During the time of the 2006 elections, consumer confidence stood at a 3 year high, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline was $2.19, the unemployment rate was at 4.5% the DOW JONES had hit a record high 14,000 + points and Americans were buying new cars, taking cruises, and traveling overseas, by all accounts the economy was doing just fine.                 

But Americans were told that they wanted 'CHANGE'! They were convinced by the Democrats and the mainstream media that the Iraq war was lost, that our efforts there were futile and that the only option left for us, was to cut and run, to surrender. We were promised that the election of Democrats would lead to the immediate ending of the war, as well as the culture of corruption that permeated Washington under the Republican's watch. Therefore after years of this constant barrage of negativity, Americans were persuade on 2006 to vote for a Democratic Congress. They voted for change!!!

And changes we got- on all aspects except the reason for which they were elected. The war was not ended and to the Democrats dismay the war was not lost, nor the culture of corruption that they spoke about, which instead of having ended, seems to have reached new heights.

Here is the change we got:

1) Consumer confidence has plummeted. For the last 8 years the Democrats have been talking down the economy and warning us about the impending recession just around the corner. Something they openly concluded will help them gain power, therefore they continue to sell gloom and doom, with total disregard of the repercussion to the average American family.

2) Gasoline rose to over $4 a gallon, yet the Democratic congress refuses to allow exploration of oil within our own territory, blocking every attempt to allow America to become energy independent. They have done this while ignoring the desires of an overwhelming majority of Americans who wish us to explore within our own territory.

3) Unemployment has risen above 6% and continues to rise. Yet the Democrats are proposing tax increases to the same businesses that have always been the largest source of job creation in our free society, and they do this at a time when these businesses are more strapped for cash than ever before.

4) Americans have seen their home equity drop by over $12 TRILLION DOLLARS and it is still dropping! This is the result of a credit crunch caused by a financial meltdown created by the Democrat’s social engineering law called (The Community Reinvestment Act) which as part of its overall package, forces financial institutions to carry bad loans, in the name of the all encompassing “greater good”.   

5) Over 1% of American homes are in foreclosure today, something that the Democrats blame on Wall Street. Yet anyone familiar with the free market understands that “incentive drives behavior”. When the government told those who sell mortgages that it would guarantee all the bad loans they made, as long as they were dubbed by the politically correct name of “Minority Loans”, the government in effect incented sales people to push bad loans on to those who could not afford them. Unethical as this may be, and condemned as it should be, it was this initiative from the Democrats with their Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac piñata that created the proper environment to make this debacle possible. In other words, Wall Street’s wrong doing was aided and abided by a politically created environment that allowed unfettered greed to be rewarded, an environment that was aggressively guarded and protected from any oversight; by the same Democrats in congress that we are now told will be correcting the problem. 

6) The “Change” voted on 2006 has largely contributed to bringing our economy to the brink of collapse, the DOW has plummeted, billions of dollars have evaporated from stocks, bonds, mutual funds and investment portfolios, consumer confidence is extremely low and the Democrats continue to talk about gloom and doom, a self-fulfilling prophecy no doubt, if the American people entrust them with additional power on the coming election.

Change is a double-edged sword. If America wants true change in 2008, they need to use the other edge of the sword to rid our government of all these merchants of doom responsible for the financial crisis.

1 – Will there be a doubling of the Peace Corps, plus a brand-new Volunteer “Youth Network”, it sounds innocent enough, but these newly form "Civilian Groups" poised to help with our national security and protect us from all internal enemies, can also be used as is the case in most communist and socialist countries to intimidate government officials and civilians alike. They will through good-intention sounding names like “Get-Out-The-Vote” programs, proceed to “fix” elections much in the way that they are already doing in most battle states on 2008.  Michael Barone’s article The Coming Obama Thugocracy expresses some concerns about this, if this is the case now, how will it be then?

2 – The Fairness Doctrine will in all likelihood be passed in both houses to effectively Hush the Alternative Media, it will quickly be signed into law by Obama, thus insuring that different points of view promulgated primarily on talk show radio throughout the country today, is immediately diluted and ultimately silenced.

3 – Our constitutional right to own a gun will be revoked once a single member of the Supreme Court is replaced, let’s not forget that the only reason that we still enjoy that right today, is due to a 5 to 4 decision by the current Supreme Court, which ruled against the Washington DC Gun Ban law, the same law that Obama had said was constitutional, until he said the exact opposite the day the decision was handed down.

4 – Kangaroo court investigations, accusations and condemnations, similar to Sara Palin’s Trooper-gate will be a normal occurrence, CEOs of large corporations and opposition leaders will be dragged to testify and defend themselves in front of Senate hearings, only to be defamed and destroyed by the left’s version of the Salem trials. You’d never know from the reading of the headlines, that what Trooper-gate truly revealed, was the corrupt nature of the union and the Juneau Alaska’s police department.  They would keep among their midst a police officer capable of game hunting without a license, wife beating, child abusing, drunk driving while on duty on a police vehicle, and threatening to kill his ex-wife and father in law. When the ends justify the means, there is no shame in false accusations and character assassination.

5 – The government interference in American citizen’s private life will increase dramatically, and with it the taxes necessary to support such an infrastructure. The current fiasco with Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac should have given us a glimpse of what can happen when bureaucrats who are more interested in building their own empires by buying constituencies with your money, are in charge of the administering of the same. 

I know it is difficult for those who have never known anything but prosperity and freedom, as is the case with all American generations alive today, to fandom the idea that the rights and environment that we enjoy could ever be in trampled. However if politicians are able to put in place judges that will impose their will upon us with total disregard for the constitution, and these judges become willing accomplice to the shielding of the politician’s responsibility for such laws, if our nation is left vulnerable, due to unrealistic assessments of the dangers that we face,  if elections are able to be manipulated by “Community Organizers” much like we are already seeing it today, if our borders are allowed to be violated openly, if the people’s money is mishandled and our financial institutions raped and forced to carry bad loans, as they were forced to do through social engineering.

Can we really be so certain that our future is not in peril? I for one, have reasons for concerns.

Casini