Under the Hammer

President Barack Hussein Obama should be running for reelection on his record. That's what incumbents do; they run on their record. They say, look at what I have done during my time in office, vote for me and I'll keep doing it and do it even better.

Obama doesn't talk a whole lot about his first term. People don't like Obamacare, and if Obama is reelected the fight with the Roman Catholic Church has just begun.

Obama thinks that he can force Catholic bishops to pay for abortions, but he has completely misjudged Catholics and the Catholic Church. Most if not all bishops will close down every hospital, university, school, social service program, youth sports league, farmers cooperative and any other venture that, according to Obamacare, will force them to pay for any type of abortion. It simply is not going to happen that the Roman Catholic Church is going to be bullied by a bunch of godless liberals.

People don't like Obamacare so Obama can't run on that. He can't run on the economy because it is in the doldrums. He is trying to run on pulling out of Afghanistan, but having American troops killed by Afghan soldiers makes that a difficult sell.

The Benghazi tragedy is blowing up in his face. Obama is going to have to claim that the only computer in the White House is an Etch A Sketch with a broken knob to convince anyone that he didn't know what was going on.

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The mainstream media would have you believe that North Carolina is "leaning toward Romney" but that it is still up in the air. Don't believe them for a minute. North Carolina is firmly in the Romney camp. The way you can tell is by what the campaigns do, not what they say.

In North Carolina we are no longer getting visits by the candidates, or the spouses, and it looks like distant family members may be too big to come here. Wisconsin and Ohio are getting the candidates. We are getting fourth rate campaign celebrities. We wouldn't be getting Jessie Jackson if there were any chance that North Carolina was in play. It isn't.

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Obama made the coward's call when it came to Benghazi, and after that first attack everything since has been an attempt to cover up the fact that he allowed an American ambassador to die of asphyxiation in a burning building while Obama sat in the comfort of the White House thousands of miles away and kept him from being rescued.

Obama found out about the attack within minutes. And as we are now learning, real time video was available and if Obama was not watching as he made decisions then he should be charged with dereliction of duty. If he was watching as he most certainly was, he was probably told that the ambassador and top aides were in the safe haven and should be able to survive the attack there.

It seems that Obama, probably with the advice of his chief campaign advisor David Axelrod (who is also involved in deciding which foreign leaders get killed by drone strikes), made a political decision that the less involvement the US had the better. Since they must have believed that Ambassador Chris Steven was alive in the safe haven, politically it would make sense to allow the terrorists to destroy whatever they wanted and leave.

It seems that it was not the time to be making political decisions. Obama says that his first priority was to make sure other embassies all over the world were protected, which is just bizarre. Why didn't he decide to make sure that his ambassador and State Department staff in Benghazi were safe first?

Obama didn't send anyone to rescue Stevens and his men. Why not? Why not immediately send in the guys who were a mile away, who could have been there in minutes and eventually defied orders and went to save who they could?

It was too late for Stevens and Sean Smith, but they saved the rest. If Obama had allowed the CIA to go in immediately, who knows, you have to figure they would have had a very good chance of saving Stevens and Smith.

If they had had some backup then the two former Navy Seals who died in the attack on the CIA annex – Glen Donherty and Tyrone Woods – would have had a much better chance of survival. In fact with proper support the attack on the annex may not have happened at all.

General Petraeus, the director of the CIA, has said no one in the CIA gave the order not to rescue those men, so you have to look at who outranks the head of the CIA.

The CIA is an independent agency and the director is appointed by the president, which means the director reports to the president. It also means that particularly in an emergency operational mode the only person in the government who could overrule the CIA director is the president.

Petraeus is a good soldier. He didn't say that Obama made the crass, calculated decision that allowed those four Americans to die, but he said he didn't make that decision. Petraeus doesn't report to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Defense Department has its own intelligence services. The CIA is an independent civilian agency. So what Petraeus was saying loud and clear is that Obama made the decision.

Obama evidently believed that he could keep this whole thing covered up until after Nov. 6, but he can't because Fox News, conservative talk radio and conservative websites won't let him. The mainstream media still aren't writing about what Obama knew on the afternoon and evening of the attack.

The idea that Hillary Clinton would tell the father of one of the young men who died that the federal government was going to catch the man who made the video and put him in jail should be a crime. Hillary Clinton should be put in jail herself for saying that to a grieving parent.

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GM – formerly General Motors now Government Motors since all of us taxpayers, whether we wanted to or not, bought a big share of the company – has an interesting business plan. In fact, the plan is so different that the government would probably be well advised to sell its shares and take the loss rather than risk the near certainty that the company will go belly-up.

GM manufactures the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt at a cost of $90,000 each. Now, for $90,000 you can get a top-of-the-line luxury automobile. No Chevy is going to compete in that market. So GM decided to sell the cars for $40,000 and take a $50,000 loss per car. But the cars won't sell at $40,000, so GM gives a $10,000 rebate, which brings the consumer's price down to $30,000 for a car with few amenities that will go less than 50 miles without being recharged and may catch on fire.

This is the car that Obama has been touting in his speeches as being a success. It demonstrates how little Obama knows about business. Fortunately for GM the car isn't selling because they lose $50,000 every time one does.

But it isn't all electric either. The Volt has a 1400 cc four-cylinder gasoline motor. By comparison the first Hondas sold in the US had a 600 cc motor, less than half the size of Volt, which is not even supposed to have a gasoline engine. It's amazing the lies that are told when the government gets involved in a project. The Volt is a plug-in hybrid that will go as far as a full battery and a tank of gas will take it.

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Whatever else you say about Obama, he has terrible political instincts. Former President Bill Clinton, the only elected president in the history of the country to be impeached, has moral and ethical problems but fantastic political instincts. It appeared that Obama knew how to run a campaign because he beat Hillary Rodham Clinton so badly in the primary and then clobbered Sen. John McCain in the general election. The primary seemed to have been a fluke and Obama looked good in the general election because McCain looked so bad. It is doubtful if McCain could have beaten Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale in that race.

Obama is so arrogant and clueless when it comes to politics, and he has such bad political instincts, that against the advice of his top advisors he has taken on the Roman Catholic Church in an election year. For far too long the Catholic Church has been silent about people who call themselves Catholic but who actively work against the teachings of the church, like Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Joe Biden. Pelosi and Biden are both big advocates of abortion and for years the Catholic Church has been largely silent about voting for politicians who support abortion.

Obama woke a sleeping giant when he decided that he could not only force the Catholic Church to pay for birth control for its employees but to also pay for a type of abortion.

Regardless of what anyone's personal beliefs are, the belief of the Catholic Church is that life begins at conception and to purposefully end that life is killing a person.

So what Obama said to the Catholic Church is that he would not force the church to pay for birth control and abortions, but he evidently thinks the people in the Catholic Church are stupid because he turned around and did just that, for some directly and for some indirectly.

In Obama's defense he knows so little about business he may not understand what it means to be self-insured. The result is the Catholic Church has filed suit against the Department of Health and Human Services. But more importantly bishops all over the country are telling Catholics that it is wrong to vote for someone who supports abortion.

It is kind of amazing because the church could lose its tax-free status if it specifically advocates for one party or one candidate. But at black churches Democratic candidates are allowed to speak from the pulpit and black pastors are allowed to tell their congregations to vote for Democratic candidates.

The Catholic Church is operating within the guidelines but making it abundantly clear that voting for candidates who support abortion is wrong and that to do so "puts one in grave moral danger." According to a letter from the Bishop of Green Bay David L. Ricken to the Catholics in his dioceses, it "could put your own soul in jeopardy."

The Catholic Church isn't supposed to tell people how to vote, but it is certainly within the church's prerogative to tell people what is a sin.

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If you are a Romney supporter and are worried about how the election is going, look at some of the newspapers that have endorsed Romney and where they are. Newspapers in Florida and Iowa, which traditionally back the Democrat, have endorsed Romney.

Newspapers at one time were opinion makers. They would endorse candidates and try to convince their readers to vote for them. Today many newspapers are simply opinion followers. They look at the polls, figure out who their readers are supporting and then endorse them. But whether they are leaders or followers it is bad news for Obama.

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In 2008, Obama received 53 percent of the vote by campaigning for "Hope" and "Change." Is there anyone out there who thinks that 3 percent of those people who voted for Obama last time – who are now unemployed, or underemployed, or simply disgusted with the economy or the current US foreign policy – are going to vote for Obama?

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Only Obama would be so arrogant and have such a low opinion of the American public that he would think that after being president for almost four years and campaigning for months that he could fool anyone with a little pamphlet, "A Plan for Jobs." If Obama actually had a plan for jobs he would be implementing it double quick.

His plan for jobs was to borrow $1 trillion and give it to state, city and county governments to spend because the only thing he knows is government. In Obama's world if the government is still at 100 percent employment then there is no problem.

The stimulus is the reason that Guilford County Schools has so far not had to cut any fat. It is as fat and happy an organization as it was four years ago, but the same cannot be said for most private sector firms.