Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 31, 2010
As you'll note, with today's first newsbite my instinct is to give President Obama "props" for a policy decision announcing approval for new off-shore drilling.
However...
Based upon reading the full article... based upon what some might term "cynical analysis"... I'm far from convinced that when all is said and done the country will gain - on balance - much from the President's decisions.
As I note in the newsbite itself... hopefully I'm simply being cynical.
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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100331/D9EPI2PG0.html
In a reversal of a long-standing ban on most offshore drilling, President Barack Obama is allowing oil drilling 50 miles off Virginia's shorelines.
* GOOD...
At the same time, he is rejecting some new drilling sites that had been planned in Alaska.
(*SMIRK*)
Obama was set to announce the new drilling policy Wednesday at Andrews air base in Maryland. ... The president, joined by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, also was set to announce that proposed leases in Alaska's Bristol Bay would be canceled. The Interior Department also planned to reverse last year's decision to open up parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Instead, scientists would study the sites to see if they're suitable to future leases.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
Obama is allowing an expansion in Alaska's Cook Inlet to go forward. The plan also would leave in place the moratorium on drilling off the West Coast.
* YA SEE A PATTERN HERE, FOLKS...?
In addition, the Interior Department has prepared a plan to add drilling platforms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico if Congress allows that moratorium to expire. Lawmakers in 2008 allowed a similar moratorium to expire; at the time President George W. Bush lifted the ban, which opened the door to Obama's change in policy. Under Obama's plan, drilling could take place 125 miles from Florida's Gulf coastline if lawmakers allow the moratorium to expire.
* HMM... AND IF A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS REFUSES WILL OUR DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT SIMPLY SAY "WELL... I TRIED"?
* IN PLAIN ENGLISH... I JUST DON'T TRUST OBAMA. IT SOUNDS TO ME AS IF THE PLAN IS TO SAY "YES" TO EXPANDING OFFSHORE DRILLING WHILE AT THE SAME TIME SAYING "NO" TO EXPANDING OFFSHORE DRILLING. HOPEFULLY I'M JUST BEING CYNICAL.
The president's team has been busy on energy policy and Obama talked about it in his State of the Union address. During that speech, he said he wanted the United States to build a new generation of nuclear power plants...
* YEAH. LET'S SEE HOW MUCH NEW NUCLEAR PLANT CONSTRUCTION HAS BROKEN GROUND BY 2010; LET'S SEE HOW MANY NEW NUCLEAR PLANTS ARE OPERATIONAL BY 2016.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aSfp5pL7BSTM&pos=2
Companies in the U.S....cut payrolls in March, according to data from a private report based on payrolls. The 23,000 decline...followed a revised 24,000 drop the prior month, data from ADP Employer Services showed today.
Over the previous six months, ADP’s initial figures have overstated the Labor Department’s first estimate of private payroll losses by as little as 2,000 in February to as much as 151,000 in November.
The economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the most of any downturn in the post- World War II era. In February, U.S. payrolls shrank by 36,000.
Today’s ADP report showed a decrease of 51,000 workers in goods-producing industries including manufacturers and construction companies. Service providers added 28,000 workers.
Employment in construction fell by 43,000, while factories lost 9,000 jobs, ADP said.
Companies employing more than 499 workers shrank their workforces by 7,000 jobs. Medium-sized businesses, with 50 to 499 employees, cut 4,000 jobs and small companies decreased payrolls by 12,000, ADP said.
TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=528848
Climate change represents a tough and complex policy issue.
As Congress debates domestic legislation, the administration participates in an international process with similar objectives. As this takes place, the Environmental Protection Agency is engaging in a form of political blackmail, threatening to push ahead on its own if elected officials don't move as quickly as the agency wants. It has already taken the first step toward leveraging the Clean Air Act to mandate GHG reductions.
Headed toward regulatory seppuku, the agency recently finalized a climate change determination that current concentrations of GHGs - about 435 parts per million (ppm) in CO2 equivalents - in the atmosphere endanger public health and welfare. EPA makes this claim not because these emissions are toxic like pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act, but because of their heat-trapping capacity. EPA has accepted the theory that increasing emissions of these gases will lead to unprecedented increases in the earth's temperature and that a much warmer earth will mean health- and even life-threatening problems. Although it has been as warm or warmer in the past, EPA wants to act assuming a worst-case scenario - even if the probability of occurrence is incredibly small.
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has set an ambitious goal of cutting GHG emissions so concentrations do not exceed 450 ppm and keeping the global average temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius. Leaving aside whether achieving such a goal is even technologically or economically feasible, let's focus on the fact that the international goal - which the Obama administration has acknowledged in the Copenhagen Accord - represents a higher concentration than what EPA claims is already endangering all of us. If EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson really believes this, she must be setting the stage for a massive regulatory assault by declaring that any increase in GHG concentrations will further harm human health and welfare.
Once the agency determines that current concentrations of greenhouse gases are unhealthy, how can U.S. negotiators agree to a U.N. limit that is higher?
While it might appear that Administrator Jackson and her army of regulators are out of step with the rest of the administration, the White House has done nothing to discourage EPA from pressuring Congress.
[R]educing U.S. emissions while developing countries are increasing theirs would have no meaningful impact on global concentration levels.
America alone cannot control emissions worldwide.
Our states and businesses will be held accountable for the impossible while other nations prosper at our expense.
* To be continued...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)
Consider the lesson from our experience with price controls in the '70s. To counteract the inflationary effects of an expansive monetary policy put in place in the 1960s, the Nixon administration slapped a 90-day freeze on wages and prices in late 1971. The fix was only temporary, though, and when inflation took off again in 1973, the administration put in place more price controls.
When farmers began killing chickens and ranchers stopped raising cattle because the cost of doing so exceeded the prices they could fetch, consumers stripped store shelves of their wares.
The resulting shortages forced the administration to relent and lift all but one segment of the price controls, the ones imposed on oil and natural gas.
In his book "The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy," economist Daniel Yergin notes:
"Washington's effort to run the energy market was a lasting lesson in the perversities that can ensue when government takes over the marketplace. ... The prices for domestic production were also held down, in effect forcing domestic producers to subsidize imported oil and providing additional incentives to import oil into the U.S. "The whole enterprise was an elaborate and confusing system of price controls, entitlements and allocations. It was estimated that just the standard reporting requirements for what became the Federal Energy Administration involved some 200,000 respondents from industry, committing an estimated five million man-hours annually." Not until federal controls were lifted did real oil and gasoline prices decline by providing incentives for new oil development.
Much like domestic oil price control shifts increased America's reliance on energy imports, the EPA's plan for a 350 ppm limit on greenhouse gas emissions is a control that will just shift emissions production overseas - the production of goods and services that consumers value.
Ends and means cannot be separated. And unintended consequences are usually severe, as the Nixon and Carter administrations discovered in the 1970s and the Obama administration [and the American People] will discover today if the EPA doesn't change course.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=528852
Contrary to the impression created in much of the media and in politics, no one has denied that temperatures change, sometimes more than they are changing today.
Three years ago, a book by Singer and Avery was published with a title that says it all: "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years."
When ancient fossils of creatures that live on the ocean floor have been found in rock formations at the summit of Mount Everest, that ought to give us a clue that big changes in the earth are nothing new, and that huge changes have been going on long before human beings appeared on the scene.
The recent statement that the earth was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today, made by the climate scientist who is at the heart of the recent scandal about "global warming" statistics, ought to at least give pause to those who are determined to believe that human beings must be the reason for "climate change."
Other climate scientists have pointed out before now that the earth has warmed and cooled many times over the centuries.
On climate issues, as on many other issues, the biggest argument of the Left has been that there is no argument. The word "science" has been used as a magic mantra to shut up critics, even when those critics have been scientists with international reputations as specialists in climate science.
Stealing the aura of science for political purposes is nothing new for the left. Karl Marx called his brand of Utopianism "scientific socialism." Even earlier, in the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet referred to "engineering" society. In the 20th century, H.G. Wells referred to the creation of a lasting peace as a heavy and complex "piece of mental engineering."
Genuine science is the opposite of dogmatism, but that does not keep dogmatists from invoking the name of science in order to shut off debate. Science is a method of analysis, rather than simply a set of conclusions. In fact, much of the history of science is a history of having to abandon the prevailing conclusions among scientists, in light of new evidence or new methods of analysis.
When the scientists in England who were promoting "global warming" hysteria sent e-mails out to colleagues, urging them not to reveal certain data and not to let the fact become widely known that there was a freedom-of-information act in Britain, they were behaving like politicians, rather than scientists.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=528912
Watch out when sweeping new legislation comes with a "bipartisan" label.
Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are working feverishly to craft a "tripartisan" approach for a new cap-and-trade bill.
Even business groups, notably the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have made favorable noises about the bill. But don't be fooled. This will be another massive tax on consumers and industry. Industry foes, of course, will be bought off with rebates, subsidies, protectionist rules and other goodies. You'll be left holding the bag.
The feeding frenzy has already begun, as noted earlier this month by Competitive Enterprise Institute Fellow Iain Murray:
"Manufacturing-state senators want billions of dollars to compensate industry. Farm-state senators want billions of dollars for agricultural producers. Nuclear-state senators want billions of dollars for carbon-free nuclear power. Coal-state senators want billions of dollars for clean-coal technology. Senators from natural-gas states want billions of dollars for fuel-switching." ... You get the idea. "Bipartisan" becomes a metaphor for "bought off."
Everyone gets something - everyone, that is, except the poor, lonely, foolish taxpayer who stands at the end of this ugly daisy chain, wallet in hand, paying for it all through higher taxes on every watt, joule and BTU of energy he or she uses.
With oil prices surging back above $80 a barrel - remember what a big issue that was for the media when George W. Bush was in office? - we don't need a new tax on energy. What we need is new energy, period - "bipartisanship" be damned.
Taxing us to death won't help. We need to go after the energy we have available now: Literally trillions of barrels of oil in shale deposits and offshore, and quadrillions of cubic feet of natural gas trapped below ground and underwater across our country.
People forget that our current economic morass was in part caused by soaring energy prices. Isn't it time we tapped our own plentiful resources and got back ahead of the energy curve?
http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=5842
Chicago’s Real Crime Story: Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence [By Heather Mac Donald]
Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. [In Chicago this] myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.
In 1984, Obama’s first year in Chicago, gang members gunned down a teenage basketball star, Benjy Wilson. The citywide outcry that followed was heartfelt but beside the point. None of the prominent voices calling for an end to youth violence - from Mayor Washington to Jesse Jackson to school administrators - noted that all of Wilson’s killers came from fatherless families (or that he had fathered an illegitimate child himself). Nor did the would-be reformers mention the all-important fact that a staggering 75% of Chicago’s black children were being born out of wedlock.
The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children’s mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.
Obama offers fleeting glimpses of Chicago’s social breakdown in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, but it’s as if he didn’t really see what he recorded. [The future president] vividly describes children who “swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block.” He observes two young boys casually firing a handgun at a third. He notes that the elementary school in the Altgeld Gardens housing project had a center for the teen mothers of its students, who had themselves been raised by teen mothers. Most tellingly, Obama’s narrative is almost devoid of men. With the exception of the local ministers and the occasional semi-crazed black nationalist, Obama inhabits a female world. His organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are. When Obama sees a group of boys vandalizing a building, he asks rhetorically: “Who will take care of them: the alderman, the social workers? The gangs?” The most appropriate candidate - “their fathers” - never occurs to him.
* FOLKS... I KNOW YOU'RE ALL BUSY. I KNOW THAT ASKING YOU TO SIMPLY BROWSE "BARKER'S NEWSBITES" ON A DAILY BASIS IS ASKING A LOT. I KNOW THAT WHEN I WRITE, "UTILIZE THE LINK AND READ THE FULL PIECE" I'M ASKING EVEN MORE. THAT ACKNOWLEDGED... FOLLOW THE LINK AND READ THIS FULL PIECE.
http://chronicle.com/article/Judge-Denies/64880/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
A California state judge has rejected a bid by two researchers examining affirmative action to gain access to California Bar Association data on the long-term success of law-school graduates.
(*SNORT*)
Judge Curtis E.A. Karnow of the California Superior Court for San Francisco County ruled last week that the state bar is not legally obliged to release the data sought by Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Joe Hicks, a former governor of the California state bar...
(*SHAKING MY HEAD IN DISGUST*)
The judge held that the researchers' argument for access to the data under public-records laws relied on a definition of "public document" that was overly broad, and could be interpreted as covering judges' rough notes, grand-jury transcripts, and other documents that the courts have long held to be exempt.
* OH, PLEASE...! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD...
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
Mr. Sander has generated controversy in the past with research concluding that selective law schools' race-conscious admission policies set up many minority students for long-term failure.
* HMM... YOU'D THINK PEER-REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY INTO SANDER'S RESEARCH WOULD BE THE "AMERICAN" WAY TO GO AS OPPOSED TO STANDING IN THE "SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR" DENYING THE PROFESSOR AND HIS COLLEAGUES ACCESS TO THE RAW DATA FROM WHICH STUDIES ARE PERFORMED.
(*SMIRK*)
http://article.nationalreview.com/429889/corporate-welfare-they-cried/stephen-spruiell
Obamacare is [already] costing - big time. AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, Deere & Company, 3M - any large corporation with significant health-care obligations to retired workers is taking a major hit to its quarterly earnings statement.
The damage could total as much as $15 billion.
The write-downs are the result of a tax change in the Democrats’ health-care legislation.
When the Republicans created the Medicare Part D prescription-drug entitlement in 2003, they decided to build in a subsidy for private employers to keep them from dumping their retirees into the Part D program. The logic behind the move was simple: If the private sector is already chipping in its own capital to provide a benefit, and if people are happy with their plans, then it would be best to look for ways to help the private sector to keep providing that benefit and sharing the cost, rather than disrupt existing arrangements and burden taxpayers with the whole cost.
Obamacare’s authors repealed the deduction as part of a bid for a better score from the Congressional Budget Office, which counted the revenue from the repeal (around $5 billion) but did not estimate the costs stemming from the likelihood that many companies would probably drop their retiree drug benefit and dump their retirees into the public system.
* PERFECT EXAMPLE OF HOW THE DEMS "FIXED THE BOOKS" REGARDING CBO ESTIMATES. AS NOTED TIME AND TIME AGAIN DURING THE DEBATE, "GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT," AND THIS IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF SLIGHT OF HAND FOLKS LIKE ME HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT!
Nor is this just a matter of fiscal chicanery: It could have real consequences for retirees who prefer their private plans. According to a study prepared by Towers Watson, a consultancy, employer plans are on average more generous than Medicare Part D plans. So much for keeping the plan you like.
TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://article.nationalreview.com/429893/break-up-the-banks/arnold-kling
Big banks are bad for free markets. Far from being engines of free enterprise, they are conducive to what might be called “crony capitalism,” “corporatism,” or, in Jonah Goldberg’s provocative phrase, “liberal fascism.”
[O]ur big banks are the product, not of economics, but of politics. There’s a long debate to be had about the maximum size to which a bank should be allowed to grow, and about how to go about breaking up banks that become too large. But I want to focus instead on the general objections to large banks.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae represent everything that is wrong with the politics of big banks. They acquired lobbying prowess, their decisions were distorted by political concerns, and they were bailed out at taxpayer expense. All of these developments seem to be inevitable with large financial institutions...our present large financial institutions probably owe their scale more to government policy than to economic advantages associated with their vast size. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were created by the government, and they always benefited from the perception that Washington would not permit them to fail - a perception that proved accurate. Similarly, large banks were viewed as “too big to fail,” which gave them important advantages in credit markets and allowed them to grow bigger than they otherwise would have. In 2007 and 2008, Lehman Brothers was able to obtain substantial short-term credit from what otherwise would have been risk-averse money-market funds, notably the Reserve Primary Fund, which “broke the buck” after Lehman’s collapse, greatly intensifying the subsequent financial panic. It is difficult to view Reserve Primary’s large position in Lehman debt as anything other than a bet that the government would engineer a bailout.
The government encouraged the boom in securitization...which helped swell the size of financial firms and was stimulated by banks’ desire to skirt capital-requirement rules. And the credit-rating agencies’ outsized role in financial markets - indeed, the very existence of a small, powerful cabal of federally approved rating agencies - was the work of regulators. Such policies fostered large financial institutions such as AIG, which built its huge portfolio of credit-default swaps on the basis of Triple-A grades from the credit-rating cartel.
* To be continued...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)
In the United States, big banks provide an invitation to mix politics and finance. Large financial firms get caught between public purposes imposed on them by Congress and the interests of private stakeholders. If they do not maintain good relations with legislators, they risk adverse regulation. Therefore, it behooves them to shape their regulatory environment. And they have done so. In recent decades, the blend of politics and banking created a Washington–Wall Street financial complex in the mortgage market. This development, and its consequences, have been well documented. Michael Lewis’s 1989 book Liar’s Poker includes a portrayal of the political exertions of investment bankers to enable mortgage securitization to take off.
“The Quiet Coup,” an article by Simon Johnson that appeared in the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic, chronicles the rapid accrual of profits and power by large financial institutions over the past 30 years; during this period, Wall Street firms were able to shape the basic beliefs of political figures and regulators, a phenomenon that Brookings Institution scholar Daniel Kaufmann has dubbed “cognitive capture.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, which describes the response of the Federal Reserve and Treasury to the financial crisis, leaves the distinct impression that senior bankers had much more access to and influence over Washington’s decision makers than did career bureaucrats.
Notwithstanding the good intentions of policymakers, who no doubt plan to create a stronger regulatory apparatus going forward, large banks will inevitably have too much power for the apparatus to govern them. They will shield themselves from its attentions by making political concessions on lending practices. So long as big banking is conjoined to big government, that is, we risk a return to the regime of private profits and socialized risk.
http://article.nationalreview.com/429902/racial-recession/kevin-a-hassett
Economists seem to have settled on a name for the economic calamity we have just lived through. They call it the “Great Recession.”
As bad as the economy has been at the aggregate level, for minorities it has been much worse. It was a Great Recession for whites. It has been a Great Depression for blacks.
(*NOD*)
However bad the unemployment rate is for the general population, it is always worse for black Americans.
On average, the black unemployment rate has been 6.6% higher than the white unemployment rate since 1972. According to the most recent data, the unemployment rate for blacks is 7.8% higher than the rate for whites.
* FOR THOSE TOO LAZY TO DO THE MATH... 9.7% AGGREGATE UNEMPLOYMENT + 7.8% = 17.5% BLACK UNEMPLOYMENT. (SO... LET'S OPEN THE BORDERS, RIGHT?! LEGALIZE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, RIGHT?! LET'S INVITE IN THE POOR OF MEXICO, CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA AND INDEED THE WORLD; SCREW BLACK AMERICANS... RIGHT...???)
(*SIGH*) (*HEADACHE*)
http://article.nationalreview.com/429851/next-battle-immigration/victor-davis-hanson
* I STRONGLY URGE FOLKS TO CLICK ON THE ABOVE LINK (OR, RATHER, CUT AND PASTE ONTO YOUR BROWSER AND CLICK) AND READ THE OP-ED IN IT'S ENTIRETY.
What we will - and will not - hear in the upcoming debate over illegal immigration?
After the health-care fight, we can expect the Obama administration to use the same template to pass “comprehensive immigration reform.” That is a euphemism for permanently ceasing construction of the still-incomplete border fence; institutionalizing a large guest-worker program; treating illegal residents as de facto citizens in terms of receiving earned-income credits, health care, and general entitlements; and providing virtual amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens.
First, immigration policy - like health care, and cap-and-trade to come - will be cast as a civil-rights issue. That is, free access to the United States and, for some, its entitlement industry for millions of impoverished Mexicans will be redefined as comparable to ending discrimination in the South in the 1960s.
[S]keptics will be branded “racists” and “nativists”...the debate will be personalized - and, above all, blurred. Opponents, we will also be told, are not bothered by illegal immigration per se. Rather they are “anti-immigrant” - as the issue is transmuted into one of hating real people rather than opposing an illegal activity.
[P]olarization is critical for the bill’s passage, since it does not have 50% public support - and won’t unless a series of constituencies can be united to see the issue in polarities such as "us vs. them," "whites vs. people of color," "rich vs. poor." Blacks will be told it is Birmingham all over again. The Mexican-American middle class, highly skeptical of open borders, will be told that opposition to amnesty is “anti-Hispanic.”
Fence-sitting House members will be promised all sorts of special multi-million-dollar earmarks to allay “voter concern.” Executive orders will be pledged to override the more disturbing elements of congressional legislation. Anecdotes about starving children, and accusations of responsibility for the deaths of hundreds trying to cross the border in the desert, will pepper the rhetoric of open-border advocates.
The key will be to redefine as liberal something as inherently illiberal as illegal immigration. Thus there will be no discussion of what the surge over the last two decades of more than 11 million illegal aliens has done to poorer American workers.
* AGAIN, FOLKS... THE "BITE" IN THE "NEWSBITE" HERE IS JUST FROM THE FIRST PAGE OF THE OP-ED; THREE MORE PAGES FOLLOW. I STRONGLY, STRONGLY URGE YOU TO READ THE FULL OP-ED.
http://article.nationalreview.com/429861/frustrating-stubborn-facts/tony-blankley
John Adams [once] said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence (“Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,” December 1770).
Though he may have been correct technically - the facts cannot be altered in the eyes of God - he was wrong to the extent that the facts can be altered in the eyes of the public.
The advocates of the new “thing” that was passed a week ago Sunday and signed into law by the chief executive claimed it would reduce the deficit by $140 billion over the first ten years. No informed person believes that “fact.” Also, fairly happily, according to Sunday’s Washington Post poll, 65% of the public thinks the new law will increase the budget deficit.
Still, that leaves 35% (or close to 100 million Americans, counting the kids) who either believe the incorrect “fact,” think the law will be budget-neutral, or are otherwise confused.
American elections tend to be won or lost on the margin. If 30% of the voters are motivated by incorrect “facts” to vote, that may well be enough for them to be the winners - who, as many cynics claim, get to write history.
* BTW... THIS REASONING IS WHY "BARKER'S NEWSBITES" OFTEN CONTAIN MULTIPLE REITERATIONS. TAKE THE NEWSBITES CONCERNING OBAMA'S SUPPOSED "REVERSAL OF A LONG-STANDING BAN ON MOST OFFSHORE OIL." I HATE TO HAVE TO NOTE THIS, BUT HONESTLY, I CAN'T AVOID ACKNOWLEDGING THAT I BELIEVE THE AVERAGE AMERICAN WILL BE "FOOLED" BY THE HEADLINES AND HOW THE MSM WILL SPIN THE STORY. I'LL BE YOU DOLLARS TO DONUTS (AND I'M ON A DIET!) THAT ON TONIGHT'S O'REILLY FACTOR THAT MORON BILL O'REILLY WILL BASICALLY GIVE THE PRESIDENT CREDIT FOR "REVERSING" HIMSELF.
(*SIGH*)
http://www.americansolutions.com/drill/2010/03/obamas-false-promise-on-offshore-drilling.php
President Obama announced today that he would open up portions of the Outer Continental Shelf to offshore drilling. [Unfortunately] the plan is defined more by what it restricts than what it opens up. The Obama administration chose to take off the table large portions of the OCS in an announcement that was supposed to be about expanding American energy.
Despite sweeping rhetoric and a promise to make "tough decisions" on offshore drilling, the Obama administration appears content to maintain a de facto ban on responsible American energy development. The new plan includes: No drilling in the Pacific Ocean; No drilling in a large portion of the Atlantic Ocean; No drilling in some of the most promising areas of the Gulf of Mexico; and no drilling in much of Alaska.
While opening up any portion of the OCS for responsible energy development appears to be a great step forward, the truth is that none of this has been finalized, and most new drilling will not occur until after 2012 at the earliest.
The offering also comes with a hefty price: President Obama wants to force Americans to swallow a massive new energy tax before any state will reap the benefits from this new offshore drilling. The bill Mr. Obama urged Congress to pass last summer, the Waxman-Markey energy tax, would eviscerate the economy, killing more than one million jobs per year while raising the cost of energy for all Americans.
If an energy tax passes Congress this year, the negative impact on the economy will happen long before the first oil comes from these new offshore leases.
In addition, the multitude of steps to be taken before any of these lease sales are made after 2012 are still a work in progress. Each offshore tract that the administration proposes will no doubt fall victim to an array of court challenges and bureaucratic hangups, each of which will push back new offshore drilling even further.
Instead of following the will of the people and moving forward immediately with offshore drilling, the President is asking us to trust him to proceed in the future, kicking the can of energy independence years down the road. Recall that during the 2008 campaign then-Senator Obama affirmed his support for offshore drilling, only to take office and implement a series of delays and roadblocks to responsible oil and gas development.
According to a study by the American Energy Alliance, offshore drilling has the potential to create millions of new American jobs and could provide more than $2 trillion in new government revenue at the local, state, and federal level.
By delaying offshore drilling for at least another two years, the President's decision does nothing to allow us to begin reaping those benefits. Mr. Obama's insistence on imposing a new tax on American energy also hamstrings any future job creation or new drilling revenues.
When Congress voted in 2008 not to extend the ban on offshore drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, they did not choose to keep a ban on Pacific waters, nor did they intend for a de facto ban to remain in effect in the OCS for at least another four years. What Congress did through legislative action, acting in accordance with the public will, the President has undone with the stroke of a pen.
http://www.gop.gov/press-release/10/03/31/pence-calls-president-s-drilling
U.S. Congressman Mike Pence, Chairman of the House Republican Conference and the American Energy Solutions Group, issued the following statement today regarding President Obama’s announcement on oil and gas exploration:
“As usual the devil is in the details. Only in Washington, D.C., can you ban more areas to oil and gas exploration than you open up, delay the date of your new leases and claim you’re going to increase production.
"The President’s announcement today is a smokescreen. It will almost certainly delay any new offshore exploration until at least 2012 and include only a fraction of the offshore resources that the previous Administration included in its plan.
“Unfortunately, this is yet another feeble attempt to gain votes for the President’s national energy tax bill that is languishing in the Senate. At the end of the day this Administration’s energy plan is simple: increase the cost of energy on every family in America and trade American jobs overseas at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.”
(*SIGH*)
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/column-is-mandate-constitutional.html
The new health care law has states and citizens lining up - but not quite in the way President Obama or Congress had hoped. Across the country, lawsuits are being filed that could have sweeping implications, not just for health care but our constitutional system. To date, 14 states have joined the stampede to the courthouse to challenge the legislation.
With this legislation, Congress has effectively defined an uninsured 18-year-old man in Richmond as an interstate problem like a polluting factory. It is an assertion of federal power that is inherently at odds with the original vision of the Framers. If a citizen who fails to get health insurance is an interstate problem, it is difficult to see the limiting principle as Congress seeks to impose other requirements on citizens.
* ONE POINT I'LL (RELUCTANTLY) MAKE BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE SEEMS TO BE MAKING IT: HOW DOES SOCIAL SECURITY PASS CONSTITUTIONAL MUSTER...??? IT'S BASICLY FORCED RETIREMENT "SAVINGS." YOU'RE FORCING CITIZENS TO PURCHASE WHAT AMOUNTS TO "GOVERNMENT INSURANCE" ALREADY.
The guarantee of federalism was essential to ratifying the Constitution and embodied in the 10th Amendment guaranteeing that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Historically, however, federalism is a constitutional rule honored largely in the breach by Congress.
For states' rights advocates, the Constitution is like a contract that is openly violated by one party with impunity. On paper, the states remain sovereign powers, while in reality the federal government appears able to dictate everything from the ingredients of school lunches to speed limits. Congress now routinely collects taxes in order to return the money to the states with conditions on their conforming to federal demands.
[T]he Supreme Court has stretched the meaning of interstate commerce to cover such things as the farmers growing wheat for their own consumption. ... With the newly minted health care law, Congress is effectively ordering a citizen to buy a product and treating the uninsured citizen himself as an interstate problem in the same way Congress regulates endangered species.
[On the other hand,] in 1990, Congress criminalized certain conduct as part of its Gun-Free School Zones Act. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1995 and held that such laws did not substantially relate to interstate commerce. The court refused to "pile inference upon inference" to find an interstate claim.
This brings us back to that 18-year-old Virginian. Congress is declaring the failure to insure oneself to be an interstate matter. There is no question that being uninsured contributes to the national crisis in health care. If that 18-year-old has a car accident, it is the public that is likely to bear the costs of his care. However, if the failure to get insurance makes one the object of federal jurisdiction, it is hard to see the why other acts of omission will not be tied to national deficiencies in public health or education or family welfare.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Unions-buy-their-way-into-the-White-House-89556382.html#ixzz0jks4PNpO
After spending $400 million to elect President Obama and expand the Democratic majorities controlling Congress, Big Labor unions now find they have nearly unprecedented access to lawmakers at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, representatives of the powerful Service Employees International Union are in the White House every day.
According to White House visitor logs, SEIU President Andy Stern was the second most frequent individual visitor to the White House in 2009, with 36 visits.
Stern's right-hand woman, SEIU Treasurer Anna Burger...was first with 39 forays into the White House to visit with Obama and other senior administration officials.
Some critics would argue that giving such open access to special interests seeking favors ought to be criminal - and in Stern's case it might even be. Stern is not a registered lobbyist...
[T]he SEIU's influence in the White House extends far beyond frequent visits. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama frequently railed against the pernicious influence of lobbyists, saying, "Lobbyists won't find a job in my White House." Somehow, SEIU's Patrick Gaspard "slipped through the cracks." Until becoming Obama's White House political director, Gaspard was one of the SEIU's top lobbyists.
(*SMIRK*)
The SEIU isn't the only union with heavy sway at the White House. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, has visited the White House at least 14 times...
Recently, it was reported that the White House called Trumka in for an emergency March 17 meeting that turned out to be critical to gaining passing of Obamacare. Desperate for votes for the controversial proposal, Obama needed Trumka to sign off on a new provision in the legislation. Sure enough, the next day the Congressional Budget Office score came in, and analysts soon found that unions had been well taken care of in the legislation. A proposed excise tax on expensive health insurance or so-called "Cadillac plans" threatened to hit union members hard, especially officers like Trumka who usually have to-grade, union-paid health benefit plans. But in the final version of health care reform legislation, the threshold for when the tax took effect had been significantly raised. Further, the tax's effective date was pushed back to 2018, leaving plenty of time for Democrats in Congress to find new ways to make unions exempt.
(*SHAKING MY HEAD IN DISGUST*)
http://www.denverpost.com/harsanyi/ci_14788032
Romney's is a hopeless quest for the presidency.
While Romney has the required drive, intellect and temperament, he is wrong on the fundamental ideological question of this time: health care.
In fact, Romney's illogical and unconvincing defense of his own health care plan is not only a deal breaker, it allows folks like White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to tell reporters that Obamacare is similar to a plan enacted (and still defended) by a leading Republican contender in 2012. And Gibbs is right.
Let's concede...that health care reform becomes the defining legislative accomplishment of Barack Obama's first term. By 2012, many of the hidden costs of this reform will have surfaced, while the bulk of the alleged benefits still will not have kicked in.
Barring some earth-shattering geopolitical event, candidate Romney will be impelled to spend a noteworthy chunk of his time pointing out differences and/or defending comparisons between the two plans - effectively eliminating the issue that holds potentially the greatest impact for Republicans.
Unlike Hillary Clinton on Iraq or Romney's dad, George, on Vietnam, Mitt can't claim to have been brainwashed by The Man. Not anymore. In fact, when recently asked about it, Romney, according to the Boston Globe, offered "an enthusiastic defense."
"Overall, ours is a model that works," Romney explained. "We solved our problem at the state level.
Here's what he should have said [instead - years ago in fact]:
"Everyone makes mistakes. Heck, I made a huge one. My plan, first hijacked by state liberals and now copied by Barack Obama, has created a fiscal nightmare in my state - one, which according to the former Democratic treasurer, has forced us to cut back on other basic services. "Though we promised an individual mandate would mean everyone chipping in, nearly 70% of the newly insured are subsidized by taxpayers - with many paying nothing. Meanwhile, health care spending in our state is 27% higher than the national average and we have a shortage of doctors to boot. And that's just for starters . . . Let me be clear. I am not here to defend Romneycare. I am here to extract my name from that botched experiment by repealing its ugly stepson Obamacare so Americans work together to pass genuine, common sense, market-based reform."
Then again, it is entirely possible Romney genuinely believes his health care model works. In which case...
(*MASSIVE MIGRAINE HEADACHE*) (*BANGING MY DESK FOR A SOLID TEN SECONDS*)
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama_-who-_excluded-lobbyists__-has-appointed-50-89531802.html
President Obama used his recess-appointment power to place four former federal lobbyists - representing defense contractors and the agri-chemical industry among others - in top policy jobs. Obama's maneuver dodges a Senate floor debate and sweeps under the rug an inauspicious milestone: The appointment of the 50th lobbyist to a policymaking job by a president who claims he's "excluded" them.
* NOTE, FOLKS, I'M NOT - NOR HAVE I - CRITICIZING THE PRESIDENT FOR MAKING RECESS APPOINTMENTS. THAT'S HIS RIGHT AND I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH CLEARLY CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL MANEUVERS. NOPE. THIS IS ABOUT ANOTHER OBAMA CAMPAIGN PROMISE BROKEN.
Isi Siddiqui enters the Obama administration from CropLife America, the D.C.-based lobby for the companies who make and sell agricultural pesticides and herbicides. Siddiqui was a registered lobbyist from 2001 to 2004, and since then he has served as the "vice president for science and regulatory affairs." Now, thanks to the recess appointment, he is the top agriculture official at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
A floor debate over Siddiqui would have been especially awkward for the president. His record of subsidizing the agri-chemical industry and using regulation to protect it fly in the face of Obama's supportive words about local and organic food. During the Clinton administration, before cashing out to the agri-chemical lobby, Siddiqui advanced a rule prohibiting private entities from having a stricter labeling standard for "organic" than the USDA's standard. Siddiqui is also a man who has gotten wealthy by monetizing his "public service" by putting his connections at the service of the very industry he had regulated in the Clinton administration. Bringing him back into government is certainly not "closing the revolving door between K Street and the executive branch," as Obama claims he has done.
Erik Hirschhorn, appointed to the Commerce Department, was a registered lobbyist at the K Street firm Winston & Strawn, where his clients included military-industrial titan Lockheed Martin and fertilizer giant Sun Chemicals.
Michael Punke, another recess appointee, will head off to Geneva to represent the United States before the World Trade Organization. Previously, at Mayer Brown, he represented agricultural interests and Time Warner. In 2007 and 2008, Punke ran his own boutique lobbying shop.
Jacqueline Barrien, going to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on a recess appointment, was registered in 2005 as a Washington lobbyist for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
These four former lobbyists were among Obama's 15 recess appointments... In his State of the Union address, Obama claimed "we have excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs." Appointing fifty earns him a Pinocchio nose.
[M]ost of Obama's recess nominations were not about circumventing a filibuster; labor lawyer Craig Becker was the only one of the 15 who was being filibustered. The other 14 recess appointments were efforts to avoid debate and discussion. It's important here to set the record straight about what a senator's "hold" is. A "hold" cannot prevent confirmation or even block a vote on confirmation - that requires a 41-vote filibuster to block cloture or one-man filibuster right out of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." A "hold" is an objection to the unanimous-consent decree that would allow confirmation without debate.
http://financialsense.com/editorials/casey/2010/0330.html
The Census already hired 1.2 million workers in the fall...now they’re planning for another 1.2 million in the spring.
February began with an additional 15,000 Census workers; the hiring will peak in April-May with 800,000 workers hired in just two months. The peak alone is projected to temporarily push unemployment downward by half a percent.
Digging a bit deeper, we find that this year, 723,000 door-to-door Census takers will be needed in comparison to 2000’s 604,000, a 16.6% increase despite the lack of an equivalent rise in the population.
The hiring numbers are pushed upward by the low total working hours per employee.
On average, each temporary Census employee will work 19 hours a week for six weeks. But “work” may not be the most appropriate word. The Census estimates that only 47.8 million houses will require a Census worker to visit. Divide this by 723,000 census takers to get 66 houses per worker. Since each temp will be employed for six weeks, this translates into less than two houses visited per workday.
The spending side of the Census equation doesn’t make much sense either. According to a Census Bureau press release, mailing back the form costs the government only 42 cents, while visiting a house costs $56.
Why does it cost $56 to visit just one house! Even with repeat visits, this seems a lot. Imagine that pizza delivery were this expensive.
The Washington D.C. Census office offers $20 per hour, San Francisco $22, and Anchorage, Alaska, pays the most at $25 per hour. On the lower end, Tupelo, MS, pays $10.50; Beckley, WV, $10.75; El Paso, TX, $12.75 per hour. With some exceptions, large metropolitan areas will receive higher pay rates.
* LISTEN... I CAN'T - AND WON'T - SWEAR BY THIS INFO. IF I GET TIME I'LL TRY TO VERIFY IT. BUT IF IT'S EVEN CLOSE TO ACCURATE...
(*SIGH*)
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