Bush’s 2009 budget projection                 $482 Billion Deficit

My July 29 correction of Bush’s budget    $789 Billion Deficit

                                                                            $482 Billion Deficit

                                                                           + $80 Billion war cost

                                                                         + $227 Billion borrowed from the Social Security Trust Funds

My July 31 correction                                $825 Billion Deficit ($789 Billion Deficit + $36 Billion Housing Bill)

Therefore, the actual deficit is about 73% greater than Bush’s very misleading number

Americans feel that politicians regularly lie and mislead them. However, it’s sad and dangerous for the country when the President of the United States starts acting like another politician – parsing, dissembling, misleading – even lying.

(Manassas, VA) The indictment of Senator Ted Stevens, the senior Republican in the U.S. Senate, is “just a symptom of the corruption that has infected Republicans and Democrats alike,” Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, said. “That infection is spreading rapidly through Washington and all of American politics, from the houses of Congress to the courthouses.”

“Sometimes, as in the ethanol subsidy program, or the bailout of the crooked mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the level of corruption is so large that it’s hard for the mind to grasp. It’s like an Enron a day,” he said.

“In 2006, the image of congressional Republicans as corrupt was a major factor in their loss of control of Congress. Since then, the Democrats are turning out to be just as bad, but the Republicans have done little to clean up their act.”

“Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, politicians of all stripes should understand that, since they won’t take action to clean up their own houses, the American people will do it for them,” he said.

The following is an e-mail that UltimateJohnMcCain.com publisher Richard A. Viguerie sent Tuesday to conservatives across the country:

Special Message to Conservatives

$4.00 Gas is a Teaching Moment for Conservatives

America’s energy problems have been brought to us courtesy of the
environmental movement and their political allies –
liberal Democrats and timid or complacent Republicans

Americans are justifiably upset with the high cost of gasoline and everything that depends on fuel—electricity, heating oil, food, truck transportation, airline tickets, and more.

Higher energy costs sets off a chain reaction that makes everything more expensive.

This public anger and alarm spells a major opportunity for conservatives because liberal policies and nonsensical regulations are directly responsible for higher energy prices. Energy prices provide a prime example to show how liberal policies are actually harmful to the poor, working families and the elderly – those whom liberal Democrats claim to be their “base.”

We conservatives must offer responsible, free-market solutions to this liberal mess.

In other words, this is a “teaching moment” for conservatives. We have a major opportunity to show the American public how the liberals have messed up their lives. High energy prices caused by bad liberal policies exemplify perfectly the differences between conservative principles and failed liberal ideology.

We must act now.

The biggest problem in doing this is our mindset. The lack of Republican leadership has put conservatives on the defense for so long that we’re forgetting how to play offense. So we in the conservative grassroots have to do the job ourselves. We’ve done it before—think of Catastrophic Health Act in the 80’s and HillaryCare in the ’90s. These successful battles were led by grass roots activist – not by national Republican leaders.

We’ve done it before and we can do it again.

We have to point out how the liberal worldview, which is that government – led by them, of course – needs to control everyone and everything. As with energy prices, central government control does not work.

In the attached article I give you the basic arguments we can use. We need to employ these arguments in every venue open to us including: talk radio, TV, press releases, syndicated columns, op-ed articles, newsletters, media interviews, letters to the editors, blogs, emails, and resolutions at political party meetings/conventions, local government meetings, political debates, etc., etc.

We have an opportunity for conservatives to take ownership of the #1 issue in America this summer and advance the conservative cause while putting the political left on the defensive.

Conservatives must provide the leadership because the establishment, big-government Republicans, as usual, have run for the tall grass and are AWOL.

When you look at the solutions that Democrats are offering to “fix” the energy crisis – more taxes and even proposals for socialization of the oil industry – and see the mostly timid, defensive solutions being offered by the Republican leadership – conservatives can see clearly that we must provide the missing leadership through our grass roots activism.

Let’s move on this one!

BELOW IS THE ARTICLE LINKED TO THE E-MAIL ABOVE. It is posted at http://conservativehq.com/news-from-the-front/liberalscausedcrisis.

As usual in a crisis, liberals are trying to take advantage of the situation. They are using the issue of high energy prices to push their agenda of oppressive regulation, ultra-high taxes, and the diversion of many billions of taxpayers’ dollars into “alternative fuel” efforts that, with few exceptions, are corporate-welfare scams.

Liberals want us to forget that they spent years pushing for higher prices. The New York Times, in an October 24, 2005 editorial, claimed that, “Cheap gas is no longer compatible with a secure nation, a healthy environment or a healthy economy – if ever it was.” On March 26, 2006, CNN’s Jack Cafferty said, “I hope gas prices go as high as they have to go to get the rest of these morons off the road in these big Hummers with the four wheel drive and the obscuring of the view for everybody else on the road...” The Christian Science Monitor, on May 12 of this year, in an editorial entitled “Why Pump Prices Need to Stay High,” declared, “Rather than prevent $4-a-gallon gas now, legislators should welcome it.”

Barack Obama June 10, 2008 on CNBC: “I think I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” Which is to say, he’s for making life uncomfortable for Americans, just more slowly.

In their desire to “punish” higher gas consumption by some, liberals are willing to make gas, home fuel, and all food and goods transported to stores more expensive. To “punish” Cadillac drivers, liberals have in fact punished working families – and the elderly and the poor are the hardest hit – by high costs of oil.

And liberals want us to forget how their policies pushed us toward their goal of higher gas prices. In fact, they want “Big Oil,” Bush, Republicans, and conservatives to get the blame for what they did. And liberals can’t let our problems be solved, because then we wouldn’t need liberals anymore!

We can make this a “teaching moment” by helping America and the world see the effect that liberal policies have on people’s lives. By making energy more expensive, liberal policies make people poorer. By keeping us energy-dependent on foreign governments, including repressive regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, liberal policies make the world a more dangerous place. By making energy more expensive and preventing use of domestic energy resources, liberals are causing the loss of American jobs. And by bottling up domestic energy resources through regulation, liberals encourage OPEC and other foreign oil sources to keep their prices inflated.

• Exploration and drilling for oil is banned in the Alaskan wasteland, even though the area proposed for such use is tiny – 2000 acres, an area smaller than Washington Dulles Airport, in a “wildlife refuge” of 19,600,000 acres, about the size of South Carolina.
• Of the 279 million acres of land under federal management where oil and natural gas could potentially be extracted, most is unavailable for exploration and drilling. Some 62% of all onshore lands are completely off-limits, and another 30% are tightly restricted.
• The government does not allow development of oil shale and tar sands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
• The government does not allow new drilling for oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, where there’s an estimated 86 billion barrels of undiscovered recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered recoverable natural gas. While U.S. companies can’t drill 100 miles off our shores, others, such as the partnership of Communist China and Cuba, can.

• Due to excessive regulation and environmental protests, not a single oil refinery has been built in the United States in over 30 years.
• For the same reasons, not a single nuclear power plant has been licensed in the United States in over 30 years.
• Liberal policies have tightly restricted the use of coal, which is abundant in the United States.
• Government regulations issued by liberals require that gasoline be reformulated for different regions of the country and different times of the year, causing simultaneous surpluses of some formulations and shortages of others, driving prices up and creating price disparities between different areas.
• Liberal regulations also require that gasoline blends include ethanol, which pollutes worse than gasoline, furthers the destruction of the rainforest so that land can be freed up for growing corn, and drives up the price of everything related to corn, from eggs (chicken feed is mostly corn) to soda pop (which is sweetened with corn syrup). By the way, about one-third of recent increases in food prices worldwide have been attributed to ethanol, which means that ethanol has put tens of millions of people in poor countries at risk for starvation. A tank of ethanol uses enough corn to feed a person for a year.
• Liberals raised taxes on gasoline so high that the government makes roughly four times as much on each gallon as the oil companies do. (Why doesn’t John McCain call that “obscene"?)
• And liberals hike oil prices indirectly by engaging in out-of-control government spending and over-regulation of investments, driving down the value of the dollar and making everything bought from other countries (such as oil) more expensive.

We need to make it clear to the American people that liberals are standing in the way of cheaper and more abundant energy. Americans aren’t radical environmentalists. Rather, we are, as a whole, practical and responsible conservationists. For example, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, Americans support drilling off the coasts of Florida and California by 67% to 18%. That support included 57% of Democrats.

In the 1970s, during an earlier energy crisis, liberals tried to take over the energy sector, with such policies as government price controls and “windfall profits taxes.” The result: They created gas lines, odd-even rationing, and Jimmy Carter’s Thermostat Police, all of which helped elect Ronald Reagan president. (Reagan then deregulated energy, which caused prices to drop and supplies to become abundant. “The economic realities of the marketplace,” he said, “have done more to bring down the price of oil than all those years of frenetic government regulating.”)

In the 1980s, liberals tried to dominate the foreign-policy debate, putting hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets in opposition to President Reagan’s policies on the Cold War. The result: They stigmatized themselves, for decades, as people who cozy up to dictators and who try to make America weak.

In the 1990s, liberals attempted, with HillaryCare, a government takeover of the most important one-seventh of the American economy. The result: They produced such revulsion at the prospect of bureaucratic healthcare rationing that the American people gave the Republicans control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

This time, as in the 1970s, liberals think they can use high energy prices to expand their power at the expense of all Americans. The liberal energy policies that concentrate power in Washington need to be repealed and replaced with practical and responsible policies based in the free market, policies that will open domestic energy production and reduce our dependency on foreign sources. This will:

• reduce energy prices for all Americans including working families, the poor and the elderly;
• reduce the costs of food and goods that must be transported to the market;
• increase our own security, and reduce world tensions;
• not just save American jobs being lost due to high energy costs, but actually increase the number of American jobs needed to tap into our vast but currently unused energy sources; and
• bring down the costs of what foreign oil we do import by using domestic sources (competition works!).

Halloween has come early this year: Republicans have forgotten how to run without scare tactics.
This year it’s Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s turn as the Democratic goblin, with House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as the witch on a broomstick. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is the vampire slayer and ghostbuster who will save us from the creatures of the night.
These fear tactics didn’t work in the three special House elections this year, and they’re not going to work in November.

Are we supposed to be scared of Democrats as big spenders? The Bush administration and congressional Republicans topped Democratic spending on every front.  Even excluding the “War on Terror,” Republicans have busted the budget.
The Democrats are going to raise our taxes? No doubt they will, but, because of the Republicans’ massive deficits, our children and grandchildren are going to be crushed by tax hikes or hyperinflation.
The Democrats are corrupt miscreants? Compared to the Bridge to Nowhere-planning, bribe-taking, page-trolling Republicans?
How about, as Bob Dole once put it, the threat of sending our youth off to “Democrat Wars”?
Never mind.

As it becomes more and more clear that the Republicans have nothing to run on, the campaign will get nastier and more personal, centered on Obama. As the real Halloween approaches, it will get worse and then continue until Election Day.
Fortunately for Obama, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has been hitting him with the Republican playbook for the past month or two, as she got more and more desperate. It didn’t work for her, and I don’t think it will work for Republicans.
To be sure, Obama has to define himself in positive tones before the Republicans succeed in defining him as a secret Muslim agent who’s going to sell us to terrorists. But he has by far the best campaign organization I’ve seen this year, and if, with much of the media in his pocket, they can’t get his message out, they deserve to lose.

Negative campaigning is not the culprit. The job in any campaign, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, is to stress your positives and just as strongly stress your opponent’s negatives. We’ve had negative campaigning in America since Colonial days, and it works. That’s why it doesn’t go away despite the sermons from the “good government” crowd.
No, the culprit is not negative campaigning, but rather, campaigning without ideas that are arguably better than your opponent’s, and relying instead on bogeyman portrayals.
McCain has been the victim of bogeyman campaigning himself, and I know him to be an honorable man who doesn’t want to win that way. The problem is that McCain doesn’t have a coherent set of ideas with which he can simultaneously fire up the conservative base and attract independents. He’s a part-time liberal in conservative clothing. Conservatives aren’t fooled by that, and liberals aren’t going to vote for a part-time liberal when they have a very persuasive full-time liberal to vote for.

Republicans on the Hill have no message of what they are for, what their principles are or how they would govern.  They can’t even agree to oppose big-government spending through earmarks.
“The lesser of two evils” is not a governing philosophy.  Yet Republicans repeatedly try to seduce conservatives with it. That strategy didn’t work in 1948, 1960, 1974, 1976, 1992 or 2006 — and it won’t work in 2008.
Obama isn’t a goblin, nor Pelosi a witch, but the Republican majority of the ‘90s and 2000s is Humpty Dumpty, prostrate and shattered.
Someday, the GOP will rid itself of the leaders who brought the party to this point. Or maybe it won’t, and a new movement or a new party will rise up as the principal opposition to the liberal Democrats.
Until then, anti-Obama-ism will inexorably sweep across the land like those zombies in “Night of the Living Dead.” Now that’s scary.

This could be seriously bad. Especially if the Main Stream Media gets it. You know, I have always suspected that McCain was dishonest. This simply proves it.
What this will do to John McCain's Presidential Campaign, is anyone's guess. But it will be interesting to see if the Blogging World and the Main Stream Media bothers to cover it.
So much for the policy of kicking out the Lobbyists out of his Campaign.
You know, I will just say what the Republicans will not say, because of their loyalty to their candidate. This is the very large distinction between the Paleo-Conservatives and the Constitution Party and the New or Neo-Conservatives and Republicans. The Neo-Con's know no integrity, if they smell money, they will go against the very fabric of the Principles of the United States of America to make a buck, even it means working for a Nation that was regarded as a Terrorist Nation.
It is a sad commentary of the present state of the Republican Party. One that makes me wretch in disgust.

Let’s just remember that 270 people died in the Pam Am flight that libya took down, and has never stood trial.  This is yet another lobbyist tied to the McCain campaign with deep ties to America hating countries.  This from the guy who has pledged to fight Washington Lobbyist.  Lobbyist are a vital culture of Washington, but it all depends on what and who they are lobbying for.

The ineptitiude of the McCain campaign no longer amazes me. I've come to expect it.

You might have figured that, after locking up the Republican nomination, Senator McCain would have moved to unite the party behind him.

...that he would have started naming conservatives to key posts in his campaign, both in workaday posts and in advisory positions, as a preview of the kind of people who would fill his administration.

...that he would have drawn up a platform of issues on which he agrees with the conservative mainstream, issues such as cutting earmarks, and stuck to talking about those things for a while.

...and that he would have kept his mouth shut about the Great Googly Moogly, known to members of the Al Gore cult as Global Warming, or, in case that warming thing doesn't pan out, Climate Change. Yes, by shutting up about GGM, he would have cost himself the energetic support of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but California is simply not in play in this election. (There is only one situation in which McCain might carry California against Barack Obama: if he wins in such a landslide that he doesn't need California.)

You might have figured that he would realize that, like every other political candidate, he needs his base to support him, or he's toast. But you would be wrong.

By failing to consolidate support among conservatives, McCain has handed a historic opportunity to Bob Barr, the former Congressman who just won the Libertarian Party nomination. A recent Rasmussen poll puts Barr at six percent, with Obama at 42, McCain at 38, and Nader at four. That means that, according to the poll, Barr's current vote is bigger than Obama's margin over McCain, and more than twice the size of the margin by which President Bush was reelected in 2004.

Ask Al Gore, who lost the 2000 election by 537 votes, about the effect that a "third party" candidate can have on the outcome. Ask President George H.W. Bush, who lost to Bill Clinton by six-and-a-half percent while Ross Perot, who ran mostly to Bush's right, polled 19 percent.

Or ask Barr's campaign manager, Russ Verney, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. Verney used to be the right-hand man to that Perot fellow.