Barrel Strength

The reality is slowly starting to dawn even among the Obama-nuts like Time magazine which opines on how Obama has become “Mr. Unpopular”.  This is a far cry from articles which proclaimed “Barack Obama’s surprisingly non-ideological policy shop” when examining his economic policies as well as comparing him to FDR, Lincoln and Kennedy.

A forthcoming book by administration’s former car czar should shed more light on this topic.  One of the things that others have noted is that in previous administration the policy makers have been on the inside and pollsters on the outside.  Obama has inverted that structure but that shouldn’t be surprised because when Obama supporters, like the resident commenter Oban, were asked about his executive experience the only thing they were capable of pointing to was his experience in running his campaign.  If that is the sum of your experience then that is all you are going to do going forward.

Some of the points noted by Rattner, the car czar include these.

• When Obama was told of the plan to pay GM CEO Rick Wagoner a $7.1 million severance package after Obama ordered that he be sacked, Rattner writes: “Suddenly I felt that I was indeed in the presence of a community organizer…”
• Rattner describes presidential political adviser David Axelrod coming to car
  meetings armed with poll data to support the takeover and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identify Congressmen in whose districts large Chrysler facilities were located.
• “[Obama's economic team] veered dangerously close to having the government take control of the two most troubled banks, Bank of America and Citigroup.”
• Rattner said Obama was frustrated with the auto companies from the start: “Why can’t they make a Corolla?” he has Obama asking.

About a year or more ago I made a number of $50 bets that Obama would be a one term President.

The rising tide of revulsion towards the man and his performance is so manifest, and the economic policies the United States is pursuing are so catastrophic, that everyone else is starting to say the same thing.

Let us review the events which are driving Americans to a frenzy of rage:

• appealing the Arizona immigration  law whose effect is merely to enjoin the state officials to enforce existing federal law;
• bowing (more than a civil nod, but a deep from-the-waist bow) to Mulsim leadership, such as the King of Saudi Arabia, while being rude to traditional allies (removing Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and actually returning the bst to the British embassy);
• a policy of ruinous inflation;
• ignoring the Muslim aspect of terrorist attacks on US bases;
• hindering the  Armed Forces  by forbidding terms like “Islamic jihad” in their planning;
• continuing the policies whereby white Americans are prevented or dissuaded from competing for student placements or jobs, saying truths about other races, or competing for contracts from government (affirmative action);
• supporting the Ground Zero victory mosque;
• a divisive and possibly unnecessary health care reform.

You will be able to add your own issues to this list, and I invite you to do so.

The farrago of politically correct attitudes that let Obama rise to the top of the Democratic party, and which sustain the basis of his support, are beyond my capacity either to amend or to tolerate. But a mighty judgment is coming, and the political elites willl be eating shit pie for their deluded arrogance soon enough. That many Americans believe Obama to be a Muslim reflects merely the correct perception that we do not have a President who is on our side.

In case you need confirmation of what the problem is, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s excellent “Intellectuals and Society”. A regime of intellectuals has been put in power. A group of people without wisdom, practical experience, or courage has been selected to govern. The consequences are that government will be returned to adult supervision as soon as possible.

The US is bankrupt. Canada is not. Therein lies a remarkable possibility for this country in the next twenty years.

Two books should be part of the reading of Canadians of all political persuasions, especially conservatives. The first was Brian Lee Crowley’s “Fearful Symmetry”, which explained what went wrong in Canada under Trudeau and successive governments until Mulroney introduced North American free trade and then Chretien (yes, Chretien) fixed our public finances. The second is “The Canadian Century”, by the same Brian Lee Crowley, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis. Both are examinations of the public finances of Canada, and to read these books is to understand, at the highest level, what has gone right and wrong with our society. Crowley never ceases to set out the moral dimension of excessive public expenditure: the electorate drunk on government services, the cost of which is deferred to future generations; the creation of pseudo-jobs; the electoral blocs of state dependents which prevent the correction of the very problem that their existence creates, and so forth.

Crowley and his co-authors make it abundantly clear that:

1) Laurier, not MacDonald, should be attributed the credit for a low-tax, free-trade policy – the classic hallmarks of what we now call “conservatism”, and

2) Bill Clinton waged a successful campaign to get the US fiscal house in order, and that both Bush the elder and the younger, to say nothing of Obama, have run the US into massive debt. In other words, Bush the younger squandered the legacy that Clinton handed to him. (Canadian Century, at pp 116-117) Clinton: bastion of fiscal probity. We conservatives need to absorb that.

Now peace upon all those partizans of conservative government who think that mentioning any merit in any liberal, no matter how long dead, is akin to “deserting the cause, that gave us our freedom, religion and laws.” The points I am making here are twofold.

First, these two books are a rapid and painless education in the essential facts of politics: how we finance government is as much a moral as it is an immediately monetary question, and it gives insight behind the squabbles in Parliament, which are of little account in the history of nations. No wonder the people who really  understand money are not fussed by whether the Liberals take over; they are only concerned with how public finances will affect the value of their investments. Conservatives do not have a better penchant for fixing them than Liberals, in both Canada and the United States, according to these writers.

Second, the Canadian Century establishes the current Conservative government in Canada is not doing a great job in sustaining the gains that Chretien and Martin made in fixing our public finances. Why conservatives should care about this issue is explained in The Canadian Century. It is a must read for the politically literate.

A scoop by Forbes magazine or idle conspiracy making?

As much as I tried to pin [CIA director Leon] Panetta down on who the culprits were, he wouldn’t name names, but indirectly hinted that the main hacker-in-chief was China. This comes on the heels of General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Chinese cleaned out the web connected mainframes at both the Pentagon and the State Department in 2007. The Bush administration kept the greatest security breach in US history secret to duck a hit in the opinion polls.

The Obama phenomenon will be recalled as one of the greatest bait-and-switch in the history of US presidential campaigns and this is already leading to some somber reassessment as noted in this article.

The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

On the policy front it continues to be more of the same.

Bill Clinton is on record stating that he got bad advice from Rubin and his handpicked successor, Lawrence Summers, on derivatives regulation: “On derivatives, yeah, I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take it,” Clinton told ABC News last April 10…

Rubin and Summers were responsible for forcing Brooksley Born out of the Clinton administration because as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission she had the temerity to suggest regulating the mortgage-backed securities that eventually proved to be so toxic. Instead, Rubin and Summers pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed into law in his last month in office, categorically exempting those suspect derivatives from any government regulation.

By then, Rubin had moved on to a $15-million-a-year job at Citigroup, which became a prime exploiter of the subprime housing market. As a result of its massive involvement with toxic securities, Citigroup, with Rubin in a leading role until early 2009, had to be bailed out by the federal government with a $45 billion direct investment and a guaranteed Fed protection for $306 billion in potentially toxic assets…

There is much more, and I haven’t even touched on Rubin’s shameful role in Enron’s shenanigans. Enough said, though, to question not only Zakaria’s journalism but, far more important, Barack Obama’s leadership in first turning to Rubin as a key campaign adviser and then putting his disciples in charge of the U.S. economy.

Conrad Black and Julius Caesar have something in common. Both live or lived in legally rough times. Justice in republican Rome was arbitrary, partial, prejudiced, and infected with political vengeance.

It was said that a Roman governor had three years to make a governorship profitable: one year to pay back the bribes that got him his office, another year to make the profit, and a third year to make enough to pay the lawyers to defend him through the inevitable trials which would accompany his return to Rome.

Conrad Black was sentenced to six and a half years on the basis of a law that was recently quashed by the US Supereme Court. The prosecution had alleged that revenues from a non-competition clause in his contract of sale of his shareholdings in his company, a clause which was approved by tax lawyers, accountants and his own board of directors, was a crime of failing to offer his shareholders his “honest services”. His conviction is an ongoing scandal. Unable to prove anything criminal by recourse to ordinary statute law, the prosecutors had to rely on a badly worded paragraph that allowed prosecutors to invent what can be called “common-law crimes”, which is a polite way of saying: making it up as you go along. 

The legal risks of doing business in the United States are enormous and not sufficiently appreciated by outsiders.

The United States has a culture of rough politics, and it is getting rougher. It bears comparison with the politics of the late Roman republic. Law has become an instrument of oppression of members of the “senatorial” as well as of the knightly and plebeian classes. Prosecutions follow no principle. The risk of being a member of the board of a corporation are so high that a great deal of money must be spent on litigation insurance.

The near obsession with legal considerations in the United States is not the sign of progress or enlightenment that Americans think it is. Rather, it is the sign that the powers of one privileged class of people, the lawyers, are becoming so great that normal human or business considerations are being subordinated to the purely legal issues of litigation and prosecution risk. The more the uncertainty, the greater their powers as a class.

It would not take a genius to reckon that the powers of priests in 17th century Spain were too great; that the whole society was becoming distorted by religious fanaticism. Likewise in the United States, and increasingly in Canada, the lawyerly class is exercising too much power. Social and business relations are being driven into a narrow legal focus, where the question becomes “what is legal”, rather than “what should we do?”.

A society built on laws is becoming lawless, and I would argue it is becoming lawless because it constantly turns to law for solutions that should come from social consensus, trust, and host of other personal and political virtues. Any partial truth held to be the whole truth becomes a lie.

Conrad Black’s contention is that about a quarter or more of the intelligent labour of the United States is unproductively employed in finance, law and accounting. The reduction of legal risk would liberate many of these people for more productive employment. For the first time in my life, just this past weekend, I started to wonder about the safety of the republic, and its future. The lesson from Julius Caesar is that when the politics get too rough, when the stakes both personal and financial get too high, then some man of talent will eventually say “enough!”, and neutralize the Senate.

Facts.

1. But while 76% of Mainstream voters think the United States should continue to build the fence, 67% of the Political Class are opposed to it.

2. Missouri Health Care Freedom, Proposition C aims to block the federal government from requiring people to buy health insurance and bans punishment for those without health insurance.  It was approved by 72.7% of the electorate.

3. A Rasmussen Reports survey “finds that just 28% of voters believe increased government spending is good for the economy….  This suggests that for 72% of voters, asking about a trade-off between cutting spending and helping the economy doesn’t make sense. A look at the demographics shows that the trade-off makes sense for only one group– the Political Class.  Among that group, 67% believe increased government spending would be good for the economy.”

It seems Obama learns something new everyday.  The bombing in Uganda by al Qaeda led him to make this statement.

In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups’ willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist.

It has taken this long for this citizen-of-the-world to realize that Muslims are racist?  Perhaps he missed this news report from 2004.

A Sunni insurgent in Baghdad has revealed how black British and American soldiers are being targeted by anti-coalition forces.

Abu Mujahed, who used a pseudonym, declared that black soldiers are a particular target. “To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation,” said the Sunni who also works in a Government ministry.

He told the Guardian reporter, Jason Burke: “Some-times we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes.”

And this guy is suppose to be intelligent and, given his background, knowledgeable about cultural norms of the world?   Perhaps NASA can give the Muslims some sensitivity training.

The White House  tosses NASA administrator Charles Bolden under the bus and flees from his presidentially-assigned  “outreach to Muslim nations” mission so fast, they’re red-shifting:

American diplomats concerned they’re being replaced by NASA employees, breathe easy: The Space agency and its administrator, Charles Bolden, are not responsible for reaching out to the Muslim world after all.

[...]

… White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, “That was not his task, and that’s not the task of NASA.”

Having taken only one week to achieve, this reversal may be the fastest Obama initiative yet.

President Obama orders NASA to help make Muslims happier about their decline in the sciences:

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation’s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.”  Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is “perhaps foremost,” because it will help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

[...]

“NASA is not only a space exploration agency,” Bolden concluded, “but also an earth improvement agency.”

And so America itself declines from space pioneer to global psychotherapist.

I ask you, who will rid us of this meddlesome priest-king?!

UPDATE

Behold the contrast, a real American President who speaks to the genuine hopes and pride of his nation:

And Dr. Charles Krauthammer hits smartly for six in his rebuke:

After the 1996 election, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole met in the Oval Office.    Dole protested that Clinton’s attack ads claiming the Republican wanted to harm Medicare were untrue.  Clinton just smiled and said “You gotta do what you gotta do.”  Now it seems Clinton has extended that reasoning to Sen. Byrd.

“He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, what does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows from West Virginia. He was trying to get elected,” former President Bill Clinton said of Sen. Robert Byrd.

One of the issues that has diminished the efficiency of the cleanup is the reluctance on part of Obama to suspend the Jones Act,  which Bush did after Hurricane Katrina and Rita.   This reluctance is obviously in deference to his union base.  This week we will find how closely he is bonded to his union base as this foreign ship makes its way to Gulf of Mexico.

With no assurances it will be allowed to join the Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleanup, a Taiwanese-owned ship billed as the world’s largest skimming vessel was preparing to sail Friday evening to the scene of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The ship — the length of 3 1/2 football fields and 10 stories high — is designed to collect up to 500,000 barrels of oily water a day through 12 vents on either side of its bow. It docked in Norfolk en route to the Gulf from Portugal, where it was retrofitted to skim the seas. The ship and its crew of 32 were to leave Virginia waters Friday evening…

Its owners claim the ship could gulp oily water at a daily rate that nearly matches the skimming total to date in the Gulf.

It would seem so and she is already engaged in preemptive planning.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is asking supporters for contributions to help prevent the “subpoenas and investigations” that would result from a GOP majority.

In his short reign as the US president Obama has been compared to Lincoln, Kennedy and Roosevelt.   Lofty heights indeed and all this when he was just sworn in.  At that time Obama very proudly pontificated how he was going to have a “Team of Rivals” in his cabinet, in a manner analogous to Lincoln’s wartime cabinet.  How is that working out O?  In the aftermath of the Rolling Stone interview by Gen. McChrystal, The Corner notes this.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal should not lose his job because of the article about him in Rolling Stone magazine. If anyone deserves blame for the latest airing of the administration’s internal feuds over Afghanistan, it is President Obama.

For months Obama has tolerated deep divisions between his military and civilian aides over how to implement the counterinsurgency strategy he announced last December. The divide has made it practically impossible to fashion a coherent politico-military plan, led to frequent disputes over tactics and contributed to a sharp deterioration in the administration’s relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The virtue of the Rolling Stone article is that Obama may finally have to confront the trouble. But the dismissal of McChrystal would be the wrong outcome. It could spell disaster for the military campaign he is now overseeing in southern Afghanistan, and it would reward those in the administration who have been trying to undermine him, including through media leaks of their own.

Was this interview with George Stephanopoulos a Freudian slip?

Sen. Barack Obama’s foes seized Sunday upon a brief slip of the tongue, when the Democratic presidential nominee was outlining his Christianity but accidentally said, “my Muslim faith.”

The three words — immediately corrected — were during an exchange with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week,” when he was trying to criticize the quiet smear campaign suggesting he is a Muslim.

This report would certainly seem to confirm that.

“The American President told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.”

That was the claim of Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, as reported in the May 2010 issue of Israel Today. According to journalist Avi Lipkin, Gheit appeared on Nile TV’s “Round Table Show” in January, on which he said that “he had had a one-on-one meeting with Obama who swore to him that he was a Moslem, the son of a Moslem father and step-son of Moslem step-father, that his half-brothers in Kenya were Moslems, and that he was loyal to the Moslem agenda.”

Obama allegedly said this in the context of reassuring Gheit that he would soon deal with Israel:

He asked that the Moslem world show patience. Obama promised that once he overcame some domestic American problems (Healthcare) [sic], that he would show the Moslem world what he would do with Israel.

Could this be true? Even if Gheit’s claim isn’t true, or was misreported, every country in the free world must be cognizant of the catastrophic sea change that has taken place in the leadership of the free world — as witnessed by events over the past year. Barack Obama took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and yet whether he is a Muslim or not, he has undeniably gone around the world promoting Islam and Sharia (Islamic law).