Just the stringent emissions requirements alone are adding several thousand dollars to the price of new cars. And the requirements that are upcoming will add $7000 to the price of each new car, according to the auto industry.

New car prices are getting out of reach for more and more Americans - the very Americans Democrats claim to most care about. Poorer Americans are forced to buy older cars, and will be left high and dry if the Draconian environmental policies of Democrats are put into practice.

Furthermore, Democrats - and in particular Barack Obama - continue to oppose nuclear power.

Apart from putting sails on cars, just how do Democrats expect Americans to drive?

Some more considerations…

Even if we had viable alternative energies for transportation available today (and we really don’t), it would take at least ten to fifteen years to wean us off of oil.

Most Americans don’t buy a new car every three years. I’ve had mine for 10 years now, and plan to keep it as long as I can. Most Americans don’t even buy new cars–they buy used.

Since the vast majority of engines on the highways today, including the 18-wheelers, are gasoline or diesel powered, it will take some time to replace all of those vehicles with an alternative-powered vehicle…unless the government comes in and mandates that all petroleum-driven vehicles be taken off the road immediately, in which case you will have a full-scale armed revolt.

And for all the talk about alternative energy for vehicles–electric, water, etc.–we are not producing them in large enough numbers to reduce our oil consumption in the near future. In short, we’re going to be needing that oil from the outer-continental shelf and ANWR, even if it does take 10 years to get here.

In addition, even if we had the technology today to make every car run on electricity, and the government gave every American a new electric car, we don’t have the power plants available to recharge them. Our power grid is already stretched to the breaking point. Remeber the brown-outs and rolling blackouts of a few years ago? And the same environmentalists who are standing in the way of oil production are also standing in the way of building new power plants, running transmission lines, and even building solar power projects in the Southwest.

Did Pres. Clinton appoint Clark because of a card-carrying liberal ideology? Did he have the same litmus test w/ his generals that he had for his Supreme Court picks (Ginsburg)?

Bill Clinton may have uttered the most despicable comment about McCain of all: he said that POWs could essentially go nuts at any moment. He denied that he was referring to John McCain, but for all of his many faults, Bill Clinton is not a stupid man.

Short of actually being killed in combat (and dead men do not good presidential candidates make), what could possibly prepare a Commander-in-Chief for the horrors of war more than having been badly injured, and then having been tortured as a POW? McCain is the first former POW to run for president. No one knows what it means to send young men into harm’s way as he does.

Good point about Clark’s schizophrenic and hypocritical commentary re: Kerry’s vs. McCain’s military service.

Last go around, Clark crowed endlessly about Kerry’s service, and how horrible it was that anyone would doubt Kerry’s integrity. He held Kerry up as a hero and ABSOLUTELY advertised his service as a reason why Kerry was fit to be commander in chief.

Now he flip flops right on his face - as he usually does.

Conservatives flip flop from time to time, but they don’t throw any vet under the bus unless that vet is out there denigrating our troops - like Kerry did.

They are two peas in a pod.

Clark is a disgrace to the uniform and it’s a tragedy our soldiers and vets had to listen to him denigrate their service in such a way.

He had NO reason to even bring the issue up other than to attack something honorable about another man.

What a truly stupid man he is.

Danny Vice
http://www.theweeklyvice.com

Thanks for your kind comments. There’s a new post on Cindy McCain. Take a look at
http://hillarynme.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/warming-up-to-cindy-mccain.

The media has spent so much time on Michelle, I felt Cindy should get a once over.

One of the article I linked to actually DID contain a proviso for payroll taxes, and the rich STILL paid a massive overall percentage of taxes.

But there’s something that needs to be understood about programs such as Social Security and Medicare: the rich do not get to benefit from them any more than the poor; and there are even moves afoot to eliminate people who earn over a couple hundred thousand a year from benefiting from them at all. The question becomes: why should the rich pay for everyone else’s retirement when they are already paying a massive percentage of the other taxes? Are you trying to claim that the rich should pay for everything? Should I quit my job and wait for rich people to subsidize me? Let me know: I’d like to retire and let someone else pay my way!

As for your last point, I KIND of agree. I agree that we have a big problem today. Our businesses are beginning to pursue the social Darwinism that goes hand in hand with kicking God out of society. Now we’ve got to deal with the rampant amorality that religious people warned us about. But I am one that looks at the millions and millions of pages of laws we now have on the books and I say, “All we need is one more law!” You can’t legislate morality, the lack of which is the real problem. “More regulation” invariably ends up being “more byzantine regulation.” And the more burdensome regulation becomes, the greater the lengths businesses - especially dishonest ones - will go to avoid the burdens.

What we need to do is work to make the financial system more SIMPLE and more OPEN, so that the people know who the dishonest cheats are and can act accordingly.

But what about all the other taxes that are regressive? Property, sales, payroll? Or the way government has toed the line on holding down income tax, but replaced it was “user -fees”? Many of these types of taxes fall heavier on the lower half than the upper half.

In MN you can look at the chart 1-5 on page 27 of this report, the top 10% are projected to pay a lower percentage of their income in state and local taxes in 2009 than any other group.

http://www.taxes.state.mn.us/legal_policy/other_supporting_content/07_incidence_report_links.pdf

I bet you and I could agree, well maybe we could agree, that we need more regulation to stop the fiscal shell games that some corporations have turned to. Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson, United Health Group with their back dating of stock options, and the list goes on.

Lay lent Dubya his company plane to campaign against Gore in 2000.