John Kerry came to Madison, and all I got was this lousy video

Sen. John Kerry headlined an Obama rally at the State Capitol yesterday, and I was there.

The crowd was estimated at 250-ish, which sounds about right. That includes a couple dozen College Republicans, who showed up at the rally, too. I got a shot of them:


Also, you can see them in the background of this picture:


That’s Kerry at the podium, and the CRs across the way. Some Democrats managed to get a big banner up in front of them a little later, so you can’t see them anymore.

I suppose I should mention: I am not hiding in the bushes. This was the only vantage I could find with a clear view of the podium. Sorry about the poor video quality, but the audio is good. Hippies know their woofers and tweeters.

On to the video. On energy policy, Kerry told the crowd that “it’s a question of how we’re going to deal with our responsibility to the planet.”



Kerry was a target-rich environment in 2004, and he’s still a target-rich environment today. I’ll excerpt:

“We’ve been trying to break the cord of our connection to fossil fuels for years, and we can’t break it because too many Republican Senators and administrations are so tied to oil and gas and oil interests that they deny us the future we deserve.”

Say, Senator Kerry, have you divested yourself of your own ties to “oil and gas and oil interests” yet? You know, those six-figure investments?

No? Huh.

I love the way Kerry mentions Al Gore – inventor of the internet – and then within a minute uses the metaphor “there are three or four Googles equivalent yet to be created in alternative and renewable fuels…”

What’s Al waiting for, exactly? Get inventing!

More:

“Think what a difference it would make if instead of sending a billion dollars a day to the Middle East we sent a billion dollars a day to the Midwest of this country…”

The Democrats’ new energy policy: drill in the Great Lakes!

This was weird:

“In solar-thermal alone you could do 6 times the electricity needs of the United States just in the southwest of our country…”

What a load of biomass. Where, exactly, did he get “six times?” The best figure I could find is in this article, which claims we could produce 90% of our electricity needs by 2050, and even that’s disputed.

Oh, I get it: it depends on the definition of “could.” See, we could supply all our energy needs with hamsters on exercise wheels, if we only had enough hamsters. And enough wheels.

That may be a good investment tip for the future, by the way.

On to health care: Kerry pokes fun at Republican dislike of “government programs.”



Notice: Medicaid used to be part of the “safety net” that keeps people from falling all the way to the bottom. Now everybody should have something like it. The VA was created to help military vets and their families. Now we should give that same help to everybody.

Lesson: government programs always grow.

There’s a baldfaced lie in this next clip:



McCain’s plan to give tax credits to help pay for health insurance “doesn’t work,” Kerry says:

“…unless you use tax credits, or unless you earn enough income that tax credits work for you, that doesn’t work for a lot of Americans.”

If that's not a lie, it's a willful deception. The tax credit, you see, is refundable. Like the $1,000 per-child tax credit that Democrats will slash once in office. A refundable credit means: you get the money, even if you don’t pay taxes.

Everyone can use it. Everyone. Kerry knows that, but chooses to lie about it.

I’m not endorsing McCain’s plan – I don’t understand enough about it, and the Democrat-controlled Congress won’t pass it, anyway – but even the New York Times says that most Americans will come out ahead, dollar-wise, and those who don’t will be primarily “those with high incomes and expensive health plans.”

In other words, exactly the people Democrats want paying more taxes.

As far as his description of Obama’s health plan…please. Obama’s plan requires companies to either provide insurance or pay a tax to support the government’s plan. Which will most companies choose? The latter. Less hassle, less cost. People will begin to actively reject employer-provided care in order to get the government plan, because the Democrat-controlled Congress will load that sucker up with benefits.

You put Obama in the White House with a Democrat Congress, and watch what they try to do. Hillarycare is going to look like something Hayek would endorse, by comparison.

On to Iraq. The new Obama theme song: "Bomb bomb bomb...bomb Pakistan!"

“His (Obama’s) judgment was right and John McCain’s was wrong.”

Of course, Obama was in the Illinois State Senate when all this was being debated, so his “position” has the benefit of hindsight. And of course, if “his judgment was right and John McCain’s was wrong,” then so was John Kerry’s.

And of course, when we heard those calls for more troops, it was John McCain who stood his ground and insisted on more troops, even though it was unpopular at the time. And of course, it’s worked, meaning McCain’s judgment was right and Obama’s and Kerry’s were wrong. And of course, our troops continue to kill and capture Al Quaeda leaders and operatives in Iraq.

Maybe Iraq wasn’t the center of the War on Terror in 2003, but it was the only place where we had the moral and legal ability to open a second front. So we did. Only a serial opportunist – like Kerry – would suggest otherwise.

One more clip: Kerry talks about achieving a filibuster-proof majority (shudder), and takes a little shot at Joe Lieberman.



All signs are pointing to Democrat gains this year. I can only hope that the voters, in their wisdom, continue their usual policy of not putting all our eggs into one basket.