This week, the Pennsylvania House Democrats unveiled a new tax proposal, which would give Pennsylvania the highest severance tax in the nation—on top of current taxes.

Natural gas exploration has become a modern-day gold rush, spurring development across the United States. The Barnett Shale play in Texas, for example, is estimated to accounts for $8.2 billion in annual economic output and 83,823 jobs, and the Marcellus Shale formation—extending across New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, has the potential to be even larger. Despite one of the worst recessions in years, this industry is growing, stimulating the economy, and creating high-paying jobs.

But some see this opportunity as a threat to the environments, and others merely want to tax natural gas drilling to fund special interests.  A leading opponent is George Soros, a billionaire who is behind left-wing attacks on the free market. American Thinker reports that Soros has attempted to combine the forces of his MoveOn.org and the Working Families Party, based in New York, to oppose natural gas drilling. Soros’s stake in the alternative energy campaign is just one part of his plan to inhibit the burgeoning domestic natural gas industry.

Many environmental groups that want to see fossil fuels replaced with alternative energy strongly oppose the industry.  New York has put a moratorium on drilling until more studies can be done.  In Pennsylvania, politicians are using fears about environmental and social costs of drilling to pass a natural gas tax.  However, natural gas companies in the state already are paying for both the costs of inspection and cleanup, and pumping millions into road and infrastructure improvement.

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Just a few years out of college and David “Doc” Sands has already racked up nearly $2.5 million winning poker tournaments, and this January he became the world’s top-ranked online tournament player.

Sands sat down with Reason.tv’s Ted Balaker to discuss Sand’s love of poker and individual liberty, the parallels between marijuana and gambling policy, and the hypocrisy embedded in America’s gambling laws. Says Sands, “At the same time they’re facilitating lotteries, they’re telling us that online poker is a game of chance that we shouldn’t be allowed to play.”

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Sometimes being in the baby poo business means you just can’t win.

If your disposable diapers take too much room in landfills, environmentalists boycott you.  If you update old diapers, a handful of parents complain about the new.  If a baby gets a diaper rash, trial lawyers target you.

Then they all come together in a perfect storm of consumer indignation and sue the disposable pants off you.

Parents have loved disposables since 1961, and market competition kept improvements like self-sticking tape, elastic waistbands, skin protectants and anti-microbial agents coming regularly.  New fibers made diapers lighter, more absorbent and landfill-friendlier.  Potty training?  Disposable training pants.

As parents (figuratively) rejoiced in their disposables, they held no interest for trial lawyers — until Pampers introduced new “Dry Max” Cruisers.

Goods manufacturers anticipate complaints after any product change or improvement.  When Pampers introduced new Cruisers in Fall 2008 with no accompanying marketing campaign, complaint levels remained static.  But after converting its packaging and announcing the change in late 2009, objections flew immediately.

In late November, Twitter and Facebook pages were created by a mom complaining the new diapers weren’t as good as the old, and Pampers should have instituted a more vigorous campaign to announce the change.  The “Bring back the old Cruisers” campaign was born.

The mom complained in the same vein until February 9, 2010 when she posted, “do you think pampers (sic) violated consumer rights when they switched diapers without fair advertising or marketing?  Is (Pampers) guilty of this?”

Then on April 7, the first diaper rash reference magically appeared.  Both sites eventually lurched into an aggressive discussion of serious rashes allegedly caused by the new Dry Max Cruisers.  Facebook members were advised “not to talk about how much we like other Pampers products” and admonished to only upload photos through site administrators.

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As of right now with 31 reviews posted, “Waiting for Superman” sits at a healthy and much-deserved 94% fresh on the Rotten Tomatoes’ scale with the only negative reviews coming from, not so surprisingly, the Village Voice and Salon.com, two hard-left outlets [my review is here]. But let’s stop for just a moment to appreciate those predominantly liberal critics who are out there supporting a film that most likely presents them with a reality that goes against their own personal beliefs.

Okay, moment over. How much time do we really want to spend crediting people for doing what they’re supposed to do?

—–

As far as the negative reviews go, to be honest I find the Salon.com critique so long and lacking in focus that I’m not at all sure what Andrew O’Hehir’s problem is. Melissa Anderson’s Village Voice pan, however, brings up a number of arguments I’ve heard before — mainly from teachers bitterly opposed to charter schools. It’s that old canard our friends on the left call “economic justice”:

I have a choice,” [director Davis] Guggenheim, who narrates throughout, admits, before asking an important question: What is our responsibility to other people’s children?

Maybe, for starters, demanding a stronger, securer social safety net. But macroeconomic responses to Guggenheim’s query—such as ensuring that all parents earn a living wage so that the appalling number of kids living below the poverty line in this country is reduced—go unaddressed in Waiting for Superman, which points out the vast disparity in resources for inner-city versus suburban schools only to ignore them. …

Guggenheim’s insistence on not engaging with the injustices that children of certain races and classes face outside of school makes his reiteration of the obvious—that “past all the noise and the debate, nothing will change without great teachers”—seem all the more willfully naïve.

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Illinois State Sen. Ricky Hendon appeared on the Don and Roma Show on Chicago’s WLS radio to discuss his candidacy for Mayor of Chicago.

It is expected that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will resign his position with the Obama Administration to announce his candidacy this week.  Hendon bristled at the prospect of Chicago’s favorite son, Barack Obama, endorcing his long-time ally Emanuel.  He outlined the issue for the WLS audience in stark, racial terms.

While Emanuel is expected to announce his departure as White House Chief of Staff this week, Hendon says it would be a detrimental mistake for President Barack Obama to endorse him as mayor.

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Even Obama voters think Net Neutrality is a solution looking for a problem

Free Press, Public Knowledge and the rest of the ever-dwindling Media Marxist “Save the Internet” contingent incessantly assert that they are pushing their government regulatory Web agenda in the “public interest” – to protect consumers from the Big, Bad Telecom companies.

Well it turns out – yet again – that the public isn’t interested in what Free Press & Co. are offering – perhaps because they rightly realize that the “reformers” are looking to burn down the Internet in order to “save” it.

There is a new poll out that shows an overwhelming majority of the consumers Free Press and Co. are claiming to be helping – don’t want their help.  75% of Americans like the Internet just the way it is – no “saving” necessary.  And 57% think the federal government should not regulate the Internet at all.

And of the 31% who think the government should regulate the Internet, more than two-thirds of them said that the regulation should be focused on privacy, online safety and protecting.

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So Senate Democrats failed again to pass a measure to halt “offshoring” of jobs, meaning employing people overseas either directly or indirectly. They oppose that but, looking at the elements of the (fortunately) languishing “Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act“, offshoring includes investing overseas in any number of circumstances. What should trouble responsible policymakers is that which prompts companies to actually “offshore” jobs when, all other things being equal, the U.S. was as rational a location for the investment as other options.

This of course is the ever-expanding regulatory state, which makes other places more attractive options for growth or even continuing investments here and which, oddly enough, the Dems embrace. Like grim death.

Even more absurd is the Democrats’ simultaneous obsession with the latest excuses for massively expanding the state, thereby offshoring jobs. These include President Obama’s ‘green economy’. The job-killing nature of this enterprise escapes Democrats. They speak as if they actually believe that mandating you use all sorts of politically divined things, like windmills and solar panels, means that surely they’ll be made here, too. Except that they will be made in those places that don’t lard on such mandates. China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia are a few countries that come to mind as places that have so far ended up manufacturing the green gadgets forced on us by our political class vapidly boasting of the jobs that such mandates will create.

That these jobs will be created elsewhere — followed by many others, incidentally, for the same reason: such mandates result in much manufacturing becoming uneconomic — is the most foreseeable outcome in the world, even if it’s always reported in terms, when it occurs, of somehow being an unforeseen consequence.

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I don’t know why presidents agree to interviews with Rolling Stone. The mag is biased against presidents and you never come off well. Remember how it treated Bush?

Bush Apologizes: The Farewell Interview We Wish He’d Give -W. comes clean – on his dad, Condi’s farts and the time Dick waterboarded the house boy

That is some high class comedy. No wonder Rolling Stone does so well in the “teenage boys who can burp the A-B-Cs demo.”

Then there was the cover photo showing Bush as a dunce. Ha! I get it! Bush is dumb. Hilarious. Never heard that one.

With that history, Obama had to be ready for a grilling. Here are some of the bare knuckles, no holds barred questions The One had to face:

When you came into office, you felt you would be able to work with the other side. When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?

How do you feel about the fact that day after day, there’s this really destructive attack on whatever you propose? Does that bother you? Has it shocked you?

What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?

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It’s déjà vu all over again.

In the early fall of 1992, George H.W. Bush was running for reelection, the economy was in recession and the Democrats had the incumbent president on the ropes. Bush was, they said, out of touch and perhaps incapable of understanding the challenges facing middle-class Americans grappling with real-world problems.

He was an elitist who played golf and ran around the world while the men and women who had put him in office were struggling just to survive. By way of contrast, his ultimately successful Democratic opponent assured people that, unlike Bush, he could “feel their pain.”

The president and his advisers argued that the recession was over. It had, according to most economists, ended that spring, and the nation was on its way to recovery. More evidence, the Democrats cried, that Bush didn’t get it.

This year, a Democratic president and his globetrotting spouse appear as divorced from the reality of today as then-President Bush seemed nearly two decades ago. Like Bush, Barack Obama comes across as a nice enough fellow who talks about things that just don’t matter to most Americans and insists on fixing things they aren’t sure are broken rather than tackling jobs they know need to be done.

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A third party group has picked up a Big Government video to create a very effective ad for November.

You may have read that there is strong evidence of voter fraud in Houston. Here’s what you may not have heard: the organization accused of shady behavior is linked to a former head of an Obama campaign office. She is a fan of Che Guevara. She is also the person who invited to a town hall meeting a woman who then posed as a doctor at that meeting during the health care debate.

Here are the details.

Last month, Houston’s Registrar accused a Democratic organization called “Houston Votes” of voter registration fraud. The allegations were recently detailed here, and make compelling reading:

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

. . . .

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also worked for the Service Employees International Union before coming to Houston. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid.

The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures. . . .

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” the Harris voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, charged as he passed on the documentation to the district attorney.

Guess who was active in recruiting for Houston Votes? That would be one Maria Isabel.

Does that name sound familiar? It should. She is a radical Obama supporter who ran an Obama campaign office that sported a picture of Che Guevara. (more…)

Glen Templeton \”God Bless Good Old Boys\”

Harvard Professor V.O. Key, Jr stated in his seminal work, “The Responsible Electorate”: “The most effective weapon of popular control in a democratic system is the capacity to throw a party from power.”    That weapon is aimed at San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts who hijacked the peoples’ House.

There has been much said about the Tea Party blaming its views on right wing talk show hosts and political pundits.  Many believe the Tea Party was formed by a Democratic Party and Administrations false conclusion that their success in the 2008 election was a vindication of their beliefs, the swing of the electorate response to the campaign positions taken, an indication of the intuitive mood of the people and, finally, as the respect it represents by an intelligent electorate.

Key concluded:  “This narcissistic approach assumes it’s most repulsive form among election winners who have championed intolerance, who have stirred the passions and hatreds of people, or who have advocated causes known by decent men to be outrageous or dangerous in their long run circumstances.”  The great Presidential scholar Richard Neustadt called it the pivotal nature of character to Presidential performance and James Barber of Duke University enhanced it with his classic book “Presidential Character”.  They both concluded that it was character more than policy that determines Presidential performance.

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Environmental groups have launched a new effort, the Safe Climate Campaign, to radically transform the American automobile and fight climate change. Nathan Wilcox, global warming director at Environment America, states: “Americans want cars that go farther on a gallon of gas. They want our country to use less oil. They want our politicians doing more to address the problem of global warming, not less.” But the proposals are so extreme that the mini-van so loved by Soccer Moms may become an endangered species.

To kick off the campaign, nineteen environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, sent a letter on September 9 to President Obama calling for a Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard of 60 miles-per-gallon (mpg). The memo also advocates a global warming tailpipe pollution standard of 143 grams-per-mile, both to be implemented by model year 2025. The memo states: “Setting strong global warming pollution and fuel efficiency standards for new cars and trucks is a key opportunity to put America on the right path.”

If adopted, these proposals will require that the average vehicle sold meet the standards or manufacturers pay a per-vehicle fine. Consumers will be forced to buy small high-mileage cars, primarily electric and hybrid, and forgo large vehicles based on the internal combustion engine, such as today’s mini-vans. Such emissions standards could significantly raise the price of our cars. Europe recently enacted similar emissions standards that are projected to boost prices by more than $8,000 per vehicle.

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The great Charlie Gasparino in today’s New York Post:

The notion of “housing” as a God-given right had been promoted by people like Barney Frank for nearly two decades. Their vehicles to expand homeownership for all were “government-sponsored enterprises” Fannie and Freddie — which, starting in the mid 90s, began buying up and placing guarantees on mortgages taken out by people with lower incomes and lousy credit histories.

Giving low-income people access to the housing market sounds nice enough — but the reality was far different. Housing prices were bid up to levels that made repaying mortgages nearly impossible. When the bubble burst, the government “sponsored” agencies were in hock for billions — and so was their “sponsor,” the US taxpayer.

And once Fannie and Freddie stopped making loans to anyone with a hearbeat (and many people without jobs), housing prices began to deflate, taking the banking system and the rest of the economy with it.

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A terrific video produced by Ben Howe over at RedState is a great reminder that November is coming–and why this midterm election is so critical in solidifying America’s future path.  The video speaks for itself, but I’d like to stress a couple of key points for those voters who remain undecided and still cling to Obama’s “hope” lies.

As I have previously mentioned, what was originally promised to you during the campaign and reiterated on Change.gov is completely different than what has unfolded the past 21 months.  Don’t believe me or still undecided, go see for yourself.  In 2006 and again in 2008, Republicans were taught a lesson by the voters.  Now, the Democrats must learn the same lesson, including the Blue Dog Democrat sellouts (there are no conservative Democrats).  They stole your health care, spent your hard earned money for endless crony bailouts, and in the age of Obama more people in America live in poverty.  Now, it is time for them to learn.  Call it a teachable moment.

The Democrats will lose their majority.  Period.  The questions are by how many seats and will it be both houses.  And it has nothing to do with great orator’s ability to communicate–especially regarding the peristent selling of Obamacare as evidenced here.  Independents and Republicans, and yes, even Democrats, know that this Congress and president defied their will–which was clearly known–so there was no failure to communicate.  It was a failure to listen, uphold their oaths, and obey the will of the American people as their elected representatives. There is no way to sugar-coat the progressive redistributive power grabs legislated by the Democrat Congress with rhetoric or car metaphors.

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From the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) website:

On Monday, September 27, the Network of Black Farm Groups and Advocates delivered a letter to all Senators urging “immediate action” regarding the passage of a measure providing funding for the settlement of Pigford vs. Vilsack, a class-action lawsuit filed by Black farmers against USDA more than a decade ago.

The current measure, which has been passed by the House, calls for $1.25 billion to fund discrimination claims that were unresolved in the 1999 settlement, known as Pigford I, which paid about $1 billion in claims to 16,000 farmers.

It is now up to the Senate to find a bill to which the Pigford II measure can be attached, and to secure this long-overdue settlement either before the fall recess or after the November general elections. Discussions are underway on a variety of possible budget cuts or revenue raisers that could offset the cost of the USDA settlement as well as a Native American discrimination settlement with the Department of the Interior.

USDA and the Department of Justice announced the $1.25-billion settlement back in February, and despite President Obama calling the settlement “a just settlement” and a “priority” earlier this month, Congress has yet to bring this issue to a close.

So the new Democrat talking point is: Buck up!

Somebody—perhaps Rahm Emanuel in his last masterstroke as Chief of Staff before he leaves to wreak havoc on Chicago—said to himself, “Self! The party is in deep, deep doo-doo, so we’ve got to do two things. 1. Go negative on the Republicans and try to rip them to shreds, and 2. Fire up the liberal base by giving them a pep talk.

So word went out across Left-Wing Land to get the base moving.

Vice President Joe Biden got the ball rolling yesterday by telling them to ”stop whining.” However: calling the very people you need a bunch of whiners is not exactly a winning strategy. So Biden took another stab at it:

“And so those who don’t get — didn’t get everything they wanted, it’s time to just buck up here, understand that we can make things better, continue to move forward and — but not yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything that we stand for in terms of the initiatives we put forward,” Biden said.

President Obama apparently got the “buck up” memo too. In a Rolling Stone article published today, he said, “People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up…if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

Again, attacking your base as “lethargic” and not “serious” probably isn’t the best Dale Carnegie way to motivate them.

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From the Associated Press:

Lawmakers are largely ignoring an Obama administration shopping list as they fashion a stopgap spending bill that’s needed to avoid a government shutdown Friday.

The Senate could pass the measure as early as Wednesday, after a likely test vote Tuesday, and the House could clear it for President Barack Obama before the budget year ends at midnight Thursday.

To speed the measure through, lawmakers appear to be disregarding administration pleas for add-ons such as $1.9 billion for “Race to the Top” grants to better-performing schools and more than $4 billion to finance settlements of long-standing lawsuits by black farmers and American Indians against the government.

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