Obama is still in trouble with Hillary voters
August 27, 2008
Barak Obama is in bad shape, and he should be concerned. First of all, Hillary Clinton showed in her speech on Tuesday night exactly why she would have been a formidable opponent to John McCain. The audience of Democrats in the Pepsi Center in Denver were loud and highly supportive. You could sense a strong connection between Hillary and the crowd. One came away from the speech wondering if the strongest audience response of the entire Democrat convention had just happened. Thursday night will need to be a barn-burner for Obama, or he is sunk with this crowd.
The second reason is exemplified by the reaction of the Clinton delegate in the video below. This is a clear example of how many in the Democrat party seem to feel about the nomination process and its end result. And this sentiment is clearly showing itself in the polls. With McCain and Obama drawing closer in the polls during Obama’s nominating convention and the disappearance of the gender gap, Barak Obama seems to have no foundation. And this convention is not causing the cement to harden. A key ingredient for him is clearly missing
UPDATE: Maureen Dowd captures the “anxiety” undertow at the DNC.
Sphere: Related ContentSaddleback live blogging
August 16, 2008
We will be live blogging the Presidential candidate forum at Saddleback Church this evening. Click on the 2008 tab above to see it.
Sphere: Related ContentDrilling now could mean lower taxes
August 16, 2008
Andrew Moylan of the National Taxpayers Union has an article in th Wall Street Journal today showing how we could lower taxes by allowing drilling in ANWR now. Using Congressional Reaserch Service numbers, he estimates that the federal government could bring in $2 trillion in extra revenue over the next 30 years.
Sphere: Related ContentPres. Bush saves Pelosi from political fallout over gas prices
August 10, 2008
George Bush was convinced (apparently by West Virginia Congressman Nick Rahall) not to call Congress back into session to write an energy bill. This is a strange twist on the effect of the “Lame Duck” presidency. Congress, it is true, will tend to ignore the policy priorities of an outgoing President when it has other priorities of its own, but shouldn’t the freedom from personal political consequence inspire principled action by that same President when no political price is to be paid by him at the polls?
That George Bush will not call Democrats to account for skipping town instead of coming up with an energy bill wreaks of “propriety” and “fair play” unduly given to congressional leadership which is guided by improper and self-aggrandizing political motives.
Read my lips, “No new energy policy for America.”
Sphere: Related ContentUSGS Survey shows huge oil-natural gas reserves in Arctic Circle
July 27, 2008
According to the New York Times, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has just released a study showing that the Artic Circle holds one fifth of the world’s oil reserves. Most of the oil and natural gas resources fall under current territorial claims. As Russia, the United States and Canada begin to go after these newly charted energy fields, most national disputes will be avoided for now. But the question remains whether American energy needs will be addressed in US Territory or whether Congress will put up barriers to expediting development of these newly discovered fields.
Sphere: Related ContentAl Gore’s Nutty Idea
July 25, 2008
Vince Carroll, Editor of the Denver, CO based Rocky Mountain News dissects Al Gore’s outrageous proposal to replace all power generation with renewable sources in the next 10 years”
Sphere: Related ContentThis would of course require utilities to mothball hundreds of existing power plants as they launched a crash construction program of solar plants, wind farms and transmission lines costing hundreds of billions and perhaps trillions of dollars. (To put this in perspective, T. Boone Pickens, another fellow who’s caught the wind-power bug, claims on his Web site, “Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20 percent of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns.”)
“Many Americans have begun to wonder whether or not we’ve simply lost our appetite for bold policy solutions,” Gore worried during last week’s speech.
For bold solutions? No. But for nutty ones: Let’s dearly hope so.
Privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-WSJ
July 16, 2008
The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, Jr. makes a strong case for Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:
Sphere: Related ContentSell off their regional underwriting offices to private investors. Don’t heed any guff about how Fannie and Freddie are “vital to the functioning of the U.S. housing market.” Houses would still need to be financed, and the private sector would jump at a chance to get the solid, triple-A business that Fannie and Freddie now monopolize. Indeed, there’s evidence that their implicit subsidy never flowed through to homebuyers anyway, but was captured by their shareholders and managers.
Pond Scum for Petroleum?
July 9, 2008
A July 5, 2008, Denver Post editorial, “Pond Scum to the Rescue?” touted a joint effort by ConocoPhillips and the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels to use algae (“pond scum”) as a biofuel alternative. The Post claims rather optimistically that this experimental process could “[fight] global warming and the OPEC oil cartel in one stroke,” and that we should “stop using ‘pond scum’ as an insult and start using it to save our wallets and our planet.” Such a rosy prediction is, with all due respect, overstated. To the contrary, the problem with oil is not the lack of alternatives. It is significant government restrictions on oil exploration right here at home that artificially limits supply and needlessly leads to higher prices.
While alternative fuels are largely limited to research and development, expansion of oil production in our own country would have a vastly greater effect on our national and economic security as a nation. And Colorado will become a major source of that security if we will decide to implement reasonable policies for energy exploration. The problem is some of our elected officials are putting up roadblocks which are nothing more than environmental alarmism. We need forward thinking in support of Colorado’s well-established, leadership role in the energy economy while maintaining our commitment to environmental stewardship. Read more
Sphere: Related ContentBoy survives Amazon forest; dies in father’s arms
July 2, 2008
From City News:
Sphere: Related ContentIt is an incredible story of survival and a tragic tale of getting there too late. It concerns an 18-year-old from Brazil named Jonathan dos Santos Alves, who spent a harrowing and almost unbelievable 42 days lost in the Amazon rain forest, only to finally be found - and die in his father’s arms minutes later.
New legal era for Second Amendment
June 29, 2008
From the Wall Street Journal:
Sphere: Related ContentWhether or not a well regulated militia remains necessary to the security of a free state, as the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares, it isn’t the compelling motive behind the constitutional right of the people to keep and bear arms. That, in effect, is what a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, clearing up a constitutional ambiguity as old as the Bill of Rights and at the heart of more contemporary debates over how the U.S. should deal with the biggest epidemic of gun violence among the world’s industrial democracies.
