As you have heard by now Sarah Palin announced that she will not run for re-election in Alaska, but she also announced that she will resign as governor of Alaska in a couple of weeks.

  Before I give you my take on her announcement, and it probably won’t be popular with most conservatives, let me make clear how I feel about Sarah Palin. I like her. I think that she is a good strong conservative and that she holds many of the same political beliefs that I do. I think that she has shown that she truly believes her stated positions, and that she is a genuine conservative.

  However, I do not think that her personna plays well on a national level. While I like the way she sounds non-political, if you will, I don’t think that the nation will buy into her in an election. While she was a breath of fresh air to John McCain’s stagnant, boring, and failing bid for president I am not sure that she would gain enough support to be a viable candidate for president.

  Now back on to the subject at hand. Why did Sarah Palin choose not to run for re-election? Was it because she has presidential  aspirations? That is entirely possible, but why did she resign? That is what I have a problem with.

  Did she resign because she thought that she would be distracted from her state duties  if she was running for president?  This is entirely possible as well, but I just am not sure. I think there may be more here. She could have announced that she was not going to seek re-election and still carried on as governor of Alaska. Politicians do it all the time.

  Did she resign because she didn’t want to cost the taxpayers any money to defend herself from the onslaught that she has been facing? She talked about how the national media and investigators have descended on her state in an effort to bring her down, and that is true. To me that shows that they are afraid of her, perhaps she does have some connection to mainstream America after all. They want to bring her down before she can do harm in 2012.

 But is that reason enough to resign if the allegations are false? What does that say about her will to fight?  If she has presidential aspirations this gives her opposition a line of attack. If she can’t handle the fire as governor, how will she be able to handle the scrutiny when she is running for the presidency of the United States of America?  How would she handle the pressure if she were to become president? And I would agree with that line of questioning.

  I think that there is more to this story than we know right now. I don’t know what it is but it seems to me that she would be better served to have remained on as governor and forfilled the obligation that she made to her state than to be be perceived as quiting when the going got tough.

  I hate to think it, but is there something to the allegations that have been levied against her? Is she getting out before the shit hits the fan? Or has she just had enough? No matter which option is the truth, it doesn’t bode well for her on a national level.

  The White House is refusing to release some papers that may shed some light on Sonia Sotomayor’s positions while she was an adviser to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. The White House is claiming that because she didn’t make any official decisions and was just an adviser that these papers are irrelevant.

  Sen. Jeff Sessions, who asked for the papers disagrees:

During her time there, the organization took extreme positions on legal issues ranging from the death penalty to abortion to racial quotas,” Sessions said in a statement. He said it was “absurd” for the White House to call the documents irrelevant

  The notion that Sotomayor had no role in what the organization did seems to be not quite the truth either as she did have a leadership role on the board.

Sessions noted, however, that Sotomayor held leadership posts on the group’s board

  These papers are being withheld for a reason, and considering the fact that Sotomayor has been overturned by the very court that she will soon be appointed to over 60% of the time, the latest being just last week, the White House is looking to avoid further embarrassment.

  Much like the administration did with the “torture” documents, the administration seems to be picking and choosing just the papers that they want to release and holding on to those they don’t want to be seen.

  There must be something in these papers that they don’t want to be seen, if there is nothing condemning to Sotomayor in the papers why not release them, even if they turn out to be irrelevant?

   They are not irrelevant, and they must be condemning or else the administration would release them. If they turned out to actually be irrelevant wouldn’t it be an embarrassment to the Republicans to have made such a big deal about this? The administration would lose nothing by releasing these documents, unless there is something in there. We will never know. Open and honest? Transparent? I think not.

  The media has been in the tank for President Obama from the very beginning, they are the biggest reason that he was elected as they refused to write or publicize any of the negative stories about Obama that surfaced during the campaign, and there were many.

  Members of the media expected that once they got him elected that he would return the favor and show them the same affection that the media showed him. They thought that they would send a chill up and down Obama’s leg. 

  But President Obama has an image to protect. And in doing so he has begun to upset the media. In order to protect his image he pre-selects which reporters will ask him questions, and in a recent press conference he coordinated a question with a Huffington Post reporter beforehand. The latter act has pushed White House reporter Helen Thomas, who has covered all of the president since JFK, over the edge, she is infuriated at what she perceives as the president trying to control the media.

  Here is some of what she had to say:

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try.

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.

“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well–for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame

    Ouch! That is some stinging criticism coming from the veteran reporter.

  The media is beginning to see that they were used by Obama during the campaign and they are unhappy about it. They are finally starting to realize that Obama is all image and no substance.

  It is about time someone in the media stepped up and brought to light the fact that while Obama’s press conferences and town hall meetings all look spontaneous they are actually very well choreographed. It is all part of his image.

  It seems that we are constantly being told by this administration that we have to sacrifice. We need to sacrifice to stop global warming and we have to sacrifice for healthcare, the list goes on and on. But their is one group of people who don’t seem to feel that the sacrifice that we are asked to make applies to them. And that group is the very people who ask us to sacrifice– the politicians.

  Taxpayer funded travel by politicians has risen tenfold since 1995, and in recent years the rate of growth in taxpayer funded travel has skyrocketed.

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records

  Not to be outdone by the Bush administration the Democrats have taken it to a new level.

Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That’s a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

  In the last two years congress has doubled their travel expenses, this just happens to coincide with the Democrat takeover of the House and Senate.

  So while Obama’s economic policies and the stimulus bill have worsened the economy and as the unemployment rate is at a 25 year high and getting closer to 10% every day these politicians do not seem to have a problem flying all across the world on their little junkets while we foot the bill. (Not to mention the fact that the people who are in the process of passing global warming legislation are flying around in personal jets which supposedly hurts the environment while they ask us to drive less and pay more.) They are traveling at record levels when they should be cutting back.

  Some of this travel is necessary while much of it seems suspect to say the least:

The Journal analysis shows that the government has picked up the tab for travel to destinations such as Jamaica, the Virgin Islands and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

  But it gets even better:

Sen. Daniel Inouye (D., Hawaii) led a group of a half-dozen senators and their spouses on a four-day trip to France for the biennial Paris Air Show. An itinerary for the event shows that lawmakers flew on the Air Force’s version of the Boeing 737, which costs $5,700 an hour to operate. They stayed at the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand Hotel, which advertises rooms from $460 a night.

  That was a diplomatic trip? Yeah Right!

  But the part that I might find the most appalling is the way that many politicians use trips to war zones, which I think is very necessary, to cover up for trips to other, more exotic places.

lawmakers combine trips to war zones with visits to more tranquil spots. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation of Democratic lawmakers to visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a day. Before landing in Kabul, the eight lawmakers and their entourage of spouses and aides spent eight days in Italy, spending $57,697 on hotels and meals.

  Nancy Pelosi used the troops and the war as cover for the real destination of her trip — Italy. I find this disgusting.

  So just remember the next time that you hear President Obama give a speech in which he claims “we can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times,” that the politicians in Washington do not hold themselves to the same standard that Barack Obama told the world he would hold us to.

  Remember that while we are being asked to sacrifice, the people asking us to sacrifice are using our money to take extravagant trips around the world.

  Remember and then tell yourself  ”no more.” And then in November of 2010 show the politicians you meant it when you said “no more.”

  Early Thursday morning, Afghanistan time, a major offensive was launched by the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. Their mission is to clear out the villages of Taliban rule before the country’s election on August 20th and to hold them.

  This is the largest offensive conducted by the United States since the beginning of the Iraq war and this is the beginning of President Obama’s new Afghanistan policy.

Where we go we will stay, and where we stay, we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces,” Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson said in a statement.

  We must remember that the cause is just and we must keep these troops in our minds, they are fighting for us. We owe  our way of life to people like these who are willing, and have been willing  throughout our history, to fight for the freedoms that we enjoy. I am sure that in the end, if the troops are allowed to do their job,  we will prevail.

  Cross posted on Grizzly Groundswell

  I have written before about how the government was going to use the drug violence in Mexico and at the United States border as an excuse to implement  strict gun control laws and while this hasn’t happened yet there is something else going on in Texas that is equally as unconstitutional and frightening.

  The ATF is actively going door to door in Texas and searching for weapons in people’s homes who have no criminal record, without just cause. Their only crime is that they have recently bought guns, and for reasons that only the ATF knows these purchases, although legal, are suspicious.

  And it goes beyond that. Because, according to federal law, they cannot compile a federal database on gun owners the ATF is walking into Texas gunshops and combing through their records, just for the hell of it, looking for anything they can use.

    If you are a law abiding gun owner who is simply unemployed that is reason enough for you to be a suspect.

People who are legally in the United States and have clean criminal records, but are facing economic problems are often recruited by traffickers to buy weapons on their behalf in order to shield themselves from scrutiny.

  But anybody seems to be under scrutiny by the ATF in Texas:

Another tip took agents on a 30-minute drive from the shack to a sprawling home with a pool in the back and an American flag out front.

It turned out two handguns, of a type drug gangsters prefer, were bought by a pastor for target practice

  This pastor’s only crime was buying the same type of handgun that gangsters like. For that he was hassled and interviewed by the ATF.

  The ATF appears to be out in full force, without probable cause and without justification, and most of all without a warrant, hassling people who are just exercising their second amendment rights and looking for any reason to arrest people.

  Is it any wonder that guns and ammunition have been flying off the shelves since Barack Obama became president? Second amendment advocates are afraid that President Obama is going to implement strict gun control laws and they are buying weapons and ammunition while they still can. People who aren’t real friendly to the second amendment claim that second amendment advocates are just being paranoid; that nothing in Obama’s record or actions so far give the impression that he will infringe on the second amendment. But when you read stories such as this one it appears that gun owners are correct about President Obama’s disdain for the second amendment.

  Instead of stopping the flow of illegal aliens into this country the ATF is hassling law abiding, gun owning, constitutionalist citizens. Something is very, very wrong here.

  One of my biggest concerns about the healthcare reform bill is the final cost of the measure once all of the votes are bought and paid for with earmarks destined to go to those who are holding out their “yes” votes. My concern may be justified because it now looks as though this is exactly how Nancy Pelosi won final passage of the climate change legislation, we can expect more of the same once the healthcare reform bill gets voted on.

  It now appears that the lollipops and ice cream that Nancy Pelosi gave out to legislators, as well has her personal charm, wasn’t what finally persuaded enough people to vote for the climate change legislation.

  According to this article there was one member in the House of non-Representatives,  Marcy Kaptur, who was on the fence and couldn’t decide whether or not to vote for the cap and tax, national energy tax act of 2009. She could not even be plied by Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream bars. But in stepped Harry Waxman with a last minute 300+ page amendment to the bill that he released at 3:00 in the morning just hours before the vote. Upon reading the amendment (apparently she is the only one to have read the amendment) she finally decided that she could vote for the bill.

  So what was in this amendment that finally persuaded Rep. Marcy Kaptur to vote in favor of passage? $3.5 billion in taxpayer money for her state, that is what was in the amendment, and that is why she voted for it. She sold out the future of America for an earmark of an astounding $3.5 billion.

  And she was not alone, that is what the 310 page amendment was all about, earmarks of various sizes that went to the states of those legislators who were holding out. Basically the holdouts were bribed for their votes at the expense of the taxpayer, as if the taxpayer wasn’t going to pay dearly enough for this legislation.

  Is it any wonder that those who opposed this legislation, such as John Boehner; who called this bill a pile of shit, were so outraged that this amendment was dumped on them at the last minute and nobody had the time to read it before voting on it? Apparently the only people who knew what was in the amendment were those who were benefiting from it and it performed its primary goal of buying the votes needed to pass this legislation.

 I first read about this story on a post by Dominique at her blog,  An Unlikely Perspective and it is an interesting one. Arizona is in the process of passing a bill that would exempt them from any national healthcare plan that the Obama administration passes.

HCR2014 is proactive and will protect patients’ fundamental rights,” Arizona State Rep. Nancy Barto, a Republican, said in a statement. “We are a front-line battle state to stop the momentum of this powerful government takeover of your health care decisions. Health care by lobbyists thwarts your rights and can be stopped here

  There have been numerous states that are crafting legislation to reaffirm state’s rights under the Jeffersonian principle of government (my state was one of them but sadly it was voted down in the state house) and this seems to be the next step.

  Arizona is not alone, at least five other states are joining in the fight against this over-reaching, all-controlling, oppressive federal government; these five states are Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming.

  It seems that discontent with this administration and their goal to control all aspects of every American citizen’s lives is beginning to grow. Legislators in various states are beginning to question President Obama’s abuse of power as he is slowly taking over private industry, capitalism, and the banking and economic system. 

  We will have to wait until 2010 to see what the results of this end up being but if we continue down this path towards government regulation of private citizens America as we know it will be gone. Hopefully this is the beginning of a movement to take our country back.

  Thomas Jefferson once said “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty” and I don’t think a truer statement has ever been uttered. Right now the government does not fear the people. This administration has nothing but disdain for the people. Not only does President Obama not fear us he doesn’t believe that we are smart enough to run our own lives. He believes that it is his job to take care of us. On the other hand there is growing reasons for the American people to fear this government, and Thomas Jefferson told us what the end result of that feeling will be.

  We can only hope that Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming end up passing this legislation. We can only hope that this is the beginning of a movement that spreads across the country, and we can only hope that more states step up to the plate and claim the rights that have slowly been eroding from the states.

  Yesterday I wrote about the manipulation that the EPA used to tailor a report that would allow them to regulate carbon emissions, this doctored report was also used by the House of non-Representatives while crafting their cap and tax legislation. To sum it up, the EPA ignored evidence in another report that was skeptical of global warming. This report did not fit the EPA’s, or the president’s, agenda and because of this it was ignored.

  Senator James Inhofe is now asking for an investigation into the EPA’s misuse and suppression of information on carbon emissions. Below is what Senator Inhofe had to say about the EPA ignoring information critical of global warming, that was written by an EPA analysis, Alan Carlin.

He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he’s ordered an investigation. “We’re going to expose it

  When the EPA learned that Carlin was working on information that was skeptical of global warming he was told to stop working on the report.

  The rumors are that the cap and tax legislation that the House of non-Representatives passed last week is going to have a tough road ahead in the senate, I doubt that very much, but if Senator Inhofe is any indication of the senate’s view perhaps I am wrong. I doubt it.

  We need a full investigation into this issue. If the EPA did in fact cover up information that they had in their possession to fit not only their agenda but also the president’s agenda we need to get to the bottom of this. The final report that was issued was used by the House during their cap and tax debate and now we are learning that information was left out of that report to advance a radical agenda.

  The EPA, the president, and the House of non-Representatives are all playing a costly game here; not just with our wallets but with our lives also. If this legislation ever becomes law it means much more than just a steep rise in every single American’s electric bill. It means much higher gas prices, an issue these very same Democrats were up in arms about two years ago when the gas prices were $4 a gallon. Now they are in the process of raising those gas prices back up to those levels themselves. But this legislation goes beyond that, this legislation will raise the price of EVERY SINGLE THING THAT AMERICANS PURCHASE!

  As the price of all industry and manufacturing goes up do to the carbon taxes imposed on them they will thusly raise the price of their products. At least those companies who chose to stay in America, because this legislation will drive many manufacturers overseas where the regulations and taxes on manufacturing are not as oppressive.

  So yes, they are playing with our lives, our livelihoods, and our way of life with this legislation and they are doing it for power and control. But they are doing it on faulty and deliberately misleading information.

  We need to stop this bill from ever becoming law and we need to hope that Senator Inhofe is successful in his calls for an investigation. This has to be investigated. The EPA, the president, the House of non-Representatives, and the Senate (if they approve this bill), are all in the midst of perpetrating the biggest fraud in the history of the world and we need to do all we can to stop it.

  OUR LIBERTIES ARE ON THE LINE!

  Good luck Senator Inhofe, it feels good to know that somebody out there is looking out for us. I can only hope that you are not alone.

  The EPA recently released a report that gave them the premise to regulate carbon emissions. This same report was used by the House of non-Representatives to pass the government expansion program more widely known as the Cap and Trade legislation last Friday in the middle of the night.

  The EPA report has one teeny, tiny little fault however. The EPA refused to release, in fact they tried to bury, the part of the report that questioned whether man-made global warming was actually occurring. They only released the part of their findings that promoted their agenda, and the all-to-willing liberals in the House of non-Representatives, with the help of eight soon to be Republican ex-nonrepresentatives, were quick to jump on it as a chance to pass their national energy tax.

The EPA did not publicly release a March report that raised questions about the validity of the agency’s conclusions that carbon emissions are a cause of global warming and a danger to human health

  The EPA was in a hurry to support President Obama’s fringe, radical global warming agenda so they ignored the part of the study that was contrary to the president’s agenda.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute obtained and released a draft of the dissenting document last week, along with internal correspondence CEI says proves the report “was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.”

  The EPA refused to listen to, or just decided to ignore,  the FACT that the weather runs in cycles:

The TSD glosses over long-term cyclical variations in ocean temperature, similar to El Nino, which “are by far the best single explanation for global temperature fluctuations,” says the report.
 
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation are such variations, and occur in roughly 60-year cycles, as opposed to the 3-5 year El Nino cycle. Their role is “not really explained in the draft TSD,” the report says. “(A)t the very least, there needs to be an explanation as to why (EPA) believes that these evident cycles do not exist or why they are much more unimportant than we believe them to be.”

  The EPA also decided to ignore the roll that sun spots play:

The TSD neglects to explore the “strong association between solar sunspots/irradiance and global temperature fluctuations.” It dismissed solar variations based on data obtained by a U.N. climate panel, but the veracity of that data has since been called into question. New research “suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68 percent of the increase in Earth’s global temperatures

  Almost seventy percent of the earth’s warming (if there is indeed warming, which I don’t believe there is) is due to sunspots but the EPA decided that information was not valid. It didn’t fit the agenda.

  The EPA also ignored my position that the earth is not warming in the first place:

The TSD’s assumption that greenhouse gases have triggered global warming is hard to verify, because “changes in (greenhouse gas) concentrations appear to have so little effect that it is difficult to find any effect in the satellite temperature record, which started in 1978.”

  And the EPA ignored the little fact that the earth has actually cooled over the last decade:

Global temperatures have declined for 11 straight years, and at the same time, “atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to increase and CO2 emissions have accelerated

  All of this information was left out of the EPA’s report to further their radical agenda and I would find it funny if it wasn’t for the fact that the House of non-Representatives used this very flawed and incomplete report as their basis for the need to pass global warming legislation.

  The EPA cherry picked the information that they found valuable for their ultimate goal of regulating “greenhouse gasses” and they cherry picked the information that would advance President Obama’s agenda item to impose a national energy tax on every America.

  The EPA is happy, they grabbed more power. The president is happy, he is in the process of grabbing more power. The American people should not be happy, if we use more power (electricity) we will pay for it dearly through taxes that are supposed to be for our own good.

  What does this say about the truth about global warming when anything that runs contrary to the “theory” of global warming must be buried? But more importantly, what does this say about our politicians in Washington if they are willing to use incomplete reports to come to the conclusion that the American people must be regulated to solve a problem that the buried portions of the report say doesn’t exist?

  The EPA has its agenda, the president has his agenda, and the House of non-Representatives have their agenda and if that means covering up portions of a report that runs contrary to the agendas, so be it.

  So much for President Obama’s pledge of transparency in government, huh? The one thing that is becoming more and more transparent to me is the fact that the American people are getting screwed.