Monthly Archives: July 2010

Worst Governor In America, Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm, is One Of The Politico’s 50 To Watch

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The worst Governor in America, Michigan’s very own Jennifer Granholm (D), is on Obama’s short list for an administration job after her term ends. Via the Politico’s 50 to watch list:

Granholm’s résumé includes a Harvard law degree and stints as a state attorney general and a Detroit federal prosecutor. She hopes to find work near her current passion: creating clean energy jobs.

Imagine what our unemployment rate would be without those  heavily subsidized ‘clean energy’ jobs.

“I am very bullish on green,” she said.

Good for you, Jenny. You might be bullish on ‘green energy’ but people in Europe and Asia are finding that ‘green energy’ is an economic loser.

An adviser on the economic transition team when Obama was president-elect, Granholm has worked tirelessly to transform Michigan’s old automotive manufacturing towns. She wooed a chairman of a solar panel company with Super Bowl tickets, traveled to Japan to lobby an auto-parts company to expand in Michigan and launched the job-retraining program for auto workers called “No Worker Left Behind.”

“[Granholm was] an adviser on the economic transition team when Obama was president-elect.” That sentence speaks for itself.

And like the president, she’s deployed an economic arsenal of tax credits and loans to ensure clean energy components are made in America. In fact, the two leaders’ energy policies frequently harmonize, especially as the administration pushes for electric-car manufacturing plants that Granholm wants to build in her state.

Electric vehicles have been hyped for a 100 years and have never really come to fruition. There are no free lunches when it comes to powering automobiles. You either will burn gasoline or coal for an EV. Wind power will never be a viable source for large scale electric power. One other problem with EV’s is the United States has very little lithium for lithium ion batteries. We need to import lithium from places like Bolivia

By the way, the Nissan Leaf EV isn’t selling so well.

“Everything he says about clean energy are words that I could have said,” she said with a chuckle. “I shouldn’t say that. He’s says them so much more eloquently than I do.”

Gack…..

Detroit And Its Third World ‘Aura’

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Laura Berman, the uber-liberal Detroit News columnist who has a serious case of Palin Derangement Syndrome, is at it again. Today, she is touting the wonders of Detroit’s status as a ‘Third World’ city. She even goes as far as describing the city as having a Third World ‘Aura.’

According to one of Detroit’s ‘opinion leaders’ its a great thing that Detroit is now regarded by business leaders as a ‘Third World’ destination.

I wonder if Laura has actually been to a Third World country? Has she seen the crushing poverty in the border towns of Mexico or the former communist countries of Eastern Europe? I don’t see how someone can actually try and spin the economic devastation Detroit is experiencing as a good thing.

In Laura’s liberal world, businesses exist to push an urban revitalization agenda and not to make money. Furthermore, in her liberal fantasy land businesses outsource to places like China, India and Mexico due to the mystique of the location and not because of the high costs, over regulation and the fact that the United States has the highest corporate tax rates (40%) in the world.

When the State of Michigan starts crying poor in the coming years and has a X billion dollar budget shortfall and politicians want to reach further in our pockets, remember stories like this.

Conservatives Should Follow David Cameron’s Agenda

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Why is it the only ideas we import from England are goofy windmills and socialized medicine. Via The Daily Mail:

Contemplate the epic sweep of the Cameron/Clegg administration. They plan to slash the size and function of the British state by cutting our £150 billion annual deficit to zero within the space of just four years.

Equally ambitious, they mean to transform the welfare state by making it worthwhile once again financially for the unemployed to take up jobs - and end the scam which has enabled millions of fit men and women to claim disability benefit.

Meanwhile David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague are brutally reassessing Britain’s role in the world, creating a new network of alliances to replace our broken ‘special relationship’ with the U.S.

British schools are to be taken out of the control of the trades unions and local authorities.

The intellectually bankrupt national curriculum will be canned. (emphasis added)

David Cameron is working to execute sweeping reduction of the size and reach of government and emphasizing the individual rather than the collective.

Taken together, the changes envisaged by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, if put into effect, would make their tenure one of the most revolutionary in all British history.

For they are planning nothing less than the break-up of Gordon Brown’s client state, with individuals being encouraged to stand on their own feet. If successful, this means a dramatic change.

This vaunting ambition shows up the miserable failure of Tony Blair’s government - and far outreaches even Margaret Thatcher’s ambition in her first term of office. (emphasis added)

Conservatives running in 2010 and 2012 need to take note.

Web Resource: Mind Numbed Robot On The Perils Of Big Government

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Friend of motorcitytimes, excellent blogger and all around good Conservative Automaton, the Mind Numbed Robot, has put together an excellent series of posts outlining the perils of big government.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Gallup Polling Caught Mixing Sampling Methods To Skew Results

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Gallup is now mixing sampling methods to skew the results. Via Red State:

But now on July 19 that Democrats are showing a big lead, despite the fact that Gallup’s pretty graph now is titled Candidate Preferences in 2010 Congressional Elections, Among Registered Voters, the sampling is different:

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking July 12-18, 2010, with a random sample of 1,535 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

Catch the difference? The Republicans lead with a sample of Registered Voters, but the Democrats lead with a sample of Adults. Someone who trusted Gallup’s pretty, but lying, picture would never have noticed. Real Clear Politics noticed, and actually recorded the polls differently. Friends noticed this and alerted me.

It is terribly dishonest for Gallup to string together two different polls as one series, as Gallup does not only in their graphs, but in their write-ups as well. Here’s an example from the July 19 release:

The Democrats’ six-point advantage in Gallup Daily interviewing from July 12-18 represents the first statistically significant lead for that party’s candidates since Gallup began weekly tracking of this measure in March.

Notice, they call the series one measure, even though it’s at least two different kinds of polls with two different kinds of sampling pools. You cannot pretend that a poll of all adults and a poll filtered by registered voters are part of the same series, even if the same questions are asked. That’s Polling 101, and whoever’s responsible for the Gallup release should have known this, and certainly whoever’s responsible for oversight of the Gallup releases would know this.

Reading this lends more weight to the entire JurnoList scandal.

Wednesday Night Links: The Millennium Falcon Guitar Edition

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This combines my inner Star Wars Geeky-ness with my obsession with Guitar Music. Via Make: Online…

Custom electric guitar build by Travis S., incorporating an original Millennium Falcon toy over a hard maple backing block attached to a purchased neck blank. I especially like the light-up engine blocks. More details are available here.

I wonder how it sounds-

Mind Numbed Robot: Prime

Don’t Kid Yourselves, Republicans Suck Too

When Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) was on Chris Matthews’ show the other night, he refused to answer what he’d cut out the federal budget. Matthews played clips of elitist Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) too, neither of which could name a cut they wanted either. All they had to say was, “blah, blah, blah … “

Cars (Redux): King Shamus Made me do it (kinda keeping with the whole guitar theme tonight)

Is pink the best color for a union thug?

And So It Begins… Limbaugh Transcript of ObamaCare Ending Private Health Insurance

Turbocharged Tuesday

US sanctions against North Korea provoke Chinese anger

Nice: Liberal journalists wanted government to shut down Fox News

JournoGate: More tales from the dark side

Next Up: The Senate Democrats ‘Climate Bill’

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The Democrats latest measure to keep their boot on the throat of the economy.Via The WaPo Post Carbon:

Reid has drafted a scaled-back bill that appeals to the Democratic base, sources said, complete with a provision limiting the amount of greenhouse gases that the electric utility sector will be able to emit in the years ahead and a low-carbon fuel standard. It will also include a renewable energy standard, but it is still unclear if the measure will demand utilities to source 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar. The sources asked not to be identified because the bill details have not been announced publicly.

An aide to Reid said the leader will not provide all the measure’s details at the Tuesday Democratic Caucus lunch. “He is not unveiling a bill in caucus,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley said in an e-mail.

While Reid is going to try to pick up Republican votes as well as unify the Democratic Caucus behind his plan, if he brings his bill to the floor next week it may just signal the starting gun for a debate that will culminate in the fall, after the August recess. (emphasis added)

Renewable energy standard, just like Eigg, Scotland. Their ‘renewable energy’ system can’t provide reliable power for 87 people.

This is not going to help our economy.

Michigan Democrat Gary Peters Budget Proposal Closes Federal Deficit By 0.25%

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After voting for Cap & Trade, The ‘Stimulus’ and ObamaCare, Gary Peters is now trying to close the budget gap. Via the Freep:

Peters, a Bloomfield Township Democrat, is chairing the four-man working group that met to come up with cuts and savings.

The other members include John Adler of New Jersey, Peter Welch of Vermont and Jim Himes of Connecticut.

Each is pushing his own proposal: Peters wants to eliminate tax loopholes for oil companies, get rid of duplicative and unnecessary federal research spending, halt expansion of the strategic petroleum reserve, end mandatory payments to states for abandoned mines and sell federally owned energy facilities to private utilities.

Peters’ office said those proposals could be worth nearly $4 billion this year and nearly $60 billion over 10 years.

The National Debt is $13.2 trillion. The Federal Government is running a $1.6 trillion budget deficit this year and Gary Peters identifies tax increases and small spending cuts that will reduce this years budget deficit by 0.25%.

Jay Leno On The Chevy Volt: “It’s a people mover, not a people impresser”

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Jay Leno, who is a big supporter of Detroit’s auto industry, gave a tepid review of the Chevy Volt.

EV owners will also be less than impressed when, as Obama promised, “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” (January 2008), and you and your neighbors start plugging in your EV every night after work.

Of course a Volt supporter and auto analyst Erich Merkle pointed out the obvious with this “knee slapper”

Leno’s Big Boy dig rings hollow, he added.

“The typical Volt driver might be a vegan,” Merkle said. “They may be opposed to a Big Boy altogether.”

Yep, and if were up the militant vegan eco-green fans, there would be no Big Boy restaurants. Well, there would be, but we would all be eating Boca Burger ground crumble meat substitute.

Here is a GM vehicle that Jay really likes:

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