More on Obama's Healthcare "Army"

"Page 496, section 5210 (Healthcare Act) calls for the establishment of a "Ready Reserve Corps", Commissioned officers to be appointed by the President, and this army can be called out by the Surgeon General. Does Congress not understand that the Surgeon General is not a real general, and should not be commanding an army?"

-- Sean Linnane, Stormbringer

Writing under a nom-de-guerre, Sean provides some very interesting information and opinions on military matters on his blog. You can link to it from this one.

The obvious queston is why does the president, the Commander in Chief, need a separate "army" linked to healthcare, crisis events, et cetera? The answer is, he doesn't!

Obama's Math Skills

"I know that Obama doesn’t want us to see his birth certificate, his college application or his medical records, but could we at least be granted a peek at his math scores? I mean, I was willing to give him a pass when, during the campaign, he referred to America’s 57 states. In the heat of battle, anyone might confuse the number of states in the Union with the number of varieties the Heinz Company used to promote. But when he announced that with ObamaCare, employers would be able to lower their health insurance costs by 3,000%, I began to have serious concerns. What if he was simply one of those people who couldn’t keep millions, billions and trillions, straight? Might that not help to explain most, if not all, of his economic policies?

Even a school child, even a public school child, should know that you can increase a sum by 3,000% or 300,000%, for that matter, but you can only decrease an amount by 100%."

Excerpt from the latest post at http://burtprelutsky.com/

Nobody's Listening

By Alan Caruba

"'There is an overall sense of frustration that no one is listening,'" pollster Scott Rasmussen said about a problem that has plagued the political party in power for decades." – Washington Times, April 2, 2010, "Independent voters turn from hopeful to angry."

The article examines the way Obama has lost the support of the great body of “independents”, people who do not identify themselves as either Democrat or Republican.

The polls, of course, all reflect the president’s falling approval rating, but the problem now for Americans is that it is clear the White House and a compliant Congress are not listening. Obama disparaged polls recently. He is not influenced by them. To put it another way, the public be damned.

Despite months of public protests of the healthcare bill and only because of a straight party-line vote (no Republican voted for it) the bill was passed and signed into law. The avalanche of lies told before and since about Obamacare has resulted in a law that only Obama’s core of supporters—Ronald Reagan used to call them Welfare Queens—still believe will benefit the nation.

Within days, Obama’s EPA director announced new regulations regarding auto mileage and the agency’s intent to regulate carbon dioxide, a natural gas essential to all life on Earth. There is now the likelihood that Congress will ram through the disastorous Cap-and-Trade Act, a tax on all energy use.

Despite the exposure of the biggest fraud of the modern era, "global warming", the Obama administration is pressing ahead with legislation based on it!

A general amnesty is likely, too, as Mexicans begin to stream across the border, fleeing the drug wars in that nation, and seeking asylum.

Dick Morris, the political commentator, notes correctly that a Republican controlled Congress can nullify Obamacare by refusing to fund it, but November looks further and further away at this point.

The other element at work is the way the bulk of the nation’s news media have utterly abandoned its most essential function; keeping an eye on government and revealing the truth about elected officials and dubious legislative proposals.

We have arrived at a point in this nation where the only reliable news to be found in the daily newspaper is in the sports section. At least the scores are accurate.

Meanwhile, the headlines everywhere today speak of new jobs added while also noting a stubborn 9.7 rate of unemployment and that is not likely to diminish any time soon. The only bright spot is that Obama can no longer blame this on the Bush administration.

When a nation’s press betrays it, the only remaining hope for any truth is to be found in the many news/opinion Internet sites and yet I am plagued by the same feeling expressed in Rasmussen’s comment that those in power are not listening and that the only option that remains to save the nation from them are the midterm elections.

In the interim, economic stagnation will be the rule.

Not everyone reads the conservative comment on the Internet and liberal websites like the Huffington Post are thriving. While the network news shows continue to lose viewers and Fox News continues to grow, the deliberate destruction of the nation’s economy continues.

One is forced to ask, does it matter when the entire governmental structure of the nation is now controlled by the machine politics of Chicago? By the lies about global warming? By more and more restrictions on real access to the nation’s natural resources?

There is, finally, the harm that results from the combination of a limited general knowledge of American and world history and an attention span that grows shorter week by week.

We are reaching the apogee of a lot of very bad decisions and failed government programs that suggest the worst is yet to come.

Everybody knows this, but what does that avail Americans when neither protests, nor recent elections of Republican governors and a new Republican Senator from Massachusetts leave us vulnerable to the increasingly rapid predation of Marxists?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Difference Between Wearing the Jacket and Flying the Jet

The Easter Bunny and the Redistribution of Wealth

I always marvel at the way political cartoonists are able to express themselves so succinctly.

Destroying America with the EPA's Carbon Lies

By Alan Caruba

Lisa Jackson, Obama’s EPA director, has just announced the agency’s new auto regulations of gas mileage based on global warming. In addition, the agency asserts the right to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions under the Clean Air Act.

There is absolutely no scientific justification for this and, indeed, many observers believe the EPA lacks the legal authority regarding its stance on CO2.

There is NO need to limit greenhouse gas emissions because there is NO “global warming.”

Greenhouse gases are purported to be the primary cause of this fraud. The EPA, like a dozen other U.S. agencies, has been pushing the global warming fraud for decades. One more lie, even a whopper about CO2, is of little concern to the EPA at this point.

Beyond the issue of scientific fraud, there are the scientific facts that demonstrate that CO2 plays a miniscule role, if any, as regards the Earth’s climate. Carbon dioxide is less than one percent of the Earth’s atmosphere (386 parts per million).

There is, in fact, no greenhouse effect. The most active element of the atmosphere is the 95% of water vapor that forms a protective layer around the Earth.

The science involved is fairly simple. Clouds have a warming effect because, in order for water vapor to condense back into water droplets, the water molecules must first re-emit the energy they absorbed to become vapor. That latent heat causes the local environment to feel warmer. It is this constant interchange that determines whether wherever you’re at right now is warmer or cooler.

The public is rarely, if ever, told that meteorologists have NO idea why clouds act as they do. All they can do is track cloud activity via satellite images, but they can only accurately predict the weather at best for three to four days ahead. This is why, when you watch a televised weather forecast, they mostly just point to cloud systems.

The Earth’s oceans contain fifty times the CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Earth’s biomass, oceans, near-surface rocks and soils contain 100,000 times the carbon in the atmosphere.

To declare CO2 toxic, the EPA is saying that all that natural CO2, plus the six pounds of carbon dioxide that every human exhale every day is a “pollutant.”

How can carbon dioxide be a pollutant when all life on Earth is dependent upon it?

CO2 is to vegetation what oxygen is to human and other animal life. Without CO2, all vegetation dies and then all animal life dies for lack of the nutrients provided by food crops.

The EPA will blame the generation of CO2 on energy use, but 97% of the Earth’s CO2 is produced by Nature!

Only about 3% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere is produced by humans via industrial and transport activity. This estimate, in fact, comes from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change! The IPCC’s other alleged climate data is subject to serious challenge, but this is not. It falls into the category of common knowledge among climate scientists.

Environmentalists are insanely opposed to all energy use with the exception of bicycles, canoes, and walking. They particularly hate automobiles, but these are the same people, along with the EPA, that have insisted on the inclusion of ethanol, otherwise known as moonshine, in every gallon of gasoline. The immediate result is less mileage per gallon and the production of more CO2!

None of these facts is a secret yet, since 1989, the U.S. government has spent $79 billion in taxpayer’s money on “climate change” research. To suggest that the government, using the data generated, has any “control” over the climate is absurd.

The result of all that government funded research has been a public that has been subjected to the massive fraud called global warming. Weather data provided by NASA and NOAA, for example, has had to have been withdrawn due to errors.

Not only has the scientific community learned that the IPCC data was manipulated and that efforts were made to suppress data refuting global warming, but the Earth has irrefutably been in a cooling cycle for over a decade at this point.

The EPA regulatory control of auto mileage and CO2 emissions is a complete fraud and a contemptible lie. In doing so it has become a gangster agency that has abandoned any credibility.

Finally, the Cap-and-Trade Act awaiting a vote in the Senate is based on the global warming fraud and, if enacted, would impose massive taxation on all energy use. It must be stopped.

The EPA's latest move must be stopped.

The fate of the nation’s economy literally depends on this.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Drill Here, Drill Now, Despite Obama's Lies

By Alan Caruba

The Obama administration announcement that it intends to lift the ban on offshore exploration and drilling came as a big surprise, albeit a welcome one.

In an early March editorial The Washington Times noted that, “Within a month of taking office in 2009, Mr. Salazar (Secretary of the Interior) froze drilling leases already approved by the outgoing George W. Bush administration. Then he imposed a six-month public comment period to precede his decision on whether to allow new drilling. When the comment period ended in September, Interior suppressed the results.”

“The comments, totaling 530,000, favored drilling by a margin of 2 to 1. Even now,” said the editorial, “six months after the public comment period, Interior—apparently displeased with the results—still has not published the public reaction.”

And, of course, Obama campaigned on restricting access to our own oil. Why don’t we find it unusual any more than absolutely nothing the man ever said in the past is not subject to revision and, therefore, untrustworthy?

For an administration that is often disdainful of public opinion, this reversal on offshore drilling is quite stunning and, of course, raises the question why. I do not even pretend to know. One can speculate that the huge new reserves of oil being found around the world makes it difficult to explain a refusal to drill for any of our own oil.

Others explain it as a political decision designed to encourage those members of Congress who do not want to vote for the Cap-and-Trade Act that is festering in some dark corner of the Senate. It is suggested that either the act gets passed before the November midterm elections or it will never be enacted. There are also fears being expressed that the Environmental Protection Agency will assert regulatory powers to limit carbon dioxide emissions without waiting for Congress to act.

Suffice it to say that Cap-and-Trade would be one more nail in the nation’s fiscal coffin. It is so awful an entire commentary will be needed to reveal its hideous details.

Since the days of Jimmy Carter, successive administrations have failed to address the vital necessity of opening our own vast reserves of oil despite the nation’s increasing dependence on imports. Bush did not act until the very end of his second term.

The current administration is lying, as usual, about the estimated amount of oil domestically and offshore. However, a U.S. Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service set the figure to be 167 billion barrels of oil, not the 21 billion currently being cited. The estimated amount is the equivalent of replacing America’s current imports from OPEC countries for more than 75 years!

In December of 2009, Rasmussen Reports released a poll that found that nearly seventy percent of Americans supported responsible offshore energy exploration and production. That’s the kind of majority that is hard to ignore.

In September 2009, President Obama went on record in a speech at the United Nations saying, “I will work with my colleagues at the G20 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies so we can better address our climate challenge.”

That “climate challenge” disappeared in November 2009 when a leak of emails between scientists for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed they had been cooking the data on “global warming” for years, deliberately misleading the public and fellow scientists. They also worked to suppress the publication in science journals of any research that threatened their scam.

So, maybe, as the nation hurtles like an asteroid toward higher unemployment, insolvency and default, somebody in the White House noticed that America’s oil and gas industry represents nearly seven percent of the U.S. economy and accounts for more than nine million permanent, good-paying jobs.

While we’re discussing the subject, it’s long past time to stop calling oil and natural gas “fossil fuels” as if they are the result of dead dinosaurs. Geologists are increasingly of the opinion that the Earth naturally and continually creates oil and gas.

The author, Dr. Jerome Corsi, has written that “Abiotic oil theory postulates that oil is formed on a constant basis deep within the mantle of the Earth, requiring no deterioration of biological materials to produce oil.”

In short, there is no such thing as “peak oil”, yet another Green lie intended to make people think we are running out of the stuff, Dr. Corsi points out that in 2008 The Wall Street Journal reported “sixteen discoveries of large oil reserves were found in the Gulf of Mexico, largely due to advances in deep-water drilling technology.”

These days reports of such discoveries around the world are routine. In 2007 Brazil announced one such offshore oil field estimated to contain eight billion barrels of oil, enough to expand its 14.4 billion barrels by nearly half.

Meanwhile, the United States has been doing little to tap its own. The number of rigs actively exploring for oil and gas in the U.S. rose by 34 to 1,282 in January 2010. Good news, but the rig count had peaked in 1981 when it was an impressive 4,530. By 1999, the industry posted a record low of 488!

It will be years before any of the newly permitted exploration and production in East and West Coast areas translates into gas in your auto, as heating oil, or any of the countless other uses of oil. But it’s a start.

© Alan Caruba, 2010