Tag Archives: Global Warming

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Top Romney aide: Romney can change his positions after primary, like an Etch-a-Sketch

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Finally, proof that Mitt Romney is a liberal masquerading as a conservative – from his own campaign spokesman.

Look:

ABC News has the raw story.

Excerpt:

For a candidate who has spent months battling the title of “flip-flopper,” perhaps the last thing he would want associated with his name is an Etch A Sketch, those do-over drawing boards that let you shake your scribbles away with the flick of a wrist.

Unfortunately Mitt Romney won’t be able to shake away this comparison any time soon. When his campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom was asked this morning on CNN how the GOP frontrunner would make the pivot to the general election, Fehrnstrom compared Romney’s primary campaign to an Etch A Sketch, a gaffe that spread like wildfire to Romney’s rival’s stump speeches.

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch,” Fehrnstrom told CNN’s John Fugelsang. “You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again. But I will say, if you look at the exit polling data in Illinois, you’ll see that Mitt Romney is broadly acceptable to most of the factions in the party. You have to do that in order to become the nominee…”

Within hours, Romney’s opponents seized on the comments, using them to reinforce the notion that the former Massachusetts governor will, as Rick Santorum said, “say anything to get elected.”

“We’re not looking for someone who’s the Etch A Sketch candidate,” Santorum said in a campaign speech just hours after Fehrnstrom’s comments. “We’re looking for someone who writes what they believe in stone and stands true to what they say.”

Both the Santorum and Newt Gingrich campaigns made pit stops at the toy store to pick up Etch A Sketches of their own, deploying their new visual aids at speeches and rallies in Maryland and Louisiana today.

Conservative Republican Rick Santorum reacts to this clip. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

This morning on CNN, senior advisor to the Romney Campaign, Eric Fehrnstrom, admits his candidate and their campaign is based on the “etch-a-sketch” model when asked by if the positions he’s taken in the Republican primary have been too conservative.

Hogan Gidley, National Communications Director, said: “We all knew Mitt Romney didn’t have any core convictions, but we appreciate his staff going on national television to affirm that point for anyone who had any doubts.  With the two year anniversary of the signing of ObamaCare upon us, can voters really believe that the man who urged the President to use his healthcare plan in Massachusetts as a model would really repealObamaCare?  Or is that promise just something they would ‘shake up and restart’ with when Romney hits the general election.

Voters can trust that Rick Santorum will say what he believes, and do what he says.  They may not always agree with Rick Santorum, but they can trust him because they know he is a man of principle.  Clearly, the same cannot be said of Governor Romney.”

Do you think Mitt Romney is a conservative? If you do, check out the links below.

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News

Even in Canada, green energy socialism closes businesses and kills jobs

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A story from CANOE about the socialist premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty.

Excerpt:

Dalton McGuinty constantly extols the virtues of so-called green energy.

One North Bay company, however, is sounding the alarm that the costs of this expensive program are forcing companies to lay off staff — and will eventually force many of them to leave the province.

John Spencer is an executive with Fabrene Inc., a company that makes industrial fabrics.

The Liberal government’s green energy plan has added $1 million a year to his hydro bill — an amount he says will eventually force his company out of this province.

There’s a line on corporate energy bills called the “Global Adjustment.” It’s that line that pays for renewable energy projects.

Spencer’s seen the GA soar over the past few years — from 5% of his bill to 42%.

In his most recent report, provincial auditor general Jim McCarter warned by 2014, the Global Adjustment is expected to be six cents per kilowatt hour — nearly two-thirds of the total electricity charge

The GA is expected to increase tenfold province-wide, from about $700 million in 2006 to $8.1 billion in 2014, when the last of the province’s coal-fired plants is phased out.

Almost one-third of this $8.1 billion is attributable to costly green energy contracts.

That will sound the death knell for his company in this province, Spencer said.

“My company won’t make it that far.”

The cost of hydro itself is competitive, he said. It’s the GA — and the $1 million it’s adding to his bill that’s killing jobs.

Electricity is now his third biggest cost — after raw materials and labour.

He has to explain that non-competitive rate to plants in the U.S., South America, China and Europe.

“It’s a very bleak outlook,” he says.

“It’s a runaway freight train. We’ve got to stop it in its tracks or we’re going to kill a great majority of small and medium sized companies,” Pearson said.

Ironically, at least 42 of the largest companies in the province are exempt from the GA.

It’s important to learn from other countries what works and what doesn’t work.

Green energy and the Ontario economy

The National Post wrote about how the Ontario government wastes taxpayer money to subsidize big corporations who experiment with unproven, expensive energy programs, like solar power.

Excerpt:

The Swedish retail giant IKEA announced yesterday it will invest $4.6-million to install 3,790 solar panels on three Toronto area stores, giving IKEA the electric-power-producing capacity of 960,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. According to IKEA, that’s enough electricity to power 100 homes. Amazing development. Even more amazing is the economics of this project. Under the Ontario government’s feed-in-tariff solar power scheme, IKEA will receive 71.3¢ for each kilowatt of power produced, which works out to about $6,800 a year for each of the 100 hypothetical homes. Since the average Toronto home currently pays about $1,200 for the same quantity of electricity, that implies that IKEA is being overpaid by $5,400 per home equivalent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of green economics and the magical business of carbon emission reduction. Each year, IKEA will receive $684,408 under Premier Dalton McGuinty’s green energy monster — for power that today retails for about $115,000. At that rate, IKEA will recoup $4.6-million in less than seven years — not bad for an investment that can be amortized over 20.

No wonder solar power is such a hot industry. No wonder, too, that the province of Ontario is in a headlong rush into a likely economic crisis brought on by skyrocketing electricity prices. To make up the money paid to IKEA to promote itself as a carbon-free zone, Ontario consumers and industries are on their way to experiencing the highest electricity rates in North America, if not most of the world.

The government’s regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, has prepared secret forecasts of how much Ontario consumers are going to have to pay for electricity over the next five years. The government won’t allow the report to be released. The next best estimate comes from Aegent Energy Advisors Inc., in a study it did for the Canadian Manufactures and Exporters group. Residential rates are expected to jump by 60% between 2010 and 2015. Industrial customers will be looking at a 55% increase.

Going back to 2003, based on numbers dug up by consultant Tom Adams, the price of residential electricity in Ontario hovered around 8.5¢ a kWh in 2003 — the first year of the McGuinty Liberal regime. By 2015, Aegent Energy estimates the price will be up to 21¢, an increase of 135%. Doubling the price of electricity in a decade is no way to spur growth and investment.

Messing around with green energy doesn’t just hurt businesses – it hurts consumers, too.

News

In California, students protest the results of their own liberal voting

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Victor Davis Hanson writes about it National Review.

Excerpt:

Here in California, students just marched on Sacramento in outrage that state-subsidized tuition at the UC and CSU campuses keeps climbing. It is true that per-unit tuition costs are rising, despite even greater exploitation of poorly paid part-time teachers and graduate-student TAs. But the protests are sort of surreal. The California legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. The governor is a Democrat. The faculties and administrative classes are largely Democratic. Who then, in the students’ minds, have established these supposedly unfair budget priorities?

Sales, income, and gas taxes are still among the highest in the nation (and are proposed to rise even higher) — prompting one of the largest out-of-state exoduses of upper-income brackets in the nation. The state budget is pretty much entirely committed to K–12 education (whose state-by-state comparative test scores in math and science hover between 45th and 49th in the nation), prisons, social services, and public-employee salaries and pensions. Whom, then, can the students be angry at?

Are students angry at public-union salaries and pensions that are among the highest in the nation? Do they think the many highly compensated retired Highway patrol officers have shorted students at UC Davis? Are they mad at the 50,000 illegal aliens in the California prison system that might have siphoned off scholarship funds from CSU Monterey Bay? Or is the rub the influx of hundreds of thousands of children of illegal aliens who require all sorts of language remediation and extra instruction in the public schools, and so might in theory divert library funds from UC Santa Cruz?

Perhaps the students don’t want billions to be committed to high-speed rail that might rob Berkeley of needed funding, or environmental efforts to introduce salmon into the San Joaquin River, in which the $70 million spent so far in studies and surveys might have come from nearby CSU Fresno? Are they mad at state social services, whose medical expenses have skyrocketed to address the health-care needs of millions of illegal aliens, and thus in theory could curb the choice of classes at CSU Stanislaus? Are they angry that some $10–15 billion a year probably leaves the state as remittances to Mexico?

If one cannot blame the wealthy for “not paying their fair share” (the top 1 percent of Californians now pay about 37 percent of all income-tax revenue — and their numbers have decreased by one-third in recent years, as the state has come to rely on the income tax for half its revenue), or Republican majorities in government, who, then, is left to blame?

Not only are their tuition costs going UP but their likely salary is going DOWN.

Students majoring in booze and hook-up sex
How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' for ya?

I got that image from a post at the American Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

  • Only 35 percent of students starting a four-year degree program will graduate within four years, and less than 60 percent will graduate within six years.
  • The U.S. college dropout rate is about 40 percent, the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world.
  • Over the past 25 years, the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in STEM subjects has remained more or less constant.
  • In 2009, the United States graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. That’s not bad, but we graduated more students with computer-science degrees 25 years ago!
  • Few disciplines have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology—about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?
  • If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering, and math, what are they studying?
  • In 2009, the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.
  • Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college.

I think this is interesting. What exactly are these students paying for?

If there is one thing I learned from my love of Shakespeare, it’s that it is tragic to be the cause of your own downfall because of your own tragic flaw. Right now, there are a bunch of young people who have been totally brainwashed by the unionized public school teachers and professors to have views on economics that are completely opposite to what works in the real world. They keep voting for bigger and bigger government, which creates more and more debt in order to provide their parents with bigger and bigger benefits. They have lots of self-esteem, but very few marketable skills. Eventually, the bill for all the government spending on “helping the poor”, (e.g. – food stamps for millionaires and bailouts for bankrupt green energy firms), comes due, and it’s the students who will be paying the bill. I wonder if they will look as favorably on socialism and global warming alarmism then?

UPDATE: I noticed that in Quebec, the most liberal province in Canada, students are doing the same thing.