“The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” ( Rudyard Kipling)

“The Gods of the Copybook Headings.”

by  Rudyard Kipling


AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ”Stick to the Devil you know.” 

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ”The Wages of Sin is Death.” 

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; 
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ”If you don’t work you die.” 

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. 
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, 
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! 

The Intellectual Activist

An Objectivist Review

The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Robert Tracinski To receive the TIA Daily newsletter for free, enter your e-mail address in the box to the left. European markets continue to collapse as the Southern European welfare states slide into insolvency. There has been a lot of discussion about the cause of this disaster, but to any good Kipling fan the answer is obvious: it's The Gods of the Copybook Headings. The title of Rudyard Kipling's poem is obscure today but would have been clear to any educated Englishman of his day. A copybook was a kind of penmanship exercise in which the student copied over and over again a sentence printed in the heading at the top of each page. These copybook headings were usually aphorisms or statements of commonsense wisdom, so Kipling used the Gods of the Copybook Headings as a symbol for basic, immutable truths. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn. The point of the poem is that the various schemes for "social progress" being promoted at the time—and most of them are still with us today—are based on denying the basic truths represented by the Gods of the Copybook Headings. With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. Kipling's derisive reference to the "Gods of the Market Place" was not intended as anti-capitalist. "The market" is not short for "the free market," as it is in contemporary parlance. Rather, the "market" refers to the public spaces where people gather to listen to demagogues who promise the impossible and the irrational—the function performed by CNN today. Which brings us to modern politicians and the collapse of the European welfare state. See if you recognize this warning from Kipling. In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." That's a concise summary of the inevitable disaster of the welfare state. And more: it names a key part of the mentality behind it—the systematic evasion of basic, obvious truths. Who thought this was ever going to work? Who thought we could build a society in which an ever-increasing number of citizens are told that they don't have to work and that their needs will be provided for by somebody else—while the burden is shoved onto the shoulders of an ever-smaller, ever-more-despised minority of producers? That's what Greece did, shifting a huge number of its citizens onto the government payroll and creating a lavish pension scheme in which the average retirement age is 61 and workers in some fields are guaranteed retirement at age 50. When the overloaded private sector could no longer pay for all of this, the Greek government borrowed money to paper over the shortfall—until the Gods of the Copybook Headings caught up with them and their scheme came crashing down. We're all headed in that direction. A recent report revealed an ominous statistic. And I'm not using "ominous" in the loose, sloppy modern way that just means "vaguely bad." By "ominous," I mean: this is a harbinger of societal collapse. The statistic? The percentage of income in the US that is derived from government payments—welfare benefits plus government payroll—is reaching an all-time high, while the percentage of income derived from private-sector wages is reaching an all-time low. If I understand the figures in this report, they imply that the government is paying out two dollars in income for every three dollars of private income. Put simply, the takers are eating up the makers. At some point—and it's not too far off—there just isn't going to be enough private income to seize to pay for the public income. The system is inherently, mathematically unsustainable. But nobody cares about mathematics. The welfare state is based on denying the truth that two and two make four. The report linked to above quotes an economist who worries that "People are paid for being rather than for producing." And that's what reminded me of Kipling. His poem concludes by describing what will happen when "the brave new world begins." When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! That brings us to the motivation for this evasion of reality. It is not just avarice for unearned wealth, as Kipling implies. It is avarice for unearned wealth—combined with a moral code that makes parasitism seem noble. The altruist creed that one man's need gives him a claim on the wealth produced by others is not just an injustice—Kipling describes it as a system that hands out undeserved rewards, while shielding men from punishment for their vices. It is also an attempt to overturn the law of cause and effect. The cause of wealth is production, but the altruist welfare state is built on the assumption that a man's need will bring him wealth, regardless of whether or not he produces anything. In order to maintain a moral code that makes need into the ultimate moral claim—while denigrating as "greed" the virtues of hard work, ambition, and success—the defenders of altruism have to stage a rebellion against reality. In this, they are supported by a whole network of modern intellectuals and philosophers, who tell them that there is no objective truth and that reality is whatever we collectively choose to believe. But reality is absolute and always asserts itself in the end, with dreadful consequences for those who rebel against it. If you think that the last line of Kipling's poem, the part about terror and slaughter, is over the top, remember that this poem was written in 1919, when the terror and slaughter of World War I were still fresh. (The Battle of Loos had claimed an Irish Guard named John Kipling, the poet's only son.) Mercifully, Kipling did not live to see the terror and slaughter to come. As for the terror and slaughter this time around, take the riots in Greece—the firebombs thrown at banks in the heart of Athens, burning three employees to death—as a warning. Let's hope we don't get around to the terror and slaughter here in America. Kipling tells us how we can avoid it. Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. There are no Gods of the Copybook Headings—not in the literal sense—so it is going to be up to us, those who insist that reality is real and cannot be cheated, to take on their role and limp up to explain it once more. To receive the TIA Daily newsletter for free, enter your e-mail address in the box on the upper left of this page.

Copyright© 2002 The Intellectual Activist

5X Events Than May End the World

X-Events that Can Collapse the World as You Know It

Posted By John Hawkins On July 9, 2012 @ 7:00 am In PJ Lifestyle Lists | 46 Comments

X-Events: The Collapse Of Everything is not a cheery book. In essence, it argues that the complexity required to underpin modern living is making it increasingly unsustainable.

The crunch comes when we recognize that societies must continually solve problems in order to keep growing. But the solution to these problems requires ever more complex structures. Ultimately, a point is reached where all the resources of the society are consumed just in maintaining the system at its current level. At this point, the society is experiencing a complexity overload; no further degrees of freedom exist for coping with new problems. When the next problem appears, the system cannot accommodate it by adding more complexity. So it collapses quickly through an X-event that rapidly reduces the complexity overload.

You’re probably wondering what sort of “X-event” could create so much havoc that our society would have trouble coping with it for months or years at a time — if ever. Here are a few possibilities.
1) Death by Physics: Destruction of the Earth through the Creation of Exotic Particles!
This is an unlikely yet fun one, if your idea of fun is seeing the entire earth destroyed.
Did you know that when American scientists were first developing a nuclear bomb, there were genuine concerns that the temperatures created by the explosion of a nuclear weapon might be hot enough to set the earth’s atmosphere on fire? That would have quickly baked all of humankind like a giant pot pie. There was enough worry about this possibility that Robert Oppenheimer called for a study on the matter, which concluded that “a nuclear fireball cools down far too rapidly to set the atmosphere aflame.” Since you’re still alive to read this column, happily that was one government report that turned out to be right.
That brings us to the Large Hadron Collider, where scientists are creating mini “Big Bangs” and temperatures a million times hotter than the center of the sun. On the one hand, this has the potential to teach us a lot about physics and the creation of the universe. On the other, we’re toying with powerful forces we don’t understand. Some people even think it has the potential to destroy the planet by creating a black hole. Others fear it could set off a chain reaction caused by strangelets that could wipe out all life on earth. The good news is that it’s probably safe. Probably — and if it isn’t, all of us will be dead before we can yell at the scientists who killed us anyway; so why worry?
2) Digital Darkness: Widespread Failure of the Internet!
The Internet has morphed into the nervous system of the global economy. It’s how you can go to an ATM anywhere and get money. It’s tied into the cash registers you use when you buy from chain stores. It’s how supermarkets and companies like Wal-Mart know where to ship their inventory. Airlines and trains are also dependent on the net for scheduling. All of that is aside from the hundreds of billions of dollars in daily economic transactions and people who rely on the Internet to communicate.
What happens if the net goes down, not in a limited area for an hour or two, but across the entire United States or even the world, for months at a time? With nations like China engaging in organized, sophisticated cyber attacks and hacking, we’d better prepare.
Of course, in an age where sophisticated malware like Stuxnet and FLAME penetrate and take down government systems, it may not be possible to fully secure any system connected to the Internet. Also, all of that assumes that a lone security expert like Robert Kaminsky, who found in the DNS system that which would have allowed him to “reassign any web address, reroute anyone’s e-mail, take over bank accounts or even scramble the whole Internet,” doesn’t exploit weaknesses in the design of the Internet to bring it down.
You think people get aggravated when Twitter or Facebook is down for a couple of hours? Well, imagine having the entire Internet down for a couple of months with no idea when it’s coming back up. At that point, a “fail whale” would be the least of anyone’s problems.
3) Running on Empty: Drying Up of World Oil Supplies!
Peak oil theory has consistently been proven wrong. So, are we likely to run out of oil? No, because as it becomes more expensive, other alternatives will become more attractive. Yet and still, this isn’t Star Trek. Science moves slowly and even after advances become tenable, it still takes time to roll them out.
That’s extremely important because there are relatively few large sources of oil. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates combined account for 60% of the world’s oil reserves. Imagine a couple of very plausible scenarios occurring at the same time — perhaps a war between Israel and Iran along with a civil war in Saudi Arabia. If that were to happen, you could easily see the price of oil double or even triple overnight with no easy fix. No technological alternative could immediately fill the gap and the rest of the world wouldn’t be able to produce enough to make up for the shortage.
In poorer nations, that would make oil such an expensive commodity that it could practically shut down their economies. That wouldn’t happen in wealthier Western countries like the United States, but you could see gas lines, enforced conservation, and dramatically reduced economic growth coupled with runaway inflation. If oil pipelines and refineries were damaged in the fight or other oil producers decided to gouge instead of helping to alleviate the problem, it’s entirely possible the economic pain could drag on for years and make the Carter era look like, well, the Carter era with twice as much Jimmy Carter!
4) I’m Sick of It: Global Pandemic!
Over the course of human history our species has endured some monumental pandemics. In the 1300s the Bubonic plague killed roughly 100 million people and reduced the population of Europe somewhere between 30% to 60%.
Keep in mind that the population of the earth was probably only somewhere around 450 million back then; so that would be roughly the equivalent of a plague that killed 75 million people in the United States today. The Spanish Flu was even worse. It also killed roughly 100 million people out of a much larger population, but it did it in about six months. If something that severe hit today, it would eradicate roughly 350 million people worldwide over the same timeframe. The scary thing is that it’s entirely possible a new natural plague could hit or, worse yet, an old virus re-engineered as a bioweapon could be loosed. While we have better sanitation than the old days and medical science has advanced considerably, it’s still entirely possible that our own personal Andromeda Strain could cause so much population loss and economic damage that it could take decades to overcome.
5) Technology Run Amok: Intelligent Robots Overthrow Humanity!
Ever seen I, Robot, The Matrix, or read Michael Crichton’s book Prey about Nanobots run wild? Then you get the general idea. At this early juncture in history, where machines aren’t very advanced, a robot rampage seems like an idea that should be left to science fiction. Is your toaster going to hop on over and treat you like a croissant while you sleep? It’s laughable.
Except that line of thinking ignores a key trend: if Moore’s Law continues to hold up, we should have computers that are as smart and mentally flexible as human beings by 2020. Put another way, by 2021 we may have computers that are smarter than the average person and increasing their intellectual superiority by the year. The idea that we can command and control intellects that far exceed our own seems plausible as long as they’re greatly limited in their capacity. However, what happens if and when we have androids as advanced as Data from Star Trek or The Terminator? It’s entirely possible that when that day comes, it could be the beginning of the post-human phase of life on earth.

The Changing World Landscape

July 19, 2012 The World Is Changing Minute by Minute by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic, and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable. Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism. With its strong euro, soft power, and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed US with its ailing dollar. Germany, ostracized after losing two world wars and struggling with the guilt of the Holocaust, as penance was to be permanently submerged in European alliances, as its economic power was always expected to prop up the euro-zone experiment. The Arab Middle East for the last 40 years seemed to be the world’s cockpit, as its huge petroleum reserves brought in trillions of dollars from an oil-depleted West, along with political concessions. Petrodollars fed global terrorism. Oil-poor Israel had little clout with Europe. In general, the West ignored any human-rights concerns involving the region’s oil-rich dictatorships, monarchies, and theocracies, as well as their aid to Islamic terrorists. Conventional wisdom also assumed that an indebted US was in permanent decline, a cash-rich China in ascendency. The world would increasingly make the necessary political corrections as it pivoted eastward. But none of that conventional wisdom now seems very wise — largely because of a number of technological breakthroughs and equally unforeseen political upheavals. The euro zone is unraveling. An aging, shrinking population and a socialist welfare state lead to serfdom, not utopia. War guilt and EU membership will no longer ensure German subsidies, but rather will serve to alienate the German public. Europe’s cloudy future hinges not on Brussels technocrats, but on Europeans’ learning how to deal with a dynamic, increasingly confident and peeved Germany. The Arab Middle East is now in a free fall. Tyrants in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen were ousted, while one in Syria totters. But while the world hoped secular democrats would follow in their wake, more likely we are witnessing the emergence of one-election Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. The region will be mired in turmoil whether these upheavals turn out to be like the hijacked Iranian revolution that ended in theocracy, or the Turkish democratic model that is insidiously becoming Islamist. Horizontal drilling and fracking have made oil shale and tar sands rich sources of oil and natural gas, so much so that the United States may prove to possess the largest store of fossil-fuel reserves in the world — in theory, with enough gas, oil, and coal, we will soon never need any imported Middle Eastern energy again. “Peak oil” is suddenly an anachronism. Widespread American use of cheap natural gas will do more to clean the planet than thousands of Solyndras. If the United States utilizes its resources, then its present pathologies — massive budget and trade deficits, mounting debt, strategic vulnerability — will start to subside. These new breakthroughs in petroleum engineering are largely American phenomena, reminding us that there is still something exceptional in the American experience that periodically offers the world cutting-edge technologies and protocols — such as those pioneered by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Walmart. In comparison, China is not only resource-poor but politically impoverished. For decades we were told that Chinese totalitarianism, when mixed with laissez-faire capitalism, led to sparkling airports and bullet trains, while a litigious and indulgent America settled for a run-down LAX and creaking Amtrak relics. But the truth is that the Los Angeles airport will probably look modern sooner than the Chinese will hold open elections amid a transparent society — given that free markets did not make China democratic, only more contradictory. Even more surreal, tiny oil-poor Israel, thanks to vast new offshore finds, has been reinvented as a potential energy giant in the Middle East. Such petrodollars will change Israel as they did the Persian Gulf countries, but with one major difference. Unlike Dubai or Kuwait, Israel is democratic, economically diverse, socially stable, and technologically sophisticated, suggesting the sudden windfall will not warp Israel in the manner it has traditional Arab autocracies, but will instead become a force multiplier of an already dynamic society. Will Europe still snub Israel when it has as much oil, gas, and money as an OPEC member in the Persian Gulf? Who would have thought that a few fracking innovators in Texas would change the world’s carbon footprint far more than did Nobel laureate Al Gore — while offering a way for the US to be energy-independent? Or that Angela Merkel, not the European Union, would run Europe? Or that Arabs would be overthrowing Arabs, as oil-rich Israel idly watched? ©2012 Victor Davis Hanson

Obama Trashes Achievers

Obama Trashes Achievers Whose Triumphs Threaten Left's Vision

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 07/19/2012 06:46 PM ET

 

There was a time, within living memory, when the achievements of others were not only admired but often taken as an inspiration for imitation of the same qualities that had served these achievers well, even if we were not in the same field of endeavor and were not expecting to achieve on the same scale.

The perseverance of Thomas Edison, as he tried scores of materials before finally trying tungsten as the filament for the light bulb he was inventing; the dedication of Abraham Lincoln as he studied law on his own while struggling to make a living — these were things young people were taught to admire, even if they had no intention of becoming inventors or lawyers, much less president.

Somewhere along the way, all that changed. Today, the very concept of achievement is de-emphasized and sometimes attacked. Following in the footsteps of Barack Obama, Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard has made the downgrading of high achievers the
centerpiece of her campaign against Sen. Scott Brown.

To cheering audiences, Professor Warren says, "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate."

Do the people who cheer this kind of talk bother to stop and think through what she is saying? Or is heady rhetoric enough for them?

People who run businesses are benefitting from things paid for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?

At a time when a small fraction of high-income taxpayers pay the vast majority of all the taxes collected, it is sheer chutzpah to depict high-income earners as somehow being subsidized by "the rest of us," whether in paying for roads or the educating the young.

Since everybody else uses the roads and the schools, why should high achievers be expected to feel like free loaders who owe still more to the government, because schools and roads are among the things that facilitate their work? According to Elizabeth Warren, because it is part of an "underlying social contract."

Conjuring up some mythical agreement that nobody saw, much less signed, is an old ploy on the left — one that goes back at least a century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic magazine, wrote a book titled "The Promise of American Life."

Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor was magically transformed by rhetoric into a "promise" that American society was supposed to have made — and, implicitly, that American taxpayers should be forced to pay for. This pious hokum was so successful politically that all sorts of "social contracts" began to appear magically in the rhetoric of the left.

If talking in this mystical way is enough to get you control of billions of dollars of the taxpayers' hard-earned money, why not?

Certainly someone who claimed to be part Indian, as Warren did when applying for academic appointments in an affirmative action environment, is unlikely to be squeamish about using imaginative words in a campaign.

Sadly, this kind of cute use of words is not confined to one political candidate or to this election year. The very concept of achievement is a threat to the vision of the left, and has long been attacked by those on the left.

People who succeed — whether in business or anywhere else — are often said to be "privileged," even if they started out poor and worked their way up the hard way.

Outcome differences are called "class" differences. Thus when two white women, who came from families in very similar social and economic circumstances, made different decisions and got different results, this was the basis for a front-page story titled "Two Classes, Divided by 'I Do'" in the New York Times.

Personal responsibility, whether for achievement or failure, is a threat to the whole vision of the left, and a threat the left goes all-out to combat, using rhetoric uninhibited by reality.

Syria's XChemical weapons - Saddam's

 

Syria's Chemical Weapons Came From Saddam's Iraq

Posted 07/19/2012 07:02 PM ET

War On Terror: As the regime of Bashar Assad disintegrates, the security of his chemical arsenal is in jeopardy. The No. 2 general in Saddam Hussein's air force says they were the WMDs we didn't find in Iraq.

King Abdullah of neighboring Jordan warned that a disintegrating Syria on the verge of civil war puts Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons at risk of falling into the hands of al-Qaida.

"One of the worst-case scenarios as we are obviously trying to look for a political solution would be if some of those chemical stockpiles were to fall into unfriendly hands," he said.

The irony here is that the chemical weapons stockpile of Syrian thug Assad may in large part be the legacy of weapons moved from Hussein's Iraq into Syria before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

If so, this may be the reason not much was found in the way of WMD by victorious U.S. forces in 2003.
In 2006, former Iraqi general Georges Sada, second in command of the Iraqi Air Force who served under Saddam Hussein before he defected, wrote a comprehensive book, "Saddam's Secrets."

It details how the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria in advance of the U.S.-led action to eliminate Hussein's WMD threat.

As Sada told the New York Sun, two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, and special
Republican Guard units loaded the planes with chemical weapons materials.

There were 56 flights disguised as a relief effort after a 2002 Syrian dam collapse.

There were also truck convoys into Syria. Sada's comments came more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom, John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts held in Arlington, Va., in 2006.

According to Shaw, ex-Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, went to Iraq in December 2002 and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Anticipating the invasion, his job was to supervise the removal of such weapons and erase as much evidence of Russian involvement as possible.

The Russian-assisted "cleanup" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achalov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."

Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achalov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003. Apparently they did their job well.

An article in the fall 2005 Middle East Quarterly reports that in an appearance on Israel's Channel 2 on Dec. 23, 2002, Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, stated: "Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria." According to the article, about three weeks later, Israel's foreign minister repeated the accusation.

Syria has long had its own chemical weapons program, but the extent it may have been aided by weapons and materials transferred by Iraq before the war has only been the source of conjecture.

We may soon find out what happened to much of Saddam's WMD.

Budget Manuver to Avoid Taxadedon

The Budget Measure That Could Be A Godsend For Romney

Posted 07/19/2012 07:02 PM ET

Fiscal Cliff: Prominent Republicans are pushing a bright idea to prevent Democrats' promise of a post-election fiscal crisis: a stopgap funding measure that could also put Mitt Romney back on offense.

Some 20 GOP members of Congress — including John McCain and 10 other senators — are proposing a measure as sensible economically as it is smart politically.

Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Marco Rubio of Florida and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, among others, have joined with congressmen like Jim Jordan of Ohio and Joe Wilson of South Carolina. All back the idea of passing, before August's recess, a six-month continuing resolution in the House of Representatives to fund the government into next year.

As the 20 lawmakers argue in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell: "Then, Senate Republicans can force a vote on the CR, forcing Democrats to explain ... why they are seeking a government shutdown crisis."

These senators and representatives are convinced that "taking the threat of a government shutdown off the table will allow a serious debate about tax and spending policy before the elections."

As important, their stopgap resolution would temporarily prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — the last thing the U.S. economy needs today.

DeMint, Johnson and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., cautioned Wednesday in a Washington Examiner article that "a series of terrible events will occur at or near the year's end if Congress does not act soon" — including indiscriminate defense cuts, expiration of Medicare payments to physicians and another debt-ceiling crisis.

Amid such orchestrated chaos, "Reid will do all he can to divide Republicans" and force them "into accepting a stopgap, temporary,
two-month government spending bill," forcing "a lame-duck session in late November or December ..."

 

 

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"That's when the real mischief can begin," the senators warn, when "under the gloomy cloud of yet another government shutdown, members of Congress who lose in the 2012 elections can freely vote to raise taxes, increase spending, pass international treaties, increase the debt limit and gut national defense."

At Thursday's meeting of Senate Republicans, McConnell was told he is naive to think a deal could be struck with Reid avoiding this calamity — especially since Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chief fundraiser for Senate Democrats, just let it be known she would love to see such a fiscal crisis because it would hurt Republicans.

McConnell, Boehner and the Romney campaign are being urged to embrace this strategy. Romney could use it effectively by demanding that Obama dare to defend congressional Democrats' fiscal mischief.

Indeed it could do even more — by turning the spotlight on how Democrats have managed to spend us into oblivion and wreck the economy at the same time.

Energy Bonanza

Walter Russell Mead on America’s revolutionary, energy bonanza

Mark J. Perry | July 17, 2012, 11:42 pm

 

 

 

Walter Russell Mead weighs in with some profound insights on America’s huge, game-changing, job-creating, energy bonanza:
“Forget peak oil; forget the Middle East. The energy revolution of the 21st century isn’t about solar energy or wind power and the “scramble for oil” isn’t going to drive global politics. The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 2oth centuries is back; if the energy revolution now taking shape lives up to its full potential, we are headed into a new century in which the location of the world’s energy resources and the structure of the world’s energy trade support American affluence at home and power abroad.

By some estimates, the United States has more oil than Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran combined, and Canada may have even more than the United States. A GAO report released last May (pdf link can be found here) estimates that up to the equivalent of 3 trillion barrels of shale oil may lie in just one of the major potential US energy production sites. If half of this oil is recoverable, US reserves in this one deposit are roughly equal to the known reserves of the rest of the world combined.

Domestically, the energy bonanza changes the American outlook far more dramatically than most people yet realize. This is a Big One, a game changer, and it will likely be a major factor in propelling the United States to the next (and still unknown) stage of development — towards the next incarnation of the American Dream.

The energy revolution is first and foremost a revolution that affects jobs. We are in the very early stages, but since the financial crisis of 2008, fracking alone has created something like 600,000 new jobs in the United States, says the FT. Throw in more jobs in both extracting and refining the new energy wealth, and add the manufacturing and processing industries that will return to US shores to benefit from cheap, secure and abundant energy and feedstock, and it is clear that the energy revolution will be a jobs revolution.
These jobs pay well; for the first time in a generation we are looking at substantial growth of high-income jobs for skilled blue collar workers. Some of these jobs, especially with overtime, will pay in the six figures; most offer wages well above the national blue collar average.

Nature — or perhaps Nature’s God — seems to love mocking pundits. Just when the entire punditocracy, it sometimes seemed, had bought into the “American decline” meme, Europe collapsed and huge energy reserves were discovered underneath the United States. The “special providence” that observers have from time to time discerned in America’s progress through history doesn’t seem to be quite finished with us yet.

Getting the new oil and gas raises complicated technical and environmental issues, and it may take some time before the dust settles and we understand exactly what we are looking at here. And drilling is a notoriously uncertain business. The energy revolution may fall short of the full hopes it stirs up. Yet the rapid progress of extraction technology is making these unconventional reserves look more real and more ‘gettable’ all the time. Rather than coping gracefully with the consequences of inevitable decline, America’s job in the 21st century looks like handling its new set of opportunities wisely and well.”

Energy Revolution 2: A Post Post-American Post

Walter Russell Mead

Forget peak oil; forget the Middle East. The energy revolution of the 21st century isn’t about solar energy or wind power and the “scramble for oil” isn’t going to drive global politics. The energy abundance that helped propel the United States to global leadership in the 19th and 2oth centuries is back; if the energy revolution now taking shape lives up to its full potential, we are headed into a new century in which the location of the world’s energy resources and the structure of the world’s energy trade support American affluence at home and power abroad.
By some estimates, the United States has more oil than Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran combined, and Canada may have even more than the United States. A GAO report released last May (pdf link can be found here) estimates that up to the equivalent of 3 trillion barrels of shale oil may lie in just one of the major potential US energy production sites. If half of this oil is recoverable, US reserves in this one deposit are roughly equal to the known reserves of the rest of the world combined.

Edward Luce, an FT writer usually more given to tracing America’s decline than to promoting its prospects, cites estimates that as early as 2020 the US may be producing more oil than Saudi Arabia.

So dramatic are America’s finds, analysts talk of the US turning into the world’s new Saudi Arabia by 2020, with up to 15m barrels a day of liquid energy production (against the desert kingdom’s 11m b/d this year). Most of the credit goes to private sector innovators, who took their cue from the high oil prices in the last decade to devise ways of tapping previously uneconomic underground reserves of “tight oil” and shale gas. And some of it is down to plain luck. Far from reaching its final frontier, America has discovered new ones under the ground.

Additionally, our natural gas reserves are so large that the US is likely to become a major exporter, and US domestic supplies for hydrocarbon fuels of all types appear to be safe and secure for the foreseeable future. North America as a whole has the potential to be a major exporter of fossil fuels for decades and even generations to come.

Since the 1970s, pessimism about America’s energy future has been one of the cornerstones on which the decline theorists erected their castles of doom; we are now entering a time when energy abundance will be an argument for continued American dynamism.
The energy revolution isn’t a magic wand that can make all America’s wishes come true, but it is a powerful wind in the sails of both America’s domestic economy and of its international goals. The United States isn’t the only big winner of the energy revolution — Canada, Israel and China among others will also make gains — but the likely consequences of the energy revolution for America’s global agenda are so large, that the chief effect of the revolution is likely to be its role in shoring up the foundations of the American-led world order.

I will look at the global consequences for geopolitics and the environment in some upcoming posts, but first things come first and I’d like to look at the domestic consequences of the boom before moving on to its impact on the world.

Domestically, the energy bonanza changes the American outlook far more dramatically than most people yet realize. This is a Big One, a game changer, and it will likely be a major factor in propelling the United States to the next (and still unknown) stage of development — towards the next incarnation of the American Dream.

The energy revolution is first and foremost a revolution that affects jobs. We are in the very early stages, but since the financial crisis of 2008, fracking alone has created something like 600,000 new jobs in the United States, says the FT. Throw in more jobs in both extracting and refining the new energy wealth, and add the manufacturing and processing industries that will return to US shores to benefit from cheap, secure and abundant energy and feedstock, and it is clear that the energy revolution will be a jobs revolution.

These jobs pay well; for the first time in a generation we are looking at substantial growth of high-income jobs for skilled blue collar workers. Some of these jobs, especially with overtime, will pay in the six figures; most offer wages well above the national blue collar average.

The boom has the potential to change the debate over immigration. The best blue collar jobs in the new oil and gas patches will demand workers with good English language skills and some technical background — good junior colleges and strong vocational high schools will prepare workers for these new jobs. Low skilled, non-English speaking workers will have a hard time competing for these jobs but will work instead in less well paid jobs servicing the energy sector and its workers. They will build houses for the oil workers to live in and staff the restaurants where they eat. As more blue collar native-born Americans see their living standards rise, it is likely that (legal) immigration will lose some of its political salience.

Towards A New Geography of Power?

There’s another advantage: these jobs will mostly be located away from the coasts. The hollowing out of Middle America has been one of the tragedies of the last generation. Looking at the depopulation of the northern Great Plains, planners began to speculate about returning large chunks of whole states to the wild: the “Buffalo Commons” idea that would have taken up to 20 million acres out of private hands. The buffalo will have to move over now for the oil rigs and the people who work them; North Dakota will not be reverting to the wild anytime soon.

But there are large oil and/or gas reserves in other downtrodden areas. Western New York State and much of Pennsylvania and Ohio appear to have commercial quantities of fossil fuel. The revival of the Rustbelt may be getting under way. And Dixie will not lose out: the US share of the Gulf of Mexico is now believed to have the potential to produce 2 to 3 million more barrels per day than the 1.2 million that it currently pumps.

Overall, the new energy geography points toward a revival of the Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri river system as the axis of American growth. That’s likely among other things to be good for America’s political climate; the Midwest has traditionally been something of a swing region — less liberal than the coastal northeast and less aggressively conservative than Dixie. Middle Westerners have tended to be pragmatic optimists over time, and it would be interesting to see how a revival of this political tendency would work out in our politics today. In any case, we may be looking at a decline in the power of the northeast and (unless California embraces its inner tycoon and begins to exploit its own energy riches) the Pacific, while Dixie continues current rates of growth and the Middle West booms.
Energy frontiers tend to be individualistic places. Canada, where the oil boom is a few years ahead of the US, has shifted to the right as power and money flow from blue Ontario and Quebec to Alberta. Prosperous blue collar workers and aspiring oil tycoons are not generally the strongest supporters of expensive welfare states, and American greens are already feeling the political consequences of a newly energized hydrocarbon sector. They are also not very interested in subsidizing the fiscal problems of other states; should California’s woes worsen and the state come to Washington for more help, the energy rich states and their representatives are likely to take a hard, skeptical look at its requests.

Even so, the Middle West’s traditional moderation is going to soften the rough edges a bit; much of the oil is coming to places where people historically have valued community ties and concerned themselves about the well being of the less fortunate. This won’t be the second coming of Ayn Rand.

Heartland Economics

There are significant economic benefits in having all this prosperity in the heartland. North Dakota and Wyoming are states where shipping costs from China and Japan are high — but Chicago and St. Louis are much better placed to serve them. Put cheap and secure energy in the Middle West, and build large new cities and centers of economic demand in the neighborhood, and the energy revival in a few states will support general economic growth in many more.

The long term outlook for the dollar and even for the federal government’s accounts will also improve. Even quite recently people assessing the long term health of the United States pointed toward inexorably rising energy imports as an important drain on the balance of trade and on the health of the dollar. But oil imports are going to decline, and exports — especially of natural gas — will help offset them. The federal government is also going to be collecting taxes on the new energy production — and on all the incomes of the individuals and companies involved, directly or indirectly, in the new energy boom.

The United States will be a more attractive place for foreign investment. Building the infrastructure required to get the new energy industry up and running and to transport its products to the market offers some very profitable and secure investment opportunities. And with the US much less dependent on foreign oil (and with the foreign oil it does need coming largely from Canada), the US economy will be much less exposed to the risks associated with turmoil in the Middle East. That is the kind of thing investors look for: high growth in safe places.

Few places are going to look more secure in the 21st century than America between the Rockies and the Appalachians, between the Gulf of Mexico and the Canadian frontier. Some of the world’s largest energy reserves will be sited next to the world’s most fertile crop land. Geopolitically, few places on earth are as secure from war; politically few can match its record of stable governance; legally, few offer as much protection for property rights and few have as long a record of offering foreign investors the equal protection of the law.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Every silver lining has a cloud, and the energy bonanza isn’t all good. We will have to watch out, for example, that the hydrocarbon boost to the dollar doesn’t price American manufacturing goods out of world markets. Here we will need to look at Europe, and see how some countries — like Germany — responded in a more disciplined way through the years when the euro was high to reduce costs and improve quality so that German goods remained internationally competitive.

We will also have to work to keep the political classes from distributing the oil wealth to the rent-seekers. We don’t want to be either the Nigeria or the Russia of the new century, in which corrupt rent-seeking elites hijacked the political process and appropriated the lions’ share of the hydrocarbon wealth to themselves. Cheap, attractive subsidies for the masses, while the real wealth goes into the Swiss bank accounts of the well connected and the unscrupulous: that could very well happen here and there are plenty of people in leading positions in American life — in both parties — who stand willing and ready to sequester the loot.

But the first great wave of oil discoveries did not turn America into a corrupt petrostate when the oil discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made the US the world’s greatest producer of fossil fuels. One important reason that still holds true today is that the US economy was so diversified and so high tech (by the standards of the day) that the oil tsunami was only one part of a much larger story of innovation and development.

Innovation remains a big part of the American energy picture. The United States has very large reserves of these new fuels, but we are not alone on the planet in having this wealth. But America is getting to the energy revolution early because our oil companies and drillers were ahead of other people in developing the technologies that can bring the new resources on line. We don’t just happen — like the Saudis and others — to be sitting on incredibly large pools of oil which the skills of other people discover and pump out of the ground. We haven’t exactly made our own luck, but we’ve made the discoveries that enabled us to take advantage of it.

That spirit of innovation and the culture that supports it are the true sources of American wealth. That is how we found oil in the first place and built our first energy economy; it is what enables us to benefit from these additional reserves — and it is what will get us on to the next thing when the new energy sources begin to run dry.

Thankfully, the United States is not a Russia or a Nigeria. Our economy and our political system are strong enough and diverse enough to benefit from an energy boom without being overwhelmed by it. The energy boom will stimulate the development of new technologies and new products in the non-energy sectors and will likely to usher in an era of broad prosperity and social advance across many industries and regions rather than just in a few.

Nature — or perhaps Nature’s God — seems to love mocking pundits. Just when the entire punditocracy, it sometimes seemed, had bought into the “American decline” meme, Europe collapsed and huge energy reserves were discovered underneath the United States. The “special providence” that observers have from time to time discerned in America’s progress through history doesn’t seem to be quite finished with us yet.

Getting the new oil and gas raises complicated technical and environmental issues, and it may take some time before the dust settles and we understand exactly what we are looking at here. And drilling is a notoriously uncertain business. The energy revolution may fall short of the full hopes it stirs up. Yet the rapid progress of extraction technology is making these unconventional reserves look more real and more ‘gettable’ all the time. Rather than coping gracefully with the consequences of inevitable decline, America’s job in the 21st century looks like handling its new set of opportunities wisely and well.

Trillions of Barrels of Recoverable Oil in Colorado, Utah: GAO

May 13, 2012

By Michael Sandoval

DENVER – Trillions of barrels of potentially recoverable oil lies within the Green River Formation of Colorado and Utah, and perhaps as much or more than the current proven oil reserves for the entire world, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
In it’s May 10 report “Unconventional Oil and Gas Production: Opportunities and Challenges of Oil Shale Development” that covers testimony provided by Anu K. Mittal, Director of Natural Resources and Environment to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, the GAO updated a 2010 report, confirming that more than a trillion barrels of recoverable oil exist in the world’s largest oil shale deposits on Colorado’s Western Slope.
Mittal’s testimony began with the prospect of centuries of domestic energy production:

“Increasing domestic oil production. Being able to tap the vast amounts of oil locked within U.S. oil shale formations could go a long way toward satisfying the nation’s future oil demands. The Green River Formation—an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions. The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves. [emphasis added] The thickest and richest oil shale within the Green River Formation exists in the Piceance Basin of northwest Colorado and the Uintah Basin of northeast Utah. Figure 1 shows where these prospective oil shale resources are located in Colorado and Utah.”

Mittal also concluded that socioeconomic benefits “could also yield important socioeconomic benefits, including the creation of jobs, increases in wealth, and increases in tax and royalty payments to federal and state governments for oil produced on their lands.”
The GAO testimony is careful to note the existing concern over “viable technologies” necessary to extract recoverable oil from the oil shale, as well as environmental concerns over water quantity and quality, impacts on air quality, and disruption to wildlife. Rapid socioeconomic development could falter just as quickly, as it has in the past, with an unpredictable “boom and bust” cycle.
The GAO’s best estimate of oil shale development is projected to occur at least 15-20 years from now, but notes that preparations to account for many of the environmental concerns—a factor, in part, for the longer time frame—should begin as soon as possible.
The GAO included recommendations directed at the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Geological Services, and the Department of Energy to develop baseline measurements and inter-agency collaboration frameworks to ensure that “potential opportunities for commercial development of large unconventional oil and gas resources, such as oil shale” be undertaken in such a way to so as to “be balanced with other potential technological, environmental and socioeconomic challenges.”

 

Paul Ryan Blasts O's" Govt. Does It All"

Pethokoukis
Paul Ryan rips Obama’s comment that ‘if you’ve got a business — you
didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen’
James Pethokoukis | July 16, 2012, 8:26 pm

It was Rep. Paul Ryan’s wife, Janna, who first saw — via Twitter — President Obama’s recent comments about
American entrepreneurs, that “if you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
And the Wisconsin Republican — thought to be on Mitt Romney’s running-mate short list — couldn’t believe it. He
thought someone must “have been putting words in the president’s mouth.”

But Obama said it all. And Ryan absolutely tore into the president in a chat I had with him earlier today. Among
the highlights:

– “The idea that these entrepreneurs owe all their success to some government bureaucrat or some centralized
planner just defies reality.”

– “Every now and then, President Obama pierces the veil. He’s usually pretty coy about his ideology, but he lets
the veil slip from time to time.”

– “We believe in free communities and this is a statist attack on free communities.”

– “He’s deluded himself into thinking that his so-called enemies are these crazy individualists who believe in some
dog-eat-dog society when what he’s really doing is basically attacking people like entrepreneurs and stacking up a
list of scapegoats to blame for his failures.”

– “As all of his big government spending programs fail to restore jobs and growth, he seems to be retreating into a
statist vision of government direction and control of a free society that looks backward to the failed ideologies of
the 20  century.”


– “Those of us who are conservative believe in government, we just believe government has limits. We want
government to do what it does well and respect its limits so civil society and families can flourish on their own and
do well and achieve their potential.”

– “He wants to be as transformational as Reagan by undoing the entire Reagan revolution.”

Now here are some longer excerpts:

Every now and then, he pierces the veil. He’s usually pretty coy about his ideology, but he lets the
veil slip from time to time. … His straw man argument is this ridiculous caricature where he’s trying
to say if you want any security in life, you stick with me. If you go with these Republicans, they’re
going to feed you to the wolves because they believe in some Hobbesian state of nature, and it’s
one or the other which is complete bunk, absolutely ridiculous. But it seems to be the only way he
thinks he can make his case. He’s deluded himself into thinking that his so-called enemies are these
crazy individualists who believe in some dog-eat-dog society when what he’s really doing is
basically attacking people like entrepreneurs and stacking up a list of scapegoats to blame for his
failures.

His comments seem to derive from a naive vision of a government-centered society and a
government-directed economy. It stems from an idea that the nucleus of society and the economy
is government not the people. … It is antithetical to the American idea. We believe in free
communities, and this is a statist attack on free communities. … As all of his big government
spending programs fail to restore jobs and growth, he seems to be retreating into a statist vision of
government direction and control of a free society that looks backward to the failed ideologies of
the 20  century.

This is not a Bill Clinton Democrat. He’s got this very government-centric, old 20  century
collectivist philosophy which negates the American experiment which is people living in
communities, supporting one another, having government stick to its limits so it can do its job really
well … Those of us who are conservative believe in government, we just believe government has
limits. We want government to do what it does well and respect its limits so civil society and
families can flourish on their own and do well and achieve their potential.

How does building roads and bridge justify Obamacare? If you like the GI Bill therefore we must go
along with socialized medicine. It’s a strange leap that he takes. … To me it’s the laziest form of a
debate to affix views to your opponent that they do not have so you can demonize them and defeat
them and win the debate by default

I think he believes America was on the right path until Reagan came along, and Reagan got us
going in the wrong direction. And and he wants to be as transformational as Reagan by undoing the
entire Reagan revolution. … I think he sees himself as bringing about this wave of progressivism,
and the only thing stopping him are these meddling conservatives who believe in these founding
principles so he has to caricature them in the ugliest light possible to win the argument.

O's Assualt on Oil Continues

The Obama administration's loathsome cowboy, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, won't take no for an answer.

He's been smacked down repeatedly by federal courts for imposing a draconian, junk science-based moratorium on the oil and gas industry. Yet, the job-killing zealot and his boss just introduced another ruinous offshore drilling ban two weeks ago.

The White House rationale for the renewed crackdown? Because we said so.

Thomas Pyle of the D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research reports that the Salazar scheme "reinstitutes a 30-year moratorium on offshore energy exploration that will keep our most promising resources locked away until long after President Obama begins plans for his presidential library."

Instead of working to enhance our energy independence and free up abundant natural resources, the Obama administration has worked tirelessly to close off access to nearly 86 billion barrels of oil on America's Outer Continental Shelf alone.

The latest plan involves the interior secretary's authority to auction oil and gas leases and to oversee oil and gas research and exploration on the OCS. Pyle explains that the "2012-17 plan leaves out the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the vast majority of OCS areas off Alaska. It cuts in half the average number of lease sales per year, requires higher minimum bids and shorter lease periods, and dramatically reduces lease terms."

The official Obama for America slogan may be "Forward," but the Salazar-Obama anti-drilling regime leaves America behind. National Ocean Industries Association President Randall B. Luthi told the Oil and Gas Journal (an industry publication):

"This deeply disappointing 'no new access' plan does not reflect the comprehensive, 'all of the above' energy policy touted by the administration, nor does it keep pace with the energy policies of foreign nations that are expanding their offshore access to develop badly needed oil and gas."

No surprise. Salazar is an unrepentant glutton for punishment — of America's energy producers. He's had the unwavering support of President Obama ever since the aftermath of the BP oil spill in 2010, when the administration implemented a radical six-month freeze on America's entire deepwater drilling industry. Republicans must forcefully counter the campaign fables being spun by Team Obama with the truth about these rogue overlords.

When the president's Chicago flacks boast of their noble commitment to transparency, remember: The overbroad drilling ban was stuffed into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama's unaccountable green extremists.

When White House operatives tout their miraculous economics, remind them: The cost of the original Obama-Salazar edict is an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages. The new ban takes both coasts off the table and throws Alaska oil and gas sales into uncertain delay.

When Democrats tout their adherence to sound science, don't forget: The administration's own expert panel disavowed Salazar and former eco-czar Carol Browner's claims that they had secured a scientific consensus for the drilling ban. In fact, Salazar and Browner completely perverted the experts' consensus against the sweeping offshore drilling ban.

When Vice President Joe Biden takes to the stump to tout the "character of his (boss') convictions," make it known: Louisiana federal judge Martin Feldman rebuked the Obama Interior Department for its "determined disregard" for the law.

And the stench deepens. In May, the House Natural Resources Committee released e-mail quoting a senior whistleblower who directly contradicted Salazar's claim that doctored support for the ban was unintentional. Where is the Interior Department inspector general to look out for taxpayers' best interests? She's knee-deep in ethics problems herself.

A federal panel that oversees government watchdogs took up a conflict-of-interest complaint against Interior Department Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall this week. USA Today first reported in May "that Kendall had attended meetings where top Interior officials discussed drafts of a peer-reviewed report on deepwater drilling." Later, she was enlisted to investigate how White House officials cooked up the scientifically manufactured report that resulted from those very meetings.

Instead of haranguing GOP opponent Mitt Romney with questions about his offshore bank accounts, this search-and-destroy White House should start accounting for its offshore drilling obstructionism. Salazar's reign has been a shady, secretive and rotten deal for America.

O Rewrites Welfare Reform - Byron York

TheBlaze
Business
‘PARTISAN DISGRACE’: OBAMA ADMIN QUIETLY REWRITES WELFARE
REFORM LAW
Posted on July 13, 2012 at 3:36pm by  Becket Adams


In move that went largely “unnoticed” by the mainstream media, the Obama administration on Thursday
released an “official policy directive” that essentially rewrites the landmark welfare reform law of 1996, the
Washington Examiner’s Byron York reports.

“The directive,” York explains, “allows the Department of Health and Human Services to waive the work
requirement at the heart of welfare reform.”

An “Information Memorandum” released by the Department of Health and Human Services’ states:
[The] HHS has authority to waive compliance with this 402 requirement and authorize a
state to test approaches and methods other than those set forth in section 407,
including definitions of work activities and engagement, specified limitations, verification
procedures, and the calculation of participation rates.

The memo, as the Daily Caller’s Caroline May notes, argues that by waiving the so-called “work requirements,”
the feds are encouraging “states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF, particularly
helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.”

Of course, the decision is seen by many on the right as a weakening, maybe even a violation, of the 1996
reform law.

The law, “originally vetoed but later signed into law by President Bill Clinton, is widely viewed as the most
successful policy initiative in a generation. Under it, the growth in welfare rolls was reversed and millions of
people moved from welfare to work,” York writes.

“Despite its success, however, many liberals remain opposed to reform.  For example, in the years immediately
after passage of the law, Barack Obama himself pledged to do all he could to undo it,” he adds.

Well, it looks like he’s done it.
The Obama administration’s decision is “the end of welfare reform as we know it,” said Robert Rector, a welfare
policy expert at the Heritage Foundation.

“President Obama just tore up a basic foundation of the welfare contract,” said Republican Study Committee
Chairman Jim Jordan.

“Today’s action is also a blatant violation of the law. After immigration, education, marriage, and religious
conscience protections, we can now add welfare reform to the list of laws President Obama refuses to follow,”
he adds.

House Speaker John Boehner released a statement criticizing the president.

“By gutting the work requirements in President Clinton’s signature welfare reform law, President Obama is
admitting his economic policies have failed,” Boehner wrote.

He continues:


While President Clinton worked with Congress in a bipartisan way on welfare reform
and economic opportunity, President Obama has routinely ignored Republican
proposals, rejected House-passed jobs bills, and imposed an agenda that’s helped
keep the unemployment rate above eight percent for 41 months.

Welfare reform was an historic, bipartisan success — this move by the Obama
administration is a partisan disgrace.

Meanwhile, as the president’s campaign continues to chase after thoroughly debunked Bain Capital narratives,
Mitt Romney has already come out and hit the White House for its welfare rewrite.

“President Obama now wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare,” Romney said.
“The success of bipartisan welfare reform, passed under President Clinton, has rested on the obligation of work.
The president’s action is completely misdirected. Work is a dignified endeavor, and the linkage of work and
welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life,” he added.


Byron's Wash. Examiner Article

While the Obama campaign goes all out attacking Mitt Romney’s business history, the Romney campaign is
looking carefully at a new Obama administration policy that could become a significant part of Romney’s case
against the president.  In a quiet move Thursday — barely noted beyond the conservative press — the Obama
administration “released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996,” according to
Robert Rector, a welfare policy expert at the Heritage Foundation.

The directive — which some Romney aides found stunning — allows the Department of Health and Human
Services to waive the work requirement at the heart of welfare reform.  That reform, originally vetoed but later
signed into law by President Bill Clinton, is widely viewed as the most successful policy initiative in a
generation.  Under it, the growth in welfare rolls was reversed and millions of people moved from welfare to
work.


Despite its success, however, many liberals remain opposed to reform.  For example, in the years immediately
after passage of the law, Barack Obama himself pledged to do all he could to undo it.  Now, he has.

The administration’s action means “the end of welfare reform as we know it,” in Rector’s words.  In coming
days, look for the Romney campaign to press that case — showcasing what Obama has done in office, even
as the president fixates on an imaginary narrative of what happened at Bain Capital years ago.

Friday morning, with Obama’s action still largely unreported, Romney released a statement calling Obama’s
move “completely misdirected.”

“President Obama now wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare,” Romney said.  “The
success of bipartisan welfare reform, passed under President Clinton, has rested on the obligation of work. The
president’s action is completely misdirected. Work is a dignified endeavor, and the linkage of work and welfare
is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.”

Who’s most to blame for the coming fiscal collapse of America?

posted at 6:01 pm on July 13, 2012 by Dustin Siggins

Note: This op-ed was done in tandem with David Weinberger, who previously worked in communications at The Heritage Foundation and currently blogs near the Twin Cities in Minnesota. All data for the calculations cited below were based off of OMB and CBO public data gathered by the Center for Budget & Policy Priorities (CBPP) and can be seen at a spreadsheet here. Special thanks go to Patrick Tyrrell and William Beach of Heritage and Richard Kogen and Kathy Ruffing of CBPP for assistance with inflation adjustments and other critical components of the calculations.

With Senate Majority Leader Reid’s (D-NV) decision on Tuesday to not pass a budget for the third straight fiscal year, the Washington game of fiscal chicken–this time over $19 billion–is in full swing once again. To provide perspective, this is less than one-half of one-percent of the 2012 budget and less than 1.5% of this year’s expected deficit. It’s also about one-eighth of one percent of our national debt.

While politicians bicker, Rome burns and the budget grows. While some pundits blame Obama, and others blame Bush, and still others blame everyone in the Beltway, the fact is neither president or party has instituted the wisest fiscal policy. Still, the increase in spending under both has not been driven principally by new spending initiatives. It has instead been driven by the increasing number of retirees and resulting growth of social spending and especially Social Security and Medicare.

Using publicly available data, we found figures on federal spending from 2000 through 2013 (2012 and 2013 spending is estimated, of course). Our inflation-adjusted calculations — using constant 2010 dollars — related to the growth of Social Security and Medicare, based upon that data, can be seen in this chart:

Here are some highlights:

In 2001, the first year of the Bush presidency, Social Security spending amounted to $528 billion. By his final year in office, it had risen to an amazing $692 billion. The increase with Medicare was even more dramatic — from $263 billion to $434 billion during that same period. While most of this was automatic growth from programs created and modified decades earlier, the president does deserve responsibility for passage of Medicare Part D in 2003, which fattened the program and is expected to have added approximately $375 billion to the national debt by 2013.

Under President Obama, the unrestrained automatic spending binge has only continued. While conservatives rightly believe that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will make health care costs worse, the vast majority of the programs, costs, tax increases and other aspects of the law haven’t yet been implemented. We have therefore not included this in our calculations. However, even ignoring the PPACA, costs of the retirement programs have continued to skyrocket.

Social Security spending leaped from $692 billion when Obama took office to a projected $770 billion by 2013. A mere thirteen billion of this increase came from costs attributed to changes in the 2009 stimulus. Meanwhile Medicare spending will have gone up from a ripe $434 billion to an estimated $491 billion during that same time. And this is excluding Medicaid, which has also grown on automatic pilot, on track itself to consume $283 billion of the federal budget by 2013.

All told, Social Security and Medicare have gone from swallowing $791 billion in 2001 to — along with Medicaid — seizing a projected $1.559 trillion by 2013. With Obamacare on top of that, and total federal spending having more than doubled since 2001, we’re looking at a very grave situation. Strong economic growth could perhaps offset the gravity of these costs in the short term, but the bottom line is that structural reform of entitlement programs is paramount to any real fiscal fix.

This makes for a disastrous structural budgetary situation. Yet, to repeat, most of the blame for this growth does not lie with President Obama or President Bush. It in fact belongs to those who created and changed the programs years and decades before either of them took office. President Obama, for example, could have a balanced budget this year – or very close to it – if it wasn’t for the burden of Social Security and Medicare.

Of course, this does not excuse these presidents and their respective Congresses from their responsibilities to make changes to the programs that make them affordable and/or return aspects of them to the states, where they belong. To his credit, President Bush did attempt to do this to Social Security in 2005, and while we believe the PPACA will worsen America’s health care costs, President Obama took on Medicare in 2009 and 2010.

But when it comes to blaming presidents for spending, pundits and politicians alike should be intellectually honest and remember it was Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson who put the federal budget on the path to fiscal unsustainability. Most presidents and Congresses since have merely failed to correct this, and this failure is why the Social Security trust fund is expected to start going bankrupt in 2013.

As most Americans know, we don’t have much time before a fiscal collapse hits the country, nailing the Debt-Paying Generation hardest of all. Yet Reid and many Republicans would rather argue over a rounding error than the 33% of the budget (and growing) taken up by Social Security and Medicare.

The Invincible Lie

 

Anyone who wants to study the tricks of propaganda rhetoric has a rich source of examples in the statements of President Barack Obama.

On Monday, July 9th, for example, he said that Republicans "believe that prosperity comes from the top down, so that if we spend trillions more on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that that will somehow unleash jobs and economic growth."

Let us begin with the word "spend." Is the government "spending" money on people whenever it does not tax them as much as it can? Such convoluted reasoning would never pass muster if the mainstream media were not so determined to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Barack Obama.

Ironically, actual spending by the Obama administration for the benefit of its political allies, such as the teachers' unions, is not called
spending but "investment." You can say anything if you have your own private language.

But let's go back to the notion of "spending" money on "the wealthiest Americans." The people he is talking about are not the wealthiest
Americans. Income is not wealth -- and the whole tax controversy is about income taxes. Wealth is what you have accumulated, and wealth is not taxed, except when you die and the government collects an inheritance tax from your heirs.

People over 65 years of age have far more wealth than people in their thirties and forties -- but lower incomes. If Obama wants to talk about raising income taxes, let him talk about it, but claiming that he wants to tax "the wealthiest Americans" is a lie and an emotional distraction for propaganda purposes.

The really big lie -- and one that no amount of hard evidence or logic seems to make a dent in -- is that those who oppose raising taxes on higher incomes simply want people with higher incomes to have more money, in hopes that some of their prosperity will "trickle down" to the rest of the people.

Some years ago, a challenge was issued in this column to name any economist, outside of an insane asylum, who had ever said any such thing. Not one example has yet been received, whether among economists or anyone else. Someone is always claiming that somebody else said it, but no one has ever been able to name and quote that somebody else.

Once we have put aside the lies and the convoluted use of words, what are we left with? Not much.

Obama is claiming that the government can get more tax revenue by raising the tax rate on people with higher incomes. It sounds plausible, and that may be enough for some people, but the hard facts make it a very iffy proposition.

This issue has been fought out in the United States in several administrations -- both Democratic and Republican. It has also been fought out in other countries.

What is the real argument of those who want to prevent taxes from rising above a certain percentage, even for people with high incomes? It has nothing to do with making them more prosperous so that their prosperity will "trickle down."

A Democratic president -- John F. Kennedy -- stated the issue plainly. Under the existing tax rates, he explained, investors' "efforts to avoid tax liabilities" made them put their money in tax shelters, because existing tax laws made "certain types of less productive activity more profitable than other more valuable undertakings" for the country.

Ironically, the Obama campaign's attacks on Mitt Romney for putting his money in the Cayman Islands substantiate the point that President Kennedy and others have made, that higher tax rates can drive money into tax shelters, whether tax-exempt municipal bonds or investments in other countries.

In other words, raising tax rates does not automatically raise tax revenues for the government. Higher tax rates have often led to lower tax revenues for states, the federal government and other countries. Conversely, lower tax rates have often led to higher tax revenues. It all depends on the circumstances.

But none of this matters to Barack Obama. If class warfare rhetoric about taxes leads to more votes for him, that is his bottom line, whether the government gets a dime more revenue or not. So long as his lies go unchallenged, a second term will be the end result for him and a lasting calamity for the country.

Nothing produces more of a sense of the futility of facts than seeing someone in the mass media repeating some notion that has been refuted innumerable times over the years.

On July 9th, on CNN's program "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer, commentator Gloria Borger discussed President Obama's plan to continue the temporary extension of the tax rates established under the Bush administration -- except for the top brackets, where Obama wanted the tax rates raised.

Ms. Borger said, "if you're going to lower the tax rates, where are you going to get the money from?"
First of all, nobody is talking about lowering the tax rates. They are talking about whether or not to continue the existing tax rates, which are set to expire after a temporary extension. And Obama is talking about raising the tax rate on higher income earners.

But when Ms. Borger asked, "where are you going to get the money from?" if you don't raise tax rates, that assumes an automatic correlation between tax rates and tax revenues, which is demonstrably false.

As far back as the 1920s, a huge cut in the highest income tax rate -- from 73 percent to 24 percent -- led to a huge increase in the amount of tax revenue collected by the federal government. Why? Because investors took their money out of tax shelters, where they were earning very modest rates of return, and put their money into the productive economy, where they could earn higher rates of return, now that those returns were not so heavily taxed.

This was the very reason why tax rates were cut in the first place -- to get more revenue for the federal government. The same was true, decades later, during the John F. Kennedy administration. Similar reasons led to tax rate cuts during the Ronald Reagan administration and the George W. Bush administration.

All of these presidents -- Democrat and Republican alike -- made the same argument for tax rate reductions that had been made in the 1920s, and the results were similar as well. Yet the invincible lie continues to this day that those who oppose high tax rates on high incomes are doing so because they want to reduce the taxes paid by high income earners, in hopes that their increased prosperity will "trickle down" to others.

In reality, high income earners paid not only a larger total amount of taxes after the tax rate cuts of the 1920s but also a higher share of all the income taxes collected. It is a matter of record that anyone can check out with official government statistics.

This result was not peculiar to the 1920s. In 2006, the New York Times reported: "An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year."

Expectations are in the eye of the beholder. Tax cut proponents expected precisely the result from the Bush tax cuts that so surprised the New York Times. So did tax cut proponents in the John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan administrations.

If this concept has not yet trickled down to the New York Times or CNN's Gloria Borger, that is a commentary on the media commentators.

Ms. Borger may simply not know any better, but Barack Obama cannot use that excuse. When he was a candidate for president back in 2008, Charles Gibson of ABC News confronted him with the fact that there was no automatic correlation between the raising and lowering of tax rates and whether tax revenues moved up or down.

Obama admitted that. But he said that he was for raising tax rates on higher income earners anyway, in the name of "fairness." How higher tax rates that the government does not actually collect make any sense, whether from a fairness perspective or as a way of paying the government's bills, is another question. The point here is that Obama knew then that tax rates and tax revenues do not automatically move in the same direction.

In other words, he is lying when he talks as if tax rates and tax revenues move together. Ms. Borger and others in the media may or may not know that. So they are not necessarily lying. But they are failing to inform their audiences about the facts -- and that allows Obama's lies to stand.

O's Risky Campaign Strategy

James Taranto: Obama's Risky Campaign Strategy

The campaign's narrow appeals to particular voting blocs could alienate other Democratic or swing voters.

By JAMES TARANTO

Barack Obama's election seemed to vindicate the 2002 book "The Emerging Democratic Majority." John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued that demographic changes made Democratic dominance inexorable, as racial and ethnic minorities and highly educated professionals grew as proportions of the population.


Sure enough, although John McCain outpolled Mr. Obama 55% to 43% among whites, the Democrat won a solid victory thanks to large majorities of blacks (95%), Hispanics (67%), under-30 voters (66%), the unmarried (65%), and holders of advanced degrees (58%).

But the Democratic majority that emerged in 2008 quickly faded. Since Mr. Obama became president, Republicans have enjoyed a string of electoral victories. What happened?

Although Mr. Obama benefited from the demographic trends Messrs. Judis and Teixeira had noted, he also was running against a dismal Republican status quo, as a challenger in a recession. Mr. Obama cultivated an image as a unifier able to transcend partisan, ideological and racial divides.

Four years later, he is a divisive incumbent defending a grim status quo of his own. Having lost the broad appeal he enjoyed in 2008, he is making narrow appeals to particular voting blocs with the apparent aim of shoring up support and turnout. He's counting on Judis-Teixeira demographics to carry him to re-election.

To appeal to single women, he picked a fight with the Catholic Church by refusing a conscience exemption from the ObamaCare birth-control mandate. For Hispanics, there was the promise of lax immigration enforcement against illegal aliens who arrived in the U.S. as children. His "evolution" on same-sex marriage seemed designed to appeal not just to gays but also to young voters, whose attitudes on the subject tend to be liberal.

But these calculated overtures carry risks. In appealing to particular demographics, the president may be alienating other Democratic or swing voters. Mr. Obama received 49% of the votes of churchgoing Catholics in 2008. Picking a fight with the church seems a sure way to bring that number down. The immigration move may boost Hispanic support in Colorado and Nevada, but polls suggest it hurts among independents in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Same-sex marriage is especially unpopular among blacks. This is the most reliably Democratic voting bloc, and no one expects that to change this year. But even a modest drop-off in turnout or support could hurt Mr. Obama. According to exit polls, blacks made up 13% of the 2008 electorate, up from 11% in 2004. That's a difference of some 3.5 million votes. Mr. Obama's 95% support does not seem like a dramatic improvement from John Kerry's 88%, but it amounts to roughly another 1.5 million votes. Add it all up, and the improvement in Democratic performance among blacks between 2004 and 2008 accounted for more than half of Mr. Obama's nationwide popular-vote margin of 9.5 million.

To defend the black vote, Obama supporters have frequently appealed to fears of Republican racism. Speaking to the NAACP's annual convention this week, Attorney General Eric Holder portrayed anti-voter-fraud efforts as "political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens." When the same convention booed Mitt Romney's speech, Obama backers like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell suggested that the Romney campaign deliberately provoked the boos because, as Mr. O'Donnell put it, "they want the video of their candidate being booed by the NAACP to play in certain racist precincts."

There's a risk here too—that all the talk about racism will put off whites who voted for Mr. Obama because they thought electing a black president would help the country get beyond race. National Journal noted Thursday that the president is at "historic lows" among working-class white men—just 28% and 29% in two recent surveys, down from 39% in 2008. Whites are a shrinking proportion of the electorate, but that doesn't make their votes expendable.

This points to the shortcoming in the analysis of Messrs. Judis and Teixeira: To them, the Democratic glass is always half full. They were prescient in identifying prospective Democratic gains but complacent about possible losses. "If the downturn in West Virginia's economy continues, the state is almost sure to go back to the Democrats," they wrote. Instead Mr. McCain won by 13 points. They classified Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee and even Texas as "competitive." All are now regarded as solidly Republican.

Mr. Obama's effort at coalition rebuilding may be his best possible strategy under the circumstances. But his path to re-election would be far clearer if, as in 2008, he had a broad appeal and didn't have to resort to narrow ones. His election showed that the demographic groups of the "emerging Democratic majority" were necessary for victory. This year we'll find out if they are sufficient.
 
Mr. Taranto, a member of the Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.