Election Fatigue

By Alan Caruba

It’s a lot like the marathon experience of “hitting the wall” when you have to push on to get to the finish line. It’s election fatigue.

Elections give media news people hundreds of hours to speculate, to evaluate, to discuss what is occurring in every district of every State, to report which candidate is ahead or behind, to trot out a new poll every day, until those who have probably made up their mind long before refuse to listen to another word.

There are, of course, thousands of words that follow an election and it must be said that the 2010 midterms were quite literally historic. As Karl Rove noted, “Tuesday’s election was epic. Republicans gained over 60 seats in the House and six in the Senate. They’ll now occupy eight additional governor’s mansions and at least 500 more seats in state legislatures.”

“The Republicans picked up more House seats than in any election since 1938, leaving the Democrats with the smallest number in the House since 1946,” and, predicted Rove, “Democratic losses could get worse in the next election. In 2012, three times as many Senate Democrats as Republicans face the voters—and many are from red states. Two more years of voting for the Obama agenda could do them in.”

The question in the minds of most Americans is how does all this translate into solving the awesome problems facing the nation and, more particularly, what does it mean to my future?

Everyone is going to have a different answer to the latter question because everyone has their own specific circumstances. I would not, for example, want to be a new college graduate right about now. The likelihood is they will be moving back in with mom and dad while others will be struggling to hold onto their homes.

While it is likely that the Bush tax cuts will remain, the temptation of States like California and other big spenders to raise taxes exists. The great challenge of our times is to shrink government at every level to an affordable size. Something is very wrong when the largest union in the nation is for government workers. It is inherently wrong that this union can give money to candidates when that money comes from members being paid with public funding.

The answer to the former question, the personal impact the post-midterm nation will have, involves the potential for a huge inflation, a continued devaluation of the U.S. dollar, a stagnant employment prospect as few jobs are created, and for some the prospect of being laid off from work or running out of the funds put aside or invested for retirement.

Real reduction of government is needed, but few believe it will occur. We have a bloated federal government workforce, many of whom are earning twice what a comparable private sector job would pay. There are entire federal departments and agencies that could be pared without being missed.

There are some important policy changes that could significantly improve the job sector and the mythical “energy independence” politicians love to talk about. You don’t just poke a hole in the ground and get oil. It takes time. Involves a lot of risk, and it takes lots of money.

Big Oil is in the business of risk and would spend the money if it was permitted to drill in and offshore of Alaska where vast amounts of oil are known to exist. There’s oil in the Dakotas and there’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico where the Obama administration is deliberately rendering thousands unemployed by slowing the permitting process. When you think oil, also think natural gas. The oil companies are as interested in it as crude.

Let’s stop handing out billions in tax credits and other funding for “Green energy”, wind and solar power. Few projects are more stupid than a proposal to build the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant in the Southern California desert. It just got the green light (no pun intended) from the Obama administration to the tune of $6 billion.

While the Greens are always screaming bloody murder about endangered species and the destruction of “pristine” land, this one project will take up 7,025 acres of federally owned land near Blythe, California. The cost of the transmission lines that will be needed is ridiculous when a single coal-fired or nuclear plant could produce many times more dependable, 24/7 megawatts of electricity than this blanket of solar panels ever will.

Barack Obama is still talking about a fictitious and fraudulent “climate change”, i.e., global warming at a time when most of the world has concluded that there is no global warming and when the largest carbon credit exchange in the U.S. just closed its doors.

Therein lies the real problem. Granted that the election has been a blow against the Obama agenda, Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton who moved to the center after his midterm losses.

Obama is a very different animal. He is still capable of doing a lot of harm from the Oval Office and, as we have seen, he is not shy about doing it. This is an administration that added $2.7 trillion to the national debt, including a record $1.4 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2009 and a $1.3 trillion deficit for FY 2010.

That’s why we must shake off election fatigue and be as relentless in the two years ahead as those through which we have passed. Obama is punishing America because he doesn’t like America.

He must be politically neutralized. It won’t be pretty.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Voters Said No. Obama Says No.

Cartoon Round Up

Al Qaeda Sends a Message Again

By Alan Caruba

On March 11, 2004, just days before general elections in Spain, bombs went off on trains in a series of coordinated attacks that killed 191 people and wounded 1,800. An investigation determined that they were the work of an al Qaeda “inspired” terrorist cell, though it was said at the time there was no direct connection.

The ruling party, Partido Popular, had supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a policy that was generally unpopular with Spaniards. The result was that its opposition won the elections.

I do not believe in coincidences and news that two explosive devices were found on cargo planes headed for America just days before our general elections suggests a pattern.

The larger pattern, of course, has been a number of recent terrorist attacks from the Christmas Eve “underwear bomber” to the more recent Times Square bomber. The only thing that seems to have protected Americans from being murdered as infidels is the sheer incompetence of those involved.

That kind of luck does not last forever.

Ironically, on October 27th I posted a commentary that was intended to be a reminder that, as we got ready to go to polling places on November 2nd, we have been too distracted from the fact that outside of America there is still a dangerous world.

Al Qaeda has sent us a message. The first part of the message was that they are still around and still at war with the Great Satan, America. The second was that they believe they can influence the outcome of our midterm elections. Though unintentional, the third part of the message is that they are a bunch of incompetents who, unlike Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City infamy, cannot put together a decent bomb.

That, of course, is an overstatement because Arabs, whether al Qaeda or not, have been blowing up each other’s mosques with regularity throughout the Middle East. There’s an Arab saying that goes something like “I against my brother. My brother and I against our cousins. My brother, my cousins, and I against the world.”

Even the Mafia had more internal cohesiveness than these sons of Allah whose biggest problem in life is who to kill next.

Unlike the Spaniards who voted to run away from the Iraq conflict, these would-be bombers have seriously misunderstood how Americans think. You attack us, we send in the Marines—and the Army—and the Air Force—and we park a couple of Navy carrier groups off the coast..

If the Yemenese do not get serious about their jihadists, finding and killing them, they will eventually get a visit from Uncle Sam. They don’t have that many friends in the world and that includes their neighbors in Saudi Arabia, so it’s likely to get very nasty for them.

The American military will be exiting Afghanistan in 2011 because President Obama never wanted to be there in the first place. I hate to agree with anything the man says or does, but in this he is correct. The Afghanis are tribal. When not finding a reason to fight one another, they will join together to fight anyone from outside. And that is likely to include the Taliban at some point.

The troops we are leaving in Iraq will be there when our grandchildren have grandchildren. The U.S. has a long history of never leaving a nation once we have invaded. Just ask the Germans, the Japanese, or the South Koreans, all of whom appear to have found that arrangement to their advantage.

Aside from the operational failure of this latest terror attack, what stands out is the lack of terror among Americans. Even the stock market took it in stride on Friday.

On Tuesday Americans are going to clean house in a Congress whose members are so unpopular that the survivors and the new winners will have gotten the message voters will have sent.

That’s not just a problem for Democrats. It’s a problem for al Qaeda, too.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Obama Hits the Wall

By Alan Caruba

We all know our own profession or industry better than others because that’s where we earn our living.

So when my old friend Jack O’Dwyer, the publisher of his namesake Public Relations News, reported that “Eight of the ten largest O’Dwyer-ranked independent PR firms were in the minus column for 2009”, adding that “15 of the top 25 and 32 of the top 50” firms reported “negative years”, it merely confirmed what I already knew.

I have been a PR counselor since the 1970s which means I have seen good times and bad. What this has taught me is that when the economy begins to fail, public relations is one of the early indicators because cutting back on PR or eliminating it from the budget is always among the first choices of corporations, trade groups, and non-profit enterprises.

I read the business and financial news because I need to know what industries are thriving, which ones are encountering losses, and, of course, what the various gurus have to say about the state of the economy. The one thing I have learned, however, is that the business press will be reporting “signs of recovery” right up to the day the whole house of cards collapses.

Barack Obama may think he’s on top of the world right now. He forced the Democrats in Congress to pass Obamacare. He signed a non-proliferation treaty with Russia. Earlier he picked up a Nobel Peace Prize. But. There’s always a “but.”

On April 8, Doug Elmendorf, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, added his voice to a growing chorus of economic experts saying that if political leaders don’t scale back spending, increase taxes or both, the U.S. will be even more broke than it already is. All the taxes collected will cover defense and “entitlement” programs. All other funds will have to be borrowed at a rate of about one billion every single day.

To be precise, that would mean increasing taxes on the fifty percent of earners that pay income taxes. Nearly half do not. Add to them the increasing numbers of unemployed who are not earning anything these days. Not exactly a fair “re-distribution” of wealth.

In a time of economic crisis, most economists will tell you it is essential to ensure that more people can keep more of their earnings than turning them over to the same government that has been wasting them. When people buy real things, the economy hums along. When they stop, it stops.

Elmendorf is worried about the increase in public debt from $7.5 trillion at the end of 2009 to $20.4 trillion at the end of 2020 if Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget is implemented as written. “As a percentage of gross domestic product, the debt would rise from 53 percent to 90 percent, CBO forecasted.”

Whoa! Ninety percent of the entire output of the U.S. economy! The last time that happened was right after World War Two!

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently said that government must cut entitlements or raise taxes. I cannot think of a single reason why government, i.e., politicians, would ever cut entitlements. All they have done since the 1930s has been to create new entitlements, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, while at the same time dipping into the funds that were supposed to be set aside to pay them and spending them.

Just how greedy is Congress and just how stupid do they think Americans are?

Well, consider this. Obamacare not only intends to slash a half trillion dollars out of Medicare funding, but also add several millions to its rolls.

Healthcare, we’re told, is “a right.” I checked the U.S. Constitution and could not find anything in there that specifically cites healthcare. Moreover, it is unconstitutional for the government to require you to purchase anything such as healthcare insurance if you don’t want to. A comparable state healthcare program in Massachusetts is already broke and, if you live there, you cannot buy an alternative insurance policy.

When Medicare was enacted in 1965, Americans were told that it would cost $9 billion in 25 years (1990). It cost $67 billion, fully seven and a half times more.

Obama is about to hit the wall. It is called reality. It will be a miracle if the villagers are not in the streets with pitchforks and torches.

It is worth pausing to remind you that wherever communism/socialism has been applied, it has failed. As an oppressive political system, it works, but as an economic system it failed the former Soviet Union and has been abandoned by the Peoples Republic of China. It has failed Cuba and is failing Venezuela.

As for Obamacare, there’s the unconstitutionality of this hideous, socialist healthcare “reform” (states are signing up to challenge it in the Supreme Court) and there is an economy that will not produce new jobs despite the inflated reports that include thousands of temporary census takers. It was a failure the moment Obama signed it.

In November’s mid-term elections, all 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for re-election. One third of the Senate, 33 members, will also stand for reelection. All of them, Democrats and Republicans alike, need to be replaced. Your town dog catcher could do a better job of running the country.

At the very least, do not vote for anyone standing for election who will not take a pledge on the Bible to cut spending, to cut taxes, and to repeal Obamacare.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

An American Billboard

This billboard is on I-75 just south of Lake City, Florida. It cost $6,500 and will be up for 10 months where an estimated one million drivers will see it each month. Anyone who thinks Americans are going to lie down and roll over for the liberals in the White House and Congress is seriously mistaken.

Obama's First Year Ends

By Alan Caruba

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy one of the books about his brief administration was “A Thousand Days” by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Even so, he had set America on a trip to the Moon, helped advance the Civil Rights movement, and, with Jackie Kennedy, brought a brief era of grace and sophistication to the White House.

January 20 will mark a year since Barack Obama took the oath of office. As this is written, the entire nation awaits the outcome of the special election in Massachusetts and many want to see an end to the Democrat control of the Senate. There are any number of ironies, not the least of which that it was Massachusetts that gave us JFK and his bloated little brother, Teddy.

It is hard to recall a more brutally partisan administration and Congress. Bribery and thuggish uncivil behavior has become the hallmark of the Democrat controlled political process; weakness and appeasement the nation’s foreign policy.

“Yes, we can” has transitioned into a public panic regarding the massive expenditures, the billions spent to take over the auto industry, banks, insurance companies, and an insulting “stimulus” bill devoted more to “green jobs” than real jobs. The final injury as the first year comes to a close would be the passage in the Senate of a widely hated Medicare “reform” that reeked of unconstitutional elements and which will surely be challenged in the courts.

It is astounding that a single Senate vote could end the reign of terror that characterizes Obama’s first year.

The answer Barack Obama gave over and over again was that it was all the fault of George W. Bush. By summer, that excuse had lost its power to influence all but Obama’s most stupid supporters.

Obama’s “first thousand days” will prove critical to the future of the nation. Profligate debt and possible default haunts most of the States and the nation as a whole. Moody’s Investor Services has warned that the nation is barely three years or less away from losing its prized triple-A rating for its securities. China has warned that America cannot assume it will continue to purchase its debt.

On Christmas Day, al Qaeda reminded Americans that all are considered targets in its terror war on the nation and the West. If they wanted to scare us, they succeeded. Perhaps they were encouraged by a President who took three months to make up his mind whether to continue to wage war on them in Afghanistan and three days before he made a public response to the Christmas attack.

After the Fort Hood assault, it was former President Bush who quietly visited the wounded, not President Obama, though he did stage an earlier photo opportunity of his greeting the returning war dead from Afghanistan.

There is no question that, in the first year- of Obama’s first—and likely his last-—term in office, Iran will achieve its goal of becoming a nuclear power with the ability to put warheads on top of missiles capable of hitting anywhere in the Middle East and as far away as Europe. Diplomacy has failed. Only one option remains.

At this writing, very nearly half of the voters express disapproval for Obama’s conduct of the nation’s affairs and they will focus on November’s midterm elections in an effort to politically neuter his administration with a transfer of congressional power to the Republican Party.

If the off-year election of Republican Governors in New Jersey and Virginia was an indicator, the steady stream of announcements by Democrat legislators that they intend to retire or change party affiliation suggests that the writing is clearly on the wall.

The leading indicator, however, remains the unemployment rate, officially at ten percent, but widely considered to be closer to fifteen percent and higher.

The President’s State of the Union speech on January 27 will be parsed and examined like a doctoral dissertation on economics, a subject Obama seems to understand only in terms of Marxist orthodoxy.

Worse for him will be the increasingly widespread view that he lies virtually all the time. He lacks credibility with everyone except the slavish drones of the mainstream media and brain-dead supporters.

Well before the end of his first thousand days, Obama has joined former President Carter among the pantheon of Presidents forever known for their failures.