American Republic Online

This piece at HotAir is the most comprehensive I’ve seen. I would have nixed the Abortion stuff myself, but rest is quite good as it lays out the real Obama in areas of Taxes, Associations/background, Foreign Policy, Middle America, Race & Experience.

Most people don’t honestly know what “change” means… here’s your answer.

What follows is by no means comprehensive, but it does shed some much-needed light on a number of Obama’s positions, statements, and associations about which he has been less than honest. We’ve attempted to boil each issue down to a succinct explanation with an accompanying, brief video clip—often starring Barack Obama in his own words. Before pulling the lever for someone who hopes voters will ignore his paper-thin resume, unsavory associations, and hard-left voting record, each citizen has a duty to do his due diligence.

Read the full article »

Barak Obama has REPEATEDLY stated that he will “not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000″, but if you’re above that 250k “rich” line - watch out!  Lets take a look at how this is a flat out LIE.  Obama has repeatedly voted against extending/making permanent the Bush Tax Credits because they are “for the rich”.  His current position is that he will let those credits that expire in 2009 & 2010 as they only benefit the rich.  Let’s see how much more taxes you’ll pay without “raising taxes”. Because merely “letting tax credits expire” and reverting to “older” -cough- higher -cough- tax rates isn’t “raising taxes” - its different.  Well its different verbage… too bad its effects are exactly the same.

1. The Child Tax Credit will return to $500 from the current $1000.  Tax Increase: $500 per child.

2. The death tax after being slowly phased out to make the transition easier for the government it will jump back to 55%.  While taxing inheritance seems like a good way to “get the rich”, it actually tends to hurt family businesses -like farmers- the most.  The dastardly rich, you see, spend tens of thousands of dollars on estate planners (both lawyers and accountants) but shield their millions from most of this taxation through trusts, off shore investments, etc. Tax Increase: varies.

3. The Marriage Penalty will return for all income levels.  This “penalty” is the fact that in dual income homes (most of America these days), couples end up paying a higher amount of taxes than they would if they were still single and paying their taxes individually.  A “fair” tax system that cares about the “working man” (and working woman) would want to tax people the same if they are single or married.  Tax Increase: varies but often several thousand dollars.

Read the full article »

Journalism.org tries its best to spin this as “its not as bad as it sounds”, but the numbers don’t lie:

Obama would probably claim that most of his negatives are coming from Fox: “I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls”

Which begs the question of where both of the candidates would be without ABC, CBS, MSNBC, & CNN???

Read the full article »

Orson Scott Card has a pointed piece on the absence of journalistic integrity these days.

An open letter to the local daily paper:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans…

Read the full article »

George Neumayr has an excellent piece at the The American Spectator.  I interject here and there for added clarity.

Debates in D.C. seem to shift ever leftward, with last year’s liberal positions becoming this year’s unacceptably reactionary ones — a trend that is bound to accelerate under a Democratic monopoly of all three branches of government.

The extent to which the 1960s counter-culture has become the culture and 1960s anti-Americanism become the new patriotism is amazing. That’s why Obama could launch his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist and pay almost no price for it. As Chris Matthews lectured Pat Buchanan on Hardball last Friday night, Ayers was a terrorist with a worthy motivation: he bombed the Pentagon because he wanted America out of Vietnam, a blameless goal indeed. Under the Left’s tortured understanding of the new patriotism, even Jeremiah Wright is pro-American: his fulminations had the purpose of drawing America into the light.

Patriotism is now measured not by respect for the conservatism contained in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution but by the level of one’s enthusiasm for the America to come.

Read the full article »

I’m not sure which is more surprising: that you can generate x-rays by pulling apart scotch tape in a vacuum or that we have a named branch of science devoted to “things rubbing together”.

a couple of guys at UCLA who’ve built a machine for unpeeling sticky-tape in a vacuum at the rate of 3 centimeters per second for the express purpose of generating x-rays.

Amazingly, it works. Check out the video for proof.

The authors write that current theories of tribology, the science of things rubbing together, don’t fully explain the amount of energy their machine generates. The search for a better theory of triboluminescence could lead to a greater understanding of electron behavior at the interface between two surfaces exhibiting stick-slip friction like, say, earthquake faults.

Read the full article »

This speaks for itself:

The US Communist Party is feeling rather smug in these days of capitalist turmoil.

At the party’s New York headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, regional party chairman Libero Della Piana, 36, laid out why he thinks Marxist-Leninism’s time has finally come.

“We are very excited, we feel that we are at a turning point,” Della Piana, an imposing half-Italian, half-African American with a pony tail, told AFP. “We can afford to be less on the defensive for the first time since Ronald Reagan…”

There is no communist running for the White House and the Communist Party does not endorse Democrat Barack Obama.

Yet many staff here wore his picture on lapel buttons, while Republican John McCain was relegated to a box of tissues — the tissues being pulled through his mouth.

Read the full article »

In what is often called political stupidity VP nominee Joe Biden had a fit of honesty at a recent fund raising rally:

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy… I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities…”

Why test Obama? I dismiss the “young” theories, but he is extremely inexperienced and all over the map on his foreign policy (half the time we’re unsure he’s aware which nations are currently our allies).  Now the trend amidst his wide array of FP comments seem to be more talking with our current enemies, distancing ourselves from our allies, and pulling back our military as much as possible.  Which could be why the Military support McCain over Obama 68 to 23.  Sen. Biden went on to say:

And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Read the full article »

“In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound,” said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. “On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.

“In general, the weather this summer was the worst [coldest/snowiest] I have seen in at least 20 years.”

Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.

Whew. Crisis averted.  And none too soon since “carbon taxes” would only drive the economy lower.  Thanks to China and India global CO2 emissions are way up in spite of guilt-ridden Americans’ trying new light bulbs and other token fixes.

Read the full article »