STAR DRECK: EPA plans to shut down coal plants by requiring they use technology from the future that has yet to be invented

Mr. Peabody, does the Wayback Machine have a setting for the year 2030?

This past spring, EPA pulled its first attempt at a greenhouse gas emission standard for new power plants, fearing it was so draconian that it wouldn't stand up in a federal court...

The Washington Post reports that the agency is about to take a second stab at stacking the deck against new coal-fired power plants:

According to those familiar with the new EPA proposal, the agency will keep the carbon limit for large natural gas plants at 1,000 pounds but relax it slightly for smaller gas plants. The standard for coal plants will be as high as 1,300 or 1,400 pounds per megawatt hour.

However, the average coal plant emits 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour, meaning new plants will need carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology--something that is a long way from being viable. Jeffrey Holmstead, who represents coal-fired power plant owners and is a former EPA official in the President George W. Bush administration, told the Post, “As a practical matter, this means that the new proposal will still stop any new coal-fired power plants for the foreseeable future.”

The International Energy Agency doesn't expect CCS technology to be routinely used by power generators until 2030. That’s years away. In the meantime, we need to continue improving the efficiency of current coal-fired technology and continue investing in CCS research instead of writing off an abundant and economical energy source.

The only campaign promise that President Obama appears to have kept with was his 2008 pledge to make "electricity prices necessarily skyrocket".

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, the price of electricity would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was... [t]hey will pass that money on to consumers." --Barack Obama, 1 November 2008

He can run, he can hide, he can evade, he can blame Bush and James Buchanan. But this is one campaign promise Barack Obama actually followed through with. And you. Ain't. Seen. Nothing. Yet.

No Wonder the EPA is Illegally Hiding Its Temperature Data

If the radical Leftists controlling the Democrat Party had even an iota of evidence suggesting the validity of global warming, they would be clamoring to make public its data. Instead, they are unlawfully concealing the data, violating Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other demands.

It would seem to be common sense for the data used in a study that guides public policy and the writing of federal regulations to be publicly available. That’s not the case when it comes to EPA and air pollution data.

As J.R. Reed explained on Free Enterprise in July:

During their pursuit of regulations that would cost businesses billions of dollars, EPA officials have refused to reveal the data used to support these proposals – not to White House officials, not to Congress, not to leading environmental experts, and not to the American people. The data sets have not been analyzed by independent scientists or gone through a peer-review process, and, yet, these findings are being used to justify onerous regulations.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, sent six letters to EPA asking for the data. In 2011, current EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy promised to do so, but never delivered it. Rep. Smith subpoenaed the agency on August 1.

ScienceInsider reports that EPA continues refusing to turn over the requested data so, Rep. Smith found EPA in default:

“You did not provide the Committee with anything new,” Smith wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. Instead, Smith wrote, the agency responded to his 1 August subpoena by providing “a file of already public information along with a letter outlining excuses for why EPA did not comply.”

In a statement, Rep. Smith explained,

EPA is using the subpoenaed data to support regulations that could cost the American people trillions of dollars. Yet the agency has refused to make the data available to Congress or the American people. Regulations based on secret data have no place in a democracy.

Ah, there's your mistake, Rep. Smith. We no longer live in a Constitutional republic, the kind in which a virtuous government does its best to hew to the letter of the law. Instead we have an out-of-control administration, with officials laced throughout the bureaucracy defying the courts and Congress.

As for "global warming"? Even the United Nations has been forced to confess the Earth is cooling.

Well, this is awkward. A leaked report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the world is not warming but actually cooling, and will continue to get colder until the middle of the century.

You remember the IPCC, right? It’s the group whose 2007 report on global warming said that snow would disappear from everywhere but the highest mountains, icebergs would melt, sea levels would rise, deserts would spread, people would die in heat waves and pretty much the earth was going to end if we didn’t immediately destroy our carbon-fueled economy with job-killing government regulations.

Well, that’s not happening. In fact, the Arctic ice cap has grown by 60 percent since 2012.

Thanks to the IPCC’s original predictions, billions of dollars were spent on supposed green measures to curb global warming ... Now, either those measures really, really paid off, or the skeptics were right all along.

There are only three reasonable ways to explain a "belief" in global warming. In order of increasing malevolence, they are hubris, greed, and Marxism. And they are not mutually exclusive; see exhibit A: Al Gore.


Related: Global Warming Comics -- The Fraudulent And The Immoral. Hat tip: Weasel Zippers.

THE TRIFECTA: Poverty, Mass Murder, and Liberals

Guest post by The DiploMad


Words evolve. They take on new meaning over the years. Social and political movements appropriate certain words, redefine them, and then use them to shape the ideological battlefield. The classic example of that, of course, is "bolshevik" and "menshevik." The Bolsheviks were, in fact, the Mensheviks and vice-versa. The word bolshevik, derived from the word meaning "majority," was appropriated by the radicals who were in reality the minority of the old Social Democratic party. The minority labeled the majority the minority and got away with it. Clever. There are many other examples of this in history such as the insistence on calling nazis and fascists right-wing when they are clearly left-wing products.

In our once great, still beloved, but evermore daft United States, precisely those who are not liberal, as in broad minded and generous in their attitudes towards others, have appropriated "liberal" as theirs. The political philosophy of this "liberalism" is one which portrays life as a series of problems that needs addressing by the state--the state guided and run, mind you, by the "well-educated liberal elite" produced by our increasingly decrepit "liberal" universities and informed by "liberal" Hollywood and "liberal" Big Media. Modern U.S. liberals are a variant of European social democrats who believe in a big state and mistrust the individual; the big difference being that US liberals have much more power in the world than their European co-religionists ever could hope. They advocate the "positivist" attitude so aptly summed up in the motto emblazoned on the national flag of Brazil, "Ordem e Progresso," so long, of course, as they are in charge of imposing the order and defining the progress. They take positivism's emphasis on rational thought and logic, and its opposition to superstition and fantasy, and turn it on its head into a "science-based" fantasy that somehow just so happens to lead to more power for them and their state. Global climate change is one stirling example of how liberals have taken a legitimate scientific-based concern over pollution, and turned it into a monumental hoax, known as Manmade Climate Change. That hoax somehow, just somehow ends up demanding more money and power for--guess who?--the liberals and their state. As we will discuss, this philosophy comprises followers who proclaim a great love for humanity while in practice exhibiting a great hatred for people.

Sorry for the long-winded intro, but it brings us to today's topic, for which I provide the following bumper sticker, "Liberals love humanity and hate people." Oh, and by the way, liberals will get you killed. Yes, killed. Modern liberalism kills people, and does so by the millions, all in the name of humanity, of course. It should have a warning label that asks you not to practice liberalism at home, or something along the lines of "I am a trained professional, do not attempt liberalism on your own."

Liberals hate all sorts of people but their special, most lethal hatred is reserved for the poor and the "uneducated." They kill the poor by the bushel, by the ton, by the hectare . . . they kill them at home and abroad. No poor person is safe from the lethal loving embrace of the liberals.

So many examples, it's hard to know where to begin. I don't pretend to provide an exhaustive account of liberal mayhem, just a glimpse at the tip of the iceberg. So, where do we start? How about with DDT? This extremely useful pesticide was virtually banned around the globe for decades because of the bogus writings of Rachel Carson, the lesbian biological mother of today's whacky environmental movement. The ban on DDT, ostensibly to save birds, puppies, and other wonderful warm things, resulted in the deaths of millions of poor persons around the globe from malaria and dengue, which came soaring back on the wings of now safe mosquitos. This tradition of sacrificing the poor on the altar of Gaia continues to this day. The insistence on the global warming hoax, long after the "science" has been shown to be false, perpetuates policies, e.g., ethanol in gasoline, opposition to domestic drilling and nuclear energy, that increases the cost of living, promotes food shortages, stifles employment, and, yes, leads to death. The opposition to cheap energy and food, the zoning restrictions in upperclass neighborhoods, all under the guise of protecting the environment, take direct aim at the lives and welfare of the poor. Liberals kill.

Liberal welfare policies create havoc throughout our society. What slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, and racial discrimination could not do, liberal polices have done, to wit, destroy the black family and turn millions of blacks into permanent wards of the state and of the liberal political machines that control most of our cities. Liberal immigration policies, beginning with the disastrous 1965 Kennedy-Johnson immigration law, insure a constant stream of poor third world immigrants, altering irrevocably the nature of our society and ensuring that the struggling black (and white) American poor cannot compete with the ultra-poor pouring in from Mexico, El Salvador, Bangladesh, and so on. Liberal minimum wage laws ensure the disappearance of the starter jobs, once a platform for the poor to spring out of poverty. All of these people, the old poor and the newly arriving poor, need, of course, social programs and more and more government help. The liberal political machine dispenses jobs and money, and the productive sectors face rising taxes, a labyrinth of regulations, and the constant presence of "helpful" government regulators and enforcers. Let the poverty and misery spread!

Liberal gun control policies also target the poor. The poor in our cities must live with the drug dealers, gang bangers, and the other hoods in the hood. The comfortable liberals live in secure high-rises, and tony suburbs well protected by overpaid and over equipped police and fire departments and expensive security firms. The poor must put up with the inability to defend themselves; they must allow themselves to be murdered in the name of ridding America of gun violence.

Likewise liberal education policies deny the poor the right to choose the schools their children will attend. Instead an alliance of politicians and teacher unions keeps the poor trapped in failing and unsafe schools, while the wealthy liberals, well, you know what they do, and it isn't to send their own kids to those schools.

The examples are endless. From the liberal refusal to allow us to become energy independent, the liberal refusal to see what Islam does everywhere it takes root, and the liberals' seemingly endless assault on the family, everywhere we look we see the death and destruction that modern liberalism brings to our shores and promotes overseas.

To speak out on this is to risk being labeled a racist and hate-monger. To fail to speak out, however, means being complicit to some of the greatest crimes on the planet: the crimes of the liberals.


The DiploMad is a retired Foreign Service Officer who blogs at The DiploMad 2.0.

WHEN A PICTURE IS WORTH A BILLION WORDS: The Unvanished Idiocy of the Anti-Fracking Crowd

Spotted over at Anthony Watts's jaint.

There’s been a lot of hullabaloo in the UK over the Balcombe fracking protests. WUWT reader Eric Worrall writes in with this comparison photo...

...Here is a tagged version of the same picture of all the plastic high tech synthetics used by anti fracking protestors in England, captured in a single photograph...

It really makes you wonder – do anti-fracking protestors think nylon tents, PVC groundsheets, and plastics grow on trees? No doubt the tents also contain high tech synthetic fibre sleeping bags, and gas powered camp cookers.

Do these hypocrites actually think about what sort of world they would have to endure, without the cheap hydrocarbons, and cheap plastic synthetics, the petroleum source of which they oppose?

And these are the same kooks that tell us humans are causing "global warming" (or is it "climate change" now, I forget) even though the Earth is cooling?

These people are such simpletons I'm amazed they remember to breathe on their own.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Two New, Humiliating Judicial Defeats for Obama Administration, in Remarkably Harsh Language

Guest post by Timothy H. Lee


“The President and federal agencies may not ignore statutory mandates or prohibitions merely because of policy disagreements with Congress.”

That rudimentary truth, familiar to any freshman political science major, should not be necessary instruction for a former professor of constitutional law like Barack Obama. The fact that it is necessary underscores the depth of lawlessness to which his administration has descended.

On a more optimistic note, however, two new judicial rebukes this week, notable for their harsh terms, show that he remains subject to some degree of adult supervision.

In the first decision, quoted in part above, the nation’s second-highest court commanded Obama’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission to cease “simply flouting the law” by refusing to rule on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository in Nevada. The governing 1983 statute mandates that the Commission “shall consider” applications and “issue a final decision approving or disapproving” within three years. Here, however, the application in question was filed in 2008, making it more than two years overdue.

That is no accident or innocent oversight, but rather deliberate delay in violation of federal law. Obama had promised during his campaign to stifle the project, so his appointees to the Commission just refused to take up the application.

Exacerbating matters, in 2011 the same D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had directed the Commission to complete the procedure post haste. “By its own admission,” however, “the Commission has no current intention of complying with the law.”

Accordingly, the Court issued a rare writ of mandamus, which amounts to an extraordinary order compelling performance of a ministerial act when all other judicial remedies have failed. In so doing, it felt compelled to address the broader issue of the Obama Administration’s habitual lawlessness:

“This case has serious implications for our constitutional structure. It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our decision today rests on the constitutional authority of Congress, and the respect that the Executive and the Judiciary properly owe to Congress in the circumstances here.”

In a second case this week, a federal court rejected a lawsuit by Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against a Dallas, Texas, employer that used criminal background checks in its hiring process.

Back in February, CFIF detailed a new EEOC memorandum informing employers that they may be sued for screening job applicants for criminal convictions. At that time, we detailed how over 90% of surveyed employers use criminal background checks, often at the specific instruction of their attorneys. After all, employers may be held liable for the violent or illegal acts of their employees against third parties or fellow employees. Moreover, background checks help prevent such things as theft, fraud or other misconduct against the employer itself.

Additionally, courts across the country have specifically ruled that employers are within their rights to refuse employment on the basis of criminal conviction. In fact, the EEOC itself uses criminal background checks.

Nevertheless, the EEOC announced to employers that, “criminal record exclusions have a disparate impact on race and national origin.”

Dismissing an EEOC lawsuit against Freeman Company, which employs approximately 30,000 people, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Titus was having none of it:

“The story of the present action has been that of a theory in search of facts to support it. But there are simply no facts here to support a theory of disparate impact resulting from any identified, specific practice of the Defendant.

"Indeed, any rational employer in the United States should pause to consider the implications of actions of this nature, brought based upon such inadequate data. By bringing actions of this nature, the EEOC has placed many employers in the ‘Hobson’s choice’ of ignoring criminal history and credit background, thus exposing themselves to potential liability for criminal and fraudulent acts committed by employees, on the one hand, or incurring the wrath of the EEOC for having utilized information deemed fundamental by most employers. Something more, far more, than what is relied upon by the EEOC in this case must be utilized to justify a disparate impact claim based upon criminal history and credit checks. To require less would be to condemn the use of common sense, and this is simply not what the discrimination laws of this country require.”

Of course, common sense and faithful execution of the nation’s laws have never been the Obama Administration’s North Star. From illegal “recess” appointments to Environmental Protection Agency overreach to ObamaCare revisions contrary to the law itself, this is an administration that considers itself above the law.

Alongside Obama’s plummeting approval ratings, this week’s judicial branch rebukes offer a rude rebuttal to that belief.


Via: Center For Individual Freedom.

THE CLIMATE LIARS: Why would anyone believe a single word out of their mouths?

A brilliant post by Pointman:

Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France during WWI, famously remarked after yet another military disaster that war is too important to be left to the generals. In an analogous fashion, when a branch of science is being used to justify the complete restructuring of the global economy, it’s no longer a scientific issue but a political one.

More importantly, it’s the ordinary person who’s being asked to finance initiatives, which will lower their standard of living and significantly increase their tax burden for the coming decades. If you’re the one actually doing the paying, you very definitely want a say, even if you’re not a rocket scientist. He who pays the piper, gets to call the tune.

So, if global warming is too important to be left to the scientists, how can the ordinary person arrive at a reasonable judgement as to its validity? We all have our own way of getting to understand something and personally being a from first principles type of person, asking basic questions about it has always been mine. When it comes to people, meaning the climate scientists in this particular instance, I find the most revealing questions to ask usually begin with why, so let’s take that approach. The seemingly simple but difficult trick is to ask the blindingly obvious questions.

Why is it that every one of the cockups and blunders we uncover in their papers always err towards a warmer global climate?

Why do they persistently withhold the data on which their conclusions are based?

Why do they, in their own words, hide behind Freedom of Information laws, as a reason to keep such data hidden?

Why do they, in their own words again, hide behind Non-disclosure Agreements, as a reason to keep the data hidden?

Why are they so vague about the exact methods used on the data to derive their results?

Why do all their computer climate models run hot?

Why have they consistently overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to CO2?

Why don’t they ever design experiments attempting to disprove their theories?

Why do the Climategate emails reveal their deep private doubts about the science, which they’ve publically reassured everyone was settled?

If the science was so solid, why’d one of their number feel they had to resort to identity theft to discredit the opposition?

Why are they telling each other to delete emails to circumvent Freedom of Information requests?

Why do they feel they’ve got to “redefine the peer review process” to prevent dissenting science papers being published?

Why do they need to get science journal editors removed from their jobs because they dared to publish a dissenting paper?

Why, after being the beneficiary of billions of dollars of research funding in the last two decades, haven’t they by now proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt?

Why is anyone who simply questions the science being equated with a holocaust denier?

The list goes on and on and on.

Global warming is a massive fraud orchestrated by crony profiteers like Al Gore and One-World Government Marxists like -- well, his name rhymes with Robama.

Global warming is a massive fraud designed to redistribute wealth from you to them.

Global warming is a massive fraud, the scale of which has never before been seen on Earth.


Hat tip: James Delingpole.

FROM THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU SOLYNDRA: More Laughable Lies and Phony Numbers for a Failed Economy

Guest post by Investors Business Daily


Energy Policy: The president falsely claims that the jobs created by the pipeline from Canada would be but a "blip relative to the need," ignoring his own State Department and the unions that support him.

At the rate President Obama is going, he may claim that building the Keystone XL pipeline will actually cost jobs. In an interview with the New York Times last Saturday, he argued that the best estimate is 2,000 initial construction jobs followed by no more than an additional 100 jobs, a mere "blip."

The newspaper's transcript of the interview showed Obama chuckling dismissively as he made his point.

Then on Tuesday, in a jobs speech in Chattanooga, the president ratcheted that number downward. "They keep on talking about this — an oil pipeline coming down from Canada that's estimated to create about 50 permanent jobs. That's not a jobs plan."

No, Mr. President, it's part of a plan to boost an economy that will create private-sector jobs, as your own State Department has told you.

After five years of review and many studies, the State Department found that "including direct, indirect and induced effects, the proposed (Keystone) project would potentially support approximately 42,100 average annual jobs across the United States over a one- to two-year construction period."

Granted, these are not permanent jobs. But the number is a lot bigger than the 2,000 Obama claimed on Saturday.

The southern leg of the project, from Cushing, Okla., to the Gulf of Mexico, which didn't need the president's or the State Department's approval, has already created 4,000 jobs as workers lay and align the 425-mile stretch of pipeline, according to an Associated Press report.

Yes, these too are temporary jobs, but there will be more permanent positions as well. The Canadian Energy Research Institute predicts that Keystone XL will create 117,000 new U.S. jobs over the next 15 years due to oil sands development linked to the project. Hardly a "blip."

It's not unreasonable to conclude that with extensive North American resources being transported, developed and refined, thousands of jobs, not only in the industries directly related but in the industries that feed, clothe and support all these new workers and a growing economy, will be created.

How many exactly, we don't know, but the number is higher than 50 and certainly larger than the permanent jobs created at solar panel maker Solyndra, which was zero.

Where did the president's pitiful estimates of 50 come from? In citing that number, he was likely referring to a State Department finding that — after the pipeline is built — it would take roughly 50 people to maintain it.
The figure ignores the 42,100 construction jobs over a two-year period or the hundreds of thousands created through oil sands development and what economists call the "ripple effect."

As Sean McGarvey, president of the Building and Construction Trades Department at AFL-CIO, said at a pro-Keystone rally just down from the White House on April 24:

"The interstate highway system was a temporary job; Mount Rushmore was a temporary job. If they knew anything about the construction industry they'd understand that we work ourselves out of jobs and we go from job to job to job."

McGarvey added: "It's about jobs — that's what it's about — put Americans back to work again in an industry that has a 14.7% unemployment rate. It's good for our economy, it's good for our country; it's good for our energy independence and it's good for working men and women in the building trades."

Keystone is about jobs, Mr. President — lots of them.


Read More At Investor's Business Daily

The High Price of Ignorance

Guest post by Daniel Greenfield


It's an iron law of nature as certain as the one about an angel getting its wings every time a bell rings or a snowstorm blanketing the area every time Al Gore comes to town to remind the carbon puffing infidels about Global Warming; every time Obama gives a speech, a thousand businesses go out of business.

On July 24th, to celebrate Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Day, Obama delivered yet another economic speech in which he castigated Republicans in Congress for the sequester that he proposed, promised big economic benefits for the entire country from Green Energy and Illegal Immigration and promised to spend every one of his remaining days trying to help working people; at least those days when he isn't on the golf course, on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard or delivering useless speeches.

An Obama speech is a familiar quality that even the scribblers whose limbs once tingled at the touch of the teleprompter have developed a callous contempt for its reflexively dishonest "Let me be clears" and the infinite "I's" that roll off its assembly line speechmakers.

An economics speech, a creature that Barack Obama has been unleashing from his political zoo on the taxpayers, lawmakers and layabouts since his post-election days in 2008 of pretending to be president complete with an imaginary seal with the motto "Vero Possumus” (which can be translated very loosely as "God Help Us All"), is an entirely familiar breed.

It's an FDR-on-crack assemblage of crackpot social plans masquerading as economic plans and homey testaments to American exceptionalism wrapped around bankrupt Euro ideas about how to run a country into the ground. And in the year 2013, the whole thing smells like last year's leftovers.

There are the warnings about all the old bridges threatening to fall down and kill the trolls living under them. Despite a second term in office, a stimulus plan, a plan to stimulate the stimulus plan and years of assorted pork, there are apparently now more Damocles bridges in the land than there ever were before.

In 2009, Obama promised to fix all the crumbling roads and bridges with a $787 billion stimulus plan full of "shovel-ready jobs". Two years later he joked to the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, led by GE CEO Jeff Immelt, whose company is the 15th biggest government contractor, that the shovel-ready jobs were not shovel-ready. It would have been nice to know that before we spent the $787 billion, but maybe that's why all the old bridges keep threatening to fall down.

And then there are the promises that we can fix all our problems with a Green Energy revolution that drives up electricity rates for everyone in order to buy windmills and solar panels from China. The Green Energy revolution has done a lot for Red China's middle class while further eviscerating the standard of living for American middle class families who are just trying to keep the lights on.

Naturally no Obama speech on the economy would be complete without urging us to invest more in education in order to get our hands on tomorrow's jobs. "If you think education is expensive," Obama said, borrowing his line from a bumper sticker, "wait until you see how much ignorance costs in the 21st century."

But we don't have to choose. As Detroit shows us, we can have both. Detroit has 5,000 teachers to 88,000 students. Its biggest challenge has been trying to win back another 5,000 students who escaped to charter schools to justify not laying off all the extra teachers. Its billion dollar school budget is all the more shocking in a city that is deep in debt and suffers from a 47 percent illiteracy rate.

The education system fosters incredibly expensive ignorance. And that ignorance can not only be found in public schools in Detroit's ghettos, but in the Ivy League alma maters of Obama and his financial advisers.

Obama's 6 trillion dollar debt is a testament to the high price of ignorance. As are all of his economic speeches calling for more Green Energy, more education and more taxes to solve all of our ills. In his latest speech, he vowed that making "preschool available to every four year-old in America" would make America competitive in the "ocean of tomorrows" and "a sky of tomorrows".

A thinking man must wonder how this backward, racist, soda-swilling country of ours ever got anything done without shoving every four-year-old in America into a "high quality preschool" presided over by the fired public school teachers of Detroit. Incredibly enough we managed to get to the moon, which was a lot closer to tomorrow than we have ever gotten from an Obama speech.

Is America's competitiveness really impeded by the lack of universal preschools? Or is it something bigger that's in the way? Could we have saved Detroit with more preschools and Green Energy?

About the only thing in Obama's entire 5,000 word speech that was at all interesting was in its opening as he pivoted from discussing the loss of middle class jobs to inveighing against the income inequality of the 1 percent. It was a convenient dodge that his average supporter was incapable of noticing, but it's at the heart of what's wrong with Obama's economic logic.

Income inequality is not at all the same thing as lost jobs. It's not that the two aren't connected. One reason for income inequality is because many wealthier Americans are profiting from offshore labor. The natural internal economic growth that would be happening here has instead been outsourced to China where the middle class is growing at an impressive rate.

Obama's speech however stayed in familiar class warfare territory. Its implication was that if the wealthy were made to pay their fair share, the lost manufacturing jobs would somehow come back. The economic logic of that is absurd. Even if we assume that the wealthy are the villains of the piece, taxing them at Hollandaise rates seems as likely to bring back the jobs as constructing cardboard factories in a cargo cult ceremony to summon the spirits of the lost jobs would.

But Obama, like most of his Socialist brethren, isn't really interested in repairing the broken relationships of the economy. The logic running through his Bolivarian speech is that forcing the rich, or at least those of their class who haven't written their timely checks to Organizing for America, to pay more will allow the government to create more jobs.

The only thing wrong with that notion is that trying to create more jobs through higher taxes is like trying to save the Titanic by drilling more holes in its hull. It doesn't work for the same reason that perpetual motion machines don't work. Any process that promises to create more energy than is put into it is doomed.

But Obama's perpetual motion tax machine isn't even close to being sensible. If other liberals at least made an effort at spray painting the shoebox black and making "vroom, vroom" noises while it spins, there isn't even any serious effort at deception here.

Obama isn't even bothering to promise to create jobs by creating more jobs. Instead all he's offering are the same empty social welfare promises that more social services, more preschools, more free internet, more Green Energy, more ObamaCare, will turn the economy around, while shamelessly claiming that it has already done as much.

There are still the occasional nods to all the nation's broken bridges that are just about to fall down, but mostly it's the same empty Socialism that proposes to tax a country to death because it's right and just to do so.

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin wrote to a French correspondent around the time that the United States Constitution took effect. Some two centuries later, government has combined death and taxes into one by taxing the economy to death.

Taxing economies to death is one thing that we have in common with the French. President Hollande began his disastrous term in office with a proposed 75% tax rate. The move sent some of the country's most prominent citizens scrambling for the exits, while the newspapers of the left screamed hysterically for their heads like a pack of cut-rate Robespierres.

France's move to tax its economy to death hit a snag when its budget minister, a member of the Socialist Party in good standing, who was supposed to lead the crusade to make the rich pay their fair 75 percent share admitted to hiding some $790,000 in a secret Swiss bank account. Then he was caught having tried to move another $19 million into a Swiss bank around the time that he was appointed Vice-President of the Socialist Group in the French National Assembly. The only thing that would have made the scene more ridiculous is if the group had kept its old name of Socialists, Radicals, Citizens and the Assorted Left.

Shameless hypocrisy and corruption is another thing that we have in common with France. And every other government on earth.

Obama has squandered money like Louis XVI and then pledged to lead a revolution to find where the rest of the money is. Surrounded by some of the most corrupt billionaires in the country, whose think-tanks help write the policy proposals that the teleprompter feeds into his brain, he inveighs against the 1 percent. And he tops it all off by claiming his disasters as successes.

Death and taxes are the only certain thing in America. But not in Detroit, where half the property owners simply chose not to pay them/ In Egypt, much of the country doesn't pay taxes. It is not difficult to imagine an America in which everyone but a handful of corporations no longer pays taxes. This libertarian paradise will be achieved not through reforms, but through social breakdown.

Obama taxes Americans. He taxes their incomes, their lifebloods and their patience. He has put his entire faith in taxes, in grubbing up enough money to serve as collateral for his latest scheme. And the road that his paradise of amnesty for illegal aliens, Green Energy for electric poverty and more government employees to administer the whole mess leads to is Detroit. Or Egypt.

Pick one. It doesn't really matter..

What escapes Obama, even as he delivers another meandering speech, is that he isn't really fooling anyone. At least not in the way he thinks. Not even most of his media allies really believe that any plan he proposes will really work. They evaluate it only based on its conformity to their ideology.

Most polls show that Americans believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction. They don't believe that Obama can or will fix anything. His bleatings about broken bridges, high tech schools and all the other nonsense that he has been relentlessly telepromptering since 2008 falls on deaf ears. What they believe is that he is well-meaning. That is why they voted for him. In the finest traditions of affirmative action, they tried to give him a second chance, not because they believed that he would succeed, but because he seemed like such a nice guy.

Obama does not occupy the White House because the nation believes in him, but because it believes in itself; in its own decency, its own sense of fair play and its own eagerness to show that it is on the side of the better angels. He has been given a chance to destroy America by an America that believes in being kind to its destroyers.

All Obama has to offer to America is a promise that consolidating government power through wealth redistribution will build the better country that he hasn't managed to build yet. While Americans go on believing in America, Obama believes only in death and taxes.


Daniel Greenfield blogs at Sultan Knish.

Hysterical, Hyperbolic Leftist Media Falls for the Old "North Pole is Melting" Gag Again

As if the tools in Praetorian Media haven't been embarrassed enough over the past four-plus years -- having to cover for their increasingly scandal-ridden failure in the White House -- their latest gaffe really is hilariously unhinged.

Al Gore’s “Reality Minions” think the North Pole is melting – except that’s NOT a photo of the North Pole

...It isn’t very hard to catch Al Gore and his Climate Reality project followers in ridiculous claims that don’t hold up. For example there was his statement on national television where he claimed the temperature of the interior of the Earth was “millions of degrees” and then there is his “Climate 101″ video that failed so they had to fake the results in post production. None of his followers call him out on such things, so it isn’t a surprise to find that they think this photo proves the North Pole is melting, far worse than before...

...Only one problem: that picture wasn’t take at the North Pole, it was taken over 300 miles away. 

You see while they were busy lecturing the faithful, they forgot the one teensy-eeensy little detail about the source of this photo. It is from camera on top of the sea ice, and sea ice isn’t static, it moves. In fact according to the University of Washington who manages and tracks  these floating cameras and weather stations, while they started out near the North Pole, they aren’t anywhere close to it now. See the map:

Oh, my. Well that certainly is embarrassing. But the hapless Leftists didn't just stop there.

That was enough to spur the sans-factually emotive Huffington Post into action with a before and after comparator:

...Of course, like the Gore Reality Bots, all of these “journalists” also missed the simple fact that the photo was taken hundreds of miles away where the buoy had drifted to. They could easily check this themselves with about 30 seconds of work, visiting the source for the photo here...

...And as of today the “North Pole melt crisis” seems to be over...

...And, of course, photos actually taken at the North Pole by the US navy show that such open water in a regular occurrence in the past:

If it wasn't for global warming, maybe the kooks at HuffPo would have some ice to put on that.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Virginia Gubernatorial Candidate Terry McAuliffe, Clinton family, and Obama DHS tied to "Cash-for-Visas" Scandal

Scandal Fatigue: Because the hits just keep on coming with the Obama administration, this time tarring the DHS with another scandal that would have destroyed a Republican presidency.

Emails between Alejandro Mayorkas and attorneys working for GreenTech Automotive show the company pressed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director to speed processing of 81 investor applications in a federal “cash-for-visas” program after each invested at least $500,000 in the hybrid car company...

...One of the visas sought by Gulf Coast is for an official with a Chinese telecommunications firm that has been investigated by the House Intelligence Committee over claims it has close ties with Chinese intelligence, NBC News reported...

...The GreenTech controversy is magnified because of its many political connections to the federal government. It’s owned by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, who announced his resignation as company chairman in April amidst an intense investigation by Watchdog. The company’s fundraising arm, Gulf Coast, is headed by Bill Clinton’s brother-in-law Anthony Rodham...

As for McAuliffe's "GreenTech"? You read my mind: it appears to be another version of Solyndra, funneling taxpayer dollars into the pockets of Democrats and their campaigns.

A former GreenTech employee described the firm as, "not a real company."

People of Virginia: vote for Terry McAuliffe for governor at your own economic peril.

Thank the Eco-tards' rejection of Keystone XL for environmental catastrophes like Lac Mégantic

Next time you see one of the climate kooks opposed to Keystone XL, be sure to thank them for the train derailment and explosion in Quebec that has resulted in an environmental disaster.

Five bodies have been found and about 40 people are still unaccounted for in the Saturday morning derailment of a runaway train that may have reached speed of up to 90 kilometres an hour.

Hampered by heat from the charred tankers, search crews hoped to expand their small safety zone over the course of the day and begin what could be a long process of examination and identification that could finally bring anguished families some closure.

A few of the nearly 2,000 people evacuated have been allowed back home but the entire town remains under a “boil water” order from the Quebec environment ministry...

...Booms on the Chaudière were installed to hold back some of the ocean of oil that gushed from exploding tankers. Each tanker on the 72-car freight train was carrying 100 tons of crude oil, the ministry said.

Yes: the train was carrying oil. Walter Russell Mead explains the ramifications of the Obama administration's refusal to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

...crashes like this are why greens should be supporting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Canada has a lot of oil. Much of that is trapped in Alberta’s oil sands, and it is of a particularly heavy and dirty-burning variety. But Canada does not have a lot of oil infrastructure. It lacks the pipelines and the refineries needed to take advantage of its bounty.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would solve this problem by bringing Canadian oil down to American refineries along the Gulf Coast. Prominent greens like James Hanson and Bill McKibben see the approval of this pipeline as “game over” for the climate, due to the amount of greenhouse gas this oil would emit when burned.

Here’s why they’re wrong: that oil is coming out of the ground whether the pipeline is built or not... lacking any proper pipeline infrastructure, companies are shipping oil by train. And not in trickles, either: Canada’s rail shipments of oil have increased by 28,000 percent since 2009.

...If greens had any sense, they would be clamoring for the Obama administration to approve [Keystone XL]. The oil is coming out whether the pipeline is built or not. At this point, it’s about minimizing the risk of events like the Lac Megantic accident.

Let me repeat for the slow-to-learn Democrat readers among us: that oil is coming out of the ground whether the pipeline is built or not. Which would make refusal to approve said pipeline not only economically suicidal but also environmentally irresponsible.

GOOD NEWS: President Obama Wants Control of Your Appliances

Guest post by Investors Business Daily


Regulation: No longer the stuff of science fiction, a little-noticed change in energy-efficiency requirements for appliances could lead to government controlling the power used in your home and how you set your thermostat.

In a seemingly innocuous revision of its Energy Star efficiency requirements announced June 27, the Environmental Protection Agency included an "optional" requirement for a "smart-grid" connection for customers to electronically connect their refrigerators or freezers with a utility provider.

The feature lets the utility provider regulate the appliances' power consumption, "including curtailing operations during more expensive peak-demand times."

So far, manufacturers are not required to include the feature, only "encouraged," and consumers must still give permission to turn it on. But with the Obama administration's renewed focus on fighting mythical climate change, we expect it to become mandatory to save the planet from the perils of keeping your beer too cold.

"Manufacturers that build in and certify optional 'connected features' will earn a credit towards meeting the Energy Star efficiency requirements," according to an EPA email to CNSNews.com.

We are both intrigued and bothered by the notion that a utility company, the regulated energy sock-puppet of government, could and probably will have the power to regulate the power we use and how we use it, as long as we're paying our electricity bills, even to the point of turning these devices and appliances off at will.

We're reminded that former EPA director Carol Browner was a big fan of the smart grid and its potential ability to monitor and control power usage down to the thermostat in your home.

"Eventually," she told U.S. News & World Report in 2009, "we can get to a system when an electric company will be able to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air-conditioner won't operate at its peak."

The same year, President Obama, who had won election on a pledge to "fundamentally transform America," signed a stimulus bill to "transform the way we use energy" with a smart grid that would abandon "a grid of lines and wires that dates back to Thomas Edison — a grid that can't support the demands of clean energy."

To make sure we respond properly to the "demands of clean energy," Obama said this "investment will place Smart Meters in homes to make our energy bills lower, make outages less likely and make it easier to use clean energy." It'll also make it easier to monitor and control our energy use.

So if one day you keep your house too cool or your beer too cold and the dials start moving, don't be surprised. Its just a campaign promise being kept.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

HIGH-LARIOUS: Man With $7 Million Yacht Lectures India on Carbon Emissions, Links Them to Deadly Floods

There's hypocrisy, there's flaming hypocrisy, and then there's John Kerry.

After expressing his condolences to the flood victims, Kerry said in a speech in New Delhi on Sunday night that the U.S. had donated $150,000 to the flood relief effort — “not the highest sum in the world,” he admitted, but “a beginning.” He went on to warn India not to dismiss the deadly intensity of the floods as a one-off tragedy. “Perhaps Mother Nature in her own way is telling us to heed some warnings,” Kerry said before a packed auditorium. “Today the science of climate change is screaming at us for action.”

I'll treat global warming climate change like a planetary emergency, when the mega-wealthy green profiteers like Al Gore and John Kerry treat it like a planetary emergency.

You know, when they sell their immense yachts and and multiple mansions.

Oh, and here's an idea. How about they use Skype rather than jet-setting around the world?

And pay their taxes to boot?


Via: Just the Tip.

IT'S COME TO THIS: Al Gore Says That Warmal Colding Turned the Earth Upside Down!

Jonah Goldberg, at the G-File, relays the most horrifying climate news I've come across since the motion picture The Day After Tomorrow:

In 1998, the Washington Post ran a picture of Earth from space. I can't remember why, but I think it was a picture from the international space station.

The picture infuriated then-vice president [Al] Gore. He called the Post's executive editor to tip him off about the "error."

"I decided I just had to call because you've printed a picture of the Earth upside-down."

It didn't occur to Gore that, from space, there is no upside down.

Really.

Democrat Pride: And Al Gore is the intellectual giant upon whom Obama relies to guide America's industrial and regulatory policies.

Oh, and this just in: according to Vermont's self-professed Socialist-cum-Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders, weather is the greatest planetary crisis that we face.

Every summer the planet gets warmer and every winter the planet cools. It's called "the seasons".

The Earth lies within the heliosphere. That is, within the atmosphere of the sun. And all of the warmal colding religionists have completely omitted the sun from their computerized models.

Yes, really.

Discovery of Endangered Slug Halts Inspector General From Dismantling EPA "Man-Caves"

Washington, DC (Spackle News Network) - Citing discovery of an endangered slug, EPA auditors halted efforts to dismantle numerous "man caves" found hidden in agency facilities nationwide.

Last month EPA's inspector general reported it had found secret rooms filled with televisions, couches, video-game consoles, and other leisure gear. “The warehouse contained multiple unauthorized and hidden personal spaces created by and for the workers that included televisions, refrigerators, radios, microwaves, chairs and couches,” the IG report said. “These spaces contained personal items, including photos, pin ups, calendars, clothing, books, magazines and videos.”

After a series of more thorough searches, however, EPA auditors also discovered a species of endangered slug living in the facilities. EPA administrators quickly filed restraining orders with the courts to prevent auditors from dismantling the man-caves.

"If we can only save one slug," said EPA Chief Gina McCarthy, "it will have been worth it. The so-called man-caves, while representing a waste of millions of taxpayer dollars, really pale in comparison to the life of the 'Windsor Slug'."

Yesterday President Obama indicated his intent to sign an executive order redirecting $1 billion to fund a study of the unique mating habits of the species. All operations at the facilities have been halted to prepare for the study.


Hat tip: Flyboys.

President Obama Declares War on Electricity

Today's declaration by President Obama that he would bypass Congress in enacting even more onerous regulations on power plants is, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, "Undemocratic, Bordering On Authoritarian."

President Obama’s climate agenda released today is being done without public or congressional support and is being pursued in this way because he knows the peoples’ elected representatives would never approve these plans, say experts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“Obama’s all-pain, no-gain agenda will cost jobs, drive up prices and have little effect on global emissions,” said Myron Ebell, director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment. “It is undemocratic, bordering on authoritarian.

“It confirms the Obama administration’s all-out war on coal, calls for more negotiations on a treaty the Senate will never ratify and displays an alarming lack of knowledge about the state of climate science. Congress should move immediately to defund as much of this as possible.”

... “He doesn’t want to go through elected officials because he knows if he put this plan in a bill and submitted it to Congress, it would be dead on arrival,” said Marlo Lewis, senior fellow in CEI’s Center for Energy and the Environment... all three elements of the president’s plan should be opposed. “Renewable energy is costly, intermittent and unreliable,” Lewis said. “If it weren’t a bad buy for consumers, Congress would not need to subsidize it in perpetuity, and 30 states and the District of Columbia would not need to mandate its use.”

...But the administration’s proposed CO2 emission limits for existing power plants pose “the biggest risk to consumer welfare and the economy,” Lewis said.

Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at CEI and author of the 2012 “The Liberal War on Transparency,” research for which turned up the secret “Richard Windsor” email address of former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, said the proposal – which would drive a stake through coal-fired power plants nationwide – should come as no surprise...

“He warned us in the now-famous YouTube video he would shutter all existing coal-fired power plants and “bankrupt” anyone who tried to build a new one – even though they provide 40 percent of our electricity and much of our competitive advantage.”

Seeing as how coal remains the largest single source of electrical power in the United States, Obama's Castro-like declaration means just one thing.

He has declared war on electricity and, therefore, the livelihood of each and every American.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

BREAKING: Neanderthals Operated Coal-Fired Plants 120,000 Years Ago

I can only surmise that Neanderthals operated coal-fired power plants 120,000 years ago because the eco-Marxists keep telling us that cancer is caused by burning fossil fuels like coal. I wonder how the climatards -- which is the term they prefer to be called, I hear -- explain this report.

World’s Oldest Cancer Found in Bone of 120,000 Year-Old Neanderthal

The world's oldest known human tumour has been found in the rib bone of a Neanderthal who lived more than 120,000 years ago.

The bone was evacuated from a site in Krapina, Croatia more than 100 years ago and has been found to have contracted the fibrous dysplasia tumour, a cancer which is common among modern-day humans...

...Researchers said it is rare to discover evidence of cancer in the prehistoric population as they were not exposed to toxins, pollution, radiation and unhealthy diets over a long period of time which has been seen to cause cancer in today's humans.

Fibrous dysplasia in modern-day humans is the most frequent of the bone-tumours, but Frayer adds: "This case shows that Neanderthals, living in an unpolluted environment, were susceptible to the same kind of cancer as living humans."

Well, let's not let evidence, facts, history, logic and reason stop the de-industrialization of America. The overstuffed crook who uses the alias Richard Windsor needs to keep plenty of food on her table.


Hat tip: BadBlue Tech News.

CAPTION CONTEST: The Official Portrait of Richard Windsor, I mean Lisa Jackson, Which Only Cost You $40,000

Courtesy of Sean Hackbarth, who writes:

The EPA spent 40,000 of our tax dollars on this oil painting...


Begin...

Matt offers: "Thanks to Climosil, I feel fresher than ever."

BUT HE'S NOT BITTER: By conceding in 2000, Al Gore says he averted a "violent revolution"

Al Gore may have a gift for grift, but he is an exceedingly dimwitted individual when it comes to law and the Constitution.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV from the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, former Vice President Al Gore claims American democracy has been "hacked." Gore also opined on former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently commenting that she regretted her decision in Bush v. Gore.

"[America] has been hacked. That is a computer term when the operating system of a computer is taken over and the computer does things the owner does not want it to. That is what has been happening to American democracy. You have 90% of the people in favor of background checks for gun purchases [sic] and the congress is incapable of doing what the American people want.

They have not been able to regulate these phony baloney financial derivatives that caused the financial crisis [sic]. They voted to invade Iraq even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Unfortunately there are a lot of examples. They can't pass a budget. I can't keep the country from facing financial danger and the main reason is simple, the influence of the money is at un-healthy levels..."

While addressing Bush v. Gore, the former Vice President said "there is no intermediate step between a final Supreme Court decision and a violent revolution."

"I did not know she was going to say it. I made the decision in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision 12 years ago, to respect the rule of law. I strongly disagreed with their opinion, said so, but the rule of law is the bedrock of American democracy. There is no intermediate step between a final Supreme Court decision and a violent revolution. what was best for the country, the answer was very simple, to respect the rule of law and avoid undermining it and dragging the court into a partisan squabble where the outcome would not change in any case. So I am going to stand by my decision to respect the judiciary," Gore said.

Violent Revolution? Pot-smoking hippies vs. Bible-thumping, gun-owning bitter clingers? Gee, who would I put my money on?

As Constitutional attorney Mark R. Levin has patiently explained -- repeatedly -- once Governor Jeb Bush certified the names of the electors, there was no way Al Gore could "win" the election. Not the Florida legislature, not the Florida Supreme Court, and not even the U.S. Supreme Court could change the Constitution's process.

Gore could have challenged the election of George W. Bush in court post facto, but only after Bush had won the election.


Hat tip: BadBlue News Service.

Old People Just Don't Get the 'Green' Thing [Papa B]

Papa B:

In the queue at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment. The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Papa B adds, "Remember: don't make old people mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off."


Related: How did we survive?.