One of my biggest concerns about the upcoming election is that if President Obama is re-elected, Obamacare gets implemented, the American people lose their sense of responsibility for their own lives, and voila, we are France.  Not a pretty scenario.  A further blow to the American value system which underpins American Exceptionalism.

Shelby Steele has written an excellent article about Barack Obama’s disdain for American Exceptionalism in the Wall Street Journal.  The last couple of paragraphs are quite profound:

America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?

As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.

Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.

Think about this statement – “His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.”  That sounds very much exactly like our President.  He won’t ask difficult things of the American people because he believes it is government’s role to make our lives easy.

A very interesting read – please take a look.

… is located here.  However, it’s really a story of two presses – the fawning press that easily overlooks when Barack Obama misspeaks, and the vengeful press which takes words out of context and amplifies its scorn for any conservative candidate or politician.  Unfortunately, both of those are the same press and it causes all conservatives to face “a headwind” in effectively communicating their conservative message.  All we ask for is consistent coverage of all the candidates.  Is that too much to ask for?

Gary Halbert has penned an outstanding analysis of Warren Buffet’s misguided NYT op-ed that the “rich” have been coddled and should therefore pay more taxes.

If Buffet feels he in undertaxed, he should send the gov’t a check.

President Obama Politics , sensing weakness in his poll numbers with Hispanics, has decided that it doesn’t make sense to deport ILLEGAL ALIENS, thereby “allowing many undocumented immigrants without criminal records to stay in the United States indefinitely and apply for work permits.”

Excuse me, but if you are in the U.S. illegally, does that not constitute criminal activity?  Does not the Constitution of the United States state that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”?  I guess that part of the Constitution does not apply to this President.

Once again, this President is placing politics ahead of doing the job he was elected to do.

I am certainly no Rick Perry fan (can you say Gardisil or Trans Texas Corridor?) but he would be 14.5 trillion percent better than Barack Obama as President of this country.  However, he faces an uphill challenge when the MSM (NBC News) is carrying Obama’s water and painting Perry as a racist.

Kudos to Breitbart.TV for highlighting this deliberate misrepresentation of Rick Perry’s comments regarding the national debt into a racist statement.

An outstanding post by the Heritage Foundation about our President bypassing the Legislative branch to “transform America”, whether legal or not.  In summary:

Congress can’t pass Cap and Trade:  The EPA rules carbon dioxide a pollutant and starts to regulate it;

Congress can’t pass Card Check:  The NLRB implements rules to make it harder for employers to fight union elections and starts telling companies where they can and can not build factories;

Congress can’t pass the Dream Act:  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and attorneys begin to exercise selective enforcement of immigration law;

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) assumes authority over Internet regulation despite a ruling by a federal appeals court explicitly denying the commission that authority;

The President disagrees with the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and decides DOMA is unconstitutional: He tells the DoJ to stop defending it.

This guy has got to go!!!

As I have been telling folks, with no record to run on, President Obama is going to point his $1 billion in campaign funds directly at whoever he is running against.  This post by Phillip Klein at the Washington Examiner states this very elequently:

With no record to run on, Obama opts for cynicism.

I didn’t realize that President Obama has been laser focused on creating jobs since day 1 of his administration.  That was certainly clarified in this video below, courtesy of the Huffington Post:

I thought he was working on maintaining our AAA credit rating, passing a health care plan the whole country could get behind, spending $800 BILLION of stimulus funds prudently to revive the economy, supporting our oil and gas drilling efforts in the Gulf of Mexico and on the mainland, making sure we have enough electrical power generating plants to meet our needs, supporting Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East, fixing medicare, etc.  Since President Obama has been focused like a laser beam on job, jobs, jobs, he can be excused that a few of these other metrics have seen some slippage since he took the reins.

Source:  (1) U.S. Energy Information Administration; (2) Wall Street Journal; (3) Bureau of Labor Statistics; (4) Census Bureau; (5) USDA; (6) U.S. Dept. of Labor; (7) FHFA; (8) Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller; (9) RealtyTrac; (10) Heritage Foundation and WSJ; (11) The Conference Board; (12) FDIC; (13) Federal Reserve; (14) U.S. Treasury

S&P Strips U.S. of Top Credit Rating

Nothing more to say!

Jake is the kid with the shoe blowout. You can read the story here.