2009 Fearless Forecasts

Another year, another set of fearless forecasts designed to prove psychics are no more reliable predictors of the future than anybody else. Here are my 2009 predictions. Please join in the fun and make your own. If you are having a New Year’s Eve party, get your guests involved. Write all their forecasts down and save the list to reveal the results at next year’s party.

· The economic downturn will be much worse by year-end. Some economists will say we are in a depression as predicted by the Elliott Wave Theory.
· Deflation will be a problem. Housing prices, in particular, will be in free fall again or still.
· The Dow will drop to 5,500 or lower, then rebound to around 8,000. Gold will go to above 1,000.
· Unemployment will be 9.9% or higher by year-end.
· The bailouts of the financial system will not work, and large banks, brokerage firms, etc. will fail because the Federal Reserve Bank cannot lend at less than 0% interest.
· Thousands of retail stores and restaurants, including national chains, will be forced into bankruptcy or will close to stop losses.
· Shortly after Barack Obama’s inauguration, he and/or his staff will be implicated in Chicago or Illinois political corruption. By year’s end, the media will have turned on Obama with vicious attacks.
· The Midwest will have flooding problems again this year due to higher than normal snowfall.
· A Montana earthquake will surprise people. It will cause little damage and no loss of life.
· We will be mired in an Afghan war where we will be unsure who our enemies and friends are. It will be compared to what the Russians experienced or Vietnam.
· Suicide bombers will come to North America, either in Canada or the U.S. If here, they will target Las Vegas.
· Jacksonville will continue to dodge hurricanes despite a very active hurricane season.
· Israel will attack Iran if we do not, and this will cause an explosive counter-reaction among Arabs. Russia, not the U.S., will intervene. Most of Europe, especially Germany, will side with Russia against Israel.
· Despite saber rattling, Pakistan and India will not go to war.
· U.S. troops will make repeated incursions into Pakistan’s northern areas to flush out Al-Qaeda.
· Mexican drug lord terrorists will continue cross-border intrusions into the U.S. The tragic death of an innocent child will galvanize public opinion and force a reluctant administration to crack down and counter-attack.

Here’s one much longer-term prediction: If Obama fulfills his campaign promise to raise taxes on the wealthy, it will guarantee a depression, and he will become the 21st century’s Herbert Hoover. It will also assure the return of Republican control of the House in 2010 and his defeat in 2012.

Barack Hussein Obama Will Not Be America’s First Black President

Even if elected, Barack Hussein Obama will not be America’s first black president. He would become our first biracial president, if the American electorate were foolish enough. It is as inaccurate to say Obama is black as it would be to call him white. He is neither; his ethnicity is biracial.

Why does this matter? Well, words mean things, as Rush Limbaugh frequently repeats. And, some would like to make this election about race, when it is not and should not be. The race card is being played already among some Obama supporters.

Jack Cafferty on CNN’s “Cafferty File” segment of The Situation Room dealt the race card on Thursday. His question asked, if Obama is not elected, does it mean that America is still racist? This question will be asked more frequently the closer we get to November 4th, especially if Obama’s poll numbers continue their downward trend. Cafferty just happened to be the first one I heard do it, but it was predictable.

The premise of the questions is: If whites do not vote for Obama, it must mean they are closet racists. It is a subtle play on white guilt. It might work, too, if Obama were black, but he is not. Obama is as white as he is black. During the early primaries, this reality posed a problem for many black voters; Obama was not black enough for them. Since then, black voters have joined Obama in his denial of his white heritage. This allowed him to clinch the Democratic nomination.

This denial may be new to other blacks but not to Obama. By his own admission, Obama has been denying his 50% whiteness since his early teens. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, he remembered: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race [white] at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”(1)

Obama disdained his white grandparents’ and mother’s Midwestern roots. He wrote:

Theirs [his white grandparents] were the faces of American Gothic, the WASP bloodline’s poorer cousins…the world in which my grandparents had been raised, the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty…where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams…(2)

About his white grandparents’ reaction to the marriage of his white mother to his black African father, Obama opined:

Whether Gramps realized it or not, the sight of his daughter [Barack’s mother Ann] with a black man offered at some deep unexplored level a window into his own heart. Not that such self-knowledge, even if accessible, would have made my mother’s engagement any easier for him to swallow. In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky…The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard. And perhaps that’s how my grandparents intended it to be; a trial that would pass…

The family from Wichita had in fact moved to the forefront of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Dr. King’s magnificent dream. How could America send men in space and still keep its black citizens in bondage? …With his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space age.(3)

Abandoned children often turn their missing parent into an idealized, heroic character. The pain of abandonment is too difficult to feel in its full reality. Therefore, abandoned children transform their pain into an intense, if misplaced, identification with the missing parent. Often, this is accompanied by an equal rejection of the parent and family who did not abandon them and is present in their lives. In fact, abandoned children often blame that parent for the missing parent’s leaving.

This was certainly true of Obama. He developed a fantasy vision of his African father and heritage while rejecting his mother’s. He wrote: “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”(4)

Writing of his father Barack Obama, Sr., Obama, Jr. admitted:

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father…The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader – my father had been all those things…It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin [Luther King] and Malcolm [X], [W.E.B.] Dubois and [Nelson] Mandela.(5)

Living in Hawaii with his white grandparents as a teen, Obama recalled:

I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight…I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant…I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood…(6)

On the basketball court, Obama befriended “blacks close to my age…whose confusion and anger would help shape my own.” Only rarely would he remember guiltily that he had white blood coursing through his veins:

White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first…Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray [a black friend] about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false…Our rage at the white world needed no object…no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure.(7)

Not only can Obama still not admit to being partially white, but also on his first trip to Kenya, he denied he was American. In an encounter in a Nairobi marketplace, Obama’s half-sister Auma translates a comment from an old woman, “’She says that you look like an American to her.’ ‘Tell her I’m Luo,’ I said, beating my chest.”(8)

No, Barack Hussein Obama can never be our first black president any more than he can be our 43rd white president. Obama could become our first biracial president. Too bad, if that should happen (God forbid), he would not want to be identified as an American president. No, as his writings prove, he would be our most racist president. Wake up, America.

1 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, (Three Rivers Press, New York, NY) 1995, 2004, p. xv
2 Ibid, 12-13; 15
3 Ibid, 22-23
4 Ibid, 51
5 Ibid, 220-221
6 Ibid, 75-76
7 Ibid, 80-81
8 Ibid, p. 310

Give a Man Enough Rope & He'll Hang Himself

It is not often that a politician produces his own noose to hang himself. Obama is the exception. The real Barack Hussein Obama is coming out slowly but surely.

It is no surprise to me to find out he is an arrogant liberal elitist. It is very much a surprise that a liberal elitist blog, The Huffington Post, is the one that outed him. They quoted him speaking about the economic malaise of the middle class,

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Clearly, Obama is clueless about people like myself, a disabled American middle class worker. My values do not change with the times. I am a Life Member of the National Rifle Association (NRA). I am pro-gun rights in good times and bad. The Second Amendment makes gun ownership a fundamental right under the Constitution. Likewise, I cling to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ regardless of my economic circumstances. I have opposed open borders, illegal immigration, and free trade for years, during times of prosperity and times of recession. I believe in the sovereignty of the United States at all times. Our Founding Fathers understood that a strong country protected its borders and its manufacturing base. Thus, they wisely forbade the income tax, preferring to raise the Federal government's operating funds through tariffs and duties on imports.

Obama's campaign is trying to repair the damage caused by his remarks at the San Francisco campaign fundraiser for the wealthy. At a Pennsylvania rally, he tried to fix it by saying:

"Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois who are bitter. They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they're going through.

"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country.

"The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That's what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don't feel like they are being listened to.

"And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention. Government that is fighting for working people day in and day out making sure that we are trying to allow them to live out the American dream."

Hillary Rodham Clinton was correct to call his original remarks "demeaning." She said:

"I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies. Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it's a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it's a matter of personal faith. I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith. The people of faith I know don't 'cling' to religion because they're bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich. Our faith is the faith of our parents and our grandparents. It is a fundamental expression of who we are and what we believe. People don't need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them."

Of course, Republicans cheered the gift of Obama's remarks. It is fantastic fodder for the Fall campaign ads if Obama is the Democratic nominee. John McCain wasted no time in exploiting Obama's self-imposed error. McCain adviser Steve Schmidt shot the first volley:

"It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking. It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."