Between Barack and a Hot Plate

Obviously a majority of Americans live ideologically, rhetorically, and economically between, as Rush Limbaugh calls them, "environmentalist whackos", those primarily made up of Hollywood and liberal elites rich enough to eschew the griminess of carbon based energy, and those whose lifestyle is supported primarily by the government.  Yet oddly, if not deliberately, President Obama has chosen to side with both of those extremes in almost every decision he makes.  Thursday's edition of the Wall Street Journal had three successive editorials which demonstrate such pandering: The Anti-Jobs President, Heavy Metal Politics, and Food Stamp Nation.

In all three of these articles, there can be no more defense or rationalization from Obama or his supporters that he is at all concerned with remedying our nation's high unemployment levels.  Anyone who says otherwise is full of sh**.  The President's actions with regard to the Keystone XL Pipeline have always been evasive and disingenuous but his latest denunciation exposes him, with no cover mind you, as a complete fraud.  Permitting for the project began in 2008, with subsequent sign-offs from Obama's own Interior and State departments.  Study after study concluded that "no significant (negative) impacts" to the environment would be effected by the project.  Not just once, but twice.  Additionally, the President's own Jobs Council, earlier this week, announced their advice that Obama support "policies that facilitate the safe, thoughtful and timely development of pipeline, transmission and distribution projects", and not to do so "would stall the engine that could become a prime driver of U.S. jobs and growth in the decades ahead."  He treated that advice as well, like he treated the advice from his Bowles/Simpson debt commission, in essence saying shove it.

Environmentalists won another round over economic and domestic energy interests when last week Obama's Interior Secretary Ken Salazar banned new uranium mining on a million acres in northern Arizona.  Millions of pounds of high grade uranium could have produced enough electrical power to light Los Angeles for 154 years.  Once again Obama administration officials from the Bureau of Land Management found after their reviews that additional mining would have "no direct impact" on protected wilderness areas or drinking water from the Colorado River.  The decision will cost area residents, already suffering from 17% unemployment, $160 million in annual economic output.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a record 44.7 million people receive food stamps.  When Newt Gingrich says that Obama has added more people to the program than any other President in history, it's a fact.  Since 2009 11.2 million more people have joined the rolls, including an additional 4.4 million just last year.  What started out as a supplemental program for the truly needy has over the years become one more entitlement for millions of Americans.

In the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, a seminal study of our nation's poorly performing K12 education system, the authors proclaimed, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Given the atrocious and destructive decisions made daily by this president and his administration, it's increasingly hard for me to distinguish the difference.