Elizabeth Crum

So, this cake was delivered to an Obama campaign office in Las Vegas today in honor of the President’s birthday:

Team Romney’s Communications Director in Nevada, Mason Harrison quips: ”Like many of Obama’s promises, this bundt is hollow in the middle.”

Team Obama probably won’t bother to respond to the political stunt, but if they did they could say ”You didn’t build that” about the public schools that the bakery staff attended and/or the public roads on which the cake delivery truck traveled.

The Republican National Committee similarly mocked President Obama yesterday, sending a cake to the Democratic National Committee with the same message commemorating Obama’s birthday.

If you’ve been living under a rock and are not aware of how all this began, the notes on the cakes are references to remarks Obama made while talking about the value of investments in domestic infrastructure. You’ll see that the full remarks take on a different meaning than the out-of-context clip:

President Obama’s re-election campaign is up with its first round of TV ads in Nevada this week after being hammered by the American Energy Alliance on gas prices.

Anjeanette Damon has the scoop on the small ad buy in Reno and Las Vegas.

Energy will be one of the issues on which voters are bombarded on the airwaves from now ’til November.

But who is to blame for rising gas prices, really? And what can be done about it?

Currently, 75-80% of the cost of gasoline is driven by petroleum prices while the other 20-25% lies in refining and distribution. The latter can be influenced by U.S. policy to some degree. The former cannot, at least not much (and hardly at all in the short term) because the influencing factors are things outside our control such as OPEC supply decisions, tensions in the Middle East and seasonal variants.

Policy leverage may be possible in the long run as U.S. demand declines and supply increases, but our influence lies more on the demand side (23 percent of world total consumption) than the supply side (9 percent of world production). Policies that reduce demand (like pushing alternative fuels or the construction and use of mass transportation) or increase supply (drill, baby, drill) or some dual front (“all of the above”) effort are where we must head if we really want to influence oil prices in the long run.

Disagreements about these things tend to be more about degree than any all-or-nothing stance (except by the extremists on both ends, but who listens to them?)

Where policy makers seem to differ the most in the national argument on energy is re: the environmental consequences of energy production and use. Energy exploration and production generates high-paying employment but also generates environmental costs that are not always obvious in the price system.

Conservatives say the economic advantages of more/faster/better fossil fuel energy far outweigh concerns about carbon emissions or occasional oil spills, and anyhow India and China are building new coal-fired energy plants every 5 minutes so it’s futile to fight that battle even if one believed in it.

Liberals and greenies say it’s a moral imperative to wean the nation off carbon, even if it costs us all a little (or a lot) more.

And never the twain shall meet. Or so it seems right now. The energy ad wars shall wage on, in Nevada and nationally, and the best narrative will win in November while voters will no doubt continue to lose at the gas pump no matter who is president.

You’re on your own, Senator, reports Politico. President Obama needs all his campaign cash for himself and has none to spare to help the reelection campaigns of Senate and House Dems. But he still hearts you guys. Really.

Or does he? Because apparently Dems won’t be seeing much of the POTUS at their big fundraisers, either. Obama has offered to do a grand total of one big money event each for the DCCC and DSCC. And to send out some email fundraising letters.

But will Obama or Joe Biden at least do events for embattled individual Democratic lawmakers? Twenty-three D-held seats are up for grabs in the Senate and the balance of power could hinge on them.

We shall see.

To blame for the president’s caution, according to Politico? Fear of GOP superPACs. Starting with Crossroads, aka Karl Rove, Inc., which will probably raise and spend as much as $300 million helping the GOP presidential nominee along with Republican congressional candidates.

But Obama for America officials were quick to tell Politico that White House officials, Cabinet secretaries and top surrogates — including Florida Rep. and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — have done bunches of fundraisers for House and Senate Dems already this cycle.

Plus, Obama’s supercalifragalistic get-out-the-vote operation in battleground states will benefit all Dems on the ticket, they said.

Feel better, Senator Reid?

This Independence Institute YouTube video on just one set of drawbacks in the Oregon Health care system is pure gold.

Watch; laugh; cry; share.

Free-marketers, conservatives and/or Republicans have recently been tagged as the “Party of No” by their big-government pushing liberal counterparts.  According to the Left, all the Right ever does these days is say “no” to every policy proposal that comes down the pike.

Saying “no” to bad policy is hardly a sin, but there are some good alternatives floating around out there.

Like these suggestions for free market health care reform proposed by Geoff Lawrence, the fiscal analyst at the Nevada Policy Research Institute.

Read the whole thing and incorporate into your Talking Points – to be added after you say “no” to Obamacare pushers.

They must be getting desperate.

Why else would the White House post the following blurb at whitehouse.gov:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Let’s re-cap.

Emails.  And casual conversations.  And stuff on the web.  That are “fishy.”  Should be flagged.  And emailed to the White House.  So they can keep track of them.  And combat “disinformation.”

Oooo-KAY.

Since when, and based on what precedent, does a sitting President ask American citizens to report on their fellow citizens in regards to political speech? Has the White House staff lost their senses?  Is the Teleprompter drunk?

The audacity of the request is eclipsed only by its foolishness. Trying to control information – or disinformation – on the web is like trying to herd a million cats. You can’t do it.

And if you’re the White House, you shouldn’t be trying.

I guess this “flag the fishy” idea was dreamt up by the same geniuses who thought it was wise to call concerned Townhall attendees an “angry mob” spouting “manufactured information” when they dared to show up and ask tough questions about health care reform.

People like the woman who asked her congressman, “How can you manage health care when you can’t manage Cash for Clunkers?”

Or the elderly woman who asked her congressman if HE was going to be on the new health care plan.

Yeah, these people are just totally unhinged.

Our elected officials must find it SO annoying to have to deal with these pesky citizens and their annoying questions.

(Iowahawk embellishes with his usual brilliance.)

Breitbart found some video of Obama speaking on health care from a 2003 speech to the AFL-CIO.

Here is the money quote:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

“Wow.”

The White House response to this?

A three-minute (mis)information video featuring Linda Douglass, a former ABC news correspondent and now the WH Office of Health Reform communications director, sitting in front of a computer screen showing Drudge’s front page and saying the video and site headline is “taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.”

Why not try to explain why Obama has changed his mind, rather than denying what we just saw him say ON VIDEO in a speech just a few years ago…?