Ugh

I've had a health issue developing  over the past couple of months, which has been sapping my energy and kept me from doing much work on this blog.  Once I'm back up and running I'll be posting again, God willing.  I'll be sending notifications via Twitter and Facebook once I'm back at it.

Peekaboo

The main stream media's latest going down on bended knee in serving the needs of the Obama Administation has been such a blatantly craven affair, I have to wonder if at the end of the day the nation's leading liberal editors and reporters still actually think of themselves as autonomous beings with free will.

Last week, President Obama's eldest daughter went on a "spring break" vacation with a few of her school chums to tourist safe haven Mexico, along with a contingent of 25 Secret Service agents.  As usual, this latest example of the Obama's pursuit of budget vacations has raised questions from some about just how much money this latest jaunt is going to cost the taxpayers.  Also as usual, the objection that the children of the President should be left out of the news whenever possible has come up, disregarding the question of whether or not the President and First Lady actually live up to that standard themselves.

What was unusual about this latest news story is that once the fact of the First Daughter's vacation was reported at a number of major online news sites, the stories began to disappear.  Links to the story suddenly went nowhere or were redirected to pages that had nothing to do with the vacation story.  After a few days the White House admitted that it had requested the story be removed, a request with which most of the news outlets complied.  Given that The New York Times on at least one occasion actually denied a Bush White House request to not publish a news story on national security grounds, this new concern with going along with White House requests to kill stories is pathetic, especially given the essentially unscandalous nature of the vacation story.

So what does this mean for the future?  I doubt that any of the White House political sharpies are following my humble little blog, but I think there's some ways that the White House could use this new ability to make news more invisible. Why limit the news embargo on the Presidential Kids to stuff like vacations or school activities and such?  How about making Malia an intern in the White House press office, and let her announce news that might be embarrassing to the administration, and then declare that coverage of this issue is off limits, because it's part of Malia's extra-curricular school activities.  Sure, it's a huge stretch, but the liberal media has shown every willingness and ability to play blind, deaf and dumb when it comes to protecting the Obama Administration.  Who knows, with Malia leading the charge, the Friday Night Document Dump might finally become a thing of the past.

Gas Man

The Obama re-election campaign seems to be in a spaghetti-at-the-wall phase as they await a clear winner to emerge in the Republican primaries, at which point the campaign will be able tailor its attacks in a more directed way.  Each day seems to bring from the White House another proposal or proclamation in the apparent hope it will shore up Obama's faltering popularity, and then the next day it's off to another one, with the effectiveness of each day's work no doubt being closely watched and noted by White House strategists.

Well, as Obama and White House make their plans for the coming campaign, let me bestow my little gift to them.  I generally find slogans to be silly, but every presidential campaign does seem to need its own little phrase that can be bathed in red, white and blue and sent out to do whatever it is a slogan can do. So far the Obama 2012 campaign hasn't had much success with this. WTF (Winning The Future) was instantly ridiculous and sent packing with a nice bit of help from Sarah Palin, and as far as I know the campaign hasn't as yet let loose another one.  So here's my suggestion for a new slogan:  Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Last week we had Obama taking a pre-emptive strike against what could turn into a huge political problem for him, namely, rapidly rising gas prices with no good prospect that they will go down anytime soon.  Could much of the rise in price possibly be due to Democrats and the environmental left systematically hampering the ability of oil companies to drill for oil within the United States over the past 20 years, thereby decreasing the domestic and world supply of oil, and making the country more vulnerable to shocks in the oil market?  And could the fact that this policy has been accelerated under Obama make him responsible for a large part of this?

The answer from Obama is of course not, it's the fault of Republican obstructionists who have done everything in their power to prevent the coming of Future World, where the cars run on algae gas and everything else is wind or solar powered, and never again will anyone have to drill, drill, drill for oil or dig in the ground for coal.  The notion that it is probably a bad idea to cripple the nation's economy by massively increasing the price of energy as a way to hasten the development of yet unproven technology is apparently alien to the Obama mindset.  His insistence that opening up the oil fields for exploration and drilling won't bring the price of gas down also shows him to be clueless about the nature of markets, especially the highly speculative oil market.

In almost every area of his presidency, Obama seems to live in a bubble world where all glory is his, and nothing is his fault.  The economy is improving! More people are going to work!  America is back and the world respects us again!  Yeah, right.  In the city where I live businesses are still failing at a depressing rate, way too many people don't have as much money as they used to, the streets are in more disrepair than ever, and there's two more houses on my block that have gone empty in the past month or so.  As far as the international scene goes, Obama might as well make his motto: Making the world safe for sharia!

Pope Obama I

President Obama's apparently personally directed HHS regulation mandating that religious organizations must pay for sterilization and contraception for their employees is turning into such a firestorm that it appears the White House may only be able to end the crisis by backing off on its position, if only temporarily.  If that were to happen, however, it would be an utterly humiliating defeat for the President, surely the last thing he wants to suffer in the run up to November's election. Assuming the President hasn't bullheadedly forbidden it, I would guess that behind the scenes the White House is frantically attempting to find a way out of this crisis that will allow the President to retreat without his campaign being seriously damaged, probably through proclaiming it has reached some sort of "compromise," real or not.

Of course, this incident is nothing more than the latest episode in the Obama Administration's endless quest to increase government power at the expense of individual liberty, always in the name of some greater good for society. That this comes right on the heels of a unanimous Supreme Court slapdown of the Administration (Hosanna-Tabor) in another case involving religious freedom makes it easy to speculate that there is something personal in this area for Obama, and that he intends to get his way on this, one way or another.

What's notable here is how badly the White House has miscalculated the level of opposition to this regulation.  It has received vocal support from that part of Obama's base who like to refer to the Tea Party as "teabaggers," but the President in this affair is receiving unusual criticism from some important Democratic leaders, who have supported him in nearly everything else.  That a good number of these Democrats represent states that will be crucial to Obama's reelection attempt must have the electoral vote counters in the Obama campaign drinking a little heavier than usual at the end of the day. And in spite of the liberal trope that American Catholics don't care about the Church's rules about sex and procreation, it's clear that the majority of Catholics are seeing this as a direct attempt to destroy the freedom of the Church and its members to practice their faith as they believe is right.  In this the Catholic Church isn't alone, and support is growing from leaders of other faiths and denominations in opposition to the regulation.

In the last three years, a vast amount of print and pixels have been devoted to attempting to figure out what exactly it is that President Obama means to do. Is he diabolical, or is he just an incompetent idealist?  Does he realize the deeper implications of his actions?  Does he care?

I'd say in this latest episode we have one answer to these questions.  This is what he means to do:  he wants to control how you and others of your faith practice your religion -- the faith so many of you believe in with all your heart. Could it be any more clear?

American Seizer

A suddenly very gray-haired President Obama has returned from his middle class hero's vacation in Hawaii, apparently determined to show the world that he's got the power, and he's going to use it.  The fact that some of this power doesn't actually exist, at least as defined by the U.S. Constitution, is one of those little problems that we're going to have to work out for ourselves.  He's a busy man with important things to do, and he doesn't have time to waste fretting about all these old-fashioned limits on his presidential power.

From what we've seen in the first three years of President Obama and his administration in action, I think it's fair to say that this President has little respect for the legal and traditional restraints on his power that previous Presidents have labored under, among them the cherished liberal hero, Franklin Roosevelt.  President Obama has maintained that the Congress had no say in the actions he took in Libya.  He has appointed numerous "czars" as a way to dilute the Congress's power to approve or deny Cabinet appointments. His Attorney General has at best been uncooperative in Congressional investigations into nefarious behavior in the Justice Department.  Only last month he signed a budget extension bill while declaring at the same time that he didn't consider himself bound to enforce a number of the items in that bill, items which he had at that moment signed into law.

So now, upon return from his vacation, President Obama has made a few "recess appointments" to federal agencies that would normally require Senate approval.  The history of recess appointments is basically a cat and mouse tale between the President and the Congress, with each side occasionally pulling sneaky moves the other side didn't see coming, but until now there has been at least one common feature:  the Congress was always in recess when the recess appointment was made.

President Obama, being the alpha creative that he is, has found a way around this little problem:  he has determined that the President can decide when the Senate is in recess, if he finds that the Congress is being obstinate and obstructionist in denying him approval of that appointment.  Never mind that the Constitution states that Congress is the sole power in determining under which rules it will operate, including saying when it is or isn't in recess.  This is one those cases where President Obama clearly understands more than the rest of us, and if he's got something that the country needs to get done, it's up to him to get it done himself, and to hell with any of those little obstacles in his way like the separation of powers and actual legal authority to act.

Since I haven't heard any talk from the Republican leadership in the House about drawing up articles of impeachment on the President, I'm going to assume this latest violation of his oath of office by Obama is going to stand for the time being until the matter has worked its way through the courts, which I assume could take years.  So meanwhile, we have a President up for re-election who has a lot of things he'd like to see get done, with possibly less than a year to do it.  What other tricks does he have up his sleeve?  If the Supreme Court this summer decides that Obamacare is unconstitutional, will he abide by that, or will he incite a constitutional crisis by somehow defying the decision, and what would that lead to?

The President's party has almost unanimously stood behind him in this latest power grab, which I find very disturbing, though not surprising.  Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership don't seem to be worried about protecting the rights and power of Congress in all this, making them essentially collaborators in Obama's campaign to increase his powers at the expense of the Constitution.  If Obama manages to prevail in the coming election, maybe we'll be treated to the spectacle of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi crowning Obama with a wreath a laurel leaves, proclaiming the dominion of our new leader, Seizer Obama.  And then maybe he could hit both of them on the head with Nancy's giant gavel, just to remind them who's boss.