Saturday, August 02, 2008

FEAR OF THE ELECTION OF OBAMA

I have been wondering how to express my FEAR of the election of Barack Obama and his liberal/socialistic solutions to America’s governmental needs. Then I got this email from my daughter-in-law and it explained exactly the problem with liberal/socialistic government solutions. This is exactly the type of government agency service and medical care we will have all over the country if Obama and a veto proof Democrat Congress is elected and controlled by big unions. Good Luck America...STOP THE WORLD I WANNA GET OFF.

Hi Everyone-- Just thought i'd share my exciting day with you....

Im glad I have learned to love Philadelphia BEFORE I had to register my car! Because if not, I don’t think I would have lasted a week.

So, since the tags on my car expired on July 31, the super on-the-ball-gal that I am, decided to register my car on Aug 1. (you know, to beat the long lines and avoid the DMV for as long as possible).

So I packed the kids up and left by 8am to beat the crowds. i was told by a friend to go to a car service station where they could do the emissions, etc and also the actual registration. So i arrived right on time only to find out that I had to go to a different place since i moved from out of state. so I put the kids back in the car and drove to the next place where I was then told I was in the wrong place, but I could walk a few blocks to the correct location.

SO the kids and I walked and were greeted by an extremely questionable crowd outside the door of the building. Of course they were all outside waiting for it to open... so we waited and waited until 9 am and then all entered like little rats at feeding time.

after waiting in that line, the man explained to me that i had to have a PA driver's license in order to register my car in PA. Oh, that was news since my friend told me she was able to do it without a PA license--(at the first place we went) but ok, i was still in a decent mood. so the man told me the address of the "best" place to go.

I should have asked him what his definition of BEST is.

so we get in the car and head to the BEST location which is in the heart of philadelphia-- right in China town and about a half hour drive from where I was. (mind you it was about 9 miles away, just a lot of traffic). Of course we get there and there is absolutely nowhere to park. I drove around in circles for about 15 mintues and finally found a 1 hour metered parking place about 3 blocks away. hmmm...why would they only have 1 hour parking places by a DMV??? So we get out of the car, put my $ in and told the kids we needed to hurry since we only had one hour.

the first thing we were greeted by was the profile of a bare bum --a homeless woman peeing on the side of the rode. that was special. then we walked on by the bus station where a ginormous woman in a white dress and headphones was dancing seductively while looking into the mirrored doors of the station....hmmm

we arrived at the license center, waited in line, and when we got to the front we were told that we could not pay with cash or credit card but that we had to have a money order.....OH OF COURSE!!! WHY DIDNT I THINK OF THAT!? So she told me where I could go to get a money order "right around the corner there is a jewelry store who sells them". Ok.

So we left, and started wandering around looking for this jewelry store... I know i am in a questionable neighborhood because there is a police officer on just about every corner. we look and look and walk and walk and dont find it. then I see a bank! yeah! so i wait in line at the bank-- which took 10 minutes. When i get to the front the ever so kind woman explains that since i am not a customer of the bank, she cannot sell me a money order. I then began to beg her. she was cold as stone. She referred me to the jewlery store down the street that sells them.

So we all start walking again. Remember that this is summer-- about 90 degrees and 500% humidity, i am dragging two kids who are hungry, bored, and want to go home-- and I am about 10 months pregnant and my feet are bursting out of my shoes with water retention.

We finally find the "jewelry store" which i honestly didnt see any jewlery, but a small Western Union sign on the roof. (clearly out of sight since we were walking under the roof..) and headed back to the DMV. Luckily the process went somewhat quickly and as they called my # I realized that I only had 5 minutes to get back to my car. So i told her and she quickly took my money, etc.

I still had to wait in a different line to get my picture, etc... but I could leave and come back.
OK! LETS GO KIDS! on another walk for 3 blocks, back to the car (next to the scary bus stop) to put a few more quarters in.... and then walk back! of course when i got there I was 2 minutes late and had a big "VIOLATION" on my windshield. a ticket. Shocking.

You can only imagine the rest... me waiting in line again... wiping the tears away so they can take my picture, the kids are still hot, hungry and having a very "boring" day. Yes, very boring...

So we left with absolutely no time to go back and actually get the car registered... it was noon already-- 4 hours from the time we started, and I had a doctor's appointment at noon. SO i arrived 1/2 hour late for my appointment, entering in to a waiting room so full of people the girls and i could not sit next to eachother. (of course we have state insurance-- which we are VERY grateful for, but you do get what you pay for). THere we waited 2 1/2 hours for my appt which took 5 mintues (blood pressure looks good, baby seems fine, you need to watch your weight....NEXT TIME I WILL GOT TO THE Local pharmacy and have them check my blood pressure and I will call the doc if i get worried!). and of course even at the drs. office we get to pay for parking so i paid the $5 parking fee (luckily we got out before the next 1/2 hour charge) and went home.

A day of "work" and still my car is not registered... the car is still full of books to return to the library and things to mail at the PO (more government institutions)... but we are all too grouchy to care...

However we are grateful that we are all healthy and alive...and that the government doesnt run the 7-11 where we got our slurpees in record time.


This is what you get with OBAMA government of liberal/socialism. As for me...I don’t want it...but if Obama is elected it is exactly what we’ll get.
Is this what you want?

NG

5 comments:

TheLonelyArtistClub said...

Can I be completely honest with you? I don't want either of these guys to be my president. Obama is possibly the world's best politician while claiming to be the world's must non-politician. I agree with some of the things McCain says, particularly I favor his energy plan over Obama's. But I think the guy is losing it. No offense because you keep telling me you're old, but I don't know how mentally stable McCain will be in 4 years. He couldn't remember the world gallon yesterday and he actually got shown up by Paris Hilton. He also comes off as bitter to me. I listened to a live "townhouse" meeting with him on CNN this morning for nearly 20 minutes and he told at least a handful of blatant lies about Obama's stances. Now I'm sure that Obama has told a number of lies about McCain, but Obama does so intelligently.

I'm actually ashamed to call myself a democrat right now. This should have been the easiest and most absolute democratic swing in the last several decades, but somehow, those idiots have screwed it all up. Why on Earth would you go on a 5 week vacation when at least most of the country perceives a serious economic crisis? And right before an election? Wow, that probably lost them a couple of close races. And this oil thing. I don't know the science of coastal drilling, but through a dozen or so student papers written by engineers about Alaskan drilling, I know now that ANWR drilling is completely pro-environment. I don't understand why they oppose it, but my best guess is that the average democratic constituent is too ill-informed to know that and thus the elected democrats have to keep opposing it to get votes. Without knowing the specifics, I'd assume that the same thing is going on with the offshore drilling. That's the one thing I like about Obama, he's at least willing to compromise on something he doesn't agree with (when was the last time we had a president do that?) As a side note, I still put forth my original argument that supply is not the greatest concern in oil prices. I still think dollar inflation has a lot to do with it, but I've heard a convincing argument by an economist today (can't remember his name but he busted the ENRON scandal) that market manipulations might really be at fault because despite increased Saudi supply promises the price continued to rise. Don't know enough about that issue to make a definite claim though. But from what I do know about economics, I think we need some major interest rate hikes to control inflation, although we're also losing production, which according to Keynesian models isn't supposed to happen at the same time. Regeanomics "solved" this problem with a positive supply shock of OPEC nations lowering prices.......so at the conclusion, I am suggesting that more oil could do us good, not necessarily because there is a supply problem but because a flooding of the oil market would lower the price per barrel (which, as I've asserted via Ron Paul before, is the new standard for dollar value) which would hopefully deflate the currency to a realistic level and increase production So yes, I'm saying to drill more with the caveat that while we do that, we also explore viable alternative energies (and I'm including Nuclear in that).

Since you disdain wind power I don't know what you'll say about this, but I'm thinking of campaigning for T. Boone Pickens for President. Apparently he almost ran back in 88. Texas Bilionaire.....remind you of anyone from 92 or 96? And as my final sidenote, I have read that Pickens' hedge fund is heavily invested in wind power, so yes, I recognize that it's possible this whole campaign for wind power is just about making him more rich.

So this didn't have much to do with anything you posted except the article title. Enjoy regardless.

Lonely

NewsGnome said...

Hi Lonely,

I’ve got some really bad news for you...I agree with a lot of what you say, but perhaps for different reasons. I’m going to try to go down the list because you’ve brought up what are fundamental questions of this campaign. McCain’s age and Obama’s inexperience. I believe McCain can handle the age thing and I’m old enough to know. But he has not won my heart. In fact I don’t like him much at all so my donations are going to the congressional and senate races. I don’t like it when principles are merely bargaining chips to trade for votes. I disagree with the “lies” you say he told about Obama. Obama hasn’t had a solid stance on anything, drilling, campaign finance to name just a couple. That’s not his problem. He is too inexperienced without a principled foundation to survive in the dog eat dog world of the middle east and international politics and America will pay the price. I could not disagree with you more that Obama is the world’s best politican...he is black and reads a telepromter well and that’s it. It’s easy to sound great when you’re having words put in your mouth by political operatives. When he gets into real political combat without a telepromter then we’ll see if he’s as good a politician as he is an orator. But if he is so great, why is he tied with McCain now? He should be ahead of him at this stage by 10 to 15 points. But in Gallop and Rassmussen recently McCain was ahead by a point. Obama’s biggest problem is when he has to think strategically.

What is a lie to you is a truth to me on McCain’s evaluations of Obama so we’ll probably never get together on that. The two most serious energy problems the world has is time and storage.
Alternative energies can’t replace oil for 50 years at least. We should continue efforts to clean coal and shale. If we learn that, America could become an exporter of oil to China and we could move to a plus-side balance of trade. A recent TV report showed a strip of black rock on a stratified rock formation appeared to be about 1000 feet thick, oil shale. The engineer being interviewed said “that an acre of that strata had more than 100.000 barrels of oil in it. A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons not the 50 gallons most people think. Of that 50% is turned into gasoline. Thus 21 X 100,000 equals 2,100,000 of gas per acre minimum. As technology improves so does recovery. The US Geological survey calculates that we have 11 million acres of shale oil which means we have approximately 1.1 trillion barrels of oil in shales recoverable in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. So the problems isn’t do we have the energy...we do. And I haven’t even mentioned coal conversion. Plus a company is beginning to convert natural gas into jet fuel and other fuels. What people don’t seem to realize is that in a place like ANWR there may be 15 billion barrels of oil, but there are 35 billion cubic feet of natural gas that goes along with it. And we haven’t even seriously examined the Bakken formation which could have more than oil than Saudi Arabia.

Secondly, coal, nuclear, natural gas in the ground and oil are nothing more than storage systems that can be used at our leisure. Most alternatives don’t provide that option and therefore have a huge disadvantage.

I agree that with Pelosi and the Dems trying to ignore the gas problem will indeed cost the democrats seats. They’ve put themselves into a situation that will only get worse, even if oil drops to $3.50 a gallon. It appears that they’re willing to destroy the American economy to get the Whitehouse and people feel it in their daily lives. They took over the house and senate and look where we are. As low as George Bush numbers are he has three times the poll numbers of congress. The Democrats have been total failures running congress. Suddenly oil prices are dropping because Bush is pushing off shore, ANWR and other drilling....that tells you supply is the dominate factor. The rest of the world knows we’re sitting on the biggest supply of oil shale and coal in the world...we’ve just got to use it.

Market manipulation is a red herring. If you don’t have energy to sell no amount of market manipulation can correct it. Thus Supply and Demand is still the deity of energy. And you caught T. Boone Pickens in his big lie he’s trying to foist on the America People. It’s not really that I hate wind power, it’s how you have to get it...it destroys the visual environment just like oil derricks did in years past, but eventually they took those down and replaced them with smaller pumps. I spent many summers at Lake Tahoe and they used to have hot air balloon rides over the lake and they shut them down citing visual pollution....wind power generators are no different to me. Have you ever consider what would happen if alternatives didn’t work...as in the case of ethanol?

We made a big mistake dropping nuclear power and environmentalist are responsible for forcing us into using coal and oil before we had scrubbers etc. They can only blame themselves for that. There was a huge carbon free nuclear plant near Sacramento CA that they forced to shut down because of the Jane Fonda movie...it would have been supplying power today had that not happened with no problem. Environmentalists, by doing so, added to the carbon problem we have today. The French supply almost 80% of their power with nuclear...they don’t seem to be chicken littles crying the sky is falling. The Saudis only supply us with less than 10 per cent of our oil so they’re not a major factor for us. ANWR could replace that amount for us for the next 15 years. What is more, is that alternative energies can’t replace oil in the time frame everybody thinks. Gore said we have to do it in ten years. That’s what Ted Danson said about the oceans in 1990...that they’d be dead in ten years. Tell Ted the oceans ain’t dead and it’s almost 20 years. Two years ago several Hollywood elites claimed we had 5 years left if we didn’t change global warming. I even tried to get a GWer to bet a thousand bucks they were wrong and two of them chickened out. Wouldn’t put their money where there mouth is. Global warming has been going down since 1998...maybe they’re right...despite the fact that China and India are on their way to surpassing our carbon footprint by a mile.

Oil prices are tumbling and stocks are up another 300 points today. Obama is in trouble. And behind the Democrat scenes the Dem leadership is worried about voters beginning to see for themselves his platitudes aren’t real policy and it will be interesting to watch what the Clinton’s do. Sharpening their stilettos no doubt.

Great post Lonely NG

Anonymous said...

-for some reason I can't get my google id to register today, so I'm going to post this as anonymous but it is of course Lonely if you can't tell by the length-

First off, my first reaction when I saw the stock the numbers midday the day after posting all of that was to think, oh well that hurts my arguments with NG. I am glad that we had at least a day of recovery and I'm hoping that it continues next week. I'm actually getting ready to make the first real investments of my life, with the exception of a miniscule amount my uncle helped me set up in a mutual fund in the 90s. I sold a relatively new car this summer since I won't need one in chicago and I recently realized that on over 10k I had only garnered $1.25 in interest over a couple months. So I am paying a lot more attention to the markets now and won't just be spouting tag lines anymore.

There are still a few small fundamental reasons why I consider myself a liberal, but as we have seen in a lot of these comments we've recently exchanged, as far as energy policy goes, I'm much more closely aligned with what you believe than with fellow democrats and I expect that once I reregister to vote in Illinois I will probably mark myself as an Independent. I don't think I've ever expressed my opinion on ethanol to you, but I have more reason to hate it than you. My father works in the beef industry and the higher prices for raw materials combined with many consumers willing to spend less on the finished product has resulted in some of the worst years in his career. He's connected to a number of companies and some of them were making giant profits just 3 or 4 years ago and now are hoping to break even. Screw ethanol. I sympathize with the farmers who are making more money now because my grandfathers, if still alive, would be part of that group, but stop these ethanol requirements immediately.

I could go on about energy but I think we've covered most of it already. I pretty much agree with most of what you've said, although I'm not sure how much oil I would want to export, unless we were generating a larger percentage of our power from nuclear (and I knew about the French thing, I'm a super pro nuclear). I would think that it might be effective to just use our own oil, stop importing, and stockpile the reserves for later when I'm sure oil will once again spike. But I don't know the exact numbers so that might not be the best thing.

As always, I ramble. I really wanted to respond to this to comment on global warming. 6 months ago I would have taken your bait on global warming and argued furiously in favor of it. After listening to some people that know more about science than me, I now realize that a lot of the things I readily accepted as fact either weren't true or framed in a deceptive manner. I can see how Al Gore could be using the idea to his benefit, but one of the struggles I have with completely disagreeing with the idea (as opposed to being moderately skeptical as I now am) is I still can't see what benefit so many other, non political people get out of it. But the reason I bring this up is not to debate the points but I think it is a good opportunity to illustrate something about my views that I think you missed when we first began debating on each other's blogs. When I was using inflated language to talk about my ideas of Intellectualism and consensus, what I failed to adequately express is what I just said about my own views on Global Warming. By 21st Century Intellectualism I was trying to say that the true intellectual (which I was counting myself as one) doesn't just hold to a position because they originally chose that position, but is willing to listen to the other side. I consider myself a more intelligent person because I was willing to listen to what people with better scientific credentials than myself had to say about the topic. That was what I was originally trying to get at in those posts, but the pretentious, academic attitude I started my blog with overshadowed that simple idea. And I do think you for your criticisms. Didn't agree with them all but they have changed my online writing style more into how I talk and debate in person, and not some bland persona.

As far as what we should do about the "risk" of global warming though, I think we will disagree somewhat. I've been assigned to read the Jonathan Harr book "A Civil Action" this summer for one of my fall legal classes. I'll try to explain in brief, if you're familiar with the book, the highly publicized 80s trial or the Travolta film version, you can probably skim over the next few lines. Two companies in Woburn, MA dumped a chemical called TCE (used to clean metal parts in machines) onto the ground outside of their facilities or into barrels that were not properly secured. Now at the time that these chemical were dumped (60s) there was no hard scientific evidence that TCE caused cancer, but throughout the 70s an abnormally large number of people receiving water from wells that were contaminated with TCE developed serious illnesses including 8 children who died of leukemia.

Now the point to that example was that those companies had no idea that TCE would kill anyone when they dumped it. Transition. Even if the Al Gore version of Global Warming is a fabrication, can we know what the other potential side effects of pollutants will be? Why do people talk about clean coal technology now? It's because we know it's safer and better for our communities than the original coal tech, which I doubt many people thought was risky originally. This line of reasoning brings out my inherent anxiety of the unknown, but my point is, if we can improve our energy production and manufacture in a way that is less harmful (even if the actual harm is minor) to our environment or to our families, then shouldn't business be pressured to do so? (and I think that's the key thing we'll disagree on, I believe in pressure and I'm guessing you believe in the businesses eventually do so on their own). And I'm not talking about drastic paradigm changes that would destroy companies. I recognize that there's a balance between protecting the world and the economic well being of people, but I wouldn't put the slider 100% on the economic side. I think I would put it around the 70-80% side.

Okay that was extremely long and I'm sorry you had to read it all, but there were just too many things percolating in my head after reading your response. I will eventually comment on your most recent post. I had heard nearly all of those figures but I'm still trying to sort out my own thoughts on it.

Lonely

Anonymous said...

Al Gore does not care about the environment.
All of this is just a prerequisite to higher energy costs and "green" taxes.
If he was sincere he would not want to be making money from it which he is. Britain has the highest taxes in the world and now they pay green taxes which does nothing to impact the environment but it does line the pockets of politicians.
Obama is on that same of making it harder for the struggling middle class with his tax proposals.
It's not just the rich he wants to tax. Just go back to the Carter years with a democrat president and congress. Thank God he wasn't voted in again because we were definitely on our way back then.
Did you hear about Obama's latest "Global Poverty Tax" Yes another tax increase on struggling Americans to feed the rest of the world. Not only does he want all American citizens to benefit from the struggling working people's taxes he wants the rest of the world to also.
Don't vote for this man he is a puppet of George Soros who is out to bring this country down and with the right players in place he may succeed.
Believe McCain isn't my best republican choice but he is our only choice.
Buyer Beware!
tos

NewsGnome said...

Tax Tax Tax. That's all Democrats know...and It only tax Americans to pay for everybody else's problem. KGlobal Poverty Taxes...GOOD GRIEF Charlie Brown, is there no relief from grief brought on by democrats? How about we start fixing our own problems like energy. NG