all know how many conventions Cedar Rapids hosts.

On September 14, the Department of Agriculture announced that taxpayers are now on the hook for loans to 27 rural electric cooperative utilities. DOA made $603 million in loans to help electric utilities "upgrade, expand, maintain and replace rural America’s electric infrastructure."

This is the same administration whose Environmental Protection Agency is waging war on coal-fired utilities and mining (coal provides 50% of all electricity in America). On September 16, USDA announced funding for more than 500 projects to boost renewable energy production (wind and solar) despite the fact that this represents just over 2% of all the electricity produced and companies producing solar panels are declaring bankruptcy on a weekly basis these days.

Secretary Tom Vilsack also noted that USDA Rural Development “is providing $35 million to finance smart grid technologies such as advanced metering infrastructure.” The problem with smart grids is that, if the utility thinks you’re using too much electricity to cool your home or business in the heat of summer, it can reduce the amount you receive. Same goes for warming it in the winter.

Not to be outdone, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced in late August that it was making more than $53 million in grants to 17 states “to support conservation planning and acquisition of vital habitat for threatened and endangered fish, wildlife, and plants.” The Endangered Species Act has been one of the greatest failures in U.S. history and responsible for thwarting billions in development. This money is intended to remove yet more landmass from development, all in the name of obscure species and plants.

On September 14 the Department of Justice announced grants totaling $118.4 million to “enhance public safety in Indian Country.” The money went to tribal governments. Apparently the Apaches are on the warpath again. Over the last two years, DOJ spent $121 million on conferences.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the money flowing from the Departments of Defense, Education, Veteran Affairs, and Homeland Security. It is in fact just a quick overview of the funding the Obama administration is spending while 14 million Americans are trying to find a job and others struggle to pay their mortgage or put their children through college.

It is a look at a government grown so large and so profligate that its credit rating was recently reduced and our President is on the campaign trail telling Americans they must pay more taxes despite the fact that 40% pay no taxes and “millionaires and billionaires” pay 70% of taxes collected. It’s the same government that wants to impose a 1% tax on all banking transactions, the deposits and withdrawals of your money!

Tea Party, anyone?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The More Obama Speaks...

By Alan Caruba

The most interesting thing happening in the world of politics and finance today is the way Barack Hussein Obama continues to lose traction every time he gives a speech.

After the “jobs” speech, Wall Street dropped three hundred points when the market opened the following morning.

When longtime, staunch supporters of Obama such as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews look and sound betrayed, it is clear that even Obama’s liberal base is in disarray. Matthews, presumably a seasoned political observer, had poured all his faith into Obama, believed in hope and change, and Obama only delivered a huge national debt, the first downgrade of the nation’s triple-A credit rating, massive unemployment, and the sad repetition of failed solutions.

Conservative commentators were openly disdainful of Obama’s use of a joint session of Congress as a stage for a purely political speech, but it was the public as always that had the last word.

Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress in February 2009 garnered 52.4 million viewers. By January 2010, the State of the Union speech drew 48 million and the 2011 SOTU attracted only 42.8 million.

His “jobs” speech was watched by 31.5 million. On the East Coast it was 7 PM, but in California it was 4 PM. Maybe it was just the time difference? Or maybe people have decided that listening to Barack Hussein Obama is just a great waste of time, no matter what the hour may be.

I know that the conventional political wisdom is that Obama has 14 months to go and that he’s a great campaigner, but to my eye his audiences following the “jobs” speech were composed mostly of union members or the very young.

Among the military, whenever he addresses them, the silence is palpable. Recall the sullen response he got at West Point when he announced his Afghanistan strategy, if one can even call it that.

There is a hard core of perhaps 20% who love Obama to the exclusion of his record of failure to focus on the economy. Others, though, from the black and Hispanic base are beginning to look for the exit. The Black Caucus is unhappy. Hispanics are unimpressed.

The race card is being played. Class warfare is being encouraged. These are the tools of a demagogue.

Obama, though, is convinced that if he just talks enough he can change opinion; thinks he is the master salesman, the ultimate campaigner. What he does not see, nor sense, is the derision with which his message is being received.

The public has had two and a half years to take his measure and while he cannot be fired until November 2012 and will not leave until January 2013, he is pure poison to any hope of economic recovery. He has the reverse Midis touch; whatever he touches turns to poop.

It was almost comical that the solar panel company he touted as the green jobs wave the future, Solyndra, received millions from the government, filed bankruptcy, and got a visit from the FBI that seized its records and computers. When it comes to picking winners and losers, Obama always manages pick a loser and stick the public with the bill.

Meanwhile his administration seeks to block Boeing from creating new jobs and raids Gibson guitars for using the same wood as every other guitar-maker in the nation. His administration shipped guns to the drug cartels in Mexico for reasons beyond comprehension. His Attorney General pleads ignorance.

His rhythmic phrase, “Pass this bill”, repeated seventeen times in the course of his speech to Congress ignored the fact that there literally is no bill. Out on the campaign trail a day or so later he was still saying it.

Obama is intoxicated with the sound of his voice, his staccato delivery, his hand gestures, and all the other elements of oratory upon which he has depended for his rise to the top. He just hasn’t figured out that it is not what you say, nor how you say it, that matters. What matters is the result of his policies. They don’t work.

Obama matters less and less in national affairs except for the destruction he and his minions continue to wreak upon a nation struggling to come back from a major financial crisis, fearful of his flawed judgment, not hiring, not spending, and waiting impatiently for November 2012 to arrive.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama's Jobs Speech is D.O.A.

By Alan Caruba

Not only is President Obama’s forthcoming “jobs” speech a self-inflicted embarrassment when he was told he could not deliver it to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday—the first time any President was refused the day and time of his choosing—but it is essentially D.O.A.; dead on arrival.

Every one who has had to endure the last two and a half years of Barack Hussein Obama knows he has no idea how to “create” any jobs other than government jobs or how to cut through the Gordian knot of Washington’s regulatory and taxation bureaucracy. For starters, since taking office his administration has accelerated regulations more than the entire two terms of the man he blames for his problems.

Obamacare has stalled hiring as businesses large and small wait for its repeal. Already repealed by a vote in the House of Representatives, if the November 2012 elections give the nation a Republican Senate and President, this huge burden will be removed. On September 1, Wayne Crews, a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and nationally recognized authority on federal regulations, wrote a commentary in The Washington Times in which he said, “Mr. Obama’s slate of yet more regulations is beyond merely alarming in this tense environment. The Federal Register already stands at more than 54,000 pages so far this year.”

Crews especially cited the cesspool of over-regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency, for its proposed “Maximum Achievable Control Technology” pollutant control mandate for fossil-fuel utilities, for cement plants and boilers widely in hospital and factor use, for “dust” that is stirred up during normal farming, and for power-plant coal ash.

Obama just asked the insane EPA to withdrawal its proposed ozone rules that Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com says “would provide no health benefits, but cost $1 trillion per year in compliance, and kill 7.4 million jobs by 2020.”

“Far from a jobs agenda,” said Crews, “Mr. Obama advances an explicit anti-jobs program, one totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in costs and hundreds of thousands in jobs lost and jobs that can never appear. On top of an orgy of rule-making, our government, as deliberate public policy, prohibits access to safe and efficient extraction of fossil fuels on land and offshore.”

Everyone agrees that small business and entrepreneurship is the engine that actually creates new jobs. Crews noted that “Back in the early 1990s, the proportion of all regulations impacting small business stood at 14 percent of the total number of regulations. Today, 21 percent of rules impact small businesses—up three percent from 2009.”

Obama has also become well known for his advocacy of “green jobs” and, one day after Wayne Crews was lamenting the regulation explosion, Stephen Moore was writing in The Wall Street Journal that “President Obama is expected to seek another $250 billion or so in new stimulus funds next week, with plenty of money for clean energy and the creation of so-called green jobs.”

Future economists will calculate how much money the Obama administration has wasted on the fantasies of wind and solar energy, but what we know for sure is he has utilized all the powers of government to ensure that access to the fossil fuels on which ours and every other economy worldwide is based is thwarted, slowed or punished.

Moore wrote of an Obama-appointed U.S. attorney who brought criminal charges against seven oil companies for “causing the deaths of 28 migratory birds found in oil waste pits.” No such charges have ever been levied against the owners of wind farms that routinely slice and dice hundreds, if not thousands, of birds and bats.

Virtually every program the Obama administration has launched to turn around the economy has been a failure

The Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success recently pulled together data on the state of unemployment today, two years after Obamacare, two years after the “stimulus” act, two years after the bailouts of GM and Chrysler, et cetera. There are, according to the Center, 14 million Americans unemployed and still actively looking for work. There are five unemployed workers for every job-opening and, in August, NO NEW JOBS were created.

In terms of long-term unemployment, about 6.2 million workers have been unemployed for six months or more. Among them, 4.5 million have been jobless for a year or more. Unsurprisingly, the least educated are the hardest hits. Since January 2010, the Center says there has been a net loss of 500,000 jobs for people with high school diplomas or less, but a net gain of 1.2 million jobs for college graduates. Unemployment among blacks and Hispanics is significantly higher than for whites.

His brain clogged with Marxist and Keynesian nonsense that puts government at the center of the economy, Obama’s Thursday speech will be a hodge-podge of failed programs, proposals to spend billions we don’t have, and a tinker-toy constructed of various tax credits and other efforts, none of which have worked since the day he took the oath of office.

Watch what the stock market does when it opens Friday morning. Then watch as businesses sit on what money they have, hire sparingly, and wait until Obama is gone as of January 20, 2013.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

President Blah, Blah, Blah

By Alan Caruba

President Blah, Blah, Blah got in front of the television cameras midday on Monday to say the usual meaningless things he has been saying since he was elected, none of which are true and none of which have been able to hide the fact that he has driven the nation into the ditch with a lot of help from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Over the weekend he unleashed the White House attack dogs to blame the nation’s problems on the Tea Party when, of course, it was his administration that added three trillion to our debt.

After a while we just stop listening to what a president says; especially if we have concluded he is either clueless or has a hidden agenda.

“If his lips are moving, he’s lying” is an old cliché, but it fits President Barack Hussein Obama because it is quite likely that no one believes him any more with the exception of the usual brain-dead liberals who still think he is a genius. So far he has shown a genius for increasing the debt and the unemployment numbers.

This is a man who was still talking about electric cars, high speed trains, and renewable energy while the price of gas continued to increase along with everything else.

On Monday he was still talking about the nation's infrastructure as a source of jobs even after recently admitting there were few "shovel ready" projects. Tired ideas, ideas that don't work, repeated over and over again.

President Obama has been boring people from the day he took office. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The oceans have been rising a few centimeters every century and the planet is just fine. His election did not transform either the laws of nature or physics.

Instead, all that transformational gibberish turned out to be about a nation already in financial trouble as the result of the September 2008 bursting of the housing bubble. His response was to waste a great deal of time forcing Obamacare on everyone. Americans want to feel that they have a say in what the government is doing and, when they don’t, they organize.

The emergence of the Tea Party was the legacy of Obamacare. A movement without leaders, but one that made itself felt in the 2010 elections that transferred the power of the nation’s purse from Democrats to Republicans in the House and reduced their majority in the Senate.

It may just be my imagination, but President Obama seems to believe he can just stand at the podium, read from the Tele-Prompters, and convince Americans that all our problems have to do with “millionaires and billionaires”, “corporate jets”, and the folks who provide the sources of all real energy; coal, oil, and natural gas.

Nobody is buying those idiotic electric cars (except government agencies) and nobody believes the Green grifters who have been living off federal largesse with their pathetic wind and solar farms, and ghastly ethanol. If it were not for government mandates they would all have been out of business long ago.

Politico recently reported that “people and households earning more than $1 million annually made up just 0.1 percent, or just over 235,000, of the 140 million tax returns filed in 2009.” Meanwhile, there are now a record 45.8 million Americans using food stamps, nearly 15% percent of the population. You do the math.

As for those awful oil companies, the top three paid $42.8 billion in income taxes in 2010. Moreover, according to the American Petroleum Institute, oil and natural gas companies employ 9.2 million Americans and account for 7.5 percent of GDP.

If the Obama administration had not set out to thwart any new oil exploration and a US-Canada oil pipeline, and to shut down active coal mines while punishing coal-burning utilities, the economy would be looking a lot better.

In a recent column, former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, said, “But the president is supposed to be great at speeches. Why isn’t it working? One answer is that it never ‘worked.’ The power of the president’s oratory was always exaggerated.”

“The debt-ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama’s speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.”

In an effort to look as if he was truly engaged in finding room for compromise during the debt ceiling debate, Obama seemed to be on television with either a prepared or impromptu speech every other day. He does not do “impromptu” well. The casual “eat your peas” remark was received as it should have been, as someone pretending to be the only adult in the room, lecturing the rest of us as children.

I am beginning to sense that even in Congress, a lot of Democrat Senators and Representatives are beginning to do the calculus of getting reelected if they continue to vote the straight party line or are even seen on the same stage as Obama.

None of Congress’s solutions to our economic doldrums are working because of the sharp partisan divide that ignores the problems millions of Americans are encountering. They were all tried in the 1930s and they all failed.

Now that Obama has hit the campaign trail, it would be nice if the mainstream media began to report on how many or how few people turn out to listen to President Blah, Blah, Blah. How many of them are union members? How many are minorities?

How many will have been out of work for so long that by November 2012 they will vote for Bugs Bunny if he is on the Republican ticket?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Unemployment, NASA-Style

Tell Me It's Not a Depression

Why Obama Will Be Defeated in 2012

By Alan Caruba

To this observer, the likelihood of Barack Obama being reelected in 2012 is so remote that I can safely predict it will not happen. Of course, as is commonly said, two weeks, let alone two years, is a long time in politics and all manner of events could intervene, but if one follows the trends in place, he will be a one term president.

Recall that Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were one term presidents for differing reasons. Despite a genuine victory when U.S. led forces drove Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait, Bush 41 was savagely attacked by a hostile press throughout the campaign and his term in office. The former WWII hero was called a “wimp” and, when he did accede to raising taxes, he sealed his own fate. As to Carter, he was seen by all to have been a monumental failure.

Almost weekly the incompetence and sheer arrogance of President Obama has been manifest since he took the oath of office. I recall an interview in which he expressed the opinion that he might well be a one term president and I thought that odd at the time.

In retrospect, it seems to me now that he always knew that his radical socialist agenda would likely ensure his defeat for a second term. Obama was and is the "Manchurian candidate", put into the Oval Office to achieve as quickly as possible the completion of a Socialist/Communist agenda.

To put it another way, the destruction of the capitalist economic system that has been the foundation of America’s great wealth and power has always been the goal of the Left. To achieve this, Obama installed 32 “czars” in the White House, most of whom were not vetted by Congress, nor are answerable to it. They promulgate policies and regulations while by-passing congressional oversight. It's one thing to have advisors and quite another to have co-conspirators.

One has to reach back to the Clinton years to recall how soundly rebuffed “Hillarycare” was as the initial attempt to take over the health care industry in America. One needs to recall how Hillary Clinton fought through the primaries until her only opponent was Barack Obama and how, after he had secured the Democratic Party nomination, the plum assignment of Secretary of State was given to her; two peas from the same Alinsky pod.

On top of the financial crisis that too conveniently began as the 2008 campaigns were coming to an end was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—that was taken off the shelf and, this time, forced through a Democrat controlled Congress, often with bribes, often with a lot of brutal political arm twisting. And the response, even before it became law a year ago was the sudden rise of the Tea Party movement.

The next response came in the 2010 elections that returned political power in the House to Republicans and narrowed the Democrat majority in the Senate. And that is why Barack Obama will be defeated in 2012.

Another factor that will contribute to his defeat has been his support for the gangster tactics of public service unions in Wisconsin and the runaway members of its legislature. Opposition to the public sector unions has been on the rise in the nation as more voters became aware of how they have bankrupted virtually every State with salaries, pensions and healthcare plans that exceed those of taxpayers who are expected to pay for them.

Then there are the events in the Middle East and Obama’s uncertain response to them. The immediate impact will be a rise in the cost of gasoline at the pump and that is something that everyone can grasp. Add to that Obama’s attack on the nation’s energy industries, coal, oil, and natural gas, and you have the perfect storm for a president whose popularity is dropping.

In the past two years during which upwards of twenty million Americans lost their jobs, the unseemly and frequent vacations by the President or by his wife have not been well received by those less fortunate and, it should be said, less ostentatious. Dictating what Americans should eat while dining on spare ribs reminded many of the First Lady’s caloric hypocrisy.

Mostly, though, it has been the accumulation of lies about virtually all aspects of his political agenda that now comprises a record that will be mined by whoever is chosen to run against him in 2012.

There are still, however, two more years to go and Barack Hussein Obama and his “czars” can do a lot of damage if not thoroughly reined in by Republicans in Congress. Americans have little choice other than to survive Obama at this point in time. And we will.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

President Stupid

By Alan Caruba

Remember when everyone was calling George W. Bush stupid? I do. Since then, his published memoir of his years in the White House has been on the bestseller lists following two years of Barack Obama unrelenting blunders and lies.

From the beginning of the Obama administration, there were all manner of evidence that a group of hapless, moronic ideologues had been handed the reins of power. Early nominees for key posts were jettisoned or withdrew from consideration for a variety of reasons. This was followed by a huge overlay of “czars” for everything, with undefined power over and above the Cabinet Secretaries in charge of various departments.

Two years later, the candidate who campaigned against the Iraq war decisions and implementation, against Guantanamo, and deemed Afghanistan to be the “real war” is pursuing the same Bush programs. The general credited with victory in Iraq has been put in charge of Afghanistan and not been heard from since.

When the Iranians protested in the streets of Tehran last year, Obama missed a major opportunity to throw U.S. support behind them. Instead he said he did not want to “meddle” in Iran’s internal affairs! Fast forward to Egypt and President Stupid was declaring on worldwide television that President Mubarak had to go “now.” Well, he’s gone and, thank God, the military is still in charge.

Surrounded by imbeciles and ideologues, President Stupid’s national security director declared that the MUSLIM Brotherhood was a “secular” organization. His science advisor thinks all the ice at the North Pole is melting. His EPA Director thinks that carbon dioxide, a gas vital to all life on earth, is a “pollutant” and is asserting the authority to regulate it.

In both the first and second State of the Union speeches, President Stupid rambled on about green jobs, solar and wind energy, and now the need to spend billions on a “high speed” rail system in a nation where Amtrak has been losing money from the day it opened for business. In a time of severe deficits and national debt, how dumb do you have to be to want to throw billions at an unneeded new rail system?

Obamacare is the pinnacle of President Stupid’s “achievements” thus far. It has been declared unconstitutional by two lower courts and is likely to be declared null and void by the Supreme Court before he leaves office. The House Budget Committee just released a report that estimates the loss of 800,000 jobs if it becomes law. You have to be stupid to keep handing out “waivers” to Obamacare in all directions as an admission of its failure to apply only to those who do not have friends in the White House.

You have to be stupid to keep defending “global warming” or “climate change” when this huge, global hoax was exposed in 2009 as a fraud. Meanwhile, a natural cooling cycle caused freezing weather that just wiped out 80-100% of Mexico’s crops.

You have to be stupid to openly declare that you want to drive the coal industry out of business when it provides half of all the electricity the nation uses every day, but that is precisely what President Stupid’s administration is doing.

You have to be stupid to declare a moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico after courts have twice told you to remove it.

You have to be stupid to lecture the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on how to create jobs when your economic policies have been killing them for two years. And then tell them they have to redistribute their profits to their workers. They already do that. It’s called wages!

You have to be stupid to have spent the first two years of Sundays playing golf and then expect people to believe you are deeply religious.

You have to be stupid to keep bowing to foreign leaders of nations from Saudi Arabia to Japan to China when the President of the United States must never bow to anyone. We don’t even lower our flag in the presence of foreign leaders.

You have to be stupid to believe you can get away with telling lies when even an adoring press is finding it increasingly difficult to cover up or defend this behavior.

Watch now as the press begins the run-up to the 2012 elections by emphasizing how brilliant President Stupid really is.

Already the talk is about a surefire reelection if the unemployment rate gets down to eight percent when its average over the pre-Obama years has usually been around five percent and actual unemployment is twice the official figure of 9.6 percent.

You have to be stupid to think Americans will be fooled again.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The True State of the Economy

By Alan Caruba

The mainstream media will fall all over itself to put a good face on the President’s State of the Union speech. Time was when Presidents simply sent a written message to the Congress (Article II, Section 3) to be read in chambers, but we must now suffer through an hour and a half of madcap Democrat applause and frozen Republican silence.

Great television, it isn’t. The worst part, even before the speech, is that everyone knows it will be filled with boldfaced lies about “investments”, i.e., more spending, and other fictions. Thank goodness that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives (Article I, Section 7). Since Republicans now control the house those “investments” are not likely to be approved or authorized.

In recent days, AmericanThinker.com, has posted excellent articles that provide the cold hard numbers regarding the first two years of the Obama administration and past four years of Democrat rule. A sampling tells the truth.

The prices of selected commodities, all of which translate to what you pay at the gas pump or in the supermarket, have all risen in the past two years.

#Crude Oil, European Brent (barrel) was selling for $43.49 in January 2009. It now sells for $99.02, an increase of 127.7%

#Corn, No. 2 yellow was selling for $3.56 a bushel in January 2009. It now sells for $6.33, an increase of 60.5%. Corn is an important indicator because much of it, by government mandate, must be turned into a gasoline additive called ethanol. The result is that the cost of food is increased as corn which is widely used to feed livestock and in countless other ways in the food chain is diverted to make fuel.

#Sugar, cane, raw, world price per pound was $13.37 in January 2009. It now sells for $35.39, an increase of 164%,

# Unemployment, non-farm, overall was at 7.6% and is now at 9.4%, an increase of 23.7%. The number of unemployed in January 2009 was 11,616.000 and has since risen to 14,485,000, an increase of 24.7% despite the promise of “shovel ready” and “Green” jobs. The number of people on food stamps increased 35.1%. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits increased 22.2%

# The national debt in trillions was $10.627 in January 2009 and now stands at $14.052, an increase of 32.2%.

Do you see a pattern here?

By December 2010, more than fifty percent of Americans said they were worse off than they were two years earlier when President Obama took office. The Bloomberg National Poll showed that two-thirds of Americans believed the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

None of this is surprising, given that the nation is struggling to recover from the longest recession since the Great Depression. There is no indication that Obama can, will, or even wants to correct the current recession. Recessions are cyclical and most presidents have encountered one while in office.

No amount of speeches, State of the Union or otherwise, will improve the economy if the past policies of the Obama administration continue. The nation has suffered unemployment at more than 9% for the twentieth month in a row as of January. That is a post-World War II record!

The Obama administration has done nothing useful to turn the recession around. Instead it has wasted billions bailing out General Motors to save the auto union, followed by an idiotic “Cash for Clunkers” program. At the same time, it has insisted that GM turn out $41,000 electric cars while raising the mandate for ethanol levels in gasoline, thus reducing the mileage per gallon while increasing its cost to consumers.

The housing market, brought to its knees by two horrid government entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is still in the basement. The government had to seize both of them and is billions in debt as a result. “Social justice” was the excuse given for the government’s intervention in the mortgage loan marketplace instead of leaving it to the normal prudence of lending institutions.

Instead of focusing on ways to encourage the growth of small businesses, the administration spent its time and energy on passing Obamacare, taking trillions out of Medicare while at the same time adding more people to its rolls. This is the Obama definition of “saving” Medicare. More than half of the States have joined a suit to abrogate Obamacare as unconstitutional.

Obama’s is an utterly failed administration. In an effort to be reelected, Obama will apply a Clintonian approach, appearing to move to the middle, be more fiscally prudent, et cetera, but this is one leopard that will not change his spots. He is a committed Marxist and one who gives every indication of deliberately crashing the economy. In that respect, he is succeeding.

© Alan Caruba, 2011