Monthly Archives: February 2012

Contradictions

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In an energy policy article in The Daily Caller, Deneen Borelli raises some interesting disconnects between President Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.  She points out the failures engendered by his contradictions:

Despite his class-war rhetoric, Obama’s command-and-control energy policy drains our budget to reward crony capitalists such as General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and his fellow presidential jobs panel member and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr.

Ironically, the Obama war on fossil fuels hurts hard-working Americans because high energy prices have a disproportional impact on middle- and lower-income households and jeopardizes U.S. manufacturing.

And although Obama has called for fairness and a level playing field, the mandates and subsidies for renewable energy he favors would stifle competition by picking winners and losers.”

Then she gets specific.

on energy

Obama’s call for more oil and gas drilling in his State of the Union address was meant to deflect attention away from his failure to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

Obama’s energy policy excludes coal. Coal now provides approximately 45 percent of our electricity, but regulations generated by the Obama EPA are imposing significant costs on utilities, costs that are forcing some power plants to close and others to spend billions of dollars in order to comply. Those compliance costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity prices.

Fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — provide roughly 85 percent of America’s energy needs. Yet, despite the failure of companies such as Solyndra, Obama is doubling down on renewable energy by calling for a national renewable energy mandate, forcing the Department of Defense to buy enough renewable energy to power a quarter of a million homes

on jobs

The president’s refusal to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, at a cost of an estimated 20,000 jobs….

Full Credit

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In MSNBC’s pre-Super Bowl interview with President Obama, Matt Lauer had this exchange with him.

Lauer: Three years ago we sat for this interview on Super Bowl Sunday; you had been President for just 10 days, and we talked about the state of the economy, which was in dire straits, and you said this to me, quote, If I don’t have this done in three years, then it’s going to be a one-term proposition.  You got good news on Friday in terms of jobs, the unemployment rate went down to 8.3%.  But I think if you go out on the street, you ask Americans “is the recovery done?” Overwhelmingly they will tell you it is not.  So do you deserve a second term?

Obama: I deserve a second term, but we’re not done.

There’s also this from Obama’s State Department concerning the nearly year-long situation in Syria [emphasis added]:

“We’re going to work with countries around the world to call out those who are still sending him weapons, and expose that,” [State Department spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland said. The [contact group of countries] will look at helping Syria “plot a way forward and also to do what we can about the humanitarian situation.”

Still, she recognized the limitations of that strategy.

“It’s frankly not clear how much we’re going to be able to do, but we want to help.“

And that makes it all better.  We’re just trying to help.  We deserve a prize for effort.

Here are a couple of results from this Progressive focus on credit for “trying really hard” as opposed to actual results.  The outcomes indicate both their out of touch-ness and their lack of understanding of what’s important and where true value lies.  Obama speaking, again:

I think what Americans want to hear more than anything else is, “How are you going to help me right now.  If they’re hearing a persuasive argument about how we’re gonna recreate a solid path for middle-class success in this country then I think I’ll win….”

and

What’s frustrated people is that I have not been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.

The fact is, we aren’t asking, “How are you going to help me right now?”  We don’t want to hear “how you’re going to create anything for a particular class;” though we do notice that you’re only concerned about the middle class, to the exclusion of Lauer’s “underclass.”

We are asking, “When are you going to get out of our way so we can go back to helping ourselves and helping each other?”  We are asking, “How is your government going to get out of our way so all Americans can be successful–middle class, poor, and rich alike?”  We don’t care—in fact, we’re overjoyed—that you “haven’t been able to force the people’s representatives to roll over and be your lapdog.”

But Progressive self-esteem is so important.

Hypocrisy, Part II

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has an opinion piece in USA Today.

In her apologia for an Obamacare regulation that requires health insurance programs provided by a vast range of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and so on institutions to provide contraception, sterilization and abortifacients in direct, open contravention of the teachings and beliefs of those institutions (and that requires those institutions to offer those insurance plans exclusively), she writes

One of the key benefits of the 2010 health care law is that many preventive services are now free for most Americans with insurance. … So is the full range of preventive health services recommended for women by the highly respected Institute of Medicine, including contraception.

So, no one is paying any taxes, or being forced to change their existing health insurance policies, to pay for this.

Nor is there any cancellation of religious teachings or thought or fundamental tenets by this Federal government, which used to be on the other side of a “wall of separation between Church & State.”  There’s an interesting view of “free.”

That’s why in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith. This exemption includes churches and other houses of worship, and could also include other church-affiliated organizations.

Umm, no.  Not hospitals, not doctors’ offices, not clinics.  These employ (quite properly) far too broad a range of employees to be able to fit within the carefully and deliberately narrowly drawn limits of this rule.

In choosing this [extremely narrow religious] exemption, we looked first at state laws already in place across the country. Of the 28 states that currently require contraception to be covered by insurance, eight have no religious exemption at all.

The religious exemption in the administration’s rule is the same as the exemption in Oregon, New York and California.

Of course, far be it from the Federal government to set an example.  Oh, wait….

Hypocrisy

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Fox News is reporting that the People’s Republic of China is claiming that

it was forced to veto a United Nations vote on Syria because it was called before differences in the proposal were bridged, but denied playing spoiler and said it wants to see an end to violence there.

Forced.  Poor babies.  The resolution that the PRC (and Russia) chose to veto would have been a move toward ending nearly a year of Bashar Assad’s killing—to the tune of 5,400—of his own people since last March.

The PRC justifies itself by insisting that the resolution, as written, unduly pressured…the Syrian government.  This is a strange, but strangely consistent, objection coming from a country with similar problems in Tibet, and in its Xinjiang province (which is populated with all those uppity Uighurs.  Oh, yeah, and that also is the PRC’s largest natural gas-producing region).  This also comes from a country that still maintains it has a right to conquer the Republic of China.

Liu Weimin, a spokesman for the PRC’s Foreign Ministry, insisted that that too-early Security Council vote was forced before suitable (Chinese diluting) amendments had been agreed.   This, though, ignores the fact that the PRC never would have accepted a resolution that had actual teeth for ending the Syrian government’s butcherybloodshed.  Just as it had consistently demanded watering down earlier versions of the resolution.

Liu also denied that the PRC was favoring Assad, in particular.  Yet this is exactly the outcome of the Chinese veto.

The People’s Daily  opined

The present situation in Syria is extremely complicated.  To naively back one side, while attacking the other side, might look like bringing about a favorable turn, but is actually just laying up trouble ahead.

No.  It’s not complicated at all.  Either the PRC supports Assad and his behavior, or it does not.  In the meantime, people are dying today.  But that’s no trouble at all.

We don’t need to keep taking the PRC seriously on the political stage; we can ignore and bypass them—and we should ignore and bypass them, so long as they continue to side with bloody despotism.

These Chinese are not just on the wrong side of history—they’re on the wrong side of morality.

Resetting with Russia and China

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Given Russia’s and the People’s Republic of China’s veto of an Arab League motion before the UN’s Security Council “aimed at ending the violence in Syria that called for Mr. Assad to hand over his powers to his vice president and allow creation of a unity government,” vetoes that came hours after Assad’s murderous artillery bombardment of the Syrian city of Homs with an estimated 200 civilian deaths )about which Russia and the PRC surely knew), it may be time to “reset” relations.

Plainly, these vetoes are motivated by either, or both, of two things.  Others have written of Putin’s reluctance to admit that a dysfunctional, even dishonest, much less a murderous government should be susceptible to abolishment by the people: for one thing, Syria is important to a Russian naval presence in the Med, for another, Putin doesn’t want to encourage the Russian people along the same lines, and so on.  Other Chinese motives also seem apparent: Iran is a convenient source of needed oil, and Syria is an important, if not critical, ally of the Iranians.

Another motive is much more stark.  A butcher in charge of Syria hurts the US.  American impotence in dealing with this butcher, especially after the benign (compared to the Syrian situation) affair of Gadhafi, hurts the US.  Vetoes of American-backed (if Arab-led in the present instance) public initiatives demonstrate that impotence.

Following these vetoes, we’re getting some unusually strongly couched statements from President Obama’s State Department.  UN Ambassador Susan Rice has said of the vetoes

The United States is disgusted that a couple of members of this Council continue to prevent us from fulfilling our sole purpose.

and

The people of Syria…have been slapped in the face by several members of the Security Council today.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said

What happened yesterday at the United Nations was a travesty.

and

Faced with a neutered Security Council, we have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations….

and

We will work to expose those who are still funding the regime and sending it weapons to be used against defenseless Syrians, including women and children….

The question becomes, then, is this a sign that resetting is beginning?  Or is it just more idle chit-chat and firm finger-shaking from the Obama administration?