Tag: Election 2008

Amusing

Barack Obama: A Living Breathing Windfall Profit

This is a great editorial. It clearly highlights the socialist crap Obama and the Democrats are trying to ram down our throats with their Windfall Profit nonsense.

I’ll tell you what a Windfall Profit is. How about an empty suit first term senator with zero accomplishments being nominated for President by a major political party?

What Is a ‘Windfall’ Profit?

The “windfall profits” tax is back, with Barack Obama stumping again to apply it to a handful of big oil companies. Which raises a few questions: What is a “windfall” profit anyway? How does it differ from your everyday, run of the mill profit? Is it some absolute number, a matter of return on equity or sales — or does it merely depend on who earns it?

Enquiring entrepreneurs want to know. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s “emergency” plan, announced on Friday, doesn’t offer any clarity. To pay for “stimulus” checks of $1,000 for families and $500 for individuals, the Senator says government would take “a reasonable share” of oil company profits.

Mr. Obama didn’t bother to define “reasonable,” and neither did Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, when he recently declared that “The oil companies need to know that there is a limit on how much profit they can take in this economy.” Really? This extraordinary redefinition of free-market success could use some parsing.

Take Exxon Mobil, which on Thursday reported the highest quarterly profit ever and is the main target of any “windfall” tax surcharge. Yet if its profits are at record highs, its tax bills are already at record highs too. Between 2003 and 2007, Exxon paid $64.7 billion in U.S. taxes, exceeding its after-tax U.S. earnings by more than $19 billion. That sounds like a government windfall to us, but perhaps we’re missing some Obama-Durbin business subtlety.

Maybe they have in mind profit margins as a percentage of sales. Yet by that standard Exxon’s profits don’t seem so large. Exxon’s profit margin stood at 10% for 2007, which is hardly out of line with the oil and gas industry average of 8.3%, or the 8.9% for U.S. manufacturing (excluding the sputtering auto makers).

If that’s what constitutes windfall profits, most of corporate America would qualify. Take aerospace or machinery — both 8.2% in 2007. Chemicals had an average margin of 12.7%. Computers: 13.7%. Electronics and appliances: 14.5%. Pharmaceuticals (18.4%) and beverages and tobacco (19.1%) round out the Census Bureau’s industry rankings. The latter two double the returns of Big Oil, though of course government has already became a tacit shareholder in Big Tobacco through the various legal settlements that guarantee a revenue stream for years to come.

In a tax bill on oil earlier this summer, no fewer than 51 Senators voted to impose a 25% windfall tax on a U.S.-based oil company whose profits grew by more than 10% in a single year and wasn’t investing enough in “renewable” energy. This suggests that a windfall is defined by profits growing too fast. No one knows where that 10% came from, besides political convenience. But if 10% is the new standard, the tech industry is going to have to rethink its growth arc. So will LG, the electronics company, which saw its profits grow by 505% in 2007. Abbott Laboratories hit 110%.

If Senator Obama is as exercised about “outrageous” profits as he says he is, he might also have to turn on a few liberal darlings. Oh, say, Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett’s outfit pulled in $11 billion last year, up 29% from 2006. Its profit margin — if that’s the relevant figure — was 11.47%, which beats out the American oil majors.

Or consider Google, which earned a mere $4.2 billion but at a whopping 25.3% margin. Google earns far more from each of its sales dollars than does Exxon, but why doesn’t Mr. Obama consider its advertising-search windfall worthy of special taxation?

The fun part about this game is anyone can play. Jim Johnson, formerly of Fannie Mae and formerly a political fixer for Mr. Obama, reaped a windfall before Fannie’s multibillion-dollar accounting scandal. Bill Clinton took down as much as $15 million working as a rainmaker for billionaire financier Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies. This may be the very definition of “windfall.”

General Electric profits by investing in the alternative energy technology that Mr. Obama says Congress should subsidize even more heavily than it already does. GE’s profit margin in 2007 was 10.3%, about the same as profiteering Exxon’s. Private-equity shops like Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, which recently hired Al Gore, also invest in alternative energy start-ups, though they keep their margins to themselves. We can safely assume their profits are lofty, much like those of George Soros’s investment funds.

The point isn’t that these folks (other than Mr. Clinton) have something to apologize for, or that these firms are somehow more “deserving” of windfall tax extortion than Big Oil. The point is that what constitutes an abnormal profit is entirely arbitrary. It is in the eye of the political beholder, who is usually looking to soak some unpopular business. In other words, a windfall is nothing more than a profit earned by a business that some politician dislikes. And a tax on that profit is merely a form of politically motivated expropriation.

It’s what politicians do in Venezuela, not in a free country.

Amusing

New Book “The Obama Nation” Exposes the Real Barack Obama

Dr. Jerome Corsi’s new book “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality” reached number 1 in most book sales charts during its first day of release destroying the competition in non-fiction and political book sales.

Undoubtedly the Main Stream Media’s only focus will be the fact that it was written by the same man who wrote Unfit for Command. That is how they will attempt to discredit the book. They will dismiss it as a pack of lies, even though it is backed up by over 600 meticulously researched footnotes.

Meanwhile sales of Nancy Pelosi’s newest book continued to plummet as she maintains her low, low, low, low rankings on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Corsi appeared on the August 1 edition of Fox News’ Hannity’s America, to plug his book.:



SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: HANNITY: A new book due out tomorrow makes shocking allegations about Senator Obama’s background, and it may have made his campaign a bit nervous. From Barack and Michelle’s 20-year-long relationship with Trinity Church to Obama’s family connections to Kenya to his dealings with, well, Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist, the author aims to expose what he says is the real Obama.

Joining us now, in an exclusive interview, is the author of “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and The Cult of Personality,” Dr. Jerome Corsi is with us.

Welcome back.

DR. JEROME CORSI, AUTHOR, “THE OBAMA NATION”: Thank you, Sean.

HANNITY: Four years ago, 2004, you and John O’Neill launched, right here on this show, your first TV interview.

CORSI: That’s correct.

HANNITY: Unfit for command, the Swift Boat Vets for Truth.

CORSI: That’s right. It was our first television interview and our first radio also was with you in the afternoon.

HANNITY: And I warned you then, and I’m going to warn you now, all these leftists out there, you know, are going to do what they did the last time and attack you for daring to examine his record. You ready?

CORSI: I’m ready. Sean, if they attack me, they’re not answering what’s in the book. I’ve been researching this book since 2006. There’s over 300 pages, 700 footnotes, and I’ll stand by the truth of every statement in this book.

HANNITY: If I were to break your book into categories…

CORSI: Right.

HANNITY: … you talk about his background.

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: You talk about his youth.

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: You talk about his radical associations.

CORSI: Right.

HANNITY: And there are many of them…

CORSI: Many of them.

HANNITY: … which you believe influenced his…

CORSI: His politics, his formative views, and his current position.

HANNITY: And then — then you move into his current positions and where he stands. And it is a picture that you’re painting of a radical leftist socialist, a guy that believes in redistribution, that has basically — these views have been shaped and formed from his youth.

CORSI: That’s right, including being a Saul Alinsky organizer, and Saul Alinsky was a radical leftist organizer who said that his goal was redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots.

HANNITY: Walk us through those three phases, from his family to his radical associations, to his views today.

CORSI: Even in his family, I do a great deal of analysis of the autobiography.

HANNITY: That’s his father right there.

CORSI: His father. And his father — you know, Obama first presents his father as a great hero, and the truth was his father was a polygamist and an alcoholic. He had abandoned the family in Africa when he met Obama’s mother in Hawaii. He married Obama’s mother without disclosing he had not divorced this African woman.

HANNITY: And by the way, in fairness, you don’t — I would never hold it against him, the actions of his father…

CORSI: I don’t either.

HANNITY: But you’re giving it historical…

CORSI: First of all, Obama put the issue on the table in analyzing it and making it the corner of his autobiography. And I’m first criticizing that Obama was not straightforward in how he presented, really, a deception about his father as this goatherd who got this chance to go to — come to study in the United States because of John Kennedy. John Kennedy had nothing to do with his father coming to Hawaii. It was Tom Emboya (ph).

And I tie it to Obama’s current politics. Obama is still today involved in the politics in Kenya, supporting Odinga, another radical socialist running for president as recently as December 2007 with Obama supporting him, despite Odinga signing a memorandum of understanding with radical Islamicists in Kenya.

KIRSTEN POWERS, GUEST CO-HOST: You raised just now Saul Alinsky.

CORSI: Yes.

POWERS: Of course, Hillary Clinton famously identified him as somebody who’s been very influential to her.

CORSI: Correct. Absolutely.

POWERS: She grew up in the most middle class, sort of normal American family, Republican family, actually. I mean, she’s not a radical. Why does it make Obama a radical?

CORSI: Saul Alinsky was a radical.

POWERS: I understand that, but I’m saying you could — you could actually read Saul Alinsky and not be radical.

CORSI: I don’t see how. I mean, here, Saul Alinsky is saying that Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” for the haves to keep what they have, and he wrote “Rules for Radical” for the have-nots to take it away.

POWERS: Right.

CORSI: He dedicated it, “Rules for Radicals,” to Lucifer. And Obama taught Alinsky methodology.

POWERS: Do you — do you believe in Hillary Clinton as a radical?

CORSI: She was in terms of her following of Alinsky. And I think Hillary — you know, this book is not about Hillary.

POWERS: Right.

CORSI: I think Hillary has moved much more to the center. Obama, I think, at core remains the Saul Alinsky community organizer. His politics are still about redistribution of wealth. And that was the core Alinsky principle.

POWERS: And so when you describe he’s a radical leftist…

CORSI: Right.

POWERS: … what does that mean?

CORSI: It means, you know, the extreme socialist objectives that were, for instance, in Saul Alinsky, or his mentor in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis…

POWERS: In high school.

CORSI: Yes, but it was very deeply influential in Obama’s formative years, and he says this at length in his autobiography.

POWERS: But he’s probably developed since high school, don’t you think?

CORSI: You know, certainly, in college his mentors were Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, a radical anti-colonialist writer.

Then he joins the black liberation theology church. Black liberation (UNINTELLIGIBLE) on this show. Obama’s people were — Reverend Wright was…

HANNITY: The pastor.

CORSI: The pastor was challenging Sean, “You have to have read James Cohen (ph).” Well, I’ve gone and read James Cohen. I’ve read James Cohen for a long time. I’ve been writing about these issues for decades.

And James Cohen’s (ph) whole idea was that Jesus Christ historically was black, really an African Palestinian who opposed the colonialists of his day, the Romans who were occupying Israel.

POWERS: OK. We’re going to be right back. Coming up, we’ll have more shocking revelations from Jerome Corsi’s brand-new book, “The Obama Nation”.

POWERS: And we now continue with Dr. Jerome Corsi.

I was looking at the back of your book, and the blurb on it says after an Obama presidency we would be a militarily weakened and economically diminished nation. And to me that sounds like what happened under George Bush. So, you know, what is Barack Obama going to do? We’re already in an economically…

CORSI: Well, for instance, Barack Obama did this short clip in which he said he was going to not invest in new military programs; he was going to have that money go to social causes. He’s had this whole idea he was going to disarm with nuclear weapons, yet he has no practical plan except to say we’re going to move in that direction.

His pulling out of Iraq. I mean, he boasts that he was the first to want to pull out of Iraq, and that antimilitary type of position is consistent if you look back at his politics even in Illinois, and if you look back at his history.

POWERS: But what you just described seems to me are fairly conventional Democratic positions, and yet, you’re casting them as these far left views.

CORSI: Well, I’ll agree that most of the Democrats, you know, in Iraq have wanted to pull out. Obama was, you know, viciously opposed to the surge, and Obama was wrong on that.

Again, it was an anti — the instinctive position of Obama is to be antimilitary, and he’s had a history of doing that. And I’m pointing out, for instance, his whole willingness to divert money from military development purposes to social purposes, which is — I quote this video.

HANNITY: I love this stuff. By the way, you mentioned this show and the interview with Wright, and a number of things because we’ve been covering this.

You talk at length, and in the short time that we have…

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: … about the radical associations.

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: Did he lie to America about what he really knew about Ayers and Wright? He praises Malcolm X, blue-eyed devils, white people are. Alinsky. Did he — did he embrace people that he knew were radical?

CORSI: In a simple word, yes, he lied.

HANNITY: He lied?

CORSI: Yes. He has full and total knowledge of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon. He writes about it at length in his autobiography.

HANNITY: Complimentary.

CORSI: Complimentary. Ayers — you know, Axelrod is chief strategist, said, well, they live in the same neighborhood and their kids went to school together.

HANNITY: Not true.

CORSI: Not true. Obama’s kids are young kids.

HANNITY: Yes.

CORSI: Ayers’ kids are grown. Obama chose Ayers knowing he was exactly who he was, a radical terrorist bomber.

HANNITY: You — you go into Obama’s far-left domestic policies, income redistribution, his Global Poverty Act.

CORSI: His support of abortion, even late term.

HANNITY: After a child was born.

CORSI: A child was born…

HANNITY: In Chicago.

CORSI: Obama, in the state senate, wanted the child killed if the mother desired an abortion.

HANNITY: But you talk about how this campaign is being run. The American people — you call it the cult of personality.

CORSI: Cult of personality.

HANNITY: But are we being victimized by a marketing campaign you say David Axelrod is orchestrating?

CORSI: This is what Axelrod does. He creates a cult of a personality and projects this image so that issues are never…

HANNITY: But he’s been particularly successful at it, in spite of his thin resume…

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: … radical associations, poor judgment.

CORSI: And the hope projection. What Axelrod does is he borrows liberally from others. Deval Patrick’s campaign up in Massachusetts that Axelrod was one of the — so this whole just words.

I think, Sean, sometimes that Obama is auditioning for the role of Neo in the next “Matrix” movie. You know, we are the ones, this is the time. It is our destiny.

HANNITY: Slogans, platitudes.

CORSI: That’s Cesar Chavez and the — it’s borrowed directly from the organization of the farm workers going back four decades.

HANNITY: Is he going to pull this off? Is he going to be able to successfully pull it off?

CORSI: He’s going to lose. And Obama’s going to lose, I say in the book, not because of — the character issues are important, because they shape and inform the policy issues. Our campaigns are about policy issues. And when it gets down to the income redistribution, ending the capital gains tax, all these social issues, the antimilitary issues…

HANNITY: Jerome Corsi.

CORSI: … these are the policies that the issues will decide on.

HANNITY: We need more detail. We’re going to have you on with part two tomorrow.

Amusing

Democrats: An Agenda Americans Just Can’t Afford

The National Republican Congressional Committee has a new video out titled “Democrats: An Agenda Americans Just Can’t Afford”.


From Hot Air:

This is the message that the Republicans have to hammer home, especially in August when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid send Congress home without doing anything to increase domestic production. Rarely has a major issue produced such bipartisan consensus among the electorate, and even more rarely has it produced such obstinacy in the majority party in Congress. Gas price increases hit everyone across the board and make energy policy extremely personal — and the Democrats want to do nothing to increase domestic supply to correct for it.

Amusing

Barack Obama’s New Energy Policy: The Audacity of Stupidity

At a campaign stop in Missouri today, Barack Obama unveiled a new energy policy that’s so brilliant it has to be heard to be believed. And to think this guy is running for President!


“There are things that you can do individually though to save energy; making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much.” ~ Barack Obama

He actually said that!

I guess I better go check to see if my tires are properly inflated. If everybody does that, the price of a barrel of oil will drop to around 50 dollars. Why didn’t we see that all along? The man is brilliant!

Amusing

Beware of Charismatic Men Who Preach Change


The following letter appeared in Letters to the Editor in the Richmond Times Dispatch, Richmond, VA on July 7, 2008. It offers a reflection on the Obama’s current election-year rhetoric from a man that escaped Communist Cuba in 1968.

Mr. Alvarez’s story is remarkable. Americans better heed his words – he knows from whence he speaks!

It is very unfortunate that the black community along with mindless Liberals only see the color of Obama’s skin and not his character.

Beware Charismatic Men Who Preach ‘Change’

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Each year I get to celebrate Independence Day twice. On June 30 I celebrate my independence day and on July 4 I celebrate America’s. This year is special, because it marks the 40th anniversary of my independence.

On June 30, 1968, I escaped Communist Cuba and a few months later I was in the United States to stay. That I happened to arrive in Richmond on Thanksgiving Day is just part of the story, but I digress.

I’ve thought a lot about the anniversary this year. The election-year rhetoric has made me think a lot about Cuba and what transpired there. In the late 1950s, most Cubans thought Cuba needed a change, and they were right. So when a young leader came along, every Cuban was at least receptive.

When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him. They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said “Praise the Lord.” And when the young leader said, “I will be for change and I’ll bring you change,” everyone yelled, “Viva Fidel!”

But nobody asked about the change, so by the time the executioner’s guns went silent the people’s guns had been taken away. By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed. By the time everyone received their free education it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented Cuba had been knocked down a couple of notches to Third-World status. By the time the change was over more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes. You can call those who made it ashore anywhere else in the world the most fortunate Cubans. And now I’m back to the beginning of my story.

Luckily, we would never fall in America for a young leader who promised change without asking, what change? How will you carry it out? What will it cost America?

Would we?

Manuel Alvarez Jr. Sandy Hook.

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