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June 25, 2008

Exclusive: Wednesday, June 25

Presidential Watch

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Barack's Social Security A-Bama-Nation

The Democratic nominee wants to turn a pension program into another wealth redistribution scheme.

Tom Blumer, Pajamas Media.com

In a speech in Columbus, Ohio, on June 13, Barack Obama proposed a massive tax increase to fund the Social Security program.

A Democratic presidential candidate proposing a tax increase is not exactly news. But this is no ordinary tax increase.

For the first time in the history of Social Security, Obama would impose the payroll tax on a group of people - anyone earning over $250,000 from work or self-employment - who would receive no additional benefit in return. The Illinois senator would carve out a "doughnut hole," sparing those who earn between the current maximum taxable earnings of $102,000 and $250,000 from having to pay any additional tax.

This is a tax increase that is stunning in both size and scope, as this chart shows: Read article - View Chart

Will 2008 Elections Be A Rerun of 1932?

John Gizzi, Human Events.com

"Democratic congressional candidates...won more seats than anyone had dared predict...Democrats added 97 seats in the House, expanding their margin to 313 to 117 during Roosevelt's first two years in office. The large class of incoming freshmen was filled with liberals who would faithfully support Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. . . Democratic congressional candidates swept the South, much of the Midwest, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Coast. . .Republicans lost their tenuous grip on the Senate's majority and with it their majority leader and most powerful committee chairmen. The election put legislative state houses and governor's mansions across the nation largely under Democratic control."

That, of course, is a synopsis of the storied elections of 1932 in which Franklin D. Roosevelt won the Presidency in a landslide and led Democrats to their greatest triumph at the polls.

The far-reaching impact of the Democratic tide in that election cannot be understated. Democrats would hold onto majorities in both Houses of Congress for twenty-four unbroken years. Even when public sentiment soured on the Democrats in 1938 and '42 and Republicans made big gains in mid-term elections, the cushion that Democrats had from their '32 sweep was enough for them to hang onto their House and Senate majorities.

When you listen to the top campaign leaders for Republicans in Congress these days, or even read the numbers of who is up for election and who is retiring, it doesn't look good for the GOP, the Presidential race notwithstanding. Read article.

On Terrorism, Obama Is Living History

The Editors, NRO.com

Barack Obama is the herald of the September 10 Democrats.

On Monday, Obama off-handedly reiterated his fondness for 1990s-style treatment of Islamic terrorists as if they were mere criminals to be managed by prosecution in the civilian criminal-justice system. By now, that should come as no surprise.

Pressed on the subject again Wednesday, Obama insisted, "I have confidence that our system of justice is strong enough to deal with terrorists." Top Obama backer Bill Richardson, a member of the Clinton Cabinet that delegated national defense to our system of justice while radical Islam killed Americans in New York City, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen, told CNN on Wednesday that he "totally" rejected the Bush administration policy of branding jihadists as enemy combatants because doing so is somehow tantamount to "abridging our own freedoms."

Appropriately, John McCain has slammed Obama and his fellow wishful thinkers as naïve and beholden to a "September 10th" mindset - the mindset that gave us the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

The occasion for this latest dust-up was the Supreme Court's ruling last week in Boumediene v. Bush vesting alien enemy combatants detained by our military with a constitutional right to habeas corpus.

The September 10 approach was provocatively weak. It told an enemy, so committed to killing Americans that its operatives were willing to sacrifice themselves in the effort, that the world's only superpower would respond to atrocities with subpoenas and indictments. Without the prospect of a vigorous response to acts of war, the enemy continued to attack. The result was 9/11.

McCain has learned these lessons and maintains that we must stay on offense in the war against radical Islam. Read article.

Obama and The Don't Drill Democrats To America: Don't Drive. Just Shut Up and Sweat In Your Dark House.

Hugh Hewitt, Townhall.com

When Barack Obama told a Pennsylvania audience this past weekend that "We can't drill our way out of this," he was repeating the same line that Nancy Pelosi used days earlier and that Harry Reid used on Wednesday.

The Big Three Democrats are thus all agreed that their party has given up on bringing down the cost of oil and thus the cost of gas at the pump.

Because demand for oil isn't going to drop due to growth around the globe, the only way to bring the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump down is to increase the supply of oil. The only way to increase the supply of oil for the present is to explore for more oil and then bring it to market. That means drilling.

In the U.S. that means drilling on the outer continental shelf, more than 50 miles from the nearest coastline.

John McCain favors allowing states to do just that. Obama, Pelosi and Reid oppose it.

Democrats just don't care how high the price goes. They do not care about the impact on the average American family. The DDDs have three talking points: Exploration won't bring down the cost of gas very much. There isn't that much oil to find. And oil companies aren't using their existing leases anyway.

Both arguments reveal the DDDs as either ignorant or dishonest. Read article.

Global Warming Hypocrites

Mike Gallagher, Townhall.com

I've come to the conclusion that many of these people are mentally ill. They won't accept any rational opposition, scientific or otherwise, that refutes the global warming theory. Drew Johnson reported that after his organization first revealed Al Gore's electric bill to the general public, his group received a number of death threats. Their computers were hacked. Phoned obscenities were common.

I guess violence, vandalism, and profanity go hand-in-hand with the type of people who brag about driving around in a go-cart that they plug into their garage every night.

Sen. John McCain is obviously correct in calling for off-shore drilling, harnessing nuclear power, and abolishing the federal gas tax. Sen. Barack Obama is obviously wrong in opposing off-shore drilling, nuclear power, and, like any good liberal, loves the federal gas tax.

Could this presidential election really be up for grabs? Read article.

An "Era of Limits" or "Limitless Era"

Dick McDonald, Dick McDonald.Blogspot.com

Those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are bound to repeat the same mistakes that man has suffered throughout time. Today societies throughout the world suffer from a historical era of limits that the American Revolution was fought to overcome. Our Founders realized that to create a "limitless era" where the potential of society could be reached it was imperative to free the spirit of the individual - free him to decide his own economic future. To that end, they created a Bill of Rights and a Constitution that called for a tiny and small central government that did not tax income or wealth. Their prescription was economic freedom for all.

Unfortunately our Founding documents didn't protect the individual from the pain and suffering the individual would have to endure at the hands of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and the Democrat party.

Reagan saved America from the Democrat-induced stagnation by reducing the top tax rate to 28%. That left Americans with more money to run the economy. They responded for the last 25 years with the greatest spurt of wealth creation in the history of the planet.

Today we are faced with a new era of limits again brought to us by the Democrats. The New York Times opines that we should pay high prices for gas, which will automatically cut our use of fossil fuels. Barack Obama implores the public to drive and eat less to save the planet from the hoax called "global warming." He suggests we all drive cars that run on food-derived fuel - food diverted from saving us from starvation so we can continue this traitorous environmental course the Democrats and Al Gore have charted for us. Read article.

Obama's Supreme Court

Henry Mark Holzer, FrontPageMagazine.com

Last week's Supreme Court 5-4 decision in Boumediene v. Bush-holding that alien unlawful enemy combatants have a constitutional right to use habeas corpus in American federal courts to challenge their detention-came as no surprise to those of us who have watched the "Living Constitution" virus metastasize since that ideological disease first began to infect the judiciary during the Warren Court era.

Those who subscribe to Living Constitution ideology believe that the founding principles of this Nation are passé, that the Declaration of Independence's ringing endorsement of limited government and individual rights is outdated, that the Constitution's creation of a representative republic is from a long past moment in history, and that the Bill of Rights is not a restraint on government but rather a source of newly invented "rights."

There are some serious concerns if the fate of the federal judiciary, let alone the Supreme Court, falls into Obama's hands (especially with a compliant Senate). Let's take a look at the words of Obama himself:

On July 17, 2007, Obama made a speech in Washington, D.C. to the country's leading abortion-meisters, "Planned Parenthood." In the words of NBC reporter Carrie Dean, Obama not only "leveled harsh words at conservative Supreme Court justices," but "he offered his own intention to appoint justices with ‘empathy'."

Obama himself told us in that same 2007 Planned Parenthood speech: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." (My emphasis.)

So much for the classical liberal philosophy that was at the founding's core and in its fundamental documents. From now on, constitutional interpretation Obama-style is to be through the eyes of whom he sees as society's alleged victims. Read article.

Beware The Fairness Doctrine

Jack Englehard, Gather.com

Coming to a radio or TV network near you - the sounds of silence, at least from conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Same goes for Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager and Laura Ingraham and the rest of talk radio and TV.

Whispers are growing louder that certain Democrats, a growing number of them, want to impose "balance" in broadcasting, otherwise known as the Fairness Doctrine, which was legislated into FCC law back in 1949 but dismissed in 1985 because, as Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. pointed out, it "chilled speech."

It also ran counter to our First Amendment, which states that our government should not be interfering in our rights to express ourselves freely.

In a nutshell, the Fairness Doctrine is about "equal time," and I knew how this worked during my radio days back in the late 1970s, where I functioned as editor at an all-news station in Philadelphia. If one man took three minutes to denounce the mayor, we had to scurry to find another man to support the mayor - and, we had to give him the exact same amount of time or else.

They say they want "fairness" but what they really want is to NATIONALIZE THE AIRWAVES. They want government control over our eyes and ears. Read article.

Can McCain grow an economic brain?

Dave Weinbaum, JWR.com

As democrats repeat trancelike, "We can't drill our way out of this. We can't drill our way out of this," the "Wizard of Oz's" Dorothy comes to mind. Wearing the red ruby slippers she won by dropping a house on the wicked witch of the East, Dorothy closed her eyes and clapped her heels together while chanting, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home."

Last month, the Dem mantra was, "The war is lost." Guess that phony notion was buried under the house that Petraeus led US and Iraqi troops dropped on al-Qaeda. Now Pelosi, Reid, Obama, et al, have placed a new canard in front of the American people with an oath of crude defeatism. Further exasperating democratic windbags will be the just reported deal that the Iraqi government is signing with four western oil companies. The Iraqi war doesn't look much like defeat if that bears fruit, along with the thrashing of al-Qaeda and the potential of democracies springing up in the Middle East, does it?

Dorothy had more cojones than any of the current democratic wimps. She fought her way to victory over NBA caliber live trees, a poppy field OD, flying monkeys, and an H2O challenged witch. And she did it with a ragged coalition:

A tin man (Gore?)

A lion (Bush?),

A grey matter challenged scarecrow (McCain?).

And while we're talking survival, John "Anwar" McCain has finally been pushed, probably kicking and screaming, into the off shore riggers union, though he hasn't quite gone all the way to the light of Anwar crude and Rocky Mountain shale oil extraction.

Somebody must have slapped some supply and demand knowledge upside his head. I think his Sierra Club card is about to be revoked...a sure sign of hope we can believe. Read article.

Not dead yet, and cooling

Wesley Pruden, JWR.com

We're not supposed to call global warming "global warming" any more. That's so very 20th century. Now it's "climate change," just in time for the political high season, and convenient when the climate leaves the natural warming cycle and enters the cooling cycle, as it has done for millions of years. Climate change is the change that Obama, Hillary, John and the rest of us can all believe in, because changing is what the climate does best. Best of all, the hysteria so beloved by Chicken Little and his disciples is preserved, like the pickle we were never in.

In fact, the earth has been measurably cooling for the last decade, despite everything Al and his followers have done about it. The solar cycle peaked, the sun is quieter, the suns spots have faded and everybody but Al is cooling off. Even the United Nations agrees, and who could disagree with the United Nations?

The director of the U.N.'s International Governmental Panel on Climate Change concedes that nature has overwhelmed everything man can do and it might even be another decade before man can rally and the warming resumes. Until then the U.N. and related bureaucracies, which have blown through billions of dollars in "research" to prove that man not nature rules the cosmos, must work hard to keep up the hysteria level.

What drives the global-warming skeptics is that the science of weather, such as it is, has been overwhelmed by the politics of the special pleaders. Read article.

Obama's Bundler, Osama's Enabler

Ben Johnson, Front Page Magazine.com

SHOULD A MAJOR PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, WHO HAS PLEDGED HIS SUPPORT FOR OUR TROOPS, REJECT THE MONEY AND SUPPORT of an anti-American extremist who thinks Osama bin Laden had a "valid" argument on 9/11 and says she is currently acting "to undermine the war effort"? Barack Obama should be forced to make that decision about the ample funds he has received from Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans.

According to Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, Evans has "raised at least $50,000" for the Obama campaign. As long ago as February 2007, the Code Pink co-founder and pampered divorcee co-hosted a Hollywood fundraiser for Obama with her ex-husband (financier Max Palevsky) and Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen of DreamWorks studios.

Code Pinko revealed, with unusually cold-blooded frankness, the reason Code Pink targeted military recruiters - and U.S. soldiers:

Ibbetson: I understand the activism and the protesting of George W. Bush and Cheney...What is this protesting and work against the military recruitment...in Berkeley?

Evans: As an antiwar activist, one of the things you try to do is you try to find the pillars that keep us at war and try to undermine those pillars. And one of the things: You can't go to war if you don't have soldiers.

When pressed to clarify the "pillars" her deeds "undermined," the Obama bundler removed all doubt she aimed at our uniformed men and women themselves. Read article.

Arab Editor: 'Obama's Support for Israel Is Only Lip Service'

Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, Israel National News.com

If Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh were running for President of the United States, he "would promise to support Israel and guarantee its security, and would move the United States embassy to Jerusalem," wrote Abdul Rahman Al Rashed, General Manager of the Al Arabiya news network.

He stated that Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama's enthusiastic support for Israel is standard operating procedure for every American candidate. "Even the Israelis cannot believe the promises," wrote Al Rashed.

Writing in the London-based A-sharq Al-Awsat, newspaper on Tuesday under the headline "Is Obama a Political Fraud," he noted that Labor Knesset Member Ofir Pines-Paz said of Senator Obama, "I respect him but suspect him."

He concluded with a parting shot for Arabs, who he said do not understand that Senator Obama had to state support for Israel in order to bolster his chances of becoming the next president. Read article.

Could Democrats Be Cursing The ACLU?

Bruce Kesler, Democracy-Project.com

Denver in the summer is more pleasant than Chicago, but it remains to be seen how many protestors will trek to the Democratic Convention in late August. There are fissures among protest groups, between the more and less radical ("conservative liberal groups" they're called). There are false presentations of self as non-violent by one of the groups, Recreate-68, while their own statements provide some doubt of their pledge. Then, there's the self-styled anarchists, whose latest pronouncement is full of threat.

These range from reclaiming space occupied by the police state, to targeting corporate fundraisers and the city's infrastructure of capitalism, to blockading the spectacle of delegate voting....

The alliance between the supposedly more restrained R-68 and the anarchists is merely tactical. Read article.

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