Energy myths, you should know better.

http://manhattan-institute.org/energymyths/


The US get almost 60% of it's oil from foreigners, but not from where most think. Should we be drilling and refining more locally? Absolutely, and as soon as people wake up and tell the EPA and Obama off we can revive that industry, restore those jobs, and lower our fuel, shipping, goods and services prices.

1. Canada: 18.2 percent
2. Mexico: 11.4 percent
3. Saudi Arabia: 11 percent
4. Venezuela: 10.1 percent
5. Nigeria: 8.4 percent

Do we need more energy? Absolutely. Unreliable and inefficient solar and wind collection schemes aren't going to work. Nuclear energy is viable, efficient, and safe.

• More than 67% believe we can meet future energy demand through conservation and efficiency. Historically, in contrast, energy demand actually increases alongside efficiency gains. And because energy use is not static, conservation leads to only marginal reductions in demand. The EIA projects global energy consumption to increase 50% from 2005 to 2030 and U.S. energy use to increase 11.2% from 2007 to 2030.
• Just 37% correctly answered that no one has ever died from the actual generation of nuclear power in the U.S. Though the U.S. has not built a nuclear-power reactor since the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, 104 active reactors safely generate roughly one-fifth of our nation’s electricity.
• 

Is the EPA unnecessarily throttling industry and driving up consumer prices for political gains? You bet.

• Sixty-three percent of those surveyed believe that human activity is the greatest source of greenhouse gases. In fact, such emissions are significantly smaller than natural emissions. The burning of fossil fuels is responsible for just 3.27% of the carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere each year, while the biosphere and oceans account for 55.28% and 41.46%, respectively.
• Less than 28% correctly believe that U.S. air quality has improved since 1970. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the six most common air pollutants have decreased by more than 50%; air toxins from large industrial sources have fallen nearly 70%; new cars are more than 90% cleaner, in terms of their emissions; and production of most ozone-depleting chemicals has ceased. These reductions have occurred despite the fact that during the same period, gross domestic product tripled, energy consumption increased 50%, and motor vehicle use increased almost 200%.

Is the globe warming? We know the climate has been both much warmer, and much colder historically. In the last 100 years of relatively accurate temperature readings the trend has been both very slightly up and very slightly down. We're talking about a 1 degree F variation from the baseline. Notice, that is a variation not a change. You'd have to have a consistent and continuing variation to prove a change. The only real pattern is cyclical fluctuation.

Juan Williams sees racists, they're everywhere.

Racial Code Words?

Juan Williams False Charges of Racism

Obama loses touch with reality.

http://cnsnews-test.s3.amazonaws.com/sites/default/files/videos/converted/Gingrich Affair.mp4

Newt 1, liberal media 0.

Gingrich 'Tired of the Elite Media Protecting Barack Obama by Attacking Republicans'                        

Obama fleeces the taxpayers again.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-administration-says-no-oil-yes-biofuels
Obama is in campaign mode, and the taxpayers are going to fund it, no matter the cost. Obama kills keystone to appease the enviro-mental-ists, then rushes through another solyndra type government energy scheme "creating or saving" as many as 54 jobs, at a cost of $463,000 a piece. That's another $25 million wasted just to say he's creating alternative energy. When it goes belly up, no matter, he'll be reelected or out of office, so he won't care.

CBO says ObamaCare-Like Programs Don’t Save Money or Reduce Costs

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/cbo-obamacare-programs-don-t-save-money-or-reduce-costs
60% of the population know better, which is why the democrats had to ram it though. Remember, don't read it, we can't wait, just pass it?

Supreme court rejects voting maps based on race.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/story/2012-01-20/supreme-court-texas-redistricting/52694144/1

It’s about time. The more our government claims to guarantee equality through bureaucracy, the more they disenfranchise Americans. Stop creating districts to protect legislators, the real goal of gerrymandering, and start representing your constituents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/us/supreme-court-rejects-judge-drawn-maps-in-texas-redistricting-case.html?_r=1

“The justices said the lower court had not paid enough deference to the Legislature’s choices and seemed to have improperly substituted its own values for those of elected officials.” How about that. Now all we need to do is extend the same thinking to Obama’s Czars and other federal agencies unaccountable to the electorate.

Fire Judge Samuel Ray Cummings of North Texas.

http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Federal/Read.aspx?id=7261
Apparently, according to this colossal fool, the second amendment only applies inside your home. SO, lets apply that logic to the other amendments:
1 freedom of speech is gone at the threshold, and don't talk too loud inside, if your voice carries beyond the wall you're in trouble.
5 Probable cause is no longer needed, you can be search and detained at any time on a whim.
6 You have no right to a trial once you step outside your home.
13 Slavery is legal so long as you abduct the person outside their home.
15 You can deny voting rights based on race and color, as long as the voter isn't inside their home.
19 Women can't vote unless inside their home.
We need to remove this fool from office for attempting to limit our freedom and clearly ruling against the constitution of Texas and the United States.

Some people shouldn't vote.

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Don't trust your instincts

by John Stossel

01/18/2012

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Simple answers are so satisfying: Green jobs will fix the economy. Stimulus will create jobs. Charity helps people more than commerce. Everyone should vote.
   
Well, all those instinctive solutions are wrong. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in "The Fatal Conceit," it's a problem that in our complex, extended economy, we rely on instincts developed during our ancestors' existence in small bands. In those old days, everyone knew everyone else, so affairs could be micromanaged. Today, we live in a global economy where strangers deal with each other. The rules need to be different.
   
Hayek said: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
   
You might think people have begun to understand this. Opinion polls show Americans are very dissatisfied with government. Congress has only a 12 percent approval rating. Good. People should be suspicious of what Congress would design. Central planners failed in the Soviet Union and Cuba and America's public schools and at the post office.
   
Despite all that failure, however, whenever a crisis hits, the natural instinct is to say, "Government must do something."
   
Look at this piece of instinctual wisdom: Everyone should vote. In the last big election, only 90 million people voted out of more than 200 million eligible voters. That's terrible, we're told. But it's not terrible because a lot of people are ignorant. When I asked people to identify pictures of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, almost half couldn't.
   
This is one reason I say those "get out the vote" drives are dumb. I take heat for saying that, but Bryan Caplan agrees. He's a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies."
   
"A lot of bad policies ... pass by popular demand," Caplan told me. "In order to do the right thing, you have to know something."
   
The "informed citizen" is the ideal of democratic societies, but Caplan points out that average citizens have no incentive to become informed, while special interests do. The rest of us have lives. We are busy with things other than politics. That's why our democratic government inflates the price of sugar through trade restrictions, even though American sugar consumers far outnumber American sugar producers.
   
Caplan has a radical proposal for citizens: Be honest. If you know nothing about a subject, don't have an opinion about it. "And don't reward or penalize candidates for their position on an issue you don't understand."
   
Political life differs from private life. If you vote for a candidate while ignorant about issues, you'll pay no more than a tiny fraction of the price of your ignorance. Not so in your private affairs. If you're dumb when you buy a car, you get stuck with a bad car. You get punished right away.
   
"And you may look back and say, 'I'm not going to do that again.' ... It's not so much that voters are dumb. Even smart people act dumb when they vote. I know an engineer who is very clever. ... But his views on economics (are) ridiculous."
   
It's not what people don't know that gets them into trouble. It's what they know that isn't so.
   
"A very common view is that foreign aid is actually the largest item in the budget," Caplan said. "It's about 1 percent."
   
Actually, even less. Medicare, Social Security, the military and interest on the debt make up over half the budget. But surveys show that people believe foreign aid and welfare are the biggest items.
   
So, you ignorant people, please stay home on Election Day. And those of you who do vote, please resist the instinctive urge to give our tribal elders more power.
   
If Americans keep voting for politicians who want to pass more laws and spend more money, the result will not be a country with fewer problems, but a country that's governed by piecemeal socialism. Or corporatism. We can debate the meaning of those words, but there's no doubt that such central planning leaves us less prosperous and less free.

Presidential Nonsense

By Walter E. Williams

January 17, 2012

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Last week, President Barack Obama, at a Capital Hilton fundraising event, told the crowd, "We can't go back to this brand of you're-on-your-own economics." Throughout my professional career as an economist, I've never come across the theory of "you're-on-your-own economics."

I'm guessing what the president means by — and finds offensive in — "you're-on-your-own economics" is that it's a system in which people are held responsible for their actions, that they take risks and must live with the results, that people can't force others to pay for their mistakes, and that they can't live at the expense of other people.

President Obama's vision was shared by our Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony in modern-day Massachusetts. They established a communist system. They all farmed together, and whatever they produced was put in a common storehouse. A certain amount of food was rationed to each person regardless of his contribution to the work. Many Pilgrims complained that they were too weak from hunger to do their share of the work. As deeply religious as the Pilgrims were, they took to stealing from one another. Gov. William Bradford, writing his history of the colony in "Of Plymouth Plantation," said, "So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue, the next year also if not some way prevented."

In 1623, after much debate, a new system was set up, in which every family was assigned a parcel of land, and whatever they produced belonged to the family. Gov. Bradford then observed, "The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression." After Gov. Bradford's establishment of what Obama calls "you're-on-your-own economics," harvests were so bountiful that Bradford is credited with establishing what we now call Thanksgiving.

There are several seemingly immutable, hard-wired characteristics about humans that socialists, liberals and progressives find difficult to deal with and would like to change.

People tend to work harder and produce more when they own what they produce. Property is better cared for when it is privately owned. People love to exchange, what Adam Smith called a "propensity to truck (and) barter." To suppress these characteristics requires brute force.

President Obama also told the Washington Hilton crowd that "we are not a country that was built on the idea of survival of the fittest." Obama is not by himself, but "survival of the fittest" is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Charles Darwin's pathbreaking work "On the Origin of Species."

When Obama and most other people use the expression "survival of the fittest," they suggest that a bunch of people or animals are competing with one another and the strongest, smartest or cleverest survives. That's not what Darwin and evolutionary biologists have in mind. Instead, what they have in mind is that those who survive have characteristics that make them better-equipped to survive and hence reproduce themselves in a particular environment. They are not laying waste to their competitors.

Let's try a few survival of the fittest questions. Which companies do you think should survive and expand, those that can meet the changing wants of their customers in a least-cost fashion or those that cannot do so? If the means of communication become cheaper through fax machines, the Internet and telephones, should subsidies be expended to help the U.S. Postal Service survive?

Years ago, typing was done on a mechanical typewriter; milk was delivered to doorsteps via horse and wagon; slide rules were used to make calculations. Should any of these products and practices have survived, or was it OK for natural selection to consign them to the dustbin of history?

Try cornering the president or his supporters, and ask them whether they believe government should ensure that the unfit survive and rather than "you're-on-your-own economics" there should be "you're-on-somebody-else economics."