Obama to Unions: You’re my B****

I’m starting to think that a Leftist’s definition of compassion is smashing your neighbor’s knee with a lead pipe, putting a gun to your head to demand that you pay for the neighbor’s medical bills, and then calling you heartless for not sharing the lefty’s compassion in wanting to care for your neighbor.

If you hadn’t heard about the story I’m referencing it’s perfectly understandable, with the media focusing on important issues such as fabricating stories about the background of a presidential candidate who happens to be black. Far less important than the latest example of racism from the Radical Left was president Obama’s decision to finally kill the Keystone Pipeline.

Ending a seven-year political saga, President Barack Obama killed the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on Friday, declaring it would have undercut U.S. efforts to clinch a global climate change deal at the center of his environmental legacy.

“Environmental Legacy”. Because transporting oil by train instead is so much better for the environment. And I had heard from one of those “People who know things” that champagne corks were being popped in the White House on Friday. And as much as I hate getting into the tinfoil hat realm of “Doesn’t the timing of this seem suspicious?” you have to ask the question here. Immediately after another shellacking at the ballot box the president needed some victory to keep his base enthusiastic. This could have been done a month ago or at many other times before, but Democrats need the union’s organizing and campaigning muscle, and with the final election being held during his presidency behind him the unions can officially take their place as second class citizens among Democrats. As you might have guessed, Big Labor does not approve. Juliegrace Brufke at The Daily Caller reports:

“President Obama today demonstrated that he cares more about kowtowing to green-collar elitists than he does about creating desperately needed, family-supporting, blue-collar jobs,” Terry O’Sullivan, president of Laborers’ International Union of North America, said in a statement. “After a seven-year circus of cowardly delay, the president’s decision to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline is just one more indication of an utter disdain and disregard for salt-of-the-earth, middle-class working Americans.”

Nice to see the Unionistas finally waking up, although the unions outside of government or service sectors are in a tough spot. On one side you have a party that is opposed to jobs being forced to unionize, and on the other you have a party that is opposed to jobs. Personally I’d think it would be easier to fight to unionize an existing job than to force small business to hire unprofitable $15 per hour entry level workers, but that’s just me. And of course, the Radical Left’s War on Prosperity extends even to the friendly confines of the DC Beltway. Via The Fairfax Free Citizen’s Tim Hannigan:

Stephen Hollingshead, Republican candidate for State Senator in Virginia’s 33d District, argued the plan flunks a health-wealth analysis. The Act will hike power costs by $5-6 billion. At a time when Northern Virginia is still in a recession having lost 10,000 data center jobs, the lack of cheap electricity will drive companies away from locating their data centers in the area, even though data lines running below Route 7 offer companies great access to the Internet backbone.

Will marginal, if any, improvements to the environment compensate for anemic economic growth and job losses? Is this health-wealth balance?

State Senator Dick Black (VA-13) called the Clean Power Plan an “eco-scam” that will shut down 68 coal plants in the U.S. and allow “developing countries” to start up 1,000 coal plants. Where’s the silver lining for Americans, especially coal miners and plant workers there?

Powerline’s John Hinderaker also delivers a great takedown of leftist talking points on the pipeline.

The Bureau of Land Management tracks the oil and gas leases that it grants on federal lands, and compiles the numbers in this chart titled Number of Acres Leased During the Fiscal Year. Here are the totals for the last four years of the Bush administration and the Obama administration through FY 2013:

Bush:
FY 2005: 4,314,207
FY 2006: 4,385,378
FY 2007: 4,634,736
FY 2008: 2,615,259

Obama:
FY 2009: 1,913,602
FY 2010: 1,353,663
FY 2011: 2,016,176
FY 2012: 1,752,060
FY 2013: 1,172,808

The Obama administration has drastically reduced exploration for oil and gas on federal lands. The fracking revolution has occurred because Obama’s EPA couldn’t stop development on private and state-owned lands.

Read the whole thing. Back to the original point of this post, Amy Goldstein at The Washington Post had a delightful sob story piece regarding the plight of Kentuckians (emphasis in the following text is mine) in WaPo’s afternoon newsletter that leads with the unbiased, non-incendiary headline :

‘Without this little bit of help these people are giving me, I could probably die’ 

As Kentucky’s governor-elect Matt Bevin vows to dismantle the state’s health-care exchange and reverse its Medicaid expansion, residents worry that they’ll lose health benefits in a place where coal jobs have vanished and poverty has increased.

and there was this blurb in the article

Dennis Blackburn has this splintered self-interest. The 56-year-old mechanic hasn’t worked in 18 months, since he lost his job at a tire company that supplies a diminishing number of local coal mines. “The old guy had to go home,” Blackburn says of his layoff.

The article briefly glosses over the fact that cost is an issue, but mostly reads like a PR piece issued by the White House about the joy of living under Obamacare. There are two points I’d like to close with that relate to the WaPo piece:

1) maybe the cost, and more specifically, where the money for this expansion is coming from should be asked? John Cheves at the Lexington Herald-Leader asked about that triviality:

The Beshear administration offered an initial estimate for expanded Medicaid costs in a spring 2013 report from the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services. In that report, state officials predicted that Kentucky would have to pay $33 million in Fiscal Year 2017, as the federal match began its decline. In 2020, when federal payments dropped to 90 percent, or $1.36 billion, Kentucky would have to find $151 million for its share.

However, those sums were based on the theory that about 147,000 Kentuckians would enroll in expanded Medicaid this year, eventually climbing to about 187,000. By July, the actual enrollment was 316,692.

I’m not even going to into the tangent of asking what happens if all 50 states are “getting” more money from the federal government to fund these expansions – exactly where do the feds get their money from again?

2) Note the points that I emphasized from the WaPo article. maybe if the Radical Left hadn’t destroyed these people’s jobs on the altar of Climate Change they wouldn’t need Medicaid in the first place. But to leftists that does not matter – how can they feel good about being so charitable by pushing people onto government dependence if they can’t cripple them in the first place?

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Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog

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