Shadow Government and Free Speech

Everyone is more or less leaving the czars alone. Obama’s unvetted shadow government. Hillary is Secretary of State in charge of anything which doesn’t matter – not Iran, Iraq, the so-called Middle East, Honduras. She has been well and truly neutralized – i.e.; until she wakes out of her trance. The Congress and the vetted Cabinet members are seemingly oblivious to the reality that their powers are being rather quickly subsumed into the White House. Census Bureau anyone? Oh, that one hasn’t worked yet, but just wait. Now even the CIA. The FBI is going to oversee interrogations from guess where? The White House. Surprised? At least Panetta has the sense to be upset. Not Nancy, Harry or even McCain. Who has standing in the Courts to combat this? And we have so many czars and advisors. All in the White House, running the nation de facto.

Enter Van Jones, an adviser to the White House on environmental issues, and a co-founder of ColorOfChange.org. A double felon – or as it only one? How did he get his security clearance? This takes convict rehab to a new level. Did you expect convicted felons to be running your government when you voted for The One? Well that felon doesn’t like Glenn Beck calling them out. ColorofChange.org demanding the boycott of Beck’s show by advertisers.

The press is all atwitter with notions of free speech. They insist that corporate advertisers are simply exercising their right to free speech by not advertising on Beck. Well, just hold on a minute there. If Van Jones’ organization is leading the charge against Beck and he has the ear of the POTUS, isn’t there just the slightest suggestion of intimidation from the White House? It is a brave corporation that will stand up to the White House, especially one so ready to punish those who do. So it doesn’t seem like the exercise of free speech when the power of the President is weighing in on the topic. A President who, in very short order, has a record of demonizing any large industry he chooses to, just for the hell of it. We don’t need insurance companies do we? Let’s just wipe them out. Car companies? Take them over. Co-opting as many as he can, threatening others with Acorn-like attacks of the ‘people’. Pull GE/NBC in, send goons to AIG executives’ homes. All orchestrated from you-know-where. Of course they’re just exercising ‘free speech’ by pulling ads.

Obama is Very Old.

Obama is very old. He bounds up every step with the agility of a fit person. His wife’s biceps and triceps are much admired. Unfortunately, he left his brain in the early 20^th Centur y, and the brain is where youth actually lies. Obama is very old. Either his brain is not flexible enough to see what has transpired or he’s really about 100 years old and only can remember all of the injustices of the first half of the 20^th Century.

Perhaps while whining about racial inequality, Obama failed to notice that he was President of the US, Deval Patrick was Governor of the state in which the incident of which he was complaining took place, that Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest females (if not the richest) in the US and the person who, in fact, pushed his own candidacy over – because a black woman was so revered in 21^st Century America that she had that amount of influence in multi-racial America.

And please don’t forget Condaleeza Rice or Clarence Thomas, although they don’t count to you, even if they do to others. This is not a world of petty grievance any longer. Ya know what? People who vote in a black President and governor are not racist.

Get with the program, man. You might not wish to be the “One” who pushes us back to those unfortunate days. ‘Cause right now I would say you stand a more than decent chance of setting race relations waaaay back – all by yourself. This will not look too good in the history books.

Much has been accomplished in the years following the civil rights movement and most of us are able to acknowledge the evidence before our eyes. Bill Clinton, implementing much of the right’s Contract for America, created workfare to free people from the systematized enslavement of welfare, which, in demanding little from people, kept them under the patronizing thumb of government bureaucrats, with no incentive to better themselves. Workfare worked.

Where was Obama? Nursing grievances in Chicago. Well, please look at Harlem, freed from the grievance crowd by Rudy Giuliani, that racist Republican mayor. Harlem lives and thrives. Bedford Stuyvesant is being gentrified.

Look at 62nd St in Chicago from Hyde Park to Midway Airport, land where the chief community organizer plied his trade. For several miles you can walk that street, safe in the knowledge that no car will impede your way, should you opt to walk the entire stretch in the middle of the street, just for the fun of it. Yes, there are stoplights, remnants of a previous civilization, but no cars. Are there no cars due to violence? Lack of funds? What? Chicago where our delightful Rahm, David A., Michelle, Barry et.al. allowed a long stretch of the Second City to become Tobacco Road – without the tobacco.

Here’s a clue. Just because your skin is black, does not mean you’re not a racist. A racist prevents another from going about his business, fulfilling his right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’, just because of his race. Not providing happiness, but the right to its pursuit. This may be where Obama goes wrong. If you are bogged down in grievances, it diverts your attentions from productive activities. And therein lies the flaw of community activism as practiced by Obama. While business thrived in New York, thanks to Giuliani’s refusal to see color - the definition of a being race-blind - refusing to even acknowledge Al Sharpton and his whining, transforming neighborhoods by encouraging commercial activity, Obama and his ilk were in full Sharpton mode. Thus 62nd Street and Tobacco Road, Illinois.

Had anyone bothered to look at 62nd Street they might have hesitated to give the weighty responsibilities of the US government to someone who was part of this urban debacle. In a time of great economic growth, where was Obama urging his people to throw off the presumptively best-intentioned shackles of welfare and dependency to take control of their lives, their own economic well-being?

No, he was using a bankrupt model of enabling citizens to eke out some minimal existence from others, namely the tax payer, whose forbearance was great while there wasn’t an alternative model. How to game a system which failed to give self-respect or self-worth, but encouraged all the worst and least productive aspects of humans. “No we can’t!” is the motto of this point of view. How patronizing. Who’s the racist?

Not to mention the failure to acknowledge the work of millions of Americans over the last 40 years, black and white, some of whom even died, to assure the end of a racist US. Who by their efforts happened to enable you to become President. It is low to denigrate their work as if nothing. But then again where were you at the time? Oh, yes, Indonesia. And then under the tutelage of Frank Marshall Davis, born in 1906. Hmmm. He really did experience the early 20^th Century’s racism. And would be just about 100 years old or so by now.

So we really shouldn’t be surprised that Obama assumes the police are racist, in the absence of actual information about the Gates incident. He has lived a life of nursing such grievances and exploiting them, facts be damned. Thus his wife’s comments about when she was first proud of America and his darling reverend’s comments about whites.

So don’t give us a teachable moment. Perhaps the American people can teach you a thing or two about what being color-blind means. If only you could look over your nose to see what’s before your eyes.

The Non-Stimulating Stimulus

Suppose you wanted to stimulate the US economy and believed that the expenditure of $787 billion would do it, despite the other alternatives of letting the economy heal itself in the natural course of events or simply addressing the financial issues causing all of the economy’s problems. How would you go about it?

Pericles built the Acropolis and we laud his name to this day for being a great leader. FDR had the TVA, the Hoover Dam and the Rural Electrification Administration and Teddy Roosevelt, the National Parks. Barack Obama is installing toilets and trimming the greenery about the federal buildings in D.C. Now why would that be?

Where are the plans for monorails, to improve the highway system, build subways and bridges, modernize water systems? Plans which a dedicated big government type would be implementing. Someone with a vision for the country. Certainly, there is enough money to do so. The money to be spent could have been used for major capital improvements to infrastructure and new infrastructure. Rather it is being utterly wasted on the picayune, mostly maintenance, of very small things.

So what does this tell us about Obama? It all suggests he is not interested in improving life in the US, but just jamming the system with unsupportable debt and a multi-generational albatross about our necks.

What he might fail to realize is that with major capital expenditures, he would have more support from the populace – even if it didn’t get spent right away. Citizens would know that grand plans were in the offing and would be interested and willing to wait. Plus, in the tradition of great leaders he could build monuments to himself and to our civilization. Even the right wing would have problems fighting such projects. The idea that major capital improvements would be made would have a salutary effect on many people, who would view them as honoring the US’s sense of its own innovation and talent.

But that’s not Obama’s view. While his narcissism knows no bounds, and he is thus naturally inclined to place himself above all mortals and create monuments to himself, he would be unwilling to build projects which vaunt American civilization, for which he has total contempt. No Pericles he. And as a result we have expenditure equivalent to that meant for massive projects and nothing visible to show for it, now or ever.

Since his other citizen-breaking plans, cap and trade and health care are viewed with great skepticism because of the misguided, small-minded way the stimulus was planned and executed, its allocation, or misallocation in this case, is quite important to his presidency and its future.