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                 June 17, 2010

Transparently Power Hungry

by Thomas A. Droleskey

President Barack Hussein Obama promised the suckers who voted for him that he would given them a government of "transparency." While this was a lie as Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus is a fascist who hates criticism--and even probing questions from "mainstream" media--and is actively seeking to prosecute those in his socialist administration who leak information to the press (see The Obama Administration's Next Leaker Prosecution?), there are two areas where Obama is indeed quite transparent.

First, as was demonstrated on Tuesday, June 15, 2010, in his televised address to the nation on the catastrophe that has become the aftermath of explosion at the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent oil leak that is only twenty percent contained via a recovery process at the present time as an amount equivalent to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico every four days, Barack Hussein Obama is quite transparently an intellectual cipher. His address (Remarks by the President to the Nation on the BP Oil Spill) this past Tuesday evening was an insult the intelligence of viewers worldwide who watched it.

Even some of the naturalists of the false opposite of the "left" who have been supporters of his are finding that they have a veritable James Danforth Quayle on their hands who speaks in nothing but empty platitudes. It is pretty bad when committed leftist recognize the transparency of one of their own number who did not even explain how  the Federal government of the United States of America plans to deal with the massive oil spill or its disastrous consequences over the course of the long term. He simply pledged that this would be done. What's that I hear, James Earl Carter, Jr., saying "Trust me"? (See Carter wins with 'Trust me' slogan.) Depending upon what happens in the off-year general election on Tuesday, November 2, 2010, Barack Hussein Obama may not be just a one-term president; he may find himself becoming only the second elected incumbent president to be denied re-nomination by his own political party since Franklin Pierce in 1856.

Second, the speech given by Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus on Tuesday evening was a transparent power grab, a naked exploitation of the true tragedy represented by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that has already devastated the lives of so many hard-working Americans, many of whom are Catholics, along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. What I wrote three days ago in Deeper Waters Than We Think was brought to life in Obama's speech, which, as so many predicted, was used as the means of promoting his envirocommunists social engineering of using our tax dollars to promote the kinds of "energy alternatives" that were proposed by James Earl Carter, Jr., on April 18, 1977 (Jimmy "Trust Me" Carter's Energy Speech), is really all I need to say in this article about the transparency of what Obama is attempting to do as he exploits this crisis for his fascistic-socialistic ends:

Second there is also the matter of the oil rig workers who are now out of jobs in the Gulf of Mexico and and all across the rest of the country because of the Obama administration's efforts to exploit the crisis caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion and subsequent leak to advance its socialist-fascist agenda of enacting legislation mandating "alternative energy" that will result in government-created shortages of fossil fuel oil and a rise in prices for gasoline and home heating fuel (and jet fuel for airplanes) that will presage a new round of inflation, forcing many people to reduce their travels entirely, placing extraordinary burdens upon the poor who must use their automobiles to get to work.

There is no need for any kind of moratorium on the operation of new deepwater oil wells anywhere in the country simply because of the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon well that was made possible a process of cementing around the well that even executives of British Petroleum knew could result in an explosion. The "accident," if it was such (and that will be determined in due course; if not now, certainly to be revealed on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead), is without precedent. Officials of the Obama administration are merely attempting to justify their own ideological agenda by means of the six month moratorium on the issuance of  permits for new deepwater oil drilling projects, which punishes needlessly hard-working Americans and their families and the merchants at whose businesses they shop in their local communities. The imposition of this kind of suffering on innocent human beings is one of the worst kinds of social engineering imaginable.

Although reports indicate that Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus (aka President Barack Hussein Obama) is going to mandate that British Petroleum, which established an escrow account to pay for some of the damages caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil sill, pay the salaries of each of the workers who are unemployed now as a result of his, Obama's, unilateral, arbitrary and thoroughly unjustified six-month moratorium on off-shore oil drilling, this demand is unjust and ludicrous. Yes, British Petroleum is responsible for the damages caused in the Gulf of Mexico and for the loss of revenue incurred by its own workers and those who have depended upon the fish and shrimp in the Gulf for their livelihood. British Petroleum is not responsible for paying those who have been put out of work by Barack Hussein Obama and his socialist, social-engineering minions. And it is highly doubtful that any president of the United States of America has the legal authority to mandate British Petroleum to cover the costs of his own administration's volitional policy decisions that have cost Americans their livelihoods This is another one of Obama's emotional red herrings.

Have you asked yourselves when this six-month moratorium on new deepwater oil will projects, which was rejected by a panel of experts who offered their recommendations to government officials (see White House Rejects Oil Report Claims) on off-shore oil operations will end? What will happen to the floating rigs? Will their operators be content to wait for the social-engineers to decide that they can resume operations? Or will those floating rigs be shut down and moved to other locations (such as off the western coast of Africa or in the North Atlantic, as noted in the news reported just above)? Will those operators who leave ever return to the United States of America? Are the jobs that have been lost at present solely because of the social-engineering of the Obama administration gone forever? Are we at some point in the future to lose the benefits of all off-shore oil drilling and jobs associated it to other locations just as almost all of our manufacturing jobs have been lost to Red China or the Republic of China or Taiwan or Indonesia or Malaysia or Mexico?

 

An Obama "energy bill," which is the means to impose one of the chief goals of his fellow envirocommunists, the "cap and trade" on carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" emissions, is the means to give unto his Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointees all manner of vague regulatory powers that will constitute what will amount to yet another "blank check" to unelected regulators, many of whom are out-and-out socialists and envirocommunists and thorough believers in "population control," to do with the energy industry what has been done to the banking and automobile and investment industries as a result of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and what is unfolding right before our very eyes as the plans for ObamaCare are being drawn up by the pro-abortion Catholic Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, and her anti-life minions:

Late last week saw the first leaks of the administration's draft regulations for implementing the ObamaCare law -- and everything is playing out just as the critics warned.

The 3,000-odd pages of legislation left most of the really important (and controversial) policy decisions to the regulations that government agencies were told to issue once the bill passed. Now that those regs are starting to take shape, it's clear that the Obama team is using its new power to exert tight control over the payment and delivery of all formerly "private" health insurance.

The ObamaCare law references the Secretary of Health and Human Services almost 2,200 times and uses the phrase "the secretary shall" more than 725. Each reference requires HHS to set new rules on medical care, giving control to an existing federal office or one of 160 new agencies that the bill created.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (who was once the Kansas state-insurance commissioner) has taken to these tasks with zeal. In some circles, she's now known as the nation's "insurance regulator in chief."

She's starting off by applying new regs to health plans offered by large employers -- even though these costly rules were supposedly only going to apply to plans sold in the state insurance "exchanges" that don't get created until 2014. This twist is spelled out in an 83-page draft of a new regulation that leaked late last week.

Bottom line: Sebelius means to dictate what your insurance plan must look like almost from day one, no matter how you get your coverage.

Indeed, the draft regs envision more than half of all policies having to change within three years -- an unmistakable break with President's Obama's oft-repeated promise, "If people like their insurance, they will be able to keep it."

Yet that may be the least of the broken promises.

Ultimately, these rules force consumers to buy one of just four health policies -- which vary mostly only by trading off higher co-payments for lower premiums, while offering essentially the same actual benefits. In arguing for passage of the law, ObamaCare's defenders claimed the rules were aimed at health plans sold in the "exchanges." Oops: Now Sebelius is applying them to employer plans. Eventually, this would force all but the very wealthiest Americans into a single government-designed insurance scheme.

This is far from the only area where Secretary Sebelius is exploiting the law's fuzzy language to tighten her control over the private insurance market. In recent weeks, she has said that the new law gives her authority to review and even set the rates on health policies sold in private markets, a role previously left to state insurance regulators.

The ObamaCare bills were written to paper over an intellectual divide between White House economists and HHS policy wonks. Some economists wanted genuine competition to take root in the new federally managed insurance "exchanges." The HHS crew favored a one-sized government plan with tight federal regulation over benefits.

The law itself didn't explicitly side with either school -- but it did leave the writing of the implementing regs to those same HHS wonks. Unfortunately, those more moderate White House economists are now leaving the administration, including the rumored departure of widely admired businessman and health-care expert Robert Kocher.

Washington insiders refer to this HHS team as "true believers" -- a group of earnest, left-leaning activists who've long favored a single nationalized health plan. They are massaging the law's vagueness to give themselves the tight federal control over health care that will bring their vision into practice.

Critics warned that the Obama bill meant a federal takeover of health care, with Washington bureaucrats making core decisions about medical care. With ObamaCare taking shape, that's exactly what consumers are getting. Saying "we told you so" is no consolation to those who took the president at his word. (Scott Gottlieb, "ObamaCare Threatens Your Health Care," New York Post, June 14, 2010.)

 

The collection of naturalists of the "left" in the Obama administration have used TARP as a means to dictate internal policy operations  to private corporations that have received "Federal bailout funds." The naturalist Ben Stein wrote the following about this in the American Spectator:

 

The BP behavior is reminiscent of how, immediately after assuming office, Mr. Obama, with no Congressional authority or administrative allowance, simply made a phone call to fire the head of GM. When I called the White House press office to ask under what law or regulation Mr. Obama was acting, I was told he did not need a law. If the government put a lot of money into GM, it could call the shots at GM, I was told. But under what authority, I asked. "None needed," was the final answer.

Without any new legislation, President Obama has used returned TARP money as a political slush fund to prop up favorite industries. This is the same problem: serious executive action without legislative authority. (Our Caudillo President.)

 

It has been my contention since the beginning of my academic career as a political scientist that, decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America on the matter to the contrary notwithstanding as truth is not whatever the justices of the high court decide it to be but exists independently of human acceptance of it, that the Congressional delegation of "rule-making" ability to Cabinet departments and to independent regulatory bodies and the galaxy of quasi-independent agencies that are filled with unelected officials with ideological agendas and/or very close ties to the very people whose industries or businesses they are supposed to regulate is unconstitutional as it delegates unto unelected officials the power to write rules that have the binding the force of the civil law, to enforce those rules and, at least in some cases, to serve as the court of first instance in reviewing appeals to the enforcement of those rules brought before their administration law judges or hearing officers who are supposed to adjudicate fairly on the basis of their understanding of the laws written by their fellow unelected officials in a giving agency or department. There is an entire field of public law, administrative law, that is composed of lawyers who are trained to sift the Federal Register, the official publisher of all Federal rules and regulations, in order to let their corporate or middle-sized business clients who can their afford their services of any new rules and regulations that might affect their operations. This is one of the reasons why nothing short of a cataclysmic disaster is going to change the regulatory process as too many people are making too much money off of the regulations that exist and the disputes arise from their enforcement. Naturalists of the "left" thrive on issuing new regulations.

The "cap and trade" bill that Barack Hussein Obama wants but did not mention in his televised address on Tuesday evening, June 15, 2010, as he seeks to prepare the nation for another Trojan Horse bill that delegates Congressional law-making authority to his unelected rule-making legislators, was named the "American Clean Energy and Security Act" when it was introduced into the United States House of Representatives by United States Representative Henry Waxman on May 15, 2009, before being passed by a House vote of 219-212 (the same vote total by which ObamaCare was approved by the members of the United States House of Representatives on Sunday, March 21, 2010), on June 26, 2009. These are among the socialistic provisions contained therein as summarized in a newspaper report last year and cited in King George III Is Owed An Apology:

 

Although some will still not believe those findings, there is undoubtedly enough evidence to merit a discussion or debate. No debate ever took place and questioning the climate-change “science” is not tolerated well. In fact, The London Telegraph printed an article stating climate change denial should be considered a mental disorder. Al Gore commonly responds to the opposition with, “There are also people who believe the moon landing took place in a studio in Arizona too.” Therefore insinuating the skeptics and opposition are conspiracy theorists. No conspiracy theorists here AG, just conspiracy fact.

Home Audit: A Look into the Future

The bill states every home owner will receive an energy audit. What is a home energy audit? It is an intrusive visit made by the bureaucrats at the Home Energy Team or a similar group.  They will examine and report the way you live your life directly to RESNET (Residential Energy Services Network) . Light fixtures, socket types, spas, hot tubs, windows, appliances, walls and roofs will all be under review. Energy tests will be conducted throughout your house. At the end of the visit you will receive a report and a rating. The report will focus on the changes you need to make and the rating is called a HERS rating (Home Energy Rating System). RESNET will perform the audits through authorized contractors. RESNET has adopted the Mortgage Industry National Home Energy Rating Standards. The standards set the national procedures for home energy ratings.

According to RESNET, an audit consists of::

Comprehensive Home Energy Audit - A level of the RESNET Home Energy Audit process defined by this standard to include the evaluation, diagnosis and proposed treatment of an existing home. The Comprehensive Home Energy Audit may be based on a Home Performance Assessment (“Comprehensive Home Performance Energy Audit”) or Home Energy Rating (“Comprehensive HERS Audit”), in accordance with the criteria established by this Standard. A homeowner may elect to go through this process with or without a prior Home Energy Survey or Diagnostic Home Energy Survey. 

Here is an in-depth breakdown of the audit:  

704.1.2.3 The Home Energy Survey Professional shall request copies of utility bills or written permission to obtain the energy use information from the utility company, and use them to produce an estimate of generalized end-uses (base, heating, and cooling).

704.1.2.5. Minimum Procedures for an In-Home Energy Survey:

704.1.2.5.1.1 R-values of wall/ceiling/floor insulation.

704.1.2.5.1.2 Square footage and approximate age of home.

704.1.2.5.1.3 Type of windows: glazing type(s) and frame material(s).

704.1.2.5.1.4 Type, model number, and location of heating/cooling system(s).

704.1.2.5.1.5 Type of ductwork, location and R-value of duct insulation, and any indications of previous duct sealing.

704.1.2.5.1.6 Type of foundation is crawl, basement, or slab.

704.1.2.5.1.7 Checklist of common air-leakage sites indicating likely opportunities for leakage reduction.

704.1.2.5.1.8 Estimated age and efficiency of major appliances such as dishwashers, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and dryers.

704.1.2.5.1.9 Number and type of hardwired light fixtures and screw-in bulbs importable lamps suitable for energy efficient re-lamping.

704.1.2.5.1.10 Visual indications of condensation.

704.1.2.5.1.11 Presence and location of exhaust fans, and determination of whether they are vented outdoors.

704.1.2.5.1.12 Number and type of water fixtures (e.g. faucets, showerheads).

704.1.2.5.1.13 Presence and type(s) of combustion equipment; identification of visually identifiable evidence of flame rollout, blocked chimney, and corroded or missing vent connector. 

 

There is no doubt homes need to be more efficient, however, this audit will drain the pockets of the unlucky people whose houses are older and/or cheaply made due to builder irresponsibility. Let’s say your builder used cheap windows, very little insulation or a high-water toilet, the cost of those upgrades will be in the thousands of dollars. By making the recommended changes, you will receive a tax credit for improvements made under the energy star program. Please note, most rebates are 30% of cost, maximum $1500. Good luck if your central air is deemed unacceptable.  After the upgrades are completed, you must have the auditors back out to your property for a final inspection. Early reports of denying audits carry a misdemeanor charge and a $2000 fine for each count.  The more you deny, the more you pay.

As mentioned before, we do need clean energy, less fossil fuel, more efficient homes and cars, but not this way.  Make no mistake, we do have real environmental crises; drugs in the water, cloning, species extinction, genocide and genetically modified food are all very real.  Let’s focus on those, before you focus on the kind of faucet I have in the bathroom. Recycle, walk, ride a bike from time-to-time, open your windows, tune-up your car and plant a garden, but please, stay out of my house! (Kansas-City-Headlines-Examiner~y2009m7d1-Clean-Energy-and-Security-Act-brings-auditors-into-your-home.)

 

Obama's speech on Tuesday evening, June 15, 2010, was a pure exercise in exploitation and manipulation as the power hungry, Marxist-trained man who read the speech as it was being fed to his blank eyes via a TelePrompTer wants to use every genuine crisis to advance the ideological crusade that defines his entire existence. The fact Eurosocialism has failed and has brought countries there to their knees financially means nothing to him. ObamaSocialism is going to succeed where Eurosocialism has failed. Barack Hussein Obama is transparently stupid.

Third, it must be kept in mind that Obama's response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not a case of managerial incompetence. This is, as just noted, a case of pure exploitation. This is why he must blame, however obliquely, his administration's apparently disjoined response to this disaster on the administration of the man who made his own election possible, former President George Walker Bush:

When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency.  But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow.  And so Secretary Salazar and I are bringing in new leadership at the agency -- Michael Bromwich, who was a tough federal prosecutor and Inspector General.  And his charge over the next few months is to build an organization that acts as the oil industry’s watchdog -- not its partner. (Remarks by the President to the Nation on the BP Oil Spill)

 

Longtime readers of my writing know that few people were as consistently and brutally critical of George Walker Bush's presidency as I was. Bush is gone now, however. We continue to pray for his conversion to the true Faith, as we pray for Obama's conversion to the true Faith. Responsibility for governing the United States of America and mastering the details of the Federal government's bureaucracy and the implementation of public policy passed from Bush to Barack Hussein Obama on January 20, 2009. The unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started by George Walker Bush. They now belong wholly to Barack Hussein Obama. George Walker Bush bears blame for creating the conditions and establishing the programs that made Obama's election possible on November 4, 2008. He is gone. The blame for the apparent "mismanagement" for political ends of current crises rests solely on the shoulders of the empty, vacuous suit who has the blood of the innocent preborn dripping on his presidential hands by virtue of the executive orders that he has issued that have the resulted a more liberal amount of surgical baby-killing with Federal taxpayer dollars than was the case in the "Bush 43" administration.

Barack Hussein Obama made it a point in his address on Tuesday evening, June 15, 2010, to repeat the old envirocommunists canard that the United States of America has two percent of the world's oil reserves but consumes twenty percent of those world reserves. Socialists always want to change the physical behavior of people in proportion to what they consider is a "fair" share of wealth and natural resources, oblivious, as are the naturalists of the "right," it should be noted, to the simple truth that the United States of America has about two percent of the world's population but is responsible for exporting a large proportion of the sins that so offend God and cause the ruin of souls. And it is the ruin of souls as the eternal, immutable laws of God  are violated with utter impunity under cover of the civil law and in every aspect of popular culture that disrupts even the forces of nature.

What I wrote two months ago in Wake Up and Smell The Sulphur Dioxide is relevant once again:

I would entreat you, however, to consider how Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself told Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres that the sins of men in Ecuador, a country favored with the visits of Our Lady of Good Success and ruled for twelve years (1859 to 1865 and 1869 to the time of assassination in 1875) by that great exemplar of the Social Reign of Christ the King, Gabriel Garcia Moreno, would diminish the luster of the sunsets in that country on the equator:

She saw that when this would happen, the beautiful dawn that each morning would break forth with refulgence over this land--so enchantingly spectacular that some persons would rise at daybreak just to see the day break--would lose some of its brilliance. Thus does earth reflect Heaven, and the earth's beauty and vitality diminish with sin and infidelity to grace. This favor of beautiful dawns should cease, Mother Mariana was given to understand, because the Republic [of Ecuador, which was then only a Spanish colony] would become corrupt and ungrateful for the benefits it received from God. (Marian Therese Horvat, Ph.D., Stories and Miracles of Our Lady of Good Success, Tradition in Action, Inc., 2002, p. 68.)

 

Men must quit their sins and repent of them in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance. They must treat each other as they would treat Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who was made Flesh in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb, where He spent nine months growing to the point of His Nativity in poverty and anonymity in Bethlehem on Christmas Day. No one can say--that he loves Our Lord and yet supports His dismemberment mystically in the persons of innocent preborn children. And it is impossible to provide for any element of  the common temporal good on an enduring basis as long as the innocent preborn are attacked with legal impunity, as long as the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage is denied by means of contraception, as long as perversity is promoted under the slogans of "diversity" and "human rights," as long as men live as though there is no true Church and that they do not have to face Christ the King as their Judge at the moment of their Particular Judgments.

We do not know how long it will be until Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Second Coming at the end of the world, which is why we must be prepared at all times for the end of our own lives. We do not know if the signs of natural disasters and cataclysms that are occurring at the time signify the nearing of Our Lord's Second Coming. What we can say for sure, however, is that truly extraordinary things are happening in our midst as a world that has gone mad with the conceits of the deification of man and his "rights." It is up to those of us who have the Faith to see the deeper supernatural significance of these events and to make more and more reparation for our sins, especially by praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.

It is my belief, far from infallible, that God is indeed speaking to us through the events of nature, trying to demonstrate what appears to be some to be a terrible inconvenience and a source of material loss is symbolic symbolic of the horror of our own sins and the devastation that they wreak in our own souls and in the world-at-large.

As I see it, there is little more that needs to be written. We are in the midst of a chastisement. We need to make more and more reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our sins and for those of the whole world as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.

Let us continue praying for the people on the Gulf coast and for those who are working to contain the spread of the oil leak.

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

 

What are we waiting for?

 

Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

 

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

 

 





© Copyright 2010, Thomas A. Droleskey. All rights reserved.