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Archive for July, 2012
July 31st, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Government Chasing Doctors Out of Practice
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Over the weekend a New York Times profile of my (and Ashton’s) hometown of Riverside, California sounded the alarm over the crisis-level shortfalls of doctors practicing in America. For a publication as married to do-gooder liberalism as the Times, it’s tone was surprisingly fatalistic:

The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000.

Health experts, including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans. It typically takes a decade to train a doctor.

Well, there is at least one thing the feds could do: get out of the way. A helpful explainer from the Heartland Institute shows how badly government distorts the market for doctors:

[The Heritage Foundation’s Kathryn] Nix points out that when Congress passed the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, it included a cap on the number of residency positions Medicare is allowed to fund. The step wasn’t controversial at the time, and in fact it had the support of multiple organizations, since concerns abounded at the time that the United States had an oversupply of physicians.

Since then, the number of residency positions funded by Medicare has remained unchanged, capped at 1996 levels despite exploding population growth and increased demand. Groups such as the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association (AMA) have since changed positions and now support increasing the 1996 cap or eliminating it entirely.

“The biggest concern is that the demand is going up as the population ages,” Nix continued. We’re going to have more people on Medicare, elderly who need more medical attention. The new health care law will exacerbate the problem, first of all by increasing and subsidizing demand, but several of the provisions of the new law will discourage physicians from staying in the profession and will discourage young people from joining it.”

An utterly avoidable human tragedy, bred by ignorance. Who could’ve anticipated that capping supply would lead to shortages? Anyone who’s ever cracked a basic economics textbook, that’s who. We can argue over the proper methods for restructuring Medicare, but it should be obvious that “restrict the number of doctors and leave everything else the same” isn’t going to cut it.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As has been widely noted, Obamacare’s virtually indestructible Independent Payment Advisory Board has the potential to morph into precisely the kind of “death panel” Sarah Palin warned about.

Bureaucratic incompetence has long been a bugbear of conservatives. But the day is soon arriving when the bean counters will go from costing money to costing lives.

July 31st, 2012 at 9:43 am
Ramirez Cartoon: Obamanomics
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

July 30th, 2012 at 5:43 pm
DoJ Official Gave False Testimony in Black Panther Case

That headline seems to be the upshot of a little-noticed July 23 ruling by federal judge Reggie Walton — confirming what many of us have been saying and writing for well over two years now. The official in question is longtime trouble-making Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez. Hans von Spakovsky explains.

At a hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on May 14, 2010, Perez was asked by Commissioner Peter Kirsanow whether “any political leadership [was] involved in the decision not to pursue this particular case?” Perez’s answer, on page 79 of the transcript of that hearing is an uncategorical “No.” When the statements of Perez are compared to the documents that Judicial Watch forced DOJ to release in the FOIA lawsuit, Judge Walton was polite when he said they are contradictory and “cast doubt on the accuracy” of Perez’s account.

A less diplomatic judge might have said that Perez testified falsely in his hearing testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights. In other words, he may have committed perjury if he knew his statements were false when uttered.

The Commission on Civil Rights repeatedly asked Attorney General Holder to appoint a special counsel to investigate the handling of the NPBB case by the Department and the refusal of Perez to comply with lawful documents requests and subpoenas served on DOJ by the Commission. When will the Attorney General do so, and when will he ask for an investigation of this possible perjury by Perez?

This case has been a travesty all along — and all along, the Department of Justice has been giving false stories about what happened. There will be lots more to say about this in the days ahead.

July 30th, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Dismantling ObamaCare

Kenneth Blackwell and Ken Klukowski have a superb column out today on how states can help block ObamaCare as a whole by refusing to set up state insurance “exchanges.”

Key passage:

Third, if employers with 50+ employees do not provide federally-approved healthcare, ObamaCare imposes a $2,000 penalty per employee, per year. (Minimum penalty $100,000.) However, that penalty is triggered when those employees receive tax subsidies from a state-based exchange.

Since HHS-run exchanges have no subsidies, for states refuseing to create exchanges, no employer in that state will be subject to that penalty.

July 30th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
California’s Surging Exports … of People
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We’ve made a bit of a cottage industry here at CFIF of chronicling the downfall of California, a truly great state where metastasizing liberalism threatens to kill its host. Over the weekend, the Daily Caller’s Angelica Malik put the results into sharp relief:

The California Manufacturing and Technology Association found in a recent study that 82 percent of companies surveyed did not consider California when expanding or opening a new facility.

The study also noted that companies looking to expand their operations favored states with proximity to their customers, generous tax incentives, low cost labor, proximity to suppliers and a comprehensible and a favorable tax system.

California ranked last or bottom tier in all of those categories.

This comes on top of the recent news that the Golden State ranked last in CEO magazine’s ratings of state business climates for the eighth straight year.

The upshot: billions in lost revenues, millions in lost citizens, and hundreds of fleeing businesses (with scores more downsizing or dismissing the prospect of heading to California in the first place).

There’s little here in the way of silver linings, except for this: there’s a fair bit of education here for the rest of the nation. If the Lilliputians of liberalism can tie down even mighty California, they can wreak untold havoc anywhere. No one is immune. It’s just a shame that it requires such a significant casualty to convey this point.

July 30th, 2012 at 11:21 am
Prophylactic Against Mandated Contraceptives and Abortifacients

I’m up at FoxNews.com today.

As President Obama’s mandated insurance coverage of sterilization, contraception, and abortion-inducing drugs takes effect on August 1 for ordinary businesses, the Health and Human Services mandate’s ultimate survival suddenly appears blessedly jeopardized.

Federal district Judge John J. Kane of Colorado on Friday issued a temporary injunction blocking the mandate from being applied to Hercules Industries, a family-owned manufacturer of air-conditioning products….

Citing precedent, Kane wrote that the weakness of the mandate’s legal position looks “serious, substantial, difficult and doubtful” based on statutory grounds alone, without even considering the significant constitutional challenges raised by Hercules. As Kane summed it up, the government’s stance amounted to an assertion that “a for-profit, secular employer… cannot engage in an exercise of religion.” This is poppycock – and dangerous poppycock at that. It amounts to a claim that an individual employer, or a closely-held family corporation, does not enjoy the right to religious exercise unless those rights are channeled through a church in a formal worship setting….

The ramifications of this decision could be enormous. If even a secular entity enjoys a “likelihood of success” on the merits of the challenge to Obama’s sweeping edict, then the dozens of suits filed by explicitly faith-related institutions probably enjoy a particularly strong likelihood of victory in court….

This could be very, very important for small businesses nationwide.

July 27th, 2012 at 3:33 pm
Jonathan Chait is Vermin

Please forgive me if that headline is too strong. But I’ve always thought so, and now I know. Chait is actually suggesting that racism is driving the negative reaction to Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark. Give me a break. What a skunk this guy is. The last refuge of a scared, cheap-shot, leftist scoundrel is to yell “Racism” in a clouded, weirder way than ever attempted before. As in:

Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. …The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans….The entire key to the rise of the Republican Party from the mid-sixties through the nineties was that white Americans came to see the Democrats as taking money from the hard-working white middle class and giving it to a lazy black underclass. Reactivating that frame is still the most mortal threat to the Democrats and to Obama. …

What a steaming load of diseased dung this is. The time has come to call this “racism” wolf cry what it really is: the Left’s version of McCarthyism. As with the original, the game is to accuse adversaries of something awful, and awfully untrue, purely for political effect, to cause a political wound. (The difference is that at least McCarthy had some small basis for his vilely overstated accusations, as the Venona documents have since shown; this cry of racism, here as in so many of the Left’s uses of it in recent years, has not even a shred of truth to it.)

I associate myself with the remarks of John Nolte at Breitbart, who called Chait’s dung heap “equal parts hilarious, maddening, unAmerican, and just plain pathetic.”

The reason Barack Obama’s outlook is alien to the American tradition is not because he is black; it is because he was mentored by a Communist, raised by leftists, inculcated with foreign values in Indonesia, befriended (and willing befriending of) some of the vilest radicals and terrorists on American soil, studied and emulated the evil Saul Alinksy, and consciously chose (by his own testimony in his crafted, semi-fictionalized “autobiography”) the persona of a man disaffected from and antagonistic to many of the values historically adopted and admired by most Americans.

He says we cling to guns and religion as a way to deal with our own bitterness; he says we didn’t build our own businesses (or the roads and such paid for by taxes on the profits from our own labors); he says Americans have been arrogant and dismissive of Europe and that we are “still struggling” with the legacy of Jim Crow; he runs roughshod repeatedly over religious liberties; and again and again, he shows disdain for the actual workings of the free market that is the means of our prosperity.

I don’t care if it is his “white” half or his “black” half that is demonstrating these attitudes. When the pasty white Ted Kennedy showed some of the same tendencies, we conservatives opposed him just as fiercely. Race has nothing to do with it. But vicious McCarthyism of the Left, such as that exhibited by Chait, will target anybody who exposes hard truths about their own left side of the political debate.

But just as blackness is no reason to attack Barack Obama, so is it also no defense for his supporters to use as a crutch every time he sticks his feet in his mouth. Black feet taste no worse than white feet. But very few feet are tasty dishes — and when both of somebody’s feet are left feet, the likelihood is for stumbles of the sort that cause those feet to end up in one’s mouth.

July 27th, 2012 at 1:45 pm
McDonnell Has Gone Down My List

Ashton, I don’t see McDonnell happening. He wouldn’t be an awful choice, but he is preternaturally cautious, and he offers some targets for Demo cheap shots — which, while cheap, my still be effective.

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July 27th, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Virginia’s Bob McDonnell as Romney’s VP?

The Washington Times quotes some GOP operatives as saying the culturally conservative Virginia governor could provide the link to the conservative base Romney needs while not upstaging the presidential candidate on the stump (an apparent consideration given the rhetorical abilities of other possibilities Chris Christie and Marco Rubio).

I don’t know much about McDonnell’s tenure as governor or his political chops, and the Times article may just be a puff piece doing McDonnell a favor by keeping his name in the mix and on Drudge Report where I first saw the article.

But since Quin has weighed in on McDonnell as a possible vice presidential candidate – sort of – I wonder what he thinks about the potential for a Romney-McDonnell ticket.

Quin, thoughts?

July 27th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
UN Gun Treaty Treats Dictatorships and Democracies Equally

Last week my column discussed the disastrous legal consequences likely to emerge from the ongoing negotiations to create the Arms Transfer Treaty at the United Nations.

Fox News reports that with the conference coming to a close, a draft text has been released that has everyone not working for a dictatorial regime hopping mad:

While critics say U.S. gun owners and interests would be left exposed by the draft, it has drawn criticism on other fronts. Activists on the political left say it is a gift to illicit gunrunners around the world, and the only group that seems to like it is the rogue states leading talks, say critics.

“The talks … are now being dominated by skeptical governments including Iran, Syria and Cuba, intent on having a weak treaty, or no treaty at all,” Control Arms, a global movement that says illicit gunrunning is fueling conflict, poverty and serious human rights violations worldwide, said in a statement. Other activists named North Korea, Egypt and Algeria as additional spoilers of the UN’s stated aims for the treaty: to keep conventional weapons out of the hands of rogue regimes, terrorists and criminals.

Heritage expert Ted Bromund says it’s no surprise why the draft text of the ATT treaty is benefiting bad actors while stymieing liberals’ good intentions:

Any conceivable ATT, simply because it is being negotiated through the U.N., will be based on recognizing that all members of the U.N. are equal and sovereign states and thus have equal rights. The inevitable result of this, in the context of the ATT, will be a treaty stating that Iran and Venezuela have the same rights to buy, sell, and transfer weapons as do the U.S. and Japan. The U.N. already contains far too many dictatorships; negotiating a treaty that enshrines their equality of status in the realm of arms transfers is inherently a bad and dangerous idea.

As I noted in my column, the push for the ATT at the UN arose because gun control groups could not get legislation they favored passed in the United States Congress.  But instead of getting the hint that the political marketplace was unreceptive to their ideas, gun controllers threw in their lot with a body that treats every government the same, even those willing to turn a gun control treaty into a mechanism that oppresses citizens at home and abroad.

It will be a form of perverse justice that when the ATT becomes an international law protecting Iran and Venezuela’s ability to kill their own people and arm other dictatorships like Syria that the constituency most responsible for enshrining those rights will be gun control groups.

July 27th, 2012 at 10:42 am
This Week’s Liberty Update
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Center For Individual Freedom - Liberty Update

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Hillyer:  Obama’s Welfare Abuses: From Worse to Worst
Senik:  Liberals’ Tyranny of Tolerance
Lee:  Correcting Some “Assault Weapon” Myths
Ellis:  USDA’s Food Stamp Bullying Confirms Obama’s Dependency Agenda
Jester’s Courtroom:  Bieber Fever Leads to Lawsuit

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

July 26th, 2012 at 5:18 pm
Gail Collins: Moron
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I have a working theory to explain the existence of pundits like the New York Times’ Gail Collins, self-parodists who find themselves incapable of escaping the intellectual shallows of liberalism: they must all be secretly financed by a group of wealthy conservatives who regard providing endless fodder for bloggers on the right to be a form of public service.

In Collins’ newest dispatch from the outskirts of sentience, she travels to Williston, North Dakota, a sort of 21st century boomtown where unemployment hovers around one percent thanks to the huge oil reserves now accessible from the Bakken formation.

The reality of the economic dynamism in Williston is so painfully clear that Collins is forced to present it in a fairly positive light, though that doesn’t keep her from some of the reflexive sneering of a Manhattan imperialist (she sniffs that there’s a Wal-Mart instead of an adequate mall and that “The most ambitious restaurants would be classified under the heading of ‘casual dining.’).

Because Williston’s success is fueled by conventional (read: useable) energy, however, the gravitational pull of Collins’ liberalism kicks in when, in the second half of the article, she sets out to expose the unseemly side of Williston’s growth. The results are pathetic.

First, Collins takes a swing at fracking so half-hearted that she doesn’t even seem to have bothered indulging her reflexive impulse to crib some talking points from a Huffington Post op-ed by Alec Baldwin (lest you think I’m joking, it’s here).  Her devastating critique includes the fact that the process “uses a lot of water” and makes the town dustier. Well.

Where she really goes off the rails, however, is in her attempt to portray the local economy as a thing of horror:

… Right now … there’s no place to live. Honestly, no place. To house its teachers, the school district has already purchased two apartment buildings, which have long since been filled even though the residents are all required to share their homes with another teacher. Superintendent Viola LaFontaine has taken to the radio airwaves, urging citizens to come up with places for the new faculty to stay.

“We’ve been getting good applicants,” LaFontaine said. “But they’ll make $31,500. When they find out an apartment is $2-3,000 a month, they say they can’t pay that.”

Yes! Housing costs in Williston, N.D., are approaching those in New York City. Many of the oil workers stash their families back wherever they came from, and live in “man camps,” some of which resemble giant stretches of storage units.

If the place you love can’t quite climb out of the recession, think of this as consolation. At least you’re not living in a man camp and waiting half an hour in line for a Big Mac.

Ms. Collins, meet supply and demand. Supply and demand, meet Ms. Collins.

What our fearless columnist is describing is the typical trajectory of boomtowns. The sudden surge of demand sends prices skyrocketing. But if her view extended beyond the tip of her nose, Collins might realize that this is the predicate for a second round of employment growth and a general lowering of prices. When demand is so high that a remote region of North Dakota can charge rents rivaling those of the beating heart of New York City, it’s an open invitation for developers to make their way to Williston, relieve the housing shortfall, and get rich in the process. Ditto the overcrowded restaurants. That means new jobs created. And the increased supply means lowered prices.

One final note: it’s telling that teachers are Collins’ go-to example. Reading her column, one could reasonably wonder how Williston’s housing stock could be both (a) so expensive that it’s prohibitive for many potential tenants and (b) filled to the gills. The answer: private-sector workers are making more than enough to meet the demands of the city’s rent. Only in the public sector, where wages are set by government diktat instead of the market, are crucial employees priced out of a place to live. That’s a real shame for the teachers of North Dakota. If the school system was privatized, they’d all be getting rich now too.

July 26th, 2012 at 3:44 pm
HHS Mandate Hurts Businesses

The infamous HHS mandate, forcing employers to provide insurance covering sterilization and abortifacient drugs, kicks in on Tuesday. Most of the attention has focused on church-based organizations fighting this mandate, but private businesses are affected too. Badly affected.

Here’s one.

Hercules owners William Newland, Paul Newland, James Newland, and Christine Ketterhagen, and its vice-president, Andrew Newland, are practicing and believing Catholics. They desire to run the company, an HVAC manufacturer, in a manner that reflects their sincerely held religious beliefs, including their belief that God requires respect for the sanctity of human life. Their lawsuit, Newland v. Sebelius, is in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

Here’s more on the case at this link.

July 25th, 2012 at 5:55 pm
REINS Act Gets New Champion

The important reform bill, the Regulations of the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, is getting new champion with the retirement of Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY).

From an emailed press release announcing the change:

“Todd Young is one of the hardest-working and most diligent new members of Congress.  He has enthusiastically championed the REINS Act at home and in Washington,” said Congressman Davis.  “Congress has excessively delegated its constitutional responsibility for making the law of the land to unelected bureaucrats for too long.  The REINS Act is one of the most important structural reforms to restore this accountability.  I am confident that Congressman Young will be a tireless champion for the REINS Act going forward.”

Calling Young “tireless” is a good word choice.  According to the Congressman’s official bio, he put himself through night school to get an MBA from the University of Chicago and a law degree from the University of Indiana.  Prior to that, he enlisted in the Navy en route to securing an appointment to that branch’s academy.

Young will need that doggedness to pass the REINS ACT into law.

Currently, there is no congressional oversight of bureaucratic “major rules” costing the economy $100 million a year or more in compliance costs.  The REINS Act would change that by requiring administrative agencies to submit proposed major rules to Congress for an up-or-down vote in both chambers before becoming law.  The aim is to stop rogue agencies like EPA or HHS from legislating through rulemaking what they can’t get Congress to pass through the normal lawmaking process.

What are Young’s prospects?  This year, Rep. Davis convinced the GOP-dominated House to pass the bill, but like every House reform, the REINS Act died from inaction in the Democratic Senate.  But if after the November elections the GOP can hold the House and gain the Senate with conservative reformers – or Republican incumbents scared straight by conservative primary challengers – then expect to see the REINS Act make great strides towards passage.

Our constitutional system needs Congress to get back in the game on regulation, if for no other reason than to reestablish accountability between the laws that govern us and the people we elect to pass them.

Good on Davis for picking Young to succeed him.  Now voters in the several states need to send another crop of conservative reformers to the Senate to help him out.

July 25th, 2012 at 11:13 am
A New Guess on the Vice Presidency

My psychic antenna are picking up, more and more, the sense that Mitt Romney will choose Bobby Jindal as his running mate. I like that choice very much, although I still don’t understand why there is no evidence that Romney has even considered Jon Kyl of Arizona — who, according to my latest analysis of the race, would actually be a superb political choice as well as excellent substantively.

As of now, I am officially retracting my earlier prediction (not suggestion, but prediction) that Chris Christie would be the choice. The campaign just doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.

If I were to lay odds on the likelihood of each potential candidate being chosen, it would be something like this:

Chances of a Jindal pick: 30%

Tim Pawlenty  20%

Paul Ryan  18%

Rob Portman 16%

Kelly Ayotte 10%

Jon Kyl 2%

Rick Santorum 1%

Marco Rubio 1 %

Chris Christie 1 %

John Thune 1/2%

Condoleezza Rice 1/2%

July 25th, 2012 at 9:49 am
Ramirez Cartoon: White House Leaks
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

July 24th, 2012 at 7:04 pm
An Answer to the Transparency Question

Victor Davis Hanson makes a modest proposal:

So how much do we wish to detour from the issues to know about the background of either candidate Romney or incumbent Obama? Some sort of compromise seems in order. If transparency is really what the public demands, and if these issues distract attention from a necessary debate over the economy, then in bipartisan fashion let us now demand full disclosure from both candidates: ten years of income tax returns from each, full and complete access for journalists to all known medical records of each, and complete release of all undergraduate and graduate grades, test scores, and other records.

Romney may not wish to release a decade’s worth of careful tax planning and investment that might reveal him to be more concerned about making money and keeping most of it than about outsourcing or foreign bank accounts. Obama may likewise be embarrassed over a prior undisclosed ailment, or a relatively unimpressive Occidental or Columbia record that would belie his media reputation as the “smartest” man ever to serve as president in the nation’s history. Perhaps for much of August we might hear that Romney had a gargantuan Swiss bank account, or more bankers in the Caribbean than we had surmised. Maybe Obama smoked more marijuana than he has admitted to or received lots of Cs and even some Ds in International Relations — grades that would make it almost impossible for most students to get into Harvard Law School.

I predict that if they do release their records, each man reinforces the central objection to his candidacy: Mitt gets hit for his money; Obama for his record.

July 24th, 2012 at 6:32 pm
Mike Bloomberg: Proper Response to Lawlessness is More Lawlessness
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There’s been a predictably breathless reaction from America’s politicians to last week’s horrific movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. As I noted yesterday at Ricochet, the vast majority of it is for naught, as the crucial variables that allowed the attack to play out were beyond the ken of public policy. But the benchmark for abject stupidity was easily set by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the following to CNN’s Piers Morgan last night while advocating for stricter gun control:

“I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say we’re going to go on strike,” Bloomberg told the “Piers Morgan Tonight” host. “We’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.”

Bloomberg is now, understandably, trying to walk back his comments with the same rationale that Barack Obama is currently employing — “I didn’t mean the words that actually came out of my mouth.”

Put aside the tyrannical instincts of an executive who sees withholding the provision of public safety as a legitimate bargaining chip. Does Bloomberg not realize that the American people, who don’t share his reflexive passivity, would only further arm themselves in the face of a government intent on abdicating one of its foundational roles? Here (as, alas, virtually everywhere) Bloomberg would do well to read his Calvin Coolidge, reflecting especially on Silent Cal’s reaction to the 1919 Boston police strike, where his response was — as was his wont — as clear as it was concise:

There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.

Not even when you’re just trying to drive home how much smarter you are than everybody else, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, we hate it for you.

July 24th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
Obama Dismantles LBJ’s “Great Society” as Poverty Rises to 1965 Levels
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Well, never let it be said that Obama hasn’t achieved anything other than a record number of golf outings and fundraisers.  He has dismantled LBJ’s “Great Society,” as poverty approaches levels not seen since 1965:

The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.”

We recall Obama promising to cut the deficit in half by the end of his “first term,” to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, to adhere to public campaign finance limits, to not raise taxes on anyone earning under $250,000 “by one dime” and that unemployment would never reach 8% under his “stimulus,” but never this.

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July 24th, 2012 at 1:44 pm
The Reality of Obama’s ‘All of the Above’ Energy Strategy
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An instructive study in the contrast between the president’s rhetoric and results.

Rhetoric:

“We can’t have an energy strategy for the last century that traps us in the past. We need an energy strategy for the future – an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy.” — President Obama, March 15, 2012

Results:

Pennsylvania’s PBS Coals Inc. and the affiliated RoxCoal Inc. announced that they would idle some of their deep and surface mines, laying off 225 employees in the process.

…  According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which first reported the layoff, the company employs 795 workers.

In Alledonia, Ohio, Murray Energy Corp. announced Friday it would lay off 29 union coal mining jobs at The Ohio Valley Coal Co.’s Powhatan No. 6 Mine.

“The failed energy policies of the Obama administration and the ‘war on coal’ that the president and his Democrat supporters have unleashed are the direct causes of this layoff,” said Powhatan mine general manager Ronald Koontz, according to The Wheeling Intelligencer. “Unfortunately, for us, this is just the beginning [of] the work force reductions.” — The Daily Caller, July 23, 2012

There comes a point at which the cognitive dissonance that underpins grandiose pronouncements with no relationship to reality simply make the speaker look buffoonish. Looking for that line, Mr. President? It’s behind you.