Move Over, Slick Willy!

By Alan Caruba

Does it seem to you that Obama is seeking to dominate the news cycle with a lot of appearances on television? If so, you’re right. This is a presidency that understands that a large portion of the population will respond to the mere fact that he is on television, but not to the specifics of his message.

Even so, he is a masterful orator. He is so relaxed, so smooth, so apparently in control of his alleged facts, and has such a light touch when he needs it to inject a bit of humor that he challenges the likes of former President Bill Clinton for the moniker of “Slick.”

The contrast with former President George W. Bush is particularly sharp. Bush was one of the least articulate speakers, subject to all kinds of distracting quirks when he spoke, prone to malapropos, and an accent that most people associate with good ole’boys having a beer at the local bar.

Despite that, we tend to forget that Bush got most of his bills through Congress, especially spending bills like the Medicare Prescription program and “No Child Left Behind”, a liberal education program for which few have anything good to say. He was, however, unable to convince either Congress or most Americans that Social Security is a ponzi scheme that must inevitably fail.

Obama is utterly charming and beguiling and he knows it.

He has arrived at the Oval Office with one of the thinnest resumes for any actual achievement, other than running for office, of any prior President. At least Clinton and Bush had been governors, a common platform for the leap to the White House.

I hear from a lot of people who say the same thing. Obama scares them.

They have good cause. Few people are aware of the influence that Frank Marshall Davis had on the adolescent Obama. Davis was a newspaper journalist, poet, and organizer for the Hawaii Communist Party, part of the CPUSA. Born in Kansas, living much of his life in Chicago, he moved to Hawaii in 1948. He would claim that he had been “brain-washed for years after the Bolshevik revolutions.” An Afro-American, one can easily see how Obama would identify with him while being raised by his white grandparents.

When you combine the way Obama was marinated in communism during his teen years and, after an Ivy League education, followed his mentor’s footsteps to Chicago where he studied the techniques of “community organizer”, Saul Alinsky, the separate threads of Obama’s path to the White House begin to come together. Alinski literally wrote the book on how to deceive people into accepting communism.

Little wonder the inclusion of a major revision in healthcare was discovered buried deep in the so-called “stimulus” bill. The socialist healthcare programs in Canada, in England, and elsewhere are a horror. Imposing a socialist healthcare program on America has nothing to do with job creation and everything to do with expanding an ever growing and ever more intrusive government bureaucracy.

And yet Obama’s actual election margins are slim. He won by 53% in the general election with 46% of the voters choosing other candidates. Very nearly half of the voters did not and presumably still do not support him. They are the ones who are scared and they should be.

“We won” in a constitutional republic does not mean you are free to govern by executive order and with a majority in Congress that is determined to impose the largest spending bill in the history of the nation.

The refusal to compromise, a rush to impose legislation without the traditional debate and discussion process, and a cult around the man in the White House is a danger to the republic.

With less than a month in office, Obama has managed to unify the Republican Party in ways we have not seen in decades. They understand the danger even if they don’t have the votes to deter it.

The Secret of Success

By Alan Caruba

Unless you are a pest control professional, it is unlikely you ever heard of Norm Ehmann. Those of us who were fortunate to know him, however, just loved the man. He passed away recently at the age of 84 and everyone in America owes him a huge debt of gratitude.

Every business and industry in America has a handful of men who transform it and always for the better. They come to their daily tasks with a personal integrity and an enthusiasm that is irresistible.

There was a time when, if people had a pest problem, they asked the local pest control provider to park his car or truck around the corner so others would not know. The inference was that you were not keeping a clean house. People who engaged in pest control had a handful of products and devices to get rid of insect and rodent pests. Their business practices frequently involved a low-ball price for dubious services and results.

Norm Ehmann was instrumental in changing that. He was involved in pest control for more than fifty years and he was passionate about it. What he and others did was introduce educational seminars to the profession. He understood that the most important element of eliminating insect and rodent pests was a thorough-going knowledge and understanding of their habits, life cycles, and harborages.

I knew Norm because, back in the 1970s I participated in the introduction of a remarkable new insecticide called “Ficam.” It was applied with water. It was lethal to a wide variety of insect pests, but virtually harmless to human beings. You’d think this was a good thing, but many years later, the Environmental Protection Agency demanded that the product undergo a repeat of the multi-million dollar registration process and the manufacturer decided it just wasn’t worth it.

I tell you this because it reflected what happened to DDT. During WWII, DDT successfully saved the lives of countless American soldiers and refugees from insect-borne diseases. People were literally dusted with DDT and, then as now, they lived because of this remarkable insecticide. Then Rachel Carson wrote a book, “Silent Spring”, that defamed DDT and, in time, it was banned. Every year now, in Africa alone, five million people die from Malaria for the lack of this miracle insecticide.

Norm worked for Van Waters & Rogers, a leading distributor of pest control products that purchased the company for which he was a salesman. He helped take VW&R from a $3 million operation under its previous owner to a $200 million enterprise. The introduction of new pesticides is the reason that Americans do not have to fear the diseases that insect and rodent pests spread whether it be in a supermarket, a hospital, a school, a hotel, or anywhere else professional pest control services exist.

For Norm, pesticides, used properly, were the answer to the threats of disease and property damage that had always plagued mankind. Over his life he was instrumental in creating 8,000 insect slides and specimens to help train pest control operators, owners and technicians.

That’s why people greet “the Orkin man” and other pest control folk with a smile. Most arrive in a clean uniform, have a professional demeanor, and all are licensed and certified by state agencies.

Norm didn’t just give sales talks. He helped train thousands of men and women to be effective, to understand the products they were using, to understand the pests to be exterminated, to project pride in their profession, to regard and respect each customer as essential to their own success.

Such people transform their industries and, as a result, improve the lives of all Americans.

Obama's Middle East Stumble

By Alan Caruba

With every passing day, I am beginning to believe that President Obama lives in his own world, a kind of parallel universe to the real world. Speaking from Obama World, he is convinced that if enough kind and gentle words are spoken, he can personally change the Real World. He can’t.

What is required most of any President is the ability to understand history and to see the world as it is. As often as not, it has been war that has transformed history and there is a reason that the symbol on your dollar bill shows the eagle clutching emblems of peace and war in his talons. The left talons hold peaceful intentions, the right demonstrate our readiness for war.

It is understandable that Obama feels the way he does. He is the son of a white mother and a black, Kenyan father. His father, who deserted the family, was a Muslim and his step-father, an Indonesian, was a Muslim also. Obama says he’s a Christian and here again we find another example of how he perceives himself to be a bridge between two worlds in his own body and life.

He has, however, identified himself as black, so the white part of him, despite having been largely raised by his white grandparents, takes a back seat. Even so, he has succeeded beyond (or because) of his wildest dreams in a predominantly white society.

In his first interview with a media outlet as President, he chose Al-Arabiya and a message to the Muslim Middle East.

I am reminded of the saying, “Everything I ever needed to know about Islam, I learned on 9/11.” It was, for most Americans, their first real introduction to fundamentalist Islam, although three decades earlier, they got more than a taste of it when the Iranian Revolution took U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979. Islam is all about making war.

Even earlier, Americans witnessed the Arab response to the establishment of Israel in 1948 through one war after another on that nation. The Israelis’ recent response to constant shelling from Gaza was just another example of the utter intransigence of the Muslim mind after the Israelis had unilaterally withdrawn from there in 2005.

Obama’s message reeked of submission and weakness. It barely resembled the actual history between the United States and the Middle East and surely ignored its own wretched and violent history, even in the modern era.

In his excellent book, “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present” by Michael B. Oren, he makes it abundantly clear that the Arabs of the Middle East and in North Africa were a problem from the very beginning of the new nation. “Prior to the Revolution, the only major threat to America’s vital Mediterranean trade came from the Middle East. Styling themselves as mujahideen—worriers in an Islamic, holy war—Arabic-speaking pirates preyed on Western vessels, impounding their cargoes and enslaving their crews.”

And today Muslim pirates ply their trade off the coast of Somalia! The birth of the first U.S. Navy and Marines was a military response to piracy that took them to “the shores of Tripoli.”

If Obama thinks that the Arab or Persian mindset has changed, he is mistaken. Not that long ago, Iranians took British troops hostage in the Persian Gulf and within days of his Al-Arabia interview Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was demanding that the U.S. apologize for what he deemed “crimes” against it, conveniently ignoring the fact that taking diplomats hostage broke any number of international laws. President Jimmy Carter’s equally weak response ended with the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan.

Another Iranian government spokesman, Gholam Hossein Etham, characterized Obama’s appearance as meaning that “Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination has failed.” There was a good and valid reason former President George W. Bush named Iran as part of an “axis of evil.”

If there is one thing those in the Middle East can spot half a globe away it is weakness and Obama’s interview told them everything they needed to know about the new U.S. President.

Thanks to Islam, much of the Middle East as well as parts of Africa continue to regard terror and violence as the only road to a new Caliphate that will rule over the world in the name of Islam.

There is no peace between the so-called Palestinians and Israelis, and never will be. The Syrians are still trying to retake Lebanon, using Hezbollah as theirs and Iran’s proxies, as they do with Hamas.

Pakistan, a Muslim state that barely passes for a nation is in turmoil and at odds with both Afghanistan and India. Some in Turkey are trying to return it to its Islamic roots after a successful history as a secular state. Iran’s leaders are all fanatics. Its people, however, appear to love America. Most Middle East and North African states are dictatorships in one form or another with the ironic exceptions of Israel and now Iraq!

The man who sits in the White House as the result of endlessly repeating the words “hope” and “change” is discovering that change is slow and often glacial. He’ll be running low on hope for the Middle East after the new, proposed influx of U.S. troops into Afghanistan begins to take casualties.

President Obama is off to a very bad start. Americans are going to need all the hope they can muster to survive the next four years.

What Goes Around, Comes Around

By Alan Caruba

The cliché, “What goes around, comes around”, will prove its worth as the abortion known as the Democrat “Stimulus” bill begins to fail of its own dead weight to stimulate anything more than a larger federal government capable apparently only of devaluating the U.S. dollar while piling more debt upon debt on you, me, our children and grandchildren.

How difficult is it to understand that, if you are deeply in debt, you cannot spend your way out of it, even if you have a machine that prints paper money?

As Alyssa A. Lappen, a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of ‘Institutional Investor’ and other magazines, and a former associate editor of ‘Forbes’, pointed out in a commentary on FrontPageMag.com, “While the bill will vastly increase the federal government’s reach, it is noteworthy that the government has never profitably managed a single enterprise.”

She noted a few government failures, starting with the mortgage giants, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, two “government sponsored enterprises”, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the U.S. Postal Service. Is there anyone left who does not know that the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid systems are insolvent? Also insolvent, noted Lappen, “are 40 out of 50 States…”

So, while the Democrat majority in Congress is rubbing its hands in anticipation of political power based on massive handouts of public funds, when the “stimulus” does not reverse job losses in a year or so, these same folks will be loudly shouting “you’ve got to give it time.” If they had done nothing at all, this recession would on its own have played itself out in anywhere from six to eight months, maybe a year. This is the normal cycle for these financial events.

Now there is literally no end in sight for the recession along with the possibility it will hemorrhage into a full-fledged depression.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, one trillion dollars is about one-third of annual U.S. government spending and 13% of the U.S. economy. It is more than the GDP of all but twelve nations in 2007. It is roughly one-sixth of the entire outstanding U.S. federal debt held by the public and one-tenth if you factor in intra-government debt such as Social Security IOUs.

The Democrats will argue that every $1 dollar injected into the economy will yield 1.5 times that in greater output. It is an utterly false assertion that assumes that the government can, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “create wealth out of thin air.”

The stimulus bill will, in both the short and long term, come back to bite the Democrat Party and President Obama. In the long term, your great grandchildren will still be paying it off.

In the meanwhile, $18.5 billion (based on the ever-changing figures in the bill) will be spent on “energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Another $2.4 billion will be set aside for “demonstrations of how to safely remove atmospheric greenhouse gas” but the catch to that is that the Earth is cooling and carbon dioxide plays almost no role whatever in either a cooling or warming cycle. In short, more than $20 billion will be utterly and totally wasted.

A classic example of why the stimulus bill, before it is signed into law by President Obama, will fail is the $1 billion allocated to Amtrak. In 1971, the National Railway Passenger Corporation was a federal government rescue of the former Penn Central. Amtrak has never shown a profit in the past thirty-eight years.

If the economy and, indeed, the United States, can survive the massive wastefulness of this bill, another bill will come due for the Democrats and President Obama. It will be a political one demanding they explain why, other than greed, arrogance, and the pursuit of power, they foisted this monstrosity on Americans?

How soon will that be? As soon as the unemployment figures, around 7% at this writing, fail to come down and, in all likelihood, increase. Six months? A year? By the 2010 elections?

A population that, throughout the 1990s, managed to borrow more and spend more than they could afford, is inclined toward instant gratification. The polls already show that a significant majority of them, having sobered up, do not like the stimulus bill. In a year or so they are going to dislike it even more.

Bits & Pieces of News

By Alan Caruba

There is so much news coming at us from all directions that it is easy to let some important aspects of it slide by. Here are some bits and pieces of recent news items.

Associated Press: “Last week’s Iraqi elections appear to have been a rousing success—a major step toward a stable democracy that will hasten the day when U.S. troops can leave.” That was the first paragraph of a Feb. 4 story, but in my daily newspaper the headline read: “One peaceful election hardly testifies to stability in Iraq.” Give me a break! President Bush said it was vital to the Middle East that more democracy be encouraged there and, guess what, in addition to Turkey and Israel, it’s called IRAQ!

EnergyTribune.com: “Ethanol Bankruptcies Continue, 14 Studies Have Exposed the High Cost of Ethanol and Biofuels.” That’s the Feb 4 headline. It turns out that “about nine percent of all the ethanol plants in the U.S. have now filed for bankruptcy and some analysts believe the numbers could reach as high as twenty percent.” That’s because the whole ethanol thing is a scam. It has driven up the costs of corn so high even the producers can’t afford it any more. And ethanol does nothing to reduce dependency on imported oil. Producing and using it puts more, not less, greenhouse gas emissions into the environment.

The Middle East Media Research Institute: Reporting on “The Reality of Oil Import by the United States”, it turns out that we are not sending billions entirely to the Middle East as is commonly reported. Figures for 2007 reveal that, although Saudi Arabia remains second among the nations from which the U.S. imports oil, Canada was number one, Mexico was number three, and Venezuela was number four. We imported oil from England as well and, with the exception of Iraq and Kuwait, the rest were either African or South American nations.

Numbers USA: They sent a notice on Feb 2 that addressed some statistics the mainstream (or is that lamestream?) press have neglected to report. Among the figures cited was the fact that 2.5 million Americans lost jobs in 2008 at the same time the federal government was permitting the immigration of 1.5 million new foreign workers! To put it another way, 138,000 new foreign workers continue to arrive each month while Americans are filing for unemployment benefits!

Agence France Presse: Would you believe that the forthcoming Durban II United Nations racism conference has Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya chairing the planning committee and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran as the vice-chair? You can’t make up stuff like this. UN Watch, an independent group, said, “it’s heart-wrenching though not surprising that Durban II is hijacking the noble cause of human rights and anti-racism, with the aim of legitimizing an agenda of hate and extremism that targets innocents in Mumbai, Madrid, Israel, and elsewhere.” The UN is a place where totalitarian governments get together to undermine the most fundamental tenets of Western civilization.

Star-Ledger (NJ): The headline on a Feb 6 four-paragraph story read “Activist gets 22 years for Michigan State fire.” The real story however is that she was a member of the Earth Liberation Front, never mentioned at all in the report, and had caused a million dollars damage and destroyed years of valuable research on New Year’s Eve 1990. She also admitted to a dozen other acts of property destruction. Describing her as an activist is comparable to saying that Osama bin Laden is an “activist.”

All Media: The big news is, of course, the impending breakdown of the national and international financial system. If calmer heads prevail, we may just avoid it, but with President Obama bad-mouthing the economy and breaking out in a public sweat, there isn’t much hope of a happy outcome.

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.” Obama’s new theme is “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Obama Scares the Heck Out of Me!

By Alan Caruba

Having been around since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, I have seen twelve Presidents come and go prior to the $160 million coronation of Barack Hussein Obama.

I have got to tell you this guy scares the heck out of me.

I am used to guys like Harry Truman who, when the job was done, got on the train and went home without any fanfare. He was so broke Congress had to vote him a pension so he could afford to buy postage stamps. He turned away offers to sit on the boards of corporations because, as he put it, he wasn’t President anymore and he wasn’t going to sell the title for a few bucks. It’s called integrity.

It’s not that we haven’t had our scary Presidents before. Nixon scared me because he just looked like a creep. In fact, CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, was the actual name of the group that got him his second term. Unknown to the rest of was another group working out of the White that was called “The Plumbers.” You can read about it in the dozens of books that were written about the Watergate scandal, most of them by Woodward and Bernstein who have dined out on it ever since and several by the perpetrators themselves.

Carter gave me the creeps, too. He was barely halfway through his term in office before a whole bunch of people came to the same conclusion and then we all had to wait around to get rid of him and get our diplomatic hostages back from Iran.

Reagan, God bless him, made us all proud to be Americans. He wasn’t a saint, but he sure was a happy warrior. He was so good at it the Russians pretty much threw in the towel.

I’m going to give both of the Bush’s a pass because they have been so beat upon that it would be gratuitous to say anything. Let history do that and my bet is it will be a lot kinder than that howling, raving pack of liberals that want to blame them for everything short of the War of 1812.

Obama is a whole different creature. He’s half black and half white. He spent the early part of his life being raised by a Muslim stepfather in Indonesia. His actual father was from Kenya where he had another wife, was Muslim, and ended up dying in a drunken car crash because he had blown a promising career. Later Obama’s mother divorced and came home, handed the kid off to be raised by her parents, and, well, who knows?

We’re supposed to know a lot about Obama because he wrote, before the age of 50, two books about himself. Two! Then, after getting elected Senator from the great State of Illinois where everything is strictly on the up-and-up (like Minnesota), he decided he’d rather spend his time running for President before even serving half of his first term!

His mission, he kept telling us was to "change" D.C. so that all those lobbyists weren’t running everything and only people with impeccable resumes would solve the great problems of our times. Only he picked most of his administration from the failed Clinton debacle (saved only when voters put Republicans in charge of Congress) and, it turns out, a whole bunch of former lobbyists! Plus a couple of tax cheats.

By the end of his first two weeks, Obama was so punch-drunk from the reality of being President, he and the wife snuck out of the White House to go read stories to second graders. Never mind that his predecessor, George W. Bush, found out about the 9/11 attacks doing the very same thing!

Obama doesn’t think that cutting payroll or corporate taxes will get us out of the present crisis. Instead, he wants to blow a trillion dollars on what everybody knows is pure political pork. Meanwhile governors, mayors, and everybody else are lining up to get a piece of the Great American Taxpayer Handout Jamboree!

History tells us that Obama’s “solutions” are the same failed ones that FDR tried. Ten years after the Crash of ‘29, they still weren’t working and the soup kitchen lines were around the corner and down several blocks. Yet, in a February 5 opinion published in The Washington Post, he said “the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems” was “misguided”, adding that “I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.”

No, just barely over 50% of the voters elected him and, as usual, some 50% of all those eligible to vote stayed home. So there’s no overwhelming mandate for change. The election was a vote to blame George W. Bush for all our current problems when, in fact, Congress gave its blessing to his agenda, rarely opposing any of it including the Iraq war. Bush had warned against the disastrous actions of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, but Congress refused to listen.

Obama’s acolytes keep babbling about “green jobs” and a “green economy” when the only kind of green anyone wants to see is a paycheck that can be turned into greenbacks.

His Washington Post opinion promised “more than three million jobs over the next two years” but neglects to mention that most would be government jobs. The claim is absurd. The demand for quick action echoes the same demand by former Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, when he asked for $700 billion in bail-out money. Half of it is now largely unaccounted for and word from Capitol Hill is that they overpaid for a lot of whatever it was they purchased.

Meanwhile, Obama also called for “energy independence”, decrying “Our dependence on foreign oil" and calling for wasting more money on “renewable energy” (solar, wind and ethanol). No nation on Earth is or can be energy independent. We import the bulk of our oil from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela, along with Saudi Arabia. We have billions of barrels of our own oil, but Congress will not allow companies to drill for it.

At last count fourteen ethanol producers had filed for bankruptcy and the use of corn for fuel had driven up the cost of food and feed stocks around the world. His “solutions” are stupid.

He’s surrounded himself with loonies that want to take away our guns, that think coal-fired plants to generate electricity are evil (they provide over 50% of all the electricity!), wants Detroit to make cars that no one wants to buy, and to make nice with Iran while they kick sand in his face.

This guy is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. To be charitable, let’s give him a whole month in the White House and then find a way to impeach and remove him.

Annoying Science

By Alan Caruba

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chairwoman of the House Environmental and Public Works Committee, has pledged to “follow science” when it comes to drafting legislation and one of the first new laws she wants passed is one that would impose a cap-and-trade limit on greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid the dreaded global warming that is NOT happening.

I must confess I am always perversely impressed with the ability of politicians to lie through their teeth, be obscenely ignorant, and do both at the same time. The problem for politicians and the environment organizations is that the real science of climatology and meteorology can be very annoying.

According to Sen. Boxer, “The surest way to create good jobs in this country is to mobilize for clean energy” (wind and solar). What California needs is real jobs, not green ones, but considering how spectacularly mismanaged its budget has been under the current green Governor, it’s a wonder that Sen. Boxer can say such things with a straight face.

“The whole world,” says Sen. Boxer, “is doing cap-and-trade, so we need to be consistent.” Oh yeah? Well, China isn’t doing it. India isn’t doing it. It’s not being done throughout Africa or most of Asia. A handful of European nations that signed onto the UN Kyoto protocol have tried it and they are trying to find a way out because cap-and-trade is a great way to weaken businesses and industries by sucking money away from their need to compete and grow.

Capping greenhouse gas emissions and trading “carbon credits” (the business that Al Gore happens to be in) to avoid a global warming that is NOT happening is criminally stupid.

Based on the notion that carbon dioxide and humans are the driving force behind global warming, it ignores the fact that CO2 is 0.0038 of the Earth’s atmosphere and six billion humans exhale CO2 daily. Do humans change the climate? Or does the Sun have something to do with it? Oceans, too. And clouds!

Meanwhile, on February 5, Greenpeace will release the results of a “carbon footprint analysis on the economic recovery package” via a teleconference whose participants will assert that “global warming will create a major drag on the U.S. and world economies…” No, it is all those idiotic UN environmental treaties that do that. And, again, there is NO global warming.

All this talk of “green jobs” ignores the fact that the more than a half million job losses that have been announced in recent weeks have nothing whatever to do with the environment. If you have lost your job with Home Depot, Starbucks, Microsoft or Caterpillar the last thing on your mind is global warming or the environment. You weren’t laid off because the Earth is supposedly getting warmer.

We do not have a “green economy”, currently the popular Obama administration buzzword. We have an economy in crisis because banks are not financially stable and people are not buying cars, not able to sell their homes, eat out as often, and all the other countless decisions that mean formerly thriving industries and businesses are in big trouble.

The next time you hear someone talk about a “sustainable environment”, keep in mind they are talking about stopping the construction of roads, bridges, coal-fired or nuclear plants, and just about anything else that represents more energy, jobs, and development of any kind.

There’s a reason that Barbara Boxer’s California is an economic disaster area. It’s because they have passed so many “environmental” laws that businesses, industries, and people cannot leave fast enough.

While President Obama and some members of Congress try their best to ignore the vast amount of actual science that demonstrates there is NO global warming the truth will continue to manifest itself until it can no longer be denied.