(Reuters) President Barack Obama will call for cutting the top 35 percent corporate tax rate as early as this month, according to two sources close to the administration.

The president is likely to propose a rate closer to an average of that seen in peer nations, the sources said.

That would put the rate at about 20%. But, why not announce it now? Because this isn’t about passing a corporate tax rate cut, but, about politics

Facing a potentially tough presidential re-election challenge this November, Obama will propose cutting the rate following the release of his 2013 budget plan on Monday, February 13, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record.

While he spent a big part of his January speech to Congress criticizing businesses for moving jobs overseas, Obama said that “companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world.”

If he does announce a plan, the details will probably end up helping just a few companies, probably ones led by people who vote Democrat and donate to Democrats, much like with Obama’s Stimulus. And much like Obama’s vaunted bank settlement, which seems to help the big bank owners.

An overhaul of the corporate tax system is extremely unlikely in an election year, but the president’s proposal could be an olive branch to the business community to show that he agrees with them on one key aspect of tax reform.

And there you go, this is about campaign optics, not about actually Doing Something. He’ll probably offer up something which looks great on the outside, but has poison pills on the inside, which are objectionable to the GOP. The media will avoid mention of the poison pills, and make the GOP look bad. If the GOP has any brains, they should pass a clean corporate tax rate quickly, forcing Obama’s hand. They should do the same with the payroll tax cut, extending it for one year, get ahead of the curve. Obama whined about this in this week’s weakly address (yes, I meant to spell it that way). Obama plans to offer the cut in his budget. Now we know why Democrats wanted a 2 month extension: to attempt to make Obama look magnanimous by pushing a year long extension, which is what Republicans wanted in the first place.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Politico) The issue of race and American politics, never far beneath the surface during Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, is making a loud, overt and surprisingly early appearance in the 2012 presidential race.

And no one knows — least of all Obama himself — what impact the race card, always a wild card, will have on the president’s reelection prospects.

I’ll suggest it backfires, particularly if Team Obama and their sycophants attack Romney’s Mormonism.

In the past several months, Newt Gingrich has drawn sharp criticism for labeling Obama the “food stamp president” and for suggesting poor kids in New York’s majority-minority school system burnish their work ethic by picking up mops. First lady Michelle Obama bridled at the perception that she’s an “angry black woman.” Obama’s Chicago-based campaign has pushed back against stories that he’s more or less given up on the white vote.

Except, Newt wasn’t just talking about Black people: the majority of food stamp recipients are Caucasian. Michelle Obama is the one who brought up the angry black woman thing in order to create racial division. And Team Obama was the one who said they had given up on the white vote.

But nothing has illustrated the potentially explosive political impact of race — an issue that Obama has downplayed throughout his career — like the firestorm around the image of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer wagging her finger at the first black president of the United States.

If there were any illusion that 2012 would be the post-racial election most Americans hoped for, it vanished with that single shake of a finger and 30 seconds of sniping lost to history in the turbine roar of Air Force One.

Got that? The duly elected Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, is an evil racist simply because she wagged her finger in the face of a disrespectful half-black President. By that definition, we could call Obama a sexist, since he was disrespectful to Brewer and walked away.

But, what else does Obama have to run on? He certainly can’t run on his record. He doesn’t like to talk about his signature legislation, the Stimulus and Obamacare. He can play with the economic numbers all he wants, but people are hurting, and things are not getting better. The housing industry is still a major mess. Real world prices are rising. Disposable income is very low. Consumer confidence is low. There are historic numbers of people who have given up on the job market. The recession supposedly ended in June, 2009, yet, here in 2012, nothing seems to have changed.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Said story: Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights. (snip)

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.

Some may in fact see it as a UN plot, but, then, the UN has been pushing junk science and all sorts of initiatives, most recently “biodiversity” and “sustainability”, as a means to put more control into the hands of government, as well as people’s hard earned money. As Tom Nelson points out

Is Revkin really sure that Tea Party activisits don’t just see their hard-earned cash being blown on idiotic left-wing bad-weather-preventing projects?

Let me tell you a little tale. Behind my home is a greenway that follows the Neuse River. The stretch in my area, which extends a few miles from the Highway 264 bridge north, is mostly dirt and gravel. Over the last few months they have been paving it. And cutting down trees. Wait, cutting down trees on a greenway? And by “months” they have literally been slapping down a mile or two of pavement perhaps 5 feet wide. I hear their machines every weekday for months. Not quite sure what they are doing, but, I’m pretty sure it’s expensive. Now, I have no problem with the greenway. In fact, I think it’ll be great to rollerblade on (there are no good places in my area to ‘blade). Of course, not many people used it before: most folks either walked the sidewalks or the golf car paths. I’d go for a walk down it beforehand (it’s been closed for about 5 months now) and see no one else. A $13 million bond was voted in back in 2007. Perhaps, in this economy, it isn’t the time to spend the money on a greenway that will barely be used. Total cost for all the greenways is $30 million. Rather expensive, eh? And wasteful. Should have put convicts out there building it.

Similarely, TEA Party activists are tired of the government wasting enormous amounts of money, usually overspending at high levels, on “green” projects that will rarely be used. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes nature projects for the sake of nature are good. But, be responsible with the money. And don’t cut trees down on greenways, for goodness sakes.

(Washington Examiner) “Let’s see it,” a frustrated Sen. Jeff Sessions said on the Senate floor Monday afternoon. “Let’s bring it forward.”

By “it,” Sessions meant a Democratic proposal for a 2012 federal budget. In recent days Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has been asking, pushing, pleading, cajoling and begging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put forward a Democratic plan. So far, Reid has steadfastly refused.

That’s nothing new. The last time the Senate passed a budget was April 29, 2009, which was, if you are counting — and Jeff Sessions is — 755 days ago.

Oh, wait, my mistake, that’s annoying, that was Byron York writing last year. Let’s move to this year

(The Hill) Senate Democratic leaders on Friday said they do not intend to bring a fiscal 2013 budget up for a floor vote.

“We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year — it’s done, we don’t need to do it,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters on Friday.

Reid and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) argued that the debt-limit agreement in August directs spending for the next year and said Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) has already asked the heads of the subcommittees to write their appropriations bills for fiscal 2013.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has said he would probably mark up a budget resolution for 2013, but Reid recently told the Hill he didn’t expect any floor action on a measure produced by the panel.

And then we have

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who is working on his own budget plan, tweeted Friday that Senate Democrats “?confirm they’ve given up on budgeting. What a disgrace. Reid’s refusal to budget is a recipe for crisis.?”

Ryan has said that Democrats should be embarrassed to claim the debt deal as their blueprint because it “fell far, far short of solving this country’s fiscal problems.”

“It’s been more than 1,000 days since Senate Democrats have offered a budget plan to the American people,” Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the budget committee, said in a statement. “Now, once again, the Senate’s ineffectual Democrat majority balks at the task of leadership.”

Obviously, this has to be Bush’s fault in some manner or form. I’m not sure how or why, but, definitely Bush’s fault for this complete abdication of responsibility by Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats. It’s not like that pesky Constitution says

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

Technically, I suppose we could generously consider the aforementioned debt ceiling agreement to be a “consequence of appropriations,” but that would be very charitable for FY2012 and certainly does not cover Fiscal 2013. The House GOP need to make sure they go on record with a true budget, brought to the floor and passed. They’ve done that for FY2012 already. Multiple times. The Democrat controlled Senate refuses to pass one, which is quite understandable, what with the next general election coming up. They’ve decided that there is less damage in abdicating their responsibilities than in showing the American public what they intend to do with the People’s money.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Fox News) In an effort to cut the unemployment rate among veterans, the Obama administration is calling for a new conservation program that would put veterans to work rebuilding trails, roads and levees on public lands.

Let’s give him some credit for wanting to reduce the unemployment rate among veterans, even if it is surely politically motivated, geared towards peeling off some veteran support from the GOP for Election 2012. But, let’s face it, it is pathetic that Obama thinks the best use of men and women who served in the most professional, educated, modern, and high-tech military ever seen is to get them jobs as menial workers. Granted, they would get paid well, being federal money and all. But, they are certainly more capable then being offered ditch digger jobs. Not to mention simply creating new government jobs, rather than private sector ones.

Of course, much like with his Stimulus, the jobs probably do not exist. Furthermore, the idea, like most of his ideas, isn’t particularly original

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Civilian Conservation Corps that operated during the 1930s could be viewed as a model for what the administration will try to accomplish through its “Veterans Jobs Corps.” He said that the administration will propose spending $1 billion that would be used to put an estimated 20,000 veterans to work restoring habitat and eradicating invasive species, among other activities.

So now the Obama admin. is looking towards Depression era make-work programs that failed to stimulate the economy, and helped keep the USA mired in depression for a decade.

Barack Obama’s avalanche of needless regulations on coal-fueled power plants are going into effect and the net result will be the closing of hundreds of power plants all across the country just when our need for power is increasing. This will absolutely necessitate the cost of our power to skyrocket. But, this is exactly what he wants. He wants to rape us for our power. He said so from the beginning.

Well, now that he’s had the opportunity to put into place just some of the new rules and regulations he wants — and he’s only pushed through a tiny bit of what he really wants, indeed — we are already seeing the results of his attack on us.

Look to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland where six coal-fueled power plants are being shut down by FirstEnergy because the retrofitting the power plants will have to undergo to satisfy Obama’s whims is just too expensive to justify.

Company spokesmen say there is no help for it.

“This decision is not in any way a reflection of the fine work done by the employees at the affected plants, but is related to the impact of new environmental rules,” said James H. Lash, president, FirstEnergy Generation and chief nuclear officer. “We recently completed a comprehensive review of our coal-fired generating plants and determined that additional investments to implement MATS and other environmental rules would make these older plants even less likely to be dispatched under market rules. As a result, it was necessary to retire the plants rather than continue operations.”

Obama is forcing these new regs on the whole industry. Many thousands of jobs will be lost — this particular shut down will cause the loss of over 500 jobs initially — and the loss of the generating capacity will force a larger load on other plants necessarily causing costs to go up for all of us.

This isn’t just affecting out-of-date plants owned by FirstEnergy, either.

Douglas Gotham, director of the State Utility Forecasting Group, for instance, says that rates hikes are on the way in Indiana, as well, and all because of Obama’s onerous new EPA regulations.

“Due to the federal regulatory focus on emissions from coal-fired generators, Indiana is expected to experience larger price increases than projected on a regional or national level.”

This is exactly what Obama wanted. Remember in 2007 when he sat down with the San Francisco Chronicle and told us all that he wanted to bankrupt the coal industry and that our rates would “necessarily skyrocket”?

Well, his plans are succeeding. Prices are indeed “skyrocketing.” Worse, jobs are being lost. As Sean Harkbarth of the US Chamber of Commerce notes,

Utility MACT is only part of the assault on coal power plants. Last September, I wrote about how EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution rule cost 500 jobs in Texas. The Chamber’s senior vice president of Environment, Technology, and Regulatory Affairs, Bill Kovacs told Congressmen last summer that the “cumulative impact of regulatory action can be overwhelming” and is causing power plants to be taken offline and putting people out of work.

Hackbarth points to testimony of EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus who admitted last April that jobs are not part of their determinations.

So, Obama’s plans really are well on the way to fruition. But it’s just beginning. He very much wants to do far more damage than he has thus far.

(H/T Thurber’s Thoughts)

(ABC News) President Barack Obama today signaled an aggressive tact for his early re-election campaign, critiquing his Republican opponents by name and insisting he’s ready to “fight with every fiber of my being” for a second term.

“How much do you want it?” ABC News’ Diane Sawyer asked Obama during an exclusive interview in Las Vegas.

“Badly,” the president said, “because I think the country needs it.”

The country needs it, eh? “Badly” is a good word for Obama to use

In Obama’s World, the country needs that. Badly. He further went on to say

“Whoever wins the Republican primary is going to be a standard bearer for a vision of the country that I don’t think reflects who we are,” Obama said.

Obama thinks the following vision is better and reflects who we are (via American Power and The Conservative Manifesto)

The rest of the interview is pretty much as delusional as you’d expect, and about as grounded in common sense and the real world as Obama’s economic policies.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Anyhow, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza called the speech a “confrontation wrapped in kumbaya”

At first listen, President Obama’s State of the Union address had all the hallmarks of the sort of bipartisan, let’s-do-the-right-thing-for-America tone that characterized his 2008 presidential campaign.

Probably because it was a campaign speech, in which Obama has proved further that he is only interested in being president of some Americans, and not others.

But, listen closer and a more hard-edged, challenging tone reveals itself— a preview of what the incumbent will likely sound like as he seeks a second term this November.

“We’ve come too far to turn back now,” said Obama at one point. “As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”

First, those policies were primarily Democrat ones, and who was in charge of Congress when the economy went south? Yup, Democrats. Second, if we do not turn back now, we’ll end up going over the falls like Greece, Italy, and other European countries.

Later, he offered an even more blunt challenge: “With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow.” He also repeatedly urged Congress to “send me a bill”, making clear that the ball, legislatively and politically, was in their court.

Well, gee wiz, Barry, the House GOP has passed over 30 economic bills which are languishing in the Democrat controlled Senate. Perhaps you should have a talk with Harry Reid, ya think? But, I guess it is easier for Obama to mimic Hugo Chavez then Bill Clinton, who mostly played well with others and realized that the game is about leadership and compromise, rather than abusing one’s political opponents and becoming a tin pot dictator.

Obama even had the temerity to whine at the Republicans for not immediately passing the payroll extension for a whopping two months, and he wants a long term extension, which is what Republicans wanted in the first place.

Anyhow, over at Speaker Boehner’s website, we find a few things Obama didn’t say during his 7,000 word campaign speech

“My policies are hurting families and small businesses, and making the economy worse.” Since President Obama took office, 1.7 million fewer Americans have jobs, gas prices have doubled, and families have endured nearly three years of an 8 percent or higher jobless rate.

“I’m to blame for the failure of my policies to create jobs and strengthen our economy.” President Obama has resorted to the politics of division, blaming everything and everyone from Congress to his predecessors to the American people to ATMs for his poor economic record.

“I have listened to the American people and will approve the Keystone XL energy pipeline.” The Keystone project, which would create at least 20,000 new jobs in manufacturing and construction, is supported by lawmakers in both parties, labor unions, governors, and editorial boards across the country. And US News reports most Americans want the pipeline built too.

“My own hand-picked jobs council has urged me to embrace the Republican approach to job creation – and I’m going to take their advice.” Not only does the president’s jobs council report align with the Republican approach to creating new private-sector jobs, it reflects legislation already passed by the House and awaiting action in the Democratic-controlled Senate. See here.

Along with a few more. Oh, and apparently Obama didn’t take the time discuss his signature legislation, Obamacare. He ignored it. I wonder why?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Fox News) As President Obama prepares to rev up his re-election drive with his third State of the Union address Tuesday night, he and his aides have already begun framing the fall contest as a “choice” election, not a simple up-or-down referendum on his own job performance in the Oval Office.

In so doing, the president borrows a page from an unlikely playbook: that of the man he has spent the last five years disparaging, George W. Bush.

It was President Bush, in his 2004 matchup against John Kerry, who perfected the “choice” strategy. Buffeted by mounting opposition to the Iraq war, the incumbent argued that the alternative to a second Bush term – that being the Democratic senator from Massachusetts – was so dangerous that voters should put aside any misgivings they might have about the president.

Well, it is very interesting that Obama would reach back and attempt to run in this manner, but, digging deep, President Bush actually had a record to run on, besides painting Kerry as dangerous. Bush dealt with a lingering economic downturn when he first came in to office, then a big downturn post-9/11, and turned both around. He lowered taxes for all (unfortunately, his tax plans removed a large amount of workers from paying federal taxes.) He saw historic lows in the unemployment rate. He reached across the aisle to get Ted Kennedy’s “No Child Left Behind” passed. He responded to 9/11 by taking out the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, freeing tens of millions from an oppressive Muslim fundamentalist regime. He took out Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime, freeing tens of millions of people. He provided enormous relief for AIDS patients domestically and around the world. Expanded Health Savings Accounts (which Obamacare now restricts). He pushed his “Healthy Forests Initiative”. No attacks on American soil post 9/11. Got Libya to renounce their terroristic ways and give up their WMD programs. And the list goes on and on. Not all of it good, but, a solid list of accomplishments.

What does Obama have to stand on? An unpopular ObamaCare bill which is raising costs, high unemployment, historic deficits, $5 trillion in new debt, low consumer confidence, stopping the Keystone XL pipeline (of which Canada is not waiting to see who wins in 2012 before turning to China to sell the oil), giving billions to Brazil so they can develop deepwater oil fields, of which Brazil is now going to sell to China, people giving up on the workforce, and wasting almost a trillion dollars on his Stimulus. His idiotic policies have unfortunately turned people away from investing in alternative energy sources due to his malfeasance, and the way he has pushed electric vehicles has made them a joke, setting them back by decades. His EPA is on the wrong track and failing to protect and engage on real environmental issues. He has failed to reign in the TSA under his watch. He has pissed off our allies around the world, and pandered to our enemies (and failed there, too).

And let’s not forget the historic and unprecedented number of golf days, vacation days, and campaign events.

But, let’s give him his due: he did authorize the mission that took out Osama Bin Laden, which I still maintain was a gutsy call. He has ramped up military actions against Islamists, and expanded them into other countries. He did ramp up deportations for awhile, and go after the companies that hire them. And, um, well, ah, …… well, he keeps burger shops near the White House in business!

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

First, if you’re quoting Andrew Sullivan as an actual conservative, get out the chest high hip waders. Second, Obama was always good at talking the talk, but, could never walk the walk, because he himself was intensely partisan to the far end of the progressive spectrum. There is nothing wrong with that, people have their own set of beliefs. It’s when one acts on beliefs, forcing them on people, that the problems start. And James Pethokoukis at The American Enterprise finds 11 stunning revelations from a confidential Larry Summers memo to Obama in December 2008 that was a key source for the New Yorker article. Here are a few of them (the bold is James’ writing, the italic is Larry Summers own writing

The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda. The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quickly and be inherently temporary. … The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.

Team Obama knows these deficits are dangerous (although it has offered no long-term plan to deal with them). Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding new offsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run.

The financial crisis wasn’t just Wall Street’s fault. A significant cause of the current crisis lies in the failure of regulators to exercise vigorously the authority they already have.

The first one is the most significant, which highlights what we all inherently know, that the point of the stimulus was to give payback to campaign contributors and elected Democrats, as well as pushing Obama’s far left progressive agenda without regard for realities. Solyndra is the perfect example.

Oh, and then we see the “death panels” crop up even back then

IPAB was there at the very beginning. There are two possibilities for making tough decisions on the long-run budget, which could be done either separately or together: creating an executive-branch “health board” (which focuses on one part of the issue) and a Congressionally chartered commission (which could focus more broadly).

From the beginning, Team Obama wanted to implement the panel of 15 unelected and unresponsive bureaucrats to make decisions on our personal health care.

Doug Ross writes “The revelations in this document alone should be enough to bring down the Obama administration. The level of dishonesty laced throughout the Obama White House is both shocking and repellent.” Let’s add some fuel to that fire, looking at the very first paragraph in the Larry Summers memo

In the absence of fiscal stimulus the economy is projected to lose 3 to 4 million jobs in 2009. Together with the jobs we have already lost and population growth, we will be 7 million jobs short of full employment. The unemployment rate is projected to rise above 9 percent and not projected to start falling until 2011.

That is Summers saying what would happen without the Stimulus, which is mostly what happened with the Stimulus. Except, with the Stimulus, jobs loss was greater, and the unemployment rate didn’t start to fall until late in 2011, partly due to people dropping out of the job market, essentially giving up.

Summers also concluded that a core package more than $300 billion was not “feasible to design sensible proposals along these
lines that go much beyond this total size.” And then they go on to propose hundreds of billions more.

There are all sorts of interesting tidbits in both Pethokoukis’ article along with the Summers meme, which provided a blueprint for spending obscene amounts of taxpayer money for political payback and pushing Obama’s extremist political agenda, which wasn’t even in the same landmass as his supposed “post-partisan” coming together speeches. Read them both.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.