Friday, January 30, 2015

The Obama Epic Fail Series - Government Management Policy


We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:


  • Transparency and integrity
  • Economic policy
  • Foreign policy
  • Healthcare policy
  • Government management policy

Government Management Policy

I believe most politicians have such big egos that they are always looking for the legacy opportunities while neglecting the daily, hum drum operation of government. I am pretty sure LBJ is prouder of the civil rights bills that he helped get passed than making sure that Social Security checks went out on time. I am pretty sure that Nixon is prouder of his opening up relations with China than making sure that taxes got collected on time by the IRS.

This President is no different. Given the many epic failures of his administration that we have reviewed overt the past week or so, it is not surprising that he is now reaching, or over reaching, for any kind of positive legacy:
  • Obama Care is turning out to be a disaster but he does not want to even adjust it via some common sense changes lest it be viewed as a failure.
  • Dodd-Frank was passed years ago but it cannot be considered a positive legacy since much of the rules and regulations to support it have not even been written yet by the Obama administration.
  • He is willing to bypass Congress and violate the Constitution by trying to unilaterally enact immigration rules and laws by himself.
  • He wants to make community college free for those interested even though the merits of such an expensive boondoggle are few, if any.
As a result of feeding his ego and desperately trying to go down into history, Obama, like most of his predecessors, has neglected to effectively and efficiently operate even the most basic government functions. However, if you go down the list of government dysfunction under his administration, it seems that it is even worse than the dysfunction of those that came before him.

On top of this dysfunction, he cannot even claim that government is failing to provide even basic services because of budget cuts. The Federal government under his leadership has collected more taxes, spent more money, and had bigger budget deficits than any Presidency before his, which makes the following epic fails in government management even more despicable:
  • Medicare, Medicaid and a handful of over Federal government welfare programs still lose over $100 billion a year to incompetence, wasteful spending, and criminal fraud.
  • Social Security still loses over $100 billion a year to incompetence, wasteful spending, and criminal fraud.
  • The IRS admits that it fails to collect well over $400 billion taxes from tax evaders but somehow finds the time and resources to suppress the First Amendment rights of huge numbers of American citizens.
  • The Defense Department is so screwed up that professional auditors have actually given up trying to figure out the Department's financial and accounting dealings and misdealings, a situation that probably wastes tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars every year.
  • Despite spending well over two hundred billion dollars via the Department of Education during his Presidency, our failing public school education processes are no better now than when Obama took office.
  • Despite spending well over a hundred billion dollars via the Department of Energy during his Presidency, the nation still has no strategic and effective energy plan despite spending billions of dollars on a string of failed energy companies and projects with no societal benefit in return.
  • The country via the Federal government still has no coordinated plan to attack the major health crisis and problems of our time, problems and crisis that continually drive up the cost of medical care and medical insurance int his country.
  • The Federal government continued to hand out huge bonus checks to upper level executives and managers in the Veterans Administration even though thousands and thousands of veterans were not getting the medical care they were promised and what they well deserved, with some of them dying while waiting for proper and delayed treatment.
  • Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are quickly approaching the edge of fiscal insolvency but six years into this Presidency, the President has no plan on how to fix any for these programs in a cost effective and quality effective manner.
  • The current national debt, while receding from the astronomical growth rates of the first four years of the Obama Presidency, will start rising drastically again very shortly due to the budget trajectory this Presidency has set the country on.
  • Despite spending over a billion dollars and having a three year head start, this administration could not put together a relatively simple website process for Obama Care.
  • Even worse than not be able to build the Obama Care website process, this administration proceeded with the rollout of the website despite knowing that it would fail almost immediately.
  • Despite spending well over two hundred billion since the beginning of his administration, Obama's Department of Homeland Security has not been able to stop multiple terrorist attacks within the country (e.g. Boston Marathon bombing, Fort Hood shootings, underwear bomber, Times Square bomber, etc.), has not been able to secure our southern border, and has even done a horrible job protecting the White House with White House windows having been shot out, an intruder forcing his way deep inside of the building, and German tourists strolling into restricted areas before being stopped.
  • This President has overseen the massive spying and data collection of information on the communications habits and content of just about every American, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, with little societal benefit to show for the violations.
  • Despite failing America in delivering even basic services in a cost effective and quality manner, this administration continued to waste millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on such stupid projects as funding a study to determine when dogs became man's best friend, building a video game to simulate prom week, funding pottery classes in Morocco, and other such nonsense that affects virtually nobody in America except for those that receive the money to carry out such inane projects.
Yes, everyone wants to hit a home run, in baseball, in life and in the Presidency. But if you cannot hit singles and get on base, then the home runs are usually not very important. 

If you cannot operate basic government functions, then who cares whether or not you got free community college tuition for a small handful of people. The rest of America is seeing their tax dollars being spent in a haphazard and ineffective manner, whether it is endangering their retirement revenue stream and medical care, allowing tax cheaters to get away without paying their fair share, denying veterans the medial care they need, etc. 

If you cannot do basic government functions, if you allowed government to turn into Jabba the Hutt, the obese, disgusting, and resource consuming monster of Star Wars, then you are an epic fail when it comes to providing efficient and effective government services for hard earned taxpayer dollars.

That will do it for this series which examined the performance of the Obama administration along five different dimensions. Unfortunately for the country, this Presidency has been an epic failure along every single one of those five dimensions. By the time he leaves office, we will have wasted eight years of not resolving any major issue of our times, not streamlining government to make it more effective, not having any credibility in foreign affairs, and added more than eight trillion dollars to our national debt. Epic fail.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:


www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w








Thursday, January 29, 2015

The Obama Epic Fail Series - Obama Care

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:


  • Transparency and integrity
  • Economic policy
  • Foreign policy
  • Healthcare policy
  • Government management policy

Healthcare policy, a.k.a. Obama Care

This is the fourth topic in this series which examines whether and where the Obama administration was an epic fail. The first post in that series can be accessed at:


Today we will take a summary look at Obama's legacy piece of legislation, Obama Care. Of all the areas to determine if this administration has been an epic fail, Obama Care is probably the easiest one to conclude...epic fail. We have been documenting and discussing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care for a number of years now.

In fact, every month there have so many unfolding disasters from this law that we usually have to devote multiple posts to cover all of the bad things that have been spawned by Obama Care. To review the dozens of disasters from the legislation, just enter the phrase, "the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care" in the search box above.

As we have pointed out many times, Obama Care is doomed to failure since it never addressed the underlying root causes of high and growing healthcare costs in this country. The main reason for high health care costs is not the fact that people do not have health care insurance, there are many other reasons that drive the cost increases. 

Even if every American had health care insurance, the overall costs to the nation would not change and would continue increasing. These root causes of ever higher costs include the following realities:
  • Americans eat too much.
  • Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
  • Americans smoke too much and drink alcohol too much.
  • Americans do not exercise enough.
  • Current Federal government programs encourage the production and use of inexpensive high fructose corn syrup and plain old sugar, two ingredients that infest and infect the nation's food chain.
  • The legislation does nothing to encourage break through research to attack and conquer the major cancers and diseases of our time.
  • Americans are getting older on average, increasing the likelihood aging diseases (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.) will become more prevalent and costly.
  • Medical tort reform of the entire industry is required.
  • Insurance company competition across state lines is discouraged.
  • Current government healthcare programs already waste tens of billions of dollars every year, money that could be used to improve health care in the country.
As we said above, even if every citizen got health care insurance as a result of Obama Care, these root causes and underlying problems would still exist. They would still be driving health care costs ever higher. 

Basic economic theory and reality teaches that if you reduce demand for a product or service and not change supply, the price has to go down. If we consider health care to be the service and we reduce the demand for cancer treatments, alcohol treatments, heart disease, obesity, dementia, etc., then price and and costs would go down as would the cost of health care insurance.

Consider some information from a previous post we did that illustrates what we are talking about and what is possible:

Dr. Delose Cosgrove, the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic is one of the best and well known hospitals in the world. Despite being the best and serving some of the richest people in the world, they also have one of the lowest costs structures. How did they accomplish this double play of outstanding care at low costs? According to the article and Dr. Cosgrove's experiences:
  • In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well.
  • Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs.
  • Smoking, diet, and lack of exercise, according to Dr. Cosgrove, contribute to  40% of premature deaths in this country, 70% of chronic diseases such as heart disease, and account for 75% of the nation's total health care.
  • At the Cleveland Clinic, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated fro Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available, and in the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons.
  • From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.
Get people to eat right and reduce national health care costs by up to 10%.  Get people to stop smoking, exercise, and eat better and reduce health care costs by up to 75%. Imagine how much less expensive health insurance would be if health care costs were reduced by 75%? Get the government to stop subsidizing the production of corn fructose syrup and sugar and see how fast the food chain might get healthier.

Obama blew it it two big ways. First, he mistook a public health problem for a health insurance problem. Much like the long term seat belt usage public health initiative, we need a long term healthy living public health initiative in this country. Get people to understand the benefits of healthy living, much like most now understand the value of seat belts, and the cost of health insurance will take care of itself.

Second, he could have been epic in the realm of John F. Kennedy's epic declaration in the 1960s that the country would put a man on the moon within the next decade. Obama should have put forth a set of national challenges that would have focused the country on curing major cancers, eliminating Alzheimer's, etc. within the next ten years. That focus and success on any of these bold ideas would have significantly reduced health care costs while making life much healthier, longer, and better for millions of Americans. 

Alas, Obama did nothing like that. Rather than being bold and out front leading the nation, he and his minions went behind closed doors to craft a secret health care bill that:

  • Never addressed the root causes of high healthcare costs.
  • Will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt in the next ten years.
  • Will leave tens of millions of Americans without health care insurance ten years from now.
  • Has resulted in almost as many Americans losing their current health care insurance coverage than those that attained it under Obama Care.
  • Has exposed millions of Americans to easy identify theft fraud via its inadequate data systems processes.
  • Has resulted in health care insurance premiums and deductibles being higher for individual health insurance policies in most states after Obama Care took effect than before it took effect.
  • It made criminals out of ordinary Americans who decide they know what is best for themselves and their families and who refuse to purchase health care insurance as mandated by Obama Care.
  • It has resulted in a higher rate of doctors leaving the profession or retiring earlier than expected in order to avoid the hassles of dealing with Obama Care requirements, making a national doctor shortage even more severe.
  • In many cases it has lessened made the quality of health care since many Obama Care policies do not allow policy holders to have access to the best treatment options available in order to reduce insurance company costs.
  • For Obama Care Medicaid customers, many are finding out that although they have health insurance, they may not be able to get health care as fewer and fewer doctors are taking on Medicaid patients due to the reduced doctor fees that Obama Care pays Medicaid doctors.
  • Has stymied economic growth and wage growth since it has forced many companies to reduce the work hours of current employees, forced some companies to move jobs overseas due to the increased business costs of the law, and curtailed the hiring of new employees.
  • Has set up programs that subsidize insurance company losses with taxpayer backed financial guarantees.
  • Has substantially increased the cost of certain medicines for those Americans in need of medicinal help, pricing many of those medicines out of the reach of people even though they have Obama Care insurance policies.
  • Caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred, insurance policies, their preferred doctors, and their preferred hospitals even though the President lied and said those preferences would remain intact if Obama Care was enacted.
We could go on but you get the idea. Rather than being an epically good thing to do, reduce suffering, reduce costs, and improve the quality of life of Americans relative to health care, this administration misdiagnosed the root causes and put together a Rube Goldberg-like bureaucracy that is ineffective, dangerous, and expensive.

Rather than being half way there to curing cancer and other major diseases, rather than being half way there to better public health, we are in many ways much worse than where we were as a nation five years ago. Obama could have been Kennedy-esque by setting the nation on a path to healthier, and less expensive living, much like Kennedy set us on the path to the moon. Instead, Obama Care has been an epic fail that will cost the country trillions of dollars over the next generation while doing nothing to improve the overall health of the nation.

When you are closer to be Rube Goldberg than being JFK, epic fail is the only conclusion.


Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w















Wednesday, January 28, 2015

The Obama Epic Fail Series, Part 3B - Foreign Policy

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:


  • Transparency and integrity
  • Economic policy
  • Foreign policy
  • Healthcare policy
  • Government management policy

Foreign Policy Part 2

1) This past week, the Yemeni government, a supposed ally of the U.S.in the fight against terrorism, collapsed under the weight of a Shiite rebel force supported and funded by Iran. However, this was not supposed to happen. As late as last September, Obama proclaimed that: "This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us,while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years."

However, most of us and the rest of the world might have a different definition of "success" than the President's, based on the overthrowing of the current government this week. Even with a supportive government in Yemen, Al Qaeda's most vicious and successful branch was in Yemen.With the collapse of the government and the support they gave to Obama in fighting terrorism in general and Al Qaeda in particular, his strategy is now in tatters and an epic fail.

2)This President, and his closest advisors such as John Kerry, blatantly refuse to admit the obvious: most of the current terrorism going on in the world is being done by Islamic extremists. This does not mean that the majority of Muslims are like this, it just means that much of the terrorism is being done in the name of Islam.

However, failure to recognize a problem means that you will never resolve that problem. Consider a recent article from the Heritage Foundation that listed out recent terror attacks, all of which had an Islamic slant to them:

  • December 2010: Stockholm – An Iraqi-born Swedish citizen who had lived in the U.K. carries out a suicide car bombing, injuring two and blowing himself up. Although the planned attack failed, Swedish authorities believed the terrorist intended to detonate the vehicle remotely in an attempt to kill as many people as possible during the busy Christmas shopping season.
  • March 2012: Toulouse and Montauban, France – A French national of Algerian origin kills three off-duty soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi in three separate terrorist attacks in southern France. Before being killed by police in a shootout, the terrorist, who carried out the terrorist attack in the name of Islam, told authorities he did so in part because he was mad over France’s military role in Afghanistan.
  • May 2013: London – British serviceman Lee Rigby is brutally murdered in broad daylight by two British citizens who were converts to Islam. Rigby is run over by the terrorists before being hacked to death as the murderers shouted “Allahu akbar.” Both terrorists are convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
  • May 2014: Brussels – A terror attack carried out against a Jewish museum kills four. A French terrorist who had returned from fighting with Islamists in Syria and Iraq is charged with carrying out the attack. The terrorist is described by one former hostage as a “publicity-loving sadist,” whose depravity knew no bounds even prior to the attack on the Jewish museum.
  • December 2014: Joue-les-Tours, France - A 20-year old French national, who is a Muslim convert with known sympathies to radical ideology, injures three after attacking police with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” He is shot and killed by police.
But this denial should not come as a surprise since this administration went years refusing to acknowledge that the Fort Hood attacks was a terrorist attack, classifying the attack as "workplace violence," an insult to those who died and were wounded. Failure to declare the obvious is an epic fail and an insult to the intelligence to the rest of us that see what is going on.

3) The relationship with China has not gotten better during the Obama administration. China has been bullying nations in its region for a number of years now, claiming territorial and island rights that other nations have long held were theirs. There have been military and diplomatic confrontations with Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and others, with the Chinese ignoring any Obama administration pleas to play nice.

In fact, some experts are saying that relations between the U.S. and China have not been this bad in decades: "U.S.-China relations are worse than they have been since the normalization of relations, and East Asia today is less stable than at any time since the end of the Cold War," Robert Ross, a political science professor at Boston College and an associate of Harvard's John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. 

So China ignores us and is not scared or respectful of us, Russia invades countries at will and is not scared or respectful of us, looks like the Obama administration has taken us back to the future with the advent of a Cold War atmosphere as a result of the bumbling foreign relations management of the Obama administration.

4) But it is not just Russia and China where the foreign affairs management of been an epic failure. By allowing the NSA to spy on foreign leaders, even those that were and are considered allies, the Obama administration ticked off a whole range of foreign leaders including such stalwart allies as Angela Merkel of Germany. You cannot spy on people and then expect them to embrace yourself or your foreign affairs policy.

The Prime Minister of Brazil was so ticked off by the spying that she cancelled herself out of a White House state dinner, a highest honor that the White House can bestow on anyone, that is how made the Obama administration made her. Time Magazine reported on how Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sirkorski truly felt about his country;s relationship with the U.S. during Obama's tenure: 

In tapes obtained by a Polish magazine, Radoslaw Sikorski sued an expletive to describe his country's alliance with the U.S. 

Polish magazine Wprost claims to have obtained recordings of a conversation in which Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski says that “the Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security. It’s bulls—t.

The quote is an excerpt of a longer conversation purportedly between Sikorski and former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski that Wprost is expected to publish Monday or Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The leaked recording comes just two weeks after President Barack Obama visited Poland.

Great, when an ally says the relationship is bulls--t, you really are an epic fail.

The following link to a CNBC news broadcast from earlier this year quite nicely summarized how erratic and non-effective the administration has been relative to all types of other countries, foes and friends alike:


From the collapse of Yemen to a new Cold War with Russia and China to ticking off many, many allies, this administration's voeign policy record can be viewed not other way than an epic fail. Today's and Yesterday's examples prove this conclusion, one could not do much worse if one was trying to encourage our enemies and piss off our friends.

This epic fail series will continue tomorrow when we switch gears to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.


Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w



Tuesday, January 27, 2015

The Obama Epic Fail Series. Part 3A - Foreign Policy

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:


  • Transparency and integrity
  • Economic policy
  • Foreign policy
  • Healthcare policy
  • Government management policy


Foreign Policy Part A

1) The most epic foreign relations failure of this Presidency is discussed above. His non-attendance at the rally for unity in France to protest against terrorism was a historical opportunity missed and a slap at the rest of those in the world that are fighting against Islamic terrorism.

However, he doubled down on this disaster when later in the week he sent Secretary John Kerry to France along with James Taylor to have Taylor sing a long ago hit song, "You've Got A Friend." Really? Miss a historical diplomacy opportunity and instead you send an aged rock and roll singer who has not had a new hit in decades? This is what passes for foreign affairs management in the Obama administration, rock and roll songs? You cannot make this incompetency up. How embarrassing.

What's next? Send the cast from Disney's Toy Story movies to the Iranian nuclear disarmament talks to sing "You've Got A Friend In Me?" Once you replace real foreign policy thinking and strategies with popular rock songs the sky is the limit in other foreign relations situations.

2) President Obama took office in January, 2009. Six years later, North Korea and Iran are six years closer to having nuclear weapons capabilities with no credible deterrence or alternative implemented by the Obama administration.

3) President Obama promised that he would find a way to bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Not only has he failed to fulfill that promise, but the two parties decided to go to war while the Obama administration and its bumbling Secretary of State, John Kerry, fumbled their way to to being non-factors in the whole situation. 

The diplomatic relationship between Israel and the Obama administration was further dampened when a high ranking Obama administration official went on record and called the Israeli Prime Minister a chicken sh$#. Not a sign of a good foreign policy when that policy degenerates into name calling like this, especially name calling an ally a chicken sh#@.

4) President Obama drew a "red line in the sand" if Syria's government used chemical weapons against its own citizens in the Syrian civil war. The Syrian government went ahead and used chemical weapons, Obama did nothing to enforce his red line declaration, even denying he ever made such a statement, and had to rely on Russia to get out of a very embarrassing international situation.

Such posturing without a an action plan to back up that stance further weakened the administration in the eyes of the rest of the world. This failure of action probably was a determining factor in Russia's unopposed march into the Ukraine and the annexation of a large swath of Ukranian territory.

5) The President illegally and un-Constitutionally committed U.S. military forces and taxpayer wealth to help overthrow the Libyan government of Gaddafi. This overthrow then led to the growth of Islamic terrorists groups in the country, some of which were involved in the siege of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the unnecessary death of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

6) The President withdrew all U.S.military resources out of Iraq despite the objections of his military advisors and others who told him that Iraq was not yet ready to stand on its own. He proudly proclaimed that we were leaving behind a "sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq."

Shortly thereafter, as predicted by the experts, a Sunni and terrorist uprising in northern Iraq became ISIS, probably the most dangerous terror organization ever to be formed. ISIS threatens to destabilize whole countries in the Middle East and spread its version of violent and intolerant Islam to the rest of the world.

The President condescendingly referred to ISIS as the JV of terror organizations until they started beheading people and routing the Iraqi army. As a result of his faulty logic and reasoning, U.S. military forces are now back in Iraq and the American taxpayer is paying billions of dollars to bomb ISIS forces. "Sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq" appears to be either another lie, deception, or self delusion.

Despite the ISIS beheadings, the killing and enslavement of women and children, the murdering of homosexuals, the President still refuses to call these terrorists Islamic terrorists even though they do their atrocious deeds in the name of Islam. Failure to recognize a problem means you will never resolve a problem, another foreign affairs failure of this administration.

That will do it for foreign policy failures for today. We will finish the epic fail of the Obama administration relative to foreign policy tomorrow.


Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:


www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w









Monday, January 26, 2015

The Obama Epic Fail Series, Part 2C - Economics


We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:


  • Transparency and integrity
  • Economic policy
  • Foreign policy
  • Healthcare policy
  • Government management policy

Economic Policy Part C

1) President Obama presided over the first ever credit agency rating downgrade of the financial viability of the Federal government. None of the forty three Presidents who preceded him, despite some of which dealt with world wars and economic depressions, ever managed the U.S. economy so badly that the nation's credit worthiness was downgraded.

2) The wonderful website, Bankrupting America, recently took a look at some of the latest economic statistics to see if the rosy picture the Obama administration is trying to paint about the economy was true. Unfortunately but no unexpectedly, the fantasy of the Obama administration does not match the grim reality of the economic situation that pervades the country:

  • Obama Care will cost the country $1.84 TRILLION over the next ten years. So much for the promise that the legislation would reduce the cost of health care over time.
  • The Obama administration has added $95 billion in annual regulatory burden to the economy, or over $800 for every U.S. household.
  • 46 million Americans received food assistance in 2014, a number that is up 13 million since Obama took office.
  • over 400,000 construction jobs have disappeared since Obama took office.
  • 321,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared since Obama took office.
  • The labor force participation rate is 62.7%, down three percent during the Obama administration and at its lowest level since the dysfunctional Carter administration in 1978.
You cannot claim you are doing a good job at managing the economy when hundreds of thousands good paying jobs disappear, people have given up looking for work, and the cost of living has gone up as a result of self inflicted burdens of debt, Obama Care, and over regulation.

The Bankrupting America data sources and original article can be accessed at:


3) The Wall Street Journal recently reported that recently survey found that 62% of Americans say that they do not have enough savings to cover an unexpected $500 car repair or a $1,000 home repair. 28% of those surveyed they would have to borrow money from friends or family or over extend their credit card bills to handle the situation.  

You cannot say that the economy is in good shape if more than two thirds of Americans are living that close to the edge of fiscal insolvency.

4) Let's wrap this third part of our analysis on how the Obama administration has been an epic failure when it comes to economic management, policies, and strategies. The following charts come from a recent analysis of the President's State Of The Union by the Heritage Foundation:  

- The Obama recovery from the recession took 77 months. Previous economic recoveries over the past fifty years were far shorter despite involving stagflation and other severe recessions, as illustrated by the following graph from Heritage:

(These figures are through August of 2014)















- Not only has unemployment taken so long to recover during the Obama recovery, but overall economic growth has still not returned to the levels that woulds have been expected based on previous recessions and Presidential administrations' reaction to it:


1salim

















- Despite Obama's claim that he is for the poor and middle class in this country, his economic policies have hit the poorer citizens in this country far more than the more affluent citizens:


1sherk


That will do it for this three part series on the Obama administration's epic fail when it comes to managing the economy vitality and growth of the country. Despite annual trillion dollar deficit spending, an energy revolution, a failed $800 billion economic stimulus plan, and trillions of printed dollars from the Federal Reserve, this administration failed to take advantage of these historic conditions. We ended up with weak employment growth, tepid economic growth, non-existent wage growth, expensive regulatory burdens, etc., definitely an epic fail of this administration.

Tomorrow we will move on to look at how well or how poorly the administration has done int he foreign affairs arena. Want to bet we are looking a different area but another epic fail?


Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w