Posts by AlanCaruba:
Revisiting Voting Blocs — Are They More Fluid These Days?
October 27th, 2012By Alan Caruba
It has long been a tradition in American politics to speak of voting blocs, but in an era of 24/7 news and instant communications, that may be less likely as an indicator of who votes for who.
For example, The Jewish Press, the largest orthodox Jewish weekly, came out with a strong endorsement of Mitt Romney, but the political pundits keep wondering how Jews — usually Democratic and liberal — will vote on November 6.
In point of fact, Jewish voters are a minority at best and not likely to move the dial except in South Florida, and urban centers such as New York, Los Angeles and their environs. What can be said is that Obama’s hostility to Israel is going to play a role in how Jews vote. Traditionally Democrats and liberals, they are generally close observers of the political winds and, while not all Zionists, they have a strong attachment to the Holy Land.
In a similar way not all Catholics oppose abortion and they can be found in both political parties. The notion, however, that the government demands that their institutions like hospitals, act counter to the Church’s fundamental beliefs has surely angered many Catholics. Hispanics, generally Catholic, tend toward a more conservative point of view, but the thought that they will vote as a bloc also seems a reach. Hispanic citizens come from many different places and cultures. And evangelicals could care less at this point that Mitt Romney is a Mormon. They know a man of faith when they see one.
The current wisdom regarding blacks is that they will support Obama, but it is also widely believed among observers that many will simply not vote in the dramatic numbers of 2008. Blacks are said to be disappointed with Obama regarding the economy and offended by his support for gay marriage. Overall, the African-American community has seen few gains, if any, in an economy gone south.
Women are regarded as a major factor in the election and both the Obama and Romney camps are said to be making a big effort to secure their vote, but I suspect women will either vote within their party affiliation if they are Democrats or cross party lines because of economic issues — lack of employment opportunities, the rising cost of food and gas, children who graduated college this year and are now living at home, et cetera. The Democrats’ farcical “war on women” has no traction.
Political consultants and advisors make their living reading the tea leafs of a campaign, but this one will come down to the economy, jobs and inflation. These issues affect people no matter what religion, race or gender.
The Wrath of the Seniors
There is, finally, one very large group about which and from whom little has been heard. They represent all the other voting blocs and can be regarded as one themselves; senior citizens. In 2008 the CIA Fact Book estimate of the number of senior citizens, age 65 and older, represented 12.7 % of the population; males 16,263,255 and females 22,426,914. There are more now because baby boomers are entering the ranks of seniors in the millions these days. In 2011 the first of 79 million Americans born between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s will turn 65, swelling the ranks of Medicare and Social Security recipients. A lot of the seniors, no matter race, gender, or political affiliation are very worried about Obamacare and they should be. Many already know that Obama took over half a trillion out of Medicare to fund Obamacare and you can be damned sure they are not happy about it.
At the other end of the age cycle Generation Opportunity.org, a non-profit group devoted to mobilizing young Americans (18-29) on important economic issues, reports that its polling says 76% of Millennials plan to vote. Fully 89% say that the current state of the economy is impacting their lives and not in a good way. The youth unemployment rate is 11.8% and, for blacks it is a whopping 21%. The declining labor force participation rate has created 1.7 million young adults who are not even counted as unemployed; bad news for a candidate who promised hope and change four years ago.
No doubt exit interviews and other post-election studies will reveal trends, but if, like 23 million Americans, you’re out of a job, still looking after several months, or just stopped looking, you have plenty of motivation to go to the polls and cast your vote for the only real “hope and change” available, the election of Mitt Romney.
One factor in the election has received little attention, but it should not be overlooked. A lot of states where energy reserves, particularly coal, represent a significant economic factor, have little reason to reelect Obama. An estimated 90 percent of coal reserves are concentrated in ten states, but it is mined in 27 states. Even though the U.S. coal reserves represent as much energy as all the oil in Saudi Arabia, Obama has waged a war on this valuable resource.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal production has fallen 6.5% during the Obama years. So that is one promise he’s kept; largely due to draconian EPA regulations. The EIA expects 8.5% if the coal-fired plants to retire by 2016 and 17% by 2020. Coal has fallen to 32% of net electricity generation from 48% when Obama took office.
While indicting the oil industry, the Obama administration has managed to squander billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on uncompetitive wind and solar companies, electric car production, and at one point he was advocating algae — pond scum — as a source of energy.
Instinctively, Americans know that the U.S. must maintain a strong defense and they know that is not the case these days. They love their fighting forces and their veterans. Obama does not.
For me, the most interesting aspect of the 2012 campaigns has been the total absence of blather about “global warming” and only a few references to “climate change” by either candidate. When Al Gore and John Kerry ran, they were all over this like a doggy chew bone. The President who has unleashed the Environmental Protection Agency to impose an insane list of economy-killing regulations has had little to say about an issue that we have been told for decades was the most serious one of all.
While I am still fearful about the apparent close divide in the polls—which are trending now toward Romney — I keep thinking that Obama is going to crash and burn on November 6th. Even people who are not glued to the news channels or who refuse to process negative information about Obama know he is a pathological liar and the administration’s response to the killing of a U.S. ambassador and three others in Benghazi, Libya put this on full display.
At least Democrats could believe Bill Clinton when he said he felt their pain, but Obama makes no effort to even pretend he cares about them. He’s fixated on “millionaires and billionaires.” He’s concerned that Muslims not be offended. He’s offering four more years of the worst economic conditions Americans have endured since the Great Depression.
Poor Obama, he can’t blame his failures on George W. Bush any more.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Poverty Nation
October 24th, 2012By Alan Caruba
Lyndon B. Johnson, President from 1963 to 1969, is probably unknown to the generations since then except for having escalated the Vietnam War. A memorial in Washington, D.C. is a sad reminder of the more than 58,000 young lives sacrificed. As time went along, it became so unpopular LBJ decided not to run again for a second full term. He is likely recalled less for his “War on Poverty”, a classic, liberal government program that to this day has not eliminated poverty in America.
The syndicated columnist and John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Walter Williams, recent wrote about “Poverty Nonsense”, saying, “There’s nothing intellectually challenging or unusual about poverty. For most of mankind’s existence, his most optimistic scenario was to be able to eke out enough to subsist for another day. Poverty has been mankind’s standard fare and remains so for most of mankind.”
One need only read the Old and New Testaments to realize that poverty in ancient times was a concern. “Tzedek, tzedek you shall pursue” — justice justice you shall pursue (Deut. 16:20). There’s a basic human responsibility to reach out to others. Giving of your time and your money is a statement that “I will do whatever I can to help.” This reflects the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. In Matthew 26:11, Jesus says “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me.”
It is a liberal fantasy that a society can eliminate poverty, but that does not mean a society does not have an obligation to help the less fortunate. It is the tension between these two views that separates conservatives and liberals, but every time a liberal president has held office, it has become a budget-busting calamity.
The most recent example has been the reason, in part, has been the soaring spending on welfare since Obama has been president. The financial crisis did require some effort to provide “a safety net” for those laid off from their jobs and some argument could be made to help homeowners, although many of their mortgages were granted by banks under pressure from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the full knowledge they were bad loans. They would become known as “toxic assets” that dragged down banks, requiring a massive government bailout to avoid a collapse of the entire system.
A recent article by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, based on an October report of the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, spells out the current state of government welfare spending. “Roughly 100 million people — one-third of the U.S. population — receive aid from at least one means-tested welfare program each month.”
“ Average benefits come to around $9,000 per recipient. If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the United States.”
Federal: At $746 billion, federal means-tested spending exceeded spending on Medicare ($480 billion) , Social Security ($725 billion), or the defense budget ($540 billion).
State: In 2011, state contributions into federal welfare programs came to $201 billion, and independent state programs contributed around $9 billion.
Combined: Overall means-tested welfare spending from federal and state sources reach from all sources totaled $956 billion.
This is money from taxpayers whose personal budgets are squeezed by the rising cost of everything or which has to be borrowed by the federal government.
Rector said, “Obama’s big spending plans will result in ruinous and unsustainable budget deficits.”
Why federal welfare requires eighty separate programs is testimony to the slow creep of government growth over the years since LBJ’s War on Poverty. That war was lost before it began, but it reflects the way such programs buy the votes of those dependent on them. It is a bad way to run a nation. It is bad politics. It is bad economics. And it will lead to an inevitable collapse in an economy that has shown virtually no growth in the past four years, an anemic 1.7 percent in the gross domestic product.
Voters disillusioned by the failure of Obama’s “stimulus” or Biden’s promise of a “recovery summer” in 2010 have the opportunity to end this cycle of national impoverishment in November. It may be our last chance.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
The EPA’s Planned Destruction of the US Economy
October 23rd, 2012By Alan Caruba
If there was no other reason to defeat President Obama in November, it would be the planned destruction of what is left of the U.S. economy by the Environmental Protection Agency.
In “A Look Ahead to EPA Regulations for 2012” the minority staff (Republican) of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has issued a chilling review of a massive rise in the costs of living for all Americans, massive layoffs in all sectors of the economy, and the destruction of the nation’s energy and manufacturing sectors.The report provides a nightmarish look at the regulations that EPA plans to initiate, having put them under cover prior to Election Day in order to hide President Obama’s agenda of attacking the energy sector and businesses large and small.
Here’s a list of the regulations:
Greenhouse gas regulation via the Clean Air Act
An Ozone rule
Hydraulic Fracturing
Florida’s Numeric Nutrient Criteria
EPA’s water guidance under the Clean Water Act
Stormwater regulation
Tier II Gas regulations
Boiler MACT rule
Cement MACT rule
316(b) Cooling Tower rule
Coal ash
Farm dust regulation
Spill prevention control and Countermeasure rule
These proposed regulations in aggregate, if enacted—that is to say if not stopped by congressional action based on Republican control of both the House and Senate — would prove disastrous, starting in 2013.
For example, the utterly bogus greenhouse gas regulations are based on the debunked global warming theory that says too much carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is causing the Earth to heat when, in fact, the Earth has been cooling since 1998 and there is zero evidence that CO2 has any impact on the temperature of the planet.
The greenhouse gas regulations would, the report estimates, “cost more than $300 to $400 billion a year, and significantly raise the price of gas at the pump and energy in the home. It’s not just coal plants that will be affected: Under the Clean Air Act, churches, schools, restaurants, hospitals and farms will eventually be regulated.”
If you love poverty, you will love what the EPA intends to impose on the nation.
One astonishingly stupid aspect of greenhouse gas regulation is called the “cow tax” in which ranchers will be required to pay a cost-per-animal permitting fee. More than 37,000 farms and ranches would be subject to greenhouse gas permits at an average cost of $23,000 per permit annually. It would affect more than 90% of the livestock production in America and drive the cost of meat and pork out of sight.
As to regulating ozone, the EPA itself “estimated that its ozone standard would cost $90 billion a year, while other studies have projected that the rule would cost upwards of a trillion dollars and destroy 7.4 million jobs.” Ozone is created and destroyed naturally in the atmosphere by the sun. It is most noticeable over the poles where it has waxed and waned for billions of years. So-called ozone holes show up over active volcanoes. Apparently the EPA wants to regulate the sun and volcanoes.
The technology of hydraulic fracturing occurs well below the water levels and frees up access to natural gas and oil. Naturally, many agencies in the Obama administration are doing whatever they can to shut it down with costly permit and efforts to link it to water contamination. It holds the promise of driving down energy costs nationwide.
If President Obama is reelected, billions of dollars would be imposed on virtually every aspect of life in America, either directly or through the rise of the cost of everything. This reflects the Greens obsession with destroying the greatest economy the world has ever seen, our standards of living and the quality of life for every man, woman and child in America.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Islam’s Many Murders of Americans
October 22nd, 2012By Alan Caruba.
Editor’s Note: This commentary was written prior to the third presidential debate.
Moments in history are markers from which we are expected to draw some lessons. Thus, October 23, 1983, twenty-nine years ago, was the date of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. It had been preceded by the bombing of our embassy there on April 18. A year later, our CIA station chief, William F. Buckley was kidnapped, dying after 15 months of torture by Islamic “militants.”
You can Google the lists of attacks on Americans, our embassies, hijackings of commercial air flights, housing abroad of U.S. military, and embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The USS Cole was bombed in the port of Aden, Yemen in 2000, killing 17 U.S. Navy sailors. Other lists are of Americans killed by various Muslim jihadists here in America.
A key date worth remembering is November 4, 1979 when Iranian Islamists seized our embassy in Tehran, taking 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. Then-President Jimmy Carter offered such a weak response to an offense against our nation and international laws that he was voted out of office and replaced with Ronald Reagan. Until Barack Obama came along, he was known as the worst president the nation ever had.
Americans tend to think of attacks in terms of September 11, 2001 when commercial aircraft were flown into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. A fourth was brought down by passengers in a Pennsylvania pasture. Nearly 3,000 Americans died.
The truth—the fact–is that America has been under attack for 33 years at this point, at home and abroad, and we still can’t bring ourselves to speak the name of the enemy, Islam.
President Obama whose first and middle names are of Arab origin is testimony to a lethal capacity to forget just how many times America has been attacked by its Islamic enemies and his term in office has seen the Middle East become a bastion of even greater Muslim militancy, culminating with the murder of our ambassador to Libya and three of his staff.
Americans are understandably weary of war having been drawn into conflict in Afghanistan after 9/11. We are still there to no effective purpose. Twice America waged war on Iraq, first to lead a coalition to force it out of Kuwait and then to depose Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. It took over a decade to finally withdraw our troops from Iraq and, in neither nation, can we point to anything resembling a successful outcome. Both the Taliban and al Qaeda have returned despite the occasional drone strike.
The problem, however, is that Islam in general and the Middle East, along with other Muslim nations in Africa and elsewhere, continues to pose a threat to America and the West. In the past Islam was stopped at the gates of Europe and Crusades were fought against the Muslims in the Holy Land.
A cult built around Mohammed has a “holy book” that requires them to make war without end until everyone is under their domination and all the advances of civilization are reversed. There are more than a billion Muslims in the world and it is not likely they are going to convert to some other religion any time soon.
As for terrorism, much of it is directed out of Iran these days and Iran is perilously close to making its own nuclear weapons. Iran must literally be stopped before that happens and, so far, the only nation intent on actually doing that is Israel.
The Saudis continue to fund all manner of Islamic activity worldwide to the detriment of America and the West.
Having rid themselves of dictators, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt do not appear to be likely allies in the future. The conflict in Syria threatens to escalate and intrudes into Lebanon. The so-called Palestinians remain a festering problem, kept going by nations in the region and the United Nations. Africa remains ripe for increased Islamic conflict.
In his book, “The Audacity of Hope”, President Obama said, “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
America is closing in on an election that poses a choice between the most pro-Islamic President to ever hold office and a challenger who is on record as saying he will support Israel in its effort to avoid nuclear annihilation.
There is no real “choice” here except between four more years of a presidency that actually encourages Islamic militancy, sinking further into an abyss of national poverty, the loss of our position in the world as a power for freedom and democracy, and a life of misery for the present and future generations of Americans.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Newsweek: An Obituary
October 21st, 2012By Alan Caruba
Newsweek, founded in 1933 by a former Time magazine editor, will cease to publish a print edition at the end of 2012. As a former journalist it pained me to read there will be cuts to its staff of 270 reporters and editors, but Newsweek has been a dinosaur for a long time, destined for extinction as a newsstand magazine and mailed to subscribers.
It always trailed Time magazine in circulation, a perennial bridesmaid, but the obvious reason is that digital news, delivered instanteously, killed it; its declining advertising and circulation was simply the arithmetic of failure. It will live on as Newsweek Global in the Internet, but I have some doubts about whether even a $24.95 annual subscription price will keep it going. I suspect that most of its most faithful readers are themselves dying off.
Newsweek used to arrive at my home and was devoured by my Dad, Mom, and I. It was pretty good journalism until it was purchased by The Washington Post Company in 1961. Its liberal bias began to take a toll in much the same way it has done for other news organizations.
The decline of anything resembling journalism was captured when reporter Michael Isikoff learned of President Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky only to have the story spiked by Newsweek’s editors. When the story broke on The Drudge Report it launched Matt Drudge and his news aggregation site into the Internet’s stratosphere of success.
In 2004, a study by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo concluded that Newsweek, along with all other mainstream news outlets except for Fox News and The Washington Times, were irredeemably liberal and, by definition, no longer reliable sources of news.
Newsweek’s Washington Bureau Chief at the time, Evan Thomas, had acknowledged that Newsweek was “a little liberal.” He would later become its Assistant Managing Editor and, in 1996, he went on the record after leaving the magazine saying “there is a liberal bias at Newsweek.” Well, duh!
Things just got worse when, in the May 9, 2005 edition, Isikoff reported that interrogators at Guantanomo had “flushed a Quran down a toilet” to intimidate a detainee, but the magazine later admitted that its anonymous source for the story could not confirm the story. By then, however, the story had sparked the predictable anti-American riots and deaths in the Islamic world. The story was retracted under heavy criticism.
Newsweek’s only concession to a conservative point of view has been the columnist, George W. Will who has been a contributor since 1976. Writers need a steady paycheck like everyone else, but I am sure it must have pained Mr. Will to be associated with a news publication that was suffering a progressive form of suicide.
The Internet has put great strains on the mainstream liberal news media. It came as a shock when historian Niall Ferguson’s article, “Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President” was the cover story on August 27, 2012. I am betting that Newsweek will still endorse Obama before the election, but as I watch as one daily newspaper after another endorses Mitt Romney, there might be one last gasp of reality at Newsweek. I doubt it.
Liberalism killed Newsweek.
Yes, the Internet pushed it into its coffin, but the mainstream media still haven’t gotten the message. In a world where news is delivered 24/7 and available from a wide variety of sources, putting out a magazine once a week is untenable. Putting out one that endorses liberal politicians and policies is like drinking hemlock.
It is likely that Time magazine will suffer a similar fate and I suspect a host of newsstand magazines will also begin to disappear.
I may be among the last generation to have enjoyed magazines, but I rarely read any these days. I am letting my Bloomberg Business Week subscription lapse for the same reason I stopped reading The Economist.
It gets tiresome to keep reading references to global warming or climate change in these publications when that huge hoax began to come apart in 2009 with the revelations of “climategate.” The emails between the “scientists” who were cooking the books on climate data revealed how worried they were over the beginning of a new climate cycle in 1998 in which the Earth was cooling, not warming.
It is sad to see how formerly respected news organizations have abandoned any pretense about reporting the truth. Perhaps the ultimate example of this was, as media critic Bernie Goldberg put it, their “slobbering love affair” with Barack Obama that has afflicted America with a President who does not like America and may not have spoken a word of truth since he was an infant.
As a young reporter I used to write obituaries. Now I find myself writing one for Newsweek and doing so with a great sense of relief.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
Christian Arabs Targeted Throughout Middle East
October 20th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
The nations of the Middle East have been steadily forcing out Christian Arabs that have lived there for centuries, often in the most brutal fashion. This is the hallmark of Islam that has no tolerance for any other religion. Islam is a cult that has been at war with all religions, using terror, intimidation, and deception to achieve its goal.
The process has a long history. A recent Wall Street Journal commentary, “When the Arab Jews Fled”, tells a story rarely told; the story of how an estimated 850,000 Jews living in Arab nations, many of whose families had lived in Middle Eastern nations for centuries, were forced to leave. What happened to them after Israel declared its sovereignty in 1948 is now occurring again, but for Christians in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, the ascendency of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the militancy of al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Cynically, Arab nations have pointed to the Palestinians as an example of people made refugees by the creation of Israel but, generally unknown to most Americans and others has been the role of the United Nations in maintaining the myth of refugees via its Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established to aid Palestinians in the wake of the 1948 war on Israel.
As Middle East experts, Steven J. Rosen and Daniel Pipes, pointed out in a Jerusalem Post article on July 10, 2012, “UNRWA’s most consequential problem is its mission. Over 63 years, it has become an agency that perpetuates the refugee problem rather than contributing to its resolution.
URNWA does not work to settle refugees; instead by registering each day ever more grandchildren and great-grandchildren who have never been displaced from their homes or employment, artificially adding them to the tally of ‘refugees’. It adds to the number of refugees said to be aggrieved by Israel. By now, those descendants comprise over 90 percent of UNRWA refugees.”
This presupposes that there is or ever was a state of “Palestine”, but that is a name given the region by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to replace the name of Israel. It was unsuccessful but centuries later was incorporated into the Palestinian Mandate given England to administer following WWI. In point of fact, Palestine was never a state, has no borders, has no capitol city, has no currency, and was declared by Yassir Arafat as a means to wage war on Israel. Today, this so-called state is divided into two separate entities; the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. They cordially hate one another.
After 1948, the Wall Street Journal article noted, “Jews began fleeing—to Israel, of course, but also to France, England, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.” Yemen had been home to more than 55,000 Jews’ in Aden, (where) scores were killed in a vicious program in 1947. An airlift dubbed ‘Operation Magic Carpet’ relocated most Yemenite Jews to Israel. In Libya, once home to 38,000 Jews, the community was subjected to many brutal attacks over the years.”
“In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jews continued to pour out of the Muslim countries. The Six-Day War of June 1967 brought some of the most violent anti-Jewish eruptions.
UNRWA, however, was only concerned with the so-called Palestinian Arabs. “The number of UNRWA refugees has steadily grown since 1949, from 750,000 to almost five million. At this rate,” wrote Rosen and Pipes, “UNRWA refugees will exceed 8 million by 2030 and 20 million by 2060.” This is, of course, absurd. The “Palestinians” are now the world’s oldest “refugee” population.
In addition to the obstinence of UNRWA, its existence has been an obstruction to a resolution of the conflict between the “Palestinians” and Israel. This is a violation of the UN Refugee Convention. In a January 16, 2012 article by Anne Bayefsky in The Jerusalem Post, noted that “Years of UN-driven anti-Semitism have clearly deadened the nerve-endings of democracies…”
The UN General Assembly has annually sponsored a Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, followed by the usual anti-Israel agenda items.
“By the end of a year of double-standards, discrimination and hate-mongering eighty percent of all 2010 General Assembly resolutions criticizing specific countries for human rights violations were directed at the Jewish state alone. Only six of the remaining 191 UN member states face human rights criticism at all, one of which was the United States.” The United States!
Will the UN declare its solidarity with the Arab Christians now under siege throughout the Middle East and across northern Africa? Don’t count on it.
The world, worried about the spread of war in the Middle East as the result of the Syrian conflict, is not paying much attention to the plight of the millions of Arab Christians being driven from their homes. It is a tragedy of immense proportions and it is one that is entirely the result of the inherent hatred by Islam for all other faiths.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
The Poisonous Presidency
October 15th, 2012By Alan Caruba
When the leaders of the United States, the President, his Vice President, his Secretary of State and others deliberately lie to its citizens, knowing full well that the facts about the tragic killing of an American ambassador and three of his staff are widely known, the nation has reached a point where it is paramount that he be removed from office.
The forthcoming election is the instrument and current indicators are that President Obama will be defeated. It is to be hoped that power in the Senate will be returned to the Republican Party and retainedl in the House of Representatives. This is the only way steps can be taken to avoid the financial collapse that faces the nation and achieve the repeal of Obamacare that Mitt Romney has promised if elected.
What worries me most, however, is the utter disdain for the truth that has marked the presidency of Barack Obama. It has been nearly four years of sustained lies about the steps that were taken to respond to the financial crisis facing the nation when he took office. The so-called “stimulus” wasted billions, becoming little more than a slush fund for Democratic fund-raisers, unions, and other connected parties to the administration.
Instead the administration literally seized control of General Motors and Chrysler, then in the normal process of bankruptcy, claiming to save the jobs of auto workers. What they did was shunt aside the legitimate creditors and investors in GM. They arbitrarily discontinued its often long relationship with several hundred auto dealerships, adding their employees to the unemployment lines. They then insisted that GM invest millions in the creation of an electric car that cost $47,000 to purchase and ended up purchasing them for government use with taxpayer’s money.
Obamacare, more than 2,700 pages in length and incorporating more than twenty new taxes, was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress with little evidence that any of those who voted for it had even read it. Arguing initially that he was not a tax, when challenged in the Supreme Court, the administration then said it was a tax. For some inexplicable reason, the Court permitted it to stand despite its clear over-ride of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause that forbids the government from requiring a citizen to purchase anything.
Under Obama, the foreign policy of the nation has now seriously weakened its position in the world and combined with cuts to defense spending, put its ability to protect the homeland and project power abroad at risk. The administration failed to negotiate an agreement with Iraq that would permit U.S. troops to remain in place, as they do at the invitation of many nations around the world, leaving Iraq vulnerable to al Qaeda. Setting a date for withdrawal from Afghanistan only emboldened the Taliban.
The so-called Arab Spring has mutated, not into the establishment of democratic institutions in nations like Egypt or Libya, but an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to at least ascend to positions of power in opposition to America’s interests in the Middle East and Northern Africa.
We now know that President Obama skipped some sixty percent of the daily CIA briefings that presidents long have made a part of their duties and this no doubt led to its ignorance of the impending tragedy in Libya, but the fault lies, too, with the State Department that ignored the slain ambassador’s pleas for increased security for the embassy and consulate. This is a president who has been missing in action as the Islamic jihad began to heat up across the face of the globe.
The hostility of President Obama’s administration to the vital energy sector of the nation has denied access to oil extraction on the vast acreage of federal lands. It has denied permits for offshore drilling to a far larger degree than previous administrations. It has mercilessly attacked the coal industry, responsible for nearly fifty percent of all electricity generation in the nation. Plants for electricity have closed down under the pressure of costly EPA regulations. Only the natural gas sector has grown, thanks to the technology of fracking, but both oil and gas is being extracted mostly on private land.
The economy, which could have recovered in much the same way it did during the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, has barely increased while 23 million Americans remain out of work or have stopped looking for jobs. There are 47 million Americans on food stamps, utilizing eighty percent of the budget of the Department of Agriculture. There are millions who have seen the value of their homes decrease while others have faced foreclosure. The Labor Department was just caught rigging the data on new jobs to get it below 8 percent in a record-setting 43 months.
Barack Obama, a man whose personal life history is mostly a construction of lies, whose personal records have been hidden from public examination, and who stunned viewers of his first debate with Mitt Romney by appearing so unprepared and so willing to repeat past lies, has been at the heart of a poisonous presidency.
Americans, no matter what their political affiliation or as independents, are now saddled with $16 trillion in national debt, four to five trillion of which was imposed in just the last four years, have a common interest to defeat Barack Obama. The nation will not survive four more years if he is reelected.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
The Great Ethanol Scam
October 14th, 2012By Alan Caruba.
The rocketing costs of gasoline and the price of corn being paid worldwide are the result of U.S. government mandates requiring the inclusion of ethanol in the gasoline all Americans must use. The time has long since passed to eliminate ethanol from this primary fuel.
A recent report by ActionAid USA, “Fueling the Food Crisis: The Cost to Developing Countries of U.S. Corn Ethanol Expansion” is based on work by researchers at Tufts University. ActionAid USA is an anti-poverty group. The study found that the corn-importing countries of Central America and North Africa are at the highest risk from ethanol expansion—the requirement to include ethanol with gasoline.
“Strong policy should not be based on prayers for good weather, especially when the stakes are so high. From the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to the G20, it is time to recognize that current biofuel mandates are unsustainable,” said Kristin Sundell, a policy analyst for ActionAid USA.
The group is calling on G20 leaders who are meeting on World Food Day, October 16, to eliminate incentives that encourage unsustainable biofuels production.
The idea behind ethanol is that it reduces carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and, in doing so, it saves the Earth from global warming/climate change, but CO2 plays no role in climate change, and shows up well after any increase or decrease of temperatures. Ethanol is bad science. It is bad for the engines of cars that must use such a gasoline blend. It increases the cost of gasoline and all other corn-based products. It actually increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. And it reduces the mileage a car can achieve with pure gasoline.
An authority on the U.S. oil industry is Sel Graham, the author of “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High”. He is a man with more than fifty year’s experience, first as a petroleum reservoir engineer and later as an oil and gas attorney. He is also a graduate of West Point.
Here’s what Graham has to say about the current gas prices:
“Gasoline prices could be decreased instantly by President Obama if he wanted to do so. Republicans have not yet picked up on this issue.”
“Abolishing the ethanol mandate requiring ethanol to be blended with gasoline at the pump or waiving the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) would: (1) lower gasoline prices by millions of dollars; (2) result in billions of miles of free travel annually; (3) prevent millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide from being emitted into the air; and (4) improve national security and the energy picture since it is impossible for US ethanol to ever replace foreign oil imports.”
“The following is reference data for skeptics. Gasoline prices can be lowered instantly by either abolishing the ethanol mandate which requires that ethanol be blended with gasoline at the pump or waiving the RFS. This would eliminate the millions of dollars in waivers which refineries are required to purchase because there is no cellulosic ethanol production, thereby decreasing the price of gasoline.”
“The 2012 RFS for cellulosic ethanol is 8.65 million gallons. Cellulosic ethanol production through August 2012 has been only 20,069 gallons, a shortage of 8.63 million gallons requiring $0.78 per gallon waivers.”
An essential truth that few Americans are aware of is that “The price of U.S. oil is always lower than the price of foreign oil. Last year, U.S. oil averaged $95.73 per barrel, $7.25 cheaper than foreign oil imports at $102.98 per barrel. If U.S. oil replaced the 3,261 barrels of foreign oil imports, it would be a savings to Americans of $23.6 billion annually.”
Given the enormous oil reserves in America, both domestic and offshore, there is no reason why they should not be extracted, but the environmental movement in combination with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior and Energy Departments, has restricted access to our own oil.
The ethanol mandates are not just robbing Americans at the gas pump, they are endangering the cost of food prices worldwide
Current government energy policies are a definition of insanity.
© Alan Caruba, 2012