The Spin is In! Putting a Happy Face on Obamacare's Defeat

Sensing that the Supreme Court will declare Obamacare unconstitutional, a leading voice for the Democratic Party is now trying to put a happy face on the prospect. This is the center piece of Obama's first and hopefully last term. Polls indicate that the vast majority hate Obamacare, but its defeat may be a good thing says James Carville.

Just as its passage was achieved through bribery and political thuggery, now we're told that its defeat is somehow a victory for the Obama and the Democratic Party.

Below is a news story on a Tuesday evening interview:

Carville: A Supreme Court loss will help Democrats

Posted by

CNN Political Unit

(CNN) - While the Obama administration fights to protect the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, Democratic strategist and CNN contributor James Carville said a Supreme Court overruling may not be such a bad thing for the president, politically.

"I think this will be the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party," Carville said Tuesday on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer."

He added: "You know, what the Democrats are going to say, and it is completely justified, 'We tried, we did something, go see a 5-4 Supreme Court majority'."

Carville, who gained fame working on Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, predicted health care costs will only increase in the future, in which case Republicans will be to blame for leading the drive to expel a federal program designed to help Americans cover those costs.

"Then the Republican Party will own the healthcare system for the foreseeable future. And I really believe that. That is not spin," Carville said.

Republican and RedState.com editor Erik Erikson, meanwhile argued that an overruling would represent more mainstream sentiments than not.

"Both sides, not just the Democrat side, even if the laws were upheld or struck down, there is a 5-4 conservative majority, and historically you see Republicans picking justices who have a greater propensity to gravitate to the left than you see Democrat judges propensity to gravitate to the right," Erikson, also a CNN contributor, said. "This will be an undercurrent issue for both sides, though."

Obamacare Versus the U.S. Constitution

By Alan Caruba

In a nation where Congress has already determined how much water your toilet tank can hold and whether you can purchase a 100-watt incandescent light bulb, the assertion of federal power is now so great and so unbounded that a case concerning the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), brought by 26 states will decide whether, in fact, there are any rights or powers left to the states.

What many Americans do not know is that the United States of America is composed of separate and sovereign republics, each with its own constitution. What has occurred, however, has been the erosion of states’ rights and with that, the gradual distortion of the nation’s central instrument of governance, the Constitution, to mean anything Congress wants it to say.

At the very heart of the Obamacare case the Supreme Court will hear Monday through Wednesday, March 26 through March 28, is the question of whether the federal government can coerce the states under the threat of withholding funds—in this case for Medicaid.

Obamacare vastly expands Medicaid, but it should also be noted that Medicaid has been expanded over the years without evoking this kind of organized resistance. Over a million Americans descended on Washington, D.C. on March 20, 2010 to demand that it not be passed. They were dismissed by the White House that bribed and pressured members of Congress who, it turns out, never even read the law before voting on it.

Created in 1965, Medicaid was intended to ensure that low-income individuals and families secure medical care. Obamacare represents that largest expansion in its history. As the largest federal-state funding program, in 2010 it represented some $401.4 billion. Predictions of what Obamacare will cost are over the moon.

At present, some 60 million Medicaid beneficiaries include one in four children, severely disabled people, many nursing home residents, and low-income pregnant women. Children’s and trauma hospitals heavily rely on Medicaid funding. Under Obamacare, if ruled constitutional, more than 30 million more people are expected to gain health coverage through Medicaid.

The likelihood is that a federally administered health care system will destroy what is widely regarded as the best private sector health system in the world. It will put the government squarely between the physician and his patient, determining who receives treatment and the amount and cost of that treatment.

The issue of contention for many Constitutional scholars and others is Obamacare’s demand that everyone either purchase a health insurance program or pay a fine for not doing so. Congress asserts this under the Commerce Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, that says it shall have the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.”

The early Supreme Court led by the fourth Chief Justice John Marshall (serving from 1801 to 1835) broadly interpreted these powers, extending federal jurisdiction over a number of aspects of intrastate and interstate commerce. In more recent times, under Justice William Rehnquist, (serving 1986 to 2005) the Court restricted interpretation of the Clause to allow states more control over business conducted within its borders.

The tensions between the states and the central government have always been part of the life of the nation and the Civil War was the ultimate test of whether states can secede from the Union if they feel their rights are being trampled upon. Under the many progressive social justice programs instituted since the 1930s, federal programs have acquired the power to coerce states to do its bidding simply by threatening to withhold billions in funding.

One need hardly be a constitutional scholar to understand that a federal government that can require you to purchase something you do not want or do not need can require you to do anything it wants. A government that powerful is a government to be feared.

The Tenth Amendment Center is rather sanguine about the Supreme Court’s likely decision. It notes that “In fact, from 1937-1995, the Supreme Court didn’t rule one single congressional act to be outside their constitution limits.” Thus, for sixty years, “they ruled absolutely nothing unconstitutional, and that included much of the new deal and all of the Great Society. Since that time, overruling Congress has been a rare occurrence at best.”

The Center is the leading advocate of the concept of “nullification” by which the states refuse to obey or enforce a federal law they deem a threat to the rights granted by the Constitution “For over 100 years,” says the Center, “federal power has been on one path and one path alone. It doesn’t matter which political party has been in charge. This case is the last exit ramp on the road to unlimited government.”

The Supreme Court is not famous for overturning its own decisions, precedents, and that is why many observers conclude they will rule in favor of Obamacare.

Add to that, the new Associate Justice, Elana Kagan, should have recused herself from hearing the case, having served as a Solicitor General in the Obama administration. The Court, however, defended her participation. As President Obama’s top advocate, Kagan headed the office responsible for formulating the administration’s defense of Obamacare—and oversaw the arguments both on appeal and in the lower courts because of its national importance. If that is not a conflict of interest, nothing is.

That leaves only one option left and that is a Congress elected in 2012 for the purpose of repealing Obamacare and a President other than Obama to sign it into law. The House has already passed legislation to repeal Obamacare.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate for President, is on record he would repeal Obamacare. Now he needs a Republican Senate and a Republican House in order to stop the federal government from becoming so powerful that a new revolution would have to be fought to overthrow it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Why Obama Will Lose in November

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Religion and the 2012 Elections

By Alan Caruba

The one thing that Presidents from Washington through to modern times have held in common was the belief that religion was a central component of the life of the republic.

Calvin Coolidge, President from 1923 to 1929, said “Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberality, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. There are only two main theories of government in our world. One rests on righteousness and the other on force. One appeals to reason, and the other appeals to the sword. One is exemplified in the republic; the other is represented by despotism.”

Ronald Reagan echoed this view saying, “Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”

For Barack Obama, Sundays have often been devoted to playing golf. A self-declared Christian, there are widespread concerns that he was and is a Muslim, given his childhood as the adopted son of an Indonesian Muslim, his mother’s second husband. In the 2008 campaign, he managed to overcome the fact that his spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, led a Chicago church with a doctrine of Black Liberation theology that was frequently highly critical of America.

When John F. Kennedy ran for office, the question was whether his being Catholic would play a role in whether he could be elected. He put that question to rest. Obama had to sever his ties with Rev. Wright in order to seek and win election.

As Mitt Romney closes in on the Republican nomination some liberals are already sniping at his Mormon faith. while Rick Santorum’s emphasis on the strictures of his faith has played an unknown factor in his fluctuating fortunes.

The Gallup organization began systematically tracking religion in 1948, asking Americans to name the major religion with which they personally identified. Back then, two percent (2%) of Americans volunteered “no religion” and another three percent (3%) had an otherwise unidentified religious identity. By the 1970s, the number of Americans with no formal religious identity began to increase, reaching eleven percent (11%) by 1990.

By 2010, sixteen percent (16%) said they had no religious identity or had an otherwise undesignated response. A Gallup analysis noted that “Lack of identification with a formal religious group does not necessarily mean religion is irrelevant in a broad sense in a person’s life. One can remain quite religious, or at least spiritual, while at the same time eschewing attachment to or identity with a formal religion or denomination.”

The Gallup polling demonstrates that eighty-four percent (84%) of Americans, a huge majority, do identify themselves as affiliated in some fashion, formal or not, with a faith of choice.

Drawing on two surveys, the General Social Survey and the National Congressional Study, Mark Chavez, a professor of sociology, religion, and divinity at Duke University, author of “American Religion: Contemporary Trends”, concluded that traditional belief and practice is relatively stable, but that confidence in religious institutions has declined more than confidence in secular ones.

In a March 3rd, Wall Street Journal commentary, Peggy Noonan wrote, “The other day in a seminar at a university, a student of political science asked a sort of complicated question that seemed to be about the predictability of human response to a given set of political stimuli. I answered that if you view people as souls, believe that we have souls within us, that they are us, then nothing political is fully predictable, because you never know what a soul will do, how a soul will respond, what truth it will apprehend and react to.”

The current firestorm over the Obamacare mandate that contravenes personal conscience, a pillar of all religions, has ignited a debate over the separation of church and state. The Constitution specifically forbids “the establishment” of a state religion and, by extenstion, forbids the federal government from coming between an individual’s spiritual beliefs and its demands.

Coolidge also said “We do not need more intellectual power; we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge; we need more character. We do not need more government; we need more culture. We do not need more law; we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen; we need more of the things that are unseen.”

Religion is hardwired into humans. From the Stone Age onward, we have created religions as a means to cope with an often dangerous and indifferent world, and to peer into what Shakespeare called “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Consciously or not, three years into President Obama’s term, millions of Americans are reexamining their religious beliefs and I suspect this will play an important role in the outcome of the 2012 elections.

Americans may have grown more secular in their general outlook, but there is still that inner voice, their relationship with the faith into which they were born or they embraced—their soul—and the historic distrust of big government that will shape the outcome of the election.

The Founding Fathers believed that only men of “virtue” could lead America and only citizens who practiced virtue in their lives could preserve and protect the republic. They were right.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

How Not to Go Crazy in 2012

By Alan Caruba

Election years tend to create a level of frenzy concerning the selection of the nominees and the outcome. The media feed this in order to keep readers reading and viewers viewing. The history of American elections has always been one of vituperation between the parties, so there is nothing new about this. Indeed, since so much depends on it, the political free-for-all is a healthy exercise.

It can, however, make for a difficult environment in which to go about one’s life; the air filled with charge and counter-charge, polls going up and down, and a general sense that something is very wrong with the way the government functions.

On the bright side, a gridlocked Congress may bring a measure of relief to everyone. Writing about gridlock in January 2011, Marcus E. Ethridge, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, noted that “By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.” In 2011, we saw what happens when advocates of “renewable energy”, wind and solar power, or electric cars, get priority over the needs of most Americans for reliable energy and transportation.

At the heart of the 2012 election will be the recognition that the economy is still not recovering, that government is seeking to extend and expand its control over our lives, and, even among former supporters of Barack Obama, that he has been a failure of historic proportions.

A Friday Rasmussen Reports said that “Voters right now give the edge to Republicans when asked which political party is likely to win the White House and control both the House of Representatives and the Senate in next November’s election”, adding that “a lot of voters are undecided.” Those voters may actually wait until entering the polls to cast their vote.

Another bad piece of news for President Obama is a new comparative analysis of current voter registration data in key electoral states of Nevada and North Carolina. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, there has been “a drastic drop from 2008 levels when a record-high proportion of young Americans turned out overwhelmingly to cast their votes to elect Barack Obama as President.” This is significant because more than two-thirds of young voters supported the Obama/Biden ticket in 2008.

The President had a low moment following the passage of Obamacare that transformed itself into the Tea Party movement and an even worse one in 2010 when it propelled a large number of Republicans into the House of Representatives, causing its control to change hands. He has had, in fact, only one truly high moment and that occurred when he announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. At the time, he typically took complete credit. In a speech at Fort Bragg to returning troops from Iraq, the word “victory” was never spoken.

Americans are not unmindful that the downgrade of the rating of the nation’s sovereign debt, the first in the nation’s history, was announced on Obama’s watch. The rate of "official" unemployment has receded to 8.6% but most Americans are well aware that it is far closer to 11% or more. America continues to experience that longest period of long-term unemployment since the 1930s.

For these and a myriad of other reasons, there is little reason to conclude that President Obama has any chance whatever of being reelected. The widespread contempt for Congress is also a hopeful sign for change. These are reasons to remain calm amidst the din of electioneering in the months ahead.

There is, however, all manner of troubles brewing in the world. Europe will have to find a solution to what will happen if its southern tier of nations elects to default on their sovereign debt. Cracks in the European Union are evident. If it falls apart, it will be very messy, but Europe existed before the EU and would if it disbands.

The Middle East is in the midst of a huge struggle between its fanatical Muslim faction and a population unhappy enough with former dictators to have forced out several in 2011 with the prospect that Syria’s Bashar Assad will fall in 2012.

Iran remains the wild card and its nuclear dreams will likely end with a well-timed and well-executed attack by Israel. Israel saved the world from a nuclear Iraq in 1981 and a nuclear Syria in 2007. An attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities could trigger an internal movement to overthrow the mullahs.

There are other wild cards in the Middle East. The Palestinians show no indication of giving up their dream of destroying Israel. That will not happen. Without Iranian support, both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza will be set adrift. Muslim atrocities in nations such as Nigeria where Christian churches were bombed on Christmas Day will contribute to a growing movement against Islamic terrorism. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Even the Russians show signs of tiring of their post-Soviet ruling class led by Vladimir Putin.

America faces a long period of restructuring the socialist programs that began in the 1930s and reached their peak in the 1960s. Should the GOP gain control of Congress and Obama is defeated, real change will occur.

Two other factors signal better times ahead. They are the failure of the global warming hoax and the disdain the “Occupy” movement engendered.

In 2012 Americans will take steps to end the scandals and deprecations of the Obama administration.

We shall ignore the anticipated shouts of racism.

We shall see the Supreme Court disembowel Obamacare or set in motion its repeal by a GOP controlled Congress.

We will select a President and a Congress to put things right.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The 2012 Check List for America's Survival

By Alan Caruba

Many people make resolutions to start the year, but I think a list of things that must be done to protect and preserve the Republic should be tallied.

1. President Obama must be defeated in 2012 and the obstructionist Democratic Party must lose power in the Senate to ensure both houses of Congress will be Republican and in a position to initiate real change.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency must be reined in with increased Congressional oversight and legislative limits on its rule-making capacity. Having fulfilled its 1970 mandate to clean the nation’s air and water, it should be scaled back to the maintenance of these functions.

3. Americans, despite the administration’s efforts to redefine and distract us, must keep clearly in mind the threat of Islam to the nation and the world. A Middle East in turmoil lays ahead for 2012.

4. To jump-start the economy, taxes and spending must be reduced across the board. A tax on consumption, rather than income would be a good start. Only 49% of Americans currently pay income taxes, the lowest in decades.

5. Obamacare must be repealed should the Supreme Court fail to rule that the Commerce Clause takes precedence over its requirement that Americans must purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so.

6. A serious restructuring of Social Security and Medicare must be undertaken. Older Americans who have paid into the system—it is involuntary—must be ensured their benefits will be paid, but younger citizens should have the freedom and responsibility to structure their own retirement and health plans.

7. Access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil should be increased and encouraged. Oil companies should be encouraged to build more refineries via tax credits and removal of “environmental” obstacles.

8. Congress needs to identify and fund the repair to the nation’s aging infrastructure.

9. Utilities should be encouraged via tax credits and other incentives to expand the national “grid” for the distribution of electricity.

10. Term limits for Senators and Representatives should be added to the U.S. Constitution in the same fashion the presidency is limited. Salaries, pensions, and perks should be capped. A permanent political class is a danger to citizens.

11. The Federal government should be downsized with the elimination of the Departments of Education, Labor, and Energy, along with the Environmental Protection Agency. These powers should be returned to the individual States. (10th Amendment)

12. The nation’s military which has been significantly reduced in size and structure should be expanded with attention to the upgrade and increase of its naval fleet and aircraft.

13. Congress should reject and rescind all legislation based on “global warming” or “climate change” as the former has been demonstrated to be a hoax and the latter is meaningless insofar as the climate is beyond the control of humans.

14. The United States should significantly reduce its contribution to the United Nations and refuse to ratify any of its treaties.

15. Tort reform should be instituted to reduce the costs of health care.

16. The corporate tax rate should be significantly reduced from its present rate, one of the highest in the world, to increase expansion, new jobs, and competitiveness.

17. Public service unions should be illegal. The federal government does not permit such unionization and neither should states.

18. National Public Radio should no longer be funded. The “government entities” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated.

19. The federal government should be restricted or significantly limited from the acquisition of more of the nation’s landmass.

20. Strenuous efforts must be undertaken to reduce the national debt and deficit. A devalued dollar impoverishes everyone.

These are just a few changes which, if implemented, would go a long way to reducing the ills associated with a federal government grown too large, subject to crony capitalism, and corruption.

As John Adams said, "Let us disappoint the men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country."

© Alan Caruba, 2012

America's Biggest Turkey: Barack Obama

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


2009 Inaugural Trash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama Counts on Supreme Court to Okay Healthcare Act

By Alan Caruba

There’s a reason conservatives dislike activist judges and that is their record for rendering judgments that ignore the Constitution and impose their personal views on the rest of us.

Some like the 9th Circuit Court are famous for this and, in my home state of New Jersey, its supreme court imposed a law that required the state to spend billions on “Abbott” districts in some cities to supposedly improve the quality of education.

The New Jersey court ignored the state constitution that, like all others, only empowers the legislature to authorize such funding, but instead the legislature rolled over adding to the debt level of the Garden State. Need it be said it is controlled by Democrats?

Now we learn that the Obama administration is eager to have the Supreme Court rule on Obamacare. The announcement of whether they will or not will come on November 14. Let it be said that the judges read the newspapers too. They know who’s in the White House and where the political power exists in Congress.

While there are a number of reliable conservative interpreters of the Constitution on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Associate Justices Samuel Alito Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia, what makes this particularly worrisome are the two recent Obama appointments, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The two women are liberals and Kagan in particular should recuse herself from the case because she was an advocate of Obamacare, arguing for it when she was the Solicitor General of the U.S., the position she held before being confirmed by a Democrat controlled Senate on August 4, 2010.

Obamacare should and must be repealed NOW. Restore America’s Voice Foundation recently delivered 1.6 petitions calling for this action, the largest such petition drive of its kind in history. We should all contact our Senator’s offices and demand this as well.

The House of Representatives has already voted to repeal Obamacare, a bill that distorts the “commerce clause” of the Constitution. Its passage would place more power in Congress than it was ever intended to have. Were the Supreme Court to rule that it is constitutional, nothing would stand in the way of this and future congresses from passing laws requiring you to purchase goods and services you do not want and cannot afford.

Obamacare must be defeated for the same reason that Barack Obama must be defeated in 2012. It is a wonder to me that he remains in office given the fact that:

He has refused to show a valid birth certificate.

He has a suspicious Social Security number from a state in which he never lived.

He defied a court order to cease implementing the Health Care Act.

He defied a court order to stop implementing the Gulf of Mexico oil drilling moratorium.

He has filed lawsuits against states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN, etc.)

He has appointed 45 “czars” who are unaccountable to Congress.

Under the Constitution, he is ineligible to be President because he is not a “natural born” citizen. His father was a citizen of Kenya.

There are so many reasons why he should be shorn of office that it is only the level of political corruption in Congress, the compliance of the American press, and the astonishing patience of the American people that has allowed him to be President.

America cannot afford to permit Obamacare to become the law of the land. It will not survive four more years of Barack Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Lawyers Rule

By Alan Caruba

If one looks back over the history of the members of Congress, the occupation that dominates is lawyers. It is reasonable to assume that those in charge of making laws would attract those who practice it to public office.

I got to thinking about this while considering the current 112th Congress, one that has imposed Obamacare on an unwilling majority of the population with former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, telling us that Congress had to pass this abomination in order to find out what was in it.

President Obama is a former lawyer with zero experience in the world of business and commerce. His current obsession is with “millionaires and billionaires.”

According to data from the Congressional Research Service, the dominant profession of Senators is law, followed by politics—also called “public service.” In the House, most members come from business, followed by public service, then law.

In the Senate, 49 had previous service in the House. In the House and Senate, 81 members were educators. There are two medical doctors in the Senate while the House has 15, plus two dentists, one veterinarian, one ophthalmologist, and one psychiatrist.

In the entire Congress, there is only one physicist, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist.

Given the appalling financial condition of the nation, there are only seven accountants in the House and two in the Senate.

There are only five current members of Congress who served in the military Reserves, three in the House and two in the Senate. Four are current members in the National Guard; three in the House and one in the Senate. Four Representatives and one Senator are graduates of the U.S. Military Academy. Two Senators and one Representative are graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy.

In the 112th Congress, the Senate has a former comedian.

The 112th Congress has tossed aside its primary function to address the financial stability of the nation by authorizing a “super committee”, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats despite the fact that Republicans control the House where the authorization of all funding is a Constitutional mandate and the Democrats control the Senate by a bare majority of one vote.

There is extreme partisanship in both houses of Congress because the nation is sharply divided along liberal and conservative political preferences regarding its proper governance.

The 2010 elections moved the House in the direction of conservatism. For forty years Democrats controlled the Congress until the 1994 elections gave power to Republicans. It has seesawed back and forth since then, but both parties did little to address the issue of “entitlements”, Social Security and Medicare, or the looming housing mortgage crisis that imploded in 2008.

The 2008 election gave the nation its first president who, despite flowing rhetoric about bringing together the opposing factions in Congress, has not served from a center-left position, but has plunged totally into a far Left takeover of large portions of the nation’s economy from health to auto manufacturing to financial services.

For those who despair of the present and future, it is worth noting that the Founding Fathers created a Constitution that was designed to deliberately slow down the process of legislation with checks and balances that included presidential veto powers and a Supreme Court to determine issues of constitutionality.

The last time the nation was this divided, it fought a Civil War over the issues of slavery and states rights. This time, Americans are patiently waiting for the 2012 national elections to vote in a new president and rearrange the seating charts in Congress to favor conservative legislators. Who says so? All the polls.

The Tea Party movement was the direct result of the rejection of Obamacare which has been repealed in the House and is headed to the Supreme Court. The uncertainty surrounding it continues to have a profound and negative affect on the economy.

Like moths to a candle, the power vested in Congress has drawn lawyers as the group most interested in holding high office. That remains the case today and raises the question of how a group of men and women trained to lie on behalf of their clients can be trusted to make informed and intelligent decisions about the conduct of the nation’s affairs.

“It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”, said Winston Churchill. In a private moment, he is quoted as having said, “Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing — after they have exhausted all other remedies.”

We have been exhausted by the socialism of past Congresses and the remedies that President Obama has tried to impose on an unwilling nation. It is time to do the right thing.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The World is Having a Nervous Breakdown

By Alan Caruba

If one has been in the habit of reading history then the events of the past and of the present inform each other. For this reason, it occurred to me that the world is once again having a nervous breakdown.

It’s not just about money, though surely the nations of Europe along with the U.S. have spent themselves into the poorhouse in ways that defy the imagination. If it weren’t so serious, it would be comical to see the desperation that has led our Federal Reserve to print money backed by nothing and to watch the central bankers of Europe move gobs of euros around between the new mother church, Germany, and the banks of Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Italy so that they can pay their bills.

They’re all broke. We have individual States that have a higher GDP than Greece that have balanced their budgets. Those are usually the States whose constitutions require they balance their budget. The rest are run by governors torn between taking the federal largess intended to deprive them of more sovereignty and hoping that the next natural disaster hits the State above or below them instead.

Few arrive at a nervous breakdown overnight. It takes time and a variety of bad decisions or bad luck or both. After blaming George W. Bush and Republicans for his problems, Obama has taken to blaming bad luck. Does he even know that people have concluded the economy is now officially and completely his fault?

When he proposed Obamacare, a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. to tell them not to do it. He should have listened to them. Now we call them the Tea Party.

Obama cannot explain away having increased government spending by 50% between 2008 and 2010 while calling for higher taxes on everyone at the same time there are an estimated 14 million Americans out of work, stopped looking for work, or can’t get a job because Obamacare has so screwed up the near future that businesses are reluctant to hire anyone.

The 2008 financial crisis was 100% a government creation dating back to the establishment of Fannie Mae in 1938 to purchase mortgages from banks in order to encourage more lending, more home building, more home ownership. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ignored the timeless role of greed in banking.

Rule Number One: Almost everything the government touches, it ruins in some fashion. At the very least, it increases its cost of operation.

Rule Number Two: The government’s primary function is the defense of the nation against attack. As Ronald Reagan said, “Nobody ever started a war with us because we were too strong.”

Rule Number Three: Government exists due to its ability to tax and spend other people’s money. Spending always needs to be restrained.

Rule Number Four. Government will always produce more laws and regulations than are needed. It should be restrained. (See the U.S. Constitution).

Globally, we are just emerging from a bout of total insanity called “global warming.” This was a theory that said that something that represented 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere was trapping all the heat and would kill us unless massively reduced. That “something” is carbon dioxide, a gas on which—along with oxygen—all life depends. It is plant food; the less carbon dioxide, the less vegetation. Herbivores eat vegetation and carnivores eat herbivores. Humans, being omnivores, eat both.

The other craziness afflicting the planet is “radical” Islam. The truth is that it has been just plain old Islam for about 1400 years. There are a billion Muslims, most located in the Middle East, Africa, India, and Indonesia. Wherever they are, their non-Muslim neighbors cordially hate them because Islam teaches that all other religions are false and that those who believe them—infidels—can be killed for not being Muslims. The strange part of this is, depending on whether you’re a Shiite or Sunni, it is perfectly okay to kill other Muslims, too. Christianity went through this during the Reformation, 1517 to 1648.

When I was a child, the world went crazy and held a great big war. It involved Germany, Japan, and Italy as the “Axis” powers and just about everyone else did their best to destroy their military in every way possible. The Axis was defeated first and then, still holding out, the Empire of Japan had not one, but two, atomic bombs dropped on them before they quit.

World War Two was the direct result of Europe’s World War One. The surrender terms were so awful the Germans embraced a lunatic called Hitler and the Italians fell in love with Mussolini.

The Soviet Union came out of World War One when the Germans permitted Vladimir Lenin, a Communist, into Russia. He started a revolution and the Russians swapped a czar for a new dictator. Stalin took over from Lenin, but because communism has never worked anywhere it was tried, the Soviet Union eventually fell apart in 1991. Now a republic, the new dictator is named Vladimir Putin.

As the French say, “Plus les choses changent, ils plus elles restent les memes.” The more things change, they more they stay the same.

The world is having a nervous breakdown because institutions, religions, and political ideologies are having difficulty adjusting to the migration and growth of populations. Modern communications technologies are playing a role as well.

The chimera haunting everyone is the military capacity to inflict massive devastation and death has increased beyond the confidence of governments and people that it can be controlled without having to kill a lot of people, i.e., Iranians, in the process..

Capitalism, despite an abundance of communism still around, has triumphed, but like any system, has been subjected to a great deal of abuse, rocking the economies of the U.S., Europe, and making most other nations nervous, too.

And, finally, there are six-going-on-seven billion people on a planet that is probably not intended to have that many. It puts intense strain on everything from water to food to the sources of energy that fuel modern and developing nations.

So everyone’s on edge. Nations and continents are on edge. The world is having a nervous breakdown.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

McConnell Takes Obama to the Woodshed

By Alan Caruba

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gave a response, in advance, to President Obama’s Thursday speech regarding the state of the economy.

“We’ve tried the President’s approach. It’s failed.”

I doubt that Sen. McConnell’s speech received much notice by the mainstream media, but it was as succinct an analysis of why everything the President has done regarding the economy has failed. Reportedly, Obama wants to throw more billions at “recovery.”

Much like the man caught in bed by his wife with someone else, Obama’s approach is “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

Obama has a very big problem now. Even those who voted for him have removed their rose-colored glasses and concluded that they have mortgaged the present and their future to someone who has no idea how to fix that future. He will do what he has always done. He will blame someone or something else. The Bush administration. A Japanese earthquake. Hurricanes. Bad luck. And this time around, Congress.

Sen. McConnell is no silver-tongued orator. He’s not flashy or charismatic. He is, however, the quintessential conservative politician. In his address on the Senate floor he said, “I don’t think any one of us is under any illusion that the American people were particularly eager to see us come back.” That is refreshing candor.

“After two and a half years of being told that Washington had the answer to everything from the high costs of health care to high unemployment, people have every reason to be skeptical.” If Americans are skeptical of a sharply divided, highly partisan Congress, they are even more skeptical of the President.

“For more than two and a half years, under this administration, Americans have been hearing about the wonders that government spending would do for our economy, and about the dangerous consequences of failing to apply ‘bold’ solutions to big problems.”

Sen. McConnell paused and asked, “And what’s it gotten them?”

One thing Americans know about the Obama “Stimulus” is that there are 1.7 million fewer jobs in America since he signed it. “That’s not the kind of change people voted for three years ago,” said Sen. McConnell.

What, indeed, did people think they were voting for three years ago? Change? Hope? Those aren’t policies, they’re slogans.

What Americans don’t know about the Stimulus, Sen. McConnell noted, was that it is “the one of the single most expensive pieces of legislation Congress has ever approved. The interest payments alone are projected to cost an average of $100 million a day.”

“And here’s what the President told us...the Stimulus would save or create 3.5 million jobs.” As we now know, Obama’s answer to everything is more government. When his programs are criticized his answer is that it’s just politics. No, it is the failure of those programs that is obvious to anyone and everyone.

Sen. McConnell noted the ways, rather than admit failure, Obama has taken, such as agreeing to keep taxes from going up last December, but then he identified the source of our present problems. “The President is forever eager to embrace big proposals whenever government’s at the helm, but when it comes to doing the kind of things job creators really want, he’s suddenly timid. He’ll agree to a tax cut as long as it’s temporary.”

It was a long speech, but Sen. McConnell rounded it out by identifying what can and should be done. He called on the President to send Congress the three trade treaties that have been sitting on his desk for nearly three years. He called for a reform of the budget process and for a balanced budget amendment. He warned against a series of huge and costly regulatory proposals by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We’ve tried the President’s approach. It’s failed.”

“Millions of Americans are looking for Washington not so much to do more, but for the first time in a long time, to do less—so that they can finally do what it takes to get this economy moving again.”

In the wake of the President’s speech, who are you going to believe? Him? We’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Democrats and Liberals Keep Calling the Kettle Black

By Alan Caruba

Maybe it’s “just politics” or maybe it’s the fancier psychological term, “projection”—saying that others possess the same traits as oneself—but it is impossible to ignore the way liberals in general and Democrats in particular are quick to label any Republican president or presidential candidate as “dumb.”

In a very real way, it is a form of validation. Michelle Bachmann, when she showed strength in Iowa in its recent straw vote was accused of being a ditz and the great liberal bugaboo, religious. When Texas Governor Rick Perry announced he was in the running, he caught flack for participating in a prayer gathering and actually praying! Predictably, as Perry’s popularity has soared, Politico posted an August 29 article, “Is Rick Perry Dumb?”

Anyone who has given Gov. Perry’s resume even a glancing look knows that he’s not only bright enough to have risen from humble beginnings, but he has never lost an election. And the man is from Texas, just like two previous Bush Presidents and the unlamented Lyndon B. Johnson who managed to not only mire the nation in a war in Vietnam, but to lose it.

In the Bush-Kerry match-up, their college scores were released and it turned out that Bush43 did better than his opponent. Last time I heard, securing a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a master’s from Harvard Business School is no walk in the park

By contrast, two and a half years into his term as President, no one knows what grades Barack Hussein Obama received at either Columbia University or Harvard. Indeed, as far as a “paper trail” is concerned there are still gaps wide enough through which to drive a tank regarding what is actually known about Obama such as, for instance, where did he get his Social Security number? What nation’s passport did he travel on when he visited Pakistan in his youth?

And the biggest question of all, why is he President, given that the Constitution states, “No person except a natural born citizen (that is to say, both parents being American citizens)…shall be eligible to the office of President…” This is not rocket science. A commentary from CanadaFreePress.com cited the following, “As his father was not a U.S. citizen, but rather a citizen of Kenya, Obama inherited by birthright, natural law, his fathers name and citizenship. He is NOT a “natural born citizen” of the US, no matter where he was born.”

So far, he has produced several “birth certificates” that were so bogus that they were instantly revealed as such by experts who meticulously detailed why. Just as with the 2008 campaign, the mainstream media has run interference for this usurper, largely by ignoring the issue.

When it comes to comparing smart versus dumb, how smart is Obama when the record shows that he ignored the problem of the national debt, handing it off to a commission whose findings he ignored until Standard & Poor’s downgraded the nation’s credit rating for the first time ever!

Those in the White House and leading the Democratic Party so obviously regard the American public and, in particular, voters, as stupid that they utter the most stupid things themselves, thinking no one will notice. The new chairwomen of the Democrat National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, said that Republicans are wrong on illegal immigration because they think “that in fact it should be a crime.” Earth to Debbie, it is a crime.

Vice President Joe Biden, who has become an embarrassment to the White House and Democratic Party, speaking of the decision to kill Osama bin Laden, called it “The boldest decision any president has undertaken on a single event in modern history.” What about all the decisions President Bush had to take following 9/11?

Obamacare was such a disaster that the U.S. Department of Health has had to issue 1,400 waivers. Hardly a day goes by without new revelations of the costs it imposes on the economy or the thousands of bureaucrats that would have to be hired to enforce it. The House of Representatives has already voted to repeal it and 26 States brought a court action against it; the most recent decision on the way to the Supreme Court has found it to be unconstitutional.

The same day a Politico’s article, blogger Burt Prelutsky posted a brief hilarious review of Obama’s gaffes that is well worth reading.

The Democrats have given us the dumbest, most dishonest President ever elected to that office and the race card is already being played. Democrat Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina has said, “people don’t like to deal with it, but the fact of the matter is, the president’s problems are in large measure because of the color of his skin.”

So the kettle is calling the pot black. In the case of the Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., his skin color will provide no protection from his appalling record of incompetence and stupidity.

© 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

600 More Days of Obama

By Alan Caruba

As of May 30, 2011, America has 600 days more of rule by President Barack Hussein Obama.

He is the 44th President and, while we have had incompetent Presidents in the past, we have never had one determined to destroy the nation. It has taken more than two years for most sentient Americans to grasp this extraordinary threat. He has not solved problems. He has exacerbated them.

Granted the financial crisis began in 2008 as President George W. Bush was finishing his second term, but President Obama—aside from blaming Bush for everything that has occurred on his watch—literally tripled the national debt with dubious and failed “stimulus” programs, plunging the nation into debt that rivals all others in our history.

President Obama had a lot of help in getting elected and will no doubt get it in his effort to secure a second term. The mainstream media has utterly debased itself, sounding more like the state monopolies of fascist nations.

On June 6, 2008, a reporter for the Associated Press wrote an article, “These men are likely targets in an anti-Obama campaign”, naming Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, the former Weatherman domestic terrorist, among others. One of them, Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko, an early Obama supporter, was convicted of mail fraud and money laundering the same week the article appeared.

By July 2008, Investor’s Business Daily took note of Obama’s “Stealth Socialism” when he addressed the NAACP using the code words “economic justice” four times to a cheering audience. IBD reported that “‘Economic justice’ simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It’s a euphemism for socialism.”

In October 2008, the Washington Post’s syndicated columnist, Charles Krauthammer, wrote “I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory.”

With the election days away in November 2008, Sammy Benoit, posted on American Thinker.com, wrote, “Please take a look at these people allied with the Obama campaign. Some of them are anti-Israel; others are anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel.” He named Samantha Power who had “called for an invasion of Israel to impose a solution to the Palestinian issue.” Obama’s open hostility toward Israel in recent days demonstrates how prescient Benoit was.

Shortly after the election, Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s reporter on the media asked “Are the media capable of merchandizing the moment, packaging a president-elect for profit? Yes, we are.” Then he touched on the key role the media had played leading up to Obama’s election and afterward. “We seem to have crossed a cultural line into myth-making.”

“Whew! Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed ‘Generation O’?” asked Kurtz.

In rapid succession, with some rejections, President Obama filled not only his cabinet posts, but added an astonishing level of advisors, quickly dubbed “czars”, to the White House. Their ranks included the true believers in the global warming hoax including a former Environmental Protection Agency director who had just resigned from a post as commissioner for the Socialist International Commission for a Sustainable World Society. Czars and cabinet members all represented the antithesis of moderation.

Moderation is not a word anyone would apply to the Obama administration. By February 18, 2009, political guru, Karl Rove, pointed out that “Less than 700 hours after taking the oath of office, President Barack Obama signed the largest spending bill in American history.”

His eligibility to hold the office was already an issue by February 2009 and it is not going to go away. Dr. Jerome Corsi’s new book, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” is a New York Times bestseller, its sale buoyed by widespread and growing concerns that Obama, under the terms set form by the U.S. Constitution, was not and is not eligible. Not only are there questions about his alleged birth certificate, but his Connecticut Social Security number as well.

After “Obamacare” was literally reamed through the House and Senate on a strict party-line vote, the public began to have some serious concerns. The massive assault on Medicare would bring a million people to Washington, D.C., to protest it prior to the vote and would spark the Tea Party movement. By November 2010, control of the House would return to the Republican Party and Democrats had lost members in the Senate.

By early 2011, Wall Street Journal columnist, Daniel Henninger, commented on Obama’s dwindling “likeability gap” citing the passage of time. “Obama.2008 was engaging, patient, open, optimistic, and a self-identified conciliator. Obama.2011 has been something else—testy, petulant, impatient, arrogant and increasingly a divider.”

As voters begin to scan the November 2012 horizon, Henniger wrote “Never forget: That historic 2008 victory came with 52.9% of the total vote and 52% of independent voters. David Axelrod recently noted ‘how small the margin for error is.’”

By April 2011, Gallup reported that “Barack Obama’s approval among the poorest Americans dropped to an all-time low of 48 percent…leaving the president with less-than-majority approval among all income brackets reported in Gallup’s presidential approval surveys.” Rasmussen polling showed the same numbers.

On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned the office of the presidency, the first to do so in the nation’s history. The sordid events dubbed “Watergate” forced his hand. Earlier, Lyndon B. Johnson had told voters he would not run for reelection after his pursuit of the war in Vietnam had turned them against him.

It is not beyond the realm of the possible that Barack Hussein Obama may find himself in increasing difficulty in the remaining 600 days of his first and likely last term in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama, The Great Prevaricator

By Alan Caruba

“President Obama told congressional leaders there are no plans to use the U.S. military to assassinate Libyan strongman Muammar Gadhafi — despite the administration’s policy of seeking regime change in the North African country — according to sources familiar with a Friday White House Situation Room briefing.”
-- March 25, 2011, Politico.com

Translation: Obama has already given orders to have Gadhafi assassinated.

It’s taken two years, the first in which he was everywhere all the time on television, but it took Americans who weren’t besotted by his dazzling smile, his haute couture, and “no drama, Obama” style, very little time to figure out that whatever Barack Hussein Obama says, you can count on his meaning the opposite and doing the opposite.

No previous administration has been so devoted to twisting the language like a pretzel to avoid saying what he means or does. It’s not a “war” in Libya; it’s a “kinetic military action.” There are no Islamic terrorists and there aren’t dozens, if not hundreds of illegal aliens crossing the Mexico border every day. And, after announcing that his administration was lifting the ban on offshore drilling, it has issued a grand total of one and that was to restart an existing platform.

After identifying Afghanistan as the “real” war in the Middle East and decrying the Iraq war all through his campaign, Obama took weeks to decide what to do there and finally did what Bush had done in Iraq. He increased the number of troops.

I am not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or any other professional judge of what makes anyone tick, but I know a liar when I hear and see one day after day, week after week, and year after year.

This is a President who devoted virtually the entire first year of his term to forcing a Democrat controlled Congress to pass The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, a massive assault on the nation’s health industry. It was accomplished even after a million people journeyed to Washington, D.C. to protest it.

When it was passed, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what was in it.” What was in it was more than two thousand pages of regulations creating countless new government entities, driving up the cost of health insurance, and a hideous piece of legislation that generated a deluge of requests for waivers from its draconian destruction of this essential element of the economy.

Twenty-eight States have refused to recognize Obamacare as law. A judge in Florida has deemed it unconstitutional. And it was a lie from start to finish.

This is a President whose first State of the Union speech draw derisive laughter from the assembled Congress when he referred to climate change, the code words for global warming.

This is a President who is pushing for high-speed rail in a nation whose citizens either fly where they want to go or drive where they want to go. The federally run Amtrak has never had a profitable year in its entire history.

This is a President who is pushing for electric cars when there is a perfectly functioning system for cars that use gasoline and the first ones off the assembly line cost so much and go so few miles as to be an instant joke.

By the end of his first term, “It’s Bush’s fault” became another joke and by the end of his second year, Obama had adopted most of his predecessor’s earlier decisions including Guantanamo and military trials despite his stated goal to shut it down.

The original bailout, TARP, came at the end of Bush’s term in response to the financial crisis that occurred just before the 2008 election. Obama has followed that with still more deficit spending to the point where everyone in America has an $80,000 piece of the debt he created.

There is no need to list the endless lies any more. All except his mainstream media shills and the hardcore liberal fools know he lies and does so all the time.

This should it come as a surprise for a man whose entire life is a construction of lies including the birth certificate he refuses to produce.

All hail Obama! The Great Prevaricator!

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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