More people abandon the Democrats

What’s new Today

Our #1 story is bad news for the Democrats.   More and more people are affiliated with the Republicans and fewer are affiliated with the Democrats.  It’s in line with the current Gallup polls that say Obama has an approval rating of approximately 42%.  #2 talks about how the Democrats are reinventing history.  In other words, reality is not what they claim it is.  #3 is great news.  New technology is opening up more and more oil.  Experts are saying that we will soon be an energy exporting nation.  #4 Dave Berry takes a look at 2011.  #5 runs against everything the left thinks finding that Gorden Gecko was right, “Greed is good.”  Well at least is works better than what Obama is giving us.

1.  Rasmussen: Republicans gain and Democrats Lose in Party Affiliation

The number of Republicans in the country increased by a percentage point in December, while the number of Democrats fell back two points to the lowest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports.

During December, 35.4% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 34.3%   in November and just below the high for the year of 35.6% reached in May.

At the same time, just 32.7% of adults said they were Democrats, down from 34.9% in November. The previous low for Democrats was 33.0% in August of this year. .

The number of voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties rose to 32.0% in December from 30.8% the month before.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/partisan_trends

More bad news if you are a Democrat. Looking at the numbers and using Gallup’s support by categories, Obama’s support works out to 41.6%.  At the same time in Reagan’s presidency his approval was 51.4%.  

2.  Obama’s strategy:  Lie

…But to really enter the Twilight Zone, consider these two priceless sentences from the Times story: “Winning a full-year extension of the payroll tax, Mr. Earnest said, will still be a top priority. He noted that House Republicans were now also arguing that it should be extended for a year, after some initially opposed extending it at all.”

Come again? On December 13, the GOP House passed a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut – and was promptly criticized by – you guessed it — the president. Obama favored a much shorter, two-month extension. House Republicans, under intense political pressure, eventually agreed to the two-month extension. Now the White House is declaring a full-year extension is a “top priority.” Yet as recently as three weeks ago the opposition to the president’s “top priority” came not from House Republicans but from Obama himself.

We are now reaching the point in which the president is running a truly post-modern campaign, in which there is no objective truth but simply narrative. Obama’s campaign isn’t simply distorting the facts; it is inverting them. This kind of thing isn’t unusual to find in the academy. But to see a president and his campaign so thoroughly deconstruct truth in order to maintain power is quite rare. The sheer audacity of Obama’s cynicism is a wonder of the modern world.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/01/02/obama-re-election-congress/

In the movie A Few Good Men, Jack Nickolson has the line when asked by Tom Cruise for the truth.  Nickolson’s character says, “You can’t handle the truth.”  That appears what is going on with BHO in his reelection campaign.  They can’t handle the truth so they don’t plan to use it in the campaign.

  

3.   America’s Future:  Oil exports

A rush of recent reports indicates that the explosion of non-conventional fossil fuel production continues to transform the world. (Non-conventional fossil fuel production is the production of oil and natural gas by hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling.) In fact, 2011 will mark a major turning point in energy production worldwide -- one with profound geopolitical consequences.

The first report is that Anadarko Petroleum has just raised its estimate for its Colorado Wattenberg field holdings. Anadarko estimates that the field will yield more than one billion barrels of oil and national gas. This would place it right up there with the now-legendary Bakken shale field (in North Dakota) and the Eagle Ford formation (in Texas).

The second story is that North Dakota hit a record high oil production in October of 488,000 barrels per day (bpd). This was up 100,000 bpd (or 25%) from June's production. Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, projects that the state's total oil production will exceed 500,000 bpd next year and 900,000 bpd the year after that. The state will soon surpass California (539,000 bpd) and Alaska (550,000 bpd), rivaling top-producing Texas (1.2 million bpd).

Another story reinforces these bracing estimates. The National Petroleum Council estimates that by 2035 -- if the regulators will just stop endlessly excreting new hurdles -- the U.S. will hit 3 million bpd of shale oil alone. There are about 14 to 16 new American shale oil fields just starting to be exploited.

This has led the federal Energy Information Administration to raise its estimates for total American liquid fuel output by nearly 40% -- for next year alone!...

…. For decades, the environmentalist fanatics have repeated the Malthusian myth that we are running out of fossil fuels. But the whole Thanatos-worshiping pagan enviro-religion is now facing its Copernican challenge.


http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/unlimited_domestic_energyright_now.html#ixzz1iOcLlRg9

This is revolutionary.  An oil boom like this will bring prosperity to America, raise the value of the dollar, while making our industry much more competitive.  The so-called “green energy” boom which was supposed to create 5 million jobs is nothing but an illusion, but this is reality.

4.  Dave Berry looks back at 2011

It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the gulf oil spill.

Granted, the oil spill was bad. But it did not result in a high-decibel, weeks-long national conversation about a bulge in a congressman’s underpants.  Which is exactly what we had in the Festival of Sleaze that was 2011. Remember? There were days when you could not escape The Bulge.  At dinnertime, parents of young children had to be constantly ready to hurl themselves in front of their TV screens, for fear that it would suddenly appear on the news in high definition. For a brief (Har!) period, The Bulge was more famous than Justin Bieber.

And when, at last, we were done with The Bulge, and we were able to turn our attention to the presidential election, and the important issues facing us, as a nation, in these troubled times, it turned out that the main issue, to judge by quantity of press coverage, was: groping.  

So finally, repelled by the drainage ditch that our political system has become, we turned for escape to an institution that represents all that is pure and wholesome and decent in America today: college football.

That was when we started to have fond memories of the oil spill...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/dave-barrys-year-in-review-the-2011-festival-of-sleaze/2011/12/08/gIQAyK5QTP_story.html

How can you not enjoy Berry?  This is from the first page of a five page article. 

5.  Greed is Good

…In a free-market system, in order for one to get more for himself, he must serve his fellow man. This is precisely what Adam Smith, the father of economics, meant when he said in "An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (1776):

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest…."

…Free-market capitalism is relatively new in human history. Before the rise of capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man.

Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving one's fellow man. Capitalists seek to discover what people want and then produce it as efficiently as possible.

Free-market capitalism is ruthless in its profit and loss discipline. This explains much of the hostility toward free-market capitalism; some of it is held by businessmen….

…Free-market capitalism has other enemies -- mostly among the intellectual elite and political tyrants. These are people who believe that they have superior wisdom to the masses and that God has ordained them to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us.

Of course, they have what they consider to be good reasons for restricting liberty, but every tyrant who has ever lived has had what he considered good reason for restricting liberty.

A tyrant's agenda calls for the attenuation or the elimination of the market and what is implied by it -- voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people acting voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. They want to replace the market with economic planning and regulation….

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2012/01/heres-why-i-love-greed-and-so-should-you/2054186#ixzz1iQWgh8Zt

The last paragraph I copied explains my distrust of government and the regulations that come forth from Washington.  The people in government are not saints.