Had enough “change” yet?

When the Democrats took over control of Congress in the election of 2006, consumer confidence stood at a 21/2-year high, regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon and the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent.

Since the Democrats took over, consumer confidence is down, gasoline has soared to $4.00 a gallon and the unemployment rate, as we learned this morning, has climbed to 5.5 percent.

Mutual and stock fund losses now total in the trillions, and an increasing number of home mortgages are in foreclosure.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to block homegrown efforts to drill for domestic oil, build new refineries, produce more clean-burning natural gas, increase our use of atomic energy and fully exploit our coal resources, including making motor fuel from coal. The United States will never become energy independent until we are allowed to develop the many sources of energy which are our own.

The voters opted for change in 2006, and the Democrats certainly gave it to them. Now Barack Obama and his band of merry pranksters that is the Democrat Party want voters to approve even more “change” in 2008. I don’t think our economy can stand it - do you?

- JP

The real battle now begins

To this point Obama has survived largely on the votes of young democrats that believe a politician when he talks about hope and change even if his true beliefs reflect neither.  That was fine for the primaries but how will Obama transform himself into a candidate that can win in November?  If you read most polls less than 30% of Hillary’s supporters would vote for Obama in November, how does he change that?  He must articulate similar positions that Hillary did, the problem is that by doing that he must abandon the hope and change mantra and thus alienate the young voters that got him where he is.

He has really painted himself into a corner because he can’t win in November without a greater share of Hillary supporters, he can’t get those without alienating at least an equal number of the young college types, and he will find it impossible to get conservatives to support him.  Most seniors seem to have supported Hillary, they vote more reliably than the young impressionable skulls full of mush that seemingly made Obama the nominee.  For Obama to win would mean that McCain will absolutely have to implode, not a far fetched possibility given his history, or democrat voters will have to fall for the greatest job of slick marketing and packaging in American History.

Obama is going to have to debate McCain at some point, and that is not what he is good at.  He’s good at prepared speeches, making young college girls faint (a trait even Bill Clinton didn’t possess), but he’s not shown that he can think on his feet or discuss foreign policy issues at a 10th grade level.  Ok given the state of education in this country perhaps he could have that discussion at a 10th grade level, but the point is the guy can speak, outside of that he’s not that intelligent.

It is my belief that most American’s will see Obama for what he really is, the 2nd coming of Jimmy Carter, if not we’re in for Jimmy Carter’s 2nd four years…

Racist church trumps scathing memoir

Just when the Democrats figured it was safe to come out of the Chicago churchhouse, Pfather Pfleger rose… er, sank to the occasion. Now the Dems and their pfrontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, can’t seem to get pfree pfrom the quagmire that is Trinity United Church of Christ.

They thought that had found the perfect “get out of manure free” card. What could be better to get the shamlessly racist church Obama has chosen to attend for over two decades out of the headlines than some new scandal-mongering aimed squarely at the object of the left’s obsessive derangement - Chimpy McBushitler? Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, nouveau riche with thirty pieces of silver from the book deal he had cut with a publishing house connected to leftist sugar daddy George Soros, had just started making the round of television talk shows to publicize his “scathing memoir” just chock full o’ “explosive” revelations about the Bush Administration. Hot on his heels was an army of Dem footsoldiers who, in a stretch which would impress even the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, were trying to use the flap the media was sure to generate over McClellan’s book to taint the campaign of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

If this sounds to you like a scheme worthy of a Roadrunner cartoon script, you’re right on target. Wyle E. Coyote, the perpetually hapless Dem, was yet again let down by what seemed to be a sure-fire solution from big brains at Acme Inc. And things seemed to be going so well, too. Both people and press were growing tired of hearing about Jeremiah Wright, and the Obama connection to unrepentant domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn never sparked true outrage in any sector beyond the patriotic right. Obama’s daily gaffes didn’t seem to be hurting him much, either. So the Dems thought they had found a big story with legs which was a great twofer - it would give them a fresh club to beat President George W. Bush with, and they would use those of McClellan’s charges which were related to the Iraq war against McCain. Ah, but it only lasted about a day and a half. Along came Pfather Pfleger to cut the legs out from under the McClellan story, steal Scotty’s thunder and drag Obama’s First Church of Hatred kicking and screaming back into the limelight.

Fr. Michael Pfleger, ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1975, has pastored the mostly African American Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood since 1981. His social activism has put him in league with Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Blogger Sultan Knish calls Pfleger “the white Rev. Jeremiah Wright.” The good Pfather says that he’s known Obama for 20 years.

Indeed, it was at White’s Trinity United Church where Pfleger stepped into the limelight (not to mention the manure) of the presidential campaign.

Can you say “racist”? I knew you could.

After this bizarre display by the radical priest, the Obama campaign, professing “disappointment,” was forced to remove Pleger’s endorsement of Obama from the “faith” page of the Obama website. There’s been a lot of “cleaning up” on that website over the past weeks…

No, the lackluster McClellan just can’t compete with the likes of Pfather Pfleger, a true rock star. But Scotty’s story would have probably collapsed under its own weight, even without the antics of a pathologically progressive priest to help push it to the back pages. After all, Scott McClellan didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was just another disgruntled former employee:

He reveals that he was pushed to leave earlier than he had planned, and he displays some bitterness about that as well as about being sometimes kept out of the loop on key decision-making sessions.

Also, the connection between McClellan’s publisher and George Soros leaves little doubt that Scotty and his book are just teeth on a cog in a much broader agenda. And if anyone still has any doubts, here’s what McLellan had to say about the 2008 presidential race:

Scott McClellan, making the media rounds to promote his book and push back against the ferocious counter-attack by Bush loyalists, declined to come out tonight for John McCain and said he liked what he had heard from Barack Obama.

*

“I haven’t made a decision,” McClellan told Katie Couric on CBS’s “Evening News,” when asked if he was backing the Arizona senator. McClellan paid homage to McCain, saying that the Republican nominee had “governed from the center, and that’s where I am.”

*

But without prompting, he said he was “intrigued by Sen. Obama’s message.”

Oh, well. Back to the Acme catalog. There’s just got to be something in there that will work next time…

- JP

How about a windbag prophets tax?

The Democrats are a political party so devoid of ideas that they can’t even come up with new bad proposals and are reduced to simply reinventing their old terrible ideas. A case in point is the so-called windfall tax on oil company profits. Both Dem contenders for the presidency favor a version of this old turkey.

Here’s the Barack Obama flavor:

Obama proposes oil companies be taxed on windfall profits from oil sold at or above 80 dollars a barrel, and the revenue be used to help relieve the burden of rising prices on working people, according to his campaign.

Hillary Clinton has gone past the proposal stage and has actually introduced a windfall tax measure:

Mrs. Clinton introduced legislation in the Senate today proposing [a] gas tax holiday and covering the cost of it through a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies, a campaign spokesman said.

Wait just a sec… Haven’t we been down this rocky road before? In the words of one of major league basesball’s most colorful characters, former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, “This is like deja vu all over again.” The AP’s Daniel Sorid writes:

…even liberals would have a hard time defending the country’s last experience with a windfall tax, in 1980.

*

What began as a compromise by the Carter administration to lift ceilings on oil prices grew into a bureaucratic nightmare that Congress in 1984 called the “largest and most complex tax ever levied on a U.S. industry.” The law produced nowhere near the revenue it promised, made the country more reliant on foreign oil, and generated reams of red tape, according to a 2006 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

*

The law was put out of its misery in 1988, two-and-a-half years before it would have automatically expired.

*

“It’s a terrible idea today,” said Phil Verleger, who helped design the windfall tax policy as the Treasury Department’s director of domestic energy policy from 1977 to 1979. “The windfall profit tax was a quo for a quid; the quid was price decontrol. There’s no quid right now.”

Well, Mr. Verleger, it was a bad idea then, too. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the 1980s windfall profits tax depressed the domestic production and extraction industry and furthered our dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Let me repeat that for those you on drugs or afflicted with terminal liberalism. Ver. 1.0 of the windfall oil profit tax was a disaster for the nation from which it has never recovered. Domestic oil producers found it unprofitable to produce, and the United States became even more dependent on foreign oil than it had been. It  is a major contributing factor to the situation we find ourselves in today: between Iraq and a hard place.

Why, then, in the name of all that makes sense, should this nation go back to doing something that not only did not work the first time, but was a major source of many of the energy woes we are experiencing today? Cynical conservatives are tempted to say that it is because socialists, despite the nearly universal failures of socialism throughout history, just can’t resist trying it again, hoping the results will be different this time.

The real answer is just as cynical. The oil companies are simply too inviting a target for the political left. They are fond of repeating that the oil companies are making billions of dollars of profit. Never mind that Exxon-Mobil’s profit margin of 10.7% pales in copmparison to some other well-know American corporations:

If you’re after really big earners… check out Yahoo (a 45.5 percent profit margin), Citigroup (33.4 percent), Intel (24 percent), and Apple (22.7 percent).

Never mind that Exxon-Mobil paid nearly $3 in taxes for every $1 in income. The company’s first quarter tax bill was $30 Billion.

Never mind that among Exxon-Mobil’s larest stockholders are not just individual fat cat shareholders such as the the Rockerfeller family, but many pension funds and mutual funds as well. Penalizing the big oil companies will simply force them to protect their shareholders by passing along the tax increases to consumers, who always pay the ultimate price for the left’s attacks on capitalism.

Those of us who take the time and trouble to study history do so because it is such an excellent teacher. It was the American-born philosopher George Santayana who is credited with the quote which would seem to explain the Democrats’ myopia on oil company profits:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

But it is another one of his quotes, and from the same source, which puts that first quote in context and best describe’s the Dems’ obsession with meddling in the affairs of the corporations they love to attack:

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

These liberal Democats and their two favorite candidates for the leadership of the free world are fanatics. As a conservative, I can think of one tax which I would support - a tax not on windfall profits, but rather one on windbag prophets.

- JP

Are you better off?

The Democrat National Committee is airing a new television ad, “Better Off?”, aimed squarely at Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The ad attempts to link McCain to the presidency of George W. Bush by showing clips of McCain saying that overall, we are better off than we were eight years ago. The ad ends by asking the viewer, “Do you feel better off?”

How like the liberal Dems to ask voters to make a decision based on feelings rather than something of a more empirical nature. For example, a little over one year ago:

Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high
Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon
The unemployment rate was 4.5%

But since voting in a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2006 we have seen:

Consumer confidence drop like a stone
The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon
Unemployment rise to 5% (a 10% increase

In fact, since voting for change in 2006, Americans have seen $2.3 trillion in the equity value of their households evaporate due largely to stock and mutual fund losses. Home equity dropped by $1.2 trillion dollars, leaving 1% of American homes in foreclosure.

But the new DNC ad asks voters to consider if they are better off now than they were eight years ago, not just since the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress just a couple of years back.

Okay, fair enough. Let’s compare taxes under Bill Clinton in 1999 to taxes under George W. Bush in 2008:

Single making 30K - Clinton tax $8,400 vs. Bush tax $4,500;
Single making 50K - Clinton tax $14,000 vs. Bush tax $12,500
Single making 75K - Clinton tax $23,250 vs. Bush tax $18,750
Married making 60K - Clinton tax $16,800 vs. Bush tax $9,000
Married making 75K - Clinton tax $21,000 vs. Bush tax $18,750
Married making 125K - Clinton tax $38,750 vs Bush tax $31,250

Of course, the DNC ad mentions none of this. Nor does it call attention to the fact that either Democrat candidate would be sure to raise taxes. Obama and Hillary are both on the record as saying that if elected, they would repeal the Bush tax cuts.

So in light of this data, perhaps the DNC should not have gone there with its new ad. It leaves the door wide open for an RNC response ad bringing attention to all of the above.

So how about you? Most of you have recently prepared your tax returns to file before the IRS deadline of a little over a week ago. You’ve not only seen the numbers, you’ve worked with them.

Are you better off?

- JP

What Is A True Conservative To Do?

    In today’s world, where the Press has delivered us the worst possible Republican nominee, what is a true conservative to do on election day?

     The answer, of course, is to do everything you can to minimize the damage.  Sitting home and sighing that “we’re screwed” will just ensure that we are.

     I know it will pain many of us greatly to go and vote for John McCain, but, the alternative (a Democratic president) is unthinkable.

     With McCain we won’t have the best conservative but it will be better that Hillary or Barack.  But, most importantly, getting up off our couch and going to the polls will allow us to vote for Republican candidates for the House and the Senate and even state and local Republicans.  By going to the polls we can help to determine how easy it is for any president to get his way with Congress.  By supporting Republican candidates we have a real chance of narrowing or even eliminating the Democratic lead in both houses of Congress which will go a long way towards allowing us to keep the pressure on to ensure they follow the will of the people.

     The key is to stay involved, at all levels.  Whether it is by making phone calls, donating to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee or the National Republican Senatorial Committee, it is the only way we can move our values, our beliefs, our issues forward.

     So, Be strong and stand up for what we believe in and GO VOTE!