Hillary Staffer Comes Clean

No comment necessary on this recent posting...thanks Matt!


A Hillary Staffer Comes Clean: What you were never intended to know in this election
October 31, 2008

By Anonymous_14

After a long and careful consideration of all the implications and possible consequences of my actions today, I have decided to go through with this in the hope that our country can indeed be guided into the right direction. First, a little personal background… I am a female grad student in my 20’s, and a registered Democrat. During the primaries, I was a campaign worker for the Clinton candidacy. I believed in her and still do, staying all the way to the bitter end. And believe me, it was bitter. The snippets you’ve heard from various media outlets only grazed the surface. There was no love between the Clinton and Obama campaigns, and these feelings extended all the way to the top. Hillary was no dope though, and knew that any endorsement of Obama must appear to be a full-fledged one. She did this out of political survival. As a part of his overall effort to extend an olive branch to the Clinton camp and her supporters, Obama took on a few Hillary staff members into his campaign. I was one such worker. Though I was still bitterly loyal to Hillary, I still held out hope that he would choose her as VP. In fact, there was a consensus among us transplants that in the end, he HAD to choose her. It was the only logical choice. I also was committed to the Democratic cause and without much of a second thought, transferred my allegiance to Senator Obama.

I’m going to let you in on a few secrets here, and this is not because I enjoy the gossip or the attention directed my way. I’m doing this because I doubt much of you know the true weaknesses of Obama. Another reason for my doing this is that I am lost faith in this campaign, and feel that this choice has been forced on many people in this country. Put simply, you are being manipulated. That was and is our job – to manipulate you (the electorate) and the media (we already had them months ago). Our goal is to create chaos with the other side, not hope. I’ve come to the realization (as the campaign already has) that if this comes to the issues, Barack Obama doesn’t have a chance. His only chance is to foster disorganization, chaos, despair, and a sense of inevitability among the Republicans. It has worked up until now. Joe the Plumber has put the focus on the issues again, and this scares us more than anything. Being in a position to know these things, I will rate what the Obama campaign already knows are their weak links from the most important on down.

1 – Hillary voters. Internal polling suggests that at best, we are taking 70-75% of these voters. Other estimates are as low as 60% in some areas – particularly Ohio and western PA. My biggest problem with this campaign’s strategy was the decision NOT to offer Hillary the VP slot. She was ready and able to take this on, and would have campaigned enthusiastically for it. This selection would have also brought virtually all of her supporters into the fold, and the Obama campaign knew it. Though I have no way of knowing this for certain, and I do admit that I am relying on internal gossip, Senator Obama actually went against the advice of his top advisors. They wanted him to choose her, but the only significant opposition to this within the campaign came from Barack and Michelle Obama. In short, he let personal feelings take precedence over what was the most logical thing to do. Biden, by the way, has been a disaster inside the campaign. Everyone cringes whenever he gives an interview, and he creates so many headaches as the campaign has to stay on their toes in order to disseminate information and spin whatever it was he was trying to say.

2 – Sarah Palin. Don’t believe what the media is telling you about how horrible a choice she was. Again, our internal polling suggest that though she has had a minimal impact on pulling disaffected Hillary Democrats to McCain, she has done wonders in mobilizing the base for McCain. Another thing – we were completely taken by surprise with her pick. In my capacity in the research department, I looked into the backgrounds of Leiberman, Romney, Pawlenty and Ridge, and prepared briefs. I don’t mind bragging that we had pretty good stuff on all of them. With Leiberman, the plan was to paint him as an erratic old-timer who didn’t have a clue as to what he was doing (pretty much a clone of McCain). In Romney, we had him pegged as an evil capitalist who cut jobs. Pawlenty was going to get the “Quayle treatment”, or more precisely: a pretty face, with no valid experience. Tom Ridge was going to be used to provide a direct link from McCain to Bush. As you can see, we were quite enamored of all of them. Then the unexpected happened – Sarah Palin. We had no clue as to how to handle her, and bungled it from the start. Though through our misinformation networks, we have successfully taken some of the shine off. But let there be no doubt. She remains a major obstacle. She has singlehanded solidified “soft” Republican support, mobilized the McCain ground game, and has even had some appeal to independents and Hillary voters. This is what our internal polling confirms.

3 – Obama’s radical connections. Standards operating procedure has been to cry “racism” whenever one of these has been brought up. We even have a detailed strategy ready to go should McCain ever bring Rev. Wright up. Though by themselves they are of minimal worth, taken together, Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfelger, and now, Rashid Khalili, are exactly what the campaign does not need. The more focus on them, the more this election becomes a referendum on Obama. The campaign strategy from the very beginning was to make this election a referendum on Bush. Strategists have been banging their head on how successfully McCain has distanced himself from Bush. This has worked, and right now the tide is in his favor. People are taking a new look at Barack Obama, and our experience when this happens tells us this is not good news at all. When they take a look at him, one or more of these names are bound to be brought up. McCain has wisely not harped on this in recent weeks and let voters decide for themselves. This was a trap we set for him, and he never fully took the bait. Senator Obama openly dared him to bring up Ayers. This was not due to machismo on the part of Obama, but actually due to campaign strategy. Though McCain’s reference to Ayers fell flat in the last debate, people in the Obama campaign were actually disappointed that he didn’t follow through on it more and getting into it. Our focus groups found this out: When McCain brings these connections up, voters are turned off to him. They’d rather take this into consideration themselves, and when this happens, our numbers begin to tank.

4 – The Bradley Effect. Don’t believe these polls for a second. I just went over our numbers and found that we have next to no chance in the following states: Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire and Nevada. Ohio leans heavily to McCain, but is too close to call it for him. Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa are the true “toss up states”. The only two of these the campaign feels “confident” in are Iowa and New Mexico. The reason for such polling discrepancy is the Bradley Effect, and this is a subject of much discussion in the campaign. In general, we tend to take a -10 point percentage in allowing for this, and are not comfortable until the polls give us a spread well over this mark. This is why we are still campaigning in Virginia and Pennsylvania! This is why Ohio is such a desperate hope for us! What truly bothers this campaign is the fact that some pollsters get up to an 80% “refuse to respond” result. You can’t possibly include these into the polls. The truth is, people are afraid to let people know who they are voting for. The vast majority of these respondents are McCain supporters. Obama is the “hip” choice, and we all know it.

As part of my research duties, I scour right wing blogs and websites to get somewhat of a “feel” as to what is being talked about on the other side. Much of it is nonsense, but there are some exceptions which give the campaign jitters. A spirited campaign has been made to infiltrate many pro-Hillary sites and discredit them. A more disorganized, but genuine effort has also been made to sow doubts among the unapologetically right wing sites such as redstate.com. Don’t you guys get it? This has been the Obama campaign’s sole strategy from the very beginning! The only way he wins is over a dispirited, disorganized, and demobilized opposition. This is how it has been for all of his campaigns. What surprises me is that everyone has fallen for it. You may point to the polls as proof of the inevitability of all of this. If so, you have fallen for the oldest trick in the book. How did we skew these polls, you might ask? It all starts with the media “buzz” which has been generated over the campaign. Many stories are generated on the powerful Obama ground game, and how many new voters were registered. None of this happens by coincidence. It is all part of the poll-skewing process. This makes pollsters change their mixes to reflect these new voters and tilt the mix more towards Democratic voters. What is not mentioned or reported on is not the “under-reported cell phone users or young voters” we hear so much about. What is underreported is you.

I changed my somewhat positive opinion of this campaign during the unfair and sexist campaign against Sarah Palin. I will never agree with her on the issues and will probably never vote for her, but I am embarrassed of what has happened. I can’t ignore our own hand in all of this. What I do know is that I will not be voting for Obama this time around. Treat that as you will.

Source: RedState
Posted by Against Obama • Filed Under Barack Obama, Blog, Editorials
Source: http://www.againstobama.com/2008/10/a-hillary-staffer-comes-clean-what-you-were-never-intended-to-know-in-this-election/
Similarly: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/10/a-hillary-staff.html

Another YouTube Moment

This election is really getting to me. Personally, I can't wait for it to be over. It has been the ugliest and longest campaign in history and we probably haven't seen the worst of it yet.

So when I got the email with this youtube video, I just about broke down and cried when I watched it. Thanks Doug!

Drinking the KoolAid

Does anyone remember the KoolAid commercials of old? Kids running around excited by the KoolAid guy coming to their home. Life was good when the KoolAid guy was there. Of course, the sugar in that stuff would rot your teeth, send you on the biggest sugar buzz and had no redeeming vitamin value but hey, it made the kids happy so mom bought it and we drank it by the truck loads in summer.

As I sit in campaign headquarters day after day listening to people who are in total disbelief that people are drinking the "Obama KoolAid", I am reminded of that dang commercial and the insanity that my mom actually allowed me to drink the stuff. But she didn't know any better. That was before health education campaigns and childhood obesity statistics jumped thru the roof. My kids grew up drinking sugar free beverages, vitamin enhanced low sugar juices or just plain water when they were thirsty. I was an educated consumer.

So as the people go into the polls believing that the KoolAid man is going to make everything all better, I think they will be sadly disappointed once the sugar buzz wheres off.

Here is an interesting WSJ Opinion piece from an middle eastern academic reviewing our current election.

Obama and the Politics of Crowds - October 30, 2008
Fouad Ajami

There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.


Martin KozlowskiAs the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, "Crowds and Power" (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when "distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd." These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.

On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest -- African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking -- Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama's vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.

A creature of universities and churches and nonprofit institutions, the Illinois senator, with the blessing and acquiescence of his upscale supporters, has glided past these hard distinctions. On the face of it, it must be surmised that his affluent devotees are ready to foot the bill for the new order, or are convinced that after victory the old ways will endure, and that Mr. Obama will govern from the center. Ambiguity has been a powerful weapon of this gifted candidate: He has been different things to different people, and he was under no obligation to tell this coalition of a thousand discontents, and a thousand visions, the details of his political programs: redistribution for the poor, postracial absolution and "modernity" for the upper end of the scale.

It was no accident that the white working class was the last segment of the population to sign up for the Obama journey. Their hesitancy was not about race. They were men and women of practicality; they distrusted oratory, they could see through the falseness of the solidarity offered by this campaign. They did not have much, but believed in the legitimacy of what little they had acquired. They valued work and its rewards. They knew and heard of staggering wealth made by the Masters of the Universe, but held onto their faith in the outcomes that economic life decreed. The economic hurricane that struck America some weeks ago shook them to the core. They now seek protection, the shelter of the state, and the promise of social repair. The bonuses of the wizards who ran the great corporate entities had not bothered them. It was the spectacle of the work of the wizards melting before our eyes that unsettled them.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, once set the difference between American capitalism and the older European version by observing that America was the party of liberty, whereas Europe was the party of equality. Just in the nick of time for the Obama candidacy, the American faith in liberty began to crack. The preachers of America's decline in the global pecking order had added to the panic. Our best days were behind us, the declinists prophesied. The sun was setting on our imperium, and rising in other lands.

A younger man, "cool" and collected, carrying within his own biography the strands of the world beyond America's shores, was put forth as a herald of the change upon us. The crowd would risk the experiment. There was grudge and a desire for retribution in the crowd to begin with. Akin to the passions that have shaped and driven highly polarized societies, this election has at its core a desire to settle the unfinished account of the presidential election eight years ago. George W. Bush's presidency remained, for his countless critics and detractors, a tale of usurpation. He had gotten what was not his due; more galling still, he had been bold and unabashed, and taken his time at the helm as an opportunity to assert an ambitious doctrine of American power abroad. He had waged a war of choice in Iraq.

This election is the rematch that John Kerry had not delivered on. In the fashion of the crowd that seeks and sees the justice of retribution, Mr. Obama's supporters have been willing to overlook his means. So a candidate pledged to good government and to ending the role of money in our political life opts out of public financing of presidential campaigns. What of it? The end justifies the means.

Save in times of national peril, Americans have been sober, really minimalist, in what they expected out of national elections, out of politics itself. The outcomes that mattered were decided in the push and pull of daily life, by the inventors and the entrepreneurs, and the captains of industry and finance. To be sure, there was a measure of willfulness in this national vision, for politics and wars guided the destiny of this republic. But that American sobriety and skepticism about politics -- and leaders -- set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking around every corner.

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.

From Elias Canetti again: "But the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it. . . . Only the growth of the crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private burdens."

The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat -- by now unthinkable to the devotees -- will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won't be solved by a leader's magic.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Thug Tactics

I had this discussion last night about the Democrats prevalent use of "thug tactics" in local, state and federal elections. He said I was unusually biased based on my own experiences, but I named several instances going on right now in our state elections...and then he said "that's just Tennessee".

Well, it appears we have a very good thug running for President. Check out this story.

Hillary Backers Decry Massive Obama Vote Fraud

Monday, October 27, 2008 10:45 AM

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

With accusations of voter registration fraud swirling as early voting begins in many states, some Hillary Clinton supporters are saying: “I told you so.”

Already in Iowa, the Obama campaign was breaking the rules, busing in supporters from neighboring states to vote illegally in the first contest in the primaries and physically intimidating Hillary supporters, they say.

Obama’s surprisingly strong win in Iowa, which defied all the polls, propelled his upstart candidacy to front-runner status. But Lynette Long, a Hillary supporter from Bethesda, Md., who has a long and respected academic career, believes Obama’s victory in Iowa and in 12 other caucus states was no miracle. “It was fraud,” she told Newsmax.

Long has spent several months studying the caucus and primary results.

“After studying the procedures and results from all 14 caucus states, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of personal stories, my conclusion is that the Obama campaign willfully and intentionally defrauded the American public by systematically undermining the caucus process,” she said.

In Hawaii, for example, the caucus organizers ran out of ballots, so Obama operatives created more from Post-its and scraps of paper and dumped them into ice cream buckets. “The caucuses ended up with more ballots than participants, a sure sign of voter fraud,” Long said.

In Nevada, Obama supporters upturned a wheelchair-bound woman who wanted to caucus for Hillary, flushed Clinton ballots down the toilets, and told union members they could vote only if their names were on the list of Obama supporters.

In Texas, more than 2,000 Clinton and Edwards supporters filed complaints with the state Democratic Party because of the massive fraud. The party acknowledged that the Obama campaign’s actions “amount to criminal violations” and ordered them to be reported to state and federal law enforcement, but nothing happened.

In caucus after caucus, Obama bused in supporters from out of state, intimidated elderly voters and women, and stole election packets so Hillary supporters couldn’t vote. Thanks to these and other strong-arm tactics, Obama won victories in all but one of the caucuses, even in states such as Maine where Hillary had been leading by double digits in the polls.

Obama’s win in the caucuses, which were smaller events than the primaries and were run by the party, not the states, gave him the margin of victory he needed to win a razor-thin majority in the delegate count going into the Democratic National Convention.

Without these caucus wins, which Long and others claim were based on fraud, Clinton would be the Democrats’ nominee running against John McCain.

Citing a detailed report on the voting results and delegate accounts by accountant Piniel Cronin, “there were only four pledged delegates between Hillary and Obama once you discount caucus fraud,” Long said.

Long has compiled many of these eyewitness reports from the 14 caucus states in a 98-page, single-spaced report and in an interactive Web site: www.caucusanalysis.org.

ACORN involvement

The Obama campaign recently admitted that it paid an affiliate of ACORN, the controversial community organizer that Obama represented in Chicago, more than $832,000 for “voter turnout” work during the primaries. The campaign initially claimed the money had been spent on “staging, sound and light” and “advance work.”

State and federal law enforcement in 11 states are investigating allegations of voter registration fraud against the Obama campaign. ACORN workers repeatedly registered voters in the name of “Mickey Mouse,” and registered the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys twice: once in Nevada, and again in Minnesota.

A group that has worked with ACORN in the past registered a dead goldfish under the name “Princess Nudelman” in Illinois. When reporters informed Beth Nudelman, a Democrat, that her former pet was a registered voter, she said, “This person is a dead fish."

ACORN was known for its “intimidation tactics,” said independent scholar Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., who has researched Obama’s long-standing ties to the group.

Fully 30 percent of 1.3 million new voters ACORN claims to have registered this year are believed to be illegitimate.

Long shared with Newsmax some of the emails and sworn affidavits she received from Hillary supporters who witnessed first-hand the thuggish tactics employed by Obama campaign operatives in Iowa and elsewhere.

Jeff, a precinct captain for Clinton from Davenport, Iowa, thought his caucus was in the bag for his candidate, until just minutes before the voting actually began.

“From 6-6:30 p.m., it appeared as I had expected. Young, old males, females, Hispanics, whites, gay and lesbian friends arriving. Very heavily for Ms. Clinton, a fair amount for Edwards and some stragglers for Obama,” he said.

That makeup corresponded to what he had witnessed from many precinct walks he had made through local neighborhoods.

“My mind began to feel victory for my lady,’ he said. “THEN: at 6:50 p.m., over 75 people of African-American descent came walking in, passed the tables and sat in the Obama section. I knew one of them from my canvassing. I knew another one who did not live in this precinct. And aside from four or five families that live on Hillandale Road, there are no other black people in this unusually white precinct. And one of those black couples were in my Hillary section,” he said.

Thanks to the last-minute influx of unknown Obama supporters, Obama won twice the number of delegates from the precinct as Hillary Clinton.

After it was over, “a very large bus was seen in the parking lot afterwards carrying these folks back” to Illinois, Jeff said.

Obama’s flagrant busing of out-of-state caucus participants from Illinois was so obvious that even Joe Biden — today his running mate, then his rival — pointed it out at the time.

At a campaign stop before the Jan. 3 caucus at the JJ Diner in Des Moines, Biden “said what we were all thinking when he got on stage and said, ‘Hello Iowa!’ and then turned to Barack’s crowd and shouted, ‘and Hello Chicago!’” another precinct captain for Hillary told Long.

Thanks to Illinois campaign workers bused across the border into Iowa, all the precincts in eastern Iowa went for Obama, guaranteeing his win in the caucuses, Long said.

Obama supporters were also bused into northeast Iowa from Omaha, Nebraska, where Obama campaign workers were seen handing out “i-pods and free stuff: T-shirts, clothes, shoes, and free meals” to students and people in homeless shelters,” according to eyewitness reports Long collected.

In Iowa City, red and white chartered buses with Illinois license plates arrived from Illinois packed with boisterous African-American high school students, who came to caucus for Obama in Iowa after being recruited by Obama campaign workers.

2,000 complaints in Texas

In a change in the Democratic National Committee rules for this year’s election season, four states had caucuses and primaries: Washington, Nebraska, Idaho, and Texas. “But Texas is the only one that counted both the caucus result and the primary result,” Long told Newsmax. “The others didn’t count the primary at all, calling it a ‘beauty contest.’”

Because caucuses are more informal, and can last hours, they tend to favor candidates with a strong ground operation or whose supporters use strong-arm tactics to intimidate their rivals.

“There is inherent voter disenfranchisement in the caucuses,” Long said. “Women are less likely to go to caucuses than men, because they don’t like the public nature of the caucus. The elderly are less likely to go to a caucus. People who work shifts can’t go if they work the night shift. And parents with young children can’t go out for four hours on a week night. All these people are traditionally Clinton supporters,” she said.

But Obama’s victories in the caucuses weren’t the result of better organization, Long insists. “It was fraud.”

In state after state, Hillary was leading Obama in the polls right up until the last minute, when Obama won a landslide victory in the caucuses.

The discrepancies between the polls and the caucus results were stunning, Long told Newsmax. The most flagrant example was Minnesota. A Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute poll just one week before the Feb. 5 caucus gave Hillary a 7-point lead over Obama, 40-33.

But when the Minnesota caucus results were counted, Obama won by a landslide, with 66.39 percent to just 32.23 percent for Hillary, giving him 48 delegates, compared with 24 for Clinton.

“No poll is that far off,” Long told Newsmax.

Similar disparities occurred in 13 of 14 caucus states.

In Colorado and Idaho, Obama had a 2-point edge over Hillary Clinton in the polls, but won by more than 2-1 in the caucuses, sweeping most delegates.

In Kansas, Hillary had a slight edge over Obama in the polls, but Obama won 74 percent of the votes in the caucus and most of the delegates. In nearly every state, he bested the pre-caucus polls by anywhere from 12 percent to more than 30 percent.

This year’s primary rules for the Democrats favored the caucus states over the primary states.

“Caucus states made up only 1.1 million (3 percent) of all Democratic votes, but selected 626 (15 percent) of the delegates,” says Gigi Gaston, a filmmaker who has made a documentary on the caucus fraud.

In Texas alone, she says, there were more than 2,000 complaints from Hillary Clinton and John Edwards supporters of Obama’s strong-arm tactics.

One Hillary supporter, who appears in Gaston’s new film, “We Will Not Be Silenced,” says she received death threats from Obama supporters after they saw her address in an online video she made to document fraud during the Texas caucus. “People called me a whore and a skank,” she said.

John Siegel, El Paso Area Captain for Hillary, said, “Some people saw outright cheating. Other people just saw strong-arm tactics. I saw fraud.”

Another woman, who was not identified in the film, described the sign-in process. “You’re supposed to sign your names on these sheets. The sheets are supposed to be controlled, and passed out — this is kind of how you maintain order. None of that was done. The sheets were just flying all over the place. You could put in your own names. You could add your own sheets or anything. It was just filled with fraud.”

Other witnesses described how Obama supporters went through the crowds at the caucus telling Hillary supporters they could go home because their votes had been counted, when in fact no vote count had yet taken place.

“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” one woman said in the film. “I thought this only happened in Third World countries.”

On election day in Texas, Clinton campaign lawyer Lyn Utrecht issued a news release that the national media widely ignored.

“The campaign legal hot line has been flooded with calls containing specific accusations of irregularities and voter intimidation against the Obama campaign,” she wrote. “This activity is undemocratic, probably illegal, and reflects a wanton disregard for the caucus process.”

She identified 18 separate precincts where Obama operatives had removed voting packets before the Clinton voters could arrive, despite a written warning from the state party not to remove them.

The hot line also received numerous calls during the day that “the Obama campaign has taken over caucus sites and locked the doors, excluding Clinton campaign supporters from participating in the caucus,” she wrote.

“There are numerous instances of Obama supporters filing out precinct convention sign-in sheets during the day and submitting them as completed vote totals at caucus. This is expressly against the rules,” she added.

But no one seemed to care.

Despite Clinton’s three-and-a-half point win in the Texas primary — 50.87 percent to 47.39 percent —Obama beat her in the caucus the same day by 56 to 43.7 percent, giving him a 38-to-29 advantage in delegates.

Linda Hayes investigated the results at the precinct level in three state Senate districts. Under the rules of the Texas Democratic Party, participants in the caucuses had to reside in the precinct where they were caucusing, and had to have voted in the Democratic primary that same day.

When she began to see the results coming in from the precincts that were wildly at variance with the primary results, “I could see that something was wrong,” Hayes said.

Hayes says she found numerous anomalies as she went through the precinct sign-in sheets.

“Many, many, many Obama people either came to the wrong precinct, they did not sign in properly, they did not show ID, or they did not vote that day.” And yet, their votes were counted.

In a letter to Rep. Lois Capps, a Clinton supporter calling himself “Pacific John,” described the fraud he had witnessed during the caucuses.

“On election night in El Paso, it became obvious that the Obama field campaign was designed to steal caucuses. Prior to that, it was impossible for me to imagine the level of attempted fraud and disruption we would see,” he wrote.

“We saw stolen precincts where Obama organizers fabricated counts, made false entries on sign-in sheets, suppressed delegate counts, and suppressed caucus voters. We saw patterns such as missing electronic access code sheets and precinct packets taken before the legal time, like elsewhere in the state. Obama volunteers illegally took convention materials state-wide, with attempts as early as 6:30 am.”

The story of how Obama stole the Democratic Party caucuses — and consequently, the Democratic Party nomination — is important not just because it prefigures potential voter fraud in the Nov. 4 presidential election, which is under way.

It’s important because it fits a pattern that Chicago journalists and a few national and international commentators have noticed in all of the elections Obama has won in his career.

NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher described Obama’s first election victory, for the Illinois state Senate, in a recent commentary that appeared in the London Telegraph.

“Mr. Obama won a seat in the state Senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified,” Fletcher wrote.

Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate “was even more curious,” conservative columnist Tony Blankley wrote in The Washington Times.

Citing an account that appeared in The Times of London, Blankley described how Obama managed to squeeze out his main Democratic rival, Blair Hull, after divorce papers revealed allegations that Hull had allegedly made a death threat to his former wife.

Then in the general election, “lightning struck again,” Blankley wrote, when his Republican opponent, wealthy businessman Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw in extremis after his divorce papers revealed details of his sexual life with his former wife.

Just weeks before the election, the Illinois Republican party called on Alan Keyes of Maryland to challenge Obama in the general election. Obama won a landslide victory.

“Mr. Obama’s elections are pregnant with the implications that he has so far gamed every office he has sought by underhanded and sordid means,” Blankley wrote, while “the American media has let these extraordinary events simply pass without significant comment.”

Hillary Clinton supporters, belatedly, now agree.

Obama's Redistribution Constitution

Many people think that the President has the great power to do everything from cure cancer to get your son out of jail. And in a way, that is correct. But there is a big bureaucratic minefield to get thru in order for that to happen, if it is to happen at all. Washington's bloated governmental structure rarely allows for any great power to escape their clutches.

One of the greatest unknown powers that the President has is the power to appoint Federal and Supreme Court judges. You have heard of judicial activists? Well, consider having far left leaning judges appointed to positions that can change the landscape of our society...possibly forever.

Here is a Wall Street Opinion piece that explains it much better than I can.

WALL STREET JOURNAL - October 28, 2008
Steven Calabresi

One of the great unappreciated stories of the past eight years is how thoroughly Senate Democrats thwarted efforts by President Bush to appoint judges to the lower federal courts.


Chad CroweConsider the most important lower federal court in the country: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his two terms as president, Ronald Reagan appointed eight judges, an average of one a year, to this court. They included Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Kenneth Starr, Larry Silberman, Stephen Williams, James Buckley, Douglas Ginsburg and David Sentelle. In his two terms, George W. Bush was able to name only four: John Roberts, Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas Griffith and Brett Kavanaugh.

Although two seats on this court are vacant, Bush nominee Peter Keisler has been denied even a committee vote for two years. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will almost certainly fill those two vacant seats, the seats of two older Clinton appointees who will retire, and most likely the seats of four older Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointees who may retire as well.

The net result is that the legal left will once again have a majority on the nation's most important regulatory court of appeals.

The balance will shift as well on almost all of the 12 other federal appeals courts. Nine of the 13 will probably swing to the left if Mr. Obama is elected (not counting the Ninth Circuit, which the left solidly controls today). Circuit majorities are likely at stake in this presidential election for the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal. That includes the federal appeals courts for New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and virtually every other major center of finance in the country.

On the Supreme Court, six of the current nine justices will be 70 years old or older on January 20, 2009. There is a widespread expectation that the next president could make four appointments in just his first term, with maybe two more in a second term. Here too we are poised for heavy change.

These numbers ought to raise serious concern because of Mr. Obama's extreme left-wing views about the role of judges. He believes -- and he is quite open about this -- that judges ought to decide cases in light of the empathy they ought to feel for the little guy in any lawsuit.

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e 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."

On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

In a Sept. 6, 2001, interview with Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ-FM, Mr. Obama noted that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society," and "to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical."

He also noted that the Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted." That is to say, he noted that the U.S. Constitution as written is only a guarantee of negative liberties from government -- and not an entitlement to a right to welfare or economic justice.

This raises the question of whether Mr. Obama can in good faith take the presidential oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" as he must do if he is to take office. Does Mr. Obama support the Constitution as it is written, or does he support amendments to guarantee welfare? Is his provision of a "tax cut" to millions of Americans who currently pay no taxes merely a foreshadowing of constitutional rights to welfare, health care, Social Security, vacation time and the redistribution of wealth? Perhaps the candidate ought to be asked to answer these questions before the election rather than after.

Every new federal judge has been required by federal law to take an oath of office in which he swears that he will "administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich." Mr. Obama's emphasis on empathy in essence requires the appointment of judges committed in advance to violating this oath. To the traditional view of justice as a blindfolded person weighing legal claims fairly on a scale, he wants to tear the blindfold off, so the judge can rule for the party he empathizes with most.

The legal left wants Americans to imagine that the federal courts are very right-wing now, and that Mr. Obama will merely stem some great right-wing federal judicial tide. The reality is completely different. The federal courts hang in the balance, and it is the left which is poised to capture them.

A whole generation of Americans has come of age since the nation experienced the bad judicial appointments and foolish economic and regulatory policy of the Johnson and Carter administrations. If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.

Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation's courtrooms.

Mr. Calabresi is a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor of law at Northwestern University.

Because we all need a laugh (2)

Hat tip Stacey on another funny one...

Joke of the week (Why did the chicken cross the road?)

BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change!
JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
JIMMY NAIFEH: I don't see any chickens. Move on.
HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure right from Day One! that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn't about me.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here.
BILL DUNN: To go to church. He is a good Catholic chicken.
DICK CHENEY: Where's my gun?
COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.
BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken. What is your definition of chicken?
GARY ODUM: The chicken is out of order on that side of the road. We will not be able to talk about chickens untill next year.
AL GORE: I invented the chicken.
JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken's intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.
BEVERLY MARRARO: Did the chicken have a hat?
AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.
DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won't realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he's acting by not taking on his current problems before adding new problems.
OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I'm going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.
JAYSON MUMPOWER: When we are in the majority he wont have any reason to cross the road. We will make this side of the road better!
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he's guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.
PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.
MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.
DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.
GLENN CASADA: I hate chicken.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.
JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can't you people see the plain truth? That's why they call it the other side. Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay, too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like the other side..That chicken should not be crossing the road. It's as plain and as simple as that.
FRANK NICLEY: In my day we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough.
BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.
ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.
MIKE TURNER: Chicken is delicious. I don't know why you hate chickens so much.
BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken 2008, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken 2008. This new platform is much more stable and will never crash or need to be rebooted.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

Conspiracy Theory

Okay, I have officially crossed over from the logical to the radically insane. My friend Damian reminded me of that the other night when I was writing our final 60 second ad copy for the McCain Palin campaign in Grundy County. Thank goodness for friends. I did change the ad copy to reflect a more positive and rational tone for the general public, but that has not stopped this incredibly powerful feeling inside me that "fears" the possibility of an Obama Administration.

I know, I know, it is just another election...but is it? I have never felt this way about any other election. Barack Obama represents a radical change to everything that America stands for, and as I listen to sane people expressing their undying love for this fellow I feel like I am in a parallel universe. I feel like Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy Theory". Doesn't anyone else see the whole picture behind BHO? His influences? His fuzzy funding? Has anyone read his books? Listened to his wife? Read her college thesis?

And then we get into the economics...does anyone know what "Redistribution of Wealth" really means? Has anyone studied the effects of such policies on other nations? Has anyone ever studied the rise and fall of civilizations?

My final "Conspiracy Theory" is truly radical and one my father warned me about for years and I never really understood why. My father is a very learned man, a student of history, of warfare, of marketing and of politics. I am only now starting to read the books that I should have read long ago. Nietsche, Mein Kampf, Marx and the whole bunch.

As the theory goes, an American takeover plan was hatched back in the 60's and it was brilliant. Infiltrate the schools, higher education, the justice system and government infrastructure and spread your socialist viewpoints quietly and consistently...then wait for "The One" to emerge to lead the indoctrinated masses to the final takeover. In theory, a bloodless coup, systematically planned and executed. Sun Tzu would be proud.

The question begs to be asked...is this really fiction?

So in that vein, I thought I would share this youtube moment and pray for my sanity to return after elections.

In Obama's own words

An underlying concern in America is that Barack and his wife are unrepentent racists themselves and the dream they have is one where the black people will receive the largess of what they feel the white people owe them. I am not on that exact same page but I am concerned with some of Barack's socialist leaning policies that could be skewed in that direction or any direction that has a redistribution of wealth principle attached.

Saw this interesting video on Bill Hobbs site and thought I would share it with you.

Land of the Free

I wrote about this subject earlier, but not as eloquently as this article does...thanks Bob for sending it to me!

Subject: Land of the FREE

WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, ONLY BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE

HOW LONG DO WE HAVE?

This is the most interesting thing I've read in a long time. The sad thing about it, you can see it coming.

I have always heard about this democracy countdown. It is interesting to see it in print. God help us, not that we deserve it.

How Long Do We Have?

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.'

'A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.'

'From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.'

'The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years''During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage; 3. From courage to liberty; 4. From liberty to abundance; 5. From abundance to complacency; 6. From complacency to apathy; 7. From apathy to dependence; 8. From dependence back into bondage'
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Number of States won by: Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29

Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: 'In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare...' Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the 'complacency and apathy' phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the 'governmental dependency' phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

If you are in favor of this, then by all means, delete this message. If you are not, then pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, ONLY BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE

Protectionism

Love us or hate us, America under a Republican philosophy is all about capitalism and free trade. Some feel money is the root of all evil and I will probably have to agree, but for all the "feel good" policies that our government seems to want to perpetuate (more government jobs and "free" money) it does take MONEY to make those policies run.

Here is another warning sign that we are going in the wrong direction...


Starting To Pay Price For Our Protectionism
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, October 20, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Trade: As Obama makes political hay off protectionism and promises a new Smoot-Hawley era, it's no surprise our trading partners are beginning to look to other markets — such as Europe. It's a warning.

Our No. 1 trading partner, Canada, isn't stupid. When Obama threatened last February to rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement on his own terms, our northern ally started looking abroad to other markets.

They found a big one in Europe, which seems to have few hang-ups about increasing exports and signing free-trade treaties. Last Friday, Canada and the European Union held the first talks toward an eventual free trade agreement between the two.

When this goes through, $27 billion in new trade is expected by 2014, according to a joint EU-Canada study. Canada will add an extra 0.8% to its GDP and see income gains of $11.1 billion from the new jobs and higher salaries coming in from Europe.

After all, if free trade with the U.S. bolstered Canada's economy and standard of living by a factor of four since 1994, it makes sense to do more of what brought in that wealth.

Europe's $14 trillion market is an attractive alternative to the U.S. for the Canadians, if it comes to that, and the Europeans are happy to add Canadian investment to the $500 billion investment its three largest economies drew in 2007.

Canada isn't the only one responding to these chill trade winds blowing in from the Washington elites in election season.

Colombia is also preparing to sign a free-trade deal with Europe, as its own free-trade accord with the U.S. languishes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked it in Congress last April.

U.S. allies are wise to seek other partners no matter what the U.S. climate — the U.S. downturn no doubt plays a role too. But it started with noises out of the U.S. about pulling up the drawbridge.

With a global downturn, free trade makes more sense than ever. That ought to be an election issue for the U.S., which needs to stay globally competitive. Sadly, it's not.

Canada and Colombia are effectively defending themselves from the anti-trade vortex in the U.S. by turning to other markets. The Europeans have no intention of imitating the mistake made by the U.S.

"It's never a good sign when the U.S. becomes protectionist," Philippe Favre, special ambassador for international investment and chairman of Invest in France Agency, the country's foreign investment arm, said in recent comments to IBD.

Like many European officials, Favre thinks the sentiment has been brewing for a while. "If you look at the last two or three years, there was the U.S. preventing foreigners from buying ports," he said. "The Chinese wanted to buy an oil company and they were stopped. Then you have the contract for (air refueling) tankers refused to a European company (EADS)."

Another failure was the World Trade Organization talks. "We have seen since 9/11 a U.S. trend to be more wary of the rest of the world," Favre said. "We probably underestimated the impact (of the attack) on the people and the country in the EU."

Agree or disagree, there's no doubt that protectionism will make America poorer and less influential, protecting nothing. Outsourcing is particularly full of misperceptions.

"Look at the auto industry — Japan started by exporting to Canada and the U.S., and now produces cars in the U.S. They did it because the market itself is in the U.S. We see exactly the same thing in Europe. More car plants are going up in Germany and France than Bulgaria and Romania, even though the labor costs are lower there."

Michael Pfeiffer, managing director of Invest in Germany, told IBD that exports are no threat: "We (Germans) are the largest exporters in the world — it's something we do. We have to do it."

Why? Germany doesn't have the diversified economy America does. "One-quarter of German people are employed for export industries," said Pfeiffer.

With the possibility of a protectionist Democratic president (Barack Obama) working with a protectionist Democratic Congress, the U.S. may be the odd man out when it comes to free trade.

Pity. Because free trade, as any economist will tell you, inevitably boosts the economies of those who engage in it. So others, like Canada, Colombia and Europe, will continue down the free-trade path — toward greater wealth for their citizens — while the U.S. sits on the sidelines.

The world will decide it isn't going to wait for Nancy Pelosi to come around on free trade — it's going to leave the U.S. in the dust.

Jobs and Taxes

Joe the Plumber has caused quite the stir lately. I saw him on Mike Huckabee's new show Sunday night and he reminded me of several people I know around here. Joe could have been Steve or Bob or David. All ex-military, all opinionated and all potential small business owners because they have a plan and they work that plan, maybe not everyday but most days when they aren't busy dealing with the stresses of everyday life.

As a person who has seen failure on the small business level, I feel the pain of all those who try...but I would never tell them not to because owning your own business is the real American Dream these days. Working for yourself is freedom in its purest sense. Freedom to pursue your dreams of financial independence.

Depending on what figures you read, small businesses account for approx. 70-80% of all new jobs in America. Most start-up small businesses will fail, but the ones who succeed will do so because they worked hard, they worked smart and they perservered against great odds. Life is not easy on the way to "the top".

So on two levels I disagree with Barack Obama's new tax plans for America. On a personal level, I don't believe that people who work hard to build a better life should be taxed more when they achieve it. On a logical level, it doesn't make sense to heavily tax businesses who provide jobs or could provide more jobs.

Lastly, Redistribution of Wealth is a Socialism principle. America was not founded by Socialists. The Constitution is not a living and breathing document, it is a framework for freedom. Yes, we need Change, but what kind of change and at what cost?

Socking it to small business - Wall Street Journal 10/21

Barack Obama declared last week that his economic plan begins with "one word that's on everyone's mind and it's spelled J-O-B-S." This raises the stubborn question that Senator Obama has never satisfactorily answered: How do you create more jobs when you want to levy higher tax rates on the small business owners who are the nation's primary employers?

Loyal Democrats have howled over the claim that small businesses will get soaked by the Obama tax plan, so we thought we would seek an authority they might trust on the issue: Democratic Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana. Here is what Mr. Baucus wrote in a joint press release with Iowa Republican Charles Grassley on August 20, 2001, when they supported the income tax rate cuts that Mr. Obama wants to repeal:

". . . when the new tax relief law is fully phased in, entrepreneurs and small businesses -- owners of sole proprietorships, partnerships, S corporations, and farms -- will receive 80 percent of the tax relief associated with reducing the top income tax rates of 36 percent to 33 percent and 39.6 percent to 35 percent."

Then they continued with a useful economics tutorial:

"Experts agree that lower taxes increase a business' cash flow, which helps with liquidity constraints during an economic slowdown and could increase the demand for investment and labor."

Twelve Senate Democrats voted for those same tax cuts. And just to be clear on one point: An increase in "the demand for investment and labor" translates into an increase in J-O-B-S. So if lowering these tax rates creates jobs, then it stands to reason that raising these taxes will mean fewer jobs. From 2003 to 2007 with the lower tax rates in place, the U.S. economy added eight million jobs, or about 125,000 per month. The Small Business Administration says small business wrote the paychecks for up to 80% of new jobs in 2005, for example.

Mr. Obama's tax increase would hit the bottom line of small businesses in three direct ways. First, because 85% of small business owners are taxed at the personal income tax rate, any moderately successful business with an income above as little as $165,000 a year could face a higher tax liability. That's the income level at which the 33% income tax bracket now phases in for individuals, and Mr. Obama would raise that tax rate for those businesses to 36%.

Second, the Obama plan phases out tax deductions (the so-called PEP and Pease provisions), thus raising tax rates imposed on this group by another 1.5 percentage points. Finally, Mr. Obama would require many small business owners to pay as much as a four-percentage-point payroll tax surcharge on net income above $250,000. All of this would bring the federal marginal small business tax rate up to nearly 45%, while big business would continue to pay the 35% corporate tax rate.

Mr. Obama responds that more than nine of 10 small businesses would not pay these higher taxes. Last Thursday he scoffed in response to the debate over Joe the Plumber, saying that not too many plumbers "make more than $250,000 a year." He's right that most of the 35 million small businesses in America have a net income of less than $250,000, hire only a few workers, and stay in business for less than four years.

However, the point is that it is the most successful small- and medium-sized businesses that create most of the new jobs in our dynamic society. And they are precisely the businesses that will be slammed by Mr. Obama's tax increase. Joe the Plumber would get hit if he expanded his business and hired 10 to 15 other plumbers. An analysis by the Senate Finance Committee found that of the filers in the highest two tax brackets, three out of four are small business owners. A typical firm with a net income of $500,000 would see its tax burden rise to $166,000 a year under the Obama plan from $146,000 today.

According to a Gallup survey conducted for the National Federation of Independent Business last December and January, only 10% of all businesses that hire between one and nine employees would pay the Obama tax. But 19.5% of employers with 10 to 19 employees would be socked by the tax. And 50% of businesses with 20 to 249 workers would pay the tax. The Obama plan is an incentive to hire fewer workers.

For many months Mr. Obama and his band of economists have claimed that taxes don't matter much to growth or job creation. But only last week Mr. Obama effectively admitted that even he doesn't believe this. His latest "stimulus" proposal includes a $3,000 refundable tax credit for businesses that hire new workers in 2009 or 2010.

So what sense does it make to offer targeted and temporary tax relief for some small businesses, while raising taxes by far more and permanently on others? Raising marginal tax rates on farmers, ranchers, sole proprietors and small business owners is no way to stimulate the economy -- and it's certainly no way to create J-O-B-S.

Another Shatner Moment

Man, I love this character!

British Humor

There is just something about dry British humor that makes you laugh and then go...hmmmm. This little youtube moment came via my dear friend and author, Jeanette Henderson. It has one of the best explanations about our current financial crisis that I have heard yet.

ACORN

Besides outrageous voter fraud being propagated throughout the country by this federally funded entity (our tax dollars), ACORN is the smoking gun in the sub prime mortgage crisis that has created this worldwide economic rollercoaster that we are on. And Barack Obama is right in the middle...

“’You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.’ So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left ‘community organizers’ called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness. At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis... In June of 1995, President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary Cisneros announced the administration’s comprehensive new strategy for raising home-ownership in America to an all-time high. Representatives from ACORN were guests of honor at the ceremony. In his remarks, Clinton emphasized that: ‘Our homeownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers one extra cent. It will not require legislation.’ Clinton meant that informal partnerships between Fannie and Freddie and groups like ACORN would make mortgages available to customers ‘who have historically been excluded from homeownership.’ In the end of course, Clinton’s plan cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable amount of money. And it was just around the time of his 1995 announcement that the Chicago papers started encouraging bad-credit customers with ‘dog-food’ wages, little money in the bank, and even histories of bankruptcy to apply for home loans with the help of ACORN...ACORN is at the base of the whole mess... And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s economic madness every step of the way.” —Stanley Kurtz

Atlas Shrugged

I am not a rocket scientist, but I do know that the people who drive the economic engine of our country are not the poor people. And I don't have to be that smart to understand that the only way to help poor people is to provide jobs not more government welfare.

So I believe it is fair to think that the economic engine of our country is FREAKING OUT by the upcoming election and the prospects of a socialist regime setting up shop in the White House. All the "feel good" people in America need to take a hard look at reality not in idealism. Socialism doesn't work in a free society. So we are either going to have to give up our freedom and live for the government good or we are going to have to fight back like our lives depended on it...because it does.

Maybe we should introduce "Atlas Shrugged" back into our library. The reality of Ayn Rand's profound vision of an America gone haywire is way too close to becoming true.

This article is for you Bradley!

Investors' Real Fear: A Socialist Tsunami
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, October 10, 2008 4:20 PM PT

The Crash: "Why has the market dropped so much?" everyone asks. What is it about the specter of our first socialist president and the end of capitalism as we know it that they don't understand?

The freeze-up of the financial system — and government's seeming inability to thaw it out — are a main concern, no doubt. But more people are also starting to look across the valley, as they say, at what's in store once this crisis passes.

And right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.

It isn't only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House. It's that he'll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.

Throw in a media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises, and it's no wonder panic has set in.

What is that agenda? It starts with a tax system right out of Marx: A massive redistribution of income — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need — all in the name of "neighborliness," "patriotism," "fairness" and "justice."

It continues with a call for a new world order that turns its back on free trade, has no problem with government controlling the means of production, imposes global taxes to support continents where our interests are negligible, signs on to climate treaties that will sap billions more in U.S. productivity and wealth, and institutes an authoritarian health care system that will strip Americans' freedoms and run up costs.

All the while, it ensures that nothing — absolutely nothing — will be done to secure a sufficient, terror-proof supply of our economic lifeblood — oil — a resource we'll need much more of in the years ahead.

The businesses that create jobs and generate wealth are already discounting the future based on what they know about Obama's plans to raise income, capital gains, dividend and payroll taxes, and his various other economy-crippling policies. Which helps explain why world stock markets have been so topsy-turvy.

But don't take our word for it. One hundred economists, five Nobel winners among them, have signed a letter noting just that:

"The prospect of such tax-rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy," they wrote, noting that the potential of higher taxes in the next year or two is reducing hiring and investment.

It was "misguided tax hikes and protectionism, enacted when the U.S. economy was weak in the early 1930s," the economists remind us, that "greatly increased the severity of the Great Depression."

We can't afford to repeat these grave errors.

Yet much of the electorate is determined to vote for the candidate most likely to make them. If he wins, what we consider to be a crisis in today's economy will be a routine affair in tomorrow's.

Patriot Post

I am a perpetual student of history. One of my favorite topics is the history and thought processes of our Founding Fathers. Some people believe that the Constitution is a living document, meant to "evolve" as our society evolves. I am of the mindset that it is a document of intent created by people who studied the history of Europe and Ancient societies. Our Founding Fathers ladened this beautiful document with safeguards to preserve our freedoms then and forever, based on the mistakes and successes of nations who walked before us.

The Founding Fathers greatest fear was the takeover of our nation by a corrupt few. They knew they had a reason to fear it. Just as in the Bible, human nature remains the same over time.

So as we go into this election, there are greater things at stake then just our pocketbook. We are at a constitutional crossroads. Let's just hope we get the job done. Country First!

The Patriot Post
Founders' Quote Daily

"Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."

-- John Adams (An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 29 August 1763)

Reference: Original Intent, Barton (338); original The Papers of John Adams, Taylor, ed., vol. 1 (83)

Palin Factor

One of best things about volunteering at the McCain Palin headquarters in Monteagle is meeting the people who stop by and listening to their viewpoints.

Yesterday, I had two separate Mom and daughter encounters. Both girls in their early teens came in to the headquarters to get campaign "stuff" and their mothers just happened to be along for the ride, just so proud that their girls have taken an interest in something so beyond them.

These girls were EXCITED about Sarah Palin! To me, that is the Palin Factor that is being underreported and undervalued. These young, freckle faced, fresh scrubbed, smart girls felt empowered by the fact that someone like Sarah Palin could be the Vice President of the United States.

As I listened to them talk, they just wanted to know more and more about the issues and about the political process. They had studied so much more than I had at their age and I couldn't help but get excited about the idea that these young ladies were our future, and that someone like Sarah Palin planted that seed.

The Palin Factor is exactly what our young ladies need today. She is a bridge from old school beliefs to new world realities. Not a feminist, not a stay-at-home mom, but someone who saw problems with the system in her hometown and wanted to do something about it because those issues affected her family and the other families in her town. Instead of sitting back and watching it happen, she did something about it. Now that is the kind of person I want as a role model for our children.

Tuesday's Debate

My dear political friend Lynn Sebourn did a live blog during the debate, I always enjoy his commentary...

Live Blogging the Nashville Debate
by Lynn on October 7, 2008

The debate is about to start just up the road in Nashville. I am going to try live blogging the debate.

McCain needs to do very well tonight. My internet connection seems to be moving at a crawl. Is everyone in TN trying to stream the debate live?

8:03 Brokaw introduces: We’re all doooomed!

8:04 1st question: What will congress do to bail out senior citizens? Obama: Repulican deregulation caused all our problems. McCain looks and sounds strong. But he wants to bail out homeowners to “restore home values.” Are we going to just guarantee that no ones ever loses money at anything in America?

8:10 Obama continues with “Rich people are evil” theme.


8:11 Watching on Fox News. Lot’s of shots of McCain’s back. Is it that way on all the networks?

8:13 McCain begins to hit on his record of trying to reform Freddie and Fannie. Hits Obama on his record of Freddie and Fannie donations. This is something people need to hear. Obama tries to deflect by a general muddying of his record and McCain’s record

8:17 Obama just said we need a whole new financial regulation system that should be coordinated with Europe!

8:20 Obama declares how terrible it is that our deficit has increased. He is going to cut spending while implementing all his programs. Look! No mirrors!

8:22 McCain begins to attack Obama on his record in response to a question about trust. McCain is very effective here. McCain’s argument is that he has a record of accomplishment in trying to fix things.

8:28 Obama, energy is top priority. We have to deal with energy prices RIGHT AWAY. And that’s why he calls for a 10 year program to become energy independent. If it takes 10 years, how will it help right away?

8:29 Obama will go through budget line by line. Has anyone told him that the line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional?

8:20 Internet Question: What sacrifices will you ask Americans to make? Good question. McCain: Ask people to give up unneeded programs. Elimate earmarks. Tell American people that spending must be cut. Great conservative answer. It is sad that giving up government programs is a sacrifice on the part of the Americans, but I believe it is true.

8:32: Obama’s answer to sacrifice question: filibustering… Must think about the way we use energy. He is dangerously close to asking us to all wear sweaters…. Double peace corp.

8:35 Q: How to stop too much debt and easy credit. Obama: We must control Government spending. We can’t cut taxes for business. (So how will high taxes on business discourage them from being in debt?) McCain now notes that Obama is being very unclear about his tax programs. Hitting him for taxing small business. (They have both given up answering the question) Good challenge to Obama to drop his tax plan since the economy is bad.

8:40 Entitlement question: Will you reform social security and entitlements? Obama: We must work quickly. Obama has terrible lurching transition to talk about his tax plan. He is going to give everyone a tax break except to those evil rich people and corporations. Would someone please ask Obama, HOW RAISING TAXES ON WAL-MART WILL BENEFIT ME??????

8:40 Obama is basically saying that he will fix everything because he says so. Proof by assertion.

8:47 McCain pushing hard for Nuke power. I dislike the environmental hysteria, but Nuke power would be great to help reduce oil use. Obama: New energy future is like the the induction of the computer. His answer her is incomprehensible. We can’t drill, we must use alternate energy, but seems to minimize nuclear power. This is all pie in the sky. Just trust him that it will work out.

8:53 McCain defends drilling now! Yes! Explains supply and demand.

8:54 Q: Should health care be treated as a commodity? (good question) Obama ignores question and just begins to explain his health plan. We are going to make health insurance affordable by reducing paperwork. Attacks McCain’s insurance program.

8:56 McCain properly frames Health issue as “choices vs. mandates” Good clarification from Browkaw, “Is health care a right or a responsibility.” McCain: It’s a responsibility. Obama: It’s a right. Obama clarifies that he will make you buy health care for your children. Government must make sure you do the right thing.

9:07 Obama attacking McCain on Iraq. Now attacking Iraq war in general. Isn’t that old news now. Question: Obama has been complaining for over a year about spending $700B on the war, but yet didn’t blink to spend $700B on the bailout on a moment’s notice. We could have went to Darfur instead? (Why is that important to America?)

9:10 Q: What is the Obama doctrine about using armed force when our interests are not at stake. ? Obama: We can go in if moral issues are at stake, like genocide, Darfur, Rowanda, Holocaust, etc. (Weren’t there moral issues at stake in Iraq?) McCain: Criteria is: Can we beneficially improve the situation? Sometimes are abilities are limited.

9:14 Q: Should we respect Pakistan’s borders? Obama: Obama escaped because we went to Iraq. Al Queda is stronger than any time since 2001. (really?) Send a lot more troops to Afghanistan. Get tougher with Pakistan. Insist they get tougher with terrorists (or else what?) Getting rid of Al Queda and Bin Laden is our number one military priority.

9:17 McCain takes Obama to task for threatening Pakistan. We have to get their support. We need the support of the people and turn against the Taliban. Not threatening them.

9:21 Question about changes in strategy or policy in Afghanistan. Obama: We need to move more troops there (to accomplish what?) Tell Afghans they need to get better control (I bet they never thought of that.)

9:24 McCain defends Petraus ability to accomplish mission in Afghanistan.

9:25 McCain: We will not have a new cold war with Russia. The problem in Russia is Putin. Need to put diplomatic and economic pressure on Russian to behave.

9:26 Obama: We need to send $$$$$$ to Russian satellite countries to help them. Obama says we need to anticipate these problems instead of just reacting to them.

9:34 Q: Would we defend Israel against nukes from Iran without getting permission from UN. McCain: yes, Obama: Gave a long rambling answer that included gas production. Kinda yes?

9:38 Great answer by McCain to final question: “What don’t you know and how will you learn about it.” McCain: I don’t know what is going to happen at home and abroad in the future. I have the experience to handle the unexpected.

Debate ends. My final impression. Obama spent a great amount of time not actually saying anything. He spent a lot of time just restating the question and empathizaing with the questioner without actually saying anything.

McCain gave a solid performance, but no killer moments. I’ll add a few more comments after I’ve had time to sleep on it.

www.sebourn.com

How McCain can Win

As most of you know, I am a big fan of the uber-blogger Bill Hobbs. Here is his 10 point strategy that McCain advisors should take heed (I really wish he would have done #2):

1. Return to Michigan. Actually, send Sarah Palin and her United Steelworkers Union/commercial fisherman/oil fields worker husband Todd to campaign in Michigan, and have them compare the Obama-Biden economic plan - higher taxes, more regulations, bigger government, huge spending increases - to the virtually identical economic policies of Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, which have been disastrous for Michigan. Under Granholm, Michigan's economic decline has accelerated. Obama-Biden would step on the gas. Sarah and Todd Palin can make the case effectively - and they'll resonate with Michigan's blue-collar voters.

2. Run against the bailout. Yes, that sounds counterintuitive because McCain voted for it, but it's not. The bailout may have been the only economic package that Congress could come up with and pass while operating in a crisis atmosphere, but most Americans deep down know that a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, even if necessary and the only option given the circumstances is still a symptom of a deeper more insidious set of problems that haven't been addressed. A bailout bill to "rescue the economy" can simultaneously be the only option and a symbol of just how badly Washington has been doing - or, should I say not doing - its job.

Washington bears the blame for creating the crisis that Washington is now attempting to solve with the bailout. But the bailout doesn't address the main problems that Washington caused - it doesn't reign in the Community Reinvestment Act, for example, which encouraged a flood of sub-prime lending that it at the core of the mess. (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac then securitized those risky mortgages.)

The bailout bill is like giving a transfusion to a gunshot victim while neither removing the bullet or closing the wound. McCain needs to point out who pulled the trigger.

3. Don't run against Congress. Run against Washington.

4. Hammer Obama on the Wall Street mess. It's Obama's party's fault more so than the Democrats. Obama and Biden are blaming George Bush's economic policies for the Wall Street mess, but the truth is that the seeds of the crisis were planted in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, while the five years of rapid economic growth during the Bush administration (2002-2007) actually forestalled the crisis by helping housing prices continue to rise. Once the economy hit an inevitable downturn, falling housing prices exposed the problem with the sub-prime loans.

Democrats want to blame "deregulation" by Bush, but they can't make the case stick as most of the deregulation legislation they (wrongly) blame pre-dated the Bush administration. Bush and McCain, meanwhile, proposed legislation to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - reforms that might have prevented the current crisis. Who killed their proposals? Democrats like Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank.

Obama was basically AWOL on the issue - he made no meaningful legislative attempt to address the problems.

5. Hammer Washington for the pork, earmarks and giveaways stuffed into the "economic rescue" bailout bill. "You will know their names and I will make them famous," McCain has promised. He should keep that promise.

6. Hammer Obama on his tax proposals and his spending proposals. Obama has promised a trillion dollars in spending increases. Asked at the debates what spending promises an Obama-Biden administration would have to cut because of the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, Obama named nothing, but talked about things he would spend more on, while Biden said they might have to delay a plan to double the amount of money Uncle Sam spends on foreign aid. He named nothing else.

The federal government spends around $25 billion a year on foreign aid. Biden just said they would offset a $700 billion emergency spending increase by delaying a $25 billion increase in one program. The math doesn't add up.

Obama and Biden promise to shrink the deficit, but you flat can not increase spending by a trillion dollars, on top of a one-time $700 billion emergency expenditure, offset it by delaying a $25 billion spending increase, and shrink the deficit without raising taxes.

So, Obama-Biden will either have to balloon the deficit and national debt by unprecedented amounts - with all that borrowing likely causing a huge new "credit crunch," by the way - or will have to massively increase taxes in the middle of a recession.

Obama promises to cut taxes. Bill Clinton promised that too when he was first running for president. A few weeks after he was sworn in, Clinton raised taxes on the middle class.

7. Promise to submit only balanced budget proposals. The Washington elites will scoff and say it can't be done, but there's no reason other than a lack of political will that it can't be done. It will force the other side to stamp their feet and demand deficit spending. Let 'em. Main Street Americans in their gut know that a federal government that spends trillions of dollars probably could get by with a little less, and that allowing it to spend more makes tax increases more inevitable in the years ahead.

8. Point out, endlessly, that Joe Biden's tenure in Congress has been so effective that America doesn't have any problems that $700 billion in taxpayers' money can't fix. Yeah, McCain has been in the Senate almost as long, but Biden's party was in the majority for more of those years.

9. Let Palin take the lead on economic issues. She has the right instincts (she's a Reaganite supply-sider) and she's got the street cred as a middle class working hockey mom from Main Street America to make the case. For all his virtues, McCain does not have a deep policy background on economic issues and his family wealth makes it easy for Obama-Biden to attack whatever he says.

Palin isn't an economic policy wonk, but she has something better when it comes to economic issues: real Main Street America experience in small business. Most businesses in America are small businesses. She understands them. They speak the same language.

10. ENERGY is the key to the campaign. ENERGY policy is at the intersection of national security, foreign policy and the economy. So... hammer the link between higher energy costs and the struggling economy, and the link between foreign energy dependence and national security, and point out that Obama and the Democrat's opposition to significant increased domestic production of oil, natural gas and oil from shale means we'll continue sending $700 billion a year to foreign countries that don't like us very much. ($700 billion? We've heard that number before...)

Point out with a megaphone that when it comes to increasing domestic supplies of reliable energy, Obama and Biden stand in the way, and while dependence on foreign energy impacts our foreign policy in negative ways it also enriches terrorist-coddling countries like Iran and destabilizing regimes like the one in Russia.

And it damages the domestic economy.

When gas jumped from $2 a gallon to $4 gallon, it cost my wife and myself an extra $400 a month in gasoline costs. Every month that is $400 we don't have to save, or spend on other things, or donate to charity. Imagine that kind of impact to family budgets across the country and you can see why more and more people can't pay their mortgages on time, and why consumer spending is sluggish, resulting in a general economic slowdown and job losses.

Americans overwhelmingly want increased domestic oil drilling. Obama and Biden don't - nor do they support increased use of clean coal or nuclear. They want to risk America's economy on renewables that aren't yet able to produce sufficient quantities of energy, and exotic alternatives that are expensive and won't be technologically ready any time soon. McCain-Palin should also point out that Washington solutions like ethanol subsidies drive the cost of food up, and will contribute very little to energy independence.

McCain's strength is national security and defense issues, not economics. So split campaign message duties - let Palin take the lead on economic issues and on energy issues as they relate to the economy.

She is knowledgeable on more than just oil and natural gas, and has a positive track record on energy issues. Palin - not McCain - should be the face of the McCain-Palin campaign's ads on the economy and energy. She has communication skills approaching those of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Use them.

There. Ten things the McCain-Palin campaign should do, starting right now, to win this race. It is still very winnable.

The Gipper

I wonder what Ronnie would say about this recent bailout...

“Freedom is something that cannot be passed on in the blood stream, or genetically. And it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it, or it’s gone and gone for a long, long time. Already, many of us, particularly those in business and industry, there are too many who have switched rather than fight. And it’s time that particularly, some of our corporations learned, that when you get in bed with government, you’re going to get more than a good night’s sleep.” —Ronald Reagan

History 101

Just because I think we all need another laugh...(thanks Jack!)

History 101

For those that don't know about history...Here is a condensed version:

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals, and
2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.

Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.

Here ends today's lesson in world history:

It should be noted that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it.

A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to other true believers and to more liberals just to tick them off.

And there you have it. Let your next action reveal your true self.

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