From Power Line:

Barack Obama is a lot like Sean Penn or George Clooney. If you give him a script, he can deliver it pretty well. But if he tries to talk without a script that has been written for him by others, he quickly reveals that he is poorly-informed if not downright ignorant. Today he delivered another classic, by claiming that if only we would all properly inflate our tires, we could save as much gasoline as "all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling.

Just for fun, I did the math. Properly inflating your tires can improve gas mileage by 3%. Of course, many people already keep their tires properly inflated, and many more are at least close to being properly inflated. Let’s be generous and assume that one-half of the total possible savings would be realized if we all inflated our tires properly; that’s a net gain of 1.5% fuel efficiency.

Americans drive approximately 2,880 billion miles per year. If we average 24 mpg, we use around 120 billion gallons of gasoline in our vehicles. If, through perfect tire inflation, we improved our collective fuel efficiency by 1.5%, that would be 1.8 billion gallons. A barrel of oil produces around 20 gallons of gasoline, so the total savings available through tire inflation is approximately 90,000,000 barrels of oil annually.

How does this stack up against "all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling?"

ANWR: 10 billion barrels
Outer Continental Shelf: 18 billion barrels (estimated; the actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since exploration has been banned)
Oil shale: 1 trillion barrels

So, on the above assumptions, it would take only 11,308 years of proper tire inflation to equal "all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling."

Obama is a curious case. He gives the impression of being an intelligent guy, but through his unscripted comments we have learned that he knows little about history, science or mathematics. He also seems rather shockingly short on common sense, as this most recent gaffe illustrates.

 Winds of Jihad explains how ‘sharia-compliant banking’ funds terrorism:  

Terror Financing Mechanism: SCF (Sharia Compliant Banks) as monitored by paid Shariah law advisors to U.S. banking institutions must “purify” certain return on investment(ROI) dollars that do not meet Shariah law standards. This money must be donated to Islamic charities – including some that promote Jihad and support suicide bombing. Investment disclosures state that these sums can be as high as 6% of profits of investments. With $800 billion already in SCF assets, the potential for billions of dollars to be siphoned off for terrorism is real. This would be a serious criminal violation of U.S. law.”

Shariah law authorities, some of whom are now being paid handsomely by Barclays, Dow Jones, Standard & Poors, HSBC, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Deutschebank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Credit Suisse and others, have the power to dictate Shariah compliance as deemed by “scholarly consensus” on matters of finance, family, penal law, apostasy, and war.

U.S. investment banks are essentially being money managers for regimes who want to build building nuclear weapons and those providing terrorists with weaponry used for killing American soldiers. The Taliban is reported in the news to be on the rise in Pakistan, funded by Shariah investment profits and embedded donations to “Shariah Islamic Charities.” As these regimes gain legitimacy in our banking system and their net worth increases, the network of extremism and terrorism grows. One sad example from the past: September 11th attacks were funded by Shariah Banks which provided profits to Al-Qaeda. Evidence of this was presented in a court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on behalf of Cantor Fitzgerald, Ace, Allstate, Chubb and other life insurance companies, which paid insurance benefits to over 3000 widows, widowers or surviving family members.

Shariah Law is being forced upon and/or tolerated in Europe at a rapid pace, especially in Great Britain. The correlation between Shariah expansion with Shariah Finance is clear: Shariah Finance has strong market share and acceptance in Great Britain, and now the British are dealing with serious issues of whether or not to accept Shariah Law over British Law. The consequences will be the same in America if we don’t stand guard to prevent Shariah financing from expanding and American banks from accepting Muslim standards in order to become Shariah compliant.  

 David Horowitz, champion of freedom, publishes the news that the son of a Hamas leader has defected and confirms what we know about the implacable hatred of  Palestinians and devout Muslims in general for the Jews and the Jewish state:

The son of the most popular Hamas leader on the West Bank has defected. In an interview he describes Palestinian society as one that sanctifies terror, that has genocide as its goal and derives its inspiration from the prophet Mohammed. 

Here is this defector’s warning: 

"You Jews should be aware: You will never, but never have peace with Hamas. Islam, as the ideology that guides them, will not allow them to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews. They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death." 

Interviewer: Is that the justification for the suicide attacks? 

"More than that. An entire society sanctifies death and the suicide terrorists. In Palestinian culture a suicide terrorist becomes a hero, a martyr. Sheikhs tell their students about the ‘heroism of the shaheeds[suicide bombers].’" 

Note that it is not a state but an entire society, and entire people that sanctifies exterminating Jews, and that the inspiration comes from their God. Find me the Muslim state or leader or organization who condemns Hamas or Hizabullah and their genocidal agendas or repudiates the saying of the prophet Mohammed that Muslims should kill Jews. Find me the progressive leftist who is uncomfortable supporting this call to the murder the Jews. We are facing an evil greater than Nazism and we are still referring to their religion as one "of peace" and describing their allies as "liberals" and "progressives." 

 

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is to resign his post in two months! A new leader is to be chosen by the Kadima party on 17th September.

Perhaps this signals an end to the talk of ceding the Golan Heights to the Syrians. I suspect in the face of the ever more pressing Iranian threat, a stronger leader will be chosen; someone who is not willing to surrender any gains Israel has made in the last 60 years.

Mazeltov Israel!

Maybe the Israeli governement read my post and is starting to follow my suggestions…

 It’s up to the voters now to crush this egomaniac.

Even the Washington Post is irritated by his hubris.  This comes from a column titled ‘President Obama Continues His Victory Tour’.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reported last week that Obama has directed his staff to begin planning for his transition to the White House, causing Republicans to howl about premature drape measuring. Obama was even feeling confident enough to give British Prime Minister Gordon Brown some management advice over the weekend. "If what you’re trying to do is micromanage and solve everything, then you end up being a dilettante," he advised the prime minister.       

 Environmentalists are our second-worst enemy (militant Islam being the worst).

Walter Williams writes in Townhall:

For several decades, environmentalists have managed to get Congress to keep most of our oil resources off-limits to exploration and drilling. They’ve managed to have the Congress enact onerous regulations that have made refinery construction impossible. Similarly, they’ve used the courts and Congress to completely stymie the construction of nuclear power plants. As a result, energy prices are at historical highs and threaten our economy and national security.

Read how they are likely to make things worse for us all here. 

 Jeff Jacoby writes in The Boston Globe on Obama’s ‘Sermon to the Germans ‘:

It would take nearly a year and more than 277,000 flights. But in the end it was the Soviets who backed down. On May 12, 1949, the blockade ended – a triumph of American prowess and perseverance, and a momentous vindication for Truman.

But not once in his Berlin speech did Obama acknowledge Truman’s fortitude, or even mention his name. Nor did he mention the US Air Force, or the 31 American pilots who died during the airlift.

Indeed, Obama seemed to go out of his way not to say plainly that what saved Berlin in that dark time was America’s military might. Save for a solitary reference to "the first American plane," he never described one of the greatest American operations of the postwar period as an American operation at all. He spoke only of "the airlift," "the planes," "those pilots." Perhaps their American identity wasn’t something he cared to stress amid all his "people of the world" salutations and talk of "global citizenship."

"People of the world," Obama declaimed, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." But the world didn’t stand as one during the Cold War; it was riven by an Iron Curtain. For more than four decades, America and the West confronted an implacable enemy on the other side of that divide. What finally defeated that enemy and ended the Cold War was not harmony and goodwill, but American strength and resolve.

Thomas Sowell, perhaps the wisest man in America, thinks that Obama may not be naive after all, but worse. 

Although most of the mainstream media are still swooning over Barack Obama, a few critics are calling the things he advocates "naive." But that assumes that he is trying to solve the country’s problems. If he is trying to solve his own problem of getting elected, then he is telling the voters just what they want to hear. That is not naive but shrewd and cynical.

Barack Obama’s father, and the chief mentor of his youth, and all the people who have most influenced him and promoted him throughout his life have been on the Extremely Far Left. 

Read this article and this one in Investor’s Business Daily  which make it clear as daylight that Barack Obama is a Socialist and if he were to be elected President, would turn the United States, with the help of a Democratic majority in Congress, into a  Socialist state, and try to take the country into a  Socialist International such as Marx and Lenin dreamed of.  

Quotations: 

‘Throughout his career, Obama has worked closely with a network of stone-cold socialists and full-blown communists striving for "economic justice."

He’s been traveling in an orbit of collectivism that runs from Nairobi to Honolulu, and on through Chicago to Washington.

Yet a recent AP poll found that only 6% of Americans would describe Obama as "liberal," let alone socialist.

Public opinion polls usually reflect media opinion, and the media by and large have portrayed Obama as a moderate "outsider" (the No. 1 term survey respondents associate him with) who will bring a "breath of fresh air" to Washington.

The few who have drilled down on his radical roots have tended to downplay or pooh-pooh them. Even skeptics have failed to connect the dots for fear of being called the dreaded "r" word.

But too much is at stake in this election to continue mincing words.

Both a historic banking crisis and 1970s-style stagflation loom over the economy. Democrats, who already control Congress, now threaten to filibuster-proof the Senate in what could be a watershed election for them — at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

A perfect storm of statism is forming, and our economic freedoms are at serious risk.

 

Those who care less about looking politically correct than preserving the free-market individualism that’s made this country great have to start calling things by their proper name to avert long-term disaster.’

 

Furthermore:

‘Obama’s Global Poverty Act offers us a global socialist destiny we do not want, one that challenges America’s very sovereignty. The former "post-racial" candidate obviously intends to be a post-national president.’

 The various institutions of  ‘world government’  are a looming danger to all free democracies.

Obama’s declaration that he is ‘a citizen of the world’  should set alarm bells ringing throughout the United States.   The following comes from an article you can find here. 

In fact, the terminology Citizen Obama uses reveals an attachment to a radical transformation of not just our foreign policy but of the nature of our country itself.  The “change” he has in mind could prove fatal to our sovereignty and constitutional form of government.

Questions about the appropriate role of America in the world and how it conducts its relationships with foreign powers are, of course, essential topics in any presidential campaign.  That is particularly true at a moment when the United States finds itself engaged in a global war with a totalitarian ideology, Islamofascism, that has embedded itself in many allied countries and enjoys strong support from most of our foes.

It falls most immediately to Senator John McCain to highlight Citizen Obama’s radical answers to these questions and ultimately to U.S. voters to determine whether they want a global citizen in the White House or a president of, by and for the American people.