The following is the third part of Charles R. Kesler’s speech:

Postmodernism came out of the 1960s university—though it flowered, if that’s the right word, in subsequent decades, especially after the collapse of Communism. President Obama is a child of the ’60s—born in 1961. The Sixties Left was in some ways strikingly different from the Thirties Left. For one thing, the ’60s left was much more—as they liked to say in those days—“existentialist.” That is, ’60s leftists admitted to themselves that all values are relative, and therefore irrational. But they still believed or hoped that morality could be felt, or experienced through the feelings of a generation united in its demands for justice now. Shared feelings about values became a kind of substitute for truth among protesting liberals in the ’60s, which goes far to explaining the emotionalism of liberals then and since. But when the country refused to second their emotions—when the country elected President Nixon in 1968 and again, by larger margins, in 1972—the kids grew bitter and increasingly alienated from the cause of democratic reform, which used to be liberalism’s stock-in-trade. In this context, President Obama represents not only a return to a vigorous liberal reform agenda like the New Deal, but also a kind of bridge between the alienated campus left and the political left.

The second new element in President Obama’s liberalism is even more striking than its postmodernism. It is how uncomfortable he is with American exceptionalism—and thus with America itself. President Obama considers this country deeply flawed from its very beginnings. He means not simply that slavery and other kinds of fundamental injustice existed, which everyone would admit. He means that the Declaration of Independence, when it said that all men are created equal, did not mean to include blacks or anyone else who is not a property-holding, white, European male—an argument put forward infamously by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision, and one that was powerfully refuted by Abraham Lincoln.

In short, President Obama agrees with his former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, much more than he let on as a presidential candidate. Read closely, his famous speech on that subject in March 2008 doesn’t hide his conclusion that Wright was correct—that America is a racist and ungodly country (hence, not “God Bless America,” but “God Damn America!”). Obama agrees with Wright that in its origin, and for most of its history, America was racist, sexist, and in various ways vicious. Wright’s mistake, Obama said, was underestimating America’s capacity for change—a change strikingly illustrated by Obama’s own advances and his later election. For Obama, Wright’s mistake turned on not what America was, but what America could become—especially after the growth of liberalism in our politics in the course of the 20th century. It was only liberalism that finally made America into a decent country, whereas for most of its history it was detestable.

Unlike most Americans, President Obama still bristles at any suggestion that our nation is better or even luckier than other nations. To be blunt, he despises the notion that Americans consider themselves special among the peoples of the world. This strikes him as the worst sort of ignorance and ethnocentrism, which is why it was so difficult for him to decide to wear an American flag lapel pin when he started running for president, even though he knew it was political suicide to refuse wearing it.

As President Obama hinted in his Berlin speech during the campaign, he really thinks of himself as a multiculturalist, as a citizen of the world, first, and only incidentally as an American. To put it differently, he regards patriotism as morally and intellectually inferior to cosmopolitanism. And, of course, he is never so much a citizen of the world as when defending the world’s environment against mankind’s depredations, and perhaps especially America’s depredations. In general, the emotionalist defense of the earth—think of Al Gore—is now a vital part of the liberalism of our day. It’s a kind of substitute for earlier liberals’ belief in progress. Although his own election—and secondarily liberalism’s achievements over the past century or so—help to redeem America in his view, Obama remains, in many ways, profoundly disconnected from his own land.

This is a very different state of mind and character from that of Franklin Roosevelt, who was the kind of progressive who thought that America was precisely the vanguard of moral progress in the world. This was the way Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, and every great liberal captain before Obama thought about his country—as a profoundly moral force in the world, leading the nations of the world toward a better and more moral end point. Obama doesn’t think that way, and therefore his mantle as an American popular leader—despite his flights of oratorical prowess—doesn’t quite fit him in the way that FDR’s fit him. One can see this in the tinges of irony that creep into Obama’s rhetoric now and then—the sense that even he doesn’t quite believe what he’s saying; and he knows that but hopes that you don’t.

Obama’s ambivalence is, in many ways, the perfect symbol of the dilemma of the contemporary liberal. How can Obama argue that America and liberalism reject absolute truths, and in the same breath affirm—as he did recently to the United Nations—that human rights are self-evidently true? You can’t have it both ways, though he desperately wants and tries to. Here, surely, is the deepest crisis of 20th-century American liberalism—that it can no longer understand, or defend, its principles as true anymore. It knows that, but knows as well that to say so would doom it politically. Liberals are increasingly left with an amoral pragmatism that is hard to justify to themselves, much less to the American public. The problem for liberals today is that they risk becoming confidence men, and nothing but confidence men.

The New New Deal, Part 3/3 is a post from: Common Sense University

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            The following is the second part of Charles R. Kesler’s speech:

The social and economic rights inherent in these entitlements purported to make Americans secure, or at least to make them feel secure. “Necessitous men are not free men,” FDR liked to say—which meant that freedom required government to take care of a person’s necessities so that he might live comfortably, fearlessly, beyond necessity. The long-term problem with this was that the reasons given to justify the relatively modest initial welfare rights pointed far beyond themselves. No one ever doubted, for instance, that good houses, well-paying jobs, and decent medical care were fine things. But the liberal alchemy that transformed these fine things into “rights” was powerful magic. Such rights implied, in turn, duties to provide the houses, jobs, and medical care now guaranteed to most everyone.

And on whom did the duties fall? Liberalism never came clean on that question. It pointed sometimes to the rich, suggesting that enough of their wealth could be redistributed to provide the plenty that would be required to supply houses and medical care and jobs to those who lack them. But liberalism also liked to say that the duty to provide these things fell broadly upon the American middle class—that these were basically insurance programs into which people paid and from which they took out their benefits when needed.

Could future benefits be cut or eliminated? Liberals breathed nary a word about such unhappy scenarios, selling the new rights as though they were self-financing—that is, as if they would be cost-free in the long-term, if not a net revenue generator. In fact, entitlements are the offspring of formulas that can be trimmed or repealed by simple majorities of the legislature. And the benefits have to be paid for by someone—as it turns out, primarily by the young and the middle class.

The moral costs of the new rights went further. Virtue was the way that free people used to deal with their necessities. It took industry, frugality, and responsibility, for example, to go to work every morning to provide for your family. It took courage to handle the fears that inevitably come with life, especially in old age. But the new social and economic rights tended to undercut such virtues, subtly encouraging men and women to look to the government to provide for their needs and then to celebrate that dependency as if it were true freedom. In truth, the appetite for the stream of benefits promised by the new rights was more like an addiction, destructive of both freedom and virtue.

The new entitlements pointed to a beguiling version of the social contract. As FDR once described it, the new social contract calls for the people to consent to greater government power in exchange for the government providing them with rights: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc. The more power the people give government, the more rights we receive. FDR’s New Deal implied that there’s nothing to fear from making government bigger and bigger, because political tyranny—at least among advanced nations—is a thing of the past.

In truth, however, the new socio-economic rights were group rights, not individual rights. They were rights for organized interests: labor unions, farmers, school teachers, old people, blacks, sick people, and so forth. Collectively, these rights encouraged citizens to think of themselves as members of pressure groups or to organize themselves into pressure groups. Subtly and not so subtly, citizens were taught to identify their rights with group self-interests of one kind or another.

These new group rights were conspicuously not attached to obligations. The old rights—the individual rights of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—had come bound up with duties. The right to life or the right to liberty implied a duty not to take away someone else’s life or someone else’s liberty. The new rights, on the other hand, had no corresponding duties—except perhaps to pay your taxes. The new rights pointed to a kind of moral anarchy in which rights without obligations became the currency of the realm—in which rights, understood as putative claims on resources, were effectively limited only by other, stronger such claims. The result was, at best, an equilibrium of countervailing power.

President Obama’s New New Deal doesn’t look so distinctive when you view it in this historical light. The collectivization of health care, for instance, is a hearty perennial of liberal politics and fulfills a 65-year-old promise made by FDR. Moreover, in cultivating the aura of a prophet-leader, uniquely fit to seize the historical moment and remake his country, Obama follows the theory and example of Woodrow Wilson. But there are signs of a few new or distinctive principles in this current leftward lurch, and I will mention two.

First, there is the postmodernism that crops up here and there. Postmodernism insists that there’s no truth “out there” by which men can guide their thoughts and actions. Postmodern liberals admit, then, that there is no objective support—no support in nature or in God or in anything outside of our wills—for liberalism itself. Liberalism in these terms is just a preference. The leading academic postmodernist, the late Richard Rorty, argued that liberals are moral relativists who feel an “aversion to cruelty,” and it’s that aversion that makes them liberals. And indeed, if one admits that all moral principles are relative, the only thing that really sets one apart as a liberal is a certain kind of passion or feeling. President Obama calls this feeling empathy. And yes, of course, all this implies that conservatives don’t have feelings for their fellow human beings—except perhaps a desire to be cruel to them.

Now I don’t mean to suggest here that President Obama is a thoroughgoing postmodernist, because he’s not. But neither is he just an old-fashioned progressive liberal of the 1930s variety. New Deal liberals believed in the future. In fact, they believed in a kind of predictive science of the future. Post-modernists reject all truth, including any assertions about progress or science. Postmodernists speak of narrative—one of those words one hears a lot of these days in politics—rather than truth. Narrative means something like this: Even if we can’t find meaning in any kind of objective reality out there, we can still create meaning by telling each other stories, by constructing our own narratives—and the more inclusive and empathetic these narratives, the better. President Obama often speaks this postmodern language. For example, here is part of a discussion of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in his book, The Audacity of Hope:

Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties [notice cruelty: he's against it] of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

Obama’s point here is that absolute truth and ordered liberty are incompatible, because absolute truth turns its believers into fanatics or moral monsters. Now granted, it was certainly a good thing that America escaped religious fanaticism and political tyranny. But no previous president ever credited these achievements to the Founders’ supposed rejection of absolute truth—previously known simply as truth. What then becomes of those great self-evident truths that President Obama’s admitted hero, Abraham Lincoln, celebrated and risked all to preserve? And that Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked so dramatically?

The New New Deal, Part 2/3 is a post from: Common Sense University

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            The following is the first part of Charles R. Kesler’s speech:

IN PRESIDENT Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in at least a generation. In 2008, he won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote—something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter’s squeaker in 1976—and handily increased the Democrats’ control of both houses of Congress. Measured against roughly two centuries worth of presidential victories by Democratic non-incumbents, his win as a percentage of the popular vote comes in third behind FDR’s in 1932 and Andrew Jackson’s in 1828.

More importantly, Obama won election not as a status quo liberal, but as an ambitious reformer. Far from being content with incremental gains, he set his sights on major systemic change in health care, energy and environmental policy, taxation, financial regulation, education, and even immigration, all pursued as elements of a grand strategy to “remake America.” In other words, he longs to be another FDR, building a New New Deal for the 21st century, dictating the politics of his age, and enshrining the Democrats as the new majority party for several decades to come. Suddenly, the era of big government being over is over; and tax-and-spend liberalism is back with a vengeance. We face a $1.4 trillion federal deficit this fiscal year alone and $10-12 trillion in total debt over the coming decade. If the ongoing expansion of government succeeds, there will also be very real costs to American freedom and to the American character. The Reagan Revolution is in danger of being swamped by the Obama Revolution.

To unsuspecting conservatives who had forgotten or never known what full-throated liberalism looked like before the Age of Reagan, Obama’s eruption onto the scene came as a shock. And in some respects, obviously, he is a new political phenomenon. But in most respects, Obama does not represent something new under the sun. On the contrary, he embodies a rejuvenated and a repackaged version of something older than our grandmothers—namely the intellectual and social impulses behind modern liberalism. Yet even as President Obama stands victorious on health care and sets his sights on other issues, his popularity and that of his measures has tumbled. His legislative victories have been eked out on repeated party line votes of a sort never seen in the contests over Social Security, Medicare, and previous liberal policy successes, which were broadly popular and bipartisan. In short, a strange thing is happening on the way to liberal renewal. The closer liberalism comes to triumphing, the less popular it becomes. According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans now describe themselves as conservative, 35 percent as moderates, and only 21 percent call themselves liberal. After one of its greatest triumphs in several generations, liberalism finds itself in an unexpected crisis—and a crisis that is not merely, as we shall see, a crisis of public confidence.

To try to understand better the difficulties in which the New New Deal finds itself, it might be useful to compare it to the original. The term itself, New Deal, was an amalgam of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal, and was deliberately ambiguous as to its meaning. It could mean the same game but with a new deal of the cards; or it could mean a wholly new game with new rules, i.e., a new social contract for all of America. In effect, I think, the term’s meaning was somewhere in between. But FDR liked to use the more conservative or modest sense of the term to disguise the more radical and ambitious ends that he was pursuing.

In its own time, the New Deal was extremely popular. Among its novel elements was a new kind of economic rights. The Progressives at the turn of the century had grown nervous over the closing of the American frontier and the rise of large corporations—developments they thought threatened the common man’s equality of opportunity. Aside from anti-trust efforts and war-time taxation, however, the Progressives did not get very far toward a redistributive agenda, and were actually wary of proclaiming new-fangled rights. They were more comfortable with duties than rights, and disapproved of the selfish penumbras cast by the natural rights doctrines of old. Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt preached moral uplift—doing your duty in a more socialized or socialistic era. They tended to associate rights talk with individualism of the backward-looking sort. It took the cleverness of FDR and his advisors to figure out how rights could be adapted to promote bigger government and to roll back the old regime of individualism and limited government.

What was this new concept of rights? Instead of rights springing from the individual—as God-given aspects of our nature—FDR and the New Dealers conceived of individualism as springing from a kind of rights created by the state. These were social and economic rights, which FDR first proclaimed in his campaign speeches in 1932, kept talking about throughout the New Deal, and summed up toward the end of his life in his annual message to Congress in 1944. These were the kinds of rights that the New Deal especially promoted: the right to a job, the right to a decent home, the right to sell your agricultural products at a price that would allow you to keep your farm, the right to medical care, the right to vacations from work, and so on. FDR elevated these rights to be parts of what he called “our new constitutional order.”

Of course, not all of these rights were enshrined in law. After all, President Obama has only just now enshrined a dubious right to health care into law. And not one of these rights was actually added to the Constitution, despite Roosevelt’s pitching them as what he called a “second Bill of Rights.” And the fact that none of them was ever formulated into a constitutional amendment is entirely consistent with FDR’s and modern liberals’ belief in a living constitution—that is, a constitution that is changeable, Darwinian, not frozen in time, but rather creative and continually growing. Once upon a time, the growth and the conduct of government were severely restricted because a lot of liberal policies were thought to be unconstitutional. In fact, many New Deal measures proposed by FDR were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1930s. But nowadays it’s hard to think of a measure expanding government power over private property and enterprise that the Court, much less Congress, would dismiss out of hand as simply unconstitutional.

If you consider the financial bailouts or the re-writing of bankruptcy law involved in the GM and Chrysler deals, these are the kinds of things that politicians in sounder times would have screamed bloody murder about as totally unconstitutional and illegal. But hardly a peep was heard. After all, once we have a living constitution, we shouldn’t be surprised to find we have a living bankruptcy law, too. The meaning of the law can change overnight as circumstances dictate—or as the political reading of circumstances dictates.

Despite not being formally enshrined in the Constitution, most of these new rights—what we’ve come to call entitlement rights—did get added to the small “c” constitution of American politics anyway, either during the New Deal or during its sequel, the Great Society. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and kindred welfare state programs moved to the center of our political life, dominating the domestic agenda and eventually usurping the majority of federal spending, now delicately termed “uncontrollable.”

The New New Deal, Part 1/3 is a post from: Common Sense University

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            With the General’s permission, his staff allowed liberal reporter Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone magazine, a publication that is against the war and very liberal in its content, to follow him around in Afghanistan for a couple of weeks to see what it is like to be in charge of the war going on in that country. During this time, the reporter picked up some quotes spoken “off the record” where unpleasant and uncomplimentary references are being made by the General and his staff about high-level Obama administration officials (including the President). Since these comments were well published two weeks ago when the story broke, we will not repeat them here but conclude with the aftermath of it. It would be easy to google the article and read it in its full context. The magazine article is being brought to the President’s attention, the President calls the General to Washington and after a brief 30-minute meeting in the White House, the President accepts the General’s resignation for his inappropriate comments to the magazine reporter. The announcement is made and Four-Star General David Petraeus is called upon to take over the role of Commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. General McChrystal disappears from the stage and turns in his resignation from the Army in which he served for more than three decades. End of story.

            We here at Common Sense University believe that there is much more to this episode based on the fact that it all went so well and quick. We believe that the General wanted to get out, period!!! It was all that simple. The job was taken its toll on the man, the multitude of tasks simply wore him down and he considered his options and probably found that there were really not many. Sure, he constantly had to spend lots of time with high-ranking administration officials visiting Afghanistan including the Ambassador to that country. The President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai was also constantly running interference with the day-to-day operations of the General and so McChrystal simply had enough and wanted to get out. But how could he do that without losing face with everybody who had counted on him and the troops who followed and believed in him?

            Could he claim a non-existent illness as the reason? NO! Could he just write to the President and say: I can’t handle it any longer, I am in over my head? NO! Could he openly complain to the President about the interferences by all the visitors, President Karzai or the limiting rules of engagement? NO! That did not leave him many options and in order to get out and not lose face, he decided to do something “inappropriate and unbecoming” that would force him to acknowledge his error in judgment and accept the consequences by resigning his commission. And so it went. He allowed a war-hating reporter to follow him around who then would publish a not so complimentary article entitled ’The Runaway General’ in Rolling Stone magazine.

            We refuse to believe that the General was unintentionally allowing this reporter to get near him, pick up off the cuff remarks by him and his staff about other Obama administration officials. We do not believe that the General was that naïve knowing full well that an article would be written about him in that liberal (War-hating) publication and to expose himself  and his staff to that. NO, General Stanley McChrystal wanted to get out and determined that this was the least damaging way to himself of doing so without admitting his discust for the job.        It will remain to be seen (or heard) if the true story about this episode will ever be honestly written, either by the General in a memoir or by those who were his closest confidants. Until then, we are not willing to accept the story as has been written and given to us.

General McChrystal’s Suspicious Exit is a post from: Common Sense University

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            No, she is not dead in the common use of the acronym. But something has ended and we consider that a good thing. Her career has ended! While Helen Thomas was in many ways a ground breaker for women in journalism, she was also for a very long time at a minimum very controversial. From President Kennedy (in the early 1960’s) on forward, she enjoyed a front row seat at White House Press briefings and she became known for her acidic and even confrontational questions and exchanges with Presidents and whoever the Press Secretaries were. She eventually became the White House bureau chief for UPI and was the first female member and president of the White House Correspondent’s Association and the first female member of the Gridiron Club. Later on, she joined the Hearst Newspaper company as an opinion columnist. Since she was an admitted liberal, the main stream media cut her more slack than almost anybody else. Her longevity was admirable, she celebrated her 89^th birthday in the White Press briefing room last year on August 4 and had her picture taken with President Obama who shares birthdays with her.

            Her Lebanese heritance made her automatically an enemy of Israel but it seems she managed to hide her antipathy to that country fairly well from the outside world for a very long time. Her liberal bias would surface every time a Republican became President and her exchanges were caustic as when she laid into George W. Bush in March 2006 asking him what motivated him (Bush) to invade Iraq since all previous given reasons were proven false. In November 2007, she asked then White House Press Secretary Dana Perino why Americans should depend on General Petraeus in determining when to re-deploy U.S. troops. She asked: “You mean how many more people we kill?” Now with the Obama administration she has been critical about the handling of the press which in her opinion was and is too controlling.

            Then came May 27, 2010, when she was asked during a Jewish Heritage Celebration Day event at the White House if she had a comment on Israel. The questioner was Jewish Rabbi David Nesenoff who filmed the interview (as he apparently did with everybody else). Helen Thomas knew that she was filmed and answered his question: “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine, remember, these people (the Palestinians) are occupied and its their land.”

Next question: “Where should they (the Jews) go?”

Answer: “They should go home, go back to Poland and Germany.”

Question: “So you are saying the Jews go back to Poland and Germany?”

Answer: “And America and everywhere else. Why push people (the Palestinians) out of there who have lived there for centuries? See?”

            That was all and it was finally enough to get her fired from her last employer, the Nine Speakers agency. Her openly hateful attitude towards Israel was simply too much to defend. Even though she apologized for her comments, she was ousted and they let her turn in her resignation on June 7 ending her relationship with Hearst Newspapers.

            What should we call the R.I.P. (Rest in Peace) then in her case since she has not died? We suggest among things based on her longstanding attitude towards Israel the following: Refusing Israel Peace or maybe even Rejecting Israeli People.  Common Sense University has only one question: How could Helen Thomas in her obviously deep felt hatred towards Jews be tolerated and even admired by the media, the U.S. Governments for over fifty years and the American public in general? The answer is in our opinion simple: “She was and still is a liberal!”

Helen Thomas – R.I.P. is a post from: Common Sense University

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            When a disaster like the explosion on the BP (British Petroleum) deepwater oilrig Horizon develops, it requires immediate attention and projection of things to come. A thorough analysis should have shown anybody with a sliver of common sense that this could develop into a major catastrophe with incredible consequences. After just a few meetings with real experts with experience in the industry and not with theoreticians from academia, it should have been clear very quickly that this could be identified as two separate issues. The first one being that it would not be easy to stop the leak a mile under the ocean floor within a few days but this could possibly last a while since remedial actions were no guaranty of sudden success. The other major issue was the identification of the potential consequences for the land areas nearby the spill location.

            Everybody knew immediately that the shorelines from Louisiana to Florida were threatened once the spilled oil would reach them. The good thing about that in comparison with a hurricane was that the States would have some time to take preventative measures before the oil approached land. Hurricanes normally do not give us more than a few days, a week at the most, to prepare for this natural disaster but there was little time to do the things required to minimize the damages. With this oil spill disaster, there were at least several weeks before the oil would reach the shores and effective preventative measures could have been taken.

            Now then let us compare this with the reality of what took place. The first thing we heard from the Obama administration was that this disaster was BP’s fault and that they would be held accountable. The Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar even announced that they were holding the boot to their (BP’s) throat and make them pay for all the damages. We have to ask the question: Was there any doubt that it was BP and not Disney World, Coca Cola or the Home Depot that was responsible for this catastrophe? Oh sure, some morons in the liberal media tried to blame this thing on former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. We wonder some times if liberals realize how idiotic their statements are? But back to the issue: It took President Barack Obama nine days before he even commented on the oil spill and he joined in the blame game. He decided to form a commission to look into the disaster and claimed that the government would do everything it would take to hold BP responsible. The three Republican Governors from Louisiana (Bobby Jindal), Mississippi (Haley Barbour) and Alabama (Bob Riley) appeared to have immediate emergency plans ready and begged the U.S. government for certain supplies and other help. Their permit requests to build sandbanks and other such things to prevent the oil from reaching the shores were stopped by review panels and some other bureaucratic roadblocks; they took their sweet time to review the requests and apparently refused most of these requests. It was more important that the paperwork was right and properly filled out for those bureaucrats before they could make decisions as to how to respond.

            One of the first actions President Obama took was to put a six-month moratorium on oil drilling of all offshore oil drilling projects including in Alaska and formed another commission to study the effects on future projects such as these. After some criticism, the President even visited the affected region for a few hours each, met with officials and talked nonsense by telling a group: “I can’t take a straw and suck up the oil!“ He gave nothing but empty lip service to citizens.

            Within days of the oil spill, foreign governments and international companies offered help by way of supply of equipment and materials but their offers were scuttled/refused by the same bureaucratic apparatus. Then the oil hit the shorelines and now the catastrophe took on in a very short time a dramatic turn for the worse. Daily pictures of oil covered pelicans, sera turtles and other birds as well as fish brought the true size of this disaster home to everybody. What did Obama do? He kept on blaming BP and assured the American people that he would make sure that BP would pay for all this, oh, and by the way, he was in charge of this major problem and in fact, his administration had been on the job from day One.

            When this nonsense was rejected by the people and his approval numbers went down, Obama gave a speech from the Oval office last week and after that even met with the CEO and Chairman of BP to ask them to put some twenty billion dollars into an escrow account so that an independent panel could pay those who were negatively effected by the oil reaching the shores. In the same speech on June 15, Obama also talked about the need to pass energy legislation linking this disaster as evidence that our dependence on oil was unsustainable.

            We here at Common Sense University firmly believe that if anybody with a right mind considers this leadership they should be pitied but otherwise ignored. Contrarily if anything, the actions by President Obama clearly show his ineptitude and incompetence when it comes to matters of such major proportion. His entire approach was lackadaisical at best and should be seen as such by all people. Obama has absolutely no skills when it comes to realistic analysis and a sense of how to approach problems of such magnitude. He also has no experience when it comes to leadership and it would be nice if even the liberal media would be honest and see it for what it is. Obama is a man who was deceitful in his run for the White House and we are all paying a huge prize for this and people in the Southern Gulf States will suffer for a long time to come.

            In conclusion, we believe that this has been so far a triple disaster: First, the oil rig exploded and nobody could have prevented it outside of those who worked the rig and decided to take shortcuts to meet deadlines, this is the sole responsibility of BP. Secondly, the U.S. Government has completely failed to prevent the disaster we are seeing now as the oil is reaching the shorelines in the Gulf States. But lastly, the third disaster is the fact that we are having a totally inexperienced and incompetent President in the White House who is simply lost as to what effective decisions to make. He did not realize that this was a crisis from Day One but instead treated in his usual fashion: Looking for whom to blame and pouncing on the culprits and arrogantly repeating that he is in charge and would fix it! This is not leadership, this is shameful and blatant ineptitude!

Oxymoronic Obama Presidential Leadership Role is a post from: Common Sense University

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            What is most troubling about this reality is the fact that the combined obligations of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Healthcare and so on are amounting to nearly one hundred trillion dollars. Add to this the financial obligations by most States and the picture becomes darker and darker with no hope in sight. It’s a nightmare as dark as a major tornado coming at you with the only thing not clearly known is the moment it will hit you. Even if the new Congress in January 2011 would be dedicated to getting spending under control, it would seem to be nearly impossible and we would have to keep on printing money we do not have. Raising taxes would not stimulate the economy and therefore would not remedy the problem.

            Compare this situation to an average family that has been living for a while beyond their means and now faces financial ruin due to a variety of reasons, be it job loss or illness or something else. The family has to get down and make some tough decisions like moving out of the house that they can no longer afford; transferring to another area or even State to seek employment opportunities and of course, most effectively: tightening the proverbial belt whatever that might be. Many times, a family in such a situation can walk away from it by declaring bankruptcy (therewith being released from their financial debt and obligation). But in our opinion, the United States government does not have that option or does it? Can we wake up one morning to hear the President speak on television and declare: “I am sadly forced to announce, my fellow Americans, that we as a country have declared bankruptcy.” Can such a day become reality?

            We most certainly hope not but what are the choices? We are simply running out of money right now, we are borrowing from foreign countries such as China and there will come a day soon when the Chinese will simply stop lending us money and what are we doing then? These are all serious questions and they need immediate attention and a strong effort to get answers so that we avoid such a disaster. A few weeks ago we posted an article about the financial disaster in Greece and we warned at the time that this ‘tragedy’ as we called it could befall us as well.

            We here do not have the answer to the above questions but we can recommend one thing: Question the economists and other self-proclaimed financial experts about the future and why they think we can spend ourselves out of the economic recession by amassing trillions of dollars of debt? We hear and see these guys constantly on television and they assure us that it is possible but they never get asked to be specific as to the details of such a program. We doubt very much that they can explain this and until they do and can, we should stop using them as an excuse for continued spending sprees at the governmental levels.

            Common Sense University knows one thing for sure, neither President  Obama, Senate Leader Reid nor House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have the slightest clue about the financial dangers they lead this nation into. When asked, they refer to the ‘experts’ who tell them it’s alright to keep on spending money, meaning, we can spend ourselves out of the recession that President Bush and the Republicans brought upon America. All we can say is the blame falls on all of us if this country goes bankrupt due to the incompetent people we elected to be in charge of America.

America – Simply Running Out of Money is a post from: Common Sense University

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            There goes the idea of developing and starting an effective energy plan to become (somewhat) energy independent and reducing our dependency on foreign oil sources. One cannot wonder if the environmentalist anti-drill groups are not secretly jubilating behind closed doors as they see this disaster as a timely aid in their objectives. Their charter, while not written on paper, is obviously a severe reversal of our current lifestyles, not only in the USA but worldwide. If they could rule the world, they would all have us back on bicycles or walking on foot or being transported by horse buggies. We wonder if they would not also eliminate railroads, buses and other major mass transportation systems.

            It is really too bad that we cannot transport these self-proclaimed environment protectors and fanatics by way of ‘time tunnel’ back into the middle ages, let’s say the early fifteen hundreds. When one hears them talk, they appear to think of that long ago era as the “golden years” of mankind. But we here at Common Sense University strongly believe that they are all hypocrites. Their true dream is that we all would have to give up all the benefits of our modern age while they could hang on to them. Do you really think that they would give up their computers, blackberries, cell phones and so on freely? Of course not because they would have done so already since all these modern conveniences require some sort of energy, electricity, batteries etc and that is all bad according to them.

            Just look at one their icons: Former Vice-President Al Gore wrote a book about twenty years ago wherein he proposed to eliminate the combustion engines in cars. This unabashed, arrogant hypocrite has been trying to warn us all against the greatest global disaster of all, called global warming and yet, he and his wife just bought a huge nine million dollar mansion just south of Santa Barbara, California. Add this to the fact that he flies around the world in private jets, rides on land in luxurious limousines and enjoys one of the most energy consuming lifestyles most of us cannot even dream of. This is one of the most identifiable images of unabashed liberalism, their motto is: Do as I say and not as I do!

            We here bemoan the oil spill disaster for its true reason and that is simply the damage that it is causing to the waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the beach properties of the Southern States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, even Texas and possibly Florida. The damage to wildlife will be enormous and the effect on the fishing industry cannot even be measured at this time. We also hope that this ‘accidental disaster’ will result in tighter safety measures for current as well as future offshore oil drilling ventures but to stop it altogether is an overreaction by environmentalists and politicians and that is very unfortunate.

Fallout from Gulf Oil Spill is a post from: Common Sense University

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            What does that have to do what is happening now in Greece? We think the country is experiencing a reversal of fortune of colossal magnitude that will take drastic changes in how the country has been and is being run and administered by the country’s leaders. They have allowed a financial death spiral to keep going for far too long and are approaching a state of total bankruptcy as a country.

            And since Greece is now part of the European Union, the other member States are trying to support its efforts to prevent this collapse by bailing them out with huge financial sums of money from all available sources. At the same time, they are asking Greece to introduce major reforms, spending reductions and stringent austerity measures to improve their finances. While the Greek government appears to recognize the necessity to do so, the people are rioting in the streets. They do not want their lifestyles changed, they want their benefits to continue as before and the hell with the country. This entitlement mentality clearly reflects socialism!

            We here at Common Sense University believe that this what happens when over time people get used to receiving things for free, the average Greek person does not seem to understand that there is no free lunch forever and the country as a whole has reached a point of reducing those ‘freebees‘. And in typical socialistic fashion, the people riot and revolt against the government for reducing the number of cookies they, the people, expect to receive for free.

            Why are we even writing about this? This Greek ‘tragedy’ is costing the United States of America many billions of tax payer dollars and there is no end to this continued support. The number could go well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. America, how do you like paying with your hard earned tax dollars to pay for spoiled Greeks lifestyles and freebees? But that is not the only reason we are commenting on it. There is a great danger that this country of ours might find itself in a similar situation in the near future. When we have Congress and the President think it is alright to have 1.5 trillion dollar annual deficits on top of a national debt of nearly thirteen trillion dollars, the time might be nearer than we think to find ourselves in a tragedy of major proportions. It could be called the Greek Tragedy, American style.

            If anything, we, as a people, should remind ourselves and the elected officials at all governmental levels that we have to change things very quickly to prevent such tragedy in America. We have to insist on curtailing spending at all levels and this might mean severe cutbacks on programs the people have enjoyed in the past and still do. As we have to live within our means, i.e., our incomes at the family level, should we not demand the same from those who we elect to office to administer the affairs of our country, state or municipality? Even if it means cutting back drastically and without smoke and mirror accounting tricks, so be it. If anything, we owe it to our future generations to do so. We cannot continue to just keep on spending right now our children’s inheritances, let alone burden them with a national debt that will send them all to the poor house.

Greek Tragedy is Growing… is a post from: Common Sense University

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            1. Mr. David Obey, a forty-plus year Democrat (spell Liberal) from Wisconsin who currently still chairs the powerful House of Representative’s Appropriations Committee decided to call it quits. His reason for doing so was just simply being “bone tired” after so many years. We are not buying it but instead believe that he had a serious Republican challenger in a very long time in his district according to the polls. This person, conservative 38-year old Sean Duffy, a district attorney in Wisconsin has been endorsed by among others the former Governor from Alaska, Sarah Palin. While she is continuously being maligned by liberals and the mainstream media, she appears to be effective, would you not agree?

            2. Mr. Bob Bennett, a Republican U.S. Senator from Utah was ousted recently by the Utah Republican Party rank and file delegates who voted to support two other candidates to be nominated for the upcoming Republican primary election. Bennett while being a conservative was being faulted of having voted for recent bailout legislation and his pleas to return him for another six-year term to office went unheeded. His post-ousting statement, while sincere and tearful, was pitiful to say the least.

            3. Mr. Allan Mollohan, a Democrat Congressman from West Virginia lost a few weeks ago his primary election bid. He was solidly defeated and the voters in his district elected another man who campaigned against government bailouts and further vast spending by the Federal Government. Mollohan was also several times under ethical investigations and it appears, the people in his district just had enough of him and decided to terminate his representation in Congress.

            4. Arizona Senator John McCain has for the first time a serious Republican challenger in former Congressman J.D. Hayworth and McCain has ‘rediscovered’ his conservatism and he is campaigning non-stop for his re-election in the primary in August.

            What can Common Sense University, if anything, conclude from this? Most certainly the answer is that a much greater interest and awareness exists these days among people who are normally not heard from politically speaking, at least not in an ‘off-year’ election as this one is. All polls indicate that there is great unease in America about the economy, the high unemployment rate that does not seem to change a lot from month to month and the fast increasing national debt. And despite the liberal media’s endless attempts to downplay this, the general public is concerned about the three above mentioned issues.

            Add to this the nationwide Tea Party movement and their activities and one can easily see the rumblings of an oncoming earthquake in early November of this year. Being an incumbent might not be an advantage in 2010, in fact, history might record this year as one where incumbents became endangered species. We here at Common Sense University are advocating this type of change because incumbency has shown us very little to like about it. The political spins about incumbents being more powerful is becoming less attractive and they have one thing against them newcomers in the election process do not have, a record of legislating, i.e. excessive spending among other such actions and those records can be visited and reviewed, analyzed and possibly be found as no longer desirable by the electorate. We will get the answer in about five and a half months, we just have to wait.

Early Signs of a Political Earthquake is a post from: Common Sense University

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