This speech was broadcast by legendary ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on  April 3, 1965:

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.”   To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”.  In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that <snip>tail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . .

If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and  thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them.

If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If  I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing.

Paul Harvey, Good Day.

Youtube version, although some are saying this particular recording was in the early 1990's. Either way, it's worth a listen and makes you think, http://youtu.be/LJc8Mzg0C-c

With the passing of Andrew Breitbart, conservatives have lost a great voice.  I was a fan of Breitbart and his courage to stand up in the face of liberal and media bullying.  It is my pleasure to pass along Breitbart's first posthumous blog:

THE VETTING, PART I: BARACK'S LOVE SONG TO ALINSKY

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/04/obama-alinsky-love-song

Prior to his passing, Andrew Breitbart said that the mission of the Breitbart empire was to exemplify the free and fearless press that our Constitution protects--but which, increasingly, the mainstream media denies us.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – “Who guards the guardians?” Andrew saw himself in that role—as a guardian protecting Americans from the left’s “objective” loyal scribes. 

Andrew wanted to do what the mainstream media would not. First and foremost: Andrew pledged to vet President Barack H. Obama. 

Andrew did not want to re-litigate the 2008 election. Nor did he want to let Republicans off the hook. Instead, he wanted to show that the media had failed in its most basic duty: to uncover the truth, and hold those in power accountable, regardless of party.

From today through Election Day, November 6, 2012, we will vet this president--and his rivals. 

We begin with a column Andrew wrote last week in preparation for today’s Big relaunch--a story that should swing the first hammer against the glass wall the mainstream media has built around Barack Obama.

In  The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama claims that he worried after 9/11 that his name, so similar to that of Osama bin Laden, might harm his political career.

But Obama was not always so worried about misspellings and radical resemblances. He may even have cultivated them as he cast himself as Chicago’s radical champion.

In 1998, a small Chicago theater company staged a play titled  The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, dedicated to the life and politics of the radical community organizer whose methods Obama had practiced and taught on Chicago’s South Side.

Obama was not only in the audience, but also took the stage after one performance, participating in a panel discussion that was advertised in the poster for the play. 

Recently, veteran Chicago journalist Michael Miner mocked emerging conservative curiosity about the play, along with enduring suspicions about the links between Alinsky and Obama. Writing in the Chicago Reader, Miner described the poster:

Let's take a look at this poster.

It's red—and that right there, like the darkening water that swirls down Janet Leigh's drain [in Psycho’s famous shower scene], is plenty suggestive. It touts a play called  The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, Alinsky being the notorious community organizer from Chicago who wrote books with titles like Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. On it, fists are raised—meaning insurrection is in the air.

And down at the very bottom, crawling across the poster in small print, it mentions the panel discussions that will follow the Sunday performances. The panelists are that era's usual "progressive" suspects: Leon Despres, Monsignor Jack Egan, Studs Terkel . . .

And state senator Barack Obama.

Miner obscured the truth. His article only reveals only a small portion of the poster. Here’s the whole poster: 

  (please use the link above to view the poster... it is worth the click)

AlinskyPosterFullRez

And here’s the press release:

So, what’s in the play? It truly is a love song to Alinsky. In the first few minutes of the play, Alinsky plays Moses – yes, the Biblical Moses – talking to God. The play glorifies Alinsky stealing food from restaurants and organizing others to do the same, explaining, “I saw it as a practical use of social ecology: you had members of the intellectual community, the hope of the future, eating regularly for six months, staying alive till they could make their contributions to society.”

In an introspective moment, Alinsky rips America: “My country … ‘tis of whatthehell / And justice up a tree … How much can you sell / What’s in it for me.” He grins about manipulating the Christian community to back his programs. He talks in glowing terms about engaging in Chicago politics with former Mayor Kelly. He rips the McCarthy committee, mocking, “Everyone was there, when you think back – Cotton Mather, Hester Prynn, Anne Hutchinson, Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson … Brandeis, Holmes … Gene Debs and the socialists … Huey Long … Imperial Wizards of all stripes … Father Coughlin and his money machine … Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd … and a kicking chorus of sterilized reactionaries singing O Come, All Ye Faithful …”

And Alinsky talks about being the first occupier – shutting down the O’Hare Airport by occupying all the toilet stalls, using chewing gum to “tie up the city, stop all traffic, and the shopping, in the Loop, and let everyone at City Hall know attention must be paid, and maybe we should talk about it.” As Alinsky says, “Students of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your juicy fruit.”

The play finishes with Alinsky announcing he’d rather go to Hell than Heaven. Why? “More comfortable there. You see, all my life I’ve been with the Have-Nots: here you’re a Have-Not if you’re short of money, there you’re a Have-Not if you’re short of virtue. I’d be asking more questions, organizing them. They’re my kind of people – Hell would be Heaven for me.”

That’s  The Love Song of Saul Alinsky. It’s radical leftist stuff, and it revels in its radical leftism.

And that’s Barack Obama, our president, on the poster.

This is who Barack Obama was. This was before Barack Obama ran for Congress in 2000—challenging former Black Panther Bobby L. Rush from the left in a daring but unsuccessful bid.

This was also the period just before Barack Obama served with Bill Ayers, from 1999 through 2002 on the board of the Woods Foundation. They gave capital to support the Midwest Academy, a leftist training institute steeped in the doctrines of -- you guessed it! -- Saul Alinsky, and whose alumni now dominate the Obama administration and its top political allies inside and out of Congress. 

Stanley Kurtz, author of  Radical-in-Chief

, described the Midwest Academy as a "crypto-socialist organization.” Yet almost no one has heard of Midwest Academy, because the media does not want you to know that the president is a radical's radical whose presidency itself is a love song to a socialist "community organizer."

The reason Newt Gingrich surged in the Republican primary contest in January is that he was attempting to do the press's job by finding out who the current occupant of the White House actually is. Millions also want to know, but the mainstream media is clearly not planning to vet the President anytime soon. Quite the opposite.

For example, Miner tries to turn Obama’s appearance on the Alinsky panel into a plus for the president:

Obama was on the panel that talked about Alinsky the last Sunday of the play's run at the Blue Rider Theatre in Pilsen. Neither Pam Dickler, who directed the Terrapin Theatre production, nor Gary Houston, who played Alinsky, can remember a word Obama said. But he impressed them. "You never would have known he was a politician," says Dickler. "He never said anything at all about himself. He came alone, watched the play, and during the panel discussion was entirely on point and brilliant. That evening I called my father, who's a political junkie, and told him to watch out for this man, he's going places." Houston was just as taken by Obama—though he remembers him arriving in a group.

But is it a good thing to impress the sort of people who show up to laud The Love Song of Saul Alinsky? Here are the other members of the Obama panel:

Leon Despres: Despres knew Saul Alinsky for nearly 50 years, and together they established the modern concept of “community organizing.” Despres worked with secret Communist and Soviet spy Lee Pressman to support strikers at Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937; the strike ended in tragedy when 14 rioting strikers were killed and many wounded in a hail of police bullets.  Despres worked with another Communist Party front, the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, but eventually left because of the “Stalinism” of its leaders. 

Also in 1937, Despres and his wife delivered a suitcase of “clothing” to Leon Trotsky, then hiding out from Stalin’s assassins in Mexico City. Despres and his wife not only met with the exiled Russian Communist, but Despres’s wife sat for a portrait with Trotsky pal and Marxist muralist Diego Rivera while Leon took Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo to the movies.

Quentin Young: From 1970 until at least 1992, Quentin Young was active in the Communist Party front organization, the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights – a group dedicated to outlawing government surveillance of radical organizations.  He was also a member of the Young Communist League. Young, a confidante and physician to Barack Obama, is credited with having heavily influenced the President’s views on healthcare policy.

Timuel Black: An icon of the Chicago left, Black was originally denied officer training because military intelligence claimed he had secretly joined the Communist Party. Black also worked closely with the Socialist Party in the 1950s, becoming president of the local chapter of the Negro American Labor Council, a organization founded by Socialist Party leader A. Phillip Randolph.

In the early ‘60s Black was a leader of the Hyde Park Community Peace Center, where he worked alongside former radical Trotskyist Sydney Lens and the aforementioned Communist Dr. Quentin Young.  Black served as a contributing editor to the Hyde Park/Kenwood Voices, a newspaper run by Communist Party member David S. Canter. By 1970, Timuel Black was serving on the advisory council of the Communist Party controlled Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.

Timuel Black says he has been friends with domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, “going back to 1968, since long before I knew Barack.” In April 2002, Black, Dohrn and Democratic Socialists of America member Richard Rorty spoke together on a panel entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” The panel was the first of two in a public gathering jointly sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Bill Ayers and Barack Obama spoke together on in the second panel at that gathering. Communist academic Harold Rogers chaired Timuel Black’s unsuccessful campaign for Illinois State Representative.

Studs Terkel: A sponsor of the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in 1949, which was arranged by a Communist Party USA front organization known as the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions.

Roberta Lynch: A leading member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a leader of the radical Marxist New American Movement (NAM).

Are we expected to believe that “Baraka Obama” was a countervailing voice of reason on a panel of radicals?
 
The reason that Obama's Alinskyite past, and his many appearances in political photography and video from the 1990s, are conspicuously missing from the national dialogue is that State Senator Barack Obama's reinvention as a reasonable and moderate Democratic politician could not withstand scrutiny of his political life. 

Because the mainstream media did not explore his roots, the American public remains largely ignorant of the degree to which Obama’s work with ACORN and his love of Alinsky were symbolic of his true political will.

If any of the candidates can resist the media, and parlay Newt’s strategy into a nomination, we’ll have the choice between an imperfect but well-known Republican and the real “Baraka” Obama, not the manufactured one the media prefers.

REMEMBERING THE ALAMO

By Chuck Baldwin March 1, 2012 NewsWithViews.com

March 6 marks the anniversary of the fall of the Alamo back in 1836. For more than 13 days, 186 brave and determined patriots withstood Santa Anna's seasoned army of over 4,000 troops. To a man, the defenders of that mission fort knew they would never leave those ramparts alive. They had several opportunities to leave and live. Yet, they chose to fight and die. How foolish they must look to this generation of spoiled Americans.

It is difficult to recall that stouthearted men such as Davy Crockett (a nationally known frontiersman and former congressman), Will Travis (only 23 years old with a little baby at home), and Jim Bowie (a wealthy landowner with properties on both sides of the Rio Grande) really existed. These were real men with real dreams and real desires. Real blood flowed through their veins. They loved their families and enjoyed life as much as any of us do. There was something different about them, however. They possessed a commitment to liberty that transcended personal safety and comfort.

Liberty is an easy word to say, but it is a hard word to live up to. Freedom has little to do with financial gain or personal pleasure. Accompanying Freedom is her constant and unattractive companion, Responsibility. Neither is she an only child. Patriotism and Morality are her sisters. They are inseparable: destroy one and all will die.

Early in the siege, Travis wrote these words to the people of Texas: "Fellow Citizens & Compatriots: I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna. . . . The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword . . . I have answered the demand with a cannon shot & our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. . . . VICTORY OR DEATH! P.S. The Lord is on our side. . . ."

As you read those words, remember that Travis and the others did not have the A.C.L.U., P.E.T.A., the National Education Association, and the Southern Poverty Law Center telling them how intolerant and narrow-minded their notions of honor and patriotism were. A hostile media did not constantly castigate them as a bunch of wild-eyed extremists. As schoolchildren, they were not taught that their forefathers were nothing more than racist jerks. Neither did they have pastors constantly filling their hearts and minds with this imbecilic "Obey-the-government-no-matter-what" misinterpretation of Romans chapter 13.

The brave men at the Alamo labored under the belief that America (and Texas) really was "the land of the free and the home of the brave." They believed God was on their side and the freedom of future generations depended on their courage and resolve. They further believed their posterity would remember their sacrifice as an act of love and devotion. It all looks pale now.

By today's standards, the gallant men of the Alamo appear rather foolish. After all, they had no chance of winning--none. Yet, the call for pragmatism and practicality was never sounded. Instead, they answered the clarion call, "Victory or death!"

Please try to remember the heroes of the Alamo as you watch our gutless political and religious leaders surrender to globalism, corporatism, socialism, and political correctness. Try to recall the time in this country when ordinary men and women had the courage of their convictions and were willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom and independence.

One thing is certain: those courageous champions at the Alamo did not die for a political party or for some "lesser of two evils" mantra. They fought and died for a principle, and that principle was liberty and independence. So did the men at Lexington and Concord. That is our heritage.

Today, however, our national leaders are in the process of turning the United States over to the very forces that the Alamo defenders (and America's Founding Fathers) gave their lives resisting. On second thought, do they look foolish, or do we?

© 2012 Chuck Baldwin - All Rights Reserved

Time to clean house again. We cleaned house in 2010, we're gonna do it again in 2012. This time around, we take the Senate.

Some say the Tea Party is dead. LOL. Let them think that. The liberals have been living delusional lives for too long.

But most important, we need the Whitehouse. Obama has proven his disdain for the Constitution time and time again. Remember the health care debacle, remember how he told Republicans "We won, you lost, we don't need your input"? Since the Democrats lost control of the House, Obama has publically said he will go around Congress to get his way, and he has! Obama has many times insulted our long time allies like England and Israel. Worst of all, he has declared war on our rights with over regulation, laws that edge the Constitution, and most recently NDAA. (NDAA makes the Patriot Act look like child's play) This is the man who claimed he will unite and reach across the aisle. Ha. I called it right after the election, back in 2008 when Obama began announcing his staff selections.

Until the 2010 election, Obama and the Democrats in Congress shut out the Republicans on EVERY MAJOR DEBATE, cramming unread and unwritten legislation through with claims of dire consequences and ultimate disaster if not passed NOW. Regardless of the will of the majority of Americans. Without any proven evidence except for evidence later proven to be planted by Democrat operatives, they claimed the Tea Party protesters as racist and violent. Yet these very same Democrats embraced the OW protesters who proved to be racist and violent (not to mention filthy).

Obama, "the great job creator", has through over regulation and overreach of the Federal government, cost America hundreds of thousands of jobs. And just today, Obama shut down 10,000 jobs with his denial of the Keystone permits. And with that shutdown, he delt a savage blow to American energy independence and lost access to Canada's vast oil reserves. Now Canada will sell that oil to China. (Maybe we can get oil from Soros-backed Brazil instead.)  Thank you, Mr. Obama. That was three strikes with one blow. Even your precious unions are angry at you over that one. 

If the Republicans are smart, they will keep Keystone in the headlines along with Solyndra and all the other crony money giveaways under the Obama administration all the way through November. And what will be the Democrats' response to these truths? "Racist Republicans". I could do a whole nother blog on the Democrats and their obsession with race.

A view of the recent US elections from outside the US, telling us out loud what many of us here in the US know in our hearts.

By Peter Hitchens/Daily Mail/Mailonline

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084111/PETER-HITCHENS-The-night-waved-goodbye-America--best-hope-Earth.html#

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves.  It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in.  No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama’s election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

President-Elect Barack Obama's choice for chief of staff in his incoming administration, is co-author of a book, The Plan: Big Ideas for America, that calls for, among other things, compulsory service for all Americans ages 18 to 25. The following excerpt is from pages 61-62 of the 2006 book:

It's time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, All Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service. ...
Here's how it would work. Young people will know that between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the nation will enlist them for three months of civilian service. They'll be asked to report for three months of basic civil defense training in their state or community, where they will learn what to do in the event of biochemical, nuclear or conventional attack; how to assist others in an evacuation; how to respond when a levee breaks or we're hit by a natural disaster. These young people will be available to address their communities' most pressing needs.

Of course Emanuel as chief of staff would not be in a position to introduce legislation, but this plan does seem to fall in line with Obama's Civilian Paramilitary Service requirement.  This is very worrisome.  Anyone would be a fool to think this would be limited to disaster training. Remember my earlier blog? https://www.lotterypost.com/blogcomments.asp?i=25323 Obama wants a Civilian National Security Force, "just as strong, just as powerful, just as well funded" as the military. Hear it in Obama's own words http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2yGzHfy7s 

What happens to the National Guard? Will the states have to give them up to take on Obama's Civilian National Security?

Being forced to be "good citizens" builds resentment. 

This is the model that Obama needs to look at, not Michigan's failed socialist model authored by Granholm.  I am not a Democrat by any means, but I am a pragmatist. You Obama supporters say Obama won, get over it. Well, here is what I am offering Obama as a suggestion for a Democratic economic model. 

As a resident of Michigan, I beg Obama to compare Michigan to Ohio.  Granholm is a failure, don't let her failures be America's failures.

From the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122066123687305861.html

SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

Don't Believe the Doomsayers. Ohio's Economy Is Doing Fine.

By TED STRICKLAND and LEE FISHER

Last September, Obama called Michigan Governor Jennifer Granhold "the best Governor in the country". We  here in Michigan snickered over that one.  Michigan has been in a one state recession for over 6 years, all under the Governorship of Jennifer Granholm.

Now, Obama wants Governor Granholm as Energy Secretary? O_o 

Or as a possible Supreme Court nominee? O_O

Can someone born in Canada serve on the Supreme Court?  Yes, it is a well known fact that Michigan's governor is a native born Canadian - no conspiracy theories here, just fact.

Let's talk about her energy policy here in Michigan. She is  mandating alternative energy sources - fine, we need this, but in her mandate she has increased the taxes charged on utilities and given permission to the utility companies to increase their prices so they can reach her mandate. So, my taxes go up and my utility bills go up. Thanks Jennifer.

"Best Governor in the country". Well, this is a surprise. Obama endorses Granholm's tax model and economic policies. Let's look at a brief history of Michigan under Granholm's leadership.

Granholm took office in 2003. The Michigan economy had begun to slow in 2002, the year prior to her coming into office. The state unemployment rate was 6.2%, the national average was 5.7%. By the end of 2003 the jobless rate had grown to 7.2 percent, the national rate was 5.7%. There was a job loss of 35,000, however, the unemployment numbers only reflected an additional 4,000 out of work because 31,000 people left the state.  At the end of 2004 Michigan’s jobless rate was 7.3 percent, the National jobless average 5.5%. The state lost an additional 35,000 residents and thousands of additional jobs.  At the end of 2005 the jobless rate dipped to 6.1% while the National rate dipped to 4.2%. The State continued both its job loss and population flight.  At the end of 2006 Michigan’s jobless rate jumped to 7.2%, the National average was 5.0, one third lower than in Michigan. The State lost a net 90,000 jobs and over a hundred and fifty thousand residents.  At the end of 2007  Michigan’s jobless rate was 7.6%, the National rate was 4.9%. The state lost 120,000 jobs. 

Between 2003 and 2008 two people fled Michigan for every person coming into the state. The total  job loss totaled almost 2 million, the net job loss number is lower because auto or industrial jobs were replaced by service industry jobs.

When Granholm first took office in 2003 she announce a long list of liberal social experiments she described as "investment opportunities” to improve Michigan’s economy. Of course she wouldn’t increase the taxes of the working classes, just taxes on businesses and the wealthy to fund these “investments” in “infrastructure”.  Sound familiar?

The first warnings came in 2003. Numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the NYTimes, and the Detroit Free Press, along with scholars from around the country and world warned that increasing taxes in a slow or stalled economy was a risky proposition. The advise was not heeded. 

The Governor was warned that this would start a vicious cycle - increased taxes make the products or services produced in your state more expensive and less attractive - those products and services are less attractive to buyers - they buy fewer of the goods and services - delivering less tax money -meaning another tax increase is necessary and so on and so on. Michigan's death spiral begins.

The first property tax increases were made in 2003. The have continued annually. Property taxes continue to escalate out of control.  The Michigan foreclosure crisis is not fueled by adjustable rate mortgages, it is being fueled by job loss, population flight and citizens being taxed out of their homes.  I personally know elderly people who had to sell their homes because they could no longer afford their property taxes.  People joke about Michigan is that the only thing slowing the population flight is the fact that home sales are so slow.  If I could sell my house, I'd be gone in a split second. I was born and raised in Texas and still have family there - that's where I would be, if I could.  The average home price in Michigan is approximately $200,000. A home valued at $200,000 in 2003,  is now valued at $150,000. In 2003 the property tax on the $200,000 house was $3,000. The tax today on the $150,000 home is $7,000.     

Since Granholm was elected, the Michigan sales tax increased from 4% to 6%.  In addition, business and personal income taxes have been increased repeatedly. Michigan’s Single Business Tax was replaced, to create a better business climate and “lower taxes”. The replacement, the Michigan Business Tax,  was not only, dollar for dollar, identical to the prior tax, but the rates have been substantially increased.

In November 2007 a huge additional tax increase was passed. Business taxes went up 22% and  other taxes on the residents of Michigan by 13%. The tax increase was intended to raise over 1 Billion dollars - the money would be used for additional ”investments”. The Governor promised the new tax would solve the problems of the State and “bring prosperity to all”. The Billion plus dollar tax increase was passed despite the continued warnings that it would further slow the economy and would never generate the promised revenue.

In May 2008 the State announced that additional tax increases will be necessary to prevent a suspension of services. Last years 1 Billion increase is generating $500 million less than expected, creating yet another budget shortfall and the need for additional taxes. The improved economy promised by all these increases is no where in sight.

Michigan’s 2008 budget is $44.8 Billion dollars.  In 2003 the budget was $38 Billion. The State has lost 2,000,000 jobs while increasing taxes by $6 Billion dollars. The people of Michigan are now the 5th most taxed in the nation. 

Michigan government employees have not felt the pinch or belt tightening of the average Michigan resident.   According to the Mackinaw Center for Public Policy the average salary and benefits package of a state employee is $75,000 a year, private sector workers have an average salary and benefit package of $58,000 - this number is still substantially above the national average of $48,200. Rarely will you see such a gap between state employees and those they serve.    

Michigan’s median income continues to drop. Poverty is on the increase. Detroit’s poverty level is 33%, the highest poverty level of any major city in the Country. Flint and Kalamazoo are tried for 5th in the nation (cities with a population between 65K & 250K) with a poverty rate of 35.5%.

Michigan’s auto jobs are not moving over seas. The are moving from Michigan to other States where the economic environment made auto production more competitive. The BIG THREE - renamed the Detroit Three - by Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House - are losing sales volume - even in Michigan. In Michigan Toyota car sales are up 36% while US auto sales are declining. The Toyota’s are being built in the US, just not being built in Michigan.

Barack Obama’s suggested economic change is not new … its a return to the past, to the policies of Jimmy Carter. To see his economic principles in practice just look to the economic success of Michigan. The Country cannot afford to be this successful.

If Obama wants to look at a successful Democratic Governor, he would do better to look at Ohio's Governor Strickland. I will post more on him in  my next entry.

(I want to give credit to much of this information to McaullysWorld blog)

I get such a treat out of South Park sometimes. Very tasteless must of the time, but dang funny.  This week's new episode left me with my jaw open.  They could not have possibly written, drawn, and produced this any faster. I thought at first they must have had two different episodes completed based upon who won the election, but when they mentioned the passing of Obama's Grandmother, I was stunned! This was aired first on Wednesday, then repeated on Thursday.  Here is the episode review from E!

"No wonder John McCain's concession speech Tuesday night was so gracious.

It turns out he's been in cahoots with Barack Obama for the last 10 years, and the pair have been devising a way to get either one of them into the White House as part of their plan to steal the precious Hope diamond from the Smithsonian.

Well, at least according to the folks over at South Park, who, on last night's episode, showed Obama and McCain attending a postelection meeting with other members of the "greatest thief club in the world" to explain it all.

Hey, if in some weird way it helps the economy, we say, screw it—take all the diamonds you want. "

There is a 2:32 clip here http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b67548_south_park_obama-mccain_master_plan.html  At the end there is a link to South Park Studios where you can watch the whole episode.  The episode does a take-off on Ocean's Eleven with Obama and McCain as the leaders of the heist.

BOOM-BABY!

If you are real adventurous, check out the Britany Spears episode from last year.  It was not as much funny as it was sad and telling on the state of our obsession with celebrities.  I have found that regardless of how gross and tastless many of the jokes are on South Park, there is nearly always a very truthful lesson taught about society.

Presiden-elect Obama chose Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff Thursday.  Rahm and Obama both are from Chicago and Rahm has brought his Chicago Thug methods with him to Washington.

A former Clinton whiz kid who'd gotten his start as a fundraiser for Mayor Richard M. Daley, Emanuel was connected -- in the three years after leaving the White House (where he'd helped push through NAFTA), he earned $16 million putting together Wall Street mergers. He was also zealously partisan. He had once owned a consulting business devoted to finding skeletons in Republican closets. At a Clinton vicory dinner in Little Rock in 1992, Emanuel celebrated by reciting a hoped-for necrology of Democrats who had "ed" the president-elect. After every name, he stabbed a steak knife into a table and screamed, "Dead man!" 

Rahm Emanuel is a Democratic version of Karl Rove, a pitbull known for intense partisanship and using the F-bomb. This is not a man who is going to reach across the aisle and unite anybody.  The only good thing I see in Rahm Emanuel is that he will stand up to those that want to move further to the left like Pelosi and Reid if it does not agree with Obama's plan.  Afterall, Rahm was there when Clinton went too far left and saw the resulting election victories for Republicans.

Some of you <cough>pac<cough> seem confused about some of the pro-McCain supporters reaction to Obama winning. While we do not agree with Obama' politics, we put this country first. Obama won, he is our President. With his election, we, as Americans, all won.  There are no losers in American politics. Something the liberals forgot in 2000, 2002, and 2004. 

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b67297_election_reax_from_hasselbecks_new_view.html?sid=rss_topstories&utm_source=eonline&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=rss_topstories

Although Elizabeth H gets ripped regularly for supposedly not being "smart", I think this short video from today proves otherwise.

Karl Rove, 2nd most hated man by the left said today, "Loyal opposition."  Rove has written a piece for the WSJ tomorrow regarding the election. I will read it with interest.

COUNTRY FIRST - AMERICA FIRST

Because Tenaj does not like my politics I am not allowed to post on their blog.  Tenaj has learned well from Obama and his Truth Squads.  Typical liberal who claims to support freedom of speech, but only if you agree with them.

YES! It's a great day in America!  Thank you, Tenaj, for proving what liberals truly believe in.

Liberals win, America loses.

btw Tenaj, I won't block YOU from expressing your opinion on my blog.  I believe in freedom of speech.

A fresh start for conservatives beginning Nov 5th.  Out with the old, the stale, the center leaning moderates who have taken over and ruined the Republican Party.

New leadership for 2010.  Who will it be? Who are our bright stars of the future?

I fear what will happen when Obama cannot live up to his Utopian promises.  I fear the "test" that is to come.  I will pray for Barack Obama, that he make the right decisions for our country.

I thank God for denying the Super Majority for the Democrats.

I pray that Michelle Obama proves me wrong and learns to display the graciousness needed as First Lady. 

I will pray for my country, as I always put Country First.

I can't tell you how many times I have heard liberals call Bush a Facist.  Well, I have to tell ya, Obama makes Bush look like Goldilocks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2yGzHfy7s

So what do we need with a civilian force? Do we not have the National Guard? Do we not have the CIA, FBI, ATF, the State Police, etc? 

Obama has already shown us how he reacts when the media gets tough or does not kow-tow to his agenda.  You get tossed off his campaign airplane if your newspaper endorsed McCain, and if  you ask hard questions you and your employer are blackballed.  If you are a citizen and you ask a hard question that unmasks Obama, your private life is investigated, publicized - and you are made into a joke on the campaign trail.

This is the man that supposedly more than 50% of America wants for President?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltrzP9YeaEw

Truth squads? Media blackballing? Private citizens' private lives made public, investigated, and humilated?

I thougth the liberals were about tolerance, and their mantra was it is their right to question the government. I guess that only works if you agree with them.

SEIG HEIL, OBAMA!

Your Vote. Your Right. Vote Responsibly. Make it count.  America First! Country First! MCCAIN/PALIN '08

Jessica Springsteen won the National Horse Show ASPCA Maclay championship at the Syracuse Invitational Sporthorse Tournament today. This is pretty prestigious stuff in the horse show world for junior riders. It means you are one of the best of the best.  Jessica Springsteen, daughter of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scalia, rode her horse Papillion 136 to victory over 149 other riders aged 12 to 17 from across the country. The whole family was there to support Jessica including her two brothers. The Boss is a familiar figure at the top horse shows in the country supporting his daughter and her riding.

To qualify for the Maclay Finals, a rider must first earn points to qualify for regional competition. Jessica has been one of the top riders starting back when she rode ponies and won several national championships.  Earlier this month, Jessica came in 3rd of 269 qualifying junior riders for the United States Equestrian Federation Hunt Seat Medal Finals.

Shout out to The Boss and his lovely family for staying grounded despite the fame his career has brought. I have to say that Bruce looks like any other Horseshow Dad after a long day at the horse show!

Here are a couple of screen captures I made to share: