Roy Barnes can't have it both ways

Nathan Deal resigned to run for Governor Tom Graves endorsed by Redstate's Erick Erickson 

"Figures often beguile me," wrote Mark Twain, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

Smaller Government, Character and Integrity Warren Auld for State House website Warren Auld on Facebook

Former Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, not one of my favorite politicians, used to say "all politics are local."  While I did not like his policies, he was right about the root of political action.

Those who follow my articles know my focus is mainly on the trillions of tax payer dollars controlled in Washington, D.C., and that I have very often described D.C. pork and much of state and local affairs as “puny” by comparison.

No more!

Gamecock announces the dawn of his grassroots government epiphany

Events since my return to my adopted hometown encompassing Metro Atlanta, have made me increasingly aware that we are doing ourselves a great disservice by failing to understand politics in our own backyard. In light of this concern, I plan to devote a series of articles to politics and elections on the state level in Georgia and particularly in DeKalb and Gwinnett Counties.  While some of these events and races are not in your backyard, they do instruct us on the need to keep an eye on those close to us.

The view from Stone Mountain of Georgia

Politics and money are almost synonyms.  Where one is, you find the other.  Because local politicians have tremendous control over the everyday aspects of our lives, it is important to know that we can trust them not only with our laws but with our money. In the wake of the recent removal Glen Richardson as Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, (highlighted by Erick Erickson of Redstate), many local legislators make public promises to control the corrupting influence of money by way of ethics reform. 

Unfortunately, the bright light of promise has dimmed as public attention has been driven to other concerns, like the refusal of bleeding heart public university professors to bleed their wallets so that lower income students can afford higher education in Georgia, but I digress.

The ethic of following through on ethics legislation

One of the more important pieces of ethics legislation is House Bill 920 which promises to provide for a cap on the amount of any gift from a lobbyist to any elected official.  However, this bill has languished in committee, with no apparent action since the middle of January.

The ethic of getting re-elected seems to trump true concern for ethics, even for the sponsors of ethics legislation, like Ga. Rep. Len Walker (R-107), whose district touches part of Gwinnett County. While his ethics bill languishes, he pushes a food stamp bill that could hardly have been written more specifically to benefit his own Angel Food Ministries business. Walker emphasizes that House Bill 1054 would benefit the poor by enabling them to use food stamps for online purchases. Yes, and some General Motors customers benefited from (our) cash for clunkers as GM execs live on our bailout funds. The fact is that on-line food stamp purchases would greatly increase the risk of fraud in the spending our tax dollars.

The AJC also reports that Walker receives a salary of $50,000.00 a year from the non-profit that reportedly brings in more than $140 million a year in food sales. Walker’s bill would likely increase this income through online sales. If you recognize the name Angel Foods, it is probably because you read that they are under investigation by the FBI because of the multi-million dollar salaries this ministry has paid its top executives.

The better angels of their nature prefer profit-increasing laws to that of the ethics variety

Another politician showing an apparent lapse in ethical concern owns a private probation company which contracts with local governments around the state, including Gwinnett County, to manage probation for those criminals.  Normally, I applaud some privatization of local government services, but not in the area of law enforcement and corrections, and I am a little skeptical when the same lawmaker who controls legislation for the government agency sells his product to that very same agency.    Consider that in March of 2009, Rep. Clay Cox (R-Lilburn), in Gwinnett County, introduced a bill which reportedly would severely limit state accountability and oversight of these very contracts. The bill of which his company would be direct beneficiary would end almost all scrutiny of his contract with local governments. After some public outcry, Cox withdrew his bill.  Cox has announced that he will run for John Linder’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Its not their money!

Finally, in this not so honorable roll call of Georgia Republicans, there is the case of the former Mayor of Snellville, Brett Harrell, who has announced his candidacy for the vacant State House District 106 race, also a Gwinnett County seat.  Harrell left the mayor’s office some years back to take a position as Executive Director of the Evermore Community Improvement District.  

For those of you that are unaware of the sea of local politics, a Community Improvement District or CID is a self-taxing entity comprised of business owners with the general mission of fostering economic growth. I like private enterprise helping itself, but these CID's are also the recipients of massive amounts of Federal, State and local taxes and they bear watching as well. 

In 2009 the Board of Directors of the Gwinnett County Evermore CID, fired its Executive Director, Brett Harrell.  During the protracted fight to fire him, which required the intervention of a Superior Court judge, it was reported that Harrell had been directing more than the business of the CID.  Apparently Harrell had used his own printing companies for more than $32,000.00 of CID business.  It is reported that there was no competitive bidding, and that one of the CID Board members was also the manager of at least one of Harrell’s printing companies.  

Would the citizens of Gwinnett County want Harrell to have even greater control over more of their tax dollars as a state legislature after having been fired for abuse of power in handling the smaller amounts he controlled with the CID? I hope not.

The problem is not only that all efforts to put in place ethical boundaries continue to flounder but these politicians and others like them do not seem to understand that our tax dollars are not for their personal gain. Not only do we need to pass the ethics legislation pending, we also need to stop politicians from getting rich from tax dollars.  New life needs to be found to complete the promise of ethics reform but it also needs to go further, we need reform that makes it unethical both at the state and local level to use political office for private personal gain. 

In the end, however, it seems our only real protection is the ballot box. We need to hold these three politicians and all those on every level accountable.  As long as we continue to elect people who believe our tax dollars exist for their own personal profit it may not matter how many ethics laws are proposed. We do need ethics legislation and we do need to elect ethical legislators.

The smaller the government, the better

But, maybe most importantly, we need less government involvement in fewer aspects of our lives, so that the temptation for elected officials to use our tax dollars and our liberty as their personal play things is less available to them. For the fact of the matter is that even a bigger government comprised of Popes and Billy Grahams would be less respectful of life, liberty and happiness pursuits than a small government comprised of felons!

Maybe that overstates the case a bit, but we know the free market decisions of thousands and millions is a better arbiter of what’s fair and productive than that of government planning by elites in most instances. But given the ethically-challenged examples of pork, special favors for particular businesses, and conflicts of interests; you will never hear this rooster crow that such issues are puny ever again, even if their total dollar impact is less than federal entitlements.

Yes, character may matter more in the executive than in the legislature, given that we get to see the written laws they vote on, and can vote them out at the next election. But the impact on particular businesses that don’t get government favors can be very long lasting. For, unlike the ability to expand the economic pie in a free market, government largess limits the size of the pie for all.

And in Georgia, we need bigger pies for our peaches!

The failures of all conservatives for last 45 years, not just the failures of Reagan's social conservatives for the past 30 years, have led to the present circumstance.



Recent remarks by James Dobson of Focus on the Family (referred to below) concerning the culture battles/war have been picked up on by the Drive-by Media to declare victory over the supposed theocracy-seeking social conservatives in that war and to blame "radical right wingers" for recent GOP election losses.

Such is par for the course from the Left. What troubles me more is when conservatives echo such claims, especially such thoughtful ones as Sandra Wise, as in her recent "We have lost the culture wars", Words to the Wise:

Dr. James Dobson was widely criticized for recently making the statement that we have lost the culture wars. I saw him on Hannity this past week and he backtracked a little. He clarified himself by saying that we've lost the current battle, but not the war. He talked specifically about abortion, and the fact that all of the progress that had been made is currently being rolled back by the Obama administration. He believes that even partial birth abortion will be legalized again.

I think Dr. Dobson is too pessimistic and quite inaccurate concerning abortion. Yes, the odds are great that we won't be able appoint a fifth vote to reverse Roe v. Wade on the Supreme Court given the Democratic Party majorities in the U.S. Senate and the Death Cultist in the White House, but the odds favor maintaining the current five-vote majority in favor of many state restrictions that fall short of reversal of Roe.

Dr. Larry Sabato has just published a book which explains the overwhelming Democrat gains in the last election. He believes that any Democrat candidate would have won the Presidency and that it was not all about Obama as everyone thinks. Sabato explained, in an interview this morning on Fox News, how the changes in the demographics of the country affected the last election.

One, the growth of the minority population which voted overwhelmingly Democrat, and the youth vote. He pointed out that younger people tend to be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. These trends will continue and I don't see the country moving back to being conservative on social issues any time soon. In the next few years, States will continue to legalize gay marriage, as the country moves more and more towards accepting gay marriage as a civil rights issue.

I think that Dobson was right the first time. We have lost the culture wars. The battle lines were drawn in the last election and we lost big time.

I haven't read Sabato's book, but am aware that McCain led Obama post-Palin and pre-credit crunch when the moderate Republicans candidate of choice since 2000 blew the election by agreeing with his Democrat opponent to pull the TARP over our eyes.

I know that Obama won by less than overwhelming margin that could easily have been overcome with a more enthusiastic conservative base. I also know that social issues played insignificant roles in the 2008 national election dominated by the economy and the 2006 congressional elections dominated by the Iraq War.

Yes, young people are more socially liberal than the general population, but they are more pro-life than baby boomers. Yes, blacks registered in record numbers to vote for the first viable black candidate, but they are more socially conservative than the general population. Sandra, "states" are not "continu[ing] to legalize gay marriage, as the real "movement", defined by the preponderance of actual laws passed, in the country has been We the People in referenda and state legislatures passing laws and Constitutional amendments defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman.

No referenda by citizens of a state and only one state legislature has approved of gay marriage. Even the citizens of the deep blue states of California and Massachusetts, when given the chance, have rejected gay marriage. The only "movement" towards changing such laws is the same movement we have been losing in the courts since the 1940s, and especially since the 1960s.

Conservatives have been losing the culture wars primarily within the culture, not politics, for 50 years primarily due to non-participation of enough conservatives in the institutions of the culture, i.e. press, law, academia and Hollywood, and also due to un-elected judges and the federal bureaucracy.

When conservatives gain control of the bureaucracy or the congress/white house, we play too nice.

Social conservatives entered the political arena precisely because their free speech rights were threatened and due to abortion, etc and other laws being imposed by secularists via judges, etc thus usurping we the peoples' right to self government, Liberty.

We are happy to compete within the federalist system and the culture, in the arena of ideas and let the chips fall where they may. We came into the national political arena due to usurpation of our Liberty.

Had other conservatives helped both before and after Dobson and Reagan entered the fray, and had the political spine to fire bureaucrats and "Bork" their judges been present (albeit based not on personal smears, but rather via objections to the unconstitutional Oath violating "living Constitution" interpretation mode), we would have fared better in the culture wars.

Of course, there is much truth to the idea that Christians and other so-cons may have invested too much in the political arena. After all the main purpose of the Church is the saving of souls and even if Roe is overturned, one must still win the hearts and minds of people in states. But, we must not be doing so very badly given gay marriage votes and the deep drop in the number of abortions.

This member of We the People has not, and never will, give up on cultural battles, much less the war, and given the Obamanation we are witnessing, I suspect a GOP comeback that will be partially driven by revulsion at the far left non-values of the DC Democrats that are anathema to the traditional Judeo-Christian values a large majority (76%) of Americans still hold.

Originally published @ Examiner.com, where all for verification links may be accessed, including Reagan's own words on abortion and the culture war.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer, Examiner.com and Minority Report columns

"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson

<a href="http://technorati.com/claim/hmudi89dnv" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

Originally Posted by Gamecock on Monday, May 28, 2007 10:33:38 AM

Originally published by Mike "gamecock" DeVine as Charlotte Law and Civil Rights Examiner for Examiner.com

What is the big hurry in “declaring” the winner of North Carolina’s electoral votes in the presidential election? Especially since the outcome will not slow down the transition of President-Elect Barack Obama?

The day after the election, AP reported:

“In the unofficial returns, Obama led Republican John McCain by 13,746 votes. Gary Bartlett, the state elections director, said Obama should be considered the unofficial victor. Bartlett said an estimated 40,000 provisional ballots still must be counted, but based on experience, the outcome is not likely to change when the State Board of Elections certifies the results on Nov. 25.”

Electors don’t meet until December 15th, the Joint Session of Congress to count the votes isn’t until January 6th and Inauguration Day isn’t until January 20th.

The Tar Heel state’s election official responsible for carrying out the law gives the AP license to report what “should” be, based on “experience”? After Florida 2000? And just what is the “experience” Bartlett relies upon: that “history suggests that “about 65%” of provisional ballots will be eligible.

The math: Sixty-Five percent of 40,000 equals 26,000, which just happens to be about twice as many votes John McCain needs to win North Carolina.

On Wednesday, the AP and Charlotte Observer (in none of these stories would any actual reporter attack their name to such incompetence) declared “Obama's bid to win North Carolina – now only symbolic” with provisional ballots “holding up” a decision.

What happened to McCain’s “bid”? And how dare those voters hold up a rush to coronate Obama by voting provisionally?

And the outcome is “only” symbolic? If symbolism didn’t matter to Bartlett and his agent, the Associated Press, there would have been no rush to judgment on Friday:

“The Associated Press declared Obama the winner after canvassing counties in North Carolina to determine the number of outstanding provisional ballots. That survey found there aren't enough remaining ballots for Republican John McCain to close a 13,693-vote deficit.”

Clearly AP should replace Johnny, as in “Johnny can’t count.”

Symbols matter, and the AP, aided and abetted by a North Carolina government official, has prematurely foisted a symbol they prefer upon the history books.

That is, until their “history” was examined by DeVine Law.

And this does not even account for all the millions of absentee ballots. For that story check fellow Charlotte political examiner, Caleb Howe.

It seems the process is being carried out and reported by monkeys that don’t want to see or hear anything they don’t want to say about the only bid they care about, i.e. Obama's bid.

Mike DeVine’s Examiner.com and Charlotte Observer columns.

"One man with courage makes a majority." -  Andrew Jackson

[For links to AP stories cited in this article see original story at Examiner.com]

“Small businesses should be making business decisions, not tax decisions.”

So declared John McCain’s friendliest vanquished rival for the Republican presidential nomination during a campaign rally in Charlotte last week that skewered Barack Obama for change small businesses can’t believe in.

Former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee minced no words in his condemnation of changes the Democratic presidential nominee proposes that would raise taxes on small businesses.

Adam Barrington, an ordained minister and former homeless shelter administrator (pictured right with Huckabee), served as our eyes and ears during the McCain-Palin rally last Wednesday at Hef’s Bar & Grill:

“[Huckabee delivered] a general stump speech for McCain, but the one thing that stuck out was [that] he talked about how small businesses are going to get screwed under Obama.  He talked about a mom and pop pizza place…that employs 45 people… [that], with rising energy and fuel costs [and] their profit margins…shrinking, [would] have to lay people off to pay their tax bill (under Obama’s tax plan).”

Huckabee’s indictment of Obama’s policies concerning existing businesses comes on the heels of Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s concerning disincentives to start new businesses. When confronted by Joe, the junior Senator from Illinois declared that it was “good for everybody” to “spread the wealth around.”

One wonders how much wealth won’t be available for spreading around if Obama has his way, since he would:

1) allow the Bush income tax rate cuts to expire in 2010, costing families of four making as little as $60K, up to $2000 per year;
2) raise the level of income against which Social Security Payroll (FICA) taxes apply;
3) increase the “death tax”; and
4) increase income and capital gains taxes for families earning more than $250K per year.

Most jobs in this country are created by small businesses. Obama touts his policies as friendly to small business since “most” would not be affected by numbers (3) and (4) above, never mind the devastating effect of number (2) on them. But Obama’s law changes would apply to more than half of all income produced by such businesses, earned by the very ones that are the large job producers.

All of the above is proposed amidst an unprecedented financial crisis and negative GDP growth, despite Obama’s admission that he would consider suspending his tax law changes, IF the economy was bad.

If?

One is reminded of his criticism of President Clinton’s capital gains tax cuts during a debate last spring with Hillary Clinton in which, despite being informed by moderator Charlie Gibson that revenues increased after the rate cuts, Obama still favored higher rates due to concerns of “fairness”. What is “fair” about such policies that result in less wealth to spread around and less revenue to the government was not addressed.

By contrast, John McCain would lower the U.S. corporate tax rate, which is one of the highest in the industrialized world; make the Bush tax rate cuts permanent and lower the capital gains rate.

Calvin Coolidge famously said that “The business of America is business.”

One would hope!

But the results of this examination conclude that if we want more business, we had best hope we don’t get the tax “fairness” changes Obama believes in.
 

Originally published by Mike DeVine, as legal editor for The Minority Report

Want to force the Drive-by media to cover Obama's rejection of the wisdom of America's Founding Fathers and our Constitution that produced the greatest nation on Earth?

Then Obama should be the keynote star speaker at every McCain-Palin campaign event. Play tapes of his anti-American screeds.

One has to question whether many voters that are up for grabs will immediately understand, given our woeful education system partially taken over by socialists that control the schools, Obama's contempt for American exceptional-ism and the import of his words:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples.

So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.

It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.

It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.

One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

......

Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.

You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.

The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts.

McCain should play Obama's voice over the loud speakers at every stop and then deconstruct his words as revealing a man that could not, in good faith, uphold the required Oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the precious document he trashes as "fundamentally flawed" above.

Obama sees the Constitution as only a negative document. It is, in that it limits government, but it also positively protects Liberty in so doing.

Obama loves government power, not Liberty for We the People and sees the Warren Court as not having gone far enough! Under a constitution written from the Marxist dreams of his once-met Kenyan "father" (Another Messiah's with no birth certificate and questions about his father, but this one photo-shopped a fake one and dreams of an atheist Kenyan Father while studying at the knee of a Hawaiian.), not only would a Warren Court let off a murderer that wasn't read his "Miranda rights", it would make the government a conviction-proof robber of your wealth to spread around the 'hood like a piece of the action by him as Boss/Godfather.

The U.S. Constitution is the oldest ongoing governing document on earth. The Liberty it unleashed has produced the marvel of what man can accomplish in the history of the world. How five percent of the world's population can create such great technological progress and share it. How the poor here would be considered upper middle class most places since the 1830's. How it set the stage for the only nation to fight a war and then eliminate slavery on moral grounds. How it is the magnet for the dispossessed and even put up a Statue of Liberty to beckon them.

How we produced enough wealth to build a defense strong enough to defend against enslaving megalomaniacs and be responsible for the greatest explosion of free peoples in history, within and beyond our borders in a benevolence unheard of by previous empires.

And as Colin Powell said before he lost his way, the only land we asked for from the liberated was enough to bury the dead that died for their liberty.

Obama considers that Constitution to be fatally flawed because it limits the power of government to control us.

My God! The miracle of the document is how it limits the government so that the potential of free human beings is unleashed.

Obama doesn't understand that the "negative" document is under girded by a Declaration of Independence that sees our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (especially including the right to keep the fruits of our labor as private property), as Creator-God given. He doesn't understand, or doesn't care, that the secret to why we have so much wealth that he would like to spread to favored groups as pieces of the action is the incentive of the right to private property. God knows he admitted that the question of when humans get the right to life is above his pay grade.

No, Obama hates the Constitution and would rather July 4, commemorate a Declaration of Dependence on his government. How can he take the Oath? Especially on a Bible that contains within the other great pillar of our exceptionalism, i.e. Judeo-Christian values.

No, this is not a claim that he is a Muslim. In fact, this rooster could name many Muslims that I would happily vote for President given their love and allegiance for The Founders and the Constitution and their advocacy of our shared values.

But Obama, like many that attend Christian churches, has a different view. Let his own words indict his contrary world view.

And even there, he has a contrary view.

“I’m rooted in the Christian tradition,” said Obama, who has declared himself a Christian. But then he adds something that most Christians will see as universalism: “I believe there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.”

Falsani correctly brings up John 14:6 (and how many journalists would know such a verse, much less ask a question based on it?) in which Jesus says of Himself, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” That sounds pretty exclusive, but Obama says it depends on how this verse is heard. According to Falsani, Obama thinks that “all people of faith — Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, everyone — know the same God.” (her words)

If that is so, Jesus wasted his time coming to Earth and he certainly did not have to suffer the pain of rejection and crucifixion if there are ways to God other than through Himself.

Here’s Obama telling Falsani, “The difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that if people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they’re going to hell.” Falsani adds, “Obama doesn’t believe he, or anyone else, will go to hell. But he’s not sure he’ll be going to heaven, either.”

Here’s Obama again: “I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I’ve been a good father to them, and I see that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they’re kind people and that they’re honest people, and they’re curious people, that’s a little piece of heaven.”

Any first-year seminary student could deconstruct such “works salvation” and wishful thinking. Obama either hasn’t read the Bible, or if he has, doesn’t believe it if he embraces such thin theological gruel.

Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement. One cannot deny central tenets of the Christian faith, including the deity and uniqueness of Christ as the sole mediator between God and Man and be a Christian. Such people do have a label applied to them in Scripture. They are called a “false prophet.”

I hope some national journalist or commentator with knowledge of such things asks Obama about this and doesn’t let him get away with re-writing Scripture to suit his political ends.

Obama is not one of us.

I actually have sympathy for Obama and his father-, and mother-(she was a Marxist, too) challenged childhood. No one gets to pick their parents.

But we do get to accept or reject our nation's heritage, a heritage, that in his case, provided him with a good life, liberty, including, education and the pursuit of happiness, including great wealth.

He explicitely rejects what produced that great life.

He rejects the Father of our Country.

We that embrace that George Washington and his fellow Founders of this nation and Framers of the Constitution, and who love the actual United States of America with its glorious history, must reject Obama and the America he would found, or reap the whirlwind.

Vote McCain-Palin!

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns

"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson

A Piece of the Action

Co-authored by Mike DeVine, Legal Editor and Pilgrim

Whether its Obama as Da' Boss:

<OBJECT class=BLOG_video_class id=BLOG_video-d8ccf639d4c9dbf4 height=266 width=320 contentId="d8ccf639d4c9dbf4">Cooperate, and we'll cut you in.</OBJECT>

Or Obama as Godfather:

"One day I will come to you and ask you to do me a favor." - Marlon Brando (scratching his face with his middle finger) as Don Corleone in The Godfather

The Obama family syndicate only makes offers you can't refuse, and it won't matter whether his favor to you was "a hit" on the occasion of his daughter's wedding or a Newport on the occasion of an ACORN voter registration drive.

Michelle says Barack will make you work. Obama says your children must learn Spanish lest you embarrass the nation during your next trip to Paris. You can no longer drive your SUVs and eat all you want and expect the rest of the world to say, "OK."

Naw, naw, naw, this is post-God damned America. From now on it will be the Chicago Way with Pelosi and Reid as made-family members.

And what is Obama's way? The Boss does favors for those that make the demanded protection money pay-offs. For the rest, he clears the field.

When faced with non-Maryland-carpetbagger political opponents in Illinois, he got them thrown off the ballot via petition challenges or post-leaked divorce files filled with bitter spousal hearsay.

Dare to utter a disparaging word on radio about his cronies and pals that lived lives when he was eight years old? WGN-AM gets deluged with irate callers denouncing blasphemy. Final field sweeping will be his Maid Nancy's task with the "Fairness Doctrine" as the broom.

All criticisms are deemed racist, actionable hate-speech, even if you were America's First Black President named Clinton.

Ask a spread-the-wealth stuttering-admission producing question on a rope line? Prepare for the full-court MSM anal exam.

And btw pal, check here to join the union. The location of secret ballots is a secret.

Under what Michael Barone dubbed <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YjUwZWIwZTNhY2Y0YTFkYzFmZTIyZWUwZWNkYjk4ZGM=">The Coming Obama Thugocracy</a>, there is but one Boss that can cut you in on a piece of the action. All of the action is government sponsored. make your pay-off (vote for Obama and accept membership in a family approved group) and you will get your piece, so long as that piece is less than $250K.

Sell your soul to Fannie Mae and Barney Frank and maybe you can get a bigger share.

As for the rest, your wealth will be spread around. Obama picks winners and losers much like Fannie picked winners and we all lost except Franklin Raines.

But don't mistake Obama for Robin Hood, who took back from the rich government what was stolen from his formerly Merry Men and Women (aka We The People).

No, Obama is the Sheriff of Nottingham. In most territories ruled by one boss, said boss took same by force in the beginning or was handed same by a fearful mob.

Fear is a great enemy of Liberty. Raines happened under Liberty, but, contrary to Obama and the Democrats' lie, we lost thanks to bad government policies, not due to greedy white people as CEOs.

We will suffer the consequences of those policies and our own affluent society, debt-driven moral irresponsibility, but the remedy isn't to shuck Liberty and what remains of our virtue, for a Boss.

Listen to one <a href="http://www.redstate.com/diaries/pilgrim/2008/oct/19/straight-talk-from-ayaan-about-the-free-marke/">Ayann Hirsi Ali</a>, that has lived under bosses abroad:

<blockquote>In the course of history, the search for perfect societies--that is, the failure to acknowledge human imperfection--almost always ended in one or another form of theocracy, authoritarianism, or violent anarchy. But for those who seek to work with human flaws of every stripe, and to increase the sum total of individual happiness, the free market, combined with political freedom, is the best way.</blockquote>

Under free market capitalism, there is much more action and many more winners with bigger pieces of the action.

We are at a crossroads. Obama has told his people to get in our faces. He doesn't want us to see any face but his face. The face we have been waiting for?

No.

What we must do now is look in the mirror and then look at the ground. The era of passing paper back and forth is over. The democrats have kept us from doing the real wealth creating work that relates to the ground, for 30 years.

The land, dear Scarlett is the only thing that lasts. And I don't mean a house substituting for a post-tech bubble stock. Live in your house (even if you rent) and dig into the ground again America.

Dig for oil and natural gas, and dig the foundations for new oil refineries and nuclear power plants. Want to plant a wind mill? That's cool too.

That is the path to prosperity.

Resist fleeing in fear into the arms of a Godfather or a Boss, not even The One.

Why settle for a piece of the action when you can take action and keep the pieces.

Vote McCain-Palin.

Mike DeVine’s <a href="http://gamecock.blogtownhall.com/default.aspx">Charlotte Observer columns</a>

"One man with courage makes a majority." -  Andrew Jackson