Sunday, January 17, 2016
Saturday, January 16, 2016
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.
Larry Kudlow today on his radio show repeatedly criticized Ted Cruz' attack on New York values
The Larry Kudlow Show is available by podcast at wabcradio.com.
Unlike fellow Jew Mark Levin, Kudlow found Cruz' debate remarks thoroughly reprehensible and repeatedly called on Cruz to apologize to New Yorkers.
Cruz already is doubling down, however, saying Americans don't want the rest of the country to become like liberal Manhattan.
Cruz is making a big mistake about New York. It shows he has a tin ear for politics. Americans everywhere admire New Yorkers' pluck in the face of adversity, their heroism and determination. It is politically senseless to ask such people to choose now between Ted Cruz and New York when they already have spoken their affection for the city that never sleeps.
Americans will never love Ted Cruz as much as they already love New York.
Rand Paul pledges to do everything he can to stop Trump, and then support him if he's the nominee
Rand Paul, quoted here:
"He would be a disaster. We’ll be slaughtered in a landslide. That’s why my every waking hour is to try to stop Donald Trump from being our nominee. It sounds terrible, 'Oh you're going to support Donald Trump,' but I expect Donald Trump to support me as well if I win."
Friday, January 15, 2016
Mark Levin opens show discussing birther issue telling us it's not important, opens second half hour discussing it the same way
Like Ted Cruz isn't Mark Levin's preferred candidate, especially as in the middle of the first hour Levin tried to destroy Donald Trump using Trump's own previous statements about the differences between New Yorkers' values and those of the rest of the country.
Levin can't stand it that Trump turned this into a discussion about 911.
Levin finishes the hour claiming birthers have said to Levin that both parents must be born in the US.
I call bullshit on that.
I say prove it, Levin. Show us the evidence, and send it to Ann Coulter, whose arguments and column he hasn't dared touch.
Mark Levin is avoiding Ann Coulter.
Marco Rubio's official biography misrepresents his parents as exiles from Castro's Cuba
Castro took over Cuba in 1959 after a guerrilla insurgency begun in December 1956. Marco Rubio's parents left Cuba in 1956, according to this story in the Tampa Bay Times:
'To press their case, birthers dug up Rubio’s parents' immigration papers. While the eligibility question is unresolved, in some eyes, the file (which the Times independently obtained) confirmed his parents were given citizenship in 1975. Rubio at the time said he did not know why his parents waited, though experts told the Times that it wasn’t uncommon for some immigrants to wait.
'The immigration dossier broke some news: It showed Rubio’s parents came to the United States in 1956, not after Fidel Castro took over, as Rubio’s ... official biography noted and he repeatedly implied when talking about his “exile” parents.'
In yesterday's Republican debate in South Carolina, Rubio similarly misrepresented himself on a number of issues.
Rush Limbaugh is so stupid he thinks today's bad sales numbers were deliberately delayed until after the State of the Union address
The data release occurs on a regular schedule, which can be accessed here. There's no conspiracy to make Obama look better, as Limbaugh stated in the show opener today.
New York Values: Osama bin Laden can kiss my royal Irish ass, and I live in Rockaway and this is my face bitch!
 |
| FDNY firefighter Mike Moran |
Here, The Concert for New York City, October 20, 2001.
Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates 25% to 28% of voters doubt Ted Cruz is eligible to be president
From the story here about the poll taken in the days leading up to last night's debate:
"A quarter of Republicans think White House hopeful Ted Cruz is disqualified to serve as U.S. president . . . Republican voters nearly mirror independents and the broader electorate in their belief that Cruz cannot hold the White House, with 27 percent of all voters and 28 percent of independents responding he should be disqualified."
Cornered like a rat, Ted Cruz last night resorted to a straw man argument to defend his presidential eligibility
From the transcript here:
"At the end of the day, the legal issue is quite straightforward, but I would note that the birther theories that Donald has been relying on -- some of the more extreme ones insist that you must not only be born on U.S. soil, but have two parents born on U.S. soil. Under that theory, not only would I be disqualified, Marco Rubio would be disqualified, Bobby Jindal would be disqualified and, interestingly enough, Donald J. Trump would be disqualified."
No one is arguing that to be eligible both parents must have been born on US soil, only that both parents must be citizens at the time of the candidate's birth in a US jurisdiction.
The extreme non-existent standard propounded by Cruz isn't necessary to exclude him, Rubio and Jindal (and Obama), only the constitutional one which defines natural born citizenship as beyond the reach of statute. Cruz' citizenship is statutory, not constitutional, and that is why he is excluded from eligibility. He acquired citizenship through the law, not through the Constitution:
'Because Cruz's citizenship comes from the law, not the Constitution, as late as 1934, he would not have had "any conceivable claim to United States citizenship. For more than a century and a half, no statute was of assistance. Maternal citizenship afforded no benefit" -- as the Supreme Court put it in Rogers v. Bellei (1971).
'That would make no sense if Cruz were a "natural born citizen" under the Constitution. But as the Bellei Court said: "Persons not born in the United States acquire citizenship by birth only as provided by Acts of Congress." (There's an exception for the children of ambassadors, but Cruz wasn't that.)'
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Ann Coulter's Progress: Only constitutional illiterates confuse citizens and natural born citizens
Here:
'A child born to American parents outside of U.S. territory may be a citizen the moment he is born -- but only by "naturalization," i.e., by laws passed by Congress. If Congress has to write a law to make you a citizen, you're not "natural born." ... Mostly, the Cruz partisans confuse being born a citizen with being a "natural born citizen." This is constitutional illiteracy. "Natural born" is a legal term of art. A retired judge who plays a lot of tennis is an active judge, but not an "active judge" in legal terminology.'
She seems, however, unaware that the 1790 Naturalization Act poses less of a problem for interpretation than she thinks, seeing that it was repealed by the Act of 1795, which scuttled the 1790 terminology "natural born".
Clearly the Congress had made an error in 1790, and realizing that making those born abroad natural born conflicted with the original intent of the constitution to restrict the designation to those born to citizens on US soil, Congress fixed it.
And this nugget Coulter pulls out is quite lovely in that regard:
"The only difference drawn by the Constitution is that only the 'natural born' citizen is eligible to be president." -- Schneider v. Rusk (1964)
Now if only we could get everyone to connect the dots.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
You can blame Nikki Haley, who responded to Trump not Obama, on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell
Reported here:
". . . House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell picked Haley to deliver the GOP response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address."
Laurence Tribe thinks Ted Cruz is ineligible from one perspective, and buries "reputed born in the country" during the founding for a reason
Here in the Boston Globe:
'To his kind of judge, [Ted] Cruz ironically wouldn’t be eligible, because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and ’90s required that someone actually be born on US soil to be a “natural born” citizen. Even having two US parents wouldn’t suffice. And having just an American mother, as Cruz did, would have been insufficient at a time that made patrilineal descent decisive. ... This narrow definition reflected 18th-century fears of a tyrannical takeover of our nation by someone loyal to a foreign power — fears that no longer make sense.'
Oh really? They make more sense now than ever with the diffidently un-American Obama in the Oval, whom the originalist position should also have prevented but didn't precisely because liberal interpreters like Tribe have prevailed by burying truths.
Such as: Children born abroad to US diplomats and soldiers were considered at the time of the American founding "reputed born in the country". For example, Emer de Vattel, paragraphs 216ff., whom the founders used like a textbook:
"... it is not naturally the place of birth that gives rights, but extraction. ... the children born out of the country in the armies of the state, or in the house of its minister at a foreign court, are reputed born in the country."
So it's not just a simple matter of being born on US soil, otherwise every slave child ever born here would have been a natural born citizen, making that whole 14th Amendment thingy kind of beside the point. Tribe is taking only half of the originalist position and using it against Cruz, when there is another half, which should have made Obama ineligible.
Ted Cruz is not a natural born citizen only in part because he was born in Canada without military, diplomatic or some other "official" American cover, but Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen because he was born without citizen cover from both parents. Tribe wants to ignore the latter in the case of Cruz to obscure Obama's ineligibility and argue for the priority of soil against Cruz. It's the way liberals argue, by not telling the whole truth.
But blood was equally important with soil at the founding, and you might say that in the matter of presidential eligibility, the genius of the constitution was singularly expressed in the fusing of jus soli and jus sanguinis in the person elected to embody the executive power in order to protect it, and us.
Presidents should be born in the country, to (married heterosexual) citizens.
But good luck getting that through after what Obama and the Democrats have done to this country. Next stop, a test-tube president whose parents are a Chinese lesbian from Vancouver married to her kitty cat from a pet shelter in Seattle.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
None of our early presidents were natural born citizens, but were grandfathered in by Article II
"Publius Huldah", here, correctly making the proper distinction between citizens, and natural born citizens who are eligible to be president:
In § 214, Vattel states that “fundamental law” may withhold from naturalized citizens some of the rights of citizens, such as holding public office. The Constitution is our “fundamental law”; and, following Vattel, Art. II, §1, cl. 5 withholds from naturalized citizens (except for our Founding Generation which was “grandfathered in”) the right to hold the office of President.
Remember! None of our early Presidents were “natural born Citizens”, even though they were all born here. They were all born as subjects of the British Crown. They became naturalized citizens with the Declaration of Independence. That is why it was necessary to provide a grandfather clause for them ["or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution"]. But after our Founding Generation was gone, their successors were required to be born as citizens of the United States - not merely born here (as were our Founders), but born as citizens.
And do not forget that the children born here of slaves did not become “citizens” by virtue of being born here. Their parents were slaves; hence (succeeding to the condition of their parents) they were born as slaves. Black people born here did not become citizens until 1868 and the ratification of the 14th Amendment.
So! Do you see? If Our Framers understood that merely being born here were sufficient to confer status as a “natural born citizen”; it would not have been necessary to grandfather in our first generation of Presidents; and all the slaves born here would have been “natural born citizens”. But they were born as non-citizen slaves, because their parents were non-citizen slaves.
Monday, January 11, 2016
Hey Levin you dummy! Citizens by statute are NOT natural born citizens!
If they were, they wouldn't need a statute making them citizens, dummkopf.
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