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n celebration … no, that’s not the right word … in recognition of the seating of Al Franken as the Dems’ 60th Senator, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has just released this spot:

Yeah, I know the GOP is hardly perfect and has a ton of lessons to learn, but I have to say, this message motivates me to open my wallet.

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K, gang, let’s start prepping for the Senate showdown and, hopefully, the crashing and oh- so- carbon- emitting burning of the cap and tax lunacy.  Let’s start in a chilly place that by rights should be one of the leading proponents of global warming.  Lord knows, the weather certainly could stand to get a wee bit warmer in Scotland.

But for reasons unfathomable by rational minds, Scotland has decided its proper role as a nation is to lead the lemmings off the global warming cliff.  It hails itself, claiming it has the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals – a 42 percent reduction by 2020 and a mind-numbingly stupid 80 percent slash by 2050. Just listen to Scotland’s Climate Minister (Climate Minister?! He should be filed on the spot! Have you seen Scotland’s climate? Disgusting!) says about it all:

Scotland can be proud of this bill, the most ambitious and comprehensive piece of climate change legislation anywhere in the world. As a country, we are leading global action and expect others to follow our lead as we look to the international summit in Copenhagen this December.

I bet it’s going to be bone-chillingly cold in Copenhagen this December – big global warming confab or not.

I bring all this up because in Scotland’s goals we see what’s ahead for a cap and tax America.

Get ready for hefty fines if your household doesn’t do its part. And heftier fines if your business doesn’t. That’s now the rule in Scotland.

Prepare yourself for the Greenshirts busting into your house in search of plastic bags, or forcing your corporation to drop its theft-resistant packaging for something more easy to steal. OK, they’re not yet breaking down doors in Scotland, but they are attacking plastic bags as heinous, anti-social tools of destruction, only slightly more acceptable than the dreaded product packaging.

To incentivize thrifty Scots to part with some of their cash to reduce their carbon footprints, the Scotish Parliament has approved a 50 pound reduction in a local tax.  That sounds exactly like Obama thinking.  Everyone who pitches in to save the planet gets a tax cut.  Never mind that you’ll spend a 500, or 1,000 or 10,000 pounds to insulate your quaint cottage or install solar – that 50-pound tax cut is exactly the sort of great incentive a big government control freak would come up with. And we have more than a few of those in DC.

Not all the Scots are buying it, of course.  Here’s university prof Dr. James Buckee attempting too late to interject some rationality into all this:

“As far as reducing emissions by 80 per cent, banning the internal combustion engine, and coal-fired power stations from Scotland would not get close to doing it. This is clearly unobtainable.

“More energy has been expended on finding ways to infringe on human activity than has gone into understanding the science.”

Heh.  Loved that.  And speaking of understanding the science, there was one heck of an article in Forbes the other day, Waxman-Markey Flunks the Math.  Math is the base of all science, so that’s bad news for the Warmies. Here we go with the basics:

In the U.S., electricity is produced from these sources. If you are reading this on a handheld and can’t read Wikipedia’s wonderful pie chart, here is the breakdown:

48.9% — Coal
20% — Natural Gas
19.3% — Nuclear
1.6% — Petroleum

Got that? A tick over 88% of U.S. electricity comes from three sources: coal, gas and nuclear. Petroleum brings the contribution of so-called “evil” energy–that is, energy that is carbon- or uranium-based–to almost 90%.

The remaining sources of U.S. electricity, the renewables, are, by comparison, tiny players:

7.1% — Hydroelectric
2.4% — Other Renewables
0.7% — Other

Hydroelectric accounts for 70% of renewable energy in America. But, of course, hydro is mostly tapped out. Almost every dam that could be built has been built. Ironically enough, political opposition to building more dams comes from the same crowd of tree huggers who oppose coal, gas and uranium.

Waxman-Markey is all about punitively taxing the energy sources that make up 90 percent of our electrical generation, in order to subsidize the 10 percent that’s renewable.  Well, really 3 percent if you don’t count hydroelectric generation, which isn’t targeted for big Waxman-Markey subsidies. The author then reveals what the bill is all about; not stopping global warming, but good ol’ politics as usual:

In other words, Waxman-Markey is betting the future of U.S. electricity production on sources that now contribute 3% or supply 10 million Americans with electricity. That’s enough juice for the people in Waxman’s Los Angeles County. Or, if you prefer, for Nancy Pelosi’s metro San Francisco plus Markey’s metro Boston.

Well, what about electricity for the other 295 million? You can’t get there from here with Waxman-Markey. At very best, solar, wind and cellulosic ethanol will make 20% contributions by 2025. The smart money would bet on 10%.

Besides, those nasty ol’ Devil fuels are doing very well on the technology front, advancing at a clip that rivals or surpasses gains made in alternative energy.  Engines are cleaner and more efficient, fuels burn hotter and cleaner, and extraction and processing technologies are greener than ever.

There simply is no reason for Waxman-Markey … except for power-grabbing and money-sucking.  But there is a great alternative, an absolutely brilliant alternative, promoted today by Doug Ross:

We start with the most useless government agencies we can find. The Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, The Department of Health and Human Services, The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FCC and Amtrak. For the sake of argument, let’s say that together, they consume $250 billion a year.

Congress’ job? They would be required to cut spending for these ridiculous bureaucracies according to the following schedule (which I had a lot of fun creating — all numbers in billions).

2012 – $250
2013 – $210
2014 – $190
2015 – $160
2016  – $140
2017 – $120
2018 – $110
2019 – $100
2020 – $90
2021 – $75
2022 – $60
2023 – $50

Pay-cuts? Layoffs? Closing unnecessary facilities? Who gives a crap? That’s for them to figure out.

How do you like Cap-and-trade now, Democrats?

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ichael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus met while trying to save redwoods. Their Breakthrough Institute is funded by the leftist Nathan Cummings Foundation – but they understand who wrong Waxman-Markey is, and they’ve got a pretty good idea about how to encourage new energy technologies without destroying the good old economy.

In an NPR interview, they lay it out:

“When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?” [Shellenberger] asks …. “And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never.”

Personal computers didn’t take off because there was a tax on typewriters, he says. And the Internet didn’t sprout up because the government made telegraphs more expensive.

“So is there a better way to do this? Well, we think that there is. It’s very simple: It’s that we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide.”

Shellenberger and Nordhaus support government investments in alternative energy – a new Manhattan or moon project, which is hardly a new idea, but they articulate their well-researched points well.

Shellenberger tells the [Institute's] interns that environmental groups — like the ones he used to work for — are going about it all wrong. By urging Congress to cast carbon dioxide as a pollutant that needs to be controlled, he says, they will constantly swim against the tide of public opinion.

“We’re stuck in this kind of poor paradigm for dealing with climate change, this pollution paradigm,” he says, “not because environmentalists are failures, but actually because they were so successful. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the cap and trade on acid rain — these things worked really well.”

How refreshing to hear an environmentalist actually acknowledge that things are getting better, not worse – that existing levels of regulation have accomplished their goals.  I’m a free market guy, but even so, I have to acknowledge that government investment in technology works – it’s government control of the market and stomping on competition that I don’t like.  They explain the benefits of public investment:

“There’s this idea that the government shouldn’t be involved in technology, the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers,” Shellenberger says. “Which is sort of a funny thing to say. It’s kind of like, well, why not? And when hasn’t the United States government been involved in picking technology winners and losers?”

He points to the computer industry as just one example of something that came into being because of deliberate federal investments.

And railroads. And rockets.

Of course, the hotheads are screaming that there’s not enough time, we have to act now, the world is melting and carbon dioxide is a terrible poison. These are largely the same people who condemned Bush’s “rush to war.”  Unfortunately, Waxman and Markey are staunchly set in the camp of the hysterics.  Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been in DC this week, trying to get more reasonable electeds to behave more reasonably.

I hope they succeed.  You can help.  Sign the petition.

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he Dems dream of a vast new IRS is still alive even as Congressional Dems back off from Obama’s concept – cap and trade as a tax – in favor of a seemingly less onorous cap and trade as a grant concept. But that darn Congressional Budget Office just keeps on pointing out the obvious: No matter how its structured, cap and trade will be an economic Katrina on the American economy.

The CBO has issued a second letter opining on the Dem scheme, WashTimes reports:

Congress’ chief scorekeeper says the global warming bill moving through Congress will either be scored as a major tax increase or a massive expansion of the federal government – and either one could give opponents substantial ammunition to complicate Democrats’ efforts to pass a bill.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a letter sent last week to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, said Democrats’ approach of creating allowances for emitting greenhouse gases requires developing from scratch a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. …

The six-page CBO letter also listed repeated examples of situations in which, for purposes of the federal budget, it will assume that the cap-and-trade approaches will dampen businesses’ income, meaning less revenue to the federal government.

The Dem response?  Well, they’re trying to work with CBO.  They figure that maybe if they threaten the CBO budget or start making personal attacks on its staff, they’ll be able to get the watchdogs to change a couple assumptions and come out with a rosier report. In other words, they’re not looking at the bill, seeing it for what it is and deciding to wait until the economy is back on its feet to cut its legs out from under it.  Instead, they remain intent on kicking the economy while its down and want to get fudged numbers to excuse their action.

Meanwhile, the environmental lobbying machine is busy discounting the CBO:

Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center, said the CBO will still have to issue a final score on the bill when it passes the committee, and NRDC hopes the letter is not the last word.

“What they have left out of their analysis is the benefit to consumers of energy efficiency – that actually lowers their bills. I don’t see anywhere in this long set of examples this accounts for that,” Mr. Lashof said.

That’s because the CBO hasn’t yet come up with the metrics to measure pipe dreams and fantasies.  There is no energy efficient replacement immediately available that would allow us to avoid the immediate impacts of cap and trade. As one commenter to the WashTimes story sarcastically put the Dem view of things,

The CBO is full of partisan hacks who want to do nothing more than destroy this once great nation. But, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center is a straight down the middle lovable group who would never do anything that might tear apart the very foundations of our economy.

The new bill gives the GOP and blue dog Dems some hope that cap and trade might be the first Obama policy initiative to fall flat on its face.  That certainly must be the goal, both to protect the economy from Warmie lunacy and to signal an end to the devastating run Obama’s enjoyed.

Do your part. Write your member of Congress and demand they tell you before they vote how the bill will impact your power bill and the price at the pump.  Keep asking; hold them to it.

Art: The Talk of the Times 

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he taxpayer revolution has begun. With 11 percent of precincts reporting, Sac Bee says Californians are rejected propositions 1A through 1E by overwhelming margins, with the best of ‘em barely able to break the 40 percent mark.

It’s like we gassed the state legislator with ourselves in the room. There’s going to be some hurt because of the way we voted today, but that’s OK. Sometimes it’s just more important to send a message, and today we sent it: The long-running Sacramento show Dems Gone Wild has got to stop, with all its over-spending and over-intrusiveness.

The final measure, 1F, that won’t let the legislator pay itself until it passes a balanced budget, is winning big time.

Message sent.

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ancy Pelosi’s lame defense of her ignorance regarding the use of harsh interrogation techniques is hanging like a thread on the derrier of an over-dressed S&M Folsom Street Fair reveler back home in her district.  CNN reports today that she knew, oh boy, did she know:

A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah.

This appears to contradict Pelosi’s account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.

Sheehy attended a briefing in which waterboarding was discussed in February 2003, with Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, who took over Pelosi’s spot as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

This source says Pelosi didn’t object when she learned that waterboarding was being used because she had not been personally briefed about it — only her aide had been told.

The source said Pelosi supported a letter that Harman sent to the administration at the time raising concerns. The source asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of matters discussed in classified intelligence briefings.

Faced with a complete meltdown of their integrity (something that can happen at room temperature, BTW), the Dems rose to her defense – by attacking the CIA, natch. Here’s Politico:

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

“I think there is so much embarrassment in some quarters [of the CIA] that people are going to try to shift some of the responsibility to others — that’s what I think,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was briefed on interrogation techniques five times between 2006 and 2007.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he finds it “interesting” that a document detailing congressional briefings was released just as “some of the groups that have been responsible for these interrogation techniques were taking the most criticism.”

Asked whether the CIA was seeking political cover by releasing the documents, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said: “Sure it is.”

Levin, Durbin and Feinstein … what do they remind me of … oh yeah, that’s it.

If I understand it right, a federal agency is supposed to take direct attacks on it by the president silently, then sit back, gagged and blindfolded like an interrogation recipient, as the Dems lie about what they knew, when they knew it and who told them, further damaging the agency’s ability to function.

That might be OK if we were talking about the DMV here, but we’re not; we’re talking about the CIA, whose efforts have kept our country free of terrorist attack since 2001 – something the Dems can hardly lay claim to as they work feverishly to expose our country to greater risk in the name of protecting the freedoms of those who would take our freedoms away. I mean the terrorists, not Barbara Boxer.

The CIA document in question, which provided attendees, dates and content of various briefings, was requested by Congress, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), to be exact.  The CIA is overseen by Congress and responds to its requests, which is a good thing if the Dems request the document, but is a cover up if the GOP does.

This is why the Founding Fathers saw the need for good education, and didn’t believe the Republic could survive without it.  That the Dems can get a majority of the vote only means a majority of the people aren’t paying attention.

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ome (myself included, regrettably) thought Sen. Not Phil Specter would shoot for the middle, trying to peel away liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats to cobble together a winning race.  But today we see that Specter is swinging for the fences – more specifically, the left field fence – in his new role of Democrat-turned Republican-turned Democrat.  You’ve no doubt seen the quote by now:

“If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.”

Who know that we weren’t purusing cures for cancer … even if Dems siphon off inordinant amounts of money for AIDS research?

So we learn that Specter is a scum who will exploit another’s death for political gain.  Big surprise.  But also we see that he’s willing to talk without knowledge, something that’s always served the Dems well, and that no amount of federal spending is enough federal spending, a core belief of the Dem party.  The senator apparently is unaware that federal funding for the National Institute of Health’s National Cancer Institute for FY 2008 was $4.83 billion. For FY 2007, it was $4.79 billion and for FY 2006, it was $4.75 billion.  That’s a lot of dough, and it’s going up every year.

But never let the facts get in the way of being obnoxious. Welcome to the Democrat Party, Arlen.

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he fact that John Kerry owns somewhere between $17,000 and $65,000 in AIG stock might send your conflict of interest meters buzzing, were it not for the fact that would-have-been first lady Teresa Heinz Kerry owns over $2 million in AIG stock.

Kerry is on the Finance and the Commerce, Science and Technology committees, both of which have direct responsibilities regarding the AIG bailout.

Heinz also owns up to $4 million in GE stock (Kerry has up to $80,000), a company that has been positioning itself aggressively to benefit greatly from cap and trade legislation … and one that shamelessly promotes Dem causes.

But John is a man of the people, folks.  He pours his ketchup on his fries the same way you do.  His wife just happens to have about $3 million in Heinz stock, so he’d like you to use a lot of ketchup.

The nifty source for this – and the stock info on Kennedy, Obama and  others – is ProCon.org.  None of the others is as juicy as Kerry’s though.  Since he owns individual stocks and the others have their holdings in blind trusts or mutual funds, Kerry opens himself to 57 Varieties of criticisms.

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s workers throughout the land – particularly in California – are just glad to have jobs and are going without raises and even accepting pay cuts, the goofballs in Sacramento decided quietly to give a bunch of California Assembly aides over $350,000 in bonuses.

Assembly speaker Karen Bass apparently never heard of the little uproar over AIG bonuses or thought she could stealth this through, but no dice.  Papers throughout the state carried the story and today, like a typical Dem politician, Bass tossed the folks she was championing under the bus.  Her quote:

“In hindsight, this was really becoming a distraction.”

You bet it was.  The Legislature and Gov. RINO are going to the people in three weeks with a package of ballot measures designed to bail them out from the state budget morass they’ve created through their intractability and obliviousness.  If they don’t pass, Sacramento will have to face reality and start cutting the feel-good bloat from the budget and do something to keep businesses from fleeing the state.

Bass’ recognition of reality probably comes too late to save the ballot measures.

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t’s as if the economy were robust, spewing out money to burn.  It’s like everyone agreed there was an imminent threat of global environmental collapse because of human activity.  It’s as if everyone was eagerly awaiting higher costs to everything.

It’s as if the Dems didn’t have a brain in their heads:

House Democratic leaders unveiled a sweeping plan to fight climate change and boost renewable energy this morning, including mandates for renewable electricity nationwide and a market-based system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan … is a “discussion draft” authored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D- Beverly Hills), the committee chairman, and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. Among the bill’s provisions:

* A nationwide mandate for renewable energy — such as wind, solar and biomass — in electric power generation, starting at 6% in 2012 and rising to 25% by 2025.

Shall we discuss the cost of developing that infrastructure out of thin air?  Or the plausibility of the entire concept?  Or the need, considering our coal, oil and natural gas reserves, our hydroelectric capabilities and potential, a nuclear industry just waiting to re-emerge?  (All quotes from the LA Times, BTW.)

* A “cap-and-trade” program to restrict greenhouse gas emissions by requiring utilities and other emitters to hold “allowances” for the carbon dioxide they send into the atmosphere. The level of allowances would shrink annually to reduce carbon emissions to 3% below 2005 levels by 2012, to 20% below 2005 levels by 2020 and to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

Shall we discuss this a bit?  I did with the American Petroleum Institute earlier today, and here’s what the good folks there told me:

API hasn’t taken a position on the topic of cap-and-trade per se, but we have been very outspoken about the potential costs of the cap-and-trade proposal in the administration’s 2010 budget.

Based on the administration’s initial estimate, it appeared the proposal would generate $646 billion in revenues.  Our calculations indicate that about 60% of that would come from oil and natural gas, which equates to about $400 billion. Later administration estimates indicated that the revenues could be three times the $646 billion figure, so it appears the burden on this industry – and on consumers – could be much higher than originally anticipated.

You’d think that before madcap schemes are introduced for discussion, someone somewhere might have a handle on how much destruction the proposal will cause family budgets across America.  But really – $646 billion or three times that amount; do we really need either?

* A national standard, akin to California’s, limiting carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and a new low-carbon fuel standard to further support bio-fuels and low-emission alternatives to gasoline.

Can we discuss this?  Is this really what the automobile industry needs right now?  Perhaps it would be better to get them back on their feet again before cutting them off at the ankles.

Remember, no alternative technologies are ready for market without cap and trade to penalize existing technologies.  They cannot produce enough energy, and they cannot produce it cheaply enough. Cap and trade is just a fancy name for government tromping all over the free market in the name of “saving the planet.”

The planet doesn’t need saving.  The economy does.  And the free market’s on life support.

P.S.: The LA Times report quoted several environmentalist, most of whom were positively giddy about the day’s development.  I sent the reporter this email:

Just read your story and was amazed to find that apparently there wasn’t a single source from industry anywhere for you to get a quote from. Really? Just representatives of environmental groups?

Guess what?  No response.

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