Let the Mudslinging Begin!

Democrats Unleash Ads Focusing on Rivals’ Pasts - NYTimes.com: "Democratic candidates across the country are opening a fierce offensive of negative advertisements against Republicans, using lawsuits, tax filings, reports from the Better Business Bureau and even divorce proceedings to try to discredit their opponents and save their Congressional majority."

When you can't defend your policies, your record or your ideas, all you have left are ad hominem attacks.

Study: Obama adminstration underestimated moratorium job loss | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

Study: Obama adminstration underestimated moratorium job loss | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment: "An interagency report released last week by the Obama administration underestimated the number of jobs lost because of the deepwater drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico by about half, according to a study released Tuesday by the American Energy Alliance.

The study, conducted by Dr. Joseph Mason, endowed chair of banking at Louisiana State University, found that the moratorium has cost the Gulf region 19,536 jobs, not the 8,000 to 12,000 jobs estimated by the Department of Commerce report."

Thank goodness Obama is not beholden to any "special interests," like the environmental lobby. I think it's better to be safe (i.e. put 19,000 people out of work) than sorry (risk another oil spill).

Hats Off to the Washington Post for at Least Noticing...

President Obama picks Elizabeth Warren ... and thumbs his nose at the Senate: "President Obama picks Elizabeth Warren ... and thumbs his nose at the Senate"

Constitution, What Constitution?

Review & Outlook: Elizabeth III - WSJ.com: "We have here another end-run around Constitutional niceties so Team Obama can invest huge authority in an unelected official who is unable to withstand a public vetting. So a bureau inside an agency (the Fed) that it doesn't report to, with a budget not subject to Congressional control, now gets a leader not subject to Senate confirmation. If Dick Cheney had tried this, he'd have been accused of staging a coup."

Frankly, the amount of power vested in executive branch officials by recent abominations like TARP, Dudd-Frank, and ObamaCare is scary enough. But now, the Executive doesn't even deem it reasonable to subject these officials to confirmation by the legislative branch. How does that oath of office go, "I solemnly swear to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States..."?

And of course, the deafening silence of the MSM goes without saying...

Defend It, Don't Mend It

You can do a lot with 59 Senate votes, and that was certainly clear this week as Majority Leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats slammed the door on a bipartisan attempt to repeal ObamaCare's new 1099 reporting requirement on small business. 

The Democrats, unable to sell ObamaCare to their consituents, have resorted to saying:  "it's not perfect, but it's a start, and we will fix the problems with it over time."  Well, the issue of the 1099 reporting requirements shows how empty that promise is.  Virtually everyone, including the IRS' own Taxpayer Advocate,  agrees that the new 1099 reporting requirements are an abomination:

The office of the National Taxpayer Advocate within the IRS estimates that this provision will affect 40 million businesses. In July, they issued a harsh report on the consequences of the 1099 provision. They noted that small businesses in particular will be harmed by the new reporting requirements.

They state that the new burden on businesses would be disproportionate compared the actual revenue gained. For a relatively small increase in revenue, small businesses across the country would need to purchase new software and accounting services to handle the new paperwork.

Well, the opportunity to fix this clearly flawed provision of ObamaCare came up this week, with a bipartisan majority of senators supporting it.  But Harry Reid made sure it didn't pass.  If the Democrats can't mend this provision, they can't mend any provision of ObamaCare.   They intend to defend it, not mend it.

Crippling Our Economy for the Sake of Green Myths

 

John Stossel: Going "green" | Washington Examiner

Awesome Article on Fallacies of Green Thinking. Some Highlights:

Al Gore's group, Repower America, claims we can replace all our dirty energy with clean, carbon-free renewables. Gore says we can do it within 10 years...

"It's simply not possible," says Robert Bryce, author of "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy." "Nine out of 10 units of power that we consume are produced by hydrocarbons -- coal, oil and natural gas. Any transition away from those sources is going to be a decades-long, maybe even a century-long process. ... The world consumes 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons per day. We would have to find the energy equivalent of 23 Saudi Arabias."...

How about wind power?

"Wind does not replace oil. This is one of the great fallacies, and it's one that the wind energy business continues to promote," Bryce said....

The media rave about Denmark, which gets some power from wind. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, "If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark. "Friedman doesn't fundamentally understand what he's talking about," Bryce said. Bryce's book shows that Denmark uses eight times more coal and 25 times more oil than wind.(emphasis added)

"One nuclear power plant in Texas covers about 19 square miles, an area slightly smaller than Manhattan. To produce the same amount of power from wind turbines would require an area the size of Rhode Island. This is energy sprawl." To produce the same amount of energy with ethanol, another "green" fuel, it would take 24 Rhode Islands to grow enough corn. (emphasis added)

Thank goodness we now have an administration that makes decisions based on science, not superstition or ideology!

An Environment Catastrophe In the Gulf But ANWAR is Safe

Monday, May 31, 2010

Oil spill culprits run deep | obama, oil, deep - Opinion - The Orange County Register

Here's my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place? Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Krauthammer implies there is a downside to banning offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the Alaskan wilderness. Doesn't he know that leftist policies have no downsides? The Left has repealed the laws of nature, they can:

- hobble the economy by cutting off energy resources and LOWER unemployment (thanks to all those windmill and solar panel jobs - ask Spain how that's working out for them)
- raise taxes to confiscatory levels on the most productive in our society without sapping their incentives to create wealth for the society
- give everyone in the nation access to free healthcare but not create massive shortages and rationing
- SPEND their way out of a debt crisis

Come on, Krauthammer, your thinking is so 19th century!

Don't Flush MY Money Down The Greek Toilet

This is from a free email newsletter by John Mauldin.  An incredible resource on economics and finance:

Should the US Bail Out European Banks?

The obvious answer to the above question, at least on this side of the Atlantic, is no. But that is the plan being foisted on US tax-payers by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF wants to create a $250 billion dollar bailout fund for Greece, Portugal, et al that the US will contribute roughly 20% to. This fund will loan money and that IMG debt will be subordinate (junior!) to regular Greek debt, so when Greece does default, and they will, the IMF is the last in line to get paid.
Where will the money go? It will buy mostly Greek rollover debt from European banks getting out of their Greek debt. It is a back door bailout for German and French banks. The US Senate voted 94-0 that the US should not fund any such debt if the Treasury cannot certify the probability of getting repayment. If the Obama administration allows this funding to go through, the hue and cry will be large. It is bad enough that we have to pay for Freddie and Fannie (already $400 billion and counting!). Not meaning to be churlish, but the French and Germans can bail out their own banks.

Don't let them tell you we are bailing out the Greeks - we are once again bailing out the big bankers (didn't Pres Obama refer to them as "Fat Cats?") but this time FRENCH and GERMAN FAT CATS.  And the sad fact is that this bailout has no chance of saving the Greeks - it's just money down the toilet.

Obama's Answer To Devastating Critiques of His Plan - Dismiss them as "Talking Points"

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/IBDEditorials.aspx?p=1#: "But [few in the mainstream media] notie Obama's conspicuous non-rebuttal to Rep. Paul Ryan.

It was the Wisconsin congressman who made the most pointed remarks about Obama's reform proposal. For example:

• 'This bill does not control costs (or) reduce deficits. Instead, (it) adds a new health care entitlement when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have.'

• 'The bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending. The true 10-year cost (is) $2.3 trillion.'

• 'The bill takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that's really reserved for Social Security. So either we're double-counting them or we don't intend on paying those Social Security benefits.'

• 'The bill takes $72 billion from the CLASS Act (long-term care insurance) benefit premiums and claims them as offsets.'

• 'The bill treats Medicare like a piggy bank, (raiding) half a trillion dollars not to shore up Medicare solvency, but to spend on this new government program.'

• 'The chief actuary of Medicare (says) as much as 20% of Medicare providers will either go out of business or have to stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries.'

• 'Millions of seniors who have chosen Medicare Advantage (Medicare through a private insurer) will lose the coverage that they now enjoy.'

• 'When you strip out the double-counting and ... gimmicks, the full 10-year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit.'

• 'The 'doc fix' (restoring cuts in Medicare reimbursements) costs $371 billion ... a price tag (that) made the score look bad. (So) that provision was taken out, and (put) in stand-alone legislation. But ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending does not reduce spending.'

• 'Are we bending the cost curve down or are we bending the cost curve up? If you look at your own chief actuary at Medicare, we're bending it up. He's claiming that we're going up $222 billion, adding more to the unsustainable fiscal situation we have.'

In response to all this, Obama basically talked up the benefits of Medicare Advantage. Call us sticklers, but we expected something a little more, uh, professorial."

You'd think in 7 hours, over two of which the President himself filibustered, he' have had a chance to refute one of these devastating points by Rep Ryan.

Myth - Government Run Healthcare Is An Answer to Healthcare Inflation

Obamacare’s Costly Flaw - Dr. David Gratzer - National Review Online: "Health care might be cheaper in socialized systems (in part, because of rationed care), but, even with their long waiting lists, costs are rising just as quickly there as here...

And how did the United States do with its lack of Obama-inspired Canada-Irish-German-style bureaucratic controls? Health inflation here was 3.4 percent last year, just over double the basic inflation rate. Tellingly, the worst cost increases were experienced by . . . government. Medicare costs were up 8.6 percent, and Medicaid, up 9.9 percent."

Government-run systems globally are doing barely better than the United States in controlling healthcare costs, even with government rationing. In the United States, the portion of our health care economy that seems least able to control inflation is the government, where costs are rising at a nearly 10% rate. Does this suggest to a rational (i.e. non-Leftist) mind that we should shift control for MORE of our healthcare system to the government? And remember, Medicare and Medicaid price controls are already effectively shifting a considerable amount of the burden for those programs onto private insurers. If not for that fact, the inflation numbers for government-run healthcare would look even worse.

Don't Mess With Texas

"DALLAS, Feb 16 (Reuters) - Texas and several national industry groups on Tuesday filed separate petitions in federal court challenging the government's authority to regulate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions."

OK, Other Than That, Is There Any Reason to Doubt Anthropogenic Global Warming?

Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online: "The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming."

I can't think of anything I need to add to this...

If Dems Have Their Way, We'll Be Bailing Out Utilities Next

"But addressing a Heritage Foundation seminar last May, Dr. Gabriel Calzada, Professor of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid explained what Feed In Tariffs and other wind subsidies did to Spain (as well as Portugal and Greece) got into debt:

'The feed-in tariff... would make (utility) companies go bankrupt eventually. So...the government guarantees...to give back the money in the future -- when (they) are not going to be in the office any more. Slowly the market does not want to have these securities that they are selling. Right now there is a debt related to these renewable energies that nobody knows how it is going to be paid -- of 16 Billion Euros.'


In early 2009 the Socialist government of Spain reduced alternative energy subsidies by 30%. Calzada continues:

'At that point the whole pyramid collapsed. They are firing thousands of people. BP closed down the two largest solar production plants in Europe. They are firing between 25,000 and 40,000 people....'

'What do we do with all this industry that we have been creating with subsidies that now is collapsing? The bubble is too big. We cannot continue pumping enough money. ...The President of the Renewable Industry in Spain (wrote a column arguing that) ...the only way is finding other countries that will give taxpayers' money away to our industry to take it and continue maintaining these jobs.'


That 'other country' is the United States of America.

Waxman-Markey seems dead, and Europe's southern periphery is bankrupt. But the wind-subsidy proposals being floated in Congress suggest that American political leaders have yet to understand that 'green power' means generating electricity by burning dollars."

A great article that explains in detail why wind power generation "capacity" is usually vastly overstated. Coal and natural gas plants must be standing by at all times to cover the ~75% of the time when wind turbines aren't generating power. Also, I didn't know this - California is littered with the hulks of derelict windmills from the 80's and 90's.

Obama Fiscal "Freeze" Is a Hoax

"President Obama sold the $862 billion in stimulus spending as 'targeted, timely and temporary.' Critics said that was highly unlikely, and now the 2011 Obama budget has proven them right.

To wit, the White House is proposing to convert spending sold as a one-time economic boost into a permanent feature of future government growth. As both the Tax Policy Center and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have pointed out, supposedly temporary parts of the stimulus—expansions of the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit and Pell Grants for college students—have now found their way into the budget baseline.

True to the way Mr. Obama has honored his campaign pledge of transparency, this news was buried in a footnote on page 170 of the budget's Analytical Perspectives.

...

The Responsible Federal Budget folks estimate that this fiscal sleight-of-hand would cost about $266 billion over 10 years, which by itself almost cancels out the White House's spending freeze."

The President is not serious about even slowing the spending. He is driving us over the debt cliff. This budget is full of phoney gambits, like the fact that the freeze doesn't start till next year, that they freeze budgets at levels bloated by two years of unprecedented Obama discretionary spending growth, that they assume massive savings from some future pie in the sky health care plan. But this one alarmed me more than all the others - $266B that they tried to trick us into believing was part of the current budget baseline, when in fact it is just another $266B of additional Obama robo-spending. As the link notes, just this one trick cancels out any benefit of the President's puny stab at fiscal responsiblity.

President Me! The Musical

"President Me! The Musical"

Health Care Bipartisanship Comes To TOwn

"In fact, the only thing bipartisan about ObamaCare is the opposition."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Chicago Tribune (!) - Washington - First, Do No Harm

It's crucial to keep in mind that recessions are temporary things, and they end even without decisive measures by Congress. What the political class does in the coming weeks is not likely to have a big effect on total employment.

In the long run, however, sound policies that give private companies the freedom to do what they do best, without onerous taxes and regulations, can make a difference. In the current political climate, unfortunately, Washington is more likely to do the opposite."

Chicago paper's EDITORIAL PAGE gets it right. Hope the boys in the White House still read the hometown rag.

Steyn Nails the Obama Analysis of Scott Brown's Victory

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is that he overestimated you dumb rubes' ability to appreciate what he's been doing for you. "That I do think is a mistake of mine," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it."

But you schlubs aren't that smart. You didn't get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start "speaking directly to the American people."

A couple of weeks old, but still uproariously funny, and painfully true.

Investors.com - GOP Idea Man Charts Course For Solvency

Investors.com - GOP Idea Man Charts Course For Solvency

"in January 2010, Ryan released an updated version of his 'Roadmap for America's Future,' a cure for the most completely predictable major problem that has ever afflicted America."

George Will lays out the GOP vision for dealing with the impending fiscal apocalypse. Contrast this with the "tax and spend our way out of our tax and spending problem" mindset at the center of the disastrous Obama budget.

Obama Takes Spending to Ludicrous Speed

Investors.com - If 'Unsustainable'Is New Normal, Collapse Is Closer Than We Think

"The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as 'unsustainable.' So let's make them even more so.

The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in 'Spaceballs' (which seems the appropriate comparison) called 'Ludicrous Speed.'"

Mark Steyn, of course.