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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70662)	3/30/2009 11:10:48 PM
From: Sully-	2 Recommendations Respond to of 90947

[I]n addition to all the other economic harm, a cap-and- trade tax will make foreign companies more competitive while eroding market share for U.S. businesses. The most harm will accrue to the very U.S. manufacturing and heavy- industry jobs that Democrats and unions claim to want to keep inside the U.S. A cap-and-tax plan would be the greatest outsourcing boon in history. And it may even increase CO2 emissions overall, because the developing nations where businesses are likely to relocate -- if they don't simply close -- tend to use energy less efficiently than does the U.S. Cap and Trade War Team Obama floats a carbon tariff. REVIEW & OUTLOOK The Wall Street Journal One of President Obama's applause lines is that his climate tax policies will create new green jobs "that can't be outsourced." But if that's true, why is his main energy adviser floating a new carbon tariff on imports? Welcome to the coming cap and trade war. Energy Secretary Steven Chu made the protectionist point during an underreported House hearing this month, when he said tariffs and other trade barriers could be used as a "weapon" to force countries like China and India into cutting their own CO2 emissions. "If other countries don't impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage," he said. So a cap-and-trade policy won't be cost-free after all. Apparently Mr. Chu did not get the White House memo about obfuscating the impact of the Administration's anticarbon policies. The Chinese certainly heard Mr. Chu, with Xie Zhenhua, a top economic minister, immediately responding that such a policy would be a "disaster" and "an excuse to impose trade restrictions." Beijing's reaction shows that as a means of coercing international cooperation, climate tariffs are worse than pointless. China and India are never going to endanger their own economic growth -- and the chance to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty -- merely to placate the climate neuroses of affluent Americans in Silicon Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they certainly won't do it under the threat of a tariff ultimatum. But give Mr. Chu credit for candor. He had previously told the New York Times that "The concern about cap and trade in today's economic climate is that a lot of money might flow to developing countries in a way that might not be completely politically sellable." He is admitting that one byproduct of cap and trade is "leakage," by which investment and jobs are driven to nations that have looser or nonexistent climate regimes and therefore lower costs. At greatest risk are carbon-heavy industries such as steel, aluminum, paper, cement and chemicals that are sensitive to trade and where business is won and lost on the basis of pennies per unit of product. But the damage could strike almost any industry when energy prices "necessarily skyrocket," as Mr. Obama put it last year. So in addition to all the other economic harm, a cap-and-trade tax will make foreign companies more competitive while eroding market share for U.S. businesses. The most harm will accrue to the very U.S. manufacturing and heavy-industry jobs that Democrats and unions claim to want to keep inside the U.S. A cap-and-tax plan would be the greatest outsourcing boon in history. And it may even increase CO2 emissions overall, because the developing nations where businesses are likely to relocate -- if they don't simply close -- tend to use energy less efficiently than does the U.S. Meanwhile, carbon trade barriers would almost certainly violate U.S. obligations in the World Trade Organization. Since carbon energy cuts across so many industries, a tariff would presumably have to hit tens of thousands of products. Any restriction the U.S. imposes on imports can also just as easily be turned around and imposed on U.S. exports, whatever their carbon content. Run-of-the-mill protectionism is already adopting a deeper shade of green. In January, the president of the European Commission said he may slap tariffs on goods from the U.S. and other non-Kyoto Protocol nations to protect European business. After Mr. Chu's comments, the U.S. steel lobby began calling for sanctions against Chinese steelmakers if Beijing doesn't commit to its own carbon limits, knowing full well that it won't. Look for more businesses to claim green virtue to justify special-interest pleading, a la the 54-cent U.S. tariff on foreign ethanol. Democrats are already careless about trade -- i.e., the Mexican trucking spat, the "Buy America" provisions in the stimulus, and blocking the Colombia and South Korea free-trade pacts. Now cap and nontrade may lead to a retreat from the open global markets that have done so much to boost economic growth and innovation. The closer we get to the cap-and-trade dreams of Mr. Obama and Congress, the more dangerous they look. online.wsj.com

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70662)	3/30/2009 11:45:03 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Where the Obama budget is leading us Betsy's Page Stephen Moore looks at the looming debt crisis that we will have if the Obama budget goes through. The Obama team is deceiving the public about the size of the debt by using rosy scenarios that Ronald Reagan wouldn't have dreamed of. <<< There are three ways that the Obama administration is understating the spending and debt levels embedded in the president's budget policies. First, Obama uses highly optimistic assumptions on how fast the economy is going to grow and how many jobs are going to be created over the next five years. I've worked in a presidential budget office before. Believe me: If you manipulate the economic assumptions on unemployment and GDP growth, you can make the budget deficit in the future be whatever you want it to be. You can even, as Obama claims to do, magically cut a deficit in half without cutting a single program. From 2010-13, the head of the OMB, Peter Orszag, predicts that the U.S. economy will grow at a 4 percent annual pace, when the blue chip-economic forecast is closer to 2.7 percent. Of the 51 blue chip-economic forecasters, the OMB's forecast is more optimistic than all but two. Liberals used to lampoon Ronald Reagan's budgets--sometimes with merit--for relying on a "rosy economic scenario," but even the Gipper's sunny optimism never led to economic predictions that departed so radically from independent forecasts. It turns out that about 75 percent of the celebrated halving of the deficit that Obama claims in his budget is purely a result of an irrationally exuberant economic model that almost no one believes is very likely. The Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee recalculated the OMB budget deficit assuming the average blue chip-economic forecast. It found that the Obama deficit will be $2.2 trillion higher over ten years. Next is the hard-to-swallow assumption in the budget that all of the new spending in the $800 billion democratic "stimulus" bill that Obama signed in February will expire after 2011. "We are supposed to believe," says Paul Ryan, the ranking House Republican on the Budget Committee, that "Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, Henry Waxman, and Ted Kennedy are going to allow spending for programs ranging from education for disabled kids, to Pell Grants, to Head Start, to child nutrition programs to fall off a cliff two years from now." Not likely. When Ryan asked the Congressional Budget Office what happens if the spending for about two dozen of the most politically popular programs is continued, not cancelled, the CBO reported back that the deficit and federal outlays would be $3.27 trillion higher over the next ten years. Finally, there is the crown jewel of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid domestic agenda: universal health care. This is at the top of the "to do" list of the Obama administration and is unlikely to get pulled back or postponed, as the president made clear in his press conference. Obama has not been specific about what plan he favors or about how much a national health care system will cost, but his budget allocates a $634 billion "placeholder" for that purpose. The consensus opinion, though, is that the lowest possible cost of universal health care is $1.2 trillion, with many estimating closer to $1.5 trillion. So team Obama is off by roughly $600 billion over ten years to cover all of America's uninsured. Obama says he will find ways to reduce health care costs at the same time, and I wish him well, but this is a promise that every president since Jimmy Carter has made and failed to keep. Right now, about 8.5% of our budget goes to servicing the interest on our debt. Under Obama's plans it will skyrocket. >>> It used to be that the looming crisis was that entitlement spending, particularly Medicare and Social Security were going to crowd out all the rest of the spending in the budget. Now they will be fighting with interest on the debt for the biggest chunk of the pie. And where do you think that will leave all the discretionary spending that our politicians would like to do? And how long do you think that China will continue to underwrite our debt? As Mark Steyn writes, <<< Where does the world's hyperpower go to borrow more dough than anyone's ever borrowed in human history? More to the point, given that, partly at the behest of Obama and Geithner, almost every other Western government is ramping up national debt to cover massive bank bailouts and other phony-baloney "stimuli," is there enough money out there to buy up the debt that's already been run up? Last week, at the official British Treasury auction, investors failed to buy the full complement of so-called "gilt-edged" 40-year bonds. Two such auctions have already failed in Germany. The U.S. Treasury, facing similar investor reluctance to snap up $34 billion of five-year notes, was forced to increase the interest it will pay on them. The Chinese and the Saudis have long taken the view that it's to their advantage to own as much of the Western world as they can snaffle up, but it's unclear whether even they have pockets deep enough for what America and the many Bailoutistans of Europe are proposing to spend. >>>> betsyspage.blogspot.com

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70662)	3/31/2009 1:08:49 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Can Obama Ever Nominate Someone Who Isn’t Tainted? By Matt Margolis on Ray Mabus Blogs for Victory Obama may not like wiretapping terrorists to protect his country (he was a vocal opponent to the NSA terrorist surveillance program) but he has no problem nominating someone who secretly taped a conversation between his wife and their priest to use against her in divorce proceedings. <<< President Obama’s nominee for secretary of the Navy was involved in a divorce that drew national attention for his secret taping of a conversation between his wife and his family priest that he used against her in court proceedings. The nominee, Ray Mabus, is a former governor of Mississippi and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and he served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Mr. Mabus, a Democrat, was a strong supporter of Mr. Obama in the campaign last year. In 1998, as Mr. Mabus and his wife, Julie (now Julie Hines), sought to work out their marital problems, he surreptitiously recorded a meeting the couple had with the Rev. Jerry McBride, a mutual friend. >>> So, is Obama surrounded by incompetant people who didn’t know about this, or is Obama just not concerned with someone who violated the privacy another American citizen? According to the White House, they knew. <<< A White House official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations on a personnel matter, said that officials who reviewed Mr. Mabus’s background knew about the messy divorce and did not view it as material to his potential duties as Navy secretary. In response to questions, the White House released a statement Sunday that said, “The president nominated Governor Mabus to be secretary of the Navy because he has the proven leadership and experience our nation needs to serve in this important position.” >>> So I guess Obama condones secreting tapings of conversations of Americans? I guess since Mabus’s wife isn’t a terrorist and wasn’t plotting a terrorist attack it was okay. blogsforvictory.com

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70662)	3/31/2009 6:46:39 AM
From: Brumar89	7 Recommendations Respond to of 90947

Every liberal turns weird. You've shown yourself no exception. Now go off and throw insults at people who peddle stories about Trig Palin being Bristol's kid, who claimed Palin banned books, etc.

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70662)	4/1/2009 6:23:22 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Notice that the point made by this Power Line blog post is essentially the same point made by a majority of mainstream conservatives, including Brumar. So how could anyone not see the blatant hypocrisy by the MSM for what it is? Worse still, how could anyone stoop lower & make baseless claims about conservatives like; "making up a story", "smear campaign" & "peddling it as fact". The only plausible explanation is people who've done that have such a strong emotional attachment to their ideology they've lost the ability to discern the difference between reality & revisionist history. ************** It's nice that our newspapers have decided to respect the privacy of people like a Vice President's children. It would be even nicer if they extended the same courtesy to members of both parties. Privacy? Good Idea! By John Power Line The London Times, anticipating Barack Obama's visit to Europe, writes: <<< The White House was rocked yesterday by claims that the daughter of Joe Biden, the Vice-President, was shown on video snorting cocaine. The video purports to show Ashley Biden, 27, snorting lines of white powder at a house party in her home state of Delaware. It surfaced days after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, declared that the United States shared the blame for Mexico's violent drug wars. "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," Mrs Clinton said on a trip to Mexico. >>> "Rocked"? I don't know. The White House certainly wasn't rocked by anything that appeared in American newspapers, which studiously ignored the story, with the exception of a couple of tabloids. I'm not very interested in Ashley Biden's cocaine use (assuming the woman in the video is in fact Ms. Biden). But then, I wasn't very interested in the Bush twins' underage drinking or the drug-related arrest of Sarah Palin's daughter's boyfriend's mother, either. Yet both were major news stories. Does anyone seriously believe that if there had been a video of Barbara or Jenna Bush snorting cocaine during their father's administration, the press would have refused to write about it? It's nice that our newspapers have decided to respect the privacy of people like a Vice President's children. It would be even nicer if they extended the same courtesy to members of both parties. powerlineblog.com