So the election is tomorrow.  Tomorrow the American people will decide if they want their way of life, or if they want the way of life Barak Obama proposes; high taxes, high unemployment, high welfare, highly vulnerable national security, high barriers between the citizen and Bill of Rights, and now, high utility bills.

Imagine - a warning from me about Barak Obama that doesn't include his intent to take away our guns.  Personal saftey is not the only thing Mr. Obama wants to deny everyday Americans, he would also deny us our personal prosperity.

“If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can," Obama opined to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, "It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.”

On the surface, that sounds all feel-goody and Kum-by-yah’ish to some, but the reality is devastating. 

According to the National Mining Association website:

• Half of U.S. electricity is generated from coal.
• Each person in the U.S. uses 7,539 pounds of coal annually.
• There are approximately 600 power plants (1,600 units) and 1,100 manufacturing facilities using coal in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
• Coal accounts for about 33 percent of U.S. total energy production and 22 percent of total energy consumption.
• The U.S. has nearly 268 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration (that's a 240-year supply at current rates of use).
• Coal accounts for 94 percent of the nation's fossil energy reserve.
• U.S. coal mining directly employs nearly 120,000 people; for each coal mining job, an additional 3.5 jobs are created elsewhere in the economy (that's 420,000 jobs related to coal).
• An estimated 50,000 new employees will be needed in coal mining (not the overall coal industry - just mining) over the next 10 years to meet increasing demand and to replace retiring workers.
• Railroads moved two-thirds of U.S. coal shipments.
• Coal is the largest freight commodity moved by barges on the nation's inland waterways.
• Mining (all mining, not just coal) has touched less than one-half of one percent of all the land in the United States.
• Only 3 million acres of public land have gone into private ownership from mining, while 94 million acres have been granted to railroads and 288 million acres privatized as agricultural homesteads.
• Since 1978, more than 2.5 million acres of mined lands have been restored to their original or better condition, as well as more than 285,000 acres of coal mines abandoned long ago.

So think about these statistics for a moment in respect to Obama’s intent to bankrupt the coal industry.  It’s not just the miners and the “rich” mine owners that will lose their jobs.  We’re talking about railroad employees, barge operators and tug boat pilots among others, not to mention all the manufacturing jobs that will be lost as plants either layoff workers to compensate for much higher energy costs or flat ship their processes overseas.

But what will affect you and I most directly, our power bills will go up.  They will go way up.  Half of our electricity depends on coal.  Your electric bills are what they are because coal is so plentiful, so cheap to extract and refine, and cheap to transport.  Without coal to power our infrastructure, everyone - everyone will have to pay much more for electricity.

The world's infrastructure is lubricated with oil and powered by coal.

Think about how that will affect you in your life, and I mean more than just your personal power bill going up.  I’m talking about some things like; your grocery bills will go up because the store is paying more for lights, AC and refrigeration; it will take more to top of the fuel tank in your vehicle – the gas station is powered by electricity from the attendant’s post inside the building to the pumps that pull the gas from underground tanks into your car; your stay in a hospital or getting dental work done will skyrocket – nearly every modern medical device is powered by electricity; your ISP will charge you more – those internet switches and routers all consume electricity 24x7; your phone bill will go up because the switches and computers managing our communications infrastructure are electrical devices; your water bill will go up – water pumps are electrically driven; every business that uses electricity in some capacity will pass the extra expense to the consumer in addition to reducing its workforce as it tries to keep up with punishing energy bills.

Now here’s something a bit harder to fathom because it deals with the nebulous ‘future’; Obama doesn’t want Americans to be energy-independent from the rest of the world. 

In our latest energy “crisis” a lot of folk were looking around for alternatives to foreign oil.  One of the ideas that got a lot of traction was the coal-to-liquid solution; basically the thought is to tap the vast, vast coal deposits in this country and turn it into gasoline.  It is not nearly as efficient as oil-to-gas (because coal is first converted to oil which is then turned to gas and diesel), but it would break the strangle-hold our enemies have on us via our consumption of oil.  Taking coal off the table means there is no coal-to-liquid solution, leaving us in the same mess we’ve been in since Jimmy Carter was president; way too dependent on others for our livelihood.  If Obama were less selfish, he’d see that coal is probably the best short-to-mid-term solution we have as we transition from oil to something else.  Instead, he wants to take that away.

In looking at this latest “take things away from Americans” attitude from the Democrat Nominee, I have to wonder just how bad our economy, and our lives, will become.  His proposals stifle innovation, punish success, and create a welfare system second to none, surpassing even Social Security in its socialistic / communistic impositions.  This is the sort of change nobody needs.

I’m not sure how Barak Obama thinks regular Americans (that is, those of us bitter, clingy folk) are going to afford all this.  Mr. “Can’t Afford John McCain” seems to be lying to me again.  The truth is, we can’t afford Barak Obama.

And neither can our grandchildren.