Not Too Late For A McCain Victory?

Philip J. Berg, Esq. is leading the charge to challenge Obama’s Presidential candidacy credentials. There is an ad that will be run (or is running?) in the Washington Times. You can see it here for yourself. If you’re motivated, you can even fill out the slip at the bottom of the ad and send it to Mr. Berg to be added to his petition.

Experience Reigns, Not ‘Change’

Obama Draws Heavily on Clinton Era and Congress for Appointees; Daschle Gets HHS
By LAURA MECKLER and JONATHAN WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama campaigned on the slogan of “change.” But his early appointees, including two top choices that emerged Wednesday, show that experience is one of his main criteria.

President-elect Barack Obama is looking to fill his administration with longtime Washington hands. Above, Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff.

His choice for secretary of Health and Human Services, officials said, is former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who has a long Washington résumé. Jacob Lew, one of President Bill Clinton’s budget directors, is favored to direct the National Economic Council.

The latest transition news highlighted the three personnel pools supplying Mr. Obama with his picks. Most prominent are Clinton administration veterans — including, possibly, former first lady Hillary Clinton for secretary of state. Some high-profile appointments are also long-serving members and staff from Capitol Hill. Then there are the influential Chicagoans — a group that seems smaller than the hometown crowd that usually accompanies a new president to Washington.

Linking them all is Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who has played prominent roles in each group.

Angry Homosexuals And The Intolerance of Intolerance

By Noel Bagwell
November 20, 2008

Thank you to the Los Angeles Times for providing such excellent coverage of the true face of homosexual activism in America. This is about anger and hatred, not love. In a twist from what you may be used to being fed by the MSM, it is anger and hatred that liberals – specifically homosexual liberals (theoretically not a redundancy), in this case – have towards conservatives in general, and Christians in particular.

Matthew McKelligon of Los Angeles protests Proposition 8 in front of the Mormon temple in Westwood.

I wrote recently about how images and what I call “image words” are replacing arguments. I think that’s a bad practice, generally speaking, because it contributes to the distortion of truth by questionable use of images that are subject to interpretation, rather than its explicit exposition in the form of words comprising rational, cogent and objective arguments.

Still, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, here are a few thousand words to mull over while you consider the assertions I’ve made:

Proposition 8: Full coverage

Photos: Proposition 8 protests

Google: More angry homosexual protesters

Let’s Have a Real Middle-Class Tax Cut

Obama’s tax credits won’t stimulate the economy.
By NEWT GINGRICH and PETER FERRARA

President-elect Barack Obama is right: America needs a real and meaningful middle-class tax cut. Unfortunately, despite the rhetoric, that is not what his proposals offer.

Newt Gingrich

Mr. Obama’s tax plan includes creating or expanding nine or more federal income tax credits mostly focused on low- and moderate-income earners, with an estimated cost of $1.3 trillion over 10 years. These tax credits are provided for certain social purposes, such as child care, health care, education, housing and retirement. Buried amid these is Mr. Obama’s purported tax cut for the middle class.

For the bottom 40% of income earners, who pay no federal income taxes on net today, these refundable income tax credits will not reduce tax liability but instead result in new checks from the federal government for the targeted social purposes. That’s not a tax cut. It’s welfare.

Twenty Reasons Why We’re Not Consuming

Nouriel “Doctor Doom” Roubini, 11.20.08, 12:00 AM EST
No savings–and a pile of debt.

This week’s news about October retail sales (-2.8% relative to the previous month and now down in real terms for five months in a row) confirm that the U.S. has entered its most severe consumer-led recession in decades. At this rate of free fall in consumption, real gross domestic product growth could be a whopping 5% negative or even worse in the fourth quarter of 2008. And this is not a temporary phenomenon: Almost all of the fundamentals driving consumption are heading south on a persistent and structural basis.

Consider the many severe negative factors affecting consumption. One can count at least 20 separate or complementary causes that will sharply reduce consumption in the next several years:

1. The U.S. consumer is shopped-out, having spent for the last few years well above his means.

2. The U.S. consumer is savings-less, as the already low household savings rate at the beginning of this decade went to zero/negative by 2006 and now has to rise to more sustainable levels.

3. The U.S. consumer is debt-burdened, with the debt-to-disposable-income ratio having increased from 70% in the early 1990s to 100% in 2000 and to 140% in 2008.

4. Not only are debt ratios high and rising, debt-servicing ratios are high and rising, too, having gone from 11% in 2000 to almost 15% now, as the interest rate on mortgages and consumer debt is resetting at higher levels.