The Federal Observer

The resistance to Obamacare is writing a new chapter in U.S. history. It may well become the most unpopular law since Prohibition became an Amendment to the Constitution in 1919. By 1933, another Amendment repealed it.

Obamacare passed by a straight Democratic party vote on Christmas Eve in 2009. No Republican voted for it and, as one poll recently revealed, a third of Americans are still unaware it is the law of the land. A divided Supreme Court gave it a pass, calling it a tax, but it is a profoundly unconstitutional law insofar as the federal government may not pass a law that requires Americans to purchase something and to fine them if they do not. It is also playing havoc with the economy, delaying recovery as it deters hiring and encourages firing.

Nonetheless, a number of states have gone on record seeking to nullify its enforcement and some are doing the same as regards gun control. Arizona became famous when it passed its own immigration law in response to the federal government’s failure to protect its border with Mexico. The proposed “Gang of Eight” immigration law is facing stiff opposition for its various provisions, most of which do not address the central issue of security on the southern border.

Native-born and naturalized Americans who are currently seeking work are already competing with illegal immigrants—a term that the Associated Press says it will no longer use—or standing in line behind them as they sign up for all manner of welfare benefits. The official estimate of the number of illegal aliens—oops, undocumented aliens—in the nation is estimated to be eleven million, but if the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill becomes law, it will act as a magnet to attract millions more.

What kind of idiot would write, “Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men.”

“Whatever bigoted ideology”? This is what Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times wrote on April 21.

Monday, April 22, is Earth Day. Begun in 1970, it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. It is the global platform for the Big Lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing the Earth to warm and the basis of the environmental movement’s ceaseless efforts to reduce the use of energy for any reason.

Carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing, but the Earth has been cooling due to reduced solar radiation. CO2 has virtually no relationship to the climate except to show up well after a significant change has occurred.

When I was a teenager I was a magician performing at birthday parties and before local clubs whose adults enjoyed legerdemain as much as the kids. The essence of magic is diversion, distracting the audience to watch the right hand while the left is setting up the illusion. It was a lesson I never forgot as I watch politicians divert attention from their actual agenda and right now President Obama is engaged in that as he goes around the nation asking for more gun control. 

An America that abandons thousands of years of tradition and common sense is an America that has set itself firmly on a path toward decline. That is the central issue of gay marriage that the Supreme Court will struggle to determine. A similar experience in social engineering gave us the federal protection of abortion and the murder of an entire generation of the unborn.

What we are witnessing is the tyranny of a determined minority, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals in America, barely three percent of the population, demanding that their particular sexual orientation should be codified in law by redefining marriage for everyone else. This isn’t about equality. It’s about special privileges and the destruction of marriage as solely between a man and a woman.

Like everyone else I get up each day and do my best to make sense of my life. I turn on “Fox and Friends” while I pour a cup of my morning coffee. I give a quick read to The Wall Street Journal’s editorials and scan the news until later in the day when I devote more time to its content. I spend about an hour at the beginning of each day, reading and responding to those emails I have not deleted as fraudulent schemes or matters of no interest.

I “surf” the news and opinion sites to which I contribute and move on to The Drudge Report, a news aggregator that has an influence on the day’s issues comparable to Rush Limbaugh. The news is invariably bad whether it is about the nation’s imperiled economy, the gridlock in Congress, or events around the world. As an old journalist I understand well that bad news sells and good news is relegated to the “lifestyle” or “entertainment” sections of the newspaper or news sites.

Following the sequester debacle in which Obama and his cohorts were swiftly found to be lying through their teeth, his polling numbers have begun to fall and, folks you ain’t seen nothing yet.

As the realities and costs of the Affordable Healthcare Act—Obamacare—kick in, when he leaves office, he will be remembered for inflicting pain and suffering on Americans.

The one thing the “sequester” did was to get people asking why government spending could not be reduced. Adding to the drama of the automatic cuts was the sky-is-falling, government-services-will-stop, and comparable lies the President and his cabinet secretaries told until it became obvious that the public was not buying it.

What the President did not talk about was the incredible, obscene waste of taxpayer’s money that goes on every day in every department and agency of the U.S. government. Americans are so accustomed to hearing everything described in the billions and trillions, they have lost sight of what these numbers really mean and this is particularly true in light of the nation’s huge, growing debt and deficit.

I have been puzzling over what I perceive as the growing loss of public interest in the Benghazi debacle in which an American ambassador and three others lost their lives and the former Secretary of State in a pique of anger over questions about the event said, “What difference does it make?”

It makes a difference if the State Department was derelict or indifferent to the ambassador’s cables that spelled out the security threats that he and his staffed faced or, for that matter, the attacks on other diplomats and humanitarian organizations operating in what was a war zone. African migrant workers had earlier been attacked creating an evacuation crisis, but the September 11, 2012—a noteworthy anniversary—attack simply accelerated the flight from a lawless region controlled by al Qaeda.

It makes a difference if, as we have since learned, the President was entirely detached from the crisis of the attack in Benghazi after initially been informed of it. No one, it seemed, took any action despite the six hours of the attack though it was reportedly seen in real time via satellite drone surveillance. 

The President of the United States is routinely referred to as the most powerful man on the Earth. There is a greater power and it is the changing characteristics of population, something that occurs constantly here and around the world.

Laws are powerless against it and, in particular, laws that were passed some eighty to fifty years ago with the best of intentions. I refer, in particular, to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. No one anticipated that Americans would routinely live to their current life expectancy of 78 years, nor that advances in medicine and healthcare would extend their lives into their late 80’s and their 90’s.

The utter desperation of the “Warmists”, the advocates of global warming—now called climate change—is evident in a recent “study” reported in the Daily Caller in which “an international team of researchers” concluded that “earthworms could be contributing to global warmin.” Earthworms!

That’s how stupid they think the public is.

It is useful to know the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, the object of much fear-mongering by Greens and Warmists. According to Wikipedia, “Air is the name given to the atmosphere used in breathing and photosynthesis. Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1%. While air content and atmospheric pressure vary at different layers, air suitable for the survival of terrestrial plants and terrestrial animals is currently only known to be found in Earth’s troposphere and artificial atmospheres.”

Perhaps the stupidest idea given an airing in a recent edition of The New York Times is Prof. Louis Michael Seidman’s opinion, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution.”

According to his commentary, Prof. Seidman has “taught constitutional law for almost 40 years” and he was “ashamed” it took him that long to conclude that it was an outdated, “bizarre” document.

Apparently President Obama, who was a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, arrived at that conclusion more swiftly. His disregard for the Constitution recently got a slap down from the courts that ruled his recess appointments to the labor relations board were unconstitutional insofar as the Senate was not in recess.

The Obama administration loves to pass unpopular legislation—Obamacare—and release news of unpopular policies on Christmas Eve. The assumption is that people are too distracted to pay attention and, anyway, there’s nothing they can do about it.

Illegal aliens received a Christmas gift when the chief of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), John Morton, released new guidelines for local police who might think it was their job to cooperate with ICE by detaining illegal aliens stopped for probably cause. Previously ICE had a “287 (g) program” that facilitated the process, but no more.

Many, if not most, Americans are unaware that the nation is composed of separate republics with their own constitutions. They are, of course, the individual states.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved respectively, or to the people.” – Tenth Amendment

By tying compliance with federal laws and regulation to receiving funds, the states have been coerced to accept programs that limit freedoms enumerated in the Constitution and the passage of Obamacare is but one example. Some twenty states have refused to set up the mandated insurance exchanges. Obamacare grants the government complete control over the provision of medical care that every American has formerly received from the free market health system that it destroyed. It gives the federal government control over our lives in terms of who lives or dies.

“NYSR to Sell Itself in $8.2 Billion Deal” was the lead story in the December 21, 2012 edition of The Wall Street Journal.”

“The New York Stock Exchange, the cornerstone of American capitalism for 220 years, agreed to be sold as part of an $8.2 billion takeover by IntercontinentalExchange, Inc. If regulators and shareholders approve, the combined company would own 14 stock and futures exchanges and five clearing operations that serve as middlemen between buyers and sellers of futures and other contracts, doing more things in more places than any other rival. The takeover also would seal the triumph of electronic trading over ‘open outcry’ floor trading that long dominated financial markets, as well as the push by exchanges to embrace new and lucrative kinds of trading.”

The Internet has transformed the buying and selling of stocks and other financial contracts, but it has not changed the fundamentals of capitalism.

The factors most affecting economic growth or decline remain the same and, as the “fiscal cliff” approaches for every American, it is predicted that its cost will represent an increase of $4,000 for all who still pay income taxes in a nation where an estimated 47% do not, where unemployment remains for 26 million Americans, and the Obama administration, during its first term in office, increased the national debt to $16 trillion, has spent and generally wasted billions in its “bailouts” and “stimulus” programs in addition to the billions lost on “green energy” companies that went belly-up.

Pundits and experts of every description love to predict and pontificate. That they are often famously wrong doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

The Great Depression began on October 29, 1929 with the stock market crash. On October 17th, Irving Fisher, a professor of economics at Yale University, said, “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” A month later Fisher said, “The end of the decline of the stock market will probably not be long, only a few more days at best.” The Great Depression stretched for ten years, in good part due to the “progressive” policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was elected and reelected to four terms!

Driving around my hometown and surrounding communities in New Jersey, a familiar sight has been tree stumps, the wreckage left behind by Hurricane Sandy. Having lived here with few breaks my entire life, it never occurred to me how many trees there are. From a lookout point in the Essex County South Mountain Reservation area one sees in the distance the city of New York.

As far as the eye can see, it is entirely forested.

Over the past year I endured a hefty measure of stress due to a “noisy neighbor” in the apartment adjacent to mine that caused me to lose thirty pounds. I could never enter my bedroom without pausing to listen for the pounding, rhythmic sounds of music he favored. I would be awakened from an afternoon nap by them. In the evenings I could often not watch my television or read a book.

This neighbor was visited four times by the local police, responding to the noise ordinances that prohibit such behavior, but it did not cause him to lower the volume or when he chose to play his music. He received numerous calls from the management office to lower the volume, but ignored them. In the end, management, based on his behavior and other incidents, served him with an eviction notice. He remained in his apartment for the sixty days, as per the law, after he was given notice to leave and management was working on a court order to force him out when, two weeks beyond his end date, he “voluntarily” moved out.

If anyone had read any of the many books that have examined President Obama’s life and his many questionable qualifications for office, including a Social Security number that appears to have been purloined from someone else, he should not be allowed to take the oath of office for a second time.

Here are just some of the books I have received and read over the first four years of his disastrous first term:

The Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi

Where’s the Birth Certificate? By Jerome Corsi

Deconstructing Obama by Jack Cashill

The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency by Ken Blackwell & Ken Klukowski

The Post-American Presidency by Pamela Geller with Robert Spencer

The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American values by Brad O’Leary

The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama by Paul Kengor

The Manchurian Candidate by Aaron Klein

An American Obsession: Race and Conflict in the Age of Obama by Seth A. Forman

If only one half or one quarter of the facts cited in these books were true, Obama has no legal right to be President and is committed to an ideology that seeks to undermine capitalism. He is set to take the oath of office a second time.

I recall in my youth thinking that the Civil War (1861-1865) was ancient history. As with most children, anything that occurred before my birth was “ancient.” In point of fact, the Civil War had ended just 72 years before I was born in 1937 and there were likely some men still alive who had fought in it or recalled it as youth.

I suspect that the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941, the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “will live in infamy” is ancient history to several recent generations of Americans, many of whom are the aging baby boomers born after our troops returned home, married, and began to raise families after 1945, the year World War II ended.

What I fear most is that the children and grandchildren of those baby boomers may not even know what occurred on that Sunday morning 71 years ago.

The general ignorance of Americans about their own history comes with its own price. Forgetting or never knowing that a long Cold War was fought with the Soviet Union from the end of World War II until its collapse in 1991 has left this nation with a President whose ideology concerning capitalism and centralized government closely mirrors the communist empire America expended blood and treasure to defeat.

The one thing you can count on during the Christmas season is an avalanche of media-driven scare campaigns by environmental and self-appointed consumer protection groups that are intended to ruin it with claims that everything you eat or do has the potential of killing you and your loved ones.

Here’s an example; in December 2011 GreenLivingIdeas.com posted an article by Sanya Kanelstran to let everyone know that, during the Christmas season, “A heart attack can strike at any time in a person with coronary artery disease, but heart attacks are more likely during the festive season and especially between the Christmas and New Year period because of the change in diet and lifestyle around the holidays.” So, happy holidays and try not to die.

The folks at Naturalnews.com posted an item on December 17, 2010 that warned that “Those Christmas-colored snack chips and store-bought cookies, but watch out. Eating them may cause side effects such as hyperactivity, especially in children. That’s because nearly all Christmas-colored foods achieve their colors through the use of artificial coloring chemicals, including Red #40.”

I doubt that President Obama will compromise with the House Republicans on anything that might be done to avoid the January 2nd “fiscal cliff” that kicks in with higher taxes for everyone.

Obama has made it clear that increasing the tax rates on “millionaires” is his goal and he made that clear throughout the campaign. The income that would be generated from the increased rates would generate enough money to run the nation for about a week or so at most. In politics perception often trumps reality. And those “millionaires” are mostly middle class folks earning $250,000 or more.

If my emails and the headlines I am reading indicate anything, there is widespread fear among Americans that something terrible has occurred with the reelection of President Obama. Not all Americans, though. Those who voted for Obama appear to remain oblivious despite the threat of a “fiscal cliff” or the new taxes in Obamacare that will kick in on January 2nd.

We have a Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy, Geithner, calling for an end to debt ceilings, apparently believing that America can continue to borrow money to pay for the interest on its escalating debt, now pegged at $16 trillion and growing daily. The U.S. borrows $4 billion a day. Anyone with a credit card knows that their payments increase as they struggle to deal with their personal debt. Eventually they either declare bankruptcy or turn to companies that negotiate a payment to release them.

I don’t know why anyone, least of all the press, expects to get the truth about the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012—an interesting date for an attack, don’t you think? Of course it was a terrorist operation with the fingerprints of al Qaeda all over it.

The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, was trotted out to tell everyone that the attack was the result of a video no one ever so and was “spontaneous” because, as we all know, everyone in the Middle East walks around with mortars and other heavy weapons of war. And now we hear that the President wants to nominate her to replace Hillary Clinton when she retires after his inauguration. Nice payoff for being a stooge.