under the hammer

Liberals contact me with some frequency complaining that when I write about our president I refer to him by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama. The liberals say this is unfair and I do it only to imply that he is a Muslim or a sympathizer with the Arabs over the Israelis.

This year, when Obama was sworn into office for this four-year term, he was sworn in – not as Barry Soetoro, Barry Obama, Barack Obama or even Barack H. Obama – but as Barack Hussein Obama. So it is not only the name I use for our president, it is the name he uses for himself.

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By the way, Barack Hussein Obama and Chief Justice John Roberts got it right the first time on this go round in the private ceremony held Monday. The public ceremony, not quite.

The amount of protection that Obama gets from the media never ceases to amaze me. Now it is simply considered a fact that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts messed up when he swore Obama into office in 2009, and they had to have a private do-over to make sure the swearing-in stuck.

But if you check the video, you will find that what actually happened was Obama interrupted Roberts first. The way an oath works is the judge or official says what the person being sworn in is supposed to say and then that person repeats it. To do that you have to wait for the official to stop speaking, which Obama didn't do. After Obama interrupted Roberts then Roberts got "faithfully" in the wrong part of the next sentence, but Obama paused, Roberts corrected his mistake and Obama recited it wrong anyway.

You can certainly say that the two of them really fouled up the 2009 swearing-in, but to blame it all on Roberts is inaccurate. If Obama had not interrupted Roberts one would assume he would have sailed right through it. But being interrupted in midsentence in front of millions of people all over the world by a man who in a few seconds will be the most powerful man on earth can throw you off your game. Why wasn't it Obama's fault that they messed up the swearing-in? The obvious answer is because Obama according to the adoring mainstream media can do no wrong.

It is also interesting to note that during this inauguration Obama and Michelle did not stand on a box to lift them above the crowd, as they had in 2009.

Obama was sworn in on President Abraham Lincoln's Bible the first time, and his wife's family Bible the second time. But not during any of his four swearing-ins did he use a Bible from his own family. Maybe it's not that unusual, but it does seem strange.

The big question this time around is, after being sworn into office for the fourth time, why can't Obama get it right? This time during his public swearing-in, which was all for show and doesn't really count, the president of the United States of America evidently forgot what country he lives in. It is the United States of America, not the United Sts of America. There is no way they can blame that on Roberts, so the mainstream media simply ignored it. The liberal media was so giddy about being at Obama's inauguration they couldn't be bothered with little things like whether or not Obama got the country right or whether Beyonce actually sang or lip-synched. The kind of thing that the press is usually there to report.

I watched the swearing-in and Obama's speech and was surprised at the number of empty seats. There were empty seats on the podium, and it appeared that only about half the press they expected showed up. Maybe the flu struck a lot of political bigwigs, or the cold scared them off.

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It was interesting to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton smiling and waving at the ceremony. She runs to the hospital when she is called to testify before the congressional committee about Benghazi, but she's fine to sit out in the cold for a couple of hours.

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If you listen to Democrats, and even some Republicans, for the federal government to balance its budget would require draconian cuts that would decimate the Defense Department and put major social welfare programs in bankruptcy. But the truth is that the federal government will take in $2.9 trillion in revenue this fiscal year. If the federal government would simply reduce spending to what it was a mere five years ago it would have a surplus instead of a trillion dollar deficit.

In 2007 the federal government spent $2.7 trillion. That was during the presidency of George Walker Bush and the budget deficit was about $200 billion, because the revenue that year was $2.56 trillion.

What Congress and President Obama have managed to do since then is increase spending astronomically. The projected spending for 2013 is $3.8 trillion. So even though revenue has increased to $2.9 trillion the deficit is still right around a trillion dollars.

It is an unbelievable increase in spending. The problem is not, as Obama continues to say, that the rich aren't paying their fair share. The problem is that Obama and Congress have increased spending by 40 percent in the past five years. This is during a period of almost no inflation.

Since 2007 the federal government has increased its spending by $1.1 trillion. It is an incredible amount of money and it would be nice to blame it all on Obama, but Obama is a co-conspirator. Spending bills have to originate in the House, which the Republicans have controlled since 2011. Obama in his first term had pretty much free rein in Congress. The Democrats controlled the House and for almost a year had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Spending skyrocketed and in Obama's first year in office, 2009, the budget deficit increased to $1.4 trillion.

What could only be done in Washington – where reality left the building decades ago – is that the budget deficit has remained over $1 trillion. The reason for the budget deficit in 2009 was the $1 trillion stimulus plan that Congress passed and Obama signed as soon as possible. That was supposed to spike up the spending, but then it was supposed to come back down.

It never has.

But the country ran pretty well in 2007. We were fighting the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, Social Security was being paid, as were Medicare and Medicaid. The federal government was throwing money at local governments, as it does, but evidently to go back to those years would be a tremendous hardship. It's hard to believe.

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This fact-checking racket by the mainstream media is just one more way for it to spread its liberal message that Republicans are always wrong.

You don't see Vice President Joe Biden getting fact checked when he says he was playing golf and heard the shots at the Amish school shooting in 2006. It's a good story, but like so much that Biden says, it has no basis in reality. Except that he may have been playing golf during the shooting. The closest golf course is a public course about five miles away and the pro says that Biden never played there. But even if he had, the course is too far away to hear gunshots. There is another golf course in the area, but it is 10 miles away and there is no way he could hear gunshots at that distance.

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But who cares? Biden says stupid and just plain wrong stuff all the time and the media doesn't care enought to report it.

Mitt Romney said that Jeep was moving production to China. This was deemed as the "Lie of the Year" by PolitiFact, but as it turned out – after the damage was done and the election was over – Romney was right.

Fact checking by the liberal media has become just another way for the liberals to use the press to their advantage. It's one of those weird things, but if you take the biggest party activist in the world and put "fact checker" behind his name, people believe what was said is true.

And why isn't Biden fact checked on a regular basis? When Dan Quayle was vice president he was fact checked daily. But, come to think of it, Vice President Al Gore was allowed to say absurd stuff about inventing the internet and was not fact checked. I think there may be a pattern.

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Term limits have always seemed like an impossibility to me, but the recent fiscal cliff charade is beginning to convince me that term limits may be the only way to win the government back from professional politicians whose allegiance is to each other, not to the American people who elected them.

It seemed obvious from the fiscal cliff debacle that no one was looking out for the welfare of the American people. It was all about showmanship, one-upmanship and whose turn it was to steer the ship of state.

The elected officials in Washington have far more loyalty to each other than they do to the people back home. Senators have to go home every six years and shake enough hands to get reelected. But the real power is in the Senate itself. Once a senator is elected he has access to the huge pile of money that they shift around to who ever needs help. Senators get millions of dollars raised by other senators. The situation in the House is similar, but since the House is so much bigger and stands for election every two years the situation is not quite so obvious.

Imagine how different Congress would be if someone could only serve two terms in the House and one in the Senate. The government would have to return to the people, with the big problem being that the staff would have even more power.

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As Obama launches his second term, it is hard for me to believe that the majority of Americans decided he was the absolute best person to lead this country, and then I have to remind myself that they didn't.

The majority of people who voted preferred Obama over Mitt Romney. It doesn't mean that the people who voted for Obama necessarily agree with him or even like him, but it does mean that in choosing between Romney and Obama they chose Obama.

Obama has indicated that the fact that people voted for him is because they believe in all his policies. It shows what a narcissist Obama is, but doesn't say much else.

People voted for Obama who disagree with most if not all of his policies, but disagreed with Romney more. They voted for him because they didn't think someone as rich as Romney knew anything about the lives they lead. They voted for Obama even though they didn't agree with his policies because he is a black man and they thought it was important to elect a black man to a second term to prove it wasn't a fluke. They voted for Obama because they think Romney fired people and moved jobs offshore just to fill his own pockets. They voted for Obama because they think Obama is a Muslim. They voted for Obama because Romney is a Mormon. They voted for Obama because they think his wife is hot. They voted for Obama because they thought Romney was too old to be president. They voted for Obama because they think he has a cool name. They voted for Obama because they thought he would provide free phones and free health care for them.

Evidently a large number of Republicans didn't vote at all because they didn't think Romney was conservative enough. It makes no sense, but people don't make sense.