Burning Down The House

Burning Down The House

If there’s one thing liberals/leftists just can’t get out of their systems, it’s the desire to act like Nazis. They just love the idea of imprisoning and killing those who disagree with them. And no, I’m not kidding. Every single socialist movement the world over has rounded up opponents and even here there are those who openly wish such things. . . people like global warming enthusiast Steve Zwick.

Steve Zwick, for those who don’t know, is a “climate change” alarmist who periodically writes for Forbes magazine. In his most recent article, he pulled a Hitler. Specifically, he said this:

“We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. . . They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?”

Stick in the word “Jews” and this thing comes right out of any speech by Hitler. Note how Zwick suggest the creation of an enemies list. Those people need to be marked, perhaps with a yellow sun on their lapels. They are to be considered subhuman. And when Zwick decides it’s time for his final solution, we are to burn their houses and drown them. They must pay for their treachery, these climate Jews.

And don’t think this is an isolated incident. Earlier this month, University of Oregon “Professor” Kari Norgaard (right) said climate change skeptics are akin to “racists” and should be “treated” (medically) as if they had a mental disorder. Norgaard also wrote a letter to Obama in which she called on Obama to suspend democracy to satisfy her climate-fetish. Norgaard, by the way, is a big supporter of Obama climate advisor John P. Holdren who wrote in 1977 that we should carry out forced abortions, mandatory sterilization procedures and drugging of the water supply to weed out the surplus supply of humans. She has also praised NASA global warming alarmist Dr. James Hansen, who has advocated eco-terrorism, including blowing up damns and demolishing cities in the hopes of returning the planet to an agrarian age.

She’s not alone either in advocating dictatorship. Environmental James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold to combat global warming.” (Maybe that’s where Dem. Gov. Bev Perdue got the idea that we should suspend elections until Obama can fix the economy?)

In 2006, environmentalist magazine Grist Magazine wrote that there should be “Nuremberg- style war crimes trials” for the “bastards” who are part of the “denial industry” who oppose the global warming enthusiasts. . . both Al Gore and Bill Moyer have endorsed that magazine.

Nice huh?

Anyway, back to Zwick. Besides advocating the murder of people with whom he disagrees, Zwick also became the point man for trying to defend the climategate scandal. In that defense, he actually argued that the Freedom of Information Act should not apply to requests made by right-wingers.

So there you have it:

● Right wingers should not be allowed information on what the government is doing. The law should only work for liberals.

● Climate change critics should be tracked and their homes burned.

● Obama should suspend democracy to enforce global warming enthusiasts' goals.

● And murder, forced abortion, forced sterilization and eco-terrorism are all valid tools for the government to use in helping the global warming enthusiasts achieve their fetishistic goals.

So much for it only happening in Nazi Germany. Now that I think about it. . . maybe we should start burning their houses down?

If there’s one thing liberals/leftists just can’t get out of their systems, it’s the desire to act like Nazis. They just love the idea of imprisoning and killing those who disagree with them. And no, I’m not kidding. Every single socialist movement the world over has rounded up opponents and even here there are those who openly wish such things. . . people like global warming enthusiast Steve Zwick.

Steve Zwick, for those who don’t know, is a “climate change” alarmist who periodically writes for Forbes magazine. In his most recent article, he pulled a Hitler. Specifically, he said this:

“We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. . . They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?”

Stick in the word “Jews” and this thing comes right out of any speech by Hitler. Note how Zwick suggest the creation of an enemies list. Those people need to be marked, perhaps with a yellow sun on their lapels. They are to be considered subhuman. And when Zwick decides it’s time for his final solution, we are to burn their houses and drown them. They must pay for their treachery, these climate Jews.

And don’t think this is an isolated incident. Earlier this month, University of Oregon “Professor” Kari Norgaard (right) said climate change skeptics are akin to “racists” and should be “treated” (medically) as if they had a mental disorder. Norgaard also wrote a letter to Obama in which she called on Obama to suspend democracy to satisfy her climate-fetish. Norgaard, by the way, is a big supporter of Obama climate advisor John P. Holdren who wrote in 1977 that we should carry out forced abortions, mandatory sterilization procedures and drugging of the water supply to weed out the surplus supply of humans. She has also praised NASA global warming alarmist Dr. James Hansen, who has advocated eco-terrorism, including blowing up damns and demolishing cities in the hopes of returning the planet to an agrarian age.

She’s not alone either in advocating dictatorship. Environmental James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold to combat global warming.” (Maybe that’s where Dem. Gov. Bev Perdue got the idea that we should suspend elections until Obama can fix the economy?)

In 2006, environmentalist magazine Grist Magazine wrote that there should be “Nuremberg- style war crimes trials” for the “bastards” who are part of the “denial industry” who oppose the global warming enthusiasts. . . both Al Gore and Bill Moyer have endorsed that magazine.

Nice huh?

Anyway, back to Zwick. Besides advocating the murder of people with whom he disagrees, Zwick also became the point man for trying to defend the climategate scandal. In that defense, he actually argued that the Freedom of Information Act should not apply to requests made by right-wingers.

So there you have it:

● Right wingers should not be allowed information on what the government is doing. The law should only work for liberals.

● Climate change critics should be tracked and their homes burned.

● Obama should suspend democracy to enforce global warming enthusiasts' goals.

● And murder, forced abortion, forced sterilization and eco-terrorism are all valid tools for the government to use in helping the global warming enthusiasts achieve their fetishistic goals.

So much for it only happening in Nazi Germany. Now that I think about it. . . maybe we should start burning their houses down?

Burning Down The House

View Detail

The White House Becomes Tammany Hall

The White House Becomes Tammany Hall

It is both common practice and good insider politics to favor friends and leave opponents out in the cold. It becomes a scandal when the favoritism drifts into favoring friends who are using huge taxpayer “gifts” to damage an already sick economy. Even George Washington Plunkitt, sage of Tammany, knew where to draw the line. “There’s good graft, and there’s bad graft, and the successful politician knows the difference.”

Mr. Clean, aka Barack Hussein Obama, has apparently never heard of Plunkitt. Andrew Price and I have been discussing the culture of corruption surrounding The One. Here, I want to focus on just one aspect of that corruption. The graft, cronyism and official criminal actions of his despicable administration make Boss Tweed’s activities look like a church social. Only a Chicago politician could compete with New York’s Boss Tweed for blatant self-aggrandizement and public-be-damned arrogance. But at least Tweed cooked up most of his nefarious deeds behind closed doors and through surrogates. B-HO does it openly and calls it “progressivism” and “fairness.” There’s a special level in hell for such liars and hypocrites.

Stanford’s Hoover Institution Fellow Peter Schweitzer is trying to get the word out. He calculates that about 80% of all green-weenie pie-in-the-sky funds from the Department of Energy have gone to firms whose major executives, board members or chief investors were big contributors to Obama’s 2008 campaign and are expected to do the same in 2012. Schweitzer says that the Solyndra disaster was only the tip of the iceberg, and that the Obamacrats are finding it increasingly difficult to cover up the billions of dollars tossed at unworkable schemes piloted by Obama supporters.

Here’s how G.W. Plunkitt explained it. “If two companies come to me to get a big city contract to build a bridge, and one is Democratic and one is Republican, I look to the bids. If I know that both of the bidders use high-quality materials and experienced workers, and both have bid the same price, I will give the contract to the Democrat. He’s my friend, and there might even be something extra in it for me. But if the Democrat bids low because he’s going to use inferior materials and bad workers, I will not give him the contract and if the bid by the Republican is affordable, I’ll give it to him. Who knows? Maybe he will become a friend later. But that’s the difference between good graft and bad graft.”

Now I happen to think that Obama’s green schemes are dangerous to the national health and perhaps even to national security. As of today, I don’t think his intention is to reward friends who purposely endanger public health. But it is abundantly clear that he’s perfectly willing to squelch traditional energy production and punish his non-green “enemies” while throwing good money after bad at silly, unworkable, financially irresponsible projects that are unlikely to be viable in twenty years, let alone now.

On the other hand, endangering Americans with exploding and self-immolating electric vehicles is at least gross negligence. Risking leaving huge swaths of America without energy during freezing weather because the solar panels aren’t getting enough sunlight, the wind turbines have frozen in place, and coal and oil energy have been effectively banned could easily result in negligent homicide.

Throwing billions and perhaps trillions of taxpayer dollars at unproven schemes in a poor economy is bad enough. Doing it by throwing it only at friends and contributors who have no realistic hope of succeeding is at best unethical, at worst criminal We still haven’t received a clear answer on why DOE allowed Solyndra exec and Obama contributor George Kaiser to subordinate the taxpayers’ interest in bankruptcy to Kaiser’s own interest—a violation of federal rules.

Obama not only used his influence to push DOE into approving the Solyndra, Ener1, Solar Trust for America, Beacon Power and LightSquared loans, but financial experts inside and outside the government had warned him that those companies were not viable, regardless of the federal funds thrown at them. It is also hard to explain how pouring money into an outrageously expensive all-electric sports car made in Finland helps the American economy or creates American jobs.

But friends are friends, after all. For all the Obama talk of “renewable green energy” it quickly became apparent to anyone with eyes to see that the real motivator was (and is) rewarding campaign contributors. So take notice: Obama has instructed his Department of Energy to double-down and find more future bankrupt green energy companies with sleazy, incompetent boards and executives to spend taxpayers’ money on. There must be a wealth of flim-flam men out there, ready to take federal green energy money and kick it back to the President’s campaign before filing for bankruptcy protection.

Even Plunkitt of Tammany Hall would turn red with shame at this kind of cronyism.

It is both common practice and good insider politics to favor friends and leave opponents out in the cold. It becomes a scandal when the favoritism drifts into favoring friends who are using huge taxpayer “gifts” to damage an already sick economy. Even George Washington Plunkitt, sage of Tammany, knew where to draw the line. “There’s good graft, and there’s bad graft, and the successful politician knows the difference.”

Mr. Clean, aka Barack Hussein Obama, has apparently never heard of Plunkitt. Andrew Price and I have been discussing the culture of corruption surrounding The One. Here, I want to focus on just one aspect of that corruption. The graft, cronyism and official criminal actions of his despicable administration make Boss Tweed’s activities look like a church social. Only a Chicago politician could compete with New York’s Boss Tweed for blatant self-aggrandizement and public-be-damned arrogance. But at least Tweed cooked up most of his nefarious deeds behind closed doors and through surrogates. B-HO does it openly and calls it “progressivism” and “fairness.” There’s a special level in hell for such liars and hypocrites.

Stanford’s Hoover Institution Fellow Peter Schweitzer is trying to get the word out. He calculates that about 80% of all green-weenie pie-in-the-sky funds from the Department of Energy have gone to firms whose major executives, board members or chief investors were big contributors to Obama’s 2008 campaign and are expected to do the same in 2012. Schweitzer says that the Solyndra disaster was only the tip of the iceberg, and that the Obamacrats are finding it increasingly difficult to cover up the billions of dollars tossed at unworkable schemes piloted by Obama supporters.

Here’s how G.W. Plunkitt explained it. “If two companies come to me to get a big city contract to build a bridge, and one is Democratic and one is Republican, I look to the bids. If I know that both of the bidders use high-quality materials and experienced workers, and both have bid the same price, I will give the contract to the Democrat. He’s my friend, and there might even be something extra in it for me. But if the Democrat bids low because he’s going to use inferior materials and bad workers, I will not give him the contract and if the bid by the Republican is affordable, I’ll give it to him. Who knows? Maybe he will become a friend later. But that’s the difference between good graft and bad graft.”

Now I happen to think that Obama’s green schemes are dangerous to the national health and perhaps even to national security. As of today, I don’t think his intention is to reward friends who purposely endanger public health. But it is abundantly clear that he’s perfectly willing to squelch traditional energy production and punish his non-green “enemies” while throwing good money after bad at silly, unworkable, financially irresponsible projects that are unlikely to be viable in twenty years, let alone now.

On the other hand, endangering Americans with exploding and self-immolating electric vehicles is at least gross negligence. Risking leaving huge swaths of America without energy during freezing weather because the solar panels aren’t getting enough sunlight, the wind turbines have frozen in place, and coal and oil energy have been effectively banned could easily result in negligent homicide.

Throwing billions and perhaps trillions of taxpayer dollars at unproven schemes in a poor economy is bad enough. Doing it by throwing it only at friends and contributors who have no realistic hope of succeeding is at best unethical, at worst criminal We still haven’t received a clear answer on why DOE allowed Solyndra exec and Obama contributor George Kaiser to subordinate the taxpayers’ interest in bankruptcy to Kaiser’s own interest—a violation of federal rules.

Obama not only used his influence to push DOE into approving the Solyndra, Ener1, Solar Trust for America, Beacon Power and LightSquared loans, but financial experts inside and outside the government had warned him that those companies were not viable, regardless of the federal funds thrown at them. It is also hard to explain how pouring money into an outrageously expensive all-electric sports car made in Finland helps the American economy or creates American jobs.

But friends are friends, after all. For all the Obama talk of “renewable green energy” it quickly became apparent to anyone with eyes to see that the real motivator was (and is) rewarding campaign contributors. So take notice: Obama has instructed his Department of Energy to double-down and find more future bankrupt green energy companies with sleazy, incompetent boards and executives to spend taxpayers’ money on. There must be a wealth of flim-flam men out there, ready to take federal green energy money and kick it back to the President’s campaign before filing for bankruptcy protection.

Even Plunkitt of Tammany Hall would turn red with shame at this kind of cronyism.

The White House Becomes Tammany Hall

View Detail

Obama Fails The Economy

Obama Fails The Economy

Obama has been a failure all around. His foreign policy has been heavy on retreat and his domestic agenda sparked backlashes galore. But even worse has been his economic policies. His plan of high taxes, massive government spending, and corporate subsidies lengthened the recession and created a jobless recovery. Those “green jobs” he promised were all an illusion. And now it turns out, he’s made the biggest danger to the economy even worse.

Before we talk about how Obama “fixed” the “too big to fail” problem, you might be interested in a little data on those green jobs we’re all supposed to have now.

When Obama took office, he promised five million green jobs in the next ten years. He even spent $90 billion to make that happen. That works out to $18,000 per expected job. Of course, it’s actually higher because that $90 billion is just a baseline and will cause further federal spending, but still, that's not too bad.

So how has he done? According to the White House, rather than creating 5,000,000 jobs, this money now will create only “827,000 job years” over Obama’s four years in office. But a “job year” is not a job. It is instead the equivalent of one full-time position for one year. If we spread these job years out over the ten years Obama used for the five million claim, you come up with a total of 82,700 jobs. And that means the cost per job is $1.1 million. It also means, Obama still owes 4.9 million jobs.

And don’t forget that even beyond this, you have a variety of failures under the crony clean energy loan program out of the Department of Energy, such as Solyndra, Enerl, Beacon Power, Solar Trust for America, and others. Not to mention, the $2.4 billion flushed away on building fewer than 8,000 Chevy Volts no one wants.

Call me crazy, but Obama’s attempt to create a Mussolini-like industrial policy appears to have been a colossal failure.

Now we get word that Obama has made the “too big to fail” problem worse. Imagine that. When Obama came to power, he promised an end to “too big to fail” so that taxpayers would never again need to support failed banks. Then he signed the financial reform bill, Dodd-Frank, which supposedly did that. . . though Republicans claimed otherwise. Bloomberg News now reports that the five biggest banks, i.e. those that are too big to fail, increased their share of all banking assets from 43% in 2007 to 56% now. That’s right, those five banks absorbed an additional 13% of all the banking assets in the country under Obama. In total, these five banks (JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citicorp, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) now control $8.5 trillion in assets. Moreover, the size of the banking sector compared to the rest of the economy has doubled in the past decade, making banks even more “too big to fail.” That means the problem is much, much worse than it was before the TARP bailouts.

Obama has flushed money down the toilet while squandering opportunity after opportunity to actually fix the economy and protect the country from another meltdown. His failure to act is shameful and dangerous. Let us hope the Republicans fix these problems when they finally gain control over the government.

As usual, don't forget it's Star Trek Tuesday at the film site!

Obama has been a failure all around. His foreign policy has been heavy on retreat and his domestic agenda sparked backlashes galore. But even worse has been his economic policies. His plan of high taxes, massive government spending, and corporate subsidies lengthened the recession and created a jobless recovery. Those “green jobs” he promised were all an illusion. And now it turns out, he’s made the biggest danger to the economy even worse.

Before we talk about how Obama “fixed” the “too big to fail” problem, you might be interested in a little data on those green jobs we’re all supposed to have now.

When Obama took office, he promised five million green jobs in the next ten years. He even spent $90 billion to make that happen. That works out to $18,000 per expected job. Of course, it’s actually higher because that $90 billion is just a baseline and will cause further federal spending, but still, that's not too bad.

So how has he done? According to the White House, rather than creating 5,000,000 jobs, this money now will create only “827,000 job years” over Obama’s four years in office. But a “job year” is not a job. It is instead the equivalent of one full-time position for one year. If we spread these job years out over the ten years Obama used for the five million claim, you come up with a total of 82,700 jobs. And that means the cost per job is $1.1 million. It also means, Obama still owes 4.9 million jobs.

And don’t forget that even beyond this, you have a variety of failures under the crony clean energy loan program out of the Department of Energy, such as Solyndra, Enerl, Beacon Power, Solar Trust for America, and others. Not to mention, the $2.4 billion flushed away on building fewer than 8,000 Chevy Volts no one wants.

Call me crazy, but Obama’s attempt to create a Mussolini-like industrial policy appears to have been a colossal failure.

Now we get word that Obama has made the “too big to fail” problem worse. Imagine that. When Obama came to power, he promised an end to “too big to fail” so that taxpayers would never again need to support failed banks. Then he signed the financial reform bill, Dodd-Frank, which supposedly did that. . . though Republicans claimed otherwise. Bloomberg News now reports that the five biggest banks, i.e. those that are too big to fail, increased their share of all banking assets from 43% in 2007 to 56% now. That’s right, those five banks absorbed an additional 13% of all the banking assets in the country under Obama. In total, these five banks (JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citicorp, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) now control $8.5 trillion in assets. Moreover, the size of the banking sector compared to the rest of the economy has doubled in the past decade, making banks even more “too big to fail.” That means the problem is much, much worse than it was before the TARP bailouts.

Obama has flushed money down the toilet while squandering opportunity after opportunity to actually fix the economy and protect the country from another meltdown. His failure to act is shameful and dangerous. Let us hope the Republicans fix these problems when they finally gain control over the government.

As usual, don't forget it's Star Trek Tuesday at the film site!

Obama Fails The Economy

View Detail

Ya Can’t Make This S—T Up

Ya Can’t Make This S—T Up

San Francisco would be expected to be the place where you would find the most wasted taxpayer money for Democratic pet projects. You wouldn’t be far from wrong in assuming that. Even when the city (along with the state department of transportation) spends federal funds on a worthwhile project, they will always find a way to spend large sums frivolously along with it.

And so it is with the highway improvements needed to repair the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge. In 2009, the Obama administration used federal stimulus money to fund a major portion of the $1.045 billion project which widens, improves and adds seismic protections from Doyle Drive in the Presidio to the actual approaches to the bridge. So far, not too outrageous. State and federal highways have long benefited from government/private business cooperation and the project generally inures to the public benefit. In other words, people who paid the taxes which funded the projects generally got their money’s worth.

But government has a way of gilding the lily with little “additions” that drive the cost up with no discernible public benefit. San Francisco is the capital of the ecoweenie, feelgood, waste the taxpayers money nation, and it found a way. With the help of the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Presidio Trust, the National Park Service and a couple of local busybody ecofreak organizations, the government spent over $205,000.00 to relocate (drum roll)—a bush. You see, the bush ended up smack dab in the footprint of the new roadway.

This poor little orphan bush had struggled mightily to hide behind other less honorable bushes and trees, so until the clearing began, nobody noticed that such an important bush existed in the way of the new approaches. Aha!, you say. Just another bush. But you would be wrong. It’s the beloved and rare arctoslaphylos franciscana commonly know to us commoners as the Franciscan manzanita. Wild Franciscan manzanita had been considered extinct, but somehow some sneaky manzanitas elsewhere had managed to produce this orphan.

The cost of the removal on top of all the studies to determine that the bush was indeed a Franciscan manzanita was approximately $100,000.00 alone. The total also included the replacement of the bush with a less endangered species somewhere along the side of the new roadway. On top of those costs, an additional $5,000.00 for each of three botanical gardens to house the progeny of the orphan has been set aside, plus another $1,500.00 for long-term storage of 300 seeds collected from the orphan (now the “mother”) bush. How a “mother” plant produces fertile seeds without a “father” remains unknown.

Now exactly what makes this wild bush so important and so unique? Simple. It’s “wild.” As opposed to the hundreds of Franciscan manzanitas that grow in domestic gardens and nurseries. As the wild manzanita began to disappear when patches of wilderness in San Francisco were covered over with urban development, manzanita fanciers collected them and grew them at home or in nurseries which provide decorative flora for gardeners and landscapers.

But the ecoweenies didn’t want to hurt the wild manzanita’s feelings, and got massive government machinery in motion to relocate the poor little orphan. Here are some interesting facts that I didn’t know, and perhaps you didn’t either. There is a hierarchy of flora. This “wild” manzanita got special attention because it popped up on its own with no human assistance. If it was grown in a botanical garden, however, it would be called “extinct in the wild” but would still have ecoweenie protection. The hundreds (perhaps thousands) of these bushes grown in residential yards and pots are simply called “domestic.”

So if you took the orphan bush, mixed it in with those in botanical gardens, and threw in a few hundred domestic manzanitas for good measure, could the “experts” tell which was which? The answer is “no.” They are absolutely, 100%, botanically identical. There are no hybrid Franciscan manzanitas, nor are there any genetically-altered Franciscan manzanitas. There are only Franciscan manzanitas, wild, domestic, or protected.

So after $205,000.00 plus, what have the ecoweenies actually protected? An orphan purebred Franciscan manzanita transplanted to a protected location to keep it from mixing its seeds with manzanitas which aren’t purebred Franciscan. There are different variations of the manzanita bush throughout California, and the orphan-savers don’t want those mongrel strains mixing with the noble Franciscan variety. I guess it’s OK to spend an extra quarter million on translocation (the ecoweenie word) rather than just planting it somewhere else.

Here’s the best part. The cost of a purebred Franciscan manzanita at reputable local nurseries is about $15.98. But then it wouldn’t be “wild” and therefore wouldn’t require several dozen overpaid bureaucrats to study it and move it. In fact, you could pay for the nursery’s bush and move it yourself in the back seat of your car or the bed of your truck.

San Francisco would be expected to be the place where you would find the most wasted taxpayer money for Democratic pet projects. You wouldn’t be far from wrong in assuming that. Even when the city (along with the state department of transportation) spends federal funds on a worthwhile project, they will always find a way to spend large sums frivolously along with it.

And so it is with the highway improvements needed to repair the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge. In 2009, the Obama administration used federal stimulus money to fund a major portion of the $1.045 billion project which widens, improves and adds seismic protections from Doyle Drive in the Presidio to the actual approaches to the bridge. So far, not too outrageous. State and federal highways have long benefited from government/private business cooperation and the project generally inures to the public benefit. In other words, people who paid the taxes which funded the projects generally got their money’s worth.

But government has a way of gilding the lily with little “additions” that drive the cost up with no discernible public benefit. San Francisco is the capital of the ecoweenie, feelgood, waste the taxpayers money nation, and it found a way. With the help of the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Presidio Trust, the National Park Service and a couple of local busybody ecofreak organizations, the government spent over $205,000.00 to relocate (drum roll)—a bush. You see, the bush ended up smack dab in the footprint of the new roadway.

This poor little orphan bush had struggled mightily to hide behind other less honorable bushes and trees, so until the clearing began, nobody noticed that such an important bush existed in the way of the new approaches. Aha!, you say. Just another bush. But you would be wrong. It’s the beloved and rare arctoslaphylos franciscana commonly know to us commoners as the Franciscan manzanita. Wild Franciscan manzanita had been considered extinct, but somehow some sneaky manzanitas elsewhere had managed to produce this orphan.

The cost of the removal on top of all the studies to determine that the bush was indeed a Franciscan manzanita was approximately $100,000.00 alone. The total also included the replacement of the bush with a less endangered species somewhere along the side of the new roadway. On top of those costs, an additional $5,000.00 for each of three botanical gardens to house the progeny of the orphan has been set aside, plus another $1,500.00 for long-term storage of 300 seeds collected from the orphan (now the “mother”) bush. How a “mother” plant produces fertile seeds without a “father” remains unknown.

Now exactly what makes this wild bush so important and so unique? Simple. It’s “wild.” As opposed to the hundreds of Franciscan manzanitas that grow in domestic gardens and nurseries. As the wild manzanita began to disappear when patches of wilderness in San Francisco were covered over with urban development, manzanita fanciers collected them and grew them at home or in nurseries which provide decorative flora for gardeners and landscapers.

But the ecoweenies didn’t want to hurt the wild manzanita’s feelings, and got massive government machinery in motion to relocate the poor little orphan. Here are some interesting facts that I didn’t know, and perhaps you didn’t either. There is a hierarchy of flora. This “wild” manzanita got special attention because it popped up on its own with no human assistance. If it was grown in a botanical garden, however, it would be called “extinct in the wild” but would still have ecoweenie protection. The hundreds (perhaps thousands) of these bushes grown in residential yards and pots are simply called “domestic.”

So if you took the orphan bush, mixed it in with those in botanical gardens, and threw in a few hundred domestic manzanitas for good measure, could the “experts” tell which was which? The answer is “no.” They are absolutely, 100%, botanically identical. There are no hybrid Franciscan manzanitas, nor are there any genetically-altered Franciscan manzanitas. There are only Franciscan manzanitas, wild, domestic, or protected.

So after $205,000.00 plus, what have the ecoweenies actually protected? An orphan purebred Franciscan manzanita transplanted to a protected location to keep it from mixing its seeds with manzanitas which aren’t purebred Franciscan. There are different variations of the manzanita bush throughout California, and the orphan-savers don’t want those mongrel strains mixing with the noble Franciscan variety. I guess it’s OK to spend an extra quarter million on translocation (the ecoweenie word) rather than just planting it somewhere else.

Here’s the best part. The cost of a purebred Franciscan manzanita at reputable local nurseries is about $15.98. But then it wouldn’t be “wild” and therefore wouldn’t require several dozen overpaid bureaucrats to study it and move it. In fact, you could pay for the nursery’s bush and move it yourself in the back seat of your car or the bed of your truck.

Ya Can’t Make This S—T Up

View Detail

Survival Of The Flittiest

Survival Of The Flittiest

The San Francisco Chronicle has great news for Californians. We’re number one again. In the Golden State, where the lotus-eaters aren’t prepared for great catastrophes such as a failure of the arugula crop, a shortage of imported merlot, or a Republican presidency, the state has moved to the top of the list in one vital area.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, California shines as the state most prepared for global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

It is the most prepared state for drought and water shortages. That’s because it created a huge drought and massive water shortages for the dispensable folks here in the Central Valley in order to save a worthless fish and prepare for the big anthropogenic disaster to come. Discovering that the San Joaquin Valleyites weren’t dying from thirst, the ecoweenies figured those troublemakers outside the big cities must be surviving on cactus juice, or some such thing.

Since there isn’t a lot of cactus in San Francisco, but recognizing the threat of a water shortage when made-made global warming causes the world to sizzle, San Franciscans (and other urban eco-survivalists) are loading up on Evian, Perrier and other designer bottled waters. There won’t be enough water to grow crops, at least until the Delta smelt dies it own natural biological death, but who needs agriculture when there are all those wonderful canned items such as caviar and bean sprouts? They do grow in cans, don’t they?

The Natural Resources Defense Council (aka Ecoweenies ‘Я Us) also included proactive actions in determining which state was most prepared for rapid climate change. California is in the forefront of measures to fend off the need for eco-survival. It was top of the list in efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The eco-survivalists are preparing to drive the new hydrogen and electrical powered cars which the state government has mandated within the next few years. They would drive Stanley Steamers if they could, but there won’t be any water when the crisis hits. Anything solar, wind or pixie-dust powered is being carefully conserved by the ecoweenies.

The state is also a leader in gasoline so expensive that only a rare few can use their automobiles for anything but vital necessities like getting to the store to buy bottled water. In an excess of caution, the state has also banned coal-fired energy plants which haven’t been used in California in over a century. The state already sends millions of gallons of naturally occurring water every month into San Francisco Bay and out into the Pacific Ocean in order to avoid stressing the Delta smelt by allowing the water to flow into the aqueducts. But just to put an exclamation point on their eco-sensibility, the California Water Efficiency Bill requires a further reduction in the use of water flowing in the state by 20% by the year 2020.

Eco-survivalists are different from other survivalists in that they store water and organic food, but they don’t store guns and ammunition. In the event of a genuine (as opposed to artificial) water and food shortage caused by global warming, it is unclear how the eco-survivalists plan on holding onto their food and water in places such as Oakland and Los Angeles.

Note: I’ll be in Bakersfield most of the day, so I thought I would give you something to kick around in my absence until I return later in the day. Please feel free to discuss what you and your state are doing to advance eco-survival. If you are doing nothing, please explain.

The San Francisco Chronicle has great news for Californians. We’re number one again. In the Golden State, where the lotus-eaters aren’t prepared for great catastrophes such as a failure of the arugula crop, a shortage of imported merlot, or a Republican presidency, the state has moved to the top of the list in one vital area.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, California shines as the state most prepared for global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

It is the most prepared state for drought and water shortages. That’s because it created a huge drought and massive water shortages for the dispensable folks here in the Central Valley in order to save a worthless fish and prepare for the big anthropogenic disaster to come. Discovering that the San Joaquin Valleyites weren’t dying from thirst, the ecoweenies figured those troublemakers outside the big cities must be surviving on cactus juice, or some such thing.

Since there isn’t a lot of cactus in San Francisco, but recognizing the threat of a water shortage when made-made global warming causes the world to sizzle, San Franciscans (and other urban eco-survivalists) are loading up on Evian, Perrier and other designer bottled waters. There won’t be enough water to grow crops, at least until the Delta smelt dies it own natural biological death, but who needs agriculture when there are all those wonderful canned items such as caviar and bean sprouts? They do grow in cans, don’t they?

The Natural Resources Defense Council (aka Ecoweenies ‘Я Us) also included proactive actions in determining which state was most prepared for rapid climate change. California is in the forefront of measures to fend off the need for eco-survival. It was top of the list in efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The eco-survivalists are preparing to drive the new hydrogen and electrical powered cars which the state government has mandated within the next few years. They would drive Stanley Steamers if they could, but there won’t be any water when the crisis hits. Anything solar, wind or pixie-dust powered is being carefully conserved by the ecoweenies.

The state is also a leader in gasoline so expensive that only a rare few can use their automobiles for anything but vital necessities like getting to the store to buy bottled water. In an excess of caution, the state has also banned coal-fired energy plants which haven’t been used in California in over a century. The state already sends millions of gallons of naturally occurring water every month into San Francisco Bay and out into the Pacific Ocean in order to avoid stressing the Delta smelt by allowing the water to flow into the aqueducts. But just to put an exclamation point on their eco-sensibility, the California Water Efficiency Bill requires a further reduction in the use of water flowing in the state by 20% by the year 2020.

Eco-survivalists are different from other survivalists in that they store water and organic food, but they don’t store guns and ammunition. In the event of a genuine (as opposed to artificial) water and food shortage caused by global warming, it is unclear how the eco-survivalists plan on holding onto their food and water in places such as Oakland and Los Angeles.

Note: I’ll be in Bakersfield most of the day, so I thought I would give you something to kick around in my absence until I return later in the day. Please feel free to discuss what you and your state are doing to advance eco-survival. If you are doing nothing, please explain.

Survival Of The Flittiest

View Detail

The Fix Is In—No More Coal Plants

The Fix Is In—No More Coal Plants

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued its first major manifesto since receiving the power to regulate CO2 emissions. And surprise, surprise, it’s aimed at the coal power industry. The crippling new rules would essentially make it impossible for new coal-fueled energy plants to be built.

The coal companies could comply with the rules, but the costs would be astronomical in order to contain CO2 at the levels the EPA wants. Simply put, it’s technically viable, but economically impossible.

Amid huge photos of black smoke-belching chimneys (mostly from pre-1950), the EPA announced the new standards. New power plants would be required to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity. Today’s more modern plants produce about 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. But using the junk science of anthropomorphic global warming which declares that carbon dioxide causes that warming, the EPA has set an arbitrary figure that nobody can either prove or disprove. It’s the right number because the bureaucrats say it is.

Natural gas plants already produce the lower level of emissions, but their day has not yet arrived. So far, the Obama administration has been able to keep them in check by denying permits for more drilling, particularly when “fracking” is involved. But currently, coal is the big banana for most of the American Midwest, and therefore the big target for the EPA.

Failing to get Congress to pass Cap and Trade legislation (aka the Al Gore Enrichment Program), the Obama administration is instead using another bureaucratic ploy to end-run the Constitution while advancing its own “green” agenda. If they can’t outright ban coal use, or force a chimerical system of offsets on the American public and the coal producers, they’ll just regulate coal to death under the guise of saving the industry via “carbon capture technology.”

Carbon capture is a simple concept, a complicated technology, and massively expensive. But, gee, it would help get some of that CO2 out of the air, so the EPA is only doing it for the public good. The result for the coal energy plants is one of two alternatives: Install the capture technology at their own expense and absorb the ongoing costs. That alternative leads quickly to bankruptcy. The other alternative (the one the administration is hoping for) is to pass the costs on to the consumers, making energy prices so high that the consumers will vilify the coal energy producers (without noticing who caused it in the first place).

What coal capture does is to store much of the carbon dioxide emissions in the ground instead of releasing it into the air. It’s a win-win for the green weenies. If the producers go forward with the technology, prices will rise dramatically and coal loses. If they instead release the CO2 into the air, they will be fined and ultimately forced into some arcane version of cap and trade. Coal loses. It won’t hurt the rich (it never does), but the poor and middle class will have an even greater daily burden placed on them to go with the skyrocketing cost of gasoline.

The coal industry was already limping along as the result of other heavy-handed EPA regulations regarding SO2 and mercury emissions. With the addition of CO2 to the list of prohibited or regulated emissions, the limp will turn into a complete collapse. And all of this stems from the EPA’s and the Obama administration’s inchoate search for perfectly clean energy to replace reasonably safe and acceptable energy. The former is years or decades away from being practical, the latter is already with us, but about to be destroyed.

To deflect public anger if it closed down all coal-fired energy plants immediately, the EPA has said it is only concerned with new facilities. That goes with the other two great lies: “The check is in the mail, and I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” In fact, at a Congressional committee hearing on the subject, the assistant administrator for EPA’s air and radiation unit said expressly that “the agency has no plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions for existing plants.” That, and $5.00 will get you a gallon of gasoline.

The EPA wrote a cute little escape clause for itself. Knowing full well that any plant that produces energy by using heat is going to have to repair its machinery regularly, it gave itself the power to declare any major repair an “upgrade,” thereby requiring that the older plants comply with the new rules. Naturally, they left it to their own determination what comprises a repair and what comprises an upgrade. Get it? Even the older plants have a very short lease on life.

Despite his idiotic grin, and recent habit of talking just like us common folks, Barack Obama declared his intentions during his first run at the presidency: “If someone wants to build a new coal-fired plant they can, but it will bankrupt them because they will be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” He didn’t get his cap and trade legislation, but he has since discovered the trick of using his agencies to rule by fiat.

He and his current Energy Secretary have tried to backtrack on their anti-coal, pro-green, pro-high energy price agenda in advance of the November referendum on their policies, but these liars are getting harder to believe by the day, even with their own true believers. At least the “jobs president “ won’t be costing thousands of jobs in the coal industry before the elections. It’s our job to make sure he doesn’t get a chance to do so after the elections.

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued its first major manifesto since receiving the power to regulate CO2 emissions. And surprise, surprise, it’s aimed at the coal power industry. The crippling new rules would essentially make it impossible for new coal-fueled energy plants to be built.

The coal companies could comply with the rules, but the costs would be astronomical in order to contain CO2 at the levels the EPA wants. Simply put, it’s technically viable, but economically impossible.

Amid huge photos of black smoke-belching chimneys (mostly from pre-1950), the EPA announced the new standards. New power plants would be required to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity. Today’s more modern plants produce about 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. But using the junk science of anthropomorphic global warming which declares that carbon dioxide causes that warming, the EPA has set an arbitrary figure that nobody can either prove or disprove. It’s the right number because the bureaucrats say it is.

Natural gas plants already produce the lower level of emissions, but their day has not yet arrived. So far, the Obama administration has been able to keep them in check by denying permits for more drilling, particularly when “fracking” is involved. But currently, coal is the big banana for most of the American Midwest, and therefore the big target for the EPA.

Failing to get Congress to pass Cap and Trade legislation (aka the Al Gore Enrichment Program), the Obama administration is instead using another bureaucratic ploy to end-run the Constitution while advancing its own “green” agenda. If they can’t outright ban coal use, or force a chimerical system of offsets on the American public and the coal producers, they’ll just regulate coal to death under the guise of saving the industry via “carbon capture technology.”

Carbon capture is a simple concept, a complicated technology, and massively expensive. But, gee, it would help get some of that CO2 out of the air, so the EPA is only doing it for the public good. The result for the coal energy plants is one of two alternatives: Install the capture technology at their own expense and absorb the ongoing costs. That alternative leads quickly to bankruptcy. The other alternative (the one the administration is hoping for) is to pass the costs on to the consumers, making energy prices so high that the consumers will vilify the coal energy producers (without noticing who caused it in the first place).

What coal capture does is to store much of the carbon dioxide emissions in the ground instead of releasing it into the air. It’s a win-win for the green weenies. If the producers go forward with the technology, prices will rise dramatically and coal loses. If they instead release the CO2 into the air, they will be fined and ultimately forced into some arcane version of cap and trade. Coal loses. It won’t hurt the rich (it never does), but the poor and middle class will have an even greater daily burden placed on them to go with the skyrocketing cost of gasoline.

The coal industry was already limping along as the result of other heavy-handed EPA regulations regarding SO2 and mercury emissions. With the addition of CO2 to the list of prohibited or regulated emissions, the limp will turn into a complete collapse. And all of this stems from the EPA’s and the Obama administration’s inchoate search for perfectly clean energy to replace reasonably safe and acceptable energy. The former is years or decades away from being practical, the latter is already with us, but about to be destroyed.

To deflect public anger if it closed down all coal-fired energy plants immediately, the EPA has said it is only concerned with new facilities. That goes with the other two great lies: “The check is in the mail, and I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” In fact, at a Congressional committee hearing on the subject, the assistant administrator for EPA’s air and radiation unit said expressly that “the agency has no plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions for existing plants.” That, and $5.00 will get you a gallon of gasoline.

The EPA wrote a cute little escape clause for itself. Knowing full well that any plant that produces energy by using heat is going to have to repair its machinery regularly, it gave itself the power to declare any major repair an “upgrade,” thereby requiring that the older plants comply with the new rules. Naturally, they left it to their own determination what comprises a repair and what comprises an upgrade. Get it? Even the older plants have a very short lease on life.

Despite his idiotic grin, and recent habit of talking just like us common folks, Barack Obama declared his intentions during his first run at the presidency: “If someone wants to build a new coal-fired plant they can, but it will bankrupt them because they will be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” He didn’t get his cap and trade legislation, but he has since discovered the trick of using his agencies to rule by fiat.

He and his current Energy Secretary have tried to backtrack on their anti-coal, pro-green, pro-high energy price agenda in advance of the November referendum on their policies, but these liars are getting harder to believe by the day, even with their own true believers. At least the “jobs president “ won’t be costing thousands of jobs in the coal industry before the elections. It’s our job to make sure he doesn’t get a chance to do so after the elections.

The Fix Is In—No More Coal Plants

View Detail

Is This The End Of Tupperware Parties?

Is This The End Of Tupperware Parties?

While the agents provocateurs of the fifth column mainstream media have been busy feeding us red meat in the form of the sainted Trayvon Martin and the demonized George Zimmerman, the FDA, USDA and the EPA have been setting up an all-new round of scares which will prevent us from eating or storing any red meat they do not approve of. Science be damned, along with facts.

Things that we’ve long lived with and taken for granted, or weren’t even aware of are on the federal chopping block. The two items I have specifically in mind are Tupperware and [the newly-created epithet of] “pink slime.” The reason we took no notice of either was that nobody was harmed, nobody is being harmed, and nobody would ever be harmed by either product. But Nanny knows best, we must get hysterical, and the mainstream media must push the horror of it all.

First, Tupperware (along with dozens of other food container and disposal products you all have in your homes) has intentionally led us into storing our precious arugula and sprouts in containers loaded with bisphenol A (BPA). Omigod, BPA in all my storage items! This is on a par with saccharine and silicon breast implant carcinogens potentially causing the death of millions of innocents (do you even remember them?).

Never mind that the European Food Safety Authority (the ultimate hysterical nanny), the Japanese Food Safety Agency, the World Health Organization, and yes, the FDA have all found the levels of BPA in every current product to be completely safe. The FDA made that determination as recently as 2010. But using the insanely unrealistic high standards of the European Food Safety Agency, the pro-regulation bureaucrats have gone ten times worse and are now reviewing the leaching of BPA into our stored food.

The regulators have focused on the fact that they have “suddenly discovered” that leaching effect. From what they say, they were unaware that BPA was leaching into our food via pretty colored containers. And that must be stopped, immediately. However, the Europeans, the Japanese, and earlier FDA agents were all fully aware of the leaching. And they determined that the minuscule leaching of BPA is about as dangerous as a pinhead-sized drop of water leaching into your stored macaroni and cheese.

Interestingly, the papers coming out from the FDA and the National Resources Defense Council (a left wing, anti-oil chemicals group) have joined together to damn the danger of BPA. And it isn’t just Tupperware and their competitors. Almost all the food you buy in cans is protected from the metals of the cans themselves by internal liners containing BPA, and has been for over half a century without a single reported case of cancer resulting from it. You might be misled into thinking that the hysterics are just erring on the side of caution--that it’s a matter of how much BPA is leaching. Well, there’s a small problem with that. No matter what amount is leaching, it doesn’t much matter. The human body does not store or use BPA. It merely metabolizes it and excretes it.

Like saccharine and silicon implants before it, BPA is only dangerous if administered in daily doses 1,000 times greater than is possible to enter the human body in an entire lifetime. But the mainstream media have been stirring this pot for some time now. Ecoweenies and Nervous Nellies have been warning about the dangers of BPA in editorials and “your health” columns for years. With absolutely no scientific reason to do so, they advance their agenda by advising people to use glass and metal containers. Underneath lies the war against petroleum products. But here’s the clinker, 90% of plastic containers such as Tupperware are products of natural gas refining, not oil refining.

The NRDC has been handing horror stories to the mainstream media for years. And the mainstream has obligingly reported the stories as scientific truth. Most recently, the NRDC caused a panic for apple consumers and apple product manufacturers because apples were being treated with ripening agent called Alar. CBS’s 60 Minutes went so far as to start a story about Alar by showing an apple with a skull and crossbones superimposed on the image.

The “exposé” caused serious damage to the apple industry back in 1991 and 1992 from which it has not yet fully recovered. What the mainstream media didn’t do was to print or broadcast articles which scientifically proved that animal tests on Alar were analogous to drinking daily, for life, 19,000 quarts of juice made from Alar-treated apples. That result was similar to the much-earlier version of the dangers of saccharine. Now it’s the turn of BPA.

Up next—pink slime. What is this horrific chemical that they are killing us with? How dare the manufacturers poison us with deadly chemicals manufactured solely to make beef products look better? It’s called LFTB, and for years the USDA had negligently allowed its use, most often in ground beef. The only problem with the dangers of this dangerous chemical is that it is neither dangerous nor a chemical. LFTB simply stands for “lean finely textured beef.”

The only ingredient in this “beef additive” is, well, beef. Simply put, most home cooks trim their beef, but always end up throwing away perfectly good beef because it’s not worth the effort to cut around all the smaller fat globules. For the sake of efficiency and with the ability to do so, big beef product manufacturers use the pieces that the home cook would throw away. It quickly adds up to a lot of additional beef product. They simply use huge machines to pound, cut, mash, and refine the pieces into a product that can stretch the consumer’s beef dollar.

The end-product of this refining is a jelly-like beef substance that is easily added to already-ground beef. It’s very pink, and it could be described as slimy, though not after it has been added to the other beef product to stretch that product and give it a healthy reddish glow. Naturally, the bureaucrats and food-hysterics have decided that such a thing is unsafe for human consumption. In other words, more junk science. But if they called it a healthy beef additive, nobody would panic. So they named it “pink slime” in order to advance their bureaucratic agenda. What reasonable person would want to ingest pink slime?

So what does the scare actually mean, and what are the results? It means that a perfectly safe and 100% natural product has been demonized for no reason other than the personal whims of the food fascists. The result is that the beef industry will have to grow up to 1.5 million additional methane-producing cows each year to pick up the slack caused by throwing away a perfectly good product. The other result, of course, is higher beef prices. But Michelle Obama doesn’t care about that, does she? And besides, once the EPA discovers the additional deadly methane in the atmosphere, it can ban beef entirely (which is probably the real goal of about half of the vegetarian/vegan manufacturers of this phony scare in the first place).

So, my advice to all our readers is to beware of dangerous Tupperware and deadly beef additives. And most important of all, do not, I repeat DO NOT store unused ground beef containing pink slime in a Tupperware container. This could cause your painful death in as little as 1,000 years or so.

On a more serious note--today is Palm Sunday. This is the day on which Christians worldwide celebrate the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem, fulfilling one of the Biblical prophecies. "And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, Hosanna to the son of David; blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest." Matthew 21:8,9

While the agents provocateurs of the fifth column mainstream media have been busy feeding us red meat in the form of the sainted Trayvon Martin and the demonized George Zimmerman, the FDA, USDA and the EPA have been setting up an all-new round of scares which will prevent us from eating or storing any red meat they do not approve of. Science be damned, along with facts.

Things that we’ve long lived with and taken for granted, or weren’t even aware of are on the federal chopping block. The two items I have specifically in mind are Tupperware and [the newly-created epithet of] “pink slime.” The reason we took no notice of either was that nobody was harmed, nobody is being harmed, and nobody would ever be harmed by either product. But Nanny knows best, we must get hysterical, and the mainstream media must push the horror of it all.

First, Tupperware (along with dozens of other food container and disposal products you all have in your homes) has intentionally led us into storing our precious arugula and sprouts in containers loaded with bisphenol A (BPA). Omigod, BPA in all my storage items! This is on a par with saccharine and silicon breast implant carcinogens potentially causing the death of millions of innocents (do you even remember them?).

Never mind that the European Food Safety Authority (the ultimate hysterical nanny), the Japanese Food Safety Agency, the World Health Organization, and yes, the FDA have all found the levels of BPA in every current product to be completely safe. The FDA made that determination as recently as 2010. But using the insanely unrealistic high standards of the European Food Safety Agency, the pro-regulation bureaucrats have gone ten times worse and are now reviewing the leaching of BPA into our stored food.

The regulators have focused on the fact that they have “suddenly discovered” that leaching effect. From what they say, they were unaware that BPA was leaching into our food via pretty colored containers. And that must be stopped, immediately. However, the Europeans, the Japanese, and earlier FDA agents were all fully aware of the leaching. And they determined that the minuscule leaching of BPA is about as dangerous as a pinhead-sized drop of water leaching into your stored macaroni and cheese.

Interestingly, the papers coming out from the FDA and the National Resources Defense Council (a left wing, anti-oil chemicals group) have joined together to damn the danger of BPA. And it isn’t just Tupperware and their competitors. Almost all the food you buy in cans is protected from the metals of the cans themselves by internal liners containing BPA, and has been for over half a century without a single reported case of cancer resulting from it. You might be misled into thinking that the hysterics are just erring on the side of caution--that it’s a matter of how much BPA is leaching. Well, there’s a small problem with that. No matter what amount is leaching, it doesn’t much matter. The human body does not store or use BPA. It merely metabolizes it and excretes it.

Like saccharine and silicon implants before it, BPA is only dangerous if administered in daily doses 1,000 times greater than is possible to enter the human body in an entire lifetime. But the mainstream media have been stirring this pot for some time now. Ecoweenies and Nervous Nellies have been warning about the dangers of BPA in editorials and “your health” columns for years. With absolutely no scientific reason to do so, they advance their agenda by advising people to use glass and metal containers. Underneath lies the war against petroleum products. But here’s the clinker, 90% of plastic containers such as Tupperware are products of natural gas refining, not oil refining.

The NRDC has been handing horror stories to the mainstream media for years. And the mainstream has obligingly reported the stories as scientific truth. Most recently, the NRDC caused a panic for apple consumers and apple product manufacturers because apples were being treated with ripening agent called Alar. CBS’s 60 Minutes went so far as to start a story about Alar by showing an apple with a skull and crossbones superimposed on the image.

The “exposé” caused serious damage to the apple industry back in 1991 and 1992 from which it has not yet fully recovered. What the mainstream media didn’t do was to print or broadcast articles which scientifically proved that animal tests on Alar were analogous to drinking daily, for life, 19,000 quarts of juice made from Alar-treated apples. That result was similar to the much-earlier version of the dangers of saccharine. Now it’s the turn of BPA.

Up next—pink slime. What is this horrific chemical that they are killing us with? How dare the manufacturers poison us with deadly chemicals manufactured solely to make beef products look better? It’s called LFTB, and for years the USDA had negligently allowed its use, most often in ground beef. The only problem with the dangers of this dangerous chemical is that it is neither dangerous nor a chemical. LFTB simply stands for “lean finely textured beef.”

The only ingredient in this “beef additive” is, well, beef. Simply put, most home cooks trim their beef, but always end up throwing away perfectly good beef because it’s not worth the effort to cut around all the smaller fat globules. For the sake of efficiency and with the ability to do so, big beef product manufacturers use the pieces that the home cook would throw away. It quickly adds up to a lot of additional beef product. They simply use huge machines to pound, cut, mash, and refine the pieces into a product that can stretch the consumer’s beef dollar.

The end-product of this refining is a jelly-like beef substance that is easily added to already-ground beef. It’s very pink, and it could be described as slimy, though not after it has been added to the other beef product to stretch that product and give it a healthy reddish glow. Naturally, the bureaucrats and food-hysterics have decided that such a thing is unsafe for human consumption. In other words, more junk science. But if they called it a healthy beef additive, nobody would panic. So they named it “pink slime” in order to advance their bureaucratic agenda. What reasonable person would want to ingest pink slime?

So what does the scare actually mean, and what are the results? It means that a perfectly safe and 100% natural product has been demonized for no reason other than the personal whims of the food fascists. The result is that the beef industry will have to grow up to 1.5 million additional methane-producing cows each year to pick up the slack caused by throwing away a perfectly good product. The other result, of course, is higher beef prices. But Michelle Obama doesn’t care about that, does she? And besides, once the EPA discovers the additional deadly methane in the atmosphere, it can ban beef entirely (which is probably the real goal of about half of the vegetarian/vegan manufacturers of this phony scare in the first place).

So, my advice to all our readers is to beware of dangerous Tupperware and deadly beef additives. And most important of all, do not, I repeat DO NOT store unused ground beef containing pink slime in a Tupperware container. This could cause your painful death in as little as 1,000 years or so.

On a more serious note--today is Palm Sunday. This is the day on which Christians worldwide celebrate the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem, fulfilling one of the Biblical prophecies. "And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, Hosanna to the son of David; blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest." Matthew 21:8,9

Is This The End Of Tupperware Parties?

View Detail

Justice Actually Can Prevail

Justice Actually Can Prevail

The monster that is the Environmental Protection Agency has just received a big slapdown from the United States Supreme Court. The EPA, using its huge resources, entrenched bureaucratic mentality, seemingly endless ability to spend the taxpayers money and determination that it is a law unto itself lost a true David versus Goliath battle. A family which refused to be intimidated by Leviathan won.

I’ve written on this topic twice before, each time with the hope that this brave couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett would be able to fight on until they won their battle to re-establish the very American proposition that your land belongs to you, not to the federal government and a gaggle of environmental fascists. You can review the underlying facts of the case here: Sacketts vs EPA. So this post is actually more celebratory than the previous two.

In a nutshell, the case involves a small parcel of land which the Sacketts had purchased so they could build their dream home in the Priest Lake region of Idaho. After pulling all the proper permits and complying with all environmental regulations imposed by the local, regional and state authorities, the Sacketts began to build. After the Sacketts had graded the land, laid the foundation for the house and erected some of the walls and support structures, the EPA came in, ordered the construction to halt forthwith, and ordered the Sacketts to dismantle what construction had been done and return the land to its natural state as a protected wetland.

The idea that the land was a protected wetland came as a total surprise to the Sacketts and every agency involved except the EPA. The “wetland” amounted to a small portion of the property, not much more than a puddle, which had only come to exist as the result of an unusually wet winter and spring. It hadn’t been there before or during the permit process, and left alone, would dry up on its own eventually. No wetland flora or fauna had yet discovered the puddle. It takes the sharp eye of an EPA bureaucrat to locate such obscure ecological marvels.

This was another example of ecoweenies and federal bureaucrats finding a “problem” to act on in order to make sure that their power intimidates both the objects of the protection orders and anyone else who might dare to think of building on or near the same location. Why is it suddenly a protected wetland? The EPA’s response was “because we say it is.”

What was determined in the Supreme Court decision is that the EPA (and by inference, other federal alphabet agencies) may not prevent injured plaintiffs from challenging the power of the agency early in the proceedings. In order to win by intimidation, the EPA had issued what is called a “compliance order.” Such an order requires that the victims of that order must first comply with all the terms of the order before attaining standing to sue the agency for a reversal of the order. For a family of moderate means, that is a near impossibility.

The Sacketts would have had to pull down all the construction done so far, including re-grading the land to put it back into its “natural state.” Then, and only then, they would have been allowed to challenge the EPA’s determination that their land was a protected wetland. Assuming they won the subsequent suit (no sure thing), they would then be able to start construction all over.

As an additional bullet in the head of the Sackett’s dreams, refusal to obey the compliance order would mean they could spend their limited funds on reversing the construction, then hiring counsel to sue just to get back where they started or pay daily fines of $37,500 until they did comply. The Sacketts chose not to comply, and after unsuccessful appeals, their fines had reached nearly $1 million by the time the case got to the Supreme Court.

The argument in court revolved around the nature of the compliance order, with the issue of the questionable wetlands determination a secondary issue. The EPA contended that a compliance order is only one step in ongoing litigation to make that determination. The Sacketts argued the opposite. And the high court agreed with the Sacketts. Speaking for the unanimous court, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the Sacketts had the right to sue to overturn the compliance order rather than obey it at their own expense and litigate further later.

Scalia reviewed the Administrative Procedures Act on which the EPA relied, and found that a compliance order such as the one in this case is so onerous that it comprises a final order, complete with monetary fines. The order requiring the Sacketts to restore the property to its original condition was therefore subject to immediate judicial review, both under the Administrative Procedures Act and the Clean Water Act.

No need for a private citizen to bankrupt himself complying with the order before suing to overturn the agency decision only to get back to where he was in the first place before the arbitrary and crippling order was entered. Scalia added: “There is no reason to think that the Clean Water Act was uniquely designed to enable the strong-arming of regulated parties into ‘voluntary compliance’ without the opportunity for judicial review—even judicial review of the question whether the regulated party is within the EPA’s jurisdiction.”

Justice Samuel Alito also suggested that Congress amend the Clean Water Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, and similar bureaucratic legislation in a way that would clearly and affirmatively define the limitations of compliance orders while at the same time preventing more arbitrary and capricious actions by federal agencies effectively quashing the right of private citizens to seek redress in the courts at the earliest possible time. Said Alito: “The Court’s opinion is better than nothing, but only clarification of the reach of the Clean Water Act can rectify the underlying problem.”

The attorney for the Sacketts argued before the Justices that the EPA (and by inference, any other federal agency) is not above the law, nor does any such agency have the right to prevent private citizens from seeking legal redress against the agency when those citizens reasonably believe they are being treated unfairly. He further argued that private citizens should not be required to suffer crippling sanctions without being able to petition the courts to grant redress and protect private property rights pending further litigation. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed.

Although this was an important and unanimous decision, caution must be advised before determining that this battle won a war. The EPA doesn’t like being told it has limited powers, and under this administration at least, it’s likely that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a concurring opinion which pointed out that the underlying issue of whether the Sackett’s property is or is not a protected wetland is not being determined by this Supreme Court decision.

The decision is limited to the right of a private citizen to challenge a compliance order without first having to comply with it. In other words, big government-friendly Ginsburg wanted the EPA to know that she, Justice Sotomayor and perhaps one other Justice might very well be amenable to accepting their determination that the Sackett’s property is in fact a protected wetland if the case should make its way back to the Supreme Court on that issue alone.

I’ll take my victories where I can find them. This was a major limitation placed on the power of irresponsible poorly-monitored federal agencies to harass, intimidate and threaten private citizens into surrendering to unjust federal authority. In order to win the final battle and ultimately the war, Congress must act to severely restrict the now nearly-unlimited powers of the EPA to declare private property off-limits to the citizens who own it. Now you have another reason to elect a conservative Republican majority to Congress in the upcoming general election, as well as kicking The One out of the White House.

The monster that is the Environmental Protection Agency has just received a big slapdown from the United States Supreme Court. The EPA, using its huge resources, entrenched bureaucratic mentality, seemingly endless ability to spend the taxpayers money and determination that it is a law unto itself lost a true David versus Goliath battle. A family which refused to be intimidated by Leviathan won.

I’ve written on this topic twice before, each time with the hope that this brave couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett would be able to fight on until they won their battle to re-establish the very American proposition that your land belongs to you, not to the federal government and a gaggle of environmental fascists. You can review the underlying facts of the case here: Sacketts vs EPA. So this post is actually more celebratory than the previous two.

In a nutshell, the case involves a small parcel of land which the Sacketts had purchased so they could build their dream home in the Priest Lake region of Idaho. After pulling all the proper permits and complying with all environmental regulations imposed by the local, regional and state authorities, the Sacketts began to build. After the Sacketts had graded the land, laid the foundation for the house and erected some of the walls and support structures, the EPA came in, ordered the construction to halt forthwith, and ordered the Sacketts to dismantle what construction had been done and return the land to its natural state as a protected wetland.

The idea that the land was a protected wetland came as a total surprise to the Sacketts and every agency involved except the EPA. The “wetland” amounted to a small portion of the property, not much more than a puddle, which had only come to exist as the result of an unusually wet winter and spring. It hadn’t been there before or during the permit process, and left alone, would dry up on its own eventually. No wetland flora or fauna had yet discovered the puddle. It takes the sharp eye of an EPA bureaucrat to locate such obscure ecological marvels.

This was another example of ecoweenies and federal bureaucrats finding a “problem” to act on in order to make sure that their power intimidates both the objects of the protection orders and anyone else who might dare to think of building on or near the same location. Why is it suddenly a protected wetland? The EPA’s response was “because we say it is.”

What was determined in the Supreme Court decision is that the EPA (and by inference, other federal alphabet agencies) may not prevent injured plaintiffs from challenging the power of the agency early in the proceedings. In order to win by intimidation, the EPA had issued what is called a “compliance order.” Such an order requires that the victims of that order must first comply with all the terms of the order before attaining standing to sue the agency for a reversal of the order. For a family of moderate means, that is a near impossibility.

The Sacketts would have had to pull down all the construction done so far, including re-grading the land to put it back into its “natural state.” Then, and only then, they would have been allowed to challenge the EPA’s determination that their land was a protected wetland. Assuming they won the subsequent suit (no sure thing), they would then be able to start construction all over.

As an additional bullet in the head of the Sackett’s dreams, refusal to obey the compliance order would mean they could spend their limited funds on reversing the construction, then hiring counsel to sue just to get back where they started or pay daily fines of $37,500 until they did comply. The Sacketts chose not to comply, and after unsuccessful appeals, their fines had reached nearly $1 million by the time the case got to the Supreme Court.

The argument in court revolved around the nature of the compliance order, with the issue of the questionable wetlands determination a secondary issue. The EPA contended that a compliance order is only one step in ongoing litigation to make that determination. The Sacketts argued the opposite. And the high court agreed with the Sacketts. Speaking for the unanimous court, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the Sacketts had the right to sue to overturn the compliance order rather than obey it at their own expense and litigate further later.

Scalia reviewed the Administrative Procedures Act on which the EPA relied, and found that a compliance order such as the one in this case is so onerous that it comprises a final order, complete with monetary fines. The order requiring the Sacketts to restore the property to its original condition was therefore subject to immediate judicial review, both under the Administrative Procedures Act and the Clean Water Act.

No need for a private citizen to bankrupt himself complying with the order before suing to overturn the agency decision only to get back to where he was in the first place before the arbitrary and crippling order was entered. Scalia added: “There is no reason to think that the Clean Water Act was uniquely designed to enable the strong-arming of regulated parties into ‘voluntary compliance’ without the opportunity for judicial review—even judicial review of the question whether the regulated party is within the EPA’s jurisdiction.”

Justice Samuel Alito also suggested that Congress amend the Clean Water Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, and similar bureaucratic legislation in a way that would clearly and affirmatively define the limitations of compliance orders while at the same time preventing more arbitrary and capricious actions by federal agencies effectively quashing the right of private citizens to seek redress in the courts at the earliest possible time. Said Alito: “The Court’s opinion is better than nothing, but only clarification of the reach of the Clean Water Act can rectify the underlying problem.”

The attorney for the Sacketts argued before the Justices that the EPA (and by inference, any other federal agency) is not above the law, nor does any such agency have the right to prevent private citizens from seeking legal redress against the agency when those citizens reasonably believe they are being treated unfairly. He further argued that private citizens should not be required to suffer crippling sanctions without being able to petition the courts to grant redress and protect private property rights pending further litigation. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed.

Although this was an important and unanimous decision, caution must be advised before determining that this battle won a war. The EPA doesn’t like being told it has limited powers, and under this administration at least, it’s likely that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a concurring opinion which pointed out that the underlying issue of whether the Sackett’s property is or is not a protected wetland is not being determined by this Supreme Court decision.

The decision is limited to the right of a private citizen to challenge a compliance order without first having to comply with it. In other words, big government-friendly Ginsburg wanted the EPA to know that she, Justice Sotomayor and perhaps one other Justice might very well be amenable to accepting their determination that the Sackett’s property is in fact a protected wetland if the case should make its way back to the Supreme Court on that issue alone.

I’ll take my victories where I can find them. This was a major limitation placed on the power of irresponsible poorly-monitored federal agencies to harass, intimidate and threaten private citizens into surrendering to unjust federal authority. In order to win the final battle and ultimately the war, Congress must act to severely restrict the now nearly-unlimited powers of the EPA to declare private property off-limits to the citizens who own it. Now you have another reason to elect a conservative Republican majority to Congress in the upcoming general election, as well as kicking The One out of the White House.

Justice Actually Can Prevail

View Detail

Obama Is Of Two Minds

Obama Is Of Two Minds

President Obama genuinely thinks that his idiotic grin and rehearsed verbal cadences are sufficient to make every American believe what he is saying. Even when what he is saying directly contradicts what he has just said or done a mere day or two before. He has taken Lincoln’s aphorism and twisted it into “I can fool all of the people, all of the time.” Consider his recent statements and actions on energy policy.

In his State of the Union address, the President sounded almost, well, presidential when talking about energy. He seemed to be supporting the Republican “all of the above” options for energy sources. He advocated bigg[er] tax cuts for domestic manufacturers, incentives for new companies to move into areas where old industry had moved out, and doubling the tax deductions of high tech companies which make their products in the United States.

In later speeches, he advocated increasing domestic natural-gas production by using the process called “fracking.” No, that’s not taken from Battlestar Galactica. It is simply shorthand for “hydraulic fracturing” of rock to release the natural gas contained in its grasp. He told us he was going to break the ban on offshore oil drilling in order to reduce dependence on oil being purchased from Middle East dictators. He promised on multiple occasions that he was open to any and all proposals to produce what is necessary to release or capture domestic energy supplies. He even mentioned coal as a resource a couple of times.

While touting all these abundant resources, he sensibly followed the line of many fiscal conservatives who were desirous of cutting taxes on businesses in exchange for eliminating certain “redundant, counter-productive and unnecessary” income tax deductions. All in all, not an entirely bad agenda. And the American people are certainly united in the concept of weaning ourselves off tenuous foreign energy products.

So how is this actually working out in thought, word and deed? Let’s look at those tax cuts for domestic manufacturers and energy-producers. The Crony Socialist-in-Chief spoke as if he meant all viable manufacturers and producers. But the reality is he meant only his pet projects and crony-owned businesses. He has set aside $800 billion in economic stimulus funds but has used them almost exclusively for “green” projects, many of which have failed or are failing.

On the other hand, where viable and successful operations such as oil drilling and fracking are concerned, he has specifically targeted them for “having received taxpayer subsidized payments” and therefore unworthy of the government’s assistance. What he is talking about is programs such as the oil depletion allowance. Many of us would say that at least some of those allowances are way over the top, but in fact they are little different from standard deductions allowable to all corporations (including his favored green projects), like capital inventory depreciation. If Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt, it would have had similar deductions available to it.

So instead of incentivizing these proven industries, he is working with his fellow Democrats to write punitive tax laws that will continue the pattern of putting American companies and workers at a disadvantage in the world market. Even “windfall profits” taxes are back in the leftist lexicon. On the other hand, he seems to favor deductions for companies which engage in “windfall losses.” Very logical. Punish profit and reward failure.

As we’ve discussed before, Obama isn’t really the least bit desirous of increasing domestic American energy production. He is interested in picking winners and losers and favoring pie-in-the-sky green projects while stalling or killing projects with a proven track record. As for fracking, it seemed like only minutes after Obama gave the process a thumbs-up that the Environmental Protection Agency produced a report replete with mathematical and scientific errors, sermonizing, and goals posing as practical solutions to kill a fracking project in Wyoming.

Among the “goals” the Wyoming company must meet in order to get to the natural gas is a 95% reduction in “toxic” and “greenhouse” emissions. The EPA twisted the noxious Clean Air Act to accomplish killing the project, then made it clear that any other company anywhere else in the United States which used similar methods would be subject to the same job-killing and project-killing measures. So much for developing the abundant natural gas resource.

As for all the offshore drilling, only a handful of permits have been actually provisionally granted pending further EPA determination. The approvals are largely for exploration rather than drilling. To show his support for domestic American oil drilling and oil production, Obama announced that “drill, baby, drill is a bumper sticker slogan, not a strategy.” Even his erstwhile political ally, former President Bill Clinton, said that was just plain wrong.

Speaking of the Clintons, how about that Keystone XL pipeline? The EPA couldn’t stop it at the US-Canadian border because of treaty obligations, so the State Department under Hillary stepped in to do the dirty work. 20,000 “shovel-ready” jobs which don’t even require drilling on American soil gone with the stroke of a pen. But never fear, if the State Department ever bows to public pressure, the EPA has offices all along the proposed pipeline to claim that it will produce environmental disaster (including the ruin of some sandhills in Nebraska).

Of the stimulus funds Obama claims he is going to lavish on domestic energy production, most is being frozen for future consideration. But he has set aside $80 billion for immediate use for any huckster or snake-oil salesman who can come along with a magical “green” energy project. Never mind the failure of Solyndra and several other similar favored companies. Never mind the creation of a minuscule number of jobs which disappear as quickly as they are created. Never mind that many of those jobs “created” by the administration and its cronies cost the taxpayers as much as a million dollars per job. Just say the magic incantation “green,” and the money is yours.

President Obama genuinely thinks that his idiotic grin and rehearsed verbal cadences are sufficient to make every American believe what he is saying. Even when what he is saying directly contradicts what he has just said or done a mere day or two before. He has taken Lincoln’s aphorism and twisted it into “I can fool all of the people, all of the time.” Consider his recent statements and actions on energy policy.

In his State of the Union address, the President sounded almost, well, presidential when talking about energy. He seemed to be supporting the Republican “all of the above” options for energy sources. He advocated bigg[er] tax cuts for domestic manufacturers, incentives for new companies to move into areas where old industry had moved out, and doubling the tax deductions of high tech companies which make their products in the United States.

In later speeches, he advocated increasing domestic natural-gas production by using the process called “fracking.” No, that’s not taken from Battlestar Galactica. It is simply shorthand for “hydraulic fracturing” of rock to release the natural gas contained in its grasp. He told us he was going to break the ban on offshore oil drilling in order to reduce dependence on oil being purchased from Middle East dictators. He promised on multiple occasions that he was open to any and all proposals to produce what is necessary to release or capture domestic energy supplies. He even mentioned coal as a resource a couple of times.

While touting all these abundant resources, he sensibly followed the line of many fiscal conservatives who were desirous of cutting taxes on businesses in exchange for eliminating certain “redundant, counter-productive and unnecessary” income tax deductions. All in all, not an entirely bad agenda. And the American people are certainly united in the concept of weaning ourselves off tenuous foreign energy products.

So how is this actually working out in thought, word and deed? Let’s look at those tax cuts for domestic manufacturers and energy-producers. The Crony Socialist-in-Chief spoke as if he meant all viable manufacturers and producers. But the reality is he meant only his pet projects and crony-owned businesses. He has set aside $800 billion in economic stimulus funds but has used them almost exclusively for “green” projects, many of which have failed or are failing.

On the other hand, where viable and successful operations such as oil drilling and fracking are concerned, he has specifically targeted them for “having received taxpayer subsidized payments” and therefore unworthy of the government’s assistance. What he is talking about is programs such as the oil depletion allowance. Many of us would say that at least some of those allowances are way over the top, but in fact they are little different from standard deductions allowable to all corporations (including his favored green projects), like capital inventory depreciation. If Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt, it would have had similar deductions available to it.

So instead of incentivizing these proven industries, he is working with his fellow Democrats to write punitive tax laws that will continue the pattern of putting American companies and workers at a disadvantage in the world market. Even “windfall profits” taxes are back in the leftist lexicon. On the other hand, he seems to favor deductions for companies which engage in “windfall losses.” Very logical. Punish profit and reward failure.

As we’ve discussed before, Obama isn’t really the least bit desirous of increasing domestic American energy production. He is interested in picking winners and losers and favoring pie-in-the-sky green projects while stalling or killing projects with a proven track record. As for fracking, it seemed like only minutes after Obama gave the process a thumbs-up that the Environmental Protection Agency produced a report replete with mathematical and scientific errors, sermonizing, and goals posing as practical solutions to kill a fracking project in Wyoming.

Among the “goals” the Wyoming company must meet in order to get to the natural gas is a 95% reduction in “toxic” and “greenhouse” emissions. The EPA twisted the noxious Clean Air Act to accomplish killing the project, then made it clear that any other company anywhere else in the United States which used similar methods would be subject to the same job-killing and project-killing measures. So much for developing the abundant natural gas resource.

As for all the offshore drilling, only a handful of permits have been actually provisionally granted pending further EPA determination. The approvals are largely for exploration rather than drilling. To show his support for domestic American oil drilling and oil production, Obama announced that “drill, baby, drill is a bumper sticker slogan, not a strategy.” Even his erstwhile political ally, former President Bill Clinton, said that was just plain wrong.

Speaking of the Clintons, how about that Keystone XL pipeline? The EPA couldn’t stop it at the US-Canadian border because of treaty obligations, so the State Department under Hillary stepped in to do the dirty work. 20,000 “shovel-ready” jobs which don’t even require drilling on American soil gone with the stroke of a pen. But never fear, if the State Department ever bows to public pressure, the EPA has offices all along the proposed pipeline to claim that it will produce environmental disaster (including the ruin of some sandhills in Nebraska).

Of the stimulus funds Obama claims he is going to lavish on domestic energy production, most is being frozen for future consideration. But he has set aside $80 billion for immediate use for any huckster or snake-oil salesman who can come along with a magical “green” energy project. Never mind the failure of Solyndra and several other similar favored companies. Never mind the creation of a minuscule number of jobs which disappear as quickly as they are created. Never mind that many of those jobs “created” by the administration and its cronies cost the taxpayers as much as a million dollars per job. Just say the magic incantation “green,” and the money is yours.

Obama Is Of Two Minds

View Detail

Shark! It's What's For Lunch!

Shark! It's What's For Lunch!

Eco-savvy President Barack Obama signed a bill in January that protects sharks from being captured and sliced and diced for their fins. Then he headed for his favorite left coast city where he had lunch at the Great Eastern restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The President took time out from some major fundraising with the limousine liberals to have a bite. The highlight of the restaurant’s menu? Shark fin soup.

Now it all seems a little schizophrenic to me. Michelle Obama hectors us about “eating healthy” while preventing us (and particularly our kids) from eating anything she doesn’t approve of. Barack Obama, on the other hand, takes the family to restaurants which serve lunches that include forbidden products. Maybe Barack signed the bill accidentally, not realizing that shark fins are highly nutritious (are they?). Or maybe it’s just a matter of the rules not applying to the elite.

California banned the sale of shark fin products a year ago. It outraged the Chinese community in San Francisco who asked “what next—are you going to ban rhino horn?” The federal ban has only recently gone into effect. But there might be another reason he chose that restaurant. Where you or I might go to a lunch where they serve really big hamburgers that cost as much as $10, this particular restaurant serves a bowl of braised shark fin soup for $48. What a bargain!

Now the President claims he had no advance knowledge of the shark fin soup on the menu. But then his Attorney General also claims he never heard of Fast & Furious. Besides, he broke no laws. Both the California and federal laws make exceptions for shark fins already harvested, and they can be served in restaurants until July 1 of next year. I have to wonder if there will be a menu item at the Great Eastern called “really old, stale shark fin soup” by that time.

PETA found out about the impromptu lunch arrangements too late to gather their forces and throw blood on the President. But they did make a public statement: “All animals feel fear and pain, and what kind of justification can there be for the hideous cruelty involved in pulling sharks from the water, cutting off their fins, and then throwing them back into the sea to spin to the bottom while they slowly bleed to death?”

The federal Shark Conservation Act prohibits cutting off the fins of most shark species at sea. I guess some sharks just aren’t worth protecting from spinning to the bottom while they slowly bleed to death. Maybe they exempted the Great White, since the species is rather large and doesn’t take well to having its fin cut off. Sort of like, “if you think you can pull it off, go for it.” On the other hand, it may be protected because of its movie star status and ability to raise funds for Obama campaigns. Besides, who wants to watch Shark Week on Animal Planet if the sharks are all finless?

Well, the President didn’t have the shark fin soup anyway. He opted for shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, steamed pork buns and stuffed mushrooms. I’m not sure where that meal fits on Michelle’s scale of healthy meals, but if it’s anything like I remember, it’s a cholesterol atom bomb. Even if he had ordered the shark fin soup, he wouldn’t have been breaking the law as it currently exists. But aren’t Democrats the ones who are always whining about following “the spirit of the law?”

Eco-savvy President Barack Obama signed a bill in January that protects sharks from being captured and sliced and diced for their fins. Then he headed for his favorite left coast city where he had lunch at the Great Eastern restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The President took time out from some major fundraising with the limousine liberals to have a bite. The highlight of the restaurant’s menu? Shark fin soup.

Now it all seems a little schizophrenic to me. Michelle Obama hectors us about “eating healthy” while preventing us (and particularly our kids) from eating anything she doesn’t approve of. Barack Obama, on the other hand, takes the family to restaurants which serve lunches that include forbidden products. Maybe Barack signed the bill accidentally, not realizing that shark fins are highly nutritious (are they?). Or maybe it’s just a matter of the rules not applying to the elite.

California banned the sale of shark fin products a year ago. It outraged the Chinese community in San Francisco who asked “what next—are you going to ban rhino horn?” The federal ban has only recently gone into effect. But there might be another reason he chose that restaurant. Where you or I might go to a lunch where they serve really big hamburgers that cost as much as $10, this particular restaurant serves a bowl of braised shark fin soup for $48. What a bargain!

Now the President claims he had no advance knowledge of the shark fin soup on the menu. But then his Attorney General also claims he never heard of Fast & Furious. Besides, he broke no laws. Both the California and federal laws make exceptions for shark fins already harvested, and they can be served in restaurants until July 1 of next year. I have to wonder if there will be a menu item at the Great Eastern called “really old, stale shark fin soup” by that time.

PETA found out about the impromptu lunch arrangements too late to gather their forces and throw blood on the President. But they did make a public statement: “All animals feel fear and pain, and what kind of justification can there be for the hideous cruelty involved in pulling sharks from the water, cutting off their fins, and then throwing them back into the sea to spin to the bottom while they slowly bleed to death?”

The federal Shark Conservation Act prohibits cutting off the fins of most shark species at sea. I guess some sharks just aren’t worth protecting from spinning to the bottom while they slowly bleed to death. Maybe they exempted the Great White, since the species is rather large and doesn’t take well to having its fin cut off. Sort of like, “if you think you can pull it off, go for it.” On the other hand, it may be protected because of its movie star status and ability to raise funds for Obama campaigns. Besides, who wants to watch Shark Week on Animal Planet if the sharks are all finless?

Well, the President didn’t have the shark fin soup anyway. He opted for shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, steamed pork buns and stuffed mushrooms. I’m not sure where that meal fits on Michelle’s scale of healthy meals, but if it’s anything like I remember, it’s a cholesterol atom bomb. Even if he had ordered the shark fin soup, he wouldn’t have been breaking the law as it currently exists. But aren’t Democrats the ones who are always whining about following “the spirit of the law?”

Shark! It's What's For Lunch!

View Detail

Left Coast Ecoweenie News

Left Coast Ecoweenie News

The left hand doesn’t know what the other left hand is doing in California. This past week, leftist multimillionaire Democratic contributor and “philanthropist” Susie Tompkins Buell of San Francisco decided to withhold her largess from the Obama administration since “the president has not been vocal enough on global warming.” Even though Buell is a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s, she didn’t think that the State Department’s current initiative on climate change was “enough.”

Yesterday, the State Department announced an international climate change initiative to reduce short-lived climate pollutants other than carbon dioxide. The initiative will initially cost $15 million. The United States will be joining Bangladesh, Mexico and Ghana in the effort, with moral support from Canada and Sweden. The US will provide $12 million, while the other five will make up the difference. Well, that’s nothing new. China, which is not a party to the initiative, will no doubt be glad to lend the money to the US to pay for the latest climate change fad. From the perspective of the other five, this sounds a lot like “we must do something right away, shouldn’t you?”

“Secretary Clinton today announces a climate and clean air initiative to reduce short-lived climate pollutants” read the State Department announcement. Which was quickly followed by Buell’s announcement that “I would just love to write my big check, or have a high-dollar dinner here on the president’s behalf, but I can’t. Mr. Obama has got to be a leader on the urgency of climate change.” Buell, who could afford to pay the combined share of Bangladesh, Mexico, and Ghana with bucks to spare for Canada and Sweden believes strongly that it is not her job. The money should be paid by the American government and paid for by extorting the taxpayers.

And then there’s that sovereignty thing. Buell doesn’t care who determines how much effort and money is needed to remedy the problem that most people have never heard of, as long as she doesn’t have to pay for it. And she does agree with Clinton about who the proper experts are to make these determinations. In Clinton’s words: “We will look to the United Nations. The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) lists sixteen major actions that could either be taken on black carbon or methane which could have quite striking effects with respect to global warming.” How can you trust a group that can’t even spell “program?”

The State Department uses all the right obfuscations to avoid demonstrating that its troops don’t have a clue as to what they’re talking about. But it sounds so good. “The Initiative is going to be aimed at action, at attracting high-level public support (Buell excluded, I suppose), mobilizing resources, catalyzing and helping to drive the implementation of national action plans, and broadly raising public awareness about the impact of action in these areas.” How’s that for totally meaningless?

The Obama administration says it expects the initial group of six countries to rapidly expand. I would have chosen “metastasize,” but that’s just me. “We are starting with about $15 million of funding to get this effort up and running.” And in a fit of wishful thinking, the Clinton announcement also said “$12 million of that will come from the US over two years, and Canada, and there will be, I am sure, also some funding coming from Sweden, although they are not at a phase of their budget process that they have been able to put an exact number down, but they certainly will be contributing, as will new partners and others.”

Isn’t it comforting to know that the American budget is in such good shape that we can front the first $12 million without hesitation? In fact, it’s in such good shape that the Democrats insist we don’t even need a budget. Need money for “temporary pollutants?” Just authorize it and it will take care of itself.

On a somewhat related ecoweenie note, we bought our first home near the Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco. At the time, it was a raceway and was used for occasional rock concerts. The most notorious was the Rolling Stones concert at which the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club was used as security and bodyguards, resulting in a murder or two. Today, it is one of the largest wind farms in California. I now live in the Tehachapi Mountains, near a more modest wind farm in the Tehachapi Pass. Both places share something in common. Raptors such as hawks and eagles are being chopped up willy-nilly by the 200 mph spinning blades of the wind turbines.

The Los Angeles Times reports: “The toll makes the Pine Tree site in the Tehachapi Mountains among the deadliest in California's wind farm industry. Activists say birds' behavior should be studied before erecting more sites.” The report goes on to say: “Those deaths give Pine Tree one of the highest avian mortality rates in California's wind farm industry. The death rate per turbine at the $425-million facility is three times higher than at California's Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, where about 67 golden eagles die each year. However, the Altamont Pass facility has 5,000 wind turbines — 55 times as many as Pine Tree.”

The most notable victims are the golden eagles, which are a protected species and one of two symbols of America (the other is the bald eagle). So why aren’t those ecoweenies getting massive federal help under the federal Endangered Species Act? Simple. Eagles don’t deliver votes. Eagles don’t community organize. Eagles don’t own wind farms, or any other federally-subsidized Obama-friendly project. Eagles don’t sit on corporate boards, voting to accept federal funds and tax-breaks while giving large contributions to the perpetual Obama campaign. And if eagles could reason and vote, they might just vote for their own self-preservation over inefficient but deadly green schemes.

The left hand doesn’t know what the other left hand is doing in California. This past week, leftist multimillionaire Democratic contributor and “philanthropist” Susie Tompkins Buell of San Francisco decided to withhold her largess from the Obama administration since “the president has not been vocal enough on global warming.” Even though Buell is a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s, she didn’t think that the State Department’s current initiative on climate change was “enough.”

Yesterday, the State Department announced an international climate change initiative to reduce short-lived climate pollutants other than carbon dioxide. The initiative will initially cost $15 million. The United States will be joining Bangladesh, Mexico and Ghana in the effort, with moral support from Canada and Sweden. The US will provide $12 million, while the other five will make up the difference. Well, that’s nothing new. China, which is not a party to the initiative, will no doubt be glad to lend the money to the US to pay for the latest climate change fad. From the perspective of the other five, this sounds a lot like “we must do something right away, shouldn’t you?”

“Secretary Clinton today announces a climate and clean air initiative to reduce short-lived climate pollutants” read the State Department announcement. Which was quickly followed by Buell’s announcement that “I would just love to write my big check, or have a high-dollar dinner here on the president’s behalf, but I can’t. Mr. Obama has got to be a leader on the urgency of climate change.” Buell, who could afford to pay the combined share of Bangladesh, Mexico, and Ghana with bucks to spare for Canada and Sweden believes strongly that it is not her job. The money should be paid by the American government and paid for by extorting the taxpayers.

And then there’s that sovereignty thing. Buell doesn’t care who determines how much effort and money is needed to remedy the problem that most people have never heard of, as long as she doesn’t have to pay for it. And she does agree with Clinton about who the proper experts are to make these determinations. In Clinton’s words: “We will look to the United Nations. The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) lists sixteen major actions that could either be taken on black carbon or methane which could have quite striking effects with respect to global warming.” How can you trust a group that can’t even spell “program?”

The State Department uses all the right obfuscations to avoid demonstrating that its troops don’t have a clue as to what they’re talking about. But it sounds so good. “The Initiative is going to be aimed at action, at attracting high-level public support (Buell excluded, I suppose), mobilizing resources, catalyzing and helping to drive the implementation of national action plans, and broadly raising public awareness about the impact of action in these areas.” How’s that for totally meaningless?

The Obama administration says it expects the initial group of six countries to rapidly expand. I would have chosen “metastasize,” but that’s just me. “We are starting with about $15 million of funding to get this effort up and running.” And in a fit of wishful thinking, the Clinton announcement also said “$12 million of that will come from the US over two years, and Canada, and there will be, I am sure, also some funding coming from Sweden, although they are not at a phase of their budget process that they have been able to put an exact number down, but they certainly will be contributing, as will new partners and others.”

Isn’t it comforting to know that the American budget is in such good shape that we can front the first $12 million without hesitation? In fact, it’s in such good shape that the Democrats insist we don’t even need a budget. Need money for “temporary pollutants?” Just authorize it and it will take care of itself.

On a somewhat related ecoweenie note, we bought our first home near the Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco. At the time, it was a raceway and was used for occasional rock concerts. The most notorious was the Rolling Stones concert at which the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club was used as security and bodyguards, resulting in a murder or two. Today, it is one of the largest wind farms in California. I now live in the Tehachapi Mountains, near a more modest wind farm in the Tehachapi Pass. Both places share something in common. Raptors such as hawks and eagles are being chopped up willy-nilly by the 200 mph spinning blades of the wind turbines.

The Los Angeles Times reports: “The toll makes the Pine Tree site in the Tehachapi Mountains among the deadliest in California's wind farm industry. Activists say birds' behavior should be studied before erecting more sites.” The report goes on to say: “Those deaths give Pine Tree one of the highest avian mortality rates in California's wind farm industry. The death rate per turbine at the $425-million facility is three times higher than at California's Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, where about 67 golden eagles die each year. However, the Altamont Pass facility has 5,000 wind turbines — 55 times as many as Pine Tree.”

The most notable victims are the golden eagles, which are a protected species and one of two symbols of America (the other is the bald eagle). So why aren’t those ecoweenies getting massive federal help under the federal Endangered Species Act? Simple. Eagles don’t deliver votes. Eagles don’t community organize. Eagles don’t own wind farms, or any other federally-subsidized Obama-friendly project. Eagles don’t sit on corporate boards, voting to accept federal funds and tax-breaks while giving large contributions to the perpetual Obama campaign. And if eagles could reason and vote, they might just vote for their own self-preservation over inefficient but deadly green schemes.

Left Coast Ecoweenie News

View Detail

And God Bless Marco Rubio

And God Bless Marco Rubio

There’s a good reason why a lot of conservatives want Marco Rubio to enter the presidential Republican primaries, and why he is an almost universal choice for the second spot among the same people. He’s young. He’s dynamic. His conservative credentials are excellent. He appeals to people of almost every ethnic group. But most of all, he says what he means, clearly, concisely and without unnecessary nuance.

Recently, Rubio addressed America’s unnecessary energy problems. “In the meantime, why would we tie our own hands behind our back if we are competing with other economies? You know, the Chinese will drill a hole anywhere they can get their hands on.” Lest the wind Nazis, solar fascists and ecoweenies jump on that statement, he added: “Now I’m not saying we have to be like them, but I am saying that we’re an energy rich country and conservatism, which is grounded in common sense says that if you’re an energy rich country you need to use the energy that God has blessed your nation with.”

Now there’s an energy policy I can get behind. I don’t need a sixty page exposition and a five-year, five hundred page environmental impact report to understand what the Senator is saying, let alone what he means. We are supporting Middle East and South American oppressive regimes by purchasing oil that we could produce ourselves. Onshore, offshore, and just about everywhere, we have coal, oil and natural gas reserves that could make us energy-independent in a very short period of time historically. We don’t even have to get into the nuclear power debate with this many natural resources available to us, and in addition we have huge hydroelectric potential.

So, as the Senator says, why don’t we use it? “We can have clean air and we can have clean water, but we also can have some sanity.” For this reason, Rubio says it must be a basic conservative principle that America needs regulatory reform—now. And he nails his position down succinctly by comparing it to that of the Obama administration. “They don’t have an energy policy, but rather they have ‘energy politics.’ ”

Never was a truer word spoken. While this administration threw millions of taxpayer dollars at pie-in-the-sky Solyndra, it also nixed the Keystone XL pipeline which would have required no taxpayer funding and would have produced an estimated 20,000 American jobs almost immediately. Imagine the benefit of producing that Keystone oil ourselves without even the need for the Trans-Canadian pipeline. "Made In America" is still the best energy policy available.

Note: I will be making the long trek into civilization for an overdue doctor's appointment in the afternoon. I expect to be back fairly late, since they're predicting rain in the lowlands and snow up by my abode. So if I'm late getting to your comments, I hope you'll forgive me. I'll get to them as soon as I get home. Kitty Kelly offered to take over my duties, but she had that gleam in her eye that made me decline her offer.

There’s a good reason why a lot of conservatives want Marco Rubio to enter the presidential Republican primaries, and why he is an almost universal choice for the second spot among the same people. He’s young. He’s dynamic. His conservative credentials are excellent. He appeals to people of almost every ethnic group. But most of all, he says what he means, clearly, concisely and without unnecessary nuance.

Recently, Rubio addressed America’s unnecessary energy problems. “In the meantime, why would we tie our own hands behind our back if we are competing with other economies? You know, the Chinese will drill a hole anywhere they can get their hands on.” Lest the wind Nazis, solar fascists and ecoweenies jump on that statement, he added: “Now I’m not saying we have to be like them, but I am saying that we’re an energy rich country and conservatism, which is grounded in common sense says that if you’re an energy rich country you need to use the energy that God has blessed your nation with.”

Now there’s an energy policy I can get behind. I don’t need a sixty page exposition and a five-year, five hundred page environmental impact report to understand what the Senator is saying, let alone what he means. We are supporting Middle East and South American oppressive regimes by purchasing oil that we could produce ourselves. Onshore, offshore, and just about everywhere, we have coal, oil and natural gas reserves that could make us energy-independent in a very short period of time historically. We don’t even have to get into the nuclear power debate with this many natural resources available to us, and in addition we have huge hydroelectric potential.

So, as the Senator says, why don’t we use it? “We can have clean air and we can have clean water, but we also can have some sanity.” For this reason, Rubio says it must be a basic conservative principle that America needs regulatory reform—now. And he nails his position down succinctly by comparing it to that of the Obama administration. “They don’t have an energy policy, but rather they have ‘energy politics.’ ”

Never was a truer word spoken. While this administration threw millions of taxpayer dollars at pie-in-the-sky Solyndra, it also nixed the Keystone XL pipeline which would have required no taxpayer funding and would have produced an estimated 20,000 American jobs almost immediately. Imagine the benefit of producing that Keystone oil ourselves without even the need for the Trans-Canadian pipeline. "Made In America" is still the best energy policy available.

Note: I will be making the long trek into civilization for an overdue doctor's appointment in the afternoon. I expect to be back fairly late, since they're predicting rain in the lowlands and snow up by my abode. So if I'm late getting to your comments, I hope you'll forgive me. I'll get to them as soon as I get home. Kitty Kelly offered to take over my duties, but she had that gleam in her eye that made me decline her offer.

And God Bless Marco Rubio

View Detail

Solyndra Strikes Again

Solyndra Strikes Again

The Solyndra scandal just refuses to go away. By now, everyone knows about the money thrown at a pie-in-the-sky solar panel scheme by the unwilling taxpayers on the orders of the Obama administration. The company was shaky at best, but it was run by big contributors to the Obama campaign, so a few (dozen) federal rules and plain common sense were tossed aside to fund another green disaster.

The company failed shortly after receiving the loans, and the taxpayers are now on the hook for the losses. As part of a sweetheart deal between Solyndra’s chief investors, Obama contributors all, and the Department of Energy, Solyndra not only received approximately $535 million in federal guaranteed loans, but in violation of federal law the major shareholders were granted priority in bankruptcy over the taxpayers who coughed up the money for the loan. The Department of Energy has claimed all along that it had no idea whatsoever that Solyndra was about to fall off a financial cliff.

And now we have a new wrinkle to consider. A mere two days before the Solyndra board of directors decided to file for bankruptcy protection, there was a mysterious sell-off of inventory. Allegedly, the sale was to stave off the collapse of the company. It is not an unusual procedure for going concerns which are experiencing short term cash flow problems. But in the real world of healthy, but troubled corporations, these things are carefully-planned and take place weeks or months before a company is facing bankruptcy.

The sell-off has a number of very strange-smelling details. First, there is the question of why the inventory was sold off so cheaply. The inventory was fairly evaluated at $58.1 million. It was sold for cash--$17.5 million in cash. Even very distressed corporations in need of cash can usually find a buyer that will pay the real value of the inventory, or something close to it. Even under the worst possible circumstances, getting only 30% of the actual value is nearly unheard-of.

To any trained accountant (in the Department of Energy, for instance?) this means that the company is not only in trouble—it’s in big trouble. The bankruptcy court must look at the time of the sale, as well as the buyers, and determine if the sale was for reasonably equivalent cash-to-value as well as whether there was any reasonable belief that the infusion of cash would increase liquidity to the point that the corporation might remain viable. Given the bankruptcy filing two days later, that seems unlikely. That leaves the question of who paid the cash.

Even the name of the buyer is suspicious—Solyndra Solar II. That name was picked for the affiliates of Solyndra’s debtor-in-possession lender. And who might that be? Argonaut Private Equity and Madrone Capital Partners. Argonaut is the investment wing of a foundation headed by billionaire George Kaiser. Full circle, ladies and gentlemen. Kaiser is one of those Obama contributors and Solyndra board members who got precedence over the taxpayers in case of bankruptcy. Madrone Partners also has connections to the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame.

An official spokesman for Argonaut, who also served on the Solyndra board, told reporters that the investors (which investors?) did not profit from overall sales of the inventory or the accounts receivable. A separate corporation had been formed to purchase the Solyndra accounts receivable by the same cast of characters, and is named Solyndra Solar LLC. The spokesman, Steve Mitchell, added that the plan was to give the company more time to turn around. Two days? That would be one helluva turnaround.

Solyndra Solar LLC and Solyndra Solar II were both properly listed in the initial bankruptcy filing. But it was not until a much later addendum that the full list of officers and investors of the buyers was added. And it was only at the late filing that the amount of the money, inventory, and accounts receivable became known.

All of this is unusual, but not entirely unheard of in the wonderful world of failing corporations. The purchasers have sometimes managed to make a good deal by which the original company survives and the investors in the special corporations provide the money and own the inventory which they supervise while the original entity changes form, but still remains in business. That most assuredly did not happen in the case of Solyndra.

George Mason University Professor and bankruptcy expert Todd Zywicki gingerly explains it this way: “There’s nothing inherently problematic about that as it is common to want to stockpile cash on the eve of a bankruptcy in order to have a sort of war chest going into the case. It could be a problem, however, if there were particular creditors who were benefited by converting the accounts receivable and inventory to cash for some reason or if those assets were converted for less than reasonably equivalent value."

And therein lies the rub. We await an explanation from George Kaiser, Friend of Obama..

The Solyndra scandal just refuses to go away. By now, everyone knows about the money thrown at a pie-in-the-sky solar panel scheme by the unwilling taxpayers on the orders of the Obama administration. The company was shaky at best, but it was run by big contributors to the Obama campaign, so a few (dozen) federal rules and plain common sense were tossed aside to fund another green disaster.

The company failed shortly after receiving the loans, and the taxpayers are now on the hook for the losses. As part of a sweetheart deal between Solyndra’s chief investors, Obama contributors all, and the Department of Energy, Solyndra not only received approximately $535 million in federal guaranteed loans, but in violation of federal law the major shareholders were granted priority in bankruptcy over the taxpayers who coughed up the money for the loan. The Department of Energy has claimed all along that it had no idea whatsoever that Solyndra was about to fall off a financial cliff.

And now we have a new wrinkle to consider. A mere two days before the Solyndra board of directors decided to file for bankruptcy protection, there was a mysterious sell-off of inventory. Allegedly, the sale was to stave off the collapse of the company. It is not an unusual procedure for going concerns which are experiencing short term cash flow problems. But in the real world of healthy, but troubled corporations, these things are carefully-planned and take place weeks or months before a company is facing bankruptcy.

The sell-off has a number of very strange-smelling details. First, there is the question of why the inventory was sold off so cheaply. The inventory was fairly evaluated at $58.1 million. It was sold for cash--$17.5 million in cash. Even very distressed corporations in need of cash can usually find a buyer that will pay the real value of the inventory, or something close to it. Even under the worst possible circumstances, getting only 30% of the actual value is nearly unheard-of.

To any trained accountant (in the Department of Energy, for instance?) this means that the company is not only in trouble—it’s in big trouble. The bankruptcy court must look at the time of the sale, as well as the buyers, and determine if the sale was for reasonably equivalent cash-to-value as well as whether there was any reasonable belief that the infusion of cash would increase liquidity to the point that the corporation might remain viable. Given the bankruptcy filing two days later, that seems unlikely. That leaves the question of who paid the cash.

Even the name of the buyer is suspicious—Solyndra Solar II. That name was picked for the affiliates of Solyndra’s debtor-in-possession lender. And who might that be? Argonaut Private Equity and Madrone Capital Partners. Argonaut is the investment wing of a foundation headed by billionaire George Kaiser. Full circle, ladies and gentlemen. Kaiser is one of those Obama contributors and Solyndra board members who got precedence over the taxpayers in case of bankruptcy. Madrone Partners also has connections to the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame.

An official spokesman for Argonaut, who also served on the Solyndra board, told reporters that the investors (which investors?) did not profit from overall sales of the inventory or the accounts receivable. A separate corporation had been formed to purchase the Solyndra accounts receivable by the same cast of characters, and is named Solyndra Solar LLC. The spokesman, Steve Mitchell, added that the plan was to give the company more time to turn around. Two days? That would be one helluva turnaround.

Solyndra Solar LLC and Solyndra Solar II were both properly listed in the initial bankruptcy filing. But it was not until a much later addendum that the full list of officers and investors of the buyers was added. And it was only at the late filing that the amount of the money, inventory, and accounts receivable became known.

All of this is unusual, but not entirely unheard of in the wonderful world of failing corporations. The purchasers have sometimes managed to make a good deal by which the original company survives and the investors in the special corporations provide the money and own the inventory which they supervise while the original entity changes form, but still remains in business. That most assuredly did not happen in the case of Solyndra.

George Mason University Professor and bankruptcy expert Todd Zywicki gingerly explains it this way: “There’s nothing inherently problematic about that as it is common to want to stockpile cash on the eve of a bankruptcy in order to have a sort of war chest going into the case. It could be a problem, however, if there were particular creditors who were benefited by converting the accounts receivable and inventory to cash for some reason or if those assets were converted for less than reasonably equivalent value."

And therein lies the rub. We await an explanation from George Kaiser, Friend of Obama..

Solyndra Strikes Again

View Detail

R.I.P. California

R.I.P. California

California rivals the federal government in the number and excesses of its multiple bureaucracies. Its legislature is the envy of left wing Democrats everywhere. It now has the perfect governor—Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown. It is still feeling the effects of the administration of blockhead governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

To paraphrase Hannibal Smith of the A Team, “they love it when a plan comes together.” The leaders and their faithful sheep have a plan that they think will make California green and wealthy. The citizens of Lotus Land have a nearly infinite capacity for self-delusion. Their plan is actually organized suicide by green pipedreams, regulation and taxation. The Rev. Jim Jones only needed to stay in California and wait another thirty years or so, and he could have been governor.

I’m going to list some of the most egregious excesses of California governance. But there’s method to my madness. Americans in general, and conservative Republicans specifically need an occasional reminder of what could happen to them in the other states if The One is re-elected president along with a Democratic Congress.

Those of us who live in the Central Valley are experiencing a double-whammy. California has been the breadbasket of America for nearly a century. But no more. The bureaucrats have decided that the preservation of an obscure species of fish that holds no known niche in the macro-ecosystem is more important than water for the amber waves of grain and jobs for agricultural workers. In the case of Delta Smelt vs. Human Existence, the useless fish wins. This has been a joint effort of the federal EPA and California fellow-traveling bureaucracies. California embraced the EPA restrictions and added a few of its own. No water, no crops. Simple, no?

At the same time the state, in conspiracy with the Obama administration, has decided to transform the state that was built by the automobile into the state that runs on rails. Exploiting the misery and unemployment brought about by the artificial Central Valley drought, the boys in Sacramento and the boys in DC are shoving a high-speed rail project down the throats of Californians. And they have cynically chosen the Central Valley city of Bakersfield as the first leg of the run.

The train is supposed to run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but since the resistance to the project in those towns is minimal, they chose a starting place where objections to the project could be overcome by the desperate need for jobs. Clever, huh? And never mind California is essentially bankrupt. Federal funds are available, but the state must bear the largest share of the costs of the project, which in two years have escalated from $30 billion to $96 billion without a single track being laid.

Another California bureaucracy has a plan for all Californians. The California Air Resources Board has determined that 15% of all the cars on the California roads must be fully electric by 2025. The legislature and the two most recent governors think that’s just dandy. In a state where distances between routine destinations are measured in hours and minutes rather than in miles, the state has mandated automobiles which will travel no more than sixty to eighty miles before needing a time-consuming recharge. That’s fine for the denizens of San Francisco where nothing is more than five miles from anything else. But what about the rest of the state?

At least they’re requiring you to purchase an automobile which can be converted into a heat source (accompanying illustration). In the event the weather turns cold, just pull over, kick your car somewhere near the battery compartment, and you will generate a warm fire. Sometimes immediately, but in other cases it might take as long as a week for the blaze to get going, so be careful where you park.

The federal government imposed light bulb standards on all Americans. You are expected to buy a “green” light bulb which contains dangerous levels of mercury in order to use less energy. “Not good enough,” said California. Those not fortunate enough to live near a Wal-Mart will have to buy 60 watt bulbs that used to cost twenty or thirty cents, and replace them with a $3.00 bulb, manufactured in China The new 60 watt bulb actually puts out about 57 watts of ghastly light, while a 75 watt puts out about 63 watts. They also don’t fit right in your nicer lamps, and they look absolutely hideous in a chandelier. Just follow the greenie brick road, and don’t ask questions.

Then there’s law enforcement. Or maybe we should call it law observation. When rioters like the Occupy Movement or Oakland gangs celebrating a Raiders victory loot and pillage, the police are allowed to observe, but laying a hand on an out-of-control anarchist is police brutality. This is not the fault of the police. The governor sees assault and property damage as abstract concepts that don’t happen in his home. The big city mayors express open sympathy with the bums and thugs, give meaningless orders about protecting public property, then forbid the police to do anything “violent” to prevent the occupations. The police in Oakland are expected to react to thrown cement blocks, knives and Molotov cocktails with harsh words and mean looks.

As for border-hopping illegal aliens, welcome to California, land of the freebie and home of the goodies. Bop on over to your local DMV, get a license to drive (en Espanol), then drive around the building and register to vote yourself even more largess from the few remaining taxpayers in the state. If you're old enough, you can also apply for admission to the state's colleges and universities, paying in-state tuition denied to actual American citizens from the other states.

Criminals are welcome as well. The legislature is about to get rid of that pesky “three strikes” law that kept criminals in prison and out of the Occupy camps. It’s very humanitarian, allowing the rapists to have victims of the opposite sex which are unavailable to them in the Graybar Hotel.

I guess this is my way of saying that if you’re a conservative who doesn’t like any of the current Republican candidates for president, think carefully about sitting on your hands or voting for Barack Obama in the general election. Barack Obama and his merry band of socialists have a single goal: Make the rest of the United States just like California.

California rivals the federal government in the number and excesses of its multiple bureaucracies. Its legislature is the envy of left wing Democrats everywhere. It now has the perfect governor—Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown. It is still feeling the effects of the administration of blockhead governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

To paraphrase Hannibal Smith of the A Team, “they love it when a plan comes together.” The leaders and their faithful sheep have a plan that they think will make California green and wealthy. The citizens of Lotus Land have a nearly infinite capacity for self-delusion. Their plan is actually organized suicide by green pipedreams, regulation and taxation. The Rev. Jim Jones only needed to stay in California and wait another thirty years or so, and he could have been governor.

I’m going to list some of the most egregious excesses of California governance. But there’s method to my madness. Americans in general, and conservative Republicans specifically need an occasional reminder of what could happen to them in the other states if The One is re-elected president along with a Democratic Congress.

Those of us who live in the Central Valley are experiencing a double-whammy. California has been the breadbasket of America for nearly a century. But no more. The bureaucrats have decided that the preservation of an obscure species of fish that holds no known niche in the macro-ecosystem is more important than water for the amber waves of grain and jobs for agricultural workers. In the case of Delta Smelt vs. Human Existence, the useless fish wins. This has been a joint effort of the federal EPA and California fellow-traveling bureaucracies. California embraced the EPA restrictions and added a few of its own. No water, no crops. Simple, no?

At the same time the state, in conspiracy with the Obama administration, has decided to transform the state that was built by the automobile into the state that runs on rails. Exploiting the misery and unemployment brought about by the artificial Central Valley drought, the boys in Sacramento and the boys in DC are shoving a high-speed rail project down the throats of Californians. And they have cynically chosen the Central Valley city of Bakersfield as the first leg of the run.

The train is supposed to run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but since the resistance to the project in those towns is minimal, they chose a starting place where objections to the project could be overcome by the desperate need for jobs. Clever, huh? And never mind California is essentially bankrupt. Federal funds are available, but the state must bear the largest share of the costs of the project, which in two years have escalated from $30 billion to $96 billion without a single track being laid.

Another California bureaucracy has a plan for all Californians. The California Air Resources Board has determined that 15% of all the cars on the California roads must be fully electric by 2025. The legislature and the two most recent governors think that’s just dandy. In a state where distances between routine destinations are measured in hours and minutes rather than in miles, the state has mandated automobiles which will travel no more than sixty to eighty miles before needing a time-consuming recharge. That’s fine for the denizens of San Francisco where nothing is more than five miles from anything else. But what about the rest of the state?

At least they’re requiring you to purchase an automobile which can be converted into a heat source (accompanying illustration). In the event the weather turns cold, just pull over, kick your car somewhere near the battery compartment, and you will generate a warm fire. Sometimes immediately, but in other cases it might take as long as a week for the blaze to get going, so be careful where you park.

The federal government imposed light bulb standards on all Americans. You are expected to buy a “green” light bulb which contains dangerous levels of mercury in order to use less energy. “Not good enough,” said California. Those not fortunate enough to live near a Wal-Mart will have to buy 60 watt bulbs that used to cost twenty or thirty cents, and replace them with a $3.00 bulb, manufactured in China The new 60 watt bulb actually puts out about 57 watts of ghastly light, while a 75 watt puts out about 63 watts. They also don’t fit right in your nicer lamps, and they look absolutely hideous in a chandelier. Just follow the greenie brick road, and don’t ask questions.

Then there’s law enforcement. Or maybe we should call it law observation. When rioters like the Occupy Movement or Oakland gangs celebrating a Raiders victory loot and pillage, the police are allowed to observe, but laying a hand on an out-of-control anarchist is police brutality. This is not the fault of the police. The governor sees assault and property damage as abstract concepts that don’t happen in his home. The big city mayors express open sympathy with the bums and thugs, give meaningless orders about protecting public property, then forbid the police to do anything “violent” to prevent the occupations. The police in Oakland are expected to react to thrown cement blocks, knives and Molotov cocktails with harsh words and mean looks.

As for border-hopping illegal aliens, welcome to California, land of the freebie and home of the goodies. Bop on over to your local DMV, get a license to drive (en Espanol), then drive around the building and register to vote yourself even more largess from the few remaining taxpayers in the state. If you're old enough, you can also apply for admission to the state's colleges and universities, paying in-state tuition denied to actual American citizens from the other states.

Criminals are welcome as well. The legislature is about to get rid of that pesky “three strikes” law that kept criminals in prison and out of the Occupy camps. It’s very humanitarian, allowing the rapists to have victims of the opposite sex which are unavailable to them in the Graybar Hotel.

I guess this is my way of saying that if you’re a conservative who doesn’t like any of the current Republican candidates for president, think carefully about sitting on your hands or voting for Barack Obama in the general election. Barack Obama and his merry band of socialists have a single goal: Make the rest of the United States just like California.

R.I.P. California

View Detail

Chevy Volt: Obama’s Folly

Chevy Volt: Obama’s Folly

There is perhaps no greater example of the stupidity of the left than the Chevy Volt. It is the story of massive government subsidies going to solve a non-existent problem which result in a product no one wants and which doesn’t really work. This thing should become the new mascot of the Democratic party, forget the donkey, the donkey’s a vision of perfection by comparison.

Created by the bailed-out General Motors, the Chevy Volt has been an unmitigated disaster. The car was meant to be an environmentalist dream. It would combat global warming by reducing carbon emissions and would one day free us from our dependence on evil oil. But that’s not quite how it turned out.

To ensure the car could be called a “success,” GM stacked the deck by doing two things. First, they limited the release of the car in 2011 to big liberal cities: Washington, D.C., New York City, Austin, Texas, and California, with subsequent roll outs in other liberal states, and then all fifty-seven states by November 2011. This was meant to make sure that plenty of environmentalists would be on hand to buy the car, so GM could report brisk sales. Further, they limited the initial production run to 10,000 to ensure they would have more demand than supply and could report a sell out.

They even gave it all kinds of incentives. For example, while the car has a suggested retail price of $40,280, buyers get: (1) a $7,500 federal tax credit under the TARP bailout, (2) a $1,500 “state” rebate through the state’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (more federal money), (3) a federal tax credit for the purchase and installation of the charging unit, which is listed at costing $490 plus installation, but which Consumer Reports says costs around $2,000. That’s $11,000 in subsidies to buyers.

And that’s on top of the $2.4 billion in direct subsidies given to GM by the federal government, i.e. you, to develop the Volt, not to mention the $27 billion given to keep GM afloat so they could make wonderful cars like the Volt.

That’s a lot of federal help. So how did GM do? After thirteen months of sales, GM has sold only 7,997 cars. . . they couldn’t even sell the full 10,000 they made. To give you a comparison, the Toyota Prius sold 159,000 cars in the same period.

And that’s just the beginning of the morass.

See, it turns out the car ain’t as green as they made it out to be.

The Volt actually includes a gasoline engine. So in that sense, the car is not a true electric car, but is instead a hybrid. And if you calculate the “fuel economy rating” the same way it is calculate for other hybrids, the Volt only gets 48 miles per gallon, making it one of the worst hybrids. So GM objected and argued that it was unfair to treat this car as a hybrid and instead demanded that the car be tested using only the electric engine, i.e. that the EPA pretend the owners can use the gas engine. According to GM, that would result in a fuel economy rating of 230 miles per gallon.

Team Obama, the definition of more-ass, happily agreed to play along with GM’s fraud and tested the car in the new way. But even then it couldn’t come anywhere near GM’s claims of 230 miles per gallon. Instead, they found 93 miles per gallon in electric mode and 37 miles per gallon in gasoline mode, for an overall 60 miles per gallon. By comparison, the EPA rates the Prius at 51 mpg. Also, to get the 93 mpg, you need to drive it at low speeds on the highway.

It gets worse. The EPA also measured the tailpipe emissions and found 84 grams of carbon dioxide per mile using gasoline and “nearly zero” using electricity. But a study in the UK which calculated the emissions from the electricity used to charge the battery resulted in 199 grams per mile for the electric motor. Not only is that more pollution than several other cars, but that means you actually pollute less using the gasoline engine in the Volt than you do using the electric engine. Imagine that.

And then there’s the other problem: it’s a death trap.

See, it turns out that when the Volt gets in an accident, particularly from a side hit, the batteries can be damaged. This leads to a coolant leak which causes the car to catch fire. But it doesn’t happen right away. Instead, the fire can start minutes, hours, days or weeks later. In one instance, the car caught fire three weeks after the collision. GM claims to have fixed this by adding padding to the car, but has had to offer to buy back “a couple dozen” cars from people who are now too scared to own them. A couple dozen is around 5% of the total number sold.

And that’s not the only problem with the batteries. GM put an 8 year warranty on the batteries, but estimates right now are that the battery will need to be replaced every six to eight years. The cost of that replacement? $10,000. In other words, every six to eight years, you need to put in $10,000 to keep this turkey running. Given that the resale value is expected to fall 51% in three years, that means the car is effectively disposable. . . talk about a pollution nightmare!

It’s no wonder no one wants this car.

This is what happens whenever the government gets involved in the subsidy business. No rational business would ever try to make this car. It’s too expensive (GM apparently isn’t even making money on the current prices), it pollutes more than the evil polluting cars it’s meant to replace, it costs too much to own and it’s dangerous.

Moreover, it’s fixing a problem that apparently even Global Warming enthusiasts are starting to admit doesn’t exist – according to data released by the same enthusiasts who brought you climate gate and who have repeatedly said every single year for over two decades “this year was the hottest year on record,” the world stopped warming in 1997 and has been cooling ever since!

In an age when Obama’s folly can be seen in “green tech” companies going down in flames like bankruptcy dominoes after being handed mongo Federal cash, the Volt still stands out at the zenith of stupidity.... and you’ve paid $2.5 billion dollars so far to support that stupidity. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?

There is perhaps no greater example of the stupidity of the left than the Chevy Volt. It is the story of massive government subsidies going to solve a non-existent problem which result in a product no one wants and which doesn’t really work. This thing should become the new mascot of the Democratic party, forget the donkey, the donkey’s a vision of perfection by comparison.

Created by the bailed-out General Motors, the Chevy Volt has been an unmitigated disaster. The car was meant to be an environmentalist dream. It would combat global warming by reducing carbon emissions and would one day free us from our dependence on evil oil. But that’s not quite how it turned out.

To ensure the car could be called a “success,” GM stacked the deck by doing two things. First, they limited the release of the car in 2011 to big liberal cities: Washington, D.C., New York City, Austin, Texas, and California, with subsequent roll outs in other liberal states, and then all fifty-seven states by November 2011. This was meant to make sure that plenty of environmentalists would be on hand to buy the car, so GM could report brisk sales. Further, they limited the initial production run to 10,000 to ensure they would have more demand than supply and could report a sell out.

They even gave it all kinds of incentives. For example, while the car has a suggested retail price of $40,280, buyers get: (1) a $7,500 federal tax credit under the TARP bailout, (2) a $1,500 “state” rebate through the state’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (more federal money), (3) a federal tax credit for the purchase and installation of the charging unit, which is listed at costing $490 plus installation, but which Consumer Reports says costs around $2,000. That’s $11,000 in subsidies to buyers.

And that’s on top of the $2.4 billion in direct subsidies given to GM by the federal government, i.e. you, to develop the Volt, not to mention the $27 billion given to keep GM afloat so they could make wonderful cars like the Volt.

That’s a lot of federal help. So how did GM do? After thirteen months of sales, GM has sold only 7,997 cars. . . they couldn’t even sell the full 10,000 they made. To give you a comparison, the Toyota Prius sold 159,000 cars in the same period.

And that’s just the beginning of the morass.

See, it turns out the car ain’t as green as they made it out to be.

The Volt actually includes a gasoline engine. So in that sense, the car is not a true electric car, but is instead a hybrid. And if you calculate the “fuel economy rating” the same way it is calculate for other hybrids, the Volt only gets 48 miles per gallon, making it one of the worst hybrids. So GM objected and argued that it was unfair to treat this car as a hybrid and instead demanded that the car be tested using only the electric engine, i.e. that the EPA pretend the owners can use the gas engine. According to GM, that would result in a fuel economy rating of 230 miles per gallon.

Team Obama, the definition of more-ass, happily agreed to play along with GM’s fraud and tested the car in the new way. But even then it couldn’t come anywhere near GM’s claims of 230 miles per gallon. Instead, they found 93 miles per gallon in electric mode and 37 miles per gallon in gasoline mode, for an overall 60 miles per gallon. By comparison, the EPA rates the Prius at 51 mpg. Also, to get the 93 mpg, you need to drive it at low speeds on the highway.

It gets worse. The EPA also measured the tailpipe emissions and found 84 grams of carbon dioxide per mile using gasoline and “nearly zero” using electricity. But a study in the UK which calculated the emissions from the electricity used to charge the battery resulted in 199 grams per mile for the electric motor. Not only is that more pollution than several other cars, but that means you actually pollute less using the gasoline engine in the Volt than you do using the electric engine. Imagine that.

And then there’s the other problem: it’s a death trap.

See, it turns out that when the Volt gets in an accident, particularly from a side hit, the batteries can be damaged. This leads to a coolant leak which causes the car to catch fire. But it doesn’t happen right away. Instead, the fire can start minutes, hours, days or weeks later. In one instance, the car caught fire three weeks after the collision. GM claims to have fixed this by adding padding to the car, but has had to offer to buy back “a couple dozen” cars from people who are now too scared to own them. A couple dozen is around 5% of the total number sold.

And that’s not the only problem with the batteries. GM put an 8 year warranty on the batteries, but estimates right now are that the battery will need to be replaced every six to eight years. The cost of that replacement? $10,000. In other words, every six to eight years, you need to put in $10,000 to keep this turkey running. Given that the resale value is expected to fall 51% in three years, that means the car is effectively disposable. . . talk about a pollution nightmare!

It’s no wonder no one wants this car.

This is what happens whenever the government gets involved in the subsidy business. No rational business would ever try to make this car. It’s too expensive (GM apparently isn’t even making money on the current prices), it pollutes more than the evil polluting cars it’s meant to replace, it costs too much to own and it’s dangerous.

Moreover, it’s fixing a problem that apparently even Global Warming enthusiasts are starting to admit doesn’t exist – according to data released by the same enthusiasts who brought you climate gate and who have repeatedly said every single year for over two decades “this year was the hottest year on record,” the world stopped warming in 1997 and has been cooling ever since!

In an age when Obama’s folly can be seen in “green tech” companies going down in flames like bankruptcy dominoes after being handed mongo Federal cash, the Volt still stands out at the zenith of stupidity.... and you’ve paid $2.5 billion dollars so far to support that stupidity. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?

Chevy Volt: Obama’s Folly

View Detail

Lost In The Shuffle Of Saving The Middle Class

Lost In The Shuffle Of Saving The Middle Class

Barack Obama has delivered his State of the Union address (aka, "free campaign speech") in which he laid out (sort of) his plans to save the middle class and restore the economy. At the same time, he made it clear that we must not act hastily on creating jobs if it would mean damaging the environment.

Another lame excuse for protecting his enviroweenie base, and at the cost of stalling the Keystone XL Pipeline. I'll leave it to others (here, if you choose) to vet the State of the Union baloney. I want to concentrate on one facet of that baloney. Job creation. Obama cites General Motors (aka Government Motors) as an example of his success. Well, billions of taxpayers dollars bailed GM out while the government destroyed the shares of genuine investors and turned over major company ownership to the unions which largely created the problem in the first place.

Obama spoke of "creating jobs for the future" while sidestepping the 20,000 jobs which would have been created almost instantly without the need for government assistance or government interference. Lack of control and minimal interference with success is not part of the Obama plan. So even after being given the opportunity to approve the Keystone XL pipeline after having rejected it earlier, Obama stopped the project in its tracks, again. For once, he actually did something ahead of schedule. Somehow his agenda gets priority treatment while the people's business can wait.

Obama says "tear down those regulations which block the creation of new businesses" after having used the EPA's regulations and the State Department's ignorance to block the XL Pipeline. He brags about all the energy sources that he has opened up, but somehow doesn't see blocking a "shovel-ready" project as a direct contravention of those words. Pie-in-the-sky future energy developments, subsidized by the government, are somehow preferable to tried and true and fully-vetted projects like Keystone XL.

Obama has done some insider Democrat calculus and decided that he needs the enviroweenies to save his presidency, and that the union jobs lost by squelching the Keystone Pipeline will not deter the unions from coming home to Daddy in November. Obama says the Pipeline hasn't been studied sufficiently so maybe it could, possibly, go forward at some future date. No "let's get it done right away" for the Pipeline. That is added to the fact that the Pipeline got more in-depth study over a period of years than Solyndra got "right away."

Unlike Solyndra, the Pipeline stands on its own. The people behind the Keystone project complied with every demand of local, state and federal regulators, and accommodated the concerns of local environmentalists, changing the route from that originally planned.

Obama spoke of all sorts of energy schemes, even including oil and avoiding support for Middle East tyrannies. But when it came to this one "shovel-ready" job, originating in a friendly nation on our own borders, no dice. The enviroweenies got what they wanted and the State Department deeply offended a firm ally. And unlike Solyndra, no investment of American taxpayer funds is required for the Pipeline, and both the materials and technology are already proven and in place. All that was left to do was a simple approval.

Obama has once again promised many things he either can't deliver or has no intention of delivering. He can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but, well, you know the rest (Obama is not the only one who can quote Lincoln). There is simply no honest and realistic way to explain away his killing of jobs on or related to the Keystone XL Pipeline. And in keeping with that, Obama made no mention of the Pipeline whatsoever, dodging the issue while rambling on about energy and job creation. In the Republican response offered by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, he referred to the lost jobs produced by Obama's thumbs-down on the project.

Finally, there is more than just the ecoweenie vote to consider. Green energy is big business, even if it can't come close to employing the same number of workers or providing an equivalent amount of energy as a Keystone XL type of operation. Millions, perhaps billions, are being earmarked for green projects that are part of Obama's crony socialism program. In return for government largess and favoritism, the heads of these futuristic schemes are thrilled to pour big bucks into the Obama coffers.

They even get special deals which appear to violate federal law. The founder and CEO of Solyndra was granted a contract which included subordinating the taxpayers' interest in the corporation to his own in the event of bankruptcy. In reasonable and ethical times, the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. Yet this administration seems to be very efficient at picking and funding the losers.

Note: Yesterday (Tuesday), Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) introduced a bill to force the approval of the Keystone Pipeline. It is called the Keystone for a Secure Tomorrow Act (K-FAST). I don't have sufficient information yet to be able to make any further comment on the proposal.

Barack Obama has delivered his State of the Union address (aka, "free campaign speech") in which he laid out (sort of) his plans to save the middle class and restore the economy. At the same time, he made it clear that we must not act hastily on creating jobs if it would mean damaging the environment.

Another lame excuse for protecting his enviroweenie base, and at the cost of stalling the Keystone XL Pipeline. I'll leave it to others (here, if you choose) to vet the State of the Union baloney. I want to concentrate on one facet of that baloney. Job creation. Obama cites General Motors (aka Government Motors) as an example of his success. Well, billions of taxpayers dollars bailed GM out while the government destroyed the shares of genuine investors and turned over major company ownership to the unions which largely created the problem in the first place.

Obama spoke of "creating jobs for the future" while sidestepping the 20,000 jobs which would have been created almost instantly without the need for government assistance or government interference. Lack of control and minimal interference with success is not part of the Obama plan. So even after being given the opportunity to approve the Keystone XL pipeline after having rejected it earlier, Obama stopped the project in its tracks, again. For once, he actually did something ahead of schedule. Somehow his agenda gets priority treatment while the people's business can wait.

Obama says "tear down those regulations which block the creation of new businesses" after having used the EPA's regulations and the State Department's ignorance to block the XL Pipeline. He brags about all the energy sources that he has opened up, but somehow doesn't see blocking a "shovel-ready" project as a direct contravention of those words. Pie-in-the-sky future energy developments, subsidized by the government, are somehow preferable to tried and true and fully-vetted projects like Keystone XL.

Obama has done some insider Democrat calculus and decided that he needs the enviroweenies to save his presidency, and that the union jobs lost by squelching the Keystone Pipeline will not deter the unions from coming home to Daddy in November. Obama says the Pipeline hasn't been studied sufficiently so maybe it could, possibly, go forward at some future date. No "let's get it done right away" for the Pipeline. That is added to the fact that the Pipeline got more in-depth study over a period of years than Solyndra got "right away."

Unlike Solyndra, the Pipeline stands on its own. The people behind the Keystone project complied with every demand of local, state and federal regulators, and accommodated the concerns of local environmentalists, changing the route from that originally planned.

Obama spoke of all sorts of energy schemes, even including oil and avoiding support for Middle East tyrannies. But when it came to this one "shovel-ready" job, originating in a friendly nation on our own borders, no dice. The enviroweenies got what they wanted and the State Department deeply offended a firm ally. And unlike Solyndra, no investment of American taxpayer funds is required for the Pipeline, and both the materials and technology are already proven and in place. All that was left to do was a simple approval.

Obama has once again promised many things he either can't deliver or has no intention of delivering. He can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but, well, you know the rest (Obama is not the only one who can quote Lincoln). There is simply no honest and realistic way to explain away his killing of jobs on or related to the Keystone XL Pipeline. And in keeping with that, Obama made no mention of the Pipeline whatsoever, dodging the issue while rambling on about energy and job creation. In the Republican response offered by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, he referred to the lost jobs produced by Obama's thumbs-down on the project.

Finally, there is more than just the ecoweenie vote to consider. Green energy is big business, even if it can't come close to employing the same number of workers or providing an equivalent amount of energy as a Keystone XL type of operation. Millions, perhaps billions, are being earmarked for green projects that are part of Obama's crony socialism program. In return for government largess and favoritism, the heads of these futuristic schemes are thrilled to pour big bucks into the Obama coffers.

They even get special deals which appear to violate federal law. The founder and CEO of Solyndra was granted a contract which included subordinating the taxpayers' interest in the corporation to his own in the event of bankruptcy. In reasonable and ethical times, the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers. Yet this administration seems to be very efficient at picking and funding the losers.

Note: Yesterday (Tuesday), Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) introduced a bill to force the approval of the Keystone Pipeline. It is called the Keystone for a Secure Tomorrow Act (K-FAST). I don't have sufficient information yet to be able to make any further comment on the proposal.

Lost In The Shuffle Of Saving The Middle Class

View Detail

Dunderhead Bags A Hammerhead

Dunderhead Bags A Hammerhead

Rosie O'Donnell is a true outdoorsman. She doesn't believe in hunting with a gun, but when it comes to hooking large fish, she's a real mensch. In fact, just before a new Florida law went into effect on January 1 prohibiting the killing of endangered shark species, O'Donnell and her "children" killed at least four sharks off the Florida coast. The most recent was a twelve foot hammerhead.

I tried very hard not to think of headlines such as "Whale Hooks Shark," but I failed. There does seem to be some sort of cosmic justice in the growing outcry against her from such former allies as PETA and Shark Savers.. Rosie hugs trees and jihadists, but she doesn't hug fish. In fact, she hangs 'em from the highest yardarm, and poses for photos. Now I'm not a member of Lawyers for Equal Treatment for Sharks (LETS), but something just doesn't feel right about Rosie's catch.

Rosie and the family do their fishing with semi-famous Mark "The Shark" Quartiano. Quartiano, like Rosie, loves sharks to death. Ya gotta kill 'em to save 'em, or something like that. Quartiano posted the photo on his website in his spotlight "This Month's Celebrity Angler." Quartiano says "Rosie is a great angler. She's very conservation-minded. We've caught a lot of fish and released a lot of fish. We've also caught fish for eating." Eating fish? What next, eating cows? Nobody asked the shark its opinion of Rosie's conservation-mindedness.

Quartiano was quick to point out that "these conservation guys are hitting the wrong target." They should be going after all those commercial fishermen who collaterally catch hammerheads in their fishing nets. After all, killing sharks by accident is certainly far worse than hunting them down and killing them with a crazed gleam in your eye.

Even the opposition made it clear that O'Donnell hadn't done anything illegal. Well, that's a relief. Her supporters say she is a celebrity known for her philanthropic work, particularly for children, but she should have been aware of the conservation implications of her actions. Rosie loves bioethicists, but she probably missed the position of Yale Professor Peter Singer who believes that severely disabled infants have fewer rights than healthy hammerheads.

Erik Bush is a marine conservationist who started a Twitter and Facebook attack on our dear Rosie. He says: "Right now, sharks are the most endangered animals around. This is basically an endorsement [of sharkicide]. It sends the message that it's an OK activity. And this is not an activity that we want celebrities endorsing." Neil Hammerschlag at the University of Miami's School of Marine and Atmospheric Science chided Rose with: "She wouldn't go out hunting tigers. I don't see her pictured in front of some tiger strung up. Yet these are the tigers of the ocean, they're a top predator and they're in serious decline. Yet we kill them for sport."

I don't have a shark in this hunt, so I'm just doing my best to remain neutral. But in Rosie's defense, there is a shortage in Asia of shark fins for shark fin soup. Hammerheads are considered to have the tastiest fins of all. Without Rosie and celebrities like her, who is going to fill that vital Asian need? Look at that hammerhead's fins, and tell me she's wrong.

One wag has pointed out another benefit of Rosie's skills. It would allow for an all-new regular feature on the Animal Planet Channel--Lesbian Shark Hunters. I thought of Adequate White Whale vs. Great White Shark, but it's probably too wordy.

Rosie O'Donnell is a true outdoorsman. She doesn't believe in hunting with a gun, but when it comes to hooking large fish, she's a real mensch. In fact, just before a new Florida law went into effect on January 1 prohibiting the killing of endangered shark species, O'Donnell and her "children" killed at least four sharks off the Florida coast. The most recent was a twelve foot hammerhead.

I tried very hard not to think of headlines such as "Whale Hooks Shark," but I failed. There does seem to be some sort of cosmic justice in the growing outcry against her from such former allies as PETA and Shark Savers.. Rosie hugs trees and jihadists, but she doesn't hug fish. In fact, she hangs 'em from the highest yardarm, and poses for photos. Now I'm not a member of Lawyers for Equal Treatment for Sharks (LETS), but something just doesn't feel right about Rosie's catch.

Rosie and the family do their fishing with semi-famous Mark "The Shark" Quartiano. Quartiano, like Rosie, loves sharks to death. Ya gotta kill 'em to save 'em, or something like that. Quartiano posted the photo on his website in his spotlight "This Month's Celebrity Angler." Quartiano says "Rosie is a great angler. She's very conservation-minded. We've caught a lot of fish and released a lot of fish. We've also caught fish for eating." Eating fish? What next, eating cows? Nobody asked the shark its opinion of Rosie's conservation-mindedness.

Quartiano was quick to point out that "these conservation guys are hitting the wrong target." They should be going after all those commercial fishermen who collaterally catch hammerheads in their fishing nets. After all, killing sharks by accident is certainly far worse than hunting them down and killing them with a crazed gleam in your eye.

Even the opposition made it clear that O'Donnell hadn't done anything illegal. Well, that's a relief. Her supporters say she is a celebrity known for her philanthropic work, particularly for children, but she should have been aware of the conservation implications of her actions. Rosie loves bioethicists, but she probably missed the position of Yale Professor Peter Singer who believes that severely disabled infants have fewer rights than healthy hammerheads.

Erik Bush is a marine conservationist who started a Twitter and Facebook attack on our dear Rosie. He says: "Right now, sharks are the most endangered animals around. This is basically an endorsement [of sharkicide]. It sends the message that it's an OK activity. And this is not an activity that we want celebrities endorsing." Neil Hammerschlag at the University of Miami's School of Marine and Atmospheric Science chided Rose with: "She wouldn't go out hunting tigers. I don't see her pictured in front of some tiger strung up. Yet these are the tigers of the ocean, they're a top predator and they're in serious decline. Yet we kill them for sport."

I don't have a shark in this hunt, so I'm just doing my best to remain neutral. But in Rosie's defense, there is a shortage in Asia of shark fins for shark fin soup. Hammerheads are considered to have the tastiest fins of all. Without Rosie and celebrities like her, who is going to fill that vital Asian need? Look at that hammerhead's fins, and tell me she's wrong.

One wag has pointed out another benefit of Rosie's skills. It would allow for an all-new regular feature on the Animal Planet Channel--Lesbian Shark Hunters. I thought of Adequate White Whale vs. Great White Shark, but it's probably too wordy.

Dunderhead Bags A Hammerhead

View Detail

The EPA Is All Wet

The EPA Is All Wet

What you're looking at is what the Environmental Protection Agency arbitrarily declared a "wetland." Do you see any water? Do you see any water fowl? Do you see anything that would indicate to you that this land should be left untouched in order to protect the ecosystem? No? Well, either did the Sackett family when they bought the property to build their dream home in Priest Lake, Idaho.

But the EPA saw an environmental disaster in the making, and stopped the Sacketts cold. The couple had graded away those piles of dirt you see in the picture, and had started to lay the foundation for the house after obtaining all the necessary permits. And just as they were putting up the first wooden support beams, the Environazis arrived with a restraining order, informing the Sacketts that they were building on protected wetlands.

Since this is a followup article, you can read all the pertinent facts here: EPA Brings The House Down--Literally. As of that writing, the Sacketts had lost their battle with the EPA at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the most-reversed court in America). In June of last year, the Pacific Legal Foundation, on behalf of the Sacketts, petitioned the US Supreme Court for a Writ of Certiorari (an acknowledgment from the high court that it would be willing to hear the case). In August, the Supreme Court granted the petition and will hear the case this year.

Since that writing, the Sacketts have continued to refuse to "restore the property to its original condition" as demanded by the EPA, and the daily potential fines have risen to $37,500 per day. They only paid $23,000 total for the property in the first place. These are people of ordinary means who had a dream, not millionaire envirowackos who have nothing better to do than prevent others from fulfilling their lifelong desire. The Sacketts have merely experienced what hundreds, perhaps thousands of others have experienced. But unlike most, the Sacketts refused to cave in and go away, and instead stood on their constitutional and God-given right to build their dream home on their own property.

An EPA "compliance order" such as the one affecting the Sacketts is a highly-arbitrary and tyrannical exercise of government power without decent notice. The Sacketts wrote to the EPA requesting the grounds for the order, and after seven months received a reply that admitted that it couldn't even find the Sackett's property in its EPA online wetland inventory. Then the Sacketts (who had already been through the entire permit process, including a local environmental impact report) hired a civil engineer to inspect the property for non-compliance with EPA wetland standards. He wrote a report and signed an affidavit stating that the property was not only not a wetland, but was nowhere near any other designated wetland. "So what?" said the EPA.

And here's where the Catch 22 Ninth Circuit Court decision comes in. The court held that the Sacketts could not seek judicial review of the EPA's wetland designation until after they had restored the land to its original state and had applied for and been denied a wetland permit. As you will see from my original article, that process would take a very long time, and would cost the Sacketts somewhere between $200,000 and $300,00. And the only way for them to "win" judicial review is for the EPA to deny the application. So even if the EPA did grant the permit, the Sacketts would already be out-of-pocket for about a quarter of a million dollars.

This is a classic example of how a federal bureaucracy with nearly unlimited funds can destroy the lives of American citizens who simply can't afford to be right. If the Sacketts even had the ability to spend a quarter-million dollars and more, then more huge sums of money to pursue the suit if the agency denies the permit, the EPA would already have won by warning future protestors of the cost of attempting to thwart the ecoweenie agenda. Fortunately, the Pacific Legal Foundation took the case for the Sacketts on principle. And if the EPA loses, the bureaucrats can just shrug their shoulders and say "oops."

So how does a compliance order work? When the EPA believes that a landowner is engaged in a violation of environmental laws, it may issue an administrative compliance order requiring the landowner to take certain actions and then seek judicial enforcement of the order if the landowner does not comply (in this case, the Sacketts' refusal to "restore the land to its original condition"). The issue the Supreme Court will address is the validity of such arbitrary and crippling orders. Can the landowner challenge the administrative compliance order in court before the EPA seeks judicial enforcement (here, the daily $37,500 daily fines).

The Ninth Circuit upheld the EPA's right to commit off-highway robbery without any resort to the courts. Even given the Supreme Court's awful decision in Kelo v City of New London (substituting the Constitution's words "public use" with "public purpose"), there's a good chance that the Supreme Court will slap down the growing tendency of delegating legislative and executive powers to bureaucracies. The EPA may have gone one alleged wetland too far.

What you're looking at is what the Environmental Protection Agency arbitrarily declared a "wetland." Do you see any water? Do you see any water fowl? Do you see anything that would indicate to you that this land should be left untouched in order to protect the ecosystem? No? Well, either did the Sackett family when they bought the property to build their dream home in Priest Lake, Idaho.

But the EPA saw an environmental disaster in the making, and stopped the Sacketts cold. The couple had graded away those piles of dirt you see in the picture, and had started to lay the foundation for the house after obtaining all the necessary permits. And just as they were putting up the first wooden support beams, the Environazis arrived with a restraining order, informing the Sacketts that they were building on protected wetlands.

Since this is a followup article, you can read all the pertinent facts here: EPA Brings The House Down--Literally. As of that writing, the Sacketts had lost their battle with the EPA at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (the most-reversed court in America). In June of last year, the Pacific Legal Foundation, on behalf of the Sacketts, petitioned the US Supreme Court for a Writ of Certiorari (an acknowledgment from the high court that it would be willing to hear the case). In August, the Supreme Court granted the petition and will hear the case this year.

Since that writing, the Sacketts have continued to refuse to "restore the property to its original condition" as demanded by the EPA, and the daily potential fines have risen to $37,500 per day. They only paid $23,000 total for the property in the first place. These are people of ordinary means who had a dream, not millionaire envirowackos who have nothing better to do than prevent others from fulfilling their lifelong desire. The Sacketts have merely experienced what hundreds, perhaps thousands of others have experienced. But unlike most, the Sacketts refused to cave in and go away, and instead stood on their constitutional and God-given right to build their dream home on their own property.

An EPA "compliance order" such as the one affecting the Sacketts is a highly-arbitrary and tyrannical exercise of government power without decent notice. The Sacketts wrote to the EPA requesting the grounds for the order, and after seven months received a reply that admitted that it couldn't even find the Sackett's property in its EPA online wetland inventory. Then the Sacketts (who had already been through the entire permit process, including a local environmental impact report) hired a civil engineer to inspect the property for non-compliance with EPA wetland standards. He wrote a report and signed an affidavit stating that the property was not only not a wetland, but was nowhere near any other designated wetland. "So what?" said the EPA.

And here's where the Catch 22 Ninth Circuit Court decision comes in. The court held that the Sacketts could not seek judicial review of the EPA's wetland designation until after they had restored the land to its original state and had applied for and been denied a wetland permit. As you will see from my original article, that process would take a very long time, and would cost the Sacketts somewhere between $200,000 and $300,00. And the only way for them to "win" judicial review is for the EPA to deny the application. So even if the EPA did grant the permit, the Sacketts would already be out-of-pocket for about a quarter of a million dollars.

This is a classic example of how a federal bureaucracy with nearly unlimited funds can destroy the lives of American citizens who simply can't afford to be right. If the Sacketts even had the ability to spend a quarter-million dollars and more, then more huge sums of money to pursue the suit if the agency denies the permit, the EPA would already have won by warning future protestors of the cost of attempting to thwart the ecoweenie agenda. Fortunately, the Pacific Legal Foundation took the case for the Sacketts on principle. And if the EPA loses, the bureaucrats can just shrug their shoulders and say "oops."

So how does a compliance order work? When the EPA believes that a landowner is engaged in a violation of environmental laws, it may issue an administrative compliance order requiring the landowner to take certain actions and then seek judicial enforcement of the order if the landowner does not comply (in this case, the Sacketts' refusal to "restore the land to its original condition"). The issue the Supreme Court will address is the validity of such arbitrary and crippling orders. Can the landowner challenge the administrative compliance order in court before the EPA seeks judicial enforcement (here, the daily $37,500 daily fines).

The Ninth Circuit upheld the EPA's right to commit off-highway robbery without any resort to the courts. Even given the Supreme Court's awful decision in Kelo v City of New London (substituting the Constitution's words "public use" with "public purpose"), there's a good chance that the Supreme Court will slap down the growing tendency of delegating legislative and executive powers to bureaucracies. The EPA may have gone one alleged wetland too far.

The EPA Is All Wet

View Detail