Jimmy Obama

The Cain Phenomenon

By Alan Caruba

Gov. Chris Christie has dropped out of contention as a GOP presidential candidate. So has Sarah Palin. Fading swiftly is Michelle Bachmann and the others, leaving Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and to the astonishment of a lot of people, Herman Cain.

What would astonish everyone would be a 2012 presidential race between a mulatto, Barack Obama who identifies with his African-American ancestry and ignores his white mother, and Herman Cain who rarely even refers to being a black American because it is increasingly irrelevant as people pay more and more attention to his message.

Cain would crush Obama. One gets the feeling that he got into the presidential race for that purpose.

Obama’s appalling performance in the highest office has seen his polling numbers decline. Obama is likely to be identified as the “American Idol” candidate who went from the Illinois legislature to the U.S. Senate to the presidency in four years. He is a political aberration, the result of media manipulation, and very bad mistake.

Terence P. Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of CNSnews.com, reported on Thursday, October 6, that “The Obama administration passed another fiscal milestone this week, according to new data released by the Treasury Department. As of the close of business on Oct. 3, the total national debt was $14,837,009,271,196.71—up about $44.8 billion from Sept. 30.”

“That means that in the less-than-three-years Obama has been in office, the federal debt has increased by $.212 trillion accumulated by all 41 U.S. presidents from George Washington through G.H.W. Bush combined.”

Herman Cain is all about fiscal sanity. Herman Cain is about capitalism. Barack Obama is a Marxist.

Cain’s message is beginning to resonate in Republican circles, especially among those who identify with the Tea Party movement.

This is not to say we can rule out Mitt Romney’s candidacy, though it is increasing clear that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is beginning to sound warning bells in the minds of many Republicans as his charm and bravado begins to thin in the wake of his poor debate performances and his unsteady responses to questions reporters pose.

Daniel Henninger, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, writing on September 29th, gave a brief précis of Cain’s resume in the world of business, asking “Does a resume like Herman Cain’s add up to an American presidency? I used to think not. But watching the American Idol system we’ve fallen into for discovering a president—with opinion polls, tongue slips and media caprice deciding front-runners and even presidents—I’m rewriting my presidential-election software.”

Henninger concluded that “Herman Can is a credible candidate. Whether he deserves to be president is something voters will decide. But he deserves a serious look.”

It is a long time between now and November 6, 2012, but I think Republican and, should he get the nomination, American voters, are going to giving Herman Cain a very serious look.

If Cain is elected, it will mean that a nation that fought a Civil War over slavery and waited another hundred years to finally confer full Constitutional rights to African-Americans will confound themselves and the entire world by putting Cain in the Oval Office.

I am not counting out Mitt Romney at this early point. He has become a very good campaigner. He’s refined his message, he is charming, and he “looks” like the Hollywood version of a president. He’s also a RINO, a very moderate candidate at a point in current history when the nation needs and wants radical change if it is to avert the deliberate destruction imposed on it by Barack Obama.

Herman Cain’s website offers his “999 Plan” and it is worth reading because it represents all the steps that must be taken to take American back from the brink of bankruptcy, from massive unemployment, and a thorough understanding of how to achieve that.

The primaries that lie ahead—Florida would vote next week if it could, followed by all the other states—will be the final determination of who will be the GOP’s presidential candidate. There’s plenty of time left for the fortunes of candidates to shift, but like Daniel Henninger, I am giving Herman Cain a serious look.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Yom Kippur 2011 for Jews and the World

By Alan Caruba

Ever since the Yom Kippur War in 1973 in which Egypt and Syria chose the holiest day in the Jewish calendar to attack Israel, I have always felt a frisson of concern as the day approached. For Jews it begins the evening of Friday, October 7, and continues through Saturday for a full day of prayer that ends with the ancient, inspiring expression of hope, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Even in Jerusalem, they say “Next year in Jerusalem” because it confirms the faith’s enduring bond with the land of Israel that survived not one, but two destructions of their Temples there, exiles, and, in the last century, the Holocaust followed by a return to and rebirth of Israel as a Jewish state.

The Yom Kippur war was the fourth Arab-Israeli war, fought from October 6 to 25, and ending with decisive defeats of Egypt and Syria. What has always struck me most forcefully was the decision by the Arabs—Muslims—to choose Yom Kippur as the day of the sneak attack. It demonstrated Islam’s utter and complete contempt for Judaism, but it demonstrates its contempt for Christianity as well, for both Judaism and Christianity are theologically bonded together.

Among the early Jews to immigrate to Israel, other than the founders who came initially from Europe in response to its anti-Semitism, were an estimated 600,000 Jews who fled Middle Eastern nations under the threat of death when Israel came into being in 1948. Many had lived in those nations from biblical times. Now it is the turn of Christian Arabs to flee, if not to Israel, to anywhere else in a world, but it is the world itself that is threatened by the rise of fundamental and fanatical Islam.

Writing for Jihad Watch.com in late September, Raymond Ibrahim noted a recent report “that unprecedented numbers of Copts, Egypt’s indigenous Christian population, are emigrating from their homeland in response to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.” The attacks on Copts and their churches have been mounting. It is anticipated that within a decade a third of Egypt’s Copt population will leave.

The threats against the Copts are mirrored throughout the Middle East as Christians immigrate from Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon in search of refuge. Examples include the October 31, 2010 massacre of the Iraqi congregation of Our Lady of Deliverance Church and other attacks; the ratio of Christians to Muslims in Iraq has gone from 8% to 2% in the past decade.

We wait for word on the fate of an Iranian pastor, Youcef Nadarkhani, who has refused to renounce Christianity. On September 27, an Iranian court upheld a death penalty for the Islamic crime of “apostasy.” Leaving Islam has always been punishable by death. If the sentence is carried out, he will be the first Christian known to have been executed for his faith in 21 years in Iran. He will not be the last so long as the fanatical ayatollahs hold Iran in its grip.

The irony is that the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, (580-529 BC) freed the Jews from slavery, telling them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. Until the Islamic Revolution in 1979, a large Jewish community resided in Iran.

Meanwhile, on September 25th, a suicide bomber killed himself and wounded at least 22 other people in an attack on an Indonesian church. Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest Muslim-majority nation. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “To its credit, authorities there have cracked down on hard-line Islamic groups linked to bombings on Western hotels and tourist spots—such as the attacks on Bali nightclubs in 2002 that killed 202 people, many of them foreign visitors.”

On Yom Kippur, Jews devote themselves to their Day of Atonement and pray for a year of life, health, and happiness. They do not pray for wealth. They do not pray for power. Tradition requires that they pay all debts and seek forgiveness if they believe they may have wronged someone.

Now, worldwide, Christians must, like the Jews, give renewed consideration to the threat of Islam. Drawn from desert tribal values of war and pillage, Islam has spread widely since the seventh century. It has carried its seventh century mentality forward and once again challenges the West, using terror as its chosen weapon.

Support for the Muslim Brotherhood, often misrepresented in the media as “moderate”, is suicidal. Support for Hamas is support for terrorism. And, so far, support for the Palestinians has been futile.

It is a war without quarter, whether it is an Iranian pastor, the ancient community of Egyptian Christians, or the entire nation of Israel. Islam has no tolerance for other faiths.

All must understand that we are in a war. The Israelis do. Americans must.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Who Are You Calling "Soft"?

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Unemployed Imbeciles Gather to Protest

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are the demands of imbeciles.

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Gov. Christie Should Not Get in the GOP Race

By Alan Caruba

Does anybody recall the frenzy surrounding the question of whether Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and Fox News host of his own show, would toss his hat in the ring and seek the GOP nomination?

That same frenzy is occurring now regarding New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and, as a lifelong citizen of the Garden State, I would bet a bushel basket of its excellent tomatoes that he will not.

Why? Because he says he will not and I believe him.

There are, however, a lot of other very good reasons why he won’t plunge into the political maelstrom that is our system of selecting a presidential candidate.

If Gov. Christie were to announce as a candidate for the GOP nomination his brief record while Governor would come under intense examination and it would reveal that he is not the conservative savior that many perceive.

Putting aside his great rhetorical gifts, his no-nonsense approach to answering questions in town hall meetings and interviews, his saving sense of humor, and other attributes that have generated the appeals from some party insiders and members of the public, Christie is conservative-light.

Candidate Herman Cain, speaking on Fox News Sunday, has done his homework. According to an October 3 article in the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest circulation daily newspaper, Cain noted that “Christie is far too liberal on gun control, climate change, same-sex unions, and immigration to satisfy Republican voters.”

Nor has his record as Governor gone unnoticed on the left. “Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland blasted Christie’s stewardship of New Jersey’s economy. He cited the state’s unemployment rate, among the highest in the country at 9.4 percent, and a series of downgrades to New Jersey’s bond ratings this year from the top credit rating agencies.”

None of these economic factors, unfairly attributed to Gov. Christie or not, bodes well for a run for the presidential candidate nomination. When one adds in the lateness of such an effort and the difficulties of raising huge sums of money for the campaign it suggests that such a move would not turn out well for him.

There is no question that Gov. Christie, a former U.S. District Attorney for New Jersey, has earned the gratitude of the state’s citizens for taking on the civil service unions that have bled it dry with cushy contracts featuring handsome pension and healthcare plans. Beyond that, however, many Garden State conservatives have winced to see his decisions in other areas of concern.

Many applauded his decision to withdraw the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that would have required that a percentage of energy serving New Jerseyeans come from “renewable” sources, wind and solar power. However, in August Gov. Christie signed an act that would facilitate offshore wind power for use in the state. Had he signed an act to permit offshore drilling for oil and natural gas, the state and the nation would have been far better served. Wind power would only increase the cost of electricity.

Moreover, Gov. Christie is on record saying that climate change is “impacting our state.” This is a position that is 180 degrees from a town hall meeting the previous year when he declared himself skeptical that climate change is the result of human activity. He was right then, but has been getting very bad advice from his science advisors since then.

As a former U.S. District Attorney, it should come as no surprise that he supports a ban on assault weapons. Despite opposing a law that limits the purchase of hand guns to one per month, his newly appointed state Attorney General took an aggressive legal position to defend the former governor’s law. Gov. Christie favors gun control, a position that will not find favor among lawful gun owners and sportsmen.

Gov. Christie is squishy on the issue of illegal immigration, hewing to the liberal line that those who enter the nation illegally are simply “undocumented.” He regards state-by-state laws regarding illegal immigrants to be “a federal problem” that needs a “federal fix…I am not really comfortable with state enforcement having a big role.” Suffice to say that New Jersey, like other states, has a big illegal immigrant population.

If the Governor were to hit the campaign trail with a record like this, the other candidates would have a field day and many conservative voters would have second thoughts.

In sum, he needs to review and reinforce his conservative credentials and the 2012 race is far too soon to do that. Selfishly, I want him to remain the Governor and to serve a second term. Realistically, I think he would be torn to shreds if he got in now.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Editor's Note: On Oct 4, Gov. Christie announced he will not get in the race.

The EPA Gets Caught in a Big Fat Lie

By Alan Caruba

The notion that the Environmental Protection Agency uses “science” to justify their regulations is false, just like most of the claims they issue on various aspects of the nation’s environment. Their favorite scam is to estimate the number of deaths they will prevent with some new draconian regulation.

The EPA is the American equivalent of the Gestapo, a ruthless enforcement agency with a very Green agenda that is opposed to the use of many beneficial chemicals, every form of energy, and the right of people to be left alone.

At the top of its list of priorities is the destruction of the nation’s economy with special attention to all forms of energy production. Manufacturing anything comes next, followed by afflicting the nation’s vast agricultural sector. The EPA insists that dust is a pollutant. You can’t farm without generating DUST.

To understand the threat the EPA poses it is necessary to understand that proposed Clean Air regulations are based on the claim that “global warming” is real, is happening, and is caused primarily by carbon dioxide (CO2). The claim is utterly without any scientific merit..

There is NO global warming. At least not the kind Al Gore lies about.

The North and South Poles are not melting; they gain and lose ice in a perfectly natural cycle that has been going on for billions of years. The polar bears are not disappearing. Drilling for oil in ANWR will have zero effect on the caribou. Et cetera!

With our vast reserves of coal and natural gas, the U.S. does not lack for the ability to generate electricity or to refine oil for transportation.

If you want to stay warm this winter, you better hope that utilities keep producing the electricity for your home or apartment’s heating system. Fifty percent of that electricity is produced by cheap, abundant coal and the EPA is hell bent to shut down as many coal mines as possible, leading in turn to the shutdown of utilities that burn coal. Natural gas accounts for just over twenty-four percent of electricity generation and it need hardly be said that the EPA is wary of fracking, the technology to access it.

Blowing the Whistle on the EPA

The big news—the kind even the mainstream media was unable to ignore—was that the EPA’s own inspector general has released a report accusing the agency of cutting corners regarding the “science” cited to justify its effort to declare CO2 a “pollutant.”

Simply stated, without CO2 all life on Earth dies.

It is a gas that plants use for their growth. From a blade of grass to a giant redwood, all depend on CO2, as do all the crops grown coast to coast. Enormous quantities of corn and wheat are grown that contribute to the U.S. economy, feeding both livestock and humans in wondrous ways. Take away vegetation and the animals die. Take away the animals that grace our dinner plates and we die.

Absurdly, the EPA says it is a “pollutant”, a dangerous hazard to our health.

No, the most dangerous hazard to our health is the EPA.

The EPA insists on ignoring all the other natural sources of CO2 as well as the fact that it constitutes less than one percent, 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. The oceans of the world gather it, store it, and release it. The EPA, though, says that when man is involved, it is pure evil.

Mind you, every human exhales about six pounds of CO2 every day. The fact is that the air Americans inhale daily is clean is due to the agency’s early efforts to mitigate some abuses. Those were the days before the EPA abandoned a rational, fact-based approach to its stated objectives. One of its legacies is the idiotic required inclusion of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Made from corn, it actually produces more CO2 to produce and use.

The EPA effort to regulate CO2 came along with the invention of the global warming hoax that claimed CO2 was “trapping” the Earth’s heat. That is why CO2 and others are deceptively called “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). Manufacturing everything from a donut to megawatts of electricity emits GHGs.

Finally, even the EPA’s inspector general blew the whistle on the utterly deceitful way the EPA arrives at its justification for a vast matrix of regulations that has been stifling the economy for years. The IG has charged that the EPA did not meet its own guidelines for peer review to ensure the integrity of the science stated.

Anyone who has been following the rise and fall of the global warming hoax knows that “peer review” has become a highly corrupted practice. Real peer review is critical to the integrity of any scientific study. When major science journals abandoned the peer review process to publish gibberish about global warming, they put all other new scientific studies at risk.

As Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted, the EPA’s regulation of CO2 emissions would require “230,000 full-time employees to produce 1.4 billion work hours to address the actual increase in permitting functions” that would result if the EPA is allowed to get away with this scandalous hoax. It would cost an estimated $21 billion per year. By contrast, the EPA’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 is $8.973 billion.

The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act gives it the power to regulate CO2, but it does not. It was never intended to, but the Supreme Court in one of its more idiotic rulings opened the door for the EPA claim. In his dissent from Massachusetts v EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia quipped that, as defined by the Court, “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an ‘air pollutant’”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) pointed out that “The EPA’s determination has led to a mountain of Clean Air Act regulations that could cost over a million jobs.” It is noteworthy that Sen. Barrasso said, “EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has regularly assured Congress and the American public that its finding is based on sound scientific practices.” It isn’t. Jackson “should testify immediately,” said Sen. Barrasso, “the American people deserve the truth.”

The EPA has been short on the truth about all of its claims for four decades and needs to be shut down in order to let a truly science-based agency replace it with strict congressional oversight and limitations.

The time is long overdue to pull the plug on the Environmental Protection Agency.

© Alan Caruba, 2011