What a rockin' VP pick!

I certainly didn't get my presidential pick, but at least my top VP pick is made. Now, I can actually support McCain. Palin's likeabilty factor is off the charts.

The real story about that Georgia/Russia war

It's apparently pretty much just the opposite of what you've been told by the media. Michael J. Totten investigated and verified The Truth About Russia in Georgia. You'll be amazed how badly wrong the reports on the whole deal actually are.

• TBILISI, GEORGIA – Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.

  Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.

And, for more on this also see Redstate's BatMasterson and his Russian Journalist Oleg Panfilov "Putin is solely responsible. Saakashvili had no choice" : Kremlin Stooge Kokoity Started War

So, are you still a racist?

If you aren't going to vote for Obama, you'll need to be prepared for that question. I've said all along that many people are going to vote for Obama merely under the false assumption that it will end racism. They will be dead wrong. The Democrats will never allow racism to end. My view is an over simplistic version of what the actual deal is though.

John Hawkins over at Right Wing News covers it much better as he explains The Faustian Bargain At The Heart Of Obama's Campaign

• People who are honest will admit that race is a double edged sword for Barack Obama. Yes, there are certainly racist Democrats and independents out there who will not vote for Barack Obama because he's black. On the other hand, if Barack Obama weren't black, he could have never gotten this far. A white man with his experience and abilities wouldn't have even been considered qualified to run for the presidency, much less actually become the party's nominee.

TheSophist over at Redstate explains that the Democrats are already laying the groundwork with his Dems Already Making Preemptive Excuses

• Tell me if you've had this happen to you recently. You're conversing/debating with a known leftist friend or colleague, and the topic of Obama comes up. They spend several hours praising The One, how he's so brilliant, so articulate, so charming, so... everything this country needs.

  Then they say, "But I don't think he's going to be elected" with despair in their voice.

  Naturally, you ask, "Why would you say that?"

  The answer: Because the country is too racist to vote a black man for President.

Read both and you will clearly see that this is a question you will be presented with. In certain instances, they may even throw in the "are you still beating your wife?" one too.

Me? I'm not voting for Obama for many reasons and none have to do with race. If we would have followed his lead in January 2007 we would have had all our troops out of Iraq by March 2008. That was what he said we had to do. That would have left Iraq to Al Qaeda.

Yeah, but he has Joe Biden on the ticket now, so he has foreign policy expertise, you say? Right, Joe Biden's answer at the same time was not any better. He wanted to split Iraq into 3 pieces, pin a sheriffs badge on someone, then high tail it out of there. That leaves Iraq to Al Qaeda too, although they may have just settled for a third of Iraq. Not much of an improvement.

There are more, like the fact that Obama thinks $4.00 a gallon gas is a good thing, but it just went there too fast, and his wanting a bigger chunk out of any capital gains I might get.

I'll still be called racist though, you know...

What will Obama's economic plan do for the U.S.?

From Right Wing News it's broken down pretty well in Entitlements or Strength?

• The WSJ connects the dots between Obamenomics and military weakness:

  Given the hearty support Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama received in Europe last month, he must have noticed the surprise and skepticism among some Germans when he asked that Europeans contribute more for defense. Many Europeans argue they cannot afford such an additional expenditure.

  Better even to be as dependent on the endlessly demonized USA as a baby bird on its mother than to try to pay for military strength they cannot afford, having squandered their wealth on entitlement programs that politically are easy to grant but almost impossible to repeal.

  Obama would put us in the same boat, except that America will have no protector to turn to:

Let me introduce you to "The One"

It ain't Barak Obama.

It's an eight year old guitar phenom named Tallan Latz. When he was four, he saw a Joe Satriani video and told his parents that's what he wanted to do. His parents gave him an acoustic guitar and then, for his fifth birthday, one of the birthday present options was an electric guitar. He passed on the remote controlled boat and went electric. He's been playing in two bands in the bars in Wisconsin, but has been recently kicked out because of his age. Now, he can only play in fairs and festivals.

Well, and youtube...

Allow me introduce you to T-Man. Here he is playing Hendrick's "Red House". Trust me, it'll be seven minutes of your life you won't regret.

Ya gotta love the shades...

I'm never gonna figure out these people

Okay, guys and gals driving Volkswagens. If you are sitting next to me as I sit in the '05 Mustang GT at a light, give it up! You are not going to cut me off.

I don't care if it's the girl that hangs back 3 or 4 car lengths and tries to hit the light on a roll, or the guy who jumps on it when the light changes. I'm not allowing it to happen.

You will lose!

You are, however, not helping my gas mileage when you do that...

If your piddly ass cars were better, I might even enjoy running a little, but gimme a break, you're driving Volkswagens for crying out loud...

Ahhh, isn't that special...

The Obama people are pushing a new symbol, or salute if you may. Hat tip to Moe Lane at Redstate for this.

Yep, it's a big ol' goose egg. The zero symbol. The sign of nothingness. On the Autobahn you would get written a ticket for "insulting" by displaying this to another driver.

Not the sharpest sticks in the woodpile, are they?

Humorous side effect of this is that, right about now, there's 200,000 German's wondering why the Obama people decided to use as their symbol the universal sign for a$$hole...

Here's a must read for you

It's a long, but really well written piece by Dan McLaughlin at Redstate called Why Obama's Flip-Flops Matter

• If you looked at Barack Obama's record, public statements and campaign platform as of any time before June 3, 2008 (the last day of the Democratic primaries), you could detect a trend: on issue after issue after issue, there was a conservative position, a moderate position, a liberal position...and then there was an Obama position.

Well, well, well, Mookie gives up

From David Hinz at The Minority Report - Moqtada al-Sadr Surrenders -- Disbands Mahdi Army

• The United States had the opportunity in 2004 to either capture or kill cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but refrained from doing so because we feared turning him into a martyr. A few short months ago, his Mahdi Army held the Sadr City stronghold in Baghdad, and routinely fired rockets and mortars into the Green Zone.

  Today he officially disbanded his army, from his exile in Iran, effectively ending his struggle for power in Iraq, according to a piece in Wednesday's Opinion Journal.

That's a nice little capper for the week, isn't it?

Another good read, also

Again, from Right Wing News. This one is Jed Clampett And Rethinking The American Dream By Harold S. Witkov

• Old Jed Clampett sure had me fooled. As a young baby boomer, I thought the Clampetts were living the American Dream. Only in America, could an impoverished mountain family just outside Bugtussle, Arkansas, strike it rich, move to a Beverly Hills mansion, and enjoy the good life.

  Now, however, I find myself asking challenging questions about Jed and his family. Did the Clampett's live the American Dream, or were they, in fact, un-American?

Something I hadn't thought of...

...from Right Wing News The HuffPo Post Of The Day: The Coming Liberal Sell-Out Of Afghanistan

• One of things that liberals often say, but don't believe (There's a lot of that going on with the left) is that we need to get out of Iraq so we can focus all of our attention on Afghanistan.

  However, once you understand liberals, you come to realize that they believe in talking with America's enemies, sympathizing with them, and trying to understand "how we made them hate us," but they don't believe in aggressively confronting them.

After we win in Iraq, he's right, the left might just try that surrender thing again only this time with Afghanistan. It's a thought provoking read, so check it out.

Moron Obama's energy plans

Crap, is it moron or more on.... whatever, it's one of them...

In the spring, Obama came out against the call for a "gas tax holiday" over the summer for us consumers as it would only amount to about a half a tank of gas over the summer.

Now? Obama says we need to release 70 million barrels of oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help out us consumers. After you do the math using Obama's stats for average usage, it amounts to one third of a tank of gas. ...and he has the balls to call me ignorant...

I think it needs to be pointed out that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for a reason. I'm ignorant, so bear with me here, I'll stumble through this as best I can. The need for us to have an emergency supply of oil on hand is just in case somewhere..... oh... say... the middle east erupts in war. If.... say....oh I don't know... Iran were to develop weapons of mass destruction like.... I don't know... how about nuclear weapons, and have also stated that it was a goal of theirs to wipe another nation in the region off the map.... like, oh I don't know..... Israel... we'd want to have some supply on hand to get us through for a month or two while the war worked itself out, or we could re-establish the lines of oil exportation.

Yeah, but I'm ignorant, so what do I know.

Cross posted at The Minority Report

Where does Udall stand on energy?

Looks like it's right there next to Nancy Pelosi.

Hat tip to Moe Lane at Redstate.

Here's how Obama wants to help you with the "pain at the pump"

He says he wants to give you $1,000 and he's going to make "big oil" pay for it.

The first obvious fact, to everyone except Obama anyway, is that the consumer will be stuck with paying it right on back to "big oil" as they can't afford to stay in business running at break even and so the only option they will have is to raise gas prices to cover the cost. Obama's logic for this? He believes the Democrat lie that the oil company's are making obscene amounts of money. They are not. You can see for yourself every quarter as the companies all release their financial records to the public. The last statement from Exxon had their profit margins at around 11% which is lower than McDonald's, if I remember it right.

So, who is making obscene amounts of money off the price of gas? Your Federal government, that's who. Obama might have been wiser to just offer to pay it out of the obscene tax collections they get from "big oil". The Feds make about 3 times (or more) as much as the oil companies make off the product.

So, you tell me, is Obama going to help you out much with this proposal of his?

Obama says I'm ignorant

Dang it! I was hoping I had half a brain.

On July 30th he stated that, if we just properly inflated our tires and got a tuneup we could save as much oil as "all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling".

Today, he says I'm ignorant if I believe he said that.

In case you're wondering, Powerline did the math to see just how close we could get with the tire inflation in their Get This Man A Teleprompter! article on July 30th. As you can see, if we can somehow get every single car out there that has under inflated tires up to the proper air pressure, in just a short 11,308 years we'll have saved enough to offset the amount of oil we can drill for right now, here in America.

Yeah, no where near Obama's claim.

Hat tip to Kevin Holtsberry at Redstate.

So, how's it feel to be played like a fool...

The lead Democrat is making sure you have to pay a high price for gas because she will not do anything about it. She's sitting on her hands because she thinks she'll have more Democrats elected in November and isn't going to tackle anything substantial until she has more of her boys on board. From Haystack over at Redstate we have Democrats: “There is no crisis on our side of the aisle”

• Via Politico, we have an excellent montage of quotes and comments to help us better understand why there will be no energy legislation before the next Congress is sworn in...and a clearer picture of the depths of hell Democrats are willing to drag us through in order to expand their power in Washington:

Oh those pesky Republicans...

Nancy Pelosi shut down the House of Representatives early on Friday and sent all of our reps home for a 5 week paid vacation. The Democrats and a lot of Republicans headed off, but a handful of Republicans stayed and kept the House open. They decided to stay and debate an energy policy because it didn't seem right to them that the American people have to suffer under astronomical gas prices while the Senate goes off to vacation for 5 weeks on the tax payers dime. You saw little press on it, but it's gaining some momentum. The rabble rouser's were back today to carry on.

Pelosi had the lights shut off, the mics turned off, and the cameras shut down. Our Republican representatives don't care. They give speeches, they embrace the tourist coming through on tours, and continually call on Pelosi to come back to work.

It's a pretty historic moment. It's also a beautiful thing...

I was really glad to see that Colorado's own Representative Marilyn Musgrave, who was in the air flying back on Friday when she heard the news, went back over the weekend to join the riff raff.

Republican Eric Cantor is emailing a petition you can all sign to call on Pelosi to come back and open up the shop to do an up or down vote on an energy bill.

If you want to support it then let's Call Congress Back.

Come on, it's good to encourage our representatives to do the peoples business...

Al Qaeda second in command killed?

Several reports of the last week have Zawahri killed in a U.S. air strike in Pakistan last week. I think Scott Ott over at Scrappleface has the real story in his post BREAKING: Zawahiri Dead, Global Warming Suspected

• (2008-08-02) — CBS News foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan, in an exclusive, Friday reported that al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri may be dead, and a local Taliban leader blames global warming.

It's a must read since it's scrappleface...