U.S. 2012 Election

[GAP]

Who in their right mind would have five kids? What are they, Catholic?

;D

[/mindless derail]

Think cold winters.....Catholic or not, the exercise is great....... ;D

 

[Redeye]

Perhaps, but we don't need to divert increasing amounts of arable land to biofuel crops while concurrently driving up food prices.

No. Which is the interesting part. Some of the more fascinating studies don't require that. Burning food isn't a good idea. There's studies into things like algae-based fuels that will prevent that being necessary. More interesting are ideas about using byproducts of good production. People are studying all sorts of angles.

 

[Redeye]

As an aside about democracy in general, the root problem with it is that the leaders don't do things that are necessarily for the right reason: they do it for votes.  I mean, "for the will of the people" is one thing, and "for the right reason" may be literally exclusive.  It may be the reason why many democracies are in the mess they are in right now. 

Like Greece or any other PIIGS? Pretty much. Voters are fickle and don't generally think long term, they think for themselves right now. Even worse, they don't think at all, don't know much about what they're voting about, and don't really care. What was it Churchill said, "The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."? Something like that.

The analogy is a family unit.  Imagine that there are five kids, a mother and a father.  The kids, all under ten, have equal voting rights to mom and dad.  If that's the case, then we can forego any payments on the mortgage, and we're hiring someone to do our homework for us, and we're eating pizza and McDonalds for supper every night.

The problem with that analogy is that the parents can't be assumed, necessarily, to know any better than the kids.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

The problem with that analogy is that the parents can't be assumed, necessarily, to know any better than the kids.

Most of the time I think you spout totally useless phrases and arguements but when you're right,...you're really right.

 

[vonGarvin]

Who in their right mind would have five kids? What are they, Catholic?

;D

[/mindless derail]

Maybe  ;D

 

[vonGarvin]

EDIT:


In my analogy, assume (for sake of argument) that the parents know what's best for the family, and that the children are 8 years of age, and fairly normal kids who don't have a great grasp of long-term effects.

 

[Redeye]

Yes, they can.  They are the parents, FFS.  And you know the analogy fits. 

[tangent]  I get it.  There are parents out there who are right out of it.  But my analogy fits, for argument sake.

it's not a bad analogy, TV - I agree. I'm just highlighting that it doesn't perfectly encapsulate the problem, that's all.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Sorry guys, but enjoying unprotected sex does not make morons, thiefs, dirtbags, rapists and general all-around assholes any smarter or more responsible.................we would just like to think it does.

 

[a_majoor]

Another potential issue for the electorate to ponder. Once again, the issue is there for the taking, how it is presented and framed will be...interesting to watch:

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/02/14/millions-of-dead-voters-brought-to-you-by-eric-holder/?print=1

Millions of Dead Voters, Brought to You By Eric Holder
Posted By J. Christian Adams On February 14, 2012 @ 6:40 pm In Uncategorized | 36 Comments

Over a year ago, I first warned that the Obama administration adopted a policy of refusing to enforce federal laws which require states to purge dead and ineligible voters from the rolls. I discuss at length the details of this policy as revealed to me when I worked at the Justice Department in my book Injustice. Today we learn that American voter rolls are infested with millions of dead and ineligible voters heading into the presidential election.

Eric Holder and his Leftist political appointees at the Justice Department have gotten exactly what they wanted.

The Pew Center on the States estimates nearly 2,000,000 dead voters are on the rolls, and 2,800,000 people are registered in more than one state. This is precisely the mess that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) was designed to prevent.

Last Thursday, Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, announced that it is teaming up with me and True the Vote for an election integrity project to get the voter rolls cleaned up before November. We will do what Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez refuse to do.

The Justice Department refuses to enforce Section 8 of the NVRA because, as political appointee Julie Fernandes revealed in a Voting Section meeting in 2009 that I attended, removing dead people from the rolls “doesn’t increase turnout. It stops people from voting.” Seriously.

In the meantime, DOJ has vigorously enforced Section 7 of NVRA, the welfare agency voter registration provision. Judicial Watch has determined through FOIA litigation that the aggressive Section 7 enforcement policy at DOJ had its genesis in the lobbying of Estelle Rogers, of ACORN fame. (Read her emails at the link.) One wonders if Rogers was registered as a lobbyist, or if she just lobbied the White House without registering.

Rogers also made ACORN-blessed job recommendations for attorneys applying to the Voting Section. DOJ refuses to release the names of the lawyers Rogers pushed, and whether or not they were hired to enforce election law this fall.

Instead of enforcing Section 8 and cleaning up the voter rolls, the Justice Department is shaking down states to wring out every possible welfare agency voter registrant before November.

In doing so, it has resorted to unprecedented investigative tactics that no media outlet has yet reported before today.

Justice Department sources familiar with Voting Section tactics tell me that DOJ has been sending investigators wearing wires and electronic surveillance equipment into state welfare and food stamp offices across the country to see if state officials are pushing voter registration on investigators posing as recipients. They have stung Louisiana, Georgia, Rhode Island, and potentially more states with these tactics.

Based on evidence collected, DOJ has sued Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s administration and Secretary of State Tom Schedler under the welfare agency provisions of NVRA. If the defendants have not already done so, they need to request in discovery all of the recordings and transcripts of these sting operations. Other states should immediately inform Eric Holder in writing that they consider their public welfare agency employees represented by counsel and that any interviews must be approved by state attorneys generals. Then report any DOJ lawyers who oversee clandestine electronic surveillance to their bar associations and to the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility. The states that don’t might be secretly stung next.

These tactics represent a significant development in several ways. Of course DOJ is allowed to engage in these sorts of investigations by law, but the Voting Section has never used electronic surveillance to gather evidence for a civil case before. One former Bush era Voting Section manger told me, “had the Bush administration used wires in a civil voting case, we would have been accused of Gestapo tactics.” Indeed.

The second reason that these tactics are significant is they demonstrate the frenzied priorities of the Obama political appointees before November’s elections. Because of heavy lobbying by Acorn’s Project Vote, the DOJ is now engaged in an effort to stuff the voter rolls with the maximum number of welfare and food stamp recipients, and even public methadone treatment center users. Eric Holder is fighting to fill the voter rolls with these voters before November.

At the same time, deliberate decisions have been made to ignore Section 8 of NVRA. Not a single case has been brought to clean up voter rolls during the Obama administration. Ironically, Holder, in his confirmation hearings, criticized the Bush Justice Department for “cherry picking” which voting laws they want to enforce and which they didn’t. Like so much from Eric Holder’s mouth, the statement has been shown to be a devious misdirection. Holder blames his political opponents for conduct in which he engages.

And what of Congress? Usually, the action or inaction of Congressional oversight committees is a topic I leave to others. But we face a potential electoral calamity because of corrupted voter rolls, a situation encouraged by Acorn-style groups. Ironically, Eric Holder just this week asked for millions more dollars for the Voting Section. No doubt, he wishes to flood the unit with more ACORN-approved lawyers prior to the election, lawyers eager to sue states to increase welfare agency voter registration while ignoring millions of dead voters on the rolls.

What will Congress do in response to the Pew data showing that Eric Holder and Tom Perez have failed to faithfully execute the laws of the United States? Will Holder get millions more for the corrupt Voting Section? I doubt Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va), who oversees the DOJ budget in the House, has much tolerance for Holder’s games. If anything, Congress should see to it that the Voting Section’s budget is halved, and a sizeable portion of the new lawyers hired under the questionable circumstances PJ Media has reported on should be reintroduced to the private sector.

What of the House Administration Committee which ostensibly has oversight over NVRA enforcement? Surely corrupted voter rolls and misplaced DOJ priorities are enough to awaken aggressive oversight. What could be more important than the integrity of our elections?  Let’s hope somebody with Constitutional authority over DOJ steps up before we witness an electoral debacle in less than nine months.

Article printed from Rule of Law: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/02/14/millions-of-dead-voters-brought-to-you-by-eric-holder/

 

[a_majoor]

If you think anyone in the US government can simply wave a magic wand and reduce gas prices, you're frankly crazy.

George W Bush obviously had a magic wand:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/thanks-to-obama-gas-jumps-in-a-flash/?print=1

- PJ Media - http://pjmedia.com -Click here to print.
Thanks to Obama, Gas Jumps in a Flash
Posted By Will Collier On April 26, 2011 @ 12:00 am In "Green" tech,economy,Politics,Science & Technology,US News | 127 Comments

It must have looked so simple from Barack Obama’s rarely visited Senate office, or Steven Chu’s comfortable digs at Berkeley: if only we stopped taking advantage of all those nasty fossil fuels, everything would be better. Three years ago, when then-Senator Obama was dismissing high energy prices as just another good reason for more government handouts [1], and Chu was insisting that Americans ought to pay European prices [2] for gasoline, all they heard in return was applause from their core constituencies — academics and the media.

Unfortunately for now-President Obama, the reality of $4-$5-a-gallon gasoline is a much tougher sell to the general public. He’s put himself to work spinning the line that “speculators” are at fault [3] for high prices, but the actual explanation is far more prosaic. Limited supply plus growing demand equals higher prices. That’s a formula so simple, even a community organizer should be able to understand it.

Asian demand for energy continues to rise as nations in the far east region — oddly lacking in “stimulus” spending — continue to boom [4]. Supply, meanwhile, has fallen off, not only as a consequence of the turmoil in Libya and other oil-producing countries, but also thanks to the Obama-ordered moratorium on drilling [5] in the Gulf of Mexico — and the recently ordered moratorium [6] on future drilling anywhere else off the American coastline.

Obama and his minions have been chasing the green jobs chimera for so long that it’s an instinct. They pompously suggest [7] that Americans ought to trade in their current vehicles [8] for pricey, government-approved matchbox cars [9], asserting still [10] that there’s “no quick fix” for high energy prices. History, and very recent history at that, indicates that they are mistaken.

Take a look at this chart compiled by metalprices.com [11]. It’s the price of a barrel of crude oil over the past 5 years.

See that big peak in the middle? That was the last oil spike, in the summer of 2008. Notice how the price hit a high point, then fell off a cliff afterward?

The day corresponding to that peak, an all-time high of $145.16/barrel, was July 14, 2008. By some strange coincidence, that was the very same day then-President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore oil drilling [12].
Bush’s order was, of course, immediately dismissed by the “experts.” Reuters [13] waved away the action as “a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on high gasoline costs.” Barack Obama’s campaign lectured that if “offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither.”

The movement left was even more dismissive. ClimateProgress.org [14] blasted The Washington Post for failing to headline their story about the order “Offshore Drilling Raises Oil Prices.” In response to Bush’s assertion that additional offshore extraction could equal current U.S. production in 10 years, they editorialized: “Yes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt” (emphasis in original).

There was just one problem: reality. Even though, as critics were eager to point out, any additional American drilling was years in the future, oil prices immediately went into free-fall. By Friday, July 18, the price of a barrel of crude [15] had dropped to $128.94, a 12% decrease. A month later, on August 14, the price had fallen to $115.05. In spectacular fashion, Bush’s academic and media critics were proven seriously wrong.

For commodities traders who’d been pricing oil based on a supposition of scarcity, the potential for millions of additional barrels on the market hit like a thunderbolt. The simple act of putting America’s resources on the table popped the oil bubble, and a stunning price drop followed in short order. By election day, November 4, the price of a barrel of crude had plummeted to $70.84 — a 51% decrease in less than five months.

But wait. I can already hear the cries of, “Uh uh! The price dropped because demand fell off! Haven’tcha ever heard of the Great Recession?”

Problem is, all of that happened months prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the financial crisis on September 15, 2008 (price of crude: $95.52). Oil prices actually spiked at the outset of the economic mess, peaking at just over $100/barrel on September 30 before falling again. They reached a bottom price of $30.28 on December 23, a jaw-dropping 80% off the July peak, less than a month before Barack Obama took office.

Speaking of which: Obama had been president-elect for all of five days [16] when he announced his intention to rescind Bush’s order. Oil prices started going up again in January of 2009 and steadily increasing ever since. Obama Energy Secretary Ken Salazar announced a highly restrictive offshore leasing policy [17] last December, and the Bush executive order was officially reversed [17] on February 8, 2011.

The price of crude that day was $85.85. By April 19, it had risen to $107.18, with no end in sight. (interpolation: the anti magic wand, I guess).

Update: On his PJ Xpress blog, Ed Driscoll adds “CNN Neuters Obama” [18] and a president’s impact on oil prices.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/thanks-to-obama-gas-jumps-in-a-flash/

URLs in this post:

[1] good reason for more government handouts: http://yourdaddy.net/2011/04/12/obamas-high-energy-prices-campaign-promise-fulfilled/
[2] insisting that Americans ought to pay European prices: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110302/ap_on_re_us/us_barbour_energy_2
[3] spinning the line that “speculators” are at fault: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=5051
[4] continue to boom: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/business/2011-04/17/c_13832413.htm
[5] Obama-ordered moratorium on drilling: http://www.dailyworld.com/article/DG/20110420/NEWS01/104200343/Slicing-an-artery-industry?odyssey=nav|head
[6] recently ordered moratorium: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/11/drilling-ban-revisited
[7] pompously suggest: http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/118137/
[8] ought to trade in their current vehicles: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/157263-obama-trade-in-your-suvs-for-more-fuel-efficient-vehicles
[9] pricey, government-approved matchbox cars: http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=86&load=5199
[10] still: http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2011/04/15/obama-quick-fix-high-gas-prices/
[11] this chart compiled by metalprices.com: http://www.metalprices.com/pubcharts/PublicCharts.aspx?metal=cl nymex&type=C&weight=&days=60&size=s&bg=EDF2F8
[12] George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore oil drilling: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25674571/ns/business-oil_and_energy/
[13] Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/07/14/uk-usa-energy-bush-idUKN1445445520080714
[14] ClimateProgress.org: http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/14/offshore-drilling-raises-oil-prices/
[15] the price of a barrel of crude: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RWTC&f=D
[16] had been president-elect for all of five days: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5geXQuR4D0KjwE3fpZP1tLnjmF51Q
[17] announced a highly restrictive offshore leasing policy: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/11/drilling-ban-revisited/
[18] “CNN Neuters Obama”: http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/04/26/cnn-neuters-obama/

 

[cupper]

Another potential issue for the electorate to ponder. Once again, the issue is there for the taking, how it is presented and framed will be...interesting to watch:

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/02/14/millions-of-dead-voters-brought-to-you-by-eric-holder/?print=1

I'll counter your obviously partisan article with something that give a more fair assessment of the situation, and spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with Eric Holder and other Obama Conspiracy Theories. :Tin-Foil-Hat:

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146827471/study-1-8-million-dead-people-still-registered-to-vote

 

[cupper]

And with respect to the high price of gas, here's an article that may make you think.

The basic premise is how all things are interconnected, but the part I found very interesting is how the high price of corn is effecting the California almond crop.

What does this have to do with gas prices? Well, corn prices are being driven by the demand for corn based ethanol, which is mandated by Congress to be blended with gas. Perhaps we need to push harder for commercial development of cellulose based ethanol.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146827471/study-1-8-million-dead-people-still-registered-to-vote

 

[tomahawk6]

When Obama became Prez gas prices were $1.60ish and uneployment was around 7%.Today they are over $4 a gallon in many parts of the country.Unemployment in real terms is 14%. People tend to vote their pocket books. It boils down to this "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago ?"

 

[Rifleman62]

Add the increase in home foreclosures. Estimated one million more home foreclosures in 2012.

 

[a_majoor]

And the Obama Administration's economic record in a single, easy to use graph:

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Hmm, it looks like one of those graphs that "prove" global warming...............

 

[a_majoor]

The difference, of course, is the data is freely available to anyone who wants to crunch the numbers and arrive at the result themselves.

    The above chart shows the “labor force participation rate.” This statistic represents the share of working-age Americans who are either employed or unemployed but looking for work. It is not a pretty picture. Only 63.7% of working-age Americans are currently in the workforce – the lowest in almost 29 years!

    To put it another way, 36.3% of working-age Americans do not have a job and are not even looking.

   

 

[ballz]

Besides, the fact that this graph was posted by the Republican Study Committee....

The difference, of course, is the data is freely available to anyone who wants to crunch the numbers and arrive at the result themselves.
 

"To put it another way, 36.3% of working-age Americans do not have a job and are not even looking."

Please tell me you don't believe that the "true unemployment rate" is 36.3% like this graph is suggesting?

 

[cupper]

D'oh! :facepalm:

 

[tomahawk6]

I'd sooner believe the Republican info than the democrats.When you have the President lying about his record and the media not doing its job by fact checking the administration's press statements,not to mention running phony polls you would think we were covering a Russian election.