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Never believe everything you read - even when I write it!
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My greatest personal concern, admittedly a very narrow and self-serving one, is whether my left knee will remain ok so I can play tennis until I die.
At 78, soon to be 79, I will not live long enough to see the effect Obama's destructive policies will have upon our nation. My concern there is for our grandchildren - Dagny, Emma, Elliot, Henry, Emily and Kevin and number seven arriving in early May. I also am concerned for my kids and their respective spouses but most are established and relatively secure in an insecure and uncertain world.
It was never my intention to live during the 'filet period' of America and I hope there will be sufficient meat on our Republic's bone for them and their progeny but trends are not favorable unless Obama is thrown out of office and whomever follows, both as president and members of Congress, set our ship on a better course.
That means pain. I doubt most Americans are willing to tighten their belts because the pain always impacts those on the bottom more than on the top. But that is what it will take to move us in the direction we need to take so those on the bottom have a better chance at improving their own lot.
I do not believe totally in 'trickle' down because that implies those below just sit and way for the succor to drip their way. Those on the bottom have a personal responsibility to quit having babies out of wedlock, get an education that will earn them a decent living, take control of their life and health issues and that means get off drugs and for many in the black population to quit killing each other
That is a very tall order and my expectations are not high in this regard because we have teacher unions only interested in feathering their nests, government bureaucrats who benefit from dependency and over regulation which strangles and discourages domestic capital employment and politicians who care more about financing their re-election than doing right by the nation's long term interests.
Yes, I continue to be a pessimist and though it kept me from being filthy rich it has served me well enough to be able to afford tennis balls.
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Why the significance of Jerusalem and its link to Toulouse. (See 1,1a and 1b below.)
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The Supreme Court weighs a weighty matter - "Obamascare's legality." (See 2 below.)
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I seldom watch the news but with my wife away I was eating a salad (no I bought it because I only take out garbage) and turned on the TV and caught a snippet of Obama's energy pep talk in Oklahoma. If you want to believe him then put his speech in your engine and see if your car runs on 'snake oil.'
Call me when Obama has figured out how to power 18 wheelers and diesel electric trains using solar or wind
When energy prices were going up, during GW's tenure, the oil companies were the villains. Not so today, according to Obama. It is because we are consuming too much oil and we have to import it from unstable countries that are not our friends.Today it is Iran, not the oil companies, who is to blame.
Of course, America imports a whole variety of critical raw materials but most do not visibly effect Americans because they go into everything we use and the military needs.We only understand 'at the pump' impact.
Obama pitched alternative resources as if he alone discovered them. Most of what he has had our government spend on renewables has either been a fraud payoff to supporters, ie Solyndra, or inefficient from a sustainable return on capital basis and finally produces zilch by way of our current needs. President Algae is interested in paying homage to " Greens."
His energy policies have been backward looking, have reduced our energy ability to become less dependent and has killed job growth but 'snake oil' sells because Americans are gullible and believe what they are told when it comes from the Energy Messiah. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)The answer is in the FACTS - Part II
Jerusalem's Jewish Link: Historic, Religious, Political
By Eli E. Hertz
Jerusalem, wrote historian Martin Gilbert, is not a 'mere' city. "It holds the central spiritual and physical place in the history of the Jews as a people."
For more than 3,000 years, the Jewish people have looked to Jerusalem as their spiritual, political, and historical capital, even when they did not physically rule over the city. Throughout its long history, Jerusalem has served, and still serves, as the political capital of only one nation - the one belonging to the Jews. Its prominence in Jewish history began in 1004 BCE, when King David declared the city the capital of the first Jewish kingdom. David's successor and son, King Solomon, built the First Temple there, according to the Bible, as a holy place to worship the Almighty. Unfortunately, history would not be kind to the Jewish people. Four hundred and ten years after King Solomon completed construction of Jerusalem, the Babylonians (early ancestors to today's Iraqis) seized and destroyed the city, forcing the Jews into exile.
Fifty years later, the Jews, or Israelites as they were called, were permitted to return after Persia (present-day Iran) conquered Babylon. The Jews' first order of business was to reclaim Jerusalem as their capital and rebuild the Holy Temple, recorded in history as the Second Temple.
Jerusalem was more than the Jewish kingdom's political capital - it was a spiritual beacon. During the First and Second Temple periods, Jews throughout the kingdom would travel to Jerusalem three times yearly for the pilgrimages of the Jewish holy days of Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot, until the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and ended Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem for the next 2,000 years. Despite that fate, Jews never relinquished their bond to Jerusalem or, for that matter, to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.
No matter where Jews lived throughout the world for those two millennia, their thoughts and prayers were directed toward Jerusalem. Even today, whether in Israel, the United States or anywhere else, Jewish ritual practice, holiday celebration and lifecycle events include recognition of Jerusalem as a core element of the Jewish experience. Consider that:
• Jews in prayer always turn toward Jerusalem.
• Arks (the sacred chests) that hold Torah scrolls in synagogues throughout the world face Jerusalem.
• Jews end Passover Seders each year with the words: "Next year in Jerusalem"; the same words are pronounced at the end of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the Jewish year.
• A three-week moratorium on weddings in the summer recalls the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army in 586 BCE. That period culminates in a special day of mourning - Tisha B'Av (the 9th day of the Hebrew month Av) - commemorating the destruction of both the First and Second Temples.
• Jewish wedding ceremonies - joyous occasions, are marked by sorrow over the loss of Jerusalem. The groom recites a biblical verse from the Babylonian Exile: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning,"and breaks a glass in commemoration of the destruction of the Temples.
Even body language, often said to tell volumes about a person, reflects the importance of Jerusalem to Jews as a people and, arguably, the lower priority the city holds for Muslims:
• When Jews pray they face Jerusalem; in Jerusalem Israelis pray facing the Temple Mount.
• When Muslims pray, they face Mecca; in Jerusalem Muslims pray with their backs to the city.
• Even at burial, a Muslim face, is turned toward Mecca.
Finally, consider the number of times 'Jerusalem' is mentioned in the two religions' holy books:
• The Old Testament mentions 'Jerusalem' 349 times. Zion, another name for 'Jerusalem,' is mentioned 108 times.
• The Quran never mentions Jerusalem - not even once.
Even when others controlled Jerusalem, Jews maintained a physical presence in the city, despite being persecuted and impoverished. Before the advent of modern Zionism in the 1880s, Jews were moved by a form of religious Zionism to live in the Holy Land, settling particularly in four holy cities: Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and most importantly - Jerusalem. Consequently, Jews constituted a majority of the city's population for generations. In 1898, "In this City of the Jews, where the Jewish population outnumbers all others three to one ..." Jews constituted 75 percent of the Old City population in what Secretary-General Kofi Annan called 'East Jerusalem.' In 1914, when the Ottoman Turks ruled the city, 45,000 Jews made up a majority of the 65,000 residents. And at the time of Israeli statehood in 1948, 100,000 Jews lived in the city, compared to only 65,000 Arabs. Prior to unification, Jordanian-controlled 'East Jerusalem' was a mere 6 square kilometers, compared to 38 square kilometers on the 'Jewish side.'
1a)The True Perpetrators of The Antisemitic Attacks in Toulouse and Throughout the World
By Barry Rubin
March 21, 2012
What a tragic, evil joke. A drive-by shooter in the beautiful, almost magical, city of Toulouse, France, murders three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school. Various VIPs issue statements about how terrible is this deed, how unspeakable.
And yet at that very moment, the next round of murders, the next slanderous and inciting antisemitic lies are being perpetrated by respectable people and institutions. There is no real soul-searching, no true effort to do better, no serious examination about how the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hysteria is paving the way for murder and fueling dreams of genocide.
The street thugs, fanatics drunk on the interpretations of Islam they are being fed, and the mentally twisted may be pulling the trigger but the distinguished, the powerful, and the honored are providing the ammunition.
Here are three examples of such deeds in nominally democratic countries—not Iran, not Syria, not Pakistan, where such things are even more intense—but in supposedly rational places.
1. The Turkish editor
Meet Mahir Zeynalov, an editor at Today’s Zaman, a Turkish Islamic newspaper that is supposedly moderate. Meet the modern art of tweeting. Here is Zeynalov’s response to the murders:
“Mahir Zeynalov @MahirZeynalov: Gunmen attack Jewish school in France, vandals attack Jewish cemetery in Poland, Jews burn mosques and Quran in Tunisia. What’s wrong?”
There are two ways to read this tweet. The more outrageous is this: How can it be wrong for gunmen to murder Jewish children or vandals attack a Jewish cemetery in Poland if Jews are burning mosques and Qurans in Tunisia. One act balances the other.
The other interpretation is this: What a world in which there is so much hatred! Gunmen murder Jewish children, vandals attack a Jewish cemetery, and Jews desecrate mosques and Muslim holy books.
Yet the second interpretation is almost as inciting to violence as the first. We know from many experiences—including Afghanistan right now—that anyone who burns or does anything to a Koran would set off massive riots and bloody killings. And as for burning a mosque, such a deed might well result in the massacre of every Jew living in Tunisia.
Tunisian Jews today are a couple of thousand terrified people who would run in the other direction if they saw a Koran in front of them lest they be accused of looking at it funny. What Zeyanlov has done is called a “blood libel,” a lie that might lead to the murder of Jews.
Now if some Muslim were to take seriously Zeyanlov’s tweet he would feel justified in murdering Jews, say children standing in front of their school.
2. The Dutch cartoonist
De Volkskrant is one of Holland’s leading newspapers, favored by the intellectual elite. Here is a cartoon that has just run. It shows Geert Wilders, leader of the conservative party that is very critical of Islam, getting loads of cash from a hidden hand that is clearly referring to Jews or Israel. Yes, the cartoon was written with a Hebrew text balloon, helpfully translated into Dutch as Wilder saying, “Thank you very much.”
So we have here the stereotype of the Jewish money behind the scene conspiring, in this case against Islam and against Holland. And of course it is also designed to discredit Wilders. As with the Turkish editor’s tweet above this is based on a total falsehood. There is hardly any Jewish support for Wilders party, which is by the way a legitimate political force, and there has never been the slightest evidence—even rumor—of Jewish financing for him, or Israeli financing.
Holland is a country where two political leaders have been assassinated and Wilders needs round-the-clock protection against potential assassin.
What is the message here? That Jews and Israel are trying to destroy Islam—as in the Turkish tweet—and are nefarious plotters attacking innocent people. Isn’t it just, therefore, to murder Jews and Israelis in self-defense?
3. Europe’s Foreign Minister
Exhibit three is Catherine Ashton, whose career was originally built on running the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament which favored unilateral Western disarmament in the face off Soviet tyranny. She is now the EU’s foreign minister. In response to the Toulouse shooting she has issued a statement here that spends more time reciting the sufferings of children in the Gaza Strip than about antisemitism and the demonization of Jews and Israel.
Left out is the fact that Gaza is ruled by an organization Hamas that is openly antisemitic, openly preaches genocide, frequently has carried out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews, and then glorifies those who did the murders. Remember that the only reason Hamas can rule Gaza is that Israel voluntarily withdrew from the territory in a gesture intended to promote peace, something Ashton and much of the Western media and governmental elites usually don’t mention.
When Hamas maintains a war with Israel, firing rockets, missiles, and mortars, Israel defends itself. Hamas also deliberately sites military arsenals and weapons in residential areas. Thus, civilians and even children are accidentally killed by Israel in the fighting. This is precisely what happens in other wars, including those being waged now by EU countries.
Yet Ashton does not defend Israel or its right to defend itself. She does not take sides against the terrorists. At best we get spurious neutrality that is actually anti-Israel propaganda. Note that she even refers to Palestine as a currently existing country even though the EU recognizes no such country. So much for diplomatic responsibility. Her “apology” and “clarification” came after criticism but she meant exactly what she said and will do the same thing next time as she and other EU officials have done on previous occasions.
Indeed, while Palestinian children are killed during the fighting in Gaza let’s note the two most notoriously publicized examples of the last week:
–A photo sent around, in one case by a UN official, showing a little girl as being injured this week was in fact of a girl injured in an auto accident several years ago.
–The claim that Adham Abu Selmiya was killed by Israelis has now been shown to be false. He was killed by a bullet fired into the air by Palestinians during a funeral.
–And what of the recent photo widely published purporting to show an Israeli soldier menacing a child despite the fact that the man was not wearing a real Israeli army uniform and carrying an AK-47, showing that the photo was a phony.
–The downplaying or omission of the fact that Israel was defending itself from a barrage of missiles. In one case, a prominent Dutch newspaper published a photograph with the caption that showed a rocket being fired by Israel into Gaza, instead of the exact opposite.
In short, Ashton and many others are contributing to the demonization of Jews and Israel. If Israel is so horrible that it makes little children in Gaza suffer for no reason shouldn’t Israelis and the Jews who support them, be shunned, harassed, attacked, and murdered?
These three examples are only a small sample of what is pouring out in the Middle East and elsewhere. I could go on with dozens more and so, perhaps, could you. From Sweden’s largest newspaper claiming Israel murdered Palestinians to harvest their organs to a Harvard professor’s tales of Jewish-Zionist conspiracies to control U.S. foreign policy to the dozens of “academic” conferences on Western campuses that demonize Israel at the expense of the students’ tuition payments.
What is needed is not more hypocrisy or professions of innocence–or expensive conferences where long speeches are made about the evils of antisemitism by those who do nothing but get free plane tickets and nice hotel rooms– but a real change in the behavior of the mass media that pours out lies, the academics who slander and distort, and the governments that cannot even stand with a country and people beset by terrorism and once again by the world’s oldest hatred.
Oh, and one more thing is needed: the admission that the greatest threat of hatred, “racism,” dehumanization of the “other,” and threat of persecution today–as the statistics for Europe and North America show–is not “Islamophobia” but antisemitism.
And none of those things are going to happen because the liars, haters, apologists, and enablers will not acknowledge their own behavior while those who are supposed to supervise them will not act. Hating and lying about Israel and the Jewish people is too useful politically and too entwined with the version of left-wing ideology, not to mention Islamism and the dominant interpretation of Islam, currently so powerful in the world.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Europe is no longer a safe place for Jews to live. Yet it is accurate to say that it is becoming an unsafe place for Jews to live, and certainly for those who wish to express mainstream Jewish views and to practice their religion openly. Meanwhile, the EU and various governments dare not admit that the principal cause of antisemitic activity is radical Islam, and the principal inspiration for popular antisemitism is trendy leftist ideas that now dominate much of that continent and are spreading in North America.
Thus, Jewish children are deliberately murdered by a terrorist in the midst of France. In response come get the formal statements and the crocodile tears. Yet at the exact same time as the bullets are entering the children’s bodies, as the victims fall to the ground, as the ambulance sirens sound, the incitement and the lies and the slanders continue, laying the groundwork for more hatred..
* Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are Israel:An Introduction (Yale University Press); The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).
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1b)Tolerating Hamas Invites a Mideast War
The United Nations ignores 12,000 rockets launched into southern Israel.
By RON PROSOR
'War is the unfolding of miscalculations." So noted historian Barbara Tuchman decades ago, yet this principle continues to fall on deaf ears in the international community. As terrorism in the Gaza Strip increases, threatening to set off instability across the region, the continued roar of rockets into Israel should keep world leaders up at night. But most remain mute and missing in action.
Their choice to stand idle is a grave miscalculation. The consequences for the region could be tragic.
This month, a targeted strike by the Israel Defense Forces canceled the travel plans of arch-terrorist Zuhair al-Qaisi as he headed from Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula. His itinerary included much more than snorkeling in the Red Sea. He aimed to launch another mass murder of innocent Israelis from the Sinai—and undermine the foundation of regional stability by driving a wedge between Israel and Egypt.
In the five days that followed, terrorists in Gaza stepped up their attacks on Israeli cities to 60 rockets per day (up from a years-long average of "only" two to four a day). As these terrorists sought to maximize civilian deaths, Israel worked to minimize them, with a precise and targeted offensive and defensive response.
Israel's new "Iron Dome" antimissile system intercepted more than 50 rockets over major cities, preventing more than 50 potential tragedies. Israel's Air Force hit Palestinian rocket squads with minimal civilian casualties, even though they had been intentionally using neighborhoods and schools as launching pads.
The situation in Israel's south remains as stable as a house of cards. Rockets continue to fly in from Gaza. Despite its spectacular performance, the Iron Dome is still only 90% effective at its best, whereas the terrorists in Gaza remain 100% determined to kill Israeli civilians. The clock is ticking until the next major escalation.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that if rockets fall on your head, you have a right to defend yourself. It's a simple equation. Calm will return to Gaza when rockets stop falling on Israel. However, one rocket that explodes in the wrong place at the wrong time—in a grocery store, shopping mall or school—and Israel will be forced to respond in a completely different manner.
Time and time again, Israel has warned the world that Gaza is a disaster waiting to happen. Yet, over the past decade, the ratio of rocket attacks to words of condemnation from the United Nations Security Council is 12,000 to zero.
Instead of sending a clear message that terrorism in Gaza is a grave danger, much of the international community continues to point fingers at Israel for its legal and legitimate efforts to stop the flood of arms into the area. Energy that could have been spent preserving stability in the region has been diverted to attacking Israel's responsible policies aimed at preventing future escalations.
With the Middle East locked in a struggle for a democratic future, a significant escalation in Gaza would tip the scales toward the fundamentalists. From Marrakech to Manama, it would provide cannon fodder for radical clerics and politicians to promote their hateful ideology. The Arab world would be forced to drop its focus on the atrocities of the Assad regime, giving the region's most cynical eye doctor the opportunity once and for all to blind his people's vision for freedom.
Iran understands this well. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are loading Bashar al-Assad's tanks, funding his government, and training his troops—all while funneling weapons to Hamas and other terrorist proxies in Gaza.
Today, a conflict in Gaza would answer all the prayers of Iran's leaders, distracting the world as they take their final steps toward nuclear capability. For the Iranian regime, every dead Israeli or Palestinian provides an opportunity to install another centrifuge.
The terrorists in Gaza do not pose a threat only to the citizens of southern Israel. Each rocket is armed with a warhead capable of causing a political earthquake that would extend well beyond Israel's borders. Our message to the international community is clear: Your silence is pounding the drums of war.
Mr. Prosor is Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.
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2)The Supreme Court Weighs ObamaCare
Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce is broad but not limitless.
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND LEE A. CASEY
On Monday, the Supreme Court will begin an extraordinary three-day hearing on the constitutionality of ObamaCare. At stake are the Constitution's structural guarantees of individual liberty, which limit governmental power and ensure political accountability by dividing that power between federal and state authorities. Upholding ObamaCare would destroy this dual-sovereignty system, the most distinctive feature of American constitutionalism.
ObamaCare mandates that every American, with a few narrow exceptions, have a congressionally defined minimum level of health-insurance coverage. Noncompliance brings a substantial monetary penalty. The ultimate purpose of this "individual mandate" is to force young and healthy middle-class workers to subsidize those who need more coverage.
Congress could have achieved this wealth transfer in perfectly constitutional ways. It could simply have imposed new taxes to pay for a national health system. But that would have come with a huge political price tag that neither Congress nor the president was prepared to pay.
Instead, Congress adopted the individual mandate, invoking its power to regulate interstate commerce. The uninsured, it reasoned, still use health services (for which some do not pay) and therefore have an impact on commerce, which Congress can regulate.
Congress's reliance on the Commerce Clause to support the individual mandate was politically expedient but constitutionally deficient. Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce is broad but not limitless.
First among the limits is the very nature of congressional authority, which is based on specifically enumerated powers. As the Supreme Court has consistently acknowledged, the Constitution denies the federal government the type of broad public health and welfare regulatory authority known as a "general police power," which is reserved exclusively to the states. The court has also repeatedly held that preservation of this division between federal and state authority is a matter for supervision by the courts, and its precedents make clear that congressional Commerce Clause regulation must be subject to some judicially enforceable limiting principle.
The defining characteristic of a general police power is the states' ability to regulate people simply as people, regardless of an individual's activities or interaction with goods or services that might themselves be subject to regulation. Thus, the Supreme Court has ruled that states, exercising their general police power, can require all resident adults to obtain a smallpox vaccination. Only this type of authority could support ObamaCare's individual mandate, which applies to all Americans as such, regardless of any goods they may buy or own, or any activities in which they might choose to engage.
Congress has crossed a fundamental constitutional line. Neither the fact that every individual has some discernible impact on the economy, nor that virtually everyone will at some point in time use health-care services, is a sufficient basis for federal regulation. Both of these arguments, advanced by ObamaCare's defenders, are flawed because they admit no judicially enforceable limiting principle marking the outer bounds of federal authority.
On the left and right, legal thinkers too often forget that Congress has no constitutional power simply to regulate the economy. Rather, that power comes from a series of discrete authorities—to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, to tax, spend and borrow, to coin money and fix its value and so forth—that together allow it broad control over the nation's economic affairs. As a result, congressional efforts to address national problems may well be less economically efficient than would a more straightforward exercise of police power. The Constitution subordinates efficiency to guarantee liberty.
The Constitution divides governmental power between federal and state governments so that one may check the other. This requires that the electorate be able to tell, especially on Election Day, which government is responsible for which policies and regulations with which we live.
As Justice Anthony Kennedy explained in one leading Commerce Clause case, United States v. Lopez (1995): "The theory that two governments accord more liberty than one [emphasis added] requires for its realization two distinct and discernible lines of political accountability: one between the citizens and the Federal Government; the second between the citizens and the States." Congress's use of its commerce power in passing ObamaCare eradicates those "discernible lines of political accountability."
Even so, Congress's enumerated powers support a vast and ever growing regulatory state, much of it based upon the Commerce Clause. Neither that Leviathan, nor the Supreme Court's precedents upholding it, is now at issue.
Justice Antonin Scalia explained in another of the Supreme Court's recent Commerce Clause cases, Gonzales v. Raich (2005), that the power to regulate interstate commerce, especially in conjunction with the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper [emphasis added] for carrying into execution" its enumerated powers, gives Congress broad authority to reach even local and non-commercial activities when necessary to make legitimate regulatory schemes effective. Raich upheld federal control of purely local cultivation, sale and use of marijuana, and it is often incorrectly cited as support for the individual mandate.
But the Necessary and Proper Clause does not guarantee Congress whatever power it would like to reach its policy goals. That provision supports only otherwise legitimate exercises of Congress's enumerated powers. So under the Commerce Clause, Congress can try to achieve universal coverage through regulating the interstate health-care insurance market, as ObamaCare does, by requiring insurance companies operating in that market to cover pre-existing conditions. Then under the Necessary and Proper clause, Congress could also require employers to collect data on pre-existing conditions from new hires so insurers can better plan.
Requiring all Americans to have health insurance may well create a new revenue stream for insurance companies so as to lessen these new burdens on them, but it does nothing to make these new coverage requirements effective regulations of interstate commerce as the Supreme Court uses that term. In particular, the individual mandate does not prevent avoidance or evasion of these new insurance regulations. Nor does it make compliance easier to police, as was the case in Raich. There, the ability to regulate local marijuana production and use was necessary to make its interstate regulation effective because, as Justice Scalia noted, the homegrown variety "is never more than an instant from the interstate market."
Unlike the regulations at issue in Raich, the individual mandate applies regardless of anyone's interaction with a commodity, service or other activity, like the interstate sale or transport of marijuana, that Congress can legitimately regulate. Put another way, the Controlled Substances Act is about the regulation of drugs, not people. It affects individuals only to the extent that they interact with the substances it proscribes, and it can be avoided by simply avoiding those substances.
Americans cannot escape the individual mandate by any means because it regulates them as people, simply because they are alive and here. That requires police power authority. Permitting Congress to exercise that authority—however important its ultimate goal—is not constitutionally proper and would forever warp the federal-state division of authority.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey are lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. They represented the 26 states in their challenge to ObamaCare before the trial and appellate courts.
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3)President Obama doubles down on efforts to boost solar industry
By Ed Henry
President Obama visited a dusty, desert town 30 miles outside Las Vegas Wednesday to declare he's doubling down on federal efforts to boost the solar industry.
Republicans believe Obama is gambling with taxpayer dollars as he continues to aggressively push alternative forms of energy after the failure of Solyndra, which resulted in the loss of half a billion dollars in taxpayer dollars.
"This is one of those interesting left-wing ideas which works theoretically as long as it's not real," Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich charged on the campaign trail Wednesday. "And then you put in a half billion dollars and you go, 'Oh that didn't quite work.
Obama sharply disagrees and used the world's largest solar power plant of its kind -- with one million solar panels dotting the desert here -- to assert it is his critics who are out of touch with reality.
In a nod to Solyndra, Obama said "some companies will fail, some companies will succeed." But he also lashed out at Republicans who make jokes about the promise of solar and wind power as people who have a "lack of imagination" as the nation debates how to deal with rising gasoline prices.
"One member of Congress who shall remain unnamed called these jobs 'phony' -- called them phony jobs," Obama said. "I mean, think about that mindset, that attitude that says because something is new, it must not be real. If these guys were around when Columbus set sail, they'd be charter members of the Flat Earth Society."
The problem for the President is that job growth is flat here too. There are only 10 full-time employees here at the Copper Mountain Solar 1 Facility, the largest photovoltaic solar power plant in the nation, although company officials note there will be more jobs if two other proposed plants move forward.
There are also questions about the electricity output here. This plant cranks out just 58 megawatts per hour to power 17,000 homes, while a typical coal-fired power plant can produce 600 megawatts an hour and about seven times the electricity.
Obama responds that solar is just one piece of his "all-of-the-above" strategy, and declared he will not back down from pouring in more taxpayer money since the payoffs from new technologies do not always come right away.
"Sometimes, you need a jumpstart to make it happen," Obama said. "That's been true of every innovation that we've ever had. And we know that some discoveries won't pan out. There's the VCR and the Beta and the -- all that stuff."
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a member of the panel that has been investigating the Solyndra matter, begs to differ and told Fox News the administration is too focused on getting taxpayer assistance to green companies that may not deserve the help.
"They are a green-energy focused agenda and they can't get to the heart of the matter, which is that we need to increase supply," said Jordan.
Jordan also raised eyebrows at the White House by suggesting in an interview with Energy and Environmental Daily that the Congressional probe of Solyndra is at least in part a push for votes in November.
"Ultimately, we'll stop it on Election Day, hopefully," Jordan said of the Solyndra probe. "And bringing attention to these things helps the voters and citizens of the country make the kind of decision that I hope helps them as they evaluate who they are going to vote for in November."
A White House official told Fox the administration believes it's noteworthy that a member of the committee probing Solyndra "now acknowledges that election-year politics is driving a taxpayer-funded investigation."
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