Back to Basics

When we last saw the EPA’s Al “Crucify ‘Em All and Let Obama Sort ‘Em Out” Armendariz, he was stuttering his way through a mea culpa like Jackie Gleason through an episode of The Honeymooners. Today, he finally got his story straight, well, straight enough to know that his candid speech two years ago was something he should never have said out loud. He handed in his resignation on Sunday and bumbled off into the sunset.

“Over the weekend Dr. Armendariz offered his resignation, which I accepted. I respect the difficult decision he made and his wish to avoid distracting from the important work of the agency. We are all grateful for Dr. Armendariz’s service to EPA and to our nation,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in a statement Monday.

In his resignation letter to Jackson, Armendariz reiterated that the 2010 comments did not reflect his approach to the job.

“As I have expressed publicly, and to you directly, I regret comments I made several years ago that do not in any way reflect my work as regional administrator. As importantly, they do not represent the work you have overseen as EPA Administrator,” he wrote.

This, as we know, is manifestly untrue. Armendariz reflected perfectly the work to which Lisa Jackson has set the EPA. As I noted last week, the EPA did find themselves a perfectly innocent target called Range Resources, and promptly crucified them right out where every other oil and gas drilling company could see. Jackson and her horde of legionnaires have done everything in their power to make sure that we do not drill for our own oil or gas, even if that meant trumping up charges against innocents.

The real story of L’Affaire Armendariz is that he unwittingly spoke truth to power about what our government under the extremists who currently run it thinks of us and the society we have built. We are flawed people in need of their guiding hands and if we resist, well they’ll just nail a few of us to the trees as a little lesson to everyone else about who truly wields the power in Progressive America.

Newt Gingrich ended his campaign yesterday with a statement I’m sure people on both the left and right will ridicule whenever his name comes up over the next couple of years. I won’t be one of them. See, I backed Newt for the Republican nomination and, quite honestly, I’m sorry to see him go. I won’t go into all the reasons I supported Newt (see here and here) except to say that, in answer this question, I am glad I did. I don’t think he ran a joke campaign and I don’t think his ideas are worthy of ridicule, grandiose though they may be.

Newt was a good candidate — a man of wide vision, with real plans to pry the government off our throats and a track record for making government smaller. Indeed, he was the only candidate who could claim he made decreased the power and scope of government when he had his hands on real political power. Neither Mitt Romney nor Rick Santorum could claim that, though they both tried in some form or another. After a big win in South Carolina, Newt got buried by the Mitt Romney money machine in Florida and spent a lot more time carping about negative campaign ads than he did talking up his optimistic vision for America (which, I believe, is what made him an early front-runner).

That turn in the tone of his campaign after South Caroline ultimately doomed his candidacy. Not only did he turn his attention from the incompetence of the Obama administration and the perfidity of the lapdogs in the MSM, but he changed the tenor of his message from optimism to complaints about his Republican rivals’ tactics. More than that, though, he changed (from my POV at least) the way his campaign ran — from a hungry and creative money-poor message machine to a more extravagant operation. Except that Newt, who hadn’t been running for President the past 6 years, didn’t have the money and GOP insider help Romney has. That change in operation put Gingrich in debt and unable to capitalize on his opponents’ many mistakes.

I still like Newt. We conservatives need someone to remind us, insistently at times, that our goals ought to seem ridiculous and grandiose sometimes. He tool a lot of heat for his talk about neuroscience and a moon base, but I’d rather have more of that. Aspirations are important. Vision matters. If we conservatives want to grab and hold America’s imagination, so that they let us do all the things we want (mundane and otherwise), we’re going to have to spin tales of the amazing things America can do once we get utopian progressive government out of the picture.

Democrats no longer dream big dreams. They talk about bringing down the achievers, about paving over the grand accomplishments of our parents and grandparents. When once a Democrat challenged us to go to the moon, our current President challenges us to build windmills and bridges. We can do those things — indeed we almost certainly will in some form because they must be done — but we need greater challenges.

Well smack my bottom and call me Shecky! Obamacare is actually going to drive prices higher instead of lower. Who could possibly have guessed?

Range of impact on insurance carriers. http://t.co/7PVbpjyG

April 2, 2012 12:24 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@bdomenech

Ben Domenech

Note here who is going to absorb the lion’s share of the cost hikes. In a world where market forces helped set the cost of your health insurance, individual cost would be lower because individuals would be the consumers. In Obamacare, as in the system we have now, individuals — that’s you, by the way — are costs. Your health insurance company will only need to deal with you when they’re paying money out on your behalf. You will still have no power to decide what you will and will not pay for your care nor with whom you do business. You will get a government-mandated policy with a government-mandated cost that provides government-mandated (or government-permitted) care.

And you will have no say in any of that. You will get what the bureaucracy gives you and pay what it tells you to pay because that’s what government-run health care does.

Has anyone mentioned lately that our President, Barack Obama, is a constitutional scholar? I ask because he didn’t seem to have a very good grip on matters Constitutional yesterday when asked about the possibility that the Supreme Court might overturn his signature piece of legislation.

I want to give you his full answer as recorded by Michael Memoli of the Los Angeles Times. It’s long, so I’ll jump in once in a while with a little commentary of my own just to break the seemingly endless stream of Constitutional scholarity.

“I actually continue to be confident that the Supreme Court will uphold the law. And the reason is, because in accordance with precedent out there, it’s constitutional.

“That’s not just my opinion by the way. That’s the opinion of legal experts across the ideological spectrum, including two very conservative appellate court justices that said this wasn’t even a close case.”

Oh, so if some legal experts agree with you, and a couple of them happen to be members of a party not your own (even if one of them voted for you and you named the other one Ambassador to Malta), your law is constitutional? We don’t need to consult the actual Constitution or anything else written on the subject by the guys who wrote the Constitution? Well, that does make things handy. The converse, of course, would mean that if we conservatives could find a couple left-wing legal experts who believed Roe v. Wade was wrongly-decided, then we could get it overturned. Do you think the President really wants that to be the standard?

No. Neither do I.

The bigger problem with his opinion is that he’s not really offering a learned legal opinion as befits a former Harvard Law Review President and constitutional scholar. His answer, basically, boils down to “It’s constitutional, because shut up, that’s why”. I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that ipse dixit would get you laughed out of every courtroom on the planet.

“I think it’s important — because I watched some of the commentary last week — to remind people that this is not an abstract argument. People’s lives are affected by the lack of availability of healthcare, the inaffordability of healthcare, their inability to get healthcare because of preexisting conditions.

“The law that’s already in place has already given 2.5 million young people healthcare that wouldn’t otherwise have it. There are tens of thousands of adults with preexisting conditions who have healthcare right now because of this law. Parents don’t have to worry about their children not being able to get healthcare because they can’t be prevented from getting healthcare as a consequence of a preexisting condition. That is part of this law.

“Millions of seniors are paying less for prescription drugs because of this law. Americans all across the country have greater rights and protections with respect to the insurance companies, and are getting preventive care because of this law.

“So, that’s just the part that’s already been implemented. That doesn’t speak to the 30 million people who stand to gain coverage once it’s fully implemented in 2014.

Pardon my cruel conservative heart here, but so what? Not everything that is good is constitutional.

Frank J. is a very, very smart man.

Anyway, this got me thinking, it sure would be intellectually honest if more people started framing their arguments in the terms, “I don’t like freedom on this issue and here is why…” You pretty much never see that. I mean, gun control is an anti-freedom stance, but they never argue it that way. I think maybe that’s why they don’t understand how unpopular their stance is.

The same thing with the health care debate. The mandate is an anti-freedom stance, but they try to say they’re for more freedom by ending worries about health care, which is BS. One thing is freedom and one thing isn’t; it’s not debatable. Putting a gun to someone’s head and saying, “You must buy health insurance!” isn’t freedom and no one should pretend it is. It’s okay to take an anti-freedom stance, you just should frame it terms of why you think your ideas are better than liberty. And that will probably also help you understand why so many people don’t like your views, as the left always seems to get caught off guard by that.

Or, as Justice Scalia asked, after the government’s lawyer finished reciting all the problems that Obamacare was created to allegedly solve, “Why aren’t those problems that the Federal Government can address directly”.

The answer is: they are.

If the Democrats in Congress had been more honest, they could have built an alternate Obamacare that wouldn’t have run afoul of the Constitution. It would likely have set up a government system similar to Medicare, but for individuals and those with pre-existing conditions. The new system would by definition be very expensive so Democrats would have had to either 1) fudge the numbers so badly that not even the friendly MSM could obscure it, or 2) build a tax structure right away to dump a trillion dollars or so into it each year. In either case, everyone would have to pay more taxes — likely on the order of several thousand dollars. But once they were done, they’d have their government-run health insurance program that covered those relatively few Americans who want health insurance but can’t get it.

Of course, they would have had to sell America on the largest tax increase in the history of the planet to get it. Lots and lots of people would have asked them if there wasn’t some less expensive way to get the job done, perhaps a state-by-state option or a shift of tax incentives from employers to individuals. The questions would have been tough, fair, and in all likelihood hostile to a huge new bureaucracy and its attendant tax scheme, but the Democrats would have had to make a real argument and we could have have an honest discussion about our health insurance problems.

Obamacare was the Democratic attempt to avoid that discussion. The President hid behind a lie, almost completely unchallenged by the MSM, that if you like your health insurance plan, nothing in Obamacare would force you to change it.

Let me recount to you the history of the Obama administration’s dealings with Russia.

• He sent Hillary Clinton with  a “reset” button to Russia to assure them that they would not deal with the russian government with nearly as firm a hand as previous administrations. Unfortunately, they misspelled “reset” and the gesture made them look puling and incompetent.
• He broke an agreement with our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic to build a missile defense system in both countries. Russia doesn’t want such a system because, well, they have large missiles that such a system could render ineffective. The Poles and Czechs — and let me note again that these are our actual allies — were stunned and angered by the decision, which the administration sprang on them with little to no warning.
• He confused Georgia with Russia in a meeting with the Georgian President. You might say the Georgians are a bit sensitive about their identity considering they had been invaded by Russia just four years ago.

And now this: in what the President believed was a private moment with Russian President Medvedev, he all but told the Russians that if he is re-elected, he will give the Russians a good deal on the missile shield, regardless of the will of the American people. Here is the exchange.

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

Lest you think my reaction a knee-jerk reflection of my desire to see Barack Obama retire from the White House in 2013, take a moment to consider what he said. Why would he have more flexibility after the election than before it? The various spokesweasels for the administration say that the President only meant that working out a complicated arrangement would take time and that the President would be better able to work out an arrangement after the “technical experts” worked on the matter quietly. But why should this take more time, considering it’s been an issue between the United States and Russia since the President has been in office. Has he not had the “technical experts” at work on the issue until now? If so, that is a damning statement of incompetence.

It is far more likely that the President meant exactly what it appears he meant. He can’t do what he wants most to do, capitulate on a missile shield in which he’s never believed and make peace with the brutal Putin government, so long as he knows that doing so will surely cost him a second term in office. Barack Obama knows full well that the American electorate would punish him in November if he gave away the farm to Putin and Medvedev before then, so he’s playing for time.

This is bad news, not just for us here in the United States, but for any of our allies in Europe. It is clear, and has been for a while, that Barack Obama considers Russia the real diplomatic prize.

Newt Gingrich has caught quite a bit of heat for his claim that he would, as President, help get the price of gas down to $2.50. His plan is pretty simple. He wants to increase domestic drilling, begin construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and take a giant machete to the EPA’s job-killing, price-increasing regulations on the production of domestic energy. But even those simple steps have drawn little but dismissive derision from the bureacratic class and prominent Democrats. Mitt Romney, favorite candidate of the professional Republicans, jumped on Newt’s plan with a barely-disguised scoff and used many of the same arguments. He said he would not “pander” to voters by setting, as Newt has, a certain price for gas in the future. Here’s a good summary of the criticism from CNN.

The promise might garner attention on the campaign trail, but there’s little politicians can do to influence the price of gasoline in the short-term, and long-run efforts are likely to be complicated by the global nature of the crude oil market.

“Political rhetoric is all it is,” said Guy Caruso, an economist who led the Energy Information Administration and worked as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Short of price controls, which were a disaster during the Nixon administration, politicians can’t do much to change the price of gasoline,” he said.

Other industry experts CNNMoney surveyed echoed those sentiments.

“This is absurd,” said Paul Bledsoe, a Bipartisan Policy Center scholar who spent more than 20 years working on energy policy in Washington. “Obviously the price of oil is set on a global market. In the immediate term there is almost nothing you can do.”

Both of those arguments are ridiculous and I can prove it with a couple charts and a few simple links.

Here is a chart of gasoline and crude oil prices that goes back four years. It’s tracked by the GasBuddy site, which tracks gasoline prices from all over the country. If you want to know what gas costs in your area, GasBuddy is there for you. And no, I don’t work for GasBuddy, but it’s a terribly useful site if you want to scout out gasoline prices in your burg, or elsewhere.

Notice that little gap between 6/4/2008 and 7/25/2008. At that point, gasoline hovered around $4.00 a gallon nationally, and crude oil was at nearly $150 a barrel. Then something happened, very close to July 25 that drove the prices of both down to the point that, by the beginning of 2009, gas cost less than $2.00 a gallon. Something happened to drop the cost of a gallon of gas about $2 a gallon. What could have happened?

Well, how about this?

President Bush lifted an executive order banning offshore oil drilling on Monday and urged Congress to follow suit.

Citing the high prices Americans are paying at the pump, Bush said from the White House Rose Garden that allowing offshore oil drilling is “one of the most important steps we can take” to reduce that burden.

However, the move is largely symbolic as there is also a federal law banning offshore drilling.

“This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil reserves is action from the U.S.

Jeff Goldstein has done us all a service, at great risk to his sanity. He delved into a Nancy Pelosi press release, wherein she blamed high gas prices on eeeeeeeee-vil speculators, Wall Street, Republicans, the Easter Bunny, and the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Okay, I made up the latter two, but, really what can you do with anything Nancy Pelosi says but laugh at it and pity the poor people who have to spend all day listening to her attempt to warp reality to fit her own bizarre worldview.

As it happens, Jeff did the one useful thing you could do with a Nancy Pelosi statement. He identified all the lies and put links behind them to the facts and for that, we should all be grateful. Here’s just a bit of his post, which really should live a long and useful life in your bookmarks. I guarantee you, as gas prices rise toward $4 this summer, you’re going to get a lot of use out of it.

Independent reports confirm that speculators are driving up the cost of oil, hurting consumers and potentially damaging the economic recovery. Wall Street profiteering, not oil shortages, is the cause of the price spike. In fact, U.S. oil production is at its highest level since 2003, and millions of acres have been cleared for additional development.

We need to take strong action to protect consumers from this speculation. Unfortunately, Republicans have chosen to protect the interests of Wall Street speculators and oil companies instead of the interests of working Americans by obstructing the agencies with the responsibility of enforcing consumer protection laws. They have also repeatedly opposed our efforts to end billions of dollars in outdated taxpayer subsidies for oil companies enjoying record profits.

We support efforts by the Obama Administration to expand domestic energy resources, including natural gas and renewable sources like wind and solar that create jobs in America and will end our dangerous dependence on foreign energy supplies. This can be achieved because today, the United States currently has more oil and gas rigs at work than the rest of the world combined, and imports of foreign oil have decreased.

We call on the Republican leadership to act on behalf of American consumers and join our efforts to crack down on speculators who care more about their profits than the price at the pump even if these spikes harm the American consumer and our economy.

Jeff also took a few well-placed shots at Bill O’Reilly, Hero of the People, for his shameful Pelosi impression. Do read the whole post. and follow the links so that the nest time you hear a Democrat reading the Democrat-approved talking points of the day, you’ll be able to knock them down with the practiced ease of Pelosi’s plastic surgeon shoving another quart of botox into her face.

Rick Santorum said something today at a campaign stop in Livonia, MI that struck me as simple but very profound.

What’s notable about that, you ask? It gets the relationship between government and church exactly right. The First Amendment does not exist to make sure that a particular church does not take over government but to protect all churches from undue government interference. The Founders were far less afraid of today’s Progressive Bogeyman, the Fundamentalist Theocracy, than they were of a situation in which the government backed one church and used its coercive might to squash other churches. They knew very well how that worked.

One of the great divides between progressives and conservatives is how they view the relationship between church and government. Progressives believe that the supposed Wall of Separation exists to prevent the government from becoming overrun by faith and morality and other icky bits of religious belief. They believe if that wall, erected by the Supreme Court in 1947, wasn’t there then the United States would slide into a theocracy, possibly run by the American Taliban.

Conservatives believe differently. We know that if everyone is allowed — and even encouraged — to pursue their own religious believes with as much vigor as they desire, there is no chance that any one religion will amass enough power to run our government. It is only when government intrudes upon the church instead of protecting the free expression of religion that the balance changes and favored religions gain advantage over those that do not have the regard of powerful government officials. That is how you get a national religion or, as we’ve seen in the United States lately, a national push to drive religion from the public square.

And, by the by, we conservatives also know it’s perfectly acceptable for a man to speak at a religious university about his religious beliefs, even if four years later he decides to run for President. We can do that without falling into a hysterical tantrum because we know that the First Amendment both allows it and constrains our government from letting that man become Theocrat-in-Chief. It’d be nice to have a President in office who knows the Constitution well enough to know how the separation of church and state should work. Granted, he’s no scholar or anything, but I think we can live with that.

I made a stunning discovery while recording this week’s episode of The Delivery: Mitt Romney has no intention on cutting the size of government. Now, I know that sounds like a baseless attack on Romney by a guy who is on record as saying he’d vote for a half-eaten and moldering ham sandwich rather than the Grandfather of Obamacare, but hear me out.

Better yet, hear Mitt Romney out. He’s the one who really said it. Here is what he had to say about cutting the size of government at a recent town hall meeting in Michigan:

Speaking in Shelby Township, MI, the former Massachusetts governor took a question about the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission empaneled by President Obama to address the nation’s deficit and debt issues. In his response, he said that addressing taxes and spending issues are essential.

“If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy,” he said in part of his response. “So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.”

And here is the clarification from his campaign.

The governor’s point was that simply slashing the budget, with no affirmative pro-growth policies, is insufficient to get the economy turned around.  However, he believes that budget cuts – especially in the context of President Obama’s unprecedented spending explosion – are a step in the right direction.  As he made clear in his economic plan, he believes that spending cuts that reduce the size of government and balance the budget are crucial to economic growth and job creation.

First of all, that’s utter balderdash. As I said when I talked about this on The Delivery, if we cut the federal budget to 18 percent of GDP tomorrow and left the tax rates exactly where they are, our economy would take off like it had rockets strapped to it. Of course we’d do better if we accompanies those cuts with comprehensive tax reform, but we could do very well with nothing but budget cuts. I know that Romney is supposed to be some sort of financial wizard, what with his skills as a venture capitalist and all, but he doens’t look like much of a genius when he adopts the very same “we can’t simply cut our way to prosperity” argument used by President Obama just a few months ago. What he looks like is just another lover of big government who has no problem riding herd on spending as it eats up not only our prosperity but also the prosperity of the generation that follows us.

Alone, that would be bad enough. What’s worse, though, is that he has already shown us, in this comment, that he will not cut the size of government. We need only look at his economic plan. Jim Pethokoukis was kind enough to highlight the salient points earlier this month.

Mitt Romney wants to be the next president of a country in need of serious and sweeping economic reform. And here are the first two points in his 59-point economic plan:

1. Maintain current tax rates on personal income

2.