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June 24, 2008

Exclusive: Tuesday, June 24

Click here for a PDF chart comparing the tax plans of Clinton, McCain, and Obama.

Obama vs. Osama - Promises aren't Plans, Barack

Ralph Peters, NY Post.com

Name-brand journalists have let Barack Obama make any claim he chooses about Iraq, Afghanistan or coping with terrorism without pinning him down for details.

Yet many of his comments and positions seem stunningly naive about national security. Given that this man may become our next president, shouldn't he explain how he'd do the many impressive things he's promised?

This week, Obama claimed, again, that he'd promptly capture Osama bin Laden. OK, tell me how: Specifically, which concrete measures would he take that haven't been taken? How would he force our intelligence agencies to locate bin Laden? And he can't just respond, "That's classified."

He also claimed that fighting terrorism is a law-enforcement problem, not a military one (should we send the NYPD to Mosul and Kandahar?), and that the answer to terrorism is the approach taken after the 1993 World Trade Center attack, featuring conventional trials and prison terms.

That flaccid post-'93 response only encouraged terrorists - who are unfazed by the prospect of a US prison, where the quality of life's better than it was at home. The Clinton administration's hesitancy and softness gave us the subsequent attacks on the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, on our embassies in East Africa, on the USS Cole and, ultimately, the events of 9/11.

The senator needs to tell us why it would be different now.

Obama has also said he'd send our troops into Pakistan, although he'll withdraw rapidly from Iraq. His unwillingness to discuss the consequences of a hasty retreat from Baghdad is one thing - but invading Pakistan would be an order of magnitude worse. Read article.

A Reformer's Progress

Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com

So much moral good was expected from "campaign-finance reform" that Barack Obama's announcement yesterday that he will opt out of public financing for his Presidential run is an historic moment. Senator Obama is the first candidate since the law was passed in the 1970s not to take matching funds for the general election. Even candidate George W. Bush, flush with cash in 2000 and 2004, didn't do that.

The campaign-finance law may have been on life support, but being the one who finally pulled the plug seems to have put the Illinois freshman in a churlish mood. "John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs," he explained. He expects "smears and attacks" from Mr. McCain's "allies" who will "spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations." In fact, they made him do it: "We face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system."

Is this the tone of the new post-partisan Obama era? One may wonder. The fact remains that the decision is a large and telling Obama flip-flop.

He said early on that he would accept public financing for the general campaign, which runs between the conventions and November's vote. But this was back when he couldn't be sure he would be able to raise so much money by nonpublic means, or what he has since called his "parallel" public financing system. Read article.

McCain Scores Big With Offshore Oil Drilling Proposal

Morris & McGann, NewsMax.com

John McCain has drawn first blood in the political debate following Barack Obama's victory in the primaries. His call yesterday for offshore oil drilling - and Bush's decision to press the issue in Congress - puts the Democrats in the position of advocating the wear-your-sweater policies that made Jimmy Carter unpopular.

With gas prices nearing $5, all of the previous shibboleths need to be discarded. Where once voters in swing states like Florida opposed offshore drilling, the high gas prices are prompting them to reconsider. McCain's argument that even hurricane Katrina did not cause any oil spills from the offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico certainly will go far to allay the fears of the average voter.

For decades, Americans have dragged their feet when it comes to switching their cars, leaving their SUVs at home, and backing alternative energy development and new oil drilling. But the recent shock of a massive surge in oil and gasoline prices has awakened the nation from its complaisance. The soaring prices are the equivalent of Pearl Harbor in jolting us out of our trance when it comes to energy.

Suddenly, everything is on the table. Offshore drilling, Alaska drilling, nuclear power, wind, solar, flex-fuel cars, plug-in cars are all increasingly attractive options and John McCain seems alive to the need to go there while Obama is strangely passive. During the Democratic primary, he opposed a gas tax holiday and continues to be against offshore and Alaska drilling and squishy on nuclear power. Read article.

Muslim Grievance Theater: Hijab Women Dissed @ Obama Rally Are Muslim Terror Front-Group Activists, Top Islamic Proselytizer

Debbie Schlussel, Debbie Schlussel.com

As soon as I heard about the Muslim women in hijabs being excluded from sitting behind Barack Obama at a Michigan rally, I knew what you probably knew: that CAIR and ADC and MPAC and ISNA, the alphabet soup of terrorist-sympathizing, pan-HAMAS/Hezbollah Islamofascist grievance theater, would milk the story like there's no tomorrow. It was ripe fodder for their PR branch of the jihad against America and the West.

Now, I've come to learn that one of the hijab-encrusted, rejected whiners, Hebba Aref, was an official of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), in charge of proselytizing. The Chicago Tribune identified the MSA as part of the American manifestation of the Sunni terrorist group, Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen--The Muslim Brotherhood. Aref served on the executive board of the University of Michigan-Dearborn's MSA, which demanded and obtained tax-funded Muslim foot baths at that university, a story I broke on this site last year. Two Muslim then-students at U-M Dearborn, Lola Elzein and Mohammed Fouad Abdallah, sent me violent rape and death threats.

And Aref was not just any officer of the U-M Dearborn Muslim group. She was in charge of Dawa, or proselytizing, from 2000 to 2003 at the school. Yup, she was the chief "Conversion to Islam" officer at one of the most pan-Islamist college campuses in the country. Read article.

Dems Running on Empty

Sen. James Inhofe, Human Events.com

What a difference three years makes: In 2005, I led the charge against a massive global warming cap-and-trade bill. It was a lonely battle with few GOP members willing to join me on the Senate floor to publicly oppose it.

Fast forward to June 2008: Not only was I joined by dozens of GOP Senators, but nearly 30% of the Democratic Senators rebelled against their leadership and opposed the Boxer Climate Tax Bill. In the end, Senator Boxer only had at most 35 Democratic Senators willing to vote for final passage on the largest tax bill in U.S. history. The Boxer Climate Tax Bill was so thoroughly disowned by Democratic Leadership that proponents of climate taxes will now be forced to start from scratch next year.

Republicans were prepared to debate the bill and were ready to offer amendments. But the Democrats did not want to debate, much less vote, on our amendments that were aimed at protecting American families and workers from the devastating economic impacts of this bill. When faced with the inconvenient truth of the bill's impact on skyrocketing gas prices, it was Democratic Senators who wanted to see this bill die a quick death. Read article.

Divvying the Spoil$ - Hill & Barack Ready to Haggle

Ginger Adams Otis, NY Post.com

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are heading for a meeting of the money.

As the ex-foes are scheduled to sit down face to face this week and talk fund-raising, each needs to leave the table with the promise of riches.

New campaign-finance filings reveal Clinton has even more debt than previously reported, while Obama's fund-raising has stalled.

He pulled in $22 million in May - a sharp drop from the $30 million to $55 million he got in each of the prior three months.

And presumptive Republican nominee John McCain came up almost even with his Democratic rival, taking in $21 million last month.

The new reports show Clinton's debt has risen to $22.5 million - $12 million of which is in personal loans she poured into her campaign - and she reported only $3 million in available cash. More debt is expected to be reported in the coming weeks.

In a conference last week, Clinton urged her top fund-raisers to support Obama but also asked that she at least get enough money to pay back her vendors - an estimated $10 million.

The New York senator said she was willing to take a total loss on her personal loans.

"I'm not expecting anybody to help pay that back," Clinton told fund-raisers. Read article.

Democrats Continue to Make Fools of Themselves

JB Williams, NMJ.us

Allow me to begin by stating for the record that I realize how politically incorrect it is to single out a specific group of people and acknowledge their overtly foolish behaviors. But it seems we have reached a moment of insanity, when enough really should be enough!

It seems I need to give a speech to Democrats, which I have given to my children on several similar occasions. As Forest Gump learned from his Momma, "stupid is as stupid does." People, who persist in doing stupid things, must sooner or later be referred to as "stupid!" We have reached that point with the average Democrat voter I'm afraid...

The one thing in the world Democrat politicians might be right about is the need for their voters to be saved from themselves...

As I have explained to my children, ignorance is the absence of knowledge, but stupidity is the possession of knowledge and the refusal to use it intelligently. As we are talking about obvious fundamental truths here, not nuclear physics, an absence of knowledge is not the problem.

Democrats Think Obama Is Qualified to Be Commander-In-Chief

Yet Democrats can not name a single life achievement, or even a single life experience, which qualifies Obama to be president of the most complex and powerful nation on earth. The man thinks we have 57 states...or so.

For the record, Barack Hussein Obama is a first term U.S. Senator. Obama served only 146 days as a new senator before deciding he was qualified to be president, at which time he largely stopped his duties as senator to campaign for the Oval Office. Read article.

Fuelish Democrats - How high gas prices might work for Republicans.

Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard.com

Republicans finally have a winning argument on a big issue, and they'd better make the most of it. It starts with high gasoline prices--the single most infuriating issue to voters these days--but doesn't end there.

Democrats are not being blamed for causing the price of gasoline to reach $4 a gallon, at least by the public and at least for now. Where Democrats have stumbled embarrassingly is in their campaign to persuade the public that the American oil industry is the chief culprit. A Gallup national poll in May found only 20 percent blame the oil companies for gouging, down from 34 percent a year ago.

Where Republicans have succeeded is in selling their solution to soaring gas prices: drilling for oil offshore and on federal lands, areas now off limits. In the Gallup survey, support for drilling in precisely these areas jumped from 41 percent in 2007 to 57 percent in May.

So Republicans have an issue to exploit. And it's one on which Democrats are especially vulnerable because they promised in the 2006 campaign to offer a "common sense" plan to curb gas prices. They have yet to produce one, and the price per gallon of gas has risen by more than $1.60 since Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007.

Democrats have also insisted--unwisely, it turns out--on pushing to enact a global warming bill that would further boost the price of gas and rake in trillions of dollars in new revenue. This might have made sense a few years ago,

but not in the days of public anger over $4 a gallon gasoline. Read article.

Mac's Oil-Drilling Flip-Flop Is a Good First Step

Larry Kudlow, The Corner, NRO.com

Warts and all, John McCain's flip-flop on offshore drilling is a very welcome development. When circumstances change, political leaders should change their policies. And $4 at the pump and $140 in the open market is certainly enough changing circumstances to warrant McCain's constructive shift on offshore drilling. Regrettably, McCain still talks about the "pristine" ANWR patch. But he's just not gonna move on that.

Obama, meanwhile, is repeating the tired old Democratic response that there's no way offshore drilling will lower prices now. But he is wrong. And McCain has an opening here if he'd only stop his silly attacks on "reckless speculators."

The Arizona senator doesn't know anything about speculators or investors or commodity trading or any of that stuff. The reality is, should Congress overturn its offshore-drilling moratorium, those very same speculators are gonna start selling crude-oil futures contracts and price declines will filter backwards from the longer-term contracts to the cash market. In other words, what can be bought will be sold. If drilling expectations change on the hope that future oil supplies will rise, prices will adjust lower and it will happen fast.

This is what Obama doesn't understand. It's also what McCain doesn't understand. Price changes are pulled forward in response to shifting oil-supply policies. Ironically, one of McCain's senior economic advisors, Kevin Hassett of the AEI think-tank, has just written a column on this very subject. So I don't know who McCain is talking to, but he ought to talk to Kevin Hassett, who is a very smart guy. Read article.

John McCain hires former CIA director Jim Woolsey as green advisor

Tim Shipman, Telegraph.co.uk

For 30 years Jim Woolsey has been a hawkish guardian of American national security. As director of the CIA under Bill Clinton he lived every day with the terrorist threats to his homeland.

Yet in his view, the greatest danger to the country now is not nuclear and chemical weapons but climate change and the American dependence on oil which is partly blamed for causing it.

Mr Woolsey believes the greatest weapon in America's arsenal is not the stealth bomber, the Abrams tank or the F-16 jet - but the humble plug-in hybrid car that will let most people do their daily drive on electric power.

He is one of a new generation of so-called "Greenocons", campaigners who are making the case for a green American foreign and energy policy not just to save the planet, but to keep America safe too.

Mr Woolsey is now a senior energy adviser to John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. He has played a key role in developing Mr McCain's support for a "cap and trade" system for carbon emissions, and support for renewable energy.

But the argument which is winning fans even among conservatives is that security hawks and tree huggers should unite in their efforts to combat climate change and the West's vulnerability to oil shocks. Read article.

Obama promises change - but what kind?

Victor Davis Hanson, JWR.com

By this point in the presidential campaign, the public knows that a charismatic Barack Obama wants sweeping "change." While the national media have often fallen hard for the Illinois senator's rhetoric - MSNBC's Chris Matthews said he felt a "thrill going up my leg" during an Obama speech - exactly what kind of change can Obama bring if he's elected in November?

Take Obama's foreign-policy pronouncements, which promise a break with the unhappy past. Two doctrines are most prominent. One is to engage our enemies and be nicer to our allies. The other calls for leaving Iraq on a set timetable.

The problem with the first is that key allies like the conservative French, German and Italian governments - unlike the days of rage in 2003 - now embrace pretty much the same policies that we do. Britain and the European Union just called for imposing tougher sanctions on Iran, while both France and Britain promise to send more troops to Afghanistan.

In Feb. 2007, Sen. Obama called for American troops out of Iraq by March 2008. But in the last four months since that proposed final departure, violence is way down as the U.S. military and Iraqi army have stabilized much of the country.

The world in January 2009 will not be the same as it was in February 2007. So would a President Obama really engage Iranian President Ahmadinejad just as the Europeans are isolating him, or give up on Iraq when the American military may well gradually draw down in victory, not defeat? Read article.

Time For Obama to Slaughter Some Sacred Cows

Blake D. Dvorak, RCP.com

On June 3 Barack Obama danced dangerously close to self-parody when he declared that the day of his victory over Hillary Clinton was the day "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Isn't "saving-the-world" talk better left for general election victories or inaugural addresses?

But Obama returned from heaven's heights on Father's Day with a speech on the plight of fatherhood in the black community. It is a common enough theme in black churches, but on the national scene Bill Cosby has been alone on that front for far too long. Obama then followed that with an economic speech Monday that acknowledged the benefits of globalization and the dangers of building a "fortress around America." What a welcome change from the anti-NAFTA populism of the primaries.

The media will of course say Obama is transitioning for the general election. He is. But since emerging from the primaries, Obama's problem is that his entire candidacy is focused on the theme of change. Yet when Obama is not delivering vague proclamations about hope and change from the stump, he's proposing standard liberal fare as a matter of policy. As John McCain says often enough, on no issue has Obama ever opposed the special interests of his party.

Both speeches this week showed a bare willingness to make up for this. But again, neither were anything that we wouldn't expect from a generic Democrat running for president. Read article.

America Embraces Energy Independence

Carol Devine-Molin, GOP USA.com

The Democrat Congressional powermeisters should take heed: Discontent is brewing. Americans, including many among the Left-leaning working class, are thoroughly frustrated, and they're on the verge of throwing a national hissy-fit in response to high energy prices and the high cost of living. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the Democrats are going to feel the heat before they see the light. To the credit of Republican politicians, at least they grasp the magnitude of the citizenry's current discontent, and they're responding appropriately to the emerging crisis.

Noteworthy, President Bush is spearheading efforts to lift the ban on offshore drilling, which is also being supported by GOP presidential candidate John McCain. Moreover, Republicans are wisely advocating for a tax break on gas this summer, in attempts to provide some immediate relief to the public. Out-of-touch Democrats just pooh-pooh the tax break idea, calling it a "gimmick".

That being said, Democrats are strangely behind the curve on the energy issue, as they continue their march-in-lockstep collaboration with the environmentalists. Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama is recommending that the oil companies be hit with a "windfall profits tax", which is not going to ameliorate the energy situation. As underscored by John McCain, "all a windfall profits tax will accomplish is to increase our dependence on foreign oil and hinder exactly the kind of domestic exploration and production we need."

Oil companies have a profit margin of about 8 percent, which is reasonable by any standard, even if the price of oil goes up. But more to the point, if businesses are subjected to tax increases, they'll pass their costs along to the consumers. In other words, the average American will get stuck paying more for energy if Mr. Obama's tax idea is implemented. It appears that Mr. Obama doesn't appreciate how basic business operates.

Moreover, by taking a slap at a respectable capitalist enterprise such as the oil industry, Mr. Obama runs the risk of being viewed as a demagogue that's eager to play on people's fears and prejudices. Are we to believe that the oil companies are "bad players", since they're making money in the current economic environment? Most Americans won't see it that way. Read article.

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