Recently in All Hail His Obamaness Category

I just finished watching the State Of My Chances To Get Re-Elected The Union address. It sounded pretty, full of all kinds of hopeful rhetoric and broad promises.

In other words, typical of an Obama campaign speech.

One of the things I did to amuse myself during the 1 hour and 5 minutes of the speech was keep track of how many times the president uttered certain words. I have three main word groups I tracked, those being I/Me, Fair/Fairness/Fair Share/Fair Shot, and We. Here are the totals with one caveat: I may have missed a few.

I/Me: 52

Fair/Fairness/Fair Share/Fair Shot: 7

We: 74

I did not include such words as 'My' in the I/Me group, though perhaps I should have as it could have easily pushed the total well past 70. And as I was listening I had to ponder whether it would have been prudent to split the 'We' into to separate groupings, with the first grouping being the plural noun and the second the royal 'We'. But then I would have had to pay even closer attention to the speech and I was too damn lazy to do that.

Very little surprises me about the ever more nonsensical, illogical, and incompetent Obama Administration. Two of the latest examples of this dysfunction: federal fines placed upon fuel companies for failure to blend certain biofuels in gasoline and diesel even though those biofuels don't exist; and new regulations imposed by NOAA that seriously cripple the New England fishing industry even though the need for those restrictions cannot be justified.

With every move Obama and his minions make we move closer to the dystopian hell of Atlas Shrugged. I figure it's only a matter of time before something like Directive 10-289 is handed down by executive order from Obama. (Don't think it won't happen. One clueless leftist on the WSJ Forums suggested stopping the economic abandonment of California by otherwise viable businesses by making it illegal for them to relocate out of state or to trim jobs. Others on the forum informed this idiot that such a thing is tantamount to slavery and illegal seizure of private property without due process or just compensation - the 13th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution, respectively. But then the Left doesn't really like the Constitution, does it?)

Because stupid things like this have been happening a little bit at a time, most of the people in the US don't realize it's happening. But if Obama tried to shove his agenda down our throats overnight there would be armed rebellion by the states and a Second Civil War could result. Except this time it wouldn't be North versus South but Red versus Blue.

Yes, I know it's Christmas Eve. I could easily do a feel-good Christmas story since there are appear to be a plethora of them out there this year. But that smacks far too much of me-too-ism. And while I am just as guilty as many bloggers out there of doing that from time to time, I don't want to do that today. No siree. Instead, I'm going to focus on something incredibly stupid that only a government bureaucracy could pull off.

To which government bureaucracy am I referring?

The EPA.

Let's face it folks, it has become a force for interfering in the business of America, which is business. Nonsense rules with little scientific backing or study have done more to harm our economic revival than just about any other Obama mechanism. It is one of the few federal agencies that can promote two contradictory views at the same time, all in the name of "protecting the environment."

One of the latest B.S directives deals with mercury, specifically mercury emitted by coal-burning power plants. Never mind that the amount of mercury emitted at present is miniscule and that to reduce it even more has reached the point of diminishing returns. But then the EPA also has no concerns for the mercury contained in CFL bulbs which can expose the populace to levels of mercury magnitudes of order higher than what comes out of the smokestack of a power plant.

See? Two contradictory stances at the same time. But then the EPA has an agenda that us purely political, one that ignores science. It's all about feel-good rules that do nothing to protect the environment from real threats while harping on minutiae.

One of the other things the EPA ignores about atmospheric mercury: most of it reaching the ground in the US comes from China. We have no control over Chinese emissions and I doubt very much they'll listen to Obama's EPA. (Obama lost credibility with the Chinese quite some time ago.) China will do what it needs to do to expand its economy and if that means ignoring mercury emissions that affect countries on the other side of the Pacific.

This isn't the first time the EPA has tried to control effects of emissions from outside the US with ridiculous rules that have little effect of the environment but cost businesses in the US millions, if not billions of dollars to implement. This kind of useless bureaucratic incompetence (or malfeasance) must end.

Don Surber gives us a list of the Ten Things Obama Got Wrong, though I think he could have easily gone well past ten to fifty or a hundred.

A few of my favorites:

2. He got Obamacare wrong. Along those lines, President Obama saw how Hillarycare went and decided to do the opposite. Or likely more accurately, the president heard that Hillary lost on health care because it was written in the White House. He decided he would do it differently and have it written by Congress. This was a formula for failure because he lost control of the bill. This meant he was putting his name and reputation on the line for something he never wrote. And what was written was a mess.

Don acts as if this were unusual for the Presdient, but it's not. Most of the programs and ideas and other acts he should have handled himself he handed off to his czars or Pelosi & Reid. In effect, he phoned it in, voting 'present' when his position doesn't really allow him to do that. Then again, that's how he's handled things most of his adult life. Why change now?

3. He got the economy wrong. He overestimated its strength and went full-speed ahead with spending. Budgets for agencies were doubled as liberals wanted to have a field day regulating everything. But tax revenues tanked. That $400 billion deficit he campaigned against tripled. Guess what? The public noticed. So did S&P. He is now President Downgrade.

No argument there. But then he has no real understanding of how an economy works, only how it's supposed to work according to Leftist ideology. Too bad for him the economy itself shows just how wrong Leftist economics can be. Not that I expect him to learn that lesson as he's not exactly known for being open minded, particularly when it come to anything that conflicts with his beliefs.

4. He got the stimulus wrong. The $787 billion stimulus was a grab bag of political kickbacks papered over with an unnecessary, ineffective and ill-advised tax cut. The unemployment rate would have gone to 9% if we do nothing, he said. We did something and it hit 10%. Again, people noticed.

If every penny of that stimulus had been spent on upgrading or repairing infrastructure, then it's possible the economy could have been turned around. (I still have doubts about that, but I'm willing to admit I could be wrong.) But of all that money, only $55 billion was spent on infrastructure. That's just under 7% of the total stimulus. Seven percent. Where did the rest go? To cronies and supporters who had more to do with creating this lengthy on-going recession than helping us get out of it.

One last one:

10. He got TV wrong. It's called overexposure.

I think just about everyone is sick and tired of seeing him read from his teleprompter, particularly since he's not really saying anything new. It doesn't help that he's now been on the presidential campaign trail for 4 years since he really doesn't know how to do anything else.

Is it possible Booing might get its way in regards to the NLRB action trying to block it from opening its new Dreamliner plant in South Carolina? If this AP report is accurate, the answer might be yes.

However, this 'win' for Boeing might be a Pyrrhic victory as it was contingent upon a new four year bargaining agreement with the Machinists union.

The National Labor Relations Board filed a lawsuit earlier this year alleging that Boeing violated labor laws by opening the South Carolina line. The agency claimed that Boeing was punishing Washington state workers for past strikes and said the company should return the work to Washington. Boeing has vigorously denied the charges, claiming it opened the South Carolina plant for valid economic reasons.

The agreement would call for the new 737 Max aircraft to be built at union facilities in Renton, Wash., said Tom Wroblewski, president of Machinists Union District 751.

Wroblewski said that if union members vote to approve the deal in the coming weeks, the union would inform the NLRB that it has no further grievances with Boeing.

The article goes on to say that since the union no longer has a grievance against Boeing, the NLRB would likely stop pursuing the case. (Even if it does, that doesn't mean the NLRB wouldn't pursue it some future time should the "need" arise...like another negotiation for a union contract.)

I have to ask whether the lawsuit filed on behalf of the union by the NLRB was nothing more than leverage for the union to get a better deal. After all, two of the three sitting members in the NLRB are staunch union supporters, with one of them a former administrator for the SEIU.

Something stinks about this whole thing, something legally actionable if it turns out the NLRB acted against Boeing at the behest of union leaders in order to gain an advantage at the bargaining table. Since we can't count on either the Department of Labor or the Justice Department to investigate this matter, maybe it's time for Congress to step in. It would have to be the House rather than the Senate as a majority of the Senate is beholden the the unions and would be unlikely to allow such an action to take place.

I saw this ad on TV for the first time the other night. It's to the point and describes our fiscal problems in language even Congress and Obama can understand.


Our government is addicted to spending money we don't have, the same disease that has been such a big affliction in the EU.

I find it interesting that President Obama sincerely believes that those of us Americans still working have gotten lazy.

WTF?

I don't know about you, but all three of us here at The Manse are working our butts off. Deb is working at the local veteran's home and going to nursing school. BeezleBub is going to school, taking part in some extracurricular activities, and working at the farm. Me, I'm working, working, and..umm...working.

What it comes down to is that he doesn't think we're working hard enough to support his socialist agenda. This requires people to give selflessly by working harder to support those who can't work and more specifically, those who won't work.

When productivity from those of us starts falling off it's somehow our fault. Never mind that all he's done is given those of us still working more than enough incentive to not work nearly as hard as we have in the past. After all, why should we? All he's going to do is take it away from us.

How do we know this? Because he's said as much during the beginning of his still ongoing presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber?)

It must be remembered that socialism is based upon two principles: envy, and the belief in altruism.

Of the first, it is envy by those who actually produce little or nothing who have been told that those actually producing the wealth are somehow beholden to them. It usually takes the form of class warfare egged on by the very people who see themselves above all of that. (They aren't.)

The Left sells the idea that the best way to make sure everyone has what they need is to take it away from those who actually provide it. The problem is that eventually the providers will decide it's no longer worth it to do so and they'll stop doing it. Then who benefits? Obviously, no one.

Second, socialist believe big time in altruism, that human condition where individuals put aside their own wants and needs for the benefits of others. There's a problem with this belief: no one can be altruistic all the time because by nature humans are altruistic only now and then, and then only under very specific and limited conditions for a very limited amount of time. Once their 'altruism' starts hurting them and their families it fades away. If we need any proof of that all we need to do is look at the two biggest experiments in socialism to see how well the belief in altruism fared: the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Both tried it for generations. Both failed to live up to the ideal. One utterly collapsed when their socialist economy collapsed like the house of cards that it was. The other one gave up on the idea when they watched what happened to their neighbor and decided they didn't want to suffer the same fate. They backed away from the socialist 'ideal' and embraced a limited form of capitalism, and so were saved (at least for now).

But now we have a president who has been working very hard to take us towards an ideology that has failed by appealing to ideals that have been proven to be false, and in the end, deadly. And he baits those who actually provide jobs, goods, and services by telling them they aren't working hard enough?

What a putz.

I'm beginning to wonder if President Obama will end up being the president to issue more executive orders than any other. It certainly seems he's headed that way.

With his latest I-won't-waste-my-time-going-through-Congress-to-get-this-passed edict that changes the entire student loan system, including payment caps and 'forgiveness' clauses, he shows he really doesn't like the rule of law. Not surprising for an Alinskyite leftist trying to buy his re-election through giveaways to the naïve and willfully ignorant.

But I still am not sure whether his actions are made through ignorance of how the real world works coupled with incompetence, or through the belief in a failed ideology of greed, envy, and elitism, i.e. Marxism. I'm not sure which would be worse, unless it's a combination of both.

One would think that if the Obama Administration was serious about jobs that it would at least make sure that it didn't do anything to make it more difficult for those Americans who are fortunate enough to still have jobs to actually get to work.

Just before 3 this afternoon I received a phone call from my missus, informing me she was stuck in traffic on her way to work. As she described it, there were dozens of police cars blocking traffic as a series of limousines, vans, and large SUVs made their way along US Route 3 and Interstate 93 in Tilton, New Hampshire. Traffic was blocked for quite some time, making it impossible for anyone to get where they were going. As it is the missus made it to work late.

It wasn't until later that she found out the cause for the massive traffic tie-up: Vice President Joe Biden.

It appears he was here in the Granite State for two purposes - file papers on behalf of President Obama for the upcoming New Hampshire Primary, and promote the President's dead-on-arrival jobs bill Biden claims will prevent a rise in violent crime. Never mind that his little trip caused a number of still-working Americans here in New Hampshire to be late getting to work or getting home from work.

One does not promote jobs growth by preventing those who still have them from getting to them.

One would think the level of PDS would abate after a while, but it hasn't. The vitriol aimed at Sarah Plain hasn't done anything except grow amongst the leftist shills and drones, at least to judge by the comments made to this article at the Daily Caller wondering if Sarah was on the verge of announcing a run for President.

One would think the shills would at least come up with new claims, but they've been reduced to recycling the same old (and disproven) fabrications. You know the ones:

She's so stupid that she said she could see Russia from her house!

The only reason she's doing what she's been doing is because she's lazy and wants the money.

She's a quitter. She couldn't handle the job of governor.

Trig isn't her kid.

She's in the pocket of Big Oil.

Bristol got pregnant in retaliation for Sarah not aborting Trig.

The list goes on and on, ad nauseum.

One particular commenter kept making the point again and again that she quit her office as governor just to make money. I saw her comment at least a dozen times, meaning she was "pulling a Harrop", named after a regular commenter on the Wall Street Journal opinion section who used copy and paste again and again and again as if repetition would somehow make his words true.

This was the comment I wanted to post, but Daily Caller's comment system, Disqus, was having issues and I wasn't able to post. So here's my response:

Some of the commenters keep calling Palin a quitter because she stepped down as governor. Not once have you mentioned the real reason why she stepped down, have you? Let me refresh your memory since yours appears to be defective.

She quit because her legal fees were bankrupting her and her family. Frivolous ethics lawsuits were filed by a group of thirteen Alaskan Democrats (with help from the DNC). Under Alaskan law she had to cover her own legal fees. Answering those lawsuits took up almost 100% of her time and the time of her staff, meaning she couldn't govern. Those lawsuits were filed just for that reason - to make it impossible for her to govern. It doesn't matter that every single one of those lawsuits were found to be without merit and were eventually dismissed. Every single one of them. But that didn't mean she didn't end up with legal fees exceeding $500,000.

Since then Alaskan law has been changed which now covers the governor's legal fees for such legal proceedings. That didn't help Governor Palin as she still had to pay the fees she accrued during that time. Were you in that position would you have stayed in office even though it would leave your family destitute? Somehow I doubt it.

I have no doubts my words will in no way sway you true believers in Palin's laziness and greed because you have proven yourselves again and again incapable of independent thought. You can only think along those lines your programmers allow. Heaven forbid you should stray from the party line and think for yourself.

Basically, they've got nothing new while Plain has been showing she's far smarter than much of the left has ever given her credit for and has better handle on how things work than the present occupant of the White House. And that scares the Democrats to death.

Too bad.

I'm beginning to wonder how many times Obama and his advisers will have to hear this message before they come to understand it, if at all: the American Jobs Act won't induce employers to hire new workers.

I've discussed the issue of tax incentives as a goad of hiring a number of times with some of my more liberal friends or acquaintances, few of whom don't seem to understand the reason why businesses hire more workers. They can't seem to grasp the concept that no amount of tax cuts will induce any business owner to hire an employee they don't need. Adding an worker who adds nothing to the bottom line, meaning one who does not create more income for the business than it costs to employ them, makes no sense and causes the business to lose money even with the tax cut incentive.

Message to Obama et al: Businesses hire workers when they can't meet the demand for goods or services with the employees they already have. Period.

So endith the lesson.

Way to go, Mister Hoffa! Let's see about bringing the unions back to their head-bashing, leg-breaking hey-days, shall we?

I guess he didn't get the memo about being more civil during political discourse. But then the unions are on the ropes and not finding much in the way of support from the public these days, so perhaps violent rhetoric is the only tool he and other union leaders have left.

It didn't help that Obama's Labor Day speechifying took place in that bastion of decades long Democrat machine politics and union hegemony, Detroit. As one wag put it, it appears Obama wants to do for the rest of the country what has been done for/to Detroit.

Thanks, but no thanks. I think we'll do much better without that kind of help.

The August jobless numbers came out yesterday and for once the results were not unexpected (at least not to anyone not in the Obama Administration).

Job growth for the month of August was zero. Nada. Zip. A Goose Egg. Nil. Bupkus.

The stock market reacted negatively, again not unexpectedly, dropping over 200 points and wiping out the week's gains.

Obama and his 'advisers' wonder why the job numbers are bad when anyone with a lick of sense could tell them that everything they've been doing has discouraged job growth, just the opposite of what they claim they want.

I expect the final job numbers will actually be worse, with a negative growth and an increase in the official unemployment rate to 9.2%. (Remember, the unofficial rate - approximately 19% - includes those who have run out of unemployment benefits or have given up looking for work altogether.)

That ought to help Obama get re-elected.

Listening to the plans President Obama has made to address the jobs problem, it is no surprise to anyone that he really doesn't have a plan, or at least not a new one.

If his $878 billion stimulus program had been used to actually address a number of problems within the country, those primarily being our crumbling infrastructure, rather than using it for political patronage, we might not have as much of an economic problem as we presently face. But far too many of us knew very little of that money would be used to stimulate anything but the growth of the federal government.

Will Obama's September 8^th speech try to make a case for spending even more money we don't have to pay for more political patronage? If history is any indication, then the answer is likely yes.

What the president really needs to do (but won't) is to rein in his renegade agency heads (NLRB or EPA, anyone?) who are making sure it's damn difficult for anyone to create jobs...except for government jobs.

What the president needs to do is to get the government out of the way of free enterprise to let it do what it does best - create jobs.

What the president needs to do is fire all his czars and advisers because, quite frankly, they have no idea what they're doing. Most of them are academics with little, if any, real world experience doing things like running businesses or meeting payrolls or dealing with an ever increasing avalanche of government regulations and paperwork that does nothing but cost time and money to deal with yet add little of benefit to anyone except bureaucrats.

What the president needs to do is realize that one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, was right when he said to America "Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem."

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American peoples' lives. After all, everyone in government is having a hard enough time running their own lives, let alone those of 300,000,000 other people in this country. Every government that has tried to do so has ultimately failed, resulting in widespread misery. Quite often those governments end with fatal results for members of those governments.

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one, is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American economy. History is littered with plenty of examples to show this is true. Unfortunately the president and many in Congress have ignored this truth, figuring that this time they'll get it right. (They won't.)

All I expect from the president during his speech is more of the same old crap he's taken from the FDR, LBJ, and Karl Marx playbooks, just put in new wrappings and hyped by the Lame Stream Media.

In other words, "There's nothing to see here, folks. Move along!"

I don't know about you, but I know I'm tired of hearing the uninformed trying to mislead the rest of us about our energy reserves, energy technologies (particularly proven technologies), and so-called "green" energy, which is anything but. They push untruths in an effort to fundamentally change America even though it is in no one's best interests (except theirs) to do so. Do they really think they're saving anything other than the last vestiges of a morally bankrupt and failed ideology?

Probably.

Just listen to this and you'll probably get angry at them, and particularly The One.


(H/T Maggie's Farm)

"Never have so few, done so much, to hurt so many."

       -Epitaph for the Obama presidency (2009-2012).

   

What is it about President Obama that he cannot stop campaigning? You would think that once he won the election in 2008 that he would be able to switch from campaign mode to governing mode, but no, it appears he was never able to make that transition.

Maybe it's because all he's done since he ran for office in Illinois is campaign, starting at the state level and working his way all the to the White House. He's been in the office of the highest elected official in the country, the pinnacle of any political career, and he can't stop campaigning.

From the day of his inauguration all his speeches have sounded more like stump speeches rather than Presidential speeches.

The very first speech he gave as President - his inaugural speech - sounded like a campaign speech, slamming his predecessor for 'everything that had gone wrong'. Never mind that no newly inaugurated president has ever done that before, particularly when his predecessor was standing nearby.

His State of the Union addresses have been anything but, being more about him and what he was going to do rather than being about he state of our nation. (His first SOTU speech used the word "I" 96 times and "me" 8 times. George Bush's last SOTU speech used "I" 39 times and "me" 2 times.) It was yet another campaign speech, meaningless noise quickly forgotten.

Now he's out on the stump again, this time in a $1 million+ tour bus (built in Canada), telling us yet again what he's going to to. Not that he's telling anyone how he'll do what he's promised (he never does), but he'll place the blame on the GOP for his failures, past, present, and future. It's interesting that he blames the GOP for his failures in 2009 ans 2010 even though for both of those years he had a solid Democrat majority in both the House and the Senate. His failures are his and his alone because he's incapable of leading.

He has not shown one iota of leadership, leaving all the heavy lifting to Congress, his czars, and his advisers. He has not presented an acceptable budget since he took office. He let Nancy and Harry put together that odious piece of legislation known derisively as ObamaCare and signed the bill even though it would do nothing more than destroy one of the greatest health care systems in the world, all in the name of "fairness". (One has to wonder what the word actually means to Obama, because I doubt it means the same thing to him and his progressive cronies as it does to the other 300 million+ Americans.)

And so the Neverending Campaign continues.

Since this seems to be "Video Saturday", I figured I'd add this one by Felonious Monk. Felonious addresses the debt crisis and tells Barack Obama to get off his butt and "pay your f***in' bills!".

WARNING! Felonious uses rather...umm...colorful language, so if you have any small children around I would suggest asking them to leave or to wait until they've gone off to bed this evening.

After all the dire predictions 'they' made about what would happen if Congress didn't raise the debt limit, it turns out they were wrong.

The President got his debt limit increase, but the stock market and at least one financial institution - Standard & Poor's - apparently didn't see it as a solution, and rightfully so. The stock market headed downwards, wiping out a year's worth of gains. Standard & Poor's is still threatening to drop the government's credit rating from AAA to AA or AA+ because of the government's continuing spendthrift ways.

The increase in the debt limit didn't solve the problem we're facing. It merely delayed the inevitable. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee offered an analogy that illustrated the problem perfectly.

Raising the debt limit solves the government's spending problem like raising the maximum legal blood alcohol content will solve the drunk driving problem.

I'd say he nailed it.

The pols in Washington are still going at it hammer and thongs, and after weeks of debate and rhetoric they have been unable to come up with a workable compromise about the debt ceiling, out of control government spending, and a push to raise taxes.

But a group of five ordinary citizens were able to work out how to solve the problem in only an hour.


It seems to me we've been looking in the wrong place to find the answers needed to fix this problem. Some will claim their solutions are overly simplistic and overlook the nuances and complexities of the problem. But that is the problem. Those 'nuances and complexities' are what make it seem impossible to solve the problems. The folks in Washington tend to forget that no matter what they do, someone somewhere is going to be inconvenienced or hurt. The trick is that maybe we have to ignore that situation or any solution will be impossible. And then everyone will be hurt, possibly to a level not seen since the Great Depression. That is no solution.

What say you?