Observations

More rogue-ness from the feds

2012-06-01T19:13:00.000-04:00

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has gone to court to prevent the Colorado-based firm Regenerative Sciences from using stem cells developed in one part of your body (bone marrow) to repair damage in other parts of your body, such as joints. The FDA objects to the fact that these cells are chemicals, the use of which they have the power to regulate even though the cells are taken from your body to later be injected back into your body.

The FDA is accustomed to the process by which it requires that many years and millions of dollars be spent to approve drugs developed in a laboratory before anyone is allowed to use them. Regardless of clinical results that show use of stem cells to be highly effective, the FDA finds it intolerable to let you use the cells in your own body without prior approval by a vast and expensive bureaucracy.

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More federal government control has made things much better, right?

2012-05-29T07:30:00.000-04:00

Most Americans probably have at best a foggy concept of the degree to which the federal government intrudes into their lives, and just how many people are paid to conduct that intrusion from dozens, perhaps hundreds, of departments, agencies, bureaus, divisions, boards and other bodies.

In March of this year the U.S. Census Bureau reported that as of March 2010, the last year for which complete data exist, there were 3,007,938 total federal employees, 2,583,768 of them working full-time, with a payroll that month of $16.2 billion.

Depending upon whom you believe, federal employees either make lots more than their private sector counterparts (according to Republicans and other small government advocates) or lots less than private sector employees (according to Democrats and federal employee union leaders). Looking at total wages and benefits, the Republicans and small government advocates are closer to right, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

A CBO report in January of this year concluded that federal employees with no more than a high school education and those with a bachelor’s degree averaged higher total compensation than their private sector counterparts by 36 percent and 15 percent, respectively. But where benefits are concerned, the lower the education level of the federal employee, the greater the disparity in paid benefits. “Average benefits for federal workers with no more than a high school diploma were 72 percent higher than for their private-sector counterparts,” while those “whose education ended in a bachelor's degree were 46 percent higher” than for similar workers in the private sector, whereas workers with “a professional degree or doctorate received roughly the same level of average benefits in both sectors.”

We euphemistically refer to federal government employees as “public servants,” but increasingly it seems that it is we who serve them. And just what is it that they are up to?

Many of them are madly creating rules and regulations with the force of law and enforcing them. Most of them were not created by Congress, the only government branch empowered to create laws, and Congress is not even specifically aware of many or most of them, except when someone writes a letter of complaint. Furthermore, all of this regulating and penalizing often occurs without oversight by anyone besides other bureaucrats.

“A man’s home is his castle” is a phrase that once represented America’s personal freedom, meaning that people enjoyed the position of rulers in their homes, and others had no right to enter without the householder's permission. That is no longer true; now, Washington is in charge.

This situation has become so perverse that attorney and author Mark Levin describes it thus: “America has become a society in which the people are wise enough to select their own leaders, but too incompetent to choose the right lightbulb.” In his brilliant book “Ameritopia: the Unmaking of America” he cites as one example of the degree to which the feds have become entangled in our day-to-day lives the government’s involvement in the food industry where “the federal budget for regulating nearly all aspects of food, from production to consumption, exceeds the entire country’s net farm income.”

And that is just for our food.

Here’s a test: Before reading further, make a list of the things in your most personal space – your home – that government at some level doesn’t regulate. It will not be an impressive or long list.

Now that you have completed the test, here are some of the things in your home about which you have little to say, courtesy of Mr. Levin: washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, dishwashing detergents, microwave ovens, toilets, showerheads, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, freezers, furnace fans and boilers, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, lightbulbs, certain renovations, fitness equipment, clothing, baby cribs, pacifiers, rattles and toys, marbles, latex balloons, matchbooks, bunk beds, mattresses, mattress pads, televisions, radios, cell phones, iPods, and other digital media devices, computer components, video recording devices, speakers, batteries, battery chargers, power supplies, stereo equipment, garage door openers, lawn mowers, lawn darts, pool slides, toothpaste, deodorant, dentures and virtually everything one could put in a medicine cabinet.

Things are not improving under President Barack Obama. Dr. Robert Moffit, writing for The Heritage Foundation, reports that “[s]ince President Obama took office in 2009, federal agencies have issued 75 major regulations with an annual additional cost to the economy of $38 billion. Taken altogether, the Small Business Administration last year estimated that the total cost of America’s regulatory burden reached $1.75 trillion—more than twice what Americans pay in individual income taxes,” and more than the annual budget deficits each year since 2009. And that is just from the federal government; state and local bodies also contribute.

And if it isn’t bad enough that these multitudinous rules and regulations stifle productivity and make things cost a lot more, some of them are manifestly stupid. In order to close down a business, Milwaukee, Wisconsin requires purchasing an expensive license, submitting a pile of paperwork on the inventory to be sold, and a fee based on the length of the "going out of business sale."

What has happened to the “Land of the Free” and the self-reliant spirit that made this country great?

More business-like habits in Washington might rescue the country

2012-05-22T11:59:00.001-04:00

Some Americans fully understand the potentially cataclysmic economic situation facing the country. They are not the ones we have to worry about.

Who we have to worry about are the ones – the millions – that either do not fully comprehend the problem, or have some level of understanding and either are unconcerned about the problem, are using it to their advantage, or have no idea what to do about it. Many of the people in this group hold positions in the federal government, and are responsible for creating the crisis and/or perpetuating it and making it worse.

While government and business are distinctly different creatures, there are aspects of sound business operation that belong in the Federal Government Operators Manual, and Chapter I is “Fiscal Responsibility.”

The Prime Directive, derived from the U.S. Constitution, is a simple one: Government must remain small with limited scope and interfere minimally in the lives of the citizens it exists to serve. It must be a good steward of the people’s finances, taxing minimally and spending frugally.

If such a manual existed and if it had the force of law, many politicians and bureaucrats would have been jailed or fired for their part in creating a crisis that more and more resembles to a frightening degree what now threatens socialist Europe.

The situation is this: The U.S. has borrowed debt amounting to $50,000 for every citizen in the country totaling nearly $16 trillion. Despite this enormous and growing debt, in most years the federal government willfully spends more than it takes in, averaging deficits of $1.3 trillion annually since 2009, which is approximately 40 percent more than revenue, and has increased the national debt by about a third.

To say it is foolish and risky to have done this for years on end produces one of those “well, duh!” moments. Yet, that is what we have done, and continue to do. Those Americans more concerned with the fate of the nation than with their own political well-being know that we cannot continue on this course.

There are three options to correct this crisis: Reduce spending; increase revenue; or a combination of both. The latter is the best option.

Some people advocate deeply cutting the out-of-control and frequently wasteful and fraudulent spending. These people are responsible citizens and conscientious public servants. They are accused of wanting to throw people out on the street, take food from babies, and other equally cartoonish slurs by those who want to maintain the status quo, people who a) benefit from wasting your tax dollars or b) benefit from government misspending.

Government taxation and spending is where common business practice should be applied: what would a business with costs 40 percent higher than its income do? Unlike government, which can – but shouldn’t – print money at will, if it wants to survive, a business must have more income than spending. Government should have a balance of the two.

One of the first things a business would do is cut non-essential expense. Here, the federal government has a vast array of opportunities: combine the dozens of wasteful duplicated services, reduce employee expense through attrition; fire unproductive and self-serving federal workers, and take the virtually unprecedented step of shutting down programs that do not work. Like Head Start, a true tribute to government inefficiency that a Department of Health and Human Services study found has wasted $150 billion since 1965, but produces no lasting benefits for participants.

It could scale back the frenzied regulatory efforts of the EPA and other agencies that spend our money killing jobs, raising costs for businesses and consumers, but produce negligible improvements, or do more harm than good. It could stop agencies like the GSA from robbing taxpayers to fund lavish get-togethers posing as training activities, and stop giving away the public’s money on dumb ideas like the half-billion President Barack Obama “loaned” to the failed solar company Solyndra, and other self-defeating assaults on the private sector. It could sell the 14,000 federally owned real estate properties that now sit empty and unproductive.

The government could give up its predatory attitude toward businesses and the wealthy in its futile effort to increase government revenue, and the politicians could replace their efforts to gin up class envy with practical steps that would foster job creation, thereby broadening the tax base and actually increasing tax revenue. The idea of raising taxes on rich folks might cause some people to get all tingly, but it won’t make a significant difference in balancing out the treacherous over-spending in which the federal government continues to indulge.

Federal government fiscal negligence predates Mr. Obama’s presidency by many years, but the sign that proclaims “The Buck Stops Here” is on the desk he campaigned so aggressively to earn in 2008, and before he asks a single American to pay a penny more in taxes to support a bloated bureaucracy or higher costs resulting from excessive regulation, he needs to get his administration under control. Some or perhaps most of the ideologues now running the administration are not up to the task, but the country has lots of capable people outside government that can do the job.

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Why we must become a socialist nation

2012-05-20T11:10:00.000-04:00

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Liberal U.S. media working to subvert Mitt Romney’s candidacy

2012-05-15T08:23:00.000-04:00

The experiences of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney last week illustrate how the media fail to provide adequate, objective and balanced coverage of serious campaign issues.

Campaigning in Colorado last week, Mr. Romney gave an interview to a local TV reporter, no doubt wanting to talk about his ideas for combating the horrible economic conditions, the need for jobs, and other weighty problems that threaten the nation.

The reporter began by asking about Mr. Romney’s inability to connect with Colorado Republicans, and following his 24-second answer then moved to same-sex marriage. Mr. Romney gave what he said was the same answer to this question as he has given from the beginning. The reporter then asked follow-up questions on that same subject. After two minutes of questions and answers on same-sex marriage, the reporter then asked if illegal aliens should receive in-state tuition. And then after that she asked Mr. Romney about medical marijuana.

So, given the opportunity to interview the likely Republican nominee for the office of President of the United States, a local reporter spends three minutes of the four and one-half minute interview asking about social issues.

Mr. Romney had about all he could stand, so he protested, since medical marijuana, same-sex marriage and tuition for illegals are neither the most important issues facing the nation, nor something about which a President of the United States should be concerned, since they are state issues.

And, indeed, there are obviously more important issues needing attention, such as the $16 trillion national debt that runs to $50,000 for every one of the more than 300 million Americans. How about the highest corporate tax rate in the world that makes U.S. corporations less competitive in the world market? How about the 16 percent of American workers – about 13 million, all together – that can’t find a job at all, or are underemployed? What about a nuclear Iran, and the mess in Afghanistan? How about the fact that the Democrats in charge of the U.S. Senate have shirked their obligation to pass a budget for three straight years?

None of that seemed important to the reporter, but she finally did get around to asking questions about energy.

While the Colorado reporter was focusing on less relevant topics, the intrepid investigators at The Washington Post were busy looking into Mr. Romney’s high school days, searching for archaic dirt. And, they found some.

Some of the former governor’s high school classmates from 1965 said that he had indulged in boyish behavior, and one incident allegedly involved forcibly cutting the long blonde hair of a boy a year younger than Mr. Romney, who the classmates said may have been gay. If true, this was clearly wrong and indefensible. But it was nearly 50 years ago in high school, and appears to be an isolated incident. Yet, The Post thought it was important enough for 5,000 words starting on page 1 above the fold. And since then these allegations have “evolved” into proof that Mitt Romney was a homophobic bully. He also is accused of pulling classmate Susie Jones’ hair in the third grade.

The Post’s crack investigators successfully found this 47 year-old story about Mr. Romney (13 times longer ago than the last budget passed by our Democrat-controlled Senate), but gave little attention to Barack Obama’s history with former members of the Weather Underground and his admitted “enthusiastic” drug use, and were unable to find any information about his mysterious college days, including his grades, his formal papers, his days at the Harvard Law Review, his friends, etc.

Some people’s past apparently deserves closer scrutiny than others. You can understand why The Post might regard Mr. Romney’s past as more important: he’s running for President.

It is relevant to note that the family of John Lauber, the victim of Mr. Romney’s alleged brutish haircut, is appalled that their relative would be used for political purposes. His older sister, Christine, was unaware that Mitt Romney, or anyone else, “bullied” her brother, who passed away from liver cancer in 2004, but she was clearly not pleased by the story. “Even if it did happen, John probably wouldn’t have said anything,” she said. “If he were still alive today, he would be furious.”

“The family of John Lauber is releasing a statement saying the portrayal of John is factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda,” she said. “There will be no more comments from the family.”

The treatment of Mitt Romney in 2012 and the treatment of Barack Obama in 2008 couldn’t be more different. In the Romney story, an unproved allegation of bullying gets front page treatment from The Washington Post, but admitted drug use, et al, by Barack Obama goes virtually unreported.

By emphasizing peripheral issues like same-sex marriage, illegal alien tuition, medical marijuana, and high school behavior, the liberal media distracts attention from President Obama’s dismal record on the critical economic problems. And in the attempt to discredit Mr. Romney, The Washington Post story denigrates John Lauber’s memory and upsets his family, presumably because of its obligation to inform the public. Well, about some things, anyway.

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Dennis Prager tells it like it is

2012-05-13T18:40:00.000-04:00

More wisdom in a few minutes than you are likely to see very often in this video from a year ago.

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Manmade climate change theory continues to be battered by reality

2012-05-08T11:12:00.000-04:00

Two of the major concerns of environmentalists are manmade climate change, and in response to this theory, the absolute necessity of green energy sources to replace the relatively inexpensive conventional energy we now get from coal, oil and natural gas.

Although our air is cleaner today than at any time in the last hundred years or so, it’s not clean enough for the environmental zealots inside and outside of government agencies. Hardly anyone would argue that if the activities of humans seriously damage the Earth’s atmosphere and raise its average temperature, it just makes sense to move away from fossil fuel energy toward non-polluting green energy. All they need is a plausible scenario that human activity is indeed warming the planet to dangerous levels, and people will accept moving to green energy.

However, as time passes more and more evidence comes forth weakening the case for manmade climate change; the data no longer support the idea that climate change is an imminent crisis, or a danger so great as to justify the drastic action the radical environmentalists and the Obama administration favor.

When the dirty little secrets of some climate scientists escaped a while back, revealing the manipulation and outright falsification of data they utilized to make their case stronger, that should have convinced even the staunchest climate change defender that something was wrong with their theory.

However, that did not faze them, but maybe this will: Announcing to the world that “I made a mistake,” British scientist James Lovelock, “the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his ‘Gaia’ theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being ‘alarmist’ about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too,” according to MSNBC.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,” he told the cable network. “We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.” He went on to say that “the climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said, but “the world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising,” he added.

We should all be happy that those doom-filled prognostications have not materialized, because despite the grand efforts of government agencies that are doing such tremendous damage to the economy and such a disservice to the American people, the green alternatives continue to come up short as replacements for coal, oil and natural gas.

Now we learn that not only is wind energy expensive, generally unpredictable, and reliant upon rare earth metals that are found almost exclusively in China, wind farms actually warm up the surface of the land underneath them during the night. This inconvenient truth was discovered using satellite data collected from 2003 to 2011 over a large area of Texas, which has four of the world’s largest wind farms. The study showed an increase of night-time temperatures of 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit on the wind farms. During the period of the study the number of wind turbines in the region increased from 111 to 2,385.

This data suggests that wind farms have a greater warming effect than the fossil fuel sources they are intended to replace.

The study notes that this wind turbine warming could harm local agriculture, which has already suffered through serious drought conditions over recent years. In addition to its contribution to our food supply, Texas agriculture contributes $80 billion to the Texas economy, second only to petrochemicals.

Wind turbines also take a toll on birds and bats, and make disturbing noises that affect nearby residents. And now we hear that solar farms also have problems that have stirred objections of environmentalists interested in protecting threatened species.

The desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) is the official reptile of California, and the creature is fighting for its life against the expanding encroachment of solar facilities into its native habitat of the Mojave Desert in California, and there is now a lawsuit against the government to block the multi-billion dollar Calico Solar Power project, which would cover 4,000 acres of the turtle’s vital habitat.

What an interesting juxtaposition: one of the preferred energy sources needed to overcome the climate change crisis, that one group of environmentalists tells us threatens our very existence, poses serious problems for the concerns of another group of environmentalists over green energy facilities that threaten the existence of some animal species.

Wind and solar energy are already expensive, too expensive to be a viable alternative to fossil fuels, and the pending legal battles between opposing environmental interests will not make that better.

Ultimately, this new information argues not against wind and solar power development, but for common sense and moderation to prevail in implementing these immature technologies, and in the dangerous aggressive war on fossil fuels. Moderation and common sense, however, are characteristics with which liberal environmental ideologues are neither familiar nor comfortable.

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You can’t make this stuff up: reality is often stranger than fiction

2012-05-01T09:15:00.000-04:00

A couple of items recently in the news illustrate the weirdness of some of the ideas that are put forth for serious consideration these days, and that actually gain support from some Americans.

Labor unions in Indiana are upset over the state’s recently passed right-to-work law. According to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a right-to-work law “affirms the right of every American to work for a living without being compelled to belong to a union. Compulsory unionism in any form – ‘union,’ ‘closed,’ or ‘agency’ shop – is a contradiction of the Right to Work principle and the fundamental human right that the principle represents.”

Individual freedom such as the option not to belong to a labor union was a fundamental component of the United States Constitution, but that concept has Indiana’s unionists all out of sorts. They fear the new law will cause a decline in union membership, something that is so far not supported by the data in other right-to-work states. Nevertheless, Indiana unions recently filed a suit to overturn the law. The suit cites two reasons that the law violates the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. First, the suit complains that it requires dues-paying union members to work alongside non-dues-paying workers, terming that condition “compulsory service and/or involuntary servitude within the meaning of the amendment.”

Translation: If all workers are not forced to join the union, union workers effectively become slaves.

The second point, however, seems a fair criticism: that it is unfair to force “unions to furnish services to all persons in bargaining units that it represents, but it may not require payment for those services,” and once again they make a “slavery” connection. However, this complaint is even more foolish than the first one, since the unions asked for and received monopoly rights over collective bargaining, meaning they asked to be the bargaining agent for all workers, and were granted that status. You cannot rationally seek and accept the monopoly right to bargain for everyone, and then complain that representing non-union members effectively makes slaves out of union members.

Moreover, if we are talking about slavery, it is a far more persuasive argument that forcing workers to join the union and pay dues in order to have a job makes slaves of those who prefer not to join the union.

Next, in an irrational effort at political correctness (excuse the redundancy), the Applied Research Center (ARC) and its news site, Colorlines.com, are demonizing Americans who use perfectly proper language to accurately describe a law-breaking activity.

“Drop the I-Word” is a movement that attempts to do through distraction and demagoguery what rational thinking precludes. The “i-word” – illegals – is “a harmful slur,” according to the ARC, “a racially charged slur used to dehumanize and discriminate against immigrants and people of color regardless of migratory status. The i-word is shorthand for ‘illegal alien,’ ‘illegal immigrant’ and other harmful terms,” it says. The organization hopes that a majority of Americans will fall for this grand fraud that attempts to persuade us that the criminal act of people who sneak into the United States is really not a crime.

Somewhere in the Great Beyond George Orwell is smiling.

By accurately labeling the method willfully chosen by illegal immigrants to enter the U.S., the ARC asserts that we are denying people “basic human rights.” “No human being is illegal,” it proclaims. That may be true, but human beings can do illegal things, and sneaking into the country is one of them, thus the completely appropriate terms “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant.”

Like the Indiana unions, the ARC does identify one piece of truth: “Immigrants without documents are regularly hired as cheap, exploited labor.” But this is not a result of correctly labeling them “illegal,” it results from the failure of the federal government to stem illegal immigration by enforcing immigration laws and guarding our borders. Businesses cannot hire and exploit illegal immigrants unless they are available to be hired and exploited.

Taking this absurdity to its illogical extreme, a video posted by the radical leftist organization MoveOn.org says calling illegal immigrants “illegal” fits the definition of a hate crime and calls for the word to be banned when used in the context of immigration. Rather than discuss the pros and cons of this issue, MoveOn.org prefers to silence the opposition, or better yet, imprison opponents to keep them from challenging goofy ideas like this one.

For Indiana unionists, apologists for illegal aliens/immigrants, and others inhabiting this strange other-world, working beside non-union workers is “slavery,” and illegal aliens are not illegal. Fitting nicely into this madness is the case of a Muslim U.S. Army officer crying "Allahu Akbar" while committing the jihadi murder of 12 soldiers. He is considered to have committed "workplace violence," but an American citizen with a Tea Party bumper sticker is regarded as a "domestic terrorist."

In this bizarre world the trees are a bright orange, the sky is chartreuse, the clouds are a rich puce, and standards and definitions change with the political winds. A society in the throes of such idiocy cannot long survive.

Federal Government: Arrogance at Work

2012-04-28T09:52:00.000-04:00

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U.S. in death spiral, spending like the socialist European nations

2012-04-24T09:57:00.002-04:00

The United States national debt is $15.6 trillion ($15,600,000,000,000), as calculated on April 14, which works out to nearly $50,000 for each of the more than 313,400,000 men, women and children who are citizens of the country.

Looking through historical data, running a deficit isn’t new or unusual. It is a testament to the failure of our elected representatives to run the government within its means, like we mere citizens are expected to with our personal finances. Back in 1857 the national debt was “only” $28,699,831.85, and from there on it has gotten worse. It crossed the one trillion dollar mark in 1982.

In recent years, annual operating deficits have increased the debt roughly 500 billion dollars each year from 2002 until 2008 when the deficit jumped to a full trillion dollars. In 2009, the deficit jumped to two trillion dollars and was 1.3 trillion dollars in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The big spenders are so out of control these days that they routinely spend 40 percent more than the nation collects in tax revenue.

What on Earth are they spending so much money on?

That list runs the gamut from constitutionally required government activities to expenditures on questionable and even unconstitutional activities. It includes using appropriate methods to dispense the money, and using methods that are politically advantageous, but often questionable or improper. And, it includes fraud, waste and abuse, aptly illustrated by the 2010 GSA boondoggle costing taxpayers more than $800,000 dollars.

One controversial method of determining who gets taxpayer money, but one that is very popular among lawmakers, is the earmarking process. The Federal Office of Management and Budget defines earmarks as “funds provided by the Congress for projects, programs, or grants where the purported congressional direction circumvents otherwise applicable merit-based or competitive allocation processes, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the executive branch to manage its statutory and constitutional responsibilities pertaining to the funds allocation process.”

Some defend it as a more efficient way to get budgeted federal money where it is most needed than leaving it to administrative agencies to distribute; others say it is a way for congresspersons to reward friends and buy votes. As the 112^th Congress cranked up in January of 2011 there was a bipartisan agreement to do away with earmarks. However, Representative Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) recommended that lawmakers bring back earmarks in a closed-door Republican Caucus meeting on March 30, 2012. “There was a lot of applause when I made my comments,” he said. “By and large it was very well embraced.” For this suggestion, Mr. Rogers won the April “Porker of the Month” award from Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW).

CAGW is at war with pork-barrel spending, which the organization identifies using seven criteria, any one of which qualifies spending as pork. They are: spending requested by only one chamber of Congress; not specifically authorized; not competitively awarded; not requested by the President; greatly exceeds the President's budget request or the previous year's funding; not the subject of congressional hearings; or, serves only a local or special interest.

Evaluating the 111^th Congress, the last Congress to have completed both sessions, CAGW said: “In a time of runaway spending and sky-high debt, lawmakers should have supported every opportunity to cut wasteful and unnecessary expenditures. The House and Senate each had 11 opportunities to strike pork, prohibit earmarking, rescind superfluous funds, and reduce overall spending levels. A majority voted against each and every one of these 22 measures, a stunning 100 percent rate of failure to trim the fat and protect taxpayer interests.”

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste analyzed legislators’ voting to support the interests of taxpayers by reducing spending based on party affiliation and House membership in the Republican Study Committee and Blue Dog Democrats. “The averages were: Senate Republicans – 90 percent, up nine percentage points from their 81 percent score in 2009; Senate Democrats – 8 percent, down two percentage points from their grade of 10 percent in 2009; House Republicans – 86 percent, up 15 percentage points from their 71 percent score in 2009; House Democrats – 8 percent, up four percentage points from their 4 percent score in 2009; House Republican Study Committee – 91 percent, up 11 percentage points from their 80 percent score in 2009; and House Blue Dog Democrats – 18 percent, up seven percentage points from their 11 percent score in 2009.”

There are also foolish levels of duplication of government programs. Here are some examples from the Government Accountability Office: Twenty agencies operate 56 programs dedicated to financial literacy; there are 80 economic development programs at four agencies costing $6.5 billion; the Department of Transportation spends $58 billion on 100 programs run by five agencies with 6,000 employees that haven’t changed since 1956; at least five departments, eight agencies and more than two dozen presidential appointees oversee $6.48 billion related to bioterrorism.

One searches diligently for some evidence that President Barack Obama and his party take seriously their obligation to be good stewards of the public’s finances, but finds none. Their solution is to raise taxes on the most productive Americans, not to be thrifty with spending.

Obama's Train Wreck: Don't Look

2012-04-22T09:45:00.000-04:00

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The Solution

2012-04-20T09:50:00.000-04:00

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What’s wrong with this picture? America through the looking glass

2012-04-17T08:38:00.000-04:00

Summoning forth recollections of “Monty Python's Flying Circus” and other farces, the following true-life examples of what’s going on in America ought to wake you up.

1. A Massachusetts school principal wanted to rename "St. Patrick's Day" in an effort to be "inclusive and diverse," and to ease discomfort that some students might have in celebrating St. Patrick's Day or Valentine's Day. Lisa Curtin, principal of the Soule Road School in Wilbraham, Mass., decided to change the names, and in February renamed “Valentine’s Day” to "Caring and Kindness Day,” according to parents with children in the school. Some parents criticized the decision to change the name St.Paddy’s Day to "O'Green Day" as stupid and illogical.

That’s an apt description.

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2. A North Carolina grandmother became upset when her 5-year-old granddaughter's home-made lunch was taken away at school because school officials said it wasn't nutritious enough. The lunch, which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich on white-wheat bread, potato chips, a banana and apple juice, was taken away and she was forced to eat cafeteria chicken nuggets.

The assistant superintendent of the school system agreed that the lunch was healthy, but it was missing milk, a key part of what is considered to be a healthy meal under state guidelines. The grandmother says the state should not be inspecting lunches and should instead focus solely on academics.

Don’t you admire her restraint?

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3. As reported by a Washington newspaper, First Solar, a heavily government-subsidized solar company, received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels in other countries. Last September, $455.7 million in guarantees to subsidize the sale of solar panels to two solar farms in Canada were approved. The owner of the solar farms is First Solar.

Your government at work.

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4. A Burnsville, Minn. man was arrested and thrown in jail because city officials said he had not properly put up siding on his house. Mitch Faber was cited with “having an unfinished exterior” when, nearly four years after he started it, his home’s stucco project was not complete.

Faber told a Minneapolis TV station he always intended to finish the project, but that he ran into financial trouble when the economy took a turn.

His first encounter with the city happened in 2007 when he got a letter saying the siding needed to be finished. “We were in the process of finishing,” Faber told the station. “This wasn’t something that we were trying to avoid doing.”

There were two more letters in 2009 and another in 2010, which required Faber to appear in court. That’s when he was told to finish the siding, or go to jail.

In order to comply, Faber and his wife spent $12,000 to put a stucco facade over their house’s plywood exterior. It wasn’t enough: Last November, Faber was arrested after city inspectors concluded the work wasn’t up to code.

What happens in Burnsville if you actually commit a crime?

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5. In what is being portrayed as a preview of fully implemented Obamacare, government officials in Michigan are demanding that a 9-year-old child follow standard procedure and take a dangerous course of cancer medications that can cause additional cancer – even though the boy has had three scans indicating an absence of the disease.

The Home School Legal Defense Association is an organization that concerns itself with home school rights, responsibilities and restrictions but also intercedes in cases that could have a significant impact on child and parental rights.

The HSLDA’s chairman, Michael P. Farris, confirmed that the Michigan Department of Human Services has filed suit to force the parents to administer the chemicals to their son even though he’s been clean of cancer on scans over the past year.

Well, at least it’s not a death panel.

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6. The District of Columbia Board of Elections opened an investigation after an undercover video posted online showed an activist against voter fraud going into a Washington polling station and beginning the process to vote under the name of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. When he said he didn’t have his ID, the poll worker said it really didn’t matter, and was prepared to give the activist a ballot.

Rather than find out why poll workers did not ascertain the real identity of the “voter,” who did not accept the ballot, the Elections Board has decided to investigate the activist.

Vote early and often in DC.

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7. The New York City Department of Education created a plan to ban the use of 50 words on standardized school tests, thinking the terms might be offensive to some people.

Among the words on the forbidden list were: birthdays, celebrities, cigarettes, crime, divorce, evolution, politics, sex, religion, rap music, Halloween, terrorism, rock-and-roll music, and violence.

Fortunately, and contrary to the previous examples, common sense prevailed and the school system decided against going forward with its plan.

These examples reflect government at all levels run amok, and they paint a dismal picture of America’s future, unless we wise up.

Which is worse?

2012-04-15T20:28:00.000-04:00

Please select from the following choices:

A. People who use idiotic demagoguery like the "Buffett Rule" to dupe the public?

B. People who believe the idiotic demagoguery that the "Buffett Rule" will actually make any noticeable difference?

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Obama likes stay-at-home moms

2012-04-14T17:13:00.003-04:00

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A Day Made of Glass

2012-04-12T23:22:00.000-04:00

A look at the future.

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The law professor and his difficulties with the legal system

2012-04-11T19:00:00.001-04:00

President Obama’s comments last Monday about the Supreme Court has fired up a storm of criticism that won’t go away.

"I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress," he said. "And I'd just remind conservative commentators that for years what we've heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I'm pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step."

It is a real challenge to get so much wrong in less than a hundred words.

As every middle school student ought to know, the Judicial Branch, of which the U.S. Supreme Court is the top level, is a co-equal branch of government with the Executive and Legislative Branches; it is certainly not unprecedented for the Supreme Court to overturn an unconstitutional law, and in fact, one of its primary duties is to protect the nation from unconstitutional behavior by the Legislative and Executive branches.

Second, while the 2,700 page health care reform bill was indeed passed by a democratically elected Congress, it was not passed by a “strong majority.” The bill that was created without Republican input was passed without Republican support in either house. On the final vote it passed in the House by a thin 220-207 margin, and by 56-43 margin in the Senate, a combined margin of just 5 percent. That’s less than the modest margin Barack Obama won the presidency by, and is certainly not a mandate by any objective measure. Furthermore, it should be noted that every unconstitutional law struck down by the Supreme Court also was passed by a majority of the Congress.

Next, he slighted the Supreme Court, calling it an “unelected group of people.” That’s a pretty wild statement for someone who may or may not have been a constitutional law professor at a major American university. At the University of Chicago Law School Mr. Obama’s title was not “Professor,” but “Senior Lecturer,” though the difference could be a matter of semantics.

And then he turned the term “judicial activism” on its head, asserting that by adhering to the Constitution and overturning Obamacare, the Court’s ruling would be “activist.”
Professor/Lecturer Obama is confused about “judicial activism,” which is making law from the bench, and that involves ignoring the intent of the Constitution that the Founders took such pains to express, and instead yielding to political influences and personal preferences. Essentially, the Court either supports the tenets and concepts contained in the Constitution, or it doesn’t. The former position is judicial conservatism; the latter is judicial activism, or judicial liberalism.

In response to the firestorm that ensued, Mr. Obama clarified what he really meant the next day, which was that the Supreme Court hadn’t overturned a law involving the Commerce Clause, which Obamacare stretches to its breaking point, in the last 80 years, not that only by being an “activist” court could it overturn a law passed by Congress.

That wasn’t good enough for the president’s critics, some of whom read the comments as an attempt to intimidate the Court. Nor was it good enough for the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which was interested enough in the comment to issue an order giving the Justice Department just two days to state whether the administration truly believes courts lack the authority to strike down mandates that are unconstitutional.

Attorney General Eric Holder sent the judges what has been described as “a law student-level brief on the propriety of judicial review,” that intentionally ignored the main question. Instead, Mr. Holder instructed the 5^th Circuit panel on the deference courts must pay to acts of Congress.

Trying desperately to make lemonade from the lemon the president gave to him, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained that as someone who used to be a law professor, Mr. Obama was talking in “shorthand.” Which apparently means that Obama can say something opposite to what he actually meant, and he understands what he meant, but the rest of us who weren’t/aren’t law professors unfortunately listen to him and think he meant what he said instead of what he now says he actually meant. Everybody following that?

And isn’t it fair for people to expect a constitutional law professor to understand that the purpose of the Constitution is to relieve the mere mortals who hold elective office of the temptation to substitute political motives for Constitutional protections of our unalienable rights.

And White House press secretary Carney further clarified that comment by saying, “He did not suggest, did not mean and did not suggest that it would be unprecedented for the court to rule that a law was unconstitutional. That’s what the Supreme Court is there to do. But it has under the Commerce Clause deferred to Congress’s authority on matters of national economic importance.”

Well, maybe so, or maybe not, and maybe that was appropriate, or maybe it wasn’t. However, one might reasonably expect the President of the United States, who is a lawyer and also a former constitutional law professor/lecturer, speaking on a legal matter to more unambiguously state his case.

There may be some political advantage hidden deep in this colossal screw-up, but it plainly did the president a good bit of harm, initially, helping to cement the idea that many hold of Barack Obama as a lightweight who is completely in over his head.

Sometimes, like it did last week, bad news comes down in buckets

2012-04-10T09:05:00.000-04:00

Last week was full of bad news. President Barack Obama created a firestorm with controversial comments about the role of the Supreme Court, interpreted by some as an attempt to intimidate the Court into allowing the health care reform law to stand. At the end of the week March job numbers and unemployment numbers were released showing only bad news. Job creation was an anemic 120,000, and so many people became discouraged over the poor job climate and dropped out of the job market that it caused the unemployment rate to drop by one-tenth of a percent to 8.2 percent. Normally, it is a good sign when unemployment drops, but not this time.

And, a huge scandal erupted following the news that an office of the General Services Administration (GSA), the Public Buildings Service, which is known as the "landlord" for the federal government, is now being investigated for a 2010 Las Vegas conference that cost taxpayers a cool $820,000 to $840,000.

The details of the outing reveal an orgy of spending for the benefit of the public servants who attended. The conference provided such lavish niceties as clown and mind-reader entertainment, and more than $146,000 worth of food and drinks, including $44-a-person breakfasts; $19-a-person "artisanal cheese" displays; $16-per-person pasta stations; and shrimp costing $4 each. Attendees also received $3,700 worth of shirts, $6,300 worth of commemorative coins and $1,800 worth of special vests. As you might imagine, such an extravagant affair took a lot of planning, more than $130,000 worth.

A couple of videos from the event have surfaced, showing a Buildings Service employee performing in a music video in which the employee raps: "Donate my vacation, love to the nation, I'll never be under OIG investigation." Other highlights show public employees arrogantly flaunting the wasting of the public’s money.

No doubt President Barack Obama was terribly embarrassed by this revelation, having only a year before this outrageous misuse of public funds made strong statements against corporations who received federal bailouts living it up at taxpayer expense. “You can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer's dime," he scolded. So, it had to hurt to find his own Executive Branch employees acting with the same disregard for taxpayer funds as the corporations that got bailouts.

However, the administration hastened to correctly point out that the start of this problem predates Mr. Obama’s presidency. In 2004 the Buildings Service spent $93,000 on the conference, about 11 percent of the 2010 total. From that point on, the bill got bigger and bigger as the conference moved around the country, totaling $323,855 in 2006, $655,025 in 2008, and then the 2010 near-million-dollar Vegas lollapalooza.

Obviously, the Bush and Obama administrations weren’t paying much attention to how the public’s money was being handled. And the Inspector General Office’s report last week indicates the Obama administration knew about the trip at least in May of 2010, five months before the conference took place, and did nothing about it.

The gross misuse of public funds by the Buildings Service at its biennial conference isn’t the end of the story for this agency, however. The commissioner’s budget has been rising since 2009, the year Commissioner Robert Peck was appointed. In fiscal 2009, his budget was $3.25 million, only slightly higher than two years earlier. But in 2010 the budget jumped to $6.94 million, and jumped again in 2011 to $9.16 million.

The man at the center of the scandal is Jeffrey E. Neely, the person who made sure that the conference was “over the top,” compared to previous bashes. He initially approved a $300,000 budget for the 2010 conference, but later nearly tripled the budget to about $823,000. Mr. Neely attended five of the eight agency “dry run” meetings held in advance of the conference to be sure the proposed venue would be able to deliver a show to end all shows for government workers, according to information from the GSA Office of Inspector General.

Commissioner Peck was fired in the wake of the scandal, GSA Administrator Martha Johnson resigned, and several employees have been placed on leave pending investigation, following the IG report. Apparently, none of those involved has tried to pay the taxpayers back for their outrageous spending abuses.

The evidence that our federal government is overgrown, arrogant and abusive of the citizenry continues to mount up. And yet even the suggestion that spending needs to be cut and government needs to be downsized and brought under control elicits howls of protest from liberals, statists and those on the receiving end of taxpayer money being freely doled out for all manner of inappropriate things.

Over-indulgences like this tawdry Las Vegas episode are clearly out of bounds, but apparently they are not all that unusual, and that sort of behavior didn’t originate under Barack Obama, or George Bush. But Barack Obama is the president now, and it will be instructive to see if he has the courage and the regard for the people of the United States to take quick steps to do something meaningful about government malfeasance like this.

Going Rogue, Part VII: the EPA has just doomed an entire industry

2012-04-02T23:17:00.000-04:00

Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was pursuing the presidency, he said, “If someone wants to build a new coal-fired power plant they can, but it will bankrupt them because they will be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” That was then; this is now, and one campaign promise Mr. Obama made is coming true.

“Power developers have scrapped plans for more than 100 coal-fired electricity plants over the past decade,” according to Reuters, “due to difficulty obtaining construction and pollution permits or because they were simply too expensive,” thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies, even though new plants are much more efficient and produce far less pollution than older plants. And last week’s unveiling of the EPA’s proposed emission rules for new coal-fired electric generation plants reveal standards so strict that they are impossible to meet using present technology.

The new standard for carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity is a little more than half of the previous threshold, guaranteeing no new coal plants will ever be built, as confirmed by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which reports that the most recent regulations announced by the EPA will likely increase the number of closures of existing plants in 19 states.

This prediction comes despite the assurances of Gina McCarthy, the EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation, that the impossibly stringent new requirements are only for new plants. She told the House Energy and Commerce Committee the agency has “no plans” to curb greenhouse gas emissions for existing plants. But no one familiar with the EPA’s history of over-zealous regulation believes that.

There is an option, however, as the EPA allows coal-burners to continue using America’s most dependable fuel. All they have to do is employ the new carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. But the EPA knows full well that CCS at this stage is just theory; it has not been proven to work. And – surprise, surprise, surprise – it is prohibitively expensive.

Once again Americans, including our elected representatives, have sat on their hands and allowed the unelected, unaccountable, ideologically obsessed regulators at the EPA to punish them. The EPA has sounded the death knell for an industry that has been the backbone of U.S. power production for decades, and which is a substantial part of the economy of several states, providing tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in annual tax revenue. The EPA has not yet won its war on this dependable and important American industry that today accounts for 40 percent of electricity production. But victory is in sight.

In West Virginia, where coal is a major economic engine, the coal industry pays approximately $70 million in property taxes annually, and the industry payroll is nearly $2 billion per year paid to thousands of employees. Coal is responsible for more than $3.5 billion annually in the gross state product, and all 55 West Virginia counties, even the non-coal producing counties, receive Coal Severance Tax funds, according to data furnished by the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health, Safety and Training. And coal is a major economic component in states where it is not necessarily the primary economic factor, like Virginia, Wyoming, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Coal is mined in 26 states, and 36 states produce at least some of their power with coal.

The EPA successfully developed a brilliant three-prong strategy to impose on the country during a pitifully weak economic recovery: a) put thousands more Americans out of work, b) damage the economies of a dozen states, and c) make continuing to use the most abundant fuel impossibly expensive, all at the same time!

English philosopher John Locke is regarded as one of the most influential figures in The Enlightenment. His contributions to social contract theory had a great impact upon the American revolutionaries, like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and particularly Thomas Jefferson, so great an influence that his ideas are reflected in the Declaration of Independence. He believed that legitimate government existed only with the consent of the governed.

Presented with a situation like the out-of-control, unelected bureaucrats of the EPA who issue rules and regulations with the force of law, Mr. Locke might respond thusly: “When anyone, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, who the people have not appointed so to do, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey,” because such actions return the people once again to being subjects of their government.

Some will argue that EPA bureaucrats are “indirectly” appointed by the people through elected representative, and while that may be technically correct, I’m betting John Locke would rise up in protest of many of the current actions of the federal government.

Recent administrations and – more curiously – Congresses seem unconcerned that the servants of the people working in federal agencies have co-opted Congress’ authority as the sole maker of law in our government. One wonders just how much longer the American people will accept being made government subjects by unelected bureaucrats before they follow Locke’s advice to not obey these illegal edicts.

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The inevitable results of a government grown beyond its limits

2012-03-27T09:32:00.000-04:00

There are tens of thousands of pages of federal laws and regulations, so many that every living person has broken at least one. And our devoted regulators and legislators annually churn out roughly 80,000 pages of new and proposed regulations to justify their jobs, producing a stack 23 feet high if you piled those pages on top of each other.

These edicts range from how much water your toilet uses, to replacing incandescent bulbs with “newer, better,” costlier ones containing toxic mercury, to regulating dust on farms, to the EPA water quality standards allowing so little conductivity that they make apple juice, Gatorade and Evian and Perrier bottled water harmful, as well as a long list of crimes, both serious and trivial.

This hyper-activity punishes and imposes enormous costs on individuals, businesses and state and local governments, costs that are ultimately borne by consumers and taxpayers.

One example of how regulations can negatively affect a business is the case of the Royal Palms Resort and Spa in Phoenix, Arizona. As detailed by Fox Business Network host John Stossel, “One rule that just went into effect, which you can find by flipping to page 56,236 of the 2010 regulations, will require all hotels with a pool -- or a hot tub -- to install wheelchair accessible ramps or lifts into the water.”

Due to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the hotel already had portable ramps that can assist handicapped people. But resort manager Greg Miller said the ramps have not been used in 15 years. Now, the Department of Justice has decided that the portable ramps are not adequate, and has mandated that permanent ramps be installed, which Mr. Miller said will cost about $40,000 for every pool and hot tub on the premises. But there is an alternative: pay a $55,000 fine for each pool and hot tub.

Mr. Stossel’s report continues: “Regulators admit that it's likely that fewer people will use pools with ramps in them ‘because the new requirements for a sloped entry might make the pool too shallow.’"

A lot of folks regard this as somewhat academic because they aren’t directly affected, and to really bring home how out of control our once limited federal government has grown, you have to actually feel the pain. And while low-flow toilets and expensive CFL light bulbs help understanding this in some small way, they fail to fully illustrate the pain of unfunded federal mandates.

For a starker dose of reality, consider the plight of the City of Bluefield, West Virginia, where the royal pains of too much government are being felt.

The City is the proud owner of Mitchell Stadium, a 10,000 seat football venue that has been around since 1935. It is the site of football games for local middle school and high school teams, and for other events like open air concerts, fund raising walks and other outdoor activities. It will be the home field for Bluefield College when its re-established football team begins playing regular season games this fall.

The City receives income from the two county school systems whose teams use the stadium, which helps defray expenses, and over the years expensive improvements and upgrades to the facility, like the new playing surface a few years back, often have been funded with private money.

But now the City must make upgrades to the stadium to meet requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) at a cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-million dollars. This new mandate came along when someone filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, which apparently hasn’t enough really important things to do, or has so many people working there that they could send someone right out and investigate the complaint, then issue orders to the City to either make the necessary modifications ASAP, or the DOJ will padlock Mitchell Stadium.

During the vast majority of events the stadium is far from full, and in fact, standing-room-only is a rare thing. So, it’s a fair question just how many people will really benefit from a half-million bucks of improved access for disabled visitors. The ADA called for modifying the entrance ramps from the parking lot up to the gates, and accommodating 67 wheel chairs inside the stadium. Apparently, even though there have likely never been 67 wheelchair-bound people attending an event at the same time, or even close to that number, the facility must be ready to accommodate them, just in case.

Owning and operating a football stadium is not normal for a city like Bluefield, and the City would rather not be in that business. But there are no options for transferring ownership to someone else, and the City understands that allowing the federal government to shut down Mitchell Stadium is not acceptable, so somehow it will have to come up with $500,000 this summer to keep the facility open.

This is what happens when there’s too much government. Be thankful we don’t get all that we pay for.

The good people of Bluefield and the surrounding area should keep this foolishness in mind when they go to the polls in November.

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To Obama, all countries are close allies!!

2012-03-23T19:59:00.002-04:00

Seriously?

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

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The "Occupy" mentality

2012-03-22T14:24:00.000-04:00

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Obama plays fast and furious with oil production data

2012-03-20T08:35:00.000-04:00

President Barack Obama calls fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – the “fuel of the past,” and heralds wind, solar and algae as the fuels of the future. But he ignored talking about the fuel of the present, as if it really doesn’t matter. But it does matter. The fuel of the present must exist in sufficient quantity, with sufficient infrastructure to get it to consumers, and be affordable. And there is only one source that meets those requirements: fossil fuels.

Despite his apparent disregard of this obvious fact, it does not take a rocket scientist, a community organizer, or even a law school lecturer to understand the importance of today’s situation: Fossil fuels work; green energy does not.

Favoring an impossible scenario, Mr. Obama resorts to being the class clown, offering playground humor to deflect the harsh criticism his foolish energy policy has earned. He told a fawning audience, "So do not tell me that we're not drilling. We're drilling all over this country. There are a few spots we're not drilling. We're not drilling in the National Mall. We're not drilling at your house."

Now, that’s a real knee-slapper. But the joke’s on those that believe this hogwash, and dream of plentiful wind farms standing motionless among dead birds waiting on a breeze, and seas of solar panels waiting in the dark for a cloudless sunrise.

Mr. Obama might have mentioned that we also are not drilling for oil off the Mid-Atlantic coast, off the Florida Gulf Coast and generally in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on federal lands in the Rockies. You know: places where billions of barrels of American oil await an American company with American workers operating drilling rigs. In these areas, drilling leases are down 70 percent under the Obama administration’s fairy-tale energy strategy. And while the president yuks it up in campaign appearances, Americans still get pummeled at the gas pump and are ignored in the presidential narrative.

But humor was not the only trick up Mr. Obama’s sleeve. He also slipped in a large dose of taking credit where credit is not due, and added a substantial measure of distorted facts. “Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's a fact. That's a fact. We've quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high. So do not tell me that we're not drilling. We're drilling all over this country.”

Well, sort of. While that statement may be technically true, it turns reality on its head. By saying “under my administration” he suggests that it is because of his policies that drilling has increased. Actually, he had absolutely nothing to do with the policies that prompted all that drilling, which is being done on private land where he cannot stop it, as he has with drilling on federal lands. Oil production has increased in spite of his policies, not because of them. For the increase in drilling he can correctly blame George W. Bush.

The president should have stopped with the ridiculing of the clear thinkers who want to harvest our own oil and natural gas and build energy independence. But he just had to distort more facts for good measure. “America uses more than 20 percent of the world’s oil,” he declared. “If we drilled every square inch of this country …. we would still have only two percent of the world’s known oil reserves.”

Not so fast, Mr. President. The Institute for Energy Research reports that “in classic fashion, he’s using a technicality to skirt the facts and keep the myth of energy scarcity alive. The reality is that the U.S. has enough recoverable oil for the next 200 years, despite only having 2 percent of the world’s current proven oil reserves.”

Even The Washington Post decries the president’s tactic. “The president should drop this fact … or he runs the risk of misleading Americans about the extent of the U.S. oil resources.” It’s too late; he has already misled us.

According to the American Petroleum Institute’s online publication, Energy Tomorrow: “The market sees 87 percent of our offshore acreage off-limits, it sees Federal permits lagging in the areas we are allowed to develop in, both offshore and onshore. It sees a million barrels a day from ANWR sitting on the sidelines, and it sees the U.S. blocking upwards of 800,000 barrels a day from Canada. The market sees that the U.S. could secure 100 percent of its liquid fuel needs by 2024.”

The CIA World Factbook lists the U.S. third in world oil production in 2011 at just below 9 percent of the total, a little behind Russia at 10.06 percent, and Saudi Arabia at 12.01 percent.

Apparently, Mr. Obama feels comfortable spreading falsehoods to the public, knowing that his fawning followers will believe anything he says, and the media, paralyzed by his charm, will not fact-check what he says. But while he’s busy being fabulous, wowing the throngs, the country continues to suffer under punishing unemployment and gas prices predicted to set new records this summer.

More complicated?

2012-03-15T15:06:00.000-04:00

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After February’s jobs report, some straight talk about unemployment

2012-03-13T09:28:00.003-04:00

President Barack Obama told workers at an aircraft-parts manufacturing plant in Virginia that "More companies are bringing jobs back and investing in America. And manufacturing is adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s." "The economy is getting stronger" he said.

The Labor Department revised the figures for job growth up by 61,000 in December and January, even though unemployment remained at 8.3 percent. Cumulative job growth for the three months through February was the fastest pace since early 2006.

Reuters trumpeted the job figures as great news for Mr. Obama: “Employers added more than 200,000 workers to their payrolls for a third straight month in February, a sign the economy was strengthening. … Friday's Labor Department report, which showed nonfarm payrolls increased 227,000 last month, also bolstered President Barack Obama's chances for re-election.”

The glee continued to flow: “The jobless rate held at a three-year low of 8.3 percent even as people flooded back into the labor force to hunt for work, and 61,000 more jobs were created in December and January than previously thought.”

Hooray and hallelujah! After three long years, at last the economy has begun to recover from the Obama Recovery. However, even the media cheerleading for the president cannot change reality.

President Obama boasts of 4 million jobs having been created during his tenure. That’s an impressive number. But it is substantially less impressive when we know the rest of the story. Consider that during the downturn an estimated 8-10 million jobs were lost, so after three years more than half the jobs – approximately 5.2 million – are still missing in action.

Further, if you have a tingle running up your leg after hearing the president’s job creation number, looking at the Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance will sober you up quickly. For the unemployment rate to be affected positively, fewer than 400,000 new jobless claims must be filed each week. Since March of last year, 30 of those 52 weekly reports showed new jobless claims exceeding 400,000, ranging from a low of 354,000 to a high of 478,000. Weekly new jobless claims since last March averaged 401,300, and the total number of new jobless claims for 52 weeks is 20,866,000. That means that during the last 52 weeks, nearly 21 million Americans lost their job and filed for unemployment insurance for the first time, and some of them are still jobless.

“Some economists say the real reason for the recent fast drop in unemployment isn't that there are suddenly so many new jobs — it's that far fewer people than expected are looking for work,” writes Tim Mullaney in USA Today. “Nearly three years into the recovery, the unemployment rate has tumbled even though new job gains are far smaller than in past recoveries. Americans could see the unemployment rate continue dropping to — or even breaking through — the psychologically important 8 percent mark by Election Day with far fewer net gains in jobs each month,” he notes. He goes on to explain that Mr. Obama may benefit from a politically beneficial unemployment rate as the election approaches, even though there will be substantially fewer jobs in America this year than four year ago.

Since the manner of calculating unemployment was changed in the 1990s, only those who are looking for work count as unemployed, and those who have given up looking are not counted, even though many are likely at some point to start looking again. The unemployment rate is the number of unemployed as a percentage of the labor force, which includes only those working or actively looking for work. A smaller number of those categorized as “unemployed” renders a lower unemployment rate.

Another important statistic is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the civilian population not in penal or medical institutions, and included only 63.7 percent of Americans in January of this year, the lowest rate in 30 years. Near the start of the recession, that rate stood at 66 percent. “If employment stays the same, a lower participation rate drives down the unemployment rate. If employment gains rise and the participation rate falls, the unemployment rate falls even more,” the USA Today story noted.

The story goes on to say that if “the participation rate had stayed at 66 percent, the economy would have needed 5.1 million more jobs to reach today's unemployment rate. And if the labor force had grown about as fast as mainstream economists expected, job gains since early 2010 would have been too little to reduce the jobless rate from the 9.8% level reached in February 2010, when net job losses from the recession finally ended.”

So, while the jobs picture does reflect some positive change, it is not so much a picture of a beautiful beach scene as one of a pig wearing lipstick.

As the election nears, we have to be aware of all the factors affecting the employment problem, not just the unemployment rate, given that it is a manipulated number that omits much of the story of how many Americans are suffering because they can’t find work.

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