How have 3 Dems escaped voter fury? By voting against Obama

What if the big reason Democrats are wallowing is because of their votes for the Obama agenda? And what would things look like if they hadn't supported it? Happily, an (admittedly unscientific) experiment exists to offer some insight.

Troll through the voting rolls, and you'll find an exclusive club of three House Democrats running for re-election who voted against the more controversial pieces of the Obama agenda: the $862 billion stimulus, Mr. Obama's $3.5 trillion budget, cap and trade and, of course, ObamaCare. Troll through the polls today, and you'll find a near-exclusive club of three House Democrats who are beating every electoral expectation. Were history, incumbency and the economy the main factors this fall, Idaho's Walt Minnick, Alabama's Bobby Bright and Mississippi's Gene Taylor would be packing up. That they aren't is a resounding statement on a failed Obama vision.

Take Idaho. Mr. Minnick is the first Democrat that state has sent to Congress since 1995. In 2008 he beat a controversial Republican by a mere 4,000 votes in a district that went 61% for John McCain. Mr. Minnick had barely finished his acceptance speech before political prognosticators labeled him the most vulnerable Democrat in 2010.

Yet he has served as a Western independent who shares the public's top concerns of runaway spending and big government. His record has bottled up his worthy GOP opponent, Raul Labrador.

While endangered House Democrats such as Dina Titus (Nevada) and Harry Teague (New Mexico) must explain their votes for energy taxes, Mr. Minnick used his votes to earn the backing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Idaho building industry. While Betsy Markey (Colorado) and John Boccieri (Ohio) try to reconcile their promises of fiscal responsibility with the stimulus, the Idaho press has trumpeted Mr. Minnick's award of "Taxpayer Hero" by the influential Citizens Against Government Waste. Mr. Minnick credits his standing to his message of "fiscal responsibility" but acknowledges it's his votes that have distinguished him from those practicing "election year puffery."

Mr. Bright's 2008 victory made Mr. Minnick's look easy. He won by 267 votes in a seat held by Republicans since 1964. The Alabama district is heavily conservative, and getting more so. Mr. Bright's strategy has been to cast himself as the proud rebel of his caucus. In the past few months he's also voted against Democrats' $26 billion bailout of unionized public employees and unemployment benefit extensions. He's slapped the administration on expiring Bush tax cuts. "I don't care if it's the wealthiest of the wealthy, you don't raise their taxes," he said in July. "In a recession, you don't tax, burden and restrict."

Some of this is pure politics (see Mr. Bright's recent see-saw on immigration), but on the whole he's given his GOP competitor, the bright young Martha Roby, few openings. The one poll in the race, in February, had the Democrat up 24 points. That margin has surely narrowed dramatically, but handicappers still rate this race a toss-up—when it ought to be a GOP blowout.

And finally there's the Gulf Coast's Mr. Taylor, sitting in the nation's most conservative district held by a Democrat. The 11-term Mississippian has a reputation as a maverick, more so since Mr. Obama's inauguration. He's facing his strongest opponent in years, Marine reservist and state Rep. Steven Palazzo. The GOP is itching for Mr. Taylor's scalp, and even the Democrat acknowledges this is a challenge to take seriously. Yet he remains the favorite.

Obama wields cap-and-trade as vengeance against BP; in fact, BP has been scheming to enact cap-and-trade for many years

Tim Carney has a column at the Washington Examiner detailing BP’s lobbying influence, which begs the following history lesson and first-hand account for voters, generally unaccustomed to such sleaze, to fully appreciate the game presently being played out in Washington.

President Obama announced in Pittsburgh last week that BP’s Gulf oil spill demands his wrath in the form of the Kerry-Lieberman “cap-and-trade” energy tax. Hearing this, your reaction may have been to wonder just how making energy more expensive for everyone—seniors, the poor, it’s all good—is a proper response. And the truth is that our young ideological president’s effort to make sure this crisis doesn’t go to waste is actually much worse than it seems on its face.

BP, joined by Enron, invented carbon cap-and-trade in the mid-1990s. Yeah. That cap-and-trade.

I know, because I was in the room.

And BP has been lobbying for it aggressively and at great expense ever since, some eight figures of which has gone to green pressure groups.

Specifically, in May 1997 I met with senior officials from BP, Niagara Mohawk Power, and others… “others” like the Union of Concerned Scientists and their ilk… in the Washington offices of a white-shoe New York law firm, putting our collective heads together strategizing on how to get the U.S. roped into a global warming treaty, and get “cap-and-trade” imposed domestically, too.

You can read some great internal Enron memos about this effort they led in partnership with BP at the Master Resource website, run by Enron refugee and frustrated internal whistleblower Rob Bradley. One particularly illuminating montage, including with links, is found here.

The Enron-BP partnership continued until Enron’s unhappy ending. That collapse only led BP, like GE which also picked at the bones of the uneconomic assets Enron had acquired with an eye toward obtaining the “global warming” wealth transfers, to step up its efforts just that much harder.

My introduction to the BP/Enron scheme—classic “rent-seeking” combined nicely with Baptist-and-bootlegger coalition-building—came on day two or so of my illustrious three week career as Enron’s Director of Federal Government Relations.

I went back to my office and asked some very basic—and, I now know, naive—questions like “when did we go from asking if ‘global warming’ is real and a problem to how to make a buck off of it?” Such cheek went over very poorly with my boss.

Thus began the end of my career with Enron and, in hindsight, my path to the “skeptic” side of this mind-numbingly cynical and dishonest policy push.

Having destroyed the pseudo-science behind global warming, the sane now try to block EPA's fascist social engineering bid

The Senate is set for a key test environmental vote this week and the White House is already threatening a veto.

On Thursday, the Senate will take up Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Ak.) EPA Resolution of Disapproval (S.J. Res. 26) under a consent agreement that was reached before the Memorial Day recess.

The resolution would overturn the EPA back door attempt at enacting a national cap and trade energy tax through regulation.

The White House threatened a veto Tuesday, then attempted to link the vote to the disaster in the Gulf.

“The administration and opponents of the disapproval resolution know they’re losing the argument about the costs of EPA climate regulations. They’ve trotted out one red herring after another, but trying to link this bipartisan measure to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill sets a new low,” Murkowski said.

“There is nothing in my resolution that negates fuel economy gains or makes our country more dependent on oil. Falsely linking this effort to the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico is an insult to those impacted by the spill and to the hundreds of stakeholders that are concerned about the economic consequences of EPA’s climate regulations,” Murkowski continued. “Farmers, manufacturers, small business owners, and Americans from every corner of the country have weighed in to express their support for this resolution. To suggest they are somehow tools of the oil industry for speaking out against the EPA’s regulatory overreach is cynical and categorically untrue.”

“The EPA’s endangerment finding does nothing to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico, ensure that impacted victims receive timely compensation for damages or prevent future spills. To suggest otherwise is opportunistic and it cheapens the ongoing tragedy while deflecting attention from the government’s lackluster response,” Murkowski added. “The only similarity I see between the oil spill and the EPA’s climate regulations is that both are unmitigated disasters. The difference, of course, is that it’s not too late for Congress to stop the EPA’s regulations.”

The Senate resolution has bi-partisan support from 41 co-sponsors as well as from senators like Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) with a large state coal mining industry.

“I believe we must send a strong message that the fate of West Virginia's economy, our manufacturing industries and our workers should not be solely in the hands of EPA," Rockefeller said.

No champion of laissez-faire capitalism, BP is a rent seeker

... BP is no laissez-faire champion. For years, BP has lobbied for climate change legislation, until recently running around with the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. BP lobbyists, such as Obama friend Tony Podesta, advocate oil subsidies, including a cap on liability for economic damages.

Congressional Quarterly reports that BP supports higher gas taxes because that would mean more highway spending, and thus more driving. And because BP produces natural gas, the company advocates subsidies for utilities to close coal-fired power plants in favor of gas-fired ones.

BP is boosting investments in solar energy, an industry that needs -- and gets -- billions in government subsidies. BP has asked for and received federal oil-drilling subsidies, such as a $160 million loan guarantee from the Export-Import Bank to finance a Caspian Sea drilling project.

And there's no such thing as "laissez-faire" when it comes to drilling on property that belongs to the federal government. The government is necessarily involved.

Is that South Carolina doomsday clock still ticking off the remaining seconds in Graham's term?

WASHINGTON — Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the chief sponsors of a nascent plan to address energy and climate change in the Senate, said Friday that the proposal had no chance of passage in the near term and called for a “pause” in consideration of the issue.

But his two co-sponsors, Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, vowed to press forward with a broad energy and global warming plan next week. They have been working with the White House and an array of business and environmental groups to fashion a package designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on foreign oil and create millions of clean-energy jobs.

But Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said that the current political climate had made it impossible to consider such a difficult subject. In a statement Friday, he said that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had heightened concern about expanded offshore drilling, which he considers a central component of any energy legislation. Mr. Graham also said that Democratic insistence on taking up immigration policy before energy had chilled his enthusiasm for any global warming measure.

Without the support of Mr. Graham and at least a handful of Republicans, the measure may well be dead for the year. Mr. Graham praised Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman for their efforts, but said he would not join them.

“As I have previously indicated, a serious debate on energy legislation is significantly compromised with the cynical politics of comprehensive immigration reform hanging over the Senate,” Mr. Graham said in a statement. “In addition to immigration, we now have to deal with a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which creates new policy and political challenges not envisioned in our original discussions. In light of this, I believe it would be wise to pause the process and reassess where we stand.”

Cost per household of cap and trade bill

Estimated costs per household per year for Cap & Trade in various years (2010 dollars):

2012: $90

2020: $160

2030: $550

2040: $630

2050: $930

Source: Congressional Budget Office.

Goldman Sachs helped to blow up a 33-year-old social engineering project; now it must pay

Why is the Obama administration pursuing Goldman Sachs for enabling financial transactions between sophisticated, consenting adults?

Because the financial instruments at issue blew up a 33-year-old social engineering project that destroyed markets in pursuit of an unreachable liberal objective: universal home ownership.
Goldman Sachs devised those complex investments.

The campaign for universal home ownership began in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter secured enactment of the Community Reinvestment Act, which prohibited lenders from red-lining, a practice that denied home mortgages to residents of high-risk neighborhoods.

Over time, the CRA movement spilled out of its original constituency, the conspicuously compassionate, as radicals from ACORN and other activist organizations joined the fray, gaining legal sanction to browbeat bankers and picket lenders who refused to confirm to the growing demands for mortgage accomodation.

Still, the CRA remained a modest effort by federal government standards, From 1977 through 1991, only $8.8 billion was committed under the CRA. Then Democrat Bill Clilnton became president and business picked up. From 1992 through 2005, the first year of George Bush's second term, $4.2 trillion in CRA loans went out the door.

The concept of risk apparently had been erased from the mortgage industry. Local lenders could bend to pressure for loans and then wash their hands of risk by immediately selling those loans to Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, which were backed by the federal treasury and supported by the political class. That was the first step in the process of bundling mortgages as securities, a process that resulted in mortgages from Pequot Lakes and Tuscaloosa finding eager buyers in Madrid.

The U.S. housing market sizzled.

But one savvy investor, a hedge fund operator in New York, wasn't buying it. John Paulson studied records of the bundled mortgages and made a list of the ones he considered most likely to go bad through default. Then he persuaded Goldman Sachs to craft securities based on the suspect mortgages and bet against the market by selling them short. That is, he sold securities without first buying them.

Paulson's trading was prophetic. When the housing market collapsed, Paulson earned billions of dollars, closing out his transactions by buying back the Goldman Sachs securities for pennies on the dollar. He sold high, then bought low, reversing the usual process.

What troubles sophisticated observers is this. The securities that Paulson shorted were bought by sophisticated, willing investors. Neophytes don't participate in short sale transactions. So what's the problem? Why did the Securities and Exchange Commission vote, 3 to 2, in favor of legal action  against Goldman?

Here's a thought. In essence, the CRA was a colossal social engineering project. When it was enacted, and for many years thereafter, a high-risk borrower could get a loan only by paying a higher-than-average interest rates. In recent years, however, the CRA and subsequent legislation, court decisions and rabble rousing tactics reduced the reliance on interest rates as compensation for high risk.

During the Bush administration the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low that more and more high-risk borrowers could get loans. As social engineering, the CRA was a success story.

Now, the Obama agenda is largely made up of social engineering projects designed to overcome market forces and make scarce resources available to all, whether they want them or not, whether they can afford them or not. Obamacare, for instance, would force the young and healthy to buy health care insurance even though many would prefer to take their chances and spend their money on something else. One result will be more generational theft, with the young forced to buy insurance they will not need.

Coming soon: cap and trade, which will require consumers to alter preferences and manufacturers to bear increased costs, even though the science behind global warming theory has been thoroughly discredited. In recent years, global warming has become the most powerful social engineering project of our time.

But that project runs counter to market forces, which require least cost solutions. Cap and trade would raise costs, and prices, for many of the things people buy and use. To secure enactment, the Obama administration will have to use thuggish tactics, as it did to pass Obamacare, bribing members of congress to vote against the desires of their constituents.

The SEC's lawsuit against Goldman Sachs may cause opponents to think twice about going up against the White House.

Post climategate, cap and trade not such a hot idea

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., has signed on to legislation that would block the EPA from implementing its proposed greenhouse gas regulations. That’s a pretty clear sign that House Democrats are feeling the heat on climate change.

Skelton, 78, has been in Congress for 33 years and is chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee. But in 2010 he may face a tough re-election fight.

Last June, Skelton voted with his party leadership for a cap-and-trade bill. The measure passed the House 219-212.

According to Politico, Skelton has tried to present his cap-and-trade vote to the folks back home as an effort to protect people from the EPA. The thinking here is that since it would be Congress, not the Obama administration, writing the emissions reduction rules, it would be much better.

Whether or not Skelton’s constituents were buying that, it became irrelevant once the bill stalled in the Senate. That created the possibility that the EPA would simply assert the right to regulate greenhouse gases on its own.

Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce and now Democrats like House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., are pushing legislation to prevent that.

Skelton has signed on to Peterson’s bill, which would reverse the EPA finding that greenhouse gases are a pollutant.

Fool me once, etc.

Three major US companies said Tuesday they were leaving a coalition pushing for action on climate change, dealing a potential fresh blow to landmark legislation to cut carbon emissions.

The companies -- oil groups ConocoPhillips and BP America and equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. -- said they backed efforts for a green economy but felt that proposed laws were unfair to them.

The firms said they would not renew membership in the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of business leaders whom President Barack Obama's Democratic Party often cites to bulwark its case on climate change.

Centrist Dems working on alternative that would kill U.S. exports more slowly than cap and trade

With the Senate cap-and-trade bill on ice for the foreseeable future, a key bloc of Democrats is agitating for a Climate Plan B: an existing energy policy bill they say would put the US on the path to a clean energy future. Make that a road to nowhere. The bill in question lacks any kind of cap on carbon, and contains so many concessions to the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries that one environmental group has dubbed it a "flashback to Bush energy policy."

For months, a gaggle of centrist Democrats has tried to convince the party's leaders that they should abandon their push for a cap-and-trade scheme and instead settle for passing the energy measure that was approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last June. When Republican Scott Brown seized Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat in an upset victory, these Plan B proponents saw their chance. Since then, they've been vigorously arguing that capping carbon is a huge political risk that Democrats can't afford to take in an election year. "They're using uncertainty over the Obama agenda as a whole to reinvigorate their push," said Joe Mendelson, director of global warming policy at the National Wildlife Federation.

The Plan B crowd includes Democratic senators Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln. It could also potentially pick up the Republicans who voted the energy measure out of committee: senators Lisa Murkowski, Sam Brownback, Bob Corker, and Jeff Sessions.

Carbon cap and trade scandal starts in Copenhagen

Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.

Denmark’s quota register, which the Energy Agency within the Climate and Energy Ministry administers, is the largest in the world in terms of personal quota registrations. It is much easier to register here than in other countries, where it can take up to three months to be approved.

Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register.

One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner. This case, in which nine people have been arrested, is being investigated in England.

The market for CO2 trade has exploded in recent years and is worth an estimated 675 billion kroner globally

After a brief run in Copenhagen, the curtain may finally close on a dreary global warming farce

A few days ago, the Democrats in Congress were hell-bent on passing a series of bills that would remake America. Now, they're taking time out to stage political theater in the Senate.

How else can the Senate Environment and Public Works Committe's passage of a cap and trade bill be explained?

Yes, the bill might make a long trip with President Barack Obama to Copenhagen  next month, a token of America's interest in Europe's global warming obsession. Since the Danes are known for their sense of humor, they are likely to be entertained by the committee's passage of a cap and trade memorial.

But the global warming alarmists will not be amused that their investment plays on carbon abatement likely won't pan out.

The curtains eventually will close on a strange period in American history - a period that will be examined not just by political scientists but also psychologists and students of the paranormal.

Incidentally, I once read a book about a playful experiment in which a student of mass psychology stopped at a corner and gazed at the sky - for hours. Eventually, he was surrounded by strangers, who also were gazing at the sky.

The question here is: How did alarmists persuade a large number of Americans, mostly liberals, that a ubiquitous gas, carbon dioxide, which is required by plants to produce oxygen, doubles as a noxious gas that will cause oceans to boil and end life as we know it on earth?

The reason that global warming is ending its run is that China and India, fast-growing societies focused on genuine and immediate issues, have declined to participate in global warming histrionics or the self-flagellation required by carbon abatement.

Because of lower production costs, both are already undercutting U.S. firms on price in international markets. If Congress were to proceed with cap and trade, U.S. firms would have to pay a tax on their carbon emissions, disadvantaging them further and worsening America's indebtedness to foreign treasuries.

If that were to happen, the Democrat-controlled Congress would inadvertently have authored winning campaign themes for Republicans in upcoming elections.

Better to make a brief run in Copenhagen, then take a boat ride in the harbor and hang the bill around the neck of the Little Mermaid. A burial at sea before the water starts boiling.

Why cap and trade resembles self-flagellation

"Ultra-orthodox Jews in heavy beards and heavier black coats pray for hours each day at Jerusalem's Western Wall, even under a sweltering summer sun. Each year, Shiite Muslims whip their backs bloody with chains during the religious holiday of Ashura. Religious vegetarians in Phuket, Thailand, similarly drive knives and skewers through their cheeks.

From an outsider's perspective, religious displays of self-inflicted pain can seem pointlessly barbaric. But many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists believe they have an important function: to facilitate collective action by requiring members to send a costly, hard-to-fake signal of commitment to the group's common creed.

The same impulse, in a rather less impassioned form, seems to animate the Democrats' climate change bill. Coordinating international political action to achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions is a collective action problem of grand, global scale. One way to achieve and maintain such coordinated effort is to detect and punish shirkers. (Governments keep money rolling into their treasuries by threatening tax dodgers with jail.) However, there is no world government with the power to bring wayward nations into line, no world-ranging whip to keep countries pulling in time.

This is the glaring flaw in plans for carbon taxes and cap-and-trade regimes: The world's wealthy nations may now be willing to paddle their boat upstream, but if the developing world won't row along with them, if they insist on a free ride, the boat is going nowhere."

Free markets get little respect from Obama but are killing major planks of his big government platform

Despite the best efforts of the silk stocking radicals who have laid siege to Washington, the market system is stubbornly working its will and is now on the verge of burying two of the Obama administration's most valued objectives.

A government run health care insurer, designed to compete with existing private insurers, has been dropped. The rest of the health care agenda is largely window dressing, which will not discourage the White House from claiming a monumental victory when it is enacted.

What was important was the attempt to place the U.S. government at the table where health care issues are decided, a place that would have allowed government bureaucrats to enlarge again and again their role in health care.

The architect of Russian communism, Vladimir Lenin, regarded control of health care as vital, saying, "Medicine is the keystone of the socialist arch."

For the White House, Canada became a major problem because Americans have been reading and hearing for years about the long waits and bureaucratic procedures that patients encounter. Many seriously ill Canadians come to the United States for treatment at their own expense.

In recent months, opponents have exploited Canada Care's history, as well as recent revelations, in an effective campaign against socialized medicine. American voters, seldom fans of big government, became more and more outspoken in opposition to the Obama plan.

As if on cue, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association said Monday that Canada's health care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig said patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.

"We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Because of Canada Care's obvious liabilities, more than half of Americans say they would prefer no health reform at all to a reform that places government at the table, according to polls.

The free market has spoken. Obama has dropped the government option.

The other top-priority issue, global warming, remains on the table, but is, at best, on life support.

The House passed a cap and trade bill, effectively a tax on energy, before the August recess, but the Senate did not.

Shortly thereafter, China and India essentially blew off suggestions that they join the global warming hysteria and enact controls on carbon emissions.

China and India are developing rapidly and are heavily reliant on international trade. Handicapping their exporters with energy taxes would slow their development. They are tailoring their laws to suit international markets, not international elites or global warming careerists.

In doing so, China and India have checkmated the Obama administration. If the White House resumes its push for cap and trade, and pushes s bill through the Senate, it will be forcing American exporters to raise prices, damaging their ability to compete in international markets.

The recession would deepen. More workers would be unemployed.

Even if the vaunted $787 billion stimulus were to begin to work, cap and trade likely would halt any improvement.

Then, the Bush recession would be wholly owned by the White House.

Cap and trade is, for all practical purposes, dead.

Climate models that predict future temps "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in"

"At the heart of the IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) work are computer models used to simulate global climate and weather. Any TV weatherman will tell you that predicting next week's local weather is an iffy proposition even with the latest first-alert-Doppler-whiz-bang-Vipir radars.

The IPCC's ever-more-confident and apocalyptic warnings rest on the near-impossible task of simulating with computers climate conditions for the whole planet and not for next week but for 50 to 100 years in the future. This, while science still struggles to explain exactly how clouds work.

World-renowned mathematician Freeman Dyson, who in his early years worked alongside Einstein and is now professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, had this to say about climate models: "The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/07/28/a_primer_on_cap_and_trade_97329.html

Cap and trade, from feel good remedy to noose

One month after Democrats ramrodded cap and trade through the House, the measure is beginning to look like a noose around the necks of those who voted for it.

The list includes 211 Democrats and 8 Republicans.

The purpose of the bill was to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere, pleasing global warming alarmists who had ignored the inconvenient truth that global warming vanished a decade ago.

Then, in short order, two more inconvenient truths materialized: China, a huge and rapidly growing industrial economy, declined to participate in either global warming hysteria or the remedies, and India soon followed suit.

This means that, even if the U.S. drops cap and trade, which is unlikely, China and India will continue to undercut American producers in international markets while their economies continue to outpace ours.

That's the rosy scenario.

If the administration abandons cap and trade, it will look weak and irresolute on an issue that the Democrats created and nurtured.

The third scenario is the hellish one. It is also the one that seems most likely to materialize. Determined to stick with his agenda, Obama continues to pursue cap and trade in the Senate.

In that event, Obama will be demonstrating a willingness to cripple U.S. companies in international markets, where their products would bear the added cost of carbon control and become even less competetive on price.

The net gain for air quality? zero.

National atmospheres are not stovepipes. Seal flatulence in Greenland will eventually find its way to Florida. Air sullied by coal dust from new power plants in China will eventually make its way to Camp David.

Cleansing the air over one's own country, at great expense, while other countries continue to pollute, is a fool's errand.

The three-alarm president must now pay the price of his alarmism. Two hundred and nineteen members of the House may share the experience.

Fans of markets say no to Obama's socialist vision

President-for-the-time being Barack Obama has now slandered doctors and cops while making it perfectly clear that he does not give a damn about the fundamental principles that have guided the United States for 233 years - through wars, economic turmoil, numerous transfers of power, and countless generations of new technology.

What matters to Obama is his vision of how things should be. That the founders carefully constructed a system through which voters and consumers would determine how things should be does not seem to interest him.

While pursuing the "transformation" of America that he threatened during his campaign, Obama mentions what has been only to point out how deeply flawed it all is.

Now, six months into his presidency Obama's transformational projects are all in trouble as more and more rank and file citizens, as well as politicians of various persuasions, are joining the campaign to stop him in his tracks.

*His bid to revamp health care, a step toward an eventual takeover of the health care industry by government, has been delayed at least until fall. Without drastic surgery, it probably will die. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans would celebrate the death.

*His cap and trade bill, designed to curtail global warming during a period of global cooling, while also raising energy costs in the United States, has become laughable now that China has publicly rejected American suggestions that it join the madness.

If Obama resumes his campaign for cap and trade, he will be supporting a crippling of American businesses in international markets while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions. Those emissions might even rise, given China's plans to add a number of new coal burning power plants to its industrial base.

If Obama's health care overhaul and cap and trade bills both go down, so will his bid to socialize the American economy.

But he'll still gain something from the experience. He'll have new fodder for the thing that seems to animate him most, grievance politics. Maybe he'll accuse all of us of behaving "stupidly."

Ohio's Kaptur got $3.5 billion in pork on cap-trade

"When House Democratic leaders were rounding up votes Friday for the massive climate-change bill, they paid special attention to their colleagues from Ohio who remained stubbornly undecided.

They finally secured the vote of one Ohioan, veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, the old-fashioned way. They gave her what she wanted - a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state's Bonneville Power Administration, stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, included the Kaptur project in a 310-page amendment to the legislation unveiled at 3 a.m. Friday, just hours before the bill was to be debated on the House floor. The amendment was packed with other vote-getting provisions, both large and small, that had been sought by dozens of wavering Democrats. "

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/01/sweetener-helped-sway-vote-on-house-climate-bill/

Cap and trade bill bets on long-shots that lost

"The Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House on Friday by a 219-212 margin will punitively tax energy sources that contribute 90% of current U.S. electricity (or 71% if you want to leave out nuclear). The taxes will be used to subsidize the 10% renewable contributors (but really just 3% after you leave out hydro).

In other words, Waxman-Markey is betting the future of U.S. electricity production on sources that now contribute 3% or supply 10 million Americans with electricity. That's enough juice for the people in Waxman's Los Angeles County. Or, if you prefer, for Nancy Pelosi's metro San Francisco plus Markey's metro Boston.

Well, what about electricity for the other 295 million? You can't get there from here with Waxman-Markey. At very best, solar, wind and cellulosic ethanol will make 20% contributions by 2025. The smart money would bet on 10%."

http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2009/06/waxmanmarkey-flunks-math.html

One writer has read cap and trade bill, loathes it

"The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty. Its net effect on short- to medium-term carbon emissions will be small to none. This is by design: a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers. Congress cannot contemplate those effects. So the Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself.

It proposes safety valves that will ease the cap if it threatens to have a noticeable effect on energy prices. It relies heavily on offsets – theoretical carbon reductions bought from other countries or other industries – so that big US emitters will not need to try so hard. It gives emission permits away, and tells utilities to rebate the windfall to consumers, so their electricity bills do not go up. It creates a vastly complicated apparatus, a playground for special interests and rent-seekers, a minefield of unintended consequences – and the bottom line for all that is business as usual."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/706bbcde-640d-11de-a818-00144feabdc0.html