Department of Offense

Dear Abby,
My husband has a long record of money problems. He runs up huge credit-card bills and at the end of the month, if I try to pay them off, he shouts at me, saying I am stealing his money. He says, pay the minimum and lets our kids worry about the rest, but already we can hardly keep up with the interest.

Also he has been so arrogant and abusive toward our neighbors that most of them no longer speak to us. The few that do are an odd bunch, to whom he has been giving a lot of expensive gifts, running up our bills even more. Also, he has gotten religious. One week he hangs out with Catholics and the next with people who say the Pope is the Anti-Christ, and the next he’s with Muslims. Finally,the last straw. He’s demanding that before anyone can be in the same room with him, they must sign a loyalty oath. It’s just so horribly creepy! Can you help?

Signed, Lost in DC
—————————————————

Dear Lost:
Stop whining, Michelle. You’re getting to live in the White House for free, travel the world, and have others pay for everything for you. You can divorce the jerk any time you want. The rest of us are stuck with the son-of-a-bitch for two more years!
Signed, Abby

Why Obama Is Likely to Lose in 2012
Even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out his winning margin in North Carolina.
President Barack Obama is likely to be defeated in 2012. The reason is that he faces four serious threats. The economy is very weak and unlikely to experience a robust recovery by Election Day. Key voter groups have soured on him. He’s defending unpopular policies. And he’s made bad strategic decisions.

Let’s start with the economy. Unemployment is at 9.1%, with almost 14 million Americans out of work. Nearly half the jobless have been without work for more than six months. Mr. Obama promised much better, declaring that his February 2009 stimulus would cause unemployment to peak at 8% by the end of summer 2009 and drop to roughly 6.8% today.

After boasting in June 2010 that “Our economy . . . is now growing at a good clip,” he laughingly admitted last week, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” The humor will be lost on most. In Wednesday’s Bloomberg poll, Americans believe they are worse off than when Mr. Obama took office by a 44% to 34% margin.

The last president re-elected with unemployment over 7.2% was FDR in 1936. Ronald Reagan overcame 7.2% unemployment because the rate was dropping dramatically (it had been over 10%) as the economy grew very rapidly in 1983 and 1984. Today, in contrast, the Federal Reserve says growth will be less than 3% this year and less than 3.8% next year, with unemployment between 7.8% and 8.2% by Election Day.

Mr. Obama also has problems with his base. For example, Jewish voters are upset with his policy toward Israel, and left-wing bloggers at last week’s NetRoots conference were angry over Mr. Obama’s failure to deliver a leftist utopia. Weak Jewish support could significantly narrow Mr. Obama’s margin in states like Florida, while a disappointed left could deprive him of the volunteers so critical to his success in 2008.

Mr. Obama’s standing has declined among other, larger groups. Gallup reported his job approval rating Tuesday at 45%, down from 67% at his inaugural. Among the groups showing a larger-than-average decline since 2009 are whites (down 25 points); older voters (down 24); independents and college graduates (both down 23), those with a high-school education or less, men, and Southerners (all down 22); women (down 21 points); married couples and those making $2,000-$4,000 a month (down 20). This all points to severe trouble in suburbs and midsized cities in states likes Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada.

There’s more. Approval among younger voters has dropped 22 points, and it’s dropped 20 points among Latinos. Even African-American voters are less excited about Mr. Obama than they were—and than he needs them to be. For example, if their share of the turnout drops just one point in North Carolina, Mr. Obama’s 2008 winning margin there is wiped out two and a half times over.

While many voters still personally like Mr. Obama, they deeply oppose his policies, and he tends to be weakest on issues voters consider most important. In the June 13 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 56% disapprove of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy. Fifty-nine percent in the Economist/YouGov poll of June 14 disapprove of how he’s dealt with the deficit.

And his health-care reform still holds its unique place as the only major piece of social legislation that became less popular after it was passed. According to yesterday’s Pollster.com average of recent surveys, 38% approve of ObamaCare, while its survey average when the bill was passed in March 2010 showed that 41% approved.

Finally, Mr. Obama has made a strategic blunder. While he needs to raise money and organize, he decided to be a candidate this year rather than president. He has thus unnecessarily abandoned one of incumbency’s great strengths, which is the opportunity to govern and distance himself from partisan politics until next spring. Instead, Team Obama has attacked potential GOP opponents and slandered Republican proposals with abandon. This is not what the public is looking for from the former apostle of hope and change.

In politics, 17 months can constitute several geological ages. Political fortunes can wax and wane. And weak incumbents can defeat even weaker challengers.

At the same time, objective circumstances like an anemic economy and bad decisions not only matter; they become very nearly dispositive. Mr. Obama is now at the mercy of policies and events he has set in motion. He can’t escape accountability, especially on the economy. He’s not done yet, but it will be tough to recover. More in a future column.

This article originally appeared on WSJ.com on Wednesday, June 23, 2011.

Something just happened that should alarm America about the future of our country.

The federal courts are hearing challenges to ObamaCare and we’re now hearing the true rationale behind the liberal plan to force all Americans to buy government healthcare.

The judges asked Obama’s lawyers a question that conservatives have been asking for a long time:

If Americans are forced to buy ObamaCare, are there any limits to the government’s power?

Take a look at what Obama’s lawyers shockingly told the judges: They told the judges that health care coverage must be forced on every American because billions of tax dollars are spent on Americans without medical coverage when they need medical care.

For 50 years, entitlement programs have driven medical costs sky high and to fix it, now Obama’s lawyers are telling the American people that we need the government to totally takeover our healthcare system to stop out-of-control spending!

This is absurd!

Fast-rising GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO emerging as a strong contender in the Iowa caucuses, blasted President Barack Obama’s leadership abilities in an exclusive Newsmax interview, saying Obama “could not run one Godfather’s pizza restaurant.”

Cain, who has been rising fast in the polls after his impressive showing in last month’s presidential debate in South Carolina, called the president as an indecisive leader who has lost most Americans’ confidence.

“The president has demonstrated that he lacks leadership in a whole lot of ways [and] could not run a company,” Cain told Newsmax. “And I don’t mean to be disrespectful: He could not run one Godfather’s pizza restaurant.

“Instead of being decisive, he dithers,” Cain said. “Instead of having a management structure where he can entrust to some key people responsibility, he has an organization that is unmanageable. When he added 36 czars to go with the ones he already inherited, that is an unmanageable structure. So nobody knows who’s in charge.”

Although GOP attacks charging Obama with weak leadership have been muted since the successful U.S. operation to take out Osama bin Laden, those complaints have resurfaced with the growing frustration over the lack of a plausible plan from the administration on reining in entitlements and deficit spending.

“So he’s not decisive, he dithers. He has a structure that doesn’t work,” Cain said. “He’s inconsistent, and he’s broken a lot of promises, and he is losing the confidence not only of a lot of his supporters, but has lost clearly a lot of confidence from the American people.”

Cain, a conservative talk-show host and a respected voice in management circles, is a turnaround specialist who is credited with saving Godfather’s Pizza from bankruptcy during his tenure as its CEO. Cain also served a stint as chairman of the National Restaurant Association, and was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City from 1995-1996.

Cain’s broadside against Obama might have gone unnoticed before his abrupt emergence on the national political scene. A new Public Policy Polling survey released Wednesday shows Cain is now tied with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in Iowa, behind only former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romne, who officially announced his candidacy on Thursday. 

Palin and Cain each had 15 percent, compared with 21 percent for Romney. Unlike Cain, however, Palin has yet to toss her hat in the ring.

The Public Policy survey was the third poll in the past week showing Cain near the top of the GOP heap — all the more impressive considering that he’s still battling relatively low levels of name recognition.

Other highlights from Cain’s exclusive Newsmax interview:

• Regarding criticism that he has stumbled over foreign policy issues, Cain openly concedes: “That’s a legitimate criticism of me.” But his common-sense experience and problem-solving skills, he says, can overcome any lack of foreign-policy expertise. “People need to keep in mind: What president has ever taken office who knew everything?” Cain asks. He says that he plans to surround himself with foreign-policy experts, and will ask the right questions to pursue a commonsense approach.
• Cain believes the Obama administration has greatly exaggerated to impact failing to raise the debt ceiling would have on the U.S. economy. Cain says that he would consider furloughing federal employees and temporarily shutting down some government operations, rather than increasing the government’s authority to borrow more money, about half of which comes from foreign governments. “I would furlough some federal employees. This is what a businessman does, when it comes to having to save a business,” he says. “You do what you have to do, and make some tough choices.”
• He reiterates that he had no problem with the concept of a TARP program to save the banking system from a global financial meltdown. But the implementation of TARP, he says, “was a disaster,” adding: “They picked winners and losers, they used the money for things other than banks, they tried to force money on banks that didn’t want it. The administration used it purely as a discretionary tool.”
• He predicts that the GOP presidential nominee will be a grass-roots conservative, rather than an establishment Republican. As evidence of the strength of the grass-roots fervor shaping the political process, he tells Newsmax that donations to his campaign “have gone up dramatically.”

Cain tells Newsmax he now has “almost 175,000 online volunteers ready to go to work for the Herman Cain presidential campaign.”

Read more on Newsmax.com: Cain: With All Due Respect, Obama Couldn’t Run a Pizza Joint
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama’s Re-Election? Vote Here Now!