Friday, February 12, 2010
Barker's Newsbites: Friday, Feb. 12, 2010
Ahh... FRIDAY... the end of a long week!
I'm getting a late start today; had a project to finish up this morning and early afternoon.
Before I "get to work" on presenting today's "newsbites" allow me to give a appreciative shout-out to my cyberbuddy Rob - founder of "Rodak Riffs".
Thanks Rob for leaving a comment on yesterday's newsbite thread just to let me know that someone is at least browsing the newsbites every once in awhile...
Not that anyone has to comment, but feedback - public or private (via email) is always appreciated.
Again, I'm doing this "for me" and I'd be doing it even if no one ever tuned in, but an acknowledgement of my efforts every once in awhile would not be unwelcome...
(*GRIN*)
Anyway...
As always...
EXPLORE...
and...
ENJOY...
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17 comments:
http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/80917-report-five-percent-jump-in-lobbying-expenditures-last-year
Lobbyists enjoyed record revenues while the rest of the country was struggling amid deep recession, according to a report out Friday.
Last year saw a more than 5 percent increase in lobbying expenditures as compared to 2008, said the Center for Responsive Politics' campaign finance watchdog report.
More than $3.47 billion was spent on lobbying in 2009, about $170 million more than in 2008, according to the watchdog’s analysis.
“Lobbying appears recession-proof,” said Sheila Krumholz, the center's executive director, in a statement. “Even when companies are scaling back other operations, many view lobbying as a critical tool in protecting their future interests, particularly when Congress is preparing to take action on issues that could seriously affect their bottom lines.”
Perennial powerhouses Patton Boggs and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld topped the list, but The Hill’s analysis also showed remarkable growth for the Podesta Group, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck and Holland & Knight during the recession.
http://wcbstv.com/local/governor.christie.freezes.2.1487727.html
Calling New Jersey's budget a "shambles," Gov. Chris Christie announced Thursday he is immediately freezing all state spending.
* GOD BLESS YOU, CHRIS CHRISTIE...!!!
Saying New Jersey is on the verge of bankruptcy, Christie declared a fiscal emergency, announcing drastic cuts. Among them, aid to school districts that have excess surpluses.
* SOUNDS REASONABLE TO ME!
"Today we are going to act swiftly to fix problems too long ignored. Today I begin to do what I promised the people of New Jersey I would do," Christie said.
(*WILD APPLAUSE*) (*STANDING OVATION*)
The move had Democrats in an uproar, angry the governor used his executive powers instead of working with the Legislature.
* THE LEGISLATURE IS THE BODY - ALONG WITH FORMER GOV. CORZINE - RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING THIS MESS!
"What that's going to mean is that those school districts without that money are going to be raising property taxes in the upcoming year to make up for that shortfall," said Assemblyman John Wisniewski, D-19th District.
* GOOD! WHEN THE PEOPLE ARE FACED WITH THE REALITY OF IRRESPONSIBLE SPENDING AND DEBT CREATION THEN PERHAPS THEY'LL TAKE THE NEXT STEP AND THROW THE FREE SPENDING BUMS OUT OF THE LEGISLATURE COME NOVEMBER.
* IRRESPONSIBLE BUDGETING AND LEGISLATING LEADS TO CONSEQUENCES; THROUGH CHRISTIE'S BRAVE AND RESPONSIBLE ACTIONS HE'S MAKING THOSE CONSEQUENCE KNOWN.
The governor also cut state subsidies to New Jersey Transit, saying it needs to become fiscally efficient.
(*CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
"Revisit its rich union contracts," Christie said. "And they may also have to consider service reductions or fare increases."
* AGAIN... MAKES PERFECT SENSE TO ME. EVERYTHING IS ON THE TABLE. (THIS IS CALLED "RECOGNIZING REALITY.")
[O]ne tax group applauded the governor.
"Yes it's going to be difficult to make some of these choices as were highlighted today, but education, health care and these things tend to be sacred cow and they need to be taken out of that category," said Jerry Cantrell of the Taxpayers' Association of New Jersey.
(*TEARS OF JOY*)
* SANITY AT LAST...!!!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575053324236600444.html
* MORE ON CHRISTIE...
New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie must be following the economic news from Greece. Its tattered reputation for fiscal control has turned Greece into an international financial nightmare and laughingstock. Perhaps tiring of New Jersey jokes, Governor Christie this week handed down a stiff freeze on spending.
Announcing the freeze on $1.6 billion of unspent money, Mr. Christie was blunt: "Today, we come to terms with the fact that we cannot spend money on everything we want. Today, the days of Alice in Wonderland budgeting in Trenton end."
* AND THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT, FOLKS; WE MUST PRIORITIZE SPENDING AND THAT NECESSARILY MEANS DENYING "WORTHY" CAUSES FUNDING BECAUSE OTHER "WORTHIER" CAUSES NEED THE FUNDING. IT's ABOUT BUDGETING. WE ALL DO IT. GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO DO IT TOO.
Not a day too soon, judging from the striking data that a just-released study reveals about the number of residents of the Garden State fleeing to greener pastures.
The study by Boston College's Center on Wealth and Philanthropy—"Migration of Wealth in New Jersey and the Impact on Wealth and Philanthropy"—looked at 1999 to 2008. It found that in the decade's first half New Jersey experienced a "substantial increase in both household wealth and charitable capacity," otherwise known as "expected giving." During those five years the Garden State had a $98 billion net influx of capital due to wealthy households moving into the state, and it enjoyed a corresponding $881 million increase in "charitable capacity."
The Garden State was blooming. Then the trend reversed. From 2004-2008, author John Havens found "a large decline in the number of wealthy households entering New Jersey" as well as "a moderate increase in the outflow of wealthy households leaving." The result: a net decline of $70 billion in household wealth while the "expected giving" became a net outflow of $1.132 billion.
So what happened in 2004? The study doesn't purport to explain what caused the wealth movements. But the state's most notable economic policy event that year was an increase in its top income tax rate to 8.97% from 6.37%, on incomes starting at $500,000. That's a 40% increase.
* TAX POLICIES HAVE CONSEQUENCES!
* I STRONGLY URGE YOU TO FOLLOW THE LINK PROVIDED AND READ THE FULL WSJ PIECE.
Hang in there, Guillermo. You'll be the New Drudge yet.
http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWU3ZTU5NzQ4ZjQ1NWZjM2RhMGM5MTk0MGU1NTZmZTA=
Michigan eighth-graders are 36th in the nation in math and 33rd in reading. But legislators are making sure they excel at what matters — like greening school buses by checking their tire pressures.
In 2006, Michigan created a bipartisan “Green School” law that tasked government to recognize schools with green programs. To qualify, an institution must task its students to complete half of a list of 20 green options, including:
Making sure their school “has adopted an endangered species animal and posted a picture of it in a main traffic area.”
That students participate in “a planned program of energy savings, including dusting coils on cafeteria refrigerators, placing film on windows, setting hot water heaters one degree lower, seeing how plants and trees strategically placed can save energy, and checking proper inflation on bus tires and other school vehicles once a month.”
That the school be visited by an “ecological spokesperson, a representative of the Sierra Club, an endangered animal species show, or a similar presentation.”
That “the school has solar power presentations or experiments, such as a solar cookout.”
That “the school has science class projects in which students do several home energy improvements, such as . . . clean coils on home refrigerators, and install draft guards for the doors.”
That “the school's classes visit internet sites where clicking saves rainforest habitat.”
In short, a program to indoctrinate students as green missionaries spreading the green gospel in school, home, and the community. Some 500 schools now participate in the program, reports the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, with legislation pending this year to upgrade schools to “Emerald School” status (15 tasks completed) and “Evergreen School” status for completing all 20.
Michigan is one of a handful of states with a green-school program. Call it America’s Race to the Bottom.
http://article.nationalreview.com/424815/liberals-and-the-scientific-method/mona-charen
True to their mission as the organs of the liberal establishment, Time magazine and the New York Times ran stories in the midst of the great snowmageddon warning us against drawing any politically incorrect conclusions. “Skeptics of global warming,” cautioned the Times, “are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt. Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.” Time agrees: “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.”
Note how the Times contrasts “skeptics of global warming” with “climate scientists.”
Those who now protest that any particular weather pattern should not be confused with global climate have short memories. Only yesterday, they were attributing every forest fire, drought, hurricane, and toad disease to global warming. Remember the “plight” of the polar bears? Turns out that polar-bear populations have been increasing, not decreasing, for the past 30 years, though yes, one photographer did manage to snap a picture of bears seemingly stranded on an ice floe. The alarmists are in no position to complain now that isolated weather events are being used to draw vast and unwarranted conclusions.
More preposterous is the conceit that only the warmists are actually taking account of hard science. In fact, the scandal of the past several months (which liberals have not digested) has been the long-term and systematic abuse of science in the name of politics.
Not only did scientists twist the peer-review process, manipulate data, and attempt to suppress dissent, they also destroyed records — is this the scientific method for which liberals are going to the barricades?
The entire superstructure of climate alarmism rests on data that are doubtful and possibly fraudulent. The Science and Public Policy Institute has evaluated surface-temperature records and found, among other things, that 1) instrumental data from the pre-satellite era are virtually useless; 2) fewer than 25 percent of the 6,000 temperature stations that once existed are still operative; 3) comprehensive ocean data have been available only since 2003 and have shown no warming; and 4) higher altitude, higher latitude, and rural stations were the most likely to be lost, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
As John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog has reported, the U.N. IPCC report itself does not even accurately represent the views of the scientists who signed it. Key sections expressing caveats and acknowledging countervailing evidence were altered after the purported authors had put their names to it.
It isn’t the snow outside that has discredited global warming. It’s the chill the warmists have imposed on scientific inquiry. They are acting as enforcers of orthodoxy, not seekers of truth.
http://article.nationalreview.com/424960/the-washington-dc-disconnect/larry-kudlow
[By Larry Kudlow]
According to the Washington Post, voters want smaller government and fewer government services by a large 58 to 38 percent margin. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reveals that 61 percent of voters believe tax cuts help the economy, that 59 percent think tax cuts are a better job-creation tool than increased government spending, and that another 59 percent believe higher deficits hurt the economy. Rasmussen also reports that a full 83 percent of Americans blame the deficit on the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending. And get this: In a whopper of a poll result, the New York Times reports that 75 percent of Americans dislike Congress.
The so-called $85 billion jobs program is not a jobs program at all. It is a spending bill. Temporary tax credits to hire new workers have virtually no permanent job-creating effect. In budget terms, these kinds of temporary tax credits are scored as tax expenditures, i.e. spending. Only a permanent reduction in the marginal business tax rate has the incentive effect for long-run job creation. Reducing the business tax rate makes firms more profitable after-tax. And it gives them more cash flow. Those incentives will work to expand investment and jobs.
Why Republicans are flirting with this terrible temporary small-business tax credit is beyond me. This is a moment for the GOP to send a message that they are the party of growth through across-the-board reductions in marginal tax rates — for everyone. That includes large and small businesses, along with all individuals and families. All producers and investors should get lower tax rates. At a bare minimum, Republicans should be fighting hard to extend the Bush tax cuts on the way to a longer-term goal of low-rate, flat-tax reform.
So no wonder we’re witnessing a growing tea-party revolt. I call it tea-party, free-market populism. But one-party partisan stubbornness in Washington just won’t listen to it. Democrats refuse to heed the message of the polls, or the election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and — of course — Massachusetts. They simply will not acknowledge the meaning of Scott Brown’s miracle win.
While voters may not love the Republicans, they do want political balance back in Washington. They don’t want any of this manufactured, left-wing, class-warfare populism. That’s why the anti-incumbency mood is so prevalent today, and why there is going to be major change in Washington.
What do I think voters want? Traditional, commonsense, center-right, free enterprise, which basically says to the government, “Please, let me keep more of what I earn, and please, just leave me alone.”
The time has come for our government to get out of the way, allow the American people to prosper, create wealth, build businesses, and advance technology, and let the United States be the number-one country in the world from now until forever.
http://article.nationalreview.com/424754/obamacare-vs-the-us-constitution/deroy-murdock
Obamacare flunks the first test of any potential federal law: It is not constitutional. Obamacare critics deem the individual mandate unconstitutional, since Congress lacks the power to force Americans to buy anything, especially health insurance they wisely or foolishly may not want.
Congress’s legitimate power to regulate interstate commerce has been stretched like saltwater taffy. “It is one thing, however, for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), former Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell, and the American Civil Rights Union’s Kenneth Klukowski observed in the January 2 Wall Street Journal. “That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind.”
“If Congress constitutionally can command that one buy health insurance, it can command that everyone over age 21 buy a GM car to bail out GM or, for that matter, buy a gun or, in lieu thereof, pay a fine,” says Manhattan attorney Leo Kayser III. “Under the rubric of regulating commerce, we would have no effective protection from any edict that Congress might impose on citizens to enhance commerce in whatever way Congress decides.”
Beyond this lies another problem. The individual mandate would be enforced by penalizing Americans $495 or 0.5 percent of Adjusted Gross Income, whichever is higher, if they do not acquire health insurance by 2014. Two years later, that fine would rise to 2 percent of AGI, equal to $640 today. Anticipated fines total some $15 billion. The IRS would collect these payments and require Americans to certify on their tax returns that they carry health coverage.
This represents a “direct” tax on U.S. citizens, based solely on the status of living in America. This is not a tax on income. It is not an excise tax either, since there is no tax on any transaction; if one refuses to purchase insurance, there is no transaction on which to slap an excise tax.
“Without precedent, Congress is attempting to punish the non-purchase of a private product,” says Robert Levy, senior fellow for constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, which he chairs. “That would be an intolerable affront to the Constitution and personal autonomy.”
Nonetheless, the individual mandate’s IRS enforcement scheme operates, in essence, as a tax. The hitch is that Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” Section 9 adds that “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.”
A penalty collected via the IRS would be a direct tax on individuals, independent of anything reflected in the Census or tied to enumeration of citizens among the states. As such, the individual mandate’s enforcement mechanism would fail Constitutional scrutiny. And a mandate without enforcement is just a suggestion.
One of the most compelling arguments against Obamacare is that it is self-defeatingly unconstitutional.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/11/AR2010021103331.html
* REQUIRED READING IN IT'S ENTIRETY...!!! PLEASE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE LINK PROVIDED.
[By Michael B. Mukasey, U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009 and the presiding judge at initial proceedings against Jose Padilla in 2002]
When Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb concealed in his undershorts, he committed a crime; no doubt about that. He could not have acted alone; no doubt about that either. The bomb was not the sort of infernal device readily produced by someone of his background, and he quickly confirmed that he had been trained and sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen.
What to do and who should do it? It was entirely reasonable for the FBI to be contacted and for that agency to take him into custody. But contrary to what some in government have suggested, that Abdulmutallab was taken into custody by the FBI did not mean, legally or as a matter of policy, that he had to be treated as a criminal defendant at any point. Consider: In 1942, German saboteurs landed on Long Island and in Florida. That they were eventually captured by the FBI did not stop President Franklin Roosevelt from directing that they be treated as unlawful enemy combatants. They were ultimately tried before a military commission in Washington and executed. Their status had nothing to do with who held them, and their treatment was upheld in all respects by the Supreme Court.
Guidelines put in place in 2003 and revised in September 2008 "do not require that the FBI's information gathering activities be differentially labeled as 'criminal investigations,' 'national security investigations,' or 'foreign intelligence collections,' or that the categories of FBI personnel who carry out investigations be segregated from each other based on the subject areas in which they operate. Rather, all of the FBI's legal authorities are available for deployment in all cases to which they apply to protect the public from crimes and threats to the national security and to further the United States' foreign intelligence objectives."
"As with criminal investigations generally, detecting and solving the crimes, and eventually arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators, are likely to be among the objectives of investigations relating to threats to the national security. But . . . other measures needed to protect the national security . . . may include . . . providing threat information and warnings to other federal . . . agencies and entities; diplomatic or military actions; and actions by other intelligence agencies to counter international terrorism or other national security threats."
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING...
Contrary to what the White House homeland security adviser and the attorney general have suggested, if not said outright, not only was there no authority or policy in place under the Bush administration requiring that all those detained in the United States be treated as criminal defendants, but relevant authority was and is the opposite.
The Supreme Court held in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that...detention for the purpose of neutralizing an unlawful enemy combatant is permissible and that the only right of such a combatant -- even if he is a citizen, and Abdulmutallab is not -- is to challenge his classification as such a combatant in a habeas corpus proceeding. This does not include the right to remain silent or the right to a lawyer, but only such legal assistance as may be necessary to file a habeas corpus petition within a reasonable time.That was the basis for my ruling in Padilla v. Rumsfeld that...interrogation need not stop.
What of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," who was warned of his Miranda rights and prosecuted in a civilian court?
He was arrested in December 2001, before procedures were put in place that would have allowed for an outcome that might have included not only conviction but also exploitation of his intelligence value, if possible. His case does not recommend the same procedure in Abdulmutallab's.
There was thus no legal or policy compulsion to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, at least initially, and every reason to treat him as an intelligence asset to be exploited promptly. The way to do that was not simply to have locally available field agents question him but, rather, to get in the room people who knew about al-Qaeda in Yemen, people who could obtain information, check that information against other available data and perhaps get feedback from others in the field before going back to Abdulmutallab to follow up where necessary, all the while keeping secret the fact of his cooperation. Once his former cohorts know he is providing information, they can act to make that information useless.
Nor is it an answer to say that Abdulmutallab resumed his cooperation even after he was warned of his rights. He did that after five weeks, when his family was flown here from Nigeria. The time was lost, and with it possibly useful information. Disclosing that he had resumed talking only compounded the problem by letting his former cohorts know that they had better cover their tracks.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/print_friendly.php?ID=or_20100213_5175
After learning that Qaeda terrorists with virtually undetectable bombs are planning to blow up 12 airliners carrying almost 4,000 passengers very soon, the FBI captures one of them. Would you want him Mirandized?
Reasonable people disagree about how much coercion interrogators should use to extract potentially lifesaving information from terrorists. (None at all, President Obama unwisely ordered soon after taking office.)
But no reasonable person could doubt that starting out with "you have the right to remain silent" is not the way to save lives.
Yet this is essentially the policy into which the Obama administration has locked itself by insisting that it did the right thing when it read Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber, his Miranda rights after only 50 minutes of questioning and a hospital visit.
I return to this subject because the rationalizations by Attorney General Eric Holder and other administration apologists have been so breathtakingly bereft of seriousness about the need for aggressive interrogation to protect our country.
Abdulmutallab might have been the first of a dozen Christmas Day bombers seeking to perfect the Bojinka plot, for all Holder and his colleagues knew at the time. It was sheer luck that this was not the case.
And the decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights, bring him a lawyer, and stop asking questions may yet get Americans murdered by his co-conspirators in Yemen -- who might have been located and captured or killed but for his five weeks of post-Miranda silence.
In any event, the important question for policy makers now is not how Mirandizing Abdulmutallab worked out; it is what the cost of Mirandizing such terrorist suspects in the future might be.
The fundamental principle underlying Miranda is the Fifth Amendment right of every person not to be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." And "all the Fifth Amendment forbids is the introduction of coerced statements at trial," as the late, liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in a 1984 opinion, joined by Justices William Brennan and John Paul Stevens.
In other words, neither the Fifth Amendment nor Miranda forbids aggressive interrogation to protect public safety without Miranda warnings.
The Holder-Obama policy of promptly reading terrorist suspects their Miranda rights comes close to guaranteeing that no timely intelligence will ever be extracted from any of them. Abdulmutallab's supposed disclosures starting five weeks after his Miranda warnings were far from timely.
What would the Bushies have done had Abdulmutallab appeared on their watch? Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey told me in an interview that the CIA and national intelligence directors "and ultimately the president would have been in on the decision in addition to me"; and that "I like to think the default setting would have been toward gathering intelligence rather than worrying about whether a man who did his crime in front of 285 witnesses could be convicted without using his confession."
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=521152
Didn't Acorn, the corrupt community organizer, get its federal funding yanked after its last scandal? Actually, no. Through municipal middlemen, it's poised to rake in another $4 billion. Where is the outrage?
You'd think a group implicated in dozens of electoral fraud cases, theft of funds and, most recently, helping criminals interested in bringing child prostitutes to the U.S. would have been ruled ineligible for federal aid long ago.
But think again...
[F]ederal Judge Nina Gershon ruled that Acorn is eligible for the Obama administration's proposed $4 billion in Housing and Urban Development grants within the $3.83 trillion federal budget proposal for 2011. That cancels the ban Congress placed on Acorn funding late last year after at least five of the group's offices willingly aided undercover reporters posing as a pimp and prostitute to get federal funding for a brothel and cheat on their taxes.
Many were surprised that Congressional Democrats backed Acorn's defunding. Usually, Acorn and the Democratic Party work hand in hand. Acorn supplies votes and election assistance to Democratic candidates, and the Democrats supply them with funding.
Turns out, the fund-pulling was really just for show.
Acorn is being allowed to make an end-run around the federal funding ban through the use of a middleman, the Washington Times reports.
The way it's done is through HUD Community Development Block Grants, which are given to cities and states to help boost development efforts. Instead of applying directly to the federal government for aid, a violation of Congress' ban, Gershon, a Clinton appointee, effectively ruled that Acorn can instead apply directly to cities and states.
In short, this gaping loophole means the ban is off.
No organization that has broken the law so many times has any right to even indirect federal funding. The fact the feds never prosecuted them as they should have is what has created the opening for Acorn to put its snout in the public trough once again.
* AND SO IT GOES IN THE AGE OF OBAMA...
* HEY... ANYONE REMEMBER NANCY PELOSI'S PLEDGE TO GIVE AMERICANS THE MOST ETHICAL CONGRESS EVER...?
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=521142
The Grand Canyon State [Arizona] avoids a big economic hole by suspending its participation in a multistate initiative to fight climate change. As climate fraud is exposed, economic reality sets in. Will California follow?
Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.
Leading the charge for the pact was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who insisted, "We cannot wait for the United States government to get its act together on the environment." At the time he said the regional agreement "sets the stage for a regional cap-and-trade program which will provide a powerful framework for developing a national cap-and-trade program."
Since then, the nation has slid into a recession, and the only thing man-made about climate change has been the manipulated and manufactured claims that we are doomed if we don't act to fight it.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seeing which way the snow is blowing, has issued an executive order saying her state will suspend its participation in the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for businesses and consumers.
Rumblings of discontent are also being heard in California. Assemblyman Dan Logue is sponsoring an initiative for the November ballot that would halt implementation of the state's global-warming law, Assembly Bill 32, until the state unemployment rate drops to 5.5% from the current 12.4%.
"The state's greenhouse reduction program is not a freebie," Gino DiCaro, a spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, said last month. "Large costs foisted on an unemployment-riddled state economy and increased electricity rates ... are not affordable at this time, if ever."
A 2009 study by economists at California State University, Sacramento, and commissioned by the California Small Business Roundtable found implementation costs for AB32 "could easily exceed $100 billion" and that by 2020 the program would raise the cost of living by $7,857 per household per year.
Not long ago, the New York Times reported that a new coal-fired power plant big enough to serve San Diego comes on line in China every seven to 10 days, exporting more pollution to California and the West than such draconian proposals would ever hope to curb. The pact also envisions strict emission limits on American cars at a time China has passed the U.S. as the world's largest auto market.
* THANK GOD... SANITY MAY BE RETURNING TO AMERICA!
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/bam_tax_betrayal_YxC16JkbYQ0q6Anl7bELBP
Remember Joe the Plumber? He was the blue-collar dude who confronted Barack Obama late in the 2008 campaign with this challenge: "Your new tax plan's going to tax me more, isn't it?"
Nonsense, replied the candidate: "From $250,000 down, your taxes are going to stay the same."
Indeed, he insisted, 95 percent of "working people" would see their taxes go down in his administration.
Well, think again.
A year into his presidency, Obama now says he's "agnostic" on what was the principal plank in his economic platform: No tax hikes for individuals making $200,000 a year or less -- or for households with a combined annual income under $250,000.
The president is about to appoint a task force (not another one!) to study reining in the national deficit -- and, he says, "what I want to do is to be completely agnostic in terms of solutions."
Meaning, says Obama, that he "can't set the whole thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table."
Including his once-sacred tax pledge.
This, just six months after White House spokesman Robert Gibbs flatly rejected a suggestion by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and senior economic adviser Lawrence Summers that Obama might be willing to go back on that pledge.
Now, it seems, he's willing to consider anything -- including tax hikes on the middle class -- in order to deal with the massive deficit ($1.56 trillion projected for 2010) he helped create.
Everything, that is, but what he and the Congress should be moving toward -- spending restraint.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059573079680544.html
'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it," wrote Saul Alinksy in his "Rules for Radicals." The White House would appear to have a copy.
The idea-driven Wisconsin Republican [Congressman Paul Ryan] first released his "Roadmap for America's Future" in 2008. The nation can argue about its particulars, but what is inarguable is that Mr. Ryan's plan is a real attempt to solve America's biggest problems, with bold tax, health and entitlement reforms to put the country back on the path to solvency.
At the time, Democrats could barely muster a yawn. So imagine the surprise when, after Mr. Ryan re-released his plan in late January, it became a sudden sensation. Two days later Mr. Obama used his visit to the Republican retreat to thrust it into the national spotlight. The cameras rolling, the president praised Mr. Ryan for putting forward a "serious proposal." He in fact singled out the congressman at least three times. Having done his spotlight bit, Mr. Obama then left it to the rest of the Democratic Party to systematically distort and trash the road map.
Within two days of the retreat, Obama budget director Peter Orszag had begun deflecting questions about the White House's ugly budget by hammering on Mr. Ryan's plan, claiming it "shifted costs" to families. Congressional Democrats held a conference call with reporters devoted to road map trashing, howling that it showed that Republicans would privatize Social Security, voucherize Medicare, and give tax breaks to the wealthy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi lambasted the Ryan plan in a speech to the Democratic National Committee.
[S]ome Republicans are falling into the trap. As with its campaign last year to smear Republican Whip Eric Cantor, the White House's attack on Mr. Ryan is designed to isolate and discredit one of the GOP's brightest thinkers. So it only aids the White House when "anonymous" Republican members—annoyed that they must have this debate—gripe to the press that Mr. Ryan doesn't "speak" for them.
These are the smart GOP members willing to do the hard work of explaining the difference between, say, Democratic legislation that would strip money from today's Medicare beneficiaries and funnel it to a new, unsustainable, middle-class entitlement, and Mr. Ryan's plan, which would preserve today's program for older Americans while plowing money from reform back into long-term solvency. As cheap as the attack on Mr. Ryan is, they understand that this debate was always coming, and that what they say now matters to the GOP's future ability to govern.
Should Republicans take back the House this year, or the White House in 2012, they will own giant deficits and runaway entitlements. Reality will force choices. They will either have to embrace politically tough ideas like those included in Mr. Ryan's plan, or flail through, doing nothing or succumbing to bigger government.
The longer the GOP hides or runs from those reforms, the harder it will be to embrace them later. Instead of spending so much time telling the press that Mr. Ryan's road map is not the "official" GOP plan, the party would be better off asking themselves why it isn't. If Mr. Obama is so eager for a debate about who is more serious about the country's future, they should give it to him.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/12/paul_ryans_lonely_challenge.html
Paul Ryan, a six-term Republican congressman from Wisconsin who is the ranking minority member of the House Budget Committee, has yanked himself from obscurity by doing something no one else in Congress or apparently the White House has done: design a specific plan to control long-term government spending and budget deficits. That he stands virtually alone is a damning commentary on our politics.
To govern is to choose, and our leaders recoil from unpopular choices. Americans want generous benefits and low taxes, so that's what the system -- led by either Democrats or Republicans -- provides.
President Obama continues this tradition. His administration's long-term budget projections show skyrocketing debt. In 2008, federal debt held by the public equaled 40 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). The administration has it rising to 77 percent of GDP in 2020, 99 percent in 2030 and 218 percent in 2050.
In reality, not choosing is a choice: to govern by crisis. Someday, the debt and associated interest payments (projected at $840 billion in 2020, a seventh of federal spending) may trigger a financial backlash. Lenders won't lend or will demand much higher rates. Congress would then be forced to cut benefits or raise taxes. The unstated hope is that the crisis occurs on someone else's watch.
Ryan rejects this consensus. He would make choices now. Here are some features of his plan:
-- Social Security: For those 55 or older today, the program would remain unchanged. For those younger, benefits would be reduced -- with no cuts for the poorest workers. Workers 55 or younger in 2011 could establish individual investment accounts that would be funded with part of their payroll taxes. Government would guarantee a return equal to inflation.
-- Medicare: Current recipients and those enrolling in the next decade would continue under today's program, though wealthier recipients would pay somewhat higher premiums. In 2021, Medicare would become a voucher program for new recipients (those today 54 or younger). With vouchers, recipients would buy Medicare-certified private insurance. In today's dollars, the vouchers would ultimately grow to $11,000. Eligibility ages for Medicare and Social Security would slowly increase toward 69 and 70, respectively.
-- Spending Freeze: From 2010 to 2019, "non-defense discretionary spending" -- about a sixth of the federal budget, including everything from housing to parks to education -- would be frozen at 2009 levels.
-- Simpler Taxes: Taxpayers could choose between today's system or a streamlined replacement with no deductions and virtually no special tax breaks. Above a tax-free amount ($39,000 for a family of four), taxpayers would pay only two rates: 10 percent up to $100,000 for joint filers and 25 percent on income more than that.
Ryan is trying to start a conversation on the desirable role and limits of government. He's trying to make it possible to talk about sensitive issues -- mainly Social Security and Medicare -- without being vilified. President Obama recognized that when he called Ryan's plan a "serious proposal." But since then, Democrats have resorted to ritualistic denunciations of him as pillaging Social Security and Medicare. Legitimate debate becomes impossible. If Democrats don't like Ryan's vision, the proper response is to design and defend their own plan. The fact that they don't have one is a national embarrassment.
If Timothy McVeigh and that nutcase in D.C. were mirandized, then any terrorist captured on American soil should be mirandized as well. What are we defending here, if not our way of life and our rule of law?
If you prefer safe, the safest countries on earth are the most repressive ones.
Have our wealth and concomitant creature comforts softened us into a nation of cringing pussies?
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