President Obama

Well, I'm a little behind the times; I should have posted this last week during all the inauguration festivities and hoopla, but here we go.

Unless you've been off the planet the last few months, you know that Barack Obama is now President of the United States.

I did a little background searching on him, and was pleased and thrilled to find out that he taught Constitutional Law for twelve years. That means he knows the US Constitution inside and out. He knows how Americans' Constitutional rights have been violated. This is good news. We can only hope that with his knowledge of "con law" that he will roll back the violations that have been instituted under the Bush administration: the fact that the police can enter your home without a warrant in the name of suspected terrorism, etc. etc.

I'm also pleased to see that his first official visit will be to Ottawa next month, returning to the tradition startd by Kennedy of the US President's first official visit being to Canada. A tradition Bush thumbed his nose at and went to Mexico.

His wife is also a lawyer. Together, these two appear to be a perfect power couple.

On the bad side, he seems to have ties to unions (he's wrong when he says that unions are the backbone of the middle class. That's not true) and is willing to spend money in an attempt to save the US economy. That's bad. Government spending is NOT the way to stimulate the economy. In fact, it's exactly the WRONG thing to do. I want to throw a copy of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" at stupid "economists" that say that. In fact, it's these stupid socialist, Keynesian policies that have led to so much financial mismanagement at all government levels. Let's face it, when government says they have money available, everyone wants a piece of the pie. Look at Bank of America for example: they were healthy, now they want a bailout because the bank they were buying is going to cost them a lot more money than they thought.

I'm also concerned at Obama's "buy American" message to the US. This is the age of globalization. It really doesn't matter where a product is produced; just spending the money will help keep an American in a job. If you are buying a car, it shouldn't matter if it's a US made car. Just by buying the car, you are keeping *someone* (the salesperson, the lot boy, the sales manager, the service people that will work on your car, the insurance agency that sells you insurance, etc.) in jobs. It doesn't matter if the car is manufactured in the US, Japan, Korea, etc. You are keeping *someone* in a job - and ultimately it doesn't matter where.

I wish President Obama a lot of luck. He's going to need it. The violations of freedoms are the important thing he needs to deal with. Then we can worry about government overspending.