by Bill O'Connell on July 4, 2011
Congressman Eliot Engel writes a letter to the editor of the New York Times titled, “Banning Gun Imports.” He was prompted to write because of an editorial in the Times titled “Hypocrisy, Locked and Loaded,” but I’ll address that one later. Here is how Congressman Engel sees it. There is a tremendous illegal drug business in Mexico. It has gotten so big and contentious and violent that thousands are killed every year. His solution to the problem in Mexico? Ban the importation of guns into the U.S.
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by Bill O'Connell on June 21, 2011
The above question could and should be applied to a number of individuals including Attorney General Eric Holder and even President Barack Obama. The subject is a program, run out of the Justice Department, called “Fast and Furious.”
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by Kevin Dixon on March 12, 2011
PERFIDIOUS PORTRAYAL OF HITLER AND UNIONS
The labor union was the chief tool of the early twentieth century demagogue. Modeled after the success of arousing the discontent of the French peasants of the late 18th century, it was the natural place to amalgamate the passions and tensions of workers and lead them into revolt. The basic tenet of both the Russian and German revolutions was labor based social/political revolt (“Workers of the world unite!”). The differences were in style not substance.
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by Bill O'Connell on February 28, 2011
The order in the Middle East has been crumbling, but it seems that the only place President Barack Obama knows where to lead is on the dance floor or when ramming through his socialist programs. When it comes to real solutions to fix the economy or on foreign policy he is utterly lost.
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by Bill O'Connell on February 17, 2011
K-12 education is in trouble. A recent report on schools in New York City said that of the 60% or so of students who actually graduate, about half need remedial classes before they can perform at the college level. We have a Department of Education that has spent over $1 trillion since it was created by President Jimmy Carter and school performance has declined.
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by Bill O'Connell on February 1, 2011
It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place. – Judge Roger Vinson opinion in STATE OF FLORIDA v UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Perhaps the most arrogant, condescending act of Congress was the passage of ObamaCare. Opinion polls consistently counted the American public to be strongly against it. Town hall meetings during the summer before its passage were raucous and united in opposition as politicians cowered before their constituents. Many politicians who voted for the bill stopped holding town hall meetings, choosing instead to hide under their desks. During the fall 2010 elections, rare was the Democrat who boldly campaigned on ObamaCare.
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by Bill O'Connell on November 12, 2010
When President Obama and his team stood before their supporters and introduced ObamaCare you could almost hear them sing in unison the Carly Simon song, “Nobody does it better…”. They were going to bring us the health care we had been waiting for. Magically covering every soul in America whether they wanted it or not. If they did not, the government would be just like granny used to be, “Open wide, this won’t hurt a bit.” Come to think of it, was that granny or… never mind.
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by Bill O'Connell on October 7, 2010
As they say, when it rains it pours. The Obama administration famously boasted about having its boot on the neck of BP and extorting $20 billion from the company without the benefit of due process, but now a different assessment emerges.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, faulted the administration on several fronts. “A White House spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.”
It is quite clear that this administration stumbled and bumbled along at the start of the disaster, once again fully displaying its inexperience in executive matters. Here are some of the salient points from the commission.
- “A sense of over optimism” about the disaster “may have affected the scale and speed with which national resources were brought to bear.”
- In addition, the government’s underestimate of how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico gave the impression that the government “was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid.”
- The administration took “an overly casual approach” in calculating that between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels per day were flowing when the real number was around 35,000 to 60,000 barrels per day
- Their initial low estimate remained the official estimate for a full month
- The administration was initially slow to respond and then misdirected resources when the public grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress.
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by Bill O'Connell on September 24, 2010
The Obama administration, having stepped in it with both feet to protect their union backers rather than let two of the three U.S. automobile companies go into bankruptcy, are now weighing the sale of the stock owned by us, in an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Their plans are to scale back the offering to prop up the price that they might be able to get in the market so that they can ultimately get most of the taxpayer money they spent, back.
“While both G.M. and the Treasury still hope to reduce the government’s stake in the company to less than 50 percent and rid the company of its Government Motors nickname, that goal may not be met, one of the people said,” according to the New York Times. In saying that, auto analysts are increasingly projecting that the government could get most or all of its remaining $43 billion investment, but it will takes years to accomplish. Uh-oh.
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by Bill O'Connell on September 23, 2010
The news coming out this week are not favorable to the Obama administration. The National Bureau of Economic Research pegged the end of the recession to have occurred in June of 2009. Considering that Obama’s vaunted “must have” stimulus was only passed toward the end of February and with the necessary ramp up process, it is pretty clear the recession ended without the benefit of the stimulus. To put it another way, we wasted $1 trillion on the stimulus and handed the bill to our children and grandchildren, a burden that they will have to work off.
Obama is now pushing hard to raise taxes by $700 billion which will further apply the brakes to the economy. The only way to get out of the mess of unemployment and debt, besides stopping the spending to keep from making it worse, is to grow the economy. Growing the economy will bring in more tax revenues and create more jobs. Despite the Obama rhetoric, which has to be either outright incompetence or lying, his policies are not those that will grow the economy.
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