King Barack - End Run Climate Control

How Obama Could Go Around Congress on Climate Change

Posted By Bill Straub On February 15, 2013 @ 1:32 pm In Environment,Politics | 14 Comments

WASHINGTON – President Obama is laying the groundwork for an end-run around Congress if lawmakers refuse to address the issue of global climate change.

Obama unexpectedly used a significant portion of Tuesday’s State of the Union address to urge a reluctant Congress to “pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change,” a reference analysts took to mean implementation of cap-and-trade – a system that passed the House in 2009 but subsequently was ignored in the Senate.

“But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” Obama said. “I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

The Republican-controlled House has exhibited no interest in revisiting a cap-and-trade system that critics maintain could cause consumer energy costs to skyrocket by as much as 65 percent.

“If the president wants to impose a cap-and-trade national energy tax, I encourage Senate Democrats to take it up,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday, adding, “This isn’t the agenda that Americans are looking for — and many in the president’s own party won’t support it.”

On the surface there’s little the White House can do without congressional approval. But the president expressed determination to move ahead.

“For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change,” Obama said. “Yes, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.”

The best option Obama appears to hold for achieving his climate change goals could be the one Republicans loathe the most — the Environmental Protection Agency.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act but only if the agency rendered a legal determination, referred to as an endangerment finding, maintaining that CO2 represents a threat to human health and the environment.

Former EPA Director Lisa Jackson did just that on Dec. 7, 2009, including carbon dioxide among six pollutants the agency maintains contribute to climate change – a finding upheld by the federal courts. As a result, the EPA already is moving ahead on strict standards that effectively ban the construction of coal-fired power plants unless they had the capability of capturing carbon dioxide emissions.
Now, unless Congress acts on cap-and-trade, it appears the Obama administration is prepared to move ahead on limiting carbon dioxide emissions at existing coal-fired power plants, which rank as the nation’s top greenhouse gas producers. It’s an initiative that could wind up costing the industry billions of dollars.

“The president has a full box of tools to strike back at climate chaos,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The best tool he has is the Clean Air Act. It gives him the authority to reduce the carbon pollution from our dirtiest power plants, the single greatest threat to our climate future. That will take presidential leadership. Americans are counting on it.”
According to the Energy Information Agency, coal is responsible for about 35 percent of the nation’s energy generation, a sum that has declined somewhat as some plants turn to cleaner and more efficient natural gas. Still, about 34 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas production emanates from coal-fired power plants.

Operators of coal-fired power plants may find themselves preferring cap-and-trade to new Clean Air Act emissions standards. Under cap-and-trade, the federal government determines an appropriate amount of emissions that can be released from each plant and then issues permits – also known as carbon credits — to each plant, setting a cap on the amount of pollutants each plant can emit.

In some instances it’s anticipated that some plants wouldn’t be able to meet the government-established pollution limits. Those power generators would then have to purchase – or trade for — permits from other plants that come in under their caps.

In effect, under cap-and-trade, those plants that exceed their allowances are punished financially while those who successfully reduce their emissions are rewarded through the sale of its permits. But that trading option won’t be available if the EPA simply implements new, stricter pollution regulations.

The EPA has used the regulatory tool on coal-fired plants before. In Dec. 2011 the agency adopted a Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule that established levels for emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel, and acid gases – all of which are considered dangerous to public health. The agency estimated that implementing the rules would cost $9.6 billion. The power industry asserts it’s more likely to ultimately cost in the range of $100 billion — a sum that will have to be passed on to utility customers and force the shutdown of some older coal-fired plants.

The president’s efforts are sure to attract opposition, even from within his own party.

“He (Obama) is absolutely wrong in his misguided efforts to circumvent the Congress with unilateral regulatory actions that will result in job loss, especially when it comes to the EPA’s unfair and inequitable treatment of coal mining in Appalachia, which the Congress and the courts are rightly resisting,” said Rep. Nick Joe Rahall (D-W.Va.). “I intend to keep on doing all that I can to promote coal and keep our miners on the job producing affordable energy for the nation.”
David W. Kreutzer, research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the Heritage Foundation, asserted that the scientific basis for Obama’s initiative is growing weaker.

“There have been four more years of no global warming,” he said. “In 2010, there had been no significant world temperature increase for over a decade. The streak is now 16 years long. We have four years of costly lessons on the waste and inefficiency of green-energy subsidies. It is time for the administration to quit using both arguments to justify a regulatory and fiscal power grab.”
Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, expressed support for reducing carbon emissions and noted the administration could reach its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 by “cutting emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, tackling methane from natural gas systems and enhancing energy efficiency.”

“By reaching its emissions target, the U.S. can signal that it’s serious about tackling climate change at home while enhancing its credibility on the global stage,” Steer said. “With more droughts, wildfires, and extreme weather events taking their toll around the globe, the world desperately needs more action. And, it needs the United States to be a leader on climate change.”
Natural gas production is on the rise to a great extent, ironically, because of the regulations imposed on coal. But its extraction, processing, and transmission can release methane – itself a potent greenhouse gas.

Obama, in his State of the Union address, hinted that the federal government intends to “encourage the research and technology that helps natural gas burn even cleaner and protects our air and water.”

A study by the World Resources Institute found that some technologies already exist and “can pay for themselves in fewer than three years.”

Standards set in 2012 already target methane leakage from some steps in the natural gas process. But during fracking, a method used to extract natural gas from underground, methane emerges and is burned off – creating carbon dioxide. The administration may therefore consider additional regulations identifying methane as a greenhouse gas.
The president also used the speech to address energy efficiency, setting a goal of cutting energy wasted by homes and businesses in half over the next twenty years.

“The states with the best ideas to create jobs and lower energy bills by constructing more efficient buildings will receive federal support to help make it happen,” he said.

The administration already has a Building Technologies Program within the Department of Energy that is looking to develop cost-effective energy saving solutions through “better products, better new homes, better ways to improve older homes, and better buildings in which we work, shop, and lead our everyday lives.”

The U.S. spends more than $400 billion each year to power residences and commercial buildings, contributing to almost 40 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Department of Energy. Much of that energy is wasted – 20 percent or more on average. Reducing energy usage in the nation’s buildings by 20 percent would result in savings of about $80 billion annually.
To achieve that, the administration may consider boosting energy efficiency standards on appliances like refrigerators, air conditioners and washers and dryers.

And there is also the possibility that the administration will look into reducing hydrofluorocarbons, a greenhouse gas used primarily for refrigeration and cooling.

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Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

SOTU Speech - NONSENSE Geo Will

State of the Union nonsense

By George F. Will, Published: February 15

In the 12 months we have to steel ourselves for the next State of the Union spectacle, let us count the ways that this spawn of democratic Caesarism — presidency worship — has become grotesque. It would be the most embarrassing ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy, were the nation still capable of being embarrassed by its puerile faith in presidential magic.

The Constitution laconically requires only that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Nothing requires “from time to time” to be construed as “every damn year.” Informing and recommending need not involve today’s tawdry ritual of wishful thinking by presidents unhinged from political reality and histrionics by their audiences. And must we be annually reminded that all presidents think that everything they want is “necessary and expedient”?

Some of the blame for this yearly night of nonsense goes to Ronald Reagan. Most, however, goes to Woodrow Wilson. Reagan, who loved entertainment, pioneered the regrettable practice of stocking the House gallery with (usually) admirable people. Wilson, who loved himself, had, as professors often do, a theory, which caused him to reverse Thomas Jefferson’s wholesome reticence.

When the Founding generation was developing customs and manners appropriate to a republic, George Washington and John Adams made the mistake of going to Congress to do their constitutional duty of informing and recommending. Jefferson, however, disliked the sound of his voice — such an aversion is a vanishingly rare presidential virtue — and considered it monarchical for the executive to lecture the legislature, the lofty instructing underlings. So he sent written thoughts to Capitol Hill, a practice good enough for subsequent presidents until Wilson in 1913 delivered his message orally, pursuant to the progressives’ belief in inspirational and tutelary presidents.

It is beyond unseemly, it is anti-constitutional for senior military officers and, even worse, Supreme Court justices to attend these political rallies where, with metronomic regularity, legislators of the president’s party leap to their feet to whinny approval of every bromide and vow. Members of the other party remain theatrically stolid, thereby provoking brow-furrowing punditry about why John Boehner did not rise (to genuflect? salute? swoon?) when Barack Obama mentioned this or that. Tuesday night, the justices, generals and admirals, looking as awkward as wallflowers at a prom, at least stayed seated.

Except for Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, who stayed away. They missed a clunker of a speech, although the tedium was not much worse than usual, and was redeemed by clarifying three things.

First, Obama’s declaration that nothing in his long list of proposed spending “should” — should? — “increase our deficit by a single dime” means there should be commensurate tax increases. Second, now that he has proclaimed that government “must keep the promises we’ve already made,” only the uneducable can still believe he will consider entitlement reforms. Third, by saying spending cuts under the sequester would be “harsh” and would “devastate” domestic programs, he made applesauce of those two words: The cuts would remove only $85 billion from this year’s almost $3.6 trillion budget, and over a decade they would cut just $1.2 trillion from projected spending of $46 trillion. And spending this year would still be well above the post-1945 norm as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Although Obama is a self-proclaimed respecter of science, he does not stoop to empiricism. Understandably. Data are unkind to his assertion that climate change is causing storms to become more severe and drought to become more prevalent. Measured by “accumulated cyclone energy,” hurricane and other tropical cyclone activity is at a three-decade low, and the journal Nature reports that globally “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

Wilson’s stroke prevented him from delivering the State of the Union orally in 1919 and 1920, but Warren Harding, not known for a strong sense of propriety, continued the deplorable practice in 1921 and 1922. Calvin Coolidge did so in 1923, four months after becoming president, but not a second time. Wilson’s practice was, however, made the norm by the man who had first come to Washington as Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt.

State of the Union addresses are now integral to the apotheosis of the presidency. If government is going to be omniprovident, modern presidents are going to be omnipresent, and politics is going to be infantile.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive.

25 Most Motivational Quotes

            25 Greatest Quotes

1) “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” — Muhammad Ali

2) “Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself – and be lenient to everybody else.” — Henry Ward Beecher

3) “Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” — Winston Churchill

4) “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” — Calvin Coolidge

5) “The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.” — Chuck Palahniuk

6) “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison

7) “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” — Tim Ferriss

8) “The vision of a champion is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is looking.” — Mia Hamm

9) “There is one thing that 99 percent of ‘failures’ and ‘successful’ folks have in common — they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway.” — Darren Hardy

10) “7 months straight. No stopping, no maintenance weeks, no cheat meals. Why? Because if someone beat me, I didn’t want to look back at any cheat meals and ask ‘what if’. I did what it took every single day, and THAT is why I looked the way I did. You either want it or you don’t. Just so you know, there wasn’t a day that went by in the last 8-10 weeks of that prep where I didn’t want just ONE extra yogurt, or 5 less intervals of cardio. But, I was not going to be outworked! I was NOT going to be denied! And you know what? It was all worth it.” — Tommy Jeffers

 11) “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” — Michael Jordan

12) “Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.” — Marilyn Vos Savant

13) “Winning is not a sometime thing: it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do the right thing once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” — Vince Lombardi

14) “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” — Abraham Maslow

15) “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

16) “A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week.” — George S. Patton

17) “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.” — Florence Nightingale

18) “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” — Frederick Douglass

19) “When you’re playing against a stacked deck, compete even harder. Show the world how much you’ll fight for the winner’s circle. If you do, someday the cellophane will crackle off a fresh pack, one that belongs to you, and the cards will be stacked in your favor.” — Pat Riley

20) “To remind yourself of the power of persistence, consider the metaphor of the stone cutter. How does he break open a giant boulder? He whacks it as hard as he can. The first hit doesn’t leaven even a scratch, but he strikes hundreds, maybe even thousands of times. He persists even when his actions seem to be futile. But he knows that just because you don’t see immediate results, it doesn’t mean you’re not making progress. So he keeps striking the rock. At some point it doesn’t just chip, but literally splits in two. Did the final blow break the boulder open? Of course not. It was the constant pressure being applied to the challenge at hand.” — Anthony Robbins

21) “There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” — Bruce Lee

22) “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.” — Jim Rohn

23) “It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the Arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but he who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great devotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat.” — Teddy Roosevelt

24) “Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it.” — Margaret Thatcher

25) “Falling down is how we grow. Staying down is how we die.” — Brian Vaszily
****
Previously from John Hawkins on great quotes:

BO is AWOL on Sept 11 2012

The Absentee Commander in Chief

The Defense secretary told the president that Americans in Benghazi were under attack. Then: nothing.

By WILLIAM KRISTOL AND PETER WEHNER

We've both had the honor to work in the White House. We've seen presidents, vice presidents, chiefs of staff and national security advisers during moments of international crisis. We know that in these moments human beings make mistakes. There are failures of communication and errors of judgment. Perfection certainly isn't the standard to which policy makers should be held.

But there are standards. If Americans are under attack, presidential attention must be paid. Due diligence must be demonstrated. A president must take care that his administration does everything it can do. On Sept. 11, 2012, as Americans were under attack in Benghazi, Libya, President Obama failed in his basic responsibility as president and commander in chief. In a crisis, the president went AWOL.

Thanks to the congressional testimony of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey late last week, we know they met with President Obama on Sept. 11 at 5 p.m. in a pre-scheduled meeting, when they informed the president about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The meeting lasted about a half-hour. Mr. Panetta said they spent roughly 20 minutes of the session briefing the president on the chaos at the American Embassy in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi, which eventually cost the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, security personnel Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and information officer Sean Smith.

Secretary Panetta said the president left operational details, including determination of what resources were available to help the Americans under siege, "up to us." We also learned that President Obama did not communicate in any way with Mr. Panetta or Gen. Dempsey the rest of that evening or that night. Indeed, Mr. Panetta and Gen. Dempsey testified they had no further contact at all with anyone in the White House that evening—or, for that matter, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That's not all we discovered. We now know that despite Gen. Dempsey having been informed of Ambassador Stevens's repeated warnings about the rise of terrorist elements in Benghazi, no forces were put in place or made ready nearby to respond to possible trouble. It also seems that during the actual attacks in Benghazi, which the administration followed in real time and which lasted for some eight hours, not a single major military asset was deployed to help rescue Americans under assault.

And we learned one other thing: Messrs. Panetta and Dempsey both knew on the night of the assault that it was a terrorist attack. This didn't prevent President Obama, Secretary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice from peddling a false version of events in the days and even weeks that followed, as the administration called the incident spontaneous, said there was no evidence of a coordinated terrorist attack and blamed the violence on an anti-Muslim video. So the White House, having failed to ensure that anything was done during the attack, went on to mislead the nation afterward.

Why the deception? Presumably for two reasons. The first is that the true account of events undercut the president's claim during the campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis. The commander in chief not only didn't convene a meeting in the Situation Room; he didn't even bother to call his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans under attack.

This is an embarrassment and a disgrace. Is it too much to hope that President Obama is privately ashamed of his inattention and passivity that night? And that he has resolved, and instructed his senior staff, to take care that he not be derelict in his duty as commander in chief ever again?
 
Mr. Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, served in the George H.W. Bush White House. Mr. Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the George W. Bush White House.

A version of this article appeared February 11, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Absentee Commander in Chief.

Woodward: Sequestration was King Barach's Brain Child

GOP Leaders Wield Unlikely Weapon Against Obama: Bob Woodward
By Eliana Johnson
February 8, 2013 9:21 P.M.

Republicans Friday afternoon bludgeoned the administration with an unlikely weapon in the political battle over the impending sequestration: the words of Bob Woodward, theWashington Post journalist whose exposure of the Watergate scandal in 1972 brought down the Nixon presidency.

As White House press secretary Jay Carney blasted “spin doctors on the Republican side” for spreading the “fanciful concoction” that the White House wanted the sequester, House Republicans deployed a passage from Woodward’s most recent book, The Price of Politics, that tells a different story. According to Woodward, it was then-White House chief of staff Jack Lew who introduced the idea of sequestration into the debt-ceiling negotiations that subsumed Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2011. “Reid bent down and put his head between his knees, almost as if he were going to throw up,” Woodward writes.

That, according to both Woodward and Republican lawmakers, is how President Obama strong-armed sequestration into the Budget Control Act of 2011, and why the president today bears responsibility for finding a way out of the problem he created.

In the sequestration battle, the office of House Speaker John Boehner is serving as Ground Zero in the GOP’s communications offensive. His aides on Friday circulated a photograph of the incriminating lines from Woodward’s book, which promptly zipped around Capitol Hill. GOP lawmakers on Friday afternoon, at the urging of Boehner’s staffers, replaced their Facebook and Twitter avatars with the photograph. The campaign also includes a Twitter hashtag, #obamaquester, and an attempt to change the way Republicans are talking about the issue. “We’re encouraging people to say ‘President Obama’s sequester,’” says Boehner’s press secretary, Brendan Buck.

“It’s important for people to know that the president was ultimately responsible for conceiving of this idea,” Buck tells National Review Online. “The president has tried to pin [the sequester] on Congress, saying that they came up with it and that they must fix it, when in fact Congress thought this was a terrible mechanism to use,” Buck explains. “This is what the White House insisted on.”
Buck praises Woodward’s book, which provides a play-by-play account of the largely unsuccessful 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations between the White House and House Republicans, as a useful corrective to the White House’s message. Woodward, he says, took the time to “look at the facts, dig deep, and see what really happened,” and worked diligently to set the record straight. “We’re very happy with the way it came out.” Woodward, though critical of all of the participants in the 2011 negotiations, ultimately lays the blame at President Obama’s feet, assailing him in particular for displaying a personal arrogance that, in Woodward’s view, may very well have scuttled negotiations.

On a day like today, when the White House warned of the “women and children who would lose vital nutrition assistance” if the sequestration takes effect and placed the burden for averting it squarely on the Congress, Woodward’s narrative was particularly useful, and it was evident that Republicans relished the opportunity to wield it against Democrats. “A lot of people tend to take the White House’s word over ours,” Buck says. In the sequestration debate, it may, ironically, be Bob Woodward who prevents that from happening. 

The Cost of Rahn Emanuel's Grandstanding G. Will

 The price of moral grandstanding

WASHINGTON — Politics becomes amusing when liberalism becomes theatrical with high-minded gestures. Chicago’s government, which is not normally known for elevated thinking, is feeling so morally upright and financially flush that it proposes to rise above the banal business of maximizing the value of its employees’ and retirees’ pension fund assets. Although seven funds have cumulative unfunded liabilities of $25 billion, Chicago will sacrifice the growth of those assets to the striking of a political pose so pure it is untainted by practicality.

Emulating New York and California, two deep blue states with mammoth unfunded pension liabilities, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has hectored a $5 billion pension fund into divesting its holdings in companies that manufacture firearms. Now he is urging two large banks to deny financing to such companies “that profit from gun violence.” TD Bank provides a $60 million credit line to Smith & Wesson, and Bank of America provides a $25 million line to Sturm, Ruger & Company.

Chicago’s current and retired public employees might wish the city had invested more in both companies. Barack Obama, for whom Emanuel was chief of staff, has become a potent gun salesman because of suspicions that he wants to make gun ownership more difficult. Since he was inaugurated four years ago, there have been 65 million requests for background checks of gun purchasers. Four years ago, the price of Smith & Wesson stock was $2.45. Last week it was $8.76, up 258 percent. Four years ago, the price of Sturm Ruger stock was $6.46. Last week it was $51.09, up 691 percent. The Wall Street Journal reports that even before “a $1.2 billion balloon payment for pensions comes due” in 2015, “Chicago’s pension funds, which are projected to run dry by the end of the decade, are scraping the bottoms of their barrels.”

Nevertheless, liberals are feeling good about themselves — the usual point of liberalism — because New York state’s public pension fund and California’s fund for teachers have, The New York Times says, “frozen or divested” gun holdings, and in February Calpers, the fund for other California public employees, may join this gesture jamboree. All this is being compared to the use of divestment to pressure South Africa to dismantle apartheid in the 1980s. Well.

Apartheid was a wicked practice. Guns are legal products in America, legally sold under federal, state and local regulations. Most of the guns sold to Americans are made by Americans. Americans have a right — a constitutional right — to own guns, and 47 percent of American households exercise that portion of the Bill of Rights by possessing at least one firearm.

For Emanuel to say gun makers “profit from gun violence” is as sensible as saying automobile manufacturers “profit from highway carnage” — which, by the way, kills more Americans than guns do. Emanuel, who is more intelligent than he sounds (just as many think Wagner’s music is better than it sounds), must know that not one fewer gun will be made, sold or misused because Chicago is wagging its finger at banks.

Moral grandstanding, however, offers steady work and The Chronicle of Higher Education reports a new front in “the battle against climate change”: “Student groups at almost 200 colleges and universities are calling on boards of trustees to divest their colleges’ holdings in large fossil-fuel companies.” Of course, not one share of those companies’ stock will go unsold because academia is so righteous. Others will profit handsomely from such holdings and from being complicit in supplying what the world needs. Fossil fuels, the basis of modern life, supply 82 percent of U.S. energy, and it is projected that they will supply 78 percent of the global increase in energy demand between 2009 and 2035, by which time the number of cars and trucks on the planet will have doubled to 1.7 billion.
Institutions of higher education will, presumably, warn donors that their endowments will be wielded in support of the political agenda du jour, which might include divesting from any company having anything to do with corn, source of the sweetener in many of the sodas that make some people fat and New York’s mayor cranky. Or anything to do with red meat, sugar, salt, trans fats, chickens not lovingly raised. …

Liberal ethicists may decide that the only virtuous investments are in electric cars. The Obama administration says 1 million will be sold by 2015. Maybe 70,000 have been so far. Just imagine how pension funds will prosper by betting on the next 930,000.

BO Unleashed 2nd Term Nightmare

Krauthammer: Obama unbound  CK



WASHINGTON — The media herd is stunned to discover that Barack Obama is a man of the left. After 699 teleprompted presidential speeches, the commentariat was apparently still oblivious. Until Monday’s inaugural address, that is.

Where has everyone been these four years? The only surprise is that Obama chose his second inaugural, generally an occasion for “malice toward none” ecumenism, to unveil so uncompromising a left-liberal manifesto.

But the substance was no surprise. After all, Obama had unveiled his transformational agenda in his very first address to Congress, four years ago (Feb. 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”

Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially nationalize health care, 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after passing an $833 billion stimulus that precipitated an unprecedented expansion of government spending. Washington now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20 percent.

Obama’s ambitions were derailed by the 2010 midterm shellacking that cost him the House. But now that he’s won again, the revolution is back, as announced in Monday’s inaugural address.

It was a paean to big government. At its heart was Obama’s pledge to (1) defend unyieldingly the 20th-century welfare state and (2) expand it unrelentingly for the 21st.

The first part of that agenda — clinging zealously to the increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — is the very definition of reactionary liberalism. Social Security was created when life expectancy was 62. Medicare was created when modern medical technology was in its infancy. Today’s radically different demographics and technology have rendered these programs, as structured, unsustainable. Everyone knows that, unless reformed, they will swallow up the rest of the budget.

As for the second part — enlargement — Obama had already begun that in his first term with Obamacare. Monday’s inaugural address reinstated yet another grand Obama project — healing the planet. It promised a state-created green energy sector, massively subsidized (even as the state’s regulatory apparatus systematically squeezes fossil fuels, killing coal today, shale gas tomorrow).

The playbook is well known. As Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now, it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.

Monday’s address also served to disabuse the fantasists of any Obama interest in fiscal reform or debt reduction. This speech was spectacularly devoid of any acknowledgment of the central threat to the postindustrial democracies (as already seen in Europe) — the crisis of an increasingly insolvent entitlement state.

On the contrary. Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American system.

For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the state.

In the eye of history, Obama’s second inaugural is a direct response to Ronald Reagan’s first. On Jan. 20, 1981, Reagan had proclaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And then succeeded in bending the national consensus to his ideology — as confirmed 15 years later when the next Democratic president declared “The era of big government is over.” So said Bill Clinton, who then proceeded to abolish welfare.

Obama is no Clinton. He doesn’t abolish entitlements; he preserves the old ones and creates new ones in pursuit of a vision of a more just social order where fighting inequality and leveling social differences are the great task of government.
Obama said in 2008 that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Clinton did not. He meant that Reagan had transformed the political zeitgeist, while Clinton accepted and thus validated the new Reaganite norm.
Not Obama. His mission is to redeem and resurrect the 50-year pre-Reagan liberal ascendancy. Accordingly, his second inaugural address, ideologically unapologetic and aggressive, is his historical marker, his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the left. If he succeeds in these next four years, he will have earned the title.