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O's recent SOTU speech was deliberately contrived to gull the citizenry. Ohaha wants Americans to believe he "just happened to drop by" the WH for a spell....and doesn't have anything to do with the dismal state of the US economy.

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REFERENCE In his weekly address circa July 9, 2011, Barack Obama blamed the Bush Administration for his record defict.

EXCERPT FROM The Hill: “We can meet our fiscal challenge,” the president said. “That’s what the American people sent us here to do. They didn’t send us here to kick our problems down the road. That’s exactly what they don’t like about Washington. They sent us here to work together. They sent us here to get things done.” Obama sounded a positive note about negotiations over raising the federal government’s debt limit. “The good news is, we agree on some of the big things,” he said. “We agree that after a decade of racking up deficits and debt, we finally need to get our fiscal house in order.”

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In a fair accounting, President Obama is responsible (along with the then-Democratic Congress) for the $1.3 trillion in deficit spending in 2010 and the estimated $1.6 trillion in deficit spending in 2011. He [Obama] should not get credit, moreover, for the $149 billion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) repayments made in 2010 and 2011 to cover most of the $154 billion in bank loans that remained unpaid at the end of the 2009 fiscal year —loans that count against President Bush’s 2009 deficit tally.

The Treasury Department says that all but $5 billion of the TARP bank loans has now been repaid. The portion of repayments that was for loans issued in 2009 should be deducted from Bush’s deficit tally, not credited to Obama as deficit savings. There is some astounding number crunching in this article, and a chart of modern day president’s “average annual deficit spending” ........a frightening conclusion of what happens if Obama has an 8 year term.

The more I read about this Obamacare mandate and the opposition by the U.S. Catholic bishops, the more I think the bishops are all wrong on this.

It's not that Obamacare is a legitimate application of government authority, mind you. It's just that the Catholic bishops are completely full of sh!t when then complain about what they perceive as an abrogation of religious freedom under Obamacare. So many of these Catholic institutions were 100% on-board with a usurpation of personal freedom when it came to supporting a government-run health care system. That has been a part of the lobbying efforts by "Catholic" groups for years.

Obamacare does include a religious exemption. The only real problem these bishops have now with Obamacare is that their own Catholic organizations don't meet the requirements of the religious exemption. And nor should they, either . . . BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS.

Despite its name, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is not a religious organization. It's a lobbying group whose specific mandate is to serve as an advocacy group to petition the U.S. government on any number of issues. That's why the organization is located in Washington D.C., where it serves as primarily a leftist lobbying group on matters that include health care (they're fully on-board with government-run health care), gun control (they're big fans of gun control), the death penalty (they're strongly opposed to it), the minimum wage (they always want it to be higher), supporting any "affordable housing" program out there, etc.

The same can be said for almost every "Catholic institution" in the U.S. today. Notre Dame isn't a Catholic school; it's a big business that generates tons of revenue from government grants and loan guarantees. Catholic Charities isn't a Catholic organization at all; it's a big business that gets a lot of its revenue from government programs. And nearly every Catholic hospital in this country would be forced to close its doors if it didn't serve patients with coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, etc.

What's really galling these bishops is that this Obamacare mandate is going to do something these bishops never wanted to do, and don't ever want to do: It's going to force them to make their institutions Catholic again. After spending the last 60 years trying to straddle the fence and serve God whily currying favor with Caesar (often through its quiet, implicit support for radical "Catholic" leftists in government like Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi), the Catholic Church is finally learning what it should have known all along: You can't serve both God and mammon, folks.