Plus, as an added bonus, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says cap-and-trade will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on greenhouse gas emissions. See below.

Fox News reports:

The revolution will not be televised: it’s been blinking along on a giant bakery sign in St. Louis, Mo., instead.

Fed up with his congressman’s vote on a sweeping climate-change bill that passed the House of Representatives on Saturday, the proprietor of McArthur’s Bakery took to his street sign and posted a clear message to all passersby:

“Russ Carnahan voted to … close us and other … small business.”

David McArthur, vice president of the 52-year-old family operation, a Gateway City institution, is one of a growing number of business owners and taxpayers nationwide who are mobilizing against the so-called cap-and-trade bill, which would levy harsh fines on energy consumption that harms the environment.

McArthur told FOXNews.com that every aspect of his business relies on the forms of energy targeted by the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and that his congressman, Carnahan, was supporting “a direct tax increase on small business” by voting for it.

“We make (our product) with electricity, we bake it with gas, we refrigerate and freeze it with electricity and we distribute it with gas and oil,” said McArthur, who said he worries that high prices could cost his company up to $15,000 a year in an industry with a very tight margin for profit.

The legislation requires that the country reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020. Big energy plants and producers would have a cap on emissions like carbon dioxide, but could purchase “credits” from other companies that have met their reduction goals. The Obama administration says it will pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the plan would have a minimal effect on most taxpayers, costing an average family about 25 cents a day in its first years of implementation.

But the effect on small businesses could be wide-reaching.

“He’s killing small business — he’s killing us,” McArthur said of Carnahan, who was one of a majority of Democrats who voted for the bill in a closely fought 219-212 vote.

McArthur, who penned a scathing letter to Carnahan, is not alone in taking the message directly to his congressman. Dozens of small protests were organized over the weekend at federal buildings and outside the offices of national lawmakers who voted for the bill.

Mike Wilson, who led a protest in Cincinnati of about 100 people on Saturday across from the offices of Rep. Steve Driehaus, D-Ohio, said he was appalled by the 1,500-page legislation, which was fast-tracked by House leaders for a vote Friday. A 310-page amendment was slapped onto the bill Friday morning.

“It was, quite frankly, criminal passing a bill that you didn’t read,” said Wilson, founder of the anti-tax group Cincinnati Tea Party.

The TEA Parties around the country are now beginning to include irritation with the cap-and-trade legislation along with the increasing debt and tax burden we’re already seeing.

Now for the best part, the EPA made a statement in hearing that studies show any form of cap-and-trade will not change greenhouse gas emissions in the United States:

EPA Administrator Jackson confirmed an EPA analysis showing that unilateral U.S. action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would have no effect on climate. Moreover, when presented with an EPA chart depicting that outcome, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he disagreed with EPA’s analysis.

“I believe the central parts of the [EPA] chart are that U.S. action alone will not impact world CO2 levels,” Administrator Jackson said.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) presented the chart to both Jackson and Secretary Chu, which shows that meaningful emissions reductions cannot occur without aggressive action by China, India, and other developing countries. “I am encouraged that Administrator Jackson agrees that unilateral action by the U.S. will be all cost for no climate gain,” Sen. Inhofe said. “With China and India recently issuing statements of defiant opposition to mandatory emissions controls, acting alone through the job-killing Waxman-Markey bill would impose severe economic burdens on American consumers, businesses, and families, all without any impact on climate.”

China will never come on board and neither will India, they aren’t that stupid to destroy their economies for a total global warming lie.

The bottom line then is that if cap-and-trade passes, it will only be a way to take your wealth in new taxes and fees on your utility bills. Even the EPA admits it will have no positive environmental effect, it is all a scam intended on growing government control and influence in the private sector and placating liberal groups like Greenpeace.

Don’t buy it! Call your Senator and tell them to oppose any form of cap-and-trade and ask them why they are going to raise your utility bills for a hoax.

ABC’s The Note reports:

When Vice President Joe Biden announced a new $3.3 billion grant program to upgrade the nation’s electricity network, the rationale was simple: “This is jobs — jobs,” he said in April.

But the Obama administration is now saying it will not take the potential for job creation into account in “rating” proposed projects for possible funding — after initially saying that would be a primary consideration.

In April, when the Energy Department first announced regulations for companies that wish to apply for “Smart Grid Investment Grants,” “job creation and retention” was among the explicit criteria.

“Projects will be evaluated based on the extent to which they create and retain jobs,” the Energy Department wrote in its official “Notice of Intent” for the grant program.

Other criteria included “project approach and feasibility” and “project impact.”

But late last month, the department quietly modified the criteria to take the job piece out. As the department explained in a June 26 set of Frequently Asked Questions:

“These criteria differ significantly from those presented within the [Notice of Intent]. First, DOE removed the criterion on the extent of jobs creation and now will require applicants, as stipulated within the Recovery Act, to report quarterly on the number of jobs created and retained.”

In a question-and-answer section written to help applicants understand the process, the document continues: “Will DOE use the number of jobs estimated to be created and/or retained as a criterion for rating a proposal for funding?”

“No. Although job creation is not included in the technical criteria used to rate proposals, it plays an important role throughout the grant process, and grant recipients are required to submit the numbers of jobs created and retained in their quarterly reports to DOE and to recovery.gov.”

No further explanation was given. A Department of Energy spokeswoman said that, despite the change, job creation still “will be taken into account as one of several factors in the application review,” since the program is being implemented in accordance with the goals articulated in the stimulus package.

“The goal of the Recovery Act is to support projects that will create jobs now and usher in a clean energy economy that will also create jobs for years to come,” the spokeswoman, Jen Stutsman, said in a written statement.

But Energy Department officials declined to answer questions about why the grant evaluation process was made.

The shift means less emphasis will be placed on the potential for job creation as the Energy Department decides which projects to fund — even as the stimulus package has come under fire for not doing more to spark job creation.

The “smart grid” project aims to upgrade the nation’s electricity system to promote energy efficiency and reliability. Jobs impacted by the “smart grid” investments could include everything from meter manufacturers and installers to software providers and managers; the deadline to apply for grants is August 6, so no funding decisions have been made yet.

Katherine Hamilton, president of the GridWise Alliance, which advocates for “smart grid” investments, said she was not aware of the change until contacted by ABC.

She said the Energy Department appears to have decided that emphasizing job creation may not produce the breadth of projects that are needed to upgrade the nation’s electrical network.

“Job creation can be very artificial” as a way to measure a project’s worth, Hamilton said. “It could be that they realized that.”

After money for the project was included in the $787 billion stimulus program signed by President Obama in February, the administration has touted it as a key job-creating venture.

When Biden announced the “smart-grid” grant program in April, at a transformer factor in Jefferson City, Mo., he said it was about “jobs — jobs.”

“I’m happy to announce today the Department of Energy plans to distribute nearly $3.4 billion — $3.4 billion — in Smart Grid technology development grants. Your management here, and all of you, you are in the business of being able to compete for those. This is jobs — jobs,” Biden said.

Well, Joe, apparently it’s not going to be J-O-B-S like you claimed. In fact, this is simply an illustration of the entire stimulus package at it’s worst. Liberal Government projects like greening the electrical grid in this country will not produce jobs in the short or long term, as once touted.

Slowly but surely, this administration will have to answer for the claims it made time and time again which continue to not pan out in the time frame they set for themselves, that is the ironic part.

The “green job” myth is nonsense and will never come to fruition with the government trying to artificially impose it on the economy. “Green jobs” will be created when there is demand and thew private sector expands to meet that demand, those will be the only real “green jobs,” if such a thing exists. The government can subsidize an industry but it will never run efficiently or pan out the way it would in the private sector.

Bloomberg reports:

July 7 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. should consider drafting a second stimulus package focusing on infrastructure projects because the $787 billion approved in February was “a bit too small,” said Laura Tyson, an adviser to President Barack Obama.

The current plan “will have a positive effect, but the real economy is a sicker patient,” Tyson said in a speech in Singapore today. The package will have a more pronounced impact in the third and fourth quarters, she added, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not the administration.

Tyson’s comments contrast with remarks made two days ago by Vice President Joe Biden and fellow Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee, who said it was premature to discuss crafting another stimulus because the current measures have yet to fully take effect. The government is facing criticism that the first package was rolled out too slowly and failed to stop unemployment from soaring to the highest in almost 26 years.

Obama said last month that a second package isn’t needed yet, though he expects the jobless rate will exceed 10 percent this year. When Obama signed the first stimulus bill in February, his chief economic advisers forecast it would help hold the rate below 8 percent.

Unemployment increased to 9.5 percent in June, the highest since August 1983. The world’s largest economy has lost about 6.5 million jobs since December 2007.

So Obama isn’t opposed to another, he just doesn’t believe people will stomach it politically right now after we’ve watched billions of dollars wasted on liberal pet projects. Plus, he knows the first one isn’t even wasted yet so there is no need to begin wasting more until we’ve thoroughly blown the first $700 billion. Wasting taxpayer money is an art form Washington has perfected over time.

Then here’s friendly Uncle Joe once again inspiring confidence in this administration’s ability to read economic data:

That’s pretty peachy keen, especially considering they swore up and down that the first Obama stimulus would keep unemployment below 8%, which it has not, nor has it created or “saved” a single job as they often claim.

At least Biden now said that it’s OK to blame the Obama administration for its failures instead of Bush, I’m glad we were given permission to blame those responsible.

America already has stimulus fatigue and the higher and higher we see the national debt and deficit spiral with not a shred of result, the less likely Americans will be to continue trusting the incompetent economic team in the White House.

MyWay reports:

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) - Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t wait long to give some hint of what her political life might look like after she leaves office at the end of the month.

After staying out of the public eye for most of Saturday, a day after abruptly announcing she would soon give up her job as governor, Palin indicated on a social networking site that she would take on a larger, national role, citing a “higher calling” to unite the country along conservative lines.

“I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint,” the former Republican vice presidential candidate wrote in a posting on her Facebook page. Palin’s spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, confirmed Palin wrote the entry.

Palin shocked even her closest friends on Friday when she announced she would resign July 26, more than a year before her first term ends. But the controversial hockey mom has not revealed many details of bigger plans and national agenda.

Palin instead cast herself as a victim and blasted the media, calling the response to her announcement “predictable” and out of touch.

“How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country,” the statement said. “And though it’s honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make.”

The abruptness of her announcement and the mystery surrounding her plans have fed widespread speculation. But Palin attorney Thomas Van Flein on Saturday warned legal action may be taken against bloggers and publications that reprint what he calls fraudulent claims.

“To the extent several websites, most notably liberal Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore, are now claiming as ‘fact’ that Governor Palin resigned because she is ‘under federal investigation’ for embezzlement or other criminal wrongdoing, we will be exploring legal options this week to address such defamation,” Van Flein said in a statement. “This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law.”

He also told the Anchorage Daily News that Palin wasn’t in any criminal legal jeopardy.

The rumors of legal trouble or FBI investigations are totally false, it’s nonsense.

The truth in this matter is really yet to be revealed, we don’t know where Sarah Palin is headed next nor what her future political plans may be.

Video of her statement:

People are speculating in all directions as to what this means for her political career, either good or bad.

She’s clearly a fund raising powerhouse and I would caution anyone in underestimating her ability to connect with people or her political ambitions. She will be a positive political force for conservatism moving forward, we just don’t know in what capacity that will be yet.

The Examiner reports:

From coast to coast on 4th of July, Americans will be celebrating their independence with a new revolution. They will be attending TEA Parties (Taxed Enough Already) in the name of lower taxes - a response to the unprecedented spending by the Obama administration.

What began as a spur of the moment event at the end of February grew into a national revolt by the April 15th tax day. And now Americans of all political persuasions who believe in lower taxes for a stronger economy are planning their biggest TEA Party to date.

Trent Humphries is the organizer of the Tucson, Arizona TEA Party.

“You have to tip your hat in admiration to those groups who are able to hold an event on the 4th of July. It is a long, difficult slog to develop an effective event on a holiday, especially when City Halls and parks and Recreation departments are onto us this time around are becoming more stringent as to their requirements. The degree of difficulty has risen, but the abilities of our organizers is growing.”

Humphries says there are differences between the April 15th event and the Independence Day one.

“We will have about 20 candidates for state and local office as well as over a dozen political organizations and causes to have tables and booths at out event. We expect to have quite a number of people that have never even heard of the Tea Party to attend due to the amount of fun activities we have planned. That gives us the opportunity to put them before some of the best spokespeople for our cause, such as Tammy Bruce and Tabitha Hale. Should be a good time.” Conservative stand-up comic Stephen Kruiser, host of RFC Radio’s Planet Kruiser, will be emcee-ing the event.

Conservative pundit and Fox News regular Michelle Malkin will be speaking at the Dallas TEA Party, which will be packed with entertainment including internet comedian Steven Crowder.

Greensboro, NC will be having a more traditional Fourth of July cookout/TEA Party, with hot dogs and “good ole American apple pie.”

To find a TEA Party near you, cllick here.

Just a measure of scale, check out the nationwide map of known gatherings:

View the map here.

More to come later.

I am on a much needed vacation this weekend on the Gulf coast of Florida.

Fox News reports:

Private for-profit clinics are a booming business in Canada — a country often touted as a successful example of a universal health system.

Facing long waits and substandard care, private clinics are proving that Canadians are willing to pay for treatment.

“Any wait time was an enormous frustration for me and also pain. I just couldn’t live my life the way I wanted to,” says Canadian patient Christine Crossman, who was told she could wait up to a year for an MRI after injuring her hip during an exercise class. Warned she would have to wait for the scan, and then wait even longer for surgery, Crossman opted for a private clinic.

As the Obama administration prepares to launch its legislative effort to create a national health care system, many experts on both sides of the debate site Canada as a successful model.

But the Canadian system is not without its problems. Critics lament the shortage of doctors as patients flood the system, resulting in long waits for some treatment.

“No question, it was worth the money,” said Crossman, who paid several hundred dollars and waited just a few days.

Health care delivery in Canada falls largely under provincial jurisdiction, complicating matters.

Private for-profit clinics are permitted in some provinces and not allowed in others. Under the Canada Health Act, privately run facilities cannot charge citizens for services covered by government insurance.

But a 2005 Supreme Court ruling in Quebec opened the door for patients facing unreasonable wait times to pay-out-of-pocket for private treatment.

“I think there is a fundamental shift in different parts of the country that’s beginning to happen. I think people are beginning to realize that they should have a choice,” says Luc Boulay, a partner at St. Joseph MRI, a private clinic in Quebec that charges around $700 for most scans.

The critics of the private clinics in Canada are angry because ti means some people are getting better care outside the government system on their own dime, how dare they. Again, the liberal mindset is prevalent here which states that we shouldn’t lift everyone up to a better level of care, we need to tear it down so everyone has equal access to crappy care instead of using the free-market to improve it.

One year for an MRI! That is insane and I cannot believe some people in this country think the government will be our solution in health care. We had a family member in the hospital last year and they had a MRI later that very day as opposed to waiting a year in Canada.

Canadian citizens have seen the writing on the wall and it is not shocking to see many of them step up and beyond the government care-rationing to get better care outside of the terrific “free” health care they get from their obscene taxes.

On the topic, here is another perfect example of where the CanadaCare system comes up short forcing a baby to be sent to Buffalo, NY for treatment:

A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports.

Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 14 weeks premature.

A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.

This is the failure of the Canadian health care system, not US immigration laws.

Hot Air elaborates:

First, the child would have gotten care in the US, too, regardless of insurance status. People get emergency care regardless in this country. There is a difference between health insurance and access to care that some people elide for purposes of political argument. No one gets turned away from emergency care for lack of ability to pay.

But why wasn’t there a NICU bed for the child in the entire nation of Canada? The government of Canada won’t pay for more. They don’t exist to expand supply to meet demand; their single-payer system exists to ration care as a cost-saving mechanism. In a free-market system, supply expands to meet demand, which is why Canada could subcontract out to a US hospital for capacity. Michael writes that paragraph as if it was mere luck that an NICU bed happened to be open in the US, but that’s a function of the system, and not luck. These parents are separated from their child at the moment through the fault of Canada’s government and not the US.

Stunning how a baby would be forced into the United States for health care since Canada has such a great health care system, right? The next question is where the United States will send children when we can’t get the proper care under Obamacare.

So the bottom line is that some parts of Canada are opening the door back up to private health care to meet the demand while the United States, under the Obama administration, will be pushing for a socialist system. How fun.

Who’s in the mood to wait 1 year for a MRI? Not me!

The WaPo reports:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide, potentially limiting the circumstances in which employers can be held liable for decisions when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination against minorities.

“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the white firefighters “understandably attract this court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them.”

Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens signed onto Ginsburg’s dissent, which she read aloud in court Monday.

Inexplicably, Sotomayor tried to bury this case and prevent it from moving on to the Supreme Court. Her decision was terribly wrong to begin with and I’m glad justice has prevailed for these firefighters in Connecticut.

The Hartford Courant has more on the background of this case if you’re unfamiliar:

The 20 plaintiffs in Ricci, one of whom is identified as both Hispanic and white, claim that the city’s decision to scrap the examination results before any promotions were made violated their rights to be employed in an environment free from racial classification.

All 20 plaintiffs would have qualified for promotion had the test, which the city purchased for $100,000 from a consultant, been used by the city civil service board. No blacks scored high enough to qualify for promotion. The test was divided between written and oral questions.

The city administered the test to 118 candidates, 27 of whom were black. None of the black candidates scored high enough to qualify for 15 immediately available promotions. After a series of raucous meetings, the city civil service board decided to scrap the examination results and promote no one. In subsequent litigation, the city suggested the test was racially biased. It said the decision to scrap the results was “race neutral” because it disadvantaged no one group of test takers more than another.

Karen Lee Torre, the New Haven lawyer who sued on behalf of the firefighters in 2004, reacted sharply to the suggestion that the test was biased. During oral argument, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. remarked sarcastically that the only criticism of the test came from an executive with a competing test preparation firm. The competitor testified at a civil service hearing in New Haven that, even though he had not read the test, he thought he could have designed a better one, Alito pointed out.

“The only thing wrong with the test is that it didn’t suit the political agenda of the mayor of New Haven,” Torre has said. Her reference to Mayor John DeStefano refers to an element of the lawsuit that has been little heard from since the case reached the lofty, legal realm of the Supreme Court.

One of the white firefighter claims is that DeStefano jettisoned the promotional exam to satisfy influential, black political supporters who were pushing for a greater black presence in the fire department’s officer ranks.

Analysts have said Ricci embodies a number of firsts. It is viewed as the most important race and hiring case of the high court’s current term and some speculated it could reshape hiring and promotion policy affecting millions in government and private industry.

President Barack Obama’s nominee for the high court, Sonia Sotomeyor, twice ruled for New Haven and against the white firefighters as a member of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. Conservative critics of her nomination have been reviewing her role in the case.

Ricci also is the first case to broadly raise the issue of race and the workplace under the leadership Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. And it is the court’s first examination of race since Obama’s election.

The Obama administration took its first stand on race and civil rights when weighed in once Ricci reached the Supreme Court. The administration sided with New Haven, saying the city was justified in dropping the test if it determined the test had “gross exclusionary effects on minorities.” But it urged the high court to send the case back to U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton in New Haven for trial to allow the 20 plaintiffs an opportunity to argue that the city acted with a discriminatory motive.

There were no “gross exclusionary effects on minorities” as the administration alleges, that is total nonsense. This case is all about playing to the liberal constituents. Had all minorities passed the exam, there wouldn’t even have been a case. This all comes down to merit and whether we should truly be judged on our character, not our color as Dr. Matin Luther King, Jr. espoused.

The Department was afraid of being sued because not enough minorities passed the exam, though everyone taking the exam had the same opportunities and the same learning material before the test. The men who passed had simply done their homework and were prepared for this exam yet the city scrapped the test fearing racial repercussions.

How ironic that Sotomayor’s record of being overturned has grown while she’s still in the nomination process to sit on the bench of the very court which overturned her.

Sotmayor should be embarrassed at this ruling as should the Obama administration. For everyone else, it is nothing but good news as the SCOTUS reaffirmed some semblance of a meritocracy in this country.

Read the full decision here: RICCI ET AL. v. DESTEFANO ET AL. (PDF)

It has been called the largest tax increase in history and the House of Representatives is set to pass it soon, with President Obama’s full support. It is called the “cap and trade” legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions as part of the global warming hoax, and you will pay through the nose for it.

Report from the Examiner:

House set to pass historic Climate Change bill. After weeks of compromise Obama announced the House is set to pass the Climate Change bill called Waxman-Markey. The key compromise delays regulation of farms for 5 years and gives the regulatory powers to the Agriculture Department not EPA. Midwestern farm states where concerned about EPA’s analysis of ethanol production which questions its true role in carbon reduction when including indirect upstream and transportation costs.

The bill is expected to add $10 per month to the average utility bill, costing the average U.S. household between $80 and $175 per year, The bill is expected to reduce imported petroleum from nearly 900 million barrels per to year in 2007 around 500 or 600 million barrels per day in 2030. The specific numbers are highly debatable. But most Americans agree action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is required soon. Support for Climate Change action falls off sharply among households earning less than $50,000 per year. Wealthier suburbanites support the bill.

The bill called a carbon cap and trade program reduces the amount of carbon allowed to be emitted by industry over time. A key compromise in the bill to coal states is giving nearly 85% of the carbon credits for free. A similar approach in Europe in 2005 has failed to reduce carbon emissions there. The carbon market remains weak during the Great Recession as economic output has declined and not reducing any carbon. The European approach to giving away its carbon credits is seen as a major flaw in the proposed U. S. system. By giving away the carbon allowances, industry is not as quickly stimulated to reduce carbon emissions.

The goal is to reduce carbon emissions by 17% by 2020 and 85% by 2050. The price of carbon is expected to rise over time as the amount of carbon allowed to be released is reduced. Given the recent Wall Street scandals, confidence in a carbon cap and trade program based on a Wall Street model are fraught with uncertainty. Another key compromise was allowing “offsets” that account to reforestation and prevention of deforestation, highly questionable and difficult to calculate the true emissions reduction. But as Bismark said “politics is the art of the possible”. While fraught with uncertainty and amid great compromise, it looks like the U.S. will have a carbon reduction plan to bring to the Copenhagen Protocol in December.

The Wall Street Journal discusses it further:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done.

Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman’s many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership’s solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.

Their gambit got a boost this week, when the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of what has come to be known as the Waxman-Markey bill. According to the CBO, the climate legislation would cost the average household only $175 a year by 2020. Edward Markey, Mr. Waxman’s co-author, instantly set to crowing that the cost of upending the entire energy economy would be no more than a postage stamp a day for the average household. Amazing. A closer look at the CBO analysis finds that it contains so many caveats as to render it useless.

For starters, the CBO estimate is a one-year snapshot of taxes that will extend to infinity. Under a cap-and-trade system, government sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that can be emitted nationally; companies then buy or sell permits to emit CO2. The cap gets cranked down over time to reduce total carbon emissions.

To get support for his bill, Mr. Waxman was forced to water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats. The CBO’s analysis looks solely at the year 2020, before most of the tough restrictions kick in. As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to “offset” their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.

The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: “The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap.”

More from the WSJ on why this is being pushed through so quickly, perhaps because the public is starting to catch on to the global warming hoax:

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

The truth has been pouring out, slowly but surely. Politicians like Al Gore cannot control all the information in the day and age we live in which means voices of reason and intelligence on the “global warming” issue are coming forward to debunk it. Reasonable evidence points to global warming being a natural cycle, not man made in any way, nor can we change it if we wanted to.

The legislation before congress is simply more ways of controlling and taxing the population at the behest of liberal special interest groups.

John Stossel of ABC News has been one voice trying to cut through the political garbage:

The debate isn’t closed, it hasn’t even begun because the climate change zealots don’t want their assertions to be challenged since they cannot stand up to scrutiny. The evidence against man-made global warming is piling high yet congress is going to pass some sham legislation for a non-existent hoax and we’re all going to pay more for it.

This is the time to call your legislator and demand they vote not against this wealth grab by the government. These are the same politicians who preach global warming yet do not change their own habits of taking jets everywhere they go, same old liberal hypocrisy. Surprise, surprise.

Update:

Thanks to 8 Republicans who chose to betray their country, this piece of garbage passed the house 219 to 212 with 44 Democrats voting against it as well.

Here are the offenders:

For the record, here are the Democrats who voted “No”:

Altmire
Arcuri
Barrow
Berry
Boren
Bright
Carney
Childers
Costa
Costello
Dahlkemper
Davis (AL)
Davis (TN)
DeFazio
Donnelly (IN)
Edwards (TX)
Ellsworth
Foster
Griffith
Herseth Sandlin
Holden
Kirkpatrick (AZ)
Kissell
Kucinich
Marshall
Massa
Matheson
McIntyre
Melancon
Minnick
Mitchell
Mollohan
Nye
Ortiz
Pomeroy
Rahall
Rodriguez
Ross
Salazar
Stark
Tanner
Taylor
Visclosky
Wilson (OH)

Hopefully this will die in the Senate despite Obama’s pleas that it be passed before America has a chance to examine this farce.

The best quote about this whole issue:

Never have so few stolen so much from so many to achieve so little.

It is a shame that the government is passing legislation based on junk science aimed at increasing taxes and killing economic growth in the energy sector. The carbon credit market is the biggest sham there ever was and people like Al Gore will be profiting dearly from it as companies barter their carbon credits to stay in business, it’s insane.

The heat is now on the Senate to put this to bed and not impose junk-science legislation on the American people thieving more of our wealth.

The bottom line, stack a poll with people who voted for Obama in a 2 to 1 margin and you get some broad support for his policies, imagine that. Then it becomes front page news.

CNSNews.com busts the poll wide open:

(CNSNews.com) - A New York Times/CBS News poll released Saturday that showed broad bipartisan support for President Obama’s health care reform, over-sampled Obama voters compared to McCain voters, critics say.

The poll, administered June 12-16, found that 72 percent of respondents favored the creation of a government health-insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.

It also said 50 percent of respondents thought the government would do a better job providing medical coverage than private insurers, up from 30 percent in 2007; and that 59 percent thought the government would be better at holding down costs, up from 47 percent two years ago.

But critics including pollster Kellyanne Conway say the results are inaccurate because they are heavily skewed toward those who voted for Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

In addition, other indicators point toward a repeat of the defeat Hillary Clinton’s proposed government-run faced in the early ‘90’s.

Out of 895 respondents, 24 percent were Republicans, 38 percent Democrats, and 38 percent were independents, according to a June 20 release from CBS News. While the release says the sampling was conducted at random, those numbers are significantly below the 32.6 percent who identify themselves as Republican according to a May survey from the nonpartisan Rasmussen Reports.

Similarly, the Times/CBS poll said 48 percent of respondents had voted for Obama, versus 25 percent for McCain, a nearly two-to-one advantage for Obama supporters.

Had those results been reflected in the November presidential election, Obama would have garnered 66 percent of the vote to McCain’s 34 percent, Conway, president & CEO of “the polling company,” told CNSNews.com.

“Was the vote 66-34? You tell me,” Conway said.

In 2008, Obama won 53 percent of the vote, McCain won 46 percent.

Conway said that the poll was skewed toward Democrats and Obama supporters because the Times and CBS made it so.

Predictable, yet sad how the new government-media complex is working hand-in-hand to push socialized health care on the country using faulty polling data. Some people were inevitably fooled by the poll since the New York Times made it their headline story:

“Almost nobody ever takes them to task for this, because they are CBS and the New York Times,” Conway added. “It is true that more Americans are identifying themselves as Independents, but everyone is doing polling; no one (else) is getting these numbers,” Conway said.

The Times ran an accompanying story on the front page of the Sunday edition with the headline “In Poll, Wide Support for Government Run Health.” The findings were also reported by most other major outlets.

The Times article interpreted the poll results as indicating broad, bipartisan support for government involvement in health care.

Then you find out that just below the surface, there is no support for a government health care plan which begins to infringed on the private sector.

Rasmussen points out that, in these areas, the Times/CBS poll was consistent with other polls.

“CBS, like everybody else, found that most people are satisfied with their health-care coverage,” he said. “But they have qualms about the overall system. And that is the biggest single obstacle to reform: people do not want to change their own coverage.”

Conway agreed. Because of their satisfaction with their own coverage, Americans are unlikely to rock the boat.

“The difference this year could be that Barack Obama is a more compelling messenger than Hillary Clinton.” But, she added: “Americans can do the math.”

They are hesitant to support the record expenditure it would take to pass sweeping health-care reform. Conway says.

So there it is, the 72@ number is totally bogus made up of Obama voters used to create the appearance of such support for Obamacare. What’s amazing is that this isn’t even speculation, just examine the polling methods and you can see the purposeful skewing as clear as day. The country didn’t vote for Obama in a 2 to 1 ratio which means this poll is already invalid before it even hit the presses. This appears to be something a bunch of amateurs would do yet it’s from the New York Times and CBS News, need I say more?

Here’s a hint: When the media has to skew polls to show inflated support for something, it’s bad news for the administration’s plans.

Reuters reports on the continued government intervention into lending:

(Reuters) - Two U.S. Democratic lawmakers want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery, the Wall Street Journal said.

In March, Fannie Mae said it would no longer guarantee mortgages on condos in buildings where fewer than 70 percent of the units have been sold, up from 51 percent, the paper said. Freddie Mac is due to implement similar policies next month, the paper said.

In a letter to the CEO’s of both companies, Representatives Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Anthony Weiner warned that a 70 percent sales threshold “may be too onerous” and could lead condo buyers to shun new developments, according to the paper.

The legislators asked the companies to “make appropriate adjustments” to their underwriting standards for condos, the paper added.

In an interview with the paper, Weiner said the rules have “had a real chill on the ability to get these condos sold,” at a time when prices of condos have fallen enough to attract potential buyers.

Once again, we have politicians trying to regulate the market which will inevitably lead to bad things, just like the housing bubble. Fannie and Freddie have become corrupt organizations used by politicians as leverage to their constituents of guaranteeing them home loans. Now Frank, the moron who defend Fannie and Freddie as they went down in flames, is sticking his nose in again to cause more trouble.

I have a suggestion, perhaps Barney Frank should take responsibility for his incompetence and resign, for the good of the country. God forbid Fannie and Freddie have tighter lending practices, perhaps we’ll avoid another real estate meltdown.

Once again, here are number of incompetent Democrats defending Fannie and Freddie a few years before the housing crash, the inexplicable Barney Frank included:

Pathetic. Washington needs to stay out of the free market for a change, that would truly be something new we haven’t seen in years.

MyWay reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Dramatically hardening the U.S. reaction to Iran’s disputed elections and bloody aftermath, President Barack Obama condemned the violence against protesters Tuesday and lent his strongest support yet to their accusations the hardline victory was a fraud.

Obama, who has been accused by some Republicans of being too timid in his response to events in Iran, declared himself “appalled and outraged” by the deaths and intimidation in Tehran’s streets - and scoffed at suggestions he was toughening his rhetoric in response to the criticism.

He suggested Iran’s leaders will face consequences if they continue “the threats, the beatings and imprisonments” against protesters. But he repeatedly declined to say what actions the U.S. might take, retaining - for now - the option of pursuing diplomatic engagement with Iran’s leaders over its suspected nuclear weapons program.

“We don’t know yet how this thing is going to play out,” the president said. “It is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.”

Obama borrowed language from struggles throughout history against oppressive governments to condemn the efforts by Iran’s rulers to crush dissent in the wake of June 12 presidential elections. Citing the searing video circulated worldwide of the apparent shooting death of Neda Agha Soltan, a 26-year-old young woman who bled to death in a Tehran street and now is a powerful symbol for the demonstrators, Obama said flatly that human rights violations were taking place.

“No iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice,” he said during a nearly hourlong White House news conference dominated by the unrest in Iran. “Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”

I applaud his language on this, I just wish he would have done so sooner in support of overthrowing this ruling, barbaric regime. Support from America is key in pushing this forward and exacting real change during this time of unrest.

America needs to stand for freedom and liberty in the world, we should not be timid about it. Many Iranians have probably looked next door to Iraq and have watched that country become a functioning democracy which, perhaps, has inspired some of this outrage. The Iraqi democracy may be a big part of pushing Democratic reform throughout the Middle East.

I only hope the people of Iran can push hard enough against the iron fist of tyranny.

The WaPo reports:

Barely half of Americans are now confident that President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus measure will boost the economy, and the rapid rise in optimism about the state of the nation that followed the 2008 election has abated, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Overall, 52 percent now say the stimulus package has succeeded or will succeed in restoring the economy, compared with 59 percent two months ago. The falloff in confidence has been sharpest in the hard-hit Midwest, where fewer than half now see the government spending as succeeding. In April, six in 10 Midwesterners said the federal program had worked or would do so.

Two weak points on the domestic front remain: Obama still gets tepid marks on his handling of problems facing the big U.S. automakers, and as many people disapprove as approve of his handling of the federal budget deficit. On the deficit, intensity runs against the president, with 35 percent “strongly” disapproving, compared with 22 percent who say they are solidly behind his efforts.

More broadly, worries about the deficit remain widespread, with almost nine in 10 Americans saying they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about its size.

One factor that continues to work for Obama, however, is that most Americans still see him as a new type of Democrat, one “who will be careful with the public’s money,” rather than an old-style, “tax-and-spend Democrat.” By this point in 1993, Clinton had lost the new-style label, which he had maintained over the first months of his presidency.

Clearly that stigma of being “careful with the public’s money” will die off once more people wake up to the nearly $2 trillion deficit which is a direct result of Obama’s government stimulus. When the government grows, the private sector shrinks which is terribly for American wealth and job growth.

More on this topic from Hot Air discussing how the “blame Bush” defense will only take Obama so far:

The biggest factor may be the unemployment report in early June that showed joblessness rising much faster than Obama’s team had predicted, even without a $787 billion stimulus bill. If so, then we can expect a major shift when unemployment crosses the double-digit threshold, as even Obama predicts it will this year. We can call that the expiration date for blaming Bush, and the moment when the economy becomes Obama’s fault, as his expensive and expansive policies fail to arrest the economic decline.

The crosstabs, as always, show some interesting motion. Majorities of both whites and blacks blame Bush, but a majority of “Others” (primarily Asians and Hispanics) blame Obama, 54%-43%. Independents split on the question, 48%-46%, leaning towards blaming Obama, a big problem if that moves towards a majority. Democrats and Republicans have predictable splits, as do conservatives and liberals, but the most interesting split comes in the Political Class demographics. Without leaners, a plurality of self-described “mainstream” people blame Obama, while 100% of the self-professed political class blame Bush.

Nor does it look good for the future of Obama’s economic policy. This question had less to do with the current crisis and more to do with Obama’s policies for reversing it. A large majority believes they know better than Obama about economic issues, 60%-30%. That holds true in almost every demographic category, with a few notable exceptions. Blacks trust Obama more than themselves, 72%-21%, and liberals by 54%-30%, but Democrats can’t even get a majority for that position, 48%-37%. Independents trust themselves more than Obama by a whopping 76%-19%, almost identical to Republicans. A majority of higher-income workers (between $60-100K) blame Obama; the under-$20K demographic, which one could expect to be loyal to Obama, trust themselves more than Obama’s economic leadership, 49%-39%.

Obama only has a few weeks at most to keep using the “inherited from my predecessor” defense, if that. The next joblessness report comes out in early July, and it will probably spell an end to that defense, as well as support for Obamanomics in general.

Over time as more people realize that their hopes and dreams haven’t been answered by the promised hope and change, these numbers will wilt more as Obama is given more responsibility for his failures by the public.

The numbers are already far short of the White House’s own estimates which said Obama’s stimulus would “create or save” millions of jobs, that was a lie.

I’ll let President Obama’s numbers do the talking:

Anyone with half a brain called it from the beginning that pouring billions into liberal special interest projects would do nothing for the economy and job creation. Instead of taking a free-market approach and letting the private sector create jobs, the President has wasted billions of dollars on projects which have had no measurable affect on the economy whatsoever, despite his estimates and claims to the contrary.

How can anyone believe White House estimates from this point forward? People are still harping about WMDs but they’re the same people now defending President Obama’s fuzzy, non-existent math.

Pew Research reports:

Relatively few Americans believe the country as a whole is spending the right amount on health care at this point, but there is no consensus on what the problem is. Just as many Americans say we are spending too much on health care (38%) as too little (40%).

This represents a sharp turnaround in the balance of opinion from three years ago. In early 2006, a 57% majority said that the country as a whole was spending too little on health care, while about half as many (26%) said we were spending too much. And this shift in opinion crosses party lines – more Democrats, Republicans and independents today say the country spends too much on health care than said this in 2006.

In April 1993 – as Bill Clinton was initiating his health care reform effort – 49% of Americans felt the country was spending too little on health care, while 36% said the country was spending too much. Just a year later – in June of 1994 – the public was divided, much as it is today, with 38% saying too much and 40% saying too little.

That isn’t even the crux of it. When asked, similarly as in 1993, how the health care system needed to be “fixed,” this is the result:

But there is less support for completely rebuilding the health care system than there was during the early stage of the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful effort to revamp health care. In April 1993, a majority of Americans (55%) said the health care system needed to be completely rebuilt. As discussion of Clinton’s proposals progressed, support for completely rebuilding the health care system declined. By June 1994, just 37% said the health care system needed to be completely rebuilt.

Again, this is mainly an illustration of the disagreement many have, including Democrats, with President Obama’s big-government policies even though they “approve” of him personally.

Meanwhile, another issue which is all-but certain to turn the public off the Obamacare plan, congress is busy finding new things to tax in order to pay for the overhaul:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Early work on the ambitious health care overhaul the Obama administration is seeking has exposed the kinds of in-house fights that typify just how hard it will be to get meaningful legislation this year. Case in point: A proposal to help bankroll universal health coverage with a dime-a-can increase in the price of soft drinks.

House Democrats have lots of potential targets for higher taxes as they aim to expand health care coverage to reach the roughly 50 million that experts say are uninsured.

Also under consideration are higher alcohol taxes, increases to the Medicare payroll tax and a value-added tax, a sort of national sales tax, of up to 1.5 percent or more.

The list of options being weighed by the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, aims to raise some $600 billion over 10 years to partially pay for President Barack Obama’s goal of overhauling the nation’s health care system to tame costs and cover the 50 million uninsured.

The final price tag for that effort could top $1 trillion, with cuts to Medicare and Medicaid covering the rest of the cost.

The tax options include:

- Increasing the price of soda and other sugary drinks by 10 cents a can.

- Applying a potential 2 percent income tax increase to single taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year and households earning more than $250,000.

- A new employer payroll tax could target 3 percent of employers’ health care expenditures.

- Taxing employer-provided health insurance benefits above certain levels - a less likely option but one that still is in the running.

House Democrats planned to unveil a draft of their sweeping health care bill Friday. It would require all individuals to obtain health insurance and force employers to offer health care to their workers, with exemptions for small businesses. A new public health insurance plan, strongly opposed by Republicans, would compete with private companies within a new health care purchasing “exchange” where Americans could shop for coverage. Government subsidies would help the poor buy care.

The public health insurance plan is the Trojan horse in this proposal. This is the part of the plan which will immediately have an affect on dismantling the private insurance market. Furthermore, more studies show that while the public plan will provide coverage to millions, some 21 million would be kicked off their current private plan as employers opt for the public option to offload costs. The results won’t be pretty as the government continues to concentrate power in Washington.

All of this points to the great possibility of defeating this government power grab and instituting an alternative plan which truly does promote competition.

Add in the fact that the American Medical Association, a group which has been pushing true reform, opposes President Obama’s public plan option due to the way it destroys a patient-centric model.

Karl Rove discussed an alternative Republican plan in a recent Op-Ed:

Fortunately, Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Richard Burr of North Carolina, and Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Devin Nunes of California have devised a plan that will likely appeal to anyone interested in making health insurance more affordable and portable.

Their proposal — called the Patients’ Choice Act — is to leave in place the tax deduction companies receive for providing employees with health insurance and to create a “Medi-Choice” tax rebate that will give individuals $2,200 and families $5,700 to spend on health insurance.

The rebate will make health insurance more affordable, especially for young people. It also will make health insurance portable, which will free people from being locked into jobs they hate because they are afraid of losing their health insurance.

The Coburn-Ryan plan also helps the hard-to-insure and chronically ill because it shares their risk across all insurance companies, providing lower premiums than they might find now. It would help those in Medicaid because they receive private insurance rather than being forced into a one-size-fits-all government program in which doctors are increasingly refusing to participate.

The House GOP also formed a Health Care Solutions Group that unveiled proposals yesterday. The group wanted to make health care more affordable, expand availability, and promote healthier life choices. It did this by proposing two-dozen ways to improve existing law to make it easier and more cost-effective to buy health insurance.

One proposal is to give families who purchase their own insurance a tax benefit similar to the one companies get for providing health benefits. Another proposal is to pass medical liability reforms that will reduce costly junk lawsuits. Still another would allow small businesses to team up to buy insurance at a group discount. The group also wants to allow families to save money tax-free for a wide range of health expenses and permit children to stay on their parents’ policies until age 25.

Under the group’s proposals, Medicaid beneficiaries would get the flexibility to choose private coverage, rather than being locked into a government-run program. The group is also calling for stepping up efforts to detect and punish Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which costs an estimated $60 billion a year.

Individual Republicans are also stepping forward with health-reform ideas, such as creating a national health-insurance market that would allow Americans to buy insurance across state lines. Sens. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) and Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) have offered other ideas, including expanding community health centers.

This is the first time congressional Republicans as a group have been comfortable talking about health care. It may be the product of necessity, but it is also necessary to get a robust debate on health-care reform.

Republicans need to talk about it because any plan which does not involved government control of your health care decisions will be more welcome by the public assuming it addresses the concepts of competition and affordability.

The Washington Times reports:

ERIE, Pa.| Former President George W. Bush fired a salvo at President Obama on Wednesday, asserting his administration’s interrogation policies were within the law, declaring the private sector — not government — will fix the economy and rejecting the nationalization of health care.

“I know it’s going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we’re in,” the former president said to applause from members of a local business group. “You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money.”

Repeatedly in his hourlong speech and question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush said he would not directly criticize the new president, who has moved to take over financial institutions and several large corporations. Several times, however, he took direct aim at Obama policies as he defended his own during eight years in office.

“Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States,” he said to huge cheers.

Well President Bush, if the government is to create an environment where people take risks and then either succeed or fail on their own merit, then why did you support the original $700 billion bailout back in September/October of 2008? If you truly believe the private sector will work out the kinks, then why didn’t you let it? In fact, I blame President Bush for the bailout mentality we still have under President Obama. Had President Bush not succumbed to the government rescue plan from the get-go, President Obama may be having a tougher time selling nationalization of the auto and health care industries now.

This is semi-infuriating to hear President Bush now sound like a champion for capitalism when we all witnessed him say that he believes in free markets, which is why he has to use socialist policies to save them. He began this trend and now we have a President who is even more on board. Again, how was Bush’s original $700 billion bailout different from Obama’s current bailouts? Perhaps in scope but the intentions and results were the same. Some companies which were bailed out still went bankrupt which was just a waste of taxpayer money.

This isn’t to say Obama has an excuse, he simply doesn’t for his irrational, failing government-first economic policies. President Bush just started top-toeing down this progressive road and Obama is now hitting the gas on it.

Bush continued:

Mr. Bush weighed in on some of the most pressing issues of the day: the election in Iran, the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and his administration’s interrogation policies of terrorists held there and elsewhere. The former president has not commented on Mr. Obama’s decision to ban “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, which the current president has called “off course” and “based on fear.”

“The way I decided to address the problem was twofold: One, use every technique and tool within the law to bring terrorists to justice before they strike again,” he said, adding that the country needs to stay on offense, not defense. On Guantanamo, which while in office Mr. Bush said he wanted to close, the former president was diplomatic.

“I told you I’m not going to criticize my successor,” he said. “I’ll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don’t believe that — persuasion isn’t going to work. Therapy isn’t going to cause terrorists to change their mind.”

I applaud him for not backing down on the prosecution of the War on Terror. We have been safe for the years after 9/11 and I believe it is in part to the Bush administration and the brave men and women who put their lives on the line defending this country.

The story started a few days ago, here is a good summation:

More on what Walpin was investigating from Village Voice:

President Obama may have a big political controversy in the firing of an inspector general overseeing the federal government’s sprawling community service program — and there’s a New York angle.

Federal watchdog Gerald Walpin [pictured] was fired last week, the White House said, for supposedly being “confused” and “disoriented.” Walpin’s job was to keep an eye on the expenditures and operations of the huge Americorps program, along with all of the organizations that it funds.

Walpin had just issued damning audits of two high-profile programs, including the widely lauded Teaching Fellows program, run by the City University Research Foundation. (Here’s a story that lays it out pretty clearly.)

That program places mid-career professionals as teachers in the New York City public schools, allowing them to teach while earning a modest salary and working toward their degree in education. The program has received tons of favorable coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere, but has been criticized by teachers unions.

Walpin’s audit [pdf] found that the program could not prove it was doing criminal background checks, had taken more money than it was due, didn’t follow certain Americorps rules, failed to regularly file required forms, and did some sloppy record-keeping.

In all, Walpin questioned awards to the program of $16.1 million and $773,000, mostly on administrative grounds. He also says the government should stop the program and recover $75 million spent over the past six years.

CUNY pledged to make changes, according to the audit, but didn’t go all the way. It also refused to return any money, and defended its policy of accepting background checks supplied by the city Department of Education. The Corporation for National and Community Service — the official name of the agency Walpin oversees — refused to ask for any of the money back from CUNY.

In a letter [pdf] to CUNY president Matthew Goldstein, Walpin in essence says that the money CUNY gets from Americorps is redundant. Basically, CUNY doesn’t need it:

“The program doesn’t work because it adds no service to the community which is not already provided by the Fellows program,” Walpin writes. “Therefore, taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth. The [government] could accomplish its goals more effectively if the funds for these grants were used… in communities where the need exists.”

Walpin cites a newspaper report which he says proves that educational awards are being used to deprive college graduates of teaching jobs because the money is going instead to taxpayer-financed teaching fellows.

Goldstein, for his part, accused Walpin of acting outside the scope of his authority.

What started as a bureaucratic flap got spicey last week when Walpin, a holdover from the Bush administration, was placed on 30 days suspension without pay by the White House.

Imagine, for a moment, if President Bush had fired an Inspector General currently investigating some Bush cronies for corruption and then cited dementia as the reason for the firing. The liberals would still be talking about the story today as the ultimate example of government corruption.

Here is the latest as of yesterday on this story:

Nothing adds up in terms of the reason why Walpin was fired, especially considering the White House was welcoming his opinions as a conservative who, for some reason, supporter the nomination of Justice Sotomayor.

Above that, however, one also has to question why the mainstream media is ignoring this story and not even reporting it.

There is definitely something corrupt at the bottom of this and hopefully some reporter will keep digging.

This time it is the sacred cow of Medicare, Bloomberg reports:

June 12 (Bloomberg) — Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.

Some $400 billion cuts, you say? Luckily YouTube exists to keep things in check. Here is a compilation put together of Democrat outrage over the years when President Bush proposed cutting less than one-tenth of what the Democrats are proposing now:

Hot Air comments:

When George Bush tried to tackle escalating Medicare and Medicaid costs and a looming entitlement catastrophe with modest funding cuts in both terms in office, Democrats screeched about seniors losing health care and pronounced Bush’s efforts dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. Now, with Barack Obama in the White House, Democrats have suddenly gone mute as the administration proposes to cut hundreds of billions from both programs.

Again, what I find most fascinating, is that the government is incapable of running the programs we already have and liberal Democrats want even more in the form of a government health insurance plan. Medicare is going bankrupt and will require $600 billion in new taxes. Think you’re not going to be paying for that? Think again, my friend. We will all be paying for it through the nose and we will all be paying for government health insurance through the nose if it ever passes, God forbid.

Seems that cutting entitlement programs is fine when the cutter has a (D) next to his or her name. In that case, they’re being fiscally responsible. If you have an (R) next to your name and you try to cut Medicare, well it’s because you hate the elderly.

This isn’t to say that cuts aren’t need because they clearly are. I just find it important to point out that fiscal responsibility is inconvenient at times for Democrats if they are not in the White House.

Fox News reports:

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday that “everyone guessed wrong” on the impact of the economic stimulus, but he defended the administration’s spending designed to combat rising joblessness.

Biden said inaccuracies in unemployment predictions shouldn’t undercut the White House’s support of the $787 billion economic revival plan that has not met the expectations of President Obama’s team. Instead, the vice president urged skeptics to look at teachers who kept their classroom assignments and police officers who kept their beats because of financial assistance from Washington.

“The bottom line is that jobs are being created that would not have been there before,” Biden said.

But they are not coming at the pace first estimated.

Just 10 days before taking office, Obama’s top economic advisers released a report predicting unemployment would remain at 8 percent of below through this year if an economic stimulus plan won congressional approval.

Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that unemployment in May rose to 9.4 percent.
Biden said the White House is keenly aware of the gap between the rhetoric used to sell fast passage of the legislation and the reality that has 14.5 million people unemployed.

“No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought — and everyone else thought — the unemployment rate would be,” Biden said.

Those projects came from a report co-written by Biden’s chief economist, Jared Bernstein. Last week, Bernstein briefed reporters on the stimulus spending and insisted the report was in line with others’ research, but not aligned with reality.

I’d have to call him wrong since a lot of people were warning that the answer to too much debt wasn’t to go even deeper into debt. Instead, it now appears we’d have similar unemployment with the stimulus compared to if we did absolutely nothing at all. Amazing how much hundreds of billions in taxpayer money simply cannot buy.

The punchline in this story is how Biden still contends that we should actually believe the White House and its claims with regard to future job creation and the stimulus money. The same incapable, Keynesian economists who got it wrong for Obama are now claiming that they’re incorrect guesses shouldn’t destroy their credibility. Please, this is becoming a traveling comedy tour of economic follies.

The White House has tapped Biden as its chief spokesman on that economic stimulus plan, sending him across the country to drum up support for a plan that has yet to make the impact it promised. On Thursday and Friday, Biden visited Pennsylvania, Kansas and Michigan to highlight projects the stimulus has funded.

The vice president said losses each month have dropped, although the economy is still losing jobs.

“Can I claim credit that all of that’s due to the recovery package? No. But it clearly has had an impact,” Biden said.

Biden said the estimates were based on standard economic models.

“Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed,” Biden said.

Despite the fact that none of the economic data currently available points to any positive affect from the stimulus package, Biden still claims that it has had a positive affect. Sounds like the typical liberal argument of trying to create facts and figures out of thin air to fit their agenda.

We’re all looking at the same thing and we can all see it. Here we have Biden asking whether we’re going to believe him or our lying eyes? It’s a joke, just like the entire economic policy from this administration which has been a total failure from the beginning. Socialist policies fail. Always have, always will.

However, the bottom line is that Biden is just dead wrong that “everyone” guessed wrong on the stimulus. Many Americans, myself included, were speaking out against President Obama’s stimulus package from the beginning and we’re being vindicated more and more every single day. The Biden tap-dance

Steven Burd, the CEO of Safeway supermarket stores, wrote a great Op-Ed piece on this topic:

Effective health-care reform must meet two objectives: 1) It must secure coverage for all Americans, and 2) it must dramatically lower the cost of health care. Health-care spending has outpaced the rise in all other consumer spending by nearly a factor of three since 1980, increasing to 18% of GDP in 2009 from 9% of GDP. This disturbing trend will not change regardless of who pays these costs — government or the private sector — unless we can find a way to improve the health of our citizens. Failure to do so will make American companies less competitive in the global marketplace, increase taxes, and undermine our economy.

At Safeway we believe that well-designed health-care reform, utilizing market-based solutions, can ultimately reduce our nation’s health-care bill by 40%. The key to achieving these savings is health-care plans that reward healthy behavior. As a self-insured employer, Safeway designed just such a plan in 2005 and has made continuous improvements each year. The results have been remarkable. During this four-year period, we have kept our per capita health-care costs flat (that includes both the employee and the employer portion), while most American companies’ costs have increased 38% over the same four years.

That right there is the bottom line. People clamor about the costs of health care and then pretend that if the government pays it, that means the costs are being reduced. That is a total like as it simply shifts the cost from the private sector to the taxpayers.

Safeway’s plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.

As much as we would like to take credit for being a health-care innovator, Safeway has done nothing more than borrow from the well-tested automobile insurance model. For decades, driving behavior has been correlated with accident risk and has therefore translated into premium differences among drivers. Stated somewhat differently, the auto-insurance industry has long recognized the role of personal responsibility. As a result, bad behaviors (like speeding, tickets for failure to follow the rules of the road, and frequency of accidents) are considered when establishing insurance premiums. Bad driver premiums are not subsidized by the good driver premiums.

As with most employers, Safeway’s employees pay a portion of their own health care through premiums, co-pays and deductibles. The big difference between Safeway and most employers is that we have pronounced differences in premiums that reflect each covered member’s behaviors. Our plan utilizes a provision in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that permits employers to differentiate premiums based on behaviors. Currently we are focused on tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Safeway’s Healthy Measures program is completely voluntary and currently covers 74% of the insured nonunion work force. Employees are tested for the four measures cited above and receive premium discounts off a “base level” premium for each test they pass. Data is collected by outside parties and not shared with company management. If they pass all four tests, annual premiums are reduced $780 for individuals and $1,560 for families. Should they fail any or all tests, they can be tested again in 12 months. If they pass or have made appropriate progress on something like obesity, the company provides a refund equal to the premium differences established at the beginning of the plan year.

How shockingly simple is this to implement? Just like auto insurance where high-risk drivers pay higher premiums, high-risk health insurance recipients pay more as well. This prevents healthy people paying the costs for smokers, drinkers, skydivers etc… The healthier you are, the lower your premium. Just like the safer driver you are, the lower your car insurance premium. That way individuals are being rewarded for their work, not some collectivist notion of “fairness” in which everyone is hosed for someone else’s bad decisions.

This is one of many solutions and approaches to reducing health care costs yet the progressives in government are bent on turning health care into a government subsidized enterprise. Why won’t congress and President Obama even consider alternative solutions and intelligent legislation instead of nationalization? My short answer is that President Obama, and other progressives, want their power consolidated and they want more and more people dependent on government programs and under government control. There is little evidence to the contrary considering the plethora of working, free-market solutions which are constantly being ignored.

Americans Love Government:

Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So which is it — stupidity, ignorance or insanity — that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?

According to latest Rasmussen Reports, 30 percent of Americans believe congressmen are corrupt. Last year, Congress’ approval rating fell to 9 percent, its lowest in history. If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you’ll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? “Government ought to do something!” When people call for government to do something, it is as if they’ve been befallen by amnesia and forgotten just who is running government. It’s the very people whom they have labeled as thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks.

Aside from the general level of disgust that Americans have for congressmen, there’s the question of whether there is anything that Congress does well. What about Social Security and Medicare? Congress has allowed Social Security and Medicare to accumulate an unfunded liability of $101 trillion. That means in order to pay promised elderly entitlement benefits, Congress would have to put trillions in the bank today earning interest. Congressional efforts to create “affordable housing” have created today’s financial calamity. Congress props up failed enterprises such as Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service with huge cash subsidies, and subsidies in the forms of special tax treatment and monopoly rights. I can’t think of anything that Congress does well yet we Americans call for them to take greater control over important areas of our lives.

I don’t think that stupidity, ignorance or insanity explains the love that many Americans hold for government; it’s far more sinister and perhaps hopeless. I’ll give a few examples to make my case. Many Americans want money they don’t personally own to be used for what they see as good causes such as handouts to farmers, poor people, college students, senior citizens and businesses. If they privately took someone’s earnings to give to a farmer, college student or senior citizen, they would be hunted down as thieves and carted off to jail. However, they get Congress to do the identical thing, through its taxing power, and they are seen as compassionate and caring. In other words, people love government because government, while having neither moral nor constitutional authority, has the legal and physical might to take the property of one American and give it to another.

The unanticipated problem with this agenda is that as Congress uses its might to take what belongs to one American to give to another, what President Obama calls “spreading the wealth around,” more and more Americans will want to participate in the looting. It will ultimately produce something none of us wants: absolute control over our lives.

The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’30s and ’40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the name of “social justice.” In Germany, it led to the Enabling Act of 1933: Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation and, after all, who could be against a remedy to relieve distress? Decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of what Nazi Germany would become, succumbed to Hitler’s charisma.

Today’s Americans, enticed, perhaps enchanted, by charismatic speeches, are ceding so much power to Washington, and like yesteryear’s Germans are building the Trojan Horse for a future tyrant.

I can’t find much fault in Williams’ line of thinking as he is referencing this with a historical background in mind. That is really the bottom line on these government programs, that liberals enjoy watching the government confiscate wealth and redistribute it in the form of services and tax refunds to people who don’t even pay taxes.

If I go to my neighbor’s house and steal money out of his wallet to pay for my doctor’s visit, it’s called breaking and entering along with theft of personal property. However, if the government does the exact same thing through taxation, it is called “social” or “economic justice.” There is little difference between the two in my eyes, only that government is able to get away with it but I’m not.

Liberals may well be too stupid or ignorant to be aware of what it means when they call for greater government involvement in more aspects of life. Congress has failed for decades and will continue to fail until the people demand accountability. It is insanity to give more control to the government and expect that this time, they’ll do it “right,” if that is even possible with the confiscatory programs.

With history as a guide on the failures of government social programs, this really isn’t even a debatable argument in terms of whether the government will inevitably fail, since it already has. When the government starts deciding who wins and who loses, we have all already lost.

The Washington Post reports:

Off-year elections rarely predict the future — except when they do. That’s why Democratic and Republican leaders will be closely watching the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and especially Virginia between now and November.

The lineup is almost set. In New Jersey, Republicans have nominated Christopher Christie, an aggressive politician who made a name prosecuting corrupt politicians. He will face off against incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs executive and former U.S. senator who has had a rocky first term. In Virginia, Republicans have selected former attorney general Bob McDonnell as their nominee.

The last piece will fall into place on Tuesday, when Virginia Democrats pick their nominee after what has turned into a spirited race among three candidates: Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman; state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds; and former delegate Brian Moran.

Fast-forward to today and we have now learned that Virginia state Senator Creigh Deeds has won the Democratic Primary and will battle Republican Bob McDonnell in November.

News on Virginia from from the Associated Press:

State Senator Creigh (CREE) Deeds has won Virginia’s Democratic primary for governor.

Deeds beat former Clinton White House insider Terry McAuliffe and former state Democratic legislative leader Brian Moran on Tuesday.

The victory sets up a Deeds rematch with Republican Bob McDonnell, who beat him in the 2005 attorney general election by 323 votes.

McDonnell is a conservative with strong ties to religious broadcaster Pat Robertson. He was unopposed for the GOP nomination.

Deeds was the only Democrat in the race not from the Washington, D.C., suburbs. Primary rivals criticized him for legislative votes supporting Virginia’s broad, pro-gun laws, actions popular in rural areas that don’t play well in cities and affluent suburbs.

More from the AP:

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Turnout was light Tuesday as voters chose a Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia’s primary.

The primary marks the first bid for elective office for former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, who led Hillary Clinton’s 2008 White House run. He faces state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds and former Democratic legislative leader Brian J. Moran.

In the fall, the winner will face former attorney general Bob McDonnell, the well-funded nominee for a Republican party desperate to overcome crushing losses in the 2008 election. McDonnell, a conservative with strong ties to religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, faced no opponent for the GOP nomination.

So it will be the following come November:

New Jersey
John Corzine - Democrat Incumbent
Christopher Christie - Republican Challenger

Virginia - Open seat
Bob McDonnell - Republican
Creigh Deeds - Democrat

We will continually update both New Jersey and Virginia election news and watch these races very closely.