Raising debt ceiling w/o vote of Congress would be impeachable act, says Representative; Congress must declare war, not President; Marco Rubio on taxes and taxpayers; Illinois drops writing exams; Obama commands mortgage companies with edict; No accounting for lack of warming is a travesty; NY may lift ban on hydraulic fracturing; The costs of wind turbines in the UK

Expose Obama writes: Not all Republicans are rolling over in the face of President Obama’s unconstitutional usurpation of power. Rep. Tim Scott, R-SC, said if the president moves forward with a plan to raise the debt ceiling without Congressional authority, he would consider it “an impeachable act.” Scott told the Tea Party group LowCountry 9.12 on Tuesday:

This president is looking to usurp congressional oversight to find a way to get it done without us. My position is that is an impeachable act, from my perspective. There are a lot of things people say, “Are you going to impeach the president over that?” — No. But this? This is catastrophic. This jeopardizes the credibility of our nation if one man can usurp the entire system set up by our Founding Fathers over something this significant…There will be a revolt among the American people, and that’s what it takes. http://www.exposeobama.com/2011/07/07/congressman-calls-obamas-debt-ceiling-proposal-an-impeachable-act-video/?utm_source=Expose+Obama&utm_campaign=0804b2d902-EO_07_07_20117_7_2011&utm_medium=email

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From the Daily Kos, [of all places - as left wing as it gets] !: Via fellow blogger WIIIAI, I was alerted to an Obama press conference I somehow missed on Wednesday. One could use up a lot of electrons on picking apart what he had to say on lots of subjects, but let's concentrate on the most egregious statements - the ones on Libya (a subject which, curiously enough, was apparently not important enough to be addressed by Obama in his introduction, and only came up in the Q&A session).

Q: There have been a lot of questions about the constitutionality -- constitutional interpretations of a few decisions you’ve made, so I’ll just simply ask:  Do you believe the War Powers Act is constitutional?... A: I’m not a Supreme Court justice so I’m not going to -- putting my constitutional law professor hat on here.  Let me focus on, initially, the issue of Libya.  I want to talk about the substance of Libya because there’s been all kinds of noise about process and congressional consultation and so forth.

Absolutely remarkable. To a man who was a Constitutional law professor, discussions of the Constitution and laws passed by Congress are just "noise." The Constitutional mandate for Congress to declare war is just a "process." Are we sure this man actually was a "Constitutional law professor"? I have my doubts. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/01/990603/-Obama:-Constitution-and-laws-are-just-noise-and-other-lies-about-Libya

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Real Clear Politics writes: "We don't need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system. Then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on the Senate floor. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/07/07/sen_rubio_we_dont_need_new_taxes_we_need_new_taxpayers.html
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WLS AM reports: Illinois will assess only reading and arithmetic now that high school juniors will no longer be tested on their writing skills during standardized exams every spring, according to a published report.
Cutting the writing exams will save about $2.4 million amid the state's budgetary shortfalls. Writing tests for elementary and middle school students were dropped last year. http://www.wlsam.com/Article.asp?id=2230405
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The Wall ST. Journal writes: The Obama administration will require mortgage companies to extend more generous mortgage relief to help certain unemployed borrowers from losing their homes to foreclosure.
Under policy changes announced Thursday, mortgage companies that collect payments on loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration will be required to offer 12 months of forbearance for qualified unemployed borrowers. Currently, out-of-work borrowers with these loans can receive a minimum of four months without mortgage payments. http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2011/07/07/mortgage-aid-for-unemployed-expanded/
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The LA Times writes: An Obama administration official who was the principal architect behind the federal government's bailout of General Motors Corp. in 2008 may have lied to Congress, lawmakers charged on Thursday.

Ron Bloom, former senior advisor to the Treasury secretary and now assistant to the president for Manufacturing Policy, reportedly told a journalist and an author that he "did this all for the unions." http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-bloom-testimony-congress-20110707,0,2630822.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fpolitics+%28L.A.+Times+-+Politics%29
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The UK Telegraph reports: The headline of this post really shouldn’t be controversial. It chimes perfectly with what Kevin “null hypothesis” Trenberth wrote in that notorious 2009 Climategate email to Michael Mann:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

And it’s what Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview when he said that there had been no “statistically significant” warming since 1995.
it turns out all that pollution that Chinese are pumping into the air thanks to their unhealthy obsession with economic growth and giving better lives to their children is actually counteracting the effects of Man Made Global Warming.

“Results indicate that net anthropogenic forcing rises slower than previous decades because the cooling effects of sulfur emissions grow in tandem with the warming effects greenhouse gas concentrations. This slow-down, along with declining solar insolation and a change from El Nino to La Nina conditions, enables the model to simulate the lack of warming after 1998,” the team explains.

In other words Man Made Global Cooling is cancelling out Man Made Global Warming. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100095506/there-has-been-no-global-warming-since-1998/
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CNN writes: In a surprise move, New York state is likely to lift its ban on hydraulic fracturing, the controversial process used to extract natural gas.
The state's Department of Environmental Conservation released a draft Thursday of proposed regulations governing what's known as "fracking," in which drilling companies inject thousands of gallons of water, sand and some chemicals deep into the ground to crack shale rock and release gas. http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/01/news/economy/fracking_new_york/index.htm
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The UK Telegraph reported: In the week when it was reported that 20 per cent of the EU's fast-soaring, trillion-euro budget may soon be spent on "fighting climate change", it was timely that Britain's energy companies should have met with the Department of Energy and Climate Change to raise one of the best-hidden secrets of our Government's obsession with wind power.

Centrica and other energy companies last week told DECC that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.

We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on "spinning reserve", 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8612716/Proof-that-the-Government-is-tilting-at-windmills.html
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