Last week, President Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union address. After two years of having the media, political pundits, and citizens in general fall all over themselves toting what a great speaker but president is and how provoking he is motivating the country to unite and make the United States a better place, this particular speech seemed less than inspiring.

Is Barack Obama losing his touch? Is his trademark talent beginning to wane? The past year brought Obama has gotten in front of just about every TV camera he could, TelePrompTer alongside, ready to rally the American people to action in support of his policies and agenda. According to several polls, he did get a bump in popularity as a result of the state of the union, but how long will it last? For the president to maintain an approval rating above 50%, he has to convince the American people that he will go in the right direction -- a direction that is best for both the country and the citizens.

Lately, Obama has been all over the board with the direction of his presidency. One day, he comes out with a plan and a commitment to rein in federal spending. The next day, he proposes a new stimulus bill. Only now, he's not calling it a stimulus bill, it's a jobs bill. In 2010, the focus of the Obama administration is jobs. Except of course Cap and Trade. This year being called a climate bill.

Let's not forget the emphasis on passing the health care reform bill. After a year of trying to shove them through Congress, a few more pushes is all that's needed to make it law. Obama has said that its failure into passage, is due to the fact that he did not explain it well. Well, land sakes, Pa, all us dummy Americans just didn't know or were able to understand what we were being told by Congress. In team the treasury to buy the votes needed to get it through the Senate is just something that the masses are too stupid to comprehend. If a health-care reform bill was to ensure all Americans, bring down cost, and provide better coverage, it would have no trouble being passed on its merits. It would even be better if it had cross state portability and tort reform. Neither version that went through Congress did these.

The budget process is also a joke. After spending an extra trillion dollars in 2009, President Obama is increasing his spending for fiscal year 2011. Again, Obama is placing the blame on the past 10 years. Well, he only means to blame the eight years of the Bush administration. Every time Obama blames Bush, he is de facto admitting that he is in over his head. The TARP money was supposed to be a loan to the banks to save the financial structure of the country from collapsing. It was supposed to be a loan and paid back to the taxpayer with interest. Lo and behold, it was. Except for the bailout of the auto industry. Now, Obama wants to tax the banks in order to get the money back. I'm sure none of this incidence will be passed on to the consumers. Obama is trying to gain popularity by exploiting the greed of capitalists, mainly bankers. Will it work? That remains to be seen.

The American people may be gullible, but they still have to be sold. One of Obama's latest catch phrases is that he is never been so optimistic about America as he is today. I'd like to be optimistic about America today also. But I am being held back by this concept called reality.

President Barack Obama claims he is not an ideologue. He came to office with an agenda in mind. He promised the American people hope and change. However, the American people had a different idea of what hope and change meant than President Obama.

Obama turned out to be more of a progressive than the American people thought. First of all, America believed it needed a new direction because of a faltering economy. Unemployment was rising and the GDP was falling. Now, after a year, we are still uncertain about the direction of the economy. The number of jobs is falling as is the unemployment rate. Not sure how that works-one would think that these two figures would be inversely related.

It has been a year since we passed the $787 billion stimulus bill. It was designed to stimulate the economy and to create jobs. The number of jobs it is created is debatable. At best it is created only government jobs and very few if any private-sector jobs. The Obama administration claims that it has saved somewhere between thousands and 2 million jobs. Of course there are no hard and fast rules of how these jobs are counted. Perhaps this is why some jobs get counted twice or even five times. One thing we can be sure of is that creating census counting jobs is not going to give us long-term economic job stability.

Let's ask the question; What has Obama accomplished in this first year? Health care reform? No. Thank goodness for that one. What was sold to us as covering more people, holding down costs, and making health insurance more affordable has turned into buying the votes and bribing a few senators to get their vote in order to pass the bill in the Senate. If this bill was going to be so great, why was all the wheeling and dealing done behind closed doors in order to get the minimum number of votes needed?

Cap and Trade? No. Again, they goodness for this one too. What is designed to curb pollution on a worldwide scale has morphed itself into higher energy taxes in the name of creating green  jobs. What is a green job? And how will they be counted? Again, this will only result in higher taxes and higher energy costs for all Americans. Is this progress? If it doesn't reduce any pollution, that's okay because the government needs the revenue to continue its spending binge.

Fiscal responsibility? No. President Obama begins every fiscal responsibility speech by blaming George Bush. Well, George Bush is not president anymore and Barack Obama needs to begin taking responsibility for his own fiscal mismanagement. It was under Obama's watch that trillion dollars was added to the budget deficit by spending more TARP money and re-spending the tarp money then needs to happen. After all, the economy is coming out of the recession because of the success of the stimulus bill. That's what the administration keeps telling me anyway.

Increasing federal spending by 84% and then imposing a freeze on spending is a gimmick. How can the lectures on fiscal responsibility be taken seriously when one day the president says we are spending too much and the next day he is ready to forgive all the student loans. And why the special treatment to students who get government jobs? Their loans are forgiven 10 years earlier? Gosh, Pa, this wouldn't be another payoff to the unions, would it? The entry-level government jobs tend to be union jobs.

Tripling annual deficits and then promising to cut them in half by 50% doesn't sound like hard decisions are being made. As a voter, I thought I was being promised fiscal responsibility the whole time. Hope and change wasn't explained as payoffs for unions and trial lawyers. But that is what was delivered. Yes, often as is hard to remain a person of principle amid a large opposition. I will agree that it is much harder to do what is right versus what is most popular. But what is right, must be right for America. What is being done cannot be based on a political agenda. Especially if the political agenda is based on an ideology of bad ideas.

It did not take long for the Liberals to jump on Sarah Palin for writing a few words on her hand during a keynote speech at the Tea Party convention. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was also poking fun at Sarah Palin by writing words on his hand. That just goes to show how immature this administration will behave. What Gibbs did should be an embarrassment to the administration. But it wasn't.

Receiving lesser coverage, which means it was only covered by Fox news, was Barack Obama giving a speech recognizing military corpsman. What is well-documented is Barack Obama's dependence on teleprompters. And what was illustrated by this under reported story is that Brock Obama-who wants a reputation of being smarter than everybody else-needs to have several words on his Teleprompter written phonetically. He pronounced corpsmen as 'Corpse man'. Sure, anyone can mispronounce a word here and there, but Obama repeated it several times. Why would a person as smart as Obama mispronounce the same word multiple times? The mainstream media is giving a pass on the commander-in-chief mispronouncing military words. Now we know why the mainstream media is sometimes called the lame stream media.

Another item of note is that Barry Gaffeagain needed a Teleprompter to talk to a sixth-grade class. How much confidence is the president of the United States portraying to grade schoolers when he needs a Teleprompter to talk to sixth graders?

How can the citizens of the United States feel confident that the president is doing the people's work when we are seeing examples of the immaturity of the president and his administration. Obama is clearly in over his head. He cannot handle the presidency. The office of the presidency involves more than just sitting down for TV interviews on the channels that only give favorable coverage to Obama and his policies.

Robert Gibbs wrote on his left hand; hope and change. What was written on his right hand? Wipe with this one. The left-wing liberal media left that part out.

Athletes trained for decades. They waited for years. Finally came their chance to participate in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver British Columbia. But where's the snow? It was 50° and raining. The hopes were dashed, the dream is gone. And it's all attributed to global warming.

But the story gets worse. Multiple snow storms marched their way up the East Coast shutting down the United States government for about a week. Even though it cost $100 million a day, it was a cheap week. Cheap compared to what Congress would spend. The snowstorms hit the south. The states that had not seen snow in years, now saw snow. And the reason for this? It's global warming.

Global warming fanatics manage to explain both warm weather and cold weather with the same argument-global warming. The carbon dioxide given off by breathing humans as creating a greenhouse gas which is trapping the sun's rays causing the earth to get warmer. In the same manner, it is explained by saying that more evaporation caused by the warm temperatures is getting into the atmosphere and is cooling down because the clouds caused by the evaporation are causing the atmosphere to get colder causing more snow. So the argument works on both ends. And it might make sense if you don't think it thoroughly.

Scientists that once claimed the earth is irretrievably getting warmer are now trying to avoid arguments by skeptics who have shown scientific data that the world is getting cooler. The truth is: nobody knows for sure.

So if nobody knows for sure, why are we acting as if we do know for sure. The federal government is trying to impose some sort of taxation programs upon the citizens called Cap and Trade hoping that it will turn into some feel-good legislation so that we think were doing the right thing by saving the earth and paying higher taxes. It has to be more that the progressives want to convince us that global warming is true so that they can get more taxation to push the progressive agenda.

Even the Wisconsin Legislature is pushing its own Cap and Trade bill in an attempt to convince our citizens that the taxes in the state of Wisconsin are not high enough. Governor Jim Doyle apparently wants to go out with a bang further eroding the economy of the state of Wisconsin. He wants to push a mass transit system with money given to him by the federal government. Of course the federal government is borrowing the money. How are the operating costs going to be paid for? These costs are going to go on forever. But there is no plan to effectively paid for this mass transit system. Where will the riders come from? Are they all going to the same place? How many tracks are going to be laid? Will these all be counted as green jobs? Isn't that how it's being sold to us?

Yes, we have realized that we do need to create jobs in this state. However, imposing higher taxes to subsidize programs that people are not going to use will erode the economy even further. If an effective tax policy is initiated, it can be the private sector that will be driving the market towards this so-called green economy. We cannot be forced into a green economy especially if it's based on findings that are not truthful. The citizens of this country are not so stupid that we are going to be spoon fed a bunch of lies repeated enough times to be taken as gospel. Not anymore. Let's hope not anyway. 

The Louisiana purchase was not enough. But Cornhusker Kickback was not enough. The omnibus bill was not enough. The federal government is now going to kick into high gear wasteful spending across the United States in an effort to shore up the reelection of Democrats in the fall election. In short-the Obama administration is going to waste taxpayer money buying votes.

Kicking off this week, President Barack Obama is fueling up Air Force One for a cross country tour to campaign for Democrats. He has lined his pockets with about a half  trillion dollars from his failed stimulus bill that was passed last year. A year later, the Obama administration has been touting how well it has worked. Yet, only about a third of the money allocated has been paid out. According to Joe Biden, that is how it was designed. The administration must be proud that all the unemployed people who have lost their jobs since Obama has taken office, will only have to wait out a few more months for the government to take action.

In what is being called the Vegas payout, Barack Obama traveled to Nevada to campaign for his old crony Harry Reid. Gary Reed was very proud to have Barack Obama make a speech without talking with his- [you know the quote.] President Obama also brought along a couple billion dollars to bail out Nevada mortgage holders who are not responsible enough to take on a reasonable amount of debt. If you can't afford your house in Nevada, no problem, taxpayers across the country for future generations will help you pick up the tab.

Coming only days after Obama decided to create a debt panel to suggest ways on how to reduce the deficit, the president has found that there is plenty of money to buy votes. Harry Reid is in serious trouble poll wise in his bid for reelection. But for every Democrat who is in trouble in his election, the Democrats will dip into that trillion dollar slush fund that was created last year as the stimulus bill and more recently as the TARP fund (from the money which was paid back and should have gone to reducing that debt), and can spend it all in Democratic districts and in states where the Democrat is in trouble for a Senate reelection campaign. Is this how the rest of the stimulus funds are going to be spent? And Obama's discretion while campaigning for Democrats?

If the Wisconsin Senate seat now held by Russ Feingold is not in trouble, I guess we won't be able to expect any of this generous stimulus funds for Wisconsin. So for all the monies being spent across the country, Wisconsin will get nothing. And if we reelect Russ Feingold, Wisconsin will get nothing.

2010 was supposed to be the year that the Obama administration turns their main focus to job creation and economic recovery. After a couple of weeks, the focus was again shifted towards the passage of a government run health care bill.

Obama has staked his presidency and the success of his presidency on the passage of a health-care reform bill. After spending all his political capital in 2009 over the passage of a health-care reform bill, President Obama came out earlier this year saying he was going to slow down and concentrate on a good bill rather than trying to ram through the monstrosity that the original bills had become. But, seeing that that looked too much like hard work, Obama is again trying to pass the Senate bill.

This time is different though. Obama has actually put out an 11 page bill highlighting some of the points he wants in a reform bill. Then, he is going to hold another beer summit in Washington inviting Republicans over with the illusion that he is going to make this bipartisan. As was seen in the past, Obama is going to listen to the Republican ideas and then categorically dismiss them. Then, his administration will again claim that the Republicans have no ideas. He will claim they just want to be obstructionist.

The way the Obama administration sees it, the only way to have your own ideas is to bring in a wheelbarrow with about 3000 pages of confusing, licit worded documents that will spend about $1 trillion and raise taxes at least that much, and call it a bill that creates jobs and saves lives.

The support for health-care reform has fallen off dramatically as more Americans find out what is actually being proposed by the members of Congress. Obama claims that the American people are just a bunch of dumb dumb dummies and can't understand what is being proposed. It is being sold as a free lunch and if there's one thing that Americans know, there is no free lunch

the Democrats view bipartisanship in Washington as Republicans invading their own ideas and principles and signing on with the Democrats. If they don't, the Democrats will claim victory that the Republicans are in fact obstructionists and will be passing the bill on their own ramming it down our throats through the process of reconciliation. If Americans did not want this bill through the regular process, why would we want it this way? Again, the Democrats think that the American public is just too dumb to know what's good for us. Americans are too dumb to welcome a bunch of new taxes. Americans are too dumb to put two and two together and only come up with 3 1/2. If we came up with four, we would not have that extra half to put towards deficit reduction.

Even earlier this year, I thought the Congress and the ministration were finally going to figure out that spending trillions of dollars that America does not have, is not going to be as popular as it was last year. However, we see the progressives in Congress ready willing and able to keep spending trillions of dollars adding to the deficits that are becoming burdensome and feeling absolutely no responsibility to control government spending. After everyone is broke, then what will we do? It looks like we're going to find out.

Health care reform and climate change. Two recurring news items. At the end of 2009, it seemed like we were going to be able to move beyond these two stories. But they keep coming back. Is it Groundhog Day? Is it a recurring nightmare?

President Obama said last month that in 2010 he was going to make jobs is number one priority. The next day, he moved on to health care. We abandoned health care ever since. After a 7 1/2 hour lunch meeting, we find that nothing was accomplished. No minds were changed. In January after the Massachusetts Senate election, President Obama said in a news interview that he was going to slow down and get things right. One could almost interpret that as taking the health care bill, scrapping it, and starting over from scratch putting in the ideas that are needed and leaving out the arm twisting, backroom deals, etc., also known as sausage making. Now, the president wants to ram it through within six weeks. Is this supposed to make the American people more confident in our government?

Global warming is another subject that keeps rearing its ugly ignorant head. After the House of Representatives passed its bill, it lost steam in the Senate. Then came climate gate. Revealed were the e-mails saying that the science was inconclusive. The members of the climate change committee concealed their findings that the globe is not heating up anymore. Again, one would think that they would be trumpeting these findings saying that we are getting the problem licked. Perhaps, what they're not telling us is that there is money behind all of this global warming data. Whether it is true or not.

Now the global warming nuts are coming back out in full force saying that January 2010 was the warmest January ever. And they have a couple of years' data to back this up. Despite all the blizzards that have shut down the East Coast, it was actually warm. Huh? Like the progressives with health care, the global warming advocates have decided that the American people are just a bunch of dumb dumb dummies that cannot comprehend what is actually going on. So, the global warming advocates are going to use the same technique-keep lying and tell the same lies again and again so that we start to believe it.

What also makes these stories parallel each other is that the politicians want to use the excuses of global warming and the evil insurance companies to levy huge tax increases on the American people at a time when the economy is being prolonged by the mismanagement of the administration beginning last year. Let's not waste a crisis. What we had not imagined last year, is that we would still be tackling the same problems, the same way, in the same manner. Bad ideas that do not make sense should not be forced upon us no matter how bad things get. Is the worst behind us? The progressives are hoping we will answer no.