Michelle Obama Decides to Ski Aspen

by Keith Koffler – White House Dossier – 02/19/2012

Michelle Obama has embarked on a skiing vacation with her daughters in Aspen, Colorado, according to the Aspen Daily News.

The first lady, who just returned last month from 17 days of relaxation in Hawaii, is skiing in Colorado on Presidents’ Day Weekend for the second year in a row. Last year she went to Vail.

Michelle’s decision to ski out West again instead of hitting slopes closer to Washington would seem an inopportune choice for a first lady who is helping her husband campaign on issues of “fairness.”

The Obama campaign has set itself up as the defender of the poor and the middle class against the “One Percent,” a theme which clashes with the image a first lady who is taking frequent and exclusive vacations.

Just last August, she sojourned on Martha’s Vineyard, and the month before she travelled to southern Africa for a trip that mixed official business with tourist outings like an African safari. In July 2010, she took an exorbitant excursion to the southern coast of Spain, flying out with friends and family on a large jet that often serves as Air Force 2 and then staying at a ritzy hotel.

What’s more, as the government struggles to cut the deficit, the symbolism of a first lady jetting out to Aspen with a security entourage at taxpayers’ expense to ski would seem to send the wrong message about cutting back on spending.

For her last two Hawaii vacations, Michelle left separately from her husband at extra cost to taxpayers in order to ensure she got the full vacation while the president was forced to remain in Washington a few extra days to finish work with Congress.

President Obama last summer called for “an attitude of shared sacrifice” to solve the nation’s deficit woes.

Michelle this weekend is reportedly staying at the Aspen home of a wealthy Obama backer from Chicago. She held a fundraiser at the same residence last July.

by Joel Gehrke - Beltway Confidential – 02/17/2012

President Obama rallied with union workers at a Boeing plant in Washington, but he praised the manufacturing conducted by Boeing in South Carolina, even though his National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) tried to close the South Carolina plant at the behest of the Washington union workers.

“So this company is a great example of what American manufacturing can do in a way that nobody else in the world can do it,” Obama told the assembled workers this afternoon at the Everett, Wash., Boeing plant.   ”And the impact of your success, as I said, goes beyond the walls of this plant.  Every Dreamliner that rolls off the assembly line here in Everett supports thousands of jobs in different industries all across the country. Parts of the fuselage are manufactured in South Carolina and Kansas,” Obama also noted before mentioning factories in other states.

The NLRB tried to close that South Carolina plant, though, after union workers in Washington argued that Boeing had built the new factory in South Carolina — which is a right to work state — in retaliation against the Machinist Union strikes that had slowed production in Washington state. The NLRB dropped the complaint in December after Boeing signed a new contract with the machinists.

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein argued that the NLRB “helped unions shake down Boeing” by pushing the complaint, which would have cost over 1,000 non-union jobs in South Carolina, until the union received the new contract. 

“What’s happening here in Everett can happen in other industries,” Obama added today during his discussion of American manufacturing.

“The issues facing Genesis underline the notion that if you do something quick and dirty, you are going to wind up with big mistakes and unintended consequences,” said Lisa Belenky, senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.” – Los Angeles Times 02/11/2012

by Doug Powers - 02/14/2012

Last August, the Department of Energy finalized a partial guarantee on an $852 million loan to the Genesis Solar Project.

Genesis is the latest in a long line of taxpayer-backed “clean energy” projects that’s teetering on the edge of the cavernous green money pit. Here’s why:

One of California’s showcase solar energy projects, under construction in the desert east of Los Angeles, is being threatened by a deadly outbreak of distemper among kit foxes and the discovery of a prehistoric human settlement on the work site.

The $1-billion Genesis Solar Energy Project has been expedited by state and federal regulatory agencies that are eager to demonstrate that the nation can build solar plants quickly to ease dependence on fossil fuels and curb global warming.

Instead, the project is providing a cautionary example of how the rush to harness solar power in the desert can go wrong — possibly costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and dealing an embarrassing blow to the Obama administration’s solar initiative.

Genesis had hoped to be among the first of 12 approved solar farms to start operating in Southern California deserts. To do so, it had to meet certain deadlines to receive federal assistance. The 250-megwatt plant, being built on federal Bureau of Land Management land 25 miles west of Blythe, is backed by an $825-million Department of Energy loan guarantee.
[...]
Plans for Genesis call for parabolic-trough solar thermal technology to create enough energy to power 187,500 homes. But last fall, as crews began installing pylons and support arms for parabolic mirrors across 1,950 acres of land leveled by earthmovers, the company ran into unexpected environmental and cultural obstacles — the kind that critics say could probably have been avoided by more rigorous research and planning.

DoE officials are worried that if the foxes keep delaying Genesis, construction won’t be completed in time for it to declare bankruptcy.

As for the prehistoric human settlement, unreliable sources tell me that pictographs found at the site seem to depict an entire civilization getting crushed under the weight of what appears to be a giant solar panel next to dollar signs flying out a window, which appears above a caption that translates to “don’t make the same mistake we did.” Administration officials are still trying to decipher the meaning of that while moving forward with the Genesis Project at any and all costs.

One way to ensure more rigorous research and scrutiny on the part of government when it comes to these “clean energy” startups would be to tell the administration the proposals are for oil pipelines instead of solar projects. You want due diligence, you got it.

In related news, as the kit fox distemper outbreak plagues the Genesis Solar site, there’s been an outbreak of taxpayer distemper in other parts of the country.

Why Obama Loves Ginsburg Best

By Jan LaRue at American Thinker – 02/11/2012

In a choice between the Constitutions of the United States and South Africa, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gives South Africa home court advantage.

Ginsburg took a taxpayer-funded trip to Egypt where she advised Egyptians to look elsewhere than the U.S. Constitution in drafting their own. She urged them to be “aided by all Constitution-writing that has gone on since the end of World War II.”

So much for the test of time and reality.

Ginsburg prefers the Constitution of South Africa (CSA), the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Convention on Human Rights for today. Anyone who’s read her opinions and speeches knows her penchant for wandering off our constitutional reservation to find enlightenment in international and foreign laws.

Ginsburg is an advocate of abortion rights and gender equality as expressly guaranteed in the CSA. In 1977 Ginsburg and feminist Brenda Feigen-Fasteau co-authored a report titled Sex Bias in the U.S. Code for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, advocating sex integration of the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and in prisons; for reducing the age of consent for sexual acts to persons who are “less than 12 years old” and a comprehensive program of government-supported child care,” to name a few.

Undoubtedly, Ginsburg’s champion in the Oval Office shares her preference for the CSA over the U.S. Constitution. Said Obama in 2001:

“But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”

It’s so fatiguing finding obscure “liberties” among penumbras formed by emanations in an outdated Constitution written by a bunch of old wise guys working without a net. There were no feminists among them, Ginsburg lamented to the Egyptians. Alas, the Founders clung to religion and guns.

And slavery existed in 1780 America, Ginsburg reminded the Egyptians, while omitting that “We the People” banned it by adding the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. Meanwhile, in Egypt, human trafficking for sex and labor abounds, and “the commercial sexual exploitation of children is greatly under-acknowledged given that Egyptian cities (Alexandria and Cairo in particular) are reported destinations for sex tourism,” according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Ginsburg is apparently aglow with the “Arab Spring,” and imagines that the Muslim Brotherhood, which now controls 75% of the Egyptian Parliament, is keen on human rights. Following are some of the rights in South Africa’s Constitution  that are unlikely to pass the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sharia test:

• Reproductive choice
• Homosexual rights (South Africa’s Constitutional Court cited “sexual orientation” equality when it ordered Parliament to legalize same-sex “marriage.” (Ginsburg no doubt agrees, based on her concurrence in Lawrence v. Texas. Obama dumpsDOMA.)
• Heath care services, including reproductive care (What a help to uphold ObamaCare’s mandatory contraceptive coverage by healthcare providers despite religious objections.)
• A healthy environment (Cap and Trade, anyone?)
• Social justice
• Education, including adult
• Access to any information held by the state (so much for national security interests)
• Inherent dignity and having dignity respected and protected (and covered by a burka)
• Freedom of expression except “advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion”
• Freedom from all forms of violence (how about female circumcision?)

All of which the state must make “progressively available and accessible.” Maybe Egypt can qualify as a distant cousin of the EU and get a bailout after Greece, Italy, and Spain.

In addition:

• “The rights in the Bill of Rights may be limited only in terms of law of general application to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable” (What government gives — government can take away. This happens when government ignores that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”)
• Courts “must consider international law and may consider foreign law” when interpreting the Constitution (as Ginsburg says).
• Property may be expropriated “for a public purpose or in the public interest” (as Ginsburg agreed in Kelo v. City of New London, permitting one person’s property to be taken for the benefit of another private person under the guise of “public purpose”).
• There is no right to keep and bear arms. (Ginsburg dissented in District of Columbia v. Heller, which upheld an individual right to keep and bear arms.)
• No person may unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds in terms of subsection (3).” (So much for private property and religious liberty rights.)

Not to be outdone in discounting the U.S. Constitution, Ginsburg’s fan club at The New York Times ran a column Monday by Adam Liptak, titled: “‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World.”

Maybe Neil Diamond will have a new hit, “Nobody’s Coming to America.” Maybe Congress will cut funding for the obsolete Border Patrol, ICE and USCIS.

According to Liptak, “the Constitution has seen better days.” He cites a forthcoming study in The New York University Law Review “that bristles with data”:

“Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.

“The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.”

Liptak concludes:

“There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.”

What Obama, Ginsburg and Liptak ignore is the decline in power and prestige and economic collapse of socialist countries with constitutions less similar to ours.

May God save the United States from further Obama appointments to the Supreme Court.

Jan LaRue is senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union.