President Obama’s favorite flipped out radical buddy, Cass Sunstein, has met a bit of a roadblock in the form of GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who is concerned by Sunstein’s radical pro-animal positions. Seems like an odd thing to block a nomination over, but pause and consider these Sunstein quotes:

“I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.” – Animal Rights, a 2004 book by Sunstein.

“Laws designed to protect animals against cruelty and abuse should be amended or interpreted to give a private cause of action against those who violate them, so as to allow private people to supplement the efforts of public prosecutors.” – ibid.

Sunstein, a Harvard prof who’s been nominated by Obama to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, will have the power to review every single federal regulation and suggest changes to make them more conformed with Obama’s vision of Amerika.

The Hill reports that Sunstein could be gleefully rubbing his palms together, waiting for confirmation because his point of view “strongly suggests” that “there should be extensive regulation of the use of animals in entertainment, in scientific experiments, and in agriculture.” He gave Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a member of the Agriculture Committee, teh sort of assurances a nominee gives when asked pointed questions, you know, “Oh, I said that? Well, whatever, but it surely wouldn’t influence my actions. Don’t believe it just because I wrote it; believe what I’m saying now because I’m saying it.”

Chambliss says he’s talked to a lot of agricultural interests that aren’t ready to buy Susstein’s confirmation hearing conversion, so he’s going to block the nomination until he gets a chance to ask the nominee face to face.

The White House had no comment. But we’re told they think this is one baaaaaad development.

Among Sunstein’s other radical viewpoints is one that would come in handy to Obama as he plots his takeover of America’s healthcare system.  Sunstein once urged the federal government to devalue the elderly when calculating the benefits of federal regulations because “A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”

Read more at the American Conservative Union.

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he token Dem was “unsurprised to mildly happy” (which I read as “miffed”) over  Sarah Palin daring to make a joke at the expense of John Kerry’s “long face,” but didn’t seem to be bothered that Kerry’s earlier crack wishing it had been she, not Mark Sanford, who went missing was unprovoked and clumsily tied Palin to dereliction of duty and infidelity.

He says I’ve mischaracterized this position, and for brevity’s sake I’ll just say Wah! Wah! Wah! that I have.  This post isn’t about that.  It’s about media bias and it all started when the Token Dem sent me the CNN news clip below, saying it showed that Palin was “just cementing her ‘mean-girl cheerleader’ image.”

I actually chuckled at the nasty tenor of the crack, even if I didn’t agree with it, but I didn’t much care for the clip:

(CNN) She’s visiting troops on a peacekeeping mission, but Sarah Palin signaled Friday she’s ready to go to battle with John Kerry, who reportedly made a joke earlier this week at her expense.

The Boston Herald reported that on Wednesday, before South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s exact whereabouts were widely known, the Massachusetts senator mused to reporters the wrong elected official had dropped out of sight.

“Too bad if a governor had to go missing it couldn’t have been the governor of Alaska,” he said, according to the paper. “You know, Sarah Palin.”

Palin herself, speaking to U.S. troops in Kosovo, responded Friday with a shot aimed straight for the face — literally.

“Then Sen. John Kerry makes this joke, I don’t know if you saw this, but he makes this joke saying, ‘Aw shoot, of all the governors in the nation who disappeared, too bad it couldn’t have been that governor from Alaska…’” she said.

“But the way he said it, he looked quite frustrated, and he looked so sad, and I just wanted to reach out to the TV and say, ‘John Kerry, why the long face?’”

Palin is overseas visiting Alaska National Guard troops on a peacekeeping mission.

What’s missing that keeps this report from being an objective recounting of the Cute Face/Long Face tiff? Why, the troops’ response, of course. Give it a listen:

Would it have been that hard for the reporter to mention that the troops cheered – or even that they cheered wildly – at her joke?  Answer:  While it would have required just typing a few words, yes, it would have been very, very hard for the reporter to do anything that might tilt the advantage towards Palin.

It was not hard, of course, for the reporter writing the Boston Herald recounting of Kerry’s original joke to include the line, “The democratic-centric crowd laughed.”

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Oh, they’d like to think the leader of the free world can give everyone a free lunch and still lead the economy out of recession, and Lefties turn to Huffington Post whenever economic worries overwhelm them, knowing they’ll find there reassuring blather to dope them back into a happy stupor.

But not today. Today they find a column by Dan Dorfman titled Everything Is Not Coming Up Roses.  After running through the latest rosy scenarios one gets if one hangs around the Rose Garden too much, Dorfman settles in with one Madeline Schnapp, economic researcher at TrimTabs Investment Research,whom he calls “one of the country’s leading liquidity trackers.” Her view:

The labor market, as Schnapp sees it, is still in horrible shape. Granted, she observes, weekly unemployment and continuing unemployment claims have declined slightly, but they remain at high levels, while online job demand appears to have stabilized at an extremely low level. As for housing, she says the notion that it’s starting to recover is nonsense. Aside from the growing defaults in Alt-A mortgages, California foreclosures are up 156% since March.

Another big worry, according to Schnapp, is the huge government debt. Spendthrift Uncle Sam, she points out, has to sell $1.5 trillion of new debt every quarter just to finance the deficit and pay down existing debt.

Her worrisome economic bottom line: “How can anyone say the economy is out of the woods?” Taking that concern a step further, she feels the economy is unlikely to expand until well into …

Well into when? Well into when? Oh, that’s the news that bodes really badly for Uncle Barack “Sam” Obama. Schnapp, like many other economists the readers of HuffPo would rather ignore, believes there will be no economic expansion until well into 2010.

Like maybe November, sometime after election day. And it could well be GOP landslides in the House and Senate, brought on by frustration with Obama’s terrible bludgeoning of the economy, that finally spark the economy into recovery.

Art hat-tip: Red State Conservative

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emember the BTU Tax?  I didn’t, which caused me to make a mistake in my post yesterday, when I made this comment in response to this, from Obama’s Rose Garden shill for the Waxman-Markey energy tax, “We have been talking about this issue for decades, now is the time to finally act.”  I said:

“We’ve been talking about carbon taxes for decades?!”  Where does he get this stuff? How dumb does he think we are?  If you stretch the timeline rather aggressively, pressure to tax carbon began within the last ten years, and even then it was promoted only by a small group of whackos.

I forgot one particular whacko, Al Gore, who in 1993 – decades ago – tried to move a tax on energy – British Thermal Units, or BTUs,  through Congress.  Mea culpa.

Matt Dempsey, a GOP staffer at the Senate Energy & Public Works Committee brought me back into the light:

As the House prepares to vote on the largest tax increase in American history, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill, and as President Obama tries to persuade his House allies to vote for same, EPW Policy Beat took another trip down memory lane.  We landed in 1993 as the House was voting on the Al-Gore-backed BTU tax.  As we and others have stated before, the historical and political parallels between the BTU tax and Waxman-Markey are striking: members fearful that voting for an energy tax would have political repercussions at the ballot box; members fearful of voting for a bill that would then die in the Senate; members fearful that an energy tax would be regressive, harm consumers, destroy jobs and slow economic growth; members fearful of a man named Gore pushing an energy rationing scheme that harms the heartland; and Democratic congressional leaders and Administration officials (read: Gore) desperately searching for exemptions and last-minute deals to shore up support.  As the proverb goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

As you know, because “we have been talking about this issue for decades,” the BTU tax did fail, as Clinton dropped the bill in the Senate, when it became clear it didn’t have enough Democratic support there. Many of the Dems who voted for it in the House found themselves scrambling to defend their votes, and many could not, losing their seats. And America was spared having to commit forced economic suicide at the hand of a radical environmentalist politician.

We don’t have to go back to 1993 for lessons on how bad Waxman-Markey is; we need only visit Spain today. As George Will pointed out in his column yesterday:

[Gabriel] Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration’s green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

Calzada says Spain’s torrential spending — no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources — on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada’s report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies — wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation — sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency — of capital. (European media regularly report “eco-corruption” leaving a “footprint of sleaze” — gaming the subsidy systems, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc.) Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy has subtracted about 110,000 jobs elsewhere in Spain’s economy.

A GOP study found the same thing here in the U.S. – green jobs aren’t particularly high-paying, but require an average government subsidy of $100,000.

I attempted to engage some green-tinted lefties in a meaningful conversation on the topic yesterday on a  New Mexico political blog (I got there via a Twitter link, if you’re curious). I response to a guest column plea for a yes vote on Waxman-Markey, I wrote:

Ask yourself, which is melting faster, the ice caps or the economy? Hint: It’s the latter by far, and spiking all energy costs in at least the short- to mid-term will only deepen and lengthen the recession.

As for all those new clean energy jobs, you cannot count the jobs Waxman-Markey supposedly will open up unless you also count the jobs it will destroy in oil, gas and related sectors of the economy, where several million are employed.

Out of work New Mexicans will suffer through higher costs long before they get the benefit of any new green jobs, I’m afraid. Call your representatives and ask them to vote NO on Waxman-Markey.

That spawned a raft of responses, mostly negative, including one saying I sounded like an oil industry propagandist. I challenged them to find anything wrong with anything I said, but they didn’t even try.  Instead, they waxed on about all the jobs Waxman-Markey, or ACES as they refer to it lovingly, will create.  As I understand their argument it goes like this:

We would feel really good if we could get jobs in the green industry because the world is like dying, you know, and we’re so excited about it, we’d like everyone to pay more money for everything in order for us to get those jobs.

That’s what we’re up against folks: Ignorant self-interest.  And ignorant self-interest is what they’re really talking about when they say “money,” as in “money makes the world go ’round.”

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aced with stiff opposition to the first major platform of his campaign to come before a vote in Congress – the Waxman Markey screw the economy/appease the radical greens bill – President Obama has been forced to drop everything and dial for votes.

Robert “I’ve Just Got to Get a Message to You” Gibbs confirmed the prez is calling congressmen to hustle votes and told the huddled press today, “We know where we are, and I’d bet on the president.”  That means the vote is a lot closer than they’d like.

Obama also hustled up a quick bully pulpit event in the Rose Garden to deliver this, the best the golden-tongued one can come up with in support of his massive energy tax:

I know this is going to be a close vote [expectation management], in part because of the misinformation that is out there that suggests there is somehow a contradiction between investing in clean energy and our economic growth. ["Mis"-information that shall go unrebutted.]

But my call to those members of Congress who are still on the fence as well as to the American people is this [Who aren't on the fence - even Obama's core voting block opposes it!]: we cannot be afraid of the future, we can’t be prisoners of the past. [And we certainly can't ask questions about cost or effectiveness.]

We have been talking about this issue for decades, now is the time to finally act.

That last line deserves more than a mere bracket.  “We’ve been talking about carbon taxes for decades?!”  Where does he get this stuff? How dumb does he think we are?  If you stretch the timeline rather aggressively, pressure to tax carbon began within the last ten years, and even then it was promoted only by a small group of whackos.

Besides, even if the discussion had been going on that long, the only thing one could conclude from it is that the Dems have not been able to get their way thus far, due to overwhelming opposition to the proposition of adding massive society-wide cost increases in the name of unilateral tilting at the global warming windmill.

And why, pray tell, is now the time to act?  Just ask yourself this simple question: Which is melting faster, the economy or the planet? That one is so easy, even a Democrat can get it.

It’s not too late – sign the petition!

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One nice thing you can say about Mark “The Bastard” Sanford – his breaking scandal probably took some viewers away from the All Barack Channel’s special on Obamacare.  And that might have been a relief for our president, who apparently needed a prescription for his massive headache after comprehensively failing to sell comprehensive health care reform.

(Disclaimer:  I was watching Jack Bauer try to figure out who assassinated David  Palmer in season 5 of “24,” so I somehow managed to miss the ABC sell-a-thon.)

Reports this morning show it was pretty rough going for the Prez, who portrays himself as a man of the people, but only so far …

President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people — like the president himself — wouldn’t face.

…Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.

Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother I always want them to get the very best care.” (source)

And they’ll get that care through a government-run system like Canada’s?  Obama also struggled to explain how a government-supported system wouldn’t cut the legs out from under the private delivery of medical services.  Faced with GOP criticism on the matter, he said:

“They’re wrong,” the president said, arguing that in a Health Insurance Exchange, the public plan would be “one option among multiple options.”

The concern, Gibson articulated, is that such a plan wouldn’t be offered on a level playing field.

The president rebuffed that, arguing that “we can set up a public option where they’re collecting premiums just like any private insurer and doctors can collect rates,” but because the public plan will have lower administrative costs “we can keep them [private insurance companies] honest.”

Obama said he didn’t understand those advocates of the free market who constantly say the private sector can do things better and are yet worried about this plan.

I can’t understand why a man who is as smart as the president can look at the Post Office and Amtrak and still want to shove government’s nose into the health delivery and insurance system.  At least let’s give him a few years to show us what he can do with GM and Chrysler before we turn our bodies over to him.

Brave Michelle Malkin actually watched Obama Night on ABC and summed it up well:

Things the Obamercial taught me…

*More government = less paperwork and less bureaucracy!

*Dear Leader proclaims: “The stars have aligned.” (This from the oaf who wrongly mocked Nancy Reagan for holding seances in the White House. Reminder: It was Hillary who did that.)

*”We can’t afford not to act.” Like we haven’t heard such empty apocalyse-now haranguing a gazillion times over the last year.

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ichael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus met while trying to save redwoods. Their Breakthrough Institute is funded by the leftist Nathan Cummings Foundation – but they understand who wrong Waxman-Markey is, and they’ve got a pretty good idea about how to encourage new energy technologies without destroying the good old economy.

In an NPR interview, they lay it out:

“When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?” [Shellenberger] asks …. “And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never.”

Personal computers didn’t take off because there was a tax on typewriters, he says. And the Internet didn’t sprout up because the government made telegraphs more expensive.

“So is there a better way to do this? Well, we think that there is. It’s very simple: It’s that we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide.”

Shellenberger and Nordhaus support government investments in alternative energy – a new Manhattan or moon project, which is hardly a new idea, but they articulate their well-researched points well.

Shellenberger tells the [Institute's] interns that environmental groups — like the ones he used to work for — are going about it all wrong. By urging Congress to cast carbon dioxide as a pollutant that needs to be controlled, he says, they will constantly swim against the tide of public opinion.

“We’re stuck in this kind of poor paradigm for dealing with climate change, this pollution paradigm,” he says, “not because environmentalists are failures, but actually because they were so successful. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the cap and trade on acid rain — these things worked really well.”

How refreshing to hear an environmentalist actually acknowledge that things are getting better, not worse – that existing levels of regulation have accomplished their goals.  I’m a free market guy, but even so, I have to acknowledge that government investment in technology works – it’s government control of the market and stomping on competition that I don’t like.  They explain the benefits of public investment:

“There’s this idea that the government shouldn’t be involved in technology, the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers,” Shellenberger says. “Which is sort of a funny thing to say. It’s kind of like, well, why not? And when hasn’t the United States government been involved in picking technology winners and losers?”

He points to the computer industry as just one example of something that came into being because of deliberate federal investments.

And railroads. And rockets.

Of course, the hotheads are screaming that there’s not enough time, we have to act now, the world is melting and carbon dioxide is a terrible poison. These are largely the same people who condemned Bush’s “rush to war.”  Unfortunately, Waxman and Markey are staunchly set in the camp of the hysterics.  Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been in DC this week, trying to get more reasonable electeds to behave more reasonably.

I hope they succeed.  You can help.  Sign the petition.

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ired finally of all this talk of freedom and unswayed by Obama’s warning that the world is watching (like they ever cared!) the Tehranical Mullahs showed their true selves today as they unleashed their fury on protesters gathered at Bahrestan Square in Tehran.

Listen to this chilling account from a woman calling in to CNN … terrifying:

“They beat people so bad … it’s so devastating I don’t know how to describe it,” she says, barely holding onto her emotions.  How badly did the regime’s Islamist henchmen behave?  How about throwing people to their deaths off pedestrian bridges bad? Or how about swinging into protesters with axes bad?  I was going to post a picture of what it looks like to be hit by an axe by a Bassij militia member, but can’t bring myself to post it on C-SM. You can see it at Threats Watch if you have the stomach.

This is the regime Obama wants to sit down with to discuss honorable things.  Is he still so naive as to believe these Islamist murderers can be trusted? After six plus years of European failure to deal with them? After the blood in Baharestan Square?

Does he really think he’s got the magic words and the electric charm to blind that hateful darkness?

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resh from cancelling funding for anti-missile systems as North Korea threatens to launch a missile towards Hawaii, the Obama administration has found something else to cut … so it can keep valuable programs like research into why guys don’t like wearing condoms. Newest to go: a satellite upgrade that could help FEMA with, oh, the next Katrina.

The WSJ reports today that Obama is putting hte axe to “a controversial” Bush administration spy satellite program at Homeland Security that would have provided federal, state and local officials with access to spy-satellite imagery to assist with emergency response and domestic-security needs. What kind of domestic security needs? Oh,just stuff like being able to scout out suspicious terrorist-like activities at ports or border crossings.  Nothing that important.

I put the “a controversial” in quotes because what that Bush did wasn’t controversial.  Dems cooked up criticism of the satellite program because they were convinced the Bush-Cheney-Rove cabal was going to use the satellites for domestic spying.  But now that the Annointed One is in office, that should no longer be a  problem, right? And national security should come first, right.

No, sillies.  Campaign contributions from the ACLU come first. Always.

WSJ reports that CA Dem Rep Jane Harmon and Janet “Human-Caused Tragedites” Napolitano were behind the axing of the program.  As Jack Bauer would say, “Dammit!”

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As the administration that promised to be the most ethical ever plods on through the dark forest of disclosure forms, the president is finding once again that what’s easy to promise on the campaign trail is hard to deliver once in power.  Another case in point:

The criminal defense lawyer nominated by President Obama to be the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey is declining to identify more than half of his private clients on government forms designed to help the public guard against potential conflicts of interests.

Paul J. Fishman, nominated to serve as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, is citing the privacy interests of the clients – an exemption that is permitted under federal ethics laws, but that leaves prosecutors on an honor system to police their own conflicts, ethics watchdogs say.

Mr. Fishman provided the names of 29 clients on the government disclosure form, including a convicted former New Jersey municipal official, a health care company and the former girlfriend of New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

But he withheld the names of “approximately 37 confidential clients,["] saying they cannot be named because they are involved in grand jury or other secret investigations. (Washington Times)

We are told by a Pepperdine law prof that “you just have to trust the guy’s ethical integrity” because the guy has a right to protect clients like crooked municipal officials and girlfriends of governors. Riiight.

Fishman, who’s made $2.3 million in the last 18 months, so he must be pretty good at defending creeps, did feel it was OK to provide this client list:

• Thomas A. Greenwald, a former Far Hills, N.J., council member who pleaded guilty to laundering about $700,000 in loan-sharking and gambling proceeds;

• Alfred S. Teo Sr., a businessman who pleaded guilty in 2006 to insider trading and was sentenced to more than two years in prison in 2007;

• Richard Stadtmauer, the brother-in-law of convicted New Jersey developer Charles Kushner. Stadtmauer was sentenced to more than three years in prison earlier this year in a tax-fraud case.

• Carla Katz, the former girlfriend of Mr. Corzine, in a civil lawsuit involving her former role as an official of a union for state workers.

Three of those four stand convicted despite Fishman’s counsel – and since he’s made so much money, one can only conclude that these upstanding citizens of New Jersey were in for much worse originally.  This experience with limiting the pain for those guilty of graft, money laundering, tax evasion and other white collar crimes should serve the Obama admin well, should any of its appointees become the focus of New Jersey’s federal prosecutor.

If confirmed, Fishman will replace Christopher J. Christie, now the Republican candidate for governor, who forged a reputation as a corruption-busting prosecutor.  Rather than carrying on that tradition, Obama elected to appoint a corruption-bust-dodging defense attorney to the job.

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