Front Page News
The current topic of whether Judge Sonia Sotomayer will be confirmed for a supreme Court appointment is now front page news. Was Judge Sotomayer really saying that one ethnic group make better judges than those of another? The Democrats are jumping all over Republicans when they question the judge on some of her decisions. Some of the Democrat senators are suffering selective amnesia when they are reminded of their treatment of Clarence Thomas and Alberto Gonzales. Their main criticism is not qualifications but that they cannot tolerate minority Republicans in government, particularly in roles of importance.
President Obama is constantly talking about all the jobs that he will create. He even claims to have created 250,000 new jobs. He forgot to subtract the jobs that have been lost since he took office and after the stimulus was passed, unemployment is far higher than expected and is rising. Obama is still blaming Bush for the bad numbers. The only jobs he seems to find are with the government. Opening up our nation to drilling for oil could provide many jobs and so could building nuclear power plants and finding more natural gas. Obama has a fetish about this ridiculous “cap and trade” program which is only a tax on the American public. He still believes the socialist premise that high taxes help the economy. His cabinet members making decisions remind me of a bunch of high school students pretending to be involved in a make believe student run government.
Governor Palin of Alaska has encouraged drilling for oil in her state and now we find that Alaska’s Chukchi’s waters may contain 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil. The governor has said that the only thing left to do is drill. Those brilliant Obama Energy Department experts are now telling us to paint our roof’s white in addition to wind power and other ideas to replace known solutions.
The blame game is still alive about who and what caused the housing crisis. I have pointed out in prior blogs about how Barney Frank and Chris Dodd both urged “caution” in restricting activities of Fannie and Freddie. Now Frank blames the problems on deregulation when Republicans wanted to reign in Fannie and Freddie with more supervision. He likes to blame the bankers and those evil Wall Street types even though they are heavily regulated. Why do we let these hack Democrats get away with this?
Obama is dead set on setting up a socialist health care system where government czars will analyze health treatments and determine if the treatments are cost effective. The socialist systems of Canada and England work this way and the public must wait for necessary surgeries and procedures before they can secure the proper treatment.
A recent wall street Journal article on the state of Maryland and creating a millionaire income tax bracket that would raise the top marginal income tax rate to 6.25%. However, Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes and the state-local tax rate can climb as high as 9.45%. The next year after the millionaire tax was levied, guess what? In 2008 a approximately 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year, 2009, there were 2000 million-dollar tax returns filed. Instead of gaining revenue, the state collected $100 million less in taxes. The Laffer Curve is as relevant with state revenues as it is with the federal government.
Talking to Obama about energy and drilling and taxes and the unreal hypothesis on global warming is like trying to convince your children that they should reduce their candy consumption and eat more vegetables. The country is in real trouble and I will try and address the long term deficits that we are faced with and the failure to increase jobs for the unemployed.
Gary E. Marsella