Who?

What president has overridden his military generals on battle plans ... has castigated and investigated the national media ... has been suspected of colluding with the Russians ... has defied Constitutional scholars and courts with his executive orders ... his foreign policy has been confused and disruptive ... has demanded complete loyalty from those around him ... has been accused of crony capitalism ... his economic judgments have often been questioned ... has been a divider not an uniter ... yet is still adored by a good percentage of Americans as he is comfortably ensconced in a D.C. mansion.

How has he weathered all that has gone wrong ... and yet he still preserveres? A huge ego and self confidence, that's how!

Of course, we're talking about Barack Hussein Obama ...

Green Fertilizer

Farmers will often plant a green crop such as alfalfa or timothy and then, after a month or so, plow it under in order to enrich the soil. It's called green fertilizer. Apparently our federal government has similar notions about their environmental, or "green," investments ... only the appropriate word is not fertilizer. It's the s-word. It is "green s-word" and the Department of Energy under the Obummer administration has produced tens of billions of dollars of such s-wordy investments ... no, wrong word ... these were basically give-aways ... otherwise known as crony capitalism. And now the shame of this evil largess is keeping the Department of Energy from releasing key documents to Congress investigators that chronicle these insider deals ... see: Daily Caller Article. Of course this withholding of key documents is illegal ... but when has this been a consideration of one of the most corrupt administration's since Richard M. Nixon.

I have commented on this cringe-worth crony capitalism before ... see: Crony Capitalism and Crony Capitalism Redux. Read 'em and weep.

A Tale of Two Parties

The two party system in the United States is a sham. The Democrat party is no longer recognizable as the home of Sam Nunn, Herbert Humphrey, Barbara Jordan and JFK. This party, under the leadership of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid has successfully moved far left and is about to take this turn even wider. This party no longer wishes the United States to be the leader on the world stage (a stance once called isolationism) and has alienated many allies. It no longer wants a strong military ... witness our president's recent veto of the military appropriation legislation. It wants open borders with very loose enforcement of immigration laws. It is anti-capitalistic ... except for Mom and Pop capitalism ... according to Hillary Clinton in the recent Democrat presidential debate ... and crony capitalism ... according to our president. It favors single-payer health care. It desires European-style nanny-state Socialism with very high taxes funding an ever-growing welfare state. It tolerates repressive Communist governments in Cuba, Venezuela, and China. It has fully swallowed the myth of global warming as a way of expanding the reach of government. It embraces political mendacity ... now dismissed as "spin." It abets the Black Lives Matter movement ... clearly an anti law enforcement cabal.

The Republican Party, under the leadership of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, is effectively Democrat-light ... a bunch of prancing eunuchs. It only offers token resistance to all the excesses of the galloping Left. It lives in dread of the slings and arrows of the main-stream media (clearly an arm of the Democrat party). It can only give lip service to resisting the tax and spend policies of our fifth-column politicians ... in fact often adding its own precious ornaments to frequent congressional Christmas-tree legislation. It is a party that has lost its way after Ronald Reagan showed it how powerful conservative policies could produce domestic economic growth and international hegemony. Somehow, these lessons were submerged by their own success. Now, some on the Right have realized this backsliding and are trying to restore the idealism that wrought these national benefits. However, the old-time Republican establishment is resisting such a revitalization ... and would prefer the comfort of the current status quo.

Enter Donald Trump who has sensed the frustration of the conservative class in this country and has the communication skills to convince many of them that he can champion the roll-back of the Democrats' excesses. Whether he can or not seems unimportant to his acolytes as they see the demise of our national identity and are willing to grasp any avenue out of  this perdition.

The Drip Strategy

President Obama is bound and determined to keep the American public distracted throughout the run-up to the November elections with his drip strategy. These "drips" are a series of media-hyped Romney "gaffs" that keep them (us) from focusing on all the policy disasters that his administration has wrought ... the Middle East imploding; high unemployment rates; Iran's impending nuclear weapons; trillion-dollar federal budget deficits; a series of the administration's extra-legal moves to circumvent Congress (on immigration, on welfare requirements, etc.); operation Fast and Furious; high gasoline prices; the Fed's quantitative easings; a litany of crony-capitalism losses; etc.; etc. ... I (unfortunately) could go on much further.

I strongly suspect that there is a queue of these mostly-meaningless Romney slips that await the naive American media consumers and will be dripped out by the White House in an attempt to dominate the news cycles for the next six weeks. They probably will also be splashed into the upcoming debates to fill the conversation (likely with the complicity of the moderators) to keep these debates from focusing on the plethora of real issues.

Now that you know this Obama strategy, you can check off these "kerplops" as they come forth ... probably at a rate of two or three per week. They will be but distracting drops when placed next to the ocean-full of our current administration's manifest bunglings.

Afterward:  Apparently, the most recent of these drips is missing a key portion of Romney's remarks in Boca Raton about the 47% who pay no taxes ... shades of Rosemary Woods.  Read the whole story and you fill in the blanks: Mother Jones Fesses Up.

Caught My Eye

Four tidbits on the Internet that have recently caught my eye:

1. According to the Congressional Budget Office the cost of Obamacare is now estimated at $1.76 trillion over ten years (and well over $2.5 trillion if you count other implementation costs according to Charles Krauthammer on Fox News last night) as opposed to the "around $900 billion" that Obama promised in order to get this monstrosity "passed" through Congress ... see: Washington Examiner Piece).

2. Relatively unnoticed, President Obama's Pentagon is also proposing to save $13 billion by 2017 by upping the premiums on military health care benefits ... see: NY Post Article.  Shame on them!

3. A relatively obscure Bureau of Labor Statistics table is now getting some media attention.  It is called "U-6" and it highlights the structural unemployment in the United States.  Are you ready for the (more) realistic number?  It's 14.9% ... see BLS Release.  Yes, it has come down too, but it is still quite a bite higher than the 8.3% figure ballyhooed by the national media.

4. As part of its fire-hose crony-capitalism spending,  the Department of Energy provided a loan guarantee to a car company of $529 million to build cars in Finland ... see: ABC News Report.  Here is a quote from Consumer Reports when it tried to check out this new "green" car (the electric Fisker Karma): “We buy about 80 cars a year and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process.”

Oh yes, and one more ... yesterday U.S. Marines were disarmed when our Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, spoke to them in Afghanistan ... a clear affront to our proud soldiers by our lily-livered empty suits.   See: The Telegraph Article.

And so, to bed ...

Capitalism on Trial

Isn't it funny and, yes, a little frightening that Republican candidates for President like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry can make blatant anti-capitalism statements for their own seeming political gain?  (See details at: Newt's Attack and Perry's Attack.)  Fortunately it doesn't seem to have so far worked ... but this is just the beginning of a full-frontal assault on our free-enterprise system that is bound to occur once the presumptive Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, is chosen.  He and Bain Capital, the private equity firm he once ran, will be made the poster children of this onslaught.  This belligerency is what the Occupiers represented this past summer and fall ... and the surprising sympathy that they received among many media types and left-leaning pols was a omen of what is to come in this fall's election season.

The liberals in the United States have for generations been eating away at the foundations of capitalism ... often funded from the profits gained from the very system they despise.  This is despite formidable evidence that capitalism is a wealth generating engine nonpareil and that its many alternatives are not.  Just the contrast that is evident in China where merely a soupçon of capitalism has unleashed mighty forces that are propelling this former denier of property rights into an economic powerhouse ... should be enough to convince the Occupiers that their nihilism is futile.  But no ... the current economic stagnation in the United States, has inflamed the juices of these anarchists.  They would pull down the economic structure of this country around their heads without any thought-through idea of what to build in its stead.

Yes, capitalism does develop some warts from time to time (trusts, insider trading, creative accounting, carried interest, crony capitalism, etc.) but these have, can, or should be easily remedied.  And many politicians, unfortunately including Gingrich and Perry, but more predictably including Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are more than willing to capitalize on this current anti-capitalist fervor to gain or retain their place at that feeding trough called "big government."

Crony Capitalism Redux

Halliburton* ... That's a name that, to most Liberals, typifies crony capitalism.  Dick Cheney was its CEO from 1995 to 2000 and the working assumption was that he directed unsolicited government business to it so that his stock would go up and he would unfairly prosper.  This may or may not be true, but what is true is that Halliburton is a large company that, because of its expertise, has received many federal contracts under both Republican and Democrat administrations.  It would be difficult to unravel whether there was any undue favoritism sent its way when Cheney was Vice President under George W. Bush ... but, so far, there has not been any creditable exposé.

However, the story under The Barry's watch is quite different.  I have previously written about crony capitalism instances here (see: Crony Capitalism.)  Now, below are four more examples of what government largess (crony capitalism) is directed to companies connected to our current administration:

- Siga Technologies, Inc, a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) connected company, has received a $443 million no-bid contract from the Obama administration for an experimental smallpox drug (see: Seedy Details).  Smallpox was eradicated worldwide in 1978.

- Fisker Automotive, a Finnish electric-car company connected with former Vice President, Al Gore, has received a $529 million loan guarantee from this administration's Energy Department to create zero jobs in the United States (see: Annoying Details). 

- Silver Spring Network, another administration butt-buddy, has had its connected utility companies recently given $560 million in grants ... again by the Energy Department (see: More Money to Friends).

- SolarReserve, a Nancy Pelosi-connected green-energy company, has been given a $737 million loan guarantee, once again by the Energy Department (see: Princess Nancy's Silk Purse).

And for even more, see John Stossel's comments on the Obama-friendly window company, Serious Materials (see: Stossel Spills the Beans).  And I'm reasonably sure that some more of this sewage will turn up before next year's election.

* Halliburton is not an oil company.  It is a project management and oil-well service company ...  it provides many services to oil companies (like putting out oil-well fires) and to many other entities ... such as the federal government.  Its biggest competitor is the French conglomerate, Schlumberger.

Afterward:  I was just listening to Senator Dan Coats on CSPAN about a $730 million Energy Dept. conditional loan to Severstal, a subsidiary of a Russian company, OAO, to produce high-strength steel for autos.  The problem, according to Sen. Coats, is that most of the rationales used by the Energy Dept. to justify this loan are fallacious.  I urge you to read the story on this loan at The Indiana Economic Digest.  The only thing missing from this analysis is ... exactly who is the administration's crony in this transaction.  But, given the looseness of the facts asserted by the Energy Dept., I'm reasonably sure that there is one.  Stay tuned.

Also $1.6 billion from the DOE to BrightSource Energy (a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. company) ... see: Another Biggie and $564 million of DOE money into a variety of biorefineiries including $25 million to Amyris ... see: DOE Honeypot  (major source: Throw Them All Out)

Long afterthought: Here is another link to a listing of Green Energy pork: Michelle Malkin

And: Another One Bites the Dust

Crony Capitalism

The Barry is sagging under the weight of two crony capitalism disclosures -- Solyndra Corp. (see: Reuters Article) and LightSquared (see: LightSquared).  Now we hear that Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric and a clear Obama crony, has just been thrown a $230 million bone from OGX, the Brazilian oil company, to supply them with off-shore drilling technology (see: Surprise GE Contract).  Now, clearly coincidentally, when Obama was in Brazil earlier this year, he announced a $2 billion U.S. loan to help Brazil develop its huge off-shore oil discovery (see: Forbes Take on the Loan ) ... despite the fact that he has effectively stopped oil exploration off our own shores.  He punctuated this largess by another of his arm-waving grand gestures ... saying that the United States is looking forward to importing this new Brazilian oil (see: Drill Brazil Drill).

Is anyone surprised that Obama will raise $1 billion to fund his re-election campaign?

Long afterthought:  Here is another link to a listing of Green Energy pork: Michelle Malkin