A Megalomaniac in the White House

Main Entry: meg•a•lo•ma•nia
Pronunciation: \ˌme-gə-lō-ˈmā-nē-ə, -nyə\
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin
Date: 1887
1 : a mania for great or grandiose performance
2 : a delusional mental disorder that is marked by feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur
— meg•a•lo•ma•ni•ac \-ˈmā-nē-ˌak\ adjective or noun
— meg•a•lo•ma•ni•a•cal \-mə-ˈnī-ə-kəl\ also meg•a•lo•man•ic \-ˈma-nik\ adjective
— meg•a•lo•ma•ni•a•cal•ly \-mə-ˈnī-ə-k(ə-)lē\ adverb


I will be the first to say it. Folks, we have a problem in the White House. And I don’t mean this in a joking manner. The President of the United States, while the economy is falling down around us, is once again focusing on health care. He is obsessed. He is tone deaf to the will of the people. He is arrogant. He is ideological. And I truly believe there is a mental flaw that is dangerous to the country and to him personally. He is Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon all wrapped up into one, with an inflated view of himself and his own self importance to a danger point not seen since Watergate. The guy is nuts, and there are serious problems to our Constitutional system ahead.

Whether Mr. Obama and his cohorts want to admit it or not, the American public has turned away from Obama’s omnipotence. They have reviewed his health care proposals, and have overwhelmingly rejected them with only 27% of Americans now believing the Democratic plan should pass. The public has rejected the plan, and the corrupt and slimy process by which it was achieved.

Not only has the public rejected it, it has been rejected with a passion not seen in this country since the Vietnam War. Of more concern, is the transference of this anger to the government as a whole. A CNN poll released today shows that 56% of all Americans now think the rapidly expanding government monster is an IMMEDIATE threat to our freedoms. Among Republicans, 70% agree the government is an immediate threat, and the figure is 63% among independents, the group that put Obama into power.

Heretofore, although his policies are being overwhelmingly rejected by the American public, he held a strong degree of personal popularity. In my humble opinion, the arrogance and contempt for American concerns exhibited at the so called Health Care Summit will destroy even that. Yes, Mr. President, elections do matter, especially the upcoming one in November, 2010.

His comments at the end of the summit saying vote with him, or he will push it through by whatever means necessary won’t play well with an opposing public he is supposed to represent. If he tries his threatened parliamentary maneuvers, he will in effect give the American public the finger, and then we have a problem. His contempt for the American public is stunning, but we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, he is among the elite. The rest of us are just clinging to our guns and religion.

How the anger of the American will play out is a major concern. He is not king. He is an elected official who ran on a centrist platform. He promised a new cooperative Washington based on consensus and compromise. What we got instead was a complete abuse of power by a bully in the White House and partisans in Congress. He couldn’t even get his own party to agree on his outrageous plan, and is now trying to blame Republicans who were literally locked out of negotiations run by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid behind closed doors. These folks passed the bill in the dark of night on Christmas Eve they were so afraid of public reaction. It doesn’t get more scummy than that.

We have seen Mr. Obama’s character flaw before. I strongly suggest he review Richard Nixon’s tenure in the White House. I also strongly suggest that his aids find this guy a psychiatrist to take care of his megalomaniac, narcissistic tendencies before it’s too late. If he wants to destroy himself, and his scummy friends in Congress, that is up to him. I fear for the country.

Hold Onto Your Wallets

Hold onto your wallets, folks. Here comes stagfalation. Reports today from the government today are giving pause to the inflation and commodity hawks. Monthly unemployment apps increased by 31,000 to 473,000. It was expected to decline by approximately 15,000. Even more disturbing was the 1.4% monthly increase in the PPI (wholesale Producer Price Index). That is an annual PPI inflation rate of 16%. That’s right…16%. As we all know, those wholesale price increases will translate sooner or later into retail prices.

Alright, so retail prices for produced goods will go up…what else is new? Well, commodity prices will start to rise as the investor class look for a hedge against the inflation. That means you will pay more for any commodity based product from gasoline to bread and cereal. In addition, gold prices will begin to rise; great for the gold investor and lousy if you want some jewelry.

The Federal Reserve, whose mandate by law is to control inflation, will have to act. It will raise interest rates and tighten the money supply by either increasing the reserve requirements for banks or simply taking the cash out of circulation. Watch the news. They do that by “selling bonds” and paying interest to people to park their money on the Fed balance sheet.

As interest rates go up, the government will have to pay more just like you and me. You know all that debt we just incurred? Interest rates will go up on that, and the cost of debt service to you and me for government debt will cripple all other government programs. Of course, they could just print money, in which case the dollar would collapse and we would have hyper inflation.

In addition, other countries will not want to buy our debt, forcing interest rates up even further. Taxes will have to rise to pay for basic government services. Folks, this is not a good thing.

Keynesian economics is an economic theory propagated in 1936, and came to prominence as economists concluded that World War II, and the associated massive government spending, pulled us out of the Great Depression. It believes that government is necessary to cure the inefficiencies in the economic system, and looks for private/public partnerships and massive government intervention into the country’s economic system to save us from ourselves.

The 2008 financial collapse is an example of what empowers Keynesians to up the intrusiveness of the central government. Maybe it was needed, but socialists use it as a simple power grab wrapped in intellectual mumbo jumbo.

The cure is often worse than the disease: stagflation. High unemployment, high taxes, high interest rates, high inflation combine to form the misery index. Those of us who lived through the Carter years know what this is.

Are we headed there again? The articles I read today seemed mixed and tempered fears. On the other hand, I am a firm believer that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Even money says this is beginning of something we don’t want to go through!!

The Health Care Summit Trap

With the election of Scott Brown to the Senate, and Obama’s increasingly dismal poll ratings, and the debacle poll ratings for numerous Democrats in the Senate and House in the upcoming fall election, President Obama has indicated that he may be willing to compromise on the proposed health bill stalled in the Congress. He has invited Republicans to a televised “summit” on February 25 at Blair House.

I am for health care reform, just not Obama’s health care reform. That is the message of the American public as evidenced by the Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts special elections. Yet while Americans are screaming for jobs, Obama and his homeys continue to harp on the health care issue largely stalled by his own party. If he couldn’t pass it with his majority in the House and super-majority in the Senate…what’s a Republican to do? But they persist, nonetheless.

There is big part of me that hopes a summit meeting such as this would succeed. Until you have been in the position of losing your health care and not able to buy it, you have no idea how important that pre-existing condition provision is. I have been there and it is scary. But that massive ideologically based 2000 plus page reform bill isn’t the answer, and Obama’s continual focus on it rather than moving to the jobs issue gives me concern.

I suspect this is a setup. This past year, I have witnessed some of the most rotten, base, and slimy political maneuvering and payoffs with this Obama group I have seen in all the years I have been following politics. I have now been conditioned to expect the worse, and I am rarely disappointed. This is a scummy bunch who will stoop to anything to get 100% of what they want 100% of the time. They keep going for broke, and keep coming up empty. Their learning curve is a tad skewed. Maybe it is because they are from Chicago, or maybe it is because they are hard ideologues incapable of viewing the world from any perspective other than their own.

At any rate, the administration seems incapable of understanding that the problem isn’t how the message has been delivered. Americans understand the message as well as the despicable process they used to achieve it. Americans don’t like the process. Americans don’t like the message.

There are those who believe this health care summit is being designed to give Obama cover. The real purpose is to find a way to blame Republicans, who had little to no input on the health care bill, for its failure; then to use that blame to pass large parts of it through the reconciliation process contrary to American wishes.

I think they are on the money. But I think it will fail. Obama has placed himself into a cocoon of progressive advisors and is oblivious to just how unpopular the current health care monstrosity is. I don’t believe sufficient members of the House or Senate would try this given the toxic political landscape it would create for them.

That is a lesson Obama will have to learn; that is if he is capable of learning. Ehhhhh!

Dictatorship of the Whack Jobs

We live in a day and age when anyone with a crackpot idea can get the infamous 15 minutes of fame and we are supposed to shake in our politically correct shoes. What’s scary is that people actually give serious consideration to some of this garbage. Much of the muck in which we find ourselves today can be directly traced to some of these nutty ideas, and like trained politically correct dogs, we subject ourselves to a Dictatorship of the Whack Jobs. If you say something long enough and loud enough, people will begin to believe it. Before you know it, the craziest person in the room is running the asylum. Three examples have surfaced over the last 24 hours.

1) Mother Theresa deserves to be on a stamp. Our beloved post office has decided to honor this marvelous woman by issuing a postage stamp in her honor; and here come the whacked atheist groups complaining that this is an endorsement of religion. Here is a “saint” in both the sacred and secular sense that devoted her entire life to the poorest of the poor. Yes, she was a nun. And Martin Luther King was a minister. So what!! Now we will hear a prolonged discussion about the separation of church and state. Let’s all sing a verse of Silent Night and forget the whole thing.

2) Johnny Weir is an American ice skater currently going through the 2010 Olympic trials. In one of his performances, he wore a costume trimmed in fox. Here comes some whack job animal rights group, the Friends of Animals, requesting that he change his costume and respect the rights of animals. You know what? Go away. You mind your business and I will mind mine. But poor Johnny, afraid he would be harassed at the Olympic qualifying events, acquiesced and changed to “faux”. If you don’t think the harassment of those who wear fur coats is real, I have personally witnessed, right in downtown Youngstown, red paint thrown on fur coats by these idiots. Here is the deal. My wife wears fur, and lots of it. And she will continue to wear fur. The former wife of a friend of mine said it best when confronted by one of these misguided animal rights fools. She said: “This mink was born for me to wear on my back!” And that’s the fact, jack.

3) Speaking of which, Ground Hogs Day was this past Tuesday. Here come our friends at PETA complaining that Punxutawney Phil should be replaced with an animal robot because the groundhog is being subjected to extreme cruelty while looking for his shadow. I should have the life this animal has, pampered to the max the other 364 days of the year. Of course this was a cheap publicity stunt for this group which crossed the line from legitimate concerns into complete insanity a long time ago. But you know what? Some idiot will be sitting watching his television set going “Ya, man. They’re right. We ought to stop that stuff. Save the groundhog.”

Are all of the above funny? Of course they are. And for the most part, we take them for what they are worth. The point is that just because someone complains about something doesn’t mean we should act on it. The biggest nuts are the ones with the biggest mouths. If it starts to sink into our societal norms, we all end up paying the price…and sacrificing our freedom.

Just ask the restaurant owners in New York City who are being told by Mayor Bloomberg to take salt shakers off the tables and limit salt content in their food. Limited salt intake is a good idea if some of us need to do that. On the other hand, it’s none of Mayor Bloomberg’s business. Maybe he will try to ban people wearing furs in New York next…and take my word for it…you will see that coming in the next few years in some city, some place.