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Post by twinder on May 12, 2011 19:23:56 GMT -5
You should hear them. Four of 'em, all within a 20 foot square area, croaking away. All...night...LONG!
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Post by Ritty77 on May 13, 2011 5:53:22 GMT -5
Demagoguery 101May 13, 2011 Obama’s immigration speech was meant to gin up votes, not advance sound policy.
I’m going to do my part to lead a constructive and civil debate on these issues. – Barack Obama, speech on immigration, El Paso, Texas, May 10 Constructive and civil debate — like the one Obama initiated just four weeks ago on deficit reduction? The speech in which he accused the Republicans of abandoning families of kids with autism and Down syndrome? The debate in which Obama’s secretary of health and human services said that the Republican plan would make old folks “die sooner”? In this same spirit of comity and mutual respect, Obama’s most recent invitation to civil discourse — on immigration — came just eleven minutes after he accused opponents of moving the goal posts on border enforcement. “Maybe they’ll need a moat,” he said sarcastically. “Maybe they want alligators in the moat.” Nice touch. Looks like the Tucson truce — no demonization, no cross-hairs metaphors — is officially over. After all, the Republicans want to kill off the elderly, throw the disabled in the snow, and watch alligators lunch on illegal immigrants. The El Paso speech is notable not for breaking any new ground on immigration, but for perfectly illustrating Obama’s political style: the professorial, almost therapeutic, invitation to civil discourse, wrapped around the basest of rhetorical devices — charges of malice compounded with accusations of bad faith. “They’ll never be satisfied,” said Obama about border control. “And I understand that. That’s politics.” How understanding. The other side plays “politics,” Obama acts in the public interest. Their eyes are on poll numbers, political power, the next election; Obama’s rest fixedly on the little children. This impugning of motives is an Obama constant. “They” play politics with deficit reduction, with government shutdowns, with health care. And now immigration. It is ironic that such a charge should be made in a speech that is nothing but politics. There is zero chance of any immigration legislation passing Congress in the next two years. El Paso was simply an attempt to gin up the Hispanic vote as part of an openly political two-city, three-event campaign swing in preparation for 2012. Accordingly, the El Paso speech featured two other staples: the breathtaking invention and the statistical sleight of hand. “The [border] fence is now basically complete,” asserted the president. Complete? There are now 350 miles of pedestrian fencing along the Mexican border. The border is 1,954 miles long. That’s 18 percent. And only one-tenth of that 18 percent is the double and triple fencing that has proved so remarkably effective in, for example, the Yuma sector. Another 299 miles — 15 percent — are vehicle barriers that pedestrians can walk right through. Obama then boasted that on his watch, 31 percent more drugs have been seized, 64 percent more weapons — proof of how he has secured the border. And for more proof: Apprehension of illegal immigrants is down 40 percent. Down? Indeed, says Obama, this means that fewer people are trying to cross the border. Interesting logic. Seizures of drugs and guns go up — proof of effective border control. Seizures of people go down — yet more proof of effective border control. Up or down, it matters not. Whatever the numbers, Obama vindicates himself. You can believe this flimflam or you can believe the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. The GAO reported in February that less than half the border is under “operational control” of the government. Which undermines the entire premise of Obama’s charge that, because the border is effectively secure, “Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement” didn’t really mean it. I count myself among those who really do mean it. I have little doubt that most Americans would be quite willing to regularize and legalize the current millions of illegal immigrants if they were convinced that this was the last such cohort, as evidenced by, say, a GAO finding that the border is under full operational control and certification to the same effect by the governors of the four southern border states. Americans are a generous people. Upon receipt of objective and reliable evidence that the border is secure — not Obama’s infinitely manipulable interdiction statistics — the question would be settled and the immigrants legalized. Why doesn’t Obama put such a provision in comprehensive immigration legislation? Because for Obama, immigration reform is not about legislation, it’s about reelection. If I may quote the president: I understand that. That’s politics. www.nationalreview.com/articles/267122/demagoguery-101-charles-krauthammer
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Post by philunderwood on May 24, 2011 8:28:41 GMT -5
Dependency and Votes By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | Those who regard government "entitlement" programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality. To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything the government fails to provide is something that people will be deprived of. In other words, if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry. If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you fail to subsidize prescription drugs, old people will have to eat dog food in order to be able to afford their meds. This is the vision promoted by many politicians and much of the media. But, in the world of reality, it is not even true for most people who are living below the official poverty line. Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck-- and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air conditioning, color television and a microwave oven--and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs. Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight even more often than other Americans. As for housing and homelessness, housing prices are higher and homelessness a bigger problem in places where there has been massive government intervention, such as liberal bastions like New York City and San Francisco. As for the elderly, 80 percent are homeowners. whose monthly housing costs are less than $400, including property taxes, utilities, and maintenance. The desperately poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are-- in the world of reality-- the wealthiest segment of the American population. The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the wealth of households headed by people in the 35 to 44-year-old bracket, and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone under 35 years of age. If the wealthiest segment of the population cannot pay their own medical bills, who can? The country as a whole is not any richer because the government pays our medical bills-- with money that it takes from us. What about the truly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in low-income and high-crime neighborhoods, people are not stealing bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get money to support their parasitic lifestyle. As for the rest of the poor, Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University long ago showed that you could give the poor enough money to lift them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what it costs to support a massive welfare state bureaucracy. We don't need to send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state can advance. The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency, because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus. We have all heard the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians. For politicians, giving a man a fish every day of his life is the way to keep getting his vote. "Entitlement" is just a fancy word for dependency. As for the scary stories politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.
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Post by philunderwood on May 30, 2011 7:29:49 GMT -5
Pro-Obama Media Always Shocked by Bad Economic News By Michael Barone www.JewishWorldReview.com | Unexpectedly! As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy. "New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported cnbc.com May 25. "Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise." "Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations." "Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19. "U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote The Wall Street Journal May 18. Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009. Mainstream media may finally be catching up. "The latest economic numbers have not been good," David Leonhardt wrote in the May 26 New York Times. "Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported — 'a real surprise,' said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics." Which raises some questions. As Instapundit reader Gordon Stewart, quoted by Reynolds on May 17, put it: "How many times in a row can something happen unexpectedly before the experts start to, you know, expect it? At some point, shouldn't they be required to state the foundation for their expectations?" One answer is that many in the mainstream media have been cheerleading for Barack Obama. They and he both naturally hope for a strong economic recovery. After all, Obama can't keep blaming the economic doldrums on George W. Bush forever. I'm confident that any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word "unexpectedly" in stories suggesting economic doldrums. It's obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists — the president's re-election — if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there's still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover's phrase, prosperity is just around the corner. A less cynical explanation is that many journalists really believe that the Obama administration's policies are likely to improve the economy. Certainly that has been the expectation as well as the hope of administration policymakers. Obama's first Council of Economics Adviser Chairman Christina Romer, whose scholarly work is widely respected, famously predicted that the February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent. She undoubtedly believed that at the time; she is too smart to have made a prediction whose failure to come true would prove politically embarrassing. But unemployment zoomed to 10 percent instead and is still at 9 percent. Political pundits sympathetic to the administration have been speculating whether the president can win re-election if it stays above the 8 percent mark it was never supposed to reach. Administration economists are now making the point that it takes longer to recover from a recession caused by a financial crisis than from a recession that occurs in the more or less ordinary operation of the business cycle. There's some basis in history for this claim. But it come a little late in the game. Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare. All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small businessmen. Employers aren't creating any more new jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then. In the meantime many potential job seekers have left the labor market. If they re-enter and look for jobs, the unemployment rate will stay steady or ebb only slowly. We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are "unexpected," voters may decide someone else can do better.
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Post by philunderwood on May 31, 2011 8:39:08 GMT -5
Seductive Beliefs By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | One of the painfully revealing episodes in Barack Obama's book "Dreams From My Father" describes his early experience listening to a sermon by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Among the things said in that sermon was that "white folks' greed runs a world in need." Obama was literally moved to tears by that sermon. This sermon may have been like a revelation to Barack Obama but its explanation of economic and other differences was among the oldest-- and most factually discredited-- explanations of such difference among all sorts of peoples in all sorts of places. Yet it is an explanation that has long been politically seductive, in countries around the world. What could be more emotionally satisfying than seeing others who have done better in the world as the villains responsible for your not having done as well? It is the ideal political explanation, from the standpoint of mass appeal, whether or not it makes any sense otherwise. That has been the politically preferred explanation for economic differences between the Malay majority and the more prosperous Chinese minority in Malaysia, or between the Gentile majority and the Jewish minority in various countries in Europe between the two World Wars. At various other times and places, it has been the preferred explanation for the economic differences between the Sinhalese and the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, the Africans and the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Czechs and the Germans in Bohemia and numerous other groups in countries around the world. The idea that the rich have gotten rich by making the poor poor has been an ideological theme that has played well in Third World countries, to explain why they lag so far behind the West. None of this was original with Jeremiah Wright. All he added was his own colorful gutter style of expressing it, which so captivated the man who is now President of the United States. There is obviously something there with very deep emotional appeal. Moreover, because nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings, there will never be a lack of evil deeds to make that explanation seem plausible. Because the Western culture has been ascendant in the world in recent centuries, the image of rich white people and poor non-white people has made a deep impression, whether in theories of racial superiority-- which were big among "progressives" in the early 20th century-- or in theories of exploitation among "progressives" later on. In a wider view of history, however, it becomes clear that, for centuries before the European ascendancy, Europe lagged far behind China in many achievements. Since neither of them changed much genetically between those times and the later rise of Europe, it is hard to reconcile this role reversal with racial theories. More important, the Chinese were not to blame for Europe's problems-- which would not be solved until the Europeans themselves finally got their own act together, instead of blaming others. If they had listened to people like Jeremiah Wright, Europe might still be in the Dark Ages. It is hard to reconcile "exploitation" theories with the facts. While there have been conquered peoples made poorer by their conquerors, especially by Spanish conquerors in the Western Hemisphere, in general most poor countries were poor for reasons that existed before the conquerors arrived. Some Third World countries are poorer today than they were when they were ruled by Western countries, generations ago. False theories are not just an intellectual problem to be discussed around a seminar table in some ivy-covered building. When millions of people believe those theories, including people in high places, with the fate of nations in their hands, that is a serious and potentially disastrous fact of life. Despite a carefully choreographed image of affability and cool, Barack Obama's decisions and appointments as President betray an alienation from the values and the people of this country that are too disturbing to be answered by showing his birth certificate. Too many of his appointees exhibit a similar alienation, including Attorney General Eric Holder, under whom the Dept. of Justice could more accurately be described as the Dept. of Payback.
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Post by philunderwood on Jun 2, 2011 17:26:31 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=8Bad job numbers June 1st, 2011 | Author: Bruce McQuain I’m sure they’re “unexpected”: Private-sector employment growth decelerated sharply in May, according to Automatic Data Processing Inc.’s employment report released Wednesday, in another possible sign of a sputtering U.S. recovery. Employment in the nonfarm private business sector rose a seasonally adjusted 38,000 in May, well below the 175,000 increase expected by economists. In April, private payrolls showed an increase of 177,000, ADP said. “This is exceptionally weak,” said Eric Green, chief market economist at TD Securities Inc. in New York. “This was a dismal report, indicating a significant slowdown in job creation after six months of solid gains,” said Nicholas Tenev, economist at Barclays Capital Research. “Sold gains?” Yeah, not so much. We’ve yet to hit the threshold of job creation – about 300,000 or so – necessary to tread water, much less be adding jobs. The gains we’ve seen in the past six months have been “positive” in that there were net jobs created, but 38,000 is about 10% of what we need per month to begin to chip away at unemployment. The government will report its version of the numbers on Friday (the above is the ADP report): On Friday, the government will report on U.S. nonfarm payrolls for May, data that also include government workers. Economists polled by MarketWatch are looking for a gain of 175,000 in payrolls and for the nation’s unemployment rate to tick lower to 8.9% from 9.0% in April. That would mark a slowdown from the healthy 244,000 jobs added in April. It would also tell us that there is no real slowdown in hiring government workers, wouldn’t it – you know, despite “budget woes”, etc. And note too that we again, despite “a dismal report”, see economists saying the unemployment rate will “tick lower” to 8.9%? Yup, the Ministry of Truth is available to feed you whatever data you want to believe (which may explain why “improvements” in the unemployment rate don’t seem to boost consumer confidence at all). Again, not being at the “tread water” level with job creation, you have to wonder how the calculations are figured and what is being considered and not considered to anticipate the unemployment rate coming down in the face of “a dismal report”. Dale has covered the real numbers for quite some time – well into double digits. But there is indeed a larger question out there – is the workforce actually shrinking and the old norms no longer the standard by which we should measure unemployment. I.e. are older workers looking at the job market and saying, “to heck with it, I can retire and I’m going too”? Don’t know for sure, but regardless, the numbers from ADP remain “dismal” for May. ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Jun 9, 2011 10:39:08 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=8Unemployment: The real numbers and the real problem June 9th, 2011 | Author: Bruce McQuain Not only the real numbers, but the real reason: Labor-force participation, the share of Americans who are working or looking for jobs, has fallen to its lowest percentage since the mid-1980s. That’s partly because people have grown discouraged about their ability to find jobs and have given up looking. With those workers on the sidelines, the unemployment rate has been lower than it otherwise would be. The official unemployment rate hit 9.1% in May. Including all of those who had part-time jobs but wanted to work full-time as well as those who want to work but had given up searching, the rate was 15.8%. Of course Dale has been saying that for some time with his own calculations. Discouraged workers, however, may also have taken another option – retirement – since it is the age of Baby Boomer retirement. So it’s not clear yet how many of those who were workers and lost their jobs are “discouraged” workers or retired workers. Bottom line, though – a lot of people have seen their lives drastically changed. Here’s the inherent problem in long-term unemployment: [T]he odds of finding a job steadily decreased the longer someone was out of work. Some 30% of Americans who had been out of work for less than five weeks found new jobs last year. Those odds deteriorated for the long-term unemployed. Of those who had been unemployed for more than six months, slightly more than 10% found new jobs. Nearly 19% dropped out of the workforce. The problem endures this year: As of May, 6.2 million had been out of work for more than six months and more than 4 million haven’t work in more than a year. And the outlook, at least at the moment, doesn’t look like it will change anytime soon. This is Obama’s political Achilles heel. This is what gets incumbent presidents an early retirement. I’m not hoping that this persists through the 2012 election, I’m suggesting that there is nothing to indicate it won’t. That is Obama’s challenge. And it is also the GOP’s attack line. This is Obama’s record – something he has to run on for the very first time. Time to begin pointing it out now. ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Jun 24, 2011 12:31:31 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=63Misusing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve June 24th, 2011 | Author: Bruce McQuain There’s a difference between a political use of the SPR and an emergency use of the SPR. It is for the latter the SPR exits. However the Obama administration has decided to use it for political reasons. Why do I say that? Well, 30 million barrels of oil is about a day and a half use in the US. Or said another way, this is nothing more than political busy work in an attempt to pretend like the administration is a) concerned about the price of gasoline and b) doing something about it. But a short walk back through their history with the oil and gas industry makes the case that they’ve essentially been opposed to gas and oil exploration and have used every excuse and bureaucratic means to slow or stop it in the two plus years they’ve been calling the shots. American Petroleum Institute president Jack Gerard sums it up nicely: "It’s confusing as to why we would wait to this point to release part of the (SPR), but we’ve still failed to step forward and say let’s bring long-term supply to the marketplace, create American jobs at a time when we have 9.1 percent unemployment and produce millions of dollars of federal revenue at time when we’re struggling with a debt and deficit crisis. … Just yesterday the administration sent a letter to Capitol Hill opposing a permitting bill that was designed to expedite permits in Alaska to produce oil and natural gas. We are getting a confused message." API’s Mark Green make the most important point in a succinct three sentences: The United States could and should be taking steps to increase its own production by 2 million barrels a day or more for decades – which is possible if the government would grant much greater access to America’s ample oil and natural gas reserves. In the long run this would do more for consumers, increase energy security, create jobs and help solve the debt and deficit crisis, to which Gerard referred, by delivering more revenue to government. Instead of a long-term energy strategy that would help keep the strategic reserve in reserve, the administration seems to be taking action for the sake of taking action trying to cover itself while the economy keeps struggling. Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce’s Energy Institute adds: The Obama Administration’s decision to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is ill-advised and not the signal the markets need. Unrest in the Middle East is likely to continue for quite some time, so a temporary increase in supply is not a substitute for a long term fix. Our reserve is intended to address true emergencies, not politically inconvenient high prices. Rather than dabbling around the edges, the Administration should take steps to increase domestic production of oil—on and offshore, like the bill the House passed last night. With U.S. crude oil production expected to decrease by 90 million barrels in the next year, the Administration should instead focus on increasing domestic production will improve our energy security, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and create thousands of jobs. Note the numbers she cites. The administration is releasing 30 million barrels over the next 30 days while presiding over a total drop in production of 90 million barrels annually due to their opposition to increased domestic production. What is being done with the SPR release is simply more smoke and mirrors from the smoke and mirrors administration. It does nothing to address the long-term need for increased domestic production, it will do nothing to address the price of gasoline (there is no supply problem at the moment) and it is a misuse of an asset that is to be used for real and dire emergencies. But then we’ve come to expect nonsense like this from the Obama administration. Symbolism over substance. Pretending to be both concerned about consumers and engaged in helping them when in fact their real policy is to opposed the real solution – increased domestic drilling. ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Jun 25, 2011 7:21:38 GMT -5
neoneocon.com/2011/06/24/james-taranto-wonders-what-happened-to-the-worlds-greatest-orator/James Taranto wonders what happened to the world’s greatest orator James Taranto wants to know what happened to Obama, the world’s greatest orator. He concludes that the notion was always an empty myth, and that Obama never has convinced anyone of anything: … f Obama is following popular sentiment, he certainly isn’t leading it. And has he ever managed to do that?…True, Obama was persuasive enough to get elected president–but that was with a hapless opponent, a dour nepotist as his intraparty rival, a public fed up with the other party, and a media-driven cult of personality. Part of that cult of personality is the myth that he is the World’s Greatest Orator, a myth the Times evokes with its hazy recollections of times when he was “highly persuasive.” When was he highly persuasive? When he sold the public on the so-called stimulus and ObamaCare? When he campaigned for Democrats in 2010? When he rallied public support for his last change in Afghan policy, an increase in the U.S. troop presence? The truth is, there’s an Emperor’s New Clothes aspect to Obama’s supposed status as the World’s Greatest Orator. We’ve heard the myth of his eloquence over and over, yet he keeps “unexpectedly” making gaffes or tin-eared statements.
All of this is true—at least, since Obama has become president, a hint of it beginning quite early with his curiously flat inaugural speech. And it has continued, with Obama being an especially poor speaker and prone to gaffes when he departs from his notes (as he did the other day). I’m on record as saying that Obama has always seemed like a poor speaker to me. Even when he was on the campaign trail, his speeches were loaded with platitudes, self-aggrandizement, and promises (both vague and specific) that he was unlikely to be able to fulfill. But it was very clear that they did persuade a great many people—to believe in him, that is. So in some sense, at least back then, Obama was a great orator if you measure such things (as Taranto seems to be doing in his piece) by the ability to persuade.
This was not just media hype, either. Enthusiasm for Obama affected a great many people, including a number of my friends who are ordinarily not very politically oriented. This affect Obama’s oratory had on many people was present as early as his address at the Democratic Convention of 2004, and probably even earlier, since the evidence is that he’d been regarded for most of his life as a person of spectacular promise who could and should be president some day, although his actual accomplishments were not all that great. There’s a theory that’s been around for quite some time that Obama uses hypnosis in his speeches. If so (and I’ll leave it to you to make your own judgment on that), I submit that he’s lost that ability. Whether or not he ever was consciously employing hypnotic techniques, I submit that whatever persuasive skills he did have (and he certainly had them) rested on an edifice of believe in the power of Obama himself. For reasons that were not particularly rational, hearers felt that due to characteristics they perceived and/or imagined the man possessed (fill in the blank: intelligence, reasonableness, post-racial harmony, persuasive powers over even our enemies) he would be a highly successful president. It all rested in belief in his nearly-unlimited potential—a potential that at the time was almost totally untested. Obama himself shared that belief in his own magical powers, perhaps more than any listener, and it enabled him to deliver his famous stump speech with incredible conviction and chutzpah, which in turn had a powerful effect on those listeners inclined to believe—and their number was legion. This effect could not survive too much scrutiny in the real world, unless Obama had managed to deliver the goods. To a certain extent, no one could have delivered the fabulous goods he promised. But Obama hasn’t even come close, and therefore his oratory is falling flat—both his own belief in his powers, and the belief of listeners in those powers. Once those go it’s like Dumbo’s feather, and he falls flat (in Obama’s case, metaphorically rather than physically). That’s not to say that Obama has suddenly become humble; he has not, not by a longshot. But his abilities in the rhetorical arena are probably never going to be what they once were.
Posted by neo-neocon
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Post by Ritty77 on Jun 25, 2011 7:48:10 GMT -5
Speechworld vs. RealworldThe widening gulf between Obama’s rhetoric and realityThe Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They’ve got a ballpark figure: Let’s raise $2 trillion in revenue every year, and then spend $4 trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print? Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the president did give a speech about “a new budget framework” that he said would save $4 trillion over the next twelve years. That would be 2023, if you’re minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he’d “estimated the budget impact of this framework.” “No, Mr. Chairman,” replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.” “We don’t estimate speeches”: There’s an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. Indeed, having no other accomplishments to his name (as Hillary Clinton pointed out), giving speeches is what got the president his job. You remember — the stuff about “hope” and “change.” Were the CBO in the business of “estimating speeches,” they’d have run the numbers and concluded that under the Obama plan, vague abstract nouns would be generating 87 percent of GDP by 2016. For whatever reason, it didn’t work out quite like that. But that’s no reason not to give another speech. So there he was the other night expounding on Afghanistan. Unlike Douglas Elmendorf, the Taliban do estimate speeches, and they correctly concluded from the president’s 2009 speech that all they need to do is run out the clock and all or most of the country will be theirs once more. Last week’s update confirmed their estimate. “Winning” is not in Obama’s vocabulary. Oh, wait. That’s not true. In an earlier unestimated speech, he declared he was committed to “winning the future,” “winning the future” at some unspecified time in the future being a lot easier than winning the war. In fairness, it’s been two-thirds of a century since America has unambiguously won a war, but throughout that period most presidents were at least notionally committed to the possibility of victory. Obama seems to regard the very concept as something boorish and vulgar that would cause him embarrassment if it came up at dinner parties. So place your bets on how long it will be before Mullah Omar’s back in town. And then ask yourself if America will have anything to show for its decade in Afghanistan that it wouldn’t have had if it had just quit two weeks after toppling the Taliban in the fall of 2001 and left the mullahs, warlords, poppy barons, and pederasts to have at each other without the distraction of extravagant NATO reconstruction projects littering their beautiful land of charmingly unspoilt rubble. That’s not how the president put it, of course. But then the delightful appeal of an Obama speech is the ever wider gulf between Speechworld and Reality. So in this instance he framed our retreat from the Hindu Kush as an excellent opportunity to stop wasting money overseas and start wasting even more in Washington. Or in his words: “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” Gee, thanks. If America were a Kandahar wedding, that would be the cue to fire your rifle in the air and grab the cutest nine-year-old boy. Naturally, not everyone sees eye to eye. Like Afghanistan, ours is a fractious land. But as Obama said: “Our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong, no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” Climb ev’ry mountain. Ford ev’ry stream. Are you sure we can afford ev’ry stream? Yes, it’s far less rugged than it sounds. In compliance with EPA regulations, no real hills and dales were harmed in the making of this glib rhetorical imagery. “At his best,” wrote the New York Times of Obama’s speech, “the president can be hugely persuasive.” Er, if you say so. He’s mostly persuasive in persuading you there’s no urgency about anything: All that stuff about Americans sweating and straining for the most distant horizon is his way of saying you can go back to sleep for another couple of decades. If we hadn’t been assured by the New York Times that this man is the Greatest Orator of All Time, there would be something offensive in the leader of the Brokest Nation in History bragging that we’re not the guys to shirk a challenge, however grueling and demanding it may be, no sirree. The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along. Remember Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla.? “I never thought this day would ever happen,” she gushed after an Obama rally in 2008. “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” Is Peggy really the gal you’d want to hike a steep hill with? In Speechworld, nation-building can be done through flatulent rhetoric. In Realworld, nations are built by people, and in America the productive class is battered and reeling. Obama wasted a trillion dollars on a phony stimulus that stimulated nothing but government, and wants to try it one mo’ time. That’s what yokes “nation-building” near and far. According to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence now accounts for 97 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. The bit that’s left doesn’t function, not least because it doesn’t need to. How can, say, Helmand develop an economic base when everybody with a whit of sense is making massively inflated salaries as a translator for the Yanks or a security guard for some EU outreach project? When the 97 percent revenue tide recedes with the American withdrawal, what’s left will be the same old 3 percent ugly tribal dump Afghanistan was a decade ago. It will leave as little trace as the Obama stimulus. The sheer waste is appalling, immoral, and deeply destructive. In Kandahar as in California, all that matters is excess: It’s not working? Then you need to spend more. More more more. What does it matter? You’re not spending anything real. America would have to find $15 trillion just to get back to having nothing in its pocket. But who cares? As long as we’re united in our commitment to excess, no CBO debt-to-GDP ratio graph is too steep for us to take to the next level, and no horizon — 2060, 2080, 2104 — is too distant to serve as a plausible estimate for significant deficit reduction. In Realworld, political speeches would be about closing down unnecessary federal bureaucracies, dramatically downsizing or merging others, and ending makework projects and mission creep. The culture of excess that distinguishes the hyperpower at twilight would be reviled at every turn. But instead the “hugely persuasive” orator declares that there’s nothing to worry about that even more government can’t cure. In Speechworld, “no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” In Realworld, that’s mainly because we’re going downhill. And the horizon is a cliff edge. www.nationalreview.com/articles/270460/speechworld-vs-realworld-mark-steyn
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Post by Ritty77 on Jun 25, 2011 9:04:26 GMT -5
I said before he was elected that I didn't see the "great" in his oratory skills. His growing list of boorish, boneheaded remarks shows that his intellect isn't all that it was cracked up to be either. Add that to his worship of failed collectivist ideas and you get an unconvincing, repellent, failed one-term president.
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 5, 2011 7:15:10 GMT -5
Ignorance, Stupidity or Manipulation By Walter Williams www.JewishWorldReview.com | There's little that's intelligent or informed about Time magazine editor Richard Stengel's article "One Document, Under Siege" (June 23, 2011). It contains many grossly ignorant statements about our Constitution. If I believed in conspiracies, I'd say Stengel's article is part of a leftist agenda to undermine respect for the founding values of our nation. Stengel says: "The framers were not gods and were not infallible. Yes, they gave us, and the world, a blueprint for the protection of democratic freedoms — freedom of speech, assembly, religion — but they also gave us the idea that a black person was three-fifths of a human being, that women were not allowed to vote and that South Dakota should have the same number of Senators as California, which is kind of crazy. And I'm not even going to mention the Electoral College." My column last week addressed the compromise whereby each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining representation in the House of Representatives and Electoral College. Had slaves been counted as whole people, slaveholding states would have had much greater political power. I agree the framers were not gods and were not infallible, but they had far greater wisdom and principle than today's politicians. The framers held democracy and majority rule in deep contempt. As a matter of fact, the term democracy appears in none of our founding documents. James Madison argued that "measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." John Adams said: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Stengel's majoritarian vision sees it as anti-democratic that South Dakota and California both have two senators, but the framers wanted to reduce the chances that highly populated states would run roughshod over thinly populated states. They established the Electoral College to serve the same purpose in determining the presidency. The framers recognized that most human abuses were the result of government. As Thomas Paine said, "government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil." Because of their distrust, the framers sought to keep the federal government limited in its power. Their distrust of Congress is seen in the language used throughout our Constitution. The Bill of Rights says Congress shall not abridge, shall not infringe, shall not deny and other shall-nots, such as disparage, violate and deny. If the founders did not believe Congress would abuse our God-given, or natural, rights, they would not have provided those protections. I've always argued that if we depart this world and see anything resembling the Bill of Rights at our next destination, we'll know we're in hell. A bill of rights in heaven would be an affront to God. Other founder distrust for government is found in the Constitution's separation of powers, checks and balances, and several anti-majoritarian provisions, such as the Electoral College, two-thirds vote to override a veto and the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify changes to the Constitution. Stengel says, "If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn't say so." That statement is beyond ignorance. The 10th Amendment reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Stengel apparently has not read The Federalist No. 45, in which James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, said: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." Stengel's article is five pages online, and I've only commented on the first. There's also little in the remaining pages that reflects understanding and respect for our nation's most important document.
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 8, 2011 20:36:28 GMT -5
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 15, 2011 11:53:27 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=15A little recent history presented as a reminder July 15th, 2011 | Author: Bruce McQuain With these debt ceiling negotiations underway, it is useful to remind ourselves, especially with an election year looming, how we got in this spot that has Moody’s threatening to downgrade our bonds based on the possibility of default on the debt. The WSJ covers that for us: On spending, it is important to recall how extraordinary the blowout of the last three years has been. We’ve seen nothing like it since World War II. Nothing close. The nearby chart tracks federal outlays as a share of GDP since 1960. The early peaks coincide with the rise of the Great Society, the recession of 1974-75, and then a high of 23.5% with the recession of 1982 and the Reagan defense buildup. From there, spending declines, most rapidly during the 1990s as defense outlays fell to 3% of GDP in 2000 from its Reagan peak of 6.2% in 1986. The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008. Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945. (Even in 1946, with millions still in the military, spending was only 24.8% of GDP. In 1947 it fell to 14.8%.) Though the recession ended in June 2009, spending in 2010 stayed high at nearly 24%, and this year it is heading back toward 25%. This is the main reason that federal debt held by the public as a share of GDP has climbed from 40.3% in 2008, to 53.5% in 2009, 62.2% in 2010 and an estimated 72% this year, and is expected to keep rising in the future. These are heights not seen since the Korean War, and many analysts think U.S. debt will soon hit 90% or 100% of GDP. Here’s the WSJ chart talked about above: In terms of percentage of the GDP, only WWII compares to the outlays we’ve seen in the past 3 years. And not only did the Democratic Congress and Obama “consciously blow up” the debt, they never offered a budget as required by law. This what just throw money to the wind time and hope it landed somewhere it might help. To call what they did a “plan” is to give real plans a bad name. Now, suddenly, Obama is “serious” about this stuff, making demands that a fix be found, etc. Where the heck was he when this money was going out faster than little Timmy Geithner could print it? So let’s be clear, as Obama likes to say: Congress is responsible for the way so much of this spending was wasted, resulting in little job creation and the slowest economic recovery since the 1930s. But in the U.S. political system, Presidents are supposed to be the fiscal adults. When they abdicate, the teenagers invite over their special interest friends and blow the inheritance. The President is now claiming to have found fiscal virtue, but notice how hard he has fought House Republicans as they’ve sought to abate the spending boom. First he used the threat of a government shutdown to whittle the fiscal 2011 spending cuts down to very little. Then he invited Paul Ryan to sit in the front row for a speech while he called his House budget un-American. How does one take this President seriously given this litany? Easy answer – you don’t. I mean, look at this: Now Mr. Obama is using the debt-ceiling debate as a battering ram not to control spending but to command a tax increase. We’re told the White House list of immediate budget savings, the ones that matter most because they are enforceable by the current Congress, are negligible. His offer for immediate domestic nondefense discretionary cuts: $2 billion. As for Mr. Obama’s proposed entitlement cuts, they are all nibbling around the edges of programs that are growing far faster than inflation. He’s offering few reforms that would make a difference in the long run. Oh, and ObamaCare is untouchable, despite its $1 trillion in new spending over the next several years, growing even faster after that. And this goes to the point of my previous post. When you look at how we got here and who is responsible (yeah, he didn’t inherit this – this is all his) it is hard to find any grounds for confidence that the same people have any idea or desire to change their ways. And yet they’re going to try to convince the American people that Obama should keep his job and Nancy Pelosi should be returned to the House speakership (with a sweeping victory putting a Democratic majority back in the House). It’s enough to make a grown man cry. ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 21, 2011 12:28:37 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=12Blunt talk from Bernie Marcus about Obama and economy Published July 21, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain This has been a week for CEOs speaking out against the Obama administration. This time it’s someone I actually admire. Bernie Marcus, co-founder and CEO of Home Depot, has given an interview to Investors Business Daily and it is a pretty frank denunciation of the policies this administration has followed since coming into power. It’s one of the things I admire about Marcus – he pulls no punches: IBD: What’s the single biggest impediment to job growth today? Marcus: The U.S. government. Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we’d tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It’s become stifling. If you’re a small businessman, the only way to deal with it is to work harder, put in more hours, and let people go. When you consider that something like 70% of the American people work for small businesses, you are talking about a big economic impact. Remember that Home Depot was launched during the then worst recession in 40 years and Marcus took it public 3 years later. He’s built a business from the ground up and created thousands of jobs. He actually understands what it takes. He also clearly understands what will kill it. Here is one of the key points one has to understand about this administration and Marcus is on it: IBD: President Obama has promised to streamline and eliminate regulations. What’s your take? Marcus: His speeches are wonderful. His output is absolutely, incredibly bad. As he speaks about cutting out regulations, they are now producing thousands of pages of new ones. With just ObamaCare by itself, you have a 2,000 page bill that’s probably going end up being 150,000 pages of regulations. We’ve been warning you from the beginning to pay no attention to the man’s words and instead scrutinize his deeds. Often they are the opposite of what he has said he’d do. For example: In January, however, he issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to review their regulations, looking for rules that are inefficient or outdated. His aim, he explained on The Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed page, was to "root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb." But there’s a catch: All those new regulations Obama put in place will not be subject to review. Just days after the president issued his order, an anonymous administration official conceded to the Journal that "new regulations will not be priorities for the look back." Meanwhile, more than a dozen federal bureaucracies—including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board—are exempt from the review because they are independent agencies. That’s another in a long list of many examples of him saying one thing and doing something else. His speeches are politically driven and designed to give him political cover while his actions are ideologically driven and part of an agenda. Marcus is then asked about the debt talks: IBD: Washington has been consumed with debt talks. Is this the right focus now? Marcus: They are all tied together. If we don’t lower spending and if we don’t deal with paying down the debt, we are going to have to raise taxes. Even brain-dead economists understand that when you raise taxes, you cost jobs. With all the talk about tax increases it means we have a lot of zombie politicians who haven’t a clue, unfortunately. I mean how difficult is this? When you raise taxes in a recession, many businesses are going to have to make a decision aren’t they? Use the money to pay the tax or hire. Any guess which will win out? You can’t go to jail for not hiring. Finally, and this one is devastating in its forthrightness, Marcus is asked what he’d tell Obama if he could sit down with him and talk about job creation. His answer is a classic: IBD: If you could sit down with Obama and talk to him about job creation, what would you say? Marcus: I’m not sure Obama would understand anything that I’d say, because he’s never really worked a day outside the political or legal area. He doesn’t know how to make a payroll, he doesn’t understand the problems businesses face. I would try to explain that the plight of the businessman is very reactive to Washington. As Washington piles on regulations and mandates, the impact is tremendous. I don’t think he’s a bad guy. I just think he has no knowledge of this. One can only wish Contessa Brewer was around to ask about economic degrees. Marcus is right about Obama’s lack of knowledge. He’s surrounded by a lack of knowledge in this area if his policies are any indication. As has been pointed out repeatedly, a president who was really concerned about jobs would be green lighting oil and gas exploration as fast as he could make it happen. And he’s certainly made speeches about doing just that, but as usual, his actions betray his words. Marcus has got a bead on this administration and this president. As long as they are in power and continue with the course of their regulatory policies, the economic malaise that has settled over this country will continue. ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 23, 2011 7:55:58 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?cat=18The Obama Administration’s war on carbon-based energy Published July 22, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain A little reminder: We are currently in the middle of a war against carbon based energy being waged by the current administration to do precisely what Obama promised as a candidate. Raise energy prices. The method is irrelevant to him. No “cap and trade”? Fine. He’ll find other ways. And that’s exactly what is happening as we speak. For instance, via the EPA. Background – apparently the EPA released its new proposed “Cross-state Rule” on July 7th – a couple of weeks ago – after previously sending it around for comment. The rule is scheduled to go into effect on January 1st of 2012. It is 1,323 pages long. It seems they threw a new requirement into the mix that was not in the original proposed rule and that none of the energy generating owners knew was coming. It would require many to shut down. The Electric Reliability Coalition of Texas picks it up from there: ERCOT’s May11 report to the Public Utility Commission on the impact of the proposed environmental regulations did not address the impact of SO2 restrictions on coal plants in ERCOT because these restrictions on Texas were not included as part of the EPA’s earlier rule proposal. We have not had time to fully analyze the entire 1,323-page Cross-State Rule released July 7 or to communicate with the generation owners regarding what their intentions will be. However, initial implications are that the SO2 requirements for Texas added at the last stage of the rule development will have a significant impact on coal generation, which provided 40 percent of the electricity consumed in ERCOT in 2010. Our concern is that the timing of the new requirements – effective Jan. 1, 2012 – is unreasonable because it does not allow enough time to implement operational responses to ensure reliability. We fear that many of the coal plants in ERCOT will be forced to limit or shut down operations in order to maintain compliance with the new rule, possibly leading to inadequate operating reserve margins with insufficient time to reliably retrofit existing generation or build new, replacement generation. So the EPA pushes out a new reg with drastic limits on SO2 that were not in the original draft of the regulation. If left unchanged it will, per ERCOT, cause many coal-fired plants to shut down or limit their generation. And with 40% of electricity generated by coal in Texas, that will be a significant loss of generating power. Texas will then have to buy what it can’t generate itself and consumer prices will do precisely what candidate Obama hoped – and planned- for them to do. Now think of this and its effect across the country. Right in the middle of a recession (he’s not the only one trying his best to shut down coal). Brilliant. Of course that isn’t the only facet of the war on carbon based energy being waged by this administration. Oil and gas also have seen what has now become to be called a “permatorium” on offshore drilling enforced by the administration. Using the Deepwater Horizon blowout as its excuse, the administration has slowed permitting to a crawl and is dragging its feet as slowly as possible to, one suspects, fulfill Obama’s desire. Study after study have shown that opening the process back up to at least the speed in which it was previous to the accident could create hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions in revenue. A real step toward jumpstarting the economy. Just yesterday another study made that very point: Faster permitting of offshore oil and gas projects could create nearly 230,000 new jobs in 2012 and boost the economy by $44 billion, including a surge in tax revenue, according to an industry-funded study released Thursday. The report by IHS CERA said job growth would extend beyond the Gulf Coast states, boosting employment indirectly as far away as California, New York, Florida, Illinois and Georgia. The study, funded by the Gulf Economic Survival Team, a group of largely Louisiana-based energy and business interests, looks at data on the pace of permitting by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement through April 30. That’s six months after the end of a federal moratorium on offshore drilling, which the government imposed after last year’s Deepwater Horizon accident killed 11 workers and triggered a 5 million-barrel oil spill. Permit approvals take 95 percent longer now than before the spill, the study says. You can read the study for yourself here [pdf]. But that last number is telling. There’s no reason for it. The industry has stepped up and raised the bar significantly on safety. The numbers quoted in the study projecting jobs and revenue are for 2012. What administration concerned with jobs wouldn’t leap at such low hanging fruit? This one. Compared to historical trends, pending exploration plans are up by nearly 90%, approvals are down by 85% ,and the approval process has slowed from an average of 36 to 131 days. And there’s no reason for it. Meanwhile, what we have is tough to get to market. Take West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil. As for WTI, inadequate pipeline infrastructure makes it difficult to get the stuff out of North America — and that depresses its price, especially when demand is also weak. Its problems could also get worse before they get better. Output from North America is growing faster than expected. Canadian producers, for example, recently said output will grow from 2.7 million barrels a day to 3.4 million by 2014 and North Dakota production is surging. Meanwhile efforts to build new pipelines are mired in political controversy. And they’ll remain mired in political controversy as long as this administration is in power. Slowly, but surely, a nation with huge energy resources is being strangled by a government and President who want to intentionally raise energy prices. Inadequate pipeline infrastructure means less product makes it to market. Less product in the market place means higher prices for what does make it there. Who pays? Consumers. However, proposals and applications to build pipelines, submitted in 2008, still await action: In September 2008 TransCanada applied to build a new pipeline — the Keystone XL — to bring diluted bitumen from the oil-rich tar sands of Alberta to thirsty American refineries on the Gulf Coast. It is hardly a radical proposal. Canadian crude has been flowing to the U.S. for decades. Another Canadian company — Enbridge — operates the Clipper pipeline across the Canadian border to Chicago. In July 2010 TransCanada began operating its Keystone pipeline from Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma, which is a major storage and pricing depot…TransCanada estimates that building the pipeline will mean more than $20 billion — $13 billion from TransCanada itself — in investment and 13,000 new American jobs in construction and related manufacturing. The company also expects more than 118,000 "spin-off" jobs during the two years of construction. TransCanada says it has signed building contracts with four major U.S. unions. It projects that construction will generate $600 million in new state and local tax revenue and that over its life the pipeline will generate another $5.2 billion in property taxes. The Energy Policy Research Foundation in Washington estimates that by linking to the XL, oil producers in North Dakota’s Bakken region will enjoy efficiency gains of between $36.5 million and $146 million annually. Lower transport costs will mean savings for Gulf Coast refiners of $473 million annually if the pipeline meets conservative expectations of shipping 400,000 barrels per day. Jobs and revenue (in addition to those previously cited in the study), there for the taking, and this administration sits and waits. And of course, the newest controversy to hit the energy community as to be used as an excuse not to act has to do with hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”. This is a 64 year old technology that has been used in the US on over a million wells. Suddenly, after news of massive new findings of natural gas in shale formations, it is a problem. And, of course, once it can be officially designated as a problem area, it must be investigated and regulated by the federal government. Complaints of ground water contamination have derailed the exploitation of these energy assets while the politicians argue, dither and delay. With those delays, again, go thousands upon thousands of potential jobs for Americans. Name a reason for the sorry shape our economy is in and the government’s apparent refusal to aggressively move to help the energy industry create hundreds of thousands of jobs? Review that video again. It’s not long, but it plainly gives you the reason. Is that what your government is there to do? ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 23, 2011 8:02:51 GMT -5
This from an administration that continually expresses concern for our more vulnerable citizens when trying to make Conservative proposals look bad, and constantly speaks of no new taxes on the middle class.
This war on carbon-based energy is far more harmful to the vulnerable and costly for the middle class than anything the Conservative side is proposing.
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 23, 2011 8:24:35 GMT -5
spectator.org/archives/2011/07/22/inhibiting-an-oil-and-gas-boom#Inhibiting an Oil and Gas Boom By Paul Chesser on 7.22.11 @ 6:08AM The fossil fuel shale extraction industry, where technological advancements and discoveries of huge reserves of oil and natural gas hold great promise for the nation's future energy needs, is under attack. In June the New York Times ran a dubiously sourced series of stories that sought to show the bullishness on natural gas is overblown. The National Legal and Policy Center exposed how reporter Ian Urbina seemed to rely heavily on a Texas-based shale gas critic for his stories (others just called it "shoddy reporting"), and asked the Times' ombudsman Arthur Brisbane to address the stories' credibility. He did, writing, "My view is that such a pointed article needed more convincing substantiation, more space for a reasoned explanation of the other side and more clarity about its focus." Then there is the obsessed, Herb and Marion Sandler-funded ProPublica, which has published 120 stories almost entirely dedicated to alleged problems with the gas industry -- mostly about hydraulic fracturing (called "fracking"), the process used to break open the shale to access the natural gas. Some environmentalists allege the practice harms drinking water, an unfounded claim. Former Rocky Mountain News columnist Dave Kopel discovered ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten's prejudice in 2009. In an email, Wyoming groundwater regulator Mark Thiesse told Kopel, "I spent several hours on the phone and around a dozen follow up emails to try and help [Lustgarten] write a factual article. Unfortunately he seemed to have his own agenda." ProPublica's exuberance for attacking natural gas is highlighted in their music video titled, "The Fracking Song." But media distortions are less of a problem than excessive government regulation and panic by environmental extremists. Earthjustice, amidst hysteria over fracking and other normal activities that have been safely employed to access gas, recites from Reuters: "A widening shale gas revolution is killing the economics of renewable energy, even as falling costs allow wind and solar to overtake fossil fuels in niche areas." They think this is bad and ignore the facts that wind and solar costs are artificially "low" (but still not low enough) thanks to taxpayer subsidies. Tired of the beating, members of the oil and gas industry last week issued a report about the promising future of energy in the U.S. -- if government and Earth perfectionists don't successfully impede. The Western Energy Alliance's " Blueprint for Western Energy Prosperity" cites projections by respected analysts ICF International, which assert: • "The West is projected to generate 1.3 million barrels of domestic oil and condensate production a day by the year 2020, an amount that exceeds the current daily oil imports from Russia, Iraq and Kuwait combined." • "The West has the potential to produce 6.2 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas annually by 2020, an additional one Tcf from 2010 levels." • "Combined, western oil and natural gas is projected to produce more energy on a daily basis than the total U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Venezuela, Colombia, Algeria, Nigeria, and Russia." • "The number of direct, indirect and induced jobs in the oil and natural gas sector is projected to increase by 16 percent to 504,120 by 2020." Impressive, but there are many hitches and glitches -- namely, litigation-happy environmental groups who thwart affordable fossil fuel energy that actually works, while instead promoting inefficient, expensive wind (dirty and unconstitutional, as revealed by my organization, American Tradition Institute) and solar (also unconstitutional, in certain states). Worse, EPA and other government agencies often go along with the extremist groups and invite litigation, and then (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) "settle" their "dispute" at the expense of taxpayers. As solutions, the WEA Blueprint recommends comprehensive reform of federal leasing, permitting and environmental analysis processes. The group also calls for a moratorium on any new or expanded regulations, in favor of "a more efficient, predictable means than the current and ever expanding maze of haphazard federal regulation." And they also seek relief from unreasonable litigation that only seeks to obstruct and delay, rather than constructively and cooperatively seek best solutions to protect people and the environment they live in. WEA also seeks for states to amend their renewable energy standards to allow natural gas to compete to provide electricity on "fuel-neutral performance criteria" such as cost and emissions. I mildly disagree as the renewables mandates are anti-freedom, anti-consumer, extremely costly and as I mentioned earlier, unconstitutional. Open the electricity market to true competition for power generation and gas will do just fine. It's not a coincidence the unemployment rate in North Dakota is 3.2 percent, where most land is privately owned and the Bakken formation is producing oil, gas and jobs. Private equals liberty, and less meddling by government and outsiders, so there is where the energy and work flows more freely.
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Post by Ritty77 on Jul 24, 2011 6:46:26 GMT -5
This from an administration that continually expresses concern for our more vulnerable citizens when trying to make Conservative proposals look bad, and constantly speaks of no new taxes on the middle class. This war on carbon-based energy is far more harmful to the vulnerable and costly for the middle class than anything the Conservative side is proposing. With failure of the Cap and Trade legislation, the Obama EPA is simply applying their policies anyhow. I trust that it won't be too late to undo these by January of 2013.
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Post by philunderwood on Jul 25, 2011 6:46:21 GMT -5
Obama: The man without a plan By Mark Steyn www.JewishWorldReview.com | Earlier this month, Moody's downgraded Irish government debt to junk. Which left the Irish somewhat peeved. The Department of Finance pointed out that it had met all the "quantitative fiscal targets" imposed by the European Union, and the National Treasury Management Agency said that Ireland was sufficiently flush "to cover all its financing requirements until the end of 2013." Which is more than the government of the United States can say. That's not the only difference between the auld sod and America. In Europe, austerity is in the air, and in the headlines: "Italy Fast-Tracks Austerity Vote." "Greek Minister Urges Austerity Consensus." "Portugal To Speed Austerity Measures." "Even Queen Faces Funding Squeeze In Austerity Britain." The word has become so instantly ubiquitous that Leftie deadbeats are already opposed to it: "Austerity Protest Takes Place In Dublin." For the rentamob types, "austerity" is to this decade what "Bush" and "Iraq War" were to the last. It can't be long before grizzled old rockers are organizing some all-star Rock Against Austerity gala. By contrast, nobody seems minded to "speed austerity measures" over here. The word isn't part of the conversation – even though we're broke on a scale way beyond what Ireland or Portugal could ever dream of. The entire Western world is operating on an unsustainable business model: If it were Borders or Blockbuster, it would be hoping to close the Greek and Portuguese branches but maybe hold on to the Norwegian one. In hard reality, like Borders only the other day, it would probably wind up shuttering them all. The problem is structural: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. Developed nations have 30-year-old students and 50-year old retirees, and then wonder why the shrunken rump of a "working" population in between can't make the math add up. By the way, demographically speaking, these categories – "adolescents" and "retirees" – are an invention of our own time: They didn't exist a century ago. You were a kid till 13 or so. Then you worked. Then you died. As Obama made plain in his threat to Gran'ma last week that the August checks might not go out, funding nonproductivity is now the principal purpose of the modern state. Good luck with that at a time when every appliance in your home is manufactured in Asia. As I said, these are structural problems. In theory, they can be fixed. But, when you look at the nature of them, you've got to wonder whether they ever will be this side of societal collapse. Blockbuster went bankrupt because it was wedded to a 1980s technology and distribution system. In government, being merely a quarter-century obsolete would be a major achievement. The ruling party in Washington is wedded to the principle that an 80-year-old social program is inviolable: That's like Blockbuster insisting in 2011 that there's no problem with its business model for rentals of silent movies with live orchestral accompaniment. To be sure, there are some problems parking the musicians' bus in residential streets, but nothing that can't be worked out. But "political reality" operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the "debt ceiling" debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting "Hats off, strangers!" at Britain's Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on – or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something. Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as "the grown-up in the room." There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president's staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he'll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he's going to play Haydn's Cello Concerto No 2, and, even though there's no cello in sight, and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they've ever heard. The only "plan" Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt. How about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democratic Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Sen. Reid can't even be bothered pretending he's interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that's your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way. It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They're passing austerity budgets so austere they've spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street – and yet they're still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more – and nobody's downgrading them. Well, don't worry. It's coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional. In the debt-ridden treasuries of Europe, they're talking "austerity." In the debt-ridden treasury of Washington, they're talking about more spending (Kathleen Sebelius is touting new women's health programs to be made available "without cost.") At the risk (in Samuel Johnson's words) of settling the precedence between a louse and a flea, I think Europe's political discourse is marginally less deranged than ours. The president is said to be "the adult in the room" because he is reported to be in favor of raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.
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