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The state of California should be considered the poster child for a legislative act requiring all voters pass an intelligence test prior to being allowed within 500 yards of a polling place.  Furthermore, I would joyfully and enthusiastically support any ballot measure in California that made it a misdemeanor to use an elected state politician as a target for periodic or impromptu rifle practice regardless of said rifle’s ability to fire in a semi-auto or full-auto capacity, the caliber of the rifle being used, the deadly nature or penetrating power of the cartridges loaded, or how many cartridges one could fit into its magazine.  As evidence for the need of such future legislative acts I submit the following information on the ballot referendums recently passed by California voters.

Proposition 30
Proposition 30 will increase sales taxes by 1/4 percent for four years and increase income taxes on earnings over $250,000 for seven years.  As with all so-called “temporary tax measures” these time restrictions mean nothing.  Throughout the entire recorded history of the state, no temporary tax increase imposed has ever been removed as promised.  The $6 billion increase in tax revenue expected from this measure will go straight into the general fund of the state and there is no accountability for how it will be used.  This may benefit Henderson, Nevada and other affluent, rapidly growing, out-of-state suburbs if the state citizens upset by the passage of this measure and the increase in their taxes decide to move, and since many of those people are also small-business owners, they will more than likely take their business with them, resulting in a loss of jobs for the state.  This measure will not reduce or otherwise affect the rapidly escalating cost of the state’s public school system nor will it impact the underfunded state employee pension fund.

Proposition 39
Proposition 39 will dramatically increase corporate income taxes which will ultimately force even more of the state’s large employers to close shop and move to Arizona, Texas or somewhere else where the state isn’t as openly hostile to business and common sense is a bit more common.  The loss in tax revenue resulting from this corporate migration will greatly reduce the expected increase anticipated by the incompetent political hacks that came up with this brilliant idea.  The loss of these businesses will also decrease the number of employment positions in the state and increase the already dismal unemployment rate.  Since there is no accountability provision built into this massive tax increase the politicians in Sacramento will be free to squander whatever additional revenue they gain from this as they see fit.

Proposition 35
Proposition 35 re-defines the legal concepts of pimping, pandering, and prostitution as human-trafficking.  Furthermore, under this law if “anything of value given or received” is associated with an act of sex, that act then becomes a ”commercial sex act” under the terms of this provision and the person or persons receiving can be convicted of human-trafficking and that person would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of their life.  According to these changes in terminology the son or daughter of a prostitute receiving the normal sustenance and shelter of daily life as a result of their parent’s illicit earnings would be considered as having received something of value and therefore in violation of the state’s human-trafficking law.  That child, upon conviction, would then be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of their life and would be subject to increased fines and prison terms for their activity as a trafficker.  While it may seem like a stretch, under the provisions of this new law, the generous gift of a set of diamond ear-rings or other bling memorializing a spectacular private event by your legal partner could transform that ecstatic moment into a ”commercial sex act,” turn your beloved spouse into a hooker, and land you in prison as a human trafficker, to say nothing of having to register as a sex pervert for the rest of your life or having to deal with the cops at your door every time some horny freak abused a chicken in the neighborhood.  For a state that completely disregards the fact that they have gone way out of their way to increase human trafficking in the state by enthusiastically encouraging the increase in their population of illegal aliens, this law is absurd beyond all human comprehension.  Every day hundreds of young girls are lured over the border from Mexico with promises of good paying jobs by scumbags who then force them to act as prostitutes for agricultural workers all over the state before abandoning them by the side of the road, and no effort is made to stop this or eliminate the root cause behind it.  In fact the law enforcement agencies in the state are prohibited from even interfering with these people unless they start shooting each other in public, and yet the state politicians want us to believe that they are concerned about human trafficking.  Obviously one or more state official has figured out a way to increase the size and wealth of their bureaucratic kingdoms as a result of these changes.  The largest concentration of sleazy prostitutes in this state are the incompetent politicians in the state capital and we would be a lot better off if we dealt with them before we allow the state gestapos the sadistic pleasure of invading the bedrooms of consenting adults

Proposition 40
If rejected, this would have given the citizens of the state the ability to end the con job perpetrated by the Democrats in the state legislature when they shanghaied the Citizens Redistricting Commission and gerrymandered the state’s Senate district boundaries in a manner even more maniacal and unfair than they were prior to that commission’s futile effort to restore some semblance of sanity and fairness to the states election process.  Unfortunately, the proposition was passed and the Democratic con-artists will be allowed to continue as they were.  With the continuation of the newly gerrymandered system of Senate district boundaries the state’s Democrats are assured that no political competition will ever threaten their ability to fleece the California voters in perpetuity.

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California Politics

He promised the Black voters he would take care of everything, increase their welfare checks, pay off their mortgages, double their civil rights and bitch-slap their honky oppressors; Once elected he would get his new-found brothers and sisters free college educations, good paying jobs and fancy houses in formerly white neighborhoods. In the last four years he’s managed to get one rich, black, college professor out of jail after he slapped a cop, but other than that he’s pretty much turned his back on the Black communities and left them to fend for themselves. The promises got kicked under the rug and the poor Blacks are suffering worse under his economic plans than any other minority group in the nation.

He promised the Hispanics an end to the immigration problem. Certain amnesty for the 20 plus million illegal aliens crowding into the U.S. and social welfare programs up the wazoo for all who signed sided with him. Once elected, he spit in the faces of the legal Hispanic citizens who came to this country legally in hopes of bettering their lives. He’s ignored the problems of their communities becoming a haven for illegal alien criminals, rapists, pedophiles, gang-bangers and drug addicts, and in the last four years he has done nothing to solve the immigration problem that is worse today than ever before. His economic policies have decimated the Hispanic communities along with the other minorities and they are no better off today than they were under George W. Bush. Their loyal support for Obama in 2008 got them nothing more than a kick in the teeth and higher taxes to pay for the social welfare programs putting money in the pockets of the scum they tried to escape when they left Mexico to come here.

In the last four years Obama has managed to make it easier for the rich to get richer, he’s given the banks and credit-card companies the upper hand over the low and middle-class debtors they’ve been bleeding dry for years, and he’s even managed to figure out a way to pay their over-inflated salaries with the hard-earned tax dollars of the dwindling number of working-class American tax-payers.

He has broken his campaign promises to the Blacks, the Hispanics, the greedy labor union assholes, the poor, the middle-class and everyone else that was dumb enough to fall for his lies and cast their ballot in his favor. Ironically enough, most of these people are too stupid to understand how badly they’ve been screwed and plan to vote for the jerk again, however, the first Black presidential swindler of the U.S. government is now running for his second term and sees the need to hedge his bets by cornering the market on yet another minority group.

Obama now figure that the lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals and transgender voters of the U.S. will supply just enough votes to ensure his victory in the 2012 presidential election. The simple mention of his support for same-sex marriage was enough to drop them to their knees (so to speak) and now he is rolling out all sorts of campaign programs aimed at convincing them that he is their one and only hope for salvation. How stupid can people be? I guess we’ll find out.

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Barack Obama, Blacks, Hispanics, lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals, transgenders

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In a way I wish I could be more sympathetic with the Occupy movement. I finished a three part article on the Occupy thing in my local paper, and I’ve read a lot of crap on the net about their various activities around the country, but nothing I’ve read to this point has really explained what they’re stirred up about or why they are willing to get their heads busted and spend a night in a cell with Bubba. According to one source the Occupy movement is directed against economic and social inequality, and to a point the YouTube videos and newspaper articles bear this out with talk about them being the 99%, corporate greed and corrupt capitalists, but the people speaking the loudest for these mobs all look like recently unemployed yuppies and waanabe throwbacks to the anti-Vietnam war protesters of the late 60′s. Their inarticulate yammering borders on hysteria and whatever the message is that they are trying to get across seems far too vague amidst the flying rhetoric, the babble of the crowd, and the and the juvenile property damage wrecked by the lunatic fringe that has attached itself to them. In Oakland the crowd was chanting “End Capitalism;” that message came through loud and clear, but what didn’t compute in my mind was the why of it. What would it really mean to end capitalism? If we ended capitalism what would we base our economy on afterwards? How would ending capitalism make the economic situation of the people in this country more equitable? My gardener is a capitalist. He mows my yard and I pay him to do it, it works for him and it works for me. If we do away with capitalism would he be mowing my yard for free, or would I be paying him and mowing my yard myself? I suppose I might be a bit dense on this point and I would like somebody to draw me a picture of what this would look like or give me a diagram of how it would work because I just don’t get it.

I suppose that, deep down,  I think these Occupy people are nothing more than a bunch of idiots. The whole thing reminds me of the rabid-dog gun control crowd who want to prohibit a machine for the actions of its operator. Corporations are nothing more than companies. They provide services for which people choose to pay. The whole idea behind them is to make a profit, and the amount of profit they make is directly proportional to how many people desire the service they provide and are willing to pay for it. Where is the evil in that arrangement? If nobody were willing to pay for the service that a company was selling then how long would they remain in business? It doesn’t matter how big a company is or how much money they have now. Bank of America, Capital One, Chase Manhattan, how long would any of them last if it were not for the people who chose to do business with them? The fact is that many of the people who are out there bellowing the loudest have checking accounts and credit cards through the companies they are targeting and that sort of detracts from the credibility of the whole show. The real question should be is the problem rooted in the banks and the big corporations or is it in the government officials and elected representatives who secretly take their money in exchange for passing laws that benefit the banks and the big corporations unfairly, and at our expense? If this is the case, and I am fairly certain that it is, then ridding ourselves of capitalism, the one thing that has made this nation a land of prosperity and achievement for all, would be like shooting ourselves in the foot before a race. Why not fix the corruption in government, eliminate the laws they have passed to keep us all screwed to the floor and leave well enough alone?  I don’t like Bank of America any more than the next guy, but I am not about to cut my throat over it.

Why is it the Occupy crowd, as educated as they claim to be, can’t figure out that destroying capitalism and turning the big corporations into victims is not the brightest way to go when focusing on corruption seems like such an easy way to fix things up? Personally, I think that they know, but since it isn’t in line with their agenda they aren’t bringing it up. Besides it’s easy to get everyone fixated on the corporations and giving them a target keeps them from seeing the real villains.

The Occupy crowd claims that they represent 99% of the people but I suspect they represent far fewer. Aside from the perpetual joiners who leap onto every cause that wanders by, the crowds occupying the current protest sites around the country seem to be heavily weighted with college students, recent graduates, and characters wearing SEIU t-shirts. This explains a lot more than the rhetoric they’re spouting for dissemination through the news media, but whether or not is it something that you or I would normally support is something else. The colleges and universities in this country were long ago taken over by the extreme left and the curriculum offered is slanted to support their political views. The students are graded more on their ability to assimilate those views than they are on the absorption of actual knowledge. Degrees in mathematics, hard science and engineering have been declining for more than thirty years while graduates with degrees and even doctorates in ethnic studies, sociology, political science, and Hispanic Culture have soared. These are people that have taken out high interest rate educational loans over a period of four to six years while they pursued what amounts to the most worthless educational experience imaginable and thirty days after they finally graduate they find that they have absolutely no marketable skills that any employer is looking for. and as an added bonus, they are $175,000 in debt that they can’t pay off, and even if they filed for bankruptcy their educational loans won’t be discharged. It’s hard to imagine the joy of being 23 years old and starting your adult life with no job and $175,000 in debt. But is that a good reason for destroying the foundation of our nation’s economic system?

Honestly speaking, I suspect that rather than 99% of our society, the Occupy crowd actually represents about 43%. 43 is the percentage of Americans who are partially or completely reliant on financial assistance from state or federal government to meet their basic human needs. 43% of the nation is receiving some form of food stamps, housing subsidies or clothing allowance from the government and this number is growing very fast. This is the segment of American society most threatened by cuts to entitlement programs and without the ability to raise the tax money needed to pay for these programs, that threat is closer to becoming a reality and the amplitude of vocal outrage increases. But is that a good reason for destroying the foundation of our nation’s economic system?

When we hear the chants and speeches coming from the Occupy protestors are we actually hearing something that constitutes a legitimate complaint or are we letting our own displeasure with the current elected representatives lead us into agreeing with something that is completely unworkable. It’s easy to sympathize with the underdog, the poor family that has been psychologically conditioned to rely on others for their basic human needs, but do we really think that destroying our own way of life is going to help them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to strengthen the economy by eliminating the corrupt practices enshrined by crooked politicians and kick-starting the free market so that jobs were available? Rather than draining what little money the American middle class still might have to pay for the food, clothing and shelter of those who are either unable or unwilling to care for themselves, wouldn’t it make more sense to start cutting these programs back and wean these people off the public dole so that they could care for themselves and take some responsibility for their own lives?

With the 2012 Presidential Election coming up it is unlikely that you will hear anything of this nature proposed by the candidates from either party. If they want to get elected they will sympathize and pander to anyone listening. Unfortunately that is not going to solve the problem, and if we don’t solve it, it is going to get worse. The Occupy protestors might be a mass movement, but they do not represent the American people. If we really want to see a solution to the problems we face we need to quit listening to the guy with the degree in Hispanic Studies and start listening to the voice of common sense, otherwise we just keep losing and the other side will just keep taking.

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Occupy

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Herman Cain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, and he ran for the U.S. Senate in Georgia in 2004 but did not win in the primaries. His presidential campaign for the White House in 2012 began way back in 2010 when he hit all of the early presidential states, became a YouTube sensation, and addressed more than 40 Tea Party rallies around the country. Throughout all of this, his prior run for the presidency, his senatorial bid in 2004 and up until October of this year, a mere thirty day ago, in a presidential campaign that began over a year ago, not one word was said by any of the women who were suddenly overcome with a spasm of self-righteous indignation and are now claiming that back in 1997 he behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner with them. While this sort of trash may sell tons of newspapers, the fact is these women lack any sort of credibility and have nothing whatsoever to support their allegations.

I could just as easily claim that I caught Barack Obama in my back yard groping my dog. Furthermore, I am absolutely certain that there are numerous individuals out there who would be more than willing to allege that, they too, discovered Barack in their yard or barn doing the big nasty with their pet or their prize pig. The truth doesn’t matter when the news media gets on board and starts blasting the story across their headlines with every morning’s new edition. Repeating a lie often enough does not make it true, but to the easily swayed and the extremely gullible, anything nasty that shows up in newsprint is quickly bought into. In fact, the more vicious a rumor is, the more apt people are to buy into it even when there isn’t a shred of evidence to support it.

I look at the timing and substance of these allegations as a good indication of exactly how much neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party wants a credible candidate running for office. Consider the fact that if a candidate with any real sense of integrity and decency should actually run for the presidency, and against all odds, win the office, it would be the end of “business as usual” for both parties and neither of these corrupt political gangs are about to let that happen if they can scuttle it quickly before the average working people have a chance to get behind it and start pushing.

This country is not going to be pulled out of the frying pan by a die-hard Democrat or a die-hard Republican; they have too much invested in keeping things the way they have been and they are not about to let someone who might represent the people come in and screw up their party. However, if this nation is going to be put back on the right track it is going to take somebody that is not part of the current problem to do it. If Obama gets another four years we get more of the same. If Romney wins the election we get more of the same. If Perry wins the election we get more of the same and the same with Bachman, Gingrich, Huntsman, Santorum, Clinton or any of the others that have helped make the mess that we are in. If the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, why would we vote for the people that have already shown themselves to be dishonest, self-serving and politically corrupt while in office? Quit voting for political parties and political hacks and start voting for somebody that will do the job we want done.

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Barack Obama, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain

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If the only way that Rick Perry can get to the top of the Republican heap is to smear the character of his fellow Republicans I believe that says more about his character than any words he has to offer. The allegations of sexual harassment filling the newspapers with respect to Herman Cain are so old that their pubic hairs are grey and the fact of the matter is that they say absolutely nothing about Cain himself. He was a business leader in charge of a large operation when these allegations first came out and there are damn few business leaders of any size organization that don’t carry some sort of sexual harassment claim in their baggage. It happens to be one of the most popular claims anyone with a grudge can level and thousands of such allegations are filed every year only to be found without merit.

According to AP News the latest of these allegations comes from a woman who said she “considered” filing such a complaint against Cain as a result of remarks she claims he made back in the 1990′s. This is just about as far from credible information as one can get, and yet this is the sort of thing that Rick Perry is digging up and leaking to the press in the hope that Cain’s campaign goes belly up so he can grab a bigger piece of the pie for himself. Rick Perry’s campaign took off with a bang but it seems to have fizzled out since he began airing his extreme evangelical Christian beliefs, some of which are downright scary.

Personally I believe that, as a Republican candidate for President in 2012, Herman Cain might just be the biggest concern that the Democratic Party faces and they would be entirely orgasmic if Cain’s fellow Republican candidates ganged up on him in the effort to send him packing. For one thing, the Democrats could point at it and say they were right all along about the Republicans being nothing more than a bunch of racists. Not that it would really prove anything, but what the hell, what ultra-liberal Democrat needs proof? Cain’s presence in the GOP line-up hinders the Democratic Party’s ability to portray the GOP as the party of the filthy rich white guy, and that’s an image they need to pump full of air before we get too much closer to election time. The Democrats have portrayed themselves as the party that fights for the downtrodden and oppressed for so long that they’ve forgotten that they’re also the party that started the Ku Klux Klan and fought against integration in the South. A black man running for President on the GOP ticket will do major damage to nearly fifty years of liberal lies and propaganda.

At this point in time, Herman Cain is the closest thing to a Presidential candidate the GOP has in the race. Perry’s a Christian fanatic and as would prove to be as bad as any Islamic fanatic could be as a president. Romney is still not much of a conservative and while he may be the favored son of the GOP leadership because he comes closer to their new left leaning conservative positions, the fact is he is nearly as liberal as Obama. When you get right down to it, in a race between Romney and Obama it wouldn’t matter who you voted for because you would end up with the same old garbage either way.

All things considered, I will still vote for Ron Paul if he gets the nomination, but if he doesn’t I would like to see Herman Cain get a shot at it.

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Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Barack Obama

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Barack Obama is lying through his teeth when he portrays himself as an innocent bystander in the congressional battle over the debt ceiling. Any compromise according to the terms of the battle he has established for the Democratic members of Congress is unlikely for the simple reason that the Democrats are unwilling to accept anything less than their entire Christmas list, and Obama has vowed to veto anything that doesn’t meet his unreasonable demands.

The President has not demonstrated any reluctance to threaten the pay for American soldiers stationed around the world and seems to dismiss the catastrophic damage that action would have on their struggling families surviving on an American soldier’s miserly income. Nor has he been reluctant to threaten the fixed income of this nation’s elderly Social Security recipients, the most fragile of all Americans on the economic spectrum. However, the president has said nothing at all about the ever-increasing influx of unskilled, semi-literate illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S. and receiving federally subsidized healthcare, housing assistance, educational assistance, food stamps, and in many cases, Social Security checks from a trust fund that they have never paid into.

Despite the positive messages of economic recovery being carefully crafted for the American news media by the White House administration, the American economy is no better today than it was the day that Obama first stepped into office. The increases in productivity we hear so much about would be considered mere fluctuations by any other administration and stock markets around the world are erratically swinging up and down with each new bit of propaganda released. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 99.07 points in the first half-hour of trading this last Friday alone, and it is completely obvious that no sense of stability exists in the American market. Raising the debt ceiling in this sort of an unstable economic environment could trigger a torrential flood of liquidity into the global economy which could jump start inflation in many emerging economies around the world, even as it strangled our own fragile and faltering economic recovery.

If the U.S. Congress does not increase the debt ceiling by August 5th, Obama has warned that the nation would default on the national debt, and as a consequence, many investors would lose confidence and the triple “A” credit rating of the country would tumble, which in turn would force the interest rate up for future loans. What Obama has not said is that there are sufficient funds in the U.S. Treasury to continue paying the interest due on the loans that we have taken for many months to come, and as long as we continue to make those payments, no state of default would exist. If the federal government does allow some or all of those debts to go into a state of default, even when the money to pay the amount due is available, that action will clearly be self-inflicted and the sole justification for it will be entirely political in nature. If the United States defaults on the obligation to pay the debts that it has incurred, it will not be because it lacks the means to pay those debts, but because the Obama Administration and the Democrat controlled U.S. Senate are willing to gamble with the future well-being of the American people in a high-stakes poker game for the continued control of the American government.

The Democrats called the clock as the Republicans were busy stumbling over their feet, and at the last minute they tried to back into a win with bluster and bravado. Both sides are all in and the pot’s so huge the chips are rolling off onto the floor, the Republicans need to catch perfect to pull this out of the fire with nothing more than a deuce to seven low and they know they’re drawing thin. The unreadable Democrats are hoping like hell that they can float over what they suspect is their opponents flop bet and bluff them into a fold. Several of the on-lookers have suffered coronaries in the excitement and the EMTs, who have them spread out on the floor nearby just declared one dead when their zapper failed to restart his heart, but none of the players seem to notice, or care about this minor distraction. A lot of people get off on the rush of a good game but when you’re seeing it from the perspective of a chip on the table it just doesn’t have the same appeal. If all of us were not sitting in the pot piled up in the center of the gaming table, we might better appreciate the excitement and adrenaline rush of a game that truly puts the highest of the Vegas high-rollers to shame.

When you consider all of the great things that you have ever been told about your nation, the history, the struggles, the personal sacrifice and the heart wrenching tug of patriotism you feel as you hear the national anthem and see the flag being raised, you don’t like to think that the whole thing is being run by a bunch of over-stuffed, self-aggrandizing slobs who would capriciously risk the future welfare of the American people along with their kids and grandchildren for decades to come for the sole purpose of gaining something that they should not be allowed to have in the first place, and that “something” is exactly what this entire debate is all about. It is not merely about the budget or the debt ceiling; it is about having 100% control over the future decisions made by our government. It’s all about power, and about having the authority to do as one pleases. To leave things as they are, to alter them in your favor, or even to use that power to dismantle the safeguards that protect our liberty, and accelerate the slow creep of tyranny’s tentacles as the social structure and income distribution of the subservient masses are realigned to affect compliance with a vision none of us are privy to. Unfettered government was the bane of our forefathers, and the political representatives in which we have placed so much trust are about to give us a firsthand demonstration of why those august gentlemen of old held that view.

If I have given the impression that it’s only the Democrats who labor under the burden of guilt in this picture than I must apologize for that image is incorrect, for across that gaming table piled high with the hopes and concerns of so many Americans sit the Republican players of the game we’re watching. A game in which you and all you hope for in the future amount to nothing more than a thin circular disk of plastic and paper – one of many on the pile. It’s far beyond being merely unfortunate, but as any poker player can tell you, one side will win and the other will lose, and the chips will remain nothing more than chips. The chips never win the game.

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Barack ObamaRepublican PartyDemocratic Party, debt ceiling

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Congressmen James Clyburn, D-South Carolina, John Larson, D-Connecticut, who chairs the Democratic caucus, and Xavier Becerra, D-Los Angeles, seem to believe they’ve struck gold, or at least silver in the form of a silver bullet by which Barack Obama would be empowered with the ability to unilaterally usurp the power of our politically polarized congressional, raise the nation’s debt ceiling by presidential fiat, and save us all from certain economic catastrophe brief seconds before our mothers, our flags and our apple pies are snatched away forever by the dastardly actions of mustachioed villains.

In succinct terms, these liberal representatives of the American people’s best interests are urging Obama to invoke a clause from the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which, according to their somewhat questionable understanding, gives Obama the presidential authority to cut through the Gordian Knot of political bickering that has paralyzed congressional action on the budget, and single handedly raise the debt limit by executive order, thereby ensuring the continued good credit rating of the United States.

James Clyburn is the guy that denounced Bill Clinton as a racist after Clinton compared Obama’s 2008 victory in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s win in the 1988 primary election. He is also the character that leveled the hysterical allegation that the number two primary political party in the U.S., the GOP is a plague on the American people, as opposed to being the legitimate party of the opposition as any reasonable Democratic representative would view them. Clyburn is also one of those Washington politicians who seems to think that the really good changes, the history making changes in government, come not as a result of congressional debate among the legitimate representatives of the people, but as a result of presidential actions stretching the bonds of legal authority. To support this view he points to the Emancipation Proclamation, the executive order to racially integrate the armed forces, and the executive order that ended desegregation in the public schools. In each of these examples congressional action was stymied by incessant political bickering and the resolution that was necessary to solve the problem being confronted came only as a result of an executive order issued on the authority of the President at the time. I will point out that all of Clyburn’s examples have to do with items that are considered sacrosanct civil rights victories by various minority groups, however, I will not speculate on why he chose these specific examples or why he believes they are relevant to the issue of the debt ceiling.

Clyburn’s exuberant support for Obama unilaterally ending the congressional debt ceiling debate with a presidential mandate has attracted a great deal of attention in the press, and as the deadline for action moves closer, the bug-eyed panic of the overly-liberal American press will seek to pound the American public into jellied submission with an ever-increasing supply of speculative opinion regarding the 14th Amendment provision now being waved about like some magical talisman that will protect us all from the catastrophic consequences that these same hysterical journalists spit and spew about as if they had any real basis for valid concern.

Admittedly, when the 14th Amendment provision being spoken of here, is removed from the context of the numerous paragraphs preceding it as well as the few that follow, and this single paragraph, freed from its context, is placed under glass in a vacuum so that it can only be seen from one side, it might be possible (with sufficient squinting) to extract something along the lines of what Mr. Clyburn claims to see in those lines of text. However, freed from these onerous restrictions, and sitting in the company of it’s intended brethren (the paragraphs before and after), Clyburn’s vision of extreme presidential license dissolves into nothingness like overly enlarged and pixilated print suddenly brought into focus so that it can be read and understood properly.

The provision in question, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, reads as follows: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.”

With the exception of three words, and the context of the entire 14th Amendment surrounding Section 4, Clyburn’s interpretation appears to be watertight, however, with the inclusion of the requirement that the public debt in question be “authorized by law” the bottom of his apparent watertight container falls out and we are drenched with his illogical cherry-picking of statements taken out of context. Furthermore, when the purloined Section 4 is placed back into the context of the entire 14th Amendment, the entire container, which we mistakenly considered watertight, evaporates like mist in a high wind and we are left standing there with nothing but the handle, and even that may not be a substantial as it seems.

Eight hundred and twenty-two days after the last shot of the Civil War was fired, South Carolina ratified the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and it became the law of the land. The 14th Amendment is considered one of the three Reconstruction Amendments in that the provisions it contains were written with the intent of rectifying the numerous problems associated with the American Civil War and the Southern State’s secession from the Union, and rebuilding the Union. The Amendment contains a number of provisions directly addressing the Confederacy and the leaders of the secessionist government. The citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment provides a broader definition of citizenship that anything that previously existed and specifically overruled the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in the case, Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that blacks could not be citizens of the United States. The Due Process provision of the 14th Amendment prohibited state and local governments from unfairly depriving persons of life, liberty, or property, and the Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause established that each state ensure equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment which has been called the “public debt clause,” confirmed the legitimacy of all United States public debt incurred as a result of the Civil War and legally appropriated by the U.S. Congress. It also established that the United States government would not be liable for any losses suffered as a result of freeing the slaves nor would the U.S. government be liable for debts incurred by the Confederacy. The express intention obvious in Section 4 of the 14th Amendment was to bring an end to all further debate regarding the financial obligations of the United States government directly attributed to the Civil War.

In the infinite wisdom of the U.S. Supreme Court, the 14th Amendment has risen from the ashes of the bloody rebellion which it attempted to correct, and like many good laws with predetermined intent, it has been applied to issues entirely foreign to the purposes of it’s authors, but that is another issue, and one best left for another time.

Were it not for the fact that the 14th Amendment was written specifically to correct the issues that arose from the Civil War, and a few other minor items that James Clyburn neglected to take into consideration, Obama might be able to wield the authority of a true dictator and make all of the unilateral decision he could ever dream of. If it weren’t for the pesky nature of having to put things into their proper context many things would be so easy. Section 4 states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned,” and therein lies a formidable obstacle. Before a public debt can be considered valid according to this provision, it must be “authorized by law,” and before any debt can be considered “authorized by law” under the terms of Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, that debt must be incurred with the authorization of Congress because the U.S. Congress is the only branch of the American government constitutionally authorized to borrow money on the credit of the United States (see Section 8 – Powers of Congress). The Executive Branch of the United States government cannot arbitrarily and certainly not unilaterally make a decision to borrow money on the credit of the United States, and to do so would be a serious violation of the U.S. Constitution, to say nothing of a gross usurpation of congressional power. Even in his wildest authoritarian dreams, Obama cannot borrow didily-squat against the credit of this nation.

The idea that the President can do anything necessary to avoid defaulting on the national debt is ludicrous and without foundation. Even if, as some interpretations would have it, defaulting on the national debt is impermissible and by itself a violation of the constitution, the simple fact of the matter is that there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution, including the 14th Amendment suggesting that a President may, at his discretion, assume the authority of the legislature if he deems it necessary to prevent a violation of the Constitution. Where would the stopping point of such authority end? If Obama decided to eliminate the division of power that our system of government has been founded on, which is what it would take for him to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, then he would also have the authority to unilaterally raise taxes, to print more money when he thought he needed it, or to sell off federal property as he saw fit. He could subdivide Yosemite National Park and raise taxes to pay for the construction of low-income housing for welfare addicted liberals who have supported him in the past, and he could do it all without ever bothering to mention anything to Congress because they would be even more irrelevant than they are today.

The argument that Barack Obama can unilaterally invoke the 14th Amendment’s public debt provision and raise the debt ceiling by presidential fiat lacks merit. However, if if, by some twisted interpretation of the language, he felt sufficiently justified in doing so there is a great deal of doubt that his action would resolve the problem because a huge black cloud of doubt would hang ominously over any bonds issued as a result of his action and potential investors would face the very likely possibility that the federal government might, at some point in the future, refuse to honor those debts as being legitimate. The risk associated with this fear could force investors to lose confidence and result in a steep increase in the interest rates, a catastrophic consequence that would rapidly accelerate the national debt and cost the American people billions of dollars.

This nation was founded on principles that function best through the mechanisms of free speech, access to credible information, and open debate. The most glaring failure of our current situation is an undeniable indication that, while the principles remain, the mechanism that forces them to mesh like the gears of a clock are not being applied. The role of our President is not to threaten the economic welfare of old people soldiers in the effort to say public opinion, and the role of Congress is not to set the President up for failure at the expense of the American people. In these efforts the offices of both are diminished and our image as a nation is made to suffer more than it is already suffering at the hands of our current leaders.

There is little doubt that in a reasonable society, and with legitimate leadership on both sides of the issue, this problem would not arise, and if it did, it would be easily resolved by honest debate and compromise. However, as societies go, we ceased to be reasonable many years ago and our elected representatives in Washington, the self-styled leaders of the two primary warring factions in this debate, represent not what is best for the American people they purportedly represent, but their own best interests, including, amongst many, what’s good for the party they are affiliated with, their odds of re-election and their ability to stack the deck in favor of their personal investment portfolio. In light of the burden these hidden agendas place on our elected representatives, is it any wonder that the American people are constantly on the losing side of every Washington equation? Solving the problem of the debt ceiling, the budget or any of the numerous actual and imagined crises makes exciting fodder for the political war being waged by the liberal news media against the conservative status quo, and the Democrats against the Republicans, but speaking strictly from a realistic point of view, none of it solves any of the real problems that are currently dragging this nation down into the gutter and the people along with it. As a distraction, it is certainly entertaining, but shouldn’t we, the American people, expect more from our government than entertaining drama? The truth would be a good place to start.

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Sixteen years ago, amidst the threat of another government shutdown like we are facing today, Newt Gingrich, one of many Republican presidential candidates for 2012 was then serving as the 58th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. In 1995, Gingrich found himself representing the face of American conservatism in the dramatic standoff against Bill Clinton’s unwillingness to make the budget cuts that resulted in the 1995-1996 government shutdowns. Similar to what we are seeing today, the Republican opposition to Clinton’s economic demands was suffering from deep internal divisions brought about by the unrelenting pressure of Clinton’s administration and even more pressure being applied by the nation’s predominantly Democratic news media. While Clinton’s approval rating was falling like a stone during the shutdowns, the Democrats found an opportunity to make Gingrich’s opposition to Clinton look like a personal vendetta. The Clinton administration pushed this perspective for all it was worth and the news media adopted the fabrication as the gospel truth. Newt Gingrich couldn’t stand up against the constant personal attacks coming at him from all sides and quickly caved in to the president’s demands. Clinton’s approval rating went higher than it had ever been once the budget was signed into law and as an added bonus Clinton was elected to a second term and the Republicans lost eight seats in the House during the 1996 elections.

According to the figures I got from the government’s accounting website, the federal government is taking in around $200 billion per month, the interest on the national debt runs an average of $29 billion per month, Medicare & Medicaid at approximately $50 billion per month, Social Security at another $50 billion and military and VA costs at around $5.8 billion. $50 billion x 2 + $29 billion + $5.8 billion = $134.8 billion & $200 billion – that = $65.2 billion remaining each month after the major government debts are paid. After all the bills are paid the government is sitting there with $65.2 billion dollars of the tax payer’s money that they can piss away on all sorts of ridiculous projects as they see fit, but they seem to think that this is insufficient. Why is that? If I want to take a vacation when things are tight financially and I can’t just plunk down a big chunk of change, then I have to save for a month or two in order to finance my vacation. What’s the matter with the government having to save up the tax dollars we give them when things are tight and they want to finance some outrageous boondoggle that benefits thirty-two people hidden in the swamps of Georgia? They already have the ability to borrow up to $14.3 trillion dollars and force all of us to foot the future bill. Why is that outrageous amount of money insufficient for their needs?

What does the federal government plan to do that is going to actually benefit the American people who will be paying the bills? When is the last time they built a major highway across the nation, or refurbished an old one without charging the states for the cost? When is the last time that they purchased a major piece of land for a national park that everyone could use and enjoy without having to pay an arm and a leg to get in? When was the last time they actually improved anything without making somebody in Washington richer than hell or financing some political fool’s personal empire.

The federal government is gung ho to benefit the criminals that sneak into our country illegally, but what have they done for the people that put them in office and then get stuck with their bills? Illegal aliens get subsidized college educations and no-interest home loans but combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan can’t find jobs to support themselves and their families and their kids get no breaks on college tuition. The federal government has a multitude of special programs to ensure that the kids of illegal aliens get the finest medical care available but American citizens who are up in their years get forced into sub-standard clinics for Medicare and Medicaid services provided by med-school drop-outs who treat them like they were constantly whining hypochondriacs, and routinely withhold medical services resulting in deaths that would have been avoided by any legitimate physician. The federal government will stop the payment of wages earned by American soldiers who are serving their nation overseas but they will not stop the payment of entitlements to criminals that have violated American immigration laws by entering the U.S. without the proper immigration authorization.

We have been here before and survived the consequences. This is not the first time we’ve been in these financial waters and it won’t be the last. The threats we are hearing from the Democrats now are the same threats that the Democrats of 1995-96 were throwing around when we faced this situation last, and they are as bogus today as they were then. If the budget fails to pass and Obama does not get his borrowing limit raised he can exercise his discretionary authority to make people miserable. He can punish the military personnel by withholding their pay and he can cut Medicare and Medicaid payments to the senior citizens, but it is entirely discretionary and he can chose to cut something else if that’s what he want to do. Cuts in military pay and Medicare are not going to balance anything in the government’s budget and everybody in Washington knows that. Cuts in military pay and Medicare are designed to cause great hardship on the American citizens and as a direct result yield the greatest amount of outrage possible. Our nation’s Democratic leadership is hoping and praying for that outrage, okay, maybe they aren’t praying, but they are hoping. They have been gearing up the Whitehouse press corps and the news media to deflect that outrage onto the Republicans who denied them the increase in spending power. “We didn’t want to do that to your grandma but they gave us no choice!”

Barack Obama is predicting economic “Armageddon” if he and fellow Democrats don’t get their way and the opportunity to spend additional billions of our tax dollars on programs and entitlements that benefit few. The sky will fall into our laps, geriatric old folks will keel over in their tracks, our soldier’s will all convert to radical Islam, China will barge in and take over the U.S., and Jesus will hate all of us forever. Of course none of these things will happen, and the bad things that do happen will be engineered by politicians in the attempt to create pressure on other politicians. In short, the whole thing is a load of shit and we should not fall into the middle of it because the only people that will lose in this deal is us. That is you and me -the people who will be expected to foot the bill. Obama threatened the Republican opposition by telling them not to call his bluff, and that is exactly what the American people should be hoping for. Call his bluff. Let the whole frigging mess go into meltdown mode. Break off that furry little arm that keeps reaching into our wallets for more and more of our income; stuff it up the butt of the government monkey it was formerly attached to and send it on its way. It is not time to say no to more government money grabbing, it’s time to say “Fuck no.”

I can be as sympathetic as the next guy but when it comes to either feeding myself or feeding the 40 million illegal aliens our government has allowed to take up residence here illegally, then screw the illegal aliens, their mothers and their kids. Most of us are just barely scraping by as it is. People who are making a hundred grand a year are living from one paycheck to the next, wondering if they are going to be able to make their next hyper-inflated house payment and still feed their kids, and nobody in Washington D.C. is thinking about throwing them a life-preserver so why in the hell are we bailing out every semi-literate, nail-bender and drywall worker scrabbling over the border fence and through the Sonoran desert on their way to Los Angeles? That may sound pretty selfish to some but it’s just common sense to me. We take care of our own first, and then if anything is left over, we can lend others a helping hand.

Hopefully this time around the Republicans won’t cave in like they did in 1996, but I won’t be getting my hopes up too much. After all they are no too different from the Democrats when it comes to their inclination towards corruption. Maybe the best we can hope for is that in this knock-down-drag-out the Democrats and the Republicans slit each other’s throats and both sides bleed out before our eyes. Now that’s my idea of “Change.” In the meantime, let’s move on to something important or create a new crisis that has more appeal.

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Declared GOP Candidates 2012

Herman Cain
Newt Gingrich
Gary Johnson
Ron Paul
Tim Pawlenty
Tom Miller (Flight Attendant)
Vern Wuensche (Businessman)

Declared Indepependent Candidates 2012

Fred Karger (Indepependent ?)

Exploratory GOP Candidates 2012

Mitt Romney
Rick Santorum

Potential GOP Candidates 2012

Michele Bachmann
John Bolton
Lindsey Graham
Jon Huntsman
Sarah Palin

Potential Libertarian Candidates 2012

Wayne Allyn Root

Potential Independent Candidates

Tim Gay Sr. (Concerned Citizen)
Charles Harvey (Retired citizen)
Becky Rusher (Computer Tech)
Charlie Crist (Governor of Florida)

Declined GOP Candidates

Haley Barbour
Mike Bloomberg
Scott Brown
Jeb Bush
Chris Christe
Mitch Daniels
Jim DeMint
Mike Huckabee
Bobby Jindal
Bob McDonnell
Mike Pence
David Patraeus
Marco Rubio
John Thune
Donald Trump

As of today there have been more people declining potential candidacy than have declared their intention to run. Unfortunately some of the best names are in the group that has declined, and the list of declared candidates is still short by one obviously well-qualified and charismatic leader.

The list of GOP declared candidates as well as the list of Independent declared candidates has picked up a few oddballs, including a computer technician, a ROF (retired old fart) and a flight attendant. The biggest surprise to date was Fred Karger’s declaration to run for the presidency. Karger has worked as a political consultant, a gay rights activist and an actor; he has also worked on nine presidential campaigns and served as a senior consultant to the campaigns of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford. I am not clear on whether he is running as a Republican or as an Independent at this point, but if he is running as a Republican that qualifies him as the first openly gay presidential candidate from a major political party in American history. The Liberals will be pulling “Jokes about gay conservatives” off of their list of what is “politically incorrect” as they did in the past with racist remarks about black Republicans.

As far as the news media is concerned (or hopes), Mitt Romney is purported to be the GOP candidate who is most likely to win the nomination. This may be nothing more than wishful thinking on their part because I seriously doubt Romney’s ability to win against Obama, and I am sure the media would call it the same way. Of course I wouldn’t suggest that the American News Media would stoop to such shoddy and manipulative techniques during a campaign; not much anyway.

It was no great surprise that Donald Trump fell by the wayside this early in the game, and Huckabee’s departure doesn’t create much of a void. In a similar light, the murmurs regarding Lindsey Graham’s possible intention to run adds nothing of merit to the lineup. There were a sufficient number of pseudo-conservatives spoiling the soup before Graham started mumbling his “me too” noises.

The biggest surprise so far is the fact that we have heard absolutely nothing from Sarah Palin. For somebody who seems to thrive on front page notoriety, she has been awfully quiet lately. Is it possible that the queen of the Tea Party has had second thoughts and decided not to run? Personally I believe she has one run left in her, and this is it. If she fails to run in 2012 she will be completely irrelevant in 2016. Oddly enough, I believe that Palin is the most formidable potential candidate the GOP currently has available to them, however, for a variety of sound reasons, she is the least likely to win their full support.

As much as I hate the thought, given the GOP lineup as it currently stands, the probability is high that Obama will win a second term of office and have four more years to destroy whatever is left standing in the U.S. after his first term of office. Of course the 2012 presidential election is still some distance in the future, and anything can happen between now and then so I will make no prediction, however, if everything remains static and nothing too remarkable takes place then we can all rest assured that we are truly screwed.

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Navy Seals, acting on top secret intelligence, assaulted the Pakistani stronghold of Osama bin Laden, faced a withering firefight by a number of armed terrorists and successfully killed the Al Qaeda leader as he fought to avoid capture. The Seals were then extracted from the compound in Pakistan, taking Osama bin Laden’s body with them and it was dropped into the ocean to avoid giving the terrorist group a corpse to rally around.

Navy Seals, acting on top secret intelligence, assaulted the Pakistani stronghold of Osama bin Laden, faced a withering firefight by a number of armed terrorists and successfully killed the Al Qaeda leader as he fought to avoid capture. The Seals were then extracted from the compound in Pakistan, taking Osama bin Laden’s body with them and it was later buried at sea in accordance with the religious requirements of Islam to avoid giving the terrorist group a corpse to rally around.

Navy Seals, acting on top secret intelligence, assaulted the Pakistani stronghold of Osama bin Laden, faced a withering firefight by a number of armed terrorists and successfully killed the Al Qaeda leader as he fought to avoid capture while hiding behind a woman. The Seals were then extracted from the compound in Pakistan, taking Osama bin Laden’s body with them and it was later buried at sea in accordance with the religious requirements of Islam to avoid giving the terrorist group a corpse to rally around.

Navy Seals, acting on top secret intelligence, assaulted the Pakistani stronghold of Osama bin Laden, faced a withering firefight by a number of armed terrorists and successfully killed the unarmed Al Qaeda leader while hiding behind a woman. The Seals were then extracted from the compound in Pakistan, taking Osama bin Laden’s body with them and it was later buried at sea from the deck of a ship in accordance with the religious requirements of Islam to avoid giving the terrorist group a corpse to rally around.

Navy Seals, acting on top secret intelligence, assaulted the Pakistani stronghold of Osama bin Laden, killed one man who fired at them and a large number of unarmed people who were present, and successfully killed the unarmed Al Qaeda leader while hiding behind a woman. The Seals were then extracted from the compound in Pakistan, taking Osama bin Laden’s body with them and it was later buried at sea the deck of a ship in accordance with the religious requirements of Islam to avoid giving the terrorist group a corpse to rally around.

Navy Seals, accompanied by a dog, and acting on top secret intelligence, assaulted the Pakistani stronghold of Osama bin Laden, killed one man who fired at them and a large number of unarmed people who were present, and successfully killed the unarmed Al Qaeda leader while hiding behind a woman. The Seals were then extracted from the compound in Pakistan, taking Osama bin Laden’s body with them and it was later buried at sea the deck of a ship, with a Muslim clergyman in attendance in accordance with the religious requirements of Islam to avoid giving the terrorist group a corpse to rally around.

Members of the Navy Seals elite squadron of juggling mime commandos cunningly disguised as members of the Hare Krishna cult visited the Pakistani stronghold of Osama bin Laden. After dispatching numerous unarmed individuals encountered along with Osama bin Laden, they stuffed a pound of bacon up Osama’s ass and fed him to their dog while still alive. The remains, which were scraped up off the floor into a used sausage bag, were later were flushed into the ocean through a toilet on board their helicopter as they made way home.

——————————————

All things considered, how Osama bin Laden met his end really doesn’t matter as much as the fact that he is dead, and that he didn’t die of old age but as a result of a bullet to the head fired by an American soldier. It doesn’t matter if he was armed, unarmed, hiding behind a woman, a male prostitute or the Cookie Monster. It doesn’t matter if one, five, ten, or a hundred armed terrorists fought back to save him and died because of it, and the number of unarmed dead left behind could total in the thousands for all I care. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter if they were men, women, children, Catholic Nuns or the Vienna Boys Choir. If they were there and got shot then it is simply not an issue regardless of what they were doing or why. Whether or not Osama’s dead corpse was flung into the sea from the helicopter or buried at sea from an aircraft carrier in accordance with the requirements of Islam is less of a concern than the number of unarmed people killed. For all I care, they could have thrown his ass out of the helicopter alive, kicking and screaming, to splatter all over Masjid al-Haram and the pilgrims in Mecca during the height of the Hajj. In retrospect, the details matter far less than the results. Osama bin Laden is dead and that, in my book, is a good thing.

Barack Obama, in his initial announcement of the event, late Sunday night, may have been a bit too creative with the relevant facts. His abysmal performance as our president over the course of the last two years is fairly obvious, and it can be safely assumed that he will do or say anything he feels he can get away with to make himself look better than he actually is.

Admittedly, after first watching the video of the announcement, I wanted to give the man credit for doing something right for a change. After a solid week of non-stop corrections and revisions to the story, Obama’s initial announcement is looking more and more over the top with each passing day, and we are left wondering how someone who sat in the White House situation room and watched the events unfold on a big-screen monitor by direct, live feed during the raid could possibly fail to get any of the relevant details correct when he later related the event that took place. After six days of corrections and additions to the official story I felt compelled to go back and watch the entire announcement a second time, and in light of everything that has happened since, I came away with a somewhat different perspective.

Following a dramatic stage-left entrance Obama dives into a three minutes and 49 second description of the 9-11 events, quickly slipping in the fact that Osama bin Laden is now dead. The remainder of the speech is given over to how he made the search for bin Laden a priority, how he was first approached with the possibility that the terrorist leader had been located, how he analyzed the incoming intelligence, how he authorized the military mission to take Osama out of the picture. He gives a few seconds over to the soldiers who actually accomplished the task accompanied by numerous false statements regarding the details of the raid and then goes back to patting himself on the back and swelling his own head with assurances that, under his leadership America will continue to support the victims of 9-11 and their families, he makes the delusional claim that the war against fanatical Islamic fundamentalists is not a war against Islam, and he concludes by saying that the U.S. will continue to embrace all of the fine patriotic things that he has not exactly epitomized since he first entered office, God bless everything, blah, blah, blah, and back down the hall he goes.

If I am not mistaken, it almost appears that Obama was making a huge effort to take ownership of everything that has happened since 9-11-2001. The fact that he omits any mention of his predecessor, who was in office at the time of the 2001 attacks and initiated the military response which Obama refused to support at the time, did not slip by unnoticed. While I can’t say that the event that gave rise to the announcement was orchestrated in a way to cast a favorable light on Obama, his announcement afterwards and his some of his comments at the New York firehouse following his appearance at Ground Zero certainly lead me to believe that he is trying to alter the public’s perception of his poor past performance on matters of national security.

Whether or not the American voters are that forgetful or downright dumb is a question that will be answered in 2012. Osama bin Laden was killed during Barack Obama’s first term of office, and for whatever role he played in that effort he should receive credit. However, Barack Obama is the guy who voted against the American response to 9-11 in Afghanistan, he voted against the U.S. military going into Iraq, he voted against the reallocation of funds necessary for the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in 2005, he voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which granted legal immunity for CIA officials involved in the extreme interrogation techniques that gave us the first clue about Osama bin Laden’s hiding spot, he voted against the 2007 Iraq war funding bill on the grounds that it didn’t contain a timeline for pulling our troops out of that country, and he voted to restore habeas corpus to the terrorists detained in American custody. Barack Obama did everything he could as a Democratic Senator to obstruct the American war effort against terrorists while that war effort was being led by a Republican president. During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama was the guy who said that he would end the war in Iraq during his first year in office and withdraw all American troops from that country regardless of their progress. He is also the character who stated that he pledged to meet with any US enemies, anywhere, and at any time without preconditions.

Obama is the guy who has done a lot of frantic backpedaling on his campaign pledge to pull the U.S. troops out of Iraq, and as far as his pledge to meet with our enemies, he now claims that he meant to say the exact opposite, however, his voting record is fixed in time and dedication to obstructing the self-defense of a nation wrongly attacked can’t be denied. His ludicrous and costly half-assed attack against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya was a pointless exercise in futility and his decision to subordinate our nation’s military personnel and our nation’s ability to make decisions regarding that absurd conflict to the United Nations merely adds insult to injury. Furthermore, the only reason he scuttled the U.S. military’s involvement in this absurd effort was the discovery that Al Qaeda terrorist were an integral part of the rebel forces we were supporting and he wanted to avoid that information coming to light at some point during his re-election campaign. If it weren’t for that little discovery, we would still be bombing the crap out of Libya for the offenses of a tyrannical leader who is no different than the tyrannical leaders of Syria, Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia or any other Middle Eastern outhouse of a country that the U.S. government has been content to ignore, and support for decades.

Virtually every single foreign policy success that Obama has achieved while in office is the result of his continuation of foreign policies that were established by George W. Bush. In every instance where Obama has attempted to deviate from the foreign policies that were established by Bush, he has fallen flat on his smug face. Furthermore, in his continuing effort to provide illegal aliens with safe, unopposed access to the U.S. so that they can have their babies and take the jobs of even more American citizens, he has also opened our southern border to an influx of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists intent on disrupting our way of life and killing innocent civilians, and for the first time since the 9-11 attacks, the existence of covert terrorist cells within the United States has become an irrefutable fact of life.

Obama was probably hoping that the overblown drama of his announcement would make the American people forget that he is the primary culprit who destroyed the American economy, Obama is the guy that banned oil drilling in the Gulf Coast and offshore drilling anywhere else in the nation which overjoyed the Middle Eastern oil magnates and forced the price of gasoline through the roof, he has put millions of American out of work, forced thousands out of their homes and onto the streets, shoved his ridiculous health care reform act up our butts, pandered to the millions of illegal parasites ripping the moral heart out of our homeland, illegally involved us in an ill-conceived third military conflict and squandered the money of the American taxpayers by bailing out incompetent automobile manufacturers, banking and financial institutions and international corporations entirely owned by foreign stock holders, and that he has stuck us, the American people, with the massive debt incurred as a result of all of these bad ideas, a debt that our children, grand-children and great grand-children will be paying on for decades.

Obama deserves the credit for giving the order to take out Osama bin Laden. It involved a lot of risk and could have come back on him drastically if it had failed. He gambled big and he won – good for him. Does this mean the he will make a good president, that he should be re-elected in 2012 or that anything he says, does or considers in the past, the present or future has any more merit than it would have otherwise – NO. He is the same incompetent, overly arrogant, manipulative, pathological lying asshole that he was the day he was born and he should never have been elected to public office in the first place, let alone allowed to win re-election in 2012. Now if we can just get those stupid Republicans to support someone worth voting for.

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