…,this one purportedly by a Law student, that sounds like a GREAT idea to me!

DIVORCE AGREEMENT

Dear American liberals, leftists, social progressives, socialists, Marxists and Obama supporters, et al:

We have stuck together since the late 1950’s, but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I want a divorce.

I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has run its course. Our two ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on what is right so let’s just end it on friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our own way.

Here is a model 20 separation agreement:

Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by landmass each taking a portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes.

We don’t like redistributive taxes so you can keep them.

You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.

Since you hate guns and war, we’ll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA and the military.

You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore and Rosie O’Donnell (You are, however, responsible for finding a
bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move all three of them).

We’ll keep the capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart and Wall Street.

You can have your beloved homeless, homeboys, hippies and illegal aliens.

We’ll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO’s and rednecks. We’ll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.

You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and we’ll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us.

You can have the peaceniks and war protesters. When our allies or our way of life are under assault, we’ll help provide them security.

We’ll keep our Judeo-Christian values…You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism and Shirley McClain.

You can also have the U.N…but we will no longer be paying the bill.

We’ll keep the SUVs, pickup trucks and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Subaru station wagon you can find.

You can give everyone healthcare if you can find any practicing doctors. We’ll continue to believe healthcare is a luxury and not a right.

We’ll keep The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the National Anthem. I’m sure you’ll be happy to substitute Imagine, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, Kum Ba Ya or We Are the World.

We’ll practice trickledown economics and you can give trickle up poverty your best shot.

Since it often so offends you, we’ll keep our history, our name and our flag.

Sincerely,

John J. Wall
Law Student and an American

P.S. Also, please take Barbara Streisand & Jane Fonda with you.

P.P.S. I would like to include the following addendum:

Again, in the spirit of this Divorce Agreement, we will also keep the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States of America since the current administration, from President through all those listed above have ceased to use or abide by it. You can keep the writings of every anti-American you choose to follow.

Works for me!

Hat Tip to the illustrious B.J.S.

…from today’s Washington Times Online. I’m somewhat pressed for time this morning, I have some people to meet, but figured I’d share them.

Here we have a fine example of the term, “haste makes waste” in action, in this case mongers of political agendas in such a hurry to blow our hard earned tax money that they misinformed the public, largely through failure to do their homework and largely to get their itinerary pushed through in a hurry, in an un-thought-out, unconstitutional, just plain stupid act, part of the idiotic and ill advised TARP program.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. misled the public about the financial weakness of Bank of America and other early recipients of the government’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating “unrealistic expectations” about the companies and damaging the program’s credibility, according to a report by the program’s independent watchdog.

The federal government last October loaned Bank of America and eight other “healthy” financial institutions a total of $125 billion - the initial payout from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - in an attempt to avoid a series of major bank collapses that would push the sputtering economy into a free fall or depression.

The rationale for giving money to stable banks and not failing ones, regulators said, was that such institutions would be better able to lend money and thus unfreeze tight credit markets - a major factor in last year’s Wall Street losses.

Right. Now the American taxpayer gets to pay the price for the blatant miscalculations due to political agendas and faulty thinking of a number of general purpose assholes.

Moving right along, we have the messiah Barack Hussein, whose military expertise evidently outshines that of his generals, coming up with excuses as to why he’d rather allow U.S. servicemen and woman to die than to commit more troops where General McChrystal says they are needed. What does McChrystal know, anyway, right? He’s just a general, whereas Obama, the guy who once, for campaign reasons, said the war in Afghanistan is justified in order to compare it to Iraq (according to his excellency, unjustified) is so much more knowledgeable about warfare that, well,

One day after an attack in Afghanistan killed eight American soldiers, President Obama’s national security adviser downplayed both the importance of U.S. troop levels and the possibility of a Taliban return to power.

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested that Gen. McChrystal’s call for more troops must be tempered by diplomatic considerations as the president weighs how to deal with the 8-year-old war.

“Well, I think the end is much more complex than just about adding ‘X’ number of troops. Afghanistan is a country that’s quite large and that swallows up a lot of people,” the retired Marine general said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Right, let’s here more, Jones. What else did Obama instruct you to say, and being an ex-military man yourself, how does it feel to be a party to it?

The rest of the story can be found here.

…that says it all.

The sad part is - this is 100% correct

This should be read and understood by all Americans—Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature,

It is now official—you are ALL corrupt morons:

The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775—you have had 234 years to get it right—and it is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935—you have had 74 years to get it right—and it is broke.

Fannie Mae was established in 1938—you have had 71 years to get it right—and it is broke.

War on Poverty started in 1964—you have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to “the poor”—and they only want more.

Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965—you have had 44 years to get it right—and they are broke.

Freddie Mac was established in 1970—you have had 39 years to get it right—and it is broke.

The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, it has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before—you had 32 years to get it right—and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every “government service” you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars—AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?

Are you crazy, or do you just believe all Americans are morons too?

Truly, the inmates are running the asylum—and what does this say about us, as voters who put such idiots in office?? If we do not vote against EVERY incumbent currently in office—we are ALL morons, regardless of our political leanings.

Thanks and a great big hat tip to B.J.S.

…given the obvious intentions of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid dynasty to ignore the will of the American people in order to bring their own vision of a socialist country to fruition, whether or not the Tea Party’s culminating march on Washington, D.C. will ultimately effect anything.

I say this as someone who, in the past, has done at least some of my share of conservative activism, because in the past, we’ve had a government led by people who, at least minimally, remembered that their employers were the citizens of these here United States.

Now, however, we have the Obama Administration combined with a liberal-run, Democrat majority in the House and Senate who couldn’t give a rat’s ass what the people want.

After all, they reason, they know better than we do what’s good for us, and obviously that means that a socialist country is far better, in their estimation, than the free country to which we have been accustomed since our forefathers bled and died to earn us that freedom.

So a humongous number of Americans from all over gathered in D.C. on Saturday to convey to the Obama machine what it is that Americans want from their (our) leaders.

Sarah Bond’s outrage over massive deficit spending and debt is not a partisan matter for her. And it was enough to motivate her to travel from San Diego to Washington to let politicians know what she thinks.

“I’m here out of sheer frustration of spending from both parties, and this started with TARP,” Bond said, referring to the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, pushed by President George W. Bush and supported mostly by congressional Democrats.

Bond was part of a large crowd marching on Washington on Saturday. Adam Brandon, spokesman for Freedom Works Foundation, one of the main sponsors of the event, estimated the crowd at 150,000. But on Sunday, the group’s Web site estimated that hundreds of thousands of people turned out.

What do the politicians think of that?

Regardless of precise number, Bond told CNSNews.com that members of Congress “are just confused and panicking because they never had to deal with this many fiscal conservatives before.”

Well, shouldn’t that tell them something?

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) also thought the gathering represented a fundamental realignment of politics in America.

“Anybody that doesn’t recognize this is mainstream America is going to miss the boat. I hope my party, the Republicans, realize that this is not a right-wing group,” DeMint told CNSNews.com. “This is moms and dads and grandpas and grandmas. This is Democrats and independents. They just are alarmed at growth of government and debt and takeovers and the health care was just a tipping point.”

The problem, Mr. DeMint, is that while the Republicans have long been a problem where our fiscal spending is concerned, they are not in the majority on the Hill, and since the Democrats took over that majority, even moreso since Obama lied, hand on Bible, when he vowed to “protect and defend the Constitution” and assumed the Presidency, the Republicans have been continually beaten down by the folks on the left side of the aisle.

The real problem, here, is the Democrats, who are the ass boys & ass gals for the far left. Most of the Democrats on the Hill belong to those lefties, they are no longer their own people. They are the shit the far left scrapes off the bottoms of their shoes when they don’t need them for anything. Once honorable Democrat politicians now follow the corrupt, anti-America beat of the liberal drum, with only a handful of blue-dog exceptions.

Barack Hussein, Pelosi and Reid call the shots, their only ambition being to drag this country so far to port as quickly as they can that there’ll be no turning back. No matter what lies they tell us about their respect for the Constitution, the truth is that they hold that great document in profound contempt and want to grind it underneath the heel of socialism.

Which comes back to why I am not entirely convinced that the whole Tea Party thing is really going to do any good. If no one in the position to do anything about anything gives a damn what the people want, well…

George Skypeck, a Vietnam Army veteran from Accokeek, Md., said Americans are rising up as they did in the 1960s, only this time it is not the radicals who are speaking up. “The 60s radicals are now in office,” he said. “I didn’t like them then, and I don’t like them now.”

Good observation, George.

Some of the signs read, “Prosecute ACORN, Not the CIA,” “Stop Spending and Start Cutting,” “Obomunism,” “Not with My Money,” and “Adams-Madison-Jefferson: The Original Right Wing Extremists.”

Tom Hill of West Haven, Conn., held a sign reading, “Today’s State Controlled Media,” calling ABC News the “All Barack Channel,” CNN the “Counterfeit News Network,” NBC News “Nothing But Crap” and CBS News “Controlled By State.”

BRAVO!!!!

Now let’s hope I’m wrong, or just one of those yees of little faith, and the sheer numbers of conservatives who participated have made some kind of difference.

Let’s all drop what we’re doing and go to work for Uncle Sam! That way, we’ll each be able to earn back our tax money and more as those taxes continue to go up and come full circle: They pay our salaries and benefits, we pay it all back to them in taxes.

Almost like kiting a check.

The House-passed climate change bill, if enacted, would expand the federal government so much that it would take billions of dollars and thousands of new employees to implement.

Yes, let’s just keep on bloating the government, blow it up like a balloon until it bursts.

Now-obscure federal agencies such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would have to become mini-behemoths in order to handle their expanded responsibilities. Congress would have to appropriate billions of dollars for more bureaucrats, much of which is not reflected in the House bill.

So, what’s a few billion here, a few billion there, right? Ask any liberal, it’s nothing at all, surely not when it’s being spent wisely, such as in the course of pushing a really bad idea based solely on the replacement of scientific evidence by the politics of a gaggle of agenda driven left wingers.

“It could be a $2 trillion market within five years,” said Bart Chilton, commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

How?

The commission, which would police the new futures market for allowances, apparently would need to expand its work force by at least 31 percent initially to fulfill its obligations under the bill. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which would oversee the day-to-day trading of allowances, has estimated that it would have to expand by 20 percent or 30 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which would oversee pollution regulation, also would balloon in size. The agency regulates 330 million tons of pollution a year but would regulate 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year from 7,400 facilities under the legislation.

I say go for it! Let’s bankrupt the country once and for all!

What’s with these people, anyway? Don’t we look for stuff like common sense and brains in the candidates we vote for?

I guess not.

“I’m not sure the government is capable of handling the bureaucracy that will come if the carbon market is set up,” said William Kovacs, senior vice president of environment and regulatory affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

That’s okay, as long as they’re spending our money faster than they can tax it out of us, the sun will be shining in Liberal Land.

Read the entire article here.

We are witnessing, via the excesses of the Obama Administration and the Democrats on the Hill, the largest and, by virtue of its size, least affordable spending spree by any government in history, sums of money so vastly beyond that which we have to spend that to say these people are overextending us would be a profound understatement.

The children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the present generation, as yet unborn, are becoming unwitting lenders in the financing of the great debt being generated, yet when their taxtimes arrive, they will no longer function as lenders, but as borrowers — through rendered-necessary and heavily increased taxes, it is they who will be forced to pay off both the principals and interest of the immense debt underneath which our incumbent, irresponsible liberal “progressive” leaders are in the process of burying them.

This collective “groundbreaking” expenditure is falsely packaged as a series of measures geared toward jump-starting our troubled economy. In actuality, it is a collection of temporary bailouts that will lead to other temporary bailouts as the supposedly bailed-out companies fail under the inept auspices of government direction and allocations of massive amounts of the current and future taxpayers’ hard earned lucre to liberal “progressive” political PACs, unions and Utopian causes — you know, those bureaucracy-generating ones, for which our political left is famous, that snowball over the years into expensive tragedies.

Hundreds of billions of dollars. The concept, even, of so much money is mind boggling.

That said, stop and think.

There are what? About three hundred million people in this country? And the Obama spending spree totals more than two million times that number?

Well, Barack, Pelosi, Reid and friends, how about this?

If you’re dead set on doing the socialist thing, why not simply bail out all Americans on a case-by-case basis? This one needs his irresponsibly assumed mortgage paid off, fine: pay it off for him. That one is un-or-underinsured in the healthcare department, pay off his hospital bills or open an account from which his health insurance premiums can be debited. This one’s homeless but wants to work and be independent, get him a small studio apartment, pay the bills and give him a few hundred a month to eat and commute on while he’s attending the trade school we’re paying for and then looking for a job. Etc, etc, etc…

Let those in need of assistance file for it, give them, say, a three month window and the carved in stone warning that the government is only going to do this one time. To process claims and disburse funds, hire qualified temps with an understanding that the job will only last three months.

Even if everybody in the country had a million dollar problem, three hundred million would be a real bargain compared to what they’re serving up now.

That, friends, is about as far reaching a compromise as I would make, were I in the position to do so.

*Offer extends only to individuals, not big corporations, and only to U.S. citizens.

Capable, visionary, ambitious people built the big banks, brokerage houses and automobile companies into the dynamos they have become. Let these same concerns now fix themselves, restructure, go Chapter 11, do whatever they need to do. Don’t nationalize these private sector businesses under the pretense of bailing them out. This is America, we don’t do that kind of thing.

Or at least we didn’t.

…when I look at the way things have come together for the worse in America, well…

Fannie Mae and other unconstitutional governmental (thanks, Democrats) incursions into the mortgage millieu snowballed, gradually gaining girth until we were looking at a voluminous downhill juggernaut that, very rudely, took the rest of the economy with it as it headed on down the hill.

Waiting conveniently at the bottom of said hill, we found any right thinking American’s worst nightmare — profoundly far left majorities in the House and Senate with the likes of a Barack Obama waiting to be sworn in as President of the United States (no, I’m not throwing rocks at the man, I’m merely making what I prefer to refer to as an astute observation).

We have foreclosures, we have failing banks and brokerage firms, we have failing auto makers.

We have the annual multi-billion dollar illegal immigrant problem, all those criminal aliens our political left, those same critters now running the country, want to legitimize.

At any rate, things aren’t looking all that rosy right now, and given the crock of shit stimulus package these people have dropped on us, they look even bleaker for the future.

Forget the AIG bonuses and all the rest of the stuff that’s making making the public’s blood boil; All the rage we expend on those picayunes — yes, they are bagatelle when placed beside the Big Picture, and they also help to distract Americans, to the joy of President Obama and the Democrats on the Hill, from those things that should be our primary concerns:

We are in the process of nationalizing the banks and other financial institutions, by purchasing their stock, which gives the government a “say” in the day to day affairs of these concerns.

We are being committed to programs that make children as yet unborn into unwitting moneylenders, only lenders with a twist — they will also be the debtors, paying back both principal and interest in the form of taxes.

We are watching a liberal president and a liberal Congress allocate billions of dollars into the coffers of PACs and unions that support their leftist campaigns so that they’ll have these same funds on hand to donate to future liberal campaigns — this is nothing short of robbing all American taxpayers in order to perpetuate the careers of a few politicians who have little or no use for the letter of the Constitution. The most descriptive terms I can think of for this are Grand Larceny and Treason.

We are witnessing the greatest rape of our economy in history, trillions of dollars we neither have nor can afford to borrow being poured like water into bureaucracies, agendas and political programs that will lead us into the depths of economic tragedy as they expand and demand exponential expenditure increases, transforming the world’s greatest economy into the same pitiful class as those of any failed socialist country.

Returning to the top of this post,

I Dislike Sounding Like A Conspiracy Theorist, but…

Our current economic situation, much of it sparked by policies and bureaucracies forced onto/ into the private sector over the last couple of decades by the folks on the left side of the aisle, seems to have coincided rather conveniently with our having both a liberal run Congress and a liberal president at the same time, enabling the passing of the legislation that now threatens to transform our beloved country from the successful free market behemoth it has always been into the miserable, infinitely less free socialist state our miserable, shit eating, treasonous, Stalin loving liberals have longed it to be, their Utopian little minds unable to grasp the depths of the consequences they, themselves will have to bear along with those of us whom they are victimizing by sabotaging the capitalist republic in which we have been quite happy to dwell.

Concurrently, they have pursued the three agendas that are of paramount concern to any totalitarian government.

They attack belief in G-d, because belief in Him might stand between the citizens and their total devotion to the government;

They control and manipulate the media, using propaganda and selective reporting to shape public opinion and, as we’ve seen, even to elect a president!

I hate to say this, my friends, but it looks to me as though our nation’s internal enemies are winning, have perhaps already won, through a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

By the time 2012 arrives, it may well be too late to reverse what the Obama Administration and the Pelosi/ Reid Congress have set in motion.

I dislike sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but…

I am forever hearing liberals complain about “income inequity”, whose dubious statistics the Democrats and the MSM use to press for more and more government interference in the marketplace. When you tell a lefty that a major reason Congress has such a low approval rating is that they haven’t accomplished a thing since the Democrats assumed leadership on the Hill, he or she invariably replies that “they raised the minimum wage”.

Then the more “informed” among them (the ones who read the New York Times), will give you bogus income statistics to show that the average wage has decreased. Some attribute this falsehood to a failure of the Bush tax cuts to help the “little guy”.

My stock reply is that the only thing that might offset the positive effect of the tax cuts is the increase in the minimum wage. Whenever it increases, everybody gets a raise, not just the guy at the bottom of the wage scale. An employer has to pay that increase x 8 x 40 x 52 to all his employees, and that adds up, often to such measures as downsizing to pick up the slack for significant decreases in company net revenues.

Naturally, that falls on deaf ears as liberals believe that a business is responsible for assuming the role of a social services department for employees, even if it loses money in so doing.

But I’m getting a little off track, here.

Where this so-called decline in employee wages is concerned, I am in complete agreement with an article by a columnist I have long considered to be as spot-on as one can be, Thomas Sowell.

Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the Census Bureau, which seem to indicate that.

On the other hand, income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service seem to show the exact opposite: People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91 percent by 2005.

The top one percent — “the rich” who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left — saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26 percent.

Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income increased by 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.

How can all this be? How can official statistics from different agencies of the same government — the Census Bureau and the IRS — lead to such radically different conclusions?

There are wild cards in such data that need to be kept in mind when you hear income statistics thrown around — especially when they are thrown around by people who are trying to prove something for political purposes.

One of these wild cards is that most Americans do not stay in the same income brackets throughout their lives. Millions of people move from one bracket to another in just a few years.

So much for “the rich get richer…”

The column can be read in its entirety (highly recommended, it’s brilliant) over here.

I’ve debated (actually, given the propensity of liberals to screech and try to talk over dissenting opinion, “argued” might be a better word) with subscribers to both liberal doctrine and the MSM over their misbegotten statistics regarding the results of the Bush tax cuts, notably among them millions of jobs that have been created as companies invest surpluses created by their lowered tax bills in expanding their interests and hiring more people.

They say that the average wage has decreased.

I say that “Well, what do you expect? When jobs are created en masse, most of them are entry level. People who had no jobs are suddenly working again, and they are starting at the bottom.”

Most of them will eventually earn promotions and pay raises and, as Thomas Sowell said, they will be followed by others who, while starting off on the lower rungs of the compensation ladder, will progress, as time goes by, into higher income brackets.

Mainstream liberals are, for the most part, either financially comfortable or on food stamps. Neither group has any idea whatsoever as to the other’s realities, though the former believes they are experts on the latter’s realities.

Right.

A liberal who earns two hundred thousand bucks a year, up from fifty G’s right out of college, hasn’t a clue re the life of, say, “the guy who sweeps”, a dishwasher, a retail sales clerk, a cabbie, a homeless person, a bus driver or a welfare mother of three. The valet who parks the liberal’s car at his favorite night club, a busperson in a restaurant, a cashier at a gas station or convenience store, a desk clerk at a hotel, all are ciphers due to the very reality of their being there to serve. Individually, they are outside the equation. All the subjects of liberal attention, with the exception of specific opportunities to play the dreaded “race card” or conservatives ripe for attacking for political ends, are anonymous masses, which allows for a plethora of creative statistics and the interpretations thereof.

Unrelated to the topic at hand but relevant where disinformation by the MSM is concerned, Ann Coulter has a column out on the fearless leader of the liberal propaganda and lies community.

…about the price of gas being over $3.00 a gallon at the pump, the cost of heating a home in winter and water year round with natural gas, and the cost of electricity going up as consumption increases, Democrats and Republicans alike. I’ve heard a vicious, nasty, ugly rumor that many on the left blame George Bush. Can you believe that? I mean, Democrats blaming Bush for something. Preposterous!

How could they? It is, after all, the Democrats who are responsible for the lion’s share of our dependence on greedy, terrorist producing countries for oil. They’re the culprits behind energy resources and capabilities laying fallow within the boundaries of U.S. territory and good old American know-how.

I ran across this spot-on commentary by Pete Du Pont in yesterday’s (30 July 07) Opinion Journal, titled Just Drill, Baby that literally brims over with information.

America’s domestic oil production is declining, importation of oil is rising, and gasoline is more expensive. The government’s Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. crude oil field production declined to 1.9 billion barrels in 2005 from 3.5 billion in 1970, and the share of our oil that is imported has increased to 60% from 27% in 1985. The price of gasoline has risen to $3.02 this month from $2 in today’s dollars in 1985.

Washington politicians will tell you this is an “energy crisis,” but America’s energy challenges are far more political than substantive.

First, we are not running out of oil. In 1920 it was estimated that the world supply of oil was 60 billion barrels. By 1950 it was up to 600 billion, and by 1990 to two trillion. In 2000 the world supply of oil was estimated to be three trillion barrels.

I can testify, personally, on the heady days of the late 1970s, when I worked in the offshore “oil patch” for awhile out of Louisiana. I say “heady” because every other week was seven days of party time on “the beach” (in Nawlins) between weeks on the rigs. Back then there was an oil boom in the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere in the very early 1980s, the oil companies capped most of the wells in favor of keeping our domestic oil in reserve and buying from the Arabs.

Depending on the Mooslims for our main sources of energy and transportation fuel is pretty dumb when there are alternatives. Lately, OPEC went so far as to cap the amount of oil they produce in order to keep prices up.

And there are alternatives.

The U.S. has substantial supplies of oil and gas that could be accessed if lawmakers would allow it, but they frequently don’t. A National Petroleum Council study released last week reports that 40 billion barrels of America’s “recoverable oil reserves are off limits or are subject to significant lease restrictions”–half inshore and half offshore–and similar restrictions apply to more than 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (We consume about 22 trillion cubic feet a year.)

Access to the 10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve has been prohibited for decades. Some 85 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, but a month ago the House again, as it did last year, voted down an amendment that would have allowed the expansion of coastal drilling for oil and natural gas. All of which leaves the U.S. as the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.

Just as we’re the only country on earth that permits rampant violation of our borders and permits our immigration laws to be made a mockery of, we are the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.

Then there are all the other energy ideas Congress wishes to adopt–better energy efficiency for washers, driers, boilers, motors and refrigerators; greater fuel efficiency for cars; and more use of wind, solar and geothermal power generation. Good ideas all–especially more fuel-efficient automobiles–but not substantively or immediately very helpful in meeting the challenge of increasing America’s energy supplies to keep our economy, jobs and prosperity increasing.

To do that we must build many more nuclear power plants and increase our drilling for oil and gas. The NPC report says it takes 15 to 20 years from exploration until production begins, and it costs $3 billion to build an average 120,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery. That is just the opposite of the current congressional policy of reducing oil use, blocking access to existing domestic oil reserves, not increasing nuclear power generation, and touting ethanol as another subsidy for farmers.

Ah, ethanol, ahem…

I’ve already posted on the reality behind the ethanol lie in the past. Evidently, Mr. Du Pont feels the same way I do about it.

Oil, natural gas and nuclear power are the indispensable energy resources to insure the prosperity of America’s economy. But that is not what the congressional leadership thinks. So if we mustn’t drill offshore for oil or natural gas, or build nuclear power plants, what is the politically correct action Congress intends to take?

Increasing ethanol subsidies for farmers is at the top of the list. Ethanol is a politically hot energy substance produced from crops like corn, soybeans, sunflowers and switch grass. Current law requires 7.5 billion gallons to be produced by 2012; the new Senate bill would increase that to 36 billion by 2022.

But ethanol is not a good gasoline substitute. It takes some seven gallons of oil to produce eight gallons of corn-based ethanol–diesel fuel for the tractors to plant and harvest the corn, pesticides to protect it, and fuel for trucks to transport the ethanol around the country. So there is not much energy gain, nor with all the gasoline involved does it help with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And ethanol yields one-third less energy per gallon than gasoline, so that mileage per gallon of ethanol-blended auto fuel is less than gasoline mileage.

Ethanol is a politically popular subsidized product. Producers get a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy and are protected from international ethanol imports by a 2.5% tariff and an ethanol import duty of 54 cents a gallon. These subsidies have brought more than 100 American ethanol refineries into operation, and another six dozen are going to be built, which has nearly doubled the price of corn, raised the cost of beef and other corn-fed livestock, and increased the cost of milk and corn syrup for soft-drink manufacturers.

(Above emphasis mine, though I will add that I disagree with Mr. Du Pont’s intimation regarding man’s activities having any effect on climate change, ie nor with all the gasoline involved does it help with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, though the Goremongers might give it some thought)

It’s quite obvious that the reason a large number of these people we elect to the Senate and the House pursue lifelong careers in politics is because they wouldn’t last a week in the private sector…at least as businessmen and businesswomen. Corporate shareholders wouldn’t stand for being bankrupted by incompetents the way we Americans tolerate these idiots bankrupting our country, creating unnecessary inflation and squandering our taxes.

According to such cartoon characters as Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, should they manage to get enough of their fellow travellers elected so as to have a majority in the House of Representatives, with Pelosi expected to become Speaker of the House (well, Halloween is almost upon us, so what’s a good scare among friends?), one of the first priorities of the Democrats will be to stamp out the Bush tax cuts and roll back our taxes to 1990s levels.

If I were an enemy of the state, I would utterly destroy my hands applauding this ambition. Unfortunately, I am a patriot who loves America, to say nothing of the fact that I am also an American who lives and pays taxes here, so I must convey the blatant fact that I am not a fan of this intended tax increase.

I understand the Democrats’ need to tax me into the ground. Well, not exactly understand it, per se, but I realize that the Democrats have a serious problem with their fellow Americans being able to keep some of the money they earn and are fixated on the concept of raising taxes whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Some people are into sky diving, some people collect butterflies, some people are passionate stamp collectors, some people love archery, some tennis, some throwing rocks at passing cars, some surfing porn websites, some collecting sea shells, some climbing trees, others mountains…. Democrats are into raising taxes. It’s what they do, just as sucking blood is what mosquitos do, or what leeches do.

It’s not their fault, it’s simply who they are.

They particularly like to tax those who are successful, like the rich and like large, prosperous corporations, and are very much like Robin Hood — they take from the rich, and give to the poor. It makes them feel good — hell, it makes them feel great — stripping a big company of its investment capital plunges them into ecstasy.

Back in the 1980s, during the Reagan Administration, the greatest President in my lifetime stopped the bloodsucking practice of penalizing American business for its success, allowing it to keep its investment capital in order to put it to work, and lo and behold, despite the Democrats’ criticism of what they fondly referred to as Reaganomics, our economy exploded into a dynamo of successful professionals, low unemployment, newly created millionaires and prosperous companies.

This trend continued through the Bush 1 Administration, but then, alas and alack, American voters sent Bill Clinton, a Democrat, off to the White House.

Keeping to the sacred tradition of Democrats, he raised taxes, as usual targeting the rich.

Before the end of his second term (he was actually reelected, go figure!), we were plunged into recession. The unemployment rate soared, businesses struggling to stay afloat transferred record amounts of their production to outsourced labor pools and after Algore, Clinton’s Veep, lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, the newly elected President engendered massive tax cuts.

Naturally the Democrats, dismayed that Americans were being permitted to keep more of their earnings, mounted yet another of their innumerable bumper-sticker friendly campaigns — “The Republicans have given tax cuts to the rich, screwing the poor as always!”

That was worth, at the very least, a good chuckle, since every American taxpayer was entitled to the cuts. The Democrats somehow managed, once realizing that they really couldn’t produce any low income working folks who were being either neglected or recieving the fid, cited poor people on welfare and other premature social security venues who weren’t benefiting from the tax cuts, the fact that these people didn’t pay any income tax to begin with notwithstanding… they actually forced the government to give something “back” to these noncontributors as well.

Meanwhile, the tax cuts enabled corporate America and smaller business people to use the “surplus” equity to expand existing business and create new enterprises.

The result has been a major rebound in our economy and a serious decrease in the unemployment rate that is still adjusting downward. America is again flourishing!

But let’s not be too confident, friends, okay? We still haven’t had this year’s elections, so we don’t actually know where we stand.

We’re pretty confident about holding a Republican majority in the Senate, but there has been a lot of negative conjecture regarding the House majority after 7 November. Personally, I believe we’ll hold our majority there, as well, though we’ll have a few less seats.

But…

Should the Democrats gain a majority in the House Of Representatives, they will raise taxes, and you can bet your bottom dollar, assuming you still have one, that the late 1990s recession will return even more quickly than it went away.

Of course, the Democrats will find a way to blame Bush….