Obama Campaigns For Re-Election On Public Dime

What a total waste of our money and time and it is more important than ever to change this administration from in to out. mc

Posted 12/01/2011 04:04 PM ET

Election '12: President Obama jammed traffic in Manhattan on Wednesday. State business? No, he was raising campaign funds. It's just the latest example of his questionable strategy of running for re-election by taking from the public.

And no, the public was not invited. Three stops the president made were strictly for fat-cat donors who paid as much as $36,000 a plate for the privilege, while reporters weren't even permitted to cover the protests outside the hotels.

But the trip was hardly just between Obama and his donors. The three trips disrupted rush hour traffic in New York City and the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, something that very much cost the public time and money. The only winner was Obama, who flew home with $2.4 million.

That's emblematic of the arrogance of this president and the kind of re-election campaign we can expect him to conduct: always leaning on the public and its government to get his.

Earlier this week, ABC News reporter Jake Tapper noted that Obama's flight schedule had a curious concentration of U.S. swing states in the upcoming election. Tapper asked White House spokesman Jay Carney if it wasn't just disguised "campaigning on the public dime." Carney denied it, disingenuously claiming that Obama spends only 5% of his time on politics.

But maybe that's because he's showered his allies at Acorn's front groups, like Acorn Housing, with as much as $27 million in taxpayer cash, according to research by Matthew Vadum, writing in the Washington Times.

Acorn, remember, was the community organizing group supposedly disbanded over fraud and corruption, but like a boiler room somehow keeps reappearing under new names and raking in taxpayer cash.

Acorn's members already have openly bragged that>>>

Wealth Solves, Rather Than Creates, The Poverty Problem

Class warfare has become a key talking point in the Obama administration. It is high time to vote this administration out of office before they do more damage to America. mc

By THOMAS L. KRANNAWITTER Posted 11/30/2011 05:48 PM ET

Class warfare is alive and healthy in elite parts of America today. Yes, elite. Only elites — a tiny fraction of a fraction of the American public — are able to camp in public parks denouncing businesses, while other elites in high government offices and the media discuss them. The rest of us have to work.

So what do the elites want? From the repeated assertions of our president that the "rich" pay too little in taxes, to the anti-capitalism chorus of Occupy Wall Street, the echo chamber refrain seems to be that those who've earned less deserve what those who've earned more have. But in the idiom of Marxist political economy — the haves vs. have-nots — what do the haves, have?

It's not money, simply. It's wealth, of which money is merely a measurement. Money and wealth are commonly confused, but their differences are important if we're to respond persuasively to the unjust demands of some for the property of others and explain why the creation of wealth solves, rather than creates, the problem of poverty.

Imagine several people shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Nothing survives the wreck, save only one item: a printing press filled with paper. As the people crawl to safety, they're exhausted. They stare in disbelief and shock.

But soon they begin to realize that they're hungry, thirsty, cold, unprotected from the elements. They're in dire poverty. They must think and act, or die. What shall they do?

Suppose one of them happens to be a member>>>

Will The EPA Choke Oil Shale Production

Of course they will, that is what they do best. The Obama administration's war on energy is more aggressive than its war on terror. mc

Posted 11/30/2011 06:36 PM ET

New Energy: The latest salvo in the administration's war on energy may be new rules and permits to regulate a process to get oil and gas from porous rock, sacrificing jobs and economic growth while under review.

There are a few areas of the U.S. that are booming. Two of these are in North Dakota and Pennsylvania, states that sit atop two massive shale rock formations, the Bakken and the Marcellus.

Extraction of oil and natural gas from these formations have created jobs and economic growth in the midst of a stagnant and parched economy.

The oil and gas is extracted from this porous rock by a process called hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking."

The process involves the injection under high pressure of fluids, mainly water with a few chemical additives, to fracture the porous shale rock and allow the release and extraction of the oil and gas trapped inside the porous rock. Environmentalists contend these chemical additives contaminate groundwater supplies.

The fluid used in the process is 99.5% sand and water. There are other chemicals ranging from the citric acid found in soda to benzene, which are used to reduce friction and fight microbes.

Shale formations in which fracking is used are thousands of feet deep. Drinking water aquifers are generally only a hundred feet deep. There's solid rock between them.

Yet the Environmental Protection Agency, >>>

Badly-Needed Alaskan Oil Is Kept From Market By Obama Decision

Once again our faithful President is avoiding his responsibilities and allowing more dependency on foreign oil. Way to go 'oh anointed one". mc

Posted 11/29/2011 06:48 PM ET

Energy Policy: The same administration that says we can and should get oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is blocking a bridge needed to get it to market on environmental grounds.

In his May 14 weekly radio address, President Obama called for annual lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), not necessarily out of any conviction that increased domestic energy supply is good for prices and national security, but basically to perpetuate the myth that the oil companies refuse to drill in leased or leasable areas.

While he restricts oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the north coast of Alaska, and imposes outright moratoriums on federal lands and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Obama wants the appearance, if not the reality, of supporting domestic energy production from fossil fuels.

The NPRA, 23 million acres of North Slope wilderness, was established in 1923 by President Harding to ensure a reserve of oil for the U.S. Navy.

Obama has cited it as an example of areas where the oil companies could drill but are reluctant to, knowing full well his administration has walled off preferred areas offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

The problem is that at least one oil company,>>>

Loved by media, Barney Frank Helped Cause Financial Crisis

The Barney will get off Scott Free and be applauded as a "who me" type of guy. Way to go Barney! mc

Posted 11/28/2011 06:24 PM ET

Congress: Establishment media are swooning over the unexpected departure of ultraliberal Barney Frank. But this "champion of the little guy" actually helped cause the mortgage disaster, then kept the system broken.

'Congress will now be a little dumber," was the kind of nonsense we heard from the mainstream liberal media after Frank, D-Mass., former chairman of the House Banking Committee, said no to running for re-election next year.

Formally reprimanded by a heavily Democratic House on a 408-to-18 vote in 1990 for ethics offenses regarding his financial relationship with a male prostitute, Frank has for decades been a fast-talking, acidic presence in House debates.

But he wasn't smart enough to realize that the politically correct poisoning of mortgages would lead to a calamity rivaling the Great Depression. "I, like many others, did not see the crisis coming," Frank said Monday.

He sure didn't. Back in 2003, what did he say when the Bush administration proposed what the New York Times described as "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago," including a new agency to supervise Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Frank said: "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." Fannie and Freddie, of course, are those corrupt public-private hybrid monstrosities that gave lots of mortgages to people with horrendous credit ratings.

After 1996's welfare reform, liberals like Frank found other ways to redistribute wealth. Yet even after the politicization of mortgages led to the financial crisis, last year's Dodd-Frank reform kept "too big to fail" and other defects in our federally mismanaged banking system.

Manhattan Institute scholar and>>>

E-Car Fires: Big Bump In The Road

When the politicians get involved and in this case mandate electrical vehicles, it is no wonder that where there is smoke there is fire. mc


Posted 11/28/2011 06:52 PM ET

The lithium-ion battery pack for a Chevrolet Volt, shown here at a GM plant in Detroit, is being probed as a fire hazard. AP View Enlarged Image

Industrial Policy: The investigation into the safety of electric car batteries intensifies after additional fires involving the flagship of a proposed electric vehicle fleet. Central planning doesn't work for cars or insurance.

When the Toyota Prius was being accused of having overlooked design flaws that were causing accelerators to get stuck with fatal results, the owners of Government Motors, a competitor, wasted little time pushing for a recall and congressional hearings while accusing Toyota of cutting corners for the sake of corporate profits.

We wonder if the same sense of urgency will prevail in the wake of new safety tests indicating that an earlier test in which a Chevy Volt experienced a battery fire three weeks after a side-impact test was no fluke and that the car's lithium-ion battery poses a fire hazard.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced Friday the results of tests designed to replicate the May test. In that test the crash vehicle, stored in the parking lot of a test facility in Burlington, Wis., caught fire. The fire was severe enough to cause several nearby vehicles to catch fire as well.

The latest tests involved three battery packs in which the Volts were subjected to a simulated side-impact collision with a narrow object like a tree or light pole followed by a rollover. The first battery did not catch fire, but another did during testing Nov. 17. The third battery, tested on Nov. 18, began to smoke and emit sparks shortly after being rotated.

The NHTSA reaction was as much of a>>>

Ezra Klein: From 'Journolist' To Liberal Activist

Why are we not surprised. The Washington Post's standards continue to decline from lower to lowest and yet they still trend downward. mc


Posted 11/28/2011 06:52 PM ET

Media Bias: In the early days of the Gulf War, pundits marveled at the specter of Iraqi troops surrendering to journalists. Well, now it's even worse: Journalists are giving the Democratic Party its talking points.

The Washington Post's 27-year-old star blogger Ezra Klein has been called "whiz kid," and "brat packer" and a "wunderkind." Now he's actually advising Democratic chiefs of staff, briefing them last week about the supercommittee in Congress, according to a report by Fishbowl-DC on MediaBistro.com.

That means the relatively novel idea that bloggers can be placed on an equal footing with reporters in congressional briefings has been one-upped: Bloggers like Klein are now giving the briefings.

That's because Klein himself sports the imprimatur of one of the most vaunted news organizations in the world, the Washington Post. He's supposed to have the Post's high standards. But instead of reporting the news, even at a slant, as bloggers do, Klein takes bias beyond that. Instead of commenting on news, he makes it.

The problem here is not just that he blurs the lines between journalism and activism. It's that the Post is perfectly content with it, and Klein himself says that such activism is actually part of his media ethos.

Think we are kidding? The Washington Post's executive editor, Marcus Brauchli told the Washingtonian last year that Klein "is a new paradigm," for journalism, and "one we would very much like to replicate."

Amazingly, this is all a matter of the public record>>>