It’s Thursday, September 15th, 2011….and here’s the Gouge!
First up, as this forward from George Lawlor details, what used to be the thrill of victory is now the agony of “da feet”….as the results of yesterday’s special Congressional elections have Dimocrats running for the door!
Twin defeats spark Democratic fears
The Democratic Party’s rare loss of a congressional seat in its urban heartland Tuesday, accompanied by a blowout defeat in a Nevada special election, marked the latest in a string of demoralizing setbacks that threatened to deepen the party’s crisis of confidence and raise concerns about President Barack Obama’s political fortunes.
In New York, Republican Bob Turner soundly defeated Democrat David Weprin in a House contest that — in the view of party leaders, at least — featured an anemic urban machine, distracted labor unions and disloyal voters. In Nevada, a consequential state for the president’s reelection strategy, Democrats suffered a runaway loss rooted in a weak showing in Reno’s Washoe County, a key bellwether.
Even before the polls closed, the recriminations — something short of panic, and considerably more than mere grumbling — had begun. On a high-level campaign conference call Tuesday afternoon, Democratic donors and strategists commiserated over their disappointment in Obama. A source on the call described the mood as “awful.” “People feel betrayed, disappointed, furious, disgusted, hopeless,” said the source.
Less expansive but equally telling were the remarks of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, who in a conversation with reporters Tuesday morning said bluntly that Obama would take some blame for the two special election losses. “I think every election reflects on the person in charge, but do I think it is an overall statement on the president alone? No,” said Hoyer. “Do I think it will be interpreted as being a statement on Obama? That’s probably correct.”
What surprises us isn’t that these two elections turned on The Anointed One’s fallaciously fraudulent policies, but that, if you read the rest of the article, Steny Hoyer’s the only one willing to admit what the rest of us know to be true.
In a related item, again courtesy of George Lawlor, Peter Wehner asks:
Has Obama Learned Anything?
Imagine you’re in the Obama White House, and this is what you face. Democrats lose a special election in a congressional district they have controlled since the 1920s and which was framed as a referendum on the president. There’s a possible scandal brewing over the White House’s effort to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion dollar loan to a solar-panel manufacturer, Solyndra. The most recent Census Report shows median household earnings fell for the third consecutive year, back to 1996 levels. A record number of Americans are in poverty. In Afghanistan, the Taliban mounted a fierce assault on the U.S. embassy and NATO military headquarters in Kabul. A new CNN/ORC poll shows Obama’s disapproval rating has reached a new high while the number of Americans who think he is a strong leader has dropped to a new low. And that’s just today.
On a human level, one can sympathize with what the president, his advisers, and his supporters are going through right now (No….no….with all due respect, we cannot sympathize with them any more than we did with Gorbachev and his Communist apparatchiks when the Evil Empire fell). But there is a cautionary tale in this as well. When Obama was running for president, he was dismissive of those who came before him. The problems we faced, at home and abroad, would be fixed by signing this executive order and passing that piece of legislation. Hope and change were on the way. “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some game,” Obama is reported to have said back in 2004.
Being president seemed so easy before he actually was president. At the point he took the oath of office, the problems became harder to manage, more difficult, more intractable. “When I said, ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow,’ ” Obama told an audience last month. “Not, ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time, because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”
Every person who runs for president, it’s fair to say, has a healthy ego. But Obama was different; the self-assurance, the arrogance, the sense that he viewed himself as a world-historical figure was almost palpable. (Sure….like so many of today’s youths, having done nothing, he could not possibly realize how difficult it is to do something!) “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions,” Obama told congressional Democrats during the 2008 campaign. A convention speech wasn’t enough; Greek columns needed to be added. “Generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment,” Obama said – a moment when, among other achievements, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” And during the campaign, while still a one-term senator, Obama decided he wanted to give a speech in Germany– and he wanted to deliver it at the Brandenburg Gate.
Yet now we see the Obama presidency coming apart, piece by piece, day by day. Democratic lawmakers are attacking the president on the record. The unhappiness in Obama’s own party toward the president might soon evolve into an open revolt. Those who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008 are saying, with some degree of self-satisfaction, “I told you so.” And the words of Solomon will be proven right again. “Pride goes before destruction,” he wrote in Proverbs, “a haughty spirit before a fall.”
If you dig beneath the rationalizations and the excuses, the field of strawmen, and the barrage of attacks on the motives of his opponents, one can only wonder: In his quiet moments, during times of self-reflection, has Obama –an educated and literate man — learned much of anything from all this?
To learn, one must first be able to understand; if nothing else, The Obamao demonstrates the true value of an Ivy League education.
In any event, for Cal Thomas at least, (in the first column of his we’ve printed since he came to praise the Chappaquiddick Dunker, not to bury him!) the answer to Wehner’s question is an emphatic “NO!”:
Obama Is Lost, Incapable of Changing Course
“If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person.” — Bill Clinton
Nearly every time President Obama delivers a speech about the economy or jobs, something bad happens. The day after his speech to Congress Thursday night, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 303 points, a decline replicated in other indexes in the U.S. and overseas.
This president is such a prisoner of his leftist ideology he seems incapable of pulling a Clinton and triangulating to get something done that motivates the private sector to hire workers and spur economic growth.
How many more of these speeches must we endure before everyone realizes his ideas and proposals aren’t working? In his Thursday speech, the president repeatedly appealed to Congress to “pass” his “jobs bill.” From the White House Rose Garden Monday, he announced that the bill was on its way to Congress. Let the political posturing begin!
The president claimed to have signed within a month of taking office “the biggest middle-class tax cut in history.” Washington Post Fact Checker columnist Glenn Kessler called his claim “ridiculous.” Kessler gave him four Pinocchios, his highest award for dissembling. (Which of course makes him a paid shill of Exxon/Mobil, The Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers!)
The president’s approval numbers continue to fall because the public is slowly getting it. In 2009, in another speech, the president promised his stimulus policies would create 3 million to 4 million new jobs by the end of 2010. They didn’t come close, and they still haven’t. In fact, jobs were lost, leaving a net deficit of 6.7 millions jobs since the recession began, according to Heritage Foundation calculations and Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.
Obama is like a lost man who refuses to ask for directions. That’s because he has never worked in the real world with people who create real jobs. He operates on theories and an ideology that is incapable of achieving his goals.
For example, he speaks mostly of redistributing wealth, not creating wealth. He wants us to hate the wealth creators, rather than follow their example. The result has been a growing dependency on government, robbing too many of their liberty and opportunity.
Like the floodwaters that have devastated the Northeast, the federal government has overrun its constitutional limits. It should not be spending and borrowing more, but less.
The biggest contributor to economic uncertainty is Obamacare. Businesses don’t know what their costs will be and so some are either getting waivers (if they are politically friendly to the administration) or ending private insurance for their employees.
Ask yourself: If the federal government has made such a mess of Medicare and Medicaid (not to mention stretching Social Security to the breaking point), what reasonable hope is there that it will do better with an even larger national health care monstrosity? One might just as well spring Bernie Madoff from prison and put him in charge of stock portfolios.
There was a time in America not too long ago when people mostly looked out for themselves and their relatives. Parents cared for their children when they were little and the children returned the favor when their parents got old. Now we dump the kids in day care and they return the favor by dumping their elderly parents in nursing homes. The biblical commandment about honoring your mother and father was once taken seriously. Now it’s the government’s responsibility because too many think we are constitutionally mandated to be free of “burdens.”
If we want government to become smaller and perform within its constitutional boundaries, we are going to have to expect less from it and more from ourselves. President Obama understands none of this because others have largely aided him throughout his life and unremarkable pre-presidential career. He has great form, but little substance, except his failed ideology. The tragedy is he has learned nothing from failure.
If the wisdom of Bill Clinton isn’t sufficient for him, there is also Sophocles, who wrote in “Antigone”: “All men may err; but he that keepeth not his folly, but repenteth, doeth well; but stubbornness cometh to great trouble.
And since we’re on the subject, there also exist those who err….and haven’t the grey matter to realize they’re clueless….
DHS to Roll Out New Airport Security Policy for Kids Under 13
Children 12 years old and younger soon will no longer be required to remove their shoes at airport security checkpoints, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress on Tuesday. The policy also includes other ways to screen young children without resorting to a pat-down that involves touching private areas on the body. The changes should be rolled out in the coming months, Napolitano said during a Senate hearing on the terror threat to the U.S.
Napolitano said there may be some exceptions. Terrorists have plotted to use children as suicide bombers, and some children still may be required to remove their shoes to keep security random. “There will always be some unpredictability built into the system, and there will always be random checks even for groups that we are looking at differently, such as children,” she said.
We’ll be frank; whatever measures Big Sis and the TSA might employ, the entire organization, as well as Napolitano herself, have been a joke since Day One. But her and their glaring incompetence and ineffectiveness notwithstanding, were terrorists truly plotting to use children to inflict additional “man-made disasters” on America, how does publicizing the less-aggressive screening of same serve national security?!? Unless of course, this is the old….
….”reduced-security” ploy!
Whatever the case, there’s one aspect of the TSA that’s unfortunately all-too predictable: it’s always one step behind Islamic terrorists, enacting security measures designed to detect what they tried last time
Speaking of the predictable, as this Jeff Foutch forward confirms….
Obama energy policy raises costs, limits jobs
For decades, political commentators have been lamenting America’s lack of an energy policy. That’s no longer true. Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has adopted a very clear energy policy: obstruct and even vilify the coal, oil and natural gas industries while lavishing subsidies on unreliable and expensive sources like solar, biofuels and wind energy.
The events of the past few weeks provide plenty of examples. The most recent: the bankruptcy of solar-panel-maker Solyndra, which despite a $527 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy could not compete with overseas producers.
Two weeks before Solyndra’s bankruptcy, the White House announced that the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Navy will “invest up to $510 million during the next three years” to develop “advanced drop-in aviation and marine biofuels to power military and commercial transportation.” (At the same time Team Tick-Tock’s eviscerating the nation’s defense budget!)
Never mind that the entire notion of “advanced biofuels” has been a colossal failure. Despite decades of hype and tens of millions of dollars in subsidies, the U.S. still doesn’t have any substantive biofuel production other than the corn ethanol boondoggle, which is now consuming about 40% of all U.S. corn production, and soy-based diesel.
About the same time the White House unveiled the latest biofuel initiative, several news outlets reported on a lawsuit filed by Exxon Mobil Corp. against Obama’s Interior Department in which the energy giant claims it has been “singled out” for “unprecedented adverse treatment.” At issue: Exxon’s lease on offshore acreage that contains the Julia Field, a discovery that may hold 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil, making it one of the biggest finds ever made in the Gulf of Mexico.
Between 2006 and 2008, Exxon spent about $230 million drilling a pair of wells — each of them to depths exceeding 31,000 feet — that delineated the giant oil deposit. In late 2008, it applied for an extension of its lease, a process that had been routinely done many times before. But federal officials refused, saying the company hadn’t proved a “commitment to production.”
Unless the Interior Department changes its position, years of litigation will delay the production of millions of barrels of domestic oil and, with that delay, a postponement of what could be $11 billion in royalties payable to the federal government over the life of the field. (Aahhh….good plan!)
Obama regularly includes anti-oil-industry rhetoric in his speeches. Thursday night, during his speech on jobs, he nearly ignored the issue of energy policy altogether — no mention of “green jobs,” wind, solar or “clean energy” — but he did manage to squeeze in a condemnation of “tax loopholes for oil companies.” The president said the tax preferences for oil companies should be eliminated so that small business owners could get a tax credit for hiring workers.
Obama may not know it, but the domestic oil and gas industry is creating jobs, lots of them. Over the past 18 months or so, 48,000 people were hired in Pennsylvania by companies drilling in the Marcellus Shale. Last month, Halliburton announced that it would hire11,000 workers this year, most of them to work on shale oil and shale gas projects in North America.
And this week, the American Petroleum Institute, perhaps the most powerful member of the oil lobby, sent a letter to Obama saying that if the industry were allowed to drill in more areas, it could create more than 1 million jobs.
In January, during his State of the Union speech, Obama called oil “yesterday’s energy.” Since then, he’s repeatedly said Congress should repeal the $4 billion worth of annual tax preferences used by the oil and gas industry because, as he said in May, the biggest oil companies are making “about $4 billion in profits each week.”
Never mind that during the second quarter, the average member of Big Oil had a profit margin of 7.9%. Last year, Exxon Mobil, the biggest U.S.-based member of Big Oil, had a profit margin of 8.6%. That’s only slightly higher than the average profit margin of 214 other sectors tracked by Yahoo Finance. By comparison, Apple’s profit margin was 21.5%.
While Obama vilifies the oil industry’s profits, his appointees at the EPA are pushing regulations that may force the shuttering of as much as 80,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation capacity because the companies who own those plants cannot comply with the proposed rules.
The closure of the coal-fired plants, which could begin in January, will probably mean even higher electricity costs for cash-strapped consumers. Since 2005, the average cost of residential electricity has increased by about 30% and now stands at 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.
While it hammers the coal sector, the Obama administration is showering the wind energy business with what can only be described as corporate welfare. Consider the Shepherds Flat wind project in Oregon. Not only is the Energy Department giving General Electric and its partners a $1.06 billion loan guarantee on the $1.9 billion project, but as soon as GE’s 338 wind turbines start turning at Shepherds Flat, the project owners will get a cash grant of $490 million from the federal government. (Can you say “Solyndra”? We KNEW you could!)
The deal has so much “green” for the project developers that last fall, some of Obama’s top advisers objected, saying that its backers had “little skin in the game” while the government would be providing “a significant subsidy (65+ percent).” The advisers’ memo points out that the subsidies could allow GE and its partners, which include Google and Japan’s Sumitomo Corp., to reap an “estimated return on equity of 30 percent.”
Over the past year, the average electric utility’s return on equity has been 7.2%. Thus, taxpayers’ money is helping GE and its partners earn more than four times the average return on equity in the electricity business, but Obama hasn’t uttered a negative word about GE, which paid little or no federal income taxes last year even though it generated $5.1 billion in profits from its U.S. operations. (Not to mention GE’s Jeff Immelt was The Obamao’s guest-of-honor at his recent infomercial to a joint-session of Congress!)
While campaigning last month, Obama repeatedly decried America’s need for “foreign oil.” In Minnesota, he talked about the need to “win back energy independence,” and then, in nearly the same breath, he denounced the tax breaks that encourage domestic drilling for oil and gas. The solution in Obama’s math- and physics-free view of the world: more solar, more wind energy and yes, of course, more electric cars.
Never mind that in 2010, oil and natural gas provided nearly 200 times as much energy to the U.S. economy as all solar and wind energy production combined. Never mind that the Energy Information Administration recently estimated that wind-generated electricity costs about 50% more than that produced by natural gas-fired generators while solar-generated electricity costs at least 200% more.
The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 16.3% of U.S. workers are either unemployed or underemployed. In addition, about 14% of the US population, 45.1 million Americans, are now relying on federal food stamps. Given those numbers, the federal government should be doing all it can to keep energy as cheap, abundant and reliable as possible. Unfortunately, on nearly every front, the Obama administration is taking actions that will achieve the exact opposite. And with numerous analysts — as well as the Federal Reserve — predicting a prolonged recession, it is doing so at the worst possible time.
That’s not good energy policy, but it is, nonetheless, a policy.
On the Lighter Side….
Finally, in Eric Stratton Memorial “Take it easy, I’m in pre-Law….I thought you were pre-Med?….What’s the difference?” segment, James Taranto details another venerated American institution of higher learning providing its charges the Liberal version of the Constitution:
You Can’t Fight Here, This Is The War Room
“Northern Arizona University students who were passing out American flags Friday in remembrance of 9/11 got a bigger response than they expected,” reports Flagstaff’s Arizona Daily Sun:
No fewer than four university officials and a police officer descended on the group, accusing them of hindering foot traffic and lacking an advance permit. . . .
According to [student Stephanee] Freer’s footage, the first employee to walk up suggested they move outside, to which Freer replied that it was raining. The second employee, a coordinator from the Office of Student Life, told the students that it is the same policy for all student organizations to reserve indoors space, and that they could move outside or step into a booth up the hall.
Freer said that the booth was out of the way and nobody would see them. “This is for 9/11,” she said. “Do you want to shut down our 9/11 table? Are you unpatriotic?” She also asked the employee what the First Amendment states, and the employee replied, “Free speech in a designated time, place and manner.”
The students vocally sneered at the definition. After they folded up their small table, not much bigger than a TV dinner tray, a third employee told them the university is within its bounds to regulate the “time, place and manner” where students can assemble. “You’re not following what administration is letting you do,” she said.
Any questions?!?
Magoo
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