At the conclusion of Newt Gingrich’s speech as CPAC a colleague and I discussed the Republican chances for the White House. That day we heard from Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt and we both agreed that winning in the fall should not be hard. But a couple of conditions had to be met.

The most important condition of all was that no matter who won the nomination, we all had to coalesce behind the nominee and fight hard to win. What that means is that Mitt and Newt have to stop the scorched earth personal attacks. So far, Santorum has avoided getting down in the mud, but with his new ascendancy, he will now be a prime target. Stop it and stop it now. It’s not about you. It’s about dislodging the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Tell us about your vision and stop hanging labels on each other. Forget the polls showing Obama beating all comers. In January 1980, Gallup had Carter beating Reagan 63% – 32%. This is how Time magazine saw it March of that year:

National opinion polls continue to show Carter leading Reagan by an apparently comfortable margin of about 25%. They also show that more moderate Republicans like Ford would run better against the President. This suggests that Reagan is not the strongest G.O.P. choice for the November election and that he clearly faces an uphill battle. . .

Carter, for all his problems, has the power of incumbency. As President, he can react to challenges by changing the direction of the whole Government, which he has done recently by attempting to balance the budget in the coming fiscal year, a course urged by all Republican candidates. Carter is an undeniably deft—and extremely lucky—politician. He also is a relatively known quantity in the White House, whereas the inexperienced Reagan would require a definite leap of faith by voters supporting him. Says Northwestern University Political Scientist Louis Masotti: “There’s a variation on the old cliché: you don’t change horses’ asses in midstream. You’ve got one, and at least you know its contours.”

Newt Gingrich

Gingrich was on his game at CPAC. He clearly outlined what he would do, within hours, of taking the oath of office. It was vintage Newt. It was Contract with America stuff and the crowd ate it up. This is the good Newt, who is very good. Besides putting down the sword against Romney, Newt needs to clean out his closet. Whatever he did for Freddie Mac, whether good or bad, get it out there now. Just saying you were a consultant is not enough. You can bet the Democrats know what he did and if it looks bad they will protect it like it is gold in anticipation of Newt winning the nomination. Then they will devise a scheme, with their allies in the main stream media, to release it about two weeks before the general election so that it will have maximum negative impact against Gingrich and the Republicans.

If Gingrich can get any bad news out now it will die down and be old news by election day. There is a risk, that it may kill his chance at the nomination, but for the sake of the country, it is better sooner than later.

Rick Santorum

Santorum has done a good job of laying out the moral argument for his candidacy. He has to shift his focus more on where he wants to take America rather than in the dismal place we find ourselves. He has to take a cue from Reagan and Thatcher and express an optimism that will engage his fellow Americans.

He has to avoid joining the Romney – Gingrich food fight. So far he has stayed above the fray, but he is climbing in the polls and that makes him a prime target, particularly for the Romney attack machine. He has to stay clean and ride the wave of disgust that people are feeling for all the mud-slinging.

Mitt Romney

Romney has to stop the attacks. He seems to be the one to fire the first spit ball. In one of the debates, when Santorum called for a ceasefire, Gingrich seemed inclined to go along, but Mitt couldn’t resist one last shot, which Gingrich naturally could not leave alone and off we went. Negative campaigning does work up to the point where we become sick of it and then it is a pox upon all your houses.

Romney also has to loosen up and lose his perpetual sunny disposition, that seems somewhat manufactured. It would be refreshing to see him without the perpetual smile and see some genuine concern for his fellow Americans who are having a tough time. If he doesn’t connect with the common folks, he will never climb above the 25% or so that typically vote for him.

Coming Together and Being Gracious

To get everyone to close ranks behind the eventual winner, we need to care for the ultimate losers. Toward that end I would like to propose a fallback job for each of the four remaining candidates in the administration of the winner. Here they are.

For Ron Paul, I would suggest appointing him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. He could then freely find out what the heck they are doing there and make recommendations up to and including ending the Fed. For Newt Gingrich, I would suggest appointing him UN Ambassador. What better way to follow up a speech by Ahmadinejad than a critique by Gingrich destroying everything the little weasel said? For Rick Santorum, Secretary of State. He seems to understand there is more to the world than just the Middle East and that we have some work to do in our own hemisphere. For Romney, I would suggest Secretary of the Treasury. Bain Capital was not Goldman Sachs. I think between his finance background and his government executive experience as governor of Massachusetts, he could greatly help get us on the right track.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

They are still using the same tired rhetoric, about inheriting the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. The truth is that the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression is the Obama administration. Barack Obama stands with Herbert Hoover as the only presidents with negative job growth during their administrations. As if stuck in the 1930s, Obama dusted off FDR’s playbook, since he had no personal executive experience to draw on, and that playbook didn’t work then and it’s not working now.

So along comes an opportunity for a major “shovel ready” project, backed by unions, that can create thousands of jobs, move us closer to energy independence, help us depend less on getting oil from Middle East despots, and what does Obama do? He kills it. What he wanted to do, was defer a decision on this until after the election, eleven months away. He wanted to do what he does best, vote “present”.

Congress, particularly the Republicans who seem to be the only adults working on Capital Hill, included a provision in the payroll tax holiday extension, to make a decision within sixty days. People are hurting, gas prices are creeping up, unemployment benefits have been extended to extraordinary lengths, and this incompetent president says that sixty days was not enough time to review the proposal so he had to, sadly, reject it. Perhaps if he hadn’t played all those rounds of golf, perhaps if he had studied it a little closer instead of spending all that time in Hawaii, perhaps if he put this job creating proposal on the top of the EPA’s to-do list instead of their focusing on the job killing regulations to limit power plant emissions, he would have gotten his job done. But no, sorry, I don’t have my homework, teacher, I dunno, I forgot, my dog…. Enough!

Let China make an oil deal with Canada. We can always buy the oil back from them at a premium. Why not, they probably don’t have enough of our dollars as it is now. Why not give them more? This president is making decisions that will cobble together a coalition of supporters to get him reelected. This is about appeasing the environmental movement so that they won’t abandon him.

At an event in Ottumwa, Iowa, on Dec. 31, Rick Santorum mocked the idea that the pipeline posed the threat of environmental damage, noting that there were already many other pipelines in the area it would go through. “This is just, again, pandering to radical environmentalists who don’t want energy production, who don’t want us to burn more carbon,” Mr. Santorum said.

The State Department, which has authority over this since it goes between us and Canada, “said there was not enough time to draw a new route for the pipeline and assess the environmental harm.” Bullfeathers. It’s a 1700 mile pipeline. The area in question is a fraction of that length. Agree to the pipeline, get started hiring people and building it in areas not in dispute, and work to resolve the section in question. But unless it is killed, Obama risks losing the green vote and what is more important, America or Obama’s reelection?

I’d like to ask my Congressman, Tim Bishop, to weigh in. What do you have to say about this, Tim? Or are you too busy manufacturing your own campaign issue around outsourced phone center jobs. If jobs are really important to you, you would stand up and challenge Obama for killing an opportunity for good, high paying, union jobs in America. On the other hand you can stay silent, not challenge President Obama’s error and risk his ire and possibly lose campaign funds and support. So what do you stand for, Tim? Putting America first or putting your interests right up there with President Obama’s and above America’s.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Photo by shannonpatrick17

First we were told we had to pass the stimulus bill because if we didn’t unemployment would rise to 9%. The good news was that there were hundreds of shovel ready project raring to go. Later we learned that “shovel ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.” $800 billion dollars of squandered stimulus dollars later, unemployment is at 9%. But what about a real shovel ready project that doesn’t need taxpayer dollars?

There is a $7 billion project called Keystone XL that will build a pipeline from Canada to bring heavy crude oil to refineries in Texas and Oklahoma. It is estimated it will create 20,000 jobs. It will also help us rely less on oil from the unstable Middle East. The project needs the approval of the State Department because it crosses our northern border. That’s approval, not taxpayer funding. Okay, before all the environmentalists come out of their chairs,

In April 2010 and again this August, State produced multivolume environmental impact statements that concluded the pipeline would have “no significant impacts” on the environment. — Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2011

So in the midst of bus rides and hectoring us that we need to pass this jobs bill now (where have I heard that before?), Obama decides to vote “present”. He has pushed the decision on the Keystone pipeline out 12-18 months until after the 2012 election. He doesn’t want to lose the environmentalists by slipping on a banana. (BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). So expect to hear more about those “do nothing Republicans”. You know, those Republicans who have passed fifteen bills to help create jobs that Harry Reid in the Democrat controlled Senate will not even allow to come up for a vote. I can understand them opposing the Republicans. What I can’t understand is not voting on the bill either for or against. So who is really doing nothing? Say what you mean, mean what you say.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Photo by wstera2

Obama has a jobs plan, or so we are told. He will unveil it after he returns from Martha’s Vineyard. I hope it is a little more detailed than his budget plan to cut $4 trillion that no one can find by meticulously searching the Oval Office. I don’t even know what is in the plan and I have a better one. Stay in Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. President. Set a goal to play eighteen on every PGA sanctioned golf course in the country. Don’t you have some friends and family in Hawaii that miss you?

If we can just keep you out of Washington, so we’re not grappling with your non-leadership, leadership, things may not get a whole lot better until November 2012, but at least they might not get worse. Anyway, isn’t that your new campaign theme, “Just Imagine How Bad It Could Have Been! Vote Obama”?

Take North Carolina for example. Boeing opens a factory there to build its 787 Dreamliner. It hired 5,000 workers and they are ready to go. Then along comes our helpful friends in Washington from the National Labor Relations Board. They say, “Oh, no, this is retaliation. Boeing asked the unionized workers in Washington state for a moratorium on strikes and the union reasonably said they wanted Boeing to promise to never manufacture anywhere but Washington state and Boeing refused. How DARE they?!” So not only did Boeing add 3,000 jobs in Washington state, somehow opening up another factory in South Carolina, a Right to Work state, is retaliation. In an economy crawling along with unemployment stuck at north of 9% Washington is killing 5,000 jobs. When our intrepid leader, President Obama was asked about this he boldly proclaimed that the NLRB was an independent agency and his hands were tied. The President of the United States meekly says he is powerless against a panel of five bureaucrats.

If you asked some of those pesky evil Tea Party freshmen over in the House of Representatives who haven’t spent their entire lives in government service, they would probably say, give us a shot at it. First, we will drain their budget to $1; second tell Boeing to go ahead and make the NLRB’s day; and then sit back and see what action the NLRB will take with $1 in the petty cash drawer. Next step would be to legislate the Department of Labor out of existence, and the NLRB along with it. There are plenty of agencies in the individual states to take up any slack.

Other Award Winning Jobs Moves by the President

As we watch oil rig after oil rig sail out of the Gulf of Mexico to friendlier climes, the Obama administration’s mismanagement of the BP oil spill fiasco adds to the misery. Thousands of jobs were lost or put on hold. Trouble in the Middle East, disruption of oil production in Libya, we should increase domestic oil production but roadblocks to that keep getting thrown in the way. No, green energy is the answer as we watch another heavily subsidized solar energy company file for bankruptcy sending more workers to the unemployment line.

The American people are still waiting for GM stock to his $53 per share so we can break even on this wonderful investment. So how does Washington help? Let’s start by punching a bigger hole in the deficit by subsidizing the Chevy Volt to the tune of $7,500 per car in tax credits. Oh, that’s bad. No, that’s good. Chevy can’t sell them, so there won’t be much in the way of tax credit damage to the budget! Instead, the Obama administration comes out with new CAFE standards to require car companies to produce cars that get 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. If that doesn’t drive a stake through the heart of GM and Chrysler and saddle the American people with more debt, nothing will. With a $2,000 per car disadvantage over their foreign rivals GM and Chrysler are not going to be able to make small, light cars capable of this standard competitively. Well at least we’ll put those workers on unemployment slowly over the next 14 years.

How much more punishment can this economy take until we put President Obama on permanent retirement? So, please, Mr. President, I would rather you work on your golf handicap than give our economy more handicaps than it can handle.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

On the one side you have Barack Obama. On the other side you have a field of candidates who are fighting for the chance to take him on one to one. In that field of candidates there is a woman, with another in the wings, a black, and a number of white males with a great depth of experience. With Herman Cain saying, while embracing some Tea Party members, “To those who say the Tea Party is racist, eat your words.” The Democrats are desperate to find another way to create class warfare and divide and conquer. At the New Hampshire debate last night, they may have found their opening.

The moderator asked Herman Cain a question about a statement attributed to him that he would not hire any Muslims in his administration but, and here is the classic Democrat wedge, he would not apply any similar test to Christians or Jews. Cain, I believe, fumbled the question but he was picked up by Newt Gingrich who said, ““Now, I just want to go out on a limb here, I’m in favor of saying to people, ‘If you’re not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period. ‘” He then went on to compare that to similar tests for Nazis and Communists in earlier times.

Why Only Muslims?

Where Herman Cain dropped the ball was in not turning the question around and asking, “What other religious groups have members who have pledged to kill Americans, or any group for that matter? If you can point that out, I will add them to the list that needs closer scrutiny before joining my administration.” To back up what Gingrich said I need only point to Major Nidal Hasan. As a member of the military he had to take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Having taken that oath he later opened fire on his fellow Army personnel killing thirteen and wounding thirty others. On his business cards he had the abbreviation SoA, meaning soldier of Allah. His higher loyalty was to Allah and jihad, rather than to the Constitution of the United States.

This is what Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were talking about. They would not want such an individual in their cabinet, and why would they? To be politically correct? To apply the one-size-fits-all idiocy of the current administration and those on the left? Do we want to have anti-American jihadists in the administration that could compromise national security, endanger CIA field officers, tip off battle plans in the war on terror? Of course not.

So let’s nip this potential wildfire in the bud. Let’s not use the same stupid political correctness that performs body cavity searches on infants and gropes septuagenarian ladies at the airport, while skipping young men from the Middle East because the quota for scrutinizing young men from the Middle East has been reached. This is the thinking that will get Americans killed. But don’t look to the left to adopt policies that would put safety ahead of scoring political points.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Obama believes he has found the model for steering the chaos in the Middle East to peaceful democratic rule. Poland. But Obama ignores the historical events and players that surrounded that transformation from communist rule to independence.

Pope John Paul II was a Pole, and after being elected by the college of cardinals to be the Vicar of Christ, he wanted to return to visit his homeland. The atheist communists leaders were terrified of such a visit. Poland is a solidly Catholic country and the populace were thrilled that the first non-Italian pope since the sixteenth century was one of their own. The communists feared that the pope could come to Poland and spark an instant revolution with just one word.

The communists were in a box. They couldn’t deny the pope a visit for that could also spark an uprising. They had to allow it and then try to contain it. They could do the former, but not the latter. The nine day visit in 1979, gave hope to millions of Poles. One third of the country saw him in person with many more seeing him on television. He inspired them. They responded. They took back their freedom. Citizens United produced a video of this dramatic visit. Here is a trailer of that film.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obR-__x4-uE

But Obama gets it wrong. He ignores the spiritual aspect of the peaceful revolution. He ignores the support that the Polish people received from President Ronald Reagan. Instead, President Obama cancelled the deployment of a missle shield in Poland to curry favor with the Russians, whom the Poles loathe and fear. Rather than schedule a one-on-one meeting with Lech Walesa, another Nobel Peace Prize winner who actually accomplished something in the realm of peace before winning his prize, President Obama invited Walesa to meet with him as part of a group. Lech Walesa said, “It’s difficult to tell journalists what you’d like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won’t tell him, I won’t meet him, it doesn’t suit me.”

How does President Obama expect to transfer this historical event to the Middle East? There is no spiritual leader to inspire the people, and if there is, it will probably be to inspire them to kill non-Muslims. Let’s be frank. Quick, think of a name of a leader in the Muslim world who does not support jihad. When we think of leaders in the Muslim world the names that come to mind are bin Laden, Khomeini, Ahmadejinedad, et al. There are no doubt any number of peace loving Muslims leaders but they are either cowed into silence, or don’t have a strong following because their followers might fear for their lives.

Until peace loving Muslims, who want to coexist with people of other faiths around the world, step up and take back their religion and root out those who advocate death and jihad, the war on terror will continue. If such a leader would rise up, then perhaps President Obama might be onto something. The Poles, as courageous as their actions were, didn’t do it by themselves and the elements that were there for them, are not anywhere in Obama’s worldview.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

With gas prices on the rise, Bill O’Reilly, is once again targeting his favorite whipping boy, The Speculators. Like a 1940′s whodunit, we are told of those evil greedy speculators and how we need more government intervention to reign them in. The question that is never asked nor answered is, where do the speculators go when gas prices fall? If their evil intent is to drive up prices so they can make obscene profits, why would they ever stop?

It was only about three years ago when gas prices were similarly on the rise. The O’Reilly Factor was all over the speculators and how they were greedy, selfish, and had to be stopped. But from June 2008 to December 2008 the price of a gallon of regular gasoline dropped from $3.99 to $1.66 and no mention was made about the speculators. Why? Did they disappear? No.

The speculators were still there, but this time they were driving prices down. Huh? Speculators don’t care if the price goes up or the price goes down. All they care about is that the price moves in the direction they predict it will. If speculators predict prices will rise because of supply and demand, which could be affected by growth in China or political upheaval in the Middle East, they will help push prices up. If they predict prices will fall because of a severe economic contraction, they will help push prices down. They are performing a legitimate market function by providing liquidity, they are not out to get “the folks,” as Bill likes to say. Economist Walter Williams explains it here using other commodities to take some of the emotion out of the discussion where oil is concerned:

Here’s a non-rocket science question: If you expect a reduced harvest of wheat, corn, rice or any other commodity some time in the future, what would be the wise thing to do about your consumption today? I bet that the average person would answer: Consume less now so that more will be available in the future.

But how in the world can people be encouraged to consume less now? Enter the futures market, which consists of a worldwide group of millions upon millions of traders, often called speculators. Speculators, betting on a future shortage, buy up wheat, corn and rice today in the hopes of making money selling it for a higher price when the bad harvest hits. As speculators buy more and more wheat, corn and rice, they drive up today’s prices. As today’s price gets higher, people consume less, but more importantly, people do the intelligent thing without bureaucratic edicts. The vital role of the futures trader, or speculator, is to allocate goods over different time periods. And, it’s not just wheat, corn and rice that must be allocated over time but all commodities including oil.

Okay, that may explain the speculators but some have also said there is ample supply of oil, so why are prices rising?  If it is not the speculators, who is at fault? To that I say turn your eyes toward Washington. Oil is an international commodity that is priced in U.S. dollars, because U.S. dollars are the world’s reserve currency. But what has our government been doing to the dollar? With the reckless spending and unprecedented borrowing and indebtedness, we are printing money like crazy which is driving down the value of the dollar. As the value of the dollar falls, you need more of them to buy the same amount of oil.

Gold vs Gasoline prices

As you can see from this chart, the trend in gasoline prices closely matches the trend in gold prices. At one time our dollar used to be backed by gold, so you can look at gold as value based money rather than fiat money. Fiat money is where a government issues paper and says it has a worth that the government determines. There isn’t any real commodity or thing of value behind it, it has value because the government says so. Let’s look at it a different way. Let’s say you could buy your gasoline by using gold instead of paper dollars. In 1990 it would have taking 0.003 ounces of gold to buy a gallon of gasoline. In April 2011 it would take 0.0025 ounces of gold to buy the same gallon of gasoline. So while we are starting to worry about gasoline costing nearly $4 a gallon nationwide, it is really relatively cheap on an historical basis, so watch out.

Price of a gallon of Regular gasoling in ounces of gold

Historically you can see a slight upward trend in the price of gasoline when using gold as the standard of value. It has been climbing, but not ridiculously so.

So lay off beating up on the speculators and start turning your firepower on Washington. If we don’t get our fiscal house in order and soon, we will be in very deep trouble indeed. This has to be fixed and it has to be fixed now; not in ten years, not in twenty years, NOW.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

In the midst of rising gas prices, chaos in the Middle East, President Obama’s muddled energy policy (buy a new hybrid mini-van), we receive reports of a small lizard potentiall bringing oil production in Texas to a standstill. How is that? Yes, the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard is crawling toward the Endangered Species List and when that happens, evolution and the economy stops, just like it did with the Spotted Owl and the timber industry, and a little minnow turning much of the most productive farmland in the country into a dustbowl.

What the hell happened to evolution? Isn’t is supposed to be survival of the fittest? Well, sorry, Mr. Lizard it doesn’t look like your going to make the cut. How about we ship a bunch of you and your closest relatives to the nearest zoo, and let us continue being the fitter species. I thought it wasn’t nice to mess with Mother Nature, but the left seems to have no problem with it.

The left will fight to the death to save a lizard, but insist it is a constitutional right to abort the life of a human being the same size. What a twisted view of life.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps not having lived in the rarefied air of academia or politics, I have a more roll up the sleeves, get some dirt under the fingernails approach to what a job entails. Today it seems that politicians like to get in front of the cameras, fire off a sound bite and then go do something more interesting.

President Obama puts our troops in harm’s way and then jets off to Brazil to be photographed doing the samba, and saying he wants to be first in line to buy more foreign oil, this time from Brazil. Didn’t he just say that he wants to cut our imports of foreign oil by one third? Shouldn’t we be drilling here rather than lining up new suppliers?

We have a myriad of problems that include spending, the crisis in the Middle East, North Korea, unemployment, the budget, and yet the president has found time to play sixty-one rounds of golf, at last count. Who’s minding the store?

Newly elected Delaware Senator Chris Coons got on television to lament that he is holding a job fair at his Delaware office and if the government shuts down Friday night, he won’t have any staffers to run the job fair. This is very, very bad. Er, excuse me, senator but your job is to pass a budget not to be the local employment office. Cancel the job fair, as I am sure there are plenty of government and private agencies that handle that, and get back to work doing what you were elected to do.

In a similar vein, Congressman Tim Bishop is scheduled to kick off his 2012 reelection campaign this Sunday so that he can plan on continuing to pick up his $174,000 salary for failing to pass a budget. I am sure his quick retort will be that he is in the minority and therefore powerless to move those stubborn Republicans. But it was his failure a few short months ago when he and Nancy Pelosi were in the majority to pass a budget resolution for the first time since budget resolutions became standard practice. They also failed to pass the appropriation bills to fund the government until the end of the fiscal year in October.

A cynic might look at it as a designed power play. “Look, we’re going to get clobbered in 2010, so let’s not vote on a budget or spending bills and it will be a twofer. One, we won’t be held accountable for voting for higher spending and that may save a couple of seats in November 2010; two, it will dump this mess in the Republicans lap and if we hold the Senate we can force a government shutdown and blame them like we did in 1995. Then we can coast back into power in 2012.” Of course, you would have to be a cynic to believe that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?

In the midst of the current budget crisis we hear an announcement by Harry Reid that their staffs will be working through the night, and the politicians will be back in front of the microphones tomorrow.

I worked a number of years in Information Technology, specifically in the credit card business. I can remember sitting at my desk on New Year’s Eve 1999. Perhaps the biggest New Year’s celebration of a lifetime and I was at my desk. Why? Remember the Year 2000 software bug? Well, we had to be ready to respond instantly if anying we worked endless hours to prevent slipped through. Nothing did and around 3AM or so, we started to head home. On the day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, in the retail world it was “all hands on deck” to make sure that things worked and if there were any hiccups, we were on top of them immediately. Although I was a VP, I was there on the floor with the first line folks. The same went for any major software releases. If a critical decision had to be made we were there to make them. That’s the way it was done. We didn’t make pronouncements and go play golf. We were there onsite. But that is in the private sector, where things like profits and losses matter, accountability is real, and lifetime employment is unheard of. We could be fired any day, not just one day every two, four or six years.

We have a right to that accountability from our political leaders. Instead of raising funds for the next run for office, these politicians should have their salary cut off and be dipping into their savings to pay for the skyrocketing gasoline prices that are a result of not exploring for energy here, and instead destroying the dollar. Instead of doing their jobs, those on the left are ramping up their slime machines to give every reason under the sun why they can’t possibly cut any spending. There was some Congressman on the news talking about how wonderfully efficient Medicare is and how those evil Republicans want to put that in the hands of private insurers, horrors! It is common knowledge that between $60 – $100 billion is STOLEN from Medicare every year. How is that for efficiency? As I point out in my book Liberty’s Lifeline Steve Kroft of Sixty Minutes reported that stealing from Medicare pushed aside cocaine as the major criminal enterprise in South Florida.

2012 is coming and everyone one of these hand wringing, overpaid, do nothing, politicians should be bounced out on the street, if they don’t want to step up and transform Washington in to an efficient and accountable government.

That’s my opinion, I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.—War Powers Resolution of 1973, Section 2(c)

How many times have we heard both during the 2008 presidential campaign and since that Barack Obama was a constitutional scholar? Where did he find the time? Between being a community organizer, a Illinois state legislator, a law school professor, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, when did he find time for his constitutional scholarship?

While you ponder that question consider this one, has he ever really read it other than from the perspective of how to go around it? Since his election he and his progressive allies have moved us toward the “world government” model. They believe the Supreme Court should consider foreign laws in making their decisions. One of his first acts as president was a world apology tour to sooth the ruffled feathers of world leaders, that a reasonable man, a partner was now in the White House. How’s that for hope and change?

Domestically, he populated his administration with an unprecedented number of czars, and union leaders, who represent a small percentage of workers, are in almost daily contact with the administration and are frequent visitors to the White House as well. Now the Nobel Peace Prize laureate has started a new war without asking for Congress’s concurrence, but that’s okay, he got the UN’s blessing and after all aren’t they the precursor to a world government?

From a humanitarian perspective Americans don’ t like to see dictators murder their citizens who protest their treatment. So whether you think clipping Khadafy’s wings is a good thing or a bad thing, we are a nation of laws, not of men. We have a process to follow and it has not been. As you can see from the War Powers Act above, which was passed as a result of President Richard Nixon’s escalation of the war in Viet Nam, there is 1) no declaration of war by Congress; 2) no specific statuary authority to attack Libya; 3) there has been no attack on the United States. Therefore, President Obama’s action in Libya is a very serious breach of the law. Unlike President Reagan’s action against Libya in 1986, which was a single attack in retaliation for Libya’s backing of an attack that killed U.S. servicemen in Berlin, there was no attack against us.

It is good policy to get UN support prior to major action so that we are not perceived as the world’s bully, but that should come after or at least in conjunction with a debate and a vote by Congress before we commit troops. We are not at the beck and call of the Arab League and the UN to do their heavy lifting and pay the bills, when no one else wants to. To pour salt into the wound, Obama jets off to Rio to be photographed doing the samba, while U.S. service men and women are in harm’s way.

So, how long is it until November 2012?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.