The Smoke Break

You want some brie with that whine?

Enough Is Enough: Energy, ACORN & HR 1388, Tax Cheats & Illegals, And The Supreme Law of The Land

By

It’s time to stop.  Just stop.

Every day we learn more and more about selfish idiocy that created the big problems directly affecting all of us.  The new administration has taken great advantage of the situation- taking control over things that are fundamentally and Constitutionally not their responsibility.  AND WE HAVE LET THEM.

Oh, sure, some people are speaking out, but this administration continues to call them names and make fun of them.  It seems that most of the population sits and stares stupidly at their dwindling 401k funds, wonders if they’ll be able to continue to pay their upside-down mortgage, then wonders if they’ll even have a job tomorrow.  Some sit there with their hands out, looking for Pater Obama to give them something for nothing.

In today’s news, it is being reported that Congress is unveiling their latest proposal for an “energy bill“.  Pay attention – it’s all about leading us into cap and trade and in the end raising the cost of EVERYTHING that we, the people, use – and eat – every single day.

Yesterday, the Department of Transportation released a report outlining new fuel economy standards.  These are on top of the increased fuel economy standards put in place in 2007.  So while on the one hand we bail out the auto companies and the President replaces CEOs, on the other hand they are adding inordinate costs to the auto makers.  Costs that the consumers will not recoup for some 8 years (if at all).  In effect, “President Barack Obama directed the Department of Transportation” to set the automakers up to fail.

Last Friday, the Senate killed an amendment to the National Service Act (H.R. 1388) that would exclude funding for ACORN.  Yes, ACORN will continue to reap massive financial benefits from the federal government, despite their never-ending illegal activities – ranging from outright voter registration fraud to breaking and entering.  Funny that you don’t hear very much about all this, isn’t it?  The more I read about them, the more I feel I need to go take a shower; it’s hard to understand why the media keeps ignoring tabloid-worthy after tabloid-worthy problem, though after all the campaign donations ACORN made, it’s easier to understand why Democrats simply deny it.

And in what is becoming old news, or perhaps simply business as usual in this new administration, yet another cabinet nominee, House and Human Services candidate Nancy Sebelius  is revealed to have somehow not paid all her taxes.  (Senator Grassley doesn’t think this is a big deal.  Please tell me that’s an April Fool’s Day joke.)  Just like all the other failed nominees, she is a poster child for the “rich” – the very same folks the administration asks to be “patriotic” by paying more taxes.  Congessional liberal leaders like Feinstein, Kennedy, Kerry, Kohl, Pelosi, Rockefellar are all mulitmillionaires, yet get their panties in a bunch about Wall Street bonuses and pass ex post facto laws to stop them.  While they and their Congress brethren hand out “traditional” bonuses – made up of our hard-earned tax dollars, of course – to their own employees.

We also have a little “human interest” story.  Another lawbreaker getting a break, and using the excuse of our administration-derided health care system as justification:

Barack Obama’s Kenyan aunt lost her bid for asylum more than four years ago, and a judge ordered her deported. Instead, Zeituni Onyango stayed, living for years in public housing.

Now, in a case that puts the president in a tough position both personally and politically, Onyango’s request is being reconsidered under a little-used provision in U.S. immigration rules that allows denied asylum claims to be reheard if applicants can show that something has changed to make them eligible.

Such as the ascension of her nephew to the presidency of the world’s most powerful country.

Onyango’s reasons for seeking asylum have not been made public, and her immigration hearing will be closed at her lawyer’s request.

Onyango’s lawyer, Margaret Wong, may also argue that she needs to stay in the United States for medical reasons. Onyango, who has been photographed walking with a cane, has some kind of a neurological problem, said Mike Rogers, Wong’s spokesman.

All these things upset me to no end.  But awareness is only the first step.  Action must be the second.  Honestly, folks, we don’t have to take this lying down.  There is power in numbers and it is imperative that everyone who cares about stopping the dangerous direction in which the administration is taking this country raise their voices in loud and insistent protest.

When was the last time you told your elected representatives to stop the bullshit…errrr…stop the madness?  If you need to find them, go here.  Tell them you’re tired of their hypocrisy.  Tell them you don’t want the government to be running the private sector.  (Put an “i” for “I won” in the word “run” and you get “ruin”.)  Tell them you don’t want bailouts and handouts.  Tell them you want less government, not more.  Tell them to get themselves out of the way of our Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms and allow capitalism and the free market to do what they have always done – help we, the people, create the opportunities to pursue our individual, unique happiness.

Frankly, all current government programs and most of its operations should be eliminated.  Collectively, our federal taxes should fund only the military and the national infrastructure.  Government’s only business is to oversee that we all play nicely in the sandbox together.  Private enterprise  is not the government’s business.  Government doesn’t belong in our factories, in our boardrooms or bedrooms, or on our car lots.  Government doesn’t exist to pay anyone’s medical bills or to insure they have a cell phone in their pocket.  If states or local municipalities want to fund such things, then let the people who make up that state or municipality pay for it.  Let them reap their own benefits but not subject the rest of us to the expense of their failures.  Simply put, this “minimalist’ government is what the Founding Fathers gave us in the Constitution.

Go back and read it.  The Constitution is the “supreme law of the land” and, as such, gives the federal government only the powers “necessary and proper” to:

  1. Collect taxes
  2. Regulate interstate commerce
  3. Coin money, regulate currency, set standards of weights and measures
  4. Declare war
  5. Raise and maintain an army and navy

It explicitly denies the federal government:

  1. The writ of habeas corpus cannot be suspended unless in cases of rebellion or invasion, when deemed necessary to national safety.
  2. No bill of attainder or ex post facto law can be passed.

Everything else falls to the states, per the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”)  Such sovreignty was by design in order to avoid the problems inherent in a central, all-powerful seat of government.  (Think North Korea.  Think Venezuela.  Think Iran.)  The individual states, like the people of the United States, are to be seen and treated as equal but allowed to operate individually.

Note for the record that the taxes on AIG and other bailout bonuses can be interpreted as ex post facto law.  Meaning, they are passed and encompass something that has already occurred.  This would be similar to a state deciding to institute the death penalty and then executing people serving a life sentence for a crime that would fall under the new law without due process.

I don’t know if it’s ignorance or laziness or a combination of both that has put so much garbage into the American definition of government, but in the same way some shout that AIG and the auto companies should be allowed to go into bankruptcy, so, too, should our government be stripped down and reorganized.  The power, the control, must be returned to the people, to the states, but I fear wresting it from the smarmy, greedy hands that now sit in Congress and the White House will prove very, very difficult.  For to do this would require great courage in terms of personal responsibility.  We would each have to face our individual failures and unfortunately it is always so much easier to blame someone else than look in the mirror.

But if the buck doesn’t stop here, just where does it stop?

In Plain English: Obama Is Incompetent

By

Just over half the Americans eligible to vote and who chose to do so (well, at least it was presumed that all votes cast were by those who were both living and eligible – some even 77 times eligible – since there were numerous charges and indictments against Obama-campaign-funded ACORN) went to Barack Hussein Obama and in a flash we ushered in what continues to be called a new era of “hope and change”.

The problem is that the hope is now that this man resigns or otherwise disappears and that the change we’ve seen has been nothing but negative.

But I fear that Obama’s audacity (read:  ego) and the fact that too many in this country, including the First Lady, are still willing to covertly or overtly play the race card is going to keep us sliding down the thinly-veiled razor blade he proffered, too many accepted, and for which he continues to campaign.  And that is a sadness even more tragic than the economic meltdown that has the real middle class of this country wondering just how they’re going to manage to survive.

Let us consider for a moment the definition of the word “incompetent”.  There are those claim only worm-eaters make any criticisms of President Obama, but do they really understand what it means?  Merriam-Webster defines it thusly:

Main Entry:   incompetent 
Function:   adjective
Etymology:   Middle French incompétent, from in- + compétent competent
Date:   1595
1: not legally qualified
2: inadequate to or unsuitable for a particular purpose
3 a: lacking the qualities needed for effective action b: unable to function properly
 
Arguments continue to be made that Barack Obama is not legally qualified to hold the office of President of the United States, based on questions about the circumstances surrounding his birth.  While the courts continue to refuse to hear cases on this, that the President continues to allow the question to be asked is at direct odds with all his calls for honesty and transparency.  Like the old saying goes, “He who has nothing to hide, hides nothing.”  Surely it would be a simple matter to allow the release of records and thereby properly refute claims by his family of a Kenyan birth to a mother not old enough to confer U.S. citizenship upon him.  His college records remain protected as well, which again gives, at best, yet another appearance of impropriety.  Like the best of cases made up purely of circumstantial evidence, something both his Harvard law degree and his $800,000 worth of lawyers fighting to keep all his records sealed surely must know, many people have a hard time believing the answer would be something as simple as he doesn’t want anyone to know his grades in school were even worse than those of our much-ridiculed former President George W. Bush.
 
That President Obama is inadequate in his role as President has become a matter of daily course.  While both Hugo Chavez and the Ayatollah Khomeini aren’t exactly leading anyone’s list of reputable advisors, that they have both come out in the last week to blatantly blast Obama with both barrels in derision of his policies and his lack of concrete “change” speaks to the low level of regard with which the United States is now held.  And that is a dangerous place for us to be, yet President Obama continues to attempt to soothe the savage beasts with lullabies of cooperation and dialogue while treating our allies with casual disregard and in some instances outright disrespect.  As if it never occurs to him that no matter what America says or what America does, there are some people in this world who wish for nothing less than America to disappear off the face of the Earth.  
  
Further inadequacy is demonstrated in his insistance – despite rumblings from Europe that the dollar should no longer be taken seriously – that taking trillions and trillions from zero will somehow magically transform the raging rivers of federal red ink into a viable and stable national budget.  
  
The qualities required for a President to be effective are not consistent with the actions of Barack Obama.  He shows more concern about winning a game of oneupmanship with people like Rush Limbaugh and doing late-night comedy with Jay Leno (a trip paid for by the taxpayers) than properly addressing, say, the economy.   Effective leaders care enough to know the facts at hand and are able to speak intelligently most of the time without the aid of a teleprompter.  Functioning properly in the role of President is not resorting to “gallows humor” when asked legitimate questions; indeed, these never-ending media appearances only serve to show that President Obama lacks the maturity required to lead the United States.  He shows the world that he is more enamored with the color of authority and privilege he perceives his role confers upon him than he is with the grave responsibilities it brings.  This immature perspective is reinforced by alleging to have been “blindsided” by the AIG bonuses.  I don’t know very many people who find out what it was they did at work by watching the evening news, do you?  Oh, but I forgot.  When he was to have been serving as a Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama was out campaigning instead of working to represent those who had elected him so apparently couldn’t be bothered to know just what he was voting for or what his colleagues were doing.  Along the same lines he couldn’t be bothered to read the stimulus bill.  The applause of the crowds apparently meant more to him – and still does – than actually doing real work.
  
President G.W. Bush may not have been the brightest bulb in the drawer and though his business ventures were all failures, at least he had legitimate experience from which to draw when he was elected.  Including military experience, such as it was.  Barack Obama cannot make the same claim.  Since coming of legal age he has done nothing of real value, he has never gotten his hands dirty doing what anyone might recognize as a regular job.  He is the stuff of debates and models and multi-layered theories, of myths and fantasies that have never known the hard knocks from application in the real world.  Yet he feels entitled to sit in the Oval Office and to make a mockery of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and with the stroke of several pens – because of course it’s all about creating historic souvenirs – destroy the free market.
  
It is no longer a case where the silly Emperor has no clothes on.  It is that the Emperor is, whether naked or clothed, dangerously incompetent.