BloggeRhythms

While the incumbent holds strategy meetings with college professors, rather than top business experts, to theorize why his economic plans fail, a couple of today’s news items might give him a clue as to why he can’t turn a couple of the nation’s most pressing problems around. 

 

According to Neil Munro,  White House Correspondent of the dailycaller.com via Drudge; “More Americans, 42%, say they are financially worse off now than they were a year ago, reversing the lower levels found over the past two years,” Gallup announced Wednesday.

 

Just more than a third of Americans [35 percent] say their financial situation has improved from a year ago.” Gallup reported.

 

And one of the major reasons for the nation’s fiscal woes is very likely the drain on the economy caused by the nonsensically high cost of oil.  

 

In that regard, by still pandering to lobbyists, instead of really trying to fix the problem, the Keystone pipeline’s been delayed so long that Dan Springer reports, “With the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline stuck in limbo on the U.S. side, Canada’s Energy Board recently gave a thumbs up to a $6.5 billion pipeline designed to carry 525,000 barrels of oil per day from the oil sands of Alberta to ships on the British Columbia coast. The final destination is most likely Asia.”

 

The story goes on to say, “The development has the U.S. oil industry attacking the Obama administration over its drawn-out process. Noting that, “It’s taken longer to approve the Keystone XL pipeline than it did to win World War II, longer than it took us to put a man in space, and almost as long as it took to build the Trans-Continental railroad 155 years ago,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.”

 

However, aside from the incumbent’s domestic misjudgments and outright incapability causing the nation to flounder economically,  foreign policy flaws, recently exposed by Robert Gates, have now been expanded, as follows: 

 

The Daily Beast on-line, posted an item headed “Senior UK Defense Advisor: Obama Is Clueless About ‘What He Wants To Do In The World’ 

 

The article says that, “Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world. Strachan, a current member of the Chief of the Defense Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, cited the “crazy” handling of the Syrian crisis as the most egregious example of a fundamental collapse in military planning that began in the aftermath of 9/11”’

 

Sir Hew continues, “If anything it’s gone backwards instead of forwards, Obama seems to be almost chronically incapable of doing this. Bush may have had totally fanciful political objectives in terms of trying to fight a global War on Terror, which was inherently astrategic, but at least he had a clear sense of what he wanted to do in the world. Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,”

 

So, while none of this is really new, what’s interesting is that the negative commentary's coming from highly respected experts while the incumbent’s still in office. All of which indicates that the commentary isn’t specifically political, but more a current sincere concern about the need to fix the huge problems before they get any worse, if possible. 

 

Then there’s the administrations ploy to utilize athletes to promote the poorly constructed and unneeded health care tax among young people. And who was chosen? Magic Johnson and Alonzo Mourning.

 

According to the Washington Times on-line, “Johnson, the point guard who led the Los Angeles Lakers to five NBA championships in the 1980s, retired from the NBA in 1991 after announcing that he had contracted HIV. Johnson is still living with HIV and is required to take a cocktail of drugs daily to prevent the virus from becoming AIDS.”

 

And as for Mourning, the “seven-time NBA All-Star, was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease in 2000 and was forced to retire briefly in 2003 while he received a kidney transplant.”

 

Consequently, while there’s no doubt that name recognition of these two NBA greats most surely is huge, I doubt many healthy young folks are going to identify with their medical problems. Because the odds of making it to the NBA as a player and contracting serious illness in this age group are likely pretty much the same.

 

That’s it for today folks.

 

Adios