Monthly Archives: January 2015

Meanwhile, Democrats

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A Senate panel could pass a bipartisan Iran sanctions bill as soon as Thursday — but even if approved, the measure is likely to gather dust for at least two months after Democratic backers agreed to give the Obama administration more time to reach a nuclear deal.

This was a bill that wouldn’t even apply sanctions unless and until the Obama administration agreed that negotiations with the terrorist state had not succeeded by Obama’s own “deadline” of 24 March.

Senators Bob Menendez (D, NJ) and Chuck Schumer (D, NY) are among 10 Senators that suddenly have tucked their tails between their legs on the matter.

It seems that the Democratic Party is uninterested in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons, or too timid to cross its boss in the White House. Or both.

It also seems foreign government lobbying of our Senate has had its effect.

Unemployment and Unemployment “Benefits”

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From the Abstract of the Naitonal Bureau of Economic Research’s just-released paper, The Impact of Unemployment Benefit Extensions on Employment: The 2014 Employment Miracle? by Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii, and Kurt Mitman [emphasis added]:

We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment. We exploit the variation induced by the decision of Congress in December 2013 not to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession. Federal benefit extensions that ranged from 0 to 47 weeks across US states at the beginning of December 2013 were abruptly cut to zero. To achieve identification we use the fact that this policy change was exogenous to cross-sectional differences across US states and we exploit a policy discontinuity at state borders. We find that a 1% drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points. In levels, 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut. Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized.

If you want more of something, you subsidize it. The Democrats, since the Panic of 2008, have demanded ever more unemployment benefits, and it was only over their objections that the repeated extensions were halted and unemployment benefits stopped.

Hmm….

Terrorist State Threatens Terrorism

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And so it goes with Iran.

Iran is encouraging its terror allies to pursue the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s children by publishing personal information about them, including photographs of the kids lined up in crosshairs, and declaring, “We must await the hunt of Hezbollah.”

And

In addition to biographical details and pictures of Netanyahu’s children, the Iranians provided details about the families of former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon.

This was nominally triggered by an Israeli airstrike against a weapons shipment arrived in Syria but not yet dispersed in which an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps senior officer was killed.

Nominally.

On the Confirmation of Loretta Lynch

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…for Attorney General to replace Eric Holder.

During confirmation hearings which started yesterday [emphasis added],

Her biggest challenge could be explaining her support and participation in civil forfeitures, a legal process in which law enforcement agencies can seize money and other assets without charging or convicting the owners….

And so…

After nearly three years of legal battles, the federal government last week dropped its case against the Hirschs, who own a distribution company that serves convenience stores on Long Island. The government agreed to return more than $446,000 in assets and cash seized by the Internal Revenue Service in 2012 under federal civil asset forfeiture laws, even though the Hirsch family was never charged with a crime.

This was a case approved and brought by US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch.

Hmm….

Obama and “Energy”

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President Obama announced Sunday that he’ll use his executive authority to designate 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, walling it off from resource development. This abrogates a 1980 deal in which Congress specifically set aside some of this acreage for future oil and gas exploration.

He also did this without so much as a faretheewell to any of Alaska’s leadership, including, explicitly its Republican delegation in Congress. Not a what do you think. Not a heads up. Nada.

Here’s his cynical divide-and-conquer bribery attempt:

The Obama administration is poised to unveil a draft plan for selling offshore oil and gas leases that is expected to rule out auctioning drilling rights in parts of the Atlantic Ocean as well as in some Arctic waters and along the West Coast between 2017 and 2022.
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The draft plan is expected to keep the door open for selling oil and gas leases off the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, though with a larger buffer zone than previously outlined. Possible oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea [off the northwest coast of Alaska] also would be set back further from the coast than during a previous 2008 auction of drilling rights in those Arctic waters.

This draft also would set off limits areas in the Beaufort Sea, off the north coast of Alaska, that had been available before this. It’s a naked attempt to get Republicans to abandon Alaska in return for the promise of future drilling elsewhere.

None of this has anything at all to do with energy or energy independence for the US. It’s entirely, and tightly, centered on an insecure man trying to show how powerful he is to those lesser men and women impudent enough to disagree with him.