'Afterburner with Bill Whittle: Into the Sea'

Hat tip to Free North Carolina.

'Our Contemptuous President'

Some Saturday Steyn,for your reading pleasure:

Which brings us to another aspect of government that Obama apparently finds a frightful bore: budgets. In free societies, the executive is subject to the creative tensions of popular restraint, legislative restraint, judicial restraint, and fiscal restraint. All these the president has artfully sidestepped. In the last three years, the United States has ceased to have any meaningful budgeting at the national level, with the consequence that Washington piles on roughly a trillion dollars of new debt every seven or eight months. This week, before the fawning toadies at the Associated Press luncheon, Obama attacked Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan to prevent America plunging into the debt abyss and at least keep its fingernails clawing at the clumps on the cliff edge for a couple more decades. Don’t believe him, sneered the president. “Hundreds of national parks” will close. Parts of the country will see “complete elimination of air-traffic control.” We will be unable to “combat violent crime.” Two million mothers and young children will wind up without “access to healthy food.” Anything else? You bet. The Ryan plan will doom everything everywhere — “the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food that we eat.”

“This is not conjecture,” said the president. “These are facts.”
Speaking of facts, in the last year the federal government has added the equivalent of the GDP of Canada in new debt. Who’s buying it? The Chinese? Not so much. They’ve got pretty much all the Washington IOUs they need. Sixty-one percent of debt issued by the Treasury is bought by the Federal Reserve — which is to say the left hand of the U.S. government is lending money to the right hand of the U.S. government. That’s one reason the dollar is in steep decline against every major currency. Indeed, had it not been for the French and Germans et al. inaugurating the new century by inventing a currency for an artificial jurisdiction with even less connection to economic reality (the European Union), it’s likely that the markets would have yanked the rug out from under the dollar by now.

Obama's 'Faith-Based Energy Policy'

From Victor Davis Hanson:

A president, so Obama claims, has little control over gas prices. New domestic supplies of oil would not come on the market for years. Americans consume a quarter of the world’s oil supplies while possessing only 2 percent of global reserves. In a global oil market, additional American drilling would not make that much of a price difference.
But all of these claims are either flat wrong or misleading. Presidents can affect gas prices, at least in the long term, by exercising budgetary discipline resulting in a currency that buys more oil per dollar, by approving or rejecting federal oil leases, and by adding or curbing regulations that affect oil exploration and development. In all of these cases, Obama has supported policies that contribute to higher gas prices.
The point about the lag time between finding and pumping oil is valid. But that reality is precisely why presidents must green-light exploration for future generations — and why Obama is now bragging of record U.S. production only because of his predecessor’s granting of federal oil leases. Obama’s “it takes too long” argument is absurd — as if farmers should never plant new orchards since they won’t see fruit on their trees for three years or more.
Obama’s knowledge of U.S. reserves is 20 years out of date. In the first three years of his administration alone, new finds offshore, in Alaska, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in unexpected places such as North Dakota, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio have revolutionized America’s energy future in ways undreamed of just a few years ago. We probably have 100 years of natural-gas supplies at present rates of consumption and could cut our imported oil by 50 percent in a few years.
Even Obama does not believe his own dismissals of the role of global supply and demand in setting energy prices. In a tight world oil market, just a few million more barrels a day produced anywhere — or even the indication that a major producer like America might soon put 2 million or 3 million more barrels a day on the market — can help to stabilize prices. That’s why Obama is considering tapping oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve while asking the Saudis to pump a little more. Does the president believe that more foreign or previously pumped oil would lower world prices in a way newly pumped domestic oil would not?
Technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling have made it possible for Americans to produce their own oil and gas as never before. We can pump oil with less environmental damage than can Venezuela, Mexico, and Nigeria. New domestic production would save a near-bankrupt America billions of dollars currently being lost in import costs while cutting security expenses in deploying forces to the Middle East.
New oil development will create thousands of jobs, worry speculators that America will soon release lots of oil on the world market, and provide a window to produce alternative energies without slapdash, Solyndra-like boondoggles. Drilling is a win, win, and win choice — and so known to everyone except the president and his shrinking number of reactionary advisers, who prefer green faith to hard science.

I like the fact that Victor Davis Hanson includes our plummeting dollar into the equation of rising gas prices.Most only refer to more drilling as a way to ease our pain at the pump,while ignoring the fact that a strong dollar would effect the price of crude oil on the market,since it is bought and sold in U.S. dollars.The only cannidate anywhere,who is talking about strengthing our dollar,is Ron Paul.

Ron Paul Takes Ben Bernanke To School

Hat tip to The Other McCain.

'U. S. Dollar Is Now Worth 3.8 Cents'

Via Free North Carolina:

Steve Wynn Gets It,Why Doesn't The So Called The Gop Front-Runners Get It?

Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn,had this to say about our current troubles (paraphrased):

In a nutshell, he says: Deficits are killing us, our dollars are worthless, and the Democrats are bankrupting the country and vilifying anyone who's successful. So naturally, people are protesting.