Month: December 2010

Obama administration renews drilling ban. Of course it did.

Contra the Washington Post, the seven-year moratorium on new Atlantic, Pacific, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico oil drilling that will be announced today does not particularly mean that we’re going to allow new drilling in any of the other areas available to us, either*.  It merely means that these were the bans that the administration had to get on with right now before an annoyed Republican-controlled House – and a deeply frightened Democrat-controlled Senate – started asking pointed questions.  Well, one question, really: Why are we making suboptimal domestic policy decisions based on the belief structure of a very strange, and frankly not very pleasant, fringe religion?

Well, all right, we know the reason: it’s because the Greenies are always two short steps away from painting themselves with hallucinogenic moss and going out to firebomb a bulldozer for Mother Gaia.  It’d still be nice to see a little more secularism in this administration, and a good deal less fuzzy thinking.  But I shouldn’t complain: having gas prices go through the roof in 2012 will likely have a different, and much more satisfying, political result in 2012 than it did in 2008…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*The rest of the Gulf and the Arctic region.

SEIU healthcare fund abandons children.

Please note, not every SEIU healthcare fund*. The specific one doing the abandoning is a New York fund for 1199 SEIU, which parent organization lobbied heavily for Obamacare… let us briefly walk this one through.  SEIU needs more members if it wants to cover its underfunded obligations.  So it went heavily for Obamacare.  Obamacare includes mandates on expanding coverage for dependents to age 26.  Rates went up – the health care provider claims that this is unrelated to the previous sentence, but the union itself is using the dependent coverage situation to explain away the situation – so the fund dropped coverage of minors as being too expensive.  And, as the topping on the cake: this hits lower-income workers the hardest, of course.

The union wants to blame New York state for not increasing its coverage of the union’s obligations, but is taking the time to also insist that it’s NOT BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE.  Megan McArdle would like to know why they’re writing explanation letters otherwise; I’ll just note that if SEIU spent more dues money on helping their members and less money on being a raddled shill for the Democratic party then they would have been able to cover the rate hike.  In fact, they can still do that.

Not that SEIU will.  It’s still barely easier for them to lobby for taking other people’s money.  Besides, nobody at the national administrative level is going to be harmed by this, anyway.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Yet.