Barack Obama – Who Actually TOLD US He Would Make Electricity Prices ‘Necessarily Skyrocket’ – Has Completely Broken Our Electrical Grid

I’ve been seeing articles about how “vulnerable” our electrical power grid has become to various potential crises.  And we’re finally starting to get to the root CAUSE of the REAL crisis.  In short, it is the “Crisis’-in-Chief” who also goes by the name Barack Hussein Obama.

Note how this article begins by blathering on about “the polar vortex.”  And then see how – by the time the average reader has probably switched his/her brain off – you see the paragraph that says:

The electrical system’s duress was a direct result of the polar vortex, the cold air mass that settled over the nation. But it exposed a more fundamental problem. There is a growing fragility in the U.S. electricity system, experts warn, the result of the shutdown of coal-fired plants, reductions in nuclear power, a shift to more expensive renewable energy and natural gas pipeline constraints. The result is likely to be future price shocks. And they may not be temporary.

So allow me to simply restate the main point: the problem that has caused your electricity bill to soar to never-before-seen heights – and STAY THERE FOREVER – is your stupid decision to elect and then re-elect Barack Obama and a frankly Demonic bureauCrat party (which is what “Democrat” actually stands for).  It was Obama’s dictate – cheered on by worshipful DemoCrats, to bankrupt the coal plants that provided HALF America’s electricity and force them to shut down, to kill nuclear power, to shift to these extravagant and financially ruinous “green” energies so that the rich liberals who bought and invested in these boondoggles could gorge on the pig trough of public money.

I want you to understand before you read the LA Times’ spin: I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN.  I told you it would happen before you elected Obama and said, “I hope they find out about this … before they make the biggest mistake of their lives.”

I pointed out and preserved for the historic record what Obama said:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

“What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

[…]

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

[…]

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.

It’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

That’s what Obama said.  That’s what Obama did.

Obama declared that electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket” under his plan.

Obama said:

When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket…even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gasses, coal power plants, natural gas…you name it…whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retro-fit their operations.

That will cost money…they will pass that money on to the consumers.

Congratulations for voting for his damn plan.

For the record, as this article from a couple of years ago proves, this has been going on.  Obama is and has been at war with American energy and while Obama is powerless, helpless and weak before Putin he is a tyrant when it comes to dictating his domestic agenda.  His war has succeeded.

I pointed out that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.  We have billions of tons of the stuff.  And Obama made it not only useless to America’s national security and economic prosperity but actually a HANDICAP to them.

And now you get to pay for Obama’s ruinous policies.

I’m stating as a FACT that the LA Times is a biased piece of dishonest propaganda.  As an example, when they talk about “the last decade” and begin their dating with “2006” they don’t bother to tell you that that was the year that Democrats – having lied to the American people – took over both the House and the Senate.  Back then, EVERYTHING was George Bush’s fault because he was the president and he was a Republican and NOTHING could be the fault of Nancy Pelosi’s liberal lordship over the House and Harry Reid’s liberal tyranny in the Senate.  And of course now EVERYTHING is the Republican House’s fault and NOTHING is the president’s fault or the still-there Harry Reid’s fault.  The first thing Pelosi and Reid and the Democrats began doing was imposing energy insanity on America – as I documented.  But given that the LA Times is staffed with propagandist liars who spin the news rather than report it, I want you to note that even THESE Goebbels are admitting reality now:

U.S. electricity prices may be going up for good
Experts warn of a growing fragility as coal-fired plants are shut down, nuclear power is reduced and consumers switch to renewable energy.
By Ralph Vartabedian
April 25, 2014, 8:47 p.m.

As temperatures plunged to 16 below zero in Chicago in early January and set record lows across the eastern U.S., electrical system managers implored the public to turn off stoves, dryers and even lights or risk blackouts.

A fifth of all power-generating capacity in a grid serving 60 million people went suddenly offline, as coal piles froze, sensitive electrical equipment went haywire and utility operators had trouble finding enough to keep power plants running. The wholesale price of electricity skyrocketed to nearly $2 per kilowatt hour, more than 40 times the normal rate. The price hikes cascaded quickly down to consumers. Robert Thompson, who lives in the suburbs of Allentown, Pa., got a $1,250 bill for January.

“I thought, how am I going to pay this?” he recalled. “This was going to put us in the poorhouse.”

The bill was reduced to about $750 after Thompson complained, but Susan Martucci, a part-time administrative assistant in Allentown, got no relief on her $654 charge. “It was ridiculous,” she said.

The electrical system’s duress was a direct result of the polar vortex, the cold air mass that settled over the nation. But it exposed a more fundamental problem. There is a growing fragility in the U.S. electricity system, experts warn, the result of the shutdown of coal-fired plants, reductions in nuclear power, a shift to more expensive renewable energy and natural gas pipeline constraints. The result is likely to be future price shocks. And they may not be temporary.

One recent study predicts the cost of electricity in California alone could jump 47% over the next 16 years, in part because of the state’s shift toward more expensive renewable energy.

“We are now in an era of rising electricity prices,” said Philip Moeller, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who said the steady reduction in generating capacity across the nation means that prices are headed up. “If you take enough supply out of the system, the price is going to increase.”

In fact, the price of electricity has already been rising over the last decade, jumping by double digits in many states, even after accounting for inflation. In California, residential electricity prices shot up 30% between 2006 and 2012, adjusted for inflation, according to Energy Department figures. Experts in the state’s energy markets project the price could jump an additional 47% over the next 15 years.

The problems confronting the electricity system are the result of a wide range of forces: new federal regulations on toxic emissions, rules on greenhouse gases, state mandates for renewable power, technical problems at nuclear power plants and unpredictable price trends for natural gas. Even cheap hydro power is declining in some areas, particularly California, owing to the long-lasting drought.

“Everywhere you turn, there are proposals and regulations to make prices go higher,” said Daniel Kish, senior vice president at the Institute for Energy Research. “The trend line is up, up, up. We are going into uncharted territory.”

New emissions rules on mercury, acid gases and other toxics by the Environmental Protection Agency are expected to result in significant losses of the nation’s coal-generated power, historically the largest and cheapest source of electricity. Already, two dozen coal generating units across the country are scheduled for decommissioning. When the regulations go into effect next year, 60 gigawatts of capacity — equivalent to the output of 60 nuclear reactors — will be taken out of the system, according to Energy Department estimates.

Moeller, the federal energy commissioner, warns that these rapid changes are eroding the system’s ability to handle unexpected upsets, such as the polar vortex, and could result in brownouts or even blackouts in some regions as early as next year. He doesn’t argue against the changes, but believes they are being phased in too quickly.

The federal government appears to have underestimated the impact as well. An Environmental Protection Agency analysis in 2011 had asserted that new regulations would cause few coal plant retirements. The forecast on coal plants turned out wrong almost immediately, as utilities decided it wasn’t economical to upgrade their plants and scheduled them for decommissioning.

The lost coal-generating capacity is being replaced largely with cleaner natural gas, but the result is that electricity prices are linked to a fuel that has been far more volatile in price than coal. The price of natural gas now stands at about $4.50 per million BTUs, more expensive than coal. Plans to export massive amounts of liquefied natural gas, the rapid construction of gas-fired power plants and the growing trend to convert the U.S. heavy truck fleet to natural gas could exert even more upward pressure on prices. Malcolm Johnson, a former Shell Oil gas executive who now teaches the Oxford Princeton Program, a private energy training company, said prices could move toward European price levels of $10.

“When those natural gas prices start going up again, we will feel it in the way of higher electricity prices,” warns James Sweeney, a Stanford University energy expert.

The loss of coal is being exacerbated by problems at the nation’s nuclear plants. Five reactors have been taken out of operation in the last few years, mainly due to technical problems. Additional shutdowns are under consideration.

At the same time, 30 states have mandates for renewable energy that will require the use of more expensive wind and solar energy. Since those sources depend on the weather, they require backup generation — a hidden factor that can add significantly to the overall cost to consumers.

Nowhere are the forces more in play than in California, which has the nation’s most aggressive mandate for renewable power. Major utilities must obtain 33% of their power from renewable sources by 2020, not counting low-cost hydropower from giant dams in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

In some cases, the renewable power costs as much as twice the price of electricity from new gas-fired power plants. Newer facilities are more competitive and improved technology should hold down future electricity prices, said former FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, now a San Francisco attorney.

But San Francisco-based Energy + Environmental Economics, a respected consultant, has projected that the cost of California’s electricity is likely to increase 47% over the next 16 years, adjusted for inflation, in part because of the renewable power mandate and heavy investments in transmission lines.

The mandate is just one market force. California has all but phased out coal-generated electricity. The state lost the output of San Onofre’s two nuclear reactors and is facing the shutdown of 19 gas-fired power plants along the coast because of new state-imposed ocean water rules by 2020.

“Our rates are increasing because of all of these changes that are occurring and will continue to occur as far out as we can see,” said Phil Leiber, chief financial officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Renewable power has merit, but unfortunately it is more costly and is one of the drivers of our rates.”

“While renewables are coming down in cost, they are still more expensive,” said Russell Garwacki, manager of pricing design and research at Southern California Edison. The company is imposing a 10% price hike this year to catch up with increased costs in the past.

Officials at the California Public Utilities Commission, responsible for setting utility rates, dispute predictions of large-scale electricity price hikes in the near future. Edward Randolph, head of the PUC’s energy division, said price increases were not likely to exceed the rate of inflation, though the commission has refused to spell out the data on which it bases its projections. In any case, while California already has some of the highest hourly rates for electricity in the nation, the average consumer in the state pays bills that are below the national average because overall electricity use is so low.

The push to wean California off fossil fuels for electricity could cause a consumer backlash as the price for doing so becomes increasingly apparent, warns Alex Leupp, an executive with the Northern California Power Agency, a nonprofit that generates low-cost power for 15 agencies across the state. The nonprofit was formed decades ago during a rebellion against the PUC and the high prices that resulted from its regulations.

“If power gets too expensive, there will be a revolt,” Leupp said. “If the state pushes too fast on renewables before the technology is viable, it could set back the environmental goals we all believe in at the end of the day.”

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-power-prices-20140426,0,6329274.story#ixzz30Cs9hCJQ

Will there be a revolt?  Probably not.  We live in times that are even MORE dishonest than Hitler’s and Stalin’s because our leaders are advantaged with the latest skills in mass media manipulation and our media outlets are more propagandistic than Joseph Goebbels or TASS ever was.  Democrats – liars to the cores of their beings – will simply find their equivalent of “Jews” (Republicans, energy companies, insurance companies, rich people, etc.) to slander.  Bad people invariably believe lies – and we have become a bad people.

Obama declared war on coal, and with the aid of the stupid American people who frankly deserve to freeze in the dark, coal was forced to surrender.

We won’t get these assets back for YEARS if we can get them back at all, ye stupid dumbasses.  Even if you vote Republican, the investors who would bring cheap, efficient coal back on line now know that we’re only one election away from a fascist who will bankrupt them.  They won’t DARE invest in coal again: because the moral idiot American people elected and then re-elected a fascist and they know that it can happen again (and may in 2016 in the pantsuited form of Hillary Clinton).

So you CAN count on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama has permanently caused American energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”  Amazingly, he did so in a country that has more coal than any other nation on the face of the earth.

In terms of energy and in terms of so many other things, Obama made the richest nation in the history of the world IMPOVERISHED.

And not only that, but the integrity of our grid is now in open question: having abolished coal, with NOTHING to take its place in terms of either price OR supply, we don’t have enough power to provide so we’re going to have more crashes and more devastating crashes in our electrical grid.

And who is going to suffer the most from this moral idiocy?  The rich?  They’ll buy themselves generators.  And even steep increases will hardly dent the percentage of income they dedicate to their heating and cooling bills.

You stupid liberals.  Here is another example of how you afflicted the poor who will now – thanks to the Democrat Party – have to pay unprecedented percentages of their meager household incomes on their energy because you made their rates soar.

And the only other thing you can count upon in God damn America as Democrats wage economic warfare on the poorest among us is that those very poor are ignorant enough and depraved enough to keep believing the lies of the Democrats who are most oppressing them.

Famed Liberal Legal Analyst Jonathon Turley Says Eric Holder Is A ‘Sin Eater’ Who Has Shielded Obama From His Treasonous Actions

Nearly forty years ago now, Republicans proved that they could rise above partisan political self-interests as they turned on Richard Nixon and ended the cancer of his presidency.

I don’t believe Democrats have that ability in their shriveled souls.  I think Democrats would burn this nation to the ground before they would prove that they can rise above politics to do what is right for the country.  But facts are beginning to shape up that may prove me wrong yet.  Democrats are now openly calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to be fired.  And this column by famous liberal legal analyst Jonathon Turley is simply powerful:

Fire Eric Holder: Column
by Jonathan Turley, USATODAY

Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about the administration’s sweeping surveillance of journalists with the Associated Press. In the greatest attack on the free press in decades, the Justice Department seized phone records for reporters and editors in at least three AP offices as well as its office in the House of Representatives. Holder, however, proceeded to claim absolute and blissful ignorance of the investigation, even failing to recall when or how he recused himself.

Yet, this was only the latest attack on the news media under Holder’s leadership. Despite his record, he expressed surprise at the hearing that the head of the Republican National Committee had called for his resignation. After all, Holder pointed out, he did nothing. That is, of course, precisely the point. Unlike the head of the RNC, I am neither a Republican nor conservative, and I believe Holder should be fired.

The ‘sin eater’

Holder’s refusal to accept responsibility for the AP investigation was something of a change for the political insider. His value to President Obama has been his absolute loyalty. Holder is what we call a “sin eater” inside the Beltway — high-ranking associates who shield presidents from responsibility for their actions. Richard Nixon had H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and Robert “Bud” McFarlane. George W. Bush had the ultimate sin eater: Dick Cheney, who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for sins to eat.

This role can be traced to 18th century Europe, when families would use a sin eater to clean the moral record of a dying person by eating bread from the person’s chest and drinking ale passed over his body. Back then, the ritual’s power was confined to removing minor sins.

For Obama, there has been no better sin eater than Holder. When the president promised CIA employees early in his first term that they would not be investigated for torture, it was the attorney general who shielded officials from prosecution. When the Obama administration decided it would expand secret and warrantless surveillance, it was Holder who justified it. When the president wanted the authority to kill any American he deemed a threat without charge or trial, it was Holder who went public to announce the “kill list” policy.

Last week, the Justice Department confirmed that it was Holder who personally approved the equally abusive search of Fox News correspondent James Rosen’s e-mail and phone records in another story involving leaked classified information. In the 2010 application for a secret warrant, the Obama administration named Rosen as “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” to the leaking of classified materials. The Justice Department even investigated Rosen’s parents’ telephone number, and Holder was there to justify every attack on the news media.

Ignoble legacy

Yet, at this month’s hearing, the attorney general had had his fill. Accordingly, Holder adopted an embarrassing mantra of “I have no knowledge” and “I had no involvement” throughout the questioning. When he was not reciting the equivalent to his name, rank and serial number, he was implicating his aide, Deputy Attorney General James Cole. Cole, it appears, is Holder’s sin eater. Holder was so busy denying responsibility for today’s scandals, he began denying known facts about older scandals, such as the “Fast and Furious” gun operation.

In the end, Holder was the best witness against his continuing in office. His insistence that he did nothing was a telling moment. The attorney general has done little in his tenure to protect civil liberties or the free press. Rather, Holder has supervised a comprehensive erosion of privacy rights, press freedom and due process. This ignoble legacy was made possible by Democrats who would look at their shoes whenever the Obama administration was accused of constitutional abuses.

On Thursday, Obama responded to the outcry over the AP and Fox scandals by calling for an investigation by … you guessed it … Eric Holder. He ordered Holder to meet with news media representatives to hear their “concerns” and report back to him. He sent his old sin eater for a confab with the very targets of the abusive surveillance. Such an inquiry offers no reason to trust its conclusions.

The feeble response was the ultimate proof that these are Obama’s sins despite his effort to feign ignorance. It did not matter that Holder is the sin eater who has lost his stomach or that such mortal sins are not so easily digested. Indeed, these sins should be fatal for any attorney general.

Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors.

Jonathon Turley is outraged over Obama’s criminal and blatantly unconstitutional power-grab over the media.  I want you to note here: Turley says nothing against what Obama did to in criminally targeting at least 500 conservative groups in effectively denying them the right to organize as tax-exempt groups.  He says nothing about the fact that by some bizarre coincidence Obama’s EPA did the same exact thing to conservative organizations while approving liberal green groups time after time.  He says nothing about the cover-up that clearly occurred in the aftermath of Benghazi – during which the president and numerous members of his administration literally claimed that what the intelligence said was true (that Benghazi was attacked in a planned operation by al-Qaeda-connected terrorists) was false and that what was false (that the attack was somehow the spontaneous result of a Youtube video) was true.  Obama lied to the American people and had his underlings lie to the American people because if the people knew how wildly Obama’s foreign policy had failed, he would not have been reelected.  And Turley only alludes to the Fast and Furious scandal in which Eric Holder was cited for contempt of Congress over his outright lies in that matter.  And even the issue that Turley expresses his outrage – in the Obama-Holder campaign to suppress and intimidate the press – Turley doesn’t give the full weight of what Eric Holder did, such as lie to Congress under oath when he testified.

At this point, Holder is refusing to answer how many journalists he has used the power of his office to attack.  Holder’s – and Obama’s – claim is complete ignorance – as if ignorance is some kind of a virtue.

At this point, Obama has already repeatedly documented that he does not give a flying damn about the law (example: he refused to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by a president simply because he didn’t agree with the law and viewed himself above the law) or the Constitution (example: he doesn’t care about the 2nd Amendment and now we know he doesn’t give a flying fig about the 1st, either).  As I have rightly stated over and over again, Barack Obama is a true fascist.  As is Eric Holder.

The major question is simply this: do the American people care?  Do they have the last vestiges of decency to demand that Obama and his pet legal pit bull go.  Or has America crossed the Rubicon of apathy that will see this once greatest and mightiest nation in the history of the human race soon sliding into the graveyard of nations.

I’d love to be surprised, but I believe the latter.

I don’t believe the American people as a whole have any such virtue.  Which is why the beast is coming, and which is why the United States of America will join the world in worshiping the Antichrist and taking his mark.

CFL Bulbs, The Bogus Bad Science Behind Them And A Democrat Party That Swims In A Sea Of Hypocrisy And Deceit

Utterly bogus claims in the name of “science” from the same left that routinely demonizes conservatives as being enemies of science.  To be a liberal is to be a quintessential hypocrite; hypocrisy defines the left; it is the sine qua non without which liberalism could not exist; hypocrisy is the ocean that liberal fish swim in.  And hypocrisy is so completely all-consuming for the left that they can’t even see it all around them.

Other than that, they are just wrong.

Yesterday I posted an article that demonstrates how utterly and completely UNSCIENTIFIC global warming “scientists” are.  It is simply amazing to watch these pathological liars play games with the truth while somehow never losing their self-righteous chutzpah.

Btw, the first article of the series referred to below is available here. And I accessed it from a very cool site on “climate change” here.

CFL bulbs: shedding light on misleading performance claims
Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental News Examiner
January 12, 2012

This article, the second in a series, focuses on the misleading performance claims surrounding the “more energy efficient” compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs now replacing traditional incandescent bulbs. These potentially harmful mercury-filled lamps (see my previous column describing the dangers) are being forced on consumers by the U.S. congress with support from the Green Lobby and light-bulb manufacturers like GE, Sylvania and Phillips. These and other manufacturers stand to make huge profits selling the more expensive CFLs (more on that issue in my next column).

There is a growing body of evidence undermining claims of the EPA, environmental lobby and light bulb manufacturers touting the performance advantages of mercury-laced CFL bulbs.

Exaggerated lifespan

Real-world reports from the home front show that the claimed extended lifespan of CFLs is often greatly exaggerated. There is ample data indicating that the frequent switching on and off of CFLs greatly shortens their life. A study by H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, and co-author Amanda Berg concludes:

“Unfortunately, except under a fairly narrow range of circumstances, CFLs are less efficient than advertised. Manufacturers claim the average life span of a CFL bulb is 10,000 hours. However, in many applications the life and energy savings of a CFL are significantly lower.

“Applications in which lighting is used only briefly (such as closets, bathrooms, motion detectors and so forth) will cause CFL bulbs to burn out as quickly as regular incandescent bulbs . . . When initially switched on, CFLs may provide as little as 50 percent to 80 percent of their rated light output and can take up to three minutes to reach full brightness.”

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Pacific Gas & Electric originally estimated the useful life of CFL bulbs at 9.4 years. But based on real-world results, the company was forced to lower its estimate to 6.3 years, meaning that it had overstated bulb life by 49 percent. “The early burn-out rate, along with several other factors, meant that the actual energy savings were 73 percent less than the 1.7 billion kilowatt hours projected by PG&E,” the Journal reported.

Less bright, more dim with age

As many consumers have noticed, CFL bulbs grow dimmer as they age. In a 2003-2004 study, the U.S. Department of Energy reported that one-fourth of CFLs, after only 40 percent of their rated service life, no longer produced at their rated output.

And according to Wikipedia: “CFLs produce less light later in their lives than when they are new. The light output decay is exponential, with the fastest losses being soon after the lamp is first used. By the end of their lives, CFLs can be expected to produce 70-80% of their original light output.”

After conducting its own tests on bulbs from several manufacturers, The Sunday Telegraph in London “found that under normal conditions, using a single lamp to light a room, an 11W low-energy CFL produced only 58 percent of the illumination of an ‘equivalent’ 60W bulb – even after a 10-minute ‘warm-up.’”

The European Commission, which led the effort to ban incandescent bulbs in Europe, said that claims by manufacturers that CFL’s shine as brightly as old-fashioned bulbs are “not true.”

Posted on its website for consumers was the warning that “exaggerated claims are often made on the packaging about the light output of compact fluorescent lamps.”

Higher heating bills

Go-Green advocates like to complain about the fact that 90 percent of the energy from incandescent lights is given off as heat, with only 10 percent providing illumination. But they ignore one important fact: The extra heat given off during the winter months can actually lower energy bills.

According to a study by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, “The heat of incandescent lights – more than 341 Btu per bulb per hour – can help to warm a room. Therefore, if the cost of electricity is low relative to the cost of home heating fuel, there may be an economic case for changing to incandescent bulbs in colder seasons.”

In other words, on a cold day when you’re running your electric heater, it makes sense to flip on all those incandescent heat sources. Of course, the contribution of incandescent bulbs to lower heating bills is conveniently missing from pro-CFL literature.

Unsuitable for outdoor lighting

What about the use of CFLs for outdoor lighting? Forget it. Most do not operate well in low temperatures, a performance shortfall that makes them virtually useless for home-security lighting, including as lights in motion detectors. By signing the incandescent bulb’s death warrant, congress has effectively rendered useless outdoor lighting systems that keep away intruders and discourage home break-ins.

Myth of mercury reduction

One of the most misleading arguments advanced in defense of CFLs is the assertion that they reduce harmful mercury levels (a dubious proposition given that the bulbs themselves are laced with mercury).

Case in point: In a letter to the Wall Street Journal in December, CFL advocate Nicole Lederer claimed that “coal-fired power plants produce about half of all mercury.”

In his Jan. 5 response, Charles Battig of Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment-Virginia called the statement “scientifically vacuous and misleading.”

Battig cited data from an op-ed (“The Myth of Killer Mercury” by Willie Soon and Paul Driessen) that broke down mercury contributions as follows: “U.S. coal-fired plants, about 41-48 tons per year; forest fires, about 44 tons per year; Chinese power plants, 400 tons per year, while recurring geological events such as volcanoes and geysers emit 9,000-10,000 tons per year.”

“With these missing pieces of information, wrote Battig, the U.S. power plant contribution of mercury is closer to a 0.5% value than the “half of all mercury” claim by Ms. Lederer.”

Battig then offered this advice:

“Would that Ms. Lederer and the Environmental Entrepreneurs expend an equal amount of environmental anguish over placing compact fluorescent lamp bulbs indoors in homes, schools and factories. These mercury-containing, stealth-pollution bulbs bring the mercury threat right into your living room and nursery.”

No good reason for switchover

The fact is there is no good reason for consumers – even energy-conscious go-green enthusiasts – to replace their old incandescent bulbs with the much-overhyped and potentially dangerous CFL lamps. The sole beneficiaries of the forced switchover are light bulb manufacturers who stand to make huge profits selling CFL bulbs whose shelf price has been artificially lowered (but still is higher than incandescent bulbs) through hefty subsidies paid to them by taxpayers.

In light of the facts, the switchover to CFL bulbs has become a real consumer turn-off.

Think about all the lies and bogus promises that accompanied the Democrat Party forcing you to buy CFL light bulbs because they love fascism.  Think about the complete piece of crap a.k.a. the Chevy Volt and the Obama administration spending billions to ram it down our throats.  Think about Solyndra and the $10 billion train wreck of high speed rail and think about just how BAD Democrat governance truly is.

Democrats have been caught red-handed handing BILLIONS of the American peoples’ money to their leftwing special interests.  Companies like Solyndra and GE (the company that benefitted most from the Democrat Party forcing you to buy CFLs whether you wanted to or not) and the boondoggles that crony capitalist fascist Democrats hand them are a dime a dozen.  And then let me say two words – Fannie Mae – to point out just how truly dangerous these dirty rotten scoundrels truly are.

And then vote Republican while you’ve still got a country to vote for.

P.S. Another good site on bad science and the CFL boondoggle is located here.

64% Of Small Businesses Planning To Wait Out Obama, Will NOT Be Adding New Jobs (12% Say They Will CUT Jobs)

There’s the old conundrum about the wolf, the goat and the cabbage:

A farmer and his wolf, goat, and cabbage come to the edge of a river they wish to cross.  There is a boat at the river’s edge that only the farmer can row.  The farmer can take at most one other object besides himself on a crossing, but if the wolf is ever left with the goat, the wolf will eat the goat; similarly, if the goat is left with the cabbage, the goat will eat the cabbage.  How can the farmer get all of them across?

There’s actually a solution to that problem.

Now we’ve got an even more intractable problem, involving a healthy job-creating economy, a Marxist president and a Marxist Democrat Party.

This one is unsolvable, because unlike the above dilemma involving the wolf, the goat and the cabbage, BOTH the Marxist President AND the Marxist Democrat Party will devour the economy unless it is somehow taken away from them.  Like the goat with the cabbage, they will insatiably eat every job they can and turn those jobs into dead crap.  Like the wolf with the goat, they will kill the economy and systematically devour it until only bones are left.

We are still over a year away from getting the chance to save ourselves from this insoluble dilemma.

And here’s the consequence:

Little Hiring Seen by Small Business
JULY 11, 2011
By SIOBHAN HUGHES

WASHINGTON—The U.S. labor market could stay sluggish for a while, with small-business executives reluctant to hire amid the murky economic outlook.

A survey of small business owners shows a lack of
confidence in the U.S. economy. More than two-thirds indicated they do not plan
to add payrolls in 2011 or 2012. WSJ’s Siobhan Hughes reports. Photo: Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images

Almost two-thirds—64%—of small-business executives surveyed said they weren’t expecting to add to their payrolls in the next year and another 12% planned to cut jobs, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report to be released Monday. Just 19% said they would expand their work forces.

This comes after a Labor Department report Friday showed employers added few jobs in June, and unemployment rose to 9.2%. The bleak figures joined other data showing the recovery losing momentum in recent months, which has caused many analysts and policy makers to lower their forecasts for economic growth in the second half of the year.

The Small Business Administration says small businesses, defined as companies with fewer than 500 workers, employ about half of the workers in the private sector. In the Chamber’s survey of 1,409 executives, conducted by Harris Interactive, small businesses were defined as firms with revenue of $25 million or less.

More than half of the small-business executives in the June 27-30 survey cited economic uncertainty as the main reason for holding back on hiring. About a third blamed lack of sales, while just 7% pointed to problems getting credit.

“I think it’s safer to stay on hold and not hire workers,” said Harold Jackson, chief executive of Buffalo Supply, a Lafayette, Colo., distributor of high-tech medical equipment used in operating rooms.

Mr. Jackson said he has halved his staff to 15 workers since 2009 and was unlikely to start hiring soon even if his business picked up. “I can handle a reasonably large increase in business without having to increase the staff.”

Many of the executives surveyed were gloomy about the economy’s prospects. About 41% see the business climate getting worse over the next two years, compared with 29% who expect the climate to improve.

The modest hiring plans of small businesses don’t make up for the job losses in the past year, when some 29% let go workers, far outpacing the numbers that now plan to hire.

As the wise philosopher Scoobert Doo once put it upon hearing dire news, “Roh-roh.”

Between ObamaCare and the massive $500 billion in taxes it’s going to take out of the private sector, along with the 158 government bureaucracies and the thousands of pages of regulations; between the trillion dollars in NEW taxes Obama is demanding as part of any debt ceiling deal; between the Obama EPA which is simply ruling by fiat and imposing regulations that were actually voted down by Congress; between the fact that Obama won’t let us drill for our own oil even as his green energy sends the cost of energy (in his own words) “skyrocketing”; between the Obama NRLB that is openly warring with companies like Boeing for creating jobs in non-union states; between the Obama Labor Department, which is putting together some 100 job-killing regulations to strangle businesses from further hiring as we speak; and between the Dodd-Frank legislation which will systematically cut businesses off from credit, we are pretty well screwed.

We can have jobs, or we can have Obama and his Democrats.  But we’re not going to get jobs until we get rid of the people who are demonizing the job creators.  And that should just be an obvious fact by now.

AP-Reported FACT: U.S. Economy The Worst Since The LAST Time We Let A Socialist Run It

The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:

U.S. Recovery’s 2-Year Anniversary Arrives With Little To Celebrate
First Posted: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET Updated: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.

After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

[…]

But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:

— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

[…]

Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.

[…]

Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.

“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”

Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.

The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.

How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.

Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:

“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”

The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???

WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s?  WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?

And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama???  And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:

Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”

But here’s the truth:

FDR prolonged — not ended — great depression

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

[…]

”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared.  So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.

These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums.  Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology.  There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.

I can simply re-cite my conclusion from a previous article to find a particularly laughable example of this phenomena:

I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather.  And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.

Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???

It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure.  It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.

The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein.  The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.

The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”

The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.

There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading.  Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements.  The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford.  And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes.  Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs.  Folsom provides the official data to back it up.

Check out this fact from page 127 of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%.  Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues.  By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%).  Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected.  Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits.  And they created millions of jobs in doing so.

And guess what?  Regulations mandating higher wages are STILL killing jobs now that Obama is doing it.

And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN.  Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations.  They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money.  And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone.  Just like they did with FDR.

Here we are today, with “the New FDR,” Barack Obama.  Who is the top dog on Obama’s economic team?  Why lo and behold, it is none other than GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, crony capitalist extraordinaire whose big corporation has REPEATEDLY benefitted from a cozy insider relationship with big government.  And consider how Obama literally took big auto makers GM and Chrysler away from their legitimate shareholders and gave them to big unions.

Regarding “crony capitalism,” I made a sweeping statement in a previous article:

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  What did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

I stand by that sweeping statement.  People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people.  As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:

But rigid opposition from Democrats – especially Democrats like Senator Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie and Freddie and dirty crony capitalism outfits like corrupt Lehman Bros. than ANYONE in his short Senate stint – prevented any “hope and change” of necessary reform from saving the US economy.

The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Times pointed out:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM.  It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.

The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”  It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.”  Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are.  But Wallison is nonpartisan

Barack and Michelle Obama have a documented personal history of crony capitalism:

The Chicago way is a very, very ugly way.  And Obama has been in it up to his eyeballs.  Chicago is a dirty place filled with dirty politicians – and Obama was perfectly at home with all the dirt.

That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle.  This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office.  And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.

Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:

Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.

I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.

Take a look at what’s happening to small businesses, which create at least half of all the jobs in America, under Obama.  How about the fewest new business startups since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it:

Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.

And we can tie this right back to crony capitalism, as Obama has created a system in which larger businesses are protected against the threat of competition from smaller businesses:

Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations  for their  own industry because they know that they can handle all of the  rules and  paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can.   After all, a  large corporation with an accounting department can easily  handle filling out a  few thousand more forms, but for a small business  with only a handful  of employees that kind of paperwork is a major  logistical nightmare.

When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has  made the  process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses  that it is  hardly worth it anymore.  Things have gotten so bad that more  small  businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or  independent  contractors.

So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses  have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do  whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time   employees.

And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help?  Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Business points out that small businesses are planning to SHRINK rather than EXPAND their payrolls under Obama.  From the New York Times:

A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011

In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.

That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.

The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.

While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.

“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.

So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?

And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.

An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs.  That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits.  And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden.  Just to name a few.  The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.

Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too.  Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008.  Did Obama make it better?  Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.”  Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.

The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job.  Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.

Redistributing Failure: Obama EPA Goes To War Against Texas

The last Census pretty much proved the point: there is a clear population flow from failed liberal states to successful conservative ones.  And the state of Texas was the biggest winner of all.

Here’s a great title that pretty much sums it up:

Census Winners (Texas) and Losers (Obama)

So what is a good liberal to do?

Ensure that Texas is forced to employ the same utterly failed and immoral policies that are crippling blue states across the country:

EPA, Texas go to war over carbon-emission rules
posted at 2:00 pm on December 27, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

And so it begins, and on the most fertile red-state territory in the nation.  Texas, which got four more seats in the House through the 2010 Census reapportionment, has had its air-quality rules superceded by the EPA as part of its aggressive new action on carbon emissions.  Governor Rick Perry promises a fight:

The federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday effectively declared Texas unfit to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions and took over carbon dioxide permitting of any new or expanding industrial facilities starting Jan. 2.

The EPA also set up a framework for regulating greenhouse gas emissions in seven other states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Oregon and Wyoming. In addition, the agency set a timetable on establishing regulated levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

The action will give the EPA permitting authority over refineries, power plants and cement facilities in Texas, the agency said, but will not affect small pollution source facilities, such as restaurants and farms.

Well, perhaps not directly, but the increase in energy prices and shortages created by the EPA imposition of what will essentially be carbon taxes will impact businesses throughout the Texas economy, as well as consumers who ultimately pay the costs of the regulatory regime. Rick Perry has signaled a court fight to stop the EPA and the Obama administration:

Texas is the only state that has refused to implement the new rules. President Barack Obama is pressing ahead with the regulations after Congress failed to pass legislation capping carbon emissions. Perry, a Republican, calls the rules overreaching by the federal government that will cripple his state’s economy.

“The EPA’s misguided plan paints a huge target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers by implementing unnecessary, burdensome mandates on our state’s energy sector, threatening hundreds of thousands of Texas jobs and imposing increased living costs on Texas families,” Katherine Cesinger, a Perry spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement.

The timing is certainly interesting. The EPA made this move two days before Christmas, when most people had stopped paying attention to political news. The EPA’s move thus got missed by most of the national media, even though it demonstrates well the Obama strategy in 2011 to win through regulation what it could not win through legislation. And by focusing on Texas, where Republicans have a chance to redistrict with practically no interference from Democrats, the move will certainly incentivize the GOP to limit as much as possible the representation of Democrats in their Congressional delegation as the Republican-controlled House attempts to stymie the EPA’s regulatory innovation.

This also will vault Rick Perry to the highest level of national politics, even as he continues to insist that he won’t run for President. With a third term as governor in hand and a perfect political battle opening in front of him, though, the opportunity may be too much to resist for a man who could possibly unite conservatives and the GOP for a big run against a stumbling Obama in 2012.

There’s a joke I remember: What’s the difference between an American [capitalist] and a European [socialist]?  The American capitalist is riding on a bus and sees a man driving a fancy sports car and thinks, “Some day I’ll be able to afford a car like that.”  Versus the European socialist who is riding on the bus and sees the same thing and thinks, “Some day that sonofabitch will be riding the bus just like me.”

The liberal worldview was best summed up by Reagan:

“If it moves, tax it.  If it keeps moving, regulate it.  And if it stops moving, subsidize it” ~ Ronald Reagan

Punish success.  That way you can get to subsidizing failure.  And then you can move on to subsidizing all the failures that subsidizing failure produces.

Because failures will vote Democrat in order to keep benefiting from other people’s success.

Texas survived the Alamo.  But surviving Obama is like surviving stage IV brain cancer.

Democrats Abandon All Respect For American Voter And Electoral Integrity

The independent-minded American says, “Let the parties and candidates express their platforms in the open marketplace of ideas, and may the best candidate win.”

Unless you’re a Democrat, of course.

“If you’re a Democrat, it’s, “We stand for absolutely nothing but power over the people, we believe that ends justify means, and so go ahead and do whatever you need to do to win.”

Democrats need tyrant-power in order to shove terrible and evil legislation such as the $3.27 TRILLION stimulus which incredibly hasn’t even created any meaningful jobs; and ObamaCare, which is turning out to be so shockingly bad that even LIBERAL UNIONS tat supported this boondoggle are now pleading to be opted out; and Democrat environmental regulations that are destroying upwards of a million jobs and counting (and again, even UNIONS are begging for relief from these incredibly destructive policies).

You can’t destroy a country unless you have the total power to do so.  In America, the Constitution gives the people the right to rise up and throw off their shackles every two years.  At least, as long as we have a Constitution, and as long as judicial activists can’t interpret that Constitution any damn way they want to.

So Democrats have to cheat to get their “fundamental transformation.”  And cheat they do.

We think of Chicago and other Democrat strongholds, where dead people and inmates don’t only get to vote, they get to vote twice.  And apparently, Democrats are even paying dead people and inmates for their votes now.

We think of ACORN and years and years of voter registration shenanigans until they were finally caught on video doing something so vile that even many (but certainly not all) Democrats found them despicable beyond the pale.

We think of the Al Franken Senate election in Minnesota, in which a lead by the Republican candidate was overcome after new, uncounted ballots just kept magically turning up in the back seats of cars.  And then, lo and behold, we find that inmates’ ballots – well over the Franken margin of victory – were illegally counted.

We think of the vile Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson and the shockingly dishonest campaign ad that he ran, in which he deliberately tried to smear his Republican candidate for the exact opposite of what the man clearly actually said.

And now we’ve got Democrats trying to undermine the will of the American people by fraudulently running candidates to leech votes from the Republican and steal an election:

Report: Dems planted NJ tea party House candidate
By GEOFF MULVIHILL
The Associated Press
Saturday, October 9, 2010; 5:36 PM

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. — A New Jersey Republican congressional candidate criticized his Democratic opponent Friday amid mounting evidence that Democratic officials planted a tea party candidate in the race to siphon off conservative votes.

“My opponent, John Adler, represents everything that is wrong with politics in our country today,” Republican Jon Runyan said. “I would ask for an apology. But frankly, an apology from someone like Congressman Adler would be so meaningless that it’s not worth seeking.”

He spoke at a news conference as Adler, a first-term Democratic lawmaker, and his campaign remained mum about a report in the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill in which Democratic operatives speaking on the condition of anonymity confirmed what Republicans have believed for months: That tea-party candidate Peter DeStefano was put on the ballot by Democrats.

The operatives said a county Democratic employee is running at least the Web elements of DeStefano’s campaign.

Tea party organizations, which have denounced DeStefano since he entered the race in June, called on him Friday to quit. About 50 tea party activists gathered in protest outside a restaurant in Medford where DeStefano had scheduled a fundraiser Friday night.

DeStefano arrived at the fundraiser after the protesters left and told reporters he would remain in the race, but he would not answer specific questions about the newspaper’s report, dismissing the allegations as “hearsay.”

“I’m an average guy who’s running for Congress on the independent ticket,” DeStefano said.

One tea party group, the West Jersey Tea Party, said it plans to file a voter-fraud lawsuit against Adler next week.

Adler has previously denied the accusations. Adler and top officials in Adler’s campaign and did not return calls or e-mails from The Associated Press on Friday.

In an August interview with the AP, DeStefano excoriated both Adler and Runyan.

He fended off questions about Republicans’ accusations and tea party organizations’ claims that he wasn’t even a member, though he was running for Congress with the slogan “New Jersey Tea Party.” While there are several tea party groups in New Jersey, none goes by that name. Some tea party groups are supporting Runyan.

“Any American citizen can run for any office they want,” DeStefano said. “I think it’s time we get past this crap.”

He refused to answer questions about precisely when he decided to run.

In August, Adler told the Courier-Post: “I know we weren’t part of it.”

Runyan said his campaign was looking into whether there’s any legal action that could be taken against Adler.

The operatives told the Courier-Post that the plan was shared with members of the South Jersey Young Democrats, and some in that group gathered signatures for DeStefano – while others didn’t because they thought the plan was unethical.

Republicans started raising suspicions about DeStefano months ago when they found many of the signatures on his nominating petitions were from Democrats, including a former Adler campaign staffer.

I wrote about a related issue a little over a week ago, pointing out the fact that Democrats Don’t Give A DAMN About The Constitution Or Any Limits On Their Power.

In that article, I cited the audio of Democrat Robin Carnahan openly mocking the election process and the will of the voters in an exchange that went as follows:

Carnahan: “We’re going to also have a libertarian and a Constitution Party candidate running.  And I will tell you no one’s going to know who they are, but it’s not going to matter, because Glenn Beck says you’re supposed to be for the Constitution, and there is some percentage of people who will go vote for them.  And in our internal polling about six or seven percent goes like that to the Libertarian and Constitution Party.  So I’m quite sure that whoever wins is going to do it with less than fifty percent of the vote.” […]

Donor: “You just don’t sound like those Constitution Party votes are going to come out of your account.”

Carnahan: “What do you think?” (Audience laughter)

Donor: “I think you’re right.” (Audience laughter)

These Democrats don’t care about fairly and honestly winning elections; they care only about power and totalitarian control over government.  And they will use every UNFAIR and DISHONEST tactic to gain the power over the people that they seek.

And if you care about your country’s Constitution, why, you’re just an idiot schmuck to these contemptible Democrats.

I also wrote about some of the utterly contemptible examples of fraud that are besetting the Democrat Party, including the fact that ALL EIGHT of the vile little cockroaches in Bell, California, who stole millions from a town whose per capita income was only half the national average, were DEMOCRATS.

And it’s not a matter that Democrats did this a long time ago, or that they just did it recently; it’s about the fact that they are doing these things RIGHT THE HELL NOW.

If you think that Democrats have demonstrated that they deserve the right to continue governing, all I can say is that you personally are disgusting.

Meet Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize Winner and Global Warming Demagogue

We can go back and look at Al Gore, a documented fraud, a presenter of entirely false scientific claims, and the winner of a Nobel Prize for science.  A British High Court judge found nine “glaring” scientific errors in the Inconvenient Truth “documentary” that garnered Gore his scientific credibility.  But the only “inconvenient truth” was that the film was an example of “alarmism” and “exaggeration” and was not fit for viewing by British school children.

“Science” has officially and for the record made itself a propaganda tool to advance radical redistributionist social policies.

And now we have another Nobel prize winner doing the same thing to his own field of economics.

An Interview With Thomas Schelling, Part Two

CLARKE: I wanted to go back to the international climate-change negotiation process. So assuming we had a perfect U.S. bill — written by you or by 15 experts working on this full time — how would the international negotiation process work? It’s not obvious that averting global climate change is in the rational self-interest of anyone that is alive today. The serious consequences probably won’t occur until 2080 or 2100 or thereafter. That’s one problem. Another problem is that those consequences are going to be distributed in a radically uneven way. The northwest of the United States might actually benefit. So how does a negotiation process work? How does a generation today negotiate on behalf of future generations? And how do we negotiate when the costs are distributed so unevenly?

SCHELLING: Well I do think that one of the difficulties is that most of the beneficiaries aren’t yet born. More than that: Most of the beneficiaries will be born in what we now call the developing world. By 2080 or 2100 five-sixths of the population, at least, will be in places like China, India, Indonesia, Africa and so forth. And what I don’t know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese.

SCHELLING: It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there’s a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane from permafrost, and from huge offshore deposits of methane all around the world. If you begin to get methane leaking on a large scale — even though methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere very long — it might warm things up fast enough that it will induce further methane release, which will warm things up more, which will release more. And that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious.

CLARKE: And you mean serious for everyone, including the United States?

SCHELLING: Yes, for almost anybody.

CLARKE: And when you say, “exaggerate the costs” do you mean, American politicians should exaggerate the costs to the American public, to get American support for a bill that will overwhelmingly benefit the developing world?

SCHELLING: [Laughs] It’s very hard to get honest people.

SCHELLING: Well, part of me sympathizes with the case for disingenuousness! I mean, it seems to me that there is a strong moral case for helping unborn Bangladeshi citizens. But I don’t know how you sell that. It’s not in anyone’s rational interest, at least in the US, to legislate on that basis.

Well, let me at least agree with Thomas Schelling to this extent: yes, it is indeed hard to find honest people.  Especially from our “experts” whom we count upon to inform us of the facts, rather than leading us by the hand to conclusions based on false premises becauses they are arrogant elitists who think only they are smart enough to handle the truth.

The article goes on – read it here – with a seriously leftist-tilted back-and-forth about climate change and the degree to which America is morally obligated to commit economic hari kari in order to atone for its sins to the developing world.

Then we get to the moral nitty gritty to end the article:

CLARKE: I wanted to ask one more question, to go back to the moral issue here. It does seem to me that the strongest case for mitigating the effects of global climate change is a moral one. It is based not on our own interest but on the interests of people in the developing world who don’t yet exist. But it also seems to me that — while I don’t know much about game theory — collective bargaining theories generally assume the participants are rational and self-interested. So how does one go about making sense of an arrangement where we must set our self-interest aside? How does one make the moral case in a situation like this? Or is my description of collective bargaining just totally idiotic?

SCHELLING: Well, I think you have to realize that most people have very strong moral feelings. I think in a lot of cases they’re misdirected. I wish moral feelings about a two-month old fetus were attached to hungry children in Africa. But I think people have very strong moral feelings. In fact, I’m always amazed by the number of people who at least pretend they’re worried about the polar bears. […]

SCHELLING: And I think the churches don’t realize that they could have a potent effect in not letting so much of god’s legacy — in terms of flora and fauna — be destroyed by climate change.

SCHELLING: But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Now, Thomas Schelling one the one hand tells us that we should feel intensely morally obligated to “beneficiaries [who] not yet born” – as long as they’re not “a two month old fetus” who is presumably about to be aborted – in which case we apparently have absolutely no obligation at all.  But stop and think: the moral logic of abortion means the future generation doesn’t matter unless we subjectively want them to matter.  No one who advocates abortion has any right to lecture others that they should not only care about but sacrifice for “beneficiaries not yet born.” Then Schelling proceeds to presume from his own massive personal arrogance that the American people’s moral intuitions are faulty, but that his are functioning perfectly.  Which of course justifies him in lying to us to steer us toward the conclusion dictated by his own superior moral reasoning.

And then this man who presumes himself to be so morally superior to everyone “beneath” him, who is entitled to “exaggerate the threat” of global warming because Americans are not responsible to make sound moral decisions if they know the truth, says he hopes “horrid things” happen to we the poor, the huddling, the ignorant and unwashed masses.

This economist seems to live more by the law involving the telling of a lie often enough that it is believed far more than by the law of supply and demand.

It’s funny that Schelling mentions polar bears, as an admitted global warming exaggerator now proceeds to run into the pseudo-science of another global warming exaggerator.  And you have – unlike Al Gore or Thomas Schelling, who have credibility in the scientific community without having any ethical integrity – a genuine scientist being persecuted because he cares about the truth:

One of the world’s leading polar bear experts has been told to stay away from an international conference on the animals because his views are “extremely unhelpful,” according to an e-mail by the chairman of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, Dr. Andy Derocher.

The London Telegraph reports Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor has more than 30 years of experience with polar bears. But his belief that global warming is caused by nature, not man, led officials to bar him from this week’s polar bear specialist group meeting in Denmark.

Taylor says the polar bear population has actually increased over the last 30 years. He says the threat to them by melting Arctic ice — illustrated by a famous photo taken by photographer Amanda Byrd — has become the most iconic cause for global warming theorists. The photo is often used by former Vice President Al Gore and others as an example of the dangers faced by the bears. But it was debunked last year by the photographer, who says the picture had nothing to do with global warming, and that the bears were not in danger. The photographer said she just happened to catch the bears on a small windswept iceberg.

And we have the same types of people as Thomas Schelling suppresing the conclusions of science that show the opposite of what they want science to show.  Consider the White House’s suppression of a scientific report by the EPA.

Or you can go back to the “hockey stick model” to see just how far “respected” scientists are willing to go in order to pass off a bogus theory for mass consumption — and just how willing other scientists are to unquestioningly accept whatever “evidence” supports their preconceived ideological notions.

Harvard economist Martin Feldstein apparently lacks Thomas Schelling’s godlike view, and thus doesn’t seem to think he possesses the divine right to distort the truth in order to lead Americans to the conclusions he ordains as “moral.”

Feldstein simply looks at the economics – which, who knows, may be a strange thing for an economist to do these days – and concludes:

Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States. […]

In my judgment, the proposed cap-and-trade system would be a costly policy that would penalize Americans with little effect on global warming. The proposal to give away most of the permits only makes a bad idea worse. Taxpayers and legislators should keep these things in mind before enacting any cap-and-trade system.

Aside from the fact that building scientific evidence indicates that global warming is a gigantic load of malarkey (just consider how the fact that the planet ISN’T warming has now led the alarmist movement to instead begin using the term “climate change”), global warming-turned climate change alarmists have an even bigger problem to worry about: the fact that the developing world has no interests in committing their own versions of hari kari for the sake of a theory.  China and India are poised to become “global warming polluters” on such a scale that any reductions in American and European greenhouse gasses would be utterly insignificant.  So why should we dramatically undermine our lives?

Chinese and Indians know what it’s like to live in a mud hut, which is the inevitable result of dramatically hamstringing our economic output to conform to the demands of the global warming alarmists.  The western radicals either don’t know what such deplorable conditions are like, or they believe that they – being the true arrogant elitists they are – will continue to live in their glass houses or ivory towers.

New Study Published In ‘Nature Geoscience’ Shows Global Warming Models All Wrong

Let’s begin with the study:

Nature Geoscience
Published online: 13 July 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo578

Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warming

Richard E. Zeebe¹, James C. Zachos² & Gerald R. Dickens³

Top of pageThe Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 Myr ago) represents a possible analogue for the future and thus may provide insight into climate system sensitivity and feedbacks^{1, 2}. The key feature of this event is the release of a large mass of ¹³C-depleted carbon into the carbon reservoirs at the Earth’s surface, although the source remains an open issue^{3, 4}. Concurrently, global surface temperatures rose by 5–9 ^°C within a few thousand years^{5, 6, 7, 8, 9}. Here we use published palaeorecords of deep-sea carbonate dissolution^{10, 11, 12, 13, 14} and stable carbon isotope composition^{10, 15, 16, 17} along with a carbon cycle model to constrain the initial carbon pulse to a magnitude of 3,000 Pg C or less, with an isotopic composition lighter than -50. As a result, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased during the main event by less than about 70% compared with pre-event levels. At accepted values for the climate sensitivity to a doubling of the atmospheric CO₂ concentration¹, this rise in CO₂ can explain only between 1 and 3.5 ^°C of the warming inferred from proxy records. We conclude that in addition to direct CO₂ forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.

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1. School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1000 Pope Road, MSB 504, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA
2. Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
3. Department of Earth Sciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA

This isn’t just telling us that those stupid dinosaurs didn’t send themselves into extinction by driving too many SUVs and failing to implement global warming legislation to deal with carbon dioxide.  It is saying that carbon dioxide was only a tiny, tiny little fraction of the global warming that the planet experienced 55 million years ago.

This is always one of the most amazing and incomprehensible things to me: we have HAD cycles of global warming and global cooling over and over and over again throughout the entire history of the planet.  And yet that is forgotten over and over again by people who have the educations to know better.  It is a form of willful blindness and deliberate stupidity that is simply shocking (It hearkens to Romans 1, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…”).  And it is done in order to advance a political and in fact socialist agenda to redistribute wealth.

A pair of articles you should read:

What the Science REALLY Says About Global Warming

What You Never Hear About Global Warming

A Fox News Special Report story had this to say:

West Virginia, where coal is the heart of the economy.  Coal mining produces both power and revenue.  So Obama’s plan to fight climate change by taxing carbon pollution with a cap and trade system is a serious threat.  And even ardent Obama backers like Gov. Joe Manchin says, “It’s far reaching, and I think it has detrimental effects to our economy – not just West Virginia; I think the United States of America’s economy –  cannot take that shock of artificially increasing the price much higher than what we compete.”  Both senators from W. Virginia Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller oppose the plan.

American Electrical Power CEO Mike Morris says cap and trade will raise everyone’s power cost.  “As an electric consumer and a consumer of any product you’re going to pay more for it.  This is a societal decision to deal with the issue of global warming, and you can’t do it for free.  This is not an inexpensive move.”

Support industries like heavy industries such as Caterpillar would be seriously affected too.  Caterpillar has a $50 million payroll in W.Virginia.  And about 75% of their revenues comes from the coal industry, says Rolger Lilly of Walker Caterpillar.

Burning coal creates nearly half the nation’s electricity.  It is far cheaper than alternative energies (solar $.20 per kilowatt hour; wind $.14 per kilowatt hour; vs. coal at only $.03 per kilowatt hour).

And of course you know Obama has said his plan would cause energy prices to “necessary skyrocket.”

This is a plan that will literally result in Americans starving in the dark and cold unless they stand up for sanity.

Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring and necessary gas.  Without it life on earth would be impossible.  Liberals like to call it “carbon” to make you think of something black and sooty and icky; but it is odorless and colorless.  It is no bogeyman; liberals are your bogeymen.

The fact of the matter is this: when we consider all global warming gasses, “anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.”

The evidence is abundantly clear, yet we are on the verge of crushing our economic output, and killing jobs in the process, to fight a problem which either doesn’t even exist in the first place or which we can do nothing to stop.

Meanwhile, we’ve got the Obama administration actively working to suppress the science that proves that global warming is bogus.  And we’ve got expert economists saying that the fact that China and India aren’t similarly curtailing THEIR emissions will do result in nothing more than America shooting itself in the foot.

Global Warming alarmists have called people like me “global warming deniers” to impugn me as tantamount to a Holocaust denier.  I respond by calling such people “reality deniers.”

Sotomayor: ‘Let’s Put a Judge Who Has Been Constantly Overruled By SCOTUS Where She Can’t Possibly Be Overruled’

Empathy.  Who doesn’t want some?

I mean, I suppose that some part of me, as a conservative, would love for some judge to come along and say, “There, there, I’ll make sure those mean Democrats don’t do stuff you don’t want.  I’ll overturn the election.”

Only that isn’t the direction the “empathy” crap flows.  It only seems to flow from the far left.  It is a river of molten manure that springs and flows from the radical left and routinely runs its banks over conservatives and ordinary Americans.

In the case of Sonia Sotomayor, that crap river flowed right over New Haven, Connecticut firefighters who made the mistake of playing by the rules against a system increasingly geared toward running all over them as white males.  But it is a river that would have ran over every single American to the tune of billions of dollars had the Supreme Court not reversed her decision.

Here’s that story:

Sotomayor Ruling Could Have Cost Consumers Billions

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 10:56 PM

By: Phil Brennan

A decision rendered by Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, fortunately reversed by the Supreme Court on April 1, 2009, could have been extravagantly costly to American consumers, according to the Steve Milloy’s authoritative Junkscience.Com.

Charging that her nomination represents a potential threat to U.S. Consumers and to the economy in terms of energy and the environment, Milloy reported on her 2007 Second Circuit decision in Riverkeeper, Inc. V. EPA 475 F. 3d 83′

Milloy wrote that in her ruling Judge Sotomayor sided with “extreme green groups” who had sued the Environmental Protection Agency because the agency permitted cost-benefit analysis to be used in the determination of environmental protection technology for power plant cooling water intake structures.

Cost benefit analysis involves the balancing of the total expected costs of a proposal or project against its total expected benefits in order to determine its economic feasibility. Do the benefits outweigh or justify the cost?

According to Milloy, had the EPA been required to abide by Judge Sotomayor’s decision, U.S. Consumers would have been forced to pay billions of dollars more in energy costs every year as power plants producing more than one-half of the nation’s electricity would have had to undertake expensive retrofits.”

Noting that President Obama said he wanted somebody “who has the intellectual firepower but also a little bit of a common touch and a practical sense of how the world works,” Milloy said that in the Riverkeeper case Sotomayor didn’t display too much of a “common touch” and “practical sense” when it came to the cost-benefit analysis.

Senators, Milloy advised, should probe whether Judge Sotomayor “lacks the common-sense realization that the benefits of environmental regulation ought to outweigh its costs — a worldview with ominous implications given the nation’s present rush toward cap-and-tax global warming regulation and other green mindlessness.”

Indeed, writing for the majority decision that overturned Sotomayor’s ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia:

noted that forcing compliance under Sotomayor’s reasoning would make companies spend nine times the amount necessary to accomplish “nearly the same benefit to the environment that cheaper technologies would achieve.”

Spend nine times more for very nearly the same benefit.  And liberals wonder why conservatives call them “insane.”

Now, it just so happens that “common touch” and “practical sense” didn’t matter very much when we voted for our president, either.  So why should it matter to us when we put yet another black-robed master over us for the rest of her life?

Let’s hear what Obama said he wanted:

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

The guy we voted for as our president said he planned to bankrupt fully half of our source of electricity.

“Empathy” means millions of Americans freezing to death in the dark.

Get ready for it.  Because Obama’s and Sotomayor’s crap river is going to flood right down your family’s throat.

Looking over Sotomayor’s record indicates that she doesn’t have a whole lot of legal sense, either.  She has had her cases overruled six out of seven of the times that they have come before the Supreme Court.  That is how radical, and how incompetent as a judge, she truly is.

Cases Reviewed by the Supreme Court

• Ricci v. DeStefano 530 F.3d 87 (2008) —decision pending as of 5/26/2009 [update as of 6/29/09: reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer)].

• Riverkeeper, Inc. vs. EPA, 475 F.3d 83 (2007) — reversed 6-3 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg)

• Knight vs. Commissioner, 467 F.3d 149 (2006) — upheld, but reasoning was unanimously faulted

• Dabit vs. Merrill Lynch, 395 F.3d 25 (2005) — reversed 8-0

• Empire Healthchoice Assurance, Inc. vs. McVeigh, 396 F.3d 136 (2005) — reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Breyer, Kennedy, Souter, Alito)

• Malesko v. Correctional Services Corp., 299 F.3d 374 (2000) — reversed 5-4 (Dissenting: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer)

• Tasini vs. New York Times, et al, 972 F. Supp. 804 (1997) — reversed 7-2 (Dissenting: Stevens, Breyer)

Sonia Sotomayor is a judge who has been humiliated with an 8-0 smackdown of her judicial reasoning.  She has been overruled – meaning her legal judgment was contradicted as wrong – six out of seven times.  And if that isn’t bad enough, the ONLY time her decision was actually upheld (Knight vs. Commissioner), her reasoning for the decision was faulted by every single judge on the panel.

In the recent Hew Haven Firefighter case (a.k.a. Ricci v. DeStefano), Sotomayor was not only overruled on the close 5-4 as was reported;  her underlying legal reasoning that compliance with Title VII justified “race-based preferences” as a matter of summary judgment was tossed aside by all nine justices.

So what do you do when you have a judge who has displayed such a shocking lack of common sense that she would have imposed billions of dollars on the American taxpayer to accomplish virtually nothing had her decision not been overruled by the Supreme Court?  What do you do when you have a judge who has been overruled six out of seven times by the Supreme Court?

You put such a judge on the supreme court, where she cannot possibly be overruled, that’s what.

Sonia Sotomayor has said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”  And she said it not once, as was earlier maintained by liberals, but seven times.  There’s no defense of such a remark made even once, let alone seven separate times.  All one has to do to see how racist it is is to replace the words “Latina woman” with “white male” and the words “white male” with “Latina woman.”

And where do you put a judge who is clearly influenced by racial – and frankly racist – thinking?  On the Supreme Court, where her racial bias can become a fixed part of the institution for a generation to come.