Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Czech Republic have directly appealed to our Congressional leadership to expedite turning on the export spigot for our natural gas. These four nations see the directness and immediacy of the advantage of buying natural gas from us rather than from the Russians.
Promptly opening the export spigot on our own oil and gas production and accelerating our development of those fields, including on Federal land (which will have minimal production effect today; although it’ll have significant effect in the near- to mid-term by significantly expanding the supply of oil and gas on the global market) will produce an immediate spike down in the global price of oil and gas, which will have an associated immediate negative impact on the value of Russian oil and gas exports.
Blocking Russian access to credit on the global banking system—even just on the American banking system—and requiring cash-only transactions will have a negative impact on Russia’s cash reserves.
President Barack Obama, aided and abetted by the mendacious NLMSM, is touting his latest “budget” proposal as cutting spending by $600 billion over the next 10 years. But Scott Rasmussen, cited in The Wall Street Journal, has noted,
in the current year, the federal government is expected to spend $3,651 billion. …the president’s budget calls for spending $3,901 billion in 2015. That’s $250 billion more than this year. It’s not a one-year aberration either. Spending increases are projected every single year for the next decade and beyond.
The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it will let people keep health insurance plans that would otherwise be out of compliance with ObamaCare for another two years….
Yet, just a bit over a year ago, when President Barack Obama first “waived” the Business Mandate, he threatened to veto a House bill that would have codified that delay and that added a comparable delay of the Individual Mandate—what he’s now “waiving” for those two years.
Obama vastly prefers diktat to legitimacy.
Russian energy exports. Ukraine, for instance, gets some 40%-50% of its natural gas from Russia, and Europe gets roughly 30% its natural gas from Russia. Recall, just a few short years ago, too, the Russian extortion of cutting off those gas flows—in the middle of winter—over an alleged bill-paying (or not) scandal: it wasn’t those who supposedly weren’t paying the country’s gas bill who were harmed, though, it was the citizenry threatened with freezing temperatures in their own homes. And as part of the Russian extortion, they cut off gas flows to Europe, too.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) demonstrated the depth of his condition of out of touchness in a Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. Although Sanders’ out of touchness is amply demonstrated by his full-throated defense of the dinosaur that is the United States Postal Service, I want to look at a couple of other things he said in his piece.
First, there’s this:
There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service. They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services….
It’s illustrated by Table S-12 Economic Assumptions from the White House’s Summary Tables, repeated below.
The table is hard to read; the money line is the third one, labeled “Real GDP, percent change, year/year.” Beginning in the year 2018—just four years from now—President Barack Obama and his “economic” advisors predict our nation’s economic output—our GDP—growth rate to shrink from 3.1% growth per year to an historic low rate, and abysmal rate, to 2.36% in 2-019, and then to less than 2.5% after that. And to stay at that abysmal level as far as the prediction can see.
First, President Obama moves to gut our Federal defense establishment, including among other moves reducing the size of our Army to 1940 levels.
Now he wants to gut our state militias, in particular the States’ Army National Guards, also—and reduce thereby their ability to deal with internal matters ranging from disorder to disaster recovery. And, oh by the way, severely restrict the States’ ability to reinforce that drastically curtailed Federal defense capacity.
Hmm….
President Barack Obama has threatened to consult with allies to see about beginning to think of what might be done vis-à-vis the Russian attack on Ukraine. He even spent 90 minutes over the weekend on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin being chastised by Putin for his effrontery in demurring from that invasion.
Secretary of State John Kerry has decried Putin’s “unopposed entry” into Ukraine as a 19th century move in the 21st century—as though that means that Russia’s invasion hasn’t actually occurred. On Tuesday, he was enroute to Kiev while, as the Fox News headline put it, our “policy to counter Putin still is evolving.”
…government is. Or so says Czar of all the Russias President Vladimir Putin.
Of course people wanted change. But [people] cannot impose illegal change…you need to use only constitutional means.
Never mind that the will of the people is what gives “constitutional means” legitimacy, since those means are the will of the people given concrete effect. But not in Putin’s world. In his world view, “constitutional means” are what government says they are, and government is constituted the way the men populating the organs of government say it is. No people, no citizens, are involved.