Saturday, December 31, 2016

Abolish the Department of Energy

When former Texas governor Rick Perry ran for president in 2012, he promised he'd abolish the U.S. Department of Energy (at least when he could remember it). Liberals wrote this off as typical conservative stupidity.
Why would anyone want to abolish the DOE? According to one liberal commentator, it was because the department "was established during Jimmy Carter's administration and it perhaps sounds like it might have something to do with solar panels."
Jimmy Carter created it, all right, but solar panels were only a symptom of the real problem. The DOE was conceived in dark and pessimistic beliefs and forecasts that have proven totally wrong. As Obama might say, the DOE is on the wrong side of history. As it stands the department needs to either be rethought or retired.
The original legislation justified a Department of Energy because, 1) we were rapidly running out of fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas; 2) as a consequence of this we were becoming increasingly dependent on energy imports — dependence that made us vulnerable to embargoes and political blackmail; and 3) so therefore we needed "a strong national [read government-directed] energy program."
Even before fracking proved the dire warnings to be utterly wrong, we had for the most part taken care of our energy dependence. We significantly reduced any possible vulnerability to an embargo by diversifying our suppliers; over sixty countries were supplying us with oil in the 2000s. Our No. 1 supplier? Canada. Mexico also has been in the top five. This information makes "foreign oil," a bit less scary, no?
Then again the fear of oil cartels was always overblown; from 1980 until the mid-2000s, oil importers like the U.S. thrived while the exporters were the ones who suffered because of excessive dependence on oil revenues.
In the meantime, we've endured wasteful, panicked policies such as massive subsidies for the wind and solar power, and electric cars. Worst of all, Congress has saddled consumers with ethanol subsidies and mandates. These boondoggles cost us billions of dollars, and none of them are commercially viable in their own right. In fact, the DOE has produced no dramatic breakthroughs in energy technology despite 40 years of trying (and failing) to pick winners.
The only energy breakthrough of the last four decades has been fracking, and its only connection to government was a tax break for developing hard-to-get oil resources. This was an exemption from the ludicrous windfall profits tax of 1980, which was repealed in 1988 when windfall profits (whatever they were supposed to be) equaled zero for three years running.
With the fears of foreign energy or energy shortages waning in 2009,President Obama sought to gin up a sense of crisis over climate change. Yet Congress never passed the 1400-page Waxman-Markey climate bill of 2009. Even though the president took every opportunity to tell us we've frying the planet by burning fossil fuels, there has been no sense of crisis among the public.
Trump, reacting to Russian sanctions, says time to 'move on to bigger and better things'
Also from the Washington Examiner
Just as many experts began to downplay the catastrophe rhetoric, the president did not, and finally, exasperated with Congress, he tried to impose energy legislation through the DOE and the EPA with, as he said, "a pen and ... a phone." The Trump administration can undo or minimize much of the DOE's Obama-era legislating on energy.
Many would argue that the DOE does some good, even essential work. It watches over nuclear waste, for example. And there is some useful research and development going on at many of the DOE laboratories.
But any valuable work done by the DOE could be carved off into independent agencies just as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) was created by Congress so that the DOE would not have control over natural gas prices. Nuclear power concerns should be part of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the labs could be placed under an independent agency such as the Energy Research and Development Agency (ERDA) that existed from 1974 until it was folded into the DOE three years later.
Overall, the rationale for the DOE needs to be rethought and restated in ways that make it sensible for the 21st century — where fracking and enhanced oil recovery have made us confident of long-term fossil fuel supplies, and human-caused climate change, though a problem, does not seem to be generating a crisis or catastrophe.
If the Trump administration can't articulate a good reason for the continued existence of the DOE, then we should follow Gov. Perry's inclination and abolish it.
Red-state tide could flood into Minnesota
Also from the Washington Examiner
Peter Z. Grossman is the author of "U.S. Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure" and is a professor of economics at Butler University. 

OBAMA CAN’T TRASH TALK HIS WAY OUT OF BLAME FOR DEMS’ DECIMATION

OBAMA CAN’T TRASH TALK HIS WAY OUT OF BLAME FOR DEMS’ DECIMATION

Donald Trump is an inveterate trash talker, and I’m old-fashioned enough to consider this a bad thing in a president-elect. But even assuming that Trump keeps talking trash as president (a fair assumption, I think), he will not bear primary responsibility for this latest manifestation of civic decline.
Primary responsibility for “normalizing” trash talk from the White House falls instead onPresident Obama.
Obama’s latest display consists of his claim that he could have defeated Donald Trump and won a third term. Maybe yes — Obama is more popular than Hillary Clinton and a better campaigner — maybe no — Americans probably aren’t inclined, absent exigent circumstances, to grant a third term to their president.
Regardless of the merits, it was unseemly of Obama to boast he would have won a third term. And Obama’s claim wasn’t just a shot at Trump. It was, as Sam Stein of the Huffington Post says, an attack on Hillary.
Indeed, the shot at Clinton was really the point of Obama’s boast. He knows that he has left the Democratic Party in terrible shape and that some are holding him accountable for what Stein calls, with some exaggeration, the party’s destruction. Obama is desperate to shift the blame.
But blaming Hillary won’t cut it. Losing a presidential race in which the standard bearer carries the popular vote by more than 2 percentage points does not signal the possible ruin of a political party.
This is especially true when the party has held the White House for eight years. History shows that it’s difficult for a party to win three straight presidential elections. The Democrats’ failure to accomplish this in 2016 is comparable to their failures, in a very close elections, to do it in 2000 and 1968, and to the GOP’s failure in 1960, another extremely tight contest.
No one suggested that the Dems were a train wreck in 2000 or that the Republicans were in 1960. If this suggestion was mooted in 1968, it was because the Vietnam War had so bitterly divided the party, not because Richard Nixon edged past Hubert Humphrey.
The reason for hand-wringing about the future of the Democrats now is not Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat. Rather, it is the loss during Obama’s presidency of 12 Senate seats (from 60 to 48) and 63 House seats; of 12 governors; and of around 1,000 seats in state legislatures. Republicans now control 68 of 99 state legislative bodies and 33 state houses.
The GOP didn’t fare nearly this badly during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Obama can’t blame Hillary Clinton for the devastating losses Democrats have sustained in non-presidential elections since he won the White House. The blame rests largely with our trash talking president and his efforts, which eventually became relentless, to ram leftist policies down the throat of a centrist nation.
With a record like this, it takes a lot of nerve to indulge in political trash talking. Nerve is the one thing Obama has never lacked.
It’s reasonable to expect the Democrats to bounce back. How quickly depends partly on Donald Trump’s performance as president and partly on forces more or less beyond anyone’s control.
But until the Dems rally, Obama must take most of the blame for their exile from power at all levels. Thereafter, he must take it for the time spent in the wilderness.

OBAMA’S SECRET CONCESSIONS TO IRAN REVEALED

OBAMA’S SECRET CONCESSIONS TO IRAN REVEALED

Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) posted documents revealing that President Obama granted Iran permission to stockpile uranium in excess of the 300 kilogram limit set by the nuclear deal. Jenna Lifhits of the Weekly Standard has the story.
The exemptions had been kept secret for almost a year. However the Trump administration reportedly intended to make them public, which may be why the IAEA decided to reveal them.
The Obama administration didn’t just keep the exemptions secret. Apparently, it denied their existence. According to Lifhits:
Some details of the exemptions had previously been leaked. The Institute for Science and International Security revealed in September that Iran had been allowed to exceed certain caps in the deal so that the country could come into compliance with the deal’s terms.
Administration officials dismissed the. . .report at the time.
In other words, the administration was dishonest. What else is new?
Why did the administration keep the exemptions secret? Probably to be able to maintain the pretense that the nuclear agreement is holding up. Any deal will hold up if violations are secretly deemed non-violations.
A source who works with Congress told the Weekly Standard:
The Obama team was just hoping to get through the next few weeks without revealing that they’ve been allowing Iran to go beyond the nuclear deal the whole time. That way the president and Secretary of State Kerry could keep declaring that Iran has been following the deal, and their echo chamber could keep saying the nuclear deal is working.
But now it’s public. The only reason that the nuclear deal is still in place is because the Obama team has been secretly rewriting to let Iran cheat. The only question is, what’s still not being told?
It’s a good question. What’s now being told is bad enough, however:
The now-confirmed exemptions reported on by ISIS include allowing Iran to keep low-enriched uranium (LEU) in various forms beyond what’s allowed under the nuclear deal. The concession applies to forms that have been “deemed unrecoverable” for use in a nuclear weapon, and Iran has promised not to build a facility to try recover them.
But if Iran breaks its promise and builds such a facility, these forms of uranium suddenly would be recoverable. This, I imagine, is why the term “unrecoverable” apparently is not in the underlying agreement — the one that was made public.
As Associated Press reporter Bradley Klapper said to John Kerry’s spokesman when word of the secret exemption first leaked:
You’re using this term that’s not in the document. I’m just trying to figure out how we can actually check that or understand what it means. If you say some things are usable but some things aren’t, but I don’t know which are which, that’s not spelled out in the document. That seems to be a new idea here.
New and dangerous.
Kerry’s spokesman had no meaningful response.
Obama’s desire to accommodate Iran is matched only by his desire to screw Israel and lack of desire to avert disaster in Syria. Indeed, the first desire helps explains the latter two.

Friday, December 30, 2016

AT THE AP, OPINION MASQUERADES AS REPORTING

AT THE AP, OPINION MASQUERADES AS REPORTING

Yesterday the Associated Press published an article by its Jerusalem bureau chief, Josef Federman, on Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to President Obama’s betrayal of Israel in the U.N. The article is an opinion piece–a virulent one, in fact. It is suitable for publication in, say, the New York Times, as an anti-Israel op-ed. The piece is headlined Israel: humbled Netanyahu places hopes in Trump. It begins:
The Israeli government’s furious reaction to the U.N. Security Council’s adoption of a resolution opposing Jewish settlements in occupied territory underscores its fundamental and bitter dispute with the international community about the future of the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that there is nothing wrong with his controversial policy of building Jewish towns in occupied areas that the Palestinians, with overwhelming world support, claim for their state. But Friday’s U.N. rebuke was a stark reminder that the rest of the world considers it a crime. The embattled leader is now placing his hopes in the incoming administration of Donald Trump, which is shaping up as the first major player to embrace Israel’s nationalist right and its West Bank settlements.
Those are perhaps defensible statements of opinion, although I would argue that they are mostly incorrect. The overall thrust of the opening paragraphs–that the entire world other than Netanyahu’s administration and “Israel’s nationalist right” considers it a “crime” for Jews to live in their Biblical home of Judea Samaria, and that Donald Trump is the first “major player” to disagree, is blatantly false.
There is much more, for example:
In a series of statements, Netanyahu has criticized the Obama Administration for letting Resolution 2334 pass Friday by abstaining, using unprecedented language that has turned a policy disagreement into a personal vendetta.
Netanyahu’s language was unprecedented? What, did he call Obama a “chickens*t”? And was not Obama’s betrayal, coordinated with the Arabs and timed to avoid accountability to Congress or the voters, the culmination of a vendetta that included interference in Israel’s election to try to defeat the Prime Minister? That wasn’t a vendetta because, I suppose, Federman welcomed it.
Federman has opinions about Trump, too:
The recent diplomatic defeat would be much more damaging if not for a potential remaining and rather major ace in Netanyahu’s hand: the incoming Trump Administration.
In a striking departure from past policy of incumbent [Ed.: sic] presidents waiting on the sidelines, Trump tried to scuttle the resolution and called for a U.S. veto. After the vote, Trump vowed that “things will be different after Jan. 20th.”
So it’s Netanyahu and Trump who have disrupted the natural order of things by smashing precedents. How about this, Mr. Federman: what’s the precedent for a lame-duck president executing a major change in American foreign policy, against the wishes of Congress and the American people, less than 30 days before leaving office, in the face of no crisis or emergency, or even a change in circumstances?
Critically, he has appointed an outspoken supporter and donor to the settlements, his longtime attorney David Friedman, as ambassador to Israel. And aides say Trump is serious about a promise to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which even many Israelis fear could spark violence. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, home to sensitive religious sites, as the capital of the future state to which they aspire.
Sensitive religious sites like Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Moving the U.S. embassy to Israel’s capital has been part of the Republican Party’s platform for a long time. The suggestion that having the U.S. embassy on Jerusalem, along with the Knesset, Israel’s Supreme Court and other organs of Israel’s government “could spark violence” is sheer editorializing.
Mr. Federman’s article is a typical expression of the international Left’s pro-Palestinian view of the situation in Judea and Samaria. It is, as I said, an op-ed that could easily appear in a liberal organ like the New York Times. But there is not a shred of news anywhere in it. It is merely a recitation of Federman’s opinions, with the opinions of Netanyahu, Trump and their allies erected as straw men to be struck down by others.
This conclusion was so obvious that I thought the AP must have designated the Federman article an opinion piece. But no: it went out on the wire as a straight news story. In fact, as I understand the AP’s position, it doesn’t publish opinion pieces. In fact, it cautions its reporters against expressing opinions at all:
EXPRESSIONS OF OPINION:
Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP’s reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.
How about expressions of opinion in AP news stories? That, apparently, is fine, as long as the opinions are on the left.

SUPREME COURT FREAKOUT AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

SUPREME COURT FREAKOUT AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

The New York Times was once known as The Grey Lady. Today, a more apt moniker would be The Hysterical Bag Lady. The Times editorial board is home to the most immoderate, shrieking Leftism you will find this side of the Nation.
On Christmas Eve, the Times editorialized on The Stolen Supreme Court Seat. It is a classic of the post-Trump-election freakout genre:
Soon after his inauguration next month, President-elect Donald Trump will nominate someone to the Supreme Court, which has been hamstrung by a vacancy since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February.
This is wrong. The Supreme Court has been working away, deciding cases. Where the vote is 4-4, as has occasionally happened, the decision of the Court of Appeals stands. Temporarily having an even number of Supreme Court justices (the Constitution does not specify a number) is not optimal, but it isn’t “hamstrung,” either.
No matter how it plays out, Americans must remember one thing above all: The person who gets confirmed will sit in a stolen seat.
Seriously? A “stolen seat”? The next Supreme Court justice may be on the Court for decades, but the Times implies that all decisions in which he or she participates will be of questionable legitimacy, since the seat was “stolen.”
What the editorialists mean, of course, is that the justice will be a Trump appointee rather than an Obama appointee:
It was stolen from Barack Obama, a twice-elected president….
It was stolen by top Senate Republicans, who broke with longstanding tradition and refused to consider any nominee Mr. Obama might send them, because they wanted to preserve the court’s conservative majority.
This is the substance of the Times’s complaint: that Senate Republicans “broke with longstanding tradition” by deferring the next Supreme Court selection until after the November 2016 election. How do the editorialists support their claim? By citing their own paper.
The Republican party line — that it was an election year, so the American people should have a “voice” in the selection of the next justice — was a patent lie.
The Times editorial board, like so many liberals, has been unhinged by Trump’s victory. The entire board seems to be off its meds.
The people spoke when they re-elected Mr. Obama in 2012, entrusting [Ed.: sic]him to choose new members for the court. And the Senate has had no problem considering, and usually confirming, election-year nominees in the past.
The link goes to an op-ed in the Times by Timothy Huebner. Huebner writes:
On 13 occasions, a vacancy on the nation’s highest court has occurred — through death, retirement or resignation — during a presidential election year. …
In 11 of these instances, the Senate took action on the president’s nomination. In all five cases in which a vacancy occurred during the first quarter of the year the president successfully nominated a replacement.
But those events occurred long ago, and instances where the president’s party also controlled the Senate are inapposite. Mr. Huebner admits:
Of course, none of these represents an exact parallel to today’s situation. In all but one of these instances, the president and Senate majority were of the same political party, unlike today.
The fact is that there is no exact, or nearly exact, precedent for the situation the Senate found itself in when Justice Scalia died earlier this year. A distinguished appellate lawyer wrote to Power Line:
If Grassley has any sense, the nomination never makes it out of committee. The last time a justice was confirmed for a vacancy that occurred during an election year was 1932, and Cardozo was more than acceptable to the Democrats.
The closest parallel in more recent history occurred in 1968:
Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that he would retire upon confirmation of a successor. President Johnson then nominated Associate Justice Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice, and Homer Thornberry to replace Fortas as an associate justice. The Republicans filibustered Fortas, with the vote being taken in October, near the end of Johnson’s term. As a result, Warren did not retire until 1969, when Nixon was president.
It’s not an exact parallel, since there was no vacancy on the court during the election year of 1968. But then, as now, the Senate refused to vote on the president’s nominee, and the decision was deferred until after the election, when a new president nominated a new chief justice.
Nuances of this sort are, of course, beyond the capacities of the Times’s dim-witted editorial board. For them, it is sufficient to spew venom against “[t]he shameful, infuriating actions of the Senate Republicans.” It is fair, however, to ask: if a Supreme Court vacancy had occurred during the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, is there a snowball’s chance in Hell that Harry Reid would have allowed a vote on Bush’s nominee? Of course not. And the Times editorial board undoubtedly would have found excuses to cheer Reid on.
The Times editorialists denounce the “infuriating actions” of Senate Republicans, but what is actually infuriating the Times, one suspects, is that Hillary Clinton lost the election.