Free Frank Warner

Good for the Democrats: 'Debt ceiling: More Democrats threaten to vote against raising borrowing limit'

The Washington Post:

A growing number of Democrats are threatening to defy the White House over the national debt, joining Republican calls for deficit cuts as a requirement for consenting to lift the country’s borrowing limit.

The push-back has come in recent days from Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a freshman who is running for reelection next year. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) told constituents during the Easter recess that he would not vote to lift the debt limit without a “real and meaningful commitment to debt reduction.”

Even Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), generally a stalwart White House ally, is undecided on the issue .... Klobuchar is also up for reelection next year.

Months ago it seemed unthinkable that Congress might refuse to raise the borrowing limit. ...

“As catastrophic as it would be to fail to raise our debt ceiling, it’s even more irresponsible to not take this opportunity to own up to our unsustainable spending path,” Sen. Mark Udall (Colo.), another Democrat challenging the White House, said in a statement his office released this week. “If we don’t take action to reduce our deficit spending, Congress will be facing this same debt ceiling vote in the near term -– still with no end to our deficits in sight.”

Now let's see how these Democrats would cut spending to begin reducing the debt. No smoke and mirrors. They need to show some courage, competence and complete fiscal honesty. Anything less is national sabotage.

Frank Warner

Massachusetts limits power of public employee unions

This seems like a surprise, but it's simply Massachusetts Democrats recognizing reality -- and civic morality. Public servants can't be allowed to exercise greed at the expense of the public they're supposed to be serving.

Not only has the Massachusetts state House passed a new law barring all PEUs [public employee unions] from collective bargaining on health care, it passed by a veto-proof majority — because Democrats pushed the bill ....

Yes, you read that right. Democrats in Massachusetts admitted that Scott Walker [Republican governor of Wisconsin] had the right idea all along. In fact, the Commonwealth believes that the ability to manage health care coverage will save taxpayers $100 million in the next budget year.

Avoiding disaster. Mathematics is blind. It doesn't care about politics. If you subtract from the shrinking incomes of the productive private sector in order to gold-plate the non-productive public sector, you get less than nothing.

Whatever your politics, it's a disaster for public workers to crush the public. From Boston to Madison to Sacramento, state legislators know the numbers. They know that public employees can't keep treating taxpayers as a bottomless money pit.

Frank Warner

The nation is broke, so we make ourselves more dependent on foreign oil

This is insanity.

According to projections made by the Energy Information Administration in April 2010, the Gulf of Mexico should have produced 1.84 million barrels of oil a day in the fourth quarter of 2010. Instead, according to the most recent EIA estimate, due to the Obama permitorium, the Gulf only produced 1.59 million barrels. That is 250,000 barrels a day in lost production. Overall, since Obama instituted his drilling moratorium, oil production from the Gulf is down more than 10%.

But while Gulf oil production is down from pre-moratorium estimate, total oil consumption is actually higher than EIA predicted last year. Total crude oil input to refineries is up from an estimated 13.85 million barrels a day to an actual 14.25 million barrels. But if domestic production is down and consumption is up, where is the extra oil coming from?

Foreign oil.

While oil production in the Gulf is down more than 10% from April 2010 estimates, net crude oil imports are up 5%.

Even before the recent oil price hikes, we were spending a third of a trillion dollars a year on foreign oil. If we were spending that wealth on domestic oil, at least the money would be circulating in our own economy. Instead, we accelerate the nation's bleeding.

Frank Warner

President Obama finally releases his original birth certificate

Now we can say we know the first thing about President Obama.

Three years after Democrats first demanded he show it and five days after Politico.com reported that Hawaii state law prohibited him from revealing the document, the president today released his original birth certificate.

Now would Ben Smith and Byron Tau of Politico explain how they got this most basic information totally wrong? Why had they joined the "faithers," who take on faith everything their government tells them, by declaring it was legally impossible ever to see Obama's birth certificate?

Smith and Tau wrote April 22:

Hawaii law prevents the long-form record from being photocopied or released to anyone -- including Obama. Obama himself would only be permitted to inspect it -- not copy it or post it online.

'Faither' mistake. This was the heart of matter and yet Politio's Smith and Tau did not quote the law for their readers or look for possible exceptions in it. Obviously something in the law allowed the president to release his original birth certificate and post it online.

Here it is today:

The document does not appear to have any surprises. It does confirm once and for all which hospital he was born in -- the Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu. And we can see the signature of the attendant to Obama's birth.

For some super-skeptics, this will lay to rest questions about where Obama was born. But more importantly, historians finally have the original document to study. It certainly has other things to say about this president's life.

Ending 'distraction.' The White House explained how it was permitted to release the original birth certificate.

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. ... Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting.

In other words, the president asked for the original document and the president got it -- legally. Otherwise, someone just broke the law. Thanks for nothing, Politico. Combined with the news media's mind-boggling lack of curiosity, your "faitherism" could have kept the "distraction" going until the end of time.

Frank Warner

* * *

Update: Already (April 27) there is a report that the word "None" (for Obama's mother's occupation) and the "Date accepted" 1961 (on the stamped marks at the bottom) were altered on the published birth certificate. OK, it's worth looking into, but I'm going to assume there's a reasonable explanation for the touch-ups, if there were touch-ups.

Update: I do not believe this is a forgery. But take a look at this video of an Adobe Illustrator expert taking apart the elements of the birth certificate. How does a 1961 birth certificate have computer layers for such elements as signatures and dates? Weird. Perhaps Alvin T. Onaka, the state registrar who signed the document affirming it is a true copy, can explain.

CNN says 'raised seal' on 2007 Obama birth document makes it whole truth -- well, no

Donald Trump appears to be implying that President Obama wasn't born in the United States, when there's every reason to believe Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.

I still want to see Obama's original birth certificate, if only out of the historical curiosity to see what's on it. I want to see it for the record, and I want to see it to help understand why Obama spent so much money fighting fellow Democrat Philip Berg's 2008 lawsuit demanding that he show it.

CNN has an interesting story on the birth certificate up right now. It says:

"CNN's Gary Tuchman also interviewed the former director of the Hawaii Department of Health, who said she has seen the original birth certificate in the vault at the Department of Health."

Does original exist? It's odd the CNN story refers to a former director of the Hawaii Department of Heath and doesn't name her. I assume it's Chiyome Fukino, and we'll assume she said she saw it. But just three months ago Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat, went looking for the original birth certificate and wasn't allowed to see it. He had the impression an original certificate might not exist -- Obama's birth information may exist only in notes on ledgers, here and there -- but now CNN is shocked that Trump says it might not exist.

Then CNN takes the usual wild-goose chase in this story. It refers to the document that Hawaii printed out in 2007 as its official "certification" that Obama was born in Hawaii. It's not the original birth certificate, but CNN goes to pains to point out that this 2007 document even has an official "raised seal" on it.

A piece of paper has a raised seal. So what? You can put a raised seal on my college diploma. It doesn't make it my birth certificate. You can put a raised seal on a summary of the U.S. Constitution; it doesn't make that summary the whole Constitution.

Why not release it? Screw Trump and his mischief. But why does no news reporter ask President Obama why he doesn't just let us see the original birth certificate? Why doesn't Obama authorize its release?

I want to see Trump's original birth certificate, too.

Frank Warner

* * *

Update: A Seattle Post-Intelligencer story adds this:

"Hawaii law prevents the long-form record from being photocopied or released to anyone - including Obama. Obama himself would only be permitted to inspect it - not copy it or post it online."

I have never heard that before. In fact, I've read stories that said Obama could authorize release of the original birth certificate. This is a critical point, but the Post-Intelligencer provides no details. If there is such a state law forbidding the release of a person's birth certificate to the public, even if the person authorizes it, it can and should be changed. Gov. Abercrombie can propose the amendment. But is that really the law?

Update: Apparently that law had a big loophole. April 27: President Obama finally releases his original birth certificate.

Speaker Boehner says he's willing to cut oil companies' tax breaks

House Speaker John Boehner told ABC News today he's willing to cut the $4 billion a year of tax breaks given oil companies. He also wants the federal government to get out of the way of U.S. oil companies that want to drill for new domestic energy supplies.

Boehner said he wants to look at all the facts on the tax breaks first, but if it turns out they make no sense, and President Obama already says they're bad, then get rid of them. I'm still not sure what these tax breaks are supposed to encourage. The ABC News story carefully gave us no information on that. But if the breaks are unjustified gifts to the oil companies, they should be abolished and the members of Congress who enacted them should go to jail.

For the next few decades, let's replace foreign oil with American oil. Oil companies don't need subsidies, but at a time of mounting U.S. debt and shortages of economical energy, the oil companies also don't need obstacles.

Frank Warner

* * *

Note: The Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate voted 61-35 a few months ago to KEEP those tax breaks for oil exploration. Is it possible those tax breaks are more cost-effective at finding new economical energy than the solar-panel tax breaks?

What are these $4 billion in tax breaks for the oil companies?

President Obama said this today at a Nevada town hall meeting:

“Four billion dollars of your money are going to these companies at a time when they’re making record profits and you’re paying near record prices at the pump. It has to stop.”

We keep hearing about these subsidies to the oil companies. Well, the Democrats just had total control of Congress the last four years, and the White House was in Democratic hands for two of those years. Exactly what are these $4 billion in tax breaks, what are they for, and why didn’t the Democrats abolish them if they're so bad?

If members of Congress took bribes to maintain these subsidies, why doesn’t the president single out the bribe takers and sic the Justice Department on them?

Frank Warner

CBO: GOP’s $38.50 billion spending cut really cut only $0.35 billion

How do $38.5 billion in spending cuts turn out to be a lie? Consider this:

* We start with President Obama and the Democrats’ $3.7 trillion budget plan for fiscal year 2011. ($3.7 trillion is $3,700 billion.)

* Note that, operating on that budget, the federal government had a $223 billion deficit in February alone. (In all 12 months of 2007, the deficit was only $161 billion.)

* In the revised 2011 budget the Democrats and Republicans agreed to one week ago, the Republicans said they had cut $38.5 billion.

* When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reviewed the numbers, it found that the Republicans had cut only $352 million. ($352 million is $00.352 billion.)

Signifying nothing. In other words, from the biggest budget the world has ever seen, the Republicans cut less than one-hundredth of what they claimed to have cut.

The $38.5 billion the Republicans said they cut would have been just over 1 percent of the budget. But according to the CBO, the $00.352 billion the Republicans really cut in FY2011 was less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the budget.

After all that posturing, the Republicans managed to trim a $3.7 trillion budget by .0095 percent. They might as well have done nothing at all.

Full speed ahead. The Republicans took the helm the Titanic, iceberg 20 yards ahead, and ordered the ship’s speed altered from 22 knots to 21.998 knots. Instead of a $3.700 trillion budget, we have a $3.699 trillion budget. That’s pretty much saying full speed ahead!

Frank Warner

When will Democrats apologize for the Civil War?

Not only did the Democrats of the South refuse to end slavery and prevent its expansion, their secession from the Union over slavery started a Civil War that took 620,000 American lives.

Even in the North, the Democrats relentlessly opposed Abraham Lincoln’s initially modest plan to freeze the number of slave states and then they gave hope to the friends of slavery by harassing Lincoln every step of the war.

Had the Republicans not ostentatiously aligned themselves with Big Business in the 1920s, the Democrats never would have no chance at the votes of freed slaves and their descendants. But the New Deal didn’t erase the Democrats’ original sin.

Why can’t the Democrats say they’re sorry for the Civil War? Why can’t they renounce their legacy as the party of slavery?

Frank Warner

Civil War plus 150 years - Fort Sumter

The American Civil War began 150 years ago today, when the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter, an island in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor.

The Confederates under Brig. General P.G.T. Beauregard bombarded the fort for 34 hours. No one was wounded. And when the "battle" was over and U.S. Major Robert Anderson agreed to evacuate (rather than "surrender") his Union troops, the Confederates actually helped put out the fires they'd started.

(Click on the Harper's Weekly illustration to enlarge it.)

How tentatively some very big wars begin. By April 1865, the Civil War would have taken the lives of 620,000 Americans, North and South.

Frank Warner