Cost of Green Power Makes Projects Tougher Sell

From the New York Times.com - By MATTHEW L. WALD and TOM ZELLER Jr. - Michael Polsky’s wind farm company was doing so well in 2008 that banks were happy to lend millions for his effort to light up America with clean electricity. But two years later, Mr. Polsky has a product he is hard-pressed to sell. His company, Invenergy, had a contract to sell power to a utility in Virginia, but state regulators rejected the deal, citing the recession and the lower prices of natural gas and other fossil fuels. “The ratepayers of Virginia must be protected from costs for renewable energy that are unreasonably high,” the regulators said. Wind power would have increased the monthly bill of a typical residential customer by 0.2 percent. Even as many politicians, environmentalists and consumers want renewable energy and reduced dependence on fossil fuels, a growing number of projects are being canceled or delayed because governments are unwilling to add even small amounts to consumers’ electricity bills. Read more

Cost of Green Power Makes Projects Tougher Sell

Earmark Ban Fails - It's Business as Usual

From Townhall.com - By a sizable - but dwindling - margin, the Senate on Tuesday voted in favor of allowing lawmakers to keep stocking bills with home-state projects like roads, grants to local police departments and clean-water projects. But with the House set to tumble into GOP hands and anti-earmark reinforcements coming to the Senate in January, the window seems to be closing on the practice. Tuesday's 39-56 tally rejected a GOP bid to ban the practice of loading spending bills with so-called earmarks - those parochial provisions that lawmakers deliver to their states - but it appears the curtain is coming down on the practice. Read whole story here:

Earmark Ban Fails - It's Business as Usual

Consequences of Lame Duck Sessions

Commentary by Rachel Pulaski - The Senate has proven to America that lame duck sessions should be banned. One controversial moratorium that was up for vote Tuesday was the earmark ban. This ban would stop elected officials from appropriating funds for special projects without approval from the executive branch. More importantly, it would stop some of the political games played between our elected officials. For instance, H.R. 847 the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act which guarantees healthcare to 9/11 responders was tossed around in congress for years lacking bi-partisan support mostly because of the large amount of earmarks. Instead of the Democrats passing the bill through a simple majority they demanded a two-thirds majority vote. Democrats decided to pull a “procedural gimmick “ and forced Republicans either to eat humble pie or to oppose the bill and be open to charges that they were abandoning the heroes of 9/11. The Senate had a chance to end this madness but instead they decided to vote against the two year ban on earmarks. Only 42 Republicans have Senate seats in the lame duck session and most of the anti-earmark Republicans will not take their seats until January so this vote may not come as a surprise to some. The moratorium on earmarks was included in SB 510 the Food Safety Modernization Act and the Senate voted in favor of this giant FDA power grab today. This atrocity could make sharing food from your own private garden a “national security threat”. This bill would also lead to a much larger, powerful and overgrown FDA. The roll call session is available here. Clearly lame duck sessions are for the self indulgent politicians to stuff their pork filled bellies. We as voters should never allow politicians who have been defeated at the polls to continue to raise taxes, set policy or spend money that the electorate has decided someone else should be doing.

Consequences of Lame Duck Sessions

Heath Haussamen: Obama Needs to Stand Up and Fight

From NMPolitics.net -

Heath Haussamen

The president promised in 2008 to lead Washington into becoming a functional government. It’s time for him to keep that promise. President Barack Obama’s top advisers have concluded that their party’s losses on Election Day were caused “in large part by their own failure to live up to expectations set during the 2008 campaign,” the Washington Post reported recently. That’s an understatement. Obama didn’t just set the bar high for himself high during the campaign – he nearly set himself up as the messiah. In his 2008 victory speech, Obama said his election was “the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.” “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America,” Obama said. Two years later, the change he promised hasn’t come. Sure, Obama has signed some high-profile legislation into law, including the controversial health-care reform, a massive bailout, and Wall Street reform. But that’s not the change he promised in 2008. The promise was that, rather than being red and blue states, Obama would lead us to being simply the United States of America. Read full column here:

Heath Haussamen: Obama Needs to Stand Up and Fight

Hillary Has To Go

Hillary Clinton

From slate.com - A U.S. diplomat must possess patience, poise, and tact. He must also be attentive to cultural differences, a good observer, and proficient in several languages. When called upon, he must use his skills as a negotiator in the national interest. And, as the latest dump of WikiLeaks tells us, if the dip works for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he must also be prepared to spy on his fellow diplomats.

To be fair to Clinton, she isn't the first secretary of state to issue cables telling U.S. foreign service officers to spy on other diplomats. According to the leaked diplomatic cables, Condoleezza Rice likewise instructed State Department diplomats to collect such intelligence, and I wouldn't be surprised if previous secretaries of state encouraged if not instructed their diplomats to push information-collection all the way to intelligence-gathering. But what makes Clinton's sleuthing unique is the paper trail that documents her spying-on-their-diplomats-with-our-diplomat orders, a paper trail that is now being splashed around the world on the Web and printed in top newspapers.

No matter what sort of noises Clinton makes about how the disclosures are "an attack on America" and "the international community," as she did today, she's become the issue. She'll never be an effective negotiator with diplomats who refuse to forgive her exuberances, and even foreign diplomats who do forgive her will still regard her as the symbol of an overreaching United States. Diplomacy is about face, and the only way for other nations to save face will be to give them Clinton's scalp.

More here

Hillary Has To Go

FDA in Bed With Big Business

From redstate.com - You probably remember the fanatical fear that gripped the nation these last few years in response to a few factories with tainted peanut butter. You may also remember the national panic when spinach was a killer stalking grocery stores across the country. These types of events are notorious for being blown out of proportion by the national media and being chaotic by virtue of bureaucratic over-involvement. While this may be remembered by many consumers as an annoyance, it is remembered far differently by the corporations that are subjected to massive regulation at the hands of bureaucrats from the FDA as well as dozens of state and local regulators across the country. More here

FDA in Bed With Big Business

Massive Open Borders Entitlement Program

Michelle Malkin

From michellemalkin.com It’s no surprise to long-time readers of this blog that the pro-illegal immigration Wall Street Journal has come out in favor of the DREAM Act bailout. The WSJ editorial page has long crusaded for de facto and de jure amnesty — and I’ve exposed its deceptive campaigning on behalf of illegal aliensfor years. (See my deconstruction of a demagogic WSJ editorial page meeting attacking enforcement-first conservatives during the Bush shamnesty debacle.) 24ahead.com does a terrific job dismantling the latest DREAM Act propaganda from the WSJ, which backs the latest massive amnesty entitlement program and Democrat voter recruitment drive masquerading as an education bill: Not only does the Wall Street Journal endorse a bill that would harm American citizens, they also mislead about the bill: Restrictionists dismiss the Dream Act as an amnesty that rewards people who entered the country illegally. But the bill targets individuals brought here by their parents as children. What is to be gained by holding otherwise law-abiding young people, who had no say in coming to this country, responsible for the illegal actions of others? The Dream Act also makes legal status contingent on school achievement and military service, the type of behavior that ought to be encouraged and rewarded. More here

Massive Open Borders Entitlement Program

US States and Canada Consider Cap and Trade

From Bloomberg.com  - California, New Mexico and 10 U.S. Northeastern states may try to create a North American carbon market on their own now that President Barack Obama has given up on cap-and-trade legislation that stalled in Congress. The emissions-trading system would be based on a planned carbon market in California, the most populous state, and an existing regional cap-and-trade program for power plants in the Northeast, according to state environmental officials. Three Canadian provinces have also shown interest in a cross-border carbon-trading system, the officials said. “The key is to have as large and as liquid a market as possible,” John Yap, British Columbia’s climate-change minister, said in a telephone interview. Under cap-and-trade, the government creates a market for pollution rights by issuing a limited number of carbon-dioxide permits, which companies can buy and sell. More here

US States and Canada Consider Cap and Trade

Next on Wikileaks Hit Parade.....Bank of America?

From Bloomberg - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told Forbes magazine that he’ll release documents from a U.S. bank next year, said in 2009 that his group had a hard drive from a Bank of America Corp. executive. “We are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” Assange said in the Oct. 9, 2009, interview with Computerworld magazine, referring to five gigabytes of data. “To have impact it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search and get something out of it.” WikiLeaks plans to release “either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it,” Assange said in a Nov. 11 interview with Forbes, declining to identify the bank from which the documents came. He said the release would occur early next year and would include “some flagrant violations, unethical practices.” Read full story here:

Next on Wikileaks Hit Parade.....Bank of America?

Banks Resisting Fannie, Freddie Demands to Buy Back Mortgages

From Bloomberg - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are facing growing resistance as they attempt to push failed home loans off their books and onto the balance sheets of banks including Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The two government-owned mortgage companies are enforcing contracts that require lenders to buy back loans that didn’t meet underwriting standards. At the end of September, the companies reported, banks hadn’t responded to $13 billion in buyback requests. A third of those were at least four months old and Freddie Mac has begun to assess penalties for the delays. Read full story here:

Banks Resisting Fannie, Freddie Demands to Buy Back Mortgages