CONGRESS AND THE ECONOMY
If Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States, do you know what will happen to federal tax rates and government spending? If you answered "yes," then you have not been paying attention, because Mr. Obama and his advisers keep changing what they say they are going to do. Even more importantly, under the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the sole power to tax and appropriate funds, not the president. Congress always rewrites presidential tax and spending proposals, even when the president and congressional majority are of the same party, and hence no president gets to dictate fiscal policy. The questions we should be asking are: What changes is Congress likely to make in the tax law, the level of spending, and energy policy if Mr. Obama is elected, and likewise if Sen. John McCain is elected? This table shows what happened to the economy during the past quarter of a century when each party controlled (or shared control of) Congress:
AMERICA’S VICTORY IN IRAQ, OBAMA’S SHAME AND DEFEAT
A hurricane smacks the Big Easy again. Back-to-back political conventions. A surprise VP pick. Russians behaving like Russians . . . All too easy to miss the biggest story out of Iraq this year: Yesterday, security responsibility for once-bloody Anbar Province officially passed from the US military to the Baghdad government. Fallujah. Ramadi. Al Qaeda's worst atrocities. Those opposed to the liberation of Iraq celebrated years of headlines from Anbar. Then it all changed: We won - and the headlines vanished. That's because a story of victory in Iraq is also a story of shameful defeat for Barack Hussein Obama.
THE FRONTIERSWOMAN
For the first time in memory, we have a major candidate who comes from the frontier, and it's not surprising that the pundits are having a hard time coming to grips with this phenomenon. Sarah Palin is a frontierswoman. Her state capital, Juneau, cannot be reached on the highways of Alaska. If you want to get there, you must either fly or sail. And for much of the year, sailing isn't smart. No subways in Juneau, but lots of bars. The main bookstore caters mostly to the tourist trade, with a small selection of used paperbacks and a few recent best sellers. It's not so much authenticity as independence and self-reliance, which have always been the basic characteristics of frontier people. They think for themselves. They have to think outside the box, because there's no available box for them to think in. If they accepted the conventional wisdom they wouldn't be on the frontier, they'd be in some city and they'd brag about their degrees from the failed institutions of higher education. They're not big on "conflict resolution," they prefer zero-sum games. If you go up against a grizzly, you're poorly advised to look for a win-win solution.
SARAH! A SURPRISE TO THE WORLD BUT NOT TO TTP’ERS
What did that guy say standing in front of that phony cardboard Greek Temple a couple of nights ago in Denver? Nobody remembers, nobody cares. Because everybody is talking about somebody else, the most exciting political surprise of modern times. In fact, the only people on earth not surprised were readers of To The Point. On June 4, 2008, TTP's Jack Kelly - whom TTP'ers in the Forum have now dubbed "Nostradamus" - wrote Fire and Nice for McCain's VP. Her high school basketball teammates called her Sarah Barracuda. Her fellow beauty contestants for Miss Alaska named her Miss Congeniality. Fire & Nice. Nostradamus Kelly takes political acumen and prescience to a whole new level. Isn't it odd that a VP pick now being universally described by conservatives as "brilliant" and "inspired" came as such as surprise. Well, we at To The Point are happy to describe Jack Nostradamus Kelly as brilliant and inspired! So - the first question that comes to mind to ask Dems and Omaniacs is: Do you have any idea how large a full-grown bull moose is?
ARE THE DEMS STUPID ENOUGH TO MISUNDERESTIMATE SARAH?
I wrote Fire and Nice for McCain's VP back in June in which I said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be the ideal running mate for Sen. McCain. But I never thought he'd pick her. I underestimated him. And Democrats will underestimate "Sarah Barracuda" at their peril. If I were Slow Joe Biden, I'd be worried. A former journalist, Sarah Palin is careful about what she says and says it well, qualities for which Sen. Biden is not reknowned. Sen. Obama picked Sen. Biden in part because of his reputed skill as a hatchet man. But if Sen. Biden comes on too hard in the vice presidential debate, he'll look like a bully. Alaska is littered with the bodies of those who tried to bully Sarah Palin and failed.
NOT IN DENVER
That's where I am this week - not in Denver. That's where I encourage you to be as well. When Hussein Nobama gives his ridiculous Greek Temple speech today, I will literally be underwater - scuba diving off a small island in the Caribbean called Saba (say-bah). It's a funky little place most have never heard of, a mountaintop in the sea, so steep it has no beaches and no rivers. Saba's population of 1200, many of whom are descended from pirates six and seven generations ago, make do with rainwater. They live in tiny homes clustered in tiny hamlets in high mountain valleys around the island. The people are wonderfully friendly and gracious, there's no crime of any kind, the food is great, the beer is cheap, and the diving incredible - one of the best in the world. What better place to completely ignore whatever craziness there is going on in the world, particularly the Democrat craziness in Denver?
WHY DO POLITICIANS ALWAYS CONFUSE INCOME WITH WEALTH?
Which of the following families is "richer"? The first family consists of a wife who has recently become a medical doctor, and she makes $160,000 per year. Her husband is a small business entrepreneur who makes $110,000 per year, giving them a total family income of $270,000 per year. However, they are still paying off the loans the wife took out for medical school and the loans the husband took out to start his business, amounting to debts of $300,000. Their total assets are valued at $450,000; hence, their real net worth or wealth (the difference between gross assets and liabilities) is only $150,000. The second family consists of a trial lawyer who took early retirement and his non-working wife. They have an annual income of $230,000, all of it derived from interest on tax-free municipal bonds they own. However, their net worth is $7 million, consisting of $5 million in bonds, a million-dollar home with no mortgage, and a million dollars in art work, home furnishings, automobiles and personal items. The second family is clearly far better off financially than the first family, yet many in the U.S. Congress, including Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, want to increase taxes on the first (and poorer) family and not on the wealthier family.
OBAMAS FAVORITE MOSLEM
As the Democrat Convention's carefully-scripted coronation of perhaps the least qualified major party presidential candidate in recent American history builds up to its climax, few have noticed that the convention's most pregnant political message may have already been delivered before it officially started. It came in the form of a decision by Obama's campaign to feature the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Ms. Ingrid Mattson, at an "Interfaith Gathering" of Leftist religious luminaries the day before the convention opened (8/24). In doing that, Obama and the Democrat leadership rather demonstratively bestowed their seal of approval on the largest and most important front organization of the American Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial Islamist revolutionary movement dedicated, in their own words, to "a grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands." The implications of this political legitimization of a group dedicated to the destruction of our constitutional order are so profoundly disturbing that some background on what exactly ISNA and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) or Ikhwan Muslimi are is in order.
SLOW JOE BIDEN: A FERRARI FOR A MOUTH, A TOYOTA FOR A BRAIN
The funniest of several mirthful moments in the Democrats' vice presidential candidate rollout was the assertion by aides for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama that though he's been in the U.S. Senate for more than 35 years, Joe Biden isn't a Washington insider because he takes the train home to Wilmington every night. Do they really believe this? Or is it just that they think we're stupid enough to believe it? The only running mate who could have moved the needle much for Sen. Obama was Hillary Clinton, and he had powerful reasons other than electability for not selecting her. But Slow Joe?
HALF-FULL REPORT 08/22/08
We start with the revelation that there is a solid scientific reason for calling this the Half-Full Report. Psychological researchers have studied silver and bronze medal winners over the last several Olympics. It turns out that, on average, the bronze winners were happier than the silver. Those that won the silver were filled with regret that they didn't win the gold, while those that won the bronze were happy they got a medal at all rather than nothing for finishing fourth. The lead researcher, Dr. Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University, summed up the lesson learned: "The key to understanding happiness is not to think about it as a trait but as a talent. Happy people have a talent - they are able to argue that life is a glass half full." Happy people look at life as a glass half-full. Yes, that is exactly the purpose of the Half-Full Report! It's good to have science behind the reason. *** Wasn't it so much fun this week watching Obambi get the crap beat out of him by a woman and an old man? The HFR's description last April of him as a pussy sure is turning out to be spot on: