This was originally posted on May 1, 2012

Let’s say there are two grocery stores in your neighborhood.  To be honest, there isn’t much difference between them, except for the signs over the door and one has a few more organic vegetables than the other.  One of them is the dominant store in your town, and you’ve been buying your groceries from them for a few years.  To be honest, you aren’t happy with the quality of their wares or the service you get.

So when the other store gives itself a makeover and has a bit of publicity, you decide to go over there one morning.  You buy a few things, and while things are pretty much the same as at the other store, your experience is marginally better, so you start doing regular business with them.  You notice that there are a lot of people who start shopping at the second shop at about the same time you do.

A few weeks later, you get an email from a friend.  It’s basically asking “Have you seen this?”.  The first store, the one you left because of service, price, and quality, has put up a big billboard in front of their store.  On the billboard is your name, your picture, the times you went to the other store, and the amount you spent.  It also details the things you bought, and even goes so far as to make aspersions about your character based on any run-ins you’d had with store management over the years.  They have a little section for each person who has stopped doing business with them in favor of the new store.

For a grocery store, this is pretty crass and classless. For a President of the United States, it’s shameful.

President Obama and his re-election campaign are doing somethingvery similar when it comes to people who are donating money to the Romney campaign.  The campaign’s website is singling out individual donors to Mr. Romney and impugning their motivations and character for committing the sin of supporting Obama’s opponent.

These are not the actions of a man and an administration that recognize the rights of citizens to support whatever political candidate or cause they want.  This is voter intimidation just as certainly as if he had posted thugs at the polls with cudgels.

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone reading this that I don’t care for Mr. Obama, his politics, his values, or his work ethic.  I don’t have a much better opinion of Mr. Romney.  I’ve been very torn as to whether to vote for Romney this year.  I don’t like his record as governor of Massachusetts.  Nothing he has said during the primaries has convinced me that he has changed enough since then to make me want to support him.

But I will be damned if I will be intimidated by some Chicago machine thug from questioning and opposing President Obama, no matter who I vote for in November.  Things like this make me want to vote for Romney if for no other reason than to spit in the eye of the President’s campaign.

Want to see me cut my nose to spite my face, President Obama?  Keep pulling stuff like this.

This was originally posted on April 1, 2012

Washington D.C. – (DBI)  President Obama called an emergency joint session of Congress today to report on something he had found in the White House that will have shocking ramifications for the United States.

“Last night, as I was preparing for bed, I found this in the sock drawer of the extra dresser in the Lincoln Bedroom.”, said the President as he waved around a sheet of yellowed paper.

“It’s an old document that lists out how our government is supposed to work, and if you can believe it, lists out several things that our government is prohibited from doing, like establishing a religion or forcing someone to testify against himself.  Most worrisome, it limits how much we can push the American people to do in their private lives, including not doing anything about that worrisome American habit of wanting to own and carry around guns.”

Analysis of pictures taken at the event indicate that the President had found an old copy of the United States Constitution, a mostly forgotten document written during the early years of the nation.  While  some people in the United States hold to it as a ‘founding’ document for the United States, the majority of people who matter in the country, mostly found on either coast, had forgotten about its existence.

“What fools we’ve been!” opined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, flanked by Minority Leader McConnell and Speaker of the House John Boehner,  ”This actually says that if something isn’t given to the federal government as a power, then it can’t do that!  How are we supposed to continue paying people to not work and interfere with people doing things that we don’t like like making money and deciding about their health care and what they do with their own reproductive organs?”

After a quick bi-partisan conference where the document was read aloud to congressional leadership, many members of congress took the rostrum to express shock at the document’s contents.

“Really?  We have the power to declare war, and the President isn’t supposed to do anything like that without getting our OK?  But what about all of those if-we-don’t-do-something-we’ll-lose-the-interest-of-the-masses wars we’ve been launching?” said Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.

Congressional leadership immediately began drafting legislation to scale the federal government back to its level of involvement in the country as it stood sometime in 1903, the last time anyone remembered that document being brought out when leaders where trying to decide the direction of the country.

Governors across the country received telephone calls from Mr. Obama, explaining the document and how it meant that the states would be given a lot more responsibility for themselves, but also that they would not have Washington pushing them in one direction or another anymore.  The governors of Texas, Arizona, and Montana are all reported to have shrugged and gotten on with business, while those of Massachusetts, California, New York, and Illinois are under suicide watch at this time.

Stay tuned to DaddyBear International for late breaking updates to this story and others.