Last week I was down in Cancun, Mexico reporting on the U.N. Climate Change Summit (officially called COP16/CMP6) with Americans for Prosperity and Andrew Breitbart. It was several days of sun, surf, and U.N. conmen. I am back in the saddle here at home, traveling from the warm white sands of Cancun back to the cold white snow of Chicago. Where’s all that global warming when you need it?

At least I have the modern conveniences of natural gas to keep my house warm and coal and nuclear-fired electric to power my electronic entertainment and work devices. Unfortunately, if the con in Cancun is successful we may no longer have such luxuries.

One of the last places I visited in Cancun was the Villa de Cambio Climatico — or in English the climate change village. The exhibit was sponsored by the Mexican federal government and was set up in order to indoctrinate Mexico’s school children in the ways of environmental hokum.

At the exhibit we found what was presented as the ideal eco-friendly house. Of course, it was suitably small as the enviro-Nazis most certainly don’t want anyone enjoying a bit of elbowroom in their homes though it did have space for a few modern niceties. It had a tiny computer area, an actual flush toilet, and a four-foot-tall refrigerator that looks like it might be able to store enough food for two or three days.

But it was the laundry-room that took the cake.

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At the height of debate surrounding Democrats’ proposed overhaul of the American health care system, a chart purporting to explain the complex web of regulations created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act infamously made its way around the Internet and through congressional offices, inducing mockery of the legislation.

Now, as the Obama administration looks to overhaul labels affixed to new cars and aimed at pushing consumers to “go green,” both proposed label designs are being critiqued by prospective car buyers as “confusing”—with some opponents of the labeling scheme joking that one of them looks a bit like a dumbed-down version of that Obamacare “structure chart.”

According to a poll of 456 Americans over the age of 18 looking to purchase a car in the next three years conducted by branding firm Siegel+Gale, nearly 40 percent of those surveyed found this label proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to be confusing:

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I just returned from speaking to two terrific groups about California’s looming ballot initiative, Proposition 23, to delay implementation of the state’s climatically meaningless, economically suicidal state-level adoption of the Kyoto agenda, called AB 32.

On the flight out I pulled out my pocket Bastiat reader, which I carry everywhere but hadn’t re-read in a while. There, in the opening, brilliant essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen” — a work that perfectly nails Obamanomics, and the entire ‘green jobs’ fallacy that is the latest re-branding of central planning (if in its most devastating form: mandating energy price hikes on top of generational debt) — I ran across a stunning reminder:

In noting what the state is going to do with the millions of francs voted, do not neglect to note also what the taxpayers would have done—and can no longer do—with these same millions. You see, then, that a public enterprise is a coin with two sides. On one, the figure of a busy worker, with this device: What is seen; on the other, an unemployed worker, with this device: What is not seen. The sophism that I am attacking in this essay is all the more dangerous when applied to public works, since it serves to justify the most foolishly prodigal enterprises. When a railroad or a bridge has real utility, it suffices to rely on this fact in arguing in its favor. But if one cannot do this, what does one do? One has recourse to this mumbo jumbo: “We must create jobs for the workers.”This means that the terraces of the Champ-de-Mars are ordered first to be built up and then to be torn down. The great Napoleon, it is said, thought he was doing philanthropic work when he had ditches dug and then filled in. He also said: “What difference does the result make? All we need is to see wealth spread among the laboring classes.”

Spread the wealth around. So here we have Obamanomics in a nutshell.

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It’s appreciably more difficult for Washington politicians to amaze Americans who paid any attention at all to what has been transpiring in Washington. And that number is growing. But the Democrats are giving it their best shot.

Read this just out from Politico, explaining that the Senate’s committee process simply must be suspended to jam through Obama’s energy/cap-and-tax Power Grab, because it is so expansive that it would invoke the jurisdiction of six Senate committees. These include the tax-writing Finance Committee, because cap-and-trade and the new gas tax (styled by some cheerleaders who think you’re stupid as a “carbon-linked fee”).

So, again, Harry Reid is going to write a couple of thousand pages — and try to buy off the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with revenues taken from you — in closed-door, back room deals. The ability to do so is one reason the bill in its House version grew to 1,400 pages, bigger and bigger with each closed-door deal. There are so many ways to design this takeover and the wealth transfers and lost freedoms involved, and to hide and target the hurt.

If that sounds like the health care takeover, it should. It’s the same thing. As the perpetrators admit to Politico. So possibly C-SPAN might ask to be involved. Surely the White House can come up with a better response than last time.

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