A Multicultural Banking Crisis

This editorial from Investors Business Daily traces the roots of the current banking crisis that we have been dealing with for the last year or so, and which again burst into the open with yesterday's market sell-off. Back during the Clinton administration, democrats brought us multicultural lending standards that have, over time, undermined the stability of our credit system. Simply put, the liberal left thinks that it is unfair if you happen to be poor and a person of color and you don't also own your own home. They had good intentions you see. And so they pointed a gun at the banks and demanded that they lower the standards for lending. Thus was born the sub-prime market.

Now there is nothing wrong with owning your own home if you can afford to make the payments. Ownership is part of the American dream and a long term way of accumulating assets is to buy property. Wealth is a good thing if you have earned it honestly. But as noted above, you have to be able to make the payments. Unfortunately, multicultural lending standards were quite a bit lower than conventional standards would otherwise have been. They would have to be in order to make it possible for poor minority people and illegal aliens to be able to get any kind of mortgage at all. Thus we saw a proliferation of new and bizarre types of mortgages in the last few years that were designed to make it possible for anyone with a pulse to get a loan if they wished it. And many people did just that.

The results are now coming home to the economy with multiple bank failures caused by a large number of mortgage defaults. The people who were the target of the liberal's social meddling are now unable, or unwilling, to pay their bills and banks are finding that they can no longer manage their cash flows. This is what happens when you lower standards based on the liberal utopian fantasy.

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the "trickle-down" economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street's most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but "predatory."

Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the '90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.

And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.

As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae, for example, he used it as his personal piggy bank, looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud.

Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick, padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million.

Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.

In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk.

A Tale of Two Bridges

Deroy Murdock brings us this article about the now famous "Bridge to Nowhere." Critics have come up with the rather strange claim that Sarah Palin did not really kill this particular pork project. Mr. Murdock brings us the details and shows that, in fact, the McCain people have got it right. Moreover, we find that Obama not only voted for the pork project, but did so at the expense of Katrina victims.

Obama and Biden had an excellent opportunity to do the right thing. Just seven weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Senator Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) proposed to transfer $125 million from the notorious Bridge’s budget and instead devote it to rebuilding the Interstate 10 Twin Spans Bridge between New Orleans and St. Tammany’s Parish. The storm chopped up the bridge.

“We have the largest natural catastrophe we have ever seen in our history,” Coburn said on the Senate floor on October 20, 2005. “It is time we reassess the priorities we utilize in this body as we think about our obligations at home.”

Coburn’s amendment failed 15-82. Obama and Biden were among the “nays.” They and 80 other senators preferred to protect the earmarking tradition than to assist Katrina’s tempest-tossed citizens.

Obama and Biden put pork first and people second. While the residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana endured perhaps their greatest challenge since the Civil War, Obama and Biden both turned their backs on these embattled Americans.

Katrina demolished much of the city of Slidell, home to Nan Eitel, a formerly New Orleans-based attorney who relocated with her family to Washington, D.C. after the storm. The Twin Spans Bridge was “the route I used to take to work every day,” she recalls by phone. When Eitel learned Monday that Obama and Biden helped junk Coburn’s plan to rebuild the bridge she traveled every weekday morning and evening for 14 years, she says, “I was stunned. That bridge is critical to the economy of the greater New Orleans region.” She explains that it connected Slidell’s bedroom community with downtown New Orleans. She says it served “many people who worked in the oil and gas industry and the Michoud, Louisiana facility where the Space Shuttle’s rockets are built.”

Eitel says that Obama and Biden’s votes “showed a tremendous lack of understanding for that community and the bridge’s importance to the reconstruction effort.” While other routes connected New Orleans to the north and west, the ruined Twin Spans Bridge left it isolated from points east. “Without the bridge, you couldn’t get the city rebuilt,” Eitel says. “Without it, you could not bring in building supplies. Without it you could not truck in the water and food that people needed.”

The Twin Spans Bridge is being rebuilt, though without the help that Coburn tried to provide and Obama and Biden helped block.

Media Meltdown

If you have been paying attention the last week or so, you may have noticed that the media is having a hissy-fit the likes of which we have not seen in some time. It seems that every day we are treated to stories about the horrors of Sarah Palin while at the same time the numbers for McCain rise and Obama's plummet. The Obama campaign is clearly in trouble as they flail about trying to stop the bleeding from their own self-inflicted wounds. Hubris has its cost. And the media, which has been in the tank for Obama from the start, does not know what to do about it. They have gone into panic mode and it shows.

Aside from the fact that the McCain-Palin ticket is moving ahead in the polls, something that the elite media monoculture deeply fears, there is another factor that explains the ferocity of the media onslaught.

The media mavens must have noticed that despite all of their panicked, over the top flailing about, no one is taking them seriously. Despite all the smears and mud they have tried to throw at Palin and McCain, they have been unable to sway public opinion by so much as a single percentage point. No one is listening to them or taking them at face value. In fact, most people responding to polls indicate that they think the media is in the tank for Obama and is trying to undermine the McCain-Palin team. (which of course they are) The day of the media monopoly, and its ability to control the debate, has passed.

The explanation for this is that the truth is getting out through new media. People who are interested in knowing the facts have come to the conclusion that dinosaur media can no longer be trusted. And like a restaurant that regularly serves poor quality food, they are finding that no one goes there anymore.

This is already happening. All around the country, the institutional outlets of old media are dying. The LA Times and The New York Times have been forced to lay off staffers, like so many other newspapers that have been around for decades. The major TV networks are unable to attract new viewers and are seeing their ratings drop year by year. Ad revenues are falling. And people are going elsewhere for their news and information, mostly to new media, like the internet and talk radio, and taking their disposable dollars with them.

They could turn their fortunes around if they would just try to be fair and balanced like that other cable network that is getting all of the new viewers. But it would require old media to admit that they have been wrong all these years and that they have a product that they are no longer able to sell to an unwilling public that has other options.

Countdown to No Ratings

And speaking of Media Meltdowns, during the Republican convention much amusement was had at the expense of hard left network (I'm being generous here; they actually do have more than one viewer) MSMBC. Stephen Spruiell writes at The National Review about the comic antics of the out of control anchors and the thrill running up their legs as they spouted their venom at conservatives and Republicans during the convention. But we have no need to worry; they have been rewarded with the lowest ratings for any of the cable networks.

Journalism and Expendable Truths

Media still in the tank for Obama

In this opinion piece from Steve Chapman of The Chicago Tribune we see the rather vain and inglorious attempt by The Elite Media Monoculture to deal with the sinking Obama campaign by trotting out various fabrications in the hope that most people who read the essay will not already know that they are a pile of leftist agitprop. Let's take a few of these and look them over.

Last week, he released a TV spot on education studded with falsehoods. It quoted the Chicago Tribune calling Obama a "staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly." But the Tribune didn't say it. I did, in a signed column in the Tribune, which praised McCain's support for school vouchers for low-income families.

Interesting that Chapman tries here to blame McCain for something that he himself said in his own newspaper. Just how exactly does McCain bear any responsibility for what is written at The Chicago Tribune? Presumably Chapman would say that he stands by the assessment of Obama's views on vouchers, so what is the problem here? Apparently Chapman is upset that someone actually used his words against The Anointed One. But note that he does not say that his views on Obama are incorrect. He only thinks they are inconvenient.

The ad couldn't be bothered explaining why Obama is wrong about vouchers. Instead, it said his "one accomplishment" was a bill mandating sex education for kindergartners. "Learning about sex before learning to read?" asked the narrator, implying that 5-year-olds would be taught the proper use of condoms before being taught their ABCs. Which, as it happens, is not true.

The purpose of a political ad is not to teach people the theoretical ideas behind vouchers or how they have become a political issue. When you watch a commercial on TV for, say Nike shoes, does it spend a lot of time telling you the history of shoe-making or the theory of orthopedics? Not as a rule. The purpose of a commercial is to get you to accept a single idea or image as a motivation to action.

If you want to know the underlying ideas of how vouchers work there is plenty of information on the web that you can use to become educated on the issue. You can go to The Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute and read about the ideas of free markets and how they can be applied to the problems we have in government monopoly education to your hearts content. Or you can read Free to Choose by Nobel prize winning economist Milton Freidman who is credited with coming up with the idea in the first place. Responsible voters are expected to at least do a bit of their own thinking and reading for themselves before they decide who will get their vote. For Chapman to demand that a commercial become a lesson in how to understand public financed education is, of course, deeply absurd. But then, when is the major media these days anything other than absurd in their desire to see The Lightworker elected?

And as far as the sex education bill in question is concerned, note that Mr. Chapman does not actually refute the charge. And that is because the bill would have done exactly what its critics are charging. Jim Geraghty at The Corner comments:

Anyway, having now looked at the text of the sex education bill in question… it’s clear that one of its key purposes was to change existing law that said “Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades 6 through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention, transmission and spread of AIDS” to “Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.” Yes, the legislation permitted parents to take their children out of the class. But that was already existing law.

One has to wonder that the people who are calling McCain a liar seem not to have noticed that the text of the bill says just what the ad would make you think it said. But no critic seems to want to discuss the actual text of the bill. It's too easy to just call McCain a liar and leave it at that without adding any specifics. As we have seen in the last two weeks, these kinds of charges against McCain-Palin have consistently fallen down when they have been examined closely, something that the left would rather not do.

"We have yet to dispute any claim from the Obama campaign about Palin."

Neither have many other of the house organs of The Elite Media Monoculture. They have been too busy praising The One's coming healing of the planet and lowering of the seas to do any kind of serious journalism. That has been left to talk radio and the bloggers of the new media who have done the kind of job that is no longer done by dinosaur media, thank you very much. Is it any wonder that the Tribune, like so many other papers, is being forced by falling circulation and ad revenues to lay off staff? Not to us, but apparently it is still a mystery to Mr. Chapman.

Sarah Palin Hits it out of the Park

Media whines and moans

Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention was stunning in its success. It roused the conservative base and struck just the right tone between serious discussion of issues that will face our nation in the next years and the humor used to puncture the balloon of the media and the Obama-Messiah. RealClearPolitics has the video and the full text here.

Meanwhile the Dinosaur media are back on their heels trying to figure out how to attack and smear Palin without driving away the dozen or so people who are still relying on them for their regular 10 minutes of "news". Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker quotes The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook (don't you just love the irony) trying to get to some sort of smear, any kind of smear, that might actually work to stop the American people from liking Sarah Palin. The results are hilarious.

The Democrats have a problem. They had a few days of calling her a clueless redneck, a stewardess, a nonentity, and she has hurled that back in their bleeding gums. (If I were Joe Biden, I'd start practising for October 2nd right now.) Even before tonight's speech, they had backed off the "no experience" strategy, because (as the Republicans intended) that was sending shrapnel in Obama's direction. Their line right now is their default mode, that McCain-Palin is four more years of George Bush. But this too is a completely untenable strategy, since the Republican ticket now looks stunningly fresh to voters, as fresh in fact as Obama-Biden. Where they will have to end up is obvious: McCain-Palin is an extreme right-wing ticket. It is a team that will prosecute the culture war against all that is decent and civilized in the United States: that must be the line.

The Deep and Twisted Sickness of the Hard Left

Ugly hate from ugly people who like Obama

I don't really spend a lot of time commenting on the social issues like abortion and gay marriage that some conservatives find important. There are, after all, many types of conservatives. Like the Democrat party, the Republicans are a coalition of groups that tend to have their own particular ideas that they consider primary. In my case, the two big issues that I always want to keep an eye on are national security and the economy with cultural issues coming in after that. But the issues that concern social conservatives don't really move me as much because I consider them to be secondary to the survival of the country and to Western Civilization. Without a proper defense to protect the country and without a free economy to hold up our ability to act in a dangerous world, these other issues would be moot.

But you may have noticed that over the weekend the hard left has unleashed an attack on the family of Sarah Palin that is nothing short of sick and disgusting. The left pounced on Palin immediately after her nomination was announced and came up with the "story" that her youngest child was actually her grandchild. When that didn't pan out, they went after Palin's daughter Bristol for being young, pregnant and unmarried.

Bristol and her parents have chosen to keep that child, as yet unborn, and there will be a marriage in Bristol's future. But the hard left that has in the past lectured all of us about the privacy of the individual and the primacy of a woman's right to choose, is now telling us that we must reject Sarah Palin because her daughter had the bad luck to get pregnant. Note that it is not Bristol who is running for office and who, by rights should not be considered a public figure. She is just a kid herself by any common sense measure.

But the hard left is unconcerned about common sense, or decency or the rights of Bristol Palin. They like to pompously lecture to us that kids are going to have sex anyway, so why not just accept it? Well, if we take them at their word, then why are they launching this vicious smear attack against Sarah Palin based on her daughter's activity? Why such reckless hate? Why the name-calling contest at Democratic Underground? Why the attacks at blogs like The Daily Kos? What about that right to privacy that they screech about at every opportunity?

Of course we all know that these supposed concerns that the left brings up when they are useful are but a pretext and a cover for their attacks on America and the ideas and values that make America's continued survival possible. But in fact they only really value the privacy of leftists. It is only the left that is entitled to free speech. Only the left has a right to choose and to be left alone by others. Misogyny and sexism is OK for the left, but not for anyone else. For the left has a different set of rules for themselves than they do for the rest of us.

No, the smears and attacks against Sarah Palin will continue and are continuing because that is what the left does. They have to do so because they cannot go to the issues in this campaign. What the left wants is to impose socialism on this country whether the rest of us want it or not. But if they come out and say so, they lose. The American people don't want what the left wants, so the left has to hide and lie about their true agenda. And that is why they have to attack Sarah Palin. She is the living refutation of everything that they say they want. As long as there is a Sarah Palin it is proof that we don't need or want their utopian schemes. It is proof that America is a good and decent place. It is proof that regular people can make it with perseverance and effort. It is proof that the elites are wrong about who we are.

And they cannot win as long as we are confident of who we really are.

The Fighter Pilot and the Moose Hunter

McCain’s V.P. pick has electrified the base—for good reason.

In this article from Lisa Schiffren of City Journal we take a look at the Republican VP choice Sarah Palin. There is little doubt that Palin was the dark horse candidate in this contest and was a surprise to many observers. Schiffren looks at how this pick is a bold one by McCain and how it will shake up the political landscape in Washington.

It should be noted that with Palin on the ticket the Republican side now has a claim to experience in a number of areas that the Obama camp cannot match. The McCain side can now boast military, executive, business and legislative experience. The Democrats, on the other hand, can claim only two lawyers with no business or military background. And only long-time Washington insider Biden has any extensive legislative history to speak of. Unfortunately for the Democrats his history of bad policy pronouncements doesn't really work in his favor when measured against real world events. Too many of his predictions have turned out to be mistaken. And at the top of the ticket Obama has no other experience outside of politics and academia to give him balance and very little time in any political position that he has held in any case. Given his political machine background and the Biden VP pick, his argument for hopey changey is looking more and more thin.

Indeed, Obama comes from an insulated political machine in Chicago that, by its nature, would keep him outside the mainstream of political reality in the rest of the country. Time after time Obama has demonstrated by his comments that he has an almost casual contempt for the "bitter clingers" who live in flyover country. He comes from a specifically urban and liberal environment saturated with payoffs, corruption and back-room deals. Of course Chicago has many other redeeming features, but its tightly controlled and corrupt political patronage system is not one of them. Nor does it seem likely that it would prepare a candidate to understand the mostly conservative nature of the rest of the country. Obama's time with the Chicago Annengerg Challenge is proving to be a problem as well given that the project spent millions of public and private dollars with no visible effect on the Chicago education system that it was supposedly intended to help.

As the last few weeks have gone by it has become more and more clear that the Obama team is in trouble and that they are coming to the realization, slow though it has been, that they could actually lose the election in November. The desperation that they are now beginning to show demonstrates that they did not have a plan for their current situation. They thought that they would breeze into the White House on the belief that the country hated Bush and would, therefore, vote for the Democrats without any other persuasion being required. Imagine their surprise when they found out that their suppositions were incorrect.

By putting the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, on his presidential ticket, John McCain has demonstrated that rarest of all political qualities: willingness to take a real risk on a serious new venture with great potential. It’s a sign of confidence, not desperation.

If the response from the conservative base is any indication, McCain has hit a home run with the Palin selection. A sullen GOP, set to vote reluctantly, if at all, for the “maverick” (some say unprincipled) senator from Arizona, has suddenly become electrified. In the first 36 hours after McCain announced his pick, $7 million in new contributions poured in online. This isn’t because Palin is making history as the first woman on a GOP ticket. It’s because of the type of woman and politician that she is. She’s a normal person, a mother and wife, who entered politics in 1992 by running for city council in Wasilla, Alaska to oppose tax hikes. She became mayor and swept a bunch of cronies out of the bureaucracy. She ran for, and lost, a race for lieutenant governor. She served on the state’s Oil and Gas Commission, where she went after the corrupt state GOP chairman, who had taken money from oil companies. In 2006, she ran for governor and won, after first beating the Republican incumbent for the nomination.

Throughout, she hewed to a few clear principles. She championed fiscal responsibility, cutting pork in the form of capital projects as well as larger symbols of waste, such as the infamous “bridge to nowhere” sponsored by Republican senator Ted Stevens. In a state that has been awash in oil money and political corruption, she also demanded real ethical standards and sent people who didn’t meet them to jail, never hesitating to challenge Republicans who were corrupt or ineffective. And she was pro-development, supporting drilling in ANWR; for that matter, she has dealt extensively with the tricky energy issues that have become central to this year’s election, and she understands them better than anyone else on either ticket.

In summary, Palin worked her way up the political ladder, rising on talent (she’s likable and a good speaker) and incremental achievement. She didn’t marry into power, and no one handed her anything. This is what conservatives say they want in female and minority candidates for high office. Further, she’s a reformer and a Washington outsider in a year when, as Republicans know, their own party is part of the problem. She represents real “change,” to adopt a word of the moment, and for Reaganites who have been waiting for the first post-Reagan conservative generation to rise to power, Palin represents “hope” as well.

Barack Obama, Aspiring Commissar

The Editors at National Review bring us this update on the story of Obama's Stalinists and their attack on investigators looking into the details of The Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The attack on Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg is a glimpse into the kind of strong arm censorship we are likely to see if the hard left candidate Obama gains the kind of power that the Presidency will give him. Such events and the thuggish intimidation we have seen are only a small taste of what would be in store should the hard left gain power in the country. It's just another good reason to keep Obama out of the White House that he is unqualified to occupy in any case.

Listen to the Milt Rosenberg show in question here if you want to see a bit of what the hard left has in mind for you if you like to think for yourself and you happen to like the idea of a free press in a free country. Even some on the liberal side of the political spectrum have a problem with this issue. Nader supporter Steve Diamond has dug into the CAC and his blog can be found here. He has plenty of information that should be required reading for any person supporting the Dali-Bama.

While the Obama coronation proceeds apace in Denver, it is in Chicago that Americans are getting a disturbing demonstration of his thuggish methods of stifling criticism.

Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Harvard-educated social anthropologist and frequent contributor to National Review, among other publications. He is widely respected for his meticulous research and measured commentary. For months, he has been doing the job the mainstream media refuses to do: examining the background and public record of Barack Obama, the first-term senator Democrats are about to make their nominee for president despite the shallowness of his experience and achievement.

Bluntly, Obama has lied about his relationship with Ayers, whom he now dismisses as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Ayers and Obama have made joint appearances together; they have argued together for “reforms” of the criminal justice system to make it more criminal-friendly; Obama gushed with praise for Ayers’ 1997 polemical book on the Chicago courts; and they sat together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing enterprise that distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their ideological allies. Most significant, they worked closely together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

The CAC was a major education reform project, proposed by Ayers, which was underwritten by a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, complemented by another $100 million in private and public funding. The project ran for about five years, beginning in 1995. As the liberal researcher Steve Diamond has recounted, Ayers ran its operational arm, the “Chicago School Reform Collaborative.” Obama, then a 33-year-old, third-year associate at a small law firm, having no executive experience, was brought in to chair the board of directors, which oversaw all “fiscal matters.”

By the time the CAC’s operations were wound down in 2001 it had doled out more than $100 million in grants but had failed to achieve any improvement in the Chicago schools. What little is known about the grants Obama oversaw is troubling. As Diamond relates, one of the first CAC awards in 1995 was $175,000 for the “Small Schools Workshop,” which had been founded by Ayers and was then headed by Mike Klonsky. It was only the beginning of the CAC’s generous funding of Klonsky — a committed Maoist who had been an Ayers comrade in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (the forerunner of Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist organization), and who hosted a “social justice” blog on the Obama campaign website until his writings were hastily purged in June after Diamond called attention to them.

Obama's Stalinists Attack Milt Rosenberg and WGN

Growing up I remember my parents constantly had the radio on and frequently it was tuned to WGN. Nowadays most people know that WGN is where you go to watch the Cubs lose on TV and it is available on many cable systems. But WGN radio has been around forever too and if you are a Chicagoan then names like Jack Brickhouse, Harry Cary and Wally Phillips should be familiar. Another familiar name is Dr. Milt Rosenberg. He has been on the radio with his "Extension 720" program since I was in high school back in the early 70s'. His show is a high-minded talk program that brings in guests for extended discussion of interesting topics. Sometimes these topics are political, but just as often the show covers other ground from music to the arts to culture and science. Dr. Rosenberg is a host with a wide range of intellectual interests and his show reflects this. He is an academic in the best sense of that term because he is genuinely interested in ideas.

WGN was talk radio before there was talk radio such as we know it today. But it is important to note that WGN has always been non-confrontational in its approach. The shock jocks have never had a home on the station and it has tried to maintain a friendly middle of the road atmosphere that welcomes all who come to listen. (Where else can you listen to Orien Samulson's Farm Report?) Host Milt Rosenberg has a very genial demeanor on his program that is in line with this style. He is about as far from a bomb thrower as one can imagine. Some might even describe his on air personality as a bit less than exciting. But if you like in-depth interviews and discussion, then his show is worth a listen.

Now sometimes you get to a point where you think you have heard and seen it all. But listening to Thursday's "Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg" was a rather new experience for me. It certainly wasn't your average WGN radio program. Milt's guest for the evening was Stanley Kurtz and he was there to discuss his ongoing investigation into The Chicago Annenberg Challenge archives that are housed at The University of Illinois at Chicago Library.

As you may have heard, the records of the CAC that are housed at UIC have become the center of a controversy that involves the Obama campaign. These records are important because the CAC was founded by Bill Ayers and because Barack Obama was the chairman. The CAC disbursed millions of dollars during its run and naturally there is a great deal of interest in this organization now that Obama is running for President. The CAC is, after all, the only executive experience that Obama has had, so it is important to see just what he did in that job. And because of Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, any information that would shed more light on the relationship between Obama and Ayers is going to be of interest to those who are eager to learn more about Obama's past.

So it came as a bit of a shock to Milt Rosenberg that the station was quickly deluged with emails and calls denouncing him and his guest Stanley Kurtz on Thursday night. Apparently, the Obama campaign released an email to its goons telling them to call up the station and complain. And the calls from the Obama supporters had a robotic similarity in that they demanded to know why WGN "allowed" Stanley Kurtz to be on the air in the first place. They suggested that it would have been better if Milt Rosenberg and WGN would have refused to have Stanley Kurtz on the program and that it would be proper for a major radio station in a major market to censor ideas and opinions that they, the Obama supporters, did not like. Several of the callers put forth the argument that since Stanley Kurtz's views had already been refuted elsewhere, that there was no reason to have him on, although none of them could offer specifics when pressed by Dr. Rosenberg or Mr. Kurtz to support their side of the debate. Nearly every Obama caller insulted Milt by saying they now thought he was not very intelligent for having Mr. Kurtz on the air. Only one of the callers even tried to offer a systematic argument in favor of the CAC, and he was clear about not being an Obama supporter, although he considered himself to be a member of the left.

All in all it was a fascinating two hours that revealed a great deal about what we should expect from an Obama administration should The Anointed One be elected. Note that the Obama campaign is trying to get the Justice Department to silence any opposition that might have the temerity to call Barack's holiness into question. I guess that Obama has never heard of The First Amendment or free speech, and judging by the calls I listened to last night, neither have his followers. The Holy One does not appear to have any problem with using force to silence his opponents when it suits his purpose. But I guess that when you are The Chosen One the rules that apply to lesser mortals do not apply. So if you want to bully and intimidate your critics, the fact that you have A Higher Purpose That Must Not Be Stopped helps you to justify any actions that will get your enemies to shut up. If that involves force and thug tactics then so be it.

If you value your freedom to have an opinion without a gun pointed at your head, that should bother you a great deal.

Obama's Annenberg Years

In this article from The American Thinker Thomas Lifson provides us with a summary of a major event in the resume of Barack Obama that has been missing from the coverage so far from the main stream media. It seems that Obama was in charge of an educational project, The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that spent millions of taxpayer dollars but had little effect. And Obama's pal and terrorist Bill Ayers was a big part of that project. Remember that Obama has said that Ayers was just some guy down the street and that he had no special relationship with him. Now it turns out that Obama was telling a major lie and hoping that no one would find out.

Petulant Harry Reid Tells Americans to Shut up and Drop Dead

I think this gets close to the inside baseball stuff.

Fox News brings us this story in which the "leader" of the senate, Harry Reid, whom all skateboarders admire, tells reporters that they did not hear what they heard. His stubbornness, petulance and condescension were on display for all to see. Harry Reid demanded more respect for his little tantrums and ignored the best interests of the American people while yelling at reporters.

At a "pen and pad" — a more casual, off-camera chat with reporters — Reid attacked and scolded correspondents in attendance, telling them he's "really disappointed" in how they have been writing his energy plans, which include a bill to reign in speculation in the energy futures markets.

According to two Senate Democratic aides, Reid and other Democratic leaders were particularly stung by an article Thursday in The New York Times. It followed on several other reports that have highlighted Democrats' attempts to fend off defections from their ranks to GOP-sponsored amendments, measures that would permit new drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf and in the West for oil shale.

Reporters tried to pin Reid down Thursday on the amendment issue.

In the exchange, Reid told one reporter she should "watch the [Senate] floor more often. ... You might learn something."

Another reporter explained she had watched the Senate proceedings and said it was not clear he was ... offereing separate amendments, to which Reid asked the reporter if she "spoke English."

"Turn up your Miracle Ear," Reid added.

The new media has been hammering hard on this issue. Whether you listen to talk radio or read the blogs or editorials from WSJ or IVB or NR the message is consistent. It is the Democrats and their environmentalist radical supporters who are against the development of domestic energy. Not just oil, but coal, natural gas, nuclear are all off the table for democrats. What the left wants is American de-industrialization. They want you to sit in your house in the heat, in the dark and sweating. They don't care if you can't get to work. They don't care if you can't afford food.

They don't care about you at all.

If you think that they care about "the little people" remember that these elitists are all incredibly rich. Most of them are baby boomers who never had a hard day in their lives. Many of them are trust fund babies who have not had to work a real job ever. And all of them are insulated from the kind of life that you and I live where working and paying bills is not optional. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Al Gore, Edwards and Obama. They are all rich lefties who don't have to worry about the cost of food or gas. They all went to elite universities. They all live in mansions. They all have far more power than you or I will ever have. They probably can't even remember the last time they filled up their own tanks because their chauffeurs have been doing it for them for so long. They have mansions, limos and private jets. They have armies of attendants to keep the little people away.

They don't care about you. In fact, most of the time they don't even know you exist. Except at election time, that is. Like now.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said. "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

The Dems have tried to put forth a number of phony claims to rationalize why they don't want to liberate American energy production, such as the story that oil companies have leased land that they are not using. That story has been refuted by pointing out that just because you have a portion of land, there is no guarantee that there must therefore be oil underneath it. Oil companies must play a form of roulette to find oil by looking in many places knowing that some of their effort will not pay off. They pay to look in many places so that they can find the ones that really do have oil. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are hoping that you, the American citizen, are to dumb to understand the concept of averaging risk. But if you have ever played a game of Bingo you understand that not every card is a winner, and so you play many cards at once to get a winning one.

Nancy Pelosi Says Drilling is a Hoax

Consider Nancy Pelosi's contradictory demand that we open up the strategic oil reserve to bring down prices, and her claim that increased supply does not bring down prices. She says that drilling is a hoax, but is desperate to prevent new drilling by American oil companies. Why the defensiveness if there is no oil on the continental shelf? Why work so hard to prevent oil companies from doing exploration? Why the objection to atomic energy when France and Japan are doing so well using it? Why the contradictory stories?

But of course all these claims have been examined in detail in the new media, and as a result the real story is still getting out to the American people. And they have concluded that Democrats are stonewalling new energy production because of their ties to the hard left environmental movement. I would bet that the Democrat's internal polls are showing them the same thing that public polls are; Americans have come to the conclusion that Democrats don't care about the rest of us paying 4 dollars a gallon for gas as long as the Dems keep getting their big money donations from the hard left environmentalists.

But as hard as they try, the Democrats have been unable to sway American opinion on this issue. And they are worried that the Republicans in the house and senate might rouse themselves from their slumbers and notice that they have a ready made issue for the campaign, if only they would use it.

That Just Doesn't Work For Me

The fall of the American newspaper continues

You may have heard that The New York Times refused to print an editorial by the Republican candidate John McCain even though the Times printed one by the Marxist candidate, Barry the Kid, just last week. The Times was caught a bit off guard, however, when the McCain speech ended up on The Drudge Report so that every American who is interested in a free and fair election could read it for themselves and make their own decision about the views of Senator McCain. It is clear from the reaction of the New York Times that they did not consider the possibility that the editorial that they tried to censor would still get out to the American people via New Media.

David Shipley, editor at the Times, offered a lame excuse in an email to the McCain campaign that the editorial was not up to their standards:

'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq.'

'The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.'

'I'm not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.' 'I'd be pleased, though, to look at another draft.'

One could, of course, make a point about the obvious bias of The Elite Media Monoculture that is on display here in its most naked form. And many people have done just that to the embarrassment of David Shipley and the Times. But there is also a financial aspect to this that should be considered. Because the bias of the Times and other newspapers and media like it is not without consequences for the bottom line.

Just recently The Wall Street Journal reported that the Tribune company would be cutting staff at The L.A. Times, which they own, by 15%. The New York Times has seen similar cuts. Liberal and left leaning newspapers around the country have been seeing rapid and catastrophic declines in their readership and corresponding ad revenue over the last decade or so. The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming bias and contempt that leftist elites at these newspapers have for conservatives and average Americans is all to clear to the rest of us. The elites don't believe that they have any such tilt in their views of course, but for the rest of us there is a cause and effect nonetheless. And as a result we are not buying their product from them any longer. As consumers of information, those of us who want news reporting that is fair and accurate are not being served by dinosaur media either in print or on television. And we are taking our attention and dollars elsewhere.

If you are a lefty news journalist, ask yourself where all those readers went. Do you think they moved to Jupiter or something? But most elite media mavens do not have the intelligence or honesty to ask themselves this question. The answer would be far too painful. And so they go on like robots marching to the cliff with no ability to alter their liberal programming or change their final destination.

Of course it ought to be clear to the people who are running things at these companies that they have a problem and that they have driven away a significant block of consumers. And when you drive away a large number of your customers, ad revenue goes with them because they are not there to look at the ads any longer. Advertisers are noticing this and pulling their products out and putting them elsewhere. And this, in turn, means lost jobs at those very same newspapers. But the editors at papers like The New York Times refuse to see the connection between their leftist bias and the continuing collapse of their ancient empires of propaganda.

From personal experience I can say that this fall off in readers is having a deleterious effect on their ability to even get their papers put together and out the door. Where I work we do some small jobs for a newspaper whose name you would know. The part that I work with as a graphic artist has seen more and more technical problems recently. And they have had more difficultly getting us the materials that we need on time. The materials that we need in order to do our jobs have been arriving later and later with more and more errors. Under such circumstances it becomes ever more difficult to correct simple printing problems and get the job done on time and to the press. And if it is happening in this one small area, it must be happening to other papers in similar circumstances across the country. This sends a very serious message about the state of American newspapers. And it could be so easily solved if they would simply admit their bias and do something to balance their product and make it attractive once more to those readers who have left for greener pastures.

But the editors at The New York Times see the loss of jobs, readers and ad revenue and they do nothing to question whether their own actions and the nature of the content that they continue to spew might have anything to do with their situation. It is, apparently, beyond their ability or willingness to question their own wisdom or superiority over all of the rest of us. And so the fall of American newspapers and leftist media continues without relief.

Senator John McCain's Editorial

Here is the editorial that was censored by The New York Times.

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military's readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

Am the Me I've Been Waiting For

Charles Krauthammer has written a biting editorial showing us all the malignant narcissism that is typical of Barack Obama. It is difficult for me to remember any politician in my lifetime who was at once so embarrassingly ignorant and pompous at the same time. Krauthammer uses the planned campaign excursion to Germany as an illustration of everything that is self-absorbed about the Obama Messiah and it really is a hoot, or it would be if it weren't a real possibility that we might actually get a President who thinks there are 57 states.

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times.

As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" — when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow."

As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama the Slumlord

I wanted to get to this story earlier but have been generally busy. Still, it is worth noting if you have not heard about it. The Boston Globe reports on some of the slimy financial deals that Barack Obama has been involved in here in Chicago and how it has impacted the people that he claims to want to help. Well, we know that it helped to enrich his influential friends and associates to be sure. But as for the people who live in these rat-infested slums I think we can conclude that the change they were promised has yet to materialize.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

Osama Obama on the Cover

This week's New Yorker magazine features a cover that portrays Obama and his lovely wife bruno as terrorist revolutionaries in the White House burning an American flag with a picture of Osama above the fireplace. As Mike Allen at The Politico reports, The New Yorker was aiming at the conservative image of Obama in order to satirize it, but judging by the reaction, they have hit a bit wide of the mark. As any humorist will tell you, comedy must contain a grain of truth, and this one has a bit more than that. The leftist fringe is already having a hissy fit over the cover which goes to show that it is not being received in quite the way that it was intended. For the truth of the matter is that Obama is indeed a radical, although he is working very hard to prevent you from discovering it. And the left gets really mad that anyone on their side would unintentionally send the wrong message by telling a bit of the truth.

And in any event, I don't think this cover is going to help Michelle's kids.

Goodbye to All That

Another sanction of the victim moment

In this essay the publisher of Encounter Books, Roger Kimball, explains why he will no longer send books to the reviewers at The New York Times. The reason is not simply the overwhelming leftist bias that is typical of that paper and many others that take their lead from them. We all know about that. It is rather that the Times refuses to even acknowledge the existence of any books by conservatives. It would be one thing if the paper were to review books by conservatives and criticize them. But they don't even bother to do that. They just pretend that the authors don't exist, even when conservative books appear on the Times' very own top 10 list. It really is typical of how things actually work in the world of the left. In fact I was reminded of this story by its similarity to another.

I was driving home from work the other night and listening to Dennis Prager on the radio and he was discussing the case of Douglas Feith. Mr. Feith was an undersecretary of defense in the Bush administration and for the last few years has been teaching at Georgetown university. But even though his students give him high marks and even though he is a person who has held a high position in government where he has gained invaluable experience in the field and worked at the highest level, he will not be returning. It seems that the members of the Angry Leftist faculty have their panties in a twist and will not tolerate any ideas that diverge from the Stalinist line that they demand. They are calling him a "war criminal." It is important to note in this context that Mr. Feith was the only conservative to be teaching foreign policy at Georgetown. The school apparently has as its policy a complete monopoly of ideology from the left such that no other ideas will be allowed on campus. Not even one individual with a different way of looking at the world will be allowed to teach. The school has chosen to present a united front of leftist professors with not one voice of dissent. No intellectual "diversity" allowed at this school.

I mention these two different events in this post to illustrate a point made by Mr. Prager on his show. Wherever leftists control things, the result is invariably the loss of freedom to think and act as an individual and the concurrent collapse of standards of justice. When the left is in charge it's their way or the highway. They loudly preach the value of "tolerance" but the claim is a sham. The reality is that they allow only what they themselves agree with when it comes to ideas and actions. If they can find a way to control it, they do. And if they can find a way to silence their opponents they do. Actions and activities that they don't want? They will quickly be forbidden. Speech codes, the destruction of private property, when it is owned by conservatives, and attacks on conservative speakers are encouraged and rewarded. Crimes against conservatives are quickly forgotten and almost never prosecuted. In short, where you find the left, you find Stalinism.

That is why Roger Kimball is giving the boot to the New York Times. There is nothing to be gained in pretending that the left is anything other than the totalitarian movement that it is. Every day it demonstrates in clear ways that it has no use for real tolerance and diversity of the kind that real Americans actually respect. A real debate of ideas and philosophy that goes to the fundamental questions of the human condition and how we actually organize our society for our own benefit and the future of our inheritors would be one worth having. But that discussion only takes place on the right side of the political spectrum where ideas are considered important and discussion is valued. It is utterly alien to the left and will remain so as long as they wall themselves off from the rest of the population with whom they are actually at war. They have no use for the "bitter clingers" or anyone who might want to offer intellectual arguments from that perspective.

A Bear of Very Little Brain

In this brief article Rick Moran at American Thinker reports on the press conference last week of Richard Danzig. Now if you don't know who he is, you just need to know that he is a top person in Obama's campaign and if the Democrats win in November, Mr. Danzig will probably be the next head of National Security. In the press conference Mr. Danzig gave his views on which author he considers most important to read regarding our current national security situation. Those of you who have some common sense may find his choice to be a bit, well, strange.

"Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security. He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans. . . ."

Mr Danzig spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children's classic, which says: "Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it."

Now I have to say that I find this very disturbing. The reason is, of course, that it reveals in a blatant way just how unprepared and unserious these people are for the positions that they want. The President and his advisors are responsible for protecting the country from the bad guys out there. And today there is no shortage of bad guys to worry about. But here is a top Obama insider who thinks that telegraphing this kind of childish idiocy is going to help us somehow. Mr. Danzig of course did not say just how using this particular book would make us safer.

Mr. Danzig could have mentioned any number of good current books that have addressed just this subject. Authors such as Lawrence Wright, Mark Steyn, Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis come immediately to mind. And one could name many others. The last few years have seen scores of book written by serious authors from across the political spectrum that deal with the issue of national security and the situation of the world today. But apparently the people in the Obama campaign just had too much trouble with all of the big words in these books to find them interesting or useful. No, instead we get Richard Danzig bumping his head down the stairs trying to thing of something else and failing to do so.

Perhaps he should ask his fairy godmother for advice.

Vultures on an Olympian Perch

It's a good thing for the planet that you lost your job

The great and powerful elites at The New York Times bring us this editorial in which they celebrate the economic hardship that the left has brought about with their anti-drilling, anti-development energy policy. The editors at the Times think it is a good thing that you are losing your job if you are a worker for one of the big auto makers. They are glad that you are out of work because the cost of gas is getting so high that Americans have stopped buying the cars that you used to make. They are happy that you are suffering. They want it to continue and get even worse. The reason for their indifference to your plight is their belief in the global warming hoax combined with their unrestricted lust for power over the "little people." That would, of course, be you.

It’s hard to convince most Americans that there is a silver lining to $4-a-gallon gasoline. But General Motors provided a nugget of good news when it announced that it would shutter much of its production of pickups and sport utility vehicles — and might even get rid of the Hummer, the relative of the Abrams tank unleashed on the streets in the cheap-gas days of the 1990s.

And what would a New York Times editorial be without a call for a new punishing tax to make things even worse? Yes a new tax on gas to make the price even higher is just the thing we need according to the editors at the Times. Then we would all care so much more for endangered mosquitoes in ANWAR. So just remember the next time you hear some Democrat media elite or politician spouting that they are the party of the "little guy," that you don't count in that equation if you are standing in the way of their vast utopian scheme to rebuild the world along the lines that they have drawn. And remember that those lines are drawn with your blood, sweat and tears, not theirs.

Barry the Kid's HopeMobile

In this brief sound bite, brought to you by Hugh Hewitt, Barry the Kid demonstrates why he is so dangerous when he strays from the teleprompter and starts to wax gauzy about his utopian schemes. In this example he imagines a world of sunshine and lollipops where we never had to defend ourselves from dictators like Saddam and instead spent billions on a new kind of engine that apparently runs on hemp-powered windmills and recycled free-range chicken droppings instead of that nasty oil from big AmeriKan Korporations that make big evil profits.

Seriously folks, this guy is dim as a 10 watt bulb. Automobile companies all over the world are always trying to find new ways to improve the vehicles that they make. And generally cars have gotten better over the years. Today I drive an Exterra that gets about 25 miles to the gallon (as long as I don't race around like I'm in the Indy 500). That is a significant improvement over the VW station wagon that I drove back in my student days. That car got about the same mileage, but was much lighter in weight. My current vehicle is larger and therefore it is much more efficient pound for pound than what I was driving 30 years ago. But technology tends to improve step by step. Sudden transformations from one kind of technology to another are rare and unpredictable. No one can see them before they arrive. And they aren't brought about by any actions taken by government bureaucrats.

Barry the Kid's ignorance and stupidity would crush the American economy. Indeed, we are already suffering due to the policies put in place over the years by the environmentalist left. For decades we have been slowly hamstringing ourselves. Our best people in energy, science and business have been kept from doing their jobs for as long as I can remember. No drilling, no new refineries, no new nuclear power plants, no coal to liquid technology, no development of oil shale. The list goes on and on. What it all has in common is the left's hatred of American capitalism and progress and their desire to see America cut down to size. A size that is more to their liking.

So if you want to drive one of these, vote for Obama in the fall. He will give you a lower standard of living if that is what you want. But if you are weary of the constant attacks on America by the left and the inch by inch destruction of the American way of life, and if you are a Democrat who has voted for them year after year, then it is time for you to reconsider why you have been voting for the Democrats and what you think it will bring you in the long run. Because the long run is finally here at last.

Democrats to America: Drop Dead

The left requires only that you kneel

On Wednesday your Democrat party, the party of political hacks who are in thrall to environmentalists who in turn want to save endangered mosquitoes from greedy AmeriKans with cars and microwave ovens, voted to keep oil development on America's coasts shut down. Even as gasoline is rising above the $4.00 a gallon level, Nancy "low IQ" Pelosi and her merry band of pranksters were claiming simultaneously that drilling had been tried unsuccessfully and that drilling had to be stopped before it was too late.

Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., spearheaded the effort. His proposal would open up U.S. waters between 50 and 200 miles off shore for drilling. The first 50 miles off shore would be left alone.

But the plan failed Wednesday on a 9-6, party-line vote in a House appropriations subcommittee, which was considering the proposal as part of an Interior Department spending package.

With record oil prices and gas prices projected to hover around the $4 mark for the rest of the summer, Republicans have ratcheted up their efforts to open up oil exploration along U.S. coastline. But the long-sought change has so far been unsuccessful.

Most offshore oil production and exploration has been banned since a federal law passed in 1981.

"We are kidding ourselves if we think we can drill our way out of these problems," House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., said during the bill mark-up session.

For his part, Peterson said: "There is no valid reason for Congress to keep the country from energy resources it needs."

Note that offshore oil development has been off limits since 1981. In my book that's 27 years. That means 27 years of dwindling supply put in place by political hacks who probably never bothered to take an economics course in law school while they were busy learning how to sue productive business people. But I digress. I mean, just how would the little leftist shill know what would work and what would not since we have been banned from drilling there for almost thirty years? He provides no answer. He just expects you to take it all on faith. After all, you are one of those bitter clingers, aren't you?

Sierra Club lands program director Athan Manuel told a House committee Wednesday that drilling has been unsuccessful in driving costs down.

"The disappointing part about some of the energy policies being promoted (is) that it calls for more drilling when drilling really is the problem. And all we've got to show for pretty aggressive (domestic) drilling for the last 35 years is, again, $4 for a gallon of gas," Manuel said, adding "since the first Arab oil shock in the 1970s, the U.S. has produced almost 90 billion barrels of oil since then, so we've tried drilling our way out of the problem and it just hasn't worked."

Ok, I see. The problem is that we Americans like to have a standard of living somewhat above a cave dwelling neanderthal. And "drilling our way out of the problem"? When in the last thirty years did the leftist environmentalists and their Democrat toadies not fight tooth and nail to prevent American businessmen and scientists from developing our own resources right here in our own back yard? I thought that drilling offshore had been banned since 1981. But don't expect these people to do anything but lie to you. They don't like your standard of living. They don't like the fact that Americans want to be successful. They don't want you to have nice things. They don't like you at all, in fact. What they really want is to push you and me back into the cave.

The radical environmentalist left and their Democrat tools hate America, hate progress, hate capitalism, hate wealth and those who earn it and most of all they hate you for wanting to be happy and enjoy your life as an American. And that is why they are doing what they are doing. They are trying to bring America to its knees in the hopes that you will turn to them and beg for the scraps from their tables. Which, of course, they will be happy to dispense from the taxes that they collect from whatever you have left.