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Like much of the country, you may have spent your time last week snickering about the peccadilloes of yet another hapless politician who couldn't keep his pants zipped. Or maybe you were captivated by the untimely but predictable passing of the most talented musical freak of the last quarter century. Perhaps while watching the ABC-Barack Obama dog-and-pony show purporting to deal with the future of your health care system, you were deceived into thinking that this was the big issue of the week. If so, you would be wrong. Make no mistake, it is on the agenda, but the real threat of the moment was simmering up on Capitol Hill in the United States House of Representatives.

Far too many Americans were distracted by other things to notice that on Friday, June 26th, 211 House Democrats and 8 Republicans defiantly thumbed their noses at the will of their constituents and passed the largest tax increase in the nation's history.

The "Cap-and-Trade" bill will likely kill two or three real jobs for every so-called green job it creates. If this bill passes the Senate, the president's signature will make it the law of the land. If that happens, look for your utility bills to increase by fifty percent. Expect gasoline to rise to last summer's levels and above. Count on the cost of food, clothing and anything else affected by fuel prices -- in other words, everything -- skyrocketing.

In fact, "skyrocket" was the exact word Obama himself used last year to describe the inflationary effects of this legislation, even as he promoted the idea during his presidential campaign. Obama told voters at that time that his cap-and-trade proposal "will necessarily cause energy prices to skyrocket." That was a striking admission from a presidential candidate, on a par with Walter Mondale's startling statement at the 1984 Democratic National Convention that he would "raise your taxes." (The fact that John McCain is no Ronald Reagan has a great deal to do with Obama not losing every state but his own like Mondale did, but that's a column for another day.)

As we look back on Barack Obama's first six months in office, one of two things must be true: the man either believes his policies are good for the country (in which case he is a fool), or he knows those policies are destructive to our economy and he is promoting them anyway (in which case he is every bit the autocrat and Marxist many of us warned he was during the campaign). I have come to believe the latter, but either way we have a long, expensive ride ahead of us.

For those who supported this president out of frustration with either John McCain or with George W. Bush, is it not obvious to you yet that Barack Obama hates America? Those of you who thought Jeremiah Wright was an anomaly in this man's life, can you now see that this preacher of hate was just part of a long chain of negative, anti-American influences on Obama?

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