Really does take a lot of guts to demand the closure of a loophole your party created and kept open, but Obama is proving himself up to the task of Democratic mendacity:

With the cost of gas a top issue in the presidential campaign, Barack Obama on Sunday will announce a plan to crack down on oil speculation by tightening regulations on energy traders.

The announcement is further evidence that an Obama administration would take an activist, populist approach to regulating business.

Obama wants to close a loophole in federal law that exempts some energy traders from regulations that govern other exchange-traded commodities. Democrats call this “the Enron loophole” because it benefited the Houston energy-speculation firm that collapsed in an accounting scandal.

In response, John McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said: “The truth is Barack Obama is following John McCain’s lead to close a Wall Street loophole that was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. John McCain has supported bipartisan efforts to close this loophole and will work to address abuses in oil speculation.

“Barack Obama has voted the party line for Democrats who claim the loophole is fixed. The fact that Barack Obama is attacking John McCain, despite McCain’s leadership on the issue, shows that Barack Obama is driven by the partisan attacks that Americans are tired of.”

Rather typical of the liberals – enact a “solution” which actually becomes the problem, pretend to be shocked by the results, blame Republicans for it and then present another “solution” to the problem, which merely starts the whole process over again.

While there is grounds for reformed regulatory oversight of the commodities market the plain fact of the matter is that oil will remain high – no matter what regulations we enact – as long as people are willing to pay a high price for it. Speculators have done a lot to drive up the price, but so has increased demand outside the United States – the solution, however, to high energy prices is not to seek a Evil Enemy to blame (which is the basic plan of Obama and his Democrats), but to find cheap energy to replace the expensive energy. In this area, McCain simply blows Obama’s class warfare, socialist nonsense right out of the water.

McCain proposes increased production of American oil; increased development of nuclear power; increased use of clean coal technology…Obama proposes a Carteresque “windfall profits tax” (as if oil companies should be punished because other people are willing to pay a high price for their product…perhaps we should do a “windfall profits tax” on whomever makes the next hot Christmas toy on the same theory – if people want it a lot and are willing to pay a premium for it, then you’ve done something wrong), increased regulation and proposes nothing which will actually add to America’s non-oil energy supplies.

We’ve got a choice in November – between the hidebound, liberal practices of the 60’s and 70’s, or the forward looking policies set afoot since Reagan became President in 1981. For all Obama’s talk of change, he’s really all about implementing the policies McGovern advocated 36 years ago. Past vs future at stake – and Obama is stuck in the liberal economic dark ages, as if he’s learnt nothing at all.

Interesting:

For the first time in the campaign, Republican John McCain in May raised about the same amount of money, $22 million, as Democrat Barack Obama.

McCain also closed the gap in the amount of cash the two parties’ presumptive presidential nominees have in the bank at their respective disposals as they enter the first phase of the general election.

McCain reported having about $32 million in cash for primary-related expenses at the end of May.

Obama reported having $43 million in hand at the start of June — but about $10 million of that is dedicated to the general election.

Obama’s fundraising in May marked a sharp dropoff after months of record-breaking donations. Even in difficult times, such as the key loss he suffered in Pennsylvania in April, Obama brought in a steady flow of cash that usually topped $30 million a month.

The surprising cash parity between McCain and Obama means the candidates begin the general campaign more evenly matched than many experts expected, although things could change swiftly given Obama’s ability to raise money through small online contributions.

According to Obama’s campaign, the drop in donations was caused in part by a shift in focus from bringing in big money to homing in on the delegates needed to clinch his party’s nomination.

At the same time, he was forced to burn through his cash reserve in the final round of primaries, which were hotly contested by a significantly underfunded Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That last bit is courtesy of Operation Chaos – and the report goes on to note that in May, Obama spent $27 million to McCain’s $12 million and that, in and of itself, justified the Chaos effort. The conventional wisdom is that Obama will just gear right back up and raise whatever amount he wants or needs. And, so far, Obama has been a fundraising phenomena…but I do wonder just how much more he can garner? If the well of Democratic money really bottomless, or will the half billion spent on the primaries have drained the collective bank account? Time will tell – but we can at least be sure that Obama won’t just be able to spend his way into the White House; McCain will be able to put up a fight which will force Obama to climb out of his shell and actually confront the voters, and that is the place where we can crush him. Obama as a version of the “un-named Democrat” is unbeatable…Obama as a further left version of McGovern is very, very beatable.

It will also be interesting to see which campaign paradigm works – Obama’s is a top-down, massively funded drive, while McCain’s is a decentralised lean and mean campaign. I’m beginning to believe that McCain might really be on to something here, and that Obama will just be an over-funded dinosaur trying to act like the latest sports car.

I know our liberal friends are very kindly advising us to make no issue of things like abortion and gay marriage during the 2008 campaign – ever solicitous of our conservative movement, liberals worry that if we campaign on these issues it might harm us at the polls – but it is good that Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” in “Roe v Wade” will let the American people know the truth about herself:

Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff “Jane Roe” in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, will appear in her first-ever television commercial to lament her role in the case.

Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, documented abortions have killed more than 50 million unborn babies in the U.S.

In the new commercial McCorvey says, “back in 1973 I was a very confused twenty-one year old with one child and facing an unplanned pregnancy. At the time I fought to obtain a legal abortion, but truth be told, I have three daughters and never had an abortion.”

“Upon knowing God,” she continues, “I realize that my case, which legalized abortion on demand, was the biggest mistake of my life.

“You read about me in history books, but now I am dedicated to spreading the truth about preserving the dignity of all human life from natural conception to natural death.”

McCorvey is now an active Catholic.

The commercial is produced by Virtue Media, which describes itself as an organization “dedicated to producing and airing powerful and life-saving television, radio commercials and educational films.”

Susan Gerdvil, Communications Director at Virtue Media, told CNA that the organization is working with different pro-life groups to air the commercial but a broadcast is not yet scheduled.

One wonders what motivates people to do that – take a young, frightened woman and bamboozle her into being the instrument of legalised murder? I mean, do the people who did this feel good about themselves? Did they really go home after “Roe” was decided and say, “thank God – now poor, confused women who are feeling abandoned will be able to get rid of a child they think unwanted at the moment”? The people who organized the case and carried it forward – up to an including the Supreme Court Justices who issued their essentially pre-decided ruling – didn’t care about McCorvey; she was just a convenience…a prop is a play, as it were. Joined up with mostly cock-and-bull stories of “back alley” abortions, McCorvey was presented as someone who just wanted to make her own decisions regarding her “reproductive rights”…I was very young, then, but I do remember how midlly it was all put. It was just for the really hard cases; it was a matter of privacy; we must save women from the horrors of “back alley” abortions…but, as with all such liberal ideas of ditching Judeo-Christian morality, the result was very different from the advertisement.

The exception became the rule – rather than just being a few hard cases per year, the floodgates were opened up and groups like Planned Parenthood starting making bank off the procedure, and thus relentleslly propagandised about how quick, painless and liberating it was. The alleged back alley abortionist now became an abortion provider, and just hung out a shingle. A monstrous crime was set in motion which has murdered 50 million so far.

In the fullness of time this will all come to an end. Everything must be paid for, but those who advocated for this, who called it something worthy of protection and proclaimed it a basic human right, they will have to pay the Judge a very high price, indeed.

‘Cause there’s ice in them thar hills:

The existence of ice on Mars was confirmed today by NASA scientists, the first time frozen water has been sampled on another planet. Water in liquid form is an essential ingredient for life.

Whitish, dice-sized chunks, which were dug from the rocky red soil and warmed in the sun, vanished four days after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Phoenix probe dug them up June 15. They confirm what NASA satellites have suggested for years: Frozen water exists several centimeters beneath Mars’s surface.

Scientists believe ice exists on planets including Pluto, though Phoenix is the first probe to confirm it on the ground. The survey is part of NASA’s theme in Mars exploration: follow the water.

“We’ve hit what we’re looking for,” said Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station and co-investigator on the NASA project. “The job now is to find out what’s mixed in with the ice.” He spoke at a press conference in Tucson, Arizona.

Now that we’ve found ice, I imagine that one day we might even find liquid water out there, and that opens up the prospect of finding life, even if only microbial. Question for the day: Given that it is next to impossible for life to be around at all on any one planet, would the existence of life on two planets right next to each other in one solar system indicate a design in nature?

Obama is breaking his word, McCain is keeping his. President Bush still run rings around the Democrats, Pelosi and Reid still haven’t figured out how to run a Congress.

All in all, a good time to be a Republican.

Discuss these and any other issues you wish.

From the Associated Press, of all places:

The Democrat once made a conditional agreement to accept taxpayer money from the public financing system, and accompanying spending limits, if his Republican opponent did, too.

No more.

The chance to financially swamp John McCain — and maneuver for an enormous general election advantage — proved too great an allure.

Obama, a record-shattering fundraiser, reversed course Thursday and decided to forgo some $85 million so he could raise unlimited amounts of money and spend as much as he wants.

“It’s not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections,” Obama said in announcing that despite his previous commitment, he would rely only on private donations because “the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken.”

And with that, the first-term Illinois senator tarnished his carefully honed image as a different kind of politician — one who means what he says and says what he means — while undercutting his call for “a new kind of politics.”

McCain, for his part, painted the issue as a character test, saying: “This election is about a lot of things. It’s also about trust. It’s about keeping your word.”

Question: Is Obama confident of winning, and thus doesn’t care, or is that he realises he’s not doing well and needs every cent just to try and win it in a squeeker?

My bet is the latter – though we’ll have to see if Obama really has all the cash he says he does…seems to me that we’ve seen some stories of late of Democrats not being able to get the money together…of course, maybe part of Hillary deal on concession would be her rolodex of illegal donors? Plus, perhaps Al Gore can go get some money from some monks?

‘Cept when your man is being crushed in middle America and thus wants to spin himself into the White House:

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.

The campaign has apologized to the women, both Obama supporters who said they felt betrayed by their treatment at the rally.

“This is of course not the policy of the campaign. It is offensive and counter to Obama’s commitment to bring Americans together and simply not the kind of campaign we run,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. “We sincerely apologize for the behavior of these volunteers.”

This is not at all new – waaay back in the 60’s, when the anti-war demonstrations came around, the left and the MSM were very careful not to allow any of the commie flags are horrific commie propaganda to show up on TV. Back in the 80’s whenever they wanted to work up an anti-American demonstration, they always made sure that they had a mom or two with a baby carriage to lead the way, so that the MSM could get a nice shot of that, rather than the raving, leftwing lunatics bringing up the rear. Today, however, is the day of the internet, YouTube and the blogosphere – can’t pull this sort or nonsense and get away with it.

While the truth is out there and all the truth is eating away at the Obama fantasy like acid, I do still wonder if the basic, starry-eyed, half-educated liberal out there will ever star to realise that they’ve been taken for a ride by a corrupt, cynical party of power-mad cretins?

Excellent:

It takes a very short leap in logic to wonder why we produce less and less crude oil, while we use more and more of it, or why politicians talk so much about promoting alternative energy sources, but often do so little to promote these alternatives. A reasonable observer, presented only with these numbers of consumption and production, might draw the conclusion that America has accepted this fate because we have no choice in the matter, or because we have no resources of our own. But just the opposite is true: We do have resources, and we do have a choice.

In oil, gas, and coal deposits, we have enormous energy reserves of our own. And we are gaining the means to use these resources in cleaner, more responsible ways. As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston. Yet for reasons that become less convincing with every rise in the price of foreign oil, the federal government discourages offshore production.

At the very least, one might assume, America had surely been building new refineries to achieve a more efficient delivery of gasoline to market, and thereby to lower the prices paid by the American people — especially in the summer season. But the policymakers in Washington haven’t got around to that, either. There’s so much regulation of the industry that the last American refinery was built when Jerry Ford was president.

As for nuclear energy — a proven energy source that requires zero emissions — we haven’t built a new reactor in 31 years. In Europe and elsewhere, they have been expanding their use of nuclear energy. But we’ve waited so long that we’ve lost our domestic capability to even build these power plants. Nuclear power is among the surest ways to gain a clean, abundant, and stable energy supply, as other nations understand. One nation today has plans to build almost 50 new reactors by 2020. Another country plans to build 26 major nuclear stations. A third nation plans to build enough nuclear plants to meet one quarter of all the electricity needs of its people — a population of more than a billion people. Those three countries are China, Russia, and India. And if they have the vision to set and carry out great goals in energy policy, then why don’t we?

So, taking stock of our energy situation, it is time we draw a few sensible conclusions of our own. In their sum effect on the American economy, the policies of our government could hardly have left us more dependent had they been designed to do precisely that.

There is plenty of blame to go around here – GOPers and Democrats have been remiss in their responsibilities to the nation as a whole as it relates to energy policy. Again and again President Bush proposed various measures we could have been taking over the past 7 years to reduce our dependency on oil and cut our oil imports, but no action has been taken – not under the GOP Congress, not under the Democratic Congress. That $50 you just shovelled into your gas tank is the result of decade after decade of doing nothing – or, worse, actually working against energy independence by over-concern about overblown environmentalist fearmongers and/or the worst sort of “nimbyism” which makes out that everyone wants energy, but no one wants it produced within a country mile of themselves.

It is time for a change – a real change; not more of the same from Obama and not pie-in-the-sky hopes for the future…we have oil, gas, coal and nuclear power sources, and we should be working out ways to maximize domestic energy production, while the high technology change over to new sources of energy is placed on the back burner until we get our energy house in order. McCain proposes to hit the problem head on and deal with it in a realistic manner – in spite of his bows to the global warming zealots, it is clear that he’s not going to allow environmentalist whackos to set energy policy. Clean, yes; but not so clean that nothing gets done. Human activity will always produce waste, and things like this are always a series of trade-offs with no perfect solution possible. Absent a few billion of us dying, we’re just going to have to work with things as they are, not as we might wish them to be.

More Carteresque by the day:

Democrat Barack Obama misused a “code word” in Middle East politics when he said Jerusalem should be Israel’s “undivided” capital but that does not mean he is naive on foreign policy, a top adviser said on Tuesday.

Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. “He has closed all doors to peace,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.

Obama later said Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the status of the city, in line with long-held U.S. presidential policy.

Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama’s comment stemmed from “a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones.”

“So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East,” Kurtzer said.

Whether or not Jerusalem should remain the undivided capitol of Israel is a debatable issue – I think it should be, because anything remotely like a retreat on the part of Israel will just be seen by the Jihadists as another signal to attack. But one can have either view and have a rational foreign policy – but you can’t have both. You can’t, that is, try desperately to mend your fences with America’s Jewish voters who might prove vital in a close November election while at the same time keeping on board your supporters who think that the Palestinians are the good guys in the Israeli-Palestinian war. Pick one, and stick with it.

Obama tried to have it both ways, and now he’s got his advisor out assuring all and sundry that it was a mistake…just a verbal gaffe…but verbal gaffes in such a serious issue can lead to dead people, and the people of the United States need to take this into consideration as they make their choice in November.

The Washington Post/ABC poll asked the question: If the eleciton were held today, for whom would you vote?

The result was: Kerry 48%, Bush 42%

in June of 2008 the Washington Post/ABC poll asked the question: If the election were held today, for whom would you vote?

The result is: Obama 48%, McCain 42%

Obama is in big trouble – he’s still the inside favorite, but he’s got to do vastly better than Kerry if he hopes to win in November, and so far he isn’t doing it. He’s gotten a “post wrap up” bounce which, at best, has pushed him nationally about 6 or 7 points ahead of McCain, depending on the poll, but that isn’t good enough, not by a long shot. In this year of 2008, with President Bush’s approval ratings below freezing and with the right/wrong track numbers entirely in the dumpster, Obama should be crushing McCain. I mean, seriously, anything less than a 20 point lead is just bizarre, given the overall political dynamics – and this shows that the American people, in spite of leftwing fantasies to the contrary, did not turn left in 2006 and are unwilling to do so in 2008. Obama is the most leftwing candidate ever nominated by a major American political party, and he’s having a very hard time selling himself outside upper class whites and black voters.

America is a center/right political nation, and if Obama wants to be President, he’d better figure out a way to assure the average American that his policies will not be overtly leftist – all the while fighting off McCain and the GOP, who will bring up every scrap of evidence of Obama’s leftism to tear down the moderate wall Obama is building ’round himself.