A recent report concludes that global warming ended 16 years ago. Has the world been fooled by a group of radical liberal environmentalists? Is it time for policy makers to ignore false hockey stick graphs? Find out.
Barack Obama invested TAXPAYER MONEY in Green Energy:
Solyndra - BANKRUPT
Ener 1 - BANKRUPT
Beacon Power - BANKRUPT
Abound Solar - BANKRUPT
Amonix Solar - BANKRUPT
Spectra Watt - BANKRUPT
Eastern Energy - BANKRUPT
GM Volt - Solyndra on wheels - $49,000 cost in subsidies to taxpayers for each one sold.
$900 Billion Dollars with NO Jobs.
NOTE: All of these companies were Obama campaign contributors.
And how about all those bungled calls from the NFL fill-in refs?
Americans are seriously pre-occupied as we enter the fourth quarter of 2012. Obsessions about the football season and “Dancing with The Stars” are a pleasant diversion from our present hardship and gloomy future, and frustrations over the logic-defying presidential polls makes for interesting talk show fodder.
But after the election – and after the close of 2012 – Americans will need to grapple with myriad problems in our government. Whoever wins the White House will face an avalanche of trouble in the months ahead, and the ways in which these problems are addressed will reverberate for generations.
Americans must begin to see through the rhetoric of politicians and the slant and soundbytes of the media, and demand better government from those elected to serve. The “pass the bill and then figure out what’s in it” approach is unacceptable. So let’s start with our “get a grip” agenda with this: Americans must sober-up about our economic and fiscal condition.
At present it would seem that we’re taking the upcoming election about as seriously as a football game. Team Obama has the home field advantage, while Romney and company are the visitors trying to upset Obama at his homecoming. The make-up of the Congress will then round-out each team’s roster, but the “players” are thought to be all essentially the same.
Yet America is in serious trouble. Private industry is suffering shell shock from the flurry of demands and restrictions placed upon it in the last three years, most of which have stemmed from environmental constraints, so-called “banking reform,” mortgage restrictions, and Obamacare. Our currency is being debased by the minute, as our government’s debt exceeds 70% of our GDP and the Federal Reserve continues to print money while keeping interest rates artificially low.
President Obama is committed to making matters worse- he promises higher taxes and more government spending, and has offered no vision for undoing the disastrous and damaging components of Obamacare. Mr. Romney is moving in the correct direction by proposing an expansion of free trade and modest spending cuts, but does not (and in political terms perhaps cannot) come close to where we must go.
So Americans must decide – do we want prosperity and opportunity for the long-term, or do we want the short-term yet unsustainable pleasure of politicians satiating our petty jealousies towards “rich people” and dolling-out lots of free goodies? If it’s the former we want, then we’ll have to seriously change some things: freeze income tax rates where they are; cut corporate taxes; raise the Social Security eligibility age to 72 (for, say, American workers age 45 and younger) and allow for private investment of portions one’s withholdings; gut Obamacare and start over; and cut taxes on small businesses and restrictions on small business lending.
And here’s another agenda item: America must begin utilizing its own resources again. While the currencies of Europe, Japan and the U.S. have fallen in to varying levels of disrepute over the past four years, the dollars of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have remained relatively strong. And these three countries share something else in common as well- they all harvest and export their own natural resources.
Canada exports oil and natural gas. Australia exports iron ore. New Zealand uses its land to produce and export food, wood products and heavy machinery. Americans must decide – do we want to be more prosperous and secure, or do we want to feel like we’re doing something nice for plant and animal life by not using our natural resources?
A radical environmental agenda has co-opted the national dialog to the point that we only talk about drilling and refining when gasoline surpasses four dollars a gallon. And as for manufacturing and farming – plenty of us blindly accept the notion that these endeavors do nothing but rape and pillage the earth and consume “too much” energy (if you don’t believe this, ask a farmer in California). It’s time to utilize our resources and unshackle our farmers and manufacturers – and to do this we have to demand change with our government.
And agenda item number three: Americans must respect private enterprise as the necessary engine of our sustenance, instead of allowing it to be co-opted for political agendas. President Obama’s “renewable energy” agenda sounds noble and makes people feel good. But after running up untold billions of dollars in debt with the financing of “green energy” companies (over 80% of which were headed-up by Obama campaign donors), there has been no such energy produced and a majority of these companies have already lapsed into bankruptcy. What masquerades as the “green energy industry” is nothing more than debt for future generations spent financing the President’s environmental politics of today.
A similar phenomenon took hold last decade. Despite President Bush’s attempts to slow things down, both Republican and Democrat leadership in the Congress enabled the cheap credit, lax lending, and “affordable housing” policies that supposedly drove “home ownership” to an all time high (it’s hard to say no when “everybody gets a house”). It made the politicians popular in the short-run, but it drove us to the brink when the bubble burst. Government co-opted the real estate and lending industries, and it failed us in painful ways.
We are not helpless victims of politicians. But will we demand better?
Last week Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi instructed Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to not attend this September’s Democratic National Convention. Instead, Ms. Pelosi insisted, their time would be better spent campaigning at home, rather than partying in Charlotte, N.C.
Ms. Pelosi’s announcement falls in line with the AFL-CIO, which announced the previous week that it won’t be spending money to bankroll the convention. And Pelosi and her Big Labor friends are in lockstep with Democrat U.S. Senators Jon Tester of Montana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia – all of whom have chosen to avoid Barack Obama’s nomination for a second term.
After three and a half years of Barack Obama radicalizing their party, it now appears that some very powerful Democrats have had a startling realization: the Obama agenda is both dysfunctional and destructive, and has become politically lethal – Americans see that it bares little resemblance to America’s time-honored history and heritage, and they have begun to reject it outright.
Democrat candidates at all levels of government will go about campaigning over these next few months, making promises based upon their party platform without mentioning President Obama’s name. But as they talk about the following agenda items – all of which appear in the “issues” section of Democrats.Org, the national party’s web home – consider asking the candidates the accompanying questions below.
Let’s start with the issue of “energy independence.” Democrats tell us that “President Obama knows we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” and that their party is focused on “developing all of America’s natural resources...” The President himself has said that he is committed to an “all of the above” approach to energy policy, implying that he’s okay with petroleum-based energy, along with the alternative energy development that he’s promoted.
This sounds great- but consider asking Democrats this question: “If President Obama is committed to an ‘all of the above’ strategy, why did he reject the Keystone XL pipeline project that would have produced employment opportunities from the Canadian border all the way to Texas?” In reality, an “all of the above” approach to energy policy means “anything except Big Oil” within the Obama worldview – but Democrats would prefer to ignore this.
Your Democrat candidate may prefer, instead, to tell you about their party’s agenda for “green energy.” On this point, you may wish to ask “how do you feel about CBS News reporting that the Obama Administration has lost $6.5 billion of our money already on what they described as ‘risky green energy ventures?’ Did CBS lie to us?”
You may also hear from your Democrat candidate that the party is fighting for “civil rights” on behalf of LGBT couples –which is to say that they’re working for legal sanctioning of same-sex marriage. Mention to them that Democrats in the California legislature are now working on a bill to expand parental rights to more than two parents per child. Under the California plan, any individual child could have three or perhaps more, legally identified mommies and daddies. Then ask the Democrat, “Why would you limit the structuring of marriages and families to only two adults? Given how President Obama’s position on this issue has evolved, and given the highly evolved position among California Democrats, aren’t you being a bit exclusionary and narrow-minded, trying to limit a marriage or a family to only two adults?”
Concerns about the economy are top of mind for us all, which puts Democrats in an awkward situation. Still, your Democrat candidate will likely remind you that President Obama inherited a bad economy and is now working to “creating jobs.” To this you may wish to simply ask “how is a job created?” Then listen carefully to the response. It will likely be highly amusing.
There are so many other questions to ask of your local Democrat candidate, regardless of the issues the candidate raises. “Why does the so-called ‘healthcare reform law’ expand the force and power of the I.R.S.?” “Why are illegal aliens exempt from the Obamacare tax?” “Is it purely coincidental that the executives of the ‘green energy’ companies that were recipients of President Obama’s grants and loans were also donors to his previous presidential campaign?” “Why has President Obama abandoned the work requirements imposed on welfare recipients by President Bill Clinton?” “Why is 80% of the Department of Agriculture’s budget spent on food stamps, while less than 20% of it is devoted to the farming industry?” “Why is the Obama Administration ‘collaborating’ with the government of Mexico to give American food stamps to illegal aliens?” Your local Democrat will probably not want to hear these questions, and may have to admit that they disagree with parts of the President’s agenda.
You might even hear your local Democrat say that they’re abandoning the President’s agenda for America altogether – just like so many of them have abandoned the President’s convention in September.
“Today, members of Congress have a simple choice to make..”
President Obama was speaking in the White House Rose Garden this past Thursday. Our nation’s energy problems –problems that, as he stated last month, have plagued our country for over thirty years – could now be addressed with one simple juxtaposition and one obvious choice for those who serve in the House and Senate.
“They can stand with big oil, or they can stand with the American people” our President claimed, as he went on to explain his plan to end what he calls “tax breaks” for oil companies. “Right now, the biggest oil companies are raking in record profits,” he continued, “profits that go up every time folks pull up into a gas station…”
President Obama’s remarks about oil companies amount to nothing new – neither in terms of rhetoric, nor in terms of ideas – and they are easy to ignore. Yet they are worthy of our attention, because our President is responding to a crisis with campaign rhetoric that he used years ago, and with ideas that even congressional Democrats have determined to be untenable. Equally as problematic is the fact that the President’s claims get repeated over and over throughout much of the American media, without any fact-checking, contextualizing, or questioning.
So let’s start by questioning President Obama’s logic. He characterized his proposed solution to rising gasoline prices as a “simple choice to make” on March 29th. Yet, on February 23rd of this year, the President belittled the calls from Republican presidential candidates to expand oil exploration and development here in the United States. “That’s not a plan, especially since we’re already drilling” the President told an audience in Miami, Florida on that day. “It’s not a strategy to solve our energy challenge, “ he claimed, as he continued with his disparaging remarks, “…there are no quick fixes.”
So on February 2rd there were “no quick fixes,” yet on March 29th Congress had “a simple choice to make.” Expanding the use of American oil resources is bad, but raising taxes is good. This is apparently the underlying premise of the Obama Administration’s “energy policy.”
Our President’s rhetoric about the oil industry over the past few weeks is essentially a repeat of several of his past performances. During the 2008 oil price spike, in August of that year, then-Senator Obama stood in front of a stadium full of fans in Detroit and said many of the same vilifying things:
“…First, of all..” Mr. Obama began, “You’ve got oil companies making record profits…no… no companies in history have made the kind of profits the oil companies are makin’ right now…They..they…….one company, Exxon Mobil, made eleven billion dollars…billion, with a “b” ….last quarter….they made eleven billion dollars the quarter before that…makin’ money hand-over-fist…makin’ out like bandits…”
The spite and indignation over profitable American companies got the election year crowd fired-up. Yet candidate Obama’s proposed “solution” to the dilemma in August of 2008 was the same then, as it is now: raise taxes on oil companies. His rhetoric fails both in terms of basic economics, and in terms of sound energy policy. But this, apparently, is what President Obama knows, and he will not be deterred.
Beyond the folly of the President’s “tax our way to more energy” strategy, there is the disingenuousness – and the inaccuracy – of the President’s repeated claims of ‘tax subsidies” and “tax breaks” for oil companies. Despite the obvious political strategy of creating a evil demon from which he is attempting to rescue us, President Obama’s loosely worded claims about the oil industry and taxation rates are not only false, but it is harmful.
For the record, when President Obama decries “government subsidies” for the oil industry, what he is actually conveying is his opinion that the oil industry is not taxed at a sufficiently high rate. This is to say that oil companies are being “allowed” to keep more of their own money than President Obama thinks is fair, and he chooses to label this matter of “keeping to much of your money” as a subsidy.
Keeping one’s own money – whether we are speaking of a private individual or an organization – is NOT the same as being paid a “subsidy.” And oil companies are already taxed at a marginal rate of approximately 41%, as compared to an approximate rate of 26% among the other companies on the S&P 500. Yet journalists repeat the President’s claims about “oil subsidies” as though they were factual – which leads us further and further away from sound energy policies.
Anger, vilification, demonization, and misinformation. This is not the essence of leadership, and it does not unite our country. Indeed, it leads to further division – and more energy chaos.
A recent report concludes that global warming ended 16 years ago. Has the world been fooled by a group of radical liberal environmentalists? Is it time for policy makers to ignore false hockey stick graphs? Find out.
