Par for the Coarse

Barack Obama, the world's hardest-working man, took time out this week from fundraising junkets and pronouncing the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional to speak out on a matter of deep, personal importance to him: golf.

Specifically, he opined that the Augusta National Golf Club should change its membership rules to start admitting women. According to Whitehouse Spokesworm Jay Carney, the president "believes Augusta should admit women. We’re kinda long past the time when women should be excluded from anything."

Except, of course, the president's own notoriously "guys only" golf outings. Although in fairness, we can understand why Mr. Obama wouldn't want women in his party, smacking longer drives than he has any hope of hitting.

But on matters of women and hitting, Carney had less to say about this week's affectionate meeting of Whitehouse officials (not the president himself, who was presumably on the links) with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, to celebrate their Obama-assisted rise to power in Egypt and their continuing drive for the kind of Sharia law which would give the ever-frisky Sandra Fluke an endless supply of free stones instead of free birth control.

All of which makes Barack Obama's genuine commitment to women more than a little hard to believe.

Which is why female voters should be seriously questioning whether they should vote for a man who is seen as "unbeatable among women" yet, when it's politically expedient, doesn't see women as unbeatable.

The president is now making women part of his golf outings.

Supreme Irony

Alleged Constitutional scholar Barack Obama was shocked - shocked! - this week to learn of the existence and purpose of something called "The Supreme Court."

In a rose garden speech, the man who taught Constitutional law at the now thoroughly discredited University of Chicago petulantly announced that this so-called Supreme Court would be taking an "unprecedented, extraordinary step" if they overturn a law which was enacted by Congress.

Which, of course, is one of the primary responsibilities the Supreme Court was assigned when the body was created in the Constitution (which Obama hasn't actually read, but has "heard a lot about"). And far from being an unprecedented or extraordinary step, the Supreme Court has struck down over 150 laws deemed to not be Constitutional, and has done so for over 200 years now.

But the shocks did not end there for the president. Because with a look of slack-jawed, baffled outrage, he announced his discovery that the members of the Supreme Court are "an unelected group of people," implying that they lack the moral authority that comes from being answerable to voters.

Oh, really...?

Because the dark, ugly heart throbbing at the center of Obamacare is the Independent Payment Advisory Board - known as IPAB to the politically correct, and as The Death Panel to realists. This is Obama's 15-member board of unelected people who will decide what medical treatments the government will and won't pay for, and who will (and importantly, who won't) get treatment. These are the unaccountable individuals who will take Obama's euthanistic threat to pass out painkillers instead of pacemakers and give it the power of law. Law which is specifically not subject to review by any court.

Supposedly, it's the "unelected" status of the IPAB members which Obama heralds as making them more fair than any political body could be - which is the exact opposite of the president's criticism of the Supreme Court.

But that doesn't mean that the IPAB will be free of outside influences when making our life-and-death decisions. Far from it! Obamacare specifically mandates that the board "may accept, use, and dispose of gifts or donations of services or property" when making their decisions. It's practically sending out an engraved invitation for bribes...and making them completely legal!

So in the future, your life may hang not on what kind of insurance you have, but on whether you have 15 Rolex watches to give away. And if you're hoping to get the government to buy huge quantities of GM Volt Pacemakers which only occasionally burst into flame, you'd better keep your corporate jet fueled up to take the IPAB members to Club Med and provide some pretty good escort services (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) once they get there.

In summary, Hope n' Change has to admit that we don't really think that Barack Obama is as ignorant of the Constitution as he pretends to be. We think he probably knows it pretty well.

And he hates it.

Which is why he has taken the truly "unprecedented, extraordinary step" of publically attacking the Supreme Court's very right to rule on Constitutional matters (and therefore to even exist)...thereby directly challenging the structure of our government and the safeguards which the Founding Fathers established specifically to protect us from would-be dictators.

So serious and frightening is Obama's challenge to our nation's system of checks and balances that a Federal Appeals Court has just ordered (not asked) Eric Holder's Justice Department to turn in a written statement by Thursday explaining whether or not this administration concedes the authority of the Supreme Court.
Because if it doesn't, then Obamacare will be the least of our worries.

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Extremely Gross National Product

As disgusting as the Gentlemen's Agreement between these buzzards is, it's certainly no more repugnant than the appalling symbiotic relationship between the Tobacco Industry and the Government, which last week rolled out a huge new anti-smoking campaign based on showing graphic and disturbing pictures of smokers who have paid the consequences of their habit.

The $54 million ad campaign features images which are striking, to put it mildly. People viewing television, print media, and billboards will now be treated to full color close-ups of laryngectomies, stroke victims, heart patients, people with livid, disfiguring mouth and throat tumors, and - just for good measure - plenty of stumps from missing limbs.

But will the horrific - and expensive - ads actually cut down on smoking? After just one week, the Government is already bragging that calls to the phone number featured in the ads have doubled. They do not, however, say how many of those calls are from people trying to kick the habit - and how many are from angry parents of traumatized kids who've just gotten an eyeful of a woman whose toes have rotted off.

Moreover, cigarette manufactures actually used to deliberately (albeit subtly) insert death imagery into their ads under the belief that the "grim reaper factor" actually increased the dangerous appeal of smoking.

But surely the Government, which loves us and wants us all to get free medical treatment, is sincere in its efforts to stop smoking, right?

Ummm - probably not.

Because as any drug cartel can tell you, there's a lot of money to be made when selling highly addictive substances to the masses. Which is why the Government essentially made itself a partner to the Tobacco Industry (rather than shutting it down) so it could share the largesse. In 2009, the Feds raked in a sweet $8.5 billion in cigarette taxes, and the cash-strapped states pulled in almost $16 billion more. Suddenly, that token $54 million in anti-smoking ads seems like a drop in the bucket.

But the benefits to the Government don't stop there! As HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius recently pointed out, 443,000 Americans die every year from smoking-related causes. And by wild coincidence, those same 443,000 Americans will not be around to drain funds (if there were any) from Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. Ka-ching!

Still, no matter whether they're sincere or not, the stomach-churning new ads will surely convince at least a few people to give up their potentially deadly habit. Or maybe not - because the world's smartest man, Barack Obama, surely knows all the dangers of smoking but does it anyway.

But in fairness, maybe he just does it to give us Hope...

If this isn't coming soon to a billboard near you, it SHOULD be.