Domestic Policy: August 2008 Archives

Whatever happened to Global Warming??

The first half of 2008 was the coolest for at least five years, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday.

The whole year will almost certainly be cooler than recent years, although temperatures remain above the historical average.

Is it any wonder we having to read about this on a UK page? OUR media certainly isn't going to give it any airtime.

JASmius asks: Perhaps Fat Albert has been battling laryngitis of late?  Or has my reputation for aiding and abetting prophecy dissemination begun to grow logarithmically?

Prices at the pump are at a record high and Americans, feeling the pinch, are rightly demanding that Congress act.

TELL YOUR MEMBERS TO TAKE ACTION ON HIGH ENERGY PRICES!

Indeed, the American people know full well that the Congressional leadership's unwillingness to lift the ban on increasing domestic energy is the main reason energy prices are so high.

But despite all the rhetoric about reducing prices at the pump and increasing our nation's energy security, lawmakers have contributed to the problem by refusing to give U.S. companies access to vast amounts of untapped energy reserves here in the United States, including in coastal waters.

Some in Congress are open to the idea of increased access to energy. However, some drilling proposals in Washington have included new taxes on energy, an approach that absolutely won't work. Increasing taxes on U.S. energy companies is counterproductive to increasing our energy security and supply. If passed, such proposals would be disastrous for our domestic energy production.

With soaring prices and ever-increasing demand, it is time for Congress to heed the calls of the American people and take action to allow access to our nation's untapped resources, without the burden of increasing taxes.

Send a free personalized letter to your Members in Congress letting them know that the status quo is not acceptable. Demand they vote on increasing domestic energy supplies now!

Speaker Pelosi and others in Congress who won't allow offshore drilling to be brought to a vote are out of step with their peers and out of touch with the American people.

CONTACT YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS NOW!

Send a free personalized e-mail to your Congressional Representatives RIGHT NOW! Tell them to urge Speaker Pelosi to listen to the voters and let Congress take action on expanded offshore drilling before it's too late.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Mazzella
President
Center for Individual Freedom

Nothing spoils a good hoax like a sudden deluge of reality (via Newsmax Insider):

Only one in four Americans believes global warming is the biggest environmental challenge facing the world, a new poll reveals.

The ABC News/Planet Green/Stanford University survey found that public concern over the global warming issue has diminished over the past year.

Fewer than half of the poll’s respondents, 47%, think global warming is an important issue to them personally, down from 52% in April 2007.

While 80% believe Earth is warming, that figure is down four percentage points from last year.

Doubts over the science behind the global warming issue still linger in people's minds, according to the poll results reported by the National Journal. Just 30% of respondents said they trust what scientists have to say about the environment "completely" or "a lot," 39% said they trust them "a moderate amount," and 30% said they do not trust them.

Also, nearly 60% of respondents said there is "a lot of disagreement" within the scientific community as to how dangerous climate change is.

According to ABC News' Gary Langer, the diminished concern over global warming coincides with decreased media attention to climate change, in favor of the election and economy. "A database search finds 50% fewer news stories on global warming in the month before this poll was conducted, compared with the month before last year's survey," Langer wrote.

In any case, about seven in ten respondents said they're attempting to reduce their energy consumption by driving less, using less electricity and recycling.

But 63% are in favor of drilling for oil in coastal waters where it is currently not allowed, and 55% support drilling in U.S. wilderness areas where it is not allowed.

It's easy to indulge in all that "go green" nonsense when it doesn't cost you anything, or when that cost is not visible.  The global warming hysteria has always been a lot like a disaster movie.  Like Independence Day, in which viewers got to watch New York City and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and Houston laid waste, and landmarks like the Empire State Building, the White House, and the U.S. Capitol obliterated.  It was a lot of rip-roaring, rollicking fun precisely because it wasn't real.  Five years later when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were demolished for real, the entertainment value mysteriously plummeted.

The climate change crusade was similarly feel-good-esque in the thought that by using a big-ass recycling bin and driving a roller skate and eschewing back yard barbeques, you were doing your part to "save the planet".  You really weren't doing any such thing, because the mere existence of our modern civilization is not a "threat" to the planet, its ecology, or anything else, and even if it was, meaninglessly gauzy gesture-making would have no impact one way or the other.  But it built our self-esteem somehow, and as long as it didn't impact our everyday lives, it was a harmless ego-stroke.

This summer's camel's back-breaking gas price straw changed that equation.  Drastically.  The ecozealots' chickens finally came home to roost.  People are all very-very and to-to about being "green" and all, but not if it means we have to fork over fifty bucks every fill-up even if we're already driving roller skates.  And the quickest way to lose all that environmental goodwill is for greenstremists to get in our faces, thump two fingers in our chest, and tell us we've got to pay even more for gas unless we follow their instructions and be docilely herded into public transit or onto bicycles or behind the wheel of hamster-powered hybrids, freeze in the winter and swelter in the summer "for our own good".  Oh, yes, and be taxed to death to fund all these pie-in-the-sky "renewable alternatives" the damned charlatans have promised for a generation that have never panned out and never will.

Perhaps this helps explain the stunning revival of GOP courage, and even aggressiveness:

Republicans lambasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) energy plan Saturday advising her to “get out of the way” if she was not going to accept GOP solutions to the energy crisis.

In her Saturday radio address Pelosi announced that Democrats would consider opening up parts of the outer continental shelf for drilling as a part of a broad new energy plan that will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

The Democratic initiative will also seek to release oil from the seven hundred million barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve, require oil companies to pay billions of dollars Democrats believe they owe to invest in clean energy resources, increase the use natural gas and create a federal Renewable Electricity Standard.

The panic of Pelosi's Politburo continues to balloon.  They can't hide from the doctrinaire absolutism of their greenstremist wing, they can't hide the disastrous economic consequences from an arroused public that is now wise to them, and they can't bluff or bully the minority party that recognizes a Godsend wedge issue when it sees one and smells blood.

How much has the political momentum shifted inside the Beltway?  Senator "I'd sooner drill in the Grand Canyon than in ANWR" is even coming around, and implicitly leaning on the Senate's "gang of ten" to follow his lead:

In late June, McCain told voters in Missouri and Minnesota that he was open to receiving new information about exploration on Alaska’s coastal plain, but noted: “I certainly haven’t changed my position.”

In an interview with the Weekly Standard aboard his campaign plane last week, McCain made clear he has not ruled out a change in his position – to one that endorses drilling in ANWR. “I continue to examine it,” he said. So does his staff. McCain’s campaign has been quietly studying the ANWR issue and discussing the potential consequences – good and bad – of a policy change.

But in our conversation on August 13, McCain added a new wrinkle. When I asked him if he had consulted [Alaska Governor Sarah] Palin about ANWR, he said that he had not yet done so. He added, “I probably should,” he said. “I will.”

So I called Palin to ask what McCain can expect to hear. The answer is that Palin, who has been mentioned as a possible McCain running mate but has not been vetted, will make a straightforward case for drilling in ANWR. She says McCain’s willingness to take another look at ANWR is “very encouraging.”

If the King of Comitous Compromise is signaling a willingness to take another look at ANWR drilling, especially given his new role as titular head of the GOP, that cannot help but have an impact on the GOP side of the Senate compromisers.  Pulling the Republican contingents on both sides of the Capitol away from frittering away the vast potential political gains of standing with the huge majorities of the public who now favor unfettered domestic energy exploration can only tighten the Dems' self-braided noose tighter around their pencil-necks.  Throw in war in the Caucasus, the return of the Cold War, and its oil-related implications on top of the national security aspects, and the Donks are thrown into full-scale disarray with no place to retreat to.

If they retain the most tenuous link with reality, the majority will "get out of the way," try and salvage control of Congress, and survive to "shut down the dynamo" another day.  But will what even Donk pollster John Zogby is calling Dems' "cockiness," much less their ill-concealed radicalism, allow such consideration of the bigger picture?

Yes, that is a rhetorical question.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, if he was capable of encapsulation, would say it in one word: fear:

August is here and it's a time each year when many American families go on vacation. But if you're like many Americans, you're crunching the numbers and realizing this year's vacation won't be like recent years past. The cost of gasoline and its spillover effect on the price of food -- and, well, everything else -- has left your family with less money to spend. That's why over half of Americans are reconsidering taking vacation this summer to save money.

Incredibly, despite so many Americans skipping vacation this summer because of the high cost of gas, Congress left for a 5-week paid vacation without doing anything to address the soaring cost of gas and diesel. This inaction is unacceptable to the American people, many of whom can't afford a vacation this year.

There's one way you can fight back and send a message to Washington:  Join more than 1.4 million Republicans, Democrats, and independents who have already signed the "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" petition. This simple idea will allow us to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, lower our gas prices, and prevent our hard earned dollars from funding countries lead by radical dictators.  You can sign the petition by clicking here.

Since American Solutions started the petition drive two months ago, President Bush lifted an 18 year-old executive ban on offshore drilling. Congress will now be forced to decide whether they want to renew the ban against domestic drilling, which is set to expire on October 1. If we stand together, Congress won’t  be able to ignore the will of the American people.

Our new goal is to collect two million signatures to present to the Republican and Democratic Conventions at the end of August, which will force Congress to take action on this critical issue. Please join the millions of Americans united to demand action from Congress by signing the "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" petition by clicking here.

Your friend,

Newt Gingrich
General Chairman
American Solution

Congressional Donks are scared.  They're scared of their environutter base; they're scared of facing an electorate angered at their callous indifference to the inflationary energy costs they have inflicted on it through their slavish obeisance to the aforementioned environutters; they're scared of being caught in the middle with no real way out other than what the Republicans stupidly allow them.

And right now it doesn't look like GOPers are going to oblige:

“Republicans will not rest until we have an honest, up-or-down vote on the American Energy Act,” Boehner wrote in the memo written by Republican leaders. “To that end, we request that you contact the Whip’s Office and indicate any time you may have available to come to Capitol in the coming weeks. We specifically request that you indicate your availability for any days during the next two weeks, August 11th through 22nd, as soon as possible.”

Republicans began their protest on Friday, as the House went into its August recess. Through a handful of members, Republicans have been able to continue rounds of speeches on the House floor ever since. 

The plan now seems to be to continue taking to the House floor every weekday until at least the start of the Democratic Convention, which kicks off on August 25.

On the Senate side, future Majority Leader Jim DeMint (R-SC) has thrown down the gauntlet and, along with Representative Jeb Hensarling, is counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds to Energy Freedom Day:

Follow the link.  Sign the petition.  Vote the environutter bitches out, and put the grown-ups back in.

Strike a blow against the REAL "culture of corruption":

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently called congressional Republicans who want up-or-down drilling votes “hand maidens of the oil companies.” Let’s call Pelosi what she is: House [whore] of the Big Wind [pimps].

Though she seemingly backtracked on labeling drilling a “hoax” this week, Pelosi refuses to consider GOP energy proposals that don’t include massive government subsidies for so-called eco-alternatives that have never panned out.

Which brings us to Madame Speaker’s 2007 financial disclosure form. Schedule III lists “Assets and ‘Unearned Income’” of between $100,001-$250,000 from Clean Energy Fuels Corp. — Public Common Stock. Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (CLNE) is a natural gas provider founded by T. Boone Pickens. Yep, that T. Boone Pickens — former oilman turned wind-power evangelist whose ads touting a national wind campaign are now as ubiquitous as Viagra promos.

Needless to say, wind is not a "source" of energy.  Nor is it "renewable," because until somebody invents weather control technology - which I'll wager will require a whole lot energy to operate - we cannot generate wind other than the metaphorical variety so emblematic on Capitol Hill.  Which means that when there's no wind, there's no energy, and in order to turn the windmill blades, energy has to be used that is generated from a dependable - which is to say, fossil fuel-based - source.  And that's not "clean," dontcha know.

Double-M hilariously explains why windmills are such an appropriate symbol of Donk anti-energy policy:

Fittingly, the environmental mascot of the Democratic National Convention — the showcase of their alternative energy approach — is an eastern Colorado wind turbine propped up with Democratic carbon-credit funds that has never produced any substantial energy because of its chronic equipment malfunctions.

So if wind "power" is the ultimate dry well, just how does ol' T-Bone possibly think he's going to turn a profit from this boondoggle?

Do you really have to ask?:

Naturally, the Pickens Big Wind plan is proudly endorsed by Do-Nothing Pelosi’s friends at the obstructionist Sierra Club. Through another company, Mesa Power, Pickens has committed upward of $12 billion in wind farms on the Texas panhandle. CLNE and Mesa Power are separate entities, but what benefits one piece of the Pickens puzzle benefits them all. The wind venture, as Pickens himself acknowledges, depends on permanent federal subsidies. [emphases added]

And guess who has a big, fat, personal financial stake in making sure he gets those permanent federal subsidies, which genuine energy freedom would render superfluous?  So much for "saving the planet" and malevolent classist crusading against "Big Oil"; Granny McBotox just wants to line her purse, like everybody else; but she doesn't want to do it honestly, via the free market, but by sucking it out of the back pockets of thee and me, like every other greedy Democrat.

As recently as two months ago, I would not have believed it, but Senator DeMint is right - the Democrats ARE overconfident.  Perhaps "vacation" is a concept that the vulnerable members of Speakerette Funbags' caucus had better be getting used to.

NRO has some sound advice for congressional Republicans if they want to both do what's best for American consumers and businesses being bled by runaway energy prices and benefit politically from a Godsend of a wedge issue in the November election: screw compromise!:

The latest half-baked idea comes from a “gang of ten” senators — five Republicans, five Democrats — who have offered a compromise that would lift the ban on offshore drilling in exchange for $20 billion in new federal spending on alternative sources of energy. The list — ag-friendly guys like Saxby Chambliss and Kent Conrad, corn-staters like Ben Nelson and John Thune — smells of ethanol. The compromise bill includes $2.5 billion for biofuel research and billions more in incentives for automakers to make cars with ethanol-burning engines. There might be a smart way for Washington to subsidize research into alternative energy, but this isn’t it.

There is a simpler solution. The congressional ban on drilling has to be renewed each year, and the current ban expires in September, so congressional Republicans and President Bush should fight to stop the ban’s renewal. The Democrats are backpedaling like mad. Their presidential candidate doesn’t have a coherent position and has resorted to Carter-esque lectures on energy conservation. Meanwhile, the speaker of the House is telling vulnerable members of her caucus to support lifting the ban.

The Democrats find themselves on the wrong side of the most important issue to Americans right now. Now is not the time for a compromise. It’s time to keep applying pressure.

That counsel was offered two days ago.  This Senate GOP video came out today.  It doesn't sound to me like Republican senators are paying attention:

Beats me what pre-emptively offering the Dems most, of their energy agenda is supposed to get us.  To my ideological ear it sounds like the minority mentality in action.  As if the GOP side of this "gang of ten" doesn't realize just how over a barrel they have the Dems on this issue and just assumes that they've got to make a bunch of concessions to even get their "colleagues" to come to the table.  And, yes, they reek of ethanol - which inflates food prices, if anybody is keeping score at home.

But ask yourself one question: if gas prices hadn't gone through the roof this summer, would coughing up twenty-five billion dollars in "alternative" energy pork persuade the Dems to lift the congressional drilling ban one jot or tittle?  Or would the majority be gleefully bulldozing through many times that much, with these same sadsack 'Pubbies me-tooing right along in their wake?

We have finally arrived at the day of reckoning for a generation of the Left's environmental extremism.  The same public that has been brainwashed into believing that "going green" is undiluted virtuosity is now seeing the heretofore secret price tag attached to it, and is figuring out the swindle.  They've been played for suckers by utopianist authoritarian radicals, and they're pushing back.

Better late than never - especially as without a tearing down of the Dems' anti-energy wall, the problem will only get worse:

A “supply crunch” will affect the world market within the next five to ten years, the Chatham House report said.

While there is plenty of oil in the ground, companies and governments were failing to invest enough to ensure production, it added.

Only a collapse in demand can stave off the looming crisis, report author Professor Paul Stevens said.

“In reality, the only possibility of avoiding such a crunch appears to be if a major recession reduces demand - and even then such an outcome may only postpone the problem,” he said in The Coming Oil Supply Crunch.

You think $4.30 per gallon for unleaded regular, borne of $147 a barrel oil at its recent peak is outrageous?  Try two hundred bucks a barrel and six bucks a gallon while the Light-Bringer's dry-well "alternative" energy promises pied-piperize us down the road to permanent depression and economic collectivization, to say nothing of the national security implications and the fact that so many tires will blow out from over-inflation that Obama will have to nationalize Firestone, Goodyear, and Les Schwab just to keep the "middle class" whole.

Republicans are the political beneficiaries of this tempest by default.  They do themselves no favors by pursuing any course that mitigates the heat on their foes in the slightest, or enables the Donks to steal credit for letting the drilling ban lapse, sneak past the election, and then reimpose it as a rider slipped into some other typical mammoth omnibus legislation next year in the middle of the night when (they hope) nobody is looking.

One compromises when one is in a position of weakness.  When one has the upper hand, one goes for the jugular.

Dem throats are exposed.  The time for an elephant stampede is now.

There's immigration enforcement....:

A report released yesterday by a Washington think tank that advocates stricter limits on immigration says the number of illegal immigrants in the country appears to have declined significantly over the past year, at least partly because of the chilling [heh] effect of stepped-up enforcement.

The study by the Center for Immigration Studies based its findings on census data that indicate that the number of less-educated, working-age Hispanic immigrants, defined as 18-to-40-year-olds with a high school diploma or less, has dropped by more than 10%, or about 830,000 people, since last August.

Previous research suggests that a large share of less-educated foreigners is in the country illegally and that it makes up the bulk of the illegal immigrant population. Furthermore, although earlier declines in the number of these Hispanic immigrants have been linked to a rise in their unemployment rate, the current drop-off began last year almost immediately after Congress abandoned legislation to legalize undocumented immigrants and six months before any significant rise in their unemployment rate had occurred.

During the same period, the number of foreigners who were more educated or non-Hispanic, and therefore far less likely to be illegal immigrants, continued to rise or hold steady.

"Since last August" would be right after the most recent attempt by the border erasure crowd - led by John Sith McCain, I'll remind you - to force another "shamnesty" down the public's collective throat.  Which, of course, gives the lie to their stubborn claim that we can't stop or reverse illegal immigration, can't repel Mexico's passive invasion of the United States, so we have to run up the white flag of amnesty and capitulate - again.

Perhaps the exposure of that lie was not lost on the other side of the border, which may help explain a different kind of "immigration enforcement":

Mexican troops crossed the border into Arizona and held a U.S. Border Patrol agent at gunpoint on Sunday, according to a published report.

Agents assigned to the Border Patrol at Ajo, Arizona, said the Mexican soldiers crossed the border into an isolated area southwest of Tucson and pointed rifles at the agent, who has not been identified.

The Mexicans withdrew after other American agents arrived on the scene, the Washington Times reports.

It’s not known why the troops crossed the border, but American law enforcement authorities have said that current and former Mexican soldiers have been hired to protect drug and immigrant smugglers.

And as the piece goes on to elaborate, neither the U.S. or Mexican governments appear to give a damn.

Mexico's indifference I can understand, since they benefit from sloshing their underclass into our "safety net".  Ours is simply unconscionable short-sightedness.

But if a trend back toward border control and a tighter - or at least choosier - immigration policy were to take hold in the Beltway, these "innocent incursions" may become a lot less "isolated".

You can just see that becoming the new rallying cry....of the open borders zealots.  "Peace with Mexico now!  No war for selfishness and nativism!"

Heck, that could be the grounds for an Obama-McCain fusion ticket....

What do you do when you are running for the office of president of the United States and are basing your entire candidacy on an impossible scam?  When you are expecting to con the American people into voting for you based upon the "historic" nature of your campaign as the first African American to have a bona fide chance to attain the nation's highest office?  When you believe that you can skate your stratospheric hauteur, empty resume, and Marxist/Leninist/racist ideological upbringing courtesy of mentors like Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, Bernadette Dohn, et al past the electorate behind a fog of "hopeandchange" gobbledygook, an alleged personal charisma, and an avalanche of rock-star treatment-cum-in-kind campaign contributions from the "tingling" Enemy Media?

You do what Barack Hussein Obama has done over the past five months: gaffe and flip-flop your way all over the national stage; with each self-diminishment grow more boorish, classistly insulting, and racially overbearing; and embrace your inner Bolshevik tighter and tighter.

The latter has manifested itself no more gapingly than on energy policy.  Politico summed it up thusly:

The three main components of Obama’s plan are:

— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads within six years.

— Require that 10% of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term – more than double the current level.

—Reduce U.S. demand for electricity 15% by 2020.

Perhaps BO can get a million plug-in hybrids, with the big-ass trunks they'll need welded onto them to hold the hundreds of miles of extension cord that'll have to come with them, on American streets by 2014, provided he plans to subsidize a like number of tow-trucks to subsequently remove the ludicrous hulks when they block and gum up real traffic.  But if he means actually getting people to purchase and drive them, he might have a bigger challenge than he imagines.

Ditto the 10% "renewable" energy requirement.  There's a reason, after all, why renewables only account for 4% of our energy sources, and it's not Big Oil conspiracism.  Solar and wind and geothermal and "synthetic" fuels simply are not efficient, affordable, or practical enough for mass use, or they would ALREADY be in mass use.  It's like trying to milk a bull - in the end you won't get any milk and....well, you might make a happy bull temporarily, but eventually he'll get annoyed.  Plus, of course, those "renewable" sources are even less practical for transportation purposes, which is why Lucifer wants to force us all out of our cars and onto bicycles, crazy cars, and hippety-hops.

In practice this will not mean more energy from "renewables," but huge restrictions on the use of fossil fuels (and nuclear) in order to make the numbers come out.  Now one would think that such restrictions would have a dire impact upon the American economy, plunging it into a more or less permanent recession.  Which helps explain that third bullet point of cutting American electricity demand by 15% in the next twelve years.  He casts that one in the context of "energy efficiency," but in any kind of practical terms it would take little short of a self-inflicted economic collapse to impact power useage THAT much - all the more so when you remember the million plug-in hybrids the Chosen One wants on the road in half that time.  I'm guessing that increasing demand for hamsters and hamster wheels is the unspoken fourth Obama energy policy plank, as I don't see where else the juice will be coming from.

Obama unveiled this crazy Bolshevist plot on Monday.  On Tuesday he continued to tout it, and even cited California as his shining example of what American energy policy should look like.

Does he, or anybody in his organization, have the slightest recognition of what life in California was like under that sort of policy?  Ensign Ed does:

Let’s emulate California?  First, California didn’t cut their demand; they only kept it from increasing.  Next, people may remember how well California’s energy policy worked over the last two decades.  The aging infrastructure, price mandates, and botched privatization led the state into years of rolling blackouts, where utilities simply cut off supply in order to compensate for an inability to meet demand.  Governor Gray Davis got recalled from office over the issue, but the blackouts continued for years afterward. [emphasis added]

That last little detail is why I find it beyond astonishing that the Golden Child is openly championing such destructive nonsense.  Really, has he lost his mind?  I don't know what it would take to cause a Democrat to lose California's fifty-five Electoral Votes, but telling them that you're going to take the disastrous energy policy that was inflicted on them as recently as five years ago and force it on the nation at large might just do the trick.  This isn't like the parallels to Jimmy Carter, which was, after all, thirty years ago and not within the living memory of any voter much under the age of forty-five.  We're talking about THIS DECADE; Gray Davis was sacked only five years ago.  Or is Barack Hussein Obama's arrogance erecting such a thicket of conceit around him that it is convincing him that he can sell the American public - which, on balance, is considerably to the right of the denizens of the not-so-Golden State - on a permanent energy crisis that even the latter rejected?

Amazingly, the answer appears to be "yes":

The man who made the absurd claim that timely tuneups and proper tire inflation could, by his own implication, save twelve million barrels of oil a day (our current rate of oil importation which could easily be covered by drilling in Alaska, on the outer continental shelves, and tapping the vast oil shale deposits in the Mountain West) calls the rest of us "ignorant" for ridiculing his ridiculous assertion, on the dishonest grounds that we're claiming it wouldn't save any gasoline at all.  There's a guy who has lost his last thin, tenuous remnant of public relations acuity with the citizenry not yet herded by main force into Obamanation.

His latest campaign ad is a little more circumspect (which is to say, dishonest) about it, but not by much:

That "thousand dollar tax cut" is nothing of the kind, but rather a hand-out directly confiscated from energy industry profits he deems "excessive".  Profits that could be reinvested in energy exploration and R&D if the federal government would scrap its greenstremist prohibitions against developing our REAL domestic energy resources.  Which, of course, False Messiah has no intention of doing.

I'll let Mr. Morrissey deliver the coup de grace:

This sounds like a Luddite philosophy, an energy-hostile policy regardless of its source or its benefits.  Obama wants America to live in a shortage economy, where we become ever more dependent on government to ration energy and in which our standard of living decreases year after year.  Obama talks about Hope, but he’s really selling Despair … and it has started to lose whatever luster it ever had as his energy policies come more into focus.

I'll ask the question again: Is a majority of the American electorate REALLY going to vote for this babbling Bolshevik?

As Jim covered so well below, the Republicans in the House are finally showing some backbone, spirit, and LEADERSHIP. I have enjoyed watching this immensely. I have enjoyed watching Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats reveal for all the world to see their true agenda...keep the gas prices high, no matter how much it hurts all those "working families" they pretend to care about. Keep the prices high until the election in order to hurt the Republicans and gain more power for the Democrats. That's it in a nutshell.

Here's Rush's take. Michelle Malkin also has a good wrapup. Mike Pence is my congressman, and I'll be darned sure to send him an email to support the Republicans' efforts in this, as well as all the others who are there doing their jobs. I encourage all of you to do the same. They need to know we're behind them. This is a winning issue for Republicans, because it's what the American people know is the right thing to do. Drill here, drill now, pay less!

When I referred to Barack Hussein Obama as "Jimmy Carter's spritual son" a year ago, even I had no idea just how prescient a christening that was.  Because if there's any of those guys on the Federal Reserve notes (no, he's not on any of them - not yet, anyway - but work with me here....) that BO resembles, it's Jimmy Carter.

In, um, spades:

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on Friday announced an “Emergency Economic Plan” that would give families a stimulus check of $1,000 each, funded in part by what his presidential campaign calls “windfall profits from Big Oil.”

Details are in this six-page policy paper.

The first part of Obama’s plan is an emergency energy rebate ($500 to individual workers, $1,000 to families) as soon as this fall.

“This rebate will be enough to offset the increased cost of gas for a working family over the next four months,” Obama said. “Or, if you live in a state where it gets very cold in the winter, it will be enough to cover the entire increase in your heating bills. Or you could use the rebate for any of your other bills or even to pay down debt[."]

You know, I've never liked the term "economic plan."  That's the term invariably applied to any candidate's economic policy platform - "economic plan."  The reason why should be obvious to even the most casual follower of politics: it's socialist nomenclature.  Central, top-down "economic planning" by the state IS socialism.  Casting any economic policy in those terms is loaded mislabeling by definition.  It stacks the propaganda deck against any non-socialist because any policy that doesn't purport to benefit "the poor" - or the "new poor," aka the "middle class" - at the expense of "the rich" and "corporations" is, ipso facto, "special interest-driven" at "the expense of" the "middle class."

True to form, Obamanomics doesn't disappoint.  It combines Jimmy Carter's blatant robbery of the energy industry....

[T]he windfall profits tax was forecasted to raise more than $320 billion between 1980 and 1989. However, according to the CRS, the government collected only $80 billion in gross tax revenue ($146 billion in 2004 dollars). The net amount was actually less than this—roughly $40 billion — because the tax was deductible against corporate income.

CRS also found the windfall profits tax had the effect of decreasing domestic production by 3 percent to 6 percent, thereby increasing American dependence on foreign oil sources by 8 percent to 16 percent. A side effect was declining, not increasing, tax collections. Figure 1 clearly shows that while the tax raised considerable revenue in the initial years following its enactment, those revenues declined to almost nothing as the domestic industry collapsed.

The 1980 windfall profits tax was also found to be highly burdensome for the industry to comply with and for the Internal Revenue Service to administer, especially in years when no revenue was raised. It seems unlikely that a new tax could be designed in a less burdensome fashion. Tax Foundation economists estimate that U.S. companies currently spend nearly $150 billion annually to comply with the federal income tax alone. Enacting a new windfall profits tax would add an additional layer of complexity to the federal tax system.

....with George McGovern's bad check writing.  Indeed, it robs "Big Oil" of the R&D funds with which it would otherwise pursue domestic energy exploration and development of alternative energy sources, which will rob the "wealthy," "middle class," AND "poor" of far more than just one lousy check for a lousy thousand bucks - which we already got once this year already, for all the frickin' good it did anybody - through driving energy prices even higher and slamming their 401(k) accounts, through which the large and ever-growing investor class - aka We, The People - have invested in, yes, the energy sector, among others.

If economics were information technology, Lucifer could be the caveman in the Geico auto insurance commercials.  This "emergency economic" scheme is laughable even as populist claptrap.  The energy policy train left the station a long time ago.  People know why gas prices are through the roof: three decades of Democrat environmental extremism cutting off any and all domestic supplies from domestic exploration and domestic use.  They want to drill here, and drill NOW - which would, if anything, seem to be the REAL "emergency" - and no amount of hyperventilating will distract from what a profound insult to the public's collective intelligence this Carteroid nonsense truly is. 

Which, of course, provides hilarious context for the Chosen One's endorsement of "carefully circumscribed" off-shore drilling that he issued only six hours later.  And about which, of course, he is just as sincere as he is about anything [*AHEM*].  Does this mean that Bright Morning Star isn't the "Obama Hood" at Friday dinner that we thought he was at Friday lunch?

But wait, hold on a second, I've got to stop myself before I go any further.  I'm really not being fair here - to Jimmy Carter, that is.  There's more to Obamanomics than just stealing from everybody and pissing away the booty; he wants to make sure we're stripped of the ability to accumulate any wealth to begin with:

Obama refers to “big oil” and the need to reduce our use of oil by 35% over the next twenty years.

How do we get there?  Keep inflating those tires, folks:

• Increase Fuel Economy Standards
• Invest in Developing Advanced Vehicles
• Build Biofuel Distribution Infrastructure
• Build More Livable and Sustainable Communities

Read this as mandates, mandates, mandates, all to avoid drilling for abundant resources we have at our disposal.  Obama’s plan assumes that car manufacturers need government direction to build cars that will get 250 mpg, and that government should “plan” communities so that people don’t [i.e. are forbidden to] drive themselves to work.  It relies heavily on the biofuel concept....even while current government subsidies drive food prices to the point where people now starve.

....Obama wants to sink a fortune into expanding public transportation, top-down community planning, and remove the need for automobiles. [emphasis added]

Whether we like it or not.  And to think that even I thought at times that my reference to public transit as "herding the people into cattlecars" was hyperbole.

I don't know what else you can call this, straight from Heaven's Gate itself:

Over the longer term, we know that the amount of fuel we will use is directly related to our land use decisions and development patterns, much of which have been organized around the principle of cheap gasoline.

....which His Eminence is determined to deny us - for our own "good," as he defines it:

Barack Obama believes that we must move beyond our simple fixation of investing so many of our transportation dollars in serving drivers and that we must make more investments that make it easier for us to walk, bicycle and access other transportation alternatives. [emphases added]

We "must" make the "investments" HE decrees are "best" for us.  We "must" be herded onto public transit buses and "light rail" commuter choo-choos and forced out of our cars, which will be easy since he'll make sure the auto industry is destroyed by so loading it down with regulations and mandates that no family will be able to afford to own a car, let alone keep its gas tank full.  Which will "make it easier" for us to "walk" and "ride bicycles" to work, which will be so practical in a continental nation where the average commute from the suburbs and exurbs is - what - ten, fifteen, twenty miles each way daily?  My commute to my last place of employment was forty-six miles each way; yeah, I had to wade through gridlock every day, but it's not like I could have hopped on a pogo stick and gotten there any faster.

But let's look beyond commuting.  What about family vacations?  Holiday travel?  Sunday afternoon drives for the hell of it?  Isn't the automobile one of the quintessentially American expressions of rugged individuality?  Who the bleep is Barack Obama to tell me I have to put on a government-mandated brain dish and climb on my unicycle hybrid and row myself to church every Sunday?

And guess what?  Most, if not all, Americans feel the same way.  And guess what else?  That's why transportation policy, to the extend that it isn't an appalling waste of resources to begin, middle, and end with, is tailored to "serving drivers".  THAT'S THE TRANSPORTATION MARKET AS IT IS.  You don't serve a market by trying to dictate to your customers what products they're going to "buy" from you; you serve a market by selling them the products they want.

But not in Obamerica.  He doesn't believe in markets; he believes in himself.  He's GOD, after all, and it's not our place to question his "divine" wisdom.

Do not be afraid, though; remember the Obama dynamic: he puts out the Marxist drivel in which he really believes; it triggers a firestorm of outrage and public indignation and pushback; then he retreats, flip-flops, and declares that he never said it, and when you play the clips proving he did, that's proof that you're a racist.

Just ask John Sith McCain, the "tool" of "Big Oil":

As opposed to Barack Obama, the tool of "Big Green".

Or just plain "tool".

Is a majority of Americans REALLY going to vote for this puerile pinko?

UPDATE: The Mittster helpfully explains just how big a tool BO really is....

Or perhaps I'm just deferring to El Rushbo on his twentieth anniversary.

The subject is the ongoing lopsided debate over energy policy - Republicans want the American people to have energy from domestic sources, Democrats want to take us several centuries backwards and herd us into mud huts and caves, deriving our heat from campfires and our food from hunting and gathering and scavenging and our transportation from our own two feet.

The Dark Lord of the Sith has scored big on The Light Of The World on this issue, which admittedly was not all that difficult a coup to pull off.  The following was BO's attempt at a rebuttal:

In a nutshell?  Whining and BS.  There's only one "serious solution" to runaway energy prices: get the government out of the way of accessing developing domestic sources of REAL energy.  Drill in ANWR, drill off our coasts, tap the nearly a trillion barrels of oil shale deposits in the mountain West, let a new generation of nuclear plants rip.  And deregulate and de-tax the energy sector so they can pursue the collection and storage technology to make solar energy more than the pipedream it is today.

Once again, Obama makes McCain's point for him.  He offers no real solutions to the energy crisis, but more of the same failed policies that caused it.

And like another haughy Donk pretender before him, Barry just couldn't resist digging himself deeper:

We can cover the twenty million barrels of oil we use daily by inflating our tires and getting regular tuneups?  Wow!  How come nobody ever thought of that before?  Hell, how come Jiffy Lube or Mr. Goodwrench haven't latched onto that - it'd be the greatest advertising boon in television history!

Maybe because the most greater automotive maintenance diligence could possibly save under the most wildly optimistic scenarios is 0.5% to 1.6% of the total.  And that cost savings would be eaten up by the skyrocketing maintenance and health care costs generated by forcing everybody into little Yugo-like tin rollerskates that don't protect their shoehorned drivers from a stiff breeze much less any sort of collision.

Here was the Maharushie's priceless gut reaction:

Hey, he forgot to ask if Obama meant to remind us to wear an extra sweater rather than turn on the car heater when it gets cold.

Can this....

....really make a full comeback?  No matter how "cool" the packaging?