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Payne: Obama’s War on Coal Jobs
Posted by hpayne on September 18, 2012
(This article originally appeared in the Sept. 24, 2012 issue of The Weekly Standard magazine.)
Charleston, W. Va. – The billboard high over I-64 outside the capital of this blue-collar state minces no words: “Obama’s NO JOBS ZONE: The President talks about creating jobs but his EPA is destroying jobs.”
Businessmen across nearly every American industry cite the Obama administration’s regulatory assault—from Obamacare to bank lending restrictions to fuel-economy mandates—as a cause of America’s jobless recovery. But perhaps no industry can count job losses the White House is causing like the coal industry.
“We have been forced by our own country’s president and his followers and supporters to permanently close the operation,” said Stanley Piasecki, general manager of OhioAmerica, in announcing the closure of his eastern Ohio coal mine on July 31. “Both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden stated that there would be ‘no coal in America’ prior to their elections. They are making good on their intentions while they destroy so many lives.”
“Current market pressures and a challenging regulatory environment have pushed coal consumption in the United States to a 20-year low,” said Arch Coal president and CEO John Eaves as he announced the elimination of 750 jobs in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia in late June, devastating areas like Perry County, Kentucky, which has lost 30 percent of its coal jobs on the way to today’s 13 percent unemployment rate in the county.
Alpha Natural Resources also announced in June that it was closing down mines and 150 jobs because, according to the blog 24/7 Wall Street, “future sales forecasts also are being affected by a series of regulatory actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has resulted in utilities announcing plans to shut down a number of generating stations that have traditionally used Central Appalachia coal.”
For three years Obama’s EPA has done an end run around the legislative process and deployed a platoon of new emissions regulations—forcing older plants to shut down under zealous mercury rules and effectively banning coal plant construction with new carbon regulations. The agency is also waging a permitting battle against mining operations.
Though largely ignored by mainstream media that have cheered the White House global warming agenda, the effect has been devastating to businesses and communities across the eastern coal belt.
The War on Coal has turned politics in West Virginia—where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2:1—upside down. The state is hostile ground for President Obama. In May, he was embarrassed in the state’s Democratic primary when an inmate serving time in a Texas penitentiary made the ballot and scored 43 percent of the vote against the president. Recent polls give his GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, a double-digit lead.
At the Democratic National Convention, Obama told delegates that America “will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation.” But leading members of the West Virginia delegation had already made their choice not to attend in protest over the president’s regulatory edicts. Democratic governor Earl Ray Tomblin, U.S. senator Joe Manchin, and congressman Nick Rahall all stayed home. While Obama touted his “goals in manufacturing, energy” that would “lead to new jobs, more opportunity, and rebuild this economy,” Governor Tomblin was the guest at a coal retreat pondering a state industry that shed 1,300 jobs in just the second quarter. The West Virginia delegation was not alone: Pennsylvania congressman Mark Critz, a coal country Democrat, also skipped Charlotte.
In neighboring Ohio, Mike Carey, chairman of the Ohio Coal Association, condemned the EPA’s boot on the neck of that swing state, where six coal-fired power plants are scheduled for closure, taking with them hundreds of jobs.
“If you’re looking regionally, these folks understand how bad this administration has been to the American coal industry. . . .It’s an all-out war,” he says. The Romney campaign has noticed. Last month, the GOP’s candidate stood in front of a wall of overall-clad blue-collars at an eastern Ohio mine and denounced his opponent’s “war on coal.”
The administration’s actions are a historic exercise in depriving America of its greatest natural resources. Where the White House masks its global warming agenda when regulating auto miles-per-gallon by citing the need for “energy independence,” its restrictions on domestic coal expose its true carbon-capping intentions. The “Saudi Arabia of Coal,” the United States boasts some of the world’s largest coal reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration—an estimated 240 years’ worth.
The use of coal has not only brought generations of jobs, but also is the backbone of American electricity generation, providing 40 percent of the nation’s electricity—which in turn gives America’s Midwest manufacturing sector a competitive advantage with some of the cheapest electricity on the planet.
In June, Patriot Coal—with 12 mining complexes across Appalachia to Illinois and some 2 billion tons of proven coal reserves—became the first U.S. coal company to file for bankruptcy in years as its shares (echoing other coal companies’) fell 72 percent to 61 cents. There will be no federal coal bailout. Moody’s has downgraded the U.S. coal industry’s outlook to “negative” in part, says the rating service’s senior analyst Anna Zubets-Anderson, because “newly proposed U.S. carbon dioxide regulations would effectively prohibit new coal plants.”
In Charlotte, President Obama conjured cheers from his audience when he said, “My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet, because climate change is . . . a threat to our children’s future.”
In working-class middle America, the threat to the future is Obama’s plan.
Payne: Obama the Mighty Incumbent
Posted by hpayne on September 16, 2012
Conservative shoulders slumped this week as post-Democratic Convention polls showed President Obama bouncing to a 10-point lead in bailed-out Michigan and 6 percent in a national Gallup poll. Predictable gnashing of teeth followed as Right pundits blamed GOP nominee Mitt Romney for variously talking too much (about the Libyan embassy disaster) or too little (about his pro-growth economic plan).
But the truth is, challengers rarely beat incumbents (especially media-assisted Democratic incumbents).
Indeed, as the convention buzz dies away and this campaign returns to the neck-and-neck polling of recent months, what is remarkable – and of hope to Romney – is that this election is close at all. Republicans like to talk about the similarities of Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Reagan’s “comeback” 1980 election – because 1980 is the odd post-WW2 election where the challenger fell behind (if only briefly) then came back to win.
The better comparison of Obama to 1980 is how Ronald Reagan did in his re-election campaign of 1984 – after he had four years to right an economy that was as bad (if not worse) than the economy Obama inherited. The Reagan-Mondale campaign was never close, with Reagan leading throughout (Mondale’s convention bounce drew him even but otherwise he was never closer than 9 points) and winning going away on election day, 59-41.
Practicing fundamental, deregulatory market economics, Reagan rode a strong recovery following a deep recession. By contrast, Obama’s anti-business, European Socialist policies have been so disastrous (economic growth is just a quarter of that under Reagan) that he is actually in danger of losing re-election. This election shouldn’t be a game – but Romney has shadowed Obama throughout.
In this sense, the election is more like Dubya’s re-election in 2004 over Kerry (and a very partisan, anti-war media) – a tight race throughout fought over one big issue (Iraq in 2004, today it’s the economy).
The power of incumbency is no different in Michigan.
Where conservatives like myself like to point to the similarities of Romney and Governor Snyder – and the vast improvement this state has seen under an experienced business leader versus the incompetence of Obama-twin Granholm – the fact is that Snyder would likely have met the same fate as businessman candidate Dick DeVos against incumbent Granholm if One Tough Nerd had challenged her in 2006.
Voters have a stake in incumbents, having elected them once. They want to see their investment through. They are leery of changing boats (again). Thus, Obama’s opponents will be surprised to find that voters in Michigan’s EPIC poll parrot Obama’s claims that the economy is Bush’s fault – FOUR years after Dubya left office and THREE years after the recovery began. Advantage incumbent.
The New York Times’ Nate Silver is an Obamabot – but he does an effective job in crunching the numbers and indicating why Obama is no Jimmy Carter. Indeed, contrary to hopeful GOP underdog stories, Reagan consistently led Carter in the 1980 campaign thanks to an economy that was in worse shape than Obama’s pathetic recovery.
But in Silver’s numbers, GOPers will find hope.
The Obama recovery is turning south fast (which Silver’s May numbers did not predict)- including today’s negative industrial growth numbers (mirroring those of Carter even as they come much later in the campaign) and awful wage numbers showing Carter-esque losses of $4000 per household.
These are the kind of figures – combined with fresh doubts about Obama’s handling of foreign policy – that could turn independents against Obama in that rarest of electoral feats: An incumbent defeat.
Payne: The Dating Granholm Game
Posted by hpayne on September 13, 2012
“This lovely lady hails from British Columbia. She’s currently working in the public relations field – let’s have a big hand for the cute and curvaceous Jennifer Granholm!”
So did host Jim Lange introduce the 19-year old future governor of Michigan on the Dating Game in 1978.
Wearing big hair (“I was having a bad hair decade,” she now says), a low-cut blouse, hip-hugging pants – and the moles she would have surgically removed thirty years later – Granholm grills her three potential suitors in the classic ’70s show episode recently unearthed on YouTube. MIView contributor Frank Beckmann, host of WJR’s The Frank Beckmann Show, posted the long-rumored video (uncovered by Granholm fan Marty Nislick in New York) on his Facebook page Thursday.
America got an eyeful of the unhinged, fist-pumping Granholm (“Hey! Hey! Hey!” she yelled) at last week’s Democratic Convention – video that made her the laughingstock of the Internet. But in 1978, Granholm plays harder to get for her three bachelor suitors. The future GM cheerleader asks probing questions like how would you finish the poem: “Roses are red, violets are orange. When I take a shower. . . . ”
And: “What form of transportation should all girls be built like? And why?”
In the end, the now Current TV talk show host was blown away by Bachelor #2. And no, his name is not Dan Mulhern.
Payne: Hoffa turns clock back to 1867
Posted by hpayne on September 13, 2012
In a rambling speech in Washington, DC Thursday that variously compared Mitt Romney to Pol Pot and the tea party to the John Birch Society, Obama supporter and Teamsters President James Hoffa claimed that Republicans want to “roll the clock back to about 1890.”
Fact check, please. Yes, there is a political party that wants to roil back the clock to the 19th century – 1867 to be exact – bit it’s not the Republicans.
As noted climatologist Patrick Michaels (“Watts up? Who killed climate change” Forbes, January 27, 2012) has pointed out, Democrat cap-and-trade bill legislation passed in 2009 – echoing the demands of United Nations green zealots – would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 83 percent over the next four decades with the result that, by 2050, “the average American would be allowed the same emissions produced by a citizen in 1867.”
That is, since CO2 emissions closely track economic growth, Americans would be reduced to the agricultural-economy, per capita income of 1867 – before the U.S. transitioned to an industrial society and saw its fastest economic growth ever.
This means that carbon-intensive industries in which Hoffa’s labor constituents are represented – autos, steel, trucking, and contruction equipment – would be decimated. That a labor chief would embrace a party with a radical, anti-manufacturing green agenda like the Democratic Party is a scandal.
And it is also revealing as to who would really turn back the hands of time on the greatest economy in world history.
Payne: Charlotte Democrats in Chicago’s streets
Posted by hpayne on September 12, 2012
Who are the angry, greedy, striking union teachers crowding Chicago’s streets this week? They are the same faces that crowded the floor of the Democratic Convention in Charlotte last week.
The American Federation of Teachers (of which the Chicago Teachers Union is a member) and the National Education Association were heavily represented among the Democratic Party delegates (the NEA alone had 200 members on the floor in Charlotte) that cheered a week of speeches promising more power and more money for Big Labor.
Who are the AFT members who welcomed Joe Biden to their July national convention in Detroit demanding more pay and less accountability in America’s worst school district?
They are the same unionistas that crowded the Charlotte floor, led by AFT President Randi Weingarten, a member of the New York delegation. Biden expressed solidarity with the AFT ” which marched through Detroit streets in protest of Detroit Public School reforms ” while ignoring the dozens of Detroit charter schools and their non-union teachers who are revolutionizing education for inner city children.
Who are the AFSCME and UAW members who provided the funding for Occupy Detroit and led its anti-capitalist protests last fall?
They are the voices of the Charlotte hall that cheered speakers wanting more taxpayer money for the cities and auto companies that they have forced into insolvency. Both AFSCME President Lee Saunders and UAW President Bob King (who gave a primetime speech) ” and dozens of their members – were delegates at the Democratic Convention.
While a middle-upper class, white-collar media paints a picture of a Democratic Party of gays, minorities, and civil liberties, the party’s core is the union entitlement class – made up increasingly of public employee unions that make daily headlines for bankrupting municipalities, states, and school districts even as their wages and benefits dwarf that of the taxpayers who pay them.
Who are the Charlotte Democrats?
They are union protestors who carried signs of Snyder as a Nazi in Lansing while wearing shirts spelling “F*** YOU SNYDER.” They are the army of protestors that occupied Wisconsin’s capital and tried to recall its governor. They are the Chicago teachers who claim to represent the middle class even as they pull down $71,000 a year in salary (plus $15k in benefits) ” well above the $47,000 average middle class income of Chicago families (who work twice the 1,039 instructional hours per year of CFT members) who they are inconveniencing by sending their children home while they go out on an illegal strike because they want a 16 percent pay hike and less performance accountability in a school system that graduates just 55 percent of its students.
Four more years?
Payne: Obama promises in 5 years you’ll be blown away
Posted by hpayne on September 6, 2012
On Wednesday, the Democratic Convention celebrated its outreach to women by keynoting Harasser-in-Chief Bill Clinton whose presidency is best remembered for groping Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick.
How to top this jarring contradiction on Thursday?
Open Obama’s big night with his ideological twin, Jennifer Granholm – the spectacularly failed governor of Michigan who experimented with anti-business Obamanomics on Michigan before they were tried on the national patient – in primetime to cheer four more years.
Sure enough, Obama’s speech was a remarkable echo of Granholm’s 2006 State of the State “blown away” address. Both speeches promised more spending, more green “investment,” and asked voters for patience while Big Government programs build a new economy. “If you turn away now. . . change will not happen,” promised Obama.
And in five years, you’ll be blown away.
Democrats point to two-term Jenny as a model for Obama’s scorched-earth, 2012 class warfare campaign tactics. Facing a listing Michigan economy and a successful businessman candidate when she ran for re-election in 2006, the Harvard Law-educated, silver-tongued, first-woman, green governor (sound familiar?) Granholm demonized Amway’s Dick DeVos as a China-outsourcing, out-of-touch Richie Rich. But Mitt Romney is no Dick DeVos. A seasoned politician – unlike Devos whose generational run was his first bid for office – Romney is an Olympics icon and one of America’s most admired entrepreneurs.
Worse for America, Granholm’s second term is a disturbing preview of Obama II.
No political analogy is perfect, and Granholm’s first term was hardly the disaster that Obama’s has been. Skating on the coattails of her successful predecessor, GOPer John Engler, Granholm managed an economy with unemployment stalled at 7 percent. It was her second term – launched with that Obamesque 2006 speech – when she really put Granholmnomics – ie, Obamanomics – to work.
She led her second term with a $2 billion government stimulus (to “create tens of thousands of new jobs. We’ll invest. . . public and private funds to develop new sectors of our economy. And in five years you’ll be blown away,” she boasted). She “invested” billions in Green companies promising a new Michigan economy. But – like Obama’s Solyndra – the results were bankrupt companies like RASCO and Fisher Coachworks electric bus company.
Her budgets were a lesson in fiscal chaos. Before there was a federal debt ceiling showdown, there was Granholm’s 2007 budget showdown that shut down Lansing. Before Standard & Poor’s Obama downgrade, ratings services downgraded Granholm’s Michigan from “AA− with a stable outlook” to “AA− with a negative outlook.” Before Obama’s proposed tax hike in the middle of a recession, there was Granholm’s 14 percent recession tax hike-with the resulting revenue disappearing in an even larger $2 billion deficit. Before Obama’s stubborn 8 percent unemployment, there was Granholm’s ballooning 11.4 percent unemployment.
On Thursday, Granholm talked about the promise of Obama’s second term. As Michiganians know too well, it’s a promise of more disappointment.
Payne: Queen Michelle
Posted by hpayne on September 5, 2012
In Charlotte Tuesday night, Michelle Obama made a case that she and her husband care more about Americans because they were raised by regular families that cared about regular people. Yet, in four years the Obama’s have never visited Detroit’s mean streets (or any other inner city) where children face a bleak future of poor schools and poor job prospects because families have imploded after decades of anti-family, Democratic welfare policies.
Instead of applying fundamental family principles to America’s needy, the Obamas have prominently devoted their time in the White House to the government elite’s obsession with expensive organic foods and alternative green energy.
Contrary to the Democratic Convention fable, Michelle has jet-setted around the world to lavish hotels, lectured us to adopt expensive organic diets (at a time when many families are struggling to make ends meet on a Wal-Mart budget), and pranced about in $500 designer sneakers. Her husband, meanwhile, has worn a path to Malibu where he talks trendy Green politics with his rich Hollywood friends while shelling out $7,500 tax breaks to Leo DiCaprio to buy $100,000, government-subsidized Fisker Karma luxury sports cars.
This is America’s couple next door?
The Obamas are part of America’s new ruling government elites- the nomenklatura to use the delicious term coined by Soviet dissident Michael Voslenski – that makes society’s rules while never having had the private sector experience of making anything. They occupy a sphere very different from the entrepreneurial culture of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Their’s is a culture of self-reliance and business success that – in my experience – is intimately in touch with America because they hire and work with America’s working class. If Obama knew business, he would not allow the thousands of blue-collar layoffs occurring in coal country today due to his EPAnomenklatura’s War on Coal.
The now-famous story of Romney mobilizing his Bain workforce to rescue a colleague’s lost daughter is touching – but also a commentary on the entrepreneur’s passion for his fellow employees. It is an instinct quite different from the distant corporate cultures of GE and GM where Barack Obama has found his business cronies.
Ultimately, it is entrepreneurs – not the nomenklatura – who are most passionate about America’s needy. Just look at Detroit.
The people most passionate about Detroit’s comeback are wealthy entrepreneurs like Karmanos, Gilbert, Penske, Ilitch. Where elites believe that government should take their wealth so that the nomenklatura can redistribute it to organic farms and Leo DiCaprio – cities like Detroit crave job creators because they create charitable foundations and build businesses.
It is no accident that businessman Governor Rick Snyder is a much more visible advocate for Detroit success than was Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm. For Snyder, Detroit needs business to succeed – whereas Granholm needed Detroit government unions to succeed to keep her in power.
Michelle and Barack Obama talk of being normal. But in four years, they haven’t walked among the Detroiters who yearn for a normal, middle-class life if only Detroit’s nomenklatura (unions, city councilmen, environmental regulators) would get out of the way and give them – not organic food and electric cars – but safe streets and economic opportunity.
Payne: Stupak confesses Obama suckered him
Posted by hpayne on September 5, 2012
Before the Supreme Court’s individual mandate decision. Before Kathleen Sebelius forced the Catholic Church to cover contraceptives. Before Obama rammed Obamacare through the Senate on Christmas Eve without a single bipartisan vote. Before all that, the president had to convince Yooper Bart Stupak and other pro-life Dems to vote for Obamacare’s public funding of abortion to get the bill through the House.
There’s a sucker born every minute.
After months of avoiding the press (including repeated calls from MIView), the former Michigan Rep. Stupak admitted in Charlotte Tuesday that the Obama administration suckered him into supporting Obamacare with a false promise to support the Hyde Amendment – and that Obamacare’s public funding of abortion “is illegal.”
Breitbart’s Tabitha Hale reports:
Charlotte – Former Congressman Bart Stupak admits a compromise he made with Barack Obama to pass the Affordable Care Act is invalidated by HHS’s controversial mandate for taxpayer-funded contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs.
Today Breeanne Howe of Red State and I attended a Democrats For Life panel during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. An attendee stood up and asked Bart Stupak and a panel of pro-life if the HHS contraception mandate has put them in a difficult position.
Stupak responded, “I am perplexed and disappointed that, having negotiated the Executive Order with the President, not only does the HHS mandate violate the Executive Order but it also violates statutory law.”Watch the video here, courtesy of RedState.
Conservatives cautioned that the Executive Order was cheap political cover that could just as easily be undone by the President.
It took him a few years, but apparently Stupak has come to that realization as well.
Payne: One Tough Nerd Romney
Posted by hpayne on August 30, 2012
Who is Mitt Romney?
His enemies in the Obama campaign and the Mainstream Media have caricatured him as top hat-wearing One Percenter who rode to success on Daddy’s coat-tails and wants to send American jobs to China. As with so much in the 2012 presidential election, it’s an eerie echo of Michigan’s 2010 gubernatorial election in which successful business candidate Rick Snyder was painted as a greedy, China-outsourcing venture capitalist.
Like Snyder, Romney is a technocrat who sees government as a failed company in need of a turnaround. He’s not a political animal, but a bi-partisan fixer who wants to get things done – an attitude that will sometimes puts him at odds with his party’s philosophically-conservative base. Sound familiar?
“I think he’d be the same kind of president as I am governor,” says Snyder whose own term has been an echo of Romney’s years in the Massachusetts governor’ office. The personable pair are friends and share the infectious optimism found in entrepreneurs.
Who is Mitt Romney? Look at his core Michigan supporters. They are not scions of the U.S. auto industry but Metro Detroit entrepreneurs who back in 2006 saw Romney’s promise as a national figure. John Rakolta, a Mormon construction entrepreneur in Detroit; Joe O’Connor, a successful Michigan entrepreneur from humble Boston roots; the Schwartz family, the deeply Catholic founders of one of Detroit’s leading financial-planning firms, and Jewish entrepreneur Dan Gilbert.
This diverse group of small businessmen – with little experience in national politics – found common cause in Michigan native Romney because of their admiration for his competence, drive, moral character, and discipline. These qualities they believe are essential to turning around a nation that they fear is adrift.
Their support explodes the myth of Romney the corporate puppet – a caricature that, ironically, better fits Obama, who has been adopted by industry heavies like GM and GE that see bounty in Obama’s crony capitalism.
Snyder’s path to the governorship – shepherded by fellow Michigan entrepreneur Ron Weiser – was similar. It’s important to note that neither Snyder nor Romney are career politicians. They see themselves as business repairman. Not coincidentally, their successful business careers led them to private equity (venture capital, in Snyder’s case) where they could bring their experience as successful CEOs to struggling or promising companies. Their greatest challenge? Turning around government.
“One Tough Nerd” was Snyder’s campaign slogan. America, meet One Tough Nerd Romney.
The analogy extends to the two men’s struggles within their own party. The GOP base was leery of Candidate Snyder’s vague, business slogans and tepid support for social issues (RINO is a term that Snyder and Romney often hear), but Snyder’s business resume appealed to cross-party and Independent-voters.
Unlike Romney, Snyder won office without facing a charismatic incumbent – or Washington’s hostile, partisan press horde. Had he faced outgoing Democrat media-darling Governor Jennifer Granholm instead of unknown Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, he would have had a tougher task.
In office, Democratic campaign smears seem a bizarre memory as Snyder has turned out exactly as he promised: An efficient, politics-averse executive who has made the hard choices in Michigan’s budget after the chaos of the Granholm years. Despite rhetorical nods to the party’s social issues platform, it has not interested him in office. And his flirtation with Obamacare’s state exchanges has kept party conservatives suspicious.
Who is Mitt Romney? The same guy. But after the searing experience of the ill-designed Romneycare, expect a more conservative reformer in office.
Indeed, his business acumen has once more guided him to name Paul Ryan as his running mate to make sure he has policy experience at hand (although, in fairness, it was the Heritage Foundation – ahem – that guided him on Massachusetts individual mandate). Ryan also represents the business executives’ desire to advance young talent in “the firm” (see Snyder and his Lt. Guv Brian Calley).
No career pol, Romney’s policy instincts are weak. Like many executives he has an eye for short-term gain which can lead to uncomfortable flip-flops. It is why businessmen take tax breaks for green energy – because it is good for their bottom line NOW, not because it is good public policy for the long run. This is also where Snyder has crossed his party base – in taking “business” opportunities like federal millions for public transit or Obamabucks to build an Obamacare exchange.
Who is Mitt Romney? President Obama has tried to paint him as out of touch with America, but in one devastating line, Romney turned that around on Obama in Tampa. “President Obama promised to stop the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” he said of Obama’s inflated, esoteric rhetoric of four years ago. “My promise is to help you and your family.”
Thos are the earthy, practical words of a businessmen who wants to get things done. That’s the essence of President Romney – just like Governor Snyder.
Payne: Fact-checking the Janesville fact-checkers
Posted by hpayne on August 30, 2012
The Associated Press – better known as Obama’s media secret service detail – rushed into action Thursday night at the first sign of Paul Ryan drawing blood from their leader. Under the guise of “fact-checking,” AP took a number of editorial swings in order to protect The One.
Some factual punches landed, but the AP’s incorrect telling of Obama’s promise to keep GM’s Janesville plant open repeats a false media narrative. AP opined that “Ryan said Obama misled people in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wis., by making them think a General Motors plant there threatened with closure could be saved. ”
In fact, claims the AP, “the plant halted production in December 2008, weeks before Obama took office and well before he enacted a more robust auto industry bailout that rescued GM and Chrysler and allowed the majority of their plants – though not the Janesville facility – to stay in operation. Ryan himself voted for an auto bailout under President George W. Bush that was designed to help GM, but he was a vocal critic of the one pushed through by Obama that has been widely credited with revitalizing both GM and Chrysler.”
Whew! Four more years! The White House press office could not have put it better.
But in fact, the facts are these as I reported two weeks ago:
“(But) I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this (General Motors) plant will be here for another hundred years,” said Barack Obama in February, 2008, promising UAW workers at GM’s giant, troubled plant in Janesville, Wisc., that he would watch over them if elected president. ” . . . Before Obama was sworn in, the Janesville plant closed in late 2008, eliminating 6,000 jobs. And by his first day in office, Obama had forgotten the people of Janesville and the big SUVs they used to build.
The now-vice presidential nominee’s ears likely burned in 2008 because he was on the front lines trying to save a light truck plant in his backyard – even as a presidential nominee notorious for his public contempt for GM’s truck products parachuted into his district to pose as a savior. Last week, Ryan reminded America of Obama’s failed promise.
“I remember President Obama visiting it when he was first running, saying he’ll keep that plant open – one more broken promise,” Ryan said. “One of the reasons that plant got shut down is $4 gasoline. You see, this costs jobs. The president’s terrible energy policies are costing us jobs.”
(Obama’s) liberal media allies were quick to pounce on Ryan’s comments. “GM stopped production at its Janesville, Wisconsin production facility in 2008, when George W. Bush was still president,” barked the Daily Kos. . . . But the Left misses the point. Under Obamanomics, the government picks winners and losers. Obama promised Janesville would be a winner even as his economic policies guaranteed it would always be a loser. Indeed, Obama’s whole 2008 Janesville speech is a sobering road map for the job-killing policies he has put in place as president.
Were Obama serious about American manufacturing, he would allow energy companies to explore (Gulf drilling moratorium), would facilitate bringing those resources to market (blocking the Keystone pipeline), allow companies to hire employees without massive medical costs (Obamacare), encourage flexible, non-union shops (demonizing Boeing, the UAW bailout), and stop forcing companies to make products consumers don’t want (electric cars, windmills, etc.).
Payne: Private Ryan, Public Ryan
Posted by hpayne on August 29, 2012
If Mitt Romney embodies the optimism of America’s entrepreneurial class, then blue-eyed, 42-year old Paul Ryan is his public policy reflection – a pol with a Reagan & Kemp resume who wants to find solutions. “Together we can do this,” said Ryan over and over Wednesday night from the Tampa convention podium.
This is the can-do spirit of businessmen like Romney and Rick Snyder – and of reformist pols like Reagan and Ryan. You are where you come from, and Ryan’s tour down Autobiography Lane revealed a young man who had to take on responsibility at a young age when his father died, watched as his mother built a business (“she is my role model”), and absorbed the challenges of a Janesville, Wisconsin town that depended on the competitiveness of the U.S. auto industry to survive. Indeed, Ryan connects more easily to voters because he speaks the language of the jobs street – while Romney speaks the lingo of Harvard Business School.
Ryan is a pol marinated in Midwest individualism. Private Ryan reveals Public Ryan.
Ryan gave a devastating critique Wednesday of the free-spending, Obamacare-obsessed, crony capitalism that has marred the once-hopeful Obama years. The result? A generation of unemployed youth “staring at their faded Obama posters” on their bedroom wall in their parent’s house.
But Ryan, unlike many Republicans, is not content to just be a Monday-morning quarterback.
His history is to solve problems like health coverage and Medicare. Where the media has spared Obama coverage of his $700b Medicare heist and his historic downgrade of American debt, Ryan schooled America on the facts. He turned the Medicare question on its head – declaring Republicans the party of Medicare with his plan to voucherize an unsustainable system. Picking up on Chris Christie’s hard truth theme (alas, he did not spell out the failures of Romneycare), Ryan demanded that American demand accountability of its leaders.
“I’m going to level with you. We don’t have much time,” said Ryan in warning of the consequences of our European debt path. “We know what places like Wisconsin and Michigan looked like when times were good.”
As someone with Midwest factory town roots, he knows business builds that – not a government hundreds of miles away in Washington, DC.
Payne: Granholm says God shut down GOP convention
Posted by hpayne on August 28, 2012
“R convention delay due to Isaac: I guess God has ways to shut that whole thing down,” tweeted Jennifer Granholm this week.
But in contrast to Mitt Romney’s lame birth certificate joke in Metro Detroit last week, Granholm’s Pat Robertson-channeling joke was met with crickets from the national – and Michigan – media.
One can only imagine the outrage if those words had come from GOP lips. After all, Granholm is not just a prominent ex-governor and Democratic media celebrity – she is speaking at next week’s Democratic Convention in Charlotte. Imagine if Todd Akin had divined God’s wrath on Democrats. The headlines would have screamed. Reporters would have demanded that Romney distance himself. That Ryan distance himself. That Rick Snyder distance himself, and so on for days. Another diversion from the GOP’s economics theme, blah, blah, blah.
But this was a Democrat.
And so nothing from the Freep. Nothing from MLive. Nothing from the nets. The conservative blogosphere bird-dogged the comment (amplified by GOP counter-tweets) and raised enough of a ruckus that Granholm cried “uncle” the next day: “Not a good idea to tweet a joke when disaster looms. I apologize.”
Fair enough. But apologize for what? After all, thanks to the Secret Service-like protection of the MSM, she had done no harm to her party’s political image.
Payne: Beauty and the Beast
Posted by hpayne on August 28, 2012
“Beauty and the Beast” was showing on primetime Tuesday from the GOP’s Tampa convention.
There is no odder couple than Ann Romney and Governor Chris Christie. There was no greater contrast than the Michigan belle and the New Jersey brawler. Even their rhetoric appeared at odds with Ann saying that “I want to talk to you about love” and Christie announcing that “tonight we’re going to choose respect, not love.”
But despite their cinematic differences, Ann Romney and Christie were a clear one-two punch: Her job was to humanize Mitt Romney as the leader Americans can trust to take on our huge challenges, and Christie’s job was to assure America that Romney has the backbone to succeed. Ann’s job was easier than Christie’s. I have no doubt that America came away impressed with her poise and her husband’s bio as Mr. Fixit.
But I am not convinced America wants him to fix it.
“No one will work harder. No one will care more. No one can make this country a better place to live,” said Ann Romney in describing a husband with the determination to start a business and fix the Olympics. But Christie is a governor who has been fighting in the trenches – and it has not been pretty.
Christie, Scott Walker, John Kasich, and Rick Snyder (the only one of the four not to speak tonight) have fought bloody battles in the last two years against the entrenched unions that own the Democratic Party and President Obama. Walker’s epic victory in a recall election has been the headline success story, and Christie tough love has brought him 60 percent approval ratings – but Kasich was dealt a setback by a Ohio public that sided with Big Labor, and Snyder faces critical tests at the ballot box this fall.
“Our ideas are right for America” said Christie, and he is indisputably right. But right doesn’t assure victory. Like Reagan after Carter, Romney will undoubtedly roll back Obama’s stifling regulatory state, most of Obamacare, and return confidence to business so the economy can grow again. But then will Mitt Romney have the mettle to fight the much harder federal spending battles? To take on the giant federal entitlements? To reduce spending in a federal government that – unlike the states – has no constitutional requirement for a balanced budget? Will he “tell us the truth” as Chris Christie promised? Ronald Reagan could not.
American loved Ann Romney tonight for her winning defense of one of America’s most successful businessman. But did Chris Christie win America’s respect in telling them the hard truths of what is must be done?
Payne: The media’s Tampa agenda
Posted by hpayne on August 27, 2012
Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin’s wild detour into “legitimate rape” displayed not only a buffoon – but an undisciplined candidate with a tendency to wander down blind alleys like repealing the 17th Amendment (it’s the economy, stupid).
But the Akin controversy also exposes another problem: Why is the media obsessing over the abortion issue?
After all, repeated polls find that abortion does not crack the Top Ten in issues that matter to voters in this election year fraught with economic and debt crises. Yet liberal media – parroting the Obama War on Women line – has elevated the issue at the expense of news paramount to voter’s economic concerns (this writer is pro-choice).
The AP, for example, led it’s GOP convention coverage with the abortion issue despite the story being a week old and despite virtually every Republican having denounced Akin and disinvited him from Tampa. The wire service’s partisan brethren, reports the Media Research Center, found the MSM gave FOUR times the coverage to Akin’s gaffe compared to Joe Biden’s racially-insensitive “chains” gaffe
Meanwhile, Michigan (and national) readers were deprived of these important stories:
– According to Census stats, Middle class income has dropped by a staggering $4019 – and $2,544 since the recession ended three years ago, a 5 percent drop. These numbers are powerful evidence that President Obama’s claim that his policies have helped the middle class. Unfair, you say, because Mr. Obama inherited a recession? Well, even if you start the analysis when the recession ended in June 2009, the numbers are dismal.
– Due to the Obama administration’s War on Coal, coal businesses are closing and laying off workers in Ohio and West Virginia.
– Romneycare, Massachusetts’ Obamacare model, continues to foreshadow every ill predicted for its federal cousin. It now consumes 54 percent of the state’s budget (nearly double a decade ago) and the legislature this month passed price controls – a precursor to rationing.
That the MSM is ignoring these essential stories is media malpractice – especially in an election year in which voters deserve all the facts.
Payne: Fibber Joe vs. Gaffer Mitt
Posted by hpayne on August 26, 2012
Joe Biden told a Pinocchio-sized whopper in Detroit on Wednesday: Under Romney “a half trillion (in tax cuts) will go to 120,000 families. . . . The average middle class family will see their taxes go up $2000 a year.”
Two days later, in Commerce Township just north of Detroit, Mitt Romney told a gaffer: “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know this is the place where we were born and raised.”
Can you guess which one got headline news play?
Romney’s inappropriate joke stole the spotlight from his Big Mo Show as the candidate stormed into his home state to overflow crowds – riding the rock star status of his running mate, Paul Ryan, and a wave of new polls showing that the GOP ticket is threatening the Obama-Biden lead in the Auto Bailout State that Obama should have in his back pocket. If Obama losses Michigan, he is toast. Over 9,000 people descended on rural Metro Detroit’s Long Family Orchard Farm and Cider Mill “hours before the event and crowded local Commerce Township streets clamoring for an opportunity to see the pair,” reported The Detroit News (so big was the turnout – over twice what organizers had expected – that Ann Romney was briefly overwhelmed with tears on the stage).
All this momentum wasted by an off-the-cuff detour from Romney’s script.
The son of Michigan’s first Mormon governor, Romney shrugged off the birther joke as a stab at humor – but it was clearly a mistake, a lesson in the dangers of spontaneous, folksy humor when spontaneous, folksy humor ain’t your shtick. It was a blow to a campaign that has rightly seized the high ground from Obama’s gutter politics.
Indeed, the rest of Romney’s speech (and Ryan’s stem-winder before it – can Ryan be at the top of the ticket, please?) was a breath of fresh air after Biden’s divisive, truth-challenged, class warfare speech just 48 hours before.
Where Biden blamed Dubya Bush for the nation’s economic stall, Ryan said “we will not blame others, we will take responsibility.” Where Biden personally attacked Romney for not releasing his tax forms and holding “bank accounts in the Cayman Islands,” Romney attacked Obama polices that have brought 8 percent unemployment, trillion-dollar deficits, and “four years of small business finding it hard to hire people.”
And where Biden gave no road map for the next four years, Romney talked about “five things we’re going to do:”
1. “Take advantage of our energy resources.”
2. “Fix our schools putting parents and kids first and unions behind.”
3. “Trade that’s good for America.”
4. “A balanced budget. . . and get it to zero.”
5. “I’m going to champion small business” and “replace Obama care with something that gets costs under control.”
That sounds like the Hope and Change Americans have been waiting for for four long years. And if Romney sticks to the script, he’ll be rewarded for it.
Payne: Debbie Does Nothing
Posted by hpayne on August 23, 2012
Did you know that Debbie Stabenow is on the Senate Budget Committee?
When Stabenow’s GOP Senate opponent, Pete Hoekstra, held a news conference Monday taking Michigan’s junior senator to task for not fulfilling her basic job description for over three years – passing a budget – Michiganians might have been doubly surprised. Not just that Harry Reid’s Senate hasn’t passed a budget in 1,209 days – but that Stabenow is a budget committee member.
At a time when Senator Debbie has failed to do her fundamental job (try not submitting a budget for THREE years as a private sector executive – you won’t last long), the MSM has been silent.
A review of news coverage finds nary a mention of her budget incompetence. Neither has the MSM covered her “I can feel global warming when I fly” comment (which has earned her ridicule in policy circles). Or her buckling to President Obama and the Green Left to vote against the Keystone Pipeline and 20,000 jobs. Or the diversion of 40 percent of America’s corn crop to a useless ethanol mandate (at her leadership), a mandate that by some estimates is driving up food prices by 20 percent during this summer’s drought, hurting America’s poor most of all.
Nary a peep. Stabenow has not done her job. Neither has the media.
Payne: Ryan, Obama, and the Promise of Janesville
Posted by hpayne on August 22, 2012
“(But) I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this (General Motors) plant will be here for another hundred years,” said Barack Obama in February, 2008, promising UAW workers at GM’s giant, troubled plant in Janesville, Wisc., that he would watch over them if elected president. “When I talk about real change that will make a real difference in the lives of working families, it’s not just the poll-tested rhetoric of a political campaign. It’s the cause of my life. And you can be sure that it will be the cause of my presidency from the very first day I take office.”
It was just poll-tested rhetoric.
Before Obama was sworn in, the Janesville plant closed in late 2008, eliminating 6,000 jobs. And by his first day in office, Obama had forgotten the people of Janesville and the big SUVs they used to build. Obama not only didn’t keep his promise to the south Wisconsin town, he pursued an energy policy that rewarded politically connected green investors (see Solyndra and Fisker) while making it harder for Janesville to revive the trucks it once produced.
Janesville would be forgotten like so many Obama political promises but for one fateful turn of history: Janesville is the hometown of Paul Ryan.
The now-vice presidential nominee’s ears likely burned in 2008 because he was on the front lines trying to save a light truck plant in his backyard — even as a presidential nominee notorious for his public contempt for GM’s truck products parachuted into his district to pose as a savior. Last week, Ryan reminded America of Obama’s failed promise.
“I remember President Obama visiting it when he was first running, saying he’ll keep that plant open — one more broken promise,” Ryan said. “One of the reasons that plant got shut down is $4 gasoline. You see, this costs jobs. The president’s terrible energy policies are costing us jobs.”
Another reason was $70-an-hour UAW wage-benefit rates compared withToyota’s $48 hourly wage. Ryan’s speech provides some insight into the conservative policy wonk’s complex political background: a popular, six-term conservative who represents blue and white collars in a politically split Wisconsin district, who lobbied for government help for Janesville, and who voted for Barack Obama’s auto bailout.
But the Janesville closing is more revealing of Obama.
His liberal media allies were quick to pounce on Ryan’s comments. “GM stopped production at its Janesville, Wisconsin production facility in 2008, when George W. Bush was still president,” barked the Daily Kos, filling in Ryan’s obvious blank (true enough, unfriendly-to-Detroit-truck mpg laws are also the legacy of George “We’re Addicted to Oil” Bush).
But the Left misses the point. Under Obamanomics, the government picks winners and losers. Obama promised Janesville would be a winner even as his economic policies guaranteed it would always be a loser. Indeed, Obama’s whole 2008 Janesville speech is a sobering road map for the job-killing policies he has put in place as president.
Were Obama serious about American manufacturing, he would allow energy companies to explore (Gulf drilling moratorium), would facilitate bringing those resources to market (blocking the Keystone pipeline), allow companies to hire employees without massive medical costs (Obamacare), encourage flexible, non-union shops (demonizing Boeing, the UAW bailout), and stop forcing companies to make products consumers don’t want (electric cars, windmills, etc.).
Then Janesville might still have promise.
Payne: Gaffeless, truthless Joe
Posted by hpayne on August 22, 2012
Joe Biden parachuted into the heart of Detroit Wednesday, a Democratic city suffering under a 20 percent unemployment rate, the nation’s worst public schools, a federal-welfare-induced implosion of the nuclear family, violent gangs of fatherless young men, and labor unions whose fat contracts have brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy.
“Four more years!” chanted the crowd.
Needless to say, the mixed audience of suburbanite party activists and unionistas bused in to Renaissance Public High School’s auditorium (schools don’t open to students until after Labor Day) to cheer Obama-Biden 2012 don’t have to live in the mean streets that their liberal programs have created. So Biden didn’t dwell on the misery outside the school where 220 people have been murdered already this year. Indeed, Biden didn’t mention gritty Detroit reality all.
Instead, Biden gave the packed high school auditorium a lesson in Class Warfare 101.
“Why are they doing all this?” said Biden of a Romney-Ryan team he warned is coming to steal your Medicaid, Medicare, and school aid. “To provide massive tax cuts for the wealthy.”
Lesson one, trash your opponent. Lesson two, trash the facts.” A half trillion (in tax cuts) will go to 120,000 families,” scared Biden. “The average middle class family will see their taxes go up $2000 a year.”
This is a lie.
Romney’s actual proposal is an across the board 20 percent rate cut for anyone who pays income taxes. So from top earners (from 35 to 28 percent rate) right down to the bottom (from 10 to 8), everyone gets the same cut. The plan stays revenue neutral by reducing or eliminating tax deductions and loopholes (as in Reagan’s successful tax reform of 1986). Where does Biden get the $2000 figure? “This is real,” he told the audience defensively. No, he simply made it up.
Michigan’s media gaffe-police took all this with a collective yawn. “Biden didn’t offer up any overt verbal oddities,” reported the liberal Detroit Free Press, satisfied that the speech contained no “chain” diversions while ignoring its uncivil tone and serial untruths.
Biden continued to bash the rich as schemers that outsource jobs, don’t pay enough taxes, and “have bank accounts in the Cayman Islands” — the irony of which is that the rich are all Detroit has left. Were it not for massive investments in downtown Detroit by Detroit millionaires like Ilitch, Penske, and Gilbert in the last decade, Detroit would be even worse off. Yet, Biden’s approach is to create more resentment for these men, forcing them to send more money to Washington – and leaving them with less with which to grow Detroit.
“We’re going to rebuild the middle class,” Biden concluded. But the result of his party’s policies in Detroit has meant an emptying-out of the middle-class. Detroit lost a staggering 25 percent of its population in the last decade as the black middle class followed the white and ethnic middle class into neighboring, Republican-run, low-tax, low-crime Oakland County.
And that, class, is Economics101.
Payne: Michigan stumbles
Posted by hpayne on August 15, 2012
Michigan is going backwards. And that’s a problem for President Obama. . . and Governor Snyder.
Michigan’s unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent in July – nearly a half point higher than June’s 8.6 percent rate – and continuing a sudden reversal in the state’s recovery. It was the third straight month the jobless rate has risen.
The news comes despite the continued rebound of the Detroit automotive industry – belying President Obama’s claim that an auto bailout rescued the U.S. economy and focusing attention on Obama’s larger, anti-business regulatory, spending, and tax priorities that are choking national job growth.
“I am skeptical about the claim that because the auto industry was saved, that saved Michigan,” says James Hohman, chief economist for The Mackinac Center, a Michigan think tank. Hohman notes that Michigan’s unemployment rate is still lower than last July’s 10.6 percent rate, but Michigan’s stalled recovery mirrors the national economic slowdown in the second quarter.
“There is no decoupling Michigan’s economy from the nation,” says Hohman.
Granted, Michigan is not the obvious target of Obama’s War on Coal, for example, that is literally throwing people out of work in energy states like Ohio and West Virginia. But Michigan businesses are suffering from the same federal policies that are strangling all commerce: The cost of federal regulation, the uncertainty of Obamacare costs to new hires, increased health costs driven by Obamacare, and the looming tax cliff on January where – if re-elected- Obama threatens to increase the costs of capital (capital gains and dividend tax rates) by a staggering 50 percent.
Business skittishness at the prospect of second term may explain what Hohman calls “a strange, midyear slowdown” in a national recovery that is already the worst since WW2.
“Job creation has slowed down but job destruction has not,” adds Hohman of the business cycle. The rise in unemployed workers comes almost entirely from lost jobs – not workers leaving the labor force – reports the state Department of Technology, Management & Budget. In Detroit – a city whose residents voted overwhelmingly for Obama – the situation is much worse, with official unemployment at 19 percent.
Michigan’s plight is significant given Obama’s focus on its core industry as a cornerstone of his national economic policy. A key swing state, Michigan’s swoon imperils Obama’s re-election chances – but the unemployment number is hardly good news for Michigan’s pro-business governor either.
While Snyder’s first term has seen welcome stability in the state’s fiscal situation after the chaotic years of Jennifer Granholm, 9 percent unemployment also raises questions about whether he has done enough to spur growth. Yes, he has simplified the tax code and regulations, but he neglected a chance to cut individual rates (paid by many small businesses) below that if his predecessor, he has ignored he right-to-work labor movement, and he has embraced Obama’s health care exchanges for the state.
With two years still left in his term, Snyder lacks an aggressive growth plan other than hoping that Mitt Romney gets elected. But given the evidence that Michigan’s star is tied to the nation’s, that is the hope for the other 49 states as well.
Payne: How Obama bullied Big Auto
Posted by hpayne on August 14, 2012
“The Campaign,” an attack on the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling overturning restrictions on free speech, masquerades as a summer comedy starring Will Farrell. The film furthers the simplistic media-Hollywood Left stereotype that corporations buy politicians.
That’s fiction.
For a dose of reality, a new House Oversight Committee report on the Obama Administration’s 54.5 MPG-by-2025 average vehicle fuel economy mandate reveals that the real power lies with federal bureaucrats and their Green allies. Together they have forced unreasonable environmental standards down corporate throats — after which corporations must spend millions in lobbying to try and contain their indigestion.
So-called Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE) have always been opaque and ripe for abuse. But standards that were once set by the Department of Transportation — which at least has a passing familiarity with autos — have now been hijacked by the Green Church (that is, the EPA).
The result, reports the Oversight Committee is that the “the Administration dictated politically motivated standards to a captive automobile industry” in a “raw political process designed to appease environmental extremists. These special interest groups were given unprecedented and powerful seats at the table.”
Thus, the quixotic 54.5 MPG standard was picked out of thin air. This absurd number (designed by Green extremists to eliminate the internal combustion engine which drives 97 percent of new cars today) was met with shock from automakers as “representatives from GM explained to Administration officials how their proposal was ‘overly aggressive’ and commercially unworkable.”
Commercially unworkable? Details, details.
Obama Auto Czar Ron Bloom arrogantly asserted the automakers didn’t know their own business. “Our technical folks think you can get there,” he bullied in an email to one executive.
But GM — and its Detroit neighbor, Chrysler — had an ace in the hole: They are partially-owned by the same federal government making the regulations. Soon Obama — and his DC brethren — were reaping the rewards of their new regulatory power by sitting at the receiving end of millions in lobbying from the Detroit Three to tilt the playing field.
“Both Chrysler and General Motors (in 2011) posted their biggest annual lobbying tallies since the government bailouts,” reports the Center for Responsive Politics. “General Motors led the charge in 2011, pouring $10.8 million into its federal lobbying budget. (Chrysler) spent $4.3 million on federal lobbying . . . (and ) Ford spent about $6.7 million.”
As a result, the Obama Administration let slide rules that both cars and trucks had to increase fuel efficiency by 5 percent a year. Instead, trucks only had to make 3.5 percent increases (a still absurd standard). Why? Because the Big Three are more dependent on sales of light trucks than their Japanese competitors.
“Although this new incentive helped the Administration secure the critical support of the three domestic automakers,” says the Oversight Committee, “the foreign manufacturers immediately noticed the inherent unfairness. . . . One executive even described the light-truck carve-out as a ‘second auto bailout.'”
Said one Toyota exec: The deal was an “old Detroit tactic. It may hurt me, but it hurts my competitors more.”
And so it goes, with auto manufacturers of all nationalities pouring more money into Washington to influence the real power in America: Obama’s regulatory Leviathan. “The Administration included ‘bonus credits’ for certain technologies,” continues the report, “such as electric vehicles, flexible-fuel vehicles, and clean natural gas vehicles” in order to game the numbers.
How much must they be gamed? Truecar.com, a leading industry analyst, reports that the current average fuel economy of all cars sold is only 23.1 mpg — nowhere close to the 35.5-by-2015, much less the 54.5-by-2025.
Get ready for many millions more diverted to Washington lobbying.