Back to Basics

GOP 8-term incumbent Mike Castle a no-show at a recent Delaware voter forum. Conservative challenger Christine O’Donnell on the right.

I’ve said it before and Republican voters need to hear it again:

Entrenched incumbency is not an argument for more entrenched incumbency.

Remember these cap-and-tax Republicans?

Photoshop credit: Leo Alberti

Well, 70-year-old, nine-term House cap-and-taxer GOP Rep. Mike Castle has a challenger. She’s Christine O’Donnell — a young, energetic, fresh-faced conservative activist with a real shot at dislodging the entrenched liberal Republican. She’s been traveling the state of Delaware non-stop and reaching out to conservatives across the country for support. I met her on Saturday at a grass-roots gathering of Moms 4 America in Washington, D.C. Castle refuses to debate her and has resorted to sneaking in and out of local GOP meetings to avoid her. He has bagged out on four scheduled GOP primary debates, most recently one sponsored by the League of Women Voters. The establishment Republican fund-raising organizations are sticking by their big government brother.

Check out the side-by-side comparison of Castle’s tax-and-spend views with O’Donnell’s opposition to radical environmental policies and bailouts. Compare Castle’s weak support for life and personal liberty with O’Donnell’s unqualified support for life and 2nd amendment rights.

Building on my continuing War on the West/War on Jobs series, today’s column initiates an Obama jobs death toll. The social justice Left has always used Alinskyite story-telling to get its way. Time for the Right to better tell the stories of the forgotten victims of the Obama job-killing machine.

Regarding the new CBO report on the stimulus (coincidentally — or maybe not coincidentally — released on the same days as GOP leader John Boehner’s jobs speech), McQ says pointedly: “Of course it boosted the GDP by a sizeable amount. When you pour almost a trillion dollars out of the government bucket and that is part of the calculation of GDP, then naturally the GDP is going to be ‘boosted’. The question is, what good did it do. Claims of ‘increasing the number of people employed’ is, as is obvious, a guess cranked out by an economic model. But look around you. When what the bucket has dumped out drains away, what do we have? 9.5% unemployment – at least at an official level – 1.5% higher than what was promised if the “stimulus” wasn’t passed. A stagnant economy. Businesses neither expanding nor hiring. Car sales – down. Housing sales – way down. Consumer confidence – in the tank. Expanded regulation, increased taxation and a war on business…So let the left and the media try their best to make this more than it is – the effect on GDP calculation that absurd levels of governmental deficit spending will have. Take that out and there isn’t much to shout about, is there?”

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The White House War on Jobs
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

The “Summer of Recovery” is looking more and more like the Beltway Chainsaw Massacre for America’s workers. As President Obama lolls on Martha’s Vineyard with his well-heeled Chicago pals, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that 72 percent of people are very worried about joblessness and 67 percent are very concerned about massive government spending. After a nearly $1 trillion fiscal stimulus and several multi-billion-dollar corporate and union bailouts, unemployment remains stuck near 10 percent nationwide; jobless claims rose again last week. One shudders to think how many more jobs will be on the chopping block after the vacationing president finishes “recharging his batteries.”

The blame avoidance industry, of course, never takes a break. Capitol Hill Democrats blame George W. Bush. President Obama blames inaction by the, er, Democrat-controlled Congress. On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden derided GOP Leader John Boehner’s speech on the Obama job-killing machine as a return to the past. Biden sneered about the
“good old days” when Republicans held the majority in Washington. But laid-off, unemployed, and endangered Americans in the health care sector, auto industry, oil, mining, gas, and fishing industries are no doubt wondering: What’s wrong with returning to the days when they had jobs and steady paychecks?

Loathsome cowboys

How’s that Summer of Recovery working out for you? Continuing my series on the White House War on the West, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s attack on the economy, and the White House land lock-up (Part 1, Part 2) and ocean grab, here is the latest on Barack Obama’s deliberate job destruction policies.

According to the WSJ, the administration forged ahead with its junk science deepwater drilling ban despite knowing it would cost 23,000 jobs.

Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Marcia McNutt, an Obama administration science adviser, commented on the corporate culture of BP in a memo sent to Michael Bromwich, the administration’s new top offshore oil exploration regulator, on June 28.

Critics of the moratorium, including Gulf Coast political figures and oil-industry leaders, have said it is crippling the region’s economy, and some have called on the administration to make public its economic analysis. A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects…

Sound familiar?

Just last month, you’ll recall, the TARP inspector general reported on how the capricious Dealeragate mandates of Obama’s non-expert auto experts deliberately destroyed jobs in the name of “shared sacrifice” to appease Big Labor.

Then there are more and more Obamacare job-killing stories piling up like this one:

Assurant Health is eliminating 130 jobs at its offices in Milwaukee and Plymouth, Minn., by Oct. 1 as the health insurer prepares for changes under federal health care reform.

I have read several articles lately rightfully claiming the Obama should be impeached.  The power grab upon the United States parallels the likes of Hugo Chavez.  Any one of these acts should be ground for impeachment, but our current Congress refuses to take action.  Just about everything this administration has done goes against the Constitution, against states rights, against American citizens, against court rulings and against the will of the people.  But he continues to march on destroying this country, transforming it into his socialist/Marxist vision with Obama being dictator-in-chief.  He holds border security hostage for amnesty for illegals and threatens to use executive powers to achieve what Congress won’t pass, and then sues the state of Arizona for attempting to stop the invasion from Mexico.  Then there is the takeover of the auto industry, banking industry, Wall Street, health care system…where do you stop.

The problem – the current Congress can’t impeach Obama on these issues because they are also guilty of the same crimes!  If they found Obama guilty they would be implicating themselves in the same treasonous activities.  So this Congress will do nothing to stop the traitor-in-chief from continuing his destruction of the United States because to co-conspirators are playing judge and jury.

But the destruction of this country must stop and it can.  Many have looked into the background of Obama and is blatant refusal to produce the long form birth certificate proving his eligibility to be president in the first place.  I couldn’t obtain my passport with a properly certified birth certificate.  I had the original birth certificate with a stamped notarized seal, but that wasn’t good enough.  I had to order a new certified copy with the embossed seal just to get a passport.  My daughter has to produce her birth certificate, drivers license, social security card and two additional forms of proof of residency just to obtain a drivers license in Indiana!  So why is it unreasonable for the president of the United States to produce a valid, certified, long-form birth certificate.  Why has he spent millions of dollars protecting that document as well as others?  No one would spend that much money trying to cover up the truth if they were not guilty!

So, Congress needs to go after this usurper on the grounds that he is constitutionally not eligible to hold the office of the President at all.  Does this implicate others in a cover-up – absolutely.  But this country will be better off without Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano.  So if that ship sinks it needs to take the trash with it!

Many are concerned about the fallout should it be determined that Obama was never eligible to be president.  The country will survive!  Those of us around during Watergate know what the country can recover from.  We lost the President and Vice-President during the Watergate scandal, as well as a number of others, but the country survived.  The Constitution was developed by our founding fathers to preserve the country.  Yes, there will be consequences.  The laws passed in the middle of the night without Congress actually reading them and through backroom deals would not be valid.  But when you think of the abuse of power and unconstitutional standing these laws were based on then the only recourse is to remove these laws that should never have been passed in the first place.

We face tough times ahead of us, but if this country is going to survive as the republic it was formed to be, then drastic measures will need to take place in November and the months following to right the wrong that should never have been allowed in the first place.  We can survive!

I’m trying to make sense of the moratorium of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. This cannot be good for the U.S. economy. But it is interesting that it comes along right when Government Motors is about to release the Chevy Volt. You know, the electric car that costs $41,000 which no one wants. They are going to steal around $6,000 from your neighbor to entice you to buy it so the cost does go down in that regard.

I ran the numbers. Let’s say you managed to buy this little vehicle for a discounted price of $35,000 including rebates, incentives and tax credits. Let’s say gasoline is $3 gallon. Let’s also assume given that cost you would spend $2,000 for fuel a year. It’s a decent average. Depending on your car maybe you blow through $200 a month or so on fuel. Let’s also assume you could buy a used Honda for $7,000 which is roughly the same size as the Volt. That is a difference of  $28,000. Think maybe you could buy a lot of gasoline for that money? Yea, about 14 years worth before breaking even on your Volt purchase. It’s just a dumb purchase for all except the elite earth and granola people.

So why are they pushing to sell this thing and stop drilling in the Gulf? The Five Minute Forecast gives us clues:

The Obama administration’s six-month ban on exploratory deep- water drilling has four more months to go. What happens after that, nobody knows. Analysts from Morgan Stanley to our own Byron King say it could easily become a 12-18-month ban.

The result: As existing Gulf of Mexico fields deplete, fewer new ones would come on line to replace them. The resulting shock could see 6% of all the oil the U.S. uses — 1.2 million barrels a day — disappear over time.

New legislation tightening the rules on offshore drilling could come up for a vote in the House as soon as tomorrow (today). Never mind that existing rules were neither followed nor enforced in the Deepwater incident, we need new rules. The new rules would further crimp Gulf production.

In the end, the U.S. could need to import 80% of its oil from foreign producers. That’s up 20% from current needs. At current levels of consumption, the U.S. will need to import 15 million barrels of oil a day.

Where are those imports coming from? From these “iffy, at best” sources:

Whew… A long week for me last week. Traveling, working, and spending time with my son. It left me little time to pursue my passion of writing here at SUFA. But now I am back to work on the site for a couple weeks until I have to travel again for two weeks. Tonight I want to talk about something that I have been wanting to talk about all week. I want to tread into the realm of financial reform and financial responsibility as put forth by our federal government. This article is going to address some things, mostly done by the Obama administration, but really simply pertains to our federal government in general. To be honest, the words fiscal and responsibility should not even be allowed to be used in the same sentence with federal government, unless it is done to point out a lack of it. The sheer magnitude of fiscal ineptitude displayed by the federal government is staggering, and it has now pushed us both to the edge of financial disaster and to the brink of full government control over the private industry in the United States. This is both infuriating and scary as hell. And I have to say that I have taken one step closer to believing a rebellion is the only answer.

First there is the financial reform bill that has been passed and signed into law during this last week. According to the Obama administration, the bill creates a body within the Federal Reserve aimed at protecting consumers, oversight of the derivatives market, and a way for the government to take over and dismantle failing financial firms. Read that last one carefully folks, TAKE OVER AND DISMANTLE failing financial firms. In other words, we are being asked to trust the federal government to determine who to dismantle and who to let live. Is there anyone in America who is not a far left kool-aid drinker who believes that this is going to be done in an impartial manner? Because I don’t believe that for a second. And let me tell you why:

I watched as the Troubled Asset Relief Fund was administered, “saving” those few big banks who were deemed “too big to fail”, allowing all the small banks to perish along the way. The “too big to fail” got BIGGER and the end result was something that I knew instinctively was bad for our future: Centralization. Anyone who understands control and how the government intends to enforce also understands that a primary need is to centralize the power over the economy in a way that will make them easier to control. They can’t control a hundred million independent banks, but they can easily control things if they consolidate power into ten superbanks. And that is what they have done.

Further, the financial reform bill does very little in the way of reforming anything. It merely gave the government power to do whatever it likes. The real work is yet to be done. The body created by the legislation will now quietly go about creating whatever rules and regulations that it likes without regard to public opinion or scrutiny. After all, now that Congress is done doing the public “work”, the committee can do what it likes, and no one will be paying attention. They won’t answer to anyone. There will be little to no oversight of what they do. Further intrusions into the private marketplace can now occur without anyone knowing a thing about it until they are implemented, which means too late to stop them.

What else is going to happen as a result of the financial reform bill that has passed? To be honest, there is a lot that we don’t know, because as usual, they took 2,300+ pages to basically set up a committee that will figure out the rest of the steps. Of course that is because of the pork involved and the other areas that they wanted to address. For example, the bill will require thousands of U.S. companies to show what steps they are taking to ensure that the products they make, including laptops, cellphones and medical devices, don’t contain “conflict minerals” from the Congo. That will have a fairly dramatic impact on manufacturing in America, as one fifth of the Tantalum used in those devices worldwide comes from the Congo. The law contains no provisions for punishment yet, but they are already talking in Washington about sanctions and penalties. Why would any company want to manufacture in this country, where they spend more in reporting and taxes than they do in labor and materials?

What this bill will really do is further allow for the manipulation of the market by both the federal government and the large corporations who are involved. Wall Street gains extra time and ability to manipulate regulations quietly in back room deals. Or to put it more bluntly, the corporations that only have the ability to manipulate the market because of government, have now been given additional resources to manipulate the market. DC insiders will have the ability to influence the failure or flourishing of organizations based on loyalty and campaign contributions. Is there really anyone other than the kool-aid drinkers who really believe that the federal government would pass a bill that did anything other than give themselves more power, influence, and ability to profit from industry in America?

And just to add a little fire to the one world government conspiracy folks, there is the reality that the government sees the bill as a robust way to work towards that. There are many provisions in the legislation that are based on world economic decisions by groups such as the G20 or the United Nations. In fact, Treasury Thief Timothy Geithner came right out and said so, albeit in a round about way when bragging on the influence that the bill gives us. He said, “I am very confident with the strong hand that this (the legislation just passed) gives us, that we will be able to bring the world with us.”

The era of the Obama Democrats should be a political progressive’s dream come true.

Yet, adherents to modern-day progressive political philosophy are anything but happy with the President right now. Worse yet, approval of the Congress – ruled with an iron fist by the Obama Democrats – has slumped to an disgracefully low 11% mark in a recent Gallup poll of Americans’ level of “confidence” among our nation’s various institutions.

So, why the unhappiness? What could possibly make progressives unhappy, with “progressiveness” breaking out all across the land?

The most obvious answer is a straightforward, political answer: because the economic consequences of Obamanomics have thus far been negative – or at the very least Obamanomics has yet to produce economic growth. This, in turn, has paved the way for a potential implosion of the Democratic Party this November.

But underlying the short-term political problem for progressives are serious philosophical flaws. Yet much of what we see and hear from progressives these days fails to address these flaws – and that’s bad for America.

Most of the progressive criticism of the Obama Democrats seems to take-on one of either a couple different themes. First, there’s the theme that “Obama should have focused more on job creation” during his first two years in office, rather than spending so much time and energy on healthcare legislation. Progressive pundit Arianna Huffington has been sounding this alarm for at least the last nine months, recognizing before many others that, yes, even Barack Obama needs to preside over a flourishing economy if he’s going to retain any political clout.

The other theme of criticism among progressives is that “Obama hasn’t gone far enough.” His approach to “reforming” healthcare should have been to completely shut-down any private sector involvement in the healthcare industry and the medical profession, and to place it all under the auspices of government-run enterprise. Similarly, he should have put “big oil” in its place by now, and should have already legislated a reduction in petroleum consumption while “creating” a “green energy industry.”

DUI: Driving under the influence…of Big Labor-pandering, left-wing radicals

My column today dives into the TARP special inspector general’s audit of the “Factors Affecting the Decisions of General Motors and Chrysler to Reduce Their Dealership Networks.” You can find it at the TARP OIG’s website here. I encourage you all to read through the entire 45-page report. The superficial MSM coverage of the audit, released late Sunday, didn’t do justice to the independent watchdog’s damning indictment of the arrogant bureaucrats in charge of nationalizing the U.S. auto industry — or the devastating consequences of politically-driven “shared sacrifice” with Obama, his SEIU cronies, and campaign lackeys behind the wheel.

Obama had the chutzpah to drag an unemployed car dealership employee laid off by Honda up on stage Monday to attack Republicans over government unemployment benefits. I suggest Republicans match him with a stage full of unemployed Chrysler and GM workers who lost their dealership jobs as a direct result of the capricious mandates of Obama’s non-expert auto experts.

A few trips back down memory lane before we get to the column: I’ve been hounding the Hayekian fatal conceit of Treasury’s TARP peddlers (under both Democrat and Republican administrations) from day one. And I’ve been hounding auto bailout supporters (both Democrat and Republican) since day one. Only the willfully blind and the woefully dumb couldn’t see what was coming.

Chicken Littles on Capitol Hill, I’m talking to you.

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Dealergate: Destroying Jobs in the Name of “Shared Sacrifice”
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency comes as close to George Orwell’s version of Big Brother as any element of the federal government. It operates on a totally irrational basis, ignoring anything that even passes for real science. Through its regulatory power it imposes insane mandates that drive up the cost of everything and is trying to drive major elements of energy provision out of business.

What, for example, is the EPA doing offering “tips to protect eyes, skin from the Sun’s harmful rays”? Does the EPA sell sunscreen products? Charged with cleaning the nation’s air and water, why is it venturing into areas better served by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services?

Charged with keeping the U.S. waters clean, why has the EPA launched a “National Water Conservation Campaign” complete with tips such as checking the toilet for “silent leaks” or replacing your showerhead with a “WaterSense labeled model.” Do we really need the EPA in the business of approving some showerheads over others?

The answer is that the EPA wants to be involved with all aspects of people’s lives and sees no limits on its authority or power and it wants you to love it for all the effort it is making to save you from a horrible death.

Recently the EPA classified milk as oil! How crazed is that???

It based this on the fact that milk contains animal fat which is a non-petroleum oil. The result is that dairy farming has become even more costly and you can bet the costs will be passed on to consumers.

While the Gulf of Mexico is polluted by millions of gallons of oil from the BP disaster, Frank Konkel of Silver Sky Dairy in Hesperia, Michigan, and all other dairy farmers will have to develop and implement spill prevention plans for milk storage tanks. The rules are set to take effect in November.

For many years people around the world have marveled at how the United States has been so innovative and creative using good old fashioned common sense to solve knotty problems and find solutions to overcome bureaucratic hurdles.

In essence, it has greatly helped this country become number one in just about any phase of life, or commerce.  We truly were the greatest country in the world.

But in recent years, many foreign countries have used our very own mantras of excellence and brilliance to outsmart us.  One of those situations is the ‘citizenship by birth’ solution to gain something that would otherwise be very unattainable, or at the very least, very difficult.

It all starts with a provision of our United States Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to grant citizenship to descendants of slaves.

On July 09, 2010, Act for America showed an article by ABC News written on April 14, 2010 by Devin Dwyer titled, “A New Baby Boom? Foreign ‘Birth Tourists’ Seek U.S. Citizenship for Children

More Foreign Mothers Live Abroad to Give Birth on U.S. Soil, Debate Over 14th Amendment” in which it is stated that a new tourism industry is being created where of the “millions of foreign tourists who visit the United States each year, a growing number return home with a brand new U.S. citizen in tow. “

To me, this is just more legalized theft, perpetrated with the permission and yes, even encouragement, of our anti-American Executive Branch of government and featuring Mr. Obama, State Secretary Hillary Clinton, AG Eric Holder and our Homeland Security Chief, Janet Napolitano.  With four pro-terrorist, anti-Americans like that how is the country to survive?