Friday, March 9, 2012

Removing the Keystone (Pipeline)

Removing the Keystone (Pipeline)

The Keystone XL pipeline's demise tosses another shovel full of dirt onto the lid of this country's coffin.  Keystone's termination was not just a kickback to the urban dwelling, loony-left environmental voters, though that was a nice bonus.  The demise was also not just a payoff to Warren Buffet's rail companies that currently ferry unrefined North Dakota oil, though that too was an added benefit.  No, killing Keystone XL forwards two radical anti-American agendas deeply coveted by the hard-leftists occupying the White House. 
First, for some context, let's revisit the underlying Marxist dogma that drives the decision-making process of the Obama administration, including with regards to Keystone.  From a wonderful summary of The Communist Manifesto, we read:
The primary objective of communists and the revolutionary proletariat is the abolition of private property, for it is this that keeps them [the proletariat] enslaved. Bourgeois economics, i.e., capitalism, requires that the owners of the means of production compensate workers only enough to ensure their mere physical subsistence and reproduction. In other words, the existence of bourgeois property, or capital as Marx calls it, relies on its radically unequal distribution. The only way the proletariat can free itself from bourgeois exploitation is to abolish capitalism. In achieving this goal, the proletariat will destroy all remnants of bourgeois culture which act to perpetuate, if even implicitly, their misery. This includes family organization, religion, morality, jurisprudence, etc.
Sound familiar?
Fueled by Marxist ideology, one radical anti-America agenda of Soros's and Obama's inner advisers is their desperate desire for the upward destabilization of domestic energy prices.  Their repeated actions (ignore the daily pabulum spoon-fed through the MSM to the politically innocents) such as postponing Keystone reflect a premeditated plan to raise the price of domestic energy to crushing levels by executive fiat.  (The word "postpone" is bureaucratic euphemism meaning "render dead as a doornail.")  Americans have seen three years of a series of brutal administrative assaults on the coal, natural gas, oil, and power production industries.  Ignored by the media, Obama's czars, those unconfirmed hard-leftists infecting the executive agencies, have written literally hundreds of new onerous environmental regulations adversely impacting offshore drilling; fracking; and extraction, transport, refining, and sales of all fossil fuels.
At the same time, billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded government loans have simply vanished down the black hole of green energy cronyism, corruption, and malfeasance.  If this were truly a government of, by, and for the people, dozens of senior administration bureaucrats and their loan recipients would have been indicted, prosecuted, and jailed for evaporating tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars.  That is evidently not the case with the new commissariats running roughshod in Washington.
Energy soaks like rain into the ground.  Every forest, field crop, and lawn dies without sufficient water.  So, too, every business, farm, factory, church, and home suffers impairment without the energy required for heat, light, and electricity.  These artificially inflated energy costs are, essentially, a non-constitutional governmental tax.  The energy dollars "seized" from taxpayers preclude many other choices related to every American's inalienable right to discover life, liberty, and his individual pursuit of happiness.  That, my friends, is, in the classic Marxist patois, "the dictatorship of the proletariat."
Keystone's demise forwards a second anti-American agenda, one that seeks to silently subvert the foundation of our military's war-fighting abilities.  Energy is war-fighting capacity.  From the University of Washington we read:
After construction was complete in late 1942, the [Grand Coulee] dam had an immediate impact in helping the United States win World War II. As President Harry Truman said, "Without Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams it would have been almost impossible to win this war." Specifically, the Grand Coulee Dam provided the electricity needed to produce aluminum, which was crucial for the airplane construction taking place at Boeing in Seattle. With no capacity to produce aluminum in 1940, the Pacific Northwest was producing 36% of the nation's aluminum output by 1946. It is estimated that one third of the aluminum used in aircraft during World War II came from the power generated by the Grand Coulee Dam. Also, the Grand Coulee Dam provided the power needed for the plutonium production reactors at the nuclear production facilities at the Hanford site1.
Where does Keystone's demise fit into this second anti-American agenda that silently subverts the foundation of our military's war-fighting abilities?  If and when the United States is next engaged in a global war, our military will require a massive national effort, akin to WWII, to produce vast quantities of war materiel -- fighters, bombers, tanks, transport trucks, mobile artillery, small arms, etc.  Will America have enough available electrical capacity to provide the power for all these ramped-up industries plus the energy needed in a wartime economy? 
(The Congress of Vienna prevented a European war for almost a hundred years.  We are almost seventy years away from the end of WWII.  We humans quickly forget the horrors of large-scale land warfare.  After a few generations have passed, new conquerors arise and covet their neighbors' wealth, all under the guise of revolutionary ideology.  And the cycle starts anew.)
This nation has stopped building new hydroelectric projects as political payback to the hard-left environmentalists, who are living proof that Darwin was wrong.  And wind, solar, and algae are laughably unable to scale for the power requirements needed for wartime industrialization.
In other words, will America have the time to build new power plants while also building the factories to make the arms?  We absolutely need Keystone's oil flowing into America today.  Keystone incentivizes private industry to upgrade our moribund domestic refining capacity, to fuel all those new power plants, and to gas up the fighters, bombers, ships, and tanks that will be built.  Those who wish harm to this nation understand full well that there can be no "Arsenal of Democracy" if America's industrial capacity to wage war has been severed at the wellhead.
So what specific methodology might a small group of radicals atop our government adopt to swiftly accelerate the financial impoverishment of the working middle and upper classes, leading to the fatal demise of America's bourgeois and the abolition of private property?  The answer lies with the sharply rising price of energy, which ripples through the retail prices for food, consumer goods, and manufacturing -- while simultaneously devaluing our national currency through massive debt and spiraling health care costs - all woven into a mapless labyrinth of oppressive regulations. 
We are almost there.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

From Denmark: Politically incorrect cartoons - Jihad Watch

From Denmark: Politically incorrect cartoons - Jihad Watch

From Denmark: Politically incorrect cartoons

Danes not only have the world record in happiness. They are also the most trusting people and the people who have the least tendency to feel ashamed. Maybe that is why making fun of angry people and their prophet is what we are famous for. And why stuff like this can be printed in one of our biggest -- and most politically correct -- newspapers (Politiken). From Wulffmorgenthaler.com:
Wulffmorgenthaler, burqa postbox.jpg
Wulffmorgenthaler, burqa smile.jpg
Wulffmorgenthaler, festival burqa tent.jpg
Wulffmorgenthaler, Taliban New Year.jpg
Wulffmorgenthaler, Osama speedos.jpg
Translation: "What Osama does nowadays. "Guys, how do you think they fit? It is Speedos, I bought them online... I am preparing for the day that we get out of this ridiculous cave! Then we will finally have some fun!"
Wulffmorgenthaler, Arabs as Scandinavians.jpg
Wulffmorgenthaler, proper Muslim woman.jpg

The lib lie about oil revealed (again).

Articles: Big Oil and Tax Breaks

To hear the president and Democrats talk, you'd think that Big Oil was sucking the Treasury dry with huge subsidies.  Almost a year ago I wrote about the federal government's "subsidies" to Big Oil.  I said then, "They are all tax 'breaks'... about $4.3 billion per year -- about 0.2% of this year's deficit and enough to fund about 10 hours of current US government spending."
I was wrong.  The tax breaks for all fossil fuels was not $4.3B in 2011.  It was only $2.5B -- about 0.19% of that year's deficit, and enough to fund only six hours of U.S. government spending.  The source for such heresy?  The Congressional Budget Office.
Just to be clear, that $2.5B was not just for Big Oil, but also for Big Coal and Big Gas: all fossil fuels.  Here, more exactly, are those subsidies, in the CBO's words.
  • "Expensing of exploration and development costs for oil and natural gas." ($0.8B)
  • "Option to expense 50% of qualified property used to refine liquid fuels." ($0.8B)
  • "Option to expense investment costs on the basis of gross income rather than on production." ($0.9B)
I can't say I understand those "subsidies."  Is exploration not supposed to be a cost of doing business for an oil company?  Who is to say these expenses are not legitimate costs?  But let's take the CBO's word for it that these are, for some reason, "subsidies."
Let's compare those subsidies to other energy subsidies. The CBO has a chart.
 
Well look at that: tax subsidies for all fossil fuels were only 15% of all federal subsidies for energy.  The Green alternatives of renewables and "efficiency" took 78% of all tax subsidies for energy.  Big Oil has so much influence on Capitol Hill that our government subsidizes its competitors five times more.  Fossil fuels provide 77% of our nation's energy yet receive just 15% of the federal government's tax subsidies.
"Alcohol fuels," which include ethanol, took $6.1B of tax subsidies, or more than twice as much as oil, gas, and coal combined.
When did this start happening?  The CBO has another chart.
 
The explosion of energy subsidies seemed to coincide rather neatly with Democrats taking over both the House and Senate in 2007, and then the presidency in 2009.  (That darned Reagan cut subsidies for fossil fuels to nothing.  In Reagan's last year, the small amount of tax subsidies for energy was all going to renewables.)
You know who else likes subsidizing alternative energy?  George Soros.  He wrote this in January 2009:
The American consumer can no longer act as the motor of the global economy. Alternative energy and developments that produce energy savings could serve as a new motor, but only if the price of conventional fuels is kept high enough to justify investing in those activities. That would involve putting a floor under the price of fossil fuels by imposing a price on carbon emissions and import duties on oil to keep the domestic price above, say, $70 per barrel.
Somehow, George got his wish for high fuel prices even without a Copenhagen-like global Cap & Trade system.  When he wrote that, oil was only about $40 per barrel.  Just one year later, it was consistently over $70 per barrel, George's magic threshold -- as if delivered as a Christmas gift.  And this year it's been about $100 per barrel.  Good times: a 150% increase in crude oil prices in the three years since George Soros called for higher fuel prices, perfectly coinciding with the three years of Obama's presidency.
You know who else pushes alternative energy sources really hard?  The Communist Party USA:
We could begin with an immediate carbon tax that would penalize those with the largest carbon footprint - big corporations - while also making a case for the elimination of coal production and expansion of alternative energy sources.
And who else?  Presidential candidate Barack Obama said this in 2008 (via Jake Tapper at ABC):
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches.
Pretty wild coincidence, huh?  Barack Obama, George Soros, and the Communist Party all pushing the same energy policies.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

OK, let’s talk about JFK

OK, let’s talk about JFK

So presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has Bill Press’ stomach all a-twitter, huh? Why? Because, according to Bill, “So what do you do? You attack President John F. Kennedy!”

I’m so glad to hear you say that, Bill. Tell you what – since you seem to respect JFK and what he stood for and said – why don’t you write one of your next columns about the speech he gave to the Economic Club of New York back in December of 1962? If I read it correctly, he pretty much put into words what Arthur Laffer put graphically on paper, that there is a point of taxation at which any increase will result in a decrease in revenue to the government, and, equally importantly, if confiscatory tax rates on the “greedy rich” are reduced, those revenues to the government will go up.

It’s your turn, Bill. Do you really hold JFK in high esteem, or only when what he says agrees with what you believe personally?

Changing the subject just a tad, here’s some fodder for all WND readers to think about. Go read JFK’s speech, and then consider this: I’ve mentioned it in more than one email to the editor sent in to several major newspapers all around the Chicagoland area, and some I’ve sent in more than once. Not one of them has seen fit to put any into print. I get the impression that they don’t want anyone to know the truth about tax rates, especially with you-know-who in the White House.

John Babush

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Are Liberals Evil Or Stupid? | Right Wing News

Are Liberals Evil Or Stupid? | Right Wing News

Written By : John Hawkins

Forgive them for they know not what they do. — Luke 23:34

Over at The Telegraph, James Dellinpole asks, “Are lefties incredibly stupid or just plain evil?” The column was spurred by comments made by Charles Krauthammer who once famously intoned,

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

This is generally true, although the “evil” theory is making a comeback on the Right as more people have become familiar with Saul Alinsky and the Cloward–Piven strategy (Yes, Alinsky, Cloward, & Piven are evil people). Combine that with the complete acceptabilty of lying for political ends on the left, liberalism’s growing hostility to Christianity and country, and their willing embrace of almost anything that weakens the country or undermines morality, and it’s easy to embrace the idea that liberals are evil.

It’s not true, though.

…..Not that there aren’t “evil” liberals. There are plenty of them. Being a shameless liar who believes in nothing other than getting reelected may not make you a very good person, but it’s a huge strength in politics. We’ve created a system that rewards lying, lack of conscience, and acting like a sociopath; so there are a lot of people like that in Congress (They’re on both sides of the aisle). In fact, other than our prison system, Congress has the largest collection of con-men and swindlers you’ll find anywhere in our country.

Setting those people aside and getting down to the run-of-the-mill liberal in politics that you run into — are they evil people? Although I think you could make a fair case that liberalism is an evil philosophy, for the most part, I’d say its adherents aren’t evil.

Liberals are utterly indifferent to whether the policies they advocate work or not. It’s not about actually improving people’s lives for liberals; it’s about feeling good about yourself. If a policy makes a liberal feel morally superior, whether it actually does more harm than good is completely irrelevant.

Combine that with the liberal love of groupthink (The only real crime is being insufficiently liberal), the smug sense of superiority liberalism encourages that has no relation to actions or results beyond being liberal, the-ends-justifies-the-means mentality that liberalism pushes, and liberalism becomes an all-encompassing, insular philosophy.

Do liberals often do a great deal of evil? Yes. Do they mean to do it? No. They’ve been told they’re the good guys, they FEEL LIKE they’re good guys, and they’re been taught not to critically examine any evidence to the contrary because it comes from a polluted source (a non-liberal).

In a sense, they’re like people who are pouring rat poison into the punch bowl at a party while they think it’s sugar. They feel so pleased with themselves because they’re doing a good thing — and the people who’re trying to stop them? At best they don’t know any better, but more likely they’re just evil people who want everyone to have a terrible time — because of THE EVIL. It’s impossible to explain the situation to them because they start with the assumption that if you don’t want to pour the rat poison into the Kool-Aid, you must be evil, and therefore can’t be trusted. So, they live their lives inside of a feedback loop that’s nearly impossible to penetrate.

So, are liberals evil? No, they’re stupid or perhaps more accurately, close-minded, emotion-driven people with no common sense and a wholly unjustified superiority complex.

Useful Idiots at it again...

» Clueless Socialists Protest MacIver Institute - Big Government

Well, it took them a year, but the perpetually offended crowd of ardent public sector union supporters, wayward students and other socialists finally discovered that the MacIver Institute offices are right across from the Wisconsin State Capitol.








As soon as we heard a trombone playing outside our window we knew something was up. Drums are a matter of course. So are plastic vuvuzelas. But a brass section? Whoa, this was different. This was big.

Eh. Not so much.

This motley crew didn’t know diddly about the MacIver Institute, and were completely clueless about ALEC. But they absolutely knew we were both bad ‘for the people’ because someone told them so.

And they sure knew they don’t like the free market economy. You know, the same economy that affords them to spend yet another afternoon aimlessly wandering the streets of Madison protesting… just about everything.