The New York Times had this article up on their homepage at littler earlier in the day claiming that the American Society of Civil Engineers “warned” New Yorkers about the dangers of a hurricane like Sandy and had suggested options to prevent the subsequent flooding. The opener:

As the authorities examine how they can protect New York City from extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy, one of the nation’s most influential groups of engineers is pointing out that more than three years ago, it presented detailed warnings that a devastating storm surge in the region was all but inevitable.

The warnings were voiced at a seminar in New York City convened by the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose findings are so respected that they are often written into building codes around the world. Corporate, academic and government engineers at the meeting presented computer simulations of the storm-surge threat and detailed engineering designs of measures to counter it.

Officials from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and the United States Army Corps of Engineers took part in the seminar, serving on review panels or giving talks.

As for the “detailed engineering designs of measures to counter it,” the society recommended building sea walls. The seminar was even titled, “Against the Deluge: Storm Surge Barriers to Protect New York City.”

Now, what today’s NYT piece does not do — and it’s a glaring omission — is any type of reporting on what would actually happen to NYC if such a storm barrier were constructed.

To find that answer, a reader would have to comb through the Times’ archives. And this exhaustive search would lead to this op-ed, published yesterday: “Deciding Where Future Disasters Will Strike.”

McKenzie Funk argues in yesterday’s op-ed that any storm barrier built to protect New York City would, in fact, only protect the richest areas of the city and would make the flooding worse in the poorer neighborhoods:

The engineers in the room did not shy away from the hard truth that areas outside a Narrows barrier could see an estimated two feet of extra flooding. If a wave rebounding off the new landmark hits a wave barreling toward it, it could make for a bigger wave of the sort that neighborhoods like Arrochar and Midland Beach on Staten Island and Bath Beach and Gravesend in Brooklyn may want to start fretting about.

[. . .]

Some people, inevitably richer people, will be on the right side of these walls. Other people will not be — and that we might find it increasingly convenient to lose all sight of them is the change I fear the most. This is not an argument against saving New York from the next hurricane. It is, however, an argument for a response to this one that is much broader than the Narrows.

Maybe today’s NYT piece should offer a correction and admit that the places where NYC is flooded and lacking adequate relief would be even worse off if Bloomberg has listened to the “warning?”

And as for this ominous warning, the ASCE delivered in 2009, again we turn to Mr. Funk, who actually attended the conference as a journalist:

I think I was the only journalist who witnessed the March 2009 unveiling of some of the first proposed sea-wall designs. “Against the Deluge: Storm Surge Barriers to Protect New York City” was a conference held at N.Y.U.’s Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, and it had the sad air of what was then an entirely lost cause. There was a single paying exhibitor — “Please visit our exhibitor,” implored the organizers — whose invention, FloodBreak, was an ingenious, self-deploying floodgate big enough to protect a garage but not at all big enough to protect Manhattan. When we lined up for the included dinner, which consisted of cold spaghetti, the man waved fliers at the passing engineers. But as I look back over my notes, I can see how prescient the conference was. A phrase I frequently scrawled is “Breezy Point.”

It’s not much of a warning if you can only convince one journalist to show up to your event.

In their desperate bid to win over swing states Michigan and Ohio in Tuesday’s election, the Obama and Romney campaigns are plastering the TV screens with false ads about the auto bailout.

“When the auto industry faced collapse, Mitt Romney turned his back,” claims Obama’s ad over a misleading graphic quoting Romney in 2008 writing: “Let Detroit go bankrupt.” While technically true (Romney advocated a Chapter 11 bankruptcy backed by government financing), the ad implies that Romney wanted the industry to die. That is false, as the record clearly shows – and as Romney has stated in numerous interviews.

Meanwhile, Romney has Pinocchio problems of his own, fibbing that Obama sold Jeep to Fiat owners who “are going to build Jeeps in China.” Again, technically true – Jeep is soon to restart production in the huge Chinese market – but the implication is false that Jeep will move U.S. production to China.

Hardball, xenophobic, truth-stretching. Your typical late campaign mud-slinging. So what’s the difference between these two regrettable ads? Their media coverage.

The MSM is no less desperate to see an Obama win. In a cartoonishly partisan play, major media have ignored Obama’s falsehoods while pummeling Romney’s fibs on their front pages. Indeed, the MSM has repeatedly ignored Obama’s caricature of Romney’s auto bailout position – even when the GOP challenger called the president out in the third debate.

“Trumped -up issue: Will Wild Auto Claims Help or Hurt Romney?” screamed a Detroit Free Press headline on Friday before the election. This just two days after another front page headline: “GM and Chrysler: Romney Is Wrong.” There were no similar stories from the paper about Obama’s own fibs. In fact, the Free Press ignored the dramatic confrontation between Romney and Obama in the third debate in which Obama wrongly said: “Gov. Romney. . . you were very clear that you would not provide government assistance to the U.S. auto companies, even if they went through bankruptcy. ” Obama’s current Michigan-Ohio ads continue that falsehood.

The New York Times also turned front page fire on Romney’s Jeep hooey – attacking the challenger’s veracity but letting Obama’s malarkey stand.

The Chrysler double-standard is part of a pattern of MSM referees refusing to blow the whistle on numerous, crucial Midwest stories harmful to Obama (not to mention ignoring national scandals like the Benghazi cover-up). The Freep, Times and other major media have also ignored:

- 20,000 Delphi workers whose pensions were gutted by the auto bailout even as UAW pensions were made whole (Paul Ryan has talked about the issue from the stump to little press coverage).

- Pension losses by Indiana teacher and police pensions that were vested in Chrysler but illegally shorted by the president’s White House task force.

- Thousands of miners laid off in eastern Ohio as a result of Obama EPA carbon regulations.

And so on.

As the two presidential heavyweights battle into the 15th round, the MSM referee has put gloves on in the Obama corner. That’s not journalism. That’s lobbying.

Because he’ll lead on “climate change.”

He ignores the facts, spins the truth, and China-baits. Playing fast and loose with auto bailout details to secure votes in the waning days before Nov. 6, the Romney campaign is sounding a lot like the president.

But the Midwest’s partisan MSM is only reporting Romney’s distortions.

In a heated exchange in the final presidential debate, President Obama falsely accused Romney of wanting GM and Chrysler to go out of business. When Romney protested, Obama shot back “People will look it up.” People did and Obama was wrong – as the record plainly records (in interviews with this reporter, The Detroit News, a New York Times op-ed, etc.) that Romney favored government support to help the Detroit companies through bankruptcy. And just to poison the waters with a little xenophobia, Obama also smeared: “If we had taken your advice Gov. Romney about our auto industry, we’d be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China.”

Michigan’s major media was virtually silent.

For example, The Detroit Free Press - which has routinely policed Romney on its front page for opposing the UAW bailout – ignored Obama’s distortions, Sam Donaldson (apparently a White House surrogate these days) repeated Obama’s lie on Detroit talk radio, and a MLive.com endorsement of Obama also falsely accused Romney of wanting the industry to disappear.

What a difference a candidate makes. This week, after the Romney campaign hit Obama hard with similarly misleading claims that Chrysler’s “Italian” owners would ship all Jeep production to China, The Freep & Co. exploded in outrage.

“One of the great manufacturers of this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” slimed Romney. Not true, barked the Freep watchdog: “Not only was the story wrong, Romney took criticism for not knowing better and repeating it without questioning it.” True enough – but then the Freep went on to repeat Obama’s lie that Romney’s 2008 NYTimes edit advocated that Detroit automakers should go out of business

The only thing more embarrassing than the two campaigns is an MSM shilling for the incumbent.

Hurricane Sandy not only flooded Fisker electric cars at the port of Newark, but caused them to catch fire:

A story by Business Insider reports that 16 Fisker Karmas at the Port of Newark in New Jersey, submerged in seawater by Hurricane Sandy, caught fire.

Because of the storm damage, Fisker representatives have not had access to the port facilities. At this point, there is no reliable information about what might have happened, or if the fires had anything to do with the cars’ electric drive systems.

A Fisker spokesman sent CNET a statement saying that the cars were not being charged at the time, and that there were no injuries related to the fire. The statement goes on to say that Fisker will investigate once it has access to the cars.

I wonder if Fisker will now ask for more federal assistance, this time for the literal bailout of their waterlogged, yet somehow burned-out duds. 

Roger Pielke Jr. has a good piece in the WSJ (paywall’d) that compares the damage from Sandy to other major storms, as well as commentary on the actual “drought” of hurricanes hitting the U.S. Here’s the key takeaway:

But to call Sandy a harbinger of a “new normal,” in which unprecedented weather events cause unprecedented destruction, would be wrong. This historic storm should remind us that planet Earth is a dangerous place, where extreme events are commonplace and disasters are to be expected. In the proper context, Sandy is less an example of how bad things can get than a reminder that they could be much worse.

In studying hurricanes, we can make rough comparisons over time by adjusting past losses to account for inflation and the growth of coastal communities. If Sandy causes $20 billion in damage (in 2012 dollars), it would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of 242) to hit the U.S. since 1900—a significant event, but not close to the top 10. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list (according to estimates by the catastrophe-insurance provider ICAT), as it would cause $180 billion in damage if it were to strike today. Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth at $85 billion.

To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall—Carol, Hazel and Diane—that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.

While it’s hardly mentioned in the media, the U.S. is currently in an extended and intense hurricane “drought.” The last Category 3 or stronger storm to make landfall was Wilma in 2005. The more than seven years since then is the longest such span in over a century.

Flood damage has decreased as a proportion of the economy since reliable records were first kept by the National Weather Service in the 1930s, and there is no evidence of increasing extreme river floods. Historic tornado damage (adjusted for changing levels of development) has decreased since 1950, paralleling a dramatic reduction in casualties. Although the tragic impacts of tornadoes in 2011 (including 553 confirmed deaths) were comparable only to those of 1953 and 1964, such tornado impacts were far more common in the first half of the 20th century.

And as for the theory put forth by scientists like Meghan McCain that Sandy was due to man-made climate change:

Another danger: Public discussion of disasters risks being taken over by the climate lobby and its allies, who exploit every extreme event to argue for action on energy policy. In New York this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared: “I think at this point it is undeniable but that we have a higher frequency of these extreme weather situations and we’re going to have to deal with it.” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke similarly.

Humans do affect the climate system, and it is indeed important to take action on energy policy—but to connect energy policy and disasters makes little scientific or policy sense. There are no signs that human-caused climate change has increased the toll of recent disasters, as even the most recent extreme-event report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds. And even under the assumptions of the IPCC, changes to energy policies wouldn’t have a discernible impact on future disasters for the better part of a century or more.

The only strategies that will help us effectively prepare for future disasters are those that have succeeded in the past: strategic land use, structural protection, and effective forecasts, warnings and evacuations. That is the real lesson of Sandy.

What bothers me the most is that if Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg really think this is the “new normal,” then there are short-terms steps they need to be taking to lower the risk to Manhattan. But closing all of lower Manhattan to housing and business is not really something the voters will go for, is it?

We’ll see over the coming weeks if Cuomo and Bloomberg actually propose anything close to “strategic land use” or “structural protection,” but I’m not counting on it. NYC still has hospitals that put their power source to their backup generator in their flood-risk basements, I doubt we’ll see anything happen other than a new coat of paint on the existing NYC infrastructure. And certainly no major zoning changes for NYC’s most at-risk areas for flooding.

This could be the end for the electric car. Forbes:

President Obama’s vision to put a million plug-in cars on U.S. roads by 2015 is shorting out.  Speaking back in March 2009 of pumping billions of dollars in federal grants, loans and subsidies that would bring this about he promised  “This investment will not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil, it will put Americans back to work…”It positions American manufacturers on the cutting edge of innovation and solving our energy challenges.”

But woops, it turns out that plug-in car energy-saving argument is running out of juice. A September Congressional Budget Office Report has concluded that all that spending “…will have no impact on the total gasoline use and greenhouse gas emissions of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next several years.” It also found that even with the $7,500 tax credits we taxpayers generously provided to purchasers, electric cars are still a bad buy, costing owners far more over the life of the car than traditional gas-powered vehicles.

Apparently Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker, has figured that out, deciding that its new sub-compact iQ plug-in isn’t a great idea after all. Instead of mass marketing it, total production will be cut off at just 100. As their Vice Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada explained, “The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge.”

Cancellation of the iQ will leave Toyota with one pure EV in its lineup, an all-electric RAV4 model to be produced in the U.S. with Tesla Motors. Their expectations are to sell 2, 600 of these vehicles over the next three years. Still, after receiving a $465 million DOE loan, Tesla has reduced its original revenue forecast, and is now seeking a waver to amend loan terms for a second time in the event it can’t raise enough more money from investors.

The rest here.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes over at Real Clear Markets on the latest Labor Department report that shows how much money has been wasted on President Obama’s ‘green jobs’ training programs:

The Evidence Is In: Green Jobs Are a Total Waste

In case anyone has any doubt, the evidence is in. Green jobs training programs are a waste of taxpayer money. So says the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Labor in a report on the $500 million program, published on Thursday.

Assistant Inspector General Elliot Lewis wrote that of the $500 million authorized in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the stimulus bill) for green jobs training programs, $329 million was spent by June 30, 2012. Of the 113,000 people who participated in the green jobs training programs, 72 percent have completed training; 27 percent of participants got a job; 22 percent of participants got a job relating to their training; and 10 percent kept their jobs for at least six months.

That’s a cost of about $28,000 for each job retained for six months or more.

The report was requested by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa. It follows a prior report published on September 30, 2011, and reaches similar conclusions.

Workforce training programs have generally been costly, without fulfilling their goals. From the 1970s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, to the 1980s Job Training Partnership Act, to the multitude of programs today, federal job training programs have disappointed their proponents.

But give the man four more years! The rest here.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, liberals have been ever eager to finger climate change as the cause, and claim the tragedy is a dispositive argument for what we need to do about global warming. Here’s the problem, though: As Patrick Michaels has written on NRO, scientists hardly have irrefutable evidence to attribute storms to global warming. There’s some reason to think there’s a connection, but it’s hardly an, er, watertight case.

Or, as a Sunday NPR report Greg Pollowitz pointed out in this space put it:

There is a hierarchy of weather events which scientists feel they understand well enough for establishing climate change links. Global temperature rises and extreme heat rank high on that list, but Hurricanes rank low. As the IPCC special report on extreme events put it “There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.” . . .

This is not to say progress isn’t being made. One thing that does seem clear is that warmer oceans (a la global warming) mean more evaporation, and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year. In addition, a paper published just last month, used records of storm surges going back to 1923 as a measure of hurricane activity. A strong correlation between warm years and strong hurricanes was seen. Thus if you warm the planet, you can expect more dangerous storms.

Sandy was already a dangerous storm just by virtue of being several storms randomly colliding, but it surely did benefit from warmer ocean water, which can supercharge storms. But as one meteorologist explained to the New York Times, “natural variability very likely accounted for the bulk of that temperature extreme.” He went on to explain that, “my view is that a lot of this is chance . . . It relates to weather, and the juxtaposition of weather systems.” Or, as the NPR report put it, “for hurricanes, however, sticking to the science means it is still hard to point to an individual storm and say, yes! Climate change!”

But of course, that didn’t stop Mother Jones from doing just that. Chris Mooney glibly cites his own 2007 book, which discussed the possibility of sea-level rises’ contributing to events like Sandy:

As I wrote:

Even as we act immediately to curtail short term vulnerability, every exposed coastal city needs a risk assessment that takes global warming scenarios into account…Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York have been studying that city’s vulnerability to hurricane impacts in a changing world, and calculated that with 1.5 feet of sea level rise, a worst-case-scenario Category 3 hurricane could submerge “the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge.” (Pause and think about that for a second.)

No need to pause and think any longer—last night, just over five years later, much of it came to pass. And indeed, climate change, a topic embarrassingly ignored in the three recent presidential debates, made it worse.

Now those things did pretty much happen — not because of a Category 3 Hurricane and a hypothetical sea-level rise, but because of a tropical storm with an exceptional storm surge, which, it appears, happened to hit New York with full force at the worst moment, last night’s 9 p.m. high tide. And the “1.5 feet of sea level rise” projection that his book considered as a consequence of climate change didn’t cause Sandy, of course, since it hasn’t happened since the 2006 study (though it could, over the next few decades). He goes on:

Last night, southern Manhattan reportedly received a 13.88 foot storm surge, a record high and more than enough to flood much of the city. We’ve all seen the pictures. What’s more, according to Ben Orlove, director of the Master’s Program in Climate and Society at Columbia University, about a foot of that surge would not have been there if not for the sea-level rise already caused by climate change over the course of the 20th century.

Here, Mooney completely loses the thread: Yes, Manhattan experienced a record storm surge last night. But that’s a storm surge, which means increase above whatever the tide would be at a given hour and by definition has nothing to do with sea-level rise. Some parts of New York might be drier right now had the harbor’s level been a foot lower than the last century’s changes have left it, but that’s water under the bridge.

He cites an argument by Ben Orlove, a Columbia anthropologist, that some of the surge is due to climate change, but it doesn’t scan: Orlove explains that sea level in New York harbor has risen one foot over the last century, and “when this foot is added to the four feet of the high tides at the full moon, it reaches five feet, more than half the height of the sea wall.” This is good addition (though Orlove offers no evidence, here, for the one-foot rise’s being due to anthropogenic climate change), but it has nothing to do with what level of storm surge, or sea level, is necessary to devastate Manhattan, or Mooney’s earlier point about potential sea-level rises. Subtract that foot of supposedly man-made increase in the 20th century, and you still have a 13.88-foot storm tide (the high-water mark of high tide plus the storm surge). In fact, Mooney’s NASA estimates actually just demonstrate that much of New York City would be flooded by a Cat-3’s storm surge, but the IPCC’s projected sea-level rises they use wouldn’t worsen the city’s situation much at all.

The doomsday scenario Mooney greets so gleefully didn’t come about because of sea-level rises we could see from global warming in the coming decades or because of change over the last century, but because of record surge from one bad storm at high tide. Sandy showed us what flooding lower Manhattan looks like; it doesn’t prove that burning fossil fuels will make the flooding of lower Manhattan more common.

But can’t we blame Sandy itself on global warming? As explained above, it’s also difficult to draw a plumb line between Sandy and higher global temperatures. Indeed, Sandy was not an exceptionally vicious storm at all: It was the combination of several storms, like 1991’s Perfect Storm, and made landfall in a vulnerable, populated place, like Katrina.

I personally am much more sympathetic to arguments about anthropogenic climate change than many conservatives are, but that’s because I believe such claims have a solid scientific argument on their side. There may be a similarly compelling argument behind higher temperatures causing more damaging storms like Sandy (though there isn’t, yet), but that still wouldn’t make the Sandy hysterics scientific. Climate-change partisans may score short-term points, but ultimately undermine their legitimacy, by claiming tragic, one-off events as points for their cause.

Via Twitter:

So are we still going to go with climate change not being real fellow republicans?

Rebecca Rosen over at The Atlantic breathless writes, “What If We Didn’t Know Hurricane Sandy Was Coming?“

An excerpt:

It’s no exaggeration that our ability to forecast storms saves lives and dollars every year. But what if we were no longer able to make those forecasts?

Of course, it’s not that we would lose the knowledge of how to do so. The problem is that we might lose the data that feeds our models.

The New York Times reports that our weather-monitoring satellites — which fly from pole to pole, crossing the critical zone around the Equator in the early afternoon — are dying, and mismanagement and underfunding (generally resulting from Bush-era decisions or congressional Republican budgets) mean that replacement ones are behind schedule. ($182 million dollars for the weather satellites will disappear should sequestration — automatic cuts looming in 2013 — come to pass.) The result may be “a year or more” without the data these satellites provide.

We’re doomed!

Or maybe not. . .

The newest NOAA satellite, the Suomi NPP, launched last October but it is not known whether it will last until JPSS-1 is ready to go — many of its instruments are new and it is therefore difficult to predict their survival in orbit. If Suomi sputters out before JPSS-1, as government officials believe is likely, the gap would come in afternoon data collection, a time period critical because it covers the peak of midday heat, data necessary for our atmospheric models. This chart from the NOAA NESDIS Independent Review Team shows this gap below.

Well, for starters, we should be asking why a mulch-million-dollar satellite only lasts for six years (when the JPSS-1 is due to launch.) And two, the “gap” is only in the afternoon data collection.

There’s no other way to gather the data for the afternoon? We can’t fly a plane through the storm? We can use a military satellite to track the storm’s movements?

And finally, for the title of Rosen’s piece to be true, there would have to be a breakdown with all of our weather satellites, not just the afternoon forecast, as well as the loss of every sort of other weather collection device ever used. Not likely, to say the least.

Via Forbes:

ExxonMobil Pays $3 In Taxes For Every $1 In Profit

Hat tip: Steve Everley

It’s so simple, I don’t know why every homeowner in America doesn’t seize this opportunity:

RFK Jr. and late wife didn’t pay for many of renovations to make Westchester mansion eco-friendly

Oh, wait. Contractors actually require non-Kennedys to pay for these additions? 

Quick question for the IRS: Why aren’t the discounts the Kennedys received considered taxable income?

Note to everyone: Like last year’s hurricane Irene, a Category 1 that missed NYC but walloped the entire northeast, Sandy should not be taken lightly. There will be heavy rains, flooding and winds will knock down trees and power lines. Be prepared for days without clean water or electricity. We wrote about this last year on how the media discounted Irene’s initial impact because NYC was spared, until they saw what was happening north of the media epicenter.

People might fall into the same mindset that Sandy is being over-hyped, and that could be true. TV stations have to pay their bills, too. But over-hyped doesn’t mean that there’s no danger.

Here’s the latest track. Updates to follow. . .

Odd. I thought President Obama was the one who said outsourcing U.S. jobs was bad, no? The Detroit News:

General Motors Co. said Wednesday it will invest $450 million to build an all-new global Chevy vehicle at its Rosario Automotive Complex in Argentina.

The Detroit-based automaker said it would make the investment between 2013 and 2015.

“We are pleased to be making this investment in Argentina, which remains a very important market for us,” GM Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson said in a statement.

The rest here.

The Hill:

Climate change never emerged as a topic in the three presidential debates, disappointing greens who say President Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney have avoided discussing the issue.

With Defense Secretary Leon Panetta commenting in May that “climate change has a dramatic impact on national security,” some environmental activists thought the topic could wriggle its way into Monday’s foreign policy debate.

But like the previous two debates, climate change was shut out of the conversation.

What’s worse for the alarmists is that alarmist-in-chief Al Gore beclowned himself after the Denver debate when he suggests the president’s poor performance was due to the altitude.

So while the president and his supporters struck out on climate change, we had three home runs: Al Gore looked foolish; even Obama couldn’t say with a straight face that fighting climate change can create jobs; and there was no mention of how climate change is really a national-security issue.

I’m sure climate change will return to its ever-so-important perch once Romney is president and Dems need a faux issue to harp on.

The Boca Raton Bout was focused on foreign policy, but one subplot was of particular interest to Michigan’s economy: President Obama’s whopper on the auto bailout. For the first time, the two candidates went head-to-head on the Government Motors details — and Obama got it wrong. Badly wrong. Damn-the-facts-I’m-clinging-to-my-talking-points wrong.

For the record, Mitt Romney has always suggested that he favored a managed bankruptcy with government support if needed (a fact that grates on many libertarian-minded conservatives) — despite Obama & Associated Press attempts to twist the facts.

“The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk,” wrote Romney in a 2008 New York Times op-ed. He has expanded on this view in numerous interviews with this writer and others — perhaps most explicitly in an interview with our Detroit News editorial board in February:

“I would never have allowed the auto industry to disappear,” he said then, adding that — at a time when capital markets were frozen — “if government financing was needed, fine. In a managed bankruptcy process, government could have provided guarantees, financing, and DIP financing.”

Yet, Obama insisted in the debate on his “Let Detroit go bankrupt” caricature. The exchange is devastating to Obama’s veracity:

ROMNEY: The president mentioned the auto industry and that somehow I would be in favor of jobs being elsewhere. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . I said they need – these companies need to go through a managed bankruptcy, and in that process they can get government help and government guarantees, but they need to go through bankruptcy to get rid of excess cost and the debt burden that they’d – they’d built up.

OBAMA: Governor Romney, that’s not what you said.

MR. ROMNEY: Fortunately, the president – you can take – you can take a look at the op-ed.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Governor, you did not -

MR. ROMNEY: You can take a look at the op-ed.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You did not say that you would provide, Governor, help.

MR. ROMNEY: I said that we would provide guarantees and – and that was what was able to allow these companies to go through bankruptcy, to come out of bankruptcy. Under no circumstances would I do anything other than to help this industry get on its feet. And the idea that has been suggested that I would liquidate the industry – of course not. Of course not.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Let’s check the record.

But this time, Candy Crowley didn’t come to Obama’s rescue by butchering the record. The record clearly shows Romney is right. And Obama is fibbing.

President Obama’s LGChem boondoggle is a trifecta.

Per Brother Pollowitz’s post nearby, the administration’s ill-advised $151 million stimulus grant to foreign battery-maker LGChem here in Michigan displays a president disrespecting his fellow pols, shoveling money to foreign companies, and wasting tax dollars on his Green dreams.

Partisan Hack–in-Chief. Announcing the multi-million-dollar grant in 2010, Obama addressed a bipartisan crowd in Holland, Michigan,at the ground-breaking — and promptly insulted the local congressman in attendance, Pete Hoekstra. “Some of (my opponents) have made the political calculation that it’s better to obstruct than lend a hand. They said no to the tax cuts, to the small business loans, to the clean energy projects,” said Obama in a not-so-veiled shot at Hoekstra sitting just feet away. “Of course, it hasn’t stopped many of these same people from turning up at ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings, just like this one.”

The insult burnished a partisan presidential style. Members of both parties lament Obama’s refusal to build Washington relationships — thus further polarizing Congress. “It was un-presidential,” a startled Hoekstra told me in 2010 of the telepromptered put-down.

President Outsource. Obama has made it a campaign theme to criticize his Bain Capital opponent for outsourcing jobs and benefiting the wealthy. Yet, LGChem is one of South Korea’s richest chemical firms. Obama envies the green government-industrial complex in Korea and Europe, and the Holland stimulus was an attempt to bring foreign giants to U.S. shores — despite evidence that his overseas industrial policy models weren’t working.

The “green economy looks like a lot of green for the well-connected,” I reported at the Michigan View.com reported in 2010. “The president handed $150 million in stimulus money over to Korean CEO Peter Bahnsuk Kim of LG Chem. LG Chem is an $11 billion Korean conglomerate that hardly seems a candidate for the American Recovery Act. No wonder the program is so unpopular.”

President Waste. Despite Obama’s massive green investments in everything from solar panels to battery-powered cars, the green market has been a bust. The result? Bankruptcies for A123 and Solyndra following similar Michigan boondoggles under Governor Jennifer Granholm, like Fisher Coachworks and RASCO.

LGChem has become the latest poster child for Obama incompetence. WoodTV reports:

Workers at LG Chem, a $300 million lithium-ion battery plant heavily funded by taxpayers, tell Target 8 that they have so little work to do that they spend hours playing cards and board games, reading magazines or watching movies. They say it’s been going on for months. “There would be up to 40 of us that would just sit in there during the day,” said former LG Chem employee Nicole Merryman, who said she quit in May.

Your tax dollars at work.

The New York Post editors today:

Andrew’s Endless Stall

The Cuomo folks were at it again last week — pretending that the governor could possibly maybe one day allow fracking in this state.

On Friday, Department of Environmental Conservation boss Joe Martens admitted that experts set to review the “health impacts” of fracking (drilling for gas or oil in underground shale) have yet to be chosen.

But not to worry; they’ll be picked “soon.”

Martens, of course, couldn’t (wouldn’t?) say exactly when they’d be on the job, let alone when they’d finish. (If ever.)

Oh, and if the review’s not done by Nov. 29? Well, in that case, under state law, there’d have to be even more hearings . . .

Same old, same old.

Cuomo may not realize it, or maybe he doesn’t care, but his credibility is being tested here, big-time.

And the message he’s sending — that the economy and job-creation are not priorities for him — probably isn’t lost on investors, businesses, job-seekers . . .

The rest here.

And this is why manufacturing in China beats America. Because in China, they don’t pay workers to sit around and do nothing.

It’s not really the fault of these American workers that they’re doing nothing. They build the batteries for the Chevy Volt, and GM can’t give those away. President Obama’s job-creation skills at work!

Workers at LG Chem, a $300 million lithium-ion battery plant heavily funded by taxpayers, tell Target 8 that they have so little work to do that they spend hours playing cards and board games, reading magazines or watching movies.

They say it’s been going on for months.

“There would be up to 40 of us that would just sit in there during the day,” said former LG Chem employee Nicole Merryman, who said she quit in May.

“We were given assignments to go outside and clean; if we weren’t cleaning outside, we were cleaning inside. If there was nothing for us to do, we would study in the cafeteria, or we would sit and play cards, sit and read magazines,” said Merryman. “It’s really sad that all these people are sitting there and doing nothing, and it’s basically on taxpayer money.”

Two current employees told Target 8 that the game-playing continues because, as much as they want to work, they still have nothing to do.

“There’s a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch,” filling their time with card games and board games,” one of those current employees said.

The rest here.

And here’s the official release from the White House on just how fantastic all of this is. From July 15, 2010:

Background on the President’s Event in Holland, Michigan Today

Today, the President will deliver remarks at a groundbreaking ceremony at Compact Power, Inc. a subsidiary of LG Chem Ltd., a battery plant in Holland, Michigan.  The plant is the ninth of nine new advanced battery factories to start construction as a result of the $2.4 billion in Recovery Act advanced battery and electric vehicle awards the President announced last August.  The project is expected to create hundreds of construction and manufacturing jobs in Holland.  Once fully operational, the Compact factory will produce battery cells to support 53,000 Chevy Volts a year.

Ahead of the President’s trip, the Department of Energy released a new report on the economic impact of Recovery Act investments in advanced batteries and vehicles.  The report, “Recovery Act Investments: Transforming America’s Transportation Sector,” documents how Recovery Act funds are being matched with private capital to create new jobs, construct new plants, add new manufacturing lines, install electric vehicle charging stations across the country and help build the emerging domestic electric vehicle industry from the ground up.  The report can be viewed in full HERE. 

The audience was invited by LG Chem Ltd. and will be comprised of (approximately 250) elected officials, community leaders, industry representatives, and workers. 

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will accompany the President on his trip to Michigan.

*Backgrounder on Recovery Act Investments in Holland.

PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS

Peter Ban-Suk Kim, Chief Executive Officer, LG Chem Ltd. Governor Jennifer Granholm Mayor Kurt Dykstra (introducer)

And let’s not forget the obligatory photo-op!

Obama Attends LG Chem Battery Plant Groundbreaking and Gets First Seat Time in the Chevy Volt

Obama Meets President and Vice President of LG Chem