Tag Archives: political parties

Democrats, Pseudo-Science, and our Economy

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President Barack Obama stopped the Keystone XL pipeline (fortunately, it’s not permanent; a better informed President can undo this damage, but that’s for another post). Obama, supported by his Democrat confreres (though, as I said, it was his decision), offered these excuses for the stoppage:

the pipeline would create few jobs

Even taking that as accurate (thousands of jobs are not “few,” though), job creation in our present economy is not a thing to be dismissed as casually as this. Further, the John Kerry State Department’s analysis that the jobs created would amount to fewer than 0.1% of “the nation’s total employment” is fatuous on its face: other than Big Government, there are vanishingly few enterprises that don’t employ fewer than 0.1% of our nation’s total employment.

would fail to lower gasoline prices

Not initially, perhaps, as the current relative slowness of gasoline prices to fall in line with falling oil prices. However, the increased supply of oil and its associated easier delivery to refineries, can only increase the supply of gasoline relative to demand, and so the pipeline would, ultimately reduce the price of gasoline. Of course there are two sources of reduced prices, only one of which is easily visible. One is an absolute drop in price at the pump. The other, though, is easily ignored by Democrats: that’s the smaller rise in price as demand continues to outrun supply, even as that latter gap shrinks from the pipeline’s influence on supply.

exacerbate[e] climate change

Umm, no. Even were man a serious player in climate warming (this was the climatista panic-mongers’ claim; they don’t get to run away from it with a name change), the pipeline’s influence can’t be seen in the noise, given the PRC’s and India’s contribution to climate warming. However, the pseudo-science of “climate warming” is being more and more debunked—not only through exposure of all the falsified data and failed models, but with actual real data contradicting pseudo-scientists’ claims. There’s nothing present for the pipeline to influence, even minisculy.

No, canceling Keystone is nothing more than a continuation of Democrats’ pushing their crony green capitalists’ welfare, a functional if not purely intentional attack on our economy.

Who Wants Hispanic Votes?

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Recall the brouhaha over CNBC’s butchery of the last Republican Presidential primary debate. In the aftermath, the Republican National Committee removed NBC (the parent of CNBC) from moderating the February ’16 debate (currently still scheduled with the National Review as moderator along with a now-unspecified partner). In tit-for-tat response, NBC pulled Telemundo (another of NBC’s properties) from co-moderating that February debate.

Jeb Bush’s representatives sought to reinstate Telemundo, NBC’s Spanish-language network, as a partner for that debate, but the proposal was vetoed by Donald Trump’s campaign, which threatened to boycott the event.

I have a couple of questions: does the Republican Party really want the Hispanic vote, or not? Which Republican candidates want the Hispanic vote?

Is Donald Trump (never mind all his racist remarks about Hispanics) really going to be given veto power over the other candidates’ campaigns and debates? If so, do we really want such lily-livered men or women for President?

Disappointment

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And enthusiasm. Here’s an interesting remark in Colleen McCain Nelson’s and Peter Nicholas’ piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal concerning Vice President Joe Biden’s supporters, donors, and then-potential donors and their possible support for the remaining Democratic Party Presidential candidates:

Many of them face a Bidenesque gut check: will they be able to commit heart and soul to their new candidate?

Because their remaining choices are Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and folding their money and putting it back in their pockets against a future day with better candidates.

The gut check may well be limited to the primary season. Jon Cooper, the Draft Biden Finance Chairman, said:

It would be nice if I felt passionate about a candidate, and right now I’m not feeling the passion. There’s a lot I like about Bernie Sanders, a lot I like about Hillary Clinton. Whether I get excited enough about any of the campaigns to devote time and energy during the primary is the question. And right now it’s not happening.

Still, money not raised during the primaries is money not available at the start of the general campaign.

What HRC Knew

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…about blaming the murders of our Ambassador in Libya and three of his security team on a video at the time she was busily blaming those murders on that video….

An email was sent from her Libyan Embassy to her State Department shortly after those murders. Of course, the email’s sender and recipient(s) have been carefully redacted by John Kerry’s State Department.

The film’s not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest, which escalated into violence.

It is our opinion that in our messaging, we want to distinguish, not conflate, the events in other countries with this well planned attack by militant extremists.

Two days later, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice did her trick on five Sunday news/talk shows claiming the video made the “protestors” do it.

Remember this duplicity in a year.

Sovereignty

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Regarding the People’s Republic of China’s attempted seizure of the East, and in particular, the South China Sea and the associated PRC seizure of seabed minerals, below the seabed oil and gas deposits, and surface fishing rights,

The US said it doesn’t take a position on sovereignty over the South China Sea but insists on freedom of navigation and overflight. About 30 percent of global trade passes through the South China Sea, which also has rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of undersea mineral deposits.

We need to take a position on sovereignty over the South China Sea, exactly for sovereignty, that international trade, those fishing rights, and those minerals and oil and gas deposits.

We say we’re for freedom of the seas, but that begins with recognition of what are international waters and what are not. The South China Sea, and the East China Sea, are international waters, not internal lakes of this or that country.

Various nations’ Exclusive Economic Zones extend far into the Seas. Various nations have far more legitimate territorial claims to a number of the islands in those Seas.

We should be working with those nations—Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, et al.—to help them resolve their disagreements over whose territory those islands are, we should be working with those nations to help them resolve their disputes over Economic Zone overlaps.

Given the PRC’s open lawlessness regarding those waters and those islands, we should be working these dispute resolutions with the explicit exclusion of the PRC in those talks.