Photo image of the day

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Memo to Ms. Fluke and the rest of you free-loaders out there who want the rest of us to pay for your sex life: contraception is so unavailable and expensive, Planned Parenthood is totally not putting up billboards like the one pictured here at the well-traveled intersection of Navajo Road and Lake Murray Blvd. in northeast San Diego to prove those very points.

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Also, in a Friday evening news dump the Obama administration is moving forward with their intended plans to have health insurance providers provide free contraceptive services:

Officials at the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, and the Treasury today took the next step in the Obama administration’s effort to ensure women access to recommended preventive services while respecting religious liberty. The Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued today outlines draft proposals to implement the policy announced by President Barack Obama and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Feb. 10, 2012. This policy will provide women with access to recommended preventive services including contraceptives without cost sharing, while ensuring that non-profit religious organizations are not forced to pay for, provide, or facilitate the provision of any contraceptive service they object to on religious grounds. The Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued today gives all Americans the chance to formally comment on ideas for implementing this policy.

Of course, this is totally misleading in that, though religious organizations may not be forced to pay for contraceptive services, the health insurance companies will... and will pass that cost right back onto the consumer in the form of higher premiums. Also, this does nothing to settle the issue that this "compromise" forces religious organizations to offer a full range of contraceptive services against their conscience nor does it solve the conscience problem of religious organizations that are self-insured.


As that billboard ably demonstrates, there is absolutely zero need for the government to get into the business of dictating contraceptive services terms to health insurance policies. Please tell us where is the compelling need? And if there is one, don't you think that in an open and transparent market place, there would be health insurance policies that would offer those services?

This is simply about picking a fight, creating an artificial issue and shamelessly pandering to a naive and dim-witted voting bloc ahead of a presidential election.

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Quickies

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.





Let's start off with a little humor, shall we. Family friend and early reader and commenter of and on BwD, Bevvie, shares this letter from a farm kid in basic training to the folks back home:

Dear Ma and Pa,

I am well. Hope you are. Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Army beats working for old man Minch by a mile. Tell them to join up quick before all of the places are filled.

I was restless at first because you get to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m. But I am getting so I like to sleep late. Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot, and shine some things. No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing.

Men got to shave but it is not so bad, there's warm water. Breakfast is strong on trimmings like fruit juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, etc., but kind of weak on chops, potatoes, ham, steak, fried eggplant, pie and other regular food, but tell Walt and Elmer you can always sit by the two city boys that live on coffee. Their food, plus yours, holds you until noon when you get fed again. It's no wonder these city boys can't walk much.

We go on 'route marches,' which the platoon sergeant says are long walks to harden us. If he thinks so, it's not my place to tell him different. A 'route march' is about as far as to our mailbox at home. Then the city guys get sore feet and we all ride back in trucks.

The sergeant is like a school teacher. He nags a lot. The Captain is like the school board. Majors and colonels just ride around and frown. They don't bother you none.

This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing. I keep getting medals for shooting. I don't know why. The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don't move, and it ain't shooting at you like the Higgett boys at home. All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it. You don't even load your own cartridges They come in boxes.

Then we have what they call hand-to-hand combat training. You get to wrestle with them city boys. I have to be real careful though, they break real easy. It ain't like fighting with that ole bull at home. I'm about the best they got in this except for that Tug Jordan from over in Silver Lake. I only beat him once. He joined up the same time as me, but I'm only 5'6' and 130 pounds and he's 6'8' and near 300 pounds dry.

Be sure to tell Walt and Elmer to hurry and join before other fellers get onto this setup and come stampeding in.


Your loving daughter ,


Alice

"We love you!"

Dear Leader: "I love you back."

It's hard to get my mind to come to grips with all that's wrong with this. The shamelessness with which it was sent is a nice starter. Bragging not about your husband's accomplishments, but about how many groupies he has? And Obama's response is not the humble "thank you" of a man who might be uncomfortable with such adulation, because his native humility reminds him that he is not perfect. Rather, he responds as the immature rock star who wants more and more.

Next the image of Obama as loving father figure to the masses of adoring fans smacks of a personality cult worthy of Kim Jong Il. He is not our father figure, he is a fellow citizen of the Republic. He is the President, to be sure, but that position is limited and temporary.

What do you think? I am too harsh?

So asks B-Daddy of The Liberator Today.


Not at all. It is perfectly in keeping with this administration's view of itself. Preening, posturing narcissism at its finest.







From The Washington Post:

Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

Biden is totally unprepared? Looking on the bright side, given the terms of succession, we'll thank our lucky stars that bin Laden didn't have designs to take out both Obama and Biden prior to 2011.





The Wall St. Journal on California's math problems:

Long a harbinger of national trends and an incubator of innovation, cash-strapped California eagerly awaits a temporary revenue surge from Facebook IPO stock options and capital gains. Meanwhile, Stockton may soon become the state's largest city to go bust. Call it the agony and ecstasy of contemporary California.

California's rising standards of living and outstanding public schools and universities once attracted millions seeking upward economic mobility. But then something went radically wrong as California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation. The results, though predictable, are nonetheless striking. From the mid-1980s to 2005, California's population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

California's economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. The unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12% of America's population, California has one third of the nation's welfare recipients.

And any discussion or suggestion of, you know, reform, to attempt a fix of some of the underlying structural fiscal problems of the state is met with swift and forceful opposition by the progressive forces of the left who are just defenders of the doomed-to-fail status quo.



Let's see how that other "progressive" in D.C. is coming along with respect to battling the status quo:

President Obama’s budget would pile up an additional $3.5 trillion in debt over the next 10 years and shows the government’s trust funds running out of money in 2020, Congress’s official non-partisan scorekeeper said Friday.

In 2012 alone Mr. Obama’s budget would leave a $1.3 trillion deficit — $82 billion worse than if none of his policies were enacted. Over the next ten years the deficit would dip to less than a half-trillion dollars in 2017, but would rise again in the later years.

By 2022, a decade from now, the federal government would spend $5.6 trillion and take in $4.9 trillion in revenue — both figures far outstripping today’s levels.

CBO’s analysis also shows the government’s combined trust funds, including the Social Security trust funds and the cash flow of the Postal Service, will begin running deficits in 2020.

Mr. Obama released his budget last month, but it has received scant attention on Capitol Hill, where both Republicans and Democrats have ignored it. It proposed a mixture of new tax increases and tax cuts, and called for some new spending, particularly in education and infrastructure, but mostly left the entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security untouched.

(italics, ours)

We won't go too hard on the President, as has been noted before, outside of some bold individuals like Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-TN), no one in the political class appears remotely engaged in wanting to take on the problems detailed above. The math is unavoidable yet everyone is paralyzed in the face of it.




From The Huffington Post:

"Pink slime" might soon have a leaner presence in public schools than many might have initially anticipated.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced today that it will offer schools an option between two types of ground meat to purchase for student meals. The move is in response to requests from districts amid a weeks-long firestorm of public outcry against the ammonia-treated cow product.

The controversy was spurred by a report earlier this month by The Daily revealing that the USDA planned to purchase 7 million pounds of ground beef for schools that is mixed with "lean finely textured beef," or what has been nicknamed "pink slime." Two microbiologists, Carl Custer and Gerald Zernstein, said they warned the USDA against the "high risk" product years ago, but federal officials did not heed their advice.

The lean finely textured beef is a low-cost product rendered from the mostly fatty outside trim of cow carcasses or leftovers from other cuts. To salvage every bit of meat, the trimmings, combined with connective tissues and cartilage, are heated at a low temperature to remove about 95 percent of the fat. The resulting product is then compressed into blocks to be mixed into ground beef and treated with ammonium hydroxide (essentially ammonia and water) to kill pathogens like E. coli and salmonella that could have emerged during the rendering process.

Discovery of the USDA's purchase prompted Houston mother of two Bettina Siegel to start an online petition on Change.org asking Secretary of Agriculure Tom Vilsack to "please put an immediate end to the use of 'pink slime' in our children's school food." The petition had more than 225,000 signatures as of Thursday morning.

The USDA contracted to buy more than 111.5 million pounds of ground beef for the National School Lunch Program, with 7 million pounds of it coming from Beef Products: This South Dakota-based company produces lean finely textured beef. No more than 15 percent of Beef Products' ground beef mix for schools may be composed of lean finely textured beef, according to the USDA.

The announcement grants schools the option to purchase either 95 percent lean beef patties made with Beef Products' mixed product or fattier bulk ground beef without the controversial mix. The change will not affect schools until the fall as a result of existing contracts.

Those are the options? United States public education: making the case for home-schooling on a weekly basis.


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OK, gang, that's it for today. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday and we'll see you all tomorrow.
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Clean, articulate, good-looking African-American makes the case for the Keystone XL pipeline* (UPDATED)

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(please scroll down for update)

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A nice little shot across the bow that has been getting fairly heavy rotation on CBS during NCAA tournament games.




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Here's another clean, articulate, good-looking African-American back in 2008 making the case for why you should be paying for more at the pump:
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0:35 - "Nothing's for free." Except for condoms and the pill.

1:43 - Energy efficiency means... changing our light bulbs?

2:15 - Subsidizing an individual filling up their Suburban is indeed a bad idea. Just as bad of an idea as subsidizing student loans, other people's sex lives and most relevantly, tens of billions of dollars to subsidize the not-yet-ready-for-market green technology of your cronies.


We're paying higher prices at the pump, alright - making those sacrifices, however, is not bringing us any closer to true energy independence.





* For those of you that had forgot.

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(UPDATE #1): We felt B-Daddy's feedback was worth liberating from the comment section:

This is the most anti-science administration ever. They think that their secular religion trumps the technology of energy production, to whit, that they can declare that there are energy sources of greater power density than liquid hydrocarbons on a mass and volume basis. There are not, and no amount of declaring otherwise will make it so. If they were honest, they would encourage the production of natural gas, because its carbon footprint per btu and mass is less than other sources of energy. That they do not is further evidence of their hypocrisy.

He's exactly right. If you are talking total cradle-to-grave carbon footprint with respect to energy output, oil is the greenest thing going. To use the terminology of Obama's predecessor, we need to ween ourselves off our addiction to green technology... well, at least the political class needs to ween itself off its addiction to pouring billions and billions of tax-payer dollars into green energy schemes that can't pay for themselves. Time to take off the training wheels!

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Slouching towards a 4th term (cont.)

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Last week, the National Review's Rich Lowry had a column titled "Holder's Identity Problem" which took a look at Holder's considerable issues with individual state's voter identification laws.

Clever but not nearly as appropriate or relevant for the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department's identity problem with respect to indefinite detention of suspected terrorists and the killing of alleged terrorists even if they are American citizens.



Let's jump in the way-back machine and catch up with Holder in 2004 during the dark tyranny of the Bush regime:

(Via Patterico's Pontifications):

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

We must be aggressive in the conduct of the war, and in the interrogation of prisoners taken in that war. But this Administration’s view, that the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief can almost always overcome what it views as burdensome laws, restrictive International treaties, and tired old customs is extremely dangerous.

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

Now, let's see how Holder grows in office. Back to the present: Eff, it.. let's kill'em instead:

President Obama, who came to office promising transparency and adherence to the rule of law, has become the first president to claim the legal authority to order an American citizen killed without judicial involvement, real oversight or public accountability.

That, regrettably, was the most lasting impression from a major address on national security delivered last week by Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.

Eric Holder, in a speech just last week, did indeed claim that the Executive branch had the authority to kill American citizens suspected of being terrorists without due process.

Quite a turnaround, now isn't it? Imagine the rioting in the streets in Berkeley, Madison and Eugene if Bush had claimed this authority. And let's be clear, Team O did indeed carry through with this threat when they wacked Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen in a drone strike last September.

So, what is the real reason behind this new-found extra-constitutional executive power? A realization of the threat posed by terrorists to this country? A convenient opportunity to accrue even more authority? Maybe. But we think it's a little more simple than that: Obama's lazy. That's it. He doesn't want to have to mess around with the sticky business of capturing, interrogating and, mostly, detaining suspected terrorists. Afterall, this is the administration that made a campaign goal of closing down Gitmo and which still maintains a public position of desiring to see suspected terrorists in civilian courts. It's much, much easier to just wack them... it's a hell of lot cleaner that way.

Let that sink in for a moment: An administration that desires to see Gitmo residents tried in civilian courts doesn't let suspected terrorists see the light of the Cuban day.



Here's Andew Napolitano with Shep Smith talking about the subject matter just prior to Holder's speech (Via Dueling Barstools):

"Due process is not something the government gives, due process is a natural right that every human being has and the Constitution requires that the government respect that in the 5th amendment."

1:45 : Wait, al-Awlaki's son and a family friend, both U.S. citizens were killed also? We've been following this story pretty closely and this is the first time we've heard this.

"On the basis of that summary, the President can be judge, jury and executioner for any American anywhere."

2:40 : That's right - we'd almost forgot. al-Awlaki was the guy the Ft. Hood shooter was reaching out to. Fancy that, it's considered impolite to suggest that the Ft. Hood shooter was a radical Islamist terrorist yet al-Awlaki receives death by drone for being a radical Islamist terrorist... allegedly.

"If what the attorney general is about to say is accepted uncritically by Americans then we are doomed, our freedoms are gone - the President is no longer our President he is a King, he can decide who lives and who dies on his own without any evidence, without any trial."

It's being received uncritically by Americans because the 4th estate has again failed in reporting out on this travesty. One of the very types of things they despised Bush for, they will provide cover when one of their own not only matches the outrage but far exceeds it. It would only be fair then to say then that the media does not suffer any longer from "liberal bias", rather "despotic bias".

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Well known pol goes Borscht Belt to defend incoherent energy policy

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Entrance question: Can a guy who refuses to acknowledge the technology for his pet green programs aren't quite market ready get off calling his political opponents as being, uh, unscientific?


Entrance answer: It's campaign season so let'er rip, baby, even if you beclown yourself.

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President Barack Obama on Thursday derided his GOP challengers, calling them members of the “flat earth society” for their positions on energy.

“Lately, we have heard a lot of professional politicians, a lot of the folks who were, you know, running for a certain office, who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy,” Obama told a crowd during a speech in Maryland. “They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that’s good for our future. We’re trying to move towards the future, they want to be stuck in the past!”

While not identifying any of the GOP contenders by name, Obama continued: “We’ve heard this kind of thinking before. Let me tell you something, if some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not have believed that the world was round.”

Boy, that's rich. Dude is presiding over some of the highest gas prices ever and is running a corrupt, cronyistic and now we are finding via the GAO, a completely incompetent and unaccountable DOE loan program.


Perhaps, the President should consult with a flat earth convert in his midst, Dept. of Energy HMFIC, Steven Chu, who has appeared to submit to the reality that people really don't give a damn about sparkly, shiny new green technology when they are paying $4.50/gallon at the pump.




And as for that 2% myth the President has been peddling as an excuse to not drill: don't believe it. Known reserves are only the tip of the iceberg.

Please note that one of the sources is the very government department that appears completely dis-interested in developing this cheap and dependable energy resource.

That we would not go after that which is setting beneath us to spur economic growth that would provide the private capital to get green technology up and market-ready is near criminal.

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Yet another entitlement program spiraling upwards out of control

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First, a programming alert: due to a heavy workload and annual mid-March (Madness) opening rounds television viewing obligations, blogging will be light for the next few days. By, the by, we're gunning for a border war in the finals: Mizzou v. Kansas.


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Similar to what then-Speaker Pelosi said when she spoke of passing the ObamaCare bill to see what's in it, the Congressional Budget Office is having to wait year to year in their progressive 10-year budget analysis to see how much ObamaCare is actually going to cost.

President Obama's national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.

Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO's standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama's pledge that the legislation would cost "around $900 billion over 10 years." When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.

(italics, ours)

Or, as it's known in Placentia, California, "fraudulent behaviour".

A doubling of the cost in just two years: a trend line to be proud of.

The taxes and fees to pay for ObamaCare started in 2010 but the full range of goodies don't start kicking in until 2014.

Recall, it was the Democrats who claimed that Republicans were the cause of death to 40,000 Americans a month because of their obstruction of ObamaCare. We'd like a CBO projection on the number of deaths caused by this delayed implementation of ObamaCare due to fiscal chicanery.


Just 3 years ago, we had on our "unsustainable entitlement plate", Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Now, due to a goods-and-services-as-rights mentality that has taken hold of this country, we can now add ObamaCare to the plate of things we have no way in hell of paying for.

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Posts that write themselves

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We'll take the bullet on this one and do the heavy lifting because we don't think anyone else in the righty blogospere is going to cover the following news item... right?

After a short stand off between a group of veterans and the head of the Lake County, FL Democrat Party, an American flag that had been altered to depict an image of Barack Obama in the space where the stars are normally located was taken down.

The Lake County Democratic Headquarters in Tavares has been flying two American flags outside their office. The first an American Flag and the second the altered flag.

A veterans group arrived late this afternoon with the media in tow and demanded that the second flag be taken down. Don Van Beck, executive director of the Veterans Memorial at Fountain Park asked that the altered flag be removed, explaining that it was in violation of federal flag code. He offered a POW/MIA flag to fly in its place.

Nancy Hurlburt, the Democratic Party Chair for Lake County, said she would research the issue but didn’t take the Obama flag down immediately, prompting Van Beck to declare that they would take the flag down for her.

“No, you will not. This is private property,” Hurlbert responded.

After a short time spent ‘researching’, Hurlbert relented and took down the flag while the veterans looked on. She did not accept the POW/MIA flag offered as a replacement.

Why on earth did this woman think this would possibly be a good idea? We're going to assume the approval chain was an extremely short one as anyone with just a passing knowledge of the flag code would know that defacing or depicting an image on the flag is a no-no. Besides, shameless, bootlicking, hagiography is so 2008-2009. The thrill is gone, Ms. Hulbert, and everyone knows it.



And speaking of shameless, bootlicking hagiography from years gone past, you would not be mistaken if you thought this post was merely an excuse to play one of our favorite Youtube clips of all-time.

It just doesn't get any more self-serving and creepy than this, folks, Enjoy.
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Douche-baggery at its finest

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Uh, just a couple of more questions if you wouldn't mind?

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The absurdity of the statist-left knows no bounds. Plus, yet more evidence of the big lie.

From CBS Los Angeles:

The next influx of UC students may be asked to state their sexual orientation.

In January, the Academic Senate recommended that upon accepting admission offers from a University of California school students should have the option of identifying themselves as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual or transgender.

The UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools had mixed reactions but agreed that the question would allow them to collect important statistical information. They recommended putting the question on the SIR forms instead of college applications to protect students’ privacy.

(ed. note: for what purpose is this information collected?)

The news made the front page of UCLA’s campus paper Daily Bruin and is stirring controversy across UC campuses.

Supporters say the declaration will help campuses better plan for the needs of LGBT students.

Queer Alliance Board member Luis Roman said he has spoken with university officials about the proposal, which he enthusiastically supports, because he believes it will bring badly needed services for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students.

(ed. note: precisely what needs and services are required for LGBT students above that of the rest of the student population?)

Some members of that community believe it would show that there are many more LGBT students than university officials realize.

“I think the numbers are way bigger than we really imagine or know,” Roman said.

(ed. note: And? )

The sexual orientation question would likely be optional. That may mean that a sizable number of students would not respond or would do so dishonestly — skewing the results, said Raja Bhattar, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center at UCLA.

(ed. note: Questions: is this implying then that Bhattar thinks the inquiry should be mandatory and if so, how does making it mandatory compel the questionee from being any less or more forthright in his answer?)

The data would be collected from incoming freshmen and transfer students.

High school senior Brian Vo, who was visiting his friend Quincy Vien on campus, said he wouldn’t mind being asked.

“I think it’s fine. They’re just collecting information to kind of cater to the population. It’s not obligatory — it’s voluntary — so it’s up to you whether you want to or not.”

(ed. note: Cater? How about pander?)

That's about as much ridiculousness as can be fit into one news story. Congrats.

It really boils down to a social engineering statistical make-work program.


And with respect to the big lie: Similar to the contraception mandate and the valuable Congressional testimony given by their cute little mascot, Sandra Fluke, who decided to go public with her sex life and thinks that others should pay for the same, the statist-left's desire for the bedroom to be off-limits to inquiry and public policy proves itself to be just that... as it always has been.

With these two examples, the mask is beginning to slip in regards to the amount of privacy and autonomy the political class will allow you to have.



Addendum #1:

Via Leslie at Temple of Mut: the GOP's "war on reproductive rights" in graphical image form.

Who adds:

I think the “War on Women” is more along the lines of the film, “Wag the Dog“: Since, the president does not seem to have much of a chance of being re-elected, one of his advisers contacts a top Hollywood producer in order to manufacture a war that the president can heroically end, all through mass media.

I can imagine the discussion now: I am sure it went along these lines:

Stanley Motss: The President will be a hero. He brought peace.
Conrad ‘Connie’ Brean: But there was never a war.
Stanley Motss: All the greater accomplishment.

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Say, can we just forget about what I said earlier?

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It would appear as though Energy Secretary, Steve Chu is learning there is quite a bit of difference between saying dumb stuff as a pointy-headed academic and saying dumb stuff as the head of the Department of Energy.

Recall it was Chu, before entering the administration and as a professor of physics at Stanford, said he desired to see gas prices in the U.S. approach that of Europe's.

And recall a couple weeks back, Chu, now the very public face of the DOE and maintaining his principled stand on gas prices, told Congress that lowering gas prices was not really that high of a priority of his.


Well, politics has a curious way of adjusting one's principles as bad poll numbers suggest the American public does indeed hold the President and his people responsible for high gas prices.

From the National Journal:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday retracted his now-infamous quote from 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

“I no longer share that view,” Chu said in response to questioning from Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on another topic related to DOE’s loan-guarantee program.

Chu’s 2008 quote, initially included in a Wall Street Journal article, has formed the foundation for daily Republican attacks on President Obama over high gas prices.

Chu seemed to equivocate, pause, and stumble over his words when responding to Lee’s question about high gas prices. Other comments Chu made at another hearing late last month put him in hot water on gas prices. Politico reported on Feb. 28 that Chu told a House committee that he was not working to lower gasoline prices but to wean the United States off oil. That story has since been corrected to clarify that DOE is working to both lower gas prices and wean the country off oil. But that was only after the story was picked up by Republicans and used against the administration.

During his testimony before the Senate panel on Tuesday, after stopping and starting with a few thoughts on the economy and the department’s commitment to alternatively fueled vehicles, Chu told Lee: “Of course we don’t want the price of gasoline to go up. We want it to go down.”

New polling out this week found that the president's disapproval rating is going up alongside high gasoline prices, which averaged $3.80 per gallon nationwide on Tuesday.

After the hearing, Chu told reporters that he changed his view from 2008 because of the fragile economy.

“There is a real hardship that Americans are suffering at the gasoline pump,” Chu said. “The recovery is fragile. Another spike in gasoline prices could put that recovery at jeopardy. So there are many, many reasons why we do not want the price of gasoline to go up.”

(italics, ours)



Splitting atoms at Lawrence Livermore Labs is a little different from telling working Americans that higher gas prices is necessarily a good thing, now isn't Steve?

It remains to be seen, however, if Chu really believes this new-found alleged pragmatism. We doubt it. He currently runs the administration's cronyistic green energy loan program and we doubt the President would've picked the guy to run the DOE if he was a practical all of the above energy type.

With the President's poll numbers tanking, throw the people some comforting words to let them know you feel their pain and get back to business as usual.


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The economic recovery by the numbers

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With a lapdog media panting over the prospects of the unemployment number holding steady at 8.3%, it begs to be revealed what some of the internal numbers are showing.


By the numbers:


49: the number of months since the country hit peak employment in January of 2008 surpassing the previous record of 47 months following the post-9/11 recession of 2001.


37: the consecutive number of months the unemployment rate has exceeded 8 percent. The longest streak in the post-WWII era.


63.9: the labor force participation rate in February - a near-historic low. Individuals who have stopped looking for work do not count toward the unemployment rate, masking the true extent of the jobs crisis.


5.4 million: the number of individuals looking for work for more than six months, double the amount from when the President took office in 2009.


8 million: the number of Americans working part-time despite wishing to work full-time.


19.1: the total underemployment rate in which Gallup combines the unemployment with underemployment and which has been steadily rising over the last several months.


14.1: the black unemployment rate which rose half a percentage point in February.


6.7 trillion: the amount of dollars the President has requested in additional deficit spending over the next decade.


229 billion: the amount of dollars to which the CBO says will be added to the deficit in February marking the 41st consecutive month the federal government has run a budget deficit. The previous longest streak was 11 months.


$45,000: the per capita debt in this country which is higher than in many of Europe's most financially distressed countries.


$1.5 million: the amount of money an American born today will be required to pay off our current national debt which is $16 trillion and growing.



For a President that employs Keynesian gimmickry to "jumpstart" the economy, that adds unneeded complexity and additional regulatory burdens to the healthcare sector, that is attempting via bureaucratic fiat to regulate that which we exhale every second of our lives, that sinks billions and billions of dollars into a cronyistic green energy loan program and who sics his Labor Bureau on an airline company who is attempting to start up a brand new manufacturing facility, just to name a few examples... is it any small wonder then that despite the terrific news that the unemployment rate did not actually go up last month, that the long-term and behind-the-scenes numbers continue to remain absolutely dreadful?

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Video clip of the day

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Scratchy throat? Nagging cough? Hey, everyone can agree that birth control is important but it sure seems to us that cough drops are a pretty important preventive medicine, also.


Thankfully, we've had a congressional hearing on the subject.

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Duly noted: a firm nod towards what has been a part of the Republican push-back effort and which is completely counterproductive to the issue at hand which is why is the government forcing others to pay for that which is an entirely voluntary choice?


Via their cute little mascot, Ms. Fluke, the statist-left is now insisting, against decades of protesting to the counter, that one's private sex life is now of public interest and concern. If you are asking the public to, in effect, pay for you to have sex, how can it be viewed as anything but?


We do consider it a relief to know, however, that the "Keep your laws off my body!" set has finally given up the ghost and through support of the contraception mandate has admitted their battle cry was nothing more than a high falutin' argument in favor of killing the unborn.

Honesty is indeed the best policy, wouldn't you agree?

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