Obama's First Thousand Days ... Alan Caruba

Obama's First Thousand Days

By Alan Caruba

After the brief period of intoxication with candidate Obama’s rhetorical skills, the promise of “hope and change” became the business of governing a nation still reeling from a major financial crisis and issues of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the euphoria subsided, reality in the form of growing numbers of unemployed, the homes that continued to be foreclosed, and the growing realization that Obama’s attitudes toward America and his view of the world were antithetical to our well-being and completely out of touch with what was actually occurring.

John F. Kennedy’s first thousand days in office included continuing and expanding the nation’s space program. Obama has, in effect, shut it down. The Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba was sobering and the expansion of U.S. participation in Vietnam’s civil war became a national tragedy, but Kennedy’s assassination, his martyrdom, as well as the myth of Camelot that included his beautiful wife, Jackie, lives on.

By contrast, Obama’s first thousand days, a marker in time he recently passed, has been one long series of astonishingly bad judgments that have his polling numbers heading south. There is a widespread and persistent view that he has taken America in the wrong direction.

As the 2012 campaign begins to gain momentum it is worth taking a moment to briefly review the record.

He has overseen the tripling if the national debt. It stretches to the Moon and back. For the first time in the nation's history its Triple-A credit rating has been reduced.

Billions spent as a “stimulus” to the economy have done little more than waste taxpayer’s money. It was and is a political slush fund, not much different from similar programs during the New Deal era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is distinguished by its emphasis on “green jobs” that are best symbolized by the Solyndra scandal; jobs created that are each measured in millions “invested.”

Obama’s focus from the beginning, however, was the imposition of universal health care in the form of a 2,000 page piece of legislation dubbed “Obamacare” which has already been repealed by the House and will be the subject of a Supreme Court case to determine its constitutionality or lack of it. Americans hate it.

All administrations have their scandals and Obama’s is no exemption. Still festering is the ATF program, “Fast and Furious”, that actually facilitated the sale and transfer of guns to the drug cartels operating out of Mexico. The Attorney General appears to have been caught in a lie regarding his knowledge of it. It cost the life of at least one Border Patrol officer and who knows how many victims of the cartels.

In addition to the many “czars” Obama appointed to oversee public policy---many of whom not vetted by Congress---his cabinet appointees have proven to be ideologues more interested in advancing the global warming hoax and restrictions on America’s access to its vast energy reserves than facilitating a greater degree of energy independence and job creation.

The Environmental Protection Agency has literally gone rogue, requiring Congress to constantly pass legislation to restrain it from further damage to the economy.

Obama’s greatest contribution to life in America has been to make Americans so jaded that they no longer even ask if he was or is eligible to be President. He has boldly hidden virtually all of the paper trail of his life from public examination and the “birth certificates” he has offered have been, according to experts, forgeries.

Throughout his first thousand days, he has expressed contempt and disdain for almost every aspect of American society; its “millionaires and billionaires”, for the “corporate jets” used to facilitate travel in the pursuit of business expansion, for Wall Street "fat cats", for the entire medical profession who he suspects of recommending expensive treatments to patients when a cough drop will do. But oh how he loves those unionized teachers!

More recently his support of thuggish union behavior has been on display along with support of the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters that mock American values in favor of vague demands for “social justice.”

In pursuit of a second term, he is using class warfare and the race card. He is claiming falsely that Republicans have never offered him a jobs program when it is perfectly obvious they have.

He has gone from having a Democrat-controlled Congress from 2009-to-2010 that had to be bribed and threatened to pass his Obamacare law to the loss of the House of Representatives, largely due to the spontaneous rise of the Tea Party movement. His latest “jobs” legislation, introduced in an unprecedented joint session of Congress, was unable to secure even the support of Democrats.

There is a word to describe his first thousand days. It is “failure.” As this is being written, he has some 460 days left of what is surely his first and last term in office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

What Debt? Obama's Insane Spending Binge! ... Alan Caruba

What Debt? Obama's Insane Spending Binge!

By Alan Caruba

There’s a reason that President Obama wants to increase taxes. His administration cannot spend your money fast enough.

A visit on Tuesday morning to the websites of various federal departments reveals that this administration can find an excuse to spend millions on anything. Here’s a quick tour.

In the wake of the Solyndra scandal in which taxpayers were, in the words of Investor Business Daily, “put on the hook for at least the first $75 million if the company should default and with “a minimum of five green firms going bankrupt” the U.S. Department of Energy, on September 13, announced a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to Mojave Solar LLC for the development of the Mojave Solar Project.

On the same day, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced a $32.5 million grant “to finalize expansion plan of Boston’s South Station” for the purpose of expanding and enhancing the historic station on the grounds that it estimates a “50 percent increase in high-speed intercity passenger rail travel in the coming years.” And we all know how accurate estimates are, eh?

Three days later, the DOT provided $22 million to the Maryland Department of Transportation for a study of replacement options for the Susquehanna River Bridge on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C. Why not spend the money on actually replacing the bridge? On September 19, DOT awarded $25 million to the city of Charlotte, N.C. for a streetcar line “to improve access to jobs, housing, and schools.” Why money from other States should gift Charlotte with a streetcar line when the nation has a $14 trillion debt might have something to do with the fact that the Democratic Party National Convention will be held there in 2012.

In the midst of a recession that officially does not exist, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD), on September 15, announced $93 million in grants to 39 local projects “to conduct a wide range of activities intended to protect children and families from potentially dangerous lead-based paint and other home health and safety hazards.” HUD estimates there are “nearly 7,000 high-risk homes” because “providing healthy and safe homes for families and children is a priority.” Keep in mind that lead-based paint was banned for residential use in 1978, more than three decades ago.

On September 15, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services announced awards totaling $10 million “to aid 129 organizations across the country that would like to become community health centers. The funds came from the Affordable Care Act, but at the same time Obamacare cuts billions from Medicare, reducing payments to hospitals and to individual physicians providing care to America’s growing population of the elderly. Go figure.

At the Department of Commerce, on August 30, they were celebrating a $2.9 million

On September 14, the Department of Agriculture announced that taxpayers are now on the hook for loans to 27 rural electric cooperative utilities. DOA made $603 million in loans to help electric utilities "upgrade, expand, maintain and replace rural America’s electric infrastructure."

This is the same administration whose Environmental Protection Agency is waging war on coal-fired utilities and mining (coal provides 50% of all electricity in America). On September 16, USDA announced funding for more than 500 projects to boost renewable energy production (wind and solar) despite the fact that this represents just over 2% of all the electricity produced and companies producing solar panels are declaring bankruptcy on a weekly basis these days.

Secretary Tom Vilsack also noted that USDA Rural Development “is providing $35 million

Not to be outdone, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced in late August that it was making more than $53 million in grants to 17 states “to support conservation planning and acquisition of vital habitat for threatened and endangered fish, wildlife, and plants.” The Endangered Species Act has been one of the greatest failures in U.S. history and responsible for thwarting billions in development. This money is intended to remove yet more landmass from development, all in the name of obscure species and plants.

On September 14 the Department of Justice announced grants totaling $118.4 million to “enhance public safety in Indian Country.” The money went to tribal governments. Apparently the Apaches are on the warpath again. Over the last two years, DOJ spent $121 million on conferences.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the money flowing from the Departments of Defense, Education, Veteran Affairs, and Homeland Security. It is in fact just a quick overview of the funding the Obama administration is spending while 14 million Americans are trying to find a job and others struggle to pay their mortgage or put their children through college.

It is a look at a government grown so large and so profligate that its credit rating was recently reduced and our President is on the campaign trail telling Americans they must pay more taxes despite the fact that 40% pay no taxes and “millionaires and billionaires” pay 70% of taxes collected. It’s the same government that wants to impose a 1% tax on all

Tea Party, anyone?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama is Boring Us to Death ... Alan Caruba

Obama is Boring Us to Death

By Alan Caruba

About halfway into his fifteen minute televised address on Monday evening, it occurred to me that Obama is literally boring Americans to death. He was elected to a great degree based on his eloquence and he delivers a speech well, but last night’s speech is the one we have been hearing since January and earlier.

I really don’t give a hoot about “millionaires and billionaires.” Heck, I want to be a millionaire!

“Corporate jets”? What’s that all about? Even Playboy’s Hugh Hefner once had a corporate jet. I would love to have a private jet if only to avoid having to go through airport security these days.

“Corporate taxes”? US corporations pay the highest tax rates of virtually every other nation. Yes, they look for loopholes. You would, too!

“Hedge fund managers”? I don’t know any. Are they doing something criminal? No. They are making bets on the economy. Better that than blowing the money in a casino.

Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan, bestselling author, and now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, last Saturday wrote “The president, if he is seriously trying to avert a debt crisis, should stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility, which would be well received. It is odd how he patronizes those with more experience and depth in national affairs.”

And then she said, “He should keep his face off TV. He should encourage, cajole, work things through, be serious, get a responsible deal, and then re-emerge with joy and the look of a winner...” Noonan concluded saying, “he should choose Strategic Silence. Really, recent presidents forget to shut up. They lose sight of how grating they are.”

Obama’s first year in office was distinguished by his being on television all the time, from The View to late night comedy shows. He loves the camera, loves the attention, and loves himself to the point of an unseemly, off-putting narcissism.

Instead of taking Noonan’s advice, he has become the National Mosquito, always buzzing around somewhere in the room.

Why was the Monday night speech necessary? Both Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat, and John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, a Republican, have concluded that Obama had to be cut out of the discussions regarding the necessity to raise the debt ceiling because he was a hindrance to achieving any deal. To put it more bluntly, both concluded that Obama could not be trusted.

Reid and Boehner have essentially cut Obama out of the process. They have asserted the independence and the role of the legislative branch. Together they will send Obama a debt ceiling bill and tell him to take it or leave it. If he finds a reason to veto it, they will over-ride his veto and the rest of us will know that Obama’s agenda has always been the destruction of the nation.

Obama’s polling numbers reflect the growing realization of his arrogance and his incompetence. The advisors he chose and the programs he initiated have all proved to be failures and very costly ones at that. Unemployment rates today equal those of the Great Depression. Millions are on food stamps. Economic growth is an anemic one percent or so. Even people who don’t listen to presidential speeches or follow the news that closely know he is a loser.

There will always be at least 20% of voters who will support Obama no matter what happens. They are the true believers, the core that Democrats have always depended upon, unions, minorities, and federal employees.

The political pundits all said that the speech was aimed at the independents, always the most critical factor in recent national elections. The problem for Obama is that the next election isn’t until November 2012 and people tend to have very short memories. A lot of voters don’t make up their minds until they are in the booth. A year and a half from now is an eternity for these “undecideds.”

The speech was a bore, a repeat of all the poll-tested words and phrases he will repeat between now and November 2012. He’s become a windup doll, the White House Chatty Cathy.

It would be nice if we could ignore him and millions of American wish they could. The bad news is that he’s not going away for at least a year and a half. The good news is that he’s about to be neutered by both the Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

© Alan Caruba, 2011
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Dopey Deadlines & Deadbeat Democrats ... Alan Caruba

Dopey Deadlines & Deadbeat Democrats

By Alan Caruba

Is Tim Geithner the most clueless Secretary of the Treasury this nation has ever had? Is he the Eddie Haskell of national debt, so eager to please Obama that he has been a party to driving it up by trillions since his master took the oath of office?

Now, we are all forced to witness the idiotic political machinations of the White House trying desperately to put off the greatest financial debacle to face the nation in its entire history. It’s so bad that Moody’s Investor service has the U.S. “under review” to take away our unparalleled triple-A rating.

What makes his August 2nd deadline to raise the debt ceiling particularly obscene is that it is the anniversary of the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence.

For you history buffs, August 2nd was also the date in 1934 that Adolf Hitler became the Fuhrer of Germany and the same day, five years later in 1939 that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to begin developing an atomic bomb.

It makes you wonder if history isn’t just a record of wars won and lost, along with an unbroken series of mistakes that would make any sane person scratch their head in bewilderment.

How did the United States of America go from Thomas Jefferson, the brilliant author of the Declaration of Independence to Timothy Geithner, a very upwardly mobile student of government and monetary affairs?

Suffice to say, as a public servant, he has served to the satisfaction of his mentors in numerous positions and also in liberal enclaves such as the Council on Foreign Affairs and a three-year stint at Kissinger Associates, learning from one of the most Machiavellian characters of the modern era. At the tender age of 42, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The liberal elite take care of its own.

Geithner is the ying to Obama’s yang. They are perfectly suited to each other because both get their jollies playing the great game of state, although it should be said that Geithner is far better prepared for that role having studied abroad, including two years, 1981-2 studying Mandarin at Peking University and Beijing Normal University. His M.A. is in international economics and Asian studies from John Hopkins University School of advanced International Studies.

Obama’s education ended with a law degree from Harvard. Nobody knows what grades he made at Occidental, Columbia University or Harvard. He is often mistakenly referred to as a former professor of constitutional law at Chicago University, but in fact he was akin to a teaching assistant or adjunct, the lowest end of the academic ladder.

Obama’s mentors included a known member of the Communist Party when he was growing up in Hawaii, various “Marxist professors” at Occidental and Columbia University, and Bill Ayers who gained fame as a domestic terrorist, a member of the Weather Underground who describes himself as a “Communist with a small c.” To bring matters full circle, Ayers is a retired University of Chicago professor.

All this is by way of background to suggest that the debt ceiling will be increased because there is no alternative.

The Washington Posts’ Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post White House reporter, posted this on their blog on July 13th.

“Today’s White House meeting suggests there is no deal remotely in sight on the debt ceiling. A GOP aide familiar with the talks told me, “Today was the most tense meeting of the week. In fact, the president ended the meeting by abruptly leaving the room. During the meeting, the speaker challenged the president to offer real spending cuts. He said the gimmicks and accounting tricks that Washington has used for decades are not applicable here.” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has had enough. “When White House officials attempted to justify budgetary gimmicks, the speaker said pointedly ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’”

At some point you wonder what is the point of keeping the talks from public scrutiny. The pathetically passive media is not demanding particulars from the White House. So, Obama sits back, refusing to present any significant cuts. He’s serious about three things: making the Republicans out to be the bad guys, doing nothing to upset his base and insisting on tax hikes. If this is where he really stands, it’s time, perhaps, to pull the plug or pull back the curtain on the charade.”

The only thing on Obama’s mind is how to position himself as the hero that saved America from the tripling of a huge debt that is mostly his making and to make the Republicans look like horrible people for insisting that the government stop spending money faster than Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve can print it.

As Karl Rove recent wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “The president has not only governed as a liberal—he’s governed as an incompetent liberal, thereby reminding voters that electing a Republican Congress and president next year is the only way to change direction.” A recent Gallup poll has Obama losing to any generic Republican candidate!

Little of this before, on, or after August 2, 2011 has anything to do with a responsible response by the Democrats in Congress or the White House to a huge debt that just keeps getting bigger with every passing day.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, once said, “It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.” Americans, since the beginning of the 20th century have been suffering the tyranny of socialism and a bloated government with seemingly no limits on its growth or its spending.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

History is No Help to the Federal Reserve ... Alan Caruba

History is No Help to the Federal Reserve

By Alan Caruba

Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, gave a press conference on Wednesday and, try as I did, I fell asleep almost immediately. For those suffering from insomnia, I would recommend you “take two Bernanke’s and call me in the morning.”

At the time of his appointment Bernanke was widely known as an expert on the history of the Great Depression. It was commonly thought that he would avoid putting the nation through a similar experience, but a long, deep recession has put that in doubt.

In “New Deal or Raw Deal”, historian Burton Folsom, Jr., identified three major causes of the Great Depression, beginning with a Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on imported goods that was signed in June 1930 by Herbert Hoover. It was the highest tariff on imported goods in U.S. history. Other nations retaliated. “Our exports, therefore, dropped from $7 billion in 1929 to $2.5 billion by 1932.” The result was that “By July the stock market had lost one-third of its value in ten months”, a second major cause of the Depression whose beginning is generally dated to the Wall Street crash of October 1929.

The other cause was due to the fact that, in the three years leading up to the bill, “the national debt balloon(ed) from $1.3 billion to $24 billion.” Our current national debt is equal to our entire Gross Domestic Product, the value of all of the nation’s goods and services.

Folsom identified the third leading cause as “the poor performance of the Federal Reserve. “In practice, the Fed had raised interest rates four times, from 3.5 percent to 6 percent, during 1928 and 1929. That made it harder for businessmen to borrow money to invest, which hindered economic growth.”

Under former Chairman Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, the Fed has kept the interest rates it charges banks to nearly zero. Bernanke is no doubt aware that the Fed’s failure to lend money to cash-hungry banks led to the collapse of hundreds during the Great Depression.

Fast-forward to present times and we see that the Fed has literally flooded the economy with cash, essentially by simply printing money out of thin air. All of it is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the government.

On April 25, The Wall Street Journal headlined an article, “Fed Searches for Next Step” noting that it “is likely to begin closing a wide-open credit spigot this week—but faces a major decision: when to start draining the excess credit out of the economy by raising interest rates.”

Whether the economy was infused with great gobs of cash or whether that liquidity is slowed, the Fed—then and now—is caught in a vice because history demonstrates that neither action had the desired purpose. If this was a game of Monopoly, the players could put the board away in its box, but neither history nor current trends point to anything other than a severe depression.

The rating service, Standard & Poors, recently issued a warning that the U.S. debt was slipping into a “negative” situation and this has been followed with a prediction by the International Monetary Fund that the U.S. economy will be overtaken by China in just five years. S&P is famous for its failure to spot bad guys like Enron, to whom it gave high ratings right up to the day it collapsed, nor should we believe the IMF propaganda which suspiciously tries to panic Americans.

The Fed was created by a small group of bankers and came into being in 1913. In good times and bad it has functioned in concert with international banks to control the volatility of the financial marketplace and sustain the viability of the individual nations they represent. The Fed functions largely in secret. The oversight that Congress is supposed to exercise is much the same of its regulatory agencies that have rarely seen trouble brewing, nor been able to do much about it except to clean up the mess with taxpayer’s funds.

The problem in the 1930s and now is the national debt, the result of insane, profligate spending. Those in the White House and the Democratic Party are opposing any rational steps to reduce it.

Instead, it enacted Obamacare, legislation that will further crash the economies of individual States. Some twenty-eight States are already on record opposing it. An effort to have it declared unconstitutional was greeted by the Supreme Court with a refusal to expedite the case just before the judges began a three month vacation.

An April 27, 2010 Cato Institute briefing paper by Arnold King presciently noted that “Recently, the Federal Reserve has significantly altered the procedures and goal that it had followed for decades. It has more than doubled its balance sheet, paid interest to banks on reserves held as deposits with the Fed, made decisions about which institutions to prop up and which should be allowed to fail, invested in assets that expose taxpayers to large losses, and raised questions about how it will avoid inflation despite an unprecedented increase in the monetary base.”

The Cato paper was titled “The Case for Auditing the Fed is Obvious.” The fate of the nation is held in the hands of the Federal Reserve. It performed poorly in the late 1920s and 30s, and confidence in its ability to extricate the nation from its enormous debt may well be misplaced.

A combination of unsustainable entitlement programs, too much spending, and the collapse of the housing market that resulted from Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s belief that housing prices would never fall has brought us to this point in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The response by the government, however, was to buy the bank’s bad debts and engage in multi-billion dollar “stimulus programs” which we were told would create employment and put the economy on track to recovery. It has not happened.

Instead, taxpayers have had the nation’s future put in jeopardy into the next and further generations, some of whom are as yet unborn.

Despite the Fed’s printing presses, the U.S. dollar is in decline at the same time that the price of gasoline, food, and everything else is rising.

The 2010 elections that put Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives, the branch of government that initiates spending bills, has resulted in partisan warfare on Capitol Hill as the GOP weighs what steps it can take. Ambivalence about raising the debt ceiling reflects GOP concerns regarding the 2012 national elections and their fear that they, not the Democrats that regained control of Congress in 2006 will be blamed for the current crisis.

Suffice to say that both political parties deserve blame for years spent initiating excessive spending and ignoring the warning signs.

Meanwhile President Obama has declared his candidacy airily demanding that taxes be raised on “the rich” at a time when raising taxes is the worst possible choice to make as the economy struggles to recover. For the passed two years, the Obama administration has engaged in every effort to undermine and destroy the economy.

John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers and the nation’s second President, warned “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

2012 looms as an election year in which Americans will decide whether to change course or, indeed, commit suicide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Harm a President Can Do ... Alan Caruba

The Harm a President Can Do

 By Alan Caruba

The announcement that Barack Hussein Obama will run for reelection was greeted with little fanfare and less surprise. In order to raise money, he needed to make it official and he was quick to join Rev. Al Sharpton, a man with a dubious history of histrionics, at a Harlem event.

Even with the data available, two years into his first term, it is difficult to grasp how much harm he has done to the nation as its elected leader.

Despite the fact that, until November 2010, the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, he was so busy during his second year that he could not find time to present Congress with a budget. The government shutdown is pure political theatre and should be avoided. If it comes, it will be the result of a political calculation that the President can benefit from it.

Obamacare, the hallmark of his political legacy, is opposed by 26 U.S. States and has been declared unconstitution in a federal court. The House has voted to repeal it. Hardly a week goes by without finding billions in new costs buried within its pages, all of which expand the size of government beyond imagination.

In two years, the nation has accumulated debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as its entire prior history since the day George Washington took office. In January 2009, when President Obama was sworn into office, the national debt was $10.627 trillion. Today it is $14.052 trillion and rising.

The leadership that the world has long looked to America to provide has dissipated. The nations of the West, in particular the European socialist nations, have also spent themselves into penury. Portugal is the latest to cry out for help. Greece, Ireland, Spain, all once among the great powers, have drained their coffers with cradle-to-grave assurances that the government would always pick up the tab.

After two years in which every regulatory obstacle, including an illegal “moratorium” on deep water drilling for oil was imposed, the price of West Texas crude oil went from $38.74 a barrel to $99.02. Other commodities, soybeans, sugar, and corn have all seen similar increases. The price of corn has more than doubled in just twelve months.

America has enormous reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas. It has long been a giant agricultural economy, but all this potential wealth is being throttled by men and women in the Obama administration who think Americans must be forced to change their driving and eating habits. In a consumer-driven economy, they want Americans to consume less.

When President Obama was sworn in, there were 2,600,000 long-term unemployed. Today there are 9,193,000 Americans in that category. People living in poverty in America have, in just two year’s time, gone from 39,800,000 to 43,600,000. This occurred during a time when massive “bailouts” were undertaken by the government. They are now widely regarded as failures.

The greatest automotive manufacturer in the world, General Motors, is for all intents and purposes owned by the government. Auto union jobs had to be saved even if taxpayers had to have their taxes diverted for that purpose. Having brought the company to ruin with outrageous work, wage, health, and pension demands, they were still to be rewarded by the Obama administration. The heads of public service unions, among the largest in the nations, have enjoyed an open-door policy at the White House.

Having been elected by campaigning against the war in Iraq, President Obama expanded the number of troops in Afghanistan. While U.S. troop presence in Iraq was being reduced, the President suddenly engaged the nation militarily in Libya without any authorization from Congress.

With one glaring exception, no cohesive foreign policy regarding the Middle East exists. Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, an ally of the United States, surrounded on all sides by enemies and threatened daily by Iran, has been abandoned.

Egypt’s Mubarack was publicly abandoned, but Iran’s Ahmadinejad’s stolen election evoked no response when people took to the streets in Tehran to protest it. Col. Gadhafi remains in control of Libya. Syria’s dictator was called “a reformer.”

Domestically, the President calls for windmills to produce energy when they remain one of the least practical means, sustained solely by government subsidies and mandates. The factory in which he made the call belongs to a Spanish company. His call for solar energy is equally fatuous. High speed rail is yet another foolish initiative.

The last two years have been testimony to the harm a President can do to a nation and yet, despite the obvious harm being imposed on millions of Americans, the President continues to enjoy the support of people for whom the growth of the government, the increase in spending, and the nation’s loss of leadership in the world is not understood and will not be until it is too late to reverse the damage.

© Alan Caruba, 2011
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Barack Obama: A Bill of Indictment ... Alam Caruba

Barack Obama: A Bill of Indictment
By Alan Caruba

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Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All those with business before the court of public opinion will draw near. A bill of indictment has been issued for Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America. It is a call for justice from the people of the United States who allege that he is engaged in the destruction of their nation.

For the court’s consideration, it is alleged:

That he secured the office of President by falsely stating he is a natural born citizen of the United States without providing irrefutable documentation and witnesses thereof,

That he associated with persons known and unknown to hold anti-American views antithetical to the conduct of his office, to include a convicted felon, an unrepentant former domestic terrorist, among too many others to innumerate,

That he has created an unaccountable level of governmental policy-making with the largest expansion of presidential advisors, “czars”, in the history of the executive branch,

That, while in his first six months, he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia and Emperor of Japan, an act that contradicts the primacy of the office of the U.S. presidency,

That, in contradiction to his sworn duty to protect the nation, he announced the termination of the U.S. space defense system the day after North Korea launched an ICBM,

That he ordered the release of memos regarding the interrogation of terrorists interned in U.S. facilities at Guantanamo, making known to the Islamist enemies of the nation the manner of their interrogation,

That he appointed as Secretary of Homeland Security, an individual who ordered that the word “terrorism” be replaced by the term, “man made disasters,”

That, during his first six months in office, he doubled the U.S. national debt, currently at an unsustainable level, threatening the value of the U.S. dollar,

That he signed into law a “stimulus” bill, the bulk of whose funds were allocated to government employee unions under the guise of generating millions of new jobs in the private sector,

That he signed into law a “Troubled Asset Relief Program” that, contrary to the Constitution, promoted short term private benefit, rather than the general welfare, while evading the constitutional requirement of equal protection, saving some businesses while letting others expire,

That he by-passed the established legal process of bankruptcy to seize control of General Motors and Chrysler auto manufacturers, benefiting unions to the loss of creditors,

That, in collusion with the majority leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate, he initiated and engineered the passage of legislation that nationalized the healthcare industry despite overwhelming opposition by the American People,


That he has participated in national and international conferences to advocate the discredited theory of global warming and continues to advance Cap-and-Trade legislation based on it; a massive tax on energy use that will undermine the recovery of the economy,

That he has failed to protect the United States by failing to secure its southern border with Mexico and is threatening to take legal action against Arizona, a sovereign State that has passed legislation in lieu of that failure,

That he has consistently advocated “global government” over the sovereignty of the United States,

That he declared his intention to “bankrupt” the coal industry, responsible for one half of the electricity generated to serve the needs of Americans,


That he failed to take immediate and effective action to deter widespread ecological and economic damage to States bordering the Gulf of Mexico following an accident on a BP deepwater oil rig, including a “moratorium” on oil drilling that threw thousands out of work,

That he continues to advocate “a clean energy future” when such energy, solar and wind, exist only because of government subsidies and mandates, are a dangerously unpredictable source of electricity, and produce less than three percent of the electricity generated nationwide,

That two private investigators have asserted he is using a Social Security number set aside for applicants in Connecticut while there is no record he ever had a mailing address in that State and that the number was issued between 1977 and 1979. Obama’s earliest employment reportedly was in 1975 at a Baskin-Robbins in Oahu, Hawaii,

And, for these and other hidden records regarding his birth, his overseas travel to Pakistan, college records, medical records, and other means of verifying a legitimate claim to hold the office of the President,

We, the People of the United States of America demand that impeachment proceedings be initiated or that cases pending before the courts be adjudicated at the earliest possible time to prevent further damage to the economy and security of the nation.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010
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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.