Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)

President Obama recently unleashed his first campaign ad for the 2012 election year.  The 30-second spot is described as such:

President Obama has taken steps to make us energy independent and create an economy that’s built to last. He’s been a strong supporter of domestic energy production, has made historic investments in clean energy technology, and has nearly doubled fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. Because of the progress we’ve made, our dependence on foreign oil is the lowest it’s been in 16 years.

The Washington Post gave the ad a rating of “three Pinocchios” for misleading viewers with a suggestion that Obama was responsible for creating 2.7 million clean energy jobs and for cherry-picking certain citations to back up its claims.  The resulting descriptions of the ad included such words as “slippery,” “slick,” and “misleading.”

The Obama administration in a nutshell.

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Despite an anemic economic recovery and an increasingly antagonistic Iran, President Obama decided to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. Creating thousands of jobs and securing American access to oil, the much-discussed Keystone project would transport crude oil from Alberta, Canada to American refiners in Oklahoma and Texas.

For years the pipeline was an innocuous project slowly making its way through the convoluted federal approval process. After receiving all but one permit, radical environmentalist—feeling affronted two years into the Obama Administration—set their sights on the soon-to-be approved Keystone pipeline. What should have been a non-controversial construction project became anything but. Before becoming the object of environmentalist scorn, the State Department approved and advocated for the nearly identical Canadian-American pipeline in 2009, arguing:

… the addition of crude oil pipeline capacity between Canada and the United States will advance a number of strategic interests of the United States. These included increasing the diversity of available supplies among the United States’ worldwide crude oil sources in a time of considerable political tension in other major oil producing countries and regions; shortening the transportation pathway for crude oil supplies; and increasing crude oil supplies from a major non-Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries producer.

Canada is a stable and reliable ally and trading partner of the United States, with which we have free trade agreements which augment the security of this energy supply. Approval of the permit sends a positive economic signal, in a difficult economic period, about the future reliability and availability of a portion of United States’ energy imports, and in the immediate term, this shovel-ready project will provide construction jobs for workers in the United States.

Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand, environmentalists threatened to sit out the 2012 election if President Obama approved the pipeline. Organizing daily protests outside the White House, environmentalists effectively turned a non-political issue into one of the most divisive topics of 2011.

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Republicans in the Senate, led by Sen. Dick Lugar,  have introduced a bill that would force President Obama to act on initiating construction of the-1,700 mile Keystone XL crude oil pipeline from Canada. The project is expected to create approximately 20,000 jobs and increase energy security for the United States.

Although President Obama has been openly mocking and denouncing Congress for failing to pass his jobs bill, his decision, through the State Department, to delay the Keystone XL project until after the November 2012 elections has led to criticism that the president is putting politics ahead of the best interests of the country.

37 Republican senators signed onto the bill that would require the administration to approve the pipeline project within 60 days, unless Mr. Obama declares the project is not in the national interest.

The Keystone project has been interesting in that it has marked a division between two groups that have been very supportive of the president: environmentalists and Big Labor. Environmental groups, fearing oil spills and other ecological disasters, as well as celebrity “green” fans, have opposed the pipeline plan, while labor groups have supported it in the hopes of obtaining high-paying union jobs. In addition, none of the states involved in the pipeline’s path- Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma or Texas- supported Mr. Obama in the presidential election of 2008.

While the Keystone project had already been found to be environmentally sound prior to the president’s delay of the pipeline’s construction, some rerouting of the pipeline was done in Nebraska, for example, and approved by that state’s legislature quickly so as not to prevent the project from moving forward. Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Nebraska) is supporting the bill to force implementation of the pipeline. “This bill respects the Nebraska process to protect the Sand Hills while providing a commonsense approach to bring friendly oil and jobs to the U.S. without unnecessary delay,” he said.

If the pipeline project is not implemented, Canada has said that it will sell its oil to China.

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Since I’ve written before about Canada’s remarkable period of fiscal restraint during the 1990s, I am very pleased to see that the establishment press is finally giving some attention to what our northern neighbors did to reduce the burden of government spending.

Here are some key passages from a Reuters story.

“Everyone wants to know how we did it,” said political economist Brian Lee Crowley, head of the Ottawa-based think tank Macdonald-Laurier Institute, who has examined the lessons of the 1990s. But to win its budget wars, Canada first had to realize how dire its situation was and then dramatically shrink the size of government rather than just limit the pace of spending growth. It would eventually oversee the biggest reduction in Canadian government spending since demobilization after World War Two. …The turnaround began with Chretien’s arrival as prime minister in November 1993, when his Liberal Party – in some ways Canada’s equivalent of the Democrats in the U.S. – swept to victory with a strong majority. The new government took one look at the dreadful state of the books and decided to act. “I said to myself, I will do it. I might be prime minister for only one term, but I will do it,” said Chretien. …The Liberals thought their first, rushed budget – delivered in February 1994, three months after taking office, was tough. It reformed unemployment insurance entitlements, and cut defense and foreign aid… The upstart Reform Party, then the main national opposition party, had campaigned on “zero-in-three” – balance the budget in three years. “We were always trying to go faster,” said Reform’s leader at the time, Preston Manning. …The Liberals were stung by the criticism and, at first reluctantly but then with gusto, they got out the chain saws. …Cutting government spending programs went against the Liberal grain. Contrary to the Reform Party, the Liberals saw a more important role for government. Paul Martin now has a lasting reputation as the finance minister who slayed Canada’s deficit, but the conversion from spender to cutter was painful. His father, also called Paul, had helped create Medicare, Canada’s publicly funded health care system, and suddenly here was Paul Junior contemplating massive cuts.

This is a remarkable story. My only real quibble is that the fiscal restraint actually started the year before the Liberal Party took power, as the chart (click to enlarge) illustrates.

But the key thing to understand is that Canada enjoyed a five-year period when government spending increased by an average of only 1 percent each year.

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My fellow Americans–and, I suppose, Canadians:

I regret to inform you that you are not the “99 Percent.”

The 99 Percent dislikes big banks, but also dislikes big government–and big messes.

The 99 Percent does not occupy property it does not own, public or private.

The 99 Percent does not steal from local businesses, does not attack police officers, does not storm national museums, and does not defecate in public.

Flyer at #OccupyWallStreet - the address for donations is a small building in Washington, DC shared by Code Pink and other "progressive" organizations

The 99 Percent does not rank people’s views based on their skin color, gender, or socioeconomic status.

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From NPR:

Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University says in the next decade, new oil in the US, Canada and South America could change the center of gravity of the entire global energy supply.

“Some are now saying, in five or 10 years’ time, we’re a major oil-producing region, where our production is going up,” she says.

The US, Jaffe says, could have 2 trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drilled. South America could hold another 2 trillion. And Canada? 2.4 trillion. That’s compared to just 1.2 trillion in the Middle East and north Africa.

Jaffe says those new oil reserves, combined with growing turmoil in the Middle East, will “absolutely propel more and more investment into the energy resources in the Americas.”

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When President Obama announced his jobs plan back at the beginning of September, he focused almost exclusively on what the government could do for Americans. He mentioned thousands of “shovel ready” projects that needed the strong arms and constitutions of Americans willing to lend their hands to government-run projects across the country. From his speech, you’d think there were no possible projects in the private sector about to provide thousands of jobs to the growing number of unemployed.

Of course, that perception would be incorrect. While President Obama is pushing government-funded jobs across the country, he is ignoring at least one such private sector initiative awaiting his approval: a private sector initiative that could employ thousands, boost the GDP and help provide the US with energy independence…at absolutely no cost to the American taxpayer. The $7 billion Keystone pipeline project – an oil pipeline spanning the continental United States from the oil sands in Canada to the heart of Texas – is just that project.

Unfortunately, because of the Obama Administration and its cronies in environmental groups, Nebraska government and elsewhere, the Keystone pipeline project, which has the potential to create thousands of jobs, may be in jeopardy.

The Keystone Pipeline would originate in Canada, transporting nearly 150,000 barrels of oil per day from the oil sands in western Canada, down through the United States to refineries in Texas and projects in a handful of other states. Once the Obama Administration approves its construction, it could bring over a million barrels of oil per day to American refineries, boosting a severely lagging oil industry in the Gulf and possibly millions of dollars in revenue to the US. Plus, it would severely decrease our dependence on foreign oil.

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The Congressional Budget Office has just released the update to its Economic and Budget Outlook.

There are several things from this new report that probably deserve commentary, including a new estimate that unemployment will “remain above 8 percent until 2014.”

This certainly doesn’t reflect well on the Obama White House, which claimed that flushing $800 billion down the Washington rathole would prevent the joblessness rate from ever climbing above 8 percent.

Not that I have any faith in CBO estimates. After all, those bureaucrats still embrace Keynesian economics.

But this post is not about the backwards economics at CBO. Instead, I want to look at the new budget forecast and see what degree of fiscal discipline is necessary to get rid of red ink.

The first thing I did was to look at CBO’s revenue forecast, which can be found in table 1-2. But CBO assumes the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts will expire at the end of 2012, as well as other automatic tax hikes for 2013. So I went to table 1-8 and got the projections for those tax provisions and backed them out of the baseline forecast.

That gave me a no-tax-hike forecast for the next 10 years, which shows that revenues will grow, on average, slightly faster than 6.6 percent annually. Or, for those who like actual numbers, revenues will climb from a bit over $2.3 trillion this year to almost $4.4 trillion in 2021.

Something else we know from CBO’s budget forecast is that spending this year (fiscal year 2011) is projected to be a bit below $3.6 trillion.

So if we know that tax revenues will be $4.4 trillion in 2021 (and that’s without any tax hike), and we know that spending is about $3.6 trillion today, then even those of us who hate math can probably figure out that we can balance the budget by 2021 so long as government spending does not increase by more than $800 billion during the next 10 years.

Yes, you read that correctly.

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There is one thing you can say about Google – they don’t give a damn. They don’t care about intellectual property rights. They don’t care about privacy of their users. And they don’t appear to care about the law in general.

Google has been fined an incredible $500 million by the Department of Justice for knowingly and illegally assisting Canadian pharmacies illegally importing drugs into the United States.

Google has admitted that as early as 2003 they were made aware that it was illegal for pharmacies to ship controlled and non-controlled prescription drugs into the United States from Canada. But Google facilitated the sales and importation of these drugs by marketing their AdWords program to Canadian pharmacies.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) takes the position that they cannot ensure the safety and effectiveness of foreign prescription drugs. In fact, even though Canada has its own regulations regarding drug safety, Canadian pharmacies that ship prescription drugs to U.S. residents are not subject to Canadian regulatory authority, and many sell drugs obtained from countries other than Canada that lack adequate pharmacy regulations.

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Are we headed for more political business as usual, where Republicans give up too much and get too little back in the debt-ceiling fight? Friday’s papers are loaded with stories on the GOP giving up Paul Ryan’s Medicare-reform package. It’s being called “political reality.”

But let me ask this: Will they also give up any attempt to slow Medicare spending in the next couple of years, at least a down-payment on the budget deficit?

And I don’t see much talk anymore about tax reform as part of the new package. But the economy still needs an incentive jolt, which could be supplied at least by dropping the business tax rate.

Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is moving to a 15 percent corporate tax rate. We’re still at 35 percent. Canada’s open for business. Are we?

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Canadians will go to the polls on May 2nd to elect a Prime Minister.  The election has gained almost no attention in the U.S. but one candidate suddenly has a very American problem.

As reported in the Toronto Sun, Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal Party candidate for Prime Minister stated in a 2004 interview with a U.K. journalist:

“I am an American Democrat. I will vote for Kerry in November.”

Ignatieff, a professor at Harvard University, was living in Cambridge, MA at the time.  He had been away from Canada for over 30 years, having arrived at Harvard as a graduate student in 1969. In the 70s he moved to the UK, but eventually found his way back to Cambridge and settled in as an academic.  He became so settled that it was a shock to many in Canada when returned in 2005 and announced his intention to run for Parliament.  Many questioned if he was a U.S. citizen.  Feeling the pressure, Ignatieff told the Toronto Star, ”

“I’ve never been a citizen of any other country.  Nor was I a green card holder in the United States.”

If that is true, then voting in the U.S. was illegal. And a professor at the Kennedy School of Government would have known that.

A conviction for illegal voting in Massachusetts carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.  For each time that he voted.

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America faces a fiscal crisis. The burden of federal spending has doubled during the Bush-Obama years, a $2 trillion increase in just 10 years. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Because of demographic changes and poorly designed entitlement programs, the federal budget is going to consume larger and larger shares of America’s economic output in coming decades.

For all intents and purposes, the United States appears doomed to become a bankrupt welfare state like Greece.

But we can save ourselves. A previous video showed how both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton achieved positive fiscal changes by limiting the growth of federal spending, with particular emphasis on reductions in the burden of domestic spending. This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity provides examples from other nations to show that good fiscal policy is possible if politicians simply limit the growth of government.

These success stories from Canada, Ireland, Slovakia, and New Zealand share one common characteristic. By freezing or sharply constraining the growth of government outlays, nations were able to rapidly shrinking the economic burden of government, as measured by comparing the size of the budget to overall economic output.

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When movie director James Cameron descended upon the Athabasca oil sands a while back, Albertans were subjected to the predictable but nonetheless aggravating media blitz of misinformation that occurs when a mega-star chooses a cause to elevate.

The elevation came in the form of a supercilious warning to put the brakes on the world’s second largest proved oil reserve. It could, he feared, become a curse if not properly managed. This revelation came upon reflection via a government sponsored helicopter tour and a token chat with a group of not-so disenfranchised First Nations peoples in the area. (In 2009, oil sands companies contracted more than $890 million for goods and services from Aboriginal owned businesses and employed 1600 Aboriginals in permanent jobs).

And with that, Mr. Cameron and the media were able to close the case on the oil sands, as Mr. Cameron purportedly had to jet. It’s not Mr. Cameron’s fault, completely. The oil complex is just that – complex. It’s not the kind of business one just picks up as a hobby horse. Sure, Cameron can regurgitate the technical terminology if he likes. It would be difficult for a techno-geek of titanic proportions to resist a sexy term like steam gravity assisted drainage (SAGD).

Here is where I suggest “putting the brakes on.” Perhaps a moratorium on incendiary statements by celebutantes or politicians a-la-Pelosi who are not able to, because of their lack of training, do the type of deep comprehensive assessment required for these matters.

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One of the promises every president since Richard Nixon has failed to deliver on is the recurring pledge to somehow free the nation from its ever-growing “dependence on foreign oil.”

Until fairly recently, the need to find other ways to meet our growing energy needs was driven primarily by national security rather than economic or environmental concerns; both are often in conflict with worries about instability or outright hostility in those nations on which we have depended for so long.

In the early ’70s there was a belief that nuclear power might replace oil as a source of energy. Later in the decade, the spike in oil prices following the Arab oil embargo convinced the Carter administration to waste billions in an attempt to develop new unconventional domestic sources that made little sense even at the time.

Since then, politicians have tried to “wean” us from our dependence on oil by artificially raising prices, using regulations to hamstring oil and coal producers, subsidizing or even mandating more fuel-efficient technologies and trying to persuade voters that wind, solar and alternative sources of fuel are the answer.

Most energy experts believe that regardless of our ability to replace oil in the longer term, in our lifetimes we will continue to need oil to fuel our economy and to maintain a 21st-century lifestyle. The question is not whether America needs oil, but where we get it. There are really three main sources: We can buy it from our enemies; find and develop reserves within the confines of our own borders or in the waters off our shores; or buy it from stable, friendly nations.

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This weekend (starting today) looks like it is shaping up to be the next chapter in the ongoing Progressive-Marxist revolution now underway across the globe. Previous chapters of the revolution include, but are not limited to, the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, the “anti-war”* protests during the Bush presidency, the 2004 and 2008 protests against the Republican conventions, the Bank of America protests, the Gaza Flotilla movement, etc…  *The asterisk marks the discredit earned by the “anti-war” movement through their silence since President Obama took office, despite the continuation of the wars allegedly being protested against.

Here is their description of the event they are holding Saturday night:

GET OFF THE FENCE
Confrontational Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist
Convergence in solidarity with the
People’s First Demonstration
26 June 2010, 1pm, Queen’s Park
And then onwards to the Fence

If you want to understand the art of confrontational anti-capitalism, look no further than this Organizing Manual produced by one of the leading organizers of confrontational street (and flotilla) demonstrations. Pay special attention to the sections entitled, “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action” and “Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change and Other People Socialized in a Society Based on Domination”. Below is an excerpt from their section about the intentional tactic of getting arrested.

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Canadians hosted hundreds of American air passengers whose planes were grounded on 9/11. They opened their hearts and their homes to us. During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81, fearless Canadian diplomats in Tehran helped smuggle out of that maddened country endangered Americans.

None of that seemed to matter this week. Not content with putting an end to America’s historic “special relationship” with Britain, nor with bullying the U.S.’ only reliable ally in the Mideast, Israel, the Obama administration has launched an attack on our Northern neighbor, Canada. Their unguided missile landed squarely on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. It was Hillary.

Oh, my! Even the very liberal Toronto Globe and Mail felt the sting of Madam Secretary’s tongue-lashing. “It was the third time in a two-day visit to Canada that…Clinton gave Canadian hosts a headache,” writes Campbell Clark. Short work. But then, she was always capable of giving us three headaches in one day.

Clinton publicly rebuked the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper wants to make maternal health the centerpiece of Canada’s initiative at the next G8 summit.

What could be wrong with that?

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Back in November, when Peter Robinson interviewed me for Uncommon Knowledge, he waited until the last segment to throw down the gauntlet, asking me bluntly why I was so much more sanguine regarding the future than was the estimable Mark Steyn. My reply, which caught him off guard, was what he jocularly called “a low blow.” For I said something like this: “Mark Steyn is a Canadian. What would you expect? I’d be a pessimist myself if I were a Canadian.”

I would not want to deny that my ad hominem argument struck a bit below the belt, but I nonetheless thought it apt, and I have not in any way changed my mind. Mark is a man of keen understanding and quick wit, and he bears comparison with George Will and Charles Krauthammer, the very best of our pundits. Moreover; as a Canadian who has lived in Great Britain, he has firsthand experience of the profound damage done by what I, echoing Alexis de Tocqueville, termed soft despotism in my recent book. When he writes, in a recent post, “ it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished,” he is surely right. Indeed, I agree with almost every word in the following:

Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: . . . the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers”  in any meaningful sense of that term (i.e., evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there’s plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon.

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I was hoping for a fruit basket, not a threat to prosecute:

counter –

In the wake of yesterday’s terrible tragedy outside of Vancouver at the Whistler Sliding Center, where Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili sadly lost his life, safety is on the minds of many.  Only hours before the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the 21-year old lost control of his sled at 88mph and was catapulted over the track wall into a steel support column.  All throughout the week, coaches, commentators, and even other Olympians have questioned the safety of the track, as nearly a dozen other athletes have also crashed during practice runs, including a Romanian women’s slider who was knocked unconscious and defending Olympic luge champion Armin Zoeggeler of Italy.

The President of the World Luge Federation said the track is too fast and thinks it is a planning mistake, while Australian luger Hannah Campbell-Pegg questioned whether athletes were being treated as “crash test dummies“.  The shocking footage of the accident was replayed all throughout the day and evening yesterday, leaving horrified viewers focused on discussion about the safety of the track.

But in all of this shock, horror and sadness over the tragic death of an athlete in his prime and the dangers of the track on which he lost his young life, what has the SEIU focused on?

Food safety. (Translated =  unionizing)

Reports of the horrible accident in Vancouver began surfacing in the press as early as 12:30 pm EST  Friday.  Yet, the SEIU still felt their unionization Food Safety concerns were so paramount that they went ahead and issued a press release anyway, after 5:00 pm EST:

“PRESS RELEASE:  Healthcare Union Raises Concerns Over Safety Of Food to be Served to Olympic Athletes at Vancouver Olympics“

“Sodexo is providing catering services for athletes during this key moment in their sporting careers, and we’re concerned about the food they will be providing,” charged the SEIU in Friday’s press release.

It’s not as though the SEIU could not have known about the tragedy  – the story had been broadcast all over the news for at least five hours before SEIU pushed out its attack.  If they didn’t know, then they’re even more disconnected from reality than we thought they were.

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