Ironically, in his State of the Union Address tonight, President Obama railed against “outsourcing.”  That was funny, because he has spent billions of tax dollars on subsidizing the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries.

In his upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama will push for more green-jobs subsidies at taxpayer expense in the name of job creation: “With a Solyndra-scandal-be-damned attitude, President Obama is expected to revive his push for new green fuel sources in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, claiming that they will boost jobs.”  But these impractical proposals are haunted by the utter failure of Obama’s existing green-energy programs to produce economically-viable jobs or fuel.

There are only 140,000 jobs in the whole renewable-energy sector, which illustrates the absurdity of Obama’s unrealistic 2008 promise “to create 5 million new green jobs.” Most of America’s existing green jobs predate the Obama Administration, which did not create them: “from 2003-2010, the rate of growth for clean jobs was 3.4 percent.”  By contrast, Obama wiped out 20,000 jobs recently just by blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline, and recent EPA rules will wipe out at least 800,000 more.

More job losses are yet to come: in 2008, President Obama admitted that under his greenhouse gas regulations, people’s utility bills would “skyrocket,” and coal-fired power plants would go “bankrupt.”  That will wipe out vast numbers of jobs in the energy sector.

Far from creating jobs, Obama’s green-energy policies have actually reduced employment in the United States by diverting American dollars to foreign firms.  The Obama Administration used federal green-jobs money to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop” at American University.   “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas,” with the largest payment going to a bankrupt Australian company.  “Most of the jobs are going overseas,” said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

Meanwhile, America actually lost jobs in wind-manufacturing: “Even with the infusion of so much stimulus money, a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.”  (CBS News recently reported that there are 11 more companies, in addition to Solyndra, that are embroiled in financial trouble after receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer money; five have already filed for bankruptcy).  Moreover, the EPA’s own internal documents show that the administration’s global warming regulations will result in a massive “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”

Obama’s mythical green-jobs are like other imaginary jobs he claimed to have created with the $800 billion stimulus package.  The Obama Administration took credit for jobs created in 440 non-existent Congressional districts, such as Arizona’s 15th and 86th districts (Arizona only had 8 Congressional districts, as ABC News noted with amusement).  The Washington Examiner noted that at least “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

The Obama Administration claimed that the stimulus package would keep unemployment from ever rising above 8 percent, but it peaked at over 10 percent.  Obama claimed the stimulus was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admits that the stimulus package will shrink the economy “in the long run.”

Obama’s green-jobs pledge isn’t his only broken promise.  Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise of a “net spending cut,” but soon after taking office, he proposed budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt.

CBS News is reporting that there are 11 more Solyndras in the Obama Administration’s green-energy program:

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra. . .Standard and Poor’s had given the [Beacon] project a rating of ‘CCC-plus.’

(A CCC rating is also shared by Greece, a virtually bankrupt nation embroiled in a massive debt crisis).

A liberal Congress must share the blame for this fiasco, since the massive $800 billion stimulus package it passed in 2009 funded these boondoggles. As a Solyndra stakeholder exulted, “there’s never been more money shoved out the government’s door in world history.”  But as the Washington Post noted, energy programs were “infused with politics at every level” under Obama.  His Administration hastily approved subsidies for Solyndra, whose executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment, despite obvious danger signs and warnings about the company’s likely collapse. (Later, federal officials successfully pressured Solyndra to delay its announcement about upcoming layoffs until just after the 2010 election, to avoid embarrassing the Obama Administration).

The Obama Administration also used green-jobs money from the stimulus package to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.”   As the Investigative Reporting Workshop noted, “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas . . .In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company.” (The stimulus package also funnelled money to left-wing community organizers and liberal lobbying groups.)

The Washington Examiner argued that the global-warming bill backed by Obama would similarly backfire, leading to deforestation, and thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions in the long run.  Obama’s so-called “cap-and-trade” legislation was full of pay-offs for special interests.  Obama once admitted that under his cap-and-trade scheme, electricity bills would “skyrocket” and coal-fed power plants would go “bankrupt.”  Treasury Department analysts estimated it could increase costs for the average household by $1761 per year.  It contained environmentally-harmful provisions, such as ethanol mandates that damage “water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol mandates have  helped destroy forests in the Third World, and spawned famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

The Obama Administration claimed that if the stimulus package were passed, unemployment would never go above 8 percent, but it peaked at over 10 percent.  Obama relied on exaggerated claims to push through the stimulus package, claiming it was needed to prevent the economy from suffering an “irreversible decline,” even though the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package will shrink the economy “in the long run.” Ill-conceived provisions in the stimulus package ended up destroying thousands of jobs by wiping out exports.

The billions in taxpayer money wasted on foreign green jobs are yet another breach of  Obama’s 2008 pledge of a “net spending cut,” which he broke by proposing budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt.

An Occupy Orange County protester decries mankind’s existence: “Our very existence is bad for the planet.”  “Another protester told” an interviewer “that human beings are parasites,” adding that “if you take humanity off this planet, the planet would explode with prosperity.”

In May, a group of Nobel laureates and others gathered to put humanity on trial, to decide whether humanity had breached its relations with the planet.  Representing “the planet” was none other than Obama science and technology advisor Mario Molina.

Delegates to a U.N. climate change conference signed a petition to ban water, which the petition referred to using an obvious chemical name for water that anyone who has studied science or taken a chemistry course would logically recognize (as “dihydrogen monoxide”).  The petition cited the fact that water can erode rock or metal over time.

The Washington Post gave a thumbs-down to the billions of dollars dumped into electric vehicles by the Obama Administration, noting that these electric vehicles are not a “solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil, or to global warming, in the near future. They simply pose too many issues of price and practicality to attract a large segment of the car-buying public.”  It pointed out that subsidies for electric vehicles are “trickle-down economics” that benefit a wealthy few at the expense of taxpayers.  (Each Chevy Volt costs taxpayers up to $250,000).

The Post also criticized the costly ethanol subsidies backed by the Obama Administration, noting that a recently-expired ethanol tax credit “badly distorted the global grain market, artificially raised the cost of agricultural land and did almost nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A federal law requiring the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol for fuel by 2022 still props up the industry, but the tax credit’s expiration is a victory for common sense just the same.”  The Obama Administration supports ethanol subsidies, even though they have a history of  spawning famines and food riots overseas. It has forced up the ethanol content of gasoline through EPA regulations, even though ethanol production results in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution.  Back in 2008, leading environmentalists lamented the devastating impact of ethanol subsidies on the global environment and the world’s poor in the Washington Post. They noted that thanks to ethanol mandates, “deadly food riots” had already “broken out in dozens of nations,” such as “Haiti and Egypt.”

Green-jobs subsidies from the $800 billion stimulus package were used to outsource American jobs to China.  The stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office now says will actually shrink the economy in the long run, contained other provisions that wiped out jobs in our export sector and aggravated America’s trade deficit.

Even the liberal Washington Post, which hasn’t endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, seems to be souring on the Obama Administration’s failed energy programs, saying they were “infused with politics at every level.” As it noted in discussing the Solyndra scandal: “Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal ­e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials. The records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra,” which was owned by major Obama backers, like George Kaiser.

As law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds notes, “all the ‘stimulus’ and ‘green energy’ stuff was never anything but a program to put taxpayer money into the hands of cronies and supporters.”

The Obama Administration hastily approved the  taxpayer subsidies for Solyndra despite obvious danger signs and warnings from accountants about the company’s likely collapse, the misgivings of agency officials, and the company’s mismanagement and lousy-quality products. (Solyndra executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment to avoid disclosing incriminating information.) The Obama administration was determined to shovel taxpayer money to its cronies as fast as it could. As an Obama fundraiser and Solyndra stakeholder exulted,  “there’s never been more money shoved out of the government’s door in world history and probably never will be again than in the last few months and the next 18 months. And our selfish parochial goal is to get as much of it . . . as we possibly can.”  “At the time Solyndra received its grant, Vice President Joe Biden declared that the Solyndra investment is ‘exactly what the [the stimulus package] is all about.’”

While diverting taxpayer money away from productive and efficient businesses to corporate-welfare recipients controlled by political cronies, the Obama Administration is busy wiping out jobs through thousands of pages of counterproductive regulations.  Some of these new regulations are designed to spawn lawsuits that will enrich trial lawyers at businesses’  and consumers’ expense.

Obama appointees at the EEOC are busy harassing businesses that hire and fire based on merit, thus discouraging employers from hiring or expanding operations, and the EEOC is bringing costly, unjustified lawsuits against businesses.  The 2010 healthcare law imposes financial burdens — some of them large, and others difficult to calculate — on the nation’s employers, resulting in some business owners deciding not to expand or hire new employees.

Many businesses are also suffering from the effects of the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law, a 2,315 page monstrosity that makes it harder for small businesses to obtain credit, and also outsources and wipes out jobs in the financial sector. Even one-time Obama supporters in the business community have grown disenchanted: Democratic businessman Steve Wynn called Obama“the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime,” saying that “the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.”

The Obama administration has sought to temporarily pump up the economy with stimulus spending paid for with massive deficits, but as the Congressional Budget Office has noted, the stimulus package will actually shrink the economy in the long run, so it will not be able to offset the economic drag resulting from all of the Obama administration’s new regulations and red tape.

Now that Republicans feel that they have won a minor victory over Obama on the debt deal, they might be more likely to make concessions on non-debt/spending related issues like the confirmation of Commerce Secretary nominee John Bryson.  It is more important than ever that fans of the free-market pressure the Senate to oppose the nomination of this rent-seeking, radical environmentalist.  In a Kansas City Star op-ed published this morning, I show why his corporatist past is reason enough to block Bryson’s nomination.

President Obama’s nominee for secretary of commerce, John Bryson, is a terrible choice for a Cabinet department ostensibly dedicated to promoting economic growth and job creation. In fact, Bryson has made a career out of undermining both. Over the years, he has used his government connections to game the political process and receive billions in bailouts and subsidies. America does not need any more crony capitalists in high places.

Bryson’s career began as a regulator in California in 1976, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the State Water Resources Control Board. In 1979, Brown appointed him to chair California’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC). As chairman, he deliberately drove up electricity rates by using fixed-rate contracts that passed the costs of massive wind energy projects on to consumers.

Bryson readily acknowledges the effects of his policies during this period. “What California has done is knowingly incur higher cents per-kilowatt-hour costs,” he boasted in 2009. “They’re substantially higher than the U.S. average in order to invest in the kind of systems we have in California. … That’s been part of the regulatory environment for the investor-owned utilities as long as I’ve been close to it.”

As PUC chairman, Bryson helped create a regulatory structure that fixed utilities’ profits at a percent of costs. As a result, the utilities make money not by bringing costs down and selling more electricity, but by raising costs with unnecessary, expensive and redundant projects.

Moving from government to industry, Bryson parlayed his intimate knowledge of the regulatory landscape – which he helped create – into a high-level position with the utility Southern California Edison in the mid-1980s. After rising to CEO of parent company Edison International, he then used his government connections to make a series of cushy political deals for the utility. …

Bryson’s career demonstrates that he trusts politicians and bureaucrats, not businesses competing in the market, to drive the economy. Just as voters in 2010 rejected bailouts and subsidies for politically favored businesses, the Senate should reject the confirmation of John Bryson.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/08/03/3054097/the-case-against-john-bryson.html#ixzz1U01VqwoO

President Obama is refusing accept deals that would raise the federal debt ceiling because they would require him to accept cuts in wasteful green-jobs and rail boondoggles and stimulus spending:   “The president has made a bipartisan agreement even more difficult by declaring certain spending off-limits to cuts. Mr. Obama’s ‘untouchable’ list includes his $1 trillion health-care reform, $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds, education and training outlays, his $53 billion high-speed rail proposal, spending on ‘green’ jobs and student loans, and virtually any structural changes to entitlements except further squeezing payments to doctors, hospitals and health-care professionals.”  If the debt ceiling is not raised, America’s credit rating may be downgraded, leading to higher interest payments on the debt in the future.

Obama’s refusal to reconsider green-jobs spending is unfortunate given how such spending has backfired, effectively outsourcing thousands of American jobs at taxpayer expense.  ABC News reports on the subsidies for Chinese wind turbines contained in the stimulus package:

Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.

Nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been spent on wind power, funding the creation of enough new wind farms to power 2.4 million homes over the past year. But the study found that nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.

“Most of the jobs are going overseas,” said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He analyzed which foreign firms had accepted the most stimulus money. “According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S.” Even with the infusion of so much stimulus money, a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.

The biggest recipient of green-jobs funding in the stimulus package was a bankrupt Australian company that imported Japanese turbines for a windmill farm.   (Spain’s “green jobs” program, which Obama cited 8 times as a model for his own green jobs and global-warming programs,  completely failed, destroying jobs and driving up Spain’s skyrocketing government deficit. Each new green job “created” in Spain wiped out 2.2 existing jobs and cost $800,000.   New EPA rules dealing with global warming are expected to wipe out more than 800,000 jobs, while proposed EPA ozone rules could wipe out millions more.)

Obama’s refusal to cut any stimulus spending is foolhardy.  Much stimulus money has been wasted.  It has gone to prisoners and dead people, wasteful welfare spending, abandoned bridges to nowhere, and unnecessary government buildings.  Recently, $130,000 in stimulus money was spent for a book that demonized white people and encouraged teachers to treat students differently based on their race, based on wacky racial stereotypes.

The stimulus also wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.  Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor say that the stimulus wiped out 550,000 jobs.

The “’stimulus’ is not the road to economic recovery. It’s the problem, not the solution, writes Nobel Prize winning economist Vernon L. Smith.” Other Nobel Laureates like Gary Becker have also criticized the stimulus package.  200 economists signed a statement publicly opposing the stimulus package in an ad published in the Washington Post and New York Times.  Harvard  University economics professor Robert Barro called it “the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s.”

Obama’s so-called “high-speed” rail projects, which he also refuses to cut, are grossly wasteful.  They are anything but “high-speed,” and will be used by very few travelers at an incredible cost of at least “$35.3 million per mile of track.”  “Most do not even meet the requirements of the common definitions of ‘high-speed rail,’” since they will not allow trains to move anywhere near as fast as they do in Europe, Japan, or China.

The EPA gives millions to the environmental groups that sue it.  “When the EPA settles or loses those suits, it then awards the groups millions more in attorneys’ fees,” notes legal commentator Walter Olson.  “‘The EPA isn’t harmed by these suits,’ said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during the Bush administration. ‘Often the suits involve things the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal cover from political heat.’ Holmstead called this kind of litigation ‘sweetheart suits.’”

The EPA gave millions to groups that sued it to get it to regulate greenhouse gases, like the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council.  Those groups brought a lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), which vastly expanded the EPA’s jurisdiction.  More recently, they sued to compel the EPA to issue greenhouse gas “performance standards” for power plants and refineries. In a recent settlement, the EPA agreed to do just that.  Critics “said the costly settlement was ‘concocted in secret’” and that other lawsuits by EPA grantees resulted in collusive settlements that cost the economy billions, increased the EPA’s powers, and gave environmental groups things that they were unlikely to win in any court ruling.

Government funding is one of many reasons that these environmental groups have a huge financial advantage in the political process.  For example, an American University study found that supporters of the cap-and-trade bill aimed at global warming had a massive financial edge over their critics.  American University’s Professor Nisbet notes that “the effort by environmentalists to pass cap and trade may have been the best financed political cause in history.”  It nonetheless has failed thus far, perhaps because of the enormous cost and waste associated with the bill.  (In 2008, Obama said that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under the cap-and-trade plan he favored, and that it would “bankrupt” coal-fired power plants.  The cap-and-trade bill is chock full of costly corporate welfare, and would have a “trivially small” effect on greenhouse gas emissions while imposing an enormous cost, according to a former Obama Advisor.  It is supported by the same special-interests and corporate rent-seekers who supported the stimulus package’s green-jobs provisions, which used tax dollars to outsource American jobs, subsidizing foreign “green jobs” that replaced thousands of American jobs.  Recent EPA rules will wipe out at least 800,000 jobs.  Two economists say the stimulus destroyed 550,000 jobs.)

As Walter Olson notes, collusive lawsuits are not unique to the EPA, nor are incestuous relationships between agencies and liberal lobbying groups.  In his book, Schools for Misrule, he chronicles how “other government agencies, much like the EPA, use settlements of pressure-group lawsuits as a way to go along with desired expansions of power.”  For example, “corrections and foster-care systems commit to step up program offerings and . . . seek higher funding to accomplish their missions; union-allied public-sector managers give away the store on employee benefits disputes, and so forth (scroll to “Consent of the Governors”). From New York to Alabama, state education departments have covertly or even openly assisted lawsuits against themselves intended to force spending expansion. And once sweetheart negotiations result in an adverse consent decree . . . the locked-in big-government policies can be nearly impossible to unlock later on, should voters’ moods change.”

Nor is the EPA’s willingness to fork over millions in fees in collusive settlements unusual for agencies in the Obama Administration.  Other agencies in the Obama Administration frequently settle lawsuits brought by liberal groups by giving them everything they ask for, even when the liberal group was virtually certain to lose its lawsuit against the government.  The Obama Administration frequently agrees to pay attorneys fees to trial lawyers even when such fees are barred by provisions in the Equal Access to Justice Act.  That law, which governs the award of attorneys fees in many lawsuits against the EPA, protects the government from having to pay fees even when it loses a lawsuit, as long as its position was not frivolous but rather was “substantially justified.”

This issue has yet to really make a splash in the United States outside of California (which I’ll discuss below), but the European Green Police are leading the way with their next war on humanity: prohibiting ships from using bunker fuel.

Bunker fuel, also known as navy special fuel, is the bottom-of-the-barrel (literally), high-viscosity fuel used by large cruise ships, container ships, and tankers that is just slightly less viscous than the bitumen (asphalt) used to pave roads. Environmentalists hate bunker fuel because sulfur dioxide (SOx) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions are considerably more intense than those of the more refined and lighter gasoline and diesel.

While it is true that this makes bunker fuel “dirtier” than the fuel you put in your car, it is used because ships use large enough engines that are designed to handle bunker fuel and it is far cheaper due to limited demand (nearly nonexistent outside of the maritime industry).

For example, the retail price of a metric ton of 380 centistokes bunker fuel in Houston is $611. Converting per-gallon U.S. retail gasoline prices ($3.96/gallon U.S. average) to metric tons would give you a gasoline metric-ton price of $1,480.24 (42 gallons per barrel, 8.9 barrels per metric ton). If they were to pay at the pump, these ships would need to spend 145 percent more on fuel, something that is simply not economical. Requiring them to run solely on marine gas oil, which is currently $945 per metric ton in Houston, would force them to spend 55 percent more on fuel than they otherwise would. (This is an imperfect comparison given differences in density and calorific value, but still an instructive one.)

Just as consumers have seen the price of gas rise at the pump, so has the maritime industry seen huge increases in the price of bunker fuel (by more than 200 percent over the past few years). It has been estimated that as much as 80 percent of that increase has been passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices on goods.

The maritime shipping industry is the most crucial element of global trade. Besides petroleum and chemical tankers and other large cargo vessels, container ships make up a significant percentage of the world’s commercial maritime fleet. A single container ship can carry thousands of twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers. The Ebba Mærsk, for instance, has a cargo capacity of more than 15,000 TEU. Each of these intermodal containers is the size of a truck trailer. All of this cargo is moved with a crew of only 13.

If that’s not efficient transportation, I don’t know what is. But the greens don’t care. They would rather crush this industry, and global trade and all the benefits that trade entails, than support the world’s most efficient, environmentally friendly form of bulk cargo transport over long distances.

European environmentalists rejoiced recently when they convinced the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the United Nations’ maritime regulatory body, to ban ships using bunker fuel in the antarctic. The ban goes into effect in July. While there is very limited commercial shipping in the antarctic, this will effectively shut out many large cruise ships from these waters.

Not content with the southern pole, they moved next to try to push for an arctic ban on bunker fuel. Earlier this year, the enviros convinced the European Parliament to call on the IMO to impose a similar ban in the arctic, where there is a great deal of commercial shipping. But make no mistake: the radical environmental movement will not stop at the poles. They will not be satisfied until every port bans ships from using bunker fuel.

Leave it to the Californians to import these European “values” to America. The Golden Gold-Plated State’s Air Resources Board (CARB, the same folks responsible for California’s insane tailpipe emissions regulations) is now regulating bunker-fuel-powered vessels in their waters and is handing out fines to foreign ships who dare operate their businesses in a rational manner.

This recent spate of fines follows a terrible Ninth Circuit decision in March that upheld CARB’s authority to issue and enforce Vessel Fuel Rules, which are designed to reduce SOx and NOx particulate pollution, on ships in port or within California’s territorial waters. The California cruise ship industry, which caters to Pacific Northwest and Alaskan sightseeing tourists, will certainly be harmed. Not to mention California’s dominant position with cargo ports-of-entry. Commercial shipping in the Pacific Ocean — the world’s largest ocean, which covers nearly a third of the Earth’s surface — amounts to only about 15 percent of global maritime shipping, so we can expect this figure to further decline.

An EPA proposal to ban bunker fuel use within 200 nautical miles of the United States — which would have purportedly conformed with potential future IMO regulations — has yet to gain significant traction. But it will. The Gaia-worshipers have a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of hatred of humanity.

Representative Steve Pearce (R-New Mexico) yesterday removed his name as a co-sponsor of H. R. 1380, which I have dubbed the T. Boone Pickens Earmark Bill.  Rep. Pearce is an outstanding conservative Member of Congress, who is policy oriented and held in high regard by his colleagues, so his defection from the Boonedoggle Bandwagon is an important sign that House conservatives may be starting to rethink their support.  Pearce deserves special credit because the oil and gas industry, which would benefit from the Pickens-Your-Pocket Plan, is the largest industry in his southern New Mexico district.