Filed under: Economy, Law, The Constitution, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Eminent Domain, The Kelo Case, The Supreme Court
Do you remember Kelo v. City of New London? It involved the constitutional question of eminent domain, which has traditionally allowed governments to condemn privately owned land only for a public purpose such as a needed bridge or a freeway, a use that serves all the people.
The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision stands as one of the worst in recent years, handing local governments the option to seize private property in the name of “economic development.”
Suzette Kelo’s little pink house in New London, Conn. was seized by private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.’s nearby corporate facility and New London’s tax base.
In the late 1990s, politicians in New London were desperate to fix up their aging and ailing town. The city set up a private, non-profit entity which set about making a plan for a new New London.
The centerpiece would be a massive research and development facility which Pfizer needed, and they were right across the river in Groton. The politicians picked a 24 acre lot and sold it to Pfizer for $10, and added on some special tax breaks, including cleanup of the lot.
Sweet deal, but Pfizer wanted it sweetened a little more. The old Victorian houses in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood next door were not what Pfizer envisioned. They thought a high-rise hotel and luxury condominiums would be just the thing.
The development corporation, empowered with eminent domain by the city, condemned the homes of anyone who wouldn’t sell at its appraised value. Suzette Kelo and others sued to block the condemnation, and fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
There the five justices ruled in favor of the developers. America was shocked. The Court cited the development plan’s “comprehensive character” and the politicians “thorough deliberation.” And besides, it would improve the tax base and attract needed jobs. The city and the state spent around $78 million to bulldoze the homes.
But the development never happened. Pfizer merged with Wyeth, decided to close its research and development offices, and move back across the river with some 1400 jobs. The property remains vacant, overgrown with weeds and rubble. No jobs, no business. And Kelo remains one of the most reviled decisions of the Supreme Court in years.
In the face of the outcry, many states have taken action to strengthen eminent domain. But Kelo must be repealed.
Filed under: Economy, Law, Liberalism, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Consequences, Do-Goodism, Sanctuary for Illegals
The King County Washington, (Seattle) County Council on this day declared that King County would henceforth be a Sanctuary County for illegal immigrants.
Newly elected, SEIU sponsored, King County Executive Dow Constantine will replace Ron Sims who has gone back to Washington D.C. as President Obama’s Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The Sanctuary vote will be one of Mr. Constantine’s last as a council member, and as a major liberal, his vote was the deciding one.
The Sanctuary designation makes it illegal for county employees to inquire about immigration status of people with whom they come in contact. Word is apparently out in the illegal community that King County has rolled out the welcome mat for social services, benefits and welfare. Mr. Constantine has been particularly interested in cutting down on the prison population.
Coincidentally, King County’s budget is deeply in the hole, and unemployment is rising, but I’m sure that is just a coincidence. Boeing is moving to South Carolina.
Does it occur to anyone that encouraging illegal immigrants to come to Seattle will — increase unemployment for King County residents? Employment of illegals has never been a matter of, as is much quoted “jobs Americans won’t do”. They take jobs that Americans would be happy to do, and do it for less. Liberals just don’t get “consequences.”
Liberal do-goodism is going to do us all in.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: And an Unknown Future, Chrysler, Fiat, Government Motors
This picture is here because it makes me laugh. I don’t know what those things are. We once called them Pelosimobiles. From Greg Pollowitz writing in Planet Gore at NRO:
Fox News reports:
Chrysler has disbanded a team of engineers dedicated to rushing a range of electric vehicles to showrooms and dropped ambitious sales targets for battery-powered cars set as it was sliding toward bankruptcy and seeking government aid.
The move by Fiat SpA marks a major reversal for Chrysler, which had used its electric car program as part of the case for a $12.5 billion federal aid package.
As late as August, Chrysler took $70 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a test fleet of 220 hybrid pickup trucks and minivans, vehicles now scrapped in the sweeping turnaround plan for Chrysler announced this week by Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne.
Government Motors is still planning on producing the Chevy Volt, which GM in its day thought was not marketable. It goes 40 miles on an electric charge (in theory) and costs around $40,000. Then it turns into a regular fossil-fuel burning car with a very small engine. But somewhere in this process of the government running the car companies with union advice there must be something that works. Or then again maybe not.
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Progressivism., Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: big government, Huge Bureaucracy, Very Costly Bureaucracy
A while back, we posted a chart of the bureaucracy created by the House Democrat’s Health Care bill, which shows the many offices, committees, groups, programs, corps, centers, committees, funds and departments that would insert themselves between you and your doctor and your health care.
It’s pretty horrifying to consider all those bureaucrats with their sticky fingers deciding what you can have and what you shall do. The white parts are the existing bureaus. The colored parts are what is added by the bill.
Well, if you remember, that bill came in far too expensive, so they went behind closed doors and reworked the whole thing , so they got everyone’s favorite give-aways in and figured out new ways to bring the cost down. That part was hard, but they figured if you started paying the taxes and penalties right away, but put off any of the costs until 2014, that was a good way to make the costs over the next ten years look much, much better.
But just about everybody in the back rooms had things to add, and some had to be added as bribes for people who didn’t want to vote for the bill. So here is the new chart of the bureaucracy for PelosiCare. You will be astounded by how much they have added. I was. You will recognize the original chart in the center.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter what they have to promise, or what they exclude to get votes. Their plan is to get the government firmly in control. Then they can put back in the things that they took out. They can tinker and ration, refuse treatments that they think are too expensive, or medicines that are too new. They are already planning to tax wheelchairs, pacemakers, artificial hips, hearing aids and other medical equipment.
We have the world’s best health-care system. It has some problems that are pretty easily solved. But when you refuse to indulge any of the proven ways of saving money, as Democrats have, all that is left is rationing, or paying less for everything. When you pay less, you don’t get the same goods.
The purpose of the American health care system is saving lives. The purpose of the Democrats’ health care plan is saving money.
Filed under: Cool Site of the Day, Economy, Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Government Failure, National Debt, Useful Website
Prowl around enough on the internet and you find all sorts of useful websites. Here is the National Debt Clock, but it is far more than that: Call it
“The Control Panel for the Ship of State.”
We live in perilous times, and we need citizen activists who are willing to get informed and make themselves heard.
If you want to speak to your representatives in Congress, you need facts with which to confront congressmen who are often poorly informed, and do not read the bills on which they vote.
Besides, it’s kind of fun. Just don’t go there when you’re worried and can not sleep.
Filed under: Economy, Environment, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Economy, Politics, Socialism
Every time I think that there is not another word to be said about the “Cash for Clunkers” program, another bit of information turns up, demanding to be mentioned:
WASHINGTON — The most common deals under the government’s $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road, replaced old Ford or Chevrolet pickups with new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by the Associated Press.
The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F 150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade in their old trucks for new Ford F-150s. They were 17 times more likely to buy a new F-150 than, say, a Toyota Prius. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, and improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.
Well, that worked out well. You might want to keep this bit of Congressional competence in mind. It’s not getting better as the bills get bigger.
Filed under: Economy, Law, Progressivism., Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Economic Illiterates, Frightening Estimates, Health Care Bills
Oh My! The Republican staff on the Senate Budget Committee has published an estimate of the cost of H.R. 3962 (the Affordable Health Care for America Act) when fully implemented over ten years: $2.4 trillion.
In August, Stephen Parente, a University of Minnesota expert on health-care financing (and former volunteer policy advisor to the McCain campaign) came to the same conclusion.
The biggest player in the health-care debate right now isn’t Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or even President Obama. It’s the Congressional Budget Office, which is responsible for estimating the costs of proposed legislation. After the director of the CBO on July 16 testified that none of the health-reform bills in the house or Senate would reduce the rate of increase in federal spending on health care, congressional efforts fell into disarray. Many policymakers began searching for a way to get costs below the CBO’s frightening estimate of $1.1 trillion over ten years. Others attacked the CBO, calling its estimates irresponsible.
This should really worry the Blue Dogs in the House. The American people are far more concerned about the economy than they are about health care or climate change. They want unemployment addressed and spending brought under control. Mr. Parente also says:
Over the last few months, my colleagues and I at the consulting firm Health Systems Innovations have provided cost estimates of health-care reform to both Republican and Democratic members of Congress…We believe that the Democratic bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would cost $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively — much higher than CBO’s figures.
CBO estimates of health care costs have usually vastly understated real costs as the Wall Street Journal demonstrated. Why are the Democrats in Congress seemingly intent on National Suicide?
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Politics, Progressivism., Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Health Insurance, Liberal lies, Medicare
Polls tell us that most Americans who have health insurance are quite satisfied with it. Most Americans are well satisfied with the health care that they receive, including a lot of people who are uninsured. So what is so wrong with our health care system that requires reorganizing one sixth of our economy?
- Some Americans are uninsured and cannot afford health insurance.
The first number was 46 million uninsured. Then it went down to 30 million when illegal immigrants were excluded from the list. When you remove those who are already entitled to insurance from an existing program, and remove those who can afford health insurance but choose not to purchase it, you are left with somewhere around 9 to 12 million who need help. The current House bill still leaves something over 20 million people still uninsured. - Some people are uninsured for only fairly short periods between jobs.
Many of these folks find Cobra Coverage too expensive. Nothing in the bills addresses this problem. - There are huge amounts of fraud and waste in Medicare — estimated at $60 billion. Completely unaddressed. Medicare funding is being sharply cut ($150 billion) to reduce the cost of the legislation. Medicare is going broke. That is also unaddressed.
- Health insurance just costs too much.
Private insurance premiums could triple under ObamaCare. Government health insurance premiums could increase by $4,000 per family by 2020. Unaddressed.
- Health care just costs too much.
It will cost far more under ObamaCare. Things that are proven to reduce costs like medical liability (defensive medicine) are not only not included in the bills, they are specifically excluded. Trial lawyers are second only to labor unions in their financial support for Democrats. Some of the increased costs will come in the form of taxes. The Senate bill proposes a brand new tax on medical devices like heart valves, pacemakers, stents, artificial hips, insulin pumps; a ten-year $400 billion tax on all implements that retail for $100 or more. It works out to an $11,000 surcharge on every worker employed in that industry. Consequences —massive job losses, squashed innovation. - Health insurance can’t follow a person to a new job, it’s not portable.
This is completely unaddressed.
- Health insurance cannot be purchased across state lines, and in some states there is little choice among insurers.
Unaddressed, since the object of ObamaCare is to funnel everyone into single-payer government-run health care. - States must bear much of the cost of Medicaid, and they are going broke. ObamaCare funnels many more people into Medicaid, increasing costs to the states without reimbursing the states. Unaddressed.
What is it that is known to cut costs, improve ways of doing things, increase innovation and preserve and prolong life? In the vast history of the world, it has always been freedom and the free market. People create when there are potential rewards for their innovations. Doctors devise new treatments when they are not restricted by 1,990 pages of rules and mandates that punishes them for not following the rules, but interacting with patients. The word “shall” appears in the House bill 3,425 times — each time a mandate about what one must do.
Democrats believe that 111 new agencies, programs and bureaucracies filled with smart people (like their supporters and friends) can fix all the things that are wrong with health care.
Health care takes place only between doctor and patient — those bureaucrats wandering around the halls of Congress can’t fix your hurts, no matter how much they tinker with legislation.
It took years of study, learning and practice to produce the physicians who can fix our hurts and do their damnedest to cure our diseases and prolong our lives. Each of us is different. We are not the same — but products of our genetics and our environment and our habits, and we cannot be healed by either Nancy Pelosi’s or Harry Reid’s efforts to control our lives.
Democrats have not learned from evidence. People who have experienced government health care in countries around the world have urged us: “Don’t do what we did.” Democrats ignore countries who are going broke from their efforts to control health care. They do not learn from countries that are unnecessarily killing their citizens by rationing care. And so they are repeating those errors. The Democrats will ration. It is inevitable. It is the only way they have left, because they will not do any of the things that would cut costs.
It was never about health anyway. It is only about control.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Progressivism., Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: "Cash for Clunkers", $24, 000 a car, Economic Illiteracy
The “Cash for Clunkers” program continues to provide entertainment. It seems that the stimulus program which offered new car buyers a maximum $4,500 (taxable) for turning in an old gas guzzler, cost American taxpayers $24,000 for each new car sold.
According to an analysis by the automotive information form Edmunds.com in Santa Monica, California, the government could have done almost as well if they had just given the cars away.
Now, GMAC Financial Services Inc. and the Treasury Department are in talks to prop up the lender with its third bailout. The U.S. Government is likely to inject $2.8 billion to $5.6 billion of capital into Government Motors financial arm, on top of the $12.5 billion that GMAC has received since Dec. 2008. But they want to keep making loans to people who cannot afford to pay them back. Time to set the brakes.
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Politics, Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Call Your Congressman, Single-Payer Government-Run Health Care
National Review featured a symposium today, with the question “Can ObamaCare Be Stopped?” The consensus was, yes it can, if Congress starts listening to the American people. The American people are worried about the economy, not health care, which is pretty low on their list of priorities. They think health care should be reformed, but they are deeply concerned about the cost.
Democrats make it clear that their aim is single-payer, government-run health care, but they never explain why. They have wanted single-payer, government-run health care practically forever, but most of the people we see in the video above are members of Congress, and they have not the slightest intention of participating in such a plan themselves. That should tell you a whole lot about the plan.
The experience of other countries should lead to a lot more serious reflection and careful planning that have been evident in anything we have heard about the Democrat plans. And despite all the promises of transparency, we haven’t seen any plan at all.
Above all, consider the tendency of everyone involved to lie about the contents of legislation, write the bills in closed back rooms and refuse to allow anyone to see them.
The impression in Washington is that there was a lot of push back this summer with the Tea Parties and Town Hall Meetings, but that interest has declined.
Congress needs to know what people’s concerns are. They don’t, I am told pay attention to emails, but they do pay attention to phone calls, especially when the volume is high. Call your congressional representatives in both the House and the Senate, not just once but daily. Let them know how you feel.
For your congressman’s phone number, check your phone book under U.S. Government, or go to http://www.house.gov or http://www.senate.gov. and follow directions. The bill will be harder to pass in the Senate, so your senators are more important. While you’re at it, call some of the blue dog Democrats, especially those in first year seats. Call over and over again, tell your friends and relatives to do so as well.
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Law, Politics, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Competition Works, Health Care Reform, Predicted Costs
Let’s start with the fact that the Democrats want single-payer, government-run health care. I cannot fathom why they think this would be a good idea, since it has proved so damaging everywhere else. Damaging to the economy, damaging to the patients who depend on it, and damaging to the medical system itself, and damaging to the society.
But Democrats (Liberals/ Progressives) believe in their good intentions, are uninterested in studies, experience or history, and don’t care much about consequences. That’s why when they are in pursuit of their enlightened aims, their claims get more and more preposterous.
Washington has just run a $1.4 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2009 — three times the deficit in 2008 under the evil George W. Bush. And we have just been told that a new health-care entitlement will reduce the red ink by $81 billion over ten years.
The theory is that a more involved federal role by those brilliant folks in Congress will restrain costs and thus make health care more affordable. Stop laughing, it isn’t funny.
Before the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, health care inflation ran only slightly faster than overall inflation. In the years since, medical inflation has increased 2.3 times faster than inflation in the regular economy. Much of this represents advances in technology and new treatments, but the idea of government as thrifty is plain silly.
The Wall Street Journal examined the record of Congressional forecasters in predicting costs.
The record is not good. Most government programs cost far more than they were estimated to cost, and of course Congress usually cannot keep their hands off and continually tinkers.
The $81 billion “reduction” in cost came from the CBO estimate applied to the Baucus bill which existed only as a bunch of concepts. We need a good CBO estimate of whatever they have added in the back room, behind closed doors. Whatever the estimate, history tells us that it will cost far more.
You will notice that only George Bush’s Prescription Drug benefit came in under predicted cost, but I have read that the Democrats are anxious to fill in the “donut hole” which was the device that brought the program in under estimates, along with greater use of generics, and lower participation by seniors.
Peter Orzag , now White House Budget Director, told Congress when he ran the Congressional Budget Office that the “primary cause” of the cost savings is that “the pricing is coming in better than anticipated, and that is likely a reflection of the competition that’s occurring in the private market.” Competition? Who knew! The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agreed, adding that when given choices “beneficiaries have overwhelmingly selected less costly drug plans.”
There is a lesson there, but apparently no one is paying attention.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Law, Progressivism., The Constitution, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat Demagogues, President Obama
In a recent article from the blog at The American Heritage Foundation, the author quoted an excerpt from historian Thomas G. West, author of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science:
The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.
The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. … Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. … Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
…
The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s inchoate will into concrete policies.
This, the blog says, is why you have Obama’s Energy Secretary telling auto makers how they must build cars. This is why Obama’s health care plan empowers a panel of “experts” to reorganize one-sixth of our economy from the top down. Commonsense questions like “Won’t our electricity bills go up if we mandate power companies to use more expensive alternative energy sources?” and “Won’t our health insurance premiums go up if everyone is charged the same price and nobody can be refused coverage”" can’t be tolerated. People voicing such criticisms must be isolated and silenced.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Foreign Policy, National Security, Politics, The Constitution, The Elephant's Child
The office of the President of the United States has a long and complex history. Over the past 220 years, it has been occupied by just 44 different men. George Washington was the first and undoubtedly will remain the last to be elected unanimously. He came to the office reluctantly.
He had been Commander-in-Chief long before he was elected President. He was elected to that position by the Continental Congress in 1775 when he was forty-three years old. There was not yet an army for him to command, only the militias surrounding Boston. And when he said he farewell to his troops in 1783, he was fifty-one. He had only a few years as a civilian before his country called upon him again. His prudence and restraint set the country on a firm basis, and in his farewell address he said:
In the discharge of this trust, I will only say, that I have, with good intentions, contributed towards the organization and administration of the government the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious, in the outset, of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome. Satisfied that, if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe, that while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it.
The office of the presidency, with its obligations of duty and commitment, takes a toll on the men who temporarily occupy the position. They owe a debt to those who have held the office before them, and to the history left to them by previous occupants. Treaties and alliances have been laboriously created, relations with other countries, whether in trade or good will, carefully nurtured. A knowledge and awareness of that history is essential.
Thomas Jefferson said:
Most bad government has grown out of too much government. [and]
Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have…The course of history shows that as government grows, liberty decreases.
President James Polk remarked:
No President who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.
President Harry Truman:
I have tried my best to give the nation everything I had in me. There are probably a million people who could have done the job better than I did, but I had the job, and I always quote an epitaph on a tombstone in a cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona. “here lies Jack Williams, He done his damnest.”
Dwight Eisenhower said:
Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict on us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Conservatives, independents, pundits and even many Democrats are trying to understand President Barack Obama. There are so many questions.
He is clearly not the centrist that he portrayed during the campaign. Is he a radical leftist? He has described himself as a communitarian, for whatever that is worth.
Barack Obama has never, we have been told, had much interest in history. A knowledge of and respect for history are essential to the presidency. Without that you repeat the mistakes and failures of those who have gone before. Depression, inflation, stagflation, debt, unpreparedness or trust in the wrong adversaries. The demands of the office require humility, not hubris.
Nations have interests. Relations with other nations are not popularity contests. Years of carefully nurtured relationships based on fair dealing and fair trade are being discarded in the hope of deals with long-term antagonists who wish our destruction. Speeches, however charmingly delivered and meetings are unlikely to sway them from their purposes.
When a new president temporarily takes on the most important office in the world, he becomes the president of all Americans, not just the unions who supported his campaign. He must suffer criticism and mockery in the understanding that it is the right of the American people and his role to bear it.
He takes on an obligation to preserve, protect and defend the nation. The savings that represent the life’s work of its citizens cannot be spent wildly in some misguided attempt to achieve progressive goals that have been proven over and over not to work. The American people, 38 percent, want the budget deficit cut in half in the next four years. Only 23 percent think health care reform should be a top priority.
I just don’t think that Barack Obama understands the office of the presidency. Oh, he gets the prestige, and he clearly likes the perks and trappings, some of which he adopted before he was elected. He keeps reminding us that “I won!” Yet he seems not to have understood the obligation, the duty, the sacrifice of the office and the weight of the burden that a president must bear. He and Michelle keep complaining about how hard he has to work.
There’s a lot more to it than being surrounded by admirers and sycophants attending to every need, than having AirForce One at one’s beck and call. I just don’t think he gets it. What do you think?
Senior citizens have been vocal in their opposition to ObamaCare, with great justification. The costs of health care reform are largely to be borne by $500 billion worth of cuts in Medicare.
The theory was that payments to physicians would be cut sharply in the health care bill, (and then put back in a separate bill, so that the cut in the health care bill would reduce the CBO estimate of how much health care would add to the deficit) and maybe no one would notice that they put back the doctors’ pay in a separate bill, so the doctors wouldn’t oppose the health care bill. Yes, that is far too complicated, and quite a few Democrats thought it was far too sneaky, so it didn’t pass.
The old folks are still upset, and even worse, they vote and write letters and make telephone calls. So the administration answer is a bribe. They want to send each senior on Social Security a check for $250, because they’re not giving them a cost-of-living increase this year or next.
Chicago style ‘persuasion’ seems to be to bully, bribe or break. Neither criticism nor disagreement is allowed. The AMA was bought off with a promise to restore Doctor pay, the insurance companies were bribed with a promise of forcing everyone to buy health insurance, and the pharmaceutical companies were lured by a promise to let them off the hook for further attacks if they agreed to specific price-cuts for drugs.
As participants get a clear assessment of the administration’s Chicago-style thuggery, cooperation with government wishes seems the better part of valor. If you allow the government nose under the proverbial tent, first thing you know, you’ve got a whole herd of camels right in the tent with you. Your salary has been cut, or you have been fired and your corporation turned over the unions.
It is, however, all an attempt to distract attention from the increasing decline of ObamaCare in the polls. The American people don’t like the health care the government is trying to force upon us, and they are in eve-increasing numbers turning against it.
Politico writes:
President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.
With a series of private meetings and pubic taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator, and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.
Even liberal commentators are uncomfortable with the attempt to marginalize Fox News. It seems to be backfiring. But the White House is not pulling back.
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn (she whose favorite philosopher is mass murderer Mao Tse Tung) says “[The President] has continued to reach out to people who disagree with him, to look for common ground. He has adopted Republican ideas, even if our programs don’t get Republican votes. People give him credit because he has tried. And people want to see him defend himself.”
That whopper made me snort coffee out my nose. Doesn’t anyone in this White House have any familiarity with the truth?
ADDENDUM: Kim Strassel writes on “The Chicago Way” today in the Wall Street Journal. You can read her fine piece here.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Energy, Law, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, EPA. Cap-and-trade
From the website of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website:
The IPCC’s mission is to reflect the science, not create it. As the IPCC states, its duty is:
assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data.
When the EPA is regulating CO2 on the basis of the IPCC”s assessments, and Congress is attempting to pass vast cap-and-trade legislation that will cripple the American economy on the basis of IPCC increasingly flawed assessments, it is interesting to learn the IPCC’s own evaluation of just what it does and what its mission is.
There has been no significant warming since 1998, and the climate has actually cooled since 2002. The temperature sources that showed alarming warming have been proven to be faulty. The major “greenhouse” gas is water vapor — clouds, fog, mist — in far, far greater quantities than CO2, that has far more influence on climate, yet clouds are poorly understood.
Yet on the basis of IPCC global warming claims, laws are being put in place to force our economy to depend for its energy needs on the portion of our energy sources that currently accounts for only 2.4 percent of our electricity needs.
Filed under: Economy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Change, Clouds, CO2, Water Vapor
Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change.
The most glaring example of this bias has been the lack of interest on the IPCC’s part in figuring out to what extent climate change is simply the result of natural, internal cycles in the climate system.
Read that again, carefully. It comes from Dr. Roy Spencer, a Principal Research Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He is the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
For those who would like to understand the endless debate about health care a little more, the Wall Street Journal has posted all of their editorials on the health care debate in one convenient place, open to the public. Their efforts and serious analysis by many different authors are well worth your time. I have learned so much from them, and I consider them an excellent resource, which I recommend highly.
