By Eric Fehrnstrom

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary Magazine weighs in on Mitt Romney’s Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” where he denounced the “brutal crackdown” following last week’s phony vote.

As Rubin notes, Romney also looked at Obama’s shifting rhetoric on a nuclear Iran:

I am not the only one pointing out Obama’s about face on Israel. Mitt Romney has noticed the Obama flip-floppery too: “During the campaign, when he spoke to AIPAC, he said he would do everything in his power to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon. And then he went to Cairo and said that no single nation should have the ability to deny another nation the right to have a nuclear weapon. That is an 180-degree flip of a dangerous nature. . .But that’s not right for America. That’s not right for world security.”

By Eric Fehrnstrom  |   Wednesday, April 22, 2009

As President Barack Obama pushes for a national cap-and-trade system, results are starting to come in from the nation’s first mandatory program to limit carbon emissions and they foreshadow higher electricity prices for all.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), got under way on Jan. 1 and covers power plant operators in Massachusetts and nine other Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States. RGGI caps carbon emissions at current levels through 2014, and then reduces them 10 percent by 2018.

At the center of it is the concept of selling to power plants the right to discharge CO2 into the air, something they previously did for free, turning it into a lucrative revenue source for government.

The “cost to pollute” is expressed as the price to emit a ton of carbon. The first auction of permits was held last September, when the price was set at $3.07 per ton, more than 50 percent higher than the $2 predicted by the University of New Hampshire.

The price increased to $3.38 in a second auction in December. It went up to $3.51 in a third auction in March.

Through this nifty scheme, states so far have pocketed $262 million from the power-producing sector, which can only come from one place: electricity users. Auctions are held quarterly, and the per-ton price will rise as the carbon caps are lowered over time and speculators get in on the game.

Not wasting any time, the Public Service Company of New Hampshire - which services one of the participating states - has already filed a request to raise rates, the first of many increases to cover RGGI.

Aside from punishing polluters, one of the ideas behind RGGI and cap-and-trade in general is to make alternative energy sources economically viable. The easiest way to do that is to make fossil fuel-powered energy more expensive. If consumers get hurt, so be it.

What cap-and-trade ignores is the mobility of companies that want to avoid the taxing effects of RGGI. Energy-intensive industries will simply migrate to where there are no caps. The result is the same amount of pollution, just fewer jobs where cap-and-trade is in effect.

There are other problems. A natural gas plant in Corinth, N.Y., filed suit against the new system because it sold electricity under long-term fixed-price contracts. Without the opportunity to pass on RGGI costs to customers, it may go out of business. In response, New York Gov. David Paterson wants to revisit the RGGI agreement to allow him to hand out “free” allowances.

One unsympathetic environmentalist dismissed the complaint by noting that higher costs are the price “for dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

But that’s not how cap-and-trade was sold. Back in 2005, the sweet-talking Conservation Law Foundation hyped dubious studies to claim that RGGI “could cut electric bills for most businesses and residential users.”

Not even the president believes that propaganda. Obama is eying RGGI as a national model. In a 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, then-candidate Obama was honest about what cap-and-trade would mean for the nation.

“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” he said. “You know, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money onto consumers.”

In line with Obama’s prediction, RGGI is raising costs and forcing energy producers to “pass that money onto consumers.” It couldn’t come at a worse time for a struggling economy.

By Eric Fehrnstrom

In January, 2008, after winning the Democratic primary in South Carolina, Barack Obama celebrated his victory with a speech decrying the “bitter partisanship that causes politicians to demonize their opponents.” He went on to say that the bruising political wars in Washington are “the kind of politics that is bad for our party, it is bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all.”

So, how are we doing?

Fifty days into the new administration, one fact is clear: far from achieving his hoped-for reconciliation, President Obama is running the White House as if it was the Democratic National Committee, with endless plotting against political foes, the issuance of muscular statements from the West Wing and plans to use Obama’s campaign machine, Organizing for America, to pressure opponents of his agenda.

Picking a fight with Rush Limbaugh was a spectacle beneath the dignity of the office, akin to George Bush answering insults from Keith Olbermann. But it doesn’t end there. CNBC reporters who take issue with Obama’s anti-capitalist agenda are belittled in the daily press briefing. The President draws partisan lines with his speechmaking. He flagrantly distorts the opposition’s viewpoint.

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By Eric Fehrnstrom

News that Dr. Robert Lanza and his team of scientists at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester have been injecting human DNA into cow, mouse, and rabbit eggs to produce hybrid stem cells deserves scrutiny by the Biomedical Research Advisory Council, which oversees stem cell research in the state.

In 2005, when Massachusetts was wrestling with the issue of embryonic stem cell research, the issue of human-animal egg combinations was left unaddressed by the Legislature.

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