The First 100 Days - Form over Substance and Power Grabs

While Yahoo and other cult-of-Obama sites proclaim his first 100 days as a smashing success largely because of how "hip" he is, and a Fox News poll shows his approval rating at 62 percent,  there are many land mines his administration has planted that will be tripped sooner or later. When the mines start going off in voters' back yards, maybe we will seem some trimming of that all-important but largely bogus approval rating.

Surely not much of the voting public noticed or cared about a recent attempted power grab by Obama and his tax-cheating Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. As the Wall Street Journal reported last Tuesday, the Administration is proposing a preferred for common stock swap with banks receiving federal bailout money. As stated in the WSJ article, the occasion for this latest nationalization trial balloon is the looming result of the Treasury's bank strip-tease -- a.k.a. "stress tests." Treasury is worried, with cause, that some of the largest banks lack the capital to ride out future credit losses. Yet Secretary Geithner and the White House have concluded that they can't risk asking Congress for more bailout cash, the article notes.

A more sinister reason has to do with government control; by swapping preferred for common shares, Uncle Sam's shareholder and voting power increase dramatically. If they pull it off, Obama and Geithner will have successfully implemented what the WSJ aptly refers to as a "backdoor nationalization." Can you imagine the likes of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd calling the shots at our nations' largest banks?

As it turns out, Wall Street did care and the stock market fell 3.5 percent last Monday, after the weekend "trial balloon" went out. But the market has shown signs of trending upward, so one bad day doesn't raise much alarm from the public.

The question is, how many outrageous things does this president have to say and do before the public decides that the "honeymoon" is over? For those of us who want to see his policies fail, we need to remember that Jimmy Carter's fall from grace didn't begin until two and a half years into his presidency. By then the land mines his Administration had planted, with his weak national security and economic policies, were going off across America .

We don't want the public to wake up from its Obama stupor only when the current round of mines start going off in their back yards. Unfortunately, it's human nature and the prevailing form-over-substance culture that we're fighting against, as exemplified by the recent Miss USA travesty. Americans should see incidents like that, as described in Matt Barber's insightful article above, as warning markers regarding the erosion of our freedoms. If they do not, then they will assure Obama more time than he should ever have to implement his dangerous agenda while they sleep.