A Message from Mother Nature

By Alan Caruba

Hurricane Gustav is just another example of Mother Nature’s basic message to mankind.

“Get out of the way!”

Here comes a hurricane.

Here comes a blizzard.

Here comes a tornado.

Here comes a flood.

Here comes an earthquake.

Here comes a forest fire.

Here comes a volcano.

“Get out of the way!”

And that is what thousands in the path of Gustav are doing, having learned the lessons of the last Category Five hurricane, Katrina. A lot of people in the New Orleans area, not to forget Mobile and a huge swath of coastal and inland areas, just didn’t pay attention to Mother Nature in 2005. Three years later they are heading for the high ground.

“Get out of the way!”

It is astounding to me that, after all the history of mankind and the accumulated knowledge of the impact that climate and natural events have had on that history, there are still people--environmentalists--running around telling us that we are in control of the climate and we can “save” the planet.

These people purposefully ignore the role of the greatest star in our galaxy, the Sun. They ignore the role of the oceans. They ignore the role of clouds. These and other factors totally beyond the control of mankind will decide the future of the planet.

A magnetic reversal, an event that has occurred in the past history of the Earth, would wreak havoc on modern technology and civilization as we know it.

If the Earth was to tilt slightly--an event that turned lush jungles of northern Africa into the Sahara Desert--that too would impact mankind.

We are all in need of a great deal of humility when it comes to Nature. We can appreciate it. We can strive to be good stewards of where we live, but in the end it is Nature itself that will determine our fate.

We are not in charge!

All we can do is pile into our cars, get on buses, planes and trains, and get the hell out of the way!

Women Who Rule

By Alan Caruba

If you think about it, the U.S. is decades behind other nations that have been led by women. The United Kingdom’s former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, comes rapidly to mind, along with her extraordinary partnership with Ronald Reagan. Then there’s Indira Gandhi who led India for while and, of course, Israel’s Golda Meir.

Today, Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany. In truth, the list of nations in which women who have been or are currently in leadership positions is an amazingly long one. It includes Canada, Argentina, the Philippines, Pakistan, Portugal, Iceland, Norway, the Central African Republic, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Poland to name just a few.

So the notion that Gov. Sarah Palin is “one heartbeat away from the presidency” does not bother me one bit. Meanwhile, in Arizona, Janet Napolitano is Governor. M. Jodi Rell runs Connecticut, Linda Lingle runs Hawaii, Kathleen Sebelius is in charge in Kansas, Jennifer M. Granholm directs Michigan’s affairs, and Christine Gregoire is Governor of Washington.

I am pretty sure the Democrat Party, which always makes a big show of opening doors for women and various minorities, is in a panic over the Republican candidate with the guts to put a woman at the top of the ticket with him.

Men of my generation aren’t particularly “threatened” by women in leadership positions. Most of us recall that Eleanor Roosevelt was as popular and influential as FDR. In those days, mothers were powerful figures, too. Roosevelt’s mother held the family purse strings and actually lived in the White House with him. Ironically, Harry Truman’s wife, Bess, hated being First Lady and retreated to their home in Independence, Missouri for most of his tenure in office.

The mother of General McArthur of World War II and Korean War fame actually moved to a residence near West Point while he attended in order to keep an eye on him. I have always found it a curiosity of history that so many men who emerged as strong leaders also had equally strong mothers in the background.

None of this is to deny that there was and probably still is “a glass ceiling” for woman in America. I am not convinced that those who chose to make career and marriage work were or are that happy with the arrangement. I attribute it to the natural nurturing gene that women have and I still regard the role of mother as one of the most important in the world.

It is inevitable that the United States will have a woman President. One is reminded of the heroic and long struggle to achieve suffrage for women; the simple right to vote. That said, America is still a very young nation and subject to such errors and failures. What counts for me is the way we ultimately embrace change.

It strikes me that the choice of Gov. Palin is nothing short of brilliant. Thank you, John McCain. Thank you, America.

The Formidable Sarah Palin

By Alan Caruba

If Molly Brown was unsinkable, than Gov. Sarah Palin is formidable.

What a remarkable choice and what a good one.

Gov. Palin brings so many assets to the ticket it is hard to know where to begin. As she mentioned in her introductory speech, Hillary Clinton garnered 18 million votes. In my mind’s eye I saw those votes move into her column on Election Day.

There is another factor that will loom large in voter’s minds on November 4 and that is OIL. Alaska sits atop a huge reserve of oil and unknown, potential offshore of its coastline. It is Democrats that have thwarted efforts to drill in ANWR. They're going to wish they hadn't.

As the war in Iraq fades from the headlines, voters are increasingly focusing on domestic issues and high among them is the cost of gasoline and heating oil.

How tired Sen. Joe Biden will look beside this fresh new face of politics in America and how sad that the first thing the Obama campaign did was to deliberately ignore the fact that she is the chief executive of Alaska by commenting on her former office as the mayor of a small town.

Where I live, being mayor is an important job. Being governor of a U.S. State has to be one of the toughest.

Imagine doing that and being the mother of five children, the oldest of whom is headed for Iraq with the U.S. Army and the newest of whom is a Downs Syndrome baby?

Formidable! A remarkable person in her own right, but it gets better. Gov. Palin is a legitimate government reformer.

In the weeks ahead we shall hear much of Sarah Palin, but for now her resume alone must surely give her Democrat opponents pause.

As we all get to know her better, we will be asked to go to the polls and make a truly historic vote for the nation’s future.

Some Speeches are Better Than Others

By Alan Caruba

Some speeches are better than others. Sen. Barack Obama knows how to deliver a speech, but his acceptance speech was familiar stuff to anyone who has been listening to politicians as long as I have. Permit me a bit of cynicism because sometimes it allows you to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It is a bit of luck that Barack Obama’s acceptance speech was given on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. King’s famed “I’ve got a dream” speech. That speech brought people together to build a better America, to fulfill its promise of equality.

I not only lived through the Civil Rights era, but I actually met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was brief, but memorable for me. Dr. King could deliver an inspirational sermon or speech. I often wonder if the civil rights movement would have been as successful if there had not been a Dr. King to lead it. Things might have turned out differently for Barack Obama.

I thought it interesting that Barack Obama did not hew that closely to Dr. King’s oratorical style in his acceptance speech, but then it occurred to me that he is striving to get people to believe he is just like you and I. He is not.

He is the child of an imperfect mother who twice married Muslim men and whose child was literally rescued by two extraordinary grandparents. He is not like you or I.

He is half black and half white. He is not like you or I.

His intellect opened doors to elite universities, earned scholarships. He is not like you or I.

He has never served in the military, nor has he ever held a job that did not require a suit and tie. He is not like a lot of Americans.

He was imbued from an early age with the sophistry of Marxism that seeks to impose a government that promises all things to all people from cradle to grave and delivers only a soul-killing slavery to the state.

His speech had a central theme and it was jobs. In Obama’s world most Americans are out of work. They are not.

In Obama’s world, corporations are the enemy, not the engine of the economy.

In Obama’s world, the nation can free itself in ten years from its dependence on oil. No nation on Earth can do that. And $150 billion of your money and mine to the charlatans offering wind and solar power will not produce much more than the one percent of electricity these limited sources of energy currently represent.

What America needs is more drilling for oil for our transportation needs, more coal-fired and nuclear plants for the electricity we require, and more natural gas for its many benefits.

The other theme of his speech was that the last eight years of the Bush administration were a failure. Is it a failure that we have not been attacked since 9/11? Is it a failure that unemployment remains at a bare five percent, among the lowest in generations? Is a $14 trillion economy a failure?

Never mind. Obama is not addressing facts. He is in the business of generating promises like the one to reduce taxes for 95% of working families. That is not going to happen.

He promises “a world class education” for every child, but Teddy Kennedy’s failed “No Child Left Behind Act” is guaranteeing a failed education for the nation’s children. He promises higher wages for already well-paid and pensioned teachers despite the fact they are turning out students who cannot spell, cannot do arithmetic, and have no idea of America’s real history.

Promises are what politicians make. Speeches are what politicians give, but Barack Obama is no Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For one thing, Dr. King was a registered Republican.

Some speeches are better than others. I give this one a C.

Thirty Years of a Failed Democrat Energy Policy

By Alan Caruba

Millions will tune in to hear Sen. Barack Obama’s acceptance speech as the Democrat Party’s choice to be the next President of the United States. For Americans, the need to pay particular attention to his speech is essential if we are to escape thirty years of a failed Democrat energy policy.

From the days President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House and secured a windfall profit taxes on American oil companies, this nation has been made vulnerable to our enemies by emphasizing alternative energy and biofuels as the answer to our growing need for oil and electrical power.

The windfall profits tax led to the decline of the oil industry’s investments in oil exploration and extraction in the United States, and to their understandable reluctance to invest billions in the building of much needed refineries.

Congress, since 2006, has been controlled by Democrats as the majority party. In the Senate, Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, has said that “Oil makes us sick. Coal makes us sick. Global warming makes us sick.” This is such blatant nonsense that, were it spoken by anyone else, it would be easily dismissed. However, Sen. Reid controls the legislative agenda of the U.S. Senate! His counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has said that her job is to “save the planet.”

We should consider the total lack of any substantive legislation the Democrat Congress has produced in the two years they have been in control. We should consider the prospects if they are permitted to continue and their candidate should become President.

For this reason alone we should listen closely to Sen. Obama.

Global warming was and is a hoax. Thousands of scientists worldwide have dismissed the false computer models on which it is based, but more importantly at this time is the fact that the Earth has been demonstrably cooling for at least a decade.

Even the venerable Farmer’s Almanac predicts “below average temperatures for most of the U.S.” The 192-year-old publication which claims an accurate rate of 80 to 85 percent for its forecasts, prepared two years in advance, says in its 2009 edition that at least two-thirds of the country can expect “colder-than-average temperatures this winter, with only the Far West and Southeast in line for near-normal readings.”

“This is going to be catastrophic for millions of people,” said editor Peter Geiger.

I will tell you what also will be catastrophic: the election of Sen. Barack Obama and a Democrat Congress if their thirty years of attacks on the American oil industry continue, along with their thirty years of support for biofuels, ethanol, and so-called “alternative energy” or “clean energy.”

As my friend, Seldon Graham, Jr., with fifty years’ experience as a petroleum engineer and attorney, says, “The U.S. needs to eliminate both ethanol and foreign oil. If it is worth fighting for in the Middle East, it is worth drilling for in the United States.”

You will not hear such straight talk from Sen. Obama and you have not heard it from the leadership of the Democrat Party. Instead you have heard the steady drumbeat of attacks on the American oil industry and the advocacy of failed energy policies that cost Americans millions at the gas pump and leave millions vulnerable to high costs when they heat their homes this winter.

Even Sen. McCain, who still believes the global warming hoax, has called for off-shore drilling. That is a small step in the right direction. A pragmatist, he will no doubt come to see the folly of further legislative programs to address a non-existent global warming threat, but it will be Sen. Obama’s energy policies that hold the greatest threat to the nation’s economy and future.

Obama's Incredibly Shrinking Voter Base

By Alan Caruba

As we watch the Democrat Convention with its divisions and disappointments, it strikes me that Barack Obama’s voter base is shrinking. Considering that he is locked into a virtual tie so far as polling results are concerned, by November we well may be looking at a Democrat shut-out, at least at the top of the ticket.

At this point one is inclined to believe that his acceptance speech at Invesco Field is going to be greeted with the same lack of enthusiasm as his recent overseas tour and speech in Berlin. There is a growing perception that Obama’s ego is such that he requires huge audiences to satisfy it. By contrast, a bit of humility is the kind of thing voters appreciate and want.

What we can discern at this point is that Hillary, her committed supporters, feminists, and a significant portion of women voters will withhold their vote from Obama. Surely not all women will do this, but enough women are of the view that he stole “their” candidate’s opportunity in 2008 to want to punish him.

Obama is not likely to get the votes of veterans who served in America’s military going back to the days of the Korean conflict and earlier. The idea that the nation called on its National Guard and active, voluntary military to fight the wrong war in the wrong place is not one that sits well with men and women who took an oath to serve and, by extension, to go where the Commander-in-Chief told them they were needed.

Not everybody disagrees with President Bush’s decision to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan after 9/11 and to enforce the United Nation’s many resolutions against Saddam Hussein. Events in Iraq seem to confirm that the sacrifices were worth it.

There is a growing perception that, if Bill and Hillary Clinton can “roll” Obama, he may lack the backbone required of a Commander-in-Chief should events heat up.

Several religious components, too, are less than thrilled with Barack Hussein Obama. Catholic bishops have taken issue with his views and those of his running mate, Joe Biden, on abortion and it is the key issue for evangelical Christians. When you add in the doubts that Jews have about him, you can kiss off the electoral votes of Florida and the usual support that the small nationwide Jewish community has usually given the Democrat Party.

It is doubtful, too, that Obama is going to find much support among the eighty million gun owners in America.

Union members that used to be automatically counted in the Democrat column are no longer a guarantee. Obama has struggled unsuccessfully to identify himself with the working class of America. Small business owners may not be too thrilled at the prospect of more increases in the minimum wage.

Then there is the “investor class” which now includes millions of Americans who, in one fashion or another, depend on having someone in the White House who does not want to sock it to the “rich” with increased taxes on capital gains. They’re not all rich, but they understand that Republicans provide a friendlier environment for economic growth.

Obama can count on the vote of dedicated environmentalists, but as the global warming hoax recedes along with Al Gore’s hairline, they are not going to constitute a voting base of significance. Gays may want to vote for Obama who favors the marriage issue on their behalf. That leaves clusters of unrepentant Marxists who, like the Communist Party USA, will vote for him.

So, as we watch his voter base begin to shrink, barring any unforeseen events, Obama’s dreams these days and nights must be haunted by the ghosts of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and the unlamented Jimmy Carter.

Michelle Loves Barack

By Alan Caruba

I am happy to report that Michelle Obama loves her husband, Barack, and their two girls. She loved her father and, although her mother was in the audience, did not once say she loved her too.

And this graduate of two elite, Ivy League universities whose names she did not mention, also loves America.

If this is what passes for politics in America these days, we no longer need soap operas or “reality” television shows with beautiful couples lusting for one another.

Though I promised myself I would not watch much of the Democrat convention, I did tune in to hear Michelle Obama’s speech. I saw her mother in the audience and noticed that, not once, did she smile. Maybe she’s just of a serious turn of mind or maybe she thought the speech was less than truthful?

I understand full well that the first night of the convention was intended to “introduce” Barack Obama to the nation. I was under the impression that’s what he did with his vague and misleading autobiography and for the last year or more during the primaries. How many times do we need to be “introduced” to someone who already has amassed such a body of lies about his past that it will take another book or two to tell the truth?

Oh, wait. There are already two books out. I read the one by Dr. Jerome Corsi, a PhD in political science. It is titled “Obama Nation” and has some thirty pages of carefully documented citations to back up each quote and fact. I recommend you read it before voting in November.

I suppose the best news out of the Democrat convention is how divided they are. The Obama camp and the Clinton camp really don’t like each other and I suspect a lot of Clintonistias will be voting for John McCain in November.

One can only hope (one of Obama’s favorite words, the other being “change”) that we will not be treated to more political pabulum over the remaining days of the convention, but I rather doubt it. The last thing the Democrats want to do is address the real issues of our times. They would prefer to continue demonizing “Big Oil”, advocating “clean energy”, ignoring Iran’s growing capacity to build nuclear weapons, and Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia.

We now have two nights ahead in which the Clintons will demonstrate who really owns the Democrat Party. No, Hillary will not dramatically wrest the nomination from Obama, but her supporters will make it abundantly clear who they think should be at the top of the ticket this year and it isn’t some upstart from Illinois.

Dave Barry, the humorist, says that the Convention has cleared seven or eight hours for Joe Biden’s acceptance speech. The reality is, however, Joe Biden is on the ticket because, like John McCain, he has spent more time in elected office than Barack Obama’s stint in the Illinois legislature and the 140-plus days he actually showed up in the Senate chambers since being elected in 2004.

In terms of the Democrat narrative, we know precious little about their presumptive presidential nominee. He delivers a good speech when he has a teleprompter in front of him. He’s all about hope and change. He has an engaging smile. He is an empty suit who hopes that his many lies will lift him like a hot air balloon into the White House.

The problem is that he also has a history of associations with Marxists, convicted real estate developers, a minister who says G-d America, the notorious Chicago political machine, and was abandoned by his African father, by his Indonesian step-father, and by his mother who gave him over to the care of his white grandparents.

It is nothing less than astonishing that this is the best man the Democrat Party could produce as its candidate for the presidency in 2008.

Tonight's TV Schedule. What to Watch?

By Alan Caruba

Decisions, decisions. What to watch tonight? Turns out that, starting on Monday, all the television networks have decided that 10 PM is soon enough to go live at the Democrat Convention. This means most viewers will still be able to watch NBC’s “Deal or No Deal.”

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of both conventions!

As for watching either or both, it’s more like watching a very long infomercial because that’s what political conventions have become. I suspect most Americans are quite unaware that prior to the television age, they were contentious affairs that often required many ballots before a nominee would be selected. They were smoke-filled, the booze flowed freely, and you couldn’t find a woman on the convention floor because they didn’t gain the right to vote until 1920. It took that long for the national woman’s suffrage movement to get a constitutional amendment passed and ratified.

We’ve had two women as Secretary of State in recent years and any number of Cabinet Secretaries since the days of FDR. We have a complete idiot as Speaker of the House and now they want one to be President! I’m telling you, it’s scary!

The conventions today are carefully scripted with the main speakers having been told what topic to address as opposed to speaking about something that might really matter to them. I am pretty sure that Bill Clinton would like to give a speech on his eight years in office, skipping over the impeachment part, but alas he will have to swallow his pride and hurt feelings to mouth some inanities about how great it is to be supporting Barack Obama. Hillary, too, will have to hold back her tears and tell her delegates to vote for that black guy who stole the nomination from her.

If you don’t want to sit through the entire session that will be provided on public television channels, you can turn to either “Prison Break” or “High School Musical”, “Decision House” or “Gossip Girl.” Any one of these would make for some light diversion from a succession of speeches about how totally fabulous Barack Obama is. We already know how fabulous he is. All we need do is read his autobiography.

Jerome Corsi gives another version in “Obama Nation” that includes some very inconvenient truths.

Presumably, the McCain campaign will be the “Gossip Girl” to provide some juicy items for us to contemplate. They have already had to respond to Madonna’s comparison of John McCain to Hitler. This is what we have come to expect from liberals.

It’s the same with the current Democrat mantra that McCain owns seven houses. He owns a home in Sedona, Arizona. I doubt he has ever stepped foot in the other real estate investments that are owned by his wife of 29 years. Apparently, being married to a wealthy wife is only acceptable if you’re John Kerry.

Oddly, the Democrats will be campaigning hard against anyone who’s rich. Millionaires = bad. Minimum wage workers = good. What this ignores is that those workers all want to be millionaires and, in America, they have a fair chance of achieving that dream. Obama has made it clear that, if elected, he wants to tax the daylights out of anyone or any couple making enough to own a home or put a kid through college these days.

I’m guessing, but I think that network ratings for the Democrat Convention will fall well below those for the recently completed Olympics. This may well be the case for the Republicans too. We have all been through a year of primary elections and are in count-down mode to get the national elections behind us.

I’m thinking that documentary on wild giraffes battling for mating rights should be interesting this evening.

Change 'Till You Barf!

By Alan Caruba

In the run-up to the opening of the Democrat convention Monday evening, I listened to the usual Democrat politicians being interviewed on the Sunday shows and it did not take long until it occurred to me that I was, in fact, watching a group of automatons who had been programmed to say “change” as often as possible.

It was nauseating. It will be nauseating. If I could get the Democrat National Committee to send me a dollar for every time the word “change” will be uttered between now and the end of the convention, I will be able to retire in comfort.

All elections are about change. That is to say, the party in power wants its supporters to vote against change, i.e., to elect its candidates to further its agenda, and the party out of power wants its supporters to vote the current rascals out so the Great Work of America can be transferred to their greedy hands.

Let us understand that what passes for government in Washington, D.C. is entirely devoted to dividing up the money that taxes and other levies accrue to that drained swamp. The party in power, the majority, gets to spend the money to the benefit of its constituents and special interests. The minority party is mostly just flat out of luck.

It has far less to do with governance than simple piracy, extortion, and connivance.

Sen. Barack Obama, a man who has possibly spent less time in the Senate chambers than previous elected members who had the misfortune of dying soon after taking office or possibly en route, has managed up to now to wage a brilliant campaign based solely on “change.”

He has fashioned himself into a messiah who is going to chase the money changers from the sacred halls of Congress, banish the lobbyists, and “require” Americans to lose weight, drive smaller cars or take the bus, end our dependence on anything and everything made from oil, blah, blah, blah. And, oh yes, pay more taxes.

The Obama version of “change” may not sit well with voters as they begin to contemplate it between now and Election Day.

Indeed, several nights of listening to Democrats rant about “change” may just produce a reaction quite contrary to their expectations and their assumptions.

Primary among those assumptions is that the voters are so dumb that, if you repeat the same phrases over and over again, those idiot voters will march like zombies to the polls and pull the Democrat levers. Underestimating the intelligence of voters is always a bad idea.

I have no idea what the Republican convention will sound like, but my guess is that it will be a far more low-key affair and one that actually deals with reality as opposed to trying to convince voters that the nation is in a “Depression”, that Osama bin Laden will quit trying to destroy America, and that if we just talk nicely with Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, Mamoud Amadinejad and the host of other gangsters running a big chunk of the world, they will accommodate us.

I am pretty sure we will not hear Democrats tell us that part of the change they want is to give more money to the United Nations as Sen. Obama proposes. We will not hear about drilling for the billions of barrels of domestic oil we have or utilizing the nation's century’s worth of coal.

Whoever is elected the next President of the United States is going to face the kind of “change” that no one, not the candidates and not the voters, can possibly anticipate. It will be along the lines of the change that occurred on 9/11. It will be the kind of change that a Category Five hurricane produces. It will be an economy struggling to revive from the unanticipated change inflicted by feckless, greedy banking and lending institutions.

The only change I want is someone old enough and wise enough to know that and with the steely courage to deal with it.

Same Old Democrat Politics-as-Usual

By Alan Caruba

The selection of Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate ensures that the 2008 election will be the same old politics-as-usual that have gotten us to this point.

Biden, a longtime Senator from Delaware, is a comfortable Democrat choice, having run for the party’s nomination several times and as an established figure in the Senate. Not a whole lot of change here.

Presumably, Biden fills in the gaping hole in Obama’s resume when it comes to foreign affairs. It’s also a sure bet that he has spent more than Obama’s 140-plus days in the Senate chambers when it’s been in session.

In the new Obama era of hope and change, Biden is no bright new face filled with new ideas. Having been on record saying Obama was not experienced enough to be President, he will have to wiggle out of that, grab his cheerleader’s pompoms, and get out on the campaign trail.

Friends who surf the Democrat/liberal websites tell me that they are already seeing signs of “buyer’s remorse” when it comes to the Obama candidacy and, though it may seem early to most people, there is increasing chatter that the 2008 election will be “stolen” by the Republicans ala the charge that followed the Gore campaign and others.

Democrats have a very hard time figuring out that a large chunk of the population just doesn’t care much for their ideas. Therefore the elections have to have been “stolen”, not lost.

One thing’s for sure, with Biden on the Democrat ticket, the issue of John McCain’s age no longer has much traction. These are two old, white-haired, white guys. When we look for wisdom and/or experience, we tend to look for age as some kind of indicator.

What we most certainly can look forward to is a splendidly vicious political campaign filled with nasty television commercials. This is what I call the “fun part” of politics but it clearly is not about policies, proposals for the future, or high-minded calls for brotherhood and national unity.

Frankly, I have grown to enjoy McCain’s plodding style. He is not going to run into any burning buildings. He does not go off half-cocked. He knows himself. He knows what he believes. He is unafraid of the media and appears to have a lot of confidence in the voters.

And Joe Biden once said he’d be happy to share a campaign ticket…with McCain!

In his speech on the steps where the Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, once spoke, Joe Biden sounded the theme of the next nine weeks. The Democrats will run against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but neither is running in this race. They will have to run away from the last two years of a Democrat controlled Congress that has accomplished nothing.

Watching the Democrats commit political suicide is one of my favorite pastimes.

The More He Talks, the Worse it Gets for Him

By Alan Caruba

Does it strike anyone as ironic that the more Barack Obama talks, the worse it gets for him?

Here’s a guy who can deliver a teleprompter speech with great power, but who has trouble answering simple questions.

Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church charitably called his responses, “nuanced.”

Others characterize them as lies.

Barack Obama has a very big problem. He is trying to explain away his radical positions on some issues that are very important to various sectors of the voting public. He won’t say he’s pro-choice on the abortion issue. He dances around favoring gay marriages. He calls for “change” but the change he wants is higher taxes for everyone and as Mr. Straight Talk, John McCain, so bluntly puts it, he’s for “defeat” in Iraq.

We have all met the Barack Obama’s of the world. They are smooth. From the moment they meet you they’re your best friend. If you’re doing business with them and you read the small print, you’re likely to decide you really don’t want the deal.

The small print so far in Obama’s life has been his wife’s hardcore racism when it comes to white people. The small print, with a few exceptions like the revelations concerning Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ex-Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers, and financial supporter, convicted real estate developer, Tony Rezko, does not include his very Muslim family relatives in Kenya and who-knows-who else will crawl out to bite him.

Bill Clinton survived longtime girlfriend and lover, Jennifer Flowers, but Obama is not likely to be so lucky.

Barack Obama’s real problem, however, is that the more people hear him speak, the less inclined they are to buy his “audacity of hope” because, like most of us, there are some serious problems like the cost of filling the car’s gas tank. Blaming “Big Oil” is nowhere near an answer when the obvious one is to drill here in America for our own abundant oil reserves.

“Clean energy” is another one of those catch phrases that no longer resonates with people who have figured out that wind and solar won’t keep the lights on. If "global warming" is mentioned, you will be able to hear the snickers resonate from coast to coast.

Hope does not stop illegal aliens at the border. Hope will not save Social Security or Medicare. Hope will not change Vladimir Putin's ambitions nor those of Mamoud Amadinejad and Hugo Chavez.

As far as the economy is concerned, simply taxing everyone and redistributing the money is not a popular notion these days. Hope is a fine thing, but it doesn't generate jobs.

I, for one, am looking forward to the Democrat Party convention in Denver next week. I want to hear what Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and a roll call of fervent liberals have to say about the future. If these Democrats talk a lot of environmental nonsense or badmouth America, the Republicans hardly need even hold a convention. They will be able to phone it in.

I want to hear what Barack Obama has to say. If it’s more of the same grandiose rhetoric about hope and change, he’s on his way to being a footnote in some future history book. My guess is that Obama thinks he’s smart and that the rest of us are just so stupid that he can talk his way into the White House.

He’s wrong.

The "McCain" Cockroach Wins the Race!

By Alan Caruba

On Thursday, I attended the midday 14th “Cockroach Derby” staged by the New Jersey Pest Management Association during its 61st annual Clinic and tradeshow. The highlight of the day so far as the media in attendance were concerned was the running of the “Presidential Cockroach Race” that pitted a designated John McCain cockroach against a designated Barack Obama cockroach.

These weren’t your commonplace American and German cockroaches that have plagued homeowners and apartment dwellers since the dawn of human civilization. They were giant Madagascar “Hissing” Roaches, the kind Hollywood uses when it wants to scare the daylights out of the audience. These roaches are double or triple the size of your typical roach.

The race is run inside of Plexiglas track with two lanes. At one end the cockroaches are held in a “gate” area until the door is raised and, usually, they take off down the track for lack of anything better to do.

The “John McCain” cockroach took off as if shot from a cannon, rambling down the six feet of the track with ease and one might almost say a sense of real purpose. The “Barack Obama” cockroach seemed addled as it loitered around the gate area. It was no contest. Two cockroaches designated Republican and Democrat ran a comparable race presumably to determine the outcome of the vice presidential election. Here again the Republican cockroach won handily.

I wish to state that these races have absolutely, positively, no predictive power whatever. In the 14 years I have been witnessing them, the only thing they predicted was that the men and women of the broadcast and print media would show up with their cameras and notebooks to record the action and scribble notes while gleaning comments from the host of professional pest control folk who gather to cheer on the cockroaches in a non-partisan fashion.

Why, you may ask, do I attend these festivities? Because I am, by profession, a public relations counselor and the New Jersey Pest Management Association has been a client of mine for over twenty years. When we began our long association, they were called the “Pest Control” association, but as the impact of the environmental movement occurred, they found themselves accused of spraying deadly pesticides with no other purpose in mind than to kill every living creature known to man and God.

This was not true, but that didn’t matter to the Greens who were determined to get every pesticide banned. The problem is that the only beneficiaries would have been the billions of pest insects and rodents. Pests that carry and transmit many diseases harmful and even lethal to mankind don’t care. Pest control professionals do care.

So does the public. Putting aside the fact that every state, in the interest of public health, requires by law that restaurants, hospitals, schools, supermarkets, hotels, and everywhere else the public gathers must be protected against infestations, the industry pulls in several billion annually because people understand that bugs and other nasty critters represent a threat to their lives and property. Every year for example, termites destroy more property than all the floods and fires combined.

In time the pest control industry metamorphosed into the pest “management” industry for public relations purposes. They instituted Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs that emphasized more intensive inspections of structures and the least use of pesticides on site. New products and technologies were created to deal with termites after the most effective termiticide ever invented was banned from use in the 1970s.

Mother Nature insures that insect and rodent pests, as well as others such as bird pests and feral animals, exist in such abundance that were it not for the very unglamorous work of pest control professionals, life for all of us would be very unpleasant.

None of this occurred to the media folk in attendance or even the coverage given the event by those relying on my news release about it. Even with access to some of the leading experts in the nation who were there to conduct seminars on bed bugs, termites, rats and mice, it was the cockroach race that was their only interest.

For 61 years the New Jersey Pest Management Association’s leaders have ensured that their members—some six hundred technicians and owners attended—received the best scientific information possible to protect the public against these scourges of humanity.

To me, that was and is the real story.

The Mayor's Windy Nightmare

By Alan Caruba

People ask me, “How do you find something to write about every day?” And I tell them that I merely wait for some liberal politician and/or environmental freakazoid to announce their latest loony plan to “save the planet.”

So, thank you, Mayor Michael Bloomberg for announcing your “windmill power plan” that would put wind turbines on every building, city bridges, and everywhere else throughout New York for the purpose of “producing ten percent of the city’s electricity in ten years.”

Anyone who has to live near wind turbines will tell you that they are not just noisy neighbors, but their incessant noise can make you crazy. There are reports of medical conditions being attributed to being around wind turbines day-in and day-out.

The problem is exacerbated by the need to keep the turbines turning even when there is no wind; otherwise mechanical problems can occur. So wind turbines are hooked up to a source of reliable energy like that from a coal-fired plant to keep the blades moving.

If, I hear you saying, you have to hook up the turbines to electricity from a coal-fired, natural gas or nuclear plant, why do you need them in the first place? Good question!
Right now, in terms of all the wind turbines in the nation, the amount of electricity being produced adds up to about one percent of the total.

To put it another way, generating electricity with wind turbines is just about the most stupid way you can devise when compared to other methods. The exception to this is the use of solar panels that produce even less electricity nationwide than wind turbines.

Who, in fact, really likes wind turbines? Answer: The people who make and install them. The reason for this is the tremendous federal subsidies involved. In 2006 alone, the federal tax incentives paid out cost taxpayers an estimated $2.75 billion.

Then, of course, is the fact that the wind does not blow all the time. According to energy industry expert Robert Bryce, in economic terms that means “electricity generated by wind costs more than twice as much as that generated by coal, natural gas, or nuclear power.”

Mayor Bloomberg is afflicted with the same madness of all liberals; the belief that any cockeyed notion that pops into their head and requires a lot of money, plus produces a great deal of pain for the most dubious results, must be implemented.

The Mayor has been on a tear since taking office to force everyone to stop smoking, to eliminate trans-fats from all restaurant menus, and other meaningless intrusions into the private lives and choices of New Yorkers and anyone visiting the Big Apple. Simply leaving people alone never seems to occur to him.

Finally, let it be said that wind energy proposals that are based on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., global warming, are inherently erroneous because the Earth is not warming. For a decade now, it has been cooling and it is likely to continue cooling for decades to come.

The notion that wind energy will reduce our dependency on foreign oil is another myth. That can be achieved by drilling for and extracting the millions of barrels of oil that exist in and around the U.S.A..

If you think life in New York City can make some people crazy, then put wind turbines everywhere and watch everyone go crackers.

One thing’s for sure, the city’s pigeon population would be decimated within a year. The sound and sight of all birds would vanish from the city.

Predicting Terrorist Attacks

By Alan Caruba

If, in fact, the United States or any other nation could predict terrorists attacks there would not be terrorist attacks. They’re not called terrorists for nothing and they don’t post the date and place of their next attack on their Internet sites.

Thus, when a friend sent me an article about Juval Aviv¸ a former Israeli agent famed for heading up the team that tracked down and killed the planners of the Munich Olympics murders of Israeli athletes, I was interested to read his prediction that the United States will suffer multiple terrorist attacks. Mr. Aviv was making such predictions back in July 2005 and possibly earlier.

As the CEO of Interfor, Inc., a company that provides foreign and domestic intelligence services to corporate and financial clients around the world, his stock in trade is being able to predict trouble.

In point of fact, I could make such predictions and, in the event of a terrorist attack, claim prescience. What is most striking, however, as we approach the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, is that there have been none since.

To a large degree I credit this to the very aggressive efforts undertaken by the Bush administration, the coordination of the FBI with other intelligence gathering agencies, and quite possibly to the fact that the U.S. and its allies, including many Arab nations, have been tracking down al Qaeda terrorists for some time now.

Terrorism has become a fact of life for nations around the world. Countering it has become part of the permanent budget of nations. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Contrast it, for example, with the Russian invasion of Georgia. It can, however, be very effective. The Madrid terror attack on train commuters totally transformed its government. There are reports floating about that the Italians made secret pacts to leave Islamic terrorists alone if they did not do anything in that nation.

The best way to deal with terrorists is (a) kill them or (b) lock them up. Extending them the full protection of the U.S. Constitution is about the dumbest idea ever, considering that they exist to destroy America. Detainees who have been returned to the Middle East have just as often been picked up later while engaged in attacks against our troops.

There are conservatives in America who complain that the measures taken to insure our safety are a danger to our right of privacy. Mr. Aviv criticizes our airport security measures and, for the most part, I think he’s right. Making everyone take off their shoes or restricting liquids is, in his words, “reactive” because, in his view, terrorists will never try to hijack a commercial airliner again. They don’t need to.

For my part, I mostly worry that Americans have grown less wary, less cautious and less conscious of the fact that the Islamic jihad, the belief that everyone must become a Muslim, has not gone away and remains the motivation for future attacks.

Mr. Aviv is right when he says that we are so politically correct that, short of seeing some guys wearing bombs strapped to their chest, we would not do or say anything about suspicious behavior, unattended suitcases or packages, and similar reasons to point authorities to someone or something for investigation.

I think, too, he is right when he says that our government treats us “like babies” and that, within the circles of power, too many believe we “can’t handle the truth” fearing Americans would panic.

Since some eighty million Americans own firearms, I think our first reaction would be to reach for them if needed. Consider, in this era of terrorism, how much safer we all would be if the right to carry concealed weapons was more widespread and accessible to law-abiding citizens. After 9/11, the first reaction of many Americans was to go out and purchase firearms.

As to predicting the next terrorist attacks, the only thing that is predictable is not “if”, but “when.”

Democrat Party Secrets Revealed

By Alan Caruba

The Democrat Party has made much of the fact that this year they had a woman candidate and a black candidate vying for the party’s nomination to be its candidate for President.

To some of us with long memories and who lived in the South as I did from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, the Jim Crow, segregated society that existed was a fact of life with all its indignities. Throughout the South the Democrat Party was the Party. You could find five possums faster than you could find five Republicans. It was a solid voting block that Democrat Presidents counted upon.

That’s why the preening of the Democrat Party over how much more sophisticated and egalitarian it is these days strikes me as a lot of posturing.

And that’s why Jeffrey Lord’s article in the current issue of The American Spectator
(http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13681) is so instructive. When the Democrats gather in Denver to congratulate themselves on selecting a black presidential candidate, they might also want to explain why the Democrat National Committee website has been sanitized to remove the following:

No reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery. There were 6 from 1840-1860.

No reference to the number of Democratic presidents who owned slaves. There were 7 from 1800-1861.

No reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation or were silent on the subject. There were 20 from 1868-1948.

No reference to “Jim Crow laws,” nor is there any reference to the role Democrats played in creating them. These laws segregated public schools, public transportation, restaurants, rest rooms and public places in general.

There is no reference to the fact Democrats’ opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses Grant. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public places and public accommodations.

There’s much more, but not only did the Democrats oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1866, they also resisted that one signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, mostly as a tribute to the slain John F. Kennedy.

In my lifetime, the Democrat Party was so divided over civil rights that, in 1948, a group dubbed the “Dixiecrats” led by Sen. Strom Thurmond actually fielded candidates of their own at one point in a States Rights party. They eventually returned to the fold.

After signing the bill, Johnson famously told an aide that the Democrat Party had just lost the South for the foreseeable future. He was right.

To be charitable, perhaps the Democrat Party is just trying to make amends for all those decades in which racism was intertwined in its politics. I suspect, however, that today’s generation of Democrats running the party and supporting it have little knowledge or recall of its ugly history.

For that reason alone, I have always wondered why blacks in America have clung so strongly to the Democrat Party. Didn’t anyone tell them that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican?

Inventing the Next Phony Environmental Crisis

By Alan Caruba

The inventiveness of the Greens, when it comes to creating a new crisis after an old one has run its course, is truly extraordinary.

Since the 1980s we have been living with and refuting the notion that carbon dioxide (CO2) has so filled the Earth’s atmosphere that we are all doomed if we don’t shut down every industry known to man and God. The name given to this invented crisis is “global warming.” The problem for the Greens is that the Earth, since around 1998, is not warming. It’s cooling.

It took a long time for many of the world’s scientists to network sufficiently to begin to respond to the global warming hoax, but now those who led the effort and those that joined it all know each other. In March of this year, the Heartland Institute, a 24-year-old non-partisan Chicago think tank, organized and held an International Conference on Climate Change that was held in New York. I attended.

More than 500 scientists, economists, and other heavy-duty thinkers, people with a fondness for facts and the truth, came together from around the world. Among the speakers at the conference were men with impeccable academic credentials. They were associated with leading universities or had worked in the U.S. government’s space and meteorological agencies.

I am a science writer, not a scientist. From March 8 to March 10, I attended lectures, seminars and presentations that strained my knowledge to the limit. I concluded that what these distinguished scientists didn’t know was clearly not worthy knowing. If they could explain it in ways that even this scribbler could understand, there was hope for the world!

So, when some provocateur named Peter Tatchell published an article in The Guardian, a very liberal British newspaper, entitled “The Oxygen Crisis”, the network of scientists that had organically come together to fight the global warming hoax sprang into action.

If they had learned anything, it was that simply ignoring such deliberate nonsense can create a lot of trouble. Ignore it and pretty soon lawmakers are talking about taxing carbon, swindlers are creating “carbon credits”, and nations are subjected to “cap and trade” schemes involving greenhouse gas emissions.

The August 13 article suggested that there had been a “long-term fall in oxygen concentrations” around the Earth. The basis for the next great crisis, an Earth with less oxygen, was being tested to see if it had any legs.

Dr. Roy Spencer, a NASA scientist, summed up the reaction of his colleagues. “It doesn’t get much more stupid than this.”

Then he provided the real science as opposed to the hodge-podge of nonsense in the Guardian article. “The O2 (oxygen) concentration of the atmosphere has been measured off and on for about 100 years now and the concentration (20.95%) has not varied within the accuracy of the measurements.”

“There is SO much 02 in the atmosphere,” said Dr. Spencer, “it is believed to not be substantially affected by vegetation, but is the result of geochemistry in deep-ocean sediments. No one really knows for sure.” The reference to “vegetation” reflects the way all vegetation takes in CO2 for its growth and gives off O2, in the process. Animals breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. It is the symmetry of all life on earth.

Based on a forthcoming book, “The Oxygen Crisis” by Roddy Newman, the alleged loss of oxygen was causing deserts to spread and forests to decline. It posed, of course, a threat to all mankind.

The real crisis for the Greens is that they and their allies in the mindless media have run out of ways to frighten huge numbers of people who are more rightly concerned about the price of a gallon of gasoline, crazed Islamic fundamentalists, and the prospect of the Russians starting World War III.

With great enthusiasm, Dr. Spencer’s many colleagues joined in the discussion and, no doubt, if the idiotic assertion that the Earth is running out of oxygen should pop its head up out of its little Green hole, it will be assailed at great length.

Outrage over New Obama Book

By Alan Caruba

Eugene Robinson, a liberal columnist, was outraged over Jerome Corsi’s new book, “Obama Nation.”

Referring to Corsi, he wrote, “The ‘author’, and I use the term loosely, whose vicious lies damaged John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign has crawled back out from under his rock to spew vicious lies about Barack Obama.”

I, however, have actually read Corsi’s book, currently a New York Times bestseller, and I can tell you that it has 34 pages of citations documenting everything he has written; all small print.

Corsi, a PhD in political science, has produced a work of serious scholarship. It differs considerably from the autobiography that Barack Obama wrote and that is because it examines the facts of Obama’s life and the result is cause for serious concern about this shooting star in the Democrat firmament.

Corsi’s book about John Kerry, “Unfit for Command”, most surely did damage to his campaign as it unmasked the façade of a Vietnam War “hero” to reveal the man who had returned home to slander his fellow soldiers as rapists and murderers. It was the effete John Kerry who did most of the damage, though, at one point declaring that he had voted for a particular piece of legislation, “before voting against it.”

Ironically, it is Obama’s predilection for “revising”, i.e., changing his mind, that has planted the seed of doubt in the minds of prospective voters. It is Obama who can deliver a teleprompter-guided speech to perfection, but cannot answer a simple yes or no question without pauses and revisions in mid-sentence.

“Corsi’s new volume of vitriol, ‘The Obama Nation’,” wrote Robinson, “seeks to smear Obama as a ‘leftist’ and add fuel to the false and discredited rumor that he is secretly a radical Muslim or at least has ‘extensive connections to Islam.’” A candidate who has been endorsed by Hamas and is alleged to have received campaign donations from Gaza most certainly has some connections. More specifically, however, Corsi simply traces Obama’s early exposure to Islam given his parentage by a Kenyan and an Indonesian step-father, also a Muslim.

As for his “leftist” identity, it would be impossible after reading Corsi’s book to ignore his history of association with leftists, all painstakingly documented. His voting records reveal an extreme liberal commitment.

Why, one must ask, is Corsi’s book an instant bestseller? The answer is that voters are concerned that the Obama they are being offered by the Democrat Party is something other than what is being said about him by the sycophants eager to get on his bandwagon.

This is a candidate whose rise to fame is predicated on his opposition to the Iraq war, but who nonetheless voted to fund it; a fact that Hillary Clinton repeatedly pointed out during the primaries.

Corsi reveals a young man who was first abandoned by his father, then abandoned by his step-father, and finally abandoned by his mother to the only people who truly seemed to care about him, his white grandparents.

Corsi’s book is a brilliant and sometimes chilling expose of Barack Hussein Obama. If I were in charge of his campaign or any one of the liberal columnists seeking to put him in the White House, I would be outraged too. There’s something about the truth that always brings out the worst in liberals.

Vladimir Putin Elects John McCain

By Alan Caruba

I had the odd thought while watching the news coverage of the Russian invasion of Georgia that Vladimir Putin had locked up the election for John McCain.

Earlier I thought that President Bush had partially handed over the Oval Office when he announced in effect that U.S. troops would begin to come out of Iraq in the foreseeable future. That pretty much took that issue off the table for Barack Obama.

Obama had shot to the top of the Democrat heap of candidates by emphasizing he had been against the Iraq war from the days before he was elected Senator. Then, after that, Barack managed to find it in his heart to vote for every funding bill involving the war. This has come to be called “refining” his views. Indeed, one can witness Obama refine his views on almost any issue between breakfast and dinner.

I am pretty sure that Vladimir Putin wasn’t thinking “This is a sure way to remind everyone we live in a dangerous world, filled with people like myself who actually want to go to war if it involves a very small nation that can’t fight back.”

The net effect of the Russian invasion of Georgia was to remind anyone over the age of 65 that the United States, following World War Two, was locked into a Cold War with Russia for nearly fifty years. During that time, there were a number of hot wars as well.

I have an older brother who served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and, in 1962, I can remember being in Fort Benning, Georgia, getting ready to don full battle gear in the event the Russians tried to run the Cuban “missile crisis” blockade that President Kennedy had imposed. You don’t forget stuff like that.

And, of course, you don’t forget seven years of the Vietnam War stretching from Kennedy to Nixon. That was a proxy war, albeit a civil war. Even I participated in peace marches around the Washington Monument to get an end to that confrontation.

I have a feeling that Americans have mostly forgotten the fear that gripped us all on 9/11. If you lived or worked in New York, you were always scanning the sky for another wayward jet airliner. Soon enough we were laughing at the Homeland Security alert colors. The problem, however, is that we are still locked into a war with Islamic fundamentalists and are likely to be for a very long time to come.

Yes, there actually is a reason we have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the conflict in Georgia is occurring someplace most Americans could not find on the map, the video coverage of the long convoys of Russian troop carriers and tanks are a vivid reminder of the ugliness of war and the potential for an attack from anywhere at any time.

Ever since it became obvious that the U.S. had finally begun to win the war in Iraq, all coverage of that conflict disappeared from our television screens and the front pages of our daily newspapers.

The Georgia conflict is the kind of thing that influences voters; as well it should. Somewhere in the back of our minds we all know that McCain is an Annapolis graduate who fought in the Vietnam War and survived brutal treatment as a prisoner. Some of us may even know he comes from a family whose men served our nation in war going back to World War I.

The contrast between the statements issued by McCain and Obama was significant. McCain’s was clearly a strong denunciation of the Russians while Obama whimpered about the importance of the Russians and Georgians sitting down over a cup of tea to work things out.

So, thank you, Vladimir Putin. My guess is you just got John McCain elected.

Cooling Off Corzine

By Alan Caruba

New Orleans and Louisiana had Hurricane Katrina that wrought much devastation, but New Jersey has Jon Corzine, a governor who has managed to do what some thought was impossible, increase the indebtedness of a State that was broke when he took office.

Corzine is a multi-millionaire who grew bored counting his cash at Goldman Sachs and decided to buy the job of New Jersey’s Senator. Then he grew bored with that job and decided to buy the job of Governor. He has the support of the State’s civil service unions and presumably his ex-girlfriend who until recently was the president of one of those unions. That’s a whole other story worthy of the National Enquirer.

Like all good, brain-dead Democrats, Corzine is hot for global warming. New Jersey could be under six feet of snow and Corzine would be on television lamenting the awful effects of global warming.

He pushed through a bill called the Global Warming Response Act. Signed last year, the intent of this bill is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. The bill assumes (a) there is global warming and (b) there is some way that, all by itself, New Jersey can stop it.

Let me stipulate at this point that (a) there is no global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for a decade and all scientific indicators suggest it is going to get a lot colder, not warmer. (b) The Governor’s mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) is idiotic because CO2 plays virtually no role whatever in warming and is known to increase several hundred years after any significant climate change. It constitutes 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere.

This is not only bad science, but it is a surefire way to drive even more business out of the Garden State, if that is possible. With the highest property taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes among a handful of States that apparently hate the notion of any commerce within their borders, New Jersey would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a mass exodus of business and industry. It already has the distinction of having more people moving out of the State than moving in.

So kudos to New Jersey Assemblyman Michael Doherty who on August 14 called on Gov. Corzine to hold off proposing any new regulations associated with the Global Warming Response Act and urged the legislature to repeal the act when it resumes business after Labor Day.

You can read the whole story about Assemblyman Doherty’s efforts at:
http://www.politickernj.com/bguhl/22291/doherty-new-scientific-data-justifies-repealing-global-warming-response-act

It should be noted that the Maryland General Assembly not long ago rejected proposals for its own Global Warming Solutions Act of 2008. The bill had the support of its Democrat Governor Martin O’Malley and of course received wide support from the state’s environmental lunatics.

What people fail to grasp about these and other efforts alleged to reduce global warming is that they will find themselves trapped by a spiraling series of regulations that would punish them for running any kind of business involving “greenhouse gas emissions”; which is to say every business other than the individual whittling of wooden candlestick holders. It is a form of hidden taxation. It is a killer of business enterprises of any scale, small to large.

The nation’s governors, with a few exceptions, are all competing to be the next Al Gore. Those who propose global warming legislation should be run out of their state on a rail. In New Jersey, we’ll settle for returning Corzine to the private sector where he can only waste his own money, not ours.

Editor’s Note: Caruba is a lifelong resident of New Jersey who loves the State.

Pleading the Russian Cause

By Alan Caruba

By August 12 former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev’s opinion piece was in The Washington Post and by the next day in my daily newspaper in New Jersey as he pled the case for Russia.

Turns out, the massive troop movement into Georgia, a tiny nation on the border of the Russian Federation, the air assault, and the Russian navy just offshore, was all Georgia’s fault.

“The root of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia’s separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy.” Then, according to Gorbachev, on August 7 “The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas.”

“Russia had to respond.”

Naturally, Russia had to respond with a remarkably well coordinated attack during the Olympic Games while much of the world was distracted, while the U.S. Congress was in recess, and while many younger Americans were trying to figure out where Georgia was and why they should care.

Not to overstate the reasons why the U.S. is also probably to blame for all this, Gorbachev noted that “Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors” and “By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its ‘national interest’, the United States made a serious blunder.”

The United States regarded South Korea, when it was attacked by Stalinist North Korea, a national interest and felt the same about Vietnam. It has protected Taiwan. It liberated Grenada when communists attempted to turn it into another Cuba and it rid itself of a drug lord in Panama who was also that nation’s president. More recently, it felt its national interests were well served by chasing the Taliban out of Afghanistan (they’re back) and deposing the Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein, best known for starting wars with both Iran and Kuwait.

America has an interest in the entire world. It has been instrumental in helping many nations establish democratic governments. Our military plays a training and protective role in numerous nations.

That old guy, John McCain, a Senator who has actually been to Georgia, issued a lengthy statement regarding the Russian invasion in which he said, "Americans wishing to spend August vacationing with their families or watching the Olympics may wonder why their newspapers and television screens are filled with images of war in the small country of Georgia. Concerns about what occurs there might seem distant and unrelated to the many other interests America has around the world. And yet Russian aggression against Georgia is both a matter of urgent moral and strategic importance to the United States of America.

"Georgia is an ancient country, at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion. After a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution, the Red Army forced Georgia to join the Soviet Union in 1922. As the Soviet Union crumbled at the end of the Cold War, Georgia regained its independence in 1991, but its early years were marked by instability, corruption, and economic crises.”

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/PressReleases/Read.aspx?guid=612817d8-e377-44df-9ebe-aca0ea95e945

Reading Sen. McCain’s entire statement will tell you more about the real situation than you are likely to read in any U.S. newspaper since quite a few choose to ignore it.

The real blunder would be to forget the nearly fifty years of the Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States or to overlook the way Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has steadily replaced the Soviet Union with a comparable autocratic government that does not hesitate to murder Russian journalists who print the truth or Russian dissidents overseas who might expose it.

We have returned to the Bad Old Days of the Russian Bear doing what it has always done; forcibly subjugating nations on its borders.

What I find disturbing is how swift some U.S. daily newspapers were to publish the “party line” by a former leading participant in Soviet hegemony. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

There is No Bush Third Term

By Alan Caruba

Between now and November 4 you are going to hear over and over again the phrase “the Bush third term.”

Let’s understand something. George W. Bush is not running for a third term. He is prohibited by the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution which says, “No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice…”

The phrase, “the Bush third term”, bespeaks how utterly insane the very existence of George W. Bush has driven Democrats and their fellow travelers. In their hearts, they want to campaign against George W. Bush who twice defeated their pusillanimous candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry, two of the greatest blowhards to have ever trod the campaign trail.

In both cases, unable to cope with the final vote tally, the Democrats cried out that the election had been “stolen” from them as if to say that the voters had been too stupid to grasp the merits of their choices or too lazy to have come out in sufficient numbers. How could it be that a Republican and theoretical conservative have been elected?

How can they campaign against a President who never vetoed a spending bill that Congress sent him for his first six years in office? How can they campaign against a President who embraced Teddy Kennedy’s No Child Left Behind Act that federalized the nation’s education system? How can they campaign against a President who signed the Medicare Prescription Act that added millions more to a virtually bankrupt social welfare system? Bush has been an incorrigible Democrat when it came to domestic politics and policies.

Where Bush differed, however, was his pursuit of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the projection of American power in Iraq. How awful Bush was to remove a pathological despot, Saddam Hussein, from power! How awful Bush is to have deployed troops and encouraged allies to degrade al Qaeda to the point that no one has heard from Osama bin Laden in months and those around him keep ending up dead.

It took from 1994 to 2006 for Democrats to wrest back control of Congress from Republicans and that was largely due to the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. However, in 2008, voters can rightly conclude that America has won that war, thus eliminating it as a wedge issue.

Somewhere in the back of the minds of voters, too, is the realization that under George W. Bush the United States has not experienced another attack since September 11, 2001.

Further exasperating Democrats is the fact that the Republican choice for the presidency, John McCain, so often supports parts of their agenda that they have to pretend he isn’t the real GOP candidate!

Sen. McCain, that bi-partisan and non-threatening endless campaigner, just plods along, while their shooting star can’t help but scare the bejeepers out of voters as they begin to conclude that he is completely clueless and inexperienced.

So the Democrat campaign is now less and less about Sen. Barack Obama and more and more about the non-candidate, George W. Bush, a constitutional has-been as of January 20, 2009.

This is so insulting to voters that, by the time they have heard “the Bush third term” for the umpteenth time, they are likely to think it’s really not such a bad idea after all.

Russian Pride, Russian Power

By Alan Caruba

“Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has taken a giant step backwards into its Soviet past, and nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of energy politics. Modern Russian politics and energy sources, first oil and then both oil and gas, have been inextricably connected in a way unmatched by any other major power in the history of the world.”

That’s how Michael J. Economides and Donna Marie D’Aleo open their book, “From Soviet to Putin and Back: The Dominance of Energy in Today’s Russia.”

Central to the Russian psyche is its preference for strong leadership and, after what the Russians considered to have been the embarrassment of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, it was Putin who tapped into this centuries old desire for a Tsar. Secondary to that was the massive feeling of wounded pride when the old Soviet Union collapsed. Imagine being raised to believe that Communism was a superior economic and social system, only to discover that it was no match for the capitalism of the West?

The Soviet Union fell because, in the end, it was heavily, if not entirely, dependent on the sale of that nation’s vast oil and gas reserves. The fall in the price per barrel did in the Soviet Union and you can thank Ronald Reagan for that because it was he who hatched the plot with the King of Saudi Arabia to make it happen. Cheap oil thanks to Saudi production in the 1980s kept the price low. Soviet revenues declined.

Pride and the price of oil are surely part of the reason Russian troops are in Georgia today. The Russians want Georgia back under their control and are not unmindful that control of the pipeline that runs through Georgia would increase the power they already hold over Europe as its chief supplier of oil and gas.

Americans are awakening these days to some rude lessons about energy. If, for example, Congress refuses for some three decades to permit drilling where billions of barrels of American oil exists and refuses to permit exploration for more oil off the continental shelf, you end up paying up to $4.00 for a gallon of gasoline because you’re importing 60% or more of what you need from foreign sources.

Not all the corn grown in America could ever replace the amount of gasoline we require for a nation that virtually runs on the wheels of trucks and whose business is conducted by people accustomed to climbing on and off jet airliners. Not all the wind turbines or solar panels will ever provide the electricity we get from “dirty” coal or the 20% we get from “clean” nuclear power.

“The search for, and control of energy resources, have been central to major world conflicts, including both World Wars and other global conflicts and civil wars,” the book’s authors remind us.

The Russians understand that, even if Americans do not. War weary after five years in Iraq, a nation that sits atop the second largest reserves of oil in the Middle East, too many Americans are still too eager to castigate President Bush for ridding that region of the single most destabilizing force in modern times, Saddam Hussein. In the process, the projection of U.S. power has accelerated the degradation of the non-state menace of al Qaeda.

My guess—and that’s all it is—is that Europe and the U.S. will cede Georgia to Russia because there is no compelling reason to go to war over it. The failure to incorporate Georgia into NATO was, in retrospect, poor judgment. One wonders how fast the Ukraine’s application will be processed. The European Union is hardly a military power. The Russians sit on the United Nations Security Council and are not likely to welcome anything more than a weak protest.

The world has returned to the bad old days of the Cold War where two great powers competed, the United States and Russia. The Russians are pumping their own oil and gas reserves, earning handsome revenues in the global marketplace.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the two Democrat leaders in Congress are more concerned about “saving the planet” from a non-existent global warming than in protecting our national interests. The Democrat candidate for President would be more at home in the Russian Duma discussing the redistribution of wealth and the creation of social programs than in defending the republic.

Why John McCain Will Win - Part Duh!

By Alan Caruba

On July 29, I posted “Why John McCain Will Win” and it is already time to expand on this theme with Part Two or as I will call it, Part Duh!

Sen. Obama has entered the phase of his campaign where he is beginning to babble about ending “the age of oil” by the end of his second term. This from a candidate who hasn’t even won his first term. There’s confidence, there’s arrogance, and there is the state of self-delusion where you begin to actually believe the stupid things you’re saying.

Meanwhile, the August 7 Rasmussen Report revealed that “Americans overwhelmingly believe there is an urgent national need to find new sources of energy, and this need is more important than reducing energy usage, according to a new national telephone survey.”

Fully 81% of Americans “see development of new energy sources as an urgent priority. Only 9% disagree.”

That is such a staggering number of people, extrapolated to the entire voting population, that it virtually dooms all that blather about “conserving” energy. One can stock the house or apartment with “energy saving” devices, but in the end you either use energy or you don’t. If you are not using it, you are not “conserving” it.

“For nearly two-thirds (65%) finding new sources of energy is more important than reducing the amount of energy Americans now consume. Twenty-eight (28%) think reducing current usage is more important.” Do you want to bet that those folks who think reducing current usage aren’t doing much in their personal lives to reduce it?

The biggest environmental hypocrite is Al Gore with his energy monster of a house and his lifestyle that includes limousines whose engines are left running to keep the air conditioning going while he’s delivering a speech about how EVERYBODY ELSE has to reduce their use of energy. Now multiply Gore by that 28% of tree-huggers and you have the truth. They're lying.

In early June Sen. McCain, a pretty Green fellow himself, stumbled into the issue of finding and extracting more energy when he suggested that drilling offshore wasn’t a bad idea. Then Sen. Obama told everybody the U.S. could save millions of barrels of oil by just inflating the tires on their cars. Which one do you think sounded like a complete idiot?

Americans do not like paying $4.00 or more a gallon for gasoline. They want to drive wherever and whenever they want. The rest of the world thinks we are a bunch of spoiled brats. We probably are, but they want to be too! The more Sen. Obama preaches austerity, the worse his poll numbers will get.

Americans, however, are in for a few more shocks before they fill the streets of Washington, DC, howling for the heads of Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both of whom lead a Democrat Party that is opposed to any drilling anywhere.

My guess is that the first big shock will come just after the election on November 4. Shortly thereafter Israel, with the blessing of the White House, will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to destroy or at least delay its program to develop weapons. They wouldn’t let Saddam Hussein do it in 1981 and they wouldn’t let Syria do it in late 2007. Anyone who thinks they will let Iran do it is deluding themselves.

The flow of oil out of the Middle East will be briefly shut off and, at that point, Americans will turn their eyes toward the land of the caribou and loon, the polar bear and fur seal, and demand that ANWR be opened to drilling.

It won’t be five years or ten years as the Democrat Liars Committee will unanimously tell you before that black gold is flowing. All that is needed are some rigs and a 74 mile pipeline to link up with the one connecting the North Slope to the ports where tankers will bring it to the lower 48. That 800 mile pipeline only took three years to build. How long do you think it would take to build one just over 70 miles?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why John McCain will win.

Georgia On My Mind

By Alan Caruba

Considering what was happening in a secessionist part of Georgia, invaded by Russia, the sight of President Bush and Prime Minister Putin chatting amiably Friday night at the opening of the Olympic Games was fairly astonishing. Russian troops were in the process of invading Georgia and their planes were even bombing Gori, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.

Of course, it was Stalin who was not much upset when thousands of Georgians starved to death in the course of his advancing the power of the Communist Party over Russia and what came to be known as its satellite nations.

I had a brief mental picture of people running up and down the halls of the NATO headquarters in a panic until I realized that Georgia was not a part of NATO. What this means is that Europeans will watch from the sidelines as Russian tanks reassert their hegemony.

What is not known as this is written is whether the Russians will settle for taking South Ossetia away from Georgia. It is, not surprisingly, just across the border from North Ossetia.

What we do know is that the Russian army is very good at reducing to rubble anything they want. They wanted to retain Chechnya and they still have it. It’s mostly burnt out structural skeletons of buildings, but it still Russian burnt out structural skeletons of buildings.

As for the rest of Georgia, President Bush’s demeanor suggests that Vladimir told him that all those tanks, planes and troops are in South Ossetia purely for the purpose of liberating its people from the evil Georgians and that they—the Russians—don’t intend to grab any more land for now.

So it looks like the dogs of war will not be loosed upon the continent of Europe and the missiles will not be flying as was the fear from the bad old days of the Cold War. Wars are expensive and Russia is living mostly off its oil and gas revenues. There’s simply no point to expand this military adventure.

Moreover, they know the Europeans will stamp their feet and then do nothing. The parliament of the European Union may even convene a meeting for ten minutes or so to discuss the problem and then break for lunch.

Americans who invaded and have occupied Iraq since 2003 are not in a strong moral position to protest too loudly. And, anyway, who ever heard of the city of Abkhazia before last Friday?

Listen to Your Gut

By Alan Caruba

I have a friend who has built an international reputation as a negotiation coach. He is the author of two bestselling books on the subject and one of the salient pieces of advice he shares with the reader is to go with their gut feeling when it comes to deciding whether to do the deal or not.

He’s not kidding! Your brain may be telling you this is the greatest deal ever, but your gut is telling you that something is just not right about it. His advice? Walk away. He also warns that most of us believe we can “read” other people pretty well and, based on his experience working with some of the most complex negotiations and the people conducting them, he says that’s wrong too.

This is why we are often surprised to discover that some politician is a hypocrite or some entertainer has acquired bad habits. In my life I have known enough politicians who turned out to be crooks to assume the worst. Along with the greed for money there is often a libidinous side to a politician’s nature because they often interpret and express power through wealth and sex.

The orgy of shocked commentary regarding former North Carolina Senator and vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, is the media’s typical response to such revelations, but to me the real story was the way the same media steered clear of the story until it was broken by a leading tabloid.

It took a semen stain on a blue dress before any of the media would admit the possibility that Bill Clinton had been lascivious in the Oval Office with an intern about the same age as his daughter. It’s that kind of willing blindness that worries me. And still the media insist on telling us Clinton has such fabulous charisma. That’s not charisma. That’s the stench of recklessness that held the fate of this nation in his hands for eight years.

Sen. Edwards, of course, is the worst kind of hypocrite, married to a woman fighting cancer, a father, and living in a huge mansion while forever blathering on about how deeply he feels about the working poor in America. This self-serving narcissist has only cared about himself.

This is why my gut feeling about Sen. Barack Obama, given the thinnest resume for the highest office in the land, his collection of politically radical friends, and his big mansion, acquired with the help of a convicted developer keeps telling me that he is not to be trusted for any reason. The term “Obama mania” bespeaks an irrational, baseless response to the man.

Obama’s only politics is socialism and if the nation drifts any further to the left in the way it governs itself, America will end up looking like any one of those lame European countries that are little more than welfare states where citizens are told what they can drive and what they can eat.

Wait a minute...isn’t that happening here already? If your gut says yes, you have a very important choice to make in November.

The Olympics: A Political Game

By Alan Caruba

I am one of those people who rarely watches any sport. I was not into sports as a kid and, while I would occasionally attend a University of Miami football game as a student, I could never get into the mass hysteria that seems to afflict any crowd that watches any sport in a stadium.

It’s a “game.” The people involved are called “players” because it is a form of play. That said, I can and do appreciate the mastery of any game whether it’s Tiger Woods playing golf or some kid competing in gymnastics. I enjoy seeing anyone do anything well, be it a billiards championship or a poker tournament with a million bucks at stake.

Sports has become a mega-billion dollar industry with all manner of spin-offs for the often costly gear involved, the fan’s purchase of team-related items, and even the sale of baseball cards or other paraphernalia. I am all about capitalism, so you won’t find me complaining much about obscene salaries, although I do draw the line on universities paying a coach more than a professor or building a huge stadium while ignoring academic facilities and raising the tuition at the same time.

The Olympics, however, have always struck me as political. It’s what the author George Orwell called “mimic war” as nations compete to field teams that will hopefully bring home the glory and the gold. For that reason, it's well to keep in mind the reality that Beijing is under virtual martial law. President Bush is being urged to speak out on behalf of human rights in China. Though a worthy goal, it is an exercise in futility so far as China is concerned.

I am not likely to watch much of the China-based Olympic Games. I am happy that China has opened itself to the world to host them, but I am far less happy that the world has ignored its annexation of Tibet by armed force. As for the Chinese people, I want them to prosper as capitalists and hopefully to rid themselves of their Communist bosses some day in favor of a more democratic system.

One cannot be anything other than amazed at the progress China has made since it jettisoned the dead hand of the communist economic system. The Chinese have an ancient history of innovation and culture. Long suffering, the Chinese are an extraordinary people who were writing poetry while most of the West was still rubbing two sticks together to make fire.

The Games are China’s opportunity to demonstrate they have begun to join the modern nations of the world, competing in the arena of sports, playing host to athletes, tourists and the press of the world.

It is instructive that its current leaders are all engineers by profession. Engineers know how to create a nation’s infrastructure, building bridges, roads, plants to generate energy, and cities for its billion-plus population. They also know how to build prisons.

Across the narrow straits from China is Taiwan, an island nation that has long since demonstrated how to create a thriving democracy and economy. It did not escape the notice of China’s leaders. Despite the bellicose statements and actions of China toward Taiwan, they realized the example Taiwan set could be their own as well. This occurred only because the United States extended its protection to Taiwan after it broke away from mainland China. In order to open China to the world, however, the United States under Nixon had to undertake the diplomatic pretense that Taiwan did not have sovereign standing among the nations of the world.

So, thank you, Taiwan, for your courage and your example.

Previous Olympic Games have often suffered from the public’s disinterest in the 24/7 television coverage devoted to them. I will surely be among those watching something else for the duration of the Games, but I will be watching China for a very long time to come.

Living with the Bomb

By Alan Caruba

On August 6, 1945, in order to end the war with the Empire of Japan, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, thus launching the atomic age. The Japanese warlords did not respond with a notice of surrender, so the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered unconditionally.

That’s the way wars used to be fought. By that time, Germany had been so thoroughly destroyed with conventional bombs its cities laid in ruins. Over a half century ago, wars were not waged with concerns for “collateral damage”, i.e., civilian deaths. It was understood that the civilian population had to be killed to the point where there was simply no capability to proceed.

For a short time the U.S. was the only nation with a nuclear capacity, but thanks to having infiltrated much of the government with a vast spy network, the Soviet Union was able to develop its own atomic bomb.

At that point American children were taught to hide under their school desks or gather in the hallways to avoid the affect of an atomic bomb blast. This was, of course, ridiculous because a nuclear bomb would flatten any school, along with much of the city in which it was located.

In 1965 Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation published “On Escalation” in which he postulated the concept of MAD, mutually assured destruction, as the only rational solution to another nation’s nuclear weapons program. Red China joined the nuclear club and, in time, others such as Pakistan and India as well. Both of these nations developed their nuclear programs in secret. North Korea hasn’t even bothered to keep it a secret, nor has Iran.

Today, in the Middle East, Israel has long had nuclear weapons in response to the many conventional wars waged against it and in anticipation of a nation like Iran that is led by lunatics who repeatedly tell the world that they intend to “wipe Israel off the map.”

Although no nuclear weapon has been used in war since August 6, 1945, the likelihood that Iran will use one is too great to ignore. There are reports that Iran has tested launching presumably nuclear-tipped missiles from ships. This would be a means to attack the United States.

What is Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s response to the threat of a nuclear attack on America?

On October 2, 2007, Sen. Obama gave a speech at Chicago’s DePaul University in which he declared “A New Beginning.” He said, “America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.” While he said he did not intend to pursue unilateral disarmament, he proposed “a global ban on the production of fissile material for weapons.”

For all the treaties that have been signed since the dawn of the Atomic Age, the one thing we know for sure is that nations, if they want, will simply ignore them. Iran, for example is a signatory to the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the same time its president brags of adding thousands of gas centrifuges for the creation of fissile materials.

Presumably, Sen. Obama, if elected President, will use his charm and diplomatic skills to talk Iran’s mad mullahs into ending their nuclear weapons program. He is on record as saying he would meet with Mamoud Amadinejad, but has since “refined” that statement saying such a meeting would have pre-conditions, et cetera.

“When I’m president,” Sen. Obama now says, “we’ll strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so that nations that don’t comply will automatically face strong international sanctions.” Meanwhile, Germany has just signed a deal to purchase natural gas from Iran.

There is a simple reason that nations have nuclear weapons. Their neighbors and their perceived enemies have them. Treaties are nice, but useless. Sanctions are useless. The United Nations is useless.

My generation, born prior to or during the era of World War Two has learned to live with the bomb. Every President since Harry Truman has wanted to outlaw nuclear weapons and none has come close.

You cannot un-invent such lethal technology. You cannot assume some madman will not want to use it. The only prevention of such use is to destroy the capability to use it. Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facilities on June 7, 1981. It has more recently destroyed such facilities in Syria. When the Israelis say “Never again”, they mean it.

Sen. Obama has surrounded himself with advisors with known anti-Israel views and he continues to blather away about some form of disarmament. He has laid out a program by which America’s military defense would be severely reduced, including weapon development.

History teaches that only strength can deter aggression. Waiting to be attacked is folly. Expecting nations led by men with evil intentions to respond rationally is folly.

Mutually Assured Destruction only works when leaders care enough to not sacrifice their people, but Iran’s leaders are eager for the return of the Twelfth Imam, a mythical Islamic figure who would impose Islam on the entire world.

Sixty-three years since the first and only atomic bombs were used to end a war that had cost millions of lives we are still living with the bomb. The immediate question is whether we will witness its use against Israel and the United States.

If elected, Sen. Obama’s policies will amount to unconditional surrender in the face of a very real threat.

Let Obama Be Obama

By Alan Caruba

Watching the Obama campaign is akin to watching a movie about a train wreck that you know is coming because you know that there’s been a mountain slide and the tracks just around the bend are covered with huge boulders.

So you watch the train speed along, oblivious to the destruction that awaits it as you conjure up images in your mind of the toppled cars, the screams of the victims. And you can’t do a thing about it.

By all rights, Obama should be way ahead in the polls. And he isn’t.

By all rights, Obama’s health plan should be receiving plaudits. And it isn’t.

By all rights, Obama’s solutions to the nation’s energy needs should find some support among the media and those who believe he will bring the kind of change that will make everything right again. But it’s not.

So long as Obama could stick to vague talk of “change we can believe in” and “yes, we can”, the crowds could cheer.

Every time he comes close to addressing a real problem, however, the silence is deafening.

Here’s a guy whose whole campaign is predicated on his having been against the Iraq war, but during the 143 days he spent in the U.S. Senate since 2004, when not campaigning to be your President, he voted for every bill that funded it. Ah, yes, a man of principle!

Hillary had it right. Not only would his universal health plan not work without requiring that everybody sign up, it would--like hers—bankrupt the nation and destroy our national health system. As it is, Medicare is already piling up debt beyond what the government could ever hope to pay. Some future Congress will hand the bill to your grandchildren.

As for energy, Obama seems to live somewhere that doesn’t depend on oil in a thousand different ways. That place is not planet Earth.

Here on Earth, we use oil as energy for transportation of every description other than bicycles. Plastic begins as oil and plastic is in everything we use. We keep jars of it in the bathroom cabinet. It’s called Vasoline. Or suntan lotion.

Should we be drilling in ANWR? You bet! Should we be drilling offshore of the nation’s coastlines? Of course. We drill offshore of parts of California and throughout the Gulf of Mexico. What’s wrong with sucking oil out of the seabed a couple of miles beyond Asbury Park?

McCain is calling for 45 nuclear plants to be built to meet our need for electricity. We would be lucky if we could build half that number in the next twenty years, but first we have to get rid of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. This moron will not allow the multi-billion dollar nuclear waste storage facility the government has built in Nevada to open.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told us her job is to save the Earth, but that didn’t stop her from turning off the lights and going on vacation.

We could easily build 45 coal-fired plants. The U.S. has plenty of coal if the government will only let it be mined in places that, among others, Bill Clinton declared a national heritage or refuge or whatever.

It’s fun to watch Obama stumble around. It would be even more fun to watch his wife, Michelle, but she is being kept under wraps. Has anyone seen her lately? Michelle, who grew up in middle class comfort, went to both Princeton and Harvard, is just terribly unhappy about America. Apparently she thinks being black was some kind of obstacle for her.

In a strange kind of way, McCain doesn’t have to do much to defeat Obama. He just has to let Obama be Obama.