You probably think I was just trying to grab some attention and would use that to create fear and suspicion but this weekend <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080427/ap_on_bi_ge/britain_refinery_strike">gas hit $9.35 US per gallon in Scotland</a>.

Just for those who need a quick reference,  1 gallon US  = 3.785 litres, and 3.785 x $2.47 = $9.35. What really has them mad is petrol WAS $8.10 a gallon before the strike. That was the NORMAL price.

You can't blame US oil executives for that one. Keep in mind that up until a couple of years ago, Britain was a "net" exporter of oil. When reading the article or related articles that <a href="http://europe.theoildrum.com/story/2006/9/17/135527/399">increased taxation on oil companies </a>caused a decrease in exploration and production, ultimately leading to higher prices on dwindling supplies, one has to wonder what our future is with either of the two current Democrat candidates.

Now imagine that Hillary or Barak has their way and heavy taxes are levied on the oil industry in the US. Then imagine, not a strike, but another Katrina or worse yet an embargo by a foreign country. If you don't realize that our country is on the same path as other countries now paying over $11 a gallon for gas then you must really have your head in the sand.

Band-aid plans like Barrow's suggestion to stop filling the Federal Reserve is the typical political rhetoric. The Fed currently buys 70,000 barrels a day, while the US imported <a href="http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html">11,174,000 barrels per day as of this year</a>. The Fed purchases are .6 of 1% of overall purchases.

Using John logic, <a href="http://savannahnow.com/node/486892">if there is any</a>, that prices would drop by 25 cents per gallon if the Fed quit buying up .6% of the current imports. I guess if we all stayed home just ONE day and did nothing but visit the family we could cause the SAME or even greater drop in fuel prices. At .6% we would only have to do this once every 167 days. In this case why not MANDATE a Federal driving vacation where 2 days a year we all just stay home? Remember, I am using the same logic here as the other guy.

The sad part,  all of this filling of the Federal Strategic Reserve at over $110 a barrel, which by the way would be over 7.7 Million dollars a day, is being done to replace oil that we <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/nationalspecial/31cnd-oil.html?pagewanted=print">put on the market when oil was $69 a barrel</a>. Another hose job on the US citizen. We realesed oil and now we are replacing it with oil that is about $40 a barrel more expensive. That was a wise move. Once again the logic of the current political process.

John Barrows "plan" to drop the price by 25 cents a barrel is even refuted by the agency that he used for a reference. He estimates 25 cents while they estimate a few pennies. I would be on the side of the people that have a clue at what they are doing rather than a congressman, who the last time he came in close contact with oil was when he dripped salad dressing on his pants.

Barak talks change we can believe in. I think he has a point that we do need a change in the way Washington works and we can begin that change by electing people to office that have real life skills, experiences, and deals with the same issues the majority of this country has to deal with on a daily basis.

WHEREAS, gun-free zones prohibit law-abiding citizens with conceal and carry permits from bearing firearms in those areas, a clear violation of American citizens’ Second Amendment rights to defend themselves and others from violent crimes.

WHEREAS, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

WHEREAS, designation of gun-free zones in effect provide a large pool of potential victims for people desiring to commit violent crimes.

WHEREAS, we’ve just observed the one-year anniversary of the shootings at the Virginia Tech campus which killed 33 people despite the fact that the school is designated as a gun-free zone;

WHEREAS, there are many other examples of gun crimes committed in gun free zones, including:

• Five people killed at Northern Illinois University

• Seven people killed at Westroads Mall in Omaha, NE

• Two people were killed at a mall in Kansas City, MO

• Four people were injured by 15 rounds shot into a middle school in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma

• Six high school girls in Baily, Colorado were held hostage and sexually assaulted by a gunman.

• Thirteen people were shot and killed at Columbine High School in Colorado.

• Seven people, including an unarmed security guard, were murdered by a gunman in Redlake, Minnesota.

• Seven people were shot and killed in a Golita, California post office.

• Five people were dead after a gunman opened fire at a mall in Salt Lake City, Utah..

WHEREAS, experience shows the best way to stop shootings is by armed response, as demonstrated at the Trolley Mall in Utah, Pearl High School in Missouri, Appalachian Law School in Virginia, and New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

WHEREAS, a study conducted by John Lott, a fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, found that high crime urban areas and neighborhoods have the greatest reductions in violent crime when citizens are legally allowed to carry concealed handguns.

WHEREAS, Criminology Professor Dr. Gary Kleck, a member of the ACLU and a self-described liberal Democrat, published a 1993 study showing Americans used their guns about 2.5 million times per year or once every 13 seconds to stop crime, and most of the time a shot is not even fired.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Georgia 12th Congressional District Republican Party Convention calls for passage of legislation that would allow people with lawful conceal and carry permits to carry firearms in publicly and privately owned facilities, including schools, universities, government buildings, and retail shopping malls.

Scooter Libby's sentence was commuted by President Bush nearly a month ago, and the left is still in an uproar.   The Daily Kos, Huffington Post and other left wing blogs are full of obscenity laden comments claiming that this action was a coverup and a travesty of injustice.  Senator Hillary Clinton regularly uses the issue in campaign speeches, dubbing  the action "cronyism," (which I find absolutely laughable considring all of her husband's pardons). Cindy Sheehan has threatened to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if she doesn't try to impeach the President.

This obsession with the whole Valerie Plame affair and Scooter Libby has even infected the local paper here in Reidsville, GA. Last week, one of the columnists wrote a scathing column, charging that the President somehow skirted the law.  It was full of inaccuracies and misconceptions that were primarily regurgitations of Democrat talking points. I couldn't help but respond, and yesterday I sent the paper a rather lengthy response. I won't know until Thursday whether they'll run it, but I wanted to share it with my readers. I basically compiled facts and details that are easily obtainable, but glossed over or outright ignored by the mainstream media.   I hope you find this information useful if you ever find yourself in a discussion with someone who thinks Bush's action was a travesty.  .

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.In her July 26^th column in The Tattnall Journal, Melinda Huling accuses the President of “circumventing” the law when he commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby, the former Chief of Staff to the Vice President. How can that be, when his action complies with the highest law in the land -- the U.S. Constitution?

Let’s not forget that President Bill Clinton pardoned 147 people on his last day in office, including his step brother, former White Water Partner Susan McDougal, and tax fraud fugitive Marc Rich, whose ex-wife contributed millions of dollars to Clinton’s presidential library.

One of Mrs. Huling’s major criticisms is that Mr. Libby will spend no time in prison, and essentially gets off with paying a $250,000 fine. I don’t remember her being upset when former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger received no jail time and a paltry $50,000 fine for stealing and destroying classified documents during the 9-1-1 investigation.

I agree with Mrs. Huling that “it’s serious when classified information is leaked.” But I don’t remember her complaining when the New York Times printed sensitive national security information on its front page.

As for Mr. Libby, there are many reasonable people, including former Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tennessee) and the editors of The Wall Street Journal, who believe he should receive a full pardon. Let’s look at a few details about the investigation that liberals and their media allies conveniently overlook.

Ambassador Joe Wilson claims the White House leaked the identity of his wife, CIA analyst Valerie Plame, to retaliate for his July 2003 New York Times column. In fact, White House officials were simply trying to set the record straight about what they saw as misinformation in the column, especially Mr. Wilson’s statement that Vice President Cheney had sent him to Niger. That’s how Ms. Plame’s name came up.

It turns out that the officials were justified to challenge the veracity of Mr. Wilson. In fact, two major statements in Mr. Wilson’s column that have been proven false… not by right wing radio, but by The Washington Post and a bipartisan Senate intelligence panel. In an article dated July 10, 2004, the Post reported that the panel concluded that Plame had recommended her husband for the trip in memos to her superiors.

Concerning Iraq’s attempts to buy yellowcake, the Post article states, “The panel found that Wilson's report (to the CIA), rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.”

According to political reporter Robert Novak, whose column about Ms. Plame sparked the investigation, the Justice and State Departments knew very early on who had supplied the identity of Mr. Wilson’s wife -- then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Mr. Fitzgerald pursued the investigation anyway. Why? One theory was that he was trying to justify his job. Another is that he bought the accusation that Bush Administration officials illegally leaked Ms. Plame’s identity to punish the Wilsons. Bush haters and anti-war activists were salivating with the thought of presidential advisor Karl Rove being marched off to prison. .

Unfortunately for them, after two years and hundreds of hours of interviews and grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald found no actual violation of the official secrets act or the law banning the outing of covert CIA operatives. In fact, he could not determine that Ms. Plame held covert status at the time her name was revealed, nor could he prove White House officials knew her identity was classified when they talked with reporters.

The investigation, however, did catch one big fish. Mr. Libby was tried and convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. (Which begs the question: How does one obstruct justice when no actual crime was committed?)

In a July 3, 2007 editorial, The Wall Street Journal described the investigation as “an obsessive exercise” and “a perjury net that we continue to believe trapped an innocent man who lost track of what he said, when he said it, and to whom,”

The bottom line: Mr. Libby’s “crimes” occurred in the course of an investigation that never should have been launched in the first place and clearly was the victim of a rogue prosecutor and a toxic political climate. It’s only fair and just that Scooter Libby receive a full pardon.

Elizabeth Edwards blogs on their websites. Harry Reid holds teleconferences with them regularly. All the major Democrats running for president are slated to attend a major left-wing gathering, and now Hillary Clinton is defending them against big, bad Bill O’Reilly.

I’m referring to the left wing hate-mongers who make up the so-called “net roots.” (I prefer “nut roots.”) They post diaries and vile comments at the Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, the Huffington Post, Moveon.org, etc. These tolerant good people (yes I’m being sarcastic) routinely call President Bush “Hitler” or “even worse than Hitler,” openly wish that terrorists had killed Vice President Cheney, and express joy that Tony Snow has cancer.

Though they deny it, they are blatantly anti-American. Many of them believe that the U.S. deserved to be attacked by the 911 terrorists, contend we had no reason to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and even sympathize with the terrorists, who kill women and children and behead hostages. In their opinion, Islamic jihadists are nothing more than poor, persecuted and downtrodden people who are fighting for what they believe, and who will stop attacking us if we just leave Iraq. Never mind that their leaders openly say they want to impose Islamic fundamentalism on the rest of the world and kill those who won’t convert.

For the past several days, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly has reported about  Jet Blue's sponsorship of the upcoming YearlyKos convention. He questioned the propriety of a major corporation virtually endorsing an organization that is strongly partisan and regularly publishes obscenities and hate speech. Jet Blue withdrew its sponsorship, and the lefties howled, especially when he compared them to neo-Nazis and the KKK in their use of hate speech. To O’Reilly, Democrat presidential hopefuls attending the YearlyKos would be comparable to Republicans going to a David Duke gathering.

That prompted Hillary Clinton’s campaign website to run an online petition urging O’Reilly to “stop smearing grassroots progressives." Now that's a warm and fuzzy way to refer to people who routinely spew obscenties and death wishes to their political eemies. O'Reilly recently interviewed Hillary's Campaign Communicaions Director Harold Wolfson and confronted him with a number of DailyKos posts blasting Hillary. Wolfson accused O'Reilly of "cherry picking." Yeah, right. It's not hard to find thse cherries when the DilyKos orchard is full of them.  Which leads to the obvious question: does Hillary actually believe she can draw support from a group that considers her to be just as evil as “BushHitler?"

I have several good friends who are moderate to liberal Democrats, and all of them are repulsed by the despicable ramblings of the loony left. One friend told me it wasn’t fair to use the DailyKos or Huffington Post as examples of liberal hate speech because they represent a very small minority of the Democratic Party.

Well, if that’s the case, why do his party’s leaders pander to them?

The answer is simple… the left-wing net roots have the money and manpower (or is it “personpower”) that candidates crave. Even though Hillary and the other Democrat hopefuls don’t agree with many of their positions, they’re hoping enough of them can be co-opted into supporting them during the primary season.

I believe the Democrats are playing a dangerous game. Hillary and the others are banking on voters’ short memories, hoping that we won’t remember in November 2008 what they’re saying and doing now to woo the Kos and Huffington crowd.

But with a 24 hour news cycle on cable television and the web, it can come back to haunt them. And I just can’t believe that conservative advocacy groups and Republican candidates won’t use quotes and footage from the DailyKos convention in commercials and direct mail.

One final note: Republican candidates and officials are often blasted in the mainstream media when they meet with Pat Robertson or speak at conservative universities such as Bob Jones or Liberty. But I haven’t heard a peep of criticism from that same media about Democrats attending the Daily Kos convention, where true hate speech is the order of the day.

Maybe I just don’t watch the right programs or read the right blogs or newspapers. But then again, maybe what Rush Limbaugh calls the “drive-by media” is actually biased. As my eleven-year old niece likes to say "Ya think?"

Recent opinion polls showed as much as 80 percent of Americans opposed to the bill. That means people of all political and ideological stripes didn’t want it to pass. Why?  I believe one of the major reasons (other than concerns about border security) was that Americans don't like cheating.
 

I have extensive personal experience dealing with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.  In 1985, I fell in love with a Canadian woman. We ended up spending $2,500 in attorney’s fees, government fees, medical examinations, background checks and travel costs. It took us about 6 months before she was issued a green card.

Actually, that turned out to be a fairly simple and inexpensive experience compared to what I observed 14 years later when I worked in the Bellingham, WA office of U.S. Congressman Jack Metcalf.  We assisted hundreds of people who were trying to immigrate here or bring family members into the U.S.  In some cases, they had spent tens of thousands of dollars, and were as many as 10 years into the process.  They ended up seeking the Congressman’s help because they found it hard to navigate the bureaucratic maze that was the INS.  Unfortunately, not all were successful.

To me, the "Grand Bargain" was no bargain to law abiding Americans and to those who spent a lot of time, effort, and money to come to this country legally. The legislation rewarded cheaters, those who unfairly jumped the line and now expect to become legal through legislative fiat. This cheating is also a major burden on taxpayers who foot the bill for schooling and medical care of illegal alien families.

We can’t forget another major group of cheaters:  the employers who hire illegal workers at very low wages and provide little if any benefits. This is plain and simply exploitation. It’s also unfair to employers who follow the law and don’t employ illegal aliens.

When I first learned about the “Grand Bargain”, I was willing to consider it, primarily because it was supported by one of my favorite conservative Senators, John Kyl of Arizona, and Georgia’s two Republican Senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson.

But as the details of the bill were revealed, it became evident in a short period of time that this was primarily an amnesty bill that paid little more than lip service to the concept of closing our borders to illegal aliens.

Supporters of the “Grand Bargain” say the bill was not amnesty, and they are technically right.  It did require them to pay a $5,000 fine, promise to stay out of legal trouble, promise to learn English.  That’s certainly a good deal for them… and it’s a raw deal for those Americans and would-be Americans who abide by our laws.

Rather than make changes that would correct major flaws in the legislation, its supporters attacked talk radio, bloggers, and the conservative Republican base as being racist, nativist, and xenophobic. And the vitriol still hasn’t stopped, even after the bill’s defeat.

We conservatives are used to hearing nasty slurs from Democrats and left-wing moon-bats, not from Republican Senators, Bush Administration officials, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News commentators and anchors.

Now we’re hearing that pro-illegal immigration groups are going to stage massive protests and demonstrations demanding their “rights.”  Yeah, that’s really going to convince people to support future immigration “reform” efforts.

The simple fact is that until Congress and the President come up with a proposal that doesn’t unduly reward cheaters, a majority of Americans will not support it. A good first step is to step up border enforcement, build the fence, and seriously go after employers who exploit illegal workers. Once we stop the bleeding, then we can perhaps consider how best to legalize those who a here illegally.