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In Canada, a revolt against global warming socialism creates an economic boom

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Before we look at Canada, let’s first look at how Barack Obama has decided to appease his green socialism supporters by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline.

Excerpt:

The Obama administration rejected the long-delayed TransCanada oil sands crude project, a decision welcomed by environmental groups but blasted by the domestic energy industry.

After delaying the project past the November 2012 election, President Barack Obama was compelled by Congress to decide by Feb. 21 on whether to approve the pipeline that would sharply boost the flow of oil from Canada’s oil sands.

[…]Republicans, in turn, blasted Obama for breaking his promise to create jobs by scuttling the $7 billion pipeline.

House Speaker John Boehner, R.-Ohio, said Republicans will keep fighting for the Keystone pipeline because it is “good for the U.S. economy because it would create thousands of jobs.”

“All options are on the table” for fighting for the sands pipeline between the western province of Alberta and Houston, Boehner told reporters. “This is not the end of the fight.”

Republicans in the Senate have said they could legislate an approval of the pipeline that could get around any rejection by President Obama.

Just to be clear, this pipeline would be paid for with billions of dollars from a Canadian company based in Calgary, Alberta – the Houston of the North. They would pay for the pipeline, they would create the jobs here, and it would cost us nothing to take their money. This would not only cut gas prices for consumers, but it would help us to stop sending money abroad to countries that don’t like us very much.

How are the Canadians responding to Obama’s stupidity? They are already talking about building the pipeline to the west coast and selling their oil to China.

Canadian conservatives have no time for global warming nonsense.

Excerpt:

It is a cliché in journalism to declare metaphorical wars at the drop of a news release. In this case, it looks like war is exactly what Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver launched Monday in an unprecedented open letter warning that Canada will not allow “environmental and other radical groups” to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”

[…]Mr. Oliver took straight aim at a troubling trend in Canadian environmentalism — the foreign funding of Canadian green activist groups with the express purpose of shutting down Canadian resource development…  “These groups,” said Mr. Oliver, “seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interests to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.”

And they pulled out of the Kyoto Accord.

Excerpt:

Canada will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the Minister of the Environment has said.

Peter Kent said the protocol “does not represent a way forward for Canada” and the country would face crippling fines for failing to meet its targets.

[…]The protocol, initially adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, is aimed at fighting global warming.

[…]He said meeting Canada’s obligations under Kyoto would cost $13.6bn (10.3bn euros; £8.7bn): “That’s $1,600 from every Canadian family – that’s the Kyoto cost to Canadians, that was the legacy of an incompetent Liberal government”.

They want jobs. They don’t have money to burn on a dozen Solyndras. They don’t pass job-killing regulations on energy companies.

Since 2006, the Canadians have been electing and re-electing Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. The man has a BA and MA in economics, and he comes from the same fold as Reagan and Thatcher on fiscal conservativism and foreign policy. He has no patience for leftist community organizers like Obama. The Conservatives were re-elected again in 2011, this time with a majority government. Their House of Commons is majority conservative. Their Senate is majority conservative. And Harper has been packing the Supreme Court with fresh conservatives, every time there’s a vacancy. Canada’s economy is booming. And Canadians know how to keep it booming – they are cutting corporate taxes to 15% – less than half of our 35% corporate tax rate. We could be taking their money for the Keystone XL pipeline right now, but we’re not, because we elected an anti-business ideologue instead of an economist.

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Polemics

John Hawkins writes the most scathing anti-Romney column EVER

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Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator linked to the Anti-Romney post, and he called it “The Most Scathing Anti-Romney Column, Ever”. The actual title of the post is “Five Ways Conservatives Will Have to Sell Their Souls if Romney Wins”.

Excerpt:

If you were trying to come up with the most atrocious candidate imaginable to go toe-to-toe with Barack Obama in 2012, you couldn’t do much better than Mitt Romney. He was an unpopular moderate governor who lost 2 out of the 3 major elections he’s run in and whose signature issue Romneycare is an enormous failure. Moreover, he’s so uninspiring that he makes Bob Dole look like Ronald Reagan and that’s before you consider his incessant flip-flopping that makes it impossible to really know where he stands on any issue.

Romney’s candidacy also runs counter to almost every political trend in the book right now. He’s the antithesis of everything the Tea Party stands for — a moderate establishment-endorsed, principle-free Rockefeller Republican. On the other hand, he’s like a bad guy straight out of central casting for the Occupy Wall Street crowd, a conscience-free 1 percenter who makes $10,000 bets and lectures the public about how corporations are people — while hordes of poor and middle class Americans that he fired trail in his wake telling tales of woe about how Romney made their lives into a living hell.

At one time, I thought both Gingrich and Perry were more electable than Romney. I have, however, reassessed and now believe Gingrich, Perry, Santorum, and even Huntsman, who just left the race, are ALL more electable than Mitt. It’s also worth noting that all of those candidates, including Huntsman, are more conservative than Romney. It’s mind-boggling to consider the fact that if Romney wins, the conservative base will have chosen the guy behind Romneycare over the man behind the Contract with America, America’s premier social conservative, and the best job-creating governor in America, all of whom would also be more electable.

Here we are in what may be, forgive me for the cliché, the most important election of our lifetimes and the GOP may end up choosing a candidate who’s one part Charlie Crist and one part John Kerry as our nominee. If that’s the case, conservatives should certainly vote for him over Obama. After all, Mitt Romney will undoubtedly often do the wrong thing if he becomes President, but Barack Obama will almost always fail the country. So Romney would definitely be the lesser of two evils.

Yet and still, conservatives will probably have to pay a big price if Romney becomes the nominee. Barring an unforeseen miracle, we’re not going to see someone who was a third rate, unpopular moderate governor become a great, popular, and conservative President. The idea that Republicans in Congress will keep Romney in line isn’t borne out by anything that has happened in the last decade. During the Bush years, time and time again, conservatives in Congress abandoned their principles to follow Bush’s lead. It has been much the same under Obama. Many Democrats were willing to take votes that ended their careers because they felt compelled to stick by Barack. Mitt would have little to fear from the Tea Party or the rest of the conservative base either. After all, his thinking will be, if grassroots conservatives still had any sway in the Republican Party, he wouldn’t be the nominee. What are they going to do after he gets the nomination? Vote for Obama? Same goes if he gets elected. No matter how Nixonian Mitt turns out to be, conservatives will still view our own Massachusetts version of Arnold Schwarzenegger as preferable to whatever socialist the Democrats run against him in 2016.

ANNOUNCEMENT: I am now cross-posting some of my posts at John Hawkins’ Right Wing News, since he gave me permission to guest blog there. Right Wing News is one of the top conservative blogs.

News

Republicans pushing to rescind Democrats’ $100 billion EU bailout fund

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Here’s a shocking story from Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

When California Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker of the House in 2009, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats authorized $100 billion in spending as a line of credit for the International Monetary Fund to be used in times of emergency — funds that could now be used to bail out European banks.

As the Eurozone takes a turn for the worse and chatter heats up about more European Union and IMF bailouts across the continent, Republicans in Congress are pushing to rescind the $100 billion set-aside.

That $100 billion is an addition to the $64.4 billion the U.S. Treasury will provide in quotas to the IMF this year. That new funding has not been formally appropriated, but the IMF could request the money whenever it pleases.

[…]McMorris Rodgers is leading the charge, with more than 80 House Republicans, to rescind that line of credit before the IMF takes any more of it. She told TheDC that IMF officials confirmed to her that about $6 billion of the $100 billion has been used to help bail out Portugal, as well as St. Kitts and Nevis, a small Caribbean country.

[…]Europe has fallen into dire financial straits as of late. Just last week, the continent saw several of its countries hit with credit downgrades. Though Greece has received the most attention, McMorris Rodgers warns that Greece is just the beginning of what could be a larger and more out-of-control downward European spiral.

“I think it’s important to recognize that Greece — all the eyes have been on Greece — Greece is a relatively small country,” she said. “You’re talking two percent of the European Union, 11 million people, and yet there’s already been over $300 billion in bailout funds made available to Greece through the European Union and the IMF. That’s more than their entire GDP.

“So, if they [the EU and the IMF] were to continue down that trend, the amount of money we could be talking about is just off the charts.”

As vice chair of the House Republican Caucus, McMorris Rodgers is the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress. She has sponsored a bill that would rescind the extra bailout funds and use them for deficit reduction. South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has already gathered more than 20 co-sponsors for the Senate’s version of the legislation.

The U.S. Treasury ordinarily has about $65 billion set aside for international banking emergencies, an IMF credit line that’s already been tapped. Without any approval from Congress, Geithner promised the IMF in an official statement that he plans to double that $65 billion quota.

“Our current quota is about $65 billion and now, so, that raises the question: ‘How are you going to pay for that [doubled quota], Mr. Secretary?’” McMorris Rodgers said.

Bailing out the EU? But we have our own debts to worry about.

Thanks to Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the United States’ gross debt is now more than our GDP. After Obama gets his $1.2 trillion debt limit extension approved, our new credit limit will be $16.3 trillion – which is 107% of our annual GDP. When Obama took office, our debt was at $8 trillion.

How bad is bad?

Greece’s debt to GDP ratio is about 160%, which is higher than America’s 107% ratio – but ours is rising. We can look at Greece and see what is in our future if we don’t fix things now.

USA Today explains how this debt crisis is affecting ordinary Greek citizens.

Excerpt:

Unable to pay off its loans, Greece has been forced to slash its spending and public benefits, raise taxes and rely on bailouts from the wealthier EU nations. Though its new prime minister says the country has a pathway to recovery, Greeks say they aren’t hopeful about a change in their lives anytime soon.

Higher taxes, high unemployment and little economic growth added to reductions in services and pensions that have been part of the attempted solution to Greece’s financial ills have forced people to the brink who have never been there. Greeks have been taking to the streets to protest the changes. The government this week said that 1,580 demonstrations had been held in Athens this year.

“After 34 years of work, I can’t get a pension; I need at least four more years of work,” Katsikadakos said. “Plus, I have to pay 450 euros every month to the state for health insurance and social security, just because I own a company, even when I have zero income.”

About 183,000 businesses will shut down by summer, according to a new study from the General Confederation of Professional Craftsmen. The study expects that 100,000 of those will close in the next month or two, leaving hundreds of thousands of people jobless.

One out of four small- and medium-size-business owners say it’s possible they’ll declare bankruptcy in the next year, according to a recent state survey. If true, it would mean 320,000 lost jobs.

[…]Taxes to pay for the public sector and an expensive pension system have been high. Three new taxes have been added since 2009: a self-employment tax of 300 to 500 euros, a solidarity tax of about 1% to 5% of one’s income and a real estate tax.

This is bad, but what is worse is the effect of this debt crisis on young people in Greece – they are the real victims of their parents’ pattern of voting for the Greek socialist party over and over and over again – with predictable results. Youth unemployment in Greece is now near 50%. The young people are the ones who are having their futures ruined because of the voting choices of their parents.