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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (42575)	4/6/2010 12:28:48 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Environmental Extremists Making Regulatory Policies? by Ross Kaminsky 04/05/2010 Although they were released on April Fools Day, new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations covering vehicle efficiency and water quality standards near mines are no joke. Instead, they are the inevitable outcome when government puts environmental radicals in charge of writing regulations. These unelected bureaucrats, headed by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, have no regard for or understanding of property rights, free markets, or our economy. It’s all about worshiping at the altar of “climate change” and offering penance for America’s high standard of living by attacking industry in the name of “justice”. Ms. Jackson can be viewed in a clip from an EPA video saying that “we’re building our environmental justice team, increasing budget support for their work and seeking new strategies.” Everything the EPA does must be understood within this context: “Environmental justice” is a leftist scheme to justify redistribution of wealth and the resulting regulations are not based on scientific evidence or cost/benefit analysis. The new EPA rule with the greatest nationwide impact is increased vehicle fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards. The EPA for the first time added greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for American cars and trucks. Specifically, the rule requires passenger cars and light-duty trucks to emit no more than 250 grams of carbon per mile driven by 2016. They estimate this translates into an average fleet fuel economy of 35.5 miles per gallon, an enormous increase from the current 27.5 mpg standard. The primary way that auto makers increase fuel efficiency, especially over the short term, is by making cars lighter. As Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said about a prior CAFE standards increase, “Why does CAFE kill? It does so because it constrains the production of larger cars. And in most modes of collision, larger, heavier cars are more protective of their occupants than are small cars.” This National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) study from 2003, shows that “fatality risk in car-to-car crashes increased as car weight decreased, consistent with intuition and most of the literature. “ An earlier study about CAFE standards notes that “the negative relationship between weight and occupant fatality risk is one of the most secure findings in the safety literature.” If you’ve ever held a thin sheet of steel and an equally thin piece of aluminum, you know which is lighter – and which you’d rather have around you for protection. While it’s no surprise that the aluminum industry is “cheering” the new standards, NHTSA’s assessment of the current proposal suggests a “worst case” increase of 493 traffic fatalities per year by 2016. But what’s a few hundred lives each year if they’re martyrs in the progressive jihad for “environmental justice”? The EPA acknowledges that their rules will increase the cost of cars. They say the money will be recovered over several years through fuel savings, but that’s cold comfort to those who will priced out of buying a new car. The new EPA rule regulating auto GHG emissions are based on their fatally flawed “endangerment finding” in which the EPA ruled that CO2 is a pollutant without doing any of their own research. They simply relied on the findings of climate alarmists, most notably the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization putrid with the stench of Climategate, Glaciergate, and multiple other instances of incompetence and corruption. But Lisa Jackson has made it clear that Thursday’s announcements are only the beginning of EPA’s intended regulation of all sources of greenhouse gases. EPA also issued a new rule which is superficially about water quality but its purpose is to attack the coal industry. The rule, which targets a level of water conductivity as a proxy for salinity, is a frontal assault on coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains. The National Mining Association suggests that the policy was made “without the required transparency and opportunity for public comment, is based on “’new science’ that has been found to be both flawed and limited in its findings,” and threatens “employment and economic activity throughout Appalachia.” About 11% of U.S. coal production comes from the surface coal mines targeted by the EPA. Lisa Jackson says that “Appalachian communities shouldn’t have to choose between a healthy environment and jobs.” Putting aside the unproven assumption in her statement that the environment is being made unhealthy, Jackson is really saying that she intends to remove people from the burden of having to decide between earning money to feed their families and having slightly salty streams because she knows just how many microSiemens of conductivity your job is worth. If there is any good news, it is that there is strong bipartisan opposition to the EPA’s new rules, in part because of the damage they do to particular local industries and economies, and in part because if there’s one thing legislators like to guard, it’s their own power. Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) has introduced the “Save Our Energy Jobs Act” which says that “the Environmental Protection Agency should not have the authority to promulgate rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions without being provided explicit authority to do so by Congress.” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) has introduced legislation to “suspend potential EPA regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources for two years.” Rockefeller's stance infuriated progressives, one of whom commented in response to a Washington Post article: “On behalf of the children of the planet, I sure hope Jay Rockefeller dies a sudden, and swift, death.” Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) are supporting a Senate resolution of disapproval to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. And the American Farm Bureau Federation says that “efforts under way in Congress and legal challenges undertaken by state governments (against the new EPA regulations) are offering corrective paths to undo a very real disaster headed toward farm and ranch families.” While legislators battle the EPA over the new regulations, another environment issue is looming that would be even a greater disaster. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), along with Senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.), are pushing a bill to impose a nationwide carbon tax. The EPA’s new rules are simply the Obama Administration’s latest manifestation of putting radicals in charge of rule-making. It’s not about science. It’s not about the economy. It is about progressive domination, of city and state, of body and soul. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ross Kaminsky has been a professional derivatives trader for over 20 years. Ross is a fellow of the Heartland Institute and writes about political economy and current events at Rossputin.com. He also contributes to blogs for the National Taxpayers Union and FreedomWorks among others. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- humanevents.com

To: TimF who wrote (42575)	2/9/2012 11:34:09 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

The Audacity of Obama's Secularism By George Neumayr on 2.7.12 @ 6:10AM God has no rights in a culture dominated by fashionable bigots. The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism's final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the "guts of the last king." Under this spirit, the forces of secularism picked up speed in the 18th and 19th century, went into overdrive in the 20th, and now floor it in the 21st. Barack Obama is the one these revolutionaries have been "waiting for." He is the stealth radical, soft in temperament but hard in thought, who seeks to use religiosity without religion to purge all traces of God from public life. Not wanting to repeat John Kerry's electoral debacle -- which even Nancy Pelosi attributed to the leaden senator's undisguised secularism -- Obama worked hard to con the religious into voting for him in 2008. He "valued" religion, particularly the votes of the religious. On his campaign web page, "people of faith" enjoyed their own special slot, a mere two tabs down from the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community." Obama cast himself as a "post-partisan" politician on matters of the spirit. He found fawning dupes in the religious community to provide him with pulpits and platforms for faux-pensive addresses on his newly conceived "connection between politics and religion." This pretentious throat clearing amounted to nothing more than Alinskyite advice to his fellow Democrats that they exploit religion for secularist and socialist purposes. Vulgar and violent French Revolutionaries paid the Catholic Church the small courtesy of candor. Obama prefers deception and sweet sophistries. But the announcement of his attempt to strangle Catholic schools and hospitals through an HHS contraceptive/abortifacient mandate will make his con job a little more tricky in 2012. Not that he can't pull it off. Democratic strategists have informed the press that they are confident his anti-Catholic bigotry won't threaten his reelection. Obama's Fifth Column within the Church also stands ready to help. The National Catholic Reporter, to take one example, has run a sympathetic editorial about his HHS mandate. And even ostensible opponents of it on the Catholic left and center already reveal the white flag near at hand. In the last few days, they have been blubbering weakly that the issue is not "contraception" -- a subject on which they agree with the president -- but the etiquette of partisan coordination and team play. In other words, the heretical priests and nuns who shilled for Obamacare feel that the president has made them look like old fools by exposing its secularist underbelly for all to see. Obama prides himself on his Aloha-style "tolerance," but it is more like the tolerance of Paris circa 1789. The ideological offspring of Diderot and Alinsky -- the latter called Lucifer the first radical -- Obama seeks to banish orthodox Catholicism from his refashioned America. While he can't throw faithful priests and nuns into prison yet -- not that fellow secularists haven't tried; Richard Dawkins and his pals routinely call for the jailing of Pope Benedict XVI -- Obama seeks to accomplish the same end by different means. By turning her schools and hospitals into conduits for contraceptives and abortifacients, he can neutralize and corrupt the Catholic faith, choking off her last breaths. He once said to coal industry workers: sure, you can keep going but we will "bankrupt" you under a system of global warming regulations. His message to Catholics isn't much different. Sure, practice your faith in public, he tells them in effect through his HHS mandate. But if you do, we will fine and prosecute you. Obama's secularism is like an acid that burns through everything it touches. His poisonous ideology authorizes him not just to "separate church and state" but to dominate church and state. The goal of this control is to secularize everything, including religion itself. Contained within his secularism is a totalitarian seed, which will grow and grow until nothing is a "private" matter. As the hapless executives at the Komen Foundation recently learned--after committing the thought crime of withholding private donations from abortionists--no one is free to leave Obama's Animal Farm. Some pigs on it are more equal than others, and, remember, the secularist Napoleons can never be wrong. Listen carefully enough to Kathleen Sebelius's defense of Obama's raping of religious freedom and one can hear the thuggish voice of totalitarianism. Did you see what she cited as proof of Obamacare's respect for conscience? That the government will refrain from injecting Catholic women with birth control! Wow, what a thoughtful regime. Even one of Stalin's party hacks might have grinned at the crude logic of that one. About the Author George Neumayr is a contributing editor to The American Spectator. spectator.org

To: TimF who wrote (42575)	8/29/2012 11:01:39 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

Why Romney Is Winning on Welfare By Mickey Kaus “Our most effective ad is our welfare ad”–Romney ad strategist: 1) Told you so; 2) It was clear at an Atlantic/National Journal forum in Tampa this morning that the MSM is very proud of itself for abandoning traditional “false balance” and declaring in its own voice that Romney’s ads are wrong. A front page news (not opinion) article in the New York Times simply asserts: The Romney campaign is airing an advertisement falsely charging that Mr. Obama has “quietly announced” plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for welfare beneficiaries … The only trouble with this inspiring reclamation of journalistic manhood is that … Mr. Obama did quietly announce what certainly seemed like plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for many welfare beneficiaries. Bring back false balance. 3) Romney’s ads are overstated and oversimplified–some of them say Obama has ended the work requirement, not that he plans to end it. But they get at a decidedly non-trivial point, which is that Obama’s department of Health and Human Services is undermining at least two aspects of the historic 1996 welfare reform law: a) That recipients should be required to “Work First,” at the best job they can get, rather than be paid to prepare for a better job that may or may not materialize down the line; and b) that we want to get welfare recipients into jobs quickly because that’s the best way to get them out of poverty–but we also want to require work to deter would-be recipients from making the bad choices that would put them onto welfare in the first place. 4) I didn’t think Obama supporters would resort to crudely arguing that talking about welfare is really talking about race–a historic loser complaint for them. I was wrong. Maybe voters suddenly love being told that their concern for a work ethic makes them racist, and that legitimate misgivings about the dole–voiced, in the past, by Bill Moyers and Piven and Cloward, not to mention Bill Clinton–are really a “dog whistle” to bigots. 5) Would a “dog whistle” tactic even make any sense? As John Ellis notes, it can’t be about white working class men–Romney’s already got them in his pocket. The ads are more likely to appeal to disillusioned women who voted for Obama last time–and to anyone who thought the welfare issue had been settled, or who worries more broadly that Obama was not the neoliberal he appeared to be in 2008 (when he ran ads boasting about … slashing the welfare rolls). If there are millions of racists in the electorate, it’s hard to believe they were seriously thinking of voting for Obama until … wait,! the dog whistle! 6) Bill Clinton’s most effective ads were anti-welfare ads–he promised to “end welfare as we know it.” Was he a race-baiter? As noted, Obama ran ads claiming “[h]e passed a law to move people from welfare to work, slashed the rolls by eighty percent.” Was Obama a racist too? Or is the new, MSM-enforced rule that ”one can’t even mention welfare in political advertising any more?” Unless you are praising it, of course. Thank God we got rid of “false balance.” 7) The question of giving cash to able-bodied people regardless of whether they work is a pretty basic values issue, one that transcends race and class.*** Voters traditionally, and appropriately, judge candidates by their values–values being one clue as to how politicians will react to currently unknown problems that arise in the future. Clinton recognized this–he resurrected liberalism’s reputation by answering the question clearly in favor of work. If Obama is now even subtly breaking the Clintonian bargain (after suggesting he wouldn’t), that’s a big deal. The one point on which Romney seems off-key is his charge that Obama approved the waivers in order to “shore up his base.” That would be insane–even if there are large numbers of pro-welfare voters out there, which would be news, they’re almost surely voters Obama has already locked up. Nor did Obama publicize the waiver decision to his base or anyone else. Meanwhile, the waivers risked alienating a far larger group that almost certainly includes the undecided voters Obama desperately needs to get. From a purely political perspective, the waivers were a spectacular screw-up. Essentially, Obama may have lost his presidency to make a few antipoverty bureaucrats at HHS happy. _____ –Even here Romney could argue that Obama’s HHS “ended” the requirement that states require work. But the ad suggests recipients are no longer required to work–something that would only happen if states apply for the waivers and if HHS approves them (as it clearly planned to do in some cases). *– Thomas Edsall approvingly quotes Steven Law, a strategist for the conservative Crossroads USA SuperPac, for the idea that welfare is “more of an economic issue than a values issue” because unemployed workers know there aren’t enough jobs out there (so more people on welfare is just more evidence of the sour Obama economy). But unemployed workers still value the work ethic, and even now may be troubled by the idea that Obama is starting to make lots of permanent exceptions. The HHS officials who approved the waivers gave no indication that they were doing so in response to the high unemployment rate–indeed, some of them were part of the liberal lobby that proposed many of the same exceptions in 2005, when the economy was still growing. It’s a values issue. dailycaller.com