Well, congratulations Chuck Hagel! You are in not-so rarefied air, at least where the Obama administration and his connections are concerned. You may remember that in the 2012 election, the very same CPUSA endorsed Barack Obama as their choice for President(link).
It amazes me that despite Obama's myriad ties to card-carrying members of the communist party, endorsements from communist organizations, and his own statement from his "autobiography", Americans continue to believe that Obama is a moderate Democrat, even to the point of angry denials, lashing out at those who dare to mention these facts with charges of "racist".
Obama in his own words:
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos.The Marxist professorsand structured feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy. Whenwe ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpetsor set our stereos so loud the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling conventions. We weren't indifferent, or careless, or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant.No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names." Barack Obama - "Dreams of My Father" pg 101
From the well-documented card-carrying communist and Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis, to former "Green Czar" Van Jones, Obama has surrounded himself and his administration with those with ties to communists or the party itself. Both Valerie Jarrett's and David Axelrod's family have ties to the aforementioned Davis(1). Obama friends Bill Ayers has described himself and a communist with "a small "c". The Obama story is rife with various persons with connections to the communist party and/or are sympathetic to one degree or another communist ideology.
Chuck Hagel is no communist. But, that the CPUSA believes that his worldview is simpatico enough with theirs should send up red flags all over a man who would be charged with overseeing our military men and women.
While the price at the pump remains high, average gas prices are slowly coming down in some areas of the country (though where I am , the price has recently recently seen a small increase, and remains over $4/gal.). This, despite the fact that the GAO has reported that there are over 3 Trillion barrels of known crude oil reserves in the Green River Formation. But don't expect to see it anytime soon. Remember, the Obama Administration, which a few months back said that they should not be blamed for high prices, as they have no direct control over the pump price, and anyway, we can't drill ourselves out of our dependence on oil. Laughably, they now want to take credit for pump prices going down.
The Democrats are, if anything, schizophrenic in their consistency. When prices went up to $4/gal under Bush, it was blamed on the "two oil men in the White House". The media ran daily stories on the pain at the pump. When prices dropped to under $2/gal several months later, Democrats and the MSM were silent. Contrast that with Obama and the mainstream media's reporting, which has been a mirror image of the reporting during Bush. Prices go up, Obama has NO control, and there are few stories on the "pain at the pump". Prices go down, Obama credited.
The fact that the media is biased towards Obama is no surprise. What's surprising is that they make it so easy to expose their bias. They are not even trying to hide their lack of journalistic ethics any longer. They might as well wear Obama 2012 attire on the nightly news. Diane Sawyer can barely contain her idolatry of the President.
The Democrats can no longer have it both ways. Bloggers and the new media are holding them accountable, in their own words, for what they've said and done in the past. It is all out there for those who look hard enough. Democrats tell us that drilling for new oil will not produce any results for ten years. They said same thing back in 2002, or ten years ago. What might that have done for America's foreign dependency if we had started to drill in ANWR back then? I'll tell you. We would have an additional 1.5 million barrels of oil a day going into the supply! Using the laws of SUPPLY and demand, how might that affect the price? Hmmmm?
President Obama and the media are only partially correct when they say that he, or any President can affect price at the pump. Much of the price is determined by the speculator market, taxes, regulations, environmental impact statements, et. al. But the President, and the Congress, do have some effect on prices at the pump.
When the President goes out and puts a moratorium on drilling offshore, thus taking all of that oil out of the supply, and creating insecurity in the oil markets, that is going to have an effect of higher prices at the pump. Obama correctly states that oil production is up since he took office, which is technically correct. What he fails to mention is that the increase is on private lands, of which he has no control. Oil production on federally owned lands is at a nine-year low.
Obama, and the Democrats, also blocked production of the Keystone Pipeline, a pipeline which Americans supported 2-1, which would bring in over 700K barrels per day to the U.S. from Canada, and create an estimated 179,000 jobs. Obama, when presented with an opportunity to really provide shovel-ready jobs to out-of-work Americans, killed the deal. He eventually "okayed" the Southern portion of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the Gulf, but this was a PR ploy. That portion was going to be built regardless, as it is entirely within the U.S. The portion which actually needed his approval was the portion which crossed the international boundary from Canada to the U.S.
Dems use our dependency on foreign oil as a talking point for promoting "green technology". Much of what is called green, though you can call it a noble cause, is decades from being efficient enough, cost-effective, or reliable enough to replace coal, gas, or oil. But being "noble" is not what many on the Democrat side are concerned with.
Case in point on the opposition of Dems to the Keystone XL project: Weaning us off of foreign oil is a big lib talking point and Chuck Schumer, Democrat Senator from New York, who opposed Keystone, then called on the Saudis to increase their oil production to bring down prices! Notice that Schumer, like all the Democrats, does understand how supply affects the price! They LIE to the American people when they say that they have no control. Yet government and environmental wackos lobby for, and block the means of getting oil and coal to market. Using environmental laws, issuing moratoriums, revoking permits to coal companies, blocking the construction of additional refineries, mandating different "blends" of gas for winter and summer. Designed to lower pollution, they have done little more than create higher prices at the pump, through higher costs in production, storage, shipping, and through creating shortages, by not having a single nationwide standard for gas. Many states have their own "boutique" fuels. For example. if a refinery goes down in California, they cannot just import fuel from Arizona to offset the loss of production, as each state have their unique boutique fuel blends.
Obama's policies, even the ones he inherited, have a significant effect at the pump, and in other areas of the economy. Policies such a Obama's, which hinder the supply of a product to market, will be felt by consumers, in the form of higher prices for gas, food, and every other consumer product. It was Barack Obama who said that energy prices would naturally skyrocket under his policies.
It may be the only time that Barack Obama has told the truth to the American people.
GAO: Recoverable Oil in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming 'About Equal to Entire World’s Proven Oil Reserves'
(CNSNews.com) - The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday. Continue Reading Here
I don't know that I've ever seen Bill Whittle more angry and upset. But, it is a righteous anger fueled by the lies, deception, and willful destruction that all we hold dear as Americans, that is the catalyst for his indignation. Led by a cabal of leftist ideologues, the Obama Administration and the Democrats have enacted a scorched-earth policy upon the U.S. economy and its people. Whittle, like a surgeon, exposes the sordid cast of characters, or "merchants of despair", that Obama has placed around him, and lays open the contemptible character of the man, Obama, himself.
Whittle's point is this: Are we going to allow this man to get another four years in the White House? It's up to YOU!
This is a clarion call to the American people. Forward or retweet this to as many Americans' as you can, and vote this November!
Afterburner with Bill Whittle: Merchants of Despair
Who is responsible for the current economic malaise? If you ask Bill Whittle, it's Obama's pals like David Axelrod, Harry Reid and Tim Geithner, some of the many Merchants of Despair. These merchants are costing taxpayers trillions and creating deep national divides based on class and race. Will the despair continue for another four years? Find out.
Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago.
So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod.
Suspicions had already fallen on Sheila O'Grady, who is close with David Axelrod and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain's personnel records from the National Restaurant Association (NRA).
The Daley-controlled IRA works hand-in-glove with the NRA. And strangely enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have been a sexual predator.
