Barak 'Hugo" Obama

If you took Bill Clinton and took away his sense of humor, his conniving pragmatism and his political restraint what do you get? America's second black president, Barak 'Hugo' Obama. There are an increasing number of signs that point to Obama being more lawless and more arrogant even than BJ Clinton, the former record-holder in those categories, and they are becoming alarming. The amazingly boring and condescending use of $200,000,000 of his burgeoning slush fund to pontificate to us lowly Americans before a traditional sporting event is an example of what's to come from our dazzling Messiah.

When Pelosi-Reid-Obama install the 'Fairness Doctrine' and change broadcast licensing to a yearly process you'll be amazed at how quickly the prime-time line-up will be preempted for an important Obama utterance. Failing newspapers will be 'revived' by the Newspaper Rescue Act, a benevolent government hand extended to a struggling industry to save jobs and add a new layer of supervision to reporters and editors. In the future layoffs at newspapers will be restricted to reporters whose anti-social views distort the news; i.e. conservatives. National Reporters Union officials will make sure that no Non-Union writers are hired and that those who are have a sufficient respect for the needs of the poor and the children. Just today it seems three reporters from papers which endorsed McCain have been kicked off the Obama campaign plane and sent home to say goodbye to their families, write their wills and wait for the 'Age Of Change' with the shades drawn. Getting snubbed by Obama will be like getting snubbed by Stalin, your friends back away as though you have the plague lest they be involved in your fall. Now the SuperBowl, The NBA Finals, The World Series and The Olympics will be preceded by stirring and inspirational messages from El Caudillo Maximo. You see, in a one-party socialist state the government controls everything and nobody says no to The Big Man. If you are interested in what's coming may I suggest you read 'A Bend In The River' by V.S. Naipal. Or just peruse the following from the London Times of May 29:

"On a day of already heightened tension surrounding the closure of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), Venezuela's most prominent independent broadcaster, officials turned their sights on Globovisión, a local television network and CNN, the US cable news network, accusing them of plotting against the Government."

Oh you have a problem with any of Barak 'Hugo' Obama's policies? So did Joe The Plumber. The Obamanoids could have dropped that argument. They could have just ignored the Joe The Plumber incident and let it die, but Barak 'Hugo' Obama always has to have the last word. And, in a very 'funny' co-incidence Joe The Plumber's government records were scanned for usable sewage just as Sara Palin's e-mails mysteriously made it onto the front pages of the Obama-zomby press. Joe Wurzelbacker has been assaulted by what is an obviously orchestrated attack by the Obama campaign. Guess what Joe, when you go to get a bank loan to buy the plumbing business you dream of owning you better bring a ski-mask and a shotgun if you want to walk out with any funding because your banker has to worry about the Federal Bailout Money which is now his bank's only real asset.

What will these totalitarians do when they get total power? All three branches of government will be solidly dominated by people who ardently believe that they have been empowered to enact a vast social-engineering scheme and seize any existing resources to put that scheme into practice. These people are notoriously thin-skinned and go after the mildest criticism hammer and tongs. The days of a politician remaining comatose as he is viciously attacked will end when W departs, Barak 'Hugo' Obama is cut from different cloth. He responds to provocations from counterrevolutionary troublemakers.

You see, paying taxes is 'patriotic'. Not paying taxes is unpatriotic. Complaining about taxes is unpatriotic. And for the unpatriotic Bush has left us the Patriot Act. Now, the feeble Bush only used the Patriot Act to act against nihilistic, utopian, Islamic terrorists...people who are now on the Obama donor list, who have all been registered as Democrats by ACORN and several of whom have had long relationships with Barak 'Hugo' Obama. When it was being used to harass a pack of zany towelheads by the excreble Bush the Democrats hated The Patriot Act; Harry Reid announced it's demise with glee at one point. But you know, applied to the Right People, the Patriot Act might come in handy. We're all going to want to hunt down the snakes who are holding out on the poor by trying to cling to assets properly devoted to the state, that goes without saying.

The Venezuelafication of America is already happening. Collapsing state governments are releasing dangerous criminals while they lay off cops which will create a Caracas-style crime wave. After all crime is just a free-lance version of income redistribution; Socialism without red tape. People over property! In fact, the socialist rot that has been taking place for the last forty-four years is coming to a head no matter which pack of idiots takes power in Washington DC. Industry after industry is being sucked into the maw of government subsidies or being cowed by crowds of zealous regulators. Capital is fleeing and the flight will accelerate in the months between a Dem landslide and The Coronation Of Change. When the mask is dropped on Nov 5th and the power-hungry and arrogant leftists begin to dance in the streets with the bloody heads of W and Lady Liberty on pikes screaming, "Yes we can!" every movable penny in the nation will begin rolling offshore and the New Age can begin.

The Bradley Effect

Can he still do it? The polls are tightening but RCP.com still has Obama crushing McCain. But where does RCP get that number? They get it by averaging in polls from political porn mags like Time and Newsweek that show Obama is more popular in the US than Kim Jong Il was in the last popularity poll taken by the Pyongyang Intellegencer. The guys who tried to use fake memos to torpedo Bush in the last election and still haven't acknowledged that they might have made a mistake are running a poll that shows a wide Obama lead. Oh really?

What advocacy group ever took a poll and came out with an answer that showed that their position was unpopular? According to the Sierra Club's poll we are all dying to abandon our cars and take up subsistence agriculture with the help of our animal friends. The Heritage Foundation finds an American population gazing fondly at the Constitution and yearning for a constructionist judiciary. The Tuna Foundation finds that tuna is the most popular fish. The New York Times finds that America is lusting to vote for Obama. Can we believe any of them?

We cant even believe the ones that show a very tight race, the one's that have consistently shown this to be a very tight race with a swing to McCain when Palin appeared on the scene and a swing to Obama when the market crisis erupted. But the numbers in these polls have always returned to an inside-the-margin-of-error squeaker. What does that show? It shows a large group of very soft supporters who are truly conflicted about where they are going to end up.

The frightening economy is a big plus for Obama. The line coming from the Obama camp that this chaos is a result of Bush's tax policies might be a total lie but it is unrefuted by the feeble McLame and it hits home. Who could look at that wizened piece of gristle Ted Stevens skulking away from his seven felony convictions and not have anything but contempt for a party too stupid to demand that this fossil not run for re-election when he was under indictment and on his way to his 84th birthday party? People just aren't going to vote for someone as repulsive as Stevens. When 'The Torch' Toricelli was in a similar situation in New Jersey, a state where future convicted felons make up a huge proportion of the state government and even a larger percentage of the electorate, Bill Clinton appeared to make sure 'The Torch' did the right thing and dropped off the ballot. He was replaced by a vacuous, grinning half-wit named Lautenburg (pronounced Lousy-burg). Yes Lousy-burg wears adult diapers and drools at his desk in the Senate but one of his attendants makes sure that he is a reliable vote for Harry Reid and the boys. The Republicans haven't lost their brand they've lost their way. So its asking a lot for anybody to vote voluntarily for this pack of inferior schlubs. The average air conditioning repair man knows a weak-kneed, greedy, valueless incompetent when he sees one.

Meanwhile, across the aisle here is this shiny new candidate and this party behind him that are attempting to hide their inner Stalinism behind a facade of center-left populism. They ran a convention where all the usual loudmouths were silenced and an attempt was made to appear concerned about the lives of their taxpaying helots. Those clever Democrats are confident that the Great Unwashed will continue to not notice that states whose governments are controlled by Democrats have the highest unemployment, the highest taxes and the biggest deficits. States where sales and property taxes rise as policemen and firemen are cut from the rolls as crowds of felons are handed voter registration cards and released early from prison because protecting public safety has become too expensive. The Democrats are confident that their ability to pretend to be honest moderates instead of the corrupt, glassy-eyed, Stalinist social engineers that they really are will get them through another round of elections with vast majorities in the legislature and Barak Hussein Obama happily ensconced to lead the social revolution from the White House.

But that pesky internet has changed everything. Thats where most people get their information these days. They get e-mails from their friends that direct them to clips on U-tube. U-tube has changed everything. You can see any event without any commentary from your betters in the media. Clips like Obama's little talk about redistribution on NPR get millions of hits. So did his argument with Joe The Plumber. What a message to Blue Collar America that was! We're going to take your wealth and spread it around, buddy. These blue collar types know that after the trillions of dollars that supposedly have been spent to cure poverty the poor people don't look any more prosperous than they did a generation ago and they recognize 'spreading the wealth around' as the euphemism for highway robbery that it is. Meanwhile people are U-tubing the Wright sermons and all of Barak's various statements about sharing the wealth. They're seeing Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing a victory dance on the corpse of the Bush Tax Cuts and thinking about just how high taxes can get...

If polls like Zogby and Gallup go into this weekend showing the gap that they show now then McCain will win the election. If Obama hasn't closed the deal by now then what the polls are showing is the very normal reticence that any normal human would feel when faced with the necessity of voting for a sawed-off, stuttering, incoherent, Wrinkly Old White Dude like McCain. I freely admit that I have the same feelings myself. Where I part ways with many people is that I'm not going to let my healthy contempt for our cross-eyed ole Maverick cause me to vote to put a slicked-up version of Leon Trotsky in the White House. I think a lot of people are going to have the same problem and they are going to end up, like me, having to face the ugly prospect of living the rest of their lives knowing that they voted to put John McCain in the White House.

So What's Your Plan, Skep?

I've been shooting my mouth off about how misguided everyone else is. Its almost as if I were a Democrat, insulting everyone else without revealing what I would do in the current situation. Thats a valid question to ask of anyone who casts as many aspersions as I do. What's Skep's plan?


Lets assume that I have the political power to pass any bill through the legislature and then the executive power to enforce them. Here is some of what I would do:

Pass a Constitutional Amendment forbidding the Federal Government to meddle in education and mandating that only local school districts shall make educational decisions. It would limit the size of these districts to 100,000 students. Implementation of this would include the disbanding of the Federal and States Departments of Education and keeping only a small statistics-gathering entity under the aegis of some other cabinet department. It would also include the immediate ending of subsidized and guaranteed student loans, an end to Title One and Head Start and the myriad other wasteful and ineffective federal education programs.All subsidies to higher education would cease immediately.

I would immediately announce a two-year freeze on all cost of living adjustments in transfer payments, food stamps, salaries and government contracts.

I would implement by a Constitutional Amendment a flat tax so that everyone in the country pays taxes and has an incentive to keep them low. I would include in this tax a maximum rate of 20% of income which can only be raised beyond that by a one-year increase by a two-thirds vote of Congress and signature by the President.

I would eliminate all capital gains taxes and repeal Sarbanes-Oxley.

I would create an approval process for nuclear power plants, oil drilling, pipeline construction and other energy-related projects that would allow anyone in opposition to have one opportunity to submit their objections to the project and make their case with no further litigation. The rights of people to sue for damages caused by these activities would not be compromised.

I would remove all restrictions on energy extraction, requiring a reasonable level of protection against environmental damage.

I would end all subsidies for 'alternative energy'.

I would immediately end all agricultural subsidies.

I would make Supreme Court and Federal Judge terms six years and pass a Constitutional Amendment that redefines the powers of the court, limiting their ability to legislate from the bench.

I would drastically change the criteria for Class Action suits and explore reforms in tort law. The loser in any suit should be liable for the court costs to cut the number of nuisance lawsuits.
The 'deep pockets' concept should be limited or eliminated.

I would pass a Constitutional Amendment making Public Employee Unions illegal and union membership in the private sector completely voluntary. No more closed shops.

I would pass a Constitutional Amendment mandating that legislative districts be drawn in a way that maximizes competition instead of creating safe districts. Government bureaus and contractors would be forbidden to lobby and run political campaigns to increase their funding. With full and instant disclosure I would eliminate the contribution limits for individuals to political campaigns.

I would pass a Constitutional Amendment requiring the re-registration of every voter. A digital thumbprint and photo would be required after proof of citizenship is presented to the registrar. The severely disabled can be registered in their homes by an election official but all other voters will be required to show up at the polls to vote and provide sufficient identification. The mentally incompetent and the homeless would not be eligible to vote. Passage of a simple civics test will be mandatory to screen out the ignorant and the illiterate. The test will be in English only.

I would pursue free trade and remove as many restrictions on trade as possible. These moves would involve reciprocal actions by our trading partners, especially China.

I would explore ways to decentralize or privatize Medicare and aggressively attack fraud in the system.

I would end all government housing programs.

I would officially create a forum so that advocates of economic destruction to effect the climate publicly come forth with scientific proof that carbon emissions cause climate change and debate openly and fairly with the scientists who are refuting this nonsense.

I would cut our funding to the UN and only fund projects that advance democracy or aid refugees. I would make it clear that American foreign policy will be predicated on our national interests and that there will be immediate consequences to countries who oppose those interests.

These are just a few of the things that I can think of. The touchstone would be to decentralize and de-bureaucratize as much as possible. There would be an immediate effect that would result from the drastic downsizing of government that I propose. Several million people would lose their jobs. The freezing of transfer payments and COLAs will cause further hardship. But if we dont do anything, or worse yet, enact some to the proposals emanating from the Democrats then a lot more than several million people will lose their jobs. The people who would lose their jobs under my regime will lose their jobs eventually and permanently in the economic collapse that will happen if the current course is followed. The economy will go into a prolonged depression, one which will possibly be permanent if the socialist policies that are being proposed and the ballot-box stuffing now taking place cause permanent change in the system.

Save Yer Confederate Dollars!

Its 2010. I need a pack of gum. Could one of you guys lend me $10,000 to get a pack of gum? Oh rats...by the time you hand me that snazzy new $10000 bill (pictured above) the price of a pack of Juicy Fruit will have risen to $11000. I hate when that happens. And it DOES happen. It happened in the former Soviet Union. Its happening in Zimbabwe. It has happened in Mexico and Argentina. It happens in all Socialist countries. It will happen here when we elect a socialist government on Nov. 4th. It will happen much faster than people will believe.

What is money? Paper money started as a promise by the government to pay the bearer 'on demand' the equivalent amount of gold or silver. Everybody knew that there were a lot more paper dollars floating around then there was bullion to back them up but by the time a stable paper currency was in circulation, after the Civil War, the economy was expanding and booming so no one even wanted to cash in their paper for illiquid, non-negotiable metal. Political campaigns demanding a return to 'hard' money were big losers.

Then came the Depression. Roosevelt confiscated all gold money, a fact lost on the idiots who are currently buying gold to hedge against the coming wave of inflation. Unless you have purchased your gold from a burglar who stole some hoarders stash of Krugerrands there is an electronic record of your purchase that a specie-hungry socialist government will impound and use to hunt down the morons who think they were smarter than everybody else. You'll be asked to share with the less fortunate, Mr. Gold-hoarding, counterrevolutionary, individualist scumbag; and if you hold out you'll learn the kind of methods a money-hungry socialist state will resort to when its ruling class needs hard currency to pay for its blunders and extravagances. Steam rooms so hot you cant breathe, enforced sleeplessness, your wife and children tortured in front of your eyes...those were the methods of Stalin's gold police. In Saddam's Iraq they cut your toes off with bolt-cutters and threw your kids off the roof of a four-story building in case they suspected you were holding out on them. I'll bet our American geniuses can do better...and they will!

Meanwhile expect a visit from Grandma, kiddies. You see, in mega-inflation a Social Security check that is adjusted for a phony, way-understated inflation rate once a year is going to be totally worthless. Ditto the nationalized 401k and private pension you thought you had... there are bills already being proposed that will seize those assets in the name of Fairness. So the one meal a day that your eternally shrinking paycheck will allow you to afford will have to be shared out amongst another generation. Think it cant happen? Well, after the fall of the Soviet Union it DID happen, exactly like I just said.

That is the logical end of all these cradle-to-grave welfare schemes. The Europeans, long propped up by American capitalism and wealth will be left to flounder and crash into a chaos and anarchy not seen since the Dark Ages. The oil thugs, a pack of parasites too incompetent and lazy to extract their own oil, will see their oil royalties drop to nothing as the international trading system collapses, sending the former nomads back to their herds of sheep and camel-hide tents while the unsustainable modern cities are inhabited by the corpses of the helpless citizens who were unable to make the leap back to Bedouinism. The International Welfare States of Africa, finally freed of the accursed foreigners and their filthy aid money will quickly revert to primitive, murderous savagery where the surviving tenth of their former populations will revert to eternal tribal war, slavery and periodic famines and epidemics; a happy restoration of their indigenous cultures that the anthropologists were so upset to see lost to consumerism. As modern communications and commerce break down the excessive populations of Pakistan, Iran, India, Indonesia and China will be pulled down in the crash to a tenth of their former levels if a nuclear war is somehow avoided in the chaos.

Global Warming wont be an issue anymore as economic activity is cut by 90%. Not that any form of environmental consciousness will continue to exist. Socialist countries have by far the worst environmental records and without any effective international criticism all restraints will be gone. With everything stripped down to edge-of-survival mode no one will be sniveling about clean air or clean water. But environmentalists can look forward to herds of deer and packs of coyotes and wolves roaming through the abandoned suburbs which will slowly return to the wild.

What role did an assertive, capitalist America play in the Old Order? It was a bastion, a competitor, a beacon, an example of how things can be done right. Remove that capitalist America from the scene and what is there to keep the world from a new socialist Dark Age? The values of the West, developed from the Renaissance, The Age Of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern technology have been abandoned and forgotten. Nothing but inertia is holding this society together. Obama will give it the push it needs to collapse.

Instead of an international outlook people's horizons will be completely local. Elections, if they continue to exist, will involve only one party and be completely meaningless. That is already happening and the Obama-nation will complete the trend by adding giant chunks of phony ballots to each election.

And look at that $10000 bill. Under our current tax code people that have $10000 bills are the truly wealthy. You're going to have a pocket of them every day in Obamaland after you cash your paycheck (in inflation you are paid the readjusted amount of your pay daily...if you're lucky). Even though one of those Sharptons will only buy a pack of gum the unadjusted-for-inflation tax code is going to sock it to you because YOU will be a multi-multi-millionaire according to the code...time to share that excess cash with the treasury. Its patriotic. And you know what will happen to the unpatriotic; they will be given Free Health Care to cure their anti-social mental illness.

There isn't a single thing that I have talked about in this post that hasn't happened in other countries. If Americans aren't unique, possessed with a philosophy that sets this country apart from the oppressive governments in other countries, but are merely 'citizens of the world' then those same things will happen here quickly and without the distant example of an America to restrain the excesses. we are the last outpost and that outpost is about to fall.

America Deserves Obama

The fools. A protest vote against Bush is going to propel this country into socialism and financial ruin. That's where we were headed anyway, mind you. The Republicans were in control in 2005 when the truth about Fannie and Freddie became obvious. Not only did they not go public with this boondoggle's ties to the Democrats they then sat silently by while the Democrats ran the next year yelling, "Culture Of Corruption!" at the Republicans. And they were 100% right...the Republicans were so corrupt that you could mistake them for Democrats. In fact the comity of the Bush years had created one big Government Party, a giant engine dedicated to dishing out entitlements and subsidies to all and sundry. The same mighty entity that hands Archer Daniels Midland billions in ethanol subsidies also created mortgage rules that allowed people to cite welfare and food stamps as income on their mortgage applications. Universities have been wallowing in cash from subsidized and guaranteed government loans to middle class students as they scrambled for the most prestigious degree possible as credentials replace merit as a criteria in hiring. Millions receive the 'Earned Income Tax Credit', a great big fat government check for doing absolutely nothing. The expanding bureaucracy sops up millions of middle class youths with empty college degrees qualifying them to engage in feckless, brain-dead paper shuffling for all eternity.

Thats the thing about the end of the New Deal, virtually everybody is on the take by now. The hidden math is now becoming obvious; the only way that the government can fund its operations now is to print money. Digital money, not worth the paper it isn't printed on. But what does a country filled with idiots who are hopelessly up to their eyeballs in debt know or care about sound financing? Who cares about that kind of crap anyway? John Q Public runs his household on the plastic, with an occasional refinance to zero the cards out. These current troubles are all Bush's fault so if we get rid of Bush and the Republicans it'll be OK, right?

Its certain that raising taxes will lower revenues drastically. That is, its certain to me. Its not so certain to the Democrats. Somehow they missed the memo about what happens to investment capital when you tax it too highly. It disappears. When you tax income too highly people tend to spend rather than invest and in many cases lower their incomes by doing less work. There's a country 150 miles to the South of me where you only have to look to see the results of oppressive government. I'm glad the Racists didn't get that fence built, we might need to get under it to get the jobs that will blossom down in Mexico once the environmental laws in this country close down the agricultural sector up here. A nice job in Sinaloa picking tomatoes. Thats what those idiots are voting for. It'll be a nice 'Change'.

I was talking to my brother on the phone. He's a cement contractor in Las Vegas. I asked him if people had thought this 'spreading the wealth around' thing through. After all, the most valued customers in Las Vegas are the upper middle class, people with real disposable income. But that disposable income is going to get 'spread around' (ie. seized by the state). That can't be good for a place like Vegas. The enviros want an end to individual automobile ownership and consider filling the air with Global Warming-causing carbon fumes as you drive from LA to Vegas as a crime against the planet. Why is Obama ahead in the polls in Las Vegas? A socialist government will reduce that City Of Fools to a desert ghost town where tumbleweeds blow down the deserted streets.

Why are they voting for Obama in Michigan? Or New York? These are places that are staring bankruptcy in the face because of excessive taxation and regulations. I thought people always voted for their economic best interests but here we are. The people who have the most to lose are the most enthusiastic advocates of economic suicide. The upper middle class is living in a dream world. There are already bills in Congress that will nationalize all private 401k's. Lets vote for more Democrats so that they can get passed more easily. When the rich and their money take a powder because of high taxes whose wealth do you think it is thats going to get spread around?

Thats why I'm sad. This society is completely delusional. Our image of who we are does not match the reality of who we are. This is a whining, spoiled country of people who feel entitled to carve out a nice cushy spot for themselves at the expense of everyone else. The outside world is forgotten, aspirations to world leadership an expense and a bore. The old rules that built the most prosperous society in history are scorned and ignored. Enterprise has turned into a few giant companies bribing compliant legislators for protection from competition and conniving huge subsidies from the public purse. These giant multi-nationals encompass bureaucracies as large and counter-productive as those in government. Labor unions have become not the champions of oppressed laborers but the bloated advocates for overpaid, lazy and worthless parasites.

The old ethic of individual achievement is scorned. The collective is what's important. That was the essence of America's greatness, the idea that your fate was your own. I've spent a lifetime listening to immigrants telling me how lucky Americans are to be masters of their own fates; that was the definition of freedom to them. But how many of those same immigrants, now completely assimilated into American society, are going to vote to rob themselves and their children of that very freedom they struggled so hard to obtain? I suspect they'll be voting for Obama in large numbers.

That we could have an election with so many unmentioned weighty issues hanging over our heads and two such inferior candidates is what's wrong with this country. This election is a failure of the current political and social system. The cataclysm which will follow as these Democrats put their absurd social engineering schemes into motion will be dire. But not undeserved.

The Iron Rice Bowl

In the 1960's the 'best and the brightest' blundered into the Vietnam War. Their idiotic micromanagement and overintellectualizing set ridiculous parameters which hamstrung our forces there and prevented a swift victory. When things started to get tough they walked away from the policy and joined the leftists in the permanent bureaucracy and the media in attacking the war and the man they left holding the bag, LBJ. Their sons used the 2S deferment to avoid the draft and spent the years of the war hiding in 'elite' universities which were intimidated by mobs of violent drug-addled Maoist revolutionaries into becoming bastions of politically correct thought.

These same campus revolutionaries grew to become powerful, important people. As the MegaState grew enormously so did the opportunities to carve out a fortune as a lobbyist, department head, consulting attorney, head of a 'non-profit' or any of the other myriad ways to milk the system for ten or twenty times the size of your pathetic 'salary'. But those salaries arent so bad either. Even in local government salaries have swollen to the point where people are easily in six figures. Even cops and prison guards are in 100k-land, with the promise of a phat pension after they retire, and the Max of Social Security if they work a few more years in the private sector. The office buildings full of these myriad 'departments' pop up like mushrooms, all named for the local pork-barreling congressmen who managed to get the overpriced boondoggle of an office building approved and built by his kickback-serving union buddies and contractors that gave him a healthy taste on the side, causing the building to cost four times what it would if it was built by private enterprise.

But the middle class has been on the take too. A liberal government loan program has made college mandatory for any kid who wants to get ahead in the world. The colleges are full of kids downloading their papers off the internet and killing the monotony by binge-drinking and snorting coke. Now the 'status' of the degree is all that matters; college-educated nudniks wander the landscape as ignorant as donkeys and overloaded with debt. What, if anything, you might have managed to learn in college is almost irrelevant. The tidal wave of credit that caused the real estate and finance boom was a gift to most middle class people. Most partied with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fake 'equity' and parlayed these magically generated wealth into obscenely large houses and the trappings and pretensions of elegance. Cable channels sprung up whose themes were remodeling your home, cooking gourmet food and dressing with style. "TV dinner by the pool, I'm so glad I finished school!" sneered a Frank Zappa song in the sixties...but if you DID finish school you could join the swelling class of 'middle managers' shuffling an ever-growing mass of papers and e-mails back and forth like some tide of sludge that flows aimlessly back and forth over the landscape. It used to be that a doctor was a doctor. He had a medical records girl back at the office and a nurse. Now he's a 'medical corporation' attached to legions of insurance, accounting, and legal paper shufflers. Even the simplest medical transaction is handled by dozens of people by the time its resolved.

The wealth of this class of smart, educated, pampered professionals is tied up in three places; their house, their pension and their 401k. There is an air of certitude in their lives that doesn't exist in the lives of the little dactylos who scurry about in their little office domains or who perform the various services or provide the products that they buy. The Iron Rice Bowl has arrived. If you reach a certain point in government or the bureaucracy of a mega-large corporation these days, and not a high point either, you can be assured that you will never feel want or need again.

But whats this? Can the system which has been constructed so very carefully since 1933 have some fatal flaw that no one, up to now, has noticed. After all, expansion has occurred always in the same direction under Republicans and Democrats since the days of FDR. When Clinton and Gingrich went to the mat in 1996 it was during an argument about the rate of increase of Medicare; Clinton wanted 7.5% Gingrich 7.2%. Thats the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

But now there's a problem. Medicare is broke. Government intervention and bungling has made mortgage equity decline drastically. In the 'bailout' (aka effective nationalization) of the financial industry the shareholders were completely stiffed, they lost everything. Who were the shareholders? Pension funds and 401k accounts for the most part. Companies like Chrysler are announcing huge layoffs of 'salaried' personel; the people who write the memos and guidelines so essential to automaking. The entire structure of the world which has spawned a burgeoning professional class and given it a sense of entitlement is tottering, needing only a small additional push to collapse entirely.

Enter Barak Obama and the Democrats. They are now going around announcing that when they get elected they will be handing out trillions of dollars to all and sundry. Only a few rich people will have to be bothered with the bill. Of course the inflation that all the Socialist policies will cause will push even low-wage employees into the top tax brackets but at first that will be OK because it will effectively make most debt worthless. Unions will be empowered to 'organize' even the smallest and most marginal companies... those that survive the tax increases and enviromental regulations that will cripple the economy. Inflation and confiscatory taxes will end any new investment in the private sector and to make up the slack new quasi-governmental corporations will spring up as the efficient sectors of the economy die, like algae-scum floating to the surface of a dead lake. Cronies and political allies will be running these enterprises... mainly into the ground.

But the educated elite, who are overwhelmingly advocates for and voters in favor of the megastate, will be the biggest losers in this situation, just as they were in the Soviet Union when it collapsed. The Iron Rice Bowl is an illusion. Blue collar types have skills they can barter and sell. Average people have been forced to scrape by and survive all their lives; not so the elite. They went to school, university and then got a cushy sinecure in some organization and there they have remained, peacefully chewing their digital cud. They have no survival skills in the wild. And hyper inflation is going to make things pretty wild.

I mentioned in a previous post the gloom and depression of England when they adopted the disastrous policies that we are on track to put in place here. It will be worse here. People will be looking to the usual insurer of last resort, government, and it will be flailing and applying the old tried-and-true methods which will make things increasingly worse. The next indication of the way things are going will be the collapse of Blue State state governments. New York, Massachusetts, Michigan and most especially California are about to implode, taking hundreds of thousands of state employees and the pensions of them all into the whirlpool as it sucks everything down into the black hole of bankruptcy.

The people in this country seem to not know where all this leads. They don't know what is happening in Venezuela as the newly nationalized power company turns out the lights on the empty store shelves and crime-ridden streets. The phony ballots that no one seems too worried about in this year's election will morph into a phony currency just like it has in Venezuela and in every other Socialist state. The course is clear and unstoppable.

But what should we, who see the folly of all this, do? We have to keep the faith and fight for our beliefs. It wont be easy in the times that are coming but this creeping welfare-state disease has to have a crisis before it burns itself out and recedes...or kills its host. The 'ideas' that have generated this crisis have to be seen to have failed before some more workable alternative develops. Creative destruction. During the misery have hope that the truth will prevail. It makes us stronger than them.

Its Almost THAT Day!

Its all people talk about! I'm getting TOTALLY sick of it. I'm not wearing a danged costume OK! I'm not going to any wild drunken Halloween parties and there won't be any bowls of candy laying around for me and my wife to add to our waistlines. We haven't had a trick-or-treater in years. How do you say 'trick-or-treat' in Farsi? The idea of these rich Iranians and overstuffed Yuppies who live in this neighborhood climbing these steep streets in the quest for a free candy barrette when you can buy a bag of them down at Target for $3 is ludicrous. You're just asking for a speeding BMW whose cell-phone occupied driver is talking with his wife a block away to mow you down like ninepins in the autumn gloom.

Speaking of autumn, what idiot put Halloween in a season where temperatures plunge into the low seventies or even the sixties as the sun goes down? These pampered children are never allowed outside anyway and spend most of their time playing 'Grand Theft Auto' or downloading porn off the internet. You think they're going to don some idiot costume and wander the streets panhandling candy bars when they can just bully Mom into driving down to Costco and getting the institutional-sized tub of Oreos for them to eat in their locked bedrooms while they paste Hannah Montana's face on the female co-star of 'Motel Mamas' in the new cracked copy of AfterFX they just downloaded off the web? I don't think so. Kids are not what they used to be.

I cast my mind back to the halcyon days as a boomer youth, happily participating in the orgy of vandalism and misbehavior that was Halloween, or the night before which was labeled 'Mischief Night'. This was the time to prop spikey ten-penny nails under the tires of the neighborhood grumps. Trees hung with toilet paper, windows were emblazoned with every foul curse that Larry Weiderspan's older brother learned in reform school, shrubbery was turned into torches with a liberal dousing with lighter fluid. We didn't ask our parents permission to go out in the freezing cold pitch darkness with a gang of our friends. They were glad to get rid of us at all times. There wasn't an egg left in a single refrigerator and we made water balloons from random hoses for the pitched battles with those punks from the next street.

Kids don't do that kind of stuff anymore. In these decadent times they go to organized 'events' in malls or, if they're older, they find places they can congregate and do some binge drinking. The older youngsters, those in their teens and twenties, have turned Halloween into a drunken Pagan orgy. Women aren't any looser than the young boomers, that would be impossible, but they wear better underwear to a Halloween party purchased with their individual accounts at Victoria's Secret Online and egged on by the lastest round of Paris Hilton scandals. Boys have been reduced to brain-dead oafism by the ADHD drugs the school gives them to wash down with gallon-sized jugs of Jose Cuervo that their big brother buys for them them at Costco. Offices encourage their employees to dress up, a sure method of separating the alienated from the sincere. Eat sugar, you helots; a fat slave is a happy slave! Who of us hasn't snarled with contempt at the administrative types and their retarded sense of 'fun' ? It makes you want to burn the place down with all of them in it. The Age Of Obama will fix their Democratic-voting adzes.

But the best part of Halloween is the commercials! You know that Mattress World is going to dress up their employees as mattresses and sofa cushions listlessly waving their arms that are sticking out of these badly-sewn furniture costumes. They might as well have a sign behind them saying 'Help Wanted- Half-Wits Only'. Kind of like what they should be putting behind Obama in his commercials.

This might be the last big Halloween. The consumer culture that created this beastly wallow in oral hedonism and piggery is probably going to be a thing of the past soon. People won't be so eager to party as the standard of living tanks and the currency becomes worthless. Devils and ghosts won't be so funny when they come down to earth and make your Iron Rice Bowl pension effectively worthless. That second house up at the lake will be just as worthless when environmental regulations take away your car and leave it the spooky, broken-windowed, abandoned haunt of ghosts and raccoons. It will be harder to put up a funny skeleton display in your front yard with the one 40 watt $250 mercury-gas-filled light bulb you can afford to illuminate it. The hard drinking will go on. That is a characteristic of Socialist societies. Having children is not.

Now in the autumn of our country the thoughtless crowd seems to be in the mood to temporarily put down the bag of Three Musketeer miniatures screw the cap back onto the generic bottle of Walmart Gin and load the cats, the kids, the illegal alien live-in maid and grandpa's ghost into the Mini-van and drive this bloated and obese crewe twenty yards down the street so they can all vote for a New Age Of Change. Trick or Treat Mr. Big Government! Just put all the free goodies in the bag and we'll be on our way. A hundred years of Socialist failure mean nothing to these lard-brained, mouth-breathing morons... Obama is as persuasive as the guy from Mattress World and he wants to give you more than just a free mattress! People are so stupid its scaring me to death. We've been cursed with the demons of ignorance, selfishness and greed and they will steal every penny from the fools who think they can vote themselves something for nothing. A country cursed.

Well, I'm going to go fill my sink with water and put an apple in it and try to grab it with my teeth. Tradition.

Night Of The Generals

Who was the worst general in American History? There are a lot of candidates. Even the brilliant generals like Lee, Patton and Sherman made mistakes. But there are generals who only made mistakes, generals whose actions prolonged wars, increased casualties and created future problems.

Some people say that George Washington was an incompetent general. He lost battle after battle but the effect of his staying in the field was that he won the war. His tactics against a well disciplined enemy could raise some questions but his strategy was a winner. He had the strength of character to keep the entire enterprise from going on the rocks and the image of him standing strong led, in the end, to his opponents realizing that they could never win and that any resources that they spent trying to hold on to their American Colonies were wasted.

Usually George McClelland is cited as the worst general in American History. With good reason. In the peninsular campaign he had a 4-1 advantage over Lee and ended up running with his tail between his legs. After the bloody collision at Antietam, when Lee was wounded and trapped on the wrong side of the Potomac McClelland could have finished him off and ended the war. Lincoln was so furious he fired him. The strategic effect of McClelland's blunder was that the war continued three more years and the South was totally destroyed. But McClelland built the Army Of The Potomac from nothing and in the end that led to the defeat of Lee and the Union Victory.

But there is one general who has been consistently wrong at every step of his career as a general. the long-term effects of his foolish decisions have included the destrustion of ten percent of the office space in New York City and the felony conviction of a totally innocent man.

What did Powell's decisions have to do with 9/11? Think back to the attack on our marines in Beirut. First of all Powell and his mentor Casper Weinburger put those brave men in the middle of a chaotic war between some of the most murderous and crazed fanatics in history. One of those factions was Hezbollah. Hezbollah found some deranged lunatic and got him behind the wheel of a truck filled with explosives which he rammed into the Marine barracks causing 350 or so deaths. This was after the US Embassy had been similarly attacked a week before with 50 deaths. That the Marines hadn't been dispersed in the face of this is another thing that should be charged to the leading military commander in this age of micromanagement.

But then the terrorists struck. The panic in Washington was sickening to behold. A female Senator, whose name I forget, was sobbing into the microphone bawling that we had to get our people out of there! It was like watching a pack of chickens react to the entry of a rattlesnake into their coup. Even Reagan was stunned and slow to react, partly because he had Powell and Whine-burger moaning in his ear about disengagement. The only thing on anybody's mind was avoiding additional casualties.

In Baalbek and the Bekaa Valley they waited for the waves of B-52's which they expected to arrive at any moment to send their seedy Islamic butts to paradise. But the azure blue skies never were filled with a rain of 2000 lb bombs. The people who were proposing making Beirut uninhabitable by bombing every power plant, water pumping station and bridge in the area were just spouting hot air. The battleship New Jersey showed up a few weeks later and lobbed a few shells into the mainly Druze villages on the coastal mountainsides but the fact that Hezbollah continued to exist and thrive instead of being a broken remnant counting its losses in the ruined moonscape of the Bekaa Valley was a message to terrorists everywhere that they could kill Americans with impunity because we were so terrified of casualties and bad publicity that we would never use our awesome firepower to any effect regardless of the provocation.

When it came to moving in for the kill in Iraq in 1991 it was the same story. Swartzkopf asked for one more day to finish off the Republican Guards. He didn't get it. The symbolism of a 100 Hour War and Powell's aversion to further Iraqi casualties drove the decision to let the remaining Republican Guard units escape the trap and survive to suppress the Shi'ite rebellion. Powell then stood silent while several hundred thousand Shi'ite civilians were slaughtered by the people he was so merciful to.

Somalia, same story. The death and mutilation of our Rangers didn't provoke a devastating response, just more sniveling and hand-wringing. The Powell Doctrine was a message to Osama Bin Laden that the sky was the limit. The cowardly west would absorb blow after blow and the Powell Doctrine, without Powell in command, ruled the day. The only response to these horrible terrorist attacks were a couple of random cruise-missile strikes and a feeble bombing of Baghdad timed to politically benefit the embattled Clinton Administration.

As Secretary Of State Powell made one of his worst mistakes when a group of Venezuelan military officers arrested Hugo Chavez. Powell insisted that the 'democratically elected leader' of Venezuela be released...condemning the officers who arrested him to exile or prison and condemning the Venezuelan people to a brutal dictatorship which is impoverishing them and actively acting against democracy in the region. Once again Powell's actions aided an enemy of our country to survive and flourish.

Then we have Powell, feeling aggrieved that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 happened in spite of the year and a half of diplomatic fiddling around and that his name was attached to it. He resigned with bitter feelings against the Bush Administration for linking his good name to what had become an unpopular policy amongst his inside-the-beltway social circuit. He directed his minion, Richard Armitage, to start blabbing around to journalists that the lying scumbag Joe Wilson was married to a CIA agent named Valerie Plame who had possibly been the reason that Wilson was sent on his mission to Niger. Then, in one of the great non-coincidences of history, Upchuck Schumer, the most baldly partisan Senator in the Senate, called for an investigation into whether karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the White House were behind the leak.
Powell sat there for two years, while a totally innocent man was convicted on a process crime based on the perjury of a liberal journalist, silent; knowing that the original leak and all the coverage in the press had been generated by his own man. It is the most disgusting and dishonorable act, an act seeking to sabotage the policies of a sitting president and land his innocent associates in prison, that has ever been committed by any American general in history. It was pure spite and bile.

That's the inner soul of this timid and incompetent general. His record of misjudgement is long and our country has paid a very high price for his 'leadership'. Maybe he was to be expected from the Vietnam Era officer corps who saw their military victory in Vietnam turned into a political defeat and vowed that they would never be hung out to dry like that again. Their criteria for using force was so cramped and narrow that it almost negated any military advantage in capability that the US had by convincing our adversaries that we would never use it. Bush and Rumsfeld have altered this a tiny bit, and a whole new group of officers are emerging from our actions in the War On Terror who can take pride in their accomplishments and treat the media with the contempt they deserve. Maybe, if the military survives the coming national bankruptcy, the damage of the Powell Doctrine can be reversed but the author of that doctrine will always be a figure of contempt and a symbol of prevarication and indecision. The Plame Affair showed Powell to be a man of dishonor and to have have the self-centered soul of a political bureaucrat, not the honor of a general. That this man's endoesement is seen as lending 'military credibility to the anti-military Obama clique is an example of whats in store if BHO is elected.

The Secret Life Of Swing Voters

The Polls! The Polls! It's hopeless because of the Polls! Boo-hoo, say all the Republicans that I know, the polls are saying we're cooked! If you turn on your TV set even the 'Fair And Balanced' geniuses at Fox News are singing the same song. Obama is already meeting with his putative cabinet picks and dining on lobster and champagne at expensive hotels in the lissome company of the adoring Michelle. Out in the rest of the planet the polls are running ten to one in his favor from Lapland to Swaziland. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have announced that this election will install a 250-seat Democratic delegation in Congress and give the Dems a sixty-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. This election is going to be the biggest victory for the Democratic party since Lyndon Baines Johnson stood on the fresh grave of the Sainted JFK and painted Barry Goldwater as a Right-Wing Monster From Hades!
Isn't it?

Sure doesn't feel the same way it did in 1964. It seems like the Republicans are motivated by fear that the whole system of governance and economics that made this a wealthy country are about to be abandoned. The Democrats, what are they motivated by? Vague promises that Obama cares about The Children? His commercials are the worst I've ever seen. They don't say anything. They're the commercials of a candidate who is complacent about his coming victory and doesn't feel like he needs to explain himself to the voters--or even to attack his opponent.Its the same thing that happened after he clinched the victory against Hillary, the party started rolling before the deal was done, landing him with some embarrassing and unexpected defeats in the late primaries.

Now him and his coterie of media stooges have attacked Joe The Plumber while Palin is out there drawing gigantic crowds and calling BHO an ACORN cheater. The libs don't deign to answer those 'accusations' about massive ballot-box stuffing in the swing states. If they don't think that Americans resent a gang of Marxist criminals filing thousands of fake voter registrations then they have been at the banquet for too damned long. The backlash against this and the myriad other unanswered questions about BHO are going to haunt him on November 4th...just as Kerry's embarrassing silence in the face of the Swift Boat accusations proved them true so eloquently.

Doubt is Obama's enemy now and doubt is what the polls are showing. He's no Lyndon Johnson, breaking ahead after the convention and romping to the finish. There is no great groundswell in the nation to ensconce a socialist government with a smarmy lying radical at its head. The Joe The Plumber types have not had their questions answered at all. Instead they've seen the actual Joe The Plumber told to abandon his selfish dreams and turn over his 'excess earnings' over to the state for redistribution. And so the polls continue to show Obama ahead but well within the margin of error. What I think the polls are not showing is how soft the support he has is among the working class. These are the people who are going to bolt on that last weekend.

There isn't any sign from the Obama/mainstream media campaign that the march to nationalization is anything but on track. They exude confidence in their 2-4% margins. Anyone with doubts is obviously a closet racist, just as anyone who questions Obama's radical associations or brings up votes that he managed to cast in his disengaged career as a part-time legislator is just as obviously a secret Klan member. No one has ever tried to bring up the most glaring fact about Obama's record in the Illinois and US Senate...this guy doesn't show up for work very often. No wonder he 'spurned work in the private sector'; most bosses like to see their employees show up for work and get stuff done. No one has ever accused Barak Obama of that. He was a counselor for ACORN and the Annenburg Foundation but no one has ever confronted us with anything he ever did for them besides cutting loose a few meaty earmarks once he gained elective office. He didn't lead angry mobs, he didn't fight furiously to radicalize steelworkers. I'll bet he showed up for work three days a week in time to go to lunch and then went back and made a few phone calls to guys like Rezko, scheming to get himself elected, and then home in time to catch the last half of Oprah.

So now he's goofing off a little in the face of his apparent about-to-happen landslide victory in November. But people often choke on lobster, especially the kind they serve at the Waldorf-Astoria to overly confident candidates spending their overstuffed campaign's excessive cash. Joe Plumber, Six Pack Sid, and the rest of the yokels and their unfashionably-dressed Palin-like wives have had a lot of fingers poked into their eyes by the Obama campaign, some of it inadvertent, but all of it important. There is still a lot of doubt about the Republicans out in the hinterland. The polls might be right. I don't think the American people are going to look at this massive attempt at cheating at the polls, are going to sit by while a female Vice Presidential candidate is cruelly and unfairly slimed by a biased media, are going to sit back and enjoy being sneered at as a bunch of racists by a pack of overeducated elitist snots and then are going to go to the polls and vote for these same people. You can all laugh at me on November 5th for being such a fool but I just dont believe that this level of mendacity and hubris is going to be rewarded with victory.

Obama Stalls Again

When he decided that the Democratic Party wouldn't dare to alienate black voters by nominating Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama stalled. Even though he was acknowledged by all to be the winner Clinton started whupping him in state after state by huge margins. All the Obama blather about the Clinton's being closet racists alienated voters. His ringing speeches didn't connect. He started to get the image of a star-struck elitist who was out of touch with the majority of Americans.

Then there was the triumphal World Tour, an event so successful that the Obama-struck media doesn't mention it at all these days. In other words, a flop that didn't produce a single usable five-second sound bite. Ditto the resounding flop of the Democratic convention. The disaster of the Greek Column Extravaganza was mercifully (for Obama) overshadowed by the entrance of Palin onto the scene. That grandiloquent moment in the Arena at Denver was another prime example of where Obama could have closed the deal and set the theme for a romp to victory. He didn't.

In the world of sales there is no higher compliment than to be described as a 'closer'. A closer gets the chumps to sign on the dotted line, he seals the deal. Some of us can be witty, charming and persuasive and will make a sale occasionally to someone who was probably going to buy our product in the first place but a closer is responsible for refrigerators being seen in igloos. Ronald Reagan was a closer. Bill Clinton was a closer. Barak Obama is not a closer.

The media doesn't see it. They believe the phony polls that have a 39% Dem sample and a 28% Rep sample. They think Joe the Plumber is some kind of Right Wing Nut. I mean, talking about socialism for God's sake! How gauche. They've gone after this impudent plumber hammer and tongs. His divorce records have appeared on the front pages of newspapers. A flurry of other media charges and attacks have been leveled at this dude. I'll bet he wishes he had a reasonable expectation of privacy like Bill Ayers. What are those idiots in the Democratic Party and their pet media stooges thinking about? When someone charges you with wanting to take away people's freedom the last thing you want to be seen to be doing is trying to destroy his life for asking the question. How many Joe the Plumbers are watching this and asking which side the Dems are really on? This is the kind of guy that expands his plumbing business by taking on a couple of guys and maybe a kid who learns the trade from the old hands. These days that counts as a $250k business. Inflation is pushing a lot of tiny micro-businesses over the $250k line. These guys are burdened with workman's comp, matching social security payments, oppressive regulations and reporting requirements and already ruinous fees and taxes. For Obama to announce that their 'wealth' needs to be spread around to people who really need it is a total insult to people like that. Right now half their income is being flushed down the government toilet and now Obama and Biden are telling them that if they expand their business their remaining proceeds will be shared amongst the truly deserving; a group which doesn't include members of their family. Its so patriotic! Blue collar America is just waiting to have their taxes raised in the name of fairness.

Now Obama's poll numbers, which briefly rose in response to the chaos in the markets and the scary economic times, are sliding again as people notice that his response to this insecurity and chaos was incoherent and involves raising taxes on these already near-bankrupt businesses. He has not made a persuasive case for any kind of a remedy for this or any other problem that faces us. Energy crisis? Don't drill for oil, inflate your tires. Banking crisis? Print money. Medicare going bankrupt? Expand the program to cover everybody. Problems solved.

At some point the attacks on Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, who is drawing 60-70,000 person crowds in swing states, as being yokels who are motivated by racism are going to define Obama as the front man for the political class, which is what he is. Now, Bill Clinton was that and so (to my deep sorrow) was W Bushy but neither of them were as extreme as Obama. The Old Pols were willing to take some eggs from the Golden Goose but they understood the folly involved in killing the critter to get to the goodies faster. Not so Obama. Now with their poll numbers supposedly showing a rout they are waving recipes for roast goose and inviting everyone to dinner. Will the Joe the Plumbers vote for this idiot? Do these people reward candidates who call them racists for wanting to keep a little portion of their paycheck? I don't think so. Obama has given regular working people a strong reason to vote against him and no reason to vote for him except that they're mad at Bush. If he was Bill Clinton that would be enough, as it was in 1992. Clinton was a closer. Unlike Obama.

Barak Aragorn Obama

In 'Lord Of The Rings' Aragorn realized that he didn't have enough men to turn back the attack that was being launched on Middle earth by the Evil Sauron. He is confronted by Elrond who tells him to 'walk the path of The Dead'. The mighty Aragorn enters the underground realm of the dead and summons them to the crusade. The evil Sauron is thwarted and the dead then return to their eternal rest, souls replenished.

When it comes to fighting evil the dead have their uses. Ask Barak Obama. A couple of months ago when his spinmiesters were trying to define just exactly what a 'community organizer' was they blithely announced that Jesus was a 'community organizer'. Some people thought that this was excessive hyperbole bordering on blasphemy but this attitude was obviously just a product of White Racism. You see Jesus was kind of a piker compared to Obama. After all JC only raised one guy from the dead and that was at a fundraiser/funeral (ala Clinton) and then it turns out that he pulls off this so-called miracle and then doesn't have a voter registration form handy. What a shnook! What kind of community organizing was that?

Not so Obama. The Dead flock to him in waves and there are no shortage of forms to enable them to exercise their rights as necro-citizens. The current surge in the polls for Obama is mainly the result of ACORN's registration drive for these necro-voters. This is in co-ordination with a parallel campaign to enfranchise another heretofore underrepresented voter group, cartoon characters. I've worked in the animation industry all my life so you can imagine me bustin' my buttons with pride as I see Homer, Bart, Lisa and Marge Simpson as registered voters in cities across the country, always with the local ACORN office as the address to which their absentee ballots are sent. And my beloved Smurfs are now taking their place beside great Americans like Mickey Mouse and Popeye in the proud rolls of the enfranchised. Soon an accurate portrait of the American electorate will look like a sequel to Roger Rabbit shot in a graveyard.

So you see when the polls shift by changing the numbers of Democrats and Republicans sampled they are only taking into account the huge influx of 100% reliable Democrat votes which are flooding the system. The necro- and graphico-voters have a 100% turnout and they are the most reliable Democratic voters possible. No outrage or failed policy can shake their rock-solid determination that The Children continue to be protected by the party with a heart. Among living humans Obama is probably a sure loser. But with these new voters factored in...

This is not funny. The Democrats violent objections to any form of voter verification or identification show who the culprits are. The permanent bureaucracy will fight to protect its privileges. The ignorant and the unwashed electorate have shown that they don't possess a sufficient understanding of the importance of mega-government to be entrusted with a choice of leaders. This is the party which claims to stand for 'the people' but which in fact has become the party of the wealthy and the powerful; whether they be employed by huge corporations gleening subsidies to cover up for their ruinous mistakes or are the entrenched and arrogant politicians who are paid for these subsidies by the same corporations or the parasitic bureaucrats in ten thousand agencies and towering office buildings whose swelling little empires are competing ever more voraciously for the shrinking and anemic remains of the private sector to fund increasing perks and fatter pensions. There is too much at stake for these people to let the public upset the apple cart.

So now our Hugo Chavez-like Democratic candidate is preparing to stuff the ballot boxes with phony ballots. All the Democrats' pretentions of a New Morality have been thrown into the trash in the lust for power. But that happened under Clinton, this is just that same horrible ethic writ large. One that the Mushy Bushy was happy to play along with, BTW. But the Dems hated Mushy Bushy and attacked him daily and fervently always yearning for a new Golden Age of Total Government. Now they have a candidate who has more contempt for this country and its traditions than any other candidate has ever had. He has been steeped in the academic thuggery of the Left and owes no respect to the democratic ideals of the country he finds so lacking. Just as with Clinton, another empty fatherless youth is about to act out the adolescent frustrations which tore him apart as a young man in the arena of the White House. What a national disaster if the living, non-cartoon voters are stupid and blind enough to empower this guy.

A century of failure should warn most people away from all these utopian recipes being proposed by Pelosi, Reid and Obama but it doesn't. Surely the government-engineered financial sector disaster we are currently living through should be some cause for caution. The rationale for removing any qualification criteria to get a mortgage was an altruistic one. The system was being opened up to the 'deserving poor'. Rules that were imposed by the need for sound business practices were repealed in the name of equity. But don't worry, the financial corporations have been rescued by a tidal wave of phony money. The six and seven figure salaries of the heads of these vast enterprises are secure. They've learned the lesson that the government can push them to make disastrous mistakes but then will cover them over with a mess of cash when things go south. The auto industry, hamstrung by predatory Unions and impossible CAFE standards is passing into the Wraith World of nationalized quasi-private government-supported always in the red sectors of the economy. The automakers deliver on their impossible-to-fulfill union contracts by falling into the forgiving arms of government receivership and assuming the aspect of British Leyland. The outcome of all this good work on behalf of the formerly powerless is absolutely certain; bankruptcy and inflation. Government workers impoverished, their pensions worthless. 30% unemployment. The tenured professors will be standing in the Food Stamp line with the laid-off factory workers and former newspaper reporters. Atlas will shrug- Big Time!

That's when it gets ugly. What did Obama's fellow socialists Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez do when the economy started to collapse? They had an amnesty of hardened criminals. The streets of Caracas are now more violent than those of war-torn Bogata or the favelas of Rio. When the New Age justices realize that Three-strikes laws discriminate against criminals on the basis of race they will be overturned under our Living Constitution and the victims of this racist persecution will be compensated for their lost years. They will then be set free knowing that their crimes will go unpunished as long as they only victimize the middle and working classes and leave the nobility alone. This will be just one of the many things which will conspire to crush the spirits of the potential opposition.

That's us. We jumped on the phony equity party train with everybody else. I was half a million dollars ahead at one point. Usually the only way to get your hands on that half-mil would be to sell the shack and hand whopping percentages to estate agents and tax collectors. Some people just borrowed on their 'equity'. You could max out your plastic at the mall, go home and write yourself a check from the equity line of credit and shazzam! your shopping spree was on the house! As the tide receded we fools who thought we were rich are now faced with gigantic debts. Kids are graduating from college $200,000 in the hole with no decent job prospects in store. The ever higher taxes which are crushing the economy and stifling job creation are low compared with other socialist countries. Obama and the gang will fix that by taking things to levels the up-to-now relatively untaxed under $50,000 a year types are going to find hard to believe. Mega inflation will push the untaxed into the confiscatory tax brackets of the rich. While subsidies will increase and government continues to grow, while unions use 'card check' to forcibly enroll every worker in the country, while the Iron Rice Bowl of fat pensions is handed to more and more retirees from the Public Sector the percentage of the paycheck the average person is allowed to keep will shrink to levels that serfs in the Middle Ages didn't pay.

So expect the computers to 'malfunction' during the 2012 election and when the malfunction is corrected a huge Obama landslide will be revealed-- just like Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Once Obama is in we will never get rid of him. The law means nothing to these guys. They will never relinquish power. I know there are still people saying that they'll vote for Bob Barr because Mclame is so, well, McLame but I'm begging you, don't do it! We all have to stand up and stop this coup d'etat by the left. They stand poised to finally finish this country off and replace it with another dreary socialist People's Republic. Vote NO on Obama by voting for McLame.

Airstrip One

If America responds to the current economic shakeout by turning total power over to the Democrats what will it be like to live under the new policies? Most Americans have never lived in a socialist country and don't have any experience with what its like.

I was living in San Francisco in 1976. The animation industry was slow in LA so I had moved up to live on unemployment and the occasional Sesame Street or commercial that would become available up there. I had an MG Midget that I had kept in pretty good shape. Being a straight single guy in the mid seventies in SF was like being a sailor in Tahiti in the 1790's with a keg of nails; we can say it was a good place to meet women.

But one day I was reading in the newspaper that you could get round-trip tickets to London for $350. Sounded cool. I sold the MG and got the address of a friend of a friend who said I could crash on her sofa in Fulham. I said goodbye to my redheaded roommate Zina and away I went.

I was completely ignorant of where I was going. An English acquaintance told me that London's climate was similar to San Francisco in the winter; she forgot to tell me that London's climate in the summer was similar to San Francisco's in the worst winter it ever had. I was underclad as I arrived at Gatwick. I took the train to Victoria and then grabbed a cab to Charlotte's flat near parson's Green in Fulham. That was where I got my first shock. In America it can be cold outside. Its true. I've even walked outside in LA in the winter and you can see your breath when you breathe, so I know about cold! But I've never walked into a house where you could also see your breath. Charlotte's roommate Roz explained that they couldn't afford to turn the heat on and only had a little space-heater that they took from room-to-room in their Victorian era flat.
That was a common story. This was February. It was cold! Nobody I knew could afford to keep their heat on in those old, draughty, high-ceilinged old flats, built in more prosperous times when people could afford to turn on the heat.

I went to a party in Knightsbridge put on by some friends of Charlotte's who were impoverished children of former aristocrats who were all semi-employed and living in flats inherited from their families' former success. I met a guy who ran an animation studio. He asked me if I ever worked on piecework for cash. Duh! Of course. In LA I preferred working piecework for cash. Regular employment destroyed your incentive to work and screwed up your unemployment. But I learned that here being an illegal alien made me a hot property. Most film crews are ad hoc groups that dissolve at the end of each job. Of course the regulars get hired back whenever work pops up, but there are always gaps. But in a socialist country you can't just lay people off. You have to go before a government board, dominated by Trotsyite trade union types and pay compensation to each worker for throwing him out of the job he's entitled to have. An expensive process if your business is the production of television commercials. So a floating crew of illegal aliens, mostly Argentinians and Chileans fleeing the generals, Spaniards and Italians fleeing their own bad economies and refugees from the real commies in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

"I can make you legal but then I can't use you." One employer told me. They couldn't afford to hire English people. There were some old hands, of course. You can't have an entire company running with just free-lancers, but the staff was kept to a minimum. No new kids were being trained or hired. Too expensive and risky.

I encountered the Union. A very scary Cockney union rep confronted me at one studio. Even though I was standing there holding a pile of scene folders under my arm I insisted that I was here on vacation just checking out the scene. My alarmed employer took the union guy aside. Money changed hands and the little bloke walked up to me smiling and said, " 'ave a nice olly-day.' Britain had become like Mexico. Petty bribery was everywhere. The powerful got their little bite (mordida) for ignoring the stupid, insane laws that made life impossible. Another time I was in a studio where four of the staff came in from a two-hour lunch visibly drunk. The boss complained. The shop steward walked up to him and said, "One more word out of you mate, and we all walk. Right lads?" There was hearty agreement from the staff. Me and the Chilean guy who was picking up work with me at the same time were the only reliable employees this guy had.

We were also the cheapest employees that this guy had. He was paying his staff animators 300-400 pounds a week for sitting in their chairs, no matter what they did, while they were there. Firing someone was next to impossible and involved another trip to the labor board, an expensive deal even if the dismissal stuck. He was paying us undocumented types cash for what we did. We had every incentive to work like dogs whereas our British colleagues had every incentive not to. The marginal tax rates, on top of the normal 60% that was taken from the average paycheck, were near 100%. Why should people work overtime for nothing? Piecework was taxed so heavily for Brits that it wasn't thinkable. So even though these dudes were paying us a low rate compared to what I got in LA we were getting 100% of it in cash, which made me relatively wealthy in this tax-strapped impoverished, cash-poor society.

I needed a place to live. I thought it would be a problem in a densely-packed city like London but here the laws again conspired to make my life easy. This was the age of the squatter. Any unoccupied house could find itself invaded by a pack of filthy hippies during its owner's absence, with the true ownership to be decided at some future date by The Housing Board which had a definite tilt against the petty-bourgeois and in favor of the lumpenproletariat. People who had business abroad were looking for people like me to flat-sit. I got to live in some pretty nice digs in Nottinghill Gate, Maida Vale, Fulham, and Clapham. In between I rented rooms near Marble Arch and in a commune in Wandsworth run by a Welsh warlock named Brynn. I had cash and was not likely to declare myself a sitting tenant and go down to the housing board and achieve unevictable 'sitting tenant' status-- which made paying rent a voluntary activity. Paying property taxes 9Or 'rates' as they cal them there) was never voluntary for a landlord. This forced more and more landlords to sell out to the local 'housing trusts' which were run by and for the local pols.

There was an air of doom in the country. Everything went on strike all the time. Nobody had any money. Men who invested in buying a woman a dinner in a restaurant expected to sleep with the recipient of the free meal. At first I didn't get it. Women in LA or SF expected to be taken out for a no-strings-attached feed during the getting-to-know-you process but didn't feel any obligation to do anything in return; if sparks flew fine, if not, too bad. Money was so tight in London in those times that a woman had to respect that a guy fancied her enough to spend a good portion of the few pennies the state and his bills left him on her. Going out to dinner and to a rock concert or a club was a real treat and it was understood that it would end up back at your place unless you were a complete muppet. Women decided whether they liked you enough to sleep with you before they said yes to a date, not after a couple of dates. Again I was the sailor in Tahiti with the keg of nails. In a socialist society cash rules.

The coal miners went on strike so there were rolling blackouts. The air traffic controllers went on strike so the airports were closed. The bakers went on strike so I couldn't get my Cornish Pasty for lunch. The firemen went on strike and when they called in the Army they refused to cross the picket line. The nurses and then the doctors went on strike. The tubes went on strike. British Leyland went on strike. More and more industries were grinding to a halt. There was a bleak air of desperation and defeat. Young people were leaving the country for contract jobs in the oil-wealthy Middle East or in Hong Kong. America, also having economic problems under the leftish Carter administration was looked on as the land of plenty. I had an exotic accent from the land of plenty.

So thats what we're in for. Tax rates that confiscate your entire paycheck. The middle and lower classes which under the current system are paying very little income taxes are in for a BIG surprise. The sunny days of Bush-Clinton-Bush are over. Inflation will push the unindexed earnings of even the most lowly-paid helots into the 'truly wealthy' brackets. 'Free' health care will come with a price tag that will shock the 'deserving poor' and everyone else. As will the decline and chaos in the health care system as the Feds do to it what they've done to the financial and banking systems. Property rights will be non-existent and property taxes will be confiscatory. Young people will be unemployed and bereft of the most basic opportunities. There will be no investment capital available and more and more of the private sector will be absorbed into a state-corporate economy that will have no interest in efficiency or innovation. The average person will not be able to afford to drive a car. Thats the Change We Can Believe In. Believe it, its coming.

Hecklers

I never thought I would see it. An angry crowd berates the candidate for not attacking his opponent! This limp noodle of a McLame is standing there letting the Democrats get away with the biggest governmental blunder since Mao Tse Tung's 'Great Leap Forward'. He's letting Obama walk away from the fact that he emerged from the Far Left of the Democratic Party and now is pretending to be some kind of a moderate. McLame is ignoring massive, systematic voter fraud by a radical left-wing group which has received large infusions of cash from the Obama Campaign and for which Obama worked as a community organizer!

Members of the crowd, in what was supposed to be a 'town meeting' full of sympathetic supporters demanded that McLame start getting tough with his opponents. Obama went through that entire last debate without having to answer one single question about his involvement with the people who ran Fannie and Freddie. But more important he should have to explain the underlying policy of making mortgages available to people who were formerly thought to be unqualified to get a mortgage. The Democrat line was always that these people were victims of 'redlining' and one form of discrimination or another and were kept from their 'right' to own a home by greedy bankers imposing unreasonable restrictions. It turns out the the restrictions were very reasonable and kept a crowd of vulture-like speculators at bay. As soon as the document-free 125% no down mortgages with a low two year negative amortization teaser rate appeared house values ceased making any sense and a crash became inevitable.

Has McLame missed what a big issue this is? Obama hasn't. He's got a simple, understandable explaination. The Republicans, under McLame's good buddy George Bush, removed the restrictions and allowed Greedy Wall Street Bankers to make worthless loans which they now are proceeding to sell to the taxpayers at full value. The eternal nudnik Bush can be forgiven if he sits quietly and lets himself be blamed for yet another Democratic disaster, that's who he is.
McLame is also reluctant to issue the mildest criticism of his Dem buddies. The reason Palin has made such a splash is that she has no such inhibitions. Even reigned in as she was she womped that lump of a Biden. I guess we cant expect something like that out of Mclame.

But we're furious. Those people in that crowd were speaking to my heart. They should have tarred and feathered that old duffer and declared a party mutiny-- one that placed Palin in the top spot on the ticket. At least she would go down fighting. The leader that we have yearned for since the retirement of Reagan and through the long night of Bush-Clinton-Bush has arrived and unfortunately is tied to a worthless old Maverick. Fight for us, and stop sucking up to your buddies in the Senate! Obama is the most vulnerable candidate in political history.

People chide the media for bias. McLame doesn't. He doesn't ask why him and Palin will go on liberal news shows but why Obama can't do an interview with Brit Hume or Charles Krauthammer. Why there is never a conservative journalist 'moderateing' one of these phony debates. Not ask, YELL TO THE SKIES! The media will have to cover that.

He'll never do it. He doesn't have a song in his heart. Right now the polls are showing an Obama massacre. You can all believe that people are going to look past the voter fraud and forget who engineered this mortgage mess and dance to the polls to happily install the least qualified presidential candidate in American history. I don't see it. I think that the voter fraud by the ugly thugs at ACORN is the Wellstone Funeral of this election. Obama is a dishonest sleaze and I think that this election will turn on the last weekend. It McLame hits him hard enough Obama will lose big.

So now its time for McLame to lift himself out of his stubborn accomodationism and listen to the angry mob. Does he have it in him? Probably not.

The Most Boring Debate EVER!

I've been working the night shift at a studio that converts 2d films to 3d. 4:30pm to 3:30am. What a grind! The resulting insomnia is hard to overcome. I thought I would bring a radio in and listen to last night's debate as I worked rotoscoping elements of stupid film clips into the wee hours. I'm glad I didn't. Those two buffoons are about as relevant and interesting as the contestants in a beauty contest when they answer the question, "What would you do to change the world?" I never would have been able to stay awake and so would have added to America's jobless statistics.

Now all the people that I know who are anti-Obama (I know few real McCain supporters) are really depressed because the polls are showing Obama slightly ahead. This is a case of the headline being different than the text of the story. If you just read the headline you miss the statement, "Leaners are included in the total of the candidate they are leaning towards." That means people who answer, "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" are included in the final percentages. The 'internals' of the polls are skewed in favor of the Democrats, generally speaking. The media supports the Democrats so is it any surprise that the polls conducted by that same media are coming up with the desired result? Its like those phony polls that we get in fundraising letters ("Do you support Ted Kennedy's radical socialistic power-grab or would you rather the government not tax 90% of your income?). No group of any persuasion takes a poll and doesn't get the desired result. What's the persuasion of the media again? Unbiased. Scientific. Right.

Excuse me if I just don't see it the way that the pollsters do. I think back to Bill Clinton, a true political heavyweight, a guy who was never caught flat-footed ever by anybody. This great performer, this political star who had a gang of spinners and attackers who came across like in between TV guest shots on cable news shows they sat around in the back room snorting lines of chicken crank and taking the edge off the methedrine rush by passing around a bottle of Wild Turkey. Gremlins like Carville would pop up and filibuster, lie and insinuate at a mile a minute like some babbling speed-freak. The fax machines of the press were jammed by faxes from the Clinton Campaign. They attacked, attacked, attacked while their smarmy candidate felt our pain and our daughters with his great big long fingers. And what did the most politically talented Democrat to emerge since Harry Truman add up to? Numbers in the forty percent range.

Clinton 'debated' Dole in '96...that one I saw, and a truly pathetic spectacle it was! Does anyone look at Obama and say to themselves, "Wow! That dude is as good as Big Bill, our first black president!"? No they don't. Obama gave a good speech or two last February but he's definitely been off his feed since he got the nomination. He can't answer questions off the cuff at all. Every performance he gives shows what a lightweight he is. Obama doesn't know anything; or he realizes that what he does know is so unacceptable that he feigns ignorance. The whole 'Hope and Change' thing has dissolved in a cloud of ambiguity. Obama's only gambit now is to attack George W Bush. He has no agenda, no identifiable program, no philosophy, no direction new or old.

So what's my point? My point is that the "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" people are not going to vote for Obama. They never were. These voters are upset with Bush after eight years of total media saturation and are freaked out by the financial crisis so when the phone call from Zogby comes they speculate on whether they might take a flyer and vote for the New Guy. When the day arrives these are 90% McCain voters. This is the Bradley Effect. Blue collar people need an affirmative reason to vote for someone as radical as Obama and his themeless mish-mash of ridiculous attacks against McCain are not a reason to vote for Obama. He's not even 'The New Guy' anymore, Palin is. She's drawing crowds of fifty or sixty thousand in the battleground states; more than Obama. She's the draw in NASCAR land, where the swing voters live.

So November 4th the "Well, I guess I might vote for Obama, maybe" folks are going to walk into the voting booth and actually be forced to make a decision. They won't have any reason to vote for an Al Sharpton-like ACORN 'community organizer'. The numbers that Hillary Clinton got against Obama towards the end of her run, when it was certain that Obama was going to be the nominee, are going to be replicated by McCain in some places that are going to surprise everyone. This is an opportunity for all of us. Because of these polls the Obamanoids are giving 2-1 odds. Time to start placing a few bets. But make sure that you get someone else to hold the money; you're dealing with Democrats here and history has few examples of a more sanctimoniously dishonorable group of people than modern liberals.