A "Bush League President"?

Conservatives take heart! After viewing the mainstream Sunday morning talk shows it’s no wonder why conservatives get so pessimistic about the possible outcome of the 2010 election. However, after watching this weekend’s round of shows it became obvious that the Obama campaign is desperate and even the liberal-bias networks are beginning to feel the pressure. Meet the Press devoted most of their show to the 1st Anniversary of the Osama Bin Laden capture. Now we hear that everyone was opposed to it (Biden, Gates, Clinton, etc.) and our president made the courageous decision to go with the Navy Seals instead of a missile attack on the house, or doing nothing. You have got to be kidding! First of all, most of the people writing stories about that decision have no direct information from any of the participants, and Time magazine’s version of the account is not exactly what I would call objective given their track record.

We know that doing nothing was not an option; since our intelligence was 90% sure he was there. This would eventually leak out and would be suicide for Obama. Second, a missile attack on a town that housed the Pakistan military elite, and might cause peripheral damage, kill civilians, and be considered an attack on Pakistan, is not a particularly the low risk option. It would appear that what was done was a decision that you, me, or our military would have preferred. But now the Obama campaign says that Romney would not have done it! Just another indication of the desperation. Poor vs. rich, black vs. white, employer vs. employee, union vs. business, war against women, anything but focusing on the economy and Obama’s track record of spending us into the brink of insolvency.

Peggy Noonan had an excellent article this weekend in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A Bush League President”, in which she describes this president’s rather boring rhetoric, pandering to his special interests and emphasis on the small things with no vision for the future. She said “he lacks joy; he’s cool but lacks vigor. A lot of what he says could have been said by a president 12-20 years ago”. Noonan believes that Republicans should cheer up. She believes that this administration has no answers and when you add the GSA scandal, Solyandra, and a host of mistakes in the Justice and Energy Departments, day-to-day governance is essentially non-existent. It’s getting re-elected that only matters.

At this time in the election process Ronald Reagan was trailing the incumbent Jimmy Carter by 14 points and he won in a landslide. Romney and Obama are essentially even, and regardless of the power of an incumbent president and all that free exposure, it appears that the Republicans have the momentum, and Obama is desperately seeking a campaign theme, because he can’t run on his record. Take heart, a lot of surprises are ahead.

Obama's Fruitless War on Oil

Our President’s war on the oil industry may play well with his primary constituency but for the informed voter it is an exercise in futility. First of all, the $4 billion in tax breaks, or subsidies, or giveaways, or whatever he calls it, is peanuts compared to the $86M that the government rakes in from the oil and gas industry everyday! Yes, I said every day. He is using this as purely a political campaign ploy to make it appear he is really concerned about gas prices, when the truth is he is not. He believes that higher carbon-based fuel prices are good for his green energy agenda.
The fact is, your children, their children, and your children’s children, will primarily be using oil and gas for decades to come, long after Mr. Obama is history. His excursion into wind, solar, electric cars, etc. is pre-mature and wasting our money. These methods will best be developed by the private sector which can do the research necessary to eventually make them commercially viable. His political cronies are taking money from his national alternative fuel giveaway program with loan guarantees, tax breaks, and subsidies for investments that eventually fail for lack of a market, while they personally skim off the top and the government ends up paying the bill.
The reality is that fossil fuels are a gift from God! Not only are they a relatively cheap and excellent source of energy but also a source of chemical building blocks for most of the products that add value, benefit, and pleasure to our lives. Medicines, plastics, solvents, chemicals, building products, you name it, most anything we touch. The amazing thing is that we have loads of it, and are sitting on oil and gas reserves that will last us hundreds of years, if we have the will or desire to recover them.
Another ridiculous thing about this political ploy is that the $4B in “subsidies” is minor compared with the $35.7B in corporate taxes that the industry paid into the government in 2009 and every year, according to the Federal Energy Information Administration. In fact, the average effective tax rate for oil and gas companies was 41.1% in 2010. Most other manufacturers pay an effective rate of 26.5%. ExxonMobil reported that its profit in the 1st Qtr of 2011 for its retail gasoline operations was 7 cents per gallon. Gasoline taxes range between 26.4 cents per gallon in Alaska to 66.1 cent per gallon in California, and averages 48.1 cents/gal, which says that governments (federal and state) make at least 7 times the profit per gallon than the oil companies!
The oil companies really don’t care about the $4B in tax benefits; however, the fact that it is prejudicial to the industry is the issue. All other companies enjoy the same deductions so why should an industry that supports more than 9 million jobs in the U.S. be singled out because the President says “the oil industry is profitable enough without these tax breaks and that the money should be spent on alternative energy sources”. Since when does he get to decide whether Exxon, Apple, or any company is “making enough”?
Many taxpayers in this country have 401k’s that are invested in ExxonMobil and they like when its stock appreciates and it pays dividends to its stockholders. No single person, particularly one who never had a real job should decide the profitability limits of giant corporations, unless they live in China, Cuba, Russia, or Venezuela.