jfore's Blog

Well, it's official. We are in a Recession. According to the financial gurus this recession actually began back in December of 2007. Of course, George Bush is being blamed. But let me ask you, have you heard ANYONE in the media from ANYWHERE in the world reminding people that the Democrats took over the Congress in 2007 and that's when the economy started going to hell in a hand basket?

The first hit was the increased minimum wage because all wages are keyed to the minimum wage. People had to be laid off and labor costs skyrocketed. The Democrats had to keep their union buddies happy.

Then the Democrats in Congress ala Barney Frank and Chris Dodd got their Democrat cronies installed in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and proceeded to destroy the economy for their own gain. They needed the money for themselves and their reelection campaigns.

As they turned the mortgage industry into their own private piggy bank they started forcing banks to make loans to people with no hope of ever paying them back by using Carter's Community Redevelopment Act. The Democrats had to keep ACORN, NAACP and groups like them happy.

Then the Democrats refused to open up access to our own energy sources and made us rely on super expensive foreign oil even more. The Democrats had to keep their environmental kook buddies happy.

Then, the Democrats tried to increase their control over peoples' lives by passing all sorts of new regulations out of committees that don't require presidential approval.

Then, we elected a new Democrat president who wants to raise taxes on businesses forcing them to start cutting back so that they can be ready to take the hit. Plus he wants to take money away from the producers and give it to the non-producers. Redistribution of wealth anyone? So the people with money aren't buying so they can survive when the Democrats start tasking more money from them.

All of this whittled away at our economy. You whittle away at a tree trunk long enough and the tree is going to come crashing down. But will the Democrats say, "I can not tell a lie, I did it ?" Of course not! They say it's George Bush's fault and the media says YESSA MASSA, your secret is safe with us. But the only people who were ringing the alarm bells were in the Bush administration. But would anyone listen? NOOOOOO!! Yet when it comes time to point fingers the very people who caused this chaos are blaming the people who were trying to prevent it.

Where's the media in all this? They're busy kissing Obama's feet and other body parts. Meanwhile, the country collapses around us. You can never solve a problem until you first identify the cause. Instead, we make the people who caused the problem even more powerful. You people who voted for Liberals deserve whatever you get.

I read this story and couldn’t help wonder how America could allow something like this to happen. I thought we were a compassionate society.

J.C. Gumm played bass guitar at the local Presbyterian church every Sunday morning. Well, one Sunday in September he happened to be the first one to arrive at the church. When he opened the door he was greeted by what he thought were the sounds of a baby cooing. He was right. There at the door was an infant wrapped in a towel. He said, "It was just like a scene from a movie."

Gunn called 911 and held the baby until paramedics arrived. As it turned out, the baby only had a slight case of hypothermia which can even happen to babies that are born in hospital delivery rooms, and recovered very quickly. The nurses nicknamed the baby Autumn Doe after the season.

It seems that a couple of hours earlier the baby’s 22 year-old panic stricken mother had given birth to the baby all alone in a nearby yard after three hours labor using instructions she had read on the internet. She cut the umbilical chord with scissors and threw the placenta into the trash. Then, thinking that it was legal to leave the baby at a church as a safe haven, she carried the baby 3/10 of a mile to the church and had left the baby at the church door knowing that someone would be there very soon. She said that she was going to get something warmer to wrap the baby in and leave a note but had accidentally locked herself out of her apartment.

The only one who knew that she was pregnant was her ex-boyfriend who was in Wisconsin at a National Guard training camp and is due to ship out to Iraq in February or March.

Even though some states do allow newborns to be left at churches, in her state of Washington it’s only legal to leave them at a fire station or a hospital within 72 hours so state prosecutors are charging the mother with third degree abandonment of a dependent person which carries a penalty of up to one year in jail.

Now here’s the part that baffles me. If she had killed her baby in an abortion clinic a few weeks earlier she would be fine. No one would have thought anything of it. But here we have a young panic stricken mother who was trying to do the right thing by carrying her baby to tern -- in spite of the fact that her ex-boyfriend was pressuring her to have an abortion -- and now she is being treated like a criminal.

She told police, "I thought I could have sworn I read churches too." She may have made an error in judgement by leaving her baby at a church instead of a fire station or a hospital, but her intentions were right. She just couldn’t deal with the idea of killing her unborn child in an abortion clinic or leaving it to die after it was born, and she panicked. She told police, "I knew that if I were to leave it at the church it would be taken care of, you know. Put into an adoption agency and getting her a family that really wanted it and give it a great life. I cannot take care of a baby and I can’t deal with it. I don’t have a job. I’m not financially ready." But since she allowed her baby to live and then went to great lengths to make sure that it was taken care of, she has been arrested and faces time in jail. Would someone please explain the logic in that to me.

This woman went to a lot of trouble to carry that baby to a place where she thought it would be safe and cared for. She even called the police the next day and turned herself in after she heard on the news that "authorities are concerned for the health and safety of the mother and are eager to identify her to ensure that she receives the appropriate care." In reality, that was only a trick to get her to identify herself so that they could arrest her.

Think about the message that we’re sending to other young women out there who are in similar situations. What do you think they’re going to do to their babies now? Some of them will go to an abortion clinic and kill the baby and the ones who can’t afford an abortion will simply toss the baby into a Dumpster where it will never be found and walk away. Why should they go to the trouble of trying to make sure that it’s cared for and risk being arrested?

This mother thought that she was doing the right thing by leaving her baby at the church. What are you going to accomplish by prosecuting her? She needs help, not jail time. He baby is now being cared for by her ex-boyfriend’s mother and has a chance at a long and healthy life. Babies that are aborted or tossed into Dumpsters never have that opportunity. She gave her baby life. But these prosecutors are trying to make an example of her, and all they’re doing is telling other women that they’re better off to abort the babies or toss them in the trash.

Okay, let’s have a show of hands. How many of you knew that, last Tuesday, a U. S. District Court judge in Washington D.C ordered that 17 Chinese Muslim detainees who were captured fighting Americans in Tora Bora and have been held in Guantanamo Bay since 2002 should be released in the Washington D.C. area IN THE UNITED STATES? What better place to find juicy sites to bomb, right? I don’t see any hands going up.

The two presidential candidates and the media – with very few exceptions -- have simply ignored it

The Washington Post reported. "It was the first time a U.S. judge has ordered the release of a Guantanamo Bay detainee, and the first time a foreign national held at the facility in Cuba has been ordered transferred to the United States." The judge justified this by saying that these men couldn’t be sent back to their native country – China – because the Chinese government considers them to be terrorists and might arrest them. Well, DUH!! Apparently this idiot judge doesn’t agree with the Chinese government.

He did this in spite of the fact that the Justice Department pointed out, "U.S. law would deny these man entry because they had trained at camps sponsored by ... a group that the Bush administration designated a terrorist organization. I know. Since when does the law mean anything to a Liberal judge?

Fortunately for us an appellate panel stepped in and issued a temporary stay in order to give the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. a chance to look at the issue before these murdering terrorists are turned loose into our neighborhoods.

I have to stress the words "temporary stay." The stark reality is that one Liberal judge decided that we are violating the civil rights of these murderers who have vowed to kill us and we should no longer be allowed to keep them away from society even though they were captured fighting Americans and their own government thinks they’re terrorists and would love to arrest them. He decided that these murderers being held at Guantanamo are simply harmless victims of the evil United States and we shouldn’t be afraid to live next door to them.

Friends, that order will stand if the Circuit Court doesn’t overturn it. Also remember, there are about 200 other terrorist thugs being held in Guantanamo that may also be released into our general population by these Liberal morons in black bath robes. Yet nobody is even questioning how it’s possible that a U. S. Judge could think that our Constitution requires us to let these thugs loose on the American people. Be afraid. Very afraid.

The Liberal knee jerk reaction to the current troubles in the mortgage industry is to automatically blame Capitalism and the Free Market System in general, and Republicans in particular, for our current financial problems, facts be damned.

Well, I don’t want to shock you Libs out there, but the market didn’t cause this. The market was handling things just fine until Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and all your Socialist friends started fiddling with it. You see, one of the biggest myths out there about Wall Street is that it’s populated by rich white Republicans when quite the opposite is true. Most Wall Street executives are Liberal Democrats who have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the Religion of Liberalism by their liberal professors in their liberal schools. Two extreme examples are Warren Buffett and George Soros. This is also why the largest amount of donations from Wall Street firms go to Democrats and Liberal Groups.

So the truth is, this current crisis never would have happened were it not for liberal social engineering brought about by the Carter Administration and escalated by the Clinton Administration.

It all started in 1977. Jimmy Carter hadn’t been in office very long when he and his Democrat cronies in Congress passed the Community Development Act. The purpose of this Act was to put pressure on the major lending institutions to make risky loans to poor people. This was the beginning of the government’s meddling in the mortgage industry Carter’s goal was to have everyone in America owning a home within 20 years.

Obviously this Bill didn’t make any sense at all from a business perspective. Helping poor people buy homes is a noble cause, but the reality is, there are people out there who can’t afford, and should not buy a home. Forcing banks to give them loans isn’t going to make them any more able to pay the loan back. If the truth be known, the real purpose of this Bill was to buy votes, to create dependency on Democrats in Washington, finance left wing groups and create love for the Democrat Party.

Well, this Bill didn’t really have a huge impact under Reagan and Bush 41. There were a few bills passed that removed cumbersome government regulations from the mortgage industry, but none of them had any effect at all on what is happening today. Unfortunately, every Republican effort to do away with the Community Development Act of 1977 met with Democrat resistance. The fact is, the real trigger of our current problems came when the people in the Clinton Administration decided to implement that Act with a passion and rewrote Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s rules requiring banks to meet a "diversity quota" in their loans.

Enter stage right, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno and Assistant Secretary of HUD Roberta Achtenburg. Under Clinton’s direction, these people used the power of the government to put pressure on banks to take on risky loans. They were told that a certain percentage of their loans had to go to people who, by any stretch of the imagination, weren’t qualified. They did this by telling the banks that, and I quote Janet Reno, "There will be investigations if you do not follow these regulations. If you don’t make loans to these people – (essentially people who have no hope of every paying the money back) – we’re going to investigate you, and we’re going to tie you up." They also threatened to prevent these financial institutions from expanding or merging unless they met a certain level of "Community Development" loan making. This opened the door for the Democrats, and a few liberal RINOs, to direct some of these funds to radical Left Wing groups like ACORN, which has been indicted numerous times all across the country for voter fraud, and the very radical left wing Woods Fund. You know who ACORN and the Woods Fund are, right? They’re the groups that terrorist Bill Ayres and village idiot Barack Obama were working for in Chicago during their "Community Organizer" days. Don’t forget that ACORN has been indicted over and over again for voter fraud which is their main reason for existing. Also remember that Obama’s friend and advisor AND FELON Tony Rezko is in that mix too.

So, the Clinton Administration was forcing banks to loan money to people who basically had no way to pay it back. They couldn’t afford to make a down payment, they couldn’t afford the closing costs, and they couldn’t afford the going interest rate for mortgages, so new types of loans were invented to get these people into homes and these loans were EXTREMELY RISKY.

At the same time this was going on Freddie and Fannie’s executives were buying up all this worthless paper and cooking their books in order to get big bonuses for themselves. Surprise surprise! Almost all of these executives were high ranking Democrats in the Carter and Clinton Administrations at one time or another and were being protected by the Democrats in Congress as they looted Freddie and Fannie to line their own pockets.

Well, why would Congressional Democrats protect the illegal actions of Freddie and Fannie’s executives? Simple! At the same time Freddie and Fannie’s executives were looting the company’s funds they were also funneling money to Congressional Democrats to the tune of $4.3 million since 2005 in the form of campaign contributions. They also made large donations to left wing groups that were rife with fraud and corruption themselves and dished out sweetheart loans for the Congressmen.

Here’s how the scam worked. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would buy up these sub-prime loans because the law allowed them to show these notes as assets even though they were nothing more than promissory notes from people who had no real ability to pay them back. Then Fannie and Freddie’s executives were using some "creative bookkeeping" and forging signatures to allow these worthless notes to show up as increasing assets on their books.

Well, guess what executive bonuses were based on. You guessed it, increasing assets. So Congressional Democrats and a few Republicans, along with the management of these two government entities. were able to loot Fannie Mae of hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and perks. But these "assets" were worthless. Several of the perpetrators of this scam were found guilty of fraud and ordered to pay huge fines which doesn’t seem to have bothered them at all. Some of them are currently under investigation by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. The problem is, congressional Democrats structured the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight so that it doesn’t have any real power. Go figure. This is a $10.6 billion accounting fraud scandal folks, and the Democrats DON’T CARE.

So, Fannie Mae chairman and chief executive James Johnson, the former executive administrator to Walter Mondale in the Carter Administration and now a big Obama supporter and campaign donation bundler collected $1.932 million in bonuses from Fannie Mae. He received over $21 million in his last year at Fannie. He also received millions of dollars worth of sweetheart housing loans from Angelo Mozilo at the now bankrupt Countrywide Financial Corp.

Johnson currently advises the Obama campaign and is the man that Obama relied on to help him choose his running mate. He officially stepped down only after the loan scandal involving Countrywide surfaced. Even so, he still talks to Obama on the phone a lot.

Chairman designate and ex-Clinton administration big-wig Franklin Raines, who was forced out of Fannie Mae because he cooked the books, collected $1.11 million from Fannie in bonuses. He collected over $90 million during the five years he was there and also got millions more from Countrywide in sweetheart loans.

Raines is a big Obama fan and has been and unpaid advisor to the Obama’s campaign right along on ,what else, financial and housing affairs.

Vice Chairman Jamie Gorelick was hired at Fannie Mae in spite of the fact that she didn’t have 10 seconds worth of experience in the real estate or finance industry. She collected $770,625 in bonuses and received over $26 million during her five years with Fannie. She was instrumental in covering up Fannie’s financial problems by forging signatures on accounting transactions to assure that she got that bonus. Makes you wonder why she’s not in jail right now. Well, rumor has it that Jamie Gorelick will be Obama’s Attorney General if he wins the election.

You remember Gorelick? She’s the one who was actually running the Clinton Justice Department while Janet Reno did press interviews. She created the infamous WALL that tied law enforcement’s hands and was the single biggest reason we suffered the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

There’s a lot more to this. There are others that looted the company but, in the interest of time, I’m not going to list them all. Suffice it to say that every one of them is a Big Democrat Lib and most of them are working to elect Obama today.

While we’re at it. The current chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Chris Dodd (D, Ct) is the single biggest recipient of donations from Fannie Mae receiving $165,400 since 1989. Obama is second. However, Dodd received his money over many years, but if you look at the donations made in the last few years Obama is far and away number one on Fannie’s favorite politician list having received $126,349 since 2004.

So, Democrats have basically set up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be their own private piggy banks. They used them to line their own pockets by cooking the books, funding their campaigns through donations from Freddie and Fannie employee PACS, and financing their Liberal Agenda by having Freddie and Fannie give money to their favorite Left Wing groups, some of which came back to them in the form of campaign contribution. Then they were able to get sweetheart loans for themselves and their political cronies..

Fannie and Freddie also became home for out of work Democrat politicians, mostly from the Clinton Administration.

The fact that Fannie and Freddie were buying all these bad loans eliminated all risk from the mortgage industry. Even so, things would have still been fine if real estate values had continued to rise. But, you see, with no risk, and low interest rates, the home building industry kicked into high gear and it wasn’t long before their was a glut on the market. There were more houses out there than there were people to buy them. Add to that the increasing fuel and food costs and many more people decided to stay where they were. So, there was a housing glut and prices fell through the floor.

The people who had these loans couldn’t get refinancing or sell the houses to cover the loans because the loans started out at more than the house was worth when they bought it and now the house is worth even less. As more and more of these loans defaulted, the banks had less and less money to lend and the whole house of cards the Democrats had created began to collapse. Easy mortgages and high real estate prices led to more houses on the market. More houses to sell led to falling prices. Falling prices led to mortgage defaults because people found themselves in homes that they couldn’t sell or refinance. Mortgage defaults led to less money to lend. Less money to lend prevented people who were qualified from getting mortgages. This led to more defaults and more homes for sale and the vicious circle continued to grow until we come to what we see today.

So this problem was by no means the result of a runaway unregulated free market led by crooked CEOs in the banking industry. There were a few crooks in the mix, but that’s true of any industry. The market and the CEO’s were running things just fine until the Liberal Democrats stuck their nose into the machinery. All roads lead to Washington Democrats and their liberal government policies and the way they were manipulating and fleecing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Well, why didn’t anyone in the Bush Administration notice what was going on and try to do something about it? Doesn’t that make the Bush Administration responsible?

The fact is, the Bush Administration tried on twelve different occasions to get Congress to rein in Freddie and Fannie by warning them that they were going to collapse and take the rest of us along with them if something wasn’t done. This effort began as early as 2003. The Bush Administration tried to get Freddie and Fannie to accept outside auditors and have better capitalization. But guess who blocked their efforts. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D Ct) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D Ma). They stood in the way of any reform. They claimed that there was nothing wrong with Fannie and Freddie and Republicans were just trying to scare people. They said that we can’t get rid of affordable housing. Well, their definition of affordable housing is giving houses to every Liberal Democrat who can’t pay for it.

In 2005 Alan Greenspan warned Congress that Fannie and Freddie were a train wreck waiting to happen. Shortly after that the Republicans introduced legislation that would have given regulators the authority to crack down on Fannie and Freddie. The Bill did get out of committee and it passed the House, but Senate Democrats led by Dodd, opposed it and it failed to pass. It was defeated on a straight party-line vote. After all, the biggest opponents to that legislation are the same Democrats that received the largest campaign contributions from both Fannie and Freddie. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Christopher Dodd have received mind boggling amounts of money from Fannie and Freddie and they didn’t want anyone looking into their accounting practices. Unfortunately, the Republicans didn’t have a big enough majority to beat back opposition from the Democrats and their RINO friends. The Republicans also shot themselves in the foot when, in the name of the "New Tone" they gave Democrats key positions in the Congress and in the White House.

The fact is, this current banking crisis has Liberal Democrat fingerprints all over it and the biggest fingerprint among them all is Bill Clinton’s. In his first year in office Jimmy Carter and the Democrat Congress passed the Community Development Act that was designed to force banks to take risky loans. These loans would never have been made under any commonsense business model but the Carter Administration said screw the business model. Then Clinton and his cronies decided to buy votes, create dependants, and get financing for groups like ACORN and the Woods Fund at the same time they were weaseling big bonuses and campaign contributions for themselves. This situation was made even worse when the Democrats took over the Congress in 2008.

So the very people who are responsible for creating this mess in the first place are the same people who want to be in charge of fixing it today. They created the situation that led to this and then ignored all the warnings that they were creating a train wreck. Yet now they actually have the nerve to sit there and say that they have no responsibility for this and that they are the only people who are qualified to fix it..

Well this isn’t all that complicated. Its Economics 101. I doubt, however, that Socialist brains can even grasp it. Whenever they are confronted with the facts liberals look like a deer caught in the headlights and then go right back to spouting their bumper sticker sound bytes.

By now it’s no secret that Nancy Pelosi closed down the House of Representatives a few weeks ago and sent her sycophants home on recess without acting on a very critical energy bill that would have, among other things, opened up the Outer Continental Shelf to oil exploration and drilling. To make sure that everyone knew that it was the Democrats who weren’t interested in lowering the high gasoline prices House Republicans stayed in Washington and continued to make speeches from the floor of the House calling for Pelosi and Bush to recall the House back for an emergency session to pass that bill. Of course Pelosi would never do that because , if she did, she knows the bill will pass. I’ll explain in a minute why that would be bad for her. And don’t get me started on Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and his gang of 10 who are trying their best to screw everything up. You see, Pelosi are Graham are too stupid to realize that the current moratorium of offshore drilling expires on October 1st anyway.

In an effort to shut the Republican down Pelosi had the lights, cameras and microphones turned off. But the Republicans turned them back on and continued. Of course, Pelosi’s buddies at CSPAN and in the mainstream media simply ignored what was going on.

The excuses that Pelosi and other Democrats offered for not passing that bill actually insult your intelligence.

First, they said that drilling today wouldn’t yield any new oil for ten years. Barak Obama says it will take even longer. He said, "You wouldn’t see any full production out of any oil drilling off the coasts until 2030." Then in June he upped it and said, "It will take a generation to reach full production." Sorry Barak, that’s simply not true. Oil companies say that they can start pumping oil from certain areas in less than two years. If you use Pelosi’s logic no one should ever start school. After all, that education won’t do you any good for at least 12 to 14 years.

You have to start somewhere. Confucius said, "The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is today."

If that wasn’t bad enough, she wants us to stop using fossil fuels altogether and start using alternatives. She forgets that there are no alternatives available right now to allow us to do that. Most alternatives will never be viable and others are really still in the experimental stage. Just as a footnote here, Sir What’s His Name of Virgin Airlines recently flew an empty 747 from London to Paris with one engine being powered by a fuel made from coconut oil. That flight was so short that the plane never really got in the air before it was coming down to land. Yet it took 180,000 coconuts for that one short flight on one engine. But Pelosi thinks that she has so much power that all she has to do is will it so and it will be so. How arrogant can you get? Only GOD has that kind of power. By the way, one of her "alternatives to fossil fuels" is natural gas. Someone needs to educate the San Francisco Treat to the fact that natural gas IS a fossil fuel.

Wind, hydroelectric and solar sources of energy can be used to produce about 20% of what we need. But they require the use a lot of land and they aren’t very efficient. The best they can produce is about 14% of their design capacity. Even so, the tree hugger types are now attacking those alternative sources by fighting the installation of the power lines needed to bring the electricity from these alternative sources to where it’s needed. So don’t try to tell me that Liberals give a rats rear end about lowering gas prices for you and me. These environmentalists aren’t trying to save the planet. They will do everything in their power to destroy the U.S. Economy because they think America is the source of all evil in the world and they see energy as our Achilles heel.

The next excuse is that drilling here will only reduce the price of gas a few pennies a gallon. Again, not true. Gas prices took a nose dive when Bush just suggested that he was going to lift the White House moratorium on off shore drilling thus allowing Congress to lift theirs. After Bush lifted the presidential order he said, "The only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress."

Well, after saying that, the Democrats started yelling for Bush to release 750 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve. Then they did the stupidest thing on record. They decided to sue OPEC to get them to increase production. I bet that will be REAL EFFECTIVE. I’d bet OPEC is shaking in their boots thinking the Pelosi is going to sue them..But I thought increasing the oil supply wouldn’t lower the price at the pump Ms. Pelosi? Am I missing something? Why will oil from OPEC and the SOR lower gas prices but drilling for our own oil won’t hmmm?

Then they told us about all the millions of acres of oil leases that the oil companies aren’t drilling in. Pelosi says that they need to drill there before we open up new areas. Read my lips. These people are in the OIL BUSINESS Ms. Pelosi. They need crude oil to stay in business. If there was any oil to be had in those areas don’t you think they’d be drilling there? And don’t forget your no growth environmentalist buddies who are standing in the way of any progress. Opening up those areas is Congress’s way of pretending to do something when they really aren’t. They open up the leases knowing that there was no way the oil companies were going to waste their time drilling in those areas.

The next excuse is that oil rigs are unsightly. After all, a visitor to Florida might actually see one of these rigs. Another lie. The closest rig would be at least 50 miles offshore. Most of them even farther. Fisherman also know that the fishing is better near the rigs that are already there.

That leads us to the next excuse. These rigs pose a serious environmental threat. Then they’ll point to the 80,000 barrel oil spill that occurred off the coast of Santa Barbara, California in January of 1969. They seem to forget that that spill occurred almost 40 years ago. Compared to the technology today, the drilling technology available in 1969 is like comparing a 12 inch black and white TV with vacuum tubes to a 60 inch solid state plasma with surround sound. Drilling is vastly safer and more environmentally friendly today.

That Santa Barbara spill also caused the oil companies to step up their efforts to prevent future spills. As a former manager at an oil company I can tell you that oil spills are very costly things and no oil company wants to have one.

Well, what about natural threats like hurricanes? Since oil wells are now capped off beneath the ocean floor and not on the surface like they once were, even if the entire rig snaps off and blows away the well is still capped. That’s why the 3,050 offshore oil rigs were able to cope so well with Katrina, Rita, Gustav and other assorted tropical storms. 168 platforms and 58 rigs were severely damaged by those storms but no significant amounts of oil were spilled.

Now, that doesn’t mean that oil drilling is squeaky clean. They’re just 99.999% clean. There are occasional spills. According to the U. S. Minerals Management Service out of the 11,855 billion barrels of oil produced offshore since 1980 101,997 barrels of oil have been spilled. That’s a 0.001% spillage rate over the last 28 years.

Now listen to this. That means that drilling is 95% cleaner than nature itself. 625,500 barrels of oil seeps from North America’s ocean beds EVERY YEAR. Conclusion? There is no significant threat to the environment.

So, how much oil do we have in this country? I’m glad you asked. In 2006 the Interior Department estimated that there were about 85.9 billion barrels of undiscovered oil sitting offshore in the Outer Continental Shelf areas within U. S territory. In 2007 the Energy Department’s Task Force on Strategic Unconventional Fuels said that "America’s oil shale resources exceeds 2 trillion barrels including about 1.5 trillion barrels of oil equivalent in high quality shales concentrated in the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming... Depending on technology and economics, as much as 800 billion barrels of oil equivalent could be recoverable from oil shale resources yielding (more than) 25 gallons per ton."

The combined 885.9 billion barrels of recoverable oil that the government estimates to be within U.S. territory on the Outer Continental Shelf alone is over three times as much oil as the 260 billion barrels known to exist in Saudi Arabia today.

Yet Democrats still cater to the left wing kooks and refuse to allow us to drill for the resources we have right here in this country. The United States is like a beggar who rattles a tin cup asking for handouts while sitting on billions of dollars of his own money.

I know, I promised to tell you why Nancy Pelosi would be hurt if we drill for our own oil. Well, here it is. I’m sure you’ve all heard the ads by the oilman T. Boone Pickens touting his wind power/natural gas plan. Well Pelosi has invested heavily in his plan to the tune of about $50,000 dollars. It could be more but that’s the last I heard. Well, that scheme will only work if the price of oil stays high. Guess who is in a the best position to keep oil prices high. Could it be Nancy Pelosi? She can block our efforts to add to the oil supply by drilling for our own oil, thus lowering prices. The oil prices stay high and Nancy Pelosi makes tons of money. Haven’t you ever wondered how these people come to Washington with a very modest net worth and then leave a few years later as millionaires? Well, now you know. They manipulate legislation and government contracts to line their own pockets. If you ever want to find out why a politician does anything, follow the money trail and you’ll be right most of the time. The rest of the time they do those things because they’re stupid. Just because you can put on a good enough show to get elected doesn’t necessarily make you smart. Pelosi is the poster child for that idea. There are a few exceptions, but the exceptions are rare.

So, what do you say? I say DRILL HERE - DRILL NOW!!!

Ever since the attacks occurred on 9/11 the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have shifted their traditional focus away from trying to solve crimes after they’ve already happened and now they do whatever they can to detect criminals and prevent them from committing their crimes in the first place. Now why didn’t we think of that before? Of course this effort has been directed most toward the detection and prevention of terrorist attacks.

To make their efforts more effective Attorney General Michael Mukasy recently issued a new set of investigative guidelines for the FBI to use in detecting terrorist plots. Predictably, this didn’t set too well with the Democrats in Congress. More specifically, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick (Leaky) Leahy (D-Vt.) assisted by the ranking Republican RINO on the committee Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). That should come as no surprise. Specter has been known to cater to the ACLU quite often. Why Republicans reelected that guy I’ll never understand. But we did and now we have to sleep in the butter we smeared around.

These guys have their panties in a wad because they think Mukasey’s new guidelines might infringe on someone’s civil rights because they allow law enforcement to consider "race and ethnicity" as they search for terrorists. Translation? They’re afraid that the investigators might actually notice that terrorists tend to be young Arab Muslim males from Islamic controlled countries.

In their defense, the Justice Department assured these two nut cases that no one would ever be considered based on their nationality or religion alone. After all, they have a pretty good track record by not assuming that all Italian Roman Catholics are members of the Cosa Nostra.

Even so, Leahy and Specter did get Mukasy to agree to delay the implementation of his guidelines until after Leahy can hold an investigation into the matter in mid September. In other words, Leahy stopped it and will now drag his feet to see that those guidelines are never implemented.

If we are ever attacked again -- and chances are good that we will be -- never forget the idiots who tied the hands of the people who are trying their best to keep us safe. They worry about the civil rights of people who are trying to kill us. Yet they forget that being killed in an explosion or flown into a building in an airplane is a major violation of the civil rights of Americans. But that doesn’t seem to count to Democrats and RINOs.

More news that you won’t see in the media.

According to Pamela Geller of the Atlas Shrugged blog an examination of the Federal Election Commission filings made by Barack Obama reveals that he has been receiving campaign contributions over several months totaling $24,000 from three brothers from the Edwan family. Well, what’s the big deal? People give to political campaigns every day. Well, here’s the problem. These three brothers are Palestinians who currently live in Rafah, Gaza near the Egyptian border. Rafah is a known Hamas stronghold and a hotbed of terrorist activity.

Terrorist connections aside, Attorney Debbie Schussel points out that, first, foreign nationals are forbidden from giving any money in connection with any election in the U.S. be it local , state, or federal. Second, the most any individual is allowed to give to any federal candidate or to the candidate’s campaign committee is $2,300 per election. That makes these contributions very much illegal. However, I guess the precedent was set by Bill and Hillary Clinton who accepted money from Red Chinese Communists and the Feds ignored it.

If this wasn’t so serious, the way that the Obama campaign tried to hide these contributions would be almost funny. At the very least it shows just how stupid they think Americans are. Schussel explained, "They listed the campaign contributions as coming from Rafah, Georgia..." (There is no such town)... "They used the ‘GA’ from Gaza so it makes it look like it’s legal; and for the zip code it says ‘972,' which is actually the area code to dial over to Gaza."

Let’s face it, if the Obama campaign is going to thumb its nose at the Federal Election Commission by taking contributions that are way above legal limits, why should it bother them if the money comes from foreign nationals with a possible connection to Terrorists. Doesn’t that tell us what kind of president Obama would be?

Don’t expect to hear any of this coming from the mainstream media anytime soon. If John McCain had done this it would be front page news for weeks, right?

There is a lot of talk right now about alternative energy sources that are suppose to be the silver bullet that will kill our dependence on fossil fuels. Unfortunately there is no technology available today that will allow us to do that, and no matter how much Congress insists that there is, the truth is still the truth and nothing will change that. People are working on it and someday we may have an alternative to petroleum, but not today.

One particular source seems to have come to the forefront recently as a result of a series of ads run by T. Bone Pickens, and oil man, promoting the use of wind power. Pickens sees a way to make money from the recent craze to use alternative fuels, and I don’t fault him for that. But that’s all it is, a craze, and that’s all he’s doing, trying to make a bundle of money while he myth of wind power is alive..

To find out the facts on wind power I went to the E.ON Report on Wind Power that is published in Great Britain. E.ON Netz operates the largest energy grid in Europe and has been a leader in developing the means to use wind power to generate electricity for quite some time now. So they are the experts, and this report points out some of the shortcomings in using the wind to generate electricity.

The first downside to wind generators has earned them the wrath of animal rights groups all over the world. You see, the spinning blades on wind generators have a tendency to shred birds every now and then and heaven help you if one of those shredded birds happens to be endangered. In California they’re known as Condor Cuisinarts. This means that any effort to install a wind generator is met with just as many law suits from animal rights kooks as a nuclear power plant would face. They also generate the wrath of the likes of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy if you dare to try to spoil their view while their out yachting by installing wind generators along the shore.

The second thing is the cost. Per kilowatt hour of capacity wind generators are very costly to install and maintain when compared to conventional generating plants. Conventional generators are usually inside buildings and are protected from the elements. Wind generators on the other hand are, by their very nature, exposed and in hard to reach locations. They must also be built to withstand the ravages of nature.

The third thing is the power source to operate the generators isn’t consistent. Wind generators need a consistently strong wind twenty four hours a day seven days a week in order to be efficient. Well, that’s just not going to happen. No matter how windy the location is, on average, there is only enough wind available to supply about 30% of the power needs of its users. That means that 70% of the power must be supplied by a more conventional source.

The fourth problem is that wind generated electricity fluctuates as the wind speed fluctuates and no one wants to have their lights alternating from very bright to very dim all the time. This means that the operators must try to balance out the flow of electricity by the short term use of conventional generators.

Problem number five is that power grids are not able to handle a load that is constantly fluctuating. Power companies try to predict the wind speeds so they can take measures to compensate for this problem but forecasting wind speed in advance is not very reliable. Since there is no way to store the electricity produced by stronger winds to be used during the slack times this wavering flow of electricity creates real problems on the power grid. If the operators aren’t careful there can be major overloads from time to time that can damage a lot of very expensive equipment.

On, Sunday, July 6, 2008 the forecasted wind speed at a wind farm in Oregon proved to be much less that the actual wind speed they encountered. When the wind suddenly picked up the power grid operators couldn’t react to the increased flow of electricity fast enough and the excess power threatened to burn out the generators at the Bonneville Hydroelectric Plant. They could have shut down the hydroelectric generators by spilling more water but the EPA said they couldn’t do that because it might kill a few salmon and we can’t have that now can we. When they tried to call the wind generator operators to get them to shut down the wind generators, since it was Sunday, all they got were answering machines. Well, to make a long story short, they did manage to get someone at one of the wind farms and they were able to shut down the wind generators at that location just in the nick of time to avoid disaster. If they hadn’t stopped it in time that incident could have fried the power grid in most of the Northwest. They may not be so lucky next time.

The bottom line is this. Wind generated electricity is only able to replace electricity generated at traditional power stations to a very limited degree. Since wind generators rely on a very unreliable power source themselves, the wind, this means that wind power has a very limited load factor even when it is technically available. In other words, wind power never supplies power even close to its design capacity. Power companies that use it cannot guarantee that it will be available for any consistent supply of electricity. Experience has shown that wind generators, on average, only produce about 14% of their design capacity. That means that 86% of what they are capable of producing never materializes and must be supplied from other sources. Consequently, this means that traditional power generators must be on line at all times with a capacity equal to at least 90% of the installed wind generator capacity, and since these conventional generators can’t be turned on an off by throwing a switch they must be running all the time so that they are ready to balance out the shortcomings of the wind powered units.

So the only way that wind power even comes close to being commercially viable is through huge government subsidies. Your tax dollars, folks. Even then wind power isn’t really saving anything since the conventional generators must be on line anyway. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Okay folks, lets get real. Liberals are telling us that we need to conserve just about everything we use today and the incentive they give us is that we’re going to save tons of money.

That’s exactly what the people in Charlotte, North Carolina were told when the Charlotte City Council mandated water conservation. They put up with toilets that wouldn’t flush, dirty cars, and brown lawns. In other words , they were responsible citizens and helped save a lot of water. Well, the decrease in water use resulted in a decrease in revenues for the city owned water utility. We can’t have that now can we? So what do you think the City of Charlotte did? They raised the water rates by 15% to make up for the loss. You're taxed if you use the water, and you're taxed if you don't.

Several cities in the U.S. have installed red-light cameras to catch red-light runners in an effort to make you safer. They told us that the cameras would pay for themselves in increased revenues from traffic fines. Some cities in Florida have followed suit. However, many cities that put them in have now turned them off. You see, tickets issued for running red lights actually went down so much that the traffic fines weren’t even paying for the electricity to run the cameras. Besides, the city relied on those fines to make money and they wanted that money back. So I guess your safety wasn’t as important as they told you it was. Making money from the traffic fines was what they really wanted.

What do you think is going to happen if you start driving a roller skate with a lawnmower engine in it and save gasoline? The gas tax revenues are going to drop. Do you think those politicians are going to let you get away with that? They’re going to raise the gas tax to make up the difference.

What do you think will happen if we survive the mercury hazard and save tons of electricity by using those CFL bulbs they’ve mandated? Electric company revenues will go down. Then what do you think will happen? They’ll raise your rates to make up the difference.

Government never thinks that it should ever have to make do with less, but they don’t think that that’s any problem for you. Trust me, you’re going to pay one way or the other.

Well folks it has begun. In light of the June 12, 2008 Supreme Court ruling that gave Guantanamo Bay detainees access to American courts the U. S. District Court of Appeals in Washington DC ruled today that a Chinese Muslim named Huzaifa Parhat can no longer be considered an enemy combatant and should be released. Parhat is one of several Chinese Uyghurs, a Chinese Separatist group living in Afghanistan with known ties to al Qaeda, who are being held in Guantanamo. The government has been trying to find a country willing to accept the Uighurs but, so far, have had no luck. The court said that since there is no evidence that Parhat had actually picked up a gun an fired at any Americans, he must be released. Who knows, maybe the Liberals on the court will allow him to move into your neighborhood. Get ready, this is only the beginning, folks.

With the threat on another attack looming large over America Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat leadership in the House decided that they owe more to the Trial Lawyer Lobby than they owe to the American people. So, instead of passing the Protect America Act that would help protect Americans they spent their time before leaving for vacation holding hearings about some baseball players who were suppose to be taking steroids.

I've got it! Let's start a rumor that all Islamic Terrorists are taking steroids. That should get the Democrats to pay attention.

I have maintained for quite some time now that our public schools are abandoning traditional education more and more in favor of becoming indoctrination centers where "Liberalthink" is the main subject. School Boards seem to be more interested in turning out students who are proficient in the art of politically correct thinking than they are in turning out students who actually have the skills they will need in the future to get a decent job. Did you notice how Clay Aiken struggled last night on the "Are You Smarted Than A Fifth Grader" show over how much 8 times 8 was? It’s a good thing for him he can sing.

.

One of the latest examples of this occurred at the Adams Middle School in Brentwood, California. The principal, Adam Clark, encouraged all the students to dress like the opposite sex on the last day of "Spirit Week." It was suppose to create sensitivity and tolerance of cross dressers, transsexuals, and transvestites among the students. That’s something that every 13 year-old needs, right?

.

One parent of a seventh-grader questioned the principal about this and was told that she could keep her son home that day if she didn’t want to send him to school dressed as a girl.

.

To make a long story short, when the parents got wind of this the outcry to fire the principal was so great that the event was cancelled and instead the students were asked to wear the school colors on that day. The parents won this one. Even so, they need to watch very closely what’s going on in schools today. You’d be surprised.