The nasty side of Barack Obama

This is unprecedented.  Since the 1970s the government has shut down something like 17 times but I’ve never known a president to close the ocean.  That’s exactly what President Obama did in a vindictive move to make the partial government shutdown hurt.  Over 1,100 square miles of the Florida Bay was placed off-limits to fishermen and the Coast Guard was sent to enforce the closure.  Just how much it cost to utilize national resources in this way is anybody’s guess.  One thing we do know.  It doesn’t cost a dime to leave the ocean – and the people who fish in it – alone.

But that’s not something that comes natural to a meddling liberal like Obama.  As you’ll recall, he also closed open-air monuments in Washington, DC that required no park supervision.  Again, it cost much more to close them than to leave them open.  Obama even had the park service close off scenic overlooks so tourists couldn’t stop and gaze at Mt. Rushmore.  Yeah, he closed overlooks; carved out slithers of asphalt that cost nothing to keep open.

Then there was the case of the elderly couple living on Lake Mead in Nevada.  The couple was thrown out of their home because even though they own the home itself they lease the property from the federal

government.  Chances are they’ve never seen anyone from the government on their property until now.  They were given just 24 hours to vacate.  What possible excuse could Obama have for that other than trying to inflict pain and blame it on the Republicans?

Apparently, that’s exactly what he’s doing.  While he was kicking people off the ocean and out of their homes he set up a website for people to share their shutdown heartaches.  He was compiling them and sharing them on the Internet.

This is probably the most childish thing I’ve ever seen any politician do and I’ve seen politicians do some childish things.  But it’s worse than just childish.  It’s downright mean-spirited and vicious.

Oh, and he allowed furloughed federal workers just 15 minutes to check their e-mail so they could read that he was working with Congress to solve the impasse.  What does it cost to let furloughed federal workers check their e-mail as often as they please?  Nothing!

If this is any indication of the debt ceiling negotiations we’re in for a rough ride.  Not raising the debt ceiling is being portrayed by Obama and the Democrats as economic Armageddon.  Of course, these are the same folks who cried wolf over the sequester and the government shutdown.  Starting to look like they lie a lot.

The fact of the matter is we have plenty of money to make the debt payment.  About 7 cents of every dollar goes to service the debt.  Money is continuously flowing into the treasury and we have plenty to pay our bills.  What not raising the debt ceiling means is we can’t go into more debt, which is a good thing.

We’re looking at about a $700 billion deficit this year.  Our national debt is around $17 trillion.  The American people have had enough.  In a recent Fox News poll 58 percent of the people were against raising the debt ceiling while only 37 percent were in favor of it.  To show you which party is the party of big spending, 78 percent of Republicans are against raising the debt ceiling while 57 percent of Democrats are in favor of it.

That’s exactly where the problem is.  Not only can we no longer afford more debt it appears we can no longer afford more Democrats.   

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Doubling down on the global warming hysteria

Is there any wonder that young folks are losing sleep.  Washed up rocker Bob Geldof continues to struggle for relevance with outlandish statements.  "We may not get to 2030," Geldof warned kids at the One Young World summit in Johannesburg, unless something is done about global warming.

Geldof told the young delegates, "There will be a mass extinction event.  That could happen on your watch.  The signs are that it will happen soon."  This is the same hysterical nonsense that has been recklessly thrown out by global warming alarmists for decades.  The bad news for them is "soon" has

come and gone a thousand times and none of what they've predicted has come true.

Let's review.  Al Gore told us in his dreadfully pessimistic motion picture that hurricanes would continue to grow in severity and numbers.  Neither has been true.  In fact, we've been experiencing an abnormally quiet period for hurricanes since Katrina in 2005.  Gore also warned that the polar bears were nearing extinction.  The truth is polar bear populations have exploded since the 1980s.  Gore and his Branch Algorian disciples told us there would be no sea ice in the Arctic by the year 2013.  Arctic sea ice has not only not disappeared, it's 60 percent larger than it was last year.  The doomsday prophets have predicted all sorts of mayhem if we didn't change our evil ways and none of it has come true.

But the torpedo under the water line to the global warming scare has been their very own climate models.  Way back when they were predicting dramatic temperature rise because of our relentless release of CO2 into the atmosphere.  The day of reckoning has arrived.  There are 73 climate models dating back to 1979, the year NASA launched a satellite to track temperature around the globe.  Even though CO2 has continued to rise, temperatures have not.  In fact, despite the IPCC choosing to ignore the obvious, global temperatures have remained steady for the last ten to fifteen years.  In other words, ALL of the climate models were wrong.

The IPCC tells us we can't draw any conclusions from just 15 years of data then, in the same report, tells us humans have been causing global warming only since 1950.  So, 63 years of data plucked from several million years is definitive but 25 percent of that time period is apparently irrelevant if it doesn't fit their political agenda.

You see, Geldof, Gore, et al use guilt as a powerful motivator to separate people from their money.  If you've been convinced you're destroying the planet you'll pay any price to repair the damage.  These hucksters of hysteria know that.

Perhaps Geldof should've picked a time a little further down the road.  The year 2030 is just 17 years away and Bob Geldof is now 62.  Like Al Gore and the IPCC, he may just live long enough to see how ridiculously wrong he was.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Government shutdown? What government shutdown?

What if they threw a government shutdown and nobody noticed?  The wolf-crying Democrats had secretly desired a government shutdown so they could blame it on the House Republicans and thus score some political points.  The only problem is no one really noticed.

What we did notice is, like all the sequestration wolf-crying, the disaster never materialized.  And as with the sequestration, I must say I was surprised and impressed by Speaker John Boehner’s determination to stand his ground.

Whether or not you really care about a government shutdown really says something about where you are on the political spectrum.  Far-left liberals were freaking out over a government shutdown.  Far-right conservatives wanted to see it happen.  I must confess that I was in that latter group.  Not because I wanted to see anyone hurt or even inconvenienced.  I just wanted people to understand what a non-issue a government shutdown really is.

Do you realize that the government has shut down 17 times since 1970?  Sometimes for several weeks at a time.  The only one I really remember was the face-off between Newt and the boys and Bill Clinton in 1995.  I remember that one so vividly because I had a ringside seat, broadcasting from the basement of the U.S. Capitol for the duration.  What I remember were the lies coming from the Democrats.  They claimed the Republicans wanted to cut Medicare and give a tax cut to their rich constituents.  The truth of the matter was the Republicans weren’t cutting anything.  They simply wanted to slow the growth of Medicare.

The news media piled on the Republicans and blamed them for the shutdown but I have no recollection of any negative repercussions from the government closing its doors for a few days.  In fact, it was the government shutdown that lay the groundwork for slowing the growth of the entire budget and getting Bill Clinton to sign welfare reform after using his veto pen on it twice before.  The end result was we had a balanced budget by 1998 expressly because the Republicans pushed the issue of spending restraint.  Without even cutting a dime, just slowing the growth, revenue was allowed to catch up with spending and we balanced the budget, no thanks to the free-wheeling, spend-like-a-drunken-sailor Democrats.  (No offense to you drunken sailors.)

Had 9/11 not happened we likely would’ve seen balanced budgets all the way through the Bush administration.  Can you imagine that?  Can you imagine not having to raise the debt ceiling?  Of course, President Obama says that raising the debt ceiling doesn’t mean we’re raising the debt.  Yeah, he actually said that.  No, Mr. President, I’m sure it means we’re getting ready to instantly balance the budget.

So, again the president and the Democrats are wolf-crying about the debt ceiling.  They say if we don’t raise the ceiling we’ll default on our debt.  Think about that for a moment.  We’re nearly $17 trillion in debt and they’re trying to tell us if we don’t go into more debt we’ll default on everything?  Please.  It’s like saying you’re making payments on a house and two cars and when the bank won’t approve your loan for a third car you’re going to default on everything.  It makes no sense whatsoever.

We’re bringing in over $2.5 trillion a year.  We have more than enough money to pay the debt payments.  We may not have enough money for all these liberal welfare programs but that’s the point.  If we don’t raise the debt ceiling it means we’ll have to live off what we bring in.  Is that such a horrible thing?

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Government Shutdown: This ain't 1995

Harry Reid, Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats made a gross miscalculation.  They thought no matter what happened the American people would blame a government shutdown on the Republicans.  After all, they were working off the template of 1995.  But the template from 1995 is obsolete.

In 1995 the issue was Medicare.  The Democrats had one talking point: "The Republicans want to cut Medicare and give a tax cut to their rich constituents."  You heard that from every Democrat at every turn.  Forget that it wasn't true, it was repeated so often and never challenged by the media that it stuck. The truth was the Republicans were merely trying to slow the rate of growth.  There was no cut in Medicare but that didn't matter.  What mattered was Speaker Newt Gingrich had become a lightning rod in American politics.  Even those who admired his guts and his leadership skills had a hard time dealing with his arrogance and his ego.  There is no Newt Gingrich to focus on in this current budget fight.

Secondly, the issue is dramatically different.  Medicare was an issue that resonated with everyone.  We all paid into the program and seniors were due what was coming to them.  To think that anyone would cut that (which they weren't) rubbed people the wrong way.  Couple that with the accusation that Newt and the boys were greasing the palms of wealthy donors with a tax cut (which they weren't) and you can see how they lost the argument.

The issue today is Obamacare, a program of which millions of Americans are terrified.  They've heard the reports of numerous companies cutting employee hours below 30 per week to get around the tremendous cost increases.  They've seen co-workers laid off in anticipation of its implementation.  They've witnessed the nightmare of the exchange launch.  They're happy with their health insurance now and they are frightened everything about it is going to change and change for the worse.

Like they did with their Mediscare tactics in 1995 the Democrats tried to create Obamascare.  It blew up in their faces.  Harry Reid was so sure a repeat of 1995 was inevitable that he got cocky.  A little too cocky.  He shot down every proposal for compromise from the House Republicans to the point that it became obvious he was the obstructionist, not the House Republicans.

Then came the kids with cancer.  Reid thought he had found the perfect photo op.  Kids with cancer were being locked out of clinical trials because workers from the National Institutes of Health were being furloughed.  He blamed the heartless Republicans of wanting to kill little children.  Then John Boehner outflanked him.  Boehner offered to fully fund the NIH with a stand-alone bill.  Harry Reid rejected the offer which led to a question from CNN reporter Dana Bash that encapsulated the whole government shutdown fight.

"But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn't you do it?" Bash asked Reid.  Harry's response?  "Why would we want to do that?"

Wow!  Frying pan?  Meet fire.

Then there were the World War II veterans.  They flew into Washington on Honor Flights, a program designed to take veterans near the end of their lives on a final trip to pay tribute to their fallen comrades at the World War II Memorial.  The memorial is an open-air park that's open 24/7, regardless of whether or not park employees are around.  Obama sent barricades to keep them out.  They ignored the barricades and visited the memorial anyway.  As one veteran said, "Normandy was closed when we got there, too."

What a powerful scene.  Men from the greatest generation who fought to save the world from the Nazis were being played by an egotistical, spoiled brat who was on the verge of being stripped of the chance to force-feed his socialist agenda down the throats of the American people.  The initial confrontation was a PR nightmare so what did the president do?  He doubled down.  The next day he had the park service erect a fence to keep the veterans out, a move that obviously cost much more money in the midst of a government shutdown than allowing these men to pay tribute to their lost friends.  They stormed the fence, too, leaving park personnel with the unenviable task of arresting 90-year-old men in wheelchairs.  As one park police officer put it, "I'm not going to enforce the 'no stopping or standing' sign for a group of 90 World War II veterans," according to WND.com  "I'm a veteran myself."

They whipped fascism in their teens and in their 90s they may very well have whipped socialism.

What Democrats hoped would be a story of mean, ole Republicans shutting down the government ended up being Democrats with a nasty streak who were willing to deny kids with cancer the care they needed and World War II heroes a chance to say a final goodbye to friends they lost on the battlefield just to score political points.

Make no mistake about it, Government Shutdown 2013 is Obama's Katrina.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Kenyan terrorists look a lot like Syrian rebels

By now you’ve heard about the Kenyan mall massacre where innocent people were asked by the terrorists to tell them the name of Muhammad’s mother.  Those who could not were executed on the spot, including children as young as five years old.  These are the types of animals we’re at war with.  This is the unspeakable horror of daring not to conform to their radical vision of Islam.  The story, of course, gained international attention.

But what about the terrorists in Syria who were going house-to-house in Christian villages and slaughtering anyone who did not profess a belief in Islam?  Where was the outrage from the United States?  Where was the condemnation from our president?  There was none.  Why?  Because this president, through the CIA, is sending guns to these animals.  You see, these terrorists who have been indiscriminately killing innocent people all across Syria are the Syrian rebels.  These are the same Syrian rebels Obama wants to help and is helping.  These are the same barbaric bastards who Sen. John McCain sees as moderates.

I fear for our country.  I fear for our future.  We have so lost our way that we can no longer tell good from evil.  People like McCain and Lindsay Graham and Obama want so much to depose the Assad regime that they’re willing to literally make a pact with the devil.

Did you catch this headline?  “Syrian Rebels Attack Christian Village, Behead Priests.”  Or, how about this one: “Syrian Rebels Slit Throat of Christian Man Who Refused to Convert to Islam.”   Probably not.  These headlines were found throughout the international media and on conservative sites like Breitbart.com and Townhall.com but got very little play in the mainstream media.

Here’s what’s frightening about all of this, aside from the fact that we’re aiding this human debris.  What’s frightening is that the American people are being spoon-fed what the administration wants them to know.  The news media are no longer the watchdogs of the government.  They’re the lapdog of the government.  I’ve often said that media bias isn’t so much in what they tell you, it’s in what they don’t tell you.  We’re not being told nearly enough about who the Syrian rebels really are because if the American people knew the truth they would be outraged.

People like Sen. Ted Cruz have tried to tell the people.  John McCain despises Cruz because he dared speak the truth on the proposed Syrian air strikes when he said America should not become “al Qaeda’s air force.”  McCain has actually been meeting with Syrian rebel generals and whined that the terrorist rebels feel abandoned by Obama.  Hard to understand how when Obama is sending them weapons.

McCain was called on the carpet by Fox & Friends when they aired a video of Syrian rebel terrorists shooting at an airplane and yelling “allahu akbar,” the trademark scream of terrorist suicide bombers the world over.  McCain acted as though the host, Brian Kilmeade, was some kind of Islamophobe scolding him that yelling “allahu akbar” was no different than a Christian saying “thank God.”  The difference is Christians saying “thank God” don’t walk around sporting dynamite vests.  Of course, this is the same McCain who traveled all the way to Egypt to meet with the Muslim Brotherhood, another terrorist organization that has had meetings with Obama in the White House.  But understand this.  The Syrian rebels we are supporting right now are no different from the mall terrorists in Kenya who killed children with one exception.  McCain and Graham and Obama haven’t met with them yet.  But just give them time.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

It's your economy, stupid

Now that Syria has sort of blown up in President Obama’s face he’s once again turned to the economy.  In a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the demise of Lehman Brothers the president sought to take credit for anything he could find good in the economy and blame the rest on the Republicans.  Nice try, Mr. President, but the people are no longer buying it.

He bragged about 7.5 million private sector jobs he has created but the facts tell a completely different story.  The fact is there have only been a little over a million jobs created since Obama took office.  This is one of the slowest, if not the slowest, recoveries from a recession in the history of the country.  Why?

Well, for starters, George W. Bush and the Republicans have nothing to do with it.  Consider this.  Obamacare is turning the American work force into part-timers.  There are stories every day of companies that are cutting employee hours so they don’t have to bear the sticker shock of higher healthcare costs under Obamacare.  And the working poor are being hurt the most.  Here’s the reason.  Obamacare mandates that an employee pay no more than 9.5 percent of their income on health insurance.  Of course, health insurance is a fixed cost so, naturally, it’s a bigger percentage of someone’s salary making $30,000 than it is someone making $300,000.  So, if your employer is now paying 60 percent of your health insurance they don’t have to pay more money for the higher-salaried employee but they do for the lower-salaried employee.

Consider this example.  The Kaiser Family Foundation says the average family insurance plan is now just north of $16,000.  For that employee who’s making $300,000 by law they can’t pay more than $28,500 of their salary toward health insurance.  So even if they were footing the whole bill their employer wouldn’t be obligated to pay anything toward their health insurance.

Now let’s take the employee making $30,000.  By law they can’t pay more than $2,850 toward their health insurance.  If their employer is now paying 60 percent they’re paying $9,600 of that $16,000 health insurance tab.  Under Obamacare they’ll be required to pay $13,150 or 82 percent of that person’s health insurance.  Now do you understand why lower-paid employees are getting cut back to under 30 hours?  If you’re employed under 30 hours then your employer isn’t required to pay a dime of your health insurance.

We also have far more people trapped on welfare since Obama changed the standards during the recession.  More people on welfare means fewer people working.  Obama’s EPA has waged war against the oil and coal industries, killing tens of thousands of jobs in the process.  At a time when there’s an oil boom going on in North Dakota, primarily on private land.  Were the president to open up public land to oil development experts say we could be energy independent in five years, only having to import a little oil from Canada.  Imagine that.  No more entanglement in the Middle East over oil.

Between the president stubbornly standing in the way of getting at our energy resources and blocking the completion of the Keystone Pipeline millions of potential jobs go unfilled.  The way to economic recovery is through a booming economy and that comes from allowing the private sector to create jobs, not by killing them.  Unfortunately, the recession is still real for most Americans.

This is your economy, Mr. President.  After nearly five years at the helm there’s simply no one left to blame.  It’s time for you to own it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Putin saves Obama from himself

Vladimir Putin may have saved Barack Obama from himself.  Hell bent on striking Syria over alleged chemical weapons attacks Mr. Obama found himself out in the cold, rejected by his allies and, in all likelihood, left to slowly twist in the wind by Congress.  In fact, the House had indicated it would not vote on the Syrian resolution so as not to embarrass the president on the world stage.

Then in stepped Russian President Vladimir Putin.  He came up with an idea of having Syria turn its chemical weapons over to international control and stepped back and allowed Secretary of State John Kerry to float the idea in a speech.  The idea was well-received and Kerry and Obama quickly took credit as a way out of this crisis.

Of course, this was another homemade crisis at the hands of President Obama, just like Obamacare and the sluggish economy.  Had Obama not offered up an ultimatum none of this would’ve happened.  That’s not to diminish the use of chemical weapons but more and more evidence is emerging that suggests the Assad regime had nothing to do with the chemical weapons attacks.

Can you imagine if Obama had attacked Syria and sparked World War III in the Middle East?  Iran had vowed to attack U.S. interests in Iraq along with attacking Israel.  Israel would have surely retaliated then it’s like breaking up a bar fight between two brothers.  You hit one and the whole family is going to jump you.  Then, to ultimately learn that it was the Saudi-backed, al Qaeda-run Syrian rebels who used the chemical weapons in the first place?  Wow.  What a mess that would’ve been.

Fortunately, Putin stepped in to keep Obama from doing something real stupid.  But look at what has ultimately happened.  Obama said the use of chemical weapons would be met with serious force from the United States.  If we truly believe Assad used chemical weapons there were absolutely no consequences.  All he had to do was agree to give them up after he used them.  It’s like the police allowing a mass killer to simply throw down his weapon and they let him walk free.

If Assad does comply with turning his chemical weapons over to international control it could prove to be akin to one of those lame gun buy-back programs.  You know the ones where Grandma turns in her late husband’s revolver he kept in the sock drawer.  The gun had absolutely no chance of ever being used in a crime yet the police can crow that they got another “dangerous weapon” off the streets.

What if it was the Syrian rebels who used the chemical weapons?  The UN says they’ve used them before and now they’re going through Christian villages killing Christians who don’t convert to Islam on the spot.  What about their chemical weapons?  Aren’t we going to demand they turn theirs in too?

Apparently not because this administration, along with other naïve accomplices like Senator John McCain, somehow has come to the conclusion that the same al Qaeda that hit us on 9/11 and now controls seven of the nine Syrian rebel groups is a moderate faction we can do business with.  So we get Grandma to turn in her weapon but the criminal thugs who are known to have terrorized and brutalized innocent people still have theirs.  At the end of the day I don’t see how this is a victory but for the LCDs (the Lowest Common Denominators) it may be all they need to convince them that Barack Obama is a brilliant strategist and master negotiator.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.