Boxer, Kerry Set to Introduce Climate Bill in Senate

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN of ClimateWire

Published: September 28, 2009

Ending some nine months of closed-door deliberations, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) will release global warming legislation Wednesday that they hope will be the vehicle for broader Senate negotiations and an eventual conference with the House.

The bill's authors said last week that they expect to start hearings early next month on the bill, with a markup in Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee to follow soon thereafter. They also acknowledged that their legislation is just a "starting point" in a bid to win over moderate and conservative Democrats, as well as Republicans.

"I hope what we've done is constructive and well-received," Kerry, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Thursday. "I have no pretensions, and neither does Barbara, that this will be the final product. It is a starting point, a commitment, full-fledged, across party lines to do what we need to do to protect the planet for the next century."

The Boxer-Kerry bill will build in large part off H.R. 2454 (pdf), legislation approved in June by the House following several marathon months of negotiations that involved lawmakers representing coastal and industry-heavy districts. Exactly what is the same in the two bills remains to be seen. As for differences, Senate Democratic aides say they expect the legislation to divert from the House bill's 17 percent emissions target for 2020 and go with an even more aggressive 20 percent limit. The bill also will stay silent on exactly how the Senate should divide up emission allowances.

At least five other Senate committees are also expected to contribute to the climate debate. The Foreign Relations and Agriculture committees are preparing language without convening a markup.

Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he will hold votes on his pieces of the global warming bill. And the same goes for Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who last week told reporters that provisions on international trade and the allocation of emission allowances would be marked up provided Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says the bill is "clearly moving."

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) has already approved legislation (S. 1462 (pdf)) out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that includes a nationwide renewable electricity standard and a raft of other energy incentives, including a provision that could bring oil and gas rigs closer to Florida's Gulf Coast. Bingaman is also planning a hearing Thursday on several competing cost estimates associated with the House-passed climate bill. The session, which was postponed once earlier this month, now gives senators an early public forum to sound off on the Boxer-Kerry bill.

Already last week, several Democratic senators working outside of the Boxer-Kerry camp said their ideas would be melded into the legislation at a later date. "It's going to need a lot of work," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Brown said he did not expect the Boxer-Kerry bill to include language adopted in the House that tries to assist energy-intensive manufacturing industries, including steel, pulp and paper and cement.

"My understanding is they did not include the House language on manufacturing," Brown added. "But I've been talking to them about it. They are very open to it. They are in no way dismissive."

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said she also does not think her concerns will be addressed in the initial draft from Boxer and Kerry. That means further efforts on issues related to agriculture, offsets and energy intensive industries.

"We will have to take a look at the language and then determine it from there," Stabenow said.

Kerry last week sought to change the vernacular surrounding the climate bill and sell its concepts more broadly, insisting it is not a "cap and trade" proposal but a "pollution reduction" bill. "I don't know what 'cap and trade' means. I don't think the average American does," Kerry said. "This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it's a pollution reduction bill" (E&E Daily, Sept. 25).

But a leading GOP opponent to the Senate climate effort quickly pushed back on the Democrat's strategy.

"No matter the semantic games employed, or the extent to which Democrats wish to hide the truth from the American people, cap and trade will mean more job losses, more pain at the pump, and higher food and electricity prices for consumers," said EPW Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.)."

Both Brown and Stabenow said they would welcome the release of the Senate bill even though it will give critics something tangible to target.

"It always does," Brown said. "There is always something to shoot at. But I think it is the right step, and then we start working to improve it."

Senate Democratic leaders, including Reid and Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), have said that they do not know if there will be enough time to get to the climate bill on the floor this year. But Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), one of the lead authors of the House bill, said that he is not giving up yet.

"At this stage in the House no one was predicting we could be successful," Markey told reporters. The lawmaker said he expected the Senate to closely follow the House bill's outlines, especially "once people sit down and begin to understand we have dealt with the major interests in the country.

Schedule: The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing is Thursday, Oct. 1, at 9:45 a.m. in 366 Dirksen.

Witnesses: Douglas Elmendorf, director, CBO; Richard Newell, administrator, EIA; Larry Parker, specialist in energy and environmental policy, Congressional Research Service; and Reid Harvey, chief, climate economics branch, climate change division, U.S. EPA.

Reporters Allison Winter and Katherine Ling contributed.

Copyright 2009 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

September 29, 2009

Europe Socialists Suffer Despite Capitalism’s Woes

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.

It is not that the left is irrelevant — it often represents the only viable opposition to established governments, and so benefits, as in the United States, from the normal cycle of electoral politics.

In Portugal, the governing Socialists won re-election on Sunday, but lost an absolute parliamentary majority. In Spain, the Socialists still get credit for opposing both Franco and the Iraq war. In Germany, the broad left, including the Greens, has a structural majority in Parliament, but the Social Democrats, in postelection crisis, must contemplate allying with the hard left, Die Linke, which has roots in the old East German Communist Party.

Part of the problem is the “wall in the head” between East and West Germans. While the Christian Democrats moved smoothly eastward, the Social Democrats of the West never joined with the Communists. “The two Germanys, one Socialist, one Communist — two souls — never really merged,” said Giovanni Sartori, a professor emeritus at Columbia University. “It explains why the S.P.D., which was always the major Socialist party in Europe, cannot really coalesce.”

The situation in France is even worse for the left. Asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: “No — it is already dead. No one, or nearly no one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.” While he was accused of exaggerating, given that the party is the largest in opposition and remains popular in local government, his words struck home.

The Socialist Party, with a long revolutionary tradition and weakening ties to a diminishing working class, is riven by personal rivalries. The party last won the presidency in 1988, and in 2007, Ségolène Royal lost the presidency to Mr. Sarkozy by 6.1 percent, a large margin.

With a reputation for flakiness, Ms. Royal narrowly lost the party leadership election last year to a more doctrinaire Socialist, Martine Aubry, by 102 votes out of 135,000. The ensuing allegations of fraud further chilled their relations.

While Ms. Royal would like to move the Socialists to the center and explore a more formal coalition with the Greens and the Democratic Movement of François Bayrou, Ms. Aubry fears diluting the party. She is both famous and infamous for achieving the 35-hour workweek in the last Socialist government.

The French Socialist Party “is trapped in a hopeless contradiction,” said Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. It espouses a radical platform it cannot deliver; the result leaves space for parties to its left that can take as much as 15 percent of the vote.

The party, at its summer retreat last month at La Rochelle, a coastal resort, still talked of “comrades” and “party militants.” Its seminars included “Internationalism at Globalized Capitalism’s Hour of Crisis.”

But its infighting has drawn ridicule. Mr. Sarkozy told his party this month that he sent “a big thank-you” to Ms. Royal, “who is helping me a lot,” and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a prominent European Green politician, said “everyone has cheated” in the Socialist Party and accused Ms. Royal of acting like “an outraged young girl.”

The internecine squabbling in France and elsewhere has done little to position Socialist parties to answer the question of the moment: how to preserve the welfare state amid slower growth and rising deficits. The Socialists have, in this contest, become conservatives, fighting to preserve systems that voters think need to be improved, though not abandoned.

“The Socialists can’t adapt to the loss of their basic electorate, and with globalism, the welfare state can no longer exist in the same way,” Professor Sartori said.

Enrico Letta, 43, is one of the hopes of Italy’s left, currently in disarray in the face of Silvio Berlusconi’s nationalist populism. “We have to understand that Socialism is an answer of the last century,” Mr. Letta said. “We need to build a center-left that is pragmatic, that provides an attractive alternative, and not just an opposition.”

Mr. Letta argues that Socialist policies will have to be transmuted into a more fluid form to allow an alliance with center, liberal and green parties that won’t be called “Socialist.”

Mr. Winock, the historian, said, “I think the left and Socialism in Europe still have work to do; they have a raison d’être, and they will have to rely more on environment issues.” Combined with continuing efforts to reduce income disparity, he said, “going green” may give the left more life.

Mr. Judt argues that European Socialists need a new message — how to reform capitalism, “recognizing the centrality of economic interest while displacing it from its throne as the only way of talking about politics.”

European Socialists need “to think a lot harder about what the state can and can’t do in the 21st century,” he said.

Not an easy syllabus. But without that kind of reform, Mr. Judt said, “I don’t think Socialism in Europe has a future; and given that it is a core constitutive part of the European democratic consensus, that’s bad news.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Michelle Malkin

Why parents don’t trust the Educator-in-Chief and his comrades

By Michelle Malkin • September 4, 2009 10:00 AM

My column takes another swing at all the president’s radical education men. For more background on Commie Michael Klonsky, see Andrew McCarthy’s report from last October here. I mentioned some of the activists in the White House Teaching Fellowship program here. Don’t forget your Hall Pass on That. The guys at The Nose on Your Face have cooked up some Junior Czar badges, too.
And for more on the nationwide backlash, read here. Hope and change!

***
Why parents don’t trust the Educator-in-Chief and his comrades
By Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

They think we’re crazy. “They” are the sneering defenders of Barack Obama who can’t fathom the backlash against the president’s nationwide speech to schoolchildren next Tuesday. “We” are parents with eyes wide open to the potential for politicized abuse in America’s classrooms.

Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered this week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama. In the clip, a parade of entertainers vow to flush their toilets less, buy hybrid vehicles, end poverty and world hunger, and commit to “service” for “change.” Actress Demi Moore leads the glitterati in a collective promise “to be a servant to our president.” Musician Anthony Kiedis pledges “to be of service to Barack Obama.”

The campaign commercial crescendos with the stars and starlets asking their audience: “What’s your pledge?”

This same “Do Something” ethos infected the U.S. Department of Education teachers’ guides accompanying the announcement of Obama’s speech – until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to “help the president.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country – circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts.

O’s bureaucrats can whitewash offending language from the Sept. 8 speech-related documents, but they can’t remove the taint of left-wing radicalism that informs Obama and his education mentors. A spokesman maintained that the speech is “about the value of education and the importance of staying in school as part of his effort to dramatically cut the dropout rate.” But the historical subtext is far less innocent.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky – a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called “small schools movement” to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of “inequity, war, and violence.”

A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The “change” agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama – and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.

Ayers preached his education-as-“social justice” agenda to his “comrades” at the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela three years ago:

“This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President [Hugo] Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”

Ayers continued:

“I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!”

This is why informed parents do not trust the Educator-in-Chief and his “comrades.” You can take Obama from the radicals in Chicago. But you can’t take the Chicago radicalism out of Obama.

September 25, 2009

Obama's Self-Worship

By Mona Charen

President Obama's speech to the United Nations has been called naive and even "post-American." It was something else, as well: the most extravagant excursion into self-worship we have yet seen in an American leader.

Beware of politicians who claim to be "humbled by the responsibility the American people have placed upon me." It's a neon sign flashing the opposite. And sure enough, in almost the next sentence, the president allowed that "I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world." Really? The whole world pulses with hope and expectation because Obama is president? People in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo and Taipei have a spring in their step because an Illinois Democrat won the White House?

Well, yes, he says, but it's not "about me," rather it's a reflection of dissatisfaction with the "status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences and outpaced by our problems." Oh, yes, and everyone around the world was electrified by Obama's campaign slogan because these expectations "are also rooted in hope. The hope that real change is possible and the hope that America will be a leader in bringing about such change."

Obama is, we are told, the smartest man to sit in the Oval in many a year. And yet he is capable of truly flabbergasting fatuities like this: "In this hall, we come from many places, but we share a common future." You don't say? That's right up there with Warren Harding's declaration that "the future lies before us."

Obama announced that we no longer "have the luxury of indulging our differences to the exclusion of the work that we must do together. I have carried this message from London to Ankara, from Port of Spain to Moscow, from Accra to Cairo, and it is what I will speak about today." Note the personal pronoun. But what message has this evangelist carried to all these world capitals? That hope and change have been vouchsafed to the fallen world in the person of Barack Obama?

During last year's campaign, Michelle Obama and her defenders insisted that her statement "For the first time in my adult life I'm proud of my country" (for supporting her husband) was unfairly wrenched from its context. Maybe, though she said it more than once.

But Obama's indictment of the United States before the U.N. suggests identical sentiments. "I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust," the president said. And mostly it seems, those views were justified. America had acted "unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others." Addressing himself directly to America's critics, the president declared, "For those who question the character and cause of my nation."

He could have mentioned the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the billions spent on fighting AIDS in Africa, tsunami relief, the Green Revolution, defeating Nazism and Communism. Just for starters. But that's not what the president had in mind.

".I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months. On my first day in office, I prohibited without exception or equivocation the use of torture by the United States of America. I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed." The audience, composed in part of regimes that pluck out the eyeballs of political enemies and hack off the hands of suspected thieves, applauded vigorously.

There are no limits to the good that can be achieved if the world will follow Obama's leadership. "Consider the course that we're on if we fail to confront the status quo: extremists sowing terror in pockets of the world; protracted conflicts that grind on and on; genocide; mass atrocities; more nations with nuclear weapons; melting ice caps and ravaged populations; persistent poverty and pandemic disease." Yes, that's humble all right. All of those evils can be avoided by the right leadership? The hubris is staggering.

Not that the solutions Obama proposes could, even if fully implemented in every detail, prevent those catastrophes. Arguably, his solutions would invite worse. He proposes, for example, not just to fight nuclear proliferation (on which he has so far achieved nothing), but also to rid the world of nuclear weapons. By promising this, he a) ratifies the arguments of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-il that it is somehow unjust for some nations to have nuclear weapons and others not; and b) commits the United States to suicidal unilateral disarmament. If the U.S. did give up its nuclear weapons and by some miracle the other nuclear powers did as well, world peace would not dawn. The race to acquire those weapons by lesser powers would intensify, as their relative value would increase immeasurably.

Those are the kinds of cold realities Obama might grapple with, if he weren't so distracted by his looking glass.

Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.

http://www.youtube.com/user/GJTOWNHALL2009#play/all

Information or Indoctrination?

The President Speaks to Our Children: Information or Indoctrination?

September 23, 2009 by Teri Christoph

By Stacy Mott, Founder and President of Smart Girl Politics

As do many of us, I have two separate accounts on Facebook. One is one hundred percent political while the other is a personal account for friends and family. I have many friends from both sides of the aisle and try not to let politics affect those relationships. However, it has become more and more difficult in the last few weeks, with more people speaking out on both sides about the health care issue, missile defense shield, and the President’s speech to school children.

The last one was the most challenging issue from which to refrain. For those who do not follow politics on a daily basis like I do, it is hard to see why there would be a concern for the President to encourage children to take responsibility, work hard, and stay in school. Were this all that had occurred, I would have agreed with them. However, what many on my Facebook page were not aware of was the lesson plan that was sent out by the Department of Education a few days before the President’s speech was made public. In the lesson plan for teachers were instructions on how to have children write about supporting or helping the President. We will never know what the President’s speech actually contained prior to the outrage over the speech began. Was the original speech truly a message to students about working hard and personal responsibility?

Even with all of the hoopla over the lesson plan suggestions, some schools still found ways to push support for the President. A few days after President Obama’s speech, one of the members of Smart Girl Politics contacted me and was upset about something that had transpired in her daughter’s school. Her daughter, a senior in high school, had come home upset because, although the speech was not shown in her school, her anatomy teacher had made the class watch the President’s health care speech. After the video was shown, the students were given a short quiz about the speech. The questions asked gave the assumption that the answers provided in the President’s speech were fact and not opinion. The students were given no opportunity to discuss opposing views or have a debate on the topic. In fact, when one student stated that the President had lied, the student was told that kind of talk was unnecessary. Students in the class with opposing views were forced to remain silent or whisper amongst themselves.

The daughter of our member was so upset about what had occurred that she refused to finish the quiz and brought it home to her mother for review. A copy of the quiz is provided below. Some of these students were educated on the health care debate going on in the country, while others simply took the information as fact and filled out their quiz. For those students, President Obama’s speech was their education. Is that not considered indoctrination?

OnStartups

I have a picture in my head of what the average entrepreneur is like. I’d guess pretty young (think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) living the red beans and rice lifestyle and working 80+ hours a week and sleeping under their desk. On some parts, I’m probably right — but on many, I’m flat-out wrong. This is demonstrated by a recent report from the Kauffman foundation for entrepreneurship. The report is titled “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur”. It’s based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries (that’s my first mistake, as it turns out entrepreneurs start companies other than Internet software companies — who knew?)

In any case, here are some of the points from the report that I found the most interesting.

1. The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

2. 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.

3. Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds

4. 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.

5. 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or widowed.

6. 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children.

7. The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.

8. 74.8 percent indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.

9. Only 4.5 percent said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.

10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

12. The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.

Which of the above surprises you the most and alters your mental model of what entrepreneurs are like?

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Mon, Sep 21, 2009

Obama the impotent | Steven Hill | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Obama the impotent

The disappointment with Barack Obama is tangible – on climate change and financial reform Europe leads while the US lags

• 
• • Steven Hill
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 September 2009 13.00 BST

Much hope has been invested in Barack Obama's ability to strike a new course for the US following eight years of Bush administration unpopularity. Yet many in the US and abroad are impatient with the pace of progress under the Obama administration. The president made the rounds on five news talkshows on Sunday as he pressed his policies and vision, preparing for what is likely to be a difficult week.

Besides the ongoing battle over healthcare, this week sees two showdowns between Europe and the US that will reveal further slippage in American global leadership. The first showdown comes today at a UN special session on climate change in New York City; the second will come at the end of the week at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, where America and Europe will butt heads over financial system reforms designed to ensure that the AIGs of the world can never again cause an economic collapse.

Europe has been increasingly critical of America's failures to live up to its global responsibilities. The US is not only the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases but is by far the largest per capita emitter of carbon and other pollutants. China comes close to the US in terms of total carbon emissions, but it has four times more people, who each belch far less individually. Europe, while having much the same high living standard, has an "ecological footprint" that is only half of America's, since Europe has taken leadership in implementing renewable technologies and conservation practices.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised to reverse the Bush administration's terrible ecological record. Yet so far the world has seen more symbolic gestures from the Obama administration than accomplishments. Its biggest achievement so far has been a disappointment. President Obama signed an executive order to increase US motor vehicle mileage standards – but only to a level that will push fuel efficiency by 2020 to a level that European and Japanese cars reached several years ago, and even China has already achieved.

Europe has announced donations of $2bn to $15bn a year for the next decade to help developing nations cope with climate warming, yet the Obama administration has not offered anything close to that amount. Europe also wants binding, near-term targets for developed nations, proposing a 20% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020, or 30% if everyone agrees. The Bush administration of course rejected such targets – but now it looks like the Obama administration is not willing to go much further. It has said such targets should be voluntary but verifiable.

With the US Senate bogged down in the fight over reforming healthcare, American leaders have said that the senators might not move on climate legislation until 2010, well after the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. That drew a sharp response from John Bruton, head of the European Union delegation: "The United States is just one of the 190 countries coming to this conference," Bruton said, "but the United States emits 25% of all the greenhouse gases that the conference is trying to reduce. I submit that asking an international conference to sit around looking out the window for months, while one chamber of the legislature of one country deals with its other business, is simply not a realistic political position."

Even Europe's conservative politicians, such as Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's minister of climate and energy, are expressing impatience: "It's rather crucial that the US can show a credible pathway," Hedegaard said, pointing out that the US emits twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as Denmark, without gaining anything in improving its quality of life.

That's the start of President Obama's week. At the end of it, President Obama will appear at a meeting in Pittsburgh of the G20, a bloc of both developed and developing nations, representing 85% of the world's economic output and most of its population. On the table will be reforms designed to avoid a repetition of the financial panic and global economic collapse perceived as having originated on Wall Street. Despite immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages needed to overcome the crisis, the financial sector in the US is rapidly returning to business as usual. Indeed, three US banks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan – which received some $45bn of bailout aid, each paid billions of dollars more in bonuses in 2009 than they earned in 2008.

Here again, Europe is leading, while the Obama administration is dragging its feet. Europe has proposed far-reaching reforms designed to impose new rules on executive pay and bonuses, requiring that banks link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance, and that they "claw back" any bonuses received in the face of losses. Europe wants a financial police force that has powers to slash payments where investments prove to have failed, and to force boardrooms to control levels of speculation. Europe also wants to block the exercising of stock options for set periods and expose top bank directors to penalties, following huge payouts to failed bank chiefs.

The Obama administration's approach has been much more tepid, to say the least. The US financial industry, as expected, is fighting these reforms, but what do we make of a recent quote by President Obama questioning the need for supporting Europe's proposals. "Why is it," he asked during a recent interview, "that we're going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or [American] football players?"

Besides the fact that President Obama was wrong – the National Football League does have salary restrictions – Silicon Valley businesses and NFL quarterbacks don't cause an economic collapse when they screw up. It's very sobering that, if David Letterman read that quote on his TV show and asked his audience: "Who made this clueless statement, former President Bush or President Obama?" we know what the response would be. Or would have been.

In response to American foot-dragging, European leader Jean-Claude Juncker said Europe should act on the bonus issue "whether the Americans are with us or not." He said that a Europe-only charge "will take on such force over time that the Americans will not be able to sit on the sidelines."

Many leaders and supporters are beginning to wonder what is causing this growing gap between the Barack Obama that many people saw on the campaign trail, and the Obama they see in the White House? Beyond Obama's oratorical skills, which excited not only American voters but people all over the world, he is mostly untested as a politician. His previous experience was only a few years in the US Senate and a few years more as a state senator. A sinking feeling is arising among many that President Obama may not be up to the task, that he may not possess the artful skills needed to accomplish even his own goals.

But it must be recognised that it's not just Obama's shortcomings that are causing the problem. The very structure of the American political system is at the heart of these failures. For example, thwarting Obama on a regular basis is an unrepresentative senate where "minority rule" prevails and undermines what a majority of the country may want. With two senators elected per state, regardless of population, California with more than 35 million people has the same number of senators as Wyoming with just half a million residents. This constitutional arrangement greatly favours low population states, many of which tend to be conservative, producing what one political analyst has called "a weighted vote for small-town whites in pickup trucks with gun racks."

In addition, the senate's use of that arcane rule known as the "filibuster" means you need 60 out of 100 votes to stop unlimited debate on a bill and move to a vote. A mere 41 senators, representing as little as 20% of the nation's population, can stymie the other 80%. Given a vastly unrepresentative senate wielding its anti-majoritarian filibuster, it is hardly surprising that minority rule in the senate consistently undermines majority rule, whether on healthcare, financial industry reform, environmental legislation and many other policies.

Pile on to that an uncompetitive, winner-take-all electoral system, marinated in money and special interest influence, and the sclerotic US political scene is deeply troubling. None of these anti-democratic structural features are going away any time soon. Unless Barack Obama is able to demonstrate a better level of political skill than he has shown so far, everyone needs to fasten their seatbelts. The world is about to enter a challenging phase where the US – the undisputed leader of the free world for the past 60 years – is going to rapidly cede its place at the head of the line.

It appears that the wheels may be coming off the world's post-war leader, and not even Barack Obama can stop it happening.

The American Spectator : Thank You, Barack Obama

Thank You, Barack Obama

By Ben Stein on 9.14.09 @ 12:36PM

Dear Mr. President:

As a 64-year-old, lifelong fiscal conservative and Republican since Nixon, may I humbly thank you? In the eight months or so since you took office, you have succeeded in reviving a party, the GOP, that many had left for dead.

1) You have named men to office so wildly irresponsible, so extreme in their positions, so vulgar in their means of expression, that they have made the Republican Party regain its of gleam of gentility and good graces. I am not talking only about the tough guy/ballet dancer Rahm Emanuel, who screamed like a jilted drunken sorority girl at GOP leaders after Joe Wilson's outburst (itself a disgrace) last Wednesday night. I am talking about a high White House official who called Republicans by a barnyard epithet at a public speech recently. This is the same guy who signed a petition to investigate whether the government caused 9/11 -- itself a favored position of Neo-Nazis and other nut jobs. Thank you. I thought no one could outdo an appointment like Henry Paulson, Bush 43's Treasury Secretary -- but you have.

2) You have proposed a national health care plan so wildly extravagant, incomprehensibly complex and over the top that it makes President George W. Bush's budget gaffes seem like blips -- plus you have told fibs about it so immense that you have embarrassed yourself as a public figure:

• Obviously, no responsible leader in government thinks there are enough savings in Medicare to pay for national health insurance. That old canard -- that you'll pay for a huge program through cutting out "...waste, fraud, and corruption..." was old and lame and pitifully untrue in the days of John Adams. It is a bad joke now...unless, unless you really are planning to totally gut Medicare and basically end decent health care for the elderly. This has become a legitimate fear after last Wednesday's speech. If you really do believe you can squeeze enough out of Medicare to pay for your health plan, maybe the "death panel" myth wasn't really a myth after all.

• The idea that you can do a trillion dollar plus program with no new taxes and not add to the deficit and you swear that's true is all too much like your promise to "...read every line..." of the federal budget to root out "fraud, waste and corruption." (How are you doing on that reading, by the way?) Lies that big make the Grand Old Party -- who also told whoppers about the effects of the Bush 43 tax cuts -- look like Honest Abe. Thank you for being an even bigger tale teller than we were. You have given us the opportunity Clinton took away from us to make us look fiscally prudent. No one else but you could have done it. THANK YOU!

• No one who has ever been to the Department of Motor Vehicles, no one who has ever been audited, no one who has ever tried to get a Social Security problem corrected believes your fibs that your health care plan will not come between patients and doctors. When your bullying partners in Congress get your bill passed and Americans start to see what havoc you have wrought in the doctors' offices and the hospitals, the party of Ronald Reagan is going to look awfully good.

• Thank you for creating a massive federal entitlement program that will push us closer day by day to national bankruptcy while you fiddle. Every large government entitlement program -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- is racing towards bankruptcy. Now, you have created a new one to sink the ship of state. A rescue party led by the Republicans will, sooner or later, look mighty handy to the voters.

Oh, and there is so much more -- coddling Iran while it gets ready to nuke Israel, hugging the worst person in South America, our mortal enemy, Hugo Chavez, not demanding any accountability for the hundreds of billions you -- and Bush 43 -- handed out to the multi-millionaire bonus babies of Wall Street.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. We thought we were down and out, and now you have given us a fresh start. You have, so to speak, let us hit the "reset" button on all of our messy recent history. You guys are so bush league, so to speak, you make us look like seasoned, sensible, prudent professionals. And it only took eight months. Thank you, President Obama, and we'll look for more. You truly are the gift that keeps on giving.

Tea Party Express

Tea Party Express Takes Washington By Storm

FreedomWorks Foundation, a conservative organization led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, has organized several groups from across the country for the Saturday event, dubbed a "March on Washington."

FOXNews.com

Saturday, September 12, 2009

• Photos

A crowd of people, some carrying signs, are shown during a rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009. (AP)

They came. They saw. They protested.

Yet it remains to be seen whether the demonstration Saturday in the nation's capital, against what protesters view as out-of-control spending by an expanding federal government, will conquer Washington.

The tens of thousands of protesters marched to the U.S. Capitol chanting various slogans and waving posters that voiced a rather broad array of grievances against big government and the leaders, particularly President Obama, who the protesters blame for its size and scope.

Some signs, reflecting the growing intensity of the health care debate, depicted President Obama with the signature mustache of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Many made reference to Obama as a socialist or communist, and another imposed his face on that of the villainous Joker from "Batman." Other protesters waved U.S. flags and held signs espousing fiscal conservatism, declaring "I'm Not Your ATM" and "Go Green Recycle Congress."

The rally, and others like it, have been billed as "tea parties," part of a movement that takes its cue from the Boston Tea Party and other imagery from the days of the founding fathers. On Saturday, men wore colonial costumes as they listened to speakers who warned of "judgment day" -- Election Day 2010.

FreedomWorks Foundation, a conservative organization led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, has organized several groups from across the country for the Saturday event, dubbed a "March on Washington."

Demonstrators chanted "enough, enough" and "We the People." Others yelled "You lie, you lie!" and "Pelosi has to go," referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Some carried signs with slogans such as "Obamacare makes me sick"

The line of protesters clogged several blocks near the capitol, according to the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.

The demonstration was part of the so-called Tea Party Movement that gathered steam in April to protest tax policies. And Saturday's event was the culmination of a 34-city, 7,000-mile bus tour that began Aug. 28 in Sacramento, Calif.

The "partiers" have cited a host of grievances and demands, such as a call for any health care reform to create more competition and be guided by market principles, not a government-run plan.

Organizers said they anticipated tens of thousands of proponents of limited government to attend. They said it would be the largest group of fiscal conservatives to ever gather in Washington.

Lawmakers also supported the rally. Rep. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said Americans want health care reform but they don't want a government takeover.

"Republicans, Democrats and independents are stepping up and demanding we put our fiscal house in order," Pence, of Indiana, told The Associated Press.

"I think the overriding message after years of borrowing, spending and bailouts is enough is enough."

Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., also spoke at the rally. DeMint said he'd had enough of "Alice in Wonderland" politicians promising more programs at the risk of financial disaster.

"The president has warned us if we disagree with him he's going to call us out," DeMint said. "Well, Mr. President, we are out."

Richard Brigle, 57, a Vietnam War veteran and former Teamster, came from Paw Paw, Mich. He said health care needs to be reformed -- but not according to President Barack Obama's plan.

"My grandkids are going to be paying for this. It's going to cost too much money that we don't have," he said while marching, bracing himself with a wooden cane as he walked.

The rally comes on the heels of heated town halls held during the congressional August recess when some Democratic lawmakers were confronted, disrupted and shouted down by angry protestors who oppose President Obama's plan to overhaul the health care system.

"I can't figure out to save me what [Mr. Obama and the Democrats] are trying to accomplish, unless they want socialism," 73-year-old Joseph Wright, a retired paper-mill worker, told The Wall Street Journal.

Wright rode from Tallahassee, Fla., to Washington this week on one of the many chartered buses bringing in demonstrators from states as far-flung as Massachusetts and Arkansas.

Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event -- an ethic they believe should be applied to the government. They say unchecked spending on things like a government-run health insurance option could increase inflation and lead to economic ruin.

Terri Hall, 45, of Starke, Fla., said she felt compelled to become political for the first time this year because she was upset by government spending.

"Our government has lost sight of the powers they were granted," she said. She added that the deficit spending was out of control, and said she thought it was putting the country at risk.

Other sponsors of the rally include the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and the Ayn Rand Center for Individuals Rights.

Norman Kennedy, 64, of Charleston, S.C., said he wants to send a message to federal lawmakers that America is "deeply in debt." He said though he'd like everyone to have free health care, he said there's no money to pay for it.

"We want change and we're going to get change," Kennedy said. "I want to see fiscal responsibility and if that means changing Congress that will be a means to that end."

The White House on Friday claimed it was unaware of the planned rally.

"I don't know who the group is," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters with a shrug.

But a House leadership aide warned fellow Democrats that up to 2 million demonstrators could turn out.

"It looks like Saturday's event is going to be a huge gathering, estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to 2 million people," Doug Thornell, an aide to Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., wrote in a memo obtained by FOXNews.com.

But conservatives believe the memo is ploy to inflate expectations for the turnout anticipating that it will fall short.

"It's an old political tactic to get out in front and make wild projections and when they're not met, claim their opponents don't have the juice," said Pete Sepp, a spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, one of the organizers of the rally.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

September 13, 2009

America Spoke

By James Simpson

America spoke September 12th in Washington, DC. Real America. Not black America, not white America, not Hispanic or Asian America, not even conservative or liberal America. Real America. There were mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, newborn children and kids on the way up; there were many, many elderly and a lot of disabled folks, young and old, in wheelchairs. Many of these people had never been to a protest before in their lives. People were pleasant, polite and considerate. There was not a drunken eye in the house. The most unlikely bunch of domestic terrorists one could ever imagine. Contrast that with the Leftists' "peace" movement in Seattle a few years back.

We are not liberals or conservatives. We are Americans. I am not a conservative, I disdain that label. It was dreamed up by some leftist so people like me could be buttonholed and dismissed as, "oh, he's just a conservative." And as the media has fallen further into the Left's maw, conservative has morphed into "rightwing" which has morphed into "radical rightwing nut" and inevitably, "fascist!" Of course Hitler was in fact a leftist, and allied with Stalin until he realized he had been duped. But the left glosses over that inconvenient truth, as they do with the truth generally.

I am an American. I believe in American values; that is, the principles and guiding documents on which this country was founded. Is it conservative to understand, appreciate and defend the United States Constitution? All public officials make a solemn pledge to uphold it. Are they all conservatives? Is it conservative to believe in the First Amendment? So are all journalists conservatives? These days, many "journalists" are actively trying to suppress any news that doesn't fit their agenda. They are not trying to suppress "conservative" speech; they are not hypocritically trying to stifle "alternative" views. They are attempting to systematically shut out the truth.

In fact, there are no "conservatives" and "progressives," there are Americans and un-Americans. There are no "traditional values" versus "progressive values," there are those who have values and those who do not. There is not traditional morality and new morality; there is only morality and immorality. There is no "Right" and "Left," there is only right and wrong!

And the Left, personified today by Barack Hussein Obama, is horribly, horribly wrong.

This rally resoundingly confirmed that America has woken up. Of course, before we even got there, we fully expected the mass media to play down the event. On the bus drive in, we agreed the media would put the attendance at "tens of thousands."

Sure enough, practically every news outlet in the United States has reported "tens of thousands." ABC, NBC, CBS and even Fox gave those figures; however the CBS headline only said "thousands." Dan Rather's ghost must still haunt the editorial rooms. Interestingly, The British Daily Mail newspaper reported "up to two million."

Early on, someone erroneously reported that ABC had said "two million." ABC later reported an estimate of 60,000-70,000. That quickly became the news of the hour, as the Leftist netroots sought to discredit the event by focusing on this mistake, even accusing Michelle Malkin of somehow posting a fake screenshot of the march. They later recanted, but continued to accuse her of inflating the attendance numbers, a charge easily disputed by just reading what she said.

Surprisingly, MSNBC's Tom Costello disputed NBC's own reported "tens of thousands" which they claim came from Park Police. (Since the "Million Man March," which the National Park Service estimated at much less than one million, they no longer provide formal estimates.) Costello said that "Our own people (NBC's) say in the hundreds of thousands." Surprisingly his report was perhaps the most honest, straightforward report of anything I saw from the networks. See it here.

I think NBC got it right. Here is a series of time lapse photos of the march from 8:00 am to 11:30am. The crowd was constantly anywhere from 25 to 50 abreast. I know. I walked in the middle of it, along the sidewalks to move forward quicker, and around the entire circuit, up to and beyond Senate Park. At times, we were so crammed together, breathing became strained. Taking the low number, and assuming a line of 25 crossing a given point every second for three-and-a-half hours, gives you about 300,000. Whatever the actual number, it was certainly magnitudes greater than "tens of thousands."

It was fun checking out all the signs. I took tons of pictures. The collage below is just a few of the many good ones I saw.

As one blogger related:

Chants on the march included "Shut down ACORN!" and "Boot Charlie Rangel!" and "Don't tread on me." There was not a single "Hey Hey/Ho Ho" in evidence. Songs included "Glory Hallelujah" and "My Country 'Tis of Thee." The most moving chant might have been when we walked past the Newseum, with its ginormous carving of the First Amendment on the side, and the crowd spontaneously said "Read that wall! Read that wall!"

I was in the crowd that began shouting "Read that wall!" as we passed the Newseum. It was indeed ironic to see the First Amendment covering the entire front of that ten story building, and to consider how vicious, unprincipled and dishonest has been MSM attempts to shut us up. It prompted that spontaneous outburst from the crowd.

My two favorites though, were "You Lie!" and "Here we are!" the latter being Steve Elliot's retort to Barack Obama's insulting threat, "we will call you out," which prompted a riotous uproar from the crowd.

I only saw a few astroturfers at the entire event: one lonely, frightened looking ACORN girl trying desperately not to be noticed, and a singing troupe. This was obviously a professional gathering. The men were dressed in tuxedos and women in formal black dresses. They sang a well-rehearsed song about loving the evil Blue Cross/Blue Shield just as it was, and held perfectly printed signs, like "Our Death Panel Turns a Profit" and "Let them Eat Advil." The satire of course, was meant to convey that this is what the "status quo" gets you: bad, expensive coverage. It was a prime example of the Left's typical non-sequitur argument: things are terrible now and you're terrible for resisting change. The argument illogically assumes things couldn't get any worse. Newsflash: things can always get worse, and under Socialism, they always do.

Here's a great short video of march highlights. See a good Glenn Beck video about the march too, with added comments by Chuck Norris.

Meanwhile, Obama fled to Minnesota for the weekend, finding, not surprisingly, an adoring crowd to sit raptly at his feet while he expounded on the virtues of his health plan as counterpoint to the march. The White House laughingly denied having any prior knowledge of the march. As the Washington Examiner reported:

On Friday the White House claimed they had no idea the rally was even planned. A ridiculous assertion that shows how dismissive the Obama administration and the Democrat-led Congress are of those who oppose their agenda. It is impossible to believe that President Obama knew nothing of the event. The denial is a perfect example of why the President is losing the trust of many Americans. He stretches his credibility to its limits, and beyond.

Amen.

All it all it was a great day for America. The sleeping giant has awoken again. We are on the march, literally. Now the work begins.

September 13, 2009

The sad truth is that our representatives will not listen

Robert A. Bonelli
It is really not about the numbers. Whether the Tea Party protest in D.C. on Saturday attracted the 70,000 preliminarily estimated by the Capitol Police; or the several hundreds of thousands reported by some in the old media and many in the new media; or the helicopter count of more than 1.5 million (which the images of the massive crowd spreading from the Washington Monument to the Capital Building support), all that really matters is that this enormous showing of Americans from all walks of life is being ignored by the old media and by our own elected representatives.

Okay, so the facts are: a tremendous showing of impassioned Americans (who paid their own way -- as opposed to the paid demonstrations we have all witnessed by organized labor and other so-called progressive groups); the old media paying little attention; a white house that thinks they can release a statement saying "the president is unaware of any such protest" and actually think real Americans are going to believe that; and most of our elected representatives simply ignoring what took place!

How can a representative republic's representatives ignore those whom they represent? Unbelievable -- isn't it? Boy if this is not a reason for term limits, then what is?

The sad truth is that the people we elected think that know better than the people who elected them. This is glaringly true about the current majority Democrats. Many refused to hold town hall meetings this summer because they simply did not want to face the people; those who held town hall meetings dismissed the opposition as fringe; leaders of the Democratic Party resorted to personal slurs calling the American people "Nazis" among other insulting and demeaning names. Even the President of the United States referred to American people standing up in opposition as "those tea-baggers" while he waved a hand in a completely dismissive manner.

Have the American people had enough? The best way to show that we have is to keep speaking up and keep speaking out. Keep calling our representatives and letting them know that we will not be dismissed and that we will not be silent. Keep reminding those we elected that they work for us and not the other way around. Keep reminding them that they must listen to us!

If our representatives continue to pretend that they do not hear us, then let our voices be heard with crystal clarity in November of 2010 by imposing term limits instantaneously with our vote. We still have that liberty and we must use it.

Increase in minimum wage is BAD for low income workers.

Up to two million march to US Capitol

Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama's spending in 'tea-party' demonstration

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 9:39 PM on 12th September 2009

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Up to two million people marched to the U.S. Capitol today, carrying signs with slogans such as "Obamacare makes me sick" as they protested the president's health care plan and what they say is out-of-control spending.

The line of protesters spread across Pennsylvania Avenue for blocks, all the way to the capitol, according to the Washington Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.

People were chanting "enough, enough" and "We the People." Others yelled "You lie, you lie!" and "Pelosi has to go," referring to California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

Tens of thousands of people converged on Capitol Hill on Saturday to protest against government spending

Demonstrators waved U.S. flags and held signs reading "Go Green Recycle Congress" and "I'm Not Your ATM." Men wore colonial costumes as they listened to speakers who warned of "judgment day" - Election Day 2010.

Richard Brigle, 57, a Vietnam War veteran and former Teamster, came from Michigan. He said health care needs to be reformed - but not according to President Barack Obama's plan.

"My grandkids are going to be paying for this. It's going to cost too much money that we don't have," he said while marching, bracing himself with a wooden cane as he walked.

FreedomWorks Foundation, a conservative organization led by former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, organized several groups from across the country for what they billed as a "March on Washington."

Organizers say they built on momentum from the April "tea party" demonstrations held nationwide to protest tax policies, along with growing resentment over the economic stimulus packages and bank bailouts.

US President Barack Obama sports a mustache famously worn by German dictator Adolf Hitler

Demonstrators hold up banners on Capitol Hill in Washington on Saturday

Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event - an ethic they believe should be applied to the government.

They say unchecked spending on things like a government-run health insurance option could increase inflation and lead to economic ruin.

Terri Hall, 45, of Florida, said she felt compelled to become political for the first time this year because she was upset by government spending.

"Our government has lost sight of the powers they were granted," she said. She added that the deficit spending was out of control, and said she thought it was putting the country at risk.

Anna Hayes, 58, a nurse from Fairfax County, stood on the Mall in 1981 for Reagan's inauguration. "The same people were celebrating freedom," she said. "The president was fighting for the people then. I remember those years very well and fondly."

Saying she was worried about "Obamacare," Hayes explained: "This is the first rally I've been to that demonstrates against something, the first in my life. I just couldn't stay home anymore."

The heated demonstrations were organized by a Conservative group called the Tea Party Patriots

Like countless others at the rally, Joan Wright, 78, of Ocean Pines, Md., sounded angry. "I'm not taking this crap anymore," said Wright, who came by bus to Washington with 150 like-minded residents of Maryland's Eastern Shore. "I don't like the health-care [plan]. I don't like the czars. And I don't like the elitists telling us what we should do or eat."

Republican lawmakers also supported the rally.

"Republicans, Democrats and independents are stepping up and demanding we put our fiscal house in order," Rep. Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said.

"I think the overriding message after years of borrowing, spending and bailouts is enough is enough."

Other sponsors of the rally include the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and the Ayn Rand Center for Individuals Rights.

Recent polls illustrate how difficult recent weeks have been for a president who, besides tackling health care, has been battling to end a devastatingly deep recession.

Fifty percent approve and 49 percent disapprove of the overall job he is doing as president, compared to July, when those approving his performance clearly outnumbered those who were unhappy with it, 55 percent to 42 percent.

Just 42 percent approve of the president's work on the high-profile health issue.

The poll was taken over five days just before Obama's speech to Congress. That speech reflected Obama's determination to push ahead despite growing obstacles.

"I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than to improve it," Obama said on Wednesday night. "I won't stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are.

"If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we'll call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution."

Prior to Obama's speech before Congress U.S. Capitol Police arrested a man they say tried to get into a secure area near the Capitol with a gun in his car as President Barack Obama was speaking.

Police spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said Thursday that 28-year-old Joshua Bowman of suburban Falls Church, Virginia, was arrested around 8 p.m. Wednesday when Obama was due to speak.

'Parasite-in-chief': The title given to the American President during the demonstrations on Saturday

Bowman's intentions were unclear, police said.

Today's protests imitated the original Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists threw three shiploads of taxed tea into Boston Harbour in protest against the British government under the slogan 'No taxation without representation'.

The group first began rising to prominence in April, when the governor of Texas threatened to secede from the union in protest against government spending. Waves of tea party protests have crossed America since.

Today's rally, the largest grouping of fiscal conservatives to march on Washington, comes on the heels of heated town halls held during the congressional August recess when some Democratic lawmakers were confronted, disrupted and shouted down by angry protestors who oppose President Obama's plan to overhaul the health care system.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1213056/Up-million-march-US-Capitol-protest-Obamas-spending-tea-party-demonstration.html#ixzz0QwydJMRr

Ethanol Fuel

Ethanol Fuel From Corn Faulted As "Unsustainable Subsidized Food Burning" In Analysis By Cornell Scientist

ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2001) — ITHACA, N.Y. -- Neither increases in government subsidies to corn-based ethanol fuel nor hikes in the price of petroleum can overcome what one Cornell University agricultural scientist calls a fundamental input-yield problem: It takes more energy to make ethanol from grain than the combustion of ethanol produces.

At a time when ethanol-gasoline mixtures (gasohol) are touted as the American answer to fossil fuel shortages by corn producers, food processors and some lawmakers, Cornell's David Pimentel takes a longer range view.

"Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning," says the Cornell professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Pimentel, who chaired a U.S. Department of Energy panel that investigated the energetics, economics and environmental aspects of ethanol production several years ago, subsequently conducted a detailed analysis of the corn-to-car fuel process. His findings will be published in September, 2001 in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology .

Among his findings are:

o An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel's analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.

o The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented. As many as three distillation steps are needed to separate the 8 percent ethanol from the 92 percent water. Additional treatment and energy are required to produce the 99.8 percent pure ethanol for mixing with gasoline. o Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU. "Put another way," Pimentel says, "about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTU."

o Ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline. "That helps explain why fossil fuels -- not ethanol -- are used to produce ethanol," Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. U.S. drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't for government subsidies to artificially lower the price."

o Most economic analyses of corn-to-ethanol production overlook the costs of environmental damages, which Pimentel says should add another 23 cents per gallon. "Corn production in the U.S. erodes soil about 12 times faster than the soil can be reformed, and irrigating corn mines groundwater 25 percent faster than the natural recharge rate of ground water. The environmental system in which corn is being produced is being rapidly degraded. Corn should not be considered a renewable resource for ethanol energy production, especially when human food is being converted into ethanol."

o The approximately $1 billion a year in current federal and state subsidies (mainly to large corporations) for ethanol production are not the only costs to consumers, the Cornell scientist observes. Subsidized corn results in higher prices for meat, milk and eggs because about 70 percent of corn grain is fed to livestock and poultry in the United States Increasing ethanol production would further inflate corn prices, Pimentel says, noting: "In addition to paying tax dollars for ethanol subsidies, consumers would be paying significantly higher food prices in the marketplace."

Nickels and dimes aside, some drivers still would rather see their cars fueled by farms in the Midwest than by oil wells in the Middle East, Pimentel acknowledges, so he calculated the amount of corn needed to power an automobile:

o The average U.S. automobile, traveling 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol (not a gasoline-ethanol mix) would need about 852 gallons of the corn-based fuel. This would take 11 acres to grow, based on net ethanol production. This is the same amount of cropland required to feed seven Americans.

o If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.

---

Adapted from materials provided by Cornell University News Service.

America's Dim Bulbs

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, September 10, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Energy Savings: Europe's ban on the incandescent light bulb began phasing in this month, and the U.S. will soon follow. Is Thomas Edison to blame for global warming? And why are we exporting green jobs?

When the warm-mongers assemble in Copenhagen this December to hammer out a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, no doubt their work to save the earth from the carbon dioxide that gives it life will take place under the eerie light thrown off by compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) mandated by the European Union to fight climate change.

The bulbs are more expensive, costing up to six times as much as an equivalent incandescent bulb. But they're said to be more economical in the long run because they supposedly use up to 80% less energy than old-style bulbs and don't burn out as quickly.

The change will be gradual. The clear 60-watt bulb will be allowed to be sold until at least September 2011 and clear 40-watt bulbs until 2012. In Germany there's a run on Edison's creation, with sales of incandescents up 34%. Is a black market in bulbs in the offing?

The Telegraph newspaper reports that European officials are conceding CFLs are not as bright an idea as first advertised.

An 11-watt CFL is advertised as being the equivalent of a 60-watt incandescent. Officials in Brussels responsible for the ban admit that this is "not true" and that such claims are "exaggerated."

Tests conducted by London's Telegraph found that using a single lamp to illuminate a room, an 11-watt CFL produced only 58% of the illumination of an "equivalent" 60-watt incandescent — even after a 10-minute warm-up that consumers have found necessary for a CFL to reach its full brightness.

The European Commission advises consumers of the environmental hazards posed by CFLs. If one breaks, you're advised to air out rooms and avoid using vacuum cleaners to prevent exposure to mercury in the bulbs. You can't just throw out an old bulb. It must be properly thrown out, lest your bedroom or family room become a Superfund toxic waste site.

Mercury is considered by environmentalists to be among the most toxic of toxic substances and, yes, it is dangerous if ingested or handled over time. We've been warned that high concentrations in fish are dangerous to pregnant women. We've been told mercury in vaccines causes autism.

So now it's safe in fragile light bulbs?

In 2007, Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act. It mandated CFL use in the U.S., making incandescent bulbs a controlled substance and outlawing that bane of civilization, the 100-watt bulb, by 2012, with the rest outlawed by 2014.

CFLs work best in fixtures designed for them. Simply swapping bulbs may not provide the advertised service life and will further compromise the advertised illumination. And if you have dimmer switches, well, regular CFLs don't work well with them.

Seeing this further intrusion into the free market and denial of consumer choice, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., last year authored HR 5616, the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.

Predictably, it was buried in committee and went nowhere.

But, hey, think of all the green jobs that will be created. Problem is, they're in China. General Electric plans to close an incandescent bulb factory in Westchester, Va., next July, costing 200 workers their jobs. GE is also shuttering incandescent factories in Ohio and Kentucky, axing another 200 positions.

Not only are wages lower in China, but so are environmental standards, London's Times recently reported: "Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs."

Less light, fewer American jobs, increased Chinese imports and the danger of mercury contamination.

What could possibly be wrong with that? Maybe we should let the consumer decide.