Greta Van Susteren interviews Donald Trump at Fox Nation:
DONALD TRUMP: Well, the fact is, he takes more vacations than any human being I’ve ever seen. They used to complain about George Bush, but I understand he’s already exceeded George Bush and we’re not even through the year. So he likes vacation.
I’d be careful complaining about this. Don’t forget the alternative to vacation is Obama actually showing up for work. How has that worked out so far?
Vanessa Ho at Seattlepi.com:
Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.
McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.
But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program.
You might be surprised and disgusted to find that it takes a $20 million grant to create 14 jobs and retrofit three homes, but you shouldn’t be. Private companies can’t make it in the ‘green’ space, it’s no surprise the government fails even harder. After all, the government has the added burden of implementing bureaucracy on top of anything it touches.
Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.
Mostly administrative jobs? I’m not a contractor, but give me $20 million and I guarantee I could land more than three contracts and create zero administrative jobs. Give that money to a motivated and business-savvy contractor and they could turn it into a multimillion dollar company that provides dozens or hundreds of jobs in the span of a few years—just not a ‘green’ company, because the whole pretense is a complete lie.
Greg Turner And Jerry Kronenberg at The Boston Herald:
Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.
I’m glad I don’t pay taxes in Massachusetts, though I’m pretty sure this company received Federal funding as well. How many “green” energy companies need to go out of business before we all accept that alternative energy isn’t viable? Show me a single alternative energy company that is making money (collecting a subsidy from the government doesn’t count). Is there just one?
Byron York at The Washington Examiner:
“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. “But over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.” Obama listed three events overseas — the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises — which set the economy back.
Unfortunately for President Obama, America isn’t interested in who he blames for the economy. No other president got a free pass when faced with “bad luck”—especially regarding the economy—and this president will be no different. Obama’s policies, Obama’s economy.
Noel Sheppard Quoting Paul Krugman:
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better—
So, let me see if I can wrap my head around this. Krugman is saying that a fake war with aliens will literally save the economy, but the $700 billion1 we’ve spent on a real war in Iraq is contributing to the current economic crisis. Oh, except for that one article where he argued that the Iraq war actually helped stimulate the economy.
Do you think Liberalism is just a special case of pseudologia?