Extortion From Junk Science

Extortion: In the run-up to the Paris climate talks, poorer nations are agitating for greater reparations from developed nations to pay for their climate “damage.” It’s further confirmation the warming scare is just a shakedown.

Evidence that man’s use of fossil fuels is causing the planet to warm is a shaky proposition, and that’s being charitable. In fact, Earth isn’t even warming. Temperatures have not increased in any appreciable way in almost two decades.

Yet, according to media reports, some poor countries say they’re victims of weather disasters, their residents becoming refugees escaping catastrophe. These nations want the U.S. and other wealthy countries to cough up more than the $100 billion a year that’s already been pledged to them to mitigate global warming.

More specifically, they’re asking for “additional compensation for weather-related disasters as well as a ‘displacement coordination facility’ for refugees,” says USA Today. “And they want all this to be legally binding as part of the larger anticipated Paris accord.”

Of course they do. They know a good racket when then see one. These countries refuse to liberalize their economies based on the successful model that America and other prosperous nations have provided, yet they want what capitalist economies have. Rather than create wealth of their own, they, with the help of Westerners working to tear down free-market capitalism, prefer to appropriate that produced by others.

We’ve noted that the global warming scare is driven by a religious fervor — and has in fact become a faith for some — as well as an urge to destroy capitalism.

There are also elements who want to use climate change as a nightstick to punish developed nations for having successful economies. It’s a way to redistribute wealth on an international rather than national basis.

In the late 1980s — almost 30 years ago — a former Canadian environment minister admitted to the Calgary Herald that it doesn’t “matter if the science of global warming is all phony.” What matters is that climate change provides “the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said. (Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change)

“When everything is evidence of the thing you want to believe, it might be time to stop pretending you’re all about science.”–Ann Althouse

The environment? It’s a convenient facade to hide a political agenda. Anyone who gets in the way is tarred as a denier of science and menace to nature.

Consequently, the threat of being bullied creates fear and allows the scam to move ahead with minimal resistance. The climate talks set for December will just let those behind the warming scare pretend not to do exactly what they are doing.

Almost two years ago (2009), Roy Spencer, a climate scientist with unimpeachable credentials who has never taken research dollars from an oil company, noted on his blog that “the main reason the models produce so much warming depends upon uncertain assumptions regarding how clouds will respond to warming.”

The models, according to Spencer, don’t follow the path of nature but instead use the assumptions the researchers plug in.

“One would think that understanding how the real world works would be a primary concern of climate researchers, but it is not,” wrote Spencer.

“Rather than trying to understand how nature works, climate modelers spend most of their time trying to get the models to better mimic average weather patterns on the Earth and how those patterns change with the seasons.”

More recently, a study found that models have been unable to accurately predict past climate.

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study, told the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

“There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models,” said Dickens, a professor of earth science at Rice University.

Like carmakers, the scientists keep rolling out new models. One that has “a more realistic simulation of the way clouds work” has emerged from Japan, says Patrick Michaels, a former president of the American Association of State Climatologists who now is a fellow at George Mason University.

This “more sophisticated climate model,” Michaels wrote recently on the Cato Institute’s @liberty blog, reduces the amount of expected warming by 25% from earlier models.

The old wisdom that feeding junk into a computer will cause it to spit out junk explains why the public has been hectored about a nonexistent global warming threat for almost 20 years.

Researchers need to be more careful about what they load into their models. Until then, we have no choice but to respectfully consider their work and the political activism that goes with it to be junk science. (IBD)

King Coal

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

Like that matters to King Fiat…

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

Like that matters to King Fiat….

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.

THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA!

“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.

But the biggest emitter isn’t going to go for it… 🙂 So if you want to cut your head off, they will gladly take it.

Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

You mean because Global Warming Caused by Man is a Farce! Nah, you couldn’t mean that… 🙂

“There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations. “There is an implicit understanding that this not require ratification by the Senate.”

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century.

That’s why we had one of the most severe winters on record! 🙂

At the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month, delegates will gather at a sideline meeting on climate change to try to make progress toward the deal next year in Paris. A December meeting is planned in Lima, Peru, to draft the agreement.

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions. That regulation, which would not be final until next year, already faces legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen states.

But unilateral action by the world’s largest economy will not be enough to curb the rise of carbon pollution across the globe. That will be possible only if the world’s largest economies, including India and China, agree to enact similar cuts.

The Obama administration’s international climate strategy is likely to infuriate Republican lawmakers who already say the president is abusing his executive authority by pushing through major policies without congressional approval.

“Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like — and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, said in a statement.

Like The King cares!

A deal that would not need to be ratified by the United States or any other nation is also drawing fire from the world’s poorest countries. In African and low-lying island nations — places that scientists say are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change — officials fear that any agreement made outside the structure of a traditional United Nations treaty will not bind rich countries to spend billions of dollars to help developing nations deal with the forces of climate change.

Seventeen years later, the Senate obstacle remains. Even though Democrats currently control the chamber, the Senate has been unable to reach agreement to ratify relatively noncontroversial United Nations treaties. In 2012, for example, Republican senators blocked ratification of a United Nations treaty on equal rights for the disabled, even though the treaty was modeled after an American law and had been negotiated by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

This fall, Senate Republicans are poised to pick up more seats, and possibly to retake control of the chamber. Mr. McConnell, who has been one of the fiercest opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy, comes from a coal-heavy state that could be an economic loser in any climate-change protocol that targets coal-fired power plants, the world’s largest source of carbon pollution.

The world’s largest source is CHINA. But they aren’t going for it, so this farce is the just cutting off your head and handing it to them. But it will make all the liberals “feel good” about “doing something” even if it’s the wrong thing. That’s what liberal do.

And we all get to suffer for it.

Don’t worry, be happy.

 

President Fiat Strikes Again

With a boom in Oil and Natural gas, creating 10’s of thousands of good paying jobs and lowering unemployment to very healthy ranges in the area where this is going on it’s time for President Fiat and HIS AGENDA to strike and kill even more jobs and wreck the economy.

As always, perfect timing.

Not even a week after Americans were told the U.S. economy shrank 1% in the first quarter, the White House unveils its new climate-change rules that will kill more jobs and reduce GDP even further.

THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA!!!

Next, here are the things you need to know about how the regulations will negatively impact the economy.

-New regulations will kill 226,000 American jobs.

-New regulations will cost the U.S. economy $51 billion per year.

-Even with new regulations, carbon is only expected to decrease by 1.8 percent by 2030.

-Despite EPA claims new regulations will reduce the cost of power, electricity rates are expected to go up. Details from AP:

Electricity prices are probably on their way up across much of the U.S. as coal-fired plants, the dominant source of cheap power, shut down in response to environmental regulations and economic forces.

New and tighter pollution rules and tough competition from cleaner sources such as natural gas, wind and solar will lead to the closings of dozens of coal-burning plants across 20 states over the next three years. And many of those that stay open will need expensive retrofits.

And, of course, higher energy cost won’t hurt jobs, the the poor, your employer. But hey, they’ll be more  environmentally green (rather than evil monetary green) and we’ll save the planet from the evil humans (until the next round) ! That’s the important thing– That we are “doing something”.

So what if it’s the wrong thing and the wrong time. THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA!

The EPA will enforce these regulations by putting the regulatory boot to the neck of industry and force it to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 30% by 2030 from 2005 levels.

By some estimates, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s, the benefits from the regulations, in terms of lower carbon emissions, would be one-half the cost to the economy.

What a bargain. Those costs include higher electric power costs, about 200,000 fewer jobs each year, and $50 billion lower GDP per year, with that number climbing over time as the regulations choke off growth (see chart, below). The South, which relies on coal more than other regions, will take the biggest hit.

Oh, and the impact on global carbon emissions to stop global warming will be infinitesimal, because most of the major greenhouse-gas emissions come from China, India, and other fast-growing nations that have little interest in making their citizens poorer or curtailing their economic growth with new climate regulations.

China’s 1.3 billion citizens are expected to nearly double their coal use over the next 25 years — swamping any reduction in U.S. emissions.

But Washington says don’t worry about the blow to the economy from these new restrictions and rules. We will make up for the lost output and employment by creating more green jobs.

Amazingly 5-1/2 years into this administration, the Obama spinsters are still peddling this nonsense. Green jobs? You mean from Solyndra? Bankrupt Fisker Automotive? In 2009, after the stimulus bill, we were supposed to get several million green jobs. We got a small fraction of that number instead.

In short, the White House is now going to do to our energy industry what ObamaCare has done to our health system. At least ObamaCare was passed by Congress.

The energy regulations are being issued through executive branch authority. And to think liberals used to call George W. Bush an imperial president.

As we have noted many times, the only sector of the economy that has held the U.S. out of a double-dip recession under Mr. Obama is the “evil” fossil-fuels industry.

The revolution in oil and gas output accounts for nearly all of the net new jobs in the economy since 2009.

The lower electric power costs from cheap gas and clean coal have made U.S. industry — manufacturers of steel, chemicals, plastics, automotives and technology products especially — far more competitive than ever vis-a-vis our European and Asian competitors.

Maybe the White House hasn’t noticed, but Europe tried the green energy route a decade ago and now countries like Germany are running away from the high costs and inefficiencies of windmills and solar panels and returning to efficient fossil fuels and even fracking. Instead of learning from Europe’s mistakes, the Obama administration wants U.S. power plants to repeat them.

Let’s not sugarcoat the agenda of Mr. Obama and his radical green friends. This is about putting the coal industry out of business. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal with at least 500 years of supply, and under Mr. Obama’s regs, we are not going to use it.

Meanwhile, China is building coal-burning power plants every month to power its economy.

Obama professes to have an affinity for America’s working class. What will he say to the hundreds of thousands of Americans employed by the coal industry in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Wyoming and Virginia — where whole towns have been decimated by Tom Steyer and other left-wing millionaires and billionaires who fund the green movement?

What isn’t well known is that the U.S. already has slashed its carbon emissions in recent years as clean, cheap and abundant natural gas becomes a greater source of electricity production.

Yet the greens hate natural gas too, and won’t let pipelines be built to transport it. Meanwhile, coal has become a much cleaner and less expensive form of electricity production as well. This is due in part to regulation, but more to technological breakthroughs.

If climate change is a global problem, it surely won’t be solved by world government edicts and petty bureaucrats to enforce them, but through more technological breakthroughs and more economic development. Markets solve these problems far better than mandates.

Obama boasts that these new rules will be his legacy. He’s right. This is a president who is so beholden to the far left of his party, he is willing to put tens of thousands of Americans in unemployment line, make U.S. industry less competitive and increase the cost of living for U.S. families.

But we’re “green” and we are “saving the planet” while we’re at it and that matters more than some stinking old evil old capitalist BS and satanic fossil fuels.

“The bottom line is that this new rule will kill good-paying jobs in rural communities throughout the country. In Arizona, this proposal will likely force the Navajo Generating Station to close its doors, which will mean the permanent loss of nearly a 1,000 good-paying jobs,” Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar said in a statement, vowing to fight the regulations and EPA overreach.

Who needs a job anyways. You’ll have more time to do things that you love, rather than working.

The Government is here to save you! 🙂

Obama already has the worst job creation record of any president during a recovery since the 1930s. In the name of stopping the oceans from rising — yes, this arrogant White House really believes government can do that — Obama is going to intentionally slow down the economy even more. We already have nearly 18 million unemployed or underemployed Americans.

Congratulations, Mr. President. That’s quite a legacy. (IBD)

It’s not easy being Green! 🙂

 

So break out the horse and buggy, the candles and massive house fans (summer) and Bonfires (winter)  (and for “the rich”-solar panels) because here comes President Fiat to make your life “better” with higher electricity bills and few jobs!!

I guess you will need $15/hr just to pay your energy bills… 🙂

THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA!

We’re From the Government how can we help you today?  🙂

The Dark Side of Green

Homeowners on the hunt for sparkling solar panels are lured by ads filled with images of pristine landscapes and bright sunshine, and words about the technology’s benefits for the environment – and the wallet.

What customers may not know is that there’s a dirtier side.

But I doubt this Dark Side of The Green “paradise” is worth anything because THEY are doing something for the environment and global warming so they are unassailable.

The Road is paved with them an all that…

While solar is a far less polluting energy source than coal or natural gas, many panel makers are nevertheless grappling with a hazardous waste problem. Fueled partly by billions in government incentives, the industry is creating millions of solar panels each year and, in the process, millions of pounds of polluted sludge and contaminated water.

To dispose of the material, the companies must transport it by truck or rail far from their own plants to waste facilities hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of miles away.

The fossil fuels used to transport that waste, experts say, is not typically considered in calculating solar’s carbon footprint, giving scientists and consumers who use the measurement to gauge a product’s impact on global warming the impression that solar is cleaner than it is.

After installing a solar panel, “it would take one to three months of generating electricity to pay off the energy invested in driving those hazardous waste emissions out of state,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor who conducts carbon footprint analyses of solar, biofuel and natural gas production. [Emphasis added]

The article then discusses solar panel companies in California, which leads the U.S. market:

The state records show the 17 companies, which had 44 manufacturing facilities in California, produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge and contaminated water from 2007 through the first half of 2011. Roughly 97 percent of it was taken to hazardous waste facilities throughout the state, but more than 1.4 million pounds were transported to nine other states: Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

Several solar energy experts said they have not calculated the industry’s total waste and were surprised at what the records showed. ​[Emphasis added]

The fossil fuels used to transport that waste, experts say, is not typically considered in calculating solar’s carbon footprint, giving scientists and consumers who use the measurement to gauge a product’s impact on global warming the impression that solar is cleaner than it is.

After installing a solar panel, “it would take one to three months of generating electricity to pay off the energy invested in driving those hazardous waste emissions out of state,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor who conducts carbon footprint analyses of solar, biofuel and natural gas production.

The waste from manufacturing has raised concerns within the industry, which fears that the problem, if left unchecked, could undermine solar’s green image at a time when companies are facing stiff competition from each other and from low-cost panel manufacturers from China and elsewhere.

In many cases, a toxic sludge is created when metals and other toxins are removed from water used in the manufacturing process. If a company doesn’t have its own treatment equipment, then it will send contaminated water to be stored at an approved dump.

“We want to take the lessons learned from electronics and semiconductor industries (about pollution) and get ahead of some of these problems,” said John Smirnow, vice president for trade and competitiveness at the nearly 500-member Solar Energy Industries Association.

The increase in solar hazardous waste is directly related to the industry’s fast growth over the past five years – even with solar business moving to China rapidly, the U.S. was a net exporter of solar products by $2 billion in 2010, the last year of data available. The nation was even a net exporter to China.

New companies often send hazardous waste out of their plants because they have not yet invested in on-site treatment equipment, which allows them to recycle some waste.

Nowhere is the waste issue more evident than in California, where landmark regulations approved in the 1970s require industrial plants like solar panel makers to report the amount of hazardous materials they produce, and where they send it. California leads the consumer solar market in the U.S. – which doubled overall both in 2010 and 2011.

The Associated Press compiled a list of 41 solar makers in the state, which included the top companies based on market data, and startups. In response to an AP records request, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control provided data that showed 17 of them reported waste, while the remaining did not.

The same level of federal data does not exist.

But what about Solyndra, the solar panel company that left taxpayers on the hook for $535 million and turned its equipment into modern art after going bankrupt?

Solyndra…reported producing about 12.5 million pounds of hazardous waste, much of it carcinogenic cadmium-contaminated water, which was sent to waste facilities from 2007 through mid-2011.

Before the company went bankrupt, leading to increased scrutiny of the solar industry and political fallout for President Barack Obama’s administration, Solyndra said it created 100 megawatts-worth of solar panels, enough to power 100,000 homes.

The records also show several other Silicon Valley solar facilities created millions of pounds of toxic waste without selling a single solar panel, while they were developing their technology or fine-tuning their production. [Emphasis added]

But the Associated Press adds in defense of solar energy: “While much of the waste produced is considered toxic, there was no evidence it has harmed human health.”

The article concludes with the assertion that solar energy is still better for the environment than fossil fuels, and it’s better that the toxic sludge end up in waste facilities than in the air or water.

The only challenge is getting the solar panel companies to be open with the amount of waste they produce.

The executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which began in 1982 and scores companies on their environmental impact, commented: “We find the overall industry response rate to our request for environmental information to be pretty dismal for an industry that is considered `green.’”

THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA

No matter what the cost or consequences, obamas pet “green” energy products will always have only the best reported on them….that may be why we don’t hear much about them except in his speeches on how great they all are. Hey, I will be the first one to say we need to explore all the options in front of us, but at the same time lets not put our blinders on to the reality of the situation. When he stops trying to blow smoke up our butts maybe he will begin to become credible…not likely in our lifetime though! If we used BS as an energy source, obama and DC could power the world….may be worth looking into. The Hot Air resources alone has to be worth something besides debt and decay.

Zombie Nation

The Obama administration passed another fiscal milestone this week, according to new data <http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np> released by the Treasury Department. As of the close of business on Oct. 3, the total national debt was $14,837,099,271,196.71—up about $44.8 billion from Sept. 30.

That means that in the less-than-three-years Obama has been in office, the federal debt has increased by $4.212 trillion–more than the total national debt of about $4.1672 trillion accumulated by all 41 U.S. presidents from George Washington through George H.W. Bush combined.

(and as much as George W Bush in 8 years! BTW)…

This $4.212-trillion increase in the national debt means that during Obama’s term the federal government has already borrowed about an additional $35,835 for every American household–or $44,980 for every full-time private-sector worker.

The Unemployment rate (those reporting that they are unemployed NOT the ones who have given up) is still 9.1% in the last jobs report. Half of the jobs “created” were union people who were on strike and not anymore.

But don’t worry, Obama’s Son of Stimulus where he SPENDS EVEN MORE will save us all! 🙂

OCCUPY WALL STREET 

“God bless them,” Pelosi said, “for their spontaneity. It’s independent … it’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.”

“The message of the protesters is a message for the establishment everyplace,” said the House Democrats’ leader. “No longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street.” (Weekly Standard)

Pelosi on The Tea Party 2009:  protesters are “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.”

“This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.”

“However, it is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue,” the two leaders write…. “These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.”

“This isn’t about politics,” Obama said. “This about people’s lives… That’s why we must get this done – and why we will get this done – by the end of this year.

Now onto the Demands (hold onto your sanity):

All Debt world wide must be forgiven.

Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Has your brain processed how insane and naive that is yet?

From the Occupy Wall Street website:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand. (the fact that that is technologically impossible right is immaterial to these loons)

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now. (OH, THE STIMULUS and The American Jobs Acts!!) 🙂

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union. (Gee the Union backers of this couldn’t have been behind this one!)

These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.

“this is what democracy looks like” — The Occupiers.

Has your brain exploded yet? Well…

OBAMACARE

The federal government is taking on a crucial new role in the nation’s health care, designing a basic benefits package for millions of privately insured Americans. A framework for the Obama administration was released Friday.

The report by independent experts from the Institute of Medicine lays out guidelines for deciding what to include in the new “essential benefits package,” and how to keep it affordable for small businesses and taxpayers, as well as scientifically up to date.

The advisers recommended that the package be built on mid-tier health plans currently offered by small employers, expanded to include certain services such as mental health, and squeezed into a budget. They did not spell out a list of services to cover, but they did say that treatments should be cost-effective.

Until now, designing benefits has been the job of insurers, employers and states. But the new health care law requires insurance companies to provide at least the federally approved package if they want to sell to small businesses, families and individuals through new state markets set to open in 2014.

Existing workplace plans won’t be required to adopt the federal model, but employers and consumer advocates alike predict it will become the nation’s benchmark for health insurance over time.

“The federal government has never before attempted to define what constitutes essential medical benefits for Americans with private insurance,” said Stephen Finan, a top policy expert for the American Cancer Society.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement that officials would hold “listening sessions” around the country before any final decisions are made, a process that could take months.

“Before we put forward a proposal, it is critical that we hear from the American people,” Sebelius said. The law would expand coverage to about 30 million uninsured people.

Hear this: KILL THE WHOLE THING AND GO AWAY!

Not “Listening” to that are you? 🙂

Red State.com: It is time to face reality. I am not nearly well-informed enough to offer even an educated guess as to the immediate cause of the market crash and subsequent recession/depression. But it seems painfully clear at this point that a substantial portion of the economic growth we enjoyed in the years prior to 2007 was entirely illusory and funded by ill-advised and unsustainable lending practices. This is a problem that doesn’t solve itself overnight. And moreover, when it is “solved,” a substantial portion of us will nonetheless have to accept a lifestyle that is much less comfortable than the ones we enjoyed 5 years ago.

What scares me – I mean, truly terrifies me – about this entire situation is not what I am going to do about my own predicament (although I would be lying if I said it did not cause me substantial amounts of stress). It is that no Presidential candidate who stands a chance of winning can afford to say anything like the preceding paragraph. It would be political suicide for any candidate – Republican or Democrat – to suggest aloud, “You know what? As a candidate I can fix things around the edges and start us on the road to recovery, but if we’re being perfectly honest with each other, it’s going to be a long time (if ever) before things get back to the way they were.”

And if the American people cannot stand to hear that message even when it is the manifest truth, we are in serious trouble. Because what it means is that we have become a nation in which people cannot be told to act like adults because we are no longer capable of doing it. And a nation where people have to be promised free ponies and unicorn dust even when everyone can see there’s no more ponies in the stable is a nation that’s just biding its time until final collapse.

America is going to go through a difficult time of readjustment and we will only get through it by knuckling down, determining to generate more productivity and make do with less – in other words, doing the things that brought us through before. If we have become so cushy and coddled that we can’t even stand to hear that it needs to be done again, then we are lost.

47% of poeple pay no income taxes. 48% of them are on government assistance.

The bottom 50% of all people pay 3% of the taxes.

So are you ready to make real sacrifices or do you want someone else to do it for you?

Only, there is no one else.

The truth doesn’t care if you don’t like it. A lesson I learned several years ago.

But Obama is here to save you. Rejoice!

And if disagree  you’re a greedy, rich-loving, sicko racist. 🙂

And the Occupiers are the future of America and the liberal media will be egging them on. 🙂

“Because what it means is that we have become a nation in which people cannot be told to act like adults because we are no longer capable of doing it.”

Rejoice.

Been Here, Done This

Green Jobs Vs Reality: Green Jobs

President Obama is expected to seek another $250 billion or so in new stimulus funds next week, with plenty of money for clean energy and the creation of so-called green jobs.

Never mind that no one can seem to find many Americans who got green jobs as a result of the original stimulus spending. Consider two stories.

In the 2009 stimulus, the feds gave nearly $3.2 million in green-energy grants to my county of Arlington, Va., with almost $300,000 used to install solar paneling on the roof of our local library. (Don’t ask why the feds are giving one of the five wealthiest counties in America free money.)

Arlington officials boast the project will save $14,000 in annual electricity costs, but the solar panels have a life span of no more than 10 to 15 years. So the feds spent $300,000 to shave at most $150,000 off the net present value of Arlington’s electric bills. Some 3,000 counties across the country received federal funds for the same kind of negative-return energy conservation “investments.” This is the kind of “clean energy” program the administration wants to expand.

Oh, and the Company that got $535 Million in Stimulus Money and was the golden boy of Obama’s plan, just went bankrupt and we lost all the money and the jobs!

Wind, waves, and solar which are all the hippie liberals will consider in their “all in” energy plans are not viable. But they don’t care. They will make them work and if you have to suffer for it until they do (or don’t)–well by god you’ll suffer!

Obama instead touted steps his administration has taken without Congress, including the new vehicle-fuel economy standards announced in recent weeks. (The one that some economics predict will make your next car cost $11,000 more and may not be technologically viable at this point without everyone being forced to by a hybrid or an electric car–gee I never thought of that… 🙂 ).

“Think about it. That’s what we got done — and by the way, we didn’t go through Congress to do it,” Obama told workers at an advanced battery plant. “But we did use the tools of government — us working together — to help make it happen.” (The Hill)

Congress (aka The Republicans) are evil and get in his way!

“I think the White House continues to believe that oil politics are very important to the economy and the next election, and they are determined to enact whatever policies they can, especially those that have a populist bent,” Paul Bledsoe, a senior adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center said. (The Hill)

Whether they work or not is inconsequential. They just have to sound good, feel good, and get him re-elected. So that when he’ not facing a re-election campaign from 2013-2016 he can do whatever the hell he wants and Congress can go pound sand!

Don’t doubt it.

Now for a good energy news story. I recently traveled to Wheeling, W.V., which is 45 minutes down the road from Pittsburgh along the Ohio River and smack in the heart of the old Rust Belt. Unlike most places you go to these days, the town is booming. Defying the national mood, people are optimistic about the future. Why? It’s what residents are calling the “West Virginia gold rush.”

Except it’s not gold, it’s natural gas. Wheeling sits atop the famous Marcellus shale formation—one of the biggest treasure troves of natural gas ever discovered in America. With recent breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing technology, that gas can be extracted at very affordable prices. A few years ago Wheeling farmers and land owners were getting about $50 to $100 an acre for drilling rights. Now they get up to $3,000, plus monthly royalties. What was once a dying town now has jobs and new funds for schools and roads, while West Virginian farmers and land owners are getting rich. The same story of economic revival can be told about counties in Pennsylvania and Ohio sitting atop the Marcellus bonanza.

Then there the oil in the Dakotas, possibly more than Saudi Arabia…

Even the White House acknowledges that the natural gas deposits in the Midwest and Texas contain potentially 100 years worth of cheap natural gas. Yet as far as I can tell, President Obama has never even uttered the words “Marcellus shale” in a major speech. Incredible.

In early August a Department of Energy advisory panel reported that fracking for natural gas poses risks to air and water quality and so should be subject to tighter regulations—hardly a ringing endorsement. The green movement wants it stopped completely because of dangers to water, even though continued technological progress will reduce these risks.

The White House’s hostility toward fossil fuels seems to know no bounds. Exxon has made some of the largest oil finds in a decade, in the Gulf of Mexico, and yet the Obama administration is holding up the leases and permitting process. In North Dakota, an Obama-appointed U.S attorney has brought criminal charges against seven oil companies (with penalties of up to six months in prison) for causing the deaths of 28 migratory birds found in oil waste pits.

According to data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Industrial Production Indexes, the oil and gas industry, which the Obama Energy Department loathes, has had more growth in output than any other manufacturing industry in the U.S. from 2005 through 2011. As a reward, the administration is proposing $35 billion in new taxes on the industry to slow it down. Even if we accept the dubious White House claim that all the oil and gas tax write-offs are unwarranted loopholes, a 2011 Congressional Research Service study finds that per unit of electricity produced, for every two cents of tax subsidy to Big Oil, Big Green (wind and solar) get closer to $1 in handouts.

“The environmentalists are for any energy source unless it actually works,” notes Stephen Hayward, an energy expert at the American Enterprise Institute. A few years ago the Democrats were all in favor of natural gas at least as a “bridge” energy source. That abruptly changed when the extent of America’s abundant natural gas resources became fully known and more affordable drilling techniques opened up a superhighway to energy security. The irony of the green movement’s reactionary antifracking crusade is that one of the most important developments in cutting U.S. carbon emissions has come from replacing coal-burning fire plants with natural gas.

So we now have a national energy policy directing our resources away from cheap, efficient and increasingly abundant fuels like coal, oil and natural gas while we channel billions of tax dollars to 500-year-old energy technologies like wind power that can’t possibly scale up to power a modern-day industrial economy. That’s a shame. (Stephen Moore)

But it “feels” good.:) It’s all touchy feely…

For more than two years the president has been giving “important” jobs speeches — and no wonder. After an $830 billion stimulus and multiple “jobs” bills since, the employment picture has only deteriorated. The economy added zero jobs in August, and 2.4 million fewer people work today than when Obama took office.

Yet despite the advance billing on all those previous speeches, none was anything remotely “bold” or “imaginative,” something Democratic lawmakers and Obama’s liberal media cheerleaders are now hoping for with his next one.

Instead, in every speech, Obama simply dusted off the same crabbed list — more money for roads and “clean energy,” various temporary tax credits, more unemployment insurance, temporary payroll tax cuts — despite the fact that each has already been tried on his watch, and all proved to be expensive failures. A rundown:

• In December 2009, Obama’s big jobs speech called for billions more on roads, extended unemployment benefits, tax credits for weatherizing homes and some temporary help for small companies.

• In his 2010 State of the Union address, Obama said “jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010” and touted his “new jobs bill.” What was in it? Money for roads, a small-business tax credit, weatherization credits and investment in clean energy.

• On Labor Day that year, Obama delivered yet another jobs speech, but offered only one idea — $50 billion more for roads.

• His 2011 State of the Union speech was also supposed to focus on jobs, but all he had to offer was a vague “innovation agenda,” another push for clean energy and — you guessed it — more money for roads.

• And then in July 2011, Obama argued that once the debt-ceiling debate was finished, the country could turn again to jobs. His big ideas: extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, and spend more on roads.

Maybe this speech will be different. But unless Obama has kept some secret breakthrough job-creating idea hidden in his closet all this time, would it be a surprise if he just puts a fresh rhetorical gloss on these same proposals?

The problem isn’t just that these ideas aren’t “bold,” it’s that they’ve all been tried since Obama took office, and they’ve all failed. Among those he’s expected to include this time around:

More infrastructure spending. The stimulus bill spent nearly $100 billion on infrastructure. Yet when the bulk of that money started to get spent in the “Recovery Summer” of 2010, the economy shed 329,000 jobs.

A new-hire tax credit. Obama signed the $17.5 billion HIRE Act in March 2010 that offered companies up to $6,000 in credits and exemptions for hiring unemployed workers. Obama said this would “encourage businesses to hire and put Americans back to work.”

Employers apparently didn’t get that memo, since the number of private-sector jobs climbed a meager 0.6% by the end of the year.

More unemployment benefits. These have been extended several times in the past few years. The administration thinks they will create jobs. But every credible economic study says that extending unemployment benefits mainly extends unemployment as many workers wait until benefits run out before taking that next job.

Extending the payroll tax cut. In January, Vice President Biden claimed the one-year payroll tax cut that had just kicked in would “put $112 billion into the pockets of 155 million workers … spurring growth and creating jobs.”

The results so far this year: virtually no GDP growth and 104,000 more unemployed. Economist Bruce Bartlett summed it up: “There is no evidence that the lower payroll tax has done much of anything to stimulate either spending or hiring.”

Money for clean-energy jobs. In January 2010, Obama announced a $2.3 billion clean-energy tax-credit plan that would, he said, “give a much needed boost” to this industry.

Today, the landscape is increasingly littered with failed clean-energy companies, including Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that got $535 million in stimulus-backed loans but which is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Will Obama go bold this time? What other options does he have? The nation’s in no mood for another massive “stimulus” plan after the last one mainly just doubled the nation’s debt.

But he’ll give us one anyways, he’ll just manipulate the words but the meaning will be the same. His ideological playbook doesn’t have any other pages in it.

And he and his economic advisers don’t appear ideologically capable of embracing genuine free-market solutions that would generate actual growth — real tax reform that cuts rates and dramatically simplifies the code, significant relief from Obama’s own out-of-control regulatory machinery, an end to the looming ObamaCare nightmare, major entitlement reform, among them.

Instead, the administration appears eternally wedded to the idea that endless government meddling and tinkering in the private sector with targeted spending, temporary tax credits, and eye-of-the-needle tax relief will somehow, someday miraculously combine to spark growth.

In a piece published almost exactly one year ago, Obama’s newly appointed chief economic adviser, Alan Krueger, boasted that the HIRE Act was “an example of the kind of temporary, targeted and responsible policy that has been the hallmark of this administration.”

We hope Obama has learned by now that this approach isn’t responsible at all, and that he would offer some truly bold proposals that break from his failed Keynesian past. But given what we’ve seen over the past 2 1/2 years, we’re not holding our breath. (IBD)

I wouldn’t. He’s too ideologically rigid to notice. If we just SPEND EVEN MORE  (“Infrastructure”) eventually banging our ideological head against the wall will break the wall! 🙂

Don’t doubt it.

Going Green

Just not Greenbacks.

President Obama declared today’s 41st annual Earth Day proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.” (at a prior town hall)

Green Day: The day set aside to save the planet has become a second Halloween where we fear imaginary planetary ghouls and goblins. Greenies get the treats, but the trick has been on us.

It is appropriate that Earth Day comes a week after Tax Day, for our slavish dedication to saving the planet rather than saving jobs imposes a hidden tax on all of us in the form of reduced economic growth and rising inflation.

This Earth Day, we have more to fear from rising gas and food prices than from rising sea levels.

We have long argued that wealthier societies are healthier societies and that reducing emission levels to those desired by such entities as the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change and treaties like Kyoto was a recipe for global poverty.

Consider that a 2008 MIT study showed that even the carbon footprint of a homeless person in the United States is more than four times the U.N. recommendation.

Last week, after a record 92 tornadoes struck North Carolina over the weekend, a Time magazine blog seriously asked the question, “Did climate change play a role in this violent outbreak of tornadoes?”

It is such constant fearmongering that drives climate change hysteria. Consider that the worst tornado outbreak in U.S. history occurred in 1974 — the year Nixon resigned.

That was also around the time that major media outlets like Newsweek were warning of a coming Ice Age. That year, there were at least 163 tornadoes in 13 states.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has produced a chart showing tornado frequency fluctuating over time but in general decline even as levels of carbon dioxide increased since that record year and as improvements in storm detection, reporting and monitoring occurred.

Hurricane frequency and intensity, as well, are a natural cyclical phenomenon, made worse only by growing numbers rushing to the coasts, not fleeing from them.

Chalk this latest fear mongering next to the myth of Himalayan glaciers that were supposed to banish by 2035.

Fear is the warm-mongers’ stock in trade. Facts are not. But they lead us to do things like ban offshore drilling to save the fruitful and multiplying polar bears and to put corn in our gas tanks in the form of ethanol.

This only drives up demand for corn and food prices while the gas used to get to the supermarket soars in price as well.

We are still looking for the 50 million climate refugees the United Nations Environmental Program predicted in 2005 would be fleeing coastal areas and soon-to-be-submerged islands by 2010. At last report, the coastal cities to be affected are booming in population, as are the islands that are still well above sea level.

As Indur M. Goklany of the Cato Institute wrote recently in the New York Post: “Climate-change remedies can lead to greater poverty, starvation and disease, as well as widespread ecological destruction — some of the very misfortunes that they’re supposed to prevent. In our haste to address global warming, we have yet to think seriously about our policies’ unintended effects.”

Certainly the war on fossil fuels and energy consumption in general lead to reduced economic growth and lower standards of living.

It is based on the irrational fear that carbon dioxide, the product of human respiration and the basis of all life on Earth, is a dangerous pollutant.

These days the U.N. is seriously considering a proposed treaty granting human rights to the planet itself.

This is being pushed by those who consider the human beings on the planet a plague upon Gaia, the Earth goddess, and that efforts to reduce their numbers are to be encouraged.

These are the inmates that are running the global warming asylum. Boo! (IBD)

As all this suggests, environmentalism has become our newest religion. According to Joel Garreau, professor of law, culture and values at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, a religion is characterized by “a distinction between sacred and profane objects; a moral code; feelings of awe, mystery and guilt; adoration in the presence of sacred objects and during rituals; a worldview that includes a notion of where the individual fits; and a cohesive social group of the likeminded.” Environmentalism, Garreau concluded in an article last year, fits this definition of religion very well.

Environmental historian William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin, Madison — president-elect of the American Historical Association — writes of environmentalism that it has “certain landscapes — usually the wildest and most natural ones — [that] are celebrated as sacred”; it is “openly prophetic”; it develops frequent “parallels to biblical prophecy in the Hebrew and Christian traditions”; and it offers “practical moral guidance about virtually every aspect of daily life….from the apocalyptic to the mundane.”

Contemporary environmentalism prophesies virtually the same set of environmental calamities resulting from global warming: rising seas, famine, drought, pestilence, hurricanes and other natural disasters. Often without realizing it, environmentalism is recasting traditional biblical messages. The Endangered Species Act replaces Noah’s Ark; wilderness areas are the environmental “cathedrals”; Earth Day is the new “Easter,” a time for deep religious reflection and revival.

Environmentalism thus is literally, not simply metaphorically, a new religion.(DC)

So Happy Green Day. Happy, Happy, Joy Joy!

Save the Planet!

Just not any greenbacks. They’re evil! 🙂

And Satan is the $5 a Gallon for that evil Gas for that evil gas-guzzling behemoth you own.

And it’s “the rich” people’s fault!

Oh, and the EPA has declared your exhales as a “danger to human life” already.

And “green” products cost more.

But you must save the planet from you, or else you’ll go to HELL!

AMEN! 🙂