Boy It's FUN To Be President!

President Obama was elected almost two years ago. He has been in office for 19 months. He has a lot on his agenda--wars in Afghanistan, where American deaths are sky-rocketing, and in Iraq, where we're trying to disengage while averting disaster. He also has an ongoing recession which, we've been told ad nauseum, is the "worst since the Great Depression." I won't go into what Ronald Reagan inherited--21% prime rate, stagnation, etc., but that is definitely fodder for another post.
On Obama's watch, we also had the catastrophic Deep Horizon oil spill, a disaster he didn't focus on for almost eight weeks, and then only because his poll numbers were plummeting. We've had soldiers captured and held by the enemy--one for almost a year now. We've had unemployment go up from an average under George Bush of 5.2% to over 10%. (It is down to about 9.5% now, mainly, according to most economists, due to the fact that many people have stopped looking for work.) This despite the fact that we were promised that if the huge, almost $1 trillion "stimulus" passed, unemployment wouldn't exceed 8%. Many experts believe when those people are taken into account, as well as those who have taken minimum wage jobs just to get a paycheck, the real unemployment rate is close to 20%! Home foreclosures are happening in record numbers, banks are failing by the hundreds, homelessness is on the rise, several states are on the verge of bankruptcy, there is an economic crisis unfolding in Europe as several nations fall under their crushing debt burdens (a fate which awaits this great country if we don't get our fiscal house in order), and, on the security front, we've had several attacks and attempted attacks on our own soil by terrorists, China has tested anti-satellite weapons and perpetrated several hacking attacks to test our defenses. There are many more problems we need to address as a nation, and a president is supposed to be the executive who organizes all the responses. That's why he has a cabinet and literally hundreds of thousands of federal employees at his beck and call--to handle problems, to organize solutions, and to make life better for the American people.
With all these problems, I have a problem with what's been going on. President Obama, since his inauguration, has played in excess of 40 rounds of golf, over 8 just since the oil rig disaster.
Each time, of course, the president is taken there either by helicopter or in a multi-car motorcade--all at taxpayer expense. (George Bush played 24 rounds in eight years and was accused by the left wing press of being out of touch with the American people. Of course, Obama gets a pass). He has taken countless vacations (at least three since Deepwater alone). He has urged people to vacation in the Gulf, then taken his family to exclusive Bar Harbor, Maine for their vacation. He has vacationed in Hawaii in a house costing $35,000 per week. His wife is on the way to Spain shortly, where she has reserved 30 rooms at a 5-star hotel to house her entourage. He has had numerous parties at the White House, including a recent feting with Paul McCartney and a Tony awards show. In short, the man who purports to be Everyman truly seems to want to vacation and dine everywhere but where the common man goes. When Obama first became president, remember how he told the people how wonderful the cheeseburgers were on Air Force One? Remember how he flew on Air Force One to New York for a dinner date with Michelle at a posh restaurant? Can you count how many times he's gone out to restaurants in the DC area where the price of one dinner is equivalent to many people's salary for a week? All of this is funded by taxpayers--the same taxpayers who are losing their jobs by the millions; the same taxpayers whose taxes are about to skyrocket with the expiration of the tax cuts put through by George Bush.
The point is that this president seems more intent on partying his way through his presidency than being serious about it. Perhaps that is due to the fact that he is still very young (he turns only 49 on August 4th), and his reckless days of partying and cocaine consumption aren't that far behind him. (Hey, he admitted this in his own book!) His administration isn't much better.
I mean, water gun fights between the Chief of Staff and the Vice-President? Please! At any rate, watching this man govern makes me wish I could be elected, because boy, it sure looks fun to be the president!

Back to Bush?

A few years ago, when Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was reading an article about it and there was a link which you could use to email her well wishes. At the time, my wife had already been fighting the disease for a few years, so I knew what this woman was facing and, overcome by compassion, I sent her an email wishing her well. Imagine my surprise when that email immediately landed me on the DCCC email list--I wouldn't have thought Democrats would stoop so low as to use cancer as a tool to increase their sales penetration, but they did, so now I receive the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) emails on a regular basis. At first I was upset and tried emailing back and asking them to take me off the list, but I never got a response. However, after a while I started reading the emails, and I was shocked at some of the hatred and vitriol spewing forth. I mean, after all, this is the official campaign arm for congressional Democrats, not Daily Kos or something.
Anyway, so I'm reading today's DCCC posting, and the headline is, "@Stake: Back to Bush." I got to thinking whether or not this is a smart strategy on the Democrats' part, so I started comparing Bush to Obama. After all, this country, this economy, this deficit, this security situation, it's all Obama's now. He was elected almost two years ago. He owns it. So, let me share with you some comparisons between the two:
For George W. Bush's entire eight years in office, the average unemployment rate was 5.2%. This includes inheriting a recession from Bill Clinton (although did you ever hear him complain about his inheritance as much as Obama has complained about his?), and it includes the aftermath of 9/11. Obama also inherited a recession, but while Bush's tax cuts spurred the economy and got it going, Obama's huge explosion of deficit spending and government intrusion has not done anything to speak of, unless you believe their malarkey about "jobs saved". What a neat, convenient statistic to invent! Obama's average unemployment rate for his entire presidency so far is 9.2%! The numbers get even more stark the more you look.
While President Bush was excoriated by Obama on the campaign trail for running a then-record $450 billion dollar deficit, Obama's first budget contained a deficit of approximately $1.4 TRILLION!! For those who don't know, a trillion is a thousand billions. (A billion is a thousand millions). Now, he has argued that he had to spend these huge sums on a "stimulus" because of Bush, but his budget blueprint calls for deficits in excess of $1 trillion until at least 2020, at which time the total federal deficit will be in excess of $18 trillion dollars! At that point, the number one cost in our budget will be interest on the debt. When Bush left office, the federal deficit stood at $5.8 trillion. If Obama's deficits are because of Bush, why do they run at roughly the same levels for a decade? Do we need a stimulus each year for the next ten years?
After 9/11, which was planned for years, the policies Bush implemented kept this country safe and free of terror attacks. Choosing where to fight the battle (Iraq) was brilliant, because if you choose the battlefield, you are one step up on the opponent. The terrorists all flocked to Iraq, where we killed them by the dump-truck load. Afghanistan was much more hostile territory, so keeping up the hunt for bin Laden there and destroying the Taliban were the objectives. The major battle in the Western civilization vs. Muslim extremists war was Iraq, and all the terrorists said so too. Making them fight over there kept them away from here. Obama has reversed all these policies. He is pulling out of Iraq and intensifying the fight in Afghanistan. He hasn't read many history books, or even talked to many people from the former Soviet Union. Putin could tell him this was a bad idea. Now we're mired in a Vietnam-type war in mountainous, murderous terrain, and our casualties are skyrocketing. Not only that, but we have had a terrorist mass shooting at Fort Hood, and the young Nigerian man who tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit only failed because his bomb didn't ignite properly. Because of Obama's policies, in other words, the terrorists are bringing the fight here.
There are many more comparisons between these two presidents, and the longer Obama is in office, the more Bush's approval ratings go up. I've recounted many of the lies told by this administration, and I remember people accusing Bush of lying all the time. What did he lie about? Certainly not WMD's. Every major intelligence organization on the planet believed Saddam Hussein had them, and he probably did. He probably sent them to Syria or buried them in the desert, but the truth is that even if he didn't have them, Bush didn't lie--he was wrong. What else did Bush lie about? Nothing that I know of. Obama doesn't seem to be able to tell the truth about anything--watch his no new taxes pledge go up in smoke after his "deficit commission" issues its recommendations--a deficit commission formed by him to fix a problem caused by his policies. No wonder government's getting bigger!
Here are a few more differences: Bush throws out the first pitch at a baseball game and looks like a former player. Obama doesn't look nearly as athletic. Did you see his pitch? Bush talked in an optimistic manner about what we were going to do and what we could achieve. All Obama talks about is what a horrible hand he's been dealt. While some foreign leaders might not have liked Bush, they respected him. He was a president who commanded respect, and with whom other nations didn't want to screw around. Obama started his presidency apologizing to Muslims first (his first interview was to Al Jazeera), and then the rest of the world. He's bowed at the waist to everyone from the emperor of Japan to the king of Saudi Arabia. It just isn't becoming for a president.
So you decide. Think long and hard. Lose the hyperbolic rhetoric of the Bush years and remember them for what they really were. Years of growth, of economic expansion, and of security. Years during which this country was respected. Compare that with the Obama record so far. My advice to Democrats? Don't frame the election as an Obama vs. Bush decision. That may make the losses you're going to suffer in November much worse.

More Lies and Deception

An earlier post listed many of the lies told by this president and this administration, and it also remarked that these lies are told with no regard for what truths might already be out there on YouTube or some other forum, which shows just how stupid this president thinks the people of America are. I ran out of space with that post, so I'm continuing with the "lie listings" in this post. So, here are a few more whoppers told by Mr. Obama:

Lie--"I will be a force to bring the nation together."
Truth--In truth, this is one of the most partisan presidents ever. He consistently refers to Republicans as "them" and, in today's Washington Post is quoted as saying, "Republicans talking about deficits is like an arsonist talking about fire safety." A good sound bite, but is there really a comparison? Obama excoriated George Bush for running a $450B deficit, but his budget blueprint shows deficits well in excess of $1T for at least a decade. The real point, however, is that Obama has absolutely no bipartisan bones in his body. It's his way or the highway. Thankfully, it looks like it's the Democrats who will be taking to the highway come fall.

Lie--"We're doing everything we can to stop the leak."
Truth--The truth is that Obama has played golf at least 8 times since the leak began, and he's taken three vacations since April! He has also had several parties at the White House, including hosting Paul McCartney and, tonight, there will be a show for the Tony awards. In my opinion he doesn't want the leak stopped until it totally destroys the lifestyles of those in the Gulf--then he can put them on the dole and control them better. After all, they don't really like Barack Obama down there. A recent poll shows the people think Bush did a much better job on Katrina than Obama is doing on the oil spill.

Lie--"If you like your current health insurance policy, you can keep it."
Truth--Now that they are starting to write the regulations, we're seeing how much of a lie this actually was. They have put stringent rules on all the grandfathered policies, making it almost impossible that they won't become subject to review and control by the administration. For instance, I don't know the exact numbers, but if your copay rises by 5%, then your policy loses its grandfathered status and comes under control of the bureaucracy. The government itself now estimates that up to 80% of private plans will eventually go away and the people in those plans will be forced into the government insurance program.

Lie--"The individual mandate is NOT a tax!"
Truth--This was another lie told over and over and over again when the sales schtick for health care was at a fever pitch. Now the administration is battling lawsuits over the mandate, for where in the Constitution does it say the government can force anyone to pay for a private service? Their tack in court, however, is that the mandate IS a tax, and therefore the government has the authority to impose it and collect it. He was supposedly a Harvard law professor (wonder if this is true?), so he should have known this up front.

Lie--"I don't want to control the automobile business."
Truth--The fact is that the control of the business was used to great Democrat advantage. On top of that, he installed a car "czar", answerable to nobody, who calls the shots on who gets paid what. The unions were given a huge stake in Chrysler and GM, and the Chrysler dealerships which were closed were done so in a very partisan manner--a recent study shows that almost 100% of the closed dealerships had given money to Republican candidates. This is the kind of thing done by Stalin. Thank you Ford for not taking the money and keeping at least one part of the industry free. Question: if he doesn't want control of the auto industry, why not sell the shares, take the loss or gain, and get the hell out?

OOOPS! I've run out of space again. As I said before, I could literally write for hours about all the lies told by this administration and this president. However, then nobody would read it! So, yes, there will be a future post continuing this train of thought....

More Solutions for Today's Problems

I've written about solutions for energy and immigration in earlier blogs, as well as the need to legalize marijuana and what that would do in many areas, from lowering incarceration rates to creating a new tax base. Today I want to just list a few of the major problems facing this country and what I think should be done about them. We must realize that many of these things and their consequences are intertwined.

1. Job creation: First of all, it is lunacy to think that government can efficiently create jobs. For a decent paying job it takes, say, $40,000 of the taxpayers' money. How much comes back? In the form of tax revenue, I would say that $10,000 is a generous estimate, especially if the person owns a home and itemizes. There are other trickle down amounts, such as the fact that the local businesses will do better because this taxpayer also presumably shops. But the point is that this is an inefficient way to create jobs. Instead of spending all the taxpayers' money in this way, it should be in the form of tax cuts and business incentives. First of all, tax cuts usually are a direct stimulus, since "found" money usually gets spent. By business incentives, I mean a lowering of the capital gains tax, a reduction in the suffocating control of the government, and a lowering of health care costs. If businesses aren't afraid to invest, then jobs will be created. It's been proven over and over. And these are jobs that aren't paid for directly by the taxpayer.

2. Health care: Start by scrapping Obamacare and its $1 TRILLION+ price tag. Then, work on what the problems actually are. Bring down doctors costs for one. I would create a national school for doctors which was free for those who might qualify, with the caveat that, after graduation, they would work for a minimum of six years for essentially low pay, much as the folks who graduate from the service academies give up six years of their lives. We would use these inexpensive doctors to staff huge clinics which would treat the poor. Let's face it. Just saying to everyone, "You have to buy health insurance" doesn't cut it. There are always going to be people who can't afford to pay for the insurance. These are the people who are falling through the safety net. They are the ones who need our help. They come in all colors, genders, and ages. Once we set these clinics up, we can start sending the people choking our emergency rooms there, treat those who need it, and eventually get to the point of offering preventive care.
There are other ways to bring down costs, some of which are being killed by high-powered lobbyists. Tort reform is one way, for instance. The lawyers don't like this one, but we've got to limit liability for doctors. This would lower medical malpractice insurance costs drastically, which would then enable doctors to lower what they charge.
We also need to get all the medical records computerized so we can check for people who are scamming the system. I know this isn't just individuals. Several times I've found the facilities my wife and I have used trying to bill us more than once. It's always explained away as an honest mistake, but what about the people who aren't watching? President Obama sold Obamacare by promising to pay for a lot of it with "500 billion dollars worth of waste and fraud." This is one of the few things I agree with him about--that there is a huge amount of waste and fraud. The difference is that I think we actually ought to do something about it. Nothing is being done right now.
There are many other things associated with this that we need to do, such as lowering crime rates and getting people off dependencies as much as we can. Due to lack of space, I'll tackle this later. Just as an example, though, imagine how much we'd save if we could get even a small percentage of the people on Skid Row off of drugs or alcohol. There are "Skid Rows" all throughout this country. See this short slide show and think about the effect of cleaning up these places and getting these people sober, or at least some of them: http://hub.witness.org/en/node/5335

3. The size of government: This one is simple, and it affects everything else. Government is too big, period. The Obama budget blueprint through 2020 shows us running deficits in excess of ONE TRILLION DOLLARS each year! This is crazy. We need to immediately cut the government budget by 20% across the board, and immediately impose a hiring freeze. We can then reduce a lot more over the years by attrition. The point is we HAVE to reduce the size of government. A lot of people are under the impression that the deficit has something to do with our economy or with our business relations with other countries such as China. Our deficit has nothing to do with any of that. It is how much comes in versus how much is spent. The bottom line is that government spends too much money. Let's face it--we all know that government wastes money and my proposed 20% reduction will be on everything from Congressional and staff salaries, to weapon systems R & D to, yes, Medicare and Medicaid. Part of this reduction will come with my health care recommendations listed above.
We also need to get rid of certain government agencies outright. The Department of Education, for example, has been a disaster. Despite spending more and more money centralizing control of the nation's education, ever since the inception of this department (created by Jimmy Carter), America's educational results have been slowly sliding. When things don't work, you change them! Let's change this! The same goes for other agencies--why, for instance, do we even need a Commerce Department?
(Department of Education building)

4. BUY AMERICAN. We were once the greatest creditor nation on Earth. We are now the greatest debtor nation. Yet we are trying to hold onto a lifestyle we enjoyed when we were flush. It doesn't work that way, and the bill has to come due sooner or later. I vote for sooner. However, we can also turn the whole problem around by doing one simple thing. Buy American made products. No, don't have the government mandate that you do. Let's just start a movement to buy it only if it's made here. However, you have to think about this. For instance, the Honda I drive is built in Ohio with 90% American made parts, including the engine and drive train. This is, in my opinion, an American made product. I don't care if it doesn't say "Ford" or "GM" or "Chrysler" on it. If we bought American made products, more people would work, prices for American made goods would come down, and we would start running a trade surplus for a change. Also, new industries would be re-created, such as the American television manufacturing industry.

I believe this nation should commit itself to...being kind to Muslims?

John F. Kennedy once inspired a nation and a world with his challenge to America to land a man on the moon: "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." I was getting ready to turn eleven when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The awe in which I held the astronauts, the space program, and the country as a whole cannot be described, nor has it ever been forgotten. To this day, when I think of their achievement, or when I am looking up at the moon on a crisp, cool night, I am like that little boy again, impressed with the immensity of space and astounded by its possibilities. I thought as recently as a few months ago that once again, in my lifetime, I would be witness to inspirational deeds. Some time ago President Bush set us on a course for the exploration of Mars. The program, Constellation, would begin with another moon landing, after which the moon would be used as a jump off point for a trip to Mars.
Then, a few months ago, it was announced that Constellation had been killed by the Obama administration. Billions of dollars had already been spent, and a whole new generation of kids was starting to take notice. After all, it is their generation which will make the actual trips. But now, the landing craft are being dismantled, and even as our own heavy lift capability has degraded to the point where we have to depend on the Russians to take material to the International Space Station, we are dismantling the rockets which could complete the mission to Mars and beyond. When this decision was announced, Barack Obama stated that he would be looking to private enterprise to build the rockets we need. Space is one thing that I feel is important enough that we should have a national program, and we should be building our own rockets, not dismantling them.
Now, Obama's own NASA director has, in an interview, stated what Obama's #1 goal is--to create better relations with the Muslim world. HUH?? This is the truth, I'm not making it up! Here's the link to the interview: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/05/nasa-chief-frontier-better-relations-muslims/
Man has always looked beyond his boundaries for new challenges. Climbing Mount Everest, sailing the ocean solo, flying across the Atlantic, circumnavigating the globe, and yes, going to the moon. It is through these endeavors that mankind finds out the best about itself, about what great and wondrous things can be achieved with effort and determination. There is no hill too high to climb. So, JFK once inspired us to look to the heavens and send a man to the moon. Obama is inspiring us to...be kind to Muslims?