To understand why Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating, all you need to do is look at this analysis done by The Gainesville Tea Party.

Even liberals should be able to figure this one out. Especially the last line that shows how serious Washington is about restoring fiscal sanity and our economic health.

Keep in mind also that this analysis does not include the sixty plus trillion dollars in unfunded and mandated obligations of Medicare and Social Security.

Why S&P Downgraded the US:

U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000

Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000

New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000

National debt: $14,271,000,000,000

Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

Annual family income: $21,700

Money the family spent: $38,200

New debt on the credit card: $16,500

Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710

Total budget cuts: $385

The stimulus bill turned out to be a slush fund to award green energy grants to big campaign contributors and to buttress under-funded labor union pension and benefit plans in the states. And the green technology jobs went to China. Feeling stimulated yet?

It also marks the third anniversary of the death of the ‘media watchdog.’

And the good news is . . . ‘Hollywood’ reports that movie revenues hit a 16-year low.

The result: projected domestic revenues for the year of $10.15 billion, down 4 percent from 2010′s, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. Taking higher ticket prices into account, movie attendance is off even more, with an estimated 1.275 billion tickets sold, a 4.8 percent decline and the smallest movie audience since 1995, when admissions totaled 1.26 billion.

So why is that good news? It’s ‘Hollywood,’ that’s why.

Adam Carolla explains the OWS crowd’s self-entitlement mentality.

‘Too big to fail’ is one thing. Try this, ‘Too big to save.’

The teachable moment here is, unless we turn this ship around, you’re looking at our future by looking at the economic situation in Europe today. Good too for the Brits continued refusal to adopt the ‘solution’ the European Union has in mind. It’s best not to board a ship while it is sinking. Besides, they have their own problems.

House Republicans totally botched the issue by accepting Obama’s premise that extending the tax cut would create jobs by wanting to take it out to 12 months instead of just two. That Obama did not want a 12 month extension proves that point.

Speaker Boehner blew it by not framing the issue for what it really is. The gross amount of $160 is nothing more than street money given out by the community organizer and paid for by (that 99%) senior citizens and the disabled.

Under President Jimmy Carter, The ‘Department of Energy’ was instituted on August 4, 1977. Its purpose was to lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Imports: In 1977, 8,565,000 barrels of oil (net) per day, or 37.3%.  For 2009, 9,667,000 barrels per day, or 51%

Domestic production has declined. The U.S. produced 3 billion barrels of oil in 1977. By 2009, that was reduced to 1.95 billion, according to the EIA.

Oil consumption in the U.S. is up, not down. In 1977, the U.S.consumed 18.4 million barrels of oil per day. In 2009, we consumed 18.77 million barrels per day, making the U.S. the world’s largest petroleum consumer.

Gasoline usage has grown significantly. In 1977, the U.S. utilized 7.1 million barrels/day of gasoline. In 2009, Americans used 8,997,000 barrels/day, or 378 million gallons/day.

Gasoline prices have continued to rise. In 1979, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. was $0.58 per gallon, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Adjusted for inflation, that is the equivalent of $1.85 in 2010 dollars. In 2009, the average price of gasoline in the United States was $2.88 per gallon. During 2008, oil prices reached a record high of $145 a barrel, with gasoline prices of more than $4 per gallon throughout much of the nation.

A huge federal bureaucracy was created. The Department of Energy brought together under one Cabinet secretary more than 50 agencies that dealt with energy, including the Atomic Energy Commission. Upon its creation in 1977, according to official estimates, the new DOE employed a total of 20,000 people. Today, the Department of Energy has 16,000 permanent employees and 100,000 contract employees around the nation.

The agency’s budget, meanwhile, has ballooned from $8.4 billion in Fiscal Year 1980 to $26.5 billion in FY2010.

Good intentions do not necessarily translate to good results, especially where the federal government is concerned. Matter of fact, the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of Education (both DOE’s) should be the first to go in cutting government waste.

H/T Political Vel Craft

All the studies of the pipeline are done. Our Canadian neighbors are not happy that Obama chose to delay his decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 election. Senate bill S.1932 is Republican’s attempt to force the president’s hand before the election, calling for a decision from the Sec. of State within 60 days.

The bill would:

1. Establish congressional affirmation that Keystone XL is good for job creation, economic growth, and national security;
2. Require the President, through the Secretary of State, to issue a permit within 60 days to allow the Keystone XL project to move ahead, unless he finds that it’s not in the national interest;
3. Require the permit for Keystone XL to contain strong and specific environmental protections and protect states’ rights;
4. Require the federal permit to recognize an alternative route approved by Nebraska, protecting their ability to shift the route of the pipeline to avoid the Sand Hills area, while not holding up construction elsewhere;
5. Concludes more than three years of federal review by deeming the Final Environmental Impact Statement to be adequate.

Where President Obama is concerned, his re-election takes precedent over the national interest. Because if he were to approve the pipeline, he would alienate his environmental base and risk losing their campaign contributions. If he rejects it before the election, he puts BIG LABOR (labor unions are in favor of the pipeline) on the ropes and risks losing their support.  To him, putting off the decision until after the election is his way of voting present and doesn’t risk a dime of campaign contributions or support from either the environmental or labor union special interests.

If he rejects it, how could he explain to the American people why the nation doesn’t need 700,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude and 140,000 high-paying jobs? After all the green-energy bankruptcy scandals (BrightSource, Solyndra, etc.), he can’t say with a straight face how green energy is the answer to today’s energy problems. His own Energy Information Administration . . .

projects that most petroleum-based and non-petroleum based liquid fuels — including those derived from fuels such as coal, biomass, and natural gas — will continue to be used for transportation over the next two decades.

At a time when our economy is struggling and real unemployment is north of 11 percent, a truly shovel ready project like this means over a hundred thousand jobs nationwide. 14,000 in Oklahoma alone according to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), ranking Republican on the Senate Environment Committee.

In my state of Oklahoma alone, we’d be creating 14,000 jobs with the Keystone pipeline. Existing pipeline infrastructure can’t accommodate the current volume of crude oil, which makes us more dependent on imports and vulnerable to increasing prices. The Keystone pipeline will improve both the inbound and outbound flow of crude oil at Cushing, OK.

Speaking to the President’s speeches of lessening U.S. dependence on Middle East oil and creating jobs, Inhofe continues . . .

There’s not one piece of legislation in the House or Senate right now that would do more to achieve both of these goals than this Keystone bill that we are introducing today.

If you think we don’t have an energy problem, consider this. Bill Clinton opposed ANWR exploration because, he said, it would take 10 years to get anything out of it. That was nearly 20 years ago and ANWR is still closed. As recent as five years ago, people in the Northeast United States were suffering from a lack of heating oil. (84 percent of heating in the NE comes from oil.) Back then, Joe Kennedy’s oil company accepted discounted heating oil from the hemisphere’s idiot, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, to ostensibly ‘help’ poor people in the United States. A political move to give then President Bush a slap in the face.

All the green energy talk and environmental lobbies have managed to do to solve the NE problem is . . . nothing. Five years later and we have headlines like this one, ‘Northeast states cut heating aid to poor.’

If there ever was a case to increase oil production, I think people going without heat or food would make a compelling case. Even though these are the people Obama champions on the campaign trail, he officially ignores them in The White House.

National security meets foreign policy

While we’re on the subject of oil independence, let’s take a look back to the Carter administration and the long lines at the pump, the gas rationing, and OPEC’s embargo that caused it all.

Jimmy Carter was forced into getting a spine and came up with the Carter Doctrine. It was supposed to ensure protection of Middle East oil. Carter declared that the United States would consider any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the gulf region an assault on U.S. vital interests, and would be considered an act of war that would be repelled by military force if necessary. Carter also invented the Cabinet position of the Department of Energy which, thanks to environmentalists and big government statists, was and is a dismal failure.

Today, the Iranian situation is still volatile. They are making threats via military exercises to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil traffic. With the Keystone Pipeline project on the table, and people in the Northeast  being left in the cold, and Iran threatening to cut off oil to most of the world, how does him voting present on the Keystone Pipeline work for you?

So far, except for ‘social justice,’ there is no Obama Doctrine.

What this means to liberals is the government must take more money from the private sector and give it to someone (including campaign contributors) who did not earn it so they can spend it instead. Being tied to this social justice (Socialist) narrative like they are, there simply is no place in Obamanomics for economic growth to occur in the private sector.

Link: US growth revised down for third quarter – FT.com.

“For years now, Republicans have been telling us that tax cuts pay for themselves. ”

When the taxes are on income and investment, they do. When they are on funding entitlement programs, which produce nothing, they don’t.

Link: Exposed: The GOP’s dirty little secret about tax cuts

The administration goes through some machinations of the number of people out of work to make the unemployment percent seem to go down. They no longer count, like they no longer exist, those people out of work who gave up looking, the underemployed, and those whose 99 weeks of unemployment compensation has run out. When you count them as still alive, the unemployment rate is 15.6 percent.

When you don’t count the them, you cut (on paper) the number of people in the job pool. That is how the administration and their media followers can say the percentage dropped .4% from 9 to 8.6 and yet make it sound like things are getting better. When they are not.

“When the unemployment rate declines, we want to see both employment and participation increase as discouraged workers return to the labor force. Today, we got the former, but not the latter, making the 0.4 percent drop look a bit suspect,” Neil Dutta, US economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told clients. “We would not be surprised to see the unemployment rate give back some of its decline in the coming month(s).”

Considering that nearly half of the jobs created were for the Christmas retail season, expect them to go away in January.

This smoke and mirrors scheme was explained last August in this post.