Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 2, 2011


Pay no attention to rising oil prices, my friends...

Instead... relax...
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9 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110302/ap_on_re_us/us_barbour_energy_2

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a potential presidential contender, accused the Obama administration Wednesday of favoring a run-up in gas prices to prod consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars.

* WELL, DUH...!

Barbour cited 2008 comments from Steven Chu, now President Barack Obama's energy secretary, that a gradual increase in gasoline taxes could coax consumers into dumping their gas-guzzlers and finding homes closer to where they work.

In 2008, while the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Chu told The Wall Street Journal that energy prices were the lynchpin to an energy overhaul. "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe," Chu said in September 2008.

* FOLKS... AGAIN... THIS IS OBAMA'S ENERGY SECRETARY!

March 2, 2011 at 11:18 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166362512952294.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

We have the smallest navy in almost a century, declining in the past 50 years to 286 from 1,000 principal combatants.

Sixty ships were commonly underway in America's seaward approaches in 1998, but today there are only 20. We are abdicating our role on the oceans.

Apologists may cite typical postwar diminutions, but the ongoing 17% reduction from 1998 to the present applies to a navy that unlike its wartime predecessors was not previously built up. These are reductions upon reductions. Nor can there be comfort in the fact that modern ships are more capable, for so are the ships of potential opponents. And even if the capacity of a whole navy could be packed into a small number of super ships, they could be in only a limited number of places at a time, and the loss of just a few of them would be catastrophic.

* FOLKS. AS YOU KNOW, I'M FOR CUTTING U.S. DEFENSE COMMITMENTS AND IN LINE WITH THIS CUTTING THE U.S. DEFENSE BUDGET. THAT SAID, HOW AND WHERE WE CUT - AND WHERE WE REINFORCE - IS A MATTER OF VITAL DEBATE. IT SEEMS TO ME THAT OUR PRIORITIES MUST BE "DEFENSIVE" POWER PROJECTION ABROAD AND SELF-DEFENSE AT HOME. THE U.S. NAVY MUST RETAIN OVERWHELMING COMMAND OF THE SEAS. THE QUESTION THIS ARTICLE RAISES - BUT DOESN'T ANSWER - IS WHETHER OUR NAVY IS BIG AND STRONG ENOUGH NOW TO SERVE THE NATIONAL INTEREST AND WILL IT STILL BE BIG AND STRONG ENOUGH IN FIVE... TEN... FIFTEEN YEARS ASSUMING WE STAY ON OUR PRESENT PROCUREMENT PATH?

* BASICALLY, I'M JUST PASSING ON THE NUMBERS HALPRIN'S ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS. WHAT TO MAKE OF THEM... (*SIGH*)... THAT'S THE RUB.

March 2, 2011 at 12:07 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/02/us-markets-oil-idUSTRE71192R20110302

Oil rose on Wednesday as escalating violence in Libya threatened the OPEC nation's oil infrastructure and markets braced for a potential prolonged disruption.

Prices jumped to close in on fresh 2-1/2 year highs on news that fresh airstrikes hit Brega, about 1.2 miles from a Libyan oil terminal, after Muammar Gaddafi launched a land and air offensive to retake territory in Libya's east.

* FOLKS... WHY IS GADHAFI BEING ALLOWED TO USE HIS AIRFORCE? THERE SHOULD BE A NO-FLY ZONE IMPOSED AND ALSO NO "LOYALIST" ARMORED UNITS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO BE EMPLOYED.

March 2, 2011 at 12:51 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/drilling_reversal_OGftP1UZCc3axbk1xA8KaL

The Obama administration has ended its de facto ban on deepwater drilling, issuing on Monday the first permit since the BP spill last April.

* WELL... NOT REALLY... BUT READ ON...

That could spell relief for a region that lost 12,000 jobs and billions in business due to Team Obama's chokehold.

But Gulf Coasters shouldn't set their hopes too high: The permit awarded to Houston-based Noble Energy isn't even a new contract - it simply lets the company revive a project frozen last year.

(*SHRUG*) (*SMIRK*)

[Note: The Obama Administration] approved a permit three days before Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to go before a hostile House panel Thursday morning.

* THREE DAYS...!

What's more, it took a truly insane amount of pressure just to squeeze that one permit from the White House: Mideast revolutions are threatening oil supplies and sending prices soaring. A federal judge in New Orleans held the Interior Department in contempt of court last month for delaying permits. Two weeks later, the same judge ordered the feds to approve permits pronto, calling their inaction "inexcusable." [Bottom line,] for the U.S. to begin tapping its vast deepwater reserves, it took a Middle East in flames and judicial fireballs back home - all to re-approve a single existing oil contract.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

"I have no idea how quickly new applications to drill will be filed. I have no idea how long it will take to approve the next one or the next one after that," [says Michael Bromwich, Obama's director of the agency overseeing offshore drilling.]

* GREAT! JUST FRIGG'N WONDERFUL, HUH?

March 2, 2011 at 2:50 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/564577/201103011820/Avastin-Proves-Drug-Rationing-Alive-And-Well.aspx

Each year 17,500 women are treated with Avastin, a late-stage breast cancer drug that restricts blood flow to tumors, slowing their growth, shrinking them, sometimes even eliminating them. The drug typically extends a patient's life for a few months, but some "super responders" can go on living for years.

In late December, the Food and Drug Administration moved to rescind the approval of a miracle drug that currently represents the last, best hope for women with metastatic breast cancer.

Women suffering from breast cancer have just one last shot at keeping Avastin a viable treatment option: Roche, the pharmaceutical company that makes Avastin, has begun the appeal process on the FDA's decision. The FDA's final ruling could come as soon as February. (Both the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance have been publicly urging the FDA not to revoke its approval. The National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a nonprofit alliance of oncologists that produces treatment standards recognized in more than 100 countries, still supports the drug as a breast cancer treatment.)

* CONGRESS SHOULD INTERVENE IF THE FDA STANDS BY THEIR DECISION TO WITHDRAW APPROVAL FROM AVASTIN.

During the health care debate, few charges were more controversial than the one that government would decide who lives and who dies by rationing medical care. But based on a recent government health care ruling, it looks as if that accusation wasn't such an exaggeration. Avastin treatments for breast cancer can cost upward of $90,000 a year. The government vociferously denies it, but almost no one in the medical community believes that the FDA's unprecedented decision to revoke Avastin's approval for the treatment of breast cancer only was completely unrelated to cost.

In making recommendations, the FDA's Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee is supposed to consider only clinical evidence. Yet one of its members - University of Nebraska oncologist Jean Grem - admitted that she was cognizant of the drug's hefty price tag.

[G]overnment insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid will no longer cover Avastin if the FDA's ruling stands.

The reason Avastin is expensive is that Genentech, the division of Roche that developed it, spent $2.3 billion to research and develop the drug.

If the federal government can arbitrarily decide not to pay for a drug based on its cost rather than its clinical effectiveness, pharmaceutical companies will be a lot less willing to spend billions developing the next cutting-edge, lifesaving medicine.

The government drug-rationing that begins with Avastin isn't going to stop with Avastin. Dr. Donald Berwick, the Obama administration's recess appointee heading up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has said that "it's not a question of whether or not we will ration health care," but "whether we will ration with our eyes open."

* SOMETHING TELLS ME THAT WHATEVER THE FDA DECIDES, SHOULD (GOD FORBID) MICHELLE OBAMA DEVELOP BREAST CANCER, SHE WON'T BE DENIED AVASTIN. ANYONE DISAGREE...?

March 2, 2011 at 4:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/564579/201103011820/How-Green-Is-Your-Lost-Job-.aspx

A study of renewable energy in Scotland shows that for every job created in the alternative energy sector, almost four jobs are lost in the rest of the economy.

"Worth The Candle?" by the consulting firm Verso Economics confirms the experience of Spain and other countries: The creation of "green" jobs destroys other jobs through the diversion of resources and the denial of abundant sources of fossil fuel energy. The Verso study finds that after the annual diversion of some 330 million British pounds from the rest of the U.K. economy, the result has been the destruction of 3.7 jobs for every "green" job created.

The study concludes that the "policy to promote renewable energy in the U.K. has an opportunity cost of 10,000 direct jobs in 2009-10 and 1,200 jobs in Scotland." So British taxpayers, as is the case here in the U.S., are being forced to subsidize a net loss of jobs in a struggling economy.

(*BANGING MY HEAD ON THE DESK*)

As the Telegraph's James Delingpole reminds us in reporting the results of the British study, "wind and solar power have proved a disaster in Germany, Denmark and Spain (where Dr. Gabriel Calzada Alvarez calculated that for every 'green job,' the country had destroyed 2.2 jobs in the real economy)."

If these numbers were extrapolated to America, instead of a touted 3 million-job gain from alternative energy, we should expect the loss of at least 6.6 million jobs in other industries.

(*SIGH*)

Under a target agreed to with the European Union, Britain is committed to generating nearly a third of its electricity from renewable sources, mainly through building thousands of wind turbines. The Daily Mail's Christopher Booker calls the push for alternative energy "the greatest scam of our age," a statement we find hard to disagree with. Booker reports that in Britain, "To keep our homes warm we were having to import vast amounts of power from nuclear reactors in France." He notes that the total usable output from Britain's 3,500 turbines is no more than a single conventional power plant, which is necessary as a backup when the wind doesn't blow.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

These wind turbines are so expensive, according to Booker, that Holland recently became the first country in Europe to abandon its EU renewable-energy target, saving billions of euros.

Despite the evidence in country after country, we intend to repeat their mistake.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, architects of the Obama administration's economy-killing war on fossil fuels, announced on Monday that the development of offshore wind farms would be fast-tracked, with a goal of issuing leases off four Atlantic Coast states by the end of the year.

(*CONTINUING TO BANK MY HEAD ON THE DESK*)

March 2, 2011 at 4:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/01/AR2011030106355.html?hpid=artslot

Before he addressed the crowd that had assembled in the St. Louis Hyatt Regency ballroom last November, Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly had one request. "Please don't mention my son," he asked the Marine Corps officer introducing him. Four days earlier, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly , 29, had stepped on a land mine while leading a platoon of Marines in southern Afghanistan. He was killed instantly.

Without once referring to his son's death, the general delivered a passionate and at times angry speech about the military's sacrifices and its troops' growing sense of isolation from society.

The American public is largely unaware of the price its military pays to fight the United States' distant conflicts. Less than 1% of the population serves in uniform at a time when the country is engaged in one of the longest periods of sustained combat in its history.

* AND DEMOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, THIS ONE PERCENT AND THEIR FAMILY SUPPORT NETWORKS HAVE FAR MORE IN COMMON WITH EACH OTHER THAN WITH THEIR FELLOW AMERICANS.

President Obama devoted only six sentences to the war in Afghanistan in his State of the Union address in January.

* THAT'S BECAUSE HE'S A DOUCHE BAG.

As in many military families, Kelly's two sons followed their father into the Marine Corps. The three Kelly men have participated in 11 combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade.

As one retired Marine Corps general noted in a condolence letter to Kelly a few days after his son's death: "Service to and sacrifice for the nation have become a legacy affair for a relatively small number of families."

(*NOD*)

March 2, 2011 at 4:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/green_boondoggles_81Ro9WtcQmuCwQp2E5lobI

President Obama hasn't abandoned his jobs-killing global-warming agenda, just wrapped it in the rhetoric of "clean energy."

Obama's budget aims to hike Department of Energy spending by 12% from 2010 levels. He proposes $8 billion more for various clean-energy programs - on top of the $30 billion "invested" via the 2009 stimulus. Even that's only the tip of the iceberg. To pay for it all, Obama would stick it to Big Oil. He wants to eliminate $43 billion in oil-tax breaks over 10 years. That would be fine if he were aiming for a "level" energy market, with the government playing no favorites; in fact, he's just looking to divert the subsidies to his favorites.

Pumping money into pie-in-the sky energy projects has been a perennial presidential project since Jimmy Carter. But Obama has a new wrinkle: The White House believes that past pushes for alternative fuels failed (despite subsidies) because they did nothing to ensure a market for the new products. So Obama has decreed that he wants 80% of America's energy to come from clean sources by 2035.

* EVEN THE SOVIET UNION "ONLY" CREATED FIVE YEAR PLANS; OBAMA HAS A 24 YEAR PLAN!

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

That won't happen automatically, so the Center for American Progress (the Obama White House's unofficial think tank) argues for a federal "35 by 35" standard - mandating that 35% of America's energy come from renewables by 2035. This means the feds would force all utilities to generate more than a third of their electricity from renewables - a guarantee of far higher prices. A Heritage Foundation study found that even a scaled-down version of the plan, a 22.5% renewable standard by 2025, would bump household-electricity prices 36% and industry prices 60% by 2035 - producing a net GDP loss of $5.2 trillion between 2012 and 2035. So much for green growth and jobs.

(*SIGH*)

Obama also means to make America's transportation oil-free to ensure a low-carbon future for mankind. To this end, he wants a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. So, while low-income families face a cut in heating assistance from Uncle Sam (and higher electric bills), rich people would get $200 million for a $7,500 tax rebate to use toward each $40,000 Chevy Volt.

Obama also wants a $4 billion down payment toward a six-year, $53 billion plan to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail. In fact, his own transportation secretary admits that this can't be done for less than $500 billion.

(*HEADACHE*)

March 2, 2011 at 4:30 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/02/AR2011030204800.html

The newly Republican-controlled House opened the envelope of postal finances on Wednesday, and what it pulled out wasn't pretty.

It was a statement by Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, who said that unless things change, the post office will run out of money by October, the end of this fiscal year.

Donahoe told the House post office subcommittee that without some important changes to the law the post office cannot survive as a self-financing entity.

* FOLKS... THAT'S THE WHOLE ARTICLE. THAT'S IT! THREE SENTENCES!

* FOLKS... WE'RE LIVING EITHER IN THE LAND OF OZ OR PERHAPS WONDERLAND. THIS IS JUST SURREAL...

March 2, 2011 at 4:34 PM

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