Monthly Archives: August 2012

Tolerance

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Last Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention, Saratoga Springs, UT, Mayor and Congressional Candidate Mia Love spoke rousingly and favorably (see related, below) of the Republican ticket for President.  Oh, and she’s black.  And a woman.

Later that night and early last Wednesday, she was brutally assaulted in her virtual world.  Because she’s black, and a woman, and apparently a runaway from the Progressive plantation house.

Here’s a screen shot of her hacked Wikipedia page, captured by Tabitha Hale:

Here’s another example, from The Daily Dot:

An American citizen, Progressives say, is a “sell-out to the Right Wing Hate Machine,” a “dirty, worthless whore,” and a “House Nigger” when s/he doesn’t toe the Party Line.

The open bigotry isn’t all of it, though.  There’s also the soft bigotry of the Left, who’ve said…nothing…about this assault.  Which is why it’s legitimate to lump the “mainstream” Progressives into the same cesspool as these actors.

Moreover, Progressives also have actively ignored the diversity of the evil conservatives and of the Republican Party’s convention.  MSNBC, for instance, covered Nikki Haley’s (R, SC) speech that Tuesday night and…no one else’s.  This with a speech card that included Mayor Love, ex-Congressman Artur Davis (R, AL), Senate candidate Ted Cruz (R, TX), and Governor Brian Sandoval (R, NV).  And on Wednesday night?  Well, they had an article on Vice President-nominee Paul Ryan’s speech, but they completely ignored Governor Susana Martinez’ (R, NM) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speeches immediately preceding his.

On Rocket Science

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Here’s an excerpt (the second video at the top of the article) from an interview Fox News‘ Megyn Kelly had at the Republican National Convention Tuesday with Mia Love, Mayor of Saratoga Springs, UT, and Republican Candidate for the House of Representatives from Utah’s 4th District:

Megyn Kelly: How do you use that [her father’s advice about not being a burden on society, about giving back instead] in your life?

Mia Love: Well, if you think about it, as Mayor of Saratoga Springs, I have to ask myself several questions before I make any new commitments: is it affordable, is it sustainable, is it my job?  I’m doing everything I can…to make sure we have a fiscally sound city.  It’s not rocket science; the most I’ve done is really step out of the way and allow the economy to thrive, allow businesses to come in and add resources….

That’s clear enough.  Works at the national level too: get government out of our way.

Renewable Energy

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Has German Chancellor Angela Merkel figured out something Barack Obama hasn’t?  As recently as last June, her government had set a goal that by 2020, renewable energy (vis., wind and solar) would comprise 35% of Germany’s electricity production.  In the first half of 2012 (ending that June), Germany already was generating 25% of its electricity from wind and solar, among other renewables.

Then some other things became apparent.  Germany’s Renewable Power Act requires power companies to buy wind- and solar-originated electricity in significant quantities.  Their largest industrial electricity users consume 18% of the electricity produced,  However, they pay only 0.3% of the extra costs generated by those required buys—German taxpayers pay the difference.

The power grid hasn’t kept up with the growth in alternative energy sources—like the offshore windparks in the Baltic and North Seas off the country’s north coast.  Many of those projects are at a standstill, with no way to deliver the power they generate to the mainland.

That Renewable Energy Act provides incentives to build wind turbines, but it doesn’t provide incentives to build the natural gas-fired power plants the country needs for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing (see the figure).

Withal, German consumers are faced with skyrocketing electricity bills.

Now Merkel is changing her mind.  She; her Environment Minister, Peter Altmaier; and her Economy Minister, Philipp Rösler are meeting with industry and union representatives “to discuss the rising costs for consumers.  In the run up to that meeting, Altmaier has indicated that he hopes to…put the brakes on the current rush toward renewables.”

In the US, we have these: green energy subsidies (guaranteed loans, tax credits) and a Federal requirement that power companies buy power from renewable energy producers.

Off the New England coast, special interests found the views from their beach front manses would be offended by wind farms, and the potential farms themselves were declared a “hazard” to aircraft, so they are not even being built.  In central California, environmentalists won’t allow some solar farms to be built and won’t allow the power cables that would deliver solar electricity to cities to be built.

The EPA still requires ethanol to be blended into our gasoline, even though not enough of that is being produced to meet EPA requirements, much that is produced is exported, and the whole charade is driving up the cost of food.

Maybe we should, in  this case, try Obama’s meme of being more like Europe, or at least more like Germany.

Four More Years of This?

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Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s Deputy Campaign Manager, Stephanie Cutter, had some…interesting…things to say recently.

Well, I think that worker probably has a good understanding of what’s happened over the past four years in terms of the president coming in and seeing 800,000 jobs lost on the day that the president was being sworn in, and seeing the president moving pretty quickly to stem the losses, to turn the economy around.  And over the past, you know, 27 months we’ve created 4.5 million private-sector jobs. That’s more jobs than in the Bush recovery (or) in the Reagan recovery.

Hmm….

The Investor’s Business Daily editorialist had a few things to say about her claim.

She starts counting private-sector job growth under Obama in February 2010 and, sure enough, in the 29 months since then (not 27 as Cutter says), there have been 4.5 million private-sector jobs created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

February 2010 was fully eight months into the economic recovery.  So Cutter has simply picked the worst month under Obama as her starting point….  In the aftermath of the 1981-82 recession, private-sector jobs bottomed out in December 1982, the month after that recession ended.  Twenty-nine months later, the private sector under Reagan had created 8 million jobs—nearly twice as many as under Obama.  How about Bush?  …if you use the Cutter method, the private sector created 4.7 million jobs in the 29 months after July 2003, when the job market bottomed.  In other words, Bush beat Obama by his own preferred measuring technique by 200,000 jobs.

What’s more, after 29 months of allegedly stellar job growth under Obama, the jobless rate is still 8.3%.  By this point in the Reagan and Bush jobs recoveries, the unemployment rate was 7.2% and 4.9%, respectively.

It’s important to note, too, that Obama continues to offer not least minim of evidence that these created jobs have resulted from his policies in particular, and not from the normal economic business recovery that follows any recession—only now with the recovery rate suppressed by his policies.

And there’s this tidbit that bears on Cutter’s claim.

In January 2009, the month President Obama entered the Oval Office and shortly before he signed his stimulus spending bill, median household income was $54,983.  By June 2012, it had tumbled to $50,964, adjusted for inflation. … That’s $4,019 in lost real income, a little less than a month’s income every year.

[E]ven if you start the analysis when the recession ended in June 2009, the numbers are dismal.  Three years after the economy hit its trough, median household income is down $2,544, or nearly 5%.

Some jobs he’s “created.”

Now, isn’t Cutter the one who spoke Obama’s lie about his Republican opponent being a felon?  Isn’t she the one who carried Obama’s denial of all knowledge of his SuperPAC’s ad accusing his opponent of killing a woman with his practices at Bain?  Why, yes.  Yes, she is.  Can anyone take seriously anything her mouth talks about?

A larger question: can we afford four more years of an administration so plainly out of contact with the reality of our current economic strait?

 

h/t Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club

Some Immigration Musings

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Former Governor, Ambassador, and Republican Presidential Candidate Jon Huntsman had some thoughts on immigration in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.  His heart is in the right place, but his thoughts are incomplete and naïve.

Huntsman rightly points out the importance of immigrants to our nation’s economy and to our freshness of thought.  He also rightly reviews past mistakes we’ve made vis-à-vis immigration—the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement, the 1924 Immigration Act, among others.

But he offers nothing concrete in the way of a solution beyond the usual “need to improve our visa system” and “need to recruit immigrants.”  But he does add this:

Such initiatives won’t only bring talent here—they will allow us to deny it to our competitors.

Sure.  Immigrants are pieces of meat, or tools to be used to our advantage and against other nations in a zero sum game.

Cue Bill the Cat.  This drivel is of a piece with the Progressive claptrap that says all blacks must be Democrats or they’re traitors to their race, that gays must be Liberals, or they’re self-hating…whatever.

No.  We should be welcoming immigrants because they’re human beings who want to make something better of their lives and their families’ lives and they have something to offer our nation—not because they have something to offer.

Note, though, that the visa games Huntsman rightly decries do need to stop; this is an important component to real immigration reform.  But there’s far more to this than just putting paid to some visa quota nonsense.  We need to make it much easier for folks who want to come here to do so easily.  The delays in getting visas need to be eliminated.  The visa system needs to be simplified: there really only needs to be three kinds of visas: residency, visitor, and business.  And I’m not convinced three categories really are necessary.  All categories should offer a path to citizenship, but that decision should be take-able by the immigrant (or resident alien, if he just wants to live here) at any time, or never, without impacting his visa.

It needs to be far easier physically to cross our borders, too.  Entry stations should be far more closely spaced, and not at all limited to urban areas.  This, just incidentally, will severely hamper human trafficking as the mules (and worse) will find their services needed far less.

But legal entry into our country is only one leg of the stool of immigration reform.  Sitting opposite that easy entry is a need to tightly secure our borders.  There really are folks who want to enter under the radar because their hearts are not pure and their goals are nefarious: drug traffickers and terrorists come to mind.  Accordingly, it ought to be hard to enter without a visa and at any place other than a check point.  This will require improvements and expansion in border patrols, surveillance equipment, and so on—and not just at the borders, but in depth.

And the third leg.  What do we do about the illegal aliens that are present?  Justice—to Americans, to aliens who have entered legally (maybe especially to them, since they’ve grunted through our Byzantine entry mazes and still got in legally), to existing immigrants—demands that the illegal aliens not be given a pass.  Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D, IL) and Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) both have partial solutions that are worth building on in this area.

Most importantly, and making reform harder to do, all three legs of this reform must be done together.  No one of these is sufficient, and if less than all are done, the imbalance will just blow up the effort.