The vindication of former President Bush? Christopher Taylor Opinion Zone Washington Examiner
By: Christopher Taylor
President Bush was reviled and hated at an almost unbelievable level while in office, with almost no accusation or conspiracy theory untried or unbelieved by the left. Every single action the man took was considered evil and horrible, every single event was an excuse to shower bitterness and spite toward the man and all he did. President Obama's career and political campaign for eight years was largely shaped by how he acted toward President George W. Bush. Now all that has changed.
In one event, on May Day, the entire case against President Bush was demolished by one of his greatest critics: President Obama.
Lets start with the invasion of Iraq, which was solidly opposed by the Democratic Party by 2004 when they realized they needed a tool to attack the president with for the elections. It was in Iraq, because of the US presence there, that a courier was captured, a courier that gave us key information that led to the location of Osama Bin Laden. Bush's decision to invade Iraq turned out to not be a distraction after all, but a key to getting Bin Laden.
Guantanamo Bay, long decried by the left as a haven of human rights violations and extralegal activity, a place President Obama swore repeatedly to close down (and has not) was the location where information critical to the location and killing of Osama Bin Laden was uncovered. Instead of being a blight on America and the source of Osama's popularity, Gitmo became his doom.
Other secret prisons, held up as proof of the sinister, awful nature of the Bush administration, were the site of other information needed to find Osama Bin Laden.
For years, the left argued that the Bush administration and no other administration has ever used torture to get information from terrorists and terrorist suspects. They argued this was ineffective, and further that it was evil and something that America should never use.
Several leading figures, including Leon Panetta, have noted that it was the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" long called "torture" by the left that got us information to find and kill Osama Bin Laden - techniques still in use by the Obama administration.
Direct, targeted killings by military drones, bombs, and soldiers was condemned by the left during the Bush administration, but with a single stroke, the Obama administration reporting the use this tactic to end Osama Bin Laden showed the validity of the tactic. Not only that, but the Obama administration has long argued that this tactic is perfectly legal.
Tho were previously attacked as "Dick Cheney's Assassination Squad." The left's A List talking heads such as Seymore Hersh, Keith Olbermann, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart, among others all specifically attacked this team as an extra-legal tool used by the sinister Vice President Cheney to carry out a personal agenda. Now we find out that it was this very team which moved into place and carried out the mission against Osama Bin Laden.
Patriotism, previously mocked and attacked as being crass, manipulative, and even a tool of the political opportunist is suddenly popular again on the left. When Osama Bin Laden was announced dead, the celebrations and patriotism began, with flag waving and chants of "USA! USA!" heard outside the White House.
President Obama's passive "lead from behind" method of downplaying and reducing US leadership in the world was a direct reversal of President Bush. Bush was called a "cowboy" and reckless, and the bold, open view of America as a leader in the world was despised. Now, however, the USA is seen to lead by taking out Osama Bin Laden personally, striking into the heart of another nation to carry out a mission in a unilateral manner without any UN approval or world-wide permission.
The truth is, the Bush administration's tireless efforts to fight terrorism worldwide in the face of unbelievable opposition and pressure by the left was so effective and so right that now, even hard left former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had to recently thank President Bush.
This was a long process that started years ago under the Bush administration, and was carried out using the same techniques with the tools and areas established by the Bush team by the Obama administration. Two presidencies in a row worked to bring about the death of Osama, resulting in justice for the man who attacked America twice on its own soil.
President Bush told America we needed to be ready for "patient justice" before we could finally see Osama Bin Laden taken in. And President Obama, one of the Bush administration's most strident and vocal opponents, used the very tools, techniques, and tactics that he attacked previously and very publicly to accomplish it all, vindicating former President Bush and six years of the War on Terror before Obama took office.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/opinion-zone/2011/05/vindication-president-bush#ixzz1LtJYr1oU
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
The Waterboarding Trail to bin Laden
The Waterboarding Trail to bin Laden
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said that as late as 2006 fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from harsh interrogations..
By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
Osama bin Laden was killed by Americans, based on intelligence developed by Americans. That should bring great satisfaction to our citizens and elicit praise for our intelligence community. Seized along with bin Laden's corpse was a trove of documents and electronic devices that should yield intelligence that could help us capture or kill other terrorists and further degrade the capabilities of those who remain at large.
But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them.
Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.
That regimen of harsh interrogation was used on KSM after another detainee, Abu Zubaydeh, was subjected to the same techniques. When he broke, he said that he and other members of al Qaeda were obligated to resist only until they could no longer do so, at which point it became permissible for them to yield. "Do this for all the brothers," he advised his interrogators.
Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.
Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden's couriers that helped in last weekend's achievement.
The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—"enhanced interrogation techniques"—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.
The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.
In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.
Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say "reopening" advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.
Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the "dirty little secret" of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable.
It is debatable whether the same techniques would be lawful under statutes passed in 2005 and 2006—phrased in highly abstract terms such as "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment—that some claimed were intended to ban waterboarding even though the Senate twice voted down proposals to ban the technique specifically. It is, however, certain that intelligence-gathering rather than prosecution must be the first priority, and that we need a classified interrogation program administered by the agency best equipped to administer it: the CIA.
We also need to put an end to the ongoing investigations of CIA operatives that continue to undermine intelligence community morale.
Acknowledging and meeting the need for an effective and lawful interrogation program, which we once had, and freeing CIA operatives and others to administer it under congressional oversight, would be a fitting way to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703859304576305023876506348.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said that as late as 2006 fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from harsh interrogations..
By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
Osama bin Laden was killed by Americans, based on intelligence developed by Americans. That should bring great satisfaction to our citizens and elicit praise for our intelligence community. Seized along with bin Laden's corpse was a trove of documents and electronic devices that should yield intelligence that could help us capture or kill other terrorists and further degrade the capabilities of those who remain at large.
But policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them.
Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.
That regimen of harsh interrogation was used on KSM after another detainee, Abu Zubaydeh, was subjected to the same techniques. When he broke, he said that he and other members of al Qaeda were obligated to resist only until they could no longer do so, at which point it became permissible for them to yield. "Do this for all the brothers," he advised his interrogators.
Abu Zubaydeh was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of 9/11. Bin al Shibh disclosed information that, when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydeh, helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the United States.
Another of those gathered up later in this harvest, Abu Faraj al-Libi, also was subjected to certain of these harsh techniques and disclosed further details about bin Laden's couriers that helped in last weekend's achievement.
The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—"enhanced interrogation techniques"—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.
The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.
In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.
Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say "reopening" advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.
Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the "dirty little secret" of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable.
It is debatable whether the same techniques would be lawful under statutes passed in 2005 and 2006—phrased in highly abstract terms such as "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment—that some claimed were intended to ban waterboarding even though the Senate twice voted down proposals to ban the technique specifically. It is, however, certain that intelligence-gathering rather than prosecution must be the first priority, and that we need a classified interrogation program administered by the agency best equipped to administer it: the CIA.
We also need to put an end to the ongoing investigations of CIA operatives that continue to undermine intelligence community morale.
Acknowledging and meeting the need for an effective and lawful interrogation program, which we once had, and freeing CIA operatives and others to administer it under congressional oversight, would be a fitting way to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703859304576305023876506348.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Reward, Don't Punish CIA Interrogators
Reward, Don't Punish CIA Interrogators Linda Chavez Columnists Washington Examiner
While the Obama administration deservedly revels in the success of the U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden this week, one question remains: Why is the Justice Department threatening criminal prosecution of the men who made the mission possible?
CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that the initial information that led to the discovery of bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad came, in part, from information obtained by "enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees." Yet, Attorney General Holder persists in what appears to be a vendetta against these very CIA interrogators.
In August 2009, Holder ordered a continued investigation into "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by the CIA, even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors concluded that no crimes were committed. The irony in all of this is made worse by President Obama's acknowledgment of intelligence agencies' role when he announced that bin Laden had been killed.
"Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome," Obama said. "The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice."
Some thanks. Instead of admitting that CIA waterboarding provided vital information -- including the nom de guerre of the courier who led us to bin Laden -- the administration appears to want CIA operatives behind bars.
What seems clear is that Obama came into office with one set of assumptions about what it takes to protect national security and has changed his mind after two years of intelligence briefings and firsthand experience. It was easy for candidate Obama to criticize President Bush for authorizing what Obama called "torture" and quite another to be confronted with what it takes to protect Americans from another devastating attack.
But Holder may not have gotten the message. It is noteworthy that among those gathered in the Situation Room to watch the bin Laden mission unfold, Holder was nowhere to be seen.
Among the many inconsistencies in the Obama administration's disavowal of enhanced interrogation is its willingness to use lethal force. I have no problem with the decision to kill bin Laden, regardless of whether he was armed at the time or posed a direct threat to the Navy SEALs who took him out. He declared war on the U.S. and has publicly admitted that he was responsible for the 3,000 deaths on 9/11.
The president's spokesman has finally confirmed that bin Laden had no weapon when he was killed and that he did not use his wife as a human shield, as initial accounts suggested. Indeed, the only armed resistance came early in the 38-minute mission, when bin Laden's courier -- the one whose name CIA interrogators obtained from enhanced interrogation -- fired on SEALs as they entered the compound's outer buildings.
So the president is perfectly willing to kill terrorists but not willing to waterboard them? It makes no sense.
Holder has already had to reverse himself on military tribunals for detainees and has admitted that Guantanamo will not likely be closed before 2013. It's seems that both decisions were influenced by the fact that Obama knew that bin Laden was within our grasp. Even Holder couldn't imagine putting bin Laden in a U.S. jail and trying him in criminal court.
Obama has taken much of the credit for making the decision to go after bin Laden and to risk American lives in taking him on the ground: "(L)ast August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice."
It was the right decision -- but the president should reward all those who made it possible, including those initial CIA interrogators. It's time for the administration to admit its error and drop the investigation of the intelligence professionals whose work ended in bin Laden's death.
Linda Chavez is the author of "An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal."
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/05/reward-dont-punish-cia-interrogators?sms_ss=blogger&at_xt=4dc7f84246119451%2C0#ixzz1ML08HfRk
While the Obama administration deservedly revels in the success of the U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden this week, one question remains: Why is the Justice Department threatening criminal prosecution of the men who made the mission possible?
CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that the initial information that led to the discovery of bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad came, in part, from information obtained by "enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees." Yet, Attorney General Holder persists in what appears to be a vendetta against these very CIA interrogators.
In August 2009, Holder ordered a continued investigation into "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by the CIA, even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors concluded that no crimes were committed. The irony in all of this is made worse by President Obama's acknowledgment of intelligence agencies' role when he announced that bin Laden had been killed.
"Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome," Obama said. "The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice."
Some thanks. Instead of admitting that CIA waterboarding provided vital information -- including the nom de guerre of the courier who led us to bin Laden -- the administration appears to want CIA operatives behind bars.
What seems clear is that Obama came into office with one set of assumptions about what it takes to protect national security and has changed his mind after two years of intelligence briefings and firsthand experience. It was easy for candidate Obama to criticize President Bush for authorizing what Obama called "torture" and quite another to be confronted with what it takes to protect Americans from another devastating attack.
But Holder may not have gotten the message. It is noteworthy that among those gathered in the Situation Room to watch the bin Laden mission unfold, Holder was nowhere to be seen.
Among the many inconsistencies in the Obama administration's disavowal of enhanced interrogation is its willingness to use lethal force. I have no problem with the decision to kill bin Laden, regardless of whether he was armed at the time or posed a direct threat to the Navy SEALs who took him out. He declared war on the U.S. and has publicly admitted that he was responsible for the 3,000 deaths on 9/11.
The president's spokesman has finally confirmed that bin Laden had no weapon when he was killed and that he did not use his wife as a human shield, as initial accounts suggested. Indeed, the only armed resistance came early in the 38-minute mission, when bin Laden's courier -- the one whose name CIA interrogators obtained from enhanced interrogation -- fired on SEALs as they entered the compound's outer buildings.
So the president is perfectly willing to kill terrorists but not willing to waterboard them? It makes no sense.
Holder has already had to reverse himself on military tribunals for detainees and has admitted that Guantanamo will not likely be closed before 2013. It's seems that both decisions were influenced by the fact that Obama knew that bin Laden was within our grasp. Even Holder couldn't imagine putting bin Laden in a U.S. jail and trying him in criminal court.
Obama has taken much of the credit for making the decision to go after bin Laden and to risk American lives in taking him on the ground: "(L)ast August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice."
It was the right decision -- but the president should reward all those who made it possible, including those initial CIA interrogators. It's time for the administration to admit its error and drop the investigation of the intelligence professionals whose work ended in bin Laden's death.
Linda Chavez is the author of "An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal."
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/05/reward-dont-punish-cia-interrogators?sms_ss=blogger&at_xt=4dc7f84246119451%2C0#ixzz1ML08HfRk
Friday, May 13, 2011
Thoughts on a Surreal Depression--California's Central Valley
Thoughts on a Surreal Depression by Victor Davis Hanson
Here in Fresno County, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, the official unemployment rate in February to March ranged between 18.1 and 18.8 percent. I suspect it is higher in the poorer southwestern portions, especially near my hometown of Selma, about two miles from my farm.
Since 2000 we have both lost jobs and gained people, and the per capita household income is about 65% of California’s average, the average home price about half the state norm.
In some sense, all the ideas that are born on the Berkeley or Stanford campus, in the CSU and UC education, political science, and sociology departments, and among the bureaus in Sacramento are reified in places like Selma — open borders, therapeutic education curricula, massive government transfers and subsidies, big government, and intrusive regulation. Together that has created the sort of utopia that a Bay Area consultant, politico, or professor dreams of, but would never live near. Again, we in California have become the most and least free of peoples — the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.
The subtext, however, of most of our manifold challenges here in the other California are twofold: we have had a massive increase in population, largely driven by illegal immigration from Latin America, mostly from Oaxaca province in Mexico, and we have not created a commensurate number of jobs to facilitate the influx.
I often ask business people on the coast why there are not more industries in places like Selma other than agricultural related work that is locale specific. I would sum up their responses as something like the following: Our workforce does not have the educational and linguistic skills to justify, in global terms, the amount of wages and benefits necessary to employ them, hence jobs are mostly in service and government. Software engineering, computers, or Silicon Valley-like industry are out the question. But apparently so are large manufacturing jobs, despite an abundant workforce. As I understand employers, they seem to suggest that steel pipe, electrical wire, or radios would not be better manufactured or fabricated here, and yet still cost two to three times more than a counterpart assembled abroad.
In addition, they believe that the state government would look upon any employer of a large industry not as a partner that would alleviate unemployment and lessen county expenditures, but more or less a sort of target to regulate, advise, lecture, and chastise, both to justify the expanding government regulatory work force and to achieve a fuzzy sort of social justice. There are, of course, large plants and businesses here, but hardly enough to absorb the thousands entering the work force.
The result is about one in five adults is not working in the traditional and formal sense. A morning drive through these valley towns confirms anecdotally what statistics suggest: hundreds, no, thousands, are not employed. Construction is almost nonexistent. Agriculture is recovering, but environmentally driven water cut-offs on the West Side (250,000 acres), increasing mechanization, and past poor prices have combined to reduce by tens of thousands once plentiful farm jobs.
We live in one of the most blessed climates in the world, without major floods, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes. The soil is unmatched. The Sierra and its rich snowpack loom immediately to the east with all its recreational, hydroelectric, and timber wealth; we are but three hours from either San Francisco or Los Angeles. And yet this is now one of the most impoverished areas in the United States, statistically in many categories of income, education, and employment well behind Appalachia.
But we are experiencing a funny sort of depression, or rather a surreal sort. I grew up with stories from my grandparents of 28 people living in my present house. My grandmother, she used to brag, had a big kettle of ham bones and beans cooking nonstop each day and fed assorted relatives as they came in from the vineyard and orchard. My grandfather made one trip to Fresno (16 miles away) every 10 days for “supplies.” The pictures I have inherited from my mother show an impoverished farm — this house unpainted and in disrepair, ancient cars and implements scattered about, a sort of farm of apparent 1910 vintage, but photographed in the 1930s — one that I could still sense traces of as a little boy here in the late 1950s.
And yet all I heard were stories of happiness, hard work, and collective sacrifice. Relatives would say that the “’30s” were the worst and best years of their lives, as they related sagas of real genius involving fruit canning and curing, ad hoc repairs to equipment, and cobbled together furniture and clothing —all without spending any money. I just looked in my grandfather’s diary; he has a happy entry in 1958 about raisin prices over $200 a ton — quite in contrast to $40 a ton he received in 1936. (A ton of raisins would fill two of those huge watermelon bins you see in the supermarket.)
In contrast, in the present depression, the out of work and poor are as numerous, but both unhappier and yet far better off than prior generations. This is not the rant of some right-wing laudator temporis acti, or the death throes of an aging old white guy, but rather empirically based and shared by most of my friends in the ascendant Mexican-American middle and upper-middle classes, many of whom are becoming quite conservative.
The cars of our poorer brethren in our major discount stores are late model and often expensive. People get into them with full carts of food and clothing. Housing here is cheap and good. How to square this circle between official poverty and misery and the veneer of a well-off general public?
I’ve been discussing these disconnects with farmers, a professor or two from CSU Fresno, and local business people. All come to the same conclusions. There is a vast and completely unreported cash economy in Central California. Tile-setters, carpenters, landscapers, tree-cutters, general handymen, cooks, housekeepers, and personal attendants are all both finding work and being paid in cash. Peddlers (no income or sales taxes) are on nearly every major rural intersection. You can buy everything from a new pressure washer to tropical fruit drinks. For this essay, I stopped at one last week and surveyed their roto-tillers, lawn mowers, and chain saws, new and good brands.
New “restaurants” are sprouting all over the highways — mobile stainless-steel encased canteens with awnings and chairs set up along the road. And yet for all the cash economy, it seems almost everyone in the food stores and doctors’ offices are on food stamps, Medi-Cal, and rent subsidies. A carload of people drove in last week, inquiring about a house nearby; the occupants assured me that they had county housing vouchers.
A third ingredient is easy credit, whether for credit cards or late model cars. The result is statistically we are impoverished with near 20% unemployment; but in reality something stranger and weirder is transpiring. Prosperity and well-being are mostly assessed in relative not absolute terms. There is little appreciation of the wonders of the iPhone, whose computerized, and GPS-driven gadgetry would have been confined to millionaires ten years ago; there is frequent lamentation that the iPhone in question is not the latest model as others enjoy. A Camry is not worshipped as a wondrous machine that can get one 200 miles in 3 hours, in air-conditioned and musical luxury, only that one has a 4, not a 6 cylinder model, without leather seats and 6-disc CD.
The combination of 2 billion Indians and Chinese in the world marketplace, exporting cheap goods, has meant fewer jobs for Americans and far more material playthings now accessible to every stratum of society. Again, easy credit, combined with little shame or penalty in defaulting on what one owes, has allowed a superficial parity with the upper-middle class. Massive government transfers and relaxed eligibility have ensured households thousands of dollars in entitlements and subsidies. We have printed $5 trillion since 2009, and borrowed $1.6 trillion just this year. And the huge influx of easy government cash shows here.
Cash wages have meant augmented entitlement money and are competitive with those who are formally employed and who pay 30% of their money in payroll, health care, and federal, state, and local income tax deductions. The result is an odd sort of poverty, in which superficially the unemployed and poor to the naked eyed are almost identical to the upper middle classes.
Indeed what distinguishes the latter — the ability to pay a child’s tuition at college, frequent travel, higher end clothes and cars, a pool, or boat — seems rather superfluous. Need-based student loans and grants are now ubiquitous, one can learn more about Florence on a cable TV in-depth tour than going there, and a Lexus or Mercedes is not much different in reliability and comfort from a Honda or Nissan. I did an experiment the other day. I priced “wicker” furniture at Kmart and Wal-Mart and then drove up to an upscale North Fresno design outdoor living boutique. In short, the local version from China was about $300 for an ensemble, the high-end version was priced at $1700. To the naked eye, they were again almost identical and explain what I mean by the “veneer” of affluence. Ditto everything from jogging clothes to watches, and one can be outfitted in Selma for 10% of the cost of the brands of those popular in Palo Alto.
Some final tesserae in this confusing mosaic: The rhetoric of poverty and oppression is far more strident than the Depression-era, spread the wealth, Huey Long sort. The sense of injustice voiced by the SEIU or public employee unions suggests wide scale Dickensian malnutrition, not an epidemic of obesity so amply chronicled by the first lady.
History’s revolutions and upheavals — whether the Nika rioting in Constantinople, the periodic uprising of the turba in Rome, the French upheavals, or the Bolshevik Revolution — are rarely fueled by the starving and despised, but by the subsidized and frustrated, who either see their umbilical cord threatened, or their comfort and subsidies static rather than expansive — or their own condition surpassed by that of an envied kulak class. Perceived relative inequality rather than absolute poverty is the engine of revolution.
These are strange and dangerous times. An insolvent federal government, an exporting China and India, and an almost complete indifference to federal immigration, tax, and regulatory laws have all combined to create a well-entitled but increasingly angry population, one “empowered” and made more, not less, bitter by the last two years of governance in Washington.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/thoughts-on-a-surreal-depression/
Here in Fresno County, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, the official unemployment rate in February to March ranged between 18.1 and 18.8 percent. I suspect it is higher in the poorer southwestern portions, especially near my hometown of Selma, about two miles from my farm.
Since 2000 we have both lost jobs and gained people, and the per capita household income is about 65% of California’s average, the average home price about half the state norm.
In some sense, all the ideas that are born on the Berkeley or Stanford campus, in the CSU and UC education, political science, and sociology departments, and among the bureaus in Sacramento are reified in places like Selma — open borders, therapeutic education curricula, massive government transfers and subsidies, big government, and intrusive regulation. Together that has created the sort of utopia that a Bay Area consultant, politico, or professor dreams of, but would never live near. Again, we in California have become the most and least free of peoples — the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.
The subtext, however, of most of our manifold challenges here in the other California are twofold: we have had a massive increase in population, largely driven by illegal immigration from Latin America, mostly from Oaxaca province in Mexico, and we have not created a commensurate number of jobs to facilitate the influx.
I often ask business people on the coast why there are not more industries in places like Selma other than agricultural related work that is locale specific. I would sum up their responses as something like the following: Our workforce does not have the educational and linguistic skills to justify, in global terms, the amount of wages and benefits necessary to employ them, hence jobs are mostly in service and government. Software engineering, computers, or Silicon Valley-like industry are out the question. But apparently so are large manufacturing jobs, despite an abundant workforce. As I understand employers, they seem to suggest that steel pipe, electrical wire, or radios would not be better manufactured or fabricated here, and yet still cost two to three times more than a counterpart assembled abroad.
In addition, they believe that the state government would look upon any employer of a large industry not as a partner that would alleviate unemployment and lessen county expenditures, but more or less a sort of target to regulate, advise, lecture, and chastise, both to justify the expanding government regulatory work force and to achieve a fuzzy sort of social justice. There are, of course, large plants and businesses here, but hardly enough to absorb the thousands entering the work force.
The result is about one in five adults is not working in the traditional and formal sense. A morning drive through these valley towns confirms anecdotally what statistics suggest: hundreds, no, thousands, are not employed. Construction is almost nonexistent. Agriculture is recovering, but environmentally driven water cut-offs on the West Side (250,000 acres), increasing mechanization, and past poor prices have combined to reduce by tens of thousands once plentiful farm jobs.
We live in one of the most blessed climates in the world, without major floods, earthquakes, fires, or tornadoes. The soil is unmatched. The Sierra and its rich snowpack loom immediately to the east with all its recreational, hydroelectric, and timber wealth; we are but three hours from either San Francisco or Los Angeles. And yet this is now one of the most impoverished areas in the United States, statistically in many categories of income, education, and employment well behind Appalachia.
But we are experiencing a funny sort of depression, or rather a surreal sort. I grew up with stories from my grandparents of 28 people living in my present house. My grandmother, she used to brag, had a big kettle of ham bones and beans cooking nonstop each day and fed assorted relatives as they came in from the vineyard and orchard. My grandfather made one trip to Fresno (16 miles away) every 10 days for “supplies.” The pictures I have inherited from my mother show an impoverished farm — this house unpainted and in disrepair, ancient cars and implements scattered about, a sort of farm of apparent 1910 vintage, but photographed in the 1930s — one that I could still sense traces of as a little boy here in the late 1950s.
And yet all I heard were stories of happiness, hard work, and collective sacrifice. Relatives would say that the “’30s” were the worst and best years of their lives, as they related sagas of real genius involving fruit canning and curing, ad hoc repairs to equipment, and cobbled together furniture and clothing —all without spending any money. I just looked in my grandfather’s diary; he has a happy entry in 1958 about raisin prices over $200 a ton — quite in contrast to $40 a ton he received in 1936. (A ton of raisins would fill two of those huge watermelon bins you see in the supermarket.)
In contrast, in the present depression, the out of work and poor are as numerous, but both unhappier and yet far better off than prior generations. This is not the rant of some right-wing laudator temporis acti, or the death throes of an aging old white guy, but rather empirically based and shared by most of my friends in the ascendant Mexican-American middle and upper-middle classes, many of whom are becoming quite conservative.
The cars of our poorer brethren in our major discount stores are late model and often expensive. People get into them with full carts of food and clothing. Housing here is cheap and good. How to square this circle between official poverty and misery and the veneer of a well-off general public?
I’ve been discussing these disconnects with farmers, a professor or two from CSU Fresno, and local business people. All come to the same conclusions. There is a vast and completely unreported cash economy in Central California. Tile-setters, carpenters, landscapers, tree-cutters, general handymen, cooks, housekeepers, and personal attendants are all both finding work and being paid in cash. Peddlers (no income or sales taxes) are on nearly every major rural intersection. You can buy everything from a new pressure washer to tropical fruit drinks. For this essay, I stopped at one last week and surveyed their roto-tillers, lawn mowers, and chain saws, new and good brands.
New “restaurants” are sprouting all over the highways — mobile stainless-steel encased canteens with awnings and chairs set up along the road. And yet for all the cash economy, it seems almost everyone in the food stores and doctors’ offices are on food stamps, Medi-Cal, and rent subsidies. A carload of people drove in last week, inquiring about a house nearby; the occupants assured me that they had county housing vouchers.
A third ingredient is easy credit, whether for credit cards or late model cars. The result is statistically we are impoverished with near 20% unemployment; but in reality something stranger and weirder is transpiring. Prosperity and well-being are mostly assessed in relative not absolute terms. There is little appreciation of the wonders of the iPhone, whose computerized, and GPS-driven gadgetry would have been confined to millionaires ten years ago; there is frequent lamentation that the iPhone in question is not the latest model as others enjoy. A Camry is not worshipped as a wondrous machine that can get one 200 miles in 3 hours, in air-conditioned and musical luxury, only that one has a 4, not a 6 cylinder model, without leather seats and 6-disc CD.
The combination of 2 billion Indians and Chinese in the world marketplace, exporting cheap goods, has meant fewer jobs for Americans and far more material playthings now accessible to every stratum of society. Again, easy credit, combined with little shame or penalty in defaulting on what one owes, has allowed a superficial parity with the upper-middle class. Massive government transfers and relaxed eligibility have ensured households thousands of dollars in entitlements and subsidies. We have printed $5 trillion since 2009, and borrowed $1.6 trillion just this year. And the huge influx of easy government cash shows here.
Cash wages have meant augmented entitlement money and are competitive with those who are formally employed and who pay 30% of their money in payroll, health care, and federal, state, and local income tax deductions. The result is an odd sort of poverty, in which superficially the unemployed and poor to the naked eyed are almost identical to the upper middle classes.
Indeed what distinguishes the latter — the ability to pay a child’s tuition at college, frequent travel, higher end clothes and cars, a pool, or boat — seems rather superfluous. Need-based student loans and grants are now ubiquitous, one can learn more about Florence on a cable TV in-depth tour than going there, and a Lexus or Mercedes is not much different in reliability and comfort from a Honda or Nissan. I did an experiment the other day. I priced “wicker” furniture at Kmart and Wal-Mart and then drove up to an upscale North Fresno design outdoor living boutique. In short, the local version from China was about $300 for an ensemble, the high-end version was priced at $1700. To the naked eye, they were again almost identical and explain what I mean by the “veneer” of affluence. Ditto everything from jogging clothes to watches, and one can be outfitted in Selma for 10% of the cost of the brands of those popular in Palo Alto.
Some final tesserae in this confusing mosaic: The rhetoric of poverty and oppression is far more strident than the Depression-era, spread the wealth, Huey Long sort. The sense of injustice voiced by the SEIU or public employee unions suggests wide scale Dickensian malnutrition, not an epidemic of obesity so amply chronicled by the first lady.
History’s revolutions and upheavals — whether the Nika rioting in Constantinople, the periodic uprising of the turba in Rome, the French upheavals, or the Bolshevik Revolution — are rarely fueled by the starving and despised, but by the subsidized and frustrated, who either see their umbilical cord threatened, or their comfort and subsidies static rather than expansive — or their own condition surpassed by that of an envied kulak class. Perceived relative inequality rather than absolute poverty is the engine of revolution.
These are strange and dangerous times. An insolvent federal government, an exporting China and India, and an almost complete indifference to federal immigration, tax, and regulatory laws have all combined to create a well-entitled but increasingly angry population, one “empowered” and made more, not less, bitter by the last two years of governance in Washington.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/thoughts-on-a-surreal-depression/
Thursday, May 12, 2011
And They Call It A Recovery? Not compared to Reagan's!
And They Call It A Recovery? - Investors.com
Growth: It's been nearly two full years since the recession officially ended, and the economy is still struggling to get off the ground. It didn't have to be this way.
When the Commerce Department released its estimate for first-quarter growth — a meager 1.8% — President Obama's chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, at least conceded that "faster growth is needed to replace the jobs lost in the downturn."
And granted, the economy needs to expand by at least 2.5% just to keep up with growth in the labor force. So at 1.8%, we're essentially losing ground, a fact that last week's 429,000 initial jobless claims underscores. But what Goolsbee didn't acknowledge is that the economy could be growing at a much faster rate, and would be if it weren't saddled with Obama's reckless policies.
How do we know this? Compare the two worst post-World War II recessions. Both the 1981-82 and the 2007-09 downturns were long (16 months and 18 months, respectively) and painful (unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1981-82 and 10.1% in the last one).
What's dramatically different, however, is how each president responded.
Obama massively increased spending, vastly expanded the regulatory state, and pushed through a government takeover of health care. What's more, he constantly browbeats industry leaders, talks about the failings of the marketplace and endlessly advocates higher taxes on the most productive parts of the economy.
In contrast, Reagan pushed spending restraint, deregulated entire industries, massively cut taxes and waxed poetic about the wonders of a free economy.
The result? While the Reagan recovery saw turbocharged growth and a tumbling unemployment rate, Obama's has produced neither. Consider:
• GDP. In the seven quarters after the 1981-82 recession ended, the economy cranked out quarterly growth rates that averaged 7.1%. Under Obama, GDP growth has averaged a mere 2.8%. (See chart at right.)
• Unemployment. Under Reagan, the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.5% by this point in the recovery. Under Obama, it's still stuck at 8.8%.
• Long-term unemployment. There were far fewer long-term unemployed by this point in the Reagan recovery; just 18% of the unemployed had been without a job 27 weeks or more. Under Obama, that figure is an astonishing 45%.
• Consumer confidence. By this point in the Reagan recovery, the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index had hit 100. Today, the index stands at just 65.4.
• Deficits. Under Reagan, the federal deficit was trimmed to 4.8% of GDP by 1984. Under Obama, the deficit is expected to climb to 10.9% of GDP this year.
Obama and his defenders like to say he inherited the worst downturn since the Great Depression and that things would have been worse still had he not acted. But the recession was almost over by the time he took office — and officially over just six months after that.
So while Obama's policies had little to do with bringing an end to the Great Recession, they've had everything to do with producing what is by far the worst economic recovery in the past 70 years.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=570566
Growth: It's been nearly two full years since the recession officially ended, and the economy is still struggling to get off the ground. It didn't have to be this way.
When the Commerce Department released its estimate for first-quarter growth — a meager 1.8% — President Obama's chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, at least conceded that "faster growth is needed to replace the jobs lost in the downturn."
And granted, the economy needs to expand by at least 2.5% just to keep up with growth in the labor force. So at 1.8%, we're essentially losing ground, a fact that last week's 429,000 initial jobless claims underscores. But what Goolsbee didn't acknowledge is that the economy could be growing at a much faster rate, and would be if it weren't saddled with Obama's reckless policies.
How do we know this? Compare the two worst post-World War II recessions. Both the 1981-82 and the 2007-09 downturns were long (16 months and 18 months, respectively) and painful (unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1981-82 and 10.1% in the last one).
What's dramatically different, however, is how each president responded.
Obama massively increased spending, vastly expanded the regulatory state, and pushed through a government takeover of health care. What's more, he constantly browbeats industry leaders, talks about the failings of the marketplace and endlessly advocates higher taxes on the most productive parts of the economy.
In contrast, Reagan pushed spending restraint, deregulated entire industries, massively cut taxes and waxed poetic about the wonders of a free economy.
The result? While the Reagan recovery saw turbocharged growth and a tumbling unemployment rate, Obama's has produced neither. Consider:
• GDP. In the seven quarters after the 1981-82 recession ended, the economy cranked out quarterly growth rates that averaged 7.1%. Under Obama, GDP growth has averaged a mere 2.8%. (See chart at right.)
• Unemployment. Under Reagan, the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.5% by this point in the recovery. Under Obama, it's still stuck at 8.8%.
• Long-term unemployment. There were far fewer long-term unemployed by this point in the Reagan recovery; just 18% of the unemployed had been without a job 27 weeks or more. Under Obama, that figure is an astonishing 45%.
• Consumer confidence. By this point in the Reagan recovery, the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index had hit 100. Today, the index stands at just 65.4.
• Deficits. Under Reagan, the federal deficit was trimmed to 4.8% of GDP by 1984. Under Obama, the deficit is expected to climb to 10.9% of GDP this year.
Obama and his defenders like to say he inherited the worst downturn since the Great Depression and that things would have been worse still had he not acted. But the recession was almost over by the time he took office — and officially over just six months after that.
So while Obama's policies had little to do with bringing an end to the Great Recession, they've had everything to do with producing what is by far the worst economic recovery in the past 70 years.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=570566
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Obama's 'Annie' Energy Policy--delusion tops unicorn wishes
Obama's 'Annie' Energy Policy - Investors.com
Gas Cost: Is it just us, or do Obama's policies sound suspiciously like that "Annie" song: Don't worry about today's killer pump prices, a bright energy sun will come out tomorrow.
When gasoline prices topped $4 a gallon in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama had a simple message for voters: There's nothing that can be done about it today.
Certainly not offshore drilling. Obama trashed Sen. John McCain's call to open up vast tracts of offshore oil to exploration and drilling. It would not, he said in June 2008, "lower gas prices today. It would not lower gas prices this summer. It would not lower gas prices this year."
Nor a gas tax break. Letting consumers temporarily off the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax hook was, Obama argued, merely a "gimmick" that would "only worsen our addiction to oil."
And not even opening up more oil and gas leases. Obama said oil companies "already own drilling rights to 68 million acres of federal lands, onshore and offshore, that they haven't touched."
Indeed, Obama claimed that anyone suggesting a short-term fix was just trying to peddle "false promises, irresponsible policy and cheap gimmicks that might get politicians through the next election."
Nope. What we needed, Obama argued in June 2008, was a plan for tomorrow that provided more money for alternative energy: "I will invest $150 billion over the next 10 years in alternative sources of energy."
Fast-forward three years to this past Saturday. Gas prices again top $4 a gallon, and what's the president's message to struggling families? "There's no silver bullet that can bring down gas prices right away." And anyone who suggests otherwise is just "trying to grab headlines or score a few points."
But don't worry, Obama has a plan that will solve all our energy plans tomorrow. We just need to "invest in clean, renewable energy. In the long term, that's the answer."
Never mind that, had we started drilling in 2008 as McCain wanted, we might actually be realizing the benefits today in lower prices, or that no credible energy expert believes alternative energy will amount to much for many years to come.
And especially don't pay attention to the fact that the short-term policies Obama has put in place are, if anything, putting upward pressure on gasoline prices.
He's put a virtual "permitorium" on offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon spill, and just this week his EPA forced Shell to abandon its drilling plans in Alaska. In December, Obama reversed course and abandoned plans to open new areas of drilling in the eastern Gulf and Atlantic seaboard, locking up vast amounts of potential new oil.
Meanwhile, Obama continues to push for billions in new taxes on oil companies that would just show up in higher pump prices. And his politically motivated attacks on speculators will do absolutely nothing to lower prices.
Obama is right that domestic production had climbed in the past two years to levels not seen since 2003. But this had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the policies of his predecessor. In fact, Obama's own Energy Department forecasts that domestic oil production will drop sharply over the next two years as his policies actually do start to take effect.
The president may think that, in the face of dark clouds cast by historically high and rising gas prices, he can just stick out his chin and grin because the sun will come out tomorrow. But if he continues to block every new source of oil and gas that we desperately need today, tomorrow will indeed always be a day away.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/570340/201104271827/Obamas-Annie-Energy-Policy.aspx
Gas Cost: Is it just us, or do Obama's policies sound suspiciously like that "Annie" song: Don't worry about today's killer pump prices, a bright energy sun will come out tomorrow.
When gasoline prices topped $4 a gallon in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama had a simple message for voters: There's nothing that can be done about it today.
Certainly not offshore drilling. Obama trashed Sen. John McCain's call to open up vast tracts of offshore oil to exploration and drilling. It would not, he said in June 2008, "lower gas prices today. It would not lower gas prices this summer. It would not lower gas prices this year."
Nor a gas tax break. Letting consumers temporarily off the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax hook was, Obama argued, merely a "gimmick" that would "only worsen our addiction to oil."
And not even opening up more oil and gas leases. Obama said oil companies "already own drilling rights to 68 million acres of federal lands, onshore and offshore, that they haven't touched."
Indeed, Obama claimed that anyone suggesting a short-term fix was just trying to peddle "false promises, irresponsible policy and cheap gimmicks that might get politicians through the next election."
Nope. What we needed, Obama argued in June 2008, was a plan for tomorrow that provided more money for alternative energy: "I will invest $150 billion over the next 10 years in alternative sources of energy."
Fast-forward three years to this past Saturday. Gas prices again top $4 a gallon, and what's the president's message to struggling families? "There's no silver bullet that can bring down gas prices right away." And anyone who suggests otherwise is just "trying to grab headlines or score a few points."
But don't worry, Obama has a plan that will solve all our energy plans tomorrow. We just need to "invest in clean, renewable energy. In the long term, that's the answer."
Never mind that, had we started drilling in 2008 as McCain wanted, we might actually be realizing the benefits today in lower prices, or that no credible energy expert believes alternative energy will amount to much for many years to come.
And especially don't pay attention to the fact that the short-term policies Obama has put in place are, if anything, putting upward pressure on gasoline prices.
He's put a virtual "permitorium" on offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon spill, and just this week his EPA forced Shell to abandon its drilling plans in Alaska. In December, Obama reversed course and abandoned plans to open new areas of drilling in the eastern Gulf and Atlantic seaboard, locking up vast amounts of potential new oil.
Meanwhile, Obama continues to push for billions in new taxes on oil companies that would just show up in higher pump prices. And his politically motivated attacks on speculators will do absolutely nothing to lower prices.
Obama is right that domestic production had climbed in the past two years to levels not seen since 2003. But this had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the policies of his predecessor. In fact, Obama's own Energy Department forecasts that domestic oil production will drop sharply over the next two years as his policies actually do start to take effect.
The president may think that, in the face of dark clouds cast by historically high and rising gas prices, he can just stick out his chin and grin because the sun will come out tomorrow. But if he continues to block every new source of oil and gas that we desperately need today, tomorrow will indeed always be a day away.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/570340/201104271827/Obamas-Annie-Energy-Policy.aspx
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Oil imports spike as Obama oil ban decreases domestic production
Oil imports spike as Obama oil ban decreases domestic production Conn Carroll Beltway Confidential Washington Examiner
President Obama sent a letter to Congress earlier this week urging them to “eliminate unwarranted tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, and to use those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” Let’s leave aside for a second the fact that even after 30 years of subsidies, clean energy energy accounts for just over 1% of all U.S. energy production. If Obama really wanted to reduce our dependence on foreign oil tomorrow he could end his Gulf of Mexico permitorium on offshore drilling.
Here are the facts: According to projections made by the Energy Information Administration in April 2010, the Gulf of Mexico should have produced 1.84 million barrels of oil a day in the fourth quarter of 2010. Instead, according to the most recent EIA estimate, due to the Obama permitorium, the Gulf only produced 1.59 million barrels. That is 250,000 barrels a day in lost production. Overall, since Obama instituted his drilling moratorium, oil production from the Gulf is down more than 10%.
But while Gulf oil production is down from pre-moratorium estimate, total oil consumption is actually higher than EIA predicted last year. Total crude oil input to refineries is up from an estimated 13.85 million barrels a day to an actual 14.25 million barrels. But if domestic production is down and consumption is up, where is the extra oil coming from?
Foreign oil.
While oil production in the Gulf is down more than 10% from April 2010 estimates, net crude oil imports are up 5%. At $83 dollars a barrel (the approximate average price of oil in the fourth quarter of 2010) that means Obama’s oil drilling permatorium increased American dependence on foreign oil by about $1.8 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of last year alone. The numbers only get worse as Obama’s permitorium further cuts into production. A Wood Mackenzie study predicts that for all of 2011 the permitorium will result in the loss this year of about 375,000 barrels of oil a day.
More imported oil also means higher prices at the pumps. The EIA explains: “Retail gasoline prices tend to be higher the farther it is sold from the source of supply.” It costs more money to transport oil to your gas station from the Persian Gulf than from the Gulf of Mexico.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/04/oil-imports-spike-obama-oil-ban-decreases-domestic-production#ixzz1Lj0Q5hyC
President Obama sent a letter to Congress earlier this week urging them to “eliminate unwarranted tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, and to use those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” Let’s leave aside for a second the fact that even after 30 years of subsidies, clean energy energy accounts for just over 1% of all U.S. energy production. If Obama really wanted to reduce our dependence on foreign oil tomorrow he could end his Gulf of Mexico permitorium on offshore drilling.
Here are the facts: According to projections made by the Energy Information Administration in April 2010, the Gulf of Mexico should have produced 1.84 million barrels of oil a day in the fourth quarter of 2010. Instead, according to the most recent EIA estimate, due to the Obama permitorium, the Gulf only produced 1.59 million barrels. That is 250,000 barrels a day in lost production. Overall, since Obama instituted his drilling moratorium, oil production from the Gulf is down more than 10%.
But while Gulf oil production is down from pre-moratorium estimate, total oil consumption is actually higher than EIA predicted last year. Total crude oil input to refineries is up from an estimated 13.85 million barrels a day to an actual 14.25 million barrels. But if domestic production is down and consumption is up, where is the extra oil coming from?
Foreign oil.
While oil production in the Gulf is down more than 10% from April 2010 estimates, net crude oil imports are up 5%. At $83 dollars a barrel (the approximate average price of oil in the fourth quarter of 2010) that means Obama’s oil drilling permatorium increased American dependence on foreign oil by about $1.8 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of last year alone. The numbers only get worse as Obama’s permitorium further cuts into production. A Wood Mackenzie study predicts that for all of 2011 the permitorium will result in the loss this year of about 375,000 barrels of oil a day.
More imported oil also means higher prices at the pumps. The EIA explains: “Retail gasoline prices tend to be higher the farther it is sold from the source of supply.” It costs more money to transport oil to your gas station from the Persian Gulf than from the Gulf of Mexico.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/04/oil-imports-spike-obama-oil-ban-decreases-domestic-production#ixzz1Lj0Q5hyC
Monday, May 9, 2011
Obama Approval At Lowest Level Ever In Pennsylvania
UPDATE: Obama Approval At Lowest Level Ever In Pennsylvania, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds. “President Obama, who carried Pennsylvania 55 – 44 percent in the 2008 election, is underwater mostly because of his deterioration among independent voters, who disapprove of his performance 57 – 37 percent, compared to 50 – 46 percent approval in February.” But he’s even losing Democrats.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Archer writes:
As a PA resident I can attest to the sea change in attitudes towards Barack Obama here.
It’s public, it’s palpable and it’s entirely due to inflation.
It’s astonishing to me that a bunch of guys who are supposed to be so smart think that women aren’t going to the grocery store and leaving in a state of shock, disbelief and, occasionally, panic.
And a Democrat who frightens women cannot win anything. Period.
I just started playing a sort of instant citizen poll at stores. It began a week or so ago at Sams’ Club:
I was in one of THOSE lines and ended up chatting with a well dressed middle aged woman with a cart half full of grocery items.
I made mention of the fact that while I didn’t normally make the hike to Sams’ that with prices going up I figured I had to make the effort.
She exploded: Prices are sky high, she’s feeding three kids, eating store brands and sale items but can’t afford to stock up, on and on.
Then the lady in front of HER piped in: if prices keep going up she doesn’t know what she’ll do, their budget is already at the breaking point, trying to keep a daughter in college, off she goes.
Then a man in the next line over heard them and HE jumped in: this is ridiculous, Washington is killing us, economy broken, he’s off to the races.
I thought maybe this was just a coincidence, so I’ve started the same conversation in store lines twice more in the past week and it’s exactly the same: people are frightened and EVERYONE wants to talk about it out loud.
The interesting thing to me is that everyone used to be very reluctant to speak out in public against Obama. You were always afraid some leftie whackjob would hear you and tear into you. You know what I mean.
But now the gloves are off, people are freaking out and Obama can raise FIVE billion dollars for his campaign and organize until the cows come home and call everyone in the country a racist until he turns blue but it’s not going to convince anyone that they’re not paying an arm and a leg for half a cart worth of food.
There is no more basic thing to people, and it’s off the hook.
I don’t see how the Republicans could possibly mess this up. Then again, after a lifetime of watching them do just that, if there’s way they’ll find it.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/119455/
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1327.xml?ReleaseID=1594
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Archer writes:
As a PA resident I can attest to the sea change in attitudes towards Barack Obama here.
It’s public, it’s palpable and it’s entirely due to inflation.
It’s astonishing to me that a bunch of guys who are supposed to be so smart think that women aren’t going to the grocery store and leaving in a state of shock, disbelief and, occasionally, panic.
And a Democrat who frightens women cannot win anything. Period.
I just started playing a sort of instant citizen poll at stores. It began a week or so ago at Sams’ Club:
I was in one of THOSE lines and ended up chatting with a well dressed middle aged woman with a cart half full of grocery items.
I made mention of the fact that while I didn’t normally make the hike to Sams’ that with prices going up I figured I had to make the effort.
She exploded: Prices are sky high, she’s feeding three kids, eating store brands and sale items but can’t afford to stock up, on and on.
Then the lady in front of HER piped in: if prices keep going up she doesn’t know what she’ll do, their budget is already at the breaking point, trying to keep a daughter in college, off she goes.
Then a man in the next line over heard them and HE jumped in: this is ridiculous, Washington is killing us, economy broken, he’s off to the races.
I thought maybe this was just a coincidence, so I’ve started the same conversation in store lines twice more in the past week and it’s exactly the same: people are frightened and EVERYONE wants to talk about it out loud.
The interesting thing to me is that everyone used to be very reluctant to speak out in public against Obama. You were always afraid some leftie whackjob would hear you and tear into you. You know what I mean.
But now the gloves are off, people are freaking out and Obama can raise FIVE billion dollars for his campaign and organize until the cows come home and call everyone in the country a racist until he turns blue but it’s not going to convince anyone that they’re not paying an arm and a leg for half a cart worth of food.
There is no more basic thing to people, and it’s off the hook.
I don’t see how the Republicans could possibly mess this up. Then again, after a lifetime of watching them do just that, if there’s way they’ll find it.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/119455/
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1327.xml?ReleaseID=1594
Snapshots from inside Washington's job-killing machine
Snapshots from inside Washington's job-killing machine Hugh Hewitt Columnists Washington Examiner
By: Hugh Hewitt
Call it "metastatic government." The federal government has grown so large that every month, indeed every week, brings long lists of new examples of the feds' reach into the lives and businesses of ordinary Americans.
The Consumer Products Safety Commission publishes a handy list of its recalls on a monthly basis. In April, the CPSC issued at least 23 recall notices of a wide spectrum of products from candles to garage door openers to hot chocolate pots, and kept up a list of warnings on everything from post-tornado hazards to pool safety and the dangers of open windows around toddlers.
This week the "Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children," a sort of Borg of nanny-state agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture, published sweeping draft "guidelines" on how all food products intended for youths aged 2 to 17 ought to be packaged and marketed.
"Guidance" also flowed out of the Environmental Protection Agency this week, a vast set of paragraphs on the new proposed standards for determining what wet patches of ground the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ought to be regulating going forward.
The EPA candidly admitted it was growing its reach via the new rules, and even the arrival of a letter from 170 congressmen led by three with key oversight roles -- Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, Rep. Tim Holden, R-Pa., and Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. -- didn't deter the bureaucrats in search of more power.
And down in Texas, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service presides over the dunes sagebrush lizard's crawl toward protected status under the Endangered Species Act, which will quickly affect oil and gas exploration across west Texas.
The FWS was taking "input" last week and will continue to do so for a few more before acting to sequester tens of thousands of acres of resource-rich land from use.
These are just four fingers of the many-handed beast that the federal government has become. I am aware of each of them because my law partners and I practice in these areas and field calls daily from companies that have received a recall notice, or which produce food that will have to change its advertising, or who wish to build in areas that are dry 350 days a year but perhaps about to be regulated by the feds under new rules.
The lizard is just the latest in a long line of not-remotely-endangered species that get catapulted onto the "endangered species list" by radical environmentalist groups, with devastating consequences to land owners and those they employ in the building of residential or commercial projects or natural resource exploration.
These are just four agencies acting in just one week or month. These are just the federal burdens rolling out from agencies I know about and work with. The vast majority of the government officials involved aren't bad people or power-mad Machiavels, just executives doing their jobs as directed by law and regulation. We have constructed a self-propelled job-killing machine that grows and grows and grows.
It is hard to overestimate the cost of this metastatic growth in government. We can total up the cost in lawyers and lost production, but we will never see the lost opportunities and the businesses that didn't start because of these proliferating burdens.
Congress has to grapple with this quiet killer of growth, or we will never get back to low unemployment. Each of these job killers proceeds under the banner of good intentions, but they are collectively acting to smother the American dream.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/05/snapshots-inside-washingtons-job-killing-machine#ixzz1LiGAMf5G
By: Hugh Hewitt
Call it "metastatic government." The federal government has grown so large that every month, indeed every week, brings long lists of new examples of the feds' reach into the lives and businesses of ordinary Americans.
The Consumer Products Safety Commission publishes a handy list of its recalls on a monthly basis. In April, the CPSC issued at least 23 recall notices of a wide spectrum of products from candles to garage door openers to hot chocolate pots, and kept up a list of warnings on everything from post-tornado hazards to pool safety and the dangers of open windows around toddlers.
This week the "Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children," a sort of Borg of nanny-state agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture, published sweeping draft "guidelines" on how all food products intended for youths aged 2 to 17 ought to be packaged and marketed.
"Guidance" also flowed out of the Environmental Protection Agency this week, a vast set of paragraphs on the new proposed standards for determining what wet patches of ground the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ought to be regulating going forward.
The EPA candidly admitted it was growing its reach via the new rules, and even the arrival of a letter from 170 congressmen led by three with key oversight roles -- Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, Rep. Tim Holden, R-Pa., and Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. -- didn't deter the bureaucrats in search of more power.
And down in Texas, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service presides over the dunes sagebrush lizard's crawl toward protected status under the Endangered Species Act, which will quickly affect oil and gas exploration across west Texas.
The FWS was taking "input" last week and will continue to do so for a few more before acting to sequester tens of thousands of acres of resource-rich land from use.
These are just four fingers of the many-handed beast that the federal government has become. I am aware of each of them because my law partners and I practice in these areas and field calls daily from companies that have received a recall notice, or which produce food that will have to change its advertising, or who wish to build in areas that are dry 350 days a year but perhaps about to be regulated by the feds under new rules.
The lizard is just the latest in a long line of not-remotely-endangered species that get catapulted onto the "endangered species list" by radical environmentalist groups, with devastating consequences to land owners and those they employ in the building of residential or commercial projects or natural resource exploration.
These are just four agencies acting in just one week or month. These are just the federal burdens rolling out from agencies I know about and work with. The vast majority of the government officials involved aren't bad people or power-mad Machiavels, just executives doing their jobs as directed by law and regulation. We have constructed a self-propelled job-killing machine that grows and grows and grows.
It is hard to overestimate the cost of this metastatic growth in government. We can total up the cost in lawyers and lost production, but we will never see the lost opportunities and the businesses that didn't start because of these proliferating burdens.
Congress has to grapple with this quiet killer of growth, or we will never get back to low unemployment. Each of these job killers proceeds under the banner of good intentions, but they are collectively acting to smother the American dream.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/05/snapshots-inside-washingtons-job-killing-machine#ixzz1LiGAMf5G
Sunday, May 8, 2011
If Our 'Food Stamp Recovery' Persists, Obama Will Lose Big
Morning Jay: If Our 'Food Stamp Recovery' Persists, Obama Will Lose Big The Weekly Standard byJay Cost (Note: the first few graphs are included for illustration; the rest are at the original piece linked above and at end)
I have noticed something unsettling in my own life lately: I know a lot of people who are on food stamps or some kind of extraordinary government assistance. The count right now stands around 10 people, which is a lot for a small town denizen such as myself.
That is a personal reminder of a very serious, yet rarely discussed economic, social, and indeed political problem: the fact that better than one out of seven Americans today requires government help to put food on the table.
The following graph is only for the hale and hearty:
The start date of this heartbreaking graph is important – June, 2009 is the point at which, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the economy hit bottom and began to recover.
What we see in this graph is one example of a persistent feature of the recovery to date. On the top-line of the economic data, it often appears as though we have filled in the hole that was dug by the Great Recession. Check out this graph of personal income per capita to appreciate that. However, it is largely an illusion, a product of deficit-financed government spending – in the form of things like food stamps, extraordinary unemployment benefits, and the relatively stable federal employment situation.
Call it the American "food stamp recovery:" take away the government supports, and the economic picture looks very bleak indeed. Two sobering features stand out.
First, the ability of the private sector to provide people with a stable standard of living is in a long-term decline, one that has only eased, not reversed, in recent months. The following graph captures this phenomenon by tracking real wages per capita derived from the private sector.
What we see here is that the private sector wages and salaries are actually at a thirteen-year low point when measured on a per capita basis, and the most recent reading (from Quarter I of 2011) showed a continued decline. The only “good” news is that the slope of the descent has eased.
Second, the empty spot in the national wallet generated by the breakdown of private wealth has been filled by a socialization of personal income directed by the government. The following graph tracks the share of personal income that comes from either government transfer payments or government salaries.
Yikes.
All of this leads to the next point. This has been the worst economic recovery in generations, at least as it is felt by the average American. Let’s be precise in our language here: we’re not talking about the recession itself; we’re talking about the recovery, which has entirely been on Barack Obama’s watch.
This is not rhetorical bluster, but empirical fact. The following graph demonstrates that by comparing employment in this recovery against every recovery since 1960. What I did was take the percentage of the adult population that was employed when NBER says a recovery began, set that as a baseline (100 percent) and tracked how this recovery stacks up against previous ones.
As we can see, this one is worse than any other in 50 years.
Unsurprisingly, we also see weakness in terms of real per capita income, as the next graph demonstrates. I did something similar with this one – taking real income per capita (minus government transfer payments) at the point that NBER says a recovery began, setting that at 100 percent, and tracking how the current recovery stacks up against previous ones.
Taking the last two graphs together, the ultimate point is validated: this is the worst recovery in generations. The 2001 recovery saw similar weakness in terms of real income, but jobs bounced back better that time. What's more, the 2001 recession was substantially milder, so we should have expected a greater snap-back this time around.
On a cause-and-effect level, it’s hard to assign much blame to this president, or any president for that matter. As we can see from the last two graphs, the recoveries from the 1990, 2001, and 2007 recessions were all slow and unimpressive, suggesting that there are greater forces at play than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Indeed, the transition to a post-industrial economy might be the single biggest factor. The once-great anchors of the American economy – steel, automotive, rubber, and other industries – used to be able to lay workers off temporarily during a slowdown, then bring them back when demand picked up, as can be seen in this graph. But the industrial sector of the economy is today just a fraction of what it used to be, meaning that such a brisk rebound is no longer possible.
Obama does deserve some of the cause-and-effect blame for this recovery, mostly due to the terribly inefficient stimulus. I was recently in Washington and was able to snap this photograph, which should go down in the annals of history as a testament to Keynesianism run amok.
It goes without saying that there were better ways to generate a recovery than this, so Obama and congressional Democrats deserve some cause-and-effect blame for the pace of the rebound. (Side note: Two years after Congress appropriated the money for this project, it is still not completed.)
On a political level, the blame for the recovery goes entirely to President Obama. Indeed, looking at the polls on his handling of the economy, you can see that he is already taking the heat.
And so, we can lay down the following marker: if the economic recovery does not begin to show substantial improvement, the likes of which we have not really seen in the last two years, and if the GOP nominates a reasonably acceptable alternative, this president is going to lose in 2012, and the final result will not be close. Nobody gets reelected with employment way down, real income way down, and 14 percent of his fellow citizens on food stamps. Nobody.
And the president needs something more than a “recovery” in the sense that we’ve seen to date. When you start controlling for inflation, population growth, and government intervention, the recovery we’ve seen has only been, at best, a treading of water for average people. This president needs to see a significant improvement in real, per capita, and private metrics of personal economic vitality. Put simply, he needs something more than this "food stamp recovery" to win next year.
People who are giving such a heavy advantage to the president next year must be making at least one of two assumptions: (a) the economy is suddenly going to do better than it has done in the last two years; (b) the GOP nominates a dud.
On the Republican nomination front, Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media shouldn't count on that, for the reasons I elaborated here. And when it comes to the economic growth front, no more peeing on my leg while telling me it's raining: After two years of this disappointing, anemic, worst-in-several-generations, quote unquote recovery, I just don’t believe that the big, long-promised rebound is coming any time soon.
Instead, what I believe nowadays is that this president is in a huge amount of trouble, as we all are.
(For the rest of the charts): http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-economy-still-not-good-enough-reelect-obama_559238.html?nopager=1
I have noticed something unsettling in my own life lately: I know a lot of people who are on food stamps or some kind of extraordinary government assistance. The count right now stands around 10 people, which is a lot for a small town denizen such as myself.
That is a personal reminder of a very serious, yet rarely discussed economic, social, and indeed political problem: the fact that better than one out of seven Americans today requires government help to put food on the table.
The following graph is only for the hale and hearty:
The start date of this heartbreaking graph is important – June, 2009 is the point at which, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the economy hit bottom and began to recover.
What we see in this graph is one example of a persistent feature of the recovery to date. On the top-line of the economic data, it often appears as though we have filled in the hole that was dug by the Great Recession. Check out this graph of personal income per capita to appreciate that. However, it is largely an illusion, a product of deficit-financed government spending – in the form of things like food stamps, extraordinary unemployment benefits, and the relatively stable federal employment situation.
Call it the American "food stamp recovery:" take away the government supports, and the economic picture looks very bleak indeed. Two sobering features stand out.
First, the ability of the private sector to provide people with a stable standard of living is in a long-term decline, one that has only eased, not reversed, in recent months. The following graph captures this phenomenon by tracking real wages per capita derived from the private sector.
What we see here is that the private sector wages and salaries are actually at a thirteen-year low point when measured on a per capita basis, and the most recent reading (from Quarter I of 2011) showed a continued decline. The only “good” news is that the slope of the descent has eased.
Second, the empty spot in the national wallet generated by the breakdown of private wealth has been filled by a socialization of personal income directed by the government. The following graph tracks the share of personal income that comes from either government transfer payments or government salaries.
Yikes.
All of this leads to the next point. This has been the worst economic recovery in generations, at least as it is felt by the average American. Let’s be precise in our language here: we’re not talking about the recession itself; we’re talking about the recovery, which has entirely been on Barack Obama’s watch.
This is not rhetorical bluster, but empirical fact. The following graph demonstrates that by comparing employment in this recovery against every recovery since 1960. What I did was take the percentage of the adult population that was employed when NBER says a recovery began, set that as a baseline (100 percent) and tracked how this recovery stacks up against previous ones.
As we can see, this one is worse than any other in 50 years.
Unsurprisingly, we also see weakness in terms of real per capita income, as the next graph demonstrates. I did something similar with this one – taking real income per capita (minus government transfer payments) at the point that NBER says a recovery began, setting that at 100 percent, and tracking how the current recovery stacks up against previous ones.
Taking the last two graphs together, the ultimate point is validated: this is the worst recovery in generations. The 2001 recovery saw similar weakness in terms of real income, but jobs bounced back better that time. What's more, the 2001 recession was substantially milder, so we should have expected a greater snap-back this time around.
On a cause-and-effect level, it’s hard to assign much blame to this president, or any president for that matter. As we can see from the last two graphs, the recoveries from the 1990, 2001, and 2007 recessions were all slow and unimpressive, suggesting that there are greater forces at play than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Indeed, the transition to a post-industrial economy might be the single biggest factor. The once-great anchors of the American economy – steel, automotive, rubber, and other industries – used to be able to lay workers off temporarily during a slowdown, then bring them back when demand picked up, as can be seen in this graph. But the industrial sector of the economy is today just a fraction of what it used to be, meaning that such a brisk rebound is no longer possible.
Obama does deserve some of the cause-and-effect blame for this recovery, mostly due to the terribly inefficient stimulus. I was recently in Washington and was able to snap this photograph, which should go down in the annals of history as a testament to Keynesianism run amok.
It goes without saying that there were better ways to generate a recovery than this, so Obama and congressional Democrats deserve some cause-and-effect blame for the pace of the rebound. (Side note: Two years after Congress appropriated the money for this project, it is still not completed.)
On a political level, the blame for the recovery goes entirely to President Obama. Indeed, looking at the polls on his handling of the economy, you can see that he is already taking the heat.
And so, we can lay down the following marker: if the economic recovery does not begin to show substantial improvement, the likes of which we have not really seen in the last two years, and if the GOP nominates a reasonably acceptable alternative, this president is going to lose in 2012, and the final result will not be close. Nobody gets reelected with employment way down, real income way down, and 14 percent of his fellow citizens on food stamps. Nobody.
And the president needs something more than a “recovery” in the sense that we’ve seen to date. When you start controlling for inflation, population growth, and government intervention, the recovery we’ve seen has only been, at best, a treading of water for average people. This president needs to see a significant improvement in real, per capita, and private metrics of personal economic vitality. Put simply, he needs something more than this "food stamp recovery" to win next year.
People who are giving such a heavy advantage to the president next year must be making at least one of two assumptions: (a) the economy is suddenly going to do better than it has done in the last two years; (b) the GOP nominates a dud.
On the Republican nomination front, Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media shouldn't count on that, for the reasons I elaborated here. And when it comes to the economic growth front, no more peeing on my leg while telling me it's raining: After two years of this disappointing, anemic, worst-in-several-generations, quote unquote recovery, I just don’t believe that the big, long-promised rebound is coming any time soon.
Instead, what I believe nowadays is that this president is in a huge amount of trouble, as we all are.
(For the rest of the charts): http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-economy-still-not-good-enough-reelect-obama_559238.html?nopager=1
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Holder: captured terrorists get presumption of trial in civilian courts
Eric Holder Senate Judiciary Committee Terrorism Civilian Trials The Daily Caller
Holder tells Judiciary Committee that captured terrorists get presumption of trial in civilian courts By Jeff Poor
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions pressed Attorney General Eric Holder on whether presuming terrorists captured by the United States would be tried in civilian courts could hinder America’s intelligence gathering efforts.
“Isn’t it a fact that if you presumptively to try an individual who is a terrorist planning or plotting or attempting an attack on the United States that if you presumptively are going to move them into civilian court, they are entitled to Miranda warnings within a few minutes of arrest, they are entitled to an appointment of a lawyer, they are entitled to be brought publicly before a civilian magistrate, entitled to pre-trial discovery, entitled to a speedy trial?” Sessions asked. “Can that not be a detriment to interrogating that individual over a period of time and obtaining information that protect Americans from further attack?”
Holder denied that using the civilian system would be an impediment to obtaining information.
“I think if one looks at the way with which the civilian system has worked in the past, we’ve certainly had the ability to convict hundreds of terrorists,” Holder said. “We have gotten actionable intelligence from people who were tried ultimately in the civilian system. We have modified how Miranda should be viewed.”
Looking for clarity for military and law enforcement officials, Sessions asked Holder to state clearly whether it was U.S. policy to presume captured terrorists would be tried in civilian courts.
“My question to you fundamentally is every law enforcement officer involved out there, every military person involved out there needs to know what the policy is,” Sessions said. “So, is the policy that they [captured terrorists] would presumptively be tried in civilian court?”
Holder, citing the president himself, said there is a presumption of that captured terrorists would be tried in civilian courts.
“As I said, the archived speech that the president made was that there is a presumption,” Holder said. “It is not an irrebutable presumption that cases go to the civilian court with regard to the Miranda issue, but I think we have demonstrated hundreds of times, hundreds of times, that we can get actionable intelligence, while at the same time prosecuting people in jail for really extended periods of time.”
http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/05/holder-tells-judiciary-committee-that-captured-terrorists-get-presumption-of-trial-in-civilian-courts/
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/05/holder-tells-judiciary-committee-that-captured-terrorists-get-presumption-of-trial-in-civilian-courts/#ixzz1LgxLvTEp
Holder tells Judiciary Committee that captured terrorists get presumption of trial in civilian courts By Jeff Poor
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions pressed Attorney General Eric Holder on whether presuming terrorists captured by the United States would be tried in civilian courts could hinder America’s intelligence gathering efforts.
“Isn’t it a fact that if you presumptively to try an individual who is a terrorist planning or plotting or attempting an attack on the United States that if you presumptively are going to move them into civilian court, they are entitled to Miranda warnings within a few minutes of arrest, they are entitled to an appointment of a lawyer, they are entitled to be brought publicly before a civilian magistrate, entitled to pre-trial discovery, entitled to a speedy trial?” Sessions asked. “Can that not be a detriment to interrogating that individual over a period of time and obtaining information that protect Americans from further attack?”
Holder denied that using the civilian system would be an impediment to obtaining information.
“I think if one looks at the way with which the civilian system has worked in the past, we’ve certainly had the ability to convict hundreds of terrorists,” Holder said. “We have gotten actionable intelligence from people who were tried ultimately in the civilian system. We have modified how Miranda should be viewed.”
Looking for clarity for military and law enforcement officials, Sessions asked Holder to state clearly whether it was U.S. policy to presume captured terrorists would be tried in civilian courts.
“My question to you fundamentally is every law enforcement officer involved out there, every military person involved out there needs to know what the policy is,” Sessions said. “So, is the policy that they [captured terrorists] would presumptively be tried in civilian court?”
Holder, citing the president himself, said there is a presumption of that captured terrorists would be tried in civilian courts.
“As I said, the archived speech that the president made was that there is a presumption,” Holder said. “It is not an irrebutable presumption that cases go to the civilian court with regard to the Miranda issue, but I think we have demonstrated hundreds of times, hundreds of times, that we can get actionable intelligence, while at the same time prosecuting people in jail for really extended periods of time.”
http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/05/holder-tells-judiciary-committee-that-captured-terrorists-get-presumption-of-trial-in-civilian-courts/
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/05/holder-tells-judiciary-committee-that-captured-terrorists-get-presumption-of-trial-in-civilian-courts/#ixzz1LgxLvTEp
Friday, May 6, 2011
Obama's losing his mojo in polls--media hushes, yawns
Obama's losing his mojo - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Obama's losing his mojo"
In the George W. Bush years, poll results that showed the American people losing confidence in their president were featured routinely on the front page of major newspapers like The Washington Post. But when The Post discovers that President Obama's ratings are collapsing, you need a search party to find where inside the paper they're buried.
On April 26, The Post offered three stories on polls, each with bad news for Obama. The only one mentioned on the front page (in the very bottom right-hand corner) was a Post/ABC poll showing "rising gas prices are leading Americans to drive less and hurting the president's popularity." From there, the reader would have to travel to page A-12.
"Hurting" is an understatement. Only 39 percent of those who called gas prices a "serious financial hardship" approve of Obama's performance as president. Among independents who found hardship, 67 percent disapprove of Obama. Ouch.
The Post said this hardship could "slow Obama's re-election campaign." Again, that's putting it mildly. Sixty percent of independents feeling the pain of gas prices said they would definitely not vote for Obama. In a matchup with Mitt Romney in that bracket, Romney wins by 24 points.
On page A-10, there's another poll story: More Americans disapprove of Obama's management of the war in Afghanistan than support it: 44 percent approved, 49 percent disapproved. Once again, just focus on the independents: 53 percent disapproved of Obama's handling of Afghanistan.
Remember the daily barrage of Bush (lack of) approval stories during the Iraq war? Where are those same "reporters" now?
On page A-8 there's perhaps the most shocking poll story: Egyptians still disapprove of America. This poll came from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, created in 2002 by liberals at Pew to underline global dissatisfaction with Bush.
Only 20 percent of Egyptians have a favorable view of the United States compared with 79 percent unfavorable.
How could this be after our media hailed Obama's "historic" speech in Cairo in 2009, bowing deeply to what "the holy Quran tells us," telling how he loved as a child to hear "the call of the azan at the break of dawn," and playing up "civilization's debt to Islam"?
Pew asked specifically whether Egyptians had confidence in Obama. Perhaps they loathed America but liked Obama? Nope. The breakdown was still slanted to the negative: 35 percent had confidence, while almost double that number, 64 percent, disagreed.
By contrast, fully 75 percent of those surveyed had a favorable view of the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
This is certainly not the reception that media liberals and Pew pundits expected. They couldn't imagine that perhaps people in other countries just have an anti-American animus regardless of the president. We elected a pandering leftist who apologizes for America and insists in Cairo that "this cycle of suspicion and discord must end" -- and disapproval of America in Muslim countries barely budged.
Pew reported polling in 23 countries around the world in its spring 2011 survey, but there are no results yet as to how popular Obama is among our allies. Days before the 2008 election, NBC touted a Pew poll, and from Istanbul, correspondent Dawna Friesen concluded, "If the world had a vote, Barack Obama would win in a landslide. ... Regardless of who wins, the world is clamoring for a new America in 2009."
All that media hyperbole about the historically charismatic Obama healing those global wounds inflicted by the Bush-Cheney neoconservatives has crashed and burned. The media pushing that discredited narrative now need to acknowledge that Obama can't work miracles, especially when half the time he waits around for someone else to make the miracle. He cannot be honestly portrayed any longer as an inspirational leader -- not here, not anywhere.
L. Brent Bozell III is president of the Media Research Center.
Read more: Obama's losing his mojo - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/zito/s_734678.html#ixzz1LFsD1QNP
In the George W. Bush years, poll results that showed the American people losing confidence in their president were featured routinely on the front page of major newspapers like The Washington Post. But when The Post discovers that President Obama's ratings are collapsing, you need a search party to find where inside the paper they're buried.
On April 26, The Post offered three stories on polls, each with bad news for Obama. The only one mentioned on the front page (in the very bottom right-hand corner) was a Post/ABC poll showing "rising gas prices are leading Americans to drive less and hurting the president's popularity." From there, the reader would have to travel to page A-12.
"Hurting" is an understatement. Only 39 percent of those who called gas prices a "serious financial hardship" approve of Obama's performance as president. Among independents who found hardship, 67 percent disapprove of Obama. Ouch.
The Post said this hardship could "slow Obama's re-election campaign." Again, that's putting it mildly. Sixty percent of independents feeling the pain of gas prices said they would definitely not vote for Obama. In a matchup with Mitt Romney in that bracket, Romney wins by 24 points.
On page A-10, there's another poll story: More Americans disapprove of Obama's management of the war in Afghanistan than support it: 44 percent approved, 49 percent disapproved. Once again, just focus on the independents: 53 percent disapproved of Obama's handling of Afghanistan.
Remember the daily barrage of Bush (lack of) approval stories during the Iraq war? Where are those same "reporters" now?
On page A-8 there's perhaps the most shocking poll story: Egyptians still disapprove of America. This poll came from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, created in 2002 by liberals at Pew to underline global dissatisfaction with Bush.
Only 20 percent of Egyptians have a favorable view of the United States compared with 79 percent unfavorable.
How could this be after our media hailed Obama's "historic" speech in Cairo in 2009, bowing deeply to what "the holy Quran tells us," telling how he loved as a child to hear "the call of the azan at the break of dawn," and playing up "civilization's debt to Islam"?
Pew asked specifically whether Egyptians had confidence in Obama. Perhaps they loathed America but liked Obama? Nope. The breakdown was still slanted to the negative: 35 percent had confidence, while almost double that number, 64 percent, disagreed.
By contrast, fully 75 percent of those surveyed had a favorable view of the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
This is certainly not the reception that media liberals and Pew pundits expected. They couldn't imagine that perhaps people in other countries just have an anti-American animus regardless of the president. We elected a pandering leftist who apologizes for America and insists in Cairo that "this cycle of suspicion and discord must end" -- and disapproval of America in Muslim countries barely budged.
Pew reported polling in 23 countries around the world in its spring 2011 survey, but there are no results yet as to how popular Obama is among our allies. Days before the 2008 election, NBC touted a Pew poll, and from Istanbul, correspondent Dawna Friesen concluded, "If the world had a vote, Barack Obama would win in a landslide. ... Regardless of who wins, the world is clamoring for a new America in 2009."
All that media hyperbole about the historically charismatic Obama healing those global wounds inflicted by the Bush-Cheney neoconservatives has crashed and burned. The media pushing that discredited narrative now need to acknowledge that Obama can't work miracles, especially when half the time he waits around for someone else to make the miracle. He cannot be honestly portrayed any longer as an inspirational leader -- not here, not anywhere.
L. Brent Bozell III is president of the Media Research Center.
Read more: Obama's losing his mojo - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/zito/s_734678.html#ixzz1LFsD1QNP
Americans Blame Wasteful Government Spending for Deficit
Americans Blame Wasteful Government Spending for Deficit
PRINCETON, NJ -- The large majority of Americans say spending too much money on unneeded or wasteful federal programs is to blame for the federal budget deficit, while 22% say the deficit is a consequence of not raising enough in taxes to pay for needed programs.
These results are based on an April 20-23 USA Today/Gallup poll. Given a forced choice, Republicans almost uniformly place blame for the deficit on too much federal spending, rather than a shortage of tax revenue. Majorities of independents and Democrats agree, albeit by somewhat smaller margins.
Accordingly, Americans generally favor spending cuts rather than tax increases as the way for Congress to reduce the deficit going forward.
This question asks Americans to choose among five ways of reducing the federal deficit, ranging from a total reliance on spending cuts to a total reliance on tax increases. The responses cluster at the "spending cuts" end of the spectrum. About half (48%) of Americans say reducing the deficit should be done mostly or only with spending cuts. Another 37% say it should be done equally with spending cuts and tax increases. Eleven percent say mostly or only with tax increases.
Thus, overall, 85% of Americans explicitly favor spending cuts as at least part of the solution to reducing the federal deficit, with more than half of these favoring only or mostly using cuts. This compares with 48% who explicitly favor tax increases as at least part of a deficit reduction strategy -- a number consisting mostly of those who want an equal emphasis on spending cuts and tax increases.
The major partisan distinctions in response to this question reflect the choice between mostly/only spending cuts versus the equal use of spending cuts and tax increases. Republicans are most likely to favor the former; Democrats, the latter. Independents' views are between these two extremes. Relatively few Americans of any partisan identification favor mostly or only using tax increases to reduce the deficit.
Implications
Given a choice, Americans of all political persuasions are more likely to say that too much wasteful and unneeded government spending is the cause of the federal budget deficit, rather than too little tax revenue. Americans of all political persuasions also say cutting back on federal spending should be a major focus of efforts to reduce the deficit going forward.
Still, some emphasis on tax increases is part of the solution for almost half of Americans. Thus, it appears Americans would most likely tell their elected representatives to attack the federal deficit primarily using spending cuts, but with a secondary reliance on raising tax revenue.
(See poll for charts) http://www.gallup.com/poll/147338/Americans-Blame-Wasteful-Government-Spending-Deficit.aspx?utm_source=add%2Bthis&utm_medium=addthis.com&utm_campaign=sharing&utm_term=Americans-Blame-Wasteful-Government-Spending-Deficit
PRINCETON, NJ -- The large majority of Americans say spending too much money on unneeded or wasteful federal programs is to blame for the federal budget deficit, while 22% say the deficit is a consequence of not raising enough in taxes to pay for needed programs.
These results are based on an April 20-23 USA Today/Gallup poll. Given a forced choice, Republicans almost uniformly place blame for the deficit on too much federal spending, rather than a shortage of tax revenue. Majorities of independents and Democrats agree, albeit by somewhat smaller margins.
Accordingly, Americans generally favor spending cuts rather than tax increases as the way for Congress to reduce the deficit going forward.
This question asks Americans to choose among five ways of reducing the federal deficit, ranging from a total reliance on spending cuts to a total reliance on tax increases. The responses cluster at the "spending cuts" end of the spectrum. About half (48%) of Americans say reducing the deficit should be done mostly or only with spending cuts. Another 37% say it should be done equally with spending cuts and tax increases. Eleven percent say mostly or only with tax increases.
Thus, overall, 85% of Americans explicitly favor spending cuts as at least part of the solution to reducing the federal deficit, with more than half of these favoring only or mostly using cuts. This compares with 48% who explicitly favor tax increases as at least part of a deficit reduction strategy -- a number consisting mostly of those who want an equal emphasis on spending cuts and tax increases.
The major partisan distinctions in response to this question reflect the choice between mostly/only spending cuts versus the equal use of spending cuts and tax increases. Republicans are most likely to favor the former; Democrats, the latter. Independents' views are between these two extremes. Relatively few Americans of any partisan identification favor mostly or only using tax increases to reduce the deficit.
Implications
Given a choice, Americans of all political persuasions are more likely to say that too much wasteful and unneeded government spending is the cause of the federal budget deficit, rather than too little tax revenue. Americans of all political persuasions also say cutting back on federal spending should be a major focus of efforts to reduce the deficit going forward.
Still, some emphasis on tax increases is part of the solution for almost half of Americans. Thus, it appears Americans would most likely tell their elected representatives to attack the federal deficit primarily using spending cuts, but with a secondary reliance on raising tax revenue.
(See poll for charts) http://www.gallup.com/poll/147338/Americans-Blame-Wasteful-Government-Spending-Deficit.aspx?utm_source=add%2Bthis&utm_medium=addthis.com&utm_campaign=sharing&utm_term=Americans-Blame-Wasteful-Government-Spending-Deficit
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Victims of Communism Day
Victims of Communism Day
Ilya Somin • May 1, 2011
Today is May Day. For the past several years, I have advocated that this date be transformed into Victims of Communism Day. My 2007, 2008, and 2010 posts on the subject explain the rationale for this idea. Here’s a summary from my very first post on the subject, which remains equally valid today:
May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day....
The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.
In this post, I explained why the longstanding relative neglect of communist crimes is deplorable — not just from the standpoint of understanding the past, but also that of doing justice in the here and now and ensuring a better future. For a good summary of the extent of communist crimes, see this 2005 May Day post by political scientist Rudolph Rummel, a leading academic expert on mass murder.
Since my last May Day post, new evidence has emerged suggesting that the communist mass murders in China were on an even larger scale than previously thought, and greater than those in the Soviet Union. This strengthens the case for an international rather than Russia-centric date for Victims of Communism Day.
Much debate has focused on the question of whether communist mass murders qualify as genocide. In my view, some of them do qualify as such, but the entire distinction between genocide and mass murder has been vastly overblown. The mass murder of innocent people is equally evil regardless of whether it was committed out of racial, religious, ideological or other motives. I discussed this point in detail in this series of posts.
2011 is also the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, one of communism’s most notorious crimes, though ironically also one of its comparatively smaller ones. For my thoughts on the Wall, see here.
http://volokh.com/2011/05/01/victims-of-communism-day-3/
Ilya Somin • May 1, 2011
Today is May Day. For the past several years, I have advocated that this date be transformed into Victims of Communism Day. My 2007, 2008, and 2010 posts on the subject explain the rationale for this idea. Here’s a summary from my very first post on the subject, which remains equally valid today:
May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day....
The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.
In this post, I explained why the longstanding relative neglect of communist crimes is deplorable — not just from the standpoint of understanding the past, but also that of doing justice in the here and now and ensuring a better future. For a good summary of the extent of communist crimes, see this 2005 May Day post by political scientist Rudolph Rummel, a leading academic expert on mass murder.
Since my last May Day post, new evidence has emerged suggesting that the communist mass murders in China were on an even larger scale than previously thought, and greater than those in the Soviet Union. This strengthens the case for an international rather than Russia-centric date for Victims of Communism Day.
Much debate has focused on the question of whether communist mass murders qualify as genocide. In my view, some of them do qualify as such, but the entire distinction between genocide and mass murder has been vastly overblown. The mass murder of innocent people is equally evil regardless of whether it was committed out of racial, religious, ideological or other motives. I discussed this point in detail in this series of posts.
2011 is also the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, one of communism’s most notorious crimes, though ironically also one of its comparatively smaller ones. For my thoughts on the Wall, see here.
http://volokh.com/2011/05/01/victims-of-communism-day-3/
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Gas prices keep rising; Obama: 'Let them buy smaller cars.'
Gas prices keep rising
Meanwhile, Obama says: 'Let them buy smaller cars.'
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Let them eat cake." That's what Marie Antoinette, the queen who lost her head during the French Revolution, is said to have responded when she was told the peasants had no bread.
She never said that. Antonia Fraser, who wrote a biography of the unlucky queen, said the callous remark actually had been made a century before by Marie-Therese, wife of King Louis XIV.
But President Barack Obama did tell an American worried about gasoline prices that he should buy a new car: "If you're complaining about the price of gas and you're only getting eight miles a gallon, you might want to think about a trade-in," Mr. Obama joked in response to a questioner at a campaign stop near Philadelphia April 6.
It apparently didn't occur to the president that people for whom it is a hardship to pay a dollar more a gallon for gasoline can't afford to buy a new car.
The remark makes Mr. Obama sound clueless, or callous, or both, but most of the journalists who covered his visit to Gamesa Technology Corp. didn't report this exchange. They couldn't drop it entirely down the memory hole, though. Blogger Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) made a screen grab of the initial AP story that reported it. Video of the exchange was posted on YouTube.
Gas prices have doubled since Barack Obama became president. With wages stagnant, unemployment high and food prices rising at the fastest rate since the 1970s, this imposes real hardship on many Americans.
It also means our moribund economy is likely to fall back into recession. When the real price of oil doubles within a year, GDP almost always declines, noted James Cooper in the Fiscal Times Monday.
Oil prices are rising because (a) the value of the dollar is declining, which makes everything we import more expensive; (b) the Middle East, where most of the world's oil is produced, is in turmoil; and (c) because the Obama administration has sharply restricted oil drilling at home. Gasoline prices could be cut in half within a few years if those restrictions were lifted, according to Rep. Joe Barton, R-Tex, a former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The price of gas is a dollar a gallon higher now than it was at this time a year ago. Most of the rise has come since Mr. Obama imposed a partial ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
The last oil price spike ended on July 14, 2008, which, noted Will Collier, "was the very same day then President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore drilling."
The price of oil began to rise again in January 2009, which, coincidentally, was the month Mr. Obama announced he would reverse Mr. Bush's order.
But only 1 percent of the oil price stories on the evening newscasts of ABC, NBC and CBS since the drilling moratorium was imposed have mentioned there might be a connection between administration policy and rising gasoline prices, noted the Business & Media Institute.
The president also bears much of the blame for the other reasons why oil prices are soaring.
Mr. Obama has added trillions to our massive national debt, which is the most important reason the dollar is losing value.
Unrest in the Middle East has been made worse by the weakness of Mr. Obama's foreign policy, which, in the case of Libya, one of his advisers described as "leading from behind."
At least some of the president's advisers want gas prices to go higher so the "green" technologies they fancy will seem less uneconomical. "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe," Steven Chu, his secretary of energy, told the Wall Street Journal in December 2008.
Our gas prices are getting closer to those in Europe, currently about $10 a gallon. But even with massive subsidies, "green" technologies can't compete.
Last May Mr. Obama spoke at Solyndra, a California company that manufactures solar panels and which received $533 million from the stimulus bill. Six months later, Solyndra announced it was closing its old plant, delaying construction of a new one and laying off workers.
The president may not mind higher gasoline prices, but he doesn't want to take the blame for them. So he's pretending to do something about them, while actually doing nothing. Attorney General Eric Holder will investigate whether "speculators" have been driving up prices, Mr. Obama has announced.
This is like O.J. Simpson's search for "the real killers." But the irony is lost on most in the "mainstream" media.
Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11121/1142937-373-0.stm#ixzz1LDBUqRb1
Meanwhile, Obama says: 'Let them buy smaller cars.'
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Let them eat cake." That's what Marie Antoinette, the queen who lost her head during the French Revolution, is said to have responded when she was told the peasants had no bread.
She never said that. Antonia Fraser, who wrote a biography of the unlucky queen, said the callous remark actually had been made a century before by Marie-Therese, wife of King Louis XIV.
But President Barack Obama did tell an American worried about gasoline prices that he should buy a new car: "If you're complaining about the price of gas and you're only getting eight miles a gallon, you might want to think about a trade-in," Mr. Obama joked in response to a questioner at a campaign stop near Philadelphia April 6.
It apparently didn't occur to the president that people for whom it is a hardship to pay a dollar more a gallon for gasoline can't afford to buy a new car.
The remark makes Mr. Obama sound clueless, or callous, or both, but most of the journalists who covered his visit to Gamesa Technology Corp. didn't report this exchange. They couldn't drop it entirely down the memory hole, though. Blogger Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) made a screen grab of the initial AP story that reported it. Video of the exchange was posted on YouTube.
Gas prices have doubled since Barack Obama became president. With wages stagnant, unemployment high and food prices rising at the fastest rate since the 1970s, this imposes real hardship on many Americans.
It also means our moribund economy is likely to fall back into recession. When the real price of oil doubles within a year, GDP almost always declines, noted James Cooper in the Fiscal Times Monday.
Oil prices are rising because (a) the value of the dollar is declining, which makes everything we import more expensive; (b) the Middle East, where most of the world's oil is produced, is in turmoil; and (c) because the Obama administration has sharply restricted oil drilling at home. Gasoline prices could be cut in half within a few years if those restrictions were lifted, according to Rep. Joe Barton, R-Tex, a former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The price of gas is a dollar a gallon higher now than it was at this time a year ago. Most of the rise has come since Mr. Obama imposed a partial ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
The last oil price spike ended on July 14, 2008, which, noted Will Collier, "was the very same day then President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore drilling."
The price of oil began to rise again in January 2009, which, coincidentally, was the month Mr. Obama announced he would reverse Mr. Bush's order.
But only 1 percent of the oil price stories on the evening newscasts of ABC, NBC and CBS since the drilling moratorium was imposed have mentioned there might be a connection between administration policy and rising gasoline prices, noted the Business & Media Institute.
The president also bears much of the blame for the other reasons why oil prices are soaring.
Mr. Obama has added trillions to our massive national debt, which is the most important reason the dollar is losing value.
Unrest in the Middle East has been made worse by the weakness of Mr. Obama's foreign policy, which, in the case of Libya, one of his advisers described as "leading from behind."
At least some of the president's advisers want gas prices to go higher so the "green" technologies they fancy will seem less uneconomical. "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe," Steven Chu, his secretary of energy, told the Wall Street Journal in December 2008.
Our gas prices are getting closer to those in Europe, currently about $10 a gallon. But even with massive subsidies, "green" technologies can't compete.
Last May Mr. Obama spoke at Solyndra, a California company that manufactures solar panels and which received $533 million from the stimulus bill. Six months later, Solyndra announced it was closing its old plant, delaying construction of a new one and laying off workers.
The president may not mind higher gasoline prices, but he doesn't want to take the blame for them. So he's pretending to do something about them, while actually doing nothing. Attorney General Eric Holder will investigate whether "speculators" have been driving up prices, Mr. Obama has announced.
This is like O.J. Simpson's search for "the real killers." But the irony is lost on most in the "mainstream" media.
Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11121/1142937-373-0.stm#ixzz1LDBUqRb1
When Jimmy Carter Is your best-case scenario, you're in trouble | Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Columnists | Washington Examiner
Sunday Reflection: When Jimmy Carter Is your best-case scenario, you're in trouble Glenn Harlan Reynolds Columnists Washington Examiner
By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
People on the right have been comparing President Obama with Jimmy Carter for a while now: The rise from nowhere via inexplicable press adulation, the smarmy moralizing, the excessive faith in his own abilities, the tendency of everything he touches to turn to crap -- all seem eerily reminiscent of the Carter presidency.
But now it's people on the left who are saying the same thing. Trouble is, at this point a Carter rerun is probably a best-case scenario.
Democrat Eric Alterman writes: "Ask yourself if the following story does not sound like another president we could name. The gregarious Massachusetts pol, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, could hardly have been more eager to work with a Democratic president after eight years of Nixon and Ford.
"But when they first met, and O'Neill attempted to advise Carter about which members of Congress might need some special pleading, or even the assorted political favor or two with regard to certain issues, to O'Neill's open-jawed amazement, Carter replied, 'No, I'll describe the problem in a rational way to the American people. I'm sure they'll realize I'm right.' The red-nosed Irishman later said he 'could have slugged' Carter over this lethal combination of arrogance and naivete, but it would soon become Carter's calling card."
But it's worse than that. I see Alterman's point, but we've reached the point where this sort of comparison works more as a defense of Obama than a critique.
First, Obama doesn't rely on rational description to persuade the American people, but rather on his -- now seemingly shrunken -- oratorical skills, without regard to substance.
And, second, rather than pushing a program he thought was rational over the objections of the Democratic congressional leadership, Obama virtually outsourced the stimulus and health care legislation to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, producing a misshapen mass of special-interest giveways that did little for the economy or for health, and that created massive public indignation. Obama here was like Carter without the engineer's rationality, or force of personality.
Obama is worse in another way. Though Carter had a mean streak, he was not prone to divide and name-call in the way that Obama has done. From his remarks about bitter clingers to his administration's increasing willingness to call any criticism racist, Obama's administration has been far more divisive than Carter's.
Likewise, the Obama administration has shown a thuggish streak, involving everything from "jokes" about Internal Revenue Service audits to the recent National Labor Relations Board attack on Boeing's factory move from a unionized plant in Washington state to a plant in South Carolina where workers had voted to go nonunion, that was not so pronounced under Carter. Call it the difference between Plains and Chicago.
Carter looked hapless in the face of high energy prices, but Obama actually seems pleased: He announced early on that his policies would necessarily cause electricity prices to "skyrocket," and his recent town-hall response to a man who complained about the cost of his commute was a suggestion that the man trade his car in and buy a hybrid.
To Carter, higher energy prices were an insoluble problem; to Obama, they're a tool to encourage Americans to live more constrained lives -- and perhaps to buy a Chevy Volt from the bailed-out General Motors.
Meanwhile, on foreign policy -- another Carter weak point -- Obama also looks worse. Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conceived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.
At the moment, Obama is involved in three wars, and in two of them he is losing. (The third, ironically, is the war he ran against, in Iraq, where things seem to be going comparatively well).
Afghanistan appears to have turned into (at best) a stalemate, with drone attacks of the sort Obama the candidate criticized being our chief weapon. Libya, a war that Obama started at the behest of the "lady hawks" in his Cabinet (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and Special Assistant Samantha Power), has been a half-hearted, run-by-committee affair that has mostly served as a reminder that NATO can't do very much without the United States firmly in charge.
In Egypt, where Obama supported the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak (a reliable, if unappetizing, U.S. client) by a different bunch of reformers, polls now show the United States is disliked by three-quarters, while a similar number look favorably on the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
In Syria, where there is a popular revolt against a genuine U.S. enemy, the Obama administration has been conspicuous by its absence. Apparently, Syria's reformers don't pass the test.
Then, of course, there is the economy. Carter had big government, but Obama has brought us monstrous government, running up bigger deficits in the first half of his first term than Bush did in eight years and increasing the national debt by more than 50 percent.
The stimulus, which was touted as a way of keeping unemployment below 8 percent, couldn't even keep it out of double digits, and even now 8 percent looks pretty good by comparison with what we've got.
But while all that spending didn't stabilize unemployment as promised, it did destabilize America's credit rating. As bad as things were under Carter, the United States wasn't at risk of a credit downgrade, as it is now.
Plus, inflation is beginning to ramp up, as gas and grocery prices skyrocket. Some worry that the inflation rates of the Carter era will look mild by comparison with what's coming down the pike.
And that's the lesson: Up to now, comparisons with Carter were a tool of Obama's critics. From now on, they're likely to be a tool of his defenders. Because as bad as Carter was, Obama is shaping up to be worse. Much worse.
Examiner Sunday Reflection contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is founder and editor of Instapundit.com blog and a law professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/04/sunday-reflection-when-jimmy-carter-your-best-case-scenario-youre-trouble#ixzz1LD6VNEVe
By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
People on the right have been comparing President Obama with Jimmy Carter for a while now: The rise from nowhere via inexplicable press adulation, the smarmy moralizing, the excessive faith in his own abilities, the tendency of everything he touches to turn to crap -- all seem eerily reminiscent of the Carter presidency.
But now it's people on the left who are saying the same thing. Trouble is, at this point a Carter rerun is probably a best-case scenario.
Democrat Eric Alterman writes: "Ask yourself if the following story does not sound like another president we could name. The gregarious Massachusetts pol, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, could hardly have been more eager to work with a Democratic president after eight years of Nixon and Ford.
"But when they first met, and O'Neill attempted to advise Carter about which members of Congress might need some special pleading, or even the assorted political favor or two with regard to certain issues, to O'Neill's open-jawed amazement, Carter replied, 'No, I'll describe the problem in a rational way to the American people. I'm sure they'll realize I'm right.' The red-nosed Irishman later said he 'could have slugged' Carter over this lethal combination of arrogance and naivete, but it would soon become Carter's calling card."
But it's worse than that. I see Alterman's point, but we've reached the point where this sort of comparison works more as a defense of Obama than a critique.
First, Obama doesn't rely on rational description to persuade the American people, but rather on his -- now seemingly shrunken -- oratorical skills, without regard to substance.
And, second, rather than pushing a program he thought was rational over the objections of the Democratic congressional leadership, Obama virtually outsourced the stimulus and health care legislation to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, producing a misshapen mass of special-interest giveways that did little for the economy or for health, and that created massive public indignation. Obama here was like Carter without the engineer's rationality, or force of personality.
Obama is worse in another way. Though Carter had a mean streak, he was not prone to divide and name-call in the way that Obama has done. From his remarks about bitter clingers to his administration's increasing willingness to call any criticism racist, Obama's administration has been far more divisive than Carter's.
Likewise, the Obama administration has shown a thuggish streak, involving everything from "jokes" about Internal Revenue Service audits to the recent National Labor Relations Board attack on Boeing's factory move from a unionized plant in Washington state to a plant in South Carolina where workers had voted to go nonunion, that was not so pronounced under Carter. Call it the difference between Plains and Chicago.
Carter looked hapless in the face of high energy prices, but Obama actually seems pleased: He announced early on that his policies would necessarily cause electricity prices to "skyrocket," and his recent town-hall response to a man who complained about the cost of his commute was a suggestion that the man trade his car in and buy a hybrid.
To Carter, higher energy prices were an insoluble problem; to Obama, they're a tool to encourage Americans to live more constrained lives -- and perhaps to buy a Chevy Volt from the bailed-out General Motors.
Meanwhile, on foreign policy -- another Carter weak point -- Obama also looks worse. Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conceived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.
At the moment, Obama is involved in three wars, and in two of them he is losing. (The third, ironically, is the war he ran against, in Iraq, where things seem to be going comparatively well).
Afghanistan appears to have turned into (at best) a stalemate, with drone attacks of the sort Obama the candidate criticized being our chief weapon. Libya, a war that Obama started at the behest of the "lady hawks" in his Cabinet (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and Special Assistant Samantha Power), has been a half-hearted, run-by-committee affair that has mostly served as a reminder that NATO can't do very much without the United States firmly in charge.
In Egypt, where Obama supported the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak (a reliable, if unappetizing, U.S. client) by a different bunch of reformers, polls now show the United States is disliked by three-quarters, while a similar number look favorably on the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
In Syria, where there is a popular revolt against a genuine U.S. enemy, the Obama administration has been conspicuous by its absence. Apparently, Syria's reformers don't pass the test.
Then, of course, there is the economy. Carter had big government, but Obama has brought us monstrous government, running up bigger deficits in the first half of his first term than Bush did in eight years and increasing the national debt by more than 50 percent.
The stimulus, which was touted as a way of keeping unemployment below 8 percent, couldn't even keep it out of double digits, and even now 8 percent looks pretty good by comparison with what we've got.
But while all that spending didn't stabilize unemployment as promised, it did destabilize America's credit rating. As bad as things were under Carter, the United States wasn't at risk of a credit downgrade, as it is now.
Plus, inflation is beginning to ramp up, as gas and grocery prices skyrocket. Some worry that the inflation rates of the Carter era will look mild by comparison with what's coming down the pike.
And that's the lesson: Up to now, comparisons with Carter were a tool of Obama's critics. From now on, they're likely to be a tool of his defenders. Because as bad as Carter was, Obama is shaping up to be worse. Much worse.
Examiner Sunday Reflection contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is founder and editor of Instapundit.com blog and a law professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/04/sunday-reflection-when-jimmy-carter-your-best-case-scenario-youre-trouble#ixzz1LD6VNEVe
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
JammieWearingFool: Obama Rails Against Oil Subsidies, Gave ACORN $3 B...
JammieWearingFool: Obama Rails Against Oil Subsidies, Gave ACORN $3 B...: "Yeah, how dare those evil oil companies who produce a product we all need get money from the federal government . President Obama lashed out..."
Obama Rails Against Oil Subsidies, Gave ACORN $3 Billion in Stimulus
Yeah, how dare those evil oil companies who produce a product we all need get money from the federal government.
President Obama lashed out at oil companies — and the tax breaks they get from the government — for a second consecutive day on Thursday and again in Saturday's address.
“Four billion dollars of your money are going to these companies at a time when they’re making record profits and you’re paying near record prices at the pump,” the president said at a Nevada town hall. “It has to stop.”
Funny, but he didn't have such objections when the criminal enterprise known as ACORN was given $3 billion in his stimulus scam two years ago.
At least $53 million in federal funds have gone to ACORN activists since 1994, and the controversial group could get up to $8.5 billion more tax dollars despite being under investigation for voter registration fraud in a dozen states.
The economic stimulus bill enacted in February contains $3 billion that the non-profit activist group known more formally as the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now could receive, and 2010 federal budget contains another $5.5 billion that could also find its way into the group’s coffers.
An Examiner review of federal spending data found that ACORN has received at least $53 million in federal money since 1994.
So glad to see the media point out his hypocrisy. Oh, nobody has?
Posted by JammieWearingFool
http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2011/04/obama-rails-against-oil-subsidies-gave.html?spref=bl
Obama Rails Against Oil Subsidies, Gave ACORN $3 Billion in Stimulus
Yeah, how dare those evil oil companies who produce a product we all need get money from the federal government.
President Obama lashed out at oil companies — and the tax breaks they get from the government — for a second consecutive day on Thursday and again in Saturday's address.
“Four billion dollars of your money are going to these companies at a time when they’re making record profits and you’re paying near record prices at the pump,” the president said at a Nevada town hall. “It has to stop.”
Funny, but he didn't have such objections when the criminal enterprise known as ACORN was given $3 billion in his stimulus scam two years ago.
At least $53 million in federal funds have gone to ACORN activists since 1994, and the controversial group could get up to $8.5 billion more tax dollars despite being under investigation for voter registration fraud in a dozen states.
The economic stimulus bill enacted in February contains $3 billion that the non-profit activist group known more formally as the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now could receive, and 2010 federal budget contains another $5.5 billion that could also find its way into the group’s coffers.
An Examiner review of federal spending data found that ACORN has received at least $53 million in federal money since 1994.
So glad to see the media point out his hypocrisy. Oh, nobody has?
Posted by JammieWearingFool
http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2011/04/obama-rails-against-oil-subsidies-gave.html?spref=bl
Thanks to Obama, Gas Jumps in a Flash
Pajamas Media » Thanks to Obama, Gas Jumps in a Flash
Thanks to Obama, Gas Jumps in a Flash
By Will Collier
It must have looked so simple from Barack Obama’s rarely visited Senate office, or Steven Chu’s comfortable digs at Berkeley: if only we stopped taking advantage of all those nasty fossil fuels, everything would be better. Three years ago, when then-Senator Obama was dismissing high energy prices as just another good reason for more government handouts [1], and Chu was insisting that Americans ought to pay European prices [2] for gasoline, all they heard in return was applause from their core constituencies — academics and the media.
Unfortunately for now-President Obama, the reality of $4-$5-a-gallon gasoline is a much tougher sell to the general public. He’s put himself to work spinning the line that “speculators” are at fault [3] for high prices, but the actual explanation is far more prosaic. Limited supply plus growing demand equals higher prices. That’s a formula so simple, even a community organizer should be able to understand it.
Asian demand for energy continues to rise as nations in the far east region — oddly lacking in “stimulus” spending — continue to boom [4]. Supply, meanwhile, has fallen off, not only as a consequence of the turmoil in Libya and other oil-producing countries, but also thanks to the Obama-ordered moratorium on drilling [5] in the Gulf of Mexico — and the recently ordered moratorium [6] on future drilling anywhere else off the American coastline.
Obama and his minions have been chasing the green jobs chimera for so long that it’s an instinct. They pompously suggest [7] that Americans ought to trade in their current vehicles [8] for pricey, government-approved matchbox cars [9], asserting still [10] that there’s “no quick fix” for high energy prices. History, and very recent history at that, indicates that they are mistaken.
Take a look at this chart compiled by metalprices.com [11]. It’s the price of a barrel of crude oil over the past 5 years.
See that big peak in the middle? That was the last oil spike, in the summer of 2008. Notice how the price hit a high point, then fell off a cliff afterward?
The day corresponding to that peak, an all-time high of $145.16/barrel, was July 14, 2008. By some strange coincidence, that was the very same day then-President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore oil drilling [12].
Bush’s order was, of course, immediately dismissed by the “experts.” Reuters [13] waved away the action as “a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on high gasoline costs.” Barack Obama’s campaign lectured that if “offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither.”
The movement left was even more dismissive. ClimateProgress.org [14] blasted The Washington Post for failing to headline their story about the order “Offshore Drilling Raises Oil Prices.” In response to Bush’s assertion that additional offshore extraction could equal current U.S. production in 10 years, they editorialized: “Yes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt” (emphasis in original).
There was just one problem: reality. Even though, as critics were eager to point out, any additional American drilling was years in the future, oil prices immediately went into free-fall. By Friday, July 18, the price of a barrel of crude [15] had dropped to $128.94, a 12% decrease. A month later, on August 14, the price had fallen to $115.05. In spectacular fashion, Bush’s academic and media critics were proven seriously wrong.
For commodities traders who’d been pricing oil based on a supposition of scarcity, the potential for millions of additional barrels on the market hit like a thunderbolt. The simple act of putting America’s resources on the table popped the oil bubble, and a stunning price drop followed in short order. By election day, November 4, the price of a barrel of crude had plummeted to $70.84 — a 51% decrease in less than five months.
But wait. I can already hear the cries of, “Uh uh! The price dropped because demand fell off! Haven’tcha ever heard of the Great Recession?”
Problem is, all of that happened months prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the financial crisis on September 15, 2008 (price of crude: $95.52). Oil prices actually spiked at the outset of the economic mess, peaking at just over $100/barrel on September 30 before falling again. They reached a bottom price of $30.28 on December 23, a jaw-dropping 80% off the July peak, less than a month before Barack Obama took office.
Speaking of which: Obama had been president-elect for all of five days [16] when he announced his intention to rescind Bush’s order. Oil prices started going up again in January of 2009 and steadily increasing ever since. Obama Energy Secretary Ken Salazar announced a highly restrictive offshore leasing policy [17] last December, and the Bush executive order was officially reversed [17] on February 8, 2011.
The price of crude that day was $85.85. By April 19, it had risen to $107.18, with no end in sight.
(see original for all links) http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/thanks-to-obama-gas-jumps-in-a-flash/
Thanks to Obama, Gas Jumps in a Flash
By Will Collier
It must have looked so simple from Barack Obama’s rarely visited Senate office, or Steven Chu’s comfortable digs at Berkeley: if only we stopped taking advantage of all those nasty fossil fuels, everything would be better. Three years ago, when then-Senator Obama was dismissing high energy prices as just another good reason for more government handouts [1], and Chu was insisting that Americans ought to pay European prices [2] for gasoline, all they heard in return was applause from their core constituencies — academics and the media.
Unfortunately for now-President Obama, the reality of $4-$5-a-gallon gasoline is a much tougher sell to the general public. He’s put himself to work spinning the line that “speculators” are at fault [3] for high prices, but the actual explanation is far more prosaic. Limited supply plus growing demand equals higher prices. That’s a formula so simple, even a community organizer should be able to understand it.
Asian demand for energy continues to rise as nations in the far east region — oddly lacking in “stimulus” spending — continue to boom [4]. Supply, meanwhile, has fallen off, not only as a consequence of the turmoil in Libya and other oil-producing countries, but also thanks to the Obama-ordered moratorium on drilling [5] in the Gulf of Mexico — and the recently ordered moratorium [6] on future drilling anywhere else off the American coastline.
Obama and his minions have been chasing the green jobs chimera for so long that it’s an instinct. They pompously suggest [7] that Americans ought to trade in their current vehicles [8] for pricey, government-approved matchbox cars [9], asserting still [10] that there’s “no quick fix” for high energy prices. History, and very recent history at that, indicates that they are mistaken.
Take a look at this chart compiled by metalprices.com [11]. It’s the price of a barrel of crude oil over the past 5 years.
See that big peak in the middle? That was the last oil spike, in the summer of 2008. Notice how the price hit a high point, then fell off a cliff afterward?
The day corresponding to that peak, an all-time high of $145.16/barrel, was July 14, 2008. By some strange coincidence, that was the very same day then-President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore oil drilling [12].
Bush’s order was, of course, immediately dismissed by the “experts.” Reuters [13] waved away the action as “a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on high gasoline costs.” Barack Obama’s campaign lectured that if “offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither.”
The movement left was even more dismissive. ClimateProgress.org [14] blasted The Washington Post for failing to headline their story about the order “Offshore Drilling Raises Oil Prices.” In response to Bush’s assertion that additional offshore extraction could equal current U.S. production in 10 years, they editorialized: “Yes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt” (emphasis in original).
There was just one problem: reality. Even though, as critics were eager to point out, any additional American drilling was years in the future, oil prices immediately went into free-fall. By Friday, July 18, the price of a barrel of crude [15] had dropped to $128.94, a 12% decrease. A month later, on August 14, the price had fallen to $115.05. In spectacular fashion, Bush’s academic and media critics were proven seriously wrong.
For commodities traders who’d been pricing oil based on a supposition of scarcity, the potential for millions of additional barrels on the market hit like a thunderbolt. The simple act of putting America’s resources on the table popped the oil bubble, and a stunning price drop followed in short order. By election day, November 4, the price of a barrel of crude had plummeted to $70.84 — a 51% decrease in less than five months.
But wait. I can already hear the cries of, “Uh uh! The price dropped because demand fell off! Haven’tcha ever heard of the Great Recession?”
Problem is, all of that happened months prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the financial crisis on September 15, 2008 (price of crude: $95.52). Oil prices actually spiked at the outset of the economic mess, peaking at just over $100/barrel on September 30 before falling again. They reached a bottom price of $30.28 on December 23, a jaw-dropping 80% off the July peak, less than a month before Barack Obama took office.
Speaking of which: Obama had been president-elect for all of five days [16] when he announced his intention to rescind Bush’s order. Oil prices started going up again in January of 2009 and steadily increasing ever since. Obama Energy Secretary Ken Salazar announced a highly restrictive offshore leasing policy [17] last December, and the Bush executive order was officially reversed [17] on February 8, 2011.
The price of crude that day was $85.85. By April 19, it had risen to $107.18, with no end in sight.
(see original for all links) http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/thanks-to-obama-gas-jumps-in-a-flash/
Monday, May 2, 2011
The Tea Party: How Extreme Can You Get?
The Tea Party: How Extreme Can You Get?
John Hinderaker/Powerline
We are living in a bizarre moment in history. Our establishment--the press, the academy, all unions, most politicians, many in business who have skin in the Ponzi game--assure us that borrowing trillions of dollars to finance wasteful spending, while sticking our children with the tab plus interest, is perfectly sensible. On the other hand, believing that we should live within our means is? Crazy!
Michael Ramirez lends historical context to the debate;
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/04/028877.php
John Hinderaker/Powerline
We are living in a bizarre moment in history. Our establishment--the press, the academy, all unions, most politicians, many in business who have skin in the Ponzi game--assure us that borrowing trillions of dollars to finance wasteful spending, while sticking our children with the tab plus interest, is perfectly sensible. On the other hand, believing that we should live within our means is? Crazy!
Michael Ramirez lends historical context to the debate;
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)