Let’s see if we can take off our rose colored glasses long enough to remember the day when Barack Obama said that he would accept public funding for his campaign. He made a promise that if John McCain accepted public financing, so would he. But that promise became totally dispensable compared to the possibility of receiving millions of dollars from grass-root fund raising. After all, every dollar received from ordinary Americans was a vote in his favor, right? What’s a promise when you can have proof that you are universally loved?

Now here’s the rub: Do the people who voted with their dollars care about broken promises?

If this candidate can go back on his word for money, can you trust anything he says?

Can you trust that he will only raise taxes for those making more than $200,000 a year? Suppose it becomes convenient to drop that cut-off  a little lower? What if raising taxes for those making $100,000 a year will pay for healthcare for every single American? We have already established that promises are like piecrusts, very crumbly and easily broken, at least by this man. What if the deficit can be wiped out by raising taxes on those making $80,000? What if, what if, what if? Promises are not worth much.

Last night Obama ran a 30 minute commercial on every single network except Fox and some of the sports cable channels. He did this because he could afford it. He did this because he broke a promise. I think that the next time this candidate makes a promise, someone should make cross his heart or we’re all in deep trouble because this man can’t keep a promise for, let’s see, how did Boggie put it, for a hill of beans.

Here we go again. One more radical association. One more terrorist connection. One more chance to deny it. Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Middle East Studies at Columbia University and a longtime friend of Senator Obama. In 2003 Khalidi was toasted at a party to say goodbye in Chicago, when he was leaving Columbia. Also celebrating that night was none other than Bill Ayres. There is a video tape of this aprty when some very anti-Israeli sentiments, including a poem, read by a young girl, condemning Israel as a terrorist nation. As no surprise, the L.A. Times is refusing to release the video tape, citing a promise to the source. The Times did write about the event, is rather insipid way, referring to the evening as an evening of music, celebration and a dash of politics. When Senator Obama, during one of the debates, was asked what he would do if Iran attacked Israel gave one of his customary long-winded replies and casually added at the very end that military options were not off the table. It was the clearest indication of where the Senator's heart lies in regard to Israel. This video taped event seems to confirm that. There will be much rejoicing in the streets of America when Senator Obama gets elected a week from today. There is also be much rejoicing in the streets of every terrorist stronghold in the Middle East, and that should give every American pause while in the polling booth next Tuesday.

My gardener is a proud Mexican American business man who started his landscape company by himself, just he and his wife, six years ago. Today, he employs 14 men who work for him for $8 an hour. He estimates that his crew does about 30 yards a day. I pay him $40 a time.If you do the math he collects $1200 a day, or $6000 a week which comes to $300,000 a year.President Obama already has plans for some of the loot.My gardener is one of the wicked and greedy wealthy. One of the people who has been making money while breaking the backs of the much neglected  and used middle class.I never thought I would live to see the day that my gardener’s income would get redistributed to me. After all I have a Graduate Degree and two Undergrad Degrees and he dropped out of high school. We will also soon have government provided and controlled health care.I think I am going to give up two of the three jobs I currently have. I won't need them, anymore, in an Obama Administration. Remember if I fall within the blessed group of 38% of Americans who do not pay any tax, I will get a refund check. A free unearned handout from my socialist Uncle Sam.Welcome to Socialist America.We are finally joining the ranks of Western European Socialist States like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland.<BR>Perhaps we should ask to join the European Union.

If I keep this up my gardener is going to get as famous as Joe the Plumber. This is my second post involving my gardener, in a way. He also prides himself on having learned how to protect a lawn from frost during the winter months. Frost is about as bad as it gets here in Southern California, during the winter. During one of our occasional chats the other day, he was explaining to me the technique of spreading cow manure so that by the time winter is really here it settles down and protects the roots from the cold. He said that it was all about spreading the manure. The expression rang an unpleasant bell. Spreading something. Spreading manure. Spreading the wealth. Then everything came together. Then I realized  what was crawling around in my subconscious. Obama’s ability to spin. It a long impressive list. A list of spreading verbal manure.

1. Look at the spin about Ayres. Several people have said that he was introduced as the Illinois replacement senator in Bill Ayres living room. Obama has consistently lied about this, once during one of the debates and his supporters say it’s all about interpreting the question.

2. Then there’s Tony Rezko and the relationship with him. Acting as his attorney and an attorney for Acorn. More spin.

3. How about attending the church where Rev. Wright consistently said anti-American and racist things, but the good Senator never heard any of them.

4. Then there were the proposed meetings with hostile leaders without preconditions…but that has changed now.

5. Some of the finest spin on the planet involves working around admitting that our military is wining in Iraq and that the surge worked.

6. The guy is loaded with cash because he lied and said he would accept limited public funds if John McCain did so. This one is more than spin.

7. It took a plumber to get him to admit his socialist plan to spread the wealth around.

So when it comes to spreading anything Obama is a passed master, whether it is wealth or verbal manure.

I hope that unlike the roots of my lawn, this manure doesn’t keep the American public too warm and cozy, or we could be headed into a disastrous four years.

It took a plumber to extract the truth from the socialist liberal in moderate centrist clothing that is Barack Obama. When have you ever heard the Democrat candidate say, even euphemistically, that his intention is to spread the wealth around?

It is so profoundly Non-American a concept that he wouldn’t dare mention it even to his socialist leaning friends in northern California. After all, they make big bucks and they are not about to share, by force. Now the word is out. Now those who did not know about this and care about it have discovered that when liberal progressives talk of leveling the playing field, they really mean that those who have worked hard and made a fair amount of money will have to support those less ambitious among us. They will have to share their wealth with burger flippers who dropped out of high school or got pregnant in high school or destroyed their minds with chemicals or got married to the first person who they were physically attracted to at the wise age of 17, or just decided that the rat race wasn’t worth it.

It is amazing that progressive liberals who normally do not give a hoot about Christian Principles, start quoting Jesus Christ when it comes to redistribution of wealth. I suppose even Christ serves a purpose when it comes to advancing one’s agenda

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I hope that this is an eye-opener for those still sitting on the fence. All I ask you to do is to picture America being run by the Progressive liberal triumvirate of Pelosi, Reed and Obama. Then wait till Obama replaces two Supreme Court judges with far left progressive liberals….America will never be the same again!

The English language is a living language. The guardians of Webster’s Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary are perpetually adding words and changing words, as well as making subtle changes to the meanings of words. As an example take the word “media”. This was once the term used for our forth estate. The press! Now with the advent of the IT world, media has come to mean any means of conveying information. Another example is the word “gay”. It once meant being frivolously happy. Old English songs used it a great deal. It now denotes someone’s sexual preference. One final example is the word “postal”. Where this word was meant to convey anything connected with the post system, it now is an adverb which means the loss of mental control to the point of violence. Thus words change and the change is added to our lexicon of daily usage.

I propose another word which is new, but has a double meaning in our political system. In 2004 when John Kerry’s past came back to haunt him and the Democrats were convulsing over the ads being created and paid for by Kerry’s swift boat comrades in arms during the Vietnam conflict, the term “swift-boating” was conceived. It came to mean any last minute, last ditch, desperate effort of an opponent at airing some dirty laundry that would broadside someone and totally sink a campaign by turning public opinion against the candidate it was aimed at. It’s a handy term. It has been used a great deal. By liberal democrats. Republicans, conservative or otherwise, are never swift-boated. This is a tactic that apparently has been conceived, designed and executed by the vast right wing conspiracy. Thus, when anything is aired by the Republicans about Barack Obama’s association in his shady past, as per Bill Ayres and Rev. Wright, this is a prime example of swiftboating. It is loftily dismissed as dirty pool by the sophisticated left. It simply isn’t cricket. If the GOP airs an ad asking why Jim Johnson and Marc Rich are both under suspicion of financial wrong doing, well, again, its swiftboating.

Now, here’s the point of this post:  The lefties and the Obama Campaign can bring up the Keating stuff against John McCain. They can accuse the GOP of being hand-in-hand with the greedy bunch of CEOs who caused our economic woes, and this isn’t swiftboating. Today I read an article by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone which talks about how John McCain is really not that much of a hero, in as much as he broke down under torture and confessed to his Vietnamese captors. The idiot Dickinson goes on to say that McCain also was foot loose and fancy free as a twenty something who wanted to go to Rio to “get laid”, as opposed to volunteering to organize some communities or join the peace corps.  Bare in mind, this isn’t swiftboating. It is last minute. It has all the flavor of being last ditch and desperate. It is fully intended to broadside the Republican Candidate, but it doesn’t qualify as swiftboating, I do believe, because, swiftboating is something the only the despicable right wing can do. The left is to noble to resort to this lowly activity.

So, there you have it. A word which means two different things depending on which side of the political spectrum uses it. If it is practiced by the GOP, it is a heinous activity designed to sink a noble, young, be-dimpled candidate who is the only hope of America.  If it is used by the Democrats, it is a way of letting the voting public know what they will get if they make the horrible mistake of voting for John McCain. 

It is a Democrat thing to create new areas of life where the Federal Government can dole out assistance to the people. FDR created the New Deal, LBJ created the Great Society and now Obama is proposing another set of government handouts.  Personal responsibility is old fashioned and outmoded. You can still own your own home if you work for minimum wage and are bringing up three kids without the benefit of a spouse, because he or she is out mating with someone else. You are still entitled to a decent retirement even if you worked at minimum wage all your life because you dropped out of school before graduating your high school year. Senator Obama says, now, that health care is a right. So add one more to that list. You are entitled to health insurance no matter what you do for work.

Entitled! Period! Everyone has the right to health care.

Where, in heavens name, did that come from? Someone posted something the other day about the Declaration of Independence not including the rights to “Life, Liberty and Good Health Insurance.” But it has become politically expedient to offer health care to everyone. You’re damned if you don’t. It has become politically expedient to offer huge rebates for every child one has. A kind of incentivizing procreation. Once again, try not offer this, as a plan for your presidency, and you’re damned on the spot. On the liberal agenda the financial leveling of the playing field is a euphemistic way of referring to wealth redistribution. Just like they used to do in the good ol’ Soviet Union. Does anyone remember Lenin, Trotsky and Marx? Only they called a spade a spade. No nice fancy terms for it. You taxed the heck out of the rich and paid it out in entitlements to the poor. The poor just hung around looking pathetic, waiting for the handout to come.

Well, today John McCain was challenged by a man in the crowd he was addressing, to name names of those responsible for the economic breakdown we are enduring right now. He named Chris Dodd, Barney Franks and Barack Obama, in the Senate for this. The customary Democratic push for low income housing. In the old days, post WWII, when houses were selling for $40,000, then low income housing was set at $18,000. Perfectly doable and affordable by someone making very little money. But today with houses selling at the inflated rate of $300,000, low income housing is still way up at $200,000. At 6% that is a mortgage payment of over $1500 a month. A minimum wage household cannot afford that kind of outlay every month. Tweak the numbers to get these low wage earners into a house and what you get is the kind of melt down that is happening to us right now. So it was Democrat Ideology which caused the problem. I hope everyone is clear about this. By Chris Dodd’s own admission it was loans which were defaulted on that caused the problem. Loans made to low income wage earners at Democrat insistence.

But it wouldn’t be politically expedient to say that. It sounds way better to the Democrat base to say that Republican Greed on Wall Street was to blame. One exonerates oneself at the same time as one buys a lot of “stick it to the man” good will from the liberal base. That is what the Democrats on the hill did and with the collusion of the Print Media and the likes of Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Chris Matthews and  they came out smelling like a bouquet of roses.

Well it looks like the cat is out of the bag. John McCain finally had the courage to stand with the people and blame the right culprits. Now I’m waiting for the next debate for us to hear him ask Barack Obama for a real explanation of Bill Ayres and the CAC and Acorn and the Weathermen. I’m waiting to see the Democrat Messiah wiggle his way out of this one.

Reaganite - Glenn J. D'Abreo

Reaganite@hangright.org

www.hangright.org

 

If you are a Conservative Republican, as I am, then you realized, from the word go, last night, during the Presidential Debate, that you do no matter much any more. On the other end of the spectrum, if you are a liberal Democrat, as misguided as you might be, you realize that you too, do not matter much any more. John McCain was as centrist as he has ever been. Barack Obama was even more centrist than he has been since the end of the primary season. He has even picked up the “cut spending” line from his opponent. Both candidates were going after the undecided centrist voters who will call the election this time around.

 

There were times when I had difficulty deciding whether I was listening to Barack Obama debating John McCain or Joe Lieberman debating John McCain. The only thing separating Lieberman from Obama is the war in Iraq. Obama has become more hawkish

( he will go after Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden), he has become a fiscal conservative (he’s going to cut spending -- with a Democrat congress, no less), he has become a pro-nuclear energist as well. John McCain is going to create a $300 billion entitlement which will pay off bad mortgages. Wonderful! Obama is going to give 95% of the American people a tax cut which will be paid for not so much by taxing the greedy rich as by cutting spending.

 

On the whole Obama’s answers were too thought out and too studied. As usual one got a doctoral thesis for every question he was asked. McCain did not go deep enough into his answers, which left listeners wanting more details. McCain particularly missed the opportunity to explain how his health care plan will work and how it gets paid for.

 

The faux pax of the evening was Obama’s answer to the question about Israel. Here’s the scenario: Israel has been attacked by Iran. What would you do?

As usual we got a doctoral thesis.

A thesis which ended a few minutes later, with the line that military options were not off the table. Excuse me? Let’s get this clear: Israel has been attacked by Iran, and military options are not off the table. You mean you do not strike with everything you have to defend Israel against a rogue Islamic nation with nukes? I know now, who I want to be our next commander-in-chief.

 

In 27 days we will know, for certain. I hope that each man’s base, the faithful Republicans or Democrats, can get their minds off being let down, and vote for their candidate with the hope that their ideals are the ideals of candidate they elect to the highest office on the planet. Last night didn’t give any of us much hope of that.

While the electoral map looks more and more dismal for John McCain, both campaigns have started resorting to personal attacks. It was the McCain Campaign that started the shooting match. Sarah Palin said that Obama had had the habit of hanging around with accused terrorists. I wish she hadn’t. I wish that it had been the Obama Campaign that had started the dirty business.

The issues have been sidelined and now past associations and past scandals seem to be the order of the day. Frankly, I don’t care much whether John McCain was involved with the Keating bunch or if Barack Obama had a love-in with a terrorist. These past events and associations simply do not matter given the enormity of the problems facing our nation right now, today, in 2008!

Personally, as an American voter, I want to know what they are going to do about the current economic crisis. I want to hear specific plans. I want to hear what we are going to do to prevent this financial tsunami from ever plaguing us again. I also want to hear what they have learned in the past three weeks that will make a difference in the way they are going to handle the economic crisis. I want to hear that everyone to blame is being investigated by the FBI for the possibility of fraud. I need to hear what their penalties are if they are found guilty of fraud or gross mismanagement. I need to hear that the taxpayer is now a shareholder in every entity that was bailed out. I need to hear that taxpayers will be paid interest on their loan to these entities before a single shareholder gets a penny.

Given that the whole economic climate of America has changed, I don’t want to hear whether the other guy will raise my taxes or not. I don’t want to hear about whether the bailout was right or wrong, it done now and to quote the Bard, “it cannot be undone”. Please don’t let me hear about health care; that is perhaps the biggest pipe dream, today, that either candidate ever had. That isn’t happening for a long, long time. If we are so tuned in to national security, can you imagine what is going to be the state of our national security if we go headlong into a deep, deep depression which will take us five year to dig out of? How much more susceptible do you think we would be to terrorist attacks.

Let’s have answers and solutions and not accusations….

This morning, after the Vice Presidential Debate of last evening, if I were a veteran Senator of 35 years, I would be feeling really bad for myself. After all, he has been in this campaigning/debating game since Sarah Palin was probably in forth grade. Yet, he came of stuttering, unsure of himself, he was repetitive and he kept throwing out memorized statistics like a junior in high school trembling his way through his first confrontational experience for the debating society. Quoting the Good Book and this is not something that Progressives like to do, "To whom much is given, much is expected." Thus it was with Joe Biden. On the contrary we all expected this of his opponent Sarah Palin. The print media had all but written her off, and perhaps justifiably so, after the Couric and the Gibson interviews. She was expected to regurgitate memorized talking points, statistics and pearls of wisdom about her running mate's excellent qualifications for Chief Executive. She certainly did some of this, but she also spoke from the heart in many places. The group of people, mostly conservative women I have to admit, with whom I watched the debate,  were electrified when Palin asked the American people to be responsible with credit card debt and diligent in taking responsibility for their own lives.She positively established herself as a complete Washington outsider. She said she didn't "understand you guys in Washington." She was able to explain John McCain's energy policy better than the venerable Senator has ever done it himself. For me, she came out on the right side of global warming. She was not prepared to believe that all the negative effects we are experiencing, were being caused by human activity and that China and India had to take some responsibility for cleaning up the planet as well as our country.

At the point where the potential Veeps were asked about gay marriage, Sarah Palin sounded a great deal more honest and believable than did Biden. Both were against same sex marriage, but Palin was careful to say that while she is tolerant of people making up their own minds about partners in life, she wanted to be careful of the crawling, insidious effects that gay-partner rights might have on the only definition of marriage; that of being a contract between one man and one woman. No "ifs', "ands", or "buts".

In spite of everything, Palin won last night, especially with the middle class kitchen table crowd, which will make the winning hit in November. I am a little disappointed that she did not take the many opportunities she was given( much to Gwen Iliff's credit) to say that winning in Iraq is fundamental to our entering into any conversation with Iran or North Korea or Hamas in Lebanon.  That winning in Iraq will give us the position of strength we need to negotiate and discuss with those who hate us and want to destroy us. It will put teeth into our diplomacy. And that is the only way to sit down and talk to rogue dictators who may or may not have nuclear weapons. Otherwise, our diplomacy will simply be another weak attempt at Chamberlain-esque appeasement; something that leaves you a lot weaker and in a lot more precarious position than your were in the first place.