harmonicminer

Ohio shale drilling spurs job hopes in Rust Belt

A rare sight in hard-luck Youngstown, a new industrial plant, has generated hope that a surge in oil and natural gas drilling across a multistate region might jump-start a revival in Rust Belt manufacturing.

The $650 million V&M Star mill, located along a desolate stretch that once was a showcase for American industry, is to open by year’s end and produce seamless steel pipes for tapping shale formations.

It will mean 350 new jobs in Youngstown, a northeast Ohio city that is struggling with 11 percent unemployment.

There’s a lot more at the link above, detailing many different ways that the going after shale oil in the midwest will create real jobs, not loony-toons-pie-in-the-sky “green” jobs that Obama has been selling out of his trunk (at a huge markup) after stealing them from industries that were doing something useful and marketable.

How did he steal the jobs? If you have to ask, you haven’t been paying attention. When you over-regulate, over-spend, and over-borrow, you steal jobs. It’s very simple.

Obama’s policies have helped to create a thousand losers for every winner he personally picked. And even his picked winners are losing.  When generally supporter-of-all-things-liberal Google is pulling out of an obvious Goongoggle (read it out loud) because it’s a loser they picked in a moment of obvious miscalculation, it’s clear that everyone is catching on, except maybe Obama.

In the meantime, it looks hopeful that some people in Ohio may get to go back to work.  And Obama will have had nothing to do with it other than to just get out of the way.

If he does.

The emperor’s new clothes are starting to look a little bedraggled.  Great opinion piece from the Los Angeles Times (of all places)

Speaking on behalf of millions of Americans who’ve grown angry and frustrated over the president’s 32-month ineffective inactivity on the job creation front, President Obama on Thursday told members of Congress they really have to do something about the crummy employment situation — and do it quickly.

Citing the plight of millions of struggling Americans whose wishes for jobs Obama ignored for most of the 961 days he’s been in office while chasing shinier healthcare and financial reforms, Obama said it was time that Congress stop blaming others. He said it was time members take responsibility for their inaction and halt their phony partisan games and political circus acts that pervade Washington culture

Because the Americans Obama hasn’t been listening to are really hurting now. And — who’s counting? — but it’s only 424 days until Nov. 6, 2012. No plan yet to pay for Obama’s ideas. But he wants immediate passage of his American Jobs Act anyway

Obama, whose Democratic spending priorities have pushed the national debt beyond $14,000,000,000,000, said it was important to curb spending and keep to the deficit reduction plan agreed to earlier this summer while also investing in, you know, many important things

He then provided a joint session of Congress with a broadly ambitious list of goals that sounded to many people very much like a lot more spending, like, say, the $787 billion economic stimulus bill of 2009 that didn’t stimulate much of anything except that national debt

With the national debt already increasing $3 million every minute of every day, Obama wants to repair and modernize 35,000 schools. Obama wants $35 billion to go toward salaries for teachers, firefighters and police.

Obama wants $140 billion largely to update roads and bridges. Obama wants another $245 billion in business and individual tax relief. Obama also wants to extend unemployment benefits.

And Obama wants it all right now. Seriously. Now that his Martha’s Vineyard vacation is over, this situation is urgent.

Obama didn’t have room in his 4,021 word speech to mention how he intended to pay for all this new sounds-an-awful-like-increased-new-stimulus-spending-but-we’re-not-using-that-word-anymore.

Aides said Americans should trust the president and sometime soon he would be outlining the finances that would not increase the national debt by one dime, honest.

Today in Virginia and next week in Ohio, Obama begins an aggressive autumn of travels selling his sounds-like-new-spending plans by day and fundraising by evening, bashing guess who for not solving the job crisis long ago.

Because like pretty much every sentient American, he knows full well there isn’t one chance in Haiti of the divided Congress approving this package.

In fact, Obama’s counting on that because grandiose program-proposing like this costs nothing-zero-nada, except the limo gas to the Capitol. Yet it gives perpetual candidate Obama tons of swell-sounding details to talk about during the 2011-12 reelection campaign.

Because he can’t blame his mother-in-law for the nation’s economic mess. When’s the last time you heard a Harvard grad say, “Boy, did I blow that!” So, the only culprits left are in Congress, especially those Repugnicans.

But here’s the catch that Obama and his Windy City wizards missed: Most Americans are not politically obedient machine Chicagoans. Like a linebacker reading the quarterback’s eyes, they’ve already figured out this South Sider’s game.

This week’s ABC News/Washington Post Poll found that, based on their 961 days’ experience with the current White House crowd, 47% say Obama’s new economic program will have zero effect on the economy.

Worse politically, twice as many — 34% vs 17% — say Obama’s plan will actually make matters worse, instead of better.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll the other day found 73% of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track. That’s 23 points more than felt that way at the beginning of summer.

Funny coincidence. The last time the revealing wrong track number was this high (78%) was in the autumn of 2008, just two weeks before Americans bought Obama’s “Change to Believe In” line.

And they have the pink slips to prove it.

I know, you probably saw this news bit already, but since Nearly 40 percent of Europeans suffer mental illness, and it’s now official, I feel constrained to point out that many of us have thought Europeans were crazy for many years.

Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

With only about a third of cases receiving the therapy or medication needed, mental illnesses cause a huge economic and social burden — measured in the hundreds of billions of euros — as sufferers become too unwell to work and personal relationships break down.

“Mental disorders have become Europe’s largest health challenge of the 21st century,” the study’s authors said.

At the same time, some big drug companies are backing away from investment in research on how the brain works and affects behavior, putting the onus on governments and health charities to stump up funding for neuroscience.

“The immense treatment gap … for mental disorders has to be closed,” said Hans Ulrich Wittchen, director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany’s Dresden University and the lead investigator on the European study.

“Those few receiving treatment do so with considerable delays of an average of several years and rarely with the appropriate, state-of-the-art therapies.”

Wittchen led a three-year study covering 30 European countries — the 27 European Union member states plus Switzerland, Iceland and Norway — and a population of 514 million people.

Let’s not kid around. When you’d rather be on the dole than taking care of yourself, you’re nuts.  When you think the world owes you a living, you’ve definitely gone bonkers.  When you think the solution to keeping your government benefits is to import foreign workers who are hostile to your very way of life and basic beliefs, you’re crazy.  When you think it’s natural to  live like a dependent teenager up to the age of 40 or so, you’re positively certifiable.

Of course, the American elite, whether political, social or academic, seems to think that Europeans do almost everything better, and frequently compare the USA to Europe in a way they think is unfavorable to the USA.

I’m pretty sure, though, that only 19% of America is crazy.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that 19% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president.

Proving, I think, that only half as many Americans are as crazy as Europeans.

Andy Pudzer, CEO of CKE Restaurants Inc

The case is presented in a very clear way.  No rhetoric, just facts.

The policies of President Obama are having a significantly negative effect on our economy.

China on track for modern military by 2020: U.S.

China appears on track to forge a modern military by 2020, a rapid buildup that could be potentially destabilizing to the Asia-Pacific region, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

Fueled by its booming economy, China’s military growth in the past decade has exceeded most U.S. forecasts. Its aircraft carrier program, cyber warfare capabilities and anti-satellite missiles have alarmed neighbors and Washington.

Some China watchers, including members of the U.S. Congress, note with apprehension that rising Chinese defense spending coincides with Washington’s plans for defense cuts.

This is nothing new.  Amuzikman has already posted here the gist of an exchange between Obama and Chinese Premier Hu on the occasion of Hu’s visit to the USA.

All chuckles aside, this is really no laughing matter. 

I think this recent news shows that China is a more serious problem than some want to admit.  Given that it is the Pentagon that produced this report, and it is the Pentagon that has been listening to Thomas P.M. Barnett (perhaps rather more than it should have been), maybe this is a sign that some degree of realistic understanding is developing of the long term nature of Chinese intentions.

The Chinese think LONG TERM, in a way almost no American can quite understand.  

One thing I don’t get about the folks who think China isn’t a big problem is this:  intelligence types talk about both capabilities and intentions.  It used to be we mistrusted Chinese intentions, but didn’t think their capabilities were close enough to ours to be a real danger.  Now that Chinese capabilities are growing fast, analysts like Barnett seem to want us to think less suspiciously of Chinese intentions.  That kind of wishful thinking seems a poor substitute for actual, hard planning about what we’ll do as a nation regarding a China with high capabilities AND bad intentions.

Given that we KNOW who China supports, who China funds, what China wants, and what China’s history is in the last 50 years of working against US and western interests, this notion that all China really wants to do is sell us stuff, and they’re only building a modern military to increase their self-esteem, seems like whistling in the dark to me.

I keep thinking about this.

Thomas Friedman re Obama’s “vetting” by media during his campaign in 2008

During the 2008 presidential election season, many Americans were captivated by then-candidate Barack Obama’s promises of hope and change. And some would argue that much of the media were taken in by the promises too. Nearly three years into the Obama presidency, is it fair to say the media were duped?

On Sunday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Howard Kurtz asked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman just that question. According to Friedman, the jury is still out.

“Way too soon to tell that kind of thing, I think,” Friedman said. “I think if — look, what have I been calling for, you know, the president to have — I think there is, we just so desperately needed a grand bargain that involves restructuring of debt, raising of taxes, cutting of spending and investing in the sources of our strengths as a country from everything from infrastructure to government-funded research to education. It’s so clear that’s what we need. My personal frustration with Obama has been that while he certainly tried that grand bargain for a little bit, it just kind of went away. Well, it didn’t on the work. He said [House Speaker John] Boehner backed out. I don’t know who backed out.” 

Kurtz pointed out that Friedman had an unusual closeness with Obama as one of his golfing partners. Friedman said that was a benefit.

“Yeah, anytime you spend four hours with the president, either with a spoon in your hand or a golf club in your hand or nothing in your hand — you learn something,” Friedman said. “If he invites you to lunch — anytime you get a chance to talk to the president, in any context, I find incredibly beneficial.”

Yeah, Tom, sure.

Anyone who thinks the media even looked at Obama crosswise during the 2008 election cycle is either deluded or covering up…  or just incredibly uninformed.  The media covered up for him, literally, by burying stories that might have told some inconvenient truth about him, by substituting puff-pieces for actual investigative journalism, and by throwing up mud at his opponents, especially Sarah Palin.

John Ziegler’s movie Media Malpractice tells the whole story.  Here is info on how to get the DVD, or you can just catch it on Netflix.

Full disclosure:  I composed the music for the movie.  But I would not have done so if I hadn’t agreed with its message.

The remaining question:  will the media do any better in 2012?  I used to think they’d eventually become embarrassed by their non-performance of journalistic duty in 2008 and backtrack a bit.  But with the media continuing to release White House spin as news, I’m having my doubts about it.  I’d guess that even if Obama’s approval rating continues to nosedive, the media, who simply can’t stand a Republican (even a “center-right” one) in the White House, will still try to carry the flailing Obama over the finish line….  again.

Now, honestly, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or sling the end product of canine digestion at this particular website.

As the 2012 election begins, we know grassroots support will be more important than ever before. President Obama is working every day to keep making America stronger — and together we’ve got an opportunity to get his back.

Sign up for campaign updates and see how you can help build on our progress.

Join us in the fight to keep building a better, more prosperous America. Are you in?

Are you nuts?  Do you want to help Obama/Biden “Build on his progress”?  What progress would that be, exactly?  Impoverishing America for the next 50 years?  Alienating our allies and emboldening our enemies?

I guess we could call it hopeless change.

Whoever is writing this drivel has a tin ear for public opinion.

“A better, more prosperous America”?  I think I know how we can help that happen.

Regime change in 2012.

Another of the Powerline Prize entries, this one a music video called “Shovel Ready, Not Shovel Ready Enough”. Very funny, and very effective… and very sad. A TRILLION dollars for essentially nothing very helpful….

Somebody was shoveling something, alright.

14 trillion and a few hundred billion change is what the federal government owes, right now. It’ll be more like 15 billion by the end of 2011.

Guess who gets to pay it back? Not me. Maybe not you, if you’re middle aged or so. Here’s who will be paying it back, in cash, in kind, in trade, or in economic disaster and unemployment.

Another entry in the Powerline Prize contest.

Another high placing (but not quite winning) entry in the Powerline Prize competition for a media product to illustrate the danger of our national debt.