Trump reverses Obama's Clean Power Plan, lifts ban on coal mining leases on federal lands

Another promise kept. Now if we could just get back all the income we lost because Obama deliberately did nothing about middle class jobs for eight years.

From the story here:

The Clean Power Plan required states to collectively cut carbon emissions [CO2] from power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Trump laid out 28 policy prescriptions in his Gettysburg address which repudiate Obama, but Obama still says Trump has few hard and fast proposals

Obama always has had trouble with math. And denial.

Here:

"I think he is coming to this office with fewer set hard and fast policy prescriptions than a lot of other presidents might be arriving with. Do I have concerns? Absolutely, of course I've got concerns. He and I differ on a whole bunch of issues," Obama added.

From Gettysburg:

1. Propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.
2. Institute a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health).
3. Require for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.
4. Institute a five year-ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.
5. Create a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
6. Institute a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.
7. Announce intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205.
8. Announce withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
9. Direct Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator.
10. Direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately.
11. Lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.
12. Lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward.
13. Cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.
14. Cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama.
15. Begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia from one of the 20 judges on my list, who will uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.
16. Cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities.
17. Begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back.
18. Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.
19. Work with Congress on a Middle Class Tax Relief And Simplification Act. An economic plan designed to grow the economy 4% per year and create at least 25 million new jobs through massive tax reduction and simplification, in combination with trade reform, regulatory relief, and lifting the restrictions on American energy. The largest tax reductions are for the middle class. A middle-class family with 2 children will get a 35% tax cut. The current number of brackets will be reduced from 7 to 3, and tax forms will likewise be greatly simplified. The business rate will be lowered from 35 to 15 percent, and the trillions of dollars of American corporate money overseas can now be brought back at a 10 percent rate.
20. Work with Congress on a End The Offshoring Act. Establishes tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free.
21. Work with Congress on a American Energy & Infrastructure Act. Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years. It is revenue neutral.
22. Work with Congress on a School Choice And Education Opportunity Act. Redirects education dollars to gives parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice. Ends common core, brings education supervision to local communities. It expands vocational and technical education, and make 2 and 4-year college more affordable.
23. Work with Congress on a Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act. Fully repeals Obamacare and replaces it with Health Savings Accounts, the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, and lets states manage Medicaid funds. Reforms will also include cutting the red tape at the FDA: there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, and we especially want to speed the approval of life-saving medications.
24. Work with Congress on a Affordable Childcare and Eldercare Act. Allows Americans to deduct childcare and elder care from their taxes, incentivizes employers to provide on-site childcare services, and creates tax-free Dependent Care Savings Accounts for both young and elderly dependents, with matching contributions for low-income families.
25. Work with Congress on an End Illegal Immigration Act. Fully-funds the construction of a wall on our southern border with the full understanding that the country Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full cost of such wall; establishes a 2-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence for illegally re-entering the U.S. after a previous deportation, and a 5-year mandatory minimum for illegally re-entering for those with felony convictions, multiple misdemeanor convictions or two or more prior deportations; also reforms visa rules to enhance penalties for overstaying and to ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.
26. Work with Congress on a Restoring Community Safety Act.Reduces surging crime, drugs and violence by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars.
27. Work with Congress on a Restoring National Security Act. Rebuilds our military by eliminating the defense sequester and expanding military investment; provides Veterans with the ability to receive public VA treatment or attend the private doctor of their choice; protects our vital infrastructure from cyber-attack; establishes new screening procedures for immigration to ensure those who are admitted to our country support our people and our values.
28. Work with Congress on a Clean up Corruption in Washington Act. Enacts new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.

Ted Cruz says he'll vote for Donald Trump as promised, urges you to join him, and says Hillary is wholly unacceptable

Here on Facebook, citing primarily Supreme Court appointments and the fate of the Bill of Rights, then the costs of ObamaCare for millions of Americans, the Democrat war on coal, oil and gas, the lawless executive illegal immigrant amnesty, threats to National Security from Muslim immigration, and Obama's giving up of US control of the internet.

That should also help him get reelected down in Texas.

Smart move. Really late, but a smart move.

Trump digs coal in Charleston WV

Obama's war on coal kills Peabody Energy, the US' largest coal company

Number two Arch Coal went belly up in January.

Story here.

Meanwhile 7 coal-fired power plants in Michigan are closing this week to meet new EPA emission regulations. Almost 1,000 megawatts of electricity generating capacity go away as a result, to be replaced by north of 500 megawatts of capacity from a natural gas plant.

Details here.

Hillary's jobs plan: We are going to put a lot of coal miners out of business

Last night, video here.

Supreme Court decision staying EPA power emissions rule means states likely to win in court

So reports The Hill, here:

The decision means that the EPA cannot enforce the rule until the litigation against it is finished.

It also means that the court believes that the states, companies and groups suing the EPA are likely to win their case when its merits are considered.

A big victory for electricity from coal and for Laurence Tribe: Supremes stay EPA rule implementation shutting down 53 plants

The New York Times reports here:

WASHINGTON — In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. ... “We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation, protecting workers and saving countless dollars as our fight against its legality continues,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which has led the 29-state legal challenge. ... In a second filing seeking a stay, coal companies and trade associations represented by Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said the court should act to stop a “targeted attack on the coal industry” that will “artificially eliminate buyers of coal, forcing the coal industry to curtail production, idle operations, lay off workers and close mines.” ... Mr. Tribe added that the plan “will cause the closure of 53 coal-fired plants in 2016 and another three in 2018.”

Another Obama achievement: deliberately bankrupting coal companies, destroying jobs and making electricity more expensive

From the story here at Bloomberg yesterday detailing the coal bankruptcies:

Obama has backed tougher limits on carbon dioxide blamed for climate change.

New mercury standards that took effect last year led utilities to retire 23 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

On Friday, his administration said it will stop leasing public land to coal developers and will weigh raising royalty fees for exploration while it studies the fuel’s environmental impacts.

Both production and demand for coal this year will fall to the lowest level since 1983, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said this week. ...

Arch [Coal Inc.] has followed Alpha Natural Resources Inc., Patriot Coal Corp., Walter Energy Inc. and James River Coal Co., in bankruptcy.

In other news, mining (129,000) and logging jobs (2,000) declined 131,000 in 2015, the biggest decline since 1986 and the third worst year of declines since 1939.

Since 2007 net generation of electricity from coal has declined by almost 30% through October 2015.

While retail sales of electricity in 2014 are almost exactly identical to such sales in 2007, measured in kilowatthours purchased, the cost of that electricity has gone up over 18% over the same period as coal's role is being deliberately curtailed.

World leaders agree to totally toothless climate accord

Story here.

Coal for Christmas everybody!

WaPo Gen Xer drinks climate Kool-Aid, attacks Baby Boomers for causing global warming and running up the $18 trillion debt

spotted headed to Mt. Rushmore

Here:

"Boomers soaked up a lot of economic opportunity without bothering to preserve much for the generations to come. They burned a lot of cheap fossil fuels, filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases, and will probably never pay the costs of averting catastrophic climate change or helping their grandchildren adapt to a warmer world. They took control of Washington at the turn of the millennium, and they used it to rack up a lot of federal debt, even before the Great Recession hit."

Substitute "liberals" everytime you see "boomers" in the essay and it makes a lot more sense than attacking your parents per se. Instead the author prefers to commit Maoism in "Baby boomers are what’s wrong with America’s economy". 

Meanwhile, exporting good jobs and importing cheap labor were artifacts of the 1960s revolution, advanced by people who were fellow travelers under FDR. The height of the baby boom generation was what, aged 10 in 1967? 

In the end, Jim Tankersley can't add and subtract, but what his father gave him for Christmas in 2012 for his patricidal thesis says it all:

"After I first outlined this argument to my father in 2012, he gifted me an actual lump of coal for Christmas."

Well done, Dad! The earth remains full of coal, especially American earth, ensuring energy independence as far as the eye can see, as well as oil and natural gas and . . . thorium! If only we'll use it. 

It makes more sense to rely on these going forward because they remain so plentiful, employing technologies to make them harmless to human health, invented by smart people from every generation.

But if a Maunder Minimum ensues in 2030, we might not care as much about the health as the warmth.

President signs Trade Promotion Authority (Fast Track) knocked off the news by Supreme Court decisions

The Senate passed TPA last Wednesday, on the 24th, 60-38, but the next day ObamaCare was upheld by the Supremes and the following day Same Sex Marriage, both of which sensational developments obliterated the trade story from the news cycle. The trade vote story from last Wednesday is here. The roll call vote is here. Once again just five Republicans in the Senate voted against the job-destroying measure: Collins, Cruz, Paul, Sessions and Shelby. The same five who voted against bringing the measure to the floor.

The signing story from today is here.

They do what they want to do. We have no say in the matter. But if we vote for any of the principals, we are complicit in the deed.

The country is shell-shocked by it all, walking about in a daze, the part of it that cares anyway.

Obama has had a huge week, winning everything consequential, with Republican help in the Congress and the Court, meaning Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader McConnell and Reagan appointee Justice Kennedy.

The only thing Obama lost and the people won was the Supremes' rebuke of the EPA on coal. Your electric bill will go up later rather than sooner.

The last days of this administration are dark indeed.

The bad news for graduates: if you follow your passions you'll likely go off the rails

USA Today mediocrity Laura Vanderkam sells the snake oil here:

"[T]he good news is that the economy is evolving in ways that make [following your passion] more practical than your graduation speaker realizes. The key is recognizing two things. First, work and life aren't separate; a career is ideally a way to profitably live out your interests. And second, you don't just want to follow your passion; you also want to rally other people to follow your passion. Doing so is how you will get to do what you love for the rest of your life. Fortunately, building a following is more possible than ever, even for young people, if you play your cards right."

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America didn't become the greatest economic powerhouse in the history of the world because its people followed their passions. Ask the millions who slaved away their lives tilling the soil, mining the coal and driving the trucks. Rather it was relentless commitment to hard work, delaying gratification and saving which formed the basis for the success. As for rallying other people to follow your passion, that is a complete waste of your time. And since time is one of your only advantages relative to everyone else, you ought to concentrate on using it more wisely. It's the greatest leverage you have, next to your energy.

Work. Save. Invest.

Einstein's successor Freeman Dyson: Climatologists don't understand the climate, burning coal is good for crop yields

Quoted here in 2013:

"I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic."

"I just think they don’t understand the climate," he said of climatologists. "Their computer models are full of fudge factors."

"The models are extremely oversimplified," he said. "They don't represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds."

"It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation," Dyson said. "About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO-2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil."

"They’re absolutely lousy," he said of American journalists. "That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed."

"It was similar in the Soviet Union," he said. "Who could doubt Marxist economics was the future? Everything else was in the dustbin."

The New Republic fired Tim Noah over a year and a half ago: the canary in the coal mine?

Tim Noah, as true a liberal as you'll ever find, has since landed at Politico, which tells you a lot about one Chris Hughes, the new owner of TNR since 2012. Evidently Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, couldn't abide the likes of Tim Noah.

Noah was fired under the new Hughes ownership already in early 2013. And now in late 2014 it appears the top editor and the veteran literary editor also have been forced out, and in protest more than two dozen additional editors and staffers have quit the magazine, which celebrates its centenary this year. The former employees have met instead to conduct the magazine's funeral.

The damn thing has literally blown up. Leave it to a 31-year old rich kid to wreck something so storied.

Politico reports here.

The Detroit News Explains To Obama How He Could Learn Something About Coal From Europe

Here:

Europe’s experience with such hardline carbon rule-making [as Obama's] would suggest the [US Chamber of Commerce's] claims are more credible than the administration’s. Clean energy investment among European Union members dropped 14 percent in the third quarter of last year, as governments reconsidered policies similar to the ones Obama is putting in place.

The reason: Electricity costs in Europe are the highest in the world, and are helping to drive away manufacturing jobs. Instead of shutting down coal plants, Europe is actually building them again as a way of dropping those crushing electricity costs.

Higher utility bills will hurt poorer Americans the hardest, and ultimately will necessitate even more wealth transfer schemes.

In addition, the resurgent U.S. manufacturing industry will be slowed. Energy is a crucial component of building things, obviously, and today American manufacturers enjoy a distinct advantage because of relatively low electricity costs. Raising those costs will hit industrial states, like Michigan, particularly hard.

Obama thinks he has achievements, which must mean he is suffering a psychosis

From the long story in The New Yorker, here, by image-accommodating biographer David Remnick:

As Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements—the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology—he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest consequence; he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's see.

Starting with the economic rescue, Obama said at the time in early 2009 that he had more than enough on his plate without having to worry about the financial crisis.

So who fixed that?

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. While everyone was fixated on the controversy over TARP and the crony capitalist, fascist character of that bailout in the mere hundreds of billions of dollars as millions of Americans were losing their homes, behind the scenes the Fed was providing multiple trillions of dollars of short-term loans to just about any bank or business in the world which was in trouble, at rock-bottom low interest rates which homeowners could only dream about, right into 2010. They all got fixed while 5.6 million Americans went on to lose their homes through 2013.

And what did Obama do in response to that?

Disgracefully fire Bernanke in public by saying he'd overstayed his time at the Fed, but that came only long after everything looked like it was truly stabilized. And I do mean "looked". The fact of the matter is extraordinary measures remain in place at the Fed because the banks' condition is still not healthy enough to do without them. When those end, the crisis will be truly over, not before. The rescue is still underway, with no end in sight.

Then there's the 44 months of job growth claim. Well, the truth is we are in the 72nd month of the jobs recession as we speak today, the longest jobs recession in the history of the post-war by a long shot. Bush's had been the longest previously, at 47 months. And it is estimated that the current jobs recession will not be over for another 6 months, which means we'll finally have matched the number of payroll jobs which existed at the time the recession began, but only after about 6.5 years have gone by.

But that says nothing about a return to normalcy. Include the shortfall which exists in the numbers because of net population growth over the period and the country will still be in a serious jobs deficit once the jobs recession is over, and for a long time to come without some major driver for jobs appearing on the scene.

Finally, I'm not sure how anyone measures a reduction in carbon emissions when China keeps them billowing into the air at a record rate, burning coal and oil in huge quantities. Obama can point to the closing down of coal power plants in this country if he wants, but all that does is make American electricity more expensive as China's waves of pollution waft ever eastward over the Pacific, polluting our air, water and farmland.

But if anyone's contributing to the reduction in carbon emissions in this country, it's the American worker who isn't working. Travel on the road in this country has been stuck at levels first reached between 2004 and 2005 for five long years because so many people no longer have a job to which to commute. Every month that goes by shows the same statistical result: no progress in miles traveled back to the levels of the 2007 peak. It's an odd thing to be taking credit for.

If it is clear from these facts that Obama is delusional and lives in a separate reality, it is also clear from Remnick's story that Obama has to work hard at crafting it, even about what is probably at the heart of his mental problems in the first place: 

When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Is it less dangerous? I asked.

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Scratch that,” or, “I think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.”

Why does the smartest president ever have to edit everything, all the time, until it makes sense to him?

Who do you call to have the president committed?

The Obama Regime Shut Out Private Online Healthcare Brokers For Over 3 Years

The Obama regime shut out help from private online health insurance brokerage firms for over three years, and it wasn't until July 31 that it finally relented and entered into partnerships with private online health insurance brokerages like ehealthinsurance.com, which routinely handles online traffic in a range up to 20 million, to facilitate ObamaCare's online presence.

CNBC reported the breakthrough here and the story was widely disseminated at the time.

But USA Today here featured a story earlier that month which highlighted the frustration of such brokerages over the way the regime had shut them out until the very last minute, when it was already way too late:

So far, none of the government exchanges being run by the federal government, individual states, or federal-state partnerships has given ehealthinsurance.com and other for-profit Web markets the green light to enroll uninsured individuals under the Affordable Care Act's subsidized coverage scheme.

"I'm just totally mystified, puzzled, flummoxed as to why the administration isn't using somebody like me to help," said eHealth CEO Gary Lauer, whose company is a leading industry player among a dozen or more Web-based markets that have sought to partner with various government exchanges.

Lauer noted that he had been an enthusiastic supporter of the new health law championed by President Barack Obama. But the stone-walling, foot-dragging and other inexplicable hurdles that he says his company has faced in offering subsidized insurance under that law has made him increasingly skeptical of the plan. ...

But Lauer and others think the delay on allowing participation by Web marketplaces may be a canary-in-the-coalmine indication of overall problems with the exchanges being ready for business by October.

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No one in America should have been surprised to see the rollout of Healthcare.gov fail spectacularly like it did when it made its appearance at the beginning of this month.

Rasmussen Poll Finds 'Tea Party' Label Most Negative, 'Liberal' Second Most

Here:

"[T]he latest national telephone survey finds that 44% regard Tea Party as a negative description for a candidate."

This is what happens to a movement which allows others to define it and co-opt it. With most of the Republican Party skeptical of the movement at best, threatened at worst, there was none to defend the Tea Party from the outrageous insinuations from the left and its allies in the media. It has died by a thousand paper cuts.

The Tea Party's present bad rap is in many ways its own fault. It assiduously refused to unify as a national movement around a platform of ideas and candidates. As a consequence, it was variously captured by elements of Ron Paul's libertarian movement here and individual Republicans and Republican front-groups there.

As a protest movement the Tea Party needed to change because the initial outrage and emotion which brought it to life is not a sustainable or proper vehicle for conservatism. If it is, then conservatism becomes indistinguishable from the demagogic enemy. Unfortunately for the Tea Party, it opted for the change it got not by choice but by default. Refusing to coalesce as a party around a platform of ending bailouts and cronyism, limiting government spending, and endorsing the candidates who supported that as a matter of the utmost importance all doomed it. Republican interlopers like Michael Steele (who failed), Rep. Bachmann (the Lone Rangerette of the US House), and Sarah Palin (who got the bailout religion very late) pounced early and effectively to steal the limelight.

Political originality is no easy invention, but Tea Partiers were ill-served by devotees of the two-party system when true originalism and enthusiasm for the constitution should have taught the Tea Party that proper political representation is the sine qua non of republican government. And in that struggle for representation it is the two parties as we know them who are most at fault for circumscribing it in a US House of 435 members which should by now consist in 10,267. The coin of the realm has Republican on one side, Democrat on the other, but in the middle is nothing but worthless metal. 

Democrats and liberals were entirely happy to jeer from the sidelines as the neophytes were neutered by their political betters in the Republican Party. As usual, it is the Republicans who do the dirty work of liberalism, not the least of which is collecting its taxes and advancing its social agenda incrementally. The reaction of the Tea Party to the radicalism of Obama was profound and deep, as was its dismay by the failure of Republicanism to step up to it.

May the Tea Partiers learn, lick their wounds, and begin planning for another day. Freedom needs them.

Neil Barofsky Calls Geithner And Obama Two-Faced Housing Bailout Liars

'[I]n 2009, $50 billion in TARP funds had been committed to help homeowners through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a program that the president announced was intended to help up to 4 million struggling families stay in their homes through sustainable mortgage modifications. Hundreds of billions more were still available and could have been used by the White House and the Treasury Department to help support a massive reduction in mortgage debt. But Geithner avoided this path to a housing recovery, explaining that he believed it would be “dramatically more expensive for the American taxpayer, harder to justify, [and] create much greater risk of unfairness.” Treasury amplified that argument in 2010, after it reluctantly instituted a weak principal reduction program in response to overwhelming congressional pressure. ...

'[T]hree years later, with a tightening presidential election and a Democratic base disillusioned by the government’s abandonment of its promise to help homeowners (less than 8 percent of the funds originally allocated in TARP for foreclosure relief has actually been spent), Geithner and the administration would like to present themselves as having undergone a conversion.'

Read the entire entry here.

The announcement of HAMP is what really got Rick Santelli's goat on CNBC one day in early 2009 and set off a fire storm which coalesced in the outrage of the Tea Party movement. The conservative instincts of the Tea Party movement were and remain opposed to bailouts of homeowners, bankers, car manufacturers, insurers, multinationals like GE, and on and on. Barofsky is probably right that this is nothing more than a cynical political ploy to shore up support among Democrats. But if he's not buying it, who will?