THE DEMOCRATS ARE FRACKED
It's not just that the Dems are going to lose the White House in November. Control of the Oval Office regularly flips back and forth between them and the Pubs over the years. It's not just that the Dems are going to lose big ("rrreally big, rrreally big" as Ed Sullivan would say) in November. Zero will be lucky to carry 10 states in a Romney Landslide, while the Pubs will take the Senate and gain seats in the House. Yet the Reagan Landslides of 1980/1984 were far greater than anything Romney can hope for - and the Dems were back in the White House saddle four years after the Gipper. No, what is going on is much - as in much - bigger than mere electoral loss. What the Dems are going to lose in November is about as big as it gets. They are going to lose their raison d'être - their "reason to be," the basic justification for their existence. This is why they are panicking, why most everything they do now is doltish, for panic makes you stupid. This is why Zero is making moves of ever-increasing desperation - Amnesty EO's, Executive Privilege merely to protect his corrupt AG. This is why the Moonbat Media is in a state of foaming hysteria. For all of them, their fear and fury is existential.
AMERICA NO LONGER HAS A PRESIDENT
The clearest indication yet he thinks of himself more as the Emperor Barack I than as the president of a constitutional republic came last week (6/15) when Mr. Obama declared he would no longer enforce immigration law for illegals under age 30. The president does not have the right to decide which laws he'll enforce and which he'll ignore, Mr. Obama acknowledged when he spoke at a Univision forum in March of last year. "The notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case," Mr. Obama said then. "There are laws on the books that Congress has passed... The executive branch's job is to enforce and implement those laws." But desperate people do desperate things. Mr. Obama's imperial decree came a day after his much ballyhooed speech on the economy bombed, two weeks after Republican Gov. Scott Walker won a smashing victory in the recall election in Wisconsin. By arrogating to himself a power the Constitution gave to Congress, Mr. Obama hopes to accomplish three things:
PRESIDENT COVERUP
There must be something really, really bad in the documents his attorney general is trying to conceal from Congress. If not, President Barack Hussein Obama has lost his mind. With the honorable exceptions of Sharyl Atkisson of CBS and Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, the major media have ignored for more than a year one of the biggest scandals in American history. Now that the president has claimed executive privilege, they can ignore it no longer. Since there's been so little reporting of it, most Americans are learning of the scandal for the first time. Here's a recap: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let more than 2,000 deadly weapons -- including .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles -- "walk" across the border to Mexican drug cartels in an operation known by the code name "Fast and Furious." Another code name for the operation was "Gunwalker." Its purpose, Justice said, was to trace the guns from the straw buyers to cartel bigwigs, so they could be arrested. This wasn't true, three ATF whistleblowers told the House Oversight Committee last July, because no effort was made to trace the guns once they crossed the border, and Mexican authorities hadn't been informed of the operation.
THE LOGISTICS OF CRUDE
Last week in Part 1 of this series, The Dynamics of Crude, we discussed refineries and products. Now we move to Logistics of Crude Oil and Refinery Products. Although Ayn Rand's 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged" portrayed rail as important, especially for Wyatt's Refinery, rail was on its way out by the end of WWII. Today's major transportation methods are via pipeline and water (barge & ship). The reason is quite simple: loading and receiving infrastructure. Here is a great description of both crude oil and refined product pipelines from 2001: How Pipelines Make the Oil Market Work. I have read lots of supposedly learned pundits wailing away how Warren Buffett and BNSF Railroad are going transport all that Canadian crude oil when Obama announced that he was blocking the Keystone XL's construction. This is impossibly dumb -so dumb that Jack Wheeler is convinced it isn't dumb at all, that it's a crony capitalist payoff to Buffett for his supporting Zero. Buffett bought BNSF for $34 billion in 2009, counting on graft from Zero to provide his ROI.
SERVANTS, NOT CHARLATANS
Barack Hussein Obama has been loudly proclaiming that he is not responsible as president for the big increase in spending because it was already "baked in the cake." He could have been more accurate by noting that under the Constitution, Congress is responsible for spending. In fact, Congress -- both Democrats and Republicans -- has been by nearly unanimous votes rejecting his proposed budgets, but only because they were not willing to spend as much as he was. As can be seen in the table below, the big surge in spending began after the Democrats took control of Congress in the 2006 election. Members of the new Congress took office in January 2007, when the fiscal year was already a quarter complete. The first budget the new Congress was responsible for was the 2008 budget. When Mr. Obama was a member of Congress, he voted for the big increases in spending. He also was the one who proposed, and got, a nearly trillion-dollar increase in spending as part of his "stimulus" program in early 2009 after he took office as president. So, for the president to argue that he is not at all responsible for the big increase in spending is, to put it politely, a bit much.
IT’S OBAMA’S CRONY SECTOR THAT’S DOING FINE
When President Barack Hussein Obama said "the private sector is doing fine," perhaps it's because he thinks the private sector consists chiefly of the crony capitalist fat cats he sees at his megabuck fundraisers. People who shell out $40,000 per plate -- as did those who attended the dinner at actor George Clooney's home in Los Angeles last month -- obviously are doing "fine." Let's call them the crony sector, not the private sector. "In the first 12 days of June, Obama has attended 21 fundraising events," ABC News reported Tuesday (6/12). "He has now attended 163 re-election fundraisers for his campaign and the Democrat Party." That's more than the last four presidents put together (three of whom served two full terms).
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/15/12
It was yet another lousy week for Zero, but to tell the truth, it's getting reeeeaaallly boring talking about this guy. I am so excruciatingly bored with him and his grimacing wife and his moonbat supporters and his groveling media sycophants and his union thugs and his crony business-shysters and his airhead celebrities. So let's get outta here and go somewhere else. How about France? That should be fun - for it's simply awesome to witness the French immolate themselves. When I was growing up, there were two Frances. One was that embodied by Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972) - completely captivating, oozing French charm and savoir-faire, impossible not to like. Here's a link to him singing Thank Heaven For Little Girls in Gigi (1958). The other France was embodied by Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) - completely pompous, oozing arrogance and pretentiousness, utterly ungrateful to America for saving his country in World Wars I and II, yearning for the days of French gloire (glory) centuries ago and pretending they still existed. De Gaulle's France is the only one left now, still pompous, still the arrogant beggar, with a hopelessly incompetent champagne socialist running the place.
WILL ROMNEY BE OUR FDR?
If you want to trace back all America's woes caused by the pathologies of liberalism to their original source, you'd focus on the inception of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. True, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism places the blame earlier, on "America's first fascist presidency," that of Woodrow Wilson. But much of Wilson's assault on our Constitutional freedoms didn't last, and was reversed by his successors, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, resulting in the debacle of Herbert Hoover, the Dems gaining the House in 1930 (first time since 1916), and the complete entrenchment of the Dems at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in 1932. FDR became America's first president-for-life (he finally died in office in 1945), while the Dems held a monopoly of power in the House for the next 62 years (with two irrelevant interregnums, 1946-48 and 1952-54; the Pubs finally got the House back, 1994-2006). Yet the FDR/Dem victory of 1932 was far, far more than an electoral victory of one political party over the other. It was transformational, so deeply altering the fundamental relationship of Americans to their government and to their Constitution that the alteration lasts to this day - and is now, in fact deeper than ever. For conservatives, FDR's transformation was and remains disastrous for America's freedom, America's culture, and the integrity of America's Constitution. Today, as we reach the final economic consequences of FDR's transformation, it has proved to be equally disastrous for America's prosperity. What we need is a president who can not only reverse FDR, but who can generate a transformation of his own, altering the relationship of Americans to their government that restores their freedom, their culture, their prosperity, and their Constitution. We need our own FDR. The question is: will Mitt Romney be that president?
DO HUMAN BEINGS HAVE EXPIRATION DATES?
After celebrating her 60th year on the throne in style this past week, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II can now look forward to breaking some more records. She is already, at 86, Britain's oldest monarch (were she to die now, her son would immediately be the 12th oldest). On Sept. 10, 2015, she would pass Queen Victoria to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history. To beat Louis XIV (who succeeded to the throne at the age of 4) for the longest reign in European history, she would have to live to 98. Elizabeth II is still going strong, but the maximum human lifespan isn't rising at anything like the rate of average life expectancy, which is rushing upward globally at the rate of about three months a year, mainly because of progress against premature mortality. Indeed, we may already have hit some kind of limit for maximum lifespan-perhaps because natural selection, with its strict focus on reproductive success, has no particular need to preserve genes that would keep us going to 150.
CENTRAL BANKS CAN CREATE MONEY, BUT ONLY THE PRIVATE SECTOR CREATES WEALTH
Assume you are a skilled heart surgeon and your patient needs a new heart valve, but you were given a spoon rather than a scalpel to cut open a chest. Relying on the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB) to cure the lack of job growth is going to be no more effective than giving a heart surgeon a spoon. Central banks, such as the Fed and ECB, can cause major economic problems by printing too much or too little money. They do not cause fiscal problems - too much taxing and spending - nor can they cure them. Last week, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke came close to acknowledging what many already know - that the Fed can do little at this point: "To the fullest extent possible, federal tax and spending policies should increase incentives to work and save, encourage investments in workforce skills, stimulate private capital formation, promote research and development, and provide necessary public infrastructure," he said. ECB Chairman Mario Draghi has basically said the same thing to the political leaders of the eurozone countries. The political class, to cover its own irresponsibility, is trying to dump the economic crisis on the central banks.