Obama Renews Attack on American Coal Industry

EPA Takes Aim at Coal Plants

from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is set to introduce new rules this week that take aim at greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, says the Wall Street Journal.

The long-awaited action will sharply limit the emissions allowed from power plants built in the future, but will allow existing coal plants to keep operating for years.

• The new rules will essentially make it unviable to build new coal-fired power plants, unless they are fitted with yet-to-be-commercialized carbon-capture technology.
• The rules would limit the permissible emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to a little more than half of what a typical coal plant emits today, administration officials have said.

By contrast, cleaner-burning, gas-fired power plants are expected to remain viable under the rules.

The utility industry has fought hard against the rules, arguing that if new coal plants are effectively banned, the industry will be forced to forswear a cheap and plentiful source of electricity generation.  The unveiling of the rules is also likely to draw fire from Republicans and business groups.

Some environmentalists are also expected to criticize the measure, because it doesn’t apply to the hundreds of coal-fired plants currently operating and gives them years to clean up.”

Source: Keith Johnson, “EPA Takes Aim at Coal Plants,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2012.

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577306472837955502.html

Krauthammer…..Time for the Party to Unite. Message is “Help Us Win in November”

“I think the sort of rush of endorsements, President Bush today, yesterday Marco Rubio. Jeb Bush, and just about everybody in the ‘establishment’ is a message not for the voters but to the other candidates,” syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said on FOX News’ “Special Report” panel tonight. “It’s over. They’ve admitted, the candidates have admitted, Santorum and Gingrich, they can’t win themselves. And they’ve admitted their only objective is to block Romney and to have a contested Tampa convention which Marco Rubio explained last night, I think cogently, would be a disaster.”

“So for the good of the party, what they’re hearing from the elder statesman, the up-and-comers and everybody in between, is step out, do it for the party, and you’re not going to win any way,” he said. “Help us win in November. I think it makes sense.”

Video from RealClearPolitics:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/03/29/krauthammer_to_santorum_gingrich_its_over.html

Time to Unite the Opposition to Obama’s Government by Ukase

We Will Battle Obama With The Candidate We Have –

Not The Candidate We Might Want

(Updated with response from a senior Gingrich advisor)

 by Myra Adams        at Pajamas Media, article by Rick Tyler:”Unless you want to see Obama fully unleashed in his second term.    

Hearing the news that conservative “rising star” Florida Senator Marco Rubio has endorsed Mitt Romney, one could now say his nomination is a “slam dunk.”

That phase, you may remember, was famously attributed to CIA Director George Tenet in 2002 as he assured President Bush about the evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Now, Mitt Romney’s presumed “slam dunk” nomination reminds me of another infamous phase from that same Iraq War era.

“You go to war with the army you have—not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

That statement, uttered in 2004 by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was in response to a soldier’s complaints about equipment shortages.

So now it is time for a “teachable moment”.

Take Rumsfeld’s quote, revise it slightly, and apply it to Mitt Romney as the GOP 2012 nominee.

We will battle Obama with the candidate we have — not the candidate we might want or wish to have at a later time.

This statement should be the Republican Party mantra going forward.

For as Republicans, do we really have a choice?

Imagine a President Obama 2.0. His second-term sequel would be a disaster movie with the name “Unleashed.”

We only saw a glimpse of it this week with the Russian “open mike” incident and Obama is well aware that if re-elected, he will never have to face the voters again.

He will rule as much as possible by executive orders. He will find ways to do end runs around Congress, if he knows they will not go along. He will have at least one, maybe even two, Supreme Court seats to fill, and that will be his most enduring legacy.

The possibilities are endless how Obama 2.0 will find ways to trample the Constitution.

And who will stop him short of impeachment?

As a concerned American, I believe it is imperative that President Obama is defeated. Thus, Republicans must rally around Mitt Romney because he is the candidate we have – not the candidate we might want or wish to have at a later time.

Now all you disgruntled Republicans out there, repeat this quote twice in the morning and once at bedtime.

Trust me, you will feel better.

Update: In a sign that Mitt Romney’s opponents are not taking the advice I offered in this column quietly, here is an email I just received from Rick Tyler, who is the senior advisor for Newt’s PAC Winning the Future and an all-around Newt cheerleader. He wrote:

To quote Rick Santorum, “Bulls—”.”

Rick Tyler

(Mr. Tyler also gave me permission to post his email.)

“The Reverend”, Al Sharpton at his Demagogic Best at Trayvon Martin Rally

Racist Al Sharpton performing Obama racist services in Florida to exercise America’s black community to become  reenergized  for the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama this November.     President Obama’s main constituency has been flagging in its enthusiasm for the black ‘half’ of the American president.    Unemployment   is over 15% in the inner city black plantations.       The Huffington Post presents the following announcement:

Al Sharpton At Trayvon Martin Rally:

‘We Are Tired Of Going To Jail For Nothing

 And Others Going Home For Something’

 (VIDEO)

Click on below for Huffington Post video:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/23/al-sharpton-trayvon-martin-rally_n_1374975.html

Comment:   My all those tens of thousands of black males  incarcerated for nothing.    All those murders, beatings, rapings and pillagings just occurred via spontaneuou combustion!    I wonder what their victims’ survivors think?

The most racist communities in America occur in the inner city black  plantation population.

Lefty Whites Pitch-hitting for Black Racists Cloud Martin Tragedy

Trayvon Martin: What It’s Like to Be a Problem

Melissa Harris-Perry   SISTER CITIZEN    at the Nation

“Trayvon Martin was not innocent. He was guilty of being black in presumably restricted public space. For decades, Jim Crow laws made this crime statutory. They codified the spaces into which black bodies could not pass without encountering legal punishment. They made public blackness a punishable offense. The 1964 Civil Rights Act removed the legal barriers but not the social sanctions and potentially violent consequences of this “crime.” George Zimmerman’s slaying of Trayvon Martin—and the subsequent campaign to smear Martin—is the latest and most jarring reminder that it is often impossible for a black body to be innocent.

Black communities in the United States spent much of late March expressing outrage about Zimmerman’s actions and the Sanford, Florida, police department’s inaction. But the anger and grief are not exclusively about this single act. They are prompted by the ways the case reveals the continuing subordination of full citizenship for black Americans.

This is not a straightforward issue of racial inequality, discussions of which are often reduced to an almost competitive empirical analysis of which Americans have the most problems. On those terms, there’s ample evidence that black Americans have consistently had fewer resources and opportunities. But this case is not about which race or group of people has the most problems. Right now people of all races have problems. With a decade of war, an unemployment rate still hovering at historic highs, stinging gas prices raising the cost of consumer goods and a housing market still on its knees, there are few families untouched in some material way by our national challenges. Even for those who have remained insulated from our collective difficulties, there are personal tragedies and loss.

Yes, everyone has problems. And, yes, government has a role in making citizens individually and collectively more resilient. Moreover, democratic governments have a duty to ensure that citizens bear the weight of these burdens more equally.

But the democratic social contract is not violated when citizens have problems; it is violated when some citizens are a problem. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described the experience of being black in America as a constant awareness that others viewed him as a problem. “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question…. How does it feel to be a problem?” This is not a statement about black people having more problems than their white counterparts. Du Bois captures the defining element of African-American life as the very self, but most especially the visible, black self in public space as being a problem.

Liberal democracy—based on commitment to individual liberty and dignity—does not exist if the government legislates against particular bodies in public spaces, as it did during Jim Crow, or when it is complicit in the violent policing of those bodies by other citizens, as in the Trayvon Martin slaying. For more than two years, vocal pockets of conservative activists and politicians demanded proof of President Obama’s citizenship—as if a black man was trespassing simply by being elected to the Oval Office. As the president was being asked to show his papers to the nation, state governments in Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina empowered police officers, school officials and merchants to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they deemed suspicious of immigration violations—suspicions that are triggered primarily by racial, ethnic and linguistic profiling. Despite the dramatic legal changes brought about by the ending of Jim Crow, it is once again socially, politically and legally acceptable to presume the guilt of nonwhite bodies.

This is the political setting for the moment when George Zimmerman approached Trayvon Martin as he walked home in the rain with a bag of Skittles. During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Zimmerman’s neighbor Frank Taaffe suggested “if he [Trayvon] had just answered him [Zimmerman] in an appropriate manner, ‘I’m just here visiting. My mother’s house is around the corner,’ and be upfront and truthful, there wouldn’t be any problem.” Fox News host Geraldo Rivera weighed in on the case by saying, “I’ll bet you money, if he didn’t have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way.” Conservative commentators and websites piled on, pointing to Trayvon’s gold teeth and his tattoos. These statements suggest that the unarmed teenager was culpable in the encounter that led to his death, not because of any aggressive or illegal act but because he was not following the appropriate protocol for being black in public. A black body in public space must presume its own guilt and be prepared to present a rigidly controlled public performance of docility and respectability.

Sagging-pants laws in Louisiana, Georgia, Florida and Arkansas attempt to legislate that public performance of black bodies by making it illegal to enact particular versions of youth fashion associated with blackness. Philadelphia, New Orleans, Cleveland, Chicago and other cities have responded to violence in predominantly black communities by imposing curfews on young people and then policing these rules most vehemently among black youth—making it a crime for them to be in public space. New York City’s “stop and frisk” law empowers police to temporarily detain a person based merely on “reasonable suspicion” of involvement in criminal activity, which in practice has been vastly disproportionately applied to young men of color.

It is easy, but wrong, to write off Zimmerman as a deranged man whose violence against Trayvon Martin was tragic but unpreventable. Zimmerman was acting in ways entirely consistent with the long history and contemporary reality that assumes the criminality and potential danger of black bodies.”

Comment:   Sexism is at the foundation of the feminist hysteria of the past generation.    Few socio-political movements in America have been so corrupt in the goals, action, and thinking.   

One of those movements that outclasses the  SISTERCITIZENS of the country was the KKK and the years of Democrat Party racist control throughout the American South.    

Another vile corruption of the American way of life is the Democrat Party’s dictatorship over the inner city black plantation culture where apparently  unbeknownst to racists such as  Melissa Harris-Perry,  sociopathic and psychopathic black male populations terrorize whomever stands in their murderous rampaging.

“SISTERCITIZEN”  gals  either through profound ignorance or sociopathic hysteria……or simply being an American Lefty, never seem to be able to focus on truth and reality.

Hysteria was a fundamental political tool of  Hitler Nazi Germany to abet State growth and control.    Both black racists and white feminists  keep Hitlerian hysteria alive and well.   They, as American lefties, can do no other.

In time, hopefully soon,  the details of the tragic death of 17 year old Trayvon Martin will come out of the clouds in general, and the tornados of  leftwing demagoguery in particular.   Isn’t it remarkable how similar the black racist movement tirring trouble in the Martin death is to the behavior of the sheeted Klanners of years gone by.   

Al Sharpton makes a great Grand Wizard, black style.

Obama’s Conartistry, Obamacare , Violated the Law……That is why the Government ‘Defense’ was Embarrassing!

Constitutional Opinions

Constitutional Contempt

By W. James Antle, III    at American Spectator:

Why the Obama legal team struggled at the Supreme Court.

After three days of arguments before the Supreme Court, the Obama administration and its supporters have been found in contempt. Not of the court, but of the Constitution.

Twenty-six states and the National Federation of Independent Business challenged the constitutionality of President Obama’s signature piece of domestic legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The sophistries on which the Obamaphiles relied to defend their health care power grab were perhaps best summarized by Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick: “That the law is constitutional is best illustrated by the fact that — until recently — the Obama administration expended almost no energy defending it.”

That lack of energy came back to haunt them Tuesday when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli turned in a stammering, barely coherent performance worthy of the public defender in My Cousin Vinny as he struggled to articulate a constitutional defense of Obamacare. The arguments went only slight better for Verrilli yesterday. The administration seemed ill prepared to answer even basic, predictable questions about the law’s constitutional basis.

Like Nancy Pelosi, when pressed to square the federal government’s actions with the Constitution, the Obama legal team could only reply, “Are you serious?”

For at least five of the nine Supreme Court justices, the answer appeared to be yes. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the key swing vote, seemed skeptical of the commerce clause justification for the individual mandate. He recognized that the mandate to purchase a specific product fundamentally altered the citizen’s relationship with her government, informed Verrilli that he had a “heavy burden” of proof, and questioned whether the government could create commerce in order to regulate it.

Justice Antonin Scalia, as is his wont, went even further. “One way or another, Congress is going to have to reconsider this,” Scalia said. “Why isn’t it better to have them reconsider it in toto?” Even the liberal justices, who spent much of the oral arguments trying to save Verrilli from himself, heaped scorn on the Obama administration’s argument that the individual mandate is a tax, except when it isn’t.

A major point of contention was that the government could identify no principle that limited the powers it asserted. Why can’t Washington compel people to eat broccoli, buy burial insurance, or carry cell phones from which they could call 911? There was no obvious answer, suggesting that the administration sought to dress up a general police power — which the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution explicitly denied the federal government — in the language of the commerce clause.

Indeed, the issue goes far beyond health care. For decades, members of the elected branch of the federal government have barely pretended to adhere to the document to which they swear an oath. They do not consult the Constitution when they seek to accomplish their policy goals. They do not recognize its clear limits on their power.

While liberals have been most comprehensive in their rejection of enumerated powers, preferring instead to use the Constitution as a battering ram against Christmas trees in the town square, this constitutional amnesia has been a bipartisan affliction. It manifested itself among the center-right policy wonks who toyed with the individual mandate since the 1990s. It was seen in the unchecked growth of government even when Republicans are in power.

Even advocates of relatively activist government in the context of the times believed that constitutional amendments were necessary to prohibit such obvious economic activities as slavery and the sale of alcoholic beverages. Defenders of the health care reform law did not even bother to cite evidence that the people who ratified the Constitution intended to delegate to the federal government the powers the Obama administration claimed.

Instead you have Lithwick asserting that “all the conservative longing for the good old days of the pre-New Deal courts won’t put us back in those days as if by magic.” And New York Times legal columnist Linda Greenhouse mocking Paul Clement for calling the individual mandate “unprecedented” in his legal brief (as if precedent has never been considered in a court proceeding before). And the solicitor general pleading for deference even as he cannot point to one enumerated power that would validate his argument.

The American republic was founded on the idea that the federal government possesses only the powers granted to it by a supermajority of the people and the states. Ratification of the Constitution and its amendments is the process by which that supermajority gives its consent. This once-basic notion of governance was relegated to the fringes. It is now returning to the mainstream.

Obama’s solicitor general was caught flat-footed not because he lacks legal skills. He is part of a political culture that has never thought seriously about the Constitution, has never thought that our masters in Washington need to beg the people for any permission beyond their vote every two to six years, and has regarded the doctrine of enumerated powers as a pre-New Deal relic. The Washington conventional wisdom has long been rooted in constitutional contempt.

Chief Justice John Roberts may yet be reluctant to overturn a major act of Congress by a narrow 5 to 4 vote. Anthony Kennedy could get out of bed tomorrow and decide that the individual mandate is the greatest thing since Roe v. Wade.

But no matter how the Court rules, the bedrock assumptions of constitutionally limited government have returned to the mainstream of American political discourse. The Constitution is back. If we can keep it.

Scalia: Making us read the Obamacare bill would be cruel and unusual punishment!

Scalia on severability:

Making us read this entire bill

would be cruel and unusual punishment

 by Allahpundit    at HotMail:

Via the Washington Free Beacon, the oral argument laugh line du jour and further evidence that Scalia, whom the left once viewed as a potential vote to uphold the mandate, looks set to drop an atomic bomb on the whole scheme. The unspoken punchline is that Congress didn’t want to read the bill either (right, Nancy?), which is how this landmark boondoggle with a dubious constitutional novelty at its core somehow ended up … without a severability clause. That was today’s subject — if the mandate is struck down, does the rest of this thing have to die with it or can other provisions of the law be salvaged? Congress almost always adds a section about that when it drafts a bill. It forgot this time. Oops.

Two clips here, one of Scalia and the other a not very satisfying set of audio highlights from the AP. I think Sotomayor’s point is fair: If the Court creates an insurance “death spiral” by knocking down the mandate but leaving everything else intact, there’s nothing stopping Congress from eliminating that death spiral by simply repealing the rest of the statute and starting over. The argument for having the Court kill the whole thing is more pragmatic than legal, I think — no one wants to see insurers go out of business because Congress ends up gridlocked and paralyzed on yet another issue. But don’t forget (a) the insurance industry has a lot of political muscle and they’ll bring the full force of it to bear on incumbent congressmen to find a solution and (b) given that we’re all going to have to put on our big-boy pants soon to reform Medicare, maybe a crisis now will be a wake-up call in forcing Congress to start thinking big. Surely they wouldn’t sit idly by while America’s health insurance industry disintegrated around them. And before you say, “But that’s the left’s path to single payer!”, read Karl’s Greenroom post. The Republican House will never, ever, ever pass it, and The One really, really, really doesn’t want to preside over Americans losing their coverage as insurers go belly up. Especially in an election year.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/28/scalia-on-severability-making-us-read-this-entire-bill-would-be-cruel-and-unusual-punishment/

Update: Speaking of single payer, Josh Marshall makes one of the left’s most effective arguments for ObamaCare: How can the mandate be unconstitutional when a far more aggressive power grab like single payer, i.e. “Medicare for all,” probably wouldn’t be? The latter would fall under Congress’s tax and spend powers, which dodges the Commerce Clause problem in forcing people to purchase things from third parties. But if liberty’s your bottom line, it’s cold comfort to know that the bigger of the two federal expansions is likely on safe ground constitutionally. For more on that, go read Jacob Sullum’s depressing take at Reason.

Obamacare Destroys the “Basic Nature of our Government”…..Paul Clements

Paul Clement:

What’s at stake here is the basic nature

of our government

 by Allahpundit     at HotAir

He’s just 45 years old, a former Solicitor General under Bush, and gave the argument of his life yesterday on the most momentous day for small government before the Supreme Court in decades. At this point, I’d say he’s a mortal lock to be nominated by a future Republican president. So watch the clip. In a few years, this guy will have a lot of influence over your civil rights and obligations.

 

Click for video:  
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/28/paul-clement-whats-at-stake-here-is-the-basic-nature-of-our-government/

I keep thinking about Kennedy’s point yesterday that the mandate “changes the relationship between the individual and the government in a very fundamental way.” That’s the core of what the Constitution does — it defines the relationship between individual citizens (and the states) and the federal government. He was basically accusing the White House of trying to change the constitutional order. The logical next step in that chain of thought is “and you can’t do that without passing an amendment,” but instead he turned around and asked Verrilli whether there isn’t a “heavy burden of justification” for any law that seeks to do so. The suggestion seems to be that you can tweak the basics of Article I with a simple statute provided that you have a really good reason. Note to Kennedy: That logic is an even more fundamental change to the constitutional order than the mandate is.

The way they’re purporting to meet the “heavy burden of justification” is with the “health care is unique” argument. Noah Feldman makes it as well as anyone could, but he’s awfully heavy on the “necessary” and awfully light on the “proper.” The left’s point about “uniqueness” seems to me less a good-faith argument for why this law is kosher under relevant Commerce Clause precedent and more window dressing for the idea that because the law purports to solve a vexing long-term problem of life and death, the sheer necessity of it should diminish the requirement that it be proper. What they’re asking for, in other words, even though they can’t phrase it this way, is a waiver from the Commerce Clause because this boondoggle is that important. And Kennedy, per his “heavy burden of justification” reasoning, just might give it to them.

Update: As a counterpoint to Clement, go see what poor sap Donald Verrilli was reduced to arguing by the end of business today. Someone buy that guy a beer.

Krauthammer: Biden is Obama’s Attack Dog; Obama to be portrayed as the above-it-all cool stranger,

KRAUTHAMMER: “They’ve decided that good old Joe is going to be the attack dog. After all, what else is there for a Vice President to do? Except that I think Biden had been assigned the job of tracking every cent that was spent in the trillion-dollar stimulus to make sure it’s well spent, so I’m sure he is still working on that late at night.

“On this, they have their line down on Romney: The out of touch plutocrat who cares not about the ordinary American. The problem is that Romney isn’t out there on his own, he’s the one going up against Obama. Obama has his own out-of-touchness issue. In ’08 it worked in a sense because he was a spectacular stranger that came out of nowhere and that kind of coolness and detachment was attractive and it added to his charisma. Well that’s all over now, that hope and change stuff is done. And now looking at him as a president who has a record, he has this kind of detachment and coolness which I think is also edges on to the side of being cold. So, I’m not sure it’s a competition of who is the warmer, the fuzzier and cuddlier candidate that the other side is going to win. I think it’s a tie on that. I think in the end it will be on the policies.”

Click below for the Krauthammer video at realclearpolitics:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/03/28/krauthammer_obamas_detachment__coolness_edges_on_to_the_side_of_being_cold.html