The Failure And Stupidity Of Democrats’ Fascist Central-Planning Documented In Leftist Los Angeles Times

Two articles on the same day from the same liberal newspaper pretty much put the kibosh on any portrayal of liberals as anything other than completely insane:

A big bet on electric vehicle manufacturing goes bust
Production of electric vehicles and batteries was supposed to create high-tech jobs in Indiana. Think City and Ener1 set up shop, enticed by government incentives. But soon they filed for bankruptcy.
January 27, 2012|By Julie Wernau

Reporting from Elkhart, Ind. — For politicians betting on electric vehicles to drive job growth, the view from inside Think City’s plant here is their worst nightmare: 100 unfinished vehicles lined up with no word on whether they will be completed.

 Only two years ago, the tiny Think cars (two can fit in a regular parking space) were expected to bring more than 400 jobs to this ailing city and a lifeline to suppliers who once made parts for gas-guzzling recreational vehicles.

“We’ve said we’re out to make Indiana the electric vehicle state. It’s beginning to look like the state capital will be Elkhart County,” Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said in January 2010 in announcing government incentives used to attract Think to his state.

 Instead, the Hoosier State’s big bet has been a bust. The plant is devoid of activity; there are just two employees. A Russian investor who recently purchased Think’s bankrupt parent in Norway has been silent about its future.  A government-backed Indianapolis battery maker that was to supply Think wrote off a $73-million investment in the car company and Thursday declared bankruptcy. Two unrelated electric truck makers Indiana planned to nurture have yet to get off the ground.

 Indiana’s foray into electric vehicles is a cautionary tale for states in hot pursuit of high-tech manufacturing jobs. Think’s story illustrates how politicians so badly wanted to stimulate job growth that they showered the automaker and the battery supplier with tax benefits and incentives while at the same time failing to determine whether there was a market for the car: a plastic two-seater with a top speed of about 65 mph and a price tag approaching $42,000.

 “Where’s the value?” Gregg Fore, an Elkhart recreational vehicle industry executive, said of Think. “I could buy a golf cart for five grand if that’s what I wanted to drive.”

 Fore says the federal and state governments as well as Elkhart subsidized the Think project apparently believing those tax benefits would drive down the vehicle’s price and make the cars more attractive. “By giving money to the battery company and electric car company, they are saying, ‘We want you to buy their products even though we know you don’t want them.'”

 Indiana’s total losses aren’t immediately known. Katelyn Hancock, a spokeswoman for the Indiana Economic Development Corp., the state’s economic development arm, declined to disclose how much Think and battery-maker Ener1 had received in taxpayer-funded credits and incentives, saying such information is confidential. Ener1 also refused to provide the information.

 What is known, however, is that the Obama and Bush administrations poured millions of dollars into battery production in a quest to power thousands of Think City vehicles with lithium-ion batteries. To date, Ener1 has spent $55 million in federal funding, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

 Some analysts say government backing of the car didn’t seem like a bad investment at the time. “It looked like electric vehicles were it in 2008. It really did,” said Theodore O’Neill, an analyst who has followed the electric car industry. “You had the government calling the shots and doling the money out with the major” automakers.

 Still, O’Neill says he wouldn’t buy such a car. “For $40,000, you can get a certified pre-owned BMW convertible and a Vespa scooter. Both of them. And if you want to have a good time, put the top down.” General Motors’ Chevy Volt electric car sells for about the same price.

Think City’s plant, a 10-minute drive from Elkhart’s Main Street, appears all but abandoned these days. When a reporter visited recently, the parking lot was empty and the visitor entrance and lobby were laced with cobwebs. A single pickup truck and a sign telling visitors to ring the buzzer were the only signs of life near the rear of the building. Inside two men were quietly baby-sitting the plant, awaiting headlights and seat belts from Europe so the cars could meet U.S. standards.

 What eventually is supposed to happen to these cars isn’t clear. No one in Elkhart could point to a local executive in charge of production. A person identified as a spokesman declined to comment, saying he was no longer on the payroll.

 The person who may have the most to say about Think’s future also isn’t talking. Russian investor Boris Zingarevich bought Think Global, the Norwegian parent company, at auction a month after its bankruptcy.

 Reached by phone in Russia, Slava Bychkov, a spokesman for Zingarevich’s Ilim Group, said he could not provide details of plans for the car company.

 “The management is now under the restart process and will communicate their strategy in [the] near future,” Bychkov said.

Okay.  So Democrats’ bright idea to impose “green” cars on America was a rather stupid one and all the promises they made about such vehicles and all the jobs they would create were all a bunch of lies.  So we’re finally abandoning that idiotic boondoggle, right?  I mean, obviously nobody but a collection of abject idiots would keep demanding we keep pursuing the same utterly failed policies, right?

Wrong.  You can NEVER underestimate the sheer imbecilic stupidity of liberals or their determination to implode America with said stupidity:

California orders hike in number of super clean cars
The state’s air board issues new rules to automakers as part of its effort to cut greenhouse gases.
By Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times
January 28, 2012

California, long a national leader in cutting auto pollution, pushed the envelope further Friday as state regulators approved rules to cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars and put significantly more pollution-free vehicles on the road in coming years.

The package of Air Resources Board regulations would require auto manufacturers to offer more zero- or very low-emission cars such as battery electric, hydrogen fuel cell and plug-in hybrid vehicles in California starting with model year 2018.

By 2025, one in seven new autos sold in California, or roughly 1.4 million, must be ultra-clean, moving what is now a driving novelty into the mainstream.

The board also strengthened future emission standards for all new cars, making them the toughest in the nation. The rules are intended by 2025 to slash smog-forming pollutants from new vehicles by 75 percent and reduce by a third their emissions that contribute to global warming.

“Today’s vote … represents a new chapter for clean cars in California and in the nation as a whole,” said Air Resources Board chairwoman Mary Nichols.

Auto manufacturers are uneasy with some of the provisions but generally support the package, which took three years to develop. “We know the board wants to push the automakers,” said Mike Love, national regulatory affairs manager for Toyota Motor Sales. “We said we’re willing to go along with you and do our best.”

The requirements are expected to drive up car prices. The board staff predicts that the advanced technologies needed to meet the new standards will add $1,900 to the price of a new car in 2025. But that would be more than offset by $6,000 in estimated fuel savings over the life of the vehicle, according to the board’s staff.

Zero-emission autos now make up a minuscule portion of the more than 26 million cars in California, with just a few hundred fuel cell cars and about 34,000 battery electric autos on the road.

“The fact that we are going to change what consumers can buy is one of the most important things we can do,” board member Ken Yeager said before the panel, at the end of a two-day hearing in Los Angeles, voted 9 to 0 to approve the rules.

Manufacturers are poised to introduce a number of new electric and plug-in hybrid models. “This year, two dozen or more new vehicles are going to come out in the market,” Love said. “Everyone is trying their idea for EVs (electric vehicles), plug-ins.”

Nichols said she has seen “a real change in attitudes on the part of auto companies that have seen the handwriting on the wall…. The reality is that companies see the future is going to be in electric drivetrain vehicles. They’re moving there as fast they can.”

But automakers do still have concerns, particularly whether consumers will buy the ultra-clean cars.

“Automakers are mandated to build products that consumers are not mandated to buy,” said Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which includes Chrysler Group, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. “If the electric vehicle infrastructure is not in place, consumers may be reluctant to buy these technologies.”

Jack Nerad, Kelley Blue Book market analyst, predicted that “the added expense and lesser versatility of the ‘environmental’ vehicles” will continue to make them less desirable to consumers. Manufacturers might have to sell clean cars at a loss to meet the requirements, and “buyers of conventional cars will pick up the remainder of the tab,” he said. One of the most disputed elements of the rules centered on a clause that in the early years of the mandate gives credits to automakers who reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of their fleets more than required. Those credits would cut the number of electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrids the companies had to offer in California.

Jay Friedland, legislative director of Plug In America, called it “a loophole you can drive a truck through” that will undermine the 2025 goal of having ultra-clean cars make up 15% of the new vehicles sold in the state.

A zero-emission mandate is not new in California. It dates from 1990 but was progressively watered down over the years.

The state’s ambitious goals to slash its greenhouse gas production renewed focus on the role that super clean cars could play.

“The steady drumbeat of the need to get off the dependence on petroleum is really what is driving this,” Nichols said. “It’s taken longer than we’ve hoped.”

Starting with model year 2015, automakers will have to meet tougher standards for smog-forming emissions and, in 2017, greater limits on pollutants that contribute to global warming.

By 2025, the standards are designed to reduce the average smog-forming emissions of new cars and light trucks by 75% compared with those sold today.

The greenhouse gas limits, which would be the same as the federal government has proposed for vehicles nationally, should cut those auto emissions by a third more in 2025 than required under current standards. To meet the new limits, the board staff anticipates the auto industry will make greater use of advanced hybrid technology, stronger and lighter materials and improved emission control equipment.

If oil companies don’t reach an agreement with the state to voluntarily install alternative fueling stations, such as for hydrogen fuel cells, the new rules will also require them to do so when a certain number of cars using that fuel is reached. The outlets could be placed at an existing gasoline station or a free-standing site.

“I hope the oil industry will get on board rather than dragging its feet,” said board member Hector De La Torre.

Democrats are more rigidly determined to be stupid and to impose their immoral stupidity on others than any other people who have ever lived.  I say that because they come from the greatest nation on earth with the greatest example of the success that comes from liberty and economic liberty.  And then they choose every single time to choose the 100 percent failed track record of centrally planned economies.

Democrats are also fascist to the cores of their shriveled little souls.  They have long-since convinced themselves that they are better than you and smarter than you and more moral than you.  And that gives them the right to dictate – because that’s precisely the right word – what kind of health insurance you must have and what kind of light bulbs you must use and what kind of car you must drive.  Whether it is utterly insane or not.

It doesn’t work.  But that is completely irrelevant:

Conservatives who want the government to end all energy subsidies say they are not surprised that Obama won’t let go of the clean-energy mantra.

“They don’t look at Solyndra as part of the larger problem of the Energy Department and the federal government intervening in the markets,” said Jack Spencer, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “They see it as a failed program within the larger context of a succeeding policy.”

Solyndra.  Ener1.  Think City.  Beacon Power.  Evergreen Solar.  AES.  SpectraWatt.  Amonix.  It doesn’t matter how many times Obama or Democrats fail with other people’s money.  Because they are maximally immune from reality.  And when they create these boondoggles they invariably seem benefit their big Democrat donors (crony capitalist fascism alert).  And did I mention that they play their games with other peoples’ money?

We have the most important election in our entire history coming up this year: we either vote Democrat and vote to go the way of the Dodo bird or we vote Republican and vote for a chance – and I mean only a chance – to survive.  Because Obama has already wounded this country so terribly in his “fundamental transformation” that it may well not survive no matter who runs it.

FD HIDDEN DIV

FD HIDDEN DIV

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.

Government Report: New Obama EPA Rules To Cost More Than 800,000 Jobs

There’s all the crap about Obama being a Kenyan and a Muslim, etc. ad nauseum.  We’re way beyond that.  I for one don’t think that Barack Obama is conspiring to fly any planes into any skyscrapers.

That said, he is nevertheless a terrorist.  He is an economic terrorist who literally destroys jobs by the hundreds of thousands – something no Muslim jihadist could ever do to us.  And my labeling of Barack Obama has nothing to do with the color of his skin or even with his religion; it has everything to do with his Marxist ideology.

Exclusive: EPW report shows new EPA rules will cost more than 800,000 jobs
posted at 8:45 am on September 28, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

Actually, it’s not just the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s minority contingent that fears the loss of nearly a million jobs from new EPA rules on greenhouse gases and other emissions issues.  It’s also groups like the United Steel Workers, Unions for Jobs and the Environment, and experts like King’s College Professor Ragnar Lofstedt.  Hot Air got an exclusive look at a report that the EPW minority staff will release later this morning detailing the economic damage that an activist EPA will do to the American economy, and which will come at perhaps the worst possible time, both economically and politically.

The executive summary spells out the stakes involved in the effort to rein in the EPA:

New standards for commercial and industrial boilers: up to 798,250 jobs at risk;

The revised National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone: severe restrictions on job creation and business expansion in hundreds of counties nationwide.

New standards for Portland Cement plants: up to 18 cement plants at risk of shutting down, threatening nearly 1,800 direct jobs and 9,000 indirect jobs;

The Endangerment Finding/Tailoring Rules for Greenhouse Gas Emissions: higher energy costs; jobs moving overseas; severe economic impacts on the poor, the elderly, minorities, and those on fixed incomes; 6.1 million sources subject to EPA control and regulation; and

In fact, the new regulations threaten to put entire industries out of business.  The new standard for boilers, titled “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Major Sources: Industrial, Commercial, and Institutional Boilers and Process Heaters” and called the Boiler MACT, creates a standard that literally no producer in the US meets at the moment.  The industry group Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA) represents end-user firms that employ 750,000 in various industries, and they concur:

IECA members have 6 units that were part of the best performing units and none can comply with the standards based on the best performing units. Based on the analysis of the data EPA used to develop these standards, it appears that none of the coal-fired boilers in the source category can meet the proposed standards.

What happens when the installed boilers don’t meet the new standard?  Factories and other facilities will have to close, putting jobs in danger and firms already hammered by the recession will lose production days — which will destroy jobs.  That’s why the United Steel Workers have sounded the alarm, insisting that the EPA’s proposal will mean disaster:

“Tens of thousands of these jobs will be imperiled.  In addition, many more tens of thousands of jobs in the supply chains and in the communities where these plants are located also will be at risk.”

Nor are steelworkers the only group at risk.  New industrial standards for Portland cement threaten to stop all American production in the name of environmental protection — and send the work overseas to China, where ironically the standards are more lax and more pollution will result:

“So rather than importing 20 million tons of cement per year, the proposed [rule] will lead to cement imports of more than 48 million tons per year. In other words, by tightening the regulations on U.S. cement kilns, there will be a risk transfer of some 28 million tons of cement offshore, mostly to China.” – Professor Ragnar Lofstedt, Kings College (London)

Again, no facility in the US meets the standards proposed by the EPA.  Imposition of these standards would at least temporarily close almost 20 percent of all American cement producers and reduce long-term cement production from 8-15%.  The cement that will be needed for construction demand will have to be imported, primarily from China, which is expanding their cement production using environmental standards significantly below current American standards.  In other words, we can expect more pollution, not less — just outsourced along with the jobs in the industry.

Watch for the full report later today at the EPW Minority Caucus website.

Obama isn’t backing down.  His jihad against fossil fuels and the US jobs those fuels create and sustain must succeed.  No matter how many Americans are harmed.  But in spite of the facts, our Liar-in-Chief keeps spinning and twisting:

“We may end up having to do it in chunks, as opposed to some sort of comprehensive omnibus legislation. But we’re going to stay on this because it is good for our economy, it’s good for our national security, and, ultimately, it’s good for our environment.”

Let’s give a listen to what Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu had to say about yet ANOTHER attempt to destroy the economy and destroy American jobs:

“The president’s policies right now are doing much more harm than the [BP] spill itself to the economy of the South coast. … It’s just gotten to a point where people in Louisiana ask, ‘Do they even understand what is going on down here?’ They have the entire offshore industry virtually shut down.”

Obama imposed a job-crushing drilling ban in the Gulf of Mexico, which has resulted in drilling rigs moving away from American jobs.  Even as Obama and his pal George Soros fund deep drilling operations in Mexico and Brazil.

When even labor unions and Democrat politicians start standing up and screaming that a Democrat president is destroying their jobs and their lives, it is way past time to take notice.

If we don’t vote these Democrats out and take away both the House and the Senate from them, we may not have a country by the next election.

Get Ready For $7/Gal Gas To Meet Obama’s Target

You may not be smart enough to realize that you voted yourself right out of your car in voting for Obama.  But that’s pretty much what you did:

March 2, 2010, 6:35 pm
Fuel Taxes Must Rise, Harvard Researchers Say
By SINDYA N. BHANOO

To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving must simply increase, according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.

In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consume 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.

Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”

Dr. Morrow, formerly a fellow at the Belfer Center, is a professor of mechanical engineering and economics at Iowa State University

Researchers said that vehicle miles traveled will increase by more than 30 percent between 2010 and 2030 unless policymakers increase fuel taxes.

This insane result of Obama’s policies comes in the wake of the fact that global warming, or climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is a documented fraud based on the worst pseudo-science and demagoguery.  Far from being scientific, the global warming agenda is now being blasted as a blatant danger to the field of science itself by the Institute of Physics.  Just look at their first two points as they confront “ClimateGate” and the collapse of even a facade of scientific legitimacy:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

The Institute of Physics continues to damn “climate change research” up one side and down the other for a total of 13 points.  Climate change is a sick, twisted joke that has fundamentally eroded trust and credibility of the entire scientific enterprise.  Not that Obama cares.  He is a true believer who will destroy our economy by massively redistributing American wealth to the rest of the world in order to “fix” the planet.

Obama’s irrational energy policies also comes in the wake of the fact that the United States has massively more domestic oil than Democrats previously claimed.  Which is to say that any energy policy that does not include the concept of “drill baby, drill,” simply isn’t rational.  We have abundant oil, natural gas, and coal resources.  In this time of economic difficulty, let us finally use them!!!

Democrats have always dreamed that America would become more like Europe.  And soon it will: we’ll be taking buses because we can’t afford to pay the same skyhigh prices for gasoline that Europeans have to pay because THEY elected socialists.

Nobody should be surprised.  The same guy who said that energy prices would necessarily skyrocket under his agenda has taken position after position that will have us freezing in the dark.

You voted for “change,” America.  So go change out of your nice comfy car to a long, nasty, bumpy bus ride.

Maybe we should start watching Flintstones episodes so we can learn how to build cars in the age of Obama.