Right Lane Update 2.10.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Only 36% Think President, Congress Should Stop March 1 Spending Cuts

President Obama and many members of Congress expected strong voter opposition to automatic and across-the-board government spending cuts scheduled for March, but it hasn’t materialized. Partly that’s because most voters recognize that they’re not really spending cuts anyway. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 36% of Likely U.S. Voters now think the president and Congress should stop the automatic spending cuts from going into effect next month. Thirty percent (30%) disagree and say Congress and the president should not stop the automatic spending cuts.  Just as many (34%) are undecided.

~~~~~~

For Obama, It's Chiefly About Firing up His Base   A Commentary By Scott Rasmussen

As President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address, he has indicated that gun control and immigration will be two of his top priorities. His administration's actions also indicate an ongoing commitment to place a high priority on environmental concerns. These items, though, tend to rank fairly low on voter lists of priorities. Consider than 86 percent of voters nationwide rate job creation as most important, and 80 percent say the same about general economic concerns. Seventy-one percent believe that government spending is very important.  Where do the president's priorities fit on that scale? So why is Obama pursuing these particular initiatives? It may, of course, be due to the fact that they are important to the president himself. Freed of concerns about re-election, it may be that these are simply things he wants to get done. Surprise, surprise!! Oh! yes, remember he cares so much about YOU.

~~~~~~

Doctor Slams Political Correctness at National Prayer Breakfast

Dr. Benjamin S. Carson at National Prayer Breakfast slammed political correctness, health care, and the national debt with President Obama seated right in front of him. Watch....

~~~~~~

White House Drone Plan Reveals Obama's 'Hypocrisy'  By Jim Meyers

As a senator, Barack Obama decried George W. Bush’s use of presidential war powers to prosecute the war on terror. As president, Obama has embraced those powers and promoted the preemptive use of drones to target al-Qaida operatives. That’s the thrust of an editorial in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that accuses the administration of “hypocrisy.” Sen. Obama and Eric Holder, before he became attorney general, denounced memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that explained why water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques were legal. And as attorney general, Holder boasted that the new administration had banned those techniques.  “Yes, this crowd doesn’t arrest and interrogate suspected terrorists,” the Journal observes. “It merely blows them away with missiles from the sky.” The editorial comes after the leaking of a confidential 16-page Justice Department memo asserting that the U.S. can order the killing of American citizens it deems a threat.

~~~~~~

Obama Lashes Out at Cable News During Prayer Breakfast

President Obama commented on the tone of politics during this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast, specifically criticizing cable news, saying “I go back to the Oval Office and turn on the cable news networks, and it’s like we didn’t pray.” OBAMA: I have to say this now our fifth prayer breakfast and it is always just a wonderful event but I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast everything we’ve been talking the whole time at the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten, on the same date as the prayer breakfast – I mean you’d like to think that the shelf life wasn’t so short. I go back to the oval office and I start watching the cable news network’s and it’s like we didn’t pray. And so, my hope is that humility – that that carries over every day, every moment.

~~~~~~

Obama Did Nothing to Save American Lives in Benghazi and Lied About It

Nothing. That is what President Barack Obama did on the night of September 11, 2012, as terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and killed four Americans, among them Ambassador Christopher Stevens. President Obama’s inaction was revealed in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday by outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. Under direct questioning by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Panetta admitted that he had no communication with President Obama after their “pre-scheduled” meeting at 5:00 p.m. EDT. The attack on the consulate had already been under way for 90 minutes at that time. Neither the president nor anyone else from the White House called afterwards to check what was happening; the Commander-in-Chief had left it “up to us,” said Panetta. Panetta’s testimony directly contradicts President Obama’s own claim to have issued “three direectives” as soon as he learned “what was going on” in Benghazi. As he told a Denver reporter in October:

"I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure we are securing our personnel and that we are doing whatever we need to. Number two, we are going to investigate exactly what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Number three, find out who did this so we can bring them to justice"

Now we hear on the record, that is simply not true.

~~~~~~

Chromosome Comparison Shows More Chimp-Human Differences  by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.

Since the original 2005 chimpanzee genome report, researchers obtained and made available for public use additional chimpanzee DNA sequences, courtesy of federal tax dollars. However, this new chimpanzee DNA sequence is somewhat flawed—it is not represented on its own merit because researchers assembled the chimp genome’s sequence fragments based on the human genome framework. Using the most recent version of the chimp genome, a sequential comparison to the human genome on an individual chromosome basis was performed at ICR. The chimp chromosomes were digitally sliced into individual files of varying DNA sequence lengths. Depending on the chromosome, optimal slice size was about 300 to 500 DNA bases long. Each slice was then compared to its human chromosome counterpart using previously optimized algorithm parameters. Using this approach, comparisons were optimized for each chromosome irrespective of gene or DNA feature regarding its linear order and position on the chimp chromosome. This ICR research project defined the similarity for each chromosome as the percentage of chimp DNA that aligned (matched) to human DNA. This definition was somewhat conservative because it did not include the amount of human DNA that was absent from chimp DNA, nor did it include the chimp DNA that was not even similar enough to align to the human genome assembly. For the primary chimp chromosomes (autosomes), the amount of optimally aligned DNA sequence provided similarities between 66 and 76 percent, depending on the chromosome. In general, the smaller and more gene-dense chromosomes showed higher DNA sequence similarity—although there were several notable exceptions. Only 69 percent of the chimpanzee X chromosome (female sex chromosome) and only 43 percent of the Y chromosome was similar to human DNA. Genome-wide, only 70 percent of the chimpanzee genome assembly was similar to human DNA under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. These results actually confirm previous research where omitted data were included to produce much lower estimates of DNA similarity between humans and chimps for previously published secular reports. While chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high DNA similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor. These results illustrate the genetic and biblical fact that humans are not just another primate, but they are uniquely created in the image of God.

~~~~~~

GOP has the leverage and should call Obama’s bluff  Charles Krauthammer
For the first time since Election Day, President Barack Obama is on the defensive. That’s because on March 1, automatic spending cuts (“sequestration”) go into effect – $1.2 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic (discretionary) programs, half from defense.  The idea had been proposed and promoted by the White House during the July 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations. The political calculation was that such draconian defense cuts would drive the GOP to offer concessions.  It backfired. The Republicans have offered no concessions. Obama’s bluff is being called and he’s the desperate party.  He abhors the domestic cuts. And as commander in chief he must worry about indiscriminate Pentagon cuts that his own defense secretary calls catastrophic. So Tuesday, Obama urgently called on Congress to head off the sequester with a short-term fix. But instead of offering an alternative $1.2 trillion in cuts, Obama demanded a “balanced approach,” coupling any cuts with new tax increases. What should the Republicans do? Nothing.  Republicans should explain –

Message No. 1 – that in the fiscal-cliff deal the president already got major tax hikes with no corresponding spending cuts. Now it is time for a nation $16 trillion in debt to cut spending. That’s balance. The Republicans finally have leverage. They should use it. Obama capitalized on the automaticity of the expiring Bush tax cuts to get what he wanted at the fiscal cliff – higher tax rates. Republicans now have automaticity on their side. If they do nothing, the $1.2 trillion in cuts go into effect. This is the one time Republicans can get cuts under an administration that has no intent of cutting anything. Get them while you can. Of course, the sequester is terrible policy. The domestic cuts will be crude and the Pentagon cuts damaging. This is why the Republican House has twice passed bills offering more rationally allocated cuts. (They curb, for example, entitlement spending as well.) Naturally, the Democratic Senate, which hasn’t passed a budget since before the iPad, has done nothing. Nor has the president – until his Tuesday plea.

The GOP should reject it out of hand and plainly explain (message No. 2): We are quite prepared to cut elsewhere. But we already raised taxes last month. If the president wants to avoid the sequester – as we do – he must offer a substitute set of cuts.  Otherwise, Mr. President, there is nothing to discuss. Your sequester – Republicans need to reiterate that the sequester was the president’s idea in the first place – will go ahead.  Obama is trying to sell his “balanced” approach with a linguistic sleight-of-hand. He insists on calling his proposed tax hikes – through eliminating deductions and exemptions – “tax reform.”  It’s not. Tax reform, as defined even by the White House’s own webpage on the subject, begins with lowering tax rates. It then makes up the lost revenue by closing loopholes. Real tax reform is revenue neutral. It’s a way to clean the tax code by eliminating unfair, inefficient and market-distorting loopholes on the one hand while lowering rates to stimulate economic growth on the other. Obama has zero interest in lowering tax rates. He just got through raising them at the fiscal cliff and has made perfectly clear ever since that he fully intends to keep raising taxes. His only interest in eliminating loopholes is to raise more cash for the Treasury – not to use them to lower rates. That’s not tax reform. That’s a naked, old-fashioned tax increase. 
 
Hence Republican message No. 3: The sequester is one thing, real tax reform quite another. The sequester is for cutting. The only question is whether it will be done automatically and indiscriminately – or whether the president will offer an alternative set of cuts.  Then we can take up real tax reform. Reprise the landmark Reagan-Tip O’Neill-Bill Bradley tax reform of 1986, a revenue- neutral spur to economic growth and efficiency, and to fairness for those not powerful enough to manipulate the tax code. The country needs tax reform. But first it needs to rein in out-of-control spending. To succeed in doing that, Republicans must remain united under one demand: cuts with no taxes – or we will let the sequester go into effect.  The morning after, they should sit down with Obama for negotiations on real tax reform as recommended by the president’s own Simpson-Bowles commission: broaden the base, lower the rates.  Any time, any place. Geneva, perhaps? The skiing is good. Skeet shooting, too.

~~~~~~

World Famous Neurosurgeon Calls for Market-Oriented Health Care Reform In Front of Obama; Will Media Report?

At his keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, world-renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson laid out some ideas he had for improving health care in the United States of America. Seated to his right was the president of the United States, who appeared to not care much for the good doctor’s market-oriented idea of tax-free Health Savings Accounts. During his remarks, Carson came up with several solutions to some of America’s most pressing problems, including focusing on the importance of education. Carson also touched on the economy, saying that he thinks about the issue frequently. “We don’t want to go down the path of many failed nations,” he said, pointing out what he says is “fiscal irresponsibility” in our government. He seemed to offer the idea of a flat 10% income tax, which would prevent many successful people from taxing their money oversees [sic]. He cited “602 banks in the Cayman Islands” created as havens for those seeking to escape high taxes. “That money needs to be back here building our infrastructure and creating jobs,” he said. Carson’s remarks regarding what appeared to be his alternative to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) appeared to make the president uncomfortable at times, with Obama looking down and away as Carson began to describe specific suggestions. ACA is President Obama’s landmark health reform legislation that was passed in 2010. Carson has spoken openly in the past about alternatives to the law.

~~~~~~

"Speak seldom, but to important subjects, except such as particularly relate to your constituents, and, in the former case, make yourself perfectly master of the subject." --George Washington

We often use the term "non compos mentis" to describe particularly outlandish pronouncements made by NeoComs or other "useful idiots" of the Left. The words are Latin for "not of sound mind," or, in short, insane. To be sure, that sums up all of so-called liberalism, but there are some subjects that seem to bring out the craziness more than others. The Second Amendment is one of them.

Last weekend, in an effort to portray Barack Obama as friendly to firearms, the White House backed up his boast of going skeet shooting "all the time" with a dubious photo of President "Skeeter" out at the range. (There's even an action figure now.) We soon outlined the reasons for our skepticism and then proceeded to have some fun at the president's expense, but the larger point is that the White House wants to marginalize as crazy any gun owners who call him on the gimmickry. Of course, we're not the ones who aren't of sound mind.

Many Beltway leftists have never held or fired a gun, much less actually know what they're talking about when it comes to the tools themselves or making policy regarding them. One of the most laughable examples is when Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) infamously described a barrel shroud as the "shoulder thing that goes up." Yet for a leading proponent and author of federal firearm legislation to be this ignorant is incredibly dangerous to Liberty. Some insanity never ends. Joe "Non Compos Mentis" Biden, who after Newtown led the White House crisis exploitation team on gun policy, virtually threw out the Second Amendment when he said Wednesday, "It is clearly within the right of the government to determine what type of weapons can be owned by the public." On the contrary, that's exactly what the Second Amendment is there to prevent. Biden also lamented that 1,600 people have been killed by guns since Newtown. He didn't mention that 3,300 children will be killed by their own mothers today alone through abortion.

Meanwhile, when gun control doesn't actually reduce violence -- and it very rarely does -- leftists scramble for ways to explain it. White House adviser David Axelrod struggled this week to account for Chicago's shocking murder rate (42 already this year at the time of his comments), claiming that it's because "all around us are areas with weak laws and with very lax background checks and a lot of illegal guns flow into this city." Technically, he's correct: Guns used in Chicago crimes are often bought outside the city. But that's because there aren't any gun stores in Chicago. Criminals don't generally succeed in buying from licensed gun dealers, either. And Axelrod doesn't explain the low crime rate in surrounding communities. Politicos aren't the only ones spouting crazy talk. Singer Tony Bennett showed an astounding ignorance of history when he said that if we don't enact strict gun control, it will be "the kind of turn that happened to the great country of Germany, where the Nazis came over and created tragic things and they had to be told off." Memo to Tony: If Germany's Jews had not been disarmed, millions of them might not have been slaughtered by their own government.

Certainly these leftists aren't heeding George Washington's advice to "speak seldom" and, when you do, "make yourself perfectly master of the subject."

~~~~~~

President Obama and Congress Has Done Now  By Wendy Bidwell
As many of you know, on Tuesday, President Obama asked Congress to delay the sequester and pass a hybrid solution of spending cuts and tax increases. This sequester Obama now wants to cancel was part of the debt ceiling legislation that passed in July of 2011. The White House gave birth to the sequester to get fiscally conservative U.S. Representatives to agree to raise the debt ceiling.

Ideally, our lawmakers should be able to agree on $1.1 trillion dollars in spending cuts… They could start with Tom Coburn's suggestions in Wastebook 2012 and go from there.   However, the legislation was designed as automatic, across-the-board spending cuts over the next decade to prevent kicking the can further down the road. It was written in such a way so that if for some reason our lawmakers couldn't decide on cuts, both sides of the aisle would take a hit… The Democrats don't want cuts to discretionary spending, and the GOP doesn't want cuts to defense.  Charles Krauthammer says, "Of course, the sequester is terrible policy. The domestic cuts will be crude and the Pentagon cuts damaging. This is why the Republican House has twice passed bills offering more rationally allocated cuts. (They curb, for example, entitlement spending as well.)"  I agree with Krauthammer that this is bad policy. But that isn't really the point I'd like to make today…

The President came up with the sequester to offset the cost of raising the debt ceiling. Since the debt ceiling part has already gone into effect and cannot be reversed, the sequester should now take effect. As a wise man once told me, "There is a lot of gray area… but some things are simply black and white."  Also, the President has no intention of reforming the tax code, but he would like to raise taxes on hardworking Americans (even though he already got his tax increases in the fiscal cliff deal). If the GOP and Representatives from Obama's own party wish to exercise good judgment, they will stand firm on the sequester.  The negotiating on this issue took place over a year ago… It is time for the President to fulfill his side of his own compromise. If the sequester (or another mix of spending cuts that equal $1.1 trillion) doesn't go through, then our lawmakers are reneging on their commitments to us, the taxpayers. But there is also more than logic to factor into this argument…  According to today's Rasmussen Reports update, only 36% think the President and Congress should stop the cuts slated for March 1st. Our lawmakers thought voters would oppose any automatic, across-the-board spending cuts, but they were wrong.  

~~~~~

Wind Power – Just Better? Simple method!  Make the cheap and abundant fossil fuel too expensive through market manipulation and create the illusion that alternative fuels make economic sense!

Australian Wind Energy Now Cheaper Than Coal, Gas, BNEF Says ... Wind is now cheaper than fossil fuels in producing electricity in Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Electricity can be supplied from a new wind farm in Australia at a cost of A$80 ($84) per megawatt hour, compared with A$143 a megawatt hour from a new coal-fired power plant or A$116 from a new station powered by natural gas when the cost of carbon emissions is included, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. – Bloomberg

In the excerpt above, we can see Bloomberg, a mainstream media elite mouthpiece, positioning wind power as a great boon and economically efficient approach to energy generation. The real reason for promoting alternative energy consumption such as wind power has little to do with the environment, from what we can tell, and everything to do with control. Huge energy producing wind farms, solar farms and other alternative resources are vastly complex to develop and integrate into the power grid. Coal, oil and other naturally occurring sources of power, meanwhile, are continually demonized. From our point of view, this is by design. The idea is to disenfranchise those who seek to be energy independent and to promote complex solutions that demand bureaucratic oversight. In this article, excerpted above, Bloomberg makes a continual argument for energy complexity. The wire service explains that coal-fired power stations built in the 1970s and 1980s can still produce power at a lower cost than that of wind, the research shows, but that fossil fuels are growing more expensive. Of course, reading further informs us that this is not due to supply and demand but because government itself is raising the costs because of government's "price on carbon emissions imposed last year." Australia is the first major Western country to formally tax carbon emissions. And there remains a great deal of controversy about such taxes, given the infinitesimal contribution of manmade carbon to the atmosphere.

Global warming – AKA climate change – remains highly controversial, too. But that hasn't constrained Australia's leftist government when it comes to taking action. Bloomberg writes the following:

"The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world's best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head," Michael Liebreich, chief executive officer of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in a statement today ...

Australia last year started charging its biggest polluters a price of A$23 a metric ton for their carbon emissions to discourage the use of fossil fuels and fight climate change. Natural gas prices in Australia may triple by 2030, BNEF said. "The low and falling costs of renewable energy and high and rising costs of coal- and gas-fired plants suggest that much of Australia's new generating capacity is likely to be renewable," Sydney-based Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Kobad Bhavnagri wrote in the report. We can see Bloomberg is flogging its own subscription-finance facility, above. Leaving aside the conflict of interest inherent in reporting so dramatically on trends that one is monetizing, we are left with the ongoing questions about why these sorts of articles never recognize the larger controversies.

The meme itself is obviously in disarray. The Daily Mail, for instance, ran a long article late last year on why wind power is coming into increasing disfavor in Britain. Christopher Booker writes, in part:

Ten years too late, it's good riddance to wind farms – one of the most dangerous delusions of our age ... Energy Minister John Hayes has announced no more wind farms are allowed to be built in the UK ... The significance of yesterday's shock announcement by our Energy Minister John Hayes that the Government plans to put a firm limit on the building of any more onshore windfarms is hard to exaggerate. On the face of it, this promises to be the beginning of an end to one of the greatest and most dangerous political delusions of our time. For years now, the plan to cover hundreds of square miles of the British countryside with ever more wind turbines has been the centrepiece of Britain's energy policy — and one supported by all three major political parties.

Nowhere will this announcement be greeted with more delirious surprise than in all those hundreds of communities across the land where outraged local protest groups have formed in ever greater numbers to fight the onward march of what they see as the greatest threat to Britain's countryside for centuries.  So unreliable are wind turbines — thanks to the wind's constant vagaries — that they are one of the most inefficient means of producing electricity ever devised. Indeed, the amount of power they generate is so derisory that, even now, when we have built 3,500 turbines, the average amount of power we get from all of them combined is no more than what we get from a single medium-size, gas-fired power station, built at only fraction of the cost.

No one would dream of building wind farms unless the Government had arranged to pay their developers a subsidy of 100 per cent on all the power they produce, paid for by all of us through a hidden charge on our electricity bills.

The only way the industry managed to fool politicians into accepting this crazy deal was by subterfuge — referring to turbines only in terms of their 'capacity' (i.e. what they could produce if the wind was blowing at optimum speeds 24 hours of every day). The truth is that their average actual output is barely a quarter of that figure. Yet it was on this deception that the industry managed to fool pretty well everyone that wind farms could make a contribution to Britain's energy needs four times larger than reality — and thus was 'the great wind scam' launched on its way.

Wind power has many difficulties, which is why it has never been relied upon as a chief source of power. The Bloomberg article provides us with a mainstream narrative but such a narrative does not offer us the larger reality.

Conclusion: In an era of information plenty, we wonder how long such articles can be convincing, let alone the investment opportunities they purport to provide.

~~~~~~

"Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that, after the most industrious and impartial researchers, the longest liver of you all will find no principles, institutions or systems of education more fit in general to be transmitted to your posterity than those you have received from your ancestors." --John Adams, letter to the young men of Philadelphia, 1798

~~~~~~~~~~~~