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It’s the Economy, Stupid, and It’s Good!                              

By Alan Caruba: Contributor to America’s Gazette

          Lacking any real issues to run on, the Democrat Party and its candidate have been telling anyone who will listen that the United States is staring a new Depression in the eye. They cite the rising per barrel cost of oil, rising health care costs, and the “failure” of the Bush administration to create jobs, despite the fact that the government doesn’t create jobs; private industry and businesses, large and small, do that.

         If you believed the Democrats, you would have to conclude the economy is a mess, but it is not. By June of this year, all the economic indicators pointed to a very healthy economy and one that was growing. Writing that month, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief, of U.S. News and World Report, was almost euphoric. “New jobs are being generated in large numbers, income is growing at twice the rate of last year, and the acceleration is such that we will probably see 5 percent growth in the gross domestic product.” The numbers by June included the fact that 61 percent of private industries surveyed had added workers, “the highest in four years.”

         Add to that the fact that companies “are laying out more and more money on capital equipment to meet orders growing at double-digit rates.” Zuckerman noted that “corporate profits have surged over 25 percent this year, on top of last year, when they exceeded $1 trillion for the first time ever”, adding that “sales have improved in 58 of the 60 scoreboard industries, with the first back-to-back quarters of double-digit revenue growth in three years.”

          Americans by June were enjoying household wealth that “passed the $45 trillion mark, a new peak, surpassing the previous high of early 2000.”

No doubt much will be made of the working poor in America, pitting them against “the rich”, but Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, recently reported that “Overall, the typical American defined (by the Census Bureau) as poor has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He can obtain medical care.     His home is in good repair and not overcrowded. By his own report, his family isn’t hungry, and he had enough money in the last year (2003) to meet his family’s essential needs.” What is considered “poor” in America is considered opulent by most of the world. 

       In his book, “Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality”, by Olaf Gersemann, a German reporter who came to America to check the facts of the American economic model, says “Over the last 25 years the US economy has enjoyed an average real growth of 2.9 percent. That’s 55 percent more than the Germany economy mustered, 48 percent more than in France, and 39 percent more than in the European Union as a whole.”  _

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Watch Out

  The tags that are attached to those disagreeing with liberals have had a divisive impact on this nation, while at the same time liberals accuse the opposition of being  divisive.

        While we have not seen the arrests prosecutions, court cases and

imprisonments that occurred under the “Alien and Sedition Acts” for  

Pa. Dem. Gov. Rendell Caught in Vote Fraud Attempt to Disenfranchise the Military

        This is just one of over two  dozen reported cases of Democrat's Attempts  to prevent military absentee ballots froom being counted.

        Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell's decision Friday morning to seek an extension for absentee ballots returned by soldiers serving overseas came less than 24 hours after Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., accused him of mounting while disenfranchising the military. Continue

Red America, Blue America

by Paul R. Hollrah: Contributor to the American Gazette

        For the past several years I’ve been writing a novel – in my head.  What most troubles me now is that, day-by-day, what I have envisioned as fiction is fast becoming reality.

       My story begins with a constitutional crisis that eventually causes the United States to divide into two separate countries, East America and West America.  The crisis that I envision was precipitated by actions similar to the Clinton Administration’s attempts in 1996-97 to destroy the U.S. patent system at the behest of the Japanese and Chinese – the resulting economic impact so devastating that we could not continue as “one nation, under God, indivisible.”

        As I envisioned the two Americas, East America would continue as the smothering  welfare state that has been created since FDR, rushing headlong toward authoritarian socialism, while West America would establish itself as a laizze faire capitalist state, reverting to the original U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as its fundamental document of government. 

        The dividing line between the two countries would be the Mississippi River.  And after a period of five years, during which time every American would be required to decide his or her nationality, all of the bridges and highways connecting East and West would be destroyed and East American troops would be posted along the frontier to discourage further

troops would be posted along the frontier to discourage further emigration from the “workers paradise.”   

         But alas, time and events have caught up with me.  What could have been a best-selling work of fiction is now fast approaching reality.  But it’s not the economy or the loss of the patent system that brings us to the brink of irreparable national schism.  What brings us to the brink is the loss of our ability to speak to one another openly and honestly, to debate public issues with any degree of faith in the honesty and sincerity of those on the political Left.

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Open Letter

         The Republican Party:

         (a) started as the anti-slavery party in 1854,

         (b) fought to free African Americans  from slavery,

         (c) designed Reconstruction, a ten-year period of unprecedented political power for African Americans,

         (d) passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting African Americans freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote,

         (e) passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 granting African Americans protection from the Black Codes and prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations,

         (f) passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 granting African Americans protection from the Jim Crow laws,

         (g) established Affirmative Action programs to help African Americans proper with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan that set the first goals and timetables and his 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act that made Affirmative Action Programs the law of our nation, and

         (h) never sponsored or launched a program, passed laws, or engaged in practices that resulted in the death  of millions of African Americans,

Whereas Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka (a 1954 decision by Chief Justice Earl Warren who was appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower) was a landmark civil rights case that was designed to overturn the racist practices that were established by the Democratic Party,

          Whereas after Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt received the vote of African Americans, he banned African American newspapers from the military shortly after taking office because he was convinced the newspapers were communists,

Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Law, opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was later criticized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for ignoring civil rights issues.

          Whereas Democratic President John F. Kennedy authorized the FBI (supervised by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy) to investigate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on suspicion of being a communist,

          Whereas Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, made a 14-hour filibuster speech in the Senate in June 1964 in an unsuccessful effort to block passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and was heralded in April 2004 by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd as a senator who would have been a great leader during the Civil War,

          Whereas when the 1964 Civil Rights Act came up for vote, Senator Al Gore, Sr. and the rest of the Southern Democrats voted against the bill,    

         Whereas in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans,

          Whereas Democratic President Bill Clinton sent troops to Europe to protect the citizens of Bosnia and Kosovo while allowing an estimated 800,000 black Rwandans to be massacred in Africa, vetoed the welfare reform law twice before signing it, and refused to comply with a court order to have shipping companies develop an Affirmative Action Plan,

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Standing with my friends

material.  It doesn't take a PhD in economics to see what happens at Eastman when natural gas prices triple. Last year, top managers took a 6 percent pay cut; workers took a 3 percent pay cut.  Over 12,000 people work at Eastman, but there are one million jobs in the American chemical industry which could go overseas searching for reasonably priced natural gas.

           What has been Washington's response?  To restrict access to natural gas supplies - as well as to other forms of domestic energy production.

           The United States has plenty of natural gas.  We just can't get to it.  Almost half of the nation's natural gas supply sits under federal lands - and much of them are closed to drilling, including the Atlantic and Pacific   coasts and the Rockies.

           Many people don't like the idea of drilling for gas (or oil) in these federal lands. These same people often also object to nuclear power, another source of power that does not pollute the air.  They suggest instead massive windmills, as tall as football fields are long and as noisy as freight trains, which to my way of thinking scar the landscape in the name of saving it - without producing much energy. 

           This shortsighted thinking overlooks that we are relying on foreign sources for our natural gas (and oil), some of it from a dangerous part of the world where Americans are dying every day. 

           There are rays of hope.

           Congress has approved a pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska (another place we have plenty of it) to the lower 48 states.  Plenty of countries are happy to sell us Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) - but again these are foreign sources and there are environmental concerns about storing LNG in terminals on our coasts.

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Kerry's Discharge

military regulations require that all pay, benefits, and allowances are revoked, along with all medals and honors.

        So, if John Kerry was dishonorably discharged, what were the grounds?  As a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and while still an officer in the Naval Reserves, Kerry met with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in Paris in May 1970.  And in July 1971, seven months before the completion of his six-year Navy commitment, he led a demonstration in Washington urging Congress to accept the enemy’s seven-point peace proposal, word-for-word as proposed by the Communist Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

        What gives even greater credence to the suspicion that Kerry was given a dishonorable discharge in 1972 is the saga of his missing medals.  Kerry has claimed that he lost all of his medal certificates.  However, after receiving an honorable discharge in February 1978, six years late, and five months after being elected to the United States Senate, all of his medals were restored to him on a single day, June 4, 1985.

        If it is possible, as we are reliably informed, that a defendant in a murder trial can be convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence, then is it not reasonable to assume that John Kerry received a “less than honorable” discharge from the U.S. Navy in 1972?  As of this writing, Kerry refuses to sign a Standard Form 180 to release all of his military records.  His campaign spokesmen have insisted that all of his records are posted on his campaign website.  However, the Washington Post has reported that the Naval Personnel Office continues to withhold some 100 pages of documents.

        Should we learn one day that President John Forbes Kerry was dishonorably discharged from the United States Navy, what then?  In recent times we have had a president who lied under oath in a court of law and who was subsequently impeached and disbarred.  Can the American people handle another scandal of such proportions?  Senator Kerry must clear up this mystery before the people vote on November 2.  #

Find out for yourself  by going to  this site.