I have spent some time on the phone and in correspondence with the Letters editor to conclude he is thoughtful and on the ball, though exceptions to the page’s excellence occur. While we do not expect perfection here on earth, sometimes these exceptions are so ridiculous as to demand ridicule. Saturday’s Letters page is a case in point.

Wind’s taxpayer lifeline is expiring, and you can feel it in the air. Responding to a piece touting shale gas, a windmill enthusiast wrote to defend the honor of his beloved pinwheels against gas, a proxy for abundant, reliable (they always work, so you can actually run an economy on them…wind, well, not so much) fossil fuels:

The energy to service a wind farm is free. For gas generation you need water, steel, energy, labor, chemicals and food stocks…

If there is a point here it must be to imply that wind energy is cheaper. It is a twist on the old line spouted by “renewables” pushers, “the wind and the sun are free!”, ignoring that wind and solar power are bloody expensive.

The wind and sun passing by one’s plot is free just as is the gas, oil or coal under it. But just three of these five fuels may be cost-effectively converted into electricity. Meaning that talking point is, like so many of the greens’ utterances, not just meaningless but useless.

Now by pure luck an always-informative gentleman named Willis Eschenbach had just posted, at the invaluable “climate” site Watts Up With That?, an item detailing the “levelized costs” of various energy sources. Levelized costs represent capital costs plus fuel, operations and maintenance. That is, the term circumvents silly talking points like the above.

Eschenbach, citing the US Energy Information Administration, lays the case out in fine graphic form for any WSJ reader, or letters editor, who cares to check: the three cheapest sources for new plants are gas, followed by dams and coal (despite the thirty-year war on it, escalated by an aggressive blitz of late, Old King Coal is still hanging in there). All are reliable.

Then comes land-borne wind, which is intermittent, but almost precisely tied with coal, despite all of the fawning, enviro statute-waving, fast-tracking and other gimmes afforded this failed contemporary of coal-fired electricity.

Our correspondent continued:

…, then build a pipeline to your power plant.

Sir, as an avowed fan of the gadgets, are you not aware that windmills require special, extremely expensive transmission lines because of their rather variable output? And lots and lots of them, given the suitable locations for wind farms are generally far away from where the (occasional) electricity is used, making that expense really add up?

Oh, yes, that reminds me of the efforts by greens to block said transmission lines (and of course the bird-killing turbines) because, well, given their location, they scare all sorts of critters such that they’ve been stymied in California, Oregon and Wyoming as I recall of the top of my head. Expensive, expensive.

He struggled on, heroically:

Maybe wind is just so productive that many jobs aren’t created, nor little in the way of multipliers.

Wha? But, wind isn’t productive. After decades of throwing billions at it on a serial lie, the intellectual insult of which is compounded with each iteration of “isn’t it time we began investing in…” what is risibly called a “new technology”, wind provides a little over 2% of our electricity. Despite the War on Coal, and with an enormous portion of wind’s share brand new (and all of it extremely costly), after a Bush administration-pushed surge and the huge spike from a $90 billion “stimulus” debacle.

Finally, he closes with:

A wind farmer knows the cost to produce power for 20 years. What other power generation source can claim that?

Answer: your partner in welfare, solar. What I believe he alludes to here is that they both exist in any material way only where state laws make utilities carry, and therefore consumers pay for, their stuff, locked at today’s high rates in by 20-25 year contracts.

So our doughty wind warrior proves a little too much here, reminding us that if spectacular advances in efficiency really were around the corner, the schemes propping them up would be ever more reckless and absurd.

When the good news is the selling point is untrue, you know you’re dealing with something you ought just abandon.

If wind and solar had a valid argument we would have heard it by now. They’ve both had more than a century of competing with coal-fired electricity, and a long time to try and edge out gas, yet remain mired in facially absurd incantations like that run by the WSJ Letters page on Saturday.

They still call themselves “new technologies”, they absurdly demand merely “a chance to compete”, and then admit they are still where they started with the line “isn’t it time we began investing in…” After billions squandered over decades protecting these losers from actual competition they admit they’ve made immaterial progress. Next!

Meanwhile, as we sit here today your elected policymakers are being lobbied to extend the windmill welfare queens’ lifeline for another four years — to get them yet another four years, until the next four years, as wind (and solar) is and will always remain just a few decades away from cost-competitiveness.

Each time around industry press releases admit it all: if this subsidy goes away the industry disappears, because it is not economic. That’s your money, and your economy being dragged down by the higher energy costs.

CO2 is released not just by oceans when they warm (absorbed when they cool) or decaying plants, or people exhaling, but combusting “fossil fuels” like the coal, gas, and, in some places, oil used to create electricity. CO2 emissions generally correlate with economic prosperity–more on that, momentarily.

But there is even less to this absurdity than meets the eye. Here’s how the ClimateWire story opens:

UNITED NATIONS — Generating enough electricity to supply the 1.5 billion people on this planet who live without it does not necessarily have to add much carbon dioxide to the global mix, U.N. experts argued in their annual Human Development Index.

The report, released yesterday, takes on the nettlesome subject of how the world can help bring these billions, most of them impoverished and living in Africa, into the light. It argues that “providing basic energy services” could happen with a CO2 increase of only 0.8 percent.

The fear that adding this level of energy supply to world accounts would mean much higher carbon output is unfounded, said William Orme, of the U.N. Development Programme, during a press briefing here on the report.

“That’s false,” he said. “You can actually do all that without creating a 1 percent rise in carbon emissions.”

Think about that. According to a UN report — coincidentally timed in the run-up to talks next month on replacing the energy-rationing Kyoto Protocol — you can create electricity for just under a quarter of the world’s population without, per the UN, even a 1% increase in man’s marginal contribution to CO2! That’s called UN Math.

The first thing that jumps out to those of us trying to find a way to make this statement be true is this interpretation: “Basic energy services” is in the eye of the beholder, a beholder who has his, viewing the dramatically lesser basic needs of others. He who seeks what others have surely has a different perspective. So far, the Kyoto disaster has affirmed this.

And then there’s this interpretation, which actually is necessary in any reading of this claim. Once the lights go on, at some level, then no growth for you! You’ve got what we think you need, now shut up.

As stated, CO2 equates with economic activity, with the statistical hiccup of certain wealthy countries depending heavily on nuclear power for much of their prosperity, like France and, until very recently, Japan and Germany.

So here again we see the newly fashionable effort to redefine prosperity, writing out economic GDP in favor of a mishmash of statist ideals leaving despotic hellholes as supposedly happy little nirvanas compared to those of us who thought reducing drudgery, disease and premature death from brutish, nasty living was somehow a good thing.

As AEI’s Steve Hayward notes, one “typical example of popular wisdom is the Happy Planet Index, which ranks the ostensible ‘happiness’ of the United States at 150th out of 178 countries, chiefly on account of America’s carbon footprint.” Mmm.

Ignore for the moment the internal confusion of this ClimateWire paragraph (surely a typo, which seems to be the principal way they get things right), and catch the argument. “Still, the U.N. report says high living standards ‘need to be carbon-fueled and follow the examples of the richest countries.’ A high degree of fossil fuel consumption was not seen as improving a nation’s life expectancy or education level, for example.”

So guess what the UN has in store for them, while also working to rope us into agreeing to Kyoto-style rationing? The UN report suggests “off-grid renewable options.” Ah, yes, the old reliable — er, wait, unreliable, “intermittent” — wind and solar power. Remember, we didn’t say often or how long the lights would be on, did we?

Just behold those happy poor…er, representatives of noble cultures. So wise, educated in ways we wealthy people will never comprehend (such are the wages of carbon sin). They’ve got a light bulb now, and they can turn them on during the day when the sun shines to power it!

So, yes, UN, you can “provide electricity” to 1.5 billion people without even slightly increasing CO2 emissions.

That is, if you don’t mind turning down, and sometimes out, the lights of many others.

And possibly squirrels running on wheels in their cages. Lots of them. And pedal-power. Hey, you need to get in shape anyway.

I mean, there are many ways this could be true. Yet, under any reading, why would we place this responsibility in the hands of, or even anywhere near, a group of people who believe in energy scarcity, not abundance?

We’ve already got such a crew in charge, here, and look at the swell direction things are headed.

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the “bad timing” file, especially for the Obama Administration and the UN.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (whose scams I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a “science czar” John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to for developing his “environmental”’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, operating domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to — user names and passwords for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA, thereby also seeking to undermine the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978.

The IPCC, you will recall, is Al Gore’s co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and the host over the years of numerous scandals involving fudged and twisted climate data, research plagiarized from student theses, popular magazine articles, and green-group press releases, and, of course, the infamous Climategate emails which showed coordinated efforts to “hide the decline” in temperature data. This is not just one more scandal, however. This is much bigger.

Until the Request is posted at CEI.org, consider the following:

* CEI’s FOIA request details how the UN informed participants that it was motivated by embarrassing releases of earlier discussions (“ClimateGate” key among them) and, to circumvent the problem that national government transparency laws posed, the group itself.

* CEI reminds OSTP that this practice was described as “creat[ing] non-governmental accounts for official business” and “using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications” in a recent analogous situation involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. CEI expects similar congressional and media outrage at this similar practice to evade the applicable record-keeping laws.

* This effort has apparently been conducted with participation — thereby direct assistance and enabling — by the Obama White House which, shortly after taking office, appointed Holdren’s office to the lead role on IPCC work from the Department of Commerce. The plan to secretly create a FOIA-free zone was then implemented.

* This represents politically assisting the IPCC to enable UN, EU, and US bureaucrats and political appointees to avoid official email channels for specific official work of high public interest, performed on official time and using government computers, away from the prying eyes of increasingly skeptical taxpayers.

* CEI also reminds OSTP of a similar, ongoing effort by the administration to claim that records on U.S. government computers belong to the UN IPCC, refusing to produce them under FOIA. This practice was affirmed in a report by the Department of Commerce’s Office of Inspector General earlier this year.

As talks resume next month to forge legislation to act as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, CEI looks forward to OSTP ceasing this unlawful activity and providing prompt access to the requested records so the taxpayer can know what they, and the IPCC, are up to.

So this morning, we requested all relevant records under FOIA, including all records sitting on that server, as they all were provided to US government employees for official purposes. This was filed with OSTP run by controversial “science czar” and, we now know, former Mitt Romney “climate” adviser John Holdren. The taxpayer deserves to know about this coordinated effort between Holdren’s OSTP and the UN.

Possibly one Republican candidate will call in the next debate for ending US funding of the IPCC, now shown to be actively working (with the Obama White House) to subvert US law. Enough is enough is enough. Possibly Governor Romney could defend Holdren and the IPCC.

In the meantime, we look for Rep. Henry Waxman to reprise the level of outrage he displayed over Abramoff to prove it was also not political and come down hard on the practice he so aggressively condemned and pursued, demanding preservation of records, threatening subpoenas, the whole works. With our request, that’s essentially what we’ve done, and we’d appreciate the company. You too, NPR.

Of course, it may not be of interest to the media, because it only uncovers unlawful dealings to hide an effort impacting our entire economy, the premise for that “fundamental transformation” of America, with the sleazy lobbying operation being the UN. We’ll wait on OSTP’s response and hope for the best from the Hill and Republican candidates.

Mr. Romney finds himself needing to detach himself from these past positions on environmental issues without painting a target on his back for more accusations of flip-floppery. Otherwise, he must plainly state that voters should expect him to stick to his prior instincts on these issues.

This is too big a topic to pussyfoot around. The importance of Romney’s views on energy and his courting of environmental lobbyists — including a venture capitalist about to take the reins of what has become the world’s largest (and worst) VC slushy fund — cannot be overstated at this point.

This would be true even without Solyndra having exposed many voters to the growing fiscal disease in “green” industries, which is so typical and predictable that some of us foresaw it long ago.

Romney’s seeming embrace of the corrupt environmental lobby is made all the sadder by the fact that this country has a real opportunity for a spectacular revival with a domestic energy production boom. But such a change will require a leader with both strong vision and the will to stand up to anti-business, anti-energy extremists.

Considering the legacy of absurd and often outright offensive “comprehensive energy legislation” that passes Congress every few years and the relative executive stewardship of the Reagan through Obama presidencies, it is abundantly clear that this change will only come about through a President with better instincts about energy and the proper role of government than our current leaders possess. This will require particular knowledge about the role of energy in the economy and in liberty.

If time is an issue, not to be flippant, but each Republican presidential candidate can get a season or two of “Dallas” to watch on the campaign bus. Better yet, drive that bus to towns where the power plant is now a victim of a President who has waged war on abundant affordable energy (IER has identified them, even though the legal departments of too many energy producers warn against publishing this information for fear of upsetting the administration that, um, is trying to off them anyway).

While there, GOP candidates should take the time to listen to someone who who can explain that none of the “sustainable” energy production methods favored by progressives can replace the capacity and cost-effectiveness of much-reviled coal plants (there are a couple of candidates who already know this, but we can be under no illusions that this is universally shared knowledge).

These candidates should continue by heading to places such as southeast Ohio or most anywhere in Appalachia, where residents have few prospects for wealth creation except underground coal and gas deposits but they find their access to those resources under assault by intrusive bureaucrats. They must take note that this trend is part of the ongoing War on the West, a cycle of government-induced poverty that could be easily remedied with a simple no-cost “stimulus” — lifting extraneous burdens from energy producers.

The GOP presidential field would also do well to remember energy boom times and the role one played in the rebound from Carter’s first term, then to consider the changes needed to roar out of this second Carter term the same way. The United States possesses the world’s largest combined oil, coal and gas resources; therefore, our energy woes stem not from any shortage of raw materials but merely from restrictive policy.

Furthermore, the “climate change” record must be cemented in its proper place in the energy debate. The taxpayer-owned records that we at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and American Tradition Institute are working hard to ensure find their way into the public domain, through our transparency campaigns — from UVa, NASA, NOAA, DoE, EPA, and just wait to you hear what we’ve learned about the IPCC — can make policymakers’ lives much less contentious when it comes to the media pressure/assault they will face from the green industry faithful next year.

Also, candidates for the White House must see the advantage in a more information-rich policy debate, and therefore better-informed electorate, in two ways — first, as a hedge against a nominee winning higher office, then giving in to pressure from environmental lobbyists. The recidivism rate among pols with this kind of history is something on the order of 100%, but that trend must be reversed in 2013. Second, and more charitably, getting all of this information out into the public’s attention is a way to help a candidate complete a smooth transition on these issues with a simple explanation that a better scientific understanding of climate change and its relationship (or lack thereof) to traditional energy production methods is a compelling reason to reverse course on green subsidies and costly regulations.

It is ultimately beneficial to pick this fight and have this discussion this early in the presidential race. Our government’s anti-growth policies must be stopped and reversed, then a radically different course must be plotted. We will then reap the economic, social, and national security rewards of robust domestic energy production. But this will not come without a fight, so it’s good to see candidates like Rick Perry starting one.

These two headlines from today’s Global Warming Policy Foundation update ought to finally shake some sense into any of the many US companies pushing for our involvement in the Kyoto debacle. That’s a demand invented by Enron (greenies, I was in the room, don’t bother), and I particularly recall DuPont’s rep whining like a child to the US representative about their being denied the right to cash in, at a State Department briefing at one global confab I attended in 2002.

This is particularly true on the heels of the experience of Coca Cola and Unocal with the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act, under which they were sued to pay for the actions of a government in whose country they operated.

Specifically, news reports indicate that:

“Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against ‘global warming,’ a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism.

The evictions were ordered by New Forests Company, an outfit that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the ‘carbon credits’ on to transnational corporations. The company is backed by the World Bank and HSBC. Its Board of Directors includes HSBC Managing Director Sajjad Sabur, as well as other former Goldman Sachs investment bankers…

Villagers told of how armed ‘security forces’ stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others.

‘We were in church,’ recalled Jean-Marie Tushabe, 26, a father of two. ‘I heard bullets being shot into the air.’

‘Cars were coming with police,’ Mr. Tushabe said, sitting among the ruins of his old home. ‘They headed straight to the houses. They took our plates, cups, mattresses, bed, pillows. Then we saw them getting a matchbox out of their pockets.’

‘But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming,’ reports the New York Times.”

To beat some too-typical greens to their punch, no, this is not what happens when one introduces “market mechanisms” into environmental schemes.

The only armed goons I’ve read about under our Clean Air Act, with its cap-and-trade scheme (designed quite differently, to keep the price of coal-fired energy affordable, not make it “necessarily skyrocket”) came from EPA.

This is what happens with the UN running things.

And of course, as the UN’s own lead economist on these issues, Ottmar Edenhofer has acknowledged, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore”; no, instead, “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

For a detailed treatment of how one line in the Judiciary Act of 1789 would be abused to imperil our industries while chilling international investment — when the real problem is the UN and its scheming little UN schemes — see my paper expanding on a discussion originally written for the Federalist Society, both of which are available here.

Keep these things in mind as you hear the usual green hysteria and demands in the run-up to November’s annual Kyoto negotiating session, this year’s “last chance to save humanity (or at least schemers’ schemes) in Durban, South Africa.

Then at Rio’s World Environment Summit in June, during our presidential campaign, which State Department officials privately insist Barack Obama will not attend, even as other heads of government do.

Mmm. This is “Rio-plus 20”, celebrating the 1992 confab where the ‘global governance’ gang ultimately behind the present massacre first roped us into the Kyoto process. As I recall, the president at the time also said he wouldn’t go. And that fella didn’t even promise to reverse the oceans’ rise (which the oceans have decided to do for themselves, incidentally, unless a mere inauguration and some crushing rules in the pipeline were enough to do the trick).

Don’t just say no to statist, global governance-types and rent-seeking companies trying to tie us down into these regimes promising to transfer them power and wealth, and secure markets for phony commodities and uneconomic goods where none would exist, and otherwise pick your pocket at the further cost of eroding our liberties. Say no, and let everyone know why.

Solyndra may only, as administration apologists cite, represent about 1% of ‘green’ stimulus loot, and friends and family may prove to be parties in some percentage — say, between half and 99% — of the greendoggle recipients. But 100% of the recipient projects require government schemes to exist, and 100% are designed to socialize the risk, keep reward with private ‘investors’ (term used loosely for reason of the socializing of the risk), and pay off for reasons other than their performance or their economics.

When such projects exist — and they do always thanks to the political process — well, cronies do tend to abound. It’s less a bug than a feature.

Specifically, think back to that October 2010 internal memo to the president from senior administration officials including then-National Economic Council chair Lawrence Summers, reported on by the Wall Street Journal and noted (with somewhat less context and illumination) this week by the Washington Post. In it, Summers shared a commonsensical worry: “He believed the government would end up funding projects that would have been built anyway or funding projects that flopped.”

Those two categories represent precisely the universe of what these programs fund.

In the order described by Summers, that would be guaranteed-market schemes like wind farms and solar arrays, and manufacturers of the wind and solar gadgets.

The former stimulus beneficiaries won’t go bust — though they will saddle ratepayers with exorbitant electricity bills in the event renewables ever really did become viable — because state ‘renewable electricity standards’ where they are put up, like California, place them in guaranteed contracts with utilities to buy their output at a massive mark-up over the going rate for electricity, for usually around twenty five years, passing the cost on to the economy.

Why would they need a big loan to guild the facility? Economically frivolous states had already guaranteed the market. The answer is, they don’t.

The latter category, the manufacturers, are the busts. These are the ones whose specific pitch was without this wealth transfer, we don’t go forward. These are the projects which were in fact a gamble particularly dependent on adopting the cap-and-trade scheme to guarantee people would have to buy their stuff. This of course wasn’t viewed as such a gamble, because passage was assumed by all, including DoE when handing over the half billion to Solyndra (and for some months after), what with massive majorities in both the House and Senate guaranteeing it. Until they didn’t.

Regardless, these respective attributes, different if similar government supports paying the schemes off all at taxpayer expense — from loan guarantees to ‘rents’ from a national mandate in the cap-and-trade bill — make it absurd to call them ‘investments’. The risk was spread among taxpayers and the reward left with the private contributors of a typically much smaller share. Who, almost universally had friends or relatives in government. That’s who gets in on ’sure things’.

This goes a long way in explaining why this most absurd of all of the ’stimulus’ handout schemes, the ‘green’ programs, are populated by so many political supporters and cronies. The projects are chosen for reasons other than their economics or their performance, but on the basis of politics.

As such, we see the case study in moral hazard that is the slow-motion explosion that is the ‘green’ energy bubble. Expect more connected players to emerge as recipients of these handouts. That they will be among the recipients of ‘green stimulus’ lucre is as predictable as the coming series of further collapses.

But one distraction has proved persistent within the repertoire even as others get tried out. It is a new utilitarian “green” talking point, applied so far to the entire suite of folly, from electric cars to windmills, and thus deserves response. That is, we had to make bold moves on this front or face the prospect of falling behind China in the great [insert green boondoggle here] race.

Given that this does not seem to be going away any time soon, please consider the following about the alleged Yellow Peril.

Americans should be far more concerned about Belgium producing better beer, chocolate and Brussels sprouts than us than over the prospect of China developing a superior solar panel. It’s a solar panel. Not Flubber.

I understand that this can be difficult to keep in mind with all of the mysticism attached to anything labeled “green”. But the romantic folly is getting really expensive.

Solar electricity generation was first patented in 1888 and Music Men have sauntered into town ever since vowing revolutionary this and that and cost competitiveness juuust around the corner — it’s always been just around the corner, and always will be — and that they’ve finally fixed the bugs in the system such that it’s now viable…some of which bugs upon scrutiny are actually features (the sun, like the wind, is intermittent, that is, it isn’t an alternative to something that works when you need it, let alone all the time; and it is very diffuse, meaning it takes a lot of space to produce a little).

And so we’ve squandered scores of billions time and gain. Yes, billions. So much for “isn’t it time we began investing in…”

And, do not fear that they will leave us on the outside of their solar panel nirvana looking in, beholden to them. China is only making the things to sell them to us. Not cluttering their own energy system with solar.

If you don’t want to buy solar panels from China, don’t pass laws requiring us to use solar panels. Otherwise, you’re going to buy solar panels from China. Things that exist solely due to political divination, not for reasons of their economics or performance, are essentially commoditized. The low-cost producer will always win, and it will never be us.

China’s edge is in mass producing commodities. Not innovating. Similarly, anything like solar panels that require command-and-control policies to exist will always be something China beats us in. They’re communists.

Why not fetishize that which China is doing that actually drives its prosperity: going on a binge of building coal-fired, nuclear and hydroelectric production?

If Western political leaders abandon this vanity of pushing uneconomic energy sources into the economy because, well, we should be making and using them — despite there being many and very good reasons that we do not — the Chinese will immediately retool their industry to make something else.

Hopefully, it won’t be something else that only exists because Western politicians have concluded it should. But I’m realistic.

The more legitimate fear is not that we lose some mythical race to China but that we succeed in turning into the country Obama cited eight times as his model to examine if we want to know where he’s going: Spain. Oh, yeah…remember the European boogeyman previously invoked to convince you we simply must accept this absurd industrial policy? Whatever happened to that?

Well, after decade of tossing their own billions down this same kind of crony-populated ratholes, they lost their industry to China. Spain, Germany, Denmark and any other model Obama used to cite but no longer does is experiencing this. For reasons stated above. The key point is to note he no longer cites these European miracles. Now it’s suddenly China.

We do not know for sure that Solyndra will put an end to politicians’ profligate pouring of debt-financed wealth down this drain. But, in the event this proves out, the half billion it cost us will also prove to have been worth it. In the meantime, let’s educate Americans on Obamanomics, one ridiculous talking point at a time.