Rick Moran
Yes, I realize using a Nazi analogy is probably crossing a line somewhere but really, how else can you describe a candidate for President who eschews the forms and traditions of our democracy to substitute the imagry of totalitarian rallies of the past?
On Thursday, August 28, Barack Obama plans to accept his nomination at Invesco Field in Denver, rather than at the Pepsi Center.It’s going to cost the convention committee a lot of money to make the move, but Invesco Field can handle more than 75,000 spectators and will make a much better picture.
Well – come to think of it, I probably am going overboard a bit in comparing Invesco Field to the Nuremberg rallies held during Nazi party get togethers. (There were also the 70,000 people who came out to see Obama in Oregon.). But Americans have always been wary of a candidate who stirs passions to the boiling point in his followers. Don’t believe me? Ask President William Jennings Bryan or President Huey Long. The kind of rank populism and fervid emotion emitted by their supporters caused a lot of distrust on the part of the voter who prefer ordinary men who demonstrate humility in seeking the office rather than Messiahs who flout their populism.
I guess 20,000 wasn’t enough for him to speak in front of at the convention center.
The reigning media narrative is that because this is a heavily Democratic year, Senator McCain is a clear underdog to Senator Obama. The narrative has almost nothing to do with the appeal of the candidates’ respective policies — and it’s clear the Obama campaign is concerned voters will begin to notice.
“Let me tell you something. There’s really nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics that is common sense (sic). There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they get home. There’s nothing liberal about wanting to make sure everybody has health care, but we are spending more on health care in this country than any other advanced country. We got more uncovered.There’s nothing liberal about saying that doesn’t make sense, and we should do something smarter with our health care system. Don’t let them run that okie doke on you!”
Peter Kirsanow is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. These comments do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Commission
City records show Davis used some of the money to build a 72-unit apartment building for senior citizens at 87th and Ashland. The $10 million project — built with a $5.7 million loan from the city — netted Davis nearly $700,000 in development fees, city records show. His son Cullen Davis is paid to manage the building, which opened three years ago with a ceremony featuring Mayor Daley.Davis, who’s now business partners with Daley’s nephew Robert Vanecko, has known Obama for years. Obama began serving on the Woods Fund board in 1993, the same year he was hired as an associate lawyer with Davis’ small Chicago law firm, Davis Miner Barnhill. Obama kept working there until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004.
Drill!
By Michael Reagan
FrontPageMagazine.com | 7/7/2008
Americans are worried. Americans are angry. Soaring gas prices are seriously crippling our economy and hitting us where it hurts the most — in our pockets.
We have a right to be angry, but anger is no longer enough. It’s time for rage — good, old American rage aimed at those elitist Democrats who prefer to see the folks beggared by soaring fuel prices rather than take the action this very real economic crisis demands.
Drill.
We know that the law of supply and demand is what’s causing gas prices to soar, but merely knowing the ultimate cause of the crisis is not enough. We need to know why the most obvious remedy — one that promises to increase supply — is being studiously avoided by the powers that be, the leadership in Congress.
Once Americans become aware of that reason, get out of the way because they will be at the gates of Capitol Hill armed with pitchforks and scythes like enraged villagers marching on Dracula’s castle, determined do wreak vengeance on the very people who refuse to act in the way current circumstances clearly demand.
The steady increase in gas prices can be stopped dead in its tracks, and rolled back to less onerous levels literally overnight. The Democrats in Congress have in their hands the magic wand they could easily wave, but they arrogantly refuse to use it. And so we continue to pay the price for their refusal to help their fellow Americans when they have the power to do so.
All they need to do is lift all moratoria and restrictions on domestic, offshore and Alaskan drilling for oil. That’s all. A quick wave of that magic wand is all that’s needed. But they will not act, and for that they must be made aware that they will pay a steep price at the polls for their refusal to act when action is desperately needed.
Make no mistake about it, the liberals in the House and Senate — in the pockets of the super-rich environmentalists who scarcely conceal their contempt for their fellow humans, activists who won’t be happy until every automobile is driven from America’s roads and highways — simply will not come to our aid.
As Marie Antoinette is said to have remarked about her starving subjects who were demanding bread, “Let then eat cake,” many of our elected Democratic members of Congress are in effect saying of Americans, “Let them ride bikes.”
In their contemptuous sophistry their spokesmen sneer that opening the gates to domestic and offshore drilling would not yield results for 10 years. That excuse for inaction is insultingly deceptive. While it will take years to see our domestic supply of petroleum begin to take up the slack, the very declaration that the floodgates will be opened and America is on he way to independence from foreign oil will strike fear into the hearts of OPEC and the speculators who have driven the price of oil skyward.
Their reaction would be instantaneous — they would increase production to the fullest extent possible, motivated by the knowledge that their stranglehold on supply faces its eventual demise, and gas prices at the pump would fall.
As economist Lawrence Kudlow wrote in his column, “An America First Energy Plan,” “As soon as you say, ‘End the drilling moratoriums,’ it is precisely those traders who will start selling oil contracts — long before the first offshore oil barrels are delivered to market. If they see presidential leadership on oil and shale drilling, they will rapidly turn a bull market into a bear market.”
A partial answer to our immediate problem is at hand. The steady increase in pump prices can be halted and prices somewhat rolled back to a more acceptable level. Yet those environmentalist-controlled Democrats are turning their backs on the voters who sent them to Washington and coldly refusing to lift a finger to help the American people, preferring instead to lay the blame for the problem on big oil, speculators, and every place but where it belongs: on themselves.
If that doesn’t enrage you, nothing will.
If this continues, the payback will come in November, when people drive them from office, unless they do what needs to be done: Drill, Drill, Drill!
