Barack Obama was the worst possible choice for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008? Why? Two reasons:

1 – He’s black.

2 – He won.

Now I fully expect the intellectually dishonest folks among us to stop reading right there and brand me a racist instead of reading on to find out that I’m not. For the rest of you, here is the “rest of the story”…

When Mr. Obama decided to run for President and started doing well in the polls, a huge portion of the American electorate went wild with excitement at the opportunity to finally elect a black man to the highest office in the land. They became so enamored with the idea in fact that they simply chose to ignore all the signs that, if elected, he would lead our country down the road to ruin.

During the campaign he made no attempt to hide his love for Socialist ideals, which fit in perfectly with his background and the friends he has chosen to associate with throughout his life. He pretty much told us straight up how he wanted to “transform” America into a country vastly different from the one that most of us know and love. And with the help of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and others in power he already has.

If he was a white male, Obama would simply leave office some day with the reputation of being among the worst Presidents ever to hold the office. And yes, I sincerely believe that history will soon enough judge him that way. But the problem is he is in the unique position of being the very first black President this country has ever had, which will only compound his status as the country’s worst leader in the minds of the true racists among us. Had he been the type of President who would do the country proud, Obama could have done his part to prove that a black man can indeed be trusted to competently run the country. Instead, he has given the racists an excuse to say otherwise.

I’m glad that our nation has proven once and for all that skin color is no longer a barrier to ascending to the office of President of the United States. It was in fact long overdue. But Barack Obama was the worst possible choice to be the man to crush that barrier. I believe history will show that he was indeed an abject failure at leading the U.S. in the direction in which we truly need to go, and there was simply no need for the American electorate to “settle” for a “first black President” who would turn out to perform so poorly – especially when he gave us all so many signs during the campaign that his Presidency would end up that way.

There are countless black men and women of high character and patriotism who would make fine Presidents, and they will certainly get my vote if they ever decide to run. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Lieutenant Colonel Allen West are two that immediately come to mind. With so many great candidates of this calibre to choose from, it’s a real shame that the opportunity to elect the first black man to the office of President of the United States was so terribly wasted on Barack Obama.

Down big in the polls for the Florida Senate Republican Primary race, Governor Charlie Crist was asked a number of times by Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace whether he intended to remain in the Republican Primary or drop out and run as an Independent. Here is the short video in which he gives a repeated, emphatic answer:

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Crist announced earlier today that he is dropping out of the Republican Primary in order to run for the Senate as an Independent. Can the voters in the Sunshine State trust Charlie Crist to do the right thing in voting their interests when his back is against a wall? I’ll let you decide for yourself based upon his answers to Mr. Wallace’s questions.

Alabama gubernatorial candidate Tim James has come up with a novel idea that I think deserves careful consideration, and not just in Alabama. It goes something like this…

This is America, and in America we speak English, and virtually all of our road signs are in English. Therefore, if he is elected Governor he will propose that all driving tests in Alabama will be administered in English. Seriously now, how can anyone disagree with that policy? After all, since our road signs are in English, shouldn’t all of the drivers on our roads know at least enough English to enable them to drive safely?

But as expected, there are plenty of folks in Alabama and around the country who disagree with Mr. James. They say that English-only policies discriminate against people who don’t speak English. I say hogwash! If I were to decide to emigrate from America to Mexico, would I expect the Mexican authorities to give me a driver test in English? Of Course not. If I emigrated to Croatia, would I expect the authorities there to be “sensitive” to the fact that I don’t speak or read Croation and administer the test in English? No!!

America has historically been a proverbial “melting pot” with immigrants coming from all over the world to the U.S.A. in order to make a better life for themselves and their families. And historically, once they got here they learned English. All new arrivals should be expected to do the same.

Liberals like to argue that the U.S. has no official language, and they are right. I think it’s high time that we designate English as such. After all, the overwhelming majority of Americans speak it, regardless of where their ancestors came from, and our government does its official business in English as well. Why on earth shouldn’t English be designated the official language of the United States of America. Besides, I’m growing weary of hearing “Press 1 for English…”

The liberals are trying their best to paint the Tea Party activists as a bunch of racists, but this video (among thousands of others) proves otherwise. Take a look and watch Herman Cain speak to an adoring Tea Party crowd (yep, they are mostly white) in the heart of the former Confederate State of Georgia. Wouldn’t you think that if the “tea partiers” were racist they would be doubly so in the deep south?

As you can see in the video, the crowd not only allowed a black man to speak, they also yelled in approval at virtually everything he said. And how could one possibly miss the “Herman Cain for President” signs being held aloft?

For decades Americans got their news from three primary sources: newspapers, radio and television. Printed newspapers have been around for centuries, and network television newscasts became hugely popular after TV sets became ubiquitous in the 1960′s. But today both are in a serious state of decline. Why? Two new and extremely popular competing media: talk radio and news blogs.

Talk radio actually got the ball rolling about a decade ago by giving folks an alternative to the same old left-leaning news dished being out by the “mainstream media”. Virtually all successful talk radio programs are conservative in nature, and they tend to be more “fair and balanced” than the network news programs. This new outlet helped level the playing field quite a bit by giving conservative voices a chance to be heard for the first time in decades. And guess what? Conservatives are still in the majority in America!

Next, along came the phenomenon known as blogging, and it has turned out to be the straw that broke the back of the liberal mainstream media once and for all. Today, the vast majority of Americans get their news online, and most of that online news is delivered via thousands of independent bloggers and a growing number of dedicated online news sites.

One of the most influential of all the news bloggers is Andrew Breitbart, the fearless genius behind Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood. These three blogs have become recognized in recent times as news breakers that rival the mainstream media of old. In fact, it was Breitbart himself in conjunction with a couple of brave young citizen journalists who brought down the ultra-powerful and ultra-corrupt ACORN organization via a series of brilliantly captured videos of various ACORN employees engaging in some quite un-American activities.

Thousands of citizen journalists like Andrew Breitbart have forever changed the way most Americans get their news, and they have also managed to increase our trust in the veracity of the news. Television news is now a mere shell of its former self, and printed newspapers are quickly headed for extinction. But the bloggers are here to stay. And I for one am happy to see this amazing change take place.

Now that Associate Justice John Paul Stevens has announced his retirement effective at the end of the current term, President Obama will soon be announcing his second pick for the Supreme Court. Let’s hope he learned at least a bit about the Constitutional role of the Supreme Court since his nomination of Sonya Sotomayor just about a year ago. This is what he said at the time when asked the type of individual he would be looking for to replace Justice David Souter:

“I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”

Excuse me Mr. President, but according to the U.S. Constitution and the principle known as “rule of law” that govern our nation, the role of a Supreme Court Justice is based solely and completely on “abstract legal theory”. The law is the law and the Constitution is the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s role in our representative democracy is to make decisions about the legality of laws and lower court decisions based entirely upon their constitutionality. “Empathy and understanding of how our laws affect the daily realities of people lives” have no legitimate place in the decision making process that a justice must use.

By now the liberals reading this are probably thinking that I have a heart of stone and ice water in my veins, but that isn’t the case at all. Empathy and understanding certainly have a place in running our government, passing our laws and “looking out for the little guy”. And that place rests soley among the members od the legislative and executive branches, NOT the courts.

New laws that right social wrongs and “level the playing field” are sometimes needed, and Congress has been pretty good at writing and passing them throughout our nation’s history. But when a law is contrary to the Constitution, regardless of how good the the lawmakers’ intentions when they passed it, the Supreme Court has a legal and moral responsibility to cast their personal opinions and their own good intentions aside and declare the law unconstitutional. If the problem being addressed is so grievous or outrageous that Congress feels that it simply MUST do something about it, they can either rewrite the law to conform to the Constitution or amend the Constitution in a way that makes the law that was previously struck down ultimately constitutional.

Critics of this approach – the correct approach – will say that it’s incredibly difficult to pass a constitutional amendment and get it ratified by the states. They’re right. And that’s by design. The founding fathers were wise enough to know that a Constitution that can be changed on a whim is pretty much worthless, so they made the process to amend ours both difficult to accomplish and lengthy. But the Constitution can be amended, and it has been numerous times since our nation was founded.

It is my hope that President Obama will honor the Constitutional role of the Supreme Court and nominate someone who will strictly interpret the Constitution when deciding how to vote instead of simply trying to “make new law” on his/her own. After all, we have a highly-paid Congress who have been tasked with that job, and all things considered thay have historically done a pretty decent job at it. And when they failed, the Supreme Court has set them straight.

Well, it has finally happened. Disney recently announced that the syndicated movie review program “At The Movies” will not be renewed after the current season ends. To be honest, I don’t see how it managed to hold on as long as it did.

Launched in the 1970′s by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, the weekly show featured the two film critics squaring off about their likes and dislikes among new movie releases. The opinions they offered for each movie was easy to understand – either a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, and the pair often gave different opinions. The critics staffing the show have changed over the years, but the format has remained basically the same.

The problem with the critics on “At The Movies” has always been their inclination to give reviews that didn’t jive with the success or failure the films would ultimately find in the marketplace. Films that receive two thumbs down often turn out to be blockbusters while the ones the critics rave about often turn out to be flops. But with only a handful of people reviewing movies, those who paid attention to them had little choice but to watch the show even if it meant taking the opinions rendered with a grain of salt.

As with so many other media industries, the undoing of “At The Movies” came courtesy of the Internet. Nowadays all one has to do to find out how good a movie is is visit a couple of blogs where real people – lots of them – post reviews of their own. No longer are we stuck with the opinions of just two opinionated critics who make their living telling others what they will or won’t enjoy. Now, in a matter of minutes we can read a couple of dozen reviews by real people just like you and me. I ask you, which reviews are likely to be the most relevant?

And so it goes. “At The Movies” certainly had a good run, but in all the years that it has been on the air I have never watched more than a few minutes of any particular show. Why? I always found it hard to find any common ground between what I liked and what the critics liked. And apparently I wasn’t alone.

For over two centuries now the United States of America has been the envy of the world. She has long stood tall and proud, a great nation whose strength and resolve have been admired like no other – even by her enemies. Our country and the free market economic system upon which it is based have not only allowed us Americans to enjoy the highest standard of living in the history of the world, they have also helped billions of people in other countries persevere through times of great trouble and distress when disaster struck.

But now as we head into the second decade of the new millennium, we Americans see our elected leaders taking us down a path of political and economic destruction. The boom created by the greatest economic engine ever devised by man and blessed by the Creator could soon give way to gloom and doom thanks to massive government spending and ever-stronger restraints on personal liberty and free enterprise. If our elected leaders fail to wake up to the idiocy of their actions, the United States of America will soon become just a hollow shell of the bastion of freedom, power and prosperity that she has been since rising triumphantly from the ashes of tyranny way back in 1776.

As an American patriot it pains me to see this great country being ruined by a temporary majority who have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about governing against the will and wishes of the governed. Make no mistake about it: America is in decline. It’s up to us, the REAL Americans, to reverse the nation’s course this November. If we don’t, the America we all know and love could quite possibly cease to exist.

Well, they did it. In the end the Democrats in Congress went against the expressed wishes of the American people and passed a health care reform bill that is so unpopular that even many of the politicians who voted for it find it appalling. Why were so many of them willing to throw their careers away in order to help pass a bill they despise? Because of one man: Barack Hussein Obama.

Mr. Obama was able to convince the moderates weasels in his party that his personal legacy as President is more important than their own political careers. My guess is he told the Blue Dogs who were threatening to vote no over the abortion funding issue that if they failed to pass health care reform after making it 98.6% of their entire job for the past year, he (Obama) would be seen as a failure, and that would set a bad precedent for the first non-caucasion to occupy the oval office. So not wanting to appear to be the spoiler of history, they caved.

Now that the Senate Health Care Bill has been made the law of the land, we can all sit back and watch the wobbly wheels of our economy fall completely off unless the Supreme Court steps up to the challenge and strikes this monstrous legislation down on constitutional grounds. I believe they ultimately will – at least major portions of it – but we’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime we find the Representative Democracy that has served us so well over the last 2+ centuries gasping for breath, struggling to survive after such a brazen assault on the Constitution and the obvious intent of the founding fathers. I’m still proud to be an American, but as of this morning the America I love seems to be slipping away from the patriots’ grasp.

It looks more by the day like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t be able to twist enough Democratic arms to pass the Senate’s version of health care reform outright in the House, so she’ll probably end up using one of the back door deals that have been discussed to ram it through anyway. By whatever procedure it takes, I’m predicting that Obamacare is about to become the law of the land. I’m also predicting that as soon as it does a slew of lawsuits will be filed immediately to stop it.

There will be several possible strategies of attack for the lawsuits, but I believe the first attempt will be to ask the courts to declare the mandate that every person in the country must purchase a health insurance policy to be unconstitutional. No article or amendment in the US Constitution gives the government the authority to compel anyone to purchase anything, and that includes insurance.

Of course the liberals have been quick to point out that most states require automobile owners to purchase car insurance, but that analogy is way off the mark. You are only required to purchase auto insurance as a condition attached to the privilege of owning and driving a car. No state requires any person to own or drive a vehicle, which means that no state requires anyone to purchase car insurance if they choose not to. Rather than own a car, they can always opt to walk, take a cab or bum a ride from a neighbor instead.

Another possible plan of attack will be to challenge whichever sneaky procedural maneuver Pelosi and her minions choose for ramming the bill through without a direct vote on the already-passed Senate bill. A procedure called Reconciliation was the first tactic discussed, and I believe it would fail to stand up to a Constitutional challenge. The Reconciliation process was set up explicitly to allow the Senate to rush emergency budget measures through the legislative process without having to overcome a filibuster where 60 votes for cloture would be needed before the bill could even be brought up for a vote.

To use Reconciliation to pass Obamacare, the House would have to pass the Senate bill in its current form, then vote on a separate Reconciliation bill to iron out the difference between what the House wants in the health reform bill and the bill that has already passed the Senate. Harry Reid would then only have to muster 51 votes to pass the Reconciliation bill in the Senate instead of the usual 60 required to end a Republican filibuster.

It should be obvious to anyone capable of critical thinking that there is precious little in the Obamacare bill that deals with budgetary issues, so it should be an easy sell to the Supreme Court that the use of Reconciliation to pass it goes completely against the intent and authority of the process. One would hope so at least, and with the current makeup of the Court I believe that’s the way they will rule.

The irony of this entire debacle is that most Americans do want health care reform. They just don’t want this health care reform which if enacted will give the federal government direct control over the entire health care industry. There are a number of provisions in the Senate bill that are actually quite popular when considered on their own, but the bill as a whole is seen by most folks as a socialistic pile of junk.

Obama, Pelosi and Reid have boxed themselves into a corner. They have managed to invest an entire year on the prospect of passing a health care reform bill that an ever-growing majority of the American people simply do not want. But they plan to use any means possible to pass it anyway in order to create a “legacy” of being the President and Congress that finally got this liberal boondoggle enacted after a century of vain attempts. I believe the Supreme Court will ultimately be where this disaster waiting to happen finally meets its fitting end.