Can we please put to rest the canard that the sub-prime crisis was caused because “we let people own houses that they couldn’t afford”? “WE” did no such thing and even if we did, those loans were not the cause of the sub-prime financial crisis. The sub-prime crisis was not caused because the Democrats forced the banks at gunpoint to lend money to blacks and irresponsible poor people. The sub-prime crisis was caused by irresponsible, criminal rich people who figured out a way to swindle the system and pay no consequences. It was caused by college-educated rich people who figured out a way to divorce their profits from any risk of loss. It was no less criminal than the S&L collapse in the early 90s or the Enron scandal at the start of the 2000s.

Barack Obama is not hiding his birth certificate. He has not refused to show his birth certificate. The “original birth certificate” debate is the most ridiculous mishmash of misunderstandings and outright lies that I’ve seen in a long time. Barack Obama has not refused to show his birth certificate to a court because no court has ordered him to show his birth certificate. Barack Obama HAS shown his birth certificate and it contains everything that is needed to show his eligibility to serve as president. There is no evidence at all that Barack Obama was born outside the United States.

A parent cannot give up the U.S. citizenship of his/her minor child. A minor child cannot give up their own citizenship, in fact. Thus, it was not possible for Barack Obama’s mother to give up his U.S. citizenship and render him ineligible to serve as president of the United States.

An economic stimulus package is more than a $500 check to everyone in the United States. This one drives me nuts. I keep hearing people argue against Obama’s economic stimulus package because “the last stimulus package didn’t do any good”. Well, DUH!! That wasn’t a stimulus package. It was pissing into a bucket. What the hell use was $500 in my pocket six months ago? A better plan? Reduce payroll taxes for a year and put an extra $25 in my pocket every single week. That $25 will get spent, trust me. That’s a spending stimulus package that will encourage me to replace my coffee maker, go to the movies, buy a few magazines, pay for a coffee at the diner — in other words, the kind of regular, sustained spending that keeps money circulating.

However — off track there. This economic stimulus package is being sold wrong. It’s not a bailout, and it’s not a “stimulus”. It’s a freaking investment. We’re not talking about sending $500 to every taxpayer. We’re talking about rebuilding crumbling roads, bridges, schools and public buildings. We’re talking about upgrading water treatment plants, repairing, rebuilding and re-tooling the energy delivery grid, increasing the reach of broadband access — and every single one of those things will improve our ability to meet challenges in the future.

Industries do not move their manufacturing and service jobs overseas because of lower taxes in other countries. They move to other countries because of the lack of regulations governing their business. They move to other countries because no one in other countries requires them to provide for worker safety. No one in other countries requires them to clean their poisons out of the water before they dump it into the rivers and oceans. They move to other countries because they can pay workers less than half what they pay them here and force them to work more hours than is good for health, safety or sanity.

“Improving infrastructure” does not mean building roads and bridges. Or, more specifically, it means MORE than building roads and bridges. It means more than giving money to states who hire people to repair roads and bridges and wastewater treatment plants, though those are all very necessary things and are part of the equation. It means investing in companies that are laying cable for broadband access – because the U.S. is so far behind other countries in providing universal broadband access, it’s not funny. It means providing government funding for startups who are working on ways to produce and deliver greener energy choices. It means things that many of us can’t even conceive because we aren’t THERE, dreaming up things that may be possible.

The vast majority of Obama’s supporters do not believe he is the Messiah, and we have not drunk anyone’s Koolaid. Frankly, Obama wasn’t serving up Koolaid. He was serving up cups of truth laced with hope. I’ve never quite got the people who think we all fell under the spell of Papa Obama promising that he’d “take care of us” when every single one of his speeches enjoined us all to work for the things we believe. We voted for empowerment, dude. We voted for a guy that said “you gotta work for the change you want, but if you work for it, I will back you every step of the way”.

As many people voted for Obama IN SPITE of his color as voted for him BECAUSE of his color. Most of us who voted for him didn’t give a fig what color his skin is. And frankly, most of those who voted for someone else didn’t give a fig what color his skin is, either. But race most certainly played a part in this election. It was the tap-dancing elephant in the room.

The story of Kaylee Anthony was a sad one, but it occupied far more media attention than it deserved. Sadly, there are thousands more little children who go missing every year and whose names no one ever has heard.

Torture does not deliver actionable intelligence most of the time. It’s a fiction promoted by some of our favorite television shows. The truth is that we get more truth through softer interrogation techniques.

The media is not liberal or left-wing biased. Sorry. It’s just not. The media has promulgated all the right-wing talking points for so long that most people have never even HEARD a real liberal agenda.

There’s more, so much more that I can’t possibly fit it into one post. There are fallacies about public health care (hint: Canada’s “socialized medicine” is far more effective than ours, and Canadians don’t want to sneak across the border to see our doctors), about economics (corporate tax cuts do not stimulate anything but higher profits for stockholders and CEOs) and about the economy (we DO need to rebuild our manufacturing base and create local economies without losing sight of the global economy). I’m holding my breath till January 20th… and we’ll see where we go from there.

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My “knee jerk” reaction, from what I’ve learned so far, is that this
woman breaks the mold in almost every conceivable way. I like women the
way they are, and think they should continue to be the way they are,
but if you want an example of the feminist model of a woman not being
restricted by pre-conceived notions of what a woman should be, She’s
it. She shows that woman can not only be all they can be, but also
anything they want to be. On their own.

She compares favorably to Hillary in that she’s totally self made. Her
husband, a real man to be sure, had nothing to do with her rising to
governership. There may be some minor experience issues. She’s never
had to dodge sniper fire for instance. Although, she likely would
return fire. While simultaneously breast feeding.

What’s difficult about this is that a lot of it is true. Palin is definitely an independent, outspoken woman who won an election for governor in the rough-and-tumblest state in the country. She does not conform to the traditional feminine gender role in as many ways as she does. And here’s the thing: she is the beneficiary of societal attitude changes brought about by decades of strong, feminist women standing up to demand that they be treated with the same consideration as men. She is in the position she holds because generations of women before her dared to stand up and demand that they be judged on their brains and their abilities rather than on the fact that they have a womb. She is proof that not only can a woman achieve recognition in the arena of national politics – she can do it with young children in tow.

I’m not a Palin fan. I want to make that clear up front – but I am defensive of MY rights as a woman. On that basis, I am heartily offended by those who question her love for her children – especially the youngest – because they have never seen her holding the child. It has no bearing on her ability to do her job, and I’m heartily offended by the notion that the mother of a young child should not be doing anything other than mothering that child. And just as I will defend to the death my right to hold my 17 year old daughter’s hand and support her through the difficult decision to have an abortion, I uphold HER right to be proud of her daughter and support her through the difficult decision to carry her child and raise it.

And here’s where the difference comes in. MY belief system does not limit her daughter’s choices. I would not in a million years presume to tell any woman that she MUST have an abortion, no matter how unfortunate and horrible the circumstances, no matter how much better off I believe the mother or society would be if that pregnancy is terminated. Her belief system, on the other hand, would force my daughter to have child no matter what the circumstances.

We absolutely should be asking hard questions about Palin, but those questions should not be about whether she should be running on a presidential ticket when she has an infant son and a pregnant daughter. Instead, we should be asking: how can she advocate an energy policy that further enslaves us to the oil companies (oops, doh! One pays her husband’s salary!); how does she answer charges that she abused her power as governor for famiy reasons?; why does she feel it’s necessary to lie about her opponent to score points?; and really, can she do her own taxes? Because if she can, she should have figured out that her poor parents, who just bought a service station, aren’t very likely to see an increase in their taxes under the Democrats, and might even be better off.

Earlier, Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., told FOX News: “Many of us speaking on the floor today, including the Republican leadership, believe the president of the United States should call this congress back into session immediately under Article II of the Constitution, and demand that this Congress deal with the issue of energy independence.”

Energy independence? Really? I vote that we start working to declare our energy independence as well – independence from our need for fossil fuels, independence from the oil companies whose only view of the future is one that keeps us a slave to oil drilling. There are alternative energy sources that are renewable. The biggest argument against them is that they ‘cost too much money to produce’ – but they only cost too much money to produce because they are not yet the standard. Oil is only cheaper -today- because everything is geared toward producing and using oil, and the proposals before Congress would do nothing but keep us stuck in a future where we rely on oil. This isn’t the time to be thinking in terms of dependence on FOREIGN OIL – we need to be thinking in terms of independence from any limited resource energy source.

The whole farce yesterday hinged on one cry – Dems are blocking lower gas prices.

“I just saw one of the Democrats interviewed on television. The question was, if oil was $10 a gallon and you knew exactly where to get it in Alaska or on the coast, would you drill there, and there was no answer,” House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, of Missouri, said before a last-minute gathering before reporters late Friday.

What Blunt left out was the fact that IF you knew exactly where to get it, and the Congress voted to allow you to get it TODAY, you would not see a single barrel of it for 10-12 years, and it would not affect the price at the gas pumps until 2030. And I’m not getting my figures from some flaky left-wing hippie-pinko conspiracy site. Those are from a report released by the Energy Information Administration in the Annual Energy Outlook Analysis for 2007. The report included a projected timeline of the effects that lifting offshore drilling restrictions in the Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf regions would have on US oil production. The results:

The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. Total domestic production of crude oil from 2012 through 2030 in the OCS access case is projected to be 1.6 percent higher than in the reference case, and 3 percent higher in 2030 alone, at 5.6 million barrels per day. For the lower 48 OCS, annual crude oil production in 2030 is projected to be 7 percent higher—2.4 million barrels per day in the OCS access case compared with 2.2 million barrels per day in the reference case (Figure 20). Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.

The fact is that we missed the boat on this one 40+ years ago after the oil crisis of the 1970s. That’s when we should have turned the lion’s share of our resources to finding and developing ways of using alternative energy sources instead of making fun of those who advocated for the same. Looking for ways to prop up our dependency on oil by digging more holes in the ground is a short-sighted solution. It’s rather like an addict declaring freedom from his pusher by planting his own poppies. In a few years, he’ll have cheaper heroin, but he’ll still be a slave to his addiction.

“I’m all for recycling — but it’s better applied to paper and plastic than to the failed policies of the 1970s,” he said.

“The next president must be willing to break with the energy policies, not just of the current administration, but the administrations that preceded it, and lead a great national campaign to achieve energy security for America

We have proven oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States. But a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production. And I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and to put our own reserves to use

¥Obama said:

“John McCain’s support of the moratorium on offshore drilling during his first presidential campaign was certainly laudable, but his decision to completely change his position and tell a group of Houston oil executives exactly what they wanted to hear today was the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades,” he said.

“It’s another example of short-term political posturing from Washington, not the long-term leadership we need to solve our dependence on oil,” he said.

¥Florida Senator Bill Nelson said: