Obama's Speech Filled with Rhetoric, Wishful Thinking, According to Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation Columnist, Robert Hale

/PRNewswire/ -- The Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation website, http://www.fgfbooks.com/, released a column yesterday critiquing 14 points from President Obama's speech on Tuesday. North Dakota attorney and builder, Robert L. Hale, takes the President to task for "wishful rhetoric" and his "clear misunderstanding of how markets work."

Some of Hale's 14 points include:

--The President said: "In order to save our children from a future of debt, we will also end the tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans." Hale comments: "Does it seem a realistic that two percent of Americans are going to pay off a federal debt estimated to be between $12 trillion and $19 trillion?"

--The President said: "We have done more to advance the cause of health care reform in the last thirty days than we have in the last decade." Hale replies: "What has been provided is health care insurance -- not health care reform. Nothing has been done to reform a health care system that is bloated by massive Medicare and Medicaid mismanagement.

--The President said: "...we will put Americans to work making our homes and buildings more efficient so that we can save billions of dollars on our energy bills." Hale replies: "As a builder for more than 30 years, I can state unequivocally this is a fiction. It is simply cannot be done.

--The President said: "I'm proud that we passed a recovery plan free of earmarks." Hale comments: "Yet news reports identified up to 9,000 earmarks in Congress' $410 billion omnibus spending bill."

--The President said: "The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything... and [how] businesses make payroll." Hale responds: "Businesses do not make payrolls with loans. Those that do, don't stay in business; they fail."

For more than three decades, Mr. Hale has been involved in drafting proposed laws and counseling elected officials in ways to remove burdensome and unnecessary rules and regulations.

"For those who listened carefully and understand how sustainable jobs and prosperity happen, the President's speech was a terrible disappointment," Mr. Hale said.

Obama Lied to Gun Owners, Says CCRKBA; Attack Plan Revealed by Holder

/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama deliberately and repeatedly lied to America's 90 million gun owners across the country when he insisted that he would not try to take away anyone's firearms, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, reacting to yesterday's remarks by Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder that the president will seek to reinstate the ban on semi-automatic firearms, said Obama "knew he was lying to the nation because his own Web site touted his plan to revive the gun ban and make it permanent."

"We warned America that Obama's 'support' for the Second Amendment was empty rhetoric," he stated, "and now Holder's disclosure has confirmed it. Obama was lying, and now gun rights may be dying."

Several times on the campaign trail, Obama told voters "I'm not going to take your guns away." He said it at rallies in Duryea, Pennsylvania and in Boise, Idaho. He also told a news conference that "Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear... I think people can take me at my word."

"Right now," said Gottlieb, "I wouldn't take Obama's word if he said it rains a lot in Seattle. Apparently, law-abiding gun owners have nothing to fear unless they own sport-utility rifles, semiautomatic shotguns, handguns and any other firearm that Obama and his anti-gun attorney general don't like."

"Thanks to Eric Holder, who has been far more honest than his boss about his anti-gun philosophy, it is now clear that the new president doesn't support the Second Amendment at all," he observed. "American gun owners should remind Democrats in Congress that the Second Amendment means what it says, especially when the president doesn't."

With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation's premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.