Bridging the Gulf in Obama's Geographic Knowledge

During the close of President Barack Obama's sixth appearance as Chief Executive on NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Mr. Obama sought to embarrass penny pinching opponents to infrastructure "investments."



President Obama opined that as the Panama Canal is being widened to accommodate Super-Tankers, Gulf Coast ports like Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida needed to dredge their ports lest these trade tankers go elsewhere.

Perhaps these ships will navigate in the Gulf instead of venturing to Southeast Atlantic seaports.

This gulf in geographic knowledge should not be surprising to a high information voter.  During the 2008 Presidential election, then candidate Senator Obama (D-IL) claimed that he had visited 57 states and had one more to go.

While such a verbal flub like the 57 states faux pas may delight detractors, it is easy to understand it as a slip of a tongue from a tired candidate without the retinue of White House staffers.   For the latest Late Night appearance, Mr. Obama is coming off of vacation (again).  The President sought a softball interview with an entertainer.  Mr. Obama brought out specifics and they had no correspondence to reality on the map.

When President George W. Bush mispoke, the establishment liberal media (a.k.a. the Lamestream Media) was quick to label him a dunce and persiverate in mocking the former President's intelligence.  More likely than not, the Lamestream Media will ignore this flub because it does not fit their natural narrative and asking hard questions to our Dear Leader may cause a journalist their job or access to the White House.

SNAP -- Food for Thought

Despite the happy news reports from the Lamestream Media that the economy is on the mend and the end of the housing meltdown, a record number of Americans are on food stamps.  In 2012, the federal government spent $74.6 billion on food stamps, which was increase of 70% from the amount spent prior to the 2008 downturn.   Now 15% of the populace or 47.8 million people on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

As the federal government defaulted its budgeting duties to sequestration, which is just a 2.3% cut in the rate of domestic spending growth, the Obama Administration has been making these budget reductions as painful as possible for the American people.  So a variety of high profile ham-handed cuts have been made, like releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants in detention facilities, cancelling White House tours for school kids, rolling closures at the Smithsonian Museums, reducing the size of the Marine Corps by 22,000, cutting military contractors by one day furlows amount to a 20% salary cut, cancelling Blue Angels flights, cutting the Air Forces flights by nearly 20%, delaying maintenance on navel vessels delaying deployment, cuts in air traffic controllers delaying flights and more. 

 In this artificially austere environment, the Obama Administration continues sharing the SNAP program for illegal aliens.





Judicial Watch has exposed documenst from the U.S. Department of Agriculture of Spanish language advertising campaign sent to the Mexican embassy advising people how to apply for food stamps in the United States.  The salient detail is a statement that is both bolded and underlined  which notes: “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”

So a government that is so supposedly cash strapped that it is laying off air traffic controllers,  government contractors and risking military readiness continues a campaign for what the politically correct Obama Administration (and the White House stenographers working for the Associated Press) would label  "undocumented immigrants."   Or as Jay Leno joked, "undocumented Democrats."



Nevertheless, this neither inspires confidence in the competency of comprehensive immigration legislation, Executive Branch budgeting skills or public policy prioritization.

 While this information has prompted Senator John Thune (R-SD) to vow that this USDA program will be cut, these seem like empty words from a minority party in a Senate that did not even bother to pass a budget for three years.  When Senator Harry Reid decided to finally pass a budget, after the threat of not being paid unless they did their jobs,  the Senate Democrat passed budget featured another $1 trillion tax hike and the budget deficit actually increases. 

Rather than appealing to Mexicans, maybe we should target our advertising to give succor to Chavistas, as America is currently being run like a banana republic, albeit without the comfy upscale clothing.