Source: Rhino Times Greensboro

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Under the Hammer

by John Hammer

July 19, 2012

President Barack Hussein Obama never ceases to amaze.

Just when I thought he had shown himself to be unbelievably out of touch with the world of business, he says something that proves that is not the case at all. It’s not that Obama doesn’t know anything about business, it’s that he hates private enterprise.

Obama’s statement about nobody being successful in business on their own is remarkably naïve. Of course, no business is a complete island and we all use the public roads and bridges, but that is not what makes a business successful. If that were true every business would be successful.

You don’t hear him say that no one should take credit for graduating from law school because they all got help along the way, do you?

Obama, more and more, is letting the American people know how he thinks, and it appears he thinks everything good comes from the government. He talks about teachers as if all teachers are government employees, despite the fact that he is the product of private education.

What Obama actually said was, “If you’ve got a business­ – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” People do start businesses and they are successful because of the hard work and the smarts of the owner. Not only is that true, it is the American way. This country is powered by small businesses and they exist primarily because the owners work hard and often sacrifice to keep them in existence.

Tough campaigns bring out the best and worst in people. Obama it seems is going to be much more outspoken about his love of government and hate of the private sector as this campaign goes along.

This campaign may come down to those who believe in capitalism and private enterprise and those who believe in socialism and the government.

It’s supposed to be a no-no to call Obama a socialist. It’s like questioning something about his background. For example, if you wonder why Obama refuses to release personal information about himself that most other presidential candidates release, then you are a “birther” and a nut by definition.

However, it is apparently perfectly understandable that the mainstream media is demanding that Mitt Romney release 12 years of income tax returns.

Maybe Romney should make a deal and release one additional year if Obama will release the information about who paid for him to go to Occidental College; another year if Obama will release information about who paid for him to attend Columbia University; and another year if Obama will release information about who paid for him to attend Harvard Law School; with bonus points for details about who paid for the expensive foreign travel that Obama did while a student.

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The obvious Republican presidential candidate all along was Mitt Romney. It took awhile to get there and he certainly wasn’t my first choice. However, when you consider some of the lightweights that were in the lead at one point or another and look at what the Obama campaign is already throwing at Romney, it is obvious that some of the others would be like Sen. John McCain was at this point in his campaign, desperately looking for a way to get the race over with.

The attacks by Obama are going to get much, much worse. Obama cannot run on the economy, and he can’t run on the war in Afghanistan – where nobody is really sure what his goals are but he wants to keep Americans there fighting and dying until he decides it is time for them to come home. That time, by the way, is just a date he sets. No goals no accomplishments, just a date.

As the campaign continues it is going to become obvious that the sitting president of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world, cannot run on “Hope and Change.” What is going to change this time, the curtains in the Oval Office? Or maybe this time around he’ll get the quote right before they have the rug made?

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The mainstream media determine what the story is, write it and then keep reinforcing and don’t let the facts get in the way.

All the talk now is that Romney has to be sure and not make the same mistake McCain did four years ago when he picked then Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. The mainstream media hated Palin from the get-go and they still hate her today. The story is that she somehow cost McCain the election, that she was a drain on the campaign rather than an addition.

The American people were already bored with McCain and the McCain campaign when Palin appeared on the stage. Palin turned a ho-hum Republican convention into something people actually wanted to watch.

Palin had a disastrous interview with Katie Couric, but that was mostly the fault of the campaign. Why the campaign didn’t yank her out of that interview after five minutes is a mystery. It certainly appeared that there were people in the McCain campaign who were trying to make Palin look bad, or perhaps even trying to make sure that McCain didn’t win. If they weren’t working against McCain then they are so incredibly incompetent it is amazing they found jobs outside the federal government.

Palin brought life to a moribund campaign. She wasn’t used well and was incredibly mistreated by the campaign, but McCain didn’t lose because of Palin, she was his only hope of winning. However, he couldn’t take advantage of it because he listened to the same folks who killed his presidential campaign in the primaries. It wasn’t until McCain ran out of money and let everyone go that he started winning primaries. Then he hired back the same campaign buffoons who had ruined his primary campaign, only this time he never fired them, so there was no comeback.

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When you hear Obama talk about raising taxes – or ending the tax cuts, which is the same thing – it is important to remember that this has nothing to do with revenue. Obama is perfectly willing to borrow a couple of trillion dollars every year. Revenue only matters if you are trying to live within your income. Obama doesn’t give a hoot about living within the tax revenue.

So he is just talking about income redistribution. Obama is more interested in taking money from the rich, because he thinks the rich should have their money taken away than he is interested in providing the federal government with revenue.

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Condoleezza Rice is brilliant, and in many ways she would make a good vice presidential running mate. Rice would not help Romney with the black vote, but she would help him a lot with women. One huge problem is that Rice is pro-abortion, and she is not borderline pro-abortion, she is very much in favor of keeping abortion legal.

If Romney picks her then the conservative Republicans just won’t bother to vote. They are not going to vote for Obama and they won’t vote for a pro-abortion candidate so they will stay home in droves.

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The US Postal Service is going away. It is no longer going to exist in the way that we know it today. One question the politicians have to answer is how much money does the federal government want to waste to make it appear that mail is still important.

Saturday mail delivery is a ridiculous, useless expense. Instead of closing branches, which actually are useful, the post office should end Saturday delivery next week.

One of the reasons they don’t is the lobby from the newspaper associations. Many small papers depend on the postal service to deliver their papers on Saturday. Those papers will just have to bear the cost of delivery themselves. The idea of delivering mail on Saturdays for the junk mail companies and a few publications is ridiculous. Mail service is so bad now if it were cut to three days a week it wouldn’t make much difference to most people.

Imagine you were a college student in 2008 who got out and worked for Obama because you believed in change, and believed in change you can believe in. You were convinced that if Obama were elected president things would change, that he could do something about the economy, that the US would not be involved in foreign wars or in keeping foreign prisoners at Guantanamo. You believed that the policies of old were gone and Obama could and would bring real change to the way the United States operates at home and abroad.

Now it is four years later and you’re looking at how that hope and change worked. You have to ask, “Is Obama any different than any of the other politicians?” The answer is no. But in Obama’s defense, I think he fell for his own rhetoric. He started believing some of the stuff he was saying. If Obama didn’t believe he was invincible then he would not have flown to Copenhagen at the last minutes to personally plead before the International Olympic Committee for the Olympics to be in Chicago. The Unites States lost a lot of face when Obama went and he couldn’t even move Chicago out of third place. He went and he had no effect. To have the president of the United States turned down cold by the Olympic Committee did not help our international prestige.

Obama apparently thought he could sit down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and say, “You need to reduce your country to what it was before the 1967 war.” And then Netanyahu would say, “You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?” But that didn’t happen. Mideast peace is certainly no closer. Obama’s magic worked on the voters but it doesn’t work in the rest of the world.

So are those folks who worked for him so hard four years ago going to be taking days off from work to go and campaign for Obama? It doesn’t seem likely. And why would the college students of today campaign for “the man.” Obama is the president. He can’t claim he’s going to change anything.

Obama hasn’t changed anything except the person living in the White House. Obama’s wife goes on expensive trips abroad at the taxpayers’ expense. The family goes on expensive vacations to exclusive resorts. Politically Obama hasn’t even been able to get a budget passed. He certainly hasn’t brought about much change.

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The amount of protection given to Democrats by the mainstream media is enormous. It’s a wonder Republicans ever win considering the difference in the way they are treated. Obama – at a rally in Roanoke, Virginia – suggested that folks who were feeling woozy because of the heat seek medical attention from “paralegals.”

Now, Obama knows full well that paralegals are not who you go to for medical attention, but it’s what he said. The American newspaper reporters tweeted about it, but didn’t report it. The Daily Mail in Great Britain did report that misstatement and the fact that American newspapers didn’t bother to report it. But, my goodness, if former President George Walker Bush had said that, the American newspapers would have brought up once again the fact that Bush didn’t know the difference between a paralegal and a paramedic and how could someone that dumb graduate from Yale, but probably not mention that Bush also has an MBA from Harvard.

Vice President Joe Biden can hardly make a five-minute talk without some major gaffe, but the press rarely reports them. Nor does the press make much of the fact that Biden actually makes money on his Secret Service protection because he rents the Secret Service a cottage next door to his house in Delaware.

The Secret Service follows quite a few folks around, but as far as anyone has been able to determine Biden is the only one to charge them rent. Maybe he’s not as dumb as he sounds every time he opens his mouth.