Not Birds Of A Feather

It was funny, you have to admit. 

No sooner had Pope Francis prayed for peace in the Ukraine, and released two white doves from his Vatican window, than a crow and a seagull swooped in for the kill.  Feathers flew, the thousands in St. Peter’s Square gasped, and the suggestion that God was saying something must have entered even the most skeptical of minds.

But, saying what? 

Words of Doom

Noman watched the State of the Union address last night expecting to be infuriated at the President's cocksure impudence. Thankfully, President Obama left his bellicosity on the cutting room floor and adopted a high and lofty, aspirational tone instead.

He would have made a great black preacher had he decided to save souls rather than America.  Regardless, his charms and gifts were on full display along with his rhetorical flourishes worthy of a Jesse Jackson, or Jeremiah Wright.

No bailouts, no handouts and no copouts... [Put-out! Gimme some VAT.] 

What he said and didn't say last night, however, was not the issue.  By most accounts, at least those by people not carrying water for him, the speech was mendacious and vacuous on its merits.

For instance, the President failed to eliminate oil company subsidies when his party controlled both houses of Congress (rather aggressively).  Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid rebuffed him; why should he expect different treatment form John Boehner and the Republican controlled House?

He was on stage to look like a serious man with a serious plan, and to play "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" that Americans so want to embrace in a post-racial political milieu.  His challenges were to convince the middle class that they can continue to like him though he holds them in contempt, and to trust him on the basis of pearly words artfully delivered.

He was advised going into the speech to play down his first-term deeds by the very thug he employed to muscle them through Congress.  Former Chief of Staff, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel suggested that the President look to the future:

"What you do with the first term is say, 'I inherited a mess, I did what I could to stabilize it, and here's what we're gonna do.' "

That's pretty much what the President has said all along, when he isn't claiming that the sun shines on America due to his brilliance.  The trust deficit between the President and the American people stems, however, precisely from his first term, especially its first two years.  

While Americans were still bleeding from the financial meltdown, the President viewed his inheritance as an opportunity to be exploited rather than a crisis to be stabilized.  And exploit it (and us) he did, as attested to by the expansion of the federal government, a run up in the nation's debt by half during his first three years alone, and an economy frozen in apprehension at what's likely to come, e.g., the kick-in of ObamaCare, higher interest rates and stagflation.

The President and Chief of Staff Emanuel were opportunistic when the nation could least afford to be governed by opportunists, and when it most needed a practical Administration.  The escalating debt now stands at an unsustainable $16 trillion dollars--more than 100% of GDP--which affirms what he denied: that this really is about big government v. small government. 

More precisely, it's about civil society and personal initiative, which diminish as government expands to assume their province and responsibilities.  Government must recede in order to allow citizens and private institutions to assume protagonism for their own lives as befits a free people.

Of course our leaders can always sound appealing by promising more and more goodies, as the President did last night.  But, the costs are not so attractive, least of all those associated with habits of dependency.

Aside from the size and scope of government, the issue with President Obama is about not being able to trust a man for whom words detached from reality come so effortlessly.  Hearing him implore unity and fairness, one would never guess that just the prior week he violated consciences by forcing religious institutions' health plans to cover treatment that they find morally objectionable, and killed a no-brainer pipeline project that was crucial to the economic well-being of the nation and of blue collar workers throughout the midwest.

Unity, fairness?  Noman doesn't trust the President to determine their meaning and set their terms.

Unfortunately for America and the world that depends on its financial strength, the opportunity that the President pursued with maniacal fervor was one to recreate a European social welfare state in the USA.  For historical reasons, America is infertile ground for that degenerative species of political economy

The President's vision was quasi-socialized medicine, captive industries, a dependent populace and a larger share of wealth and power in government hands.  Even more unfortunate is that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid wielded unstoppable and unprincipled majorities in both chambers of Congress, which enabled him to achieve all of the above.

Words matter.  And, as the President understands only too well, so does delivery.

Contrary to what the President thinks, however, neither matter in lieu of deeds.  Thus far, his actions have Americans contemplating one credit downgrade already, the possible loss of the dollar's reserve currency status--after all, we only won that distinction by virtue of being unlike all the world's big-government states--seething unrest throughout a moslem world coming under the sway of hegemonic fanatics, and a dispirited and divided people at home.

Noman doesn't know if the President's stage performance cast the spell on the electorate that his Party hoped for.  He does know, however, that whenever the President displays his silver-tongued, voice-modulating, head-swiveling Thespianism, it reminds him ever the more of Conan the Barbarian's nemesis, Thulsa Doom. 

Pinnochio Discovers Natural Gas

President Obama has returned from yet another vacation determined to convince people that, despite all indications to the contrary, he really is pro-business, pro-middle class and pro-jobs.

You'll recall that last January brought us a missive from his desk vowing to slash unnecessary regulations.  He also hired a new, business friendly chief of staff to replace political animal Rahm Emmanuel who moved on to rule Chicago rather than Congress.

Daly resigned abruptly this month, ostensibly to spend more time with his family.  Uh-huh.

Now, in an election year conversion typical of his Party,  the President appears to have turned 180 degrees in order to embrace the natural gas industry, which his Administration had spurned in favor of renewable energy boondoggles.

A re-election campaign is a terrible thing to waste, and this year's race is already producing miraculous changes at the Obama White House: The latest example of a bear walking on its hind legs is the President's new embrace of . . . natural gas from shale. 

Last week the White House issued its latest report on jobs and it includes a section on "America's Natural Resource Boom." The report avers that a few years ago there were widespread "fears of a looming natural gas shortage," but that "the discovery of new natural gas reserves, such as the Marcellus Shale, and the development of hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract natural gas from these reserves has led to rapidly growing domestic production and relatively low domestic prices for households and downstream industrial users." 

Please pass the smelling salts to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Lisa Jackson at the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Ms. Jackson was in the news last November for revealing the Obama Administration's actual regulatory approach to energy, in that case, coal.

Psychoanalysis is usually the wrong way to understand politics, but the Obama Administration may be reviving the field with its Freudian slips. The latest to land on the couch is Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson, who gave an unintentionally candid interview this weekend with Thalia Assuras of Energy Now News. 

Ms. Jackson was asked about the EPA's regulatory boom and the resulting mass retirements of coal-fired power plants.

When pressed, Ms. Jackson went on to say that "What EPA's role is to do is to level the playing field so that pollution costs are not exported to the population but rather companies have to look at the pollution potential of any fuel or any process or any plant or any utility when they're making their investment decisions."

In fact, when Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, its goal was clean air, not the industrial planning that Ms. Jackson's comments about "levelling the playing field" reveal... It certainly doesn't contain a roving mandate for Ms. Jackson to guide investment decisions (emphasis added). 

What Ms. Jackson really means is that she is trying to make coal—the workhorse of U.S. electric power—artificially more expensive. This is to serve her anticarbon goals, if not the consumers who will bear the costs and may suffer if the U.S. electric grid is compromised.

Back to natural gas, we can apparently ignore all the fang and claw that the Administration has flashed to gore industry with generally, and the traditional energy industry with specifically.  At least through the election, environmentalist ideology will have to yield to the nation's well being.

Maybe Democracy isn't such a bad system after all.

With respect to natural gas:

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the White House has favorably mentioned the Marcellus Shale, the natural gas reservoir below Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other Northeastern states. And now he's taking credit for this soaring production. 

We checked to see if someone slipped a press release from the Natural Gas Council into the White House report by mistake, but apparently not. 

The catch is that this endorsement runs against every energy policy pursued by the Obama Administration for three years. The Institute for Energy Research reports that royalties from oil and gas drilling have fallen more than 90% since 2008 because of Interior Department permitting delays and rejections.

The EPA recently issued a flawed report on groundwater contamination that could shut down the fracking process the President is now touting as a jobs producer. EPA's political goal is to grab power to supercede state drilling regulation. The industry regards new EPA authority as a real threat to its future.

 Naturally, the reader is free to trust the President's sincerity if  he wishes to.  If you do, Noman is selling a bridge that he'd like to discuss with you.

Saint Buffet's Chutzpah

'I'll donate a dollar to pay down the deficit for every dollar that Congressional Republicans donate' taunts Warren Buffet in a Reuters article (n.b. indirect quote).

He must have finished President Obama's copy of "Rules for Radicals" and decided to get on the fun side--the media's side--of the Statist v. Liberty conflict.  Annoying your enemy, especially to the delight of Alinsky's realistic revolutionaries, is a winning tactic according to the handbook for community organizers.

The irony of the quintessential "Have" speaking in the name of the "Have Nots" to persuade the "Have Some, Want Mores" to play in a game that gives him, not them, yet more is rich.

This "Have Some, Wants More" isn't fooled.

In return for his advocacy of Statist governance, Buffet gets the President's private assurances that BankAmerica, for instance, won't be allowed to go bankrupt, and that it is safe for him to invest billions of dollars in it on buccaneer terms.

The person who said that higher risk was necessary to earn higher returns didn't understand crony capitalism.

If Warren Buffet wants to squander the prestige he earned as a capitalist on behalf of Statist politics and governance, that's his business.  We the people are free to ignore him, as we surely must do if only for the sake of self-preservation and that of the our country.

There were a couple of passages in the article, however, that begged a rejoinder.

The jabs over voluntary payments come as higher taxes for the wealthy and extension of payroll tax breaks for middle-class Americans are becoming increasingly contentious issues for the 2012 presidential race. Obama is trying to paint Republicans as only favoring the wealthy, while Republicans are trying to brand the president as relying on tax hikes to fund excessive spending.

While it is certainly the case that each Party is jockeying to paint the other in the least favorable light, someone should point out that the picture Republicans are painting accords with a plausible reading of reality, whereas the one that Democrats are painting does not.

Borrowing a line from the immortal Josh Steiner, Republicans' claims are more a Manet than a Monet; Democrats'  are much more a Munch--they say more about the painter's state of mind than about what they depict.

First, the President's claims that Republicans favor only the wealthy, are pure bloviation.

Unlike Warren Buffet, George Soros, Jon Corzine, Jeff Immelt, George Kaiser and the cadre of deep-pocket donors from Wall Street to Sunset Blvd. that fill the President's war chest to overflowing, Noman is not wealthy.

He knows that what passes for government since Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi took over Congress in 2006, and especially since Barack Obama took over the White House in 2008, favors neither the middle class, no-family nor him.

To benefit from Democrats' favor, one must know somebody rather than something useful, have pressure group connections, join the metastasizing public sector, or generally be willing to lay down, roll over and beg.

Democrats' economic initiatives hinder the nation.  Republicans' initiatives to reduce the scale and scope of government, taxes and regulation help the middle class and Noman by stimulating rather than suffocating private initiative, thereby unleashing rather than shackling the economy.

Republicans' economic initiatives promise hope for those skillful, lucky and blessed enough to seize opportunity.  Democrats promise effortless abundance that exists nowhere but in heaven and in utopian fantasies.

Noman prefers freedom--even if it means the possibility of failure--to servitude and a life dependent upon whom one knows rather than upon what.

On the other hand, the President is relying on tax hikes to fund excessive spending.  He fights like a rabid wolverine--a low-biting one at that--to defend every ounce of pork and patronage in the budget.  He snarls and growls for tax increases through the use of euphemisms like "fairness."

Then he has the audacity to lambast Republicans for not compromising.

Total national debt has levitated by 60%, to over $16 trillion, during his Presidency despite the government's receipt of $2.1 trillion in tax revenues each and every year of it.  How much is enough?

While current annual taxes slightly exceed 2005's amount, today's deficit surpasses that year's by $1.3 trillion. The difference is big government's spending of $3.8 trillion. The facts are plain to see.

That would constitute excessive spending in most people's estimation.  But, for Liberals, the Goldilocks standard applies.  Whatever the amount spent, as long as it increases year-to-year by a higher rate, it is never excessive and always just right (barely).

But, not for baby bear, whose belongings are casually appropriated by somebody else.

Before President Obama arrived in the White House with his notion of fairness, the federal government never spent more than $3 trillion in a single year.  Thanks to his exertions, it will never again spend less, and is projected to spend $4 trillion by 2015.

Any bets on the actual figure reaching $5 trillion as ObamaCare bureaucrats settle into their offices?

Which Party is painting a realistic picture, and which is just doodling?  You be the judge, in November.

The second point regards Saint Buffet's social theory, specifically his confusion of government with society.

Buffett said in the Time interview the United States needed a tax system that favored people who were not born investors. 

"We need a tax system that takes very good care of people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system, and to capitalism, but are nevertheless just as good citizens, and are doing things that are of use in society," he said.

Noman begs to differ.  We need strong intermediate associations--e.g., family, church, schools; in short, educational, religious, cultural, charitable and other organizations--not a tax system that robs these associations to favor pet groups, and recycle money with strings attached.

In a revealing moment of the New Hampshire debate last Saturday night, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney explained how this operates for good citizens doing useful things for society.

For instance, the Catholic Church was forced to abandon its role as a provider of adoptions in the state of Massachusetts because of its unwillingness to genuflect before Liberals' sexual dogma.  For refusing to serve Baal, Catholic Charities has been denied millions of dollars in federal funding used to help victims of sex trafficking.

Why is this money in the governments' hands to begin with so that it can meddle with the religious beliefs of Catholics, and others?

Buffet apparently doesn't realize that the agency of government is not the only means to assist people that aren't as well adapted to the market system and capitalism as he is.

Yet, he uses his celebrity to debilitate the very system in which he honorably earned it.  By doing so he exposes his ingratitude, as well as ignorance of political economy and life in the middle class--as opposed to among those who deign from the heights to speak for it.

Then again, the government doesn't work as well for most people as it does for him.  He's in a select club of cronies, membership in which makes it worth his while to shill for Statists.

Noman prefers a less contrived game: one in which he and his no-children are free to become the next Warren Buffet, and in which the living legend doesn't labor to ensure that everybody stays in his or her place.

The English Embassy Gaffe

President Obama has made another largely unreported gaffe that, for novelty's sake, the Heritage Foundation would like to highlight.

In a press conference this evening, the president referred in stumbling fashion to the “English Embassy” in Iran instead of the British Embassy. One can only imagine the kind of howls of derision that would greet any presidential contender if that kind of basic error were made before, say, the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. You can watch the video above. 

In case the president is unaware, England forms part of Great Britain, which also includes Scotland and Wales, though not Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. There is no such thing as an “English” embassy anywhere in the world, and there hasn’t been one for several centuries.

Noman only mentions it because of the beating that Republican presidential candidates have taken for momentary mental lapses, e.g., Rick Perry's oops moment, Herman Cain on President Obama's Libya incursion.  Since the mainstream media views its mission as covering up for Democrats' mistakes (and misdeeds) while attacking Republicans' every slip up, it's good for alternative media to note the inconceivable: the President himself flubs on occasion.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this latest slip-up by President Obama. After all he recently described France as America’s closest ally, and famously declared that he has traveled to no less than 57 states. But it would be nice if the leader of the free world bothered to look at a map once in a while, or even paid a visit to the British Embassy in Washington, currently housing the Churchill bust that Mr. Obama unceremoniously threw out of the Oval Office soon after his inauguration.

The larger question is whether this most recent gaffe signifies a broader disregard for Great Britain along with other traditional US allies.

From siding with Argentina on its call for UN-brokered negotiations over the sovereignty of the Falklands, to placing “a boot on the throat” of BP, Britain’s largest company, the Obama administration has downgraded relations with America’s closest friend and partner on the world stage. The Special Relationship still matters greatly on several key fronts for the United States, from the NATO-led operation in Afghanistan to the global war against Islamist terrorism. US-British military and intelligence cooperation remains vital to the defense of the free world, and cooperation between London and Washington will be imperative in standing up to an increasingly aggressive Iran. The White House will no doubt dismiss this latest faux pas by the president as a slip of the tongue, but it cannot disguise the fact that it has on many occasions treated Britain and other key allies with an air of disdain, and even contempt.

Big media's Liberal bias disturbs Noman and strikes him as politically dangerous given that democracy depends upon an informed--not deformed--electorate.  Nevertheless, the Heritage Foundation's last point is the salient one.  President Obama's predilections run towards the Continent and away from Britain, towards Islam and away from Israel.  Right or wrong, his picture of the world is markedly different than most Americans'.