THANKS OBAMA! Toys 'R' Us Reportedly May Close At Least 100 Stores

[AlleyCat]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 06:56:49 -0800 (PST), Tom Sr. says...

> > If Trump takes credit for job creation
> > doesn't that mean he gets the blame for job
> > losses?
>
>
> But, but, but... LOGIC!
>

That's not logic, you fucking idiot.

T.R.U. has been going down for the last DECADE, including the EIGHT years
OBAMA was in office.

God, you liberals are pathetic and weak.

Didn't hear a peep out of your wide-open ass when they were on their way
down during the Obama years... why not?

Selective outrage is the homosexual's ONLY chance of being relevant in a
world where he's not.

Go ahead, lonely-ass and pathetic basement dweller... give us your best
WHOOOOSH, since you have NO argument for REAL logic.

"LOGIC" says that OBAMA'S policies hurt Toys-R-Us, since they've been
going down for a lonnnng time... longer than Trump's been in office.

Go ahead... WHOOSH me... it'll just prove how ignorant and stupid you
really are.

--

Wanna make a Conservative mad? Tell him a lie.

Wanna make a Liberal mad? Tell him the truth.

[Rudy Canoza]

On 12/19/2017 2:50 PM, AlleyPussyBitch stopped sucking cock long enough
to lie:

>
> On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 06:56:49 -0800 (PST), Tom Sr. says...
>
>>> If Trump takes credit for job creation
>>> doesn't that mean he gets the blame for job
>>> losses?
>>
>>
>> But, but, but... LOGIC!
>>
>
> That's not logic, you fucking idiot.
>
> T.R.U. has been going down for the last DECADE, including the EIGHT years
> OBAMA was in office.

Fuck off. Nothing Obama did damaged Toys R Us, and nothing Trump has
done has made the economy strong. Except for too much regulation, Obama
largely kept his hands off the economy and it grew. Trump hasn't done
anything much to damage the economy yet, although if he follows through
on any of his wrong and benighted protectionist policy goals, that will
kill it.

[TOS tRudey Ball now!]

On 12/19/2017 4:12 PM, little man Ball wrote:
> On 12/19/2017 2:50 PM, AlleyPussyBitch stopped sucking cock long enough
> to lie:
>>
>> On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 06:56:49 -0800 (PST),  Tom Sr. says...
>>
>>>>      If Trump takes credit for job creation
>>>> doesn't that mean he gets the blame for job
>>>> losses?
>>> But, but, but... LOGIC!
>>>
>>
>> That's not logic, you fucking idiot.
>>
>> T.R.U. has been going down for the last DECADE, including the EIGHT years
>> OBAMA was in office.
>
> Fuck off.  Nothing Obama did damaged Toys R Us,

Not directly of course.

> and nothing Trump has done has made the economy strong.

Dead wrong, little man Ball:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/28/news/economy/gdp-second-quarter-trump-economy/index.html

http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/04/news/economy/trump-economy-approval-rating/index.html

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-economy-improves-164926081.html

The Trump economy improves to A-

President Donald Trump has repeatedly railed about the loss of American
manufacturing jobs. Yet, a surge in manufacturing employment is one of
the bright spots in the economy right now — and it has helped boost
Trump’s grade on Yahoo Finance’s exclusive Trumponomics Report Card.

We now give the Trump economy a grade of A-, two notches higher than
when we launched the report card in May. Since we issued our first grade
— a B — the economy has improved in three significant ways:
manufacturing employment has risen, exports have gotten stronger and the
stock market has continued its upward ascent.

Our Trumponomics Report Card, calculated with data provided by Moody’s
Analytics, grades the Trump economy by comparing it with the economy
under six prior presidents, going back to Jimmy Carter, at the same
point in their first term. Here’s how Trump stacks up nearly eight
months into his presidency:

Trump is getting what he wants

Still, Trump has bashed companies moving jobs overseas and praised those
creating more U.S. jobs, which could be having some effect on where
companies decide to invest and open new facilities. Whatever the cause,
Trump is getting what he demanded — more manufacturing jobs.

The latest employment report showed that employers created 156,000 new
jobs in August — a relatively disappointing number. But that included
36,000 new manufacturing jobs, the biggest gain in four years. And
manufacturing output, adjusted for inflation, is at record highs.
American companies are producing more with less, while also hiring more.

Most economists think growth ought to continue, since profits are
strong, inflation is subdued and there are no obvious problems.

> Except for too much regulation, Obama
> largely kept his hands off the economy and it grew.

A lie.

He added reams of absurd new regulations that increased the cost of
doing business and strangled growth.

https://spectator.org/36682_obamas-regulatory-excess-and-abuse/

The critique of Obamanomics has focused primarily on the runaway
spending, taxes, deficits and debt, and the throwback monetary policies
at the Fed. But Phil Kerpen, Vice-President for Policy at Americans for
Prosperity, has now fully complemented that with a thorough exposé of
Obama’s regulatory excess and abuse in his just published new book,
Democracy Denied: How Obama Is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to
Radically Transform America — and How to Stop Him.

The theme is “democracy denied” because after the blowout Republican
landslide of 2010 Obama refused to listen to the people and did not even
consider changing course from the most left-wing policies of any
President in U.S. history. Instead, he just pivoted to bypassing the
Congress the people elected and maximizing instead the vast regulatory
powers of the Executive Branch.

For example, since cap and trade legislation obviously no longer had any
prayer of getting through Congress (even the overwhelmingly Democrat
Congress of 2009-2010 wouldn’t pass it), Obama said after the election,
“Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only
way. It was a means, not an end.” I took that as a personal threat. You
should too.

But Obama is going beyond even maximizing Executive Branch regulatory
powers. His established pattern and practice now includes exceeding
statutory authority, ignoring court rulings to rein him in, and breaking
agreements with Congress, as Kerpen documents.

Obama’s Flower Power Energy Policy

Kerpen powerfully illustrates this with a thorough discussion of Obama’s
regulatory abuses and excesses on energy policy, just one example of
many in the book. Shortly after Obama took office, his Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar “canceled land leases for energy development on 77
parcels of land in Utah. Then he canceled a pending oil-shale lease sale
based on his expert judgment that it ‘didn’t meet the smell test.'”
Kerpen adds, “Overall there has been a steep drop-off in leasing on
federal lands….2010 saw a 79 percent drop in leasing in Colorado,
Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming from 2005. Total
onshore royalties dropped 33 percent in just two years.”

Even more virulent is the Obama Administration’s attack on coal, which
the President seems to have targeted for quick phaseout, even though we
have the world’s most expansive coal reserves, offering 200 years of
inexpensive energy. Kerpen writes:

The Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and
Enforcement is pursuing tight restrictions on coal mining under a
so-called “Stream Protection Rule” that the agency admits would destroy
7,000 of the country’s 81,000 coal-mining jobs. The EPA has virtually
shut down mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia using guidance
documents….[S]aid Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association,
“That is tantamount to saying the intent is to strictly limit coal
mining in Appalachia.”

After the 2010 electoral blowout, the left-wing Center for American
Progress (CAP) was immediately ready with a 53-page report on how Obama
could use federal regulatory powers to continue “progressive” left-wing
policies, regardless of what the voters had just said. Kerpen described
the results for the coal industry: “Many of the EPA actions urged by the
[CAP] report are already underway at the EPA and are referred to in the
energy industry as the ‘train wreck’ because they seek to massively
burden the coal industry with enough regulations to bankrupt it.” As
Obama explained his regulatory policies during the campaign to what he
thought was a closed-door meeting among left-wing extremists, “So, if
somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will
bankrupt them.”

Public outrage over soaring gas prices in 2008 forced both Congress and
the Bush Administration to repeal the ban on offshore drilling. Kerpen
reports, “The pressure on [candidate] Obama was so intense that he even
reversed his opposition, claiming on August 1, 2008, that he would
support offshore drilling under some circumstances.” But that just
turned out to be more Obama calculated deception, which I knew at the
time. Kerpen explains:

Salazar’s first public policy statement, just weeks after being
confirmed… focused on stopping the opening of the outer continental
shelf…. The policy stance of the Obama Administration throughout 2009 —
a year of severe economic weakness — was to ignore the overwhelming
desires of the American people and do nothing to move forward on the
no-cost, genuine, stimulus policy of allowing access to offshore oil and
gas.

Current government estimates of America’s offshore oil reserves project
that they are sufficient to replace all imported oil from Saudi Arabia
for 30 years, and such initial estimates usually involve just a fraction
of the oil to be found once exploration and drilling starts. But Obama
does support offshore drilling — in Brazil, at the expense of American
taxpayers. He announced in April 2009 a $2 billion U.S. loan guarantee
for Brazilian offshore drilling, offering the aspiration for America to
be Brazil’s best customer.

In March 2010, Obama announced a supposed offshore drilling plan, to
great fanfare celebrated by the Democrat captive media (e.g. the New
York Times). But that just turned out to be more calculated deception as
well. Kerpen explains, “He was promising to allow a limited lease sale
for waters beyond 50 miles — past where geologists think most of the oil
is.” The plan actually involved, Kerpen further explains, reimposing the
offshore ban within 50 miles along the East Coast, and entirely north of
Delaware and on the entire West Coast. It was even accompanied by
canceling five lease sales in Alaska.

Outright lawlessness occurred in the offshore drilling moratorium
imposed by Obama’s Interior Department in response to the 2010 Gulf oil
spill. Kerpen recounts that Obama appointed an expert task force to make
recommendations concerning how the federal government should respond to
the spill. The task force report featured a recommendation for a
six-month moratorium on all deepwater drilling activities. But as Kerpen
explains, “the recommendation for a moratorium was not supported by the
authors of the task force report.” Task force authors wrote in a letter
to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Senators David Vitter and Mary
Landrieu:

[W]e are concerned that our names are connected with the moratorium
as proposed in the executive summary of the report. There is an
implication that we have somehow agreed to or “peer reviewed” the main
recommendation of that report. This is not the case….[T]he scope of the
moratorium on drilling which is in the executive summary differs in
important ways from the recommendation in the draft which we reviewed.
We believe the report does not justify the moratorium as written and
that the moratorium as changed will not contribute measurably to
increased safety and will have immediate and long-term economic effects.

Kerpen reports that the executive summary in question was rewritten by
the staff of White House energy czar Carol Browner to endorse the
moratorium. President Obama then used his staff rewritten task force
report to justify the offshore drilling moratorium “with full knowledge
that it would put more than 23,000 Americans out of work at a time of
record high unemployment.” That moratorium applied off the coast of
Alaska as well as in the Gulf and everywhere else. This is yet another
example of the Obama public relations style I have called “calculated
deception,” more worthy of a Third World authoritarian government than
the world’s leading liberal democracy.

Kerpen continues, explaining: “On June 23, 2010, U.S. District Judge
Martin Feldman issued a stinging 22 page decision, [with] an injunction
to overturn the moratorium based on the political manipulation and the
Interior Department’s utter failure to justify the breadth of the
moratorium.” Judge Feldman wrote regarding the studies Interior cited
for the moratorium:

How these studies support a finding that shear equipment does not
work consistently at 500 feet is incomprehensible. If some drilling
equipment parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are? Are all
planes a danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All
trains? All mines? That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed and rather
over-bearing.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Obama Administration’s
request for a stay of Feldman’s ruling. Yet Obama’s Interior Secretary
Ken Salazar “reimposed a very similar moratorium disregarding the
rulings of the two courts,” Kerpen reports. Salazar imperiously
pronounced, “We will only lift the moratorium when I as Secretary of
Interior am comfortable that we have significantly reduced those risks.”
Salazar and the Interior Department were held in contempt of court by
Feldman, to no avail.

The moratorium was supposedly lifted in October 2010. But as Kerpen
explains:

[T]he end of the formal moratorium didn’t put anyone back to work,
because the Administration continued to drag its feet on permitting…. By
February, 2011, there were more than 100 Gulf of Mexico permits pending
at the Interior Department’s newly created regulator, Bureau of Ocean
Energy Management… which had not approved a single permit since the
moratorium was supposedly lifted.

The state of Alaska sued in September 2010, alleging that the illegal
moratorium effectively continued. But by February 2011, Shell pulled the
plug on already permitted offshore exploration in Alaska, which the
Administration had suspended even after the investment of billions in
the project. Shell said it couldn’t spend any more given the regulatory
uncertainty.

Kerpen concludes on energy policy: “When President Obama took office,
the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States was
$1.83. What has happened since was not an accident, but the result of a
consistent set of anti-energy policies designed to make prices skyrocket
so that we can’t afford to use as much gasoline and electricity.”

Internet Authoritarianism

Kerpen discusses in detail the FCC’s adoption of net neutrality
regulations on December 21, 2010. The foundation for those regulations
is that the companies that invest in and build the Internet
infrastructure can’t be trusted to manage it, arbitrarily favoring some
users over others. So the government needs to step in and manage it,
eventually taking over control of the Net.

Of course, the experience has been that under private management in the
competitive market, the Internet has been the freest institution in the
world. But wherever the government has stepped in to control the web,
that freedom has been restricted or squelched.

Obama’s FCC appointees adopted this regulation even though just 8 months
earlier the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously in Comcast
v. FCC that the FCC has no statutory authority for it. Kerpen also notes
that in the 2010 Congressional campaigns, 95 candidates signed the
pledge of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to promote Net
Neutrality and Internet regulation, and all 95 lost. Moreover, a bill
introduced in Congress to provide FCC authority for such regulation
garnered only 27 co-sponsors.

Yet Obama continues to implement such regulation heedless of the people,
the courts, and Congress.

Hot Air Tax

During the 2008 campaign, Obama privately told the editorial board of
the ultra-left San Francisco Chronicle that under the cap and trade plan
he now intends to implement regardless of the wishes of the voters,
“electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket…. Because I’m capping
greenhouse gases, coal power plants, natural gas, you name it — whatever
the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That
will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.” Kerpen
explains, “In other words, cap and trade is a way to impose a massive
energy tax — and pretend it’s not a tax. He adds:

These regulations will cost every American thousands of dollars a
year without any environmental benefit to show for it –except a nice,
green feeling for our political elites. And to what end? The regulations
would have no discernible impact on global levels of greenhouse gases or
on global average temperature, even if you believe the most dire
predictions about global warming. In fact, the 83 percent reduction in
emissions Obama supports would prevent a ridiculously insignificant 0.09
degrees Fahrenheit of warming.

CBO in fact scored the Waxman-Markey House cap and trade bill as an $873
billion tax increase, and agreed with Obama’s private opinion that it
would be passed on to consumers. Yet, despite the overwhelming
opposition of the voters, and the refusal of Congress to pass it, the
same greenhouse gas reduction goals were included in Obama’s 2012
budget. As Kerpen explains, “Obama is telling the EPA to just pretend
the bill passed and regulate away.”

Grassroots, Tea Party Solutions

But Kerpen doesn’t just complain. He offers good, long overdue
solutions, leading with the REINS Act (Regulations from the Executive in
Need of Scrutiny). As Kerpen explains, that legislation proposed by Rep.
Geoff Davis (R-KY) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) “cuts to the heart of abuse
of regulatory power by requiring any major regulatory action to receive
the approval of the House and Senate as well as the signature of the
president before it can take effect.”

That would restore the Constitution to control over-regulation. As
stated in Article I, Section I, “All legislative Powers herein granted
shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist
of a Senate and a House of Representatives.” Kerpen adds, “In Federalist
47, James Madison explained that the U.S. Constitution was written to
avoid the danger of legislative and executive power being fused by
prohibiting the executive from making laws…. Yet we now have precisely
the situation that Madison and the other framers wanted to avoid. We
have regulators who are effectively writing and executing their own laws.”

The Republican-controlled House is expected to pass the REINS Act this
year. Nobody knows what the Democrat-controlled Senate will do, or even
whether it will allow a vote on the measure.

Kerpen further advises that “We must repeatedly and unrelentingly…
deliver these two messages to Congress: You can delegate authority, but
you can never delegate responsibility. If you fail to stop
out-of-control regulators, voters will hold you accountable.” That is a
powerful message coming from one of the nation’s most effective
grassroots organizations.

Kerpen has written the best book available on Obama Administration
regulatory abuse and excess. It is must reading for every informed voter.

> Trump hasn't done anything much to damage the economy yet, although if

Shaddup, dwarf!