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When I wrote Red Hot Lies, I backed up the claim with specifics and evidence. Sadly if typically, a new talking point has emerged among the cap-n-trade cheerleading Left - which as I showed at two town hall meetings with Rep. Michele Bachmann last Thursday excludes the non-financially vested Left, to their credit.

At both meetings the press - whose penetrating questions beforehand were restricted to "Who's paying for your trip out here?" (Bill McAuliffe, Minneapolis Star Tribune...it was that mean old Young America's Foundation...now, what did Gore tell you about who gave him $300 million, which is slightly more than my airfare?) - and the Alinskyites in the audience at one session clinged like grim death to a supposed life raft in the sea of red ink, "an MIT study on cap and trade" disputing certain cost estimates for such a scheme.

Today I see the Huffington Post repeats the claim that Rep. Bachmann was lying about the cost... without saying what the lie was, or otherwise backing up the language. Some person denies cost projections about a scheme designed to price energy out of current levels of use, somehow making anyone else who projects cost estimates a "liar", which is pushed as the take away point in coverage and public discourse.

OK, usual playground logic, ad hom and subject-changing, shocked shocked, and all that, but here's the test:

Is Barack Obama lying?

Numerous cost estimates, all projections of the future, are floating around about what a cap-and-trade bill would cost. It is a fool's errand to bother claiming to know which is most representative - one I lapsed into in q-n-a once, I admit, by offering a range of projections (and an audience member shouted "Lie!"...no, actually it's a range of projections). A principal reason this is a time-waster is that the Waxman-Markey bill, "the" game in town right now, cleverly avoided assigning specifics to their scheme, thereby ensuring all potential recipients of its rents will pant after the project in hopes that it is they whose beak gets wetted at the expense of the economy.

So, again, the question is whether the man pushing this scheme, the man whose political vanity or social engineering dreams it is to satisfy, is lying?

The only relevant estimate of cap-and-trade legislation is that it would cause your energy prices to "necessarily skyrocket".

That's Obama.

Hey, Left, stop changing the subject and answer the question: Is Obama Lying?