[Hoot Gibson]

When it comes to football Hoot I agree with but your statement about the Democrats screwing up the economy is wrong. Just about every major recession has started under a Republican President dating back to the great depression and Hoover. I have worked most of my Adult life as a Machinist and I was employed with one of the Worlds largest auto part manufactures when the bottom fail out of the economy during the second Bush term. The company I worked for lost close to $50 million and had to shut down two major production lines and layoff close to 100 people. The tax breaks that the Republicans handed out to the Large Oil companies were the root of the energy problems. The whole Republican Ideal of tax breaks for the wealthy and Big buisness forgets about human nature. It assumes that the money they save in taxes will be invested but it forgets that people are sometimes just greedy. When the big SUV and full size truck became too expensive for many people to drive (because gas prices were around $5 a gallon) this was like a knife in the belly to Ford and GMC. What did the Oil companies do??? They reported record profits! How does this effect Coal? When the production of cars is slowed the demand for steel is decreased and when there is a low demand for steel there is no major demand for Coal. I am not a Obama supporter but his move to bail out the USA Auto industry will someday be looked at as one of the smartest moves ever by a US President and probably saves the Coal industry. I do know this, when ever the company I use to work for ran parts for Toyota or Honda the steel was shipped in from Japan or China. All the steel that Ford or GMC or even Mercedes Benz used was made right here in the USA. The major mistake that Obama made was extending the Bush era Tax cuts in trade for extended unemployment benifits for the unemployed. Just like lots of people are greedy many people are lazy and cashed their unemployment check for 2 years instead of finding a job or creating their own job or business. This slowed the recovery of the economy. I voted for Clinton but if someone would have told me that Obama would save the US Auto industry and take out Bin-Ladden, I would have dam sure voted for him!

More Americans are out of work today under the Obama administration than at any time in this country's history, including the Great Depression. (Granted, population has a lot to do with that fact - but unemployment has soared far above what it was at the end of the Bush administration and unemployment was very low for more than six years of his two terms.)

The steel industry is no longer the major consumer of coal that it once was. Most modern steel mills no longer use coke, so the metallurgical coal market has been declining for years. Much of the steel that is imported from Japan is first shipped to them as scrap metal. Most of it is melted using high voltage vessels, blended with trace elements for different grades, and then shipped back to this country. I spent some time working at a large Indiana steel mill developing software applications and that is the process that they use. Most mills that used coke in this country have been shut down or upgraded because they cannot compete with the modern Japanese and American mills.

Obama is a socialist. The bailout, as you call it, of GM and Chrysler amounted to the federal government pumping billions of dollars of tax dollars into the companies, meddling in their business decisions, and leaving many shareholders (including pensioners) high and dry as they forced GM to give the UAW a large ownership stake in the company. Now, the UAW, a major shareholder of GM, will be negotiating a contract with GM's competitor, Ford - which refused to accept a bailout. GM was given billions of dollars that will never be repaid to the federal government. Give any company a blank government check and it will survive until the government goes broke.

As for oil companies, their record profits amount to pennies on the dollar (around 10 of them typically). Those profit margins pale compare to the ones posted by companies in many other industries, including software. Oil companies generate hundreds of thousands of jobs and American oil companies are dwarfed in size by the Chinese national oil company and as large as they are, they are too small to fix prices the way that Democrats like Obama claim. When a company has more than $100 billion in revenue, a $10 billion profit is not all that great. In other words, a 10 percent return in today's market is pretty good, but you would earn far more in dividends investing in a company like Microsoft or Apple in a typical year.

I know that I am not going to convince you that Obama is doing major long term damage to our economy. If you really want to understand economics, I encourage you to watch some videos of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell on Youtube. After watching them, read as much as you can or watch some videos featuring Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and decide which economic theories are more compelling.

One last thing, look up charts showing job recovery following the Bush recession (the Obama "recovery") and compare it to every other recovery since the Great Depression. if you have not already compared the jobless recovery under Obama to previous recoveries, I think that you will be shocked. Do the research and then tell me that I am wrong but don't rely on what you hear politicians from either party tell you is happening to our economy.