Not long ago President Obama lit what Mark Steyn could have referred to as his latest exploding cigar. By now, you’re probably familiar with "Julia", the composite woman (not to be confused with the president’s composite girlfriends) who we learn lives a wonderful life with the comfort of cradle to grave assistance from the government, and how terrible her life would be as a result of a Romney presidency. Like manna from Heaven the conservatives had a field day with this one. The Romney campaign immediately fired off some tweets in response, we saw the Twittersphere light up with "#Im Not Julia" themed tweets, and of course, we saw a fair amount of ridicule in conservative publications and blogs.

We saw too may timeline parodies to list – PJ Media did a good job with their take. National Review’s Rich Lowry pointed out how condescending and insulting toward women the campaign is. Over at Flopping Aces Warren Beatty (the blogger, not the actor) submitted a guest post pointing out the dangers of becoming a society of Julias, which included a great comment below this story from FA contributor Skookum, who made an observation about the name choice that got a chuckle from every George Orwell fan who scrolled down to the comments.

When the Julia story broke I was ready to throw in my two cents, but as my faithful readers know I don’t write on a topic that someone who’s a better writer than me has already written. I was thinking of putting together another parody timeline that was completely empty showing how Julia’s life would have been had her mother chosen to terminate her with a government funded abortion, but too many other timeline mockups are already out there.

The above mentioned Warren Beatty stole a lot of my thunder, but thankfully for me he stopped short of a very disturbing conclusion in the motivation behind this ad campaign. First, I have two sidebars to help illustrate my point.

In a recent episode of Castle, Nathan Fillion’s character (Yes, THAT Nathan Fillion for all of the Firefly geeks out there) has a pretty close relationship with his soon to be college aged student daughter. One of their bonding activities is chasing each other around their home playing laser tag. In this episode the daughter didn’t want to play, saying ""I think it’s time to holster the laser guns and be adults". This gave her middle aged father a moment of painful introspection after getting a lesson on maturity from his teenaged daughter.

Another example goes back to an ad campaign for men’s underwear from the early 90′s. In my weekly subscription to Sports Illustrated one of these ads would appear just below the reader letters and showed men doing some low-key activities while wearing the company’s underwear. One that stuck with me was one that featured a 20-something looking guy in his briefs and undershirt looking very happy while carrying a little boy up on his shoulders with the boy holding a toy airplane over his head. The main ad text read something like, "Remember when you were young and couldn’t wait to grow up and be a man? How’s it going?" That ad really made me take a hard look at myself and my 20-something "Straight laced workaholic in a low paying job by day, bar hopping idiot by night" life style. I guess that the ad didn’t impact me too much, as it would take me almost another 20 years to get my act together enough to get married to a woman like Sister Babe.

So what is the conclusion that I’m trying to make? Team Obama put in time and effort to put together the entire Julia campaign. Whenever anyone is advertising or selling any point, there is one key factor that goes into the process before the first word is typed or pen meets paper.

"Will this appeal to my target audience?" The message of Julia is that one should expect to spend one’s entire life dependent on others to some degree at every stage of life.

At no point does she become that adult and take full responsibility for Julia. And if someone else is paying your bills, that gives them control over your life, in Julia’s case at every step. Personally, I’ve never met any kids who talked about how much they love having their parents and teachers tell them what to do, any elderly men or women eagerly awaiting the day they go into a nursing home or any former inmates reminiscing about the simplicity of prison life.

The most disturbing element of Julia is who the president thinks we are. Apparently the administration thinks that we have lost our sense of individuality, of ambition, and yes, responsibility. At every stage of our lives we shouldn’t just hope for a helping hand, we should expect and are entitled to that helping hand. It can be paid for by one of the various bogeymen that leftists love to cite in big businesses or the wealthy. Unfortunately when you sit down and do the math, neither one can ever produce enough to pay for a nation of Julias. At some point someone has to be the individual or group of individuals who produce more than they take. Thomas Sowell recently wrote a great article how politicians can can legislate dependency to keep their hold on their jobs even if they are ultimately killing their constituency.

Do we want to go down the path of Greece or France? How about the model that Detroit set for riches to rags, or California’s inevitable day of reckoning? As my previous post on paying off our national debt shows, we have some serious problems that won’t start getting better until we start taking them seriously. We don’t have to watch our country drive off a cliff. But for that to happen we have to choose, both as a nation and as individuals to not let that happen. But if we truly have become the nation of Julias that President Obama thinks we are then we will not survive as a society. As much as it pains me to say this, if he is right I’m not sure that we deserve to.

Cross Posted at Brother Bob’s Blog

Dragline excavator in the Baltic Oil Shale Basin - Narva

While our MSM continues to wag their tongues all over Obama’s gayness they somehow, someway, missed the news that an auditor from the GAO testified in Congress and said:

“The Green River Formation–an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming–contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,”Anu K. Mittal, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment said in written testimony submitted to the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.

“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.

“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

And this may shock you….but Obama issued new regulations on fracking a few days ago. I know…a Democrat wants more regulations? Who woulda thunk it.

So just in time to hear the great news that the world’s largest oil reserves is on this continent…not Saudi Arabia, not Iran, not Kuwait. But here in the United States we get Obama to eff it all up.

Shocking.

Even more shocking is the lack of media coverage:

Searches on “Government Accountability Office” (not in quotes), “shale,” and “mittal” at the Associated Press’s national site return nothing relevant to the energy-related story which will follow. A Google News search on “Anu Mittal,” the person from the GAO who on Thursday testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology`s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, appears to return seven relevant items, but it’s really five. The first is a press release from the Luddite (aka Democratic) members of the committee pooh-poohing the importance of Ms. Mittal’s assertions. The other four are from non-major and/or non-establishment press sources: Newser, American Thinker, Daily Markets, and the Inquisitr (yes, spelled correctly). Only one other news outlet I’m aware of, Media Research Center’s CNS News, has also noted Ms. Mittal’s testimony.

…Of the outlets which did cover it, two of them gratuitously brought the Iraq War into the discussion. Newser’s Neal Colgrass wrote: “Maybe President Bush should have invaded the Midwest instead of Iraq.” Residents of Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming will be amused to learn that Colgrass believe that their states are in the Midwest. They’re not. Similarly, the unbylined Inquisitr report snarked that “While the United States has invaded much of the Middle East in search of lower gas prices, perhaps President Bush should have been focusing his efforts on the Midwest region of the United States during the first Iraq war.” Media bias clearly runs very deep — miles deep, if you will.

First Lady Obama presumes that her husband’s Supreme Court Nominees will protect political rights not enumerated in the Constitution. She made this remarkable claim at Democrat fundraisers by stressing that Sotomayo and Kagan are indeed political appointees and can be counted on to protect the right to “Love whomever we choose” and “the right privacy”. This mysterious “Privacy” right is presumably a reference to Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but these nebulous terms are often invoked to mean anything Democrat strategists want them to mean at a later date.

In a typical Michelle Obama statement, her bathos logic maintained its chaotic and barely decipherable cross word puzzle style:

“Let’s not forget what it meant when my husband appointed those two brilliant Supreme Court justices, and for the first time in history our daughters and our sons watched three women take their seat on our nation’s highest court.

But more importantly, let us never forget the impact their decisions will have on our lives for decades to come–on our privacy and our security, on whether we can speak freely, worship openly, and, yes, love whomever we choose. That is what’s at stake here.”

Of course, the appointment of the ACLU lawyer, Ruth Bader Ginzberg was a Clinton appointment and she has since claimed the Constitution to be a flawed document and that we need to look at other countries for laws to guide our judicial process.

Now with the latest political appointments being bragged about as stooges for the Obama regime and the refusal of Kagan to recuse herself from the hearing of the Individual Mandate Clause of Obama Care, the seriousness of the appointments of Sotomayor and Kagan are being viewed with skepticism by people wanting to preserve the integrity of the Constitution.

Ms Obama’s speech was not a collection of off the cuff and extemporaneous remarks, she gave the same speech again at another fundraiser in Detroit. She obviously has sound reasons to believe her decidedly un-American speech claims.

We are now left wondering what these Progressive “Plants” are programed to achieve with their “Love who you choose” clause and what other Progressive objectives they are programmed to pursue or do they await directions from the White House. Does this include children, animals, and multiple partners or can we expect an element of reasonable restraint from political operatives within the Supreme Court.
Michelle seems confident that these justices are in her husband’s pocket.

Michelle has reassured us that her husband’s political operatives believe we should be able to speak freely and worship openly, but then again, maybe political stooges may see that only certain speech and worship are considered to be within the proscribed politically correct boundaries and everything else should be considered offensive. Since the question is bound to arise, how ideologically programmed are these Progressive Stooges in the Supreme Court.

Should women from the Left take pride in the fact that they have a victory with mandated condoms and birth control for college students; therefore, they can play humpy rumpy with even less responsible men and forget that their sisters in many parts of the world are still struggling against mutilation, slavery, forced marriage, childhood marriage, state condoned sexual abuse, and religious sponsored murder. Perhaps these issues are a little too close to a real struggle as well as incongruent and counter productive to the president’s true ideological beliefs, since most of those crimes against routinely happen in the Muslim World and are much more difficult to deal with than the concept of free condoms for college women with healthy libidos.

We should also remember that Ginzberg told the Egyptians trying to write a new Constitution for their new country to forget using the US Constitution as a template; consequently, they are now debating how many hours after a wife dies is a man allowed to have sex with the corpse of his deceased wife. Yes, the Feminist movement should be proud of its progress and its stooges.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“”If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from….You make a big election about small things,” ” – Barack Obama 08/28/08

Obama uttered these words just a few short years ago. It was supposedly a charge against politics as usual.

Now, he is following the politics as usual playbook to a tee.

And as he continues on his “anything but my record” tour he had the gall to say Ronald Reagan would be FOR the Buffet Rule:

President Obama continued his push Wednesday to build support for the Buffett rule by suggesting that Ronald Reagan would’ve backed the plan to set a minimum 30 percent income tax for the wealthiest Americans.

“If it will help convince folks in Congress to make the right choice, we could call it the Reagan rule instead of the Buffett rule,” Obama said in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

“I’m not the first president to call for this idea that everyone has to do their fair share,” he said, quoting one speech in which Reagan said it was “crazy” for the rich to be able to use loopholes to get out of paying taxes. “He thought that in America the wealthiest should pay their fair share and he said so.”

This new talking point was spearheaded by ThinkProgress which put up a video of a speech Reagan gave in 1985 in which he remarked about an executive paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Yet Reagan told the story as part of a larger pitch for tax reform. Unlike Obama, Reagan was interested in targeting loopholes so that he could lower rates, to allow people to keep more of their own money.

“Lower, flatter tax rates will give Americans more confidence in the future,” Reagan said in the speech referenced by Obama. “It’ll mean if you work overtime or get a raise or a promotion or if you have a small business and are able to turn a profit, more of that extra income will end up where it belongs — in your wallets, not in Uncle Sam’s pockets.”

And Obama isn’t trying to close any of those loopholes. Whether the rich get richer or the poor get poorer is not the point. It’s getting re-elected, that’s the point. We spend 1,500 billion a year and he’s making speech after speech about a rule that would net 4-5 extra billion a year. What’s the point?

To get re-elected. To get his Socialist vision of our country more widely accepted. And when he is re-elected (and he will be, Romney has no chance) he can then begin pushing for the expiration of ALL the Bush tax cuts, including those on the middle class. That is the only way they can pay for the entitlement state envisioned by Obama and pals. Hell, even that won’t pay for it.

Sneaky Obama:

The Buffett rule is really nothing more than a sneaky way for Mr. Obama to justify doubling the capital gains and dividend tax rate to 30% from 15% today. That’s the real spread-the-wealth target. The problem is that this is a tax on capital that is needed for firms to grow and hire more workers. Mr. Obama says he wants an investment-led recovery, not one led by consumption, but how will investment be spurred by doubling the tax on it?

The only investment and hiring the Buffett rule is likely to spur will be outside the United States—in China, Germany, India, and other competitors with much more investment-friendly tax regimes.

Which means we’re screwed.

Exit quote:

So now we find out today that not only was Ronald Reagan for tax increases on the rich, Ronald Reagan was pro-abortion. Have you ever stopped to realize this bunch of people, the Democrat Party, Barack Obama, they hate Reagan. They have always hated Reagan. They engage in revisionist history about the Reagan years. But when they need to move their agenda forward, when they need to marshal support for what they’re trying to do, who do they invoke? LBJ? No. Teddy Kennedy? No. JFK? No. RFK? No. Bill Clinton? No. They invoke Ronald Reagan, the beloved Ronaldus Magnus.

Now, what does that tell you? They have to take one of the most popular presidents in history, a Republican, a person with whom they have absolutely nothing in common and without any agreement whatsoever and try to convince the American people Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan did what Obama’s doing. It is shameless. It is offensive, and, like everything else Obama is doing, it’s a lie.

Exit video: (especially the last half when Stephen Hayes asks “don’t reporters have a job to do?”….why yes they do….to ensure Obama gets re-elected)

The real Vladimir Ilyich Obama stands up

As part of his fantasy “deficit reduction” plan, Barack Obama proposed a number of new taxes. One of them was the so-called “Buffett Rule.” When it was initially proposed, it was part of the plan to reduce the deficit.

‘Buffett rule’

President Obama

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” he said. “It’s hard to argue against that.”

Mr Obama suggested a “Buffett rule”, which would see Americans who earn more than $1m pay the same rate of tax as those who earn less.

The proposal refers to billionaire financier Warren Buffett, who has complained that he and his wealthy peers pay relatively less tax than the people who work for them.

Many high-income Americans benefit from tax loopholes that see earnings on investment taxed at lower rates than wages.

On Sunday Republican Paul Ryan, chairman of the House budget committee and a proponent of deep cuts and no tax rises, described Mr Obama’s plans as “class warfare”.

The president referenced Mr Ryan’s criticism on Monday, justified his tax-and-cut package by saying simply: “It’s not class warfare, it’s math.”

So how much impact would the Buffett rule have on either the debt or the deficit? The White House refused to say.

But for the moment, the White House wants to keep the attention focused on Obama’s argument that it’s unfair to tax Buffett’s secretary at a higher rate than her boss.

“I’m not going to give you a schedule of how broad individual tax reform would break down and what impact it would have,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said at the Wednesday briefing. “The president simply believes that as a matter of principle that unfairness ought to be changed.”

Republican lawmakers — noting the absence of real numbers — attacked the plan as a political charade, an attempt to score points in the November election instead of a serious policy to reduce federal debt. One outside analysis by the non-partisan Tax Foundation indicates the rule would generate another $36.7 billion a year in revenue — far from enough to make a serious dent in a national debt of $15 trillion.

It’s estimated that the “Buffett Rule” would bet around $4 billion per year.

A bill designed to enact President Obama’s plan for a “Buffett rule” tax on the wealthy would rake in just $47 billion over the next 11 years, according to an estimate by Congress’ official tax analysts obtained by The Associated Press.

That figure would be a drop in the bucket of the over $7 trillion in federal budget deficits projected during that period. It is also minuscule compared to the many hundreds of billions it would cost to repeal the alternative minimum tax, which Obama’s budget last month said he would replace with the Buffett rule tax.

Obama’s proposed deficits run over a trillion dollars for as long as anyone can imagine.

Since the Buffett rule would have essentially no impact on the debt or the deficit, Obama has shifted tactics. It’s no longer about deficit reduction- now it’s all about fairness.

The Obama administration is emphasizing “fairness” over deficit reduction in its renewed pitch for the “Buffett rule” ahead of next week’s scheduled Senate vote.

Introducing a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires “was never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control,” Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters on a conference call Monday afternoon. “This is not the president’s entire tax plan. We’re not trying to say this solves all our economic problems, all our budget problems.”

So it’s not the math? It’s fairness? OK, then.

“Fairness” was Vladimir Lenin’s central campaign theme- equality of outcome. It’s what Communism is all about.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the political structure of the Soviet Union (1917–1989) tried to emphasize equality of outcome as a primary goal.

Via Wikipedia

It also led right to Josef Stalin. So how is $4 billion a year going to create “fairness”? How is it going to give everyone a “fair shot”? How does that actually work? Will the yearly $4 billion go into the “fair shot pool”? And once that doesn’t do anything, will Obama be back asking for a 90% tax so everyone can have more “fair shots”? Is the ultimate goal control of and business and everyone’s salaries so the Obamitburo can determine what’s “fair” for all of us?

The fly in the ointment? Life isn’t fair.

If life was fair, I’d have Barack Obama’s wealth. If life was fair, we could all be astronauts. If life was fair, my kids wouldn’t have lost soccer games 8-1. If life was fair, we’d all get into Harvard Law.

It can be argued that it’s a terribly unfair thing for someone to lose at the Master’s. Why is there a “champion” of the NBA each year? That’s not “fair” to the other teams. Why play the Superbowl? It’s not fair that one team has to lose. It’s even more unfair to the teams that did not make it. Why not just have every tennis match and baseball game end in a tie! That’s fair!

But then, what’s the point of playing? What’s the point of doing anything if the outcome is the same if you try as if you didn’t try?

It’s also not “fair” for only half the country to pay Federal taxes. As someone once said, we all ought to have some “skin in the game.” We all ought to pay the same tax rate.

That’s fair.

The Marxist genie is out of the bottle. Neal Boortz compared Obama’s words to those of Marx:

“Responsibility from all” = “From each according to their ability.”

“Fairness for all” = “To each according to their needs.”

Watch some future democrats’ attitudes toward redistributing their GPA

Click here to view the embedded video.

Obama is no longer about recovery or growth. He’s all about fairness.

The ultimate result of a Obama’s fairness vision would see equal outcome for everything. No matter how hard you work, no matter the risk you take, you earn the same amount of money. No matter how hard you study you earn the same grades. Everyone owns the same house, the same car.

The good part is that everyone gets to be a doctor, lawyer or airline pilot. Without question, though, some democrats would be more equal than other democrats. That’s how it went in mother Russia too.

Somewhere, Vladimir Lenin is giddy with glee.

This past week the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against ObamaCare. The decision, expected to be handed down in June may very well be the single most important case in the history of the United States.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the perennial swing vote on the court pinpointed the argument on Tuesday:

Here the government is saying that the federal government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases, and that changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.

He is making the observation that if ObamaCare stands, the federal government can not only tell you what you are prohibited from doing, but at the same time it can tell you what you must do.

Donald Verrilli, the administration’s attorney, suggests that the reason the government can regulate the healthcare market is that that everyone participates in it at some point.

Justice Scalia points out that everyone participates in the food market and therefore the government could use that rationale to force everyone to buy broccoli.

Verrilli’s retort: Though the two markets do share that one trait, they remain distinctly different. The healthcare market, he said, contains participation that is “often unpredictable and often involuntary.” The food market is not that.

Which in turn caused Justice Alito to ask about burial insurance, the cause of which is often unpredictable and almost always involuntary.

You can see where this is going. This gets us to the fundamental question about liberalism in general. When will enough regulation be enough? Will there ever come a point where liberals believe that there is simply enough government regulation in place and that they should stop making new laws? Is there a point where citizens are going to be allowed to exercise individual responsibility to the point that they are responsible for their own lives? From the federal government all the way down to local towns and counties, what one describes as freedom in America is rapidly shrinking.

The thing that liberals never seem to get is that the unknown factor in their plans for universal perfection (read equal outcomes) is the fact that it includes humans. There is nothing that humans have ever been involved in that is perfect, that is 100% successful or 100% safe. Yet liberals continue to push the envelope. And it’s not just about safety… it’s gotten to the point that New York City’s Department of Education believes it’s the government’s job to save people from getting their feelings hurt so they’ve put out a list of 50 topics that should not be used in tests because they might offend various people. Dinosaurs are on the list, presumably because it would offend people who don’t believe in evolution. Computers in the home cannot be mentioned (because not all kids will have computers in their homes) but mentioning a computer in a school environment is allowed.

Is there some point of minutia that is beyond the reach of liberals? John Stossel did a special recently called “Illegal Everything” about regulation and featured children from around the country being stopped from selling lemonade. In one case, in Midway, GA, one of the little girls’ father went to city hall to find out what law the girls had broken. No one knew, but the Chief of Police was clear about why they had to be stopped: We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, or what the lemonade was made with.

In the spirit of the times, I would like to suggest a new regulation. All men should be required to get a federal dating permit in order to strike up a conversation with a women in a bar or at the supermarket. Certainly some men lie about all sorts of things in order to get a woman into bed. From their jobs (or lack thereof) their salaries, their previous relationships, their education and even their marital status. Women across the country would be saved from ever getting their hearts broken or their purity despoiled. Licenses would be $25 per year and would have to be shown within the first 5 minutes of any intended coupling. The woman could scan the license with her smartphone and immediately know everything about her would be suitor.

Such as system would open a Pandora’s box of issues. What happens when a man changes jobs? How long does he have to update his license? What happens if he gets a raise? A cut in pay? Who decides if a previous relationship ended amicably, the man or the ex? Does she have the right or obligation to comment on the issuance of his license? How would a government computer weigh an acceptable honesty score? Does lying to your girlfriend about how beautiful your last girlfriend was generate enough positive points to outweigh the truth you told her about how bad her cooking is? Is there even a remote possibility that this could somehow make dating a better experience?

This may sound farfetched, but that’s what happens when government gets involved in practically anything. Education. Healthcare. Housing…

At the end of the day the United States, like every other society throughout history is guaranteed to be imperfect by the fact that it is made up of imperfect humans. Liberals make the mistake that collective decision making and rule making can move the nation farther down the road to perfection. It can’t and it won’t. The strange thing is, the more regulations they foist on the population, the more people become law breakers, inadvertent and otherwise. With over 100,000 federal regulations and literally millions of state and local ordinances it’s virtually impossible that individuals can go through any day without breaking some laws. With so many regulations, virtually everything is illegal, and it’s simply the whim of the regulators, politicians and police that decides who gets prosecuted and for what.

ObamaCare is the single most important court case in a century for one simple reason. It presents the American people with the clearest choice between freedom and statism since the calamitous 1942 decision in Wickard v. Filburn.

If the Supreme Court throws out the individual mandate and the rest of ObamaCare, perhaps citizens will finally feel like they have a fighting chance in taking on the borg that government has become and begin the process of rolling back the overreach that permeates every area of our lives.

On the other hand, if the Court upholds ObamaCare then it is the swan song of freedom as you know it. The United States will not collapse the next day or the next week or even within the next few years. It will however happen. Power corrupts absolutely and absolute power corrupts even more… A government bestowed with carte blanche will see no reason to ever curb its own power, and eventually it will take over everything. Lemonade anyone?

Obama does it again….

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years:

The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018. As you might expect, Republicans were not impressed with the decision:

“The president’s actions have closed an entire new area to drilling on his watch and cheats Virginians out of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. The announcement “continues the president’s election-year political ploy of giving speeches and talking about drilling after having spent the first three years in office blocking, delaying and driving up the cost of producing energy in America,” he said.

But hey, during “his watch” oil drilling is at an 8 year high.

Sigh…

He complained about subsidies to oil companies but was promptly shut up by his own Party.

He attacks drilling offshore, he blocked the Keystone pipeline, refuses to drill in ANWAR, all the while he funnels millions upon millions of our dollars into obviously flawed green energy companies who promptly go bankrupt and THEN tries to take credit for drilling permits issued long before he took office.

Presidents can affect gas prices, at least in the long term, by exercising budgetary discipline resulting in a currency that buys more oil per dollar, by approving or rejecting federal oil leases, and by adding or curbing regulations that affect oil exploration and development. In all of these cases, Obama has supported policies that contribute to higher gas prices.

The point about the lag time between finding and pumping oil is valid. But that reality is precisely why presidents must green-light exploration for future generations — and why Obama is now bragging of record U.S. production only because of his predecessor’s granting of federal oil leases. Obama’s “it takes too long” argument is absurd — as if farmers should never plant new orchards since they won’t see fruit on their trees for three years or more.

And now he is ensuring a 5 year moratorium on drilling on the Atlantic coast.

The man is a joke.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even some of the liberal judges appear skeptical about Obama’s defense of ObamaCare:

On the first day of oral arguments in the case challenging President Obama’s national health care law, justices seemed skeptical that the individual mandate should be considered a tax — one of the main consitutional defenses being offered for the law.

To be clear, today’s 90 minutes of oral arguments did not concern the underlying merits of the case, but whether an 1876 law called the Anti-Injunction Act bars the Court from ruling on the suit at this time. Under the Anti-Injunction Act, people cannot challenge a tax in court until after they have paid it, something that would effectively punt the issue until at least 2015. However, there is some overlap between this question and the idea of whether the mandate is a tax, and justices on both sides of the ideological fence expressed skepticism that the mandate should be treated as a tax.

“This cannot be a revenue raising measure, because if it’s successful, there won’t be any revenue raised,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the mandate.

Another liberal on the court, Justice Stephen Breyer, said of Congress’s description of the fine for non-compliance with the mandate, “They called it a penalty and not a tax for a reason.”

Alito came in for the swoop:

Justice Sam Alito asked Verrilli whether he could point to another case in which courts identified something as not a tax for the purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act while still ruling it was a constitutional exercise of taxing power. Verrilli could not name any.

Bam!

First Obama said the mandate wasn’t a tax, and then they said it is.

And now even the liberal judges of the Supreme Court are looking a bit wary on their argument.

Ed Morrissey:

That doesn’t bode well for ObamaCare advocates. If the mandate gets struck as a constitutional overreach, then regardless of whether the Supreme Court finds severability or not, the entire structure of ObamaCare collapses. It will hasten momentum for its repeal, and insurers will switch sides to demand its complete rejection.

And even Howard Dean believes the mandate will be struck down:

Dean, a former presidential candidate who also chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, said on “CBS This Morning” that it’s “likely the individual mandate will be declared unconstitutional” but he expects the justices will sever that finding from the rest of the bill, meaning other elements, like the ban on denying people insurance based on pre-existing conditions, could remain in effect.

Howard Dean believes ObamaCare will survive if the mandate is struck down. Richard Epstein:

…if the individual mandate is struck down, does the rest of the law go down with it? As Abbe Gluck and Michael Graetz recently noted in the New York Times, both the Obama administration and the states opposing the program insist that the entire ACA will go down the tubes if the mandate is struck down. Their motivations of course diverge. The Obama administration thinks that the all-or-nothing position improves the odds that the mandate will be upheld, given the vast dislocations that will follow if it is struck down. The states think that the mandate is a loser on its own terms, and want to bring the rest of the statute down with it.

Both sides are wrong. As I have urged in a brief coauthored with Mario Loyola of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute, Title I at the very least has to fall if the mandate is struck down because it is the only backstop that Congress put in to control adverse selection under the ACA. Writers like Gluck and Graetz are wrong to say that allowing severability rightly puts the issue back into the lap of the next Congress. A future Congress could easily be paralyzed on the issue, which leaves us with an incoherent structure. But we do know that the 111th Congress that passed this bill a year ago on March 23, 2010 did regard the two as indissoluble.

Just because the rest of Title I is not severable from the individual mandate does not mean that the mandate itself is saved from constitutional attack by propping up the Commerce Clause with the Necessary and Proper Clause. The key issue is this: Severability asks whether one part of the legislation can function as Congress intended if another part is stripped out. In contrast, the Necessary and Proper Clause only saves that legislation which is needed to make the statute cohere. As noted earlier, the individual mandate was only introduced as a second-best response to the ACA’s problem of adverse selection risk.

The mandate is not necessary for that purpose because there are other devices that do a far better job in coping with that omnipresent danger. And it is surely not proper to use an extraordinary remedy that expands the scope of Congressional power to achieve an end that could be controlled by more traditional means. Thus, restrictions on the power to pull out of an insurance plan can deal with adverse selection and general taxes can deal with the need to subsidize high-risk individuals —if that is thought to be a legitimate government function.

In the end, Obamacare’s rickety economic structure is intimately connected to its constitutional infirmities. The simple fixes that control the worst excesses of the ACA obviate the need for the government’s constitutional adventurism.

If SCOTUS strikes the mandate down I believe it will provide momentum to repeal it. At least I hope it does.

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE

Click here to view the embedded video.

“If the federal government can regulate the relationship between parents and their children on their own family’s farm there is virtually nothing off limits”
– Senator Jerry Moran

Just when I thought Obama’s big government couldn’t get more intrusive we have this: (h/t Gateway Pundit and Allen Wall)

The U.S. Department of Labor is proposing revisions to child labor regulations that will strengthen the safety requirements for young workers employed in agriculture and related fields. The agricultural hazardous occupations orders under the Fair Labor Standards Act that bar young workers from certain tasks have not been updated since they were promulgated in 1970.

The department is proposing updates based on the enforcement experiences of its Wage and Hour Division, recommendations made by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and a commitment to bring parity between the rules for young workers employed in agricultural jobs and the more stringent rules that apply to those employed in nonagricultural workplaces. The proposed regulations would not apply to children working on farms owned by their parents.

“Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America,” said Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis. “Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is another element of our comprehensive approach.”

The proposal would strengthen current child labor regulations prohibiting agricultural work with animals and in pesticide handling, timber operations, manure pits and storage bins. It would prohibit farmworkers under age 16 from participating in the cultivation, harvesting and curing of tobacco. And it would prohibit youth in both agricultural and nonagricultural employment from using electronic, including communication, devices while operating power-driven equipment.

The department also is proposing to create a new nonagricultural hazardous occupations order that would prevent children under 18 from being employed in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials. Prohibited places of employment would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.

Additionally, the proposal would prohibit farmworkers under 16 from operating almost all power-driven equipment. A similar prohibition has existed as part of the nonagricultural child labor provisions for more than 50 years. A limited exemption would permit some student learners to operate certain farm implements and tractors, when equipped with proper rollover protection structures and seat belts, under specified conditions.

The proposed rules only affect “hired farm workers,” not those working on farms owned by their parents.

So that should make us all breath a sigh of relief for the American farm family right?

This just shows how much the Obamacrats are out of touch with America’s farm belt. In multi-generational farm families, you often have several siblings or other relatives living in close proximity. Parts of the operation may be owned by several family members. Some of the land may be rented. Some family farms are technically considered limited liability corporations or other such arrangements. It can get complicated.

Johnny might work on his dad’s farm, but he might also go right next door to his uncle’s property to work for him a few hours in the afternoon. These rule changes would make that traditional practice much more difficult.

Under these rules, kids wouldn’t get to drive (or sometimes even ride!) tractors. Typically, farm youngsters drive tractors from an early age. I did. My 14-year old nephew, an experienced tractor driver, tells me he started driving a tractor at about age 7 and was driving in the field by 9 or 10.

Not only do the new regulations prohibit the kids’ driving tractors, except under certain conditions, they can’t even ride the tractors!

Farm kids would also be restricted from working with livestock.

To be sure, livestock, like farm machinery, can be dangerous. I remember my dad told me never to turn my back on a bull. But does the DOL think farmers aren’t aware of the dangers? That’s precisely why farm children are exposed to the farm operations from an early age, then gradually placed into positions of more and more responsibility.

Thankfully Senators Thune and Moran along with 37 co-sponsors are offering up a bill to fight this attack our farmers:

Last year, DOL Secretary Hilda Solis proposed rules that would restrict family farm operations by prohibiting youth under the age of 18 from being near certain age animals without adult supervision, participating in common livestock practices such as vaccinating and hoof trimming, and handling most animals more than six months old, which would severely limit participation in 4-H and FFA activities and restrict their youth farm safety classes; operating farm machinery over 20 PTO horsepower; completing tasks at elevations over six feet high; and working at stockyards and grain and feed facilities. The language of the proposed rule is so specific it would even ban youth from operating a battery powered screwdriver or a pressurized garden hose.

“The Department of Labor has proposed 85 pages of unreasonable and overreaching rules that would unnecessarily restrict the participation of young people in agriculture related activities,” said Thune. “Family farms and farming communities teach young people responsible work ethics and these proposed rules would change that by severely limiting the commonplace activities in which young people can learn about agriculture. This is another example of the Obama administration initiating unsolicited regulations that would prohibit normal practices that have been carried out in rural areas for generations—not to mention limiting a desperately needed workforce to replace the current generation of farmers whose average age is nearing 60 years old.”

“There is no better example of the vast overreach of government into the everyday lives of Americans than the Department of Labor’s proposed rule to regulate young people working on farms and ranches,” Sen. Moran said. “For generations, the contributions of young people have helped family farm and ranch operations survive and prosper. If this proposal goes into effect, not only will the shrinking rural workforce be further reduced, and our nation’s youth be deprived of valuable career training opportunities, but a way of life will begin to disappear. This proposal should alarm more than just rural America

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Department of Labor Secretary, a person who cares little if immigrant’s are legal or not, put these new proposals up last year but the outcry was so great she had to postpone the implementation and just announced last month they she will “re-propose” the “Parental Exemption” regulation.

Either way this is just one more example of Obama regulating every little aspect of our lives.

A Blast From The Past...This Is How The Left Viewed Bush Then

As I wrote about in an earlier post, the hypocrisy of the left in regards to Obama’s policy of allowing assassinations of United States citizens is quite telling.

Take for example this speech given by our Attorney General in 2004:

With all due respect to President Reagan, the problem is not government. The problem is with those who run the government. In the struggle against terrorism, these people have made a mockery of the rule of law…

And yet a disturbing pattern has emerged. Lawyers for this administration have attempted to sanction the wholesale roundup and extended detention of Middle Eastern men on routine immigration violations, and the indefinite detention of American citizens with minimal judicial supervision, and without access to legal counsel.

Now I understand that we live in difficult times, and that we face an extraordinary, unprecedented threat. We cannot be naive in how we expect to conduct this struggle. This is not a time for the liberal community to see our enemy for anything other than what they are: murderers bent on the destruction of our way of life, which is superior to that which they seek to impose. We must be aggressive in the conduct of the war, and in the interrogation of prisoners taken in that war. But this Administration’s view, that the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief can almost always overcome what it views as burdensome laws, restrictive International treaties, and tired old customs is extremely dangerous.

Our history is replete with scandals and miscues that are tied to the unrestricted exercise of Executive Branch power, in peace and in war. We must employ techniques in the current struggle that are consistent with the spirit of our founding documents, and that will also stand the test of time. We must feel comfortable, fifty years from now, looking back at our actions in a way that we do not when we examine for instance, the detention of American citizens during World War II.

Now let me be clear. This is not to equate American al-Qaeda sympathizers with law abiding Japanese-American citizens. But citizenship must mean something. The guarantees that come with it must be respected.

The war on terrorism can be won and our tradition of respect for civil liberties can be respected. The tension that this administration sees existing between the two simply is not correct.

That was then, this is now:

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asserted on Monday that it is lawful for the government to kill American citizens if officials deem them to be operational leaders of Al Qaeda who are planning attacks on the United States and if capturing them alive is not feasible.

“Given the nature of how terrorists act and where they tend to hide, it may not always be feasible to capture a United States citizen terrorist who presents an imminent threat of violent attack,” Mr. Holder said in a speech at Northwestern University’s law school. “In that case, our government has the clear authority to defend the United States with lethal force.”

…While Mr. Holder is not the first administration official to address the targeted killing of citizens — the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, did so last month at Yale Law School, for example — it was notable for the nation’s top law enforcement official to declare that it is constitutional for the government to kill citizens without any judicial review under certain circumstances. Mr. Holder’s remarks about the targeted killing of United States citizens were a centerpiece of a speech describing legal principles behind the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

“Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Bush’s practice of fighting this war on terror and I agree wholeheartedly with Obama’s new policy.

But the hypocrisy is mindboggling.

I never thought I would link to Glenn Greenwald but he is especially pissed at the hypocrisy from his side of the aisle:

(1) The willingness of Democrats to embrace and defend this power is especially reprehensible because of how completely, glaringly and obviously at odds it is with everything they loudly claimed to believe during the Bush years. Recall two of the most significant “scandals” of the Bush War on Terror: his asserted power merely to eavesdrop on anddetain accused Terrorists without judicial review of any kind. Remember all that? Progressives endlessly accused Bush of Assaulting Our Values and “shredding the Constitution” simply because Bush officials wanted to listen in on and detain suspected Terrorists — not kill them, just eavesdrop on and detain them — without first going to a court and proving they did anything wrong. Yet here is a Democratic administration asserting not merely the right to surveil or detain citizens without charges or judicial review, but to kill themwithout any of that: a far more extreme, permanent and irreversible act. Yet, with somerighteous exceptions, the silence is deafening, or worse.

How can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions without judicial review? How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable assertion of war powers? If Barack Obama has the right to order accused Terrorists executed by the CIA because We’re At War, then surely George Bush had the right to order accused Terrorists eavesdropped on and detained on the same ground.

That the same Party and political faction that endlessly shrieked about Bush’s eavesdropping and detention programs now tolerate Obama’s execution program is one of the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time.

He goes on write and link to my post, saying “By stark contrast, right-wing leaders, pundits and bloggers are being commendably consistent”

Yup. We have.

I agreed with the policy then and do now.

And I completely agree with Glenn when he writes that the hypocrisy of the left is “the most extreme and craven acts of dishonesty we’ve seen in quite some time.”

Obama in 2006:

The bottom line is this: Current procedures under the CSRT are such that a perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government’s case and has no way of proving his innocence.

I would like somebody in this Chamber, somebody in this Government, to tell me why this is necessary. I do not want to hear that this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that. I know that every time I think about my two little girls and worry for their safety–when I wonder if I really can tuck them in at night and know that they are safe from harm. I have as big of a stake as anybody on the other side of the aisle and anybody in this administration in capturing terrorists and incapacitating them. I would gladly take up arms myself against any terrorist threat to make sure my family is protected.

But as a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.

This is not just an entirely fictional scenario, by the way. We have already had reports by the CIA and various generals over the last few years saying that many of the detainees at Guantanamo should not have been there.

But it’s ok to assassinate that person without judicial review now eh?

Where’s the terror for your family members now?

H Y P O C R I S Y

In a sign that the left’s hypocrisy may not be going over so well is this editorial from the NYT’s today:

Perhaps most disturbing, Mr. Holder utterly rejected any judicial supervision of a targeted killing.

We have said that a decision to kill an American citizen should have judicial review, perhaps by a special court like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes eavesdropping on Americans’ communications.

Mr. Holder said that could slow a strike on a terrorist. But the FISA court works with great speed and rarely rejects a warrant request, partly because the executive branch knows the rules and does not present frivolous or badly argued cases. In Mr. Awlaki’s case, the administration had long been complaining about him and tracking him. It made an earlier attempt to kill him.

Mr. Holder said such operations require high levels of secrecy. That is obvious, but the FISA court operates in secret, and at least Americans are assured that some legal authority not beholden to a particular president or political party is reviewing such operations.

Mr. Holder argued in his speech that judicial process and due process guaranteed by the Constitution “are not one and the same.” This is a straw man. The judiciary has the power to say what the Constitution means and make sure the elected branches apply it properly. The executive acting in secret as the police, prosecutor, jury, judge and executioner is the antithesis of due process.

While the NYT’s editorial pages maybe coming around to their hypocrisy, we do not hear the wailing and the crying from the rest of our media, the rest of the Democrat party, the rest of the liberals.

H Y P O C R I S Y