Reid: I’ll Force a Vote on the Jobs Bill…Eventually

Mark Noonan3 Comments

From the Las Vegas Sun:

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Republicans won’t support President Barack Obama’s jobs plan, but he still wants them to vote on the sweeping $450 billion economic recovery effort.

“We are going to have the Republicans belly up to the bar to turn down this plan,” Reid said during a virtual town hall meeting with supporters Wednesday.

Reid said he won’t immediately take up Obama’s plan because the Senate must tackle other issues first. He didn’t specify which bills would receive priority over Obama’s economic solution…

Anyone have an idea of what other, crisis issue we have before us which pre-empts jobs?

What is really happening here is not a Reid worry that the GOP will uniformly vote it down, but that half a dozen vulnerable, 2012 Democrats will vote against it, as well.  The last thing Obama, Reid and the Democrats need is for the Obama jobs bill to die in the Democrat Senate.  So, Reid’s “I’ll force them to vote” is just bluster…he won’t move until the House does.

Solyndra II?

Mark Noonan18 Comments

Not satisfied with having thrown hundreds of millions away on Solyndra, the Obama Administration is now going to throw billions – from a Department of Energy press release:

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced the Energy Department finalized a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to Mojave Solar LLC for the development of the Mojave Solar Project (MSP).  When complete, the 250MW solar generation project located in San Bernardino County, California will increase the nation’s currently installed concentrating solar power (CSP) capacity by approximately 50 percent.  Abengoa Solar Inc., the project sponsor, estimates it will fund more than 900 construction and permanent operations jobs…

Sounds great, huh?  But we’ve heard this before from DoE:

Vice President Joe Biden, appearing via satellite from Washington D.C., today announced the Department of Energy has finalized a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, Inc., which manufactures innovative cylindrical solar photovoltaic panels that provide clean, renewable energy. The funding will finance construction of the first phase of the company’s new manufacturing facility. Annual production of solar panels from the first phase is expected to provide energy equivalent to powering 24,000 homes a year or over half a million homes over the project’s lifetime.  Solyndra estimates the new plant will initially create 3,000 construction jobs, and lead to as many as 1,000 jobs once the facility opens.  Hundreds more will install Solyndra’s solar panels on rooftops around the country…

Will the new loan guarantee prove better than the last, or is this good money after bad?  Also, did the people running Mojave Solar LLC donate to President Obama?  Other Democrats?  How often have they been to visit the White House?  Is this a hard-nosed, business decision or just another political pay off?

HAT TIP:  Zero Hedge

Team Obama: Utterly Clueless

Mark Noonan40 Comments

From the Daily Caller:

President Barack Obama will present his “jobs plan” on Wednesday at a company which is shipping jobs overseas.

Obama is scheduled to present his “jobs plan” in Apex, N.C., on Wednesday at the headquarters of WestStar Precision.

WestStar is a high-end, specialty manufacturer that just opened a new facility in San Jose, Costa Rica — creating many new jobs there, but not in the United States…

You have to wonder – are they really this stupid?  Obama has a massive staff of people dedicated to his well being and re-election…did no one check to see just what this photo-op backdrop was up to?  Couldn’t they find one company out there which actually expanded its American facilities of late?  Which didn’t just ship a bunch of jobs overseas?  Making this even more bizarre is the fact that the company owner is a Democrat who has donated to Obama’s campaign.

If we on the GOP side were allowed to write the script for Democrat implosion in 2012, we couldn’t have done better than this.  One thing I’d like to know – you liberals out there who are convinced that Obama is on the side of the little guy…here he’s going to an event to tout his job program at a company which ships US jobs overseas  rather than endure all the laws and regulations you liberals have imposed…and the owner of the company is not some GOP “millionaire and billionaire” fighting tenaciously for his corporate jet tax break…he’s a liberal Democrat.

Explain that, if you can.

Median Male Earns Less Than in 1968

Mark Noonan68 Comments

From Zero Hedge:

While the fact that a record number of Americans are living in poverty should not surprise anyone at this point, what should surprise many is that according to Table P-5 of the Census report of (Lack of) Income, the median male is now worse on a gross, inflation adjusted basis, than he was in… 1968! While back then, the median income of male workers was $32,844, it has since risen declined to $32,137 as of 2010. And there is your lesson in inflation 101 (which we assume is driven by the CPI, which likely means that the actual inflation adjusted income decline is far worse than what is even reported). The only winner: women, whose median inflation adjusted income over the same period has increased by 188%. That said, it is still at 65% of what the median male makes. So injustice all around…

Why has this happened?  Because since 1968 we have gone about destroying – via taxation, regulation, lawsuits and “nimbyism” – the ability of Americans to make, mine and grow things.  We can’t all answer phones in call centers, nor can all of us be computer programmers.  We have to make things, mine things and grow things…we have to produce wealth.  If we do, then wages rise…if we don’t, then they stay flat or decline.

It is time to restore the American economy be removing the barriers to wealth creation.  We have to allow people to work for a living – if we do, then wages will start to rise, fewer people will need government assistance and our overall finances – public and private – will improve.  If we don’t, then we die as a nation.  It is as stark as that.

And in order to do all that, we must over turn the current Ruling Class – they are in charge of Big Government and Big Corporation.  They are very well off and don’t care at all about how the average American lives.  They live in a world where struggle is non-existent, the family is unimportant and God is forgotten. As long as they are latched on to us, things cannot improve.  Remember that as we go in to 2012…anyone who is unwilling to shake up the status quo is unworthy of support…and the more revolutionaries  (ie, TEA Partiers) we can elect, the better.

White House Pressured OMB on Solyndra Loan

Mark Noonan13 Comments

From the Washington Post:

The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.

The Silicon Valley company, a centerpiece in President Obama’s initiative to develop clean energy technologies, had been tentatively approved for the loan by the Energy Department but was awaiting a final financial review by the Office of Management and Budget…

Hey, gotta rush it through – Biden needed a photo-op and Obama donors didn’t want to wait around for a payoff on their investment!  I mean, my goodness, its not like it was real money – it was taxpayer money!  You can do anything you want with that!  As long, that is, it goes to line the pockets of liberal crony-capitalists…

Investigate all loans by the US government to all entities – for profit or not for profit; any time the US government guaranteed a loan, we need to find out just how and why it was done.  Who got paid?  Once we know that, we’ll be able to really unravel the corruption.

Special Elections

Mark Noonan19 Comments

Here are the AP results for the NY-9 race, and the NV-2 race.

The NV-2 race is just about a foregone conclusion – as it turns out, I’ve been up in Reno the past few days and so caught a bit of the GOP advertising:  all Obama, all the time…”don’t send a rubber-stamp to DC”, that sort of thing.  I don’t recall they even mentioned the Democrat candidate’s name.  Expectations are for a double-digit GOP blowout…but Mark Amodei, taking nothing for granted, has been pressing the turnout efforts.

The polls in the NY-9 race just closed a few minutes ago and while polling has been good for the GOP, I do expect a Democrat win…they are pulling out all the stops and the district does have a reputation for voter fraud.  But even if the Democrats managed to squeak out a win, it will be a signal for defeat in 2012 unless Obama changes course.  And if the GOP does pull out a win, just that much more devastating for the Democrats.

UPDATE:  In NV-02, Amodei has 64% against Marshall’s 31%; NY-09, Turner has 51% against Weprin’s 48%; still way early.

UPDATE II:  NY-09, 271 of 512 precincts reporting, GOP winning 53/46; NV-09, 166 of 858 reporting, GOP winning 58/37.

UPDATE III:  AP calls NY-09 for Republican Bob Turner.  First GOP win in NY-09 since 1921.  Dems already spinning it as  meaningless…meanwhile, in private, they are starting to wonder if they should “primary” Obama…

UPDATE IV:  AP calls NV-02 for Republican Mark Amodei.  A crushing victory – 57% to 37%.

Turns Out, It Doesn’t Take a Village

Mark Noonan26 Comments

From Physorg:

“In the African villages that I study in Mali, children fare as well in nuclear families as they do in extended families,” said U-M researcher Beverly Strassmann, professor of anthropology and faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “There’s a naïve belief that villages raise children communally, when in reality children are raised by their own families and their survival depends critically on the survival of their mothers.”…

Only in modern, liberal times can it require a study to find out that families raise children and do just fine with it.  Sorry, Hillary, but we don’t actually need a “village” populated with Department of Education and Health and Human Services bureaucrats…

All government policies must be directed towards this end:  making it possible for one man and one women to raise their children as they see fit.  If it helps in that task, it is good and must be done…if it harms that effort, it must be stopped.

HAT TIP:  Instapundit

Hatch: Who Wrote the SEIU Goon Handbook?

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Senator Hatch’s press release:

U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) today wrote to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member and former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) official Craig Becker to inquire about his involvement in union intimidation efforts. The letter sent to Becker comes after the SEIU’s “Contract Campaign Manual” was made public. The handbook tells union members to purposefully try to damage their employers’ reputations by coming up with allegations against their employers and managers and to even break the law to gain leverage in contract negotiations.

In the letter, Hatch writes that, “the manual explicitly advises union members to engage in tactics designed to attack the reputation of an employer as well as its managers and to purposefully damage an employer’s relationship with vendors and customers.  In addition, it advises employees to uncover “dirt” on management officials and publicize the information in order to obtain leverage in contract negotiations.  The manual even goes so far as to encourage union members to disobey certain laws when it serves the union’s purposes.”…

As a matter of free speech, you can write all the books on how to be a union thug you like – but who writes the thuggery how-to books is a matter of public interest.  Did Becker write it?  If not, then who?  Inquiring minds want to know…

As the unions become ever more irrelevant to the average, American worker they do appear to becoming more desperate in their tactics.  Remember, when you intimidate an employer you are also intimidating employees…if you are willing to smash the property of a corporation which can call upon financial resources to fight back, imagine what effect that will have on individual workers who have no such resources?  Essentially, the unions are trying to scare everyone – to prevent anyone from challenging the unions.  And that works out to a prohibition against challenging the union bosses, who often don’t act as if they give a fig for the cares of workers.

Finding out who wrote this manual is a good, first step in trying to curb this intimidation…and to call unions back to their duty.  A union dedicated to representing the legitimate interests of workers who voluntarily belong to the union is  good thing…but a union dedicated to advancing the cause of a particular party and keeping the bosses rolling in wealth, that is another mater, entirely.

Attack on US Embassy in Kabul

Mark Noonan24 Comments

From the Wall Street Journal:

Insurgents staged a series of attacks across Kabul on Tuesday, with rocket-propelled grenades, gunfire and suicide bombers targeting the U.S. Embassy, in one of the most brazen Taliban assaults on the Afghan capital.

A spokesman for Kabul police said the Taliban first struck the U.S. and other embassies, then launched assaults at several other targets in the city, including suicide-bomber attacks on a traffic-control office and on a high school. A school bus also was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, wounding several young children. Police rushed to the scene to unload bloodied children from the damaged bus…

Savages to the end – and  the reason why, no matter how long and hard the fight is, we can’t withdraw…not until at least a semblance of stability is built in to the Afghan regime.  We can’t set a time limit on this – though we can, as time goes on, likely use ever fewer US troops as the Afghan forces become more capable.

Trust me on this, I’m tired of it, too – and I bet the troops are even more tired of it.  But to quit is to turn the people of Afghanistan over to beasts in human skin.  We can’t, with honor, do that.