The Most Disturbing Thing About Barack Obama

     The most disturbing and troubling thing about President Obama's State of the Union speech was the very thing that is most disturbing about all of his speeches and public appearances, it is what is conspicuously absent, not what is painfully present. Barack Obama treats his Americanism the same way he treats his whiteness, he ignores it and/or derides it mercilessly. This president is the first in the collective memory of Americans who is deliberately unwilling to acknowledge the greatness of America and the endowment made to the library of freedom by the principles and values enshrined in the founding documents of this great nation.
     It is easy to understand why Barack Obama excludes his white heritage. It can not be used, as his black heritage can, for everything from bullying the leadership of Harvard to list him as a professor when he was no more than a guest lecturer, to winning the presidency of the United States and pushing his radical agenda over the objections of persons who he characterizes as racists for opposing him. The exclusion of his American heritage is done for much the same reason, but with a target audience being the America-hating folks who comprise his base.
     Never before in this nation's history have we had a president whose overwhelming good fortune required so little effort on his part. And instead of being grateful for the unearned advantages he enjoys as a result of the efforts by more substantive men than himself, he sneers and snarls at the very source of his liberty. This is a common affliction among Leftists, i.e., the duplicitous behavior of biting the hand of liberty that feeds them their freedom to do so.
     But Barack Obama is only a symptom of the Leftist cancer that has metastasized in the vital organs of this great and free republic. He was, after all, elected by persons who have the same sense of entitlement and self-hatred for their own nation that he carries proudly to every podium from where he spews his corrosive rhetoric. Barack Obama chooses to lower the esteem of his political opponents in the eyes of the public, rather than raise up the stature of America. He would rather give Americans reasons to be victims than to give them reasons to succeed. We have a president whose conscious aim it is to detract from the human spirit instead of inspiring it, and to punish the free exercise of liberty instead of encouraging it. It is Barack Obama's ideology that results in the pathogen of oppression and the virus of tyranny that disturbs the soul of liberty and causes it the uneasiness of imminent thoughts of its demise.

The Great Apple Conspiracy

     This past Monday, Apple Computer Inc. reported their earnings for the quarter ending December 31, 2013. The company's earnings and revenue beat estimates and they sold a record 51 million iPhones in the quarter. One would expect investors to reward Apple with a spike in their share price, but just the opposite happened after the analysts panned the company's earnings as missing their expectations of 55 million in iPhone sales.
     A company's share price can be greatly affected to either the upside or the downside by analysts in the short term, which is why they have deluded themselves into believing that they are demigods of the financial world. But in the longer term, a company like Apple that continues to deliver record breaking quarters will be justly rewarded by investors. Billionaire investor Carl Ichon, who holds almost 4 billion dollars in Apple stock, recently said investing in the company is "a no-brainer."
     The big knock on the post-Steve Jobs (the company founder who passed away in October of 2011) Apple is that they are not innovating. But Apple's success has always been one of perfecting innovation, not initiating it. Apple did not innovate the Mp3 player, that was Sony. They did not innovate touch screens and Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices, that was Palm. And they did not innovate the smart phone model, that was Research In Motion with their Blackberry device. What Apple did best was to repackage others' innovations in more reliable and mature technology that they made appealing to the masses. Besides, the first iPods were released late in 2001, the next "innovation" from Apple was the iPhone, six years later in 2007. Their last innovation was the iPad, which was released in 2010, so the claim that they are not innovating as fast as they use to, has no basis in reality.
     Since taking the reins of Apple after Steve Jobs died, Tim Cook has presided over record-breaking quarters financially, a nest egg of cash that has topped 100 billion dollars, a share price that has appreciated thirty percent in two years, and additional share value delivered to investors in the form of a generous dividend. He has also recently inked a deal with China Mobilcom, which will make Apple's iPhone available to its 700 million customers.
     The reason for the analysts' dour outlook for Apple has more to do with petty animosity than with the company's fundamentals. As a method of criticizing CEO Tim Cook, the analysts speak of Steve Jobs in glowing terms. The fact is they Hated Jobs as much as they hate Cook. But the analysts are like all those Democrats who hated Reagan, and now that history has proven him right, they want to attach themselves to that greatness by saying they "worked with Reagan on many issues." As long as Apple continues to make better and more reliable products than everyone else, and delivers value to share holders, I will continue to support them with my patronage of their products and investment in their stock.

The Age Of Manufactured Economic Growth

     It never ceases to amaze me how the market mavens in their shortsightedness choose to believe vacuous economic data over hard cold facts. Yesterday, the market rose on an increase in consumer sentiment, a number obtained from survey data that is processed through a meat grinder of unrelated variables. The market barely noticed the much more reality based durable goods statistic for the month of December, which dropped 4.6% instead of rising the expected 1.5% that most economists predicted. The preceding data is illustrative of the deliberate and artificial manufacturing of a healthy economy where one does not exist for the purpose of supporting Wall Street and an ever increasingly unpopular president.
     The juked statistics and artificial sweetener added to the economy from the Federal Reserve's bond-buying program, has not been enough to coax life back into the rotting corpse of this worse economy in 70 years. President Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke are pretending no more, as they pull away the teat of easy money from the grasping market that once prattled on the knee of big government economic theory that resides in computer models which fail to work in the real economy. And now the lame duck president and the retiring Fed chief can use their economic failures as a stepping stone to propel them into the stratosphere of wealth that to often comes to "public servants," whose policies have rained down economic hardship and despair upon tens of millions of their fellow Americans.
     Those on the Left like Barack Obama have convinced a significant portion of American citizens  that it is the government which supports the economy under the weight of the free market, but just the opposite is true. It is the heavy hand of government that pushes down upon the economy and weakens its supports that consist of free market principles. The president and others on the Left preach the twisted sermon of income equality and fairness, but those things only truly exist in a healthy and thriving free market. There is no greater laboratory of fairness and equality than one in which those who provide goods and services and those who freely choose to avail themselves of those goods and services are able to contract with each other, sans the interference from the bloated belly of big government.
     The reality of economic hardship caused by this administration is beginning to break through the thin dam of subterfuge and dishonesty used to construct it. The manufactured economic growth used to propel the stock market has done little to do the same for average Americans. And the president who orchestrated the economic death of a nation will take his JP Morgan Chase multi-million dollar portfolio and his million-dollar-a-speech stipend he will receive after he leaves office and never look back at the devastation and misery he has left in his wake. And somehow, in his mind, this is fair.

Another Nail In The GOP Coffin

     There has certainly been many reasons in recent years for the Republicant party rank and file, and especially the conservative wing of the party, to become disillusioned with leadership. There has been a palpable and distinct unwillingness on the part of the Republicant establishment to embrace the conservative values and principles that have brought the party not only political victory, but have helped them to connect with average hard working Americans. Additionally, and more troubling, in recent years there has been an effort on the part of some Republicants in congress to champion Leftist issues from global warming to immigration reform.
     A recent Wall Street Journal story highlighted the claim by some House Republicants that House leadership is considering a delay on an immigration reform (aka amnesty) vote until the deadline has past for conservatives to mount primary challenges to Republicant House members who may vote for it. The thinking is that without the baggage of an amnesty vote until after the deadline, Republicant House members who support it will breeze to easy victories because the rank and file will be forced to vote for them, given no other alternative.
     If this strategy is implemented by Republicant House leadership it will be one more nail in the coffin of the GOP, and will make the unlikely scenario of a third party more likely. There is only so many times that the base of the Republicant party will be ignored, unappreciated, and downright mocked by the establishment before they will pull their support for this dying and retching beast known as the Republicant party. I am not sanguine about third parties, and do not think one can gain the power and influence to effect real change in the near future. But as the Republicant party establishment continues to push its voters away, it creates an opportunity for the building of a better alternative.
     It is a shame that the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan has succumbed to the cancer of progressivism that eats away at the heart of all that is good, decent, and purely American. As a party we have lost our way, and so we not only embrace the moral corruption of amnesty for illegal aliens and global warming, but our leaders in the party de-emphasize and are reticent to ring the bell of social issues for fear of repelling voters who want no part of morality. The Republicant leadership aims to break the inextricable bond between social rectitude and the prosperity and liberty upon which this great nation can continue to be a beacon of righteousness in a world where tyranny and oppression is waiting in the wings of moral consciousness, eager to replace true justice.

Bullies And Modern Parenting

     There has been much talk recently about bullying, especially as it relates to cyber-bullying. Several suicides of teens who had been bullied on social media sites have been in the news, and in typical fashion, the tragic outcome of a deeper problem are blamed on the most convenient and easiest target. The issues which prompt the taking of ones own life are complicated and can not be tied into a neat little package and explained away by the words and images shared by others on Facebook, Twitter, or one of the many other social media sites used by bullies and their targets.
     I feel for the families of teens, or anyone else for that matter, who feel that death is the only sanctuary from the problems and stresses of day to day living. But suicide is after all the ultimate act of selfishness, the individual being so withdrawn into a world that contains only themselves, that ending it is an act of the ultimate control which they feel is lacking in their lives. Someone who commits suicide does not do so only because bad or hurtful things are being said about them over the Internet, but because they have deep-seeded issues, one of which is knowing how to handle adversity and the ultimate unfairness of life.
     Modern cyber bullying is really no different than bullying of the past. I remember an episode of The Andy Griffith Show in which Opie was bullied. Andy instilled in Opie the lesson that if he ran from the bully, and allowed him to have control over his life, he would never stop running. He also inculcated in Opie the understanding that the weakness was in the bully, not himself. Because of the self-esteem movement of the last twenty years and other Leftist psycho-babble, modern parents have taught their children that adversity equals unfairness, instead of teaching them that conquering adversity is a necessary part of building character. Or as Oliver Wendell Holmes once so eloquently stated in a speech at Harvard University in 1895, "the measure of power is obstacles overcome."
     I believe that the inability for many young people in the modern culture to overcome the adversity of bullies is directly related to the constant drum beat from the Left that life should not contain the struggle to overcome obstacles. Many modern children are pumped full of self-esteem and a false sense of their importance to the world by their parents and then sent out into a reality that has no obligation to recognize them as special. They then become despondent and angry as a result of  their parents having not prepared them for the world as it is but rather the false reality of a fair world where adversity and struggle have been magically removed. But this fragility of character is not only cultivated by modern parents, but by a modern culture that has lost its way on a sea of self-obsession and false self-importance.     

The Compound Nature Of Munoz Tragedy

     There is a situation brewing in Texas which is illustrative of how far down the road of dehumanization we have traveled as a nation. It further explains the inability for some who are inundated with the culture of death to place any value on life. I allude to Marlise Munoz, the Fort Worth, Texas woman who is pregnant and on life support. The family and their lawyers are going to court to allow them to end Marlise's life, thus ending the life of her unborn child. The hospital is following Texas law which forbids the removal of a pregnant woman from life support as long as there is a chance to save the life of her unborn baby.
     The Munoz's lawyers have determined that the baby has abnormalities and is "non-viable," a self-serving sanctimonious legal statement masquerading as a medical diagnosis. Have we arrived at a place in our culture that life is so cheap and inconsequential that it can be summarily dismissed because a lawyer says that life is "non-viable?"  Does the baby living within its brain dead mother not have the same right to live as anyone of us? Therein lies the rub, because if the answer to my proceeding question is no, then it is only a matter of time that the right to life will be determined by an ever changing list of conditions.
     It has always amazed me how those who support abortion, mostly on the Left, will move heaven and earth to protect the smallest animal life on the planet, and wet themselves over the smallest micro biotic life found on some distant planet, but refuse to acknowledge the life growing inside a human woman as a child. Even in the hard cold light of science, a fertilized egg in a woman's womb meets all the requirements of life. And that life is human. In other words, if left to maturation it will be a human child, not a cocker spaniel, a tit mouse, or a petunia. Furthermore, with what we now know about DNA, a baby in its mother's womb has a distinct genome from the mother, and therefore is a unique human life and not just  "a part of the woman's body."
     The legalization of abortion forty years ago is the standard-bearer of Leftist policy failure. The main driver of legalized abortion was as a way to reduce out-of-wedlock births, mothers of unwanted pregnancies being legally able to end that pregnancy and neatly dispose of their children. That was, of course, what the pro-abortion crowd used as their main argument in the debate. The out-of-wedlock birth rate in the nation as a whole in 1974 was 6%, and among the inner city black community it was 20%. Today, after forty years of government sanctioned infanticide of millions of unwanted children, the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the general population of the United States is 43% and among the inner city black population it is 75%.
     I feel sympathy for the Munoz family, it is never easy to lose a loved one. I am sure they feel helpless at not being able to save the life of Marlise. But they are not helpless in saving her baby's life, and I am sure Marlise, like any other mother, would do anything to ensure the safety of her child. Even if it means that her brain dead body must be kept on life support until her baby can be safely taken from it. To do any less would not only be immoral, but a sin against the institution of motherhood of which Marlise was a member.

Business Leaders' Ignorance Obama Best Friend

     I recently received a letter in the mail from the Veterans Administration, solicitous in its tone about my disposition with regards to health care insurance. The letter was prompting me to immediately drop everything and register for "the health care I deserve", on the government's health care exchange and identity thieves market place. Funny thing is that I am not even a veteran, unless one counts being separated from the Air Force before completing basic training back in 1982. I guess I am still in the government's system even though not an official veteran, which is illustrative of how far down in the barrel the Obama administration is willing to scrape to scare up enrollees for its socialized health care scheme.
     I have also been receiving emails prompting me to relinquish all my personal data (and liberty as well) to the greater good that our caring leader and his compassionate comrades in congress have graciously given the people of this great nation under the auspices of health care reform. These emails make their way to my inbox a couple of times a week, and here I thought I had hidden myself so well in my bunker apartment in a non-descript Mid-Western city. It begs the question in my mind that if the president's health care boondoggle is so great, and the crowning legislation of the last hundred years that Americans are going to love as was sold to us by Nancy Pelosi and others, why then must they expend hard earned tax payer dollars on commercials, emails, and letters to beg people to enroll?
     President Obama and Democrats sold "health care reform" as a means of insuring all those unfortunates that were previously uninsured. But according to Aetna CEO, Mark Bertolini, only 11 percent of enrollees his company is seeing are previously uninsured. Mr. Bertolini and others are beginning to realize what some of us knew before the law was passed four years ago, i.e., the law is not suppose to insure the uninsured, but move previously insured persons from private insurance into subsidized highly regulated government programs.
     Mr. Bertolini showed his political naiveté by stating that more choice is needed for health care reform to succeed. He says it is essential for a healthy market place. It is astounding to me that after five years of the Obama regime there are still smart people like Mr. Bertolini that seem obtuse about the real agenda of Barack Obama, in which choice and a healthy market place are certainly not welcome. It is this political ignorance among our business leaders that has, in part, allowed President Obama to implement policies that operate contrary to the tenets of liberty. Mr. Bertolini and other insurance execs still believe that their companies will benefit from the president's health care law. Instead they will awaken one morning to find they have been pushed out of the health care insurance business and replaced with the single-payer, government-run system that Barack Obama has said is his eventual goal. 
    

Barack, Baron Of Bailouts

     There are many contestants in the running for the most disingenuous position taken, or statement made by President Obama. So many, that volumes could be filled with his acts of dichotomy, false statements, and flat out whoppers. And those volumes would require an entire building the size of the Smithsonian in which to store them. One of the classic dichotomies of President Obama is something that has weaved its way through his entire tenure as president. It is his demonization of corporate bailouts, while at the same time providing them through his policy.
     He began his presidency by rousing the rabble against corporate America while he was providing them with tax payer funded bailouts. Early on in his administration, President Obama sent community agitator types to the homes of AIG executives at the same time he was writing the embattled Insurance company checks totaling in the tens of billions of dollars. He was also using tax payer dollars to bail out the U.S. car industry, General Electric, and so-called green energy companies like Solendra and others. President Obama and his delirious Democrats even wrote into Financial Reform, also known as Dodd/Frank, future bailouts for the country's largest banks.
     We have recently learned that the President and his legions of legislative larcenists wrote into the new health care reform law bailouts for insurance companies who, because of the law, have risk models that will not work because they are not getting the young and healthy to sign up in enough numbers to fund the system. Tim Griffin, Republicant House member, has proffered legislation to remove the bailouts. But this may have been unnecessary if Republicants would have read the bill and made the American public aware of its awfulness. The public outcry may have prevented Democrats from even taking up the bill, similar to what happen in 1994 with HillaryCare.
     But far from trying to stop tax payer funded bailouts of private sector companies, Republicants have actually enabled them. After all, it was President George W. Bush who laid the ground work for the Obama bailouts with the ill-advised Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP), during the depths of the financial crisis of 2008. A program sold to the American people as one that would actually return a profit to the treasury, but ended up costing tax payers like every other government expenditure.
     Even the trillion dollar stimulus, and the almost half a trillion dollar "son of stimulus" implemented by the Obama administration was a bailout. Most of that money having gone to union thugs, phony green energy companies owned by supporters of the president, and agitator groups like ACORN. Probably the biggest bailout of the Obama presidency has been the one given to Wall Street. To date, Wall Street has benefited from the Federal Reserve's monetary policy either directly or indirectly to the tune of 3 trillion dollars.
     Most of the Federal Reserve's bailout of Wall Street has been accomplished with created-out-of-thin-air money. That activity by the central bank reduces the wealth of all Americans by flooding the market with ever more worth less dollars. And at some point the Fed's deleveraging of their spending spree with monopoly money is going to cause significant inflation. But do not hold your breath that there will be any relief for hard working Americans who will pay higher prices for goods and services, while also paying higher taxes to support an ever increasing list of corporate cronies of the president.        

The Midas "Touched"

     My sympathies are with all those who followed the advice of Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, et al, and bought gold at the beginning of 2013. If you are one of these unfortunate souls, you know better than anyone that you lost 30% of your hard earned money in the gold market, which you were told investing in would prevent you from losing your hard earned money in the stock market.
     A year ago, when gold was approximately $1800 an ounce, the radio gold hucksters and others were intimating that the precious metal was going to reach three, four, or even five thousand dollars an ounce. Instead, gold plummeted to its current price of just over $1200 an ounce. Mr. Beck and others were selling gold as a means for folks to increase their wealth. Now that gold has proven a bust as an investment, Glen has changed his sales pitch to push gold as a tangible asset worth having in some sort of Madd Maxx scenario. 
     Gold reached its all time high in the 1980s, and in order for it to achieve the same inflation-adjusted level today, it would have to reach $2400 an ounce. A real bummer for those who bought at the 1980s high and have held it for 35 years. Even those who bought gold at the market low in March 2009 and are still holding it, have only realized a thirty percent return on their investment since, while stocks have appreciated 150% during the same period. And although the case can be sufficiently made that stocks are riding high on the wave of Federal Reserve stimulus in the form of its bond-buying program known as quantitative easing, the Fed's easy money policy has also driven up the price of commodities, including gold. Just the opposite of what should happen, but more proof of the havoc caused by government interference in the free market.
     Part of the goldies sales pitch for their favorite precious metal is to convince an uninformed public of the oft repeated myth that the stock market is a zero sum game. In other words, if someone makes money in the market, someone else must necessarily lose that same amount. The ignorant who believe this think that the pie is only so big and never grows, this being the case, the stock market would be valued the same over time and never change. But one does not have to lose money for someone else to make money. Consider the following example to illustrate my point. I purchase shares of stock in company X for $10 and sell them for $15. The buyer of my shares hold them until they appreciate to $20 and then sells them. We have both made money on the same shares. A real life example is Apple. In the late 1990s, Apple stock was a couple of dollars a share, today it is $550. Millions of people made money on Apple shares over the last 15 years. The pie grew!
     I do acknowledge that precious metals like gold can add value to a portfolio, but they must be carefully managed because of their volatility. Buying any precious metal and holding it for long periods of time is not a wise investment strategy. And as for the end-of-the-world scenario about which Glen Beck has fantasized, you can keep your gold. I would much rather have guns, ammo, and fuel. 

Return Of The Modicans

     One of the boiler plate responses of Modicans in defense of Rinos in congress is that as long as they agree with them 70% of the time, the Modican will support the Rino. I would pose the question to these Modicans, "which 30% of the United States Constitution are we then going to ignore just to have in congress persons with an "R" behind their name?"
     In a recent radio interview I heard Andy McCarthy, whom I generally respect, admire, and with whom I agree 80% of the time, twist himself into a pretzel defending the National Security Administration collecting private information of innocent Americans simply as a device to protect those same citizens from the threat of terrorism. Those in the McCarthy camp would have us believe that we need to abandon constitutional principles at the altar of security.
     It seems that the charter of the Republicant party has become entangled in that of the Democrat party, which treats the constitution like some ancient document that no longer applies when there is an agenda to be implemented. It has gotten so bad that those in the Republicant party who do defend the constitution to the best of their ability, are intimated as radicals by others in their own party. A case in point is Rand Paul, whose only sin is that he actually expects the government for which he serves to have fidelity to the constitution, specifically the fourth amendment as it applies to the NSA scandal.
     I have heard so-called conservatives like radio talk show host, Bill Bennett, not only disagree with Rand Paul's defense of the constitution, but adumbrate that Senator Paul is some wild-eyed extremist that is off the reservation for his allegiance to the constitution he took an oath to protect and defend. I would not want the reader to confuse my support of Rand Paul for criticism of Mr. Bennett, whom I admire and respect a great deal, having read many of his books and listened to hundred of hours of his radio broadcasts. But the nexus of academia and government resides in the very soul of Doctor Bennett, having spent most of his adult life in one or the other.
     The very core mission of conservatism is the preservation of the principles and values outlined and enshrined in the constitution and other founding documents of this great nation. To do any less can not be considered conservative. While there are many who consider themselves conservatives simply by saying so, it is those who are willing to suffer the slings and arrows, many from their own side in the battle, for defending the precious life blood of our republic, who are the true conservators of constitutional principles. It is with individuals like Rand Paul that our best hope lies, and not with the Modicans who are more concerned with populating big government with "Rs" instead of depopulating big government all together according to the principles of Madison, Jefferson, Adams, et al, who gave up their security for God's precious gift of personal liberty. Let us not now squander that gift of liberty for security that is worthless without it.

The King Legacy

     Today we honor and remember the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., not only a champion of civil rights for blacks, but truly a great American who believed utmost in the Christian ideals, breathed to life by the birth of Jesus Christ and formed into a nation by our Founding Fathers. It was his belief in the sacred principles and values outlined in the founding documents of this country, and his mission to awaken the conscience of a nation to live those precepts more fully and completely, that distinguished him from so many "civil rights" leaders since.
      Martin Luther King Jr. began life as Michael King in 1929. His father, who was a minister, attended a Baptist conference in Nazi Germany in 1934. During that conference he was so inspired by the life and mission of the great German 16th century reformer, Martin Luther, that upon his return home he legally changed both his and his young son's name to Martin Luther King.
     Martin Luther King Jr., like Martin Luther King Sr., was a deeply spiritual man and was dedicated to non-violent change. In 1955, while attending a meeting at his local church, word came that his house had been fire bombed. He rushed home, concerned at first with the safety of his wife and small child, but after finding them safe, his concerns turned to the angry mob outside his home wanting vengeance. The potentially explosive situation that may have occurred between the partially armed mob and police was subdued when the Reverend King calmly walked out onto his front porch and silenced the crowd with his mere presence. He told them that violence would only hurt their cause and that they should follow the advice of the bible to meet hate with love. He told them to go home and put down their weapons, and they did. Such was the power to heal that the Reverend King possessed, not only for an angry mob, but a nation that had forgotten the better angels of its nature.
     A deliberate attempt by the media and others on the Left to diminish Reverend King's dedication to God, first and foremost, has taken place over the last few decades by their insistence on calling him Doctor King to the exclusion of calling him Reverend King.  Reverend King's ideal society where a man is judged, "not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character," has been turned on its head by modern "civil rights" leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose aim it is to give special privilege based on skin color. And while the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. organized marches and boycotts to achieve justice for all men, I would not sully his name and memory by calling him a community organizer, that term having been so bastardized and corrupted by men like Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama.
     In this time when we must once again fight for true liberty and justice as Reverend King did almost 60 years ago, we would be heartened and wise to remember the reverend's message of non-violence and the eventual justice it can bring. In one of his famous speeches entitled How Long? Not Long. The Reverend King said, "the arc of the Universe is long, but it bends towards justice." We must always remember that the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was one of fidelity to God and his justice, which applies to all men regardless of skin color.
    

ObamaCare: Website Working, Law Is Not

     As members of the Obama administration, like Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebilus, are doing cartwheels over their billion dollar website, healthcare.gov, actually working at a minimal level more than three months after it was launched, the new law has not even achieved that pathetic level of competency. And anyone defending this glittering jewel of colossal failure known as the Affordable Care Act, is doing so as they eat the chocolate-covered paving stones and lick the lollipop daffodils that line the road leading into the fairy land of hope and change.
     Recently, an official with the ObamaCare invasion team could not tell a congressional committee how many persons who signed up for health care insurance through the government's exchange actually have paid their premiums. We have also learned that almost 80% of those signed up through the ObamaCare exchange have been eligible for subsidies, which means they are old, sick, or both, and not the young healthy enrollees that the Obama administration was planning on to fund this boondoggle.
     A report that arrived this week from an emergency room physicians group, stated that emergency rooms are seeing a massive increase in the number of ObamaCare patients as a result of health care providers opting out of providing care to those on the program. This recent revelation, in addition to  the many providers dropping Medicare and Medicaid patients over the last couple of years, has painted a bleak health care picture for this country where persons are covered by government insurance, but can not find quality care. This, of course, is the goal of any socialized health care system, i.e., to turn doctors into bureaucrats and patients into widgets moving along a cold, unfeeling assembly line in the factory of government incompetence.
     There are many lessons to be learned from the disaster visited upon this great nation by ObamaCare, but the one that illustrates the utter futility of all Leftist policy is static analysis. The fantasy of static analysis is what informed the Obama administration that their burden of health care would be borne mostly by the young and healthy signing up en masse. The reality of dynamic analysis reveals that the young and healthy are opting out, leaving only the old and the sick. It is similar to the static analysis used to raise taxes on tobacco products with the goal of increasing revenue, which over the years has decreased the number of smokers only to leave the remaining ones, mostly poor, to pay ever higher taxes on cigarettes.
     But the flawed analysis of thinking statically is not important to those on the Left pushing their poison. Because their goal is not public policy that works or results in positive outcomes, but to create failure that they convince citizens can only be solved by an ever expanding and more intrusive centralized government.
    
    
    

Dead Men Tell No Tales, Apparently Neither Does The U.S. Senate

     The bi-partisan senate report on the Benghazi debacle was released this week. And while it stated that the Al Qaeda murder of U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three others could have been avoided, it stopped short of assigning any accountability. The report used the political device of blaming agencies like the State Department, as if it were capable of making decisions without any human agency. This is convenient for those humans whose agency is responsible for the operation of such governmental departments.
     Hillary Clinton's name is not present in the report once, which is shocking considering that she was a major player in denying the security needed for embassy personnel, and figured prominently in the cover-up which involved the story about a YouTube video being responsible for the attack. Hillary Clinton's name being conspicuously missing from the report is analogous to leaving out the name of Pontius Pilate in a report about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
     The report further appears to blame the dead ambassador, Chris Stevens, for not making security requests for Benghazi, even after he had done so for Tripoli, the capitol city of Libya. Is it not the responsibility of the Secretary of State to weigh all data available to her, and after concluding that further security is needed, authorize it in spite of what her underlings may say. Hillary Clinton belongs to an ethos which informs its members that they have some divine charter to impose their decisions upon citizens of this country when it comes to everything from health care insurance to light bulbs. But when it comes to executing their jobs as it relates to foreign policy and the safety of those abroad executing it for them, all of the sudden they do not want to take responsibility for making decisions.
     Shame on Senate Republicants on the Intelligence committee who signed off on this report without proper responsibility being assigned to those who, first created the security risk for the attack to occur, and then blatantly lied about the source of the attack being a spontaneous demonstration initiated by an anti-Muslim YouTube video. Why did the report not include President Obama's promise that "justice would be served," and yet a year and a half after the attack Mohsen Al-Azazi, the man known to have masterminded the attack, is free to eat and drink openly in the cafes of Libya, thumbing his nose at the United States of America?
     So often, as is the case with these congressional reports, they serve no other purpose than to make our elected representatives look as though they are doing something other than wasting tax payer dollars. Four Americans, including an ambassador, died because of the deliberate incompetence of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Their deaths require not only justice be served against those who orchestrated the actual attack, but also those who created its circumstance, heard the cries for help and turned a callous deaf ear to the men who eventually were horribly murdered, and then lied for weeks afterwards to cover their ideologically-driven incompetence.

A Primer On Executive Orders

     Many on the Right, as well as elsewhere along the political spectrum, have deplored President Obama's use of executive orders to impose his agenda. But Mr. Obama is not the first President of the United States to use executive orders, in fact the practice began with George Washington and has continued through every president since. Barack Obama does not even hold the record for the most executive orders, a distinction that is owned by Franklin Roosevelt with his 3522 executive orders. FDR makes BHO look like a piker, the latter having only 161 executive orders through July 2013. The first president to break 100 executive orders was Ulysses S. Grant at 217, the first to break 1000 was Theodore Roosevelt at 1081.
     The very first executive order was issued by George Washington in 1793. It was an order instructing federal officers to prosecute any citizen who interfered in the war between England and France. Congress and the courts have usually given presidents a wide berth on executive orders, but in 1952 during the Korean war one written by President Truman was challenged before the Supreme Court. A steel strike threatened that very precious commodity during wartime and President Truman issued an executive order to seize control of the nation's steel plants. The Supreme court determined that since the strike fell under the 60 day cooling off period required by Taft/Hartley, the Truman executive order was unconstitutional.
     In the Youngstown decision, which was the first time in our history an executive order was dismissed by the Supreme Court, the 6 justices in the majority stated that the power to issue executive orders must come from an act of congress or the Constitution itself. Justice Robert H. Jackson, who wrote the majority opinion, delineated the three levels of executive orders as follows:
          A president has the most authority when he has the expressed or implied consent of congress.
          A president has uncertain authority when congress has not imposed its authority by action or   
          inaction.
          A president has the least authority when the executive order is incompatible with the expressed
          or implied will of congress.
Since the Truman order fell into the third category due to its violation of the Taft/Hartley Act, it was ruled unconstitutional.
     Article II of the constitution gives the president the authority to issue executive orders, even though it does not use that term. In fact, the term Executive Order did not make its way into the vernacular until the 1860s. Article II, section 3 of the constitution states, "he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed..." It is this seemingly innocuous statement that has spawned such political debate throughout our history, and continues to do so to this day.
     If President Obama issues an executive order that, as Justice Jackson outlined in the Youngstown case, is incompatible with the will of congress, then he will be in violation of the constitution. For instance, if Mr. Obama were to issue blanket amnesty to illegal aliens it would violate the immigration laws passed by previous legislation, therefore fulfilling Justice Jackson's requirement for being an unconstitutional executive order.
     So far, President Obama has very cleverly walked a thin line on his executive orders, being careful to not let any of them fall into Jackson's third category. Of course the constitutionality of any executive order is predicated upon the issuing president being challenged by congress, or brought before the Supreme Court by a civilian source and the Court agreeing to hear the case. This may be a tall order to fill against the first black president, and Mr. Obama may take advantage of this fact to venture into uncharted waters with his executive order privileges. Only time will tell.

The Saran Wrap President

     To a great extent the Left has been successful over the past few decades in retraining many Americans to see the source of their rights as government and not God. In doing this the Left has also removed the individual citizen's responsibility to liberty, and their obligation to oppose that which infringes upon that liberty. The Left knows that a population that see its government as the well into which they dip their ladles of freedom and extract rights for themselves, has no need of a constitution. And without adherence to a limiting principle like the constitution, government will grow powerful enough to revoke even the God-given rights bestowed on all people who yearn to be free.
     There has never been an American president who is as willing as Barack Obama to redefine the very founding of this country, and place himself above the constitutional principles of representative government and the sanctity of God-given rights. Recently, in a publicized portion of a cabinet meeting, the President said he would use his pen to issue executive orders to impose equality, i.e., income redistribution, amnesty, and "fairness." The last principle being defined as anything which destroys the American spirit and places more emphasis on government.
     There are those that have claimed Barack Obama is a complex and deep individual. But over the past decade that he has bullied his way into the national spot light, he has been as transparent as a piece of Saran Wrap. I recall when he was running for president in 2008, a radio interview surfaced from the early 2000s where he expressed a desire to replace the constitution, because of its limiting principle on government, with what he called a "redistributive model." This is the same interview in which he called the United States Constitution, the greatest document of individual liberty ever conceived by the mind of man, a "charter of negative rights."
     It has been clear all along that the Saran Wrap President was not hiding his desire to reshape the very founding of this great country from liberty-centric to government-centric. The Founding Fathers abhorred the idea of a nation driven by a centralized government, thus limiting it to the enumerated powers given it by the people through the constitution. The Saran Wrap president and his minions of mindless mavens have twisted the founding principle that the peoples rights come from God and the government's rights come from the people, to the completely opposite proposition. In the world of Barack Obama, rights come from a divinity, only that divinity is government and its demigods are the fallen angels of liberty like himself that now do the bidding of tyranny and oppression.
    

The NSA Defenders Forget American Revolution

     There use to be very few absolute defining issues comprising the public policy discourse of this nation. That is to say that most debates of the past between Republicants and Democrats were how to implement policy that was in the best interest of the people of this great country, while still maintaining constitutional integrity. Modern times have found this nation in the grips of one party (Democrats) that wishes to replace the constitution and the free choice and privacy it enshrines, with the tyranny of big government. And another party (Republicants) who seem ineffectual at stopping them, and at times even supporting their destruction of personal liberty.
     The National Security Administration spying scandal is an issue on which there can be no compromise, if one believes in the citizen's constitutional right to be secure in their papers and personal effects. This includes phone calls and emails. For me it has been a sickening sight to watch many on the Right agree with the egregious violation of basic rights inherent in the NSA's electronic dragnet in which they have snagged every American. These so-called conservatives have decided for everyone that security is more important than liberty and that information has become a government commodity to be traded for the country's constitutional soul.
     The defenders of such privacy invasions as the NSA collecting the phone records and Internet traffic of every American, say it is necessary in a post-911 world to keep us safe from terrorism. But safety without the freedom of personal privacy is just another word for tyranny. These who have the sacred duty to protect the God-given rights of free people enshrined in this nation's founding documents, have traded the holy grail of liberty for the profanity of big government progressivism.
     The defenders of the NSA spying on innocent Americans justify the program by stating that the data collected is "meta data," and will never be used unless there is reason to believe there is a connection to terrorism. But this "meta data" is the key which unlocks the vault of personal data on every American. In the hands of an out-of-control executive branch, this data can be used to target political opponents or anyone else the administration deems worthy of privacy invasion. This has already happened in a spectacular and frightening way with the Internal Revenue Service. There is no reason to believe that this administration would not use other agencies under its control to advance their political agenda and destroy any opposition to it.
     I do not oppose the NSA spying on Americans because Barack Obama is president, although he is the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to use the power of government to crush his opposition in such a blatant and public way. I oppose the NSA spying on Americans because it is antithetical to the very foundation of the American Revolution, which for those who still remember, was about severely limiting the power and authority of centralized government. Liberty can hardly survive under the rule of a government authority with virtually unlimited access to personal information ripped from the dwindling privacy of every American citizen.

Barack Obama's War Against The Commercial Bus Industry

     The latest executive edict from "Dear Leader" is a mandate that all commercial buses must have lap and shoulder restraints for every passenger. This over-reaching attempt to punish yet another industry with higher costs has been implemented, according to the Obama administration, to ostensibly save about 20 lives a year. A figure that represents forty percent of the approximately 50 persons who die in commercial bus accidents every year in the United States. The cost to the commercial bus industry could reach into the tens of millions of dollars in additional procurement and installation costs, not to mention maintenance costs on the new equipment.
     Apparently the President is not concerned with the lives of school children or anyone riding public transportation, these two classes of buses having been exempt from the decree. According to the National Health & Transportation Safety Administration, there are 400 deaths a year due to bus accidents. One hundred and thirty seven are children riding school buses, about 213 are a result of public transportation bus accidents, and only 50 deaths a year are attributable to the commercial buses that are subject to the new edict.
     When one delves further into the data, it shows that riding a commercial bus is actually safer than riding in  a car. There are approximately 45 deaths per every 100,000 bus accidents, but a whopping 251 deaths for every 100,000 car accidents. This chasm in the statistics exists even with the ubiquitous nature of seat belts and shoulder restraints present in cars, further mitigating the President's argument to force their installation in commercial buses.
     Contained within the latest proclamation from King Barack is language that ensures easier access to litigation against commercial bus companies, yet another pay back to the trial lawyers for their unyielding support of the current regime. Just to remind the reader once again, this latest dictate does not apply to public transportation or school buses, violating the sanctity of Equal Protection Under the Law. Which seems to be the modus operandi of the man who preaches the false gospel of equality and "social justice."
     This latest edict is illustrative of President Obama's disconnect from reality as it applies to matters of business and economics. Apparently when Barack Obama was matriculated in the Leftist seminaries known as the university system in this country, he did not learn that additional frivolous costs placed on businesses results in a reduction in the quality of services, higher prices, or both. But then it would not matter to an authoritarian narcissist like Mr. Obama, who revels in his constitutionally illegitimate power to impose ridiculous regulations on better men than himself, and micromanage an economy that he has never worked in or contributed to in any significant way. 
    

The Lack Of Principled Conservatism Present In Christie Defenders

     I have deliberately kept my opinions to myself the last couple of days about the Chris Christie circus in New Jersey over the lane closures on a busy bridge in Fort Lee. The lane closures, which caused quite a traffic jam, was apparently political payback aimed at the Democrat mayor of that city. Mr. Christie took 107 minutes on Thursday to explain that he knew nothing about the lane closures and was very peeved at members of his administration who did, firing Bridget Ann Kelly, a close aid to the rotund Governor since  2010. My opinion about this dog and pony show is more about reaction from those on the Right than it is about what Governor Christie knew and when he knew it.
     Beyond the scandal created either by Mr. Christie's political vengefulness or his lack of judgment with regards to those with which he has populated his administration, is the reaction by some on the Right that borders on defense, or suggests that he should be defended by his fellow Republicants. Even the elder statesman of conservatism, Rush Limbaugh, suggested that more of a defense of Christie should take place within his own party. Others in talk radio have verbally tripped over themselves to extol what they say are the characteristics of great leadership exhibited by Governor Christie in Thursday's press conference.
     The repeating theme on much of talk radio yesterday and Thursday was to exculpate Chris Christie of any blame or wrongdoing by immediately enumerating every one of the many Obama scandals from his tenure in the White House. This is analogous to excusing a man for stealing a car simply because another man embezzled a million dollars from the corporation for which he worked. One of the core conservative principles is advocating for righteousness and truth, regardless of the party affiliation of the wrongdoer.
     I am not saying that closing a couple lanes of a major bridge in a city run by a political opponent, causing a snarling traffic jam, is on par with allowing four Americans to die at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi, Libya. Nor is it as serious as using the Internal Revenue Service to suppress votes of your political opponent in an election year. Nor any other Obama scandal one wishes to use in comparison. But everyone can agree that the lane closures were wrong. Mr. Christie did nothing to repair the damage to his reputation and character, showing little honor by sacrificing Bridget Ann Kelly to the gods of the Leftist media, while he sheltered himself behind empty platitudes and righteous indignation.
     Governor Christie has never impressed me as anything but a bullying opportunist, lacking in core convictions other than keeping himself supplied with political power and cheeseburgers. And those who call themselves conservatives, and also wish to defend Mr. Christie, should examine their own convictions and values. For the two positions, in my opinion, are mutually exclusive and cannot peacefully coexist in anyone who counts themselves among principled conservatives. 
    
    

Waking Up From A Fed-Induced Dream

     Persons whose delusions have made it impossible for them to draw a distinction between reality and fantasy are given psychotropic drugs, therapy, and sometimes committed to institutions and made to wear funny jackets with arms that tie around the back, or they are given positions on Wall Street. The stock market over recent years has made a transformation from analysis which leads to the markets being a leading indicator of the nation's economic health, to a body of reactionaries who buy or sell equities based on current data manufactured by the propaganda machine housed in what use to be the most venerated symbol of this country's principles. Gone are the days when those who drove the market did so based on future prospects for the nation's economy and the companies that operated within it.
     Two recent examples that prove my thesis are the lower than expected first time claims for unemployment and the fewest number of corporate layoffs in almost 15 years in the month of December. Both of these data bits are seen by the folks on Wall Street as good economic indicators, but they are not. Both statistics are masquerading as a positive, costuming over the core problem in the economy, i.e., the lowest Work Force Participation Rate in 35 years.
     The fewest corporate layoffs in almost 15 years is due to the fact that over the last five years corporate America has cut their labor force to the bone, and their skeleton work force has very little left to be cut. The lower than expected first time claims for unemployment are a result of the same driver of the lowest corporate layoffs in almost 15 years; more persons are already unemployed long term and the lowest percentage of working age adults are actually working in the economy in almost half a century. In other words, the entire economy is operating with a skeleton crew, which means there are fewer working persons who can lose their jobs. It is analogous to a parent of an F student being happy because their child can not do any worse.
     The equities and bond markets have been so skewed and bastardized by government interference through the Federal Reserve's meddling with their bond buying program, and holding interest rates at an all time low for the last 6 years, that it is hardly a viable gauge of where the economy has been or where it is going. This disconnection of the market from the real economy is going to come to a crashing end as they become reconnected vis-à-vis the Federal Reserve pulling away the artificial supports propping up the market.
     As the dolts of Wall Street begin to remove the blinders of quantitative easing and see the Obama economic disaster of more unemployed Americans than ever, sub-standard economic growth, and mounting poverty, they will pull their money out of stocks, causing a collapse. If there is one thing the market movers do well, it is protecting their own financial interests. And the stock market will seem like a much less friendly place for them and their money sans the 85 billion dollars a month that Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have been printing in order to keep it buoyant in the waters of the worse economy since the Great Depression.
    
     

The Fault, Mr. Gates, Lies In Thyself

     Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense for both the Bush and Obama administrations, is set to release a tell all book, mostly about his tenure in the Obama White House. What has been released of the book, no doubt to peak the public's interest to garner more sales, is provocative indeed. I am not sanguine about former administration officials leaving office and signing lucrative book deals to publicize that which was said in private meetings, seemingly unimportant to the author at the time, but somehow gaining importance to him years after leaving his post when he can profit financially from it.
     Mr. Gates writes that President Obama's overriding concern about Afghanistan was just getting out, even as he was committing new troops to the surge in 2010. At one point Mr. Gates reveals that President Obama did not believe in his own strategy to the point of thinking it was sure to fail. This should be concerning to any American, but especially those who lost loved ones to a strategy not fully supported by their Commander In Chief and implemented only for political reasons. In fact, Robert Gates writes, that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cavalierly spoke about their opposition to the Bush strategy in Iraq purely based on the politics at the time.
     All of the damning revelations in Secretary Gates' book mean absolutely nothing in 2014, but would have made much more difference in 2010 and 2011 when they occurred. But did Mr. Gates resign his post and go to the media with this startling information? No! He sat in subsequent meetings with a posture that lead President Obama to believe he was nothing but a loyal member of the administration. It was only after any good could have come from his revelations, like saving servicemen's and service women's lives or preventing the re-election of Barack Obama, that he disseminated this important data. And I might add, at a time when he could collect his thirty pieces of silver for this damning but expired information.
     It is not a surprise that Mr. Gates claims that he believes President Obama to be a man of integrity. A man without integrity like himself, would of course see a man like Barack Obama as being in possession of that virtue. I would not want the reader to infer that I am exculpating Barack Obama for his deplorable behavior with my criticism of Secretary Gates, the two are not mutually exclusive. But similar to Edward Snowden, Mr. Gates' release of sensitive information in itself is not wrong, only the manner and timing in which he chose that release. It is illustrative of the lack of rectitude present in too many of our leaders of the modern era, and a culture that allows it to continue un-convicted by public opinion.
    

The Dichotomy Of Unemployment Extensions

     It must be wonderful to be Barack Obama and be able to speak out of both sides of your mouth and have a slavish media that will convince a low-information public of the legitimacy of all your positions, even when they contradict each other. And the media, ah yes the media. That organized propaganda arm of the Democrat party which has the ability to report government shutdowns because of frigid weather as necessary, but a shutdown of far less government functions resulting from some Republicants standing up for fiscal sanity, as the end of civilization as we know it.
     But I digress, back to my original point that we have a President that is as unacquainted with the truth as he is with decency and honor. Leading him and his slobbering devotees in the Senate, House and the main stream of Leftist society to push for an extension of federal unemployment benefits for the non-working. While at the same time they pound their chests about how their policies have brought the job market roaring back to life. If the latter is true, the former is unnecessary. Federal taxpayer dollars should never be used to subsidize unemployment. These kinds of subsidies have been shown by a multitude of studies to lead to more unemployment because of the tendency of the unemployed to wait until their subsidy is ending before they look for employment in earnest.
     The breathtaking idiocy of the position taken by President Obama and congressional Democrats was best exemplified by the recent remark by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said that for every dollar paid out in unemployment benefits, a dollar fifty of economic activity is generated. Further comments saw Democrats actually saying 200 thousand jobs would be lost unless they were given the authority to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize persons not working. If what the Majority Leader and other Democrats are saying was true, then all this country would need to do to create a roaring economy would be to put every American on unemployment and sit back and watch the growth.
     The fact is that for every dollar paid out in unemployment benefits, a dollar fifty must be confiscated from the economy by government, the dollar that goes to the recipient and fifty cents to pay for the bureaucracy to administer it. And while unemployment recipients may spend their entire check in the private economy, there is no recouping of the bureaucratic costs involved in the transaction. Additionally, those recipients of taxpayer dollars would actually spend more money in creating economic activity if they had jobs, which would allow them to actually create new wealth instead of simply transferring and redistributing current wealth.
     It is illustrative of the Lefts complete lack of compassion for unemployed Americans that they argue for extending the crumbs of government-administered unemployment checks, instead of the creation of jobs so these individuals can buy a whole loaf. But it is exemplary of Leftist policy religiously evangelized by Democrats and others whose only real goal is to grow government by shrinking personal wealth. The unemployed, like so many other "beneficiaries" of Leftist policies, have been damaged, some irreparably, by those very policies whose aim is not to help Americans up but to keep them down under the weight of an increasingly obese federal government.
    

Fall Of Fallagua Highlights Bush Failures

     The recent recapturing of the city of Fallagua in the Anbar province of Iraq by Al Qaeda terrorists, is indeed a mournful day in the history of the United States and Iraq, as well as the entire Middle East. It has signaled the official resurgence of Al Qaeda and the decline of any hope for even a modicum of democratic rule in the region. And while it has been President Obama that actually snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq, it was President Bush who weakened those jaws to the point that they were so easily opened.
     Mr. Bush's first major mistake was allowing the religious zealot Mohammed Hasan al-Maliki to grasp the reins of power from the much more moderate and level-headed Ayad Allawi. Allawi was placed into power with a combination of U.S. backing and the good blessings of Iraqi leadership formerly in exile during the Saddam Hussein regime. Mr. Allawi did not have the funding to beat Mr. Maliki in the Iraqi election, which saw the latter garnering almost unlimited financial support from Iran. Mr. Bush, knowing this and having the opportunity to help the United States' ally, Mr. Allawi, decided to pass and allow Mr. Maliki to take control of the country whose ground was stained with so many brave Americans' blood.
     The other mistake that President Bush made was to leave all decisions about future involvement of U.S. troops completely to the discretion of his successor, Barack Obama. Mr. Bush could have made certain troop requirements and agreements with the Iraqi government a matter of U.S. law, but chose instead to trust his successor's loyalty to the Iraqi/U.S. common interests of liberty and security. Mr. Bush's miscalculation of Barack Obama's sense of duty to the higher calling of humanity resident in the library of the human spirit, contributed to the rebirth of Islamic inspired terrorism, not only in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East.
     Believe me, there was no greater supporter of the Iraq war than myself, I still believe that it was the right thing to do. It removed a proven threat to the region, Saddam Hussein, who was a sponsor of terrorism and a menace to decency. But President Bush took no steps to insure that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were not moved to Syria, where they recently were the instrument used  to reduce U.S. influence while increasing the stature of Russia and their proxy. He also gave no real support to Ayad Allawi, a friend to peaceful and democratic ideals. Had Mr. Bush made the necessary decisions to weaken the influence of Al Qaeda in a more permanent way, they would not today be aided so greatly by the fecklessness and fraudulent ideology of Barack Obama.

The Obama Lost Decade

     This Friday when the jobs numbers are released to the public for the month of December, the expectation is that the economy added some 200 thousand jobs. This, of course, will be hailed by the main stream media and others on the Left as an achievement by the Obama administration on par with Sir Edmund Hillary conquering the icy slopes of Mount Everest. And while 200 thousand jobs added in a month would be a positive sign for an economy just beginning to emerge from the depths of a recession, it is far less than adequate for an economy that is headed towards its fifth year of recovery.
      I have written before about this administration's pathetic hubris with regards to what they call "an improving job market." The fact is that the average monthly job growth for the United States since the end of World War II is somewhere north of  200 thousand. In periods of recovery from the many recessions the nation has endured in that same time frame, monthly job growth typically reaches half a million new jobs or more. During the Reagan recovery in the mid to late 1980s, some months saw job growth approaching a million. Barack Obama himself promised monthly job growth of half a million by the end of his first term, just one of the many promises broken by this president for which he is not held accountable.
     Americans have now suffered more than half of what is shaping up to be an Obama lost decade. With devastating effects that include, but are not limited to, substandard Gross Domestic Product growth rate, real unemployment around 15%, a doubling of food stamp recipients, a record 90 million working age adults unemployed, and economic malaise that has transformed this engine of world economic growth into a pathetic, slobbering, grasping transient looking for a handout.
     The United States has had at least seven substantial recessions in its post World War II history, none lasting as long, cutting as deep, and inflicting as much economic hardship as the Obama recession. Not only have none of us under the age of 70 ever lived through such rampant unemployment and anemic economic growth for such an extended period of time, but we have also never had an administration that seems not to care. In fact, this obtuse administration plays with their mathematical models borne of some twisted fantasy of academia, instead of the economic realities of an economy in which none of them have ever had to earn a living.
     By the time Mr. Obama leaves office in January of 2017, the damage done by his economic policies will require at least another two years to repair, rounding out the Obama lost decade. And while he and members of his administration will brag about having "transformed America," they themselves will never be touched by the grief and misery that that "transformation" wrought on a free nation. It is ironic in so much as the man who promised hope only brought hopelessness to millions of Americans. He will have increased poverty more than any president of the modern era, reduced the standard of living and brought about the decline not only of the United States' stature in the world, but a giant step backward in the delivery and quality of medical care for the average American. Such is the accomplishments of a man who entered the presidency as the least accomplished person to ever hold that office.

IMF Study Illustrates Flawed Leftist Thinking

     Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff recently penned a research paper for the International Monetary Fund on the debt crisis facing advanced and emerging economies around the world. Their conclusions were that advanced economies like the United States will necessarily have to restructure their debt far beyond the extent to which many countries did after World War I. Much of the world's debt crisis is in advanced economies, where central banks have blindly implemented monetary policies that will only make deleveraging of their debt more difficult, according to Reinhart and Rogoff.
     Emerging economies deleveraged over a decade ago before the financial crisis of 2008, and as the authors of the study rightly point out, the world's advanced economies reached a peak in their debt to Gross Domestic Product ratios not seen since the end of World War II. In fact Reinhart and Rogoff suggest that levels of debt carried by advanced economies like the U.S. are at a two hundred year high. Certainly the seventeen trillion dollar debt of the United States reached under the spend thrift Obama administration, is more debt than mankind has seen in the history of the world. And that does not even count the unfunded liabilities of entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs of government promises to the citizens, which currently stands at a staggering 90 trillion dollars.
     One of the most disturbing aspects of the Reinhart/Rogoff study is the cold, hard reality that the debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio will reach 95.3% for the Eurozone and a whopping 109.2% for the United States in 2014. Emerging economies will reach a measly 33.6%. These levels of debt to GDP have taken the U.S. and other advanced economies into uncharted waters, thereby making austerity measures and central banks' artificial liquidity programs a moot point to economic recovery.
    While I do agree with Reinhart and Rogoff about the dire debt predicament many advanced economies are facing in the new year and beyond, their solutions seem to be more of what created the problem, i.e., more government intervention in private sector economies. Part of the Reinhart/Rogoff remedy is government taxation of savers. These two brilliant Harvard economists miss the obvious lesson of history that less government involvement in private economies is the solution, not more.
     Deleveraging of government debt can only occur with a deleveraging of government involvement in business, with lower taxes and less regulations to restrain the engine of growth that is the free market. Reinhart and Rogoff seem to have allowed their brilliance in economics to become dulled by exposure to Leftist thought in the world of academia. It is only through less government and more private sector growth that public debt can be mitigated and eliminated. But once again well-meaning economists under the spell of Leftist thought believe that government is the answer, a thought process that is analogous to pumping water into a sinking ship.

The Mythical ObamaCare "Winners"

     The most recent act of acquiescence by the modacans on the Right is acknowledging that while there are some winners in the ObamaCare lottery, more Americans will be worse off under the new law. Exemplary of this reality is a Dodge dealership in Michigan which has a handful of employees that will receive federal subsidies for almost their entire health care insurance premiums. The majority of the dealership's remaining employees will pay much higher premiums and deductibles, and have unwanted insurance coverage imposed upon them by the force of the federal government. It is the living embodiment of the old adage, "When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul." And as the Obama administration, through its unconstitutional health care insurance law, has created millions of Pauls, it has at the same time transformed tens of millions of Americans into unwilling Peters.
     The modacan's desire to play the role of moderator between those who blindly see ObamaCare as a blessing and those who correctly see it as the scourge of liberty, has once again placed their good intentions over common sense and thousands of years of history. These slap-happy Republicants would rather go-along-to-get-along than inform and educate the public why ObamaCare, or any government-run health care system for that matter, is bad for everyone. The modacans seem content to help the Obama administration add fuel to their propaganda fire, rather than neutralize the source of that fuel, i.e., stories about those who are benefiting from ObamaCare.
     If any Republicants in the arena of public policy discourse are interested in how they should approach the "successes" of ObamaCare, listen up. First of all no one benefits from a socialized health care system that replaces a vibrant free market health care insurance industry with burdensome government bureaucracy. Industry must serve the needs of its customers or cease to profit. Government systems only exist for their own edification on the backs of the tax paying public. So even those who may look at the health care insurance they have received under ObamaCare as a gift, that gift will quickly turn into a curse once the system is over burdened and their benefits are cut and their non-subsidized costs skyrocket.
     What Republicants should be highlighting is doctors being forced out of practice, medical device innovation being made impotent by added tax burdens, the planned destruction of the health care insurance industry leaving government as the only choice, life and death decisions being made not by doctors and patients but by Washington bureaucrats, and mostly the loss of freedom and liberty for Americans to choose the health care coverage they desire, or no coverage at all if that is their prerogative. ObamaCare has made losers of us all while making winners only of the Leftist technocrats that pull the levers of health care which are now all located in the crucible of corruption and coercion known as Washington D.C.

The Hopelessy Stuck Akademik Shokalsky Symbol Of Climate Change Religion

     On November 28, 2013 the Russian ship Akademik Shokalsky set out from New Zealand to recreate the 1911-1913 journey of Australian explorer, Douglas Mawson. Mawson's was the first such exploration of Antarctica, and the 52 researchers and 22 crew aboard the Akademik Shokalsky were recreating his icy journey, of course on a modern ship with all the advantages of the twenty first century. Unfortunately the re-creators became hopelessly stuck in the Antarctica ice on Christmas eve and rescuers have been unsuccessful in their attempts to reach the ill-fated ship.
     What makes this story especially delicious is that in addition to their recreation of Mawson's journey, the researchers aboard the Akademik Shokalsky wanted to gather data in support of the hoax known as man made climate change. They were hoping, as all true believers of the global warming religion hope, to find evidence of their faith somewhere, anywhere, that the globe was warming and ice was melting, causing a rise in sea levels and other cataclysmic outcomes for human beings. Unfortunately for the researchers aboard the Akademik Shokalsky, they became bound, and unable to move, in what appears to be thousands of tons of global warming. The ice is so ubiquitous and dominant in the Antarctica waters, that three ice breaker ships have been unable to free the research vessel.
     This very public spectacle is illustrative of the Lefts unyielding devotion not only to their agenda, but the fantasies which comprise it. Already there has been the beginnings of talk from those on the Left, and especially those belonging to the global warming cult, that the Akademik Shokalsky's icy predicament is a result of, not a despoliation of, the theory of man-made climate change. This lunacy is exemplary of the Lefts inability to recognize facts and truth when they contradict the agenda they aim to impose on their fellow human beings for the sake of giving their own lives some meaning, i.e., they are "saving the planet."
     The ice-bound Akademik Shokalsky should stand with the volumes of other evidence to dispel the backward thinking of those who place fiction over fact and superstition over science. But I would not expect the blinded devotees of global warming to come to their senses anytime soon, after all they are some of the same persons that believe government can effectively manage the health care of over 300 million Americans. The hopelessly stuck research ship is a fitting symbol for the Left, who are hopelessly stuck in the ice jam of their own agenda-driven "science," which is exposed as more of a fraud with each passing year that their dire predictions are so spectacularly proven wrong.