WHITE HOUSE MASTER TO SLASH EXEC PAY

• Cap-and-trade legislation had to limp over the finish line in the House of Representatives with the help of a few moderate Republicans, who then caught holy unshirted hell from their constituents. Environmental legislation generally has taken a drubbing in public opinion polls when people consider how costly it is.

• The Employee Free Choice Act may be stripped of its “card check” provision in the Senate, which would effectively do away with secret ballots for unionization elections. Even in its watered-down form — which still includes highly objectionable, mandatory, binding so-called gunpoint arbitration and makes no concessions to employers who don’t want to have to prop up teetering union pensions — it might not pass the Senate. And the leadership of the House has refused to touch it until the other chamber has made up its mind.

• On health care, forget the rage set off by private citizen Sarah Palin tweeting about “death panels.” Forget the misleading talk about whether there will be a “public option.” (The ever-evolving plan is one giant public option, folks.) Forget the angry voters who crowded into the town halls during the August recess. Forget that a number of Democratic senators and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are still not willing to sign on to a bill. Right now, even after Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress last week, it’s possible Democrats don’t even have the votes in the House — where they currently enjoy a 77-seat majority.

It’s entirely possible — nay, likely — that Obama will lose on all three big issues. He’ll probably take that personally. As he has pushed for the passage of his reforms, his public approval ratings have taken a beating, and voters have started to trust the Republicans more than his party on a host of issues.

The question that most political handicappers are considering right now is not “Will Republicans make gains at the midterm elections?” but “How large will those gains be?”

President Obama devoted nearly $60 billion of his stimulus package to building a new green-based economy rich in renewable energy and strategies to cut carbon. But despite the price tag, not one green job yet exists. It comes down to a problem of etymology. No one can yet agree on what a green job actually is.

Good thing we allocated $60 billion to allegedly create a numbers of something no one can define.  Newsweek would have done well to ask for said clarification in, say, January.

The working definition paints a broad stroke: a job that’s good for the economy while simultaneously healing the earth. But that leaves lots open to interpretation-natural gas is technically a cleaner fuel than crude oil, but it’s still unsustainable-making it difficult, if not impossible, to measure whether eco-based jobs are being created and whether, as the administration has claimed, they’re the saviors of a sagging economy.

“He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary.

He sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Africa to talk about international development but does not have anyone running the Agency for International Development. He has invited major powers to a summit on nuclear nonproliferation but does not have an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation. He has vowed to improve government efficiency but does not have the chief performance officer he promised.

‘If you’re running G.M. without half your senior executives in place, are you worried? I’d say your stockholders would be going nuts,’ said Terry Sullivan, a professor at the University of North Carolina and executive director of the White House Transition Project, which tracks appointments.”

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas. …

But it still doesn’t allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields, which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won’t allow at home.

Ed:

This seems odd in several ways.  For this particular administration to offer billions in loans to a foreign oil company makes a mockery of a number of Obama talking points.  First, why does Petrobas need loan guarantees to pursue its exploration?  As the WSJ notes, it is a very large corporation, which should have the resources to get to the oil on its own.  Obama, who has ripped American corporations for their supposed subsidies in American tax policy, now wants to use an empty Treasury to give cash to a Brazilian oil company.

Next, Obama keeps insisting that we cut back on our use of fossil fuels.  He and his allies in Congress have blocked exploration of American oil fields off both shores for decades, and Obama insists that we would only keep enabling our oil addiction if we started drilling off of our own coasts.  Yet he has no trouble committing $2,000,000,000 of our money for Brazil to drill off its own coast.

Here’s a proposal: Let American companies do what Obama is paying Brazilian companies to do — drill offshore.  We won’t have to pay them money or float them any loans to do it, either.  In fact, we will make money off of the leases, while the effort creates hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs in the US, creating more tax revenue rather than emptying out the Treasury.

Update: Who else besides Obama has taken an interest in Petrobras?  Hmmmmmm:

His New York-based hedge-fund firm, Soros Fund Management LLC, sold 22 million U.S.-listed common shares of Petrobras, as the Brazilian oil company is known, according to a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Soros bought 5.8 million of the company’s U.S.-traded preferred shares.

Soros is taking advantage of the spread between the two types of U.S.-listed Petrobras shares, said Luis Maizel, president of LM Capital Group LLC, which manages about $4 billion. The common shares were 21 percent more expensive than preferred today, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. …

Petrobras preferred shares have also a 10 percent additional dividend, said William Landers, a senior portfolio manager for Latin America at Blackrock Inc.

“Given that there will most likely never be a change in control in the company, I see no reason to pay a higher price for the common shares.” Brazil’s government controls Petrobras and has a majority stake of voting shares.

This story is from last Friday.  Is it a coincidence that Obama backer George Soros repositioned himself in Petrobras to get dividends just a few days before Obama committed $2 billion in loans and guarantees for Petrobras’ offshore operations?   Hmmmmmmmmmm.

After watching their stimulus package fail to stimulate and an increasing number of Americans wondering whether President Barack Obama has the first clue on economics, Vice President Joe Biden steps back into the fray to rescue his partner.  In a New York Times op-ed, Biden argues that voters have misunderstood Porkulus.  It wasn’t intended to deliver a big “jolt” to the economy, Biden says — apparently forgetting what he himself said last month….

…Biden says that the administration’s progress has been right on target.  Yet Biden just three weeks ago today told ABC News that the White House had misread the economy…

….As for the “jolt,” Jonathan Adler at The Corner and Mark Silva at Swamp Politics note that just a couple of weeks before that, Biden was Joltin’ Joe when it came to the stimulus…

…All of the above links come from the White House web site.  Maybe Biden would like to do a little research at the office before attempting to build the next ridiculous cover story for the failure of Obamanomics.

California could allow new oil drilling under a tentative agreement the state’s governor and lawmakers reached to plug the state’s $26.3 billion budget hole.In a rare agreement with environmental groups, oil producer Plains Exploration & Production Co. (PXP) has proposed promptly expanding oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara, then shutting down four oil platforms and two onshore processing facilities in Santa Barbara by 2022. The company also agreed to donate 4,000 acres of land for public use. The company would slant-drill into the state’s seafloor from a platform it operates in federal waters.

Environmental and community groups in Santa Barbara have hailed the project, called Tranquillon Ridge, as a major milestone in their efforts to shut down the oil rigs off Santa Barbara’s coast. Current law allows offshore drilling operations that were in place prior to a 1981 moratorium on new offshore drilling to continue indefinitely.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has championed the project as a new source of desperately needed cash to fill the state’s budget gap. The state would collect an up-front payment of $100 million from Plains, followed by and as much as $2.3 billion in royalties over the 13 years of the project.

The budget compromise supposedly ends the crisis without raising taxes. Which is a clearer victory.

The World's First LED Interior-Lighted Treehouse

That is, if you believe the human-caused Global Warming hypothesis. But in any case, with electrical rates soaring and expected to continue going up, anything that saves more than two thirds of energy use is good.  Located In California, the treehouse pictured above was completed in May 2009 and is, I believe, the world’s first treehouse with interior Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lighting. There is a UK-based company that sells treehouse kits, some of which have outside decks. Their deck kits have LED lights you can mount in the decks to light the house exterior, but they have no internal LED lighting. I claim the above as the world’s first. The LED light engine is mounted in the center, on the ceiling, and provides excellent white interior light equivalent to a 100-Watt incandescent light bulb, but uses only ~13W.

What does this have to do do with politics? Once again, it is the Conservative who actually goes out and implements energy-saving technology in a practical way, at their own expense. Even in a small way like this  it is action. Frauds such as AlGore  just talk about it while using it to get rich and dupe others into supporting them.

This saves 87% of the electrical energy that would have been used with incandescent lighting.  Plus NO toxics: No Lead, no Mercury!

Night Photo with LED Light Engine Visible

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin and Newsalert