CENTRAL VIEW for Sunday, January 25, 2009

After one year: Heck of a job, Mr. O!

Recent weeks and, indeed, the last year have been tough on the Obama Administration which began with such high hopes. Now, some Obama supporters may be wondering how all that promised “hope and change” is working out for them.

On the foreign /military policy front, we still have over 100,000 troops in Iraq. Mr. Obama is adding 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The Club Gitmo detention facility is still full of terrorist detainees. Twenty-percent of the detainees released by former President George W. Bush and the Obama Administration have rejoined either al-Qaeda center or one of its regional branches.

Candidate Obama’s promise of lower cost health care did not make it into either the House or Senate versions of ObamaCare; instead, the added costs are estimated as high as $1.8 trillion. Now, polling data reveal that Americans in vast numbers want no part of ObamaCare nor its sweetheart deals to buy Senate votes.

After losing two gubernatorial races and one U.S. Senate race to the GOP, the Obamessiahs have their PR six-guns trained on bankers. In the old, black and white western movies, the land-stealing bankers wore the black hats. So, going after the banking industry makes good PR sense.

Years ago, yours truly was the principal assistant to the head of Public Finance for a venerable Wall Street investment banking firm. First day on the job, my boss handed me a copy of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the New Deal reform legislation designed to prevent investment banks from getting involved with stock trading.

Back then, our activities were strictly limited to raising money to “re-build a rusting America,” by helping state and local governments find the money for water and sewer systems, power lines, airports, prisons, power grids, roads and bridges. That was during the golden years of the Reagan economic boom.

In 1999, the Clinton Administration, led by Robert Rubin, repealed Glass-Steagall. That put the stock-trading fox in charge of the banking hen house and is the underlying cause of today’s financial disaster. Today, the Draconian banking “reforms” currently proposed by the Obamessiahs are chilling the business environment. Reenactment of Glass-Steagall would get rid of the fox, restore discipline and reduce uncertainty.

According to the polls, today’s business owners and banks are frozen-in-place. They are so scared of what the regulatory and taxation future may hold that businesses won’t borrow job-creating expansion money and banks won’t lend it. So, today’s business is standing still, like a deer caught in the headlights.

Conservatives have now taken heart because Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, just won the Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat held for 46 years by the man who, except for being a Kennedy, should have served a term in Club Fed for the DUI-related manslaughter of Mary Jo Kopechne. Considering that GOP registration in Massachusetts is only 12-percent, Brown’s victory represents a political earthquake in Massachusetts, anyway.

Global warmers suffered yet another tsunami when the U.N.’s climate change expert admitted the U.N.’s dire prediction of Himalayan glacier melting was based a single media interview with a single Indian glaciologist. That confession was another blow to the Obamessiahs’ Crap on Trade legislation that would have the effect of transferring the wealth of the United States to developing nations which, by the way, have made it clear that they do not intend to do anything to cap the amount of carbon that they are spewing into the atmosphere.

That said, the junk science relied upon by the global-warming crowd should not be allowed to invalidate the ideas that we do need to clean up our environment and that we do need to use every way possible to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, studied at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. Dr. Hamilton is a former assistant professor of political science and history at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

©2010 William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com