Charles Krauthammer:

…the event that drove home the extent of Obama’s antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline, after the most extensive environmental vetting of any pipeline in U.S. history. It gave the game away because the case for Keystone is so obvious and overwhelming. Vetoing it gratuitously prolongs our dependence on outside powers, kills thousands of shovel-ready jobs, forfeits a major strategic resource to China, damages relations with our closest ally, and sends billions of oil dollars to Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and already obscenely wealthy sheiks.

Obama boasts that, on his watch, production is up and imports down. True, but truly deceptive. These increases have occurred in spite of his restrictive policies. They are the result of Clinton- and Bush-era permitting. This has been accompanied by a gold rush of natural gas production resulting from new fracking technology that has nothing at all to do with Obama.

“The American people aren’t stupid,” Obama said (Feb. 23), mocking “Drill, baby, drill.” The “only solution,” he averred in yet another major energy speech last week, is that “we start using less — that lowers the demand, prices come down.” Yet five paragraphs later he claimed that regardless of “how much oil we produce at home . . . that’s not going to set the price of gas worldwide.”

So: Decreasing U.S. demand will lower oil prices, but increasing U.S. supply will not? This is ridiculous. Either both do or neither does. Does Obama read his own speeches?

Obama says of drilling: “That’s not a plan.” Of course it’s a plan. We import nearly half of our oil, thereby exporting enormous amounts of U.S. wealth. Almost 60 percent of our trade deficit — $332 billion out of $560 billion — is shipped overseas to buy crude.

Drill here and you stanch the hemorrhage. You keep those dollars within the U.S. economy, repatriating not just wealth but jobs and denying them to foreign unfriendlies. Drilling is the single most important thing we can do to spur growth at home while strengthening our hand abroad.

Instead, Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Deterred? Hardly. Our undaunted seer of the energy future has come up with his own miracle fuel: algae.

Why, explained Obama, “we can grow it right here in the United States.” (Sounds like a miraculous local find — except that it grows just about everywhere on earth.) Accordingly, yet another $14 million of taxpayer money will be sprinkled on algae research by Steven Chu’s Energy Department.

This is the very same Dr. Chu who famously said in 2008 that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels of $8-$10 a gallon — and who on Tuesday, eight months before Election Day, publicly recanted before Congress, Galileo-style.

Who do they think they’re fooling? An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.

High gasoline prices are a major political problem for Obama. They are not just a pain at the pump, however. They are a constant reminder of three years of a rigid, fatuous, fantasy-driven energy policy that has rendered us scandalously dependent and excessively vulnerable.

The White House should fact check the prez before he insults the GOP for being ignorant.

Such as this jibe for not buying into his windmills approach to energy:

“They might have even sided with one of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, who reportedly said this about the telephone: ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore, because he’s looking backwards, he’s not looking forwards.”

But Hayes never said that. Washington Post:

…Hayes, in fact, was such a technology buff that he installed the first telephone in the White House. A list of telephone subscribers published in the article “The Telephones Comes to Washington,” by Richard T. Loomis, shows that the White House was given the number “1.”

His cocky crap has inspired a hilarious outpouring of crowd-sourced scorn. Here’s just one sample. There are dozens:

Then there are the tweets for the twit.

#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts Woodrow Wilson was lost at sea while attempting to escape with Tom Hanks from a deserted isle

#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts Calvin Coolidge was known by hipsters of the roaring 20s as LL Coolidge and enjoyed his “Coolidge cookies

#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts Ulysses S. Grant was our first Greek president.

Obama feigns being above politics, but his actions are rarely otherwise. ObamaCare was passed with fake numbers. Enron would face criminal charges for such trickery.

Now, to unload a hot potato, he’s pushing the Catholics contraception issue off until after the election.

Writing yesterday, James Capretta noted:

At 4:15 p.m. this afternoon, the Obama administration issued its latest pronouncement on the HHS mandate, in the form of an Advanced Notice on Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM). So what did the administration have to say on this late Friday afternoon?

Basically, it was a thinly veiled attempt to punt the entire issue into 2013, thus allowing the president to continue his doublespeak on the issue — pretending that he is interested in protecting religious liberty with pronouncements about a forthcoming concession while the policies he actually implements go in exactly the opposite direction.

In the ANPRM, the administration said it is seeking input and comments on the so-called “accommodation” that the president announced on February 10. But the ANPRM also makes it clear that this process of getting input and issuing new rules will be very long and drawn out — so much so that the administration doesn’t expect to issue final regulations until August 1, 2013. Thus, with the issuance of the ANPRM, the administration is basically saying it won’t be making any further policy in this regard prior to this November’s election. That’s telling in and of itself. The administration is desperate to get past November without this issue further hurting the president. Thus they announce an elaborate process that they expect to take more than a year to complete. Meanwhile, the president will undoubtedly continue to reiterate his interest in protecting religious liberty — it’s just that he can’t tell us how exactly he will do so until he has safely secured a second term…

David Lynch directed this anti-littering spot in 1991. Who knew rats ate paper?

Bernard Goldberg:

I don’t know why those nasty conservatives are always taking cheap shots at the United Nations. I mean, the U.N. cares about stuff, important stuff. Don’t the delegates who leave the comfort of their homes in places like Zimbabwe and Bangladesh only to endure the hardships of Manhattan and Geneva do really important work?

Why yes they do. Here’s just the latest example. The U.N. Human Rights Council is meeting in that aforementioned hellhole called Geneva, Switzerland taking up a matter brought to the council’s attention by the NAACP. The civil rights group says that laws in the United States that require voters to show photo IDs before casting their ballots hurt poor folks in general and black folks in particular. Photo ID laws, according to the NAACP are discriminatory because they disenfranchise voters who don’t have the wherewithal to get a picture ID, and, that, the argument goes, suppresses the minority vote.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a human rights violation to me.

Want to know how bad it is? I’ll tell you anyway. Eight states passed photo ID laws in just the past year and similar laws are pending in 32 more states. Talk about your crimes against humanity.

“This really is a tactic that undercuts the growth of … democracy,” according to Hillary Shelton, the NAACP’s senior vice president for advocacy, speaking about those photo ID requirements. Ms. Shelton told Fox News that such a burdensome requirement “undercuts the integrity of our government, if you allow it to happen. It’s trickery, it’s a sleight-of-hand. We’re seeing it happen here … and we are utilizing the U.N. as a tool to make sure that we are able to share that with those countries all over the world.”

So who’s going to listen to these cries for help? Well, let’s start with the delegates from Saudi Arabia, a nation that cares deeply about voting rights. Unless you’re a woman. Then you’re not allowed to vote.

Then there are those two beacons of light that care so very much about “the growth of democracy” — China and Cuba, one-party dictatorships where it’s not a good (more…)

An interesting visualization.

Give it a moment to load, then move the button left or right.

by Burt Prelutsky

I keep hearing people insist that Obama will win re-election in a cake walk. Frankly, I don’t believe it. According to the polls in September, 2008, he would have lost to John McCain, who ran as lousy a presidential campaign as Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis, if the economy hadn’t suddenly tanked. So what has Obama done since then that would give him an edge in 2012? ObamaCare? Cash for Clunkers? Fast and Furious? Solyndra? A $16 trillion dollar deficit? Nixing the Keystone pipeline that would have brought us thousands of jobs and oil from a friendly source? Turning the likes of Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Jacob Lew and Kathleen Sebilius, into czars? Kowtowing to the Saudis, George Soros and the unions?

He demands civility from conservatives and then keeps his yap shut when the likes of Maxine Waters, Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, vilify and demonize not only political opponents like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, but Republicans in general and Tea Party patriots specifically.

It has been apparent for months that Obama, who ran as a man who would unite all of us, intends to drop the camouflage this time around and run a presidential campaign that divides Americans by race, religion and income. The question that comes to mind is why, with a Republican House and what is expected to be a Republican Senate, Obama even seeks a second term. Can it be that he and Michelle are so enamored of the presidential perks of free travel, paid vacations to exotic locales, galas with celebrities at the White House and never having to stand in line to shoot a round of golf, that nothing else counts?

There is also the matter of being in the spotlight. Some people just can’t get enough of it. Although most of us would weary of being the focus of so much attention, being constantly eyeballed by the media, the public and the Secret Service, there are certain strange creatures who crave it the way normal human beings crave oxygen.

If the cost of gasoline is what it takes for voters to wake up and smell the fire and brimstone emanating from the Oval Office, I can only hope that the price keeps rising through Election Day.

Speaking of those in the public eye, what is it that makes so many people lose all sense of perspective when it comes to the death of a celebrity? Over the past 15 years, we’ve seen millions of seemingly normal people take leave of their senses simply because Lady Di, Michael Jackson and now Whitney Houston, have died. Why is it that we make so much of the passing of a one-time English royal; an entertainer who managed to give plastic surgery almost as bad a name as pedophilia; and a singer who destroyed her life with alcohol and cocaine? What is it in our collective DNA that inflates their passing to such an enormous degree?

Why, when we barely notice the death of medical researchers who cure our most dreaded diseases; of writers and composers whose creativity revives our culture; of military warriors who sacrifice their lives to ensure our liberty; do we carry on like those poor souls in North Korea who are severely disciplined if their public grieving doesn’t quite hit the mark?

For that matter, why does Governor Chris Christie order the lowering of flags throughout New Jersey just because Whitney Houston happened to have been born in Newark? I mean, if you lower it for a drug addict, how will you not lower it when people such as Buzz Aldrin, Andrew Napolitano, Shaquille O’Neal, John Travolta, Sam Alito, Bill Parcells, Bruce Springsteen, Eva Marie Saint, Michael Douglas, Al Leiter, Jerry Lewis, Meryl Streep, Joe Thiesmann, Frankie Valli, Joe Pantoliano, Bebe Neuwirth, Bret Baier, Jason Alexander, Joe Pesci and Antonin Scalia, eventually cast off their mortal coil? And what about Nathan Lane, Martha MacCallum and even Pia Zadora?

And if Whitney Houston deserves such recognition, what about Barney Frank? I mean, you and I might regard him as a national embarrassment, but when he retires at the end of his current term, in order, I assume, to devote more time to perfecting his Elmer Fudd impression, he will have spent 32 long years in Congress.

Believe me, I know how utterly preposterous honoring Rep. Frank sounds to most people.

Still, if Governor Christie isn’t going to have any standards for such state tributes beyond the ability to carry a tune while stoned out of one’s gourd, he might consider just leaving those flags permanently at half-mast.