Source: Rhino Times Greensboro

under%20the%20hammer
Under the Hammer

by John Hammer

June 21, 2012

After President Barack Hussein Obama was interrupted by a question in the Rose Garden on Friday, June 15, someone asked if a reporter would have yelled at the president if the president had been white.

People have such short memories, it is amazing. Sam Donaldson yelled at President Ronald Reagan about the Iran-Contra scandal every time Reagan stuck his head out of the White House door. That was considered perfectly acceptable by the mainstream media because Reagan was a conservative Republican and Donaldson was way left, at least as far left as Obama and maybe further.

It’s an indication of the kind of campaign that Obama is going to run with the help of the mainstream media. Everything that is said about him that is not complimentary will be deemed racist.

But Obama is going to have to run a dirty campaign if he hopes to win because if Obama runs on his record he loses in landslide proportions. He has no policy goals to run on other than to do everything in his power to make the government bigger and run up more debt. But that is what he’s been doing and it isn’t very popular with the American people.

Besides, by now the American people have learned that Obama says he is going to do things and then just doesn’t. Obama made a huge point of signing a resolution right after he was sworn in that he would close the Guantanamo detention facility in a year. Now, over three years later, it is still open and there are no plans to close it. Obama was advised not to make that promise, but he did.

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Obama has already made some big mistakes in his campaign. He decided to hold the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. The idea was that North Carolina was a swing state. But it isn’t looking like Obama can win North Carolina, which means he has to devote a lot of time, energy and money campaigning in North Carolina when he knows it is not in play.

The Charlotte location has also put Obama in trouble with the unions because North Carolina is a right-to-work state. The unions are going to support Obama no matter what, but the level of support will be the question.

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The biography Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss provides a source about Obama’s past that is not from Obama. Up until this book by a respected biographer was published, the only source of information about Obama was his own book, Dreams from My Father, which was not an autobiography but more of a fictionalized account of Obama’s life up to Harvard Law School.

Even Obama said that much of it was more or less made up. But now there is a real source who actually went around and talked to people who knew Obama. He will always have one of the more meteoric rides to the White House, but if this country is to survive, it should be a short stay.

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Obama runs one of the strangest executive branches of government this country has seen in years. We have had do-nothing presidents before, but Obama is not a do-nothing president. In some ways he is a do-everything president, but he certainly doesn’t work well with others.

Secretary of Commerce John Bryson was involved in three bizarre car accidents in California on Sunday, June 10. The result of those accidents was that Bryson was hospitalized and charged with felony hit and run. The official report is that he had a seizure, which sounds like a story.

But Bryson is the secretary of commerce appointed by Obama, and as a member of Obama’s cabinet he is actually 10th in line for the presidency. He’s not at the beginning of the line, but he’s not at the end with the White House chef and the White House gardener. So he should be an important part of Obama’s government.

However, Obama didn’t find out that Bryson had been involved in a series of traffic accidents for 36 hours. Being charged with a felony is serious business, and you would expect the president would want to be notified as soon as possible when any member of his cabinet is arrested, even if they are only charged with a misdemeanor, but certainly if they are charged with a felony. The president’s Sunday golf game could have been disturbed, but in this case the president’s weekend was not interrupted with the news that a member of his cabinet had been arrested. It does make you wonder what Obama does on Sunday other than play golf. He certainly doesn’t want to be bothered with work.

But Obama isn’t really into his cabinet very much. You would think that with a war going on in Afghanistan that Obama would meet regularly with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, but Panetta has only been to the White House 13 times.

Bryson actually topped that easily, having visited the White House 31 times. Even Energy Secretary Steven Chu has visited 17 times.

It seems Obama is much more interested in people who can help his campaign, such as Hilary Rosen, who made the infamous attack on stay-at-home-mom of five Ann Romney, saying she had never worked a day in her life. Rosen visited the White House 33 times. But compare all of those to head of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka, who has visited the White House 69 times.

Obama, by the way, did call his commerce secretary on Tuesday after the accidents and arrest on Sunday. So in this age of instant communication, where something happens in Des Moines and is tweeted all over the world in minutes, it took the White House a little less than two days to respond to a felony arrest of one of its cabinet secretaries.

The country is involved in a war in Afghanistan, where men and women are fighting and dying. Obama insists on making some of the decisions that should be made, not by the president and not even by generals, but by the officers who are on site and know the facts. Imagine if a decision has to be made and the president is in one of his do-not-disturb periods. What happens to the soldiers who are depending on him?

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The question “Were you better off four years ago?” is a frightening one for the Obama campaign, because the vast majority of Americans are much worse off than they were four years ago. The exception is in the public sector, where employees are still getting raises, just as if the economy were ticking along without a problem.

Obama made certain that the public sector didn’t suffer from the economic downturn with his $1 trillion stimulus plan. The money was used to make sure the public sector didn’t have the same problems as the private sector. This was the money that was used to fund the infamous shovel-ready government projects. Even the White House now admits there is no such thing as a shovel-ready project. If a trillion dollars was used for shovel-ready projects and there is no such thing as a shovel-ready project, it makes you wonder where all that money went.

Here in Guilford County we know where some of it went because the Guilford County school system received enough stimulus money to put millions in a savings account. Multiply that by about 100 school systems in the state and 50 states in the country and it’s not a trillion dollars, but it’s a few billion.

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If Republicans really want to cut the size of government they need to start with regulations. If the Republicans cut back on regulations they can cut budgets by eliminating those who wrote the rules, those who interpret the rules and those who enforce the rules. It has reached the point of ridiculousness. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is proposing legislation to set a uniform national standard for egg laying hens. Is this something the federal government, which is nearly $16 trillion in debt, really needs to be working on?

It sounds absurd for the US Senate to be worried about non-uniform egg laying chickens, but it is par for the course. In North Carolina under Democratic rule, cow’s milk was made illegal. You might say, “That’s not true because I bought some just this morning.” But you bought cooked milk. What is illegal is milk as it comes from a cow – raw milk – which humans have been drinking for thousands of years. The milk lobby doesn’t want farmers to be able to sell their milk directly to customers without having to pay to have the milk processed, so raw milk is illegal in North Carolina, and it is even illegal to sell shares of a cow. You can sell shares of just about anything else but not of a cow because then the government couldn’t prohibit you from drinking milk from your own cow.

The regulations for beer and wine distribution and sales are even weirder.

This is what the legislators spend their time on, making rules like this.