Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe predicts GOP will take over Senate

MICHAEL MCNUTT
Inhofe tells the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber that voters will sweep Republican senators into office after undergoing the “shock treatment” given the nation’s economy through policies enacted by the president and fellow Democrats.

Voters will respond to the “shock treatment” given by the president’s national economic policies by sweeping in enough Republicans in November to take over the U.S. Senate, Oklahoma’s senior U.S. senator said Thursday.

“Every institution that made America great happens to be under attack today,” U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe told members of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber during a breakfast at the Oklahoma City Marriott. “Maybe America needed a shock treatment, and we got a shock treatment. … I will predict the shock treatment will precipitate in a really great renaissance in the free enterprise system.”

Inhofe, R-Tulsa, said he expects Republicans could pick up as many as 13 seats in the Nov. 2 general elections to gain control. He listed off potential wins in Arkansas, Colorado, California, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Connecticut and Oregon. Republicans need to pick up at least 10 seats to be in the majority; 34 seats are up for election. The Senate is made up of 57 Democrats, 41 Republicans and two independents who caucus with the Democrats.

Oklahoma Democratic Party Chairman Todd Goodman, asked later to comment, said Democrats should hold onto the majority in the Senate.

“The national trend of being anti-incumbent … would tend to favor the party in the minority, but I think we’ll maintain the majority,” Goodman said. “So many of the Republicans are just battling for the fringe right. The tea party clearly is more identified with the Republican Party nationally, and I think that’s going to be a very important factor.”

Inhofe, elected in 1994 to the Senate to fill an unexpired term and re-elected three times since then, said Americans are starting to understand that policies by President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are attacking the oil, banking, insurance, health care and military industries.

“By attack, I’m talking about the government taking over,” Inhofe said. “The public never believed that we would get to the point where our government would do what government is doing today.”

The federal bailout programs that have added to the country’s deficit are having an adverse effect on the economy, he said.

“There’s no one out there who can read or write who doesn’t know you cannot sustain a deficit of one year of $1.4 trillion,” Inhofe said.

Looking to 2012

If Senate Republicans gain control, it’s likely Democrats up for re-election in 2012 will move away from supporting the president’s policies, Inhofe said.

“When the ship sinks, the rats jump off — they’re not going to go down with the ship,” he said. “We’re going to see a behavioral change in Democrats who have been following and doing everything they could to help with the administration.”

Inhofe criticized a one-year moratorium on requesting earmarks, or money for special projects, which was announced earlier this year by Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Inhofe said earmarks should be called appropriations, saying that appropriating funds is the job of Congress. He said no money is saved when a congressional earmark is removed — the money remains in the budget and is spent by bureaucrats and administration officials.

“It goes right back to the bureaucracy,” he said.

Inhofe this year requested more than $615 million in special projects, with about two-thirds of that for defense contractors and military bases.

Inhofe said he gets along with U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Muskogee, who does not request earmarks.

“When you really need something for Oklahoma, he’s there,” Inhofe said. “All I want him to agree with is just to define earmarks as appropriations, then we wouldn’t disagree on anything. If there’s a ridiculous appropriation out there, we’ll go out and fight it together.”

Inhofe said he is proud to bring federal money to pay for improvements at the state’s military installations and highway system.

Inhofe, last re-elected in 2008, said he hasn’t thought about whether he would seek another term in 2014.

“I’m 75 years old, but I still fly airplanes upside down and I don’t know why it is — I don’t hurt anywhere and I don’t feel any different than I felt five years ago,” Inhofe said. “If circumstances are the same as they are today, yeah I would be running.Read the original article NewsOK

Obama Decried, Then Used, Some Bush Drilling Policies

Less than four months after President Barack Obama took office, his new administration received a forceful warning about the dangers of offshore oil drilling.

The alarm was rung by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which found that the government was unprepared for a major spill at sea, relying on an “irrational” environmental analysis of the risks of offshore drilling.

The April 2009 ruling stunned both the administration and the oil industry, and threatened to delay or cancel dozens of offshore projects in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite its pro-environment pledges, the Obama administration urged the court to revisit the decision. Politically, it needed to push ahead with conventional oil production while it expanded support for renewable energy.

Another reason: money. In its arguments to the court, the government said that the loss of royalties on the oil, estimated at almost $10 billion, “may have significant financial consequences for the federal government.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed its decision and allowed drilling in the Gulf to proceed—including on BP PLC’s now-infamous Macondo well, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.

The Obama administration’s actions in the court case exemplify the dilemma the White House faced in developing its energy policy. In his presidential campaign, President Obama criticized the Bush administration for being too soft on the oil industry and vowed to support greener energy forms.

But, once in office, President Obama ended up backing offshore drilling, bowing to political and fiscal realties, even as his administration’s own scientists and Democratic lawmakers warned about its risks.

After the Macondo well blew out, sinking the Deepwater Horizon rig and causing a catastrophic spill, Mr. Obama said his administration should have been more vigilant in handling the oil industry. “More needed to be done, and more needs to be done” to tighten oversight, he told reporters recently.

Still, the administration defends its intervention in the court case, and says the ruling made it look more cautiously at whether to open new areas to offshore drilling. It pins blame on the Bush administration for pursuing a policy for deep-offshore drilling “that was driven by one principle: open everything,” said White House spokesman Ben LaBolt.

“Over the course of the year,” he said, “the Interior Department conducted a review process to produce an offshore strategy that closed a number of environmentally sensitive areas from exploration and put in place a process to explore where additional production could take place.” Since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, he added, “we are implementing top to bottom reforms to ensure that a disaster like this is never repeated.”

Michel Olsen, a former official in the Bush Interior Department, defended the previous administration’s offshore approach. “Our policy was founded on the requirements of the law,” he said. “It wasn’t just to give industry whatever it wanted.”

Mr. Obama inherited a slew of energy challenges when he took office in early 2009. The agency within the Interior Department charged with overseeing the oil and gas industry, the Minerals Management Service, was reeling from scandals. An inspector general’s report months earlier had described rigged contracts, drug use and sex between MMS employees and industry representatives.

Along with cleaning up the MMS, Interior had to wrestle with a five-year drilling plan the Bush administration had filed just days before leaving office. The plan sought to open the waters in most of the U.S. outer-continental shelf to oil and gas exploration between 2010 and 2015. The push into ever deeper waters in the Gulf, which began in earnest in the mid-1990s, reflected the reality that drilling in shallower waters was largely tapped out.

To buy time and work out its own policy preferences, the Obama administration reopened the Bush plan for public comment.

The tensions in the administration’s own deliberations were clear from the start. Mr. Obama’s Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, quickly picked a fight with the oil industry when he retroactively withdrew 77 oil-and-gas lease sales in Utah that the Bush administration had approved in its final weeks. The move drew applause from environmentalists and criticism from oil companies.

In April 2009, Mr. Salazar went on a four-city tour to discuss the nation’s offshore energy future. His first stop: A solar-powered convention center in Atlantic City, N.J., where he touted the potential of offshore wind power to supply clean electricity to the eastern seaboard. Boosting offshore renewable energy had become a “top priority” for Interior at the express wish of Mr. Salazar, who had issued a secretarial order to that effect just three weeks earlier.

But, before the packed house of politicians, activists and interested citizens, Mr. Salazar also defended the need for more offshore oil and gas. “The reality is that we have oil and gas potential in significant ways, especially in” the Gulf of Mexico, he said, according to a video of the event.

The administration was apprehensive about expanding offshore drilling. But it also hoped to get a legislative package on climate change through Congress. At the center of the bill was a controversial and potentially expensive provision requiring companies to acquire permits to release carbon dioxide.

To navigate Capitol Hill, the administration needed to strike a balance between the “green energy” projects favored by environmentalists and liberals, and the traditional oil and gas projects favored by Republicans, whose support would be crucial in the Senate. Continuing to promote offshore drilling was part of that bargain.

But the federal appeals court decision, which came just days after Mr. Salazar’s tour, threatened to throw a wrench in that process. The case was brought two years earlier by indigenous Alaskans and a coalition of environmental groups. It challenged a Bush-era plan to lease large chunks of offshore Alaska to oil drilling.

The groups argued the strategy didn’t adequately account for the whole range of environmental perils raised by oil drilling on the outer shelf.

The appeals court agreed, ruling that the federal program was based on “irrational” analysis. The government’s own assessment, the court found, weighed only the impact of oil washing up on shorelines. In a foreshadowing of the post-spill debate, the court noted that the analysis didn’t address the impact of a significant spill further out at sea.

At first, Mr. Salazar used the ruling as a way to draw a distinction between his approach and that of the Bush White House. Blasting what he called “the previous administration’s failure to apply the law,” Mr. Salazar said in a statement that he planned to “fix the problems” the court identified. He would do so not by firing managers or shaking up MMS, but by subjecting offshore drilling to heightened scrutiny. Those fixes, he said, would “put oil and gas leasing decisions back on a firm scientific footing.”

Still, the ruling presented an immediate problem. It threw into uncertainty hundreds of millions of dollars in drilling projects already under way in the Gulf—the source of about a third of the country’s domestic oil supply and the lifeblood of the regional economy. In addition, the government had another big lease sale for Gulf offshore acreage coming up in August.

In its response, the government noted that the oil and gas from approved exploration and drilling projects had a combined value of $7.65 billion. Among the existing leases, the petition noted, was the March 2008 Lease Sale #206. That deal included BP’s acquisition, for $34 million, of the acreage encompassing the Macondo well.

Voiding existing leases, the Justice Department argued on behalf of Interior, would cause “severe and unnecessary disruptions” to oil and gas activity in the Gulf of Mexico, and could push companies and drilling rigs toward other nations with less onerous regulations.

A day after the administration’s petition, the industry’s main lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, made its own case echoing the government’s arguments. “The significance of [Gulf of Mexico] activities under the five-year program cannot be overstated,” the API argued.

In late July, the D.C. appeals court responded to the government petition by clarifying its earlier ruling. Only drilling in Alaska, the case’s main focus, would be stopped. Activity in the Gulf of Mexico could continue while the administration carried out a new environmental analysis to address the court’s concerns about deep-water spills.

Mr. Salazar began to express confidence that he had resolved the problems within the Minerals Management Service that had led to poor oversight of offshore drilling. In September, in testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee, he listed the steps he had taken to make sure ethical lapses “don’t occur in the future.”

Still, inside the administration there was debate about the right policy for offshore drilling.

On Sept. 21, Jane Lubchenco, Mr. Obama’s handpicked head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, filed a lengthy comment on the Bush-era drilling plan still under review. She cited several concerns, including the government’s tendency to underestimate the likelihood of oil spills and to downplay their potential environmental impacts. She also noted the government’s penchant for cribbing from older, often outdated, environmental analyses.

She cited a Congressional Research Service study from earlier in the year. “The threat of oil spills raises the question,” the report said, “of whether U.S. officials have the necessary resources at hand to respond to a major spill.”

The administration’s struggle to find middle ground on its offshore policy came to a head in Senate hearings in mid-November, just weeks after a drilling rig off the coast of Australia had suffered a deepwater blowout, creating an oil leak that would go on for months.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) pointed to an enlarged photo of the Australian rig in flames and asked rhetorically whether he was “just being old-fashioned” to worry that a similar blowout could occur in the U.S.

MMS Deputy Director Walter Cruickshank assured the panel that such fears were misplaced. The Australian rig wouldn’t have been licensed to operate in U.S. waters, he said. The U.S., he said, had “what we believe is the most aggressive oil spill contingency planning…in the world.”

On March 31, Mr. Salazar joined President Obama in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to announce their new offshore policy. Standing before an F-18 “Green Hornet” fighter jet designed to run partly on bio-fuel, Mr. Obama told the audience that “we’ll employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration…And we’ll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence.”

The plan was designed in part to allay the federal court’s concerns. To satisfy the court’s demand for better “balance,” it included a broader environmental analysis, examining the impact of spilled oil on marine life and not just on shorelines.

It also ranked prospective drilling areas in terms of their environmental sensitivity. The Central Gulf of Mexico, where BP’s Macondo well was based, topped the “most sensitive” column. It also scrapped a handful of planned lease sales in Alaska.

But the proposal kept much of the Bush plan intact, and even added for the first time new lease sales off the coast of Virginia.

It also relied extensively on environmental impact analyses carried out in April 2007 that the court had found wanting.

The 2007 document said “large oil spills associated with [outer continental shelf] activities are low-probability events.” The “most likely size” of a serious spill, that report concluded, would total 4,600 barrels—a fraction of what the Deepwater Horizon continues to allow into the water every day.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which brought the original lawsuit, said their court victory wound up changing little. “Salazar, and by extension Obama, have pursued the same offshore program as the Bush administration, even while playing a smoke-and-mirrors game,” he said.

Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, President Obama offered a plug for wider offshore exploration. “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” he told a gathering in Charlotte, N.C. “They are technologically very advanced.”

On April 20, with the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, everything changed.

The Macondo spill has forced the administration to take many of the steps it dismissed as draconian last summer in the wake of the appeals court ruling. On May 27, Mr. Salazar canceled a lease sale in the Gulf set for August. He ordered that all lease sales set for 2011 had to face tougher environmental scrutiny.

And he ordered a six-month moratorium on all drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. That moratorium was struck down as arbitrary by a federal judge in New Orleans in June, but Mr. Salazar has fought back, insisting the moratorium remain in place. So far the judge’s ruling stands.

Read the original article on WSJonline

Fri. night news dump: W.H. says 51% of company health plans won’t meet Obamacare guidelines

Mark Hemingway

Andrea Billups: Unpresidential Obama

Perhaps this is the “change” portion of the agenda.

In recent days, President Barack Obama has eclipsed his unflappable campaign image, exposing himself as man with a melting point, a Mr. Once-Cool turned hot. After 18 months, his approval ratings continue to drop as his losses outpace his wins and his rock-star status of 2008 feels more garage-band as the dog days of summer descend on deflated Washington.
 
The media, even those squarely in his corner, are using words like snappish, on the edge, even testy and defensive to describe Mr. Obama’s response to an increasing host of issue woes that have tested his administration’s ability to govern and strained his loping, athletic portrait and sleek “I’ve got this” visage. It appears that as his frustration mounts, confidence even among some Democrats has waned, his considerable influence declining as he stumps for vulnerable congressional candidates with a midterm election looming.
 
“It’s clear the President is finding the job more challenging than he anticipated,” observes GOP strategist Cheri Jacobus of Obama’s public whining. “Governing is not campaigning, and making promises is quite different than keeping them – especially when the details are revealed.”

  “While there is an obvious personality flaw emerging with Obama’s recent snappishness, of considerable concern is that the job of President seems too big and too difficult for him to handle,” adds Miss Jacobus, who serves as president of Capitol Strategies PR.
 
 “His recent claim that this has been the most challenging 18 months or any 18-month period since the 1930’s was very telling – and even more alarming. Especially since he has a Democrat-majority House and Senate,” she said. “It appears he may not be up to the job even in the easiest of circumstances.”
 
The BP oil spill, still churning in the stained Gulf Waters, is fast becoming Mr. Obama’s own Katrina-stye debacle. As oil drifts toward Gulf beaches and wildlife estuaries, it is bound to get worse, even if the leak is somehow plugged. Some television stations are now broadcasting running meters of just how many gooey gallons – 12,000 to 19,000 per day by government estimates — continue to pour into once clear blue waters, the urgency increasing even as President Obama uneasily shifts course on responsibility for the growing disaster. Where is his Brownie to blame? The Minerals and Management Service seems a less juicy substitute for someone hapless to take the fall.
 
First his White House asserted that the global oil giant was in charge of the spill, but then last Wednesday, the President seemed to reverse that tact, “defensively and sometimes testily,” the Associated Press described, asserting that he took full responsibility  “to make sure this thing is shut down.”
 
But his BP disaster talk — “plug the damn hole” – was not the first time his remarks turned blunt. Karl Rove, the White House adviser to former President George W. Bush, described Obama’s incivility on the job as  “sulfuric rhetoric.”
 
“For a man who is enormously self-aware, Mr. Obama could also use a little bit more self-awareness. He should consider how powerful – and inappropriate – a model he sets by his own frequent course and uncivil language.”
 
Just this past week, in a closed meeting with Senate Republicans – the first in a year — the discourse turned rancorous, causing some to dub Mr. Obama “thin-skinned.”
 
“He needs to take a Valium before he comes in and talks to Republicans” said Sen. Pat Roberts, in an account of the meeting reported by the Washington Post.
 
“This is closed press,” Mr. Obama reportedly chided Sen. John Barrasso, suggesting that he was playing to the cameras that were not in the private confab.
 
Not that such a meeting moved his agenda forward. Some senators questioned his motives with larger issues like financial and healthcare reform continuing to divide Congress and voters. They chided the President for his partisanship and his distance from their concerns.
 
““The pattern is they’re pretty good at reaching out when they need you, and when they don’t, they don’t mind running over you,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham last week to Politico.
 
“The distrust level right now is pretty high among our guys — and on both sides,” Mr. Graham said.
 
As the pressure mounts, Mr. Obama must take notice that a majority of Americans say they don’t’ like what they are seeing. And that his message of hope and change has been squandered through a seeming “I know what’s best for you” internalization.
 
Miss Jacobus, in a column she writes for The Hill, described his behavior as “presidential petulance,” calling Mr. Obama “weak but hardly humbled.”  Mr. Obama, she added, “is in dire need of a tutorial on how to win friends and influence people.”

 “Senate Republicans have been smacked over the head with the olive branch too many times, so the dearth of trust should come as no surprise,” she writes. “Obama’s ‘my way or the highway’ approach is truly stinking up the joint.”

Read the original article Human Events

Cap-and-Trade is Back

By Brian Sussman
On Wednesday Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) plan to introduce legislation designed to inflate the cost energy, strain family budgets, and decimate America’s manufacturing sector — all in the name of supposedly saving the climate.

Kerry and Lieberman have been revamping legislation that narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year.  The House bill imposes oppressive limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and establishes a complex cap-and-trade scheme in which the federal government determines how much CO2 a business may omit.  If a business exceeds its allowance, it may purchase additional “carbon credits” from an exchange, where the credits will be traded like a commodity.  Rules for the exchange of carbon credits, including the trading of carbon derivatives, are addressed in the House bill, and my sources tell me the Senate version will include these same stratagems.

In an email sent to the media last week regarding their plans, Kerry and Lieberman said,  “We can no longer wait to solve this problem which threatens our economy, our security and our environment.” My insiders also say the new Kerry-Lieberman proposal will keep the House bill’s goal of attaining a 17 percent reduction of greenhouse gases (below their 2005 level) by 2020. Apparently the Senate bill will allow cap-and-trade to hit power companies first, and then within six years include the manufacturing sector.

The new bill apparently calls for more loan guarantees to build nuclear plants, and grants U.S. coastal states a share of the revenue produced by any expansion of offshore oil and natural-gas drilling.

This is a bill that will cause all of us to suffer great loss.

Presently 40 percent of CO2 emissions in the United States are derived from electricity generation, 35 percent from transportation, and 25 percent from business, industry, and natural gas to heat homes.

So where will the 17% cut come from?  Especially given that (according to U.S. census projections) there will be an additional 30 million people in the United States by 2020.  If the cuts are distributed proportionately the biggest blow will be to electricity production. Since 50 percent of our nation’s electricity is derived from coal, that industry and it’s customers will be hit hardest.  Coal plants are going to have to be shuttered.  And what will replace that energy resource?  Nothing. 

Some might counter saying the House bill touts complex tax credits for wind and solar development.  However when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining those two alternatives don’t provide a watt of energy — they’re simply enhancements, not baseload providers.  Additionally, the Kerry-Lieberman loan giveaway for the construction of nuclear plants — which do not generate carbon emissions — is simply a lure to entice gullible Republicans to bite, because the White House is not a fan of nuclear power.

Recall that during his January State of the Union address, Mr. Obama said that America needs to be “…building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.”

In an apparent move to look good on his promise, two days after the speech, Bloomberg reported: “President Barack Obama, acting on a pledge to support nuclear power, will propose tripling guarantees for new reactors to more than $45 billion …”

However, the proposal was a ruse. Many forget that shortly after taking office Obama’s first budget planned to cutoff money for the Nevada nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain — meaning that the $10 billion in taxpayer dollars spent since 1983 to ready Yucca for storing nuclear waste was a total loss.  Yucca Mountain will officially be zeroed-out in fiscal year 2011.

Meantime, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced the creation of a special panel to find a solution for storing nuclear waste.

Problem is, we already had a solution — Yucca Mountain.

America has no nuclear option. And, as I have written here at American Thinker, the probability of additional drilling for domestic fossil fuels is low as well.

So, where will the carbon cuts come from?  They’ll come from the American people who will be forced to use less energy because of the higher costs imposed by cap-and-trade, and a variety of new energy taxes.

Proving my point, last week members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, took part in the Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference.  One of the better-attended seminars was entitled, “Efficiency and Renewables.” Presenters included Nancy Sutley, White House Council on Environmental Quality. According to the brochure promoting this session, “The cheapest, cleanest, and fastest emission reductions will come from the energy we never have to use at all. Cutting energy use also saves money on homeowners’ electricity bills and reduces costs for business.”
Translation: America does not need a plan for additional power plants to serve a growing population; instead the people must use less power. Coercion through increased pricing will be a key prod in producing the societal behavior modification necessary to accomplish this goal.By the way, Nancy Sutley is also the woman who announced the hiring of the radical Van Jones in March 2009, declaring: “Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs, and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies to advance the President’s agenda of creating 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources. Jones will also help to shape and advance the administration’s energy and climate initiatives with a specific interest in improvements and opportunities for vulnerable communities.”

Further straining the family budget, a new set of fees and taxes will be imposed on all sectors of the economy that produce greenhouse gases. This will include transportation, farming, livestock production-even restaurants that cook barbequed chicken and ribs over an open flame, and bottling companies that sell fizzy drinks. To absorb the increased cost of doing business, companies large and small will be forced to raise their prices. Already pinched personal bank accounts will be further hammered as virtually everything is going to cost more.

The Kerry-Lieberman bill is also a job killer. To meet the demands of the new emissions limits, the few manufacturing businesses that remain in the United States will be further shipped overseas. This is a part of an elitist plan to redistribute America’s wealth abroad. In other words, this legislation will purposefully execute the loss of well-paying domestic jobs, so that those in Third World and underdeveloped nations have a chance to improve their standard of living — at our expense. 

Proving my point is the House version of this bill. If your manufacturing job is shipped overseas, you are eligible for three years of unemployment compensation, at 70% of one’s pay, plus retraining and relocation expenses.  The intent is to pacify your anger with a three-year paid vacation.

And another dirty little secret about the Democrats’ need to pass cap-and-trade: it’s a revenue builder.  According the Wall Street Journal, the cap and trade system could actually generate between roughly $1.3 trillion and $1.9 trillion between fiscal years 2012 and 2019.

This so-called energy bill is a punch to the gut that American does not need.  And keep in mind, as I have conclusively proven through past missives at American Thinker, as well as in my book Climategate, the temperature of the earth is not warming, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and without the greenhouse effect planet Earth would be a big ball of ice.

To pass, cap-and-trade will need bipartisan support. Thus far only Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have spoken out in favor of supporting a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases.

However, other Senate Republicans who could cross over and support this bill are Olympia Snowe of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, George LeMieux of Florida, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, and the retiring George Voinovich of Ohio.

Read the original article American Thinker

Limbaugh:Strikingly Unpresidential

David Limbaugh

President Barack Obama doesn’t deserve the reputation he’s had for his style and temperament and for being gracious, civil, bipartisan and post-racial. He is often ungracious, uncivil, hyper-partisan, race-oriented and vindictive. He mocks and ridicules almost for sport. More than any president in my memory, he often does not comport himself presidentially.

Why does this matter? Well — if I even have to answer that — he is the face of America. The left constantly talked about George W. Bush’s swagger and his cowboy diplomacy and how that damaged our “image” in the world and our relations with other nations.

But George W. Bush was nothing if not circumspect, discreet and respectful in his dealings with foreign leaders and his dealings with his political opponents. He was exceedingly presidential, demonstrating an extremely high respect for the office he held and what it represented.

How the president presents himself does matter for all the obvious reasons, but I believe Obama’s behavior and the public’s perception of it are relevant for other equally important reasons. He came into office with a reputation for being sophisticated, gentlemanly, above the political fray and open-minded. But it was a facade, facilitated by good looks, a seemingly pleasant demeanor and an extraordinarily fawning — and forgiving — media. He has been getting a pass on his unseemly conduct for way too long, which partially explains the disconnect between his personal likability and the unpopularity of his socialist agenda.

I believe that if the public were fully attuned to how unpresidentially he has consistently behaved, it wouldn’t be as approving of him personally, and in turn, politicians wouldn’t be so afraid to call him out on his Machiavellian and brutish behavior, the exposure of which would have an electoral impact. If more people understood what I believe to be this man’s actual character, they wouldn’t — in the face of his consistently highhanded tactics in pushing each and every one of his destructive agenda items — reflexively assume he’s such a nice guy who means well. Then, they might be more vigilant, and heaven knows we need megadoses of vigilance these days.

I have theories about why Obama is consistently getting a pass, beyond the media’s corrupt liberalism and the allies he’s created through his racial and class warfare, but that’s another column. The point for now is that he is getting a pass, and his behavior is increasingly indefensible.

We talk about Obama as a graduate of Saul Alinsky’s school of thuggish street agitation, but it is more than just a casual charge. He is Alinsky personified with a disarming smile. It’s not just a matter of his having embraced a political strategy that involves hitting below the belt and abusing power to help his friends and hurt his enemies. His behavior is not just a tactic; it’s part of who he is. It is apparent that he has been coddled so long that he simply has zero tolerance for any opposition.

Indeed, he is exactly the opposite of who he billed himself to be: “I will bring a new type of politics to Washington.” As a committed liberal ideologue, he is neither a uniter nor one willing to consider both sides of an issue. But it’s not just his extremist views that are divisive. He is also often personally divisive, petty and mean-spirited.

From the time he cavalierly dismissed Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate with “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” I knew some cold blood ran through his veins. As president, he has been gratuitously nasty with people who have dared oppose him, and he has affirmatively targeted and demonized entire industries to advance his agenda.

Consider: his command that “the folks who created the mess” not “do a lot of talking”; his endless scapegoating of George Bush; his rude treatment of foreign leaders, from Britain’s Gordon Brown to France’s Nicolas Sarkozy; his abominable treatment of Israel and its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; his character assassination of inspector general Gerald Walpin for blowing the whistle on his friends; his demonization of surgeons and primary care physicians as dishonest mercenaries, Republicans as “liars,” secured creditors as “speculators,” tea partiers as “domestic terrorists,” Arizonans as “irresponsible,” rural Americans as bitter clingers and America itself as being “dismissive,” “arrogant” and “derisive” and as having “a responsibility to act” because it is the only nation to have ever “used a nuclear weapon”; his vilification of Wall Street “fat cat” bankers, big pharma, big oil, insurance companies, big corporations, corporate executives, Cambridge policemen, conservative talk show hosts and Fox News; his snubbing even of the liberal press pool; his egomaniacal behavior at the health care summit; and his administration’s flirtation with criminalizing Bush-era officials for their legal opinions.

Read the original article Human Events

Republicans dig in against Obama on finance reform

Top Republican Mitch McConnell said Sunday he would still oppose Democratic plans to reform regulation of the US financial sector even if an alleged “bail-out” fund is stripped from the bill.

President Barack Obama has vowed to crack down on Wall Street to prevent a repeat of the global economic meltdown by creating a financial protection agency and reining in executive bonuses and risky investments.

McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, has led opposition to the reforms on the basis of inaccurate charges that they would encourage future bailouts of banks deemed too big to fail.

In a bid to bring Republicans to sign on to the most sweeping overhaul of the finance industry since the 1930s, the Obama administration has offered to jettison the idea of the 50 billion dollar liquidation fund, which would in fact be paid for by the banks themselves and not taxpayers.

Despite an unusually direct attack from Obama in the president’s weekly radio address basically accusing him of lying by saying that the reforms would support and enable further bailouts, McConnell refused to back down.

Sticking to his guns about the “bail-out” fund, the Senate Minority Leader went even further, and in language reminiscent of recent partisan clashes over health care reform suggested the Democrats go back to the drawing-board.

“There are other problems with the bill,” McConnell told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

“We need to get back to the table and get it fixed. I don’t know anybody in the Senate who thinks we ought not to pass a bill. The question is, what’s it going to look like?”

Republicans face the tricky task of trying to oppose the next chunk of Obama’s reform drive while avoiding being portrayed by Democrats as in the pocket of unpopular Wall Street finance barons blamed for sparking the crisis.

Democrats, who have already passed regulatory legislation through the House of Representatives, need to peel away at least one Republican vote to pass a bill in the Senate.

A Democratic financial regulatory reform bill has already passed out of the Senate Banking Committee by Democrats without Republican support in a 13 to 10 vote, paving the way for a full Senate debate, expected as early as this week.

All 41 Senate Republicans have signed their names to a letter to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying they opposed the current legislation, which was drafted after months of bipartisan talks.

“We are united in our opposition to the partisan legislation reported by the Senate Banking Committee,” they said in the letter Friday, which was made public by McConnell’s office.

The letter stopped short of committing the signers to support a parliamentary delaying tactic called a filibuster to kill the bill, Obama’s top domestic priority now that his historic health care overhaul is law.

Despite continued, blanket Republican resistance to the Obama agenda, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told NBC’s “Meet The Press” program he believed tough legislation would pass.

“I am very confident that we’re going to have the votes for a strong package of financial reforms that’ll bring derivative markets out of the dark (and) help protect the taxpayers from having to fund future bailouts.”

Obama pledged Friday to veto any Wall Street reform bill that lacks tough new rules to regulate the trade of derivatives, a class of asset implicated in sparking the financial crisis.

His comments came on a day when his cause received a significant boost from news that leading Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs was charged with fraud in the sale of subprime mortgage-based derivatives.

Republicans have warned that if the US government imposes tough new regulations on derivatives, firms that want to trade in the instruments will simply look elsewhere than the United States.

Derivatives trading came under the spotlight early in the economic crisis, when it emerged that bundled-together mortgage products had a paper value that bore no resemblance to their true value.

The resulting losses blew a hole in the finances of banks like Lehman Brothers, forcing them into bankruptcy and pushing others close to collapse.

Critics say the opaque trade in derivatives must now take place on open exchanges, where they can be more heavily regulated and scrutinized by investors.

Read the original article Breitbart

Religious terms being removed from security document

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Officials say President Barack Obama’s advisers will remove religious terms such as “Islamic extremism” from the central document outlining the U.S. national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror.

 The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”

The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document still is being written, and the White House would not discuss it.

A plane went down in Russia today, but Poland is forever.

By Judi McLeod 

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to ponder the timing of the crash of the Tupolev Tu-154 in Smolensk, Russia one day after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US President Barack Obama signed off on their respective nuclear weapons.

Sad to remember today that the last time Poland was in the news was on Sept. 17, 2009—the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland when Obama abandoned Poland’s missile defence system in Europe.

As a nation, Poland holds the enviable status as a worldwide icon in the fight against Communism.  It was Polish son Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II who stood courageously against the regime and was a leading figure in its ultimate collapse.

Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski was leading a delegation of top Polish officials, including Gen. Franciszek Gagor, head of the army and chief of staff, to memorial ceremonies at Katyn, the site of a massacre of 22,000 Poles by Soviet agents 70 years ago.  “The soul trembles to think that Katyn has taken new victims,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the International Affairs Committee in Russia’s parliament.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was the catalyst behind the broadcast of the Polish movie Katyn on Russian state television last Friday and who on Tuesday will attend the 70th anniversary commemoration ceremony in Katyn Forest without his Polish counterpart, has been tapped to head the commission to investigate the crash.

Canada Free Press (CFP) longtime Warsaw-based columnist David Dastych wrote CFP that “Poland suffered a great tragedy this morning.”

“More than 90 souls, including many high officials of the Polish state” President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, MPs, the highest military, banking officers and many other people.”

“A heroine of SOLIDARITY, Mrs. Anna Walentynowicz, who was also on the plane, died.

“Poland is in deep mourning, which will last one week.  The Presidential powers were assumed, according to the Constitution, by the Speaker of the Polish Parliament (The Sejm), Mr. Bronislaw Komorowski.

“Presidential elections, slated for October 2010, will probably be held in June, 2010.

“I knew several persons, who died in the crash today.  Some of them were my friends,” said Dastych who must return to a hospital next week for further cancer tests on his lungs.

Heroism in Poland is, and has always been, epic.

Dastych, himself an active warrior against communism, was imprisoned by the Polish KGB in the early 1980s.  Sentenced to eight years, he served three, finding release when Communism collapsed.

Young people of today should remember forever Poland’s courageous role in the history of Europe.  The fate of all Europe was decided In the Polish-Russian War of 1918-1921 during the fight for Polish independence.  It was Poland’s victory in the Battle of Warsaw over Communist Russia, led by Gen. Jozef Pilsudski that changed the world.

A plane went down in Smolensk, Russia today, but Poland is forever.

Read the original article Canadian Free Press

Pence calls president’s drilling announcement a ‘smokescreen’

Kerry Picket

President Barack Obama announced today his administration would pursue to expand offshore drilling (Reuters):

President Barack Obama will announce on Wednesday he will stick with a Bush-era plan to drill oil and natural gas off the coast of Virginia but will not pursue energy development in waters off the U.S. Northeast and the West Coast that were recently opened to drilling. 

Obama, who wants Congress to move a stalled climate change bill, has sought to reach out to Republicans by signaling he is open to allowing offshore drilling, providing coastlines are protected. Allowing offshore drilling also would create jobs and reduce U.S. long-term dependence on foreign oil.

GOP leadership is not buying the president’s plan, though. Congressman Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican, said in a statement today:

“This Administration’s energy plan is simple: increase the cost of energy on every family in America and trade American jobs overseas at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.”

“As usual the devil is in the details.  Only in Washington, D.C., can you ban more areas to oil and gas exploration than you open up, delay the date of your new leases and claim you’re going to increase production.”

“The President’s announcement today is a smokescreen.  It will almost certainly delay any new offshore exploration until at least 2012 and include only a fraction of the offshore resources that the previous Administration included in its plan. 

“Unfortunately, this is yet another feeble attempt to gain votes for the President’s national energy tax bill that is languishing in the Senate.  At the end of the day this Administration’s energy plan is simple: increase the cost of energy on every family in America and trade American jobs oversees at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.”